What the Fiction 3.1

What The Fiction!

Literary Journal of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction & Poetry Volume 3, Issue 1 • Winter 2015

WTF Staff FOUNDING/MANAGING EDITOR

Michael K. Brantley

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Ann Fitzmaurice

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Dr. Rebecca Godwin

Cover Art: “Man by the Shore” Painting by Contributing Artist Catherine Altice.

From the Editor Thanks again for taking the time to peruse the pages of What the Fiction. We’re especially proud of this issue, not just because of the girth (a record 24 pages!) but the amazing quality of the work. And of course, our covers just keep getting better and better.

The number of contributions is rocking our world, and that is a good thing. Some things that we’ve accepted will go into the next issue. As we remain online only, we’ll probably cap things at 24 pages and then roll out another issue. We also may be adding editors in each genre as opportunities present themselves, and we most certainly will be looking a design editor before the next issue.

Sed et tellus at quam sagittis pharetra. Donec faucibus sagittis justo.

We hope you will keep reading, and if so inclined, send us your work. You can see from the contributor notes that we publish seasoned veterans all the way down to undergrads — it’s the quality of the work and whether it is a WTF kind of story. We hope by now that identity is starting to show.

We look forward to a big 2015, and hopefully will be edging towards print issues, subscriptions and paying contributors. In the meantime, let us know what you think by visiting the website at www.whatthefiction.com.

Enjoy!

Michael K. Brantley Managing/Founding Editor

2

Table of Contents Poetry Arizona

John Grey

4

Theology Lesson

Lynn Elwell

7

There Once was a Woman Who For Maya Angelou The Clock Struck Backscatter Seven Colors

Holly Day B. T. Joy A.J. Huffman Richard Barbee Richard Barbee

8 9 17 20 23

Corey Martin Fred McGavran Matthew Drollette

5 10 18

Rebecca Godwin

21

Fiction Shave By In Parallel Universes The Farmer’s Son

Review Bear Wallow

3

Arizona

By John Grey It’s the opposite of rain, the reverse of splashing in it, seeking shelter from it.

Imagine, a downpour battering the roof as silence, the trickle down windows as clear as baby’s breath.

It’s what a cloudburst would be like if there were no clouds.

It’s a tour of weather’s contrariness with a cactus for a guide.

John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in The Lyric, Vallum and the science fiction anthology, “The Kennedy Curse” with work upcoming in Bryant Literary Magazine, Natural Bridge, Southern California Review and the Pedestal.

4

Shave

By Corey Martin I called my wife into the bathroom. She came in and I asked if she would shave me. She grabbed the straight razor and shaving cream out of the mirror cabinet. She applied the shaving cream all over my five o’clock shadow. I never let it get too out of hand, but sometimes it was unavoidable. Other times it was just out of laziness.

She grabbed the razor and turned my head to the side; left cheek first.

“Your phone went off while I was cleaning dishes,” my wife said. I could feel the strokes of the razor pull at my facial hair.

I asked who was calling. She told me it was nobody calling, it was a text. I liked getting texts from people. I hated talking on the phone. Most of the time I would just sit and listen to some one rant and babble like a child, and by the end of the conversation I was nearly ready to throw the damn thing against the wall. Texts were simpler: you didn’t have to listen to an annoying voice and best of all you didn’t have to respond if you didn’t want to.

“Who is Brooke?” my wife asked.

I had known Brooke for almost two years. She worked a small kiosk in the mall. I would visit the mall on Friday nights after work and she would stop me for small talk. She was younger than I was, but mature. I always had a thing for brunettes. Eventually we exchanged numbers, and we would text occasionally. The texts were innocent enough; I never felt the need to tell my wife about it. Brooke had a boyfriend, and I never led her on in any way. It was very innocent.

But now she was texting me, and my wife saw it. I told my wife it was just a friend of mine.

“What kind of friend?” my wife asked.

“Just a young woman I met at the mall,” I said. “She works at one of those kiosks places. The tables in the center of every mall, you know, that sell jewelry, sunglasses, and some offer massages.”

“Which one does she run?” my wife asked.

“She sells phone cases,” I replied.

My wife had finished the left cheek. She moved around to the right side of my body, turned my head to the side, and started on the right cheek. The strokes were beginning to feel forced, as if digging into my skin. I looked down at my hands, thinking that I would find blood.

“Why would she be texting you this late at night?” my wife asked. She wiped the shaving cream off the razor. I could see the light bounce off the razor, as if it were smiling at me.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Did you read it?”

