Riding Light Summer 2014 Preview

The Riding Light Review A sixteen-year old boy once imagined riding on a beam of light, and his simple thought experiment played an important role that would later change the world—it ushered in the age of Modern Physics. This boy was Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s use of imagination fueled his work in physics, which eventually lead to his famous 1905 papers on Special Relativity.

The Riding Light Review emerged out of a desire to push the boundaries of creativity through language, ideas, and story. We believe in the power of imagination, the fuel for our ideas and innovation. This notion inspired the name of our magazine.

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Masthead Chief Editor Cyn C. Bermudez Managing Editor Taylor Lauren Ross Senior Editor Jennifer Porter Layout Editor Andrea Ellickson Reader Jamie Hoang Š 2014 The Riding Light Review ISSN 2334-251X This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from individual authors or artists.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without permission of the author(s) or artist(s) is illegal.

www.ridinglightreview.com 4

Contents Fiction 13 TERRA COTTA SOLDIERS Joe Baumann Art: Isabella Kelly-Ramirez 26 THE STAIN James Stolen Art: Jourdie Ross 52 Compound James Fowler Art: Staff (Taylor Lauren Ross) 78 SPUN Linda Michel-Cassidy Art: Mike Lanni 5

82 Scheherazade Sidestep Catherine Evleshin Art: Isabella Kelly-Ramirez 92 RUNNING AFTER IT Dan Crawley Art: Jourdie Ross 126 THE MOAT Ian Summit Art: Mike Lanni 142 The Whole True—False, Should— Shouldn’t Clifford Paradox Robert D. Kirvel Art: Sara Weinstein

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Nonfiction 37 Seeking Our Fortunes Joanne Nelson 119 A Monk During Peacetime Ari Laurel Cover Art HERE Jourdie Ross

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Artists Isabella Kelly-Ramirez is an artist working out of Hollywood, CA. She works in multiple mediums: painting, drawing, sewing, assemblage, and collage. Isabella received her B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA in 2008. As a current member of the Los Angeles Art Association, Isabella periodically shows her work at Gallery 825. Her work has always centered around the idea of constructing a facade or wearing a mask to embody “the other” as a pathway to better understand one’s self. Theater and masquerade initiated her early interest in alter egos and the art of assuming different personalities.

Isabella’s use of pop culture, fashion, patterns, cosmetic color palettes, glitter, and gems creates an eye-catching veneer for something more detrimental.

Jourdie Ross was born and raised in Southern California by an artist mother and architect father. Observing and expressing the world through images has supported and informed her life from an early age. She holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Arts & Letters from Prescott College and has studied painting with working artists in the United 8

States, France, New Zealand, and Ghana. She continues to learn every day and hopes to do so ad infinitum.

Mike Lanni’s first passion is the study of human beings.

He received his Bachelor of Science in Behavioral and Social Psychology from the University of California San Diego and his Master of Organizational Development from Claremont Graduate University. Mike believes that as an artist, his primary responsibility is to reflect and further the experience of what it is to be human. Working with coffee mixed to different concentrations, creating oil paintings on wood reliefs and panels, and sculpting in steel, he creates every piece of art to achieve a moment of wonder and reflect the breathtaking beauty of the natural world. Using bold, striking imagery, Mike works in partnership with nature to create pieces that halt, provoke, and energize.

Sara Weinstein is a Ph.D. student studying infectious diseases in wild animal populations. In addition to hunting for parasites, Sara occasionally does scientific illustration, makes t-shirts, and adds to her webpage of biology themed comics.

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Editorial I am pleased to introduce the first issue of The Riding Light Review.

The idea for RLR came to me while I was reading the slush pile for another magazine. There were so many stories that needed a home. I discussed the idea with a couple of fellow writers and the next day we were creating a literary journal.

I don’t think we realized how many decisions we’d have to make over the next months. Oh, sure, there was the reading and deciding which stories to accept—a gargantuan task in itself. There were also aesthetic, procedural, and editorial decisions to make. In the end, our little labor of love pulled together to become the most amazing first issue.

In this inaugural issue, we feature original short stories from Joe Bauman (“Terra Cotta Soldiers”), James Stolen (“The Stain”), James Fowler (“Compound”), Linda Michel-Cassidy (“Spun”), Catherine Evleshin (“Scheherazade Sidestep”), Dan Crawley (“Running After It”), Ian Summit (“The Moat”), and Robert D. Kirvel (“The Whole True–False, Should–Shouldn’t Clifford Paradox”). We have creative 10

non-fiction from Joanne Nelson (“Seeking Our Fortunes”) and Ari Laurel (“A Monk During Peacetime”). We also have artwork from Jourdie Ross (cover art: “Here”) and original artwork from Mike Lanni, Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, and Sara Weinstein.

The stories in this issue are an eclectic blend of everything from the rule of money, to death defying women, to the complexities of the parent-child relationship, to the waning of romantic love. We hope you enjoy these stories as much as we did.

Lastly, I’d like to give a special thanks to the RLR editorial team: Taylor Lauren Ross, Jennifer Porter, and Andrea Ellickson for all of their hard work in bringing this issue to life.

Sincerely, Cyn Bermudez

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TERRA COTTA SOLDIERS Joe Baumann While Laura strings beads at the table, Jorge army crawls across the kitchen floor, the red tile cool on his skin. The whole house is hot, the glass windows without shades letting in the bursting sun, and even the box fan Laura found on the street—functional, if streaked with dirt and a bit bent— only gives a small breeze, one that, when the fan is too close, sends her beads running across the tabletop and when too far away is swallowed up by the stifling clouds of humidity hanging in the kitchen. Laura’s hands shake, and her fingers are slick to the tips, so it takes her longer than usual to thread her necklaces. She looks down behind her at Jorge finally, after he cups his hands around her ankles. He asks her when Angel will be back, and she shakes her head, turns back to her work, and says she doesn’t know. But she does know, in a dark, knowing-the-unknown sort of way: she knows he won’t be back, but she doesn’t tell the boy that.

Jorge plays a game while Laura makes her necklaces, the ones she sells at the market in town for cheap, for just enough 13

money to buy them bread and the occasional bit of anemic meat, to tourists and the well-off enough who would never buy her jewelry because they really like it or find it gorgeous.

She knows why they hand over their crinkled bills, small denominations stuffed into and forgotten at the bottoms of purses, rummaged for out of pity and sadness for her flimsy skirt and greasy hair, her dry skin, skin too white for her to be native, the white of a tourist just like them who has somehow been cleaved to this place and its heat and dust. It covers her like a scarlet letter, a shameful dress that oozes the need for pity, a uniform that reminds of some disaster, some fall from grace. It fills Laura with a shame she’s ashamed for feeling. But Jorge doesn’t know this as he crawls from the living room, past the ratty couch with exposed stuffing, through the archway with the cracking paint, and approaches her pale legs, which dangle from her perch on the stool at the table. His head is empty of the worries of the world, deaf to the whispers that escape strangers’ lips as they pass this house, Etianne’s house. The fronts of his legs and forearms stick to the tiles, his body constantly covered in a film of sweat that doesn’t bother children his age.

He also doesn’t know that Laura can always hear him even over the growl of the box fan, the little thwacks of his uncoordinated hands on the floor, the scrapings of his pointy kneecaps. That she can smell him, the sweet scent 14

of child sweat and, somehow, leaves, an autumnal odor he carries in his arms and the hair that he never washes. But she pretends that he is sneaking up on her, lets him cuff his little fingers, bony and dirty, around her. They feel like warm, slippery shackles on her skin. Laura lets him do this because she loves to hear him giggle, the sound of gleeful water skipping through rocks and silt, a joyful noise she soldiers through her days to hear. The walls of this house are too glum and suffocating to her otherwise. She smiles and looks down at him, this boy that was not hers but has become so because he is no one else’s, and he stares up at her, dreaming of her eyes and the thin lips that are always smiling to hide the exhaustion and futility she feels in her cheeks.

The wild dogs shit in the scorched front yard as they roam the streets. They smell of mange, leaving footprints laced with feces on the cracked sidewalks. Jorge has to stare down at his feet when he runs through the dried-up grass so he doesn’t step in the runny shit-piles, but he often forgets and drags the smell into the house. When he does, Laura looks at him with disappointment, never yells because she doesn’t have the energy in her to be angry, but also because she knows that her sadness is his weakness, the same weakness that once worked on his father, that the fallen blank look she gives him is the thing that makes him crack, turns him into the most cooperative version of himself, the boy willing to 15

scrub off the shit himself and wipe the floor down with a soggy rag. Sometimes Jorge follows the dogs, begs Laura to let him catch one and wash it, bring it inside and feed it. But she explains to him that they have no food to give, doesn’t he remember? How his stomach always yawns like a monster, growling a hunger that makes him cry sometimes? And then he nods his head and says okay, you’re right, I know. He does know that. He does know that Laura is always right.

When Laura visits Angel in jail, she closes her eyes and lets him speak, the aroma of bitter fall leaves that escapes his mouth the same as the one haunting Jorge’s armpits. She lets his breath enter her nostrils and she feels like warm blown glass, the way he must have made Etianne feel before Laura even existed for him. Angel is dirty and his eyes are sad, and Laura assures him that Jorge is okay, but her own despondency seeps through her words. Does he know about me? Angel asks her, and she nods, but then shakes her head when he asks if Jorge knows about Etianne, who gave him the sharpness in his nose and the blue of his tiny eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the sandiness of his hair. Laura tells Angel that she can’t find it in herself to tell the boy because she’s worried about what it will do to him, that she thinks it will suck out the happiness she sees in him, the joy that overpowers his hunger and thirst and dirtiness. She doesn’t tell Angel that she worries what such information will do to her, that if Jorge knows about his real mother he will 16

abandon Laura, will stop holding onto her, and that without his warm grip on her feet she’ll drift away. Instead, she tells him he is happy. He is a happy child, she tells Angel, and she just can’t let that die too.

