May 2017 by The Wagon Magazine

The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

VOLUME: 2 - ISSUE: 2 - MAY 15 - 2017

Columns: Sotto Voce -Indira Parthasarathy 07 The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck 18 Letter from London - John Looker 10 P&P - Yonason Goldson 14 Musings Of An Axolotl - C.S.Lakshmi 29 Flash-Fiction: Leah Holbrook Sackett 38 Fiction: Steve Carr 53 Anshu Choudhry 61 Dave Ludford 72 Sean Padraic McCarthy 76 Poetry: Neela Padmanabhan 16 Dilantha Gunawardana 36 Serkan Engin 40 Mohammad Shafiqul Islam 43 Denis Waswa Barasa 49 Roger Turner 67 Book Review: Divya Dubey - Turtle Dove by Dibyajyoti Sarma 51 UKRAINIAN LITERATURE: Fiction: Tetiana Aleksina 23 Poetry Review: Marta Pombo SallÃ©s / Mario Savioni 25

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PRASAD'S POST Cracked pot and fragmented thoughts

The print version of The Wagon Magazine is usually uploaded on

www.thewagonmagazine.com and www.ISSUU.com at the end of each month so that some print copies could be sold. April 2017 edition, concentrating on the Ukrainian Literature specifically, was really an achievement. I should thank Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single (https://unbolt.me/) here for their sincere efforts in bringing this special edition. While uploading the April edition in the Issuu.com platform, I found out, to my utter surprise, the real reach of the magazine in various parts of the world. Moreover, the number of readers to download and read the magazine in Issuu platform (Wagon Website is not included) stumped me. I am placing the screen shot of the statistical data here. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

* Nothing is original Xerox is existence Make yourself a copy And paste your resistance -Poet Christopher Allen Breidinger There is an old story of a water bearer, often told to me by my grandma and her set of betel-nut chewing, checker playing goons (whom she considered her friends) There was a water bearer, once upon a time... Mmmm… Did he marry a flamethrower? No… Don’t interrupt me… He had a couple of large earthen pots. You have seen the weighing balance in that petty shop of Ramu Chetti? Have you not? Haan,… I have. Like that balance, he carried the pots, after filling the water from the village pond, each hung on each end of a pole, which he carried on his shoulders. Why are you giggling? Grandma, that is funny… like Ramu uncle’s balance? Crooked? … No! This, I don’t want. Tell me the story of that ugly frog and the beautiful princess… Then only I will buy you your betel leaves for you to chew, hereafter. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

5 Fut! (That was the sound of her slapping me, but affectionately) Blackmailing me? That … that play, you had better keep it reserved for your naive mother … not with me… now, listen… One of the pots had a small crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the village pond to his master’s house but the cracked pot reached with only half full…. Hey, where are you trying to go? ... No. Here, sit on your dim butt… Listen, this is important…. Really… mmmm… This ordeal went on and on for so many months… years… The bearer was delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, akin to some intelligent people who live only in a make belief world of words sans wisdom… You know… whom I am referring to… However, the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do… Are you listening? Good! … After a year of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day. “I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.” “Why?” asked the bearer. “What are you ashamed of? Did you happen to eat any lotus flower that smiles? ” “No… no... I didn’t! Please… please… do not humiliate me… I have had enough of that already! I will not take such an odyssey… Master, I have been able, for these past two years, to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your master’s house. Because of my flaws, you have to suffer and you don’t get the full value of your efforts,” the pot said. The water bearer felt sorry for the old cracked pot and in his compassion he said, “As we return to the master’s house, on our way, I want you to notice the beautiful colourful flowers along our path.” Indeed, as they went up the hill, the old cracked pot observed the The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

6 sun warming, beautiful wild colourful flowers on the side of the path and this cheered it to some extent. But at the end of the trail, it still felt bad because it had leaked out half its load, and so again it apologized to the bearer for its failure. The bearer smiled and said to the pot, “Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because, I have always been aware of your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the village pond, you’ve watered them. And, I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the house. Without you being just the way you are, this beauty to grace his house would not have happened. Ha.. This is today’s story? You may not like it today… in future, someday, you will recall and realise this. What? We’re all cracked pots. In this world, nothing goes to waste. You may think like the cracked pot that you are inefficient or useless in certain areas of your life, but somehow these flaws can turn out to be a blessing in disguise. * Sweet Purpose – a poem by Wiseton Prins portrays exactly what I feel. Wisdom is not solely measured by experience But more by capacity for it I have glimpsed deep into history I have sieved through its successes ...for the soundest advice I could find Most profound I have received from the greatest achievers in its archives I choose to commit my heart entirely To the work I love best For it is this calling that shall liberate the sanctity of my humanity The world I dwell in fathoms not a shred of my quest For it views life through the lenses of reality The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

7 True as it may be that my work suffices not to endow me ...with common currency in these economic times The rationale of my perception discerns far beyond this temporary mist Let them roar their throats in laughter at my perceived stupidity But it is their children and their childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children that shall benefit most ...From this shelter of thoughts and dreams that for them I build * The Wagon is on in its second yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey. 14 editions have been published so for including a Macedonian special with Usha Akella, African special with Peter Ngila and Nyamu KJ, Ukrainian special with Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single. The overwhelming response makes me go ahead. There is plan on the anvil to come out with a couple of special editions, Odia and Assam literature in this year. However, to sustain and keep up the momentum, I need the support from your end too. Please subscribe, ask your friends to subscribe OR on their behalf, you can subscribe. That would help the Wagon to move forward smoothly, without any lurch. Thanking you in advance, Krishna Prasad a. k. a. Chithan

To subscribe or buy a copy, from anywhere in the world EXCEPT INDIA, please contact DK Agencies: pubrel@dkagencies.com

Copies to be delivered WITHIN INDIA, please contact: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

SOTTO VOCE INDIRA PARTHASARATHY

Bharati’s private voice. Once a saint was cursed to be a pig. He felt humiliated. So, he asked his son to kill him soon after the transformation. The moment his father became a pig, his obedient son approached him to put an end to his ‘cursed state’. However, his father had second thoughts. He told his son, ‘let me experience being a pig . You may come after a few months to kill me.’ When the son came after six months to carry out his father’s order, the saint- turned- pig told him that he really enjoyed being a pig and that he was reveling in the company of other boisterous pigs. ‘If you feel ashamed, you may kill yourself ’, he added. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

9 This is a story from one of the Upanishads, which Mahakavi Subhramaya Bharati narrates in a poem addressed to the goddess of poetry. He likens himself to the saint in the story. He says ‘when I was a young poet, I was committed to the Muse totally. But circumstances have led me to renounce my absolute dedication to pure poetry ‘ What does Bharati mean by ‘pure poetry?’ Apparently, Bharati had two voices in him and one was his private voice, rhapsodic, lyrical and spontaneous and the other, his public voice that led him to identify himself with the political and social causes of his slumbering nation. In a poem addressed to ‘Parasakthi’ (‘Primeval Power’), he says: ‘When I pray to you with the burning fire of intense love and appeal to you to bless me with words of power that will usher in a new era of social progress, you tell me, with a mysterious smile on your face, that a poem well-written is by itself the message and it should have no other thematic burden’ What is ‘Parasakthi’? Bharati describes it variously as ‘the sparkling soul of the Dark Night’, ‘Wisdom in stone’, ‘when time has a stop, the Eternity of the Moment’ and ‘ pure ecstasy well-expressed ‘. When he is in this mood, his voice is free-flowing, not given to any homiletic pressure. This is his private voice that has been, unfortunately, least studied by most of the Bharati scholars. ‘Kuyil Paattu’ (‘Cuckoo’s song) remarkably illustrates his private voice. It deals with neither a political nor a social issue. The poem reads like as though it wrote itself. It is in direct conversation with the reader, emanating, as it does from the inner voice of the poet. Bharati calls it ‘a dream’ and mischievously adds, which reads like a challenge, ‘if the learned Tamil scholars are able to find a philosophical meaning for this poem, let them tell me’. And, ‘the learned Tamil scholars’ did not disappoint him! One tried to find ‘the Paramatma and Jivatma relationship’ syndrome in the poem and another called it ‘the poet’s spiritual journey from the known to the unknown’. Many more such stuff and nonsense followed, while interpreting this poem. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

10 What, then, the poem tells us? It reads like a fairy tale, not committed to logic or reason. It is a fantasy, a dream a la Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. The dream constructs a story and there is a story within that story. The whole thing is an illusion and there are illusions within that illusion. It is like a wheel within a wheel and one is at a loss to know which an illusion is and which reality is. The reality comes at the end, as the poet wakes up to find himself, ‘living in his old house, surrounded by his ancient mat, writing pen and scattered manuscripts and magazines’. The recurring theme of love is expressed in exquisite poetry in a universal language, unburdened by thematic or critical conventions .It is a pure poem of sheer aesthetic charm that does not assume the moral responsibility of offering any message to the reader. The medium is the message.

Indira Parthasarathy is the pen name of

R.Parthasarathy, a noted Tamil writer and playwright. Kuyil Paattu is translated by Mr N V Subbaraman as ‘Cuckoo’s song. A portion of the book is placed here - Editor

…When flute has a crack Waste, waste, waste! “I pine for love, and if I am denied My preferred goal- death, I am to decide!” None can depict the deeds of the Divine? Of all the wonders created by thee Music divine designed par excellent! If blue skies and seas, green woods and trees great Nothing greater than the power-power Of hymns and songs on earth a miracle! Translator of ‘Kuyil Paattu’, N V Subbaraman is a bilingual poet. He blogs at: ENVIUS THOUGHTS. https://nvsr.wordpress.com. E mail id: nvsubbaraman@gmail.com The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

Letter from London - 7 from John Looker

Ghost Dances The phone call ended when my aunt said she was sorry but she had to go, it was time to leave for her ballet class. She is eighty-seven. Further down the family line we have a seventeen year old granddaughter who is studying dance. Her main studies are literature, history and theology – she is an intellectual girl – but dance is both a passion and a minor academic subject. Her school dance class recently made a brief trip to New York to watch performances and to visit a studio. You might wonder why New York, because our own country is not backward in dance. We took her recently to an evening of top-flight dance in Oxford where the renowned Rambert company were performing three breathtaking pieces from their repertoire. A third member of our family, a daughter-in-law, is a professional dancer and is an animateur with Rambert, working across eastern England to instruct teachers and senior students in the company’s world-class choreography. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

12 With all this talent around me, why is it that I have about as much flare for dance as the widowed Queen Victoria on a bad day? But certainly I enjoy watching dance, and another treat in Britain recently has been the weekly TV broadcasts from the BBCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;young dancer of the yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; competition which ranges from ballet to Kathak and Bharatanatyam from South Asia. If we consider the broad field of all the Arts, then dance and literature seem to be stationed at opposite wings: one is all body, the other all mind. They are both born from the imagination however and both can touch the heart. This dichotomy will become clearer if I tell you about Ghost Dances, the key item that night in Oxford. It had been choreographed by Christopher Bruce, a gifted dancer and choreographer who had

trained with Ballet Rambert, worked with leading dance companies in several countries and earned an international reputation. Ghost Dances was thrilling. It entered the mind through sight and sound and made the heart beat faster. Being such a sensual experience, it cannot be conveyed adequately in words. And yet there is something to tell you that was not apparent in the dance itself. The performance began with a darkened stage before a backdrop of mountain peaks seen through mist. Three male dancers appeared, their faces impassive, just masks with deep black eye sockets The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

13 and wild hair, their bodies painted to indicate skeletons. As they began to dance there was no music – only the sound of wind rushing. It was eerie, mesmerising. Then Andean pipes began to whistle softly and we could pick out the notes of a stringed instrument plucked gently. As the rhythm intensified, the dancers suddenly paused and then moved in unison towards the audience, their masked faces staring out expressionless. The rhythm became insistent, led by drums. Then a change of pace: the music was gentler now and half a dozen figures in country dress moved slowly onto the stage. The masked figures receded. The music lightened. It became peaceful, Arcadian. Prominent among the country dancers were a woman in a red dress, a man in a jacket. But the masked dancers emerged from the shadows from time to time – the music ceasing, the sound of wind returning – to seize and carry off one of the country folk. It was evident that the masked skeletal figures were a sinister presence, their interventions compelling, presumably fatal. But who were they exactly, and who were these country people? Where was the mountain scene and what was going on? Music and dance, needing no words, are able to reach people of any language. Whether the audience spoke English or Tamil, Japanese or Maori, made no difference. The sensual and emotional appeal was direct. But the subtler questions went unanswered, unless you opened the programme. Those who read English would learn this: Ghost Dances was inspired by a book which describes the horrors of the Pinochet regime in Chile (An Unfinished Song by Joan Jara). This seventeen-year dictatorship, which came into power following a military coup d’état in 1973, became infamous for its oppression, kidnappings, torture and secret executions. Reading the Rambert programme notes, the dance took on a darker colour. This was not only Death or Fate intervening in the life of Everyman or Everywoman but a representation of infamy. It takes language to bring a sharper definition. I am reminded that the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, was considered a threat by the Chilean dictatorship and his death has been attributed to poisoning. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

14 The programme notes also told us that “Ghost Dances absorbed many cultural influences from Latin America, its rituals, masks and fascination with the Day(s) of the Dead. Christopher Bruce was particularly intrigued by primitive South American Indian rituals, where the dead were celebrated in ceremonies at which elaborate skull masks were worn by ‘ghost dancers’. The dead were cremated and made into a ‘soup’ which was ingested by the tribe members. As Bruce said, ‘I liked the idea of the dead living on within those who are alive’ “. Finally, we also read that the dance could, tragically, relate to events in many countries across the world. Reading the notes, layer upon layer of influence and intention are uncovered. On the other hand, simply in watching, the audience is moved and transported – and any amount of personal interpretations become possible. The dance was premiered in England in 1981 – so this was a revival, one among many. Our daughter-inlaw, the animateur for Rambert, has taught Bruce’s choreography. Our granddaughter has studied Ghost Dances for her school course. I haven’t asked my aunt whether she would like to perform in it.

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 (through Amazon) 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 ‘When Time and Space Conspire’, an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Austin International Poetry Festival. His blog, Poetry from John Looker, is at https://johnstevensjs.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

15 PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

YONASON GOLDSON

Footnotes Impressions, Through a scarlet haze, And shockwaves, From each passing phase Take flight, take wing, Pretend to sing, But truly, They don’t mean a thing. Insight, Hindsight, I-don’t-mind-sight; Can you see to find the way That carries us from day to day -Or is there none? What’s done is done. The die is cast. All’s lost Or won. Academic ignorance Of symbiotic circumstance Entailing only random chance Is such a shame. A formula less erudite Perhaps could have success despite Evidence not to the contrary. But tell me: who’s to blame? The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

There was a time, That waxed sublime, A moment bought Without a thought, But that was then. So when again, As shadows fall, Do we begin? Confusion, Self-delusion, Slightly frightful inobtrusion All askew, Are only footnotes on a page, Wild beasts within a cage, When Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m with you.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson, a talmudic scholar and former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, a keynote speaker with 3000 yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experience and newspaper columnist, lives with his wife in St.Louis, Missourie, where he teaches, writes, and lectures. His latest book, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages, is available on Amazon. Visit him at http://proverbsandprovidence.com. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

NEELA PADMANABHAN

ONE HUNDRED Inside and outside, loneliness blankets again. * Sounds, noises, voices stave off her ears. kith and kin, friends and others approach her in earnest, closely trying hard to pay their respects and affections by facial expressions, signs and hand movements. Making her to apply the holy ash on their heads and foreheads, Seeking her blessings by prostrating and touching her feet in esteem, one by one to the mike to lecture long with obvious body language, movements of facial muscles, expressions through eyes, symmetrical gestures of hands; Others as audience seated in front The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

18 applauded and laughed aloud encouraging; Flashes of cameras blind the eyes. After sumptuous feast with numerous dishes, hollow words in gossip, sons and daughters grand children, great grand children dear, near and distant ones neighbours and friends all depart with sweet packets, leaving behind withering garlands, shiny shawls, fruits, sweets, discarded colour papers and twines and other packing materials of gifts they brought. As all functions do it ended auspiciously… She returned to her old abode of two rooms… Inside and outside, loneliness blankets again.

