April / May 2018

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The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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VOLUME: 3 - ISSUE: 1 - April/May - 2018

Columns:

Sotto Voce -Indira Parthasarathy

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Letter from London: John Looker

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The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck

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P&P - Yonason Goldson 14

Book excerpt Syllables of Rain by D.S. Lliteras

SOTTO VOCE

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Poetry:

Anjana Basu 20

Sanjeev Sethi 26 Aditya Shankar 28 Adam Levon Brown 57 Tom Pescatore 61 Fiction: Matt Ingoldby 33 Matt Nagin 41

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Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

INDIRA PARTHASARATHY Salman Rushdie made a startling statement a few years ago, when he sweepingly declared ‘Indo-Anglian literature represents the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books… the prose writing produced by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the sixteen official languages of India, the so-called vernacular languages’...

Or, in other words, Rushdie means that that the Indians should thank the visionary Lord Macaulay but for whom The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

4 the Indo-Anglian writing would never have come into being and, as such, poor India would never have been in the literary map of the world. In 1835 perhaps, according to Rushdie, Macaulay said, ‘let there be English’ and a century and forty-six years later, in 1981 there was this post structuralist postcolonial masterpiece ‘Midnight Children’.

In Mahabharata, a king is advised by his guru, ‘Be a garland-maker, O king!, not a charcoal burner’. What does this mean?

One can make a beautiful garland by tying together different kinds of beautiful flowers, and he can burn several types of wood to make charcoal. In a garland, all the flowers, without losing their distinctive identity stay together to present a beautiful picture of the whole. But in charcoal, all the woods are reduced to ashes without any distinctive identity of any of them. So the king is advised to respect the linguistic, religious and cultural diversity of the citizens of his country and not to impose on them a unitary form of Government.

Indian literature is such a garland decorated by the literary works obtained in the various idioms of India, which are disparagingly dismissed by Rushdie as ‘vernacular languages’. The localized and aggressively regionalised fiction in the Indian languages may be incapable of projecting the ‘ mobile, migratory, diasporic and cosmopolitan characters’, as the Indo-Anglian stories do, but by characteristic touches of culture-centric linguistic nuances, they capture the soul of India, whose relevance exists only in its multiple diversities.

Indira Parthasarathy is the pen name of

R.Parthasarathy, a noted Tamil writer and playwright.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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Letter from London - 17 from John Looker

I wonder how much you feel your life has been touched by modern buildings. I have just visited an exhibition which held some peculiarly personal references for me.

After the War, the south bank of the River Thames was scarred by the devastation of bombing. The Festival of Britain was organised, filling a riverside site with unconventional new structures, mostly temporary although the Royal Festival Hall has lasted. There was the Skylon which appeared to float in the sky and the tent-like Dome of Discovery. Architects had to design buildings that could be assembled quickly, often with structural engineers in a key role. I was taken as a six-year old and the whole site was unlike any street or neighbourhood I had ever seen.

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6 Today there is an exhibition dedicated to this type of building at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts in Norwich. Models, drawings and, above all, architectural models are displayed. Not everyone likes the style of construction – all that metal and glass. If it has a fault, the exhibition does not acknowledge how much controversy modernist architecture has caused. But there are plenty of excitements.

As you approach the Sainsbury Centre there is an extraordinary tower outside, a leaning latticework of bright red steel. This turns out to be a recent reconstruction of a sculptural design from 1919: Valadimir Tatlin’s renowned Monument to the Third International. Quite a sight. But on reflection probably less revolutionary than the earlier Eiffel Tower, which is not mentioned in the exhibition.

There are however drawings and paintings of the Crystal Palace, from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, itself built in revolutionary materials and techniques. Such a loss that this building was destroyed by fire! Its name lives on in London’s Premier League football team whose ground was close to my school.

The Sainsbury Centre is itself a modernist construction of steel and glass. It was designed by Norman Foster in kit form for easy assembly on site, and in a manner that gave maximum flexibility of use inside. It houses a permanent exhibition of sculpture and artefacts from cultures around the world. With its clean lines and natural light, I find it most appealing.

Other exhibits included Richard Roger’s competition-winning design for a new wing to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

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7 It was never built. Prince Charles excoriated it as ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved friend’. Instead, a tame but rather pleasing post-modern extension was built in the classical style much preferred by the Prince of Wales.

However, some of the design elements found their way into a subsequent building by Richard Rogers: his new HQ for Lloyds of London – the famous steel and glass tower with the lift capsules on the outside and a soaring internal atrium criss-crossed by elevators. While I was in the exhibition, an architect was explaining to an overseas visitor how the design team had felt the need to reassure the traditionalists at Lloyds by recreating the old board room from their former building.

Other major buildings illustrated include the international railway terminal at Waterloo from which I used to catch the train to Brussels and Paris; London’s Stanstead airport which has provided the model for airports elesewhere; and an exhibition hall in Leipzig, Germany, which I once visited.

And a small display of objects tells of the inspiration architects drew from the manufacture of automobiles and aircraft.

Most of the buildings celebrated are large structures. Almost more revolutionary I felt were designs for housing to be built in kit form: houses to be made with window units from trains and buses.

They were to be inexpensive, ecological and colourful, flexible in use and easy to extend. But rarely built – when it comes to homes, it seems we like our traditions.

My childhood memories however also include large numbers of ‘prefabs’ built across London to house the many thousands who needed new homes after the War. In their way they were a successful The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

8 answer to a pressing need, but few now remain.

Indeed modernist architecture has never gained much popularity. Too technological for most people’s taste perhaps? But some highly successful and conspicuous examples can be found in every modern city. In London we have a few much loved examples. Their official names are largely ignored.

They are know as the gherkin, the cheese grater and so on.

The one exception to this renaming is The Shard: Britain’s tallest building. But then, the developers had the good sense to give it a congenial and memorable name.

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The Wanderer

Andrew Fleck

Trees and Gallows John Looker lives with his wife in Surrey, south-east England. His first collection of poetry, The Human Hive, was published in 2015

by Bennison Books and was selected by the Poetry Library for the UK’s national collection. His poems have appeared in print and in online journals, on local radio and in two anthologies: When Time and Space Conspire, an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Austin International Poetry Festival, and Indra’s Net, an international collection published by Bennison Books in aid of the Book Bus charity. His blog, Poetry from John Looker, is at https:// johnstevensjs.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

O the highways of the Middle Ages, Lined with gallows and chapels!

The nineteenth century French poet Paul Verlaine probably had the fifteenthcentury poet François Villon in mind as he wrote those lines. Villon had no doubt seen his fair share of chapels, and probably a few more sets of gallows than he would have liked to. A religious scholar (all scholars in his era were religious, of course) at Paris and later –though not much later, a robber and vagabond.

His crimes included the killing of a friend in a brawl, the robbery of a chapel, and, possibly, the leadership of a gang of thieves. At The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

10 one point he was condemned to death, although the punishment was not carried out. He wrote some long, disarmingly direct autobiographical poems, humorous, bawdy and touching, full of stand-alone epitaphs like this one...

The name’s Frank, and so’s my curse Born in Paris, near Pontoise And this here rope, a canny length, Will teach my neck the weight of my arse (Je suis François, dont il me poise Né de Paris, emprès Pontoise, Et de la corde d’une toise Saura mon col que mon cul poise) Villon, we may imagine, was rather a humorous fellow in the first place – but it was perhaps the thought of his impending (and ignominious death) that brought out the funniest in him. I suppose the essence of gallows humour is the desire to make light of the very darkest moment – one is disgraced, and about to die, painfully, but one can still at least elicit a laugh from the crowd with a pithy joke or, as here, a skilful rhyme.

In the north west of Europe, the medieval era ended definitively with the Protestant Reformation that quite abruptly ended the business of shrines, pilgrimages and many of the roadside chapels of which Verlaine spoke.In England, as elsewhere, the Catholics did not let their ancient traditions go without a fight: there was a ready supply of young men ready to die – or to kill – for the old faith. One such was ChidiockTichborne, who was involved in the so-called BabingThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

11 ton Plot to kill the Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, and replace her with the imprisoned Catholic queen, Mary Queen of Scots. The plot was, in fact, a set up from the start, and when it unravelled the young gentleman was taken to the Tower of London with his co-conspirators, and condemned to death. While awaiting his execution, he wrote one of the most famous and most touching elegies in the English language. The middle stanza is perhaps the darkest: My tale was heard and yet it was not told, My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green, My youth is spent and yet I am not old, I saw the world and yet I was not seen; My thread is cut and yet it is not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

In this sad poem, regretting a life to be cut down in its prime, indeed, a life hardly yet lived, there are foreshadows of the terrible execution to come. The metaphorical connection between gallows and trees was frequently employed in the 16th century (as in later centuries too), most famously in the nickname that Londoners gave to their public gallows – the Tyburn Tree. And while the cut thread refers to the thread spun by the classicalFates and cut at the end of your life, it also portends the rope that Tichborne would hang from, that would be cut after he was hanged, but not yet dead. It could even remind us of the intestines that would be pulled out of the still breathing young man’s body and would be wound around a wooden spindle – for that, too was part of the punishment for those deemed traitors. Darkly ironic puns seem to find their way into even the saddest poems about the gallows.

Tichborne’s elegy conferred on him a kind of immortality, but The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

12 most of the men and women who met their end on the gallows were not talented poets, defenders of the faith like Tichborne, nor eloquent ne’er-do-wells like Villon, but members of the voiceless masses. The 16th and 17th century

Spanish poet, Luis de Góngora mentions them in his lament against the vicissitudes of fortune in Da Bienes Fortuna (What Fortuna Grants): Down in the village The poorest of fellows Just for stealing an egg Is slung from the gallows While another walks free Of a hundred thousand crimes.

Hoping for reasons, You’re lumbered with rhymes.

