ISSUE 47

Blue Mesa Review

Albuquerque, NM

Founded in 1989

Issue 47

Spring 2023

Blue Mesa Review is the literary magazine of the University of New Mexico MFA Program in Creative Writing. We seek to publish outstanding and innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, along with compelling interviews.

Cover Art

Yucky Yucca

Ruben Miranda-Juarez

BLUE MESA REVIEW

Spring 2023

Issue 47

Editor-in-Chief

Managing Editor

Associate Editor

Fiction Editor

Nonfiction Editor

Poetry Editor

Faculty Advisor

Evelyn Olmos

Ruben MirandaJuarez

Cyrus Stuvland

Anthony Yarbrough

Kyndall Benning

Tyler MortensenHayes

Marisa Clark

Graduate Readers

Undergraduate Readers

Kyle Browder

Joe Byrne

Amy Dotson

Isabella C. Montoya

Meg Vlaun

Jordyn N.

Bachmann

Evan D. ChiltonGarcia

Tessa Keenan

Danica Lee

Sama I. Maadi

Kioshi Morosin

Andrew Sowers

Lizbeth Torres

Ethan Ward

Touch Melissa Goodnight

Letter From the Editor

Dear Reader,

It is truly bittersweet to be here now writing this second, and last, letter from the editor to you all. It has been an honor to serve as your editora-en-jefe (you had to be there) of Blue Mesa Review this past academic year, and to get to build alongside you all a couple of wonderful and brilliant issues. Whether you are a past or present contributor, a faithful reader of our magazine, a devoted submitter, or part of the BMR team, I am grateful for your belief in this magazine and your patience with me.

I have served as a member of Blue Mesa Review for the past three years. First as a submissions reader, then as poetry editor, and most recently as editor-in-chief. Now, as I graduate the MFA in Creative Writing program here at the University of New Mexico, I am faced with the task of saying goodbye to this publication and the remarkable people that make it up. I want to thank my team (in alphabetical order because I don’t have favorites): Anthony, Cyrus, Kyndall, Ruben, and Tyler. Each of you have exceeded my expectations in the care and wisdom you brought to this magazine. A huge thanks to our faculty advisor, Marisa Clark, who cultivated a rigorous and positive community of undergraduate and graduate readers and offered trusty insights to our editorial staff.

The writing and art inside issue 47 is exceptional and I left each piece with a profound feeling of hope and love. As you read through the magazine I hope you find things that surprise, intrigue, comfort, and delight you, just as I did.

Welcome to issue 47, and goodbye.

Un gran abrazo, Evelyn Olmos

Issue 47

By Jack Thome

Freud’s The Uncanny and the Ghost in the Nursery

Sadie Hoagland

It’s hard to know where to begin. With Freud’s concept of the uncanny as that which makes you feel notat-home in your own home? As that which makes the familiar (a girl) into the unfamiliar (an automaton?), a ghost story (The Sandman) into a reality (a killer)? Or with Freud himself, who tells us the uncanny exists in our fear of being buried alive, which is actually rooted in a primary fantasy of the pleasure of being in the womb?

Or that night? Or that woman’s story? Each thread here its own hourglass knocked sideways, but somehow still raining sand.

That night. My son is ten months old and has another very high fever. His third in the past few weeks. The doctor will later diagnose him with poly febrile syndrome, but right now we’ve just returned from a second nighttime ER visit. He has been cleared of pneumonia; his heart rate had been 175 when we got there so they had given him a chest Xray. His tiny ribs pressed like a flower in the giant machine. I am in my teaching clothes, having taken him as soon as I got home and felt his hummingbird heart race as I nursed his hot little body. It was like holding a loaf of bread right from the oven. Now that he’s got a lower fever, I want him to sleep well, in his crib, but I won’t leave him alone. He’s too lethargic to cry out strongly if he needs me. I pull the mattress off our Ikea hideaway couch and put it on his floor.

I can’t sleep at all, listening for his breaths. And then suddenly, I am asleep.

Freud writes that “the uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”

It’s worth noting here that before I moved to Louisiana I didn’t believe in ghosts, not really. I had one strange experience living in an apartment where I felt like there was always someone in the room, someone who needed addressing. A nagging feeling. But then we moved into this house where my son was born, I heard walking up and down the hall. I would get up multiple times, thinking my daughter was sleep walking, to find the hall empty. My husband heard this, too.

Once, I felt a hand on my back as I slept. Again, I went to my daughter’s room thinking she’d somehow touched me and snuck back to her room, only to find her fast asleep. Another time, I heard someone say my name in the dark: Sadie. Clear as day. An adult woman’s voice. In this house, too, I dreamed my husband’s dead mother. I never met her but still, my description of her outfit was spot on my husband said.

And this was all before the second baby, my son. Before the breastfeeding while working full time, and before getting very little sleep. My labor with him began in the house in the middle of the night, with me throwing up violently. The initial separation of my body with my son’s body exquisitely painful, and always dangerous, as I bled excessively with both my children’s births. Horrifying and natural. Repulsive (the lumps of tissue, the placenta) and gorgeous (ten perfect tiny fingernails). The within, the without.

My body, according to Freud, instantly converted from my son’s Heimlich, his home, to his unheimlich, his uncanny. Freud writes of the female genitalia: “this unheimlich place, however, is entrance to the former heim (home) of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning.”

When my daughter was born, my first natural childbirth, I made a sound I did not know I could make. I was on all fours on the labor room floor and was nearing the end of the labor. It wasn’t a scream or a yell somewhere in between the two and it came from deep within. It took me a moment after I heard it to realize that I had made this cry. I was no longer myself, but of my body. I closed my eyes then, and surrendered any sense of what old Freud would have called an ego. As the bones of my pelvis pulled apart, I felt as if I was in some dark place within my body. Or without. In that same liminal place, perhaps, that my infant was in those last moments before her birth.

Language brought me back to this world with a simple phrase, the kind of two words you can string together at that stage in childbirth: Becoming animal. Minutes later, my daughter was born, and I’d never felt more human than when she squinted her tiny eyes up at me, her head the size of a grapefruit damp with black hair.

Even in the second labor, being this doorway is mysterious. It’s easier and significantly faster but there’s still a slipping away. A deep internal moment before he comes when I feel as if I am both vessel and passenger, both container and water. A fluidity as I become this threshold between his pre-life and his life. It’s not something to understand, and it’s not something we talk about when we talk about motherhood mother as border. These months after birth, I wonder when I stop being a border. When he will be his own, but also when he will be securely in this world, and mine rather than of me.

During this time of his fever, my son lies in his crib sometimes, laughing. We watch on the baby monitor as he looks at one spot in the room, a spot where we see nothing and he is smiling, listening, laughing. Who is talking to him, we wonder? We decide it’s okay, since he’s laughing. Is he somehow part of that other world still? (There are many cultures who believe that prelingual babies can still see and hear and talk to spirits). Am I? Are all new mothers? Is that why the ghosts?

I read the woman’s story when I’m desperately scrolling through a FB group I’ve joined, a group for the valiant cause of getting newborns to sleep. Moms post photos of babies sleeping with captions like “Success! Slept her first night through!” or “Don’t be deceived: This sweet thing kept me up all night.” Everyone posting is tired, some desperate, some there because they’ve come through the worst of it and have ideas to offer. People spout kindness and support and reminders that teenagers sleep through the night, so it won’t last forever. Women, it’s all women, expressing their fears, confessing to co-sleeping, asking questions about how bad pacifiers are really. We all basically want to know if we are failing parenting, or if we just feel like we are failing parenting.

The post shows up in my feed not long before Halloween. The woman writes this story to the group: After her son is born, she is rocking him in a chair and feels a hand on her shoulder. No one is there. Shortly after, she lays her infant on a bean bag while she turns to change her toddler daughter’s diaper. She hears a noise, turns around, and sees a pillow covering his face. A pillow that had been on the floor. She quickly moves it and gathers her children in her arms and tells the spirit to leave. Her nose starts gushing blood. She calls her husband, and together they call a priest who comes over the next day.

The real horror of the story, of course, is that if it wasn’t a ghost then she somehow covered her child’s face with a pillow without being conscious of it. The horror, the threat, is coming from inside the house. The blood gushes from her nose. Her body then is haunted: she is perhaps still this liminal space, the gateway for which the unfamiliar to enter the familiar.

Back to that fevered night. I somehow fall asleep. I dream that I notice a hole in the ceiling in the corner of his room, a ragged woody wound that leads to the attic. I get up on the nursery chair and climb into it, and there I find a ghost. Not just a ghost, but the ur-ghost. A screaming blackness it’s death personified and it’s coming for my son. I decide to leap for it, across the wood rafters of the attic. I want to strangle it.

As I leap, I am suddenly awoken by a fierce and painful pinch on my left shin. I wake up sweating, terrified. I understand that whatever presence is in the room has awoken me as some act of grace, but I am now too scared to sleep. I drag my body across the floor, I rub my shin, the pain still there, I reach my hand through the bars of my son’s crib and feel for his breath. The room is pitch black and I am utterly sure that there is someone in the room with us.

I don’t think this is an essay, by the way, about postpartum psychosis. The other symptoms, like a lasting break from reality, were not there for me or, seemingly, my Facebook friend. Certainly, lack of sleep and stress explains some, if not all, of this. And that’s fine, I’m not opposed to the logical explanation. But even in within that logic, this is interesting phenomena.

The horror that is both internal, a dream of death, and external, a clear and horrifying pinch. It is both real my son’s acute illness, his fragility in that moment and surreal, a ghost in the room. For my Facebook friend, the logical explanation is actually more horrifying than the paranormal explanation. The reactions to her post are things like, “get some sage,” (followed by a reminder of cultural appropriation and the devasting environmental impact on desert white sage of white people suddenly getting into sage), two replies calling her to move, two to actually burn down her house. Some gentle suggestions that sleep deprivation causes hallucinations and one counter-story from a woman to casually demonstrate it.

She tells of a midnight trip to change her child’s diaper; she’s so tired she can barely walk straight.

She picks her child up and accidentally catches his leg slightly on the changing table. She believes she has ripped his leg off. She puts him down to start looking for his severed leg on the floor.

When light finally crept into that night, I looked for a mark on my own leg. In the blue dawn light, I thought perhaps a bug had bitten me. I wanted a bug bite to be there. But there was none, though it still felt sore.

My son’s fever broke with the morning, and I briefly thought about moving him out of the room. For weeks, I stared at the ceiling I had crawled through, checking it for any sign of structural weakness.

I never told this story on social media, or anywhere before now. In some ways, the uncanny of postpartum is a space that defies language, or any kind of analysis. Part of this has to do with priorities, I mean who gives an eff about Freud when your nipples are raw and you haven’t slept more than two hours straight in six weeks (not exaggerating here). And part of this has to do with a historical disregard for women’s stories, a disgust of women’s bodies, a belief that women can’t tell the truth, really, and an idea that there is something so domestic and boring about it all and keep it in your journal, will you? (Sure, right after I pick up this severed baby leg. Boring?!)

But also, to talk about all this otherness is to remember the power that is revealed in childbirth. Bringing another human into this world is a power that frightens, and always has (no need to review the history of the patriarchy here). Having a child, and holding this child, you can’t help but feel outside of yourself. I made this thing? I am that which separates life from death? I remember looking at the umbilical cord as they cut it. It was so disgusting, purply, and wet, like a dead thing snaking out of me. And yet it was amazing. This is how this baby grew? This thing now nestling into my chest and making little grunting noises is my child? This thing who will survive his infant illnesses and a global pandemic and in just a few short years grow into a child who will eat waffles and say things like “Ahh, man…”. There’s some part of this that is just too strange, too magical for words.

But another reason, perhaps the real reason, I didn’t post my ghost story is because I feel I am constantly balancing a performance between being a mother and an academic and at this moment in my life when my second child was ten months old the two felt like violently opposing forces in my life. Being exhausted but expected to remember important scholarship, to sound smart, to perform intellectualism even as my body leeched nutrients my brain needed to my baby. Even as my primary desire was to hold him, be with him, to gap in wonder at him rather than do anything else.

To be able to think about these events in relation to an essay I often teach, then, is a reconciliation of these two parts of my life. The unheimlich, the unspeakable, the liminal, the sheer wonder of childbirth, articulated. It is an attempt to render what is uncanny, legible.

You see, my body was and now my house is haunted with children, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am at home in this haunting. And as for the ghost in the house, the one that pinches you awake from a nightmare, that makes you check your son’s breathing, that walks the halls at midnight. We can live with that.

Miracle Brian McPartlon

Drift Line

Emma Aylor

Lately, I only want partial pieces.

1. Worm-bored ribs from a bittersweet. 2. The navel

twist, alone, of a moon snail.

3. Dramatic ruffle, three thrills, from a huge gray oyster. Dulled silver underneath. It isn’t conscious, decisions in beachcombing being usually based in entire interior affinities for shape, color, rarity, or strangeness, meaning I make them and seldom define a method, but nevertheless I end my walk the prior half-hour misted, whole, and inaccessible to me,

as good walks in such flow should be and open my hand, and not a single item is sound. 4. Stained-glass sliver

of a fulgur whelk’s fleshlike inner pink. 5. Two riddled triangles in strips of ocher on white. The parts

make me think first of O’Keeffe (not the shell paintings, but her bones): the pelvistousles and sockets laden by sky that seem in some lights by crop and density abstract, but most often strike me as extravagantly natural.

This is the way we find things. 6. Tip of a pen shell, opaque but iridescent. Maybe this is why I like the pieces now, even as it marks me

an entirely different person than the child I was, on the same stretch of Atlantic beach,

who cared exclusively for intact butterfly shells (my term for coquina) and undamaged scallops, razor clams, baby’s ears,

and teeth; distinct, too, from the woman I’ve seen this week:

summer neighbor with yellow sifter

garish against her sensible straw hat and black suit, who stands ankle-deep in the water to reach the shingle and bends, inspects, selects, bends again for a perfect shell that hasn’t yet been pushed to visible sand. Now look what I’ve got

so many resemble potsherds, curves broken from vessels, sewn or woven covers, and handwriting

(7. Tunnels and punctures sorted like cuneiform on one saltwhite square) that it appears impossible I’m the first person to touch.

8. Slide of another pen. Thin as moth.

See, right through it, water polished, working like nothing. I’m mistaken. Like itself.

Facing It Together Series

Jack Bordnick

The Man in the Woods

Karen Parkman

In May, Chase left his life in Cambridge to go live in the woods. “In a place with more trees, rather,” he corrected when explaining to colleagues that filled the sterile cubicles of the textbook company where he’d worked for nine years. That way it didn’t sound like he would be living off the land, which he would not be doing. He made jokes: “Didn’t every adolescent boy dream of being Thoreau?” though the time when he believed himself capable of thinking great thoughts had passed.

He’d dreamt of staying in the Berkshires, where his parents used to take him and his two brothers every summer. Perhaps he hoped to revert back to a younger version of himself, the version that skipped rocks and rode his bike to downtown Stockbridge. But he settled for a considerably shabbier arrangement in an old cabin on a pond in western Massachusetts, near the Connecticut border.

There were some things he could not leave entirely behind, like his two children, who arrived for a visit with Chase’s ex-wife, Ellen, about three weeks after he moved in. They tumbled out of Ellen’s car and demanded to see the dock before Chase even finished hugging them hello. Now, Maddy and Aiden were admiring a group of peaceful mallards.

