Riding Light Winter 2015 Preview

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.� – Albert Einstein

Riding Light Winter 2015

The Riding Light Review

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.

Riding Light 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.

Masthead Editor in Chief Cyn C. Bermudez Managing Editor Taylor Lauren Ross Layout Editor Andrea Ellickson Associate Editors, Fiction and Nonfiction Ashley Johnson Melissa RaÊ Shofner Associate Editors, Poetry Michael Cervin Kara Donovan Readers Jamie Hoang R.L. Black 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.ridinglight.org

Contents EDITORIAL FEATURED ARTIST Cover Art CHALLANGED IDEAS Roxanne Coble Fiction TORUS Anthony C. Lanni Art: Artful II CONDUCT AFTER CAPTURE Charlie Reed Art: Remove This Fear I THE BLUE PERIOD David Braga Art: Creatures II A PROBLEM AT WORK Margaret Karmazin Art: Following Foxes I THE NARCISSIST Matthew Brennan Art: Creatures I QUEEN OF THE COCKROACHES Tom Tolnay Art: Artful I A BLURRED REALITY Silvia Villalobos Art: Remove This Fear II

THERAPY Sally Oliver Art: Face Solo A PLUMBER‘S UNHAPPINESS J.T. Townley Art: Following Foxes II Poetry MOHEGAN BLUFFS Jéanpaul Ferro LETTER FROM A SOLDIER Jéanpaul Ferro 100 DEGREES HEAT Ha Kiet Chau MAZE-BLACK NIGHT Ha Kiet Chau KITCHEN CHILDREN Rage Hezekiah TINCTURES Rage Hezekiah A CUE FROM NATURE Hannah Pascale Jarvis HAPPINESS (FIRST PERSON) & FAULT LINES Hannah Pascale Jarvis ENGAGEMENT PHOTOS Daniel Lassell

NOW HERE Kevin Murphy Nonfiction WAITING Nels Highberg DOLL BABY Amanda Silva LANCÔME OF PARIS HAS A GIFT FOR YOU James Gallant

Acknowledgments Riding Light is a collaborative artistic venture: writers, artists, and editors coming together to contribute a quality work, to establish our voices among the larger landscape of literature and arts throughout the world.

I am humbled and inspired by the generosity of our readers and patrons. The support of our readers and patrons is essential for Riding Light‘s continued success. Riding Light receives support through regular and one-time donations, as well as through reading and sharing of the magazine.

The dedication of the Riding Light staff is exemplary. The time and hard work our volunteers donate in bringing this magazine together is invaluable.

A very special thank you goes out to Bita and Rajesh, Brian Wogensen, and the Riding Light staff.

Thank you for supporting the arts. Thank you for supporting Riding Light.

I hope you enjoy Riding Light’s first winter issue.

Editorial ―The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. There is no more darkness. …and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it's high noon, the hottest day in history…‖ – ―Midnight Sun,‖ The Twilight Zone I was a latchkey kid. I was home alone quite often. Fictional worlds were my mainstay. Science fiction and fantasy, the speculative and the weird, and tales of horror were the lifeblood of my imagination. I watched a lot of television: Twilight Zone (original and reboot), The Outer Limits (original and reboot), Tales from the Crypt, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Night Gallery, Ray Bradbury Theater, Amazing Stories, and many more. Too many to name. I was a human TV Guide. I knew what was on and when. A writing friend once told me that she wondered what it was like inside my head with some of the crazy story ideas I came up with. It‘s a lifetime of consuming this type of fiction; it has and continues to influence me.

The winter issue is a sort of tribute to that type of storytelling, from realist to speculative to weird, tales juxtaposed upon the mirror of life. This is a very special issue, our first and possibly only full color issue. We feature Los Angeles artist Roxanne Coble. Her mixed media art is a conglomerate of scenes pieced together to form a coherent idea, a thought, a story—art that reflects our world, our dreams. From haunting stories (speculative and contemporary) to poetry that evokes a dream-like sweltering heat in the winter, we hope you enjoy Riding Light‘s winter debut.

Sincerely, Cyn Bermudez Editor-in-Chief

Featured Artist Roxanne Coble is a Los Angeles-bred mixed-media artist and illustrator. She graduated from UCLA with a BA in Art History and a passion for the creative. Known for her altered book journals, her work focuses on a combination of mundane imagery and illustrated fragments. Inspired by the quirks of everyday life, completed journal pages embrace both humor and emotion—all while exploring topical events that occur within her personal life. Currently, Roxanne is working towards her MFA and single-subject credential to teach art.

For more of Roxanne‘s art, please visit her website at http://bybun.com.

Artful by Roxanne Coble

TORUS

Anthony C. Lanni The overwhelming impression is of steel, bent and twisted to resemble an organic form. The torus is large enough to walk through, a hallway curving back upon itself in every direction. The trunk at its center is plated in armor, reflecting light but not image.

Caution is required as you make your way around the interior checking connections and circuits. The floor is uneven, not made for human tread. The walls are panels, filaments, vanes of conductivity.

The structure is built to house maddening energy, and if you slip, if even the smallest piece is out of alignment, that energy will fail to coalesce.

Or worse yet, it will flare out of control, an exponential disaster beyond reckoning.

You check and recheck your work, testing every tiny component. It‘s cold in here, cold enough that you can see your breath, but you‘re sweating. The jumpsuit clings to your back, your sides just under your arms, and the insides of your thighs. The dorsal sides of the sleeves are damp, used over and over to wipe salty droplets from your brow.

It takes hours.

Finally, you finish. You‘ve made your way completely around the interior, and after double and triple checking the last connections, you step through the tiny door. There are components to check here, too, but these have already been handled; your team is as thorough as you. By necessity. Failure isn‘t just a shrug here. It‘s a billion, ten billion dollars. It might be your very lives.

The nerve center is down a long passage, so long there is a tiny monorail to ride. The ride is five minutes. Inside, monitors light a half-dozen visages from below. There‘s a projection on the wall, but it‘s dimly lit. The bent hall is visible there, courtesy of fiber optics in a recessed alcove.

Someone is counting down. You sit, holding your breath. Your duty is complete. Lights flash green and amber. Team members acknowledge their calls. Each positive response is a step closer to success. Each step closer means the next has a greater chance of failure.

Okay. Okay. Okay. All green.

The big screen begins to brighten. Electrons and positrons and neutrons fly in circles, the steel tree at their core; they spin faster and faster, emitting energy in every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some of those frequencies are visible to the human eye.

Energy froths and boils, screaming in ever-faster revolutions. It radiates outward and compresses back, held in by magnetic walls.

The dials are approaching the red. There‘s nothing to do now but wait to see if everything works. If it does, no one will want for electricity ever again. If it fails…

Best not to think of what happens if it fails.

There is a tremble, an audible change. And then you know.

Anthony C. Lanni is a systems administrator by trade who spent close to two decades in the film industry before transitioning to dot coms this year. He has successfully completed two NaNoWriMo Challenges for a total of just under 150,000 words in two months. He was one quarter of a writing group that won second place in the Stanford Story Slam 2013 and is currently working on his third novel, a series of fantasy novellas, and numerous short stories. This is his first short story publication.

MOHEGAN BLUFFS Jéanpaul Ferro

The ghosts sail out from the Charlestown Breachway every night at dusk, the wind filling their sails, shadow filled, all these tiny pewter disks shining atop the waves, and sometimes you can hear them saying: I just want to go home; and they sail out into the Great Salt Pond into the middle of Block Island, where the parking is always free; where all our familiar dreams go on vacation; and when you‘re ready maybe you‘ll go there too; out into the mystery of happiness— you and God in a perfect place, out into this little secret that lasts no longer than a second: never desire anything.

LETTER FROM A SOLDIER JĂŠanpaul Ferro

I look for you in the dark, beyond the Massachusetts woods where the wolves hide at the edge of the field, all night long as the rockets rain down just a little bit harder; I go through all the alleys as the buildings come down and everything turns to ash, But I am just a little bit broken, broke in all the right places— a million little jewels that split apart all across the ground.

JÊanpaul Ferro is a novelist, short fiction author, and poet from Scituate, Rhode Island. A nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared on National Public Radio, and in Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Asia Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Cleveland Review, Cortland Review, Portland Monthly, Arts & Understanding Magazine, Saltsburg Review, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994); Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008); You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009); Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009); Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011), nominated for both the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry. He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. Website: www.jeanpaulferro.com Email: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net

WAITING Nels P. Highberg Hoping it would be enough to skip dinner and whatever it would cost, especially if I ate slowly, I walked to Café Express to buy lunch.

A roast beef and avocado sandwich, an hour or two of cool air I didn‘t have to pay for, unknown jazz from KUHF playing over my head—my first stretch of calm since my last year as an undergraduate at the University of Houston began. It was only September 1992, but I could envision my actual graduation the next year on May 15. Just a few more books, a few more papers, and I would be the first in the family to hold a college degree. Mama would see her youngest child with diploma in hand. She could never provide any of the money I needed to earn my BA, but she supplied the motivation. If it helped alleviate any of her worry about how I would be able to live on my own, I would do it. And I was almost done.

