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INDIANA REVIEW Summer 2022 Volume 44, Number 1

ISSN: 0738-386X

Indiana Review is a not-for-profit literary magazine published twice yearly in Summer and Winter. Issue 44.1 was published in Summer 2022.

Editor Mariah Gese Associate Editor Alberto Sveum Fiction Editor Jenna Wengler Associate Fiction Editors Laura Dzubay Shreya Fadia Joe Hohman Alison Stoos Denise Weisz Poetry Editor Soleil Davíd Associate Poetry Editors Janan Alexandra Sabrina Ghaus Rose Wehrenberg Nonfiction Editor L. Renée

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Indiana Review © 2022 by the Trusteees of Indiana University. All poems and stories in the magazine are works of the imagination. The publication of the magazine is made possible by grants from the English Department of Indiana University, the College of Arts and Sciences, and private support.

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Associate Nonfiction Editor Janan Alexandra

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FICTION

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Dr. Bloch Takes His Restandel Natanya Biskar

Camp Emeline Taryn Bowe

Where It Comes From Desmond Everest Fuller

SLIPPAGE Sharon Hashimoto

Your Next Girlfriend Has PCOS Ra’Niqua Lee

Secret Menu Items Kayla Lightner

NONFICTION

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Flip of the Switch: A Glossery of Disordered Sleep & Love

052 064 068 ###

Song of the Apostates

Susanna Childress Grace Gilbert

The Grass Crown: A Coronation Evan J. Massey

How to Ready Your Bones Lucy McBee

To Speak, to Sing Rose Nguyĕn | Winner of the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Prize

POETRY

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PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: PANDEMONIUM

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The end of the world means trans bois sprout from sequins.

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Aubade After Earth

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The Hearing We Inherit

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When I finally leave New York, I am going to burn everything

George Abraham

Kay Ulanday Barrett Ariana Benson | ½ K Prize Finalist

Joshua Burton | ½ K Prize Finalist

Jason B. Crawford | ½ K Prize Finalist

078 ### ###

Thunderbird M.K. Foster

Fashion Statement Therese Gleason

Self Portrait as Ophelia Floating in the River Sadia Hassan | ½ K Prize Finalist

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god of worship Ruth Ellen Kocher

in regard to beginning Ruth Ellen Kocher

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our agreeable end

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Thukela

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The Black Outside

Ruth Ellen Kocher

I can tell you Chantel Massey | ½ K Prize Finalist

Sihle Ntuli

Sempiternal: To the Future of a Crescent City Karisma Price Joy Priest

Broken Body Alluvium Heidi Andre Restrepo Rhodes

Sonnet for the Study of Extreme Illusion Machined into the Highest Degree of Sacredness Heidi Andre Restrepo Rhodes

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Not forgetting, but choosing to

080

when mama wept

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When people tell me that dancing hula makes you exotic

Sanam Sheriff | Winner of the ½ K Prize

Dāshaun Washington | ½ K Prize Finalist

Danielle P. Williams | ½ K Prize Finalist

084

after her latest stroke my aunt sounds like Gertrude Stein Sandra M. Yee

FOLIO

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Editor’s Note The In Between of Sleep Allison Albino

Extraordinary Phenomena Elliot Alpern

While Emerging from the Courts of Hell, Dong Xian Thinks about Cut Sleeves Celeste Chen

088 ### 091 ###

Any Day Now

108

listen

Devon Halliday

NETWORK SUPPORT Kira K. Homsher

高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺 Caroline M. Mar

Lucia Left Guadalajara and This Is What Happened After Patricia Patterson Petra Salazar

FICTION

Where It Comes From Desmond Everest Fuller Wade had never hitchhiked before. I knew those white shoes of his wouldn’t last the day unscathed if he came along. But when our thumbs snagged a ride, he matched me, lean and long legged; for a moment, clapping down the blacktop, we were horses, racing to the tailgate of Corey Foss’s Chevy pulling over in a mess of white exhaust and break lights.

We hopped up in the truck-bed and benched ourselves on the toolbox. Corey was a sheep farmer, and his truck carried the residual stink of lanolin. Wade looked around as if this new vantage showed him things about fallow pastures that he couldn’t have seen before. I’d been working the fields and watching my dad and the other men like him sweat into their dirt for almost half of my fourteen years. I’d never seen anything to suggest that anything changes.

I had told Wade that he’d have to find his own way home. There were chores to get done before Dad started passing around blame by the fistful.

Mr. and Mrs. Wellhouse had moved their boys, Walt and Wade into the new residential community Mr. Wellhouse developed on land where we used to find arrowheads and catch frogs. Now, it lay stripped and veined with isolate pockets of caul-du-sacs surrounded by farmland. I’d been sitting in the Wellhouse’s living room, admiring Wade’s new Adidas. Johnny Quest wore them in all the new episodes. I felt too old for Hana-Barbera shows; cartoons

Fuller | 14

didn’t dirty white shoes working hogs, bucking hay, or kicking rocks waiting on a ride to come along.

I had gotten up to hit the road when Wade had asked if he could thumb the way with me. His eyes were doing their camera-shutter blink, and he sat down, as he sometimes had to, hugging the arm of the couch. When the spell passed, it took all the sound out of the room with it. Wade curled and uncurled his fingers and said he wished he could be more like me. It was a strange and earnest thing to say. I couldn’t sit with it in his house that smelled of paper and lemon oil, where you didn’t get smacked if you left a light on, or the wind turned wrong and moved the rain off a crop.

The truck shivered beneath us as Corey gave two blasts of the horn and pulled off the shoulder in a lurch of tires spitting gravel.

Too fast. Over a year after the Wellhouses had moved here, us locals still wanted to show off or somehow ruffle their middleclass sensibilities; it was a scarlet thing we couldn’t help but chase As the truck tilted to take the road, the toolbox shifted beneath us. Metal scaping metal. The edge slammed against the back of the cab, crushing Wade’s fingers in-between.

He didn’t scream or curse. I’d never heard Wade swear. The sound that pealed from him was high and mournful; the sudden absence, how far we are from our mothers’ arms, that a wound clarifies with painful certainty. It was the first time I had seen human bone, his skin peeled back off the grey and red mash of knuckle.

Wade’s eyelids quickened like hummingbird wings, and I imagined the storms in his head raging in waves of lightning glass.

15 | Fuller

I grabbed his arm to stop him from tumbling over the side and pounded the roof of the truck until Corey pulled off. He took Wade up in the cab and wrapped his hand in an oil rag. Blood stringed in a cherry drizzle over Wade’s Adidas.

It was fifteen minutes speeding to the county clinic. I rode along in the back and tried not to look the garnet droplets beaded on the toolbox. Redundant fields rolled by. I knew Dad would hit me for all the work left undone. We rushed by a windbreak, and a murder of crows lifted from the quaking aspens and floated like fire-blackened newspapers across the sky.

At the clinic, they took Wade somewhere behind those heavy swinging doors, his hand pinned under white lights. I bothered a nurse in reception until she gave me a dime for the payphone. It was Wade’s older brother, Walt, who answered.

As I told him what happened, I thought about Wade’s lungs panting next to mine, his toothy grin and long legs, passing me as we had raced to Corey’s Chevy. It made me sorry in a way I’d never been sorry before, but I couldn’t find the words to say as much. I stopped talking then, and when Walt spoke, there was a calm quality in his voice that I imagined as a shadow thrown in lamplight, lips moving in silhouettes played out on a wall.

Wade never hitchhiked again. But later, I would lose years in places that were strange and stirred with hostility in their shadows and suns. Unreckonable miles swirled in the dust on the side of any road where you’re thumbing and there are no

Fuller | 16

lights in the distance, and home is a foreign thing that feels like it happened to someone else.

It was a few months after Wade had smashed his hand. He and Frank Padges and I were riding in the back of Walt’s new ’65 Cortina. The three of us packed into the backseat with our duck-hunting gear.

“Walt’s giving us a ride out there,” Wade had said the night before on the telephone, “No hitchhiking required.”

Now I know he was trying to make light of his bad day, joking like that. But I didn’t understand then, and a snarl of bad feeling caught me in the quiet humming over the phoneline. It sure as hell wasn’t my fault he’d been so green, no matter how much it felt that way.

The pullout before the green gate to the game preserve was a bare spate of mud crosshatched in tire-tread. We tumbled out of the car into the cool redolent morning. It was November, and the sky was cracked and gray.

Walt called after Wade as we headed for the gate, “What’d we say, Bud?” Walt had graduated that spring. He still lived at home but wore a neat beard and had started in sales for a fertilizer business in Pullman. Both brothers wore crewcuts the color of straw and were taller than me.

Wade called back, “We say, ‘we’re a-okay.’”

17 | Fuller

The exchange felt like something between brothers that, as an only son, I couldn’t understand. I jogged ahead and didn’t look back as Walt pulled onto the road, shouting after us.

“Happy hunting, boys. See you back here by four.”

Frank and I had come along at Wade’s invitation for a daylight chance at some duck. That morning, Mr. Wellhouse had added our names to the permit in pencil below Wade’s and Walt’s. The wave of planned communities and golf courses that men like Mr. Wellhouse were ushering through county approval had corralled the wetlands, where Frank and I had often hunted with our fathers, into this narrow reserve with gates and postings and permits we couldn’t afford.

We climbed with our shotguns and backpacks over the gate and followed the fence line that marked the reserve’s edge. Most of the important things – binoculars, waders, decoys – belonged to our fathers; we carried their smell on us over the wet brown grass.

Dad had handed me his galoshes and a box of shells. A bitter pull at the corners of his mouth. He didn’t mention us riding Mr. Wellhouse’s permit. But he warned me not to make him regret the loan of his boots. I wasn’t keen on catching the wallop of his hand.

I had known it to bark, hot and sudden.

When I was twelve, our barn burned down in the reek and squeal of immolating hogs. My left eye had swollen shut before Mom could get him to stop. Turned out, the pole light I left on had shorted and sparked. His own shoddy wiring on the cheap. Dad never regarded me straight on after that, always looking beyond me or out his side-

Fuller | 18

eye. Mom would say, “Y’know he’s in knots with how sorry he is.” But I watched how he stared out over our acreage with dull resentment.

Days kept sliding across the windows without his say-so. Each morning, a hurtful familiar surprise.

Frank had a crumpled pack of Winstons he’d swiped from his uncle’s glovebox. We smoked and felt more like men for it. Wade’s cigarette kept falling from a quaver in his left hand. His right was still bound in a leather brace. It would be after Christmas before he could use it again. After a couple fumbles, the cherry went out, the paper damp and ruined.

Frank shook his head. “Those were my last three.”

He asked Wade if Mr. Wellhouse would dress our birds. “My mom said I’m not bringing a wet duck in the house.”

Wade nodded. “He’ll make jerky if you ask him.”

“Maybe, if I get two birds at least. Mom makes a mean roast.”

“Well, I hope you get two birds, Frank.”

Frank’s father inseminated cows for a living and took odd jobs when he had to, same as my dad did in the bad seasons. We had met when we were little, helping our folks shell walnuts to sell.

We battled to see who could shell the most and argued over who had won. He threw a good fastball and was a cocky sonofabitch.

We were what passed as friends.

19 | Fuller

Freshman year, Wade had no friends. We’d all tried to grind him down after he showed up on his first day with side-mirror ears off a face as open as an August sky; his clothes were nicer than our parents’ Sunday best. A couple of the real hayseeds roughed him up bad, tore his blazer. One guy knocked his tooth out and kicked it down the hall outside the woodshop. I couldn’t find fault with how Wade handled it. Didn’t snitch to the principal, or cave to Mr. Wellhouse wanting to press charges.

