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S U M M E R 2016 DOU B L E

POETRY

ISS UE

| FICTION | ART | ESSAYS | REVIEWS

IN THIS ISSUE

Ghost stories and cicada symphonies Archeologists and hurricanes, plus Postcards, portraits, and painted birds

VOLUME 65.3

Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

Spring/Summer 2016 V O L U M E 65.3

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Contents

Spring /Summer 2016 | VOLUME 65.3

FICTION RYAN HABERMEYER Ellie’s Brood 16 PAUL LINCZAK Frankenstorm 32 BRANDON BARRET T Gerald’s Last Ghost Story 104 MATT IZZI Bully Bus 130 SHELLEY BERG The Dirty White Sky 143

POETRY KAREN SKOLFIELD How to Leave the Midwest 9

Poem in which the Reader Will not Ecounter the Letter “Z” 10 KATHERINE ROBINSON Wild Boar 12

Afterworld 14 LAUREN GOODWIN SLAUGHTER Kitchen, 5 A.M. 29

Cookery 30 RONALD TOBIAS Jubilee 48

How Newton Learned Poetry, or, Why Goats Hate Snow 49 Hungover 58

DOC SUDS

In an Age of Great Injustices 59 Why All the Cashiers at Total Wine Know Me by Name 60 G.C. WALDREP

Adri# amoung Bells, and like unto Ca!le 62 I Circled the Train Museum 63

KYLE NORWOOD

Reason 118 Time and Motion Studies 119

T.K. LEE

Of Monsters 126 Particular Habits 127 Riesling D’Etre 128

HEATHER BARTLET T Ars[on] Poetica: Letter After 140

Semiotics 142 JOHN-MICHAEL P. BLOOMQUIST

Defence for the Prodigal Son 158

Landscape with the Fall of Peter 159 Leviathan 160 M.J. GET TE

Everglades 162

NONFICTION KHRISTOPHER FLACK Return to Sender 50 MARTINO MARAZZI Amelia 82 M.B. McLATCHEY The Good Thief 110

ART MONICA CANILAO Introduction to the Artwork 64

Beyond Mountains 65 Wave Tops Break Off 66 Time Table 67 The Smew 68 Time Machine 69 Swimming Cities 70 Sweet History 72 Owned Worker 73 The Order That We Died 74 The Treasure Nest 75 Installing for Home Mender 76 Home Mender for Hold the Fort 77-78 Anacostia Monument 79

KAREN SKOLFIELD

How to Leave the Midwest You cling to the rocketed beauty of silos, the easy abundance of sky.

In their own way, the wheat and corn love you. Through you, wheat passes into every darkened link of the food chain, from you to the grubbish eaters of spent skin and night soil, to the bats and songbirds, the primacy of housecats, and when the housecats die the wheat feeds upon their crumpled felinity. In every field, bright spots of green signal a body beneath. The old mare needs a resting place, even if she’s no more than ashes. The night of the stable burning, how you thought: put cloth over their eyes! Those horse books from childhood, the young teen saving the recalcitrant stallion, the espalier of barn beams creaking in the throes of flame. It was the wildness that had to be pulled out of the screaming animal, replaced with a new kind of trust. This is what the Midwest does: pulls you from your squalling infancy, teaches you to put one trembling leg in front of the other. Then it shows you the door.

KAREN SKOLFIELD

9

Poem in which the Reader Will not Encounter the Letter “Z” The last le!er being classical and omega.

The lighter-than-air ship ending up in flames.

The crew put “No smoking” signs in the lounge, but in those days, who paid a!ention? A#er bu!ons there were other ways of keeping jackets closed, li!le railroad tracks pleased to meet each other.

Before the blastocyst and embryo, the hope of breath, names ba!ed around.

Tracy, consider how your last name placed you in the last chair in every classroom and you longed for teachers to see your hand slashing the air with answers. They never did.

Now, no more le!ers carved with a rapier into the skin of children. No more stitches that go right le# right again, no more switchbacks loping up a mountain’s face. For anything less than one, consider the shape of a goose egg, and then remove it. In sleep, a single le!er coming from the mouth in one long stream, then reeled back in. Belt of the heavens where bulls may leap into stars.

For every le!er placed out of bounds, there’s one more member of the undead crying over the loss. The sound hiding at the tail of so many plurals. Put a bunch of animals in cages, charge admission. How the mind wanders to the near-horse, fleeing its own stripes.

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K AT H E R I N E R O B I N S O N

Wild Boar I have been a wild boar.

- Taliesin, Welsh 11th Century

His scent is lost inside the oldest trees where bark tusks once gouged now circles the trunk’s deep core.

Seven centuries back, small oaks shake around him, ferns turn belly-up and thick spit flies o his tusks until the spear knocks him to slender, awkward knees.

His spine slopes into the ground like a moraine heaped by retreating glaciers.

All winter, the cured flesh hangs hangs in salted skeins from the ra#ers like drying fishing lines.

He carves a razor from the tusk and shaves his beard for her.

Seven centuries gone, boar paths stamped across hills still lure me, a bedrock restlessness I follow until my violence is spent,

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

running a#er nothing I’ve seen, pursued by nothing I’ve known, through oak forests turned to fields eaten flat by sheep.

K AT H E R I N E R O B I N S O N

13

Afterworld My arm, disguised as a crane, stretches into the pen where a fledgling balances carefully on one stilt-thin leg and uneasily eyes the puppet beak offering him grain.

He shyly advances as recorded crane calls play— throatless sounds he’s heard only through the thick white shell of an egg.

Centuries before I learned to pince corn in this cla!ering beak, cranes were said to breathe in the souls of the dead and carry them, flying in long lines, that—seen from earth— forked out like veins in a leaf, or swayed like eddies of foam on the sea.

Lulled by ra!ling calls, souls rode in the white-keeled birds and waited to be exhaled when the cranes landed in the a#erworld, whose map, cross-hatched like fish scales, they had memorized in their patient, one-legged watch.

The chick, pecking gravel, learns to wait for the painted bird arriving daily, white cloth daubed with flecks of red and black:

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the image looms again when huge white birds appear by the river, and the ground suddenly roars with a se!ling spray of wings— white birds arriving and arriving from nowhere he’s known—

and the grown crane flies toward familiar calls and arching necks— the muffled scent of human nowhere near.

K AT H E R I N E R O B I N S O N

15

RYAN HABERMEYER

Ellie’s Brood It was the spring nothing thawed. There were a few warm days at the end of March, but soon enough the ice returned. In early June there were still no leaves on the trees. People waited for flowers but by the end of August there weren’t even weeds. The frost was everywhere.

O#en thin and invisible but there, lurking behind it all. None of the tadpoles came out of the pond as frogs. The birds didn’t return. One winter carried into the other.

Harvey kept the town informed of all the weather happenings with his newspaper column. He encouraged folks to keep a generous food supply and a copy of Robert Frost poems just in case the world did end.

Some of the farmers were anxious to plant crops, and there was a minor alarm when Frank Lowry’s beehives were lost to moisture—or maybe it was brood disease or the queen just commi!ed suicide—but very few were genuinely worried, least of all Harvey. He had lived in town more than thirty-five years and seen plenty of strange and this winter didn’t break the top five. He relieved everyone when he printed his shortest ever Sunday column: Nature still works, friends. Ellie’s pregnant.

Neighbors talked. They talked about how it happened and what would happen next. They said people shouldn’t raise a baby in the foothills. It was unnatural. Others circulated a petition demanding the day become a town holiday. It’s the bizarro apocalypse, they said.

No, it’s simple biology, Harvey explained in another column. Hibernating bears like to stay close to their honey.

People questioned if the biology was that simple. Harvey was no Abraham. And hadn’t he talked for years about how having children made him nervous? Then this girl comes along and, well, poof, you never know people.

Even before the pregnancy more than half of Harvey’s columns were devoted to the peculiarities of that oldest of rituals: breeding.

What were babies for if not replacements? he o#en said. Parenting was a twisted enterprise with the endgame of making li!le copies of yourself—like a string of paper dolls.

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

And it isn’t enough that they look the way we do, Harvey would rant at the bar to anyone who listened: we dress them like us, teach them to laugh our laughs, believe our beliefs, tell our lies for us, imprint them with all our fears and inadequacies and nostalgias. If that’s not horrible enough then we teach them to make mistakes different from our own but ones that hurt just the same.

“It’s enough to make you want to cut your dick off,” he once wrote.

He lost library privileges for a month for using such obscenity.

Ellie had trouble keeping track of all the rumors. She was a whore, a saint, the victim of predatory male courtship. On more than one occasion the rumor was she had been abducted and impregnated by aliens. It was too much. As far as she could tell the gossip in this town did not obey the laws of physics. She had to explain it to Harvey.

Objects moving at the speed of light appear to slow down to stationary objects. Time stalls on a beam of light, she told Harvey. Rumors here were different. They le# the lips and never slowed down. People exhausted one only to start another.

“What can you do?” Harvey smiled, rubbing her feet hard enough to make her cringe with uneasy relief. “It might be winter but it’s the season for reproduction.”

Then the news nobody anticipated.

Just the facts, Harvey reported. Miscarriage. No sympathies, please.

He never wrote a newspaper column again.

The turkeys were Harvey’s idea. He remembered what one of the old-timers said thirty-five years ago when he first came to town to live with his uncle: to keep from going loopy in the foothills, it was best to make friends with the animals. Circumstances had obliged him to put that wisdom to the test. Ellie had a swollen chest and her blood wasn’t regular. They needed to restore some balance to nature.

He purchased a dozen turkeys, a mix of toms and hens, and drove home with them in the back of the pick-up. Two of the birds took an unfortunate leap and gobbled their way under the wheels of a passing semi. Harvey spent an hour gathering the remains off the highway.

“It’s okay,” he told Ellie as he unloaded the pick-up and sent the turkeys sprawling into the fields. “This makes a baker’s dozen.”

RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

17

“You’re not a baker. And you can’t count.”

“You’re missing the point.”

Ellie chewed her lip. “What makes you think you can breed wild turkeys?”

“Maybe I can’t. But it’s something to take our mind off things,” he said, trying to be reassuring the best he knew how.

“What things?” she wanted to know. She said it deliberately to make him feel uncomfortable.

It hurt her, this flippancy, this old patronizing wisdom of believing he could make it right with the snap of his fingers, even if he wasn’t trying to be mean and was only trying to show he loved her. Hey, honey, you lost the baby but I got you turkeys! That was the problem with Harvey: he loved so big he o#en got it wrong.

“We need to relax,” he smiled, and put his arm around her awkwardly in a half-embrace she did not return. He pulled his arm away and put his hands in his pockets.

It was easy to see he was relieved by the turn of events. With Harvey it was all whimsical. He had avoided seriousness for most of his life. Even when his mother died he turned it into a joke, refusing to give a eulogy and inviting people to the pulpit to tell a story about Judith that made them laugh instead of cry. Harvey didn’t make any room for tragedy. That was why he wrote a silly column for thirty-five years and never once said anything worth repeating.

So, yes, he must be relieved with what had happened. He wasn’t ready to be a father, not even a#er decades of reading on the subject. He was a writer, his life a question of commas and other expertly arranged punctuation he could blot out and erase on a whim. For her it was not so easy. Nature had made its correction. Miscarriage. Such an odd word.

Like most words, it must have been invented by a man who needed a name to fill the lack he felt inside, the lack he wanted to pawn off on someone else because he could not understand the shape of things.

“Breeding them won’t be so difficult,” Harvey said as they surveyed the turkeys from the slope. No sooner had he said it than he let his chin drop against his chest, the way he did when suffering indigestion.

“I did not mean that,” he said.

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

“I know with you it’s just words,” Ellie said, pa!ing his cheek warmly.

Harvey gazed at the flock which began to spu!er and zag in the evening snow. The bigger toms were marking their territory. “Ten is luckier than twelve. I feel good about having ten,” he said.

“They’re heading for the thicket. Boy. You sure did get the wild ones.”

Harvey snorted. Then he brushed past her. Ellie held her breath as he started into a trot, waving his arms and calling a#er the turkeys.

Halfway down the bu!e, he was in full sprint. Two of the jakes disappeared into the thicket. Harvey managed to keep the others at bay by throwing snowballs until they started back up the slope toward the old barn they had never once used since moving in together.

A#er he corralled them into the barn he found Ellie inside. She kissed him on the cheek. Before turning up the stairs she said, “Next time, try not to dream so big.”

Harvey converted the barn into a pen for the toms and jakes. On the other side he put up some wire meshing for the gobble!as, as he called them. When he bought the feed and supplies one of the farmers had told him to keep the toms and hens separate.

“Nothing like delayed gratification to raise a roost,” Harvey laughed.

“Don’t be a jackass, Harvey. If you let those toms on her now they’ll tear her to pieces. And I mean pieces. You lose the whole ra#er.”

Harvey stood there with the bag of feed slung over his shoulder nodding his head without a clue. The farmers snickered. They knew Harvey never did mind looking like a fool.

“Well, I appreciate the advice,” he told them. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I do my best sex scenes with a typewriter and a glass of gin.”

All the men had a good laugh.

He never did keep the turkeys penned up for long. They were always escaping. Sometime past midnight Harvey could hear the jakes pecking at the windows. When he opened the door they invited themselves inside and stood in the parlor, bobbing and fanning tails as if it were a game.

During the a#ernoon, when he was tired of writing or bored with reading, Ellie found him in the barn teaching the toms how to gobble.

Like the town, they were confused by the winter that refused to thaw.

RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

19

“If they don’t learn to gobble the hens won’t know it’s time to mate,” he explained.

A#er a few weeks of training them Harvey became impatient and decided to let the turkeys roam instead of cooping them in the barn.

For two days it seemed to be working. They heard gobbles before sunrise. The toms were stru!ing like he had read about in the manual and there were other proper courtship displays.

Then one morning, they found all but four of the turkeys butchered during the night. Two gobble!as and two toms survived. There were feathers and guts and turkey heads all down the slope.

“Maybe wolves,” Ellie said.

The surviving turkeys seemed to sense something was wrong. For Ellie it was plain to see these were not dumb birds. There was something human about the way the turkeys marched in ritual fashion among the ta!ered corpses. Circle le#. Circle right. Fluff and ruffle.

Gobble gobble. It was an unse!ling li!le dirge. Again and again they made their li!le march. It gave Ellie hope that nature knew what it was doing even when it seemed to be spiraling this way and that.

Harvey was collecting the turkey innards when he noticed one of the toms went into a frenzy. It dashed down the slope, kicking up li!le flakes of snow. It was heading for the pond.

“Suicide!” he yelled.

He tried to get Ellie’s a!ention but she was pe!ing one of the gobble!as with purple caruncles and acted as if she didn’t hear him.

Harvey tossed the half-frozen entrails at her feet as he ran past her.

———— The tom had leaped into the pond. It wasn’t moving. Harvey leaped in a#er it. By the time he reached the bird it was floating on its side, mostly submerged in the water. Rolling out of the water, Harvey took off his shirt and wrapped it around the tom. It still wasn’t moving. He tipped it upside down and began to whack it with an open palm. He shook it by the feet.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn you!”

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Ellie, who had come out of her trance, watched him swing the turkey by the legs as if it was a wet towel. He whirled it around his head. Twice he slammed it against a tree trunk. He rubbed the turkey’s chest with his palms. The gobbler’s head knocked against his mouth.

Harvey tasted blood. His knees buckled under him and, in frustration and rage for fi#y-seven years of futility, he tossed the gobbler into a heap of snow like he was taking part in an Olympic event. Then he rested with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

The turkey lay in the snow for a few minutes. Then it twitched. It wobbled back to its feet. It stru!ed up the slope. It paused in front of the gobble!as to puff its chest and shake its wa!le.

Ellie could not stop laughing. Harvey huffed past her, grunting like a school boy with a wounded ego a#er he’s been removed from the playground swings.

Harvey took a long bath that night. He sat on the bed and watched Ellie alternate between painting her toenails and folding unused baby clothes. She put them in a box destined for the a!ic. He wanted her to be bi!er. He waited for it. He wanted some acknowledgment of discomfort, some forbidden rage. He wanted to see her grotesque,.

But she kept appearances with a remarkable indifference, with what he supposed could only be the evolutionary legacy of some pioneer stoicism. She was the most audacious toe painter in history.

Sometime a#er midnight she found him at his typewriter, distracted by the turkeys roaming the parlor. Like most evenings he was lost inside his own head, researching his great literary project: an encyclopedia of exceptional Americans. He had tried to tell her about the first man who photographed snowflakes but he lost interest.

“Are you trying to write yourself into there?”

“Hmmm?”

“The encyclopedia,” she said. “Are you writing yourself into history?

Is that what this is about?”

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, placing one ear to her belly. He had not done this when she was pregnant and now he felt like he had missed out on one of life’s great mysteries.

She ran fingers through his hair. For a moment she thought he might RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

21

touch her like before. Harvey had li!le interest in sex. It was a freak of nature she had go!en pregnant at all.

She looked one way and he looked the other.

“Nobody should be wri!en into a history like this,” he said. “I’m fi#y-seven next month. Jesus was in his thirties when he saved the world. What the hell have I done?”

Ellie smiled and kissed the top of his head. “You resurrected a turkey.”

It went without saying that life with Harvey was not what she expected. Ellie thought it would be exotic, living on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The house itself was worthy of being in a movie. She kept waiting for something to happen, something, well, dazzling was the only word that came to mind even if it was a bit girlish. Isn’t that what people come out here for? she wondered the first few days a#er moving in. To be dazzled by nature? Harvey shook his head. Nope. We come here to be bored, he told her. It takes too much effort to dazzle.

The turkeys were perhaps too much dazzle. Painting her nails was not Ellie’s first a!empt to distract herself from Harvey’s experiment.

She had taken up carpentry. She went out into the woods with an axe and cut down the biggest tree she could find, roped it and tied the knots herself, and hauled it into the shed where Harvey kept his tools. She made a rolling pin and a lopsided coat rack. Nothing else seemed to take shape. She found the wood intractable and it refused to become anything other than shavings on the floor of the shed, or worse, warped bookshelves and other ugly furniture. When Harvey took the time to notice what she was doing, the immediate pride in her accomplishment quickly faded to annoyance.

“Yes, a bird house,” he said, like a grandfather might praise a grandchild.

Maybe he didn’t mean it as a mockery. Maybe a bird house was just a bird house. Maybe this was just a conversation with her own ghosts.

She was grateful for the distraction of work. She had missed it.

Ellie had worked plenty of odd jobs in her young life: veterinary assistant, courier for a congressman, pillow stuffer at a factory, elevator tester, and bird whistler. This city, and that town. One lifestyle and then another. The pay was junk but she had never been interested in

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C A R O L I N A Q U A R T E R LY

money. She hoped to find a life within each of these lives she was living.

When she felt close to mastering the job she quit. Nothing seemed to startle her long enough to want to stay.

She met Harvey working as a professional ma!ress sleeper. He saw her in a window display while out shopping for some replacement parts for his typewriter.

“If I buy this bed do you come with it?” he asked.

She pretended not to hear him and kept her eyes closed. His voice had sounded old enough to worry her but smooth enough to make her curious. He had to ask two more times before she looked at him.

She might have found him creepy if he didn’t have such a stupid grin on his face. Like it was his first pick-up line in thirty years.

He offered to buy her a coffee, but they ended up having lunch. He pretended not to notice their tremendous age difference. He found it both endearing and impressive she had worked so many trades. He had trouble focusing on this one life and had been too afraid to do anything else.

“How many different lives have you lived?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Apparently I’m still looking for the right one.”

Harvey insisted there was plenty of work in town, even showed up at her door the following week with a list of classifieds. It was all a ruse to invite her to dinner.

They went to bed that night. It wasn’t like her. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe she had given him false hope and when the moment pressed against her, almost smothering her with affection, she was too afraid not to stumble headfirst like she always had. But a#er so many years adri# a life with Harvey Fiske felt safe and calm as mother’s milk.

———— They never se!led on what they were. Maybe she was just a girlfriend. It had been four years now. It was possible she had misjudged his intentions. He never introduced her as anything. “You know Ellie,” he would say to houseguests or at the newspaper office parties. Never, this is Ellie my wife, or Ellie my fiancé. Just plain Ellie. Nobody would RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

23

mistake her for a wife in this town, where wives had expensive necklaces and took naps, drove fast and tore up speeding tickets. They le# unexplained notes on the fridge like, Gone ‘til eight. Wives were constipated. She was none of the above.

Everybody loved Harvey. Why not her? It was practically a crime not to. Sure, he was old. Old enough to have had the measles—the actual measles? she asked and he had grinned—which le# him with a slightly pock marked face. He was chubby but not fat. He brushed away self-consciousness with wit – or by being a bi!er ass, depending on who you were talking to. He wasn’t afraid to tell her anything. He didn’t need her and he didn’t want to be needed.

It would never work between them. She thought it would last, at most, a year. You can build a house together but merging two buildings, especially when one is an historic landmark, took skill beyond what she had. She thought she might train him out of his bachelor ways and groom him into a proper husband for one of the town widows.

She could play matchmaker. Maybe that could be her trade. She had learned how to weld in less time and that was damn difficult.

Harvey turned out to be a full-time job. He le# dishes everywhere.

He pissed on the toilet seat. He slept with his socks on. He disappeared for days and then reappeared and kept her awake late at night with stories he had been writing and interviews he was conducting. He drank wine like an idiot. He was like an enormous puppy.

She never planned on becoming a mother. It was not for lack of love. She had plenty of that to give. It was not ignorance. Her own mother had never been anything but the kind of woman to dress children and keep a house and regre!ed it all her life once the brood le# the nest. Ellie remembered being at the hospital before her mother died. Sometimes she was lucid near the end and other times she seemed far removed.

“I wish I had met him in the snow,” her mother said.

“Met who, mom?”

Her mother let out a deep, ra!ling breath. “A proper fuck,” she said.

The nurse giggled, then hurried out of the room embarrassed by this breach of etique!e.

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———— Ellie was the only one in the room when her mother died. She did not mention the dirty word to her sister and father. She made up some other last words during the eulogy. Her mother was a good Christian woman and would not have said shit if her mouth was full of it.

Ellie was so busy trying not to become her mother that when she got pregnant it came by surprise. All this time, what she thought was running away from was really running into the life she was trying to escape. She sat in the bathroom with the pregnancy stick, her face twisted with a troubled joy.

With a brief thaw the toms started mating regularly. At night Ellie could hear them. Harvey was pleased. The hens were really coming into lay. The first breeding yielded nine poults. They matured unreasonably fast. In six short weeks the male chicks had grown into jakes and were trying to mate with their mothers. And then the gobble!as were roosting again. Harvey counted the eggs. Forty-seven.

“It’s not natural,” Ellie told him as they watched the jakes try to woo their mothers away from the older toms. While one of the toms was busy gobbling to a!ract a mate, the faster jakes would mount the hen who had answered the call. Then the old tom, entirely oblivious, would mount her a second time. They watched this li!le charade repeat for hours.

“It’s incest,” Harvey said, doing his best to sound stoic. “It’s polygamy.”

By the end of the week there were over a hundred eggs in the barn.

“Come to bed,” Harvey told her one night as she stood by the door.

“It’ll even out. Let nature run its course.”

For the next two weeks he tried to hide from her the nastiness of the hatching, worried she didn’t have the stomach for it. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t be upset. Since they had been together she had about as much passion as a doorknob.

One morning he found her in the bathroom. She was kneeling among the hens. There was fresh hay in the tub and cracked eggs in the sink. At least four dozen chicks. Chirping and echoes. Bloody handprints on the floor. Soiled towels. Half-eaten poults on the tile.

RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

25

Ellie was bent over one of the smashed eggshells. It was only a#er she looked at him that he realized she had been giving a newborn poult mouth-to-mouth. The thing squirmed between her fingers like a cannoli. Harvey watched as she took a knife from her pocket and delicately nicked the throat before fi!ing in the straw. She blew hard.

