Madcap Review Issue 1.0 by Madcap Review

Masthead

Editor in Chief Craig Ledoux Managing Editor Emily Stokes Art Editor Faith Savill Fiction Editor Sarah Kuhn Nonfiction Editor Mary Kay McBrayer Poetry Editor Jeffrey Peterson Readers Chris Antzoulis Brittany Baker Joanna Benjamin

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor

Little Creatures / E.E. Lyons

Holy Terror / Elif Varol Ergen

There Is a Song / Shebana Coelho

Man Ray / Cecile Ceuillette Berberat

23 Questions for Jonas Kaufmann / Alison Kinney

Apostate / John Keene

Black Betty by Rone

Scuttled in Their Stalls / A. H. Jerriod Avant

The Undoing / Marcia Aldrich

Saturation. Incubation. Illumination. / Faith47 / Ian Cox

What Profit Hath a Man of All His Labour / Nick McRae

Where Dangerous Things Moved / Jacob Powers

November 19, 1910 by Ever

After We Talked / Maria Flaccavento

High Kick / Justin Champine

Tiger Style by Adam Cicchini

Terrestrial Illuminations, Part II, No. 14 / Duane Locke

This Is Surely a Curious Fact / Jessica Lilien

Mickey Target by Dylan Egon

In The Year of Too Many Hero Masks / Tufik Y. Shayeb

Sass / Bill Derks

Childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Play / Bruce McRae

Oslo / Phlegm

Crabs / Louis Bourgeois

Abstract Landscape / Sten & Lex

The Miscarriage / Allen Davis

A Necessary Feat / Emmet Martin Penney

Lead Me Where My Trust Is without Borders by Jane Wunrow

Remedies / Emmet Martin Penney

The Fat King Eglon Murdered / Nick McRae

Yin Hunter Shi by Tararchy

12:14 AM, Bangkok / Jaime Mathis

Lyric IX / Juan Eugenio Ramirez

Dades Gorge / Marin Sandy

Inverted Pyramid in Color / Christopher Derek Bruno

Heads / Jasmine Nikki ‘Nikay’ C. Paredes

Night’s Woman / Pamela Rivas

Lyric X / Juan Eugenio Ramirez

The Mad Boy / Steven Klepetar

Twelve Days in October / Elizabeth Inness-Brown

Dinner Party / Bianca Stone

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CO2 / John Keene

119

The Sea Is History […] / Jasmine Nikki ‘Nikay’ C. Paredes

120

Flood / Phlegm

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Contributors

122

Letter from the Editor

Time seems to march on, doesn’t it? About a year ago, this journal was little more than an idea. It was nameless, faceless. With the help of Emily Stokes and Jeffrey Peterson it began to take form. We bounced names off one another. Each successive attempt ricocheted, never stuck. The staff had nearly been filled when we decided to put every possible name into a spreadsheet and vote. Madcap was our sole survivor, a sort of gladiatorial champion. Madcap Review fit. We wanted experimental work, writing that defied genre, art that demanded our attention. We chose not to set limits on the content of submissions because this kind of decree—“no genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, animal stories, etc”—is, frankly, discouraging. Great work can dip a toe in each of these categories, or it can submerge itself entirely. We decided to look for great writing, full stop, not writing that fit neatly into a box. Of course, we admire controlled writing, and that which is often called “literary fiction.” We have a little bit of everything in this issue, and were lucky enough to receive the type of work we’d been hoping to see. Madcap is more than words, though. I’d made a pledge, from the outset, to treat artwork with respect. Madcap would not be the home of the halfhearted grayscale still life. Art in literary journals so often feels like an afterthought. In fact, there are times when there’s no art editor whatsoever: the images seem to sneak in through the gaps between the poems and stories. Not here. There’s a reason we call Madcap a ‘journal of art and literature’ rather than a ‘literary journal.’ We have a tremendous amount of respect for art and artists. Faith Savill, our art editor, has done a remarkable job pulling together artists from around the world. I’m so proud of the work she’s done, and can’t thank her enough for introducing me to the work of Ever, our cover artist. What a visually arresting piece “November 19, 1910” is. I’m amazed every time I see it. So, Ever, thank you. And thank you again. But the plaudits don’t stop there, do they? Emily Stokes deserves a medal for her counsel, her grammatical and poetic expertise. I’m fortunate to have such a strong second-in-command. Thanks to Jeffrey Peterson, for taking me seriously when I approached him with the idea to start Madcap. His knowledge and his vision have been irreplaceable. Thank you to Sarah Kuhn, who is always willing to pull me back when I’m going too far. The work she’s done has been tremendous. Thank you to Mary Kay McBrayer, who I’ve never met in person,

but who was willing to join this madcap scheme on our first foray. And many thanks to our readers: Joanna Benjamin, Brittany Baker, and Chris Antzoulis, for taking the time to read our submissions. This is a staff of volunteers, and we couldn’t accomplish nearly as much without them. Thank you to Liz InnessBrown, whose work is featured in this issue, and who advised me throughout college and encouraged me as a writer. Thanks, also, to M Janet Mars, who granted us permission to use his font in our banner. Finally, thank you to Mary and Paul Jenkins, my mother and stepfather, for standing by as I hurled endless statistics their way, and for listening, enthusiastically, as I complained about nearly everything under the sun. I suppose I’ve done a fair share of bragging too. Again, thank you for listening, and thank you for your advice. Speaking of statistics, for those of you familiar with the VIDA count, 51% of the work we’re publishing was created by men, 49% by women. This is remarkably balanced considering the fact that 63% of our unsolicited submissions came from men. Gender disparity in publishing is, even to this day, still outrageous. I hope you’ll take a minute to visit VIDA’s site and learn more about the invaluable work they’re doing. In total, we received over five hundred submissions from 44 states and 18 countries. We considered more than a thousand individual pieces. Of all these submissions, we were able to offer just 2.4% a spot in Madcap. This makes us more selective than Yale. Dubious assertions aside, I was thrilled with the quality of work we received, and I’m excited to see where the next issue leads us. But don’t worry yourselves with thoughts of Madcap 2 just yet—that’s for the editors to do—just kick back with your laptop, e-reader, or smartphone, and enjoy Madcap 1. It was a pleasure to put together for you. Many thanks for reading, and best regards.

Craig Ledoux Editor in Chief Madcap Review

Little Creatures E. E. Lyons

At night the mice run wild inside our walls, breeding filthy nests of young. They keep my mother from sleep. - Did you hear them? she says in the morning. She’s wearing a quilt like a chiton, and palming bales of wire wool. - I didn’t, I say. - You didn’t see the spiders either. Last week, at supper, there was a hatching. Tiny, translucent spiders trickling up from the corner. It was just the two of us—all the men have left. She got them with a napkin before they got very far. My childhood bedroom is in ruin. She says she is over fixing up, but she’s agreed to put the mattress back and patch the drywall where the mice were heard. I found a box of my picture books stashed like smut in the crawlspace. And my old desk, cobwebbed and cowering out in the shed. She called me down the other day. I was writing. I haven’t written since the split. - There’s a woodchuck up in the cedar. He’s so fat. He’s going to fall. He was gone when I got there. She was standing by the back door, radiating light. I’ve noticed lately that the sun will come through her and she will glow all over the kitchen. He looked like a tunneler, she said. She scratches her braid when she’s strategizing. She’s stopped dyeing her greys.

- We’re losing the deck to the chipmunks. I’ve seen their hole. I’m going to stuff the hose down it this afternoon. There was a time when she loved the chipmunks and had a name for each one. There was a time when she read The Mitten to me and sewed fingerpuppets out of felt. Now, she keeps an owl at her arm. It snatches the swallows from under the eaves. I hear their little guh and my pen goes off the page. - I’ve been working on the same sentence for weeks, I say at dinner. - What’s that? she says. She’s pulling some kind of roast out of the oven. - Do you ever hear from Dad? When she looks at me, her eyes are marble. - The war against the wild is unwinnable, she tells me. She eats and reads schematics for a system of spits. - I might have to kill this novel, I say. - Even death is a thing that Nature wills. -Who said that? I ask. But she is looking out into the night. When the eating is over, the whole house becomes quiet. The air echoes itself, as in a temple. I go up to my desk. I keep a picture in the top drawer. An image of an echo: just a bit of tissue that used to nest inside me. I feel another sentence rising, ready to burst whole from my head. But then, a sound. A tiny scratching. Just inside the walls.

Holy Terror by Elif Varol Ergen

There Is a Song Shebana Coelho

A bone of some thing not human an animal bone small dull white an arc rounding to edges braised brown cut with canyons and rivers that once ran There are tiny holes at the edges pin pricks that lead to a hidden hollow land where creatures who see dark as light live and love their bony lives The curve in the middle like a dancer bending to song lifting to spirit The rough brown edges blood dried blood lost dark flesh darkened by rupture Someone killed the flesh that housed the bone

It has scars like me its naked shape unafraid to show where it hurts where fissures cleave in two separate the flesh once connected What god once joined man put asunder There is a song in the bone There is a song in the hollow There is a song in the scar I sing it

Man Ray Cecile Ceuillette Berberat

Man Ray for breakfast. Man Ray for lunch. Man Ray to bring the mimosa and a single flower to your sickbed, on Valentine’s Day, like your mother used to do in winter when the steps of the mason temple were filled with snow and your dog was young and joyful and you could not make it once around the block without resting. As Lucille Ball as it is Frieda Kahlo, lips blood red and impaled in the worst of places. Mexican too, like the sixtyyear-old cross-dressers you sat with on Fridays, when the express 333 was full to Venice Beach and their red hair was thinning in front and in back. Like the colors on your road trip to Texas where New Mexico’s skies were a baby blue also, and the winds at the rest stops were whipping and twirled you, in your yellow/white jersey, eating pancakes alone. It’s the postcard your lover made, with her girlfriend before you, in Scotland, as babies. Her cheeks in black & white. The red rose in the foreground was a magician’s prop, or was it? Go search and see, in your bags of evidence and memories that you hate to look at, just waiting for fire, or instead for the Polaroid of her, rosebud nipples in your sister’s apartment, summer in Brooklyn and all that must mean. Or use a fucking telephone where she lives now, in Oregon, with that other nude model, the one in oil pastel who posed as a bowler and a baseball player and was impaled also, much later, same location.

23 Questions for Jonas Kaufmann Alison Kinney

Besides English and Italian, Isabella speaks French and Spanish, hates big groups. What kind of big groups? Carola asked. This kind, Isabella said, waving her hand to indicate the Viennese Opera Ball.—Donald Barthelme Dazzling audiences as a post-apocalyptic holy fool, gunshot bandit, or lovestruck suicide, operatic tenor Jonas Kaufmann is no stranger to catastrophe. After losing his voice while performing a bit part in Parsifal, he struggled to transform himself from an airy lyric tenor to a master of the French, Italian, and Wagnerian dramatic roles. Kaufmann’s singing is baritonal and darkly colored, with seemingly effortless top notes and ethereal pianissimi. While some critics feel distanced by his originalist interpretations—and the box-office vaunting of his Byronic good looks—others are seduced by his musicianship and soaring lyricism. Placido Domingo has called him “one of the best singers I ever heard.” We discover the real Jonas Kaufmann: Q: Before pursuing your vocal career, you studied mathematics. Think fast, Kaufmann!: If the accursed Kundry mocked Christ in 33 A.D., how old was she when Parsifal baptized her? If Arizona Governor Jan Brewer proclaimed “Jonas Kaufmann Day” on February 24, 2013, how many Not-Jonas-Kaufmann Days will elapse by the 2063 quinquagenary (including leap years!)? Multiply by the number of times Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times has called your voice “virile”?…. Well. Wasn’t it smart to follow your strengths? Q: Paris Opera’s 2007 La Traviata imagined you and Christine Schäfer as 1960s chanteur Théo Sarapo and his wife, Édith Piaf. With Sarapo’s journey from adenoidal hairdresser to pop superstar so suggestive of your own career, can you discuss the possibility that God gave us your dusky, distinctive voice to resuscitate Sarapo’s oeuvre? If not in Théo: L’Opéra —which you of all people, Bayerischer Kammersänger, could totally commission—then in a song cycle, capitalizing on your success 13

with Winterreise? From Schubert’s “Gefrorne Tropfen fallen / Von meinen Wangen ab: / Ob es mir denn entgangen, / Daß ich geweinet hab’?” to Sarapo’s “A quoi ça sert, l’amour?”: an organic progression, nein? Q: Why, sure, you have other options. Having already portrayed so many innocently smoldering virgins—Parsifal, Lohengrin, Werther— might you consider bypassing Otello and Tannhäuser to steer straight for the dirty old man roles? Milan may be gunning for a Kaufmann Don Pasquale, but I envision you as Rosenkavalier‘s Baron Ochs, fondling Sophie: “Tender as a pullet! Not very plump—no matter—but so white.” You may not be a bass now, but we’re talking five-year plans. Q: Or…in the William Kentridge production of The Nose, Paulo Szot nearly got upstaged by the strutting papier-mâché nose. Only imagine: Jonas Kaufmann as The Nose, the rare artist to transition successfully from opera to mime! Shouldn’t you be considering your place in the annals of opera history, and not just coasting on Werther? Q: Werther: a young man who kills himself for love of a married woman. The Act III aria, “Pourquoi me réveiller?”—that’s what I ask the cat every morning. You sing it like you have a cat, too: “Why awaken me, o breath of spring,” a lilacs-out-of-the-dead-land lament for one’s meaningless existence, fed and then blighted by vain hope, ringing the rafters with agony, then whispering, beseechingly, for it to desist. There’s no way you don’t have a cat. Q: You debuted as Siegmund in Robert Lepage’s production of the Ring, mingling demigodly vigor (that high A!) with the balmy, vernal tenderness of “Winterstürme.” Tell us about the time that Deborah Voigt (a gleaming, irrepressible Brünnhilde) sneaked you backstage for a midnight ride on The Great Metropolitan Scream Machine, that glitchprone, 45-ton, seesawing set piece that morphed from Rhine to Rainbow Bridge to flying cavalry: HOJOTOHO, HOJOTOHO, HEIAHA!…. Get out! Lepage told you to get off his fence? Doesn’t he realize that you’re J-Kau, and you can fly like a Walküre any time you damn well please?

