From the Depths, Winter 2013-14 "Journeys"

Letter from the Editors Dear Readers, The “Journeys” issue of From the Depths features works of fiction, poetry, and creative prose where the heart of the work revolves around the journey--the unfolding story of who we are and how we make our way in the world. From here to there and the spaces in between, join us for open road adventures, crossroads and crossing paths, planned beginnings and unexpected endings. Join our traveling storyteller as he takes you on a journey through the pages, focusing not on the destination, but the journey traveled.

We are proud to present the Winter 2013 issue of From the Depths. Enjoy!

Best regards, Susan Warren Utley Savannah Renée Spidalieri Editors, HWP

Copyright © 2013 HAUNTED WATERS PRESS. All Rights Reserved.

No portion of this periodical may be reproduced or used in any form; printed, electronic or mechanical, without the express permission of the publisher. The only exceptions are to the contributing authors ninety days following publication. From the Depths is a quarterly publication of Haunted Waters Press. Cover design by Susan Warren Utley © 2013.

Please see Credits & Permissions for attributions.

Works contained herein are works of fiction. Characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any actual places, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Printed and published in the United States of America.

First Printing: December 2013. For more information please visit www.hauntedwaterspress.com Or email us at editor@hauntedwaterspress.com From the Depths is a quarterly literary journal released in the months of March, June, September, and December in digital format, and periodically in print form. All submissions should be sent through our online submission manager. Please visit the Haunted Waters Press website to review our submission guidelines.

This publication is made possible through the hard work and dedication of the contributing editorial staff who give their time so generously.

Funding and support for Haunted Waters Press provided by The Man. Thank you for encouraging us to follow our dreams.

From the Depths Journeys Winter 2013-2014 EDITORS Susan Warren Utley Savannah Renée Spidalieri PENNY FICTION EDITOR Penny Dreadful FEATURES EDITOR Savannah Renée Warren DESIGN & LAYOUT Susan Warren Utley CREATIVE SUPPORT TEAM Debby Warren-Manning Rebekah Postupak

In this issue...

While the World Sleeps Christopher Dysart

The Mail-Order Couch Ruth Z. Deming avenue down lincoln Liz Jacoby

Welcome i Cord Moresk

Backwoods Philosphy Erin Armstrong

Time Warp Scott T. Starbuck

The Greater Yet to Come P. C. Moorehead

My G r a nd mother Boarded a Ship Tina Wayla nd Flash Rebekah Postupa k

Once in Nebrask a Robert Vivian

Do Not Spe ak to Me of Death Michael Pa trick Eltrich He Just Can’t Turn in His Badge Diane Giardi Late Birthday Dri ve Shelley Kahn Allison

At Hea rt K. Garc ia

o ds In the Wo by Sylvia Ash

Things I’ve Taken a M atch To Darlene Pagán

Feeling Tense Elizabeth W. Seaver

Hilltoppers Cumberworth Sheila

rn The Retu Weitzman n w o r B S arah

Keepers Charles Tarlton Grooved Pavement John A. McCaffrey

4

n otte avin g e N B ah S ar

r Dark Matte g án Darlene Pa

Immigrants Herbert Englehardt Who Could Ask for More Clay Renick

Letter from the Editors The Lovely Con trib

utors

Authors The Lovely Penny ions Credits & Permiss About the Press

Show Us Your Colors

5

The Mail-Order Couch

by Ruth Z. Deming

6

Jose carried you over the threshold the companion of my latter days I was finished with the has-beens couches bought at thrift stores other people’s sweat and cigarettes You are newly born the stork wrapped you in cellophane a couch for eternity.

In the foothills of North Carolina they dressed you in your wedding gown red as raspberries glistening in a pie and slipped on your high-heel pumps a blend of alderwood and birch You’ve settled down far from the clang of manly hammers the swoosh of bouncy soy-product stuffed into your cushioned hips and breasts Tired, I lay down to nap sixty-six years of exhaustion visions flooding the forest of my mind: Why have I returned to foggy San Francisco? or the sweltering heat of Houston where I reigned five years as a failed wife?

Never an answer only sweet comfort in your arms we rejoice in the manic depression I sloughed off like a snakeskin the new kidney pulsing invisible in the belly where Sarah and Dan once grew and your silent attentiveness intuitive as an oak.

Here, let us get up and greet the dawn Nearing eighty, I am nearly as old as mother when she died Your cushions have grown hard, pebbly inside Still we thrill to the string quartet and the birds splashing in the birdbath I’ve told friends I’m no Henry the Eighth intent on divorce But, who, my darling will want you when I'm gone?

7

While the World Sleeps Streetlights are bubbling up from gutter water like jewels or glowing tearswhite and yellow drops lined up the sides of the street, granting me safe passage through the cold air on a warm summer night.

4am.

There’s no one out and it’s so quiet all I can hear are the rattling spokes on my bike skipping over pavement stones.

I’m sure I’ll live forever.

Nights like these I live lifetimes.

And for the first time in years, I’m alonelove nobody, just a body drifting over the Earth’s surfacedetached, aimless, cruising- my left hand swaying at my side and my feet working at old plastic pedals that moan and push with each pass.

The grass from stranger’s lawns let out hot and sharp chords and notes as I pass them bystack and grow on top of each other like a song I heard in high school that my friend wrote in a small garage full of smoke, back when we were fierce and full of the same glowing energy as the shimmering gutter water and the singing grass that’s building up into a crescendo all around me.

8

Christopher Dysart

down lincoln avenue stadium lights hide orion, crowds cheer, horns and whistles officiate, distinguishing winners from Losers. on the tailgate of a yellow pick-up a woman sits attentive, her eyes fill with orange and yellow harvest moonlight high schoolers swing in and out of alley shadows smoking, drinking from flasks. traffic rumbles by and sirens blare as an unwavering stare consumes, commands wordless conversation warm, kind wind shakes loose locks of non conforming hair tickling her cheeks and jaw as wrinkled, creased fingers battle-attempt to tuck behind deaf ears.

Liz Jacoby

9

22

It reminded me a lot like an indoor yard sale — the January night our lease finally ended— as my wrist turned the brass knob of our apartment’s front door to the sights and scents of piled cardboard nostalgia

that was labeled with black marker and scratched out words, lined up in rows, but cluttered open in the very center of what was left of our bare living room

with the tongues of box panels sticking out at me like children seeking attention; I decided it was best to reminisce with their demands a while longer.

So I dug with curiosity, discovering memories like the tawny floral dress that you wore during the summer we made love in the Poconos,

or the poem that I wrote for you, scribbled on a good humor “Happy Birthday!” card,

or even broken picture frames and various Kerouac books— the very writer whose grave I planned to propose to you on when we both had enough credits to finish school.

But then my attention shattered as I noticed you in the corner along the cheerless walls like a little girl at a lemonade stand, unnoticed, who decided to pack up for the rest of the day.

With rain water in your eyes and thunder in your voice, all that was left for me by the end of the night was just the outside doormat with the seven letters stitched off.

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I t’s dusk and the grass around my childhood home is alive with lightning bugs clinging to its green stalks, blinking in and out of existence. The honeysuckle bush next to the porch is sweet, the yellow and white flowers waving me a welcome back in the wind. The soft, aged brown wood of the house smells of red clay, now-dead dirt dauber nests clinging to its sides, filled to the brim with the carcasses of brightly colored spiders.

I trapped a wasp in a jar with a dirt dauber once to see what they’d do. Nothing was the answer for two hours, but I waited them out, watched them fight to the death rather they wanted to or not. For a while they clung to the air holes at the top, on separate ends, at peace with each other and at war with the jar. They were desperate to get out and clung to each other in an attempt to forget, frenzied in a way that almost looked like lovemaking until the red wasp began stabbing the other over and over, until it curled in on itself at the bottom of the jar. I felt shamed afterwards, they had no way of knowing I had a child’s patience. I would’ve gotten bored in another twenty minutes and let them go.

I left this place as soon as I could, before I ended up curled up at the bottom of the jar.

Everybody knows that if you don’t get out of this place when you can, you’ll be pregnant, frontlawn standing, Bi-Lo shopping to see your friends from high school by twenty-one. I couldn’t do that, couldn’t be that. I was bigger than this place full of people too dumb to care that there was more.

I learned in class that it is the Other that makes a people feel ashamed of their own culture. It is a different sort of disconnect to hear yourself described in an academic setting, when nothing of that life is. It makes a person yearn for something that seems so far out of reach now—thousands of miles away down the road, in my memories, in a way that might never be the same again.

Now that I’m back though, I hear the whippoorwill that nests in the woods by my window calling out. It’s still too hot to breathe at ten o’clock and the bugs by the light on the porch are all one mass hodgepodge swarming. People say all the time how much I’ve changed, but this place hasn’t. I am a part of this place and I want to believe that maybe I could never leave something that I was a part of, or maybe I wish that it could never leave me. I recall the jar from my youth and wonder distantly if I wasn’t the wasp after all.

41 13

Time Warp As children in the abandoned lot, the future colonel misses the block and the principal drops face-first in mud as the football wafts like a Goodyear Blimp over the heads of the electrician and sailor to be caught by the large-handed drug addict in the end zone who is freer at this moment than he will ever be again.

Scott T. Starbuck

14

The Greater Yet to Come I opened the Father’s Day card. Not an unusual occurrence, you might say, yet it was a first for me. You see, I’m not a father; I’m not even male. The card came from my nephew, Jed, the thirty-one-year-old son of my brother, Rich.

When Rich learned of his cancer diagnosis, he visited my husband, Tim, and me several times in the years prior to his death. Jed, Rich, and assorted other relatives would come roaring down from up north, cruising in Jed’s old van along the scenic river route. Jed had re-arranged the back of the van to make it comfortable for his dad, and as Rich’s health continued to diminish, he often rested there, while other family members explored the local tourist attractions and vistas. I missed Rich’s vigor, but I enjoyed sitting in the van with him, listening to his beloved operas, as others ventured out to climb the bluffs, see the sights, and search the sands.

Returning from an outing once, Rich and Tim sat in the back of the van, both dozing, while Jed and I sat up front. Jed drove, and we both mused silently, as we climbed the rises and rounded the turns of the winding road. It had been a good day. We had all laughed, as Tim carried on a long, cheerful conversation with some river otters. Then we had ridden the riverwalk carousel, before going into a nearby restaurant for fresh fish dinners.

