EAST COAST INK, Issue 006: ROOTS by East Coast Ink

east coast ink issue 006 | roots

C O N T E N T S EAST COAST INK | Issue 006 | ROOTS

L E T T E r

f r o m t h e e d i t o r 2

P O E T R Y 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T h e y F o u n d T w o N e w S a p p h o P o e m s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .................. .................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .................. .................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................

Historically Speaking Lines Dissatisfied Intervista Caught Me with Vinegar Notre Dame, a Dead Sestina Dirty Roots Compost for Spring M y N a m e Wa s M a d i s o n Sissy Descent S t r a w b e r r y J a m e s t o w n To i l e

F I C T I O N 2 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W o o d .................. Sirens and Silence .................. Arbeit Macht Frei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . H o m e , O n c e

M I C R O F I C T I O N 3 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R u b b e r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P i l l o w

N O N F I C T I O N 4 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R E : “ I F e e l I t M o v i n g T h r o u g h M e ” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . S w a m p P e o p l e .................. My Balún Canán

ISSUE 006 EAST COAST INK Spring 2015

“roots”

eci staff owner, editor-in-chief Jacqueline Frasca associate editor Austen Wright fiction editor Erika Childers nonfiction editor Jill Shastany

reviews Laura Apperson editorial interns Danielle Behrendt Isabelle St. Clair

East Coast Ink Issue 006, Spring 2015: Roots. Copyright © 2015 East Coast Ink Cover image by Jacqueline Frasca. Images inside front cover and on pages 8, 15, 23―24, 35, 37―38, and inside back cover by Jacqueline Frasca.

East Coast Ink magazine is produced four times per year and is an individually owned and operated publication. For additional content , please visit ecimagazine.tumblr.com and connect with us @ecimagazine. Pitch us your creative nonfiction and submit fiction, poetry, micro fiction, book reviews, mixed media artwork and photography to ecimagazine@gm ail.com. Copyright of all materials reverts to the individual artists and authors. No materials may be reproduced under any circumstances without written permissions from the editorial staff.

letter from the editor A c o u p l e ye a r s a g o, I re a lize d (via various sessions wit h therapist s and n u t r i t i o n is ts ) th a t I h a d a ve r y strong assoc iation linking food to being va l ue d a n d i n c l u d e d ; growin g u p, my Grandm a and Papa’s house was t he plac e to b e fo r a ny a nd a ll h o lid ays , th e random weeknight , t he oc c asional Sunday s u p p e r. My G ra nd ma g ot co mm issioned for her pies by a handful of my fa the r ’s f r i e n d s — s h e h a d re cip e s for hom em ade I t alian st aples that she passed o n to my mo m a n d fo o d wa s th e ce nterpiec e of our fam ily gat herings. I st arte d o ut w i t h l i t t l e co u s ins a n d g ra d u a lly along c am e sisters, our fam ily events g e tting a l i t t l e bi g ge r a n d lo u d e r. On th e other side of my fam ily it was largely the s a me ( exc e p t G re e k). My fa mily wa s always toget her when I was younger, and whe n I wa s o l d e r a nd my re la tion s h ips were turbulent and my self- esteem dro ppe d to ze ro , I ’ d tu rn to fo o d to try to draw from the posit ive m em ories I tied to it— a n d s o me time s ju s t to fe e l a nyt hing at all. Ro o ts d on’ t a lways s h ow; som etim es they peek t hrough c rac ks in t h e g ro u nd , b u t la rg e ly th ey thrive below the surfac e, drawing from their s u r ro u n d in gs a n d g rowin g d e spite us. The way our root s weave, regard l e s s o f o b s t a c l e s , s h ows ju s t h ow ingrained t hey are. What roots us to our grea te s t fe a r s c a n s ome time s ta ke ex trem e m easures to sever—what feeds us happine s s c a n be j u s t a s te n a ciou s , eve n if it doesn’t always show. A f te r a ve ry tr ying winter here on t he E ast Coast , we’ve m ade it to the ve rn a l e q uinox , wh ich me a n s spring is here whet her it likes it or not . Down i n At l a n t a , s eve nty-d e g re e d ays have t rees bloom ing, while in Boston the o u t ra g e o us s n owb a nks h ave b egun to m elt (even though m any lost hope tha t t h ey eve r wou ld ). W ith th e s e extrem ely welc om e longer days c om es our s ixth i s s u e , wh ere we a s ke d a r tis ts and writers to delve into what t heir pasts a re ro o te d i n a n d wh a t ma d e th e m , be it a person, their c ulture, an event , or o t h e rw i s e. We h o pe you e n joy d e lving into t he past s of these art ist s as m uc h a s we h ave . En j oy th e wa r me r we a ther and longer days—t his issue is best ser ve d a s p a r t o f a we ll-s tocke d picnic. T h a n ks for re a d in g.

Jacqueline Frasca

editor-in-chief

patrick nguyen a.k.a. Dozfy

[ poetry ] THEY FOUND TWO NEW SAPPHO POEMS Katherine H. Gibbel

I would not think to touch the sky with t wo arms. I didn’t even grab the frozen kiwi in frozen yellow grass—our corner kingdom where strays ride shotgun.

The month’s final orbit lacks absurd markers: sunrise, birdcall, ambulance, sounds which make day, lost in fog—looking two ways—grimly haunt those who cannot read stars. The last lunar transit broke all old records, but shows up pixely the morning after. Moon bites into sun’s red rind during her ell iptic walk of shame.

historically speaking Carly Feinman

We are all aroused by the icy water of cash payment . You know you want it and hey, it is a thrill to cup in your hands and splash against your face.

But checks don’t wear halos, their veils are torn plus they aren’t virgins anymore. Fat fingers tug at portable property like it’s on the verge of going flaccid. Coins and bills have greasy pedophilic mustaches and the children, plucking daffodils by the roots, are asking for it . They’re starting so much younger these days, something really must be done.

Anything can be tamed and civilized, all it takes is a smooth shave and a crisp top hat , right? But nothing keeps a population in deep and necessary concentration like a sexy object dangling from a strong but conquerable stick.

lines

Grace Black our gnarled limbs come of age and true beauty in breaths of weathered ache lines of peeling bark inscribe our sutured pith all the buried, unseen hands of time of woven weft and warp we are all stories, deeply rooted in this earth

“Hands: Yoni,” Drawing, 30” x 22.5”, 2012, Soe yu nwe

Dissatisfied Jill Shastany

We were wearing each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bones down when you asked me what I thought about a lie and I told you it was all the same to me, whether true or untrue. When you walked up to me and the stones scraped each other in horribly smooth crunches, and you tripped, you were holding out your hands. The feather that fell from the above hovering gull steadied you.

That night the moon was replaced by a glowing rock under ragged cloth of ice. And the only stimulation we needed was what the stars provided, and the microscopic magnitude of their wisdom. We held a contest to decide whose might would overturn the stone, but both of us were disqualified, dissatisfied. It concerns me. It always did. It always followed. No matter where I was going, or from where I was coming.

Like a digital mixup, a signal interrupted, the treesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; silhouettes crackling the pleasant screen.

Tomorrow there will be no more moon. Nor anymore room for me to move in the shell I once possessed. It will break open, horribly glistening in fluorescent radiance, beautiful and ghastly in its truth. And when you wake up, there will be a piece of moon in your eye. You will take a knuckle and rub it out , and look at me with less marvelous eyes than ever before.

D A V I D D Y T E

intervista

Christopher Mulrooney Hogwood conducting Pulcinella in L.A. is asked about Vaughan Williams’ famous remark to the effect that S. had written erroneously round the matter artists often miss the point of other artists’ work and in that most greatly resemble the critics mirabile dictu carrying coals to Newcastle not in his line Hogwood refrains from quoting S. to the countereffect that Vaughan Williams might very well please himself with his writing as it may be

caught me with vinegar Jacqueline Frasca

When I think of you, I think of spring. It’s never cold enough to snow, never warm enough for bare legs. I’m in a constant state of goose skin, wanting to shiver but having to force it . My lips are always chapped, my teeth won’t let them heal. I think of being hungry and forgetting how that feels. Nothing passes my lips, nothing tempts my tongue. My stomach is silent , my energy stored. I am still and patient , my limbs tense and secure. Without much effort , denying is easier when you deny me so easily. I think couches and basements, I think maybe I have no taste for honey for a reason. Something about vinegar keeps my attention; I’m wrapped up in it , content as it keeps me working, content with its reliant sting.