After pulling out a fresh yellow highlighter and Willa Cather‘s Sapphira and the Slave Girl from my backpack, I reached for my glass of Dr Pepper and curled my left leg underneath me. I saw a reddishpurple spot on my ankle that had never been there before, physically tiny but drawing my eye as though a spotlight had been turned on it.

I scratched at it, but the spot remained while the skin reddened. It did not feel like a scab or a bump or a pimple or an abrasion or anything at all. It was just there.

All I could think about was Kaposi‘s sarcoma. KS. The splotches that had dotted Blane‘s bald head the last few months of his life. Lesions in the blood. The surest sign of AIDS. Medical facts tried to break through the din in my head. It had been less than a year since I met Blane. Just months since we had fallen in love, put on ties, and stood before our friends holding hands and saying we would be husbands, lovers, and friends. KS could not appear in less than a year, even if I were infected with HIV. I knew that. I knew the facts. After being given the message throughout my adolescence that gay equaled AIDS and AIDS equaled death, I believed the surest way to guarantee I would not

become another statistic, another emaciated man in a hospital bed, was to read everything about AIDS I could find. If I saw what had become the familiar use of small caps for AIDS or HIV in the Houston Chronicle or Time or anywhere else, I stopped to read the words around it, no matter what. If a newscaster said either word on the nightly news or a primetime special, I stopped to listen. But after the walk back to my apartment from Café Express became a frantic jog, and I had put the Styrofoam box of what I couldn‘t eat in the fridge, I called the National AIDS Hotline.

The woman on the other end spoke calmly even as I added detail upon detail. I had loved and had sex with a man who died of AIDS. Yes, we were safe. He told me he had HIV soon after we met, that he found out after his lover died ten months earlier. Yes, it had been less than a year since we met and just about two months since he died, about three months since our last sexual contact. No, we never did exchange semen. But wasn‘t it possible? I mean, I‘d never seen such a spot anywhere on me before today. Yes, KS normally appeared eight to eleven years after initial exposure, and I had only been having sex for five years. But wasn‘t it possible? Yes, getting tested was the only way to know. Yes, I knew where to get tested. I hung up and kept picking at the spot on my ankle. HIV took time to chip at the immune system—it lingered for years before KS or cytomegalovirus or toxoplasmosis or any of the other things AIDS always seemed to bring appeared. But all those facts were trumped by the memory of Blane washing dishes last March, me drying, he bending down to pick up a fork I‘d dropped, and the spots dotting his head. And then his neck. Then everywhere else.

It was Sunday, and I couldn‘t take the test until Wednesday. The Montrose Clinic offered free confidential and anonymous HIV/STD testing on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. At other times, groups used the clinic for free mammograms, prenatal counseling, or other community medical needs. I certainly was not going to take the test at the campus clinic. Flu shots and sinus infections were fine reasons to go there, but HIV testing? I‘d read plenty about how little privacy meant when it came to AIDS to stay away from anywhere except the one place that existed solely for people like me. The Montrose Clinic

was six blocks from my apartment, a signless, cinder block building on Richmond Avenue demarcated only by the street number, 1410, in black block numbers over the door. A piece of white paper taped inside the window of the door—the rest of the glass blocked completely by faded blue paper—listed the hours. I had checked them several times since moving to a garage apartment on West Main after Blane died and his mother told me I had to leave the house she now owned. I passed the clinic on the way to the bus stop every weekday and checked the front door occasionally to verify the hours.

Where I would take the test had been obvious from the day Blane died. When had finally become clear, too: September 19, 1992.

It had been over a decade since the first cases of what would come to be known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, were identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The early 1980s were then filled with a lot of fear and a lot of panic.

There were even more rumors, abundant confusion, and widespread denial. At first, some referred to the disease as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID. Cosmopolitan magazine—picking up on an article that had appeared in Discover—proclaimed that women had nothing to fear from ordinary heterosexual sex because the ―rugged vagina‖ could fight HIV in ways the ―fragile anus‖ could not. They were wrong. By the time I moved to Houston to start college in 1988, most of the facts had been sorted out. Millions of first-year college students left home knowing these facts. We were part of a generation lucky enough to know how to protect ourselves even as people continued to die around us.

I worked part-time at an art gallery answering phones, going through mail, and greeting visitors as I staffed the front desk whenever I was on duty. On Wednesdays, the gallery closed at 5:00 p.m. I could have walked to the clinic from there, but that would have meant waiting for over thirty minutes outside on one of Houston‘s busiest streets where anyone could see me. It was easier to walk the four blocks home and wait. Well, it was easier to walk the four blocks home. I sat at my desk and flipped through my copy of The Complete Shakespeare. I moved back and forth through the thin pages of The Comedy of Errors trying to read for the next day‘s discussion, but I kept glancing at the

clock on my bookcase. When the red lines formed 5:43, I shut the book and reached for my keys. Normally, I never left the apartment without my backpack and a book or my cassette player and headphones, but I just took my keys and wallet with me out the door.

I walked as slowly as I could without anyone thinking I was lurking. I even walked around the block and turned down Colquitt toward Dunlavy, just to pass the time. Watching for cracks in the concrete sidewalk and avoiding them when I could, I kept my head down. In sixth grade, Mr. Mann, the tall, lanky principal who would retire a couple of years later, stopped me in the hall in January as I walked from reading to science. He placed one finger under my chin and pushed my head up. ―Don‘t always walk around with your head down,‖ he said. ―Look up. Look proud.‖ I never did listen, but I remembered.

The clinic and the people inside it mirrored other clinics around the country. A clipboard with a Bic pen on a string. A sign-in sheet, first names only. A receptionist with a little smile, graying ponytail, soft wrinkles around her eyes. The whir of window-unit air conditioners from here and there. Gray-speckled linoleum and orange plastic chairs. A television broadcasting news of traffic snarls and aboveaverage heat. Adults flipping through magazines or staring into space.

A thin man in a little room asking questions, checking off boxes on forms, explaining procedures. A clock on the wall above my head, second hand clicking and clicking and clicking. A nurse in white pants and a purple smock with another tiny smile and calm voice.

Little glass vials with different colored rubber stoppers on a metal tray. A needle. My arm. Blood. A square of cotton gauze and a BandAid. A slip of paper with a date to return two weeks later. Squeaky shoes stepping across the floor. A blast of heat in the face after the opening door. Then home.

The next day, I turned twenty-three years old. I had always felt an affinity for prime numbers ever since learning about them in elementary school. Prime numbers were special. As a kid, I started setting my alarm for 7:03 or 9:37. I saw them everywhere—the rolling numbers on a gas pump or printed on a receipt at the grocery

store—and assumed the years my age was prime were going to be more exceptional than the rest. At seven, I broke a mirror and thought the bad luck from it led to my grandmother‘s stroke when I was thirteen. At seventeen, I had sex with another man for the first time, which confirmed why my mind and body reacted as they did when my male neighbors were out mowing their lawns shirtless or changing the oil in their trucks. All day, I wondered if twenty-three would be the year my life began its end.

Mama called that morning at 8:00 on the dot to wish me a happy birthday. I said nothing about the spot on my ankle or the blood test but just talked a little about classes and work before I had to leave in case the bus was early for once. She knew why Blane died. I wasn‘t going to lie about that. But she maintained the same attitude about his death that she did about everything else: it was my business and no one else‘s unless I brought it up. My father divorced us when I was fourteen and made his affair public by marrying the woman and adopting her children as his own. Mama, who had never been talkative in the first place, steeled herself against the stares at the post office and grocery store by keeping her head up and mouth closed. I tried to do the same at school when other kids or the teachers would point and whisper, but I kept my head down. My lips stayed together all the same.

Over the next two weeks, I went to all of my classes and sat in the same seats close to the front but off to the side. I never did finish The Comedy of Errors and never could follow the discussion, not able to distinguish between Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse, let alone Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse.

With the election coming up in November, our professor was always trying to stick in Ross Perot jokes whenever she could, but I never understood them. Chemistry wasn‘t too bad, mainly because it was a section for non-science majors. The Chinese woman‘s lectures on covalent bonds and redox equations made enough sense without my needing to open the book, even if the same group of women in the front row complained, loudly, before and after class, day after day, about how her accent made it impossible for anyone to learn anything. In Women Writers, I liked getting lost in Dr. Childers‘s stories of reading Willa Cather‘s letters in the archive at the

University of Nebraska and noting how Cather inserted bits and pieces of her own life into her fiction. A man a couple of rows behind me would whine before class about how stupid those stories were before trying to make the woman next to him giggle about the dick sizes of the department‘s male professors he had seen in the showers at the university gym after tennis practice.

In my head, I tried to think of smart responses to shut everyone up, but I knew I was just jealous. None of them seemed to need a minimum wage job to eat. A guy in the student center was angry his parents had bought him a Mazda instead of an Audi; I wanted that problem even if I couldn‘t tell anyone what the difference between an Audi and a Mazda was. A girl was upset that a professor would not let her take an exam she had missed while on a family reunion cruise in the Mediterranean. Mostly, I envied all the straight people, the couples holding hands and feeding each other french fries by the fountain near the administration building or even the fraternity brothers who bragged about banging bitches at parties held every weekend in one of the houses west of campus. I knew I should be sympathetic to the girl who quit coming to class because she had become pregnant, but all I kept thinking was that it was possible not to have a baby even after one had started growing inside you. HIV stayed in you no matter what.