She said she didn’t read the text. She told me how she was drying dishes and moved my phone away from the counter so it wouldn’t get messed up. After she was finished she turned off the kitchen light and saw a blue glow coming from the counter. My phone was lighting up. When she picked it up she saw on the screen there was a new message from Brooke. Rather than delete it, like most wives would, she put the phone in her apron.

My wife stood up and wiped the razor clean. I felt my cheeks; smooth, like a baby. She pulled the phone out and gave it to me. For a moment I questioned whether or not to read the message. My

5

mind went in every direction imaginable: Is this just a greeting? Does she want to me for coffee? Or perhaps she broke up with her boyfriend and is looking for a shoulder to cry on? What harm is there in any of those things?

My wife tilted my head back and started shaving my neck. I laid the phone on my lap and clenched my fists together.

“Are you not going to answer it?” she asked.

“It’s not important right now,” I said. But I knew better.

“Is this like the last time?” she asked. The strokes of the razor were much slower, as if she were sculpting a work of art.

I told her this had nothing to do with the last time. I told her Renee was dead; two years next month. I still thought about Renee from time to time; sweet girl. We used to go out for pizza every other week when we got our paychecks and split the bill—at least that’s what I told my wife. One night after pizza, and a little too much beer, we wound up at the lake, kissing each other, holding each other until morning came.

My wife found out through a friend who happened to be at the pizza place one night and saw me with Renee. I tried to explain to my wife what had happened, but she would not listen. She packed her bags and stayed with her mother for almost two weeks. I stopped seeing Renee when my wife left. Three days had gone by when I got a call from Renee, telling me I needed to see her. She said it was urgent.

I drove to the lake where she waited on a bench in the shade. It was there that she told me about the cancer.

After Renee had died, I explained to my wife what happened at the lake on both occasions.

My memories of Renee stay with me, not reminiscing but a warning to myself.

“No,” I told my wife. “This has nothing to do with that. That’s all in the past and I’ve moved on from it. We both have moved on from it.”

My wife continued to shave my neck. She stopped at one point; the razor lay across the vein in my neck. One nick is all it would take.

“I suppose you’re right,” my wife said. She continued to the slow strokes. It seemed like an eternity, this shave. I felt my leg vibrate. My wife heard the phone go off. The razor was away from my neck now, but still grasped firmly in her hand.

“Are you going to answer it?” my wife asked.

I splashed water on my face and dried off. The phone sat within inches of my wife. I knew what she would do now.

Corey Martin lives in Greenville, NC. He has a Bachelor's degree in English that he received in 2011 from East Carolina University.

6

Theology Lesson Lynn Elwell On those rare occasions when my grandparents visited our family, they insisted I attend church with them. Off we’d go to Calvary Lutheran; needless to say, I was terribly eager to see the horses, but none ever showed up.

They had a very good friend there whose name was Mrs. Bullock. She stood ram-rod tall, wore high, stiff collars that pushed her stately head a bit higher than it was intended to be. Her expression looked, for all the world, like she just smelled something exceedingly unpleasant. One day, I overheard my grandpa tell grandma that Mrs. Bullock was surely a God-fearing woman and grandma nodded like she always did no matter what he told her. I asked why anyone would be afraid of God and grandpa took his time answering.

If you disobey His commandments, you’ll be consigned to a very dark place full of flames and sulfurous clouds for the rest of eternity and nothing will slake your desperate thirst.

Why would He do that ?

Because he loves you.

Lynn Elwell is a retired research scientist and teacher and has poems published in Poem; Passages North; Ship of Fools; Blue Unicorn; Oyez Review; and The Homestead Review to name a few. Elwell lives in Durham, NC.

7

There Once was a Woman Who

By Holly Day There once was a woman who

prayed for just one little baby she didn’t care what it was

but the only baby that came fit in her palm and would not move

small, too quiet, curled tiny it did not cry. morning came

she sat by the windowsill, rocking the quiet cradle with the tip of her finger,

singing songs about all the things her child would never see.

Holly Day was born in Hereford, Texas, “The Town Without a Toothache.” She and her family currently live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she teaches writing classes at the Loft Literary Center. Her published books include the nonfiction books Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, and the poetry books Late-Night Reading for Hardworking Construction Men (The

8

For Maya Angelou

By B. T. Joy

May 28th, 2014 Who knows what migrations the heart can remember?

Or regions known by wing if not by mind?

How swallows in the corncrib begin in late August to dream of the Pyrenees, of the tan and turquoise minarets of Morocco and the summers round Johannesburg.

