2018 Freshwater Literary Journal by Freshwater Literary Journal

Freshwater Literary Journal 2018

Freshwater Editorial Board 2018 Julia Alexander Lynn Johnson Ryan Russin Carissa Satryb Derra Tennis Faculty Advisor: John Sheirer

Cover Photo and Design: John Sheirer Interior Design: Victoria Orifice and Miranda Stephens

Freshwater Literary Journal is published annually by Asnuntuck Community College. We review poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The upcoming reading period will be August 15, 2018, to February 15, 2019. Responses sent by the end of March 2019. Poetry: Three poems maximum, up to 40 lines each. Prose (fiction or creative nonfiction): One or multiple pieces up to 1,500 words total. No previously published material. Simultaneous submissions considered. No snail-mail submissions. Email submissions to Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu. The 2018-19 Freshwater Student Writing Contest will focus on poetry. The contest will be open to full- and part-time undergraduate students enrolled during the 2018-19 academic year at Connecticutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s community colleges and public universities with an entry deadline of January 31, 2019. More information will be available by September 2018 at www.asnuntuck.edu/freshwater. We can be reached at Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu; Please follow Freshwater on Facebook: FreshwaterACC.

Table of Contents 5 / Freshwater Student Writing Contest, 2018 8 / First Prize: “Finding Beauty in the Pain,” by Raygan Zononi 11 / Second Prize: “Portrait of the Writer as Cat Food,” by Sarah Velcofsky 14 / Third Prize: “Thirty Years up in Flames,” by R.J. Caron 18 / First Honorable Mention: “I’m in College,” by Abigail Burson 21 / Second Honorable Mention: “Fourth of July Foul Up: A Bad Feeling Leads to a Boom,” by William Besner 25 / Third Honorable Mention: “Shits-Creek,” by Dorian Xanyn 29 / Gale Acuff: “This Side Up” 31 / Julia Alexander: “Roadkill” 33 / Geer Austin: “Riding After School” 34 / Cathy Beaudoin: “Where Dreams Come Alive” 38 / Robert Beveridge: “The Death of Fire” 39 / Ace Boggess: “What was the Worst of your Nightmares?” 40 / Gaylord Brewer: “Alone at the Homestead” 41 / Patrick Brown: “Steamer Train Engineer” 43 / Peter Neil Carroll: “Finance” 45 / R.T. Castleberry: “A River, then the World” 46 / Corey D. Cook: “Long Sands Beach (York, Maine)” 47 / Corey D. Cook: “Nana’s Last Boat Ride” 48 / Zack Dempsey: “I Just Enjoyed the Ambulance” 51 / Eric Greinke: “Another Old Photo” 52 / John Grey: “A Modest Storm by All Accounts” 53 / Jessica Handly: “Filthy Mouths and Bad Attitudes” 57 / Ruth Holzer: “Make-Believe Ballroom” 58 / Ruth Holzer: “Three Gratitudes” 59 / Ann Howells: “Change of Season” 60 / Ann Howells: “Relinquishing Paradise” 61 / James Croal Jackson: “Last Night’s Bonfire at my Desk” 62 / Lynn Johnson: “Aprons” 66 / Jeffrey H. MacLachlan: “The Music Box” 67 / Jeffrey H. MacLachlan: “Delivery” 68 / Polly Martin: “The Next Chapter” 71 / Jenean McBrearty: “Things of Wood” 72 / Kevin J. McDaniel: “King of Pop Warner” 3

73 / Ken Meisel: “Lorraine Motel, Mullberry Street, Memphis” 75 / James B. Nicola: “Sunday Morning” 77 / Victoria Orifice: “Tobias Wolff is not a Sociopath” 80 / Simon Perchik: Untitled 81 / Aiden Pleasent: “All the Better” 84 / Ellis Purdie: “Muscle to Bone” 87 / Stephen R. Roberts: “The Raft” 88 / Stephen R. Roberts: “Breakfast Fix with Morning Birds” 89 / John Timothy Robinson: “Black Sandstones” 91 / Kathleen Roy: “Harbinger” 92 / Kathleen Roy: “Keeping the Art in Rinehart” 94 / Kristin Santa Maria: “Unexpected Endings” 97 / Terry Sanville: “Eating Early” 102 / Carissa Satryb: “Partner in Crime” 106 / Abigail Skinner: “Flat White Sky” 111 / Richard Smith: “Catapult Launch—2” 113 / M. Stone: “New Eyes” 114 / M. Stone: “Endless Days Done All too Soon” 115 / Jeffrey Warzecha: “Where Can I Find a Hairdryer Out Here?” 116 / Diana Woodcock: “Clinging” 118 / Contributors Notes

Freshwater Student Writing Contest 2018 Our 26th annual contest was open to full- and part-time undergraduate students enrolled during the 2017-18 academic year at Connecticut’s community colleges and/or public universities. This year’s contest focused on memoir essays that reflect on the writer’s personal experience up to 1,500 words. This year’s judge was Bernadette Duncan, author of Yappy Days: Behind the Scenes with Newsers, Schmoozers, Boozers and Losers, a memoir chronicling her career as a producer for radio and television talk shows. Judge’s commentary on the winning essays: I was so moved by the window into these lives. I took notes on all of the essays because that allowed me to feel my way through this—not just think. After some reflection, I was able to see which essays had “legs,” so to speak. I wanted to see how they played out in their impact and lasting feelings. What a treat to participate in this contest.

First Prize: “Finding Beauty in the Pain,” by Raygan Zononi, Asnuntuck Community College The heartache flew off the page and haunted me for days. The writer speaks directly to the reader, and with that crafting choice, she grabbed me by the eyes, ears, and heart. The depth of emotion is immediate. A deep-dive. The reader does not need to be a parent to understand the universal feelings of pain and loss. This author delivers moments of acceptance while she strives to fit into her constantly changing world. By the end of the piece, there is hope and a sense that maybe she has achieved peace in the pain.

Second Prize: “Portrait of the Writer as Cat Food,” by Sarah Velcofsky, University of Connecticut

This memoir hits all the marks: irreverent, funny, jaw-dropping honest, and just plain intelligent. The writer “inventories” her personal life right there before the reader, intertwining quotes from a diary with thoughts from her current personal philosophy. She seeks truth and accepts that sometimes there are no answers. And that, of course, is an answer. I like her courage. I wish this were a book.

Third Prize: “Thirty Years up in Flames,” by R.J. Caron, Asnuntuck Community College This writer won me over with his steady delivery and voice, as well as a gift for dialogue and vivid scenes. The father-son dynamic feels honest—and suggests trouble with alcohol (without judgment or “knock-you-over” emotion). His down-to-earth style offers an honest window into the real struggles of a working dad and the trials of family life.

First Honorable Mention: “I’m in College,” by Abigail Burson, Asnuntuck Community College This writer takes us on life-threatening dramas in the drug world that are mesmerizingly vivid. We know she has grit and can fight back with intelligence, but it’s terribly unsettling to imagine her world with lines like, “Black eyes pinned like a snake stare back at you …” The title gives hope that the author has found a positive path.

Second Honorable Mention: “Fourth of July Foul Up: A Bad Feeling Leads to a Boom,” by William Besner, Asnuntuck Community College This suspense-driven story is full of forewarnings and intensity. The writer’s inner- and outer-conflicts with his brother draw the reader into the many challenges … all the while the clock is

ticking. Talk about pressure! And—oh, no—there’s a baby in the mix!

Third Honorable Mention: “Shits-Creek,” by Dorian Xanyn, Asnuntuck Community College This writer is all mischief—and presents realistic characters who are caught up in a power-play loaded with attitude. It’s a dance of human nature. Not only does the dialogue feel real, but the voice the writer chooses is uniquely his.

First Prize

Finding Beauty in the Pain Raygan Zononi It makes sense that the first story I would tell would be my own. In my search for the perfect story, I found myself deep within the abyss of my worst nightmare. I want to tell you, so you can feel the beauty of pain—what it steals from you and what it gives back to you. The crosses we bear are so heavy, aren’t they? We hide within ourselves, because the fear of letting go—letting others see what you hate most about yourself—is more frightening than living inside the walls of our own prison. We live in fear and in isolation because at some point in our lives, someone told us it was better there. Somehow the phrase, “It takes a village,” became a myth, a story or legend passed down from a time when life must have been more simple. Raising children is hard. It’s a combination of losing and finding yourself all at once. You lose who you were but revel in the newness of who you become. Then, after the years pass and the newness of parenting morphs into routine, you completely forget who you are. Because everything becomes about them. Raising children with special needs is harder. You begin to lose yourself the very first day you hear a diagnosis. Your every step, breath, conversation, sleepless night, tear ... is about them. Raising a child with special needs, while you battle your own mental illness, is hardest. There is so much fear there. You’re battling wars with IEPs and programs for your child, fighting the good fight to get them what they deserve, all the while, inside, you’re screaming, “I’m drowning! Can you see me? Help me, please. Don’t let me let go!” But you can’t find the right way to actually get the words out. How will I be judged if I do? How will people respond? Will my children be taken from me when I ask for help? Mine were. It’s not easy to tell you this. I wonder what you must think of me? I never hurt my children, never neglected them or put them in 8

an unsafe situation. I was crying every day for weeks. When my depression hit me like a hurricane, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stop the tears, and my children had to watch that. Every day. I knew it wasn’t fair to them. I reached out to every person I could think of, begging them to take my babies so that I could get help. But we all have lives, jobs, kids, obligations. Maybe they, too, were battling their own illnesses. In some ways, I felt my asking was unfair. It might have actually been unfair, but I also think I didn’t ask for help from the right people. For the sake of privacy, I will stop here, so as to not hurt the ones who couldn’t be there. Help came. But it started as the most painful experience a parent can go through. I asked the state Department of Children and Families to take my babies. Now, I know what you must think of me. I know what I would have thought about you. How could I do that? What kind of mother am I? I gave birth to them. They are my responsibility. But it was also my responsibility to make sure they were well taken care of, not subject to a mother who struggled to get out of bed each morning. I did what I thought was best, and that’s all we can do, isn’t it? I spent eight days inpatient. The first two days, I cried pieces of my heart into every pillow or sleeve. I regretted what I had done. Part of me still does. Slowly, I began to allow the other patients into my darkness, and they allowed me into theirs. The healing started as I began to see how beautiful it was to share my hurt with others who also hurt, sometimes far more than I did. I absorbed their stories, their trauma, their tears. I saw that I wasn’t alone. Maybe my story was unique, but my pain wasn’t. Why do we hide from each other? How did we become a race who fights against unity instead of offering our open arms to each other? Do you know how beautiful, how healing, it is to let go and let others see how beautiful we are, in spite of our flaws? We are all a little bit damaged. We are all hurting in some way. We are all unique, but entirely the same. We are all strength in weakness. We are all capable of incredible things. We are all imperfectly, perfect. My journey is only just beginning. I have a long battle ahead. It won’t come without its fair share of wounds and scars. I will have to prove myself and show a group of strangers I entrusted my children to that I am okay enough for them to come home. I will

cry. I will hurt. I will miss and, at times, feel empty. In turn, I know I will also grow. I will fight. I will roar my personal battle cry. I will bring them home. And I will heal. To all of you, let it go. Let the wounds within you become visible. Let yourself love someone you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. Vulnerability is not a weakness; it is a strength we all forget we have. Do this, and maybe together, we can be everything we were meant to be.

Second Prize

Portrait of the Writer as Cat Food Sarah Velcofsky On October 6, 2017, after a few lines of musing in my journal about how much of my life I’ve spent setting clocks, I think I came out of the closet. “Starting to wonder if I’m a lesbian or asexual,” I wrote. “The thought of having sex with a man is kind of repugnant, but sex with a woman seems slightly better …?” My journal is supposed to be the place where I lock away painful and confusing thoughts, never to be thought again, but this one keeps dogging me. I suppose it is true that I do find the idea of sex with a woman marginally more tolerable than sex with a man. In my mind, there’s a level of common ground, familiarity, freedom from judgment. A woman might not be grossed out by my apathy toward shaving my armpits. A woman might be more tolerant of my blubbery belly that will probably never completely go away. It’s not that I think lesbians don’t have standards. I just think they have a more realistic and sympathetic view of a woman’s body than a man who thinks we pee and bleed out of the same hole. “I think it’s just insecurity over being a 21-year-old virgin,” I continued in my journal, noting in parentheses how much it pained me to commit that to paper. Make no mistake, it still does— no one in my life other than my therapist knows that deepest and darkest of secrets. Maybe a woman might be a little more tolerant of the awkward fumbling and the mild panic attack I might have if I ever actually find myself in someone else’s bed. After all, a lot of queer folks don’t discover their identities until well after the sexual awakening that we’re expected to have in high school, or freshman year of college at the very latest … right? I told myself that I would lose my virginity freshman year, but the year came and went without going any further with a boy than watching Amélie in my dorm during move-in weekend. After that, I told myself that I had to lose my virginity before I turned twenty, because then I could at least say I was a teenager when I lost it. I did take a tiny step in the 11

right direction: I had my first kiss. Granted, it was only two months before I turned twenty, it was with a complete stranger in a club in Edinburgh during a Kanye West-themed night, and the feeling of someone else’s tongue in my mouth is one that I shudder at to this day. But he seemed nice, the DJ’s playlist was on point, and any clumsiness on my part could be excused by those five or so shots of store-brand vodka that my friend and I knocked back before heading out. At least it’s funnier than your typical “kissing-myneighbor-behind-the-shed”-type first kisses. “Maybe sex and relationships just don’t interest me, because I feel like I would have gone and gotten myself a boyfriend by now if I really wanted one, or found someone I thought was worth the time,” I wrote further. Maybe there’s a kernel of truth to this one. I’ve never really pined over a guy in real life, just ones that I make up. Ones that are sweet and gentle, know how to cook and clean, and don’t make weird comments when I tell them that I’m not changing my last name if I get married. That’s part of the problem—no real person could ever measure up to those creations because I imagine them, so of course they’d be perfect for me. I never really liked any guys in high school because, regretfully, none of them looked like they could be the frontman for a Misfits cover band. And no guys in high school liked me either, probably because of my weight and my shitty attitude, so I felt like it was at least partially out of my control at that point. In college, I started running into more or less the same problem. I had a hard time connecting with people on a platonic level, much less on a romantic or, god forbid, a sexual level. My mom attributed my predicament to my Resting Bitch Face™, saying that no one wanted to talk to me because I looked angry all the time, and that I needed to be more aware of my facial expressions if I wanted to make friends or, by some chance in hell, land a boyfriend. Now, as a senior in college, I still feel fairly ambivalent about sex and relationships when I’m not drowning in the shame of my inexperience in those areas. I still recoil when men try to get close to me, physically or emotionally. I fear disappointment—my brother and my dad are perennial sources of disappointment, so why should any other man be different? I fear being disrespected. I

fear having to spend my life cleaning up after a manchild who was never taught how to do anything for himself. I fear judgment. I fear being abused. So, what about women? I feel infinitely more at ease around women than I do around men, but I don’t feel like a lesbian just because of that. And I don’t know if I’m completely asexual if I still hope to someday wake up at 11 a.m. on a Saturday morning next to my soulmate, eat an everything bagel, and watch Antiques Roadshow with them. But if I have enough fuel to write this essay, then I don’t think I’m completely straight either. “Being celibate forever does free up a lot of time for hobbies,” I concluded in my journal, “but it also inevitably ends in dying alone and being eaten by my cats for two weeks before anyone finds me, so I’ll have to weigh my options carefully.” My cats will be named Barney and Roberta.

Third Prize

Thirty Years up in Flames R.J. Caron In the small town where I grew up, a trio of ski mask-wearing men kidnapped three security guards at gunpoint. After they drove away, a series of ground-shaking explosions sparked an intense blaze, resulting in 4,000 men and women losing their jobs. Amazingly, no lives were lost at the destroyed manufacturing plant. I remember that cold winter night like it was yesterday. It was March 1, 1975. I was twenty-five, had little money, and still lived with my parents. They rented the lower level of an old green duplex in Shelton, Connecticut. At that time, Shelton housed huge factories that hugged the Housatonic River. My father, Bob, also known as “Speck” by his many buddies, worked at the largest plant for thirty years. The plant had been recently purchased by a businessman named Charles Moeller, and it was home to the Sponge Rubber Products division. The red-bricked building was enormous: three city blocks long, one block wide, with two floors. That night, I was heading home from a party in New Haven. I was buzzed yet clear-headed enough to make the ten-mile drive home. When I reached Derby, the small town across the river from Shelton, I couldn’t believe what I witnessed: clearly visible was the Sponge Rubber plant with a blindingly bright reddish glow hovering above it. As I drove closer, flames and billowing black smoke penetrated the sky! “What the hell! Gotta tell dad!” I shouted to myself. Rushing into my parent’s bedroom, I forcefully shook my father and yelled, “Dad! Wake up! Your factory’s on fire!” It was about five-after midnight, and my dad had been snoring loudly when I ran in. “What?” my father asked, in his groggy, smoky voice. “Sponge Rubber’s on fire!” I was full of nervous energy, completely awake, and my high had worn off. My father’s bloodshot blue eyes sprang completely open. “What part?” he cried out. 14

“The whole thing!” I responded. “The whole thing?” he echoed back, confused and shocked. “Yup. All of it!” I often joked and kidded him, but he knew by my tone that I was serious. He sat up quickly and practically sprang out of bed. Grabbing his Coke-bottle glasses, without which everything was a blur, he got dressed and we drove to the site. Not a word was said on that five-minute ride. Parked atop a steep hill, we looked down upon the surrealistic nighttime nightmare. The temperature was in the teens, and the first thing I saw was streams of ice surrounding the fire hydrants. There were at least fifty firefighters with high-powered hoses blasting water on the areas with the most severe blazes. Bright red-and-white lights flashed continuously. Ten fire trucks were at the scene, with volunteer firemen from five towns. They focused on Building 4, closest to the river, where the fire was totally out of control. Portable spotlights illuminated the area, and between them and the flames, it was bright as day. Frigid steam shot from the firemen’s mouths. They were battling the extremely hot fire while engulfed in the crippling cold. A few brave men slipped on treacherous ice while either running toward or retreating from the smoke and flames. Sirens sounded and horns blared again around 1 a.m., and another five fire engines drove into the battleground. Another twenty or twenty-five men engaged in the firefight. They wore bulky black coats, and helmets, which displayed their departmental emblems. The men fought off frostbite by wearing gloves. I watched them clutch the water-spewing, high-powered hoses against their bodies for stability. “This is bad,” my father mumbled. His voice sounded chokedup and trembling. I took my eyes off the fire and glanced at him. Maybe an illusion was cast due to the poor lighting, or my father’s appearance reacted unfavorably from a sudden reality check. But I swore he aged ten years over the past twenty minutes: his hair seemed grayer, and his forehead wrinkles were more pronounced.