Q: Elizabeth Peyton’s many paintings of you, in balsam-and-etherflowing-through-your-veins mode, joined those of Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Leonardo DiCaprio at Gavin Brown’s enterprise last year. Critic Peter Schjeldahl called them “points of ardor in the cold world.” Yet, can we agree that the showstoppers were Peyton’s portraits of Met General Manager Peter Gelb, whose Valhallan exorbitance and avidity for under65 audiences shone from every lick of rosy, nacreous flesh? Didn’t his potency hammer all the rest of you into Nibelungen insignificance? I messengered him a silver rose once, but he never responded, so I tried poisoned violets. Q: Do heldentenors avoid the Lohengrin “Bridal Chorus” if they marry, lest they raise hopes that they’ll divulge their true identities as Grail Knights, get stabby, and vanish in their feathery boats, because, let’s face it, no bride wants an ordinary wedding night when she could have, instead, a Bayreuth-debut-worthy “Mein lieber Schwan” of floating, otherworldly pensiveness yielding to burnished sensuality and regret? Q: La Scala made you wade in a marsh for Act III of Lohengrin. Parsifal featured a lake of blood; can it be an accident that The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross said you “gave a fluid but disappointingly indistinct account of the title role”? Emphasis mine. Don’t you get waterlogged? Oh, prosthetic feet—like The Lord of the Rings?…. I hadn’t considered, but your sound does have a Númenórean muscularity, and there’s your lovechild-of-Frodo-and-Aragorn hair…. Well, writing opera-hobbit slash fiction isn’t my bailiwick…. Of course, constantly stuck in airports, you’d need creative outlets…. Sure, “Au fond du temple saint” has some hot Björling/Merrill/Galadriel threesome potential, but do you mind if we get back to discussing craft? Q: The intimacy of your stage presence is simultaneously its strength and drawback. We’ve witnessed your earnest, minutely observed correlations of line to action, more introspective and natural than traditionally operatic, in the unhinged grin belying Don José’s pleas to Carmen (Royal Opera 2006); the unfocused gaze of Florestan, imprisoned in the dark (Fidelio, Lucerne 2010); and Don Carlo’s teasing grab of his portrait from Elisabetta (Salzburg 2013). How about the Met Shrug, that 15

masculine, New Yorky gesture separating the boys from the men? Every time a hero does a heroine wrong at Lincoln Center—in Norma, Rigoletto, Tosca, Les Troyens—he shrugs: whaddya want? Notably, Peter Seiffert as Tristan, accused of invading Isolde’s country, murdering her fiancé, and kidnapping her to marry his uncle, retorted, “That was resolved,” and did the Met Shrug! With mounting anticipation of your debut as Tristan, what will you bring to this acting challenge? Will you play it big or small, adding the hapless whole-head wobble or the defensive chin jut? Q: A BMW promo shows you driving and singing “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée,” sounding like anybody who sings in the car and happens to be the International Opera Awards Best Male Singer of 2013. Does it embarrass friends when you join in on “Happy Birthday”? Do you karaoke?…. I can’t believe that the man who sang Faust and Siegmund back-to-back is scared of karaoke! Look, we’ll hit Koreatown, and we’ll start you easy, with a duet: “Ebony and Ivory,” “I Got You Babe,” “Leather and Lace”…. You can be Stevie Nicks; I’ll be Don Henley. Or vice versa! Don’t be silly: either way, you’ll acquit yourself like a Meistersinger.

Apostate John Keene Miles Dewey Davis, Jr.

Unbroken, yet the pain of lifting your right arm remains unbearable, some terrible shit going down in your blood, these young dudes, trying to be helpful, can’t understand what you mumbling, so they nodding, painting traces of tired melodies that sicken you to your soul—where the fuck am I?— following whatever it is they think they hearing cause you a legend, and you recall how astonishing and cruel you once were towards your elders and peers, still are, tearing out thirds from Bird and Diz’s circle, cutting lesser trumpeters, scolding Trane, strafing tracks by Haden and Evans, disassembling modal systems, driving that sweet group with Herbie and Wayne in the early 1960s, then fusion, dropping out, funkalating, walking in late, blowing whether you cared or not, turning your back to the audience when you felt it, chords so cold they would send brothers and Swedish gals into paroxysms cause they could never get enough of what you withheld. Now you struggle to cop a breath to shape a clean note. Death, keep on stepping.

Truth is, they don’t know a goddamn thing about Alton, Illinois. They don’t know what really went down with the wives and children, the other women, all those sidemen whose shadows you carry around like passkeys inside your harmonies, how like the tonic in sonata form what comes around goes around and payback surely is a bitch you’re paying premium right now. They don’t know what it means to be a Black dentist’s son, a scion, trained at Juilliard and in the dream logic of Harlem, returning to your daddy’s farm long past grown, him leaving you to live or die in the sweat of your nightmares in your room above the barn as you battle the past, your ghosts and junk, wrestling like Jacob the relentless angel that yearns to slay you, lay you out so you keep swinging, burning in those hazy blues of backrooms and burning spoons, turning back to every word and tune that ever sustained you— Don’t fail— finding the breath to wield a grace note: Death, not yet.

Tonight: amped to decibels to blow the eardrums clear of hearing, bassists and keyboardists whose names you never learned or cannot remember, ancestors and mojos and Ju-Ju protecting you even though your heart keeps popping like a snare drum and your ears register only a red buzzing, you mount the stage— or was that yesterday, when you prepared to state with your horn what your lips refuse to bear away, how it’s not about being a genius or merely surviving, how nobody ever sees what goes down in the head of a brother striving so hard to make something beautiful and impregnable and lasting out of the margins of this blue life, how the dues you pay never suffice, and you play and play and play thinking that moment will come but it never does, or it came so often you realized it only too late, like now, so you’ll always blame yourself, assume responsibility. Passion is a song you sing on your own terms: the set opens, and you hold your breath to map the evening’s destiny: sound. Death, get ready.

Black Betty by Rone

Scuttled in Their Stalls A. H. Jerriod Avant (for Bob Kaufman)

every throat a hose rusting inside out live on the heels of panic blackberries luring us into thickets none would remember this if it were not for the hole in his lie she blew his voice launching through the car windows the brain will always gather before it explains anything even these rhythmic arms beg genuine bone connected to bone connected to the dwindling cartilage sand in an hourglass it takes years to shatter a trial against an ego a stronghold rising a parched knot in the neck she strokes these braided straws she walks across the floor with hands of work much too torn for any of this holding that she does at every house party she is this candle we like to light her flicker we frame her wax we swallow with our cold mouths

The Undoing (The Great Michigan Ice Storm) Marcia Aldrich

12/21, 10:42 p.m.: the power goes out— Comes on, goes out, comes on, Goes out for good. We wait.

Freezing rain pelts the skylights above us, holes to the night sky, no moon. Trees along the river creak and groan, black branches twisted in ice, hiss and split, undoing themselves all through the night. 500 pounds per quarter inch of ice for this glaze event, this silver thaw. The weight breaks whole trees, snaps them like tinder. Sometimes one bad thing happens after another, everything I touch and everything that touches me is a poison, a toxic thistle no one should brush up against much less eat, an invasive species that can’t be stopped. I want to pull this bad spell out at the root, yank it to kingdom come but there is no at the root; the tendrils of misfortune, spiny and studded and tenacious, have spread underground all the way to the river and neither fire nor flood nor ice can destroy them. —————————————————— 12/22, 7:59 a.m.: with trackers strapped to our boots, we walk the icedover ground, find post-apocalyptic trees ripped open, gaping, split down the middle the way my mother’s hair turned grey in one streak of lightening after her husband died, caught in a collapsed steel mine. A million little matchsticks are strewn across the frozen wastes, dogwoods and serviceberries bowed down and sunk into the snow. There’s something about not being able to do a thing that makes me let go, step out

of myself, give over and give up the idea that I control anything. I am at the mercy of the storm; I am not entitled to a happy life, to food or warmth or berries at my feet. I can make nothing happen. I am but an honored guest at the ice buffet.

Begin descent from the plateau of yard down the canal of railway ties cut into the snow-crusted hill; slide unceremoniously in an epic push to stand on the frozen river, a new birth story; See the gap between the riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ice and exposed tree rootsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a thaw zone.

A rusty drain pipe 2 feet in width 23

down the side of a yard hangs over the river’s edge a frozen waterfall stillbirth in its mouth; uprooted trees sprung free sprawl across ice: abandoned vessels.

One winter when I was seven, skating on the river below our house with kids from the neighborhood, Mike’s dog Rusty fell into a hole, a thaw zone, near the stone bridge. I fell in after him, the ice splintering all around me as I tried to pull us out. The hole got bigger and bigger until no one could reach us and the kids receded to the banks. We see no one on the river—it is as if we are the last people alive, the last couple. No one ventures out to survey the damage, to clear the glass trees lit through with sunlight, to see the spun, blown glass arching over the river. The field’s maize-colored grasses, heavy with ice, kneel over— whole fields of them bowed in submission. We walk on the river, not the land. Why do I feel melancholy walking in the middle of the Red Cedar River? Has my mood been created by my memory or has the river created it? I remember what it was like to swim under the ice, to be unable to touch bottom, to wait for rescue. Too cold, the footing too treacherous. Not even the squirrels are out and the deer are bedded together deep wherever deer go in a storm front. They aren’t ready to venture out yet. Not more than a week ago, when I was washing dishes, I looked up from the sink and saw a herd of deer across the river in the snow-filled woods. They were running in wide circles,

looping round and round the horizon. No one was chasing them, but the chase was in their blood. There, the concrete remains of an abandoned bridge: a face to be written on. Under the new bridge on Dobie Road, a carcass of a deer. Recently enough killed that the blood still mixes in the snow and ice: mess of fur, bare leg bones, and a fleshless rib cage. No stink in this cold. Was it hit by a car, did it limp to the river to die or did it fall through the ice and drown? The coyotes found it—the coyotes whose existence some people dispute here in mid-Michigan—but I’ve seen at least one coyote running on the edge of the bank by the river, an outlier. Sometimes the deer want to cross from one side of the river to the other. Last winter one stood at the edge of our yard for the longest time looking out at the river. She wanted to cross —I could feel it. I wanted to cross over too. She was wondering if the river was frozen enough to support her. The snow had formed a bed over the ice, making it hard to tell how thick the ice was. If she ventured across she would fall in and then I would fall in too. 12/22, 5:03 p.m.: darkness falls. House lit with candles. Standing at the sink in the faintly-lit dark, I feel something outside my windows in the backyard. Sometimes before seeing I feel a change in vibrations, a rearrangement of the atoms in the air. I walk outside to the balcony and below me a large herd of deer, come out of hiding at the end of the day, gather and look up at me in a strange kind of healing on this winter night. A motley crew, scruffy and winter-dark—the edges of their separate bodies disintegrate, undone by the night. Waiting for a sign that the storm is over, that the creaking and groaning and splitting will cease, they look to me as if I am their patron saint.

Saturation. Incubation. Illumination. by Faith47 photo by Ian Cox

What Profit Hath a Man of All His Labour Nick McRae

And then there came a storm that scattered roofing tin across the pasture, dragged us out into the fields and stained our hands with rust. The barn sagged open to the sky. One can still frame with folded hands the lost, squared shoulders of the farm. They bleed by way of dark pines into other farms. Every family violates its borders. What use here is love with empty forests, no one left to call in from the freeze? The barbed wire strung around the tender maple tightens its garrote with every rain. It still is terrible to hear the cast-iron bell ring out across the deer trails sheened with frost. The patriarch is dust and silk beneath his pitted obelisk.

Where Dangerous Things Moved Jacob Powers

The boys had been gathering swollen, flesh-colored butternut squash since noon. The vegetables dotted the lower field as if dropped carelessly from heaven by God himself. Between each row, the migrant workers had been kneeling with box cutters, slicing the squash from the vines, chatting in Spanish. Among the cowboy hats and worn leather boots, the two boys moved with the workers, kneeling, grabbing, and cutting, before moving again. The green tractor crawled along the gentle hillside, spitting black smoke from its upright exhaust pipe in angry plumes. The wagon followed behind it like a defeated animal. Colton stood and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a dark smear. “Look, Jesse! An arrow head!” Jesse severed a squash from the vine, before taking the stone from his brother’s hand. “It’s just a rock, Colt. Keep moving, the Cadi’s on its way back down.” The machine was bending the far end of the field, giant tires planted carefully between the rows carved in May, when the earth was still soft with memories of winter. “Jesse, just look at it again, it’s a real one. It’s just like Uncle Ren’s.” “Start moving the fucking squash, Colt—” The growl of the tractor drowned Jesse’s voice. Together, the boys sprinted back toward it, moving alongside, as they piled squash into the bed. The driver bounced with the grooves of the field, the ash from his cigar falling into the air and blending with the dust. When the row was finished and the tractor had begun down the other side, Colton sat on the ground, panting.

“It was real, Jesse. You made me drop it.” Jesse crossed his arms over his chest, squinting through the sun at Mariana who was working next to her mother. Colton looked up at Jesse. He wondered why his brother stared at her the way he did. Jesse always looked away before their eyes met. It was like she came from somewhere else, someplace where dangerous things moved among the trees in the mountains. Colton wondered what it might be like where they came from, a different sun striking her face. “You’ll find another one, Colt,” he said, looking down. “Let’s get back out before Uncle Ren sees you sitting.” Once the August sun had begun tucking itself away under the hills, the boys walked with the tractor driver and his wife along the dirt road toward the farmhouse, which looked down over the fields. The migrants had arrived in April to get the planting started. Each year they arrived in their white 15-passenger van with a new group of workers. When school ended, the boys’ mother would drop them off, their skin still pale from long days inside, and they’d watch her pickup bounce down the driveway, going wherever she went for the summer. Colton listened to the workers’ tongues flick Spanish words, which to him always sounded one of two ways—dispute or desire. He wondered why the men wearing loincloths and eagle feathers in the pictures he’d seen at school were so finely chiseled and why they never had facial hair or round stomachs like the Guatemalan men. When they reached the top of the hill, they found Uncle Ren sitting on the sagging front porch of the farmhouse, crossing his swollen forearms over his red flannel shirt. His elbows stood out, bony, dirt-stained from mornings after the farm-stand didn’t sell, or afternoons when produce buyers backed out. Those days he’d show up at the migrants’ camp with a pot and a wooden spoon, and work alongside them with a cruelty that humiliated even the most skilled field hands. “A’right, Papi, what got done today,” he said, pulling a stack of bills from the blue banking pouch. 29

Jesse pulled Colton toward the oak, which stood off the east-facing corner of the house, and sat at its tangled base, looking out over the fields. He ran his fingers over the raised red marks the chickens had left on his forearms; he’d slaughtered fourteen that morning. Colton had watched reverently while his older brother twisted their heads over his knuckle, waiting to catch the limp birds and slip their legs into the metal hangers where they’d be eviscerated. “When do you think mom’s coming back?” Colton asked. “She ain’t.” “Don’t say that, Jesse. She always comes back.” Jesse picked a piece of grey bark from the tree and broke it into small pieces, tossing them into the grass between his legs. He stared down over the field to the migrants’ camp below, toying with the idea of taking over the farm someday. “Maybe she’ll bring back something nice this year,” Colton continued. The fire had been awakened in the camp, just within the woods beyond the lower field. Shadows passed briskly through the glow. “I can’t believe I lost that arrowhead,” Colton said, looking up at his older brother. The fading daylight filled the contours of Jesse’s face with dark pools that scattered as he lit a cigarette. “It wasn’t an arrowhead,” Jesse said, glancing back out over the field. “And even if it was, it’s a good thing you lost that thing, ya’ know that, Colt?” He took a long pull on his cigarette, trying to look stern. “Those arrowheads were used for killing. Indians killed one of the little girls who lived here on the farm. She was about your age.” “How do you know?” “Uncle Ren told me,” Jesse said, pausing to look hard into Colton’s eyes. “Happened right over there in that field.” 30

He pointed, cigarette glowing between his fingers. “Her ghost still haunts the farm, just looking for the savage that killed her—plus, I heard her crying one night I was outside locking the pens. I wouldn’t want to have an arrowhead that took a life, would you?” “There ain’t no ghost, Jesse.” “I heard her with my own two ears. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to, I don’t give a shit, just be glad you dropped that damn thing.” “Well, what about Uncle Ren’s arrowhead?” “Why do ‘ya think Uncle Ren is tapped the way he is?” Colton shrugged. “Exactly,” Jesse said. Once the crickets had begun sighing, relieved of the harsh August sun, the driver and his wife crunched past the boys down the dirt road. He was flipping through a stack of bills, while she looked down at the dirt road, humming quietly to herself. “C’mon boys,” Uncle Ren yelled, before standing from his old rocker and walking into the house. In the living room, Colton sat hard on the couch while Jesse made his way around the room, staring into the framed photographs which pieced together a rough history of the farm. The oldest sepia shots hung proudly over the fieldstone fireplace, showing the ancestry, worn and dirty with weathered New England faces. “These Mexicans will be the death of me,” Uncle Ren said, walking through the door and shoving a beer into Jesse’s hand. He poured half a glass of whiskey from the bottle and tilted it back. “Squash came in good this year,” Jesse said. 31

“You get the field cleared today?” “Almost,” Jesse replied, tipping the beer back awkwardly, wincing as he took it down. “Corn tomorrow,” Ren said. He took a sip from the glass. “I got a phone call from your mother today.” “Yeah?” Colton said, moving forward on the couch. “Said she’s heading north next week. She’ll pick you up just before school starts.” “She’s gonna bring us home somethin’ nice this year,” Colton said. “How old are you boys now?” “Eight,” Colton said. “Well ain’t you special,” Uncle Ren replied, tipping his glass back. “Sixteen,” Jesse followed. Colton pushed himself back on the couch, legs stuck straight out in front of him. Jesse tipped his beer back again. “Next year I want to put you in charge of some things, Jesse. I’m getting too old to be chasing these farmhands around.” Jesse tipped his beer back again, repressing a smile. “Alright,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “And that means you’ll have to start looking after yourself here on the farm, Colt. Understand?” “Uncle Ren?” Colton said quickly. “Jesse says there’s a ghost here on the farm, and I told him it’s a bunch of crap, but he said you told him so.”