Neela Padmanabhan (b.1938) is a leading figure in the arena of Tamil literature, but writing in Malayalam and English too. An engineer by profession, a humanist by instinct, he has straddled the scene like a Colossus, creating novels (20), short stories (170) and poems (160) and critical essays (150) that have found warm reception from the readers. An eminent litterateur, he celebrated his 75th birth anniversary on April 26, a couple of weeks before he was honoured by ‘Ilakkiya Chinthanai’, one of the prominent Tamil literary organisations in the State, for his contribution to literature. To encourage young writers, he instituted two awards titled ‘Neela Padmam’ and ‘Thalaimuraikal’ for best poem and short story respectively, through the Thiruvananthapuram Tamil Sangam. He can be reached at: http://www.neelapadmanabhan.com/ The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

The Wanderer

Andrew Fleck

Wanderer on worms One of the greatest of the poets of the First World War, Isaac Rosenberg is remembered best for poems evoking the close up details of life on the front, right down to its smallest, dirtiest aspects. One of his poems, Louse Hunting, describes men, trying hopelessly to clean ‘a shirt verminously busy’ with lice; another,Break of Day in the Trenches, with an ironic nod towards Rosenberg’s Jewish roots, or rather to the negative stereotypes of Jews of his age, addresses a ‘sardonic rat’ with ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’-one who runs between the British and German camps without any particular national sympathy. In his anthology of First World War Poetry, however, Tim Kendall chose to start the selection of Rosenberg’s with the short prophetic poem that begins: A worm fed on the heart of Corinth, Babylon and Rome. Not Paris raped tall Helen, But this incestuous worm The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

20 As verminous as the poems quoted above this may be, but the vermin in question here is a strictly metaphorical fellow – the worm of corruption that, as Rosenberg saw it, caused the destruction of four great Empires– Corinth, Babylon, Rome and Troy – and would, he goes on to warn, consume a fifth: England. It would not occur to many observers of the First World War, then or now, to blame the slaughter of the war on the corruption of the British Empire – most pin the blame more squarely at the feet of the Kaiser (and I tend to agree); but, as his reference points show, Rosenberg takes a rather longer view of events. Rosenberg’s worm has a definite sexual connotation, but I don’t think Rosenberg means to say that England is doomed because of its licentiousness; rather the ‘seduction’ or rape is a metaphor for the fatal weakening of a civilization’s resolve by the corruptions of greed, self-enrichment, nepotism and exploitation. In any case, it is an inspired choice to introduce the reader to Rosenberg, putting the sordid details of war in a wider perspective. As in Rosenberg’s poem, the worm of William Blake’s The Sick Rose has obvious sexual connotations, but this poem too may have a political meaning: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night Through the howling storm Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The poem is from Blake’s Songs of Experience, a companion to the Songs of Innocence, and the poem does indeed seem to be about the corruption of young innocence by the old and lustful. But – if we take the rose as a symbol of England, as it often is, it could as easily be about the corruption of the idyllic Albion of Blake’s imagination by the corruptions of the age he lived in – of industry, rationalism, Empire. Of course, the poem is so resonant and ambiguous it could support a number of interpretations. To contemporaries of Blake, the The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

21 worm would have been reminiscent of the serpent of Eden, whose temptation of Eve led to the expulsion of man from paradise. Certainly, the worm seems to have some impressively devilish powers – whoever heard of a worm that flies through the night? Well, the Anglo-Saxons certainly had. The dragon in Beowulf, the great epic poem of old English, is sometimes called the wyrm, a word the Anglo-Saxons used for anything from a maggot to a giant serpent. This is odd to speakers of modern English, but it may have reflected a general belief about the link between small serpentine creatures and giant ones. I believe there are old Japanese and Korean folk tales of tiny worms lurking in small pools that become great dragons. Growing up in the north east of England, we sang a song at school called The Lambton Worm, a nineteenth century music hall song in the local dialect, based on a medieval legend in which a local knight finds a strange worm – perhaps an eel or lamprey– in the river Wear, and throws it back, only to find that when he is away fighting the Crusades: the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed, An’ grewed an aaful size; He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob, An greet big googly eyes. The worm ravages the lands around the Wear, swallowing cows, sheep and children whole until Sir Lambton returns. The knight dispatches the worm, with the method recommended by a local wise woman of covering his armour in spikes so that the greedy serpent chops itself to pieces when it wraps itself around the hero. From the ‘wyrm’ of Beowulf, to Saint George’s dragon and the Lambton Worm, it seems the English have something of a penchant for slaying dragons, or worms. If such great dragons, as opposed to little worms, have any relation to corruption, it is in the legend that he guards a great hoard of gold, the greed for which brings destruction down on man. Tolkien, who borrowed the imagery of the dragon’s hoard for The Hobbit, was alive to the sense of the dragon’s wrath as a symbol of the devastation that overweening greed for money or power can bring. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

22 Tolkien readers may also remember a character called Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings. He was the evil counsellor, working for the forces of evil, who poured evil counsel into the befuddled King of Rohan. As in Middle Earth, so in the Middle Ages – and into Tudor times, people preferred to blame a monarch’s ‘evil counsellors’ for his failings rather than the monarch himself. When Henry Bolingbroke raised a rebellion against Richard II at the opening of the 15th century, he sought foremost to restore the rights to his land that the king had stripped of him, but also to rid the court of the clique of new men and flatterers who enriched themselves at the expense of the country (or at least at the expense of the old nobility that Bolingbroke represented). In Shakespeare’s Richard II, written in Elizabeth’s reign almost two hundred years after the events it depicted, Bolingbroke, after landing in England, calls the King’s clique The caterpillars of the commonwealth, Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away The caterpillar metaphor is elaborated upon later in the play, when the queen overhears two gardeners complain of the realm’s corruption, asking why they should tend their garden so carefully When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars? If ‘caterpillars’, rather than ‘worms’, sounds a rather light insult to modern ears, bear in mind that for an agricultural country, few creatures could be as loathsome as those that destroy vegetation (while, as any gardener knows, worms – earthworms at least – are actually good for your garden). The accusation levelled at the corrupt courtiers in Shakespeare’s Richard II is that they have used for their own ends, and destroyed, resources that belong to the commonweal, just as a caterpillar destroys a garden and the fruits that are meant for the enjoyment of all. For a person living in the sixteenth century, a devastated garden makes perfect sense as a metaphor for a ruined country. Some thirty years later William Browne of Tavistock used the The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

23 motif of gardens as Shakespeare had before him: A rose as fair as ever saw the north Grew in a little garden all alone; A sweeter flower did Nature ne’er put forth, Nor fairer garden yet was never known Browne continues his sonnet by describing the Arcadian delights of this garden – dancing maids and fairies and what not, but… But welladay! The gardener careless grew; The maids and fairies both were kept away; And in a drought the caterpillars threw Themselves upon the bud and every spray. ‘Careless gardener’ is a fair description of James I, who was a notorious spendthrift and was ridiculously generous to his friends and favourites. Although his reign was by no means a bad time for the country, it was known for the favour-seekers who would swarm around court, hungry for titles, sinecures and privileges; it was a common in his reign for people to look back with nostalgia at Elizabeth’s reign and exaggerate its glories. It seems likely that Blake writing a century and a half on, had been influenced by Browne and Shakespeare and other poets who had used such garden imagery with a political message. On the way, the caterpillar was replaced by the worm, but the connotation is the same –that which eats away, that which destroys. And from its insistent appearance in our literature through the centuries, we see this worm, caterpillar, or dragon– this corruption – is an eternal presence in the garden, or as Rosenberg has it, the heart of England, indeed of any human society. But of course, we can also see this merely by opening the newspapers. Credits: All the poems in this article are available on the internet. There is a fine selection of Rosenberg’s poetry and some illuminating biographical notes in Poetry of the First World War, Ed. Tim Kendall, Oxford World’s Classics, London 2013. The Lambton Worm song was written by Clarence L. Leumane( d. 1928) The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

April edition, with special concentration on Ukrainian Literature, was welcomed by one and all. Due to page restrictions, a couple of articles were kept in abeyance. I am happy to place them here. Also, there is the column written by C. S. Lakshmi and I wish I had it for the previous edition. -Krishna Prasad

What’s the Buzz BY TATIANA ALEKSINA The day had turned out to be really nice. It was late March, or early April, I don’t remember. Who cares about calendars when the sun warms your belly so pleasantly? I stretched and yawned. I happily glided between wakefulness and slumber. Maja’s winglets shone and lured me. And I could swear they were buzzing with a rendition of ‘Sweet Painted Lady’. I was lulled and aroused… It was getting hot, so I took cover under the leaves. I don’t know how long I was drowsing, but I woke up because of human yells. I sighed. There’s nothing they enjoy better than making noise and mess. And they call us a plague, don’t they? The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

25 The yelling got closer and louder. The ground quaked, the bush shook. Drunk guffaws and ribaldry ripped this calm day in two like a butcher’s knife, beat the bejesus out of it. Someone brayed, ‘Jujube! Regale the King with sweet savouries!’ The crowd ululated and rushed to the bush. Holy Royal Hexapods! What were they going to do?! It smelled of trouble, and I decided it was high time to bug out of this unfortunate plant. I made to leap off and… nothing happened. Reprobate Polyphagas! What the hell? I had a shot at jumping a few times in a row but it was in vain. The sun which had caressed me so pleasantly had also played a low-down trick on me. My back leg had tightly glued to a drop of melted resin. I made the only decision I could. I huddled under a leaf, sat tight and didn’t move. All I could do was to wait out this mayhem. I have indistinct memories of what happened next. There was a snapping of the bush then someone bending a bagel shape out of twigs. I was like a poppy seed on its surface. There were cries of ‘Must die!’ and ‘Hosanna!’ A cacophony of voices, laughing and crying… the thick smell of blood. The smell drove me crazy. I was twitching like an epileptic and trying to escape this crowned trap. We’re not freaking grigs. We don’t enjoy the stench of flesh. I can’t bear this smell. I just can’t. Desperately, I sank my jaws into my stifled joint… It grew dark. I hobbled slowly. At least I’d escaped with my life and other limbs intact. After all, it was only a leg. I had another five. And wings! That poor guy now dangling from a cross was definitely having a much worse day than I. Damn. I have wings! Why not just go? I took to the air and laid a course for Horeb. Everybody knows that the best nymphet stews are there, and I really need some rest now.

“My bio is laid inside my writings... or is lied. I’m not too sure. Yes, guys, English isn’t my native language, but I have the impudence to write in English anyway “- TETIANA ALEKSINA The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

A review of Mario Savioni’s poem, “The Sea is Watching” By Marta Pombo Sallés MARIO SAVIONI Mario has written a number of books, mostly prose-poetry and so far one photography table-top book. Mario’s accomplishments include graphic design projects for The San Francisco Opera, a 300+ series of images called Urban Reflections, representation in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California, and various literary works.

The Sea is Watching In some complacent nest, I saw the open door – The extraordinary field of innocence. She weeps having not expected To be a party to purity. It is a field of fog at the end of the lake, Where the weeds swirl. He says, “I do not need tea.” Again, the swirling field. He walks alone along the edge. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

27 Do you know the sound of water lapping? A sun setting behind reeds? He hears laughter not meant for him And words: “Death waits not on age.” “The young sometimes die before the old.” She loves him, this slayer of rice paper. She races in winter to free him. They cry on a bridge. She is shadowed. Young lovers. Spring comes. Spring is the answer. Or is it summer? In it, I see the weakness of men, And a woman’s burden is to trust. But we are not strong enough To carry the weight of ourselves Through this eagerness. Laughter there is none. A bloodied mouth, the searing wind, As if evil came, Then rain, a purity. The field weak now, Showers pouring, The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

28 A storm, Things breaking, And then suddenly it stops. Who is the wiser? So much lucky red silk – Floating debris. Two women wait, While the sea is watching. It is like Noah, And so they sit Looking at stars from a rooftop. It is about men and their gentleness, As she waves the lantern in space And sees the shooting star.

A review By Marta Pombo Sallés I was rereading Mario Savioni’s book entitled ‘After’ (http://www.

blurb.com/b/1986861-after) and had a closer look at the poem “The Sea is

Watching”.

I like it very much as a poem, having found inspiration in the Japanese movie of the same title: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0316829/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

To me, the whole poem sounds musical, especially when I read it aloud from the book and also listening to its reading by the poet aloud on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-BEgmRZw1s

This is my interpretation of the poem: The “complacent nest” could be a euphemism for ‘brothel house’. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

29 The “field of innocence” is something I associate with Oshin. She is an innocent prostitute because she still believes in love although she is a sex worker. She falls in love twice. She weeps because the promise of marriage with Fusanosuke has not been fulfilled. She is not “a party to purity.” There seems to be a ‘he’, not wanting tea and ‘walking along the edge’, either Fusanosuke or maybe it is the second chance she gets when she falls in love again with Ryosuke. The word “edge” also suggests ‘risk’. Could they be the “young lovers”? There is death, someone younger dying that could refer to Ryosuke killing Kikuno’s customer. The coming of spring suggests the lovers’ season par excellence. The beginning of love. Summer would mean this love is already ripe. I also see the traditional man-woman roles. “The weakness of men” who are supposed to be so strong but they are weak with the pleasures of the flesh as they need prostitutes and sex, often abusing women. Luckily the rain and the storm seem to come as an opportunity for purity, for the prostitutes to clean themselves and to get rid of this life. The “lucky red silk” appears to me as the symbol for the brothel, now a “floating debris”. The two women sit and wait on the rooftop, a symbol for an anchor where they can hold on to. “The shooting star” is hope, a wish that someone will come and rescue them from the flood, maybe the second he, Oshin’s second opportunity in life, that is, Ryosuke coming by boat.