Obviously, my dad was extremely cold; he kept pacing and shivering, trying in vain to get warm. So far, he’d been through six Pall Mall cigarettes, and I knew there’d be many more to follow. My father rarely shared his feelings or concerns, but I knew he was worried. He was fifty-five years old, too young to retire and possibly too old to begin a new job. His pay was decent, but no money was saved, since he lived paycheck-to-paycheck. A good chunk of change went toward his vices: his smokes and his frequent bar visits. My father was convinced he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was. Although he didn’t drink before or during work, from the moment his shift ended until he got home and nodded-off in his recliner, he was “feelin’ good,” as he used to call it. “Dad, wake-up and go to bed,” I’d often say. “You’re snoring!” “No I’m not. I‘m just resting my eyes,” he’d automatically responded. With the flames still eating away at the factory, my dad removed his glasses and wiped his tearing eyes with his trembling hands. I’d only remembered seeing him cry less than five other times. I thought the last time was when he was told that my mother had tuberculosis. “C’mon Bobby. Let’s take a walk,” he said. That was about 1:30 a.m., and the fire was still lighting up the darkness. “I need a couple of belts to thaw out,” he mumbled, trying to justify his craving some booze. He often gave me lame reasons why he’d go out to drink. My father never seemed to care that I responded to his excuses with a degrading shake of my head, followed by a loud sigh. “Hey, Speck!” the half dozen guys hollered when we walked in to the small neighborhood bar. It reminded me of hearing everyone at Cheers yelling, “Norm!” “Nice night for a fire,” my father sarcastically said. The guys laughed. “Gimme a shot and a beer, George,” he told the bartender. That was his “usual”: Calvert whisky with a glass of draft beer as a chaser. Three or four of what are now called boilermakers would give him that “pie-eyed” look.

I drove us home a little after two in the morning and supported him so that he wouldn’t stumble into the wooden hallway walls and wake my mother. Although she, like he, was a loud snorer. My father didn’t have to work the next few days following the blaze; the firefighters made sure every final ember was extinguished. He spent the next month working with the clean-up crew, sweeping and carrying charred debris that filled a fleet of dump trucks. After that, my dad collected unemployment for a few months. He then worked six months at a local paper mill, only to be let go without warning. My father’s unemployment compensation expired, and he didn’t find another place to hire him. His working days were over. “Speck’s” face sported waves of wrinkles, and his grayishbrown hair turned completely white within the following twelve months. He knew he’d never work again, so my father cut down on drinking and smoking, due to lack of money. Although he was sad, my dad remained tough and, through it all, never lost his sense of humor. My father loved to make people laugh, an endearing trait I acquired from him. What wasn’t funny, though, was the outcome of the investigations into the life-altering crime that was committed at Sponge Products. The three masked kidnappers were caught and sentenced to long prison terms. No insurance compensation was awarded to the owner, Charles Moeller, in the $68 million claim he submitted. However, Mr. Moeller was acquitted of all charges and avoided prison. Like I said earlier, I’ll never forget that bitterly cold March first night. I witnessed one of the largest industrial fires in United States history, and it forever changed my father’s life.

First Honorable Mention

I’m in College Abigail Burson Crackling. That’s the sound addiction makes. Labored, apprehensive breathing—suspense buzzes in the air of the cab of a softly lit pickup truck pulled harmlessly on the side of a quiet residential neighborhood. What’s inside its gleaming black doors is the devil itself, or the closest thing this innocent suburban neighborhood will ever experience. Tear, rip, slice, flick. The small meaningless wax papers are thrown to the floormats in an agitated hysteria. One by one, hastily, in a burning white heat of desire, they recklessly, shamelessly drop to the floor. It is as if the evil will culminate soon and what has started must now be finished, which is exactly what this is: the beginning of a welcomed end. You are sweating. Your heart sounds like African Congas. You pick that rolled paper bill up and there it is staring up at you, like a mental UFC fight. A life or death triple dog dare. “Do it,” whispers the devil. What have I done? your mind screams, but then you remember how bad you want it to end: the pain, the suffering, the craving, the yearning, aching, the sickness, the shame, the guilt, the craving. Your head lowers that little tightly rolled bill to that mighty mound of devil’s dust. The brownish chunky pile has raided you of everything, including your very heart and soul, your very being. It has crushed your spirit, like many others, and steals the flicker of light out of your eyes. You are dead inside, numb. Nothing bothers you now: you take a breath, a powerful inhalation, and when your head lifts, your eyes meet your reflection, and you see the devil looking back at you. Black eyes, pinned like a snake, stare back at you, hollow, empty, welcoming death, if it will ever come. It couldn’t come fast enough; you crave death like you crave the rotten poison pumping through your veins. Your phone is vibrating delicately in the cupholder, but you hold your stare in the mirror, ignoring the silent pleas from Mom and Dad, your long time loveable boyfriend, all who have done 18

nothing wrong. It’s not their fault, but you will make them understand where addiction took you, make them suffer like you did. It’s selfish, really, but the pain must come to an end; you cannot hang on any longer. “They’ll be alright,” the devil pants, as the drugs rock your body, and your body goes limp against the leather seat of the new truck your father let you borrow. More guilt. Your breathing slows drastically as the drugs kick in. As you sit back, so does the bottom of an orange prescription pill bottle, and with a single swallow, way too many milligrams of Xanax swim down your esophagus, bouncing off each other, landing happily in your days-old empty belly where they are destined to kill. This is what addiction feels like. You sit back and reminisce about what just happened at the dealer’s house as the hot salty tears cascade over your chiseled, prominent cheekbones and pour down your concave cheeks like a tropical deluge. A real nice guy. Rape is a terrible thing. As if there wasn’t pain enough. As the tears drip off my chin, the memories flood in. You just want to see your little sibling, your little brother who hung himself at 16. We’ll never know why he did it, but at least they’ll know why I did. You smile, a devilish smile, as you welcome the thought of being reunited with your brother after all these years. In your peripheral vision, your homework from this morning’s class lays on the seat, and on top of it rests a small note. Just a few words of love and apology to my parents ... and a reminder that I will tell my little brother how much my parents grieve and hurt and miss him: the note says I will tell Nathan that Mom and Dad say hello and send all of their love. There you are, sitting in the dark on a rather dirty side street, and your entire being swells with anger at what life has put you through, from years ago, to less than an hour. I’ve already taken too much, but there’s a little more on the corner of the folder, so you do what your addiction tells you to do. Now you’ve done it. You smile while looking back at your reflection, not even recognizing my own face. I look like I could spit venom. Your body is hot and itchy, and you grin as you take the next bundle and

shred it apart like a wild animal tearing vociferously through a hot meal. You can’t do it anymore. The addiction is too powerful. The memories are too strong. This is what addiction feels like. Sniff, sigh, sniff, cry. Depression is a terrible thing, and I’m a sailor lost at sea. You gasp as your breathing comes close to a halt and your torso falls against the stitched leather seat just as the beam of flashing blue and red light hits your back window. You try to lift your arm to press the lock button, but you can’t—it’s only four inches away, but your hand is at least thirty pounds, and you feel your consciousness begin to fade. It’s happening. Finally, peace. You smile as the sirens come out of nowhere, and there are flashlights, so many flashlights, and voices, multiple male voices, authoritative and strong, and I’m happy because I don’t care. The deed has been done, and I’m smiling, and I still am when at that very moment, the truck door opens, and your body comes tumbling out, still smiling that devilish, haunting smile, and the sirens come from everywhere. This is what addiction feels like.

Second Honorable Mention

Fourth of July Foul Up: A Bad Feeling Leads to a Boom William Besner I knew when my brother Steve told me in June that he’d bought fireworks for the Fourth of July that things were not going to end well. It all happened about twenty years ago. We all lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, where fireworks are illegal, and we are not talking about simple firecrackers and bottle rockets either. It doesn’t bode well when you refer to the guy supplying you with illegal fireworks as, “the bomb guy.” My door buzzer rang, so I went to the intercom panel in my living room and pressed the speak button. “Who is it?” I asked as I let go of the talk button and pressed the listen button. “It’s me,” Steve said. “Let me in.” I recognized his voice, of course, so I pressed the button to unlock the security door in the lobby of the building at the end of the hall from my door. I walked through the kitchen to the front door and unlocked it as I looked through the peephole in time to see my brother walking down the hall carrying a medium-sized cardboard box. He was dressed in his usual attire: baggy blackand-red basketball shorts that hung from around his hips exposing his underwear and a matching oversized nylon jersey, though he rarely played basketball. He fancied himself a hoodlum and wore clothing that he thought reflected that “style.” When he neared the door, I opened it for him, letting him into the apartment. “Hey dude, look what I just picked up from my bomb guy!” he exclaimed. He took the box into the living room and began rifling through it and placing items on my coffee table. Inside was an assortment of “normal” fireworks, firecrackers, sparklers, bottle rockets, and jumping jacks, but the box also contained a long cardboard tube and square boxes along with instructions.

My brother was (and still is) notorious for ignoring instructions and directions for anything and everything. Inside the small square boxes were what appeared to be baseball-style grenades with a long fuse coming out of the top. Knowing Steve wasn’t going to read the instructions, I looked them over to learn what he had on his hands. The information explained that these were mortar-type fireworks with a report, meaning they exploded inside the tube propelling them into the air where they then exploded again with a bang and a shower of sparks, referred to as a “starflower.” They also explained that, for safety reasons, you needed to mount the tube to boards for stability and run away from it after lighting. “Just to let you know, you’re supposed to build a base for this tube and run away after lighting it. Then they explode out the tube and blow up in the air, so basically these are like grenades, a scaled-down version of what the city shoots off the bridge,” I explained, reading the instructions, holding up the tube. “I know, but I don’t have the time or money to do that. Besides, that’s just stupid safety stuff. I know what I’m doing,” Steve replied. “And I want to be able to stash it away in case the cops show up.” I just shook my head and felt a deep unease. I knew he wouldn’t care about how I was feeling. We packed it all up and set out to pick people up. It was me, my brothers Steve and Matt, Steve’s girlfriend Melissa, their infant daughter Natilie, Steve’s friend Mark, and our step-brothers Timmy and Billy. We usually watched the fireworks from this parking garage under the I-90 highway. We’d park in the top corner of the garage nearest the Memorial Bridge. We’d always bring refreshments and set up a bag for trash that we hung in an opening in the wall. We’d arrive early and be the only ones there for a while. So my brothers decided, since no one was around, to test fire the fireworks. They loaded the projectile into the tube, lit it, and boom, it went off. Shortly after that, another boom sounded, and we saw the shower of multicolored sparks. Everything had worked flawlessly, but I still couldn’t shake my bad feelings. Other people had begun to flow in, and before too long the city’s fireworks display started. We all stood there watching,

Melissa with Natilie in her lap on the roof of the truck, when I noticed Steve and Matt get the fireworks out and set them up. Their plan apparently was to add to the city’s display already in progress. What happened next happened faster than it takes to explain it, but from my point of view, it happened in slow motion. Surrounded by a crowd of people, I saw them set up the mortar and insert the projectile into it. While this was happening, Mark, my stepbrothers, and I ran for cover. I took cover by the side of the vehicle, watching through the window—incidentally, right next to the gas tank. As they loaded the mortar tube, they each held it because it was sitting on the rounded top of the parking structure wall. This was the point when I was overcome with a feeling of dread like I had been wrapped in a dark, cold, wet blanket and was viewing everything in the third person. As they lit the fuse and let go of the tube, the force of their hands releasing it after they lit the fuse caused it to rock back and forth. The tube fell, spilling the grenade out on the ground as Matt ran for cover, leaving Steve the only person close to it. It was at this moment that time seemed to slow to a crawl as the explosive bounced and rolled around until it finally came to a stop. Acting fast, he scooped up the “grenade” and rammed it back into the tube. Then pointed it at the wall next to the bag of trash. (To this day I still wonder why it never occurred to him to point it into the sky, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose.) The initial explosion meant to carry the explosive aloft instead fired the explosive into the wall where it ignited the bag of trash, causing flaming debris to rain down on the people below. The “grenade” ricocheted off the wall, hitting Steve in the chest, igniting and melting his nylon jersey. (He still carries a scar from the burn he received). It bounced off his face and busted his lip, before blowing up about ten feet directly over Melissa and baby Natilie’s heads. The crowd’s anger rose and coupled with the fact that there was no way to get the truck past the crowd. The cops were showing up (and everybody knows it’s not a good time unless the police show up—at least that seems to be what my brothers seem to think.) I thought it best to take my stepbrothers and walk home, leaving Matt and Steve to deal with the mess they had made. Even

looking back on it today, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a blessing that no one died or was seriously hurt.

Third Honorable Mention

Shits-Creek Dorian Xanyn Sundays in September—the last remnants of summer to a fourteen year old. I was a freshman, young, dumb, and ready to do something stupid at almost every opportunity. The sky was grey. It had rained either the night before or early that morning. The heat dried the road, but the grass was still wet. The day was humid, that wet, choking, force that wraps claws around your windpipe from the inside, filling your lungs and sinuses with the earthy scents of mud and grass and salt that comes up at the sound of whooshing trees and crashing waves. Darin and I were walking about the neighborhood, in and out of people’s yards. We were at the bottom of the cul-de-sac headed to the river. Darin was the boy up the street. Can’t say we were friends. Can’t say we were enemies. He was a scrawny white boy with freckles, blue eyes, and dark brown hair. He always slouched back his shoulders and extended his neck forward, making him look shorter than me on a side-to-side comparison though he was about two inches taller. His jaw was slightly slacked, which gave his face the characteristics of something Neanderthal-esque. He spoke with a slurping accent. I don’t know if that had anything to do with his slacked jaw or if he told the truth when he said his birth father was Czechoslovakian and he got a secondhand accent from the few years he knew him. I always thought that was bullshit. He was sensitive about his speech impediment. Across the road from my house were two summer homes that overlooked the water. This year neither were used. We went through the yards to save time. We usually did this to get to the water quickly, but this time it was different. I stopped in their yard. I was feeling restless and a little mischievous. The owners had a canoe; it was there all summer, it was there all fall, all winter and all spring, and again it would lay dormant, hiding behind the brush of cattails, not seeing or touching the water. “Hey, hey!” I called to Darin. “Yeah,” he stopped and turned to me. 25

“You’ve been across the river?” “Yeah, my cousin lives in Swansea.” “No-no-no. I mean like sail across. You’ve ever been sailing?” “No, you?” “Yeah, bunch of times.” I was lying. “Well, we got a boat.” “You can’t sail.” “Maybe not. Hand me that big stick, and I certainly can row across like on a gondola.” He handed me a long, thin stick about twelve or thirteen feet long. I tossed it like a javelin down to the water’s edge. “Help me flip it over.” “No.” I was left to flip the boat myself and lead it down the slope to the water. As I rocked the boat back and forth trying to turn it upright, a new scent emerged, a pungent stench that tore through the mud and grass and salt. A spicy smell. A spicy-vinegar smell with hints of rotting fish. I turned the boat over to a can of Portuguese squid my friend Wayne and I used for bait the last time we went fishing. I hid it under the boat for the next time we went and forgot about it. I moved the boat and let it drop down the sandy slope to the river shore. That took minimum effort. I clapped, exclaiming, “Wooo,” then pointed across the water. “Darin, I bet I could get across the river.” “Five!” “How ‘bout ten and you suck my balls?” “Homo!” “Fuck you! And help me position this thing.” I started edging the canoe into the water. He stepped down from the grassland onto the sand and down to me. “It won’t work. The river’s too deep. The stick won’t get you far.” “The stick just needs to get me half way. Then, if I have momentum, the current will pull me down and across. At that point, I just have to use the stick to prevent the nose from pointing downstream.” “It’d help if you angled it against the current.” “D-doy. Help me!” “No.”

I fixed the position of the boat. He sat in the sand watching me. I grabbed the stick, holding it like a staff, one foot in the boat, doing my Captain Morgan pose. “I take it you won’t help me shove off?” “Nope.” “Ass.” I shoved it into the water, going against the river at a forty-five degree angle. I ran it in. I hopped in once the water was up to my knees. I did as I said; I oared it like a gondola driver. I shoved it into the water on the left side, then right, then left, left, right, left, left, right. I kept the two-to-one row, hoping it would keep my angle against the current. It was straightening out, so I upped to a threeto-one row, gaining some speed. I looked back to Darin on shore. I flipped him off yelling obscenities. I was a quarter across when the stick could no longer touch the bottom, even when I squatted down and jammed my arm in with it. The undertow was strong, bending the stick back until I felt my wrist about to snap. I took it out quickly and noticed that my measuring drastically angled the boat downstream. I was close to the red traffic-cone looking buoy that showed the halfway point. Feverishly rowing against the current, I noticed something that forced me to stop. I looked down. There was water up to my ankles. I looked back to shore. Darin was there taking pictures with his phone. “There’s a fucking hole in the fucking boat!” I screamed as loud as I could, my voice cracking and creaking. In one breath, my voice was horse, and still he didn’t hear me. This is how I die, I thought “Oh, fuck.” I said. Darin was a fink and a liar. If I left the boat and it sank, he would tell his step dad, a local cop, and my life would over. If I went down with the boat, I might get a page in the yearbook. Eh, I don’t like that much attention. If I somehow got the boat ashore, he had no proof and I’d be golden. I grabbed hold of the fifteen-foot docking rope tied to the backend of the canoe, wrapped it around my right shoulder, and jumped in the water and swam for shore. Did I make the hole? Was the hole always there? I kept thinking not about time or drowning or the pain of this rope tightening around my socket, but what happened? I came to the 27

conclusion, convinced myself, that the owners broke it. The water came from a small porthole in the middle of the boat, where one would put a sail mast. They jammed the aluminum pole in too hard, cracked the hull, and never used the boat again. That’s why it was abandoned. My foot was over the port for the most part, until I decided to measure the water. That’s why it took until I was half across to flood. I finally got to shore and flipped the boat over, dumping the water. Tired, out of breath, and wheezing, I looked at Darin. “There’s a hole in the Goddamn boat. There’s a fucking hole.” I bent down trying to move it back into their yard. “Help me! Please!” He looked at me. “I’m going to tell my dad.” I stood up. “What?” He ran away. I saw him between the houses, running up the street towards his house. Asshole, I thought moving the boat in the direction of the sandy slope. My joints hurt. My right arm, my strong arm, had no circulation the entire time I was swimming and now was ice and fire and nails and acid. My legs were frozen stiff. The belly of the boat was slippery with saltwater and algae. I dipped my hands in sand to get some traction. I had the help of gravity getting the boat down. but now I was fighting against it. Gritting my teeth, my feet slipping in the sand, I slowly got it up the hill and into their yard. I got it right above the can of squid. The bottom was covered in sand and hand prints, so I grabbed a cattail-head and wiped down the sand and water. As I left, I saw Darin walking down the hill. “Hey!” he called, running up to me. “Don’t talk to me.” “I didn’t tell. I just had to shit,” he laughed. Fighting every urge to punch him in the face, I breathed out fire. “I can’t possibly hate you any more than I do right now.” I walked away with him calling back, saying, “It was just a joke.” I went home and took a hot shower to relax my arm and wash away the mud, and salt, and stupid.