The second floor, where the lumpy beds are, is even hotter than the ground floor, haunted, she thinks, by the stench of dried blood and childbirth, so Laura sleeps on the uneven couch in the living room and molds her body around the spots where the springs stick up like sharp teeth. Sometimes Jorge’s child body can’t handle the heat in his tiny room at the back of the second floor even when he lies atop the nattered blankets and manages to cradle his head on the ineffective pillow just right, and he tiptoes downstairs and nestles his way into her, laying his head by hers, neck across her arm, and even though she feels muffled and hotter with the boy there, she doesn’t say anything, pretending, even in the dark of night, not to know he’s there, and she lets his light breath, the small wheeze of air escaping his little snotty nostrils, rock her to sleep until light streams through the grimy windows and wakes her. By the time the sun peeps in, Jorge has already slunk off to go to the bathroom, to pretend he was never there. She never feels him leave, as he slips away like a tiny phantom. It is the only time he successfully tricks her into not noticing his movement.

She came to teach, was given a classroom with air 17

conditioning and chalkboards and everything. No desks, but how much could she ask for? They wanted her to teach the children English, because somehow that language, harder and slower than their native tongue, would give them an escape, would lead them from this dark-age part of town (the mayor’s words, not hers) and let them eat steak and French fries and drink sodas whenever they wanted. Would afford them silk suits and high-rise apartments, things even the mayor only saw in his dreams. They crammed in, those tiny children, many of them shirtless and all of them bony, staring up at her. Not one was sure why they were there, but Laura smiled and clasped her hands together and started reciting the alphabet.

On days it rains and no one goes to the market, Laura takes Jorge to the cemetery after the drops stop falling and the thunder is but a tiny rumble on the horizon, the gray clouds swept away by the returning sun, which shines on the muddy puddles that pool on the sides of the road and in the potholes that mark the strips of asphalt and dirt like acne. She keeps her promise to Angel to take Jorge to visit his mother, but she can never bring herself to tell Jorge why they’re traipsing, hand-in-hand, through the unkempt and unadorned graveyard, why they maneuver slowly around the headstones and stop and circle Etianne’s several times.

The boy cannot read yet, isn’t old enough to care to learn how, doesn’t know—may never know—what he might be 18

missing out on by being unable to understand letters carved into a gravestone. Jorge looks up at Laura, who smiles down at him, her lips wobbly, and she tightens her grip on his hand. The humidity rises as the afternoon stumbles by, the air thick as honey, and they are glazed with perspiration when they leave the cemetery. Jorge asks Laura if there are ghosts, if that’s what happens to people when they get buried, but Laura says nothing. Or maybe, Jorge says, unfettered by her silence, they become soldiers. Soldiers? she asks, unable to resist. Warriors of the ground, Jorge says. Of the earth. She doesn’t ask him what he thinks they might be protecting.

She convinces the apathetic sheriff that she’s there to keep teaching Angel English, that he’s paid her for this, though the lie stinks like Swiss cheese. Laura stares at Angel, slumped in his cell, eyes empty as she says this. The sheriff—obese, with a thin, limp mustache over lips that are limp; his whole being is limp—shrugs and says nothing, reads the newspaper. She can feel his eyes on her as she approaches the cell. When Angel stumbles up to her he smells of alcohol, a sharp, unpleasant scent. She knows she should be happy that he hasn’t been carted off to a state prison yet, not that anyone will ever come for him. When Laura whispers a hello to Angel, he responds in Spanish, his voice liquid. She asks him if he’s been drinking, once in English, then again in Spanish so he can’t act like he doesn’t understand her. Laura knows the officers give him swigs 19

from their bottles, that they laugh and play cards with him through the cell’s bars when she’s not around, and that he’s only locked up to save face. Everyone from his part of town loves Angel, his gorgeous face, his deep, filling voice, the slender shoulders and arms that are muscled but not stocky, the taut stomach and infectious laugh. Even Laura, despite her better judgment and guarded stance, feels herself relax, the tension in her shoulders and hips dissolving, when he smiles and says that he is sorry, the lo in his lo siento a sensual hiss, the final o a bass line, a deep reverberation that pulls the annoyance and uncertainty from her like air escaping a balloon.

Laura knew something was wrong when Jorge wasn’t waiting outside the school’s splintered door when she arrived. This before the school was shut down, before she moved into Etianne’s house after Angel’s arrest that day, before she started stringing the necklaces so that Jorge wouldn’t starve. The boy was always excited, throwing his arm up and shouting out answers before she could call on him, his mushy English pronunciation garbled, the words half-swallowed, his solutions to the word problems she gave often wrong but too enthusiastic to stop her from smiling. She nodded out a si and bueno nonetheless while the other children looked around the room and fanned themselves through the heat. Dust squirted into the room in the afternoon through the open door—it had to stay open 20

or else the room would become an oven that could cook them all—and stained her skirts brown. But the day Jorge was gone Laura could barely keep her focus. She wondered where the bright boy had disappeared to, and she let the children leave early. They scrambled out into the sun, their laughter baking into the tired ground.

Laura gets a letter from her mother every now and then, and she writes back pages of lies. Tells her that the school is doing well, that she’s happy and healthy. When her mother asks when she’ll be home and if there’s a phone, she responds in a harried script that she doesn’t know when she’ll be back—true—and there isn’t any telephone service where she lives—true—and that she doesn’t know anyone with a phone she could use—false. She hates herself for lying as she does, and she worries: what if something does happen to her? What if Laura disappears and no one ever comes looking for her? What if she becomes like Etianne, a woman that was mesmerized by Angel’s turtledove voice, his smooth face, a woman who left behind everything she knew to be with him, who died in childbirth and her own son doesn’t know her name? At least Jorge will know Laura’s name. He’ll remember her. She wonders if that is enough.

She stuffs some money into her pocket every day, saving it up to buy some wilting flowers from a vendor at the market.

Pansies tinged with brown, a tiny bunch of them, held 21

together by a rubber band. They have obviously not been watered. They are brittle as hay, but they’re something. She takes Jorge with her to the cemetery in the early evening when it is at least a little cool, to Etianne’s grave. Laura hands Jorge the flowers and motions for him to set them atop the stone, in the center, and he does, slowly, as if the tombstone will come to life and consume him. She can tell he is nervous, but he does it, drops them on the grave and scampers back to her, taking her hand. He stares up at her and Laura nods. He doesn’t ask what they’re doing. She doesn’t explain. They live a life of silence, of attention to the wind.

She wonders aloud if Angel will ever get out, but she worries she’s become a ghost because he doesn’t answer.

He’s drunker than ever, more intoxicated and unaware every time she comes to see him. The last time she goes to him, the front of his pants are covered in a dark circle and he smells of piss. His lips are crusted with vomit and his breath stinks.

Angel tries to ask about Jorge, but his words are grizzled and foamy, stuck together in a slurry muck. Screaming at him does no good, just sends him stumbling back as though the volume of her voice is a slap to his face, a sledgehammer swing at his chest. He falls against his heavy bench and leans over, passes out, mumbling words she can’t comprehend.

It grows cooler outside, the sun setting sooner. Jorge finds a 22

shirt and wears it for six days straight. He complains of the growing cold, and the market hours become slimmer each day, the crowds thinner. A strain rumbles in Laura’s chest, uncertainty mounting in her gut as she wonders what she will do. She must tell Jorge about Etianne, about the woman whose house they’ve taken root in, the home they’ve allowed to become overgrown with dust and waste, because when she is gone, Etianne will disappear, too. Perhaps weeds will start erupting through the floor. She won’t go back to Angel, she tells herself. She will not become like Etianne, trapped in him, a prisoner to his musk and smile. He is poisonous and deadly.

She sits at the kitchen table, strings another necklace. They still sell, but not as often, and she finds herself bringing home larger tangled strands of beads each day. But what else is she going to do? When she looks at Jorge, she can’t imagine him alone, her heart breaking as she grinds her teeth in uncertainty. They feel like hardened clay. So, now that she has told herself she can never go back to Angel, that both she and Jorge must forget about him, she spends all of her time sitting in the kitchen threading nearly-invisible twine with split ends through the tiny holes in the marbled beads and waiting for the messy boy to grab her ankles, to link her to the tiled floor, to keep her here, to keep her soldiering on earth.

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Joe Baumann possesses a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Rougarou: an Online Literary Journal. He is the author of Ivory Children: Flash Fictions, and his work has appeared in Tulane Review, Willow Review, Hawai’i Review, and many others, and is forthcoming in Lalitamba and Lindenwood Review. He will be joining the faculty at St. Charles Community College in St. Charles, Missouri, as an assistant professor this fall.

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THE STAIN James Stolen It first appeared in mid-May, right after a storm of snow and lightning had descended upon La Grande. In the morning Blake found the spreading stain at the corner of his den. It was a deep rusty color, vaguely akin to blood, but already smooth like varnish on the hardwood slats. Wondering what it was, he touched it tentatively at first. He pulled back the rug and found it was sodden all the way through, a thin fluid seeping from the Navajo wool. He stared at it for a while, still unsure of what it was or what it meant.