We all laughed at Wade’s stutter and incessant blinking. The way he’d stoop to gather his notebooks he was always dropping. A low chorus of “Ooohs,” rippled around his routine visits to the nurse’s office – cheap jokes and pranks were all we thought we could afford. Once, a couple boys snuck up behind him with cymbals, stolen from the band room, and crashed them behind his ear. He folded, convulsing on the ground. “I’d appreciate you didn’t do that again, fellas,” was all he said once he could speak again.

Far as I knew, he never said a bad word to anyone about anyone.

And never cursed.

I know we’re taught to follow that lead, but I couldn’t find it in me. It wasn’t in our day-to-day that tarnished, slow and sure as rust. We were a bunch of old batteries leaking at the back of a shed; you could measure the rub between any two of us in the corrosive air.

The Wellhouses moving here made us all embarrassed for our coffee cans full of loose change that could make or break Christmas, our hand-me-down clothes, and the poached meat in our freezers. Mr.

Fuller | 20

Wellhouse’s shiny Lincoln, that carried them in their fine clothes and milk-skin, reflected us back to ourselves as warped and stunted creatures like carnival mirrors. Our folks kept it in a quiet way. But us kids fussed and itched, scratching ourselves red.

We lost our resolve to hate Wade once the weather turned up in May and the drought-heat baked the leaves right off the sycamores. Mr. Wellhouse had a pool put in behind their house.

Wade welcomed everyone, as if none of us had ever done him wrong. We all wanted to snatch up a moment of cool blue luxury. I think I spent every summer afternoon I could get away from helping Dad with the farm, swimming till the chlorine fried my hair and made my eyes feel coarse. Sometimes, Walt would join Wade and us younger boys in the pool.

We’d become anxious for our own faces to bristle with whiskers like his. We all tried to dunk Walt, climbing his arms and back; he fended us off with a laugh that was joyful and sounded like nothing could hurt him while we got water up our noses and wondered what we’d look like in a couple years’ time, waiting for some impervious feeling to settle over us.

I lapped the pool that churned with shouting boys. At the far end, I pulled myself up and out and stood dripping on the cement patio.

In the backyard, the sunlight beneath the three apricot trees was beautiful and green with shade. Next to me, an Adirondack chair held a watery figment like an inkblot. The streaked outline on the wood of where someone’s shoulders had rested.

21 | Fuller

I heard Walt’s voice rise above the others, assured, relaxed.

Suddenly, my skin felt too tight, and I could scarcely hold my breath from leaving me. I dove beneath the sky’s cerulean reflection and lashed out at the water. Something I couldn’t name was burning up all the patience in my lungs.

Another time, I’d just turned fifteen. I’d worn jeans instead of shorts, and the sun was too bright. Shards of it glanced off the rollicking crowded waters of the Wellhouse’s pool. The boys I had known since before we could talk splashed and cursed. Wade grinned and stayed in the shallow end. His condition had worsened and fits could lay him low at any time.

I changed into swim-trunks in the Wellhouse bathroom that was white and lilac and cleaner than anything in my house ever could be. Catching myself in the mirror, I stopped: I was just as I had been - the mole on my sternum, the scar below my left nipple but with an entirely different person rippling just beneath my skin.

I sensed his teeth grimacing back at me as I lingered in the in my own mirrored proximity, waiting to be pulled into razor sunshine.

After walking for a half-hour into the reserve, we crested a rise where the air stank of peat. Cattails in a slough. The pond before us bent in a teardrop. The water’s edge souped with dead reed stalks. In the mud of the banks, frogs lay buried for winter with their frozen blood.

Wade stumbled at the shore, sucked down air, and shook off whatever cyclone had whispered through him. I stopped and looked down at him. He threw me a resigned smile. “This son-of-agun’s always calling audibles on me.”

Fuller | 22

“Come on now, Wade,” Frank said. “Don’t get twitchy on us.”

He tossed his father’s decoys in a pile; the clatter spooked a flock of starlings up from a hazelnut bush. Kneeling, Frank shucked his gloves and scooped up handfuls of mud.

“What you need is some fortitude.”

In his palm lay a torpid frog the size of a fig. “Swallow it, Wade. It’ll make your spells go away. My granddad done it when he got scarlet fever.”

When Wade said no, Frank shoved him. I looked at Wade’s ruined hand cupped in leather at his side. His face had been so eager as he had followed me out to try hitchhiking.

I said to lay off. Frank glared at me – wasn’t this to be expected? Wasn’t it our right? He pushed the frog-bearing spade of his hand into Wade’s sternum.

“He’s not eating that,” I said.

“Alright, then you gotta.” Frank shoved his hand under my nose. The frog smelled of mold and piss. “It ain’t going back in the ground now.”

We chickened at each other until Wade proffered his hand between us. He’d do it. And he would have. But I couldn’t accept him wanting to take on smoothing things over: the way it would say, this was who he was, and this was who we were. Wade stood tall enough to pluck the frog from Frank’s palm. Before he could reach, I grabbed Frank’s wrist and tilted it up towards my face. The frog slid cold and wet and sleeping down my throat, and that settled things.

23 | Fuller

Frank was ruffled and started pointing and ordering: we’d set up a blind across from the bulrushes where a clearing opened above the pond. I sipped from my canteen and didn’t waste breath arguing; Frank would jaw me down until he could claim he was right about something. And I didn’t disagree when he volunteered me to set the decoys while he and Wade built the blind. Dad’s galoshes were the tallest; the tops brushed my thighs.

Wade lingered with me as Frank made for the hazelnut thicket.

Our breath clouded above us, and he told me that Mr. Wellhouse planned to move the family down to California in a year or two, after he sold the rest of the lots he’d developed.

“They don’t have winter down there.” As he turned to follow Frank around the pond, he said, “Sometimes I can’t tell if you wanna bite my head off or put me in a jar.”

The pond was the color of milky tea. I hadn’t dragged the decoys more than a couple yards into the shallows when silt-covered layers of twigs, leaves, and decomposing reeds collapsed beneath me. Water rose from the false bottom, spilling over the lips of Dad’s galoshes with a burp of displaced air. I thought my teeth would burst as the cold leapt up my spine.

“Christ,” Frank said when I joined them in the blind, “You went right in.”

I kicked off the boots to drain down the slope while my wool socks steamed.

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We waited beneath the hazelnut bush draped with an old army blanket. Wade puckered his lips against the stem of his father’s expensive new duck-call and issued a strangled honk.

“You’ve gotta use your hand, Wade, like this.” I showed him how to cup his fingers over the spout to warble the call. But with his brace, Wade couldn’t bend his wrist.

“You know a greeting, feed call, lonesome hen?” Frank said.

Wade honked off what sounded like choked impersonations of the dead.

“Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, Wade.”

“He ain’t calling down no ducks,” Frank said.

We watched the wind lick the water in sparse gusts. Time passed with granular slowness.

Cold puckered my groin, and I felt damp in my marrow. On each breath, I willed a raft of mallards or canvasbacks to flourish on the pond, and for us to shoot with accuracy, for everything to fastforward until we were back in Walt’s Cortina with the heater on full blast. I waited in my socks with sensations of ice chips pushing under my toenails until I’d lost feeling below my knees.

The galoshes lay next to me, their canvas interiors soaked through.

The pond remained still and opaque, creasing the granite light moving west.

25 | Fuller

We ate salted peanuts and talked in low voices while Wade practiced calls. Frank reminded us that he knew things we didn’t.

His brother, Dustin, had deployed in October. Snooping through his room, Frank had discovered Dustin’s stash of Playboys. He had never imagined all the differences of nipples.

And the Ursula Andress centerfold – forget the Dr. No bikini, this was the real deal - it was hard to describe to us boys who, Frank was sure, didn’t know. He nudged Wade with his elbow. Did Wade prefer girls with tight little tips or big pancake nipples? Did he know or had he ever even seen any?

“Why don’t you shut up, Frank?” I said.

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m freezing, and you’re annoying the shit outta me.”

“The cold’s shriveled your pecker.”

“Bite me. Where are these goddamn ducks?”

The honk of Wade’s duck-call broke over us, and we shut up for a moment. After a spell of quiet, Frank brought up Starla Gills, a sophomore that went to Wade’s church. What did Wade think her tits were like under those presbyterian sweaters? If I could’ve felt my feet, I might’ve stood up then just to blow our cover and piss Frank off. But then Wade laughed, a full-throated swell that sounded bigger than his body and took us aback.

Fuller | 26

“What’s the gas, Wade?” Frank said.

But Wade just laughed and shook his head. He wouldn’t say what it was. For a second, he was much older than both of us.

The sky was full of ice crystals floating in the clouds. Looking up between the hazelnut branches, I let my eyes get lost in the brooding. In my winter dreams, I smelled apricots where I felt my way through strange darkness, hearing the chide of water flowing and the brush of skin like pages turning. Sometimes thoughts like these would linger with me, and I couldn’t shake them. But whenever I got the notion to get them down on paper, it was no easier fitting them into words than giving shape to the rain. I guessed some people had an easier time of it than I did. As we sat in the blind, I wondered about that. It felt unfair to me then. How a moment passed you by without a hint or a word while the heft of the hurt could strike you dumb as a post. Now, it seems all I do is corral memories into words. Moments that I had no real sense of from within their shimmer as I was passing through them, as they were passing through me.

We waited. Our decoys bobbed dumbly on the pond. My jaw ached, and my back was wracked with muscle cramps. Wade’s lips had swollen from working the duck-call. He dropped and scooped it up again.

Then, Frank hissed and pointed. We saw them, fleet and speckled against the mineral sky. Wade honked a greeting call that almost passed muster, and we watched their wings lock and tilt towards us.

“Alright, that’s fine, Wade. Don’t scare em off.”

27 | Fuller

They were above us then and we saw the emerald caps of the males. They circled the pond once, well out of range, then shifted east, rising again.

“Comeback-call, use your hand, Wade, call em’ back. Keep it going, don’t stop, damnit.”

Wade’s comeback petered after their formation as the mallards lifted back into the gray emptiness until they disappeared, and our hands felt clammy against our shotgun stocks.

“I’m sorry fellas,” Wade said. He looked down at the plastic call in his one good hand.

“A whole Saturday, blown,” Frank muttered.

“Next time,” Wade said. “My dad does make great jerky.”

We made our way back over the fields with our packs and our shotguns that felt heavy and foolish. I registered little feeling in my legs, stumbling through the grass, in Dad’s galoshes that were still wet and stinking. I worried they’d be ruined and what that would mean. Our progress towards the gate, towards Walt’s Cortina and warmth, metered out in succedent posts sagging against lines of barbed wire.

Across the fence to our left, sat a 56’ Cadillac Sedan that hadn’t been there that morning. It had taken a beating over the decade: paneling flaked off the fenders, the chrome

Fuller | 28

pockmarked with dents. It rested, obtuse to the fence line, at the end of a pair of veering ruts.

“There must be an access road on the far side,” Frank said as we stopped. I wanted to keep moving. The car had no business in the middle of a field, and my guts churned with snowmelt. But Frank was already making for it. We lay our guns down safely, like we learned in scouts, before crossing over.

A burnt taste clung to the air. Steel-wool light reflected off the windows, and we saw nothing inside until we were very close.