Putting the rest of the whiskey into his mouth, he looked over at Jesse, holding the sip there for a moment before letting it down. Jesse leaned back and smiled. “Plenty of ghosts around here, Colt,” Uncle Ren said. “Don’t pay’em any attention.” “Told ya’,” Jesse said. “Well, Jesse said your arrowhead is cursed, and I don’t believe it.” “Go on,” Uncle Ren said, pointed to the mantle above the fireplace. “Grab it.” Colton moved forward on the couch as he watched Jesse walk to the oak mantle and grab the small shard of flint. After looking down at it, he walked over and placed it into Uncle Ren’s palm. “You want it?” Uncle Ren asked, holding it out to Colton. “It isn’t cursed?” “I never said that. I asked if you wanted it.” Jesse smiled, looking at his little brother. “Tell ya’ what. I’ll leave it right here on the mantle, and if you want it, you just come on in and grab it. You boys go take yourselves a nice shower, then get down to camp. It’s some kind of Mexican holiday. They’ll be making your dinner tonight.” Having scrubbed their bodies with washcloths and bar soap, the boys climbed back into their clothes, and snuck through the house, avoiding Uncle Ren, who by this time would’ve drank enough whiskey to slur the ends of his words. Outside, the darkness had unveiled the campfire, swaying feverish in the clearing, casting bent shadows among the low hanging trees. Like a neighboring star, beyond the fields and past the river,

the center of town was carved into the woods, burning with an orange electric light. The forest separating them from the town made the farm feel like the only place on earth. In June, Colton had missed his mother. Knowing one of the orange lights in town was attached to the side of their apartment, he would wonder if she was there without them. No matter how many times she left them at the farm, something gripped Colton’s chest when the night got quiet or the snarl of the tractor left him alone with his thoughts. But by the end of the summer, he had rebuilt himself. “I could stay out here all year,” Colton said as they neared the bottom of the hill. Jesse looked down at him and chuckled. “That’s why I hear you crying for mom at night when you think I’m sleeping. You ain’t cut out for farming, Colton.” “I am too cut out for it. And you’re a shitty brother—you ain’t cut out for that.” “Just wait until the ghosts come out and try to take you down to the river. You’ll be begging me to save you then. And you know what I’ll say—I’ll tell ‘em to take you off.” The camp was busy when they arrived, the women shuffling from table to fire, stirring, chopping vegetables, and patting tortillas, which they slapped on the backside of an oil drum with a fire below it. The men were bringing wood from the pile to the pit and clearing space for the celebration. The boys walked past the fire where the makeshift table stood—a piece of plywood resting across two stacks of old tires. On its surface, dishes collected from the thrift store in Aster cradled chopped vegetables, soups, tortillas, salsas, and roasted chicken. On the right side, bottles of amber alcohol stood lustrous, swallowing the firelight. Colton picked up one of the flowers that had been strewn between the dishes and the bottles, smelling it before placing it on the back edge 34

among a pile of roses footing a statue of the Virgin Mother. Unscrewing the cap of one of the bottles, Jesse took a swig. He tossed the cap into the woods before putting the bottle back. “Let me have some of that,” Colton said. “Just a sip,” he said, handing the bottle to his little brother. Colton hadn’t tasted liquor before June, this being the second time, but he had always known it was coveted, that it changed people in mysterious ways. He smelled the opening before tipping it back. Jesse laughed. “Ya’ like it?” he asked. Colton winced. “Think we’ll dance tonight?” he asked, wiping his mouth. “They’ll probably dance.” The workers began to gather around the fire, and Colton watched as Jesse searched casually for Mariana among the group. Once everyone had found a place, the tractor driver spoke, smiling and moving his hands out to his sides. In unison, the workers crossed themselves and hung their heads. Jesse stepped back, spitting on the ground before lighting a cigarette. The driver delivered a rapid prayer, almost poetic in its rhythm, as if it were a single word, and while he spoke, Colton plucked Mariana’s name from the otherwise mysterious stream of sound. He thought maybe it was her birthday. When the driver finished, the entire congregation said, “Amen,” and their voices broke into conversation. The boys ate on paper plates, sitting on a fallen tree by the table. “I wish mom cooked like this,” Jesse said, biting into a chicken leg, twisting it as he attempted to free the meat. “Mom cooks alright,” Colton replied.

“Yeah if you like to eat boxed shit. She couldn’t cook like this if our lives depended on it.” “Yes she could,” Colton replied. “Why don’t she then? If she could cook, why don’t she ever cook for us, huh? I’m going to marry a girl who cooks,” he said, lifting his chin in the direction of Mariana, standing by the fire, “She’s gonna’ be my wife.” “I’m gonna’ marry a girl like mom,” Colton said. Jesse laughed, spitting the food in his mouth out onto the ground, throwing the bone down next to it. “You don’t know shit about mom.” Before he could reply, the work radio, powered by four D batteries, released Spanish guitars and drums from the speakers. Gradually, bottles of alcohol were opened and mixed in a variety of glasses and coffee mugs. As the music carried the night forward, the camp seemed to take on a single voice. Colton danced among the workers, occasionally taking a sip of whatever glass he could find. Everything took on a paper quality, not just the trees and the tents, but his thoughts, his movements. The workers laughed with him as he moved around the fire, and as he danced the women grabbed his hands and spun him, leading him through the numbers. Before Jesse disappeared, two of the workers danced alone in the center of the group, the woman leading the man around, looking uninterested as he tried to wrap his arms about her. Colton knew everything happening before him was beautifully sacred, strictly forbidden outside the forest, and kept hidden from people with pale skin—people who lived in the orange glow of the town below them, where they could never love the farm the way he did. Somewhere between dinner and dancing, Colton began to understand the meaning of their words. He laughed when they laughed, moved between them. Mariana grabbed him by the shoulders and danced with him by the fire, kissing his cheek when the song ended. He remembered Jesse 36

watching them from beside the bottles on the table, smoking cigarettes, his face standing out pale beneath the shadows painting the edge of the camp. Then he remembered the suddenness of Jesse’s absence. As Colton walked toward the house, hanging on to the thought that maybe Jesse was there with Uncle Ren, the murky night air molded itself into shapes. As he walked up the driveway, he hummed the song his mother used to sing to him. Every so often the earth shifted left, then fell back to its original position before falling left again. Behind him, the celebration carried on as if inside a paper bag, an occasional roar of laughter tearing through the opening into the woods, and behind it the center of town shimmered, a reflection on a muddy pond. Colton whispered Jesse’s name in front of the house, listening for movement, a voice, and when nothing came he said it again. In that moment, nimble as a field mouse, the thought of Uncle Ren’s arrowhead came to him. It made his heart contract and his feet move toward the house. The screen door moaned only after enough space had been created for Colton to slip through. The inside of the house was cool; it always seemed hungry to him, hollow. From the living room door, he saw Uncle Ren’s hair outlined in the moonlight over the back of his chair. He slept deeply after drinking whiskey. Colton had learned this after making a habit of creeping into the kitchen to drink his milk at night while Uncle Ren and Jesse slept. Carefully, he walked into the room, arms out for balance, and stepping on the metal rack, which held the fire poker, brush, and small bronze shovel, he found the arrowhead where Jesse had left it for him. Walking back into the camp, he pressed the sharp edge of the arrowhead into the palm of his hand, wondering what it could do to a person at full speed. He had only held it one other time, but thought about it often, even during the winter when he was in their apartment trying to fall asleep while his mother stumbled around the kitchen. Halfway to the camp, a sound crept from the woods, collapsing Colton’s thoughts to a single point inside his head. It was a girl’s voice; it sounded

like something wounded. He gripped the arrowhead tighter as Jesse’s voice followed it through the trees. As he crawled through the damp leaves toward Jesse’s voice, he heard him shushing. Then came a low moan. Colton held against a fieldstone wall, looking over the top of the mossy rocks at Jesse, almost buried under the black veil of night in the forest. His white flesh stood out, a blemish against the darkness. Propped up on his hands, he rocked strangely, lowering himself down onto his elbows. Just as he was about to say Jesse’s name, he saw Mariana below him, lying with her legs splayed to either side, maybe struggling, but without desperation—a sort of listless thresh. She was breathing heavily. Colton watched, wanting with everything to look away. He heard Jesse shushing every so often and his body grew increasingly deformed, like a scar on the earth. As soon as their motion became something that resembled violence, Jesse threw his head back, neck extended and contoured with networks of sinew below the surface, face strained to resemble a smile. Colton thought Jesse looked straight through him. Once he was back in the house, Colton pulled himself deep into his sleeping bag, panting, drawing the flap in under itself. He gripped the arrowhead, wishing it were back on the mantle, back with the photos of the people who gave it meaning. When the sun rose over the hills, Colton heard Uncle Ren’s footsteps stop at the edge of his bed. He found Uncle Ren standing over him when he opened his sleeping bag, looking down and stroking his beard. Colton’s fingers gripped the arrowhead. “Time to wake up, boys. We’re getting out to work early today.” Jesse rolled over, pulling the blanket over his head. Before he could rest still again, Uncle Ren tore the blanket from him, throwing it on the floor. Jesse pulled himself into a fetal position, his stiff clothes dotted with brown clips of leaves.

Uncle Ren laughed, “Have yourself a good night there, chief? You boys giddy-up and get downstairs.” After a silent breakfast, the boys followed Uncle Ren toward the camp. As they walked along the tree line, obscured by the mist drawn from the earth on summer mornings, Colton imagined it was still going on, somewhere in the fog. He thought maybe it wasn’t really Jesse at all. He wondered if a human body could even move like the thing he’d seen in the darkness. Arriving at the camp, Uncle Ren walked to the middle where the fire had turned into a pile of ash, still sending a single pillar of smoke into the trees. He began shouting at the tents. Colton felt something watching them from the trees. Beside him the statue of the Virgin stood among withering flowers and bowls of uneaten food. He put his hand in his pocket, grasping the arrowhead as the workers crawled from their tents, rising from the beaten ground, muddy where they had danced the night before. They gathered, opposing the boys and their uncle. Uncle Ren gave directions to the driver, who turned and translated for the others. He pointed toward the fields as Colton looked up at his brother. Jesse lit a cigarette, gazing across the camp toward Mariana who stood among her people. Her eyes, haunted, unwilling to meet his, looked toward someplace else. “You boys are working the corn picker with Papi,” Uncle Ren said, placing his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “Keep ‘em in line alright.” The workers walked past the boys in a group, chatting amongst themselves. As they passed, Colton heard a different sound in their voices, a broken sound, something misplaced. He wanted them to go back where they came from. He knew they would be happier there, he knew the farm could never be their home, that it could never be a home. As they broke the tree line, the sun burnt against Colton’s skin. They crossed the field, following the group of laborers, until Colton stopped. “Jesse, I don’t want to come here anymore.”

Jesse stopped and turned back toward Colton. “I want mom to come back,” Colton said. “I don’t want to come to this farm anymore.” Together they heard the tractor roar inside the barn. “It don’t matter,” Jesse replied, turning and beginning back toward the barn. Colton watched Jesse, eyeing the dark mud still caked to the back of his forearms and elbows. He reached into his pocket and felt the arrowhead with his fingertips. The dead look he’d seen in Mariana’s eyes that morning came back to him as he felt its sharp edges. As Jesse disappeared into the barn where the tractor idled, waiting to be unchained, waiting to strip the land of everything, Colton wished the forest had just swallowed his brother whole. He wished the ghosts had dragged him out deeper than anyone should ever go, out to a place where dangerous things moved among the trees in the mountains, and left him there.

November 19, 1910 by Ever & the printers at the Cabiros Workshops

After We Talked Maria Flaccavento

I know exactly how to put things in my body. I know where the door is, how to sheep the crowds in thru it on a good day. In the dream I set reasonable goals for myself. 2 sheep. 3 sheep. And then breakfast. I live alone so I can put things in my body. Some things happen how a classic tune does. Sometimes in the dream I am a backup Motown dreamgirl, the kind who could’ve really made it big just didn’t, and I live alone for practice. Sometimes in the dream you’re putting things inside your body and they’re coming out like pebbles, smooth. Uneven. So I crush them up to powder and I put them in my body. Sometimes this is how a reason feels. I live alone inside it. My beehive rustles the ceiling. I know exactly all the corners and how deeply. I know all about the swarm. I know it swells, and how it pulses when it leaves your body. I hum some bars from My Girl, swing my hips in this way. Sometimes in the dream I live alone because it’s better this way. I can swing my hips. And I can for you. I can also everywhere. I know the cards. I know my Devil here. I know his bat wings. And that the Tower is crossing me and the Tower is crumbling down, I know that crumbling down. I know your mouth and the bees in it. I know everywhere the corners. I know all the words to this one. O yes I know exactly how. I can see where it’s uneven up ahead. I put my toes there. Set a goal for myself. 1 rock. 2 rock. Rest. I use my hips. I move around exactly. This is how supposed to feels. I put it into my body where it belongs.