My blood, meanwhile, was out there in the city. All the little vials collected at the clinic that Wednesday night were carefully marked.

Those who chose anonymous testing had random numbers attached to their vials, a piece of paper given to the patient the only way to connect the blood to the person. If the patient didn‘t return, the results sat in silence. Those who chose to be tested confidentially had their birthdate noted along with gender and last name. If the patient didn‘t return but positive results did, the patient could be found, theoretically. When given these options, I chose confidential. I did not want to hide from this. I did not want to feel shame. When Blane died, I told everyone who asked how, but fewer people asked than I expected. The obituary in his weekly hometown Pennsylvania newspaper listed pancreatic cancer as his cause of death. His family chose both to lie and to hide. I did not want to play that game.

Choosing the confidential over the anonymous test helped ensure I wouldn‘t change my mind. I was going to find out whether I liked it or not. The blood was out there.

At some point after the clinic closed that Wednesday night, all the vials were placed carefully in a car or van and transferred to a lab somewhere in the city. Technicians in pastel jackets and rubber gloves handled each one carefully. Even if they were bored by the routine, they must have made sure to take care of themselves. And they must have taken care to follow protocol and ensure that no one would be told they had HIV coursing through their arteries and veins unless it was absolutely most definitely there. That‘s why each sample was tested at least twice with the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or ELISA, test.

Somewhere in Houston, my blood was being separated into its parts, the serum isolated and then diluted, the remnants then mixed with HIV. The question: what would happen when my blood came into contact with the HIV? Was my blood‘s serum filled with antibodies failing to fight HIV already in my system? Or would antibodies newly form, strong and hopeful against the new predator, unaware of their predestined failure? It would take a few hours to know. The sample wouldn‘t exactly bubble as though it were Pop Rocks mixed with Coke, but after a few hours, my blood‘s HIV status would be clear. A technician would repeat this process with a different sample of my blood, just to make sure. A few more hours, and then another check for the proliferation of antibodies.

Any hint of tainted blood and the technicians would turn to the Western blot. Technicians used special gels to pull out the blood‘s proteins in an attempt to determine, again, whether antibodies already fighting HIV were present in the blood or not. The Western blot, however, worked slowly but gave more information—the test distinguished the subtle differences between actual strands of HIV. It could take up to a day to get those results, not that such specificity would really matter to me. It was like determining whether an American soldier in World War II had been shot by a German Walther P38 or Lugar P08; the knowledge might help develop more

effective combat strategies or on-field medical processes later, but at the moment, a guy had simply been shot.

That‘s why the clinic required two weeks before it would give anyone her or his results. They didn‘t want to tell patients to return only to send them out as they waited for more results. Best to keep everyone waiting the same amount of time no matter what. Best to test the blood this way and that before letting a patient know what future she or he could begin to imagine next. In the early years of testing blood donations, twenty-two people in Florida were wrongly told they had HIV; seven committed suicide before any error had been found. It was always best to wait. Best to be sure.

I knew things were happening somewhere out there. I knew my blood was being separated and squirted, broken apart and analyzed. I knew paperwork was being filled out for me to receive on Wednesday, October 3. But I had two weeks to wait. My introversion—like my mother‘s—had been a core part of my identity for as long as I could remember. Most of my friends finished college in the typical four years while I stretched classes out a bit longer to work more hours and avoid taking on further student loan debt.

Everyone I knew was away in grad school or back in their hometowns, which was fine since my plan had always been to go to grad school as soon as I had my BA in hand, too. When I could be alone in my apartment, I was. I talked to Mama every few days. I showered and shaved. I ate. I turned the rabbit ears on my TV this way and that so I could watch Melrose Place, A Different World, or whatever else was on. I did homework in whatever spurts I could until I would get distracted remembering what Blane thought about a song on the radio or what he once said about an actor on TV. Every few days, I watched Backdraft not because I had a deep affinity for the film but because Blane spent the day with me when I bought a used copy of it at Blockbuster.

I had been spending the year house-sitting for a professor while she taught in North Carolina. A three-bedroom house to myself with only cable and phone bills to pay, the first time in my life I was able to watch MTV or CNN. About a month after we met and just a

couple of weeks after he told me he was HIV-positive, Blane and I spent a Sunday at a local Chinese place chatting over beef with broccoli and General Tso‘s chicken before visiting the video store next door to find something for the afternoon. Blane was thirtyseven, while I was twenty-two, an age difference that was pretty typical for each of our dating histories and something we never talked about. Or something we never had time to talk about. As we settled into the couch and I picked up the remote, Blane looked around the living room. ―You know,‖ he said, ―we could rearrange things a bit, take advantage of all this space.‖ In college, he studied interior design until he couldn‘t afford it any longer and began working a series of retail jobs at malls around the city.

Over the next hour, we moved things this way and that. We took a red plaid chair from one bedroom and a small oak side table from another for the corner and relocated a bookcase from the hallway to the side of the front door so the space would not feel so desolate. I especially loved his choice to re-align the couch so it was perpendicular to the wall separating the living room from the dining room and across from the TV. Back on the couch together with the Universal Pictures logo turning on the screen, I sank into the crook of his arm. He leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head.

Wednesday, October 3, arrived. For two weeks, routine helped numb me. Homework and steady job tasks tempered any anxiety before it could engulf me. When my thoughts began edging to the extremes of worrying not just about death but about dying, a few chemistry equations or another Gertrude Stein chapter brought me back into the moment. But rolling out of bed that Wednesday morning, anxiety moderation was not going to happen. I thought of skipping chemistry, but sitting alone in my apartment sounded worse. After class, unable to make any decision about what to eat, I wandered around the food court in the student center. I just left, taking the bus that would drop me off a few blocks from work rather than the one that would put me two blocks behind the gallery and next to the clinic. The kids at the Greek Orthodox school on Yoakum Avenue were running and yelling on the playground. They had the swing sets with broad black rubber seats that were my favorite when I was eight.

There was typical steady traffic on Alabama, cars and trucks with windows down and radios blasting. The people at the gallery were happy to see me early so I could help with a bulk mailing for our November shows. Trying to get all the multi-state, state, and city labels right always took time. The afternoon passed.

Nothing about the clinic had changed. The sign-in sheet and clipboard were the same. The newscaster on TV was the same. Some of the people were even the same. A few years earlier, I hung out with guys from Delta Lambda Phi, the gay fraternity. One of them worked at a clinic like this one across the city. After a campus die-in on World AIDS Day where chalk outlines of our bodies stretched across the sidewalks emanating from the center of campus, he told me about the post-test counseling process. Emotions were always high for everyone involved, so counselors followed a tight script to keep themselves and the patients calm. Or at least calmer. I knew what to expect, then, as a woman walked into the exam room, my file in hand. ―Now, I haven‘t looked inside, and I don‘t know the results. I wanted to talk with you about ways of responding to the possibilities, first.‖ Stifling the urge to tell her I knew the drill so we could just jump to the end, I reminded myself to be polite and look her in the eye rather than stare at the folder.

We reviewed what brought me to be tested in the first place. I told her about Blane as she smiled gently and nodded. ―So, if you find out you are HIV-positive today, what will your next steps be?‖ I mentioned the brochure I had been given two weeks earlier about AIDS Foundation Houston. I noted that I would start there with my search for medical help and how to pay for it. ―And if you find out you are HIV-negative, what will your next steps be?‖

I said I would continue to do everything I could to stay HIVnegative, following my own script by noting ―risk reduction‖ in my response.

She opened the manila folder and snapped her head back a bit, not enough for most people to notice except I was scrutinizing her every move. ―Did you ask for an anonymous or confidential test?‖ I told her I asked for the confidential. ―Oh, I can‘t remember the last time someone took one of those. I was surprised to see an actual name and birthday.‖ She handed me the piece of paper. ―Your blood showed no presence of HIV.‖ And that‘s what it said. There was a space for my date of birth, one for my gender, and one with my last name in block letters. September 19, 1992, was listed as the date the blood was drawn, and October 3, 1992, was listed as the date I would return. Under ELISA 1, it said ―negative.‖ Under ELISA 2, it said ―negative.‖ The space beside Western blot was blank. A few weeks later, I noticed that dates and times had been written in boxes next to each test. The first ELISA was completed at 11:47 a.m. on September 20, 1992. The second and final test was done at 3:33 p.m. the same day. My birthday. Before I had shown my monthly pass to the driver of the bus that would take me from school to home, the testing of my blood was done.

Someone knew I was negative. For two weeks, the results sat in a file.

Day after day after day, someone knew. But I didn‘t.

The rest of the school year was a struggle. Classes grew more tedious.

I burst into tears at the end of my first date in months because I could not imagine falling in love with a man again. Grad school applications seemed insurmountable. Mama needed money to help with the house payment. Blane was still dead. But Wednesday, October 3, 1992, about 6:47 p.m., I was alive. I stared down at my feet, my dingy white Nikes, soles worn smooth from the walks between home and work, from work to the grocery store, from home to the bus stop, around the university. I stared at my feet—left foot forward, right foot forward, left foot, right—and thought, Remember this moment. Remember it, because it proves you are alive.