“There’s a guy,” Frank whispered as he came alongside the car. The drivers-side-door clicked and swung open.

The man who pulled himself out of the car was as old as our fathers. None of us knew him, a rarity there in those days. He scowled with sleep-brined eyes screwed nearly shut. I thought he might collapse if not for the door propping him up.

“Need help, mister?” Wade said.

The man recovered a pair of linty pills from the breast-pocket his rumbled blazer and washed them down with a long swig from a flask.

“Y’all know Thurston?” Consonants lisped off the swollen wedge of his tongue. “Thurston’s a no-good-sonofabitch.”

Without looking at us, the man slouched into the driver-seat and turned over the engine.

29 | Fuller

“Y’all push now.”

The three of us shared glances of mutual doubt. But nothing was said. And we were boys and did as the man told us. We squatted, shouldering against the back bumper. My body felt thick, flopping, as I pushed. It was as though I was made of rubber and couldn’t muster the blood to my limbs. Our boots slid back from the unyielding Sedan, and we coughed in the gouts of exhaust flooding out the tailpipe.

“He’s drunk as a skunk,” Frank whispered.

“Mister,” Wade called out, “These wheels aren’t moving.”

“Well, push, damnit.”

“Sounds like you’ve stripped your clutch.”

We heard him slamming his hands against the steering wheel, making little grunts. He shut off the engine and emerged again.

Folds of skin around his eyes wrinkled up tight.

“Y’all did this to me.” His voice was cracked and lowing.

“Like hell,” Frank said. “Probably burned it up tooling around out here.”

The man fumbled with his coat until he found his cigarettes.

“Boys these days’s all no account pussies.”

Fuller | 30

He smoked and stared down at the mud on his wingtips as if we weren’t there. Everyone was quiet. Nobody seemed to understand how to extract ourselves from the moment, so we stood waiting for whatever was going to happen to play out.

When the man lit a second smoke, Frank rubbed his fingers together. The man grunted and tossed a cigarette towards us.

Wade reached and lost it between his fingers. It lay at his feet, paper split around a brown rupture of tobacco.

“Nice going, Wade,” Frank said.

The man scowled at Wade. “You smoke that, boy.”

Frank scoffed. “He’s not smoking it all broken. Give us a fresh one.”

“You don’t waste my smokes.”

Wade shook his head and blinked fiercely as if grit were flying in his eyes. The man’s face turned near-purple.

“What a bunch of pussies.”

Then the man moved with a swiftness that I wouldn’t have believed. From the car he retrieved a large pistol of a make and model that would become ubiquitous with Clint Eastwood a few years later. It looked absurd, a gleaming parody of a gun.

He aimed the heavy revolver into Wade’s face. “Smoke it, boy.”

31 | Fuller

All the breath flew out of me.

And I knew Wade would fall before he hit the ground. His eyes flew back to whites, and he thrashed and arced as if the earth were electrified, his insides turned mutinous.

I felt suspended between what I saw happening and who I was, failing to form the question of what I should do or to even wonder if I could move if I tried. It was a terrible feeling.

The man stared with those eyes buried in skin at Wade writhing on the ground. All three of us stood, just watching for what felt like a long time. We might have stayed like that until Wade flailed in two, but then the man shoved the pistol into his waistband and knelt beside him. With shaky hands, he touched Wade’s shoulder as if his bones were made of sugar. Bile dribbled between Wade’s lips as the man turned him on his side.

Frank took off his jacket and draped it over Wade, crouching across from the man who was talking low, muttering something, but I couldn’t make out the words.

The sight of the three of them clumped together turned something in me; it seemed we had become primitive and hopeless creatures huddled without the warmth of a fire. The man’s voice droned on like moronic psalms. A wave of nausea crashed and whipped through me. Suddenly I could move again. I needed the man’s voice to stop. I knew where my gun lay and the distance from my hand to the trigger.

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My body moved out of time with my thoughts and carried me over the fence. I gathered my shotgun and felt the cold metal against my cheek as I trained it on the man.

Maybe I told him to back away, because he stood and turned to look at me. In that moment, the urge to pull the trigger and pepper his face with birdshot was a visceral thing pecking at my fingertips and whispering, you can, you can.

His eyes widened, and I truly saw them. Lightless stones sunken in bruise-colored pockets. Something profane and true lurked there and reflected back in me.

I’d see it again in places where I’d try over the years to lose myself, plummeting along the curvature of greater and greater distances: In the burnt cinnamon night over Kenya; in a truckbed, among the goats I named after US presidents, rolling up the spine of South America; in finding myself broke again, loitering around gas stations in Florida and Nevada and Kansas - all the worst states I’ve passed through - where a ponytail could earn you a cracked skull; in the peyote I ate that turned Arizona into a glistening field of blood vessels.

I felt it getting closer all the time until it was staring out of my bathroom mirror in the morning after my first wife left me for another man. I was most alone. Nights became a vacuous cycle of my breath swirling in the dark. And I felt as cold and numb as I did on that day in November when I was fourteen, staring into the eyes of a stranger where I saw, but couldn’t grasp, all that

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rusted-out hardness could deny a person. Sometimes, thinking on all that my life became or failed to be, I still wish I’d shot the man. As if that would have changed any goddamned thing.

I stayed drawn on the man as Wade’s spasms gradually stilled, and Frank helped him back through the fence. I stayed with him as they shuffled away until I thought they were well out of range of that enormous pistol.

We regarded each other across the fence. Blackbirds were calling.

The man leaned against his car and smoked.

“What’s wrong with him,” he said.

“He gets seizures. You gave him a bad one.”

He stared straight into the barrels and said without quarter, “Nobody’s had a harder time than me. No one’s even come close.”

When I caught up to Frank and Wade, the man was becoming a shape against the shape of his car flattening into the horizon. Wade was puking up what looked like dishwater. There was a metallic smell on him.

“Christ,” Frank said.

We could see Walt’s Cortina idling in the pull-off. Walt ran up to help us lift Wade over the gate. In the backseat, Frank and I rode with the windows down. The heater fan whirled loudly in the dash.

Wade rode up front, leaning against Walt’s shoulder.

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“What’d we say, Bud?” Walt’s voice was quiet. “What’d we say?”

Wade trembled and gulped air in loud sips, snot and tears messing his brother’s sleeve. Walt steered and rested his ear against Wade’s head like he was listening for something within.

“I’m busted up,” Wade mumbled. Walt shushed him and drove faster towards the clinic.

“I’m all bust to shit. It’s all shit.”

Through all the picking and bull we’d dragged him through, I’d never heard Wade swear before that. His broken hand, capped in leather, brushed, grippless, against Walt’s arm. And once, he’d said he wanted to be like me.

On the radio, Buck Owens and his Buckaroos filled the car with tinplated melodies. Walt turned it up and began singing along softly.

“Oh, the sun’s gonna shine, in my life once more. Love’s gonna live here again. Things are gonna be the way they were before. Love’s gonna live here again.”

In a lancing second, I hated Walt for his steady hand on the steering-wheel and the love that sang for his brother dirty and crying beside him. Like he knew where something was hidden, and could get to it anytime, and I couldn’t.

“No more loneliness, only happiness. Love’s gonna live here again.”

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What gave him the right, or the will to sing?

The mildew never leeched out of Dad’s galoshes, their canvas linings reeked of spoiled cheese and turned ashen, flecked in black mold. They quivered like fish mouths next to me on the car-seat as we bucked over country roads, into the distance that promised to be the same as everything falling away behind us.

I leaned my head against the car-door, my breath spooling out the window. The air whipping by us pulled me up into a dream where every invisible door was opening, showing me where I’d find all the hidden love in my heart until I wouldn’t have recognized me coming along anywhere in the whole damn world.

Riding with my eyes closed, I tried to hold onto that feeling. I heard Wade’s shallow breathing; I heard the tides of his tremors and fits; I heard the muted efforts of his heart. The warmth in Walt’s Cortina was rendering sensation through my naked feet and hands in currents of hot glass. The squirm of my own blood hurt so bad I thought I was going to cry.

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SLIPPAGE Sharon Hashimoto Always, her mother had praised Warren. As a bank manager, he was too important to reschedule meetings. And Martha had been the one left to scold and take away the takuwan, the fermented tofu, the soy sauce and sit by her mother’s side as the technicians at Day Vista Dialysis plugged in the tubes to the shunt in the withered arm. Only one good spot left, a doctor had told her, for a transfusion line. They should save it for later. That “later” never came.

Mostly, she talked to Warren on the phone. His distant voice had insisted: “Don’t worry about paying the hospital. Ma has plenty of money.”

Plenty, Martha had thought as she imagined her brother holding the cell phone, his other hand covering his ear like he always did.

She shrugged and studied the front door with its dead bolt and chain. The house was almost empty. Little trace of her mother remained. Stacked next to the front door were boxes and overstuffed plastic bags for her younger brother to go through.

Things like locks with metal keys, things like the Coleman ice box and gallon water jug the family had used for camping. Martha had found them in the back of the basement closet. She’d sorted through the clothing, toys, and furniture for what was still usable, like the card table with a wobbly leg. Family possessions she couldn’t make herself let go of but didn’t want for herself. She’d lugged the last of four folding chairs towards the pile, propping it up against the wall. Martha could still hear her mother saying, “When you go to the basement, think about what you can bring

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back up.” Trip after trip: downstairs with boxes, upstairs with the junk to be thrown out. Was it a Japanese thing? she wondered.

Martha stopped to catch her breath.

Warren was always late. Sometime in the afternoon, he’d said.

It was past three o’clock. Warren didn’t have many weekends off. Martha didn’t see him much except for Thanksgiving and Christmas and their father’s memorial, then those long days at the hospital, and finally with the hospice nurse at home.

Martha knew Warren had hired a gardener to mow the lawn. He paid the bills and balanced the checkbook. Her mother had always brightened at his two kids, opening her arms for hugs and kisses on her cheek.

Whenever Warren and his family were around, it had seemed like they pushed Martha out of the room, to clear away the makizushi and oden that Ma had taught her to make. For her to gather the dirty dishes for the kitchen sink because Martha knew her mother didn’t have the strength to wash them. To be fair, Warren’s wife always offered to help. But Ma would shift the conversation, insisting “sit, sit .” Ma had said once to Martha in private, “What do I know about the kinds of food Warren and the kids eat?”

Divorced. No babies. But Martha had a steady administrative assistant job at Providence Hospital. She owned her condominium and liked to travel with her girlfriends from her book club, once bringing her mother a wool shawl from Ireland.

“Itchy,” Ma had complained, rubbing her arms. Martha enjoyed

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ocean cruises, meeting strangers who became her ocean family for a week as they walked around on the slippery deck to glimpse the blow hole plumes of whales.

Martha saw herself as a responsible child. She’d gently bathed her mother, careful not to bring out the purple bruises so quick to pool under the papery skin, and laundered the soiled sheets.

Towards the end, she’d slept in her old twin bed in her room across from her parents, listening for the bell she’d set on her mother’s night table. Finally, Martha had been the one to lay her fingers against the cold cheek, then her palm against her mother’s chest, to tell those gathered by the bed side: “No breath. No heartbeat.”