“Why are the boy ducks the colorful ones?” asked Aiden. “That seems backwards.”

“The boy ducks attract the girls,” Ellen explained. She was weighted down by the kids’ bags they’d insisted on looking at the pond before going into the house.

Maddy batted her eyes and did a flat-footed waddle to make Aiden laugh. Chase regarded them with a mix of adoration and apprehension. They were at such terrifically weird ages; Aiden was six, and Maddy was eleven. Ellen herded them up the rickety wooden stairs that lead up the hill to the back porch of the cabin. Before following them inside, she placed a flat palm on the porch’s wooden beams and pushed, as though expecting them to crack.

The inside was decorated with old lawn ornaments and paintings of birds and the floorboards protested loudly when walked on. With Ellen here, Chase half-expected the floor to cave in and make a mockery of his whole endeavor.

The kids went to argue over who got which twin bed in the second bedroom while Ellen surveyed the kitchen with Chase.

“Well, it seems sturdy enough,” she said.

“That’s like what you’d say about a ship you hope won’t sink,” Chase replied. She accepted the joke with a nod and a shrug. A little over a year had passed since their divorce, and they’d only recently discovered how to speak to each other in a relatively normal way. Trying out a joke or saying something kind felt less like jumping off a cliff.

Ellen called the kids into the kitchen to kiss them goodbye. “Squeeze as hard as you can, so it lasts me ‘til next week!” she said as she knelt down, the three of them a clutching

mass by the kitchen table. Chase felt a tug behind his sternum; Ellen was better with kids; she knew how to act with and inspire enthusiasm.

The kids waved from the window, bouncing their hips against each other, while their mother’s car disappeared from the driveway. Then Maddy sashayed into the bedroom to change into her bathing suit and said, “So what are we exactly supposed to do here?”

Chase had booked the cabin after what felt to him like a message from the universe that he should remove himself from normal life.

Soon after the divorce was finalized, Chase started seeing men. On the nights he didn’t have the kids he ventured out to gay bars. He made an online dating profile. At first he did all this in a detached sort of cloud. He had the idea that he would eventually go back to women, so there was no need to make a fuss. Then, after spending the first night in another man’s bed, he woke up to find detachment replaced by panic. He felt skinned and adolescent in his mid-thirties. He was both insanely attached to every man he went out with, and terrified to spend another moment with him, whoever he was. He and his heart were crashing wildly around the greater Boston area. It seemed very late in life to be going through something like this.

The final straw was getting into a car accident with his children in the backseat. It wasn’t a serious accident, nor had it been his fault; the other driver had barreled through a stop sign and hit the passenger’s side of Chase’s car as he crossed an intersection. At the moment of impact, Chase was turned slightly, addressing Aiden, who was poking Maddy, and so did not see the other car coming. The question of fault in the eyes of the insurance company hardly mattered with his children in the backseat. The point was he could have been facing ahead. The other driver, a young woman, had pressed her hands against the sides of her face and said, “Oh no, oh no,” while they exchanged information. Her guilt did not alleviate his own.

The divorce, the stress of dating, the process of learning all the new ways to have sex he felt he could have faced all that if the car crash hadn’t happened. He could no longer stand his apartment or its appliances. He quit his editorial job at the textbook publisher. As soon as the lease on his apartment ended May1st, he dumped half his stuff at Goodwill and the other half in storage, and booked the cabin for twelve weeks.

How to explain this series of events to Ellen, or anyone else? He didn’t know how to talk about any part of his life anymore. All he knew was that he needed to get away. “You need a physical expression of the change you’re enduring inwardly,” Ellen offered at one point. She was a guidance counselor and liked to help people articulate their feelings. “That sounds right,” said Chase.

On the third night, the kids sat at the kitchen table in their bathing suits while Chase scanned the fridge for something to feed them. Since moving into the cabin, he’d occupied most of his time by cooking increasingly complex meals. How much easier to focus on stirring a risotto instead of thinking about his failed marriage. Last night he’d made a filet with a cherry demi-

glaze served with spinach soufflé. The night before, pork belly cured in miso. He drove thirty minutes to the nearest town, to a butcher who sold beautiful, translucent slabs of meat. He’d been so many times the butcher, a tall and amiable man, now expected him.

The kids were not interested in his culinary ventures. He made them scrambled eggs, again. “And as for me,” said Chase, pulling a packet from the fridge, “I’m having liver.”

“That. Sounds. Disgusting,” enunciated Maddy through a mouthful of eggs. They watched as their father chopped the mushrooms and onion while the butter began to crackle in the sauté pan. When he bought the liver, the butcher had asked him what he planned to do with it. When Chase replied he was going to smother it in a brandy cream sauce, the butcher raised his fingers to his lips and then let them burst in appreciation.

“Do you know what the liver does?” he asked while adding the liver to the foaming butter. “I saw a drawing of a liver in a human body in the back of Maddy’s science book,” said Aiden. “It looks like a Thanksgiving turkey in there.”

“That’s great, Aiden,” said Chase, a little alarmed at the comparison. He let the meat brown for a couple minutes before adding the onions and mushrooms. “I think it’s a kind of filter. All the blood in your body runs through it and it cleans it out.”

“And you’re eating it?” exclaimed Aiden.

Chase poured brandy in the pan. “It’s good for you.”

“People eat hearts and kidneys, too,” Maddy told Aiden, who shook his head furiously.

Chase looked at them; their plates were empty and they watched the stove expectantly. “Watch this.”

He struck a match to the brandy so a flame burst up from the pan. Maddy and Aiden gasped, then applauded. Chase added heavy cream and turned the dish out onto his plate. “Do you want to try it?” It was a beautiful dish, rich and thick with alcohol and dense meat that had served multiple, mysterious functions before it was removed.

“Bleh,” said Maddy.

“Forget it,” said Aiden.

That night Ellen called to say goodnight to the kids. Aiden passed the phone back to Chase, saying, “She wants you to say goodnight, too.”

Chase accepted the phone, a bit surprised.

“How are you holding up, just the three of you?” asked Ellen.

“I’m just glad to have their company. The only person I see here is the butcher in the next town over,” he said.

A silence followed this, and he was surprised to find it thick with tension. He felt a tremor of panic, the need to backtrack. “I just go to his store. I buy things to cook. I’ve been cooking a lot. Trying a lot of new things new dishes.” He faltered; it seemed hopeless to continue.

“They say it’s good to try new things, but no one mentions the danger of them becoming a habit.” Ellen sighed, and Chase could sense her wanting to take back what she’d just said.

“No, actually, I’m glad you know someone out there. If something happens you have someone nearby to call. And…you always did like to cook.”

Chase gripped the phone. He wanted only to rush past this tiny, ridiculous miscommunication. Not so long ago, they’d been able to sense each other’s moods and meanings through the alchemical connection of their marriage. Or at least they were able to breeze past the moments where they didn’t completely understand each other.

He knew that beginning to date men hurt Ellen in a way that dating women wouldn’t have. It meant Chase’s desires had been mysterious and unreachable to both of them all those years. It meant they knew much less about each other than they’d hoped. He supposed Ellen wondered, though she did not ask, how his attraction to men had factored into the divorce and how aware of it he’d been before they decided to split.

“I can really feel myself becoming centered out here. Becoming more…myself,” he declared. “Being out in nature really reminds you how amazingly, perfectly suited creatures other than humans are to their environments. How they belong in them. They’ve been in a long, long conversation with the earth over thousands of generations, and now they live exactly as they’re designed. You would like it here,” he added for some reason.

“That’s good, Chase,” said Ellen. “Good for you.”

In the mornings he took long walks. Though the landscape surrounding the porch was an unimpressive blanket of leaves, scrubby bushes, and spindly trees, the pond itself was quite beautiful. It was edged by healthy pines and big boulders that begged to be climbed on. He liked to see the ducks land in the water all together, in a graceful stream.

He had this fantasy when he went out for walks that came from his childhood, when he would play in his parents’ backyard by himself. He was surprised by its reemergence. He imagined himself wandering the earth after an apocalyptic event, like a nuclear war or a pandemic. He learned to hunt and live off the land, leap stealthily from one rock to the next, defend himself from evil roving gangs of human survivors. It was too embarrassing to consciously wonder about, but Chase enjoyed sinking into this character every morning. It allowed him to walk without faltering, to catch the slightest movements in the trees, to carry some measure of toughness, of grace.

He had seen an ad at the convenience store for a living museum in one of the nearby towns that recreated rural life from the early 19th century. Once the kids were up, he asked them if they wanted to go look at the animals. They shrugged agreeably.

“Dad,” said Aiden once they were on the road. “How come Mom sounds mad on the phone when we’re with you? Are you mad at each other?”

“No, she isn’t mad,” said Chase, though it hit him with more clarity than usual that for all he knew, Ellen was mad. “You know we both get sad when we’re away from you guys.”

“She’s just worried. She always worries about you,” said Maddy happily. “She asks us all these questions about how you’re doing after we see you.”

Chase looked at her through the rearview mirror. She was holding a book about a sixth grade girl who is whisked away by a warlock who tells her she was actually a princess from a fantasy world destined to reclaim her kingdom. Maddy had explained the plot in excruciating detail at dinner the night before.

He said, “Your mom shouldn’t be making you think she’s worried. I’m okay. We’re okay.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t okay,” said Maddy, lifting her book back in front of her face. “You’re just living out in this weird place right now.”

He half-winced, half-smiled at Maddy’s brash, intuitive wisdom. He wondered if she also had a fantasy when she walked in the trees, of being a warrior princess from the imaginary worlds in her books. That private image of herself would get her through just about any level of loneliness or boredom. But then she would become self-conscious about it and bury it deep somewhere, where it would only return in times of crisis.

Chase parked the car in front of the visitor’s center, an enormous white-paneled house with black shutters. Dirt paths led through the village to each attraction: a barn with a silo, a field of crops, various shops, and, in the distance, the white steeple of a church. They went into a little white house and met a young woman in a blue bonnet who explained to them about the lives of women in her time period. On the back porch she let them take turns churning butter in a wooden barrel. “How do they make butter now?” Aiden wanted to know.

“I have no idea,” she replied, and Chase couldn’t tell if she was answering in character.

Chase bought them locally made fudge from a shop and they sat on a bench to wolf it down, observing the other groups of tourists and the villagers in their hoop skirts and long coats. “Can you stay here overnight?” asked Aiden. “I would rather live here than go to school.”

“They go back to their regular lives on the weekend I bet,” said Maddy. “To catch up on their TV shows.”

“I bet they live here,” said Aiden defensively. “I know they’re just acting, but I bet they live here and act all the time.”

They looked to their father for confirmation, but Chase shrugged, not wanting to prove either of them wrong.

“If you lived back in this time, you would not be able to go on dates with men after you got divorced,” said Maddy to Chase.

Chase felt the space around his diaphragm freeze and then get very hot, though Maddy had spoken in a neutral tone.

He and Ellen told Maddy and Aiden that Chase was seeing men almost a year ago, reasoning that this would give the kids time to get used to the idea before they met a boyfriend. They told them in the foyer of Ellen’s house after one of their weekends with Chase. Ellen had muddled the explanation by calling it, “making a new family, but with a man,” which Aiden understood to mean his father wanted another brother. “But you already have Uncle Jack and Uncle Rob,” he explained patiently.

The whole conversation ended awkwardly. Both children said, “Okay,” as though they could tell this was an important announcement but weren’t exactly sure how it related to them. They wanted things to be normal. Maddy, being older, seemed to reason that this was a thing younger boys were potentially teased for, but adults were exempt from that danger. They’d reacted similarly to the car accident. They’d been shook up at first, but later that night Chase overheard them in the bathroom, when they were supposed to be brushing their teeth, planning how they would tell their classmates they’d been in a car crash. Aiden even asked Chase if he could bring the crumpled bumper to school for show and tell.

Still, the kids’ comments on it gave Chase a teetering feeling, as though any conversation on the topic could be irreparably messed up. He coughed and motioned for a juice box. Maddy handed him one and continued, “Unless, would you even be allowed to get divorced?”

“When I’m older,” said Aiden, “I’m going to be a candlemaker from the eighteen hundreds. And I’ll never get divorced.”

At the end of the week, Chase and the kids met Ellen in Worcester, halfway between the cabin and her house in Roslindale. They ate together in a diner off I-290. The kids told their mother about the pond and the town that was stuck in time. Chase caught Ellen’s eye and tried to gauge how aware she was that this was the first time they’d all eaten a meal together around the same table in months.

In the parking lot, as the kids settled into Ellen’s car, Ellen asked in a whisper, “Chase, how much longer do you plan to stay there? And where exactly are you planning to live once your rental period is up?”

Chase pretended to think. The timing, the timing of everything. It was the only thing that mattered. It was the difference between comedy, humiliation, and derangement. August 1st loomed like a big, gray cloud. Finally he said, “I guess I’m waiting until it feels like I’m done here. And then I’ll know what to do.”

Ellen sighed and put the kids’ bags into the trunk. Before she got in the driver’s seat she folded her hands on the top of the car.

“The kids want to know where their father is. I don’t think this is a matter of you not knowing what to do. I think this is a matter of you wanting to stay in between things.” Chase spread his hands. He did not want to go through life making expressions of helplessness, but it seemed the only gesture available to him.

The kids were watching them through the back window. Ellen gave Chase a smile, to wrap things up. As she got into the driver’s seat she said, “Just don’t go crazy out here.”

He woke up the next morning depressed, as he always was after dropping off his kids. He went out for a walk. When he was the man in the woods he could disappear into his surroundings. He could pretend the paths were familiar, that he knew the types of birds by heart, that the sounds of cracking branches meant something to him. He accidentally wandered into the

backyard of another cabin, where an older lady peered at him, startled, from behind her curtains. He bolted.

The butcher greeted him that afternoon as he perused the display cases in the shop. Each purchase chipped away at the modest savings account he’d accumulated from his publishing job. But he couldn’t bring himself to think of this. He picked out a rabbit saddle he planned to stuff and wrap in bacon.

“No one else knows what to do with this,” said the butcher. “Try feeding it to a wife and kids you won’t get far.”

He had said some variation of this multiple times. Chase took a deep breath and replied, “I’m here temporarily with my partner. He’s finishing his PhD. My kids live with my ex-wife but they visit twice a month.”

This was more information than the butcher asked for, but he seemed to like being confided in. He moved like a bartender, wrapping and weighing the meat without having to take his eyes from his customer.

He slapped a price sticker on the white paper and said, “Next time your kids visit, tell me. I’ve got these filet steaks I’ll give you a discount.”

Chase left feeling strangely unsettled. This was the first time in weeks he had said something about himself out loud to a stranger and he chose to say something untrue. He’d invented a life for himself. On the drive home he considered if it was the life he really wanted. He closed his eyes briefly and tried to see the face of the imaginary partner finishing his PhD.

He remembered the suspicion the butcher had inspired in Ellen. She probably imagined him out having exciting, youthful sex with strangers, strangers whose bodies would never remind him of hers, while she put the kids to bed and considered signing up for Match.com. He wished he could tell her how far off that vision was from the truth. He wished she could know how inept he felt, how mad with grief, how hopelessly far from love.

It had occurred to him even before his marriage as far back as high school to sleep with a man. But he was terrified to initiate a romantic connection. The possible reactions of friends and family bothered him far less than the idea of being rejected, or not knowing what to do in bed. And he had Ellen, his wife and friend why couldn’t he want her more? They married so young, right out of college, and sex was the least organic part of their relationship.

