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VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2
JUNE 2014
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VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2 Summer 2014
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All work is the property of the attributed writers and artists. Copyright Š Loose Change magazine 2014 www.loosechangemagazine.org
Editor’s Letter
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Molly Dickinson Having launched into this role with our relaunch in March 2013, and seen the magazine through the release of its first print anthology edition one year later, I could not have asked for better bookends to my time as managing editor of Loose Change. Since our inception as WonderRoot’s literary magazine in 2010, I have been honored and humbled to witness the growth of what is now an undeniably luminous, uniquely beloved publication—and organization—dedicated to supporting artful writing in Atlanta. Serving as Loose Change’s managing editor is an incredible opportunity to help shape not just the ongoing evolution of the magazine, but the evolution of Atlanta’s deepening literary community. I’m grateful to have had that opportunity, and excited to see where it takes the next ME…and the next, and the next.
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Thank you, readers, writers and fellow volunteers for making this and every issue a privilege and a pleasure. Thanks, especially, to WonderRoot for making both mine—and for inviting me to continue to serve Loose Change as an advisor and forever advocate. After four years, twelve issues and more than one thrillingly new chapter, my connection to Loose Change remains as indelible as ink on paper. I’ll never be able to put it down.
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Table of Contents
! ! Cover Art, Flatirons, drawing by Chelsea Raflo ! Editor’s Letter ! Table of Contents ! ! Cyclops, fiction by Bobby Sauro 1 ! Drawings by Chelsea Raflo 4 ! Negative Spiral Galaxy, drawing by Chelsea Raflo 5 ! Precepts, poetry by Emily Heilker 6 ! C’est n’est pas une pipe, poetry by Emily Heilker 7 ! Day, poetry by Laura Carter 9 ! Our Lady of Extreme Balance, drawing by Chelsea Raflo 10 ! Lovely Land, fiction by Jared Yates Sexton 11 ! Chart Notes, poetry by Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois 15 ! Fractions, poetry by Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois 17 ! Flatirons, drawing by Chelsea Raflo 18 ! Kapow!, fiction by Sarah Hocut 19 ! Dry Garden, poetry by Madeleine St. Romain 22 ! Cool Clothes to Remember, drawing by Chelsea Raflo 23 ! Funnies, poetry by Dave Hardin 24 ! Transformer, fiction by Benjamin Soileau
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Targeted Marketing, drawing by Chelsea Raflo
! She, poetry by Laura Carter 33 ! Yield, nonfiction by Laura Oliver 34 ! The End, drawing by Chelsea Raflo 38 ! ! Contributors
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Cyclops
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Bobby Sauro
It was time to meet the Boys, although nothing close to poker or a round of golf was on the agenda. Irish is the first to greet me. “Hey Cyclops,” he says. “You got that right, brother,” I say, and raise my fist. With Kentucky Gord’s passing, I now have the largest skull protrusion of any in our group. “Bow to the Chief Cranium,” Mighty Manny Rodriquez says, and hands me a doughnut and a breakfast blend. “You under three-inch guys kill me,” I say. “Now, get outta the way so I can take my rightful place as the leader of this illustrious crew.” There were four of us left. The number would only decrease because once the group formed, no new members were admitted. The medical director didn’t want to upset the harmony of the collective. “Yeah, this is a banner day for me,” Toms River Tom says and shakes my hand. “The Mets have lost three in a row and I’ve got Shrek here breathing on me with coffee breath.” Tom and I actually went to grammar school together but hadn’t seen each other for fiftyfive years. Dr. Lilly walks in and the remaining members of the Monday Morning Support Group, Trounch 3, clear their throats and sit down. The wall in front of me is clean and bare, except for a framed article from Oncology Today. “How’d you do, Dr. Lil?” Tom asks. “I killed it,” she says. “I was second in my age group of the female triathletes.” “The Lillinator,” I say. Dr. Lilly blushes. “I’ll probably do Zumba or kickboxing next,” she says. “We’ll see.” She calls up our test results on her iPad. She lost a lot of weight while training for the triathlon. Her white coat hangs from her like a sail in calm waters. “Potassium levels are tricky devils,” she says. I’m feeling weak and hope it doesn’t mean that I’ll be the Cyclops with the shortest tenure of all. I see black rings overlap on a sign that says “Nuclear Medicine In Use Nearby.” I’m lightheaded and woozy, which doesn’t make sense because the rest of my body feels weighted down. Tom’s sitting to my right. I remember that he sat to my right in grammar school too. During recess, we flipped baseball cards against the bathroom wall. I tossed mine side arm, like a Frisbee. "1
Tom flicked his wrist, like he was rolling a Skee-ball. I do what I did then when I felt bad. I tell myself that everything will be okay and I float to my favorite place, the boardwalk at Asbury Park. As a kid, I visited you more times than I can recall. I never wanted to leave. I ate Taylor ham sandwiches and creamy fudge. I played games of skill, like Water Gun Fun, and won worthless but coveted prizes such as plastic back-scratchers shaped like monkeys' paws. During high school, I came to visit you after the prom. Not a bad night but not fantastic either. You told me, have fun tonight and don’t worry, you’ll come back to see me years from now with someone you really love. During college, I came to show you what awesome friends I had but you were going through a rough time. Angry clouds hunkered low, like crumbled fists. With many of the boardwalk buildings destroyed by fire or gutted for redevelopment, I saw turbulent rows of whitecaps tumbling to the ocean floor. If it wasn’t for the familiar scaffold-like sign of The Empress Motel, I could have been standing at the edge of the Bering Sea. My friends scattered to their cars. “Don’t worry,” I told you. “Everyone’s entitled to bitch sometimes.” Later in life, when I was already sick but didn’t know it, I brought my nephew to meet you. Only one kiddie ride remained, and if it worked the way the I was advised to leave Nashville drifter who operated it looked, no parent would let their child near it. The attractions for grownups had fared no better. The shuttered Leap of Faith roller coaster required just that from anyone brave enough to climb on board. Still, my nephew didn’t want to leave so we played Lucky Leo’s betting wheel. There were about ten different names and objects in the center of the wheel—SIS, DAD, MOM, POP, BETH, MIKE, a shamrock, a diamond, a black cat. From where I stood, the odds didn’t look too bad. After spinning for three minutes, the wheel landed on MIKE. “I win!” I said and threw my hands in the air. “I’m Mike.” “You lose!” the teenage girl who controlled the wheel said. “You bet on MIKE and the needle landed on Black Mike.” I leaned over the counter, squinted, and saw that on the edge of the wheel were many lightly drawn smaller boxes. One of those tiny squares was Black Mike. In the end, it didn’t matter. The girl had given my brothers and nephew something to laugh about the rest of the night, which we spent strolling four abreast, up and down the sand, looking at the stars. I open my eyes and see that instead of our usual semicircle, the Boys are moving their chairs in line with mine. “This is a technique that has had a lot of success in Sweden,” Dr. Lilly says. “You okay, Chief ?” Manny asks me. “Everything’s fine,” I say and move my chair in line with his. I hold hands with him and Tom. “At some point, we’ll do some visualization exercises,” Dr. Lilly says. “But they’re pretty advanced, so that’ll probably be in three or four months. For now, just close your eyes.” "2
I watch the guys do just that and then join them; each of us dreaming of things that will forever remain hidden. 