Marta is an English and German high school teacher from Barcelona, Catalonia. She studied English and German Language and Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She got her degree in 1992. She has always loved arts, literature and languages. In her free time she writes poems and short stories mainly in English but also in Catalan (her first language), German and Spanish. She also loves dancing. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

30 MUSINGS OF AN AXOLOTL

C.S.LAKSHMI

Distant Thunders, Distant Deaths

When Ukraine was mentioned first, the only event that loomed large in my mind was the Holodomor, the genocide of the 1930s, in which millions died due to forced starvation. I had also seen a video of survivors who were very old now but still remembered the horrors of death by starvation. They recalled people being killed for not surrendering the grains, of children begging, of hunger overtaking The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

31 mothers who ate their children. And the video was done so that the world remembers this genocide. There is also a museum that documents this genocide. Later I read a very poignant review by Olena Hirna published on Amazon. com of the novel Sweet Snow by Alexander J Motyl. She writes: 80 years after the Ukrainian genocide of 1933, Alexander J. Motyl speaks for those millions of â&#x20AC;&#x153;saintsâ&#x20AC;? who died quietly of famine, devilishly orchestrated by Stalin and his sadistic GPU, and most of whom had never had their voices heard even in their native tongue, let alone English, understood by every educated person in the world. This is a much needed novel based on memoirs, documents, statistics and facts, retold in families from generation to generation. Millions of peasants: men, women, children died in their village huts, in the fields or on the roads, while looking for food, after being robbed of everything, last bag of seeds included, by armed Bolsheviks. Those who resisted were murdered on the spot, priests and village elders crucified in their own churches. This is the genocide, which even descendants of the descendants of the executors are afraid to admit, happened in the middle of the famously fertile land of Central Europe. Their hateful denial is obvious to the world even today. That is why the topic of this novel is so actual that it gives us the knowledge about what autocratic military regimes may lead toâ&#x20AC;Ś The novel Sweet Snow, which I hope to read, is situated in the Ukrainian countryside where a terrible famine is raging and it is winter. It is about how four different people, a German nobleman from Berlin, a Jewish communist from New York, a Polish diplomat from Lwow, and a Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna come to share a cell in some The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

32 unknown prison. At some point they escape miraculously and wander around the completely devastated region to see desolated villages and frozen corpses and the novel is about how they deal with what they see and their own lives and the question of mortality. I also found out that the Ukrainian Museum Archives (UMA)

had the 1933 famine edition of T H Shevchenko’s Kobzar with illustrations by Vasyl Sedliar (1899-1937). Shevchenko had written Kobzar in the nineteenth century. The famine edition, however, had 48 full-page sketches by Sedliar with accompanying verses from Shevchenko’s poems, making it clear that Sedliar and his editor, Andriy Richytsky (1890-1934), were commenting on Stalin’s Famine and not Tsarist Russia. Both Sedliar and his editor Richytsky had been arrested by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and shot dead. Continuous efforts are made to keep the memory of this genocide alive in the minds of the later generations to warn them about what a totalitarian regime can do. It was during the course of understanding these various efforts that I came across this poster: The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

33 The poster was by Leonid Denysenko with the title â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why!?â&#x20AC;?, a 550mm x 400 mm, Graphic art on paper, black ink & gouache done in 2008. It was a poster commemorating the Ukrainian Holodomor. As a student of history I know that there have been many famines in India. The most remembered where more than five million died was the great famine of 1876-78. It was also a fabricated famine when Indian grains were exported and the Indian population allowed dying of starvation. It was after this that many began to seek foreign shores to find jobs as labourers. Jeyamohan has written a novel in Tamil on this famine. There are also others who recall famines in their oral history narrations. But the one famine I clearly remember is the 1943 Bengal famine, a famine that occurred a year before I was born. It was clearly a famine that was created by an administration that did not worry about how peasants died. Nearly four million had died in this famine. I found out recently that there were drawings done by the Bangladeshi artist, Zoinul Abedin on the Bengal famine. A drawing of his, painted in Chinese ink on paper, showing a family struck by the Bengal Famine, was used as the cover image of the book Darkening Days by Ela Sen in 1943. The book which chronicled the Bengal famine was banned by the British authorities. The painting on the cover of the book in black ink tells many stories. I began looking for other drawings of Zoinul Abedin and found a few of them The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

34 which were equally haunting in their imagery in black brush strokes. Those of us who appreciate the contribution of cinema to history and our lives know about Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) based on the story by Bhibutibhushan Bandopadhyay, which is on the Bengal famine of 1943. I had seen it many times. What I remembered was that Satyajit Ray, unlike his earlier films, had decided to make this film in colour. I can still recall the scene where a woman dies muttering “Rice.” Many of us argued then that Satyajit Ray had tried to “beautify” death not only by his choice of making it in colour but also by the way he shot death. There was also the film by Mrinal Sen made in 1960 called Baishey Sharavan (Wedding Day) where he talks of a newly married couple caught in a famine situation. In 1980, Sen made Akaler Sandhaney (in Search of Famine). Both these films are referred to and analysed in the article “Center, Periphery, and Famine in Distant Thunder and In Search of Famine” by Dharmasena Pathiraja and David Hanan in the book Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land by Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield brought out by the Wayne University Press in 2006. Should such man-made mass deaths become part of a museum, I wonder often. What makes it necessary to chronicle death, document it and make it part of a museum like the way the Holodomor genocide or the holocaust has been? The question arises often when communal riots happen in India and when one reads continuing news about farmers’ suicides. Then I feel that it is important to document death to know about life. We can’t know what life is and its value, unless we know in what shapes death can happen and who can bring them about. Totalitarian regimes, ruthless colonizers, a class of greedy people, who care only for themselves, groups of people filled by hatred for certain groups of others can all bring about deaths of a large group of people. It is important to make museums of such deaths in the form of stories, poems, drawings and The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

35 paintings and films. We have documented the Partition and the 1943 famine and many other such disasters that have affected the people. But a museum is what we need to visit these events time and again, so we never forget what human beings can do to one another when they become powerful enough to inflict death through ideology, policies and hatred. Taras Shevshenko may have written these lines in the nineteenth century for Ukraine but, for me, these lines from a long poem “To the Dead, the Living, and to Those Yet Unborn, My Countrymen all Who Live in Ukraine and Outside Ukraine”, have been written for all times: Day dawns, then comes the twilight grey, The limit of the live-long day; For weary people sleep seems best And all God’s creatures go to rest. I, only, grieve like one accursed, Through all the hours both last and first, Sad at the crossroads, day and night, With no one there to see my plight; No one can see me, no one knows me; All men are deaf, no ears disclose me; Men stand and trade their mutual chains And barter truth for filthy gains, Committing shame against the Lord By harnessing for black reward People in yokes and sowing evil In fields commissioned by the Devil… And what will sprout? You soon will see What kind of harvest there will be!... Look well into our history’s store And read it closely, o’er and o’er; That glorious tale you may have heard,— But take it slowly, word by word; No punctuation mark omit, For even commas lend their bit; The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

36 Examine everything you see; Then ask yourselves: Now, who are we? Whose children? Of what fathers born? By whom enslaved in utter scorn? Then only will you understand The Brutuses of this your land Slaves, grovellers of Muscovy And Warsaw’s refuse, such will be The illustrious hetmans you applaud! And have you something then to laud, Sons of Ukraine, where misery chokes? Perhaps that you walk well in yokes, More nobly than your fathers walked? Don’t boast that you have bravely stalked: Your hides are being tanned, though callow, But they were often boiled for tallow!...

C S Lakshmi is a researcher and a writer

who writes in the pen name - Ambai. She is one of the founder trustees of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) and currently its director. Kobzar (Ukrainian: The bard), is a book of poems by Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko,first published by him in 1840 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Taras Shevchenko was nicknamed ‘The Kobzar’ after the publishing of this book. Publication of the work was forbidden by the ‘Ems Ukase’, which forbade the publishing of Ukrainian-language literature. This prompted the publication of the work in non-Russia-ruled lands, such as in Prague (now in the Czech Republic) and Germany. Literally, ‘kobzar’ in Ukrainian means a bard, although not a regular one, but rather the one who along with singing plays on a musical instrument, ‘kobza’. In the contemporary Ukrainian the word is being more associated with the famous Ukrainian series of poetic literary works and for which Taras Shevchenko was given the same nickname. Kobza is roughly similar to a guitar. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

POEM -

Dilantha Gunawardana

THE WAGON I have no jeweled throne Just a trusting commode, though with cracks, That still gives me something beautiful A blissful feeling of relief and levity. I have a palanquin though Mounted on two legs and sometimes Crawling on four limbs and my wife Habitually gets inside my portable home For a little ride to La La land. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m no deity - I can never ride a juggernaut. I will never own a chariot nor have I the affluence To own a Suzuki Baleno or a Honda Vezel. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

38 I will always be a rugged old wagon That will make the long miles On a bureau desk and shorter miles On a coir mattress, in the circadian cycles Of work and play. And all I ask is that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m worthy one day.... When fate the bullock Will pull me towards somewhere beautiful, As mythical as my wedding night. When I will look at that little wagon Peacefully asleep next to my blooming wife Demanding me for a pledge To be his trustworthy ox Who will guide his wagon down mileposts Of his own inimitable story.

Dr Dilantha Gunawardana is a molecular biologist who grad-

uated from the University of Melbourne. He moonlights as a poet. His poems have been accepted/published in Forage, American Journal of Poetry, Kitaab, Eastlit and Ravens Perch. He mixes science with poetry, when what matters is the expression of both DNA and words into something serendipitous. Although an Australian citizen, Dilantha is domiciled in Sri Lanka, his country of birth. He blogs at - https://meandererworld.wordpress.com/ The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

FLASH FICTION

Leah Holbrook Sackett

Pieces of Pride

Betty was sobbing deep, panicked sobs. Her index finger and thumb were glued together and stuck to a tissue. She could not wipe the tears and snot from her face without becoming further stuck in her situation of Guerilla Glue. The culprit for the broken Fat Friar Cookie jar was the cat, Mr. Bumbles, but the guilty party was Betty. Mr. Bumble’s clumsiness and her greed had brought the Fat Friar to his shattered end on the tiled laundry room floor. Now, the cat sat nearby licking himself; immune to her tears. She should have just left things alone. But she’d had the damn cookie jar on her mind; so she unpacked it to consider it, but all she could think of were broken stories to tell her sister Virginia. It all started 20 years ago when their mother passed away. Betty had assumed she would take the Fat Friar Cookie jar. It was full of so many memories. She had not anticipated Virginia would want it too and claim it first. During the packing, Betty had slipped the Fat Friar Cookie jar under some old linen in one of her boxes. Later, when Virginia had unpacked everything at her home, she came up a Fat Friar short. She called Betty, and Betty lied. “I have no idea where the cookie jar is,” she said as the Fat Friar beamed up at her from her dining room table. A few months later, when her sister and her family were coming over for Easter, Betty hid the Fat Friar up in her bedroom. Over the years, the Fat Friar moved from prime locations of pride to corners of iniquity. Even once Betty and Virginia had all but ceased talking, the Fat Friar would sit out on the kitchen counter full of ginger snaps. However, with time, comes age, and Betty The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

40 feared that her secret would either come out after she had passed or her sister would pass without them mending their relationship. Both scenarios filled Betty with dread and remorse. It was in a moment of regret that she dumped the cookies into the trash and wrapped the Fat Friar in a kitchen towel and tucked him away on a shelf of the laundry room. He began to shadow her with thoughts of exposure. She was now haunted by her selfishness in the form of a muffled Fat Friar. Consumed with shame, she un-wrapped the Fat Friar one afternoon to look her sins in the face, albeit a chubby porcelain face. When the doorbell rang, Betty set the cookie jar on top of the dryer and scurried to the front door. In the mean time, the rather wide Mr. Crumbles jumped down from his perch on a shelf stuffed with Tide, Bounce, and linens. In addition, he bumped that Fat Friar to the floor. If it were possible, Betty would have paid any price, one that would even exceed the value of the cookie jar, to set things right. Her husband stood silent behind her with his large worn out hand on the small of her back as she frantically tried to piece the Friar back together, but there were little pieces missing. And, all of the cracks were obvious with their tiny gapping maws. The cookie jar could never be completely whole again. Betty became angry and blaming of her sister at first, for her fierce determination and tenacious reach for this Fat Friar. Protective of her pride in the face of the truth with nothing to cover up her sin at that moment, she felt her sister forever slipping away. A shard. Lost. Gone.

Leah Holbrook Sackett is an adjunct lecturer in the English department at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

POEM -

Serkan Engin All the Notes of the World Symphony

I am a red Laz boat cruising on the mountains of Kurdistan where my Kurd and Turk brothers are burning by falling on the ground syllable by syllable None of the requiems is able to express the pain of the stone-throwing Kurdish children raped in the hell prisons of Fascist-Kemalism I picked up Armenian roses from my dreams against racism in Turkey The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

42 Impish sparrows of my hope are warbling Lazish on the shoulder of the life I am kissing in Greek the wet sentences of the night in the moonlight I am hugging the spring in Zazaki from the most petted place of its waist We were burned million times at Auschwitz where conscience was dead Our dreams were bayoneted 72.000 times in Dersim with disgusting smile of savageness We were toys for torture plays in Iraq with American style “freedom” We were Alevi people shot street by street from the heart of the civilization in the cities of Maras and Corum We were 353.000 Pontian Greeks massacred by racist desires of bloody epaulets Western “civilization” ignored the slaughtered flowers on our collars in Srebrenitsa Our Armenian lullabies were annihilated 1.500.000 times in the bosom of Ararat They broke the arms of our freedom with stone in Palestine They chopped our childish enthusiasm with machetes in Rwanda

The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

43 While profit pyramids of pharaoh arms industry companies are raising mephistophelian on dollar basis While the chairs and epaulets of glutton selfishness are growing fat I refuse to add even one more letter at the tail of warmongering sentences Because I love all notes of the world symphony

Socialist Laz-Turk poet and author Serkan Engin was born in 1975 in Izmit, Turkey. His poems and articles on poetry theory have appeared in more than fifty literary journals in Turkey. In 2004, he published a poem manifesto, entitled Imagist Socialist Poetry. He has been trying to launch a new movement in Turkish poetry and to this end has published numerous articles about literary theory. His poems and articles on poetry theory have been published in English in many international literary journals all over the world. He is the first Turkish poet in history who has written a poem on Armenian Genocide. His poem named â&#x20AC;&#x153;Barbarian and Ms Daisyâ&#x20AC;? which has been dedicated to the victims of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides has been accepted to the Armenian Poetry Project in 2015. His political articles on Islam and also Armenian, Assyrian, Greek genocides have been published in many countries in many languages including Sweden, USA, Greece, India, France, Argentina, Netherland, Armenia, Indonesia and Finland. http://paperboatsofpoetry.blogspot.com.tr/ The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

POEM -

MOHAMMAD SHAFIQUL ISLAM

PASSPORT I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to make fences for division among Humans having the same skin and life style, the same Eye colour, eating almost the same dish from birth till Death, and loving each other the same way. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

45 Any boundary between the two lands, but there exists Invisible lines one shouldn’t cross without documents The Kushiara winds its way, I cross the river by a boat And see lots of birds flying from this part to the other Cheerfully giving no thought over passports or signatures Fish swim across water on both sides, see people walking Along both banks, but don’t identify difference, can’t Say where they belong. To be humans makes all the Difference – you’re fated to suffer oblique looks. You’re A legal traveler, they stare! Keep waiting, they have time To gossip. Wait, they’re tired of enjoying leisure in the Office. Let them keep you seated, more, and after hours You sign, go to another office to see them chew paan and Watch television – serials or action films. They’re glued to The screen. How dare you disturb them! Jibanananda Das Appears before you, you deeply wish to be reborn as a bird 1. Kushiara: Kushiara is the name of the river that serves as an international border separating Assam, India, from Bangladesh. 2. Paan: Paan literally means ‘betel leaf ’. It is chewed like a chewinggum, but it is also nutritious. 3. Jibanananda Das: Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is recognized as one of the most acclaimed poets of Bengali literature The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