Traveling into the darkness on that trip home, the van seemed like a silent rocket, hurtling alone and unknowingly through the vastness of space. Time vanished, and the four of us were just there, earthlings in our little ship, resting lightly on our connectedness and on the consciousness that somehow all would be well, even though two of us – Tim with his heart problems and Rich with his cancer – were ailing.

The peace and deep silence of those long moments held, even as more populated areas came into view. Looking over to me, Jed took note of the mood. “This is family,” he said in a deep voice. I nodded.

Like neurons intimately entwined in a great brain, we communicated without words, participating in something that was more than each of us individually. Rich and Tim, both now gone, have taken the longer journey through death. Jed and I, still here, communicate often.

The Father’s Day card? It was a reminder to me of our silent nurturing of one another on that short journey, from river to city, the journey foreshadowing the greater yet to come.

P. C. Moorehead

15

My Grandmother Boarded a Ship

by Tina Wayland

28 16

My grandmother boarded a ship and left her country at six.

Said goodbye to Lithuania, to aunts with mud under their fingernails.

Goodbye to dirt floors and the ledge above the fireplace where she curled into cousins in the worst of winter.

My grandmother boarded a ship and waved and waved.

Prayed in small Lithuanian words for safe passage to an unknown life.

Asked her Baltic God to sail her to her mother.

Tried to picture a house with wood floors and loaves of white bread.

The taste of cola and sliced ham.

My grandmother boarded a ship and sat, day after day, on deck.

Traced lines in the spray.

Drew maps even though she’d never seen one.

Sketched countries even though she could only see the sea.

My grandmother boarded a ship and one day there were trees on the horizon.

A long, wet forest that cut the coast and broke the ocean.

She saw the shore and wondered if that shadow was her mother.

If that sway was a sister. Her brother.

If her journey was done.

My grandmother boarded a ship to Canada and the ship brought her home.

29 17

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Begotten

Sarah Navin

by Sarah Navin

Hex’s real name was Arietta Luther, and the suit she was

wearing belonged to her deceased father. She was wrapped in a pinstriped cocoon that looked and smelled like the ghost of Mr. Luther himself. The coat alone came down past her knees, and beyond that, the white stockings she wore to parochial school were stained red from the aftermath of shaving accidents. Hex was twelve years old and everyone worshipped her. The teachers did so because “the child has suffered so much, but she truly knows strength in the grace of God,” and we, her classmates, because she spoke to the dead during the séances she performed in her garage on Friday afternoons.

It was Mrs. Luther’s prayer candles that Hex was using for her ritual on this particular Friday. The widowed Mrs. Luther was devoutly religious and decorated her home accordingly; crucifixes appeared around every corner. From a distance, it looked as though lowercase T’s punctuated the walls, similar to the way Mrs. Luther’s disapproving “tut” sounds punctuated her sentences. She owned five rosaries, two of which she kept in silk-lined boxes. The other three she kept under her pillow, in her purse, and on her bedside table, respectively. She was an attractive woman with freckled skin and a blonde bob, and she didn’t wear makeup simply because she didn’t need to. Unfortunately, Hex had inherited none of her mother’s pretty plainness, which left her with the more interesting likeness of her late father. She had his small, sunken-in eyes, as well as his disproportionately large lower lip. They had the same ash brown hair, which Hex never allowed to reach her shoulders before she chopped the ends off with craft scissors. Mr.

20

Luther would have cautioned her against this during his lifetime, but at the moment his image had been reduced to a mousy young medium wearing a suit coat nine sizes too large for her, and he had very little say in the decisions she made.

Regrettably, in description, Hex Luther is not a visually appealing individual. However, this is not to say that she was without beauty. The candlelight in particular gave her gray irises a metallic quality, as though under her father’s suit and her school uniform, Hex was a network of chains and gears. It made sense that she had a roaring furnace for a heart that pumped hot liquid silver through her veins.

Everything about Hex represented who she was. Her name, for example. During one of her séances, she claimed to be contacted by a victim of the Salem witch trials: a young sorceress named Hexta. This spirit spoke directly to her mind and identified so closely with her that Hex (Arietta, at this point in time) absorbed her energy and – to quote Hex herself – “Became two parts Hexta, one part Arietta.” Of course, she promptly adopted the name and refused to answer to anything else. Hex was unpredictable.

This was a trait that even our parents were not too preoccupied to recognize, and it was only their faith in Mrs. Luther’s parental competence that persuaded them to let us walk straight to the Luther household after school on a weekly basis. What they were unaware of was that Fridays were ritualistically her shopping day, and from three o’clock to five, Mrs. Luther was in the downtown Minimart, caloriecounting everything with a label.

And so, it is a temperate Friday in November, Hex’s mother is nowhere to be seen, and Hex herself is standing before us, shimmering like a hologram.

“The Ignotum isn’t separate from the Notum. It’s not under us or above us, it’s all around us.” In school, we had learned that “notum” and “ignotum” are Latin for “known” and “unknown.” Years later, these are the only Latin words

we remember for one reason only: Hex used them as pronouns for the living world and the afterlife.

What she was explaining with this statement was that the world of the dead surrounded ours, as well as resided inside it. There were spirits under supermarket shelves, between the shutters on our windows, even in the spines of our grammar books. The Ignotum was on a different plane of existence than ours, she said, and spirits didn’t obey the same bodily laws that we did. “That’s why they’ll come when they’re called,” she assured us, “because they don’t have to worry about walls or floors or gravity.”

She prompted us to join hands. We were seated in a circle, our bookbags tossed in the corner of the dark garage, prayer candles pouring lavender into the air. Hex was standing on her father’s workbench, and the wall of tools behind her looked like an arsenal of medieval weapons in the candlelight. Of course she was wearing her father’s suit, her most effective thread from our world to theirs. Her hands were lost in the giant sleeves, but somewhere in there her fists were clenching and unclenching in anticipation, as always. Hex slowly tilted her head up as though a doorway to the hereafter was about to appear on the plaster ceiling.

“Residents of the Ignotum,” she announced, “souls of the departed, echoes of life, join us.” A candle, whether by our anxious breaths or an otherworldly arrival, went out. We stifled our gasps and clutched each other’s hands more tightly. We didn’t panic though, as we had done this several times before, and we knew what was to come. The first candle was never the last. Hex’s grin was visible through the slightly thicker shadows.

“Join us,” she repeated, “travel on the wavelengths of our energy and inhabit this space where we welcome you.”

Another candle. There were only three left now, and though we could see one another, Hex was engulfed in darkness at the far wall. Her voice penetrated the shadows again, she was yelling: “We are no objects of life, friends! We are as one! We relinquish our breath and our blood in this moment to meet you halfway between our worlds! Welcome, guests!

Welcome!” Two more candles went out and smoke overpowered the lavender. It was dark and silent for a moment. Linked at the hands, we did truly feel like a singular being, and a subterranean pulse travelled through us. The final candle extinguished itself, right on time, but suddenly Hex’s uncharacteristically nervous voice came to us through the pitch blackness: “Dad?” Everything after that was routine. We kept our hands linked as a swarm of sounds and feelings roared around our heads. Babies were crying, women were screaming. A muffled dialogue was going on, a man laughed, and a group of children were reciting multiplication tables. Things pulled our hair, climbed onto our shoulders, hugged us around the waist or simply rushed by our faces. The air shifted from perfume to alcohol to sulfur and then back to perfume. It was dizzying, as always, but we didn’t let go of one another. Usually, this would go on for several minutes before it gradually died down and Hex re-lit the candles, one by one. As she did so, we would thank our guests for coming, and wish them luck crossing back over to the Ignotum.

This time, though, hardly thirty seconds passed before Hex scrambled to the opposite wall and flicked the light switch on. The clamor immediately ceased and the air

smelled of smoke once again. We all turned to look at her, perplexed. Her hair was ruffled, her chest was heaving, she was trembling all over, and she was staring in shock at a space above our conjoined circle.

But most importantly, she was no longer wearing the suit.

We quickly followed her gaze. Three feet or so above our heads, Mr. Luther’s suit coat was suspended stiffly in the air, filled out as though it was occupied. Immediately upon viewing it, we released each other’s hands to scramble backward in surprise. The very second we did so, the coat collapsed in on itself, falling to the floor in a musty heap.

Hex was still staring. It didn’t take us long to find our backpacks and haul open the garage door to escape into the sunlit normality. Most of us ran home. Others stopped at the end of the block, content to rest at a safe distance from the Luther house.

The following Monday, a school announcement was made that Arietta Luther had gone missing over the weekend. We were directed to relay any information we might have to the school administration, and generally avoid any inflammatory comments that might further upset Mrs. Luther or spread rumors. An organized prayer for Arietta’s safety was held after lunch.

Once we had adjusted enough to speak to one another, we did trade theories. Those who had been in Hex’s garage the previous Friday tended to congregate after her disappearance, struggling to justify what had become of her.

One notion was that she had journeyed into the Ignotum, of course. Another was that she had been kidnapped by the government for holding her rituals. Someone brought up that she had run away in order to escape the entities that were making themselves comfortable in her garage.

The most popular theory, of course, was that she had finally established contact with her father and accompanied him back to the second plane.

Arietta Luther never returned. She who preferred the name “Hex,” who spoke to the dead and possessed an otherworldly vitality despite the overwhelming theme of death in her life. She who acquainted her classmates with the unknown while her mother was at the grocery store.

In coming years, most of St. Rita’s parochial academy would forget about Hex and the police department would give up scouring the small and surrounding towns for her.

Mrs. Luther would move out, taking every single religious trinket with her, leaving behind an empty house. We would, understandably, return to the unlocked garage at some point and attempt to recreate the events of that day, candles and all. It would, also understandably, fail without Hex’s mechanisms to draw in the dead.

So if you ever run into Arietta Luther, address her only as Hex. Tell her that the students of St. Rita’s send their love.

And if she stays for conversation, remind her that we still – on particular Fridays – feel company in an empty room, or a breeze without the windows open. Because it’s true. And if we turn our focus inward, we can sense that little deposit of hot silver in our blood.

But don’t betray our hopes by looking for her. As much as the idea of a living, breathing Hex Luther thrills our nostalgic senses, we have thoroughly convinced ourselves that she is walking the boundary between the Notum and Ignotum, one day to return to us in a candlelit room. And when she does, we hope with all our hearts that she will tell 21 us just how well her father’s tailored suit still fits him.