Warren had invested in Microsoft. He and his wife had a twostory house in Bellevue with a view of Puget Sound. He had never offered advice about her own nest egg. “You have to be willing to lose money,” he’d once told her in passing, before their mother had called him out of the room. And Martha hadn’t brought the subject up again. She was the type to hoard every penny, keeping coffee cans full of change. It had always been her way. Even with her babysitting jobs, Martha had put aside a little to give her parents, especially after her father was laid off from his airplane wiring job at Boeing during the recession when everyone was leaving Seattle. There had been that famous billboard sign on Pacific Highway South – Will the last person leaving Seattle—turn out the lights. Martha could see Warren loosening the neck of his white shirt with his index finger. “The house needs fixing before we put it on the market,” she’d told him. “Leaky kitchen faucet.

The toilet runs. I can call a plumber.”

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“Nah,” Warren had answered. “I can do it.”

“You need to pick up your stuff,” she’d added. But Martha didn’t know if he’d heard before the dial tone hummed in her ear. She couldn’t remember if Warren was good with a wrench or if her brother had watched their father work with duct tape, tinkering around the house trying to save money.

As the son, Warren was the executor of their parents’ will. He knew numbers, but so did she. After high school, she lived at home, taking a stock job at Nordstrom’s bargain basement shoe department while attending community college. It was less expensive to transfer after her A.A. degree. Martha bit her tongue as she thought again of how her mother had gone through her jewelry box, giving Warren the diamond ring and wedding band to pass on to his own daughter. Or the used Chevy Impala Warren got, for his good grades and transportation to an out-of-state college. Pressing her lips together, she nodded, breathing heavily through both nostrils.

Martha walked into her old bedroom, the one place that had been hers--the one with the pear tree shading the window. The walls were blue. In third grade, Martha had stayed home from school with the measles and a high fever. She hadn’t recognized her mother, thinking Ma had been a bothersome Warren, whom she told to go away, leave her alone, slipping herself deeper until the blankets closed over her head. Alone, she had stared at the walls and imagined a sea tide rising and falling away. Voices warbled around her like water gurgling in her ears, flowing over her neck as she floated on her back. Bound by her twisted nightgown, she’d

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tasted something bitter that spread from her tongue to the sides of her dry mouth. Every part of her had itched as she burned. How she had rubbed and scratched herself. She’d been convinced that when she’d opened her eyes, her fever had shot out like lasers.

Touched by her swollen fingers, her body heat had melted the walls into textured swirls. No one else had noticed. No, her mother had insisted, the walls were exactly the same. No one had believed. But to this day, small white scars remained on her abdomen. Martha fanned her face with a hand; why was it so warm?

She pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her flannel shirt pocket and checked her list. Almost everything was crossed out, except for the few small tasks Warren had promised to take care of.

Martha moved on to the living room. The hard wood flooded with shadows as Martha closed the venetian blinds. She didn’t want strangers peering in from the street. She didn’t want them to see how empty the house had become. The realtor had told her that the large lot with its fruit trees, its location only three blocks away from an elementary school—these would help with the sale.

When her parents had purchased the house for $14,000 back in 1958, there had been three other Japanese families on the block along with a retired couple and a widowed teacher. Judy Sumiye, from across the street, had been her best friend.

Did Warren know how to fix things? Martha glanced at the wall phone still in its old spot at the end of the large kitchen. Here was the door jamb that measured their growth, the door jamb Martha had fallen and cracked her forehead against. The gash required a butterfly bandage. Warren had lived downstairs in the basement

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past their father’s shovels and tools, past the canned foods her mother shelved for emergencies, past the hot water heater and noisy furnace. Warren had secrets in his room like the dried blood from his nosebleeds he rubbed against the wall until their father made him wash it clean with bleach and hot water. And the Playboy and Hustler magazines he hid under the mattress.

Why had Warren wanted to come home at all? Martha wondered if there was a special floor board with something else he had hidden away. A long time ago, when they were kids, Warren with his first pocket knife had cut clods of dirt out of the backyard’s lawn to make small holes for a cache of cats’-eye marbles, a skate key, a shiny match box. “You need a treasure map,” she’d told him: “Five steps straight out from the left corner of the patio, turn right and take three more steps…like that.” Three weeks later, forgotten, the holes were overgrown with grass.

When Warren came through the front door, she was surprised to see him in jeans and a grey sweatshirt. For a moment, he looked like any kid brother coming home from playing basketball with his friends. Except for the gray threading through his dark hair, except for that thickening waist. Then there was his red toolbox which Warren placed on the floor. Martha stared, slowly realizing it was her father’s. When had he taken that?

Warren’s jaw dropped when he saw the stacked boxes.

He groaned, “More stuff.”

And I Goodwilled most of it, all on my own, Martha thought.

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“There’s your train set with the steel tracks, even some of those smoke pills for the chimney. Your comic books: Fantastic Four.

Your carp flag for Boy’s Day.” She remembered how she’d been jealous of some of her brother’s stuff. Ma and Pa, they’d always found a way to give Warren what he’d asked for. She was the eldest, the one who would find a way to do without.

Warren said, glancing away: “I want to get started on that kitchen faucet.”

Martha snorted. He was the one who had taken the entire morning and afternoon getting here. Her brother turned the worn spigots on and off. Did he really know what he was doing?

Martha frowned as Warren wiped his fingers on his pant legs. The stainless steel was dirty because she’d been running only a small slip of water to keep the drain from backing up.

“It’s probably been years of rice and grease,” her brother said. “I’m going to have to wrestle the basket strainer out.”

He’s saying it’s my fault, Martha thought. I didn’t run the hot water often enough. I let Ma flush down coffee grounds. She stooped to pick up a hammer.

Warren raised his eyebrows and reached past her for a pipe wrench and needle-nose pliers. “I want to fix things, not make them worse.”

Martha felt her face flush. Warren shouldn’t complain. Everything under the sink, she’d chucked into the garbage: old coffee cans,

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never used-up bottles of detergent, moldy pieces of soap. Still, she shook her head as Warren scooted his way under on his back, muttering about the lack of space, how hard it was to work with all the pipes and nuts and washers above him. That was his problem, she decided. Dutifully, she tried to hold the flashlight’s beam steady.

“I need to put some torque on this nut,” Warren said, breathing heavily. “Hold the pliers here, like that. Got it?”

Martha wasn’t sure what she was doing. It was crowded and hot and she didn’t want to touch her brother or get in his way.

She just tried to stay still and to hold the one position he’d assigned her. That’s why she wasn’t prepared when Warren gave the pipe wrench a hard jerk and the pliers flew out of her hands.

The propped-up flashlight rolled, rattling across the kitchen floor.

Warren’s head thudded against the bottom of the sink. “Baka,” he yelled.

She hadn’t heard the word in such a long time. Idiot. Stupid fool.

Their father had used the curse when he was angry, when things weren’t going his way. The word was like a bomb going off and then Pa had given everyone the silent treatment, the rooms of the house echoing with his heavy footsteps. Like when he glared at another house payment bill. If he lowered his voice and spoke the word slowly, somehow it was even worse. “Not you,” her mother had tried once to explain. “Pa means himself.”

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“Let’s forget this whole thing,” Martha said. Inside her head, she felt like she was shouting.

Her brother paused as if counting to ten. From the dark under the kitchen sink, he said: “I thought you were ready.”

“I’m too old for this,” Martha replied, struggling to her feet.

She felt a small twang give in her thigh as she picked up the flashlight. “Why waste effort?”

“Because I can do it,” Warren said, his voice muffled, even softer.

“Don’t you remember how the whole family changed the light socket in the basement? There was Pa, trying to save money, standing on that white stool Ma used for cutting hair. Pa would teeter back and forth, his arms wind-milling for balance. Ma told me she was afraid he’d fall, or worse, electrocute himself. She held his legs to steady him. Sometimes, Pa would put his hand on her head or shoulder when he got tired. I held the flashlight, trying to aim it at the right spot but there’d always be a shadow that got in the way.”

Martha shook her head. She didn’t remember anything like what her brother was describing. “What did I do?” She checked the flashlight, turning it off and on again, pointing the beam under the sink until a circle of light found Warren’s face. He held spread fingers up to block the glare. No wonder Warren’s voice sounded funny. He was lying on his back, head pushed against the back wall as far as it could go. Martha aimed the light back on the pipes.

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“You read the instructions he’d written down from the hardware store,” Warren answered. “You tried to be so clear. Ground wires, red wires, pig tails, nuts…I thought we were all going to die together when Pa put the light bulb in and told me to flip the switch.” He sighed. “And it worked.”

Why wasn’t that event anything close to what she knew? Martha wondered. She wanted to tell Warren to come out from under the sink. She wanted to correct her little brother with the facts. Ma had held the flashlight, and it was the washing machine they’d been fixing while their father had struggled with putting on a new belt. She’d been reading from the manual. It was like that one time she’d emptied her savings account to pay Warren’s spring quarter tuition. Warren had never said thank you. He hadn’t even asked where the money came from. But he’d had that lousy job as part of a clean-up crew for Super 6 motels and Kentucky Fried Chicken while studying statistics and business law at Lewis and Clark College. Now that she thought about it, maybe her parents had never told her brother the money was from her.

Warren shifted his position, one knee pointing towards the ceiling as if to give him better support. “One more time,” he said.

“What exactly do you want me to do?” Martha wished she had more hands as she tried to understand her brother’s instructions. In the end, fixing the sink didn’t take as long as she expected. Maybe it felt long because she had been holding her breath. Tools were scattered across the linoleum floor with its checkered red and white squares. An old bucket was half full with dirty water, and her mother’s old and holey

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dish towels were soaking up the puddles. Martha had kept them for the final clean-up. She wasn’t ready to say good-bye to the house just yet. At least the sink was fixed. She was afraid to mention the toilet.

Warren wiped beads of sweat and grime off his forehead with his sleeve.

Licking his lips, he opened the door of the refrigerator, saw nothing, closed it, then opened it again. Cool air flooded into the kitchen.

“Don’t waste money,” Martha almost said, mimicking her mother.

Why was Ma’s voice so loud in her head? Especially here. In her own condo, Martha never said things like that. Instead, she murmured, “There should be a couple of cans of pop in there.”

Warren handed her a drink, then snapped the tab of his own. He leaned against the stove counter, then turned to open and close the storage cabinets. Taking a swig from his Pepsi, he said: “Ma kept the good stuff, the canned eel, on the top shelf. And the dried shrimp. Those cans of Vienna sausage and deviled ham.”

A lot of the cans were years past their expiration date. Did Warren want them? There was something about the way her brother’s hands clung to the cabinet knobs, his arms spread wide apart.

If she were a girl again, jumping up to peer over Warren’s shoulder, she’d imagine the same things. “Kuromame,” Martha broke in. “They were always too sweet. Disgusting black beans. But everyone had to have at least one mouthful…”

Warren finished the well-worn refrain: “to have good health for the new year.” He smiled, nodding to himself.

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“I didn’t chew. You know, I just swallowed them down. Your problem was you kept chasing them around on your plate.”

Maybe he won’t remember about the bathroom, Martha decided. Her can of pop was cold in her hand. She could almost hear Pa saying that toilets were easier than sinks.

Straightening her back to ease the kink in her shoulders, she took a step towards the oven and the four burners. The kitchen table was gone, but she could still see everyone seated while her mother dished out steaming rice into their ochawans. From the way his nose twitched, Martha could tell that her brother was remembering yet another kind of food.

“I miss those carbonated tablets, those Fizzies. Jungle Juice. Ame Candy. Dried fish jerky that was salty and sweet.” Warren shyly smiled. “It was surumi. Ma passed it over the front seat during car rides on the way to mushroom hunting.”