I BLEED WORDS FOR YOU I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what I write for you, still my soul searches for words to admire you in verse. Letters play with me, fly over my head like mists, slyly slink, fall in numerous droplets. I continue drifting to bring them together, deepen with wistful feels and subtle emotions. Words buzz like mosquitoes, wish my inertia, see random wriggles in my veins. I struggle, my head spins, pain begins to grow, social eyes throw me into an abyss. Beetles crawl, I close my eyes, and with a palette of colors, strive to paint your portraits. Vinci, my hero, appears, and I see my Mona Lisa smile. A purple flower blooms. I dream within a dream â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you love clouds, my life seeks haven in your wings. I bleed words for you. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

IN SEARCH OF LIGHT Crawling on surging streams Striding along jarring roads Passing sleepless nights I searched for light in soul Talking to birds for hours Tweeting to shadows at daylight Writing letters to the dead I continued search for light Whenever a glimmer winks at my soul I find a ray of hope The world seems to cheer me up Maybe a message of mirage! I look at the sky, clouds play I look at the grass, leaves smile I look at the sea, waves dance A new dream I begin to see Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no end to miseries The populace are visited on every day Corpses float in rivers The bright are hacked to death

The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

48 Rapists laugh, victims in fear Killers prepare for another massacre Writers, publishers aren’t spared Militants walk on dead bodies Question leaks devastate education Intellectual deformities dominate Traffic jams in megacities worsen The greedy grab land, rivers dry The day starts with usual sunrise Sunshine doesn’t last long Politicians pretend to be wise

MY LAST EVENING AT THE PARK STREET A little confusion, where to pass the quiet evening Suddenly Oxford Bookstore comes into mind And I walk all alone along the Park Street Amid horns of vehicles, hues and cries of so many Young boys and girls eating street fuska, potato Chops, chatpatti, peanuts or tea – they don’t have Any intent to interfere with others. Some skinny Children of poor parents from slums Keep their eyes on running vehicles, passersby The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

49 And the people inside cars maybe to find How much different the color of their blood is Their eyes are still red, thanks to sleeplessness Night after night. Getting into the bookstore, I enter the world of books, explore poetry, Buy some favourites, have iced coffee and join in A quiet adda on poetry. She comes in, sits beside me, Fills the space with an aura of poetry as if A fresh poem, just printed out for recitation. Her hair Is like cascades, eyes as black as kohl, lips as lissome As peaches. She smiles to make me oblivious Of agonies Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been suffering for a thousand years We exchange glances and smiles, know more, Get to Au Bon Pain to have the last coffee together And talk poetry for the last time at the Park Street. Fuska: Fuska is a snack, a kind of street food. Chatpatti: Chatpatti is a snack, kind of street food with a mixture of hot and tangy spices.

MOHAMMAD SHAFIQUL ISLAM,

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet 3114, Bangladesh. He is the author of three books: Wings of Winds (Poetry, 2015), Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories (Translation, 2016) and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad (Translation, 2017). In February 2017, he was a poet-in-residence under at the Anuvad Arts Festival, India. His areas of special interest include poetry, short fiction and translation from Bengali into English. Email: msijewel@gmail.com. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

POEM -

Denis Waswa Barasa

Cry of a soldierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s widow What lies beneath this tomb? Politely tucked in privacy and aplomb Above a rock as hard as steel Between fine linen and quite still A matter of life and death A matter of a thousand battered breaths What lies beneath this earthen womb? Hiding with it trillions of treasures And the tiniest if any of our woes What hopes and dreams lie in throes? Having been unfulfilled in life, to be dreamt in echoes The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

51 What smiles we miss and miles ahead What joys we lost and pain we lead Oh this beautiful mound of earth Awhile ago gaping but now firmly firmed You reddish brownish mammoth keeping away We, dependants of him we long cherished Tell him he fought not in vain He died for our gain Across the boundary Yonder in enemy territory Our flag will always fly My husband I am proud of you The assassin will not rest You will in peace rest We in peace live.

Denis Waswa Barasa, a Bachelor of Education (Arts) degree and a Master of Arts degree in Literature from the University of Nairobi, teaches English and Literature in Kenyan secondary schools. He enjoys writing poetry and drama.

The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

BOOK REVIEW

Turtle Dove By

Divya Dubey

Reviewed by

DIBYAJYOTI SARMA

Divya Dubey, is a Publishing Entrepreneur & founder of Gyaana Books. Turtle Dove: Six Simple Tales is her first collection of short stories. Her other short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Out–of-Print, Muse India, Kindle Magazine, Urban Voice 4, and New Fiction Journal (forthcoming). She has also written for The Hindu Literary Review, Hindustan Times, Indo-Asian News Service, Pravasi Bharatiya, All About Book Publishing, Book Link, The Publisher’s Post, Chicken Soup for the Indian Couple’s Soul, etc. She occasionally conducts lectures on publishing and creative writing. She was shortlisted for the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur Award, Publishing, 2010.

Probing deep into ordinary lives

This slim volume of six stories comes with a subtitle, ‘a collection of bizarre tales’. If you are thinking of Roald Dahl or Angela Carter variety of bizarre, it is not. Rather, I would call the stories The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

53 psychological, and thrilling. Psychological doesn’t mean that the stories are dense and rambling – they are raw and illuminating. Dubey’s characters are everyday people, who could very well be somebody you know. They are rooted in their reality, set in urban Delhi and its surroundings. However, as the stories progress, Dubey does something extraordinary. She punctures this reality ever so slightly and opens up another world hidden in plain sight. This is a world where the ambitions of a star student lead him to the path of crime; a parent’s desire for a girl child destroys the life of an only son; silly childhood fights between a grandmother and a granddaughter accelerates into lifelong rivalry; a Good Samaritan turns out to be not so good after all; and after 18 years, two childhood friends let go of each other, without judgment. There is also the title story, Turtle Dove, which is certainly the highlight of the collection, not because of its ‘bold’ theme, but how it is constructed, bit by bit, incident by incident, and how, in the middle of the story, the Dubey turns it upside down to create a delicate mirror image. This is why I call the stories thrilling. The plots are not thrillers (though there are some murders and other petty crimes in the mix), but how Dubey manages the plot threads to turn something mundanely familiar into something twisted is indeed thrilling. A good short story is a ‘slice of life’; there is no beginning and end, no denouement and happily ever after. If you apply these parameters, Dubey’s stories are good. For the characters she conjures leap up from the confines of their stories and continue to live on, because they are people we know. They are us. Name: Turtle Dove - Author: Divya Dubey - Publisher: Readomania - Pages: 160 - Price: 199

Dibyajyoti Sarma, who has published two volumes

of poetry and an academic book, besides numerous writing credits in edited volumes, journals and websites, was born in rural Assam, the homeland he abandoned for a promised land in Pune.

The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

FICTION

Steve Carr

A MOTHER’S RITES Thursday before the last weekend in August, hot wind perfumed with the drying golden grass that covers most of the roadside mounds of heated earth blows in through the open windows. The rush of wind fills the car’s interior. It’s Harriet’s normal speed on this stretch of interstate headed east, and she knows it well, having traveled it often throughout the years. Dying quick deaths, bugs splatter on the windshield leaving blotches and streaks. His face stuck out of the back window, long ears dancing about his head, tongue extended lapping in the scents of summer decay, Lucky wags his tail, a satisfied partner to the viewing of the open countryside being passed at seventy miles per hour. At the turnoff to Wasta, the car is slowed and here Harriet turns and decreases the car’s speed to forty miles per hour and then decreases it even more as she enters the small town. Wasta has changed very little over the years. A few ramshackle buildings line what could be called the downtown area. At fifteen miles per hour, she cruises through Wasta and continues out of this throwback to dreams that The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

55 never happened of becoming a travelerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stop, usurped by the clever marketing of ice water offered in nearby Wall. Outside of Wasta, few houses stand along the road she takes, it being an unlikely and almost desolate environment in which to encourage homesteading. It leads to the dried muddy banks of the Cheyenne River where dead trees submerged each spring in the yearly floods remain rotting in place. Here, she puts her foot on the brake pedal and the car comes to a stop alongside a rusty barbed wire fence, a boundary marker for some landowner protecting his wasteland from â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what? Harriet gets out of the car and then lets Lucky out. The dog runs off toward the river, his barks muted by the silence that hangs over this place like a death shroud. Harriet steps over some fallen fence wire and treads across the gray cracked earth, headed toward the river. No grass, weed, or wildflower grows along the riverbank, only varying hues of dried red mud provide color. The river is barely a stream that moves slowly on its way to wherever it is destined to end. The water is brackish and unappealing, only tempting to Lucky who bounces over it and through it with abundant energy. On the opposite bank, a lone cow, head bent and moving slowly, makes its way upriver. Lucky seems unimpressed with it and continues his frolic back and forth across the Cheyenne. Harrietâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son, Jeffrey, thought this place magical, the name Cheyenne bringing to mind the days when the Sioux Indians roamed these parts in search of the great herds of buffalo, a place where movies were made to recall the glorified struggles between land seeking settlers and the noble Indian. Here he had searched the ground for arrowheads, never finding one but always hopeful. Lucky was his companion, sticking near him awaiting a friendly pat on the head or encouragement to join him and run along the muddy river until both were coated with thick globs of wet soil. Inhaling, the air here was dense with the almost fetid odor of lifelessness, that and the drying cow pies that dotted the ground like drying black pimples. Harriet too is entranced by this place. She had happened on it quite by accident one summer when Jeffrey was very The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

56 young and inspired by him being enamored with its other worldly quality, they had returned every year at the same time, finding nothing changed, nothing new except an occasional fallen tree or the carcass of a dead cow. While all else seemed altered by time, this small stretch along the Cheyenne River never did. Lucky responds to her whistle, rushing to her side, his fur matted with mud, his eyes bright and if it is possible for a dog, full of joy. She leads him back to the car and there she opens a large thermos of cold water and douses him with it and rubs the mud and grime off him. He is cleaner but not entirely free of the evidence of the excursion. She opens the back door and he leaps onto the seat. She takes her place behind the wheel, starts the car and turns back toward Wasta and back to the interstate. Fifteen minutes later, she pulls into Wall, stops at the corner convenience store and fills her gas tank, refills the thermos from a faucet extending out from a wall outside the store, then heads into town. Cars line the main street, parked at angles on each side of a median strip. Storefronts on each side of the street, most built or remodeled to look like a nineteenth century western town, are crowded with tourists gaping in the windows at shelves upon shelves of western and frontier souvenirs. Harriet pulls off on a side street, finds a shady spot to park the car, rolls down the window to give Lucky some air in the late afternoon heat, and fills his water dish and sits it on the floor in the back. He knows the routine and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t complain other than to look longingly at Harriet as she closes the door and heads toward Wall Drug Store. Glaringly commercial, overstocked with cheap trinkets, it is room upon room attached to make a good-sized mall of useless paraphernalia for a town of less than 900 people, and crowded as it has come a long way since its inception as a simple place for people to stop and get a free glass of ice water. She knows her way to the cafeteria and without stopping to look at Indian headdresses or plastic colt 45s as Harriet might have done had Jeffrey been along, she goes straight to the counter and in quick fashion given the length of the The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

57 line that was ahead of her, orders a buffalo burger and fries and a diet Coke. She takes her tray with her order number on a small placard placed on it and goes into the large dining room. Surrounded by dark paneled walls covered with original works of western art, she takes a seat at a long table in the center of the cafeteria, in between a hodgepodge of men, women and children noisily living up the experience of being in this amusement park that has no rides other than a horse that requires a quarter to make it buck for a minute or two while a child sits on it. The food arrives quickly, delivered by one of the students from a nearby college hired for the summer to supplement the workforce that Wall and the surrounding area was lacking. Of three places in this journey, this was Jeffreyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second favorite, owing to its stacks of useless junk and lack of shame in providing nothing authentic other than the paintings on the wall, which he had studied as carefully as possible, reveling in those that were of mountain men, stallions on their hind legs, Indians on snowy plains and ragged buffalo in raging stampedes. Harriet eats only half of the burger and few of the fries, wrapping them in a napkin to be carried to Lucky. She stops at the counter again and buys two of Wallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cake donuts, considered by Jeffrey to be the best donuts in the world, bar none. She leaves the drugstore through a different door than the one she came in by and makes her way down the street to a very wagging tailed dog pleased with his treat, which he devours almost as soon as it is offered to him. At the end of the street and before leaving Wall is the only local grocery store, a small mom and pop place with five aisles that provides the basics for the locals and anything that someone who intends to camp at the nearby Badlands National Park would need. Harriet buys coal for a grill, two bags of ice and a variety of smaller items and some Slim Jims for Lucky. She leaves the store carrying two bags, one with the ice, the other with the remaining items. At the car, she opens the trunk and moves aside the folded up tent, a shovel, and a small cardboard box with the top neatly taped closed and lifted out the ice chest and places it on the ground. In goes the ice, several bottles of orange juice, a pack of hot dogs and a package of bologna. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

58 She repacks the trunk and sets off again, leaving Wall. From Wall to the entrance of the Badlands National Park, it is only a few miles, and the famous rock formations begin a few miles beyond the turnoff past the entrance, the right-handed turnoff that Harriet takes after buying a pass to allow her to camp until Sunday. Small gray clouds of dirt and gravel kick up behind her as she drives slowly past a broad stretch of prairie on the right and a ridge overlooking a deep valley with rolling hills of rock and stretches of barren land and yellow prairie grass to the right. Even before arriving at it, the wooden signs with silver lettering direct her toward the prairie dog town straight ahead. Cars are parked on each side of the road, with people milling about with cameras pointed at the prairie dogs who stand at alert on their hind legs atop their mounds a hundred feet from the edge of the road, or they dash in and out of the hundred or so holes that beneath constitute their habitats. Harriet drives by the parked cars and the prairie dogs very slowly, swallowing hard against the rush of emotion that is overtaking her. Beyond there she picks up speed and takes the turns and stretches of straight flat unfinished road all the way to the campgrounds barely noticing how little anything has changed, after all, it had only been a year since the last time she and Jeffrey had been there. An oval shaped space the size of several football fields bordered on one side by a wall of rock and a stretch of land cut through by a dry creek bed on the other, the campground is busy but not crowded. Harriet pulls into the closest available spot nearest an old dead tree that Jeffrey had cut his initials into, and parks the car. Keeping Lucky in the back seat, barking to be set free at last, she unpacks the trunk, sets up the tent and lays out the sleeping bags as well as the ice chest inside it. When set up she hooks Luckyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leash to his collar and lets him out of the car and walks toward the creek bed, stopping to let him survey the myriad of scents and to relieve himself. Harriet is tired now, and she sits on a ledge of rock and watches small birds, terns or swifts, she wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sure which, circling overhead, occasionally dipping down to the creek bed and scooping up something much too small to be seen by her. In the distance, she hears the one bird sound The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