Flash

by Rebekah Postupak

22

“ You busy Saturday?” he asked, studying the floor.

“I just got errands, and I guess laundry,” she said.

“Wanna get married?”

Neither of them breathed for a long moment. And then: “How long will it take?” she asked.

“It’s quick,” he said, daring to look across the table at her glinting dark eyes.

“Okay then,” she said. “Just so it doesn’t take too long. I got a lot of running around to do.”

They grinned at each other in the way that eventually over the years grew as comfy and familiar to them as his mahogany easy chair and her Dutch apple pie. The comfy grins saw them through childbirth and child death, new jobs and lost jobs, and from a suburban house to a plain apartment. The years nibbled away at their bones and teeth and hid dentured grins behind whiskers and chins until no eyes but theirs could see the grins.

“Guess that does it for me,” he said one day, his voice raspier than he’d remembered it being.

“Yeah? Me too, just about,” she said. “One or two things to finish up first.”

“I love you forever,” he said. He reached a thin hand across the bed and put his fingers lightly on her fragile grin, his eyes fixed on hers until the last possible moment.

“You were right,” she whispered as his hand fell away.

“That didn’t take long at all.”

23

Once In Nebraska

by Robert Vivian

Once in Nebraska I saw lightning fork out over the plains in a broken tree of shattered light, and I felt its voltage ripple through me but there was no place to put the electricity so I stuck it away deep inside and carry it in me wherever I go, bright shattered tree dangling just behind my heart. Once in Nebraska I kissed a girl in a park and she kissed me back and her blond hair glistened like gossamer in the sunlight and her skin smelled so clean and warm I knew I’d never forget it, and I haven’t. I haven’t. Once in Nebraska I buried myself in the snow in zero weather because I wanted to hear the voice of God and so I held my breath on land that was nothing but powdered dune waiting for God to speak, but I only heard the wind and then I knew the altar that is earth and myself stretched out across it as a wide-eyed sacrifice that would one day be forged in a great shattering truth.

Once in Nebraska I rode my bike with my brother when we were boys and we heard on the radio that a man had murdered two girls with a broken arrow two miles from where we played, and I remember mud on our jeans and the cries of cicadas coming out from everywhere, screaming violence and sundown as breathable as the dust rising off gravel roads, the killer caught a few hours later at a car wash trying to wash the blood off his T-shirt and the ten-speed he had stolen though he almost made it all the way to Boys Town.

Once in Nebraska my first wife left me, and I went to downtown Omaha to try to sell a microwave at a pawnshop and was laughed out of the store when I asked for $50. The man behind the counter said, “Listen, buddy, it’s not even worth $5”—and I walked out with the microwave in my arms, cradling it like the child I would never have as a cold wind whipped down Farnam Street, stinging my face like a fistful of bees. Once in Nebraska I heard a young couple screaming at each other in the apartment above and how their angry footfalls scraped and pounded back and forth like hammer blows, something inside their heels and the balls of their feet containing a painful mystery that would never be revealed, only lived through again and again, and how when they stopped fighting all was quiet except for a mouse in the wall nibbling away at a piece of dry wall, its forepaws trembling like a hungry old man eating a piece of stale toast at midnight.

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Once in Nebraska I thought I would be famous, I thought tomorrow, tomorrow, next month, next year, and time was a dream of a future that did not exist except as a private movie inside my head and all the other characters incidental to the action but also an indictment of it whenever they opened their mouths so dream was already fading to distant rumor called many years ago, called when I was young. Once in Nebraska, twice in Nebraska, many times in Nebraska I wandered the streets of Omaha drunk and alone, looking for something, looking for someone, though I never found it and I never found her and the search was like a song without beginning or end and it wasn’t a sad or happy song, just a song that seemed almost like a dirge that gave me my voice, a song that continues even now in muted form, growing quieter each day and turning into something like praise. Once in Nebraska I knew wind and sky and they knew me as little brother, little dreamer, and weather was not just a part of the news but a stark beautiful indicator of all inner and outer, spirit and matter, delivering me wood smoke and sunflowers, thunderclap and rain and wind-beaten awnings like sails out at sea.

And Nebraska knew me as blank empty canvas and torn away page, Nebraska knew me as runaway son and mystic aspirant and as a few bright grains of glowing dust and I was not beholden to anyone or anything but a strange restless yearning when I grew up there, and Nebraska deigned that I should take my restlessness abroad to many places and many rivers and into other dreams of water, and Nebraska was always saying Goodbye, goodbye though I mistook its continuous farewell as an injunction to turn into wild flower, which I was never been able to do though the desire was in me from the first and still is in some secret wellspring at the bottom of my throat, and Nebraska said winter and Nebraska said zenith and spoke many times in whispers of the kingdom that is here but hidden except after a storm in long bent grasses that keep waving and waving, signaling to follow their rootless fire all the way to the horizon where the stars are waiting to be seen again in the echo of their light that went out long ago, even though they look like that have just started shining above the dew-covered earth that lies beneath them wanting, finally, only to be loved.

25

Do Not Speak to Me of Death Do not speak to me of death It will speak for itself soon enough When it comes in silence or a howling rage And takes the things you love the most There will be nothing you or I can do But watch in quiet brittle pain As the past is turned from flesh to ash And the future stolen from beneath our feet Do not speak to me of death I have seen enough I really have Still it comes with fire and blood and cold sharp steel And one by one our friends depart No matter how we beg or scream or cry There is nothing you or I can do Except remember those we’ve loved And busily await our turn to leave

Michael Patrick Eltrich For Matthew and Robyn

26

In the Woods In the woods going home-tracing the way when you never left a trail of grains along the path no special markers no blazing on trees or broken branches and maybe the stone cottage with smoke bubbling from the chimney the warm hearth the candle or lamp glowing maybe that Heidi home was just a myth maybe there never was a snug retreat worth finding worth getting back to-in the woods the dark, dark woodsÂ

Sylvia Ashby

27

He Just Can’t Turn inHis Badge He just can’t turn in his badge, leave the grey, torn swivel chair with two cigarette burn holes, empty the long metal drawer, licorice gum and Red Sox game stubs.

He can’t sleep later than four, eat more than one warm pretzel before the subway ride.

He can’t remember window views of daylight or visible scenes of seasons changing, just the heat and smell of long, worn shirts in summer and the cool of ice in tall paper cups.

He just can’t turn in his badge, give up his extension, erase his message.

He can’t leave fast, crucial minutes and relax in daytime, pastime, new time.

He just can’t turn in his badge and fold away navy blues, unclasp pins still polished.

He can’t leave the files with names of lives changed in poorly thought seconds, now photos, prints, records defining who they are by what they’ve done.

He can’t leave the spaces he has made to enter these lives, leave a word, a number, an opening for something different, something fresh.

He can’t cook, or garden or communicate well with family.

He fails at intimacy, forgets dates that matter.

At the bureau is his name, his line, the sound of his deciding voice, his locker and desk and a grey, torn swivel chair with two cigarette burn holes.

He just can’t turn in his badge.

Diane Giardi

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Things I’ve Taken a Match To The ballerina in her jewelry box with a heart painted on the top. Picture frames and peach pits. Peppercorns and cracker jacks. The edges of a tractor tire. The rope holding the tire up in a tree in a neighbor kid’s yard, the one who called my father a spic. A Barbie doll’s leg. A snake husk. A teddy bear’s green eye. A stink bug. Tinsel. A Christmas tree on New Year’s Eve. A letter telling a man I was leaving him. A bale of straw. Hair spray. The Blue Frog Bar and Grill in River Town, Chicago, where I sang karaoke two weeks after my mother died. My body. Paper stuffed in a bottle of sugar cane schnapps. A destination.

The barn windows the bottle burst through. The mown fields where the flames crawled. The house on the other side. A map. The tent I was meant to sleep in. A rumor. A lie. A letter telling a man I was coming home. The good girl pulling the night up to her chin for cover, again and again and again.

Darlene Pagán

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Late Birthday Drive On the 23rd of OctoberThe stale birthday cake is an ode To the memories and empty air My sister remembers those days In her inner heart, as the dark Pervades her home, she dreams Of those old days We celebrated all together then I tighten my grasp of cards We still write every year After each tear she cries again Sometime later, we motor to the condo Sucking the air from the highway Sewing our flowers shut we taste her cake again this year A labor of love, if always Garish, harbinger of hard times Ahead, the gardens Teeming like champagne We drive by a hobo sitting there At the roadside smoking She gave everything to us We don't drop our gaze Or pause to fill his cup These sad times seem forever Our mother sleeps in the dust.

But on the road, I see her now Blink and she is gone. That last birthday Heading into a long sleep Through barrows of loam and cold It is a clear enough story We want to bake your cake, Saying blow those candles out And let's get back to loving you But we never can.

Shelley Kahn

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Feeling Tense A future, perfect, hovers just out of reach, a Jaguar racing ahead while you lumber along in the minivan.

In the poppy red glow of its tail lights, you dream: no more soccer games, homework and back talk, planning the party you'll throw on Mommy Independence Day. Fireworks. There will be fireworks.

You'll dance holes in your shoes, drink too much, swim naked, watch your own television set, unaccompanied by the usual all-night soundtrack--size eleven arpeggios hammering the frayed staircase runner.

That very present arrives.

Even now you can't believe, but your heart has no spark of party in it.

Maybe it will be more like a progressive dinner, assembled one course at a time. Plates this month, cups in six, decide the menu next year some time-A future progressive party.

Maybe if preparations stretch out long enough, the invitation list will include those grown-ups you gave birth to who thanked you by spewing milk, a curdled stripe down your little black dress.

A perfect future party.

Maybe they'll come.

Elizabeth W. Seaver 31

At Heart

by Allison K. Garcia

T he small plane bumps down on Mexican soil and a smile flutters up from my heart. The familiar runway leads to the first of many crowded bus rides for our trip. Resting in the valley of the southern altiplano, it is always a pleasant temperature in Guadalajara, usually staying in the 60s and 70s all year long. They have a rainy season and a dry season, but my favorite time of year is when the guavas are ripe, though we hardly ever seem to plan it right.

Mexico. Every time I go, I fall in love again with the culture, the people, the food, the music, and all the sights and sounds around me. With the help of my husband, my friends, and my church family, I carry the Mexican spirit even when I am hundreds of miles away. It has been two years since our last visit, and a hope has filled my heart. I 32

believe this will be the time. The time I really blend in.

