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U F M 3 0 UFM

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CO NT EN T S COVER

Poetry

Michael Hunter “Manufactured Optimism”

Lucinda Watson

Prose Patricia Warren “Hurricane Me”................................................9

Charles Edward Brooks

“The Other End of the Room”........13

“In Rome With My Dad on Business” “Letter Yet Unsent” “Labor Day”

19 20 21

Abigail Warren

“Blessing of the Letters” “Old Boyfriend” “The F Train”

22 23 24

Ben Kline

“Blessing of the Letters” “Old Boyfriend” “The F Train”

Editor’s Note About Us Submission Guidlines Bios and Credits

5 4 6 29

UFM DECEMBER 2017, Issue 30

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UMBRELLA FACTORY WORKERS Editor-In-Chief

Anthony ILacqua Copy Editor

Janice Ilacqua Art Director

Jana BrAMWELL

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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 UFM editor’s letter - December 2017 Welcome to Issue 30 of Umbrella Factory Magazine.

In these halcyon days at year’s end, hunkered down under winter solstice skies, we humbly offer to you, Issue 30. I think all seasons are good for literature and for literary magazines. In this winter season, I suppose, reading is an especial reprieve from cold weather, holiday hub-bub and the all too normal media we get bombarded with daily. I think literature is good for the soul. Isn’t it a refreshing thought that you can read something that ignites your imagination rather than taxing your patience?

In this issue, new fiction from Patricia Warren and Charles Brooks. Poetry this issue from Lucinda Watson, Abigail Warren and Ben Kline. “Manufactured Optimism” by Michael Hunter is our cover art.

Our Pushcart nominations for 2017 are both in this issue. Our nominations are Lucinda Watson’s poems: “In Rome With My Dad on Business” and “Letter Yet Unsent” and Patricia Warren’s short story “Hurricane Me.” We have participated in the Pushcart Prize since 2012. Best of luck to both Lucinda and Patricia.

At Umbrella Factory Magazine we hold true to our word: connecting well developed readers to the best writing available. Thank you for your continued support with this issue and all the issues before it.

Read. Submit. Tell everyone you know. Stay Dry. - Anthony Ilacqua

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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 of Umbrella Factory Magazine. 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. Image size should be 980x700 pixels, .jpeg or .gif file format. Provide a place for the magazine title at the top and article links.

We accept submissions of three (no more and no less) poems. Please submit only previously unpublished work.

We also accept small portfolios of photography and digitally rendered artwork. We accept six pieces (no more and no less)

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.

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

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NONFICTION Let’s just say nonfiction is a piece of expository writing based in fact.

Further definitions are as follows: piece-a work with a beginning, a middle and an end. Expository writing-writing with a purpose such as, but not limited to, explanation, definition, information, description of a subject to the extent that a reader will understand and feel something.

Think about the cave paintings of 30,000 years ago, they tell a story.

And for the modern man, a good film documentary conveys its purpose. A film about Andy Warhol and his friends who liked to drink and smoke and screw is interesting. A film about how I felt at age ten and watching the adults in my life drink and smoke and screw is not a good idea.

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.

In the body of your email please include: a short bio—who you are, what you do, hope to be. Include any great life revelations, education and your favorite novel.

Your work has to be previously unpublished. We encourage you to submit your piece everywhere, but please withdraw your piece if gets published elsewhere.

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PROSE

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HURRICANE ME Patricia Warren

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prose

See the alligator embroidered on that fellow’s shirt? It’s making me nervous. Anything can remind me: a lake, a shotgun house, even a stranger’s expression settling into a grimace in a crowd. I haven’t been to the ocean in forever.

And I haven’t visited New Orleans since Katrina, though no place has a finer open-air café featuring not circular but square doughnuts heaped with powdered sugar, to savor with café au lait. Now I prefer scripted places, like Sea World, which I plan to visit with Elijah, my nephew, today— unless he learns about last night’s ghastly event from the kid in the green shirt, with whom he’s building Legos, or from ghoulish images flashing on the TV.

But, possibly because my memories swallow me like an alligator coming from behind to snap off my leg, I’m susceptible to such images.

Maybe Elijah and the green-shirted kid won’t even notice. Yesterday morning, for example, I was reading my newspaper in this same hotel breakfast room, like a man in a TV commercial, when my thoughts plunged into an abyss even without today’s provocations.

“Can I get you anything?” an attendant asked as she wiped the neighboring table, swatted a palm frond aside, and scooped up a crumpled dollar bill.

I hadn’t even noticed her. I was busy postponing my shuttle ride over to Disney World. It was our first full day here. Then, spotting a review of a consultant’s memoir in which he described reviving New Orleans after Katrina, I nearly threw up my breakfast burrito. With my mouth full I inelegantly said, “No, thanks.” Where was he when Katrina hit? Apparently somewhere in California working at another consulting job. And indeed his jargon might have suited any place at all—not the place I know best.

“Okay,” the waitress shrugged.

“Pop-Pop! The tram!” Elijah said, pointing outside. Yesterday, of course, he hadn’t met the green-shirted kid and was eager to go.

“Can’t you be still?” I asked, then regretted my impatience.

It was my mom who suggested I carry Elijah here. One day, as soon as I walked in her door, thereby confronting my dad’s table—even his jacket though he’s been dead a year—plus the

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odor of Elijah’s hamster cage, she called out from another room. “Your sister’s got that good job now, and Elijah needs something to do between camps.”