High Kick Justine Champine

First, everything I did I did because I wanted to be a Radio City Rockette. What did I know about anything? I could not imagine an occupation more glamorous. They were all kept in a women’s hotel with pink Lucite furniture and their names spelled out in tiny light bulbs above their headboards, which were all in one very long row like in a nursery. I had seen this on a television special. It showed them all cutting paper snowflakes together on the floor wearing these white fur headbands; it showed them doing a kick line in their pajamas. Can you imagine? So I was a little more than six feet tall, I placed second in a fourth of July leg contest that was sponsored by some small time hosiery company. They gave us all pairs of nylon stockings and then we paraded behind the mayor down Main Street tossing candy and pantyhose at everybody on the sidewalk. I was eating nothing but boiled cauliflower and canned tuna fish. I was drinking fifteen glasses of ice water a day and gluing sequins onto everything I owned, even the handle of my toothbrush. I had a dance teacher, the only confirmed homosexual in town, and he had actually seen the Rockettes in person and had actually gone to New York City. I felt crushed with relief and embarrassment when he informed me that my dream was not an unreasonable one because my face was not quite homely, but very plain, and well-suited to the uniformity a dance team like the Rockettes demanded. “The idea,” he explained, “is to move as one lean, glittering leg.” After six months I took a bus to the auditions. You wouldn’t believe how much Vaseline I had on my teeth. My hair was shellacked into a gleaming, impenetrable dome. I did not buy a return ticket because neither myself nor my dance teacher nor the first place winner of the fourth of July legs contest nor the people from the small-time hosiery company expected me to return. When I left, they gave me a velour headband with plastic reindeer antlers fixed to the top. My god, I said, I am going to get some use out of these. They said, We love you, Debbie. 43

I got through three high leg kicks and a full split before being stopped by the preliminary judge, a stern, imperial looking woman who had probably been described as handsome since the time she was sixteen. I prayed she would not be our house mother at the women’s hotel with the pink Lucite furniture and the paper snowflakes. “You’re a giant,” she said in a flat, severe kind of way. “Didn’t you check the height requirements? Didn’t anyone tell you? You can’t go through to the next round, you should go to the circus.” I thought she was pulling my leg. “You are pulling my leg right now,” I told her. She started to laugh, and I started to laugh too and then couldn’t stop, and I thought about my suitcase full of pantyhose with reinforced heels in the shade of Sun Kissed, and I thought about my plain, blendable face and how I wanted this woman to comb my hair gently, but I also wanted to knock her teeth out. I still couldn’t quit laughing. I started doing high kicks, at first kind of half-heartedly, but then I saw this exasperated expression on the handsome woman’s face which made me irate, so I really put all I had into it. I kicked furiously, did twenty-five in a row, I was breathing like a champion horse. I kicked so high my knee was back behind my ears, I was eight feet tall and then sixteen feet tall and then my head was sticking out of the roof and I was licking the raindrops off the Chrysler building. “Go home,” the woman said. “Please, just go back to where you came from.”

Tiger Style by Adam Cicchini 45

Terrestrial Illuminations, Part II, No. 14 Duane Locke

A furled purple flower leaps from a bush of sticks. I was thinking about the meeting of René Char and Martin Heidegger. It was a thought that was no thought; it came vividly without a content. It had no representation or masks. A pine warbler’s yellow flashed through the tall, uncut grass. I was happy And became un-cut grass. I began to recall why Lyotard said: It is impossible To write what one wants to say. What comes out is an approximation. A speck of unconcealment with a blur Of concealment. A tail wag without a bird that is impossible to become mobile Without aviary corporeal pulsations. An approximation is thrown into the world, and is interpreted by approximations Of the approximation. There are no poems, only interpretations. There are only our approximations and the listener’s or reader’s revisions, Rebirths, or murders. Words are not the realities they are rumored to represent. There is something other—an alterity without altars or vocabulary. Without arbiters and carousels. The other is no thought.

No thought is the most powerful mode of thinking that people have. Ostensible thoughts, familiar thoughts, are self-deceptions. Words are not orioles among oranges on days of misty rain in Sorrento, But are smoke signals from a fire that never was lit to flame.

This Is Surely a Curious Fact Jessica Lilien

It came to my attention roughly five weeks ago that my next-door neighbor —to the left, when facing my home’s front—had lost her mother. I use the term “lost” not in any euphemistic sense, to convey that the subject has ceased to live; instead, I intend its most literal meaning. That is to say, my next-door neighbor—to the left, when facing my house—misplaced her mother and does not remember where she left her. A description of setting, historical background, biography of relevant characters, and autobiography may help the reader understand the strange predicament of my easterly neighbor and her misplaced maternal kin. That is to say an autobiography pertaining to myself, the narrator, rather than that of the reader. However, if the reader believes it will be of help, he or she may choose to supply his or her own history. Blank pages are provided at the end of this written exploration for such an eventuality. The narrator and, by extension, his neighbors—both easterly and otherwise —live in a town called Blue Jacket, which is named for a prominent Shawnee military leader in the Northwest Indian War. Blue Jacket also went by the name Weyapiersenwah, which is unfortunately something that I do not know how to pronounce. The narrator lives in Blue Jacket, Kansas; he is regretful if this causes any confusion in the reader, and understands that the reader might naturally assume that Blue Jacket was located in Ohio, as that is indeed the state for which Blue Jacket, a.k.a Weyapiersenwah, fought. The narrator is unable to explain this inconsistency. Blue Jacket, Kansas is a town of just under 3,000 folks. Though not a particularly diverse town, and though education and income levels tend to fall a few percentage points below state averages, its populace does have the distinction of voting slightly more liberal than is usual in even the bigger cities in Kansas. The yards are green, the schools are safe, the restaurants are clean. There are giant squid in the reservoir. Every year a teenager or two, drunkenly or on a dare, takes an ill-advised midnight swim there and is

devoured. We celebrate the beginning of each spring with a craft and music fair held in Truman Square, which attracts many from nearby towns and cities. It was just this past April that a quilt collectively made by the Presbyterian Church’s Women’s League was auctioned off at our Spring Fair for over two hundred and fifty dollars, which was then donated to the American Cancer Society, earmarked for breast cancer research—a cause we can surely all support. The subject of this exploration, my neighbor, belongs neither to the Presbyterian Women’s League, nor to the Presbyterian Church in any capacity at all. There is no social stigma attached, in Blue Jacket, to a person’s lack of church attendance. This is all for the well, as my neighbor is not affiliated with any known religious institution. She is in her late forties or early fifties. I have never inquired of her the exact year of her birth, as this is often considered impolite. She wears business casual buttondown shirts and a series of black and grey slacks to her job, which is not in town. I have hypothesized that she may be a secretary or low-level support staff manager for the parahuman embryo production and cloning plant in Topeka, but I have also never inquired about this. Her name is Frances. She is very beautiful. Until five weeks ago, she cared for an aged mother named Theresa. Their names indicate some familial history of Catholicism. This is also unverified. I—the narrator—have always lived in Blue Jacket. I am 32 years old. I have a large red birthmark across my neck and right jaw and right cheek. I have changed my mind; I do not wish to give any further autobiographical information. The last time that Frances and Theresa were seen together by more than one credible witness was on Thursday, May 29th. At least eight separate human witnesses, some of whom I may have interviewed myself, swear to having seen Frances and Theresa at, or on their way to or from, the grocery store— a trip which also included a brief additional stop into the adjacent 99-cent store immediately following their exit from Happy’s IGA. I was not one of these witnesses. I do not leave my house. I see it in my mind, though. The grocery trip was uneventful: Frances had some minor amount of trouble maneuvering Theresa’s wheelchair over the small quarter-step up into the 49

store, but Marty Enfield claims to have assisted the two ladies. He claims to have noticed nothing unusual. Once inside the store, they made a leisurely circuit alternately up and then down each aisle, buying many of their usual grocery staples, such as brown rice, skim milk, various produce, and a single small flank steak. The single steak, it should be noted, was a notinfrequently purchased item, and was destined to be shared between the two of them; one ought not attempt to interpret this as a clue. They were both physically small women, with relatively healthy habits. Upon leaving the grocery, they transferred their recent purchases into their 1972 Ford Country Squire and, instead of immediately following the bags’ lead into the car and thence back to their home, they decided to enter the 99cent store which existed—along with King’s County Liquor, the Sunshine Tanning Salon, and the blackened, burned-out husk of what used to be a beauty parlor—in the same shopping center as the grocery. Though confirmed to have been inside the store for at least 17 minutes, they exited empty-handed. Two apples and an ice cream sandwich from a box of a dozen had been stolen from their bags of groceries while the women were inside, one of those apples having been replaced with a large red and black non-poisonous millipede, rolled up into a self-protective ball—though, as far as I could ascertain the two women never noticed this small change. The two women entered the car, put on their safety belts, and returned home. There are no further credible witness accounts of them seen together, though Frances did not report Theresa missing for another three days. I believe it is Dunn, the sheriff’s brother-in-law, who has been spreading the unfair rumors which have implicated me in Theresa’s disappearance. Dunn has never liked me. Frances and her mother returned home from their shopping trip while I was in the basement. (Mine.) I heard their car pulling into their driveway, and quickly ascended to my first floor to watch. There is a large, flat window on the eastern side of the front of my house. If I want to use it to look at Frances, I have to press my face against the far corner of it, and smash my left eye socket up flat against it, and twist my eyeball as far to the right as I can. Then I can see enough to usually catch almost all of her coming and going from her front door.

Which is what I did on the 29th of May. Frances took Theresa’s wheelchair out of the back of their station wagon, unfolded it, and helped Theresa into it. Theresa could in fact walk, but only very weakly and slowly and for short distances at a time. The wheelchair was a vehicle of convenience and comfort, not an absolute necessity. If she had wanted to escape from an attacker, for instance, who was chasing her through her house, and she was without her wheelchair, she would not have been able to do so. It’s probable the wheelchair wouldn’t have helped either, though. But, if she needed to get to the bathroom late at night without any assistance, that would be something she could manage. Frances pushed Theresa into their house via the wooden ramp that Frank Hollins and his son Jason had built for her, custom-made, when Theresa started using the wheelchair more often than not. (They were in her house, building the ramp and widening doorways and such, for almost two weeks, four and a half years ago. I don’t know why no one questioned them. They’re suspects.) After something like one minute, Frances exited the house alone, gathered the groceries into her arms, and took them inside. She closed the door. She did not lock it, though she would some hours later, just before they went to bed for the night. Blue Jacket is a very safe town. I never saw Theresa again. I hereby swear to that. At this point I moved up to the second floor of my house. On this floor there is an empty bedroom, decorated appropriately, featuring a vantage point from which I can see four different windows into Frances’ house: one in the kitchen, one in the living room or den—whose angle is very bad and which has a curtain almost always drawn against it anyway, one in Theresa’s bedroom, and a tiny rectangular smoked-glass window that leads to what I assume is a bathroom, probably the shower, though from what I have observed it has never been opened, and it is impossible to see through under any lighting conditions. I did not see either woman through any of these windows for at least an hour and nineteen minutes. We must conclude that these seventy-nine minutes are the ones during which Theresa was lost. It is also very important to note that tomorrow is July 4th, which everybody knows what that means. And also, I went to school with Dunn. 51

Three days after this shopping excursion, the Sheriff was contacted. Theresa had disappeared. Frances had lost her. I can swear that no one other than Frances entered or left that house in those three days, though on the third day, very early in the AM, a small, pinkish (perhaps albino?) bat did fly down the chimney, and has to this day still not flown back out again. Later reports would refer to it as a “winged rat,” though whether this was metaphoric or an actual, literal interpretation of what that animal was, I am unsure. According to Frances, at one moment her mother was in the house, in a certain chair in a certain room, and then suddenly—she wasn’t. Doors were locked from the inside, windows were inaccessible to theoretical intruders, and Theresa was not mobile enough to have left on her own. The Sheriff was sure it was foul play. I suspect Frances believed it was somehow due to mystical or paranormal intervention. I knew that silly Frances has simply misplaced her mother, as she tended to misplace things from time to time. There are four other notable circumstances that ought to be taken into consideration in the evaluation of any theory. First: on the second day after the women’s final appearance together, the fountain in Truman Square began running blood. Second: Dunn’s sister’s torso was found in the lime quarry fourteen years ago, painted blue and wrapped in newspapers. Third: at no time in those three days did Frances ever call me on the telephone or otherwise attempt to contact me. Fourth: the light bulb in Theresa’s bedside lamp had been burned out for almost nine days, and no one had ever bought a new one to replace it, although they had been inside a 99-cent store on the very last day that anyone ever saw Theresa. Frances, understandably rattled, understandably guilt-ridden by the scale of her ineptitude, weeping, pale-faced, being led back into her own home by the widower Sheriff, staring at my house’s windows—though (I knew!) they were rendered opaque from the bright outside sunlight. Frances, lovely and forgetful. (And what July 4th means is that the Carter boys mix human bone meal into the gunpowder for the town fireworks display and everybody knows that. And who will be watching? Frances, that’s who. Alone this year. Yesterday, Annette, the mail carrier, attempted to deliver to her a large

white box wound around with butcherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s twine, for which she refused to sign. This is surely a curious fact.)

Mickey Target by Dylan Egon 54

In The Year of Too Many Hero Masks Tufik Y. Shayeb

our friendship began as a river stone that hatched itself into an broken eggshell out came that something wet and avian its fleshy body lurching on tiny pebbles its chirping vague and nearly scrambled, we drained it down a dirty sink, all down the sticky floral dishes, taters and dogs bits all caught upon the surf of suds we knew who we were back then, fists secured like tiny change banks our proud matriarchs could not stop it the dirt and grit, and the dust on shoes our busy fathers could never see it, the lizards we trapped in chipped jars we ran on juice, ten-thousand volts of too much, flopping around like fish the roof, a worn out deck, crying safe, as cousins tumbled in weeds and jeans this city, home to undersized villains and too many superhero masks on racks genre was too foreign, stuck in cheeks, as light-sabers and katanas clacked

in the above-ground pool, dead soldiers floatingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their noses scraped the rough blue, plastic battlefields of underwater and a grave of bruised knees and thunking summer had planted an oval river stone and this was what we hatched in the desert

Sass Bill Derks

My cousin Greggy was spazzing down the sidewalk in his little red mommy shorts. His shoulders hitched up and down. His sneakers were falling off and he slapped at his chest like the bugs were on him. Ever since he turned six, I think attention was all he wanted from the world. And since my mom and Aunt Carol had gone shopping at Penney’s for like the millionth time, I was stuck babysitting the turd for another whole hour. That good sun was on my legs as I sat on the curb in my shorty shorts. The Episcopal Church was there in front of me. I was wiggling my toes in my pink All Stars—pretty sweet—and as I made sure Greggy didn’t trip into the road, Victor Guerrero, who was so only my guy-friend and nothing else, came down from his balcony when he saw me outside. When I yanked Greggy down the steps seven seconds earlier, I swear I could feel Victor peeling back his curtains and spying at me through his third floor window. But like every day when he came to visit with me, the only thing he liked to do was put his hip next to mine, flip his greasy bangs out of his eyes and say all kinds of crazy shit. I mean—he wasn’t horrible—but I still liked to imitate his moves to my friends just to show them how stupid he was. ‘Hey girl.’ I’d flip my hair to the side. ‘Whatcha doin’ with that puddin?’ I’d say. Greggy did somersaults beside us. Victor and me sat, picked at the grass and stared at the long windows of Episcopal Church where a bunch of people in sweaters and dress pants were glomming onto each other. The willow switches my mom’s boyfriend had trimmed back from the fence that morning were piled next to mine and Victor’s butts. Greggy howled up the tree, and when I turned away from him completely, Victor leaned over, put his chin on my shoulder and said, “Hey. Holly-girl. Why don’t you let me get a sniff of that burrow you got hidden down there?” His breath smelled like burnt corn, and out of instinct, and because Victor was known for saying all sorts of weirdness, I did my move where I get all back-straight on people. I said, “Whut, dude?”