This year, they will accept me as one of their own.

While waiting for our bags at the carousel, I dream of the scent of fresh guavas and the tacos we hope to eat tonight.

My mouth waters at the mere thought. Eager to start our trip, we make our way through customs. The security guard squints at me and says something in Spanish that I only half catch. I recover, but with a crack in my wall of confidence. We take a perilous taxi ride home to my mother-in-law’s house near La Barranca, pointing out new buildings and traffic patterns since our last vacation.

After hugs and tears, lick-attacks from the family’s pit bull, Venus, and hours of catching up, my hubby and I finally experience our favorite moments of our trips –

walking hand-in-hand down the dusty, broken sidewalks of Joaquín Amaro towards Santa Cecilia. Our fingers intertwined, we smile at clumsy toddlers, petite old women, and other young couples in love. We walk for blocks and blocks, passing on the sidewalks between the street vendors and the small, lit-up storefronts selling their specific items: shoes, backpacks, medicine, pirated music or movies, food, haircuts, or school uniforms.

A little girl points at me with her chubby arm. I am pulled out of my revere and a wave of discomfort rolls over me. I shake it off but find myself randomly looking in the crowds for other white faces. I have gone for days, sometimes weeks, in earlier visits without seeing any of my gente. I am pulled in two directions – the desire to blend in and the awareness of being different. Returning my focus back to the present moment, I take a deep breath.

With two million cars in the city, the air is hard to breathe.

Busses roar by and let off exhaust, causing a low tickle in my throat. The aroma of toasted corn quickly replaces fumes as we pass an indigenous woman cooking corncobs over a small, charcoal fire. The night air is a pleasant seventy degrees, and the storefronts and street vendors light up the uneven sidewalks. I dodge strollers, the dancing man with special needs, and mangy stray dogs searching for their evening meals. I cannot contain my joy. We are back in Mexico.

Though it has been two years since our last visit, little has changed. We find our favorite taquería, sit down on the odd, metal stools, and wait our turn. The vendor’s blondish-gray ponytail bobs as she expertly scrapes around the meat with a spatula on the sizzling, metal basin grill, moving small quantities to the hot center to prepare tacos for patrons. A few spatters of grease pop and land on my arm. I sit back, inhaling the aroma.

My husband asks what she has but she runs off the list too fast for me. Another brick cracks in my wall of confidence.

In America, most Latinos think I am Chicana or Puerto Rican or at least ponder at how I speak Spanish so well. But here in Mexico, they can spot me in a second, and I am suddenly conscious of my Spanglish words and incorrect phrasing.

I ask the taquera to repeat herself and then decide on two of chorizo. Today I am being adventurous and also order one with lengua. I don’t usually get tongue but have tried it once before in America. She asks if I want it with everything as she grabs meat off the steaming grill with two overlapped palm-size tortillas.

“Sí,” I reply. She sprinkles on cilantro, onions, and little chile and hands me my orange, plastic plate. It is covered in a plastic bag that she will later toss in the trash, so they don’t have to wash dishes. I look at the tongue taco. Oh God. It is a big slab and still has the taste buds on it. I ask for lime, squeeze on the citrusy goodness, and eat the tacos de chorizo first. A burst of spice and flavor explode in my mouth. They are better than I remember. Too soon, they have disappeared into my stomach. I give a sideways look to the taco de lengua.

My husband smiles at me. “You want me to eat it?” He bites into his tripe taco with ease.

I frown. “No, I’ve had lengua before. Just not with it looking quite so much like tongue.”

He laughs and sips on his glass bottle of Coca Cola. For some reason, Coke always tastes better in Mexico. I think it’s because they use real sugar instead of corn syrup but I’m not sure if that’s really why. I sit up taller and bite into the taco. The tongue is thick and slightly chewy but has the same flavor I remember. I eat it quickly. “It’s good,” I tell hubby. “But I like the chorizo better.” Once I can get the woman’s attention, I order two more chorizo tacos and sip my soda. Hubby orders more, too.

In the time we’ve sat down, the little taquería has served another dozen customers and probably fifty or more tacos.

We aren’t the only ones with good taste. Some take it to go.

I watch her rapidly fill small, plastic bags with onions, cilantro, and salsa. I like the way she grabs the right amount of meat into the tortillas and ties the bags in one quick swing and pull. These everyday actions are like a show for me and are part of the fun of eating food on the streets.

I savor the last two tacos and the final gulps of soda. “Son deliciosos, gracias.” I smile at the woman. We pay her the $4 for ten tacos and, with full bellies, stroll back by moonlight through the city streets. A motorcycle zooms down the dark street with no headlights. Then suddenly I smell them.

“Guayabas,” I call out to hubby and point to the smushed, yellowish green, seedy fruits on the sidewalks. I look up at the guava tree and take a deep breath. Its sweet aroma overtakes any trace of smog and swirls around me.

Tomorrow we will go to the tianguis, an outdoor open market, and buy a ripe, delicious kilo of them.

Two blocks later, we are assaulted by more glorious scents as we walk past the neighborhood panadería. I breathe in the yeasty sweet air of freshly baked pan dulce. We stop in and fill up a bag. I hug it to my chest, grinning, and we open the iron door to my home away from home. Unable to resist the bread, we share a piece in the kitchen with a glass of milk and then settle onto the faded living room couch, the light from the television glowing into the tiled, concrete room.

Fireworks celebrating some holiday related to La Virgen go off like gunshots, scaring Venus. We chuckle as she hides under the coffee table, her tail between her legs, but we are able to coax her out again. Through the welded, barred steel windows, neighborhood children bounce soccer balls in the street towards imaginary goals, screaming, “Fuera!” and “Gol!” and a bouquet of insults and curse words.

I take in my surroundings and my heart beats a mariachi rhythm. I realize that it doesn’t matter how others see me but how I see myself. Though most people cannot see beyond what is on the outside of me, I have the unique ability to see all that is within me and accept myself for who I truly am – an American girl with mixed European roots, born and bred in New Jersey, who carries in her heart the culture, the food, the language, and the spirit of her husband’s people.

Underneath my many layers, beneath all that defines me, I am Mexican at heart.

33

Hilltoppers

by Sheila Cumberworth

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Haunted Waters Press is pleased to present an excerpt from author Sheila Cumberworth’s true life journey, Hilltoppers, a memoir about growing up in Minnesota during the 1950s. Sheila is retired from the University of Michigan and spends her summers in Port Austin, where she spends a lot of time looking into the depths of Lake Huron.

Enjoy!

I was the fifth generation of my family to live in the house where I grew up, on a hilltop of gently rounded land facing directly into the northwest overlooking Bald Eagle Lake, Minnesota. The land was purchased by my great grandfather, Archie Ferdinand Thompson, in the 1880s, and the first house he built on the property was for his wife, Bertha Frances Thompson, and their daughter, Octavia, my grandmother. Over the years, he built other homes to house a burgeoning family as Octavia married, then had two daughters, each of whom of married and had children, one of which was me. By the time I was a child, there were four dwellings on the land and several outbuildings. Three of the homes were occupied by family members; the fourth was rented to families who had no choice but to be incorporated into the circle of our communal lives.

The original home and surrounding area was referred to in earlier times as “Thompson’s Hill” and by extension those

of us who lived there were called “Hilltoppers.” The name stuck.

When my parents bought the original homestead after the deaths of my great-grandparents, I became the fifth generation of my family to live in the house. With the complacency of childhood, it didn’t seem to me then to be remarkable. I believed that everyone lived among the ghosts and traditions of one’s ancestors. My greatgrandmother died in the bedroom where I slept as a baby.

My grandmother was married in the bay window of our living room. My mother was photographed as an infant sitting on the lap of her great-grandmother, Harriet Jane Goodwin Pierce, on our back porch, flanked by her mother and grandmother. I had that picture framed one year for Mother’s Day: four generations of my founding mothers assembled on the back porch where I played as a child.

Such matriarchal power was represented there! It was a power that permeated my childhood.

The house had been built in the late 1800s. I don’t know exactly when, but it doesn’t really matter much because so much of the original structure was changed over time. It changed drastically during my early childhood when my father tore into the walls to replace the electrical wiring, setting off on a decade-long program of renovations that totally altered the appearance and character of the place. To

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this day, my sister and I still dream that the walls are moving around in the house. In my memories, I try to fix my age by figuring out which year we gutted the back room and kitchen, or re-did the front and side porches.

My father’s renovations were ostensibly to improve the safety and warmth of the home while achieving a more modern face-lift. However, they also had the effect of putting his indelible mark on a piece of property he acquired as a result of his marriage to my mother. Male territorial marking behavior, as expressed through “renovation” seems to run in the family. As generations of husbands came into the matriarchy, each in turn built or renovated something.

Even my grandmother’s second husband, who was in his seventies when he married her, was compelled to add a sunroom to the side of the little retirement home that was built for my grandmother in the 1950s. My Uncle Terry and Aunt Barb still live in that little house – it is the last of the properties owned by the original Hilltoppers. Our house, the first that was built on the lake, was sold in 1963 when my father finally succeeded in breaking away from the matriarchal clan and moved our family to Buffalo, N.Y. It was a defining event for all of us, but particularly for my grandmother. I remember her wailing and wringing her hands, telling of the weddings, and the deaths and the rich family life that had gone on under its roof. I also remember the little odd things that cropped up as a result of the sale.

Details such as surveys and the division of land caused great trauma as boundaries never formally demarcated were platted and posted.

Then there was the need to dig another well. Over the course of nearly a hundred years, four houses had sprung up on the original landholding, each tying into the same water source, which was located on our section of the land.

Drilling a new well seemed the last insult to the family members who stayed on. It is a testament to the strength of family bonding that we were able to break away physically from that life, re-settle and yet keep our ties as a family.

I was sixteen the year we moved away, bored with my small town life and eager for adventure in the “East” (as we mistakenly thought of Buffalo, NY.) It wasn’t until my grandmother’s death sixteen years later that I began to reckon the cost of my loss and come to terms with the meaning of that early life on Bald Eagle Lake.

