Nov 2017

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The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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VOLUME: 2 - ISSUE: 8 - NOVEMBER - 2017

Prasad’s Post 02 Columns:

Sotto Voce -Indira Parthasarathy 05

Letter from London-John Looker 08

The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck 12 P&P - Yonason Goldson 31 Poetry:

Kousik Adhikari 18 Lisa Brognano 22

Steven Manuel 27 Sanaa Uppal 64

Fiction:

Jane McAdams 41

Tushar Jain 50

Paco Aramburu 57 Book Review: Ramu Ramanathan/ Jyaneswar Laishram 47 Novella: Zdravka Evtimova -part-2-

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Mise en scene - Photo Story -Wrapper art: Paolo Marchetti 86

THE WAGON MAGAZINE

KGE TEAM 4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

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PRASAD'S POST

From Aphorism to Ifferism

On a vacant weekend, I was reading an article by Sharon Dolin in

poets.org, in which she quotes James Geary, the author of ‘Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, an encyclopaedic compendium of aphorisms’, classifying the first stanza of Emily Dickinson ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ as an aphorism.

That triggered me to dig deep.

In my dictionary, an aphorism is ‘a terse statement of a truth or opinion; an adage.’ The word comes from the Greek aphorismos, meaning ‘to delimit’ or ‘define.’ An aphorism draws a circle around—and then occupies—a tiny territorial space.

But, Sharon approaches aphorism differently and offers a list of varied definitions. She starts with Kafka’s ‘Zürau Aphorisms’ translated

by Michael Hofmann. This collection contracts and expands the notion of what an aphorism can be. Some are mere observations: ‘Like a path in autumn: no sooner is it cleared than it is once again littered with fallen The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

4 leaves.’ Others strike like snapshots — fragments — of the personal: ‘To let one’s hateand disgust-filled head slump onto one’s chest.’ And, of course, some grapple with such large concepts of good and evil: ‘Once we have taken evil into ourselves, it no longer insists that we believe in it.’ Finally, there are aphorisms that, rather than delimiting something small, seem capable of offering a Weltanschauung, a world view, as in the justly famous aphorism that ends the Kafka collection: It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen.

Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone.

The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other; it will writhe before you in ecstasy.

This aphorism verges on being a parable: a story that teaches.

This is a self-portrait of the artist as a receptacle of, versus creator of, reality. Or, as the Moody Blues sang aphoristically many years ago, ‘Thinking is the best way to travel.’ After exploring more on aphorisms, Dolin gets back to Kafka again with this: ‘A cage went in search of a bird’ (Zürau Aphorisms)- a one-line poem.

Dolin drives us towards this collection of Kafka’s aphorisms by declaring that this compilation is ‘a road, a tale, a desire. That’s what’s so compelling about it. It is not a small clasped box, as many aphorisms can be, but a cage that catches the imagination and leaves the door open’. It will be interesting in the ‘space where the lyric and the aphorism meet and marry’.

I love this one by the poet James Richardson and enjoyed the way in which ‘aphorism drops into metaphor and then, the border between the aphorism and the ultra-short poem is obscured’: ‘Am I the past? / As the lake forgets the rain.’

Interested readers may visit Sharon Dolin’s webpage for more at sharondolin.com. * The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

5 I was introduced to Siva Book Store, a secondhand (many a times, many more hands) book shop in Chennai

by Prof Rajja of Pondicherry. I was looking for books on aphorisms. Then, my eyes fell upon a book titled ‘Ifferisms’ by Dr Mardy Grothe.

This is an anthology of aphorisms that begin with the word ‘if ’, the biggest little word.

The inner flap conveys that these ifferisms, as they have been dubbed by quotation anthologist Grothe, explaining how they demonstrate the powerful role hypothetical and conditional thinking play in our lives. Quotation lovers will savour scintillating observations from the usual suspects – Twain, Wilde, Shaw, Emerson, and Franklin – as well as scores of contemporary wits.

I, of course, purchased the book. Here are a few sampling.

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

‘If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.’

‘If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.’ - Booker T. Washington.

‘At a conference in the 1970s, W. Karl Kapp, a professor of economics at Switzerland’s Basil University, attempted to capture the hazards of making predictions by relying solely on computer models: ‘If there had been a computer in 1872, it would have predicted that by now there would be so many horse-drawn carriages that the entire surface of the earth would be ten feet deep in horse manure.’

Read more at drmardy.com/ifferisms/book.

Krishna Prasad a. k. a. Chithan The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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SOTTO VOCE INDIRA PARTHASARATHY

The history of our epic battle for independence that has been so far

written is only about the activities of the political leaders, great and not so great. Stories of those, who were not aligned to any political party, and who were from the diversified fields of art and culture, but yet, involved as they were, with the freedom movement in their own individual ways, have been sadly forgotten or ignored. The subaltern history of such unsung men and women needs to be told in the pan Indian context if one has to have a comprehensive and holistic view of our freedom struggle.

The publication of the diaries diligently maintained by Bhaskaradas (1892-1952), primarily, a theatre activist, besides being many other things, sums up the social history of Tamilnadu from 1917 to 1951.

Anandarangan Pillai (1709-1761), who was a dubash during the French rule in Pondicherry, was, perhaps, the earliest diarist in Tamil. The jottings made by him every day read almost like essays, whereas, Bhaskaradas, totally unaware that in a computer age, the The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

7 way he wrote would be known as ‘micro-blogging’. He had ‘twittered’ a mixed bag of events and expenses of his everyday life each such noting not exceeding 60 words at the maximum. They were in handwritten manuscripts soiled and withered and only the readable parts of his notebooks have been redeemed and published. Thanks to the untiring efforts of the diarist’s grandson S.Murugaboopathy, a modern theatre activist in his own right.

The names of all India leaders Bhaskaradas had mentioned in his diaries in different contexts, would almost read like a veritable political ‘who’s who’, all those, popular during the early and middle part of the twentieth century. The most interesting part of it is, he had composed songs on almost all of them, and also about the movements with which they were associated, like Khilafat movement(1919-1924), Rowlatt Act protests (1919), Salt Satyagraha (1930), Jallianwalabagh massacre (1919) etc.

Bhaskaradas was so overwhelmed by Gandhiji that he wrote several poems on all the things that Gandhi loved most, like charka, ahimsa, prohibition, untouchability and rural reconstruction. He met Gandhiji once in the train when he travelled in South India and gave him the poem he had written on him. On listening to the first line of the poem, when it was translated to him in Hindi, that began, “Gandhi oru parama eezai sanyasi’, Bapuji smiled and remarked, ‘O! God, he has made me a saint!’ Later, this song was immortalized by K.B.Sundarambal, when she rendered it for a gramophone record.

Bhaskaradas was a great hit with the gramophone companies, like His Master’s Voice, Odeon, and others that he had written nearly 500 songs for them that were sung by an illustrious galaxy of musicians like S.G.Kittappa, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, S.D.Subbulakshmi, M.S.Subbhalakshmi, S.V. Subbiah Bhagavatar, M.S.Sivabhagyam, M.S.Viswanathdas, T.P. Khader Patsha and others.

The actor Viswanathdas was once arrested on the stage for singing a song by Bhaskaradas in a puranic play, that was loaded with political meanings. His most well-known song was ‘Vellai Kokkukala’, wherein, Valli, the spouse of Karthikeya, while guarding her family millet farm, demanded the white cranes, to go off their fields never to return, as The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

8 they had no claim on them. The hundreds of the people, who used to flock to see the play, knew how to read between the lines and understood who ‘the white cranes’ were (British). Bhaskaradas makes subtle, mature and factual references to all these incidents in his diaries without getting emotionally involved.

His was an inclusive art that embraced all the sections of the Tamil society, the rich and the poor, the classical elite and the street-singers, the road vendors, the fisherwomen, the weavers, the gypsies, and beggars. He composed songs for all of them relating to the needs of their profession and heard them sing. In fact, in those days, in the music-oriented Tamil society, no beggar used to ask for alms without singing. As most of the songs that many of the beggars sang were the lyrics written by Bhaskaradas, in the title-crazy Tamil Nadu, he came to be known as ‘Bhaskaradas, the poet for the beggars’.

The beggars used to travel in the trains, ticketless, singing these patriotic songs.

One lasting impression after going through this voluminous and well got up book is, how such a nationalistic, refreshingly secular, liberated and open-minded Tamil society that seemed to have existed during the period in which Bhaskaradas lived.

‘Patriotism’ was not thrust on the people by a government gazette notification but was an intrinsic aspect of the people, who lived at that time.

Indira Parthasarathy is the pen name of R.Parthasarathy, a noted Tamil writer and playwright.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

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Letter from London - 12 from John Looker

Our quarterly journal The Poetry Review woke me up recently with

a discussion of offensiveness in poetry. It began with three essays in their summer edition and continued this autumn.

The writers are debating poems that invoke attitudes on race, gender, sexuality and so on. Coarse language is covered but their primary target is whether poets are justified in giving voice to values that will be deeply offensive. This is a longstanding debate in literature but it parallels the dispute in academic circles today about whether lecturers should be allowed on campus if their views might upset anyone. Looking further afield, there are religious groups who extend their notion of heresy to condemn the free expression of views from others.

So, how far may poets go in treading on sensitivities?

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

10 Let’s deal quickly with sex. There have always been poems in bad taste. The writers quote some famously crude Latin poems. Two of the essays mention a poem that became notorious a couple of years ago: Keats is Dead so ...... . I recoil from quoting even the title.

Look it up on the internet. Written by a young New Zealand woman, Hera Lindsay Bird, it is less about sex than death and an affirmation of life. However, even though crude language may shock, that’s not really the issue.

The focus becomes clearer with discussion of a poem by a young male writer, Bobby Parker, published in The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt).

Again, I’ll spare you the title but you could Google “thank you for ...”. This poem also was not primarily about sex but it caused great offence to those who felt it treated women as mere objects. It’s misogyny that is at issue: ten thousand years of it.

The Poetry Review debate includes two poems by older male poets which portray an elderly man’s sexual interest in young women while cruelly disparaging women their own age. Both raised a storm of criticism: Climbing Everest by Frederick Seidel, who is described as ‘the moustache-twirling villain of American poetry’ but who has a substantial following, and Gatwick from Craig Raine who became famous with A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. They are established poets with distinguished reputations, here seen taking risks. Seidel was more readily forgiven, possibly because his poem turns unambiguously against the speaker, confessing the helplessness of an old man dependent upon a female carer.

The essayists spend time considering whether these poems are well written. There is an implied message about “art redeeming crudity”, as one contributor puts it – the defense in the The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

11 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That might excuse simple bad taste, but the main question is about the moral responsibility of writers to others.

This is most evident in their consideration of racial attitudes.

There is no reference to the well-trodden debate over TS Eliot and anti-Semitism. Their test case is a controversial modern poem called The Change by Tony Hoagland. In this the speaker is a white male who remembers an occasion when he hoped that a white tennis player would defeat “a big black girl from Alabama” The description of the black player stings with racial stereotyping and the speaker’s instinctive preference for the white player is transparent: because she was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips.

If we confine ourselves to close reading of the text we might conclude that Hoagland was celebrating a historic change in racial attitudes in America. The poem’s title is the first clue. Half way through we read: There are moments when history passes you so close you can smell its breath, you can reach your hand out and touch it on its flank.

Moreover, at the close we find: and in fact everything had already changed— Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone, we were there, and when we went to put it back where it belonged, it was past us and we were changed.

One who could not excuse this poem’s racial stereotyping was The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

12 Claudia Rankine. She was angry. In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, she spelt out the numerous and daily micro-aggressions that black people encounter, in addition to major injustices that are better known.

Understanding this puts the Hoagland poem in an entirely different context, one in which racial stereotyping and tribal loyalty come smartly to the foreground.

What should we say then of the poet’s rights and duties?

It was Shelley who wrote about poets being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. In A Defence of Poetry he considered the effects of poetry upon society. It brings pleasure. It can awake an ambition of becoming like Achilles, Hector and Ulysses. Poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world”. He argued that, to be good, people must imaginatively put themselves in the place of others – and that poetry enlarges the imagination. More: “Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man”.

He overstated his case even then, and today cinema and television have far more reach than literature. But he was surely right that works of imagination can shape minds and consequently shape society. Why else would totalitarian regimes seek to control writers?

Let’s acknowledge that writers have responsibilities to society but that literature should be a place in which established thought – even taboos – may safely be challenged.

And now a postscript: I’ve just read CS Lakshmi’s piece in The Wagon Magazine (Sept 2017) on the death of HG Razool. She regrets how little support he received from fellow writers when he was forced by religious authorities to apologise for a book of poems, Mailanji, which “according to him, was a way of asserting that there is no such thing as one Islamic way of life with which all Muslims, from whatever region and whatever gender, can identify themselves”.

CS Lakshmi ended with the image of the hoopoe or hudhud bird which, though its wings be broken, flies forever in the search for truth.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

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The Wanderer Andrew Fleck

Published in 1650, a year after England had killed their king,

Charles I (the king of the Welsh and Scottish, too), Henry Vaughan’s poem The World starts with a description of a sublime vision: I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world And all her train were hurl’d.

Vaughan lived in Brecknock– now known as Brecon, in Wales, and was known to love wandering atop the local hills when he found time away from his work as a clerk, and later a physician. I like to The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

14 think that this vision was inspired by a walk up the Brecon Beacons, where, on a clear night, you surely do get a view of the universe and at least some cognisance of the greater time scale at which the cosmos operates. We are getting a God’s eye view of the universe here: Vaughan was a Christian, and Christians believe that God exists outside of time – or perhaps inside and outside of it, and thus can perceive eternity.

The imagery is very Platonic, too– with the universe moving according to the harmonious motion of the higher spheres.