Now, my sister’s a lot younger than I am, hence Elijah’s young age. I looked at Dad’s table knowing that a request was coming. Actually the table was more like a desk—dark wood, expensive-looking, an heirloom from his family. In fact, the desk was his only heirloom other than a high forehead. Because it was unwieldy, immovable, like my parents’ lives, the desk had always bewildered me. As usual I was perceiving its faraway villagers, carved in wood, fetching what appeared to be buckets of water, without much perceptiveness. Maybe I was bored. And also there was the sound of Elijah skateboarding outside, slapping that thing against the wall, the railing, even the street. Through the window I spotted his red sneakers glimmering. I like Elijah—like the way he’s always jumping around seeking another plane to dwell on. “What kind of something to do?” I finally asked.

“You’ve gotten so you mumble, Theodore. Just in the last year.”

Not wanting to ask her to get a hearing aid, because I knew she’d say no, I tried again.

“WHERE SHOULD I CARRY HIM?”

“HE’S ALWAYS WANTED TO VISIT DISNEY WORLD,” my mom said as she came in the room knotting the trash, which meant she expected me to carry it outside.

“YOU WANT ME TO CARRY THAT OUTSIDE?”

“Well, you don’t have to yell. Just speak distinctly.”

When I ran into Elijah out by the trashcan, he said, “Mee-maw says we’re going to Disney World!” Evidently, she’d already made promises.

Sure enough, before I left, she pulled out coupons from the desk drawer.

So there we were three weeks later in the hotel breakfast room, a replica of a hundred others I’d seen while driving my tractor-trailer rig around the country, though this one was fancier. Scrambled eggs in a silver tin, waffles with whipped cream on the side, burritos—all were drawing a crowd. Except for me: I was yearning for the window shades and plush comforter

in Room 416. At the same time, Elijah was peering at me needing to extract something I wasn’t sure I still possessed. Well, no sooner did I try to repossess it than I saw the book review about the peripatetic consultant’s memoir.

Already I’d disappointed Elijah, taking him when we arrived the evening before last not to Disney’s fireworks but around Orlando. After exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s town, because my sister told me to, we crossed an invisible line and happened upon a rich neighborhood—its exquisite houses bordering a lake so pristine that it resembled a mirror. Then, nearby, a surprise: A tiny museum from the 1920s adorned with art deco etchings, and thus a craftsmanship reminiscent of my father’s desk. No doubt time, weather, had ennobled the museum, which seemed too dreamy to enter until, beneath two live oaks, I spotted a gate that was ajar.

I’d almost forgotten Elijah was there, but when I cracked open the gate he followed me inside. There we found a courtyard thick with grass, and bordering that were miniature art studios, one of which was hosting a drawing class and a model whose unclasped red hair unfurled something in me too, until Elijah scooted outside to inspect a mosaic of Columbus’s ships sailing hypnotically toward the New World. Bedazzled—by the refinement, by the museum’s small scale—I walked out a changed man, then across the street to another wing also featuring a courtyard, where a young woman was dancing with Hula-Hoops beside a stucco wall in a tiny yard. Round and round spun an array of colorful hoops: Above her head, underneath her legs—purple, yellow, I can’t remember what else because they spun so fast—the colors blurred together, highlighting her grace, not to mention the grey moss dangling from the live oaks, tossing me into another realm. For several moments I was still.

But understandably, Elijah was bored, and the next morning I prepared myself for Disney. Just outside the hotel’s brisk glass doors the tram was rumbling. With Elijah’s brightness, his curiosity seeping into me, I ate a doughnut and nibbled on a tasteless chunk of cantaloupe. Perhaps I was mulling my options? But after a few beats, I pulled myself from the consultant, then a climate story—rain forests, carbon dioxide—and

summoned my magnanimous side, the side my lady friend Bertie once saw in me.

“Are you ready?” I asked, cheerfully this time, regretting my impatience.

Turned out we hadn’t a moment to spare.

Behind various specimens of humanity—fat people, wizened people, shrewd-looking people, even a man towing an oxygen tank—we lined up and boarded the tram dutifully as a blaring voice instructed us to. After helping a squat lady and a man, sweat glistening above their lips, up the back step to a seat, I stood gripping a pole.

Yet no sooner had the tram lurched ahead than several folks gathered near the twin doors impatient to dismount. Meanwhile the blaring voice guided us, cajoled us, and cracked silly jokes, as if to convince us we were all on one team. Predictably, once disembarked, the impatient folks plunged ahead, passing others studying their maps, while Elijah and I chose a moderate pace. But eventually, no matter how they began, everybody settled into formation, their faces streaming by like masks, as Elijah and I wound through the park, rode a few roller-coasters, and shook Tinker Bell’s hand.

“Tinker Bell’s for girls, Pop-Pop,” said Elijah, and yanked me toward another rollercoaster. Which seemed excessive. And sure enough my dread was warranted: After a harrowing two-minute ride, we rolled into a station, and an overhead contraption drenched our caboose with water. My ears were drenched. All around everyone screamed, and I longed for Room 416.

Mercifully, however, we were set free by a pirate who motioned us toward a cafeteria, to which others hastened with delight and in some cases loud exclamations.

Yet after we sat down near a gaggle of revelers and bit into our desiccated burgers, I sensed torpor lurking underneath the delight. Maybe no one else did? Feeling alone, I perused several faces, but their unfamiliarity didn’t relent. Then a ghost, alighting from a blue wooden chair, wove tenderly around a man in a baseball cap, a young family, and four chairs strewn in a passageway before vanishing into the crowd. Not that anyone else appeared to notice.