Nels P. Highberg is an associate professor of English and Modern Languages at the University of Hartford, where he teaches first-year writing and general education interdisciplinary courses in the arts and humanities. His work has appeared in Concho River Review, Feminist Teacher, Feminist Formations, Medical Humanities Review, and other places.

Following Foxes by Roxanne Coble

A PROBLEM AT WORK Margaret Karmazin

―Make yourself comfortable,‖ says Dr. Kleed. ―Humans usually prefer the soft chair. A container of tissues is available next to it.

Quite a few of you profusely weep during our encounters.‖ The Mental Director is a distinguished Blatec who volunteered to work on Arcadia after his mate died and offspring dispersed. Arcadia is a mixed race colony on the fourth planet orbiting Keplar 6-9.

Jasmine Bordy settles into the chair. ―What seems to be the problem?‖ asks Kleed.

Jasmine hesitates. She is, the doctor can immediately see, the type not overly fond of admitting the existence of her inner demons, but she sallies forth. ―I came here believing I‘d be perfect for the job, but now find it more and more difficult to manage the workers.

Apparently, I do not, as I had thought, possess advanced skills at interpersonal relations.‖ Dr. Kleed takes note of a slight quiver at the corner of the patient‘s mouth. Emotion plays across Human faces; interpreting them is like absorbing an interesting novel. Some other species he treats show their feelings in different ways, but as with Humans, he is proficient at spotting them. ―First, let me establish that you are Project Head of New Green Enterprises, where you manage a workforce of 1,294 individuals in the undertaking of mining the bio-ore luchite. You have been here two Arcadian years in this capacity, is that correct?‖ ―Yes,‖ says Jasmine. ―Tell me more about the problem.‖

Dr. Kleed exhibits the typical Blatecian slate-colored skin and mesomorph build. His home planet‘s gravity is 122.34 percent of Earth‘s and 110.5998 percent of Eden‘s, the other Human colony, so that its natives have developed thick, strong bones and muscles and resemble ancient Earth Neanderthals with exaggerated features.

There is the addition of extra ear holes and double rows of teeth. His smallish black eyes detect, in addition to the Human range of vision, ultraviolet and infrared. He is one of only eighty Blatecs on Arcadia, the rest of the population consisting of Humans, Puridians, and assorted other sentient species. ―I‘ve been denying it all for some time now, Dr. Kleed. Pretending that my mounting stress has just been due to acclimatizing myself physically and emotionally. But lately, I‘m starting to think that I‘m just not cut out for this line of work. And three years remain on my contract.‖ ―Why don‘t you give me the details,‖ says Dr. Kleed.

Jasmine picks at one of her fingernails somewhat aggressively. ―I used to be a people person, but now, frankly, I find most people despicable or at the very least aggravating—their predictable, petty grievances; their refusal to see the larger picture and only caring about their personal desires; their nastiness when even mildly put out.

At the very least, five individuals per day come to complain about some other person or group. And then I‘m expected to solve the issues, in spite of my other responsibilities, without possibly knowing every detail of the situations and frankly, not caring a hoot. I feel like a mother with hundreds of squabbling children. After a while, who cares who is right or wrong? Just shut the hell up!‖ Dr. Kleed looks off into space for a moment, and then he says, ―How is your personal life?‖ He emits a little squeak, which Jasmine politely ignores. She, along with everyone else educated in Blatecian physiology, understands that he cannot and feels no need to control his passage of digestive gasses. Fortunately, they have an inoffensive odor.

―I don‘t see how my personal life could be affecting the issues at work,‖ she says. ―It is a fact that since the arrival of the new Governor and his more egalitarian ways, the populace has grown restless and rather full of oats.‖ ―Oats?‖ asks Dr. Kleed, looking up with interest. ―It‘s an old expression,‖ says Jasmine. ―It means that someone is feeling…‖ she hesitates, ―arrogant? Overconfident? More likely to demand their rights.‖ ―Is there something wrong with that?‖ ―Not really, but if hundreds of people are demanding their rights all at the same time, and those rights conflict, well….‖ ―Do you have an assistant?‖ asks the doctor. ―A Puridian,‖ she says dismissively. ―And?‖ ―Well, you know how they are.‖ ―How are they?‖ Jasmine perks up, sits straighter in the chair. ―Well, the mating season thing. Three times a year is a bit much. Causes all that upheaval.‖ ―I need to mention,‖ says the doctor, ―that the mating season of Humans is all of the time.‖ ―And because of that, everything continues as is,‖ she retorts. ―It‘s just a normal part of life, like evacuating one‘s bowels.‖ ―And the mating seasons of Puridians is not a normal part of their lives?‖

She sighs. ―You know what I mean. What do you think triggered the Halidan Riot? All those hormones and ruffled feelings. How am I supposed to run a mining company with that going on? It would never be tolerated on Earth or Eden!‖ ―Your assistant is causing you trouble?‖ She sighs. He notices a twitch at the side of her mouth. ―He could,‖ she says, ―handle things quite well if it weren‘t for the periodic hormonal rush. You know how talented most Puridians are in PR. I mean, they aren‘t called ‗the diplomats of the galaxy‘ for nothing.‖ ―He could, you mean, help carry the load of interpersonal issues you encounter on the job.‖ ―Actually, he is quite personable and efficient, much better at dealing with females than I am. Maybe too good at it.‖ Kleed notes a reddening of the sides of the patient‘s neck. ―Too good at it?‖ he prompts.

She looks away and out the window, which offers an expansive view of a plain of waving grasses on the other side of the River Brunli, named after one of the earlier explorers from Eden. Carrying their massive loads to the settlements up north, barges move slowly up the river. Aircars hover, following the river and occasionally veering off toward city central. Kleed studies her, glad for the tiny respite in which to do so.

As far as Human females go, she is reasonably attractive. Middleaged, fifty of her home planet years, with thick, dark hair wound up in an interesting configuration on top of her head. She has filled out the patient form; he surreptitiously slides his eyes over it now. One grown son back on Eden, he sees. No current mate.

He does a once-over of her aura, which he can detect in part, though some of it is out of his visual range. Over her head flares a golden cone while green and yellow flows from the rest of her with

occasional bursts of red. He murmurs, using his own language, into his datahold: The cone signifies an ability to cause change in her vicinity; the green an interest and possible abilities in energy healing; the yellow a tendency to intellectualize emotion; and red, unresolved rage at earlier treatment by authority figures. ―What are you saying?‖ Jasmine asks, her hazel eyes alert. ―I need to keep records,‖ evades the doctor. He taps his head. ―Memory isn‘t what it once was.‖ He pauses. ―I asked you about your Puridian assistant being ‗too good‘ at dealing with females?‖ She seems annoyed, fidgety. He has long been aware that Humans are generally fidgety. The word for this in his mother tongue is ―bitbitabit,‖ which he admires for the mental picture it gives of the condition.

Jasmine shrugs. ―He flirts.‖ ―With Puridian females?‖ ―No, with everyone. Puridian, Human, Laquidine, Mardubite, you name it. Has them all eating out of his hand.‖ ―That‘s what you hired him for, no?‖ ―He doesn‘t have to go that far,‖ she says. ―Two fifths of our customers are female or metasexual. It‘s ridiculous to flirt with nonPuridians anyway. He can‘t mate with any of them even if he tried!‖ Dr. Kleed leans forward, his little dark eyes gleaming. ―But he can with a Human.‖ She reddens more violently than the last time. ―I suppose,‖ she says. ―I never thought about it.‖ ―Think about it now,‖ says the doctor.

She, having a pale complexion, turns an even darker shade of red.

The doctor finds this interesting. His own people do not blush.

Instead they give off an odor when embarrassed, not unpleasant, of a certain kind of nut. All in all, he comes from a nicely aromatic race. ―I suppose he could,‖ she says. ―Has he ever given you a signal that he is interested in you in that way?‖ She looks away. ―There have been hints,‖ she admits reluctantly.

He gives her a moment and then says, ―Have you ever imagined mating with him?‖ The anger he saw in her aura is now evident in her face. ―There is nothing wrong with fantasy,‖ he prompts. ―Everyone fantasizes.‖ ―Even you?‖ she counters. ―We‘re not here about me,‖ he says coolly. ―We‘re here about you.

But yes, even I occasionally do it.‖ He waits for her response. Both Humans and Puridians cannot long stand a silence, so he figures she will break eventually. ―I might have,‖ she says.

He nods. ―Go on.‖ Her eyes are evasive. ―A dream or two maybe.‖ ―In addition to the fantasies, you mean?‖ he says.

She rolls her eyes. ―I suppose.‖ ―Your assistant, he is attractive?‖

―Possibly,‖ she says, ―though not in Earth terms.‖ ―How would they differ?‖ He finds what various species consider sexually alluring endlessly enthralling. Even on his own world, the preferences of the various racial divisions never fail to fascinate. The Rathdaal and their love of recessive chins, even to the point of having theirs surgically shaved; the Deranos‘ preference for short forearms and large, flat feet—a sex worker with those attributes can pull in a high price. ―Well,‖ she says, ―styles change from time to time and place to place.