How round dawn I rise, to get breakfast on, plumes of steam rising from the kettle-spout, and common birds, pigeons and sparrows, still crying from the trees outside.

Later, browsing through poets, I find this year’s year separated by a score from 1928 and, later again, I hear your caretaker found your body, eighty-six years old and still as recognisably strong, in your home in North Carolina.

Though I wonder where you are, proud southern woman.

Where can you be now who I met in so many places?

On the Ionian Sea, where I sailed and read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

In a schoolroom, young and awkward, where I heard your poem about laughing at the self.

Reciting with my sister: “But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

Where can you be now?

What expansiveness is fit for one who spent her lifetime running the rim of a tin cup over the bars of other people’s cells?

B.T. Joy B.T. Joy is a Scottish poet living and working in Glasgow. He has published poetry in journals, magazines, anthologies and podcasts worldwide; including in Forward Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Presence, Bottle Rockets, Frogpond and The Newtowner. After receiving his honours degree in Creative Writing and Film Studies in 2009 he went on, in 2012, to receive a PGDE from Strathclyde University and has since taught as a High School English teacher. He is also the author of two volumes of haiku In The Arms Of The Wind (2010) and The Reeds That Tilt The Sky (2011). His haiga have appeared with the World Haiku Association, Haiga Online and Daily Haiga. He was one of six writers nominated for The Ravenglass Poetry Press Competition of 2012.

9

In Parallel Universes

By Fred McGavran We had not been out past 10 PM in years. Joyce often turned down invitations for fear I would fall asleep over hors d’ouevres or her feet would give out as she attempted to rise from an unfamiliar commode. The Jefferson wedding was a happy exception. Not only did I stay awake through that endless hour until the bride and groom emerge from the Klieg lights to signal dinner is served, but Joyce processed to and from the hotel bathroom several times without once calling 911 to get back on her feet. When we finally returned to our condo, I waited at the foot of the stairs until she had completed her ascent, wondering how those tiny heels could support such a mass and fearing that if she lost her balance, I would not be able to get out of the way in time.

“Help me with these,” she commanded, collapsing on the bench at the foot of the bed and sticking out her feet.

“Aren’t they painful?” I said, poking around her left ankle for a buckle. straps.

“This is the first evening I have been pain free in years,” she exclaimed as I peeled off the

I was about to start on the other shoe, when I saw a blue light winking at me. Holding up her foot, I looked closer. Something like a computer chip with a LED light was embedded in her left heel.

“Did you step in something at the party?” I asked, trying to be discreet.

“Give me that,” she snapped.

I pried out the chip and handed it to her. She extended the other foot to be unbound.

“What are these things?” I asked as I removed the other shoe.

Another chip was stuck to her right heel.

“It’s an atomic equalizer that neutralizes magnetic fields and restores the atoms in your body to their correct alignment.”

“I didn’t know that our atoms were out of alignment,” I ventured.

“Telephones, lamps, computer screens, the refrigerator, everything has electromagnetic fields that disturb our atoms.”

“Is it wise to reset them after all these years?” I wondered, fearing that her attempt to perfect the atomic structure of her body would have no better outcome than her attempts to perfect me.

“What do you know about atomic imbalance?” she snapped, her favorite line whenever I dared question her latest obsession. “You have one, too.”

10

“I do?”

“Look under your left heel.”

Sure enough, one of the chips was under the shoe insert, blinking shyly at being discovered like an elderly man leaving a pornography shop.

“Don’t you feel better?” Joyce demanded.

I didn’t know what to say. After all, it was the first night in years where I had drunk four glasses of wine without losing consciousness.

“How does it work?”

“That’s a trade secret,” she said, rising triumphantly from the bench and tottering into the bathroom.

As I undressed, I remembered our ship going through a degaussing station during the War to neutralize the magnetic fields around it that would set off German mines. The human body, however, is not metal, and the air around us is not the sea that generates an electrical current as a ship passes through it. It was late, however, and I dared not risk a confrontation over magnetic theory with a woman who could climb stairs on spikes.

The natural healing industry prospers by a single maxim: if a little is good for you, a lot must be very good. Thus Joyce, with me in tow, had progressed from sampling various herbal remedies and laxatives to massive doses meant to cleanse our bowels and cells of decades of toxins, and ward off a panoply of diseases. Regardless of sometimes bizarre effects, she would increase the dosage until, like Schopenhauer, she demonstrated once again that satiation or frustration is the inevitable end of human aspiration.

I knew she was doubling down on the chips when I caught her in my closet removing the chip from my shoe.

“I’ll order another for you, Walter,” she promised. “They come in two-packs.”