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! Drawings ! Chelsea Raflo !
I recently moved by myself to a new city, and my current work has a lot to do with this change. I tend to work in many different mediums, but my inclination for this series was to gravitate toward simplicity and clarity. These drawings also function as an effort to process my surroundings and the inevitable feelings of isolation that crop up when I place myself outside of my comfort zone.  
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! precepts ! Emily Heilker !
i prefer to whittle them down to the bones, so that they gleam bright white when the light hits them and bounces off, as light is wont to do. then, when they are so fragile and thin that they might be used as toothpicks, the words seem stronger, somehow. lean and limber, ready for weight. 
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! cest n’est pas une pipe ! Emily Heilker ! my ears are not your ears. obviously,
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you say. i say, apparently not.
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my hands are not your hands. you agree;
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i comply, closely examining the extant curvatures
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of our wrists, parallel lines etched, bone-
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white, bonebrittle in the dim light,
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brandishing walls, whitewash. the son of man moons
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above: projects his expressionless head.
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bisect us? please, we have no need, we now
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eat, spooning words into eccentric
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rings floating outwards into the tall blanks, grimaces.
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you smoke the pipe that isn’t. you take
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down my hair and release
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again the peacy curls that aren’t.
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! Day ! Laura Carter ! Sewed. ! Bones of ordinaire— ! beginning of day, ! house known as You. !
The only reason to enter a church is song; curve of Lucinda’s lux-voix entering a street:
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You think you lost it or did You lose it? like wanting something more than what has been given, sorry for what you said, sorry for hate. You believe You; you continue to love what becomes Your sad-
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ness. Who was this political jiver; who was this political jiver? Your heart falls down into the bottom of a well, again, like new loving: a starred plain
! as if to say there is something that wants to be held ! un-
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! Lovely Land !
Jared Yates Sexton By god, he yelled, the way you love I’d be better off in the wilderness. It was a proclamation he offered often and his lover Sweet Pea had no understanding. He had lectured to her on the inherent privelege of the male sex, the unbalanced transaction of love —the female a bearer of beautiful antiquities and the male a basket of half-rotted fruit—but no matter how he explained it, how loud he grew in tone, she would shake her head and try and assure him that the matter was square. I’m afraid you don’t listen, he told her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. The shape and heft of your love is crushing me, consuming me, threatening to swallow me whole. He was pulling at the thighs of his denim. If I don’t leave town, he said, leave this bed of lust and seek penance, I’m as good as dead. Having recently moved her every possession into Tupelo’s apartment by the park, Sweet Pea was reasonably distressed. In the throes of their passion he had regularly promised her forever, even an existence beyond forever that he had taken to calling Lovely Land, until recently when the intensity had seemingly grown too free and too wild and their coupling was to be followed by violent ruminations on Tupelo’s part. After they had come undone he walked the four rooms of his apartment, banging his fists and still-hard member against the walls, his cries like that of a guilt-soaked beast. Why? she asked him, trying to soothe him and stroke his sweat-silked hair. She existed to live and to help Tupelo live, the kind of partnership she had dreamed of, the kind that she had been told was only a myth or artifact of folklore. When he shivered and gnashed his teeth, so hard at times that bits of them broke off like gravel, she responded by holding him harder to her breasts and sweetening her voice to new and unheard of levels. Because, he said to her in those moments, because, because, because. His mantra, his enchantment, he said it again in the packed lot of the Piggly Wiggly, a rucksack waiting on the hood of his car. Because, because, because. He looked out across the highway and then pointed at a clove of trees. The Bulloch County State Forest. Forty square miles of every manner of southern tree and southern beast. That, he said to her, is where I belong. With my brethren of dirt. Sweet Pea was about to beg him one last time, to bare her heart and remind him of the love she carried like so many rocks, but he was hustling toward the trees, toward the waiting lap of steaming nature. He crossed the highway, a stream of hustling cars separating him and Sweet Pea, so much so that when he looked back, a lusting wife of Lot, he saw only the marquee of the grocery store, the towers in the distance, the life he’d left behind. "11
The first night he camped two miles in and prepared a meal of beans and half a loaf of bread. While the beans were finishing on the fire he laid out the last vestiges of his former existence. He had brought along, for good measure, the Semi-State patch he’d earned as a lineman for the Bulldogs his junior year of high school, a single thread from a quilt his dearest grandmother had made him, and four photos of Sweet Pea, their surfaces already teeming with cracks and wrinkles. Oh, he said to those pictures, the group of them spread about the fallen log he’d taken to using as his coffee table, Sweet Pea, if only you knew you were the sweetest succubus of them all. It was a delusion he was having difficulty unknotting from reality. One night, after a marathon session, he’d laid awake in his bed next to a snoring Sweet Pea and stared at the ceiling until he’d been privy to a vision. He remembered lying there and thinking to himself, If I stare long enough, if I think hard enough, then surely the Eye of Existence will open to me. And sure enough it had. Amid a whirling, glowing stew of lights the Eye had opened and Tupelo’s every suspicion had been confirmed. He saw amid the vision the very god and savior of Flesh, a pink and glistening idol that groaned and screamed in agonistic ecstasy with its every movement. Behind him, ready to be unleashed, an army of trained succubi and steely-eyed assassins of sex. Among them, highly-decorated and in a position of leadership, his one and only. Sleep never came for Tupelo that night. The raw power of his vision overloaded his circuits and left him in a wordless stupor. Even when Sweet Pea rose up from the bed, stretching and straightening her dangerously perfect body in the sunlight, he was left without so much as a good morning. She walked her frame into the bathroom and, within his full view, teasingly prepared for her day. In the midst of the display Tupelo knew what he had to do. He had to leave. He had to run into the great yonder and fast the way a holy man would. He had to find a place devoid of stimulation or temptation and purify himself of the delicious toxins she’d let loose into his bloodstream. He slammed his fist into one of the pictures – a snapshot of him and Sweet Pea lounging on the beach, the two of them holding up cold cans of beer and smiling, Tupelo remembering the sweet session they’d shared that very morning as a neighbor clicked the camera. Then he battered it again for good measure. A knot in the log under it bruised his hand and when he raised it up for inspection he could see that he’d also ripped the skin and left a small riverbed of blood. He pressed it to his mouth and sucked in a long stream until it offered no more. My blood, he thought, spitting it on the ground. A sacrifice to the wild. As he did he felt a pinch somewhere above his ankle. Then another. A few pinches began on his other calf. He stood up, alert, already feeling the power of nature and the certainty of his plan. To witness it further he pulled up the legs of his jeans and saw dozens of tiny red dots roaming up and over his skin, through the curls of his dark hair, an army of fire ants feasting on him. Tupelo raised his arms toward the sky and said, Savior of Flesh, your message is received. "12