59 she knew at some deeper level, the call of a meadowlark, his short melodic warble echoing from some nearby stretch of grass and down the creek all the way to her heart. Saturday morning, Lucky is curled in a ball by her side and breathing heavily, Harriet awakes and sees the moving shadow on the side of the tent. She undoes the zipper on the sleeping bag and crawls to the tent door and unzips it and sticks her head out. Five feet away a large, mangy buffalo is nibbling at a small tuft of grass as its dozen or so companions do the same not much further away. Lucky is now up attempting to push his way past her. She quickly zips up the tent door and sits back down on the sleeping bag, quietly opening the ice chest and taking out a bottle of juice and twisting off the cap and relishing the coolness of it as she drinks. Buffalo are unpredictable and dangerous, so she makes as little noise as possible, opening a package of Slim Jims from their noisy plastic wrapping with great care then feeding it to Lucky. Exactly when she falls asleep again, she later does not recall, but it was near noon when she awakes in the hot tent with Lucky jumping about eager to take care of business. The buffalo are gone. Throughout the day, she takes brief walks to the creek bed, mainly to give Lucky exercise, but mainly stays near the tent sitting on an Indian blanket she had purchased at a small store in Scenic years ago, and reading Willa Cather’s “Oh, Pioneer.” She snacks on bologna sandwiches and fig Newton’s. The campers around her are cordial without being intrusive and tend to their own activities without pressing her to join them, which is exactly how she wants it to be. As evening approaches with purple skies and silvery clouds fading away in the darkness, she builds a small fire in the grill that had been built by the park service, basically a pit dug in the ground surrounded by a small circular wall of iron and topped with a grill of metal bars blackened by the fires that had been built beneath it. When darkness sets in, she places two hot dogs on the grill and listens to the grease crackle as it falls into the fire. She opens a can of Lucky’s favorite dog food for him and they eat together, seated next to one another on the Indian blanket. While others in the campground are still awake, she The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

60 crawls into her tent with Lucky and pulling him to her, settles into the sleeping bag and falls sound asleep. Morning comes with the patter of raindrops hitting the tent. It is comforting, being safe inside the manmade cocoon away from the rain, and she almost resents having to put Lucky on his leash and take him for his morning walk. The air is warm, almost balmy, as the rain comes down softly but steadily. The leaves on the trees are glistening and the bare patches of ground are a darker shade of red, but not muddy. She goes down into the creek bed and kicks at small stones as she leads Lucky along the leash. He has located the scent of something he found interesting, which has evidently headed the same direction they are walking. She and Lucky go some distance when she finds herself near the underbelly of an overpass. Her shoe crunches on the rocks beneath her feet, sending a wave of the small birds she had seen the day before flowing out from their mud nests built under the bridge, swooping up and over the overpass in a mass of chirping black bodies that disappeared back under the span and into their nests until she makes another noise and they repeat their frenzied flight pattern as before. Leaving them in peace, she ventures back the way she had come, arriving back at the tent in time to miss the deluge that followed. For the remainder of the day she and Lucky remain in the tent, her reading and him sleeping or busily gnawing on his favorite chew toy. By nightfall, the rain stops and the clear skies become alive with the twinkling of stars. Harriet is awake even before the Sunday morning sun rises over the campground. She lies in the sleeping bag rubbing Luckyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ear much to his apparent delight and listening to the distant sounds of a coyote, and the nearer sounds of birds in the nearby trees giving song to the beginning of day. As light begins to creep across the tent, she hooks Lucky to his leash, takes him down to the creek bed, and unhooks it, letting him run about free for nearly an hour before calling him to her side and walking him back to the campsite. Other campers are preparing to leave, with tents being taken down, folded, and stacked onto car tops or in car trunks. Some weekend holdouts The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

61 like her are taking it slower, fixing a final breakfast of eggs and bacon prepared in cast iron skillets placed on the grill, or heading off for a final walk down the ravines or up to the hilltop hoping for one last sighting of buffalo. “This is it,” she says to Lucky, realizing that she had barely spoken more than those three words all weekend. She opens the trunk of the car and takes out the shovel, then goes to the tree that had Jeffrey’s initials and at its base she begins to dig a small hole. Once she makes her way down about two feet, she stops digging and sits the shovel aside. Lucky is tied to the car and is whining and straining at his leash. She pets his head, then takes the small box out of the trunk of the car, and carefully peels the tape from the two flaps at its top. She lifts out a bundle, and carefully removes the bubble wrap and cotton and throws the wrapping items into the trunk. In her hands, she holds a bright blue earthen jar decorated with a variety of images; footballs, cowboys, spaceships, and one of Lucky. She retrieves the two donuts from the car, then walks over to the hole and removes the lid from the jar and pours ashes from the jar into the hole. Once the jar is emptied, she places the donuts on top of the ashes then replaces the dirt in the hole and pats it down. She thinks that maybe she should say a few words, but none came to mind. This is not a time for words.

Steve Carr began his writing career as a military journalist and have had short stories published in The Wagon Magazine, Double Feature, Tigershark Magazine, CultureCult Magazine, Fictive Dream, Bento Box, Ricky’s Back Yard, Visitant Literary Journal, The Drunken Llama, Sick Lit Magazine, Literally Stories, Noise Medium, Door is a Jar, Viewfinder, The Spotty Mirror and in the Dystopia/Utopia Anthology by Flame Tree Publishing, the 100 Voices Volume II anthology by Centum Press, the Winter’s Grasp anthology by Fantasia Divinity Magazine and the Neighbors anthology by Zimbell House Publishing, among others. His plays have been produced in several states including Arizona, Missouri and Ohio. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

FICTION

Anshu Choudhry

The Communion They had always mesmerised the girls; unlike the airplanes, the mere robots with their sham of the wings, stiff, paralysed, the extremely poor imitations, neither fishes nor birds. The new school building at four storeys was tall for small limbs. The girls counted the stairs for each floor and threw their bodies against the wall at the bends of the unending staircase to suck in more air than their undergrown lungs could pull at each drag. But no heights daunted them, the kites. They floated at the highest point the eye can see, a speck of black; the mole on the face of the sky marking its blue beauty with unassuming elegance. And then The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

63 they would arrive in hordes, swimming in the sky their synchronised dance; bodies in harmony with the rhythm of their souls. These birds of prey, navigating the procession of peace as they meditated under the sun. In their yogic trance, they defied gravity and reached higher and higher, these kites dwelling on the essence of the cosmos. The girls squinted their eyes and strained their brows across limits, to resist the sun for a glimpse of this ethereal dance even as the kites regaled in its bright exuberant luminosity. Near, nearer, they kept reaching for its blazing intensity and yet their wings neither burnt nor melted as they mocked the Icarus. It was for the sun they celebrated and with the sun they celebrated, the power that the one received from the other. The congregation made them the spirits, the immortal beings of a blue paradise, imperishable, impermeable, and immune to the limits of mortal survival. The lunch break would be their nemesis; slamming the brakes on their celestial rounds, their meditating resolves succumbing to the lure of a sandwich, a samosa, a piece of cheese stuck in the delicate fingers of a hungry child crying for her mother. When she swooped down, she did not make any noise, no whistle; not even the rustle of her feathers alerted the victim of the attack. A sharp pain and a wince and for a moment an eclipsing darkness swept across the eye. The tiffin dropped to the ground with a clanging noise and with it the egg and the bread. She swooped and was gone. A feather, dark brown with a grey white quill, laid at the feet of the loser. ----“Mini…….how many tiffin-boxes have you lost? At least nine or ten………Is this all you are learning in school? To be irresponsible with your stuff?” Only when the mother saw the scratches pink and red around the nose, close to the lips of the girl that she felt a twinge of sympathy. “So it is the kites who are attacking ……but how can birds take away lunch boxes?” And how could the girl know if not the mother. The girl was mortified but not petrified. How amazing that a bird could have so much power. Her eight year old mind was in awe despite the anguish The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

64 from the losses she was suffering. And so were all her classmates and older school girls who too were startled by this bird attack, unarmed, unprepared to deal with the crises. The matronly teachers or the glamorous fragile school idols equally harassed and helpless. The Sisters, the office-bearers had no solution except to regard the advice of the Church sermons, on discipline, tolerance and patience. Strictures for students were announced in the school assembly--â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Students must be careful, must cover the food with box covers, must keep their faces to the ground, must not litter the playground, must pick up any food pieces accidently dropped, must not chase the birds in case of an attack, must stay in the class-rooms even during lunch-break if the class-teacher so instructs.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; So now, it was prohibited for the girls to be scattered in the playground and it would rather they stick around like the sticks in a match-box, fastened to their seats and desks inside four walls of uninspiring class-rooms that rendered the scrumptious of food insipid. The lunch break reduced to an eating class had lost all meaning and the playgrounds all festivity, deserted and devoid of the chitter-chatter, the twitter and tinkle of puerile feminine voices that perhaps the kites envied. The green playground spotless, clean but barren, desolate and lonely, inviting and waiting. The huge trees surrounding it standing mute, guarding the terror stricken landscape, guilty of the crime of sheltering the terrorists. The girls noticed that the wind could not sway the branches as much and the leaves did not shimmer as much, and the elements had not the force as much as when they strolled out, loitered, ran and played, pushed each other, heckled and jeered with food stuffed in their laughing mouths. After a month of silent treatment, the kites felt ignored and the whistles died out. The girls watched from the classroom windows, looking out for them but they haunted no more as the black marbled mementoes placed stiff on the parapets and cornices of the tall school building. Neither did they hold meditation soirees and the blue skies appeared bland, dismal and inert by the loss of black beauty spots that had enlivened its expanse. Another week went by and the teachers were sure, they were gone. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

65 -----â&#x20AC;&#x153;Children, today is Miniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birthday. We will have a small party in the class. Her parents have sent chocolates and creamy pastries for everyone. After that, you will be allowed to go out to the playground. But first, your sports class.â&#x20AC;? The class teacher wished Happy Birthday and everyone sang in chorus. Mini looked at the gold watch that wrapped around her wrist like the hand of her dead grandmother, delicate and pale. Her mother had attempted to fill the void in her heart by fitting the chain-strap on her hand; and she could actually feel the quaint old grandmother holding her small wrist, firm and familial. Its little dial, pearly white embedded with a starry diamond, shone like the face of the moon captured in a mirror encased by a gold frame. Its affluence bewitched her childish mind and the sheen of the gold case and chain- strap thrilled her raw aesthetic sense seeking to assert its birth. At that moment, the glass of the dial, the thin wired loops and links that held the patterns of chain-strap together, appeared to Mini, as fragile, as elusive, as the dream of her grandmother. She removed it by the click of the lever and the tiny constricted pocket in the tiffin box meant to hold a small spoon seemed the safest chest for its concealment. How could it be risked in the sports class? The running and shoving, the upside down manoeuvres of the limbs, the tumbles and the ballistics of amateur gymnastics would be a grave danger to its gossamer existence. Mini was proud of her cautious precocious brain and her mother would be too. ----As promised, they were let out for the lunch break. The girls swarmed into the desperate waiting playground famished for their company. The green grass welcomed the assault from their stomping feet. They bumped against each other, fell upon each other, rolled over and hit the ground but the ample bosom of the maternal green tuft shielded them. They sang and played and leered and jeered and the jingly giggles echoed in the skies silent for a month. They pushed and strutted their bodies until tired of the jubilation and finally picked up their tiffin boxes. The smell of creamy vanilla pastries The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

66 wafted through the air. The aromas made them hungry and they dug their teeth into the white fluffy softness. Then she struck, from behind the creamy rise of the pastry; hidden from view, the attack was silent. The flapping of large wings against Mini’s cheek sounded the alarm. She disappeared with the same agility as with which she had pounced. Mini rued the loss of her tenth tiffin box. “Where’s your gold watch?” It was out of genuine concern that the class-mate remembered the beauty Mini had forgotten in the tiffin box. To Mini, it was as though she had lost her grandmother yet again. This time she had been swept up to the skies and Mini herself was to blame for this accidental lapse. If only the watch was not forgotten in the tiffin-box, the grandmother would be holding Mini’s wrist. Mini looked up to the heavens, to ask forgiveness. The sky was cast in a spell and the spectacular dance of black beauties held the cosmic stage. Their synchronic movements celebrated the sun, the light and the day. Nothing could disturb this harmony of the earthly souls and the heavenly bodies floating in the magnificence of blue space. It seemed to Mini, a glimpse of her grandmother’s abode. Did the grandmother wade through the blue depths as effortless and as light? Had she mastered this choreography and had she developed wings that glided her gently higher and higher towards heavens? Or did she descend from the heavens for such expeditions? A feather rolled down; a huge brown keratin plume with a large quill landing on the green ground as a shrill whistle pierced the silence that had penetrated Mini’s paranoid mind numb from the shock of her loss. On impulse her head turned upwards to the parapet of the four-storeyed building that housed the classrooms. She saw her sitting there as a queen, resplendent and domineering, her majestic wings flapping every now and then like the robes of an empress flaunting her imperial powers. Under her claws, the silver metal of the tiffin-box glinted from the cutting light of the sun burning bright at the noon hour. She held at it, seemed to be playing with it, her beak pricking at it, gnawing it. She moved about on the wall, The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

67 skipped a few steps, hopped a little dance but did not let go of the gleaming steel. Her large wings beat around restless and Mini dreaded her flight. She spent time on fiddling with her prey-- the lifeless box gripped in her fierce talons, wondering perhaps of its use for her own good while Mini and the classmates waited below breathless and stiff, for her next move. She dropped it without warning. It landed right before the girls and Mini wriggled her fingers into the small spoon pocket. The moon dial shone its pearly sheen and the gold frame glittered with happiness as the watch struggled out of the pocket of the lunch box. A loud whistle announced the euphoric moment of recovery. She swooped down and flapped her wings with a force that swept the air around the girls and soared back into the skies. Mini and the girls watched after her as she climbed higher and higher to join the communion that awaited her. “Strange, it has never happened before. The kite returning your tiffin-box! Was she thanking for the cream pastry?” “No, she was wishing me a happy birthday! Thank you Grandma!” Mini kissed the watch and strapped it back on her wrist. There were giggles and squeals and laughter interspersed with heavenly whistles as the performances resumed the communion; across the earthy green grounds and the sublime blue skies above.