NOTRE DAME, A DEAD SESTINA

- for felicia hoLton

Katherine H. Gibbel

While I light one low candle, many sand colored orthopedic grandma shoes ripple, shuffle, stumble, collect on the altar. In white robes and gold chains men hold the body of Christ and place tasteless pieces on the women’s wet tongues. I light it for her. My tongue is dry—as hot as the candle’s blue flame hissing its tasteless ditty for an atheist grandma. Priests add, “Her wordy spirit is chained downstairs, but would you like to collect

the ashes?” Dementia forgot her, collected new phrases and pleated her tongue into a goldfish. She lost the words for chain smoking and depression. Candles flickered in the blacks of Grandma’s eyes where recognition is never tasteless.

So we live in bitter memory—the tasteless curse words she tamped in snow. We collect bedtime yarns and upbraidings. Grandma’s frozen pints of pasta sauce smacked of tongue lashings, lipstick stains, long thin candles. When I was little, she gave me a gold chain with an ink pot . Her necklace, its chain turned the wrong way, now tastes less of death and more of metal. Here, candlelight’s wicked-away finish collects and drips light . I bite my iron tang tongue. Sun set; body ash; flame snuffed; grandma

died. Imagine my grandma with the wolf of death, whose chains and stones hum, as the two speak tonguein-cheek of a new room of her own—tasteless shadows for curtains. And waves collect and whisper that is all and lap over this candle.

dirty roots Carly Feinman

I’ve never understood why taking clothes off either makes us clean or dirty, I always thought it just makes us more us.

My grandmother used to smile at my body in the tub arthritis thumb rubbing suds from my forehead she’d only stop humming to still my squirming limbs tilt my chin back and say you ain’t clean ‘til you squeak. But I stopped taking baths stopped listening to my skin, let men smirk at my skin on their sheets they always knew exactly what they wanted. I’ve never known exactly what I wanted.

I’m lying next to a new man, his arm is heavy over my empty stomach he snores I stare at his sneakers on the floor and I am filthy. I’m wailing in the shower scorching and scratching at my soapy skin, when will I ever be clean?

compost for spring Grace Black

her lips kept secrets a thrush of hidden truths

feathered roots suckle from her time-worn veins clots of blood and hate and many muddied paths

mistakes were far from few upon her weary way now a branchless birch a stump in waiting

she greets the coming season well-worn past; compost for spring

my name was madison Daniel Willey

Sometimes When my skin wants to peel away And my body squirms in its own flesh I think about her And how she became me. And I wonder what it would have been like to be pretty. The soft mounds of my belly and the ripple of my thighs Have not always been poetry. When she was sixteen She didn’t think she’d make it to eighteen And she didn’t . So I owe her an apology for ripping her from my chest Like something so unholy. But I guess when you shred away at something so desperately like that , Things get left behind And I wonder how my life would have been If I had just once felt like I was pretty. She always thought maybe she would be beautiful If a boy would touch her face and hold her hand And I want to tell her that nearly four years later I would still not believe in my own two feet As I lay with my ear to their chest . I want to tell her The sound of someone else’s beating heart is beautiful But only when the sound of your own Stops getting in the way. I want to promise her that someday someone will touch her So when they touch me I can stop thinking about how someone is finally touching her. I want to feel their skin on mine And not on hers. I want her ghost to stop haunting the hollows of my bones So I can lay to rest the thought That maybe (maybe) ((i wouldn’t have done it if i had been pretty.))

Abigail Griswold

sissy

Christopher Mulrooney they would not let you be an artist but you escaped the loony bin they put you in and rose a prince but they would not have you serve you retired from the scene and emerged a monarch they would not have

descent

Jill Shastany I remember you pulling down My underwear, as I climbed out of bed. I hadn’t slept the night before; My mind had been occupied by mounting obligations, fried Now you were on fire with one thought only My head pounded, I had to be out the door Your eyes followed from your place in my bed I walked into the kitchen, I came back I sat down, we kissed I asked if it was okay to... And it was. You said, “Oh, God,” And then my name, And told me you were going to... And afterwards asked If it was to get you to stop harassing me. “I like when you harass me,” I said, Mad from lack of sleep. The night before, you had said we were bad people.

Strawberry Jamestown Toile Jacqueline Frasca

Fill the days with white wine, still demeanor, and grape vines; bide your time sinking in right by the tide, and watch the sand turn from dark to light again, feel the thirst of the earth. Feel the sun overtake the blinds and stop close-eyed living and dreaming in repose. I would rather take that third of my life by the wayside, or in a riptide.

Fill your days with touches, lips and fingertips, with a lack of distance in full color, your course upon this path secure, and on this film focus on her bones and their bends, and keep your jones for blades of grass, damp dirt , and spades of rust – fill them with promises of country sides and city skies. Fill them with foxgloves, blueberry bushes in linked backyards and by far fill them with every bottle you’ve emptied with me, think of them in the shades of apple trees and please remember the winter’s shiver, every picture taken of the pills and the pride, dunes in Truro, sunlight through strawberry Jamestown toile drapery in San Francisco, Clutching down comforters to tell of words locked in boxes with tickets and trinkets.

Fill your life with every type of smile and while you sow more seeds in rows of threes keeps all thirstiest leaves, every drawn mark and nuance of my lark perception; fill me with angles, letters, and new places, new spaces in the world. Take those little pieces of everywhere we go, and know that I hate routine, and keep everything.

”Untitled Vessel #4,” Red Earthenware, 15” x 13” x 33”, 2014, Soe Yu Nwe

[ fiction ] wood

Cody Strait Wood lived on a hill called Ruck Hill in west Princeton. But , people in town either called it Frog Hill or Rich Hill—Frog Hill for the way that toads would slide down to the bottom after it rained and cover the road so thick that you thought the earth was writhing. Rich Hill was really just because everyone who lived up there was loaded—filthy rich and paranoid enough to put themselves a half-hour from the nearest grocery store. Dave Wood’s house could not be seen from the road, because the driveway was long and the trees so thick. Most houses up there were like that . The first few times my Grandmother took me over there she drove right past , until we noticed the maple tree: a relatively young sapling that stood right at the end of the driveway. It was unique because it had been wracked by a storm and leaned way out into the road—the roots showing in gnarls on the other side, still clinging to the soil. I was in the sixth grade when I moved in with my grandmother and started going to the school there. I met Wood on my first day, sitting on my own at lunch, when I saw him kick a kid named Ben Adams in the face. From what I could gather, Wood had dropped something shiny, and when Adams stooped to pick it up, he got the shoe to the face. Wood managed to pick up whatever the thing was before a teacher came over. She had not seen the kick, but there was laughter all around them. “What’s going on?” She asked Wood. “Adams fell.” “He fell?” “Adams’s dad must’ve buffed the floor extra good last night ,” he looked up and found me, sitting right there in full view. “Ben, tell me what happened,” she said. It was obvious what had happened. There this kid was on his ass, left side of his face going red. All he was missing were tread-marks from the bottom of Wood’s shoe—maybe a Nike sign to go with it . But , when the teacher asked him, he just shook his head and looked like he was going to cry. “This kid saw the whole thing,” Wood said, pointing at me. The teacher looked at me and asked what happened. So, I lied about it—of course I lied. Adams was obviously the person to be sympathetic towards. But , I was new, and I had a bad past that everyone knew about , and at twelve-years-old Wood just seemed cool. He seemed like the person

you want to be around if you were looking for experiences. The teacher barely bought it . She looked like she wanted to pull Wood to the office anyway, but Adams wouldn’t say a word, so she really had nothing. What amazed me was the way everyone around was watching—the whole sixth and seventh grade, practically—and no one said anything. Not even Adams. Wood sat with me after that and asked me questions. Where was I from: Worcester. Why had I moved: because my parents were junkies, and the government took me away from them. I said it like it was a scar I was showing off that made me look tough. He was really interested in my life before Princeton, and we spent the rest of lunch talking about it—something I’d never done. Not with the social worker, not with my grandmother. I told Wood because he thought it was cool—the way suburban kids think anything like that is cool, because they only hear the interesting parts and never have to worry about living through it . To this day, I’m sure that at least half the reason he befriended me was because he knew how much his father would hate it . I remember asking him what the shiny thing was that was worth kicking Ben Adams in the face. He pulled out a silver cigarette case he’d stolen from his mother, packed with her Virginia Slims. Girl cigarettes, he said, but they do the job.

I met both his parents the Friday after the Adams incident . The mother was sweet in a condescending way. She treated me extra nice, like I was an orphan with a busted leg—a tragedy case that she could dress up like a civilized person. And she did: I left that night with a bag full of Wood’s hand-me-downs, which I didn’t need, but took out of politeness. His father was a rich-fuck, sired by rich-fucks for generations. He never did anything openly to me. But , I remember that first night that he would stare at me with his scotch in hand, like he was waiting for me to pocket the silverware. I don’t think we spoke more than four words between us for the first few years I knew him. Eventually, when Wood became a disappointment , his father warmed up to my straight A’s and my part-time library job to humiliate his son. I never considered that he ever really liked me or forgot where I came from. He used me as a weapon. I could almost hear him saying: see what the poor cit y boy with bad blood can do? It was bad. But , when have you ever heard of a rich-fuck father that was proud of his son? Wood never had a chance when I think about it .