This Side Up Gale Acuff I don’t care if I die but not before I ask Miss Hooker to marry me—she’s my Sunday School teacher and will keep me straight and even if she turns me down I can ask her again, again and again if it’s necessary and break her down but not too far down, not far enough down that she won’t learn to love me but maybe she’ll be grateful anyway because she’s 25 to my 10 right now so she’ll always have a young husband, or younger anyway, that’s something to be proud of. In class today she told us that we’ll die anytime and probably not know when because it’s up to God, when He’ll take us back, into Heaven that is, if we’ve been good but if we’ve been more bad than good then it’s Hell for sure. After Sunday School I damn near asked her, to marry me I mean, but something stopped me, probably Satan, so instead I told Miss Hooker to watch me stand on my head. I took her outside and stuck my head on the grass and kicked my legs up over my head and held that pose for ten seconds though my jacket fell down over the back of my head and my tie divided my face in two and she said You can turn yourself right-side up again —I did and my face was red from all that blood and gravity. My, Gale, you’re something she said, after the world was upside down no more, my half of it anyway and her half as it always was except for what she saw of me. Except for what she 29

saw of me I guess nothing changed for her. She might’ve joined me except for her skirt. And her chin looked like a flattened nose and her mouth like an eye full of eyeballs and her nose and eyes a mouth in three parts, I call them Father, Son, and Holy Ghost but I’m not sure which is which. I’d ask but I think that’s blasphemy. Or it should be.

Roadkill Julia Alexander “Driving is an incredible responsibility,” my dad would say, grasping onto the door handle for dear life as I drove us around our neighborhood for the hundredth time. I didn’t get my driver’s license until a month before my nineteenth birthday. I never needed it during high school, and I lived in the city my first semester of college. When I came home, my dad would take me out in his truck a few times a week. By the time I finally was able to drive on my own, I was ecstatic to have more freedom. I went out every night for a month even if I had nowhere to go. One night, I was clunking along in my ‘99 Explorer, maneuvering across the back roads of my hometown, and I started to feel more confident in my driving. I was singing along to the radio, when suddenly, a raccoon ran into the road in front of me. I screamed, but I couldn’t react quickly enough to avoid it. I looked into its beady black eyes. Then, there was a soft thud. I looked into the rearview mirror. There was the silhouette of two tiny hands flailing up at the sky in the headlights behind me. It was still alive. I prayed the car behind me would hit it again, but they swerved to avoid responsibility. I pulled over, still screaming. I grew up around animals. We had ducks and chickens in a coop in the backyard. Sometimes a coyote would get in. You could tell from pretty far away if that had happened. A mess of red feathers would be sticking out of the fence. I would always have my dad more closely investigate. I didn’t have the stomach for it. My dad always taught me never to let an animal suffer. When I was twelve, we were driving home from dinner and saw a deer get mowed down by a truck. She survived the hit and run, but just barely. As we drove away, I looked back. She was whipping her neck up off the pavement, trying desperately to get the rest of her body to follow. My dad calmly drove me home, got the shotgun from the safe in its black case, and then left again to shoot it dead. “It’s the right thing to do,” he had said when I started to cry. I reached into the backseat and grabbed the metal baseball bat my dad had put there. “Just in case someone’s giving you a hard time,” he had said when he handed it to me in our driveway. I 31

turned it over in my hands, running my fingers across its smooth surface. It was ice cold from spending the autumn tucked beneath the seats. I walked back up the darkened road to the helpless, squirming life, half melted into the pavement. Its hands were still moving. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what really got me. The hands. Its little fingers grasping up at nothing, like a child reaching out for the embrace of a parent. I took a deep breath. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The right thing to do,â&#x20AC;? I whispered. The right thing to do. The right thing to do the right thing to do the right thing to do therightthingtodotherightthingtodo. I raised the bat above my head and swung down hard, before I could change my mind.

Riding After School Geer Austin We pull on blue jeans, chaps and boots and clomp, with dogs plume-tailing behind, over the expanse of gravel between white house and red barn past a garage with gaping doors and a row of garbage cans into hay-dust and manure steaming in cold air. We tack up, mount and head away from family into rusty meadows, gray-bare woodland trails, places that belong to us. We follow a stream crusted with ice, dammed with logs weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d traversed in summertime, and enter a frozen field. Our horses gallop up a hill we call Middlebrook Mountain, their manes flying black or chestnut, the sound of their breath hard. Atop the hill, the horses nibble faded turf, and we scan the horizon several miles away searching for a glint of ocean.

Where Dreams Come Alive Cathy Beaudoin At the age of twelve, I imagined a life different from the one I knew in Northern Connecticut. Whether it was hiking in Yosemite Valley, or paddling on a river in Idaho, my instinct was to want more than cul-de-sacs, a job at a chain restaurant, and traffic going nowhere. Like many kids growing up in the 1970’s, my imagination was fueled by books. At night, I sprawled across my bed with my face stuffed in a palm-sized paperback, and my Saturday’s were spent at the library. I read about Amelia Earhart and Ann Davison, who flew or sailed across the Atlantic Ocean at a time when women didn’t do such things. I fingered the words on the pages, let hope fill me, and remained silent. After all, my dreams weren’t the kind my parents could understand. To them a trip to Dairy Queen was an exciting activity. I watched as my parents lived their lives, and wondered if it was a sin to dream. When I wasn’t reading, I liked to hang out in the tool shed. The self-appointed caretaker of the yard, it wasn’t unusual for my parents to see me headed to the back yard. Based on looks alone, the shed was far from an appealing place to be. Erected just beyond the corner of the house, it kept a small section of the neighbor’s ratty, old wooden fence from falling onto our property. The sides and roof of the structure were made of prefabricated metal, sprayed white at the factory. Inside, the floor was composed of a patchwork of warped and sagging sheets of plywood. When it rained, water seeped in and mosquitoes flourished. Every time I entered the shed, I was keenly aware it was not a place meant for me. It was my mother who expressed a singular vision for what a daughter should be. And, in my mind, it resembled the life of a doll in a doll house. The idea that the shed was my place did not come without apprehension. Every year, in late May, a bees’ nest appeared out of nowhere. It was cleverly constructed under the three-inch deep eave, just above the rusty sliding doors. The ominous buzzing tempered my enthusiasm for the outdoors. Over time I learned the bees were mostly harmless, and if I didn’t agitate them, they left me alone. Our ability to share space meant I could come and go 34

without worry. Still, whenever I poked around the tool shed for more than a couple of minutes, I anticipated my mother’s disapproval, and was ready to offer the requisite penance for being me. One of the pleasures the shed offered was exposure to the New England weather. If I was in the house and saw steely, black clouds approaching from the west, I ran outside and took shelter in the shed. Doors wide open, I grinned as the thunder clapped, lightning flashed, and wind whipped the branches of the weeping willow until they flew horizontal to the ground, nowhere to go. Sometimes, the thunder was so loud the walls of the shed shimmered and shook. During the winter, snow and ice clogged the tracks for the doors, making them difficult to slide and separate. Once I coaxed the doors open, I stood inside, shook my hands to warm my fingers, and watched my breath hang in the air. Regardless of the season, the shed was the place where my spirit came alive. Like any other tool shed, its primary purpose was for storage of home and outdoor equipment, including the lawn mower. When I assumed responsibility for cutting the grass, we had a push mower with a broken self-propelling mechanism. While it took some effort to push it, I didn’t care. I embraced the physical activity. Week after week, I pushed the mower over the third of an acre of grass. The task satisfied my need for symmetry, and a sense of relief filled me as I carved perfect, parallel lines across the lawn. Each time the task was finished, I stood in the driveway, celebrated my elevated heart rate, and took one last whiff of the freshly cut grass. No one ever knew how much comfort I took from feeling my T-shirt stick to my sweaty back. Standing in the kitchen with a glass of water, I sensed the disappointment in my mother’s sideways glance. Hoping to pre-empt an angry flurry of words, I quickly offered a sign of peace, “The ironing is next on my list. I just need to clean up.” Without a word, my mother retreated to the living room, and I returned the mower to the shed. Then I took a seat on the front stoop, licked my thumb and forefinger, and tried to rub away the lime green stains on the toes of my white sneakers. Looking up and down the street, I wondered why none of the other girls used a mower. My sneakers as clean as I could get them, I went to the basement and ironed my father’s work shirts.

Besides the lawn mower, there was a flimsy wire rack in the shed. It was the home of a random set of tools: a hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches, and a broken set of plyers. I liked to take one in my hand and feel how it was weighted. In a pinch, I had confidence I could use these small instruments. On the floor, next to the rack, sat a box containing a drill, some drill bits, a sander, and a glue gun. I had no use for those items. Only my brother was given the guidance needed to handle those things. When I lurked in the background as my father showed him how to sand a board, I was told to stop being a pest. I learned it wasn’t my place to spend time with my father, his only responsibility to teach a boy how to become a man. I wished it were different, but I didn’t feel singled out. The shed also housed the pool supplies. There was a fivegallon bucket of chlorine, and hoses used to vacuum the pool, a cheap, above-the-ground model. Mostly, my mother took care of the pool. That was her slice of heaven, floating for hours when the temperatures climbed above eighty degrees. Though I liked to swim, the pool wasn’t a place where mother and daughter bonded. She wanted her space, and I knew enough not to make waves. The crown jewel in the tool shed was my brother’s Rupp mini bike. In his stern voice, he expressed a deep conviction that the mini bike was off limits. Under no circumstances was I allowed to ride it. I knew any appeal to my parents was useless. Instead, jealousy festered as my brother got to have all the fun. He’d rev up the engine and ride the bike down the street to the single-track trails in the woods. My brother and his friends rode those trails for hours on a Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, I was forced to sit, clean and pristine, on the sideline and listen to the screaming engines from afar. In those moments, I understood the link between sins and hell. There were plenty of times when the bike sat in the shed, unused. The way I saw things, that was my time to live. When I sat on the machine, I felt whole. Desperate to feel the engine generate heat and vibrate enough to make my forearms tingle, I improvised and settled for the dream. With my right hand, I griped the throttle, rotated my wrist backwards, and pretended to give the engine gas. Arms slightly bent at the elbows, I imagined the engine’s high-

pitched whine and what it was like to move forward. With my left hand holding the handlebar, my fingers stretched out and grabbed the clutch lever. I squeezed hard. The toes on my right foot pressed the brake until it engaged. I pictured the back tire fishtail, smiled, and chuckled to myself. The hours passed. I wanted more. Unbeknownst to anyone, I spent more time on the mini bike than my brother. I caressed every inch of the gas tank, the fenders, and the torn vinyl seat cover. In time, I garnered enough nerve to drop the bike off its kick-stand and leaned it this way and that way into the imaginary corners of life. I closed my eyes as tight as I could, and watched as the force of the engine tore up the demon that tried to define what a girl should be. Just as dirt spun up from the rear tire and splattered anyone who tried to stifle me, my mother called out, “Mary, what are you doing back there?” “Nothing.” I yelled out, and frantically pushed the bike back on its stand. “I was just about to vacuum the pool for you.”

The Death of Fire Robert Beveridge I always thought that fire would die a fiery death burn with majesty higher, higher until no fuel remained to burn and then sputter out or else that fire would die a cold death melt snow again, again, until overwhelmed by endless numbers of the enemy or else that fire would die a watery death sink into the dark deeper, deeper come up for the third time as a sizzle, wisp of smoke but in our house the fire fades a few pale red embers could be re-sparked with the right application of paper, but now everyone has gone to bed and I sit and stare as the last feeble ember fades

“What was the Worst of your Nightmares?” - questionnaire Ace Boggess Never afraid of drowning, yet there I was in back of a beat sky-blue Oldsmobile— up front, my father in butterfly collar & leather driving gloves, mom silent in the passenger’s seat. The Olds raced along a Carolina avenue &, whatever way we went, a wall of ocean faced us: Hollywood tsunami, incredible, rising above all buildings in slow-motion animation. It gave us the nick of time to turn: left, then right, then nowhere.

Alone at the Homestead Gaylord Brewer Handful of tossed corn scratch a thank you for three mottled eggs dug from the straw, half carrots for the horses, for the forlorn mutts biscuits and encouragement. Morning rounds complete, low cold sky settled in, back to the cabin—cushioned rocker beside the big window, wool socks you sent that finally arrived. Wood fire in the stove, new book, shelf of sustaining provisions— cream soup, coffee, butter, bread and thick-cut bacon. A steller’s jay peers in with its dark crown at an angle. Screeches once and flies, preferring its own company. Just the right kind of lonely.

Steamer Train Engineer Patrick Brown Sitting in the worn-out Station Master’s chair, with one armrest long since dismembered from its frame due to misuse and boredom, I hear the rumbling of a two-cylinder diesel engine turning over. I peer out on the sun-spotted train tracks through the steel bars of the ticket window, which incarcerate me within the dim train station. I watch as my best friend and fellow engineer, Kyle, stands before the incessant line of shouting children and their anxious parents. He mechanically tears ticket after ticket as the people rush by him. As the line dissipates, a last group of straggling park patrons appears before me, a twenty-dollar bill in one of their outstretched hands. “How much?” inquires one of the impatient parents. “A dollar fifty for kids and two dollars for adults,” I reply in a tiresome tone. After I calculate the total price, take their money, and give them the blue and yellow train tickets and change in return, they scurry to the end of the line, expecting to make it on this departure. The line stops halfway down as Kyle shuts the gate behind a full load of passengers. The familiar sighs and groans of disappointment flow down the line like a wave to the last family I had sold tickets to. I step out into the warm summer air, fix my striped train engineer cap on my head, and walk around the back of the station to the front of the train. Both Kyle and I regrettably must explain the apparently not-so-obvious fact that the train is full and won’t fit any more passengers. “It’s only a ten-minute wait,” we both declare to the distressed mass of families, answering the question on the tip of their lips like psychics. I express the urgency of departure to the last few boarding tourists by flipping the switch labeled BELL on the control panel. As the repetitious binnng, binnng, binnng of the swaying bell atop the rumbling engine starts up, everyone hops aboard, including Kyle in the caboose. I slowly push forward on the vibrating accelerator lever, and the train lurches forward out of the train station. For the thrilled passengers, this is a breathtaking excursion around Look Memorial Park; for 41

me, it’s another ride around the track on another day of work at my summer job. Although driving the small train around the one-mile loop isn’t exactly a strenuous task, it becomes increasingly tedious and burdensome with each identical loop, and even more so with each eight-hour day of work that passes. Each outing is analogous to the other. I memorize every tree we pass and every turn we take. I could practically fall asleep halfway around the track if it wasn’t for the one feature that I never would manage to adapt to the tunnel. A mere hundred-yard-long tube through a man-made hill, the tunnel is by far the most hair-raising aspect of my job. Whether tradition has spawned from the fear felt by some of the younger riders or the excitement of the others, the riders all shriek maniacally from the beginning to the end of the tunnel. No matter how hard I try to block it out, the howls consume the train as the air itself feels loud upon one’s skin. The darkness is teeming with noise. Within seconds, the spinning front wheels of the train emerge from the hole in the far side of the hill, and I am free from the drone of high-pitched yells. After a few more dazed turns and swerves in the track, we’re pulling into the station. As I gently apply the air brake, I pass the lingering row of relieved faces. The train comes to a halt, and I hop off and rush to open the gate at the exit. I retreat into the rear of the station. The only support I find inside is the decrepit chair behind the familiarly confining steel bars. Now there is a second line in front of the station. Again, there will be a full train ride at the Look Park Memorial Steamer Train.

Finance Peter Neil Carroll Maybe because my father fixed pocket watches and antique clocks I never carry a timepiece and permit my electric alarm (a gift) with its insane morning scream to be accurate only twice a day. The one watch I cherish belonged to my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father, a gold stemwinder attached to a chain that he held close to my face, springing open the lid to bump my nose with a slight ping of surprise. That watch has ancestral history not for its age or rarity but how my grandpa used it for so much more than telling the time. A glazier in New York who earned $5 a week for six days of labor, he had no means to pay the fare to bring his wife (my grandma) from Minsk. Obviously he could not afford a gold watch. But he bought this one on the installment plan for 50 cents down and quickly pawned the watch for $50 to cover grandmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passage. Afterwards he kept up the payments and managed to redeem the pawn. Whereupon grandma announced she wanted to return to Minsk unless he brought her parents to America, prompting him to refinance the watch. But for that delicate object, the only thing of value he ever owned besides his tools,

he would have been another lonely immigrant in a lonely city and I would be nothing at all.