Anshu Choudhry holds degrees of Masters Level in

Mathematics and English. She is based in New Delhi, India and works for the Government of India. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Kritya, Ken*again, Full of Crow, Asian Signature, Muse India, EastLit, Hans India, Setu Journal, Silver Birch Press and anthologies amongst others. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

POEMS

RogerTurner

the galumphers book Every child knows there’s monsters Hiding in the closet and under the bed But, I have a secret each child should know And it’s about a Galumpher instead.... Galumphers are watchers They help keep the peace They help keep the monsters in line Three eyes watch the closet, Three on the monster And three more...did I mention they’ve nine? Galumphers aren’t dangerous They live under the bed They eat socks and the occasional mouse But, the one thing that’s certain With a Galumpher, well fed Closet monsters won’t stay in your house The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

69 If you believe in those monsters You’ll believe in these too They’re as real as the monsters you fear Just remember Galumphers Eat the mice and your socks With Galumphers , the monsters aren’t near I’ve never seen a Galumpher But I know they are real I know this, because I once was a kid My dad checked my closet Before he’d turn out my light That’s where the bad monsters hid One night he told me Of the Galumphers that watched With their five ears and nine eyes to see And as my socks went missing And the mice disappeared The Galumpher was a new friend to me Should you meet a Galumpher Out from under the bed Just smile and pretend not to see For he’s probably out To get the dust bunnies off And to go and have a long pee. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

70 A group of Galumphers Rarely is found Say you’ve seen them and folks say “harrumph” But just so you know If you see three or four A Galumpher group is called a clumph A Galumpher is quiet He keeps out of sight He’s protective and knows what to do They keep children safe Keeping monsters away Eating one sock of which you have two Some might be orange While others are blue You don’t know what color they’ll be But, they stay in the darkness There under your bed So, you don’t know what color you’ll see Galumphers aren’t scary They might make you jump If you see one, it may scare them too Just smile and nod And lie down and sleep Let the Galumpher do what he must do

The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

I gambled with the devil There’s holes in all my pockets No more money do they hold My hands can’t go much deeper Trying to shield them from the cold I’ve got ‘bout fifteen dollars Rolled and stuffed inside my boot Got it from a pawn shop Where I went and sold my suit The road to where I’m going Is one I’ve never been before I’ve gambled all I own away I’m looking for a score All my life’s possessions Are scattered across the land In pawn shops and casinos In the mountains and the sand I gambled with the devil Didn’t win, had no chance Now, I’m hitching it to nowhere With empty pockets in my pants A dealer with a lucky streak And me on my last legs Now, I’m one step up from dying I’m now one of the worlds dregs The money in my left boot Won’t last long when I hit town I’ll find the first casino And my sorrows I will drown The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

72 Be it on the tables Or at the bar telling my tale It won’t last long no matter But my soul still ain’t for sale I gambled with the devil Didn’t have a chance at all It’s amazing that the distance That there is for one to fall It didn’t take a decade And it didn’t take a year But, I’m one step from the bottom Aching hard for my next beer I’m hitching it to nowhere But, I’ll know when I arrive Don’t know how long I’ll stay there Or how long I will survive I’ve got holes in all my pockets All I own is on my back I gambled with the devil He took red, and I took black.

Roger Turner is a writer living in London, Ontario,

Canada. He has been married to Megan, for 19 years... happily, so he is told. He has a number of books published and available for sale on a diverse number of topics. His book The Christmas Ponies, illustrated by Donna Clement, has been translated into German, and French and is also in a colouring book format. He enjoys golf, baseball and hockey, though, mainly as an observer now. His favorite writers are Peter Straub, Charles Dickens and Dr. Suess. His works have been compared to those of Edward Lear, Suess, and Shel Silverstein... but, his sales have not. An oversight, in his opinion. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

FICTION

Dave Ludeford At Least Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Still Got the Signed Photo of Ronnie Evans

It sits, pride of place, on the mantelpiece next to the picture of my mam and dad taken on holiday in Scarborough in 1963, the year before I was born. My signed photograph of Ronnie Evans, goal scoring legend of Blakeley Rovers: 180 goals in 10 seasons in all competitions for our local club. He should have played for England, or at least, for one of the big clubs. Manchester United, perhaps, or Arsenal. But it was never to be. Dead now, unfortunately,of cancer. Aged 50. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never think that a once fit and healthy-looking man would have smoked so much. I wrote and asked him for the signed photo when I was ten years old, telling him that he was my biggest hero. Which he was, never having had an elder brother to look up to. I never missed a home game and my dad took me to dozens and dozens of away matches, The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

74 too; coach trips organized by The Collier’s Arms, the pub nearest the Blakeley ground in Tarrant Road and my dad’s local. The signed photo arrived three days later: Ronnie standing tall and proud, facing the camera, one foot on top of a football like a hunter posing with his kill, his hair in the curly-perm style copied from Kevin Keegan and his moustache like a massive, hairy caterpillar. I’ve treasured that picture all my life. I’m what you might call down on my luck. It all started when my mam died two years ago, and when she went, I think it’s true to say that a bit of me died, too. I idolized her and cared for her since my dad passed away fifteen years ago. Nothing was too much trouble. Losing dad had been bad enough, but when Mam went…well, it was like I had no purpose in life anymore. I started drinking heavily, lost my job and I now face losing the family home. I can’t afford to live here anymore and I live day to day in terror of the postman delivering more bills and bad news. Postmen? I call them Bad News Deliver Officers. I remember away match days. Mam was never a footie fan, but she went out of her way to make sure we had a cracking pack-up lunch to take with us on the coach, most of which I’d eat on the journey to whichever ground we were travelling to. I was always such a hungry child. Times were hard then, in the early seventies, because of the three-day working week and all the strikes and power cuts and whatever. But we never went short. There was always food on the table. Therefore, Saturday mornings on away match days would see mam a bustle of activity making cheese or corned beef sandwiches, piles of them, with bananas, apples, bags of crisps and packets of ‘choccy’ biscuits. Anyone would think we were taking food enough to last us for a week’s holiday away. Dad and I would walk the short distance to the Collier’s in time to get good seats on the coach; I always preferred the back seat, as I loved to swivel round and pull funny faces at the cars behind us on the motorway. Happy days. I’ve done some shameful things recently, things that I’ll forever feel guilty about and will struggle to come to terms with. I’ve sold stuff my mam and dad gave me for birthdays and Christmas to The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

75 pay for drink, food and bills: a watch, a radio, a portable CD player amongst many other things. Stuff with sentimental value. But you know when you feel pressurized, and trapped, and start to panic? It’s like drowning, you can’t breathe, you feel yourself sinking further and further into the depths of despair. That’s how I’ve been, like another person; a person I don’t like very much. If I were to encounter such a person in town I’d cross the road to avoid him. But he’s unavoidable. He is me. I sold my car as well last week. That paid the electric and council tax with a bit left over. It was good to have a bit of money again but it didn’t last long; dribbled through my fingers like sand through a sieve. My mam loved that car; I took her on holiday in it every year, to Skegness and once even as far as Llandudno. We had some good times on those holidays, stayed in some lovely clean digs and the meals were out of this world. My mam always said that food tastes better when somebody else cooks it for you, and she was right. Mam would eat chips on those holidays (she rarely ate them at home) and also ice cream and it was as if she was a little girl again, I could see it in the way her lovely bright eyes lit up even more as the sun shone gloriously and she would beam the widest, most gorgeous smile. How can someone so warm, beautiful, and alive simply no longer be? I can’t understand how such a vibrant life-force can just seep away. I remember one home game in particular; 1975, we were up against Grantham Town. It was a glorious autumn Saturday afternoon in September, the sort of golden day that you never wanted to end. Ronnie scored a hat trick that day and could have had loads more and we won 5-1. Afterwards we went to the Collier’s- as we always did- and dad drank beer with his mates inside while I sat outside with a bottle of Vimto and a packet of cheese and onion, watching the world go by. When we got home mam had made corned beef pie which tasted divine, and I had another bottle of Vimto which dad had bought in the Collier’s along with a couple of bottles of ale for himself and a bottle of white wine for mam. Dad had had a modest win on the horses that very morning, and it was nice to have a few luxuries. We all sat on the settee watching telly, ‘Dad’s Army’ was The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

76 on and afterwards a play that I didn’t really understand but it wasn’t really for kids anyway. Mam and Dad liked it, it was a comedy, and they laughed uproariously every few minutes. I dreaded bedtime but once I’d settled I went out like a light. I filled nine bags full of stuff for the charity when mam passed away, although it was several months before I could bring myself to do it. I can’t remember how many bags we filled when dad died. All those personal items gone: ornaments, clocks and mam’s dolls that she loved to collect, cutting the coupons out of the back of the newspaper and sending off for them. The house seems so bare now, so bereft of life, it echoes like an underground cave. If I cough it sounds like thunder. But there are some things that I’ll never sell, or give to charity. Things that will come with me, no matter where I end up living, even though my future looks so bleak. Like the photo of my mam and dad taken on holiday in Scarborough and at least I still have that treasured signed photo of Ronnie Evans, my hero.

Dave Ludford is a poet and short story writer from Nuneaton, England. He is the author of over 40 published works of poetry and narrative fiction. He is currently at work on his first novella. His stories have been published in Schlock! magazine in the UK (www.schlock.co.uk), Fever Dreams magazine (www.feverdreams.co.uk) and poems at www.poetrysuperhighway.com The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

FICTION

Sean Padraic McCarthy

IMPRINTS Bradan Cary pulls over on Bartlett Street and looks up at the house. Broken glass and a board in a window on the second floor. It is early September, the children all back at school, and the street is deserted. He passed two men talking further down the street, but now they are gone from sight. Bradan gets out of the car. The sun is bright and high above him, but the breeze picks up and blows a newspaper page across the yard; tall grass, dried and dead from the late summer sun. The yard is littered with papers and trash, as are all the yards up and down the street, and the front porch is sagging, the steps rotten and missing two boards. It is a workday for Bradan. He is on the road usually two to three The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

78 days a week, but is rarely in this city, so, while he is here, he has decided to stop and see the house. The city, derelict and crumbling, is really little more than an impoverished overgrown town. Plenty of crime, drugs and stabbings, but it is a city only by its numbers; no tall buildings, cathedrals or impressive theatres. Bradanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife Kotryna grew up in this city and she lived in this house once; the first floor, with her first fiancĂŠe, back in another time, over twenty years before. Bradan has seen pictures in photo albums. But it never looked anything like this. Not back then. On the porch, a broken swing moves in the breeze. Bradan looks up at the window. Pictures them up there now, a young family, or almost a family; Kotryna, her boyfriend--a man she hopes will soon be her fiancĂŠ--and her small daughter Dalia. The woman, actually little more than a girl, stands in front of the mirror, curling her hair high. It is 1989. She is slim with curved hips, gray blue eyes with heavy, Slavic lids, high cheekbones, sculpted features and dirty blonde hair. She looks at a greeting card, open on the dresser, a card for her boyfriend, a one-year anniversary. The dresser is covered, jewelry and perfume, hairbrushes and photographs; knick-knacks and mementos; a Hummel. Yet to get dressed, the woman is topless, just in her panties, white, and as she moves to pick an outfit out of her wardrobe, she turns to see him, standing in the room, aiming a camera at her. She raises one hand in protest and uses the other to cover her breasts but she is smiling. Robert. She had been living with him eight months at the time of their first year dating anniversary, escaping her mother and the craziness that had always been her family. His friends all called him Bob, she told Bradan. But she called him Robert. He liked her to call him Robert. He liked to sound dignified. Respected. He worked for a shipping company, but was taking a night course in astronomy at Harvard Extension School when she moved into the apartment with him and he liked to tell everyone that he went to Harvard. Always quick to mention that he had a 3.5 G.P.A., never mentioning that he only took the one class. This was fine with her at the time, she said. Because she knew that, he never The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

79 finished high school. She also knew that embarrassed him secretly. The man puts the camera down, tackles her onto the bed. His hair, short and perfectly combed, is dark as are his eyes. Chiseled features, bordering on feminine, in indent on the tip of his nose. He kisses her lips once, and then kisses her neck. It tickles. She begins to giggle, stroking his back, and her legs up tight around him. Long legs. Beautiful. They are both so young. On the other side of the wall, her daughter, long blonde hair and wide brown eyes, not yet four, watches television in the living room. Barney. Purple and dancing. Moving around in a slow circle. The man looks into the women’s eyes. She is still sprawled beneath him, and she raises her head a bit and kisses him. Their eyes meeting, just inches apart. Her lips move. “Shut the door,” she whispers. Kotryna doesn’t like to talk about it much anymore. Robert was not the natural father of the little girl, but he quickly accepted her as his own, doting on her, giving her presents, eleven new outfits the first Christmas and trips to the zoo, the movies, and the aquarium. He never had anything growing up, he told Kotryna, so he wanted things to be different with Dalia. He wanted her to have everything. So did Kotryna. She never had a thing when she was young either. Hand-me-down clothes from the neighbors, canned vegetables from the local food pantry, and holes in the roof where bats flew into the attic. She and her friend Lori would sometimes sit on the roof, sunning in bikinis and smoking a joint, and even during the day sometimes they could hear the bats flying around inside. Hear her mother screaming downstairs at her younger brothers and sisters. Her mother was always screaming, and it was mainly her mother whom she wanted, needed to get away from. She had been sent into exile after getting pregnant a month after graduating high school—a boyfriend of two years, four years older—and that had for the most part been the end of any chance of closeness she might have had with her mother. Kotryna was the shame of the neighborhood, her mother told her. A fornicator, her mother said. A slut. Her mother dragged her to see their parish priest, belting her in the car with one hand and driving with the other. And then, once in front of Father, she was quiet and humble, telling the old man that she loved The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

80 Kotryna. She just wanted her to see what she had done wrong, what she could do to make it right, and she wanted him to bless her. If only, she said, she could ask for forgiveness. Kotryna refused, she told Bradan. She didn’t want forgiveness. Maybe from God, but not from her mother, and not from the smelly old man in the rectory who told her both she and her child were going to hell. Robert, she told Bradan, offered her a chance to escape. She met Robert in her older brother’s apartment. Her brother lived on the second floor, Robert on the first, and she would come over for drinks sometimes on a Saturday night. The boys would play cards and Robert would sip his drink, watching her…Big brown eyes…Sad eyes… Something lost inside of them. It was two months before he asked her for a date, and then after that, another month before he had tried anything. That touched her, she said. He was sweet. Thoughtful. And he didn’t treat her as if she were easy. Ever since she had gotten pregnant, boys she had dated had assumed that she was easy. She wasn’t easy. He bought her a gold necklace with a locket for their threemonth anniversary, a picture of Dalia inside. On top of him, inside the apartment, the woman moves quickly, frantically. She grinds until she comes, her body tensing, shaking, and then once she is done, he turns her around. Her face is plush against the pillow. He leans over, kisses the small of her back, runs a finger slowly up her spine, barely touching. His eyes are somewhere else. Empty and lost. “What do you want me to do?” he mouths, placing his hands on her hips. Her body is still bucking a little, just beginning to calm. She turns her head to look back at him. “Anything you want.” Bradan hears voices again. A man’s voice, carrying on the breeze from somewhere distant, but he can’t hear what the man was saying. Has to be a neighbor. But the voice sounds removed, doesn’t seem real. Bradan hears a car door slam, an engine start, grinding metal The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

