Crack the Spine - Issue 178

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 178

Issue 178 January 6, 2016 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art “Dream” by Kate LaDew Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art.

CONTENTS Kate LaDew Blind Trees

Alexander Payne Morgan

The Slave Owner’s Daughter Pays a Condolence Call

Bart Bultman

Clothes That Don’t Fit

Sara N. Gardiner ENG 103

Benjamin Harnett

Natalia

Rachel Crawford Night Sweat

JD Duff

Rapine

Ivan De Monbrison Separation

Kate LaDew Blind Trees

It was really dark and it scared Billy. Really very dark. Yes, really very very-made him think of when he was young and every time he turned off the light to go to sleep started remembering ghost stories. Every ghost story he’d ever read or heard or, well, just every one and his sock feet would hit the floor and his hand would hit the light switch and they didn’t go away, the remembered stories, but they settled, soft in his mind and it was okay again.

It was that kind of dark exactly.

But it was okay too. This kind of dark, because he was with Keegan and Keegan couldn’t tell a ghost story without laughing. Each laugh made a little dark go away or maybe a little light shine--A little light shine Billy decided.

More positive.

So they kept walking and it got brighter but not enough to keep Keegan from running into a tree. A deep little sigh escaped, as if it were a complete surprise.

Billy giggled. Giggled really, like a little boy, not because it was funny necessarily--Billy hated when people laughed at him, watching him being clumsy, often, all the time--not funny, no, but just the surprise. As if it never occurred to Keegan that hitting a tree while walking drunk in woods they’d never been was a foregone conclusion. As if he couldn’t believe it.

Billy giggled again, kept going, until he heard Keegan curse. Loud. It echoed.

Well, maybe--Billy was sure actually, quite positive--it didn’t echo but seemed so in his mind. Everything seemed loud there, wondered if maybe something wasn’t wrong. Alcohol dulled the senses. He should be deaf by now. He should

never have heard Keegan’s sigh, his deep little sigh like wonderment, or the sound the leaves made when they hit Keegan’s backside. He did though and he’s glad now--confused, maybe things reversed in his system, it would suit him-- but glad and Billy kneels down where he assumes Keegan is and smiles.

He doesn’t see, can’t, even with his laughs lighting everything up, and it would only irritate Keegan, to be hurt alone and Billy smiling.

“Well,” he says, as if that explained everything.

“Well,” Billy says back but doesn’t move.

“I guess I could live here,” Keegan sighs and it makes sense to Billy. He doesn’t feel like moving either. Not really. Seemed a waste. He was here with Keegan and that was good enough. No need to move.

“I’ll live here too then.”

“Well yes,” Keegan says, and smiles. At least Billy thinks he smiles. Wants him to have smiled, like it was implied. Keegan living here implied Billy would too. Of course. Well yes.

He’s still sitting there, in front of the tree, and so Billy sits down, patting the earth with his hand, smoothing a spot that only brings up the wet dirt, fingers moist and he doesn’t care. Now that he’s beside Keegan, in the woods, in the dark, just a little drunk, and it’s so cool--He didn’t notice but it’s cold, chilly like his father says. “Chilly today, hot tamale”. Billy laughs and forgets about the cold but doesn’t think about his father. He doesn’t so much anymore, being away from home he’s sort of forgotten. But because he’s not thinking of his father, Billy can’t feel guilty, only dizzy and maybe a little sick--happy.

“What’s funny?” Keegan asks and Billy looks at him, hoping Keegan can see.

Hoping he knows it wasn’t Keegan that was funny, he would never laugh at Keegan, unless he wanted him too.

And so he says, soft, “Nothing,” because it’s true and places his hand over what amazingly turns out to be Keegan’s hand and it’s warm and dry and he hears Keegan laugh a little too.

“Can’t see the tree for the forest, eh?” He laughs again and Billy laughs and it’s bright and it’s okay and they keep sitting there in the woods, like they were at home, watching TV or talking or just being there, comfortable.

“I don’t know how I got here,” Keegan says and moves his hand over Billy’s, like he’s using it as a landmark, something to tell him he’s still on familiar land and not lost, not lost at all in woods he’s never been.

“Walked,” and Billy isn’t joking because that’s all he can remember, walking and thinking of when he was little and ghost stories and Keegan and how bright it was.

“Nice here,” and Billy nods even though Keegan can’t see him agreeing and neither moves and it really is nice and Billy wonders why. It’s cold and damp but good somehow, because he’d never been there, maybe. And when he finally went--finally because if it was nice, he should have gone before--he went with Keegan and they both found it together, at the same time.

“It’s so dark,” Keegan says and his hand flinches a little. Billy isn’t sure if hands can flinch but it moves like it’s surprised and he touches the underside of Keegan’s pinky with his own and feels Keegan’s hand relax.

He shouldn’t be warm but Billy is. Maybe it’s the alcohol but he would rather it was something else. Keegan’s looking at the tree--Billy thinks, assumes, Keegan’s still, he’s never still--like it will move any moment, like it did just that, moved into Keegan’s way. If it did, Billy loves this tree. He wants to thank it, embrace it but he would have to move and that means Keegan’s hand would move and he likes it like this, just like this, and so he stays where he is, looking

at Keegan looking at the tree. He needs to speak. Suddenly, he really needs to.

“When you laugh I can see,” Billy says and if he wasn’t drunk, if he wasn’t drunk and cold and warm and in unknown woods with Keegan it might seem stupid. But Keegan’s here, beside him, using his hand as a landmark, looking at Billy now, and he’s sure he’s smiling and it’s okay. It’s okay.

Alexander Payne Morgan

The Slave Owner’s Daughter Pays a Condolence Call Savannah, 1953 Eight-year-old me with my ancient granny knocking.

Little black girl greets us at the door.

“White Lady come to see you,” she calls out over her thin shoulder.

I never knew I was white.

Hannah comes, equally ancient, riverbank wrinkles Tybee-cloud hair whose deceased daughter tended my granny, helped her scrub and cook and clean.

Hannah welcomes her unexpected dowager, my grandmother powdered skin, ash-cast hair, quivers on my arm, settles in the room’s best chair.

Hannah takes up a cane-bottomed seat, but I have to stand, pinned in place

by Granny’s grip.

These elders talk and nod and talk.

I would so rather go and play.

With an owner’s unselfconscious ease, my Grandmother weaves condolence, compliment, reminiscence..

“Weren’t things so much simpler when we were girls?”

Hannah nods and smiles, coughs, chokes, recovers.

Hand-stitched angel dolls Negro and Caucasian mixed peer down from shelf and mantel stand behind glass-fronted cases line the floor like heaven’s breadline.

Even I know these angels aren’t happy birds.

They weave their own self threads, hum their own self tunes, hate not having teeth.

Little black girl stands out the front foyer, looks in at me, smiles, but we can’t play.