In the half-bathroom he ran water over a towel and returned to the den, where he wiped away the slippery and cool liquid until it thinned. Blake was strangely passive about it, not terribly concerned with its source or the damage it had already clearly done, and he did not feel it of importance to find the well from which it had sprung. Instead he approached the task as a challenge, as a menial chore he had to overcome. As he tried in vain to remove the stain from the wood, however, he discovered it had originated from beneath the baseboard. The long wood strip was stained 27

a brighter hue of scarlet. He worked for a while, trying to tease out the most practical means of cleaning it away.

After a moment of ringing the perimeter he began to scrub vigorously at its center, but the stain did not thin or degrade.

Blake went to wash the towel out in the sink, and the water in the base turned a slight pink, the filaments of color spiraling down the drain. He smelled his hands afterward.

He wanted desperately for there to be an odor, some tell of what it was, some inkling of where it had come from, but his skin smelled only of water and the bacon rashers he had been frying when he discovered the stain. When he returned to the room the stain seemed darker and larger in circumference—and it began to trouble him. *** At Ace Hardware, Blake wandered the aisles, his brown eyes perusing the bottles of cleanser, the amber tint of oils, the full lavender color of soap products. In the end he bought five bottles of varying products, each claiming to be highly awarded or ranked by Home or Dwell or The American Woodworking Guild. He bought the bottles with his credit card and carried them out to his truck, which caught the glare of midmorning light. The snow had already mostly melted, and the sidewalk was stained with stray apple blossoms and water.

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He drove south on Jefferson and then turned east toward Island City. Blake felt his elbow ache as he unloaded the truck; the scar tissue that ran the length of his bicep was knotty and pale against the brown skin. The chain that had spun out from the fracturing saw guide arm had whipped back and split open his flesh to the bone. As he lay there beneath the tall pine trees he felt no pain, at first. The logging foreman vomited when he saw the coils of artery and veins and fat. Blood stained Blake’s whole side and soaked into the duff of pine needles and spring grass. Someone tied a tourniquet at his shoulder, the wrenching pull of the knot startling him. He had screamed and convulsed once before passing out, his eyesight throbbing with a pinkish color as he succumbed.

It still bothered him from time to time. He felt the mass of scar tissue weigh in his arm, the muscle atrophied and thin throughout his recovery. When he had first taken his shirt off in front of Akira he could tell that she carefully noticed.

Blake had met Akira Yamada at Benchwarmers during her second semester of her junior year. She was from Beaverton, and was studying conservation biology with an emphasis on riparian ecology. She wore a red chambray shirt unbuttoned at the collar and a pair of khaki pants, and he recognized her, having seen her at a party the weekend before. She was drinking at the bar with another student, and when he approached her she smiled, pushing her long 29

straight black hair away from her face when he asked if he could take the empty seat beside her. She said fine and he sat down and asked her what she was drinking, and whether she would suggest it. She said maybe, and told him it was a regional ale, and so he ordered one and asked her to tell him something about herself. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-three and he liked her immediately. It was the first time since the accident that he had really made a connection with someone.

He felt that his friends first pitied him, and that they were unsure of how to act around him, as if he had become some kind of stranger. Blake knew though that he too acted differently around them, that he had changed, or maybe that the accident had given him the excuse to change. His temper began to flare at unexpected times, and his tendency to leave dinners early became routine, as did the ease with which he would argue without judgment at every little contest.

This night was different, though, and he felt the human warmth in his chest when she laughed at one of his stories, when she told him she loved skydiving, when she let him finish her drink, when she touched his side before she left, handing him a napkin with her number scrawled on it above a loopy heart. He smiled when he folded it up and paid his bill. Blake called her the next day and asked her to have coffee with him at the White House, an invitation she 30

quickly accepted. Blake remembered the anticipation he felt as he waited for her on the deck. She arrived riding a bike, her face wet in the rain, her breath showing in the cold air.

The way she touched his skin made him burn. She traced where it was stained tawny and beige and white with scar tissue at his arm, and he was conscious of its appearance and told her so. There was also a square in his inner thigh where they had taken skin grafts for the surgical repair.

She hadn’t said anything, and when she kissed him on the shoulder her lips left only a dull feeling above his injury. He was embarrassed, ashamed somehow of his body.

“Don’t,” he said, when she first tried touching it.

“Okay,” she replied. “If you really don’t want me to.”

“Not yet,” he told her.

She asked him about it again, a few days or so later, right after he tripped on a pair of her crumpled jeans that lay beside the bed, which caused him to spill coffee on the duvet. He had apologized effusively as the stain widened into a ghostly inkblot, but she smiled, smoothed the material out, and motioned for him to sit beside her. He put the two mugs and the plate of scrambled eggs and buttered wheat toast on the bedside table and told her about the accident. He showed her more closely the underside of his arm where 31

the damage was most extensive.

“It looks like it hurt,” she said.

“It didn’t at first, not when it actually happened,” he admitted. “I guess I must have been in shock. When the chainsaw snapped back it happened damn quick. Like I was punched or something.”

“It makes you look rugged.”

“I guess.”

“Rugged and tough.”

“I messed up,” he admitted. “Nothing rugged or tough about it. Some people just think I’m broken up inside.”

“You’re not broken.”

She kissed him after that, her tender fingers tracing the whorl of scar tissue before she took his hand and placed it on her breast. He could feel the cadence of her heartbeat beneath her tee shirt as she turned toward him, laughing aloud as she felt the cooling coffee stain touch her foot.

After pushing the rug back until it rolled up against the 32

coffee table, Blake laid out all of the cleaners on the floor.

It was mysterious, how large it had grown while he had been out. The fluid had fanned beyond the stain mark, and he had to retrieve a second towel before he could begin. First he tried the all-natural cleaner. The liquid was a slight greenish color and thick like motor oil. He rubbed it on and let the cleaner soak into the wood. As he ran the cloth around and around he found himself thinking about Akira. He realized that he missed her in a way he hadn’t before. She had graduated from EOU and gone to visit her grandparents in Kamakura two weeks back. She had broken up with him several months before that, however, at a point when it had been fairly amicable for them both. She told him that he was too quiet, too still for her; that he had been too unwilling to share his thoughts, his secrets, or his hopes.

She told him that even despite that, she wanted to move on, to seek someplace new. He let her go too easily, he thought now. Everything he had let go of too easily.

Since the accident he had been unemployed and living on workers’ compensation; he withdrew from his inheritance at times to pay the rent. He no longer went out to Ten Depot to listen to music and sample the latest ale from Terminal Gravity. He no longer visited his friends from school. It was tasks like this that now garnered his attention. He grew to enjoy landscaping the yard, to enjoy placing brick or stone or hoeing rows in a small herb garden he had fashioned. He 33

grew to find satisfaction in shaping purpleheart and maple into cutting boards or butcher blocks in the small woodshop he had built in the garage. He preferred to eat hamburger steak late at night when he grew hungry instead of going out with friends. He would rather drink on the back roads than sit at the bar at Bud’s. It was these little things, these directed tasks that now filled his life. Blake sighed, turning the cloth over as he stared at the stain and the way it was brilliantly present and unchanged.

It had grown again, despite his work. The rusty color had taken a deeper tint as well. Blake sat back on his haunches and lifted a second bottle. He was beginning to grow irritated. What was this unearthly stain? Was it an apparition?

Some hallucination conceived out of the slow haze of the Percocet he occasionally took? Blake sheepishly bought the painkillers from a high school junior who liked to be called Laser. He had never asked why, but paid for the pentagonshaped pills with cash out on Hunter’s Road. The whole activity looked and felt excessively illicit to him, like out of a movie or something, and he wondered why they didn’t make the exchange outside the public library or at Pioneer Park. It was funny how it all worked out though. He would ask Laser next time if they could just make a pass at the Looking Glass bookstore, maybe in the science fiction aisle.

He changed towels and tried a new solution. As it soaked into the wood he went to the garage for a pry bar to pull 34

back the baseboard. He also found a light stand and a hammer, carrying all three back to the den. It was growing warmer now and he checked his watch to see how much longer the solution had to set. As he waited Blake pulled a can of Olympia from the icebox in the mudroom and drank from the lip for a long moment. After he wiped away the cleaner he was upset to discover that the stain had remained relatively the same, unchanged and full. He slammed the bottle down, the mixture sloshing audibly inside.

“Goddammit,” he swore. He pushed the remaining bottles aside and used the pry bar to scrape through the first layers of slate blue paint and primer over the baseboard. Beneath he could see where the stain had inched up along the interior strip. It was again that blood red, dark and murderous.

Blake leaned down and smelled it, afraid that his mind was inventing the rounded shape, the lake it made on the wood. Again, it gave off no odor. He considered calling his father in Seattle and asking him for advice, for an estimation of what this possibly could be. But that would lead to a discussion of other things he didn’t wish to talk about. He then thought quickly about ripping the floorboard up, of gouging the pry bar deep into the sheetrock, and excavating this hard and deep scar from the den with brute force. The feeling quickly passed, however, as he moved back from the corner and finished the beer from the armchair.