This is only the beginning, however. According to Platonic cosmology, the universe consisted of a series of concentric spheres which diminished in their perfectness, with the most corrupted matter at the very centre – the earth that is, the world of the poem’s title.

In the poem, Vaughan describes people in this world trapped in sin, sorrow or darkness – who, like the figures in Plato’s cave allegory, prefer the darkness to the light, while only few can rise up to the eternity that he presents right at the start. The poem is a fascinating, and quite beautiful vision, borne of Vaughan’s Platonic Christianity.

But, as befits a poem that must describe our corruptible world, it alludes no less fascinatingly to secular matters too. Here is part of the second stanza: Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found, Work’d under ground, Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see That policy; Churches and altars fed him; perjuries Were gnats and flies; It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he Drank them as free.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

15 The mole surely alludes to the old English or Welsh prophecy of the Mouldwarp (itself a dialect word for mole), a great disrupter who would overturn the country, sowing chaos and disorder where there had been harmony. This was an insult thrown at Henry VIII, for one, whose reformation of the English church and dissolution of the monasteries in the early 16th century caused a radical and painful break with England’s mediaeval past. The description of one who works underground, however, would be better suited to a courtier, one who operates behind the glittering façade of royal power. It brings to mind Thomas Cromwell, the Machiavellian right hand man of Henry, in the traumatic early days of the English Reformation, who helped solve the King’s ‘great matter’ in a way that engineered the transformation of England– and thus Wales – from a Catholic to a Protestant country. This radical break with the past, forced on a reluctant population, involved the desecration of churches and alters, the selling off of church and monastic property; it also led to the executions of many who resisted the changes, from figures like Thomas More and the Carthusians of London who refused to acknowledge Henry as head of the church, to the brave men of the North who rose up against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and – after being hoodwinked by the king’s fake peace agreement, were hanged in their hundreds. The story seems to fit Vaughan’s description very well – a great overturning, Machiavellian plotting, the destruction of churches and straightforward lies...

All that happened a hundred years before Vaughan’s time, but his too was an age of great upheavals. At the time of the poem’s publication, the English Civil Wars (actually a series of interlinked wars that had stretched across all the countries of the British Isles) were drawing to a bloody close, with the defeat of the Royalists and the ascension to power of the amilitaristic faction of the Parliamentarians, who, in fact, dismissed the parliament and in its place, and the kings place, put their leader, one Oliver Cromwell, in power. Oliver was not a direct descendant of Thomas, but his family could trace theirs back to the influential Cromwell family from which had sprung their predecessor, illustrious or infamous depending on one’s religious The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

16 sensibilities. Among his followers were many zealous Protestants, including determined ‘iconoclasts,’ who destroyed church property because of their religious beliefs. After the war, Cromwell’s forces also took revenge on some of the people who had defied them, even in distant parts of the Kingdoms like Wales – Vaughan, with strong Anglican and Royalist sympathies suffered some loss of property, so he had more than an academic interest in the figures who executed the war. Oliver Cromwell as a general and later dictator does not fit the bill of someone working ‘underground’, as Thomas did, but he was certainly responsible for blood and tears – and his troops were known to be especially cruel to the Welsh – if only because they mistook them for the Catholic Irish. This figure in the poem is perhaps kind of amalgamation of figures from current events, history – including one figure, pointedly, related to a prominent figure of the present, and folklore.

I have seen the ‘mouldwarp’ prophecy described as ‘Galfridian’, an adjective that refers to another Welshman, the 12th century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae, The History of the Kings of Britain. Although himself a clergyman, Geoffrey’s history is a world away from the pieties of the Catholic Mediaeval Europe: despite occasional nods to Christianity, it is for the most part a celebration of the heroic history of the Welsh up to their eclipse by the invading Anglo-Saxons. The adjective Galfridian refers to the practice of using animals or creatures in prophecies, although Geoffrey claimed that the prophecies in question were not his own but those of the great wizard of Welsh legend, Merlin. In Geoffrey’s account, Merlin is invited to give a prophecy by the king of the Welsh – the Britons, as they were then called. Merlin orders a hole to be dug up, under, which lies a pool, so he orders the pool to be drained and at the bottom of the pool lies a white dragon and a red dragon. The two dragons tussle and eventually the white dragon prevails. Merlin offers an unambiguous interpretation of this vision: Alas for the Red Dragon, for its end is near. Its cavernous dens shall be occupied by the White Dragon, which stands for the Saxons whom you have invited over. The Red Dragon represents the people The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

17 of Britain [i.e. the Britons, that is, the Welsh], who will be overrun by the White One: for Britain’s mountains and valleys will be levelled, and the streams in its valleys shall run with blood.

Later, however: ‘The seed of the White Dragon shall be rooted up from our little gardens and what is then left of its progeny shall be decimated.’ This is, of course, an all too uncannily accurate prediction, first of Britain’s conquest by the English, and secondly, the English’s own conquest several centuries later by the Normans. It was likely concocted by Geoffrey or his sources to match the historical facts. One of the reasons his history was so resonant in his own age and beyond, aside from its great font of Arthurian legend, is that it indirectly supported the Norman Elite’s legitimacy – if the English had effectively stolen the land from the Welsh in the first place, then that undercut the narrative of the lingering English resistance to Norman rule.

Merlin’s prophecy goes on for pages and pages, but he ceases to offer further explanations of what he describes, as a host of strange figures, human and animal range across Britain, besieging, conquering and slaughtering as they go. Much is a condensed and obscure history of Britain since the Saxon conquest, but there is also a lot of concealed comment on contemporary Norman affairs in there. Like Vaughan, Geoffrey lived through a Civil War – the so-called Anarchy of the mid-12th century, in which two grandchildren of the Conqueror, Stephen and Matilda, vied for the throne as the country’s institutions decayed, local lords acted like kings in their own realm and the Scottish and Welsh grabbed portions of England for themselves.

The key battlefields of the war – Lincoln and Oxford – are referred to frequently, but what exactly Geoffrey made of events and who he is rooting for is never quite clear – it is obscured by all his Galfridian tendencies, perhaps deliberately so: Geoffrey had an ecclesiastical career to look to, after all.

Interestingly, on the frontispiece of his poetry, Vaughan signed himself ‘The Silurist.’ The Silures were a Welsh tribe famous for their effective opposition to Roman invaders. Perhaps he saw parallels between the 17th century Cromwellian and the Roman threat to The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

18 Wales back in the first century CE. The Welsh have been resisting foreign invaders for quite some time. Although it hasn’t been preserved for posterity, I expect a druid or two made a ‘Galfridian’ sort of prophecy about the fate of the Romans in Britain– and I expect it was quite right.

Sources and Credits: The Oxford Authors: George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. Louis L. Martz, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986– it is Martz’s introduction that explained the significance of the Silurian connection The History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books, London 1966

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

Currently, he is working on a historical fiction set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a project that he hopes will come to fruition at some point in 2017. Originally from the north east of England, he currently lives in South Korea with his wife and two small children. www. sweettenorbull.com.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

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POETRY

Kousik Adhikari

Tale of a Cat There is tremendous rain, water Harvesting dead earth, limbs so long slept.

He was late in school.

He has to sit with Sasa, the woolly swollen girl.

He hates the cat, grumbling with gruesome noise, Licking her paws for another win.

He did not listen to the class He does not hear splattering water upon the hot roof.

One by one all songs dropped One by one naked stars lie on the sky.

Beautiful, blind, deaf and dumb The lonely boy hears the gushing waves Climbing the stairs, up to waist.

Up to neck till he could not breathe the sky.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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Faces

In my October hour of Sunday noon I saw the mirrored faces Faces green with vegetables Yellow in broken sunlight All faces white and black and blue You heaped on Eiffel tower of ages Above my heads that I put on with so much ease (How smart! I often think) As those faces walk on my heads.

Life is ecstatic! Life dangerous, lives just leaped From ifel tower on my heads looking to the gone rivers of twilight Of memories, Are you panicked?

Have you heard the thump?

In a Sunday noon of October the broken faces began their march Salutes the empty mirror Have you seen the limping legs walking on the broken alleys?

Of my heads? Of my memories?

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Sounds Evening stumbles here, rolled down from the speechless mountain Standing dead Hercules before us, far before there the water stood He had friends once; now too close to speak words, Too dumb to hear touches Waiting on the vast beach of raging sea, I hear the rings of sorrows, joys, humanity and death Slide back to the retreating waves and back to oblivion Where god keeps smiling on sounds of evening. Sounds of our

tomorrows.

Move your eyes away, away from me and keep smiling to the torn heaven Lost tomorrows, before we shall reach our hotel at night Before the room is locked at the face of world, Before your sad face smiling to the tune of dreams of quixotic castle White bronze hands of a lovelier prince, Pretty woman, you have gulped down witching gall, holding it at your

throat Do you know me when I feel nervous like a rotten insect?

Deep-delved in gall, In the humiliating terror of madness?

‘Come’ , she said.

‘Come under the trees, my prince, And feel the darkness of white’.

Her white face rolled up laughing covering me Covering me till the small man also could laugh.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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Lifelike Stones withered, blue clouds on mountain standing one foot, Long coils of bony grass arising out of hot mud Rude earth has drawn its long skirt From mountain faces, from idle water From valleys to cliffs a snoring orange wind arose It has nowhere to go, nowhere to sing as if is late I know here everything happens without default With ease as perhaps life had been.

Kousik Adhikari, M.A, M.phil, is an independent

research scholar, publishes both critical and creative writing in many reputed national and international journals and magazines.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

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POETRY

Lisa Brognano BRUNT OF THE STORM Streaks of lightning stabbed the darkness, fluttered in the sky to brighten the blue-black with gray clouds smoothed flat As the thunder clamored and the knockknock lessened, rain teamed and raced toward the ground, essentially ready to uphold a magnificent wellspring of dew The storm tumbled and heaved, blasted every oak branch, held the land by its throat—mischievous to a fault Mud swam in snake-patterns through the rivulets, green leaves clogged up the flow, a sogginess pervading, a deep impression made on the land.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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FOR THE MENDER The shawl in her lap,

a task to mend, threading the needle by the glow of

a lamp, every movement of her hand closed the hole,

newness to the tired black shawl,

doctoring the wardrobe of all five brothers,

but the shawl was hers, passed down from her mama.

Drag the needle up— secure the lace along the edge, such pretty lace; jeans were next to resurrect, so with thimble ready, she steadied her hand, moved it along the denim, replenished her resolve with a hymn, la, la, la she hummed to herself, sewing all the while, occasionally shooting a glance at the basket,

torn-apart shirts with potato-sized

holes, enough work for weeks to come; always more sewing, always

more cooking and cleaning‌

only female among five brothers.

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INGRID THE DETERMINED In admiration of tempus fugit, Ingrid did everything in a rush, thinking it was best to ride on the wings of time before it flew away forever.

In her spare moments she quilted, knitted, loop-stitched, boxed, yoga-posed and ridge-climbed, sought out masters in every art, arranged meetings with people who could teach her how to harness time.

Each marathon she ran had rigorous terrain; the mountains she climbed poked into the clouds.

Toward the end of a race, the roadway grew murky; at once she understood it was futile, out of reach, never to be impeded….

No, it reeved, hummed, nudged and pulsed at every turn, besotted with haste, ultimately antsy; she’d done all she could do…it was time to bow out.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

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VALERIE’S DOORSTEP He stood on Valerie’s doorstep, roses in the crook of his arm, large amounts of his resolve dwindling; he had half a mind to leave, drop them and run But suddenly the door opened and she beamed at him, cradling the flowers against her breasts, which meant no turning back, no escaping Out of habit, he swiped his hand over his mouth, doing his best to stare at the doorbell, the one he’d never pressed; it hovered just past her elbow None of that mattered when she invited him inside for tea, a drink he considered unmanly, a romance he was currently rethinking, if only the roses hadn’t elated her so much Like a fool, he stood no chance of turning down the teacup placed in front of him, intricately-painted daisies along the lip, yet he had to figure this out— were they right for each other or not

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OAR IN HAND For adventurous types, the slap of tough waves, the spit of white water, a raft coursing through the rapids, ordained a sisterhood with nature, a euphoria that felt gritty to the touch, and how could it not?

No one noticed the sting of overturning, the soggy mess of getting back in, the extent of brainpower it took to push forward, steer clear of rocks and boulders around every bend— but exhilaration taught the choppy water its ways, how to let the oar sink in, push out, dig in, and chatter on….

Lisa Brognano is the author of the novel ‘A Man for Prue ‘(Resplendence, forthcoming in Sept., 2017) and a book of poetry, ‘The Willow Howl’ (Nixes Mate books, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in national and international literary journals. She holds two master’s degrees, one in English and one in Fine Arts.

Currently, she lives in New York with her husband.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

28

POETRY

Steven Manuel

ETYMOLOGIES 1 That the Lithuanian word spelled as dome means “attention”.

Or lutum, “mud”. [Isidore I.xxix] sacrilegium

When the Temple’s

been o’erthrown

take what you can.

So that I live where things hold.

‘and I am certainly never sure,

when I hear of some war,

or of some religious excitement, or of some new manufacture,

or of anything else that fills the ear of the world,

that it has not all happened because of something

that a boy piped in Thessaly.’ elysee elysee The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

29

Hear the Bard Od. 13.9

[for Charles Segal]

A thousand years

to clarify these verses. Density unfold, Demodokos sung in such measures; the song grew rich

by old myth in new ears.

Wine passed among

aristocrats, the servants bristling

amid sweat. Women’s lips and old men’s tears

trained by voice and kithara.

Hera jealous among stars’ flick-in-words, wick of candles’

swat, boil in wax heat, the lamps unburden

dark words fabled round.

A water of sound. A fire of song.