What‘s currently alluring on Arcadia among Humans? Well, it varies person to person.‖ ―Generally,‖ says Dr. Kleed. ―I am interested to hear a female‘s personal views. I want to hear what you find pleasing.‖ ―Taller than me, I guess,‖ she says, ―bigger physically. I prefer medium coloring, brown to dark blond hair, hazel or brown eyes, square jaw, and a muscular though not bulbous build, not too hairy.

Nice hands, longish fingers. And good smelling. Odor is very important. And the man should be intelligent. That goes without saying.‖ ―And your assistant? The Puridian. What is he like?‖ ―Ashen colored as they usually are, lank white hair, eyes like almost colorless water, nose sharp enough to cut something, those high pointy ears, that jutting chin. The usual. Skinny. I could probably snap him in half myself if I chose. Though I know how strong Puridians are; it‘s just their look, like delicate poets. Not my idea of compelling.‖ ―Uh huh,‖ murmurs the doctor. ―Really,‖ says Jasmine. ―By now I know my type.‖

―When was the last time you had the opportunity to engage with your type?‖ She hesitates. ―Let me think….I don‘t know, I suppose it was Captain Arnold. When he delivered that shipment of ingots.‖ ―Wasn‘t that almost two Arcadian years ago? I seem to remember there being a problem with it interfering with another load from Puridia? It was in the news, some controversy over selling rights?

Around the same time as the Establishment Day celebrations.‖ She winces. ―Now that you mention it, possibly. Yes, I suppose you‘re right.‖ ―A long time,‖ repeats Kleed. He remains silent.

She finally breaks the silence. ―I hadn‘t realized it was so long.‖ ―Captain Arnold did not return?‖ ―No. He…he‘s very busy and usually in space. I didn‘t really expect—‖ The doctor interrupts. ―How does that make you feel?‖ Her mouth hangs open as if she has no idea what to say. ―Think,‖ he says. ―Well, it hurt some. I mean, it did seem that we were good together.

He did say he was getting too old for such long trips and all the interplanetary red tape and that he was thinking about settling down in one place and writing a novel. He was even looking at quarters in the Roush settlement—part of that hotel now turned into condos— and hinted that it was large enough for two. Then he just disappeared.‖ ―Could he perhaps have run into difficulties? Possibly be dead?‖

―I think I would have heard,‖ she says.

After a long pause, Kleed says, ―I know of several interspecies relationships that work quite well. Our Assistant Governor‘s, for instance.‖ She doesn‘t respond. ―Offspring, if one insists on having them, can be helped along in the lab.‖ ―I don‘t want any more offspring,‖ she says. ―I‘m fifty. I might only have seventy more years.‖ ―I am just saying,‖ says the doctor. ―I am giving you permission to enjoy life. ― ―He‘s not my type,‖ she says. ―Type, shmype. What does that mean? The soul occupies many kinds of bodies. It is the soul you are attracted to. ― ―Well, it‘s the body that you touch,‖ she snaps. ―You know what they say about Puridians,‖ he counters.

In spite of herself, she smiles. But then she looks severe. ―It‘s not wise to mix business and pleasure.‖ ―It is done all the time all over the universe,‖ says the doctor. ―And in this particular case, you‘re the boss.‖ He notes that her color has improved dramatically. In fact, she looks as if she has lost ten years in age. Is it possible that even her mammary glands appear to be placed higher on her chest? Of all the races with which he deals, Humans show the most propensity to exhibit visual physical change in response to emotion.

He stands up and extends a hand. ―I believe we are done for today. If you wish to make another appointment, speak to my secretary on your way out. Or feel free to contact me later, if you feel the need.‖ She stands up. She is taller than he is by probably fifteen centimeters. ―Thank you,‖ she says.

He notes a smile dancing at the corner of her lips that she can‘t seem to control.

He loves his work.

Margaret Karmazin‘s credits include stories published in literary and national magazines: Rosebud, Chrysalis Reader, North Atlantic Review, Mobius, Confrontation, Pennsylvania Review and Another Realm. Her stories in The MacGuffin, Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review and Words of Wisdom were nominated for Pushcart awards. Her story, "The Manly Thing," was nominated for the 2010 Million Writers Award. She has stories included in Still Going Strong, Ten Twisted Tales, Pieces of Eight (Autism Acceptance), Zero Gravity, Cover of Darkness, Daughters of Icarus, M-Brane Sci-Fi Quarterlies, a YA novel, Replacing Fiona, and a children's book, Flick-Flick & Dreamer, published by etreasurespublishing.com.

DOLL BABY

Amanda Forbes Silva Her left eye socket gaped wide, empty of the delicate blue glass that had gazed back at me only hours before. Cradling her in my arms, I scooped her off the bed and heard an echo round the inside of her porcelain skull. I closed my left eye and peeked my right against the hole, still framed by perfectly painted eyelashes. A white orb glowed as it slid around the cavernous blackness.

Holding her at arm‘s length, I examined her body. Not a scratch marred her peachy complexion. Her arms and legs dangled, defeated, but intact. The remaining eye shone as its twin rattled and rolled, unseen. I inspected her banana curls and perfectly pinned hat, trying to figure out what had happened, though I had no trouble imagining the culprit.

The wrapping paper still fanned around the box she came in, both abandoned to the floor after I had placed her on my bed for safekeeping. My friends and I were celebrating my tenth birthday in the garden, not with a tea party—befitting the kind of girl who would ask for such a doll—but with water balloons, muddy feet, and grass stains.

We—I—had left my sister, Ali, out of the fun. She was four years younger than me, but neither her age nor her lisp kept her from bossing me around. It didn‘t matter to her that I was now officially in the double-digits. Excluded and alone, she rushed upstairs and into my room where she found my perfect doll propped against my pillows, prim and proper. Her anger had nothing to do with the doll itself. But, since she couldn‘t poke out my eye, Ali pressed her pudgy thumb against the glassy pupil and pushed. The eye fell free, beginning its endless massage of the doll‘s empty cranium.

I knew she had done it. Brit, my youngest sister, was too little to find my friends interesting and not yet strong enough to maim a doll. ―Mom! You‘re never going to believe what Ali did this time!‖

I fought back raging tears as I pounded down the stairs and into the kitchen, my little cyclops clutched against my chest. The guests had already left and all that remained of the party were the shreds of balloons sprouting like polychromatic dandelions all over the lawn.

Ali loved dandelions and often twisted one of their sunny heads under my chin while asking, in her singsong voice, ―Do you like butter?‖ If a yellow tinge reflected under my chin, the answer was ―yes.‖ This was an amateur trick compared to her favorite dandelion routine, involving decapitation. ―Hey Manda! Watch this,‖ she‘d sing.

Her thumb, grubby and sticky from all that sucking, poised beneath the blossom. ―Mama had a baby and her head popped off!‖ The blossom launched in my direction, but I never asked whose head it was--the baby‘s or the mama‘s.

Prior to my tantrum Ali disappeared, which is exactly what I had wanted all day; however, she resurfaced for supper, throughout which she lisped her innocence—committed to the lie that the eye must have ―just fallen out.‖ I silently fumed, willing her eye to just fall out. By bath time, she cracked. ―Mom, I have to tell you something,‘‖ she said, peeking over the edge of the tub.

I squinted between the crack in the door, ears poised for the confession. ―What‘s that, Ali?‖ Mom wrung out a washcloth. A silver stream of water cascaded into the suds.

Ali frowned at the bubbles, brow furrowed. ―Well, Manda thinks she‘s so smart and I wanted to play with the water balloons, too, but she wouldn‘t let me.‖ Mom nodded, smoothing the washcloth over Ali‘s back.

I stifled a groan. How long was she going to whine about something that wasn‘t my fault? I couldn‘t help that I was older, and I wasn‘t going to have her tag along and lisp at us all day. Whenever anyone else mentioned or mimicked Ali‘s speech, I became their enemy and her bravest defender. But today was my birthday and I deserved a break from translating and policing. Keeping her away from my friends spared me both tasks. ―I was so mad. So mad!‖ She practically growled as her initial anger resurfaced, singeing her cheeks.

Reaching for the towel flopped over the radiator, Mom smiled, eyebrows lifted. Expectant. She already knew how this story ended. ―I couldn‘t help myself.‖ From behind the door I realized I wasn‘t going to be able to help myself when that urchin finally oozed out of the tub.

Mom stretched her arms wide, spreading the towel to receive Ali. The water skimmed the side of the tub as Ali stood, moping, shoulders drooped, beads of water dripping from her curls. She leaned forward into the towel Mom hugged around her. As Mom lifted her out, Ali began to sob, resting her head on Mom‘s shoulder.

Mom stood rocking Ali back and forth, a slight chuckle accompanying every sway.

She looked less like a five-year-old and more like a baby, swaddled and wailing. Catching her breath, she turned her hiccuping face to Mom‘s. ―Can I sleep in your room tonight?‖ ―What for?‖ Mom asked, her laugh challenging Ali‘s sobs.

Ali‘s voice squeaked to a near deafening pitch with every word. ―That doll scares me. I‘m afraid she‘s gonna get me.‖ She surrendered her head onto Mom‘s shoulder and choked the rest of her tears into Mom‘s neck. Apparently, it didn‘t occur to her to feel scared of me or afraid that I would get her, given half the chance.