He leaned back. “You know what I mean,” he said. Usually when we were together, like in the back of the roller rink where we piled all our coats, I could shove his shoulder and he’d get the hint. Only this time his voice made me kind of sick in my throat. So I reached over, picked up one of the fresh willow switches and showed it to Victor in my fist. I said, “How ‘bout I rope this around your face?” “Easy Beezy,” he said. “I’m jus’ doin’ ma thang.” I jerked the switch. He flinched, tried to grab it from me but couldn’t. We wrestled for a sec in the grass. Then Victor tried to reach behind my back for it. His arms were cold. My yellow tank didn’t go all the way down and his one hand stayed on my bare hip while the other stopped going for the switch so much. “Gimme,” he said. “No,” I said. We stopped. We sat there totally awkward. And when I looked over at all the church people still hugging and shaking hands across the street, there was a squirm in my belly from the feel of Victor’s hands around me. He poked my arm once, and then again. He said, “You’re all bone, girly.” I almost went to punch at his nuts for saying it. And the only reason I decided not to was because I saw my friend Cassie come walking at us. She waved to her dad who was the preacher’s helper on Sundays. She crossed the road in her white heels, and it was pretty hard not to notice she was looking all Betty Lou in her blue dress with white polka dots. She also must have had some sass with her that day because, when she came up to us, she kicked Victor’s sneaker and said, “Stop messing with Holly. You know she’s like my sister-friend, right? Don’t mess.” “Holy cats. Sassa-fricken-Fras,” I said. Cassie gave Victor her uppity eyebrow. Victor nudged my shoulder all warm. “This girl just mad,” Victor said. “You only got a taste, Cassie-girl. So now youse mad.”

Greggy spazzed over from the middle of the yard and slapped his own face. Then he skipped circles around Cassie and sang his little song about her, ‘His Bestest Super-Friend in the World. Don’t you mess. Don’t you mess.’ But I have to admit, when Victor piped in and said, “Shut up, you little turd,” I kind of thought there was a cool side to him, like we were dating and he knew stuff about me. But that’s when Cassie’s sass kicked back in. She said, “You’re a fucking mistake, Victor.” “What’s that?” Victor said. Cassie bent forward and her French braid was about as perfect as you could tie it. “You heard me. You’re a mistake of the earth, Victor.” A little bang flipping. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. Defending him, I said, “Greggy over here was a mistake.” Greggy nodded. “My dad was in the army,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.” Cassie put her hands on her fancy hips and watched down the hill where all the roofs were eye level with us and the smoke from the mountains steamed behind them. She kept her head turned toward the sun. “Can you leave, Victor?” She held her hand to her ear. “Isn’t your bitch-ass mom calling you?” We waited. I didn’t hear anything, only the sound of Greggy popping his cheeks apart. Victor flipped his bangs, huffed, got up, gave Cassie the ‘youcan’t-faze-me’ shoulder and said, “More like your mom is calling me.” It wasn’t a very good burn back—mom jokes never work—but Cassie’s mom was kind of a church-freak and we all thought she had the wets for Victor’s dad.

All of a sudden Cassie shoved her finger down her throat and made a puking sound as Victor hiked up his pants. He went onto the sidewalk and headed home, which was just a few doors down behind a set of walnut trees. I hummed and watched his butt. I said to Cassie, “Aside from all the hair flipping, and the creep factor, he might actually be kind of sexy.” “Holly. Please,” Cassie said. “What. Don’t act like I don’t need it,” I said. “You’re twelve,” she said. I stuck up my nose, “Going on twenty.” “You wish.” I closed my eyes and raised my brows while her back stayed turned. She cleared away those willow switches to sit, and her perfume—that old lady Avon brand that smelled like she’d been rolling around in Band-Aids—hit me in the face. I almost said something about her getting it from her mom’s medicine cabinet, but I shook it off because she was right. She was totally my sister-friend, and even though she went to church and knew all the Jesus-jams by heart, I knew sister-friends didn’t come around but once in a blue. Greggy yelled, “Help me. I’m stuck, Cassie.” Some other kind of dead branches were piled up next to the neighbor’s shed. Greggy was lying down in the shade by them and his shirt was twisted underneath him from rolling around so much. He held up a boney leg and pulled his foot in and out of the pile of sticks. “Quit it, turd,” I said. Cassie hit me. “Just pull your foot out, silly,” she said.

“Oh,” Greggy said. He rolled up and called her name in the air. “Cassie-FoFassy. I got new trucks, new trucks.” She told him to go get them, to let her see, so Greggy jumped some imaginary hurdles along the yard and into the house. Cassie’s legs were crossed into the road and the toes of her white church-heels tapped together. Sometimes it made me sick how nice she looked all the time, so I peered over at the stop sign one yard over—the sign I always told Greggy was out of bounds—just so I didn’t have to see her freshness. We were quiet for a sec. One of those orange city trucks grumbled by and Cassie peeled her legs in. My eyes got big as I stared at the church windows and said, “Last night was an enormous bang-session over here. I think my mom is sexing the entire town, Cassie-girl. No joke.” Cassie wiped the creases out of her dress. There was something about it that I didn’t like so I kept my head turned. “What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You realize I just got out of church, right? Are you watching Greggy… or is it Victor?” she said. “For sure I’m watching,” I said. “But what does that matter?” I flipped my hair behind my shoulder. Then I didn’t say much because I knew Cassie and Victor kissed like seven times in one sitting underneath the California Cruisin’ pinball machine at Skate Estate. Not only that, but she was the babysitting queen of the entire universe. She’d taken Red Cross babysitting classes at the fire barn where she had to stick her finger down a baby mannequin’s throat. She gave the stupid thing mouth to mouth, even. Then she couldn’t answer the door when the volunteer fire-chief, her dad, knocked on the door and pretended to be a stranger. But one night, when everything seemed to be going good with her sitting gigs, Cassie had a seizure on her living room floor in front of three of her kids. One of the older ones called Cassie’s dad while Cassie laid there jiggling in her blue dress. It was super weird to know that that could happen to her at any moment, and I felt bad in a way that made me not want to hug her, like she was super-delicate, so I guess you could say we weren’t really the greatest friends, anymore.

“It matters,” she said. Over her shoulder she tried to watch inside the house for Greggy. We had a big window in front where my mom’s vine plants curled around the sill. I looked, and since I didn’t see any flames inside, I figured everything was good in the hood. Greggy could stay inside forever for all I cared. Cassie still wasn’t paying attention to me. “But aren’t you listening?” I said. “My mom is like sexing the entire town. Guys are coming down from the mountains just so they can come on down the mountains.” “Disgusting.” “It’s true.” My shorty jean shorts went up pretty high and I kept slapping my thighs so Cassie could see I was total seriousness. “She has like two boyfriends,” I said. “They come over on different days, and like, at eleven, or whenever they think I’m sleeping, I can hear my mom getting her brains banged out.” “Wow,” Cassie said, just trying to act cooler than me. I kept talking. “You listening?” “I guess.” “Well, yeah,” I said. “One guy tells her where to go,” I said, “on the bed or whatever. And another one is always saying, ‘C’mon. Let’s just try it once.’ And then, whatever he was asking for, I think my mom said okay to it because they started moving around the furniture. She kept saying, ‘Easy, babe. Easy.’ Do you even know what that means?” I asked her. If Cassie did know, she didn’t say anything, so I clenched my fists and raised them up like I was talking to Jesus when I said, “You don’t know how that feels, Cassie. I have to listen to it all night. And Victor is so…” I stopped to take a breath. “Sometimes he’s all sorts of hotness. Not all the time, I mean. But when he’s older, I think he’s going to be like a model. Like for Guess jeans or something.”

My knees pressed together. I rocked them back and forth with my hands lain back in the grass, and across the street, I watched Victor’s third floor balcony through those walnut leaves. His dad was a dentist with an office next to the grocery store downtown, and Victor’s bedroom had an open glass door with white curtains. When the wind blew, the curtains moved over the balcony’s railing like bed sheets. “Your mom is totally old enough. She can do what she wants, I think.” “My mom is a total bitch,” I said. I didn’t want to remind Cassie about how my mom totally freaked and hit me when I took a little money from her drawer, fifty bucks, and when I left Greggy at the tasty freeze just because I wanted to talk to my friend and just forgot him. “She is such a bitch,” I said. “And she’s old. That’s for sure. But don’t you think it’s time for me?” I asked. “Holly? Dude.” It took a sec for her to breathe. “But with Victor?” she asked. “Sure. Well—whoever?” “But Victor?” Cassie said again. “He’s like the sass-man,” I told her. “He tells you what he wants.” There was that squirm in my belly again. “And it’s always that crazy talk. It makes me feel all fondle-fingers. Like a pillow between your legs.” My eyes went big. “Or a showerhead.” I wiggled my brows. “In a good way.” “I can’t imagine that’s a good kind of fondle,” Cassie said. “Grody Victor.” She plucked up a piece of grass. With her short nails she peeled it apart like string-cheese, and then made a face like she was sorry for having to rip it to shreds. “And you don’t want guys like him telling you what to do either,” she said. “Believe me.” I knew Cassie was just mad because Victor told her to meet him at the Dairy Freeze one night. Only when Victor showed up, he had his two brothers with him. She ended up paying for everyone. It was totally her fault. Victor never said it was supposed to be an alone-date. But it wasn’t like Cassie not 63

to agree with me, or at least not to say I was totally stupid for liking him. That’s why I asked, “Are you getting all Jesus-jam on me right now? You’ve been doing a lot of Jesus-jamming,” I said. The way she shook her head you’d think I was completely out of the park. A beeping noise came from around the corner. I thought it was that city truck coming to pick up the yard trimmings behind us. We stood up to give it room. Cassie wiped off, and down the road I saw my aunt’s green mini-van driving toward us, its hood flashing through the tree shade. Its tires snapped over the walnuts. It pulled into our driveway next to where we were chillin’. My mom got out in her ruffled pink blouse: the satin one boyfriend-numbertwo had given her. My aunt Carol stumbled out in her Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt and it was pretty obvious they’d hit up Roscoe’s to catch the margarita special again. My mom laughed with a big mouth. Then she said something about the bartender’s butt and slapped the hood of the van. “Whoa big fella,” she kept saying. They didn’t pay any attention to us. Not even my aunt Carol. Thank God they went inside. The screen door slapped. I squinted and thought how stupid they were, and I said to Cassie, “But seriously. You were just Jesusjamming on me. I don’t play that shit, man.” “God,” she said. “No I wasn’t.” With the toe of her pretty shoe she kicked at a stray stick in the grass. “Look,” she said. “You’re my sister-friend. So you can do whatever you want,” which was true. “Just—careful, okay,” she said. I rolled my eyes. That beeping noise was still going and I heard my mom scream from inside the house, “Holly! What the fuck?” Her most favorite words. “God,” I said. We went inside because that’s how things were with Cassie and me. It was allowed because Cassie’s parents took me on vacation with them once, and my mom said she trusted Cassie more than any kid, including me. We went through the living room, and when we turned into the kitchen, the entire room was filled with this gray, hazy smoke. The fire alarm above the table was going off. Everybody ran around, which made everything seem extra crazy with the beeps. “Oops,” I said. The water 64

in the sink ran over a pot Greggy had burned up on the stove. He was stupid enough to try to cook mac and cheese without water. My aunt was smirking about it all. “Holly girl,” she said—all high-pitched —for the millionth time. A dish towel flapped in her hands under the fire alarm. Greggy of course sat Indian style on the carpet which separated the kitchen and living room. He picked at his shoes and cried about it. An empty box of mac n cheese was gripped tight in my mom’s hand. She shook it in my face. “He was hungry,” she kept saying. “You’re supposed to be watching him. Did he even eat?” I said, “Whut?” and then, “I asked him if he wanted to eat. He said, ‘No.’” But the turd busted me out. “No she didn’t,” he said. I kicked at him with my pink All-Star. “Holly!” “I’m sorry,” Cassie jumped in and said. “He said he was going in to get his trucks and I forgot about him.” “Don’t protect him,” I said to her. The old bitches gave each other the eye. “It’s not your fault, Cassie,” my mom said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff anymore.” The smoke cleared out enough for my mom to light a cigarette. The lighter slapped down on the table. She threw her hair over her shoulder like she does when she’s super pissed. “I can’t even fucking believe this. I can’t even fuckin’ believe it.” My aunt gave her this half-sad, I-don’t-what-to-tell-you face, but when I saw her do it, it sent this spike toward me like everything was supposed to be my fault and not any of theirs for hitting up margaritas again. My hip shucked to the side. “Believe whut?” I said.

My mom set down her cigarette real slow in the ashtray. I knew what that meant. So when she blew out smoke and stomped toward me across the kitchen, I curled my lip and stayed leaned against the wall this time. “Whut?” I said. As soon as I’d said it, she grabbed me by back of my hair and pulled with everything she had. I squeaked, and the way she was holding me half against the corner of the kitchen wall I could barely fight back. “Bitch,” I said. I got hold of her satin blouse, tried to rip it from her—the new blouse I knew she loved—but a chunk of her hair was caught in my pinky. I thought I’d had her too this time, because I was getting older, and I knew this wouldn’t happen if I could set her on her ass, stand over her and say, “Fuck you, fuck all of you.” But it seemed like she knew it all along, that I was getting too old and I was ready for it, so it was like she’d tried even harder by putting all her strength into me and shoving. “Cindy,” my aunt said. When we turned into the living room Greggy got up and started hitting at our legs like there were flies on them. “Cindy,” my aunt Carol said, again. “Cindy, enough.” She kept pulling on me. From her old lady strength I had no choice but to do this roll onto our carpet even though I must have been hurting her too by nail pinching. I was on my side with my one hand doing a wrestler move like Victor to stay up. I could almost do something where I could get up, go outside and run over to Victor’s if I had to. That’s what I was thinking, but she had both hands in my hair, and she was way too heavy. The bitch even got on top, and before I knew it, I couldn’t stop her from putting me flat on my back with her knees on my arms. I squirmed, and right then I wanted to be like a baby wolverine in a shoebox, and another part of me wanted to lie back all what-the-fuck-ever. “You’re a fucking mistake of the world,” I said. My face stung and I coughed and cried a little. Her fingers dug into my neck. My hair had that feeling like the roots were bruised and I realized I couldn’t get out of it because I could barely breathe, and I half-wanted to cry even more because I couldn’t throw her off and I had to stay in her house as long I didn’t have a job, and working at Tasty Freeze was all I could ever think of to get her out of my life forever so she could puke the night away and die.

