Fourth River, Issue 5

$10.00

Poetry

William Kupinse

Audrey Abbott Iacone

Cynthia Belmont

Miriam Levine

Bob Alexander

David Blair

Ada Limón

Sally Alexander

Elizabeth Bodien

Joan Mazza

Di Brandt

Jo McDougall

Fiction

Mary M. Brown

Ander Monson

Daryl Farmer

Daniela Buccilli

Julie L. Moore

Laura Hogan

W. E. Butts

Joyce Odam

Laurie Koozer

Rick Campbell

Nancy Pagh

Shirley Sullivan

Naomi Cohn

Karen Porter

Todd A. Whaley

Jim Daniels

Todd Possehl

Andrew Wingfield

Todd Davis

Jonathan B. Rice

James Deahl

Fernand Roqueplan

Interview

Brent Fisk

Mike Schneider

Bob Alexander

Stephen Frech

Matthew J. Spireng

Sally Alexander

Leonard Gontarek

Richard St. John

Ander Monson

Sandra L. Graff

Mary Swander

Emily Gropp

Philip Terman

Nonfiction

T. Mozelle Harris

Jeffrey Thomson

Susan Jo Burwen

Elizabeth Hoover

Jim Tolan

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Richard Jackson

Isaiah Vianese

Jennifer L. Johnson

Emily Johnston

Julie Marie Wade

K. T. Landon

Miriam Jones

Michael Walsh

Robert McGowan

Janet R. Kirchheimer

Andrea L. Watson

Laura Esther Wolfson

John P. Kristofco

Laurelyn Whitt

The Fourth River

Children’s/Young Adult

A publication of the Chatham University MFA in Creative Writing Program

5

Autumn 2008

A publication of the Chatham University MFA in Creative Writing Program

Issue 5

Autumn 2008

Executive Editor

Sheryl St. Germain Editor-in-Chief

Christy Diulus Senior Editors

Heather McNaugher Aubrey Hirsch Kathy Ayres Managing Editors

Jolynn Baldwin Laura Vrcek Associate Editors

Nathaniel Fuller, Yvette Mingo, Amy Sargent, Catherine Stevens-Davis, Adam Sukhia, Joshua Manuel Assistant Editors

Liz Ashe, Michelle Burton Brown, Becky Clever, Adam Factor, Shelley Gordon, Heather Gustine, Jen Hemphill, Kate Homer, Jason Jordan, Sara Ries, Kayci Russell, Marissa Schwalm, Meghan Tutolo, Carolyne Whelan Cover Art: Barbara Roux Cover Design: Krista Terpack Design: Leslie Karon-Oswalt

The Fourth River (ISSN 1559-310X) is a production of the MFA in Creative Writing at Chatham University. We welcome submissions of poetry, fiction, young adult fiction, and nonfiction that explore the relationship between humans and their environments—writings that are richly situated at the confluence of place, space, and identity, or that reflect upon landscape as culture, and culture as landscape.

Subscriptions: The Fourth River is published annually in the autumn.

Rates: $10 (single issue), $16 (2 years), $22 (3 years).

Submissions: Please address all correspondence, business or editorial, to The Fourth River, Chatham University, Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15232.

Further guidelines at http://fourthriver.chatham.edu Reading period August 1st –February 15th. We do not accept email submissions.

Copyright© 2008 by The Fourth River. All rights reserved.

Reproduction, whether in whole or part, without permission is strictly prohibited.

Printed in the U.S.A. by Morris Publishing, Kearney, Nebraska.

Table of Contents Emily Johnston Dusks in Fairbanks—March .................................................................................. 13

Leonard Gontarek Stones (drawing) ...................................................................................................... 15 Ascension II...............................................................................................................16 Silver 3 .......................................................................................................................17

Di Brandt Gracias ......................................................................................................................18 Poets in New York .................................................................................................... 20

Julie L. Moore Reasons to Stay ........................................................................................................ 22 Something to Amaze ............................................................................................... 23

Daryl Farmer On the Old Denali Road ......................................................................................... 24

Miriam Levine Winter Fire ............................................................................................................... 38

Jeffrey Thomson Landscape with Pigeons and the Tree of Heaven .................................................. 39

Fernand Roqueplan Shoalwater Ridge ..................................................................................................... 40

Michael Walsh Shore ......................................................................................................................... 41 Inheritance .............................................................................................................. 42

Richard Jackson Wait for the Tone, Then Leave Your Message ....................................................... 43 Thirty Sentences for You ......................................................................................... 44

William Kupinse Osier ......................................................................................................................... 45

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Jim Daniels Landfill America...................................................................................................... 47 Northern Lights ....................................................................................................... 49 Watching Another Drug Bust ..................................................................................51 Defeat in the City Game.......................................................................................... 53

Laura Hogan Burning on the 405 .................................................................................................. 55

Jennifer L. Johnson Burning Red Cedar .................................................................................................. 56

Robert McGowan Fences ....................................................................................................................... 64

Todd A. Whaley Flutter ....................................................................................................................... 67

Elizabeth Hoover Trivia .........................................................................................................................74 Mint .......................................................................................................................... 76

Richard St. John A Blessing in Baltimore ........................................................................................... 78

Naomi Cohn Jews in Space ............................................................................................................ 83 The River Eff ra ......................................................................................................... 84

Daniela Buccilli The Gentle Giraffe Talks to Her Father.................................................................. 86

Jim Tolan Breath Robins........................................................................................................... 88 Half a Man Loves a Woman in Two ...................................................................... 89 Stray ......................................................................................................................... 90

Todd Possehl Partitions...................................................................................................................91

Philip Terman Under the Flyway .................................................................................................... 92 Speaking to the Woman with My Brother’s Heart ................................................ 94

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Jo McDougall Leaving the Summer Rental Near Bar Harbor, Maine ......................................... 96 A Fair Day ................................................................................................................ 97

Elizabeth Bodien The Harvesters ......................................................................................................... 98 Evelyn Snake Woman.............................................................................................. 99

Laurie Koozer Hillcrest Valley Parade.......................................................................................... 100

Emily Gropp These First Days ......................................................................................................115 Horse, Black Pearls .................................................................................................116 Geography Lesson ...................................................................................................118

David Blair Gouache Easter ...................................................................................................... 120 Highway ..................................................................................................................121 Rustbelt................................................................................................................... 123

John P. Kristofco Thirteen Mountain Souls ...................................................................................... 124

Jonathan B. Rice Cavatina after the Rainless Year .......................................................................... 125

T. Mozelle Harris The Burden of Home.............................................................................................. 126

Ada Lim贸n Precious Territory .................................................................................................. 128 The New World of Beauty ..................................................................................... 130

Bonnie Jo Campbell Garlic Mustard Diaries ..........................................................................................132

Susan Jo Burwen Another Side of Paradise........................................................................................142

Interview with Ander Monson Jessica Shelenberger ............................................................................................... 144

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Ander Monson The Usual Kind of Coma ........................................................................................152 Short Sermon On/For the Serious Number ......................................................... 154 Dear Boar ............................................................................................................... 156

Shirley Sullivan Black Smudge ..........................................................................................................159

Julie Marie Wade Blake ........................................................................................................................169 Whidbey ..................................................................................................................170

Isaiah Vianese We Should Dream ..................................................................................................171

Andrea L. Watson Inventing the Land .................................................................................................172

Laurelyn Whitt Man With Light in His Fingers..............................................................................173

Todd Davis Questions for the Artist ..........................................................................................175

Cynthia Belmont Viewing the Hessian Treasures..............................................................................176 Yes, You, October ................................................................................................... 177

Mike Schneider How Well I Go with Dirt ........................................................................................178 Crows .......................................................................................................................179

Joan Mazza After Two Days ...................................................................................................... 180

Joyce Odam Gray Landscape ......................................................................................................181

Laura Esther Wolfson Climbing Montmarte .............................................................................................182

Nancy Pagh To the Woman Who Stole My Visa Card .............................................................189

Mary Swander Dead Man’s Float ...................................................................................................191

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Sandra L. Graff A Poet Reads Her Work ........................................................................................ 200

Audrey Abbott Iacone Excerpt from Burnt ............................................................................................... 201

Sally Hobart Alexander and Robert Alexander What Can Laura Do? exerpt from She Touched the World ............................... 208

Interview with Sally Hobart Alexander and Robert Alexander Yvette Sheron Mingo and Cate Stevens-Davis .................................................... 211

Mary M. Brown Finding Bethel .........................................................................................................218

W. E. Butts Thrush and Squirrel ...............................................................................................219

Janet R. Kirchheimer Taking Flight .......................................................................................................... 220

Miriam Jones Dandelions and Puppets ....................................................................................... 221 Degenerate ............................................................................................................. 222

K. T. Landon Catch and Release ................................................................................................. 223

James Deahl Giving Thanks ........................................................................................................ 227 Kaufmann’s Dining Rooom .................................................................................. 228

Stephen Frech The Space a Fall Opens.......................................................................................... 230 Of This Death, An Unknown Number ..................................................................231 Enter the Minotaur................................................................................................ 236

Andrew Wingfield Wonders of the World ........................................................................................... 237

Matthew J. Spireng This One Goose ...................................................................................................... 264 Bison, Yellowstone ................................................................................................. 265

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Brent Fisk Natural Selection ................................................................................................... 266 Dry Spell, July 1931................................................................................................ 267

Rick Campbell Verbs for Armadillos ............................................................................................. 268 Philosophy Made Simple ....................................................................................... 271 Sitting in the Emergency Exit Row ....................................................................... 272 A Theory of Humours .............................................................................................274

Karen Porter Something Old in the Neighborhood.....................................................................276

Book Reviews ....................................................................................................... 277 About the Authors ...............................................................................................281

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From the Editor Pittsburgh is a city of hills and rivers. It is a city contained and constrained by nature—evident in the bridges, tunnels, embankments, stairs, retaining walls, overpasses and underpasses throughout the city. The constant struggle between humans and their landscapes is apparent in the actual infrastructure. I feel it in the back of my calf every time I travel up the stairs that lead from Fifth Avenue to Chatham’s campus. I remember it when I see a car bobbing in the flooded Mon Wharf on the evening news.