The injustice for Góngora’s peasant is great – he is killed for a trivial crime, while another fellow – perhaps not quite as poor, we may surmise, gets away with his. Even if noblemen were condemned to death, they could unless, like Tichborne, they were condemned as The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

13 traitors, choose a more dignified, and quicker matter of passing – in England, for example, the sword and chopping block were favoured by the upper-classes.

But the gallows, though no longer public, lingered on into the twentiethcentury. In the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde, in Reading Gaol witnessed the hanging of a fellow prisoner, of that dire event made a long,quite beautiful narrative poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Like Tichborne, he plays, bitterly, on the similarity between the gallows and the tree: For oak and elm have pleasant leaves That in the spring-time shoot: But grim to see is the gallows-tree, With its adder-bitten root.

And, green or dry, a man must die Before it bears its fruit!

Similar imagery appears in Abel Meeropol’s1930s song Strange Fruit, sung, famously, by Billie Holiday, and later by Nina Simone: Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcCm_ySBslk )

Meeropol’s lyrics referred to the lynching and hanging of the American South of his era. The poetry is bitterer, even than Wilde’s, which similarly mingles the pastoral and murderous. For though The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

14 Wilde disagreed with, indeed abhorred, the execution he witnessed, he was at least witnessing the execution of a murderer, who had been tried and sentenced by a court. The victims Meeropol sings of were victims of injustice, black men beaten and killed by mobs on the basis of rumour, hearsay or mere lies.The imagery is brutal and tragic, recalling the grim illustration of Jacques Callot’s, La Pendaison , while the anger is remarkably controlled, both in the lyrics themselves, and in Billie Holiday’s delivery. And even here, as with the above poems, there is humour – in the incongruity between the pastoral idyll of the South and the gruesome results of the work of the mob, a satirical stab most definitely aimed at the murderers.

Credits The Verlaine line is taken from Leon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute, Transl. John Coleman and Harry LorinBinsse, Cluny Media, 2017 Tichborne’sElegy and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are in the public domain.

The translations of Villon and Góngoraare my own, and fairly loose. The last couplet in the Gongora poem, translates a Spanish phrase ‘Cuandopitosflautas,cuandoflautaspitos’. ‘When [you’re expecting] whistles [you get] flutes, when [you’re expecting] flutes [you get] whistles.

Strange Fruitlyrics as reprinted in Tom Glazer (ed.), Songs of Peace, Freedom & Protest, Greenwich, CT, 1970, pp. 294-296© 1940, E. B. Marks Music Corp.

Andrew Fleck, who has been a secondary school teacher, proof reader and EFL teacher, among other things, writes on poetry and history at sweettenorbull.com.

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PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

You know who they are. You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere. On the roads. In the malls. In office buildings and grocery stores and parking lots.

There’s no way to avoid them. And there are more of them every day.

You know who I mean: the drifters.

They’re the ones driving just under the speed limit – 28 MPH in a 30 zone, not quite slow enough to pass and maddeningly unaware. They’re the ones walking through the aisles, down the halls, up the stairs, and across the floor, like Energizer Bunnies with batteries that have finally run down, refusing to stop but plodding along, sporadic, lethargic.

And it’s not just their lack of speed, not merely their dawdling.

That we could live with, anticipate, and circumvent. It’s something The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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much more than that – or much less.

They drift.

NOWHERE TO GO, NO PLACE TO BE On the roads, they drift back and forth between – and often across – the lines, incapable of keeping to one place inside their lanes or keeping one lane to be their place. They don’t understand the concept of turn lanes at all, creeping into them by inches as they reduce speed…slowly… slowly… until, at last, they come to rest half in and half out, blocking traffic in four directions as they wait for the moment of optimum safety, when not a single car remains visible on any horizon.

For that matter, the way they turn can’t really be called a turn; rather, they describe long, sweeping arcs, beginning half a block before the intersection (which had been entirely empty of cars at the moment of their decision) and rolling so ponderously that oncoming traffic has to slow and stop and wait, creating backups halfway to the state line.

As pedestrians, they are no different. They meander down the sidewalks, looking irresolutely for some hint of destination, knowing through some sixth sense whether you are trying to pass them on the right or the left and instantly changing tack – the only movement they are able perform with alacrity. They are particularly fond of doorways and stairwells, where they instinctively come to a stop, thereby causing the greatest possible congestion.

They seem to be everywhere. But it wasn’t always like this – was it? There weren’t always so many of them – were there?

Perhaps the exponential propagation of drifters explains the currentpopularity of zombie movies. The living dead – unseeing, unthinking, lumbering slowly but inexorably toward nothing in particular – are truly among us.

Where have they come from? And are we in danger of becoming like them?

IT’S ALL ABOUT ME In his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway popularized the term “lost generation,” referring to the men in their The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

17 twenties who returned from World War I traumatized by the horrors of a war that stole the innocence of their youth, men unable to find their place in a world that wanted nothing but to forget the past.

Confused and without direction, they struggled to make sense of the senselessness of their experiences.

Post-WWII was a different story. This was a war we could understand, against an enemy of incontrovertible evil. And those who fought in it were spared the indignities visited upon their fathers.

This was the greatest generation, who returned home to a country that recognized their self-sacrifice and celebrated their victory. They picked up their lives as members of a grateful nation that allowed them to buildfutures of vision and purpose and stability.

But the aftermathwas more insidious. Although the bloodshed in Europe ended in 1945, the threat of nuclear annihilation during theCold War years haunted the children of the sixties. Their discontent led to the hippie revolution, which metastasized into the Me Generation of the seventies, which spawned the culture of entitlement and self-absorption so pervasive throughout the Western world of today.

We want to feel good. We want to enjoy ourselves. In short, we want what we want. And that’s what we think it means to be happy.

We’ve become a society of wanderers, a truly lost generation.

We race through our daily routines as we drift through lifein search of we-don’t-know-what. We seek relationships without commitment, connecting through vapid messages with invisible, online friends while ignoring real, flesh-and-blood companions close at hand.

We look for salvation in devices that lead us, like Alice, down the rabbit hole of peculiar and capriciousillusion.

Of course, previThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

18 ous generations indulged their own delusions as well.Who’s to say whose fantasies are more or less benign?

THIER WORLD, AND WELCOME TO IT In 1934, Robert Kenneth Wilson of Scotland produced the so-called “Surgeon’s Photograph,” claiming only that he had caught “something in the water” on film.

Widely hailed as the most convincing proof of the Loch Ness Monster, it was revealed by Wilson 60 years later that he had attached a modeled serpent neck to a toy submarine.

In 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright of Cottingley, England, shot a photo of her 9-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, surrounded by dancing pixies. The pictures captured public imagination and spurred passionate debate until, 64 years later, the two admitted to fashioning the “fairies” out of magazine pictures and cardboard.

In 1890, anti-Semites in the Czarist government presented as evidence of Jewish conspiracies a booklet outlining the plan of rabbinic leaders to topple world governments and thereby achieve world domination. Ultimately proved a forgery, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion drew heavily from an 1864 pamphlet, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by the French satirist The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

19 Maurice Joly as an attack against the political aspirations of Napoleon III. Largely influential in developing the world view of Adolph Hitler, there are still those today who cite the Protocols as authentic.

Even the most unlikely conspiracy theories find traction,for people will believe in anything before they believe in nothing.

Whether its government cover-ups, neoconservative cabals, alien abduction, or the ghost of Elvis, we’ll believe in whatever assures us that some guiding force is driving the course of our own existence.

And perhaps that is the silver lining. As aimless as our drifting may appear, we do seem conscious that something is missing from our lives. Caught in the paradox between blind faith in the miracles of technology and the persistent yearning of our souls for higher purpose, we look here, look there, look everywhere for something to fill the hollow space inside us.

BEHIND DOOR NUMBER 1 Ultimately, the answer may reside not so much where we look but how we look. This was the message of the great talmudic sage Rabbi Meir when he said: Do not look at the container but what is in it; for you may find a new vessel filled with old wine, and you may find an old vessel that contains no wine at all.

In modern parlance, we’ve learned it this way: don’t judge a book by its cover. The problem is that we do just that.

Swept up by glitter and glamour, we spend much more time fixated on outer trappings than inner substance. If we would simply turn the cover or look inside the bottle, a whole new world of understanding would open upbefore our eyes.

But we don’t want to make the effort. Instead, we shift our attention from one shiny new object to the next. Unfocussed, undirected, unsure where we should turn next – we drift.Undisciplined, we find that authentic wisdom persistently eludes us.

But wisdom is not merely acquiredthrough diligence and discipline; wisdom is the source of diligence and discipline. A fool is neither a dolt nor an ignoramus; he is one who does not wish to become wise. And in a society that increasingly worships vicarious pleasures The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

20 and superficial achievement, the motivation to acquire wisdom has grown as rare as the discipline necessary for its acquisition.

THEY HAVE EYES BUT CANNOT SEE There is no cure for intentional blindness. Neither optometrist nor corrective lenses can repair willful myopia. Only by heeding the inner voice pleading for us to pierce the shroud of intellectual darkness can we kindle the light of wisdom. This is the voice that urges us to reject the blandishments of pixilated culture in favor of pursuing genuine purpose.

Elsewhere in the Talmud, Rabbi Dosa son of Harkinas teaches that, Late morning sleep, mid-afternoon wine, children’s chatter, and participating in assemblies of the ignorant remove a man from his world.

There will always be those who embrace superficiality, terrified of the consequences of commitment and the responsibilities of discovering true meaning. Don’t join in the company of those who drift through the days and years of their lives, indifferent to the timeless wisdom that could save them from themselves.

Instead, seize the day and look toward the mountain tops; or, better yet, to the stars. Seek out the truly wise and sit at their feet to drink from their wisdom. Don’t be afraid of what you might discover, and don’t be dissuaded by the scorn of fools.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson, keynote speaker with 3,000 years’ experience, lives with his wife in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, newspaper columnist, and high school teacher.

