Litro 164 Teaser by Litro Magazine

Senses

ISSUE 164

Alison McBain Douglas J. Ogurek Anna Martin Sherry Mendelson Amy Crosby Trevin Wyant Charlie Keyheart Brianna Bjarnson Lilian Faschinger

Cover art | Anna Martin

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editorial staff

Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto | Online Editor online@litro.co.uk Ar ts Editor Daniel Janes, ar ts@litro.co.uk | Assistant Fiction Editor/Story Sunday Barney Walsh, fictioneditor@litro.co.uk Tu e s d a y Ta l e s H a y l ey C a m i s , t u e s d a y t a l e s @ l i t ro . c o . u k Flash Fiction Editor, Catherine McNamara, flash@litro.co.uk C o n t r i b u t i n g E d i t o r a t L a rg e S o p h i e L ew i s , R i o , B ra z i l Design Assis t ant Elina Nikkinen | Adver tising Manag er +44(0) 203 371 9971 sales@litro.co.uk

Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend. General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971

table of contents #164 Senses / 2017 June

Contributors

Editor's letter

fiction

10 15

Taiki-chĹŤ no chinmoku (The Silence of Waiting) - Alison McBain They're Just ... Here - Douglas J. Ogurek

The New Victorians - Charlie Keyheart

Ice on the Lake - Lilian Faschinger, Translated by Geoffrey Howes

essays

Night on the Hill - Sherry Mendelson

Animal - Brianna Bjarnson

flash

Oasis - Amy Crosby

art series

cure me, xenobiotic, se.cure, mindful.heart - Anna Martin

Cover: Begin Again - Anna Martin

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5 CONTRIBUTORS

Alison McBain is an award-winning

author with more than forty short stories and poems published, including work in Flash Fiction Online, FLAPPERHOUSE and The Gunpowder Review. When not writing fiction, she is the Book Reviews Editor for the magazine Bewildering Stories. Alison lives in Connecticut with her husband and three children.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g., extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. Recently, Ogurek guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology. He also reviews films at that same magazine. More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Sherry Mendelson MD is a psy-

chiatrist and writer living in the Los Angeles area with her family. Her work has been performed in Los Angeles and Palo Alto by Jewish Womens' Theatre and published by Antigonish Review and The Jewish Journal. Currently she is writing a memoir about coming of age in the 1960s in California and finding her way to medical school.

Geoffrey C. Howes has published

widely on Austrian literature and translated a number of writers, mostly Austrian. His translated books are: Robert Musil, Three Women (2014); Jürg Laederach, The Whole of Life (2014); and Peter Rosei’s Metropolis Vienna (2009) and Ruthless and Other Writings (2003).

Born and raised in Northern California, Brianna Bjarnson holds a master’s degree in English and teaches writing at Sonoma State University. Her work has appeared in Superstition Review, Zaum, and Whisperings Magazine. Although she loves living among the alluring rolling hills of San Francisco’s North Bay, she often dreams of London.

6 Amy Crosby currently lives on the

south coast of England and, despite a perfectly lovely upbringing, has always had a penchant for the dark and strange, which frequently finds its way into her work. Her fiction has been published in MUSED - The BellaOnline Literary Review, Prole and Bunbury Magazine, as well as in various literary webzines. She can be followed on Twitter via @red_ little_rose and found online at www. amy-crosby.com.

Charlie Keyheart teaches Adult Ed-

ucation in The Bronx, New York. An avid biker, he enjoys touring the five boroughs with his daughters Livia and Zoe. Charlie has published in The Moth and The NYC Writing Project: Voices.

Trevin Wyant is an American illus-

Anna Martin is a digital/traditional

artist, writer and photographer based out of Saint Augustine, Florida. She is an avid explorer and much of her artwork is inspired by her travels and life experiences, and she strives to capture emotions and inspire others with her work. Her work has been previously exhibited in various galleries and museums, such as the Rosenberg Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and has also been published in various art magazines such as Grub Street and Plenilune Magazine. Anna is a freelance artist, and is always looking for new work and collaborative projects. Anna also frequently works under the pseudonym Vacantia, and more of her art can be found at her online gallery:Â http://www.vacantia.org.

trator that employs a variety of mediums to bring his images to life. He grew up in the small town of Jackson, Ohio and after earning his BFA in Drawing, spent a year working and teaching in Tokyo, Japan. He is a published illustrator with a style that leans toward the macabre and dark fantasy genres- his works often connecting to the human experience and psychology.