He could be that boy again, Martha thought, the one who balancewalked the length of fallen giant fir trees at Mount Rainier. That’s how she saw him. She wondered about asking if Ma had fed his kids wasabi peas. She wondered if they knew any Japanese.

But they probably didn’t. She’d taken two years in high school.

Her instructor had commented on her calligraphy brush strokes—“pretty healthy looking”--as he tried to be kind.

When she thought about it, most of her Japanese came from the food her mother prepared. Maybe five hundred of those words were left. It was here, in the kitchen, where they came

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back. One of her cruise friends had told her, if you didn’t speak French every day, it slipped away.

Martha pressed her lips together and swallowed. Slowly, she gathered the wrench and pliers, fitting them back in the red tool box. On her hands and knees, she mopped the floor with another clean rag while Warren took out the garbage. Light motes hung, twirling like small undiscovered moons in the thin afternoon light. Looking up, it was as if a shadowy figure stood at the fixed kitchen sink, as if running the cold water and looking out the curtainless window towards the T-shaped clothesline and the apple tree behind it. Was it memory, or Ma’s ghost? This was the last time she and her brother would be in this house working together. She looked around the kitchen and noticed that the sunset changed the pale blue of the walls. Only Warren was left.

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NONFICTION

Song of the Apostates Grace Gilbert It goes something like this.

Honey keeps ripping up my manuscript so I keep just yelling at her.

I don’t feel guilty for shouting at an animal; however, I do feel shame for being heard by my stylish neighbors— the wreath on their front door much, much bigger than mine, more centered, just better looking in general.

For whatever it’s worth, I am aware from years of watching “Criminal Minds” of the homicidal triad & the fact that I wet the bed until I was in my late teens does not fare well for this character I’ve spun together.

However, animal cruelty is not cruelty in this case just despondency and I think, really, that trying to believe in God all those years wrung all of the urine-soaked latent psychopathy right out of me.

Also, was never one for fire setting.

Now I seem to cry at everything including my insufferably adorable kitten and sometimes I see Jesus in my toast.

He is fucking everywhere.

O my proverbial gluten fiber.

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My perfect putrefied grain.

If I’m being honest godlessness becomes me— I just don’t know what to focus on first anymore so I do it all at once.

“i am such a public human / and you have every satin piece / of my heart” is the final poem in the manuscript and has a catnipinduced rip clean through the center like Jesus just got crucified.

The sky looks about that color, too.

Pittsburgh: well-baked dishwater.

Jesus could die over and over and over again and the sky would look about the same.

What I’m trying to say is that my hometown best friend, Lola, texted me a picture of her sonogram and I wept softly into the thin blush-colored pillow B sleeps on, but he wasn’t there, it was just me and the ghost of his cum and some snot (my own) and a hardly-formed baby boy (Lola’s) on a screen in a damp palm in an apartment the size of a DMV waiting room.

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Go fucking figure.

There’s a moment where I kneel on the linoleum kitchen floor with wet, scraggly hair and a fistful of Meow Mix, trying to feed Honey out of my hand so she forgets the sound of my anger.

She buys it, easy, which makes me feel like I would be a bad mother, though my dreams and other peoples’ dreams have tried to convince me otherwise.

Lola is a closed adoption baby.

When we were six we used to joke about how, maybe, we are twins, but she was so so small that she fell under the bed in the hospital room and the doctors just missed her and put her up for adoption while sweeping the floor later and even when my mother told us gently that it Just can’t be and isn’t true, we wanted it so hard that it seemed to stick.

Dreams I’ve had lately: 1. My daughter, who looks just like B, wakes me for a glass of milk. It is so realistic I think I’ve seen a ghost of the future.

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2. B and I have a baby boy named Hudson and I don’t want to take care of him and B has these wretched bags under his eyes and a baby wrapped around his chest in one of those daddy slings and the apartment has ugly ugly carpeting and it’s all a hideous mess.

3. I bake my grandmother’s ashes into a meatloaf. I eat it spoonful by greasy spoonful.

Giant Eagle, the grocery conglomerate, is the featured player in last year’s pregnancy scare (almost typed “scar” on accident—fitting).

I had just moved to Pittsburgh and didn’t have a Giant Eagle advantage card yet, so when I tried to stealthily purchase a Giant Eagle brand pack of pregnancy tests (So Fast! Compare to Leading Brand!) at the self-checkout aisle in one of the busiest stores in the city at five fucking pee-em the machine woman kept repeating SCAN YOUR ADVANTAGE CARD☺until a line began to clog back and around into the cereal aisle.

I was crying, the hot way of course, but didn’t really mean to, with a bottle of Barefoot wine tucked into my clammy armpit, and eventually the nice man in the green peacoat who watched the whole pitiful debacle scanned his card for me and he probably got five cents off a gallon for purchasing a twenty-oneyear-old’s pregnancy test at Giant Eagle.

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Karma, that capitalist bitch.

When I got home (my first shitty, roach-infested apartment), it was Lola I texted, not Scott (my possible baby daddy) and in those two minutes between being possibly? pregnant and being definitelyor-definitely-not! pregnant her little blue text bubble sat next to mine like we were back in our little made-up hospital room or on the school bus or in her twin-sized bed with a family-sized canister of cheese puffs laughing out our asses at something carefree and wonderful like the happiest little children do.

Because Lola is a closed adoption baby, as is her boyfriend, deciding to let this baby go to another couple wasn’t an option… even when she went in for a checkup thinking she might be a few weeks pregnant (if at all), definitely still in abortion-territory (options!), and then found out that she was actually seven months along (!), due on Christmas during a pandemic (!!) and, quite possibly, during a fascist regime (narrowly avoided that one) which really only gave them two months to figure out how to begin an entire life in their tiny countryside home on a butcher’s and medical secretary’s salaries—and and and and—

When I scroll through Twitter, a meme: “it’s always ‘who is daddy’s little cumslut’ and never ‘HOW is daddy’s little cumslut?☻”

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After I told him about Lola’s baby saga, B bought me plan B, which is an odd-looking bucktooth of a sentence to type.

He said he never wants kids.

I keep his wares stocked under the bathroom sink, next to the discount cat litter (the unscented, clumping kind), and try to see his gesture as a kindness but can’t help also seeing it as a prophylactic for resentment.

While on the toilet I wonder about Lola’s belly.

I wonder how big it is now, and what driving is like, and if it’s hard for her to shave her legs, and if she lingers a bit longer in the baby clothing section at our hometown Walmart where we used to walk around and “Awwwwww” at all the wittle wittle shoes that, en masse, look like an adorable little crudité platter compared to big meaty human feet and their grossly expensive coverings.

Some names I’ve collected: April, Peregrine (pretentious), Jorie (Jo for short), Aoife, Wren, Willow, Rory, James, Atlas (also pretentious), Evangeline, Hudson, Lucie, Daisy —

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Lola and I were converted during a week of fundamental Christian summer camp her mom implored us to attend.

We were fourteen.

They showed us a narsty clip from “The Passion of the Christ,” the one where the Roman guards get lit up and smack Hot Jesus with that big spiky whip.

At some point I cried and sat under a tree and said sorry sorry sorry be in my life.

There were stars and touching confessions around a campfire.

All very Candace Cameron Burre.

I hardly remember anything except how weirdly real it felt, how new.

That and Jim Caviezel’s sex covered with a tattered loincloth.

His bloodied lustworthy limbs.

It eludes me how I got roped into fundamentalism so successfully, but that rope is gnarly.

Tight as fuck.

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Tied right to the foot of a huge menacing cross that stood over Lola and I for six long years.

Cloaking us with its purity shadow.

Telling me to cry cry beg God for mercy every time I reached for that glorious showerhead.

Telling me Modest is hottest even when that arsehat of a Baptist elder put his hand up my thigh.

Telling me to shhhhhhh.

Telling me it was my sin, not his, the bootylicious polyester of my Walmart fitness shorts too juicy a temptation.

It must’ve been The Camp.

It felt like chaste MTV. A crusade but for Hip Kids.

There were bikinis and churros and places to smoke if you wanted to, though no one did except that one guy named Collin who was really misunderstood but was also converted during the same altar call.

Powerful stuff that blood.

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This illusion of freedom was supposed to make us choose the freedom of God because everything else puts a “hole in your heart” that is “God-sized” like our aortic chambers really could only be filled with the particular goop of the Holy Spirit.

I bought it, though, handfed the Meow Mix of the gospel, and Lola and I vowed to abandon all of our sinful ways, which at fourteen was just some combination of chronic masturbation, cursing at the lunch table, and stealing Essie nail polishes from Walmart.

We really thought we were evil, though. We thought, less of us more of him.

Funny, all that guilt. Dangerous.

Dangerous guilt over blood Mel Gibson made us watch like we spilled it.

And then, Milo. November 11, 2020. Born like a ripe little melon.

Sweet preemie apostolic babe. Healthy as can be.

Like the cutest fucking clockwork, he came a whole monthand-a-half early.

Even though I’ve lost my god, I have a hard time not crediting this one to anybody.

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The fucking nerve. The fucking beauty of it.

I lost God somewhere between sex and sexuality.

A sluggish year-long decanting.

It went something like this: I realized I wasn’t straight and it tore a brick through my spirit sinews. I realized I was hot and it made me hate any liturgy that told me not to be. I realized sex in the back of Scott’s 2001 Volvo, parked in a highway runoff in Western New York. I realized N, the woman I lived with, was abusive & God was her flimsy scrim of an excuse in acting that way.

I realized myself. I thought, this is pretty good out here away from the wolves. I thought, God isn’t real God isn’t real God isn’t real.

I sat in a bar with Lola in 2018 and we said huh, huh, how did we get to this point.

And we laughed and laughed and tequila and twins and a world where we shattered back together without Providence or Mel Gibson to help.

I’ve been planning my wedding with B on Pinterest.

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A secret board.

We’re not getting married, I just want to sometimes.

I would wear white, then red. A reception at the botanical garden where B and I loved each other and never said it. A quick change somewhere in there. Cupcake, donut, Radiohead as I walk down the aisle. Making out on the 61B. Clear acrylic invitations and vows with poetry and jokes. Some mix of sisters and friends as bridesmaids. Little Milo as the ring bearer. Happy happy parents.

Honeymoon in Taiwan. Then a boho-chic chunk of real estate big enough for Honey and I to coexist without her eating my book.

All on two writers’ salaries.

Feasible, feasible, love opens like a hole.

Now I dream of someday losing all my money to it.

I see Milo through the glass door on Christmas Eve. Plague day.

He still looks like a fetus.

I say, Happy Christmas I love you already.

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Give him a little onesie that looks like a lion.

I stay five minutes and leave my long lost twin to operate in her own world so, so far away from mine. Happy diversion.

In the car all the way home, I think of babysmell. I think of the elder’s hand on my leg and the god of my pussy and the god who died and how I killed him. I think of all the kittens in the world and mine specifically.

I think of Lola.

I think of B. I think of the one day walking down Braddock when he looked at me and said We can do anything we want no god just us.

I think of the other dream, the one where B proposes and I’m with child and then we look at the fat-bellied smiling blue whales.

They are just out in the air, floating.