He wanted desire to be a non-essential part of himself, something that could be taken out or put away. It was too messy, too impulsive to be considered part of who a person really was. It was the body behaving without the mind’s permission. But now, desire was revealing itself to be an assertive force, demanding attention. It was so different with a man the broad shoulders, thin, hard hips matching up, like a palindrome. It made him buzz, like all the liquid in his body had been carbonated.

Chase woke up early the next morning, the first day of June. Because he had no television, he did not know of the approaching storm until a few hours before it was scheduled to reach western Massachusetts. On his walk, the trees whipped in the wind. Back indoors, he found three voicemails on his cell phone about the storm warnings, two from Ellen, and one from the landlady who owned the cabin.

He shut all the windows and unplugged the appliances. The rain began that afternoon, a slight trickle that morphed over the hours into a downpour, interrupted by rolls of thunder. When the electricity went out he lit candles, filling the living room with the scent of cinnamon. He sat on the floor with his back against the ottoman, reading a mystery novel he’d unearthed and eating cold leftovers: braised short ribs and a leek and potato quiche.

The walls rattled in the wind, first pleasantly and then angrily. They seemed to breathe in and out with the long gusts of the wind. The air was electric and thick with humidity. At dusk, Chase peered out the window to see great, flat sheets of rain, rolling like the surface of water brought to a boil. In the dying light he could see the driveway had been reduced to a puddle.

At that moment he felt so exposed, so alone and out of the way, he understood that he had no idea what he was doing out here.

The way he had dropped it all a person wasn’t allowed to just do that. He thought of all his stuff stacked up in the storage unit. The coffee machine, a wrinkled armchair, stacks of documents he was afraid to throw away all his worldly possessions in an eight-by-eight foot tin box. Perhaps those things would wait for him, but you couldn’t do that with people. They wouldn’t be stored away for later.

The cabin shook with the next roll of thunder. He should have gotten a nicer place, where he could see neighbors. How stupid it would be if he came out here only to be washed away with his cabin in the storm. What would happen to Maddy and Aiden?

Maddy and Aiden! How did he get such good kids? He wanted them to bring every hurt, every disappointment to him. He wanted them to take all their sadness out of themselves, put it on a plate, so he could consume it for them, like a lemon meringue pie. He wanted them to show up at his house and say, “Here can you take this please?” and then bound out the door into their easy, happy lives while he waved goodbye, swallowing all of it, absorbing and removing it from their lives, until they showed up next time with more.

He hadn’t missed the kids this intensely in some time, and he reached up to feel his rib cage above his heart. Their and his aloneness, and Ellen’s, seemed like a terrible shadowy force, something that began in the brain but leaked out into the atmosphere, separating people from each other, trapping them in the knowledge their feelings belonged to no one but themselves.

Then there was a loud and terrible crash and the sudden descent of branches.

Chase threw himself down to the floor, shocked first by the sound and then by the realization that he was surrounded by leaves. He’d cut his hand on a piece of glass from the window, the window must be broken. The rain was pouring through the smashed frame, soaking the floor. The shock turned to terror. He flipped onto his stomach. His knee was pinned beneath a branch, and in his fear he yanked it out, scraping the skin. He dug his fingernails into the rug and began pulling himself away from the wet embrace of the tree, the wind whipping through the window.

As he crawled his way out a strange focus settled over him. He was the man in the woods, wholly without support, so hardened by life that his whole purpose could be summarized in a single phrase: stay alive. He had only to pull himself with slow, fluid movements, out from under his captor. He thrived in this state. He would build a shelter from the howling winds, and crouch down, ripping his clothes to wrap his knee and bloody palms, and wait for the light to come. He broke free of the branches, the pain in his twisted knee growing with each movement, and crawled out of the way of the rain pouring through the window. He leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom, where it was dry, the adrenaline draining from his body, and continued to imagine the ways he could rescue himself.

The storm steadied into a lazy rain soon after. Chase fell into a restless sleep on the floor, his head on the fluffy bathmat. He woke when his phone rang from where it was lying on the bathroom tiles; the landlady calling. He pieced together that a tornado had touched down in Springfield practically next door, he thought, part amazed, part nauseous. She asked if there was any damage. He peered around the doorframe to look at the branch. Its thick middle arm rested on the loveseat so the branches touched the coffee table. The window frame was splintered and the lamp was in pieces. Chase told her there was a tree in the living room. She groaned. “I’ll be there in an hour. God, it’s a lot of baggage, you know? I chose a life with an awful lot of stuff in it,” she said, and hung up.

For a moment he sat on the bathroom floor, dazed. Then he jolted upright and grabbed his phone to call Ellen.

“Put the kids on,” he said when she answered. “I’m okay. Put them on.”

There was a rustling sound and then Aiden’s voice. “How bad was the storm?” he shouted. “Are the ducks okay?”

“The ducks are okay. Dad’s okay,” said Chase.

“Don’t worry about the ducks,” said Maddy. They were on speakerphone, their voices scratchy. “We wanted to watch the weather channel but Mom said we had to be in bed and she’d tell us what happened. And you’re okay!”

“What did the people in the olden days museum do?” asked Aiden. “And the horses?”

“Um they have storm shelters,” said Chase. “Under the barns. They’re all safe and dry together under there.”

“That’s a relief,” said Aiden.

He heard Ellen ask for the phone back.

“Come back here,” she said. “Listen I’ll put you up in a hotel. For a week. You can look for a place to stay from there.”

Chase faltered. But of course he couldn’t keep living here with a tree in the living room. Somehow the fact that he would have to leave had not yet occurred to him. He shrank from the idea. It wasn’t time to go back. He was supposed to have until August.

“I have to think,” he said.

“Chase, for God’s sake!” said Ellen. “What are you doing? What are you doing out there so far from from your life? You can’t stay there, so you’ve got to come here. This is where everything is! It’s all so simple, I don’t know why you insist on making it so goddamn hard for everyone.”

Chase rested his head against the tiled wall of the bathroom. What was this shame, again? The constant companion of his life, following him around like an old reliable dog. He told Ellen he would come to Roslindale later and they would talk. The main thing was to see Maddy and Aiden. He could figure out what to do from there.

“I’m really glad you’re not hurt, Chase,” Ellen said in a rush. Her voice was higher. “My God, if something happened.”

He hung up and pulled himself to his feet. The branch lay defiantly across the floor of the living room. A breeze from outside ruffled the leaves.

He turned his back on it and went outside to his car. The tires were submerged in two inches of water, but miraculously, it started.

He drove on the curvy narrow roads with no destination. There were only a few other drivers out, and each time someone passed they waved, as though to acknowledge both their survivals. The ground was littered with branches, sinking into the mud.

The extent of the damage left him feeling dwarfed and small. He was not the man in the woods. He was from a world of useless knowledge. What could he do? He could cook. This seemed hopelessly beside the point.

Finally he was there, where he’d been going without realizing it. The butcher’s shop. It was his only destination, the only place he ever went.

He peered through the windows. It was dark. The humming glass cases were now silent and damp with condensation. Chase froze as a figure emerged from the back room. He hadn’t even let himself hope someone would be there. The butcher started at the sight of him, and then his face opened up in recognition. He unlocked the door.

“You made it,” he said. Chase knew he meant made it through the storm but it sounded as though he’d been expected. “Come inside.”

The butcher led him past the glass cases to the back room. It was a room of Formica and stainless steel with knives and big slicing appliances. But for all that, it was small and warm. Chase sat down on a stool by the counter. His throat was dry. The feeling of inevitability was fading. Chase did not know why he had come here. He was embarrassed, but the butcher did not look irritated. He looked at Chase as though he had invited him in, which, Chase remembered, he had.

“I’m sorry to come by here,” said Chase, as though he’d been asked for an explanation. “The place where I’ve been living is ruined. I don’t know where to go next. I couldn’t think of any other place to go.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” said the butcher. “It’s all right. That storm after a thing like that, it’s normal to want to come out to talk to someone.”

“To confirm that you really are still alive.”

He startled himself a little, saying that. The butcher looked at him curiously. Chase took note, suddenly, of the meat in the silent glass display cases.

“What’s going to happen to all this food?” asked Chase.

The butcher’s face twitched into a frown. “It’ll have to go. It’s already starting to go bad. I don’t mind telling you it’s going to break my heart to watch it all go into the trash.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a shimmering red slab of cured ham. It was certified Spanish Serrano ham, one of the most expensive items in the shop, wrapped in a blanket of gorgeous brown fat. The butcher conjured up a knife, which he used to slice off a long, transparent piece. He handed it to Chase.

“Let’s enjoy what we can.”

Chase realized he had not eaten since the afternoon before. He and the butcher ate slice after slice. The jamón was all muscle and salt, intensely satisfying, each filmy slice packed with sustenance.

The butcher wiped his knife on his apron. Chase’s phone buzzed. He grasped at his pocket, but ignored it. It would wait. There seemed to be no urgency outside this room. Chase said, “I don’t have a partner here. There are kids, but no partner.”

The butcher nodded sympathetically. “It can be hard to say that out loud sometimes.”

“I suppose it doesn’t really make a difference. I guess that’s why people come out here to the middle of nowhere. So no one can say whether you’re one person or another. Do you think?”

The butcher considered it. “Well, as far as I know, you could be anybody,” he said. Chase realized he did not know the butcher’s name. He wondered if he had read the signs right. He tried to remember how Ellen had first approached him. She had made some comment, something warm and inviting but a little cutting, like she knew something about Chase just by looking at him. But all Chase remembered was that he and Ellen had smiled at each other and something was contained in that smile a sort of helpless knowledge. It was a look that said, it’s too late, we have already embarked.

The butcher was looking at Chase with a different sort of smile, as though he was wondering what Chase would do next. This could be a breakthrough, Chase thought, or it could be the most humiliating moment of his life. As Chase considered his tactics he realized with equal parts horror and excitement that he was doing the simplest thing; he was leaning forward.

Machinations

Janina Aza

Karpinska

Unclean

Shawna Ervin

Slow, meditative music played from an iPhone to a small speaker at the front of the meeting room at the Presbyterian retreat center in the Colorado mountains. I had been hired to teach a creative workshop Saturday afternoon, then invited to stay until the retreat ended after breakfast on Sunday.

Women silently rose from their places at round tables and filed into lines at the back of the room. Church leaders, all women, sat on one side of long tables. In front of each leader was a serving bowl with warm water, a bottle of scented soap, a hand towel, and scented hand cream.

The pastor, a woman, had quoted a Bible verse about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. “We wanted to offer you comfort, to give you what Jesus gave his disciples, to serve you in a way that would be uniquely female.”

The only sounds were the soft muttering of prayers from leaders as they washed and dried hands, the shuffle of footsteps over the carpet, the whoosh of chair cushions when each woman sat or stood. Outside a large window at one end of the meeting room, the sun gradually turned the sky orange and pink, then deepening shades of blue.

Twenty-five years earlier I stood at the bottom of a staircase in the church I had gone to since birth. I backed into a kids Sunday school room, the tall youth pastor towering over me. He was stern.

“What you reported is serious.”

I was sixteen. I had reported my dad for sexual and physical abuse, had been placed in foster care. It had been several weeks. I begged for a ride, went back to church expecting hugs, offers of places to live.

I nodded, looked at the pastor’s belly. I couldn’t get around him, I knew.

“You love your church family?”

I nodded again. My dad was the assistant pastor and music leader. My mom was the bookkeeper. I had been dedicated into the fundamental Baptist congregation as a toddler, run down the hallways with a younger brother after services, memorized verse after verse, gone to church twice each Sunday and on Wednesday nights as long as I could remember, learned how to convert people, followed rules that forbid secular music, TV, movies, alcohol, tobacco, playing cards, dancing, and more.

“I know you love them. I know you want to guard your church family’s hearts.” He took a step toward me.

I backed up. I studied the toys on the shelves for what would hurt him the most a metal toy truck, a marble ramp and moved closer to the shelves. My stomach lurched and burned. My skin tingled.

“What you reported, what you said, what you…” The pastor looked up and down my body. Disgust curled at the corner of his lips. His gaze lingered at my breasts. “Until you are ready to repent and confess to your sins, it’s best if you aren’t here. You need to take some time to make your heart right before God, before the church. You understand, right? Love is not easy.”

I crossed my arms, curled my shoulders forward. I was dirty, dangerous. I would learn later that my parents stayed in the church, that the church put up the bail money for my dad until his trial, that they advocated for my dad to be sentenced to probation rather than prison time.

At the retreat, I watched the sky turn purple, then black, stars flicker above a mountain. I hadn’t planned to take part in the handwashing ritual. I was there to teach women to play with language. Despite the gap in time, my exile from the church was still tender.

Women at the table where I sat gestured toward lines, urging me to have my hands washed. I no longer believed in God, but reluctantly took a place at the end of a line. The leader was the woman who had hired me. If I was going to have my hands touched by a religious person, I wanted it to be someone I knew. The line moved forward. A woman sat down, extended her hands. Soap, towel, hand cream.

I would be next. I sighed, imagined the leader saying she was glad I was there, that the workshop had gone well. I imagined my hands wrapped in a towel, the leader holding them for a moment, then massaging hand cream into my parched knuckles.

The woman ahead of me stood. Whoosh. I stood back to let her pass. Another woman slid into the seat and laughed. “I was waiting for the end of the line,” she said. “I knew you’d want to wash my hands.” The woman and the leader laughed softly.

“This will be my last one,” the leader said to me.

Another leader a few lines away saw me. I didn’t know her. She waved a hand over the empty chair in front of her station.

My stomach lurched. Reluctantly, I walked toward her.

The leader held her palms out. I lifted my hands from my sides, then stopped before I might give something I couldn’t get back. I shook my head slowly, then more vigorously.

“I can’t,” I said to the bowl. I smelled lavender and a hint of lemon. I craved touch, that gentle moment, to feel in her touch that I had become clean again. My hands shook.

“You can’t?” The leader’s hands were soft, her fingers curled gently.

I imagined my hands falling into hers, the sound of her voice lulling me into belonging, watching my sin dissolve in the bowl. Grief threatened the peace of the moment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I shoved my hands into my pockets and backed away. “I can’t.”

Nerve Cell

Josephine Florens

The Dogs, The Dust: Open

Tamara Panici in the earth he digs through fall searching /out last year’s bone…

see him rotting in a shady alley / how the grass grows through his ribs / a rake of eternal passage…

particles spreading up in the stars / from where with this same wonder / he barks back at you –Gabriel

Decuble

Uncle says, Mother says, (the silence says,)

We had to kill the dogs. They rummaged through our garden, chewed and swallowed our vegetables.

Who are we without a few beans in our bellies? Without a ripe tomato in our guts?

(It is true people will eventually eat anything to stay alive.)

The dogs deserved to die the same as anyone deserves death.

It took hours or days. Days in line for handful of dust. A bag of mysterious grey pulp. We put the sludge on the smallest fire on the oven that worked harder than our country to feed fourteen mouths.

(Our bones never warm though our souls burn with the hunger for another day lived.)

We made traps with barbed wire, pulleys, and heavy rocks. Sometimes we used old car batteries.

Always there was nothing at the end of the line. (At the end of the line, you see there is nothing but a crying mother. A bloated corpse. No, not a corpse, a boy.)