His latest book, ‘Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages’, is available on Amazon. Visit him at yonasongoldson.com The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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POETRY

Anjana Basu

THE THUNDER HAS A RIVAL the thunder growls above the scarlet flowers and walls the leaves glisten poison green the trees in their splendour preen and droplets roll in graffiti scrawl the green of a snake’s scales your phosphorous glitters burns the air like green ice thrown here and there a dance to the siren’s banshee wail green hardened to emerald burns the traffic lights catch the fever and throw wide their arms green green and green forever At dusk the bike stream’s commotion sets up an endless new vibration The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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SONNET

The look on those faces of those men in white Who have gazed too hard within the maelstrom And had it gaze back in a withering blight Fisted hard behind the ominous thunderstorm Above their heads the silk cotton tree Weeps its scarlet tears slow shed In a green landscape that flames with ferocity A burning that signals forever the death of red This is no country for starched white men, a created waste Of promises broken and lives ruined in haste For them remains only the recriminations Of defeat and time met with resignation

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HIERARCHY OF RED Nothing beats the flare of red It draws everything into it The moving masses Flags fluttering It has the hierarchy of horses about it Something stately almost monumental Red men dead men Or otherwise in motion Red coats or waves of the red flag Power of the same sort One gone to earth, the other vanquished Power mud blood Shed in the dust Where no grass grows

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MARIGOLDS MOONING Sitting in the corner of my room on a full moon night and finding no ink in my pen I dipped it in the spill of silver all night my my pen raced over the paper in streaks of white fire the heat of lost love my mind’s turning and churning in agony traced and retraced day rise came without warning its gold burnt the page

the bracelet you forgot you gave me has grown claws under the smooth patterns of silver

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1 the coals of summer burning embers that glow only in the light of day not lighting the darkness with their warmth or your heart that needs coals to stir it into some affection these coals garland many on their journeys through or round the fire commonest of all gold, all ruffle petalled flowers the marigold burns in the heat of summer but are winter’s small balls of sunshine a distant promise whispered of a warmth that never glows 2 a halo of ash underneath the embers smoulder and catch the morning sun yellower than the beams more like marigolds than the ends of coal a memory of garlands strung from the ashes of the fire the pyre of love life’s cigarette has been smoked out the ashes remain of a loop of marigolds around a careless neck and the heart’s embers burning till the end 3 a cool wind blows over the marigold saris and stiff folds of fabric, the small petalled sunlight distilled in garlands a day for love strung on the seven strings of wisdom that no one wants to play instead the yellows stalk and circle in a parade heat rising though the wind blows soft and cool

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POETRY

Sanjeev Sethi SEASON OF CHANGE the weather calls to me it tells me stories of hills folded sheets of sunlight points of the young moon at the back of the south wind tears lie in wait when the evening smoke hangs lower than the clouds this is the season of change a yearning time when the children are shoulder high and the man has danced away the long ago the once upon a time forgotten but the stories still blow in shafts of light october’s yellow leaf swirl the last sulky rains of the monsoon before skyfall

Born in Allahabad, schooled for a time in the UK, Anjana Basu has to date published 7 novels and 2 books of poetry. She has appeared in The Antigonish Review. The Edinburgh Review and The Salzburg Review have also featured her work. Her by-line has appeared in Outlook, Vogue India and Conde Nast Traveller.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

Springlock Scissors of solitude nip at my inwardness.

There is no cruor, expressions of anxiety burst in workmanship of others bents and beauties. Grains on banisters of time are evocative of spent winters, woozy summers.

Xanadu of letters never abandon my xyst.

Changeover The chiffonier stacked no cookie jar.

I had to gun for confitures in every nook and cranny of my unreality. The thoroughfare was fraught with queries of the unkind sort. There was safety in shunpikes or with oneself.

Heartless acts are commissioned by soft hearts. Or those who visualize themselves in such a cut. This is the condition of the human construct.

Rapscallions identify with right-minded qualities. Error is in the frame of reference.

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Amelioration As I age I notice new lovers splash their scars chop-chop, faster than we used to when young? Does age rescue from high-handedness of oners. Love is not for leptodermous: onerosity of lovers braces me to believe, heart has no paraph. This love must end. I am on the lookout for spagyric rays to cover me.

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POETRY

Aditya Shankar

Emptiness Loneliness doesn’t believe in stealth.

In spite of our itch to eclipse its insignia, its ornate patterns assert their existence. The inattentive reader thumbs a tome to declare the intent, shadow of seclusion chaperons the lip and ledge of the isolated.

The Butterfly When a butterfly perches on your urban hand, do remember it outlived

Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry. His most recent collection is This Summer and That Summer (Bloomsbury, 2015). His poems are in venues around the world: London Grip, Morphrog 16, Ink Sweat & Tears, M58, 3:AM Magazine, After the Pause, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Broadkill Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Otoliths, Communion Arts Journal, Postcolonial Text, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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the loud call of flowers, the lure of honey within, the pride of belonging in the garden where it is imagined.

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Love in the Time of Dominion

its wings aren’t restricted to traversing only the distance between two blooms its antennas, only to indulge in food gathering or its body, meant to rub only against the cold stem.

Do not assume it doesn’t mourn the loss of a mate, because its voice is feebler than a bird or that it doesn’t tire, seeking the unattainable.

A lonely butterfly reminds a defeated human.

When it perches on you, two frail souls lean against each other.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

In the Year XX* when the state is more powerful and rich, lovers will be labeled anti-state and dangerous. As a new addition to the list of discouraged indulgences, love scenes would carry statutory warnings. Beware of what you do on the streets. The fine for kissing, hugging, and winking is in the works. Planning to cuddle in a dark park?

Think again. All set to replicate their success in nailing the savage drunkards with breathalyzers, the police is currently being trained on love detection equipment: Kissalyzers, Lickalayzers, Fuckalayzers.

Forget what we discussed about making out in a parked car. Eloping lovers caught from secret tunnels in a desert or from bubbling tips of papaya stems in rivers would be booked and tried under the provisions of POLA* (Prevention of Love Act). The heart emoticon would vanish from the screens. Banned, it will become the flag of underground activist groups. The equivalent of defense budget will be earmarked for funding research to diagnose citizens with hidden love.

How the state wishes for the invention of a smart device that reads love like an inflammation between flesh and bone. An apparatus with a back button that lets you roll a person back to a loveless state. Those suspected to be infected with love will be looked upon as rocks with concealed water. Mass surveillance would invest as much personnel for monitoring private life of citizens, which by the updated definition, would mean the freedom to eat and drink one time a day, to enjoy any state censored content (book/movie/hybrid), and so on.

Note: * - The Year XX varies depends on where you are. Read the text in past, present or future Tense as necessary. ** - An act modeled around POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), but much more gruesome.

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The Food Chain The office cafeteria speaks in the foreign language of calories.

All food distanced from their origins, equated to a scale of measure, the same meter of bagatelle, like army recruits in a parade or child laborers in a mine – stone faced in their pain.

A burger and biryani, equal moons at the storefront display, at 360 calories apiece.

For the downcast eyes, they are wild mushroom caps that conceal the moans of chicken locked away in cages without wing space,

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As if one hunger is equivalent to another, as if the food chain is all about equal mouths and equal feeds, as if a man’s venom is the same as a snake’s, the brown hand that reared the white meat and white bread and the white hand that sold the brown burger, the hand raised to protest starvation, and the hand hidden after crushing the protest – all diluted to the sameness of numbers at the dining table height.

the tears of cow in livestock trucks without light tunnels, the rear leg wounds of pigs leaping over barbed fences, the shiver of cabbages in freezers, not in farm dew.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

Aditya Shankar is an Indian poet, flash fiction author, and translator. His poems, fiction, and translations have appeared or is forthcoming in the Unbroken Journal, Modern Literature, The Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Ghost Parachute, Canada Quarterly, Indian Literature, MoonPark Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Books: After Seeing (2006), Party Poopers (2014). His anthology of poems, XXL is forthcoming (Dhauli Books, 2018). He lives in Bangalore, India.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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FICTION

After a notoriously bloody and hard-won campaign lasting almost thirty years, and recorded with necessary rigour in Jungman’s Crossing the Rejd: An Early History (1886) and less so in Mugwell’s Battles of the Plain (1908), the victorious armies of AlKubai regrouped at a small oasis somewhere north of the Rejd plains. Survivors limped from the horizon every hour, whittled down to scarecrows by starvation and the heat of the sun, and when at last no more returned the men numbered only fifty; though two thousand rode out of the Kingdom of Olan.

The mood that night was relaxed and those who could share stories of loved ones greatly missed, and bawdy songs to mourn the dead. Of the high command there remained only King Al-Kubai himself, Defender of the Final Faith; two of his harem; and the Vizier Mureen - a careful and ambitious mage to whose cunning, some say, the ultimate success of the war was owed.

At dawn before the men were to begin their homeward march, the Vizier Mureen broke into the King’s tent with a wail of dismay.

“King of the Desert, Moon-Chosen and Defender of the Final Faith, a vision was revealed to me this night. By a black sun I saw ranks of fallen infidels rise up and meet in secret with the Bedouin, with whom they conspire to ambush your grace along our journey home.”

“Impossible.” the King swore. “No Bedouin would dare attack us now.”

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

35 “Nonetheless, my king; we are too few to defend you.

“Let them try!” Al-Kubai declared with customary boldness.

“See what has become of their brothers.”

But the Vizier soothed, “Let me travel on ahead, dressed in royal garments and riding the King’s steed. The Bedouin may ambush me, and by my failure to return you will know my fate, and wisely take the longer route around the desert.”

