Volume 5 Issue 3 - The Beauty Issue

CONTENTS 4

I Am the Tenderness Beneath JACK M. FREEDMAN, JARED A. RICH, BETH A. GREENE

5

Scarecrow GARY GLAUBER

6

Girl Becomes Woman DILKI JAYASOORIYA

8

beauty BRUCE KAUFFMAN

9

Secret ERIN BOYCE

10

What is True for One STEPHEN FAULKNER

13

The Missing Toe LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZÁBAL

15

Beautiful SHANNON L. CHRISTIE

16

Thank You; Next!

KYLE CLIMANS

18

love softens EMMA ELOISE HUSSEY

19

Two Toothbrushes DON KINGFISHER CAMPBELL

20

Where is the Eye of Beauty?

LOUIE DI GIANNI

21

Tree Rings ALYSSA COOPER why do anything at all is what I wanted to say SAM DAVID

22 24

28

Love Reminiscences EDILSON A. FERREIRA

29

Buying Boots, Plateau Mont-Royal CAROLYNE VAN DER MEER

30

waif aged BOB MACKENZIE

31

Quadrifoglio MEG FREER

32

Young Willow Tree WILLOW SCHLEICH

34

Existence

35

Dearest FERRIS E. JONES

36

Last Summer JOAN MCNERNEY

37

Face in the Crowd JOHN GREY

38

The Woman on a Pedestal NINA TELEGINA

40

Beauty at the Beach Reading JOHN TAVARES

47

Sunday Solitude ANDREW SCOTT

48

Cinderella LYNN WHITE

49

Waltzing with the Morning Glory KEN ALLAN DRONSFIELD

SAJEDA MANZOOR

FEATURE Pearl SHANNON SWIFT

Front Cover

DUSKA DRAGOSAVAC 2 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

Back Cover

BENJAMIN DIONNE

FREE LIT M A G A Z I N E Beauty Editor-in-Chief Ashley Newton

Literary Editor Eunice Kim

Staff Writers

Kyle Climans, Alyssa Cooper, Bruce Kauffman

Contributors

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozábal, Erin Boyce, Don Kingfisher Campbell, Shannon L. Christie, Sam David, Louie Di Gianni, Benjam in D ion n e , Dus k a Dragosavac, Ken Allan Dronsfield, Stephen Faulkner, Edilson A. Ferreira, Meg Freer, Gary Glauber, Jack M. Freedman, Jared A. Rich, and Beth A. Greene, John Grey, Emma Eloise Hussey, Dilki Jayasooriya, Ferris E. Jones, Bob MacKenzie, Sajeda Manzoor, Joan McNerney, Joseph S. Pete, Vanessa Peral, Francesco Reale, Carolina Rojas, Willow Schleich, Andrew Scott, Shannon Swift, John Tavares, Nina Telegina, Carolyne Van Der Meer, Lynn White

Colophon

Free Lit Magazine is a digital literary magazine committed to the accessibility of literature for readers and the enrichment of writing for writers. Its mission is to form an online creative community by encouraging writers, artists, and photogrphers to practice their passion in a medium that anyone can access and appreciate.

Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Or is it in the simple moments: the intricacies of our lives that are at times sloppy and imperfect? Is it recognized too much? Not at all? And to top it all off, how is beauty ever truly defined?

At its core, beauty is all about the combination of a number of qualities that please our aesthetic senses. Who says the sense is restricted to sight?

Perhaps beauty is a feeling; one you get after you’ve spent time with ones you love. Maybe it’s an experience or a memory.

Several of the pieces in this issue touch on the idea that there is beauty in small, precious moments. Shannon Swift’s Pearl reminds us that a terrible event can lead–and link back to–something beautiful. Other pieces reflect on the physicalities of beauty and how it affects us.

Whatever beauty means to you, don’t let the ideals of aesthetics, and the expectations of our soecity, take away from its charm.

Ashley Newton Editor-in-Chief

Contact

editor@freelitmagazine.com

Next Issue

The Humanity Issue July 2019 VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 3

I Am the Tenderness Beneath

JACK M. FREEDMAN, JARED A. RICH, BETH A. GREENE I Am The Fire Alarm Boldly Ringing Vibrancy

I Am The Moor; Murky Depths, Pulsing Eternity

I Am The Wind Blown Medusa, Untamed

I Am The Moot Point.

Savage Against Paranoia.

Employing Miraculous Contentment Passionately.

I Am The Silk, Frail Flight Finding Strength I Am The Keen, Alert Falcon, Soaring Infinity, Endurance, Motivation I Am The Moon, Shine Bright Despite Darkness 4 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

I Am One Soul, Crazy, Broken, Fixable.

Progress...

Necessary.

I Am Sky, Pure Azure Marred; SuicideSculpted Midnights Shimmering, Crepuscular

I Am Mad With Great Levity.

Passion, Freedom’s Panoramic Revelation.

I Am One Life Worth Saving.

Seeking Sunshine, Vicarious Livelihood I Am Red Clay, Flesh Pliant Earthen Outsides Hardening; Impervious, Impregnable.

Scarecrow

GARY GLAUBER You seem genuine enough from a distance, a facsimile that mimics what others deem real.

Yet something is not right and it’s hard to determine what it is from afar.

Your presence scares off ordinary pests, spooked by your outward appearance.

Its beauty and vivacity confound and intimidate.

Your directness, your certitude are positively frightening to some, how you hold fast against winds that sway most lesser souls.

Your strength is what makes you seem so unbelievable, and yet there you are: proud and accomplished, visibly achieving, outstanding in your field.

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 5

Girl Becomes Woman DILKI JAYASOORIYA

i was twelve when my thighs became slick of blood and mango juice for the first time. how do you measure the corruption of girl flesh? by the looks of men. girl, don’t you know? nobody wants rotten fruit even with thirty percent discount. aunties wring their hands in despair. honey, honey, look at you, all teeth and no bubble gum, shaved head and dirty feet like some punk bhikkhunī. girl, when will you learn? bitches don’t get married. so i told mom that buddha had stretched ears too and she says that she would have been fine with that if i only didn’t pull too hard. cuntbleeds, earbleeds, heartbleeds – chill, mom. that’s what tampons are for. i was seventeen when my fingers became slick of coconut oil and the warmth of her skin again. the christian god reminds me too much of my father but i would still like to be baptized with coca cola zero in front of saint mary. girl, you really set a high bar for the rest of us, you know that right?

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FRANCESCO REALE

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 7

beauty

BRUCE KAUFFMAN beauty does not know that it is it is that whisper beneath the flesh it arrives unannounced a small surprise in a day it is gentle more it is the epitome of compassion it is not how it lays before us it is that piece of itself that washes through remains within it is not a picture of itself or of even life it is the reason

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Secret

ERIN BOYCE I carry a secret in a dark forest.

My roots scraped raw but hidden under a mossy cloak of brave words.

I tell no one.

Beauty deceives me now.

Inside every flower a spider waits promising a sharp sting of longing and the shame of a desire to be bitten, to surrender to your poison, to take you inside me, abandoning reason, and tear the tender threads of care I’ve woven around myself.

But, knowing that the cause is not the comfort, I follow a silent path away from you as a warm moist pain still glistens in a tender place.

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 9

What is True for One STEPHEN FAULKNER

H

owever it will turn out, he thought, I will at least have asked her.

The door opened to his knock, the sudden breeze from inside the apartment fluttering the bouquet of carnations he held stiffly in his fist. She thought the gesture sweet and charming, though in her mind he had used the word charmant to tell her how she looked to him.

The movie they went to see was interesting and she made the word sound like a mild curse; once it was said, nothing more of the film was mentioned. So this is the way of it, Ramyar’s mind said, unbidden as he assessed her tone, her mien, her very prejudices.

There were small negatives about her he hadn’t noticed on previous dates and he found that they mattered little. As the evening continued he remained determined to stay on his self-determined course.“I had a lovely time,” she said. And he thought: there it is, standard kiss-off; yet you never can tell what is really meant by it.

“Did you?” he asked. And she said again that she did as she wondered what he had heard in her words that made him want to ask. Had she made that simple declaration sound too uncertain, too desperate, or maybe even an attempt at seduction? She would have to watch the way she said things from hereon if there was something to continue between them. And, with this one, this man, she did want things to continue. She hadn’t liked and respected and found attractive any man all at the same time. Ramyar was the first and, strangely enough, he was a foreigner, an Indian, though still an American despite his dark complexion and slight yet lilting accent and maybe it was that exoticism that added to his allure: the foreignness of the way he presented himself mixed with that gentle ordinariness that seemed to waft off him like an aroma of sweat and vinyl.