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The Grass Crown: A Coronation Evan J. Massey A few days ago, I was suddenly overcome with the urge to mow grass. And being that I had just moved into a 6th-floor apartment, and therefore had no grass to mow, I downloaded a mowing simulator on my work iPad. It was then that I was also overcome with laughter at the thought of me virtually cutting grass while my students pulled their hair out like weeds during an exam essay. “I’ll help you after I finish this client’s lawn,” I’d say in my head. Before I hit the road in my riding lawnmower, I chose my avatar and, in keeping with my own identity, selected the Black man with a beard and a yellow hat—the latter sadly missing the John Deere logo. He was a blacksmith, you know, John Deere. My homie Deere created the first commercially successful scouring plow, which took Flyover Country by storm. Though, maybe I shouldn’t play around with that word “storm.” At the tender age of four, John Deere lost his father, William Deere, who boarded a boat for England in hopes to provide a better life for his family. He was never heard from again. He’s presumed to have died at sea. RIP “Dub D.” That’s something I could never imagine, losing my Pop. It was my Pop who taught me how to mow grass; how to adjust the blade height, to press the fuel primer bulb after gassing up, and how to admire your work afterwards with a glistening glass of lemonade as the sun sprayed strokes of light across your landscaped masterpiece. I read somewhere that you can actually paint your lawn. Lawn paint seems, at least to me, like it’s specifically for the inept curators of yards, the non-landscapers. From the long metal hose, a shower of emerald extract spritzes onto the earth. Looks inauthentic, fake as hell. Like something out of a video game. I had just cut my first

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lawn in the simulator and when I shaped up the edges of a flower bed, the plants bloomed with herbal brilliance. It was on to the next house, and I started to remember that, when I was younger, it wasn’t smart to go from house to house in my neighborhood.

Especially across the street and two houses down where a man named Cornbread lived. Once, Cornbread asked my Pop to borrow our lawnmower and I remember him smiling at me behind our screen door and how the gold grill in his mouth lacked luster. We didn’t know it then, but weeks later he’d kill a kid who was close to my age. For posing as a gang member. To this day, I still think about how that could have been me. A pristine lawn never conveys the full story of its owner. What if every spike of grass could speak?

I can’t help but consider the centuries-old tales seeded in the soil. Native American tribes made baskets, beds, and houses from grass. The Cheyenne burned grass and mixed it with ashes, blood, and tallow to make paint. My cousin once burned a bush in front of his house, and a small flame soon grew into a scorching inferno, incinerating every one of the leaves. And when I informed my Pops, who was inside the house, that the bush was burning, he commenced to whipping me. I looked for meaning, but there was nothing biblical about any of this. My Pop’s copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sits on my Ikea bookshelf. And looking over at the thick tome reminds me of the Billie Holiday lyric from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynchings. “The blood on the leaves and blood at the root,” is the blood of my ancestors circulating beneath our feet, coursing through the auricles, sheaths, and crowns. Blood that fertilized every stem on plantations. My people have a complicated relationship with the soil. For centuries our lives were centered around the land and removing every resource born from

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it without a penny in compensation. That’s why, unfortunately, I can’t even look at freshly-tilled farmland or flourishing crops. They are reminders that I, in another time sown in the past, labored from dusk till dawn in those fields. My grandfather told me that a Black farmer named John Boyd Jr., from my home state of Virginia, drove a mule and wagon, and then a tractor to the Capitol as efforts to shed light on the discrimination that Black farmers face across the country. It is because of this discrimination that Boyd thinks, one day, Black farmers will soon, sadly “go extinct.” In a smaller effort, I once drove lawn mowers to the front of Lowes, during a summer when my car had broken down and had to walk 3 miles to work in the Lawn & Garden section, selling plants and bags of mulch and pea gravel to rich white folks. Where I also once witnessed two Black kids running out of Lowes to their car, being chased by the Loss Prevention guy for stealing something of which I do not remember. I tried to memorize the car’s license plate, but forgot it by the time I reached the front door. I was afraid that I’d mistakenly be associated with those kids; the Loss Prevention dude kept his eye on me for the duration of my shift. I’d disclosed this to my coworker from Philly, whose only job, it seemed, was to recover all the carts around the parking lot and taxi them back inside. He said he hadn’t seen the thieves. He cleaned a large canal of sweat from his forehead and hobbled back into the heat. But the dude in the Domonic’s sausage food truck had seen them. “And then I saw you,” he said. Once, I told him that I had eaten at a certain Indian restaurant in town to which he dismissed. “They buy their food pre-cooked,” he said. “They only heat it up and serve it. Don’t go there,” he said. It sounded like a command. Much like how the Drill Sergeants in the Army ordered us not to walk on the grass,

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screaming, “Get off my grass!” Like it was their grass. Like they had birthed, along with Mother Earth, every loving ligule and leaf.

I know that a well-landscaped lawn can make you feel regal, like Stanley in the movie Friday when he yelled at Craig and Smokey for stepping on his property. Like you’re the king of the block, of the neighborhood, like you should be fitted for some kind of grass crown. In Rome, a corona graminea, a grass crown, was presented to a general who saved a legion of soldiers or an entire army in battle. Though the OG Augustus Caesar was awarded that joint out of political respect and achievement. I swiped away from the mowing simulator and cued up Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp.

I’ve been looking for ways to plant my man Tru in the curriculum. I’d like my students to recognize his mastery of descriptive language.

The way he describes a scene makes me feel like I’m wandering in a plush carpeted plain where the leaves of grass whisper and waft in unison as the sun audibly hums above me. In Tru’s title story The Grass Harp, Dolly asks, “Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story—it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived.” She continued, and it hit me when she said, “when we are dead it will tell ours, too.”

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How to Ready Your Bones Lucy McBee First: spend the fall semester of sophomore biology dissecting the frog assigned you.

Get used to formaldehyde, the way it crouches on your taste buds, vinegars the lining of your nostrils, cling-films your eyeballs.

Wield the reverse zipper of the scalpel responsibly. Understand this: the cold that transfers from the frog’s flesh to yours is only temporary and only while you handle it.

You hadn’t thought of yourself as squeamish, but when you make the first cut to open the chest cavity like the flaps of a robe, you fail to realize that you slice the inside of your finger. When you finally notice your glove filled with blood — the hand a fish suffocating in latex — you pass out. You’re slick with cold sweat and humiliation when you revive, breaded in floor grit, the class peering down at you like a surprise specimen.

Even though you’re 15 (a year older than your grandmother when she was sent off to marry a man twice her age, one she’d never met, and all she got by way of orientation was: “Put your dolls away, you’re going to be a wife now,” so why should you wallow in complaints, you have no idea what real hardship is, letmetellyou), your first thought is that you want your mother. Don’t show them that. Laugh the whole thing off. As you command your bones to rise up, be sure to crack jokes about a tunnel and a bright light and how maybe, just maybe, you croaked there for a bit.

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There are things you don’t love about the process, of course, and you think about dropping a level into another class, but you want to be a bio major in college, and your guidance counselor tells you for that you need AP bio as a senior (“where you’ll take apart a cat — godbless — so make your peace with the toad”), and honors bio is a prerequisite. You don’t correct her. Just drift out of her office without acknowledging her giggled advice to stock up on Compound W. There’s no way around the frog but through it.

You don’t love how this frog has to die a new death each time you shove aside an organ with your probe, trace the bumpy path of digestion, go poking around in the heart like you lost yourself there. Forget what you don’t love and pay attention to all the words you hear — they’ll be on the test. Cloaca, ileum, vena cava.

The other students name their frogs things like Kermit or Hoppy or Stiff. One boy chooses Carl. Another calls his Dad. The only name that ever appears on your frog’s bodybag is your own.

Shove aside that unsettledness you feel during the reproductive unit when you discover it is a her. Ace the quizzes. Dutifully name every avenue and knobby landmark on the roadmap of her insides.

Peritoneum, oviducts, glottis.

When there’s nothing left to draw or diagram or reveal, when no hiding place for secrets remains for either of you, it’s time for the

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midterm exam: strip the bones of your frog and memorialize her in the only way that remains.

Before you can do that, your mother dies. “Passes,” the priest keeps saying during the funeral mass. (Even though the church weeps incense, you can only smell formaldehyde.) He never says dies. Only “passes.”

She dies on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1984. The day after, the class begins ridding the frogs of flesh, as if flesh has been the enemy all along.

You’re not there.

On the third day the class is busy destroying fleshidence, you’re at your pediatrician’s office though you don’t want to be. You’re vaguely embarrassed at having a pediatrician when you’re 15 and 5’9”. But your aunt drags you in, stoop-shouldered, because she notices you aren’t swallowing solid foods and you have to admit it’s because you can’t.

There’s something stuck in your throat. A bony lump. A cold chunk of slab. Something you can’t get past, even though you try.

Maybe you’re worried too — but don’t you dare admit it out loud — because swallowing seems awfully important to survival, which you desperately want to do despite the numbing sheets of disorienting pain, and even that realization — that you actually want to survive — comes as a sideways surprise like a rib bone canted upward, and the doc orders pics and there’s no physical obstruction, so he says it’s grief grief grief like the

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sounds a frog makes as it leaves proof of its existence on the unruffled surface of a nighttime pond.

You want to say: “Frogs belong to the clade Salientia, which comes from the Latin salere, ‘to jump,’” because you think the doctor would appreciate a dose of med school trivia. But you opt for silence. Good girl.

And he prescribes Valium to relax the muscles in your throat and you take them because what did they know back then? Valium for a kid, why not?

You’re supposed to be off it before returning to school — doctor’s orders — but the morning of your reentry two weeks later, long before the sun is up, you sneak a half anyway, severed with a grapefruit knife, the only blade your aunt missed when she did her sweep of the kitchen, shooting worried glances at the bedroom door your father barricaded himself behind. Predictably, the knife fails to deliver a precise cut.

Swallow the larger half.

Go in early to meet with your biology teacher. It’s already clear by the few hallway interactions at that depopulated hour that you’ve become a strange specimen to your mothered peers, one they’d rather handle with a thick glass dome than a butterfly net.

“I asked for a volunteer to prepare your bones,” Mrs. Garafolo says, herself a specimen teetering on the lip of a boiling vat, a

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dank mausoleum, a slow death by desiccation. “Jimmy Malkowski offered, and look what a good job he’s done.”

She caresses a long naked bone curved like hindsight. You have no idea which part of the frog’s body that out-of-context bone belonged in. You wonder if it helped her jump away from danger.

Before the one time it didn’t. Don’t chide yourself for that now.

“I’m going to break the rules for you,” the teacher announces. She peers at you with self-congratulation masquerading as pity, she who is double your mother’s age, whose adult children haven’t needed her for decades. “You may take your bones home and piece them together at your leisure.”

Leisure, she says, like it’s a puzzle on a beach. That word punches a hole through the Valium veil.

Don’t snap, don’t scoff, don’t scowl. Hold yourself together.

“Normally I would never allow any part of any specimen off campus property,” she says. “But in your case…”

Just nod. Take the acid-washed bones home with you in a brown paper bag like somebody’s lunch.

Through the blur of tears, the mess of bones is a sinister jumble of pickup sticks. Don’t sink. Don’t. Call your cousin, who took this class five years ago.

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She drives up in her Beetle convertible, Wham! on the radio. She smells like outdoors. With whispers of glue and soft humming, she knits the bones together. It takes many, many hours. You want to help but you can’t seem to drag your bones toward those naked, expectant ones. Don’t say so. Instead, offer to lend a hand and thank her as she waves you away. Bring her snacks.

“Not bad,” you say when it’s finished. There are bones leftover, but those shouldn’t matter like they would if the frog were a bicycle or a chaise lounge.