That life will never come back, except as I try to tell it here. And though I hope I get things right, I doubt that I will. I tried to tell about this life and these people some years ago, envisioning it as some grander fictitious saga: something Faulkner might have written or the Englishman Delderfield. I realized, however, that I didn’t know enough of the essential facts about the early years on Bald Eagle to write a convincing fiction. Hopefully, by trying to tell the truth of what I do remember, I can summon and piece together enough memories – which by their nature may be as easily fictitious as true – and flesh them out by fancy to convey a sense of the way things were. Such is the essence of a memoir. Who can say if it’s true or not? It’s as I remember it and as I also remember what I’ve been told by others. Finally, perhaps it’s really as I’d like to remember these things, which in the end is where the pleasure lies in writing it down.

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I will start then with what I remember of what I was told about the first Hilltoppers, and in particular Greatgrandfather Archie Thompson who first came to Bald Eagle Lake in the 1880s.

The First Hilltopper Archie Thompson built the first year-round house on Bald Eagle Lake. He wasn’t the first man to live on the lake: there had been a small shack built on the north end a few years before he arrived. I don’t know who lived there, or what he did. He didn’t stay on long and left no permanent mark on the lake or the community that developed there.

Presumably there were also Indians who had lived there.

However, by the 1880s when Archie arrived on the scene, they had been defeated and moved either west or north of Bald Eagle to respective reservations or other territories. I didn’t have any interactions with native people until I was ten years old and went to a camp on Cass Lake which adjoined Indian land.

But I did know about the Indians in the area, in part because Bald Eagle Lake lies north of the larger community of White Bear Lake, a town named by a celebrated story of a young brave who killed a white bear that was ravishing the chief’s daughter and so won her for a bride. Mark Twain included it in his tales of the Mississippi, and it is often reenacted by the townsfolk on various civic occasions.

Bald Eagle is today a township of White Bear Lake, a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. In my parents’ childhood it was still largely a resort community with a clear definition between “summer people” and the yearround residents. This was changing in my childhood, as homes were gutted and rebuilt, and resort cottages were torn down to make way for larger, more permanent homes.

When Archie Thompson built the house on Bald Eagle Lake, however, the lake itself was surrounded by wilderness as impenetrable as the New England forest from which he’d come.

He had come to Minnesota as a young man without prospects. His mother was a widow. His father had been a sailor in the Civil War, killed during the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. Oddly, he wasn’t on either vessel, but was blown off the deck of an adjacent Union battleship: early collateral damage. He died before Archie’s birth, and so his mother gave her son “Ferdinand” as a middle name in allusion to the famous lines from The Tempest in which Ariel informs the young Prince, “Four fathom five thy father lies.” Drowning has played a significant role in our family, a fact perhaps not so significant given our love of the water and tendency to live upon it.

Like many men of his period in similar circumstances, Archie went west to seek his fortune. In his case, he followed the railroads out to St. Paul and became a mail clerk there. For awhile he lived in town, residing in boarding houses. He yearned, however, for a more rustic atmosphere and a place to call his own. Because he was a New Englander by breeding, he adopted the emerging

“commuter” habit of his eastern peers who lived in communities along the train lines that brought them into the centers of commerce. Archie applied the same logic. He rode the local train lines to their end, and then walked around a mile’s radius in search of a place to build.

Ultimately, that is how he found the hilltop at Bald Eagle. It was a mile walk to the train station and a half-hour ride into town, an ideal commute.

He married his childhood sweetheart, a girl named “Frank.” Actually, she was Bertha Frances Pierce, a young woman from Stoughton, Massachusetts, who had remained behind to follow her own pathways. Exceedingly bright, but also from a poor family, Frankie Pierce had gone to Wellesley on a scholarship provided by a kindly neighbor.

Fiercely proud, she taught school – Latin, Greek, and mathematics – both in the Boston area and later in impoverished areas of Appalachia until she paid off her debt to him. She was gritty, hard-headed and out-spoken. It took Archie more than a decade to convince her to abandon her career and come west to marry him.

When she finally agreed, her parents sent her out on the train. Archie met her at the station in St. Paul and took her to Stillwater where they were immediately married.

Because they got such a late start in life, they had just one child, my grandmother, Octavia Goodwin Thompson, a girl they called “Ted.” I don’t know which is more ironic: for a Latin scholar to name her firstborn child “Eighth daughter” or for a child as petite and feminine as my grandmother to go by the tomboy moniker “Ted.” She was a woman who

had a lot of names during her lifetime, none of which seemed to fit her very well. Perhaps that was one of her difficulties.

Octavia-Grandma-Ted married my grandfather, Oscar Albert Blien, shortly after World War I. He was the older brother of her college roommate and the son of Norwegian immigrants from Hanska, a small all-Norwegian farming community in southern Minnesota.

With the young couple’s nuptials duly sealed, and the later arrival of my mother, and after several unsuccessful attempts, my aunt Barbara, Archie Thompson built a second house on the hill for his daughter, son-in-law and growing family. It was the start of the “clan.”

By the time my mother and aunt married, there were three houses on the hill. A third house, a small bungalow, was built in the 1920s as a summer guest house and rental property. It wasn’t long before the families sorted themselves out to reflect this new order. My folks took over the original homestead and began renovating; Aunt Barb and Uncle Ter bought the second house built for Ted, and my grandparents moved into the rental house until 1950 when their retirement home was completed on the fourth and remaining corner of the hill.

Intrigued? Look for the complete memoir of Sheila Cumberworth’s Hilltoppers soon to be available in print.

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The Return After the usua l ritual of keys and bed linens assigned, I look for you on the above the bay. bluff Behind you th e snow mount barely visible ains against the sk y paled by dist quote the pain ance ting of “White on White” and the old ac he comes back , familiar as doubt.

But you speak at once of your intentions in art and I of the failure of my own wor k to match what I mean to convey.

You find a kind way to make yo urself clear pointing to the island too far no rt h to be seen from here where yo u live with someone you love now.

The ache shar pens as we discuss the relationship of love to art in even tones, im personal as your prose.

Later, alone under stars de nse as a spill of table salt I am already th inking of the la st day and what I’ll re turn with: some photogra phs of you a journal as ja mmed as my tr avel case a sketch of thes e near-islands and the uneven of this poem. coast

Sarah Brow n Weitzman

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Dark Matter Invisible to the eye, emits no light. Galaxies cluster and turn on hidden spindles. Scientists count stars, gauge dust and gas but the math never adds up— the missing mass like the missing limbs of a primordial creature whose shape we can only guess, the gravitational pull the force of a space after a loved one’s gone, how hard it is to breathe despite a breeze from a window.

Days spin out weeks then months then years, expanding into the vast universe of grief. You search for clues in drawers, cupboards, pant pockets, coat pockets, boxes, bags. You flip through the pages of books, files, photo albums, again and again. There is her face in a frame and here pressed in a book, blue flowers with purple tips, and there in her careful handwriting a recipe for potato pear soup.

In the sky, starlight fires through unseen energy.

By the time it reaches you, some of the stars are still alive, some long dead— the difference you’ll never know.

Darlene Pagán

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Keepers Charles Tarlton

T he mid-morning sun was shrouded behind fog and low clouds. If this had been anywhere in New England instead of San Francisco, you would said it was going to rain. The Norwegian Princess was docked at Pier 35, and despite the lack of sun, several hundreds more sightseers than normal were walking on the Embarcadero. They mixed with locals on their way to work; the visitors gazing all around, the natives keeping their heads down.

Keeper Watson, tall and hairy, came all wrinkled and grays himself along the promenade. He was pushing his grocery cart of worldly goods, his head imperceptibly turning side to side as he spoke in agitation with himself.

"Well, I'm not going," he said, turning to the right, "there's nothing wrong with me."

"There's plenty wrong," he said leftwards, and a Dutch tourist looked up and quickly away.

"I don't want to hear it," again to the right. "No doctor!"

He stopped his cart at a big square municipal trashcan, and stuck his head inside and pulled out a plastic bag containing two styrofoam packages that still held halfeaten burgers that he quickly scarfed. Passersby threw him odd glances, but no one dared to stare.

"That's better," he said, rightly.

"With your diet," the other replied, "it's a wonder you're able to stand up at all."

"Diet?" was the reply. "I eat as the Lord provides."

"The Lord?"

"They do not sow or reap or store away in barns," he said, "and yet your heavenly Father feeds them."

"The Lord doesn't give out antibiotics," said to the left, "but you'll be needing some of them soon, you keep eating garbage."

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"Perfectly good," he says.

At that moment, along their angle of vision, there were synchronized the images of a sailboat, a distant ferry, a closer up Red Italian container ship, and the Bay Bridge-all in a line.

"That's exactly how the universe is known to us," was spoken to the right. "Consider an eclipse of the moon," he said, "merely a chance alignment of my eye, the moon, and the earth itself."

"Have we ever seen one?" to the left. "An eclipse of the moon?"

"There was one once on the cover of that magazine," the other said, "another treasure rescued from the trash."

"There! Right there!" the left hollered. "Did you feel that? Right here," and his hand came out of a pocket and was laid across his heart, like a pledge. "Feel that! That's the start of a heart attack!"

"You're an old hypochondriac," right spoke, "the slightest inward trembling of nerves or twitching of muscle and you're calling for the nurse."

"I'm just reporting" "Don't I know?" And he gave the grocery cart a heavy shove and walked off down the sidewalk, the head now turning left, then right.

Keeper came at last to a remote enough bench for cleaning feet. He sat down, amidst a quarrel about myocardial infarction and a doctor's visit, and took off his shoes. He pulled off his socks, once white, that were now murky and damp, and rubbed his knuckly toes for comfort.

He reached in a pocket and took out a pocketknife and went to work on the end of his big toe.

"There are heart medications," the left side said, "the doctors can give you."

"No medications, nothing's wrong, I tell you."

"Don't try and tell me," said the left, "it's my heart, too, and it's faulty, any fool could tell."

"Works fine for me, besides, you go into a hospital you better be ready to die. I read that. The most dangerous places around."

"You're just afraid," the right side said, "you figure you know nothing, then nothing's wrong. Like your dead father."

"Leave him out of this."

"He died from being afraid of dying. That's what the doctor said. They wanted to do autopsy, remember? But we wouldn't let them."

"He'd have had a fit!"

"And now you are equally afraid, when a little exam and some pills would make us safe."

For a moment only silence as the knife dug under a nail and leveraged out a wad of something black and gritty. He couldn't resist a more careful examination, closer up, and then he flicked it away.

"I've never known anyone," the right continued, "who, once scooped up in an ambulance, ever came back."

"Well, then," sarcastically was said, "no worries, it will heal itself."

"People live into great old age with tickers far worse than this one."