But this narrative—man versus nature, the old man against the sea—is only one of many truths about our interaction with our environment.

We struggle with nature, but we are also of it. Most people happening upon a bird’s nest cast down from a tree during a storm would marvel at its beauty and fragility. Most wouldn’t hesitate to name it part of nature, and a city is, in essence, a bird’s nest writ large. Our environments are constructed, but no less valid as a site for an environmental narrative because of that. In fact, divorcing our lived experiences from our ideas of environment is a mistake we can’t afford to keep making. Nature out there in the wild certainly deserves protection, but so does the nature in our cities, as well as the people in them.

As much as we struggle with nature, we also exploit it and enjoy its bounty. The two can be difficult to tell apart. Farming is an area where this is most obvious, and it is not just a rural problem. We need farms to feed our cities, so no one can sit in their third floor walk-up and say “not my problem.” Current big agriculture is not sustainable, safe for the environment, or safe for us. Pittsburgh has seen the issue of exploitation played out visibly in its three rivers—the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio. The rivers have their own history of pollution and recovery, which parallels the reinvention of Pittsburgh from the pollution-ridden steel town of memory to most livable city. This is another truth about our interaction with the environment.

Not every use of nature is exploitive, though. Our journal is named for the underground fourth river that passes beneath the city. Technically it is an aquifer, properly named the Wisconsin Glacial Flow, but it has entered the city’s imagination as another river. This fourth river has been harnessed as a symbol of the city; water from it feeds the fountain at the Point in downtown Pittsburgh. With jets of water up to 200 feet high and lit white and gold at night, it is absolutely beautiful. It also serves as an apt metaphor— working with nature we are able to bring beauty up from the depths.

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When choosing the poems, essays, and stories for this issue, we looked for pieces that explored all these truths about human interaction with the environment. We’ve collected a wide range of voices that create their own narrative.

Daryl Farmer’s fiction story “On the Old Denali Road,” set in the wilds of Alaska, follows the classic arc of man versus nature. It explores this struggle in a modern setting, where the smallest of decisions can mean life or death.

The poem “This One Goose,” by Matthew Spireng, blurs the lines between human and animal, eliciting an all too human response to the loss of a loved one, even though the loved one in this case is another goose. In “Another Side of Paradise,” Susan Jo Burwen reminds us viscerally that we are part of nature. We are never more aware of that fact than when attending to the most basic of functions. There is no way to romanticize this, though as the name suggests, it is set against some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. K.T. Landon’s “Catch and Release” deals with nature in the most intimate of environments—our homes. Robert McGowan’s essay “Fences” lyrically laments fences built deep in the woods to protect nothing from no one. All these pieces, along with the many others in the journal, force us to examine and re-examine our place in this world in an effort to define nature in a way that has room for us in it.

Christy Diulus

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Emily Johnston Poetry Dusk in Fairbanks—March

Between my fingers, the sky is crushed open— a bud of lavender brushed between split birch branches, their thinning gray knots, then down into triangles forming between them. Last September, I crushed her open with fingers now brushing triangles onto the page. I said she was keeping things between herself and me—not each of us, both refusing to reach back into our first thoughts of warning. I am spreading crushed colors now, and if I am the fingers then I am back in our first thoughts, shaping them in front of myself so I see our life for what it was— crushing the spread of color, each of us trying to be the fingers writing the story, waiting to be dipped into—spending most of our days in between colors, writing stories—calling them love.

I am holding crushed lavender as sun makes its way, yellowing, into my room. Waiting to be dipped into, I float between two colors and blow out the lamp, birches coming into light

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reflecting crushed herb in my palm. I want no more lavender—my skull bowing toward white bark approaching moonlight. Birches replace anything made from human hands. Each of us has this canvas, this bruised enough bowing toward bark crushed in light, then toward triangles forming between birches drawn by our hands. This is in our room, lifting into the sky between each finger.

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Leonard Gontarek Poetry Stones (drawing)

A woman washes her feet in clear water. A rippling moon blurs the stones.

These are feet I have held, stones I have kissed.

A helicopter rustles the trees. Flowers, boulders, inchoate forms the flickering light has made.

To hell with these poems that reveal the self. Hell, carpeted with violets.

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Leonard Gontarek Poetry Ascension II

The stars start as lights at the end of the pier over the ocean where people are dancing.

The refineries to the west stink of cabbage and mercury. See why the workers’ wives won’t kiss them. The little boy’s ball rolls through the fence of the graveyard. He leaves it. Hmm. The elevated jerks by the light and darkness in a room. A man moistens his finger, more than customary or acceptable, and searches for the definition of fireweed and kung po. We are lost children. The distant fires are raspberries in the night drilled by car lights.

Trees, summer, smother us.

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Julie L. Moore Poetry Something to Amaze

There is one advantage— just one—in not knowing everything, in walking through fields time and time again, still finding something to amaze— like these three birches huddling together, feet wedged in ice, snow sifting through their arms.

And the shiver in those arms.

Their silent torsos thick with acquiescence.

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Daryl Farmer Fiction On the Old Denali Road

To not get yourself in the situation in the first place: that was the key to winter survival in Alaska.

Yet, there he was. Walking into the wind, the snow stinging his unprotected face. On his head he wore a thin blue ski cap. His black Levi sheep skin jacket was not waterproof. The bunny boots he wore were warm to eighty below, but heavy, and he felt their weight in his thighs with each step through the rapidly accumulating snow. He had decided to leave his snowshoes back at the site of the accident, thought they wouldn’t be needed on the road, and would be burdensome to carry. He wished he had them now, though, in the ever-deepening snow.

Decisions made in a storm, he thought: the difference between life and death.

It was late afternoon, and already the sun, wherever it lay hidden behind the gray darkening clouds, was going down. He walked in the tire tracks that he himself had made, less than an hour before. He had, when he left two days before, decided to take the old Jeep, rather than either of their two newer cars: the Ford Ranger which he usually drove, or the Pathfinder which he left for his wife. He liked driving the Wagoneer, felt like a true Alaskan vehicle, had bought it on a lark from old Mr. Bagsby, the man at the end of their block. But the Wagoneer was lying on its side now, off the road.

“Son-bitchin moose,” he grumbled. He took a deep breath. Stay calm, he thought. Be smart, now.

He had been on his slow way home, from Fairbanks to Anchorage. A winter road trip, three days away from Nancy and their two children with an overnight stop in Talkeetna. He was a college professor, had been in the Anchorage University education department for five years. In Fairbanks was a student teacher he supervised, and an inter-campus departmental meeting to attend. All of which took him less than half a day, leaving almost two whole days doing what he most loved: Alaska wilderness photography.

He had been a skilled hobbyist since even before his professor days, had even tried his hand for awhile at being a professional, though he’d failed

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miserably. He could never quite make himself charge enough, and his equipment costs were always higher than his profits, had started chipping away at their credit cards. So he gave it up as a career, and maintained it only as a hobby. He was good at the photography part, though. His work was starting to be known. He had prints hanging in galleries and cafes, both in Anchorage and on the Kenai. He had even done slide presentations of his work at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. It was his way back into the wild, photography. It took him to the edge, alleviated his fears. Like the time at the Grand Canyon. He and Nancy had been married just a year. They’d arrived to the canyon after dark the night before, and set up camp in the nearby National Forest. The next morning they rose early, before sunrise, and drove to a pull-out near the canyon edge.

There was no railing there, just one small sign of caution. He had set up his tripod, waited for the sun to rise. As the colors changed, he had inched nearer the edge. Nearer and nearer. Generally, he claimed to be afraid of heights, but he was focused on the world through his lens. He edged nearer.

“Be careful,” she had said, and he noticed a tightening of breath in her voice. He looked down, and realized that his tripod was setting precariously on the canyon’s edge, four thousand feet of drop just inches away. He had looked down and felt a tension, a queasiness in his gut. But it wasn’t fear that he would fall, he realized then. It wasn’t fear that he would jump, exactly, because he wasn’t suicidal, but he realized that the tension was caused by restraint. Death, he thought. Always there at the edge of things. A part of him wanted to know how it would feel to fall through that air. He looked back at her. She was watching him closely.

“It’s why horses need reins,” she’d said.

He’d had dreams since then, had probably had them before, of falling, of floating through endless space at high velocities. As a rule he was not a morning person, but he woke from those dreams alert, charged.

It had come from nowhere, that moose, came bounding on the gravel road in front of him, and he driving faster than he should have been, hit his brakes, felt the fishtail, spun to the opposite lane, and trying to avoid a boulder, overcompensated, spinning a full 180 degrees to the other edge of the road. As if in slow motion he felt the shifting of gravity. The Wagoneer veered to the edge of the road. He could feel it sliding, tilting. He felt the drop, the vehicle around him slamming onto its side. Then the silence of the winter afternoon as he reoriented. The sky was to his left, the southern mountains above him. Calm at first, and then the adrenaline came in a rush, and he felt his body start to shake. The characteristics of shock, he thought, but he couldn’t remember. Pain shot through his left forearm as he tried to push away from his door and he hollered, a noise that came from the back of his throat, an animal noise that he scarcely recognized being of his own

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making. The arm was broken, he understood that then, and he pulled it into his body, grimacing, and rolled onto his shoulder.

His head above his left eye felt wet, and as soon as he touched it with his right hand he knew by the warmth it was blood. The car was still running.

The tape he’d been listening to had ended shortly before he saw the moose, but it was on continuous play. He was startled, then, by the burst of music.

Verdi’s Rigoletto. He listened to the music briefly, before reaching up and turning the ignition off. He could smell gasoline.

He had to get out. No bad decisions, he thought. He had to be smart here. There were three ways. He could kick out the windshield, but it would be difficult to climb out without cutting himself on the glass, especially with only one good arm. He could stand up and try to climb out the passenger side. The door was stuck, had been since he bought it. Would never open from the inside. But he could roll down the window. Still, he would have to pull himself out with only his right arm. A one-armed bar dip, and he at two hundred thirty pounds. Lardass, he thought. Dumbshit. All the ways to die in Alaska in the winter. Avalanches, snow-machining accidents, hypothermia, plane wrecks, drowning. Driving your car into a ditch.