Bart Bultman

Clothes That Don’t Fit

The rain came down as if the drops were racing themselves, winners were not awarded though, they simply mingled together as if the earth was a party while the earth had had enough, and tried to send the rain elsewhere. The same thing, the day before, happened the same way.

“Miserable,” said Taylor watching the rain make the windows cry.

“Absolutely miserable. Pathetic man cannot survive on bread alone. Bread must have been a metaphor for the Earth, because I don’t like either soggy.”

He turned around.

“Are you listening?”

“Almost,” said Aaron.

“What? You can’t hear me over the rain?”

“No, I’m trying to drink my coffee.”

“Don’t drink it. This day has no purpose, other than to give us the perfect example for why bear’s hibernate.”

“Bear’s hibernate in the winter because it’s cold.”

“I’m cold.”

A draft wafted around the window by Taylor, moving like a cold water current, unseen. He did not fear it, and while he watched the rain come down in abundance he was making his stand.

Aaron poured sugar into the bottom of his mug, measuring by sight, then hid it with coffee to the top, pouring fast, then slow. The sudden rush helped the

sugar dissolve, and the tempered pace at the end made clean-up unnecessary.

Unlike the rain, Aaron knew when to stop.

It was not too bitter, nor too sweet. And most pleasing, it delighted upon his naked tongue like a hot shower in cold, cold December.

“Coffee?” said Aaron.” It’s warm.”

“No.” Aaron drank multiple cups in the morning. After each he checked the sugar remnants gathered at the bottom of the mug and laddered up the side he drank from. It was easier not to stir the sugar in, so it was hard for him to do otherwise. If he needed more sugar, he poured more in before the coffee. And if he had some left-over he washed it out with water and stoically sent it down the sink where it looked like he was getting rid of sediments. Sugar was cheap.

But life had no condiment that it could call sugar’s compliment. The closest was friendship, but since you didn’t pay money for it, and if you did it was an artificial friendship that needed constant seasoning to freshen it from spoiling, it was hard to see how it had anything in common with any other commodity.

“I made a full pot,” said Aaron.

“You always do. Just like it’s always raining. It did this yesterday, remember?”

“I thought it was bright and sunny yesterday.” Aaron had spent the previous day on the road, driving back from his parents. The day before that was the 4 th of July. But there were no fireworks. It had rained.

“You know you brought the rain with you.”

“Yep. I lassoed the clouds and steered clear of any road with an overpass.”

“A rope dangling from an overpass. There’s a pretty sight.”

“There’s an undertaking in your conviction, which is short of action, all the way short.”

“You’re right. The rain’s accommodating, though. It wants me to go outside and drown myself in any of the hundred puddles that are big enough to fit my face.”

It was Sunday. Some places gave their employees an extended weekend with Monday off. But not Taylor’s, nor Aaron’s. The disagreeable weather was supposed to clear up in the early morning hours and give way to a strong sun that would seem to pull the evening out longer. The weatherman was predicting that Monday would feel like the longest day of the year, the day the 4th should have been.

There was a problem in the kitchen that Aaron didn’t want to bring up, but he did.

“We don’t have any food.”

Taylor watched the rain run down the window in strands that plastered to the glass and wouldn’t move because he didn’t want to touch it, like wet hair in the shower. Darker hair than his. And longer. Much longer.

“I’m too disgusted to eat.”

“Well, I think, one of us needs to go.”

“Have fun,” said Taylor.

“No, it makes more sense if you do it.”

“File that poor logic of yours, for chapter eleven.”

“Let’s not go that far.”

“Okay, I’ll stay here.”

“No, you go,” said Aaron. “Unlike me, you’re miserable. And also unlike me you can’t get any more miserable. Out of the two of us, there is really only one option.”

Aaron drank a necessary amount of his coffee. Less than a glutton would, but more than a healthy person would. Alcohol, and how it slows the mind and opens wide the appetite, is the nearest thing to coffee’s antithesis. Aaron, contentedly, could drink coffee for three-quarters of the day, and not feel hungry.

“I’d rather have to accurately count the raindrops, than go out in them.”

The kitchen was messy but organized. The sink, like an empty swimming pool, had accrued the debris of dirty plates, the apartment’s worth, along with a number of forks, knives, spoons, but not a matching amount, and more plates than the most useful utensil, the fork. That was how Aaron found it when he returned from his parent’s, when Taylor said instead of going to his, he hadn’t.

Aaron poured sugar. A timekeeper would have counted for two seconds.

Then he filled his mug with coffee.

Taylor crossed his arms and bit his lip on purpose, making the effort to make it hurt a touch. “Do you think the weather knows what month it is?”

That year had brought a summer that felt like fall.

“When I’m cold,” said Aaron. “It’s usually because I’m hungry.”

“Clothes,” said Taylor. “I’m going to put more clothes on.”

“A rain coat?”

Taylor’s room was at the end of the hall. The bare walls echoed his voice. “I’m not hungry.”

In two connecting slurps, the cadence people might use to honk their horns, Aaron drank some of his piping hot coffee. It slid down his throat like an ember warming all the way.

Taylor came back still wearing his shorts with his bare legs showing and his blonde hairs hard to see. His feet were bare, he had not decided to put on socks

or slippers, and his only alteration was to fit a grey sweater over his T-shirt.

Like all clothes too big, the grey sweater was very comfortable. But it looked a bit ridiculous, like Taylor was wearing a lampshade.

“Nice dress,” said Aaron.

“Hail,” said Taylor. “The type of precip for Aaron’s comments.”

He was talking to the rain. As if it was applause, it applauded like a hundred little fingers clapping on the window.

“And I hate hail,” said Taylor.

“More than rain?”

“Let the rain die for all I care.”

“And the hail, how would that be effected?”

“Everything’s affected. No rain, no crops, no food, no groceries, no need for me to do anything.”

“Any need for you to do the dishes?”

“Let the dishes die for all I care.”

Aaron stood up. He thought it was a good idea to get another cup of coffee, this one for Taylor, and to force it upon him.

“I’ll tell those dishes,” said Aaron.

While he poured Taylor’s coffee, it was only convenient to replenish his own.

Some dripped from the sprout down the side of Aaron’s mug. The mug was white and the coffee thinned to an unpleasing brown. He wiped it with his finger, and like it was frosting, licked his finger.

“I brought you something.”

He set Taylor’s mug on the windowsill. Taylor looked down on it.

“I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want you to waste it.”

“Well, don’t rape me with it.”

Aaron noticed a long, directionless strand of hair, black, on Taylor’s sweater.

He pulled it off trying to pinch it and nothing else. Taylor turned around.

“What the hell?”

“Nothing.”

Down at his side, behind his leg, Aaron let the strand fall. Like the raindrops it would get lost when it reached the bottom, and then returned to his chair, all the way on the other side of the room.

“Dirty raindrops,” said Taylor.

“You would think,” Aaron started to say but then lifted his mug, and drank and swallowed. “That dark clouds would make dark raindrops, but it must be a heredity thing where it skips a generation.”