The left side sat up, and startled again. "Oh, sweet Jesus!

Can't you feel that? I'm going to be sick! Oh, it hurts!"

A long pause, then, and nothing more was said, some deep breathing only, and a finger on a pulse.

The right said after, "Nothing at all, I'm telling you." Then he added, "If you're finished with the toes, let's go."

So, laboriously, he folded up and put away the knife, pulled on his socks, and laced up his shoes.

"This is likely our last day on earth," the left look said, leaned into the grocery cart, and they went along some more.

But, only as far as the large paper coffee cup left on the little round table outside the Starbucks. He was over to it and took a swig. Still warm, not hot, but not cold either.

"The Lord will provide, as I said," the optimistic right side proclaimed.

"I tell you what," the left side of the squabble offered. "If we can go to the clinic, I'll do all the talking and you can look the other way or read a magazine. If it's bad news, I won't tell you anything until they've cured us."

"And, then what?"

"Then we can go on about our business, eating garbage and having lofty thoughts, as always."

"And what if they decide to cut us open?"

"And what if we really need to be, as you say, cut open, and we don't have it done? Then mightn't we die?"

"Let's continue along here. I'm still hungry. There's good stuff usually around the Fish and Chips."

"But, what if we keep putting it put it off and it just gets worse?"

"Stop talking! Just stop talking!"

"Feel it?" asked of a sudden on the left. "Did you feel that?"

Keeper Watson pushed his grocery art farther along, humming softly, his eyes alert, kept turned up in a wild stare to discourage gawking tourists.

"Well, I don't care, I'm going to the clinic anyway," the lefty made his empty threat. "You can do whatever you like."

"It's not a matter of like," the myopic voice then said. "I just don't want to know, you understand? The thing that's going to get you is the thing you're most afraid of."

"That's so stupid," said the other. "You can't make sickness go away by wishing it away?"

"Oh, no? And what about miracle cures?

"The age of miracles has passed," the skeptic said, "and we now have clinics and doctors."

"Besides, we have no money."

"It's all free."

"Stop or I'll go crazy. I'll throw myself down on the ground and twist around."

"Okay, okay," the answerer answered. "You're impossible to talk to. But, let's sit down. I'm feeling a little faint."

Keeper sunk onto a bench, his right hand shoved into his left armpit.

"What now?" Keeper on the right wondered. "More signs of feigned heart failure?"

"Can't you feel that pain, there under your left arm?"

"You can't trick me, you know?"

Then phobic Keeper slipped a little on the bench, his butt slid forward, his back slid down, and his knees were buckling.

"Hey," said the other side, "sit back up there!"

But the old man just slid more down and more outward, until he was sitting all the way down on the sidewalk. He looked up and blankly straight ahead.

"Oh, man, this hurts. I can't breathe."

He leaned to the left, and leaned some more, and then went over on his left side, his hand still shoved into the armpit, the knees pulled up toward his chin.

"Oh, damn you!" the right hand Keeper cried, "you always have to have your way?"

A small crowd of tourists and locals gathered to stare.

They muttered among themselves, "what a pathetic sight, so pitiful."

But raucous Keeper was taking no prisoners. "Fuck you all" he said from the left and, then, as if in total agreement, from the right, "yes, fuck them all, them all."

In the distance siren sounds pierced the morning, coming closer and closer, red lights blinking, and everyone was watching as the EMS firemen rolled Keeper over and onto the stretcher.

"No clinics," Keeper mumbled under one of his breaths.

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Immigrants

by Herbert Englehardt Italian names in NYC Painted on earth-moving mastodons Came here on little bowlegged men Bent and twisted From years of field work In Sicilia or Campagna Their sweat became The mitochondria Of American metropolises Some drowned in American concrete Crushed by collapsing structures Of sub-standard strength Their great grandchildren Now lunch in elite clubs Jet to tropical islands Wear custom-made suits Drink vintage wines Live in castles cheek by jowl With inheritors of vast fortunes Undergirded By the labor of immigrant ancestors They would never Have acknowledged The existence of

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Grooved Pavement

by John A. McCaffrey M y father got me the job for the summer. I was back home after graduating from college, had no money, and had yet to decide what I wanted to do with a finance degree. A family friend owned a paving company and they needed extra help after winning a contract to repair a stretch of battered highway in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. The company was located about fifty miles from my parent’s house and my father lent me money against my first paycheck for cheap, clean room in a local boarding house. I moved in on a Sunday night and went to work the next morning.

My job was to drive a truck – inch it along, to be more exact, making sure to keep a straight and steady line so that the man hanging in a harness to the right of the passenger side door, wielding a lathe-like machine, could cut precise grooves in the pavement. It was tedious work, and the hours passed about as fast as the truck, making the long evenings after, alone and in my room, ever harder to take.

After the first week I thought about quitting and going back home, and I probably would have, except that Miller, the man in the harness, invited me to his home for dinner.

It was after work Friday and the crew was lazing about waiting for paychecks. Once they got them they left fast, except Miller, who took a long time studying the check before folding it neatly into his pocket. He then came over to where I was standing and said more to me than he had the entire week: “You’re welcome to come eat dinner with my wife and I if you have nothing else planned.”

I didn’t have anything planned and accepted.

To my surprise, Miller, unlike his stoic work persona, was animated and humorous at home, gently kind to his wife, but also quick to tease her in a manner that clearly pleased her. I was also surprised how easy it was to talk with him, our conversation uninhibited and interesting. The evening set me in a better mood and I resolved to hang on to the job.

The rest of the summer, I ate at Miller’s every Friday night. Perhaps the best part of meal was the walk afterward. After helping his wife clear the dishes, Miller and I would hike around his property. He had a few acres of woodland and once you got past that there was a private golf course. Sometimes we even brought rods with us and went fishing on a good-sized pond that enveloped one of the greens. The pond held perch, blue-gill and bass, and Miller had made a deal with the head groundskeeper: as long as golfers didn’t complain about him fishing, he could do so. Miller also made sure to reward the groundskeeper 44

with fresh fish – taking one or two home every so often, cleaning them (Miller was an artist with a filet knife, his cuts around the gills and stomach as pure as a Matisse line), and presenting them in clear plastic baggies that he would fill with wild mint leaves to add to the flavor.

It was the kind of thing I would tell later, after I moved to New York City and took a job on Wall Street. “Miller time” my friends named these stories, when I would trot out my experiences with him that summer. Fishing on the golf course was one I told quite a bit, and also the “races” he’d stage at a local running track. Miller, although tall and lanky, had a peculiar fear he was overweight, and on Saturday mornings would get up early and head to the local high school track to run. I went with him a few times and could never keep up his pace. But also I was a little embarrassed, because Miller, if there was anyone else running the track, would make it a point to draft behind them, no matter their speed, following them lap after lap until some silent bell would ring in his head and he would sprint past them, arms skyward, as if crossing an imaginary finish line.

Even more peculiar were Miller’s paintings. Nearly every bar or deli or store in that town had the same painting hanging prominently on a wall: a red elephant staring straight ahead, with a black bowler perched atop his head.

When I questioned Miller about this he told me “he was the artist.” He explained that several years earlier, when work had dried up and the crew was on an extended break, he decided to take up painting to keep occupied. But for several days he could not come up with one idea that interested him. Finally, he had a dream about an elephant wearing a black hat, and figured that was as good a subject as any to undertake. So he painted about 20 of them, framed each, and gave them out as gifts.

But for all Miller’s oddities, it was the work he did, the grooving of pavement, that most interested my friends. I think the fascination was that it was tangible. When I first moved to New York City, all of us were just starting out as stockbrokers, real estate agents and lawyers, juvenile white-collar professionals toiling in an ethereal confusion devoid of non-money-related outcomes. Grooving pavement had purpose outside a dollar: slots gouged on the side of the road stopped cars from sliding into ditches when it rained, and slots gouged on the side of a road warned drivers not to slide into ditches when it didn’t. I spoke as if I was a vital part of the work, not letting on that my only role was to drive the grooving truck like a lethargic

automaton. It was Miller who really needed to think, to keep a sharp eye on the diamond-tipped blades, making adjustments in positioning to ensure the cut was clean and consistent. I would have thought the job draining, but Miller found it relaxing, staring down at the cutting blades, the pavement.

It was Miller’s wife who phoned me to say he had died of a brain aneurism. She told me when and where the funeral was to be held. She hoped I would come. She said he often spoke fondly of me. She intimated that he was sad we hadn’t stayed in touch.

It was true. I only spoke to Miller a few times after I moved away, not long after that summer ended, and never did I go back to visit. Perhaps it was less about being busy than wanting to look back. I certainly was driven to excel at my job and work my way up. Plus I met a woman, got married and had a daughter. My life was moving in a gentle upward arc. I had money, security, and a loving family, everything I needed to be happy. The only problem was that I wasn’t, at least not in a way that was lasting and satisfying.

Happiness came only in short, fleeting bursts, usually following some sort of tangible success, either at work or at home. My solution to the problem was to try and generate more and bigger successes, which required me to work harder, push my family harder, focus on the end result, the future payoff. By the time I got the call from Miller’s wife about his death I was near a breaking point. My energy was depleted, I felt anxious and distracted, was having difficulty sleeping, and felt disconnected from family, from friends, from the happiness I craved.

The funeral was crowded. It was not sad. The priest, a fat old man with a face as red and fleshy as rare roast beef, gave a short mass and then told funny and sweet stories about Miller. Afterwards we all went to a nice restaurant in town and ate a buffet lunch. On the wall, of course, was a painting of a red elephant with black bowler.

I started on my way home right before sunset. Working my way through town toward the highway, I passed by the track where Miller used to “race.” I doubled back, pulled over and parked, got out and headed to the oval. There was a young man circling at a decent pace. He was tall and thin and ran with an easy grace. I envied him his youth, his freedom of motion, the look of serenity on his face as he passed. He did another lap and I slipped off my shoes, fell in behind him, my tie flapping in the wind as I ran, enjoying, at least for the moment, the steps I was taking, before the final push I would need to win at the end.

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Who Could Ask for More

by Clay Renick

T he room was dark with a light from the bathroom and a glow that passed over the bed where my mother lay with her mouth open. A rattling sound came from her throat. Her eyes were closed, head tilted back and mouth parted.

“They call it the death rattle,” my sister said from the bed side. The time was 7:22 p.m. I sat down in a chair next to the bed and felt a hesitation that came with sadness.