And there would be no sympathy for such stupidity. “What the hell was he doing driving on that road in those conditions anyway?” He could hear them, now, the rescue crew, sitting around their fires at night. Sick and damn tired of finding people dead. Smart, he thought. Be smart.

One year, the year after they’d moved here, a family of four had driven down this very road, when their car died. They’d tried to walk out. The night temperature had dropped to forty below. He’d often thought of them, walking in the cold night, trying to keep the children warm, trying to survive themselves. The family had all been found separately, two days later, by a search and rescue team, each frozen to death, the father just forty yards from an uninhabited cabin.

He looked at his watch. Six-thirty. Nancy wouldn’t be expecting a call until sometime after eight, after she’d put Abigail to bed, would be angry if he hadn’t called by ten. Would not grow concerned until midnight. Had he left her the number of the hotel in Talkeetna? He couldn’t remember. He thought of her and the kids, warm in the small house they had finally been able to afford. They had moved to Alaska in the toppered Ranger, Donnie just four years-old and Nancy three months pregnant with Abigail, their life’s belongings—what they hadn’t sold—in the small U-haul. They had slept in the back of the pick-up, the three of them, for six straight nights as they slowly made their way up the Alcan highway. It was late July, then, the daylight hours stretching to midnight, and he had felt he could drive forever. Donnie had been mostly bored by the long road hours, but perked up greatly at the wildlife they had seen on the way—the many caribou,

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the moose, and the lone grizzly bear cub playing on the highway in front of them.

The job at the university was everything he’d hoped it would be, and Alaska even better than he’d dreamed. After eight years of teaching junior high, a job he never felt comfortable with, and five years of grad school, at last he felt himself settling into a life of contentment. He was taking care of Nancy and the kids, rather than Nancy supporting him as she had done through grad school, and the university life suited him fine. The bills—student loans, credit cards—were starting to diminish. For Christmas, Nancy had bought him a used Hasselbach 6x7 camera that her father—who knew about such things—found in a California pawn shop.

After five years, not all of it easy—they’d been all but broke by the time they got to Anchorage—he would have to say now that he was happy.

Settled, content.

But even in the most content of men, there is a yearning isn’t there? A deep seated desire for something wild. A cave to sleep in, an expedition to lead. Not to experience death, but to face it, to stand up to it. We hear the howling of the wolves at night and the hairs on our arms begin to rise.

He’d spent most of the morning snowshoeing along the road that led into the National Park. He checked in at the ranger station, let them know of his plans.

“We don’t recommend people going it alone,” the ranger had warned him. She was young, broad shouldered in her dark green uniform, had looked him in the eye when she spoke, quietly gauging his competence, his health. He assured her he was not going out for long.

The day had started partly cloudy, though Denali was hidden for good.

The air had been crisp, clean. He loved the way the cold felt against his skin, the biting chill, his face tightening in the breeze. He had watched the late morning sun rise over the low mountains. He had shot three rolls with the Hasselbach: of the snow-covered rocks on the riverbeds, the ice-covered trees against the blue sky, the light shining against the distant hills. A Stellar’s Jay had landed on a branch close to him, posing. Ahead of him, eight caribou had crossed the trail, though they weren’t close enough for quality pictures. A ranger, not the woman he had talked to at the station earlier, a man probably his age, went by with a dog team, waving as he passed.

He had captured the dog team rounding the bend, the dim sun a round light behind a translucent cloud, the lead dog with her tongue hanging out.

Other than that, he had seen no one, and was glad for it. In the summer, he knew, the road that was now closed to auto traffic past the station, would be teeming with busloads of people. They would come from Japan, Europe, the Lower 48, with high hopes of seeing Mt. Denali—like most Alaskans, he never called it McKinley—or grizzly bears. Most of them would go away

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never having seen either. Wilderness in a can, he thought. Package deals at unbelievable prices. On your own, you could do it for less than half.

That morning, the park had been all his. Alaska in the winter. Who in their right mind would do a vacation such as that? He imagined the question from his folks back in the Lower 48.

This time of year, though, the end of February, heading into March, was his favorite. The days were starting to get longer. The coming of spring was not felt in its warmth, but in its light. In two weeks, the Iditarod would begin, a sporting event unlike any other. Each year he would watch the start twice—the ceremonial start from downtown Anchorage and the actual start the next day from Wasilla. Donnie enjoyed it almost as much as he did, and Abigail, too. Last year, her eyes got big every time the dogs would pass, and she would shake her fists. “Mush, mush, mush, mush, mush,” she would say.

Later in the month it would be spring break. The college and the public schools, for once, coordinated, and both had their breaks at the same time this year. He and Nancy had discussed staying at a lodge somewhere, where they could take a dog sled trip of their own, maybe even a winter camping trip, though deep down he knew that Nancy would never agree to having Abigail sleep in a tent in the winter.

He had closed his eyes and stood in the silence.

Then he had packed up the Hasselbach, and, ski poles in hand, slowly made his way back toward the station where he was parked. Overhead, the clouds were increasing. The wind had risen and faded like a sleeping man’s breath.

Back at the parking lot, he had loaded his equipment in the back of the Wagoneer, changed his snow pants for jeans and his boots for tennies, and then had gone to the station to let them know he was back.

“Made it, huh?” said the ranger.

“Were you worried?” he’d asked.

“Not really. Supposed to be a storm moving in this afternoon, though.

You going back to Anchorage?”

“Naw, I’m just going to Talkeetna for tonight,” he’d said.

“Probably a good idea,” said the ranger. “I don’t expect you’ll have any trouble getting to there.”

He had driven to Cantwell, filled up with gas and ate a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup at the Lazy J Cafe. By the time he’d pulled back onto the highway, it was already starting to snow. He put a tape in the tape player, a collection of opera songs. When he’d come to the Denali Highway turn-off, without hesitating, he’d turned left. Don’t do this, he thought. The smart thing would be to just head straight to the hotel, grab a beer with

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the locals in Talkeetna, relax and watch TV. The snow was falling harder now, and soon the roads would grow slick with ice. But he kept driving. He would drive, he’d decided, to the point where the road was closed. He knew this road was closed in the winter. A half hour, he had thought. Tops. Soon he would be losing daylight.

But then he had come to a curve in the road. The snowflakes were falling like cotton, ticker-tape. Perfect, he’d thought. He had pre-visualized, since coming to Alaska, a scene just such as what he was seeing then, and he had stopped the Jeep, gotten out and set up the tripod. In the next hour he had shot another roll of film. When he got back in the car, the Jeep was covered with snow, and he had to scrape ice from the windows. He had to get back to the highway, he knew. He drove forward, looking for a place to turn around.

That’s when he saw the moose.

The back end, he knew. It was his best way. He pulled his legs to his chest and shifted them to his door, rolling, careful not to hit his broken arm.

Slowly he stood, hunched over, and curled his way around the front seat.

He leaned briefly, winded, against the back seat, and then pulled his way around it as well. He looked at the scattered pieces around him. His tripod was leaning against his side back window, which was broken, a spider web of cracks spreading outward. There were film canisters in the corners. The Hasselbach had fallen out of the unzipped bag, and had landed against the side door, the viewfinder in pieces, the lens dented. He could hear Nancy’s voice. “You should zip that bag. One of these days it’s going to fall out of there.” Today, he thought. One of these days.

Once in the back, he pushed the top window open, stretching his arm as far as he could. On his third try, he got it to lock into place, to stay open. Then he pulled the latch and opened the bottom half as well. Gingerly he scooted to the edge and hopped to the snow-covered earth. His head throbbed. He tried to blink the pain away. Head injury. Don’t sleep, he thought.

The snow was falling harder now. He reached back into the Jeep, stretching, pulling the items closer: boots, snow pants, fleece jacket, shell. He took the window scraper, and reached under the seats to pull his gloves and hat toward him. He did all of this with his right hand. He dressed, trying to use the vehicle to shield him from the freezing snow. He had no survival kit, that box load of gear that every Alaska vehicle should have in the winter: food, water, flares, hand and toe warmers, emergency blanket, flashlight. First-aid kit. Cell phone. The Wagoneer didn’t even have a cigarette lighter. He had a small box of camping gear, a butane stove, a Swiss Army knife. Cookware.

A book of matches. He opened it. Two matches left. He imagined the voices again, the men around their fires. Stupid, he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was getting darker. He could feel the temperature dropping. He saw his

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reflection in the back window. The stream of blood from the cut above his eye was now frozen on his face.

A decision. A father found frozen forty yards from a cabin, he thought.

Should’ve stayed close to the car maybe, been easier to find. No, no. Better to move. He had to stay awake, to stay warm. There were only three prayers, his father used to say. Please, sorry and thank-you. He lowered his head, put his hands together for effect. “Please,” he whispered.

Then he started to walk.

There had been, the previous summer, something else in that box of camping supplies. He remembered it now as he walked, the wet snow blowing into his face. An item peculiar to and sold at the campgrounds of the Pacific Northwest. It was round and flat, twice, roughly, the size of a hockey puck. It was tightly packed kindling, thickly covered with wax. Firestarters, they called them. Just one would burn by itself for up to an hour. He’d had one, always carried it with the camping dishes, should have had it with him now.

Last summer, he and Nancy had gone backpacking with two other couples, friends from the university. Nancy’s parents had been visiting, and they agreed to watch the kids for the two days. He had been anxious for the reprieve from her parents, who he got along with fine, but for four weeks, all of them together in the house, he had found himself more and more finding excuses to get out, university business that he just had to attend to, though he wondered if he was fooling any of them. So he was thrilled with the idea of getting away with friends. They had kayaked out of Seward to a small island where they camped overnight.

He thinks now of that night. He had made the decision to use the firestarter, even though there was really no need for a fire, it didn’t even get dark hardly, in the summertime. He remembers now, thinking consciously, better to save this for an emergency, probably. But he had romantic notions, the six of them standing around a campfire, talking, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. As it turned out, the women had all three gone to bed early, and it was just the three men. Save it, something inside of him said, but he didn’t, he burnt it.

He remembers their conversation now, the three of them around that fire. They had been drinking whiskey and telling stories, when the conversation turned to death.