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Out the window Blake could see the faint dusting of snow atop Mount Emily and, further north, over the bowl of the valley. The snow looked out of place, aberrant and yet somehow intentional, there atop the fields of timber. During the night Blake had lain awake listening to the thunder before it began to snow. He left the bed and watched the first snow fall through a cone of sodium light from a street light at the corner from the window. The clouds flashed and broke and then came together again, the sound somehow less full, duller as the storm stifled it. His arm tensed with each coming flash, the urban glow in the underbelly of cloud turning white with each bolt. After a while Blake slipped on a pair of sweats and a wool sweater. Taking the half-full case of beer from the icebox, he went to sit outside beneath the awning. He had sat there drinking, contemplating cutting up a pill to swallow with his beer and watching as the hills were caught in the stark glare of the thundersnow.

James Stolen is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and has work in Bellevue Literary Review, Shenandoah, Sierra Nevada Review, and Ghost Town, among others. He currently lives in Oregon.

36

Seeking Our Fortunes Joanne Nelson It’s the sounds of solitaire that are most hypnotic: the ruffle of cards against each other as they’re dealt, the slow tap of a fingernail against the deck in contemplation, and the harmony of shuffling for a new game. Or maybe it’s the patterns—the red then black or black then red of the king, queen, jack; the slow buildup of diamonds and spades; and the repetition of the constant counting to three. It’s easy to imagine those first games in the mid-1700s as a kind of fortune telling, the spread of cards across the table reminiscent of a tarot reading, the study of each play a divination. Easy to envision how a lonesome player might find meaning in the cards. Ah, the queen, now that’s lucky. Notice how often she comes up. And look at all those hearts; surely my desires will soon come true!

During my seventh grade parent-teacher conference in 1973, my mother let Sister Marion McGillicuddy know that my father had left her and they’d soon be divorcing. I watched from under my long bangs as Sister Marion leaned back in her desk chair, her holy habit draped heavy on her body 37

like weight to be borne, her hands folded into the oversized sleeves so they couldn’t be seen. This was the moment she was predicting my future.

Sister Marion, who looked to be around fifty, presented a study in contrasts; the black and white of her dress emphasized her pale skin, and her large forehead stood out against the thin strip of dark hair nearly overshadowed by her white coif and black veil. Her behavior toward me had always matched the sharp variance of her garb. Some days she acted kind, her apple cheeks puffed out in a smile as she greeted me or explained a lesson, while other days— most days really—she was harsh, her features firm as she chastised me throughout the day for talking out of turn, or my penmanship, or a dozen other imperfections.

The night of the conference, my mother—clutching her purse to her stomach, her shoulders hunched against the shame of her news—sat beside me across from Sister. With her tidy desk between us, Sister Marion settled her face into a benevolent countenance, looked my mother over, and said, “I knew something was wrong with her.”

I happened to be the lone child in the class with parents who were divorcing. I hadn’t told anyone. Since Sister Marion had sent home several notes complaining of my rule infractions (wrinkled blouses, papers turned in late) 38

and problems on the playground (fighting with boys), my mother felt Sister Marion should know. Mom trusted the clergy of St. Gregory the Great and had even met with the priest the day my father had left her a note saying that he couldn’t take it anymore and was leaving. No explanation of the it was included, although I, sick with secret knowledge, believed it pertained to a woman I’d seen him kiss at a party, and the low sweet way he talked on the phone whenever Mom left the house. Father Bill had counseled my mother to go home, focus on her housework and prayer, and wait for my father to do the right thing—to come back. While my mother looked to the priest for help, I played games of solitaire betting my father’s return against my wins. *** I didn’t think my behavior was the problem at school; I thought Sister Marion was out to get me. There was the grammar test I’d messed up—she’d written cruel comments on it, I don’t remember what, only, even now, the injustice of her words, and how she insisted I have it signed by a parent. I tore it up instead. At home I told my mother what had happened and showed her the ripped pieces.

Uncharacteristically she wrote a note to school claiming that the test had been misplaced. Sister Marion, her eyes magnified by heavy glasses, looked from Mom’s writing to me several times the morning I handed it to her before she 39

folded it and placed it in the drawer of her desk. Distrust— eyes locked on me, brows raised high, and lips set tight— was written on her face, but she nodded me to my seat without speaking.

Our relationship worsened the morning I’d become so engrossed in a book that I hadn’t heard the call to take out our math papers. Sister Marion, assuming intentional disobedience, had come to my desk and completed what she referred to as an elephant sweep—stretching her arms out long, putting her hands together, and shoving everything off my desk. The loud crashing and tumbling of the day’s accumulation of texts and folders and pencils onto the classroom floor startled me out of my trance. I jumped up, quickly sat back down, and then, hands shaking and heart thundering in my chest and head, I stared at the floor, afraid to look up at the furious teacher who stood over me. Around me I heard the low giggles of the boys and the loud shaming silence of the girls.

I wonder what Sister Marion felt as she sent my books cascading into the aisle. Her heart must have been racing from the exertion of her tantrum. Did she relish the power as she stood above me, hands on her hips, chest heaving, and shouted, “Pick everything up, now!”? Did she feel pleased when she turned, habit billowing wide around her, and marched to the front of the room again? She was queen of 40

this game. She held every card. So certain her instructions would be followed—so certain that we all watched her. The classroom became quiet except for the sounds of me picking up books and folders, hunting for pencils, moving around the desk, and searching for my things. The other children’s feet and legs pointed dutifully toward Sister Marion. Their hands, I knew, were instinctively folded on their desks— just as I was sure all eyes and ears strained toward me, the unspoken question so loud I could almost taste its salty harshness.

Will she cry?

My expression, I hoped, revealed no emotion, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep it that way. The kids called me “Stone” for this habit of keeping my face impassive; I hated the nickname but refused to shed tears for the delight of Sister Marion or my classmates. I would not. Sister Marion began her math instruction calmly, only the redness where her cheeks and forehead met her wimple suggesting anything other than her usual icy composure.

During quiet reading time the next week, Sister Marion, strolling up and down the aisles, noticed that I was reading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book I’d checked out from our school’s library. Without a word she pulled it from my hands and began ripping the paperback apart in front of 41

the paralyzed class, a frightening yet comical performance with pages falling to the ground and Sister straining over the waxy cover. When she finally grew tired and the area around her feet and the nearby desktops were littered with Smith’s paragraphs and chapters (the jacket still intact in her hand), she dragged me by the arm to the principal’s office.

I imagine there must have been sound in this scene. Sister must have shouted questions, students must have made exclamations of surprise, and I must have said something, made some defense of my choice in reading. However, try as I might, I only have a visual of her angry hands throttling the book, the pages of type splayed open to face the class, and Sister tearing them off, one after another—wanting so badly to destroy the thing.

It didn’t go well for Sister Marion in the principal’s office.

The librarian, Sister Barbara, joined our group just as Father Bill instructed me to sit down and offered Sister some tea.

Sister Barbara’s upset about the ruined book was clear the second she saw its remains on Father Bill’s desk. I was an avid reader and spent most recesses in the library instead of out on the playground. Sister Barbara had recommended the book to me. Her cheeks blushed and I caught a glare thrown toward Sister Marion before she turned her attention to Father Bill and asked, “What on earth happened to one of my perfectly good books?”

42

By way of answering, Father Bill looked at me and said, “You make your way back to class now.”

Later I learned Sister Marion viewed the book as scandalous.

It took me several close readings throughout the next year to understand that she meant the scene in which the heroine, Francie Nolan, is attacked in a stairwell by the pervert the neighborhood fears. Francie’s mother rescues her and shoots the pedophile, but not before the man’s exposed penis touches Francie’s leg. The horror of the touch mediated when Francie’s father swabs the spot with carbolic acid. Now, though, I wonder if there was more, if the real issue involved the low-class, Irish Nolans themselves. If the father’s alcoholism, the family’s poverty, and the ragged children were what Sister Marion found most shameful. *** At the parent-teacher conference, Mom tried to help me out. I had an assigned seat in the back row of the classroom, the solitary girl amongst a group of trouble-making boys, and often complained about how I couldn’t concentrate.

Mom asked Sister to change my seat so I could focus better.

Sister Marion sighed, glanced at me, her kind smile pasted on, and said, “Everyone has to take their turn in the back.”

Why didn’t I jump up and shout It’s not fair? Or, Why doesn’t 43

Katie Strum with the nice handwriting and two parents ever have to sit there? Why didn’t my mom stand up and insist? At the time, though, children and parents rarely questioned or argued with teachers, and they never contradicted nuns. I stayed silent, traced the markings on the desk with my fingers, and did not let Sister Marion see my rage. *** At home, with my mother looking for work during the day and going out to bars at night, I played lots of solitaire.

After school I’d sit on the braided rug in the living room promising myself only one game before starting homework.

But I’d play for hours, the time ticking by, the dog nestled at my leg, the safe rhythms of the cards, the counting, and the repetition blocking out my worries and distracting me from the low, creaking noises of the settling house.

My grandmothers liked to play solitaire. Mom’s mom, Grandma Nowicki, played a version called Kings’ Corners.

The idea of getting all the cards out was the same, but the layout was a square instead of a straight line. Grandma played at her kitchen table late into the night after Grandpa went to bed. The bright, focused glow from a desk lamp shining at a slant and making a circle of light for the hand she dealt. Her tan, plastic tablecloth had a pattern pressed into it and the print from newspapers rubbed off in the 44

small recessed squares.

On overnights, when I sat watching her play, I’d use my fingernails to rub off bits of the black ink and, more than likely, dirt, making designs or writing my name. The temptation to write swear words was always strong, but I resisted and waited for velvet or plush naps on couches and chairs. I’d practice writing shithead over and over—the expletive my mother used when referencing my father, or sometimes damn or hell, the cusswords my friends and I more regularly experimented with. Words I could erase with the brush of my hand.