“Yes, I did,” she answered him again. And they both wondered if she didn’t sound a bit too forward, too overbearing with her positivity about what should have been such a simple thing. “Would you care to come in?” she said to cover her minor lapse of style. “Perhaps a night cap?”

Ramyar said that he would be delighted; wondering if “delighted” weren’t too strong a word to use. Leslie did not think it too strong, however; she was delighted herself that he had chosen to take her up on the offer. Still worried, though, she thought, After drinks, then what? The back of her mind made an obscene suggestion that, though tempting, she refused, at this early point in their relationship, to even remotely consider.

The drinks were soft. The conversation, once they were settled a few feet apart on her divan, was stiff. The sound of ice clinking in their glasses seemed harsh to each of them as did the sound of their slurping sips, as was the sound of their shifting their positions on the little couch. Comfort is a relative term was a thought that they shared though each using different means of definition.

In their individual minds, though, they realized that something was happening here; something had drastically changed. This was not, after all, their first date. Previously they had been free with their talk with one another, had found each other garrulous and fun.

And so, each responded in equal and natural kind to the other as neither of them had experienced with anyone else. So where had this sudden clamping down on the earlier joy of the relationship come from? Why this sudden turn off?

Bull-by-the-horns, Ramyar thought, hating the sound of that odd cliché. Something I have to say, Leslie thought, turning to say it. For both, it was the same: the warmth of breath propelled by speech touched both his face and hers at the same moment. “What…?” they both said together, a lame and querulous chorus. And they laughed, then hugged and held 10 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

one another. Mostly, though, they laughed in relief.

After the requisite trade-off of “you firsts,” Ramyar drew the figurative straw to say the first word. He momentarily forgot what it was that he wanted to say; was still rubbing the tears of laughter from his cheeks. Then, he remembered.

“What is this thing that we have?” he said. “That’s what I was going to ask. Can we look at what we have and say what it is, this thing between the two of us?” Does that sound like too much like pedantic drivel? he thought.

Leslie looked at the negligible space between them. They were hip to hip on the couch now. She shook her head.

“Only cloth, as far as I can see,” she joked. “You think we ought to do something about that?” And she thought, no, that is much too suggestive, makes it sound like we should be naked together and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea, think that I am so hard up that I can’t wait, that I feel that I am the one to make the first move, give the first hint... Is that what is happening here?

He didn’t misunderstand. Her comment had barely registered for him, he was so intent on his own thoughts and how to word the thing he had come to say. “Hmm,” he said, and then, softly: “Leslie…”

“Yes?” She looked for some explanation for the hesitancy that was evident in the querulous expression on his face, the reason for tonight being so different from the others they had spent together. She watched him with studious intent, wondering if the fun part, the joyous laughter and ability to just accept and be, was all behind them now. She shivered at the idea. “Leslie,” he said again, still hesitant, fumbling. “I don’t know if I can explain what it is. But I’ll….”

“What is it?” She felt stupid for having to ask. She wanted to understand. Maybe there was something he could tell her. But what? Laugh and be fun with me again, she wanted to demand.

“What I was saying before,” he said, sounding a little disappointed, a little annoyed with himself. “About what this is we have between us. What it is... I think that I can describe it now.”She said that it was all right.

“Tell me if I’m wrong.”

“You won’t be,” she said and put her arm around his shoulder then pulled it back, thinking the gesture too clumsy. If nothing else, it was uncomfortable. She leaned her body into him instead, resting her cheek against his chest, gazing blindly askance at a button on his shirt.

“If you tell what you feel, what you want it to be, it will be all right.” For you, she thought, and hopefully for me as well.

Haltingly, then, he told her. The world as he described it, bit by bit, was one that existed, in large part, solely of the two of them. Since it was he that was telling it, Leslie took a secondary role. She was the center of his constructed universe, but he was its master.

She allowed him this myopic view for, being an honest woman, she understood that if she were to tell the story from her own perspective, she would certainly be the one to be the protagonist, the heroine. And my time will come soon, she said to herself. I will not be the only one here to listen and nod.

For a while, then, she did listen, fascinated as his words fell sharply from his tongue, each a crystalline gem fitted into his scheme. First he spun words into strands and complexly intertwined threads that he drew for her in the air: tenderness, caress, kiss, nurture, care, desire. He wove these smaller strands together as if on a hook-loom, each strand set with a gentle twist of the invisible hand, placing each just so. With these and others, then, the basis of his world was laid down.

Then there were the rest of the major building materials, gems sparkling in his hand, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 11

ready to form the superstructure. The first one was “union.” To this he added “oneness” and “communion.” Somewhere in those associations was the word “spirit.” Then: marriage, love, coition, fidelity. She stopped him before it came to that.

“All very well,” she told him, “but listen to this.” And then she conjured up for him her own universe, one where they were an indispensable part but still only a combined two that made up one part of a more expansive whole. Her universe was a ball of packed earth to his bright and artfully displayed and glimmering jewels. And from that spangled, intoxicating array, she took her pick, her deeply considered choices. Most of his words were there when she was done, pressed to her earthy ball of friends and relatives, and for all of this he was glad. They passed it back and forth, this mutually fashioned mind reality that they had each created and that they added to and subtracted from, changing the relationship of things in and on it. But never, they realized after hours of playing in this manner, had they changed the basic premise of it: for all the real and the fantasized, the desire and understanding that it symbolized for them, this ball always had themselves, as a couple, at its very core.

“So what is it?” he finally asked, saying the same thing that he had said before, that which they had originally begun. “This thing between us?”

“A kind of love,” she said wisely. “But one not yet fully developed.”

A tender silence grew. A kiss happened and they let it linger. Soon. Too soon, they both thought. He said that it was time that he should leave.

“Tomorrow?” he asked her at the door. “Dinner?”

She said no, that she and her brother, Hector, had guests coming over. “Thursday?” she said, proffering it as an alternative and a request all at once. He thought about his own itinerary for a moment before agreeing.

When she closed the door behind him, she found herself wishing that he did not have to leave, that he could stay the night. The whole night? Maybe sex? she thought. She had never totally discounted the possibility; still, she thought it an unlikely occurrence for the near future. Though the desire was definitely there she thought it more for loving companionship than just sexual fulfillment. Loving companionship, she thought, liking the sound of the phrase. But I get that from Hector, don’t I? Yes, she thought, but he is my brother, only my brother. And that is a different thing, a wholly different kind of relationship altogether.

Of course, her mind continued with the logical conclusion to that idea, this thing I have with Ramyar is a different thing, too.

As she turned off the lights downstairs, She laughed joylessly at the very idea of her mulling over the differences between the two mes. Still, she mused over their differences, the vagrant subtleties between them as well as the main constructions of her relationships with each of these two men who were now so important in her life.

She slept well that night, though she did have a troubling dream that featured the two-faced depiction of something that could only be described as Janus-like. There was the face of a lovingly leering Ramyar on one side of the demon-god’s head, and her brother Hector’s shy and sweetly caring smile on the other.

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The Missing Toe

LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZÁBAL I stood at the foot of a statute that looked a lot like me.

I could hardly believe my eyes.

The statute’s foot had no shoe. The foot was missing a toe and I wondered if this was the sculptor’s idea. For the death of me, I could not deny the resemblance, except for the missing toe.

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 13

SHANNON L. CHRISTIE

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Beautiful

SHANNON L. CHRISTIE Beautiful lies are what you getWhen a beautiful fallacy is forever kept.

Beautiful devastation is no small featWhen it brings about beautiful grief.

Beautiful nouveau is nothing newYet beautiful chaos is how it grew.

Beautiful sympathy is all I seeI would sure love some beautiful ecstasy.

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 15

Thank You; Next!

KYLE CLIMANS

T

here were only four categories that he had to fill out, and one of them simply demanded a checkmark to say he approved of the terms and conditions.

The other categories asked for, in order of appearance, his name, sex, and age. There was even an option to put down “other” in the sex category. How progressive, he thought to himself as he put down “male.”

It was his name and age that gave him pause. He had been recommended this site by a friend of his, who had known him to be lonely and offered it as a sort of opportunity to explore without risking anything on his part. After four years of being rejected in high school by all the girls he had crushes on, he was willing to give anything a try at this point.

And so, he figured he would go with his real age of nineteen, though he lied about which day and month he was born, in case someone would take that information and use it against him. Maybe it was paranoid, but why not have some caution just in case? Who knew what kind of freaks were on this site?