When the dog falls into the trap, the weight comes down and pins his body. Then we slit his throat. The blood poured as we prayed.

Death provoked us to kill or run.

I whispered nothing in front of my neighbors and friends, my mother.

Before I ran, I was silent.

(Everyone is here.)

(Some are hidden in the ground or sky.) (Open your hands. Open your eyes.) (Open every bone and bruise.) (Open your head.)

(Open.)

(God has left you with the bodies.)

Volterra in Blue

Rachel Dziga

More Than Enough

Andrew Laing

I had begun occasionally, secretly, to see an older man. He picked me up on the only blazing day of that early June, as I sunbathed uncomfortably on the concrete floor of the naked enclosure at the men’s swimming pond at Highgate. He was a hippie pianist in his late twenties who lived in a commune and smoked a lot of pot. His long straight black hair, childish face with soft brown eyes, and a posh accent made him irresistible. He adopted me, introduced me to a few bits of London he thought I should know, like the Bang disco on Monday nights on Charing Cross Road and a pub behind King’s Cross, just to get me started. My starter gay. I didn’t tell Ugo or any of my other friends at the school of architecture that I took the Tube up to Belsize Park every so often, in the afternoons, to his room with cascading spider ferns. I had never made that kind of arrangement before. He was my first. A hidden outgrowth of my adolescent touches at boarding school. My escapades I called them, nothing more, nothing less.

It was out of the question that I would tell Ugo about the hippie and my escapades; they were sealed tight in a lockbox. I was surprised he even acknowledged me during most of our first year, I felt so inferior to him. Ugo Antelminelli di Montepietro, from an ancient family in Rome with an estate in Calabria. He was the design genius of our cohort, adored by the professors, admired by all of us for his futuristic studio projects. He made it clear I was from a little provincial English place that I was leaving behind. It was useful. He spurred me on, made me determined to learn from his worldliness. And it was also surprising that he began to think I was intellectually interesting. I’m sure it was because I was reading well outside the architectural canon, veering left quickly, devouring the Marxists, the Situationists, and the Frankfurt School. I challenged him in debates about the elite class basis of modernist architecture; how the villas designed for the rich by his heroes Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe glossed over the inequalities of the capitalist system. He enjoyed my provocations, that I challenged his privilege. It was a way for me to flirt, though I wasn’t sure he noticed.

He invited me to stay for a few days with his family in their stylish modern apartment on the edge of Rome and to go with him to Sicily afterwards, that summer of our first year. I arrived lugging a heavy rucksack on a Eurail ticket, my first time out of England, hungry, smelly and scruffy after a rough Channel crossing. I had never been inside such a luxurious building. The uniformed attendant, who sat behind a desk in a glass-walled lobby, pointed me to a lift that opened onto Ugo’s family’s shiny, striated white marble foyer. We had lunch on a tenth-floor terrace shaded by a canopy. A contessa came for coffee. His father was a diplomat. The bedrooms had matching bedcovers and curtains. In one glance, I understood the ugliness of my mother’s slapdash house with its sitting room crowded with battered wingback chairs draped in homemade slipcovers.

The first inkling was when Ugo took me to a fusty museum to show me his favorite painting. We raced through a sequence of dull galleries to stand and stare at Caravaggio’s Saint

John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Ugo explained how its dark background was a dramatic foil for the luminous pale skin of the saint, that the model had been a young laborer, our age probably, his neck sunburned, his face almost hidden in shadow. His skin was not so different than mine. The shocking beauty of the saint’s physique made me anxious, yet Ugo reveled in it. He could say things that I was not yet prepared to acknowledge, even to myself. Nevertheless, I used his admiration of Saint John as an indication of feelings he might have for me.

On our journey to Palermo in Sicily by train a few days later, I began to dare myself to wonder more. We had the cheapest class of tickets and sat crowded in a compartment with Italian soldiers in white uniforms and an old woman who shared little pastries from her basket with everyone. At the stations, young men ran alongside the train to sell fizzy, brightly colored bottled drinks through the window. As the train carriages trundled onto a ferry to cross the Strait of Messina, Ugo was slumped against me, his leg stretched out, touching mine along its length as he slept. I allowed myself not to move my leg away. I thought he was aroused, although he might have only been having a sensual dream, but I speculated that he was pretending to sleep, testing me.

We saw the lush landscapes around Noto Antico, the town ruined from an eighteenthcentury earthquake. It had been rebuilt in honey-toned stone, in a far-fetched baroque style that Ugo showed me was fantastical, overelaborated, and therefore wonderful. We studied the temples at Agrigento, strung alongside the Mediterranean. He told me that we were sitting on the crepidoma, the three steps up to the platform on which the columns of the temple stood. But instead of sketching the columns in his sketchbook, he started drawing me.

But Duncan, your freckles it won’t show in the pencil, he said. Freckles? What are they? Duncan?

I taught you before.

I felt awkward that he was drawing me, making it hard to remember the Italian for freckles. Lentiggini, remember? he said. They are spreading. And your skin is going pink. And the drawing won’t show your red hairs have gone yellow from the swimming. Blond, not yellow, I said, correcting him, as usual.

And even your blue eyes, he said, they stand out more now.

In Syracuse, Ugo was most excited to see the church in that oddly shaped square, the church built within a temple. Yes, the later seventh-century church had been constructed within the temple, so that the temple of Athena morphed into the Duomo. Ugo was ecstatic. He showed me why I should be thrilled to see it. And I was. Seeing the architecture through his eyes brought me closer to him, made me more like him.

We took a ferry out to the island of Lipari. We swam in the ocean among floating scratchy pumice stones from the volcanoes. In the evening, the local men held hands as they walked the passegiata, a casual kind of male intimacy unknown to me in starchy England. I commented on it. Ugo said ‘so what’ as if, of course, it was natural, and that it was me who was unnatural in finding it remarkable.

We returned to our studio projects and lectures in the autumn without further indications that anything might happen between us. I was surprised, yet again, that in the summer of our second undergraduate year, one drizzling lunchtime, Ugo asked me to go to Greece with him. We were sitting in the union bar, noisy with beer-drinkers. With my limited funds, I hadn’t made any plans to go anywhere. The summer was dwindling. He wanted to go to study the ancient Greek architecture seriously, sketch the temples, ensure we understood the details of the different classical orders.

We are the good travel companions, I would say, he said with his Italian accent, in his formal, oldfashioned way. Yet I was afraid worried about what it might mean to travel again with him, the questions it would inevitably raise. His possible interest in me would be confirmed or denied. I might have to make clear to him my own desires, for men. For him.

Ugo added that we could do everything ‘cheap, as you say, the rough way, like you talk about,’ as if to reassure me that our journey would be uncomfortable. His floppy, mousy hair bounced with excitement against his high forehead above his prominent nose. His commitment to traveling rough meant he might be willing to experiment with me, in other ways. The extra teeth of his wide smile flashed at me, not nearly as attractive as the hippie’s. But that didn’t matter at all, though. The hippie couldn’t give me Ugo’s laughter, his amazing ideas, his architecture, his heritage, his Rome and Sicily, his promise of what might happen in Greece. Ugo would bring sketchbooks, had already made a list of temples in the little notebook that he always carried, just like on our giro in Sicily. Temples to be checked off. We could take ferries and buses and trains, but we had to fly to Athens first. I was honored that he wanted us to go together. He didn’t ask anyone else; it wasn’t going to be a group thing. Just us.

Yes, of course, I think I can do it, I said when he asked me, though I was worried about the cost, but I had a bit more money from washing dishes at the café of a rock club in Camden Lock, that summer of seventy-seven when punk was still big. During the weeks until we departed, my chest was tight with excitement.

Before Ugo and I flew to Athens in the middle of August, the hippie gave me a folded piece of paper with a tab of LSD in it. A farewell gift, to try, if I wanted to, in Greece. California Windowpane, he said it was called. The name intrigued me, suggesting tanned blond surfers and the hopeful abundance of the west coast of America. He told me to ask my friend to look after me when I took it. I secreted it in a matchbox to take with me.

But Athens disappointed. Our dismal youth hostel had shared dorm rooms in a nondescript hardto-find neighborhood. The travelers hung their limp handwashed laundry to dry on the rooftop which did not have a good view of anything.

The streets were crowded and noisy, jammed with ugly, cheap little cars.The people didn’t look like the ancient statues I admired in the British Museum. There was one river god in the museum that I liked especially, part of the Elgin Marbles stolen from the pediment of the Parthenon; he lounged, headless, with one long thigh raised up, his torso twisted towards you, his prick lolling on his other thigh, a robe hanging off one shoulder. The men in Athens

were shorter and scrawnier. They smoked incessantly in packed cafes. We rushed around the Parthenon and went on a bus to Cape Sounion to see the Temple of Poseidon.

The first morning, we queued for the one shower room on our floor, behind a line of young men and women gripping thin over-used towels and little plastic boxes containing bars of soap.

Duncan, let’s just go together. Otherwise, one of us has to wait even longer, he said.

I didn’t have time to say no or think about it, but my heart was thumping as he held open the door for me graciously and looked proprietarily at the others behind us. He took off his shorts and t-shirt and hung them on a hook. I mimicked everything he did, to make sure I did the right thing in the unknown universe I had entered. I watched him showering, soaping himself all over, rinsing the sheets of his shaggy hair with his eyes screwed up, as I pretended not to be looking. I noticed his bushy, chestnut brown pubic hairs and his nicely shaped but not very big cock. Somehow, his balls looked proud in their curvy-skinned pouch. I turned away from him and washed myself.

I’ll wash your back, he said as though it didn’t matter.

He started soaping my shoulders and the middle of my back. I stared at the drain that was just a hole in the floor. He stopped soon and gave my back a pat and, to be honest, I was relieved. More touching would have been too much. For me, then. With him.

My disappointment with the men on the streets of Athens was made worse by having seen Ugo in the shower; it even influenced how I failed to appreciate the architecture. The Parthenon on the Acropolis was depleted of statues, edged by the tawdry Plaka, street after street of scrappy little trinket shops and over-priced cafes full of tourists.

We took a long overnight ferry to Rhodes. My mood improved when we arrived at the town of Lindos. Clear blue skies, quaint winding streets, startling white miniature houses with terraced roofs, a magnificent fortress and temple looking down on the town with its pretty bays and beaches. Beautiful young people flapped around us in white trousers, sandals, and cheerful t-shirts. Everyone at our college had said the thing to do was sleep in sleeping bags on the beach. Ugo said he was up for it, forcing himself outside the scruples of his rich family. After dinner on the first night, we crept down to the sea with our rucksacks and slept under scrubby trees on the edge of the beach.

In the morning, I found sand in my sleeping bag as I wriggled out of it. I didn’t know where I could wash. I lay watching young men in minute swimwear splash in the water. While Ugo went to find us breakfast, I tried to read from a book of essays by sociologists from the Frankfurt School; I don’t remember why I thought they were relevant for architectural theory, or why they were suitable beach reading. I think, looking back, I was burying my head in a world of difficult concepts to create a veil over my own contradictions: my secret escapades, my infatuation with Ugo, my inability to tell him how I felt about him as it would be the same as telling him I was queer. I didn’t deserve him, was less accomplished than him, would lose him, because I was queer. My looping thoughts went on and on, round and round. Habermas’s clear, rational chapter on the rise of coffee houses in the eighteenth century served to displace

my dilemmas. I imagined sipping coffee and holding forth with other intellectuals, in a place where my bodily desires might not matter, would be irrelevant, or better still, invisible.

My book was open, but I had stopped reading. One man on the beach was impossible to ignore. Darkly tanned in a way that I would never achieve, wearing a tiny black Speedo, if Speedo even existed back then. Standing contrapposto. Ugo taught me that. One foot in front, the weight on the back leg, the body turned.

Ugo reappeared with sesame-covered bread rings and bottles of water. I nibbled on the bread. The man ran out of the water, his swimwear tighter than I was familiar with in London at the Highgate Pond or at the university pool on Malet Street. He pulled his sleek black wet hair away from his face and gave me a little look that suggested he knew it was a pleasure for me to observe him from my shady bower. He ran past us with a shiny bouncing bulge to the edge of the beach where his girlfriend was stretched out, face down.

Good looking, isn’t he? Like a Greek statue. Did you like him? Ugo said nonchalantly, twisting off the metal cap of the water bottle, smiling.

Yes, good looking, I said slowly, almost doubtfully, not allowing myself to celebrate him for Ugo or for myself.

I just wondered, that’s all, Ugo said, drinking water. I turned over and returned to my book which I could not read, going red.

The sun had already burned the skin on the back of my neck bright pink. Ugo went to look around the baking town for a scarf I could wear to protect myself but couldn’t find one, so I lay under the trees. It was a safe place to take the California Windowpane, Ugo next to me on the sand, late morning. At one in the afternoon, I told him I had swallowed the little tab from my precious matchbox and that he should watch out for me. I waited. Nothing happened for ages. After about an hour, I said that I thought the ripples of the sand were moving, as though somehow alive. It didn’t seem remarkable. That was the impression at first, everything moving, rippling, vibrating.

We walked to look at the wooden fishing boats resting on the beach. They were painted with a vividness that I could not describe to Ugo; he didn’t seem able to see what I was seeing: a navy blue immeasurably deep, an impossible apple green, an orange stripe around one of them that was the most perfect hue. It took me back to a childhood moment of rare contentment when I was lying in the grass with my eyes shut and the sun tinged the inside of my eyelids that very color.

We climbed up the hill to the town and sat on a wall gazing down on the Aegean. I had no sense of how long we sat there. The surface of the sea moved in circular motions, glinting as it sent me obscure messages. We walked further up into the town for dinner in an outdoor café. The sound of water being poured into our glasses was fresh and prominent.

Can you hear that? I said to Ugo. I’d never heard anything like it, what water pouring from a jug really sounded like.

Ugo was amused. The vines on the roof of the café terrace writhed like snakes.

I was being taught about motion and energy. But underneath the fascination, I fretted that the sensations might never end, that I would be trapped forever in hallucination. My brain frizzled. I wouldn’t be able to return to a rational intellectual life. I might lose my theoretical friends with their alluring foreign names.

We went back down to the dark beach to sleep, but I was wide awake, my mind agog with sensational revelations that I could not explain to Ugo.

I want to go in, I said, beginning to take off my clothes, folding them carefully on the sleeping bag to avoid sand. It was the first time I had chosen to be nude in front of Ugo, the shower in Athens didn’t count. I hadn’t thought it through, yet it was obvious to me that I should not wear anything.

Now?

Yes. I’m going in right now. It was the perfect time, the only possible time.

I’ll come with you. He sounded resigned.

I walked down the night sand, ahead of him, towards the black sparkling water. I felt every sand granule. Everything microscopic yet magnified. The full moon was reflected on a sea pathway of a million tossing diamonds of light. I had become a symbol of something, I did not know exactly of what. Something white and fragile, an apparition of my future self in need of protection. Yet I was ready to wade into the water to see what it might give me, to learn if it might change me.

Ugo. Look at the moon, I said.

The moist, warm salt air breathed on me rather than me breathing it. I touched the water, astonished by its wateriness as though all the molecules were sentient to me as they inched up my legs. I was not striding into the water, the water itself was taking me in. The liquid became warmer, almost comfortable, alerting me to its soft stroking. When the water had invited me in sufficiently, I let it raise me up horizontally so that I was suspended exquisitely in place. I floated free, face up with arms outstretched, my body bobbing, part of the water, not of the land, dappled by silver. Ugo must be watching me, also skinned in silver leaf. I closed my eyes. I inhabited only the water. I didn’t know where Ugo was. I opened my eyes to the star canopy, clustered pinpricks of lights on black velvet, dispersed in endless constellations. I might know something of Greek gods.