Pindar’s feet move

along with his dancers’. The heat of song Orfeo’s, The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

30 unpacked in moving constellations full eyes

cast at.

Apollo hiding his sun.

Hermes aflame in his laughter,

picker of locks, director. ‘The white cypress’- map carousel (you learned it as infant).

There is a river there.

Prayer and a field,

chant and subterranean skies

to walk under as you chant.

Clarities sounding anemones.

Renew calumny, work

plain speech to strange speech.

Simonides

among sparrows.

The green eyes

in the mesh.

Apollo

hiding his sun.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

31

LZ / ELUSION UNDULA these poppies STREWN EXPANSE in the wheat (translated from Tom Meyer’s ‘LZ / AUX CHAMPS ELYSEES’)

Steven Manuel lives in Asheville, NC (US) and edits a poetry & arts journal (from a Compos’t). He graduated from UNC-Asheville in 2011 with a BA in Ancient Greek and Latin. His work has appeared in Hambone, the Chicago Review, Lightning’d Press, and elsewhere.

His little chapbook, First Ayres, was published by Longhouse (Vermont) in 2013 The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

32

PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

YONASON GOLDSON

Almost without my noticing, the light, picturesque snowfall through

which I was driving thickened into a full-blown storm upon the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. Scattered flurries wove themselves into veritable sheets of snow, and little mounds of slush beside the road coagulated into drifts high and wide enough to easily swallow the Dodge Colt that wasn’t mine. As we neared the summit, traffic began to slow: highwaymen with bandannas wrapped around their faces were pointing some cars to the left, some to the right. Left was for the road, for permission to go on, for life; right was for the exit, for buying chains or waiting for the thaw, for purgatory.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

33 “Do you think they’ll let us go on?” Margot asked.

I shook my head indefinitely, unwilling to answer. Looking ahead to the front of the crawling line of cars, I had already started panicking as I contemplated that very question. I was still agonizing over it when one of those masked faces pressed close to my window and pronounced my sentence.

I looked at him blankly.

“Keep driving,” he repeated. “You have snow tires. Get moving.”

I drove on but could not relax. Snow tires? Being a California boy, I wouldn’t have known snow tires from snow shoes. And being a California boy was precisely what had set me so on edge. After five months of hitching west to east and five days in a drive-away car returning from east to west, the California border now stood less than ten miles away. If that masked man had told me to get off the highway this close to home, I would have started to cry.

I pressed boldly ahead, skidded on my so-called snow tires, and nearly spun across the highway into oncoming traffic. I resolved immediately to proceed with more care, then discarded my resolution just as fast and turned my attention to the dial of my AM radio, spinning through static before landing upon a signal unnaturally clear. And so it came to pass that as the last two miles of Nevada highway disappeared beneath my wheels, they disappeared to the haunting, harmonic strains of California Dreamin’. And then I really did start to cry.

If Margot noticed me getting all misty, she didn’t say anything.

Then again, the two of us had exchanged hardly a word since our second day out. She had been my only taker when I asked around the lounge of the D.C. youth hostel if anyone wanted to split the cost of gas all the way to San Francisco, and it had only taken us one day of strained conversation to discover how little we had in common. We passed the rest of the ride serenaded by static from the radio.

So I did feel a measure of relief at approaching the end of the line, but this was not going to be a happy homecoming. Technically, I was not even coming home. I had never lived in San Francisco, and The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

34 I had no intention of staying there. I had grown up in L.A., and I had even less intention of going there at all.

You see, I hated L.A. I hate it still.

Covering about four hundred square miles, the City of the Angels is the largest incorporated municipal mess in these United States. And as immense as the city proper may be, it pales in comparison with the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, which sprawls in all directions apparently without end, an unnatural wilderness seemingly formed by the eruption of an urban Vesuvius whose concrete lava flowed unchecked from somewhere near the Nevada border until it spilled into the sea. One can drive across the state of Rhode Island in a little over half an hour, but only the ill-advised attempts crossing Los Angeles without a back seat full of C-rations, five gallons of bottled water, a packet of flares, and a fully grown Doberman pinscher.

But I don’t hate Los Angeles for its size, its congestion, or its utter lack of character. I adore London, which is at least as big, and I’m fond of both Atlanta, which is equally congested, and St. Louis, which is comparably bland.

Of course, L.A.’s glitter culture is another matter. I could abide the glitzy facade adorning every house, every business, every car and, worst of all, every person, if it were confined to the city limits — or even the county line. But the zeitgeist of Los Angeles has spread like nuclear fallout and contaminated the whole of California, and every resident from San Diego to Eureka finds himself equally tainted by his birthright.

I discovered this first hand while travelling cross-country, hitching rides, sleeping in youth hostels, and meeting strangers from all around the world. I came to know well the raised eyebrows, the twist of the lips, and the widening of the eyes with a mixture of curiosity, fascination and wariness when I confessed to hail from the Grape Nut State. I learned to read their minds as well: Hmm, he looks normal…

Yvette, a French Canadian girl I met in Key West, couldn’t contain herself. “You’re from California?” she protested. “You don’t look it.”

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

35 “Why?” I asked. “Because I’m not blond and broadchested?”

She paused for a thoughtful moment before answering, “Yeah.”

“Guess what? I don’t surf, either.”

But even this was mere annoyance. Few people cling to such intangible prejudices for long, especially in cases where the stereotype refuses to apply. “Well,” acquaintances would often say to me after letting slip some casual slur about inhabitants of the Left Coast, “You’re different.”

Still, I could never come to peace with the place of my birth, though it took me years to identify the source of my disdain. When I did, the insight resonated like revelation, mostly because I discovered it within myself.

I once suffered a New Yorker (about whom I remember only that her name was Lisa and that she was from New Jersey) to relate to me an Easterner’s impressions of Californians. She went on and on, recapitulating in great detail one predictable observation after another: the easy-going flakiness, the sun worship, the health food and exercise obsessions. She finally talked herself out, then posed the inevitable question: “What do Californians think about Easterners?”

After a few moments of serious thought I offered the inevitable answer: “We don’t.”

A famous poster captioned, “A New Yorker’s View of the World,” presents a view from Manhattan looking west, with everything across the Hudson River fading into obscurity. A similar view from the opposite coast, should it be drawn, might show the Golden State entirely surrounded by water, afloat on an otherwise empty Pacific Ocean. It is this singular character that I despise, more than the New Yorker’s contemptuousness or the Texan’s arrogance: the unabashed indifference of the Californian to anything that resides beyond the periphery of his vision.

Paradoxically, the heliocentricity that places the sun coast at the center of the universe nevertheless fails to fix the natives to the ground that forms their collective personality. Hundreds of thousands of sun-seeking immigrants arrive every year and, in doing so, they displace huge numbers of residents, like myriad human croquet The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

36 balls that send others in turn ricocheting off in all directions. Indeed, simply letting on that I’m a second generation Californian on both sides produces a ripple of astonishment at cocktail parties.

Armchair sociologists have suggested that either the cultural mores, the absence of seasonal change, or the drinking water may account for this California Exodus Syndrome. Whatever the explanation, I was no exception. Midway through my senior year of college I found myself haunted by the dawning realization that California was a place from which I had to escape. And so it came to pass that as matriculation drew nigh, I formulated my unorthodox response to the question every university student has to endure at least once a week in his final semester: “What are you doing after graduation?”

My answer: “Going east.”

The unvarying response: “Huh?” That’s just what I did. By Amtrak to Albuquerque, then by thumb to Santa Fe, Austin, Galveston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Monroe, Miami Beach, and Key West, with sundry stops along the way. From there it was back north to Green Cove Springs, Brunswick, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. My original plan called for New York and New England as well, but from the time I left Key West my heart was no longer in it. I pushed myself on as far as our nation’s capitol, but when, on the main bulletin board of the Washington youth hostel, I saw an ad for a driver to ferry a car back to San Francisco, home beckoned irresistibly.

Yes, home. No matter what I might think of it.

The days driving west were punctuated by nights in Pittsburgh, Columbus, St. Louis, Boulder, Salt Lake City, and Davis, with diversions in Gettysburg, Bethany, and along a stretch of highway that today lies several feet beneath the surface of the Great Salt Lake.

But the highlight of that six day journey was the schmaltzy crooning of The Mamas and the Papas rattling out of a two-inch speaker as I rolled within a stone’s throw of the California border.

I guess I really had left my heart in San Francisco.

Or maybe not. Only three months later I was on my way to England, from where I planned to set forth on a two-year expedition The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

37 combing four continents in search of a beautiful oriental princess to take my hand and lead me to Elysium.

I never did find the princess, but I quickly discovered that my embarrassing nativity had suddenly become anything but a liability.

Traditionally, Americans tickle the hearts of Europeans to roughly the same degree as do stale biscuits or planter’s warts. A few American travellers even stitch large red and white maple leafs upon their backpacks (arousing the ire of Canadians as well). At best, declaring oneself American generally results in shrugs or sighs of ponderous disinterest.

But to proclaim oneself a Californian is to capture the imagination of the European as if one hailed from Brigadoon.

Nowhere did I find this more evident than in St. Margaret’s Hope, “by far the most picturesque of all the towns of the Orkney Islands,” according to my travel guide. In this sleepy, soggy village, I exhausted thirty tedious minutes ducking into and out of the interminable North Sea drizzle before finally ducking into one of two local pubs to wait out the three hours I had left until the next public bus would arrive. By happy coincidence, I chose the establishment in which a sizeable and good spirited band of septuagenarians had gathered for their weekly “coffee morning” after picking up their oldage pension checks at the post office next door. They weren’t drinking coffee, either.

“So where’ya from?” one of them drawled, as they lost interest in the two New Yorkers with whom they had been chatting when I came in.

“California,” I said.

“Aye!” he cried. “You’ve come from the other side of the world!” And there I spent the next two-and-a-half hours as they treated me to scotch and lager so liberally that I barely managed to stagger off in time to catch my bus, lest I be stranded there till nightfall.

I elicited the same reaction in an over-crowded Paris cafe. A young woman from a group that had doubled up at my table looked over my shoulder as I tried too hard to produce a few lines of artsy The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

38 verse. I tilted my notebook toward her, but after a moment she shook her head and looked at me inquiringly.

“Poetry,” I explained.

She shrugged.

“You know English?” I asked, unexpectantly. After all, Parisians are notorious for insisting that all the world speak to them only in Parisian French.

“A little,” she said. “You’re American?”

“Californian.”

Her face lit up. “Really?”

Would I make something like that up? Well, maybe I would, since after an hour of animated conversation with these representatives of the most uppity people on earth, I found myself invited to spend the rest of the afternoon in their most pleasant company.

The most profound benefit of my western roots, however, would not reveal itself until I had placed many more hundreds of miles behind me. Luxemburg, Cologne, Vienna, Lucerne, Florence, and Athens, blurred into a confusion of images until, even after two weeks of sun and salt on the beaches of Plakias, the thought of more travel sent a paralyzing shudder down my spine. I had had enough.

I wanted to go home.

Where was home, anyway? California, half a planet away, had become a card to play, but it was no place I cared to live. Unable to go on, unwilling to go back, I cast my thoughts of home upon the softly lapping waves of the Mediterranean. And so it came to pass, out of the silence of indecision, that a small, still voice from my supernal subconscious summoned me to a different home, an ancient stomping ground that lay at the heart of the world. Jerusalem — the City of Peace — beckoned me.

As the three-thousand-year-old stones of the Holy City captured my heart and the intricate mysteries of the Talmud electrified my mind, I emerged from my pseudo-spiritual, liberal arts agnosticism like a monarch butterfly abandoning its empty chrysalis, and I embraced the traditions of my ancestors. For nearly a decade I made Israel my home and Jerusalem my city. I stopped running away from The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

39 responsibility and started facing up to it. I stopped running away from life and started running forward.

I had new disciplines to learn, however, a new language to master, a new lifestyle to adopt. With a third of life already behind me, starting over meant beginning a new childhood, and the feverish pace of a second childhood seemed too much for me as an adult.

And although the Red Queen taught Alice that only by running can we hope even to stay in place, I had grown tired of running, and ere long I found it so much easier to walk, to stroll, to promenade. So what if my accomplishments would be less than great — who was I to ascribe greatness to myself, anyway? Left to my own devices, therefore, I contemplated the low road, coasting comfortably instead of struggling to climb.

But I was not left to my own. A taskmaster set himself over me, no less demanding than those slave drivers who flayed my ancestors while their backs broke beneath their labors upon the hot sands of Pharaoh’s Egypt, insistent, unyielding, and unrelenting. As only a good teacher can and a spiritual mentor must, my rabbi knew just how to touch the right buttons to prod me out of my passivity, the way an expert horseman cracks the whip a hair’s breadth from his stallion’s ear, urging him on to greater speed.

“You have to outgrow that easygoing indifference of yours,” he would say, knowing full well how his words made me seethe. “It’s the Californian in you that’s holding you back. Get over it.”

I am over it, I wanted to say. I hate the place. I’ve disowned it.

That part of me is dead and buried.

Except, of course, he was right.

And, as a sincere teacher whose students become his children, he knew how and when to turn it around the other way.

“The Talmud explains,” he said publicly at my wedding celebration, two years after I had come under his wing, “how the intensity of holiness in the world wanes as one travels west from Jerusalem, declining by the time he comes to Egypt and utterly vanishing before he reaches Carthage.

“Imagine then,” he went on with a sardonic grin, “what one The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

40 might expect to find upon arriving at the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

But it is precisely in such a spiritual vacuum that the greatest potential for spiritual nobility lies waiting.”

I regret that I may not have lived up to his expectations.

Indeed, I will always suffer from the same small-mindedness that characterizes my landsmen. But only by turning back again and again to face the source of that very character flaw have I succeeded in conquering it — or, at least, have I kept it from conquering me.