The poult’s chest puffed like a sad balloon.

Harvey dropped the egg he was holding. “Get the fuck out!” Ellie screamed.

Exactly forty-three poults survived the hatching. Most of those in the barn froze to death overnight. The survivors were brought inside. They were ugly, misshapen things. Three beaks, eleven toes, waddles dangling from their asses. They kept breeding. Eighty. Then well over one hundred filthy turkeys. Harvey lost count, Ellie ran out of names.

Ellie insisted on keeping the turkeys inside. Harvey had grown tired of the affair. He wanted them gone. He was less playful at breakfast, not as quick with his jokes. Ellie suggested he start writing his column again but Harvey said he had lost his appetite for words.

Harvey tried to get rid of the turkeys. He wouldn’t say whether this was for his benefit or hers. He sold as many as he could to restaurants and chased others into the woods. He le# the windows open for them to wander outside but not even the wolves could keep pace with the breeding. For every ten butchered by wolves another two dozen hatched. He stopped feeding them, hoping the numbers would taper off. Instead, they ate their own dead.

The turkeys kept them awake at night. When Harvey turned in bed Ellie was waiting for him. She had watched the turkeys breed.

She had taken notes, even drawn pictures. It was all very educational.

She slept naked now, surprised at her own insistence at trying to be a mother. When Harvey told her to be quiet and tried to fall back asleep she gobbled into his ear.

He rolled over one night and was surprised not to find her in bed.

He checked the bathroom and the kitchen. All he found were a few stray turkeys roaming the hallways and others asleep in the tub. He searched the barn but she wasn’t there either.

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Outside, she had le# an obvious trail to follow. The woods were not very dense. She would have to try harder and be pre!y determined to freeze to death on a night like this.

He went at a casual pace, not wanting to excite himself. He had warned her a dozen times about following these trails. She wasn’t familiar with these woods. It was too easy to get lost. And there were salt wells. One misstep and she would be pickled sixty feet deep with nobody to hear her screaming.

———— Harvey kept pushing through the trees, the branches lashing at his face, determined to follow what sounded like gobbling. When the gobbles quieted he followed the thuck-ing of an axe in a tree stump until he found Ellie and her brood.

It was a massacre. Ellie was standing on the far end of a clearing.

She wore pajamas stained at the cuffs with blood. The dozens of turkeys circled her like enthusiastic disciples. They turned to look at him, heads bobbing, but Ellie did not. She breathed deeply from her mouth.

She focused on the axe, swinging it with the precision of a toddler until there was nothing le# of the turkey but a clump of feathers and twisted knots of skin. She tossed the remains into a heap and waited for the next turkey to take its place. Good God, Harvey thought, she must have led them out here like the pied piper.

When she paused, Harvey admired the scene. The blood made a handsome drizzle on the snow, cruel and jagged in some places and almost lovingly geometrical in others. He knew she had been at her task for some hours because the snow had fallen unevenly and the spa!er of blood beneath the snow emerged in various shades. The earth was a gruesome layered cake. He could not help but feel impressed— unnerved, but still deeply impressed by this brutality.

“What are you doing?”

Ellie didn’t look at him. He took the axe from her. He did it gently, so as not to startle her. “I think they’re dead,” she said. She used a sleeve to wipe her nose. Blood smeared across her cheek. Behind them, the RYA N H A B E R M E Y E R

27

turkeys gobbled.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“This is what I do,” she said. “This is what I’m made for.”

“Come on,” Harvey said, a bundle of nerves and sadness. “Let’s go home.”

She led the way out of the woods. The front door of the house was locked. In his hurry, Harvey had forgo!en his keys. All the lights were on inside and it sounded like a cocktail party. Harvey cupped his hands against the window glass. Ellie did the same. It was difficult to make out the shape of things at first, but within a few minutes they could see the silhoue!ed figures of turkeys. There were hundreds of them. It was a mess. There was hay. There was shit. There was blood.

They had torn open the cardboard box of baby clothes Ellie le# on the stairwell, leaving onesies and burp cloths mangled on the floor.

One of the turkeys had stuffed its head inside a mi!en and walked in circles bumping into furniture. Several toms had violently mated with the hens. There were broken eggshells. Quite a few turkeys were seated around the dinner table.

“You should write an article about this,” Ellie finally said, trying to restrain her disbelief. “People want to know about this kind of thing.”

“Nobody would believe it. It’s too weird,” Harvey said.

———— Harvey tried the doorknob. It was locked. He tapped the window glass. When Ellie put her arms around him, he flinched. She held him. She tried to calm him. For the moment neither of them moved, blanketed by the snow that all around them became a fuzzy, almost blue weirdness. They watched, on the outside looking in, as if it were the first time.

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LAUREN GOODWIN SLAUGHTER

Kitchen, 5 A.M. 1.

Through the blue ke!le’s first sigh of steam my daughter’s my mother swept beyond the white breakers.

2.

Before a thing cries I will catch it.

3.

Down? Want milk? Want up?

I Charleston for a laugh in the fridge’s spotlight.

4.

I strains through the peepholes of colanders.

5.

Bleachers of eggs go blank at this mother burlesque.

6.

In the absence of applause: forever percolates.

LAUREN GOODWIN SLAUGHTER

29

Cookery 1.

It’s terribly confusing, how the bo!le of milk was, was, still was, then went. Where did it go?

Her doll face contorts with disappointment in me (You allowed this to happen).

More? I cartoon, guzzling my sour garlic thumb. Do you want more?

For these hacked carrot torsos and unwhorled onions, soup is the only ambition. Futile food.

I’ll just boil it to oblivion.

2.

The revolving rush of children always going for the slide always was too much for me; concealed by the oak’s arithmetic-ed hearts, I’d watch every last kid launch.

In class, the answer was an ember smoking gibberish. Smoke, my eyelet dress. Silence,

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symmetrical. Such a nice, sweet girl stu!ered the yearbook scrawls.

Daughter, say more.

LAUREN GOODWIN SLAUGHTER

31

PAUL LINCZAK

Frankenstorm During Hurricane Irene, I waited until the meteorologists said the worst was about to hit the city, and then I went out and jogged up the middle of Broadway. I thought it’d be fun. Most people were hunkered down, tubs full of water, cupboards full of crackers. (I’m not criticizing—I had thirty-six bo!les of water and three boxes of Nilla wafers at home.) I ran from Ba!ery Park, near where I live, up to City Hall and back. Police cars sat curbside flashing lights. I passed a guy walking a brown terrier. No one said, “Hey lady, don’t you know there’s a hurricane?” I imagined I was the last defender of New York, staring down a gray Sauron, a destroyer of cities. I felt exhilarated, free…

Anyway. It was windy, but then it’s always windy here.

I moved to the Financial District in that period a#er 9/11 when no one wanted to be here. People abandoned million-dollar apartments or sold them for songs. I don’t blame them. For a while, passing through on the R line, you could smell dead bodies. I can’t even describe it. The air was toxic—I bought one of those surgical masks I always see Asian tourists wearing—but so far I don’t have cancer, just a one-bedroom with a view. I’ve always felt like a 9/11 profiteer. But then I remind myself I’ve had a tall ladder to climb. It’s not like I’m some house-flipping queen who swooped into Ground Zero to make a buck. Living near the disaster was a step up for me.

My grandfather said, “People will tell you that money is evil.

Nonsense! Money can make wonderful things happen. You should try to get as much of it as you can.” I’d always liked my grandparents be!er than my parents, who’d taken to driving thousands of miles to visit every Costco in America; their zeal was unbearable.

My grandfather’s zeal, on the other hand, was heartwarming—and surprising, given that he was a KGB officer during the Cold War. I learned this during college. A#er years of studying reports, he concluded that America was actually pre!y nice and escaped to see it for himself. One time I asked him how he escaped, but he shushed me and pa!ed my head.

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To be clear: my grandfather was not simply encouraging me to find a rich husband. That was the extent of my mother’s ambition for me, but not his. To him, I had two arms, two legs, and a brain; there was no reason why I couldn’t pick up a shovel and get to work.

My grandfather also said, “Don’t be obvious in anything you do.”

That, too, came from a Stalin-ish boyhood. I’m sure he could have parlayed his knowledge of Soviet intelligence into a windfall—and maybe he did, for all I know, though he didn’t have a lot of cash when he died. He faced a path that led to a big house and flashy cars, maybe a spot on bestseller lists or informing Hollywood movies. Instead he se!led in Sea Gate, in a modest house near the ocean, a stone’s throw from Li!le Odessa, where he spent the rest of his working days replacing sparkplugs in the Oldsmobiles of Russian émigrés. Among them could have been bounty hunters and spies—you never knew, and for that reason my grandfather never posed for pictures, and he never made friends.

In those days a mechanic could afford a house in a gated community on Coney Island. Lucky for me—I spent a lot of my summers there. My grandparents kept a bedroom for me. They took me to the amusement park. I loved walking on the boardwalk, sea salt in the wind. Grandma was a water wussy, and only I could convince her to brave the ocean.

She hated my Russian-less tongue, and was always teaching me. “You will thank me someday,” she said, and she was right. (Now they bring me in to work deals with Russian firms.) She was a large, pre!y woman with a booming voice. She read pop philosophy and was jolly in a way I wish I could be. She died from pancreatic cancer in 1998.

I was in New York by then. I’d moved here to study economics at Columbia. My classmates were the children of Wall Street titans or Saudi princes, whereas I had to bag groceries twenty hours a week to help pay tuition. I didn’t mind. I knew a slinky sophomore who worked for an escort service; she made more money, but you know. A#er graduation I became an Excel slave at Lehman Brothers. They expected me to work 24/7, and I thought, who’s the whore now? I wasn’t too down when the firm imploded, though I met some decent people there. By that point I was at the private equity firm that employs me still.

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33

My grandfather died a month before Hurricane Sandy hit. He had flown to Chicago for Irene the year before—his first time on a plane since he came to America—and was relieved to return to a house that was perfectly fine. (He thought I was crazy for staying; I didn’t tell him about my run.) I asked him what he did out there, and he said, “I had a hot dog. Then I went to the top of Sears Tower, and I looked at America.” I don’t know what I expected—he was eighty years old.

Thinking of him shuffling among the crowd on the Magnificent Mile, looking lost, I felt terribly sad. But then I thought, maybe he had a blast. Maybe he saw something from the top of Willis Tower that inspired him. I never found out. Ge!ing intimate details and personal feelings out of him was like ge!ing a dog to talk, and I didn’t have the touch. Then his heart gave out and it was too late. A mailman spo!ed him through the living room window, motionless on the floor.

I cried so much at the funeral I surprised myself. I’d been proud of my self-control—I barely shed a tear at my grandmother’s wake—but there was something about his service, in a li!le Slavic funeral home in Midwood, with only immediate family and a random sneezer in the audience, that felt profoundly unfair. He’d always seemed so much more of a big deal to me.

My father must have tried closing my grandfather’s bank account, because the week a#er the funeral I received a le!er from a lawyer at Bank of America, informing me that the bank had been named executor of my grandfather’s estate and his will had been submi!ed to probate court. I was invited along with my parents to a conference room in the Bank of America Tower, where we listened to the redheaded lawyer read a document none of us had known existed. My grandfather had about nine thousand in savings and a life insurance policy worth fi#y grand. He had no investments, no pension. Then came the doozy that scorched my father’s face: the house in Sea Gate was mine.

My heart kind of burped.

At the funeral, my father had said he would call a real estate agent.

As next of kin, he assumed the house was his to sell—not a totally unfair assumption. But my parents lived upstate, and my grandfather must have figured I would use the house, since I was based in the city.

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Or maybe he thought his granddaughter with the fancy economics degree would know what to do. Regardless, I can’t deny the happiness that spread through me as the lawyer informed us we had a right to contest the will. I could see the storm in my father’s mind—he must have felt he’d done something wrong. I think he was totally destroyed, actually. But, as with all things, he accepted his lot. It wasn’t so much his father’s will as it was God’s, in his view. Plus it would have been unseemly to sue his own daughter. A#er the meeting, he shook my hand like a stranger. I felt bad for him—I almost apologized—but I also felt pre!y satisfied.

I found the house on Zillow. What my grandfather must have paid less than one hundred thousand for was now worth about eight hundred thousand. Other homes in the neighborhood were on the market for a million. All these blue-collar immigrants, I marveled, si!ing on piles of money. I had never viewed the house through that lens; it was always just Grampa’s house.

It was about fi#een hundred square feet; two floors; three bedrooms in a shell of off-white siding. It had been built in the mid-1960s and looked like it, from the plush red breakfast bench in the kitchen to the white vinyl floor. My grandparents never remodeled. Opening the fridge, you’d expect to find glass milk bo!les. If the house weren’t on Beach 45th Street, an easy stroll to the Atlantic, in what had become a city of middle-class millionaires, I doubt Mr. Market would’ve blessed it so.

I knew my options: I could sell it as is, or put money into renovation and maybe sell it for a million, or I could rent it out, or I could keep it as my own getaway house. Nothing jumped out as the right choice. I’d always been unsentimental about property—I never understood, for example, why people refused offers from the likes of Donald Trump when their homes blocked some development; so what if you had memories there, you can make memories anywhere—but I knew my father would be pissed if I sold it, banking a small fortune he felt rightfully belonged to him. (He was too proud to ask if I’d share the proceeds, and I had too much of a conscience to cash out.) On the other hand, there’s a reason why I live in an apartment in Manha!an—a house is a terrifying responsibility.

PAU L L I N C Z A K

35

I spent nights staring at my ceiling and making frequent bathroom trips, like some geriatric junkie. At work, I faded in and out of meetings, experiencing sudden intense fantasies of old flames fucking my ass, or moments of u!er exhausted senselessness. I le# my glasses on top of a toilet paper dispenser; I only remembered the Diet Coke I’d le# in the office freezer a#er someone told me the can exploded.

Soon my father started calling. “Did you sign the paperwork the lawyer gave you?” Or, “Have you been by the house yet? Is it still in one piece?” And so on. He’d always been anxious, but now I thought he wanted me to know I was wrong—wrong to have inherited the house, wrong in whatever decision I made. I had not been by the house yet, I told him. I hadn’t had time. Not that it was his business.

He had never been a big caller, by the way. He was not someone who checked in. It took a big fat inheritance to get him to pick up the phone.

Sometimes I thought I could pinpoint where my relationship with my father turned south—seventh grade, when he, upon discovering a trove of unsent love notes hidden in my Berenstain Bears pencil box, mocked me mercilessly and demanded to meet my secret crush—and sometimes I thought it was silly to boil a relationship down to a single incident. Seventh grade, for Jesus’ sake. And he’d done worse since, believe me, including using my credit card info without telling me.

For a fucking lawnmower. For the record, my father wasn’t a drunk or anything, if that ma!ers.

Then one day his phone call was a warning: “There’s another hurricane.”

OK, I said. So? He could’ve told me the sun was shining and I would’ve asked what he wanted me to do about it. Which was unfair, but then so was life, and mine was too full of reports and spreadsheets and meetings and deadlines to worry about the weather. Would I prep the house just in case, my father wanted to know. I don’t know, I said, would he recommend the necessary debt portion of the buyout on my plate then, given that Congress had peed in the pool of American credit? He didn’t want to hear it, but the thing was, neither did I. Another hurricane, another neon pinwheel on some tanned weatherman’s map.

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But then the pinwheel came closer, and then it turned toward me, and then it became “Frankenstorm,” and I was like, OK, shit. I don’t normally leave things to the last minute. Actually, I had just taken a personality assessment at work, one of those Meyers-Briggs offshoots that tells you what you already know, and I swung my mallet and hit the bell for “personal responsibility.” But my lowest score? Work-life balance. Which, again, I could’ve told you. My ratio of work time to me time resembled lo!ery odds. Point is, while everyone was stocking up on water and Oreos, I was neck-deep in due diligence for a meeting with our managing director on what was, it turned out, the day before the storm hit. Which was a Sunday, if you’re keeping track.

Nobody asked for the day off. The ethos in my office was, unless you had swine flu or something, you worked; our Sunday was someone else’s Monday, a#er all.

My father called. “Do I really need to come down there?” he said.

“From Poughkeepsie?” That’s my dad. At my cousin’s wedding, he put his arm around me and said, “Well, when are you ge!ing married?”

I set out before noon that Monday. The office was miraculously closed because public schools were miraculously closed. An evacuation order had been issued; public transportation was shu!ing down.

People ba!ened down the hatches while I scooted across the Brooklyn Bridge in my silver Je!a, listening to In Utero and thinking about how some artists never stop being cool, and why that is. (And also how I was now exactly the kind of person Kurt Cobain would’ve despised, and how that had happened.) I was shaky behind the wheel, not because I could see the beginnings of the storm around me—granite sky, choppy harbor—but because I rarely drove in the city. In hindsight, I don’t know why I felt I needed a car—my parking fee alone could’ve fed a small family every month—but it felt grown up and expedient, I guess, even if I never actually had time for a weekend jaunt to Montauk or the Jersey Shore. I was happy, that Monday, just to make it to Coney Island.

The neighborhood looked deserted, but I knew it wasn’t. There were always people who refused to evacuate, no ma!er how dire the warnings. My grandfather’s house (my house), on the other hand, PAU L L I N C Z A K

37

oozed abandonment. I hadn’t seen it since before the funeral, and now it struck me as dilapidated, eerie. It needed paint, light in the windows. If I saw it in a picture I’m not sure I would’ve recognized it right away. I don’t think that’s what made it seem eerie, though. Nor was it the fact that my grandfather had died inside it. It was silly to be haunted by such thoughts—everywhere you go, when you come down to it, is a place where someone has died; there are just no chalk outlines. It was more that I had a sudden feeling that, a#er opening the front door, I’d know what to do about the house, like it would tell me. Sell! Rent! Renovate!

But standing in the entry, all I knew to do was move stuff from the lower floors, the house’s evacuation zone A. I began in the basement, which was finished in that it had carpeting and a couch. Against one wall was a box metropolis, taped and dusty. With a key, I sliced open one box and found wreaths, goldlaced bulbs wrapped in tissue paper, a plastic chipped-wing angel.

My grandfather hadn’t decorated for holidays since my grandmother died. (I think he only ever decorated to indulge her.) I wasn’t aware of any stories behind what I saw—like this bulb inspired my great grandfather in the gulag, or what have you—so I tossed the box aside. In another box I found VHS tapes labeled in my grandfather’s wobbly scrawl—Chernobyl documentaries, news broadcasts of the fall of the Soviet Union, presidential inaugurations. My grandfather never owned a video camera, so there were no videos of the family or I. (There were, however, pictures of us sca!ered throughout the first floor, which I planned to collect.) In another box I found dozens of vinyl records, mostly of Russian music. Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky; performances by Chaliapin, Vishnevskaya. I’d known my grandfather admired music, but I hadn’t known he was hoarding a collection. That box was a keeper. Another box had a pile of bank statements, receipts, and checking account ledgers, beneath which were two notebooks filled with my grandmother’s handwriting. Her Cyrillic taunted me—was it a diary? A memoir? A novel? I could speak Russian but could only barely read it. My father could translate, I figured, and if not, I could hire a student. I held one of the notebooks

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to my face and breathed it in—it smelled more of damp co!on than my grandmother’s Chanel No. 5.

I didn’t want to get lost in memories (scooping slimy seed from Grandma’s pumpkins, Grampa’s brown beach towel flapping in sunlight), so a#er checking a few more boxes and finding only a record player and a shoe-shine kit that were of interest, I lugged my plunder upstairs. It was already dark and raining. Wind whistled past the house.

I put on a parka and went outside.

I remember thinking, as I opened my passenger door and deposited my grandmother’s notebooks, that the storm wasn’t so bad. The wind was amateur; just a skim of water was on the street. I looked forward to sporting flannel PJs and curling up in bed before long.

Back in the house, my mother called. Which was typical—my father called about money, my mother about emergencies. Only when I put my phone to my ear all I heard was a garbled expression as if from a radio with bad wiring. I knew it was Mom saying my name, her voice traveling through a block of frenetic cloud. “I’m here,” I said. “Can you hear me?” I got cloud in response. “Mom, we have a bad connection,” I said. “I’ll call you when I get home.” Then, figuring maybe she could hear me just fine, I added, “Everything’s OK here. Nothing to worry about.” The sound in my ear turned to fizz. I looked at the screen on my phone: still connected. “Hello?” I tried. Then the call ended.

So that was unnerving. My parents didn’t have cell phones, otherwise I would’ve texted, but it occurred to me that I should text someone, just to announce where I was. You know, just in case. My friend Janice from college, who lived in Rego Park and whom I didn’t actually see that much anymore? Robert or Dinesh from work? Lindsay, who was my best friend growing up but who now lived in Oregon? I imagined each ge!ing a message that read, “I’m @ grampa’s house Coney Island.

All OK.” It felt desperate—if I got such a message, I probably wouldn’t have known what to make of it.

I carried the box of records to my car. Across the street, what looked like a swarm of spectral energy gushed from behind the neighbors’ houses. I stopped, throat blocked, and watched in disbelief. It was like PAU L L I N C Z A K

39

a CGI effect of evil fog. There was a hiss. Then the flood slammed my shins. The water was freezing, and it didn’t stop coming.

(I see this in my dreams now: black ocean washing over everything.)

I dropped the box of records with a splash, ran back to the house.

Water rushed through the front door with me. Upstairs, in my grandfather’s bedroom, I reached around in the dark until I found the framed photo he had kept by his bed—a sepia-toned wedding portrait: my grandmother wearing a daisy crown, my grandfather in military uniform, neither of them smiling. A totally disappeared world—and not any less so for my saving the photo. But I clutched it like treasure, and as I hurried back downstairs a wind gust rocked the house so hard I felt it shake. Stupid, I told myself as I stepped back into the flood. If I die for a picture…

I remembered to close the front door behind me. Rain pummeled me. Suddenly I was wading through the ocean, and the wind sent debris flying. There’s no other way to describe it: a long way coming, but all of a sudden.

I ducked into my car, tossed the picture onto my grandmother’s notebooks, and slammed the door. Key to ignition. The engine started. I figured the Belt Parkway, which I’d taken on the way in, would be flooded, so instead I’d go up Neptune Avenue to Ocean Parkway, then make a run through high-ground Brooklyn. I started slow, worried about flooding my engine, and outside Sea Gate the water gave way to solid road. Then it was just rain and wind for a couple blocks. Something clanked my windshield. Kurt Cobain growled from my speakers. My seatbelt alarm kept beeping. I was the only one on the road.

At a certain point I saw a lake ahead—so much for Neptune Avenue.

I turned right. I knew Mermaid Avenue would also take me to Ocean Parkway (and fleetingly, I saw myself merging onto the parkway and breathing easy), but somehow I missed the turn. Traffic lights dangled over the road like bungee jumpers a#er the plunge. Streetlights flickered. My headlights showed an onrush of rain. I futzed with my car’s GPS, but it couldn’t even locate me, let alone tell me where to go. A#er what must have been only a minute I found myself kicking up water

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again, and the blackness in front of me was the ocean. I’d driven all the way to Surf Avenue, by the beach. There the water poured in like a dam had been busted. It covered my headlights. Panic, I discovered in that moment, is like a lightning strike that shorts your mind. I may as well have driven off the edge of the earth.

I looked le# up the avenue, hoping to see pavement (it, too, could’ve taken me to Ocean Parkway), but all I saw was rain and water and darkness. Having no choice, I put my car in reverse and hit the gas, but I heard a gurgling cough from the engine, a struggle like bolts coming loose, and then, to my horror, my smart li!le hatchback died.

I hurt my fingers twisting my key, pumping the gas and hoping for a spark, but it was no use. The water outside was level with my hood.

It sloshed and slapped with the wind.

