Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #8. Summer 2015. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. Immune to Indifference. After phone party by Ben Stein It’s Sunday and warmer than it’s been in weeks warmer than it will be for who knows how long (the weather man on the radio says rain turns to snow after noon) and here I am flaky -skinned busted chair moved into the hall to haul to the dumpster popcorn in the carpet for the cats to sniff this room smells like a fucking primate house and where the fuck am I supposed to fucking sit fuck it this poem gets written standing up.
Ben Stein’s writing has appeared in the 2nd Hand and Cabildo Quarterly. He runs Open Books, a not-for-profit education and publishing venture offering personal wrtiting workshops to people with limited access to educational services. Find it here: www.facebook.com/RoughCutPress
Voices by Jes Skolnik I get asked a lot these days what it was like the first time he pried my mouth open and I spat his words out, when he crept into my spine and stacked me straight like they always try to get you to sit in church. What I usually say is predictable: that I simply faded away to make room for him, barely aware of the mist until it had barred me from my own body entirely. That it was painless and simple and that once the door was open it just never closed. Girls like me, hardy farm workhorses, aren’t supposed to be delicate in any way. We’re not supposed to secede from our stocky, fecund bodies. Our bodies make houses and children, bread and hay. We are callused. Most people seem relieved when I describe, in dramatic detail with a lot of eye-rolling and hand-fluttering, that my role in this whole thing is entirely passive. They want it to be true. It makes sense that way. A news story about one of my Manhattan appearances begins with mention of my “dark brow” and “thick waist,” but goes on to praise my scent (wisteria, violet and lily, carefully distilled), my choice of frilly, high-necked garments with just enough décolletage. Do not think I have not chosen these accessories by accident. Do not think I am not lying about this whole thing. *** The events of that day as they actually transpired begin before sunrise, that thin film of sleep dissolving from the surface of my body as if at the end of a long journey from the bottom of the ocean. In my dreams I had been a tangle of limbs with her with my breath south and stuttering, with blood singing in the balls of my feet, wet mouths, sirens both, one long tremble. My hands in her hair, hers in mine. I have been told that this is how you are supposed to feel about men. The weight of men touching me is a dead stone in my stomach. The sick of men touching me is hot bile in my throat. The weight of men touching me is Clarence in the barn loft a couple of years prior to that morning in my ear like a dog wanting something from me that I could not give. I gave him a pretty painting of it with my lips and teeth and legs and he seemed not to know the difference. How can you not see that I am not even here when your hand is in me, I said to him silently, but men don’t read your eyes. My father said Clarence would make a good husband. That he would be stable, dependable. That I would not starve and that he would not beat me. I couldn’t argue. Who would? She was at her father’s tannery that morning and I bore the foul scent of the place to see her hip propped against the till, god, that arch. She was all jumpy shoulders: “Have you heard about the Fox sisters in Hydesville? Have you? It’s so close, it’s so close! Have you heard about the knocking? We’re not supposed to talk about it but I think it’s real, I really do.” Her voice dropped and she leaned in, balling her fists up. “Charlotte, you should come over when everyone’s at night service. Tonight! We’re going to try to talk to the spirits. I might have
the gift! Everyone’s always said I’m sensitive.” If you’re so sensitive, I thought, why can’t you feel me shaking right next to you. But instead, I said, “I’d love to.” *** There were seven of us there: Anna, of course. Clarence, Emma, Elizabeth, Hazel, Albert, Carrie. Our entire school class, with the exception of Ned Wright, who everyone agreed smelled bad and was cruel and sulky and was always referred to by his full name as if there was another Ned in town (there wasn’t), and the Berry twins, Tom and Christine, who were both lovely but who couldn’t keep a secret by themselves and especially couldn’t keep one when they were together. We were all hovering around sixteen. “We’re too old for this,” said Hazel, who was beautiful in a very sharp way and who looked even more generally taut since she suddenly shed her baby fat just last year. She was chewing on her lower lip and she looked slightly less sour than usual. She kept folding and unfolding her hands, which all belied her excitement. “The spirits are not a game.” Anna was lighting candles around the perimeter of the living room in a slightly haphazard fashion – she’d just put them on any surface she could find as opposed to forming a proper circle, which, to hear Pastor Wood tell it, was how any evildoer worth his salt over the shoulder summoned up ghosts or demons. Clarence had a hand on my knee under the big table the rest of us were seated around. I let him keep it there, thinking about my father’s words. “How do we start this whole thing?” Emma was resolutely practical, wonderfully so. “Is there a song, a chant?” Anna rustled down at the head of the table and bowed her neck. The illumination of her cheekbones made her look soft like a rabbit, smoothed out the angles in her face that made her look like her mother, who had died in childbirth and who had reportedly not been the kindest of people, though nobody wanted to say that because she was dead. Her father had told me once when I ran into him on the road between our houses coming home from town with his walk sideways and his breath reeking of grain alcohol that he thought Anna was a tiny phoenix, that God’s providence had allowed her to escape the husk of her mother’s body and that we were all better off for it. Tiny phoenix: those were his words. I’d been trying to puzzle out their truth for months. When I asked my mother, who had been close to Anna’s mother, about it, she said: “The world made Martha Winston hard. The world does that to a lot of us.” That statement was not a puzzle at all. “We come to this table on this night to lower the veil between the living and the dead,” Anna intoned in her best rounded-off Pastor Wood impression. As schoolteacher and pastor, a slight but commanding, respectful presence, he was our best model of authority. “Spirits, bless us with your