We had been friends for a few months when Dickey, their greyhound, went missing. I was supposed to stay over that night , so I came not knowing about Dickey running off or anything. Wood was sitting on the front steps smoking when we drove up. My grandmother made a remark about bad parenting. When I walked over I saw that he had been crying, though I knew he didn’t want me to acknowledge it . I asked him, instead, where his parents were. “Out ,” he said. “Where?” “To dinner or something.” Then he told me about Dickey. “We’ve got to go find him,” he said, deadpan, “I said you would help.” We walked across his giant yard with Wood holding the flashlight . He chainsmoked while we called for the dog, getting closer to the tree line until we were

trekking around in the thick Princeton underbrush. At one point , Wood stopped and started sobbing. I wasn’t sure if he was crying about the lost dog or something else. I stood there and was quiet like I was at a funeral for someone I didn’t know. He looked over at me. “My dad is a fucking asshole,” he said. “I’m going to kick his ass when he gets home. I’m going to get a bat and fuck him up the second he walks in the door.” He started pacing around, and then went to a big rock where he slammed the flashlight until it was all busted up. He told me again how his father was an asshole, and how Dickey getting out wasn’t even his fault . I listened and nodded and crouched down next to him at the rock. He told me I was his only real friend. I said he was mine, which would only be true until the eighth grade. We walked around for another hour, until we could see headlights shining down the driveway. Then we went inside, and Wood’s father took him into the other room to apologize. I stayed with Mrs. Wood and she gave me ice cream and told me David’s shirts fit me good. I told her thanks again. When they came out of the office, Wood looked like he had cried again. He did not fuck his father up with a baseball bat , nor did he even throw a punch. We all ate the ice cream, and Mr. Wood made jokes about how the rum-raisin was making us all drunk. When we went to bed, we sat awake for awhile. Wood admitted to me that his father had slapped him around a little—those were his exact words. He said it was nothing serious, and it almost never happened. I asked him if his mother knew: she did. I asked him if he was going to tell someone: probably not . It wasn’t a big deal, he said. I remember thinking that was bullshit but I didn’t say so. My grandmother came to get me in the morning. Sometime during the night , Dickey had come home and scratched at the side door until Mrs. Wood let him in. We played with the dog as my grandmother said how beautiful an animal he was. Then we left , down the long driveway. We passed the maple with its roots showing—my grandmother said she thought the tree looked more beautiful that way. I said maybe not better, but more memorable. She agreed, then asked me if my night had been fun. I said it had. I remember thinking that I was glad to be living with my grandmother.

sirens and silence Jacqueline Frasca

He gathers bits and pieces around the kitchen and tosses them half-heartedly into his backpack; his mum watches from the doorway, a cigarette in her lips, eyes focusing inward. She had mastered the art of looking without seeing, as she was always reflecting too vividly. An apple, the sandwich he made last night , a can of Pepsi. He zips the bag halfway and slings it on, heading past his mum. She stops him to finish zipping the bag and sees there are no books inside. No notebooks, no papers or folders. She silently looks into his face and he can see her eyes refocusing, can see her waking up a little as the light changes in them. He knows what she is thinking as she studies his own. His eyes are blue like his father’s. They are piercing; he is not . He kisses her forehead and keeps going, out of the house. She lets herself keep thinking school is where he’s headed.

He walks along slowly, watching the sidewalk, long ponytail over his shoulder and hands deep in his pockets. He nears the library and sets the can of Pepsi out on the same bench near the woods as he does every day. He doesn’t know who takes it because he’s never seen them, but every day he leaves it , it’s gone before noon. He sits along the wall opposite the library, a few yards in front of the fire station. He sets his backpack beside him and fishes out the apple, waiting for the librarian to come unlock it for the day. This is his favorite part of the day—sitting and waiting for the library to open. So many games are played right here. First , he must try to avoid the police driving by and seem inconspicuous so he does not get picked up for not being in school. He also never knows when the fire horns will go off and the trucks will come racing out . The jolt of shock fills his entire body when the sirens start and he feels awake and alive and the oxygen comes quick and heavy. As the trucks race out he is so absorbed in their trajectory that he forgets for a little while who he is and where he is and what he’s doing and that he’s doing nothing. He often finds himself praying for fires. Then the librarian comes and he’ll amble silently inside for a day of reading physics books and encyclopedias, of giving himself vocabulary tests and thumbing through different world histories. Every month he picks a different classic to trudge through—The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies—and sometimes will do book reports. He dislikes writing essays, but turns two in a month for his mum to read. He knows when she sits with them at the kitchen table she isn’t really reading. She stares with the light far from her eyes, zeroing in on one word on the first page until she eventually wanders away from it . The librarians know he should be in school and tell him every day he needs to go tomorrow, and he nods. But every day he’s back. He makes himself useful, always returning the books he reads to their proper place and reloading the shelves from the book carts. They call on him to put back books too big that go on too-high shelves, they call on him to rearrange books on the lowest shelves

because he is young and his bones are made of clay and their backs couldn’t make the trip back up. He hasn’t gone to school in more than a year. Somedays he misses the abuse in the hallways, the faces as they try to ruin his—it was like a game. How fast can I get from class to class. Can I make it across the school without being hit . I bet they won’t get me if I go around the back of the school. The anticipation of trying to make it safely into the doorway of a classroom was like being a kid again and pretending the floor was lava. Except if you didn’t make it , you’d end up black and blue. The librarian walks up from her car, key in hand, and shakes her head at him with a smile. He deflates the little he has left; no cops or sirens today. Just today. His hunger got lost in the ending of Brave New World and the hour he spent browsing the stacks for more Huxley. He found Asimov and Le Guin before it was time to head home. His mum wasn’t there, on the couch, looking out the bay window. The cigarette in her lips had an inch of ash attached to it—she watched him come up the walk but hadn’t seen him come in. It startles her when the door opens and the ash falls onto her wrist . He holds his breath and watches the ash redden her wrist for a second, and then nothing. She settles back into herself, avoiding his eyes. He just wants to hear the sirens. Sometimes she goes out , hair thin and limp and straight as pins, in a simple cotton dress that shows all her bones. He asks if she’s going out to eat , she says she’s just going out . Tonight she is staying in, staying on the couch, staring into the front yard. Maybe she’s watching his dad mow the lawn or pull weeds or tend the hedges; he was always meticulous about all things green. At seven o’clock he coaxes the sandwich down his throat; it’s warm and melty and stale from being in his backpack, but he makes it a game—each swallow gets him to a new bonus level as he sits silently at the kitchen table. The peanut butter is thick and sticks in his throat and he focuses on making his throat work; he wants to win. When he’s done he brings the dish to the sink and scrubs it clean even though there was barely a crumb on it , just to hear the water. He dries it with a clean rag and puts it back in the cabinet . His mum hasn’t moved and her cigarette is out against her lips. He retreats to his room to read about a man named Tyler Durden and hums to keep from falling headlong into the silence of the house. He stirs at four a.m. and wanders to the living room to see if his mum has gone to bed yet . The moonlight is starting to lose its luster through the bay window and falls on an empty couch covered in ash. He grabs a dust brush and the kitchen trashcan and sweeps the ashes off the fabric and into the bin. With a damp rag he brushes off the remaining soot but the smell still chokes him. He looks out the window and thinks how clean the world must be on the other side of the glass. He checks her room, the bathrooms, the closets, the back deck, but she’s not home. He wonders when she went out as he listens for crickets. He can’t hear anything at all. The darkness down the unlit hallway pulses with complete silence, so quiet he is sure a pin dropping on tile would shatter the entire fabric of the world. He realizes

he is ready to shatter. Making for one of the several junk drawers in the kitchen, he finds a box of matches and strikes three to light them. He walks them to the couch, stained and smelling of cigarettes, and drops them in the fabric. It’s a slow burn but it lights. He watches the orange glow and waits for any sound. The flames start to spread to the back cushions and to the window drapes. The rug is catching and he delights at faint crackling. He feels his heart beating and waits for the jolt to surge blood through his veins again, hard and fast and quick and so loud. He just wants to hear the sirens.