Lilian Faschinger is an Austri-

an novelist, poet, and literary translator from the English. Her novel Magdalena SĂźnderin (1995) was translated into 17 languages, including two English translations as Magdalena the Sinner, by Shaun Whiteside (1995) and Edna McGowan (1997). The novel Wiener Passion (1999) was translated as Vienna Passion (2000) by Anthea Bell.

@LitroMagazine @LitroMagazine

Editor's letter Dear Reader, Our July issue takes a break from the more explicitly political stuff of June’s Alternative Facts issue, though politics will return – as if it’s ever absent from the times we live in! – in November’s Protest-themed issue (currently open for submissions). For this issue, we sought sensual stories for a heady summer issue – gorgeous vistas (or eyesores), sweet scents (or foul stenches), delicious flavours (or ones that make you retch), melodious (or discordant) sounds, a loving touch or one less tender … but much good writing thrives on its sensory and telling details, and this was a very open theme, really, that attracted a lot of entries and allowed other themes to emerge. Memory, for instance: in “Taiki-chū no chinmoku (The Silence of Waiting)”, by Alison McBain; an old woman remembers as her senses fade; and an old woman remembers her childhood too in Lilian Faschinger’s “Ice on the Lake” (translated by Geoffrey Howes). Meanwhile, in creative nonfiction, our writers themselves remember: Sherry Mendelson’s “Night on the Hill” is a memoir of

childhood rebellion; while “Animal”, by Brianna Bjarnson, is about a life’s love of animals – dogs, horses, birds, goats, dogs – with perhaps other undercurrents too. There’s slightly stranger work in Amy Crosby’s flash fiction “Oasis”, Charlie Keyheart’s “The New Victorians”, and Douglas J. Ogurek’s “They’re Just … Here”, in the last of which there are watchful aliens among us – and, for the eye, there’s some varied visual art, by Anna Martin, Trevin Wyant, Nelly Sanchez, and Ashley Parker Owens.

Eric Akoto Editor-in-Chief

Training for writing drama across different media contexts > MA/MFA Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media

www.cssd.ac.uk/litro CSSDLondon

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Taiki-chū no chinmoku (The Silence of Waiting)

FICTION

Alison McBain Like them, she waited.

Masuyo was married for fifty-eight years to the same man. She’d hated him for fifty-seven years. “Why did you stay with him?” her granddaughter asked her. “Why didn’t you get a divorce?” Her granddaughter sat on a chair next to the hospital bed they’d brought in after Masuyo’s fall. Masuyo’s son had moved her old bed into the basement as soon as they got the bed with the levers and gears and tubes sprawling out of the sides. Or perhaps her son had only told her that he’d stored her bed, so she wouldn’t get upset. Perhaps he’d taken it to the curb instead of storing it, knowing she wouldn’t navigate the stairs again and check to see that her two-hundred-dollar flower bedspread was neatly packed into the plastic case she’d saved from the store. Right now, some other woman could be sleeping under those pastel-coloured irises, never knowing they belonged to a dead man and his dying wife. She hated the ugliness of the utilitarian bed in her beautiful room. On her vanity was a stack of adult diapers, in a heap for anyone to see. She’d asked the women to move them out of her sight – to put them in the closet, under the bed, anything – but there was always some reason they gave why it couldn’t be done. So she spent her days sitting up in the bed staring at those diapers that, one by one, were transferred onto her failing body. Her granddaughter repeated the question. Divorce? Masuyo thought. No, that was a modern invention. People didn’t get divorced in those days. It wasn’t done. These days, the Pope could get divorced and no one would blink an eye. Back then, a person married and stayed married. One just hoped the man one saw three or four times before saying “Yes” was a good man. There was no way to tell, really. “No divorce,” she told her granddaughter. The words were much easier before her throat got a hold of them, before her ungainly tongue tried to bend and twist the sentences that were once so easy to form. Those two words exhausted her and she flicked her eyes away from the fall of her granddaughter’s face. Adults now, her two grandchildren. She even had one great-granddaughter, and another on the way. Natural that this granddaughter would ask about divorce, as she had separated from her first husband after a year of marriage. Just like Masuyo’s son, who had divorced his no-good wife after thirty years. Why he couldn’t have married a Japanese woman was a mystery. Instead, her three children had all settled for white people to share their lives with. She closed her eyes. A moment later, just a single moment, she opened her eyes to a

515 1

FICTION

They’re Just...Here Douglas J. Ogurek

/ /

The aliens were not friendly, nor were they hostile.