He let the fire ants get their fill until the itching grew so terrible that he had to reach down and swat them away. His legs were covered in tiny welts and the itch was so overwhelming that he sat down on the log and got to work scratching, his fingernails digging deep, deep into his skin and burrowing until the itch, if only temporarily, was satisfied. That night he slept in fits, a consistent dream haunting him. In it, Sweet Pea and her battalion of temptresses laid Tupelo upon a bed of fine linens and stroked fistfuls of spices into his skin. Sweet Pea, directing them, pointed out every inch bare of attention and then brought her mouth into full view for Tupelo and told him it was time. With a great grunt Sweet Pea and company lifted Tupelo into the air and carried him through a jungle of wet palms and over a raging mad sea. Tupelo tried to break free but found himself a powerless victim to their whims. The procession entered into another wild patch and then a clearing where more women, each more beautiful than the last, beat on drums and played handmade flutes and whistles, their song building until Tupelo was forced to hold his ears to keep them from bursting. In his delirium he nearly missed the temple ahead, the stones stacked on top of one another into a perfect, leveled pyramid. Up the steps Tupelo was carried until they reached the top, a platform that stood high above the clouds. He was laid out, stretched and bound, Sweet Pea hovering above him with a sharpened glint of onyx, seemingly waiting for someone, or something, to join them. Tupelo woke from the terror. He was still in the forest, still lying on a bed of pine needles. His body was wracked in pain, sore, the bites crying and screaming out in agony. He grabbed the nearest rock he could find and pressed it into the bites until they opened and bled. His mouth was full of his tongue, swollen so large that he could barely work up spit or swallow, and when he reached in to feel it it was like an organ he didn’t recognize. My god, he yelled out into the night, the words muffled by his engorged tongue. Bring me another vision. Shortly after he passed out and was woken only by the morning sun breaking through a thin layer of clouds. When he opened his eyes he was aware of a whole other level of suffering. Over the course of the night his joints had locked into place and his tongue had continued to grow until it was so large and bloated that it hung out over his lips. He touched the end of it and found it dry, nearly solid. Even worse, the air around his eyes glowed with the same lights that had illuminated his vision earlier. They were crowding in from the corners and threatening to consume everything. The realization came upon Tupelo in short order. He was dying. Wasting away in the uncaring womb of the world. He extended a shaking hand and clawed with all of his strength into the dirt. He pulled himself forward. His other hand. Another few inches. He was crawling away, leaving his rucksack, his provisions, his spent can of beans and half-empty sack of bread. Food, he knew, was of no use to him now. In his head he did the calculations. Two miles. Just far enough that he would die before he saw any glimpse of civilization. He made it forty feet and rested. The scab that his body had be"13
come whistled in pain. He rested his face in the dirt and then remembered the pictures he’d left behind. Death was a certainty now, a foregone conclusion, and in his moment of perfect agony he knew that if he perished he wanted to perish while gazing on Sweet Pea’s visage. Three hours passed. He crawled the forty feet back and lifted his body up and onto the log. It was swaying with the wind, an instrument he no longer controlled. The pictures were spread out over the pine needles, where he’d thrown them in a delusional fit the night before. The closest was the one of them on the beach. He, hoisting his beer into the air, the sun glinting off the metal, Sweet Pea lying back, ever the calmer of the two, her bountiful harvest glistening in its own right. He looked at the picture as the lights began to swarm closer to one another. He squinted and remembered what her sweat had smelled like that day as she cooked in the sun. There was a noise somewhere in the woods. Tupelo heard it but was unable to look. He’d lost nearly all motor function and was nothing short of a decoration on the forest floor. Instead, he stared at the picture and remembered how they’d talked about Lovely Land that day. Lovely Land, he’d said as the waves roiled into their feet and then retreated. The noise approached Tupelo. It was only eight feet away, nine at the most. He forced his neck to strain and lift his insubordinate head to gaze in its direction. He saw a figure through the fog of lights, a figure on two legs and featuring a pair of outstretched arms. He saw Sweet Pea, coming for him, beckoning him, calling him home. With every bit of lessening energy contained within himself, Tupelo raised shakily off of the log. At last he would go to her. He would conquer the fear, damn the visions, and lie within her sweet embrace once and for all. If love, he thought, was a pyramid in the clouds, a razorsharp stone to the gut, then love it was. Let love in, he thought. Love, love, love. Struggling against himself, he leapt into the waiting arms. He tossed his body, devoid of any and all worry or fear and his body, weak and loose like a doll’s, hurdled through the fresh air, his flesh suddenly alive, his member, bespeckled in pulsing bites, rallying one last call to action. He joined her, that growling, drooling monster of a brown bear, his loins pulsing and grinding, if only out of instinct alone.
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! Chart Notes ! Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois !
Our unit director wants everything recorded written down between the gray metal covers of our patients’ charts If we complied with his wishes we’d do nothing but write all day We’d be novelists not Mental Hell Personnel I laugh at the idea of writing the truth in Tiffany’s chart Tiffany my secret, chronic schizophrenic lover She lives in room 12, on Ward D Second floor Unit 23 Tiffany gives me Hate Letters she scribbles on Hilton Hotel stationary provided by a Salvation Army volunteer I can read her scribbles though to everyone else they are illegible I can read her heart can see it with my X-Ray vision can see through her illness see her real self the self that deserves to be my lover as I deserve her At night I lie in bed and read her letters by flashlight as I read books in childhood careful not to let my father catch me He was highly religious and believed that books were the work of the Devil the only salvation being Hard Labor as if childhood were a penal sentence Tiffany and I sometimes talk about our childhoods "15
console one another though there is no consolation there 
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! Fractions ! Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois !
Tiffany gave me notes until she stopped giving them to me and sat smoking in the day room her legs crossed at the knees worried that I could not be trusted with her secrets The roadway was not concrete, she told me on one of those days It was built of beasts expelled from zoos for being misanthropic mysogynist or delinquent lacking zoo-animal cuteness noble ferocity or languor The roadway was terrifying When she put out her thumb the animals became restive Their keepers had forgotten to feed them The beasts felt she could be their food Her treatment team was ready to abandon her forever in a half-way house warehouse her in a quarter-way house an eighth-way house even a sixteenth all those impossib fractions that never lead to wholeness 
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! Kapow! ! Sarah Hocut !
We always joked that Kennesaw Mountain was one bad storm away from being just a hill. Even on the cloudiest days, we could still see the tip-top of it as we drove south on Highway 41, passing through the intersection at McCollum near the train tracks. Some days, we took it even further and made plans of sneaking into the park late at night and burying dynamite at the summit, retreating to a safe distance and watching how we could change something so quickly – kapow! We mused about how the signs on the interstate would have to be covered up and changed, and how the high school, perhaps facing pressure from the city council to be geologically accurate, would have to rename itself “Kennesaw Hill,” a silly-sounding kind of name, because what’s so special about a hill anyway? When I was a little girl, I was afraid that it was a volcano because you let me watch disaster movies where things like that happened. I would imagine that one day, without warning, the top of it would blow straight off, and smoke would rise from the inside, just barely curling out over the edges, and rolling down through the thick trees, like dry ice unfurling itself from a cooler. And then, the lava would shoot out, hot and fast, everywhere, and so, so far. I worried that it would hit our house, that it would burn down our white fence and gobble us up. You assured me that this was impossible. I believed you until the day in fifth grade when I watched a documentary on Mount St. Helens in social studies. When I came home from school that night, as we sat at the dinner table with Dad, you listened to me patiently for several minutes as I rehashed my fears of waking up in the middle of the night to a loud explosion, the house trembling, dark clouds of toxic smoke sliding slowly in front of the moon and stars, like someone getting ready for bed and closing the blinds. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to grab everything I needed – my yellow baby blanket, the jar of money I was saving for Christmas presents, the bracelet that Norma Lynn made for me out of white string and colored beads. I contemplated how hard it would be to climb to the top of our house without some kind of ladder, and then I asked Dad if he would build one that stretched from my window to the roof. He went along with it and said he would. “Oh, sweetie,” you spoke up, reaching out to tickle my left ribs and rehashing your certainty, “Impossible!” You let me eat strawberry ice cream for dessert, and I believed you.
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We went running at Kennesaw Mountain the week before I knew. (But you had known for years.) It was a cold Saturday morning in March, and we hadn’t been to the park together since I was in middle school. We hadn’t been to the park as a family since long before then. You woke me up at 7 a.m., told me to dress warm, and asked me to put on my running shoes. Dad was still sleeping. We were in the car, halfway there, before I asked where we were going. “To blow the top off of the mountain,” you replied. It was freezing and gray. There were only two other cars when we got there. You were wearing a pink headband, and we stretched in the parking lot. You told me not to slow down for you, and I never had to doubt that you didn’t mean it. So when we got to the trailhead, I took off. On the way up, I thought about the last family vacation we took, me and you and Dad. We rented a condo in Gulf Shores for a week during the summer after eighth grade. It rained the first three days we were there. On our last night, Dad and I went down to look for crabs. We scrambled around in the sand for more than an hour before he finally scooped one up in the net. I was too afraid to touch it. He let it go, and we went back to the room on the fifteenth floor. You were sitting on the balcony in the dark, curled up in one of the deck chairs. When I started to go to you, Dad touched my shoulder gently and said, “Let her be.” I made it to the top of the mountain, clasping my hands behind my head and breathing deep through my nose. The cold air burned through my nostrils, down my throat, and into my lungs. I waited. Finally, you emerged from the trees, jogging at a slow pace. Your face was pink from the cold, and you were pumping your arms with clenched fists. I heard the shhh shhh of your wind pants as you came to me, put your hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, “I love you.” There was more you wanted to say in that moment, but you didn’t. You let it churn there in your mouth, waiting and waiting. I watched your throat as you swallowed and wondered what almost words tasted like. We stood there for a few more minutes before you asked if I wanted to go and I nodded, pulling my ponytail to tighten it, and jogging away from you. On the way down, I thought about how every fall, Coach Greenly took the cross country team to Kennesaw Mountain on clear days after school. I would run to the top and stand where we’d just stood, lungs burning as if they were coated in lava, pause for a moment to take in the view, and then listen to Doug Geroni joke, “I can see Kennesaw from here.” I thought of you every time he said it.
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It finally erupted a week later while we were sitting on the back porch in patio furniture made of PVC pipe, watching Smokey, our old German Shepherd, roam around the backyard. "20
We’d brought him home the summer I turned six, picking him out of the litter in the cardboard box outside of the old K-mart by the interstate. Dad was furious when we’d brought him home, worried about vet bills and food and whether or not he was aggressive and was it safe to have him around a small child? Smokey, who wound up loving Dad more than either of us, pawed at a branch that was stuck in the white fence and then poked it once, twice with his nose before turning his back on it. I was wrapped in a cheap fleece blanket and sipping hot chocolate from a Christmas mug when you said, “I’m divorcing your dad.” Kapow! “Impossible,” I whispered into the warm liquid, but I didn’t believe it.
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Dry Garden
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Madeleine St. Romain
Drought Temperature 102 Degrees Dull graygreen dogwood leaves hang limp, Destined for anthracnose fungus and blight.
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It's time for some frivolous reading, Something with lots more pictures than text.
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I'm in the mood for moonlit sand, Ghost crabs running up and down the beach, Searching for stranded voyagers.
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Dream on, Madeline. There's more to life than picking bones with a few old friends.
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The tomatoes have stopped setting fruit. Flea beetles eat the eggplant leaves into olive lace.
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If I were a witch, I would be thinner. My fingernails would stop breaking. If I were a witch, it would be raining now.
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Turgor is so important. Powdery mildew sucks the beebam into skeletons.