“What do you think’s the best way to die?” one of the men, Jim Wright, had asked.

“Plane wreck,” said the other man, Dave Kimball, who was a licensed bush pilot. “One last mad quick rush, and then...” he slammed his fist into his hand, “it’s all over.”

“I’m never flying with you again,” said Jim.

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He remembers now, he had thought about it as he watched the firestarter burn. The best way to die. “Hypothermia,” he had said.

“Really?” said Dave.

“Yep,” he said. “You just lay down, and wait. When the shivering’s over, you fall asleep. Very peaceful.”

And then they had all stood, drinking, watching the fire.

The snow was still falling. He could feel the weight of his boots, the snow growing deeper on the road beneath him. His legs burned with each step.

It was darker now, almost night, the sky its darkest shade of blue, the trees by the sides of the road but outlines blurred by the blowing snow. His head still throbbed, and he tried to hold his left arm steady against his body. The wind was blowing needles into his face, his boots squeaking softly beneath him. He stopped. He could feel his breath in his chest, coughed twice. He wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. He checked his watch. Only five. It felt later. How far to Cantwell? Seven miles, he guessed, maybe eight. But he wouldn’t have to go that far. Where did the houses and cabins begin? He felt the weight of his shoulders, the droop of his eyelids. In his head a war raged behind his left eye. His eyes watered and froze, causing his vision to blur.

He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. Frozen to death: the words played in his mind. Don’t sleep. Keep moving. Please. Sorry. Thank you.

He continued to walk.

Decisions. The decision for fire in the summer. It was excess, always wanting more, the things you didn’t need all that went beyond survival and comfort. What was once luxury is now necessity, his father used to say. A fire in the summer in Alaska, where neither heat nor light was needed. At what costs the decisions made? The firestarter. If he had that now, would it be the difference between surviving or not? The question played at his mind.

He thought back to the moment he turned onto the road. Don’t do this.

Those were the words he had thought, an inner voice. A pilot had told him once. They had been up in the air, going from Anchorage to Kakarak in a Cessna. He was supervising two student teachers in that district, was going to check up. The day was overcast, but not threatening. To get to Kakarak required flying over the Cook Inlet and then through a pass in the Alaskan Range. As soon as they entered the pass, everything changed. From inside the plane he could hear the wind howling. The plane rocked violently in the wind, swaying from side to side. They entered a fog. Visibility dropped to zero. He had looked at the pilot’s hands, tightly gripping the wheel and he stared ahead without blinking. I don’t need to get there this bad, he had thought. At that precise moment, the pilot had made a U-turn in the sky.

By that time they were totally socked in. He had wondered if the pilot knew

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where the mountains were. He had read of Cessnas flying into mountains.

The pilot was sitting straight up in his seat.

Then he had closed his eyes.

When he opened them, maybe only ten minutes later, they were back over the Inlet. The pilot was slumped in his seat, casually eating from a bag of chips beside him. When they landed back in Anchorage, they had shared a cup of coffee, and he had asked the pilot: Had he known where the mountains were?

The pilot didn’t smile. “Not exactly a hundred per-cent sure,” he’d said.

“How do you decide when to turn back?” he had asked the pilot.

“There’s a voice inside. Every pilot has one. The best of us learn to listen to it. I don’t know if it’s God, or just some kind of instinct, but I never argue with that voice. Ever.”

Don’t do this. He had heard it clearly when he turned onto the road. But he hadn’t listened.

The wind grew stronger. His glasses which he’d been wiping clean with his gloves became so smudged that they more impaired than improved his vision. He removed them, folded them clumsily, placed them in his inside jacket pocket. He squinted, blinking the blowing snow out of his eyes. The snow had grown deeper and he had to lift his boots higher with each step. He could feel the burning in his legs, the stiffening pain in his arm. He removed his cap, and when he did, snow fell down the back of his neck. He shivered slightly. He felt the numb warmth of exhaustion slowly overtaking him, enticing him to sleep. Odysseus’ Sirens, he thought. Keep moving. The throbbing in his head had decreased slightly. Don’t sleep, he thought. Don’t stop.

It was fully night, by then, but not entirely dark. He could make out the outlines of trees, the snow and clouds combining to cast a yellowish gray over the night. The willows stood frigid against the road side.

He came to the end of a soft rise, and when he looked over he could see the road leading into the distance through the forest. Miles to go before I sleep, he thought.

His breathing was becoming increasingly labored. He could feel his sweat beneath the layers of his clothes. He stopped to rest, took several deep breaths. It was important not to sweat. He had to keep his body dry.

He stood at the top of the rise and turned his back to the wind before him.

When the urge to sit down became almost too much to resist, he turned and started down the rise. He moved slowly, each step like lead. One foot in front of the other, he thought. The little engine that could. Please. He cradled his left arm close to his body. When he moved it at all, even tried to turn his wrist, the pain shot through him, and the whole arm started to shake.

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The wind diminished as he moved downward. The trees were higher here, closer to the road offering more protection. But he could feel the temperature dropping, the cold against his legs. His lips had grown numb. He held his right gloved hand to them trying to warm them as he walked. In the distance was the silence of the falling snow, broken only by the occasional snapping of a tree branch. His ears had grown colder as well, and started to ache.

Too late to turn back, he wondered? Get to the Jeep, try to spend the night inside. It would protect him from the snow, but not the cold. He put his right fingers to his temple and rubbed. He had to keep moving.

Widow, he thought. He tried to picture Nancy, tried to imagine the word applying to her. Single mother. He imagined Abigail, her little face, the blue eyes and pug nose peering out from her pink hooded fur-lined parka. And Donnie, with his short cropped brown hair, always eager to please, the two of them driving through Anchorage, looking for moose watching the planes take off over Point Worzonoff.

He thought to last weekend, he and Abigail and Donnie and the snowman they had built in the backyard, teaching Abby to make angels in the snow, Nancy with the camera. He imagined the photo she had taken, he and the kids and the snowman, imagined it developed and in a frame on the mantle, always the image they would remember him by.

He might have cried, then, he couldn’t be sure, his eyes already watering in the wind and the cold and the snow. He felt the throbbing in his head, his arm, the increasing pain coming from inside his ear. The voice of the sirens.

Lie down. The best way to die, he had said, easy to say by the warmth of the fire. Just lie down and wait. Peaceful.

Dying is not an option. A line from a movie, he thought, which one he wasn’t sure. He used it as a mantra. Not an option, he thought, not an option not an option as he made his way down to the bottom of the rise.

At the bottom of the hill was a narrow bridge. He took three steps onto the bridge and his feet slipped out from under him. Instinctively he put out his left arm to break his fall. He cried out at the pain, rolled over onto his right shoulder, holding the fractured limb close to his body, moaning in agony as he lay on the ground. His face stung cold, his mouth full of snow.

He crawled to the edge of the bridge and pulled himself up on the railing with his one good arm.

“Dammit,” he hollered. “Damn it to hell.” He felt the rage run through him, imagined a wounded animal. He kicked the railing, kicked it again.

Calm, he thought, calm. Sorry, please, thank you. Not an option, he thought. Smart. Be smart. His cheeks burned, inside and out—from the cold, from the rage. He tried to wipe his face dry with his coat sleeve. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his glasses. They were broken,

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the glass cracked, the frames bent. He held them in his gloved right hand and made a tight fist around them, smashing them further. Then he threw them as far as he could into the woods. His head was pounding now, and he felt himself starting to shiver again. Keep moving, he thought. Keep moving. He used the bridge rail to guide himself across the icy bridge. Then he moved back onto the road, where the tire tracks were now nearly buried by the still-falling snow. He tried to take longer strides, tried to move faster, while still conserving his energy.

If he had the firestarter, he thought. If he at least had that.

How far? He looked at his watch. Nearly eight o’clock, now. He imagined Nancy, Abigail on her lap, Donnie playing by her feet, the three of them alone in the house. Keep moving. Not an option, death. One foot in front of the other. He felt his legs growing heavier with each step, his head lighter.

The pain from his ears had extended into his teeth and jaw.

Death. Always there at the edge of things. Those were the edges he had played at. Walked right up to the boundary and tempted it, dared it to take him.

Mexico. He had been younger then, just out of college, spring break his first year teaching, single, free. He had taken a train into the country, and then ferried across the Gulf of California. He had camped on the beach, had brought nothing but a small pack of tortillas at a store in a nearby village.

He carried a small bottle of water, a flask of tequila. In the late afternoon he woke from a nap to the sound of Spanish voices, all men. Fishermen—they had moored their boats and were up the beach. He had approached them, bought some fish which he had cooked over the fire and ate that night—one of the best meals he ever had.

That night, the men came to him, asked him to join them. They drank tequila. One of the men had offered him a pill, he didn’t even ask what it was, just took it.

The fish on his plate had come to life, wanted to swim. He’d run to the water’s edge and flung his fish into the water. “Free,” he hollered. “Go free.”

The Mexican fisherman had laughed. Then, he’d heard trumpets. He sang songs in broken Spanish, making up the words as he went, all to the amusement of the fishermen.

That night, late, maybe past midnight, one of the men had asked him if he wanted to go out on the ocean. It was pitch black as they stepped into the small row boat, and headed out to sea. He was sober by then, for the most part, understood the stakes.

He thought about that night now as he walked, just he and the Mexican man whose name he never knew, the night so black he couldn’t even see the bottom of the boat, couldn’t see the man rowing in front of him, didn’t know where they were, the rocking of the small boat and the lapping of the

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waves against its sides, the stars above, the rest pitch black, somewhere in the Gulf of California.

His lips were numb now, he no longer felt the cold. Each step was a stumble forward, his legs heavy, his eyelids dropping shut, the stinging of snow against his cheeks unnoticeable.

And his hands. He tried to move the fingers within his gloves. He could see his hands move, but could not feel them, could not will the fingers to move individually. The pain in his broken arm was a throbbing that had taken over his body, a steady rhythmic pounding that played inside his skull, a nausea not only in his gut, but felt in his joints, his knees, his jaw.

The pain, though, was gone, and mostly what he felt was numb. Easy he had said that summer. Wait for the shivering to end, lay down. Go to sleep.