“The coffee.”

“I agree. It needs you to drink it.”

“It’s the dirty raindrops,” said Taylor.

“Don’t pillory my coffee.”

“Fine, if it’s your coffee, I’m not drinking it.”

“Consider me as one of those end-of-the-aisle free-sample workers you see at the grocery store. I want you to have what I’m giving out.”

“Those are stupid,” said Taylor. “If rain is pure evil, they’re the sponge. They plug my arteries.

“The sink has a plugged artery.”

“Its terminal, I can’t help it. That’s what I am. Helpless.”

“Just go heavy on the dish soap. The bubbles will keep you from seeing the water.”

“The bubbles, they look like clouds.” For a second or two, what was short of a full assessment, Taylor looked at Aaron.

“Do you want me to tell you what I think of the clouds?”

“No, but how about I tell you about the sink.”

The rain, as steady as time, hit and splashed against the tops of everything. It produced sound, but it wasn’t a musical pursuit, it was a discovery. The rain was learning what notes it could make against what surfaces. As old as time, it had been playing this game. Not once improving.

“Well?” said Aaron, waiting for a response.

Taylor shrugged his shoulders, no more affirmative than the rain’s pursuit of music.

“The sink,” said Aaron. He was caffeinated enough to be the wind, and a strong enough wind to direct the conversation even if it went off that or this course. “Is a car wash, not a parking garage.”

“Like the raindrops, you’re all wrong. It’s a graveyard—and the only happy thing I can imagine right now is silence. A graveyard must be where I want to go.”

“You’ll find the dish soap underneath the graveyard in that thing that opens up. We normal folks call it a cupboard.”

Like looking at a map and not the terrain, Taylor studied the rain not really seeing it.

“It’s all going down.”

He fell into the chair letting it catch him, or not. It was all the same.

The obedient chair caught him, sliding back an inch. Taylor looked over his shoulder. The chair didn’t hit the wall. He found something on the chair and pinched it, and pulled it off holding it up.

Dot, as she was called, her birth name Dorothy, was shorter than Taylor, he liked that. And it was a fact, even though girls have their growth spurt first, that Dot was always shorter than Taylor, as she was four years younger than him.

Love is timeless so what concern would it have with years. But to love’s detriment it’s also competitive, most notably when it has no one to play with, or no one who wants to play back.

It started with Dot, probably wanting an older boyfriend, when she ran into, by chance and geography, Taylor.

“I’ve never told you this before, so know that I mean it,” Taylor said to Aaron, when he met her. “But she’s the one. Look for a new roommate.”

Dot was part question mark, part exclamation point, but completely vivacious. The sort of thing you’d put at the end to desert a sentence.

She had, of course, long black hair.

“I can’t describe her,” said Taylor one night after he came home from work and found Aaron, late at night, drinking coffee, decaf, except Dot had poured a new bag of regular beans into the old canister they re-used and had previously stored decaf beans.

“Coffee?” said Aaron. “Made too much.”

When Taylor looked at the counter and saw the canister that Dot had switched that morning, he remembered.

“Well?” said Aaron. “If you can’t decide, maybe I should.”

Unlike Dot, Taylor was a bad liar. Or maybe it was because a lie then would implicate Dot, and all he could do with Dot in his mind was confess by and large to everything big and small, while constantly smiling.

“If you don’t want it, no problem,” said Aaron. “I’ll drink it myself.”

Taylor guided the coat hanger into his coat and set the hook on the crossbar.

“Did you hear what I said earlier?”

“Yeah, I heard all. You said Dot, then dot, dot, dot.”

It was late in the evening. Neither was tired, but Aaron was planning to go to bed soon.

“I don’t know,” said Taylor. His smile beamed. “She’s just, just—” He threw his hands overhead. It did nothing to detract his smile.

“But you said you can’t describe her?” Aaron sipped his coffee, then tabled it.

Taylor’s hands went up, half-waved, then fell hard but unaffected, like no harm could come to them.

“What do you think?” he said.

Aaron readied his coffee, holding it close to his mouth. He wanted to drink but the urge to swallow got him first.

“This coffee is making me itchy.”

Taylor smiled, somehow bigger than before, as though the sun, in its full glory, had been Photoshopped. Aaron knew something was wrong.

“What?”

Taylor threw his hands up in nonverbal unhelpfulness.

“Why is me itching, funny? And if you throw your hands up one more time, I swear to God, Allah, and Mohammed, I’m throwing this coffee at your face.”

Taylor tried not to laugh, and fought it by twisting away from Aaron, and smiling.

“That coffee isn’t what you think it is,” he said.

“Of course it is,” said Aaron. “One of us isn’t in the la-la land of nonreality love. I know how to make coffee.”

Taylor, left and right, shook his head. His lips tried to hide in each other.

“What,” said Aaron.

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? I’m not Dot, I can’t break up with you.

I’m your roommate, I could move out, but you already told me I should look for your replacement.”

“I’m not replaceable.”

“Yes, I’m sure there are two people that feel that way. But your half of the rent is replaceable.” Aaron drank from his cup. “Explain, go, tell me right now what you’re hesitant about.”

“I’m not hesitant about anything.”

Aaron set his coffee down, then calmly sat back with his hands to his sides on the couch, palms to the cushions. He looked straight ahead into space as aloof and dumb as a cat. Suddenly his hands jumped and he half-waved them and then let them fall as he put a down-syndrome look upon his face and turned to Taylor.

Taylor couldn’t help it, he laughed. A nonrepeating, great, big, room-filling cacophony of booming laughs and sharp breaths. It sounded like someone was tickling an elephant.

“Grab ahold of yourself.”

“Dot does that.”

Taylor laughed louder. It made it seem like the walls had moved in.

“Do you want to know what else she does?”

Amid recycled laughter, Taylor got that sentence out, trying three times.

“Oh, she can do anything,” said Aaron. “On cloudy days, she snaps her fingers and the clouds erase. Other times she floats her hands over buckets of water,

and makes wine. And she even, and this is the most capricious thing, takes her clothes off for her Taylor.”

A look of worry fell over Taylor. Then his laughter caught a new flame, and he pointed at himself. “Oh, me?”

“Yeah, You. Generic you. No longer an individual.” Aaron drank with defiance.

“Don’t,” said Taylor.

Aaron held the mug up. “Does it bother you? Does it shoot down your loveydovey feelings?”

“No, it’s not going to agree with you.”

Taylor traced his hand through the air in an arc, incoherently, many times.

Aaron couldn’t translate it to reason. It seemed repetitive, like Taylor was reusing the same thread. But his true intention was that each arc was its own. He was describing the sun, passing through the sky. He meant time.

“Remind me never to use you as a charade’s partner,” said Aaron. “I’d rather take a war veteran who’s seen things but is amputeed at both shoulders.”

“Dot would understand.”

“Understand what?”