My dad’s mother, Grandma Dora, had a cup of tea with a graham cracker every night and played solitaire before bed when I slept over. She counted three cards from the top of the deck, hit them on the table for luck, and then considered what to do. The top card had to be played first, and she never glanced at the other cards she held.

“Why know if nothing can be done?” she’d ask when I begged her to peek. But I wanted to look, especially if it seemed like she’d lose. I wanted to see which play might have changed everything. If she couldn’t sleep I’d hear her bring the deck out again, the sounds floating down the long hallway of her and Grandpa’s trailer to the back room I slept in. This grandfather also sound asleep, his rhythmic, 45

predictable snores punctuating the snap of cards.

In earlier years, well before seventh grade, Mom and I played double solitaire on her bed in the evening, the two-deck game similar to playing alone, except the aces in the middle could be shared. My father, still living with us, drank beer and watched TV in the basement or, if it got late, dozed in his chair, the bottle still clutched in his hand—leaning, leaning, leaning, but not quite falling. In Mom’s room, low music from her radio wove through our absorption as we dealt cards on the wrinkles of the blankets, the patterns upset if either of us stretched or moved a leg across the covers. A few times we played out. Just eight piles centered between us, arranged by suit and ace to king, our excitement bigger than the memory of who finished first.

After my father left, Mom’s head stayed too full with pictures of betrayal and her horrible grief for her to make time for priests or settle down to any games. Eventually she began working full time at a factory and I found different things to do. I befriended two girls, Nan and Amanda, and we became skilled at skipping out during lunch. The three of us crept to the edge of our school’s property while the boys played football and the other girls jumped rope. We slipped behind a row of bushes and then climbed over a fence to reach the neighborhood beyond the school. At Amanda’s, her mother also away at work, we stole cigarettes 46

and made peanut butter sandwiches. We returned before the end of lunch recess and faded into the lines of kids waiting for the bell, our secrets leaving us satisfied and confident for the rest of the afternoon. Finally done with pleasing her, I found Sister Marion much less menacing.

Was there something wrong with me? I suppose, but it was more than just the absence of my father. I didn’t fit at the Catholic school for a whole host of reasons. My short, fine hair stuck to my head in a time of long, fluffy waves for the girls; my sloppy cursive made a’s that didn’t close and wide, uneven loops of t’s and l’s; my socks fell down to my ankles instead of staying up nice and snug below my knees the way Katie Strum’s and even Nan and Amanda’s always did.

There was something wrong with how I put my mother to bed at night when she drank too much and the way I lied for her—to my grandmothers about where she went at night, and to her work when I called in sick for her. And something wrong with how many nights I asked Nan if I could stay at her house, anything to avoid another night in my own. Maybe I deserved the spot in the back with those naughty boys who threw spitballs and made faces when Sister wrote on the board. They made me giggle, and Sister’s eagle ears straightaway turned to me and singled me out for punishment. As if I’d laughed with no provocation, just a titter to announce a glorious day, to bother those angelic 47

boys arranged around me.

There was certainly something wrong with Sister Marion, though. I still picture her in her dark habit and full wimple at a time when other nuns were starting to wear street clothes or at least a dress with a simple veil. What reading of scripture nourished such rectitude and obvious disgust with my badly combed hair, my ill-fitting uniform, and me in general? How was I not someone she could care for, not someone her god thought worthy?

I’m curious to know what happened that day in Father’s office after he sent me back to class and Sister Marion had to face his judgment, the librarian’s anger, and that wrecked book. What embarrassment she suffered in the convent that evening—or if she saw herself as justified, as saving impressionable girls from literature that would lead to impure thoughts. She didn’t return the next year, nor did any of the nuns, as their order broke with the priests of our school. Our paths diverged, but in retrospect, there may have been another way to interpret her comment at the seventh grade conference. Perhaps her voice was more gentle and understanding than I color it now when I remember her saying, “I knew something was wrong with her.” Either way, it’s the inclusion of the words, with her, that makes the phrase personal, like a card flipping over and telling a fortune.

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*** Nan and I were sent to the Catholic girl’s high school after eighth grade, and later that fall I moved to my new stepfather’s home on a different side of town. Amanda started public school, and I never saw her again after graduation. Nan and I didn’t hang out in high school despite all the hours we’d spent together the previous two years. Our unspoken agreement to expand friendships, I told myself when I merely greeted her in the halls. However, even with all this time in between, I only write that with a burning face. The truth is she needed me more than I needed her, and I’m the one who wanted better status. I didn’t want to be in the back of the class and called names anymore.

Years later, at a reunion, Nan told me about her roughest high school adventure. Apparently, she’d taken off in tenth grade and joined a carnival—a cheap, ugly traveling show performing at church festivals and moving from town to town. Men who stood in the shadows, men the nuns would have told us never to approach, maintained the few rides at these fairs: a Ferris wheel, a carousel with paint-chipped horses, and the Tilt-A-Whirl. And nervous, scamming teens or sullen old men lorded over the booth games—the Rope Ladder Climb, Tip The Cat, and Ring Toss. Nan stayed away for six months before returning home. She assumed the police had interviewed me, but as far as I remember, I hadn’t noticed her absence—I’d been that successful at 49

separating from my grade school life.

I picture Nan’s rollicking household and all the weekends I spent there. The youngest of seven kids being raised by a one-armed mom and an aunt, Nan never mentioned having a dad, and I never thought to ask about one. They had the type of house where nothing was routine, and anything might happen. One day a huge tractor wheel appeared in the yard with no explanation, and we all took turns curling up inside and getting pushed down a hill, nobody to tell us to stop or be careful. What spread of cards had led Nan to cast her lot with carnival folk? Was it as simple as a crush on the boy who sold cotton candy, or did her easygoing, lawless home hold secrets I never considered?

What fortunes were we creating? My grandmothers wide-awake while the old men slept, my mother with her heartbreak and alcohol, Sister Marion hidden in her nun’s garb, and me in my bruised confusion. All of us alone in the night, stuck with ourselves. Mostly, I think, we decide our fortunes—repeat them to ourselves over and over, and then create them. It’s easy to imagine predicting the future: a joker will emerge when least expected, you’ll definitely meet a man named Jack, beware of clubs, and at some point a diamond will figure prominently. Seventh grade will end and sometimes you’ll wish it hadn’t. Occasionally you’ll win. *** 50

Now, nearly forty years later, I play solitaire at the kitchen table on my laptop. The program provides the sounds and counts the cards for me. I’m simply required to click and drag the curser, or to tap undo if I make the wrong choice.

There is a song if I win and I’m encouraged to play fast to beat my last score. Still I’m pulled in, hypnotized by the rhythms, curious to glimpse what is hidden and what I can uncover. The family dog, hoping I’ll pull him into my lap, stands on his hind legs and stretches up to scratch my leg. A dog—a different one than in seventh grade—the constant link with those long ago games of solitaire in the living room on the braided, oval rug, when I should have been starting homework. My mother and grandmothers have passed on.

I haven’t seen Nan in years, and we can only guess about Sister Marion McGillicuddy.

Joanne Nelson is a psychotherapist and educator living in Hartland, Wisconsin with her family. She is a contributor to Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM, the NPR affiliate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has published both essays and poetry.

Recently she was the recipient of a residency through Writers in the Heartland. Joanne has recently begun a project to inspire more writing opportunities in her community and is a reader for several literary magazines. Her online solitaire win percentage stands at 17 percent, although she once won five games in a row.

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Compound James Fowler

With Ruckus in full lather it’s important to keep him distracted until the rinse. Otherwise he’ll shake up a storm of suds all over her and the van. So with one hand Janice keeps the yellow Lab snapping for the chew toy on its elastic pole while with the other she sprays him down. Then she quickly switches to the brush and hair dryer while letting him gnaw the prize to his heart’s content. At bath’s end, she moves the steps up to the basin and coaxes him out with a treat while calling him good dog, clean dog. He follows her out of the customized RV and pads up the driveway to the front door.

Graciela, the Salvadoran maid, coos over him in her native tongue. Janice remarks that he must be bilingual after all these years.

Catching the joke after a blank pause, Graciela improves it.

“Si, he disobey me and the Rossiters in two language. But we love him just so.”

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SPUN Linda Michel-Cassidy

Imagine: a high school boy confident enough to wear clogs to school. I followed Matt into the yoga alternative to Gym, where he flipped them off of his toes and took a spot in the front row. I was a girl brave enough to let her mother give her a perm in the kitchen. So that’s what we looked like: me with a home perm and him in wooden-soled clogs.

That gave me the idea to wear three-inch lime green hoop 78

earrings and use a thrift store bowling bag as my purse. It was all very off-the-hook.

He wore the clogs year-round, even in the winter.

“It’s what the Swedish do,” he said. Well, what did I know?

I had a car and he did not. So I did the driving. Even when I didn’t have a class last period, I stuck around breathing secondhand smoke in the senior lounge of our disgusting high school basement while I waited for him. Then I’d drive him home, me acting like I hadn’t just wasted the last fifty minutes of my life, him tapping the toes of those clogs in time to whatever bootleg tape he had stolen from his brother’s room. We talked about where we wanted to move when we were older: him to Paris, me to California, and how much we hated the football team and the cheerleaders.

We lived near each other except that you’d reach my house and then go a bit further to get to his. Over a little bridge marked with two signs: No Swimming, which we ignored, and Bridge Freezes First, which to be honest, I didn’t notice until later.