“OK,” I said, trying to calm myself, “OK…” It sounded like I’d parked under a waterfall. My lower half was soaked and freezing. I wasn’t sure if it was be!er to remove my shoes and socks or leave them on, so I le# them on. Surrounding me were big empty spaces—parking lots, I guessed—with tall apartment buildings another block or so in each direction. I saw lights in one building, and took full breaths like a deep-sea diver preparing to submerge. I thought I’d open my door and make my way toward the lit building, press all the intercom bu!ons until someone let me in. But then there was a loud crack and a spider web appeared in my passenger window, and I remembered the YouTube videos I’d seen of the Japanese tsunami the year before, people swept up in the monstrous flood like tree branches, and my door stayed shut.

My phone had a weak signal, so I dialed 911, knowing full well that it was idiots like me pulling first responders away from fires and heart a!acks during what was surely a worst-case-scenario night for emergency services. I got a busy signal. I listened to it for a minute—poetic justice!—and then hung up.

The water outside my door looked hungry. Maybe it had reached its high point, I thought. Maybe if I just sit here…

But what if I needed to pee? Was it be!er to hold it for as long as I could, spend the night in a piss-soaked car, or risk the elements?

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What if all the water receded as quickly as it came in? When, exactly, was the tide? I lived on an island, but had no idea how water worked.

I roused my phone again, opened my Facebook app, and posted a status update: If anyone is near Coney Island Beach and willing to help, I’m stuck and in serious trouble. I am not one of those people with thousands of Facebook friends, but of the ones I have, many live in the city. A tiny hatchling of hope tried to break through its shell. I stared at the screen, refreshing the page, until James Mauricio, whom I barely knew in high school and who had become the beer-bellied manager of a Sunglass Hut in a mall outside Albany, commented, “Call 911.” When another jerk liked my status, I closed the app and tried 911 again.

Busy signal.

What the fuck, I fumed. If I couldn’t get through because some ass clown was complaining about his satellite reception…

I closed my eyes, took more deep breaths.

I was going to be OK, I decided. Also, if the need arose, I would just pee on the floor—which, I realized, was already wet. I thought it was from my drenched feet, and then I leaned over and touched my palm to the floor on the passenger side, totally submerging my hand.

Two inches of water, at least. It was coming in.

“This is not a problem,” I said out loud. “Everything’s going to be OK.” I moved my grandparents’ stuff to the back seat, and then, with a seat recline and rusty limbs (I’d always hated those perfect li!le skinny girls with their yoga mats, but now I wished I was one), I ended up there, too. Knowing exactly what I would find, I checked the floor again.

Then I sat against a door with my legs on the seat and my stuff on my belly, and argued with myself. What exactly prevented me from just opening a door and swim-walking to safety? Was there really such a good chance of being swept up in a current or impaled by flying glass?

Well, I reminded myself, there was such a chance, in fact. Maybe not good, but a chance. And opening a door would completely ruin my car, whereas I had a shot at making it through with manageable water damage. Also, I wouldn’t be able to keep my grandmother’s notebooks dry outside, not until the rain stopped. But these reasons weren’t good enough. I could certainly afford a new car, and I hadn’t known my

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grandmother’s notebooks existed until that a#ernoon. What if they contained grammar exercises or baking recipes? I mean, Jesus. What was I talking about?

I checked my phone: no service.

Through all the noise I heard a steady clanging—a flagpole pulley ra!ling inside its metal truck. It reminded me of the most terrifying music I’d ever heard, in an artsy film I saw in a theater once: a ritual orchestra in a Tibetan monastery in India, gu!ural chanting, depressed notes, horns like charging ships in triumphant disaster, and a dull bell clanging. It had sounded like death, and I was hearing it again, there in the middle of the storm. In high school, enraged and lonely, I’d put a handful of sleeping pills in my mouth, but couldn’t bring myself to swallow. In case you want to know. I played that scenario out more times than I care to admit, eulogizing myself like a juvenile, rationalizing. In another few billion years the sun will die, and everything we’ve ever done will have been for nothing—so what difference did it make if I drowned in a Volkswagen on Coney Island? There were worse ways to go, and I’d had a pre!y good life. I’d never been raped or assaulted, never been shackled to a sewing machine to make rich people’s underwear, never foraged landfills to survive, never been awakened by bombs falling on my village. I’d had enough comfort to be bothered by the li!le things, like not being asked to senior prom, like never having birthday parties, like having never been to California.

But I guess knowing the ending doesn’t ruin a story, and I wasn’t going to die, I told myself. I didn’t even want to die anymore, and don’t think that wasn’t a hard fight. Don’t think it wasn’t still a fight.

The bell kept clanging; the wind bellowed.

The water was level with my seat; I could smell it now, pungent with salt and gasoline. I needed air: it felt like it was seeping from the car and it was harder to breathe; I just needed to breathe. Forgetfully, I pressed the bu!on to lower the window behind me. It was shut tight.

On my knees, I searched the window opposite and found a tiny opening. I rummaged in my purse for my ritzy titanium credit card (don’t judge), which I used to shimmy the pane enough to fit my fingers. But pushing a car window down, I discovered, was much harder than I PAU L L I N C Z A K

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would’ve guessed. I bruised my palms. I screamed. And when it was finally down, I was spent.

The water didn’t wait, though. I had to get out.

Cursing my stupidity, I wrapped my hood tight, pocketed my phone, placed my purse and grandparents’ things on the roof of the car, and then exited through the window like a NASCAR champion.

It wasn’t easy. Rain in my face, water lapping my bu!, and my arms tired, I needed adrenaline and I don’t know what else. I was sure I’d fall in the water and drown, and a list of regrets zipped through my head—I’d spent too much time worrying about my thighs; too much of my life not liking myself; I hadn’t traveled enough; I hadn’t given a shit about changing the world; I hadn’t had nearly enough sex; I had made terrible decisions with the few boyfriends I’d had; I was too much a product of my surroundings; I’d never told anyone how badly I was hurting; things could’ve been very different; I could’ve been happier, and there was no good reason why I wasn’t. None. I was embarrassed even thinking these thoughts, and I regre!ed that, too—who had taught me it was embarrassing to be serious? I thought about my life all the time.

I thought: when water hit my lungs, would it hurt? Would it taste awful? Would I fight it? For how long?

But then I got up on the roof on my stomach like a performing seal, tucked the picture and notebooks into my parka and curled up, back to the wind. No one was around. Streetlights were dark. Behind me, in the distance, was a sunset glow, though the sun had been down for hours. It took me a minute to realize it was a fire.

My phone said I had service, so I dialed 911 again. A woman answered.

I screamed at her: “I’m stuck on top of my car! The water’s coming up!”

Calmly, the woman asked my location, and when I told her, she said all units were busy, but I should stay where I was and help would soon be on the way. Something inside me caved like a soggy ceiling, and when I asked the dispatcher to please hurry, it was with a sob in my throat. She had other calls, so I put my phone away. With the need suddenly desperate, I peed myself. I barely felt it. Then I curled up and laid still. If the water keeps rising, I thought, I’ll just jump in.

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My body tensed, waiting for a nail or acorn to lodge in my back.

For a while, I imagined a rusty nail in my spine, envisioning what I would do, until it seemed useless and morbid to worry about it. I took up such a small amount of space in the world. The odds…

I was so wet, and the wind was so strong, that I felt naked. Frozen.

From somewhere shouting rose up. Teenagers or twentysomethings.

They hollered and laughed, invincible, and I remembered it was almost Halloween. I was seven the last time I’d worn a Halloween costume—I was Snow White. I hadn’t felt well the whole evening, knocking on people’s doors, but I ate some of the candy they gave me anyway, and by the time I got home I was shivering with fever. My mother rubbed Vicks on my sternum (Vicks was her cure for everything), and my father tucked me into bed. I could see his face: his high forehead, pudgy nose, and brown eyes calm like he was tying shoelaces or chewing cud.

Boredom was his normal face. His hair was just beginning to sprout gray. Seeing me shake, he had put a blanket on top of my comforter and practically mummified me, then sat on the bed and sang under his breath. I don’t remember the song, just the sound, high and so#.

The Vicks pierced my nose with mint. I experienced an intense feeling of love, of wanting to bury my face in him. Instead, I sat up and vomited on his shirt. He picked me up under my arms and carried me to a bathroom, where he washed my face and threw his clothes into a hamper. Then he brought me back to bed, changed the blanket, and tucked me in again. “Feel be!er?” he asked. I nodded. It felt good to be in bed and I was slipping fast. My father probably figured I couldn’t hear him or that I wouldn’t remember, but he said, “Good girl. I hope you grow up to be a pre!y woman with big boobs, because that’s all you’ll need in life. Otherwise, no one will ever let you throw up on them.

I don’t make the rules, I’m just telling you…” His voice seemed far away, or I was moving somehow. His face had become dark. Everything was dark. I didn’t know where I was going.

When I woke up, I saw daylight, a queasy gray glow. Wind clanged the flagpole pulley and sent ripples through the muddy green water that still surrounded me. It had receded some. I sat up and unzipped my parka, removed my purse, the portrait of my grandparents, and PAU L L I N C Z A K

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my grandmother’s notebooks, damp but no worse for the wear. The streets were still empty. So much for rescue. My hands shook. They looked puffy, wrinkled, and old. I stared at them like they were coral.

How on earth I had managed to fall asleep, I don’t know. I stretched to see into my car, which was smeared with a layer of what looked like feces. Water everywhere. A total loss. It would be the same back at the house, I knew, only worse because of the wind. But there would be time to deal with insurance companies and paperwork and whatever. I didn’t care about who owed whom. I didn’t even care what was in my grandmother’s notebooks (my grandfather’s Russian memories, it turned out), or how I’d get to dry land. For the moment I just surveyed the blasted landscape—overturned vans, dead traffic lights, the exposed bellies of li!le motorboats—all of it in a rage just hours before. Now I was on an island in a calm sea. It was a beautiful morning. I was exhausted and relieved and a li!le ashamed, like I’d spent my sleep kicking and punching some dream enemy, and now I was like, OK…well…all right, then…

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RONALD TOBIAS

Jubilee for Charles Wesley The pack came over the hill from Gold Creek, beyond where they normally run, and into high pasture where the sheep browse in summer.

They took down twelve ewes in a hundred yards, chewing their hocks until they dropped and ripping open their sides.

By the time I got to them, their bodies were buzzing with insects in the hot sun.

Blow ye the gospel trumpet, blow, render burnt oerings and eat o the fat of the land; Blow ye the gospel trumpet, blow, amongst the angels and the devils who dance with them; Blow ye the gospel trumpet, blow, sheep silhoue!ed against the moon and the crisp night air.

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How Newton Learned Poetry, or, Why Goats Hate Snow When the sun hits just right and you can see all the things flying around your head, you wonder how come bugs don’t fly into each other, or how ants can swarm in such synchronized chaos or starlings fly so unerringly, moments when all this craziness comes together.

The apple doesn’t ma!er; what ma!ers is the rumbling in your gut and the thousand other things flying around your head; what ma!ers is this riot of comings and goings, things that fly off course and crash in your head, the genesis of sense; what ma!ers is how the goat bucks the snow to find a place in the sun and bask in a warming quantum of light.

RONALD TOBIAS

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KHRISTOPHER FLACK

Return to Sender In self-defense, I drop a blade of paper into the well of The World. In self-defense, I drop myself into The World.

A postcard From the moment I remember I’m looking at my bedroom ceiling, I am a delicate message to decipher. Multi-coated ceiling, multi-coated sky, mutli-coated parchment me, peeling forward magnified by the din of Spotlight Sun. Rising expectations cast me as a shadow so much longer than I am. As if my eyelids were a switch, the day is On and every pacing thought doused around midnight wakes up the moment I do to resume its frantic pacing, whispering echoes of directions and reminders that the wide net of early morning thought gathers up like a sack of refuse and hands back to me to continue hauling indefinitely, offering and pronouncing in one thrust, “Here.”

Before my eyes are fully open I’ve recalled my whole day and how much I know be!er than to do what I’m about to do. When they do open they groan at the sight of my workpants, stepped out of to be stepped back into with the belt tightened again. Collapsed against my closet like an accordion without its breath, they evoke the same discouraging rhythm, adding my paycheck that comes tomorrow to what I think is le# in my account now, then subtracting next week’s rent, next week’s student loan payment, next week’s electric bill, today’s food, and before I know it, this rhythm has moved me from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to the landing above the countdown of stairs outside my door. I wonder: have you ever considered the bravery of le!ing the door close behind you each morning?

Still gathering. Fall concrete crackles under my heels like static playing to the empty living room of the neighborhood. Lawns are still asleep

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si!ing up under a blanket of frost. But I’m out here, having eaten breakfast too quickly, dressed too quickly, made decisions for today in the haze of last night this morning, just now catching up to what’s happening now: Work and The World.

Knowing be!er, but still complying.

Needing to comply for now and whatever that means.

Questioning the need to comply at all and how close comply is to complicate.

Realizing 26 years a#er my first breath that it was caught by a nation the moment it le# my mouth and held as ransom ever since, while I keep trying to earn that first breath back and begin breathing freely.

All for debts I didn’t agree to take on.

Inertia passes me square by square toward the end of the block, down the sidewalk assembly line that builds me from pieces used and worn as it deconstructs me. Each passing square is another shelter gone, another way out conceived and stillborn in the span of a single step.

From arrival to departure I’m swung, through the curbside forest of half-naked tree limbs forked like open lips, until I’m delivered onto the bank of a river of traffic. Standing soldier still amongst the tombstones of The Day’s first shed shadows, I wonder: how and why will I cross this sea of strangers?

A postcard is Submi!ed through the sky as flu!ers parading KHRISTOPHER FLACK

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the appearance of parading, dancing even, while simply falling without control.

My best wishes land hard on a bed of noise. It pauses and looks at me.

I look back. Then, with a clap of the sky, it resumes. I inhale: Signatures and addresses and terms of service agreements and caps and gowns and student loan payments and credit card payments and wedding invitations and mortgage payments and insurance payments and tax payments and expiration dates and minimum payments wrapped in handwri!en notes that begin with “I’m sorry, but....”

I inhale: Copies of two forms of identification and copies of advertisements and copies of sequels being returned to warehouses of sequels and copies of birthday cards printed with zoo animals who will repeat the chorus of “We are Family” for as long as the card is open, until the ba!ery dies or is ripped out and tossed in no particular direction by fingers a!ached to a person who just can’t stand it anymore.

Deflecting these relatives with judgment as we loiter in the traffic of cha!er inebriated by more cha!er, I keep myself closed to editing by wincing shut. In this sonorous belly filled with words, it is so easy to be digested into echoes. Questions of what I want to say or how I’d like to say it are overwhelmed by the need to preserve how I’ve already been said. I have to defend my order against an imposed grammar of noise whose rules are the rules of the accidental herd, fellow message bearers who’ve had vital phrases of themselves plucked and set down just ahead of them, then picked up and set down elsewhere, se!ing them on a run-on life navigated but never understood because the rambling

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never stops to allow anyone to grasp what it means. As long as one is always talking over another, clarity can’t win. My message becomes part of the concourse of words in the dictionary of society, authored not to document a language but to claim the entire language for itself.

My discipline, my wagon, the propulsion of my journey, the integrity of my message, the only thing in all of this that truly stands for me is the destructible slip of paper I am wri!en on, and it is only by the flickering of the journey itself that I am able to try to begin reading it aloud, my counterargument and my reminder that for all of the noise, all of the brave humble words that make me remain brave and intact.

Or—the box is totally silent. It is the silence between “Do we just happen?”

and whatever the answer is.

A postcard is a The answer is the question of a drum drum drum on the box, a wrap wrap wrap on the box that ra!les the box, startles the box, pulls apart a glowing gap in its inert sky, then reaches through it to jostle and scoop the box’s innards into an unmarked canvas bag, a heroic gu!ing KHRISTOPHER FLACK

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that leaves nothing but the nothing of an empty diorama deserted by its soul of nomadic story.

Yes—just when I begin to submit to feeling like a pebble being overmixed into the drying concrete of a stale reality—just when I am bearing witness to the crime witnessed by the steamrolled statues of pedestrian ancestors who were shocked still and pressed into headstones then tamped down by the March of Progress into this sidewalk—just when I submit to knowing that I am being poured into the same mold to dry into my own headstone that will be trampled into place by this generation—just when I become too tangled in my own scribbling to see a way out, something grabs me and reminds me. It is the melting of metal, the breaking of a fever, the dissipation of fever dreams, sweat of the soul trickling whispers of “Nevermind that. The ink is dry. You are stamped. You are on your way. This is how you are taken.”

Through these reflections, Main Street looks exactly the same, but I can distinguish its reflection from my own. Like a language sha!ered into le!ers, I stand splayed on the sidewalk shining gratitude through my cracks toward the dozens of combinations of futures traveling toward me as I travel through them. Through the gears, through the rollers, through the belts and gloved hands, I am moving past the definition of the hollow storefront’s reflection with every step. With a pilgrim’s purpose, I chew on the reluctant comfort of a narrative revealed one frame at a time, wound into being by the winding of legs strengthened by propelling weary weight day a#er day. Though we would spend our whole lives prodding the mystery of how or why, while only rarely and superficially reveling in the mysterious blanket of Is, our deafening volumes of explanations will always be shorter than one life’s story, wri!en on the healed pulp that I am, message-bearer with one obligation: to arrive.

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In post offices, mailmen are called carriers.

This is their map.

A postcard is a ballot If I am a delicate message to decipher through delivery then each day is a write-in ballot. Now is your chance to amend the menu of immortal defaults of this or that with renewed life by writing anything you wish and enlisting yourself as proud patriot of uncolonized instincts, flapping wings, arms, flags of the new world against air dying for loosening. As it so#ens, the greatest secrets, all simple phrases, slip loose and puddle around your feet. The pavement just ahead of your right boot tip reads: “Man did not invent flight—he realized it.”

KHRISTOPHER FLACK

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A postcard is a ballot for hope.

Salivating habit, it’s easy to feast on yourself and offer a generous pinch to a glu!onous World, easy to be chewed and passed through the gauntlet of grabs believing their measurements of what’s le# of you, easy to feel like a single strand of tendon roasted past perfection in the humid postbag bo!om that propelled you here.

But it is also easy, because of these constraints, to arrive safely, whole,in the hands of the destination you were meant for.

The world should not appear now as it will be. Yet it is possible to look at the world now as it will be.

If—the loneliest, most impossible If—you are as brave as you were when you instinctively solicited smallness from the world, sneaking your forehead under the kinked edge of a sky blue blanket, flashlight in hand, summoning your best friend’s twilight glare over and over to complete the excavation of his greatest secrets he’d begun before he suddenly got so sleepy.

Please? Please?

Whatever he whispers is heard in changing hues, always prompting more Please? Please?

Until silence eventually cues your thumb to slide the sun off and you too fall asleep, under the sky blue blanket, that remains blue despite the oceanic black of the room. You dream of all the things you would have said he would have said until you wake in the morning and, with the skepticism of the breeze, pollinate the postbox with one more postcard.

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DOC SUDS

Hungover The se!ing sun is a kidney stone the clouds suckle like hard candy.

Cicadas collaborate with lawnmowers to compose chainsaw symphonies.

My skull is an abandoned rookery, tongue guano-crusted.

Sentences squirm and fidget under my eyes’ pin-hold, the radio can’t clear the static from its throat, and the fan circles recon on a ceiling glaciating nowhere in every direction.

I walk to the bodega for a six-pack and stare at the ceramic crock-pot filled with boiled peanuts – wet, twig-veined tobacco sacks.

I want to ease my body into that steaming pot, float the amniotic spate of salt and spice, savor the sweet mahogany soil their roots sipped from – dissolved rocks, bones and the bi!er scraps of husked mollusks that once thrived in a soothing hush of tides, silken seas like scarves swaddling the earth’s cratered crust.

But I can’t stay here, loitering like fungus on a fence post.

The night waits like a mob gathered for a public execution.

It aims to keelhaul me, rasp my tender body across its star-barnacled sky.

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In an Age of Great Injustices I feel joy especially at the roaches scurrying from my step as I reach in for another beer, my mind aiming to mimic the refrigerator’s drone.

Only the moon casting a slight light, skulking in through the blind slats, tonguing the contents of the open cupboard beside me, while the roaches wave their antennas like dousing rods.

They chirp their pre-Cambrian love songs.

The moon stretches across space, tugging the tides.

And I hold a sip of ale in my mouth before swallowing.

How else to celebrate our tiny survivals?

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Why All the Cashiers at Total Wine Know Me by Name As the se!ing sun gilds snow flows, whisky filming a sni#er’s bo!om, a quiver forms in the arctic tern’s feathered breast, the pulse of a magnet held moments from metal.

It washes sleep from the bird’s brain, tingles its hollow bones, forces its wings to unfold.

The tern enters the sky, soaring above snarling seas that gnash iceberg cuspids, tracing tropical coasts filigreed with fruit trees.

It does not stop.

Pole to celestial pole, through wind like desert sand, an adamantine urge pulling, yanking, tugging the bird’s body, the beak tip aimed by its taut neck like a compass point.

The tern lands in its arctic birthplace exhausted, post-orgasm satisfied.

But a#er a few placid weeks of fish and rest, that familiar knot returns to its chest.

That gnarled, mangled gnawing in the bird’s joints.

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So again it takes flight, the first wing flap a whisper, the sound of a cork slipping out a bo!le’s neck.

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G.C. WALDREP

Adrift amoung Bells, and like unto Cattle I want to write of the soul’s flesh, which swells like rain in the closet of knives. All who live here among us, bring out your lanterns and read them before the congregation of true believers: the hawk, the tongs, the tain in which indifference sees itself reflected, studded with blind gorse. I pledge my scarred chest to your actuarial grip, only you must remain in the charterhouse of images, where I shall bring you every black and dying bread. Print your name on this broken wall, desire. The dream’s shell, chitinous as the moving page the night tightens, lies before us on veiled sands, all but prescient. The body’s milk spoke as a single voice, a beautiful moon the blood imagined: You feel so much closer than this. I am no longer able to make music at home inside the ma!e orchard of my thought, where the wolves of faith lie sleeping.

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I Circled the Train Museum I circled the train museum. There was no parking; the streets were lined with the dead flowing endlessly out of photographs of the high school, the elementary schools, the barber college, they moved fluently across the cityscape carrying signs and banners in their hands. They had no faces; they bore images of their faces alo#, so that they could look down upon their bodies, the bodies that had cradled them. The temperatures plunged.

I worried about whether they had enough to eat, enough fuel to keep warm. I followed an empty bus out of the city and into a swath of rural country li!ered with farms. At each farm I stopped and asked “Have you seen the dead?” “No, we have not seen the dead,” each man, woman, and child responded; “No, we have never been to the city.” And then they turned their backs on me, the stranger, so that they could be!er a!end to their work, raising and lowering enormous bales of black hay, tying down the animals and then untying them, sometimes taking pieces of the animals back into their houses from which plumes of ravished smoke erupted at odd intervals, as if some private vote were being taken, again and again.

G .C. WALDREP

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MONICA CANILAO

Introduction to the Artwork My art practice is a way to generate a personal and living history.

My community and collaborators, my roots and their nearly lost traditions, my neighborhood and its trash piles are all integral, necessary parts of my life and art. I draw inspiration from found pa!erns and contemporary subcultures alike.

From boats to portraits, everything I make re-imagines the meaning of home, the power of collectivity and the imprint history has le# on me. I archive everything and collect from past lives - papers, trinkets, found photos, wood - which all become part of my own story. They build a home around me and become altars to my, and others’ past. I believe that once a person owns a thing or lives in a place, an imprint of them is le# behind.

Portraits found at flea markets and in abandoned buildings symbolize something of a lost history. My work with them is an exploration and expansion of this history, piecing the old and the new together to bring something lost back to life. I create to trigger some lost need, a feral want for human connection, and collaboration with others and the living world.