81 and a rumble of gas. Isolated sounds in a bright, still afternoon. He doesn’t belong here. He feels like the disembodied dead, looking down upon the living, catching quick untouchable glimpses of sights and sounds. There for a moment. Then gone. He isn’t sure just what he is looking for. A trace of her past, a trace of happiness, that is all, he supposes, something he can feel, a closer connection. Something to bring her back to him, to make her more real. No one is real without their past, he thinks, but the past is something we can never really share, never really make real. Can we? A memory is little more than an abstraction except for those who do the remembering. But,even then, it isn’t set in stone. Isn’t clear. Pieces put in, pieces taken out. Just colors and sounds, voices and images, but the picture never complete. Still an abstraction, always an interpretation. Much as Bradan and Kotryna have of their own lives together. What she remembers, what he remembers, and what the other does not. Bradan doesn’t know what is what anymore. He only knows he is losing. Losing hold. Losing his grasp of his marriage. And he knows she isn’t happy. The little girl sits at the kitchen table. A party hat on her head. Low lights in the kitchen as the woman lights the candles on the cake. The man stands, leaning against the kitchen sink, his arms folded, a beer in hand.Watching the little girl. They are the only ones in the room. They start to sing, and the little girl says something before she blows out the candles. A short speech? She opens presents. A drawing pad and magic markers. A play microphone with a recording machine. A Barbie Dream House, and Barbie car. The woman steps over and kisses the man, pinches his ass when the little girl isn’t looking. The man just sips his beer. He says something to the woman from the corner of his mouth. “You’ll get yours later.” The woman closes the little girl’s bedroom door gently, an ear to the door as she does, and she then tiptoes through the house, into her own room, closing that door quietly, too. The man is in the room, a drink still in hand, on the bed, watching T.V. He gets up and steps into the bathroom, begins brushing his teeth. The woman comes in, talking, slips down her jeans and takes a seat on the toilet, still talking, begins The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

82 to pee. The man spits his toothpaste, turns and looks at her a moment, stares, and the hint of smile. They are not happy. Kotryna is not happy. At least not consistently. That is the main problem. There is always something. Money. Work Schedules. Chores. The children. Who drives who where. Who does more. Always who does more. And Bradan wants to know what she was like when she was, if she was, happy. Because he can’t remember anymore. He has to believe that when she was younger, when life was simpler, she was happy. At least for a while, at least more consistently, when starting out. There is always hope when starting out, a whole life ahead. And there is no crusher of hope stronger than time. Clocks. Bradan has looked at the old pictures, read old cards. Things she wrote to Robert, things he wrote to her. Bradan wants her to be happy, even if it means going back somehow. He has tried to put himself there, inside of it. Her past. It’s a thing with him. Wanting to put himself inside the past. His own, and hers. Just a glimpse, something. Just to be able to understand it, and to make it real. His brother died, now two years back, and when he came to Bradan in a dream once, he told Bradan about the past. Or at least about time. The illusion of it all. Einstein was right, he said. In the dream, they were sitting at a bar, empty liquor bottles lined up below the mirror behind the bar, the lights low around them, the light low in his brother’s eyes, too. Empty. Dead. Bradan knew he was dead in the dream, and yet he was not. His brother had both hands wrapped around his glass of beer, but he wasn’t drinking it. He just stared straight ahead, then turned, looked at Bradan. “I can’t explain it,” he said to Bradan. “You would have to be here to understand it. You can see everything, all throughout history, everything, all happening at once.” He shook his head a little. “I can’t explain it. But it all happens at once. Everything is imprinted.” “Everything?” Bradan asked. And his brother nodded. “Everything.” Now Bradan goes to the window on the side of the house, the glass broken here, too. He can smell something. Dust. Candles. He The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

83 has always loved the smell of candles. Something Holy, something old. Something beautiful. He and Kotryna used to often light candles when they first began dating. They always had candles going. Late nights, wine, Jeff Buckley playing on the CD player, and candle wax pooling on top of the big old television she used to have in her bedroom. They got along so well then, first dating. The things they said to each other were kind. But even back then, there was something missing, and something there. A sadness that you wanted to touch, but couldn’t. Their son, once Robert’s son, is now seventeen and a constant source of fights between Bradan and Kotryna. He steals whatever he can get his hands on to buy pot, manipulates, lies. Bradan tries to discipline him, and regardless of how wrong the boy might be, Kotryna defends him, pointing the blame at Bradan, even when Bradan is defending her. And she believes, or pretends to believe, everything the boy says, no matter how ludicrous. Bradan wonders why. Is it because he is the only boy. Or something else? The connection. It is because you pick on him, she says. Blame him for everything. You just don’t like him because he is the other one’s son, she said. And someone has to take his side, she said. Bradan looks inside the window now. Everything is dark, but he can make out a few pieces of furniture. A broken chair, and another old television, a nineteen eighties model, rabbit ears, sitting on the floor, light coming in from another window. A white hearth. Leaves on the floor, and bunched in the corners, and dust. Dust. Everything covered with dust. The woman is hanging Christmas wreaths. One on the front door, and one in the living room, hung on the far wall, opposite the painting of a spilled cone of flowers in a gold painted frame. Across from the fireplace, painted white bricks, and adorned with red stockings. The old turntable is spinning. A Christmas record. Johnny Mathis. Frank Sinatra. Bing Crosby. The album cover lies flat on the coffee table. The “Greatest Carols from the Greatest Stars.” There is a star covered in macaroni shells and painted yellow, made from a child, also on the coffee table, next to bulbs awaiting hooks, a legless Nutcracker, and a The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

84 broken angel. The tree itself is nearly complete, small white and blue lights, the branches smothered in ornaments. The television is on, black and white picture and the V of the antennae reaching for the ceiling, and Jimmy Stewart runs through the streets of a snow covered town. The little girl plays on the floor. Two Barbieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Ken. All naked. The girl lifts one of the Barbies, makes her kick like a dancer, looks at the woman and smiles. There is a small Christmas Manger. Mary on her knees, her hands pressed together, the Christ in the crib welcoming the world with open arms, and the Gabriel, the angel, looming above. Holding his banner-Gloria in Excelsius Deo. The man looks at it when he comes into apartment, into the room. His face his pale, his eyes are bloodshot, half mast. The woman goes to him, grabs his hands to dance, and the little girl watches, her face alight. The man resists at first, whispers something to the woman, but she pushes, and he then gives in, spinning with her across the floor until they hit the couch. The man falls backwards, pulling the woman down on top of him. She raises her head, then leans down and kisses him. The little girl is watching, Barbie in one hand, Ken in the other. There is a porch out back. Roof overhead. More boards missing in the steps, and white plastic chairs, now dingy brown, covered with a sheen of mold. Black spots. A round rotted table with a hole in the middle to hold an umbrella, but the umbrella is long gone. More dried leaves. The rails on the porch have splintered. Bradan and Kotryna have a porch themselves. Actually two-a farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s porch out front, and another covered one out back, an enormous deck above. They sometimes sit on the porch on summer nights, the radio going-Nights with Alice Cooper. Rock star gone disc jockey for one night a week. And sometimes they will sit with the girls in the yard and have a bonfire in the middle of the circular patio that Kotryna built. Pagan, Bradan teased her. Bradan is Irish. Kotryna is Lithuanian. Of course the pagan blood is still in their veins, he said. And they both love the solstices. Celebrating summer, and a quiet observance on the winter, watching the light fade. The girls enjoy the fires throughout the summer, but they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always end well. Just The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

85 the two weeks before there was more trouble with their son. Kotryna phoned him, told him to come home, reminding him that he was grounded. And he came home, demanding that he be released from grounding. Kotryna took his cell phone, and the boy, Steven, entitled and indignant, simply took it back. Bradan called him on it, and he told Bradan to go fuck himself. “You’re not my real father,” he screamed, “I wish you were dead! I’ll piss on your grave!” He is tall and lean, chiseled from weights, and to date Kotryna has given him everything he has wanted. Bradan took the phone away again, and Steven demanded it back again, getting in Bradan’s face, and Kotryna began yelling some more, and the girls began crying. Four girls. Ages 12, 10, and 8 year old twins. Bradan felt at a loss. Power. Authority. Senses. He had never encountered terrain like this, and didn’t know where to go. How to diffuse the situation while keeping the boy in check, and not upsetting the smaller children. Also, how to prevent a scene. It was a warm night, and several of the neighbors were out in their yards. But Bradan wouldn’t give the phone back. He told Steven that he was high, told him to go inside. Steven had started screaming some more. Who cared if he was high, he said. He called Bradan a drunk. He started screaming about pot. It was a wonder drug. The greatest thing God had ever invented. It made him stronger, smarter, faster, he said, flexing his muscles as he did. Getting in Bradan’s face, he shouted that he was going to grow a strand of marijuana that cured cancer, one that cured AIDS, one that cured everything, and Bradan’s main fear was that the boy believes this. And that maybe he was crazy. He put his hands on Steven’s chest, gave him a push, told him to get inside that he was upsetting his sisters, and Steven grabbed his wrists, and then they were wrestling. The little girls crying louder, and Kotryna shouting. Pulling Steven off of Bradan’s back, telling Steven to run. It was bad that night. Worse in the morning. Possibly their worst fight day to date. Bradan had told Steven that if he attacked him again, he would have to leave. And Kotryna told Bradan she hated The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

86 him, he disgusted her, he was a loser. If anyone was leaving, it was not Steven, it was going to be Bradan. Now Bradan climbs on the porch of the deserted home. An empty beer bottle lay by the back door, the red and white Budweiser label faded. He looks into the kitchen. The stove is still there as is the refrigerator, pulled away from the wall, the door open, maybe things inside, dead things. Some empty boxes, an abandoned iron sitting on the counter. He thinks of a photo he has seen of Kotryna and Robert. Robert lying on the floor, propped up with his elbow, and Kotryna is behind him, hugging him. The little girl is sitting on the floor in front of them with a bow in her hair. Bradan can see the kitchen in the background. All three are wearing matching purple T-shirts, and all three are wearing different expressions. Kotryna is smiling, Robert has his mouth open, his tongue slightly visible, a guarded look to his eyes, Dalia, probably not yet four, looks lost. Bradan thinks of his other daughters. The little ones. The looks on their faces after he was fighting with Steven. Panicking, crying. Then the looks when he continued with Kotryna. Him. Her. Shouting at him to leave. Unbridled fear, and helplessness. The family falling apart. It is awful for children to think that way, harbor such a fear. But once it starts, how do you stop it? And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just Steven. He knows that. He knows that he himself is not innocent. He brought the girls to the beach a week later. The end of summer, autumn creeping, and the dark soon to fall like a curtain. Nantasket Beach. A long strip of sand off southeastern Massachusetts. Built up for summer people, tourism, in the late nineteenth century, only to fall down by the late twentieth. Mostly. The hotels all gone, but the hills and boulevard still spotted with cottages, and the view still breathtaking from the highest point in town. Fort Revere. They had spent the day at the beach, then had a late lunch at the Red Parrot, a deck with umbrellas and seventies Juke Box music, overlooking the water. And then Bradan had taken them to the fort, the crumbling remains of the nineteenth century bastion that sat atop of a hill at the end of town. The ramparts were covered with earth and tall grass, and the girls chased each other about squealing. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

87 Bradan could see the two lighthouses at the gate to the harbor in the distance, and inner bay spotted with sails. Water blue, crested with white breakers. He proposed to Kotryna up there, fourteen years earlier, and he liked to come back. Sometimes with her, sometimes with the children, and sometimes alone. The children disappeared down the stairs into what remained of the barracks. Dark concrete tunnels spotted with puddles and littered with broken glass. Graffiti on the walls. He heard their voices rise up like echoes. On the way home, they listened to a Beach Boy’s CD-Endless Summer, a ritual when coming from the beach-and somehow the conversation had turned to divorce. Mary’s friends’ parents had just announced that they were getting divorced. Mary sat in the front seat, beside Bradan. Ten years old, long blonde hair, she wore big white plastic framed sunglasses, and had something red on her cheek. Candy. “They said it is going to be silver,” she told Bradan. “Silver?” Bradan asked. The CD switched to Fun, Fun, Fun. “Yeah, the divorce.” She pushed the sunglasses back up her nose. “Like the Silver War.” Kiley put her feet up on the top of Mary’s seat. “Yeah, but sometimes when people get divorced they end up killing each other, Mary,” she said. “And I get the front seat next time.” “Paul wouldn’t kill Joyce,” Mary said, “because she buys him all his clothes.” Kiley was fooling with a hand held video game. “Not if they’re divorced, she’s not.” Mary turned to Bradan. “It pisses her off.” Bradan nodded. “Don’t talk that way.” “Pissed isn’t a swear because we all gotta do it,” Mary said. “Yes, it is, Mary,” said Ollie, one of the twins. She had a window seat, next to Kiley. Ollie on one side, Nina on the other. “Because you can’t say it in church.” “Daddy,” said Nina. Thick hair, and dark, wide green eyes. “If you and Mummy get divorced, I’ll hide you in the cellar.” She leaned The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

88 forward and kissed the back of Bradan’s head. “Mummy and I aren’t going to get divorced,” Bradan said. “Why do you think we’d get divorced?” “Come on, Dad,” said Kiley, “get with the program. You’re not exactly her favorite person. And Mummy has anger issues.” “A kid in my class has issues,” said Nina, “and now he has to go to the Small Room.” “Nina,” said Ollie, “that’s just because he’s mental.” “Still,” Nina said, “Daddy’s not going nowhere. We’ll just hide him.” He is staring at the Christmas Crib again. Angry, he says something, snaps. The woman watches as the girl startles, her shoulders jumping, but she doesn’t look up, just keeps playing with the dolls. The woman gives him a look, gestures to the girl with her eyes, a message about the language. He goes to the kitchen, and comes back with a bottle of whiskey. He takes a swig, then walks over to the manger. Picks up the small porcelain Christ, the baby’s arms open wide as he lay in the cradle, spread wide to welcome the world. The man examines it a moment. Then he winds up and heaves it against the wall, the statue shattering. The little girl starts to cry, and the woman just stares. Wordless. Shock. Back in the bedroom, he sits on the edge of the bed. Crying. He looks up at her, eyes pleading. “I don’t deserve you,” he mouths. “I’m no good. No fucking good.” She tries to comfort him, but he resists, shaking his head, mouthing the words “No good. No good.” The woman takes his head to her chest, quieting him. It’s all the past, she mouths to him, over. Soulmates, she mouths, we are soulmates. And she says she will never leave him. In the living room, the needle once again comes to the end of the album, rises again and goes back to the beginning. When the man starts snoring, the woman tiptoes out to find the little girl asleep beneath the tree. Headlights pass by on the street below. While finishing nursing school Kotryna worked as a surgical tech. Commuted halfway to work, and then caught the T into Boston. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

89 Her mother watched Dalia while she was at work, and Kotryna paid her fifty dollars a week. Kotryna hated this, hated being dependent on her mother, but Robert refused to help her, she said. It was her idea to go back to school, he reminded her, and it was a good lesson for her. Work is hard, nothing is free, he said, but Kotryna secretly suspected he did not want her to get a degree, didn’t want her to be a professional, make more money than he did. Her brother no longer lived upstairs at this point. He had moved with his friend to the other side of the city. A family lived up there now. A parade of children going up and down the stairs. There was a lot of noise, and a lot of trash thrown about the front hallway. Robert told her he wanted to move soon, out of the city. Someplace cleaner, someplace safer. The woman sits on the couch with two other women, posing for pictures. A fourth woman takes the photographs, and then they switch off. All four are dressed in white nurse’s uniforms, small white caps, holding diplomas out before them. After, they pop a bottle of champagne, the cork hitting the ceiling, talking, and when the champagne is gone, they sit, sipping tea, with a piece of cake on small plates on their laps. The women all leave shortly after the man comes home. The woman turns away from him as she cleans up in the kitchen. The man, eyes red, steps behind her and starts to undo the zipper on the back of her uniform. She turns around as he tugs at the zipper. It is spring. A slant of fading sunlight shines through the curtains, across the floor. Leaving the rest of the room to shadows. “Just a quick strip tease,” he mouths. “Come on. I love the nurse’s costume. It makes me horny.” Just a few weeks back they sat on the front porch. A candle going between them, and Bradan smoking a cigar. A full white moon hanging above the tree line across the street. They had been out to dinner in Boston. Gourmet Sandwiches and pomegranate martinis. Kotryna had been in good spirits on the train ride home, whispering dirty promises in his ear, but now, here, things were changing. Status quo. Back to usual. She yawned, complaining of feeling tired. A stressful week behind, a stressful week ahead. It usually worked this way, it seemed, a burst of Saturday night energy, quickly fading. The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