Where are you? I called out. Who was the Greek god of the sea? He would know. I had to know.

There were so many gods of water and the sea. But Poseidon was the main one, an Olympian God, he said.

He sounded close by, but I didn’t know where. I did not want to turn my head and face away from the heavens, yet I wanted Ugo to be part of what I saw, to know I had made a tantalizing discovery about the kinds of pleasures I might be able to have. They were almost in my grasp, if only I dared to speak and act.

You know about him, don’t you, we went to see it, the temple at Sounion, he said.

The water was feathering my skin. It could care for me; it was a new medium for me to inhabit. Me, a silvery scaled merman. Ugo must be close, standing, most likely also naked. I wondered if my outstretched arms could touch him.

We should go back up now. You’ll catch cold, my friend said quietly.

I couldn’t stop luxuriating in the water. Yet I knew the only way I could have complete pleasure would be if Ugo would hold me, if the water would let us float together; if only he would circle his body around mine, wrap me tight, so that we spun and revolved together, looking at the stars. I didn’t think of it in sexual terms, it wasn’t his prick I wanted. But I couldn’t ask him to do anything. I couldn’t utter a request. I had no words, then, to say ‘come here, hold me, I want to touch you.’

I dropped out of my floating stance to become heavy again. My toes touched the roughness of sand and bits of shells. The viscosity of the water left me, dripping from my long hair on to my shoulders as I cooled from the breeze, yet its slight hold on me was a call to go back in. But I followed Ugo up to the beach. I admired the moving whiteness of his thighs and bottom as he ran ahead. I shivered. Without saying a word, he picked up my towel and draped it around my shoulders.

You were in the water a long time, he said.

His arm held me for an extended moment, but it was not an embrace. He rubbed my back and shoulders to dry me and get me warm. I felt every single cotton fiber of the towel, the heavy weight of the entire length of his upper arm across my neck and shoulders, an inestimable, miraculous thing.

I woke up the next morning gritty in my sleeping bag, relieved I was back to normal, yet thankful for the mysteries of the previous day. A slight after-presence of the drug remained in the lurid colors of swimsuits and a red plastic toy shovel behind on the sand and in how the crests of the waves scintillated, as if still trying to tell me something. We had another day on the beach before we left on the long ferry journey back to Athens. Ugo said we should celebrate on our last night by going to a disco he had heard about from some Italians he bumped into. The idea unnerved me, I was uncomfortable going to the obvious places where boys met girls. Ugo assured me that the place would be full of interesting people, it was higher up in the town, attached to a restaurant with marvelous views over the sea.

Colored lights were strung along the edge of the roof of the bar, open to the terrace where people had begun to dance. The crowd was our age from all over Europe. They looked good, tanned, in faded t-shirts, lithe boys and girls blonded by sun. We stood drinking ouzo. I heard Italian and French. I could tell Ugo was itching to dance, his body already making little moves. He looked closely at the smooth surface of the concrete floor painted in dayglo curvy patterns.

When they played T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong”, he touched my elbow and steered me onto the floor. I looked down at the sea through strings of yellow, blue and green lights. ‘You’ve got

a hubcap diamond star halo,’ Marc Bolan sang. Everything was freighted with invisible meanings that I could not quite touch.

Ugo didn’t seem to mind being seen dancing with me. He had led me on to the floor, as though we were a couple. Or just as friends. Or more than that, I couldn’t tell. Part of me wanted to avoid my confusion by not staying too close to him. We moved around the floor, mingling with others in a loose, unstructured way. The dancers flowed next to each other, moving back and forth across the little floor.

Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” came on. Ugo popped up next to me, one hand touched my waist. I asked the DJ to play it for you, he said.

Oh. Oh. Thank you. He had remembered I was a huge fan. I reluctantly enjoyed myself, letting the music push my mood. The floor became more crowded. Just as the song reached up into one of its crescendos, Ugo stuck himself directly in front of me and planted a short kiss on my lips.

There, he said, just for you.

He stepped away and carried on dancing, merging again with others, not paying any more attention to me. He even momentarily attached himself to a girl with long white-blonde hair and startling eyes. Perhaps it was a warning. I carried on dancing, the imprint of his lips on my mouth, afraid to look back at him.

The kiss meant I would have to speak to him. It was another mysterious gift. I couldn’t just take it as it was, for whatever it was. For what was it? The surprise kiss out of the blue, in the middle of a crowd, not at all discreet, in full view of everyone, yet they didn’t seem to notice or care. I was the only one shocked and spellbound. I had to discover its purpose.

As we walked back to the beach, more drunk from ouzo, I asked him.

Why?

Why what?

Why the kiss?

Oh, I just felt like you needed to know it was okay.

Okay? I asked.

To be who you are.

That was all. He had given me the imprimatur. To be. Okay to be whoever I was supposed to be, whatever that was, whatever that might be. That I was all right. That was the gift.

It was more than enough.

And it was more than enough for me, then. But very many years later, I saw that the kiss from Ugo was the moment I should not have just graciously accepted, should not have let it go in that grateful way.

Ugo might have been essential to me like no one else. I saw that later. Much too late.

What Rough Beast

Josh Stein

Songs of Nerdlesque, vol. 1

Lauren Emily Whalen

“Theme from Indiana Jones” John Williams (from Temple of Boobs: An Indiana Jones Burlesque)

This is the first time you strip for tips, and nerds.

“Have you ever danced with a ribbon?” the producer asks at rehearsal. You nod. In your early thirties you’re quieter than ever, but you did a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fresh out of theater school, at your loudest before eleven years of hostile work environments, a shitty nonrelationship and the suicide of one of your best Joseph friends knocked the words right out of you. And that too required a ribbon, along with far more clothes.

You are more than ready for a new start, even if you’re scantily clad the entire time.

In Temple of Boobs, the name of your “track” the set of parts you play in the onehour show is also Ribbon. For you, for the past three years, “burlesque” has meant watching flawless women flit in feather boas and sequined gowns in bars that still smell like smoke of decades past, or more precisely, learning dance steps with a parasol in the tiny studio in Chicago’s West Loop where you take classes in the “art of the tease.”

This right here is nerdlesque: where cosplay and stripping meet at a dive bar, fuck in a bathroom stall, and have an unplanned baby. This particular troupe makes its home at a tiny theater in Chicago’s rapidly gentrifying Bucktown neighborhood and specializes in one-hour parodies of properties like Star Wars and Indiana Jones complete with funny dialogue, pop songs and striptease. Think musical theater, only instead of torch songs, there are tits.

You are placed in an already-running show, Friday nights at 11:30. After learning choreography and costume changes at the speed of light, to the point where you write everything down and pray you don’t come out dressed as a slutty temple dancer when you’re supposed to be a slutty monkey, you’re backstage at your first show, trying not to yawn while applying red lipstick with a shaking hand and reciting dance steps in your head while applying wig tape to your first (of three) set of pasties. Around you, the more seasoned nerdlesquers, with cool stage names like Diva LaVida and Slightly Spitfire, chatter about who they’re fucking and what they’ll order afterwards at the new McDonalds that just opened next door. You, on the other hand, are terrified and already waiting for your first cue, even though the audience, half drunk and ready to see boobies, is still filing in.

Your ribbon dance isn’t even a strip: just you, in a red leotard, sequined booty shorts and striped knee socks, gyrating and twirling with a silky red ribbon on a stick, as John Williams’ iconic score promises adventure ahead. After a few eight counts, a castmate comes onstage in her sand-colored corset with intricate hand-drawn lines. You unfasten her strapless bra (only sixteen counts, hurry! How do teenage boys do it?) and she strikes a pose, pastie-festooned tits out, while you gesture at her proudly and the crowd goes apeshit.

Soon, you’ll dress as Sexy Monkey and do your own pastie reveal, but this the ribbon dance, the successfully unfastened bra, scored by John Williams himself, dun da-dun dunnnnn dun da-dunnnnnn is what you’ll remember as your initiation, your foray into professional nerdlesque, the first time of many you’ll gyrate for pay. “That was so fun!” your best friend Rob exclaims as you share a cab back to Chicago’s east side. “You were the red line on the map from Temple of Doom!”

You haven’t seen the actual movie that Temple of Boobs parodies since you were a kid. For you, it was just a ribbon dance. For the drunk revelers, it was a touchstone of nostalgia, bringing to mind nights home from the video store, Pizza Hut personal pans and footie pajamas.

The power of nerdlesque, summed up in a Yellow Cab as you finger the floppy wad of dollar bills in your pocket.

“Call Me” Blondie (from You Have Died of Sexy: An Oregon Tail

Burlesque) You will never wear a corset again.

A few months after your ribbon debut, you’re starting to make your mark in this troupe. You score a role in their new show, with nothing but a loud voice and blonde hair when most of your troupemates’ tresses are dyed fire-engine red or Morticia Addams black. You can dance, you can drawl out dialogue, and you’re kinda funny. Very funny, if the show’s director is to be believed.

More importantly, you have no shame. Or at least, you’re rapidly losing your sense of shame. Who cares if the “classic” burlesque troupe you’re toiling in on the other side of the city only sees you as good enough to “stage kitten” (aka pick up other dancers’ panties at the end of their solo acts)? Here in nerdlesque, you’re a rising star.

Too bad the show, inspired by the millennial classic computer game, despite its fun concept is… not good. Even for a genre that revels in camp, the dialogue is rough, the choreography all over the place, and the director out of her element. The hard work and sheer talent of you and your seven castmates isn’t enough to save Oregon Tail. You know it. Your castmates know it. Soon enough, everyone in the troupe will know it.

And then there’s “Call Me”: your character’s dysentery death scene, symbolized by tearaway clothes that reveal a red and black corset laced almost to the point of suffocation, which your castmates then unlace during Blondie’s instrumental interlude, to reveal red and black tasseled pasties you twirl, shaking your tits as you stumble to your demise on the tiny stage full of girls. A command performance, Friday nights at 9 p.m.

No disrespect to Debbie Harry, but “Call Me” is a pain in your ass. It’s not your own choreography, corset or gimmick, but you feel embarrassed for yourself and your new friends, who have to unravel the damn thing every week it only seems to work half the time.

You hate feeling so constricted, squeezed in, when usually on this stage, in this troupe, and even in this silly-ass show, you feel so free. You swear your ribs are compressed like those old-timey ladies with fainting couches, only you’re in stilettos and even backstage there are only folding chairs for you to collapse on. When three months pass and Oregon Tail is replaced by a tighter and more successful Star Trek show, you swear off corsets for good.

Oregon Tail’s not all bad. The show’s inexplicably 80s-themed score is tight: Blondie, Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (during the latter you get to run around dressed as a sexy target), among other classics. Your friend Evie, thinner and more conventionally beautiful and also in the classic troupe where she’s a rising star, is in the show too, cutting up right alongside you. The gal who plays your daughter one of the only other blondes in the troupe is a real published author, which you aspire to be. The two of you talk troupe dramatics and publishing over tea outside of rehearsal. You exchange favorite YA novels while sticking on your pasties with wig tape purchased at a store that caters to drag queens.

Best of all, despite the less than inspiring source material, you have a lead role for the first time since high school something that doesn’t go unnoticed by a few of the more seasoned members of the troupe. One of whom gives you feedback you didn’t ask for backstage on opening night feedback that’s ostensibly about corset unlacing but feels more like a rant on why you don’t belong in nerdlesque, playing a sassy, sexy lead

For the first time, you realize you may be a threat.

You don’t hate it.

“What’s New, Pussycat?” Tom Jones (from Holy Bouncing Boobies! A Batman

Burlesque) Who doesn’t love a sexy cat? Who doesn’t love three?

By this point, you are in. In the span of just over a year, you’ve gone from a danceonly track in one show on alternating Fridays in this troupe, there are often two or even three dancers sharing one track and as many costumes as will fit them all to featured roles in four out of the five currently running shows. Your Friday and Saturday nights, barring

Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, are fully consumed by nerdlesque: taking two buses to get to the tiny theater half an hour early, slapping on a dark eye and red lip and plenty of biodegradable body glitter, keeping your straightener plugged in for three hours straight so you can touch up your hair during those breathless backstage moments (then and now, your hair is very important to you), and keeping an Aerie-brand canvas tote containing stage makeup, extra wig tape, dance shoes and a thickening layer of whatever glitter didn’t make it onto your cleavage and ass, in the converted garage that serves as a dressing room. You blow in year-round sporting puffy coats and three layers of sweatpants during Chicago’s brutal winters and tiny dresses during humid summers, from sex dates with fuckboys or dinner with your parents who don’t know what you get up to on weekends. You are no longer afraid to shout your dialogue to the back of the sold-out house, to alternately snark on and support the doe-eyed new girls, to carve out a space for yourself, onstage backstage and in your life outside the theater, that’s as big and deep as Tom Jones’s baritone.

Your primary role in Holy Bouncing Boobies the troupe’s longest-running show, an homage to the cheesy 60s Batman of your parents’ childhood is Egghead, where you deliver punny lines in an oversized white suit, holding a hollowed-out egg full of glitter that you eventually smash all over your nearly-naked self. One night, you even make the dancer playing Robin, whose dry yet crazy humor you admire, “break”: mid-dialogue, they turn their back to you and you can see their shoulders shaking with laughter. It’s still one of your finest accomplishments.

But in this show, when you’re not Egghead, or a mustachioed Commissioner Gordon with a man’s gray blazer over black bra and panties, you’re a pussycat.

You and your pals Polly Pom Poms and Verna Ven Detta kick off Catwoman’s scene with a cutesy little dance no stripping but still a crowd-pleaser every Saturday at midnight. “A trio is the hardest to sync at least that’s what they say on Dance Moms,” Polly, who also plays The Riddler, confides after you book the part and start learning the dance. But the three of you have hit your stride and are unstoppable, shimmying and winking in silver and black leopard-print leggings, black long-sleeved shrugs with marabou circling the wrists, black ballet slippers on your feet, pink studded collars from a sex shop circling your necks. And of course, cat ears.

You’ve never felt sexier cute and innocent, with the promise of much more underneath your omnipresent black bra than you do as a Tom Jones pussycat. The beauty of burlesque is the forms sex can take: in your face with twerking and rhinestone-studded pasties and perfect sprayed hair, or messy with tousled tresses and confetti glitter you roll around in on the floor of a basement bar this is the direction you usually go with your solo work or a sweet little kitty, shaking it at midnight surrounded by your sweet little kitty friends. You’ve always enjoyed the act of sex, the performance of it, the deep satisfaction,

the way you feel completely at one with your own body even when the sex is bad, but burlesque, both your classic solo work and the nerdlesque that’s just one step above DIY and barely pays enough to cover bus fare and pastie tape and the occasional Uber, is a whole new sparkly, freaky world.

“I think I like girls and guys,” you say one night while putting on your cat ears, for the first time ever. No one bats a mascaraed eye. You grin at the nonchalant nonreaction. To your glittering friends, announcing a truth you’ve bit down for decades is no different than naming your favorite color.

“I Love It (I Don’t Care)” Icona Pop (from Boobs on Endor: A Return of the Jedi Burlesque) You love it.