Don’t tell her the truth, that you don’t like it. That you see scaffolding for a frog ghost. A mockery of frogness. A Frankenfrog. A cautionary tale for frogs reveling in their pliable flesh, no thought for the future.

Don’t tell her that the angle of the frog on the stand bothers you, the way she looks out into the middle distance, even though her eyes have been melted away and therefore she has no eyes to see out of. You try to remember her eyes, call up the exact shape, how they looked in her face, but you can’t. Even though you try.

You try to remember the last time she smiled at you. Smiled with her eyes and her mouth.

No matter, no matter. Move on. Life, as relentless as death, won’t wait for you.

The next day your cousin drives you to school — top up, radio silent — so the fragile skeleton won’t need to ride the bus. “Glue isn’t as

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strong as ligaments and tendons and muscles, after all,” she says.

She winks at you but you fail to identify the source of humor. Push the corners of your mouth up anyway. Show gratitude. Take the stick of gum she offers. Maybe it will overpower the unkillable living memory of formaldehyde your head has become, the most alive and reliable thing about you all semester.

Go straight to class. You feel cold without the Valium pumping through your system — your aunt found your refill bottle last night, shook it so it sounded like teeth, and grimly buried it in her purse — too cold, too bare. The fluorescent lights of the classroom burn through the places where your skin used to be.

You shiver. You want your mother, the cruelest torment of all.

Set your jaw, swallow the shivering. Suppress your instincts. You want to smash it (her). You want to hurl it (her) at the teacher, want to scream that it wasn’t true what she said in September, that knowing the frog inside and out would help us know ourselves better.

Breathe. Get a grip.

Thank Jimmy for cleaning the bones in your absence. Don’t get offended when he nods curtly and looks away. Better to see his profile than the pity in his eyes.

Pass the skeleton to Mrs. G, watching it wobble a little in its frozen crouch.

Careful, careful.

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She accepts it with an anemic nod and the merest glance because she’s distracted by a run in her pantyhose and asks if any of the girls have clear nail polish to arrest it. They don’t, or else they don’t admit they do. For that you’re glad, imagining the tear reaching the sharp knob of her ankle, swallowing it whole and throwing her off her feet, but be careful to arrange your face and not show it, as if it were made of nothing but bone and glue.

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POETRY

Foster | 78

I’ve lived in this town long enough to know either a train loves you or it doesn’t. And they never do.

What I mean is, I’ve lived in this town long enough to know that no train will ever love you. No matter how much you pray, stretch your arms wider, trying harder to catch all that longing— I will never be enough.

This time. Or ever, or so I think late on Sundays when the woods ripple with mechanical animals, and I feel like I’m dying again, like my body is THE NUT SHOP off 15th, the one with the sign for NUTS! CANDIES! KNIVES! GIFT TRAYS! And I’m on my apartment balcony trying to convince myself, please don’t kill me. Not again— but then, there’s my neighbor lying dead asleep in this ivory heat. His damp face nests in the soft white bowl of his shoulder,

M.K. Foster

Thunderbird

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his smooth chest bares the tattooed shape of an ancient thunderbird holding open his lungs, carrying his clavicle, beating massive wings with every even breath. “Go ahead,” says this big bird, defying the burning sky, copping his best Dirty Harry, “make my day.”

And I want this, too. Please. Real bad. Make me whole. Yes. Let me change, I swear, I can—meaning, Don’t die. Not yet. Meaning, it’s going to be okay.

Give us this day, I pray. Even trains need a hero, even birds need a god. Yes. Give us this day.

And the next, wheeze the night bugs in heat, tree after crimson tree clotted with wet newborn screaming. And the next. And the next. And the next.

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earth was washed blue with marred cries and sullen tears

daughters learned the taste of their fathers’ sins from the warm saltwater their mothers bore

when mama wept

clouds burst asunder to remind her even the sky is a body of water failing to contain itself

boys gathered at her feet and danced praises to the great rain-maker

aunties prayed for drier days and drank waterfalls through the gaps in their teeth

Dāshaun Washington

when mama wept

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when mama wept

when mama wept

her truest face

for four-fifths of a spring

my father’s hands ungripped her neck and wiped away her tears

love became a sin

kinfolk bit their tongues so hard they had to fasten their lips to conceal the blood

jewelry wrapped itself around her finger— each golden pacifier bearing a different promise

I wept

her children danced away her tears and laughed away her cries

god showed

frontrooms and backrooms filled with incensed-smoke of cinnamon and sage

when mama wept

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when mama wept

her pleasure

songs fled her cries and returned to the chorus of summer’s breeze

rivers emptied into the corners of her crooked smile and formed great lakes

quiet’s whisper rang like an alarm

upon her face

from pain when mama wept

portraits on the walls fixed their gaze on the wailing woman

only death could part

nighttime’s soothing hush hovered outside my reach

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a solemn song to dry her joyous tears

through the halls

years wilted like flowers and folded into endless nights

xeric air moistened with dew and bled upon the fresh-cut grass

wind sang

voices echoed

unsettling warmth befell the room like lukewarm water awaiting the boil

zinfandel and chamomile baptized her sins and laid her to res

when mama wept

time became a fulcrum from which her temper swayed

when mama wept

when mama wept

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what was was words jumble in her mouth is not what the doctors shunt her body exposing what missing their mark I’ve filled in the blanks don’t touch at the optomtrist she knew what was what

Sandra M. Yee was all false starts tongue on the shore search for what is through CT scans cauliflower growths moon bright you know of her gossip who lost what when the letters remember

what loose ends a flopping fish of talk the cerebral misfire is what & MRIs synapses lost causes you know you for years a guessing game she said but she couldn’t bring me

after her latest stroke my aunt sounds like Gertrude Stein for Mary May

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her mouth drips & wants unspeakable

what they were called that thing

a reckless alphabet what I mean

FOLIO

Any Day Now Devon Halliday It’s a smash-all-the-mirrors-in-the-kingdom kind of day. Up in her ivy-studded tower, the local witch is certain that this first-born child will be the one that sticks. She’s changing the sheets on the tower bed, fluffing up the pillows. The three brothers in their homely kitchen laugh merrily with their father, unaware that this may be one of their last meals together, that soon the father and his youngest son will dine alone in gloomy triumph. The cow out in the yard must stand very still, or else they’ll find the gold weighing down her udder. Gold inflation is all anyone can talk about. Everyone’s sick of gold. The kingdom’s princes are out thwacking through brambles or back home in the castle frowning over word puzzles, preparing for the quest that could come any day now. Unemployment is high, but homelessness is down: peasants keep offering food and lodging to old crones, a limited hospitality that ends once it’s clear they’ve stumbled across the non-magical type. But that’s okay for the crone; there’s always another house. The house is inevitably humble, the furniture rickety, and the magical bag of beans at the back of the pantry sits for now undiscovered. The golden cow knows better than to go through the hole in the fence. The children are outside turning into swans. The forest is overrun with talking animals, who stymie and exasperate the local fauna. There is no history; no one keeps record. The queen holds her swelling stomach and thinks of a promise she made long ago. The king has to pay off some assassins. The most beautiful girl in the kingdom sleeps in a fortified room with a knife under her pillow. She has thought, often, of giving herself a scar across one cheek, cheating fate of

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whatever it has planned for her. But if she were the second-most beautiful girl in the kingdom, or the third-, what would befall her then? What if the answer is nothing at all? She returns the knife to beneath her pillow, counts herself back to sleep. The sheep turn to her one by one as they leap over the fence, saying: Help me. Everyone wants help with something. Can no one act alone in this kingdom? Except the brothers, who now are on the three roads leading out of town, each poised to fall prey to his greatest weakness. Though, in truth, sitting around the table with their father, the brothers almost felt they had no weaknesses; lacked nothing; were happy. Small clever men hunker behind fallen trees, waiting to pop out at the perfect moment into some traveler’s story. For now, though, the path is empty, the sun clearing a wide swath through the trees. The neighbor’s son has been turned into an ass again. Sausage links are found in the strangest places.

Another royal wedding must be celebrated: bring out the tired decorations, the peasants in their worn-out finery! The most beautiful girl in the kingdom is in attendance, for what if to skip would be her fatal mistake? The second-most beautiful girl in the kingdom dances with all the village boys, her laugh carrying across the gathered crowd. Everything must be wrapped up by nightfall; there are cows to milk in the morning. The cat is plotting some trickery that only the mouse will notice. The wine is only ever drunk in excess. Those who bragged of wealth the day before are robbed while they sleep; thus the market equalizes. If there are no mirrors, the queen reasons, her daughter will never have to know what she’s worth. The first brother has rounded the bend in the path; soon it will be time for the small clever man to leap out from behind the fallen tree. His clever mouth

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curls, rehearsing. The king tilts the goblet in his hand, watching the gold seep side to side. The cow has been betrayed—maybe by the goat? The second brother tightens his cloak. If he turns around now he could be home in time for supper. He’s standing at the edge of a garden full of mysterious and solitary species, each of which will come in handy. The hours spent weeding and watering that soil! If ever you wondered why the witch’s back is bent. She prunes away the dead branches and recites all her old incantations, which have grown foggy with disuse. Yes, this time the child will be hers. She moves the rest of her belongings to the downstairs bedroom and hangs her traveling robe on the hook by the door. When the midwife is called, she will be ready. She takes one last glance at the tower room, noting everything in its place, the rocking chair by the moonlit window, the carousel of bright objects that she’s hung above the crib, the shelf of intricate illustrated books, which she’ll read to the child every night before bed. Surely if the queen saw this room she would understand.

The witch sweeps the stone floor from corner to corner with her ordinary broom. Then she goes downstairs and out to the garden, kneeling in the mystical dirt with a scattering of seeds in hand, laboring to create a world that she stands a chance to keep.

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高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺 Caroline M. Mar

I have no one left to ask, here so I write to ask you these things.

Did you ever see this lake? Were you one of those who scaled that nearby pass? As you looked across this gorgeous landscape, all granite all tallpine all blueair, tell me what you thought— I am certain you could write, would write, would have written. And so someone read your letters to your blinded son, and so he would recite later all that he had learned because blindness doesn’t bind memory.

Did you mistake the moraine’s slide, glacier-carved, for the face of your forgotten daughter?

Did you hate the mountains for the work— armswing pickswing hammerswing shovelswing—they wrung out of you?

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Though I am not certain you could write, would write, would have written, maybe you did. That someday your barely literate son would find and read those, your journals.

When you were here, did the woods still smell of baked rock, crumbled sugar pine? Or had the silt and gilt timber barons already tumbled it all down to the water’s murk-washed edge?

清 明: we burn you papers, incense, oranges in a pile. Flowers and flowers mounded upon each grave.

The ghosts of those who died in these mountains are doomed forever.

The One-eyed Wanderer, exploded to just a hand. Old Threemoles, washed away in a dam burst.

Squeakylaugh impaled on a rail.

Longteeth. Shitforbrains. Short Chung and Fat Chung, both. No body means nobody to bury, no body

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to call home. No one to tell them hit the road, cross over, cross over— Would it be so bad if these mountains were your eternity? The thinner air of heaven.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

The blue like a lance to your heart.