He didn’t put his own name down either. Instead, he filled in “Ellis” after the kid who had always gone outside the school property to smoke a cigarette after classes were done. He’d never liked Ellis, especially since Ellis always spat on people’s shoes as they walked by.

They usually didn’t dare confront Ellis because of the half-crazed look in his eyes and the permanent sneer on his face, like he was just itching for a fight.

Now that all the information was ready, he was taken to the main forum. Names of those who were logged in appeared in a list on the right side of the screen. Some of them had pictures attached to the names. They were registered users, as opposed to the guests who made up the majority of those listed. Anyone could log in and say whatever they wanted to say as guests. It was harder to do that with a registered account.

He looked at the various messages. People were looking for all kinds of roleplay scenarios, offering their own favorite scenes that they wanted to play out, but there were also people who were advertising how open-minded they were to try anything new or daring.

As he scrolled through the options, he suddenly felt annoyed. What was the joy in doing this? How could he ever be attracted to this sort of thing? He didn’t know who was on the other end of these accounts, even the registered ones. Anyone could lie, post a picture of someone else on this site. He wondered if half the alleged female accounts were actually being operated by women.

“Come have fun with me boyz!” a message flashed out. Clicking on the name of the account, he saw that this person was from India. This surprised him, because he didn’t think that his country was going to be listed. Still, it wasn’t quite so bad, he thought. At least it wasn’t his home city or anything like that.

“Hello” was his first message to the girl from India. He hadn’t even prepared to type the next message before a little text appeared saying that the girl- or person, he figured cynically- had quit the chat site.

So, he continued offering polite greetings to those who caught his attention. Most of them either ignored him or outright quit, while some responded with such garbled English that he was the one to quit the conversation.

As he went on, a thought entered his head; how many of these people weren’t even people? It seemed like so many of them seemed to type the same things over and over again on the general forum that maybe they were just bots set loose to lure people into… well, nothing, because what kind of traps could they really lay? All they could do was waste 16 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

your time for a few seconds at best. What was even the point?

He felt frustrated, as he reflected on the conversation that he’d had with his friend about visiting such a chat site. It was supposedly a place where you messaged beautiful women who would bring your fantasies to life. Or you might help bring their fantasies to life. “How do you know if they’re beautiful?” he had asked his friend, “And how do you know if they’re even women?” His friend had laughed, inhaled more of the joint they were sharing, and stated, “Buddy, that’s what the roleplay is for!”

It seemed bizarre to him now, thinking about this kind of artificial reaching-out to a total stranger. Neither one of you knowing who the other was, not knowing a single thing about each other, here to fulfill something that one couldn’t achieve in their real life with a real person.

“Hey.” It was a new message, from a person identifying as female, apparently 44 years old, from the United States.

“How are you? Open to RP?” was the second message.

He looked at it again, wondering if this was the kind of interaction his friend was talking about.

“Definitely,” he replied, hoping that it didn’t come across as being too eager.

He thought back for a moment to the people in their 40s he had known whom he had fantasized about. There had been his friend’s mother, who had taken him and his friend to a water park for his friend’s 13th birthday. Seeing her in a bikini had been the first time he’d noticed the shape of a woman’s body, how beautiful and arousing it could be. She would be 50 now, of course. Maybe she was online, lying about her age to have some fun? She’d certainly been divorced at the time and might still be today as far as he was concerned.

He looked at the bland name that his new RP partner was using – ‘Valerie’ – and he felt himself get excited at the thought of this being someone he knew, disguised so she could get a thrilling roleplay. Surely women did this too? Why wouldn’t they? His friend said that his older sister had an account on something called Fetlife and apparently even met up with other people on that site, so why not now, where this chat site was concerned?

He tried to imagine who might be talking to him, even as the partner asked him what sort of roleplay he’d like to do. He began thinking about the things he’d always wanted to do, what he’d looked up online the most, and whether Valerie would be okay with what he wanted.

“What sort of things do you like most?” He offered, hoping to get an idea of what she’d be interested in.

There was a pause. He watched the screen eagerly, vainly trying to put himself in her head; what will she want to do? He felt himself going back to that evening a few months back when he and his friends joked around about the high school teachers who must have had insane sex lives outside of their jobs. Would this be the case? Would he get to know more about her? A single, thrilling thought slithered into his mind; would she send pictures of herself? His friend had said those kinds of girls were on here too.

Hurriedly, he added a second message before she could answer his first one.

“By the way, what do you look like?”

He sat back, amazed at his audacity. Would it be too forward? No, he thought, confidence is key.

After a short pause, his eyes beheld her reply: “Notice: Valerie has quit the conversation.”

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 17

love softens

EMMA ELOISE HUSSEY though it reigns true: blood of the skin runs thicker than water of the earth honey is viscous; sweeter than all, and i am sure that her heart brims with syrup; her veins pump nectar her eyes no different from a tap in a maple tree. her lips are undeniably glazed, coated in lush, they move like slow waves in her syrupy sea. puffing savoury sighs, my sweet, she is heavenly every touch is a toothache, every breath is divine.

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BOB MACKENZIE

Two Toothbrushes

DON KINGFISHER CAMPBELL In a plastic cup, face Each other, side by Side, one’s blue bristles Nestled just above The other’s white as if They were an embracing Couple, so romantic Makes me think of (back and forth motion) Us us us us us us us VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 19

Where is the Eye of Beauty?

LOUIE DI GIANNI

Is it a sin to believe in ugliness? It is almost a sin because it alters the trajectory of thought.

Seeing the beauty in ugliness is a challenge of the mind. My mind wavers and I don’t know why. The war can make us ugly—the cold water can wake us up like an electrical charge.

The cold shower centers. The hot shower releases. The cold will lift you up. They won’t tell you the secret of the machine.

The cloudiness of the day looms overhead. The green gets greener and we die in myth.

Dreams of engines on two wheels pass through the mind. The freedom of reality. Try to grasp it.

How does the puddle catch the rain? We pass over puddles like breathing air—and then we feel like we missed something. Thoughts vanish and reappear. Just let them go.

Women pass by. I don’t know what to make of them. Voices and faces in the shopping mall court. The distance of closeness. Walking around in circles like the repetitive dance music playing through the speakers. Particular fashions pass by—they have always been here. I want to really see them. Plants and classical European stores would renew.

Where does anti-mysticism come from? Are we consumed by a consumer culture? Does the colour of her hair matter more than how she would believe in how I think? There is a kind of disconnectedness in multiculturalism. It’s not tangible but it’s there. How do you really communicate a difference in culture? We might have to knock down an old wall to build a new one.

How do we gravitate towards beauty when we have one eye open during the day and one during the night? Freeing the mind is not an easy task. The body is the medium as well as the message. The archetype will lead us to somewhere. Remember the type of arch you pass under.

The veil of beauty on a cloudy day can mislead the eye. If there is something hidden in the corner of the eye, we had better find out what it is.

Drink the lemon water, it will be warm outside soon.

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Tree Rings

ALYSSA COOPER Bones so young that they were supple, like summer grass, so soft that they bowed to the gentlest wind, so forgiving that under pressure, they always bent; they never broke. Now, instead, I am made of kindling, dried out and brittle, ready to catch flame, my skin is cracked like salt flats, like plains of sand that remember an ocean, like when the hell did I get so old? I look into the eyes of old pictures and I barely recognize the face staring back.

This isn’t the body that he remembers, all these new puckers and scars, my skin has replaced itself again and again, it doesn't know his touch anymore, and I hope that it is never asked to remember. I hope that he is never asked to see the girl he knew inside this stranger of a woman, so hard, unforgiving, full of salt, like I am drift wood - I am ready to snap and crack under the weight of his memory.

I suppose it is true that every demon was an angel before they fell, like my field-grass bones were my state of grace, and no one stays pure forever, not in this world of winter mud and burning cold, and somewhere inside these new rings is the memory of my halo, is the memory of his hands, if you press your ear to this twisted knot, you might still hear his child voice, whispering my name.