The best time of your life is approximately 11:02 p.m. Saturdays, when Icona Pop’s ode to living your fabulous life while ruining your ex’s, blasts through the theater’s crappy speakers and you bust out onstage as a sexy Ewok.

You vaguely remember the teddy bear-like creatures from their made for TV spinoffs your household was not a Star Wars one, leaning more toward Airplane! and John Hughes’s suburban teen oeuvre and now you are an Ewok for three and a half glorious minutes. Years later, most of the choreography escapes you it was more of a dance-fight with a cast-wide fuzzy pastie reveal at the climax but what you remember most is the bouncing. The skipping. The air on your mostly bare skin, the way your foundation-caked cheeks hurt from smiling so goddamn hard, and the way you had to come down after getting offstage to put on your Han Solo outfit for the next scene.

This is the selfie stage of your life.

You take backstage selfies constantly: squatting in front of a mirror in bra and panties, the book you’re reading strategically posed in front of your pastie-festooned tits in a corner of the carpeted garagedressing room, making duck faces with your costumed cast mates or having them pose like the famous Ellen “Oscar selfie” just behind the black curtain. The audience isn’t allowed to photograph or video performances a public pic of a burlesquer’s night gig can lead to the loss of her day job, and you know people this has happened to but these days, thanks to the “6 years ago” posts that Facebook tosses your way, you can trace your nerdlesque journey in digital color, posted with everyone’s permission on an account without your last name and with a very curated group of followers. Some of whom get a little too friendly, mistaking your new body confidence for an invitation, and are subsequently blocked, ousted from your happy little naked Eden.

“New” body confidence isn’t an exaggeration. It’s taken a good two years of professional nerdlesque and various gigs outside the troupe, plus three years of classes and student shows before that, for you to finally feel okay in your own skin.

Most days.

You are, after all, a woman in a patriarchal society. But there’s one thing burlesquers of all shapes figure out real quick: their angles. Specific poses that render so beautifully you want to cry at your own loveliness, and the ones where you resemble a turtle-human hybrid. You don’t, you won’t, always love your body, but you adore your best angles. And up here, twirling in a gray bra and thong, with a headdress with brown fuzzy ears and a shrug made of the same fake brown fur that smells up quickly and has to be sprayed often with a vodkawater mix, you have never felt hotter. More yourself.

As a sexy Ewok. Who knew?

Tonight your sister is here, as part of her friend’s bachelorette. You’re excited but nervous: you know that while your sister wants to be supportive and has a dance and performance background of her own she doesn’t quite understand why you elect to bare your whole body every weekend. You were happy when her Star Wars-loving pal chose this show, as it’s more comedic and adorable than straight up “I wanna fuck each and every one of you in this here audience.” As you wield your Ewok staff, or whatever its called, and pretend fight with your dance partner, you see your sister smile in the dark of the crowd. Afterwards, she warmly observes, “You look so happy up there.”

Two and a half years after the ribbon dance, you are free.

Even for just a few minutes at a time, you don’t care about days when you’re period bloated and crampy as fuck and you have to perform at 10, 11 and midnight. You don’t care about the unflattering snaps taken by a professional photographer the troupe hired, who really should know better. You don’t care about Facebook perverts or people who call you “brave” for doing this while implying that with your not-skinny bod you shouldn’t show anything below the neck, or the always-looming threat that a faceless potential employer will stumble upon a photo of you in nothing but lingerie and fake-fur ears.

You don’t care.

“I Put a Spell on You” Annie Lennox (homage to American Horror Story: Murder House)

This whole act is a “fuck you” to classic burlesque.

Because at this point, though you book shows where you perform your own choreography, to music you chose, in pretty costumes you pay others to make for you, to music that’s the antithesis of poppy, weirdo nerdlesque, you’re kinda over that whole classic scene. The way other dancers eye you up backstage and then snottily vaguebook later about your shoes. The way Swarovski crystals are mistaken for artistry. The prissy pearl-clutching about your messy hair, your body that is way over a size 2, your sheer audacity of sharing the stage with self-proclaimed legends.

Whatever.

Sure, there’s bitchiness in nerdlesque, but it’s more in your face. “It’s a sorority,” your friend and castmate Nicole says, laughing and shrugging. You were never in a sorority, but you feel that statement in your bones.

(It’s worth noting that not only are there assholes everywhere, there are also classic burlesque folx who are lovely in every sense of the word. One of them mentored you during your single year in the classic troupe, providing endless feedback and moral support, as well as the occasional hit of really good weed. But at this point in your career, in your life, all you see is the gatekeeping. You’re in your thirties and still have growing up to do.)

One morning you hear Annie Lennox’s haunting, creepy cover of a song that’s ubiquitous in the classic scene, “I Put a Spell on You,” and you see your opening. By now, you’ve done nerdlesque outside the troupe, collaborating with other dancers who share your geeky-sexy spirit, as well as during the troupe’s seasonal “cabaret” shows where you all bring in your own work. You make up an act with a queer couple that’s a tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s foot fetish, set to the Violent Femmes’ “At Your Feet.” You and a few of your troupe pals perform a silly-scary “Don’t Fear the Reaper” at Halloween and Goth-themed shows across the city. And when you hear the Lennox, you have an idea that will fit right in: a nerdlesque act you make yourself, costumes and choreo and all. A marriage of the classic solos you create for the bars, and the character-driven nerdlesque that has your heart. A dark tribute to a troubled teenage boy.

Beautiful, tortured Tate Langdon from American Horror Story’s inaugural season is one of Ryan Murphy’s finest characters. A total 90s dreamboat until you find out he shot up his own school and did himself in after he got caught. A total 90s dreamboat despite that, inspiring so many confused feelings in AHS fans like yourself. A fantastically creepy fit for you, a nerdlesquer with feathery blonde locks, an odd sense of humor, and past trauma you don’t talk about outside therapy.

An artistic triumph and an eff you to the pearl-clutcher classicheads. Perfection.

Instead of ordering up rhinestone-encrusted satin, you steal a hoodie from your little brother and buy black sweats from Target. Black lace up boots and socks, men’s, also Target. Basic black bra and panties, which you already own going on three years in the scene, you have a plethora of black underthings. The one item you commission: a pair of pasties encrusted with silver and black beads, as darkly seductive as Lennox’s wails and Tate’s soul.

For choreography, you enlist the help of your friend Jean, who makes the steps for many of the troupe’s shows. They get exactly what you’re going for, gently assisting you with movements that undulate, that promise something bad, yet titillating. Always titillating. Jean even helps you mix the track, starting with a sound clip of Tate monologuing about “the noble war” before the residents of the murder house realize exactly who and what he is.

The crowning glory comes before the pastie reveal, when Lennox is singing about how you know better, daddy. You kneel on the ground in your black underwear, digging your fingers in a pot of thick black eyeshadow, smearing it all over your face and body in a nod to Tate’s dream-sequence skeleton makeup. At the end, a plant (usually a stage manager or willing fellow dancer) shines two red laser pointers from the back of the house on your nowbare tits, as you as Tate hold your hands up, caught, before smirking and pointing a finger gun at your own head.

“Oh my god, Evan Peters would love this!” Slightly Spitfire exclaims when you show them. You are also obsessed with the handsome actor who plays Tate, so you take this as the ultimate compliment.

Yes, it’s a tribute to a controversial character. Maybe the pearl-clutchers who hate this, will have a point. Certainly, in 2022, you might not create this same act. But at this point in your life, when your anger at patriarchy and prissiness and people in the audience and in life who will never see you as more than a piece of pretty meat, no matter what you are or aren’t wearing, has reached its repressed peak? You need to make this act. It may not be Picasso or even von Teese, but to you, it’s art. Not everyone has to love art.

And if a popular local performer can have a Charles Manson act, you can be Tate.

The first time you perform this act, smearing black makeup and collapsing dramatically in nothing but beaded pasties and a barely-there G-string as Annie Lennox scream-sings ohhhhhh yeeeeeeeeah, it’s a hit.

And the second time.

And the third time.

And the tenth.

“I Think We’re Alone Now” Tiffany (from Game of Thongs: A Game of Thrones

Burlesque) You love playing boys and you love kissing girls.

To the outside world, you’re a comfortably cis femme with a patchwork paycheck: modeling nude for artists, penning reviews of local plays and working behind the desk of a barre studio walking distance from the nerdlesque troupe’s venue. You mainly wear dresses

and skirts, you can French braid your own hair and you feel naked (and not in a good way) when you’re not wearing lipstick.

Two years in, you are a master of what they call “trouser roles” in the opera world. You swagger as Han Solo in two different shows, you deepen your voice as a fatherly Ewok, and in Game of Thongs you pout through “Ice Ice Baby” as Jon Snow and smirk in an iceblond wig as the incest king himself, Jaime Lannister. You charm the shit out of spectators. You channel every bro who thought he had a chance with you. Your secret goal is to make at least one straight woman in the audience think differently while you’re onstage.

Game of Thongs was written by the friend you made in Oregon Tail back when you were a nerdlesque baby and soon-to-be threat. Your friend also scored the show, and the songs are phenomenally matched and fabulous: Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Lorde’s “Royals,” Vanilla Ice’s one hit, and Tiffany’s mall-chick classic cover, the latter of which accompanies the Jaime-Cersei incestuous dual strip. You are not a Game of Thrones fan: too many characters, too much assault, and why all the fur? When you book the Jaime/Jon track, you watch a couple of YouTube clips (including one that becomes a very graphic sex scene that you thankfully x out of before your day-job boss opens the door to your office) and call it good. The sold-out crowds sure aren’t nitpicking your lack of nerdy knowledge.

You’re not really out out at this point, but you know you’re bisexual. You don’t have a crush on either of the lovely women you call friends, who alternate the role of Jaime’s twinlover Cersei, or on any of the gorgeous people in the nerdlesque troupe for that matter. You’re not crushing on anyone at all, really. But thanks to nerdlesque, the trouser roles, the much more open mind you have from hanging around folx who are comfortable with their gender and sexuality and their innate fluidity, you just…know.

And that sure as shit comes through when you’re rocking white leather boots and a silk tunic over a red spangled bra and thong, sweating under your plasticky blond wig, grinding onstage with your fake twin as Tiffany warbles about holding hands and the audience swills beer and cider purchased in the lobby, whoops at every removed article of clothing or pretend smooch. Even the reluctant cishet girlfriends, who tagged along as part of a bachelorette party or on a date with a former frat brother, crack a smile. Eventually, they cheer alongside the men.

Also cheering tonight: three friends you met online in a feminist group when you were still quiet, when the idea of taking off your clothes outside the dance studio and your own bedroom was an impossibility. It’s just before Halloween and audience numbers are relatively light so much to do in Chicago this weekend but it doesn’t matter. Your girls, sporting Halloween-y makeup, eagerly bounce in their seats and shout approval for everyone, and just as eagerly crack open their wallets during the mid-show tip get. Your

girls, who consoled you through exes and death and job stress and rejections, are eating. This. Up. Especially you and your fake twin sporting fake hair and exuding real sex with every step ball change.

At curtain call, your girls scream your name.

“Rich Girl”—Hall and Oates (from A Nude Hope: A Star Wars Burlesque)

“Time for a Han Solo,” you crack to the audience, a punny adlib that always hits, as you drag a center stage.

This dance set to an 80s standby you still warble along at every opportunity with your mom, a lifelong Hall and Oates fangirl who to this very day has no idea you do burlesque will be your very last in this space, with this troupe, and on the last night you do it, you have no fucking clue.

And as always, you will bring the house down.

A Nude Hope is another of the troupe’s bona fide hits, and a coveted show for many reasons. Usually sells out, meaning more and better tips. The time is steady and manageable:

Saturdays at 9 p.m., early enough to do the later shows or your own gigs after or go out drinking and really start your night. It’s tight and hilarious, with a whiny Luke Skywalker and slutty C-3P0 and a 70s-infused score. And then there’s Han Solo, the track everyone wants. The track that is yours.

Three years into playing the role a young, hot Harrison Ford made iconic, you still can’t believe it. You were still fairly new to the troupe when you booked the part, having just quit the classic burlesque ensemble because you couldn’t take one more minute of its disgusting male producer who generally made you feel like a slobby piece of shit because you aren’t dark-haired and thin. Trembling and vulnerable, you showed up to the next round of troupe auditions. You read Han’s lines with a confidence you didn’t feel, swiveled your way through a dance combination and improvised striptease. Apparently, you nailed it, or the nerdlesque producer pitied you. Even now, you have a hard time believing your own gifts.

It’s been a wild, beautiful ride, but three years into playing Han, and four after your Ribbon debut, you’ve decided to leave.

There’s a lot going on in your life: while you’ll never tire of the sold-out crowds and kiki with your castmates behind the curtain, you’re ready to have your weekends back. You have a steady day job along with a paycheck and benefits. You’re out as bi, and you’re dating. You’ve never had so many friends in your life. Most significantly, your writing career is ramping up after years of revising and rejection. You’ve signed a contract for your first novel and sold a short story to a magazine. You must make time to do the work.

There’s also a lot going on with the troupe, more precisely the owner of the theater who signs everyone’s checks. Per-show pay has been cut once, then again. The theater owner is based in Florida, and communication is both spotty and overwhelmingly negative. The dancers are blamed for not bringing in more and better audiences. Never mind that it’s not your job to do so.

Shortly after you give notice, promising to finish out the summer and do one final Game of Thongs on Labor Day weekend, a bomb will drop via Gmail from the theater’s sleazebag Floridian owner. None of you will be paid any longer, or for the previous month (somewhere out there, an asshole still owes you money). As a troupe, you’ll collectively decide you’re done not with a Norma Rae or Newsies bang, but over email with a whimper. At this point you are borderline estranged from your best friend-who’s enmeshed in a toxic relationship, so when the whimper-email hits your inbox on a Monday night you will walk in the park and stare at trees, trying not to cry about the final show you’ll never get, the bigtitty goodbye you’ll never say.

But this Saturday, blissfully ignorant that it’s your last, you revel in the sparkle.

Your costume: white long-sleeved shirt, cropped just below your breasts. Navy vest, edged with matte sequins of the same color. Navy tearaway trousers with invisible snaps down the sides under the red stripe. A red bra and matching thong. Silver pasties. And best of all, chunky black zip up boots. Real shitkickers. Years later you still think about those boots. You wish you’d stolen them when you had the chance.

Your hair is tousled and bleached blonde with undertones of red. Your body, curvy and compact and powerful. Your lips, hot girl red.

The choreography is straightforward. Sexy. Genius, really. Complements Hall and Oates’ harmonies like peanut butter to chocolate.

The outer layer, the vest, you doff first. Slowly. As always, it’s all about the tease. The audience is primed, already into it. If this were a Broadway musical, “Rich Girl” would be the eleven o’clock number, the one everyone talks about. More than once, you’ve been approached at the nearby bar post-show. People love Han Solo.

Hall and Oates sing about a woman who takes and you take the audience’s energy and channel it through your body as you peel off the shirt, toss it gently to the side. Clad in your red undies and tight pants, you make your way to the chair in black shitkickers. Step up.

Daryl Hall hits a high note. You rip off your pants.

The crowd roars. They’re particularly awesome tonight: happy, respectful, not so drunk that they’re yelling gross suggestions that get them kicked out. You’re pantsless and happy.