Art is a way to communicate and engage transcending distance, time, and place. My images and installations, like the communities and experiences they draw upon, become symbiotic. My life and art are modes of intentional living. The act of using every piece, of making use of what you find, reflects how I was raised and echos native practices. I look as much to the loving meticulousness of everyday handicra#s as to the techniques of high art. Taking something like ordinary wood pulp or cloth and passing thread through it can make common things beautiful and useful.

Every work I make is a reflection of a moment that has shaped me. These pieces rework history in a sense, creating a new mythology shaped by my experience while creating them. The value of creation is not in final product, but in process - for me, making art is about making living sacred.

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Beyond Mountains

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Wave Tops Break Off

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Time Table

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The Smew

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Time Machine

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Swimming Cities

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Sweet Hickory

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Owned Worker

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The Order That We Died

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The Treasure Nest Photo by Tod Seelie

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Installing for Home Mender Photo by Tod Seelie

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Home Mender for Hold the Fort Historic Fort Wayne, Detroit Photo by Monica Canilao

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Home Mender for Hold the Fort Historic Fort Wayne, Detroit Photo by Monica Canilao

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Anacostia Monument Photo by Tod Seelie

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Slab City Fort Photo by Aaron Huey

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MARTINO MARAZZI

Amelia The fate of a signora from Fascism to Ravensbrück.

For well over a year now I have been obsessed by the fate of an elegant and rather elusive Italian woman of the élite class, Amelia Valdameri, née Sala. When I first learnt of her existence, it was – in typical old world fashion – because of her status as the wife of Rino Valdameri, an ambitious lawyer and public figure active especially in Milan, Italy, at the height of Fascism, from the late 1920s until the early 1940s. What intrigued me was the role of her husband in securing to the young archi-star of the Italian modernist movement, Giuseppe Terragni, the commission for a project at the same time strikingly avant-garde and blatantly propagandistic – a temple to Dante, the Danteum, to be built right in the middle of the newly restructured Forums, in Rome, half way between Mussolini’s headquarters and the Colosseum, in front of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine. The symbolism of the location was clear. According to the received wisdom of the time, Dante had provided Italian culture with a blueprint of a new alliance between political and religious powers, between State and Church, much in the same way as the Emperor Constantine, in Roman times, and the current Duce, who Pope Pius XI had famously endorsed as the «Man» (the «Uomo», with the capital le!er) that the Divine Providence had allocated to the Bel Paese. Terragni and his senior associate Pietro Lingeri had feverishly worked on the drawings of the plan and on a lengthy report in the summer of 1938, while Valdameri, who was the real mastermind of the entire operation, had succeeded in pulling into the field the necessary sponsor – a wealthy industrialist, Alessandro Poss –, owner of a profitable business in the textile sector, in bad need of appeasing a regime suspicious of his fierce independence and of the extreme conservatism of his labor policies.

It had soon become clear to me that Valdameri had consistently invested in his own talent as a wheeler-dealer, chasing for seats in institutions and businesses that could give him a visible degree of

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prestige. Some fi#y years before Berlusconi, he had obtained the Presidency of the popular soccer team of A.C. Milan (although he would never actually own it, like his successor). Even more prestigious had been his election at the head of the Brera Academy of Arts, the result of bi!er feuds within the political and cultural milieu of the time. His knack for socializing and networking – I gathered – had been able to prosper partly thanks to the subdued but ever-present engagement of his wife Amelia, the sophisticated hostess of their lavish apartment in the very heart of Milan, of a country house on the road to Venice, but especially of a stunning Villa perched on the cliffs just outside fashionable Portofino. I had always been struck, as a student of Italian literature, of how scant was the research on the episode of the Danteum, which had a!racted its share of scholarly work but almost exclusively in the field of architectural history. For years I had observed my Californian graduate students in architecture during their winter program in Como, fastidiously going over Terragni’s completed masterpiece, the unequivocally named Casa del Fascio. A#er the publication of David Ri&ind’s book on the architectural debates in Fascist Italy, I understood that the time had come to try to look deeper into the fascinating failure of a monument disturbingly poised between stylish novelty and a display of power and sanctimoniousness.

Villa Valdameri in Portofino, circa 1930 MARTINO MARAZZI

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My a!ention was then at first directed toward Rino. It was in his role as President of the Brera Academy that he had risen to the center of the stage of the then vivacious art society, and in this capacity he had soon approached the regime with a grand plan for a new, sprawling site of the art school (the Academy, eighty years later, is still languishing in the same cavernous locales in old Milan).

Valdameri’s interest for a “visual” Dante had been long in the making, dating back to the early 1920s, when he had begun collaborating as publisher with a hyper-academic painter, Amos Na!ini, the illustrator of a neo-pre-Raphaelite Divine Comedy (in the customary three volumes: Inferno 1931, Purgatorio 1936, Paradiso 1941) perfect for the taste of a conservative bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. One could have hardly imagined an artist more distant than Na!ini from the new values of the European and indeed Italian art of the early 1900s. But soon Valdameri had de#ly veered toward much “cooler” circles: all he needed to do was crossing the street from across the Academy, and mingling with the new and upcoming forces of Italian modernism, many of whom gathered around the art gallery of Il Milione. Within a few years, Valdameri – while continuing his sponsorship-cum-public-readings of the illustrated Dante-Na!ini – had put together one of the most exquisite collections of contemporary artists – new masters and total newcomers: Boccioni, De Chirico, Sironi, Carrà, Morandi, De Pisis, Gu!uso, to name only a few. Two hundred and fi#y works from the Raccolta Valdameri (a li!le bit more than half of the total) had been vociferously exhibited in the heart of Rome in the winter of 1942, in an explicit show-off of cultural capital – and as a memento of the influence of the collector, whose Danteum seemed, in the meantime, to have gone off the right track due to the war priorities.

From the papers deposited both in Brera and at the State Archives in Rome one can easily glean the mix of servilism and ambition which drove Valdameri, whose public persona looks indistinguishable from his private self, constantly absorbed in a game of vanity. A vanity played out within the limits of the strictest conformism: obedience to the political and clerical powers, an unctuous rhetoric, and an insistent recourse to la famiglia as the ultimate bulwark of his reliability.

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A family stripped to its barest elements: a signora, Amelia, whose name emerges from the archival papers, connected with the request of a train card for reduced fares (a tragic irony, considering what was going to happen next); and an almost ubiquitous son, Edilio, born in 1927, whose child-like, li!le exploits and rites of passage are embarrassingly documented, if not used, in this pe!y fair of social climbing. Edy winning some junior ski race in Sankt Moritz (telegram to Mussolini, and full-page photo in Quadrante, the journal of the modernist movement); Edy mastering the rudiments of sailing in front of Portofino; Edy’s confirmation, blessed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan and

by General Badoglio, fresh from his conquest of Ethiopia, his use of chemical weapons and his public triumph with parades back at home.

The days spent si#ing through the files at the State Archives, in the arch-Fascist area of EUR, south of Rome, had helped me ge!ing started beyond what had already been said on this story. I was right in the middle of the city where the Danteum should have been built, and the signs of the old arrogance and pomposity were all around, both on the streets and in the vaults of the libraries. At night, I was checking the endlessly varied director’s cuts of my friend Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA, a different portrait of contemporary Rome which will go on to win that year’s Venice Film Festival. One night, in front of a gigantic dish of fe!uccine carbonara, the old waiter gave us the news of the sudden death, that day in a nearby hotel, of actor James Gandolfini, another icon of Italian grandeur.

The tireless effort of Valdameri as a collector of the new and daring energies of Italian art – with all that that entails in terms of contacts, networking, and all kind of deals – struck me as crucial if one wanted to go beyond the surface, and try to get an idea of how a relatively obscure lawyer could have aspired to the role of main man behind the dazzling project of the Danteum. But the fantastic collection, a#er the exhibit during the war, had soon been dispersed; Rino had died in 1943, the same year of Terragni: the former in his late forties, the la!er in his late thirties. The circumstances of both deaths are not entirely clear, not to say dubious. As for Terragni, he was, in the spring and summer of that year, trying to recover body and psyche from the traumas borne MARTINO MARAZZI

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out of his fanatical participation to the Fascist and Nazi invasion of Russia, even though he had been fortunate enough to be sent back home right before the tragic winter retreat of the Italian Army. Terragni’s nervous breakdown in Ukraine in December 1942 and his sudden death in Como eight months later have never really been made sense of. From what has been published of his war correspondence by the family, we know that he had embraced with total enthusiasm, from the very start of Operation Barbarossa, the Russian campaign for the annihilation of the Soviet regime according to the Nazi plan of a larger Reich. As lieutenant, he served in a relatively protected position and it is extremely difficult to believe that his devastating personal crisis had to be imputed only to the compassion toward his closest comrades (he hadn’t been physically injured), and that he had not been privy to the daily massacres, mostly of the Jewish population, that the German units and commandos were routinely conducting in full sight (or at a minimal chronological and geographical distance) of their Italian allies. But the standard narrative of the Italian participation to the invasion of the USSR has been a!uned to the philopietist image of the epic retreat in the winter of 1943 of a brava gente, a “good people” with a great heart, befriended by Russian peasants (especially women).

My own grandfather having taken part to it, this is a familiar story.

Terragni’s collapse is still covered by this kind of protective blanket.

For his part, Valdameri seemed to have vanished as if all of a sudden, and everything indicated that the fruits of his artistic passion had rapidly met a similar end. By the summer of 1943, as far at least as Italian Fascism was concerned, the fate of the regime appeared to have been quite clearly sealed. The curtains had been drawn. Some – not many, a#er all – of the characters had exited the stage, Valdameri and Terragni among them; but the usual audience had remained inside the country, and their destinies would have to be played out amid treacheries, deceits and unimaginable violence in the months to follow. Many of their lives – not to mention their belongings – will be lost. What had happened, for instance, to the 450 masterworks of the Valdameri collection? To solve the riddle – secondary, all things considered, in the larger scheme of things – I turned to an art historian,

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Gioia Mori, who – I had heard through the scholarly grapevine – was engaged in the exciting mission of pu!ing back together the pieces of his collection.

In the course of long conversations from the cu!ing room, I shared with Gioia my puzzlement at the idea that the two major personalities of that sophisticated paean to Mussolini via Dante had both – and rather mysteriously – cracked down a few weeks one from the other, still in their prime, in a near-perfect unison with the total débacle of the military campaign and the internal collapse of the Mussolini government. Indeed, the Fascist cabinet would have ousted il Duce six days a#er Terragni’s death.

«You know, I’ve heard that Valdameri died of a heart a!ack. While in bed with a lover, near Venice», proffered Gioia. «That le# Amelia in a most difficult predicament, having to administer all that he had accumulated behind. But you know what happened to her, don’t you?» I did not. «Well, she ended up in Ravensbrück». The women’s concentration camp. «And she never returned from there. I know for sure because one of her inmates, Bianca, was a relative of mine, and she told me that she saw her dying».

At first, though, I did not know what to do with this shocking piece of information; I couldn’t quite place it within the customary well-oiled narrative of the bona fide historian who has found all the right answers and ladles them at a safe distance, well a#er the facts. Yes, I had heard of Ravensbrück, but I hadn’t really looked into that story, and I wanted my study of the Danteum to be about such fashionable and cushy topics as modernism, and the dark side of Dantism (think of Pound, for instance), and the sure hit of “fascinating Fascism”. A bit like “Terragni as Riefenstahl”, with the hot spice of a Fascist Dante: academics do get a kick (and sometimes a be!er position) out of such things. The parallel deaths of Valdameri and Terragni was in a way so perfect in its timing as to resemble a Greek tragedy. But I wasn’t prepared to be thrust into the inexplicable suffering of a middle-aged, classy woman, to put that torture next to the one of the Vernichtung machine. How could atrocity, injustice, evil, be part of a story that had to do with style and the stereotypical relationships between power MARTINO MARAZZI

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and the arts? I absorbed the sha!ering news and put it aside, all the while continuing my erudite examination of the cultural and political context of the Danteum.

The Danteum in Rome: the Colosseum at the far end, the Basilica of Maxentius to the right. One of the original watercolors of the project

by Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni, circa 1938 ———— It had been, a#er all, a story of architects and professionals active between Milan – where I live and grew up – and Lake Como, not far away. It wouldn’t take a big effort, for an old Milanese like me, to get in touch with people and relatives still directly linked to the main characters of that drama. In fact, in a ma!er of weeks I traced the descendants of all four of them: the two architects, the lawyer, the industrialist. In particular, the role of Lingeri, Terragni’s elder associate, needed to be reassessed; not to mention that his family still owns all the originals of the drawings, and the stunning wooden 1: 50 model. Milan, in certain circles (and the city is built as a system of expanding circles – the closer you are to the center, the wealthier and more established is your famiglia) is so narrow that you can almost be sure, once you’ve met x, that you’ll very soon be connected to y and z. This is exactly what happened, and added to that part of my research a sort of flair of Euro-charm and distinction.

Doors were opened, salons were neatly prepared for my interviews, with nice, warm chats and memories of old relatives. At a distance

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of two or three generations my own findings could provide answers to questions that the descendants hadn’t had the time or the opportunity or the desire to look into. And everyone acted with tact and manners. I felt, in a way, as an undeclared accomplice. I, too, come from a family of the local bourgeoisie; I did not need to address the delicate question of the degree of involvement or approval of the regime, because I knew and could easily tell that all of their relatives, like all of mine, had been in a way or another fully-fledged Fascists, which did not prevent them from being, occasionally, brilliant minds and – since I was dabbling in family environments –, occasionally, sweet and lovable parents, relatives, and individuals. The “war” had ruined everything. I’d heard that time and again while growing up; that had been Mussolini’s mistake. All those stories had happened so long ago, that – among “us” – we didn’t even need to discuss them.

Terragni and Lingeri had been masters of their art; yes, they had been members of the Party. Who hadn’t been? Let’s ignore. Look where we are, where we live. The wounds (if there were any) are nowhere to be seen a#er so many years.

Such an a!itude is so common, and provides such a comfortable sense of coherence all across Italian society, if you just move beyond the pleasantries of la dolce vita and enter under the skin, behind the doors where only those who belong are welcome to tread. So you get used to it, and this has its perks. Everything keeps being quiet on the home front. Let historians deal with Fascism. It’s a question of style.

So I guess in a way I was overridden by an unpredictable curiosity when I found myself mentioning, in passing, the tragic fate of signora Valdameri to a relative of Lingeri, an architect of liberal leanings. «I’ve never heard of this – and mind you, I’m a friend of the Valdameris. I don’t think it went the way you say». Which, I don’t think incidentally, brought our relationship to an abrupt end. But it opened up a completely new imperative. Now, I really needed and wanted to know be!er. I could still relate to this kind of civilized negationism, but what I could not stand was the palpable nerve which killed two pigeons with one stone: historical reality and the neurotic craving for neatness “inside the circle”. It can’t happen here. It never did.

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I sent a message in a bo!le, addressed to the information center of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. I kept on acting the dutiful scholar and crossing some of my t’s. And then, bam!, a fellow researcher replied from Germany.

R: Request of information on detention and death of Amelia Sala Valdameri Dear Prof. Marazzi, we acknowledge thankfully the receipt of your le!er with the request of information about the detention of Mrs Amelia Sala Valdameri in the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück.

We have searched the documents and archives materials of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. The original arrival lists for the concentration camp in which the name and detention number of prisoners were registered are unfortunately of a fragmentary nature.

Therefore only 60% of the names of former prisoners are known…

Concerning the name: Amelia Sala Valdameri We could find a documentary evidence in one registration list: Valdameri, Sala, Amelia, born 12.3.1892, arrived as political prisoner on 11.10.1944 and received the prisoner number 77419. She came with a special transport, nr. 106 from Botzen / Italy…

I am sorry that we cannot give you more information. In autumn 1944 the camp was overcrowded and the conditions were very bad. Most women have been transferred a#er 2 weeks to satellite camps to do forced labour in the military industry. When the Allied troops came closer, the SS forced the remaining women on so called death marches.

Those who could not continue died on the street or have been shot.

Around 2.000 sick women stayed in the camp. A lot of them died a#er the liberation because of diseases or exhaustion.

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Unfortunately we have no information on how Mrs. Amelia Sala Valdameri died. … All the best for your research.

Yours sincerely Sabine Arend In her email, Arend provided me also with a basic bibliography on the history of Ravensbrück. Now that I was certain of Amelia’s fate, I plunged myself into it. There exists, sadly, quite a literature on that concentration camp, largely destined to women – for the most part labeled as “red triangles”, i.e. political prisoners – from all the European territories that Nazi Germany had invaded and devastated. Amelia, too, had been forced to wear a red triangle, and had been assigned a number.

At 52 years of age, she was one of the oldest among the 871 Italian women of whose passage we can be sure. The most recent figures indicate an approximate number of 26,000 victims in Ravensbrück – among which we have to account her – killed by the atrocious efficiency of the slave labor in the nearby Siemens plant, by the criminal use of violence on the part of the female guards (the Aufseherinnen), by the appalling state of public hygiene which will lead thousands of prisoners to die of typhus and other diseases. And yet, even within the horror of this quantification and debasement of human life, Amelia had not gone unnoticed.

Minoritarian and looked down upon with suspicion as they were, the Italians had desperately clung to one another for help and comfort. The memories of the survivors – wri!en, in interviews or on video – have all an intensity, a clarity and a directness which make them stand out in the literature of the camps. And the circumstance that the presence of Amelia was almost regularly alluded to in the handful of testimonies

by Italian prisoners smote me and at the same time confirmed me that her destiny in a way symbolized, with the most tragic individuality, the full arc of the defeat of an entire cultural and political project.

A younger inmate, Livia Borsi Rossi, first met Amelia in the huge cell of Marassi, the jail of Genua. It’s the end of July 1944: MARTINO MARAZZI

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One night I was about to go to sleep, and I heard someone crying, crying, crying. I said to myself: “Here comes another one.” In fact there she was, the contessa Valdameri. She was in mourning for her husband.

She had a white dress and black shoes, it’s as if she were here in front of my eyes. She was crying, I tried to buoy her up. She was si!ing still. Because she wasn’t used to empty the chamber pot like we were, I took care of it, and sometimes I washed some of her clothes. And there was a blonde who said: “There you go, a commie helping out the aristocrats!” In such circumstances we’re all equal, there’s no nobility or aristocracy: we’re all poor people locked in for our faith.

From Genua they’re transferred to the concentration camp of Bolzano, in Südtirol, a German-speaking area, part of Northern Italy since WWI, at the time annexed to the Nazi Reich. Of approximately 8000 prisoners, the historian Dario Venegoni (both of whose parents survived the experience, and started a family a#erward) has been able to detail the personal histories. At the camp in Bolzano Amelia probably meets her dear friend Carla Ucelli Tosi, the liberal daughter of a powerful industrialist, part of an underground network that tried to secure a safe passage for Jews into Switzerland. Amelia and Carla are neighbors in Milan and in ritzy Portofino. But Amelia is a widow, and nobody seems to have bothered to establish any kind of contact to bring her back to her life as a signora. Carla, instead, a#er a few weeks is freed – in exchange for a substantial sum of money – and the pledge of her father to keep providing the Germans with the steel that they need.

In Bolzano Amelia develops ties of solidarity with women of different extraction. Inside and outside the camp the activity of the rebels of the antifascist cartel CLN is constantly kept alive at great danger. The women of the Italian Socialist Party are at the forefront of the Resistenza: the daughter of the legendary Socialist cartoonist Giuseppe Scalarini, Virginia, is regularly sent to Südtirol to smuggle material and filter messages; her friend Ada Buffulini, a young doctor and head nurse of the camp’s infirmary, up to a certain point manages

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to funnel inside goods and printed material. Maria Arata Massariello, a science teacher with a strong Christian faith, is probably the one that Amelia feels closer to, due to the refinement of her taste and her dignified demeanor. To this day, Maria’s son owns an elegant flowerpot, cra#ed and signed by Amelia, that some member of the Valdameri family must have offered as a gi# a#er the war, in recognition of the kindness that bound these two women. Maria survived and published her memoir; Amelia did not – although the last tangible trace of her life is also a minuscule piece of writing, in the form of a scrap of paper entrusted to Ada. In it Amelia, on leaving Bolzano, with Maria and many others, in a Sondertransport to an unknown destination in Northern Europe, authorizes Ada to take care of whatever box or le!er may be sent to her name. It was a common procedure among “resistance” activists to leave behind these kind of permits as a last-ditch a!empt at keeping open the communication line. It’s a minimal but clear sign of rapport, if not involvement, with the antifascist network. It’s October 7, 1944.

A much younger prisoner, Bianca Paganini Mori – the relative of my colleague Gioia who first had given me the lead to Amelia’s tragic end – has the date wrong of a day or two in an interview of the mid1970s, but the human and emotional content of her memory is alive as anything a#er thirty years. She will sadly pass away in 2013, while I was starting to collect the pieces of this story.

The morning of October 5th, or 6th, they came to wake us up early.

Among us somebody shouted: “Go to hell, Herbert!” “Don’t you worry – he replied – today it will be you who’ll be going to hell, that’s for sure!”

They took us, brought us to the station and hoarded us on ca!le-wagons. Sixty women on a single ca!le-wagon! There were two of them full of women, and behind some other cars full of men. I remember that, apart from my mother – a woman of age –, contessa Valdameri was there, of age herself, and a pregnant woman, and others who were sick and not young. Women from all social strata: noble women, bourgeois, intellectuals, blue-collar workers – like, the workers of the Borle!i plant, who had gone on strike –, and peasants, and Livia Borsi, who was the mother of three, and mamma Rosa, from Pavia; and from MARTINO MARAZZI

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all political leanings. Sixty, and all standing – standing all! You couldn’t find a spot to sit down. We tried to make some li!le room for the older ones, so that they at least could sit down.

List of the Special transport 106 of prisoners from Bolzano to Ravensbrück, October 11, 1944. (International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen, Doc. ID 3766920, Zuganglisten des Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück) The journey up North, past Berlin, lasts five days. They arrive in Ravensbrück on October 11. The SS keep amassing women to the thousand and sending them to the production plant of Siemens and other firms. The cost of labor was so low, and the supply so large, that violence, cruelty and the ensuing carnage were a totally coherent part of the picture. Human debasement and humiliation were a systematic fuel of a process where the war machine was reaping profits as much as the industrial complex: an erstwhile European Union of Vernichtung and exploitation; largely “political” women-prisoners in a destructive

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line of productive duty. The military gain of such an operation was close to nil, which – in a way, and in retrospect – makes things even clearer.

Tens of thousand of prisoners were used as slaves in those months: every girl, every woman, with her unarmed individuality, was forced to obey to the German rules. Germans of a different kind were among the detainees; and then Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, French, Italians, Dutch, Belgians. In Ravensbrück Jews were a minority, although as the Red Army advanced toward the extermination camps of Eastern Poland they too were sent to Ravensbrück in droves – those at least who, a#er the camps, had managed to survive the death marches.

The internal subdivisions followed the pa!erns that are wellknown: red-cloth triangle for the politicoes; black for the outcasts – prostitutes, lesbians, vagrants, Gypsies; purple for the sizable group of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; green for the common criminals; yellow for the Jews; yellow and black for those who, by marrying a Jew, represented a Rassenschande – a disgrace to the race. From Budapest had arrived, in late June 1944, Sonder-Hä"ling (special prisoner) Gemma La Guardia Gluck, the sister of Fiorello, sixty-three at the time – daughter of a Jew from Trieste and married to a Hungarian Jew. She, too, would survive (not her husband) and write an eye-opening account of the tragedy that befell her and her immediate closest family. Anja Spiegelman – wife of Vladek and mother of Art – will also experience Ravensbrück, a#er Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the memory of her passage is only fleetingly alluded to in a brief exchange between father and son, many years a#er her suicide, toward the end of Maus II. It is Art who remembers and questions his father: but Vladek can only reply with a «Yah… maybe it was there…»

Likewise, it is only thanks to oblique and later testimonies that we can try to put together some fragments of Amelia’s life in Ravensbrück. Last year, spurred by me, Dario Venegoni, the historian of the Bolzano concentration camp, approached Mirella Stanzione in Rome.