arbeit macht frei Dee Travis

3331

Someday soon, when all of this is over, you’ll have to answer for the things that you’ve done... That was what the old man had said to him. His skin had been loose and cut deep with age, his back hunched, his whole appearance abject and pathetic. But his voice… his voice had been anchored and sure. You’ll have to answer for the things that you’ve done. Erich had seen thousands of old men pass by. Most kept their heads down, devoid of any hope or fire, but this one had met his eyes and given voice to his own fear. The words had tracked him through the years and across an ocean, forever threatening to present a bill he could not possibly pay. His daughter’s voice brought him back to Córdoba, where he stood overlooking the River Primero. Erich smiled as Hannelore leapt into his arms, then tightened his lips when she asked what was bothering him. She could see so much. “Nothing,” he told her. “I was just thinking of home.” Her eyes brightened. “Of Berlin?” He nodded. “And Treblinka.” She looked up, eyes narrowed. “Where’s that?” He hesitated. “Poland. Near the eastern border.” “You and Mommy are going to take me to Berlin, right?” Another hesitation. “I’m not sure, sweetheart .” “Hannelore.” Her mother’s voice came from a few feet away. “Go on inside and wash for supper.” Erich watched his daughter run inside as Elfriede stepped towards him. God, she was beautiful. When the South American sun gilded her hair, she looked almost ethereal. “You’re not sure about Berlin?” said Elfriede. “What kind of answer is that to give your daughter?” “Are you sure?” he said. “We’re not welcome there. At least here, we have a home and a family. We have a future.” “We don’t belong in Argentina,” she said. “Hannelore doesn’t even remember Berlin, Erich! She was two years old when we left . Two!”

“And what would you have me do?” He felt spent in his soul. “I will not be blamed for the state of the world. I did what I had to do to keep us safe, which meant leaving Europe. I don’t have control over all the forces of man.” Elfriede was even prettier in her anger, if that was possible. “We left everything in the name of safety, but our roots are there still, and when the Earth cools, I intend to return. I can’t stay in this part of the world. I don’t even know who I am in Córdoba!” “Well, I don’t even know what it means to be German!” He surprised himself with that bit of honesty. “Not anymore.” Her face was pure frost . “Just a few years ago, that shameful confession might have had you killed.” “Yes, but those who would have pulled the trigger were killed first , and I wasn’t .” He looked out as day ’s end danced on the river, flashing green and gold. “Our country was created in 1871, redefined in 1919, raised from the ashes in ‘33 and now… now it’s two countries: one Soviet , one Allied neither German. It’s a farce, Elfriede, not a home.” She reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek. “It’s temporary,” she said. “We’ll return there soon enough.” He held his doubts and nodded. His memories were now little more than dreams, holding no weight in the real world. The splendor of his life was a crumbling ruin... how could the thousand-year empire have only lasted for twelve? “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more hopeful with Hannelore. I was thinking of him again…” “Oh, Jesus!” In an instant , Elfriede’s hands and volume went up together. “Not that old man again!” “I’m sorry, but it troubles me still. The thought of having to answer for it all…” “He had to answer,” she said, “not you. Millions of our people died in a war that was his people’s fault , so if you are to stand somber on foreign soil and ruminate on a loss, think of our people whose blood was spilt . Not some old Jew.” Erich hadn’t known the man’s name (they were all the same, more or less) or even his number. He really was just another Jew, but who was Erich to him, he wondered? Just another soldier, another monster. Erich had never shared the details of Treblinka with Elfriede or anyone else. He alone carried the blood, the bullets, the smoke, the screams… As if knowing his thoughts, his wife stepped before him and held his face in her hands. “I love you,” she said, wiping his bangs from his eyes, “and you are a good man.” He closed his eyes and released a long breath, not knowing who he was, wishing her words to be true. The door opened and Hannelore called out to them. She brought a smile to his face. Whether there was hope for him or not , at least there was her. Erich took his wife’s hand and walked ten meters to the door ten meters further from his memories, his pain, his joy, his world, his fear. Ten more meters. He would simply have to work harder at providing for his family, at carving out a place for himself, at being the man he wanted to be. A good man. That was right , he thought; he would have to work harder. And work would make him free.

3234

home, once

Rebecca Gianotti I honk out a wad of salty snot and wince. Damn. I’ve forgotten how much that stings. It’s been years since I was dumped, had my head thrown down into the sand and the water wash away any sense of up and down. Seems like I’ve also forgotten how not to get dumped—how to duck beneath the oncoming crest in the moment right before it morphs from majestic to threatening. I used to be so agile in the waves, knew how to read them without thinking. I’d swim and dive and float and roll around in the surf like a damn seal. Now, though, now I understand how easy it could be to drown. I shake the last of the saltwater from my ears and look up at the sand dune. My brother stands there with a camera pointed my way, waving. My failure is now captured for posterity, part of the collective memory of who I am here. I raise a hand towards him then turn back to face the water. A kid, maybe all of five or six years old, rides a wave in on a flimsy piece of foam. She washes up on the sand next to me and falls off onto my feet , giggling. She stops when she sees me looking at her, soberly picks up her board and returns to the surf, leaping over the smaller waves and using her board to push up and over the bigger ones like it’s the easiest thing in the world. I sit down heavily, right at the limit of the water’s reach, and dig my toes into the sand. The kid laughs again as her furious paddling catches another wave. I want to tell her, I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always this lame in the water. I want to tell her, I was like you once. But this is what happens when you sprout wings and fly away. You forget how to swim. I get up before the kid’s parents start to worry that I’m stalking their child and begin trudging back to my brother and the car park. Shit . That’s another thing you forget – how the sand worms its way inside your bathers and into all your little crevices so that you itch and squirm the whole car ride home, any cooling relief from the water gone the second you touch the hot seat .

The mango is perfect . Smooth, firm, a sunset gold-orangepink all over. I press it right up to my nose and breathe in deeply. It smells like summer holidays, fresh and full of possibilities. “I bet you miss this, huh.” My brother lifts one hand from the steering wheel to wave at the windscreen—blue sky above, blue water below, sunshine filling the space in between. “Yeah, I do.” I hold the mango in my lap and rest my arm on the outside of the windowsill, watching tiny golden hairs blow around in the hot wind. “It’s winter where you live now, right?” “Right .”

“I bet it’s freezing.” “Pretty much.” He shivers. “You couldn’t pay me enough to trade all this for snow and ice. Why would you ever want to leave?” I assume the question is rhetorical and let it pass. A stone spire cresting a hill rises in front of us and I remember afternoons spent defending elaborate forts, going home with dirty uniforms and pine needles in our hair. Nowhere else to be and nothing else to do; the small town virtue of empty space. I smile. “Hey, do you remember playing around in the old community center up there? How we made castles in the old foundations?” My brother frowns. “I dunno. You mean where the New World Galleria is?” “The what now?”

David Dyte

My brother grins. “Oh man, you haven’t seen it yet? Opened a couple of years ago, once everyone else caught on to how we’re booming here. They tore down the old buildings. Falling apart anyway. Kept the tall monument thing as a symbol. You’ll love it .” “That’s what’s on the hill now? A shopping mall?” “It’s got a Tiffany ’s and everything,” he continues. “Anything you could buy in some big fancy city, you can get right here now.” “Oh?” “Look, here—” My brother crawls the car past rows of glass and pink granite, a coal train’s worth of high end retail. We pause outside the unmistakable pale blue bunting. Two teenagers in four-inch heels head inside, swinging Chanel and Vuitton in their hands. My brother juts out his lower jaw, defensively, proudly, and challenges me. “You can’t call us backward now, can you?” Our relationship is gorge-like—old and deep, where once swift waters ran that now only trickle. Such history confers respect , even if I can no longer swim there. “No, I guess not ,” I say. “Come on,” my brother grins again, “let’s drop the food home and go get a drink. There’s this great new spot near downtown. Drinks are a bit pricey, but everything’s done up with vintage decor. But not cheap stuff – really sophisticated, you know? All authentic. And it’s a really cosmopolitan crowd, you get all types of people. All colors too. It’s just your style. You’ll love it .” “Oh. Good.” My brother starts singing radio backup to someone I’ve never heard of, some kid from the next town over. “There’s so much raw talent busting out all over the place here,” he says. The afternoon sun has done its work and I have to pull my arm inside, feeling it burn. That night I dream about the smell of heat . Hot sand, hot bitumen. A rare downpour evaporating from hot dirt and concrete. The smell singes my nostrils and burns my lungs, and it’s familiar. I ride the rising thermals, looping up ever higher until my wings are outlined in shadow on the clouds. The air is so clear and sharp that breathing hurts. I am alone, but I can see forever. And because I am alone, I have the sky to myself and am free to move as I please. When I grow tired I dive down, thinking I might take a quick cooling dip in the ocean below. The ocean is waving at me. No, hands are waving at me from the ocean. I fly closer—it is my family, old friends and acquaintances, beckoning me to join them. “Come in, the water’s so warm!” they call. “You’ll love it!” I am tempted, I admit , to fold up my wings and jump into their circle, bobbing in the waves. But I am afraid that their clutches would pull me under and I would drown.