A River, then the World R.T. Castleberry For each day, she owns a delighted smile: courtesan lilt, business bright, modest mistress of the sewing room. Harbored by each city’s lover is a conceit that her flitting elegance leaches a world pale. I hold her husband’s sinister note, a check, a pair of airline tickets. I attempt no offense. I leave easy. Take your time in Dubai, take your turn in Kabul or Jerusalem. In seven rooms that face the river, I pace my panic. Uncapped paints pile table and desk. Arrival Ceremonies, The Hangman’s Departure are panels settled in a painter’s studio. Bruised hands that won’t heal assemble portfolios furtive with contrition. Asking my question twice, I’ve heard no answer. The evening turns late, light-hollowed, suitcases lined like rifles in a barracks. Framed by river bank, estate boundary, water’s fall blooms to the moon, splashes white as it falls, as it purls. Headlights, heat lightning slice the window panes. Town car idling, we argue destination and direction. Opinions hold, bitterly bearing gifts.

Long Sands Beach (York, Maine) Corey D. Cook We sit on the cement stairs and watch a seagull poke a rumpled paper bag with its beak as the tide comes in He tells me his mother was prone to fits of rage Destroyed so many things Not a single heirloom spared Depression glass Hand woven baskets Stoneware jugs I ask if she was ever physical with him and he turns away Stares at the relentless waves Waves that reach out for the broken For the discarded Shards of glass Splintered sticks Crushed stones Waves that will soften their sharp edges Their pointy tips Transform them into things to hold on to Things to cherish

Nana’s Last Boat Ride Corey D. Cook We planned to show her the wild blueberry bushes on Oliver Island, the freshly painted door of her favorite cottage, the loons’ nest on the muddy embankment, but she was not able to hold her head up, the latest side effect of Alzheimer’s, so she stared at the floor of the boat, the rusty anchor, the coiled nylon rope, the shadows cast by her children, her grandchildren, shadows so indistinct they could only belong to strangers.

I Just Enjoyed the Ambulance Zack Dempsey Amongst a sea of adults (a sea of legs, it might be more aptly named) the six-year-old me was being shepherded through these legs by my mother, like she was some sort of strange Moses figure. However, I wouldn’t call parting legs of drunk adults at a town fair to get to the car as impressive as the whole Red Sea business. As my tired single mother shambled a path to the car with me in tow, she was most likely satisfied that she could add another memory to my childhood. My mother was like that when I was a kid. She would always try to make my day with little things or plan trips that she could manage financially or mentally. As I was following her, I was lost in thought on how nice this fair had been: the cotton candy, that hot and sweet aroma of something good that wafts through the air every so often, the rides that probably were just barely up to code, and, of course, how that one guy vomited behind the portable potty. Truly, the town fair is an American treasure. We got into the car on that night of mild interest. I couldn’t tell you how late it was. As a child, I tended not to trouble myself with the concept of time. I was usually more interested in staring at the television and avoiding homework, though if I had to guess, it was about nine or ten at night as my mother brought the engine of her working-class car to life. I was sitting satisfied with the events of the day in the back seat. That childhood back seat, home to so many memories, that can almost make you remember what it felt like to be on those boring drives as a kid you never appreciated. My mother was driving down a side road. There wasn’t much traffic after we left the general area of the fair. I was starting to doze off as my mom tried to make small talk with me, very aware that I was already starting to fall asleep. “Did you like the fair?” she asked. “Yeah” I said, not really paying attention. “You ready to go to bed?” “Nuh-uh,” I responded, already making the back seat my bed, which I successfully managed after a while with little effort. I would have wished for my mother’s sake that I would have just fallen asleep in that seat, and then the next morning, I would 48

magically wake up on the couch—which would so often happen in those days of childhood. Someone must have thought my plans were terrible however and showed their disapproval by going 60 m.p.h. through a red light and hitting our car from the side. I didn’t really have time to ask the driver why he did that or why he was drinking when he did so either. I don’t know his name, his face, or if he even lived near me. At the time, I was more concerned about two things after being woken up by the crash: “That sure was loud” was one of them, and “Why am I sweating so much from my forehead?” was the other. My mother screamed back to me, “Are you okay?” She sounded panicked and unsure about her surroundings. I didn’t really know why she was acting strange. Attempting to try to make my mother go back to being calm I replied, “Yeah,” in a relaxed voice, I didn’t know why she had gotten so worked up, so I decided to let her deal with it and focus on the more interesting thing. My forehead was still dripping with something. Drip, went my forehead. Catch, went my tongue. Strange, I thought. This doesn’t taste like sweat. Drip, my forehead announced yet again. Catch, my tongue answered. Well now, this is odd. Did I spill something on my head? I must have. This dripping was just too often for sweat, and I wasn’t even that warm. Drip, drip, drip, drip, my forehead repeated. I was getting tired of catching. This stuff wasn’t even that good. “Hey, mom,” I finally said. “Is there juice or something on my head?” My mom was fine, maybe a bruise somewhere, and a minor neck injury over here, but fine. So, when I previously answered that I too was fine, she must have taken me at face value without actually seeing my face. She turned to look at me and saw what I can only assume is one of the most terrifying sights for a parent to see. The skin on my forehead was split open, a gash large enough that a child would need fourteen stitches for it, two layers of stitches, part of my skull exposed. Next thing I knew, she was calling someone. She sounded incoherent in her half-scream, halfshaken speech. Then I sort of faded out for a moment and was teleported to the grass outside the car. A nice man was asking me questions. I liked how comforting he was, but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying. Then I must

have lost consciousness again because I was teleported into another car. I assumed it was an ambulance by the fact the man had said that word a few times. I was very calm. I didn’t know why everyone else seemed so serious. So I just enjoyed the ambulance. It looked squeaky clean and high tech on the inside. I never got to see the inside of one before. It was lined with bandages, straps, drawers, and lights. Everything was so blindingly bright white. This next part of the story is completely blocked from my memory, and I will be going by what my mother has told me to fill in the blanks that my mind tried to protect me from. I trust her statements as they seemed brutally honest. As stated before, I was a child with a wound big enough to need fourteen stitches, so basically my entire forehead was in two pieces. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the doctors could have used anesthetics on me. Sadly, they didn’t. Because the wound was so close to my brain, they needed me awake just in case. My mom told me that I screamed loud enough to pierce walls like I was on fire and someone just kept putting me out and lighting me on fire all over again. But I don’t remember any of it. I can’t no matter how hard I try. All I can remember is waking up in a strange room with my clothes still on. They were covered in red and brown spots, which I later learned was blood, but at the time, it was just a mess to me. I finished my time at the hospital eating a generic lollipop like I had just been to the dentist’s office and nothing was out of the ordinary. Finally, I went home with freshly repressed pain. In the end, I think the worst that came of this for me personally was being forced to live out my childhood schoolyard days being called Harry Potter because of my scar and round glasses. I didn’t even like Harry Potter. What a shame.

Another Old Photo Eric Greinke In the old photo my parents are still young. I am cradled in my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arms. We are all smiling because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been born. Our first little cottage is behind us. Its tar shingles & open rafters are gone now, replaced by a Marathon Mini-Mart. My mother is small & happy in a plaid skirt. My father is tall in cuffed dungarees. I wear a diaper, a knit hat & booties. Mother has long black hair down to her waist. Father has black hair, slicked & parted. I am bald, both yesterday & today. Now I am old, & they are both deceased except in this snapshot, stolen from the past. No sign here of the tragedies yet to come, the births & deaths, the divorce of my parents, our little family gone like a glimpse of an elusive Red Fox. No indication of future diseases, promises, send-offs or receptions. Nothing is predicted or foreshadowed here in this yellowed print of three strangers, a photographic monument to potential, no blood on our hands yet, just mercy & hope.

A Modest Storm by All Accounts John Grey That last flash of lightning came through the house like a floor sweeper. No wonder the dog is under the table. And my nerves are trembling down there with him. On the table is the photograph of a man whose resolve is never shaken. A small framed square has him standing proudly in military uniform. What’s a storm compared to where he’s been. And how calm, how stanch, he poses, lending his perspective to some typical summer weather plowing through. For the thunder’s a snore compared to a barrage of missiles. Those lightning strikes are fierce but they’re not aimed at anyone. Such weather would be a reprieve for him. For he has seen what I cannot even imagine. His hair’s combed. He cracks a smile. But for his eyes, the war’s not in the picture.

Filthy Mouths and Bad Attitudes Jessica Handly For whatever reason, my mother thought it was a great idea to deprive me of decent, normal public education, and enrolled me in private school. The nuns certainly ran that roost back in the early 1980s. Seeing Blues Brothers as a kid made me feel like I should have been featured in at least part of that film. I might as well have been in boarding school alongside the brothers. Or a military academy, or Juvenile Hall. Taking a page right out of the screenplay, one particular nun became the bane of my existence. She was tall and thin, boney hands protruding from beneath the dark brown gown she wore every day. I wondered sometimes if she had actual street clothes, or if the habit that covered her steelgray hair stayed on even when she went to sleep at night. Her eyes were piercing. It didn’t matter if they were brown or blue or black; I felt those eyes on me day after day, seeing into my soul, waiting for me to slip up, and the opportunity to pounce. To this day, I can’t remember her name. It was either Angelica or Angelia, but she was neither angelic nor an angel. We kids just called her, “The Nun.” As the principal of the school, “The Nun” singled out students she disliked. Maybe they were the ones with “filthy mouths and bad attitudes,” as the Blues Brothers nun would have said. At the age of eight I couldn’t tell you what a filthy mouth was, but I had a pretty bad attitude. I hated that school. I hated every day and everything about it. The teachers, whether they were nuns or laypeople, did their best to squelch creativity and individuality. If you excelled at anything, you were immediately torn down. I was fairly good at English and writing. One day, done with my phonics page before the class had even begun, I began doodling. My desk was turned to face the closet. Another day, asked to write a description of myself, I failed the assignment. A note was sent home. My offense? There was no such thing as turquoise eyes. I sang a song at a Christmas play a couple years in a row, and when the third year came around, I was told no one was singing a solo that year. Angry and refusing to sing, I was sent back to class in disgrace.

Conform, conform, conform. By the 1980s, nuns weren’t beating kids anymore, so I never saw evidence of physical abuse. Sometimes kids had to stand in the trash pail, or in the closet, or clean the floor with bare hands and a ruler. The abject humiliation was enough to make you fall in line. The culmination of all this insanity was the day I forgot my gym clothes. The gym teacher was a real hard-ass who would ream anyone out who forgot her gym clothes. After that, you were sent to the principal’s office to face “The Nun.” Then your parents were called and told what an irresponsible disappointment their child was. Finally, you were made to sit on display in front of all the kids in gym class. The offender was usually covered in tears and dribbling snot by this point, and nobody wanted to be her. I lived in a sort of disgruntled fear by then, and when the day came that I forgot my gym clothes, I begged the third-grade teacher to let me call home to avoid the humiliation I knew was to follow. “You’ll have to ask the principal.” “Okay,” I said, and dragged my feet the whole way to the office. “The Nun” was waiting for me. “What do you want, Jessica?” I told her about my forgotten gym clothes and asked for a dime to call home. “You forgot your clothes, so you face the consequences. I’m not giving you anything.” I trudged back to class thinking about this. What I heard wasn’t face the consequences, but I’m not giving you anything. Why should she? She hated me, I hated her; the feeling was mutual. When I got back to class, I told my teacher “The Nun” wouldn’t give me a dime, and in a bizarre show of sympathy, she dug around in her purse and came up with a shiny silver coin. I clutched that coin in my sweaty little hand, thanked her and bolted down the hall. My feet drummed a panicky rhythm past the principal’s office and the big glass window that looked out onto the hall, all the way to the phone. The payphone was located between the front doors and the water fountain. Always short of stature, I reached up on my tiptoes for the phone and pressed it to my ear. The dime clanked into the machine. The metallic smell coming off the water fountain filled 54

my nostrils as the phone rang and rang. Everything around me was hard and sharp and glittering, from the phone, to the fountain, to the front doors of the school. This was a time before schools were in lockdown, but for a kid of eight, those doors presented no escape. Neither did the pay phone. As it continued to ring, I realized my mother wasn’t home. When the tears of frustration came, I hung up, turned, and “The Nun” was right there. If she could have whipped out that ruler like the good old days, I wouldn’t have been able to pick up a phone ever again. “Jessica!” she snarled. “What are you doing here?” “Calling my mom for my gym clothes.” “I told you no phone calls!” “You said you wouldn’t give me anything.” Oh yes. A bad attitude. She grabbed my upper arm and hauled me back down the hall. Her long manicured nails pierced my school sweater and bit into my flesh. The tears rolled down my face and sweat prickled the back of my neck as she dragged me back down the hall to class. When we got there, it was the third-grade teacher who got the reaming out. “The Nun” let me go. I slunk back to my chair. When she left the room, nobody laughed. In gym class later that day, I took my turn sitting on display. But there were no fingers pointed, no snickers or whispering, and the gym teacher didn’t say a word. “The Nun” fostered a mistrust of authority that followed me to high school. In every angsty moment, in every overbearing teacher and vice-principal, I heard her voice, felt her claws sink into my flesh. It extended beyond the classroom. I didn’t trust police officers for years, and still have doubts that they’re here to serve and protect. When I entered college, the disgruntled fear eventually went away. Nobody cared if I didn’t want to sing, or excelled at some activity, or had an independent thought, or dyed my hair purple, or wore combat boots in the summer. In fact, a bad attitude was valued as self-expression and creativity. Recently, I discovered that my daughter wouldn’t be allowed to enter public kindergarten until she’s five and a half. I see how bright she is and know she could succeed at a younger age. When my mother suggested I enroll her in private school that would take her at four and a half, I almost exploded.

“No way!” It was instant panic. “I’d never send my daughter to a place like that!” “Jessica, it wasn’t all bad,” my mother said. “You had some good teachers.” No one ever told my mother about the day I forgot my gym clothes. She didn’t know about “The Nun.” I’m amazed at how some of the most humiliating moments can shape much of our lives, and yet they slip by others—not even a blip on their radar.

Make-Believe Ballroom Ruth Holzer I lacked social graces, they said, and signed me up against my will for dancing lessons at the high school gym. Three evenings a week, Dad and I would move demurely through the waltz, the lively foxtrot, the rumba and the daring cha-cha-cha. I was often paired with Sid, an old goat who pressed too close and stamped on my feet. I hated his arm encircling my waist in a parody of possession, while my sweaty hand lay on his shoulder. Dad’s partner was one Josephine, who’d squash him in her exuberant embrace. What a relief to jump back in the car and laugh, thinking we were so sure-footed, certain we’d be dancing around forever.

Three Gratitudes Ruth Holzer Men from the neighboring village did not break into my house at first light and slash my throat, I have not served enemy soldiers all day on my back on a bed of planks, and my old comrades-in-arms have so far refrained from pouring poison into the tea.

Change of Season Ann Howells August pulls up a webbed lawn chair, joins us in complaining about the heat. September, leaning against the split rail fence, chews on a straw, insists autumn has arrived, cannot convince us nights are cooler.

Relinquishing Paradise Ann Howells The tropic sun commands center stage, pink and rose plumage fully flared for maximum effect. It concludes its nightly swan song—a dramatic exit. Night creeps in behind, catches us unaware, tests shadows’ tensile strength, draws them long and taut. The two of us, ingénues in this extravaganza, stumble our lines: scattered words, erratic pauses, festive façade held tenuously in place. You nibble stuffed crab, while I shift mango salad about my plate. Twilight windshift eases in a salt breeze; light trembles from paper lanterns and fairy-lights threaded among palms. We order fruited rum drinks. This place, through wet eyes, has never been more perfect. Lovemaking tonight will be urgent, desperate, clingy. We will ignore suitcases stacked, stolid, staid, just inside the door.