Step down. Bump and grind. Shrug off the navy vest, drop it to the floor. Make sure not to step on it, and remember where it is, you’ll need it again soon.

Almost to the climax.

Straddling the chair, you start to remove your bra. Toss your head of bleach blonde and dark red hair, as tousled as if you just got fucked good. Taking off a bra is a tricky thing. Taking it off in front of people? Even trickier. Years after you first learned how, you still tread carefully. Go as slow as your music will allow, knowing that a hook and eye can just decide to be finicky for no reason and it just gets worse if you tug on it. You always have the option of pulling the damn thing down to your waist if necessary.

Tonight, it comes off smooth. Though your tits are now bare, they’re mostly covered by the backward-facing chair. Keep the crowd in your sweaty palm with a sexy smirk. The song plays on.

Stride to the vest, lightly despite the shitkickers. Bend over so everyone can behold the glorious pale globes of your ass, the one that more than one lover has praised for its roundness, its abundance. You used to be ashamed of your big tush. Not the fuck anymore.

This whole dance is muscle memory, built over years of being Han, of blood and sweat and tears and air kisses and sparkles and lingerie ripped and stepped on and restored and restoned to its former glory. A few nights, you’ve phoned it in like any performer doing the same steps every week would. More often, memory gives way to pure joy, especially on this last night you don’t yet know is the end.

Back up on the chair, your chunky black boot heels you keep them on the entire act, like heels during sex in a dirty-girl fantasy, “step on me baby” dig into the leather seat. Hall and Oates warn against relying on the old man’s money, against going too far. You, as Han, can never go far enough.

You can feel the breath of the audience, the collective inhale, the curiosity of what you’ll do next. They already see your glorious ass in the red thong. And of course, they’re wondering what your boobs look like under that vest. You inhale the dust of the theater, your own power.

As soon as you hear “and YOU SAY,” you open one side of your vest, then the other.

The reveal: silver pasties shaped like the Millennium Falcon.

They scream. You smirk, triumphant.

Someone throws a twenty onstage a rare occurrence outside the tip get. You scoop up the cash, drawl “See you later” as the music fades and drag the chair offstage, heart beating loud.

This is the last time you strip for tips, and nerds.

Facing It Together Series

Jack Bordnick

My Mother’s Hands

Eleanor Kedney

I never thought of them as slight, though her fingers were long and thin. They were working hands peeling five pounds of potatoes for potato pancakes, starching a shirt, handing my tired father a glass of milk, or hanging sheets on the pulley line fastened out our second-floor window to an oak tree across the yard. Her knuckles grew knobs with age, and the thickened cord in her right palm tethered her ring and pinky finger inward to permanent unrest. I only held her hand as a child, and then again when she was dying. Those were the two times I was afraid to let go.

Over the years, it was my nimble index fingers and thumbs that cleaned her hearing aids, sorted medications into day-of-the-week pillboxes, and tied the laces on her sneakers. Once, lying in the sunroom together on a twin bed, she reached her arm across my body, and feeling its weight, I pulled away. Touch was a chasm between us, and that moment she cried pries into my memory today, bookended by her lying in a hospital bed and not getting well. I climbed in, circled both arms around her back, held her chest to mine. Her hands smoothed my long brown hair she loved to unknot and curl into kielbasa ringlets when I was a girl. It was eight days before I washed it. I was no longer a daughter.

Enchanted Space

Elina Ghanbari

Curfew

Miles Parnegg

This is the one where Ben throws his newly-rebuilt ’03 Supra into reverse and attempts to weave between medians on Eubank, spinning southbound to northbound, after Matty says to take Paseo instead ofOsunasinceit’s well after curfew,andBenobliges, puttingahand onthebackofMatty’s seat and looking over his shoulder, jacking the wheel to the left in a re-creation of a video game maneuver that couldn’t have been that hard to replicate, not on an empty street in early June on Albuquerque’s north side, tires drawing a figure eight into the pavement, but then misjudging the size of the gap between medians, mounting the curb at fifty-plus, catching the fender on an immovable yucca with its brittle drooping leaves, pirouetting the car thirty yards through the air, clipping the guardrail and sending them over into an arroyo, a slow suspended descent, Ben’s hand still gripping the headrest, CD cases sliding across the dash and onto Matty’s lap, the windshield panning up to catch the night sky, scattered stars, the winking wing light of a plane at thirty thousand feet, engine revving high in a kind of moan, and crumpling against the arroyo’s bank where the coupe’s hood accordions, as though collapsing into an earlier state, sending Ben who isn’t wearing a seatbelt through the windshield, Matty burying his face into the blinding white of the airbag whose instant deployment fractures his nose, the Supra paused momentarily upward on its front as though en pointe before falling back with a sinking, metallic gnash and sliding down to the arroyo’s basin, smearing tracks through the wet, livid earth, finally settling aslant on the arroyo’s embankment with vapor hissing from the hood. With the airbag in his face Matty feels as if he’s been wrested from sleep on a harsh, starchy pillow, fireworks bursting in his eyes the way they do when pressed against their lids until he realizes his eyes are open and a pulse beats in his head as though something is very urgently trying to get out of it. He inventories limbs, bare feet on the mats, the seatbelt cut into his neck like meat dressing. He pushes the airbag away from his face as though he were tangled in a sail, consumed by its strange but not unpleasant smell, like the inside of a bisected ping pong ball. Gone are the dusty spots on the windshield, arches of the wipers.The air comes at him unimpeded, where seconds ago there was a glass barrier. Mesh pouch of lavender seeds hanging from the rearview mirror sways, its knotted ribbon holding fast. He thrashes in the airbag, wanting to puncture and deflate it, free his skin from its coarse and tacky material, and then remembers that still there are simple movements to be done unclicking the buckle, pulling the lock tab the passenger side door swinging open easily, too easily, as though guided by a valet, stepping out into wet clay in the arroyo’s basin, cool earth enveloping his toes, forming impressions, sagebrush and chamisa quivering in the breeze that sweeps up the arroyo, taking steps with feet that don’t feel to be his own and seeing Ben struggling to stand twenty feet away, down on one knee as though having just sprinted and collapsed to fill his lungs, or knelt to

genuflect with a hand on a mahogany pew, and when Matty gets to him he puts his hands on Ben’s neck because the impact from the airbag compressed his throat and vocal chords and he can’t speak, drawing breath but emitting no words.The car’s stereo plays, its volume unchanged. “Kate” by Ben Folds Five, from one of their mixtapes. He puts his hands on Ben’s back and shoulders and chest, patting him down,searching him, making sure the major parts are still in place. “You good?” he says to Ben, pressing the words out. “You good? Tell me you’re good.” Ben wheezes, makes a bucking, gasping arch of his spine the wheeze of someone who’s had the wind knocked out of them, steering column to the solar plexus. Through Matty the sound of the fender’s snap on the guard rail reverberates, as though he were a tuning fork. The car hisses steadily, gushing steam from the crumpled radiator, wedged on the arroyo’s wall so that a wheel spins freely on its axel; the impact jolted the trunk open that finicky latch which makes the Supra appear as though it is raising its hand, beckoning. Matty feels his nose moving, freely sliding under its skin, that nauseatingpinchingin theeyes. Hedoes not put his handto it,checkforblood; heknowssomehow to keep moving, not to stop and try to make sense, orient himself. “We flew,” Ben says, regaining breath. He repeats this in the tone of someone waking from a dream, of adjusting to light sifting through blinds, and while Matty knows that this is shock, that this is Ben’s mind on delay, catching up with itself, he realizes that Ben thinks they are dead, has already begun to recount the story to himself as if from the other side. Matty looks up at the street, expecting to see a jagged maw torn through the guard rail, but it seems only shorn and slightly bent. He loops his arms under Ben’s and pulls him up, Ben crying out as Matty heaves him off his knees. To get to the street feels essential, as though the arroyo could fill and pull them away at any second. They paw up the embankment to the street, sand in their hands, feet slipping, Ben taking long searching breaths. They step into the illumined half-circle of a streetlight, an orange glow that is at once bright and dull, moths whirring around the bulb. The street is empty; it’s Tuesday, early in the morning, meaning Wednesday. Rocks are scattered in the street, tire ruts drawn through the pink gravel. The yucca they hit stands impassively in the median, a minor dent in its base, dried leaves strewn amid the rocks. The night air is humid and thick, the carryover weight of the day’s thunderstorms. It has rained every afternoon this week, flash floods all over the city, fat, operatic clouds that sail in from the north. The soil is drinking. Mosquitos are out in numbers. They alight on Matty’s arms and neck in three-point stance as he tugs on the seams of his swim trunks, because where do they go, what do they do, they have to clean up, mend this guard rail, put everything back in its place. He keeps Ben up, the weight of his leaning body, a welcome solidity. That the street is deserted feels a small miracle, a window in which evidence can be erased, this record expunged. He thinks of himself as good in a crisis, calm and clear-eyed, not prone to panic.As he pulls on his swim trunks tiny shards of glass fall onto his feet like iridescent dandruff. Somehow his feet aren’t cut up, just pale in the streetlight, his toes still pruned. They had been hot-tubbing in Tanoan, snuck into the pool with Jane, at Jane’s behest in fact, parking at Smith’s and walking two blocks to evade the security guard in his white pickup, timing their leap of the fence when the truck turned into the

townhouses, Ben helping Jane over while Matty carried the towels. Ben courting Jane for weeks, the two locked in a kind of arrested rondo while Matty plays both sides, nudging, passing info. Jane always carrying a box of cinnamon Tic Tacs, always eager for misrule, to steal traffic cones and improvise roadblocks; who mixes Red Bull and vodka and looks everyone levelly in the eye while asking what’s the worst thing they’ve ever done. Jane, who Matty envies both for her spirit and for the way Ben’s face slackens when he glances at his phone and sees that she’s texted, how he curls his hair back behind his ear in a slow, deliberate tuck before bringing his thumb to the keypad. Matty was there tonight to round out the trio, because his absence would create an imbalance, although he can feel their set reconfiguring, plates beneath him shifting, subtlety, irrevocably. He can feel what has been a we becoming a them, the triangle simplifying. Tonight the night Ben finally kissing Jane when Matty pretended to have to pee and got out of the hot tub, saying something about how the water was too hot, walking wetly around the pool to the shrouded lifeguardofficeout ofsight, instantlyfreezing in theair’s cool contrast, knowingthatthis was what it meant to wingman, that later he might even be thanked for reading the scene and clearing a path, but beneath the bubbling surface he could see Ben’s left foot pressing onto Jane’s right foot, and his stomach clamped as Ben gathered the bubbles about him as though he were immodest about showing skin, hiding what was happening beneath the surface, as though Matty didn’t know. The hiding was somehow worse, as though he had to be protected from the knowledge. When he came back some time later with his teeth rattling and arms across his chest, Ben had sunk up to his chin in the water while Jane was looking up into the night and saying something about bats, how you could hear their chirping, see their black wingbeats against the fainter-black of the night sky, smell of sulfur rising off the hot tub as he eased back into the water. “You can tell by how they move,” she said, her voice raspy and a little far-off, gesturing with her hand the sharp, mercurial cutting of the bats’flight path. It was clear in the calculated distance, how they weren’t looking at each other, the shine on Ben’s lips, her lip balm leaving its waxy trace, streaks through his wet hair made not by the teeth of a comb but by her fingers; his cock, Matty knew, pressing against the sodden fabric of his swim trunks, elevated heartbeat sending tremors through the water’s surface. He knew without seeing. “There,” said Jane, her hand shooting out of the water and pointing.Asharp shape scything through the night, banking into the cottonwood trees and then piping earthward, lost in the shadows. Ben and Jane’s chins pointed up, their necks reaching out of the water, but Matty didn’t follow their gaze. He kept his eyes on Ben, eyebrows jeweled with condensed vapor, steam rising off his head, tendons in his neck taut as cables as he tried to make out black from black

Now Ben is looking at the Supra in the arroyo and crying, holding the hair up out of his eyes as though trying to lift himself by his bangs, the kind of crying that registers more in the tremor of his shoulders than by tears in his eyes. While Ben looks at the car Matty looks out at the city.

The night shimmers in front of him; he can’t move his neck, as though the muscles there have been frozen, so he pans to see the lights smeared, more brushstroke than pixel, down Eubank to Paseo,

across the valley to Nine Mile Hill extending westward to Flagstaff, Barstow, Los Angeles, lit up by the ruby taillights of eighteen wheelers. He’s never seen the city like this, as though it were painted, distinctions between things fallen away. It is a beauty that loosens his knees and nearly makes him sick. He turns back to Ben. “Come here,” he says. “Your face.” He sees Ben straight on for the first time in the streetlight, and it looks as though he’s been paper-cut fifty times on his cheeks and forehead and chin, blood that seems as if it has yet decided to run. He pulls Ben’s face to his shoulder, hand on the nape of his neck, and takes in the familiar scent chlorine and cigarettes, the loud, non-floral cologne underneath but comes away with his fingers slick. The blood shines on his skin like molasses, and instinct pulls the finger toward his mouth, to suck the wound the way you do, and he wonders if all blood tastes the same or is as particular to the person as scent, and his nausea is mixed with the urge to taste the blood, to taste Ben in this way, but then his vision shimmers at its edges and he moves Ben to the curb and sits down, cradling Ben’s head in his lap and brushing the hair out of his eyes, his bangs that aren’t bangs but will always be his most identifying feature, and the blood seeps into Matty’s swim trunks. He pulls his t-shirt over his head, keeping his neck still, wadding it under Ben’s head to staunch the bleeding.

“Look at me,” he says to Ben, whose eyes wander, seem to move in separate directions, his pupils so dilated his irises shrunk to mere outlines. “Describe to me what you see.” He feels that he can tether Ben to the moment this way, by noticing, constant noticing. See the rain-soaked walls of the subdivision across the arroyo, hear the cicadas colliding with screened doors, see the white cross on the steeple of the Episcopal church up the street. Glimpse the bat flashing through the light, picking off insects with each pass. He bobs his knee under Ben’s head, first as a kind of nudging, to get him to speak, and then because the movement itself takes over, an impulse suffused in him from all the times he’d lain his head in his mother’s lap, imprint of the inseam of her jeans on his cheek, her hand in his hair, the coolness of her rings on his scalp, to calm him during his night terrors, when he had the flu and couldn’t sleep from the aches.

“Bugs in the light,” Ben says, and his voice is so small that Matty has to dip to hear him, feel his breath on his ear, heat that prickles the hair around the cartilage and down his neck and spine. “Your nose. It’s odd.” He reaches to touch Matty’s nose, but he takes Ben’s wrist and returns it to his side. “I miscalculated,” Ben says.