The cabin. It was late now, almost ten o’clock. That man had died just yards from a cabin. There had to be places all along this road coming up soon. Keep moving, he thought, like a boxer, punch drunk and weary. One more round, he thought. One more round.

He continued to move, the snow still playing at his face, his hands and feet like lead as he walked. The cabin, he thought. Find a cabin, a break in the road. The snow still fell, steady, insistent. He could feel the freeze in his nostrils, his eyebrows.

He stumbled twice, the lead he’d felt with each step in his feet had spread, up his legs, to his thighs. He was all weight now. Dead weight. The word played in his mind. The weight was in his back too, and on his shoulders as he stooped in the cold.

He stopped. Waited for the weight to overtake him. Waited to fall right there on the edge of the road, where his body would be found shortly after his wife reported him missing. Frozen. Stiff. Already he felt his hands the precursor to the death he was soon to suffer.

He stood and closed his eyes, listened to the wind through the brush, waited to die.

He heard a stillness, the dying of the wind, a temporary break of calm.

The road had flattened here, and pine trees rose on each side of him. He opened his eyes. It was not black out, but a dark blue, the light reflected in the snow enough to look into the night. Without his glasses, it was blurry, but he saw it. A break in the road, off to the left, just yards ahead.

A driveway perhaps. And then, behind the trees, standing like a mirage in the wilderness, he saw the cabin.

Keep moving he thought, the sight of the small building invigorating him slightly. He stood, slowly , staggering to his feet. He took a small step, and then another. Not an option, he thought.

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He stumbled slowly through the night. The snow, as if to dispute his last hope for survival, started to fall in a rush then, angrily, the wind coming in gusts against him as he inched forward.

At last, he came to the chained-off driveway of the cabin. The snow in the driveway was deeper than on the road. He could neither lift his boots over the chain, nor bend down to crawl beneath it, so he walked around it, and then up onto the driveway where the snow was deeper, much deeper as the drive had probably not been plowed that winter.

He stepped onto the drive, and his leg sunk, up to just above his knees.

He took another step, then another, each time sinking into the deep snow.

He stopped and looked at the cabin, the teasing cabin just ten to twenty yards, he thought, just that, and he imagined the man before him, standing just forty yards from the cabin, knowing perhaps that his family had already not survived. He understood then, because he knew men, that the father had made a decision. He had heard the voice, had ignored it, had stood looking at that cabin. He could have saved himself perhaps, that man, but would have had to live forever with what he had done to them.

He understood then, that the man had looked at that cabin forty yards away and had made the decision to sit down in the snow, had watched that cabin behind the blur of moist eyes, and then that man had lain down and waited. It was easy. There had been no other choice.

He took three deep breaths, and then plowed ahead, one foot in front of the other, moving the snow, pushing, moving forward, counting each step, one, two, his hands stuck in a permanent curl, his legs wet and frozen through his jeans, the throbbing of his heart, his beating heart, the crackling inside his ears as he swallowed, his broken arm at his side, he pushed forward counting, thirty, thirty one...

Thirty-seven steps, and he was at the door. With his boots, he cleared away the snow that blocked the screen door, and then he opened it. He didn’t know whether the door was locked or not, couldn’t turn the knob anyway, so frozen were his hands, couldn’t even maneuver the gloves off of his frozen fingers. He put his right shoulder against the door, and then reared back, and slammed his shoulder into the door. Tried it three times, but the door didn’t budge.

He moved to the rear of the cabin, where there was a covered porch. He walked onto the porch. There was another door, much like the front. It too would not budge. He was panting now, put his hands on his knees, took several breaths. When he stood, he felt the stiffness in his back, the burn in his thighs. His heart pounded. Beside the door was a large window. He took his right forearm and smashed it into the window. The breaking of glass shattered the night.

He lifted each leg over the sill, careful not to cut himself on the glass.

Inside, the cabin was dark, smelled like old blankets, mildew. The wind

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blew makeshift white curtains around the broken window. He fell to his knees on the cabin floor. There was an old sofa, covered with quilts, and an afghan. He crawled to it, and pulled the blankets around him. His breathing was labored, heavy, until he felt it soften, felt his heartbeat slow to a steady rhythm, felt the warmth of his breath as he exhaled into the musty cabin air.

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Miriam Levine Poetry Winter Fire

The wind smells like rust, the ash tree a slash from Franz Kline— abstract, black on white.

Negative space: ice.

The ancients stared at entrails to predict the future.

I’ll poke the smoldering wood and watch spring flare up—white shadblow, blue squills like shadows.

There’s the sun dripping sap.

Hooked mauve thorns, flaming hiss of the rose— already summer; hot June, your silk and the smell of dew burning off.

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Jeffrey Thomson Poetry Landscape with Pigeons and the Tree of Heaven

When the sun skates behind the spire of the cathedral, When that shadow paints a finger across the square where the flower vendor with daffodils in buckets sits in the new dark beneath the awning of the bank, When the cars pause and the human traffic spills and gathers as oil above flame’s blue petals buoying the black edges of a sautÊ pan, When a woman passes flashing the sudden springtime of her thighs beneath kick pleats and piping, When the world seems elegant and wet with promise, a corona of fire painted around the spire and tombstone arches of light from the bell tower paved into the square, and, equally, when the sentimental gloss of sunlight is called into question by it absence, When newspapers menace the fence as construction rumbles tectonically beyond the black-plastic sheeting, and the grimy mitts of feral pigeons (Columba livia) chortle and bob their puffed, oiled iridescence beneath the ailanthus, chased by children with handfuls of corn, I am reminded that in Chinese the ailanthus is the Tree of Heaven and pigeons are called the clumsy bird, relative of the Dodo and other flightless doves extinct on islands across the Pacific, I am reminded that the birds are symbol, the spirit in flames descending on the head of Christ, counterpart to the water of desire John drizzled upon his head, I am reminded, too, that lovers should refrain from their consumption (said Martial, Who would be lusty should not eat this bird) and that when Christ finally drove the traders from the temple, pigeons rose off the tables and swept the sky clean with their wings.

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Fernand Roqueplan Poetry Shoalwater Ridge

This evening I thought of yesterday when you called to praise the new president.

I only half-listened as your voice thinned the gloom of damp & stinking backwoods where gaunt black bear growl through garbage, cherishing civilization; this evening we walked the tracks as trains thundered uncoupling and airport spotlights extended sunset as frost deadened our fingers: how easily, you said, fire transforms ugliness— torch the debris and be nowhere when it burns.

When you called Shoalwater wind sprang from behind the landfill, slurred through third growth hemlock, rattled Jerusalem artichokes, shuffled the pile of Tribunes under the rose trellis near the trash bins where the quaggy odor of refuse seemed forgivable.

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Michael Walsh Poetry Shore

The deeper I walk into the field, the higher, the wetter the bluestem, the more leaves flash their weed-tangled silver.

Hidden everywhere, swaying, thistle and nettles bristle, all spine and stinger.

From ankle to thigh they scratch their words for tadpoles that turn to beetles, eels to roots, and fish to mice.

Now touch this slash, that sting.

The mouth can’t speak them but the skin, that strange tongue, starts to mutter.

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Michael Walsh Poetry Inheritance

Rust blooms across my land: spots like mold on white cars, their spark plugs cold as insects poisoned in orange powder.

It’s already been to the house, screwed the preserves shut for good. In the shed I touch the many red, ripe nail points. They pollinate the pale flowers of my hands.

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Richard Jackson Poetry Wait For the Tone, Then Leave Your Message

Where are you? The horizon has already crumbled.

The hills have withdrawn into their own shadows.

Without you the weight of the sky becomes almost unbearable. I should have known. The thorn sees no reason for the flower. The tree needs no birds to fill it. The river longs to be elsewhere. I should have known. The world is the loss of the world. The white mist that was patrolling the river has marched over the hills.

Beyond, all the maps are smudged with atrocities.

Everything withdraws. The rabbits twitching back into The hedgerows. The owls breaking free from the sun’s tethers.

What ever happened to the gravitational waves that held us Together? Maybe the heart is filled with spider webs.

What am I saying? It is not the stars clotting but My own emptiness among them. It is not these dreams That hang like clocks whose time has run out, but My own heart cleaning the side of the road with the other Prisoners. Now my words for you are all on parole.

The world is the loss of the world. Each word is the loss Of a word. Where are you? The artillery is sounding over the hills. The tanks are practicing in the fields.

Every fear brings another wave. Every fear nails the heart to an empty signpost. Every fear is only this inescapable desolation of what shadows the dead leave, the way you turn back to life with nothing left in your arms.

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Laurie Koozer Fiction Hillcrest Valley Parade

Aunt Sandi showed up unannounced at Grandma’s house on the tail end of the 4th of July, the dying embers of the Hillcrest Valley fireworks display still hanging in the sky.

We’d last saw her five years ago on another holiday, Christmas, when she had arrived without warning, with a greasy guy named Ron who wore gold rings as big as his knuckles, smacked her bottom every time she passed, and talked a lot about the oil in Texas. They were heading out there, he claimed, to strike it rich.

I knew that Sandi and Ron hadn’t exactly found their fortune and just a couple of weeks ago I’d heard Grandma telling Mom that things with them were on the verge of collapse. Grandma and Mom didn’t talk too much about Sandi and when they did it was with hushed tones and shaking heads.

She existed in my mind in bits and pieces—things I had cobbled together from other people’s stories.

As she hugged Grandpa and Dad, I hid in the shadows. Just inside the screen door, Mom bit her lip. Farther behind, Grandma stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a dishtowel. I waited for them to look at each other. They carried on entire conversations without speaking, their language entirely physical—the pull of an ear, the roll of an eye, the tilt of a neck. I watched for a trademark move but there were none. Grandma pushed right past Mom to Sandi, pulling her into a tight hug that lingered so long it looked uncomfortable.

When Grandma finally let go, Sandi spun around, her eyes on me and my brother. She almost squealed looking between us and our mom.

“Why look at how my little babies have grown,” she said, pulling our heads tight against her chest.