Last Nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bonfire at my Desk James Croal Jackson spilled honey clings to black wires connecting the world my lifeblood laptop nestled in her shell safe from fingers goldenrod shirt covers the old burns the pinewood ashes coat my nostrils the harsh wind blows crooked conifer to the verge almost to fracture the window waiting to kaleidoscope glass a body as canvas hardwood red lust to cleanse gathering dust rain pats the chair-infested patio drips of laughter boomerang from slippery brick and the blonde coughs from beyond the dark halls of shed fur & grime

Aprons Lynn Johnson My quilting mat was piled high with a stash of fabric scraps. Most of it was vintage—an eclectic collection of flowered, tie-dyed, and assorted prints. As I sorted through it, something familiar caught my eye. It was a cotton print, covered with Pennsylvania hex designs in blue, yellow, and green. It’s my mother’s cobbler apron. I had always thought “cobbler” was a funny name for it. It made it sound like she could wear it to cobble tiny leather boots like the shoemaker did for the elves. It might be interesting, I thought, to include the fabric from my mom’s apron in a quilt. I tried to figure out how many scraps I could salvage from this particular apron she often wore. The front of it, where she had wiped her hands countless times, was stained and threadbare. But the fabric that wrapped around the back had potential. As I began to envision a design for the quilt, I hoped there was enough good fabric to salvage several squares from it. In addition to her routine cobbler apron, Mom had acquired quite a collection of clothing cover-ups. Included were pretty half aprons with double pockets, ruffled bib aprons with rick-rack trim, and my favorite—the fancy ones that she wore for special occasions. These aprons were made of sheer, pastel organdy, fashioned with wide hems and delicate, detailed stitching. I can still picture her in my mind, wearing a party dress, high heels, rose red lipstick, and a beautiful organdy apron which she tied carefully in the back, fluffing the long ties into what she called a “butterfly bow”. Leaning over the old wooden sewing table, I began to cut the fabric from my mom’s well-worn apron with a rotary cutter. I remembered my mom peeling carrots and potatoes, rolling out pie crusts, preparing dinner, and washing countless dishes—always wearing her apron. These recollections made me smile as I began planning my quilt. ***

Running home from school that spring afternoon, I was very excited about the mother-daughter tea my Brownie troop was having that afternoon. My third grade teacher’s lessons had little impact on me that day, even though I loved school. Instead, I had been daydreaming about getting all dressed up for this special occasion with my mom. I was planning to wear my favorite Sunday dress and black patent leather shoes with white lacy socks. Our troop leaders had asked the girls to wear aprons, if possible, because we would be serving our mothers coffee and tea, along with the cookies we had made at our last meeting. “Mom, I’m home!” I yelled as I burst through the back door, tossing my jacket on the kitchen table. “Hi, Honey,” she smiled as she looked up from her usual spot in front of the sink. Already dressed for the party, she was wearing three-inch high heels and a beautiful sundress. Of course, she had covered up with her bib apron that buttoned and tied in the back. “Don’t forget, we have your Brownie tea party this afternoon. Hurry out of those school clothes and put on your pretty yellow dress from Grandma. If you bring me two ribbons, I’ll fix your braids.” I gave Mom a quick hug and kiss and raced up to my bedroom, taking the stairs two at a time. A few minutes later, I walked sedately down the stairs, wearing my yellow party dress and a big smile. Tied around my waist was a bright-orange apron that was printed with tiny black and white flowers. Attached to the waist of the apron was a white cotton, finger-tip towel. That was my favorite part. I was sure none of the other girls would have towels stitched their aprons like mine. I couldn’t wait to show my mom. But before I could say a word, she turned from her place at the sink and looked at me with a shocked expression. “Oh my goodness. Not that apron! No, no, no. You can borrow one of my party aprons because this is a very fancy occasion. Go back upstairs and get one from my closet.” Her voice was kind but insistent. I simply couldn’t imagine why she didn’t like my pretty orange apron as much as I did. “But look at this,” I said as I twirled around in my patent leather shoes in the center of the kitchen for her reconsideration. “This towel will be really neat if I have to wipe my hands during 63

the tea. And no one else will have an apron with a towel.” I doubt my air of superiority escaped her notice. “Besides,” I said, “I think it looks really pretty, don’t you?” I remembered my mother’s frequent admonition: “You’ll look nice if you act nice.” Her frown told me my persuasion wasn’t working, even if I acted very nicely. My tears told her I wasn’t persuaded by her viewpoint. “Let’s go and ask Mrs. Smith,” she suggested. I think she’ll agree that you should wear a fancy apron and not that one. Mrs. Smith was our next-door neighbor and my mother’s good friend. By now, I was crying desperate tears. I was hopeful Mrs. Smith would see the right side—my side. My mother took my hand and led me firmly to Mrs. Smith’s back door, but I was pulling back with considerable determination. “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Smith asked when she opened her back door. Her voice and face showed genuine concern for me because by now, tears were flowing down my freckled face. Because Mrs. Smith was my grown-up friend, I hoped she’d take my side. “Rowena, Lynn wants to wear this orange apron with this ... (She paused for emphasis) towel, to the tea party with her Brownie troop this afternoon. I think she should wear one of my party aprons because this is a very fancy event. What do you think?” “Well,” Mrs. Smith stalled for time. “I think a smile is the most important thing for her to wear to this party. If she can put on a smile and wear the fancy apron, I think that might look best. But nothing will look good with those tears.” Diplomacy at its best. *** I wish I could remember the outcome for certain, but I can’t. Looking back after all these years, I know that if I were the mother in the same situation, I probably would have acted exactly as my mom did. Somehow, I suspect I wore the fancy organdy apron, but only after I had dried my tears and put on “a Great Big Brownie Smile”. The Apron Quilt, as it’s now called, is finished and often keeps my legs and feet warm when I stretch out on the couch. More importantly, it warms my heart. The seven fabric squares cut from

my mom’s vintage apron don’t exactly match the rest of the quilt. But when I ask my grandchildren which squares belonged to their great-grandmother’s apron, they know. They also know that when they come to visit, I’m often wearing an apron. Sometimes, it’s the one apron from my mom’s collection that I have left. It’s not fancy, but rather, a bib apron, made from a simple white cotton print with a red-and-yellow-dotted design. The bib part of the apron goes over my head and around my neck. When I tie it in the back at my waist, it feels like a hug from my mom. My grandchildren enjoyed wearing the different kinds of aprons I made for them when they were little. They didn’t care about getting juice, food, paint, glue, or glitter on their clothes. They mostly liked the fun fabrics I chose that were printed with teacups, cupcakes, school buses, puppies, cowboys, and tools. Maybe someday the scraps from their little aprons will be included in future quilts I make for them. Last year I received a surprise package in the mail from a lifelong friend who lives far away. When I opened it, I found a quilted apron with a beautiful, flowered print and scalloped edges. Her enclosed note read: “When I saw this apron, I thought it looked just like you! I hope you’ll like it.” I immediately took a cellphone picture of myself wearing the apron and sent it to her. “I love it!” I replied. “It’s perfect. Thank you so much!” My friend had mailed me a very special gift. It was an apron, but it felt like a long-distance hug.

The Music Box Jeffrey H. MacLachlan The lid opens with a twitch of a ballerina leg. From a quiet shadow gathers men with pupils crunching light like rows of black holes. Arms straight in the air, the dancer barely moves. A chilled gust wobbles her ankles as they correct her posture before she is displayed for the rest of the world.

Delivery Jeffrey H. MacLachlan It wasn’t a deluge like a movie cemetery scene but muggy enough to trigger sneezes of rain. The cop waved me forward silently and lowering my window replied that I was delivering platters. From there I crept past the mourners holding bright umbrellas the color of autumn leaves. They filed slowly into the stone church, hanging back on the softened lawn as to not seem eager. As I pulled into the back a thin woman in her fifties wearing a camo-print dress waited. She broke the silence of unloading the truck. “Thirty-one and offduty,” she said shaking her head, ”struck by a drunk while asleep in his boat.” I nodded and forgot what I said but she nodded as well. I had left that moment, carrying deli meat and fruits, and thought of the mobile of stars dangling from the crook of the moon, the boat easing one way and then the other, like the cradle he can only recall from his dreams. Stirring a little, a beckoning siren leads him back.

The Next Chapter Polly Martin This moment, this night has taken planning, preparing and persistence. With all that, I still don’t know if I belong. I think this is where I’m supposed to be in my life, but I have been wrong before. All signs are guiding me to get out of the car, brave the cold, and start a new chapter. It is not too late to turn back. It hasn’t started yet, and the only person that knows I’m here is me. I don’t do things like this, things that are just for me, things that are positive steps to a better life. I live in the present, the day to day, paycheck to paycheck, having no future plans for my life. I have had the same job for fifteen years. I go to work, earn my check, and pay the bills. The job is why I’m even here, pushed into action. As I lean my head back on the headrest and take a deep long drag of my cigarette, I know I should quit, closing my eyes and remembering the reason I’m sitting here. The job, the new boss, the demotion, the humiliation, the words, the yelling, the shock, the panic and the sheer anger. The anger that pushed me, that drove me to make a move. After dealing with the embarrassment of being told I was horrible at my job, demoted to customer service representative, and stripped of all dignity when screamed at that I should be fired and had no right to defend myself. Being a prideful person and trying my best at my job, this was a wake-up call. I did my research, followed the steps, and found myself a way out. I open the car door, step on my cigarette, grab my backpack, turn to the school, Asnuntuck Community College, my college, and take the first steps toward my future. These steps are full of expectations, fears, worries and self-doubt. As I walk toward the building, I slowly become aware of the other students, all young, confident, and successfully keeping their backpacks where they belonged. As I struggle with my own backpack, full of pens, paper, and promise, it just won’t stay on my back. If I can’t even juggle a backpack, how will I be able to juggle a full-time job and four classes? What am I doing here? It has been twenty-seven years since I have been in a classroom. The last time I was in school, we didn’t even have backpacks! Wrestling with both my backpack and the idea of starting college, I slowly make my way into the building. 68

I have my phone out; earlier in the day I printed my class schedule and taped it to the back of the phone. I look for the room number to make sure I don’t go to the wrong room. Walking up the stairs with a herd of students, I am once again aware of my age. I thought that night classes would be full of people my age: older people giving college a shot after trying to navigate the world without a degree. Oh, I had gone down this road before. Straight out of high school, I took a class, but love had won out over education. The boyfriend, my future husband of five minutes, had made it seem like school was a waste, telling me all the cool things we could be doing if I wasn’t going to class. Eager to please, I stopped taking classes and devoted my time to the relationship. Then life took over, and before I knew what was happening, I was told I was horrible at my dead-end job. Funny how life has a way of circling around. This time I was the one thinking I should be home doing something, anything else. As I reach the top of the stairs, I walk through the doors and take a right. I look up and see that the room I am looking for is at the end of the hallway. Making my way down the hall, it seems to grow longer with each step, or I’m just slowing my pace, not sure which is the case. My heart is racing. I’m not sure if it was the walk up the stairs or the nerves. I look up from the back of my phone to check the room numbers, and then I see him. At first, I think he is a mirage. I didn’t see him enter the hallway, no idea where he came from, but he is headed my way. I feel the start of a smile break out on my face. Could it be? Is he walking toward the same room as me? This would be so great. He is like me: older, looking confused, and he didn’t even attempt to juggle a backpack. He is holding a giant cup from a fast food restaurant in one hand and a book bag in the other hand. A book bag—I love it. I can be the cool one. I watch as he turns into the room that I’m to go in. I hold my head up and begin to walk a little faster. I might just have a friend, someone who is older than me, and maybe, just maybe, he has been at this for a while and can help me figure all this out. As I approach the classroom, my head is still high, and I have a smile on my face. Entering the room, I start to scan the faces. Young—they are all young. Where did my friend go? I turn to find an empty seat, hoping he is just out of my field of vision at the back

of the class. I can now see the whole classroom, and he is nowhere to be found. Was he a mirage? Did my mind play a trick on me to get me into the class? Then I realize that he is in the room—not in the sea of young faces looking toward the front of the classroom, but at the front desk looking over the students in the room. It takes my mind a second to register that he will be my professor, not my classmate. At this moment, I recover the fading smile on my face as I take a seat. My assessment of him in the hallway was right: he hasn’t even begun to teach yet, but I feel reassured that I’m in good hands. My heart rate slows; I put my backpack on the floor, take out my book, and begin the next chapter in my life.

Things of Wood Jenean McBrearty Cradles and caskets, Barrels and bowls, Buckets and gun stocks ties to hold train tracks, Ship hulls, and main masts, yokes and plows. Tables. Beds. Guitars and violins, God made the trees; man made things of wood. Before he was redeemer, Christ was a carpenter.

King of Pop Warner Kevin J. McDaniel When I played Pop Warner, I was homecoming king for a day. The P.A. announcer’s voice echoed in the early autumn air when he read my name yanked from a pickle jar’s mouth that had swallowed other boys’ names written on confetti-like strips. I sprinted to a loud, red farm-use truck and climbed into the bed, to a haystack, where I sat beside Natalie Koslowski, queen, a local sheriff’s daughter, frequent consort of the cool-kids crowd and preppies in homeroom. Soft brown hair frolicked on her shoulders; hairspray froze the tuft teased above her forehead. A kid, white socks hiked to his knees, ran up and dared me to kiss her on the lips! as we drifted around the ball field. Blushing, we never looked up from hay straws that the wind shook loose in the sun.

Lorraine Motel, Mullberry Street, Memphis Ken Meisel Parked there, frozen in time’s ill-suppressed spell, a 1959 Dodge, its ruddy chrome face and fierce dual headlamp eyes, and its lime green fins, spiking out into two rocket spiraled red tail lights; and a white 1968 Cadillac, rectangular, leaning inward toward the motel. What happened here, when the shots, fired at this preacher, stole all this throbbing desire and hope. Some pride in the name of love called out, tore some falsehood out of a man until he could no longer stand it; this black dove of a man, speaking in tongues. At the edge of Room 306, heaven’s cusp, its drum, its threshold, persuades. The preacher’s heart, ministered in humility and the South’s shame, flocks suddenly, into a handful of raven’s feathers. Something like shining law and infinite light passes over these impartial, transfigured cars, parked still. What is it, the others think, as they feel this secret scattering; this wide magnetism, dissolving into grace? A bullet struck him hard in the neck and took his life. On Mulberry Street, a river bank: raven’s feathers. What is it, this urgency of astonishment and divinity? This high communion, impaired by no other freedom? Earlier, he had urged his saxophonist to play the song Take My Hand, Precious Lord. Something in the lyric 73

that pleadsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;precious lord, take my hand, through the storm, through the night, lead me on, to the light.

Sunday Morning James B. Nicola From the one surviving spire of many a dangling chain clanks in a rite as old as the town that was, the sound no longer pretty. The bell is tongueless now, the peal as parched as the stuck mouth of the consciousness aroused in front of the façade, which grinches, stunned at dawn, stung by the sun, the stench, the sound. He pushes the pavement then paddles the air till his palms find surer footing than his hips and legs. The mind rises again, like yesterday, recalling what transpired. Then the eyes spy an opalescence, over there, in a pothole smeared with fluid crusted like his eyes. Respite. He wambles over. The dusted bottle feels familiar. He holds it up to the sun and squints. Three amber fingers. Three more swigs. See his Adam’s apple rise and fall, his breath ring out, his gut jiggle and his face shake with joy, his fingers stop shaking, his tongue mop up the fragrance from his lips; hear his expectorant satisfaction. Gulp by gulp the geezer’s downed the rest, coughing between the thralling doses in counterpoint to the repeated caw of an unwatched lonesome bird. And then he sees, on the ground, strange shadows, rippling nonstop, like what’s above a radiator against an off-white wall in winter: heat that someone has turned on, emitted, lost. A pebble, teetered by the rising breeze if not by an unseen hand, at last decides in the end to keep its spot. Likewise the man goes back to his cardboard mattress where a sallow, tattered Book he’s salvaged serves as pillow. He tries to fall asleep again and hears an auto choke—again, motivically, between rasps—beyond the church. Behind the apse, he thinks, but doesn’t want to know. The clank returns. It’s been an hour, or multiples thereof. But who is pulling on the rope, and why, he won’t imagine anymore. He lasts another day and never sees the Sexton, the Crow, or the Automobile, his wonder fading as the giant whale of night 75

begins to swallow everything so that even a corpse might rest, invisible, till stirred by a resilient, inscrutable clanggg when the tongue of the tongueless bell in the cracked bell tower will have been, in some resilient dream, restored.

Tobias Wolff is not a Sociopath Victoria Orifice When I was fifteen, I watched a livestream of a filibuster by Senator Wendy Davis and thought the world was about to change. The year was 2013 and the bill she was trying to keep from passing would restrict freedom of choice throughout the state of Texas tremendously. It was barely a drop in the bucket, as far as social justice, feminism, and everything I valued and continue to value were concerned, but even though she didn’t succeed in the filibuster, I’ve carried the impact of watching it through the rest of my life. I remember watching that stream and feeling chills creep up my spine as the Senate gallery chanted “Let her speak!” I remember Senator Leticia Van de Putte asking a question that would resonate in my mind and in my heart for years, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?” I remember the bill not passing by a margin of several seconds, that day, to raucous applause. I didn’t remember the bill being passed one month later, in a second special session, with little fanfare. Found that one out a few years later, when I decided to do some follow-up. I remember junior year of high school, AP Language and Composition—the teacher was kind. I’d had him the year previously for classes I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to take. (They were senior classes. I was a sophomore. It was an interesting ride.) The seats were arranged in a circle, so we could all see each other, the better to facilitate discussion, I suppose. The better to alienate the friendless, I also supposed, with the empty seat to my left and surprisingly occupied seat to my right, this class period in particular. I remember reading Tobias Wolff, not much of Tobias Wolff, but the one where he’s a child with a gun, aiming at people on the street from the upstairs window, imitating soldiers he’s seen on TV. It culminates when he shoots a squirrel and cries. He pretends to pray, because he doesn’t really know how, pretends to sleep, but he

can’t, and ultimately acts like he’s fine when he’s not. He’s not fine at all. I remember the kid four seats down talking about the darkness inside of all of us, the potential to do bad inherent in humanity, how the writer probably grew up to be a serial killer, how he was clearly a sociopath. I remember saying, no, that’s not right, that’s not what this story is about. You can’t get that from this. He cried, and that was real. It was a parable about society. It was about war propaganda. It was about what America wanted from him being instilled in him at such a young age and something inside him rebelling even after he’d taken a life. Because he was young, he didn’t know what taking a life meant until he’d already done it. I remember that kid screaming at me, in this classroom, about how I was wrong and naïve and I remember his friends backing him up, the kid sitting next to me physically moving his seat back as I tried to defend myself, ‘out of the line of fire,’ if you will. I remember the teacher watching in silence. I didn’t really have many friends, back then. There were a few, none of whom went to that school anyway, and they reassured me that it was fucked up, that I shouldn’t have been put through that. It didn’t really do anything for me, in the long run. I was going through more shit than I could rightfully handle at that time, missing school and contemplating my own mortality a bit more than any sixteen year old should. It was another drop in an already full bucket that clung to the edges, even as the rest of the bucket emptied out. I remember a few weeks later, one of the boy’s friends saying, “Y’know, I looked it up, and Wolff was a sociopath, after all,” triumphantly, like it was a win for him or something. I remember shrugging, and saying, “Okay, that’s fine—still can’t really get that out of the selection we read, but cool?” and feeling very sick, deep in my gut. I remember talking to the teacher after class a few days after that, because that was something I could do, with this teacher, and noting that I’d really ruined my argument by getting passionate about it, and that I hated the way it felt. He smiled, and replied that the passion, if anything, helped my argument. I pointed out that I 78

was wrong, anyway. That had surprised him, because I wasn’t. Wolff, he said, was an incredibly compassionate, sensitive man, who ended up in the Vietnam War and wrote a lot about that, and how that experience had impacted his life, because he felt so strongly. That little liar. I didn’t reply, and that’s another thing that’s stuck with me. Tobias Wolff is not a sociopath and in a class of 20 people, I was the only one who said it, who argued it, and I had to fight for my right to be heard, and even when I was right, I was told I was wrong, and even with the lie exposed, the only one who was hurt by it was me. I never really recovered from that, among other things that I don’t care to get into, and my high school experience was less an experience and more a deep, dark tunnel that kept going deeper, spotted by pinpricks of light. I remember Wendy Davis standing at a podium, getting a warning when someone tried to help her into a back brace. At least they tried.