The King was perturbed, but saw the wisdom in the Vizier’s scheme, whose insights he’d come to rely on. And so it was the Vizier Mureen set out at noon from the oasis, his horse liveried with the King’s sigils and the royal cloak rippling behind him. To cinch his disguise, Mureen pierced an empty sack twice and wore it over his head.

He rode west, chasing the sun as it merged with the skyline and smiling as he slept; for there was no Bedouin plot, and the King’s army had cleared the plains of bandits and desert tribes. Thirty years supporting Al-Kubai, whose bravery exceeded any gift for strategy, had convinced Mureen that the mantle of King should be worn by the Kingdom’s wisest, not those ordained by birth, and the deep blaze of desert nights only stoked his resolve.

After eight months the King’s horse reached the city gates of Balagh, stronghold of the Olan kingdom, and as word spread through the city-state a great crowd assembled to welcome the returning King.

He rode in; and seeing the King so disguised, and so alone, the erupting cheers were tempered with confusion. Mureen halted at the palace plaza to climb the stem of the Holy Fountain, which, by magical means, did not flow in the King’s absence.

“Your King is returned!” he announced, “victorious against the scourges of the Rejd!”

Cheers shook the gridlocked streets and marketplaces; godwits burst from trees. A troop of palace guards who had fought their way closer now beckoned him to be led to the palace, to share his tale and reunite with Shina Al-Badr, who was not yet aware of his return.

The current court had never known Al-Kubai, but received The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

36 him with unfaked adulation and respect, ushering the masked king down an aisle of low bows and kissed earth to the dais where the throne stood, filmed with sand. Seated, the king addressed the court on what concerned them most, he knew: the matter of the mask.

“Friends, it is not through cowardice I hide my face, nor disrespect for you or this high chamber. The truth is I was cursed, in the last year of our campaign, by a black-hearted mage who sought to steal my likeness. The Vizier Mureen (a brave fighter and loyal friend), threw off the curse at the cost of his own life, the thwarted mage having stolen only my face; but in its place remains a ghastly blight so displeasing the sanity of no man could withstand it. But I bear the wound proudly, since the safety of Olan was guaranteed by it.”

Then the Vizier recounted, more or less truthfully, the arc of the campaign, the brave stands and pivotal defeats he had witnessed firsthand. So extraordinary were these accounts that any doubt about the mask would need either to extend to the whole canon, or be ignored completely. The joy of the occasion made the choice simple. The only pocket of doubt hid in Shina Al-Badr, the High Consort, waiting in the shadow by the throne. She listened for a cadence to recall her husband to her - but though the voice was familiar, she could not place it.

Court dispersed, the High Consort came forward. Her silent stately gaze was known throughout the palace, and despite the precarity of her position with the King abroad, she passed unnoticed where she pleased, from the pump rooms to the turrets. Now she feared the stasis of her life was in danger.

The Vizier smiled through his mask and told her sweetly, “There is no need for shyness, Lady Al-Badr. Almost thirty years have passed. You have a son with Duban the palace gardener, and you fear my jealousy. But you have my blessing.”

Shina bowed uneasily, remembering the proud and possessive youth who took her as his bride three decades ago. War changes men, she knew; rarely does it soften them. She thanked the King with careful formality, and left.

Duban the palace gardener lived in a world of clipped borders The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

37 and careful grass work and had missed the bombast of the King’s return, until Al-Badr came out into the grounds to inform him. Her suspicions spurred the gardener to action.

Despite his distance from courtly affairs, Duban was as proud of the Kingdom as he was of the gardens he tended, and the notion of deceit appalled him. Ignoring Al-Badr’s misgivings, he at once outlined a scheme.

The following evening, Duban placed his tallest trellis beneath the window of the royal bedroom. It only remained for Shina to leave the King’s window open that night before excusing herself from his quarters, which she did with pounding heart but without detection.

As midnight swung over the sky, Duban scaled the trellis and levered the window open. He padded quietly to the sleeping King, preparing to whip off the mask with a quick hand. But in his desperation to be careful, Duban tripped, and his flailing arm caught the frame of the tapestry that hung over the bed. The gold fixture dropped from the wall and its finial struck the King’s head with a hollow knell. A scream roused the guards outside, who bursting in beheld Duban poised over the King’s bed, his hand on the gold tapestry-rail.

Death met Duban swiftly, the jealous purpose of his breakin easy to surmise, and Shina’s mourning, and that of their son Dunyazad, was necessarily subdued. But the blow’s effect was irreversible.

Doctors were sent for, and on waking the King was discovered to have no memory at all; not even his name had survived. When he attempted to remove the mask, he was restrained. “We dare not let you, King of the Desert.” And so Mureen was informed of his condition, and his status, and everything he had described the day before was told to him as truth.

Soon the doctors and advisors had secured the mask around the King’s neck with a bronze collar; but as for the address he was expected to give next day, more invention was required. A Keeper of the Final Faith named Yunan Rassi agreed, after some bashful restraint, to inhabit the black cloak and mask of the monarch. Once The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

38

dressed, he demanded a larger mirror for his chambers in which he basked for several hours. Pious and unpolitical, no one doubted his intentions, and a speech was put together at speed.

Meanwhile the Vizier (though physically able) was carried to a bedroom in the highest turret of the palace for which the sun reserved a particular hatred that made the interior swim. Meals were lifted and bedpans lowered by means of a pulley by the window; the only door was locked. Mureen - or King Al-Kubai, as he now knew himself - had enough wherewithals to resent his isolation. But doubting his independence he only slumped back in repose, bronze collar biting his neck, and the sounds of life below him cruelly distant.

Three months passed in this condition: the Vizier Mureen languished; the false King Rassi made pronouncements decided by a secret cabal of advisors, bringing an era of renewed prosperity to Olan; and the Consort Al-Badr fought vainly to suppress the suspicion which had only grown stronger since the night of Duban’s death. Then came a knock on the Vizier’s cell door - the first since his incarceration.

A servant entered with a tray of ointments, which she discarded once the heavy door fell shut. In this guise Shina Al-Badr had finally gained entry to the room. Mureen leapt to his feet; but Shina soothed him. “Your highness, I bring ointment for your face.” And she began softly tugging at the mask.

Mureen pushed her away. “Be careful! Don’t you know the danger you’re in?” But so strong were Al-Badr’s convictions she ignored him, and tore the mask open with one tug. Straight away she recognised Mureen; though his baffled features lacked the guile she remembered of them, and his hair had turned white.

“So,” she cried. “What has become of my husband the King?”

But the Vizier did not know. He pleaded, “If I am not the King, I beg you, tell me who you see.”

But Al-Badr had guile of her own; she sat meekly on the bed.

“MadupAlgerra,” she answered. “Acrobat and wire-walker, that you should think yourself imprisoned! You, who have entertained the court a thousand times with feats of rare agility and impossible esThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

39 capes! The great Algerra in full possession of his skills could escape this cell in a moment.”

Invention at short notice was her speciality, and as the evening progressed Shina warmed to her theme, attributing myriad circus acts and feats of dexterity to the name MadupAlgerra, until the false King was induced to brave a free-handed descent from his window; but no dormant ability kicked in, the stones loosened in his grip, the ground swayed, his grasp weakened… ...and so ends the tale of the many-faced Vizier.

His body was found by a servant of YunanRassi’s, who was woken to attend to it. “Dispose of him,” the Keeper hissed, clutching his nightgown. “And say nothing. A suicidal King is best kept a secret, if only to maintain our stability. And be careful of the face; I see the mask is torn.”

Then, after checking the door to the high cell was still locked (Shina having slipped out), the Keeper retired to his room to fix his costume for the coming day. * We journey east, to where the true King Al-Kubai, lamenting the loss of a trusted Vizier, has led the vestige of his army to the border of the Rejd, and from there along the forest boundary for many months with limited supplies to where the hills rose familiar, and Al-Kubai saw they were within a day’s trek of Balagh.

Though he mourned his loss, a little of Mureen’s cunning had rubbed off on Al-Kubai, and he ordered his men to take the clothing of any dead they passed and wear them, in case Mureen’s ambushers still hunted for him. And so it was a horde of fifty Bedouins arrived at the east gate of Balagh.

The city Watch gazed down stonily; the iron gate stayed closed.

The King drew back his kufeyah and cried: “I am King Al-Kubai of the Desert, Moon-Chosen and Defender of the Final Faith, returned at last in glory! I will wait no longer to be home!”

Word passed up the chain of watchmen to the palace, where the masked King YunanRassi listened gravely, then ordered the throne room empty of all but his advisors. They shared his view: The The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

40 imposter with the face of Al-Kubai was none other than the mage who had stolen the face of that wretch in the Storm turret, returning to enact a coup. He and his followers should be slain on sight.

But Shina, who had insinuated her way back into the room, spoke up: “Your grace, this mage may yet be able to restore Al-Kubai’s face to him, so that we may release the true King from his cell. Capture the mage, and force him to return it.”

Without an audience, YunanRassi would have rejected the idea, but all ears were on him. “Of course,” he said finally, and dispatched the Watch to carry out the Consort’s words.

The East gate opened and the King was led into the city he had once called home, leaving his army outside. The streets were almost empty and those who saw the King took him for a criminal bound for the scaffold. A disapproving murmur followed the small procession - windows filled with eyes. As per tradition, a few rotten vegetables were launched in his direction.

As they passed the Holy Fountain, a miracle occurred: The spouts began to gush and form a crown of water that rose higher than the closest roofs. Whispers flared around them, so widely the very air seemed to hum, and a mood of confused celebration took hold among the witnesses.

The procession that arrived at the palace was as large as any in Balagh’s history, large enough to force the masked ruler out onto the royal balcony to see it. The battle-hardened Al-Kubai looked up and laughed. “Who is this imposter? Show me his face!”