Babies? I had never once thought of myself as her baby. But Sandi was beautiful and unlike my Mom, warm and inviting, so I liked imagining that we were really close. I burrowed my nose into her thick brown hair, like I could absorb all the mysteries of life outside Hillcrest in just one breath.

Her skin smelled like vanilla mixed with incense, like things faraway and exotic. When I looked up, I saw Grandma stepping off the porch, one hand on her hip.

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“It’s just Sandi, Ms. Henderson, everything’s fine! You can go back into your house now!” Grandma waved her arms towards next door where Ms. Henderson stood on her sidewalk, watching. Ms. Henderson offered a quick wave and scurried back into her house.

“I see things don’t change much around here,” Sandi said, with a smile threatening her lips. She shoved brown paper bags at me and TJ. “These are for you.”

We giggled, opening them. TJ whistled, pulling back the paper on a silver and ivory toy gun imprinted with a picture of the Alamo.

He aimed the gun at my dad and pulled the trigger. “Bang! Bang! Dad, I got you!”

Dad clutched his chest and pretended to fall backwards over the railing as I looked at my own gift, a tiny little glass that said “Don’t Mess with the Alamo.” I turned it over in my hand.

“Um, thanks?”

Mom grabbed it. “A shot glass, Sandi? You bought Lily a shot glass?”

Sandi put a hand on Mom’s arm. For a tense second it looked like Mom’s flesh crawled beneath Sandi’s touch. It wasn’t that I’d ever heard her say bad things about Aunt Sandi—it was that she barely said anything at all.

“C’mon, Pam. She’s gonna be a teenager soon…”

“I AM a teenager.” I stood up straight. “I turned 13 last month—” Sandi nodded. “See. Don’t treat her like a baby.”

I felt the heat of a blush creeping its way up my neck.

Mom handed the shot glass to Sandi. “I’ll treat her how I want to treat her, Sandi. She’s MY daughter.” She laid her hand on my shoulder. On my bare skin, it felt cold and calculating, like she was trying to send something through me by way of osmosis, as though all her thoughts could just flow right into me with that one simple gesture, the weight of a hand. I turned, shifting away.

Sandi looked at me with a raised eyebrow, the amber specks in her eyes popping like the fireworks we had just seen. I shrugged. I hated Mom speaking for me. Still, I had already found myself becoming this certain kind of person, not a big mouth like my best friend Lindsay, but the quiet kind who walks with my head down and always feels my heart beating a little faster and my voice choking up when a cute boy walks past or when a popular girl like Janie Ayres with her big boobs and boyfriends offers me a hit off her cigarette while we waited for the bus. I could already see my whole life stretching ahead of me just like this—Lily, always in the background.

Sandi dropped the glass in my Dad’s hands. “Fine, I’ll give it to Eddie.”

She pulled me tight against her chest, whispering: “I’ll get you something even better, kid. You’ll see.”

Over her shoulder, Mom and Grandma exchanged glances.

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Until Sandi came, our summer evenings ran like clockwork—after supper we walked to Grandma’s, spreading out accordingly—Mom and Grandma talking in the kitchen, Dad and Pappy in the backyard browsing the Hillcrest Gazette and drinking Pabst, TJ in the attic playing Nintendo and me floating between all three worlds, never quite sure where to stay, always anxious that once I picked a room, I’d miss out on something else.

For two long days after she came, we didn’t head over at all. Mom insisted that Sandi needed to spend some time alone with her parents and that we would just be in the way. That first night, Wednesday, we headed out to the mall, looking for new lawnchairs for the upcoming Hillcrest Valley Parade. Not finding anything, on Thursday we headed an hour east to Central City, where Mom and Dad browsed the aisles of Hills, Ames, and K-mart again without success.

By Friday night at dinner, my patience was wearing thin. I wanted to see Aunt Sandi. That night on the porch with her the world felt a little fuller, every motion and sound more alive, like the anticipation of a seedling about to break forth from the soil, the crackling and popping of its roots suddenly audible from somewhere way down below.

I looked at Mom, eagerly. “Maybe we can go to Grandma’s tonight? I want to see Aunt Sandi.” Mom stared at me, her blue eyes frosty.

Finally, she stood up, clearing the dishes. “I guess so.”

TJ made a face. “I don’t want to go to Gram’s tonight, I want to go to Justin’s and play. Can’t I go to Justin’s and play tonight?”

Mom pointed at me. “Your sister wants to go to Grandma’s.”

“Well, I want to see Aunt Sandi. We never see her, ya know. I want to be around her.”

Mom turned her head away. “Well, don’t get used to it, she’ll leave once you get used to it.” She said it fast, her voice as sharp as the steak knives still resting on our plates.

Dad looked up, surprised. Mom gave a half-smile and laughed, trying to pass it off as joke.

“I’m just saying, that’s all,” she said. “Sandi isn’t exactly reliable.”

“I’ll call her, then,” I said. “I just want to see her while she is here.”

Mom put up her hand, walking into the kitchen. “I’ll call.”

I watched Mom from the dining room as she dialed the phone and talked in a hushed voice. “Oh yes. We understand. Completely. You guys have a good night. We’ll stay put and plan to see you tomorrow.”

Mom came out of the kitchen, shaking her head. “Not tonight. Sandi’s not feeling well.”

A smile spread across her face. It was so big I swore I could hear it, her teeth and lips shouting without saying a word.

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The next morning Aunt Sandi knocked on the back door around a quarter past eleven, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a bikini, a straw tote bag slung over her shoulder.

“It’s goddamn hot out there.” She slid off her aviator frames, like the kind Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun. That movie, I knew, was playing down at the Hillcrest Ritz, but just like everything else that summer Mom said I was too young to see it.

Mom stood frozen at the door, a yarn washrag in her hand. “Good to see you, too, Sandi. Can you lay off the swearing in front of the kids?”

Aunt Sandi rolled her eyes, then nodded towards where I sat crosslegged at the table, eating Lucky Charms. “I thought the kids might want to go swimming.”

TJ stopped rifling through the fridge. “Please, Mom? Oh, please, can we go swimming with her?”

Mom surveyed her little sister, her little sister with the tiny bikini and the leopard-printed scarf holding back her hair. It was hard to believe that they were only five years apart, that there had been a point in their lives when they had not been so different from me and TJ. Sandi pushed out her lower lip like she was pouting. “Yeah, Mom,” she said. “Come on, please?”

Mom shook her head. “Well, I guess so, if that’s what they really want to do—” Before she even finished, TJ and I were both running right out of the kitchen, stepping over each other the whole way upstairs.

For the next few weeks our summer took on this new routine—Aunt Sandi picked us up everyday at that point when the sunlight was so hot it was a surprise that the pool hadn’t come to a boil. Then, in the burnt grass around the L-shaped pool, I sat beside her hoping that she’d tell me something important—maybe some advice about life or love, maybe some wisdom to give me a glimmer of hope that these giant braces and glasses were just a phase, that someday I’d be just as pretty as her.

Usually, though, she just leaned back in her lawnchair and didn’t say much of anything at all, flipping slowly through one of those True Confessions magazines—“I was a teenage prostitute” or “Elvis is my father,” the yellow headlines blared.

One day, after a couple of weeks of this silence, I gathered the courage to ask her a question.

“So,” I said, tilting sideways on my orange beach towel. “How was your week?”

Okay. So I’ll admit it wasn’t exactly an earth-shaking question. But still. It was something. Aunt Sandi didn’t even look up from her magazine.

“I’ve had better.” She turned the page and sighed. “I guess I should tell you something—”

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I sat up, eagerly.

“I love your mom and my mom—” She paused for a moment, lifting her sunglasses and glancing across the crowded yard. Then, she slipped her glasses back over her nose and smiled. “But they can be a lot to handle sometimes. A LOT to handle. And I just, it’s been a long time since I’ve been here and there are a lot of things about this place I’d just like to forget.” She surveyed the crowd of people at the pool.

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but figured it was best to play along. “Yeah,” I said, fumbling for common ground. “Mom and Grandma are crazy.”

Aunt Sandi laughed and turned back to her magazine. I waited for her to say more but she didn’t. I squeezed my eyes shut. A few minutes later, I felt a little sprinkle of water and heard giggling. When I opened my eyes, my friend Lindsay and her cousin Petey Lynch stood over me.

“Lily girl, come on. We must go on the diving board. Right now. Chad is in charge of the lifeguards today so he is going to tell us in advance when they blow that adult swim whistle so we can hit the snack bar before any of those other little kids….”

When Lindsay talked it came at you like a spray of water, going everywhere and touching on everything all at once. Lindsay had thin brown hair and cheeks so chubby that she always had a stripe of sunburn just across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks, like a little kid dressing up to play Cowboys and Indians. I looked at Aunt Sandi and shrugged.

“I was thinking about maybe just laying out today.”

Petey let out a loud, high-pitched laugh that made Aunt Sandi look up from her magazine. “Yeah right. It’s freakin’ hot. You better get in this pool.”

Sandi nodded, smiling. “Yeah, Lily, it’s hot. Go with your friends.”

Lindsay grabbed my hand, pulling me away.

Fifteen minutes later, we stood at the head of the snack line.

“My Uncle John’s seen your aunt out at Phil’s.”

Phil’s was a bar in the east end of town that my mom always called “a hole in the wall.”

I shook my head. “She doesn’t go out at night, he must be confused.”

“No,” said Petey. “It’s her. Uncle John went to school with her, ya know, so he’d know if he seen her.”

We usually left Grandma’s place around ten or eleven to come home. It was possible that Aunt Sandi went out after that, but not really something I wanted to think about. I liked to think of her as something of my own, not somebody I had to share with the rest of town.

The cashier handed me and Lindsay our strawberry-flavored Charleston Chews.

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Lindsay sighed. “I bet she does go out at night. I mean, she’s hot stuff.

I bet she gets all kinds of action.” She puckered her lips and made a loud kissing noise.

“That’s gross. Don’t talk about her like that. She’s my aunt.”

Petey looked up from his bag of Fritos, one eyebrow raised. “Don’t be dumb, Lily. What do you think she is? A VIRGIN?” Lindsay giggled at the very word and our eyes traveled across the pool where Aunt Sandi laid on her chair. The silver dots on her fluorescent pink bikini glittered in the midday sun. Even far away, she shimmered and sparked.