presence! Bring us word from the realms beyond! We come to you with open hands, we come to you in supplication.” She was making it up as she went along, despite the buoyant confidence in her voice. Anna didn’t use words like supplication in her daily life. We barely knew what it meant, though it sounded right when she used it, sounded like a Pastor Wood word. My cheeks were hot. Why were my cheeks hot? I was looking at her collarbone and the ringlets clinging to her neck and thinking about dreams. Clarence looked at me sideways, and I tried not to look at Anna and just Anna. Glanced around the table and took in all of our familiar faces, the range of expressions from skeptical to near-laughing and back again. It suddenly felt very cold in the room. My cheeks still burned. It was completely silent. “Spirits!” said Anna, again, a little desperately this time. “Spirits, join us at this table of goodwill!” Nothing. “Spirits! We call on thee!” That’s when I felt it rising in my chest, near to bursting, and this booming voice issued forth from my very own lips. “WHO CALLS ON THE DEAD?” Carrie and Emma started giggling. Clarence’s mouth fell open. Albert said: “Charlotte?” How did all of this go? I tightened my body, rolled my eyes back in my head, swayed a little bit: “WHO CALLS ON THE DEAD?” I’d never been one to make myself the center of attention. When the church did passion plays I’d hide in a cluster of fellow Israelites; once during the stoning of Jesus on the Cross I lobbed a particularly large chunk of rock that caused the Cross to topple over with Jesus (played by Ned Wright) on it by accident and it had been mortifying. Here, in front of just my friends, it felt safer, but still: what was I doing? Anna blinked at me. “Um,” she wet her lips with her tongue and swallowed, “Who, uh, goes there?” “THOMAS JEFFERSON,” I nearly yelled. He was the first dead man I could think of from history class. I had thought fleetingly about yelling “JEREMIAH MURRAY,” the local barber who had been trampled by a runaway horse, because he was really the first dead man who came to mind, but I didn’t know anything about him except that he was fat and well-liked and that the horse had actually been his own. Dead men can speak. Dead women get spoken for. Emma’s giggle got louder, while Carrie’s faded. Clarence craned his neck toward me but removed his hand from my knee. “I AM COME TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE DEV-
ILS OF SLAAAAAVERY,” I said, my voice rising and getting prouder. We’d always been a little smug about that sort of thing in New York State. At that time, I’d never actually met a freedman, but I’d been born just after the Civil War ended, leaving a swath of exhaustion and devastation even in some Northern towns, and it was all anyone could talk about: the proud, righteous North, always on the side of justice. The Devils of Slavery seemed like a safe thing to lecture on. Emma’s giggle had died. They were all turned to me with so much attention. I felt drunk; I’d never known I was so good at lying. I’d always thought I was one of those people whose faces betrayed them no matter what, that I’d only gotten away with the things I got away with because people were too polite or too delusional to bring them up. A loud and sudden CRACK!, and the table jumped. I nearly toppled my chair over, I was so startled. I had been lying my teeth out, but I had not made that sound. I did a quick survey from the corner of my eye, and everyone else looked just as drained, just as pallid, just as amazed. Hazel was solidly staring at me. She looked like a tiny fox, all sharp chin and cheekbones, her hair with its sheen of copper that only showed when light fell on it the way the candles shook now. “Dear Jesus God in Heaven,” she said, “have mercy on u—“ CRACK! The table had moved a full inch at least this time. “Us,” Hazel repeated. “Us, us, us, us sinners.” Her slatted, dark eyes shimmered with delight. “MY SPIRIT’S ARRIVAL ON THIS EARTH BRINGS WITH IT MUCH DISTURBANCE,” Thomas Jefferson said through me, as a late and somewhat obvious explanation, though I had no idea what presence actually might have stolen into that room. Albert was grinning, and Anna had clasped her hands beneath her chin, elbows on the table, leaning forward, greedy for more. I fainted. Not for show – I really did. Fell right off my chair, one foot splashing into Master Pepper’s bowl, barely disturbing the hound himself snoring next to it (he had been with Anna since she was a child and would go for long spells without motion at all; we often had to check to make sure he hadn’t expired). My hair unspooled, my skirts up around my waist, gone awry, gone away. This was the way it truly began. Jes Skolnik is a contributing writer to Pitchfork, The Media, Rookie, Flavorwire, and other sites you may or may not have heard of. They live in Chicago and play in the band Split Feet. 'Voices' is the introduction of a novel-in-progress.
Beyond Center for E.K. by Erica Vega I undress you, climb into your body, euphoria in your center yer marigold face, the dark with without shadow a light buds. the sun close at a distance, see what you’re saying: It is dawning somewhere & dusking else. Erica Vega holds an MFA in Creative Writing and currently teaches English at Elgin Community College in Illinois. She continues work on her novel.
Ann Arbor, Michigan by Richard Katrovas The effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s began innocuously; data anchored to his very being—address, telephone number, grown children’s names and the names of their spouses and small children—suddenly dislodged and drifted over the horizon of phonemic clusters by which they were determined. Sometimes they returned immediately, sometimes well into the night as he laid shuffling images of intimacy he could no longer name at will. “Sarah,” he would whisper, assuring himself he could never forget the name of her beside whom he lay for thirty-eight years. They’d met as kids at school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Second-generation Greek, she’d lived Greek at home and American English in the rest of post-war Ann Arbor. His first days at school had been the most humiliating of his life; composed of many second-generation Americans, mostly Greeks like Sarah, but also Germans and Irish, the class had laughed as a chorus when it became apparent how little English he understood or spoke. Sarah didn’t laugh. She befriended him, taught him. A few years later they were married. He’d stopped thinking in Czech in his mid-teens, and did not hear the language, except in snippets, for over thirty years. He was American through and through. He cursed and loved and laughed