And before an explanation could be given the quick-witted Dunyazad, son of Duban and Shina, whose presence on the royal balcony was not unusual, seized the mask by its tip and tore it off YunanRassi’s head. Such a deed would have earned a quick and grisly death at a less chaotic moment; but the astonishing rebirth of the Holy Fountain stilled even the guard’s hands.

Uproar ensued. Rassi was immediately seized and imprisoned in the Storm Turret before the vengeful crowd could reach him; deserted by his own cabal, despised by his subjects, and the crimes of the late Vizier now his to bear.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

41 Before the sun reached the pale dome of the palace the true King Al-Kubai was restored to his throne, wiser for his long absence, and the Kingdom continued to prosper under his fair reign. Without a son or daughter he named Dunyazad his successor; and Shina AlBadr was retitled from Consort to Vizier, with quarters and meals as luxurious as the King’s, and influence in all matters. Even so her own part in proceedings was kept secret - no one saw her emerge from the pump rooms under the palace, where the rusted valve of the Holy Fountain conduit was now loose.

Historians will note the thirty-year war was not the last, nor the bloodiest, military skirmish to sodden the Rejd; nor were Mureen and YunanRassi the last kings in history to earn the title through deceit. The past is a spiral, each circuit a distortion of the last, the same conflicts performed in modern masks. All we can do is remember, and anoint each turn with the same hoary fallacy: Everyone lived happily ever after.

Matt Ingoldby works as a copywriter in the UK. His stories have appeared in The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Next Review, the Lowestoft Chronicle (x2), Existeré, Octavius, Crimson Streets, Story & Grit, and one or two anthologies, working his way up to a novel. He is an active member of the Waterloo Theatre Group, and a keen runner. He currently lives in London The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

42

FICTION

Parker Smith looked into the pit of despair that was his mother’s eyes. She wore a pea coat, breathed heavy, and seemed to view him with disdain.

“Mother,” he said, “can I borrow fifty bucks?” His mother refused to examine her son’s pockmarked, ridiculous face. He was a scarecrow in the disguise of a man, the abandoned corpse rotting on the side of the road. He was everything she despised and yet she felt tremendous pity.

“Here’s twenty. Now, what do you say to your mama?”

Parker wanted to asphyxiate. Couldn’t she let him grab the cash and flee? It would be so much better that way; to run with his head between his legs, to depart madly, to escape with that fire in his gut. To run as far as possible as if it was all he had left, a final prayer, the last gasp for the doomed.

“Thank you, mom,” he said, forcing a smile. “You’ve been quite generous. Without this twenty I could scarcely go on.” She noticed the tinge of sarcasm in his voice, then looked at the skyscrapers The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

43 shimmering in the distance.

They were on a boat meandering up The Hudson River. Her job paid for it. A corporate holiday party; champagne flutes, overcooked sliders, third-rate calypso music.

She’d brought along her son because he was bored and promised not to make a fool of himself. This promise he’d broken. He’d handed out his business card to every suit on the boat practically begging them for a job.

It hadn’t been his fault; he’d been reading self-help tomes on climbing the corporate ladder, a tall stack of networking bibles, and he felt he either implemented these strategies or went home an abject failure. They said you needed to humble yourself, be of service, and ask for guidance in a non-threatening manner, and Parker took this all more seriously than if decreed by his favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

He looked at his mother once more. She seemed nothing like him. He must have been adopted; been sired by a purple-blue alien; gotten dumped at the local orphanage by a nun after a clandestine affair with a piece-of-garbage timeshare salesman.

His mother was so hard to comprehend. What he once imagined straightforward seemed all but impossible; to connect with her; to be understood; to have a relationship of merit. Oh, phooey! What was the point of angling for it? He pocketed the cash, and, as the boat docked, excused himself, scurrying home like an anguished gladiator who needed to tend to a series of pernicious wounds.

*** Parker lived in the basement of a split-family home his mother owned in Sunnyside, Queens. It was a quaint little refuge from the embittered world with brown water and lights that swayed as the subway roared by with eerie regularity. He enjoyed the sloped ceiling, fading wallpaper, antique plumbing.

His mother intended to fix the place up, but she was always working—as much as 120 hours a week. Further exacerbating matters was Parker’s slovenly ways: empty pizza boxes crammed under The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

44 the bed, porno mags stuffed behind the dresser, newspaper scraps tacked to the wall.

It was labeled a basement by the real estate agent, but it was more a grim cellar, maybe even a dungeon, at least given the way Parker treated it. He kept the place dark, gloomy, covered in cobwebs, with a strange leather whip affixed to the wall.

It was the kind of place uniquely comforting to the forlorn; a place for those seeking to avert meddling peers; a place to take a stand, hunker down, write poetry, sing songs. But most of all he enjoyed doodling.

He once wanted to be a professional doodler, but his mother discouraged it. She discouraged all his creative pursuits.

Parker couldn’t blame her. His failings had landed him where he was. And she’d been kind enough to give him cheap rent—a mere few hundred dollars per month. In many ways, he’d be lost without her.

He thought of this now as he sat on his bed doodling with great focus and intensity. The world seemed to depend on his doodles; indeed, nothing could have greater importance; this time it was a tiger consuming a horrified rabbit, the fangs bright white, rabbit juices splattering in a rollercoaster of sorrow.

He identified with the rabbit. The prey that could never quite could escape. It was most vibrant right before it was devoured.

Yet he felt sorry for the tiger too. It was tough to be the king.

He seemed to be a part of them both, to feel, from inside, the way nature defeated itself, consumed what it was; the way we were all predators and prey, consumers and the consumed; the way it all ended in the same despicable void.

It didn’t matter whether you were rabbit or tiger; we were all in an existential labyrinth; unlikely to find the Minotaur; we wandered ceaselessly, increasingly losing our way.

Parker doodled more fiercely, his hand heating up; his eyes glowing with embittered intensity, heart thumping, leg jerking madly. Down with opportunity! To hell with a cruel, pointless existence!

He was a great doodler! A doodler to be taught at international art The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

45 schools! His work needed to be enshrined in Vatican City! Why couldn’t all the buffoons eager to critique his work understand that? ***** Parker worked thirty hours a week selling dental equipment.

The phones automatically dialed random dental offices. They gave him a pitch sheet, told him to stick to the script, yet he spiced it up, improvised wildly to get dentists on the line. The problem was secretaries generally hung up rapidly or made rude comments. How could he display his salesmanship if these purveyors of provincialism, these guardians of Mouth Incorporated, wouldn’t let him through the gate?

All the rejection took a toll on his sensitive system. He wasn’t such a terrible guy, just another grifter, a bohemian-renegade pushed to the edge. He only sought to make a buck. To survive! Didn’t any of these obtuse secretaries with their phoney cheerfulness and cruel snorts get that? Someone had to put Ramen Noodles on his table! He couldn’t make it on godforsaken doodling alone! **** Although Parker loved to doodle more than anything else, he’d come to accept, over the past year, that there was no realistic way he’d make a living off his eccentric passion. Hence, of late, he’d refocused the bulk of his creative energies on becoming an actor.

It was in TV and film acting that he felt most likely to make his mark. This was an instinct, a flash radiating across a grim sky, an otherworldly sense he followed like a zombie in pursuit of human flesh.

Besides, once rich and famous, he’d use his platform to promote the doodles, and so, circuitously, achieve his life’s ambition.

The other thing that drove him into acting was the chance to escape his crazy head, to probe forbidden quadrants of self, and to enter magical worlds more alluring than his own. And it all was more alluring… even playing a P.O.W. in a Vietnamese Prison Camp. For the tortures of the Hanoi Hilton seemed far more appealing than subsisting under the fascist dictator he called mother! **** To help achieve his goal of becoming an A-lister, Parker spent The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

46 money far more rapidly than he earned it. Some of the people he hired included a personal manicurist, reiki faith healer, life coach, and soul retrieval specialist.

Originally, he’d skipped out on the soul retrieval thing, finding it a bit superfluous. But he was convinced, by people in the know, that his soul was the reason he wasn’t landing the series regular roles.

His soul was in a state of crisis. His soul was a wounded child. His soul needed to drive a Tesla…and so on and so forth.

But the tidbit they imprinted most forcefully into him was that his soul needed to be retrieved. This was an arduous process that would take weeks, months, years perhaps, at 150 dollars an hour.

Parker felt rather suspect about all this; considered it a kind of madness; but the people he’d hired were industry insiders: warm, generous, champions of eco-friendly blenders with glitzy websites featuring celebrity testimonials. They had industry pull. Radiated such prowess that he would have engaged in filthy homosexual acts with them—and he was straight—just to impress them. The point was they knew far more than he did—a fact he couldn’t ignore, now could he?

He returned to this thought process for the hundredth time as a soul retrieval specialist sprinkled water on his forehead while humming an ancient Peruvian prayer.

Parker closed his eyes, breathed in the sage, and imagined an eagle carrying him on mystical wings through a tropical rainforest.

They soared through cumulous clouds, over verdant ravines, above majestic lakes; flew back, way back, to a time before he was born; across a land of purity and innocence; to a place where he could feel again; there, the eagle descended, and told him to retrieve his soul he needed to BELIEVE he could fly.

‘Yes! Fly! Fly great birdie! Flap those wings! Yehah!,’ Parker recited to himself before opening his eyes. What a magical adventure!

He was learning to explore such depths of himself!

It didn’t matter that the soul retrieval specialist was a bitter divorcee who smoked opium every evening while playing XBOX. Nor did it bother him that the guy was put in jail, twice, for beating his ex-wife.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

47 It seemed best to pay the money, follow instructions, and have faith. There was little to lose. After all, his most high profile part to date was a cameo on The Barnyard Matchmaker—a show featuring perennial bachelors on blind dates with irascible farm animals. **** Parker’s plan was to save up enough money to move in with his Aunt Bubble, in the San Fernando Valley, and, under the mask of palm trees, in the land of Photoshop and Botox, make his mark.