Mom turned and caught my eye. She winked at me and I exhaled, surprised as the anger seemed to disappear, the heat in my face cooling. Unburdened, I skipped to my bedroom and settled against my pillow, calm and content in the knowledge that tonight Ali would sleep with one eye open. But my conscience sparked to life behind my droopy eyelids, and so, when a shadow with damp ringlets tiptoed to my bedside, I let it tuck in with me. Relieved that I had never gotten in trouble for acting like a monster in the first place, but awakened to the reality that curled next to me was a child with porcelain skin and a taste for butter, around whom dolls and dandelions didn‘t stand a chance, I closed my eyes. Wrapped in my arms her latest victim rested partially blind, one eye perpetually open.

But I knew Ali slept soundly.

Amanda Forbes Silva received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. Her work has been published in bioStories, Empty Sink, Emrys Journal, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal, later anthologized in The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2012. A native of New England, she was raised overseas and often writes about her expatriate childhood experiences. Amanda spends times away from her own pages working as an adjunct professor and freelance writer.

She is addicted to traveling and is most inspired when she is on the move. Interested readers are invited to check out her website at: www.amandafsilva.com

Challenged Ideas by Roxanne Coble

Challenged Ideas by Roxanne Coble

A CUE FROM NATURE Hannah Pascale Jarvis

When the clouds empty their heavy sadness upon the world below, the frogs do not stop their songs, echoing the bursting thunderclaps.

The leaves take each raindrop as a dance partner, each drip a tango and a dip.

The riverwater welcomes the clouds‘ tears home with round embraces, pools trickling with ring around a rosie.

Teach me not how to wait out the storm, but how to wade through it.

My arms will become wings— one with the sky— and my torn jeans will moss over.

Maybe, finally, I will be home at last.

HAPPINESS (FIRST PERSON) Hannah Pascale Jarvis

Sometimes I almost forget that these wings I call arms, these legs mossed over in Denim, these breasts and hips sculpted to mimic the curves of mountains, are all borrowed.

Could be repossessed as I swallow this pill named Happiness.

FAULT LINES

Hannah Pascale Jarvis She accentuated my pre-existing fault lines, broke me up. Made me whole.

But you, you turn my fingertips into dancers, aching to dance along your Faults. Your collar bone looks like a beautiful stage.

Hannah Pascale Jarvis is a teenager whose blood, like many others, runs with pure caffeine and poetry. When she isn't huddled in a chair, scribbling in a notebook, she enjoys painting murals, climbing trees, and playing her gender nonconforming ukulele, Jamie. One day, Hannah hopes to pulverize the gender binaries of society armed with pencil and paintbrush, and maybe a cup of coffee as motivation.

Artful by Roxanne Coble

QUEEN OF THE COCKROACHES Tom Tolnay

It took the tenants at 333 E. 87th Street one month to notice (and another two months to accept) that their four-story brownstone was rid of that most hardy, most tenacious member of the insect kingdom: the cockroach.

At first the tenants were tickled by the very idea. Roaches could no more disappear from their cabinets than faucets could stop dripping into their sinks. Not for more than a day or two, anyway. But when the residents continued not seeing the tentative antennae of these odious bugs feeling about, selecting the tastiest, heartiest crumbs on their tables, and darting out of harm‘s way into cracks in their walls, the joking about it stopped. More than one tenant went so far as to scout for them behind locked doors, in the privacy of their kitchens and bathrooms. None of them could find a single roach, only their sleek, empty brown armor, their pepper dots of waste, their hollow egg hulls under stoves and refrigerators, behind toilet bowls.

Theories accounting for their disappearance were paraded from the tarnished brass mailboxes in the vestibule to the tin-covered, fireproof door that led to the roof. Mr. and Mrs. 1A said the landlord must‘ve (―at long last‖) had every crevice and cranny fumigated professionally, though no one could recall having seen a hurry-scurry man (under a billed cap) pumping poison into the musty corners of the hallways, nor down in the basement, where trash tended to pile up until collection day. One might‘ve caught a glimpse of the janitor on the landings once a year with a dollar ninety-nine cent can of bug spray, for show, but that was about all they ever got out of that tightfisted landlord.

1B suggested that some tenant must‘ve painted his apartment, the odors of resin and linseed oil forcing the roaches to set up temporary encampments beneath the floorboards, though no one would own up to having spruced up their place; fact is, not a soul could recall smelling turpentine on the premises for years. Besides, the walls had

long been going their separate ways, and the tiles were toppling into bathtubs, and windowsills were crumbling. So it never really occurred to anyone that the place might be reclaimed with a smear of pigment and a wad of putty. Moreover, these conditions of deterioration merely opened the way for roaches to entrench themselves more deeply into the plaster and woodwork, lying low until the ―all clear‖ was signaled, whenever threatened by foreign substances.

Yet another theory, this one cooked up by 2A, was that everyone in the building must‘ve become much cleaner in their ―personal ways‖ over the past few months—washing their dishes directly after dinner, not letting refuse build up in their leaky pails, keeping floors scrubbed and counters wiped. And especially breaking the ―filthy habit‖ of snacking in bed while watching TV. 2A offered no explanation as to how such an extraordinary condition had come about. She simply contended that the roaches must‘ve found the pickings skimpier and skimpier, so they got fed up and scurried off to 331 and 335 E. 87th.

This notion seemed so silly that only one tenant (the one who lived next to the ―biggest slob in the building‖) took the trouble to point out that 4B still insisted on stacking soggy paper garbage bags outside his door, which stank up the halls for days, before carting them into the basement or the alley outside and leaving a trail of coffee grounds and chicken bones down the stairs. Furthermore, they got no help in keeping the hallways mopped, the stairwells swept. The red-nosed janitor was drunk more or less continuously and was apt to scream profanities whenever someone mentioned the sanitation situation. So no one mentioned it.

Quite the opposite of 2A‘s contention seemed to be the case. With tenants not seeing roaches around anymore, there‘d been a tendency to allow their dirty socks to gather dust under the bed for a week or three longer, to ignore the potato peels on their counters, to leave their dishes submerged that extra couple of days in the gray, greasy waters of their sinks. If nothing else, the roaches had helped keep tenants relatively honest in matters of cleanliness, which was next to Godliness, according to 4A. That‘s why cockroaches were put on this

earth in the first place, explained 3B, who had always been secretly glad the exterminator didn‘t come squirting around her radiator pipes with that red-bellied tank and white rubber hose. The other tenants had never thought of roaches as holy creatures with a higher purpose, Servants of the Lord, and this made a few of them look upon the brown and black bugs in a somewhat less contemptuous light.

The question of whether the landlord had hired an exterminator, or if someone had painted their bathroom, or if a passion for swabbing the floors had erupted at 333 E. 87th didn‘t amount to a load of soiled laundry. Cockroaches are a smug and sturdy race, proud of their ability to adapt, of their quickness in tight spots, of their highlydeveloped instinct for self-preservation. Proud of (more than anything else) a long and noble history that has its roots in the Torrid Zone. Cockroaches are not the kind to turn and run from a fight with an exterminator, nor with a tenant. They simply lie in wait, slowly but surely overcoming all obstacles to assure the continuation of their race. *** The theory the tenants finally embraced made less sense than all the others put together. They latched onto it because the timing was right and because all the sane explanations were obviously ―dead wrong.‖ About six months earlier, when all the trouble had started, a youngish woman had moved into 3A (the former inhabitant having been carried out feet first). It was rumored the newcomer had been born in the deep south, a steamy bayou region associated with strange powers where roaches were said to grow ―the size of toads.‖ This kind of talk got the tenants to thinking.

3A was a wiry little thing with a leaden face and stiff, tangled dark hair. No bother to anyone, really—went straight to her rooms without looking left or right, never speaking unless spoken to (which was almost never), and then only a word or two. A gypsy or some other sort of aimless soul, they figured she was, since she didn‘t go off to business or to a factory like normal folks. Nor could anyone remember her bringing down garbage and stuffing it into the trash

cans or, for that matter, lugging groceries up the stairs. It didn‘t take many weeks for 3A‘s peculiar appearance, standoffishness, and irregular ways to cause the tenants to decide there was a connection between her arrival and the departure of the roaches. Something was going on under their very eyes and noses, they suspected. But what?

Naturally the tenants were glad not to have to go around crushing roaches under their heels anymore; they were relieved not to see them staring back at them with increasing brazenness and downright haughtiness from their perches on the rims of their coffee cups.

Roaches were nasty little beings, and that‘s all there was to it: good riddance to bad rubbish. At the same time, the tenants were so used to sharing their homes with them, their food and drink, their most intimate activities, that it felt odd not having them around, as if an old and loyal (if distasteful) pet had been lured away from home.

The longer the roaches stayed away, the more curious the tenants became over the tar-eyed, root-haired woman in apartment A on the third floor. She was practically the only subject of conversation on the stoop, in the halls, on the roof, and within their dim, insinuationfilled rooms. Sometimes the tenants even quarreled over what could and should be done about her. But having no proof of their vague suspicions—other than powerful feelings in their bones—they tried to console themselves by staring up at 3A‘s windows, keeping an eye on 3A‘s mailbox, stopping before 3A‘s door, and frequently shaking their heads gravely.