[ micro fiction ] rubber

Melanie Faith The first time I saw a condom, you’d think would be in a health class demonstration or in a compromising position, perhaps an older guy ’s borrowed souped-up car. It was neither. Blown up with mouth-air and bouncing against white tile cafeteria floors, it appeared like an oddly buoyant , see-thru child’s balloon without a string. It bobbed beside the two gray trashcans that burped Tuesday sloppy joe scraps, ketchup clumps, and tasteless canned peas that scattered like buckshot , each can lodged between the window where two humorless workers in hair nets wielded spatulas and expected trays to hit a mark or else they ’d bark. The girl across from me had used one, carried a few in her purse the way I carried cherry Chapstik, highlighters, mechanical pencils and Quik Dry correction pens. “You know what that is, right?” her younger sister smirked; she passed me notes ripped from lined notebooks about the summer fling she’d had on her cross-country trip. “Sure,” I might have said, or “Of course,” or even “Yeah,” if an electric lightning bolt hadn’t shot static from ear to ear inside piercing the cavity that once had labeled itself knowledgeable while a smear of braying laughter torqued its way through the collected tables. Younger boys jabbed their fingers in the air and waggled their tongues, older girls rolled their eyes and rested their palms against boyfriends’ tight , jean-clad thighs for longer than necessary. It could have been an hour or three minutes later until one of two teacher monitors approached it and picked it up to cheers, yelling, “Alright , alright! There’s nothing left to see here!”

“My Braid,” human hair as inclusion in glass, 3.5” x 7.24” x 0.75”, 2014, soe yu nwe

“House, for my spirit,” hand-built ceramic, 8” x 8” x 13”, 2011, soe yu nwe

“line house,” ceramic, 35” x 25” x 20”, 2013, soe yu nwe

pillow

Melanie Faith While reading in bed around midnight she decides to place the unoccupied third pillow—sometimes a guest bed pillow—in the blank space between her right shoulder and the wall painted an ultra-pale blue shade the catalogue called Cake Stand Blue. The other two pillows in their cotton-flannel blend cases are stacked underneath her head with her dark hair cascading over the edges. Loose strands tickle her cheeks and neck from time to time as the fan, on medium, feathers her hair. There’s a sheet and four blankets, two of them knitted by family, just like she likes it . The third pillow ’s foam contours against her curves when she balances the novel in her right hand, turns while still reading, and leans gently into it . Her breath slows, calms into the need for sleep in this comfort , and she returns her glasses to their case with the coy winking eyes screen printed on the inside of the case. The novel closed around a bookmark and on the stand to her left , she reaches to switch off the bedside lamp. In the near-dark she marvels: this third pillow is as good as a living body tucked near hers. Almost . But in that almost is a chasm that discomforts her awake.

[ nonfiction ] re: “i feel it moving through me” Emma McPherson

Today I looked at my forearm and found a new scar. On the top, adjacent to a freckle, as smooth in my skin as any other inch, just quiet and shining white as if completely irrelevant . The more I stare at it , the less sure I am of where I earned it; nonchalantly, without a sound, it settled in as a part of me. Even when I am the least sure of my own reality, I can recite the existence of that tiny sliver of scar on my arm. It’s true. I kept journals when I was younger, but haven’t in years. I’m a creature of nostalgia—often I find it more bearable to plunge into the cold shock of the surface of the past and suffer in the ripping open of old wounds, because they ’re true enough. Despite the jilted perspective of a girl who is incapable of feeling worthwhile, what was written was at one point very real. There’s catharsis in it , living in the past; it’s punishing, but also helps paint a clearer image of where you come from when you just don’t know who you are anymore. Frequently I will read my old poetry book cover to cover, pour over old documents obsessively until every line is consumed, binge on my old diaries and consume how alone I felt before anyone knew I was borderline. When I had therapy once a week and an abusive boyfriend who perfectly understood what I suffered from better than I did and was able to manipulate it to his advantage. A few times a week, I imagine vividly what would happen if I ran into the man who tried to rape me. He loved me and he loathed me; despite holding him at arm’s length for years, despite telling him we would never happen, that kind of attention was what I wasn’t fit to turn away. It drew me in like light to the flies. Even when trying to seem nonchalant , avoidant , he was so aware of me, following every action, every word, biding his time impatiently. Whenever I tried to spare him from me, his rage was palpable—I was horrible, I was killing him, couldn’t I just let him pretend. I did him a great unkindness when I was drowning and let him resuscitate me. When I think of seeing him again someday, randomly out in the world in which we share many backgrounds, my fists clench and I wince despite myself. My narrow escape runs my blood cold; giving in and kissing him in the town park when I was lonely and insane makes me bloodless. Survivor’s guilt . I grope for something I’d realistically say to him if he were before me. Maybe that I’m sorry, that I was sick, that I still am—that we were always bad for each other and maybe it made sense for us to hurt each other. Then I remind myself that he meant me a great and terrible violence. Then I think if I hadn’t driven him to

that point , if I had given in, the passion he had for me would still exist . It would still be real—hateful and devastating—but true and undeniable. He would take me in his hands every day like something he wasn’t sure if he wanted to protect or destroy. He loved me like a riptide tearing a body from the sunlight . All you hear about depression is how devastating a disease it is and that it can get better. You can be cured with drugs, with therapy, with a support system. All you hear is advice on how to fix it , as if it’s an infection or benign tumor that can just be removed. Really, it’s oblivion. It’s very much malignant , everpresent , exceptionally quiet and permanent . And so very true. No one wants to tell you that depression is permanent . It’s appalling to say so. “This feeling doesn’t go away,” sings Liz Harris, quietly and gently as a truth you accept and live around. “I feel it moving through me.” For so many, living in the past or the future is extremely hazardous; it eats away at you because the human spirit is meant to survive, and only living in the present lends a hand to that instinct . But in some, their veins are shared by blood and underlying sadness; like a scientific truth about themselves, biding its time, unable to be seen but just as essential to them as the nervous system. The glands, the bones. You breathe and it breathes, you share your body with it , you feel it moving through you. My conflict lies in the clash of knowing this weight is concrete within me, inescapable and somehow essential, and acknowledging that my survival instinct has its own roots, but in something much more tempermental: People. The overwhelming and condemning love I feel for other people, and the havoc my need to spare them from any inkling of misery wreaks on my mind. The conflict a borderline faces is reality: Am I dissociating, am I perceiving that’s not there? Am I devaluing someone who means me no harm, am I idealizing someone who means me nothing but harm because harm has become equivalent to passion? Am I capable of healing when I dissociate abuse as it happens in order to avoid abandonment? Is it that not the ultimate tool of survival? I categorize my own sadness two ways: suffocating pressure and catatonia. If I could count the times I’ve woken up from a catatonic state with one song on repeat and something sharp in my hand, it would still be unimportant . It comes with the territory. The pressure is like a root system, entwined between each rib, ancient and permanent . It bides its time but it’s always being fed. Feeding. The catatonia is avoidable if I can escape, in some form, from my own mind. Often people can give this to me, more often they have no idea how. Other times I look back to something else that hurt and feel the distance of that reality and how real it still is nonetheless. For a borderline, knowing this distance is real becomes a way to ground what you’re feeling when you can’t be sure if you’re really being abandoned or if it’s all in your head. Liz Harris picks up a little louder, conviction in her voice, honesty that’s not able to be persuaded otherwise. This much she knows is true. “In dreams I’m moving through heavy water/ The love is enormous/ It’s lifting me up I’d rather be sleeping I’d rather fall into tidal waves/ and ride where the deepest currents go .”