And Mirella, seventeen at the time of her arrest, remembers being with Bianca and Amelia on Sondertransport 106 – and that Amelia was one of the two “Badoglio-women” (badogliane) in Block 17 in MARTINO MARAZZI

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Ravensbrück. Rumors and even gossip of the relationship between Amelia and General Pietro Badoglio keep resurfacing when trying to shed light on her. And they could well explain – up to a certain point – the rationale of her imprisonment. Some informers seem to allude to a relation particulière between the two. It seems certain that the marriage with Rino had been strained well before his untimely death in the arms (maybe) of a lover; it is a documented fact that their son’s godfather had been the General and conqueror of Addis Ababa; and there is proof that the Valdameris had had a bocce field built in the park of their Villa in Portofino, to accommodate one of the General’s favorite pastimes. It may not be of immediate common knowledge at such distance from the facts, and therefore worth recalling that Badoglio, very close to the reigning dynasty of the Italian King, had been chosen as Prime Minister right a#er the signing of the armistice with the Allied, in September 1943, and had acted as such until June 1944, the month before Amelia’s arrest. From the point of view of die-hard Fascists, and from that of their German bosses, he embodied the vile traitor par excellence – and everyone connected with him was deemed worthy of any imaginable and unimaginable form of vicious vende!a.

It is another fact documented in the archives of the horror (in Ravensbrück, Warsaw, Bad Arolsen) that Amelia had indeed been labeled as a “red triangle” – a political prisoner. Her friendship with Badoglio had proved fatal. The inmates frantically struggled to defend any minimal sign of human dignity; learning and reciting poems by heart to one another was one of the most peculiar and touching. Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, who has le# the most vivid and intellectually piercing account of her months in Ravensbrück, managed to save some notebooks, filled with quotations both in Italian and in French. The Italians look back at their schooldays, and Dante, with his descriptions of hell, violence and underworld, looms large. Exercising one’s memory becomes a tool against barbarity – Primo Levi, too, testifies of similar survival strategies while in Auschwitz, and he too clings to Dante’s Ulysses in an unforge!able chapter of his diary. In exchange, the French prisoners offer to their comrades Verlaine, Apollinaire, Valéry: they seem freer, more modern, with a clearer view of a new,

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possible dawn for a be!er future. Lidia, Livia, Maria and the others keep referring to the lessons of strength and resilience that Monique and the young French le#ists imparted to them: lessons of freedom and solidarity. Their youth is stronger than anything.

Amelia, on the contrary, is put in quarantine. The appalling journey, and the arrival in that inferno above ground have taken their toll.

She has no energies, no will to resist. She can’t, and she gives in. At the selections she is given a bi!er chance: she is picked as a laborer for the labor camp of Hennigsdorf, just outside Berlin. Livia again: «If she had listened to me, she would have come, and that would have saved her life, because I would have helped her out in a way or another… She had heard that the carriages were always bombed, she got scared and stayed behind, in our Block. And so she died in Ravensbrück». This could have happened in the last days of 1944, or in early 1945. In the first months of that year, several thousand women were gassed in the gas chambers of Ravensbrück. Most likely reduced to what in the camp lingo was implacably referred to as a Schmuckstück, or “trinket”, Amelia would have been a fi!ing candidate for the ultimate atrocity.

No official record of her death survives. My visit to the camp, no ma!er how unforge!able, in that sense proved unsuccessful.

Views of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in March 2015 MARTINO MARAZZI

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Last winter, then, I arranged an interview in Portofino with Giovanni Carbone, he too seventeen years old at the time, who had witnessed, from his small fishing boat, the arrest of the signora. Neither in Portofino, nor in Genua the authorities have kept any record of the mass arrests from late 1943 to the spring of 1945. The SS and their Italian underlings displayed, in that area, the usual ferocity; that day, in July, they had come to kidnap a widow, all by herself, unaware of any impending danger. Edy, her son, was not around. Amelia’s German shepherd was promptly shot, and thrown into the blue-green blissful waters underneath, not far from Giovanni and his uncle, fishing. This is not a scene that one easily erases from memory. The two elegant sailing boats pride of Rino – tireless member of the local Yacht Club – remained at bay: the smaller one ominously called Enigma. Their padrona was locked in the Castle above the delightful li!le harbor, the porticciolo where I was questioning Giovanni while, not far from us, the populist politician Grillo was commenting to an improvised crowd some of the latest Italian turmoil with his signature gestures and over-inflated talks.

Who remembers Amelia? Or rather, how fast were her and many other not so dissimilar tragedies consigned to oblivion? Very soon, and very fast, it so seems, to cleanse the conscience of Europe. Even the memory of her husband’s monumental Dante – approved by the blessing of Mussolini on the very same day, November 10, 1938, of the anti-Semitic laws for “the defense of the race” – has not gone down much in history. The elegance, good taste, and decency of Amelia were too thin qualities to guarantee any lasting impact: too frail, too feminine.

And then, at the same time, she had – no doubt – been a presence in the highest echelons of a distinguished society revering the regime, or rather, that was itself its cultural counterpart: publishers, artists, writers, journalists, the top architects of the modernist movement.

And with constant ties with the clergy, with high-level bureaucrats and Party members. Despite the war and Rino’s death, Amelia had kept at least part of those channels open: for instance, she had asked the surviving architect of the duo, Lingeri, to oversee the restructuring of a hunting co!age in her country house near Milan.

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On the other hand, the li!le that we can glean of her lifestyle even prior to the war shows us a woman with a rather open interpretation of her social world. A theatre-lover, she mingles with young and old stars of the stage: Pirandello’s Muse Marta Abba (diva and fervent Fascist), a free spirit like the dashing Raf Vallone – but she also goes out with a very well-known intellectual and antifascist, the Turinese Franco Antonicelli. There’s a photo of the two of them with a couple of common friends in another seigneurial Villa in Northern Italy, at a time when Franco had just come back from a long period of confinement due to his political activity – a fact that couldn’t be ignored, and signaled a certain nerve on Amelia’s part. Antonicelli, it should be reminded, will be the publisher of the first edition of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man right a#er the war. And yet, in the same months of the publication of Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz, the high society of which Amelia had been a part had le# a characteristic tribute to her memory in the columns of the Corriere della Sera, the unflagging mouthpiece of the Milanese bourgeoisie.

Amelia with antifascist activist Franco Antonicelli (both on top) and friends, circa 1936-38. (BLL – Biblioteca Labronica Livorno, Fondo Antonicelli) MARTINO MARAZZI

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There’s a short cut to eternity in a Catholic environment like the Italian – proclaiming someone a saint. Martirology is a ritual form of the conformist mind-set that shuns posing uneasy questions. The article has a byline which is very close to home. Raffaele Calzini, the author, had been one of Rino’s main competitors at the time of his appointment as head of the Brera Academy – a rival very well considered by a powerful faction of the Fascist Party. Now he refers the rumors concerning the death of Emil Ludwig – the famous biographer, author of the successful Talks with Mussolini (1932) –, and that of Amelia. He gives vent to the suspicion that she might have been a part of an antifascist conspiracy led by Badoglio (with whom she would have kept a correspondence), but offers a different version of her end. It would have occurred in Bolzano, where an unspecified “they” had «completely shaven her blonde-chestnut hair, and where she had died while praying: like a saint». This is a narrative similar to the one that I would had heard sixty-five years later: no Sondertransport, no concentration camp North of the Alps. A hushed mention of Badoglio, but no indictment whatsoever of Italian and German Fascists and Nazis. A saintly death silences any injustice, any abuse of power, and god forbid, any exploitation of the labor force. Sainthood defeats time and disregards pe!y questions of money. Forgiveness is just a step away from a convenient disremembrance. What had happened in Bolzano was, to a certain extent, within the borders: it was a shocking but contained outburst of violence: be!er not to look beyond, enlarge the view, open the door to other stories of defenseless women and involvement with a discredited regime.

———— I have also some old family friends in Portofino; I know the area, and I’m familiar with quite a few people down there. It goes back a long way, at least three generations. So at some point, over the summer, I mentioned to my eighty-year old father what I was doing.

Some of his acquaintances, too, might have been privy to part of this intricate cobweb. He spent his early teenage years nearby, listening

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to the bombings to the West, in Genua, and to the South East, toward Recco and Spezia. His tales of jeeps and chewing-gum, and of his first encounters with African American GIs, are a family classic. His own father had by then returned from Russia, luckily with only his toes amputated; he kept talking about that one cucumber, passed on by an Ukrainian woman, that had lasted one week and had saved his life: meanwhile his children rolled their eyes and kicked each other’s legs under the table. In retrospect, their insouciance had to do with their memories of a two-year holiday by the Mediterranean. It is always a question of points of view.

Some of my father’s friends from those days are still around; so it took only a couple of phone calls to get in touch with an older sister of one of them, a lady in her late-80s, and twenty at the time. We had a very long chat about the war. She le# me in an envelope, in the lobby of her luxurious apartment building, two mimeographed accounts of those days: one by herself, Pia Majno, about the activity of her family in the antifascist resistance; and another one by the Capuchine friar Father Giannantonio, who had organized the underground network to save Northern Italian Jews in Switzerland, and for that reason had been sent to Bolzano, then Flossenbürg, then Dachau, victim and witness of the horrors of the evil German machinery. But Pia had also a personal story to tell, of her tender friendship with Amelia, a good thirty years older. Mature mother of an only child, a son, Amelia seems to have had a so# spot for younger girls, whose company she cherished and sought for: I had already spent a long a#ernoon tea with her niece Franca, still a strikingly beautiful lady in her 90s, who had been kind of adopted as a foster-daughter. Now Pia, who had seen Amelia while carelessly frolicking around their Villas in Portofino, was confirming the gentle side of such female friendships. I hung up the phone a#er an hour or so, a bit flustered, touched and awed at the same time at the notion of having been transmi!ed by word of mouth such personal traces of one’s life, so ancient and yet so vivid and deeply felt. Pia has lived these past seventy years knowing that her adult and affectionate friend had been captured that one day in July, on her way back from Santa Margherita, and she had heard of MARTINO MARAZZI

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her ominous journey to Germany. «She never returned» – she hastened to say – and it sounded a tactful homage to the glimmer of life that Amelia had sparked, at the very least, in her younger friend’s memory.

A way, I sensed, of returning – their delicate friendship.

I went into the kitchen and fiddled around. I think I mumbled some agitated and rather incoherent considerations to my wife, who has forcefully followed my months, and by now years, of research into the still unexplored connections of Fascist and Nazi societies and culture.

I was about to start cooking when the phone rang. It was Pia again.

«Something came to me that I hadn’t said before, and that I suddenly remembered. I need to tell you this, because otherwise it will get lost.

I have a doll here at home, she’s my doll, I’ve had her throughout all my life. Her name is Amelia. I named her a#er the real Amelia when she gave her to me as a gi#, it must have been in the mid-1930s when I was a teenager, and she’s been my favorite from the very beginning.

She’s a Lenci doll, a bit ta!ered now, but there she is, she’s still with me. I still have Amelia by my side. I needed to tell you lest I forget».

Telling a story, all the more if it is based on facts, is but an elaborate form of inscription, in order to activate one another’s memories and imaginations. It is again a question of style, if you will, but above all, when dealing with violence and injustice, it strives to answer to an ethical imperative. As ragamuffin as she might be, and as long as Pia will turn to her with her love intact, the doll Amelia will let out the same light that hasn’t gone out in eighty-odd years. This is by no means a compensation, but at least, literally, a reminder. Of lost beauty and of silences. One of the last ditches of decency and honesty – and perhaps also the frail sign of the waste of such virtues in the face of whatever grinding power. The waste of a public ambition confronted with the timelessness of a free and useless gi#. The rag doll in an old lady’s room has defeated the project of a Fascist Dante amid the Roman ruins.

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BRANDON BARRETT

Gerald’s Last Ghost Story We waited four days for the diagnosis. It was explained that the tissue specimen had to be stained, and that takes a while to set, and then it has to be reviewed under the microscope, and that takes a while to get around to because pathologists work nine-to-five and not on weekends. So for four days, Ben played with all his toys and several new ones, and had all the ice cream he wanted and only rarely complained about pain under his ribcage, where they had taken the piece of liver. We held hands and watched him, and hardly slept or ate for four days until they said he was going to live, meaning the world was going to continue and thrive because my son will bury me and all is right.

So I think of Uncle Gerald. I hadn’t forgo!en him, but I hadn’t really remembered. As a boy I went fishing with Father and Gerald off the pier on Saturdays—not every Saturday but a lot of Saturdays—and we never caught anything, not ever. Gerald would claim that the fish knew we were coming because of a secret double agent: Harry, our pet goldfish at home, was calling ahead to warn them. We’d come home laughing, and I’d run up to my mother yelling: Not a single fish, Mama, Harry called again! I’d go tap on the tank and yell good-naturedly at Harry. I wish I could take Ben fishing with Uncle Gerald, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t catch anything, not ever. To see what Gerald would tell him to make it fine.

Gerald has been gone for a decade and his son didn’t bury him.

He was my father’s younger brother by four years, but they were nearly identical in appearance, except that Gerald wore a massive, bushy mustache and my father couldn’t grow one. He worked at the paper mill along with everybody else in town, but he had a college degree in English—the only degree in our family, and that includes high school diplomas—and so my father called him Professor. Gerald laughed at everything, all the time, like the purpose of his life was to be entertained. And when I was thirteen, his son, my cousin Gerald Jr., was killed.

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Three-year-old Gerald Jr. snuck out of the house when his parents weren’t looking and toddled across the road to see the duck pond, where his dad would o#en take him with handfuls of Wonder Bread. An outof-towner, distracted by something he saw in his rearview mirror, ran him down. Worst thing was, it didn’t even kill him instantly. Gerald Jr. went ahead and lived for three days on a respirator in a pediatric intensive care unit in the city, while his father begged the chaplain to tell him why this happened. Gerald’s wife, my aunt Tina, subsequently had a series of nervous breakdowns and eventually divorced Gerald and disappeared to the East, not to be seen again. We heard the outof-towner shot himself in the head two months later but survived in a manner of speaking. And Gerald began to work the pub circuit, discovering a latent relationship with vodka.

Gerald told me ghost stories when I was a kid. He knew a hundredand-one ghost stories, he always said, but he just made them up as he went along. He’d look around the room and gaze for a few moments at the ceiling fan, for example, and say, “Hey, li!le man, did I ever tell you the story about the demonic ceiling fan? It’s a great one. It’s in my top thirty ghost stories.” I would giggle and jump under the covers, and he’d get me a glass of water, sit at the foot of the bed and tell the story, and none of them were ever scary. They were all... the story about the fearsome electrical outlet! The tale of the... uh... ghostly doorknob!

He’d wiggle his mustache up and down and make giant googly eyes, and flail his lanky arms around until I would burst out laughing, and he would too.

I loved Uncle Gerald. He was strong and proud and happy, and looked like Dad, and smelled like Old Spice. But the years went by, and Gerald Jr. was destroyed by the out-of-towner, and Gerald moved into the city chasing a#er a job opportunity that never panned out. He came out to town every few weeks to visit. He’d decline the inevitable invitation to stay for dinner just once, then tell my mother, “Well, Annie, you twisted my arm. I can’t decline some of your mashed potatoes, if that’s on the menu. I’m a weak man.” And he still laughed, at everything, but he didn’t smile. He didn’t tell ghost stories. He listened and ate mashed potatoes and laughed, and then was very quiet, and drank.

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He was living in a motel at that point, the kind where you pay by the week or month, and he did some part-time gardening work until ultimately he wasn’t able to pull it together. He had a falling out with my father a#er coming to our house late one night, slurring and stumbling.

They went out into the back yard and smoked cigare!es and spoke in angry voices while I peeped from my bedroom window. Gerald was yelling—which I’d never seen him do before—and then suddenly he was crying—which I’d never seen any grown man do before—and he blustered off and skidded his Datsun into a drainage ditch just immediately down the road. Father came inside to put on a heavy coat and then drove over and towed him out and, as far as I know, the two of them never spoke again. He disappeared from our lives for years.

One day my mother got a call from Gerald asking if she could pick him up from the hospital in the city. He had nobody else to call. He was being discharged and his driver’s license had been taken away.

I ended up driving, having recently go!en my permit, because my mother was having stomach pains and didn’t feel able to make the trip alone. Uncle Gerald was waiting at the curbside wearing hospital pajamas. The clothes he arrived in were deemed unfit for human use.

The motel manager had called for an ambulance a#er he discovered Gerald collapsed in the parking lot, incoherent, si!ing in a puddle of blood-tinged vomit. Gerald was a patient at the hospital for three days.

To hear him tell it, all they did was feed him and give him vitamins.

We drove Gerald back to the motel and helped him stumble into his room, where the stink of unwashed skin was overpowering. I stepped out for a while when my mother started crying. I wandered back to the car and found Gerald’s discharge paperwork si!ing on the seat.

His diagnosis was listed as alcoholism.

The doctor probably came into Gerald’s hospital room one day, stood just inside the door, and said, Mr. Harris, the reason this has happened is because you’re an alcoholic. He came bearing a diagnosis.

The passing out, the vomiting, living in a shi!y motel, unable to find employment. All symptoms. It all comes into focus. There are treatments, there are meetings, counselors. You can easily fit it on a four inch line that is labeled “primary discharge diagnosis.” The job is done.

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My mother was si!ing in a chair with her eyes closed, holding her stomach, when I returned to the room. Gerald was curled up under the sheets. I got him a glass of water and sat at the foot of the bed.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.

“Hi, Uncle Gerald.”

“You’re quite a young man, now, aren’t you? You look just like your daddy.”

He laughed so#ly, and we sat there in silence.

“Hey, want to hear a ghost story?” he finally said, mu!ering into his chest.

“Sure, Uncle Gerald,” I said. “I miss your stories.”

“Did you know,” said Gerald, “that at some point in your life, ghosts will become…mandatory?”

This was the story: Gerald said a day will come to pass when every death leaves a ghost behind. Every single one, a hundred percent of the time. Hauntings will no longer be rare and subtle outcomes of the incredibly tragic.

They will become the inexorable reality of death. John Doe dies at home on the toilet, and it is guaranteed that his spirit persistently haunts that bathroom forever, rendering it unusable. Jane Doe has a heart a!ack in the parking lot at the grocery, and her angry ghost is pushing shopping carts into parked cars for the rest of time.

Given how many tens of thousands of people die every day, it won’t take long for the people of Earth to sort out what is going on. Hospitals will be the first institutions to become defunct, given the burden of death they see. Within weeks, the ICUs will echo with screams. You won’t pass through without suffering innumerable scratches on your face, and frostbite on your fingertips. And the hospices? Forget about it.

Gerald paused to take a sip of water. He was smaller than I remembered, shrunken, disappearing into his own loose skin. His mustache had sprawled out into a rundown beard of variable length.

He was recognizable at a glance, but paradoxically was a stranger on close inspection. I could only know him out of the corner of my eye. I was uncomfortable in his presence, this reduced shred of a man, and wanted nothing more than to leave. Ten years on, with Ben sleeping BRANDON BARRETT

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in Incredible Hulk pajamas and breathing full and hearty li!le boy breaths, I would sit with Gerald all night long. There is no understanding, until you do.

He said that the time will come when all terminally ill patients will, by law, be isolated in quarantined districts. Volunteers—later, paid professionals—will push, cart or drag the weeping sick into the slums, all the while tormented by the talons and barbs of the dead. The patient will be abandoned as deep into the district as the transporter can manage and le# to wither under the assault of ghosts, very soon to join them. And children with sick livers, will they be deserted too, Gerald? I didn’t know to ask him. These sectors will expand outward as time goes on, as it becomes increasingly dangerous to deposit the moribund into their interiors. There will be reports from NASA that the haunted districts are now visible from space, swirling black voids on the planet’s face. Gerald spun his hands to demonstrate. Mother was staring out the window into the parking lot, and I couldn’t tell if she was listening.

Death isn’t manageable. Consider all the falls off ladders, all the out-of-the-blue strokes, all the children murdered by distracted motorists. All the death that can’t be pushed off to the side. All the death that rises among us. It adds up. It multiplies. It is exponential.

One lone phantom on a freeway is almost harmless. Until the night it appears suddenly on your windshield, mouth agape, frantically clawing at the glass, and causes a massive pile-up wherein three other people die. And now four phantoms stalk the freeway, and so then tomorrow it’s sixteen.

It will not be contained. The haunting will spread. The population will disperse. Civilization will collapse. Fear of death will become nothing short of paralyzing on a grand, societal scale...because now you know. You know that you’re not going to ascend to heaven and be clutched tight to your god’s chest. Nor are you going to be wiped clean off the slate, and disappear painlessly into oblivion. No, you’re going to stay right here, with all the rest, and it doesn’t look like a good time.

Within a few generations, the cities will sag and crumble. The countryside will remain relatively sane for decades. The hinterlands,

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for even longer. Even as late as two hundred years later you’ll be able to find some isolated crag, some remote forest. But you’ll find it and then later you’ll die there, and you will cause it to be forever lost to the world.

Sometime in the future, somewhere out there is the last person.

He is at the edge of the Arctic, trying to stay warm. All around him stretches tens of thousands of miles of haunted wasteland. It could have been me, but it was benign, Gerald, the spot was benign. My world will not perish around me. We have special locks on our doors so that Ben can never sneak out, but I still check them, I get up in the middle of the night and check the locks and look in at Ben sleeping, I lean against the baby gates and I disarm and rearm the security system and I think of you in that motel room, Gerald. I hadn’t forgo!en you but I hadn’t remembered, and now you haunt me.

Mother motioned that it was time for us to go. Gerald was crying.

His dead planet hurtled through space, screaming. A tornado of fingernails, eyelashes, bone. Howling, bawling, broken. The only word is Why, why, why. The whole of the earth moans it. You feel it in the ground. Your blood hums it. You die with it on your lips.

BRANDON BARRETT

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The Good Thief The Shipyard’s tired trombone. We imagine the morning shi# falling in and we shi# in our seats accordingly. Like trained monastics, we look up from our morning lessons, our Matins, expecting John Paul Ambrose III. He is later than usual.

Four out of five mornings, he arrives a#er the second horn offering excuses: ten-car pile-ups, bus collisions; the bridge was up and a Royal fleet passed under it – their linen sails seemed to touch the soles of my feet. Fires, fallen limbs, occasional fatalities. Though we want his fantastic stories, we know be!er.

We have seen John Paul Ambrose III with his mother, now and then, at the corner store. We have heard her slurring speech, watched her struggling to count her change, fighting to stay still, straddling to keep from falling over as if her earth were on a different axis than his and ours. And John Paul Ambrose III, standing so stiff beside her as if to keep her upright, and the grocer’s suspended light bulbs bathing his silky, bowed head in a shimmering light.

Most of us have had our turn in the whiskey-damp air of this shipyard town: mothers suddenly sour-breathed and graceless; and the good fathers, the ones who come home with their paychecks, the ones who take their drink at home. Most of us have had our turn in those days without prospect, and so the shame on the face of John Paul Ambrose III is our shame as well. North Weymouth, Massachuse!s was a town between bridges, yet so o#en there seemed to be no way out. When Mary Wiles put it that way, or something like that, Miss D shook her head hard, clasped her hands behind her back and pacing big strides in front of us all, she hollered, HIGH ART, MARY! HIGH ART! Miss D hated self-pity. Self-pity, she said, is a common man’s art, and her 4th-grade students in Johnson Elementary Public School would be making high art this year.

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Not a sound from Camelot. It is the stairwell that we and the other 2nd-floor classes use for fire drills. Weeks earlier, a#er several days of King Arthur, we changed the “EXIT” sign above the door to “EXETER” as a surprise for Miss D. “Children!” she shouted, not taking her eyes off of the new sign, “This is no longer a way out. It is now a way in.”