Conquest of oneself, I discovered, is a recurring theme in Jewish tradition. The Talmud describes how Alexander the Great, on an expedition in Africa, came upon a race of women warriors. As he prepared his army for battle, he received a message from the queen.

“What will you gain by attacking us?” she asked rhetorically.

“If you defeat us, people will laugh at you for waging war against women. If we defeat you, they will laugh all the more.” (Political correctness had not yet made its mark in Alexander’s time.)

Humbled by the queen’s superior reasoning, Alexander demurred. Shortly thereafter, the Talmud recounts, he discovered the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

But how is Alexander’s exchange with the African queen precursory to his discovery of Eden? And if Alexander did find the entrance to paradise, why did he not enter?

In a sense, he did enter. Having conquered the entire civilized world, Alexander still had to be taught by this African queen the futility further conquest, the senselessness of further battle. And it was this revelation that brought him to the threshold of Eden, the realization that he would only achieve true dominion when he finally made peace with himself in his world.

Irrespective of the story’s historical veracity, its moral is clear: Alexander discovered that paradise exists in this world for one who finds it in his state of mind. In concert with Alexander’s example, I have forsaken the worldly paradise that was my first home, a place that is never too hot and never too cold, where mountains and beaches and forests and deserts all exist practically at one’s doorstep; but I fled from there pursued by a specter that won’t let me forget that The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

41 the state of California, above all, is a state of mind. Was I not forced to keep forever on guard against the influence it holds over me, how easily might I have long ago taken up permanent residence within its ideological borders, mistaking complacency for contentment, holism for holiness.

No one should need a lesson from Alexander the Great to appreciate that the City of Happiness is invariably found within the State of Mind. Ironically, I have found that my own state of mind has claimed for its capitols two cities that could be no more distant from one another in space and time, no more antithetical in thought and feeling: the City of Angels and the City of Peace.

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

His latest book, ‘Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages’, is available on Amazon. Visit him at yonasongoldson.com The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

42

FICTION

Jane McAdams

The dominoes were slick and black. They were professional gaming

equipment, serviceable in color, their red and white spots aligned martially, in rows that suggested a deeper than numerical meaning.

Sylvia felt she was about to understand something that had once eluded her. She huddled against the vinyl bumper of the table.

The Golden Dragon had instituted a smoking ban, but the bumpers still faintly exhaled the odor of long-ago cigarettes. The halogen-lit tables in the pai gow pit looked like six green felt islands floating in the air-conditioned darkness of the casino.

Sylvia had once been a freelance editor. People used to tell her, “I wish I could sit around and get paid to read romance novels all day.” She rarely corrected them, because she liked the image they conjured—a pink couch in a sun-dappled room, a fur throw, lurid plotlines and honeyed tea in a porcelain cup. But Sylvia’s life as an The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

43 editor was far more pedestrian. She shuffled around her apartment in the same pair of sweatpants, trailing crumbs across the carpet. She went for days without speaking to anyone. She agonized over a single comma sometimes, taking it out and putting it back in again, afraid of subtle alterations to the text even she might not notice. Commas could be so controversial.

Sometimes, Sylvia felt incorporeal, as if her entire existence took place in her head. The texts she edited hovered in the air before her like castles and vanished with the delete button. She and her clients emailed manuscripts back and forth—no more red pencil marks in the margins!—and her work tools were the insubstantial words and ideas that flickered across her screen or in her mind until other ideas and words replaced them.

But in the casino, life was tangible. And more than that, it was quantifiable and immutable. At the Golden Dragon, Sylvia encountered real physical objects meant to be manipulated according to specific rules.

Objects had meaning at the Golden Dragon; each had a designated place and a definite purpose.

Casino supervisors watched every movement in the pit, judging its precision, demanding minimal variation from the optimal pattern someone had established decades earlier. It was financial choreography.

Every move was some kind of monetary display-that the dealer hadn’t stolen, that the player had received the right payoff, that the chips represented the proper amount.

Beyond the glow of the lights, Sylvia could see the hemispherical cameras set into the ceiling. A little green light blinked next to some of them. In a darkened room somewhere, someone watched every game. * Sylvia had been playing pai gow for three or four days straight.

The dominoes seemed to vibrate when she looked at them now. She could add the spots on their faces almost before the dealer passed them to her. She was getting that good at the game.

The dealer swirled the dominoes around in a glistening black pile, mixing them before the final shuffle. The dominoes clicked gently The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

44 against one another, those clicks like the sound of tumblers falling into place on the slot machines that surrounded the pit, like the sound of the chips rattling in their tray, and like the sound of Sylvia’s bones settling into place as she felt the game turning in her favor. Each click and rattle was the sound of money. Sylvia felt the beating heart of the game. Or maybe she felt her own heart—red, suppurating, fleshy and raw—and suddenly alive with possibility.

The dealer deftly swept the dominoes into one rectangular mass. Then, he shuffled, a procedure so swift and precise that it seemed automated. The dominoes slipped and clicked together, now flat on the table, now in neat stacks of four, sliding over one another as the dealer whipped them into eight piles. No matter how many times Sylvia played pai gow and no matter who was dealing, the procedure was always the same—the same precise shuffle and the same clicking of the dominoes.

Nothing at the Golden Dragon ever changed. The casino was eternal. The absence of clocks and windows and natural light, of course, kept the addicted gambler from sensing the passage of time and leaving the table. But the achronology wasn’t what made the casino seem eternal. Instead, it was that the Golden Dragon made Sylvia feel perpetually young. The tables were always deep green. The walls were always muted burgundy. The lights were always the same. The employees were interchangeable and, hence, unaging. Because nothing around her ever seemed to change, Sylvia felt unchanged herself. * The dealer slid Sylvia her four dominoes. She pressed them into the felt of the tabletop, enjoying the way the thick padding resisted their dull, slick weight. Then, she held the dominoes, stacked and facedown, in her palm, trying to will a particular pattern of dots onto each one. She would create a high and a low hand of two dominoes each, and if each beat the dealer’s high and low hands, Sylvia would win. In fact, if she had a particular combination of four dominoes, she would win the casino jackpot—a figure that increased constantly, the longer someone failed to win it. The casino displayed the figure on a digital screen just behind Sylvia’s head. She couldn’t see it at that The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

45 moment, as she warmed the dominoes in her palm. But she knew the numbers kept scrolling, ever higher, as she sat there.

Sylvia imagined the jackpot-winning four-domino combination. One hand had to be gee joon, the pairing of the wild six and the wild three that represented the highest hand in pai gow. On their own, these two wild dominoes were practically worthless, but together, they were the ultimate pair. The other hand had to be a pair of twelves, a formidable duo second only to gee joon.

The dealer nodded at her, a signal that it was time for Sylvia to display her dominoes. She flipped over the first one, moving so quickly that the dots were almost a blur. She had a six—the beautiful wild six that could sometimes be a three—and one-half of the gee joon pair. But without the wild three, it was nearly valueless.

Sylvia held her breath and turned over the second domino, feeling the halogen lights burn down on her from above. She gasped: the wild three. She touched the domino again, just to be sure—one red spot and two whites. She had gee joon. It was the highest hand she could ever hope to get, and half of the jackpot winner. She had only ever imagined this hand. Sylvia gently rubbed the red and white dots that had become as legible to her as text. Because there was only one gee joon pair, Sylvia knew that no matter what the dealer’s high hand turned out to be, her hand would beat it. Gee joon was that powerful.

Sylvia’s next two dominoes, still unrevealed, would comprise her low hand. In order to win, her low hand would need to beat the dealer’s low hand. Otherwise, they would tie, and Sylvia’s excellent high hand would have done her no good.

And only one hand, the pair of twelves, would guarantee her the jackpot.

Sylvia revealed her third domino, warm from the heat of her hand. It was the twelve, two perfect rows of dots, red and white cunningly distributed among them. Sylvia had always loved the twelve, a symbolic representation of the Buddhist ideal. But she needed a second twelve to win.

Sylvia turned over the last domino: the other twelve. She slid it The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

46 reverently next to the first twelve. The pair was called “double heaven.”

It was the strongest low hand Sylvia could have, with gee joon in the high hand.

She had won. The dealer could have no other combination that would beat hers, and more importantly, she could claim the jackpot. Sylvia watched the dealer reveal his low-value, insignificant dominoes and then turned to look at the jackpot figure—the amount she had just won.

“Jackpot,” the dealer said quietly. He flicked a hand over his shoulder, signaling to the shift boss. Sylvia had always been an inconspicuous gambler. No shift boss had ever paid much attention to her quiet hands and minimal bets. Now, the shift boss looked closely at Sylvia’s hands and at those of the dealer and then murmured into her walkie-talkie. Sylvia knew she was calling the people who manned the ceiling cameras. She could almost hear the whirring of the mechanism as someone scrolled through its images to examine every detail of the game they had just played—the dealer’s shuffle, the distribution of the dominoes and Sylvia’s slow revelation of her hands.

She felt present in a way she never had before. Until then, her life had mostly passed unnoticed. Her actions affected others only slightly. She had only left a written record of herself. But now, her impact was numerical, financial, part of the visual history of the casino.

“Don’t touch the dominoes,” the shift boss told Sylvia. They waited while the camera performed its surreptitious operation.

Then, the shift boss nodded crisply at the dealer. The dealer nodded back and reached into his chip tray, counting out stack after stack of hundred-dollar chips. He set the chips into motion with gentle, clicking efficiency, each representing a loss that the casino registered from overhead. Sylvia had never touched chips of this value, and she watched as the dealer pushed the little towers of money over to her. “Congratulations,” he said, “and good luck.”

Without turning again to look at the jackpot sign, Sylvia could feel its numbers draining back down to zero. The former value of the The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

47 jackpot sat in front of her, in several neat little stacks.

She scooped up the chips and started to leave the table. She would cash out and go home.

But the dealer had begun to shuffle again. The dominoes were so slick and black, and they clattered against each other so beguilingly.

Sylvia’s heart pounded. How difficult would it be to get another double heaven? She had done it once already. The dealer was lucky.

The night was lucky. Sylvia was young, and time stood still at the Golden Dragon.

Sylvia sat quietly for a few moments, enduring the burden of her victory.

Jane McAdams was born and raised in San JosĂŠ, Costa Rica. She

has published stories in several literary magazines, including Bengal Lights and the Wisconsin Review. She runs Beaumont Hardy Editing, a freelance business.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

48

BOOK REVIEW Reviewed by

Jyaneswar Laishram

My Encounters with a Peacock

by Ramu Ramanathan

This poetry book takes hold a sort of poetic excellence in an unor-

dinary way. Ramu Ramanathan, who is also a journalist and playwright, is attributed with the deserved knack of grappling situation and circumstance in narrative poems. His poems here narrate a straight story of a series of encounters he had with a peacock, half a decade ago, on his trip to a small town called Dharampur locatThe Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

49 ed somewhere in south Gujarat. That day the bird was in a state of shock, for he failed to impress friends and pea-hens who walked away when he was performing a mating dance.

When I read I personify the peacock in the poems into a common man facing common problems at the turns of his day-to-day life, almost on all fronts. In a way, the poet deciphers the customary typecast of peacock being a proud and majestic bird that has long been the national bird of this unhappy country since 1963. Ramanathan’s witty sequential 65 poems in the book give a vivid narrative of how common life goes on, on a zigzag path, when the flavour it requires is lost.

The 65 encounters of the poet with the peacock took place in a course of six months — starting from January until June, on almost daily basis, so closely and intimately. What turned me on when I first encountered the ‘first encounter’ is the way the poet uses short lines in the form of conversation. The perspectives of conversation, in some encounters, shift into his state of mind reading what the peacock thinks and likes.

Some encounters take me by surprise as the poet shares his space and stuffs so closely with the peacock—be it his food or his house. In the fourth encounter, they share a joint and thereafter the bird enters the poet’s bedroom where his wife was still lying in her sleep at a pre-dawn hour, in the twenty-second encounter. Above all, it’s the poet’s use of ingenious poetic techniques that moves everything sequentially from one encounter to another.

Ramanathan is master observer of the perspectives of life’s tribulations that common people encounter. In the thirteenth encounter in the book, he visits a bank, The Pragithi Grameen Vikas Bank, with the peacock following him. He narrates what happens there: The chowkidar prevents him from entering He screeches I come running back What happened?

He can’t enter, says the chowkidar Why I ask The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

50 He has no money, says the chowkidar What is money? What is money?’ asks the peacock Something you and I don’t have, says the chowkidar.

Simplistic and satirical, Ramanathan’s narrative in My Encounters With A Peacock is one-of-its-kind style I have ever ‘encountered’ among the works of modern Indian poets writing in English, till date.

My Encounters With A Peacock i, write, imprint, New Delhi Pp 132 Price: Rs 300)

Jyaneswar Laishram is an Associate Editor at

S-Media Group, a magazine publishing house based in New Delhi. He writes short stories, planning for long stories, and his interest is largely inclined towards music.

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51

FICTION

Tushar Jain

Pariya Tenammi suffered from a unique problem that became the

source of all his misery. It was this that rendered his life a mess, turning it into a series of unfortunate heartbreaks unfolding one after the other. For as long as anyone can remember, whenever Pariya fell in love, seconds after, he’d turn into a gigantic octopus.

He was all of eight when it first happened. One humid August evening, his new neighbour, Nomi, eagerly tagged along with her mother to make introductions. Pariya, shy, withdrawn, approached the playful Nomi, close to his own age, with some caution and an extended hand; an ageless offering of friendship. So, when Nomi cheekily swatted away the hand and pulled Pariya in an embarrassing embrace, he was flushed with something he’d never felt before.