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I close the curtains, To wait out the day in dim rooms, panting, Hearing oceans in my ear against the pillow.
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Eventually nature breaks all hearts. 
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! Funnies ! Dave Hardin !
I make morning coffee, you go up ahead passing from panel to panel to pee in profile directly overhead while I pour
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purified water to the twelve cup line, our lazy streams split the ripened silence with the braided sound of nickel chain
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spooling coiled into a metal bowl. Darkness harries me from room to room nipping at my heel on the staircase,
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a line graph ascending in a dry hinge litany of old grievance. We retire in a welter of well-worn vignettes:
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you fanning the pages of a magazine me sawing the bow of a toothbrush our bed, a crescent of lamp light, luffing
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curtains boxed up tidy under the eaves, waffled cross section of floor and wall blocking the coda of this long running strip. 
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! Transformer ! Benjamin Soileau !
I was fiddling with one of those transforming monstrosities that toy companies make just to drive men like me crazy. It was some kind of dinosaur that turned into a speedboat and I was looking down at it, turning it this way and that, calling it about a hundred different kinds of motherfucker. My boy had been standing there watching me until he had gotten bored and run out of the room. I was just about to throw the thing on the ground and stomp it to pieces when I heard Janie calling to me. She was standing over a pot on the stove, an orange apron draped over her big belly. “What you want?” I called to her. “I said did you think of anymore names?” “What about Pico and Paco,” I said. She stopped stirring that sauce for a second and looked at it like it was an old friend whose name she couldn’t remember. “I’m serious,” she said, and got back to it. “Give me some time,” I said to her. Hell, that’s the one thing I needed most. I looked back down at the damn conundrum in my hand. She’d been after me to settle on names for a while now. Tom and Huck. John and Jim. Cody and Collin. Hell, I hated thinking about it. I thought maybe we should just name them Smith and Wesson, and be done with it, but I kept that to myself. The smell of onions was making my stomach turn. Janie had been using too many onions in just about everything she made now. That goddamn transformer had my nerves bundled up so tight that I was thinking about strangling my mother in law for giving it to Sammy in the first place. If they didn’t give him all these expensive toys that require an instruction manual then maybe Sammy would behold a stick and a string as something miraculous, and me and Janie would be off the hook. I put the transformer down on a shelf behind some pictures where he wouldn’t be able to see it. I’d get to it later. I moved behind Janie and stretched my arms around her belly. I kissed her on her cheek and sort of rubbed against her behind, but she just bumped me off of her and went on stirring that mess. I’ve been getting the bump a lot here lately, but I don’t imagine it feels very sexy to have two little ones inside of you. I pecked the back of her neck and left her in there with her onions. I went and sat in the sewing room and looked out the window at the front yard. It was the quietest room in the house. I couldn’t figure out how things got so far gone so quick. I thought of me and Janie moving together in that old boat in the sun on Bayou Pigeon. Things were good then. At least we had more fun back then, went out to eat every once in a while. I wanted to travel or maybe go to a college somewhere to be somebody important, and she was talking about going to hairdressing school, but then Sammy popped out and we got married. I knew that I had more "25
in me than to stay working at the plant my whole life, but I couldn’t just up and quit. I do what I can though. I get a lottery ticket from the Cracker Barrel every Monday night, and it’s fun to dream about until I look at the numbers, but you can’t get struck by lightning if you don’t go out in a thunderstorm. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Something caught my eye out front and that’s when Sammy tore into the room screaming and laughing. He went running right behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder I could see his naked ass run out of the room. Next came Janie, who was hollering bloody murder after him. She was yelling at me from the next room. “Danny!” she was calling. “Danny, get in here!” I could hear the paddle sliding off the top of the fridge and then she stuck her head around the corner in the room where I was. “Sammy put shit all over the dog,” she was saying. I heard her, but I was watching the fellow that had pulled into my driveway. He was standing at my mailbox, reading the numbers on it and contemplating my yard. His shiny peach El Camino was idling at the head of my driveway, farting blue smoke out of the muffler. “Did you hear me?” she said, standing there in the doorway with the paddle in her hand. “Biscuit’s covered in crap!” She took off and I could hear her struggling with Sammy. She must have caught him because I could hear him crying and wailing around. I think he liked when his mom whipped him. It was like a wrestling match for him. This fellow at the end of my driveway got back into his car and just sat there looking at my house. I smelled shit and then I noticed that Biscuit had come in the room and was looking out the window. We watched that peach El Camino back into the driveway and then Biscuit started barking. I grabbed him by the collar, careful not to get crap on my hand, and brought him in the bathroom. I walked by Janie who was struggling with Sammy and told her not to let Biscuit out of the bathroom. “Can I get some help here?” she said. “I got to see to something,” I said, and walked out of that house, away from the onions and all the crap in there. It felt good outside. I stepped out onto the carport and the man had gotten out of his car and was standing there with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. The car was still running and I was wondering to myself why on earth he had backed in when he noticed me watching him. “Howdy,” he said. “Howdy yourself.” I stepped out into the sunlight. “What can I do you for?” This fellow seemed about twenty-five, maybe thirty. He had jet black hair that came down to his shoulders and a mustache that reminded me of a young Burt Reynolds. He was dressed in what Janie calls a Canadian tuxedo, denim from head to ankle, with a belt buckle and some nice
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brown cowboy boots. There was some kind of lizard or frog on his belt buckle, but I didn’t want to stare. He stepped up to me and stuck his hand out. “My name is Kyle Ducet. I lived in this house when I was a boy.” I took his hand. “Good to meet you Kyle.” I told him my name. “Still looks the same,” he said, putting his hands back in his pockets and peering out into the back yard. “My daddy built that,” he said, nodding his head toward the shed. “And that magnolia tree behind it,” he said. “Me and my daddy planted that.” I told him that I was glad for it. “There’s some wasps up in that shed that I’ve got to take care of, but it’s sound otherwise.” I asked him where he lived now. “Oh, here and there.” He scratched that mustache. “I moved up north with my old lady and I was in town so I just wanted to sort of revisit my youth.” “We’ve been here about four years,” I said. “I believe it was the LeBlancs before us.” “They bought it when we left,” he said. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but do you mind terribly if I just sort of walk around the yard a bit. It would mean a lot.” “Help yourself,” I said. “You want a beer or something?” “No thanks,” he said, and scratched that big black mustache. I told him that I had something to do inside and I left him to it. I didn’t want to go back inside, but I knew what old Kyle Ducet was feeling. I once went back to the house that I grew up in. This was right after Sammy was born, and I was feeling sentimental as hell. I went at night after I’d been drinking with some friends, and I had sat in my truck and balled like a little baby. I didn’t get out or anything, but it felt pretty weird being back there, thinking about my momma and daddy, and about how my life was turning out. Back inside, Janie was hunched over the stove. She looked over at me when I walked in and a string of her brown hair fell out from behind her ear and danced a little in the steam rising from the pot. I wanted to go over there and bump up against her, but I knew where that would get me. I was going to tell her something about those onions. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing the wooden spoon over her shoulder. “Some fellow says he used to live here and wanted to have a moment.” “He looks like a redneck Frank Zappa.” “Burt Reynolds, I say.” I grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around and she humored me for a minute and let me two step her around the kitchen. “Sammy keeps asking about that toy,” she said when she got back to the stove. The thought of fooling with that thing made my head hurt. “Where’s Sammy?” I asked. “I made him put on some clothes and I told him to stay in his room.” The dog was scratching against the bathroom door. I put my hand on the small of her back and she looked over at me. “You know,” she said. “I could really use your help.” I opened up the kitchen window to let those onions out and that car was idling in the driveway. I made my way back into the hallway and looked in on Sammy. His bedroom door was "27
open and I didn’t see him. That boy was trouble. I went into the bathroom and got the water running. Biscuit had shit all on his back and even on the top of his head. That’s the second time Sammy put his crap on the dog. What the hell kind of person does such a thing? I hoped that boy wouldn’t end up in one of those magazines that truckers keep under their seats. I got Biscuit in the tub and started washing. I didn’t want to think about what I was doing at the moment. I thought I should be lying on a hammock on a beach somewhere with Janie, or else arguing about something with some academic fellows at a round table, maybe even receiving an award for something or other. Hell, I’d rather be cleaning fish that what I was doing. I heard Sammy behind me. I was on my knees bent over the tub, and I looked at him over my shoulder. We were eye level and I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. “Boy,” I said to him. “You should be the one doing this, you hear me?” He just stood there in his little green shorts and scratched at that brown hair. I was just about to grab him and put him in the tub with the dog. “Daddy,” he said. “There’s a man digging a hole outside.” I asked him what the hell he was talking about. “It’s a big hole,” he said. “As big as,” he stretched his arms out, and I got up and left him in there with the dog. I grabbed a towel and cleaned off my hands as I made my way outside. I went out the side door and I could see a shovel leaning up against the shed. I couldn’t see how big the hole was, but there was a pretty impressive pile of dirt stacked up next to that magnolia. When I got in the yard I could see old Kyle trotting over to his car. He was holding a big brown satchel over his shoulder. I looked at the hole in the ground and then back up at him and he looked over at me and that’s when he started running. What the hell, I thought. “Hey!” I hollered at him, but he was trotting along pretty good. I could see that bag he was holding was covered in dirt, and I took off after him. His boots were clacking on the concrete and then he was almost to his car. He threw the bag toward the window, but it bounced off the door and a shit load of money went spilling out of it onto the driveway. He reached down and started scooping the money back into his satchel, and he just about got all of it as I was getting up to him. He slammed his door and peeled out. I got up to where the car had been and I stood there in a big cloud of blue smoke. I squatted down and picked up the little bit of money that he’d left behind. It was caked with dirt, but I flipped through it and there were ten hundred dollar bills wrapped up in what looked like dental floss. I immediately shoved that money down into my pocket and slapped at the front of my jeans for my truck keys. I ran inside and grabbed them off the kitchen counter. Janie was standing at the kitchen window looking confused, but I didn’t wait to hear what she had to say. I got in my truck and went screeching off after him. There was no way in hell that I was gonna let some Burt Reynolds son of a bitch stroll into my back yard and make out with what I figured was legally mine. I couldn’t believe what was happening, but I’m not the sort of person to stand around scratching my head over it. "28
I hauled ass through the neighborhood, blowing right through stop signs. I got to the entrance of the subdivision and I saw where there was some tire marks veering off to the left, and so I followed them. I wondered how much money was in that bag. Jesus, I thought. How many times had I mowed the grass right over that spot? Five years I’d been out in that yard walking right over a shit load of dough. I started fantasizing what I could do with a bunch of money. Shoot, I just wanted to talk to the fellow and find out what in the hell was going on and what that money was from. Maybe we could even work something out since it was on my property. I passed up a few cars on Greenwell Springs Road and then I started coming up to town. When I got up to the Kroger’s, I could see that peach El Camino idling at the red light. There were two other cars in front of me, and just as I was deciding that I should get out and run over to him, the light turned green. He went squealing off and I went right after him. I got in the next lane and zig-zagged my way up beside him. He looked over at me, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t wearing that black mustache anymore. “What the fuck!” I shouted out my window to him. That car had some muscle, because it coughed out some more blue smoke and took off. I kicked down on the gas and went after him, but he was really moving. I chased him for another mile or so, and felt pretty good about my chances. He wasn’t getting too much ahead. I let out a loud hoot, almost a laugh, thinking about what it was I was doing. I sure didn’t think I’d be in a car chase when I woke up this morning. I figured it would be interesting on Monday morning when the fellows asked me how my weekend was. It felt like I was in somebody’s dream. I pressed my hand against my leg and could feel that money in my pocket. Even if I don’t catch him, I thought, I’d still have a grand. Then I started thinking about that doctor bill that was coming up and I gunned it. The cell phone buzzing in my front pocket just about gave me a heart attack. I fished it out and saw it was Janie. “What the hell are you thinking!” she screamed into the phone. I told her what had happened, how I was following him at the very moment. She wanted to know how much it was in that bag. “I don’t know, baby, but it’s enough for us to get out the hole and dress the twins in gold diapers.” She was quiet for a minute and I told her I’d better let her go. “I just want to talk to him.” “You catch that thieving son of a bitch!” she screamed. “You bring home that money, Danny Fontenot! You bring it home quick!” I snapped the phone shut and tossed it over the seat and kept my eye on the road. I wondered where Kyle Ducet was really from and where he was going. Once we got over the Amite River Bridge the two lanes turned into one. He was a good hundred yards in front of me, but I was determined. I checked my gas gauge and figured I could go for as long as he could. Up ahead, a big, red truck that was pulling a trailer pulled out into the road right as the El Camino passed him by. I was yelling every name in the book. I stepped on the gas and went to pass up the truck even though there was another car heading my way. I got up as far as I could alongside that truck and I glanced over at the driver. All I saw was a "29