Then it came out as gentle as a spring zephyr. “That decaf you’re drinking is missing the ‘de.’ So, really, it’s not missing anything. The only thing missing anything, is you.”

Taylor laughed.

“This is regular. I used the grounds from the can.”

“I know,” said Taylor. “And if Dot could see you now, she’d also know you’re drinking regular because she pranked you. She switched the beans. And now I’ve spilled them.”

“But I have to be up early tomorrow!”

“Stay up.”

“That bitch!”

The itchy feeling inside Aaron enflamed. He wanted it out. He stood up. It itched constantly like gale winds raking thorns across blotchy anger, his anger.

He then thought his spit had blood. He checked catching some in his palm. Clear but dotted.

“No,” said Taylor. “She’s not a . . .”

“Dot, dot, dot.” Aaron wiped his hand down his pant leg. “I can’t believe you can’t see what’s wrong with her.”

“Who has something wrong with them?”

“Dot.” Taylor laughed. He was looking in his pocket for his phone. He had a desperate need to tell Dot something. “You’re mad.”

“Do you want to know what she is?”

“Not single.”

“She’s common,” said Aaron. “Like the common cold.”

“Not my Dot.” “Yeah, completely. She makes you weak. You’ve lost your color, you float around walking like your head’s full of opiates. You could be driving a car, faster and faster, towards a cliff and she’d make you think you could fly. ‘Yeah, faster, faster, that’s it. Yeah, give it to me!’ She’s a girl. How many million are there? If they were all a mosquito, man would be better off, all that buzzing annoyance, at least you could only hear them if they were right next to your ear, close enough to kick them, but no. They go around dropping their larvae-like ideas, their good intentions that spawn bad outcomes. She bit you. She gave you her love’s malaria. You’re not yourself. You feel all warm inside, but you

mistake that for destiny because at some deep level you’re lucid and weak.

Taylor, she doesn’t have you by the balls. You simply lack them.”

Within the week, the relationship fizzled out. Had Taylor gone that night, or that next morning, very early, and had been with Dot, none of the doubt that Aaron planted would have metastasized. But what-if-thoughts gave way to maybe-thoughts that gave way to half-truths. It’s unfortunate that all ideas come from the same place. But Aaron, the damp rag, had smothered the flame.

Taylor moped around like Dot had broken up with him. He forsook the idea of happiness calling it a daydream that came only to the delusional. Moving from his bed to the couch, and spending the day there watching TV, shortened the breath on his energy like it had asthma pricked by anxiety. He could inhale but not swallow as though a piece of him was missing. He would have told you where it was, palming his hand over his chest.

The heart motivates. The brain rationalizes. But Taylor’s heart motivated his brain into illogical workings that leaned his life toward malaised masochism.

Feeling bad was at least feeling something. It lasted for most of the summer.

Not until late August did the rain cease, the clouds part, the warmth within him return.

It was morning, closer to noon than dawn, but still Taylor’s morning when he went downtown on a Saturday looking for any store that sold black umbrellas, the cheaper the better.

Most stores had black umbrellas with extra designs, like faint grey pinstripes you could barely notice if you weren’t holding it. That idea troubled Taylor. He wanted black. All black. Even the handle.

At the fourth store he was approached by the sales person. Taylor was lifting the umbrellas by their handles, up from the large vase-like container, to see the color and patterns. He wasn’t having any luck.

“See anything you like,” said the sales person.

Taylor thought he heard a cue, something subtly in her phrasing. She had maybe, by chance, stressed the work “like.” It meant he knew, that his appearance was good enough to modify a general comment with the specific intent to please an individual.

He bought an umbrella. It was half black, half white, alternating in stripes. A compromise. When he got back to the apartment he no longer thought his future would have a use for it.

“I thought you said you were getting a black umbrella.”

“This is black. And white.”

The smile across Taylor’s face was monumental.

“What’s her name?”

“Jess.”

“Jess what?”

“I didn’t ask because I don’t want to get used to it, you know.”

“Does she know?”

“She seems to know everything.”

“The good, and the bad?”

“Yeah, she knows both like they’re cousins. One, the good, has all the value.

And the other, the bad, wouldn’t even sell if it was free.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” said Aaron. He was getting ready to leave. He tied one of his sneakers with one knot, then did the other, and realized the loops flapped too much and then shortened them tying another knot.

“There’s a lot of happy-ever-after, happening on your shoes,” said Taylor.

“What’s she like?”

“Who?” “Jessica.”

“No, it’s just Jess. I think. Maybe it’s both, she has that kind of depth.”

“Yeah, what’s she like?”

“She’s like? She’s like? She likes me.”

“So basically she’s your mom?”

Aaron put his hand out, wanting the umbrella. Taylor tossed it upright through the air. Aaron caught its midsection.

“No, but like my mom, who likes me, she also likes me. So, I think, if they have that in common, they’ll like each other.”

“Does this thing even work?”

The umbrella worked by pressing the button that was on the base of the handle.

“Tickle its toes,” said Taylor.

“It’s not a person, it’s an umbrella.”

Aaron thumbed the button pointing the umbrella at Taylor, in case it worked, and the hilt shot out blooming the fabric. It stopped a foot short of Taylor and was all out as soon as it made its loud snapping sound.

“Is it bad luck to open an umbrella inside a house?” said Aaron.

He angled it and slid the catch back down the hilt as the fabric contracted.

Near the handle, the catch clicked. The umbrella was loaded.

“That umbrella’s been nothing but good to me.”

“Have you used it?” said Aaron.

“No, it wasn’t raining.”

“There’s a chance tonight. Pop-up showers they call it. The cloud’s sneezing.”

“That,” said Taylor, “is an umbrella you can count on.”

“I don’t like the stripes.”

“What? No. Those are good stripes. They don’t like you.”

“Did what’s her name like them?”

“Jess. Yes. Yes she did.”

“She’s guilty of having suspect taste for umbrella style,” said Aaron. “I wonder what that means about her taste in.” Aaron stopped. To cover the pause he twirled the umbrella then held it with both hands, one gently under the top end, as if considering the wait.

“Do you remember that rainfest we had last July,” he said.

“Rain? It wouldn’t possible rain until now. I just got that umbrella.”

Aaron left. He was gone for a few minutes short of three hours. It would have been over three, but on the way back he walked quickly to spend the least amount of time possible in the rain. It wasn’t hard rain, there was no intent for the drops to touch bottom, no racing. But it was constant, and harder than a drizzle. Trees branched over sidewalks like immobile umbrellas, large enough to fit ten people. Aaron didn’t need them. The white and black striped umbrella was like a cheek to tears. It made Aaron think of the July rain when Taylor sat down in the chair by the wall, too hard, and then pulled the hair, and started to cry, little tears that wanted never to be seen they were so shy. And Aaron laughed. It was raining outside, and then it was raining inside. Rain from the ocean, a sort of tear that shows ambiguous, like salt and sugar, you don’t know what it’s made of until you get a taste, or ask: “Are you all right?”