Untitled Simon Perchik At the end this sand coming by covers you with soft flowers that long ago dried as footsteps still treading inside some shallow grave smothered as afterward and dust â&#x20AC;&#x201D;you loved her the way the Earth keeps warm and between two suns place to place whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s left you walk without looking down though your arms are closing have grown together a single fingertip touching these shells and pebbles.

All the Better Aiden Pleasent The digger stands aside and observes the crowd that has gathered, surrounding the open grave. The family would pay no attention to his work, of course, far too concerned with the casket not yet lowered. Though “safety coffin” it was dubbed, the box could not protect them from contracting the cholera from which their loved one had so recently passed. Passed, and a ghastly creature he would become! But they must worry themselves with trivial topics such as the health of the living. And though still a digger’s chores never seem to cease, he is never happier than he is the moment his shovel meets the first dirt of day, the start to a strenuous night of work for which he thanks Heaven nonetheless. The push and the pull of the spade stir the sweet scent of dewdrop grass and damp soil. The task is something he has performed a thousand times, but he seldom finds the act tiring as he does the tears of the cemetery’s visitors. Though the public would never think it, he never cared for such morbid ceremonies— putting an end to an end. Just as well, for who would but celebrate his end? If the Angel ever did arrive, he suspected someone may mourn. A spirit, but if it were his own would such a ghost render proper homage? He supposes not.

Perhaps the only adequate guests were the pitied souls littered six feet under. Truly, they belonged in his field of work like no others ever would. And every once in a while, about as often as the moon is full in the cemetery sky, one cursed Lazarus will pull the twine and chime the grave bell that harkens from below. A cry, a plea, yet as dutiful as the digger may be, he would not gamble for the release of a creature so ghoulish. The sound, the public may wish, tells of a son or a mother trapped, still breathing. How unrealistic! How fantastical! Such worries of diseases and live burials while the deadly undead lay right under their noses! Families were too blinded by their love to realize what the digger knew, with an utmost certainty he could neither ignore nor deny: that the truly dead stay dead. How he wished they knew. He was baffled, angered at how rife with ignorance the people seemed to be, but he knew he could not warn them of these death-dealing demolishers, these communital carcinogens. They would only assure themselves— and with such vehemence!— that the digger was monstrous, a slayer, deserving of the gallows. He knew it was no man’s burden other than his own to ensure that the monsters stayed buried beneath humanity’s feet,

tucked under the grassy mounds that he deemed far too generous for the devils imprisoned below them. And as the digger watches the last sorrowful mourner depart, he hears— just far enough away that he may have missed the song if he were but a yard further— the faint ringing of a bell. He turns away. “Let such a monster rot,” a proud grin cracks beneath the coarse white hairs on his lip. He knew the tune, but the family was gone, unable to defer justice. The demon would rot, suffocating in its pine box, and that is what made things all the better.

Muscle to Bone Ellis Purdie Even more anthills shot up after the rain. My best friend Bennett’s yard looked like some miniature out of Star Trek, the old one, a landscape of dunes with a few patches of green grass. These days, since his diagnosis, Bennett doesn’t do much more than sleep on the couch. The last time I’d seen him, his one good arm was real skinny and ended in a knotty fist. His doctor says his muscles are turning to bone. And already, his left arm has gotten stiff and just kind of hangs there at his side. He didn’t want the neighbors to see that, his wasting body, so he wasn’t going to walk around dousing the beds in killer. He’d been laughing about it: the ants were coming for him now, just like they had the quail. Some scientists think fire ants took out almost all of Mississippi’s quail. All those low-lying chicks swarmed by ants before they’d hardly left their shells. It’s why Bennett hates the ants. He says his dogs never pointed like they did before a covey of quail, and he’ll never see that again. I stepped onto the porch. The main door was already open, and the screened one creaked on its hinges before clapping shut behind me. Inside, empty pizza boxes were stacked on the card table and dirty laundry hung on the backs of chairs and in piles around the couch. He’d made neat rows of his Coors cans on the foot bench. The hardwood needed sweeping. Last week, I’d told him to try cleaning up a little, let in some air and light. I’d read that it’s good for persons in his position to get small things done. In the kitchen, Bennett worked at the table. He was bent over, studying something, shoulder bones sharp. He was shirtless, his pale torso disappearing into loose light-blue pajama pants, and he was up on his toes. His black hair stuck up in stiff cowlicks. “Hey,” I said. He kept working. “Hey,” he said down to the table. “I still like what you’ve done with the place,” I said. Without turning around, he stretched out his arm, giving me his middle finger. “I’m too busy for that, Galyn. You should come here and look.”

I nodded, went and stood beside him. Bennett had always been a planner, someone who had a project, and it was good to see him back at something. Spread out on the table were a U.S. map, some brochures for some caves in Texas, another for the Utah Valley. There were cities circled in Texas, others in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. “You going out West?” I said. “Yes I’m going out there,” he said. “Before this shit finishes me off.” His waistband was slack, and it looked like the pants should have fallen off. “You taking some pistols and holsters?” “No,” he said. “The rifle.” “What for?” “People say they’ve seen Bigfoot here.” He tapped the brochures of Texas. “I want to find him. Hunt that bastard like I did deer. “Why?” “Because he’s never been bothered. He gives a glimpse and then vanishes. Even he should have to deal with the world. There’s some smart people that say they’ve seen him. Real smart.” He took the chair nearest him and sat down, ran his hands through his hair. “I’m talking Ph.D.s and stuff, Gale. They can’t all be wrong. I just want to see him. All I damned do is lie around anyway, might as well do so in a blind or something.” His voice had changed when he finished talking, from enthused to flat, like someone who’d thought they had a good idea. He stared at the table. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. What if you get sick out there? For nothing.” “I’m already sick. Soon I probably won’t have use of this arm.” He lifted his right hand and let it fall to the table. I nodded. I wanted us to take this trip, but there’d be no way I could take off work. I thought of him decked out in full camouflage with his rifle slung across his back, sunlight bursting off the scope. Bigfoot dead at his feet. I’d help him unfold his fingers and wrap them around the gun, and he’d hold it high. All the shutters snapping, the microphones and the questions. The headlines: Terminally Ill Man Ends the Mystery of Bigfoot. His headstone might have one of

those photos from the papers on it, chiseled gray-white into shiny black marble. You could die all right after doing something like that. I just stood there, knowing he was seeing the same things in his head, and I wished I could give those things to him. A long moment passed before I finally went out and started putting those beer cans in a trash bag. I did it slowly, reaching my hand all the way down into the bag so the cans didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t crash together while Bennett worked at the table. When I was done with that, I passed him and went out back to his shed and looked for some ant killer. There was a bright orange sack of Terro in there, but not enough for the whole yard. I took the bag and walked around the side of the house to the front. I shook the bag out over what I could until it was empty, the last grains straying off in the wind.

The Raft Stephen R. Roberts I see the raft, tied to the trunk of the big sycamore, soundlessly floating in the flood waters of memory. A friend and I assembled it over half a summer, preparing for the hardships of untrammeled wilderness. We camped out in our starry-dark backyards for weeks, preparing to depart, with knives and knapsacks secured. Each of us honed our stories on the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination as the hour drew near to take to the muddy current. But someone knew and told our parents. They arrived in the nick of time to foil our furtive endeavors. Days passed. A logjam downriver, flooded two-thirds of our dreary hometown. Six cars and a heifer drowned. My friend disappeared from the story, washing up later in a dream, as I circled in an eddy where the river bends.

Breakfast Fix with Morning Birds Stephen R. Roberts The radio comes on when I switch off the crockpot Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve set up in the broom closet. Certain frequencies screw-up from the floor like little dust devils of peripheral vision. Unidentified morning birds flutter skyward into a whiplash of cloud, then quietly explode. Suddenly the air fills with Rorschach tests. Feathers unfold into sets of livid puppeteers. Everything seems abnormal for a while, until the refrigerator begins to beg for poultry products. A few ducks fly over, paddling hard, upside down, to retrieve old echoes of quacking lost years ago. Hunger pangs of thought dangle inside the room like toothy stalactites in a cave of contradictions. Fixing breakfast, I attempt to disguise myself as a mathematical lobster with eggs over easy.

Black Sandstones John Timothy Robinson On the side of a hill where fifty years ago a road had wound through Locust posts, black Sandstones lie in the sun and heat. Frail layers that glitter with silver specks, so brittle they fall apart in your hand. Prehistoric almost, baked in humid noons, stratified, frail as thin glass. These stones mark a wagon path, worn ruts over steep ground, around rocks hands could never move. The track has disappeared, grown over in Multi-flora, Milkweed, Ambrosia. Blackberry and Orange Glow stand the path. Up there, on level ground, the grass-covered path leads to landmark slabs. A spade in soil turns up splintered light, silicate reflections that make no mirror, only earth revealing pieces of life; cobalt Vicks, green Wildroot amber-colored shards, blue flecks of Mason jars. Dormant clues have lain within this place, five hundred seasons decomposing, risen back again in evidence; clamps, seals, nails, chimney brick, knife blades, half-rotted cloth or newspapers, pieces of ovenware, dishes fill the space between foundation and root-cellar walls. Moss has claimed these rain-worn forms, broken open from all extremes, the very being of what they are. Sentinel blackâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a form of meaning over-looked as grass. 89

There are always new things here. Questions draw the eyes for truth; look up and ask, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Has the spade struck final? Is this really an end?â&#x20AC;?

Harbinger Kathleen Roy If you happen to dig up soil beneath the forsythia bush in the front yard at thirty-two Arnold Drive, you will come upon some bones laid neatly to rest, loyal bones, worthy of the lemony-yellow blossoms shooting out loud, along thin brown vines. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peaceful under the shrub, shaded and well away from the road, close to the house and family she loved and guarded so well. Her name was Beauty. She was a German police dog, a black-haired bundle of nervous energy. No one dared to step on our lawn during her watch, right up until the day she died of old age. Dad sadly laid her to rest and never once thought to replace her. He knew he couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. On her death certificate, he gave her his last name. His dog-bride. And then dug the grave by himself. The forsythia blooms a little brighter every spring since Dad died.

Keeping the Art in Rinehart Kathleen Roy “To write is to be human.” - The National Handwriting Association Harriet Rennix must be turning over in her grave. In 1962 she was my seventh grade teacher at Center School in East Hartford, Connecticut. A no-nonsense, cursive handwriting aficionado, she was determined to perfect the script of any student who was lucky enough to be assigned to her seventh grade class. I’m sure that if she were alive today she’d be an active advocate for insisting that cursive writing be taught as part of the grammar school curriculum. She would never have agreed with the majority who buy into the belief that computers eliminate the need for handwriting. I can still picture her in front of the classroom as she faced the blackboard. Her left arm akimbo on left hip. Right arm circling, twirling and swirling white chalk over blackboard as she formed capital O’s; egg-shaped ovals, topped with curlicues. I recall her ginger-red hair sprouting out of the back of her head: short, sparse and spiked, like the roots on a vinyl doll. Her head tilted to the right, in the same direction as those slanted O’s. She tirelessly wrote them on the board, imprinting on our young brains the precise way to form, slant, space and connect letters using long hand. Through patience, repetition and most of all her passion, Mrs. Rennix taught the art of penmanship. She led by example, using “The Rinehart System” to teach us. The way to learn the system was very basic: practice over and over, stay between the lines of ruled paper and never hold your #2 lead pencil so tightly that Mrs. Rennix couldn’t easily slip the pencil from our grasp while we wrote. (I always clenched my pencil too tightly and I still do.) It wasn’t enough to get a penmanship grade from our teacher. We also had representatives from The Rinehart Writing System come into our classroom to view samples of our handwriting. To prepare for this, the students wrote our full names, small and capital letters of the alphabet and one sentence containing all 26

letters of the alphabet: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two Rinehart representatives came to our classroom to judge our work. Just before their arrival, Mrs. Rennix directed us to spread our papers over the tops of our wooden desks. The representatives walked around our classroom, holding open tins containing red ink pads and rubber stampers. They stopped at each desk, examining our handwriting. The classroom was silent except for the sounds of rustling papers and the soft pounding of those rubber stamps. The atmosphere was tense as the students anticipated our turns. When a student’s writing was outstanding, the representatives stamped a red star on his or her forehead. These students wore their ink with pride and were reluctant to wash it off. Long after that ink had worn off, what remained is a skill that Mrs. Rennix gave us, to keep for a lifetime. Today, I’m sixty-seven years old. I have an eight- year-old granddaughter who unfortunately won’t be learning cursive in school. So I’ve begun to teach her myself. She is the beneficiary of my seventh grade teacher’s passion. The delicate loops and fine curves my granddaughter learns will form her name, allowing her a unique signature and a handwriting style I know Harriet Rennix would’ve been proud of.

Unexpected Endings Kristin Santa Maria “You’re fired,” the boss said. “Do you mean that I am on fire in terms of my managerial skills?” the worker asked, obviously not getting the concept. “No,” said the boss, who had no problem spelling the situation out. “You are no longer employed with this company.” “Oh no,” said the worker. The gears were starting to turn; albeit, they were turning at a slow pace and seemed to be on the brink of collapse, yet still they turned. “I really did not see this coming,” said the worker, who really should have seen this coming what with the number of days out, the minor kleptomaniac tendencies (the company still couldn’t find five staplers), and the fact that the worker lost fifty thousand of the company’s dollars. *** “I really did not see this coming,” said the darkness. “You’re fired,” said the light. *** “You’re fired,” she told her lawyer. But, really, she thought the judge had fired her. “Ma’am,” said the judge. “You are relieved of your rights to your children. Permanent physical custody is to remain with your ex-husband.” The court found her unfit. She didn’t argue. She didn’t scream. She didn’t do anything she should have done. She did kiss her children on the head. She did watch them become short specs in the distance as they left the courthouse with her ex-husband. She did all that she could do. “I really did not see this coming,” she said, though she saw it coming, like people see a tsunami coming but the seeing doesn’t change the outcome. *** 94

“I really did not see this coming,” said Abel. “You’re fired,” said Cain. *** “You’re fired,” Kim huffed. “Fired at life. I told you repeatedly that I was bringing home my boyfriend.” Donna could tell from her daughter’s tone that she was bracing for a fight. Her daughter clenched her fist, a sure sign to Donna that Kim was serious. “But, you didn’t tell me anything about him. You could have warned me." “Warned you of what exactly?” her daughter asked. “You know,” Donna said, gesturing to her own face. “Stop,” Kim said. “It’s inappropriate to make such a big deal about one minor part of his identity.” “But, it isn’t just some minor part. What kind of life will you lead? How can you ever be satisfied?” Her daughter obviously loved this man. However, Donna could not overlook the one glaringly obvious glitch in his identity. “He is a vegan,” Donna said exasperated. “Mother, what does that have to do with anything?” Kim asked. “There is nothing wrong with being a vegan,” her mother said. “You just cannot mix a vegan with a non-vegan. You just can’t.” “Well, you’re going to have to get used to it, or we will leave,” her daughter said, and Donna could hear the finality in her voice. “I really did not see this coming,” Donna whispered. Her daughter had brought home a man who just wasn’t good enough. ***

I really did not see this coming, man said. You’re fired, the Earth said. *** “You’re fired,” Sam said, laughing. The laugh turned into a racking cough that sent his body shaking like an earthquake.

“Dad, don’t say that,” Lindsay said. He could tell that she was trying to keep herself composed, but tears leaked out of her eyes anyway. She always was the most emotional of his five children. She cried at anything. She cried loudly now. His other four children just looked at him expectantly, waiting. He wondered what they would think when the end came for them. There beyond his children, he thought he saw someone else standing, someone he recognized his whole life. Or, perhaps, he just saw a shadow in the doorway. As he breathed in and out one last time, he smiled, and said, “I really did not see this coming.”

Eating Early Terry Sanville When Cynthia backed our minivan out of the driveway early Saturday morning, she almost smacked into the guy delivering newspapers. He leaned on his horn and drove up onto the sidewalk to get around us. “Don’t you dare say anything,” my wife warned. “You know I’m no good when it’s dark out.” “Your daytime driving’s not much ...” She gave me the look and I shut up. We had ten hours of mind-numbing motoring ahead, pushing eastward from the California coast past Phoenix into the Sonoran Desert. The back of our van was crammed with her easels, canvases, and all manner of artist’s claptrap that creaked and jingled with each road bump. Two hours after leaving Santa Barbara, while sucking smog in the middle of Los Angeles, my pint-sized bladder and inflated prostate gave a warning twinge. Cynthia pointed us down an off ramp and we slid into a Chevron station. I had my seatbelt off and the door half open before we stopped, made a dash for the men’s room, and patty-melted into its locked door. After retrieving the key and almost wetting myself, I pushed inside. The stink from the urinal cakes made my nose run. But like a NASCAR pit crewman, I focused on the job at hand, groaning with relief. Back in the car, I took over the driving. “Why don’t you just bring a pee bottle?” Cynthia asked. “They sell fancy ones that can hold …” “Give me a break,” I shot back. “I’m not an old fart yet.” “What? Holding your water is something only young studs do?” “Yeah, something like that.” She laughed. “You’re just bashful … as if I haven’t seen …” I clicked on the radio to shut Cynthia up but found only rightwing talk shows or rock music that sounded like my old garage band tuning up. I clicked it off. In relative peace, I drove into the sun and thought about the week ahead: winter mornings in the

empty desert, reading escapist novels while my wife splashed paint on huge canvases. “Did you bring your leg warmers?” she asked, breaking my reverie. “No. Was I supposed to?” “Remember that trip to Yuma? Your legs got so cold you could hardly walk.” “If it’s that cold I’ll stay in the car.” “And leave me alone with the scorpions and rattlesnakes?” “They wouldn’t dare bite you.” “Ha ha, very funny.” She pulled her sun hat over her eyes and fell asleep. We ate lunch while buzzing along the Interstate east of Blythe. The desert wind pushed at the van. I white-knuckled its shuddering wheel while Cynthia shoved cashews, chocolate-covered raisins, and cold pear slices into my mouth. Hopscotching our way from gas station to gas station, we fought through Phoenix’s afternoon traffic and pulled up to the Best Western in Apache Junction just shy of four o’clock. The sprawling town was brown: brown desert floor, brown buildings bordered by the brown Superstition Mountains. Even the sky was brown from dust and car exhaust. “I’m starved,” I grumbled. “Let’s unpack later and grab an early dinner.” “Fine with me. But where?” The desk clerk chimed in. “The restaurant across the parking lot has pretty good food.” “Are they serving dinner this early?” Cynthia asked. The clerk chuckled. “You haven’t spent much time in snowbird country, have you?” “No, I’m here to paint the mountains.” “Awesome. That’ll be a great conversation starter with the old far … I mean, ah, with our patrons.” The lot was full of Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs parked crookedly in their stalls. We snaked our way between cars and I yanked open the restaurant’s front door. A blast of humid air hit us. The foyer was crammed with white-haired people sitting against the walls on padded benches. Only a few were talking to each other, whining or grumbling.