Soon a#er, Exeter became our passage – not to fire drills – but to a be!er place, a place that we could go to on any day, at any time.

During math lesson, in the middle of language arts, in the midst of a peer’s recitation, any one of us might rise from his seat and wander in to feel time stop, to be alone, to feel the quiet, to walk away, to feel the train of joy in breaking rules, to hear one’s own heartbeat – and a#er a while, to miss the others, to want the others. The door to Exeter is propped open, apparently so that John Paul Ambrose III can slip in from the back of the school unnoticed by the Principal’s Office.

When John Paul Ambrose III does arrive, his face is damp and flush, his eyes dark and blank, his pants and shirt clinging to his narrow frame. Miss D has set out his breakfast: a banana-nut muffin and a bo!le of apple juice. Next to this, a packet of papers rolled up and tied in purple ribbon – this morning’s worksheets prepared for him, as one might prepare a judge’s morning schedule.

He slouches toward his morning meal and begins to eat without looking up, without looking at any of us. But we are all looking at him.

Miss D has told us again and again that, when he does come, our Savior will wear a beggar’s clothes, and that it is we who should be ready for him, not he for us. We have finished our morning lessons, and we gaze at John Paul Ambrose III as if we are expecting a speech or a vision or some sign from him. The smell of banana and nut winds through our classroom. It is a good morning for our Savior: no tardy slip, no detention, and a good and simple meal.

———— John G. Ash is reading aloud when our Art teacher, Mrs. Foreman, appears in our doorway. She is round and breathless. Her flushed cheeks draw our eyes up to the wilted silk petunias on her straw hat, M . B . M c L ATC H E Y

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and then down again to the ruby snap-bu!ons on her boxy housecoat.

One by one, we have been called out of the classroom to be interrogated by her in the hallway, and now her scent seems to hang on our clothes and in the air. It is a dizzying scent, like a medley of Christmas samples from the perfume counters in department stores – rosehips, holly flowers, lavender, and apple blossoms.

It is our second week in France, and we are what Miss D calls everything French. The American Flag in our classroom has been paired with the French Republic’s stripes – stern and blazing primaries in blue, white and red. For 8 days in a row, Sabrina Kaslov has worn her uncle’s French beret to school, and for 8 days we have eaten lunches of bubbling cider, pungent cheeses and pates, bague!es, apples and pears.

When Mrs. Foreman could not be with us last week, Miss D led our art lesson. At precisely the moment when Mrs. Foreman should have entered our classroom, Miss D leaped to her feet and asked us Children! What color is this?!

It was a small cylindrical bo!le that Miss D passed under our noses as she glided up and down our rows.

Close your eyes!! Close your eyes!!

What color is this scent?

For what seemed like hours, we passed around seasonings from Miss D’s kitchen, and we wrote down the color of cinnamon, the color of oregano, the color of mint. A#er a while, we forgot Mrs. Foreman’s taxonomy of primary and secondary colors, and instead we painted pale!es of seasonings all around us. At lunch time that day, over the scent of liver pate and fresh pears, Miss D showed us a black and white photo of a handsome man with thin silky hair whose dreamy eyes seemed to see us -- and then see through us.

BO-DER-LAARRRRRR-E. Miss D’s lips made a sensual oval, and then released a long and rippling breadth as if she were blowing smoke rings. We struggled to follow her smoke.

BOW-DEEE-LAI-YERRRR

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We pued out the mispronounced name with a new sense of chic. We seemed to be speaking in tongues as Miss D led us in a kind of chant or rhapsody of saying his name in parts: LARRRRRRRRRRRRE LAYER DER DE DERLARRRRRRRRRRE DELAYER Bau – der - laire We said his name backwards and forwards, until our lips were thick and trembling, until our tongues were no longer ours, and until our faces looked u!erly French.

Un homme de genie! A don! Un extraordinaire!

Miss D sang these French words. They were words and phrases already on placards on our wall, words that we had now and then felt encouraged to a!ach to ourselves. A genius! A gi"! Extraordinary! But, this day, these were clearly his traits, and our exercise in matching scents with colors was his lesson for us. An astonishing man with astonishing ideas, Miss D told us, he could be one source for our own dormant gi#s. And according to Miss D, we were shockingly gi#ed: future astronauts, future sopranos, future poets, future painters, nurses, marathon runners, actors. We were all there.

John G. Ash and Miss D are giving us their best performances today when Mrs. Foreman appears in our doorway and interrupts by pretending to clear her throat. We know that we should respond to Mrs. Foreman, but it is the storming of the Bastille that we are immersed in, and Miss D is causing a gust as she breaks down enormous invisible prison doors in the front of the classroom. Mrs. Foreman clears her throat again. John G. Ashe stops reading and Miss D stops breaking down doors. Mrs. Foreman tells John G. Ashe and the rest of us that SHE knows that ONE OF YOU KNOWS where her $5.00 went. She leans into her words like a seer and she dangles her straw purse from her forearm.

What color is fear?

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We all straighten up. Miss D has seated herself and is looking over her own pleated skirt, and picking off pieces of invisible lint.

What color? What color is fear, darlings?

Mrs. Foreman looks aghast as her eyes move from Miss D to all of us, and then back to Miss D. White, like a scared face!! Mary Wiles shouts out.

Brown, like a Negro, John G. Ashe chimes in.

A few weeks ago, Miss D had told us about a black man from Mississippi who had forced a university to admit black students too and then he caught a shot in the back while walking home. It wasn’t just any walk home, Miss D told us, when that black man fell dead from a shot in the back. He was making what he called his March against Fear.

We must all march against fear, Miss D told us, and so we marched that whole week. While our peers played ball or jumped rope and innocently sang “Mi –ssi- ssi and a ppi,” we tro!ed double-file across the playground. We marched not so much against bullets or racism, but against fears that we knew.

We marched against belt marks on the backs of a girl’s lily-white legs.

We marched against codes that label us.

We marched against the dead soul in our fathers’ flasks of whiskey.

We marched against the relentless summoning of shipyard horns.

We marched against the brutality of our own schoolmates.

———— Joy? Miss D is asking us to think like Baudelaire again: Green and red, Mary Wiles shouts, like Christmas No! Joy is bright pink!! Sabrina Kaslov corrects her.

We are all in it now. Some of us are on our feet shouting out colors, others sit still and scan the array of hues all around us. Miss D continues to address us without looking up: What about anger -- what color is that?

It’s white! Nicholas K. offers right away, like a fist! And in the same breadth, he instantly corrects himself, No, it’s red. Yeah, anger is red. Like

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poor old Tommy’s face when the 5th graders are done with him. A few of the motherly girls exhale a collective sigh and turn in their seats to examine Tommy Breen. Miraculously, he has escaped the 5th-graders’ bullying today. His pale and freckled face looks plumper and fresher than usual, and when he smiles a crooked smile, the motherly girls all tip their heads to one side as if they have choreographed this for him. Sabrina Kaslov even blows Tommy Breen a kiss.

Miss D seems to want to know more: And what does anger sound like?

A beating drum! Mary Wiles shouts. She is on her feet and excited by the game, but she quickly slumps back into her seat when Nicholas K. lets out a grown of disapproval.

We sense that the game may be coming to an end, so we look toward Miss D for more. Miss D tips her head backwards and searches the ceiling for a word, for a human condition, for a moment in our lives: Loneliness?

Like nothing, someone instantly offers, as if this has been the easiest word of all, Loneliness sounds like nothing.

And it’s white, someone else adds.

We all look at the redhead in the back of the classroom, the bruises on her ivory forearms showing beneath her blanched and crumpled blouse. Extraordinaire, Miss D gasps. Extraordinaire. And she bows her head, and with her right palm, she irons the front of her skirt – a gesture she saves for us. It is a gesture that says well done, and we know that she has to look down or else our brilliance will blind her.

———— Mrs. Foreman is holding her ground. She announces that one of us must come forward this instant – or she will punish us all. We are genuinely confused. We look to Miss D for help, but she shrugs and smiles.

Let’s have a collection! Mary Wiles shouts, for the Good Thief!

Weeks earlier, Miss D had read to us the story of The Good Thief.

What should happen to a thief? Miss D asked us that morning. He M . B . M c L ATC H E Y

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should get the strap, Glen Rooney shot back from under his astronaut’s helmet. Miss D pursed her mouth to that, the way she does when she is giving us time for a different answer. When the thief in the story did not get the strap but he did get Paradise, we remembered that. Miss D said that stealing does not make a man a thief, and we wondered what it made him then.

That is up to the man, she said. Until his last breadth, that is up to the man. John Paul Ambrose III and a few of the other boys looked relieved to hear that.

Mrs. Foreman hovers in our doorway and looks out over our heads.

Above her head, and above the door, are blue and red and white placards with the terms we have learned: AMOUR

REPUBLIQUE

RESISTANCE

We look steadily at one another – not a thief among us – and then back at Mrs. Foreman. Within a few minutes we have repaid the thief’s debt. We have filled a lunch bag with Saltines, a pear, and a handful of coins from our milk-money box. Mrs. Foreman glares at us.

We are communicants, but not in her parish.

We are patriots, but not from her country.

We are French.

We are a Republic.

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KYLE NORWOOD

Reason Enough’s enough: I’m going to put my foot down, kick a stone, and declare it’s all real.

Why worry about the author when it’s all so skillfully edited? Life’s a country dance with an ethnic band laying down syllables to stomp to, not a night fractured by fires destroying the harvest, as if the crude disorder at the edges could undo our work, unpress the grapes, decompact our tidy trash-bundles. Because this rumble of trucks that have my number (and me lying like an upturned turtle in the road) is just too dumb to be acceptable to reason, the drive-sha# that spins our wheels down streets shiny and dark with mingled oil and rain toward green lights in an infinite regress.

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Time and Motion Studies 1 Fundamentals of the psychology of change: boats bobbing in the marina, plump couples waltzing under paper lanterns, bartenders mixing our exotic favorites: precarious old customs carried almost too far, but enforcing a sense of enclosure (at the margin a special train for diplomats or victims speeds past without stopping). A#er all, every motion encloses itself against alternatives, unless the piston finds a crack in the cylinder block. We are privileged to witness these festivities, and we’re only a bit restless because a moment ago, when Uncle Barney wasn’t blinking, the photograph would have been perfect.

2 Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management states: “In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first. Useful results hinge upon the scientific selection and development of the worker, a#er each man has been studied, taught and trained, and one may say experimented with. Management must design the task, monitor the worker’s progress, and reward efficiency.

Gilbreth, finding that the bricks and mortar must be within the bricklayer’s reach and at the proper height, invented a new type of adjustable scaffold. The worker must KYLE NORWOOD

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grab a brick in his le# hand while at the same time taking a trowel full of mortar with his right. His required motions are reduced from eighteen to five. Only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements, and enforced cooperation can faster work be insured, leading to higher wages and increased profits.”

3 Absolutely! Let’s be clear about the day and the hour!

Sticking to the agenda is what the state requires, documents signed with an unequivocal flourish.

Once the machine starts, it takes a long time to stop: the water keeps turning the toothy gears, commanded to fall, king and obedient servant rolled into one, excessive, overdetermined (don’t take arms against it, build a dike with a bicycle path).

Raps his shoe on the table, he’s harder to keep within bounds. What if we appointed him vice president of his own life? As if the gravy cared about the gravy bowl. It wants to flood the world, the free world, the one we’ve “made free” with, taking its measure in time and motion.

4

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We stand by the track and a horseman passes at a measured gallop, regular rhythm of hooves too fast to be seen, until Muybridge sets his cameras twenty-one inches apart, numbered ONE TWO THREE and shows us, SEE a bundle of legs uncoiling, whipping scraping the ground, scratching gouging the dirt, head tripping the electric wires that trigger the cameras SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN but the legs in time and motion caught in their own rhythm FRONT kick FRONT leap and stretch HIND HIND kick FRONT kick FRONT leap and stretch HIND HIND, covering distance ONE kick THREE leap and stretch SEVEN EIGHT kick TEN kick TWELVE leap and stretch FIFTEEN and beyond the row of cameras, again a blur, but now we have seen what was too fast for the eye, and PRESTO, now we are ready to trigger a limitless blur of intricate ruthless machines—

5 Now! the imperative of work the boss vomiting eighteen wheelers with no brakes, out of the way can’t stop for pedestrians the post office is closing without my steamy love-le!er and a new world’s record beckons a golden bird flying one foot ahead of my outstretched arm, frantic stream muscling off the weight of winter pushing teaching a breakthrough that will heal the millions or split their skin wide open, nouns verbs a riot in the fancy auditorium the gilded palace the open mouth tonguing sucking whole buildings business towers birds wheeling around KYLE NORWOOD

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the sunbaked roof the life or death deadline the carousel horses je!ing spiral rings a galaxy spreading across the front page of your underwear an overcooked universe a thousand crows cawing water streaming through the portholes artillery fireworks the moment of

6 oh don’t stop don’t stop that feels wonderful I’m about to skywrite I’m coming over Jordan mercy mercy let me slower slower no faster oh immanence transcendence oh gesture of effluvia down spillways of struck gongs oh master hollow melt the walls gored locomotive who what when and oh yes the opening the angels streaming through the heavenly gate oh now it is over it is finished stop now stop stop.

7 Then there’s the freedom of what goes to waste, a trickle of gu!er water stringing its diamond nuances over tiny rough spots: a sort of liquid thinking,

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its pa!erned counter-motions always arriving and never amounting to much. So the solitude is rippled, not interrupted, by the girl in the yellow T-shirt taking a shortcut between properties.

She’s gone. No reason to speak to her or write her down, and saying so fills a line that slides by lazily. The slender woman at the doll factory doesn’t worry about the entire shipment, but, once every fi#een seconds, threads hair through a brain-hole, then combs it.

Her hands are busy, but her mind idles through radiant networks of inconsequence like the bright dust that circulates in sunlight.

8 Damn it, I want answers. And not only that: I want to dam Niagara Falls, shave without cu!ing myself, reinvent the assembly line, rewrite the history of Spirit, freeze the arpeggio, consecrate the moment, ink the new microbes on a slide, glue down shoe-prints for the fox-trot, swing a nine-pound hammer, take off my clothes and descend a staircase, examine an off-tackle slant in slo-mo, chop onions as fast as the Japanese chef on educational TV: you get the idea.

I want the guidelines in writing on my desk tomorrow morning; your secretary is authorized to work overtime if necessary, and you might want to prepare the boys in the copy-room KYLE NORWOOD

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for a busy day tomorrow. And thanks for all your efforts.

9 Where are we now? Beyond numbers, lost in the progress?

Briefly aware of the clean sky, the weeds and fire hydrant and sandy soil, and all the poignant, overused words?

Morning is alive with our favorites: the brightly colored birds, bees and planes of baby’s first picture books.

Born in a primitive dazzle of abundance, privation, vague screams without lucidity; grasp, pound, run, speak, demand; playtime, mealtime, bedtime; a!ention, boredom, frustration, sleep; clocks, pencils, maps, graph paper, microscopes, flow charts, calculators; time and motion dissected, value calculated, profits grabbed or wrenched away—an explosion of language in a sky of revolving clocks that don’t keep time, don’t speak, don’t care. . . . Can this doom be our paradise?

—Meanwhile, on a mountain peak, our avatar faces the cloud bank, the edge of the impersonal, and is lost to our farewells.

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T. K . L E E

Of Monsters A monster is easily born if you know the right nursery rhyme.

Go on, lock your door. Go blow your horn time a#er time a#er time if you know the right nursery rhyme you’ll understand the Moon (time a#er time a#er time) simply plays the Fool and soon you’ll understand the Moon no be!er than the Wolf, for simply playing the Fool. And soon we’re every one of us keeping score, no be!er than the Wolf for— Never mind. Children will learn, oh!, we’re every one of us keeping score turn a#er turn a#er turn, so never mind. Children will learn. Oh, a monster is easily born turn a#er turn a#er turn, so go on, lock your door. Go blow your horn.

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Particular Habits No. Keep your cigare!es. I never smoked. You know I drank.

A drag of my lips across the rim of a wine glass still feels a more recognizable gesture for me to thank you. At that ridiculous party, remember, “Oh, he has the nerve to wear a wedding ring,” they said behind our backs. This is why we never held hands, isn’t it? But, then, I didn’t mind at first. They did. (God, the things I didn’t mind).

Suffer the fool. Except: You weren’t my friend.

One of us made too long a career of this haphazard business of sudden nights in a stolen bed with that awful gut-rot rising up in the throat. The Lillet spilled when we tried to kiss before we began again. You realize that this, however, is not how the best stories go, the ones we tell ourselves instead of living.

Go get another cigare!e. It will be much more forgiving.

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Riesling D’Etre The feel of a napkin has lost its sentiment over the years. But then, so, has the concept of a forest, and in her hands, fingers bent was a glass of the house Riesling, the stem wet from a near accident: a spill when the glass almost fell.

It only slid, much as we had, shoulder into shoulder and conversations were too fragile, I could tell she was trying to listen, but other than a small tilt of her head, she had half her lipstick leaving its smile around the rim of Riesling, cooling itself into lukewarm and laughter.

She simply wasn’t interested in him.

He didn’t notice, and took out his ballpoint pen, grabbed a napkin and wrote his number down.

And then he did his mating dance: to leave and then leave again.

The imprint on her glass began to frown.

There’s no sentiment in such frivolous men, either; She thinks, They tear the forests up themselves.

She sighed and asked for another glass of Riesling, only sweeter; then, started counting all the glasses that she had le#.

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M AT T I Z Z I

Bully Bus Hilda watched the running man through the Plexiglas above the handicapped seats: aviator sunglasses, a crisp bu!on-down, stiff boots that made him clop down the sidewalk like an upright horse. It was one block until the next stop. The driver leaned hard into the wheel, one eye on traffic, while his companion straddled the white divider and hollered, “Go! Go!” Whom he was encouraging, Hilda couldn’t say. Between breaths, the running man appeared to laugh along. She allowed herself to join in, if only to drown out her daughter-in-law.

“—which went twenty thousand over asking,” Jennifer said.

“What did?”

“Apartment two.” She repeated it like Hilda was hard of hearing, rather than selective. “Now, the realtor says that your unit, being the top floor and having an extra bath—” So she went on, the only passenger oblivious to the spectacle of the running man.

Hilda had never warmed to her—the girl was a parrot. Lars had suggested they bond while he was at work. But she knew the supermarket trip was a guise to place her under supervision: Lars feared another incident like the one at the bank, or else wanted an eyewitness. In his opinion, she was one episode away from being commi!ed.

Hilda shucked an ear of corn into the grocery bag on her lap. Well, what mother wouldn’t go ba!y over a son like him? Bullying her out of her home of forty years, just to put a down payment on another.

“—appraised at nine times what you paid for it,” Jennifer said.

The girl was truly irritating. Si!ing idle-handed on the bus, no newspaper, no kni!ing needles—how could anyone stand it? The a#ernoon, Hilda decided, was a chance to prove her self-sufficiency.

No ma!er that Lars had cut the check. She carried her groceries, like always, with the aid of her walker. In produce she selected her own peaches and Granny Smiths, leisurely testing their ripeness for thirty seconds apiece, Jennifer’s exasperation all but sweating through her sundress. But what did the girl know about picking out fruit? She paid complete strangers to do that for her. At the register, when the

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milk rang up a dollar over, Hilda had caught the error—not Jennifer’s smartphone. Yes, so far the trip was going swimmingly. Now the running man offered a welcome distraction.

“I think he’ll make it,” Hilda said.

“Who? The realtor?”

The bus veered to the sidewalk; the door opened with an asthmatic gasp. Opposite the Unitarian Church stood a middle-aged man with a ponytail. On another day he might have a!racted her scorn—wasn’t he rather mature for a ponytail?—but at that moment the running man drew level with the rear tires. Hilda flushed with warmth. How pleasant to witness something go right for someone, even a stranger.

“Of course, you wouldn’t have to cook there,” Jennifer said.

“Where?”

“Tideview Estates.”

She recognized the name from pamphlets Lars had brought over, splashed with color photos of a manmade pond and pink-blossoming magnolia. Assisted living, he called it. She wasn’t dumb: it was a nursing home. The kind of place where everyone wore nametags, where overtired nurses snapped at you like wet towels and—Hilda fingered her wedding band—burgled your jewelry while you slept. Lars might visit weekly at first, but soon he would cite exhaustion from long hours at the accounting firm, and once Jennifer got pregnant Hilda would be as boxed up and forgo!en as a Christmas stocking in August.

The ponytailed man paid in cash, a delay that favored the running man. The first bill wouldn’t take; he smoothed it and tried again.

Steps from victory, the running man clutched his sides and slowed to a trot. What a fine show—Hilda pinned the groceries between her elbows, freeing her hands to applaud—and the peaches and apples as fragrant as an orchard! The second dollar fed easily into the slot; Jennifer was no more intelligible than a seashell; the running man, at last, arrived panting at the step, and li#ed a boot to mount it—but without warning the door sucked shut, the bus bolted from the curb.

Hilda, disbelieving, watched him shrink, like a man le# ashore as a cruise ship pulls anchor. A few passengers clapped. Whether the scraps of a planned ovation or a show of malice, she couldn’t decide. The roar M AT T I Z Z I

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of the air conditioner blasted into the space abandoned by voices; even Jennifer was stunned into silence. Was it her imagination, or did the running man, before disappearing from view, renew the chase?

“Someone ought to say something,” Hilda said.

“Why don’t you?”

The driver’s companion, lean and ropy as a licorice whip, cackled as if echoing the girl’s challenge. If anyone listened to her complaint it would be the first time. Jennifer, triumphant, slouched in her seat.

“You’ll admit it’s the only possible arrangement. We need more space and you need less. We’re hoping to give you grandchildren and—” She was like a radio that tuned to three stations. Tug on her ear: “Housing boom.” Pinch her nostrils: “Assisted living.” Yank her other ear: “Grandchildren.” Hilda rapped her knee brace. If only she could appeal to Jennifer as a woman, but how? It was true she did not need the space. The apartment was six rooms, two baths, and she didn’t have so much as a goldfish. Then there was her knee trouble. Floyd, rest his soul, had insisted on a third-floor unit—the penthouse, he dubbed it, as if a name could give it glamor. Some luxury: the building lacked an elevator. She’d bit her tongue while he pra!led on about heating bills and footsteps through the ceiling. How he could talk! Never let her get a word in, just like Lars. At least with Jennifer she had a chance.

“Please,” she interrupted. “Don’t think a child will give you any more power in your marriage.”

The words had tumbled out, perhaps too incautious a gambit. But Jennifer waved her off, a gesture borrowed from Lars.

“Really, Hilda, it’s the twenty-first century.”

The traffic was stop-and-go. Hilda pressed on, hurrying her speech.

“You mustn’t go along with everything Lars says. He has go!en his way since he was a boy. Do you know why we never had a second child? Lars wanted us all to himself. Of course, every child is like that at first, but I was sure he’d never recover. Anyway, it wasn’t us he wanted.

When Floyd died, the first thing Lars asked about was the inheritance.”

Jennifer’s body was as stiff as her mind. A three-day stubble was visible below the hemline of her sundress—the legs of a woman whose husband was never around. If only Hilda could turn the girl against

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Lars. She almost felt sorry for her: a schoolteacher forced to spend summer vacation with her osteoarthritic mother-in-law. The bus rattled like an old radiator. Then the girl’s lips parted, gaping and dumb, like she was struggling, for the first time, to formulate her own words.

“But there wasn’t any inheritance.”

Her tone was half question, half accusation. Lars had counted on a windfall, but unknown to anyone, Floyd—so stingy he refused to replace a light bulb in the second bath, until one midnight he ran his hip into a corner of the porcelain sink—had been aggressively paying off the mortgage. He mailed the final payment five years ahead of schedule, and a month later he was dead.

“Floyd never talked about our savings. You know how secretive husbands can be.”