Taylor was hiding it, turning his face. But his eyes were red. He wiped them.

“I can’t remember her name,” he finally said.

“Dot?” “Yeah, Dot. I’m terrible. I should be kept out of sight. Make me Atlantis.”

“Keep crying and you might.”

It was a joke. But more pricked tears leaked down Taylor’s cheek. He quickly smeared them away.

He saw the window. “I should go outside. The fresh air would help me, maybe.”

“You don’t have an umbrella.”

“Doesn’t matter. No one else is out there so this is the best time.”

Taylor didn’t move. He didn’t get up. He didn’t put shoes on. He didn’t go outside. He sat there content at not being content wearing the grey sweater that was too big for him but would fit him in his later years.

“Aaron?” said Taylor. He had stopped crying, and was looking for Dot’s strand of hair.

“I don’t like the rain,” said Taylor, finishing his thought.

“Do you enjoy not liking it?” Aaron got up. His mug was empty, but he got up too fast for Taylor. He frightened him.

“Cold? Thirsty? Want coffee?” asked Aaron.

Taylor shook his head. Aaron left the room.

Rain streaked down the window. Had it been multi-colored, the wavy lines would have resembled streamers, and the outdoors a party. But it didn’t, that wasn’t its reality. It was dull, a grayscale to be forgotten by sentence end. Each second, one following the other, was drawn out and quartered before it was put back together to complete some tortured device of slow, unending time. Each second swollen, and pushed up and spread tight by an undergrowth of puss.

The puss was internal, and made from within. The rainfall was constant. But Taylor was slowing it down.

In the alone room he wallowed his voice to the only person there, his reflection in the window, “This is going to last forever.�

Sara N. Gardiner ENG 103

That girl is a bundle of hot air, super-heated steam, held together by a plastic endoskeleton and C6H12O6 molecules, fueled by accidentals and key changes, by ambition and ego and a crushing fear of failure.

That girl puts things in her mouth without thinking, or else she doesn’t think, so nothing goes in her mouth, and it’s not intentional, and she is aware of it, but she doesn’t let a silly thing like starvation distract her from her goal.

Maybe the hunger pangs help her focus; it becomes a matter of principle until her stomach audibly protests, she sees movement in the corner of her eye, and she knows people are staring at her, and their gaze tangles itself in her hair, just part of the composition now.

This is the same girl who thinks of herself as a microcosm, (she likes that word) a microcosm among a thousand others, “all independent but connected,” that girl who buys three bottles of vitamins at once because she can’t resist a sale, because she thinks it somehow cancels out the D-fructose flooding her veins.

She thinks she’s cracked the system, that if you dump enough Vitamin C in with the poison, they’ll achieve some kind of balance.

And she has to be filled with helium, doesn’t she, to still be afloat with all that attached, or maybe it’s hydrogen and she’s a historical mistake waiting to happen, a figurative Hindenburg lesson to be learned and no one’s bothered yet to flag her down.

Benjamin Harnett Natalia

Natalia watched her mirror-self transform as she applied first emerald and then turquoise eye-shadow. She reached down to the pile of eye-liners on the sink and picked up her favorite liquid black, pulling a long line across one lowered eyelid, then a slight flourish, then the same, repeated for her other eye.

After applying a pale foundation to her cheeks and a daub of rouge, she covered her lips with a pomegranate shaded lipstick. She pursed and dabbed the excess, tracing the line of her lips to finish. If you had asked her, point blank, transforming from what into what, she probably couldn’t have said, only that people who put in no effort, well, she was still young enough not to let herself go.

“Pyotr,” she called, while picking through her tray of earrings, “you shouldn’t let Nicos drink like that!” Pyotr didn’t reply. He was stalking around somewhere in the apartment, and probably hadn’t heard her through the door. Nicos had embarrassed himself last night, Natalia thought, when he cornered her in the kitchen. She wrinkled her face at the memory.

Nicos had been a Communist for a while in college. “It got to be too much work,” he’d joke. “You know, with the protests, and the standing in the rain.”

Didn’t it make it hard later, you know, people always asked, with the government job?

“This is the 21st century,” he’d say. “They don’t really care about this kind of stuff anymore.”

Actually it had caused quite a bit of trouble, but in the end, investigators had ascribed his membership to his contrariness, not politics, “of which he is entirely devoid.”

Of course, in line with his stubborn nature, he continued to see Pyotr and Natalia.

“Still using the Party car?” he asked Pyotr. The light was just beginning to retreat through the gated windows. They were sitting Indian-style on a shag of white faux fur with a small Ikea table between them. Natalia brought a redplastic tray, it had some china tea-cups with colorful figures from a Russian cartoon version of “Peter and the Wolf” on them, and a teapot out of which a thin rope of steam was uncurling.

To her, Nicos, with his thin hairy arms, and his spiky black beard, and his languid, almost-yellow eyes, looked just like a goat. Natalia almost laughed, at the image of it, as if his disheveled hair hid two black horns.

After the tea, it was vodka, but Natalia didn’t drink.

Nicos had always been thin, but now he looked worn out, drawn.

Pyotr was talking about the latest US “Imperialism,” you could hear the capital noun and the italics in his voice.

Nicos had been staring into the middle distance, after Natalia gave him a look for looking too long at her legs, which were long and bare.

“Of course it’s bad as all that,” he said, “I know, but to get so riled up about something you have no power to change.” He shook his head. “It’s as unassailable as gravity, it’s a fundamental force. Just live your life,” he ended.

“Live your life. Enjoy it!”

He turned to Natalia, “How are you still with this grump?”

“I’m not,” she said, slowly, looking toward Pyotr, who tilted his head down.

“We’re split, but it’s too expensive to separate,” she said.

Nicos turned to Pyotr then to her. He took a gulp of vodka.

“How are the heavens?” Pyotr asked. Nicos had offered to take them out of the city, to his telescope.

“Work is … hard,” he trailed off.

So, late, they were in the narrow entrance to the kitchen from the hall; Pyotr was out, smoking on the fire escape. Natalia was trying to clean up. A thin trail of cigarette smoke had made its way indoors. She hated the stink. Nicos put his hand on her wrist. She batted it away.

“Hey!” she said.

He grabbed her wrist so that it hurt, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath. His eyes were big and his mouth was open and dark. His words came out strangled.

“What if I told you that this was it,” he said. “I saw something I’m not allowed to discuss, in the black, in the telescope. Maybe tomorrow, the next day, there’s nothing after it. Let me love you.” He stumbled into her, and she took the chance to dart past him, out into the hallway.

“What are you talking about?” she yelled backward.

What an ass, she thought, her heart beating. What a stupid, boorish, strange thing to say.

“Natalia?” Pyotr called from the living room, the bathroom door had come unlatched and swung open, as it sometimes did. He had his querying voice,

which irritated her, since with him, questions were always rhetorical. “What are you doing, Natalia? Did you need me?”