No matter, I did. And I started brooding over Bertie, my lady friend, who once lived in

New Orleans. With her recipes for red beans, crawfish étouffée, what would she say about the food we were swallowing so vacantly? There was no reason to linger, either for the food or, as it appeared when I scanned the crowd, the conversation. At the next table a man and woman sat mute, chins jutting close to fists, clutching and devouring their hot dogs senselessly while the fellow in the baseball cap pontificated about Congress. I was miles away from New Orleans. ***

I hadn’t even gone downtown that day; I’d driven straight from Baton Rouge to Bertie’s. Hadn’t decided whether to move in with her much less get married. We hadn’t known each other but six months or so, and both of us had endured a lot—especially Bertie. Twice a fellow at her dock-loading job assaulted her. And when you’ve had such a life, the present can seem like nothing more than a windshield obscured by a hard rain’s splotches coming down from all those yesterdays, forever dimming your view. Unless, that is, the obscurity is true clarity—but isn’t that a little bleak? And it’s not what Bertie would say.

Another problem was my son, Devon, who refused to meet her. Without ever seeing her he called her trashy. But at his age my head was a vessel of nonsense about women too. Although he claimed he was “too busy,” and he was indeed studying mechanical engineering at Tech, I knew he was befuddled.

Perhaps in a different way I was too. Because the morning before the storm hit, Bertie and I barely noticed the warnings. Figured it was hyperbole, until the next day when Bertie awoke early to do yoga, and after showering said a flood was coming. Just like that—almost biblical.

Maybe the love bug had hit me at last? Gazing at Bertie, who shimmered in her wine-colored lacy camisole, which was merely a hint underneath her blouse, I felt like civilization reigned in the world at last—emanating from her and her recycled “pieces,” as she called them, the fruits of other people’s existences she’d fermented into wine— and nothing could break our enchantment. By day’s end that sensibility had vanished forever.

Because several hours later we were on the roof, carrying a loaf of French bread and a few knickknacks, bickering about the water ris-

ing around us, and then Bertie was floating, then thrashing, in the waves.

“SWIM!” I yelled.

“I never had swimming lessons! I told you that! Why don’t you listen? Momma expected me to watch the younger kids until finally I said, ‘Don’t have no more kids unless you want to watch them yourself!’”

To me her mother was some buxom lady headed for church in a billowing yellow dress and hat in a photo on Bertie’s dresser. Bertie, however, didn’t care for church. She was wiry, always saying “hot damn,” and hoped to finish her psychology degree in another year. You’d think such details would ebb as the water surged. And yet all manner of details besieged me as I eased then shoved myself into the freezing, lapping currents.

It was rare indeed for me to act so decisively.

“You gotta live!” Bertie had said to me countless times when I hesitated before.

As if all we have is right now, she never allowed TV or phone screens to transport her to another place like I do. Never put buffers between herself and the world. I’d never met anyone like her. When I was driving trucks for a living, I had a good look at this voracious world, but never lingered long enough to let anybody or anything devour me. Not even my wife bothered me much during our marriage—something my kids now seem to resent about me.

“Don’t be ridiculous” was my wife’s favorite expression, uttered in the same tone she employed with her younger sisters or anyone else struck with whimsy or joy.

After she died I met Bertie, whose whimsy filled the air. Even at Goodwill, where she worked and where I met her, a frisson swirled around her.

Some folks call it “dwelling in the moment,” but that phrase doesn’t convey how air molecules shifted and sparkled in her presence.

“How you doing?” she’d ask a rich lady dropping off Neiman’s clothes, startling such a person out of her self-referential universe with just the lilt in her voice.

“It’s a sublime day!” she’d say to her more ragged customers who emerged looking like they’d just left Neiman’s. On the riverbanks where I fish, oysters take in water, thereby consuming phytoplankton, nitrogen, and other par-

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prose ticulate matter before returning the water purified back to the marsh. Well, Bertie’s process was similar. Not unlike the oysters, she’d take in expensive clothes, launder them, and voilà, have some natural, impecunious beauty wearing a new outfit.

But I didn’t see all this clearly until Bertie was floating away, treading with increasingly frantic motions. I believed I’d make it over to her.

Methodically, deliberately, I swam through currents that seemed improvisational, like a John Coltrane piece. But how I had the presence of mind—or callousness—to superimpose art onto such horror, I don’t know. Except she was still close by.

Also as I swam, I grew calmer, knowing what I needed to do. Not many people would miss Bertie but me, and I longed to save her. I felt like I was swimming toward the day when someone might comprehend her value, her peculiar music: The kind of music that’s never recorded, rarely granted an audience, and blends with the atmosphere so exquisitely that we all breathe its air as if it’s our due.

But the water was getting colder. I swam until my arms felt numb and I felt frigid, not knowing if the water or my heart was the problem. I encountered poop, medical syringes, a kid’s stuffed dolphin, and a plethora of plastic drink holders along with other items, other fumes, too innumerable—or hideous—to describe. It was as if the earth had burst open, spewed out its viscera, and was mocking our manufactured dreams. My calm disappeared as did Coltrane. My heart twinged, tingled, then a scratchy feeling disturbed its beating center. When someone nearby pushed someone else off a raft the scratchiness worsened. I saw someone die; I wasn’t sure I hadn’t died. When at last I looked up—snorting, blowing water from my nose—I spotted an alligator instead of Bertie.

“BERTIE!”

I screamed and screamed then thrashed in the other direction, not thinking about Bertie anymore, not thinking of anything. Something happened and I wasn’t helping anyone. By then everyone, including me, was out for herself or himself. And it was all vastly more brutal, and occasionally transcendent, than those Armageddon movies Devon and I used to watch. No script can

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depict the fury that I still can’t bear to recall. In short, the ocean had come to have a word with us.