The next few days she fluttered about the condo, speed- dialing her friends to arrange an endless series of lunches at the club. It was a relief to have her away at noon when, if I were careful, she would not know that I had had a martini before lunch, and was often fortunate enough to fall asleep with my grilled cheese and tomato soup untouched. As she was finishing her toilet one evening, I looked at the shoes she had been wearing. There was a chip in the heel and the toe of each one.

The next day I was dabbing the tomato soup off my forehead with a dish towel after falling asleep over lunch when the front door suddenly banged open, and Joyce returned an hour early from her luncheon.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed, as if I had been caught boiling the kidneys of a small child in her favorite pot.

“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, dear,” I replied.

11

“Just look at this mess!” she exclaimed, stalking into the dining room. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

I had not done a very good job of sopping up the soup with the grilled cheese. She spun around to face me.

“Just once, Walter, just once,” she began, spinning around again. “When I come home, I hope . . .”

She spun around again, and again, and again, faster and faster.

“I’d be careful with those heels, dear,” I cautioned. “They might mar the parquet floor.”

For the first time in over 50 years of marriage, Joyce was beyond words. She pirouetted like a ballet dancer, hands cupped, right toe pointing to left leg, but instead rising on her toe, she turned on her left heel like a wobbly gyroscope trying to reach a critical speed. Then she was spinning, arms out, head back, faster and faster until the floor beneath her smoked, and the years and the pounds flew away. Instead of an overweight late-seventies woman, I glimpsed a prima ballerina in her twenties, whirling in the same blur that Einstein imagined we would see when travelling at the speed of light.

Still spinning, she began to levitate and then turn clockwise in the air. Faster than an airplane propeller, she became a distortion in the cosmos, until the whole universe began to turn with her. The dining room table behind her vanished, and I saw a great mass of stars swaying and tumbling in the grand and majestic dance of the universe. Slowly, like the vortex of a whirlpool, an opening appeared, and she was sucked into it. Quicker than water running down the sink, she disappeared into a wormhole to another dimension.

I staggered back into the living room and collapsed in my favorite chair. Overwhelmed, I stared at the fissure in space-time that had opened in our dining room. Had her newly realigned atoms drawn her into a parallel universe of perfection? Who had ever witnessed such an event but God? But was she really gone? That was the question that tormented me. According to quantum entanglement theory, the futures of two particles that have once interacted are forever joined. Could I ever be sure that she was not coming back? I resolved to keep her disappearance a secret just between us.

As the days passed, I had to tell her increasingly aggressive friends that she was out with one of the others when they called. In the evenings, after I had grilled a steak on the veranda, I would sit in my chair and study the starry array surrounding the wormhole in the dining room. Sometimes, just for fun, I would toss a pistachio shell into the vortex and watch it disappear I knew not where.

One night as I was feeding it pistachio shells the vortex quivered. I was leaning forward to see it more clearly, when something shot out of the hole and struck me in the forehead.

“Ow!” I cried, reaching for it on the floor.

12

It was Joyce’s wedding ring. Of course it could have no place in a perfect world. Even in this flawed universe, it proclaimed a unity that had been lacking for decades. I decided to take it to a jeweler to sell it, after enough time had passed to create a credible story to explain her absence.

“Sorry about your wife,” the jeweler said, examining the stone through his glass. “When did she pass?”

“About three weeks ago,” I said, relieved that he had chosen such an accurate term to describe her exit.

“I didn’t see anything about it in the paper,” he said, looking up at me through his jeweler’s glass like a biologist examining a paramecium.

“It was quite unexpected,” I replied, studying my reflection in the lens. sale.

We agreed on $5,000 for the ring. I wish now that I hadn’t let him talk me into signing a bill of Meanwhile Joyce’s friends were becoming more demanding.

“We’re all here together at the club,” one of them insisted over the phone after she had been gone a month.

“Then she must be with you,” I said and hung up.

The next few weeks were the happiest in my life. I had enough money for a steak and a bottle of Bordeaux every evening. Then I would sit in my armchair and watch the cosmos circling before me and wonder what to name the stars. One night, however, I had to turn on a light to read. Like a flashlight when the batteries are wearing out, the worm-hole galaxy was starting to fade.

A few days later, as I was finishing my cold steak sandwich and beer at lunch, the doorbell rang. I ignored it. Joyce had often ordered things from the television, and if I did not go out and sign for them, the delivery people took them back. The bell kept ringing. I opened another beer. Then they started to pound on the door.

Enough, I thought, leaving the beer in the kitchen and opening the door. Two enormous policewomen, one behind the other blocked the entrance.