He felt destined to succeed once he moved to tinsel town; imagined it would only be a matter of months until he bought a palatial Malibu estate; could hardly wait to order around assistants and be fed seedless grapes while his personal ukulele player, a blonde bombshell, strummed “La Bamba.”

Was he delusional? All that can be said on this point is that his actor friends considered his monologues totally uninspiring—and in suggesting this they were being rather generous. Meanwhile, his acting teachers considered him dim-witted and pertinacious, although they encouraged him, mainly because they wanted to continue collecting premium rates for semi-private lessons.

Delusional or not he persisted. He attended countless auditions, rehearsing late into the night before a wall-length mirror he’d salvaged from a drunken tour of The Staten Island Garbage Dump.

He bought cop and gangster uniforms and pranced around his dungeon, feeling his essence meld into each new character. The odds seemed horrible. Yet what gave Parker an edge was his determination; he was so convinced of his own importance that the world eventually had to take him seriously. He’d outlast the uppity bastards.

Perhaps, too, he was right. At some point he’d get his big break; keep at it for decades, and, eventually, some bemused, wealthy producer would spot him and say, “Parker! Parker my boy! I’ve got a million dollars in unmarked bills that can be yours if you play the part of Private Investigator. That’s right Parker. A million dollars.”

Parker would look at him, long and hard, and say “Booked already.” Too busy doodling. Dine on Beluga caviar, fly private jets, and, when he felt like it, pontificate on 60 Minutes about the impeThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

48 tus for a legendary doodle featuring aardvarks on a log flume ride.

Top art critics would call him “iconoclastic” and “eerily sublime,” and even his own mother would declare him a misunderstood prodigy.

As for his uncle, who often seemed to discourage him, he’d get on hands and knees and beg Parker to accept his apology.

The greasy phone rang once more. It was his agent. Well, technically he wasn’t a real agent. It was a friend of his, a schizophrenic patient locked up at Bellevue who managed to submit Parker on casting websites. Why he did this Parker wasn’t sure. But Parker believed it had something to do with a weird homoerotic fixation the guy had with Parker’s feet.

In spite of how much Parker hated Armando, he often secured Parker decent auditions. So he couldn’t hang up.

To Parker’s great surprise Armando had a stellar audition, an opportunity for the ages. His heart thumped madly. He could barely control the anticipation. It was for a major independent film called The Fat Tuna. What an ingenious title!

The Casting Director thought he could be a great sidekick, a fantastic skinny, nerdy friend to The Fat Tuna. The goal was not to outshine The Fat Tuna, but to lend comedic relief, and make The Fat Tuna seem even fatter.

Parker loved the idea. The sides he was provided were inordinately dynamic. Over and over he practised lines like “I’m sick of you complaining you idiotic fat dummy!” Oh, the melody! The sonorous play of syllables! That perfect harmony of one phrase merging with another!

His M.A. in English Literature would be very useful here; he was going to rise to new heights; transform into a Schlegel of the twenty-first century, slinging aphorisms on the corner like bags of meth among the row houses of Baltimore.

This part was his; for he was a great thespian, an inspirer of masses, a creator of new realms of existential being. He belched. He’d eaten too many cheese-doodles and followed it with a massive quotient of grape soda Never mind. This was HIS opportunity. The misery of the past The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

49 thirty-two years on Earth could all be erased. He just needed to land this role. Doing so would make up for an unlived existence, would transform him from a fool to a hero, would save his wayward soul.

He simply had to be a witty, loveable friend to The Fat Tuna. The future seemed preposterously bright! **** When he arrived at the rehearsal space at Ripley-Grier, a dimly-lit studio space with a tawdry secretary, he was not surprised to find a waiting room filled to the brim with actors who looked exactly like him. It was always this way. There were hundreds of versions of yourself all over the city and casting directors were skilled at finding them, rounding them up, and insisting they sit in one room and wait.

How could he compete with such magnificent clones? His acting coach advised him to stay true to who he was. This made sense.

Still, he felt like a fraud just thinking about being himself in a room filled with doppelgangers.

It took hours to be called in. At last, he slated and read with a casting director who seemed barely able to speak English. The Fat Tuna was supposed to be an angry, overweight male while the casting director was an incoherent, Czechoslovakian waif.

Nevertheless, he had to make the scene real. The dialogue rolled off his tongue; he put his soul into every syllable, flung himself onto the floor, mimed poking out his eyes, kicked into the air, and improvised the word “toodaloo!”

Just as he was finishing this tour de force, a loud explosion shook the room. Everyone got up. Through the window, they examined a garbage man arguing with a bystander who’d dropped a garbage can on his foot (the noise had come from the bystander subsequently hurling the can against a brick wall). One of the casting directors kept pointing during the ensuing fist fight and the Script Girl murmured “bravo!” Parker nodded at them, and, as the commotion quelled, said: “can I finish my audition?”

They ignored him.

“No seriously,” Parker said, still standing at his mark. “From the top?”

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

50 He waited ten seconds and then became despondent, lowering his head.

“Thanks for coming in,” the casting director remarked.

“Once more?”

“NEXT!” “Pretty please?”

“NEXT!” Parker ambled sluggishly towards the door. When his hand reached the knob he turned back. He gritted his teeth, bit his hand, and, eventually, cleared his throat.

“You’re afraid to act so you sit there and condemn. You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

The casting director leapt to her feet and tried to push Parker out the room. He gave her a crazed look and clutched the table. The Director and Script Girl now joined in, Parker resisting fiercely. He exacerbated the mayhem, slightly, by crying “help! rape!”

Hearing the bedlam, fourteen Fat Tunas entered the room and sat on Parker. Meanwhile, twelve of his doppelgangers kicked him repeatedly.

Finally, Parker was let up, apologized, and ran out. All along the sidewalk, he cried out that he was a genius, an absolute legend so that even the homeless lunatic waving a sword made of tin foil and declaring himself King Arthur shook his head in dismay. *** The next day Parker ran into the same Casting Director near Hudson River Park and handed her his resume and headshot. “Sorry about yesterday,” he said.

The Casting Director grimaced.

“I just want is one more chance.”

The Casting Director threw out her half-eaten turkey club and scurried away.

“I’M A GREAT THESPIAN! DANIEL DAY-LEWIS TAKES LESSONS FROM ME. THREE HOUR GODDAMN CLINICS YOU UPPITY MORON!” From a great distance, the Casting Director gave Parker the The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

51 finger. Parker kicked a park bench. Yanked his hair. Slapped his own face again and again.

He kept cursing himself, his so-called agent, his fate. He wished he could go on another of those sightseeing cruises with his mother’s co-workers. Land a real job. This wasn’t normal! Wild highs and abysmal lows! Prolonged Intensity! Endless pressure! He was cracking up, falling to pieces, acting like half the man he could be. If only he was given a chance to play a part equal to his talent!

Was that too much to ask? For the entire system to collapse and someone to say “you’re famous now, Parker.”

But the truth was he was perpetually on the fringe, the runt of the litter, the kind of guy who would never get in the same zip code as the paparazzi.

His doodles sat on lonely shelves in the back of his dungeon.

Quiet doodles. Doodles of zero importance. No one cared. His calling. The reason he was born. It all meant nothing.

He felt so alone. So distant from everything. He sighed. He wished he hadn’t flipped out a second time at that casting director.

His soul retrieval specialist was going to need to put in some serious overtime. His life coach would reprimand him and then bill him exorbitantly for the humiliation. His mother would smirk and declare “I told you so.” And, through it all, he’d be gnashing his teeth, hoping he could prove to the rest of the world his importance in the grand scheme—as his dreams grew increasingly irrelevant.

He sighed.

Maybe they were right. Maybe he didn’t belong. Maybe his work was destined for the garbage dump. Maybe he was nothing, a human doormat, the scum of the Earth. Maybe the best thing would be to eliminate himself now, just jump off a bridge, thereby inducing his family to celebrate wildly.

He went home and scribbled for twelve hours—strange, gothic beasts ingesting casting assistants in a macabre glee—heads popping off, scripts drenched in coagulated blood, cameras hurled out icy windows.

Onward he scribbled, doodling haphazardly, doodling in alleThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

52 gories, doodling towards the word doodling, doodling because it was all he had left; he passed out with his head between his legs, the drool sliding down his chin. **** Parker might have gone completely bonkers, around this time, had he not fallen for Betsy, a sixty-two-year-old dowager who couldn’t resist his wounded-puppy-look.

She was his only acting teacher who didn’t consider herself a deity. He signed up for a few seminars, mostly scene study before she started taking him out for ice cream sundaes with all the toppings.

This Betsy was once a fine theater actor before her career had been cut short by a boating accident. She’d lost her right leg. After that, she taught from a wheelchair, living vicariously through her students, but seemingly no less dynamic and inspired as a result.

Parker found her a great rhetorician. She could talk and talk and he’d never get bored.

So it was innocent for a while- the dissection of Chekov and Strindberg, the lectures on character motivation, the advice on how to get a manager….until everything just flipped.

He’d gone over to her apartment for a grilled cheese—a platonic gesture—when she’d returned from a trip to the bathroom in a skimpy negligee.

“Spank me,” she’d said. He’d told her he had to go. There was a big audition the next day for the role of The Brainless Woodpecker, a very complex part in an animated indie that was being brought to you by the makers of Dirty Dishes, Dirty Eternity.

Betsy grabbed him. Insisted he ravishes her. He never made his audition. Hell, except for showing up at his telemarketing job he hardly left her house. His friends couldn’t understand. Was he in it for the grilled cheese? Did he want free acting tips? Might he be after her family fortune?

The real essence of it, though, was Parker was afraid. Afraid to disappoint her, afraid to leave her alone, afraid to not be what she needed. She spoke to something in him; he had to be what she needed or he’d abandon a portion of himself that had not been cared for as a child.