Driving to his house the day before Christmas break I was hoping, hoping, hoping he’d mention all the times over vacation when we could hang out. Then I could say I was 79

going to Florida to see my grandparents, which would make him want me even more than he already did, which was zero. I may have been thinking about that instead of the fact that there was actual snow blowing about.

So we’re yammering on about who set what on fire in the chem lab or a party on Friday and the car starts to spin. It was all very slow motion, just like the way they have it in a cop show. Well, Matt started to shriek, like a blood-chilling horror movie scream, but coming from a little girl. I mean, okay, the car’s spinning, but how was that going to help? He stuck out his arms as leverage against the dashboard and straightened his legs as if to stomp the brakes had he not been in the death seat.

“Hit the brakes! Hit the brakes!” he said. Still yelping. And I even had time to think that with his arms braced like that, if we hit the guardrail, his wrists would just snap in two.

The car continued to turn, with me at least having the sense to not jam on the brakes. I pumped them just like we were told in Driver’s Ed even though he was still yelling at me.

The car swirled slower and slower, not slamming into a single thing and by the time it stopped, I had fallen out of love with both that boy and his clogs.

“Crazy! That was like a ride,” he said, “or better. Something 80

no amusement park has even thought of yet.”

I invited him to walk his own self home and thought about the tiny steps he’d have to take on the icy bridge in those wooden shoes, his excellent butt and thighs tensed against slipping, just like the Swedish do.

Linda Michel-Cassidy lives in Arroyo Seco, a tiny rural village in northern New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Black Heart, Writing Tomorrow, Provo Canyon Review, Chokecherries, The Notebook and the anthology Seeking Its Own Level, among others. She is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars and was the Taos Summer Writing Conference’s Resident Writer in 2011.

In addition, she is a metalsmith and installation artist and for four years was a resident artist for the Taos Public Schools.

In her spare time she skis; although, sad to say, not enough to be called a bum.

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Scheherazade Sidestep Catherine Evleshin

I answer to a number of epithets—Grim Reaper, San La Muerte, Bones-In-Black. There was a time when I pretty much had my way with humans, but these days, you mortals have a lot of tricks to postpone my tap on your left shoulder.

And someone else makes my work difficult—Eshu Elegba.

Long ago, the Creator Olodumare threw a party for all the gods. Dozens arrived bearing gifts. The divine blacksmith Ogum presented a honed machete; the hunter Oxossi, meat and fowl to feed the assemblage; Iemanja, mother of life, a chest of pearls from her ocean depths; the herbalist Ossanha, healing leaves and tree bark; Xango, king of Oyo, his favorite horse; Oxum, the river goddess of love, in her gold satin dress, a basket of gold coins on her head.

Eshu Elegba was just a runaway kid living in the forests of West Africa. He raced in, dried leaves stuck to the grime on his feet, and offered nothing but a trifling red feather he 83

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RUNNING AFTER IT Dan Crawley

Hunt knew the lie he blurted out a moment ago to his son was probably too harsh. But at least it accomplished the intended result: stopping the nine-year-old’s babbling about his mother’s obnoxiously positive boyfriend and, apparently, Ryan’s new best friend. Hunt glanced at Ryan.

The boy slumped in the passenger seat like a half-full duffel bag. The wind howled through the cracked open windows and mussed the boy’s long hair. A blade of the sun coming through the window slowly burned Hunt’s bobbing knee.

“You okay?” The wind carried off Hunt’s words.

The boy watched his hands in his small lap.

Hunt turned his attention outside the windshield. The surrounding craggy hills and sparsely dotted juniper pines ratcheted up his loneliness. The bent yellow grasses on both sides of the interstate were prime for a brush fire. His exwife’s small four-banger engine had whined all the way up 93

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A Monk During Peacetime Ari Laurel

Thumbs are tucked. Palms make a shallow well, as if to offer feed to a nearby bird. The hand makes an obtuse angle; the fingers aim directly underneath the jaw, to strike and pull back again, like a snake’s head.

It’s Daylight Savings Time, and after class, I walk down International Boulevard to my car with my keys clutched in my hand, into the early dark, toothless and running a thumb across their serrations. The more I learn about fighting, the more willing I am to run. When doing forms in the mirror, I’m reluctant to make eye contact with my own reflection.

The shape of a fist, a real fist, feels unfamiliar. I’m told these stances ground me. Help me find my strongest posture.

Center my chi. I can barely do ten push-ups.

The Shaolin monks used to meditate in mountained temples: seeking enlightenment, sitting in one place for hours a day, and waiting for the feeling. I don’t know the feeling. I don’t actively seek the feeling. Enlightenment is a $1.50 taco from 119

the taco truck at eight p.m. I leave Oakland for Montana in six months, and every week that passes, I feel the Rockies rising to meet me, and the tide to the West receding. I plan my last burrito. My last Korean barbeque. My last mango sticky rice. I make friends and family promise to send me Ranch 99 care packages. It feels wrong to plan for these things when I wake up every morning feeling that there is so much to do, and that I don’t do enough, and it kills me.

In the monasteries, many of the monks never reached enlightenment. Or maybe they caught glimpses of it, but couldn’t draw it back. As they tried, the knit kept unraveling.

Their muscles became stiff and their bodies atrophied.

They died at nineteen, twenty years old. Nobody knew the importance of bodies. Were you supposed to transcend your body or did your body, itself, become a temple? What is the feeling I’m supposed to feel? I sing K-pop songs without knowing the words. I read books I don’t understand. I’m awful at counting to ten in Chinese. I’m finally learning to take pride in myself, and I’m being whisked away to a winter white wonderland where people don’t get me like that.

“What are you gonna do?” my auntie asks. “You gonna write, or you gonna march?” A writer and activist who did work with the United Farm Workers, she wrote for The Simpsons and Grey’s Anatomy. But when I was younger she taught me isang bagsak, a unity clap she learned in the ’80s during the 120

People Power Movement. I did it with her, but never took it outside. Who would clap with me? Now she lives in Culver City doing juice cleanses and watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. *** Sparring step number eight: I step my left leg behind my right and wind up my torso. I fling my right leg up and give a deceptively small tap with my heel. It’s supposed to aim for the groin. It only needs to be a tap.

“That’s the feeling!” my teacher says. “That’s it!”

I continue down the length of the temple, and try to remember the feeling. The tension in my midsection, the angle of my leg as it springs up. I try to replay it, get used to it, and dream about it. I don’t feel it clearly anymore. It feels like blinking during a camera flash and only seeing spots.

I leave class in the dark. Down the street, three young men are toking by a doorway.

“Hey baby,” one of them says, generically.

I turn to respond, but my mouth won’t open. I turn back and keep walking.

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“She had to look at you to know she didn’t want you,” another says. He’s laughing as I pass underneath the street lamp.

I stop at the taco truck on my way home.

When Bodhidharma invented kung-fu, it was to keep the monks from dying. Horrified by the state of their health, he felt moved to share what he knew. The movements were designed to be precise, thoughtful, and meditative, so the monks could still focus. Their muscles grew. They became stronger; they stood taller. Later, they observed earthly conflicts and saw themselves as participants. Some were glad of this: to be healthy, to live longer, to know enough to defend themselves during wartime. Others were just glad for their extended shot at enlightenment, and continued to focus their energies there. They didn’t want to answer the hundreds of questions that come with participation. *** “I’m worried I won’t be able to learn everything before I leave,” I admit on a Sunday before class. Sunday classes are

by Lake Merritt, where you aren’t supposed to take your dog but everyone does anyway, and where people tie ropes to trees and slackline in the sun. I watch joggers stretch under the columns and can smell someone nearby smoking 122

brisket.

My teacher says, “Well, you can’t really learn everything.”

I didn’t mean everything everything. Just everything up to the next level. But I don’t say that. My teacher watches my forms and claps his hands on my back. I try to relax it. In the early ’70s, someone recorded Bruce Lee saying, “Now, you put water into a cup; it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” I think about this every time I tense my shoulders to keep my bra straps up.

Friends start making jokes about how I can beat them up now. I laugh and play along, thinking of moments, while sparring, I would inwardly say uncle a dozen times. I take BART home. I hate getting my lazy ass to the city and coming back exhausted. Sinking into my seat, I notice a sign near the window that reads: “For security matters call BART Police.” Underneath, someone has scribbled the name “Oscar Grant.” The things that make me angry under my skin also paralyze me. I’m a participant with no idea how to participate. I can imagine myself scribbling that name like a hieroglyph, in impotent passive aggression, knowing only to express myself through words and signs, but never movement.

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Tonight, my roommate shows me pictures her friend sent her of a nighttime excavation site in New Mexico. “Look at this,” she says. “You can see everything. The whole galaxy.”

The sky looks like it’s swirling, and it’s like I’m leaving the atmosphere through the backlit pixels of her iPhone.

“Holy shit.”

“You’ll see a lot of that in Montana.”

What do I do to prevent myself from dying? I get eight hours of sleep a night and eat lean protein and vegetables.

I find one thing to like about each new person I meet. I choose mentors. I refuse to weigh myself because a number that can only get lower encourages perfection, and I risk confusing disappearance with results, when really I don’t want to disappear. I want to be enormous with courage.