Matty looks for the femur puncturing skin, shard of windshield piercing the abdomen. All that’s there, though, is the drawstring of Ben’s swim trunks, the knot that’s come undone, and the acne scars on his jawline, tiny craters, the oil on which shines dully like brass. He knows this is not a good sign, that the worst things happen always on the inside, failures only machines can divine, and he reaches under Ben’s shirt, runs his hand over Ben’s torso, a flat palm on the skin, trying to feel something awry, some pulse that betrays a collapsing organ or hemorrhage, and he is certain that Ben’s body will tell him, some signal will shoot up and shock his hand like static. He feels he’s earned fluency in Ben’s body, seen the ease with which he takes stairs two by two, the sweat

that sheens his forearms while pulling weeds in the driveway. How tonight he pressed himself over the fence in one liquid motion, sat astride the metal beam and reached back for Jane, the hair on his arms backlit and looking as soft as suede.And the panic that rises like bile in Matty is not for Ben’s dimming eyelids or the blood that is blanching his shirt but the sense that this certainty is unfounded, that this language eludes him, that his understanding of Ben’s body is so skewed as to render him forever incommunicable, a stranger, indelibly separate. He runs his hand faster, over the curve of oblique muscles, the hair under Ben’s belly button that does not come to attention but stays soft and downy and unresponsive, and Matty’s knee bobs faster, propelled by a shiver that runs through his whole body, as though stepping into a freezing shower, and he is pulling on Ben’s skin now, feeling the blemishes and divots and grooves and preternaturally soft spaces, his throat closed, nearly shaking Ben, pleading with his fingertips to say something, look at him, divulge and empty himself but all that comes are footsteps on the sidewalk which echo off the stucco walls and the blurring lights of a police cruiser cresting the low undulating hills of the arroyos and now cars passing them in the opposite lane, cars where there were none, but Matty does not look up as the lights swell in his eyes and he is filled by the high consuming pulse in his ears, his fingernails digging into Ben’s chest, seeing the unlined skin of his eyelids while Matty bites the inside of his lip trying to draw blood, to match Ben, and as Ben’s voice gets fainter Matty’s knee moves faster, nearly rattling at the back of his skull until in a sudden sweep Ben reaches his hand up, fingers curled, delicate and precise and pruned, trying, it seems, to trace Matty’s eyebrows and close his eyes, or find the point at which the bone has broken, and as Ben touches his nose Matty exhales sharply, a gasp that pierces the night as Ben’s skin collides with his and then the pain is there in a cool metal flush between his eyes and the whole scene goes out like a light.

Giant’s Garden

Rachel Dzinga

Instructions On How To Believe

Joanna Acevedo

1. On the first cold day of November, B has a nightmare. I want to scoop it out of him and eat it. He speaks of a lion perched on the bed next to him, ready to maul. It was almost as if you were lying next to me, in my brain, but when I turned, it was a lion, he says, the cadence of his text messages reshaping my morning. I check my email as we talk, do admin. Attend to the plant of our relationship with pruning shears.

2. We’re just meat plants, we need sun, Imoni told me, deep in pandemic lock down, three summers ago. I’ve never forgotten this, and I remember to water myself as I type on my computer, doing editorial work for X magazine. I sit in front of the glow lamp.

3. The changing of the seasons has always bothered me the slow glide from summer to fall is depressing, the days getting shorter, the nights longer. As I prepare to travel to Iceland for the first time, packing my suitcase, chasing down my various prescriptions, there is a fatalistic element to it. The darkness encroaching. B ’s nightmare is a harbinger. I, too, had nightmares last night, of a monster who admonished me when I used too many commas. Writing in the morning, I am ultraaware of my comma use. I press the delete key too many times. I edit. ***

Father goes in for a doctor’s appointment. This alone brings anxiety. His cancer, which has now been eliminated, has destroyed any plans I had for the future. You have to live in the present, B says. It’s the only thing that exists. The past is too subject to our own interpretations, and the future is too permeable; it doesn’t exist yet. I understand this on a rational level yet cannot swallow my own fear. I hold it like a penny under my tongue. Some questions lately:

Who would I be? Without this thing, which smashed into my life on my twenty- fifth birthday?

How do I be strong for my family, who needs me now more than ever?

Why do I feel the need to make everything about myself? ***

I can’t do this, I told B when the diagnosis hit. I can still hear my mother’s voice on the phone as she spits out the word cancer like an epithet. Like a linked chain of sausages, the news gets worse and worse. We hear surgery, then chemotherapy.

You have to do this, B says. You have to. You don’t have a choice. Unfortunately, my reaction to stress is to have a severe mental health crisis, run away to Tennessee, and go crazy, in that order. I feel like I’m being torn between two sick people, my mother comments.

Imagine being one of us, my father says, shutting her complaints up for good. ***

4. So I watch Dawn of the Dead and America’s Next Top Model instead of doing paid editorial work, as if by consuming media I am somehow more than myself. I correspond, via email, with various editors about various projects. I contemplate. Summer is over, says Mars, which coincidentally is the title of their new song. It is over, and with its end brings new possibilities: B and I living together, my father’s clean blood tests and sixty-eighth birthday, B and I’s twoyear anniversary.

5. I feel as if I am teetering on a ledge, about to fall. There is so much good and after a long stretch of bad, it’s impossible for me to believe in it I can’t bring myself to have faith that things are okay. I want to place my hand on B ’s chest and feel his heartbeat, feel the solidness there. What would you do first in a zombie apocalypse? Omar asks. I would kill myself, I tell him, which is my stock answer for everything. When the world ends, I don’t want to be there.

I make a cruel remark to B offhand, then immediately regret it. I don’t know my own strength sometimes the strength of my own words. We fight. Later, I realize we’re playing out my own parents, in miniature.

My self-doubt multiplies, grows legs and crawls around the apartment. As January comes closer, my anxiety increases. The days tick by, notches in my belt. I hold my breath.

We’re partners, I say in a phone call, our voices rubbed against the night. I’ll follow you anywhere.

I know this hasn’t been an easy year. Are any of them easy? I can’t imagine myself without him, without this half of my body that has been somehow disconnected and walks around without me.

I am grateful for all of it the fights, the making up, the talk of the future. The fact that, for the first time, we have a future. I hold it in my palms like an egg. It does not break.

6. At the book launch on Wednesday, we laugh until we cry. It feels good, to mix the bitter with the sweet, to be solemn after so much joy.

And so things are okay. I don’t expect it when it happens, and when it does, I’m not looking for it. This little pocket of fine-ness, a moment where there are no calamities, when I can simply be, feels like a port in the storm. In two months, B and I will cohabitate. We’re in the eye of the hurricane. This weekend, I have just been released from the Emergency Room with the benign diagnosis of a pneumomediastinum, or air around the cavity that holds my heart. It sounds scary but is actually completely safe, albeit painful. He frets over the phone with me, calls me while I’m in the hospital, and I strain to hear his voice over the noise and bustle of the doctors and nurses.

I love you, I say, waiting for his call and response.

He doesn’t say it back, but I know that his call, his care, is his way of telling me. Not everything is a metaphor. I get a chest X-ray, then a CAT scan. I love you.

And he’s there the whole time, metaphorically holding my hand. Soon we will be roommates. Soon we will be more.

7. I can’t place my trust in doctors they’re the ones who gave my father the cancer diagnosis, and although they’re the ones who healed him, too, they will always be the ones who gave me the pills that made me crazy, didn’t tell me when I was at risk of ischemic stroke from my birth control, patronized me in the Emergency Room about my own illness. Each time I go to get blood drawn I feel like they’re taking something away from me, something I’ll never get back. 8. You’re not easy, my mother says, speaking of B ’s way with me. He’s very patient with you. 9. What does it mean to be okay? What does it mean to be ne? How does one know when one has achieved it? How does one know, if possible, when one has lost it? How does one get it back? ***

In the morning, I look at apartments online. We talk, in hushed voices on the phone, in the dark, about where we’ll live, proposed budgets, design schema. East Harlem, Hamilton Heights. I press the names like beads into my palm.

I want to take the future and swallow it: I want to get to the end of the book already. I want to skip ahead. I feel incredibly lucky, yet anxiety looms around every corner. I need instructions on how to believe.

All’s well, B says, breaking the tension. I need instructions on how to believe him. ***

10. There is so much I am grateful for. My father and I, talking about the role of the artist over lunch. I think when you’re as old as I am, you don’t wonder why we do this anymore, he says, cutting his Impossible Burger into smaller and smaller bites. You don’t stop to ask why. 11. This has been the year of almost-loss: almost losing B to my chaos, almost losing my father to illness, almost losing my own mind. But I got lucky I got to keep everything, everyone I loved. I will not always be so lucky, I know. For now, I am glad. For now, I am grateful. I hope it is enough.

Late night, B reads my essay drafts, makes cogent points, and then asks: Do you really want my opinion, or what? I do, but the criticism is like pouring vinegar in a wound. We laugh about nothing, cry about everything. We love.

This is what I want this minutiae, the everyday. I want him to tell me how his day was. I want to know. I really, really want to know.

12. In this way, I learn how to have faith. It takes a long time; there are stops and starts. I have anxiety about the future. Stop that, he says. And so I do. No, it’s not as easy as that. No, there isn’t a magic cure. It takes his voice, slow and slurred on the phone, reassuring me, for weeks, before I learn.

13. I believe.

Nude in Wooden Chair

Gwyneth Henke

Authors

Joanna Acevedo

Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the chapbook List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Outtakes (WTAW Press, forthcoming) and the books The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021.

Emma Aylor

Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review Online, and elsewhere. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Shawna Ervin

Shawna Ervin is a Pushcart nominee and has an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University. She attended the Mineral School residency thanks to a Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship, is a poetry reader for Adroit Journal, and founding faculty of the Tupelo Press Teen Writing Center. Shawna is an alum of Bread Loaf and Tin House workshops. Recent publications include Bangalore Review, Tampa Review, Cagibi, Rappahannock Review, The Maine Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Sonora Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver with her family.

Authors

Sadie Hoagland

Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children (Red Hen Press) and American Grief in Four Stages (West Virginia University Press), which earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Her second novel, Circle of Animals, will be published in 2024 (Red Hen Press). Her work has been featured in Salon, Electric Literature, Mid-American Review, Alice Blue Review, South Dakota Review, Grist, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, The South Carolina Review, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in Fiction from the University of Utah and is the recipient of several fellowships. You can visit her online at sadiehoagland.com

Eleanor Kedney

Eleanor Kedney is the author of Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards, and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). An award-winning poet, her work has been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio and served as the director for ten years. Kedney teaches “Writing Toward Forgiveness” workshops based on craft techniques utilized in her books. She joined the board of the Tucson Poetry Festival in 2021. www.eleanorkedney.com.

Andrew Laing

Andrew Laing is a queer writer who grew up in rural Shropshire, England. He escaped first to London and then to New York and spends as much time as he can in Provincetown, MA. He teaches part-time in the school of Architecture at Princeton University. The story, More Than Enough, is an excerpt from his unpublished novel: If You Are Who You Are. The novel explores how desire is shaped through the discovery of places and in the distortions of memory.

Authors

Tamara Panici

Tamara Panici’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in places like POETRY, Muzzle Magazine, Third Coast, Waxwing, Denver Quarterly, Black

Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Margaret Reid Poetry

Prize, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and the River Styx Microfiction

Prize. She has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorthy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her partner and their child, and their child-to-be.

Karen Parkman

Karen Parkman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, the Key West Literary Seminar, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Witness Magazine, Uncharted Magazine, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Miles Parnegg

Miles Parnegg is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.

Authors

Lauren Emily Whalen

Lauren Emily Whalen lives in Chicago with her black cat, Rosaline. She has essays published in Write or Die Magazine, Querencia Press’s Spring 2023 Anthology, and Jabberwock Review. Her adult debut novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow a rock and roll Macbeth remix cowritten with Lillah Lawson will be released October 17 by Sword and Silk. Lauren has written four books for young adults, most recently Take Her Down (Bold Strokes Books, 2022). She is a regular contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Queerty and GO Magazine. laurenemilywrites.com

Artists

Jack Bordnick

My sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves. I am an Industrial design graduate of Pratt Institute in New York.

Rachel Dzinga

Rachel Dziga is an American artist who received her M.F.A in Florence Italy for Interdisciplinary Art and has exhibited and participated in international artist workshops. As well she has recently been featured in the book: Women Makers of Arkansas. Her practice is built upon a foundational need to disseminate and analyze collective concepts. This series of cyanotype prints beckon one to look deeper. Can one feel nostalgia for a place they have never been? All works were developed in plein air allowing the sun to impart variance. Employing the spectrum of indigo to imbibe the viewer to slow down and fall into the resonance of mystery.

Josephine Florens

Josephine Florens is a professional oil painter . Was born in Odessa, Ukraine on September 22, 1988. Lives in Bad Grönenbach, Germany, as there is a war going on in Ukraine. Graduated from Odessa National Academy of Law and received a Master’s degree in Civil Law , graduated from Odessa International Humanitarian University and received a Master’s degree in International Law. She started painting in 2017. She studied individually at the Art-Ra school of painting. Josephine Florens is a member of the National Association of Artists and Sculptors of Ukraine , member of the Odessa Marine Union, Ukraine, honorary member of the Union of World’s Poets and Writers. Creates oil paintings in various genres, such as portrait , landscape , still life , genre painting , animal painting , marina . Works with oil paints. Calls her direction of painting as modern vintage. Website is https://josephineflorens.com

Elina Ghanbari

Elina Ghanbari is a self-taught and intuitive artist. She believes that in art, you can set yourself free. Elina uses her emotions to express herself through her art. She finds an incredible connection between mind and heart that turns those feelings into art. She published her artworks in many international journals such as ojalart and internetvoid & Abstractmagazinetv, etc. She started to pursue her goals and dreams as a professional artist since 2013 until now. Her artistic name is “Elinart.” link : https://zez.am/elinart

Melissa Goodnight

Melissa’s work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and Litro among others. She earned her BA from Missouri State University, her MA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her MFA from Mississippi University for Women. She lives in Atlanta.

Artists

Janina Aza Karpinska

Janina Aza Karpinska is a multi-disiplinary Artist-Poet. Her collages are worked quickly and intuitively, with an innate sense of order, re-configuring chaos and brokenness to make a new and pleasing, cohesive wholeness. Her work has appeared in Bath House Journal; Young Ravens Literary Review; Grim & Gilded; The Empty Mirror; 3 Elements Review, among others.

Brian McPartlon

McPartlon attended the School of Visual Arts, New York and the San Francisco Art Institute. He was involved with the 1970s South of Market art scene in San Francisco as gallery director of 63 Bluxome. He has also run a successful roofing business in Santa Fe, New Mexico for decades. Exhibitions (recent and upcoming): Pie Projects, Santa Fe; CINQ Gallery, Dallas; and the International Art Museum of America, San Francisco. Press: ART UP MI; LandEscape Art Review; Magazine 43; Unique Homes; Blue Mesa Review; Another Chicago Magazine; The Uncoiled; Dream Noir; Arkana; and Santa Fe New Mexican.

Josh Stein

Josh Stein (b. 1973, Hammonton, New Jersey; currently residing in Napa, California) is a lifelong multimode creative artist, musician, writer, professor with multiple advanced degrees from the University of California and the University of Liverpool, adult beverage maker, and current MFA candidate at School of Visual Arts in New York City. With formal training in calligraphy, graphic design, and color work; more than two decades as a researcher, teacher, and writer in cultural analysis in the vein of the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools; and a decade and a half as a commercial artist and designer for multiple winery clients; he brings his influences of Pop art, Tattoo flash and lining techniques, and Abstract Surrealism and Expressionism to the extreme edge where graphic design and calligraphy meet the Platonic theory of forms in two- and three-dimensional work.

Jack Thome

Work involves Cutouts & Spray Paint on Paper which is Overlayed with Cut and/or Torn Painted Paper and Completed with Hand Painting ( usually Acrylic) Markers and/or Colored Pencil. As he says “ the Idea or Image can be Expressed in Depth by Color but Better by Layered Color and Actual Separations Adding Texture as well as Depth”