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53 Besides, it was better to vicariously make sure she didn’t destroy herself with drink, as she generally threatened than continually fail at achieving his own dreams.

It was the perfect alibi. It gave him a sense of accomplishment; it made him feel eternally useful; plus, above all else, he couldn’t resist the way she arched her back in bed and moaned like a harpooned whale.

True, the lovemaking wasn’t perfect. He didn’t enjoy when she took her dentures off and plopped them in a blue-green highball glass. Then, too, her brittle skin was rotting, and, in places, covered in grisly scabs. Finally, she put him through an exhausting bedroom boot-camp of sorts. Still, he clung to the relationship. It helped him maintain sanity in a world that had seemingly abandoned him. ***** It was around this time that Parker’s grandmother invited all her relatives to a 95th birthday party. Parker wasn’t exactly thrilled.

Little nephews gnawing at his shoes. Great aunts stuffing extra rolls into giant purses. His grandpa farting and then blaming the Nazis.

Parker invited Betsy. She tried to get out of it. Claimed she had an intolerable pain in her lower vertebrae. But Parker would not be swayed, since, as far as he was concerned, her lower vertebrae had been hurting since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Again she demurred, claiming she wanted to visit an acting friend in the Catskills. Parker didn’t care. He told her flat out that if she didn’t show up he wouldn’t see her anymore.

Betsy put on a cocktail dress, used plenty of wrinkle cream, had her hair blown out, and tried to sit up straight. Still, she looked utterly fossilized.

**** The evening began sanely enough. Everyone mingled and made small talk; there were lousy jokes about dentists and religion; one cousin had a birthday, another an amusing anecdote about bumping into her sociology professor at a foam party in Cancun.

All was running rather smoothly until a guest congratulated Betsy on her 95th Birthday.

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54 “That’s my girlfriend,” Parker said.

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“She’s 62.”

“Sorry.”

“Does she look 95 to you?”

“Really. I didn’t mean any harm.”

Parker shook his head, shooing the poor girl away. As soon as the little waif left, Betsy turned her wheelchair towards the window, her face seemingly swarmed with shadows. She took a few of her anti-anxiety pills, swallowing them down rapidly with a tall glass of scotch.

“Now, now,” Parker said. “You survived a stint as a reporter in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Surely you can handle a little mixup.”

“Of course darling. It’s just I don’t belong here. I’m an outsider.”

“Outsider? You fit in better than I do. And this is my family.”

She smiled at his quip. Looked out the window again.

“You know I sometimes have trouble grasping what you see in me?”

“You’re absolutely stunning to me. A real princess. Now let’s try to make the best of this and later I’ll make you the grilled cheese.” **** Parker had his mission. Survive the evening without losing his temper. The problem was as he pushed Betsy’s wheelchair around he overheard the comments.

His uncle smirked and whispered, “the kid likes corpses.”

To which his brother added, “when he sleeps with that old bag of bones isn’t it technically necrophilia?”

Meanwhile, his aunt chimed in with: “It’s just too bad dating an older woman hasn’t helped him mature!”

He’d thought his mother, above all, was in his corner. But she kept whispering to his aunt about her horrid embarrassment.

Finally, Parker got fed up, pulled his mother aside, and said: “I have feelings for Betsy. I know she’s not what you wanted, but, for your information, I’m in love.”

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55 “In LOVE? Son, I want to be supportive. I do. It’s just this is a poor match—even for someone with your…peculiar limitations.”

Parker just walked away. After stepping outside for a bit he told himself it was best to stand back from it all. It was a grand theater, a social experiment, something to be amused by.

Groups behaved predictably. He was an easy target, a form of prey, and, among these conformists, these sheep pretending to be wolves, he was someone to put down. They needed him—needed prey to justify their attempts at seeming ravenous.

He understands the psychology of it all. And yet perhaps because he was a sensitive, thoughtful spirit whose life had not turned out as expected it all wounded him to the core.

He’d given his soul to art. Put everything on the line in order to achieve his ambitions. He’d sacrificed stability and the respect of his peers and to them, he was a nothing, an abject fool. The way they treated Betsy just made the bonfire of his disappointments burn that much brighter.

Sure he could grasp how they wanted more from him. But it wasn’t as if they were so noble. All night they talked about how to get cheap flights through discount sites like Kayak and the bottomless salad and free breadsticks at Olive Garden as if these trivialisms could generate a kind of paradise. They had such minimal ambitions.

They subsisted in such a microcosm of what was possible.

Didn’t they understand that to doodle for him was to channel the divine? Didn’t they get that through acting he was trying to reinvent himself, make something tangible out of a crooked existence?

Didn’t they comprehend that he had something to convey, to enact, to become?

Betsy was laughing. He could hardly believe it. A great thespian, a stage actress for the ages was deeply amused by his uncle’s low-brow humor.

“Hilarious,” she declared about a man who’d molested half his cousins! Yes. What a shtick! With the way he pulled down your pants in the laundry room and fondled you! He was practically the next Rodney Dangerfield!

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56 She was living in a ridiculous fantasia, was as disconnected as the rest of his family from the truth. But he was not about to correct her. Better she holds onto her illusions. Better for the both of them.

On the hoopla went about his grandmother. Everyone made speeches and most of it seemed unbelievably phoney. They were each making sure they weren’t cut out the will; putting on a glittery show; they seemed to live for the appearance rather than substance behind it.

Finally, he stood up and said “grandma, everything you’ve heard tonight is bogus. Let’s face it, you’re a miserable louse!”

At this point, a few stragglers began to laugh. “What are you laughing at?” Parker asked. “I’m serious. Grandma just croaks already.” More laughter. He heard his mother cry out, “he does standup in the city.” Other relatives seemed to nod, considering this all a strange repartee.

“STOP LAUGHING! I’M SERIOUS! YOU’RE ALL WAY TOO DEFERENTIAL TO THIS WRINKLED, SOUL-SUCKING DEMON!” The mood shifted. Every face in the room examined him with an icy glare. He smiled back. To hell with the conformist lies. To hell with the fake happiness and silly pettiness.

His uncle stood, grabbed Parker and lifted a threatening hand.

He broke free, hissed at his uncle, turned to his grandma and said, “I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL BITCH!” With that, he stormed out.

There was a smattering of boos. His mother followed, checking to see he was okay. He was not. Nor had he been for a long time.

But he felt freer. More alive. Less burdened by the conventionality of others. Less willing to buy into this ridiculous masquerade.

The truth was that he loved his grandma. Loved her as much as anyone else at that party…but he hated the lie. The conformity.

The cowardice. The silencing of his individuality by smug members of his tribe.

An hour later he got a call from his grandma. She had cut him out her will. **** When Parker returned home he immediately reached for the doodling paper; his hand was soft now, delicate; there was a gentleThe Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

57 ness roaring out of him; a tranquility; a sense of peace and justice; the doodles emerged steadily, revealing his long-buried agony with a kind of otherworldly radiance.

Betsy showed up around midnight and they made love, her soft voice purring in the gloom. Soon they ended up in the kitchen, with him doodling once more on the breakfast island; even when surrounded by dirty dishes and ancient breakfast cereal boxes the doodles just roared out of him, one after the other, in a cacophony of necessity.

Betsy chuckled as she watched. He was a real artist. Nothing stopped him. He went all the way. He put it all out there. He let himself fail. He lived along the precipice.

That was what mattered. The rest of it was just fuel for the final confrontation. Just an impetus for a last dance. Just a bogus parade.

The rest of it could not stop him.

Matt Nagin’s poetry has been published in Antigonish Review, Dash Literary Journal, The Charles Carter, Grain Magazine and Arsenic Lobster, among other markets. His first poetry collection, “Butterflies Lost Within The Crooked Moonlight,” was released in 2017, and has obtained very strong reviews. More info at mattnagin.com The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

58

59

POETRY

The pursuit of Joy

Sacrifice I would have dipped into the void if only to touch you but once Fire and Brimstone never shook the foundation of my love for you I would have spoken to the wind but the stars in your eyes caught my tongue

The crimson stains of a blood once filled with power Has regurgitated onto the floor of regret The platelets drip into the sewer of identity crises The platelets drip into the mouth of syphilitic vampires Mountains are moved daily while Sisyphus struggles with one rock At the bottom of the hill is where all life begins and ends

Heaven is just an overrated word When I see your face The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

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60

Ashamed?

I’ve been a lot of things in my short life From caretaker for my parents and a high school dropout From a college honor student and a best friend From a mentor to a person being mentored From politically ignorant to a full blown protester I’ve gone from denial to being openly gay I’ve been a criminal and now own a business

61

While we Bleed Leaves of parishioners fall into the newly moistened soil of avarice While we bleed Molten migrants mitigate in a minutiae of Mormonism While we bleed Buddhists of Beltane arrive in bliss while staring at the crack in the wall that is humanity, while we bleed Religious sentiments fall from the lips of Saints while we bleed, While we bleed...

I’ve gone from mental health patient to mental health advocate Life is a journey in which we learn and grow from each experience I’ve been a lot of things, ashamed was never one of them.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

Adam Levon Brown is an internationally published author, poet, amateur photographer. He is Founder, Owner, and editor in chief of Madness Muse Press. He has had poetry published hundreds of times in several languages, along with 2 full collections and 3 chapbooks. He also participates as an assistant editor at Caravel Literary Arts Journal The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

62

63

POETRY

Tom Pescatore silencing the past of the unfinished corpse .XIII the way they slaughtered the crust of the earth was with the sound

Smiling toward my lost home I was an angel wrapped in a blanket

of letters torn open. it was managed bit by bit using their fingers to pick at the adhesive glue. jagged edges broken edges protrude from the ground.

the blanket had become a part of me two sets of wings

cut out the mask of the sky.

this is how I felt this morning in the rain

clouds form to coagulate the blood and keep the stars from vomiting

it misted around me the air was filled with floating perfect circles of rain

out.

my eyes turned the sky gray and with a brush my vision drug the clouds across the sky

the severed remains.

when the letter removed

the wood gaped

pulling from its core caramelized sugar melted butter over its ghost. under each eye they placed their lives worth suffocating

I had

the ground with each

I was glowing I could feel myself a beacon of light drawn to separate the dark a line from sea to shore I was not embarrassed to be alive I had arrived there fallen from the heaven of my own mind upon my own will covered in rain I smiled toward my lost home

death.