This is it, I thought. The end. Where we all end up if we live long enough.

Part of me wanted to remain detached as if to understand and analyze. The other wanted to hold her hand and wail at the loss. I’d do both before the night was over. It took hours and I can’t get the image out of my mind even months later.

Shirlee Claiborne Duncan was 82 years old, a survivor of breast and liver cancer, heart failure and diabetes. We watched her struggle from one hospital stay to another over a period that stretched years.

Images came from the past: my mother organizing the neighborhood ten year olds in cub scouts, later painting behind her drawing table where she worked as a commercial artist and smiling as a house full of children grew up and returned with their own children.

She loved dogs. There was an endless stream for years.

Some died violently on the street, others expired from disease. It always brought the same awareness that life was short and could end without warning.

I sat at her death bed with a feeling of loss. She had always been there for me as a mother. Now I couldn’t stop the process that would take her from us. The rattling breath continued as the evening passed.

What to say? She was unconscious, and yet survivors from comas report an awareness while in the sleep state. I 48

talked about our love for her and how much we would miss her and yet, it was okay to go.

Was that right? Was it okay to talk about the end? It was so hard to see her with those eyes closed and each breath coming in that croaking effort that teetered on death.

Please God, I thought. Don’t let her suffer….

The nurse checked in with each hour.

“Can’t you give her something?” I asked.

“She’s on morphine,” the woman responded. “And is due for another dose…”

She looked at her watch, “around midnight.”

Midnight came and the dose followed with a squirt down her mouth. There was so much I wanted to say, so many “remember when’s” that surfaced unsaid. The desire was there but I just couldn’t muster the effort. All I could do was sit back and watch a process that was beyond my control to stop.

Remember…. The word bubbles even now on my tongue. I suppressed the images: being sick in grade school when she nursed me back to health all day and night, trips with her to the grocery store when we didn’t have air conditioning and the store did, years ago when she paid me $.10 an hour to rake leaves in a lesson on hard work. But the values stuck.

There was so much encouragement along the way. The tree house she let us build in the yard that put several stories of plywood in a tree that overlooked a busy road next to our house. The way my sisters laughed when they caught me writing in a journal as an eight year old. My mother didn’t laugh. Instead she talked about her father who had been a feature writer for the Associated Press and how proud he would be to see his grandson with that desire.

“Mom,” I bumbled out at her deathbed. “We love you so much. We’ll all miss you. But we understand if you want to let go. Don’t fight it.”

I stopped. The labored breathing continued. Her lips were dry. I lifted a cup and small sponge from the table and moistened the cracked skin.

Why the suffering? I wondered. There’s been so much pain in her life…

My father left the family back when we were in high school. My mother had no job but sold the house and moved us down to an island in Florida. That changed everything.

We all found work. Mine was on the beach where I would sit in a chair by the surf as a lifeguard. Days of that. Full of silence. It was like a stage where I watched birds fly, felt the wind, and listened to the rolling waves drop. I never understood God before that but saw a clear pattern in that setting.

There’s a design in life. And if so, then a designer. Each of us brings that complexity in our own combination of gifts and quirks. And if so, then there must be more to life than what we see hear and now.

I started to listen more in what I now know as prayer. The years pulled me into the Coast Guard, college, feature work as a writer and then teaching.

Time picked up speed with my own family going back for visits with mom. Special time. Just being with her was nice.

She lived on social security and didn’t have much. And yet she had that special quality of knowing how you felt and having just the right words for the moment.

“It’s tough now,” she would say. “But you’ll look back and see some good that came from it.”

Work problems filled my conversation back then. Now I don’t even remember what they were. That became clear while I sat at her death bed.

One day I’ll be in that bed and my own family will be watching me, I thought. When that happens what will come to mind?

Surely not work. Not cars, houses, or money. None of those seemed to matter in her last moments. The real things of value were moments.

Moments together. Simple times. Not the kind of thing you put on a resume. Nothing you’d talk about at the office or at a party.

It’s a sharing, a passing of feeling or sentiment. In her last words several days before this, she looked at me and said “you’re a good boy.”

I was 53 at the time, but smiled and responded “and you’re a good mother.”

What more to say? I told her all along how much she meant in my life. She was a Godsend, a gift from above that can’t be measured in value.

That’s what you realize at the end. All the other stuff of life pales in comparison. In the end, all you have is time.

And time runs out.

Near 1:30 a.m. she slowly turned her head toward me. Her eyes had been closed since I got there hours before. But they suddenly opened and focused on the corner of the room.

A hospice nurse sat across the bed from me and saw what was happening. We both looked at the corner of the room where my mother pointed with her eyes. There was nothing that I could see. Then the truth surfaced.

“They’re hear for you mom,” I whispered. We couldn’t see “them”, but she could.

“They’ll take you to Jesus,” I added in a swallow. “It’s okay. You can go with them.”

Her breathing slowed at that point and grew quiet. Then stopped.

I wailed like a baby. Gushing sobs. There was nothing to stop the feeling or process. She was gone and with her—part of my heart.

I tried to describe that at her funeral later. Some family members called it “involuntary brain stem movements”, when her eyes focused on that corner of the room. Others said it was “effects of morphine” or even “reflex.” But I don’t believe that.

I was there holding her hand.

Now it’s been months since those moments. Time to reflect. Time to sort through her personal items and ready her house for sale.

There was a stack of gift cards in one drawer. They were reminders from times past as people sent a word of thanks for Christmas presents, birthday greetings or hope that she would feel better in the long sickness.

That’s where it ends. The lives that you leave. The influence that you give. The love that you share.

She was a wealthy woman in that sense. Friends who loved her. Children who cared. Memories of the moments together.

Who could ask for more.

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The Lovely Contributors Ruth Z. Deming The Mail-Order Couch Ruth Z Deming, winner of a Leeway Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is a psychotherapist and director of New Directions Support Group for people with bipolar, depression and their loved ones. She is editor of the Compass Mental Health magazine and the poetry review Icing on the Cake. She lives in Willow Grove, PA, suburban Philadelphia.

Christopher Dysart While the World Sleeps Christopher Dysart is a writer with strong roots in the Great Central Valley of California. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and putting the finishing touches on a collection of poetry. More of his work can be viewed at christopherdysart.tumblr.com.

Liz Jacoby down lincoln avenue Liz Jacoby is currently working on her PhD in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of PA. She is also an English Instructor at McCook Community College located in Southwest Nebraska. She previously completed her MA at Eastern Illinois University and BA at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She has previously had "I envy that Gatorade Cup" and "My first interview" published in Ascent Aspirations Magazine. Personal Website: http://www.people.iup.edu/ypms/ Cord Moreski Welcome Cord Moreski is a poet from Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Known for his vivid imagery and sensory detail, Moreski is currently making a staple mark along the Jersey Shore. He has recently released a chapbook entitled Capricious & Other Poems.

Erin Armstrong Backwoods Philosophy Erin Armstrong is a Creative Writing major currently studying at Georgia Regents University. She hopes to further her education and get her MFA in Fiction. She writes, predominantly, about the South and its people.

Scott T. Starbuck Time Warp Scott T. Starbuck was a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island.

His anti-nuclear clay-poem “Napali” appeared in the Oregon chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Particles on the Wall Exhibit (May and June 2013) about the “lasting impacts of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the nuclear age." His chapbook, The Other History, or unreported and underreported issues, scenes, and events of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries is available at his blog riverseek.blogspot.com/.

P. C. Moorehead The Greater Yet to Come P. C. Moorehead grew up in Washington State near what is now North Cascades National Park. Nature images permeate her poetry and prose. She has been published in many anthologies and other publications. She now lives in rural Wisconsin where the peace and beauty of the woods provide a helpful environment for her writing and reflection. She can be reached at patcmo2002@yahoo.com.

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Tine Wayland My Grandmother Boarded a Ship Tina Wayland is a freelance copywriter, part-time fiction writer and 24/7 Mommy to a smart wee toddler. You can find her copywriting info and a list of published fiction at tinawaylandcopywriter.com.

Sarah Navin Begotten Sarah Navin is a young writer living on the South Carolina coast, though she is originally from southern Maine. She spends most of her time writing short horror and surreal fiction. Some of her other works can be found in the Creepypasta archives under the username "RemovedFingers."

Rebekah Postupak Flash Rebekah Postupak is grateful for the faithful hassling provided

by Shenandoah Valley Writers and believes writing in community is the only way she'll ever finish her novels. She'd also like to thank Susan Warren Utley & HWP for their tremendous service in creating such a beautiful home for writers' work at From the Depths.

Robert Vivian Once in Nebraska Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy and two books of meditative essays.

Diane Giardi He Just Can't Turn In His Badge Diane Giardi is an Artist, Arts Educator and Poet, living in Gloucester, MA. She teaches Art at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. and her poetry has been published in the The Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Long Island Sounds, The Endicott Review, The Ann Arbor Review, and Minerva Rising, among others.

Darlene Pagán Things I've Taken a Match To & Dark Matter Darlene Pagán teaches writing and literature at Pacific University in Oregon. She has a chapbook, Blue Ghosts (Finishing Line Press) and poems and essays in many journals, including Field, Calyx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, Brevity, Lake Effect, and Hawaii Pacific Review. She is Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher and enjoys hiking, biking, the beach, the rain, and carnival rides now that her sons are just tall enough to ride.

Shelley Kahn Late Birthday Drive Shelley Kahn is employed in federal service as a civil rights attorney. She lives most of the time in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but her heart is pulled in the direction of the Delaware coast. One of her many passions in life has been to write poetry about everything she has observed in nature, in people and animals, and in the rest of her life. She is currently a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writer's Guild.

Charles Tarlton Keepers Charles Tarlton is a retired university professor living inSan Francisco with wife Ann, a mixed-media painter.

Allison K. Garcia At Heart Allison K. Garcia works full-time as a Licensed Professional Counselor but has wanted to be a writer ever since she could hold a pencil. A member of American Christian Fiction Writers and Shenandoah Valley Writers, she is working on publishing three novels. She has won best story and honorable mentions in the Flash! Friday contest and next year will be published in Grayhaven Comics All Women’s Anthology.