blonde bushy beard underneath a camouflage hat. He was screaming at me and shaking his fist. I could hear the driver that was heading toward me laying in on their horn, but I kept on. Shit. I cut back into my lane, and I nearly clipped the front of that red truck. Horns were blasting everywhere. I floored it and could see the truck in my rearview mirror go screeching to a stop, and for a brief moment I could see the smoke from those tires. I heard it too. That El Camino had gained some more, and I called that old bastard in the red truck every name I could think of for impeding my progress. I kept my eye on that peach El Camino, but it was getting farther and farther away. I saw it turn left off the road toward Sherwood Forest Boulevard. He was gonna try and hump it to the interstate. I thought about all the stops between there and here, and I started feeling some hope. Once you get out to Sherwood, there’s about four red lights before the on ramp to I-10. I knew traffic would be a mess on a Saturday. My heart was beating in my throat. There was no way in hell I was gonna miss out on this. I’d been in the trenches for too long. Me and Janie had dreams and two little alarm clocks on the way. I imagined that with even half of the money I saw in that bag that I wouldn’t be showing up at the refinery on Monday. I could see us not having to struggle any more, and I could damn near taste the salty breeze of some exotic beach, but I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. There’d be time enough for dreaming later. The phone was buzzing again and I knew it was her wanting to know what was happening. That gave me some wind. I didn’t plan on coming home empty handed. I pictured our house. It took on a strange glow in my mind. Five whole years we’d been living in a gold mine. I came up on the first red light, and I could see the little prick up ahead stuck at a light. I was right. Traffic was bad. I had to wait another hundred feet or so before I could get out from behind the cars in front of me, but when I did, I cut to my right and hauled ass through the Wal-Mart parking lot. That El Camino was at the second to last red light before the on ramp and the parking lot would spit me out right behind him. I punched it down and soared along the edge of that lot with no problem. I had him. When I came up alongside him the light turned green, and my truck went lurching out from the parking lot back onto the road behind him. Horns were blasting everywhere, and I was so close. There was only one car separating us now and I was flying. That last light turned red as we came up to it, but he gunned it on through and pulled up onto the onramp. The car in front of me braked for the light, and I had nowhere to go. I slammed on my brakes and cut the wheel at the very last second. I swerved off to the right into the Waffle House parking lot, scraped a phone booth, and slammed to a stop against a light pole. I felt a little fuzzy, but when I looked out the window I didn’t see any peach El Caminos, just some smoke hissing out from beneath my hood. I turned the ignition, but nothing happened. I wanted to get out my door and borrow somebody’s car, but I was having trouble moving. There was a fellow in his little Waffle House hat standing at my passenger window looking in at me and asking if I was ok. A siren rang in the distance, getting louder. I looked away from the man and out my window. People sat in their cars staring at me. I heard the screeching tires. I "30
looked in my side mirror and saw that red truck that I’d clipped come sailing into the parking lot behind me. I watched the bearded man get out and start marching toward me. My cell phone buzzed gently from the floorboard and then he was pulling me out of the cab. He had my shirt all bundled up in his fists, standing over me and cussing me to hell and back. His words washed over me, along with his spit, but for some reason, I focused in on his hat. It was camouflage and there was a cartoon of a lady on it with her back showing. Her rear end was whiter than the rest of her body and the caption read, I hunt white tail year round. Right before he laid in on me, I was aware of a crowd of people standing around watching. I pictured my backyard with a big pile of dirt and an empty hole. I could picture that peach El Camino just cruising into the sunset. Then I saw Janie standing over the stove back home, and Sammy chasing the dog around. I remembered the toy that I’d been working on and I knew I would get it right. Hell, I was looking forward to it. Maybe I would put it in the hole out back before refilling the dirt. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about before I was all out of time.
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! She ! !
Laura Carter
of Other (part), how long do you go remembering yourself ? (Amish return to their churches after separation;
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they grow soil for shoes. A place stays
! in deep shadows ! as long as you are able to conceive !
that you had begun to remember a friend as if recollecting, love 
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! Yield ! !
Laura Oliver
“Don’t take that,” my oldest sister Sharon warns as my call-waiting signal interrupts our conversation. “Mom wants to know if one of us called the MVA.” Sharon is referring to the Motor Vehicle Administration which we have, in fact, called out of concern for our mother’s diminished capacity behind the wheel. “Maybe she’ll think it was Andi,” (our middle sister) Sharon adds with hope. “Mom got a letter. If she doesn’t surrender her license voluntarily, an MVA rep will come to her condo and take it.” “He’ll come out in person? Ask for her wallet?” I’m trying to picture the person who does this. I think he will be a thin young man with blond hair. Call waiting goes off again, like the timer on a bomb about to detonate.
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*
This is where the story begins. My mother is a five-year-old girl being raised on an Illinois farm when she steps on a rusty nail. Within days a red line runs from the puncture in her instep all the way up her leg to her groin and she is deathly ill. There is an emergency operation in a small-town hospital. My mother lives but is unable to walk for six months. At a white clapboard farmhouse down the road two elderly brothers wonder where the little girl has gone—the determined one with the curly hair who used to come by to borrow books. They whittle a pair of crutches for her and she is mobile again, radiant at her independence, her freedom.
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*
All my life my mother has driven gripping the wheel of the car as if it were fueled by her memory of that early immobility. Our first car was black, with a visor running across the top of the windshield like a narrow awning. By the time I was nine a sky-blue Ford had replaced it and my mother was a newly single parent which may have contributed to events the night she plowed that car into one driven by an elderly man leaving the mall. I was her passenger sharing the front seat with a load of wet laundry and two bottles of cold milk at my feet. The old man had a stop sign and she didn’t but it seemed to me that my mother saw him coming and engaged in a grim contest of wills. Maybe she was just distracted, wondering what beautiful 42-year-old women who were not the sole support of three daughters were doing on a Friday night while she sat in a commercial Laundromat with her youngest. Either way, a nice po"34
liceman drove us home. I sat in the back of his squad car with a plastic tub of wet clothes and glass in my shoes. *
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As my mother approached her mid-sixties, my husband and I noticed she was having trouble backing out of our driveway. From behind the living room curtains we’d watch her repeatedly veer into the border of young Leyland cypress I’d planted. Sometimes she would realize she’d hit one, stop, pull up, and try again. With increasing frequency, however, she’d slowly mow the tree down, oblivious. Then came the small dents and dings; backing accidents mostly, until in her early eighties, with glaucoma, cataracts, and an old whiplash injury that made it difficult to turn her head, she totaled her Camry on an exit ramp. Andi, Sharon and I talked about what this meant, talked to her about it, but she was defensive and stubborn, which made us insistent and humorless. “I’m buying another one,” she announced when the insurance company gave its verdict on the car.