Jennifer bent slightly, as if reeling from a blow. Perhaps her impermeable stupidity had finally dropped its defenses. Hilda saw her chance and seized it.

“Jennifer, you’ll tell Lars, won’t you? How I picked out my own apples and corrected the cashier about the price of milk. How I don’t need anybody to cook for me. You’ll tell Lars I’m not so old yet. What I need is to be le# alone.”

She leaned toward the daughter-in-law she had never hugged, not even at the wedding, and ventured a hand to Jennifer’s exposed knee.

The faint stubble pricked her like a rebuke. The girl’s spine straightened.

“What about last month?” Jennifer locked her arms across the flat wall of her chest. “The outburst at the bank. Lars had to leave work to pick you up.”

The bus rolled over a pothole, knocking Hilda’s hand away. Her eyes flinched shut. Against the lidded darkness, an image of the running man journeyed from ear to ear, arms waving like semaphores. The outburst at the bank. She’d le# her debit card in the wrong purse, and the teller wouldn’t let her withdraw. She was certain he had raised his voice first; the men in her life, whenever confused or surprised, were always shouting at her. But the memory was indistinct. She recalled stamping her walker, the boggle-eyed stares of other customers, the branch manager barging out from a frosted-glass office, all eyeglasses M AT T I Z Z I

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and bowtie, wielding a clipboard like a shield. In the instant before she blacked out, Hilda mistook him for Lars: the posturing of a weak man who dominates his own minor kingdom. She awoke under a clinical light, a strange but kind face peering down. Perhaps it was the last kind face she’d seen. A#er that, Lars took control of her finances.

Jennifer relished telling his version: the phone call informing him his mother had been raving like a bag lady and was being discharged from St. Elizabeth’s, a forty-five-minute drive from his office on the South Shore. You would think a boy might feel some compassion. But no, Lars had shown up irate, claiming Hilda was doing her damnedest to ruin him—he’d get an official reprimand for leaving early; management was unsympathetic to personal crises.

When she opened her eyes, a wicked gleam dilated in Jennifer’s.

She had seen the same shining cruelty as the driver toyed with the running man. The world was glu!ed with bullies. Hilda could no longer endure her daughter-in-law’s voice. She pressed the yellow vertical tape, her body deciding faster than her mind. An automated voice said, “Stop requested.” What pleasure, to push a bu!on and hear a man cede so readily to her command.

“This isn’t your stop,” Jennifer said, confused.

Hilda hooked the groceries onto her walker and stood shakily.

“I have some business.”

The driver braked hard, pitching her a foot forward. The grocery bags rocked but did not fall.

“What business? Hilda, what business?” A sharp whisper at first, but as Hilda shoved past the licorice-looking man, Jennifer’s voice became more frantic. “Hilda! Sit down!”

The door hissed open; the bus knelt on its suspension. Descending the step, Hilda stole a last glance at her daughter-in-law. Jennifer had pulled out her phone and stood halfway in her seat, no doubt debating whether to call Lars—or follow.

Outside the air was thick as chowder. Hilda could not see the running man but sensed, with something like faith, his dogged pursuit. She stepped off the curb in front of a 24-hour convenience store. Her joints ached; the neighborhood was unfamiliar. They were

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five or so blocks north of the church. She entered the crosswalk in a trance. The bus sprung to full height, then se!led with a whine as the driver saw she intended to cross. But she did not cross. A#er three steps, she planted her walker, and faced him through the broad, two-paneled windshield.

A foot of air separated Hilda from the bus. If she wanted to she could touch its grill with the flat of her palm. The hot-breathed proximity of the vehicle, its brute physicality and menacing red livery, made her heart race. She craned her neck to meet the driver’s gaze. He watched her dumbly, almost bored, until his eyes deglazed with intelligence.

At the same moment she became conscious of the plan her body had carried out. She was forming a barricade.

———— Jennifer was sure to ta!le, and it would be another strike against Hilda. A case to put her in a home.

“I have a home,” she’d told Lars.

“You hate this apartment, Ma. Always have.”

Which was true. The only thing she’d miss was the skylight in the kitchen. Mornings and a#ernoons she would knit there, with a Swedish apple cake in the oven for the weekly food drive at St. Paul’s Lutheran, and as the rectangle of sunlight shi#ed across the tiles she would move her chair in its orbit. But she hated the city. The neighborhood was overrun with stray cats and, so it seemed, stray children, who trampled private gardens and violated noise ordinances with their late-night caterwauling. She had lived there her whole life and never felt comfortable. The city belonged to men like Floyd. Floyd had decided everything. But when at fi#y-eight a heart a!ack killed him, Hilda stayed, like a canary perched in an opened birdcage. It was not a decision anyone expected, but it was hers.

A#er a brief standoff, the driver, perhaps concluding that honking at a disabled woman would not be good for his career, thrust his head out the door.

“What’s the problem, lady? Keep on walking.”

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Hilda ignored him. Behind the windshield, his companion thrashed about in a disheveled laughter. It frightened her. It was malevolent and eternal, a laugh with no beginning or end. She pitied the running man, who was merely trying to catch the crosstown local that came twice an hour, and who had made a poor choice in footwear. Perhaps he was late for an appointment. Years had passed since she’d found herself in a hurry for anything, but her heart pounded with the desperate hope that he was still chasing down the bus. If he did not come, how would she defend herself? Cars in the opposite lane came to a halt.

“C’mon, lady, the coast is clear. Let’s go, huh?”

Hilda drew a fresh ear of corn from the grocery bag and began to strip the husk, humming as she flicked the sticky yellow fibers from her fingertips. The driver’s handset crackled at his waist. He spoke down into it.

“I’ve got a crackpot here.”

Passengers crowded the windshield to learn the cause of the delay.

Among them, Jennifer—sundress bunched at the hips, cell phone forgo!en in hand, her vapid face transfigured in rage. This was the woman who would give Hilda grandchildren. The idea turned her stomach: the mingling of Jennifer’s docility and Lars’s tyranny in a child at war with itself. With any luck they’d be cursed with a boy. When the boy became a man he could treat his mother like a stepladder. Yet, what Hilda would give for a pigtailed granddaughter, whom she might convert to her side and teach to cook a proper meal. Jennifer barreled past the laughing man out the door.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to the driver. “I’ll take care of this.”

She charged Hilda.

“What on earth—?” Her voice was shrill but impotent. Hilda shoved the corn into a grocery bag.

“It’s not right.”

“Lars is going to hear all about this.” Jennifer shook the phone in Hilda’s face like a set of jail keys.

“It’s not right,” Hilda repeated. She clamped both hands on the crossbar. She would stand there all day and wait for the man and set it right. Let Lars come. This time she would not budge.

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Jennifer seized the walker and tried to wrest it from her. Vibrations pulsed up Hilda’s arms until her head juddered. The sun beat down clean and harsh. She almost respected the girl for taking charge; she might even have become fond of her, if she’d had energy beyond holding on; but a paper bag was sliding, sliding out of reach—she let go too late to save it—and it toppled to the pavement. The milk carton sprung a leak. Two pounds of green-golden apples fled the scene in multiple directions: toward the curb, underneath the bus.

“Shit,” Jennifer said.

She knelt and began to corral the apples with her free hand. They seemed to multiply. Hilda wanted to cry. She had taken such care choosing the perfect fruit for her cakes. The driver cut the motor and returned to help. The milk curdled on the blacktop. Hilda cast her gaze down the sidewalk where, less than two blocks away, a dark shape advanced toward them, fast and resolute. She smiled. The gait was unmistakable. It was the running man.

She began to clap: slowly at first, then faster, to the unheard tempo of his footsteps, until her palms stung. She was correcting a wrong.

The running man would catch the bus and thank her for her good deed. Then Jennifer, and Lars, would see the truth: she did not need to be kept under watch. She was still a useful citizen. The running man loomed closer, a block away now, but only Hilda was aware of him. Jennifer and the driver turned their backs to the sidewalk, lit up in a square of sunlight. They reminded her of the ants that sometimes crawled across her kitchen tiles, intent on a crumb, oblivious to her foot striking from above. The driver peered up, ra!led by her applause.

“Crazy old bitch,” he said.

Jennifer offered no defense. She looked at Hilda as one appraises a discolored mole, then swiped the screen of her phone. Her husband, always a phone call away. Wasn’t she a li!le sorry for Lars too? Working ten-hour days as a middle-rung accountant, eyesight ravaged by fine print, resentment eating through him like an ulcer. The city had priced men like him out of being anything but permanent renters. But why did she have to make the sacrifice? The condo was a gi# from Floyd; she clung to it as proof of his love that had been absent all their M AT T I Z Z I

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marriage. Wouldn’t Lars be bi!er always, with or without a house of his own? The running man pulled alongside the bus, once again steps from the open door. Hilda stopped clapping and the a#ernoon like an orchestra dropped violently into silence, and stillness, and calm.

Then he was on top of the driver, an unleashed Ro!weiler, kicking the driver’s ribcage with his pointed boots. Jennifer, mid-dial, scrambled backward to the curb and let out a scream. The kicks came in threes, like deaths. The driver curled into a smaller and smaller target.

Through a tear in his vest Hilda saw brown skin shining and bruising.

“No,” she said. Nobody heard her; she could hardly hear herself over the shouting. She knifed out one hand as if to pry the men apart, or absolve them. “No, no.”

She’d expected the running man to tell off the driver but otherwise board peacefully. Instead he brought his heel down on the driver’s head with a terrible crunch. Blood speckled high up his boot and thigh, a gli!ering red, bright and raw. His shirt had come untucked. She realized she did not know the man at all. His eyes remained hidden behind sunglasses. Perhaps there was nothing behind them; perhaps the eyes were black and burning as asphalt. In his oversized boots he no longer looked like a sane, wronged man.

The driver’s companion, alive with new hysterics, leapt to the street and lassoed his arms around the assailant. There was a tangle of limbs twisting at improbable angles, a loud crack that Hilda could almost feel in her kneecaps. The driver groaned but did not move. A second rescuer materialized—a clerk from the convenience store—to help subdue the running man. Together they fla!ened themselves on him like a heavy quilt. Hilda tried to drive the shouts from her head.

Her eyes refused to se!le on the scene and accept it as fact. Instead she searched for something recognizable. On the curb, her knees pink and indented with gravel, sat Jennifer, cell phone to her ear. The ringing sounded far off, unnaturally spaced out. When the voice came on the line, Hilda could hear that it was not an emergency operator. It was too panicked: a man’s voice—barking, commanding, immovable.

A blackout was coming. Her legs felt like stilts in a high wind. She needed to escape the sun and reach higher ground. Abandoning the

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groceries and walker and the mangled heap she had wrought in the crosswalk, Hilda guided herself to the bus’s door. The lone step, with no operator to lower it, looked impassable. Her knees felt splintered.

A green cornhusk stuck like toilet paper to the sole of her shoe; she was too weak to shake it off. A vision of Lars discovering her crumpled on the stair kept her going, but finally that indignity was not enough, and she was ready to submit when a hand from inside reached out—a strong, large-knuckled hand—and li#ed her up the step. She collapsed into her vacated seat as if she’d scaled a mountain.

“Are you all right? Can I get you a bo!le of water?”

The voice belonged to the ponytailed man. His face was ridiculous but gentle. She willed herself to refuse, but her head dipped into a nod, and he darted off the bus toward the convenience store.

The two flights to Hilda’s apartment took her fi#een minutes, up or down, and the sudden absurdity of prolonging that routine made her laugh. She shut her eyes as if denying that world, releasing herself to the wonderful air-conditioned coolness. She could imagine a breeze feathering across an artificial pond, a bench beneath a magnolia in pink bloom, a bee pollinating the yawning tulips—how pleasant to sit, she could sit for hours and forget all about her bad knees, forget the constant bewilderment of the city—the aroma of pot roast in the oven, a kind voice calling out that supper was ready. In the courtyard, the boundless sun would shine down a path. She would put down her kni!ing and follow.

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H E AT H E R B A RT L E T T

Ars[on] Poetica: Letter After When they come, they’re going to tell you I’m guilty – soaked each word with gasoline, lit the match, watched one catch and ignite the next and the next until no silhoue!e could standout against the flame.

What they won’t tell you is there was nothing else le# to burn. The first time we prayed, she pressed her hand against my ribs: thumb first, then index finger, then the rest. It was not for mercy; it was for electricity enough to raise the fine hair from her skin -thumb index pressa static charge to every -press- no touch without suffering, no body

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without its own current.

I’m still waiting for this to pass through me You see, the danger was never the fire or the hand. It doesn’t ma!er that we could never go back; they will weep anyway. This is how it spreads, love a#er destruction. So I burn each page to get to the next – haven’t you ever read by the glow of bone turning to ash?

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Semiotics What words did she write in your palm. Did you lick the bi!er ink or let it smear inside your pocket.

This is what you wanted: pins & needles, bite marks, stained & calloused skin, the still wet scent of her mouth inside your fist. She said you can believe something by touching it – a spark, a fire, but even against its hot shadow, you tremble.

Did you know these fingers would betray you?

How far can you reach before pulling back, before her words melt with sweat, before you say enough. But it’s not enough. Look: fireflies are circling the flames & you can’t tell floating embers from the deliberate pa!erns of bugs.

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The Dirty White Sky It was a long drive in Kay’s memory, but it couldn’t have taken more than thirty minutes to get to the woods where her father hunted squirrels. Maybe it was the excitement of her first hunting trip. Or maybe it was the absence of her older sister, Mel. The sky that day was the color of the landscape—a dirty white. It hung like curtains along the country roads, dampening sound and obscuring what lay beyond. When Kay turned to look behind them, she could almost see a rippling in the wake of their car.

Kay sat in front. Uncle Dave slept in the back. It felt strange to Kay to sit in the passenger’s seat when two grownups were in the car, but she liked it. “Will I get to shoot?” she asked her father.

He slowed to make a turn. “Maybe some target practice at lunch.”

The heater released a musty, sweet fragrance that mingled with the earthy scent of her father’s hunting jacket. His jacket had a strange metallic smell, of cold and the outdoors and something unnameable.

“Is this good hunting weather?”

Her father glanced back at Dave. “It’s later than I’d like.” His lips se!led together, signaling that he was done talking. Kay began counting mailboxes out her window, giving herself double points for those with their flags raised.

Next to Dave was the green rucksack that contained their picnic lunch. Kay had never had a winter picnic and she checked periodically to make sure her uncle wasn’t crushing it. Dave, the youngest of Kay’s three uncles and her favorite, was visiting from up north, where he lived with his two dogs near the Canadian border. Now that Kay was nine, he was secretly teaching her to swear.

Kay was up to twenty-three points before her father pulled into a driveway covered with snow. To the right was a large, white farmhouse with smoke coming out of the chimney. To the back were several rusty cars on blocks, a swaybacked barn, and an outbuilding. Dense woods surrounded them. “We’re here,” her father announced. Kay felt a bubble of nervousness.

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A black and brown speckled dog jumped and barked around an old pickup truck. Its head was square and its coat was short and coarse.

“Tough-looking dog,” Dave said.

“You’re awake.” Kay’s father didn’t turn around. “Long night?”

“Certainly didn’t feel long at the time.”

Kay’s father switched off the engine and opened his door. Kay smelled campfire. “Did you bring your glasses?” he asked. “I’m not le!ing you carry a gun unless you’ve got glasses.”

“Geez, John. Yes.” Dave pa!ed around his pockets and pulled out sunglasses.

Kay’s father turned now. “I’m serious, Dave.” His voice was tight.

“They’re prescription.” Dave looked to the farmhouse. Kay looked at her lap. “Are we all going in?” Dave asked.

———— A grandma-aged woman wearing Sorel boots and a heavy cream sweater answered the door. She wasn’t plump, the way Kay thought farmers’ wives were supposed to be, but lean with short, silvery hair.

“Hiya,” the woman greeted. She held the door open with her le# hand and smiled. Kay felt suddenly shy.

“Morning, Marie,” Kay’s father said warmly. “You remember my brother Dave.”

“Of course I do. Nice to see you.” Marie looked down at Kay. “I don’t remember this one. She looks like trouble.” Marie’s eyes were animated.

Kay blushed. Her father laughed. “This is Kay.” “Wonderful.” She said it like she meant it and Kay liked her instantly.

Marie ushered the trio into the kitchen, clu!ered with papers and jars. Marie didn’t seem embarrassed by the mess. She looked from Dave to Kay’s father and back again. “If it wasn’t for those beards, I couldn’t tell you were brothers.” Kay’s father was tall and thin and Dave was shorter, with a bulging stomach. But both had the same wiry red beard and blue eyes.

“Sometimes I wonder.” Dave gave Kay’s father a look that wasn’t all together joking. “Say. That’s a tough-looking dog out there. I don’t

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remember seeing it last time.”

“No, she’s new.” Marie cackled. “Or rather, she’s used. Bill found her at the pound a couple months ago. He thinks she’s reincarnated from the dog he had when he was a boy.” She raised her eyebrows. “Even named her Daisy Duke. It’s a stretch.”

“Bill will be doing voodoo before long,” Kay’s father joked.

Marie pointed a finger. “If he asks you for some of your hair, don’t give it to him.”

They all laughed.

“I haven’t seen Bill since breakfast, but I know he’ll want to say hi,” Marie continued. “Maybe a#er you’re done. You can tell him what you got.”

“He’s not in the woods?”

“He’s not.” Marie caught his meaning and winked. “You don’t have to worry about shooting him. At least not accidentally.”

———— Outside, Kay’s father slung the bag with their lunches across his body along with his .22. They would snowshoe and hunt up to the stream that cut across the north end of the property and then have their picnic and come back. It was always the same, Dave said. Kay’s father liked his routine. Dave unloaded the gear from the car and helped Kay with her snowshoes before pu!ing on his own. Daisy Duke was si!ing in the back of the pickup on a pile of blankets, breathing heavily, as they walked toward the woods.

“God, she’s homely,” Dave said. He reached out to scratch her behind the ears, but she stiffened and showed her teeth. There was a scar on her lip.

Kay’s father looked up. “I don’t think she likes you, Dave.”

“Maybe she smells the dogs on me.”

“Could be.” Kay’s father motioned for Kay to come closer, and they gave Daisy a wide berth.

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down into the powdery snow a li!le. Dave followed. “How will we know how to get back?” Kay asked. The woods seemed vast.

Her father squeezed her neck. “We’re not going to get lost, honey.”

But Kay still felt a moment of panic when she could no longer see the farm.

“Marie said there’s a new snowmobile trail that runs along the north end. We can connect to it farther back and follow it to the stream. It’ll be easier walking.”

“When do we hunt?” Dave asked. He was moving slowly and looking up.

“We could hunt now.” Kay’s father craned his neck. “See something?”

Dave nodded. He gently pushed Kay behind him to her father, who took her and stepped out of the way. He aimed his gun high into the trees.

The shot was louder than Kay expected and she felt the burst of adrenaline spread through her. “Did you get it?” her father asked.

When he stepped forward, Kay did, too. “I didn’t even see it.”

Dave walked a ways toward a large tree and stood at the base, looking up. Then he looked down at the snow. Then he looked up again. He went on a li!le farther, eyes to the ground, before coming back. “I must have missed. I don’t see blood.”

“You sure those sunglasses are prescription?”

“Yes, John. I’m sure.”

“Uh-huh.” Kay and her father went ahead and Dave lagged behind them.

When they reached the snowmobile trail, they turned to follow it deeper into the woods. Up ahead, high in the treetops, there was a mass of leaves that Kay recognized as a squirrel’s nest. She tipped her head back.

“Do you see it?” Kay’s father whispered. They were side by side.

Kay nodded.

“This should be a good place.”

She scanned the branches around her. Beyond the first nest were two more and then another. Kay searched for several minutes but saw nothing. She looked at her father. “Keep your eyes up,” he said. And

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then finally she saw a dark spot moving.

“Dad,” she whispered and pointed.

“Good!” Slowly he took the gun off his shoulder and clicked the safety. Then he put the scope to his eye and positioned the gun in his hands. “It’s a black squirrel. That’s unusual.”

Kay smiled. “It’s good luck.” This time she covered her ears but the shot still made her jump. The black speck dropped.

“We got him.”

Kay stared at the place where the squirrel had been and felt her initial excitement ebb. “Did we?” She tried to sound enthusiastic. But what if it had been a mother with babies? What if it was the last black squirrel in the woods? “Are you sure?”

“This is hunting, Kay,” her father said gently.

Kay swallowed. “I know.” But she had a hard time walking to where the squirrel had fallen and she hoped, like Uncle Dave’s squirrel, that it would be gone when they got there.

Her father was a good shot. There was blood in the snow and the squirrel’s eye that faced them was lifeless. Already the squirrel seemed to be stiffening. Kay pretended she was staring at something far away, a trick she learned from Mel that stopped her from crying.

Her father bent down and was examining the body when behind them, where they’d le# Dave, came the sound of something large crashing through the woods. They heard Dave swear and the noise lunge and turn, breaking snow and branches. Kay and her father stood up as the first shot went off, and then there was a second and the sound of something lighter running away, like a shadow fleeing.

Kay looked at her father with wide eyes.

“Dave!” her father called out. Uncle Dave was standing, but it was impossible to tell if he was hurt. “Dave!” her father called again. Kay heard the concern in his voice. This time Dave waved an arm. He was okay. Her father took a bread bag from his pocket and put the squirrel in it. Then he turned to Kay. “Stay here.”

As her father reached her uncle, a second sound, somewhere between a moan and a whistle, started. The noise crescendoed into a wail, then quieted to a gurgle, then started again. It was horrible. Her SHELLEY BERG

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uncle and father began arguing. Kay clasped her fingers behind her neck and squeezed her arms around her ears but she couldn’t block out the sounds.

“It was a fair shot . . . ,” her uncle said, “ . . . exhausted.” Her father put his head down, his fingers working across his forehead. Dave gestured angrily. “Probably does it all the time . . .”

Her father shook his head. “I wouldn’t have . . .” When he looked back at Kay, his expression was somewhere between anger and grief.

“Stay there,” he called.

“If I hadn’t shot it—” “Dammit, Dave! I don’t care!” Kay didn’t remember her dad ever swearing, even when the boat had dropped on his foot. “It puts us in a really tough spot.” The wailing was building. Kay’s father said something that Kay couldn’t hear, and her uncle took his gun and walked off toward a pile of brush.

Her father came to her then. “There’s been an accident. Dave . . . shot something . . . by mistake.” He put a hand on her, keeping her steady.

There was another shot and then quiet.

When Dave rejoined them, his mouth pulled down at the corners.

“What did he shoot?” Kay asked.

Her father stared hard at Dave. “It was a fawn. You can get into trouble for shooting a fawn, especially out of season. Isn’t that right, Dave?”

Dave nodded.

“Dave thought it was injured.”

Kay swallowed. “But it wasn’t?” She didn’t understand why her father was so mad. “Is it because of his glasses?” Kay asked.

“It wasn’t because of my glasses.”

Kay’s father opened his mouth and shut it again. “No,” he agreed.

“Kay, we’ll have to bring you back to Marie and Bill’s. Then Dave and I will come back for the deer.”

Kay thought of the fawn lying stiff and wide-eyed in the snow.

“Can’t we bring it with us?”

“It’s too heavy. We need something to drag it on.”

“I can help.”

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“No.” Kay knew what came next. “Honey, we can’t have our picnic.”

The grief filled her up.

———— When they got to the driveway, Kay’s father unbuckled his snowshoes and told Kay to do the same. He put hers in the trunk with the rest of the gear. He kept his gun.

“Will they be mad at Uncle Dave?” she asked.

“Yes.” “Will they call the police?”

“No.” He closed the trunk. “I have to talk to Dave for a minute.” He walked Dave over to the pickup truck where Daisy Duke had been and kept his back toward Kay. She couldn’t see what he was saying, but the expression on Dave’s face reminded her of how she felt when she was ge!ing yelled at.