Some mad foot-thumping went over the floor. When I peeled up I saw Cassie in the corner of the living room in her blue dress, pretty white shoes and freckles. Of course her French braid still looked completely perfect as she held her hand over her mouth and hugged herself tight around the ribs. “That oughta make you believe,” my mom said. I curled up off the floor. It felt like someone inserted a nail into my neck. She went for her cigarettes. “You believe that one?” she asked everybody. “Cindy,” my aunt said and grabbed at her wrist. “What?” She threw my aunt’s hand away. “You got no idea what it’s like around here. You have zero fucking idea what this girl puts me through.” No one said anything. My mom smoked. Greggy slapped down into the basement to hide underneath the sink and my mom and aunt stayed in the kitchen together. “Are you okay?” Cassie said to me. I wiped my face quick. “You have to go home,” I said. She didn’t, so I ran through the living room and up the stairs to my room, because I figured they could have themselves forever if they wanted, and this place would never change. I slammed into my beanbag chair. Every once in a while I punched little holes in the drywall with my elbow. That’s what my mom deserved, I figured. But it seemed like all night I sat there picking at my fingernails. After a while, I didn’t even bother turning on my lamp. It started getting dark. The poster I had of Justin Timberlake was in front of me, and that sexy stubble on his cheeks faded away as the room got darker. I watched the light coming in from the living room, through that little crack under my bedroom door, and I knew my mom was sitting at the kitchen table all by herself, as always. I heard the window rattling on the storm door. It was obviously Cassie’s knock because she’s the only person that walks in and says, ‘Ms. Jackson?’

I heard a few whispers, then there was a soft knock on my bedroom door. “Are you in there?” Cassie asked. “You in there, Holly?” I kept quiet. There was another knock, softer this time, and when she finally quit and left, I leaned forward and hugged my knees. It was obvious we probably weren’t going to be friends anymore. So for like an hour I thought of how I wouldn’t talk to her at school. If I saw Cassie at her locker, lonely sad, not just lonely alone, I’d have to swish by and tell her to fuck off if she wanted to talk about it. “Jesus Jam about it,” I’d say. Maybe I’d have to avoid going outside when their church service got out. It was totally sad, but that’s what happens with people sometimes. My mom’s bed squeaked in the next room. The phone rang on my nightstand. I jumped up and grabbed it so she wouldn’t completely freak again. Thank god it was Victor. “What’s up, Butter,” he said. “Hey,” I said. “Sup.” “Hey.” “What’s the dealio with you?” he asked. I pulled my legs in tighter. I didn’t want it to sound like there was a wet leaf in my throat, so in the dark I swallowed, and then wrapped the phone cord around my toe. “…talk crazy to me,” I said. “Please?”

Childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Play Bruce McRae

We grew up hard. We acted like children. After school we played school. I carved my name on the desk of my flesh. I wrote mash notes to Mary Jo Talaricoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cotton panties. Miss Duke had a solid set of gams, shapely calves in silky hose. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to reach out and run one finger into Neverland. Love was getting the strap for talking back. Love was detention, our not-so-secret rendezvous. I wanted to make babies, little baby babies, however that happened. Like homework.

Oslo by Phlegm 70

Crabs Louis Bourgeois

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Cora said as the car gained on us. I’d just thrown a liter bottle of beer out the window and it’d crashed into the windshield of an oncoming car and now Cora was scared to death and calling me stupid. My friend Mike was in the back seat. He didn’t say anything at all as the car chased us. He just had a dumb looking grin on his face because he’d been stoned and drunk for hours. Just like me and Cora. I didn’t have any reason for throwing the bottle—it was still half full—I just wanted to see what would happen. The car by now had passed us and driven out of sight; it was then I knew we were in trouble. A couple of miles later, there was a roadblock of several large-looking cars. We were forced to slow down and take whatever it was that was coming to us. We didn’t have a gun or any other weapons to fight back with. We stopped and even more cars came and lined up across the road. They seemed to storm out of the cars all at once and sort of trotted towards us: a whole group of black men and women, some children too. Cora was crying by now, and still whispering almost inaudibly, Stupid, stupid, stupid. I was afraid, but not nearly as afraid as Mike who, much to his dismay, had completely sobered up now that he was looking down the barrel of a nickelplated revolver. It was pitch dark except for all the headlights so it was easy enough to see what was going on. The guy whose windshield I busted came up to me where I still sat at the wheel of the car. He wasn’t very big and he actually looked sort of pleasant, like he held some kind of white-collar job. I rolled down the window and said to him with a slight tremor in my voice, Look, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to bust your windshield. He jerked open the car door and grabbed me and I kind of slumped to the ground, mostly on purpose. Cora was still in the front seat with her head slightly bent down as if she was praying, which is exactly the kind of thing she would do in a situation like

this—she still believed in God. I was already an atheist. I converted a few months earlier when I was in the hospital for six weeks after getting busted up in a very nasty car accident. Although I really wasn’t as afraid as I should’ve been, I slumped a little more toward the ground and shouldered the fender of the car, attempting to show as little confidence as possible. The man who was pointing the revolver through the window at Mike suddenly jerked open Mike’s door and pushed him down into a kneeling position outside the car. It was then I straightened up and said to the guy whose windshield I’d busted, I’ll pay for it, I promise! I’ll give you my license and I’ll have the windshield fixed tomorrow. This girl in the front seat is the Chief of Police’s daughter. We’ll all be in trouble if you don’t let us get out of here now. He calmed down some and went to his car and a moment later came back with a scrap of paper with his phone number on it and his name. He demanded my license and I reached into the back pocket of my cut-off jeans and handed it to him. He said, I’ll give this back to you when I see you tomorrow to have the glass replaced. Then he went back to his car and got in and everyone else did the same thing at the same time. The one pointing the pistol at Mike was one of the last ones to leave. Before he put the pistol away, he said loud so we could all hear him, It’s a good thing that girl is with you two, you’re a couple of lucky motherfuckers. On the long, dark ride home, Cora was cold and silent. Mike lit a joint, and after taking a very long drag from it, passed it around and Cora finally took a hit and she began to warm up some. I kept going on about how quickly they were able to get all those people together to form a roadblock. Even the cops couldn’t have worked that quickly, I said. Mike kept going on and on about how he had never been so scared in his life, and Mike was no stranger to such situations, having already been arrested several times for shoplifting, petty drug offenses, even stealing cars, and he was just barely sixteen years old, two years younger than me and Cora. A couple of miles before we made it into town, Cora finally spoke up for the first time since the incident, and said, How, Lucas, could you not believe in God after what we just went through? What happened to you just a few months ago should make you believe in God. I replied, I died four times in the hospital. Do you understand? Four technical times I was dead. And I’m here to tell you, there’s no such thing as God. There’s just a kind of thick darkness you 72

don’t want to go into, that’s it. No light, no tunnel, no clouds and harps and all that shit. Just nothing. Just darkness. I’ve seen real Nothing. Certainly someone who’s been as dead as I’ve been should know a thing or two about God. The next day, Mike and I left early in the morning to check our crab traps. Cora was back home still sleeping soundly to the drone of the big window unit that kept the house freezing even during the hottest parts of June in Slidell, Louisiana. It was my father’s house, and the three of us had been staying there since he’d beat his second wife to a bloody pulp and gone back into the Navy for the first time since 1972, two years after I was born. Cora and I both moved in after dropping out of high school together, and Mike had just recently moved in to help me run the crab traps I’d stolen and set out in the bayous and lagoons along the Bayou Sauvage in New Orleans East. June is the best month of the year for crabbing and we had plenty enough money to pay back the black man whose windshield I’d destroyed the night before. Mike and I ran the traps and baited them and sorted the crabs in the wooden hampers before we got back to the boat launch. It was a good catch and the prices were still good because it was early in the season so the market wasn’t flooded yet. We weighed in at the seafood market where we’d been taking our catch and Mike and I both walked away with a hundred dollar bill apiece. By the time we got back home to my dad’s house in Slidell, it was only noon. Cora was up and I told her to call the black guy about replacing his windshield. I wanted my driver’s license back. For the first time in my life I was worried about getting stopped and not having it. The three of us drove back to Pearl River, where we were the night before. We found his house and drove up almost to the threshold of his door. It was a new house built of red brick with a sizable carport and an enormous above-ground swimming pool, plastic flamingoes, and all the other little entrapments of a wannabe suburbanite. It was a quaint looking place, warm looking. The black guy and his wife were at the door. They looked friendly enough, and they invited us in. The black guy shook hands with me and said his name was Sylvester. We all sat down in the clean but sparse living room and his wife came in with glasses and a pitcher of tea. Cora sipped her tea nervously; she was a nervous girl no matter where she was or what she 73

was doing. She was very shy around strangers, but it seemed to me that she was making a conscious attempt to talk with the wife. I leaned forward toward the coffee table and got down to business. I pulled out a pocket full of twenties and laid them out one by one on the cold wooden table. It was two hundred dollars to replace the windshield. Sylvester reached down into his front shirt pocket and came up with my driver’s license. He flicked the license down on the table, and I took the license and slipped it into the back pocket of my cut-off jeans that were worn and faded from crabbing every day for a month straight in the summer sun. Mike dug around in a gray duffel bag he carried with him wherever he went. Sylvester looked me up and down for a moment and said, I didn’t know you had only one arm. I said, Yes, I was in a car accident not long ago and the bones in my arm were crushed into many pieces and they had to amputate it. That was only about five months ago, but I’ve made a quick recovery. He’s tough, Mike piped up. Luke is the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the world. Then Sylvester, who seemed a bit taken aback by this newfound knowledge about my arm, said, in a slightly tremulous voice, I wouldn’t have pushed you around last night if I’d known you were crippled. I didn’t notice last night you were missing an arm. You see, we look after each other in this neighborhood. Hell, we can even feel when someone’s in trouble. This whole neighborhood’s got eyes, we’re all real close. The fucking Klan lives only a mile or so down the road, but we keep them in line, we don’t take any shit from them. I thought you were one of them. I said, It was just a stupid thing I did last night, that’s all. I was just drunk and showing off to Cora. I had no idea you were black. All I saw was a chance to break glass. I just can’t resist the sound of broken glass, there’s no other sound like that in the world. You see, I died four times on the operating table in the hospital and I haven’t been the same since. I sometimes think I can walk on water and air; I don’t give a damn about people at all since I died and came back in pieces. Yet, I’m always happy. I can’t explain it at all. You being black had nothing to do with what happened last night. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence after I finished talking. Mike rolled a joint right in front of everybody and he passed the joint around and all of us got high. We talked about the night before, already the distant past. As we were leaving, Sylvester ordered a hamper of crabs from 74

me and a quarter bag of weed from Mike. Sylvester said we were welcome to the neighborhood anytime. As we drove back home in the very same car we were in last night shaking with fear, Cora leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth and said I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stupid anymore. I could see Mike in the rear view mirror. He was smoking a cigarette and looking well. 1989

Abstract Landscape by Sten & Lex 76

The Miscarriage Allen Davis

Mike stopped sorting the mail, took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. I was surprised to see him cry because he was a tough guy who once broke a coworker’s nose. But Laura had been bleeding and this was their child, in the toilet. The medical person on the phone told him: “Pick it up. Feel it. Describe it to me.” Their child. In the toilet. Then he had to go to work. What do you say to a man at a time like that? “Throw the mail,” scowled a fat supervisor. “Just throw the fuckin’ mail.” “Go fuck yourself,” said Mike. He signed out on the bathroom break sheet, then I did too. When I got to the locker room two rum & Cokes in plastic cups were waiting on the shelf of his locker. We tapped cups and tossed them right down, then another and another and another. I took a joint from my pocket and we stood under an air vent and lit up. We started walking, no destination. We floated along, huge machines thrashing all around us, hundreds of people moving in slow motion. A freight elevator opened up and a little Vietnamese man rolled out trays and trays of mail. We took it down to the loading docks, hopped off, and in the darkness we walked along the grimy depressing channel with water so thick it barely moved. A car stopped ahead of us and a woman jumped out shrieking, “Agggggghhhhhh!” Her tortured cry pierced the night like the horn of a freight train. She leaned on the railing over the water and screeched again: “Agggggghhhhhh!” “Wait!” shouted Mike. He ran to her and they embraced like long lost lovers. Muffled crying. Relief.

A Necessary Feat Emmet Martin Penney With a line from the journals of Edvard Munch

A photo: one man dives into another’s chest. A chasm in the body’s cagework accommodates his skull— a necessary feat of living. Somewhere in the house a faucet left on all night, the water like an unfouled rope—it’s November, and still I can sleep only with the windows open. In a glass bottle, the mouse rests her carcass against the spiny rinds of her children. They would not leave the frozen earth. You were the morsel smuggled through the judas-hole, you were every hope I had for your first name carved into the soap I used to scour myself nightly. Hunger shepherds me to you.

Lead Me Where My Trust Is without Borders by Jane Wunrow

Remedies Emmet Martin Penney

Tell me again about the rain barrel of dog bones we found in the field of felled timber. That the moon sat a chewed nail spat into the dawn sky and that the trees had long untongued themselves for winter. Tell me it was so cold our rods and cones misfired: everything orange, counterfeit. In the dream, you are the sheriff. Your revolver was a gift from your father and your grandfather shaped its grip from the antlers of an enormous elk. You flick lit cigarettes at my forehead. I tell you, I hate the grind of restraints on my infected cuts,that I never set fire to the photos of your mother, but your one good eye hounds the dark for clues. Today, the crows gather in, then uncoil their blackery, but the bats wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t return until summer to marshal whole the moths that hazard the porchlight. Like last year, when the fireflies you caged in your hands threw their panicked lights against your fingers. I prescribe for myself vulgar cures: a fist of mice hearts under my pillow to calm my dreams, a vial of baby spittle to blunt my heart.

The Fat King Eglon Murdered Nick McRae

And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat. And Ehud […] took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into [Eglon’s] belly: And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out. — Judges 3:20-22 Eglon must have shuffled toward the door and sunk down on his chamber pot when he had the strength to go no further— must have smiled in his delirium to die safe in his privy, the pot so close at hand. He must have seen his hairy belly through the gape sliced in his robe, the wound dark and plump like parted lips—must have felt his innards clasp the dagger blade to hilt as it settled in his bowels. He must have gasped at his final pleasure, the shit and piss like a spirit pushing free of his body—heard the hollow slap of it on the bottom of the blood-damp pot. He must have heard his servants, nervous, shuffling in the hall, remembered hours he’d spent luxuriating in the thrill of relief— how often an embarrassed servant’s knock had broken the spell. He must have died there, squatting heavy on the pot, a breeze through the open terrace window stirring his robe about his ankles—must have reveled 81

in the freedom of his solitude: alone, unwashed, unjudged, unfettered.

Yin Hunter Shi by Tararchy 83

12:14 AM, Bangkok Jaime Mathis

It is 12:14 AM, Bangkok time, and I am drowning in my own sweat. Death pulverizes logic. A silver minnow streaks through my thoughts without result, tickling the concrete body I cannot move. This is ridiculous. Wiggle your toes. I can’t. Inhale. The world is reduced to shadow and paint and the weightless respiration of my roommate. “It’s alright,” a photon whispers, slatting through the blinds, “You’re not dying. You’re 22.” Neurons bundle tighter, oil bouncing on a piping-hot skillet, electric acid burning through chemical pathways in defiance of logic. Math begins. Solving for x, if a equals a twelve-hour plane ride and b equals life without Jesus, what is the answer? Heart Attack. Obviously. Deep Vein Thrombosis due to poor salvation, the cause. It is terribly still in this liminal dark, as though life hangs paralyzed in the abyss between shadow and light. Every sound its own inescapable melody. The ceiling fan throbs, a washing machine rocking off-center. It cannot knock impending doom from its pedestal. For a second, a shred of clarity hovers over my eyes: “Wake Karen. Ask for help.” There is a rhinoceros sitting on my chest, compressing lungs, impossible to budge. Speaking is a luxury, and I am a pauper. As a child of six or seven, I used to visit the forest behind the Cape Cod home my father had built. There, I would try to freeze time. The first step was to hold my breath, casually, so as not to alert Time to my intentions. Next, I would repeat a mantra in my head: “Time is frozen. Time has stopped. Time is frozen. Time has stopped.” At last, I would look at my watch the moment I began to exhale, hoping with all the nonchalance I could muster that it would read the same numbers as it had when I’d begun. I never lingered in the forest after I read the results, but I always walked back slower than I’d arrived.