The very next afternoon at the pool, as Lindsay chattered non-stop and Petey splashed and dunked us, my eyes drifted towards Janie Ayres, who spent absolutely no time in the pool these days, lounging instead near the lifeguard stand flirting with Petey’s older brother Chad and all of his friends. I’d been to her house once in elementary school. Her dad owned a sporting goods store and their house was so big that there was a special room just for her Barbies and another with chalkboards and desks that looked just like a classroom.

It was in that very room, I remember, that Janie told me to quit wearing the best friend necklace I shared with Lindsay. According to her, Lindsay wasn’t cool and never would be. I couldn’t believe that somebody would say something like that about my best friend. That day, I had started to cry and Janie had ran upstairs asking her mom to take me home. It was the last time she’d ever invited me over to her house. Or really talked to me for that matter.

Across the pool, Janie adjusted her bikini top. I thought about that best friend necklace, how different things might be, how different maybe I would be if I had just taken it off.

Lindsay splashed me. “What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing.”

“She’s mad at us because we made fun of her aunt,” said Petey.

Lindsay glared at me. “You’ve been different since she came here. Like you’re trying to impress her or something.”

“I am not. Why are saying that?”

“Because you’re acting weird!”

“I am not!”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Shut up.”

Petey butted in between us. But Lindsay shoved him away. “You ARE acting weird, Lily. Is it because of your cousin?”

I looked at her, surprised. “Cousin? I don’t have any cousins.”

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Lindsay and Petey looked at each other, confused. “Wait. You mean you don’t know?”

“Know? Know what?”

Lindsay cleared her throat. “Your aunt. She had a baby. In high school. I heard my mom talk about it with Uncle John. They said they remember her being absent for a long time. And when she came back she was different.

As in ‘I had a baby over the summer and gave it up for adoption different.’”

I felt like I was standing paralyzed as a tidal wave came racing ashore, the tall arc of it looming high over my head, threatening to crash down at any second. Lindsay turned to look at Sandi and then me, anticipation on her face, waiting for me to say something. That stripe of sunburn on her cheeks looked downright menacing.

“That’s a lie,” I said. “You’re lying.”

Petey shook his head. “No, Lily. I was there. I heard them say it.”

“No! That’s not true. Quit lying!” I climbed out of the pool, almost running towards Sandi.

In the lawn, without my glasses on, everybody looked like lumps of fluorescent color and varying degrees of brown and white skin. As I brushed past them, I watched the incidental flutter of hands and lips, the entire yard caught up in some silent conversation I couldn’t hear and could barely see. I thought of Gram on the porch that first night Sandi came home, her hands on her hips, telling Ms. Henderson to mind her own business. I wondered suddenly if maybe everybody knew.

“I don’t feel good. I want to go home,” I grabbed my stomach and leaned forward. Sandi smiled, knowingly.

“That time, huh?”

I nodded even though I hadn’t yet been visited by my period. “Yeah.”

“I’ll get TJ,” she said. “You pack up.” She strutted away. I slid on my glasses, watching the bounce of her body as she headed to the snack bar to get TJ. It was strange. One part of me wanted to be her, wanted to mold my own trunk-like torso into an hourglass figure and pump up my breasts until they were plump and round like hers. But another part of me wanted to chase after her with a towel just so people would stop staring. She looked like she had fallen out of one of those music videos where the chick with the big hair is rubbing herself all over the hood of a car. Her bikini bottom tied together with two pink strings revealed a tattoo of an Indian dream catcher just above her hip bone. As she walked, it looked like it was swaying in the wind.

The next afternoon, Sunday, while Mom and Grandma labored over dinner and Dad and Grandpa tended to our respective lawns, I snuck into Grandma’s living room, crouching in front of the bookcases where Grandma kept all the photo albums and yearbooks.

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I loved looking at pictures, sifting through those glances and poses of the past as if they could tell a story. If what Petey and Lindsay said was true, I hoped I could pin down an exact moment that marked the change.

I opened the same old faded albums that I had looked at for years, some of which I had committed to memory—a young Mom and Sandi posing in front of a puke green Plymouth Fury on Easter Sunday, Mom’s hand held up and her face wrinkled, right on the verge of a sneeze, Sandi’s flowered dress glowing yellow in the sun. Others were from weekend camping trips—Mom and Grandpa in their hats and long sleeve shirts, hiding their fair skin from the sun underneath canopies of netting and blue tarp, Grandma and Sandi in black one-pieces, their teeth blinding white against their tanned skin.

I traced the round edges of Sandi’s face. Her grown-up face was deflated, her cheekbones more prominent, her chin more angular. I had always noticed this about the pictures—that in one set she looked like a child but in others she looked like a woman—Sandi, blowing out candles on a cake that said “16”—her long hair draped over a dark brown peasant blouse, her mouth set in thin line, no smile for the camera, a look in her eyes like longing, like she was searching for something. I thought about Petey, about what his Uncle John had said. I leaned forward, moving the album closer to my face as if all the things I needed to know were right there, locked up inside that tiny square. If that sixteen-year old girl could talk, what would she tell me?

“Lily?”

I slammed the album shut.

“Sandi? What are you—I thought you were playing Nintendo.” It came out cold. Accusatory.

“Coming up for air, I guess,” she said. “I’m getting a callous on my thumbs.” She held out her hand to show me. I feigned interest, trying with one hand to knock the albums out of sight.

“What are you doing?” Her eyes fell to the albums and she raised an eyebrow. For a moment, she lingered in front of me. Her face shifted and for a second I thought she was going to crouch down and join me, instead she turned away, up the stairs, slowly disappearing.

A couple of hours later, Sandi sat quiet at dinner as my mom talked.

My mom always seemed nervous around Sandi, handling her the way she passed the steaming dishes of vegetables and roast beef around the table— with the tips of her fingers, warning the next person to be careful.

While Pappy said grace, I opened one eye and watched Aunt Sandi. She didn’t bow her head or close her eyes at all but turned her silverware over in her hands, moving the butter knife between her hands in a seamless motion like a twirling baton. I knew from one of her junior high yearbooks that she had been a majorette one year—the Honeybears they were called, Hillcrest’s

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finest. There was a black and white picture of Sandi in profile during the annual summer parade—one knee kicked up mid-march, her outstretched arm holding that baton like it was extension of her arm, her mouth wide open in a smile.

Thinking of the picture, of her in a leotard marching up and down the streets of Hillcrest with knee-high boots and rhinestones in her hair, I wondered if she carried herself with the same toughness she carried now, the soft edges of her body made hard by this pinched look in her eyes, something holding back. Or I wondered if it was just me, that I only noticed this now because of what I knew. I watched her spinning her spoon around the plate to scoop up peas and I wanted to know. I wanted to lunge across the table and ask. I wanted to tell my mom to shut up about the good deal on meat she’d gotten that afternoon at Riverside market, and I wanted to shake Grandma until all the secrets she carried fell right out of her mouth and onto her plate, until they were real enough that we could pass them around like the serving dishes, investigating each one before we decided which one we might want a little more of for ourselves.

In the kitchen after dinner, I snuck up behind my mom and as she turned around to put away a plate, I grabbed it right out of her hand, just like that, stripping her of what she carried.

“Did Aunt Sandi have a baby when she was my age?”

Grandma dropped the glass she was rinsing into the sink, making a loud metallic bang that hung in the air long after she had scooped up the glass.

“Where in the world does a question like that come from?”

“Lindsay and Petey said that their Uncle John said so.”

Grandma batted her hands down to her thick waist like she was swatting away a wasp. “This town is just ridiculous.” She shook her head and untied her yellow and white apron.

She fumbled for a barstool. The brown vinyl popped as she sat down and the kind of squeaky noise that might have made me giggle on any other day was suddenly serious, prompting me to stand a little taller, looking towards Mom, her hands skimming through the soapy water. I watched her shoulder blades jutting in and out of her pink tanktop, her body so thin that she could disappear if she turned sideways. Mom looked like Pappy in appearance and build. Unlike Sandi and Grandma with their soft curves, she was tall and angular, her body all straight planes and right angles. She looked fragile, like it would be easy to break her apart. Still, there was an essential hardness about her, like a jawbreaker not ready to crack. In front of the sink she washed the dishes, her entire body erect and working, as if what I had just said could be scrubbed away.

“So is it? Is it true, then?” I leaned towards Grandma.

“Don’t take that kind of tone with your grandma,” Mom said.

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Grandma stared at the corner of the counter, like she saw a stain nobody else did and was checking to see if she had just imagined it. The emptiness hung between them like a heavy curtain. With their backs to each other, neither one seemed sure what to say. Beyond Mom, I could see out the window, Dad and Grandpa in the back yard reading the evening paper, their hair glowing blue underneath the bug zapper.

I waited a long time, waiting for answers and truth that did not come.

After a while, I left, hiding in the hallways, as Grandma and Mom shuffled around, opening and closing drawers and cupboards.

“Are you planning to go to the parade?” Grandma asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Mom turned away from her, aiming the hose around the corners of the sink, blasting away the thin layer of detergent and grease.

Later that night, we wandered home, ambling through the leafy streets, the orange streetlights casting their amber glow on us like we moved about in liquid, each of our motions exaggerated in the lights as low as sunrise that peeked in and out of the canopy of trees. Mom kept her arm looped in Dad’s, her head close to his shoulder, whispering. I thought of Petey and Lindsay, spinning their secrets about my family out like a web they could trap me in. Behind Mom and Dad on the sidewalk, I followed in silence, hoping that any little word might make its way airborne right into my open ears. Not one of them did.

Monday evening was the Hillcrest Valley Parade. Just like every year on the day of the parade, the sky spit rain all afternoon so that Mom complained that our brand new chairs, which she’d finally found three minutes from our house at the True Value, were going to be ruined. All day long, we listened to her complain and waited for the sky to clear. Sure enough, by six-thirty when Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Sandi stopped by our house to pick up me and TJ, the sun was blazing.

I had told my mom a million times that I didn’t want to go to the parade. But as soon as she saw Grandma walking up the street, Mom told me to start putting my shoes on. Begrudgingly, I buckled my sandals on the front porch as Sandi approached. I wondered if Grandma had told her that I knew.