“Up to a billion birds die in collisions with glass each year in the United States.” —American Bird Conservancy When they finally came, the aliens were not friendly, nor were they hostile. Rather, they just stood there, like cartoon villains paused in mid-chase. *** A motionless alien stared at a dead beaver beside a pond. Across the pond, a man leaned on the passenger side of a sports car that played newage music. A thin metal rod extended from his back pocket. “Tim. Shit alive. You gonna take a bubble bath?” Tim chuckled and opened the glove compartment. “Well gee Bill. Did your Bulldogs win last night?” Tim’s baseball cap displayed the same padlock-shaped logo of his car’s hood ornament. “Fuckin’ Lasers.” “Boom boom boom.” Bill snorted, then jumped and swatted at a dragonfly. “Lasers got more money than anyone. By far.” “It’s one of those things guy. Like you get what you pay for?” Tim took from the glove compartment a North American bird guide. A third man flapped an orange garbage bag. “You should like his music Bill. You know, with your music box collection?” Bill touched the rod in his back pocket. “Right humanitarian of the year.” “I’m a caring neighbour.” Bill yelled toward the alien. “Hey ugly. How ya like my handiwork?” The alien did not move or avert its eyes from the dead creature. The humanitarian pulled an aluminum can from his bag. Tim flipped through his bird guide. “You’d think these aliens would get out there and, you know, do something.” “Shit alive, I saw one of those bastard beavers last night and I got the bastard. Nice wax job.” “You shot … that’s Chime wax.” “The bastard was trying to gnaw down another tree.” “Chime’s one of my clients. I thought you were going on vacation, guy.” “Yeah I wanted to hang back, take care of those bastards.” Bill picked up a rock. “Besides, I always go in a separate car.” The humanitarian tossed the can onto the shoulder. “It’s unacceptable. I didn’t buy a three-quarter million dollar home – look at these views – to have the trees knocked down

323 2

ESSAY

Night On the Hill Sherry Mendelson A personal memoir.

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Any time I found trouble as a teenager, which happened frequently, my mother warned me that I would wind up like her older sister, my Aunt Beverly. “That’s just like Beverly. She used to run around with her wild jazz friends doing who knows what. Look what happened to her after all that craziness. She wound up agoraphobic and housebound, going from psychiatrist to psychiatrist. If you don’t watch yourself, you’ll end up like her,” she said, after I’d been detained by the police for shoplifting with my friend, Linda. I was fifteen and determined to make my own way in the world, separate from my parents’ expectations of me. My mother was just as determined to imprint her ideas upon me about who I should be. Beautiful, with curly auburn hair and porcelain skin, Aunt Beverly sang in jazz clubs around Los Angeles in the 1940s. She’d won beauty contests because she was talented and pretty. She hoped to make it big as a singer and become famous. Aunt Beverly dreamed that her talent and her good looks would transport her far away from her Russian Jewish immigrant parents, my grandparents, where she spent her days slicing corned beef in Grandpa’s kosher butcher shop. It didn’t work out for Aunt Beverly. She’d planned to tour with Benny Goodman, as his secretary. She never went on tour and gradually descended into depression. Her husband, my Uncle Charles, gave up a career as a musician and worked days at a desk job to support the two of them. They were childless. Aunt Beverly turned into an agoraphobic recluse, housebound for days; her only companion a white poodle named Winston. She existed indoors, cleaning her apartment to spotlessness. After she finished, fearful of germs, she would clean again. “What a waste of a life. She was so smart. Just too into herself, her looks, and her singing,” said Mom when anything reminded her of Aunt Beverly. And many things did. Including me. But back in 1966, when I was fifteen, I didn’t know what was so bad about Aunt Beverly. To me she was my beautiful, fragile aunt who loved commenting on the latest outfit I’d sewn for myself. Occasionally, on Sunday afternoons, Aunt Beverly and Uncle Charles visited for one of our family barbecues. She’d sit at my desk commenting on each outfit I made, her soft hands flitting through my closet, alighting on each dress like two hummingbirds finding their favourite flowers. “Ooooh, Sherry, I like this one, the dress you made with the Peter Pan collar. Great lines, so slimming,” she said. She fingered her pearl necklace, her fingertips rolling across the smooth surfaces of the pearls. It dawned on me then that Aunt Beverly took an unusually intense interest in my clothing. She herself always came over well put together in fashionable A-line dresses, earrings