“You Walter Grimes?” the larger one demanded.

“Yes.” She was wider than the door, wider than two Joyces glued together. If she turned sideways to enter, she would knock her partner off the porch.

“Officer Mindy Jackson from women’s crimes division,” she introduced herself. “And this is Officer Janice Taylor. OK if we come in?”

“I’m in the middle of lunch,” I replied, starting to close the door. “Please call back for an appointment.”

13

“Let’s cut the crap,” Officer Mindy said, gripping the door with an enormous hand. “Where’s your wife?”

“She passed,” I said remembering the jeweler’s bon mot.

“Where’s her body?” Officer Janice shrieked from behind Officer Mindy.

“In cases like this, one never finds a body,” I said. “Now if you will excuse me . . .”

“We got a search warrant,” Officer Mindy interrupted.

It had been a long time since I had seen a search warrant, but it appeared to be in order. While they jostled with each other to determine who would try to squeeze in first, I went back to the kitchen for my beer. Officer Mindy very nearly didn’t make it.

“I’ll take the upstairs,” she said, gripping the rail and pulling her enormous bulk up the steps.

Officer Janice asked where to find the basement.

“You got a crawl space?” she asked.

“You would have to ask Joyce,” I replied, retreating to my chair.

An hour later they joined me in the living room, obviously disappointed. Officer Mindy was wheezing from her exertions.

“Just tell us what you did with her,” she said. “We can put in a good word for you with the judge.”

“I’m sure Joyce would prefer to stay where she is,” I said.

“Listen, Mister, we know you did it. We have the motive.”

“Motive for what?” I cried.

Towering over me, she held out a copy of the bill of sale I had signed for Joyce’s ring.

“Ready to give us a statement?” she said, stepping back to high five her partner.

“Be careful,” I said as she approached the wormhole, but she wasn’t listening.

“We got him now, don’t we, gal?” Mindy cried, beginning to raise and lower her huge feet in a parody of a football player in the end zone.

“You know it, sweet cheeks.”

Then Officer Mindy’s heel caught in the indentation Joyce had burned in the floor, and she tippled over backwards. Like a spider web hit by a bumble bee, the galaxy buckled, and Mindy’s expression changed from surprise to horror. I heard a low whirring sound, like a paper shredder stuffed too full.

“Officer in trouble!” she screamed into her shirt speaker.

Officer Janice and I watched as the galaxy turned her round and round like a dish on a Lazy Susan.

Then with a crash the door flew open, and a SWAT team clad in black burst inside.

14

“What the hell’s going on?” demanded a heavy-set man in a black helmet, who appeared to be the SWAT team leader.

Officer Mindy was dangling from the wormhole, half in and half out, like a five year old overwhelmed by a carnival ride.

“She’s stuck in a wormhole to a parallel universe,” I said.

“My ass,” she moaned.

“Come on, guys, let’s pull her out,” the heavy-set man said.

So two men grabbed her legs, two grabbed her arms, and together they pulled until she popped out on top of them, and the wormhole shriveled up to the size of a basketball. Fortunately the heavy-set man and the other SWAT team member were able to roll Mindy off their teammates before they were suffocated.

“I don’t believe it,” Officer Mindy said, running her hand over the place where the missing protuberance had resided. “I lost my ass.”

“Don’t worry, Babe, we got an ambulance outside,” the heavy-set man reassured her.

“It isn’t bleeding or anything,” Mindy said. “Whatever it was, it’s better than bariatric surgery.”

With that she held up her arms, and the SWAT team pulled her to her feet. Then she lurched outside under their admiring glances and the jealous eyes of Officer Janice.

“What the hell happened?” the heavy set-officer asked me.

“My wife Joyce was transported through a wormhole into a parallel universe,” I explained. “I don’t know what they’re going to think over there when Officer Mindy’s derriere comes floating down out of the clouds.”

I had trouble falling asleep that night. When I last saw it the wormhole, the only sure proof of my innocence, was wavering precariously above the dining room table. Without it even the most brilliant theoretical physicist could never corroborate my testimony. What could I possibly say when Officer Mindy and Officer Janice returned with an indictment for murder?

I had just gone to bed when I heard someone panting and grunting downstairs, like a scuba diver struggling to take off a too-tight wet suit. Pulling the sheet over my head, I wondered if SWAT teams gave criminals time to get dressed before they hustled them off to prison.

Finally a strained voice cried, “Keep pushing, damn it!”

With a last grunt the suit snapped off, and a body rolled free onto the dining room floor.