She smiled, showing off her dimples. “Grandma said Petey and Lindsay are in the marching band this year. Are you excited to see them?”

I shrugged. If she’d been around enough she’d have known that they’d been marching in the parade in some form or another—Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Little League—for as long as I could remember.

Grandma’s shoulders tensed and I wondered if it had to do with Petey, if the mentioning of his name had reminded her that I knew.

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“Petey said you went to school with his Uncle John,” I said, waiting for some kind of reaction.

Sandi nodded. “Yeah.”

Grandma’s neck stiffened. “Everybody in Hillcrest went to school together just about.” She looked at her watch. “Come on, we better get going.”

As we walked, Gram talked fast about people around town, filling in the silence until we arrived at Main Street. There, people stood about four-deep on the sidewalk, everybody from three towns over gathered on this one street to see their own high school’s marching band and fire trucks make their way to the Hillcrest Valley Fairgrounds where the County Fair had been set up since Sunday afternoon.

Like every other year, our chairs were tied between two oak trees near the Cherry St. bridge. Sandi took the chair on the far end and removed her sunglasses, looking around the crowd.

TJ jumped on her lap, popping his gun at her face. She laughed, swatting him away.

“I’m thirsty,” he said, looking at Grandpa.

I jumped out of my chair. “I’ll go get him something.”

Aunt Sandi started to get up. “I should go with you—” “NO!” I said. “I’m going alone.”

Grandma handed me a wad of cash. “Mm, pick me up a pop too.”

I stuffed the cash into my pockets and walked away, happy to be alone.

Two blocks away, right near the entrance to the library, I heard voices and laughter echoing from behind the hedges. I stepped behind the hedges and peeked around the corner. There, Janie Ayres held court with a bunch of high school boys. My heart pounded as I leaned forward. I watched Janie parting her lips ever so slightly, a thin stream of smoke wafting out as she spoke.

Sometimes being quiet and shy made me fancy myself invisible, my body so nubile and silent that it could dissolve right into any scenery, leaving me free to stare, which is exactly what I was doing when Janie pointed directly at my hot pink Converse hi-tops and blurted out, “Whose pink sneakers?”

Her whole group snickered and I fumbled backwards, shaken. One of Janie’s friends grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me right around the corner where I stood in front of them as scared and wide-eyed as a goldfish pulled out of its bowl, my whole body twitching—let me go, let me go, let me go.

Janie regarded me with one narrow eye and giggled.

“It’s Lilllllllllllllllllllly,” she said, doubling over on the front steps. “Lil’ Lillllllly Kingston.”

The boys regarded me warily as they passed around a bottle of pop.

Cigarettes dangled from their hands.

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“She’s not gonna narc, is she?” A boy sporting a blue polo shirt with a popped collar, pointed at me. I recognized him vaguely, just as I knew most people in Hillcrest— everybody a relative or acquaintance of somebody, the whole town interconnected like one of the spider webs in the corners of our basement.

Janie shook her head. “Nah, she’s too afraid to do that. She’s okay.”

I felt like my heart was going to burst inside of my chest. I was okay?

Janie really thought I was okay?

She giggled. “Her aunt’s the lady you guys have all been ogling over down at the pool.”

Popped Collar raised his eyebrow. “No kidding.”

There was an unexpected look of respect in their faces as they all recalled Sandi—you could see the way their heads turned and their eyes glowed, the way they were dreaming back the curves of her hips, her ample breasts, and her bare midriff. Maybe they even knew her tragic story, this thing I’d never known that had floated around town like a shared knowledge.

“Your aunt’s pretty hot,” said Popped Collar.

I turned my foot on its side, rocking back and forth like a bird standing on one leg. I didn’t know what to say.

“Ha,” said another boy with beefy arms and a shaved head. “Maybe this one will be a hottie someday, too.”

Everybody burst out laughing and I felt a rush of heat rising through my neck and face. Janie leaned forward, offering a cigarette. “You wanna smoke?”

I took a deep breath. If Sandi could have a baby and the whole family ignored it, what did it matter if I tried to smoke? I nodded, taking the cigarette. Beefy Arms pulled out a lighter and brought it close to my face. I stared at him for a moment, unsure. I tried to remember the million times I’d seen Sandi doing just this, her long fingers taking the cigarette right up to her mouth, the other hand flicking the lighter, the slow inhale she took as the flame and cigarette connected, the swirl of smoke hiding her face.

When I finally did it, it was awkward. I took in that first inhale and the orange tip ignited and my mouth filled with hot smoke, the ash burning my throat. I yanked it out and coughed. They laughed. Everything, it seemed, was funny to them. I thought they were going to make fun of me, to say something mean about how I didn’t fit in, but instead they went back to talking, like I was no longer something amusing but somebody who was part of their group—one of them, hidden away from all the families and marching bands behind this row of shrubbery. I leaned back a little on my heels, held the cigarette up to my mouth and tried to take another drag.

I heard steps and turned around, cigarette in hand. Sandi stood by the hedges, hand on her hip.

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“Lily! What in the world are you doing? You’ve been gone for a half an hour. We were all getting worried.”

Out of the corner of one eye, I saw Janie cover her mouth and Popped Collar slide the half-empty plastic bottle into a nearby bush.

Sandi looked around and let out a low sigh. “Come on. We gotta get back.”

She ignored my cigarette. Neither of us moved. I looked over to Janie, for help, maybe, or reassurance. “Come on,” Sandi said, again.

I turned to say good-bye to Janie but she didn’t even seem to notice that I was about to leave. Instead, she leaned in closer to Popped Collar.

His hand rested on her thigh. She nuzzled his neck, barely noticing that I was there.

I followed Sandi around the hedges but once we got into the crowd, I felt embarrassed, ashamed that I couldn’t even get this right, that I was such a little kid I couldn’t even fake being bad for a moment. Sandi had probably made fun of kids like me when she was my age.

With her behind me, I started walking faster, dodging in and out of parents juggling children, sno-cones, and helium balloons, bobbing and weaving in and out of the crowd, right behind my family and towards the river. I didn’t slow down until I got far enough away that the beat of the marching bands sounded like it came from a distant speaker.

“Lily! Lily!” Behind me Sandi yelled, breathless.

I turned around, angry.

“Don’t follow me, I’m going home.”

“Lily, I’m not going to tell your mom that you were smoking—” She looked at me and winked, a cocky smile spread across her face like the two of us were in on a secret.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell her. I really don’t care. It was a freakin’ cigarette.

I don’t even care. You can tell her. Tell her. Tell her. Tell her. It’s not like—I mean, it’s not like I had a baby or something.”

The change on Sandi’s face was so instantaneous it was almost like I’d never seen that smile of hers at all, like she’d always had this blank expression on her face, the sheer force of her eyes muted, the corners of her mouth limp. It was like every warm thing about her had suddenly gone cold, boiling water turning to ice in a second, once there had been something—now there was nothing.

After a moment, she moved her arms, crossing them over her chest. She looked down. For a second I thought she was going to try to deny it.

“No,” she said. “No, you didn’t.”

There was a pregnant pause. Finally, she looked back towards the parade. “We should probably get back, ya know?”

After all these weeks, I wanted more. I wanted a confession. I wanted her down on her knees, maybe, apologizing that she had kept this secret from

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me. But I could see, right then, that all I was going to get was that moment.

No explanation or words of wisdom to pass down to the next generation.

Just this flattened look on her face, a moment of shared humiliation.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

We walked back to the new lawnchairs together, in silence.

Later that night, as my family gathered on Gram’s porch to walk home, Sandi wobbled down the front steps in a tight jean skirt and red stilettos carrying a set of cheap plastic luggage.

Grandma saw her first. “Where are you going?”

We all turned around. Sandi stood framed by the front door, a knowing look in her eyes.

“I’ve got a friend down in Florida,” she said. “I’m in the mood for the beach.”

As Grandma stood with her fists clenched, Sandi hugged each one of us good-bye, her spicy vanilla scent lingering on our clothes and skin. Grandpa took her suitcases and walked her out to the car. They stood there for a long while talking. I watched, guilt rising along my spine like goosebumps, until the feeling was so strong that I couldn’t ignore it. As Pappy handed her a thick wad of money and hugged her, I ran towards them. He dropped away from her, receding into the yard.

“Aunt Sandi?”

She pointed her chin towards me. “Yeah?”

I wanted to say that I was sorry for what I had said. I wanted to make some sort of peace offering. I wanted her to reassure me that she wasn’t leaving because of what I had said. I wanted to say all these things, but I couldn’t, the words catching in my throat.

Instead, I surprised myself. “You never bought me that gift you promised.”

“What?”

“That gift. You know, Mom took that shot glass from me and you said you’d get me something. Well, you didn’t.”

Sandi cocked her head, a slow smile parting her lips.

“I’m sure I can find you something great in Florida. What do you want?”

What do I want? It felt like an impossible question to answer right then.

Shifting on my feet, I opened my mouth, stammering. “I don’t, it doesn’t matter—” Sandi stepped towards me, putting one hand on my shoulder to stop me from moving. Her brown eyes narrowed and she looked at me seriously, the kind of look that she might give another adult, an air of respect and mutual agreeability about it like we were working out a deal and she needed me to trust her.

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“You’re going to be okay,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.”

She turned then, not even waiting for a reply. She slid into her car and started it, the loud engine breaking the night’s silence. I stood, in the shadows on the lawn, memorizing her hands on the wheel, the determination in her face as she pulled away from the sidewalk.

As the dirty smoke from her exhaust pipe swirled down the dark street, I said “thank you” even though I knew she couldn’t hear. As I turned around, Mom and Grandma eyed each other with a series of shrugs and nods. I walked past them, straight towards the house, not for one second bothering to ask what they were saying. I already knew.

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Emily Gropp Poetry These First Days

These first days after your death the lake inside me turns over.

You act different.

Or I do.

Difficult to tell.

The empty swing clinks the weighted one.

You step from my body to do it.

Now the old proximity equation we practiced as children: “I can’t see you.

You’re standing too close to my face.”

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