30 Jeux de seduction - Nelly Sanchez

ART

cure me, xenobiotic, se.cure, mindful.heart Anna Martin

mindful.heart

Amy Crosby

Oasis

FLASH

She fears whispering things…

In the shower, she squats and whimpers. It’s been a long time since she last saw herself and her legs have ruptured into cactine valleys in the absence of her eyes. She casts a hesitant kind of sunshine, staring, and pricks her fingers on this new landscape. It’s hard to explore; there are hostile plants wherever she searches: mounds of coarse bushes, a thick clique of thorns that has formed in the hollow of her armpit. She fears whispering things that might have bedded down beneath the vegetation; she worries about what they might say. This country of hers is unfamiliar territory; all has become sharp. In the light, she sees blue and purple shining; colours that grow easily in the dark and you can tell that they are there from the feel of them. They sink inwards. She snuffles, whines. Her smell has changed. In the heat of the room, it rises off of her and is foreign and familiar. She smells of him. Her hands plough to sift it away. Plough and plough like an animal digging up bones. Her body is buried somewhere here, she knows it. Her body was luscious once: colours that blushed at the slightest touch. She remembers the ferns, the rubber roots that she tended with pride, her pulpy, pliant skin. And the water. She remembers the eager dampness. She does not know if she is allowed to want that back but she pictures people, anyone, no one in particular, stretched out across her turf, reclining … and the prospect makes her scared. It’s early days. She knows that. They keep telling her. It’s early days. She sees the shears they’ve left and does not touch them; hacking at the barbs will make it worse. Instead, she reaches for the dial and turns it. Rain falls.

Trevin Wyant

737 3

FICTION

The New Victorians

/ /

Charlie Keyheart Sleek, glistening, towering superstructures…

Of the two toe dividers, pink and blue, Mona preferred the blue though she couldn’t say why. The pink kept perch over the toilet, on a wire shelf through which things sometimes fell, emery boards and tweezers, small vials of cream, a much-used Bic (the Silky Touch), reminding all visitors that this was originally a woman’s abode. With Pierce travelling the country at a blistering pace, collecting shots for his “baby,” a 700-page photo review of what he’d coined, at only twenty-nine, “reflective architecture” (“I’m expanding the language!” he chirped to Mona over the phone), to be called, at Taschen’s insistence, The Glass Half-Century, it still largely was. Mona lay along the length of the sofa, painting concentric circles on her toes. She did the big nail first, turquoise, yellow, mauve. She wanted to see how far across she could go, though the baby nail, long as a fork tine is wide, would surely not permit the tiniest circle – even without the glass and a half of Pinot now staining her stomach lining. Mona stopped to admire her toes. How prettily they spread! The smallest on the right, runt of the ten, had caught up to the others – mostly. Unless you’d seen it at birth, knew to look for it, you wouldn’t notice a thing. When she was small, Mona’s father, before tucking her in, would kiss her eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and chin, then every finger and each of her toes, giving extra attention to her “shy little piggy,” which he stroked and nibbled, whispered and told secrets to. He swore one day it would outgrow the others, become so monstrous she would need special shoes. He pretended to cower before it, extracting promises of mercy for the distant future when he hoped it would rule with “justice and benevolence.” Then he’d back out of her bedroom, kowtowing obsequiously. Mona, awash in stuffed animals, and with the cool air on her justkissed toes, giggled into her princess sheets. With every pedicure, home or salon, Mona remembered this. Her iPhone buzzed, playing Until You Come Back To Me. The Aretha Franklin cover was classic, but Mona preferred Stevie Wonder’s dulcet original, and got into lengthy “discussions” on YouTube with the trolls who couldn’t accept that someone, a woman especially, might have her own opinion on things. “Baby! How’s Pittsburgh?” “Glass-Quotient: 110.” “All right.” “How are my girls?” Mona’s winey lips spread across her teeth. She grabbed the old Samsung and, pulling her Malibu blue sports bra down, snapped a quick cleavage pic. In three taps it was texted: instant porn. Two cells made life so much better. Even Pierce had to admit it.

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ESSAY

Animal

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Brianna Bjarnson

A personal essay on the love of dogs, horses, birds, goats, dogs … and of all animals.