Much later I’d think, because the luxury of thinking returned to some degree, maybe Devon was right. Bertie was just another woman, a “projection,” or so he claimed the next Thanksgiving. When I studied his eyes, his shoulders, his taut physique that propelled him through Multivariable Calculus and fencing and a zillion other activities, I understood his implication: Mourning her—or anyone—would impede my own progress. And for a few moments I wanted to be equally young and heedless again, with shoulders bursting through my shirt sleeves. Instead I quarreled with him.

“So, in your view, people are plastic and replaceable.” I said, seeing again the items bobbing in the water. “Not permeable membranes, not spirits wandering the earth occasionally finding someone to talk to.” Even if that was saccharine, I couldn’t restrain myself. I missed Bertie; I missed her ability to make small things big. If I adopted Devon’s perspective, I’d be letting her drown all over again—even reducing her to the status of those bobbing objects.

“I’m saying you’re traumatized; you’re not seeing things clearly right now.”

“How do you know I’m not real clear headed?”

He paused and emitted his little gasp.

“Dad—you aren’t very psychologically aware.”

“And you are?”

“I don’t go out with uneducated women who wear discarded clothes.”

“Why does that matter? When I see someone overburdening herself with stuff I can’t feel anything at all.”

“Feel what?”

“Feel—whatever’s there, beyond the stuff.”

“What if that’s all there is?” my son asked.

Prior to this morning, whenever I considered what happened next in the water, I usually hoped Bertie was right all along that cynicism fizzles when you look at things straight. Only that philosophy led to felicity for me, and not for her.

Nor for many others. Or so I concluded when I came down this morning, ready to hit Sea World with Elijah, and the TV said forty-nine people

were shot dead in this city that had startled me with its tiny museum and unscripted possibilities.

On the TV screen, on the front page of the newspaper, were faces. People killed overnight, while dancing, while chatting. There for the world to behold, in quotidian poses or graduation gowns, in selfies or beachside with friends—gaping back, unaware. Finally, I couldn’t confront them, nor their ordeal of waiting to see who would die. I knew that during the wait, lines between the living and the dead blurred, and for those who lived they’d remain blurry ever after, not unlike the line between horizon and ocean that dissolves if you stand on a beach and stare for too long.

“You only have to believe!” Elijah said to me moments ago, trying to get me up after his friend in the green shirt left. But that proclamation won him another friend. They’re playing a video game, and not looking at the TV overhead.

This has given me time to think, but all I can think about is how everything the murdered folks knew vanished overnight, while the survivors will hear roller-coaster screams, game screams, differently than others till they perish. Stranded between earthly scripts and ghosts, unsure which is real, they’ll be tempted to struggle into life’s back door by inventing so-called reasons for their survival—aside from arbitrariness or chance.

In my case, not fifteen minutes after Bertie vanished, after I’d heard innumerable screams and screamed not a little myself, some insouciant teenager in an alligator shirt came along. Tapping gas from other boats, he sped around in his own, lugging people like rats from the water, finding them safe havens no matter what expletives spilled from their mouths. And randomly, namelessly, he saved me too. I never saw this angel in the newspaper afterward, nor in a consultant’s memoir, just saw him in a blur—buzzing around like he’d learned sailing in another era when the world was bright and his mother took him to boating lessons one day, music the next, back when narratives made sense and alligators were whimsical things embroidered on rich boys’ shirts.

THE OTHER END OF THE ROOM Charles Edward Brooks

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prose There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.

(George Eliot: Middlemarch)

The voice on the telephone spoke softly. “Almeta, I don’t want to disturb you or take up your time.

I know you’re busy, and a lot o’ folks are callin’.

How is she this mawnin’?”

The plump, gray-haired woman sighed.

“As well as can be expected. The doctor says it’s a real light pneumonia, and of course I’m thankful for that. But she’ll have to stay in bed for several weeks. At her age, you know…”

“I know, honey. Just remember that we’re thinkin’ of you and prayin’ for both of you. I’ll let you go now. Bye, Almeta.”

“Bye. Thanks for callin’.”

When Almeta Crawley hung up, she realized that she had no idea with whom she had been speaking. Not that it really matters, she reflected cheerfully, sitting down at the telephone table in the upstairs hall.

She quickly focused her attention on a handwritten list protected by a clear plastic folder. At the head of the page stood the words: Getting Ready for Christmas.

Almeta had written out the list more than thirty years earlier, when she was in her last year at Mrs. Baucom’s Academy. In the interim nothing had been added to or removed from the tasks of preparing for her favorite day of the year: the day of hope, of fresh start, of the incursion of divine power into the unspeakable grayness of human life. Almeta’s year began on the twenty-sixth of December as a barely audible melodic line. By the next twenty-fifth of December, a rich profusion of themes had joined in to weave a triumphant, many-voiced fugue.

In January she began to make her Christmas cards, each of them a watercolor or spatterprint, sometimes embellished with sequins or glitter. She added the messages later, during the holiday season itself.

In March she started crafting ornaments for the Christmas tree. Over the years her tree had become larger and larger to accommodate the wealth of accumulated decorations. Almeta fashioned her ornaments of fine clay and glazed them

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with bright colors, pressing glitter, glass beads, and other shiny objects into the glaze. Every year Mr. Cole fired a whole tray of new ornaments for her in his kiln. She also carved objects in balsa wood—angels, fish, stars—and painted them in striking, unexpected hues: Who ever heard of lavender or cobalt-blue unicorns? Or a fierce tomatored angel? Well, Almeta Crawley liked them that way, and no visible reality existed to give her creations the lie.

In the summer she chose presents for relatives and friends, wrapped them, and laid them away in the cedar chest until the time for their distribution came round.