Nostalgia pushes against me as hard as it carries me, something heavy I can move through like water but that just means it’s surrounding me, encompassing me. So much bigger than I am, I am moving through it—it has no need to consider me. I am a small matter in comparison. Moving through me despite outside stimuli—business as usual, something you know so it relieves you of needing to believe. The love is enormous, but I’d still rather be sleeping. Something so true, so permanent . Something I can grasp as real: I’d rather be sleeping.

swamp people

Chantal Walvoord

The swamps lie on either side of the major highways in south LA like a verdant curtain. These swamps are easy to see from a distance but hard for most people to visit . A few people take swamp tours. What they are seeing, though, is a path made smooth by tourism. When you’re traveling down a south Louisiana highway, sometime you see a shack that’s falling apart with a boat nearby. The shack, which is on stilts, has a rusted metal roof. Maybe there’s a little pier and boat . Those are the places where the swamp people, the Cajuns, live. I did have relatives who lived and made their living in the swamps. Several members of my family were traiteurs or so the story goes. Auguste Verret was one even if his official occupation is listed as “swamper” in the 1880 Census. The traiteurs were not doctors. The traiteurs worked with the plants that grew in Louisiana soil. They used the Native American remedies and devised some of their own. My relative planned on devising remedies from castor beans, a plant that had medicinal and poisonous properties. Auguste was not a typical traiteur who used plants that were native to America—sassafrass, elderberry, and the like. He wanted to make use of a tree that was native to East Africa and India. He had a tract of 200 acres in St . Mary ’s Parish before the Civil War. He had planned to heal the sick with castor beans and prayer. He would rely on this potent plant and on his faith, as do all of the traiteurs. The Cajuns always said physicians were too expensive and too far away. A far more likely story is that they had come to trust traiteurs more than physicians. Some people have remedies handed done to them like heirlooms. Regretfully, I have no book of remedies handed down to me. All I have is this story: A group of Cajuns were jealous of my relative Auguste Verret’s growing acclaim in the Bayou Teche settlements. Though he accepted no payments, he could accept gifts. His house was filled beautiful clocks, fiddles, tapestries. Every square space of land was filled with gardens that his wife, Azema, tended. Azema had given him four beautiful children and his farm was filled with healthy barnyard animals—four dark stallions and four red mares, 25 hens, eight pigs and a rooster. Almost every he knew wanted his property.

One of these envy-filled men, whom will call Jean, noticed that Auguste always veered around the far East side of the swamp island. “What’s the problem? Afraid of a few trees?” Jean would say to him. “Demons are in those trees,” Auguste would say, which only made the other Cajuns laugh. They knew, however, that Auguste was a well-loved and well-respected traiteur. Arthritic people sang his praises after he gave them his medicinal cures. Bedridden could suddenly walk. Consumptive people suddenly stopped coughing blood. Mothers sick with depression became well. Frail people who had broken bones would suddenly heal. One day Auguste grew tired of Jean’s taunts. “Just you watch,” he said. He took his little boat and edged it close to the island where the abundant trees started shaking. Long coils of rope started falling on his head. Snakes. Black snakes. Pitch black. Not like the canebrake rattlesnake that were native to the area. So many black snakes from the trees fell it looked as if a dark piece of the blackest night was descending upon him. None of the snakes hurt him. They rolled over and darted far away from him as if he was an anathema. Like opposite poles of a magnet , good and evil repel each other. “Like I said,” Auguste said. “Demons are in these trees.” As they all watching, Auguste took his fiddle out that he almost always had in his boat . Auguste prayed and fiddled which was almost one and the same to him. He may have said something about “la jalousie.” Whatever he said, the snakes stopped wriggling. They became languid before everyone’s eyes. After a moment , they were indistinct from the grey Cedar and Tupelo roots that crisscross the island.

My Balún Canán Mariana Zepeda

When my grandfather moved away from Chiapas, the state where he grew up in southern Mexico, he was in his twenties and seeking opportunities that only Mexico City could offer. However, he never truly left Chiapas behind. An animated storyteller, my grandfather would gather his children around the living room of their small apartment in the Colonia del Valle neighborhood, where he’d bring to life story after story about his childhood. Like my father, I also grew up listening to stories about Chiapas: stories about coffee plantations, rural landscapes, and intrusive extended families. These details seemed immeasurably distant from my own reality. Due to my father’s job at Procter & Gamble, I spent the first decade of my life living in Caracas, Venezuela. During those years, my father took to telling me and my brother stories about home, in an attempt to mitigate the distance between Venezuela and Mexico. He began by retelling my grandfather’s stories but prompted by our curiosity, eventually began to tell his own stories. Although age has made my dad well-versed in the art of contemplation, he’s never considered himself much of a storyteller. In fact , I don’t think he realizes just how many stories he tells. And yet , one well-aimed question,

“Shelter: Hands,” porcelain nipple as inclusion in glass, 2.25” x 2.25” x 0.8”, 2014, soe yu nwe with Nayoung Jeong

and this quiet man will ramble on for hours on end. I myself always reveled in fiction. Perched comfortably atop a windowsill in our Caracas home, I would read for hours, my arm lightly brushing the mosquito net every time I turned the page. But when my father told these stories, I set my books aside, engrossed in tales that felt like fiction but which I knew to be reality. What my father’s storytelling lacks in method, it makes up for in subject matter. His theme is, unsurprisingly, the past . Many of his stories take place in quiet Mexico City streets, before the city was enveloped in its now-infamous urbanity. But the stories that I would request over and over took place in Chiapas’s untamed territories, places that I had never visited. These stories drew their power from the way they blurred the lines between the real and invented. Inhabiting that perfect middle ground between reality and fiction, they spoke of a time that had long since passed, but a place that remained very much alive.

Many years after moving back to Mexico, and about a year after I had moved away to Boston for college, my father planned a family trip to Chiapas. After 20 years of listening to these stories, I yearned see these places for myself. I often forget that my father first visited Chiapas in the same capacity that I did. His father took the family there when my dad was about ten years old, excited to show them the place where he’d grown up. My grandfather booked a train from Mexico City to Chiapas—the family didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford to fly there. My father and his siblings stayed in a little compartment on the train, fascinated by the seats that , by night , transformed into beds. They were mesmerized by the views as the train left the city and the landscape became residential, then rural. The three-day trip extended beyond them, a blank slate of extraordinary possibilities. A visit to the dining cart . A story from my grandfather. My aunt Rita, I imagine, carried with herself a small stack of books. My father counted on little toys soldiers to pass the time. Mostly, they were entranced by the train itself, the speed with which it made its way through uncharted territories, the world that came alive within its walls. My grandparents stayed in another compartment , accompanied by my grandmother’s mother. Isaura Gorostiza was a very refined woman. She’d migrated from Spain with her husband when her children were little, and refused to relinquish her sense of herself as an upper-class European, even after half a lifetime in Mexico. Both Gorostiza women disliked Chiapas: gente bien, “nice people,” lived in the city, with running water, maids, and mattresses. My father remembers opening his eyes as they crossed Veracruz—the first city that Hernan Cortez founded in Mexico—and seeing the jungle for the first time. The train stopped there and three young weary travelers jostled for a spot in front of the window. The vegetation was wild; the tops of trees were tangled with one other, blocking the morning sun from lighting the austere train stop. But the sun managed to find its way down in small rays, illuminating wondrous sights here and there, colorful birds and jungle creatures that left the young travelers wide-eyed and speechless. In Chiapas, they would find another type of wilderness. They would arrive in a small town, Arriaga, at 4 a.m. From there, someone from the family would pick them up to take them to San Cristobal de Las Casas, then Ocosingo. By then, the siblings were sick of the train. The small room, whose size had remained unnoticed throughout most of the journey because of the sights through the window, now felt

cramped and humid. The train itself, which had seemed to snake its way through the landscape at a sharp speed, now seemed to clank its way through, slow and heavy. Even the dining car had lost its grandeur: same meals, same booths, same unhelpful waiter. My aunt Rita’s eyes hurt by then from reading in a moving vehicle. My dad was tired and impatient , his face shaped into a pout . Still shrouded in sleep, the travelers left the train wagon and entered the cold morning mist . My dad marveled at the light the stars catapulted from the sky—a sight unknown to a city boy. They soon arrived at the Hotel Santa Clara in San Cristobal, where my grandfather’s cousins lived. As they walked through the streets, my dad watched the locals, up early, walking to the central market , dressed in colorful outfits that identified them as chamulitas or t zeltales or tojolabales, among others. The smoothly paved streets of their Mexico City neighborhood couldn’t hold a candle to the messily cobbled streets. It was hard to even acknowledge the existence of another world of busy streets and crowded corners as they settled into the small-town quiet . My own trip to Chiapas was a little different . For one, it was direct . A 45-minute plane ride took us from Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas. But I think I was just as awestruck as the children. We flew over miles and miles of rural landscape; expansive ranches scattered here and there denoted the presence of man, which would otherwise have been all too easy to ignore. It wasn’t that I had never seen a similar landscape, but I had spent years picturing the one below me. And even from aboard the cold and creaky Aeromexico plane, the land seemed to come alive before my eyes. As we descended from the airplane and headed to baggage claim, the airport sights told me I was still in my Mexico, however hard that had been to believe from the air. Little stores sold expensive artisanal products, mostly textiles embroidered with colorful patterns that I knew well. More than one store specialized in Chiapan cheese, a treat with which I was all too familiar. My father’s treasured cheeses sat in the freezer for weeks after a trip to Chiapas: cotija, queso crema, and his favorite, queso de bola. We stood waiting for our suitcases to emerge from the trunk of the plane. A small boy pointed out two large German Shepherds loudly to his mother. Next to a soldier on the other side of a glass window, these dogs were haughtily smelling our suitcases for drugs. It’s getting harder and harder to forget that we live in a country at war against our Medusa monster enemy. But the drug war looms, and has left no corner of my country untouched. We emerged from the airport into the dry winds of an arid landscape. The drive from Tuxtla Gutierrez to San Cristobal, where we were staying, lasted about an hour. My aunt was amazed at the paved modernity of the highway. She told us that the first few times she’d visited Chiapas, it would take them almost twenty-four hours on horseback to get from the capital to San Cristobal. Later, the first highway was built but it still took three hours of driving through the mountains on sloppily paved narrow roads to make that same trip. The road sloped up and down gently as I sat back, half-listening to the dialogue between my father and aunt . In the midst of reminiscing, the siblings had lost themselves in an argument about specifics, about practical facts of names, times, and places that made absolutely no difference to their listener. The road descended gradually down the mountains. As we neared the highest point of the highway, the