She didn't respond, which was the proper if not polite way to handle him, but instead put her fingers on an enamel hairpin from the top of a heap of various hair accessories she kept in a dish. This one will go most with my eyeshadow.

But which one will go least?

She wondered if today felt like a Disney day, or if she would go with something vintage, flowers, or maybe a barrette with dun-colored owls with expressively painted faces.

“I am going to work, Petya.” He hated to be called by the diminutive.

Her preparations complete, Natalia took a second to look, through the mirror, around the room. She checked off her favorite recent acquisitions. The mineralgreen art deco soap dish, she believed it to be bakelite, the brand new Hello Kitty shower curtain, the plush lemon-yellow towels which were neither too yellow nor too plush—a combination that she had envisioned at once perfectly upon exiting the bath one day, but that had taken months to find. All and more she had gotten at a good price, carefully stalking eBay and Craigslist.

In many ways the internet had made the resolution of her quests much easier to achieve, but simultaneously it had also schooled the holders of the odd rummage sale that many things they held worthless were in demand, somewhere. Sure, she thought, her grandparents had always said, “One man's trash, another's treasure.” But before this latest communication revolution, it was not so easy to put into practice.

“But it's Saturday,” he said. “Don't you know that workers suffered at the

picket-line and even died so that you didn't have to work on weekends?”

“Of course,” she replied, “I realize that. But Matt called while you were still asleep. Sasha got sick or something and he has no one else to cover today's shift.

Anyway, I have paperwork to finish, and I am practically his partner. If Sasha can't make the calls while the leads are still fresh, I'll be losing out as much as Matt.”

Pyotr didn't say anything. In the past, he had railed against the evils of capitalism. Failing that, had warned her that her boss was no friend of her, whatever deal that she had made, and that he was taking advantage of her skill and her labor, pocketing an outsize portion of the profits for what, because he had the ready money required to pay for an office-lease, and a few Compaq computers, and to buy CD-ROMs full of leads.

And what, asked Pyotr, does all this industry beget with your time? You interrupt people during their few moments with family, and push them to spend their limited resources on things they don't need.

That relentless engine, spurring the proletariat to grind themselves into dirt while the Matts of the world, that was her boss’s name, with their polo shirts tucked into khakis lined their pockets, feet up on the desk.

She opened the bathroom door, to find Pyotr poking at the ceiling with a broom handle, standing on a chair.

“This is the second time there's been a leak, and they do nothing about these pipes!”

It was his way of apologizing for the lateness of his half of the rent: to rail on the management, and, this she found endearing, to march around the apartment taking special care of everything that the rentiers and their lackeys had no economic motivation to do. The broom handle tore the sagging ceiling,

and a small bucketful of the pooled water fell to the floor.

“Will you be home late?” he asked.

“I think around nine.” The water became a steady drop. “Oh,” she said, “the floors!”

But he had already gotten a bucket and a towel.

As she stood, she could see both the mirror Pyotr reflected in the bathroom mirror and the real one on his knees sopping up the leaked water as the drips hit the plastic bucket with loud thumps. Even bent over like that, in a position of supplication, she could see something in him that would never bend.

That deeper will that a few years ago, when he was on the university steps giving loud speeches in a leather bomber jacket had made him so appealing.

And yet, she rather pitied him now. She meant to test his resolve. She meant to bring up how she expected the Party would pay him back the money he had fronted for them to rent a van, that had been part of the rent. Then she remembered that they were split, and she didn’t have to test him, any longer.

He put the towel into the bucket, and like that, the thump stopped.

Natalia wondered if she should have told Pyotr what Nicos had said. Such nonsense.

Matt buzzed her in. The offices were in a condo apartment that had been converted with cubicles and fluorescents. Only the bathroom was still like an apartment, and the bedroom out of which Matt walked now. Behind him, Natalia saw the bed with its beige sheets was unmade. There was a hot-plate

and a cooler in the kitchen. She tried never to notice that she was a head taller than him, even in her flats. “I'm glad you could make it. We might have to find some replacements. Sasha doesn't seem to be very reliable.�

On her first day, she remembered, Matt had shown Natalia around the office.

Shown her which of the four desks would be hers, and showed her how the computer turned on and the automatic dialer. He'd worked for years as a salesman at a car lot he told her, until one of his customers had cornered him.

Wasn't he tired of working for someone else, making a bit of commission on selling a very expensive product? And this is how he got his first set of leads and the idea to set up an office space like this. He had told her this story with pride, and seemingly in complete ignorance of the irony of telling a new employee that you got into business so you didn't have to work to make money for someone else.

This lack of awareness put Natalia at ease. It became obvious quickly that, while Matt had the leads and his savings, he also lacked any sense about the business. Natalia quickly became office manager, and helped Matt to staff the desks, find leads, and even locate potential clients and bid out various marketing jobs through subcontractors. She helped him screen potential employees. Now she was filling in for Sasha, whom she thought had been a good fit.

He had a dark spot, a stain on his chest she couldn't stop staring down at. She turned to her desk and sat. It was about 11:30, the computer clocks were always a little off. Matt wandered back to the bedroom where he had his office.

A thought fluttered into her head, it was odd for a middle-aged man to be named Matt. Even stranger to think of him, ten years older yet, with wrinkles

started and his hair gone to a few wisps.

It had been a few months since Natalia had had to do calls, though the rhythms of the one-sided conversations were the familiar background, one call ending abruptly behind her while to the left another one began again with renewed enthusiasm. She eyed the script pulled up on the computer. In a moment, the computer would pull a number from the list of leads, fill in a name of some head of household somewhere in the US at the appropriate places in the script. Matt, when Natalia wasn't paying attention, bought inexpensive leads, because he had “confidence” in his salespeople. They were expensive even for their low price as they rarely translated to a sale, and hence a commission.

Matt hadn't always slept in the bedroom. Not too long ago he had had a house and a wife.

She turned toward the door, she could see the flicker of a television, cool light, the color of lightning, on the warm adobe of the wall.

She turned back to the script and read it to herself.

“Hello *Mr. Jones*, this is *Natalie*,” Natalie was a more palatable name, “with Island Vacations Travel Club.

“I am calling today with good news, because we have a free vacation for you and your family. That's right, a free vacation just for finding out more about our travel services. I am not calling to sell you anything today, just to get your confirmation that you'd like to spend 3 days and 2 nights in your choice of accommodations . . .”

She closed her eyes and opened them again. There were no good scripts.

Usually they just went with the canned scripts, rarely making changes.

Natalia didn't have much of an accent anymore, except that she sounded a little exotic, which was an asset for this kind of thing.

Matt always said, “we have a real leg up over people who use Indians, or you know people from the Midwest.”

Natalia imagined Pyotr reading from the script.

She started the dialer.

The phone rang in her headset a few times, then a man's voice: “Hello?”

“Hello Mr. Willis, this is Natalie with—” “Who?” “—with Island Vacations Travel—” “I don't know you.”