I need to put myself in more situations that make me feel small, but I want to be the ten-car train that goes screaming into the tunnel. Choosing between these feelings, I choose to feel nervous, anxious, new, and come out brave, laughing, and savvy. I count my arm bruises in the mornings now. I showed them off to a boy who looked concerned and tried to kiss them, and I just laughed, pulling my arm away. My efforts will never be fully realized. Surely, if I can rock the coastline, I can brave the stars. It takes work to disappear, 124

almost as much as it does to do the opposite. Five stops left to MacArthur, I imagine dipping my feet in the basin of a tide pool, and I try not to think about how long it will be before I hear an ocean.

Ari Laurel grew up in Oakland, CA, and has lived near the ocean her whole life. She is a managing editor and writer for Be Young & Shut Up, as well as a blog editor and contributor for Hyphen magazine. She was a finalist in the PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Chinquapin. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Montana, in the landlocked city of Missoula.

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THE MOAT Ian Summit

I knew this was lunacy and chose it regardless. For well over five years I hadn’t bought so much as a pull-tab and now I was sitting at one of the casino’s blackjack tables. Instead of making a U-turn and going to the FrosteeFreese with Alex as planned, I worried if the car radio alone would be enough to keep her asleep. Normally she’d wake with a start when I parked the car and, having just learned contrary on PBS, say something adorable like, “Daddy, I was dreaming that seals and sharks were friends.”

But yesterday she was at her friend Phoebe’s birthday party. Along with rides from Phoebe’s dad in his two-seater helicopter around their property—referred to as “Quinlan Camp One”—the kids spent the rest of the afternoon splashing around the moat in arm floats. The moat being an actual moat: lined, heated, and filtered that encircled Phoebe’s Austrian-built play castle. So Alex was pooped.

“How does one find Austrian castle builders here in the 127

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The Whole True—False, Should—Shouldn’t Clifford Paradox Robert D. Kirvel One possibility to consider right from the get-go is that he might have been brain damaged. Might have been: as in, might not have been brain damaged, depending on who was talking.

Young Ted first encountered the expression in a British movie, but the next week he overheard his aunt and uncle using the same phrase while whispering about their son.

“He’s been at it again.” Ted’s straining ear caught the ambiguity.

At it? Ted thought they were poking fun at the way British actors speak in films, but the adults were not jesting. At it. As in their oldest boy, Clifford. Over-enthusiastic manipulation, they meant, eagerness cranked up to compulsion. The parents, distressed more about ripple effects than morality, finally opined in a peevish duet that Clifford would go crazy if he kept at it. An agnostic version of: Thou shalt not spill 143

thy seed in vain, to misquote Genesis 39:8–10. The directive was meant to warn three younger siblings against getting carried away when they attained the age of awakening.

Clifford never went crazy, but he broadened his repertoire to hand washing with such vigor and frequency that fingers and palms went raw. Skin blistered and dissolved. Later in life he took to a wheelchair—always the boy had been awkward on his feet—and toward the end he would not stand at all, though his youthful wife and doctors believed him capable if he’d wanted to stand. They maintained there was nothing wrong with his legs or feet, other than flat arches, but he did not want to get up from the wheelchair anymore, sound legs or otherwise, flat feet or no feet.

Something happened at a tender age that is suggestive.

Shortly after he turned eight years old, Clifford invited Ted to his house on a Saturday morning along with four other schoolmates. Ted was born the same month as his cousin, and the two boys grew up within shouting distance, but they never bonded, so the invitation came as a surprise. Clifford herded the boys he considered to be neighborhood pals, including Ted, down into the basement to sit on folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle while he stood before them to talk about a club he wanted to start. The idea was to repair some simple radio transmitters and receivers—geeky skills at which he excelled—so that club members could hear special broadcasts. Clifford broadcasts. Clifford’s ambition, which 144

never came to much, was to become a radio personality, but the assembled boys already knew about that pipe dream from the annoying way he read aloud in school. Halfway through an explanation of the club’s objectives, Clifford’s mother shouted something through the open door at the top of the stairs. When his mother’s language inclined to the disagreeable, the radio-personality-in-training grabbed a clothesline stretched below the ceiling, and he paced back and forth from one wall to the opposite while allowing the line to slide through his grip as angry sounds from above ricocheted between his ears. He must have been wearing a ring because the cord returned a humming noise as he walked, the behavior appearing to be practiced as his breath quickened and became raspy while his mother’s voice boomed over the humming line. She stood somewhere in the shadows at the stair top and lobbed invectives at the boys— “Your silly friends down there better … (blah) …”

—like so much soiled laundry— “I told you before to get into your eff-ing room and clean up that … (blah, blah) …”

—while the pacing below continued, until one of the boys rushed up the steps in the manner of an alarmed coyote 145

and ducked out the back door, slamming it. Three other boys followed in a knot as Ted considered what to do. He knew this much: you don’t abandon a person you know, especially a relative in a difficult situation. You don’t turn on someone who is injured and gnaw at an oozing wound like an animal tasting blood. You don’t say no and walk away because it is indecent to do so. Even at eight years old, Ted knew. Ted said no and walked away. Nothing more was mentioned about a radio project or a boy’s club with weekend meetings in the clothesline basement of Clifford’s yellybeans house, but Ted’s behavior that Saturday morning haunted his conscience for months, years. Not Clifford’s, but Ted’s. Something inside remained unsatisfied. Hungry.

As more time passed, he felt more ravenous, but all that remained were a few crumbs from the past, and the feeling never went away. Hunger. But hunger for what?

Clifford’s life, allotted a statistical mile, ended short of the mark by a few thousand feet. Why? It is possible to seek answers to the wrong questions or invoke cause and effect where no such relation is in play. It is possible to ask pointless questions that lead nowhere and take seriously suggestions devoid of merit.

At the funeral, one of the grandparents hinted Clifford’s brain might have been slightly damaged. Why slightly, and how did it happen? Or not happen? This much we know 146

because this is what we are told. God lives in all things and has a home base somewhere beyond the clouds. He is an all-knowing father who is capable of splendid works and apparent whimsy and terrible wrath for reasons not always clear to mortals. It is not obvious, for example, why Clifford died decades before the age predicted in actuarial tables maintained by insurance companies. It is also said that the devil skulks underground where it is hot and smelly, probably from sulfur fumes or putrescence or something unimaginably worse. A mortal cannot imagine the stench because a fallen human must die and enter Hades to find out. The ancient Greeks thought the gate was located at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, but that idea has grown out of favor over the centuries. Satan’s job is temptation, but what he’s really after is a person’s soul. No one knows whether God or the devil harvested Clifford’s, but some people think “fiddling with yourself ” privately puts a black mark on a person’s soul. Or eating meat on Good Friday.

Or maybe not if a person’s thinking equipment is damaged or he is of some “other faith” that shoves wrong ideas into his head, in which case the unenlightened person is or is not culpable in the eyes of his maker. We just don’t know the details.

Paradoxes abound when it comes to Clifford and family opinions in general. This is a problem for Ted in several ways. Number one: he does not like to be left hanging when 147

it comes to family issues. Number two: Ted now has two boys approaching their teens. He would like to relate the Clifford incident as a cautionary tale but knows that parents should never preach to offspring. Many experts insist this is true—about preaching—and they have been preaching that advice for years. Number three: another paradox—or brain teaser if you prefer the term—is that if parents do not take the lead in guiding the next generation (and, yes, preaching if it comes to that), then who will?

Politicians perhaps. Officeholders are elected to solve problems, but it is widely held that they are not good at much other than raising campaign contributions. Pedophile priests—a paradox in and of itself, requiring no predicate (but here is one anyway)—cannot always be trusted.

Perhaps mathematicians can help out with paradoxes and enigmas because math is the discipline, brainy folks assert, that comes closest to what human beings can comprehend about truth or certainty in our universe. (We say “our universe,” meaning absolutely everything but hinting there might be more than one universe, yet another paradox or semantic pleonasm at the very least.) Insurance companies rely on math and statistical records to generate predictions about life events, including the age at which a male like Clifford might be expected to die, slight brain damage or none. Math gives us concepts such as infinity and irrational numbers and the idea that there is no greatest cardinal 148

number. Statistical predictions are expressed in terms of mathematical probability with all its formulaic baggage.

These disciplines create more difficulties for understanding, so the fields of so-called truth along with their probability and truth tables are mixed blessings for all but a few souls possessed of exceptional tolerance for vagueness, black marks or not—from eating meat or horsing around with themselves—on their incorporeal essence.

Enough. This is all too confusing. What Ted wants once and for all is a roadmap for living and learning and getting along and dying, something to tell him what really is or is not up with family members and others he cares about. A map might have come in handy for Clifford’s family back in the day or might prove useful to Ted even at this late date as he continues to wrestle with a troubled conscience. It is doubtful that the question of eating meat on Good Friday or any other day would be solved to everyone’s satisfaction even with a roadmap, but other issues might be rendered a bit less foggy.

So Ted worked up a roadmap, admittedly a rough draft. If he can summon the courage to complete it and show it to his boys one day, he will explain that the roadmap is designed to be read across each row from left to right. Given the nature of adolescents and the possibility of free will, they can also read down or up the columns. Ditto if free will is a myth.

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He will also advise his sons to relax while looking around: the roadmap isn’t lengthy, and there is no exam, but it just might contain a useful suggestion or two about Clifford and family interactions and life in general. Here is what Ted has concluded so far.