Time was the ultimate sense. It was faith made manifest in seconds and days. If I understood Time and, through that understanding, controlled it, I would know Truth: that still, small voice capable of telling right from wrong and what to do next. If I failed to stop Time, it was proof that I was an imposter in my own life. Desire required kid gloves. Caring too much would leave me in exile, without an existence to call my own. Each failure was a hairline fracture hatching itself through the granite conviction of being Right. This was before I got cancer, before I knew that Seventh-day Adventism was spiritual foot binding that would release me gasping and disfigured in a cheap hotel on the other side of the globe after I unwrapped myself. This was the golden age when Words had gravitas, when Truth and Right were countries everyone envied you for having visited. Time stops fifteen years after my first attempt to arrest it. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d forgotten about the childhood experiments. Now that theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re working, I want amnesia. When Time stops, I die. It needs to speed up. I need to speed up so I can live before my horrible wish comes true. A translucent sheet sticks to my body like rice paper on the tongue. Every systole reinforces the path of blood to heart. How many heartbeats from death am I? Will it be sudden, like bumper cars crashing into each other, sparks flying down from the ceiling? I hope I will simply drop to sleep and never awaken. The fan whumps overhead, pushing air ripe with vomit and chili sweat over my unblinking eyes. I cannot pray, will not pray, because I hurled belief at the sky a year ago and have closed that door forever. If I am to die, I will die facing the chipped plaster wall, wondering what they will do with my body instead of wondering whether I will go to heaven. Death is calm crystal, a gentle hand on either side of my eyes, making me focus on one thing. Nothing else is important like this. My hands lie still at my sides, breath suspended between inhale and exhale. I win back all those years of wondering and mediocre longing. If I get up from this, I will return to my spawning grounds and make peace with the past. It is not a bargain,

but a promise. The clarity is there, forcing itself upon me like a street-side evangelist. Self-knowledge is unflattering at this hour. I want to die in a place where I can read the signs and speak my name to someone without having to repeat myself. This universe of personal must-haves is microscopic and meager. My body is a plank left to dry and crack in the sun. Will it ever bend again? The thought disappears, shame hanging its head. This is no time for romanticizing. My lungs collapse and inflate at the moment I surrender to an anonymous demise. As if they were immobilized until I found some humility. The clock is moving again, and I can hear the subsonic click of the second hand next to my head. With it comes the barrage of thoughts and expectations of what I deserve, how I will get it, and how far away Portland, Oregon, is. Clarity is fast becoming a titration of the past. Every second pulls me back toward a cluttered bearability. I whisper Karen’s name in the dark and apologize for waking her. She replies softly, her voice full of innocence and faith, the stream carrying blossoms aloft as it speeds over rock and fall. “It’s okay Jaime. How can I help?” For a second, it seems like I can erase these adulterous minutes and say, “Tell me it’s all okay, that I’m not dying.” All I should need to do is look at my watch for everything to fall into lockstep normality, the lowgrade despair settling over me like a favorite ice-cream binge. “I have to go, Karen. I have to go back to Portland.” It is the only thing that makes sense to my shell-shocked brain. I’ve always counted on my mind to carry me out of harm’s way and into opportunity. It has never abandoned me, always held the flicker of possibility of what I could be, what I almost am, even when the voices of Jesus, Ellen White, Mother and Church cascade over my resolve like a tsunami. But they’ve never chimed in unison before this night. You’ll burn without us. Your cancer is back. Your heart is failing. You will never have the chance to repent. This is your punishment. We are real. This is Truth. Your time is up.

I will get back to Portland by any means necessary so I can apologize to my mother and die in familiar surroundings. I have been too strange for too long and Bangkok is the final insult to my conservative, proper, dutiful upbringing. This is the moment of reckoning. Will I choose my alien path or return to the fold? What is truth when I am being wooed by death? I don’t want unknown adventure lying beside trash-lined canals in Thailand. I don’t want to teach English in countries where the people look the same to my Western eyes. I don’t want to live at constant odds with my family. I want to be boringly healthy with no idea that the world consists of more than being the featured singer on Sabbath. My eyes are opened. I will sell out for security and leave my pride, my dreams, my secular hope on the floor in this cinder block way house and feel vomitously grateful for my mother’s credit card that buys me tickets at each stop around the world. She and my father do not know I am playing the global prodigal until I reach San Francisco. I have lied to the ticket agent in London and then again in Houston to get the next flight out. My grandfather, dead two years, is dying again for my benefit. No one questions me. I punch myself in the face in the lavatory from Bangkok to London to try and silence the voices. They chatter like wives at potluck. Getting on a long-haul flight so soon after the last one will make your heart explode. Don’t take that aspirin with the Dramamine. It will give you a heart attack. I puke all the way to London. This is Truth. Life is a moment. Every second is a cadaver. Time is no ally, merely an opportunist. I stand on the curb outside Portland International Airport, waiting for my father to collect me. He does his duty and keeps a suitable distance. This is a normal reunion. The air is Oregon-fresh, redolent with wet pine and life. I think of the forest again, the solemn acceptance of failure each time my breath ran out before Time capitulated. My father lifts the red suitcase into the Montero and squires me home with a few questions about the trip. We are living on separate threads of reality and there is scant faith to leap any 87

further. This is good enough. I can close my eyes and disappear into the terrible days spanning who I was becoming and what I should have been.

Lyric IX Juan Eugenio Ramirez

It begins with simple obeisance an offering of shells an oil lamp lit on a dock where seagulls arbitrate scavenging rights amongst themselves unlash a certain commandment girls will stay youthful despite having loved on boardwalk ambles early afternoons children come into contact with an absurd patchwork of adults who call to them off-shore the way rain throughout the night drips languor into sailorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ears bearing wrecks splintered the moment theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re plucked wet from mother sacks by bony hands too fragile to provide enough warmth

Dades Gorge Marin Sardy

You see it sometimes in car commercials. Spectacular, plunging. The steep desert ridge, the hairpinned road, the sharp edge. We were tired by then, accustomed to avoiding eye contact in the streets, although the men in Morocco—Berbers (Moors, I at some point realized)— were the most beautiful we had seen anywhere. Strange, to be fending them off when we wanted to stare. But in Boumalne Dades we had been spooked immediately. On a walk, on a small path, two had followed us at a distance. The town was clustered at the base of the rocks. The color of sand. There were no other tourists at the hotel. But Sadie was sick and collapsed in the bathroom, hit her head on the thick wooden door. Across the street I bought antibiotics. She slept and we waited two winter days. In the café several men gathered. There was propane there, a heater lit just for us, the paying customers. They told us this, turning toward us with open faces, welcoming, curious. They hovered, served us tea and soup. A young man glared, then addressed us in Berber. I threw out a few words, all I knew. Azul! (Hello.) Mush! (Cat.) He stared, and then switched to English and showed me how to write my name in his ancient, alien alphabet. Others spoke of the Arabs, their long-ago conquerors, bringers of Islam. A bus driver came and went. Soft face, soft voice. He told us the Berber women had too many babies, one every year, no medicine. He looked at us as if we were his daughters and said, “The women here suffer more than the men.” We had met one young woman at the hammam, tried to speak to her as we paid for our baths, found no common language but our tattoos—hers on her face, ours on the smalls of our backs. With gestures we asked how hers was done, and she held up a safety pin.

In the fields grandmothers bent under loads of sticks, hauling them home for cooking fires. Black fabric cloaked them, covering all but a single eye. Hassan, the young man, had been to university. He would not get married. He did not want his grandma with her ear to the door on his wedding night. Did not want the bloody sheet hung like a flag out the window. He frightened me. There was rage in his voice. But he wrote in my journal, You are mazing. Why did they tell us all this? The bus driver said he had tried to pass out birth control pills, but the women would not take them. He had even tried to trick them by saying it was candy. We looked at each other. “The women here,” he said, “suffer too much.” That is what they told us. They, with their history, their poverty, their dry cold wind. Their Berber letter yaz, signifying freedom, its shape like a man with his arms up. Themselves, men. The rocks of Dades outside, stacked and shorn. The world, cleft. And we, their pale confessors.

Inverted Pyramid in Color by Christopher Derek Bruno

Heads Jasmine Nikki â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Nikayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; C. Paredes

When it happened to an aunt she said take me. It begins: an aversion to light. Pulse is also an inconvenience. I am thinking: ill blood under a microscope. I want to ruin the lamp.

Nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Woman by Pamela Rivas

Lyric X Juan Eugenio Ramirez

You in reverse a perfectly built human you naked at sunrise lugging baggage towards the door forests with eyelids instead of leaves flutter in god space between Earth and Oceanus just outside the door your breathing sounds minor chords into existence lays trinkets of reverence at your motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feet a hopliteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shield and helm a withered elm branch but perfect that day with many endearing habits like dancing with the dog clumsily balancing herself on hind legs while you hold her front paws an absurd pas de deux a thousand demons chase sunspots across the titanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face leaving it a pocked-marked archipelago just another god outside your door

The Mad Boy Steven Klepetar

He dances in the yard around trees and over the big rock until moonlight calms him and he rests by the sleeping flowers at the fence. His brow is cool and pale, his wide blue eyes aflame with what he sees in the glowing leaves: faces which love nothing human or divine.

Twelve Days in October Elizabeth Inness-Brown

Thursday, October 12 We’re all standing around, talking, eating, mindlessly eating and drinking coffee. The day is blustery October: glimpses of blue sky between furious clouds, breezy, chilly. When the balloons come—twenty-four of them, red, white, and blue —my mother calls everyone together: friends, relatives, us. We go outside to the front yard, a vast green space. The ground is, thankfully, not wet. The air is crisp. The wind grabs at our clothes, stings our cheeks. We each take a balloon. I’m worried that someone will let go too soon, but nobody does. We stand in a big circle, twenty-four of us. My mother instructs us. “One, two, three,” she says, and we all whistle, two tones, and release our balloons. They go up quick, then dance around for a moment, as if unsure of where to go. Then the wind catches them, and all twenty-four go off together in the same direction, toward town, up and away. We watch as they recede. It’s over.

Sunday, October 1 Ever since I got the call on Thursday, I’ve been thinking about what today will be like. I’m driving home to Ogdensburg to help my father write his obituary. What a strange assignment. What a difficult assignment. I’m driving alone—I wanted this chance to be alone with him, at least a little while. Next week all the siblings will come—this is my chance to have him to myself, one last time.

The drive, three hours, is unmemorable. My mind is not on the road. Then I am home. My brother Brian is still there; he and my father are working on the transceiver. The transceiver is this kit radio my dad has been working on pretty much ever since he found out his cancer’d come back, back in the spring. It’s finished now. It’s a miracle he finished it, not so much because of the cancer but just because it’s this tiny unit with tiny parts, really small, and he had to solder hundreds of little pieces into hundreds of tiny spots. As a surgeon, he has always had a steady hand, a good eye. But now his eyes are not as good and his hands much less steady. Still, he’s kept at it. Since he can’t make it up to the attic anymore to work on it, Brian has brought it down to the breakfast table in the den, along with the necessary testing equipment. They sit together and test it for quite some time. I watch from my spot on the loveseat, talking to my mom, who is in the kitchen across from me. This is the main gathering place for family, in this house of many gathering places. When Brian declares that the unit “tests out,” he gets ready to leave, and I get ready to take over. Daddy tells me that he’s printed out something he calls his “CV.” While he takes a nap in his recliner in the living room, I go upstairs to look for it. I find it lying on the desk in the bedroom. Right now he’s still sleeping nights up here, despite the struggle to climb the stairs. I sit down at the bedroom computer, which is on a classy old oak desk. For comfort, I pull open the drawer and set the keyboard on it. Then I go to work. The “ceevee,” as he spells it, is essentially an outline of his life, in paragraph form, starting at the beginning and working forward. It’s not very detailed, but more detailed than anything I’ve ever read about him before, or heard from him. Oh, I’ve heard stories, but I never got the real facts, you know? I look for the file on the computer and, when I find it, I discover that it was last updated ten years ago, 1996—around the time he first got prostate cancer. Not much has changed since then, except the addition of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So I get down to work. The hardest thing is to figure out how to say the first line. How to say he “died,” when he is still alive downstairs and is going to read this when I have a draft ready. I play with a few options, not committing any of them to paper. In the end I choose “passed into the next life.” I don’t believe in the afterlife—I’m not a religious person that way—but I do like to believe that 98

when someone or something dies, its spirit, or life essence, or something like that, remains in the universe. Isn’t there a law of physics along those lines? About matter being constant? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I do know that at the moment a child is conceived, something begins to exist that never existed before—something that I hope continues to exist beyond death. But as the child before conception does not exist, so too, perhaps, after death. We have no way of knowing. In any case, those are the words I choose. The story writes itself easily. I rearrange the elements of his life into topics, as is traditional with obituaries: a paragraph of survivors and “nonsurvivors” tells the reader about his family life; five paragraphs cover his education and career and hobbies. A final paragraph tries to show what he meant to different people: Known as “Hugh” to Jackie, as “Doc” to his ham radio friends, as “Bud” to his sisters, as “Daddy” to his children…. When I have a draft, I take it downstairs. Daddy is still in his chair. His cat, Betty, is on his lap. She is definitely his cat—she barely lets anyone else touch her. Some people, like Brian, can’t approach without her arching and hissing. Sometimes I can pet her a few times before she hisses at me. So be it. She’s made her commitment to Daddy. He takes a look at the draft. He points out a few things. He doesn’t like being a “junior,” even though he was named after his father—he wants that cut, just “Hugh A. Inness-Brown, MD,” please. His first-born son, my halfbrother, likes to be called Allen, even though his name is Hugh Alwyn, like my father’s, making him a III. “Actually,” Daddy says, pointing to the part about his education and smiling, “I never graduated from high school.” “Really?” I say. “Your CV says you got a diploma….” “Yes,” he says. “When I joined the service, the army made them give me a diploma. But I never actually graduated.”

He seems kind of proud of this. I notice, from the date he gives for enlisting in the service, that he was twenty years old then. “Why did you join up?” I say. “Because of the war?” It was 1942. “Yes,” he says, nodding. “That was just what everyone did, then.” I watch him as he reads the rest of the draft. He proclaims that I did a good job. I try to feel gratified by this, but I know how hard it must be for him. He doesn’t want to die. He really enjoys life, even now. But then I guess the hardest thing must be knowing your time is short, while not really being able to enjoy it much. He can’t eat. He doesn’t sleep well. There’s quite a lot of pain. Over the next twenty-four hours, I make revisions, showing it to my sister, my mother, my niece and nephew—everyone who comes over. At their suggestion, I add a few things. Daddy looks at it again, and he approves it. Then I go home. I have to teach the next day. “Goodbye, Daddy,” I say. “Duty calls.” He gives me a smile, and we exchange a hug and kiss and say I love you.