One day the old man in 2B, who had been visiting the old woman in 4A and rehashing this very matter over a cup of coffee, was easing himself down one stair at a time, his back having ―gone out‖ again.

When he reached the third floor he stopped a moment to rest and, as was his custom, to gaze at 3A‘s door. Just then, to 2B‘s shock, a roach crawled out from under the door and, upon spotting the old man, flitted back into the crack. This sight outraged 2B, who had argued all along that the tenants should confront 3A on what had become of 333 E. 87th‘s roaches. Emboldened by this discovery, 2B limped up to her door and put his ear against its dry wood, but he couldn‘t hear a thing—his hearing hadn‘t been all that good for years.

The old man clenched a fist and knocked on her door. Still he could hear no stirring from within, but he was sure she was in there since she rarely came and went. 2B knocked again, this time much harder.

At last the door opened, just enough for the occupant to stick her head out. 3A was so short, however, that 2B was able to get a good look inside, and he gasped at what he saw: Millions of them were clustered over every object, every surface in the room—shiny, crawly, slippery, creepy, sneaky cockroaches clinging to the lamp shade, table, armchair, curtains, thick all over the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

Hundreds, he now noticed, were nesting in her wiry hair! When 3A squeaked, ―Why are you knocking on my door?,‖ 2B stumbled backward and began shouting nothing that made much sense, and quite loudly, too. Stunned, 3A simply stared at the foolish looking old man, his arms waving wildly above his head.

3B and other tenants who were home at the time came out to see what all the commotion was about, and it wasn‘t long before they too began raising their voices and their arms at the spectacle of all those roaches, many of which had crawled onto the door and its frame to have a look into the hallway. With one eye on her and one eye on them—and squirming with itchiness—the tenants declared (giving no thought to how or why 3A had done it) it was anti-American to hoard roaches. The tenants exclaimed they were going to get ahold of the landlord and demand that he evict her right away. This threat made the shiny-skinned young woman scuttle into her room, and the tenants stared in bewilderment as the bugs opened a path for her.

Once she had disappeared into the shadowy depths of the room, the cockroaches closed their ranks and began making angry, clicking sounds in the open doorway. And as soon as this peculiar, increasing vibration reached a certain pitch, the cockroaches gushed out of the room and swarmed after the people in the hallway. So shocked, so horrified were the tenants they couldn‘t move for a few moments.

Up their ankles the roaches flowed—masses of them, springing onto their heads from the doorframe and walls and darting into their collars and down their backs and into their brassieres. In less than a minute the legions had overrun their victims on the third floor.

Though the tenants finally got their legs and arms working and were trying desperately to brush the roaches off their bodies and out of their hair, they couldn‘t see through all the tiny brown and black legs and wings in their eyes: They ran into walls and tripped down the stairs, some of them becoming severely injured. Still the roaches clung to them, followed them, clicked at them. As the tenants wailed in horror, writhed in revulsion, twisted in pain, they could hear the shrill voice of 3A sounding out orders. *** From that modest, spontaneous beginning grew a great uprising.

Legions of roaches swarmed out of 331 and 335 E. 87th close on the heels of the fleeing tenants of those buildings. Across the street, down the corner, around the block, and in the next neighborhood the same scene repeated, with trillions of cockroaches bubbling out of windows and doors into the light, while thousands of people were screeching and shaking and scratching and shimmying in terror. It was a dance macabre the likes of which had never before been witnessed in any city anywhere in the world.

With the element of surprise advancing the cause of the roaches enormously and their numbers beyond reckoning, the plague of insects spread feverishly fast and fiendishly far. All over the city, throughout the state, across the nation and, ultimately, throughout the world quadrillions upon quadrillions of roaches upon roaches were heeding the call. They marched on quick filaments out of their cracks and crevices and corners and chinks onto the floors and walls and streets of humanity. They overran not merely the apartments and houses of the citizenry but the corridors of government, business, medicine, education, science, sports, arts, entertainment, and religion.

Throbbing like one massive, scaly, glossy, brownish-black beast, the multitudes seemed a flowing part of everything, of everyone they enveloped.

Soon, no longer content with merely chasing people out of their homes, offices, laboratories, arenas, hospitals, and temples of

worship and forcing them to boogie with disgust in the streets, the roaches began chewing the tough coverings off electrical wires, blocking air-conditioning vents and heating filters, clogging the machinery of industry, short-circuiting traffic lights and, for good measure, depositing their wastes in the drinking water reservoirs and crawling over the meat and vegetables in the markets. Temperature control units overheated and exploded, department store windows shattered, office towers rocked, old-age homes flared up in flames, buses rolled over, ships sank, airplanes crashed. Riots roared in the bowels of the world‘s great subway systems as blackouts swept across the boundaries of nations.

Humanity‘s astonishment and confusion, coupled with its deeprooted aversion to these bugs, forced millions of people to retreat from the cities into the countryside—they left most of their belongings behind but unwittingly carryied plenty of roaches with them. Those who remained behind attempted to seal up windows and doorways with tape and putty and newspapers and glue— whatever they had on hand—but it was a futile undertaking. The roaches felt around and pecked away until they had gained entry, hoards of their fellow creepy-crawlies following. The cockroaches would not be denied. *** In Washington, the National Security Council met in an emergency session in the subterranean chambers of the Pentagon, and the first action they took was to activate the emergency radio and television networks. Attempting to reassure the public it was merely a matter of time before the waves of periplameta americana and blatta germanica would subside and die off, government entomologists went on the air and over the Internet. ―If all Americans work together by making sure all uncanned foods are refrigerated and all household waste is stored in tightly sealed containers,‖ they promised, ―the steady diminishment of provisions will soon take its toll on the insects.‖ But the roaches were eating everything—paint peelings, wooden molding, plastic fast food utensils, cardboard boxes, soap, plaster, rubber balls and tires, shoes and sneakers, not to mention the stockpiles of

human foodstuffs they uncovered at national distribution centers throughout North America and, indeed, the world. A few days later, when the massive infestation did not abate, leaders around the world had the entomologists and assorted experts dismissed (in some countries they were shot dead). Still the roaches came forth.

Seated at his desk in a glassed-in booth in the Oval Room of the White House, the president of the United States went on prime-time television (on emergency generator power) for one hour over the four major networks and reported that he was calling for leaders of the world to put aside ideological differences in the face of this international crisis. ―The threat is universal,‖ he said solemnly, ―so our response must be universal.‖ Within days the presidents, prime ministers, premiers, emperors, kings, queens, and even small-time dictators of the world were communicating regularly with each other over their hotlines or via emails—except for those whose transoceanic cables had been chewed up or whose computer chips had been shorted-out by the roaches.

By international decree, a command post was established at the United Nations headquarters in New York. This location held a natural attraction for the humans in that they had debated numerous global issues within its glassy walls and because it had a fully selfcontained power and survival system—plus partial defense offered by the wide river along its eastern front. A counteroffensive was hastily mapped out in the newly established war room—here in a structure that had been constructed and dedicated to the pursuit of peace.

Provisions for everything from human support services to firepower were put into place. Military officers of many different languages and uniforms were ordered to set up quartermaster depots in the higher elevations (where much cooler temperatures prevailed, the cold being disagreeable to the enemy) outside the cities in their respective countries. At these strategic outposts, they began supplying their armies not with rifles and tanks and cannons but with spray guns and bug bombs and pressurized backpack canisters filled with DDT and other secret, highly powerful chemicals.

Upon completion of a rushed basic training in this special kind of weaponry and warfare, troops were promptly deployed to the front lines in various theaters of war. At the 96th Street parallel in New York City, the US Army and Marines were dropped in by parachute and engaged the evil forces of darkness immediately. The fighting was furious, vicious, continuous: stamping, spraying, slashing, smashing, suffocating. There were many heroes, and many, many dead. But not much blood. Mostly matted bits of fiber and blueskinned corpses. While the human beings had a conspicuous physical size advantage, the cockroaches had the numbers. And the bugs had another compelling weapon: Having been oppressed for so long, they had no fear of death.

Throughout these far-flung campaigns, the generals at the UN—in TOP SECRET coded messages filed with the Operations Center— kept indicating that Humanity‘s United Forces were ―turning the tide against the ‗Queen of the Cockroaches‘ and her insidious armies of the night.‖ Meanwhile unofficial, conflicting reports from noncommissioned officers in the field were surfacing, too, and warning that HUF‘s own poisonous gases and fluids and powders were slowly but steadily killing millions of human beings along with their adversaries.

The generals‘ optimistic combat reports continued to arrive, yet the heads of state were unable to detect any significant gains as they nervously surveyed (primarily from sealed-in-glass turrets) the chaos that reigned in the streets below. The penetration of the enemy was so profound that a few suicide teams had even violated the strict security zones of the leaders‘ lofty towers—even though every precaution humanly possible had been taken to make sure roaches were not concealed in communique packets or in food or water containers. Just in time these infiltrators had been captured and stamped out. But who could say what tomorrow would bring?