“—Travel Club. I'm calling—” *CLICK*

The main thing was to maintain an even keel. You will get dozens of quick rejections, even rude ones. Rejections weren't bad, especially if they happened quick. The worst was old people, alone, lonely, who just wanted to talk.

“Hello, Mr. Houston, this is—” “Ma'am, whoever you may be, my husband is dead.” ...

Mr. Antori: “What do you mean a free vacation?”

“We just want to give you a sample of what we can offer, that we're sure you'll enjoy. The positive word of mouth is worth more than all the expensive

billboard, radio, or TV advertising we could buy.”

“I would love a sample of what you are offering, honey!” ...

Mrs. Winston: “What about the hotel?”

“In Orlando you’ll be staying in Lake Buena Vista, a few blocks away from the gates of Disneyland. 3 days and 2 nights of hotel accommodations and 2 round trip airline tickets, with no strings attach or salesman breathing down your neck. This is a real deal vacation.” ...

Mrs. Shwartz: “Oh my god, oh my god. I've never won anything before. I can't believe it's really happening to us. Larry. Larry, get on the phone.”

Natalia called leads until 4 PM. Matt brought her coffee in a pharmaceutical mug. Nexium. What was that for, she tried to remember. Heartburn? She gave him a quick tally. Two solid gets. She discussed the job posting she'd place on Craigslist, and then wrote up some invoices, put them into envelopes. At 5 she started to call again until 8 when she would pack up and leave. She looked down at her fingernails. They were short but manicured and sparkling green.

The voices were old, mainly old, some young children, the occasional teen.

People were tired, playful, irritable, sexist, peasant, chatty, quiet, nice, and mean. Her tights, also green, were stitched with a raised repeating pattern of four-leaf clovers, which she felt under her palm like braille as she talked. She felt a tiny, quiet thrill whenever she got someone's address, phone number, and credit card. The third time someone shouted “fuck off” at her, she looked at the clock. Matt had closed the bedroom door. She wondered if he was watching porn.

At 8 she left without seeing Matt. She pinned her score-sheet and some notes to the cork board. On the platform of the subway, she stood pointedly back behind the yellow verge, and watched a rat pick at a wrapper by the track. It was sleek, and beautiful, and worked cautiously with its mouth and its hands.

She put her key in the door. There were lights at the table. Water glasses.

Covered plates. It was dinner Pyotr had made. Her Pyotr had made.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said when they were sitting. “I saw something absolutely terrible yesterday, while I was waiting for the train. You know at Union Square, where they have these moving platforms—they look like torture devices, long rows of metal bars that shoot out to cover the gaps in the platform when the train comes—this man must have been standing on one when it moved and slipped between the edges and the train.

“He was pinned at the stomach right in front of me. There was nothing I could do. He had anguish in his face, and he was groaning, just groaning, kind of low.

“He kept raising and lowering his arms, as if it could help him. Someone stood six feet from him and took pictures with his phone—with the flash on! Can you imagine?”

“Was there blood? Did he die? What did you do?”

“There was nothing to do. I waited until I saw that the transit police were coming, and then I left.”

Natalia started to cry.

Rachel Crawford Night Sweat

You’ve lost your keys. You want nothing in the world so much as to find your goddamn keys. You long for their metallic compactness, their clean edges, their solid presence in your pocket.

You re-trace your steps. You return to the Chinese restaurant where you had lunch. You lift plates sticky with hot mustard and sweet-and-sour-sauce, you rifle the folds of balled-up red napkins, you drop to your knees and scuttle into the dimness beneath the black lacquer table to sift through the detritus there: half an eggroll, a single chopstick, a dried-up radish flower, a crusty fork, a tired piece of broccoli—and a gleaming white fortune slip. You pick it up. It reads, “Don’t make any long range plans.” You bump your head backing out.

You glance around the restaurant, startled to find it empty and still, except for the rhythmic sway of the red and black paper lanterns overhead. You’re startled because you are sure you heard—and still hear—the babble of the lunch crowd, the dull ring of forks against plates, laughter, laughter, the tinkle of ice in a room full of glasses. The sounds get louder and louder, echoing crazily in the empty room. You clap your hands over your ears and rush out the door into the glare and bustle of the street.

You look behind you as the glass door swings shut with a hydraulic hiss. You stare as the gold letters on the sign swinging there begin to dance, re-arranging themselves in an antic, cartoonish way, then fall abruptly back in line. But now they read “Big Daddy’s Tattoo Parlor” instead of “Lucky Dragon Chinese

Restaurant,” and a short bald man with pink skin and empty gums is leaning against the door, smiling broadly and giving you the finger through the glass.

You gaze into his unblinking frog’s eyes and feel you’ve forgotten something important. You were looking for something. Keys. Your keys. You pat all your pockets for the twentieth time and hurry down the crowded street, passing storefront after storefront with names that change each time you look at them.

It’s hot, you’re thirsty, and your hair is salty and sticking to the sides of your face like seaweed. You picture your small white house with blue curtains, cool and silent and safe. You break into a dizzy, breathless sprint and you’re home in seconds.

You lurch up your front steps and come to a stop in front of your living room window. The curtains are wide open and you can see all the way into your kitchen. The faucet is running. You’re dying to rush in, thrust your head into the sink, and let the cold water fill your mouth, spill onto your flushed cheeks.

You rattle the front door violently.

Wait a minute. The curtains aren’t wide open. They’re gone. And so is everything else. Your house is empty. Where are your dishes, your furniture, your books, your cat, your clothes? You whirl around and face the street, looking for, perhaps, a sinister yellow moving van stuffed full of your things.

But the street is empty except for a magazine stand manned by the grinning bald man from the Chinese restaurant/tattoo parlor. A magazine stand? Here?

You step closer. They’re not magazines, they’re calendars. This makes perfect sense to you. Not magazines, calendars. Beautiful ones with vivid, glossy photographs, and months and days written in exotic languages. You stand looking at a pretty one with days adorned by deep blue skies and smooth green waters and shining white sand.

As you reach out to pick it up, a hot wind boils down your street and blasts into you, and the bald man, and the calendars. Months and days and years explode into the air and swirl above your head. You chase them, but they skitter across the pavement like dry leaves.

You close your eyes against the wind, and when you open them, the street is empty again. Except for your keys, which lie at your feet. You pick them up and turn around to unlock your front door. But your house is gone. You have keys, but no door. All is lost, the bald man whispers, all is lossst...

Empty, gutted, disappearing, you sink to the curb, hold your head in your hands and sob. Your sobs grow louder, wilder, and then you bolt upright in your bed, switch off your shrieking alarm clock, kick off your sweaty tangle of sheets, and shuffle down your long grey hallway to get ready for work.