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why do anything at all is what I wanted to say SAM DAVID

Receding wonder This mirror is trash I’m indispensable in my narrative I’m infallible in my family life I’m industrial in the streets And industrial in the sheets I’m manhood soaked in its own vomit I’m a dog at meal time I’m neurotic beyond all comprehension Blame a father Blame a mother when a father dries Blame a brother when I’m high Get high when there’s no other option Clean up because it’s what I do Get high again on death Preach cancer to survivors Survive cancer to preach again Find a pulpit, call it home Abandon my second wife Be objective about my objects Be mantric about my anxiety Tell lies for no reason Tell lies for one reason Reflect for no one This mirror is trash I’m trash Recurring wonder Beg beautiful Take aim Break bread My neuroses are on display My teeth stains are vulgar I whistle ad hominem and White people type prayers I give advice unparalleled in its absence I take frantically structured breaths And you were good to me 22 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

JOSEPH S. PETE

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 23

FEATURE STORY Pearl SHANNON SWIFT

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W

hen I was seven, my mother told me about my baptism. From a drawer in the back of her closet she carefully took the small white dress that I’d worn, holding it by the Peter Pan collar and stroking the capped sleeves with her thumbs. Laying it flat on her bed where we sat together, she smoothed through the wrinkled lace with a steady hand and a loving look.

“This is your christening dress,” she explained, giving me a tender smile.

“Christening?” I looked back at her, wondering why I had ever been given something so beautiful to wear when I was too small to remember it.

My mother told me about the ceremony: the oil, spread in the sign of the cross along my infant forehead by the sacred hand of a priest, the blessed water washing over my wispy head. She said it was long; that it took place in a beautiful church and that dozens of people came to watch me become a child of God. I contemplated this: a child of God? “But we don’t go to church on Sundays. We never talk about God,” I said, matter-of-factly, “we aren’t religious.”

“No,” my mother responded, “but it’s about more than that. When you’re baptized, it’s like being born again.” It was about starting anew: purity, rebirth, innocence. She explained that I even got a new Christian name, the name of a saint. “And it was important to your very religious grandmother,” she added with a short laugh.

“A new name?” I asked, brows drawn together in confusion.

“Yes, but it’s not the same as your legal name, which is the name you go by,” she said, looking back at me. “For your christening, we decided to call you Helena.”

“Helena,” I pronounced, breathing through the h, rolling the l off my tongue, trying it on for size. “But my name is still Jess,” I said, with a tone of certainty this time.

“Yes,” she confirmed, “your name is still Jess.”

When I was seventeen, I went to a party on the beach. It was the best part about growing up in White Rock. As the neighbourhood kids and I grew older, we began going to the edge of the water at night, starting bonfires and sharing dark liquids out of paper-bagged bottles.

We stayed far enough from the pier so that the lights there were nothing but a faint glow, and the lovers walking hand-in-hand wouldn’t see us in all our adolescent misery. We sat on faded blankets around countless fires and under endless starry skies, sedating our way through the troubles of our youth. This time, we were celebrating an end to the years we’d spent together and a beginning to the lonesome paths that we’d travel on our own, as we grew into our adult selves.

I thought of my mother. She was a beautiful woman, with long sandy hair and the type of eyes that turned to gold in the sunlight. I wish she’d been there to witness me take her form, to see the way my long dark hair hung like hers on my shoulders, the way that my own eyes glowed a dark amber in the hot firelight. I looked down at the exposed length of my legs, at the way my brown skin lit up red in the bouncing reflections of the fire. This had been another difference between us, the dark skin of my father dominating the surface of my body over the pale skin of my mother. She used to drink her morning coffee with lots of cream and sugar; this is the colour I imagined myself to be. Still, I had the shape of her: legs, hands, face, fingers, nose.

“Jess?” I lifted my eyes to the figure above me. He was looking at me with a small smile, face dancing with shadows and warm ember light.

“Hi, Spencer,” I responded, returning my gaze to the pit of burning hot wood. He took the greeting as an invitation and sat down on the striped blanket beside me, sinking slightly into the sand. I smelled rum on his breath when he spoke.

“You probably can’t wait to get out of here,” he said, taking another drink and then offering it to me with an outstretched arm. I looked at him for a moment, then took the bottle VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 25

and helped myself to a healthy gulp. It tasted hot and vile. I had been wrong; it was whiskey on his breath, not rum. Around us, people were talking and huddling close to the fire. Some were even dancing in drunken stumbles, feet churning slowly through the cold sand.

“What I can’t wait for is to feel like that again,” I said, pointing indiscreetly to a couple opposite where we sat. They were lying together, holding hands and pointing at the stars, laughing. One of the girls was my friend Maeve, whom I’d known since her family moved from California to my street when we were twelve. She’d been my closest friend since my mother died. Maeve reminded me of many of my favourite things: steeped tea, raindrops, grey blue skies, a field of lavender. I envied her happiness.

“Wanna take a walk?” Spencer slurred.

I remember getting up and realizing how dizzy with drink I was. It took more effort than I’d expected and I teetered, taking Spencer’s arm for balance, walking with him away from the bonfire, away from our friends. He talked a while as we made our way towards those distant pier lights, rambling on about leaving town. I pretended to listen as I tried to remember the curve of my mother’s cheek, the length of her lashes and the smell of her perfume. We took turns with the bottle, sipping in a pattern of back and forth. After a few minutes I stopped walking, realizing I could no longer hear the murmurings of the celebration we’d left in our wake. Turning to him I suggested that we head back to the fire. It was beginning to feel cold despite the liquor pulsing through my system. He suggested that there were other ways to achieve warmth, bringing a hand up to brush a stray lock of hair from my face. He came close to me, mumbling that my hair smelled of firewood.

Looking back, I was slow to react; I know that now. Maybe I should’ve tried to fall away instead of under him when he pushed me down. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much to drink.

I remember staring at the dark waves as they came into the shore rhythmically. I focused on the water as I lay, pinned to the sandy ground, under his weight. His breath was hot on my neck and I strained my face towards the water, away from his body that writhed forcefully against my stiff one. I was just a body. I tried to be just a body. I pretended I was part of those rhythmic waves, unconcerned and completely powerful; really, it was like I’d been submitted to them.

When I woke, the sky was a steely blue, grey with the colour of night just before dawn is about to break. The tide had come in while I slept. The water nudged me gently with each soft wave. I stood, slowly, wading into its welcoming, cool touch, allowing the water to embrace me as I went under. I washed the sand from my hair and from between my legs. I stayed there for a while, just my head above water, waiting for the sun to rise. I went under once more, and came up for air. I thought about my baptism.

In October I turned eighteen. Back on the west coast, my father used to take me down to the pier for ice cream on my birthday. We’d find a quiet bench, each performing a careful balancing act with the scoops stacked high on our cones, his chocolate and mine strawberry. On the east coast, everything was different. When my birthday came there was nothing but a week of snow and ice. I spent most of the day curled under the covers of a bed that offered no comfort, in a room that felt nothing like home. On the east coast, I answered to the name Helena.

Helena was very different from Jess. She spoke softly, humbly and infrequently. She had a horrible habit of biting her nails down the beds, often drawing blood. She had short hair that ended just above the curving arc of her collarbone. She wore the colours of dark fall days. She was kind, untrusting and easily unnerved. Helena was pure, reborn and innocent.

I lived somewhere outside of myself, outside of my life, on the east coast. I had to.

In the first month that had followed, I’d managed to convince myself that it was a dream.

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I’d gotten too drunk. I’d gone for a walk. I’d passed out on the beach alone. It wasn’t until the nausea began that the suppressed memories of that night rose to the surface in a cruel wave.

She began as an intrusion. An invasion, she was a foreign object, forcing its way into my body. Unwanted, she was a parasite that fed mercilessly on my energy, on my will. As she grew I watched my body stretch, transforming in alien ways with each day that passed. I wanted my mother.

When she was born, I wouldn’t hold her for weeks. She was a bundle of pain that I had not asked for, a weight I should not have been meant to bear. Still, I had not been able to make the choice to escape my sufferings, not when they’d told me she was the size of a blueberry, budding arms. My father crosses by the kitchen doorframe, holding her tightly, and catches my eye. He stops, considering my slumped posture, my expression of stubborn rejection.

“Jess,” he says to me, voice deep and rich, as always, “it is not her fault.”

He has said this to me before. I know, rationally, that he is right. Irrationally, my mind still blames her for not letting me believe it was all a dream. I wish I could talk to my mother. My father is a smart man, but he does not know what it’s like to have a life take up residence inside his body. He doesn’t know the feeling of panic, the slow apprehension that comes with knowing your body is doing all the work for you and that soon, this blueberry has turned into a small human being who needs to be taken care of in the world that exists outside of you, too. I wish I could talk to my mother; although, my mother did not know what it feels like to experience all of this unwillingly. She didn’t know the pain of feeling like a host, rather than a mother.

I stare at her small face, pressed sideways against my father’s broad chest. I sense that she is perfectly aware of her mother’s intent neglect. I notice something then: the colour of her eyes, glowing dark amber in the sunlight that streams through the kitchen window. She seems less alien, somehow. I sense that she forgives me. She is waiting for me.