I turned over, promising myself never to open a second bottle of Bordeaux again, and the noise stopped. I was just going back to sleep when I heard someone pulling herself up the stairs. I was terrified. Then she was in the bedroom door, wheezing.

15

“Officer Mindy?” I whispered.

Projected by the nightlight, a huge shadow entered the room and collapsed on the bench at the foot of the bed. Slowly a familiar perfume enshrouded me. It was Joyce returned from I knew not where.

“May I help you with your shoes, dear?” I asked, getting out of bed and bending over her outstretched feet.

I had to cut the straps with a pen knife. The LED lights embedded in her soles had gone out, and the chips disintegrated like charcoal as I pried them off her feet.

“Where have you been, dear?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about that later.”

I had to pull her to her feet. She lurched toward the bathroom and struggled to enter. Finally she turned sideways and squeezed in. I held my breath when she turned on the light.

“Oh,” she cried when she saw herself in the mirror.

Her buttocks were encased in the same blue uniform trousers that had once adorned Officer Mindy, and she had the most enormous ass I had ever seen. From downstairs came a wet slurping sound as the sphincter to a parallel universe closed forever.

Fred McGavran is a graduate of Kenyon College and Harvard Law School, and served as an officer in the Navy in Vietnam. In June 2010, I was ordained a deacon in the Diocese of Southern Ohio, where I serve as Assistant Chaplain at Episcopal Retirement Homes. The Ohio Arts Council awarded me a $10,000 Individual Achievement Award for "The Reincarnation of Horlach Spenser," a story that appeared in The Harvard Review. Black Lawrence Press published The Butterfly Collector, my award winning collection of short stories. My adventure novel The Arminius Codex: The Hunt for the Last Roman Eagle just appeared on Amazon Kindle. He is a past contributor to WTF.

16

The Clock Struck

By A.J. Huffman The Clock Struck midnight and her world exploded in memories of ash and extinguished fires.

She was supposed to be sleeping in a palace bed, instead she was pacing the alcove floors.

Her prince was missing, had yet to return from work, something that had become all to common as of late. Rumors whispered that he preferred the imperfections of dark-alley girls, servants that lived in the village beyond the moat. She had been one of them once, a filthy girl sleeping next to an empty chimney, dreaming of baubles and balls. . .

The clock struck one, pulled her from bitter memories that had grown fond. Tonight she would conjure a different fairy, no goodly godmother, but an evil witch that could teach her a way to end this facade, shatter this glass house like a mirror that had given her nothing but bad luck and an empty life.

one joint chapbook through various small presses.

A. J. Huffman has published seven solo chapbooks and Her eighth solo chapbook, Drippings from a Painted Mind, won the 2013 Two Wolves Chapbook Contest. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.

17

The Farmer’s Son

By Matthew Drollette The rapid fire of an AK-47 popped off from a cliff top to the right. Corporal James drove the MRAP that shuffled down the canyon. The mine-resistant truck plodded along, a diesel powered desert tortoise. Bullets struck the ground around the armored convoy, puffs of dust rising as the metal fell like acid rain. A sound like hail clinked on the thick, steel roof, the ricochet off the turrets angled steel plating whistled as the rounds were deflected at odd angles. The ambush had been guaranteed. A choke point between two mountain cliffs, a river crossing: these were Al-Qaida’s favorite ingredients for a shit sandwich.

James pressed his booted foot down on the accelerator, felt the engine vibrate, working up to an explosion of power before it propelled itself across the shallow riverbed. It never got that far. The truck ahead of the corporal, already nearing the opposite shoreline, beginning its climb out of the water and onto the slanting foot of the canyon wall, vaporized.

The explosion had been the result of fifteen-hundred pounds of artillery that had been buried under the soft dirt near the river’s edge. Bad guys had probably buried them there overnight, or yesterday afternoon in the heat of the summer sun, a time most likely to allow for the group to avoid infrared satellite imaging. A “bad guy” is a childish nickname for terrorists. The Department of Defense referred to them as enemy combatants. Most of them had been farmers, James knew, before war had harvested them from their fields.

James’ dad had been a hay man. Alfalfa. James had plowed his father’s fields. He would climb the tractor, use the GPS to make strait furrows, plant the seed, water, cut, and bale. It had been a slow, simple life until James had come home from school with a pamphlet. He had shown it to his father after graduation.

“What would you do?” Dad had said, leaning on the shovel he had been using to turn the earth in the vegetable garden. His hands were scared, and they trembled slightly as they grasped the smooth wooden handle.