“Kay,” her father called. She went to him. “When we get inside, I want you to stay in the kitchen while I talk to Marie.”

She nodded.

“And you need to let me or Marie tell Bill what happened. Ok? If Bill asks you, you tell him you got tired and we brought you back to the house.”

Kay nodded again.

“Do you understand?”

She looked at Dave.

“Dave will stay here. It’s important, Kay.” “I understand.”

They stepped up to the door that Marie was already opening. “Back so soon?” Marie looked around them. “Where’s Dave?”

“By the car,” Kay’s father answered.

“Well there’s three of you, then, and Bill’s in the basement. No one’s hurt.”

Kay’s father winced. “Can we come in? I need to talk to you.”

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winked at Kay. “Every li!le bit helps.” Marie stubbed out the cigare!e she was holding and motioned for Kay’s father to follow her out of the room.

When they came back, Marie wasn’t smiling. “There’s an old tarp in the shed, hanging behind the wood pile. There might be an old plastic sled there, too. It’d be easier if you had more than just the tarp.”

“Thank you. We shouldn’t be more than an hour.” He looked at Kay. “You’ll be okay?” But he wasn’t really asking.

“Okay.” She realized that it wasn’t the right answer. “Yes.” “I’m sorry, Marie,” her father said.

“Me, too.”

———— “Well,” Marie said a#er Kay’s father shut the door. “Why don’t we get some of those layers off. You’re going to get mighty warm.”

Kay pulled at her mi!ens and placed them carefully on the table.

Then she took off her hat, coat, and boots.

“You going to leave your snow pants on? Your dad might not be back for a bit.”

Kay hesitated. Adults usually knew be!er, but she didn’t want to take them off. “I want to be ready when he comes.”

“Okay.” Marie looked at her watch. “It’s almost lunchtime. Are you hungry?”

Kay shook her head.

“Thirsty?”

She shook her head again, then remembered her manners. “No, thank you. We packed salami and bu!er sandwiches. And apples and hot cocoa.”

“Oh, I love salami and bu!er sandwiches.” Marie folded her hands.

“Well then. Just some coffee. I’ve got a pot on the stove.”

Kay looked at Marie with disbelief.

Marie laughed. “You don’t drink coffee.”

Kay shook her head. “Coffee makes you short.”

Marie snorted with laughter. A#er a second, Kay realized that

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Marie was short. “Oh. I didn’t mean—” “It’s fine, honey.” She smiled. “ Lots of kids drank coffee when I was growing up. I had coffee and a sugar doughnut for breakfast every morning. But they know more about that now.”

Marie went to the stove, where a white coffeepot was percolating.

She took funny-looking tweezers from a cupboard along with a small pitcher that she filled with cream and brought them to the table. Then she took out two teacups: a pink old-fashioned cup with a gold rim and matching saucer and a green cup and saucer with angels. Marie’s hands trembled as she set the pink cup in front of Kay. “I bet you like pink.”

Marie used the tweezers to pick up two cubes of sugar from a bowl half-buried in papers and put the cubes in Kay’s cup. She put two more in her cup. Then she poured cream for Kay and coffee for herself. “You can drink that as it is and get all the sugar at the bo!om. Or you can stir it up, and have sweet cream all the way through.”

Kay liked the sound of Marie’s spoon stirring in her cup, so she did the same. When the sandy sound was gone, she took a sip. “It tastes like peaches and cream.”

Marie smiled. “It’s like summer in a cup.”

The trembling in Marie’s hands became more pronounced and then Marie started tapping her foot, and finally she just set her cup down. “It wasn’t a fawn that your uncle killed.”

“Was it a doe?” Kay said. That was worse.

Marie shook her head. “It was Daisy Duke. Bill’s baby.”

Kay set her cup down. Cold and hot rushed up her neck. “He shot Bill’s dog?” She thought of the terrible noise. Kay put her elbows on the table. She couldn’t see right.

“There’s a law that you can shoot a dog if it’s chasing a deer. And that’s what Daisy Duke was doing. Your dad didn’t want you knowing, but I don’t think it’ll be a secret once we tell Bill.”

“Why did he shoot it?” The question used all of Kay’s breath.

“The deer was too tired. If Dave hadn’t shot Daisy, she would’ve killed the deer.” Marie straightened up a pile of mail that was sliding into the middle of the table. Next to it was a wooden napkin holder with the name “Larry” carved into it and drips in the varnish. Kay fastened her SHELLEY BERG

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eyes to it. The black squirrel hadn’t been lucky a#er all. Marie picked up a cigare!e between her thumb and index finger, like a man, and lit it. She smoked it down to the filter before she rose from her chair.

“Don’t smoke,” she told Kay sternly, and then she so#ened. “Your dad is bringing you up right.” She opened a door off of the hallway. “You stay up here, okay?” She closed the door behind her and Kay heard her shoes retreating.

The first noise sounded like a hammer dropping. The second was a noise like a toolbox being thrown. “Jesus Christ, Bill,” Marie yelled from below. “Get a hold of yourself.” Then there were lots of things being thrown and Marie and Bill screaming swear words, some that Kay hadn’t learned yet. She covered her ears. A board splintered and someone was crying. It sounded like Marie. Kay pushed her chair back and pressed her fingertips into the table. Marie had told her to stay but she didn’t think she could. She needed to leave.

She was shaking as she pulled her coat off the chair and struggled to put it on. Her hat and mi!ens sca!ered on the floor. She picked them up and dropped them again. There was pounding from below.

Kay pulled at her coat zipper too quickly and snagged it halfway up.

She tried to get it loose but managed only to get it more caught. She put her hat on instead and stuffed her mi!ens into her pockets.

Glass sha!ered, then more glass. Kay froze as heavy footsteps started up toward the kitchen. They weren’t Marie’s. She tried to breathe but her chest wouldn’t expand. Kay put on her boots. Her feet jammed the lining down but she didn’t have time to fix it. The footsteps had paused behind that door off the hallway. Any second they would come through it.

Kay pulled at the door leading outside, but the plastic rug piled up underneath it and it opened only a crack. She yanked at the door desperately. She had just managed to make an opening large enough to squeeze through when Bill emerged. His face was red and sweating.

He was sobbing. Their eyes met for a moment before she wriggled her way out. “Wait!” he rasped.

She was across the driveway, crouched low behind the pickup, before Bill came out a#er her. She didn’t think he could see her. It was

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only a li!le farther to one of the rusty cars. When Bill turned his back, she ran to it, then to the next, until she made it to the open door of the barn. Bill still hadn’t seen her as she ran through. Kay skirted around to the back of the outbuilding. Bill was calling her from the driveway.

“Sweetheart.” He sounded as though he was still crying. “Come back, honey. I won’t hurt you.” Up ahead she saw the snowmobile trail leading into the woods. She needed to find her dad.

The trail was packed down enough to support some of her weight, but it was difficult without snowshoes. She broke through once, twice.

She remembered how she and Mel made their way on their hands and knees along the big snow banks at home. Their knees would punch through but they didn’t sink. Kay’s fingers were raw as she pulled her mi!ens on and began crawling. She got several feet before breaking through. But Bill’s voice was ge!ing louder now, closer. She would be easy to see in her orange coat and pink pants once he got around the back of the outbuilding. She plunged off the trail where the snow was already churned up and wouldn’t show her footsteps and waded toward a fallen tree. She used her hands to fill in the snow behind her. Kay scrambled over the tree trunk and burrowed in as quickly as she could, covering herself completely. Only her face showed. She stared up into the sky as she struggled to quiet her breathing. Bill’s voice was close.

The cracklings of winter were magnified and muffled at the same time. Kay heard Bill’s boots breaking through the snow on the trail.

He swore and stopped. Above Kay there was a patch of blue, a hole torn in the sky. If she held perfectly still, her body would rise through the opening.

“Come inside. It’s too cold out here,” Bill called. “Damn snow’s too deep.” Kay’s lungs burned. Any minute he would hear her breathing.

“Come inside, li!le girl. It’s cold.” But he sounded unsure now, as though he was calling to no one. “It’s cold.” His steps began retreating.

“Damn snow.” They retreated more. When she heard him call again, he wasn’t as close. At the barn maybe. By now, her legs were going numb.

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her head she had no idea what time it was.

Kay got four steps from the fallen tree before she heard his voice again. She felt sick. He had gone around her somehow and was in the woods. He must have put on snowshoes. She dropped into a ball but knew it wouldn’t do much good. She was easy to see out in the open.

Any minute he would be there.

Then she heard a second voice, but familiar. She waded cautiously toward the trail. The voice got clearer. She looked around her. She didn’t see Bill. “Dad?” she called out so#ly. She crept forward, the snow to her waist. “Dad?” At first there was silence, then her father. “Kay?” She pushed forward. They were coming now, Dave and her father.

Her father seemed as tall as one of the trees. “Dad!” Her voice broke.

For a moment she forgot about Bill.

Her father knelt in front of her, looking helpless. “Kay.” He wiped her cheeks and nose with his gloves while she took deep shuddering breaths. “What are you doing here?”

“They . . . were fighting.” She could hardly speak. “In the . . . basement.”

“Marie and Bill?” Dave asked.

Kay nodded.

“Marie told Bill about Daisy Duke?”

Kay nodded.

Her father took her by the shoulders and smoothed her arms down her sides. It reminded her of the way he held a sunfish when he was removing a hook, smoothing his hands down the outstretched gills and keeping them firmly against the fish. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

“He was . . . a#er me.”

“Bill came a#er you?”

She tried to breathe without hiccuping. “He was . . . crying.”

Her father held her gaze. “Where was Marie?” “. . . the basement.” Kay started crying again.

“Did you see her?”

Kay shook her head.

Kay’s father stood and hugged her to him. Her arms felt impossibly heavy.

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“Could Bill be dangerous?” Dave asked quietly.

Her father didn’t speak for several minutes. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He looked down at Kay, then toward the farmhouse. “I don’t know.” He studied the ground. “I need to find Marie or Bill. Sort this all out.” Kay’s father looked at his brother. “You should stay here with Kay.” “I don’t want you to go,” Kay said.

“I know, Kay.” He made circles on her back, trying to calm her. “But I’ve known Bill and Marie for years. Bill’s not going to do anything. I bet he’s si!ing at the kitchen table now, waiting for us.”

She shook her head.

“I have to go, Kay. I need you to be brave.”

“No.” But he was going to go. She knew that.

He took off his snowshoes when he reached the outbuilding and leaned them up against the wall. As he disappeared from view, Kay began counting the seconds: one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand . . . She was at thirty when she heard her father calling. “Marie! Bill! It’s John.”

Kay started again. This time she was at fi#y. “John!” It was Marie’s voice. Kay looked up. Dave closed his eyes. Marie was all right. “Is Kay with you, John?”

“She is,” her father returned.

“Thank heavens!” Kay heard Marie say. “Thank heavens.”

Kay was shivering. Dave worked on her zipper until he could get it closed all the way and then hugged her close. A#er a long while, her father called from the barn and they went to meet him.

“Marie’s got a bad cut on her face,” her father explained. “She says she’s going to be fine, but that we should go home.”

Dave pressed into the corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and frowned.

“Kay, we need to bring Daisy the rest of the way to the barn. I need you to stay here. Just one more time.”

Kay’s teeth cha!ered from fear and cold. Her father rubbed at her arms and torso. “Bill’s in the house. He won’t come outside. Marie said so.”

Kay blinked.

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in the barn and sat her down. “It’s a li!le warmer here. You’ll be safe.”

She was suddenly exhausted, and when her father and Dave returned, she hadn’t moved. The body of Daisy Duke was covered with her uncle’s coat.

———— Marie was waiting for them in the driveway. She had a blue parka pulled around her. Her boots were unlaced. She was holding a washcloth to her cheek. Kay had never seen so much blood.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Marie said to her. “Bill didn’t mean it.” Kay tried to smile but couldn’t get the muscles to work.

“You’re going to need stitches,” Dave said to Marie. “We need to bring you to the hospital.”

But Marie shook her head vehemently. “No. I really am fine. I really am. Just some ice will do the trick.” She tried to wink. “In a li!le whiskey.”

Kay’s father smiled so#ly. “He’s right, Marie.”

“I’ll be fine. He’ll sleep it off.”

Kay’s father looked up past the house. “Doesn’t your son live in town? Or your sister? I’d feel be!er dropping you someplace for the night.”

Marie’s expression made it clear that she wouldn’t go.

While her father and uncle packed up, Kay got into the backseat of the car. She would let her uncle sit in front. She se!led into her usual place, behind the driver’s seat.

Her father had given Kay the rucksack with their lunches in it, even though she wasn’t really hungry. She took out the sandwich with her initials. It had extra bu!er and the salami cut thick. The sandwich was nearly frozen, and tasteless. She let it thaw in her mouth, squishing it against the roof with her tongue. At the bo!om of the rucksack, under the thermos of hot cocoa, she noticed a bag of chocolate chip cookies. A surprise for their picnic.

When they were ready to leave, Kay’s father opened his car door but didn’t get in. “Are you sure we can’t take you someplace?” he asked Marie. Marie was curled inward, like a dried birch leaf.

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“I’ll be fine, John. Now get.” She waved him away.

Kay’s father started the engine and let the defrost run on high as he watched Marie walk to the house and up the stairs to the kitchen door. He waited for her to go in before he shi#ed the car into reverse.

It was important, he’d taught Kay, to make sure a person was safe inside before you le# them.

Uncle Dave was staring through the windshield at the doors of the barn, now closed. Kay turned to watch out her window. The world moved away from her as her father backed out of the driveway, before it rushed forward again.

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J O H N - M I C H A E L P. B L O O M Q U I S T

Defence for the Prodigal Son If I confess anything, it’ll be the world tastes good. Bike rides on the highway beside semis passing saguaros in an areola of flowers & a ra!lesnake’s infrared search for body heat involve my thirst at the trough—the dowsing rod dipping, a moon tugging the aquifer’s mouth.

I walk into the desert & it changes my name. I see a damn turn on its spine, fish on the other side don’t believe in defeat, slapping like restraints against a bed.

The prickly pear shot-gunned to sponge still curls its anthers to my fingers.

I sleep in a temple & cannot turn back.

I see the blood writing on the walls— my name adds to the cry of a city where men turn their mothers in.

I am dust, ashes. I take word with the Lord, abiding the streets till my voice tears the night asunder.

I harvest the corporeal lights & reap the suffocations of difference—assenting to life even in death, the holiness & sex of the mantis. Swimming bu!erfly like a stone skips through its weight, taught me the wager of breath is loyal to no surface.

I eat the fa!ened swine. U!erly I breast the earth, singing its turquoise skyline.

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Landscape with the Fall of Peter If I learned to shoulder the clouds like the crane, could I too, walk on water?

The moon is tempted by the lobed wings of bats to repay the voodoo doll a crone loves as her child with sight.

How do we harvest the water, toss seed to stone and weed, yet keep the birds well fed? Asteroids scarcely miss us and the eye spots in the sun flash their whips. Why does beauty keeps us when death calls her kin? I offer a coin on the rail road of a So Cal night— boozed and high beyond belief, I ran naked into the sea a#er nobody.

Look how we feed: ca!le scream on the spit, making meat of us all.

Oh bright cosmos, the clockwork traced in the backswimmer’s rest holds my face across the waves. I’m too vain to be home in change. A pilot ignoring his gauges in the mist parallels the fate of a match, its sulfuric gasp eating and eaten by wind: our vapor blues the welder’s torch, caressing a moon to wax, refusing a world hinged by accident. As if Daedalus could harbor bi!erness against his son, or Christ for calling his name— the ice inside me dies slow as a snake by hunger. The sea concerned with its own business vanishing the splash, Daedalus forgives Icarus, and Icarus, Icarus.

J O H N - M I C H A E L P. B L O O M Q U I S T

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Leviathan —a"er “The Crucifixion,” by Frantisek Bilek As Christ closes his eyes, the breath raises him to the ceiling like the night we ate Peyote and jumped the fence to the Jacuzzi. Providing for my passage— she taught me to wash long hair, gliding my hands like a swallow through the grass, a so# grip on her hips to receive the waves of her back rising like smoke coils the room. The fever within her ribs, a wick undressing the candles, a thief breaking the window to enter his own home. Her body thinned to a nail I couldn’t pry out. The IVs in her arms, a feeding tube at her side.

We give nothing we cannot take, or lose— the heels and flask she asked me to hold, the hives on her knee, steam rising in reams. Who is to blame for the world, who can justify its carnival? In the hospital, she couldn’t sleep, blue eyes siphoning an ocean through a cave, veins raised with unwashed blood—I considered every breath drawing the ceiling near my denial, her mouth ringed in foam.

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M.J. GETTE

Everglades 1 archeologists unearth what no one le# for them— they blow sand from each artifact: chipped lapis bowls and rusted axes protest the raw touch

2 they say worldless oysters built an ossified island from the sea tossed out sunk down they speak their shame as blue devils in pieces

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3 (I held on to a worn-out wish that the world be as it was dropped love like a coin in a well then traded the wish for my reflection in the water)

4 archeologists look backwards at the byzantine drained for its fortune at the end they find the fortune (valueless) (sca!ered)

5 one piece says back then a plume trader invaded the rookery (and I shot you down) M.J. GETTE

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6 another piece the legend goes every hunter loves her kill so much that she becomes it/s prey— (I cannot move on I cannot move on—)

7 the midden grew with bones and bullet shells (the unwanted) (the secret) (the alone) as evidence that the broken builds— (my refuse saved me from the tides and time and time again: salve but no savior)

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8 archeologists discover what they already knew: some things don’t survive. some things last as gravestones to extinction or a feather in your cap (now that I know, can’t I unruin the ruins? can’t I put the water back?)

9 the water reflects whatever stands above it until the body breaks through (a wish) (a bowl) (bone out of water)

10 reliving how it got there (I promise— even if you were the last man I would not fish for you M.J. GETTE

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I’d let what I’d thrown away become my bastion building up and I would wait there squa!ing with my weapon while the waves

came in)

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Contributors

Spring/Summer 2016 V O LU M E 65.3

B R A N D O N B A R R E T T is a practicing cardiologist living in rural Virginia with his wife and son. His stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Cossack Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Jersey Devil Press, and elsewhere.

H E A T H E R B A R T L E T T holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College. Her work can be found in Barrow Street, Connotation Press, The Nervous Breakdown, Nimrod, Ninth Le#er, PoemMemoirStory, and other journals. She is a lecturer in English at the State University of New York at Cortland. She lives and writes in Ithaca, NY. S H E L L E Y B E R G ’s stories have appeared in Phoebe and Passages North. She lives with her husband and two children in Dedham, Massachuse!s, where she is working on her first novel.

J O H N - M I C H A E L P. B L O O M Q U I S T is a poet living in Richmond, VA where he

is a dual-genre MFA candidate in Poetry and CNF at Virginia Commonwealth University. His poetry has been published in Third Coast, The Southeast Review, The Tampa Review and more. He is the founder of poetryfortrash.com, a public arts project in which poems are exchanged for trash. He is the Larry Levis Fellow at VCU. In the heart of Oakland, California, M O N I C A C A N I L A O spends her days stitching, painting, printing, and breathing life into the refuse that dominates our time and place. Moving across media, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone, Canilao makes a delicate visual record of the personal and communal.

She received a BFA from California College of Arts and Cra#s and has shown in galleries, community spaces, and abandoned places worldwide. In 2013 she was awarded the Fleishhacker Foundations Eurkea fellowship. Her recent and ongoing projects include a collaboration with National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey in the Sonoran Desert’s Slab City, a collaborator with Seafoam Palace which is a Museum of Curiosities in Detroit, a solo show at Subliminal Projects in LA, and the show Witch Wife with artist Swoon at the Chandran Gallery in San Francisco.

K H R I S T O P H E R F L A C K is an earth scratcher, tinkerer, and cook. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gastronomica, Alimentum, The Boston Globe, Briarpatch, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and other publications.

He lives on his first-year homestead in Maine with his fianceé and innumerable iterations of wild things.

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M . J . G E T T E is an MFA candidate in Poetry and Anthropology minor at the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthro/ Poetics, BOAAT, Tupelo Quarterly, Fugue, Eratio, Indefinite Space, otoliths, and elsewhere. She won the 2015 Gloria Anzaldua Poetry Prize for her chapbook The Walls They Le" Us, forthcoming by Newfound. Earlier in 2015 she was awarded a writer’s residency with Arquetopia, Oaxaca for a project in architecture, culture and language, alongside the Marcella DeBourg Fellowship.

R Y A N H A B E R M E Y E R earned his MFA from the University of Massachuse!s and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Los Angeles Review, Fiction Southeast, Cha#ahoochee Review, Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Dislocate, Mid-American Review, and others.

M A T T I Z Z I lives in East Boston. His stories have been published in Post Road Magazine, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. A short play of his appears in the current issue of Third Coast. He is originally from Rhode Island.

T . K . L E E is an award-winning member of the Dramatists Guild of America and

the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, among others. A published writer of Pushcart-nominated fiction, in addition to award-winning poetry, he is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women.

P A U L L I N C Z A K received an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellow in Fiction. His writing has appeared in Salt Hill and Stone Canoe.

M A R T I N O M A R A Z Z I teaches Italian literature at the State University of Milan, Italy, and has been Visiting Professor at NYU and Fellow of the Italian Academy at Columbia. His fiction, all in Italian, includes two collections of short stories: La fine del Purgatorio, and Filogenesi (Sedizioni, 2008 and 2010), and most recently the novel La finta (Nerosubianco, 2015). Among his scholarly books: Danteum (Cesati, 2015); Voices of Italian America (Fordham, 2012); A occhi aperti (FrancoAngeli, 2011).

He lives in Milan with his family.

CONTRIBUTORS

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M . B . M C L A T C H E Y is a widely published poet with an extensive background in literature, philosophy, and ancient and modern languages. She is Poet Laureate of Florida’s Volusia County and Associate Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. She was awarded the 2011 American Poet Prize

by The American Poetry Journal and was a 2015 Poet Laureate nominee for the state of Florida. Her debut poetry collection The Lame God was awarded the May Swenson Poetry Award by Utah State University Press in 2013. In 2014 she was awarded the FLP Chapbook Prize by Finishing Line Press for her poetry collection Advantages of Believing.

K Y L E N O R W O O D is the winner of the 2014 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His science-fiction narrative poem “ Cyrano” appears online in Devilfish Review. His poems have also recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lake (U.K.), Light, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology Poems for a Liminal Age. He lives in Los Angeles, where he earned a doctorate in English at UCLA. K A T H E R I N E R O B I N S O N holds an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and she lives and teaches in Baltimore. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, The Common and elsewhere. Her essays have been published by Ploughshares and The Poetry Foundation.

K A R E N S K O L F I E L D ’s book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry. She has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, New England Public Radio, Massachuse!s Cultural Council, Ucross Foundation, Split This Rock, Hedgebrook, and Vermont Studio Center.

L A U R E N G O O D W I N S L A U G H T E R is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness (forthcoming, October 2015). Her fiction and poetry have recently appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, Hayden’s Ferry, Kenyon Review Online, Valapariso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, as well as the anthologies The Doll Collection and Belles’ Le#ers 2. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and will soon take on the editorship of PoemMemoirStory.

D O C S U D S was born in Wisconsin and currently resides in Quy Nhon, Vietnam.

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His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Flyway, Lunch Ticket, New Delta Review, Paper Darts, Zone 3 and elsewhere.

R O N A L D T O B I A S lives on an old sheep ranch in Philipsburg, Montana. His tenth book, Behemoth: The History of the Elephant in America was published

by HarperCollins in 2013. “How Newton Learned Poetry” and “Jubilee” are from his first collection of poetry, Ranchman’s Handbook. He’s currently at work on a second volume, Granite County.

G . C . W A L D R E P is the author most recently of Testament (BOA Editions, 2015) and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013). He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

CONTRIBUTORS

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