JD Duff Rapine

That morning in the attic, the summer heat crowded between the cedar walls. I stood in my Wonder Woman bikini, watching my best friend, oozing with sweat, pant his way through piles of forgotten toys. He flung porcelain dolls across the wide planks, scratching my mother’s mahogany hope chest. He hurled winter clothes that blanketed the dusty floor. I pleaded for him to stop, but he didn’t hear. He had vowed to find her that morning. Continuing his mission, he ordered me to help as I wondered how I would explain this heap to my parents. “She’s not up here, and you’ll clean this mess.” My hand grabbed his arm and tugged toward the door, but he spotted her shoe under a mountain of coats. “Ah-ha!” he screamed. He dragged her cloth legs from the bottom of the pile. Dirty and battered, her bonnet hung from yarn braids, face scarred with crayon, smocking peppered with large holes. He threw her on a mound of sweaters, pulled her knickers to her knees, pumped into her with deep thrusts and exaggerated moans. His laughter drenched her silent cries. I tried to grab her from him, but his weight was too much. “It’s called humping, “ he said. “I don’t care what it’s called. Don’t do it to my doll.” He lifted off her and threw her at me. I cradled her and started to exit. “Where are you going?” he laughed.

“It’s your turn with her now.” His eyes raving, I bolted down the attic stairs, pledging to keep safe my forgotten friend.

Ivan De Monbrison Separation

à tout moment une bouche s'ouvre et menace de m'avaler des ombres saignent posées au sol des mains raclent le fond de mes yeux ce que j'ai dis me quitte d'un coup et s''éloigne de moi à grands pas pour aller frapper ton visage je croise au hasard ta mort elle m'indique où est ton cadavre et je me penche sur toi pour faire un bouche à bouche perdu d'avance à la folle que j'ai connue et qui s'est transformée en morte la pyramide de l'oubli repose sur son sommet sa base tournée vers le soleil n'est plus qu'un vaste cimetière tu soliloques tu tournes en rond et seuls des ongles poussent aux branches dans la forêt du temps perdu mais tu restes là sans bouger le ventre ouvert à tout venant voile pliée qui oscille ou bien silhouette restée coincée entre deux murs infinis d'un couloir recouvert de paumes et que tu as mille fois parcouru sans jamais y trouver d'issue ton portrait s'ouvre dans un miroir s'emparent de tous mes souvenirs qui se transforment en reflets j'essaye de suivre ce chemin

from time to time a mouth opens and threatens to swallow me up bleeding shadows left on the ground hands scratching the bottom of my eyes what I've just said deserts me now and is going to hit you in the face by chance I walk by to your death who tells me where your body is I bend over in order to bring back to life this mad-girl whom I once knew who has turned out to be lying dead under the pyramid of oblivion resting on its very top its base exposed to the sun just like a large cemetery you soliloquize you turn in circles while fingernails grow on the trees in the forest of time lost then you stay there standing still your belly opened to the wind like a folded sail now swinging or like a figure still stuck between two endless walls in a corridor plastered with palms which you have walked so often without ever finding a way out your portrait opens up in the mirror and catches all my memories turning them into reflections I try to follow up the path

j'essaye de comprendre ces mots mais ma gorge est un entonnoir où tombent un à un tous mes cris qui bâillonnent ma conscience la fenêtre écrase un abîme la lumière arrache les carreaux peau contre peau je ne sens plus le souffle brûlant qui allume cet incendie la porte ouverte mais sa lumière décalquée à la surface rayée du disque rend ma douleur pyromane ce brasier peut bien brûler ma bouche cousue ne laissera plus sortir de son beau vertige né d'une démence qui se transforme peu à peu en promenade funambule au bord d'un monde évidé et d'un passé que j'ai voulu retenir au dernier moment et qui me fil entre les doigts... tu éloignes déjà à grands pas par ces rues désorganisées où seul ton souvenir de biais se pose sur moi de temps en temps comme l'oiseau aux ailes arrachées ou une cicatrice sans dents

I try to understand the words but my throat is like a funnel where all my screams keep falling down I gag my own consciousness the window crushes down a chasm light starts tearing up the glass and skin to skin I can not feel the burning wind that kindles up the fire blazing through the door while light has just been traced on the scratched surface of the disc which makes my pain pyromaniac this fire may well burn my sewed mouth will no longer let go a sound charming wreck of my madness turning little by little into the tightrope walker's walk on the brim of a hollowed world and by a past that I've wanted to keep until the last moment and which is now escaping me now you're walking away fast by these disorganized streets where your memory askance comes down on me from time to time like a bird with ripped wings or like a teeth-less scar

Contributors

Bart Bultman Published by Forge, Straylight, and as well as The Transnational, Bart Bultman lives on the other west coast, commonly referred to as West Michigan.

Rachel Crawford Rachel Crawford has worked as a waitress, bail bondswoman, high school and college English teacher, editor, poet, and writer. Her poetry appears in many print and online journals and she is a contributing co-editor of “Her Texas” (Wings Press, 2015), an anthology of Texas women poets, writers, artists, and songwriters.

Ivan De Monbrison Ivan is French poet, writer and artist who lives in Paris and Marseille. His poems or short stories have appeared in several literary magazines in France, Italy, Belgium, The UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and in the US. Five poetry chapbooks of his works have been published: “L’ombre déchirée,” “Journal, La corde à nu,” “Ossuaire” and “Sur-Faces.” His first poem-novel “les Maldormants” has been published in 2014, in France

JD Duff JD Duff grew up in the suburbs of New York City. She has a Master of Arts in Writing and a Master of Arts in Teaching English Education from Manhattanville College. JD taught college writing for over seven years; she is currently in the process of starting a writing company, Uptown Writing Workshop, which will offer both academic and creative workshops. JD’s most recent poems, “The Deconstruction of Aunt Jemima” and “Alien Life” can be found in Melancholy Hyperbole. Her short story, “Playing Poker with Jesus” was recently published in London’s Storgy Magazine.

Sara N. Gardiner Sara N. Gardiner will graduate in December 2015 with her BFA in Creative Writing from SFASU. She has been writing for over ten years and is finishing her first in a series of novels from her home in San Antonio, TX. Benjamin Harnett Benjamin Harnett, born 1981 in Cooperstown, NY, is a fiction writer, poet, historian, and digital engineer. His essays, poems, translations, and short stories have appeared, recently, in Brooklyn Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Wag’s Revue, the Columbia Review, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He holds an MA in Classics from Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn, with his wife, Toni, and their pets. In 2005, he co-founded the fashion brand Hayden-Harnett. He currently works at The New York Times. His occasional musings can be found at www.tinyletter.com/benjaminharnett.

Kate LaDew Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. Alexander Payne Morgan Alexander Payne Morgan’s poetry has appeared in The MacGuffin. He received an honorable mention in the 18th National Poet Hunt Contest in 2013 and first prize in poetry in the Springfed Arts writing contest in 2015. He’s a member of Detroit Working Writers. He has attended the Squaw Valley Writers Workshops and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Morgan works as a technical editor and ghost writer. He’s married and lives near Detroit with his wife and two teenage children.

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