“The Army needs farmers, people to teach the locals how to use the land.”

“You’re already a farmer.”

“Did you know Afghans still use mules to pull the plow?” He wiped a drip of sweat from behind his ear.

Dad grunted, wiped his brow, and spit in the dirt.

Now, Corporal James was being dragged from behind the steering column of his MRAP, his head lolling from side to side, pivoting like a grotesque bobble-head as 18

rough hands dragged him down into the river. His uniform soaked through with water as he was pulled through the current and out onto the bank. His truck had lost its doors. The wheels were sitting at odd angles. There were holes in the bullet-proof glass that had been meant to protect him.

Shrapnel had turned the four-inch thick composite into a sponge. The corporal felt his hands going cold, but a warmth was radiating across his abdomen. He struggled to stand, rolled over, was forced back onto his back. A man stood over his limp body. The man’s face was covered with a scarf, and he wore a long, flowing shirt that reached his ankles. The man held a sickle in his hand.

Corporal James flung his arms out to his sides, searching for something to fight with. His fingers plowed the wet soil, gouging the dirt with their nails. He brought back a fist of mud. With resignation, he pressed the earthen lump to his lips, inhaled. He thought of the farm, pictured the sun going down over the flat horizon. He remembered playing with the ancient tools Dad had hanging in the barn. Once, he had left an antique wheat sickle out in the rain, and it rusted. Dad had been angry, had made him scrub the tool and grind its edge into a razor sharp enough to shave with. Then, he had hung it back in the shed. Lesson learned.

The man with the rough hands grasped the edges of Corporal James’s Kevlar vest and pulled him into a sitting position. The sun was behind the man, making him seem a shadow as he threw his head back and let loose a primal victory cry.

Corporal James closed his eyes, heard the shouting of other men around him.

“Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar,” they all sang. God is great. God is great. God is great.

Matthew Drollette spent nine years in the armed forces, joining the Army when he was seventeen. He married at twenty. Matthew deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 and Iraq in 2011, both times leaving behind a new born baby. He is studying creative writing at Weber State University.

19

Backscatter

By Richard Barbee I finally visit my grandfather’s farm.

Sturdy wind sways the pecan grove, in unison, boughs iced-over, supple enough for branch-bending over fried leaves and hulls ravaged before equinox enrages chill.

Holly shrubs slump, shiny and green.

Distant acres idle while thickets encroach on vineyard’s edge.

I never helped him pluck grapes, but I enjoy most wines. Parched, in hiatus, I salute late-day shadows, debate my off-season seclusion, bleak with snowy whispers I deflect into the bramble, where thorns glisten awaiting the scythe. Sun twitches, but only radiance from his good earth can thaw these bristly acres, answer their lingering regret, and resolve matters eulogized by night.

20

Jeremy B. Jones Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland.

Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2014. 263 pg. Available also as an ebook.

A Review by Rebecca Godwin Jeremy Jones’s first book adds his name to the catalog of fine North Carolina writers. Memoir, history, and observation of contemporary issues such as immigration, marketing, and land development, Bearwallow moves seamlessly across time and geography, highlighting human connections that endure despite conflicts and change. After a man helping him and his wife with a busted car radiator in the middle of the state identifies them as “mountain folk,” and therefore “good people,” Jones sets out to explore how his Henderson County home and his ancestors there shaped him. In language clear and rich, he unearths complexities as he writes respectfully of earlier generations and gently leads readers to deepen their cultural understanding.

A special pleasure of Bearwallow is the love of language that Jones reveals. Words can create people’s reality, as he explains with history lessons debunking supposed “discoveries” of Appalachia, including that of post-Civil War local color writers creating stereotypes: Appalachians as earthy and rustic or as backward and violent. While Jones grew up seeing such dualities, as an adult he realizes that truth lies somewhere between such dichotomies, in the gray areas. He can revert to local speech patterns, “the g’s falling away, the long i’s stretching longer” (170), or model perfect articulation for newly arrived migrant children at Edneyville Elementary School, where he spends a year teaching English as a Second Language. Etymologies often instruct him. Pondering the proposed development of Bearwallow Mountain by The Grand Highlands, Jones considers not only the benefits of more paved roads and the money struggling farmers can make from selling their land but also the environmental destruction of animals’ homes, loss of that farm land, shortage of water.

Ambiguity, from the Latin root ambiagere, “to wander uncertainly,” describes his awareness that “nothing is simple” (103), and on bike rides that form one motif in this narrative, wandering feeds his wondering about the past as well as about future directions for his own life and the community’s.