“Jesus, that woman looks just like my great aunt,” Cynthia whispered, motioning to a stooped lady grasping a walker with a built-in seat and a hand brake. I always wondered what those brakes were supposed to do: stop speeding walkers? Make parking on hills easier? There were three of them lined up, like some kind of showroom display. After checking in with the hostess, we stood as more people crowded inside. Cynthia and I were the only ones with dark hair, except for one guy wearing an incredible rug that didn’t match his snow-white muttonchops. As seats became vacant, we let others take them. Someone tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Does your wife want to sit down?” an old guy asked between rasping breaths. I glanced at Cynthia and smiled. “Thanks, but we’ve been sitting all day. It feels good to stand.” “Ya don’t have to rub it in,” the man grumbled, fingering his cane. For a moment I thought he was going to whack me with it. “He’s just trying to be chivalrous,” Cynthia whispered in my ear. I leaned down toward him. “Is the food good here?” “Reminds me of Army food. But it stays down, and the Chablis is cheap.” I thought about ordering a carafe and drinking it right there in the foyer. But the hostess suddenly called our name and we hustled after a high school kid in a bow tie, winding through a maze of parked walkers, wheelchairs, and canes protruding from Naugahide booths. Cynthia sniffed. “I can’t smell anything over the lavender.” She held a Kleenex to her nose, her allergies in full attack. I kind of liked the perfume smell. Reminded me of my Granny, sitting at her sewing machine with straight pins clamped between her seamed lips, humming an old Polish tune while we neighborhood kids played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” in her backyard. The bow-tied kid seated us at a table against the wall. A girl brought menus. I stared at the glossy photographs of deliciouslooking food and compared them to meals just delivered to a table across the aisle. There was no resemblance. A crowd of seniors

circled the salad bar. A woman who looked like Mrs. Claus bonked her head on the Plexiglas spit guard as she tried to bring the soggylooking vegetables into bifocal range. The wait staff ran everywhere. Made me tired just watching them. We ordered. The food arrived hot, the drinks cold and appropriately intoxicating. I loosened my belt and leaned back in the chair. At the tiny table next to us a woman picked at a pork chop and drank green tea. Her long gray-yellow hair was uncombed, her brown cardigan buttoned wrong. She retrieved lipstick from her purse and, with a trembling hand, began applying it, missing her lips and streaking her chin and cheeks. Cynthia leaned toward her. “Ma’am, can I help you with that?” The woman’s face flushed. “What? Am I making a mess?” “Well, yes, a little bit. Here, let me.” “I lost my compact somewhere, and my hands shake so bad …” “That’s all right. Hold still for a moment.” Cynthia dipped a napkin in a glass of water and gently rubbed the woman’s chin and cheeks. The lady smiled, showing off perfect dentures. “I feel like a little girl getting my face wiped by my mother.” “I’m sorry,” Cynthia, said, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” “No, no. It’s a good memory.” “Do you live here or are you just visiting?” “We moved to Apache Junction in ’87. But my Harold passed two years ago … and I’ve been out of sorts ever since.” Cynthia looked at me and frowned, then turned back to the old dear, holding the lipstick as firmly as one of her paintbrushes. “I’m an artist. Going to paint the mountains tomorrow.” “I kinda thought you looked the bohemian type.” “Why?” “My hair used to look like yours. You wait. Ten years from now it will be just like mine.” Cynthia’s frown deepened. “No need to be sad about it, dear. We all get old. Look at this crowd, a gaggle of geezers, all of us.” Her high laughter tinkled above the clatter of plates and silverware.

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Outside in the parking lot, Cynthia scowled. “Ten years … I’m nowhere near her age and …” “Relax, hon. I’d give you at least twelve years before you …” “Look who’s talking, bladder boy.” She grinned and dug me in the ribs. We slept well that night, glad for strong hot showers and a king-sized bed fitted with Magic Fingers to ease the ache of tired muscles, sore backbones, and bruised egos that just weren’t yet ready to surrender.

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Partner in Crime Carissa Satryb A single week of abandonment was one of the longest, most excruciating weeks of my life. We had just moved to Connecticut from Indiana, and I was petrified of the new unfamiliar territory and fresh faces. My parents had to finish signing documents for the house we were selling, so they abruptly dropped my brother and I off with some relatives close to our new school … states and states away. It was my first day of school in the second grade. As all the other kids paired off into groups giggling and heading out to recess, I was left sitting alone and writing a letter to my parents. I carefully shaded in the flower on my “miss-you” card to my mom and dad, trying to construct the perfect petal but still feeling like it was inadequate, to say the least. My brand-new teacher, Mrs. R, came over to check on me; she was aware of my situation and was the person of authority to grant me special permission to stay inside from recess that day. She peered over the sleek black trim of her glasses onto my flower, her eyes steady and kind. “My, my, what a beautiful flower that is Carissa! You are a little artist, aren’t you!?” I blushed at her comment and felt drawn to the warmth of her admiring my art, much like my own mother would have done. She patted me on the shoulder and went back to her desk to continue grading papers. She didn’t even realize that, in that moment, she had made me want to be her very best student. I was so tiny, unaware, and alone that when she showed that first sign of acceptance, I sprang to it. She was my only friend in this strange new world, and I would surely do anything to please her. She smiled at me from her desk lovingly, completely unaware that the innocent little girl she was looking at had been a terror child just a few months prior. Back in Indiana, my shy and quiet personality was nowhere to be found. Instead, I was a curly-haired, wild child raising hell on the playground with my best friend, Carly. Carly and I were inseparable. While that bond may appear cute to some adults, we had infinitely ruined it for my previous first-grade teacher, Mrs. Daun. The higher powers of the world had tested Mrs. Daun’s patience and willpower that year when 102

Carly and I were placed in her class. I am both surprised and pleased to find out that she still teaches today, so we didn’t ruin it for her. Mrs. Daun was a very organized, friendly teacher who thought she had a pretty good handle on students until she got stuck with my first-grade class. Most of the students behaved poorly, messing around and breaking nearby supplies as she tried to go through a lesson plan, but Carly and I were the tip of the iceberg. My best friend and I were so close that we could communicate by a glance or smirk, and we had the same great ideas on how to terrorize our classroom. We were a handful. On one of our worst adventures, we had snuck away from our class and into the auditorium to play on tables that were set up there. We were giggling uncontrollably and beaming with joy as we jumped from surface to surface, practicing our ballerina skills we had learned the week before. “Let’s go back into the classroom. Everyone should be at lunch!” I squealed in excitement. Carly nodded her head in agreement with me, eager to do something new. We slipped back into the vacant dim classroom, delighted that no one had come to find us yet. “Let’s do art!” We went to work coloring and cutting out paper, making Van Gogh like scribbles while getting lost in our little world. “Ahhh-hemmmmm!” A deep grumble came from behind us, causing us to jump and almost ruin the beautiful pieces of art that engrossed us. We turned quickly in bewilderment, our eyes large and fearful. There was Mrs. Daun, standing with her arms crossed and her lips pursed together. That woman did not look happy. “Now what are you two young ladies doing here in class when you are supposed to be at lunch!? I have been looking everywhere for you two, along with some other teachers!” Carly and I remained silent, our faces still frozen in shock. “I will be talking to your parents about this!” Mrs. Daun sternly spoke to us, but Carly and I were starting to realize that this was no different from any other time. Our parents tried to ground us, but we were terrible children and showed indifference to their punishments. We could remarkably entertain ourselves while staring at a blank wall for an

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hour—something other children would find agonizing. Mrs. Daun could sense us both starting to relax, so she ushered us to lunch while explaining the dangers that could have resulted from our decisions. The next morning on the school bus, Carly sat next to me like usual, but with a great big grin on her face along with a new pair of snazzy glasses. “Wow! Are those new purple glasses!?” I asked her as she beamed happily at me. Carly was quick to reply, “Yep. I love them! I still have my old pair with me if you want those!” Her grin grew even bigger after seeing the excitement that must have crossed my face. So, there we went into class that day, both of us sporting our “new” glasses. Mrs. Daun was probably having a good morning until she spotted us. Fixating on my face, she strode up to me not looking very satisfied once again. “Carissa, when did you happen to get glasses?” she asked with her arms crossed, already anticipating my answer. “Last night. I’ve needed them for a while.” I lied directly to her face. She rolled her eyes. “So, if I call your parents, they will tell me you are telling the truth?” She studied me. “Of course!” I lied again. We went through the first half of the day doing activities that I could barely see; the glasses were making everything blurry and obstructing my vision terribly. Finally, near lunchtime, Mrs. Daun was exercising her extremely stressed “endof-the-day” facial expression. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and staring blankly through the wall as if she had lost her soul. Her lips disappeared and turned into a white line as she pressed them down harshly against her teeth. She had the whole class gather into a circle. It was clear Mrs. Daun knew I didn’t really get new glasses, and she was done playing along with the ridiculous act. On one of the classroom walls were colorful pockets with each of the student’s names, and in each of the pockets were three different colored cards. When a student did something disobedient, as punishment, her or she had to take a card from the pocket while everyone watched. Everyone still had two or three cards in theirs— except for Carly’s and mine. We were both on our last card.

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Mrs. Daun lips were still pressed together as if glued, but only momentarily before telling Carly and me to step forward. “You two girls have been terrible all week, but today was the last straw! You cannot lie about something such as wearing glasses!” Before she could even tell us to pick our last cards, Carly shot me a glance to see my reaction. Within a second of making eye-contact, we burst into uncontrollable laughter. A complete laughing fit escalated between us, and then quickly cascaded into the whole class laughing and not being able to stop. Mrs. Daun was livid. She had a system in place, and we were ruining it for the other kids. This time, when I got home, I was in big trouble. But I knew that the grown-ups couldn’t do anything to keep me away from my partner in crime. We would be shortly reunited the next day at school. The only thing that would separate us would be moving states and states away. These memories of Carly flashed through my head as I finished coloring in the last details on my “miss-you” card. Mrs. R continued to smile at me lovingly from her desk as if I were a darling little angel. I don’t think she would have ever expected my previous life in Indiana to be what it was, nor would she ever realize how much her attention on that first day of school could change my previous mischievous ways. She would never know how much she lucked out; I went from being a little, curly-haired girl raising hell on the playground to a perfect second-grade student who was eager to impress her new teacher. Well, at least until I could find a new partner in crime, that is.

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Flat White Sky Abigail Skinner We were driving from Reno to Vegas. I don’t know why. I only went with Sebastian because he suggested it and I had nothing better to do. Even if I did, though, I still would’ve gone. But I wasn’t working, and my family didn’t speak to me, and I was fairly short on friends. I mean, he was it. Just him. So really, there was never a question of whether or not I’d go with him. “How many times I gotta tell you?” Sebastian said. “Put the map away. I don’t need it. I know how to get there.” He never took his eyes off the road. “I know that. I like looking at it.” I took my eyes off the map. I looked at him. “The radio signal out here is shit,” he said. “Shit, I just wanna listen to the radio.” He was right. The speakers broadcasted mostly static, maybe a whisper of Merle Haggard underneath. We were probably halfway there. I don’t know. It was just past noon and dusty enough that Sebastian had to roll up the windows of his beige Datsun. I had spent most of the morning tracking our progress on the map, but after a while the red and green and purple highway lines and the tiny letters of tiny towns got all jumbled or maybe I just stopped caring where we were. Two years ago, back when I still had a job at my uncle’s construction company and before I had given up drinking, I was at the bar, the one right behind my house, celebrating something or more likely celebrating nothing. Jonas and Leon worked for my uncle and they were there with me and we were all drinking and laughing loud. I have tried to remember what it was we were laughing about. Nothing ever comes to mind. Sebastian was working behind the bar that night, gathering discarded peanut shells in his palm and wiping his forehead with a red dish towel. Not paying any attention. We were so loud, and he just kept his eyes down on those shells. I walked over to him, probably fishing for some kind of reaction, and I said, “Sorry for the noise,” and he said, “You must really be hurting.” That just about did me in. 106

The desert is slippery. All that open space, all that nothing for hundreds and hundreds of miles, broken up only here and there by a general store or maybe a diner. Nauseating after a while, eyes desperately searching for something to focus on that is not flat sand or flat road or flat white sky. Finding nothing. Sebastian had pulled off to the shoulder because he wanted to eat his lunch. We sat in the dirt, leaning against the car for shade, but there was none and the light was nearly unbearable. He had his food laid out on his legs. A sandwich, a bag of carrot sticks, and a brownie that he had bought at the last gas station. He offered me half of the sandwich. I didn’t want it, he knew I didn’t like chicken salad, but I took it. That’s just how it was. “I figure we should be there in about four hours. Factoring in stops and all that,” he said. “Okay. Yeah, that seems right. Four hours.” I bit into the sandwich. He watched me chew. “You don’t have to. I was just being polite.” “So you have a hotel and everything set up? I mean, you called ahead and reserved a room, right? Hotels are funny about that.” “Didn’t I tell you, Philly?” He turned to me, squinted his eyes almost closed. “My friend Tim said we could stay with him. He’s got a couch. I coulda’ sworn I told you that.” The mayonnaise from the chicken salad felt like glue in my mouth. “Oh.” “Sorry, Phil. I thought you knew.” “It’s okay. Really. It’s okay.” A car drove up then, a brand new-looking pickup truck. The man inside rolled down his window when he got within earshot of us. Smoke poured from the opening. You shouldn’t smoke with your windows up, I wanted to tell him. The man flicked his cigarette onto the ground. It landed an inch from me, just barely missed my leg. “Car trouble?” he asked. Sebastian put a hand in up in greeting. “No, sir. Just having a picnic.” He lifted up the bag of carrots, gestured to the dirt next to him. The man said, “It’s hot.”

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Sebastian said, “Yes, sir.” I took another bite of the sandwich. The man bent over and rummaged around his glovebox. Smoke was still billowing through the window. Like his car was burning up by some invisible flame, blue paint bubbling and cracking and flaking off, leaving behind a map of this truck, a trail to follow all the way back to the beginning. He tossed a pair of sunglasses at us. “You’ll go blind out here,” he said, and drove off. “You play pool?” Sebastian came up to me much later that night, red towel still slung over his shoulder. Jonas and Leon had gone home, back to wives and kids, things they said I should think about getting. Quality of life and all that. But they had been laughing just as loud as me. “What?” I said, because I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me. I held an empty green bottle in my hands, was staring down into it through the tiny opening, squinting one eye and then the other like it was a telescope and asking it to, for once, just cut me a break. “Do you,” he said, slower, “play pool?” I nodded. “I play pool.” “We’re just about ready to shut down for the night. Wanna play before I hang everything up?” He already had the cue in his hand. “You’re closing? What time is it?” “Three.” “Shit.” He was looking at me, kinda smiling. At least I thought it was a smile. Maybe it was a grimace. It could have been a grimace. I set my bottle down on the table but it tipped over, knocked against the wood, rolled off onto the floor. Sebastian didn’t flinch, just looked from me to the pile of glass and nodded. “Rack ‘em,” he said, “I’ll get a broom.” The sunglasses sat on the dashboard as we continued down 95. We both already had sunglasses but Sebastian thought we should keep them, thought it made for a good souvenir of our trip. “We haven’t even had the trip yet,” I observed.

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“Come on, Phil, don’t you know that dumb saying? It’s about the journey, or whatever? So it’s a souvenir from the journey, right?” “Yeah, I know the saying.” “Alright then. The sunglasses stay.” He was still messing with the radio, searching for melody or talk show or anything that was not bleeding static. “I could sing.” I looked at him out of my periphery, could not keep the smile from my face. “Hilarious,” he said. Then, without warning, “Hey, whatever happened to that girl from Jaime’s? Weren’t you two, like, you know?” I reached up and snapped the radio off with my thumb. “Thing is goddamn obnoxious. Should’ve brought some CDs. Why didn’t we bring CDs?” Sebastian, with both hands on the wheel, turned to face me. “Philly? Did you hear what I said?” I stared at the crease between his eyebrows and would’ve stared longer but he turned back to the road, almost like the question was erased. I knew it wasn’t. “She wasn’t into me,” I mumbled. “Bullshit. You went on like five dates. What kinda person would go on five dates with a dude she wasn’t into?” “She just wasn’t,” I said, and I was losing control of my voice. I looked out the window at the expansion of desert and at that moment it looked like some planet that was not our own and I thought, isn’t it something. That you can live your whole life in a place and never dull to its ferocity. Because unlike the calm surface of the ocean that conceals all its wretched secrets underneath, the desert does not hide its ferocities. It bears them. “I’ll talk to her for you,” Sebastian said. “Please don’t.” “What the hell is with you, man? I thought you liked her. Tanya? Taylor, or something?” “Theresa.” “I’m gonna talk to her. She comes to the bar all the time. I’ll talk to her.”

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The souvenir sunglasses started to slide off the dash. I reached up to stop them from falling, pushed them back all the way to the windshield. Sebastian was humming, his grip on the steering wheel loose and nonchalant. He was sweating from his temples. For a minute I let my eyes follow the line of perspiration as it carved its way down the stubbled skin of his cheek. For one minute. And then I turned away, reached down beneath my seat, pulled out the atlas. Opened it but not to Nevada.