The Roadmap Truth and Wisdom

Lies and Ignorance

I think, therefore I am

Anyone claiming to know the truth

Know thyself

Anyone claiming to know thyself

Mahatma Gandhi

Virtually all other politicians, living or dead, but see #1, above

The world as we perceive it is rarely the world as it is

The world as we perceive it

2 + 2 equals 4 always, everywhere Treating unequals equally God and the imagination are one

God made me do it

DNA and your environment

Free will, fate, and the like

First, do no harm

War to end wars

Genuine art (you know it when you see it)

Bad art (critics can tell you what this is*)

Doubt (if scientific)

Doubt (if religious)

Faith (if religious)

Faith (if scientific)

Good questions

There are no bad questions*

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The simplest explanation is best

Ghosts, monsters, UFOs, astrology

The Internet

The Internet

Moby Dick

Hollywood film versions of great literature, except for To Kill a Mockingbird

Public radio and TV on a good day

Commercial radio and TV, especially FOX if you are a Democrat or MSNBC if Republican

Compassion

Judging the universe

*Not really. Remember, this is the “Lies and Ignorance” column.

Ted, fully grown now and trying to cope with a family of his own, is aware that the roadmap is still in the working stages. He would be the first to encourage his two boys, or anyone else, to move entries around from one side of the table to the other and challenge the statements. He does not want to insult anyone, and he would also want everyone to know that some of the ideas are not his but come from people who smart people call smart. Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, and William of Occam way back in history, or the Dalai Lama more recently. Ted is simply trying to get things right in his mind, and if he has to borrow ideas, so be it. One reason for Ted’s struggle is that his immediate 151

family and other relatives, living and dead, keep bumping into his life, and not always in a pleasant way. The more he reflects on the Clifford business, the more he realizes he does not know, rather like string theory, and this realization lends little confidence when trying to figure out the right thing to think about the past or do in the present.

Is Ted coping better now that he has a preliminary roadmap, and does the roadmap capture anything useful about Clifford to improve Ted’s peace of mind? Is he less hungry?

A few more details about the relatives are instructive at this juncture. Where to start?

Here. There are four people still alive these days who might have the real lowdown on Clifford. The “truth” so to speak.

Aunt Sarah (Clifford’s mom) remains locked in a twonote song of her own making, which alternates between episodes of mumbling depression and bouts of yelling, whether anyone is around to hear or not. Ted’s Uncle Sid (Clifford’s dad) slid into some sort of madness in late midlife after killing someone—or nearly killing someone?— and now he’s become the kind of locked-up lunatic who teaches us that madness can bring a forgiving forgetfulness.

Rumors continue to circulate among family members that somebody dropped baby Clifford on his head a week after he was born, or his brain was slightly deprived of oxygen during a difficult birth—just slightly, in which case a CAT 152

scan might have proved worthless—or he nearly drowned in some bathwater, all of which could shed light—or maybe not—on the way the firstborn son lived and died, if the details were ever verified, but asking either of Clifford’s parents at this point is a pointless exercise.

Who else? Ted has a brother who is doing okay, and his brother has a son who is not doing okay. The son loves guns, really loves guns. The son is so messed up that it worries the family, and Ted would never dream of adding to this brother’s troubles by bringing up his own. Ted’s wife is attractive and generally not a problem to anyone, but she knows virtually nothing about Clifford and cannot help on that score. Ted’s oldest daughter is struggling to become a successful artist in the Big Apple. She has met with marginal success in the competitive art scene and has been trying to work out relationship kinks with a hunky carpenter—“kinks” and “hunky” are her poetic descriptors—an affiliation rather more physical than emotionally satisfying, if a parent is to read between the relationship lines; therefore, this daughter is of some concern to her parents, but she never met cousin Clifford. Ted’s two younger children do not enter the truth equation because Clifford lived and died before their time, and kids are not the most reliable paths to truth anyway.

Ted’s parents are still living independently in their platinum years, and they could probably offer some real insight; 153

however, two difficulties render a conversation about Clifford unlikely. First, it’s a strain when they come to visit for the holidays or during summer months because the elders are disinclined to specify an end date for a stay over at Ted’s sprawling suburban house. They see no need to set a departure date “because we’re family,” and the length-ofstay disinclination causes visits to begin and end in hurt feelings quite often. Tensions run high with the parents.

Second, both parents seem to be developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and it is difficult to know what to believe or not believe when talking to them about anything in the past. Or present or future.

“What time would you like to have dinner, Dad?” “This is a funny time to be having breakfast.”

“Let’s plan on six o’clock.”

“Won’t we be gone by then?”

Split decisions then, pretty much down the middle of the family, about the past. Guilty, not guilty of complicity in the incident during the middle of the night, the terrible accident—not an accident?—that might be murder or manslaughter or suicide involving Uncle Sid and somebody else, unspecified, but probably a person with flexible morals 154

of the female gender. Verdict out as to the reason a boy grew up unsteady, timid, slower than most on his feet, odd in his thinking, and compulsive in his behavior. It was his parents’ fault; no one is to blame; it is not about blame at all. Spin of the roulette wheel with winners and losers, but is it fair to ask questions about way back when, advisable to go poking around for guilty parties, helpful to probe when there might be no clear-cut resolution to decades-old family secrets?

Ted is worried about more than a prematurely deceased cousin, to wit: his finances, health, melting ice caps, his oldest daughter because he wants her to be happy, his nephew because the young man might be dangerous to himself or others, people who drop out of school at a young age, the unemployed and unemployable, the paradox of murder to rid the world of murderers, the likelihood that his parents are developing dementia, how he can pay for the younger kids’ college educations, and the usual things about which he might have some, or absolutely no, control.

He seems unable to stop revisiting the Clifford experience and wondering what he might have done differently. The worries increase his stress level according to his primary physician, and added stress arising from warnings the doctor issues about stress increases the worrying. Modern life in a nutshell.

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Driving his cushy Mercedes to the office this morning, thirty-some years on, Ted feels it in his chest again, a nail through the heart. He wishes he could bundle the events of that ugly basement day like so much underwear and toss them into a washer and then hang the stuff on a line to dry in the sunshine. Or that a track coach had been around to blow the whistle and declare a false start. Making everyone pull up, march right back to toe the line, and start over again. But no: there is no laundry scrubber for memories, no coach or timeouts.

After thinking about brain teasers and his roadmap and the Clifford paradox at length, Ted has settled on a working hypothesis. Thinking is a good thing, he thinks, a necessary human thing, but as with his cousin’s behavior, a person can take a thing too far and end up with anatomical or spiritual irritation from overuse. As far as roadmaps are concerned, several are already out there for people who want one—for some it’s the Bible or Second Amendment or golden rule; for others it’s the scientific method or Charles Darwin—but instead of getting bogged down with roadmaps suggesting what is philosophically right and wrong, what is truth or falsehood, Ted is beginning to see the importance of behavior over thought, the idea that it’s not what people think about something that’s critical but what they actually do.

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With respect to Clifford, young Ted could have felt sorry for a troubled relative living in a rotten home environment, and he did experience sadness for his cousin in a private way, but of what practical use is sorrow for either the observer or observed? Greater tolerance would have been appropriate, but what is served by being tolerant of a kid who is so strange? A mystery then: that the boy played, how he played, and why he played so much. Something guessed at, a thing adults whispered that you were not supposed to hear because you were a child, and a child should not— eavesdrop. Decency would have been appropriate, but what kid is likely to be kind to another child who speaks in a geeky way and walks unsteadily or waves his arms around when trying to catch a ball? The thing wanted is not tolerance or a sense of decency but real behavior that makes a difference.

What is needed for a troubled child is action.

So act, but how should Ted have acted back then? Or now?

Humor might have helped. The agitated mom on the day the radio club coalesced and vaporized might have been oblivious of her impact, overwhelmed, ill, or nasty by temperament. No matter, the boys downstairs could have traced conspiratorial circles in the air at their temples, as kids do, and whispered “Grown ups!� as they giggled about the intrusion, but eight-year-olds are understandably short on perspective. It is difficult enough to know how to respond to a fuming adult who takes you by surprise; it is entirely 157

another thing for someone like Clifford to live with such a person.

The recollection of visiting Clifford’s house while growing up always reminds Ted of walking in tall grass. Most of the time everything is fine and dandy during a jaunt, but once in a while you come home with a tick imbedded in the skin or almost step on a snake slithering along the ground. Clifford was a tick with a tic, a disturbing bugger and annoying as all get out, but hardly dangerous; at least one adult in his world resembled a poisonous serpent lying in wait, and he never knew if the creature was dozing or poised to spring.

Ted knows laughter is often a missed opportunity. And this.

He could have returned to that wretched basement with its humming clothesline to tinker with a radio shoulderto-shoulder with his tick–tic of a cousin or invited the boy over to his own house for some peace and quiet away from the serpent. Not just feeling something, but an act of compassion might have been the ticket—but Ted would never say that aloud even now because he dislikes know-italls. He is a lousy advocate because he, like many folks, has a poor track record when it comes to doing the right thing at the proper moment.

These days Ted thinks about a Saturday morning when he was eight-years-old. He remembers a singing clothesline 158

and the rumble of angry words going in one ear and failing to come out the other. He thinks that compassion on his part would have lightened the load at least for a couple of hours while Clifford was alive. Then too, the Dalai Lama would have been pleased for a day.

Robert D. Kirvel has a Ph.D. in neuropsychology. He has authored numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, received awards of excellence from the Society for Technical Communications, and has been recognized by the Executive Office of the President of the United States for contributions in writing a guidance document. He now writes literary fiction and has published recent stories in American Athenaeum, Columbia College Literary Review, The Milo Review, Gravel, Shout Out UK, and elsewhere.

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