Jones also sprinkles his stories with Spanish, reinforcing parallels between Honduras, where he taught for a year, and his Blue Ridge Mountains. He finds commonalities in landscape and realizes, as he studies Appalachian history, that his going to “teach the poor Honduras children” mirrors the “benevolent work” of teachers and missionaries who arrived to elevate Appalachians in the early twentieth century (201-202).The irony instructs us all to think seriously about insider and outsider perspectives.

Dichotomies in fact create the main thematic thread that keeps this story moving. Jones contemplates contemporary class divisions (people who live in trailers rank lower than those who have real houses), and his study of history reveals two settlement trends whose influence continues:

21

roads and railroads created market towns, such as Hendersonville, and left rural areas, such as his family’s home community of Fruitland, to grow food and timber to be marketed. The Grand Highlands development project pits these two camps against each other: towns need development yet rural people want their space and resent the town’s sending water lines to Bearwallow’s top, lines for the wealthy that they cannot tie into. Jones sees contemporary arguments over land use mirrored in the two sides of his genealogy: his Scots-Irish ancestors came to the mountains as conquerors, claiming land and announcing their presence, while his Dutch ancestor was a camouflager, wanting to hide in the mountains, to become part of them and disturb them as little as possible. Throughout the book, Jones contemplates which strain dominates his personality. The refreshing thing is that he realizes his family “developed” the land by becoming subsistence farmers. Apple growers and tourists buying them work “symbiotically” (117). Each generation remakes the wilderness, shapes its own place on earth.

Jones’s imagination enables him to create delightful connections—to land, to diverse ethnic groups, to preceding generations. He explains his interest in looking back at history as that of a third generation immigrant. He envisions Civil War soldiers and German World War II prisoners walking the once-Cherokee land he traverses, creating scenes that stick in readers’ minds like movie clips. His sense of connection across time mirrors that of a well-established writer who grew up only minutes away from Jones’s Fruitland. In fact, Robert Morgan and Jones share the Dutch ancestor who becomes a Bearwallow touchstone. Readers can find Morgan’s take on Abraham Kuykendall in the short story “Kuykendall’s Gold,” in the collection The Balm of Gilead: New and Collected Stories. The distance between Morgan’s fiction and Jones’s creative nonfiction seems slight. While Morgan fictionalizes his mountains’ and family’s history, Jones tells it outright, applying fiction writing techniques to make the place, people, and stories come alive.

Writers feeling the pull of home and the urge to escape it can look to Bearwallow as a model for exploring that tension. As Jones discovers after realizing that The Grand Highlands marketers prefer “community” to “development,” Old French “desveloper” meant to “unwrap,” thus to uncover possibilities (113). Jones uncovers his own possibilities by delving into history books and family archives, listening to family storytellers, researching and playing on his banjo traditional Appalachian songs, and being a student of earth and of people’s needs. He weaves his findings into an insightful book that will appeal to readers interested in genealogy, the environment, cultural studies, or just human beings, with all their talents and flaws.

22

Seven Colors

By Richard Barbee − Sunset Beach My love struts ahead, leading the way.

She has her sway. She has her knacks: locates four leaf clovers in any field, collects sharks teeth from any shore, can extract pleasure amid unseen things.

In a latticed chair, I recline at water’s edge, let foam brine surge around my ankles.

Then I select another crest off-shore, white cap absorbed into swell, into the heave, intangible till it breaks.

I cock back my head to enjoy sea spray.

Enjoying that faint kiss, I see a rainbow encircling noon sun – no beginning, no end - I distinguish expected colors, without origin, no chance at a pot of gold.

Waving to my love, pointing up, she is awed too, but returns to her book, pages to caress, content, her blanket on glaring sand. I beckon her to the water to share this rainbow before a next cloud.

I extend one finger that extra moment, offer sand dollars and conchs, but she has her chapters, her metaphors sits content without my colors to shade her day, without a squint or glint off ripples atop the sea.

Sam Barbee’s poems have appeared Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, Potato Eyes, Georgia Journal, St. Andrews Review, Charlotte Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine. He was awarded an "Emerging Artist's Grant" from the Winston-Salem Arts Council in 1994 to publish his first collection Changes of Venue (Mount Olive Press); has been a featured poet on the North Carolina Public Radio Station WFDD; received the 59th Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for his poem "The Blood Watch."

23

Help us make a print version possible Consider a contribution to our PayPal account if you enjoy WTF All staff are unpaid and the Editor funds the journal And we don’t accept ads We’d love to be able to pay our contributors in the future Thanks for reading!

Check out our website www.whatthefiction.com

24