When I was small, I was attacked by a pack of dogs. They surrounded me, scratched their claws down my arms, tore right through my jeans and tender flesh with their sharp teeth. All I could do was stand and scream as I was overcome. After such an experience, people are often amazed that I can love dogs so much – even preferring them above all other animals. But even then, as terrifying as the attack was, I sensed that there was more to dogs than how the pack had reacted to me in that moment. I think I must have known somehow that as I grew more powerful within myself, I would no longer be in danger. I must have realized how dogs are at their core honest, incapable of lying, really – especially about me and you. Thirty years later, I still bear a scar on my left calf. The crescent moon groove shows shiny hints of teeth marks, but it remains only skin-deep. Despite the attack, I loved dogs long before I ever understood them. *** Why is it that a person’s relationship to animals – or lack thereof – says so much about the person themselves? Animals throughout time have been subjected to human thought, desire, and will. The genetically modified chicken who never experiences the simple pleasure of standing and the vicious toy dog, carried and pampered to the point of neurosis, are so commonplace now that these aberrations fail to arouse surprise in us. When it comes to pets, judgment abounds. You will be branded by the way you feed, train, contain, maintain, and interact with the animals in your care. I, too, will judge you. Just as you will judge me. In fact, I will even judge myself. It seems everyone is on board with demonizing the man who was fined for hoarding one thousand flea-ridden rats in his single-room home. Most of us love to hate the dog-fighters, the horse-starvers, the cagebreeders. But what of the suburban goldendoodle who is always ignored, never walked? What of the sickly reptile doomed to a small aquarium, far from his natural elements? The human is the only animal that consistently craves personal, recreational engagement with species outside of its own. My own relationship with animals has evolved throughout my lifetime, but my need for proximity to their flesh, their wonder, their beauty – even their danger – has remained constant. *** I have had more pets than I can name: snails, chickens, rabbits, fish, crabs. When my children were small, we got stick insects from a friend and even adopted a large snake. When I was partnered but childless, I had cats and treated them like babies. I took a five-year sabbatical from meat. I’ve had moments when I wanted to adopt every animal in a shelter and moments

Ice on the Lake

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46 46

FICTION

Lilian Faschinger - translated by Geoffrey Howes A wintry tale of icy memories for this summer issue…

The old woman stood leaning on a cane by the lakeshore. It was autumn, and between the dark spruces that covered the steep slopes on both sides of the long, narrow lake, the foliage of the sparse larches and deciduous trees glowed yellow, red, and light brown. The Benedictine monastery on the opposite side looked different now. The façade was white and no longer yellow, as it had been when she was a child. The colour and shape of the church tower had changed too. Instead of tapering, the steeple now had a sort of sharp angle to it that she didn’t like. Of the avenue of poplars that had lined the path leading from the lake up to the village, only a few trees still remained. Her right hip was hurting, and she sat down on a bench, laid the cane across her thighs, and looked at the water that was lapping, gurgling softly, against the piles of the wooden dock she had jumped into the lake from as a child. She drew the air into her nose and closed her eyes. Remember. She smelled the scent of the wood at the height of summer, and saw the black water under the dock; as a child she would lie on her stomach on the hot planks and peer down through the cracks. Today the surface looked bright, almost blue. The colour of the lake used to be darker, she thought, an opaque green that always seemed eerie. Not far away, two grebes were looking for food. One was just diving. She knew these birds could stay underwater a long time. They were beautiful creatures, their necks and faces white, their crowns black, and the distinctive hood of feathers black and reddish brown. Had these birds also been there in her childhood? She thought she could remember seeing them in the winter. Hadn’t she and her mother once found a totally exhausted grebe among the reeds, and taken it with them? Or had someone only told her that story? She kept looking at the surface of the water, which was hardly moving. Remember. Suddenly the water was frozen, and she saw herself walking with her mother on the ice. The blackness under the mirror-smoothness frightened her so that she didn’t dare let go of her mother’s hand, a rough hand she’d have liked to free herself from. Right after that she saw herself as a little girl, maybe four years old, laughing, sliding across the ice with arms spread wide, in a little dark red coat, with a wool cap of the same colour fastened under her chin with ribbons that had big round pompoms dangling from their ends. Over and over she got a running start, over and over she slid a few yards across the ice. Sometimes she fell down and stood back up again. Had a little coat like that, a wool cap like that, ever been part of her wardrobe? For one whole winter she had walked across the frozen lake with her mother almost every day. She could remember that. They had visited her grandfather, who was old and sick, on the other side. On the way over her mother had never been talkative, which had dampened her spirits. In those days the lake still froze over every year. Sometimes when it was covered by a layer of snow they had taken the sled along, and her mother had pulled it.

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