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*
One Sunday in March shortly after turning 86, Mother stops by after church. She eats less and less now and doesn’t want lunch, so we talk about my sisters and when it is time for her to go I steady her by the elbow as we walk out to her car. As we approach I do a double-take. The car has been left at a crazy lurch in the street, as if the driver had discovered a wasp on her blouse, or saw flames leaping from under the hood. “Mom! Look how you parked!” The car is also at a bizarre angle, forcing most oncoming traffic to stop and veer around it. She keeps moving toward the vehicle, pulls on the door handle, suddenly in a hurry. “And you’re in front of a red curb if you were anywhere near a curb,” I add. By now she has gotten the door open and lowered herself behind the wheel. “Honestly, Mom, it looks like a crazy person parked the car. Didn’t you notice?” “Notice what? Oh for Pete’s sake.” She pulls as hard as she can on the gaping door but because I’m standing and 34 years younger, I’ve got the upper hand. “It’s not that bad,” she says both dismissive and a touch flirtatious. She wrests the door closed, steps on the gas, and rolls through a stop sign, not even one flash of a brake light.
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*
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My mother put my sisters and me through college, left vases of wild plum in our rooms when we came home, and got a Masters degree at 52. She put Calamine lotion on our poison ivy, made at least 36 Halloween costumes by hand and 54 birthday cakes. Her aging makes me crazy and it breaks my heart. I don’t want my mother to die. “And we don’t want her killing anyone,” Andi, the ever- practical middle child, reminds me. So we research the law, the protocols for intervening and in the end it is a phone call to the MVA. Their intervention is to appear routine, a reassessment because of her age, but when the letter comes it is clear she has been reported and she is frantic at the mysterious identity of her betrayer. When she calls me I can’t bear her confusion so I take the call-waiting. “It was us,” I confess. “You?” She is relieved and confused. I explain how scared my sisters and I have become. I explain it was a difficult decision; that we agonized and we are so sorry, that we will help her get around. I say we want her to be our mother for a long, long time.
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*
The night before I left for college I passed the door to my mother’s room. She was propped up in bed reading as was her custom, her face defenseless, soft, devoid of makeup. I was the last to leave home. She would be totally alone by supper the next day; alone, as it would turn out, for the rest of her life. A wave of grief washed over me standing there in my bare feet and nightgown; grief for myself, grief for her. I entered the room, the circle of light by the bed, and gave her my sorrow, the place where I hurt, as surely as I had brought her skinned knees and fever all my life. “There aren’t going to be any smaller goodbyes.” I stumbled on the words, “Any lesser leavings.” She knew what I meant. “When I die, a long, long time from now, you’ll be ready. You’ll have a family of your own.” She held me close. She smelled of safety, soap and Ponds Cold Cream. Eventually I went back to my own room to dream of my future amidst the half -packed boxes and open suitcases.
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*
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This is how the story ends. She struggles to take in what my sisters and I have done. After a moment’s silence she says, “I understand that you love me and thought you were doing what was best.” I’m in awe.
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Later she has to say the rest because her anger is as valid as her understanding. It was mean of us. Wrong. Unnecessary. Sneaky. I remember her initial response and accept this one as well; hold them both. “My children will probably do the same thing to me someday,” I theorize. We are companions in the moment, vulnerable to the power of those who love us. “I hope so,” she says, or maybe it was, “Do you think so?” Together we pause and reflect on what is to come; the days and years she will no longer be with me. It is a future for which she has promised I will be ready, the connection between us now, electric, alive.
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Contributors
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Laura Carter lives and teaches in Atlanta. Her most recent work has been a finalist for The Noemi Press Poetry Prize and the Coconut Books First Book Prize. She writes from the east side of the city. laurachristinecarter.wordpress.com.
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Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois is a regular contributor to The Prague Revue and a Pushcart Prize nominee, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” (The Examined Life, 2012) and his poem “Birds,” (The Blue Hour, 2013). His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist, is now available from Kindle, Nook and in print.
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Dave Hardin is a Michigan poet and artist. His work has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Prague Review, Drunken Boat, Hermes Poetry Journal, Epigraph Magazine, Loose Change, ARDOR, The Anthology Of Sun and Sand, The Carolina Quarterly and scrumsideup.blogspot.com. In 2012, he published A Ruinous Thirst, a collection of poems. www.facebook.com/ARuinousThirst
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Emily Heilker lives in Decatur, Georgia. She has previously published poetry in the Eunoia and Sonora Reviews.
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Sarah Hocut was born and raised in metro Atlanta and attended the University of Georgia and Kennesaw State University to study literature/writing. She’s a recipient of the Young Georgia Authors state writing award and has been published in Kennesaw State University’s Anthologies. She is also a guest book reviewer for Flycatcher.
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Laura Oliver is the award-winning author of the The Story Within, (Penguin Books/Random House 4th printing.) Her fiction and essays appear in Glimmer Train, The Sun Magazine, Country Living Magazine, The Writer, The Washington Post, and Portland Magazine, among others. She teaches writing at St. John’s College and The Writer’s Center.
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Chelsea Raflo is a visual artist from Atlanta working in painting, drawing, collage, and stop-motion animation. A finalist for the Forward Arts Foundation's 2013 Emerging Artist Award and a recipient of MINT Gallery's Leap Year mentorship, she currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. This fall, she will attend Florida State University as an MFA studio art candidate.
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Bobby Sauro’s short fiction has appeared in elimae and Corium, among others. He resides in Atlanta, but can be found at www.sauromotel.com, which is a literary motel that houses stories and articles about Kafka, Springsteen, sweet potato vendors, Simone Weil, and the occasional 1980s vending machine. "40
Jared Yates Sexton is a born-and-bred Hoosier living and working as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. He is Managing Editor of BULL and the author of An End To All Things from Atticus Books.
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Benjamin Soileau is a proud Cajun from south Louisiana now living in Portland, Oregon with his wife. He is taking a break from the creative writing MFA at Portland State. He drives a beer truck.
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Madeleine St. Romain is a poet, librettist, and multidisciplinary artist.
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