In a flash, the room turned into a cauldron of screams. The shrieks bounced off the walls and seeped into the carpet, lamps, The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

52 everything, ensuring no one would forget that day all too easily. A bawling Nomi was hurried out by her horrified mother. She was sternly told to keep her eyes averted from the nightmarish octopus.

Pariya usually remained an octopus as long as the sheer intensity of what he’d felt lasted. Three hours later, he began to forget Nomi’s face and the warmth of her fingertips embedded in his back began to fade.

Gradually, he started to change back. His tentacles thinned to arms and legs and the frantic sobbing of his mother stopped. Our Pariya was back. Naked as the day he was born.

In those days, Mrs. Tenammi was problematically superstitious.

It was difficult to explain to her that things were the way they were because they simply couldn’t be any other way. With a set mind and turning a deaf ear to Mr. Tenammi’s reasoning and well-founded scepticism, she marched to the door of every witch-doctor she could find.

And, inevitably, for a time, Pariya became the victim of his mother’s determination. Of her resolve to find logic in a place where it didn’t exist. And to cure something that couldn’t be cured.

Poor Pariya was shown to countless tantriks and sadhus. He was smacked silly with brooms, rose-scented incense sticks, shimmering tail feathers of a peacock and numberless items drawn reverently from small, dank cupboards. To impress the paying mother, strange brown and green powders were blown into Pariya’s stinging eyes, his clipped toe-nails were tossed into a sacred fire and spirited Sanskrit prayers were raised to the heavens. All to force out the non-existent demonic spirit of the Octopus, the ashtbhuj, from the boy’s body.

After six weeks of this madness, when Pariya’s limbs didn’t swell into tentacles in a spontaneous explosion for three whole months, Mrs. Tenammi considered her efforts a triumph. She larded the victory over her husband and brought it up frequently to settle petty disputes.

At the time, she didn’t know or understand that nothing had changed.

But time, being kind would allow Mrs. Tenammiher complacency for another six years. Because it would be six years before Pariya found Graja, sitting in a corner of the classroom, scratching her name with the wrong end of a compass into the chipped wood of her desk.

Pariya was fourteen, chubby and sprinkled generously with The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

53 acne when he saw Graja one Friday afternoon. While he was geeky and solitary, Graja was no spring flower either. Stubborn, crazy and with a beaky nose, which looked as if it had been mercilessly pinched out of shape, she was wild, more storm than a girl . Did Pariya fall in love at first sight? Thankfully, no. It would be terrifying to imagine the enormous octopus slithering towards a cowering Graja across a chaotic, screeching classroom.

No. First came the fumbling of a new friendship. A day after he noticed her, Graja, deservedly, and Pariya, mistakenly, were punished in Biology class for interrupting the flow of Mr. Sen’s priceless thoughts. “The colon is an important part of the syllabus. It’s worth at least four marks!” Mr. Sen bellowed at Graja. To this, Graja couldn’t help responding icily, “Four marks or ten, I’m not interested in your colon.”

During the lunch break, Graja walked over to Pariya to apologize for dragging him down with her. And over palms placed close to each other, comparing the depth of the red left behind by Mr. Sen’s angry ruler, a peculiar bond formed between the two. In the following week, it strengthened as Pariya began to grasp, and even find pleasing, Graja’s crude humour. Graja, on the other hand, fell in love with Mrs. Tenammi’s cooking and the daily, almost sinful, pleasures of Pariya’s lunchbox.

As unlikely friendships go, it was a good one. But it didn’t last longer than a month. What went wrong? What else.

It happened on a Saturday when Graja and Pariya wandered to the roof during lunch to enjoy the shade and gurgling of rainclouds that seemed unaware that it was March. Sitting down on the cool floor across from him, Graja snapped open his lunch box. Peeling back the crinkling aluminum foil, she marvelled at the rich colour of the paranthas, the intoxicating aroma of nimbu achaar. As they both immersed their fingers into the small plastic box, trouble busily got down to work.

The first drop of rain struck Pariya’s nose in warning. Thereafter, in seconds, it grew into an onslaught. Pariya hurriedly stood up, pointlessly covering the lunchbox with a hand, searching for its The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

54 lid. Graja didn’t move. She turned her palms to the sky instead and, catching Pariya off-guard, smiled.

It was a sweet, disarming smile. It was an un-Graja smile. Pariya saw the smile and thought of a small boat, catching the wind in its large sails, managing to pull an island after itself. That was what that smile, though slight, did for Graja. In a blink, it transformed her completely, personality and all.

What happened after that isn’t all too hard to guess. Pariya was an innocent in the ways of rain. Inexperienced, he was unaware of its mischievous nature, its cunning. He had no idea how it both brought out and imbued, with the suddenness of a lightening, beauty. And to see Graja like that, her dark hair thrown back, eyes squinting at the sky and that guileless smile on her lips, Pariya didn’t stand a chance.

Two minutes later, a hysterical Graja came dashing down the slippery staircase, yelling for help. There was a monster on the terrace. When the shaking, superstitious guard, gripping the black thread around his neck with fervour, opened the clunky door to the terrace, there was no monster to be found; just a nude Pariya. With tears on his face that were indistinguishable from the rain.

The episode with Graja made it obvious for the Tenammi family what the incident with Nomi hadn’t. Now, that family of three knew what they were facing. This time, Mrs. Tenammi didn’t insist on voodoo or high-profile astrologers or black magic. All she did was hold her son, as a desolate Pariya broke down in her lap. The sheer violence of that first heartbreak spares no one. But for Pariya, somewhere, an invisible line had been drawn. A law created. My grandparents, to give them credit, never said it out loud. But when my father at fourteen wept, when the misery beat out of him in waves, he didn’t just weep for the heartbreak that was burning a hole through his chest. Chubby but bright, speckled with acne but precocious, Pariya also wept for all the heartbreaks he’d never have.

After that, life went on as usual. A portent unease descended on the Tenammi household for a while. But if Pariya was anything, he was dependable. In the years to come, he wilfully steered clear of women. What helped immensely was that puberty wasn’t yet done The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

55 with him. It was slow and methodical in its tortures. And so, with Pariya sporting a wispy moustache, pitted cheeks that broke out in hives with cruel unpredictability and new layers of fat on top of the old pudge, women steered clear of him too.

Years passed. Neighbours shifted in, shifted out. The long-held custom of having fresh flowers in the drawing-room vase had to be discarded when the florist doubled the price of sunflowers. For a few years, seven artificial, perfumed roses were stuck down the vase’s throat. Eventually, the vase was removed from the drawing room.

Pariya grew to be twenty-four years old.

This is where the story gets blurry, indistinct. I have hounded my grandparents for details, repeatedly asked friends of my parents to recount. But it has been of little use. Nobody knows how it happened but at twenty-four years of age, Pariya, my father, began dating an art restorer named Amyya. They dated steadily for three years before marrying in a splendid ceremony. The photographs of my parents’ luxurious wedding are among my most precious possessions.

A year later, they had me. And I was all of four when tragedy tore our small family apart. On a return flight from Anaheim, my mother suffered a fatal heart attack twelve minutes after the airplane picked its feet off the ground. My weeping father, inconsolable, trying to shake awake his dead wife, found no comfort in the uneasy-looking stewardess. As she repeated ‘Sir’, intoning it differently each time, my father, in his boundless grief, suffered a similar fate as my mother.

While still in the air, an acute and terminal cardiac event robbed him of his life, too.

I don’t remember my parents very vividly. What I’m left with are stray voices that I often chase around in my mind. But growing up with my grandparents, I have nudged and coaxed every story and every spare memory from them. About how my father at six tried riding his first bicycle and drove it, at a great, unfurling speed, straight into a distracted postman. How when he brought my mother home for the very first time, my grandparents were taken aback by her frankness and the way she addressed them by their first names.

When she laughed at a witticism from my father, throwing back her The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

56 head, gargling loud, raucous laughter, a silence fell on the dinner table.

There are hundreds more. But the gaps in the stories remain. I look at the pictures of my mother and am startled by her beauty. By her grace and self-possession. And when I look at my father, I’m naturally forced to wonder at the match. My father, the studious, introverted Lepidopterist (I didn’t understand the choice of his vocation at first, but now I do; with butterflies being strong metaphors of transformation, he picked a field full of creatures whose bodies too had secrets of their own) and my mother, the successful, gorgeous art restorer whose work took her to places like Prague and Vienna, belonged to vastly different worlds in every way imaginable.

So, for a long time, I believed that my father did the practical thing and took the only way that truly existed for him. He played it safe and picked someone he couldn’t ever possibly love. People have done much worse, going against their very nature s at times, to avoid being lonely.

This conclusion to my father’s story has haunted me for a while. It upsets me to think that he not only was unfair to both himself and my mother but also, more troublingly, that he never found acceptance or happiness in any form until the very end. As much as it hurt, I believed in this version of events unquestioningly. Until today.

I woke today morning with my mind in the grip of an image that had been shaken loose from deep down in my sleep. And it was a thing so rich in detail, so suffused with recognisable elements, that I instantly knew it was not my imagination but a misplaced piece of actual memory.

It took me some hours to dig out the remembrance, brush it clean and be amazed at the ease with which it resolved the mystery of my parent’s marriage and lives. I remember it clearly now. I recall being little. I recall getting up from a low bed and knuckling from my eyes the remains of whatever nightmare that had woken me. Then, half-naked, I sleepily tottered into the living room, ready to squeeze all my displeasure at being wakened into an awesome fit of crying.

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57 But the scene in the living room captured my attention and left me stunned. I remember gazing with a mixture of fear and delight for almost a minute before they noticed me there. On the couch, engulfing it, their protruding eyes fixed on the news blaring on the television, two enormous octopuses lay sprawled. Their tentacles were snugly wrapped around each other. And if my adult self truly focuses on that old image, I can see one of the two tenderly leaning its bulky head against the other’s.

He was happy. They both were.

Isn’t life bizarre?

Tushar Jain is a Bombay-based Indian poet, playwright, and author.

He was the winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, 2012 and a winner of the Poetry with Prakriti Prize, 2013. Subsequently, he won the RL Poetry Award, 2014. He was a winner of the DWL Short Story Contest 2014. He won the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing, 2016. His work has been published in myriad literary magazines and journals. He can be contacted at tusharjainnaulakha@gmail.com.

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58

FICTION

Paco Aramburu

We sat down in front of the campfire. Diego, my fellow traveler,

was blind and had a penchant for smiling and telling stories. Face reddened by the flames, he fixed a blanket over the ice box and I knew he was getting ready to begin one of his yarns.

“Go ahead.” I encouraged.

“Very well, here it goes. Let’s say that even for people who lived in neighboring suburbs of Montevideo, San José de Carrasco was virtually unknown, and deservedly so. It didn’t have the personality of a regular town, no central square, no monuments, nothing. It was an arrangement of homes that joined or separated other suburban and similarly nondescript towns. They all faced the Coastal road that bordered the Atlantic Ocean. The beaches and the towns bore each other’s names.

“In terms of public places, San José de Carrasco had three distinct locations. By far the largest, in architectural terms, was the Club.” Diego actually pronounced it ‘cloob ‘. “Its real name forgotten, The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

59 everyone knew it as just the Club. Its door facing the Coastal road and the beach, the Club was an ample building, proudly featuring the only indoor bocci-ball court on the coast. During weekends and evenings, there was always a tournament going on. At the front and to the right was the bar, next to it the only public phone cabin in San José, on top of which sat a black-and-white television set. An assorted number of chairs and sofas completed the room. The second edge of the town’s triad was ‘La Rana,’ meaning the frog. La Rana was two blocks from the Club and the beach. It boasted the name of Supermarket, which, in a small town in Uruguay, simply means that the merchandise is on display and the customer picks it up instead of asking the grocer to retrieve it from behind the counter. La Rana also sold lottery tickets and provided a forum for its patrons. To complete this triangle, half a block from La Rana was the Menendez fruit and vegetable stand, managed by Evelyn and Eusebio Menendez, the latter being the town’s UFO fanatic and owner of one of the few cars in San José.

“Now, I guess it’s time to mention the widow Galtieri, the rich woman in town. When she first came to San José de Carrasco, she and her husband owned two restaurants. She would tell everyone at La Rana about the horrors of raising children in a city like Montevideo.”

“I guess she would never have moved to Chicago then.”

“Exactly. Montevideo is so devoid of crime it’s ridiculous. She wanted to set the rules of her game absolutely. She wanted suburban safety and quiet. The son grew up to be a strong boy; he played on the beach most of the summer and went to a nearby private school.

By then her husband had sold their Montevideo beach-front house, in one of the best and most expensive neighborhoods in all Uruguay, to a retired Englishman. With the proceeds, they bought two more restaurants, bringing the total to four.”

I added three pieces of wood and stirred the fire that had burned off the humidity from the branches and was crackling happily.

“The unexpected came in the tempting form of a woman. Her name was Rosario, or I think it was. People who met her said she The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

60 had the body of Aphrodite and the face of an angel. She was from the North, from the border with Brazil, which made her a gaoosha, and she spoke a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese.”

“Is that different from a gaucho?”

“Gaucho is the Spanish pronunciation, while gaoosho is the Portuguese pronunciation which refers to both the region and the people.”

“Gaoosho.” I pronounced with relish.

“Anyway, Mr. Galtieri, with the idea or the pretext that she would attract business to his newest restaurant, hired her as a waitress. This impulsive act offended the waiters at the four restaurants more than his wife, who thought it was a good idea. All his employees wondered what kind of bug had stung Galtieri to hire a female waiter.

There is no such thing, they would protest, there isn’t even a word in Spanish for such a contradiction. The other waiters shunned her, yet she brought a lot of customers to the restaurant, and Mr. Galtieri was soon making a lot of excuses to travel to Montevideo.