Autumn found her making up dried wreaths and other adornments for house, cemetery, and church, spraying privet berries gold or silver, tying bows in ever new materials, forms, and colors. On her family’s woodland tract near Bubbling Springs, she collected pine cones, artistically shaped branches and bits of wood, small stones of bizarre form, and anything else that struck her fancy. In due course the tree itself— a majestic cedar—would be cut in these same woods.

It was then, too, that she bought packages of white Christmas tree lights and tinted each bulb a different shade.

At the end of October, she and Doxy baked fruitcakes for both domestic consumption and gifts. The women packed away these masterpieces, heavy with dates, figs, and citron, in tin boxes. Apple slices and a little glass of Madeira accompanied each cake. Almeta always thought of the pharaohs being laid to rest, with goods and attendants to meet their needs throughout eternity. But her burials were of short duration:

By Yuletide the cakes ripened into an ambrosial state, ready to be disinterred.

Now, at the beginning of December, cleaning house and designing the cookies to be baked later in the month popped up on the agenda.

Almeta registered various sounds from downstairs. Doxy grunted in the hall as she cleaned the pine floor on hands and knees. On the kitchen radio an announcer explained, with seeming gusto, the details of yet another scandal in the Kennedy family.

“Doxy,” she called down to her housekeeper, “I surely do love the smell of that turpentine. It tells you that Christmas is comin’ just as surely as a robin tells you it’s spring.”

“I know you do, Almeta,” the black woman yelled back. “When you was a little thing, you used to bring yo’ little chair and sit wherever I was cleanin’ the flo’. It used to get away with Miss Era so bad.” A raucous laugh succeeded the words.

“Yes, I remember,” said Almeta softly to herself.

After a few more minutes of perusing her list, the handsome woman raised her head.

“If I do it, I’ll have to give up something,” she whispered. “Something important. The Lord’s merciful, but His justice is terrible. He’ll demand a sacrifice.”

In the bedroom across from where she sat, something stirred. ***

The mummy in the four-poster bed spoke peevishly, but in the softest, most ladylike tone: “Almeta, you know I can’t eat tomatoes. And you sent up a casserole with tomato in it on my supper tray last night. I don’t blame Doxy for it—she’s just ignorant. I blame you.”

“I’m sorry, Mama. It was somethin’ Miz Cole sent you. I just didn’t notice that it had tomato in it.”

“Going on fifty-three years old and you haven’t learned to be responsible yet. I doubt if you ever do learn now.”

An icy red tide rose in the daughter’s lungs and throat, stifling the very possibility of speech.

Outside three men from the town cleared away long-leaf pine branches that had fallen under the weight of ice and blocked the street. Their words, not of the gentlest nature, were clearly audible in the second-floor bedroom.

The mummy fixed sharp, black eyes on the younger woman. “When is the doctor comin’ today?”

“On his way home to dinner, he said.

About twelve o’clock… Do you need anything in the meantime, Mama? Otherwise I’ll get back to my chores.”

“Your chores: twiddle-twaddle. I do need somethin’, Almeta. You know I do. I need some companionship and respect from my own daughter. That’s what I’ve always needed and never gotten. You might sit down and talk to me a little bit.”

“What would you like for me to talk about, Mama?” The iciness spread all over Almeta’s ample body.

“What, indeed! Didn’t Miz Baucom teach you how to carry on a conversation? In my day young girls went to those academies to learn skills like that.”

Almeta struggled to get her words past a frigid obstruction in her throat. “It’s not that I don’t know anything to say, Mama. I asked if there’s anything special you want me to talk about.”

“But that’s the same thing. You know what my interests are. At least you ought to after more than fifty years under the same roof.”

“Well, Miz Cole’s daughter-in-law is havin’ the altar guild next week. It’ll be the Christmas meeting.”

“What do you think I care about that? Miz Cole: We’ve known each other since we were little girls, and she sends me a casserole with tomato in it. There’s no accommodation, no consideration in the woman.”

A scalding geyser broke through the ice.

“Are you sayin’ that Miz Cole had anything but a friendly motive in sendin’ you the casserole, Mama? Just what is it you’re tryin’ to say?”

With a start, Almeta realized that she was shouting.

“Shit!” cried one of the town workers from the top of the pine tree by the driveway.

“Almeta, go right down there and tell those men I won’t have that kind of language on my property. You know I can’t stand filthy words.

And put a warm coat on before you go outside.”

Almeta left the room without a word.

Doxy was plodding up the stairs, with arthritic steps, as her younger employer made her way down.

“Miss Era gon’ be able to eat anything?” enquired the housekeeper.

“I think so, Doxy.”

“What she gon’ be wantin’?”

“Most anything. Just be sure there’s no tomato in it.”

As she continued down the stairs, a thought congealed in Almeta’s mind with the clarity of an icicle: I have to do it: There’s just no other way. ***

“Mr. Crawley, I think the child’s mother has somethin’ to say about it too.”

The uncommonly good-looking man took a sip of the amber-colored liquid in his glass. “Say away, Miss Era.” His enunciation blurred ever so slightly.

“Almeta has her schoolwork to do. She has no business gallivantin’ off to Atlanta with you.”

“With me, indeed, Miss Era. I am the girl’s father, after all.”

“Mr. Crawley, we’re all aware of that. That doesn’t mean she should spend two days of her Christmas school vacation under your sole care.

There’s a question of responsibility involved. You know how I feel about that.”

Ten-year-old Almeta swiveled her head from one parent at the north end of the diningroom table to the other at the south end. She wanted nothing so much as the outing to the state capital with her father, whom she seldom saw. She, and all her playmates, knew that he “drank,” and that his frequent absences arose from that dismal fact.