“Alright,” I say. I try to ignore the look of surprise on my father’s face as he walks to where I sit and tentatively places her in my open arms. I cradle her, meeting her eyes with mine.

We are the same, I realize. There are two of us, now, to fight this pain. My heart opens to her slowly as we sit, feeling the warmth of each other. It is the first wave of warmth I have felt in a very long time. I cry as I hold her. We stay there until the sun has swept across the length of the kitchen, watching shadows as they’re cast in various shapes by the moving light.

When she was four months old, we had her christening. She wore the same lacy white dress with the Peter Pan collar and the capped sleeves that I wore so many years before her. I remember my mother’s hands gliding across the fabric, smoothing out the creases as it lay on her bed before us. I watched as the sacred water was poured over her forehead, wondering how something so small and good had been born from so much suffering. She was a tiny pearl in that little white dress: polished, shiny and glowing with the promise of life.

Her christening name is Margaret, but I call her Margot, after my mother.

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Love Reminiscences EDILSON A. FERREIRA

I have neither the time nor the talent to sing praises to all that have enchanted me in my life on earth.

Someday, I will miss these happy and satiated eyes, my ears, even my heart.

We, who now share this land and these airs, will be no more than sparing remembrance for those who will remain.

In the short time given to me, I want to suck in fury all the honey I can get by on my lips, living the life just like that poet of sweet memory, burning my candle on both sides, my light frightening and pushing away all scarecrows on duty.

Maybe in another life, unknown to me, they give me other days, who knows, even Eternity.

But they never will give me, however, those scarlet red sunsets preceding soft nights, where I have met lovely and unforgettable women, sisters whom our race has refined in such a beauty never seen anywhere or anytime else.

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Buying Boots, Plateau Mont-Royal CAROLYNE VAN DER MEER

They’re oxblood (a word I have always loved) with wooden heels and metal studs up the sides oooh, aaah, says my husband’s mother, leaning in age having tipped her farther forward than she wants to go Her brittle, knarled fingers braise the tawny leather as she asks what size, I tell her they’re right for me she begs me to try them on and I peel down the zipper as she gasps at the workmanship—yes, yes she says, try them So I do, brushing over the silver rivets, as these are what I covet in a pair of boots I hardly need I stretch out my leg, imagine all manner of skirts and leggings to flatter their certain flair My mother-in-law whispers she’ll buy them for me but it’s our secret I nod, kiss her cheek

When we leave, package in hand, she pleads for rest on a nearby bench breath short, heart beating fast She makes excuses, feels guilty for her decline, points out there are no silver rivets to hold her together that quite plainly, she has come undone

Driving home, I feel cold tears on my cheeks I’ll treasure those oxblood boots remember her tiny, tremulous hands caressing them

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waif aged

BOB MACKENZIE she does not see life through windows alone sees far more than any window can reveal sees through the eyes and the hearts of others knows the truth though it is never told her her life has not after all been unkind though long ago it was unkind indeed but she found her way out where some did not carries still the scars and harsh memory to most this woman seems a harmless soul walking peacefully toward her own death fail to see fear and anger not so deep carried forward like some dark reckoning

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Quadrifoglio

MEG FREER

Gold loops twist and turn, an intricate, unending design— quadrifoglio, four-leaf clover.

Imagine lifting the lid of their robin’s-egg blue box the first time, opening a glorious summer sky’s hopes and promises.

I wear my mother’s earrings— delicate, simple, timeless.

Past and present flow through the loops, twist and turn on themselves—years spent in the designer’s studio, our eager study and pursuit of life and love.

Art, indescribably, fills time.

A quote appears on the Tiffany & Co. website.

“Beauty is the promise of happiness”, a marvelous mistranslation of Stendhal: “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur.”

Doubts enter—the gold may only be a cold smudge of genius beside my face, a promise that cannot be removed except by time itself.

But my earrings of hope whisper, “Be still, and know.”

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Young Willow Tree WILLOW SCHLEICH I look up through tender drooping silvery twigs unfurled sighing in the crisp early spring air to bluest sky

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WILLOW SCHLEICH

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Existence

SAJEDA MANZOOR Vast beauty In the ocean Floats like a glacier It is in the azure sky That ties the days and night In the sunrise that brightens Cities, valleys, mountains And the dense population Beauty is in the sunset When it kisses the horizon Spread unique colours onset Beauty is in a caterpillar It flies high and high When it gets the wings With lucid colours To shine bright Beauty is in each flower Tulip, crocus, daffodil and sunflower Of course in the yellow dandelion That catches the eyes of a beholder It is in tiny creatures In the cuckoo’s voice That sings the sweetest song On the oak tree branch

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Beauty is in the dew drop When it touches The fresh new crops Flickering green grass And the floating lotus Beauty is in the waves Rising gently up and down In motion and commotion Beauty is in the prayers of A mindful heart Which sings and beat With emotion It is in a child’s smile Pure like a pearl Full of love and innocence It is in the smile Of a gentle soul An angel in the earth Who cries and smile For the love of a mother Day and nights

Dearest

FERRIS E. JONES Ask me, candied bride, whose eyes so bright They send me messages of love, each night, Am I the dignity you wish to invite, The man, the sublime taste for you?

Ask me, thorny queen, whose divine sleep Calls me to dream so wretchedly deep, Am I the prickly sight one would keep, The man, the fairy tale you knew?

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Last Summer

JOAN MCNERNEY Golden sunshine spilling over cathedrals of trees forest of summer.

Your eyes are oceans of light beams of light soft beaming dancing through rivers of memory.

Forest of rivers drowning in oceans of eyes.

Your eyes when sunset spreads over sand dunes warm golden.

Stars gliding past heaven as night explodes in cathedrals of light.

We bed down together in forest of memories your body so strong golden last summer with you.

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Face in the Crowd JOHN GREY

Best, most immaculate face I’ve ever seen.

It has beauty sewn up but from there it’s gone on to caring and kindness before the first smile breaks across those lips.

Then comes sensuality, personality, likability, romance, intelligence, vulnerability, serenity.

It’s over in the corner, at a coffee house table in a huddle of other faces, but it emerges from the pack to thrill every glance, every wonder.

Does it exist as just those eyes, nose, mouth, the slip of brown hair across the forehead?

And is there a history to it?

Or is every moment, its invention, its creation?

And am I the inventor, the creator?

I’ve had the face in my mind for years and, all of a sudden, it’s escaped, it’s out there.

And in a coffee house of all places, with my one eye on the newspaper and the other calibrating, celebrating.

But then it suddenly rises and there’s a body beneath it.

It’s a person and I took it for a face.

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The Woman on a Pedestal NINA TELEGINA

There is a woman on a pedestal.

She is not me. For I am limb to limb Contained within the limits of my flesh.

But she is infinite – in her perfections.

Like a mesh of beauty, grace, and kindness, So embodied that lust stands to.

But of her body you know too well.

It’s not her greatest glory.

Her magic spark, read any fairy story, Is in her heart.

For she, with but a glance Can heal a lifetime’s wound; or gently holding Your hand unravel any dark foreboding Into the lithe divinity of dance.

She’ll cast her glow Through the bleak hallways of some dusty keep, Rise like a star from an enchanted sleep, Be given to a hero as a prize…

So let her be.

This woman on a pedestal, she is not me.

But measured by her being, Our womanhood is reckoned in the seeing Whether by line of figure, curve of breast Or by more subtle inner beauty blessed We may resemble her. We don’t. We count our losses Reflected, magnified, in this colossus, This towering feminine divine.

We’re chained to her; And so with polishes and glosses We try to imitate a little of her shine.

And how we hate and curse her when we can’t.

We circle round this gleaming monument, ‘Till she’s with all our jealousy and longing girt.

But I know I am better in the dirt.

My feet in mud; that I am for the sinking Into the sweetness and the hurt of life, and drinking Two cups of joy for every one of tears.

And that the years may hang on me, With tragedy, or illness, or gray hairs, But I have breath to catch before I’m done.

This course is to be run, and to be tasted.

So let the goddess watch – I cannot waste it In elegantly paying false respects.

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If I suspect this earth has more for me Than her grand still-life fantasy It’s not that I’m rebellious, or wild But she is womanhood as painted by a child, The way that Lancelots and Supermen, though pure And innocent, and righteous, can’t endure Into maturity; they crumble and they fall, And we let go of them. But women don’t grow old, We fail.

We do not fail. We gain.

Experience is not a stain to be rubbed out.

Why should it be we’re better off without Our life’s full sweetness – like we’re on a diet?