The outlook growing more menacing with each passing day, presidents, prime ministers and premiers from around the world pressed the UN secretary general to call an international emergency session of HUF‘s Security Council ―at the highest levels.‖ When it

was suggested that a global Internet-based teleconference be linked up promptly, technical advisors pointed out, quite accurately, that information transmitted over the Internet earlier in the campaign had been hacked by the enemy.

Within thirty-six hours the top leaders of each of the world‘s political powerhouses had swept into New York City in supersonic jetliners and were immediately ferried from the airport via spray-gun-armed helicopters, which landed in the debugged plastic bubble set up on top of the UN building. The moment the copters touched down, the dome closed up over their propellers. It was a daring mission since, according to intelligence reports, the cockroaches had established their North American headquarters close by at 333 E. 87th. But security was the tightest in the history of mankind—including a fivefoot thick, thirty-foot high ring of armored concrete on the reinforced UN roof, and this was surrounded by a fifty-foot wide, continuously flaming moat. Four 360-degree supercharged electronic bug zappers had also been specially designed and mounted on the roof to blast attacking airborne units out of the sky.

As soon as every one of the great leaders had been hustled by teams of elite UN guards (wearing self-sufficient space suits) into the decontamination area—a DDT-circulating antechamber—and their clothing had been incinerated, they sat down to work. However, after two days of disorderly debate in the welded-steel, windowless assembly hall, the heads of state could agree on only one point: the need to summon their military chiefs at once from the critical theaters of war on seven continents and try to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth out of them. Except for a few who reportedly took their own lives, all the top brass landed in New York within thirty hours. Though the men who‘d arrived with gold braids on their shoulders and medals on their chests looked pallid and haggard, their supreme commanders insisted upon getting down to business immediately. (It was the first conclave of this magnitude that had ever been conducted entirely in gas masks and otherwise, entirely naked. There was no other way to guarantee security, as well as safety.)

Severely interrogated and sternly rebuked for eighteen consecutive hours, the generals began to break down. One by one they confessed that all was not well on the battlefront. They complained acrimoniously that the roaches never seemed to sleep and were multiplying faster than they could be exterminated. When the UN Security Council demanded an explanation of why all that highpowered brass had failed to stamp out the enemy‘s reinforcement capabilities, the generals of Humanity‘s United Forces whined that the Queen of the Cockroaches was employing tactics that ―make a sham of the Geneva war accords.‖ It seemed the roaches would gush into the moist mouths, up the nasal and anal passages of the human soldiers; scurrying down their windpipes and up their asses and nesting in their warm, lightless lungs and intestines, the roaches would immediately begin laying eggs to bear millions of fresh freedom fighters. ―That‘s what these cowardly bugs call themselves,‖ wailed a five-star general, ―freedom fighters!‖ The secretary general, renowned for his cool head and clear thinking, began barking fanatically that gas masks should have been issued to every soldier and sailor and airman on the planet. He was furious the generals hadn‘t thought of this defensive move themselves. Of course they had. But the roaches had countered by clustering on the breathing filters of the masks, cutting off the air supply. ―Since she is ultimately responsible for breeding the bulk of their reinforcements,‖ another council member cried, pounding his fist on the long table, ―the queen herself should have been your primary target!‖ The generals had considered this point, too, had even launched a breakof-dawn attack on 333 E. 87th. Once again, having already carried the queen off (probably out the main sewer pipe in the basement) to some secret, underground outpost (or so it was deduced) from which she was directing the cockroaches‘ war effort, the roaches had outflanked the humans. At these revelations, the entire UN Security Council went red or purple or black with speechless rage, from their toes to their flabby stomachs to their sagging breasts to the roots of their graying hair.

After more fierce debate, accented periodically by bellowed accusations and counteraccusations, a plan centering on the advice of

the ―best political and military minds on earth‖—at least in the human realm—began to emerge, and the special HUF unit of the United Nations issued a grave but ―inescapable‖ order: ―Destroy every human being suspected of harboring the enemy.‖ That way hundreds of thousands of the revolutionaries could be eliminated at a stroke, HUF‘s Security Council concluded, while keeping human loss low by comparison. This decision was reached shortly before the emergency sessions were broken up (in a panic) by the discovery of a tiny spy-roach feeling its way along the molding of the assembly hall‘s air vent. It had somehow managed to slip through three extremely tight security filters—plus a chamber of spiders, the only creatures known to terrify roaches. When the general nearest the vent tried to squash the spy with his bare foot, it zipped back to safety behind the grating.

Around the globe every man, woman, and child (over the age of seven) was issued a packet containing five hand grenades, printed instructions on detonation, and ten tips on how to distinguish between ―carriers‖ and ―non-carriers.‖ At first people were very loathe to toss a grenade at another human being; only those with prior military experience, or those who simply ―had it in‖ for certain other people, chucked a few. Pretty soon the population at large began to catch on, however, and humans were blowing up humans upon sight—more out of self-protection than suspicion of being enemy-carriers. As fear of each other spread, so did the killings. The dead began piling up in the streets, inside buildings, and their bodies were immediately swarmed over by roaches in their frenzy for fresh human flesh.

It became only too apparent that HUF‘s response to the queen‘s strategies was not producing the anticipated military gains. While the generals‘ communiques (now arriving only intermittently) blamed these deteriorating conditions on that spy-roach at the UN, the truth was the roaches were just as content to breed their divisions of new troops in what was left of the corpses as in the chests of the living. In the end, through steady attrition and lack of untainted water, unspoiled food, and non-poisonous air, coupled with the human inability to stay awake long enough to prevent the roaches from

taking over their bodies, the spoils went to the bugs: a total, irreversible victory over mankind. *** These days the cockroaches of both hemispheres no longer need to steal crumbs of leftovers on tables to feed their immense families nor hide under stoves to catch the spillovers, for the tread of a human foot has not been feared on Earth in a long, long time. Billions of Homo sapiens died in battle or in the fumed aftermath of war. While some managed to hide out in the mountains or extremely cold climates, in the end they too perished from exposure or from lack of consumable food and water. Of course many thousands were also imprisoned in the jails the humans had constructed for their own criminals. Now all breeding among human beings has been outlawed, not to mention functionally prevented: The remaining females and males are strictly segregated. It is true a certain number of eunuchs move about in cockroach society—or rather on its fringes—but they are primarily employed as beasts of burden, slaves. Meanwhile, the human population, what‘s left of it, is getting older and older, thinner and thinner, diminishing in numbers every day.

Several thousand cockroaches reported spotting a rocket ship take off from the Sahara Desert late in the war, which caused speculation that a small band of human beings may have escaped to the moon or to one of the closer planets in the solar system. But as the minister of defense testified to the Politbureau, the Universal Armies of the Cockroach Command had secured (or infiltrated) virtually every square inch of human civilization. ―If a few human creatures managed to vacate the earth, and even if they can find sufficient food, air, and warmth, they have undoubtedly carried some of our own kind with them.‖ The assembly began waving their antennae in gleeful approval.

At long last, life among the cockroaches has settled into the calm social routine of peacetime. After their labors are through for the night, they take their ease during the day on the plushest sofas of the world, feed upon their former oppressors (and their goods)

sumptuously, and multiply at a fabulous rate in the mattresses and sofas left behind by humanity . . . growing stronger and larger every day. By now they are walking fully upright, with considerable dignity.

The insecticides have blown away, and their manufacture was outlawed. The streets have been cleared. Signs of reform are everywhere. Orphanages have been established in abandoned buses and railroad cars. Hospitals are operating out of defunct department stores (the smells of alcohol and ether in human hospitals are repugnant to cockroaches). Most recently, the centers of art and music have been reopened, and even the games played by their ancestors eons ago, such as Dustball, are being revived. Thus the high, ancient, noble culture of the cockroach is being rediscovered by the old and passed on to the young.

A few of the more exalted of their number preside in the great leather armchairs of Cairo and Washington and Moscow and Peking and London and Paris and Tokyo and Calcutta and Ottawa and Buenos Aires, where they oversee the Cockroach Action Committees of their regions, which are working harmoniously for the welfare of the populace and planning for the future. Progressive programs are regularly initiated by the Queen of the Cockroaches who, through a global network of supremely sensitive, strategically placed, extremely long antennae, rules over this peaceable kingdom from her ebony throne in the jungles of Central Africa. Once a year, the queen calls upon district leaders to leave their bureaus and gather at 333 E. 87th in New York. Here the Queen delivers a rousing speech from the window of apartment 3A, in which she commemorates the beginning of the Great Cockroach Revolution and honors those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom.

Tom Tolnay is the former editor of Back Stage, the theatrical weekly newspaper. Currently he operates Birch Brook Press, a small book publisher in upstate New York where he prints letterpress editions of literary titles. Two of his novels, Celluloid Gangs and The Big House, were published by Walker & Company. Two story collections

by Tolnay were published by Silk Label Books and The Generalist.

The author‘s individual works have appeared in more than two dozen literary and consumer magazines, including Saturday Evening Post, The Fiddlehead, Chelsea Review, The Iconoclast, Confrontation, Southwest Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Carpe Articulum, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, etc. His short stories have been anthologized by Dell, Signet, Down East Books, Literal Latte Books.

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