Allison is over-the-moon excited about her first short story being published in FTD! Sheila Cumberworth Hilltoppers Sheila Cumberworth lives in Ann Arbor, where she spent a career teaching English, fundraising for the University of Michigan, and writing. In 1995, she published a small historical book with Daniel V. Biles: An Enduring Love: The Civil war Diaries of Benjamin Franklin Pierce (14th New Hampshire Vol. Inf.) and his wife, Harriett Jane Goodwin Pierce (Thomas Publications). A graduate of Carleton College and Eastern Michigan University, she is married with two daughters, and four grandchildren.

Sarah Brown Weitzman The Return Sarah Brown Weitzman has have had work in hundreds of journals such as America, The North American Review, Rattle, The Mid-American Reciew, The Windless Orchard, Abraxas, Slant, Poet Lore, Potomac review, etc. She received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her latest book, a children’s novel titled Herman and the Ice Witch, was published by Main Street Rag in 2011.

Herbert Englehardt Immigrants Herbert Engelhardt was born in 1925 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He enlisted in the US Army in 1943 and was awarded a Purple Heart Medal in battle in Okinawa, April 1945. He has had an enormously varied career in marketing, finance, industry, education and management—themes that are explored in his poetry. He found poetry later on in life, in 2003 when he faced a serious medical procedure and suddenly felt a desire to document his life and has written over 2,000 poems since then.

John A. McCaffrey Grooved Pavement John McCaffrey grew up in Rochester, New York, attended Villanova University, and received his M.A. in creative writing from The City College of New York. His stories, reviews and essays have been published widely in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies. His debut novel, The Book of Ash (Boxfire Press), was relesed in October 2013.

Twitter: @johnamccaffrey Clay Renick Who Could Ask for More Clay Renick is a feature writer from Resaca, Georgia, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines. He's the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. His latest book is "Chain Saw Love" and is available on Amazon.

Elizabeth W. Seaver Feeling Tense Elizabeth W. Seaver spends her days painting in her art studio and early mornings and evenings scribbling poems. Besides the natural world, she most likes to write about the fragile things which connect us and the chasms between. See her art and writing at elizabethseaver.blogspot.com.

Michael Patrick Eltrich Do Not Speak to Me of Death Michael Patrick Eltrich is a recovering architect whose passions include independent travel, local food and MidCentury Modern design. In his writing, Michael explores the ways in which lives are changed by love, war and travel. He lives in Denver with Lynn Rider, a travel photographer; Mr. Notte, the not-so-big cat whose physical life has ended but whose spirit lives on; and Captain Blackie, Mr. Notte’s able successor. Some of Michael’s work can be seen at www.michaelpatrickeltrich.com.

Sylvia Ashby In The Woods Her background is in theatre, acting and writing, having published some fifteen scripts for family audiences, with thousands of productions. After publishing a short memoir this spring, she started sending out poetry; in 2013, a handful or two will appear in lit. magazines. Her theatre website is sylviaashby.com.

The Lovely Pennies Allison K. Garcia has been to three immigration rallies and enjoys shouting in Spanish. Donna McLaughlin Schwender remembers almost nothing about her childhood. Shannon Connor Winward’s three-year-old once assaulted a police officer. Brice J. Chandler is a Marine now working at a pewter foundry in a zombielike state. I. K. Paterson-Harkness has a 'how to make a moebius strip' tattoo on her arm. Rebecca Hodge clinical scientist by day, fiction writer by night. Lauren McBride likes to shoot fish in calm water with her camera. Joe Bogle still fears being in his parent's attic alone. Tina Wayland wishes winter would bury itself.

Lisa Armosino-Morris, a mother of three who used to harvest human corneas for transplant. Ed Doerr teaches middle schoolers: you are what you write. Meagan Friedman’s phobias include small talk, flying bugs and drowning in the shower. Miranda Stone is content with spinsterhood. A fortune teller deemed it her fate.

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Production Notes Cover art and design by Susan Warren Utley. Interior art, design, and derivative works by Susan Warren Utley and Savannah Renée Warren. Cover fonts include Aquiline Two and Times New Roman. Additional fonts used throughout the issue include Times, Times New Roman, Underwood Champion, Pacifico, as i lay dying, and Aquiline Two. Artwork created in Pixelmator 3.0 from Pixelmator Team Ltd. and ArtRage Studio Pro from Ambient Design. Additional artwork created in Sketch Club and TypeDrawing for iPad. Artistic image manipulation on PostworkShop from Xycod. Layout completed in Pages from Apple. From the Depths is created on a Mac. Welcome Mavericks!

Credits & Permissions Artwork created for this issue made possible by the generous donation of photographs, original artwork, and artistic tools which exist within the public domain either by gift, copyright expiration, or made available by their authors under Creative Commons License. We at Haunted Waters Press would like to acknowledge and thank the original creators, artists, and photographers, for without their contributions, this issue would be incomplete. Special acknowledgment and thanks goes out to morgueFile.com, Wikimedia Commons, rgbstock.com and their contributors. Thank you! Finally,while attribution is not required by all, we would like to acknowledge the following contributors and their works: “Old Man Walking” (Inspiration for derivative work “HWP Journeyman”) courtesy scottmliddell (Scott Liddell) http:// www.rgbstock.com/user/scottmliddell. Covers & throughout.

“Subtle Grunge Pattern Textures” courtesy Caleb Kimbrough http://lostandtaken.com/. Covers & throughout.

“Night Sky Background” and “Ancient Map” courtesy weirdvis http://www.rgbstock.com/user/weirdvis. Covers & pages 2-3, 4-5, 22-23, 38-39.

“Chain” courtesy ba1969 (Billy Frank Alexander) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/ba1969. Pages 3, 22, 34-35, 37.

“Silhouettes Lampposts” courtesy Groningen (Christine van Dam) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/Groningen. Pages 3, 8-9.

“The Long Road” courtesy Molfield http://www.rgbstock.com/user/Molfield. Pages 4-5.

“Red Road” courtesy stellab (stella bogdanic) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/stellab. Page 6.

“Colorful Street” courtesy jppi http://www.morguefile.com/creative/jppi. Pages 8-9.

“FreeRide” & “Girl Sitting”courtesy mzacha (Michal Zacharzewski) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/mzacha. Pages 8-9.

“Playground” (working title) courtesy Dzz http://www.morguefile.com/creative/Dzz. Pages 14.

“Sign” courtesy RWLinder (Robert Linder) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/RWLinder. Page 15.

“Ball3” courtesy of LuckyStock http://luckystock.deviantart.com/art/ball3-45385158. Page16.

“Lighthouse” courtesy MPT (Caetano de Lacerda Camara) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/CMPT. Page 16.

“Compass Rose Photoshop Brushes” courtedy SDWGraphics via http://www.sdwhaven.com. Cover and pages 18-19.

“Hammock between Palmtrees” courtesy Groningen (Christine van Dam) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/Groningen. Page 19.

“Tolkien Style Map Brushes” & “5 Large Cities” brush sets (trees, small mountains, city) courtesy of calthyechild http:// calthyechild.deviantart.com/. Pages 18-19 “Garage” courtesy Tome213 http://www.rgbstock.com/user/tome213. Page 20.

“Cottage 4” courtesy Colin Brough http://www.rgbstock.com/user/ColinBrough. Pages 20, 32.

“A Walk Under Moonlight” courtey TouTouke http://www.rgbstock.com/user/TouTouke. Page22.

“Arc's Rivets + Metal Brushes” courtey Arkyrra http://arkyrra.deviantart.com. Pages 22.

“Corn” courtesy sundstrom (Lars Sundström) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/sundstrom. Pages 24-25.

“Lightning” courtesy Free4All http://www.morguefile.com/creative/Free4All. Pages 24-25.

“Forest for the Tress” by Jeff Weese Uploaded by AlbertHerring [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Pages 26-27.

“Handcuffs” courtesy of mconnors http://www.morguefile.com/creative/mconnors. Page 28.

“Badge” courtesy of kconnors http://www.morguefile.com/creative/kconnors. Page 28.

“Ballerina” courtesy katagaci (Moi Cody) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/katagaci. Page 29.

“Cake” (working title) courtesy clarita http://www.morguefile.com/creative/clarita. Pages 30-31.

“Brainard Lake” courtesy Columbine (Laura Shreck) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/Columbine. Page 30.

“Hilltoppers Photo Collection” courtesy of the author, Sheila Cumberworth, scanned by Jeanne K Govert. Pages 34-37.

“Empty Cart” courtesy lusi (sanja gjenero) http://www.rgbstock.com/user/lusi. Pages 40-41.

“Route 66” courtesy mejones http://www.rgbstock.com/user/mejones. Pages 44-45.

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About the Press Haunted Waters Press is an independent publisher located in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia along the banks of the Shenandoah River.

Our goal is to bring to our readers engaging fiction in the forms of poetry, prose poetry, short stories, and novellas.

While some selections will be available in electronic formats and traditional print, others will be offered as hand-bound originals and paper ephemera as we strive to celebrate the art of the book and letterpress printing. Our print studio consists of three presses including the Cooks Victor, the Baltimore #14 and a vintage sign press.

Our quarterly literary journal, From the Depths, featuring works of prose, creative nonfiction and poetry, is released in the months of March, June, September, and December on the internet, and periodically in print form.

You will also find a steady stream of online literary content from our contributing authors featured on the From the Depths home page.

We are interested in stories that entertain us, stories that captivate us, but most of all, stories that haunt us. Please visit HWP News and our Submissions page for the latest updates on open submissions and writing contests.

Submit to Haunted Waters Press From the Depths: Spring Issue 2014 “Show Us Your Colors!”

The Spring 2014 issue of From the Depths will awaken from winter’s long sleep bursting with color.

We are seeking submissions not bound by genre or theme, but works that best represent you as a writer.

“Show Us Your Colors!” in vividly written works of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. As always, we thank you for considering Haunted Waters Press and look forward to reading your work.

Penny Fiction: A Flash Fiction Writing Competition Haunted Waters Press editor, Penny Dreadful, is selecting exceptionally small works of flash fiction to be showcased in Penny Fiction, a regular feature of the literary journal, From the Depths. Stories will also appear in the Penny Fiction Poster Collection.

Paint us a picture bursting with color in exactly 21 words--no more, no less. Extra points will be awarded for those writers who adhere to the rules.

Not really. There are no points. Just read the contest rules and impress Penny with your ability to follow instructions.

Online Literary Content Ideal for writers who prefer not to be bound by theme based submissions, we occasionally accept works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry for our online literary content. Works submitted here will be always be considered for upcoming issues of From the Depths.

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