Era Crawley continued, “I wanted her to go with me on some family visits. To get to know her Gaster relatives better. I want to take her out to the Gaster home-place and explain to her—now that she’s old enough to understand—the brilliant role that family played in the War Between the States.”

The man poured some of the amber fluid from a brown bottle into his glass and laughed.

“Lord knows what my people were doin’ at the time. They may have been in the Union Army for all I know.”

“That’s just what I mean,” snapped his wife. “You had the misfortune to grow up in an orphanage. That’s why it’s doubly important for the child to get to know the relatives she does

have.” She turned to her daughter: “Almeta, what do you want to do?”

The girl decided to ignore the threat wrapped in her mother’s question. “Mama, I know about the Gasters in the big war and all.

You’ve been tellin’ me all my life.”

The man chuckled and applauded.

“Silly girl!” Era Crawley objected.

“Well, anyway,” Almeta went on, “I want to go with Papa.”

“You’re not just silly; you’re ungrateful too!”

“Mama, you asked me what I wanted and I told you,” shouted the child, emboldened by her father’s presence. “If you didn’t want to know, why’d you ask me?”

Miss Era spoke in her most dulcet tones.

“Almeta, a lady never shows wrath. A lady never even feels wrath. How many times have I told you that?”

The man emptied his glass and rose to his feet. “We have one hour till the train leaves for Atlanta. Miss Era, pack the little one an overnight bag. Late tomorrow afternoon I’ll deliver her to you again safe and sound.” The man’s tone admitted no further discussion.

“Just as you say, Mr. Crawley,” the woman said between clenched teeth and went to do his bidding. Almeta’s eyes pursued her mother with a flush of triumph. And for just a second, a lightning streak of hatred played across her face.

Doxy poked her head into the dining room with a deadpan expression. “Mistuh Crawley, you want me to fix you an’ Almeta a shoebox to take along?”

“Doxy, that’s a good idea. There’s no diner on that train, and we’ll both be hungry before we get to Atlanta.”

“What you gon’ want in it?”

“Whatever you have handy. But be sure to include a couple of ripe tomatoes.”

Doxy’s face remained deadpan, but her eyes laughed with her employer. “Law’, I’ll run across to the sto’; you know Miss Era don’t let me keep none in the house.”

Her head high, Almeta marched through the front door under the fragile shell of her father’s protection. She knew that it was pitifully

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prose temporary. Soon the man would once again be in an expensive clinic in the mountains, and her mother would exact a terrible retribution for her daughter’s disloyalty. But never mind. In the meantime she would revel in her father’s jokes and games and, up ahead, in Atlanta’s shining lights. ***

“Miss Crawley, I’m Connie Diefenbacher from The Southern Home. Thank you for letting me come.”

“Won’t you come in?” Almeta wondered how anyone with such a name, and such an accent, could be working for the South’s leading home magazine.

“Thanks, I’ll just get my equipment out of the car.”

Once in the downstairs hall, the young woman explained that her interview and photographs would be used for one of the magazine’s hardcover publications: a Christmas decoration guide to appear in the following summer.

When her hostess led her into the living room, the reporter gasped: “How lovely! I’ve been up and down the state of Georgia these last days, looking at Christmas trees, but I haven’t seen anything like yours. It’s spectacular.”

And indeed it was. The star at the top of the big cedar touched the living room’s high ceiling. A mass of tiny lights, no two of exactly the same color, glimmered among the thick, green foliage. Innumerable ornaments, some large and brash, others exquisitely dainty, each sparkling with a mysterious message of its own, hung on the abundant branches: bells, children, angels, birds, fish and mammals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, churches… And encasing the entire tree, from top to bottom, a tissue-thin sheet of angel’s hair caught the glow of the lights and transformed the whole creation into magic.

After the tree had been photographed and enquired about in detail, Doxy appeared with coffee and Christmas cookies. The designs of the cookies aroused Miss Diefenbacher to such enthusiasm that she photographed them as well.

“Miss Crawley, it’s obvious from what I’ve seen of your home that Christmas means a great deal to you.”

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“Yes, it always has. From the time I was a little girl.”

“And do you do other things for the holiday season? Things we haven’t touched on in our talk?”

“Well, yes.” And Almeta Crawley found herself telling this young woman, almost certainly a Yankee, about activities never before mentioned outside her own household.

After the reporter left Almeta strode down to the far end of the living room and sank down on a tiny, uncomfortable sofa that her mother called a love seat. As a girl she often wondered whether two real lovers had ever sat side by side upon it.

She could never picture her own parents in such a position.

The aroma of baking cookies wafted in from the kitchen, where Doxy, in a powerful contralto, rendered her own version of traditional Christmas carols.

For long minutes Almeta Crawley gazed at the lighted Christmas tree. When I do it, she reflected, it will violate the Fifth and the Sixth Commandants. There will have to be a dreadful sacrifice, and even that will only be token retribution. But now I know what the sacrifice will be.

I’ll give up Christmas.

The terrible statement would not bear thinking about. With a stifled sob the heavy woman sprang to her feet and hurried toward the kitchen to join Doxy. ***

On Christmas Eve she heard the carolers from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church while they tramped along the next block:

We three kings of Orient are: bearing gifts we traverse afar—

Almeta bustled into the kitchen and removed the waxed paper from plates of cookies prepared for the singers. In a few minutes they would step into her front yard, their boots crunching on the hard snow, and she would invite them onto the porch.

Field and fountain, moor and mountain—

Following yonder star.

She had always particularly loved this song, the thrilling modulation from the minor key of the verse into the affirmative major of the chorus.

O star of wonder, star of night,

Star with royal beauty bright,

Westward leading, still proceeding,

Guide us to thy perfect light.