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Catapult Launch—2 Richard Smith As the late evening darkness settles on the ocean, our Skyraiders are lined up on deck at the ready, engines idling wings folded over our heads. These planes wait their turn in the catapult to be ejected into the night for their sortie over North Korea. As we are directed into position, the pilot throttles to full power checking the engine before flight time because engine failure would be disaster during take off. The wings unfurl as we are set for lift off. With a sudden slamming jolt, I almost become an integral part of my airplane. Zero to one hundred and thirty miles an hour in forty seconds minus ten. I nearly go through the back of my seat, this launch like getting hit in the butt with a baseball bat. It’s a wonder this plane isn’t thrown right through its own propeller, the way that catapult ejects us from the ship and slings us into the sky. The G-forces make my stomach feel like it’s going to slide out between my back bones. My whole body feels flattened, more wooden than flesh, my arms and legs held down tighter than any rope could ever tie them. 111

As the airplane settles into normal flight, I finally become human once more, and my first thought is that damned catapult did it again.

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New Eyes M. Stone On our drive out of the mountains, storm clouds grimy as trash fire smoke fill the rearview mirror. Hookworm curves settle into a straight-shot highway, and the pivoting sun tinges dusk a fool’s gold hue. Closer to home, I spot a Cooper’s hawk perched on a power line, its feathers disheveled like my windblown hair. The radio signal fades; folk music yields to a backwoods preacher raving about the end times. You turn the dial to silence and release a tired moan. Here, suspended in almost-night, it is easy to imagine us on the cusp of apocalypse but our old lean-to, long needing a fresh coat of paint, glows bright in the shadows and your hand on my knee is a young man’s again.

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Endless Days Done All too Soon M. Stone Late afternoon sun pierces the oaks overhead, casts a latticework pattern across your face. As we stroll past the old barn, I search the grass for venomous copperheads and docile rat snakes, steering clear of chigger-laden Queen Anneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lace. Tonight my legs will bear a miserable rash, but right now I follow the hem of your dress. We sit in a freshly-mown field, and I rest my head in your lap, aware of the thin fabric separating your skin from mine. I endure my watery hay fever eyes while you stroke my hair, hum a tune I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. The westward hills open their mouths to swallow the last scraps of day, yet as shadows purple the air, your fingers circle my wrist, and I stay.

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“Where Can I Find a Hairdryer Out Here?” - A friend’s question while on a cruise Jeffrey Warzecha First, steal a live rock lobster from the kitchen, conceal it—an extra towel from guest closet— then carry it to deck four where lifeboats hang, and, standing between two of them, hurl it into the ocean, returning claws and antennae to the Caribbean bottom from which they were dredged, all while intoning Poseidon to accept your sacrifice, to gorge on the offering, then open your arms to hug the sea-air, inhale salt mist, open and close your fists to grip wind and extract from what you trap against your palms first the plug, then the unraveled cord like magicians’ endless throat-scarves, and finally the dryer itself, from suction inlet to nozzle, then parade it like a prize, a seawind-shell, down decks and corridors, through buffet and cabins, back to your stateroom and insert its barnacled plug into socket to feel the sudden thrust of sails tautening during wind shift, equatorial air and artificial wind, waves combing back and forth through your hair.

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Clinging Diana Woodcock Barnacles with feathery appendages gracing the breakwater’s rocks—scraping off algae for sustenance, clinging. Kneel down. Lean into their world. But don’t touch. Let their silence and the incoming tide’s spray wash over you ‘til, cleansed of every last nagging frenzied thought, you become one of them. But beware: resist the urge to interfere when the terns and gulls come to call. Be in their world—become one of them firmly attached to this Brace Cove beside the Atlantic Ocean, but bury along the rocky shore any notion of rewriting the rules. When the surf lays a sea walnut at your feet, gently lift it from the wet sand, hold it in the palm of your hand as if it is all that exists: gift from the ocean stretching out before you—standing between you and Sagres. Call of the Black-backed gull breaking the great silence. Brute strength of marine crustaceans with their fixations on rocks, whales, hulls of fishing boats through every season’s wind and storm, breaking the chains of dominance that have bound you too long. 116

Finally ask yourself: would you be the thunderbird creating storms, or the barnacle clinging?

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Contributors Notes Freshwater Literary Journal, 2018 Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, Ottawa Arts Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Arkansas Review, Carolina Quarterly, Poem, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank. Julia Alexander is a poet from Connecticut. Her first book, The Dirt I Rise From, was released by Paint Poetry Press in 2015. She started her own literary magazine, Insert Lit Mag Here, which ran for seven issues between 2014 and 2016. Most recently, she has served on the editorial board for Freshwater Literary Journal. Find her at juliaalexanderpoetry.com. Geer Austinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetry and fiction has appeared in Poet Lore, Manhattanville Review, Big Bridge, Potomac Review, and Boog City, among others. He is the author of Cloverleaf, a poetry chapbook (PWP Press). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Cathy Beaudoin grew up in Northern Connecticut and now resides in San Luis Obispo, California. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Five on the Fifth and Kind Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review. William Besner was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. He now lives in Enfield, Connecticut, and attends Asnuntuck Community College as a Liberal Arts major focused on Fine Arts. He is a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, and his interests include a lifelong love of reading, writing, and drawing. He is an aspiring artist, writer, and video game designer/tester.

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Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, Ohio. Recent/upcoming appearances in Neologism, In Between Hangovers, and Clementine Unbound, among others. Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017), and the novel A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for more than 20 years edited the journal Poems & Plays. His most recent book is the cookbook-memoir, The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin, 2015). His tenth collection of poetry, The Feral Condition, is forthcoming from Negative Capability Press. Patrick Brown grew up on the banks of the Mill River in Leeds, Massachusetts, where he also worked for two summers as a train conductor at Look Memorial Park. He wrote the essay “Steamer Train Engineer” for his first-year composition course at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, in 2006. Patrick adored children and animals. In addition to driving the Look Park train, he worked one summer at Camp Hodgins for Children with Disabilities. He completed his Associate’s Degree in Business with honors at Greenfield Community College, and attended the Isenberg School of Management at UMass-Amherst. Patrick always worked hard, most recently in restaurants in Northampton Massachusetts, and was moving toward a career again working with children when he was tragically taken in an accidental opioid overdose on February 22, 2016. Patrick’s friends remember him for his wit and loyalty, along with his personable and compassionate nature. His purest expression of joy was when he was snowboarding, where, as in life, he loved to go big. Patrick’s family dedicated a bench beside the Look Park Train Station in his honor on October 21, 2017. His sister Elsa read this essay aloud to those

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assembled. Patrick’s bench dedication reads, in part, “Our twinkling star in every midnight sky,” Patrick’s own words, written in eulogy to his pet rabbit, whose death was just one year before his own. Abigail Burson is a student at Asnuntuck Community College with lives in Ellington, Connecticut. She wants readers to know that every word of her memoir in this journal is true, that her pain and struggle are real—but flowers grow from dirt, don’t they? R.J. (Bob) Caron, is a student at Asnuntuck Community College, taking primarily English/Writing classes. His hometown is Enfield, Connecticut, where he shares a condo with his wife Kathy, a cat, and four parrots. Presently, he is semi-retired but still works part time, supplementing his Social Security check by doing work he enjoys. For example, he has been a Mad Scientist over the past three years. Peter Neil Carroll’s newest collections of poetry are An Elegy for Lovers (Main Street Rag, 2017), The Truth Lies on Earth (Turning Point Press, 2017), Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places—which won the Prize Americana. His poetry has appeared in many print journals and online. He is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org and lives in Northern California. R.T. Castleberry’s work has appeared in Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, The Alembic, Pacific Review, and RiverSedge, among other journals. He is a co-founder of the Flying Dutchman Writers Troupe, co-editor/publisher of the poetry magazine Curbside Review, an assistant editor for Lily Poetry Review and Ardent. His work has been featured in the anthologies Travois: An Anthology of Texas Poetry, TimeSlice, and The Weight of Addition. His chapbook, Arriving At The Riverside, was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2010. An e-book, Dialogue and Appetite, was published by Right Hand Pointing in May, 2011.

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Corey D. Cook’s poems have appeared in After the Pause, Chiron Review, Columbia College Literary Review, Dewpoint Literary Journal, Dime Show Review, East Coast Literary Review, Lummox, Muddy River Poetry Review, Northern Cardinal Review, Red River Review, Smoky Quartz Quarterly, and many other publications. His fourth chapbook, White Flag Raised, was published by Kattywompus Press in 2015 and is available for purchase online. Corey edits Red Eft Review and lives in Vermont. Zack Dempsey says of himself, “I’m a bit of a chubby dude with a scruffy beard. I grew up in the suburbs with nothing to do besides eat and sleep. I was raised by my single mother, who is involved in the memoir published here. My favorite literature ranges from Lovecraft horror to sarcastic nihilist humor. Though my inspiration is boredom and time, I hope to keep improving my writing skills for posterity—maybe for a future son or daughter.” Bernadette Duncan (judge for the 2018 Freshwater Literary Journal Student Writing Contest) spent twenty-six years as a radio talk show producer. That career inspired her recent memoir, Yappy Days: Behind the Scenes with Newsers, Schmoozers, Boozers, and Losers (Talkers Books, 2016). In the book, she vividly recounts her years in the trenches of big-time talk radio during its dynamic decades set against the dramatic background of pre- and post-9-11 realities. She has worked with industry giants such as Larry King, Sally Jessy Raphael, Tom Snyder, Lou Dobbs, and Charles Osgood, among many others. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Cosmopolitan, and Seventeen. Eric Greinke has new work forthcoming from Gargoyle, Lake Effect, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Plainsongs, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Trajectory. His website is www.ericgreinke.com. John Grey is an Australian poet and United States resident. His work has been recently published in the Tau, Studio One, and

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Columbia Review, with work upcoming in Naugatuck River Review, Abyss and Apex, and Midwest Quarterly. Jessica Handly teaches English at Asnuntuck Community College. She holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts, has worked as a professional writing tutor, held seminars on writer’s block, led fiction writing and journalism clubs, and has served as a reviewer and tutor for other authors. She feels her greatest achievement is that she has inspired young authors to read and write. Ruth Holzer’s poetry has appeared previously in Freshwater as well as in a variety of journals including Earth’s Daughters, Connecticut River Review, Blue Unicorn, POEM, Bryant Literary Review, and Poet Lore. She has published three chapbooks and received nominations for the Pushcart. Ann Howells, of Dallas, Texas, has edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years, recently digitally at www.IllyasHoney.com. Publications: Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag Publishing), Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter Press), an anthology of Dallas/Fort Worth poets: Cattlemen & Cadillacs (Dallas Poets Community Press), and Softly Beating Wings (Blackbead Books), winner of the William D. Barney Chapbook Contest 2017. Her work appears widely in small press and university publications. James Croal Jackson is the author of The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FLAPPERHOUSE, Yes Poetry, Serving House Journal, and elsewhere. He edits The Mantle. Find him in Columbus, Ohio, or at jimjakk.com. Reading well-written stories inspires Lynn Johnson’s writing. Mostly, she enjoys memoir writing because she loves sharing stories of personal adventures and ordinary, everyday events. Lynn is a retired elementary school teacher. Returning to school at Asnuntuck Community College and taking classes in Creative Writing and Public Speaking and serving on the Freshwater 122

editorial board have been great experiences. She and her husband, David, have three wonderful, grown children and twelve absolutely amazing grandchildren who provide endless ideas for her writing. Jeffrey H. MacLachlan also has recent work in New Ohio Review, Eleven Eleven, Minetta Review, among others. He teaches literature at Georgia College & State University. He can be followed on Twitter @jeffmack. Polly Martin is a Human Service major at Asnuntuck and will be graduating in May. She came back to college after twenty-five years of life. She has worked at Old Dominion Freight Line for seventeen years as a customer service representative. After graduation, she hopes to work with the elderly. Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, who taught Political Science and Sociology. Her fiction, poetry, and photographs have been published in over a hundred and eighty print and on-line journals. She won the Eastern Kentucky English Department Award for Graduate Creative Non-fiction in 2011, and a Silver Pen Award in 2015 for her noir short story: “Red’s Not Your Color.” Her novels and collections can be found on Amazon and Lulu.com. Kevin J. McDaniel lives in Pulaski, Virginia, with his wife, two daughters, and two chocolate Labs. To date, his work has appeared, or forthcoming, in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Wiley Cash Volume X, Artemis Journal, Broad River Review, Common Ground Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Gravel, JuxtaProse, Temenos, The Cape Rock, The Main Street Rag, The Offbeat, and others. His recent chapbook, Family Talks, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, Swan Duckling chapbook contest winner, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of six poetry collections: The Drunken 123

Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015), Scrap Metal Mantra Poems (Main Street Rag: 2013), Beautiful Rust (Bottom Dog Press: 2009), Just Listening (Pure Heart Press: 2007), Before Exiting (Pure Heart Press: 2006) and Sometimes the Wind (March Street Press: 2002). His work is in more than ninety national magazines including Cream City Review, Rattle, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Boxcar Review, Origins Journal, The Bookends Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Lake Effect, Soundings East, Gravel Magazine, and Lullwater. He has a new book, entitled Mortal Lullabies, forthcoming in 2018 through FutureCycle Press. He was the featured poet interview in Rattle Magazine’s September, 2017 Rust Belt Issue. James B. Nicola’s poems have appeared in Freshwater, the Antioch, Southwest, and Atlanta Reviews, Rattle, and Poetry East. His nonfiction book, Playing the Audience, won a Choice award. His three poetry collections are Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), and Wind in the Cave (2017). Find him online at sites.google.com/site/jamesbnicola. Victoria Orifice is a Liberal Arts major at Asnuntuck Community College. She won Second Prize in last year’s Student Writing Contest, and is a former member of the Freshwater Literary Journal editorial board. With any luck, she’s presently working on one of numerous novels-in-progress. If she isn’t, please nag her about them. Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems, published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books and his essay titled, “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. Aiden Pleasent is a Game Design major and horror enthusiast from East Windsor, Connecticut. He writes casually and hopes to publish

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a collection of horror poetry or a graphic novel someday. His other passions include superheroes, science fiction novels, and digital art. Ellis Purdie is a graduate of The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Previous work has appeared in Grasslimb, New World Writing, and Quarter After Eight. He lives with his family in Marshall, Texas. Stephen R. Roberts lives on eight acres of Hoosier soil, pretending it to be wilderness. He spends more time now with grandchildren, trees, and poetry, not necessarily in that order. He collects books, geodes, gargoyles, and various other obstacles that fit into his basic perceptions of a chaotic and twisted world. His full-length work, Almost Music From Between Places, is published by Chatter House Press. John Timothy Robinson is a traditional citizen and ten-year educator for Mason County Schools in Mason County, West Virginia, who holds a regentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree. He has an interest in critical theory of poetry in structuralism and American formalism. Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetry has appeared in forty-five journals, electronic and print. He has also published several literary critical essays. Kathleen Roy is a 1983 graduate of Manchester Community College and a member of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. Since her retirement from the nursing profession, she continues to take writing classes to improve her poetry and short story writing skills. Her goal is to create a collection of short stories and poems for her eight-year-old granddaughter, Taylor. Ryan Russin is a General Studies student at Asnuntuck Community College and is a professional painter and amateur writer. He was recently named to the All-Connecticut Academic Team. Kristin Santa Maria received her MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University and is pursuing her PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design through Clemson University. She has taught English courses at a

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variety of colleges and universities, including Asnuntuck Community College. She is currently the Assistant Program Chair for English at Post University. Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California, with his artistpoet wife (his in-house editor) and one skittery cat (his in-house critic). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems, and novels. Since 2005, his short stories have been accepted by more than 250 literary and commercial journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Potomac Review, The Bitter Oleander, Shenandoah, and The Saturday Evening Post. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes for his stories “The Sweeper” and “The Garage.” Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing. Carissa Satryb is an extremely snazzy student at Asnuntuck Community College. She enjoys writing, art, nature, hula hooping, and trying to spread the word snazzy. Abigail Skinner’s previous work has appeared in Living Waters Review, for which she also works as an editor. Richard Smith has been writing poetry since 1985 and did his first four open-mic readings in Las Vegas in 1987. He has read in many bookstores, coffee shops, libraries, and on Pittsfield Community TV for the last thirteen years, and has been involved with Freshwater since its beginning in 2000. M. Stone is a bookworm, birdwatcher, and stargazer who writes poetry while living in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bop Dead City, SOFTBLOW, Calamus Journal, and numerous other print and online journals. She can be reached at writermstone.wordpress.com. Derra Tennis is a groovy English major at Asnuntuck Community College. When she's not in class, you can find her online shopping at Urban Outfitters or listening to her favorite band, The 1975.

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Sarah Velcofsky is a history major graduating in 2018 from the University of Connecticut. She hopes to one day be the person who comes up with crazy names for nail polish colors. Her work has also appeared in Long River Review. Jeffrey Warzecha earned his MFA from Lesley University and is the recipient of The Connecticut Review’s Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize. Diane Woodcock is an associate professor of English in Qatar at Virginia Commonwealth University’s branch campus, where she teaches composition, creative writing, and environmental literature. She is the author of six chapbooks and two full-length poetry books: Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale (Word Poetry Books) and Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders (winner the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Women’s Poetry Prize/Little Red Tree Publishing). Forthcoming in 2018 are Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty (Little Red Tree Publishing) and Tread Softly (FutureCycle Press). Prior to teaching in Qatar, she worked for nearly eight years in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai/Cambodian border. Widely published in literary journals and anthologies (including Best New Poets 2008), she is a doctoral candidate (Creative Writing) at Lancaster University. Dorian Xanyn is a part-time student at Asnuntuck Communicty College taking classes to pass time and further his education. He grew up in Southeast Massachusetts and has always loved writing. Raygan Zononi lives in Enfield, Connecticut, and is studying communications and journalism at Asnuntuck Community College.

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Notice of Non-discrimination: Asnuntuck Community College does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious creed, age, sex, national origin, marital status, ancestry, present or past history of mental disorder, learning disability or physical disability, political belief, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression or genetic information in its programs and activities. In addition, the College does not discriminate in employment on the additional basis of veteran status or criminal record. The following individuals have been designated to handle inquiries regarding the non-discrimination policies: Yhara Zelinka, Title IX Coordinator yzelinka@asnuntuck.edu (860) 253-3092 and Cheryl Cyr, 504/ADA Coordinator, ccyr@asnuntuck.edu (860) 253-3045, Asnuntuck Community College, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, CT 06082. 128