“As a matter of fact, even though most people refuse to believe it, they must have had an affair for Mr. Galtieri to be found naked, on her bed, with a knife through his heart. Apparently, the postal worker from the North who had been abandoned by the damsel, traveled to Montevideo in a fit of jealousy, making the six o’clock news and ending up in jail for the rest of his life. Uruguayans, in general, are not prone to fits of passion. As a matter of fact, most of us abhor it.

So, in our best tradition, people talked in hushed tones when they referred to the story that made Mrs. Galtieri a widow. Some actually claimed that they saw the Aphrodite prancing down a certain avenue frequented by the ladies of the night; others said she hooked up with an Argentine racecar driver who took her away. I’ll never know where she ended up.

“The widow Galtieri took her mourning seriously; sold the restaurants, cashed the deceased’s insurance policy and invested the money in diversified concerns, which enabled her and her son to keep their lifestyle without having to devote time to working for a living. She dedicated herself to her son and, as happens many times The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

61 with single mothers, she gave him too many responsibilities, making him the man of the house at twelve. That is probably why she couldn’t say no, when on his sixteenth birthday Julio, that was his name, decided to buy a motorcycle. The kid took his new Vespa for a spin that same evening and never returned to the house. The police, the press and the neighbors of San José de Carrasco, combed the area.”

“Was there any suspicion of abuse by the mother?”

“They loved each other, as far as the neighbors could tell. The search for Julio went countywide; it made the papers and the radio.

Neither the boy nor his Vespa could be found anywhere. After a year of exhaustive searches the police closed the case, the press got distracted by other news, and the neighbors, in different degrees, forgot and went on with their lives. The widow Galtieri, of course, was devastated.

She aged visibly and lost contact with the outside world. The few times someone caught sight of her were at early mass; they say she looked old and lost to the world.

“Routine and sameness have a way of collapsing time. The years went by and the people of San José de Carrasco put that tragedy in the back of their minds. But, one day at La Rana, a young man, in his early twenties, arrived. He stepped off a Vespa, walked up to the owner and told him he was lost. When Rodrigo, the store owner, asked him where he wanted to go, the young man, with a blank expression, told him that not only did he not know where he was going, but also he didn’t know where he was coming from. He didn’t know his own name; all he remembered was driving the Vespa on the Coastal road, stopping at and coming into the supermarket because it had looked vaguely familiar to him.

“Nobody knows today who brought it up first; was it Eulogio Menendez, the UFO fanatic, or was it Celia the midwife, or was it Washington the bartender slash ice-cream vendor? Someone came up with the idea that this lost young man must have been Julio. His features and bone structure could have been those of Julio and the old Vespa model he was driving clinched their conviction. Word spread quickly, so that evening at the club, ‘Julio’ – as everyone called him then – sat on a sofa surrounded by the nice people of San José.

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62 “The military had taken the country over that year, so no one actually proposed that they would call the police. Everyone talked at the same time, everyone had a question for Julio, who couldn’t answer his own questions. It was quite the pandemonium. Then, like you see in the movies, everybody in the club stopped talking when the widow Galtieri opened the door tentatively and walked toward the lost man. Both the widow and the young man looked at each other, while the honest people of San José watched the pair as if it were a tennis match. At the end of that impromptu meeting, it was agreed by everyone that ‘Julio’ should move, temporarily, into the Galtieri’s guesthouse, which was located in the back of their huge beachfront chalet. This would give the young man time to recuperate his memory. I don’t know how their relationship developed, all I know is that the widow was radiant and she began to frequent the supermarket again. ‘Julio’ on the other hand, with nothing to do, set himself to really getting to know his neighbors. Because his apparent knowledge of the most basic things of life was nil, he always asked the most naive questions; all this accompanied by an innocent countenance and a pair of big eyes. My theory is that he became the town’s surrogate child; he conquered women’s and men’s hearts alike. Eligible women, young and old, came from all over the region, just to get a glimpse of this guy. He learned bocci-ball from the men, went through family albums with the women and night-fished with the families.

“One day, something odd happened. The Ramoses house was burglarized while they were playing bocci ball. More than burglarized, I should say emptied. All their furniture, clothing, even the posters tacked on the walls were gone. This was a first in San José. The police came, prancing about with their guns and their intimidating questions, most of which were about the political affiliation of the victims. Three days later, while the Menendez were at a fish cookout, their house suffered the same ignominious fate of the Ramoses. The Zinnis - a week later, the Irrazabals, the Rodriguez Beldañas, even the Crevatinis, who had a deaf child, got cleaned out. This was, without any doubt, San José de Carrasco’s biggest catastrophe.”

“Couldn’t the neighbors do something?”

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63 “Well, yes. The last three or four burglaries weren’t even reported to the police. The neighbors organized both day and night patrols – the town’s four cars were volunteered for that purpose – and they organized a big meeting at the club to talk about strategy. Almost at the end of the town meeting, in came the widow Galtieri. Again, like the previous time, she made an entrance, everyone stopped talking at once. The neighbors noticed she was pale and shaky. She leaned on the telephone cabin and asked softly, ‘Do any of you know where Julio is? I haven’t seen him in two days.’ Not a word was said, but everyone understood silently. Soon, with Eusebio Menendez at the head of the parade, the citizenry of San José marched toward the widow Galtieri’s guesthouse. She handed Eusebio the key to the house and rested her weary body on the doorframe. Inside were all the furniture, clothing, and possessions of the nice people of San José. The lights in the house didn’t work, causing the neighbors to desperately inspect their possessions, piled on top of one another, in the dark.”

“Where was Julio?” I asked adding the last of the sticks to the fire.

“That’s the strangest part of the story. Right in the middle of the living room, a hole at least seven feet wide had been burned in the roof. We could see the moonlight coming through. The widow Galtieri collapsed on a couch.”

“So the guy burned a hole in the ceiling, disappeared, and left everything that was stolen in the guest house?”

“Everything, except for a couple of photographs and their negatives.

Eusebio Menendez, the UFO maniac, looked for his favorite photographs everywhere in that guesthouse. He spent every evening for over a month, to no avail. He described to everyone the photo of the object over San José beach and that one of the fuzzy outline of a being walking on the dunes. Ordinarily, Eusebio was a personable fellow, but for a long time after that incident, he became quite the pest, since he was convinced that ‘They’ had sent someone to retrieve his photographs and he felt he had to tell the story to everyone. I don’t need to tell you that no one called the police or the press. The quiet people of San José talked about the unmentionable possibilities of Julio’s appearance and disappearance The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

64 for years. The widow Galtieri withered even further. One day a few years later, the gardener found her dead, lying under the hole in the roof of the guesthouse; her opened eyes facing the stars. And that, my friend, is the story of the Galtieri’s turn on this planet.”

“She died looking for her son. Pretty creepy story.”

“Thanks.”

“But, wait! That’s it? The guy came to take the photographs and then disappeared?”

“All I can tell you is what I know, what I witnessed. You may architect some solution in your mind and then re-tell the story to someone else.”

“Listen, Diego, I’m fading fast here. Would you tell me if you hear anything out of the ordinary? I’m going to sleep.” I fussed with the fire for the last time, then wiggled myself inside the blankets and prepared myself to sleep.

Paco Aramburu was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Later in his life,

he was accepted at the prestigious Instituto de Cinematografía, and then politics became relevant; to the point that with his wife, his 8-months old son, he had to escape to other countries. He even spent several months in a jail in Uruguay. The UN took their case and he was released, then they became refugees. They ended up in Lombard, Illinois, USA, thanks to the CIA, Amnesty International and the Church of Christ the Servant.

In terms of writing, for more than twenty years he studied English and writing ad hoc. He went to seminars at North-western University, University of Iowa, etc. but he didn’t feel he was ready to publish until now.

To him, the English language is like an extremely beautiful woman, captivating, treacherous, and promising of a beautiful journey.

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65

POETRY

SANAA UPPAL

FLAMENCO A free woman is a deadly piece of information Of sounds that are slight and relentless and pondering A classic twist of magic you cannot rely neither touch nor hold She is a curse out of nowhere Challenging and frustrating She is a dance and like her own moves Keen and dynamic She will simply slip away from your hands She is a purpose She is a threshold Her company acutely restricting A deep cut The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

66 Fairly unpleasing Leaving you bewildered Ruining your meagre beliefs A tale flourishing at your nerve endings Of unobtrusive closures and preludes A memory beyond wonder and spells A random confinement Of deep residue Of turquoise surrender A wicked smile Sitting at the edge of your undiscovered soul

BLUE She knew not what to do with the clouds Hanging around...

Dusty and nomadic Tempered with gray Somewhere the chaos of the musician’s play Drenched her sorrows in fretful rains The malady of life brutally painless Crudely finished Free and tragically nude Unimaginatively aesthetic!

The rich fair irony voluptuously fixated The deep set realities loosely labouring Arresting the outrageously delusional And the infinitely monotonous drudge Crucifying the bleak and the insatiable The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

67

HOW YOU BREAK It is incredible to see how you break And break into a marvel It is another life to collect pieces of you Each shard is a face so familiar Brave bare faces Some are lost in difference Some in distance Some fixed in splinters Buried in glass webs The pain and the sight of it Without a body, creature, cause or similarity To touch it To taste it Is how you create it Beauty landscaped for you When you are new You bleed With one pure idea

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68

All I Can Remember All I can remember is nothing And darkness!

No peaks or ranges But the fall Pure fall Ah! A moment fully equipped and awake I met no one but nature inside out Following and preceding That high !

I did nothing But collide and generate In the momentum and the pace The grand destruction in the making All I can remember is the orderly scatter The innumerable pieces The uncountable me In that fall

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69 I did not breathe I knew not how to!

I was there out of nothing Peculiar I was In the fall I found nothing but pure matter As all emanated from me The colours, the depth, the linear and the spiral Everything rising as well as floating Just a relic of the spark in the fall All I can remember is...

It doesn’t have a face

THE MAKING OF A ROSE It is easy to endure it than to be separated from it and be a commoner in death It brings to you a slice of wholesome life It finds you in peace and dignity The nude designs of imperfection Everything that is or not is seeking

you in pain Sacred pain Gorgeous, breathtaking and governing It takes you deeper into the stars and makes you a moment in the bubble It has this unique quality of adorning everything that finds its shoulder The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

70 Like winds, shadows, leaves, mountains, rivers, woods and living beings Everything!

Pain is the absolute master It dictates you Holds you forever in secrecy Commands you It chooses you To be someone else To be more of who you are You are better with it than without It takes you far as it brings you back on knees at the same ground It brings you here!

A pinned thorn that clings fondly to the stem It makes you something of a rose

Born and brought up in the golden city of Amritsar (punjab, India), Sanaa Uppal has been constantly inspiring those avid readers with her works which are known as the beautiful blend of beauty and profundity.

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71

Novella -Part -2

Zdravka Evtimova

I felt overwhelmed with happiness and wanted to get out of there

before the happiness melted like everything that came my way, so I shook the guy who slept quietly on top of me and whispered in his ear, “Say `I love you’”. The tone of my voice was the same as my mother’s when she talked to the notaries and lawyers, offering them her perfect profile or a glimpse of her pearly leg. I couldn’t explain how an intonation like that was born in my throat.

The beanpole did not obey. His yellow eyes hung over my face, his mouth pressing mine. I had some money in the pocket of my blouse. It was very hard to thrust my fingers in the silk pocket glued to my skin. It took several minutes to extract a ten-lev banknote, which I left on the floor saying, “Take it.”

“Wait a minute”, the man said. His hand, rapid and scorching like lightening, grabbed the money, then he left me on the dress I had bought from Fatma. At that moment I felt the stink. Fatma was probably right; her neighbors had thrown dead puppies or worse in her cellar.

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72 After five minutes the guy returned carrying two bottles of beer and a package containing the cheapest possible, suspiciously rosy-colored, sausage a man could buy in the cheap shops, squeezed in cellars and bungalows along the Struma river.

He opened one of the bottles, poured half of it down his throat, burped and gave it to me. I tasted a gulp of the liquid and was about to drop dead instantly; the beer smelled no better than the puppies ruining Fatma’s business. The man ripped the sausage into two equal pieces, not bothering to peel its skin, tearing it with his teeth as if he hadn’t eaten for four years. I felt nauseated watching the beanpole eat the sausage; I suspected I might have to drive him if not to the morgue, then at least to Pirogov Hospital.

“Eat”, he said. “I bought the sausage for you.”

“And spent all the money”, I snapped angrily. He made no comment on my remark, just went on chewing with his mouth open and stuffed with pieces of the cheap sausage soaked in the nasty beer.

Then his head dropped to the ridge formed by my breasts. He pushed aside the last piece of sausage and turned again to me.

It felt so good that for a moment I thought, “God bless you, Fatma!” Before I went home I remembered only the guy’s scrawny ribs bulging like piano keys in his chest. My mother had had her heart set on making me play the piano and wasted heaps of money on tutors Dancho, my father’s loyal chauffeur, would drive directly from the Academy of Classical Music in Sofia to my music room.

I reached almost to the man’s dimpled, stubbly chin. He let his hand drop on my head; his fingers felt like my fathers, although some of the nails were crushed and warped. He ran them through my thick, toothbrush-bristles hair and mumbled, “Your hair’s red like a bundle of carrots.”

My hairstyle resembled a helmet, and mother criticized me severely on that account. How was it possible, she asked rightfully, that a young promising lady would get her hair cut like an infantryman? I was fat, and the hair baking my skull in its red- hot furnace made me feel hotter.

The lanky man’s hair was black, dirty, tousled, and covered his shoulders. I didn’t ask what his name was.