This quiet, and this meekness, and this dread Of growing past the pedestal and being left for dead Are in themselves another kind of dying.

We vie for prizes which we cannot use, Like we can’t fit our feet in smaller shoes, And to be blunt – what is the point in trying?

Would she be wise enough, if she were real, Not to make tyrannies of her ideals?

To know we’re made by action, and by time, Envision seas of new horizons yet, To leave our monstrous vanity behind, Watch it grow tiny, like a statuette, And fix herself some distant star that holds The fragile dreams of an imperfect world – Too delicate, but worthy of belief And leave us free To love her.

But though loving her, to live.

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Beauty at the Beach Reading JOHN TAVARES

T

wenty-one years old, Xavier was a rookie police officer on the Toronto police force for twenty-one months. He was the first police officer to arrive at the scene of the armed robbery. He remembered striding purposefully into the large branch of the bank at Bloor and Yonge Streets where the armed robbery unfolded. Before he became a member of a police credit union, he visited this same bank branch as a customer, a teenager. The branch always impressed him with its spacious size and countless rows of tellers. The robber was well dressed, attractive, with long frizzy hair, a slim waist, and a bottleneck figure. She wore a short black dress with a plunging neckline that revealed cleavage, which immediately caught his eye. Thinking the risk was minimal he didn’t draw his revolver.

Later, Sergeant Cameron said bank employees and customers thought she looked dressed for a job interview at the bank. Frankly, he thought she was wholesome, the kind of girl he’d love to “bring home to mama.” She might have been a model for a clothing catalogue.

Despite her natty dress and groomed appearance, she exuded the smell of cigarettes and cigarette smoke. She held her pistol against her hips and tight dress. When she saw him, she pointed the muzzle at him. Despite the subsequent head injury, he remembered telling her, “Toronto police. You’re taking some fairly drastic action; we need to talk.”

She laughed; practically heckled.

“You don’t want to act rashly.”

She held up her arm and aimed her pistol at him. Xavier thought the threat hollow, the gesture a bluff, the gun a replica. This attractive young woman looked to be Xavier’s age and smelled as if smoking was her passion. She pointed an authentic handgun, but he figured it contained no ammunition or she simply would not shoot. Later, he mulled the instant, recalling how sharp and vivid the memory remained, despite the head trauma. He interacted with the young woman quickly, but he noticed a tattoo: a silhouette of a curvaceous woman on the beach reading a book, on the uppermost portion of her left breast, a finely drawn silhouette tattoo that looked recent. Xavier remembered the photograph of a young woman at Woodbine Beach he took over five summers ago, which won him first prize in a high school photography contest. He entitled the image “Beauty at the Beach Reading.” When the high school teachers who ran the photography club and judged the contest discovered he did not have the subject’s permission to take the picture, they withdrew his entry. They gave the prize, a 35-millimeter single lens reflex camera, to a classmate who snapped a picture of a pair of raccoons rummaging through the garbage.

Afterwards, Xavier forever lost his interest in photography. While those thoughts ran through his head, triggered by the tattoo, she pulled the trigger. She shot him at virtually point-blank range in the head. Fragments of the hollow-point remained lodged in his brain until the day he died. The neurosurgeons determined surgery to remove the exploded bullet would be too risky.

Xavier vaguely remembered his sergeant and supervisor visiting him in the hospital, while he recuperated from his head injury, in a foggy mental state. “You faced this bank robber?”

Xavier nodded to the tall, thin, bald Scotsman, with a few long strands of dark hair neatly combed over his shiny scalp. Xavier even insisted on drawing his Scottish-Canadian mentor a shaky picture, with squiggly lines on a paper bag, taped to his bed table to catch the tissue papers and paper napkins he used to blow his runny nose and clean his messes.

The sketch showed his position in relation to the young woman and his sightlines to the tattoo on her breast. Cameron could not resist laughing in his brogue.

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

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Xavier stammered a reply, a speech affectation he would retain forever after the brain injury.

“She was a looker.”

“You thought you didn’t need to worry about her because she was a young woman.”

Xavier struggled to find the words to explain that his mother, a fiery Portuguese woman, an immigrant to Canada from the Azores, taught him to never underestimate the strength and intelligence of women or their will to power and willingness to commit violence. His brain injury left him fatigued, his tongue unable to find the proper words he was eager to speak. He did his best and stammered, paused, drooled. “You didn’t even take your sidearm out of your holster.”

Xavier nodded.

“She was attractive.”

With a long stream of salvia hanging from the corner of his mouth, Xavier nodded in affirmation.

“You would have loved to have shagged her?”

His arm trembled, as he thought it best not to disagree.

“So you didn’t even lift your revolver from its holster.”

Xavier’s eyelid started to twitched uncontrollably as he nodded.

“You would have loved to have done unspeakable and indecent things with her?”

Xavier shrugged, not expecting the sergeant would use such words. During the robbery, he thought he was acting rational, humane, and even persuasive, in not removing his firearm and aiming or shooting at the suspect.

“Idiot. You let a violent criminal shoot a cop.”

Xavier stuttered, “I—she—we—“ “You let her run free because you thought she was a looker.”

After a minute, Xavier stuttered, “I just don’t believe in the use of force.”

“You’re a bloody police officer and don’t believe in the use of force?”

He managed to stammer a few minutes later, “I mean, I didn’t think the use of force would be necessary.”

“Well, she’s still prowling the streets. We still haven’t nabbed a suspect. She might be waiting for the next opportunity. We even figure someone she knows is a cop, because that’s a .40 caliber Smith and Wesson bullet that exploded in your brain.”

Later, when Xavier got together at the strip club in the east end of Toronto with a few other disabled cops, some with disabilities acquired on the job, including posttraumatic stress disorder, and his Scottish-Canadian sergeant, they recounted the armed bank robbery that left him injured. Many times, they recalled the fine formal dress of the suspect.

Xavier was laid off work as a police officer at twenty-two years of age, due to the memory, speech, and cognitive impairment from the brain damage sustained following the bullet wound to the head. When he thought he was ready to resume his duties as a police officer, his superiors and commanding officers and even the union representative told him he should retire on a disability pension. Sergeant Cameron later admitted he believed their superiors decided to release him not because of his head injury and any ensuing impairment, but because they seriously questioned his judgement in allowing an armed bank robbery to escape confrontation. He was hoping they might have found employment for him in administrative or clerical duties or even work managing the fleet, or even washing cars.

“You don’t negotiate with an armed bank robber,” Cameron said, “or at least one with a predilection to shoot you in the head.”

“How was I to know that at the time?” he stammered.

They had variations of this conversation many times over the years, but the discussion in VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 41

the end was largely academic, the point moot. Invariably Cameron shook his head, sipped his beer or gulped his coffee. He said Xavier had his pension and was living the good life.

Xavier still carried the fragments from the .40 caliber hollow-point bullet in his brain, the shattered lead from the bank robber who fled and became lost in the busy lunchtime crowd around Bloor and Yonge, and was never caught. Whenever he talked to Cameron about the suspect, he tried to explain to him he thought he adopted the right approach because she looked like a decent and respectable young woman.

Over the years, he became aware his pension wasn’t linked to inflation and the everincreasing cost of living. At times, he felt as if he lived at the margins. He became acutely aware of a gloominess early in the morning, as he brewed a fresh cup of coffee, or looked out at the city light from his balcony late at night. Aside from Cameron, whom he considered a former co-worker, or, better yet, a mentor, he had no friends. Amidst hundreds of thousands of people, he lived downtown in a Community Housing apartment complex on Bloor Street West, several city blocks west of the big bank branch where he was shot in the head, but he felt alone. Usually he found solace in a public place, although he felt forever at the fringe of normal human relations in society. Strangely enough, when he took his medications, antidepressants and anxiolytics, he felt at peace and serene, especially when he added an alcoholic beverage–a fine glass of wine–to the mix, but he was still alone.

After he was retired for a few years, he became more aware he had plenty of free time on his hands, time he did not know how to fill. Few police officers he knew from his twenty-one months on the Toronto Police Service associated with him. In fact, he got the impression his brothers shunned him, particularly when he neglected his hygiene, allowing food and drink to stain his clothes, and paid scant attention to his dress, opting for a faded t-shirt, scuffed sneakers, and torn jeans. Occasionally he felt vertigo, dizziness, and an unsteadiness of gait that required the use of a cane.