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64

the Milk the milk is the phases of the earth turning the yellow moon bringing from it bridges of gold under which the stars are a multitude of headlights chained to the highway dying like Christmas bulbs in the cold milk of the snow reflecting the subtle alterations of season masquerading as serialized time the milk is the one after the other never serving the remote seeming where it has been stretching fore and beyond

65

better times inside the trailer it was warm you poured beer into cold glasses the beer was frothy and golden when you left you were like the echo of the last beer you had poured you collected my tab and took it with you into the West Virginia night

Conference call the phone crawls across the table on plastic legs speaker holes acting as a thousand eyes lined with fluorescent light inside the digital face the gnashing brain upon which is spoken the time tattooed by the numbers by the numbers crushing the cellulose tile pearl of the masks around whose minds are a voice wired into the unseen outlets heaven is the floor inverted above which the phone spins its silent web within the smoke obscured darkness we all live The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.

The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

66

Syllables of Rain

by

D.S. Lliteras

(An Excerpt)

After Llewellen embarks on an existential return-journey on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, he runs into an old friend, Cookie, who shared Zen Buddhist experiences with him and Jansen and others while they endured a homeless urban winter together. The following chapter begins after Llewellen has decided to end his quest and leave Baltimore.

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67

Chapter 20 I felt foolish. I took leave from work to come to Baltimore and look: here I am leaving already—end of quest.

I waited in the lounge area of the hotel’s lobby for the car rental agency to deliver their vehicle to me after I checked out of my room.

The mid-sized lobby was plain and the smell of chemical solvents indicated their effort at keeping it reasonably clean. There were three small tables with chairs arranged near a counter that ran the length of the back wall of the lobby’s lounge area. Upon the counter, there was a coffee maker with all the essentials for providing coffee to their guests: Styrofoam cups, coffee creamer, sugar, artificial sweetener, red plastic stirring sticks, and paper napkins.

I set my travel bag beside a chair at one of the small tables and approached the coffee maker. I liberated a Styrofoam cup from the stack of cups and poured myself some complimentary coffee. The coffee was hot and good.

I approached the main entrance of the lobby, as I continued drinking my coffee, to look outside. The automatic glass double doors opened, indicating that I had to step back to let them close again. I studied the street from the required distance after the doors closed.

Traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, was heavy and intense.

The rain had eased to a drizzle. I peered at the clock behind the front desk on my right and discovered that I was witnessing rush-hour traffic. The front desk clerk ignored me.

A Chevy Blazer pulled into the hotel’s carport that sheltered the hotel’s main entrance. The driver stepped out of the vehicle.

I squinted at him. I sipped my coffee. There was something familiar about him.

I went back to the lobby area and sat at my table.

The man entered the lobby, made a quick search of the interior, and saw me.

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68 He squinted at me. He hesitated. He approached me. “Llewellen?”

I hesitated. “Yes?” I set my coffee cup on the table and stood up. I pointed at the vehicle parked underneath the carport. “Is...is that my rental vehicle?”

“Yes.” “Good.”

“Are you ready to go?”

“Yes.” “I’ll take you to the rental office so you can do the paperwork there.”

“Great.” I reached for my travel bag.

“Llewellen.”

The tone of his familiar voice stopped me from grabbing the handle of my bag. I straightened up and looked at him more closely instead. “Do I know you?”

“Llewellen.”

“That’s my name, alright.”

“Welcome back.”

“Do I know you?” I repeated.

“I’m Cookie. Do you remember me?”

“Cookie. Of course. Yes. Jesus.”

“No. Buddha.”

“Yes.” We shook hands as I added, “Jansen considered you a pessimist, a devout cynic, a man who saw a shadow in all things.”

“That’s me.”

“Damn. How are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah. Yes—I don’t know.”

“That was not an intentional Buddhist statement.”

“Jansen considered you to be a Master.”

“Jansen. Hmm. Jansen. I’m a Master, alright; master of downward mobility—from a short-order cook to a part-time driver for a The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

69 car rental agency.”

“Still—you knew Jansen.”

Cookie raised his hands for emphasis. “I don’t know.”

I nodded. “Yes, of course. I don’t know.”

Cookie shrugged. “There you are—a very nice reflection.”

“Of what?

“Of...of proper Zen, I suppose.”

I frowned. “That’s behind me now.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why are you here?”

“Because...because....”

“You really don’t know.”

“Well, I...I—yes.”

“I see.”

I pursed my lips in dismay.

“No false sense of humility.”

I was not sure why I grinned.

“I could use a little coffee, Llew.”

“Coffee—sure, of course.” I grabbed my Styrofoam cup and escorted Cookie to the coffee counter. I liberated another Styrofoam cup from the stack and poured him a fresh cup. I replenished mine.

I shifted my travel bag to the other side of my chair and invited him to sit down at my table. We drank our coffee in silence for a while.

Cookie’s beard was long and his shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a pony tail. His angular features were sharp, and his pallor appeared malnourished. His brown eyes lacked luster. He wore a pair of Army surplus boots, a pair of faded jeans, a blue sports jacket, and an orange cap with the logo HTZ embroidered in the front. He appeared to be much older than when I saw him last. He looked to be a man who might be approaching his sixties. I don’t know why— “You know,” Cookie leaned against the table using both of his forearms for support, “a shot of rye would improve this coffee a The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

70 whole lot.”

“I have to admit, that would be a little too early for me.”

Cookie was disappointed by my response. “I don’t want to take any more of your time.” He stood up. “Let me take you to the rental office and I’ll be gone.”

“Wait. Hold on there. Sit down. Drink your coffee.”

He sat down.

“You’re the reason why I’m here,” I declared.

“Ah. Then you do know why you’re here.”

“Well.”

“And I believe I forced you into humility.”

“Not forced.”

“Right.” Cookie pressed his back against the chair. “So. Nothing is behind you.”

“I...I guess you’re right.”

“And?” “You. You’re the past I was looking for in Baltimore.”

“The past in the present.” Cookie smirked. “I see.”

“Or is it the other way around?”

“You poor bastard.”

“What?”

“Didn’t Jansen teach you anything?”

“Sometimes I’m not sure.”

Cookie nodded. “That’s an honest answer.”

I shrugged. “So. So—what have you been doing since Jansen’s death?”

“Nothing.”

“Well. This job you have—that’s something.”

“That’s temporary. Part time. That’s nothing.”

“I see.”

“Don’t see.”

“That’s what Jansen would have said.”

“I’m not Jansen.”

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71 I sipped my coffee. “Where do you live?”

“Here. I mean, you know, Baltimore.”

“And?” “And...and I was married to a decent woman who, well—she finally got impatient with me.”

“Oh?” “She kicked me out of our place.”

“Ah.” “It’s alright.” Cookie grimaced. “Women.”

“What?”

“They’re difficult.”

“Yeah.”

“They’re always asking questions. You know? They always want answers.”

“Mine wanted new furniture,” I said.

“You’re lucky.”

“She left me. Recently.”

“Damn. You, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Wife?”

“No.” “I see.” Cookie stared at his coffee. “At least you don’t have a room full of furniture to worry about—new or old.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“I can sure use a drink,” he declared.

“I’ll buy.”

“I don’t need charity.”

“You looked out for me and Jansen.”

“Yeah, well—that didn’t save your souls.”

“They couldn’t be saved,” I said.

Cookie frowned with approval. “Llew, my boy, I almost believe Jansen might have learned you something.”

“Cute. You know, a smile would have softened that remark.”

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72 “I don’t feel like smiling.”

“You used to smile.”

“Yeah, well—I used to listen to classical music. I used to have a soul.”

“Fish is dead,” I said.

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Cancer.”

“Rotten way to go. Largo and Zack are—” “Dead. I know. Both murdered. No apparent reasons.”

“Rotten way to go.” Cookie shook his head. “There you have it.”

“Yeah.”

“I miss Jansen.”

“Me too,” I whispered.

“Also killed for no apparent reason.”

“For no good reason,” I clarified. “Rotten way to go.”

“All dead,” Cookie muttered. “You don’t live that kind of life without a lot of risks.”

“Yeah.”

Cookie stretched. “So, do you still want this vehicle?”

“No. I want you to have a drink instead.”

“Now you’re talking.” Cookie stood up.

“And I’ve decided to stay here.”

“Good. I’ll return the vehicle.”

“I’ll go with you. Wait here a minute. Have another cup of coffee.”

“I need to use the telephone,” he said.

“Sure. Fine.”

I checked back into the hotel and I got a room with two beds.

Cookie called the car rental agency using the front desk’s telephone to inform them of the cancellation.

I went upstairs to my new room and dropped off my travel bag.

Cookie drove us to the car rental office where I officially canceled the reservation and where he officially quit his job. As soon The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018

73 as we walked out of the rental agency, I suggested that we have that drink. He recommended a place, then led the way.

It was no longer raining. It was a short walk.

a plague of penniless drunks in a rue of devotion boiled into the sidewalk from Harry’s Bar & Grill

D.S. Lliteras is the author of thirteen books that have received na-

tional and international acclaim. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous national and international magazines, journals, and anthologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._S._Lliteras https://www.amazon.com/Syllables-Rain-D-S-Lliteras/dp/193790752X The Wagon Magazine - April / May- 2018