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73 As I walked down the stairs to the cellar full of bilge water, slime, and pond scum, his steps behind me did not sound like slaps in the face, they reminded me of the first drops of rain after a twoyear drought.

“Hey”, he shouted. “When will I see you again?”

When? I wouldn’t be able to get to this shabby suburb in the near future. All over the district the eight-storey flat buildings jutted out from the sidewalks with drab balconies covered by necklaces of drying clothes and linen. Among the blocks, cars, trucks, even several buses were parked and between them stray dogs sauntered, lolling out their tongues, some sprawled like corpses under the buses parked on the asphalt, which melted in the heat.

I didn’t think even for a moment that my father would ever allow me to come here. If mother learned that her daughter had been wasting her time in this lair of thugs (let alone the fact that she had visited the building with the flooded cellar and dead dogs!) she would convince my father to buy a house in one of the upscale districts of Sofia, the capital city. I wouldn’t be able to see the lanky guy ever again.

“Listen”, I told him. “Come to the Snowdrop Cafe tomorrow evening at seven . Then I’ll tell you where you can meet me.”

For there could be no doubt that I would be seeing this man again. There could be no doubt that it had been the most marvelous day of my life. In my chest of drawers I had a lot of money; if I bought a small flat, a flat with one single room and a bathroom - one rotten flat in this swamp of crumbling buildings--then everything would be all right. If I spread an old mattress on the concrete floor I could invite the beanpole and no one would know anything about it.

Even Fatma wouldn’t. Where could I buy the small one-room flat? It would be best to choose one in the center of town, near the library, for what sort of place could be honored by the visits of Bloody Rayo’s daughter but the library?

My father would often remark, “Read, my girl, read. Science was out of my reach, but it will be within yours.” My mother paid the best teachers in English, in computers, modern and Latin dances, The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

74 and good manners to train me. Most recently, she stumbled upon the idea to get a German teacher as well: a spinster with withered cheeks who always visited our home in smashingly expensive shoes. My mother adored her for that--she could adore only expensive things.

That was the reason she had been so impressed by the young doctor Xanov who patched up my father after his drunken sprees.

Yes, the only place I was allowed to go was the library. I never visited any fitness clubs; I was too fat, so my father built a gym onto our house and hired a personal trainer to set my targets and measure my progress. But my father, no matter how generous he was, wouldn’t be allowed to buy the public library even though he had donated a dozen grand to repair the broken roof tiles. I doubt, however, he was interested in the books for himself, rather his interest in one of the librarians could account for the generousity: a puny woman with the most unhappy eyes that you could imagine, as if someone beat her non-stop around the clock. I wondered why my father liked small women with eyes as sad as death himself. The only exception to this rule was mother who was neither sad nor small, but she left him all the same.

Well, my point is that I had more than enough money to buy a rotten one room flat. If I did buy it myself, though, the news would spread through town like fire. I had no friends I could trust. The second most beloved saying my father used was “Money is the most loyal friend to man”. I could ask a lawyer to acquire the flat for me.

If I added two or three rolls of bills to his fee everything could be arranged within 24 hours and any lawyer would willingly keep as quiet as the eel in Doctor Xanov’s aquarium, an animal my mother often admired.

“Don’t you want to do this again?” the lanky youth asked, pushing his dimpled chin into the bristle of my thick short hair.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I answered. “Seven o’clock at the Snowdrop Cafe. I’ll give you more money.”

“And we’ll buy beer and sausages”, he snorted happily.

All this happened before my father was shot, perhaps half a year before his funeral. Neither he nor mother had any inkling about The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

75 my decision to take money from my drawer.

The apartment was desperately small. An empty room in a block of old flats, with its window facing north, a roof made of worm-eaten logs, crumbling plaster on the ceiling, a small empty kitchen, and a bathroom so tiny that I had to enter with my shoulder first to relieve myself. There was electricity, but unfortunately there was neither hot water nor any heat whatsoever. I bought a mattress and a cheap blanket, then I invited the maypole whose name I still didn’t know.

The room was as narrow as a coffin; the lawyer was so curious about why I wanted it so badly that I had to lie to him. I told him that I intended to house my German tutor there. The lawyer smiled, which, according to the code of judicial behavior, meant, “Bloody Rayo’s fat cow has a screw loose, no doubt about it. Her father has stuffed so full of money that it’s interfering with her brain Well, I didn’t give a damn about his inferences.

I became the owner of the room with the mattress in less than twenty-four hours. This event once again confirmed my father’s thesis that money would do more for you than your best friend. I didn’t have any friends.

Before the battered entrance door banged shut behind his back the beanpole had taken off his jeans and his dirty lilac T-shirt, the same one as before. And, like before, he did not have any underwear on.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Simo”, he said.

“Don’t you want to know what my name is?” It was evident he didn’t and so he clung to me instead, a thin rope spiraling about the masts of my endless buttocks. “Aren’t you interested in what my name is?” He didn’t answer, and couldn’t possibly do so because his mouth was full of saliva that shined in the light like mica. My mother had a diamond necklace that shined like that--and a diamond ring, and there was a diamond on the belt of her formal evening dress. My father had brought it to her from Austria. So I decided that the saliva in his mouth wasn’t mica; it was diamond. “OK. My name is Moni.

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76 Did you hear me? Moni. Here’s the money. Take it.”

He didn’t look at the money because his body had already started swinging over me. I pushed him aside, which wasn’t difficult at all. He banged against the floor but his reaction surprised me.

“You’re pretty”, he said. “You are pretty.”

It was at that moment that I understood how the other women felt. My mother. My classmates in the private school for girls, my tutors in English, German, modern dances, fitness and good manners.

The other women whose boyfriends told them they were pretty, that they weren’t fat bulldozers but simply pretty women.

“You are off your rocker”, I objected, but he didn’t hear me. ….. On the fortieth day after my father’s funeral mother paid for a solemn church service and invited all the intellectuals and financial elite of the town. Or, I should say, all the people that mother considered elite. The church service was an excellent opportunity for her to show off her mourning attire. On such occasions (and by “such occasions” I’m referring to opportunities for my mother to show off) she always hired the cook from “Casablanca,” the most expensive and posh restaurant in Pernik.

All were enchanted by the menu she offered and by her fashion. I was already very familiar with the cook’s menus because mother abided by her sacred law once a week, on Friday, to take me out to dinner to “Casablanca”. I had the feeling that the waiter knew when we were about to arrive by the sound of my mother’s jeep. The same very tall and attractive man always met us at the door, taking my mother’s hat or cape and bowing gracefully, down to the last vertebra in his spinal cord, and whispering very sincerely, “You look just wonderful, ma’m” The words would rattle like pebbles in his mouth, his eyes following my mother with such demonstrative admiration that I suspected he was ready to kiss the pavement beneath her shoes; it was hardly surprising when she would leave him fabulous tips.

Then the waiter would take my hat or coat and bring the menu, his eyes shining proudly for he had again anticipated what my The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

77 mother would order. “Shall it be shark’s loin prepared in the Saragossa way, ma’m?” My mother made it a special point for all her guests to be aware of the fact she ate shark’s loin in the Saragossa way.

She had grown up in a family of waiters. My grandmother and grandfather, her parents, experts in this trade, had weened several generations of drunkards at “The White Elephant” restaurant, and after the establishment went bankrupt they set up a pub in one of the most backwater suburbs of the town. My grandmother Shar (I suppose it was probably an abbreviation of “shark”) was slim and still had her sharp green eyes even though she was getting on in years.

Compared to her my grandfather resembled an obituary notice. He made cheap cocktails behind the bar but more often drank quietly and sadly with his regular customers, not giving a damn about the rest of the world. His only daughter, my mother, had money to burn and therefore was happy. Grandfather was given to noble charity, ordering free drinks for his old friends, a bunch of poor pensioners with receding hair who poured the cheap cocktails into their brains, blessing him day and night.

Grandma Shar looked at them with disdain, burning them with the green flames of her eyes. In her rare fits of wrath she would throw my grandpa’s friends out of the establishment in a most ignominious manner, but this happened once in a blue moon so they waited for death peacefully, full to the brim with brandy my grandfather sold to them cheap. For although my grandfather was a drunkard with thinning hair he never swindled his old pals.

As my mother entertained her guests, barely remembering the reason for the occasion, I was wondering if it was a good idea to introduce Simo to my grandfather.

********* Perhaps one of the lavish garden parties thrown by my mother marked the beginning of Gallantine’s era of fame. He used to be and still is one of the exceptionally interesting types in our backwater town. When God created humankind He stuffed too many teeth in Gallantine; I had the feeling he looked at me with his teeth yet he never failed to notice the smallest details in people’s behavior or The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

78 clothing. My mother sighed and pined for him. After she had integrated herself into the city’s elite, she developed a taste for refined gentlemen, and Gallantine was so refined that he couldn’t recognize his own image in the mirror. Probably the bevy of young swallows (which was how the daughters of the elite families were referred to), would stone me dead if they read my description of Gallantine. He was the delicacy dish on the menu of my mother’s parties. It was at one of those parties that a male individual courted me in the most refined way. Of course, I was sprawling in a custom made easy chair twice the size of a regular easy chair. I suppose my buttocks were overflowing in pessimistic waves toward the floor as my mother hurled the nets of her eyes to catch Gallantine. That gentleman was a lawyer or was on the verge of becoming one evidenced by the great pains he was going to in order to use as much judicial terminology he could. That remarkable legal functionary sat by my side, stuffed two hundred wise Latin sentences into my ear, then whispered, “Could I have the pleasure of dancing with you?”

Had I been a more sensitive soul I would have eaten the carpet under his boots and then jumped with happiness. But I imagined he would look like an exhausted exclamation mark at the end of the interminable sentence of my body. His smile consisted of honey and sugar syrup that streamed down my breasts. That sobered me up.

“Yes, you can dance with me, and I will be free in about twenty five minutes,” I declared with the hesitant voice of a beauty everyone was dying to dance with.

“It will be my pleasure,” Gallantine lied.

I went on studying the group of the intellectuals invited to my mother’s party: two financiers plus wives smelling sweetly of French perfumes. My mother hung about them rustling the skirts of her dress in a very concerned manner indeed. It was Italian and cost 6000 US dollars that my father had bought for her before he died. I mention the precise price of the dress because my mother always appreciated the discussion of how much her garments cost. She rushed enthusiastically to Gallantine bathing him in the golden torrent of her voice, “Mr. Talev,” she exclaimed. “I suspect you might be a little The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

79 bored here. Could you possibly tell me what you think about…” and he ran to tell her what he thought but returned to me very quickly.

After exactly twenty-five minutes he was holding me trying to make me dance. I should say I squashed him under my mass, the eyes of everyone at the party glued to us. I supposed that the majority of the guests were expecting I’d trip over the carpet and spread Mr. Talev in a thin layer on the floor under me.

“Do you know you are a very charming young woman,” was the young lawyer’s first sentence, and it sounded quite promising. It was evident he made efforts to smile at me, intently watching Veronica in the meantime. She was a magnificent blonde who studied pedagogy; my father had sponsored her scientific research when he was still alive between his own pedagogical endeavors and my mother’s attractions. I suspected that in spite of his immense loyalty for my mother he indulged in a little pedagogy every now and then. Apparently Gallantine was attracted by that science as well. It would be my pleasure to stick a pin in his juridical ass but the event that followed made me stare at my mother. It was the first time I had seen her so miserable--as if she had just been kicked out of the Institute of Social Sciences where she studied law.

“I’ve heard many people talk about your sharp wit,” Gallantine continued spilling the cologne of his flatteries. “In fact, let me admit I am a little afraid to tell you about the thing I have on my heart.”

“There are no reasons to panic,” I encouraged him. Wild curiosity was eating at me; what sort of a would he ask of my mother?

The compliment he bestowed upon me made me think the man had set a very high goal before him.

“Will you marry me?” he said.

It was only natural I stopped dancing. Perhaps I had stepped too heavily on his toes for his face blanched. “Didn’t your mother prepare you for our conversation?” Mr. Talev asked.. “I asked her to.” For some incomprehensible reason mother had failed to provide that precious information. My suitor’s zest for life had obviously abandoned him. “Will you marry me?” the lawyer repeated. this time sounding more convincing than before.

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80 “This is a topic of a serious conversation,” I remarked. I had noticed that that my prospective husband still watched the blonde pedagogue, carrying all the passion and despair in the world in his eyes. “I would like to discuss things with you in greater detail.”

His pale face grew almost as green as my eyes.

“You don’t trust me,” he concluded. After a second however he seemed to recollect something and added, “O Key. Now is as good as any other time.” He touched my elbow tenderly, his palm sinking up to the wrist into my blubber, then dragged me towards the terrace.

My father had bought marble from Torino, Italy, for it delighted my mother to hear the elite talk about her terrace and marble from Torino. At such moments she felt like a full-fledged lady. “It’s so wonderful here!” the lawyer sighed and stumbled over a little naked statue of Eros in the middle of the terrace, around which Torino marble vases jutted out.

“Gallantine,” I grabbed him by the hand and lifted him from the roseate marble he had hit his head against. “I will marry you.”

My quick consent to become Gallantine’s wife made him very happy. He started coughing, sending droplets of saliva at a considerable speed in all directions around his head. When at last his jubilation abated he took a deep breath, looked into my eyes, and said, “It is all right, dear. Now I’d like to list some conditions you must bear in mind.”

The denouement of the play approached: I was going to learn all crucial considerations on the part of the young semi-god who was making serious efforts to become my husband.

“I am listening to you,” I reminded him. ********* I’d like to tell you more about Gallantine. I knew he was waiting for me, proudly displaying his athletic body (male athletic bodies are priority number one with my mother) on the divan my father had imported from Italy. I supposed Gall would start spinning convincing arguments about how sharp my wit was, how God had blessed me with a rich and colorful imagination, and how well I spoke English. I assumed that that the attractive blond woman who seemed The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

81 to hover around Gallantine and made it known far and wide that she studied pedagogy had written the script for Gallantine’s performance of asking me to be his wedded wife. Her name was Veronica, the queen of pedagogic research.