Still, in the mornings, he ritualistically woke up at six a.m., seemingly ready to work at the police force from which he retired. Weather permitting, he drank strong coffee on the balcony of his downtown apartment, with a view of neighboring towers and their balconies and windows. From his balcony, he occasionally caught a glimpse of a librarian with dreadlocks and a nose ring as she prepared for her day at the central reference library above Bloor and Yonge Street. Once she approached him and asked him if he was the patron who requested the job application for the position that had opened at the reference library. His life seemed to be revolving around the downtown, whereas in the past, while he was still working as a police officer, he usually shunned or avoided the downtown area, even though he often felt the tug and pull of the allure of the entertainment district on a Friday or Saturday night. He could never find a girlfriend.

Often, he found that sitting there on the bench outside the library, smokers would approach him and ask him for cigarettes. He was not sure if it was because he became casual about his appearance or because he allowed his beard and hair grow bushy.

Unfortunately, he had no cigarettes. He never smoked.

In the summer, as he rested and relaxed on the bench outside the reference library, he took off his shirt, baring his hairy chest and paunchy stomach, and slightly humped back.

For a short time, he had certain moral qualms and reservations about his behavior, but, as he aged, he found his belief system and sense of ethics was changing. Now he sported a swarthy tan and smoked the odd cigarette in a fresh pack he carried. Whenever someone asked him for a smoke or a light, he unhesitatingly offered a cigarette. But, if the people were younger, he jokingly asked them if they had identification. Sometimes they asked him if he wanted a sexual favor in return; sometimes he felt inclined to accept their proposition.

Invariably, over a cigarette they would tell him their problems, worries, concerns, even 42 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

their life stories.

He did not mind the earful: he had plenty of time. He said he was a bachelor on a pension, still carrying bullet fragments in his head. When his fellow smokers did not believe him, he showed off the scars from the wounds from the bullet fragments and brain surgeries. In fact, he often found young women were willing, after a few cigarettes, to visit his apartment down the street from the reference library and the park. They even got physically intimate with him, although he hardly fit the image of a gallivant. Besides, from a strictly criminal viewpoint, he did not believe he was doing anything illegal. He was forty-two, brain injured, rapidly approaching middle age. He figured he might as well enjoy the grittier enjoyments, earthly delights, and sensuous pleasures while he was not only still around but also physically capable of those exertions.

His typical morning was uneventful. Just before noon, by the time of his second coffee, while he was reading the newspapers, he was ready for a change of scenery, so he usually took his takeout cup of coffee to the Central Reference building of the Toronto Public Library. He finished reading the newspaper’s business section, seeing how his assets, investments in common and preferred stocks and electronic trading funds, were performing. Sometimes he stood with those he offered cigarettes outside the main doors to the reference library. Then, early in the afternoon, he had a late lunch on his balcony, with a view of the neighborhood apartment towers. The librarian from the reference library with the slim build, nose ring, and dreadlocks, gazed across the distance at him from her own apartment window and balcony. She did not appear to have a partner, which surprised him, since she was so attractive. She looked about his age, so it amused him to see her with a nose ring and dreadlocks.

Finally, after a light snack in the late afternoon, he walked to the secondhand bookstore, on Yonge Street, a few blocks south of Bloor Street and the reference library, bustling with thousands of pedestrians and motor vehicles even as darkness approached. He bought a paperback for fifty cents and took the book to the reference library, where he sat on a bench reading the novel. He often urged himself to visit the branches of the public library to borrow some worthy literature to read, but he started to develop an aversion to visiting the library because invariably something went wrong. He might end up spilling coffee on a reference volume. He helped a disabled patron find a volume or the washroom. He would often get a begrudged reprimand from his librarian neighbor with her hair in dreadlocks and nose ring, the distressed jeans or yoga pants and plaid shirt, in the reference library.

This same librarian with dreadlocks and a nose ring sometimes checked his bags at the entrance turnstile and anti-theft gates. She harassed him over books, magazines, and even newspapers he carried in his duffel bag or backpack, thinking they were library property.

He sometimes crossed paths with her on the walk home, but she greeted his “Hello’s” and “Hi’s” with a cold stare.

Often she asked him for a cigarette. He happily complied, but after he handed her a cigarette, or two, or three, or even a whole pack, depending upon his mood, she did not even say, “Thanks.” Instead, she looked away as if he had made a pass at her. She left with her inscrutable, consistent withering face or scolding expression. At the public library, he sometimes ended up paying a fine or fee for twenty-five, fifty, or seventy-five dollars, for a book he sometimes concluded wasn’t even worth the paper upon which it was printed. Or the book might be an excellent read but he could buy it at the thrift shop for fifty cents or at a garage sale or flea market for a quarter. In fact, he knew he could obtain a better bargain by going to the thrift store. Since he was economy-minded, living on a fixed income, he took the public transit bus to the suburbs, North York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough and shopped garage sales and flea markets for books, hardcovers and paperbacks. At the thrift store, he often found an engaging novel for a low price. He usually ended up having a thoughtful VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 43

read in his favorite café inside the reference library or the open study desks on the main floor. Once he finished the novel, he usually took it to a secondhand bookstore, where he’d sell the book for the cost he paid at the thrift store, or trade it for a men’s magazine.

Once, Xavier stood outside the doors to the central reference library, drinking a coffee and basking in the sunshine of the early summer evening before he returned to his library periodicals. She asked him for a cigarette. He handed her a cigarette which she lit with a matchstick she ignited with her long thumbnail. Somehow, he managed to get into a conversation about careers with her.

“Why don’t you come and work for the library?” she asked.

“Are you serious?”

“Of course. I think you’d make a good librarian.”

“Thanks, but it’s complicated.” He pointed down Yonge Street towards the bank branch at the Bloor Street intersection. “Twenty years ago, this month I was shot by a robber right in that bank branch there.”

She took a long, deep drag and exhaled. He thought he even perceived a smile on her face. “I know.”

He was surprised. “How—did you know?”

She drew on her cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew a thick cloud of smoke in his face, as she thought a moment. “You told me. Besides, my father mentioned it. The shooting was big news at the time. My father was a police officer before he died of lung cancer.”

“Lung cancer?”

She nodded and dropped the cigarette on the cement and stomped on the butt.

“I’m sorry.”

“It was several years ago.”

Early one evening, the librarian, sporting a new copper and silver nose ring and tassels in her dreadlocks, finished her shift and faced him at the same table where he was reading a volume on stock market investing. She had a letter size brown manila envelope at her side.

“What’s in the envelope?” he asked.

“Some library papers.”

The aroma of cigarette smoke drifted about her yoga pants and plaid shirt. She started speaking to him about her love of books. Being academically inclined was not healthy to one’s economic well-being, she said. Then she described her quest to find a career that made her content. She decided to return to university as a mature student and considered returning to a business career. She did not mind working as a librarian in the Central Reference Library, drowning in the monotony of shelving heavy volumes, of which there were over a million, whispering to patrons to be quiet, but oftentimes she felt more like an education assistant monitoring children in an elementary school lunchroom.

“There are over one million volumes in the Toronto Reference Library.”

As she spoke to him, he couldn’t resist gazing at her intently. He couldn’t help remembering the day he was in the bank branch about a city block south, south on Yonge Street, at Bloor Street West, from where they were conversing. Did he tell her he sometimes felt slow, dull, and muddled because of the brain injury, the torn and hemorrhaged brain tissue caused by bullet exploding into fragments and lodging in his head? Instead, he jokingly told her that librarians were the scourges of his life. He said he would return a book, but the librarians would say that they couldn’t find the book. He wasn’t surprised because the book drop that week was overflowing with books that spilled out of the book drop, around which lurked raccoons eating spilled ice cream and uneaten hot dogs and leftover hamburgers and fries. So, he owed the library yet another seventy-five dollars.

The week before, though, he saw the same book in the bookstore remaindered at a price of 44 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

three dollars. The next week he saw the book at a thrift store for a dollar. Another week he saw the book in a cardboard box in brand new condition on the Dundas Street curb beside a dumpster outside an apartment building.

She took a bite from her bagel, sipped her coffee, and nodded in agreement. “You make a very good point. Books are commodities like anything else.” She laughed. Then Xavier complained about the limits on borrowing books on the same subject. He griped about the letters the library sent him informing him the book he requested on interlibrary loan had a waiting list a hundred patrons long. Or the robotic telephone call from the library that told him the book he was reading and waited a year to borrow was due after only a week. She offered him an oatmeal raisin cookie from her lunch bag and placed the brown manila envelope in her handbag. “I think the word you were looking for is bane: As in librarians are the bane of my existence.”

“Bane?”

“Yes, could you say that, please?”

“Say what?”

“Bane.”

“I just did: bane.”