Blue the basin the basket the berry the juice blue that counters the yellow of bleach bluing blue indigo blue dye #4 blue the bruise the bitter blue anything but an eye please blue the water the wash the vein in my body the vein in my earth our earth the sapphire blue the glittering dark sky at night sky at day sky at blue note sounding blue the print the plan the next step into blue the brazen the bold the navy the few the proud who wants that blues sing it again sister bluer than blue my blue blood true blood tv fantasy blue light blue screen blue movie blue balls blue butch blue black battered and beaten or blue like a piece of glass with the sun shining through it blue as a shard a shatter a splatter of water blue blur that won’t leave me don’t sparkle for just anything don’t break

My father loves to tell your departure: how you crashed from the open window into the garden to escape your brother’s swinging sword, how this was what drove you to ship, to sea, to foreign shore.

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How in your body’s absence, your brother blinded your baby for spite.

Your eyes toward the track’s next turn.

Heaven could be the smell of pines and snowmelt under your boots.

Heaven could be the color of this water at precisely twenty-two feet deep.

My father wrote his father’s story, how first your brother and later he, your eldest, departed to cover your foolish debts. Your rescue from debtor’s prison.

But there was, too, a before, though your son shared no stories from your hand, what it was when you were away yourself, making some kind of living in 金 山.

What I don’t know:

The blast of dynamite.

The whistle of engine.

Mar | 94

Dreams of railroad spikes falling from your son’s eyes.

Am I mistaken, calling this place beauty.

Nothing but leisure-seeking on the lake’s cool skin. Unperturbed, the water slips into my mouth whenever I swim.

who tutored your son to memorize the texts he must have later used to teach his students what was done to his mother in your absence if she was your only wife, her name, the names of your son’s wives who were not my greatgrandmother, the names of his non-surviving children who were my great aunts and uncles, whether he was gentle or harsh with them, the names of your non-surviving children, of any of the servants, who it was you loved, if anyone, if you wanted to kill your brother, too, and why you didn’t, what it was like when you returned

what happened to your brother when he returned, what happened to you in debtor’s prison, what was done

95 | Mar

to your wife in your absence, or the two before her, their names, the names of your non-surviving children 一 and 二, the names of her sisters, her mother, her friends, whether you were gentle or harsh, if it was you who taught my grandfather not to use his hands on children, who it was you loved, if anyone, if you wanted to stay or to leave, what it was like when you returned

I understand why you don’t answer.

I know the answers. I am the only possible outcome here.

Let’s not pretend you would have cared what happened to me except I am your dream of 金 山 made real—

My rings: of gold. My dress: of gold.

My eyes: of gold. My skin: of gold.

My mouth: my mouth: my mouth.

Mar | 96

Of late—no, since I was a child— I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the bachelor society.

What secrecy that invites: all those bodies, men and male, kept close in their togetherness.

I read only silence.

Did a 水 客 carry your letters for you?

I, too, would be a guest in your house, a guest made of water, a guest in every house on this land that shouldn’t belong to me.

Golden goddess of good luck, god of glory and gory success, shine of someone’s fortune, scent of dragon scale and slippery glinting teeth: you chase and chase it.

97 | Mar

What song survives the work you did, the stories you told your blind son waiting for your return your mute son waiting for your return your daughters lost to history like your letters

When you died did you hear music? Was it the clinking tone of iron into fresh-laid track?

I can make you whoever I need you to be, but I can’t stop asking you these questions.

Tell me, how did you die?

It was you who died in the street: your old head unbent and unbowed before a soldier’s rifle butt.

Mar | 98

What is your relationship to color? Does 藍 even begin to cover it? Is 金 a color?

I know no nuance in this un-simplified tongue.

水, 金: two words I still remember.

When I say 茶, your great- mocks my singing accent, lilt of my gold-laden tongue against your language’s watery shore.

granddaughter

Tiger balm smell of 媽 媽’s sore knees.

I imagine your knees after each day’s labor. Your shoulders’ ache. Each body’s work takes a different weight. Who was the one who rubbed the knots, who laid a sweet and gentle palm—though rough, like yours—against your tender hurts?

99 | Mar

Tell me about him, who loved you best. Who you hid, who hid you.

your lips

Was it

to your lips, your lips, pressed in those claustrophobic kindling rooms?

In Hong Kong, I was shy to speak to the other women. I have a girlfriend, too, finally, then laughter. A culture of women away from family and homeland, awash in women’s work and the ways it buckled them, but still: a kind of relief.

You’re teaching me the beauty of revisionist history. I make you lovers because, yes, it is in my power, because my ancestral altar needs a queerer root.

Because, too, I am afraid of the smokethick danger of you if you were not:

Mar | 100

girl children in locked cages— who could love a man like that?

How quick the language slips from our gold-plated tongues.

I have been keeping secrets from the woman I love.

Here’s what I remember: 我愛你。 紅。 海。 東南西北。

I remember my name, part of my father’s and his father’s.

I never knew yours.

yours.

I should have asked your granddaughter when I had the chance. I should

101 | Mar

I should have asked your son when I had the chance. I should

have known your name.

have known your name.

Tell me about your mistakes, what they cost you. Blood on your palm, or tears in your mouth.

So like sweat on the tongue.

I am sure this was not your dream.

I was not your dream.

The kindling rooms: every plank a match unstruck,a burn waiting to consume.

Every Chinatown burned down more than once. Picturing you driven out: a stick against your strong back, a frothing white

Mar | 102

face spitting rage race and fear. Or maybe you were one of those who went out, bought a rifle or two, armed in the way of your temporary homeland.

I’m not sure our hands aren’t bloody.

I am losing track of each detail I have forgotten, like the wood inlay chipping slowly out of my 箱.

Maybe it’s your blood I feel tingling when I turn my own gun in my palm.

We know what it is to defend ourselves.

I like the smell of my own skin after sun, and the smell of pine pitch, and pollen. Is this vanity?

This story may have gotten away from us.

Your life unravels off my unruly hand.

103 | Mar

I do not understand why you don’t answer.

I think I am telling the wrong story. I think I care more about your wife, your wives, your long-dead daughters.

When you raise a daughter, you are raising someone else’s slave.

Don’t they still belong to me?

I could decide to make you happy.

Gold is the eye the tongue the lion Gold the mountain the valley the river gold the nugget the ingot the flake the flume the fairy the dust the feather the fatherland Gold the sun and the sunlight the son You wanted sons and sons and sons Gold the daughter in spite of gold the bangles and bracelets and rings

Mar | 104

Gold the ornate and elaborate Hold me, here: this is my ordinary hand

Because only barbarians touch like that I am free to build you in my own image.

Your mouth on another man’s mouth unafraid or maybe afraid, quiet in a boardinghouse bed or a canvas tent the hurried rush of your bodies before shift change or exhaustion or the call to supper. The joy of it.

I’d rather not be gold-dusted, shimmer of bronzers and glimmering lotions, potions of nanoparticles that never break down and will float forever in this water, in the gut of a fish, in my blood. No.

I’d rather think about blue.

105 | Mar

The waves tick the clock of my patience.

Each pine a pictogram of response: here, a word on your gratitude; here, a word on your hunger.

I turn and turn the page but no more story comes. You were here, I think, perhaps stood where I stood.

You believed in shamans, oracles, fortune tellers, other small gods.

What they told you about this future: could you see me on this shore? A rock in my palm, the shape of an opened mouth.

You died You died seven thousand miles away.

The water is different water.

The trees are different trees.

Mar | 106

How long the journey. How long your death-blunted life. How long until I knew even enough of our story to know it wasn’t enough.

I’m waiting for your echo to call back across the smallest waves.

Swim, swim for the caves with me, let’s find the rock where our voices come singing.

Tell me how you survived winter.

Tell me about blue, about how you shouted and shuddered when your feet touched the water each time you bathed in the cold spring air.

107 | Mar

listen Petra Salazar you couldn’t wear the mad dogs with one hundred percent chicana written in old english across the arm because your dad was german and yet you still somehow represent la cultura indígena en méxico with your hair braided into a crown with bougainvillea and ribbon you loved your mother the way i loved my father his round face the beautiful shape of ancestors’ with claim to this hallowed place cedar and campho-phenique spaniards lost in the sangre de cristos los apache pueblo and navajo taught us what we needed to know we forgot how to worship the new gods keep sagebrush in a drawer next to la pistola for visits from por medio de va a cuatro patas blue corn atole simmering on my stove champurrado on yours i followed you like la llorona chasing pureza along the river of course i stumbled on piedras lloré y lloré por mi idioma tal vez la sepas like you knew just how to paint our lady of sorrows pero en la frontera no language is truly our own so all we can do is listen to the desert wind i cut off my hair the way you did in the self-portrait of you wearing that pig diego’s clothes scattered ashes the remains of your crown resting in peace at your feet

Salazar | 108

i wonder if your father rolled in his grave like mine i wonder if o’keeffe was a thief who stole the landscape trapped the moonflower under the white gaze maybe you and i are thieves too with nothing left unconquered but this dry caliche and water waiting for us in the barrel cactus azteca conquistador mexicano americano el oro el oro el oro disinterred and stolen with the water and all those sacred bones descansos carefully laid in hopes of being remembered forgotten i died of mal ojo as a child but was brought back to life now i see shadows dancing on walls and in eyes i don’t need them to understand but i do need you la patrona de los coyotes sin lengua to listen to the blood running down the cut veins of the rio grande turning the clay red as it flows nineteen hundred miles to the gulf of méxico sangre con sal

109 | Salazar

CONTRIBUTORS George Abraham Abraham is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Allison Albino Albino is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Elliot Alpern Alpern is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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Natanya Biskar Biskar is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Taryn Bowe Bowe is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed Ximus apici remperum, ommodit remporis endicta temoluptia eos aut dolupta vitem fuga. Ita solupta dolore

Joshua Burton Burton is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Celeste Chen Chen is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Susanna Childress Childress is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Jason B. Crawford Crawford is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

M.K. Foster Foster is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Desmond Everest Fuller Fuller is an MFA candidate in fiction at Boise State University where he serves on the editorial staff of The Idaho Review. His short stories have appeared in West Trade Review, The Timberline Review, The Gravity Of The Thing, and elsewhere. He has recorded two albums as a singer and guitarist in the band, Naked Luck.

111 | Contributors

Grace Gilbert Fuller is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Therese Gleason Fuller is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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Sadia Hasson Fuller is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Kira K. Homsher Fuller is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Indiana Review | 112

Ruth Ellen Kocher Kocher is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Ra’Niqua Lee Lee is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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Caroline M. Mar Mar is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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113 | Contributors

Lucy McBee McBee is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Rose Nguyĕn Nguyĕn is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Sihle Ntuli Ntuli is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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Indiana Review | 114

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes Rhodes is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

Petra Salazar Salazar is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

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Sandra M. Yee Yee is molor siti ut untem. Itat quasped es as nimagni dolendem nus. Taquam que conse nobitius dtumquamus inis minimus cimust, ea am hil et veni debis que occum cum sed

George Abraham Allison Albino Elliot Alpern Ariana Benson Natanya Biskar Taryn Bowe Joshua Burton Celeste Chen Susanna Childress Jason B. Crawford M.K. Foster Desmond Everest Fuller Grace Gilbert Therese Gleason Devon Halliday Sharon Hashimoto Sadia Hasson Kira K. Homsher

Ruth Ellen Kocher Ra’Niqua Lee Kayla Light Caroline M. Mar Chantel Massey Evan J. Massey Lucy McBee Rose Nguyĕn Sihle Ntuli Patricia Patterson Karisma Price Joy Priest Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes Petra Salazar Sanam Sheriff Dāshaun Washington Danielle P. Williams Sandra M. Yee

Cover Artist: Bhasha Chakrabarti, “I’m Just a Poor Fool That’s Bluer Than Blue Can Be”