No stars shone on the Georgia Piedmont.

The sky had been leaden all day, and more snow was predicted for the morrow. How different from the crystal dome over the Near Eastern desert, when the Wise Men received infallible guidance! They could not have failed to recognize it for what it was. As a little girl Almeta had envied them. Her own destiny seemed so fuzzy and confusing. But still, somehow or other, she always knew what she had to do.

After fixing supper Doxy went home to spend Christmas Eve with her own big family.

Era Crawley fussed over every item on her supper tray and ate almost nothing. She did swallow the brown tonic to build up her strength and the blueand-white Nembutal capsule to put her to sleep.

Almeta slipped on her father’s old, blue lumber jacket and carried the refreshments out onto the front porch. By the time the carolers arrived, plates of cookies and a big thermos jug of coffee stood ready on the table by the swing.

“Merry Christmas, Miss Crawley!”

“My land, doesn’t this look good!”

“How’s your mother, Almeta?”

Almeta responded appropriately to each remark, answered each question. After a quarter of an hour, the carolers went on their way, their voices again raised in song:

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume Breathes a life of gathering gloom— Sorr’wing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

Inside the heavy jacket the woman shivered as her eyes followed the departing Episcopalians and her ears the dirge-like verse they were singing. When the chorus, and the safety of the major key, burst forth, she hastily gathered up

the remnants of the refreshments and took them inside. Washing and straightening the kitchen occupied an hour, tidying this and that other part of the house another one.

And suddenly the chimes of St. Luke’s struck midnight. Christmas Day began in starless gloom. From the kitchen window Almeta saw that snow was falling again—densely, silently. After the chimes died away, not a sound penetrated the house from outside.

“All right,” she said and clicked off the kitchen light.

Climbing the stairs with unaccustomed slowness, Almeta held tightly to the banister rail. As she entered her mother’s room, the noise of the old woman’s breathing startled her. The ladylike, soft-spoken Era Crawley gave forth a mighty rattle with each exhalation, for her lungs were still congested.

Almeta tiptoed to the big radiator under the window and turned it off. The window looked into the top of a pine tree; she threw it wide open and shuddered as the cold air rushed into the room. The pine boughs prevented the snow from falling inside.

With a sharp intake of breath, she summoned all her strength and approached the four-poster. Reaching for the electric blanket cord, she switched it off and gently rolled the blanket and linen sheet beneath it down to the foot of the bed. Except for the flannel nightgown she wore, the mummy lay completely exposed.

The hostess had not joined the carolers in taking refreshments.

Now she fixed herself a little plate of cookies and a pot of tea and carried them into the living room. The tree shone in all its radiance, as if to make up for the murkiness of the early morning. Almeta Crawley walked slowly to the other end of the room and sat down on the rocklike love seat. Despite the hot tea, she went on trembling. For the joy of Christmas Day was flowing through her one last time and then away forever.

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POETRY

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Lucinda Watson

IN ROME WITH MY DAD ON BUSINESS I’m in Rome with my dad on business, addendum to a big, male package.

Small brown suitcase, thin high voice, one crinkled flowered dress, and we go out to lunch and eat black squid and bread but no butter.

In front of us is Charles Aznavour, a movie star, and a babe my dad likes a lot as he stares at her like he stares at prey.

I am almost twelve.

The lady is blond with a tight U of a skirt, hair pushed up high into a beeswax tangle, she is silent and sits still on the back of a Vespa, pillioned by hierarchy and kitten heels.

I’m watching the hunt, watching and learning.

Charles Aznavour and my father are competing but Charles doesn’t know this as he already paid for her but my dad keeps his eyes on the prize and slips wads of Roman cash in and out of his pocket, money clip flashing in the hot sun.

We go to our hotel, my dad makes a hair appointment for me.

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Lucinda Watson

LETTERS YET UNSENT I still see the back of your silvered head as you play chauffeur and drive me away from my two weddings in the antique car only you could drive.

You were dead by my third wedding so my husband and I never left the reception believing we could keep the marriage together by staying on, not dancing.

Though the last words you said to me were, “You are a loser with one misfit for a child and now you will have two more!”

I remember the smell of your houndstooth coat when my nose snuffled against it and the way your tongue lodged quite carefully in the left-hand corner of your mouth when you danced with our mother, our beauty.

I remember the X-rays of her ribs taken at the E.D. where I took her with pneumonia and the doctors asking how she broke them and don’t worry she never said one word.

I remember your top dresser drawer with thirty different compartments each filled with the necessities of your life; peppermint lifesavers, shirt stays, bullets, silver dollars, black socks, THINK books, matches from the Stork Club, Kodachrome film, 50 white handkerchiefs and a stack of hundred dollar bills.

I remember the shape of your calloused nail beds snarled like angry crabs always scrabbling at the world and its people.

Looking back now I can see your eyes and remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of you and that is what I am building on, day and each new day I will remember what you were before you were born, before you learned to speak and not to love. I’m writing to you now to tell you I have forgiven you, almost, and I—who has looked so hard for love— am ready to gently come upon it.

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LABOR DAY Since daybreak I’ve thought of you and longed for the end of things to be the beginning again.

The garden under bloomed Magnolia budded tight, and flowers, still reverent and stiff.

The dog, slimmer and less needy, the air, soft, caressing my thighs open. The school busses, backing up into garages, deeply growling, the children, smaller, dressed in overalls, and life still filled with possibilities even though it’s fall.