“No. I want to hear you say bane in the context of a sentence, as in librarians are the bane of my existence.”

He felt her legs brush against his pant leg. “Why?” “Because your voice turns me on.”

With an athletic grace and physical prowess he had not expected, she planted her foot on his crotch and wriggled her toes against his groin, and he found himself aroused.

“Say it: Librarians are the bane of my existence. Say it, please: say bane because then you’ll be demonstrating proper word usage.”

“Librarians are the bane of my existence.”

She looked around and quickly kissed his cheek. She grinned. “There, you just made my day.” Taking a bite from her bagel, she showed him thepchewed bits of bread and cheese and salvia on her tongue. Eventually, they ended talking about books on feminism, and mostly he listened. By the time the vast Central Reference Library closed, the summer sun was setting and darkness shrouded the busy downtown streets.eHe casually invited her to his place for some coffee. They could smoke cigarettes across the coffee table instead of staring at each other across the distance from their balconies. He meant the offer in a sort of chiding gesture, but she accepted, laughing with a forced hilarity. Smoking another cigarette he offered her, she said she would love to have coffee with him at his place. Arm hooked in arm, they walked to his apartment.

In his kitchen, he emptied several teaspoons of finely ground coffee into the filter basket of the percolator ready to brew a fresh poe. She interrupted, saying she preferred instant coffee, the stuff he drank when he consumed too much strong coffee and was suffering from the jitters. In fact, she insisted on instant coffee, which he found from the back of the kitchen cupboard. First, he washed and rinsed the inside of the kettle. He could not remember the last time he used the kettle or boiled water, since he definitely preferred to microwave precooked frozen dinners. He smiled as she started to boil the water in the kettle. While the kettle of steaming water approached the boiling point, she scooped a heaping teaspoonful full of the instant freeze-dried granules into a coffee mug and set it beside him.

She smiled. “I noticed that you’re a vociferous reader—or should I say a voracious reader.

Do you like fairy tales?”

“Fairy tales? Why would I want to read about fairy tales? I haven’t read fairy tales since grade school, but I read plenty.”

“I know you’re bookish. I’ve seen you reading all kinds of books and magazines nonstop VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 - THE BEAUTY ISSUE 45

in the reference library. But you should read fairy tales. I believe folklore is among the highest form of literature, especially any tales by the Brothers Grimm. I don’t know why people think they’re suitable reading for children; unexpurgated the texts are riddled with wanton cruelty and gratuitous violence.”

He gazed at her in puzzled bemusement. “Yes, I suppose the subject matter is rather grim.”

Then, while they waited for the water to heat up to boiling point, she asked him why he didn’t unzipper his pants. Initially he was slightly amazed and then he felt alarmed at the charged, provocative turn their conversation took.

“You do arouse me,” she said.

As the kettle started to whistle, she encouraged him to loosen his belt, unzip his trousers, and take out his member. She gingerly strolled to the stove for the kettle. He could not help noticing how graceful she was on her feet. Ho noticed e tattoo on her breast: the figure of a woman on a beach reading, the inked image that reminded him of the photograph that garnered and lost him a prize in his high school photography contest. Yes, in that intimate moment he saw the tattoo on her breask. He tried to remember where he had seenoit previously, since the silhouette looked so familiag. He held out the mug, thinking she was going to pouf hot water for instant coffee. She held the kettle over him and emptied a steaming stream of the boiling water onto his lap and groin.

“You’re disgusting!” she screamed.

He groaned in pain, clutching himself, and then pulling back, winced, and contorted his face in pain.

“You don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to? Picking up college girls and ditsy women on the street and luring them with fucking cigarettes! It makes me sick, so mad I can hardly control myself!”

She shook and trembled as if she suffered a neuromuscular disorder. His skin and genitals scalded, he gasped and groaned with pain.

“Go ahead!” she screamed and tossed him his cordless telephone. “Call the fucking cops!

They’ll probably laugh.” She grimaced and heaved as she took a deep breath. “I live in an apartment across the street. I see what you do here. I see through your windows, you hardly shut the curtains! You’ve absolutely no sense of decency, respect, or equality.” She hurtled her cigarette down in the ashtray. As he grimaced in pain, he mulled over the tattoo, wracking his brain at the familiarity the design invoked. She threw her plaid shirt and denim jacket and the door slammed as she hurried from his apartment, the lipstick stained filtered cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

He managed to retrieve the cordless telephone and dialed the taxi company for a cab.

When the dispatcher heard he needed help getting down to the street level for the taxi, she volunteered to call an ambulance. Xavier didn’t want an ambulance or the attention of paramedics, but he realized he had no choice and told the dispatcher he’d call himself.

While Xavier waited for the ambulance to arrivd, he noticed the brown manila envelope on the coffee table.eIt wasn’t sealed and contained a job application form. She had written instructions on completing the form in longhand in a memo with library stationary. Beside the documents was a pen with the reference library name and address. She told him to leave the application and a cover letter with Eden in human resources on the main floor.

She told him she’d be more than happy to have him use her name as a character reference.

He winced.

“You forgot your pen,” he said to no-one in particular and tossed the writing instrument to the side. Having known her from the central reference library for so long, he felt surprised when he realized he still didn’t even know her name.

46 FREE LIT MAGAZINE

Sunday Solitude ANDREW SCOTT

A breath of fresh air over the first cup of coffee.

The perfect way to start this day.

I am looking over the “to do� list and setting it aside for the greater cause.

Scanning the music shelves for the listening of the day.

Randomly pulling what will be heard in the background of the mind.

It never matters the type, jazz, rock, classical, blues or country.

Anything may be used as the soundtrack of imposed solitude.

So many options on what to relax and read to with a home bookstore with choices to make, crime, horror, fantasy, fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

Close my eyes and put hand out to pull a surprise.

Inside the covers, on the pages, the mystery of the day will be revealed on where the mind will escape.

Locked door, telephone off, coffee on, the ingredients for a peaceful time in a chair that transports me away from the rigors of life outside.

The one day to replenish the soul from the real world of hits and misses.

The emotional turbulence that is felt along the way in every day life it is swept away for just one day taken away in the music, books and sanctuary of my Sunday solitude.

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Cinderella LYNN WHITE

In her dreams she would go to the ball.

She’d meet her prince. and dance with him unforgettably so unforgettably that he would search for her later, search until his lost love was found again.

With a poetic little spell and a wave of her wand the fairy godmother made her dream come true.

We read it!

We heard it!

We know it!

Well, we know that the ball gown and transportation were sorted but who the fuck taught her to dance?

Cracked ankles.. crushed toes.. bruised feet.. these things might have led to a different outcome.

Maybe the glass slippers were magic and carried her, step perfectly in time with the music.

But we should have been told even in a fairy story, especially in a fairy story we should have been told.

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Waltzing with the Morning Glory KEN ALLAN DRONSFIELD

Mysteries inhaled in an alcoholic fog, magpies crowd upon the rotting dead.

Redwoods reaching for a sky of light of balanced upon the edge of new dread.

Bow your head in a solemn reverence as pious thoughts bleed unto the soul.

Finding your way in the Cave of Hades, watching life through a crystal fish bowl.

Shaking your head at an ignited spark; 9 volt battery to the tip of your tongue; while squeezing a faithless nerve to tears; touch once again and taste of the eclipse.

Leaning on a fence near a lighted pole, a long sip of whisky brings calmness home.

Scream in fantasy, or an alcohol dream.

Think I’ll go waltz with the Morning Glory.

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OUR CONTRIBUTORS...

Without the submissions from writers, artists, and photographers, Free Lit Magazine would not be possible! Please take the time to visit other websites linked to projects our contributors have been involved in, as well as the websites/social media platforms run by some of this issue’s contributors: KYLE CLIMANS - Twitter SHANNON L. CHRISTIE - Instagram, Twitter ALYSSA COOPER - Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook SAM DAVID - Website, Instagram BENJAMIN DIONNE - Website, Instagram, Facebook

(Model: VANESSA PERAL - Instagram) DUSKA DRAGOSAVAC - 500px Page, Instagram KEN ALLAN DRONSFIELD - Website, Facebook, Twitter EDILSON A. FERREIRA - Website DILKI JAYASOORIYA - Website FERRIS E. JONES - Website BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Finding a Voice on 101.9FM CFRC BOB MACKENZIE - Facebook, Amazon Author Page, Reverbnation FRANCESCO REALE - Instagram CAROLINA ROJAS - Facebook IRIS RUSSAK - Website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter WILLOW SCHLEICH - Website, Instagram NINA TELEGINA - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter LYNN WHITE - Website, Facebook

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