hills became visible for miles on end. The mountainous terrain seemed varnished by the soil in a striking tone of red. The moving vehicle brought us closer to this city that I’d heard so much about , the site of the famous Hotel Santa Clara, owned by my great-aunt , where my father’s family usually stayed during in their visits to Chiapas. San Cristobal de Las Casas is a quaint colonial city. Once the capital of Chiapas, it is now considered the state’s cultural center, and attracts thousands of tourists every year. I’d heard from friends that the city was absolutely breathtaking: a melody of cobbled streets, small houses with wrought iron balconies, locally owned cafes, artisanal markets. My family arrived at a chain hotel that my mother had chosen. My dad had opted against trying to stay at the Santa Clara, fearing an awkward encounter with longlost relatives. This hotel had seemed like our best options; the advertisements my mom had found on the website boasted spacious rooms, high-end dining and most importantly, close proximity to the city center. The building had looked beautiful in the pictures, modeled after a rustic colonial hacienda typical of Chiapas. But as we approached, I could not mask my disappointment at the hotel’s surroundings. It sat on the dimly lit merging point of two streets, which led to the main highway on one side and to a lonely congregation of crudely constructed little buildings on the other. The hotel faced a Pemex gas station and an Oxxo convenience store. Only the headlights of the one or two cars that sped by every few minutes pierced the confining darkness. The bare and grimy street did not resemble the place that I had pictured, the Chiapas my father had narrated into my imagination. After we checked in, my father proposed that we head toward the center of San Cristobal for a late dinner and a walk. I took him up on the offer; the rest of my family retreated to their rooms to get some rest . The concierge assured us that a 15-minute walk would take us to the Calle Real de Guadalupe, the main commercial street in the center. As we set off, we could make out the lights of the city center in the distance, but the array of dilapidated businesses stood between us and downtown San Cristobal, barricading it from our view. We both itched to reach the center, but this part of town was clearly not made for walking. The narrow sidewalk appeared and disappeared arbitrarily. Potholes cropped up every few steps, forcing us to keep our eyes on our feet . The street lamps barely lit the neighborhood, which got darker and darker the further we walked. Urban planning is not precisely Mexico’s strongest point , particularly in small towns like this one. No visible logic or order underpins these towns as they expand slowly, swelling with migration. A wrong turn to the left can’t really be corrected by another two left turns; only people who know the place can make their way through with ease. After walking around for an hour in increasingly darker and less populated streets, my father and I gave up and decided to find our way back to the hotel, using the lights of the Pemex gas station as our guiding point . My dad’s arrival in San Cristobal was immediately followed by a trip to Ocosingo. Ocosingo does not boast the same colonial charms as San Cristobal; it is small, and only reachable by miles and miles of neglected rural roads. Ocosingo is, however, the place of my grandfather’s birth and was, at that time, the home of my great-grandmother, Josefa Zepeda. My dad’s family traveled there by way of a small commercial airplane. My dad observed, wide-eyed, as a woman mounted the plane with a cluster of chickens—the stewardess politely led her to the back of the plane.

The family landed in a grassy plain in Ocosingo. They surrendered their luggage to a group of family members that materialized in an overwhelming cluster in order to help them to the house. My dad was in awe of the house right away; it stood large, signs of age coating the surface as though recently painted on. Located a few streets away from the zocalo or central square, the house was one of a few leftover colonial residences that had withstood the tests of time and revolutionary strife. The house itself looked strong and timeless, held together by a brick skeleton, paint chipping off to reveal the dull orange core. The Chiapas family showed their city relatives to their bedroom. The floor was lined with pine branches, organized into neat little piles as makeshift beds. The children were fascinated, the smell of the pine infused the room, luring them into a world of smells that came from nature. My grandmother and great-grandmother took one look at the room, and it took but one cursory glance toward my grandfather to prompt him to shuffle through the house, and speak to relatives in hushed tones. He managed to procure mattresses for the two of them. Despite their mother’s sharp looks, the children refused to sleep elsewhere; the branches were soft and beautiful. Candles were placed in each corner of the room, near the beds so that they could easily be blown out . The house didn’t have a bathroom; its inhabitants used a small fosa septica, septic tank, in the back, and a little wooden table with a hole. This too was a source of conflict , but one my grandfather couldn’t remedy. The next day, the children were awoken by the sounds of vendedores ambulantes, street vendors, engrossed in a loud battle to offer the best prices for milk and cheese. My father and his siblings giggled as the sellers’ voices vibrated through the crisp morning air; they rang in an unrecognizable accent . It was actually a quest for cheese that took us to Ocosingo on our own trip so many years later. As my aunt Rita looked at all the recently erected miscellaneous stores and artisan shops that shrouded the town in hustle and bustle and traffic, she could not hide her disappointment . We sat in the car waiting for my father to claw his way through a selection of Ocosingo’s finest cheeses for his queso de bola. I asked my aunt where the house my great-grandmother’s house was located. “It was just a couple of blocks from the town center,” she told me. “But Ocosingo has changed so much, I really don’t know anymore. I think I’d have to walk around and ask.” I looked around the cramped and crowded streets. Somewhere, among tin roofs alternating in height , my own connection to this place lay, but not within my reach. The place of my father’s summers seemed buried between the tiny Ocosingo streets crowded with street vendors and carts; between the old garbage trucks and town square teeming with people; between the lines of colorful mats where the indigenous women presented row after row of the same artisanal products sold in all of Mexico’s touristic cities. Car horns and loud garbage trucks seemed alien to the setting, as though hailing from another world. I had counted on my aunt’s memory to help me dig, hurl aside the intrusive present to find the past . But her memory, consumed as it was by a range of emotions I couldn’t grasp, could not help find the house that I could picture so vividly. Somewhere near Ocosingo stood the Sierra Nevada coffee plantation, perhaps the most poignant site of my father’s stories. My grandfather grew up there after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which engulfed Chiapas because of the state’s landowner-

“skulltula,” Dane Kelly

dominated social structure. Historians generally portray the Mexican Revolution as a peasant’s revolution, one that shook off the shackles of Mexico’s colonial past , undermining existing hierarchical structures, spurring deep change. The narrative unfolds as follows: The Mexican Revolution shifted the country ’s power structure; the tight grasp of the elite class deposed by the sheer power—in anger, strength, and numbers—of the oppressed class. Today, competing narratives have risen to challenge this rhetoric, especially in light of how little has actually changed, but this is still the dominant popular understanding of the Revolution. However, this rhetoric did not tinge the stories that I was told; I acquired it only later, through school lessons in the history of my country. My childhood stories of the Mexican Revolution unfolded through a different lens. I heard stories of the cruelty of the rebellions, the violence, and the revolutionary bitterness and hatred that spurred the cruel assassinations of landowners, along with the brutal takeover of numerous families’ properties. My family was one of these families. One night , revolutionaries penetrated the family ’s lands, murdering my great-grandfather and his sons as they took over their residence. My grandfather was spared; I imagine that someone took pity on him since he was the youngest . But despite this stroke of luck, tragedy engulfed the family. My great-grandmother was left widowed and without the means to provide for her seven daughters and remaining son. The result was a family diaspora. The siblings were separated from their mother at very early ages, shuffled through the homes of different relatives throughout Chiapas. My grandfather was first sent to the home of Uncle Ramon, a teacher at a local indigenous school. From the way my dad described him, I always pictured Uncle Ramon as a Victorian tyrannical figure. After only a couple of years living with Uncle Ramon— which felt longer, I’m sure, to my grandfather—he was sent to the coffee plantation of another relative, beloved Uncle Pilo. The plantation was named Sierra Nevada, which roughly translates into snowy mountain range. Its main product was coffee, although it also produced sugar. My grandfather had learned to read and write, along with basic arithmetic, with Uncle Ramon, so when he arrived at the Sierra Nevada he was able to take on a role as administrator, even though he was so young. He quickly learned the mechanics of working with the land, grateful for the place that had played so large a role in his escape from Uncle Ramon’s clutches. As time passed, he settled into this lifestyle, dreaming only of a future that was an extension of this present . My dad studied chemical engineering in college. It comes as no surprise then that , in his visits to the Sierra Nevada, he was fascinated by the process of transforming sugar cane into a concentrated juice, and then into powder, sugar. The stories he tells of the Sierra Nevada play into my own love for coffee. Coffee beans look like little cherries, and their smell seizes the air and holds on, as ranch employees work to arrange the beans on a large courtyard under the sun. For hours, the coffee beans will sit under the sun’s rays, later to be collected and toasted on large comales, akin to industrial-size griddles. The first time my dad visited the Sierra Nevada, the coffee beans had been carefully spaced out in the courtyard when the ranch employees discerned something in the air: the threat of rain. My dad looked up; the sky was clear, and not a cloud in sight . Still, troops were rallied. Small sheds stood in each corner of the courtyard.