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Abigail Warren

BLESSING OF THE LETTERS Oh, Astronomer

I could take almost any beating

spaceship builder

from Your waves.

of the galaxies Inside soft and fleshy look at me

peering out, sluggish on the shoals.

a periwinkle a snack for seagulls

Oh botanist of Bird-

clinging to this rocky shore

Of-Paradise and the

with my hard shell,

short-lived crocus

and sticky glue holding on.

Silence, in the salt sprays, hear my movement, my rough tongue, across this Absence.

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I search for You.

OLD BOYFRIEND I’m thinking you’re the one that really knew me, forget the thirty years past between us; how I never shared my heart just other body parts disassembled at the time.

I was puzzle pieces not out of want but the anvil and hammer that shifter of shapes disassembled my being.

Until I could leave my heart resting on the pillowcase, and open my other self to find some pleasure.

You showed up one Christmas Eve smiling, arms wide open with bright, holiday-papered gifts, on the other side of the door I was hurting someone else.

Yes, like an old country song— I never meant to hurt you— and now once again I find my life, that muscular muscle, in the beak of a bird, a mollusk pecked open against the shoals.

My mind wanders toward you, who once saw a broken self and could still love.

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Abigail Warren

THE F TRAIN She takes her slender fingers holds up an eyelid and draws a black line so close to her tear duct and smudges her already charcoal eyes blinking at her youth her beauty.

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Ben Kline

SUDDENLY ORANGE AIR Even desire is subject to convex polyhedral walls and electron orbits, maybe like him holding your hand in public only three hours after meeting at the MCA’s public entrance, maybe geo-located by a long-gone mountain range and three hundred miles by five hours drive alone with sad songs like “Close to You” and “Sometimes It Snows in April,” or perhaps an incendiary force like gravity, yanking your shuttle in two, maybe four, all that self-destructive unchained energy passing through suddenly orange air, wobbling like you shouldn’t have had that fifth glass of rosé, because re-entry breaks at the axle and tosses up swirls of wind you imagine drawn by Murakami, minus the totem grins and brightly yellow petals shimmering like sea foam refractions, embossed for everlastingness as if immortality isn’t just a fancy way of maybe being vain without being shallow when you just want to be sad about a love that will never be.

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Ben Kline

FULL STOP AT 46

In the valley of my transverse metacarpal arch, east of taut, lonely thenar space, south of my flaky, hay baling calluses the old lady at the fair finds the map of my brief time, written by sperm, egg, river hills and psychic cartography, following a plot begun on my sixteenth birthday two Ouija predictions declaring death by car crash perpendicular to full stop on my forty-sixth birthday.

As she tries to decode the legend, my clenched fist feigns sufficient grip of physiology and superstition, a busy intersection I should know better than to cross without acknowledging old beliefs and nonsense signals, these three lines she says collide into disappearance under my index knuckle, flouting the glamour of good looking corpses misleading my contour intervals, breaking away from volar safety into folds of my future, never told.

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LEAVING LAS VEGAS Four thousand eight hundred twenty-nine feet above measured sea level in the Mojave in late June - as if there were water anywhere near. Perhaps the carburetor cares. After a week I miss the round mountains back home, their true shapes hidden by trees I know best, lush oaks, sycamores and elms interrupted by strip mine scars and starlings playing Red Rover between electric lines. Twelve miles in ten minutes after the strip sank east in the rental car’s rearview the cacti assume disproportionate forms, like martians having a picnic recorded with lens flare to capture the hot wind. I prefer the humid suspension of the hollow in August when the hillside seems a hazy still life and the porch calico lies belly up all afternoon.

At the halfway Barstow splays sideways and at the only Starbucks the line goes out the door, frustrating the air shield.

The wait for want supersedes proper resource management. Kids cut line capriciously, evading consent/dissent in their thrill of being out of the car. Who orders hot coffee here?

Sixty-two miles in seventy-four minutes of indeterminately slow traffic wages a mild regret that piles dry like kindling awaiting accelerant - as if fire were patient in the desert, or romantic, like some movie made in sunny Los Angeles, where we arrive around five, and the light makes me forget everything else.

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bios

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Charles Edward Brooks was born in North Carolina and took degrees at Guilford College and Duke University. Following

his qualification as an actuary, he went on to do a doctorate at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. For some years his work involved international travel and communication in a number of languages. In addition to translations, his literary output includes novels, novellas, and especially short stories which have appeared in magazines such as Alembic, Big Muddy, The MacGuffin, Wellspring, Westview, and Xavier Review.

Michael Hunter is a Cincinnati based freelance illustrator and fine artist. He completed a BFA In painting at the Art Academy of

Cincinnati in 1986, at the dawn of computer graphics. Interested in this new media, he went on to study Computer Graphics at Pratt Institute earning his MFA in 1991. https://michaelhunterportfolio.com/

Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he writes about our modern digital existence, his many former lovers, the Eighties, and growing up Appalachian. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in IMPOSSIBLE ARCHETYPE, Kettle Blue Review, The New Verse News, The Birds We Piled Loosely, and many more. He thinks aloud, comments, and visualizes at benkline.tumblr.com

Abigail Warren lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and teaches at Cambridge College. Her work has appeared in Tin House,

The Delmarva Review, Brink Magazine, Sanskrit, Emerson Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, among others. She was a recipient of the Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize while at Smith College. Her chapbook, AIR-BREATHING LIFE (Finishing Line Press, 2017) is out.

Lucinda Watson’s book of nonfiction, How They Achieved, was published in 2001 by Wiley Publishing. She has work published or forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, SLAB, and others. http://www.abigailwarren.org/

Patricia Warren lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She has attended writing conferences hosted by One Story, Tin House, and Bread Loaf in Sicily. Her work has appeared in SNReview and The Tower Journal.

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STAY DRY. 30 /

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