90 Bradan looked at her now. Still Kotryna, still beautiful, even having passed forty. A body that could be the envy of many women in their twenties. They had been talking about sex again, and Kotryna had mentioned despite the birth of their daughter, when she was eighteen, she had never had an orgasm until she was 21. Robert, of course. The revelation both disturbed and aroused Bradan a little. Asking questions. “To be honest, we didn’t even have sex that much,” she said. “And when we did, it wasn’t really sex.” Bradan asked her what she meant, and searching the memory, her face switched to a look of disgust. “It was just weird. Kinky stuff. It wasn’t even sex.” He pressed her. What did she mean? But Kotryna clammed up. Got angry, looked off in the distance. Why would he ask her that? she said. She would never ask him anything like that. Wouldn’t want to know. Bradan thought she might start to cry, and he didn’t want to see her cry. He changed the subject, but a moment later she was up, saying she was tired. She was going inside. He had ruined it again, he thought. But ruined what, he just wasn’t sure. What he wanted. The woman dances for him. Blushing a little, looking a bit awkward, shy. The CD in the boombox is Wilson Pickett. Mustang Sally. The women’s movements are forced, slightly strained, but she does slow down when it comes time to remove her stockings, and then she turns to face him, he is still relaxing on the bed, but now his pants are down and his eyes at half-mast. Lost in the empty space between euphoria and inebriation. She goes over to him, now down to nothing herself, completely naked, and leans over and kisses the head. He puts his head back, moans a little, but then grips her chin and pushes her off. Still grasping her by the chin, he climbs to his knees, and asks her to hold still. He blindfolds her, ties her hands. She is speaking, looking to be pleading. The man positions himself on the floor behind her. The woman rests the side of her face against the floor and the man begins to thrust. He ties her to a chair, blindfolded. He lifts her chin with two fingers. Mouths some words-he wants her to beg. She shakes her head. Mouths some words The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

91 herself. She wants to be together with him, not just an object. We’re all objects, he tells her. He used to tell me that he and his girlfriend before me, Alicia, was his real one true love, she has told Bradan. Alicia loved me, he used to say, staring at a picture of her-a short girl with big brown eyes, and enormous breasts. Bobbed hair. Then he would start to cry, saying they never should have broken up, but they did, not long after she mis-carried their baby. It looked like a little monster, he said, but he said when she was born, he held her anyway. It didn’t matter. They were a family. That is part of the reason why I waited about three months before I told him I was pregnant, Kotryna tells Bradan. I didn’t know how he would react. Now the sun has nearly set outside the window, the sky broken in reds. The woman is still naked, still tied to the chair. The man is out cold on the bed, his pants still off, he has begun to snore. The woman works at her wrists. She gets one hand free, then the other. Unties her feet. Looks at the calendar on the wall. Puts her hand on her belly. She had already kicked Robert out twice by the time the baby was born, she said. Each time he had pleaded with her to let him come back. Saying he loved her. He loved his unborn son. Dalia, too. He always needed to remind her of this-himself-he loved Dalia. His family. They were his family. He sobbed on the phone, telling her he would change. Promised. Things would be different. He would stop drinking. He promised. And things would be different, she told Bradan. But just for a while. The woman is cleaning up. A radio in plays on the counter. She wears an apron over a blue dress, her hair up. The baby is in a crib in the living room, already standing when he holds onto the bars. The apartment is littered with the remnants of a birthday party. Balloons and streamers. A butchered cake with a big number 1 sticking out of the top. The little girl is watching T.V. The man comes into the kitchen, holding an open bottle of champagne. He says something to the woman, takes a long sip. She says something in return, but doesn’t turn to face him. He steps back, makes another remark, then takes her by the shoulder. She turns and snaps. A flurry of words, and then the two are The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

92 both shouting, the woman leaning forward, protecting her body. He moves forward again, and she resists, pushing herself away, trying to squeeze by him. He grabs her by the hair, she yells and whacks at her hand, and just as she does, he meets her with his left fist, in between her mouth and nose. The woman flies backward, and as she hits the floor, the man tosses the champagne bottle and shatters it against the wall. In the living room, the baby starts to scream. It hadn’t always been bad, Bradan thinks. Wasn’t always bad still. A lot of up and downs, and it has been that way since Bradan met her. Now nearly seventeen years back. They went to the same gym. Bradan remembers thinking how pretty she was when he asked her out. The went to the movies. Forrest Gump. And Kotryna said she hated it, but she cried anyway. She didn’t cry in real life, she said, only in movies. And then back at her apartment, a new apartment, they had a beer, talked. A mouse ran across the room, Kotryna, saying she was terrified of mice, brought her feet up beneath her, and a little drunk, moved close to Bradan on the couch. And then they were kissing and then they were in bed. He remembers thinking he had never slept with anyone so rambunctious in bed, energetic and involved, biting her lip and her fingernails digging into his shoulders as she came. But the next day she swore that she hadn’t had any intentions of sleeping with him. Not initially. She wasn’t like that, she said. She catered to him after that. Learned to cook, and at times even came over to clean his apartment while Bradan was at work, and she had a day off, her kids with the babysitter. She would listen to the Sound of Music or Funny Girl as she cleaned. Hair up, sports bra and shorts. They spent three or four nights a week together, and on the other nights were on the phone. Then they met the families, then came holidays. Bradan remembered second thoughts-not because he didn’t love her, he knew that he loved her-but because he felt like he was moving into space that didn’t belong to him. The two kids. Robert was gone, she said--dead in an accident after they split up-but still it all felt strange to Bradan, not knowing his role, or how to approach them. The man sits alone in the living room, staring at the television, the The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

93 sound down. Above him, children run about the third floor, shooting each other with squirt guns, their mother in her bedroom, painting her toes, and in the yard below, another man mows the lawn, but the man before the television doesn’t move. His eyes transfixed, unblinking, drink in hand, and a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. His bedroom, is empty, as is the little girl’s, the baby’s crib, the kitchen. The cigarette smoke casts a thin shadow on the wall. Bradan had proposed on the summer solstice. High on the ramparts of the fort, sail boats dotting the bay, the hills of the town crowded with cottages. He read her a poem, the last line a proposal that she didn’t see coming until, her eyes closed, he slipped the ring on her finger. Kotryna had hugged him, and then started to cry. They were married the following June. The woman’s hair is cut short, and she is wearing no make up. Still in her hospital scrubs, she stands with her back against the door as the man pounds on the other side. The man’s face is red, and sweat streams down his temples. The door is vibrating, ready to give. The baby is screaming, and the woman, panicking, mouths numbers to the little girl who holds the phone out in front of her. There is a crawl space beneath the back porch. Leaves, and weeds, a hoe, and shovel and two rakes, lying flat against the earth. There is a newspaper crumpled and stuffed inside the cellar window, close enough for Bradan to reach, and he does. The paper comes to pieces in his hands. Bill Clinton is on the front page. A much younger Bill Clinton. Clinton Denounces Roughshod, Muscle Bound Tactics of Organized Labor, the headline read. Clinton has his chin lowered, and his finger pointing. Bradan looks at the date. November 17, 1993. 1993. Bradan was still single. Still in San Francisco. Grad School. Twenty-five years old. The biggest stresses in his life were classes, papers, and making sure that he caught the electric bus on Fulton Street to get to work in the Mission District on time. And loneliness. Although, it didn’t feel as he had much time to be lonely, then. Time was funny that way, what seemed tight once, would seem like an abundance now. It was relative. But any time he had was for himself back then. Not anymore, of course. Not with kids. It has always been The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

94 Kotryna’s biggest complaint-her life hasn’t been her own since she was eighteen. Pregnant, and that was it. Kotryna is exactly a day older than Bradan. And it’s funny now. Trying to picture her here, in this house. What if she was still? And him out here. Having not yet met. And what if they never did? Or what if they had met much earlier than they did? Before he moved west, before she had gotten pregnant, before she met Robert. He has to wonder if they would have clicked, stayed together. Changed the course of history. Changed the past. Bradan fantasizes about this sometimes. Meeting a young Kotryna, still in high school. Innocent in her puffy shouldered pink prom dress and heavy blue eye shadow. Trying hard to look like an adult, to be grown up, the rush to the desert of maturity that seizes so many children. He wonders what their life would have been like if they had started so young. Neither one ever touched by anyone else. She would only have been his, never anyone else’s. Never. He remembers their wedding night in the hotel, just hours before they flew out to Paris. Her gown, a lipstick stain on the sleeve, folded over the chair and Kotryna in her garters and a bodice, lying on the floor beside him. Lying on her side, and looking into his eyes. Four a.m. and the party with their guests was still going on down the hall. She told him how happy she was. How happy he had made her, and then she brushed her lips against his. He pulled her close, her leg wrapped around him, and her face pressed into his shoulder, and he looked out across the room, out into nothing. He could hear voices down the hall. Laughter. And then an argument. Somebody shouting. Somebody crying. And then it was quiet again. Quiet except for Kotryna breathing. Already asleep. From Paris they drove across the French Country side to the Normandy Coast. Rolling green hills, cows and sheep, and small villages on hills dotting the distance. And with each village, the shadow of a tall steepled church. The light over the hills shined down upon the villages, breaking the clouds, breaking from the heavens, directly from a renaissance painting, Gothic and Holy, and Bradan remembered thinking that life was all it was made up to be. Quiet and beautiful. They stopped on a curving dirt road that wound between a small The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

95 grove of trees and made love in the fields, and in Ducey, a walled town over a thousand years old, they stayed in a room above the river in a stone hotel, massive granite bricks, and they slept with the window open, the cool breeze and the sound of water trickling below. Ivy on the outside walls, and as old as it all was, everything was green. The little girl hides in the broom closet off the kitchen. Her infant brother was on her lap, sucking on his binky. The little girl’s eyes are wide in the shadows. The man is stomping about the apartment, still screaming. The woman is lying on the floor, unconscious, the phone still in her hand, but the cord ripped from the wall. When they met she would give him hints at her past, and then clam up. But back then it was different-he felt as if he knew her. She was young, and it was easy to assume that she was the same person just a few years earlier. Back then she liked to be held, she liked to kiss, and she loved to have sex and sometimes at night, he would wake up beside her to find her crying in her sleep. Sometimes he woke her and pulled her close and other times he just rolled over, faced the wall, listened. But even then he would try and think what his life would be like if he had never met her. But once he did meet her, he couldn’t leave. He knew that, pretty much from the start. So if he left now? He sometimes felt he would leave an empty space and that was all. An invisible outline where their past had been. Where he had been. Dalia lived in New York now, and they only saw her a few times a year. Her boyfriend was young and bald with a bushy black beard, and he seemed nice enough, but also dull enough to render him safe. Bradan had always been worried that Dalia might grow up and seek out someone who was not. She was a pretty girl, and her eyes always looked slightly startled. Possibly frightened. A look that had been there ever since Bradan had met her so many years ago. Bradan had asked her once, after she moved out, what she remembered about their lives on Bartlett St., asked her after he could get little of an answer from Kotryna, but the girl’s answer was nearly the same. “Not much,” she said, licking some cookie dough from a spoon, “I was too little. I remember my bedroom, and I remember the front stairs, The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017

96 but that’s about all. And Steven crying. I remember lying in bed at night and hearing Steven crying. He cried all night long.” Bradan asked if she remembered much about Robert, but she just looked at him blankly for a minute-either thinking or trying very hard not to-and then she went back to putting cookies on the sheet. “No,” she said. Outside the front door, someone is knocking. Two policemen. They knock twice, and then call inside. The woman lifts herself up from the floor, and drags herself across the room, slumping against the wall, just behind the bedroom door. She is bleeding from a cut on her temple, and one on her lip. Her nose swollen, broken. The children are still in the closet and the baby begins to wail again. The man is pacing the apartment floor. The police knock again and call inside. The man doesn’t answer. He goes to the window, and looks out on the street and then he begins to pace again. Knocks on the bedroom door, calls out to the woman. Shouts something. The police knock harder. Bradan looks at his watch. He needs to get back to the office. He looks up at the house one last time. He thinks of their honeymoon again. From France they went to Ireland. The sea, the mist, the hills, and the green. More green. New. Everything was new. It was in Gaulway, lying in bed, in a small cottage overlooking the rocks and the sea, that resting with her head on his chest, she told him she was pregnant. She hadn’t taken a test, but she had been there before, and she knew. And Bradan knew at that moment that their lives would go on forever. Holding her tight, and smiling quietly in the dark, he had complete confidence in that at that moment, and now looking up at the remains of the house where her adult life began without him so many years back, he thought he would like to still believe that. Find something to convince him. He wonders if the shadows of the their old selves still exist in their old homes. Broken images and flashes of light, trapped in time and coming together just for a moment, to reflect who they were, and maybe even who they will one day be again. Back in a time when their love for each other seemed untouchable. Imprints. The Wagon Magazine - May -2017

97 Bradan takes a seat on the back steps. The disintegrating pieces of the newspaper still in his hand. The print all but lost. There is nothing to see. Not on the page, nor in this home. An abandoned, collapsing building with shadows inside that will never again move, that he will never touch. He has to believe she was steadily happy at one point in her life. Everybody is happy at one point. He has to believe that, but her past is her own, and will never be his. And he supposes that is how it should be. The man goes back to the middle of the living room, the gun by his side, watching the door. The door begins to vibrate. Once. Twice. The thrust of a foot. The man steps backwards across the room. He puts the pistol in his mouth just as the door flies open. The door hits the wall just as the man hits the floor. His hand, body limp, and the kitchen wall splattered behind him. Bradan starts down the driveway and is nearly to the street when he drops his keys at the foot of the walkway. He crouches down to get them and as he does, he notices the words on the edge of the cracked and pock marked cement, partially hidden by the encroaching earth, dirt and tall grass. Bradan pushes back the dirt, claws at it with his fingers. The words are just letters, four sets of initials, carved with a stick while the cement was still wet. Bradan runs his finger over each one. And then over the date. October 24, 1993. He hears his heart beating.

Sean McCarthy is from Norton, MA. His story

“Better Man”--originally published in december magazine--was cited in The Best American Short Stories 2015, and he is 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship in Fiction Award.

FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY Published by Vel.Kathiravan, K G E TEAM, Chennai, India - 600024 Printed by Print Process, Chennai- 600014 / Phone: +949176991885 The Wagon Magazine - May - 2017