The children were handed little rakes and instructed to run as fast they could and help gather the beans before the rain began to fall; drowned crops were a pervading local fear. Quickly, the entire population of the Sierra Nevada swept the beans into the sheds in time to avoid the first drop of rain. The Sierra Nevada would remain out of reach for us. My family had long ago lost touch with Uncle Pilo but , more importantly, the plantation was located within Zapatista territories. In 1994, Chiapas, sometimes a blank spot on the Mexican map due to its distance from the federal center, made international headlines with the Zapatista Revolution. On January 1, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by President Salinas the previous year, came into effect . The treaty included reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which protected indigenous lands from sale or privatization—a barrier to investment , it was argued. NAFTA also threatened a flood of U.S. imports, which would shatter the revenue of local plantations and farms. News of Chiapas does not always reach the capital right away. However, when the Zapatistas announced that they would openly wage war on the Mexican government on the eve of the revolution, the entire country turned eyes to the events that were unfolding so rapidly. The government , prompted by the presence of international media, attempted to negotiate with the Zapatistas for a time, avoiding use of the army and hosting peace talks. However, Mexico’s rising economic crisis drew the attention of politicians and the public away from Chiapas and back to the federal center, where banks and businesses were in the throes of economic pandemonium. As the international media lost interest , the state was left to its own devices, and militant Zapatistas took over large strips of land near Ocosingo, creating a curious state within a state. Back in San Cristobal, we visited another important place from my stories. The Hotel Santa Clara sits in the main plaza, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, more often referred to as the zocalo, in the center of San Cristobal. On the morning of our last day in Chiapas, we woke up early and walked to the plaza. We sat in a café to have our last big Chiapan breakfast . Most passersby were tourists, like us, wearing thick sweaters and carrying shopping bags with souvenirs, mostly from the amber shops that litter the Calle Real de Guadalupe. Some were native Chiapans, up early to enjoy the Cathedral’s Sunday morning bells. My dad sat quietly in front of his coffee. My aunt drew our attention to the vendors who sat in the plaza, setting up small displays of souvenirs to sell to churchgoers, clothed in their traditional dress. A couple of women were chamulas, from the indigenous community San Juan Chamula, and wore their classic stiff bellshaped black wool skirt . In the corner stood the yellow Cathedral, surprisingly empty. My dad commented on the view, which resembled the one he and his siblings had known as children, before the square was crammed with businesses, and attracted hordes of people every day. We were looking at the same cobbled streets, the same flocks of pigeons. It even felt like it was the same women in the plaza, laying out their mats to sell souvenirs. For years, these women had carted their merchandise to the zocalo to sell to visitors and churchgoers. But it was decades later and things had changed, a look at one little girl’s pink plastic Barbie shoes disclosed the passing of time. After breakfast , we decided to visit to the Hotel Santa Clara before heading to airport . My aunt had been talking about visiting the hotel since we landed in Tuxtla,

but my dad, shying away from an encounter with the relatives he’d lost touch with, had not set time aside in our itinerary. My aunt knew that the hotel was located on one of the streets surrounding the zocalo, but couldn’t remember exactly which one. The zocalo had been slowly filling up with people and cars, obstructing our view of the space. As we walked around the square, my aunt would pause again and again, looking closely at every building. She wasn’t sure how much the hotel had changed, she told us. My dad shook his head. He had been there about a year ago on another visit to Chiapas, and assured her that the hotel remained the same. Finally, we located the large wooden sign that stated “Hotel Santa Clara,” hinged to the wall beneath a small wooden balcony. Standing in front of the hotel, the town center blurred into a haze of people and cars. But from the balcony, the view of the plaza must have been superior. In a time when hotel chains had likely been at each other’s necks for that premier location, the Hotel Santa Clara still stood, owned by a new generation of the same family. We walked inside. My dad headed straight to the front desk as the rest of us lingered in the entryway. The front desk employee looked uncomfortable as he listened to my father speak. He finally caught sight of another employee, told us to wait , and headed from behind the counter into a small room housing the hotel’s travel agency. My dad led us inside. The patio looked exactly as I had imagined it . In the center stood a grave stone fountain, decorated with a line of red flowers. The hotel rooms surrounded the central patio in a colonial-style claustro, a quadrangle. Each room had a big and heavy wooden door; the wood’s dark somber tones stood out against the hotel’s white-washed walls. Iron lanterns hung here and there, above little wooden statues that guarded the open hallways. Fading paintings of the Guadalupe Virgin and different Biblical scenes lined the walls. A lonely wicker chair sat in the middle of the hallway. The sunlight penetrated through the open ceiling, creating small patches of heat in an otherwise chilly morning. My dad motioned for us to follow him up a heavy wooden staircase to explore the second floor. As we headed in that direction, a young man intercepted us. He asked, confused, who we were. My dad smiled at him and shook his hand. “I believe my uncle Mario was your father. Is he around? How is he doing? I saw him about a year ago when I last visited. I would love to see him again, if he’s not busy.” The young man nodded, deep creases cradling his eyes. “My father died last week,” he told us. “That’s why I’m here. I have my own ranch upstate; I live there most of the year. But I came to help my sisters out . They ’re in charge of the hotel now.” My dad looked stunned. Uncle Mario was a key character in his stories. He was the husband of my grandfather’s cousin, Clarita, whose mother, Clara, had founded this hotel. My dad and Mario had become close friends over the years, with each visit that my dad made to Chiapas. During one visit , my dad and a group of his friends had rented a car. One evening, their car swerved dangerously on a highway curve. They crashed into a railing—nicknamed fantasmas, or ghosts, in Chiapas— which kept them from sliding down a cliff. Shaken by the accident , my dad and his friends returned to the Hotel Santa Clara to get some rest . Late at night , a stranger thundered into the hotel. In a booming voice, he asked which room my dad was staying in. He was a federal policeman, he explained

haughtily, and he needed to talk to my dad because, in the crash, he’d ruined the railing, and damaging national property constituted a federal crime. My dad lay trembling in bed, listening to the policeman’s thick Chiapan accent . In a flash, Mario Pedrero descended from his room, impeccably dressed, and made his way to the front desk. He greeted the federal policeman, and led him to the hotel restaurant , giving a few rapid orders to the front desk employee. An hour and a few glasses of whisky later, Mario Pedrero and the policeman had set the foundation for a beautiful friendship. My dad awoke the next day to a problem solved. The story brought a smile to my face as I set it in context . The hotel was larger than I had imagined, and I wondered how easily voices carried through its hallways. My family expressed our condolences at Uncle Mario’s passing. The conversation went quiet , and young Mario could not start it up again. He told us that he’d be right back; he was going to go get his sisters. Our conversation was somber, weary. My dad offered a tale or two of the Mario Pedrero legend. They all smiled gently, clearly having heard it all in the past few days. My brother and I looked, but didn’t talk. Our relatives weren’t from our generation, but held the same place as us in the family. Their accents were different . The way they dressed was different . Although they were kind, a subtle barrier was set , and without Mario Pedrero’s help, my dad could not easily bridge our generational gap. I could not imagine how my dad experienced this encounter. A new—and fragmented—generation slowly eclipsing his own. As the conversation came to a halt , we promised a family reunion. We’d get all the children together. Maybe at the Hotel Santa Clara. And then, we parted, knowing that this reunion would never happen, and yet clinging to the comfort that having spoken about it offered. My family did not linger any longer in the Hotel Santa Clara’s hallways. It would have been acutely awkward to walk back in, a group of strangers exploring the site of a now-distant connection. The hallways did not belong to my dad as they used to, and perhaps had never belonged to us.

ea st c oast ink | issue 006 | r oot s