Although I possessed the weight of a combat armored vehicle I was well capable of getting on the nerves of little fluffy kittens like Gallantine. I had made him wait for me on the divan forty-five minutes now and I hoped his syrupy physiognomy was warped like a doormat under the burden of his wounded pride. Who the hell would dare to subject him to jeers of this sort? Of course, no one but me! He had probably perspired profusely and the smell of his firstclass sweat would ruin the aroma of the deodorant - liquid in which Gallantine swam every day. Sometimes I suspected that rather than a man I faced a deodorant spray.

I had made a firm decision to make men realize how precious I was so I intended to keep Gall on that divan an hour more. That was a trick I had learned from my deceased father, “A bloke waiting in front of your door is a can of beef paste, my girl.” The thought of Gallantine in the form of paste breathed new life into me.

Somebody knocked at the door. Or I should say kicked at the door, apparently trying to wrench it from its fixtures, and this, strictly speaking, was sheer arrogance. I would not allow anybody to ruin the property that my father bought at the price of his own blood.

Before Gallantine knocked again at the door made of yew wood my father ordered from Belgium, mother rang me up and spoke to me in a very concerned manner, “Gall is coming to pop the question, dear,” she sighed on the telephone. “Please, be friendly with him. You know how much that man loves you.”

This man loved most of the heiresses in town; he was a lawyer whose clients drove cars that were more expensive than the financial resources of the municipality. Gallantine had chosen me. That fact apart from being a remarkable acknowledgment of my father’s money was a topic that gave rise to unsavory comments about me.

I switched on my computer, riveted my heavenly eyes on the monitor and called out, “Come in!”

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82 “Good afternoon, my dear!” I was right,: his mouth did look like a warped doormat. “You look swell today. Has your mother informed you what I intend to do now?”

“Yes, she has,” I assured him, waiting for additional information.

“You are very beautiful,” my prospective husband ventured, and the doormat of his mouth licked at my old sandals. It was obvious he wanted to charm to me.

“I suppose you should start telling me how intelligent I am,” I interrupted him deftly. “The intelligence of a person is not visual.

You can use that and be on the safe side.”

“But you are really very beautiful,” my fiancé had evidently let his imagination run loose. “Your eyes are green like…” the comparison was too cumbersome to make and, all-too willing to eliminate the awkward pause in the conversation, Gallantine pushed his lips to my mouth. In other words he kissed me, as a proper loving husband should do. “You are an exceptionally intelligent woman and I really want you to be my wife.”

He had produced the same sentence several months earlier as he tangoed around the excessive curves of my body at my mother’s party. His offer did not surprise me at all. I was interested to know, however, what he wanted in return for his sacrifice.

“You are a person of rich and compassionate soul…”

“My soul is another good topic of discussion,” I encouraged him. “It too is not seen with the eyes.”

“I’m serious… and I enjoy your sense of humor, too.”

“Let’s drop the unnecessary pleasantries,” my voice sounded dry like the sands of the Sahara. “In spite of all your admiration for my soul, my sense of humor, my rich and colorful imagination, let us concentrate on my enormous weight.”

“You are so pretty,” my future husband repeated stubbornly.

Gallantine lacked both inspiration and imagination, and attempted again, “You are so pretty…” I thought of the scrawny gypsy boy who had used similar words. Suddenly I wanted badly to be with that gypsy maypole. The poor soul, he frittered away all money I had paid him on those nasty sausages. I loved him. “Yes. Yes, you really are The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

83 quite… how shall I put it… bosomy. Yes. You are fat. And fat is fat.

Well, you know it’s important to get on with one’s marriage partner from the spiritual point of view. In order to understand one’s partner spiritually, one needs money.”

“Gallantine,” I said. “How much money do you need to understand me spiritually after you become my husband?”

“You are intelligent, I grant you that. And I appreciate the fact you speak to the point. No prejudice, no beating about the bush.”

“Yes, yes,” I whispered changing the approach to our conversation. “You know what? I really thank you very much. You are such an attractive man and I am such a … fattie.” The clouds in the sky witnessed my humiliation. I preferred gulping down all the toads in all the swamps of Bulgaria to uttering those abject words. Well, my father used to say, “Yes, you are fat,” Gallantine spoke most sincerely, the blue scales of his eyes measuring the tonnage of my buttocks. “Yes, you are. And you are surely familiar with the fact your mother approves of me.” Yes, I knew she approved of him on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon after she had had her lunch and the beautician had refreshed her face with pineapple slices. Gallantine, however, decided to explain to me what that exactly meant. “She is great… You will become my wife: Mrs. Taleva. Can you imagine it? There will be only one Mrs. Taleva in the whole country. You will be that lady. But as you know very well everything in the world has a price,” he dropped the bait of his sentence and let it sink its sharp hook into my stomach.

I managed to keep my mouth shut and glue my eyes to the parquet floor. If I looked at him for even a second the scrambling hamster would burst into flames from the heat of my gaze. Even Gallantine would understand I hated him enough to kill him.

“And, of course, the price is high,” the hamster produced the end of his statement. “Forty percent of your father’s property, my dear. In return you will become Mrs. Taleva. If you interpret this sentence from the diplomatic point of view, it means that you’ll be welcome in all the drawing rooms of the elite, though I find it hard to imagine what you’ll talk about with these people. Perhaps you’ll have The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

84 to read some books on art or law… I have built my reputation painstakingly for many years now. You’ll be invited to all major receptions, you’ll have at your disposal…”

“Forty percent is too high a price,” then I swallowed my rage before it was too late and shut up.

“Apart from your sojourns to the elite households of the capital I will be in your bed once a month on a regular basis,” Gallantine assured me, fairly dejectedly. “Perhaps you‘ll get pregnant, although I strongly doubt it…” If my father had been alive and had heard the young snail’s plans he would have readily crushed his shell.

“Thank you,” I whispered, carefully pulling open the drawer of my desk. “I suppose you’ll spend the rest of the month in my mother’s company… or with that blond lady you study pedagogy with.”

“Yes, you are quite right, dear. Man should not live in loneliness, don’t you agree? You and I can often talk on the telephone - for example Monday evenings. Let me sum this up: 40% and let’s make the date of our official wedding ceremony. If you conceive a child by me, dear, all doors of legal bodies and institutions will be open for him. I personally will introduce him to a number of eminent families. His photographs will be in all newspapers. As for you… you will always be his mother, anyway.”

“Perhaps all that deserves 50% of my father’s property,” I whispered quietly. Wild anger burned a tunnel in my brain but an obese young woman like me should never board the sledge of anger. “What would you say to 50%?” I purred, sticking my eyes into my belly button.

I had no desire to look at him at all.

“You know what? You are very fat, but you’re cool,” the hamster smiled encouragingly at me. “50 is my favorite number.”

“I don’t need money,” I lied brazenly. “All I need is your love. If I make it 60% will you visit me twice a month?”

Gallantine’s face lit up, enraptured by the vision of the bright future.

“You’re great! Very cool indeed!” he breathed sincerely. “If you want we can do it here and now!”

I had already managed to open the desk drawer, so I thrust my The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

85 fat hand into it and dragged out a Makarov pistol. Makarov is a good gun and I hoped my father had made good use of it before those men sent him to the world beyond. I lifted the muzzle of the Makarov to Gallantine’s mouth as the he planted his hand in the glen between my breasts.

“What about 70%?” I asked pressing the Makarov against his forehead. My future husband choked on the air beneath his nose.

“Get… th…this gun a…way!” he stammered, chopping the words with the red saw of his tongue. “G..g…get it away!”

I hit his nose with the handle of the pistol. “Would you like 70%?” I repeated my question pleasantly. The sweat was running off the lawyer’s smooth forehead. “I am a very good shot,” I lied to him.

“And this piece of iron has got a silencer.”

My future husband grabbed at his stomach with both hands ready to throw up any minute now: a big blond pile of legal knowledge stewing in his own juice. He had probably wetted his finest-quality pants.

“Tomorrow you will introduce me to the eminent families in the capital,” I was quick to prepare his business agenda for the day.

The man was pressing his stomach, the contents of which on the verge of erupting, to the parquet floor my father had ordered from Spain.

“D..d…don’t sh..shoot!”

“The day after tomorrow, the 20th of December, you and I will pay a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Anev.” The hamster groped for his heart.

It seemed to me the air had congealed in his throat for he was trying hard to spit something out of his foaming mouth.

“Yes… y..yes, dear.”

“Otherwise you’ll acquire very special piece of my father’s property, a nice leaden bullet in the medulla oblongata. I believe it makes up exactly 70% of my father’s property, doesn’t it?

I was afraid that Gallantine was unable to calculate the exact percentage just now. The doormat of his face looked as if it had wiped the shoes of the entire town’s population and now lay trembling.

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86 “Dear,” I croaked using up all my compassion. “If someone learns how you asked me to become your wife - a proposal, which I have already accepted - I will make sure you do not survive our next encounter. Is that clear?” I pressed my father’s Makarov harder against my future husband’s forehead and got no reply. That made me put part of the muzzle between Gallantine’s crimson lips. ”Well, will you love me loyally and with all your heart till death makes us part?”

It is difficult for a person to speak with a muzzle of a gun between his or her teeth but Gallantine managed to cope with this impossible situation.

“Yes, I will love you,” his words did not sound sad even though I saw tears in his eyes.

END

Zdravka Evtimova was born in Bulgaria where she

works as a literary translator from English, German and French. Her latest short story collections are: “Carts and Other Stories”, Fomite Publishing, Vermont, USA, 2012, and “Impossibly Blue”, SKREV Press, UK, 2013. Her short story collection “Endless July and Other Stories” was published by Paraxenes Meres, Greece, 2013. Her novel “Sinfonia Bulgarica” was published in USA, Fomite Books in 2014; in Italy, Salento Books in 2015, and in Macedonia, Antolog Books in 2015. The novel was published in Serbia in 2016.

Her short stories have been published in 32 countries in the world including USA (Massachusetts Review, New Sudden Fiction, Antioch review etc),Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China etc. Her short story “Seldom” was included in the anthology -Best European Fiction 2015, Dalkey Archive Press, USA. The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

87

Mise en scene: PAOLO MARCHETTI

Paolo Marchetti is an Award and Grant winning independent photographer based in Rome, Italy.

He has worked for thirteen years in the cinematographic and commercial industry, covering each role in the Camera Dpt. In his photography Paolo has always paid particular attention to political and anthropological issues and has embarked upon a freelance career to focus on a combination of long-term personal projects and client assignments.

His projects are regularly published in international magazines such as Sunday Times, British Journal of Photojournalism, The Guardian, Le Monde, Geo, Days Japan, L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, 6MOIS, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, CNN, New York Times, Time magazine, National Geographic US and many others.

Marchetti has been recognized nine times with the “NPPA – Best of Photojournalism” six times the “PDN’s Award”. the “Sony WPO Award”, the “Getty Images Editorial Photography”, seven awards at the “POY – Picture of the Year”, three of which in the category “Photographer of the Year”, the “Leica Photographer Award”, the “Days Japan”, he was finalist at the “Leica Oskar Barnack Award” and has achieved the “World Press Photo”…among others.

His projects have been exhibited in galleries during the biggest festivals in the world in New York, London, Paris, Perprignan, San Diego, Rome, Angkor in Cambodia, Pingyao in China, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Copenhagen etc.

Marchetti is currently represented by Reportage by Getty Images and Verbatim. Website: www.paolomarchetti.org The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017

88

VANISHING ROOTS China’s living legacy

I

n southern China, bordering Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, the last Himalayan peaks protect a very special region: Yunnan, literally “south of the clouds.”

In China, which for vastness’ is the third nation in the world after Russia and Canada, are living more than 1 billion 300 million people. A resident on five of the planet Earth, is Chinese.

93% of China’s population is represented by people of Han ethnicity. The remaining part of the Chinese population is fragmented into 56 different ethnic minorities, more than half ‘of whom live in the far South-west of the country, just in Yunnan.

These populations are highly heterogeneous from the point of view purely socio-cultural and religious.

The Wagon Magazine - November- 2017

89 Their culture, with appropriate specifications, is a mixture of different religious elements which come together in a strange syncretism between them, many beliefs, including Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, but there are also elements of primitive-based shamanic religions, other borrowed from Islam, and to a lesser extent

by Christianity.

Ancient traditions and cultures characterize these populations, whose ancestors can still be found before the Qin and Han dynasties, over thousands of years ago.

These people, who often live in conditions of substantial isolation, are the last repositories of ancient languages that are dying, heirs of ancient traditions such as knowledge of medical herbs or clever construction of houses in dark pine.

What is quickly weakening the identity of these ethnic groups?

For decades now, many efforts are made by the Chinese government to extend its economic influence in areas populated by ethnic minorities and the imposition of political and socio-cultural development in the territory, is rapidly demolishing the identity of these populations .

The chinese regime has put his focus to the regional economic development by financing large scale projects, especially for energy supply, such as dams, oil pipelines, refineries and a vast plan of infrastructure entrusted to chinese companies etc..

China continues to sign bilateral agreements for its supply of highways, linking the province of Yunnan with Burma state.

Today the settlements key to the work of extension of infrastructure and energy investments are precisely the lands of certain ethnic minorities, their villages were swept away by the great works promoted by the Chinese government and promoted by neighboring economic giants.

The direct consequence is the extinction of an ancient culture in favor of a policy of regime only determined to accelerate the exponential growth of its economy.

The Wagon Magazine - November - 2017