Friday, October 6 This morning my plan was to spend the morning urethaning the new windows we just installed upstairs; I wanted to rehang the curtains in my eight-year-old’s room and the bathroom. Then I was going to pack, and this afternoon, after Michael’s school let out, we would drive to my parents’ house. That all changes when my mother calls, around eight, and tells me to come right over. “I don’t know how much longer he’ll last…,” she says. I call my husband, who’s working in his office over the garage, and tell him the change of plans. Then I run around the house, getting together clothes and things for the trip. I leave behind my “funeral clothes”; I leave behind my work. Do I do that on purpose? I don’t think so. It’s just hard to know what to think, what to do—I’m in a hurry. Again, the drive is unmemorable. The main difference this time is that I have Keith and Michael in the car with me. Keith drives, which leaves me 100

free to cry at will. I try not to cry too much in front of Michael; I know it upsets him. I’d told Michael about Daddy—Grampa—the night I got the call that they were not going to do the procedure, the kidney stent that might have kept him alive for another month or more. The doctor had advised him not to, saying that it would be very painful and he would have to be kept heavily medicated—not much quality of life. But it was my father’s decision. As a doctor, my father knew what the future held, and he decided to face it directly. When my mother called to tell me the news, I couldn’t help but cry; then Daddy got on the phone, and the two of us were crying so hard that few words got exchanged. I’ll come help you write your obituary, I said, and he said, I would appreciate that. That was all. We had just hung up when Michael came into the room and saw me crying. “What happened?” he said, and I could see the alarm in his little face. I put my arms out for him and hugged him. “Nothing,” I said, and then I told him that Grampa was dying. I told him a little about why; then I shifted the topic to Grampa when he was younger. “Did you know Grampa used to race cars and motorcycles?” His eyes got wide. “He did?” And I told him a little about that. Since then we haven’t really talked about it, but he knows this trip is to go see Grampa before he dies. When we arrive, it’s quite a scene. My parents live in the country, and their well has just failed. A new one is being dug, right next to the house, right off the corner of the living room. Huge machinery, very loud, lots of steam and dust and mud. A rhythmic thumping sound as the drill digs down. Inside the house are my four siblings from California, from my father’s first marriage. Tauri, obese yet beautiful, with her glowing face and long, streaming, wavy, gray-streaked hair; Lee, also very large, dark-haired, like a fatter version of my father when young; Ginny, petite, with long, straight red hair—she must take after her mother; and Allen, the oldest, still pretty handsome, still apparently in pretty fair shape, although the rough life he’s led shows in the lines in his face. Allen looks most like Daddy. He’s sixtytwo, ten years older than I. Brian, my half-brother, the baby, out of Daddy’s 101

third marriage, is also there, having come from Saratoga yesterday for a job interview this morning. My sister Resy—petite, dark-haired, pretty—is there too, doing the cooking and cleaning that my stepmother no longer has time or thought for. So seven of the eight siblings have gathered in vigil over my father. The only one missing is my brother John, a lawyer, who lives in Colorado; he’s juggling a lot of work right now, and is trying to time his visit just right, so that he can see Daddy before the end but also stay through the funeral. Daddy is in the downstairs bedroom now. He can’t move much. He’s in a lot of pain. It’s amazing how fast he’s gone downhill. I guess what they say is true: Once your kidneys go, you go. The cancer that had begun to impinge on his kidney function last week has pretty much marched on without abatement. The doctor had predicted two or three weeks; it’s only been one. Every time I see Daddy, every time I talk to him, I cry. I think I’m the worst about this. I can’t stop. I know it hurts him to see me cry, but I can’t stop. This is the hardest thing. The hardest thing in life, and certainly in my life so far: watching someone die. Watching my father die in such pain, and so reluctantly. He spends most of his time in bed. In this little room, where my mother’s mother spent her final years, the bed is next to the window. This is good, because sometimes my father is hot and we need to open the window and let in some fresh air. We talk about what a nice day it is, outside, and how lucky he is not to be in the living room today, where the noise from the welldrilling makes ordinary conversation almost impossible. People take turns coming in to be with him, but this is made awkward by the room itself; we bring in chairs, but if you sit, you can’t get close to the bed, so you’re not so much with him as you are watching him. I don’t do much of that. Instead, I spend my time with the siblings from California. Tauri has been coming east to see us regularly for about ten years. At first, we resented her—we couldn’t figure out why, after so many years without my father, she wanted him in her life again. Also, she seemed pretty flaky, full of all kinds of New Age ideas about nutrition, paranoid about the government, stuff like that. Now, of course, that all seems pretty standard to me, she’s been right about a lot of it, and I like her, although I still find her 102

manner of asking you to repeat yourself all the time a little irritating. And of course, now I understand why she wanted Daddy back in her life—and in her children’s, and her grandchild’s. So Tauri and I catch up, here and there, talking. Then I spend a long time, in the living room, on the couch, with the well-drilling going on in the background, with Ginny. Ginny’s the only one I’ve never met before. She’s about 60, I guess, or 61—second oldest. Her long hair is red without a bit of gray; it looks natural, but there’s no way it can be. Or is there? She’s supposedly something of a magician with herbal remedies, New Age medicine. Maybe she’s found a way to keep her hair young while her face ages. She’s pale, gamine-like. Later on, after they’ve left, my aunt will call her “needy.” I don’t see much need in her. Rather, she seems extremely inturned, introverted, like someone listening to voices only she can hear. As we talk, she holds a pillow to her belly and looks at me intently with those clear, bright-blue eyes that always seem on the verge of tears. She tells me how she survived cervical cancer in her twenties by seeking alternative treatments and making dietary changes, and how she is studying to become a naturopath. I’ve been hearing about this “studying” from Tauri for years; Tauri seems to worship Ginny’s magical powers, although she doesn’t seem to apply them to her own health. I ask Ginny what she does, meaning for a job. She looks perplexed for a moment, and then tells me that for the past few years she’s been taking care of an aging aunt, who’s just died this past summer. “I’m still living in her apartment,” she says. “Dealing with her things….” That explains the voices, I think. Her own voice trails off a lot. I gather that the aunt had children of her own, and that they are interested in the “things” too. It sounds like a sticky situation. And vague, and weird, like most accounts of my California siblings’ lives. Later on, Ginny retreats to her room. At first we assume she’s just catching up on sleep; they took a night flight over and arrived around midnight, spent the night in a hotel in Syracuse and drove two hours to get here by noon. Later it becomes apparent that she’s not coming out of her room. I ask Tauri if she’s all right. “She’s meditating for Dad,” Tauri says. I’ve always hated 103

the way she calls him Dad—the correct term is Daddy. “Oh,” I say, as if that explains everything. I don’t talk to Lee and Allen that much, but I do sit in on a number of conversations they have with other people. Allen has done well-drilling for a living, so periodically he goes outside to check on the driller’s progress. Lee, affable as always, moves about the rooms in a way that is both hulking and gentle, silent. We all move about from room to room as if floating, or swimming, like fish in a bowl. Trapped there but without much to do. At some point, does Jo come over? I can’t remember. I think so. Jo is an old friend from high school, who, back in May when she joined us for dinner one night and saw my father’s death looming ahead, volunteered to be my surrogate—a surrogate daughter to my parents—to visit them once a week and talk to them about death and dying and preparations therefor. She’d been through it all with her mother, who died of cancer when Jo was about thirty. She knows the ropes. And she knew that, as an outsider, she could broach topics the rest of us couldn’t. Over the last six months, she has become a real friend to my parents, especially to my mother, and a real part of our family. After dinner, it becomes known that Daddy wants to join us in the living room. This turns out to be more difficult than it might seem, because of course he can’t come under his own power, but neither can anyone lift him. Finally Brian goes up to the attic and brings down Daddy’s office chair, which has wheels, and they manage to get him into it and roll him into the living room, and transfer him to his recliner. “Daddy’s chair.” I don’t remember much of what happens that evening—just that we are all there, all the siblings, and by then we’re joined by Brian’s wife and kids, and Resy’s three kids and their siblings and children and girlfriends…all there, all together. At some point, Keith, Michael, and I leave—we are spending the night at a motel, the house being overfull. At eight, Michael finds staying in a motel a treat; he finds anything new a treat. This motel’s not much, as motels go, but it has the virtue of being cheap, and in the morning when we wake up, a thick fog will have risen up from the nearby river, making it seem as if we have been sleeping in a cloud.

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Saturday, October 7 We go out for breakfast—I’m not sure why, maybe to keep from adding to the burden at the house. Throughout all of this, my mother has been absorbed by my father, unable to sleep or eat, focused completely on him. Yet she has not come unhinged. This amazes me—that this woman, for whom an overcooked piece of meat can be a tragedy, can be so strong under circumstances such as these. When we get back to the house, things have changed. We learn that they were unable to get Daddy back into bed the night before. They got him into the office chair, and rolled him to the bedroom, but once there, it was all they could do to transfer him to another chair; they could not get him into bed. So now hospice is bringing a hospital bed: it will go into the living room, which is already prepared, the furniture rearranged so that his bed is right next to the window outside of which stands the well-digging equipment. (Luckily it’s Saturday and the well-drillers don’t work on weekends; in fact, because Monday is Columbus Day, they won’t be back till Tuesday.) I can’t recall now how or when the bed actually came, or how Daddy got transferred to it—were we gone, had we gone shopping or something?—it’s possible; I think I took Michael to the store at one point. In any case, all that happened. And then he is there. The side of the house facing the new well has been draped with a blue tarp to protect it from the mud. The tarp covers the two windows near the bed; this gives the scene an appropriately respectful feeling, an eerie blueness. Now we are all able to sit next to him, to hold his hand. From that moment onward I don’t think there is one moment he does not have someone beside him. Whenever I hold his hand, it is warm and his grip is strong. Even when his eyes are closed, he can hear what you say and respond, although he can no longer really speak. I remember now…yesterday, just yesterday, at some point…in the little bedroom…we were helping him, and I was reaching across him to open or

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close the window, and he said to me, “I’m dying, aren’t I?” and taken by surprise, I didn’t lie. “We think so,” I said. “But not today.” I am upstairs when the minister arrives. By the time I come down, he has already begun to sing. A stocky black man in a sports shirt, looking very un-ministerlike, holding my father’s hand in both of his, and singing the Lord’s Prayer in the most beautiful, deep voice I’ve ever been in a room with. He sings it very, very slowly, drawing out every syllable. He may be making the tune up as he goes. Daddy is lying there with his eyes closed, and seems to have become very calm and peaceful. I’m thinking this might be the moment he dies, but it isn’t. When the prayer is over, the minister says, “I’m going let you go now, bro,” and lays down Daddy’s hand. Then he turns to us. “I see a lot of sad faces in this room,” he says. “But I want you to know, up there in Heaven, there’s a party going on. There’s a party going on, because they know this good man is coming up to join them. So don’t be sad for him now. Let him go. Let him go up to Lord Jesus….” The day goes by. People come and go. The guy from hospice, John, who is so kind and has such sad eyes, comes and cleans my father up, and there is talk of different kinds of “Depends” to be had, to make changing him easier… they keep talking about this, it seems endlessly, in the living room, with my father right there—and all I can think is how embarrassed he must be, and how they shouldn’t assume he can’t hear them. But maybe he can hear them and he doesn’t care anymore, or maybe he’s not listening. Hospice brought my mother a little book that described the stages a dying person goes through. I can’t recall them now, but I do remember that one stage has to do with withdrawing. I wonder if he has done that. He seems to still be with us. It’s sometime today that my sister Resy, who herself used to be a hospice nurse, goes to his side and says, “Let’s wet your whistle, shall we?” He has started breathing through his mouth, his mouth open wide, like a yawn, not like I’ve ever seen any person breathe. It’s as if it takes too much energy to keep his mouth closed, as if his chin is heavy and pulling his mouth open. Resy takes one of these little blue sponges on a stick, dips it into cool water, and puts it into his mouth, and when she takes it out, he whistles! He 106

whistles like he does whenever he’s been out and comes home, and wants to let my mother know he’s back—two tones: one high, the other lower. He’s still here. He’s not gone yet. Around six, Daddy’s youngest sister, Connie, arrives. Last weekend, my mother asked me to contact all the sisters and Louise, Daddy’s step-aunt. When he found out he was going to die, my father sent them all an email, something to the effect that he “didn’t think he’d make it to his next birthday.” Which would be in February, four months from now. Mom wanted me to let them know how close his death really was, so I did. In the email, I made it as clear as I could. I was blunt, in fact. In response, Aunt Ginny called from Maine and talked to me, letting me know that she “couldn’t come now”—something to do with appointments and schedules. She said she was planning to come at the end of the month. I knew she knew, from my email, that he wouldn’t be with us that long, and I wondered how she could not drop everything and come? Her own brother? Her only brother? Aunt Page responded by email, saying she couldn’t come either. But I hadn’t expected her to, because she herself is quite old and alone and lives farther away, in South Carolina. It would be too long and difficult a trip for her. Aunt Louise I called, not having her email address, and she said that she and “the boys”—her sons—were planning to come to the funeral. But I hadn’t heard from Aunt Connie. “I think she’ll just come,” my mother said, and indeed, here she is, a day earlier than even she expected to arrive. She walks into the room and, at the sight of my father, stops, her hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes. From then on, she is either by his side, or somewhere cooking. That evening, I decide to show everyone the ice-fishing video. When my father turned 75, in 1997, I had just finished writing a novel, which was (in part) about ice-fishing, so for a birthday present I took him ice-fishing. I’d never been before, nor had he, although he was an avid fisherman who had 107

done all kinds of other fishing. So he drove over to Vermont and we put on lots of warm clothes and off we went. For $35 up in Alburgh, just north of where I live, you get tip-ups, bait, firewood, and a free trip in a pick-up truck out to your own shanty, complete with a little woodstove and the holes already drilled for you. Well, this had to be the most boring fishing experience either of us had ever had, and yet at the same time it was wonderful, sitting out there together in the cold, on the ice, in the strange silence that dampens every sound. The ice crunching under your boots. The ice twenty or more inches thick. It was Daddy who brought the video camera. Parts of the film he filmed, and then he let me take over for a while. I’d never operated a video camera before. So there’s this little span of time when the film turns sideways, as if we’re suddenly on our sides, “walking up walls,” so to speak. Because I didn’t know how to hold the camera. Trust me, it’s hysterical. There are long segments where my father is sleeping on the little bench, nothing is happening with the fish, I’m narrating sotto voce like a golf commentator, and everything is sideways. So there we all are—twenty or more of us—gathered in the living room, perched everywhere, watching this silly little film of me and Daddy fishing and sitting and sleeping, and laughing hysterically as Daddy is dying. I wonder if he knows why we’re laughing. I wonder if he’s listening. Late, late tonight, the California siblings are going home, so Keith and Michael and I can stay at the house. We find beds. We sleep. I don’t remember where.

Sunday, October 8 When we wake up, the house is quieter. The California siblings are gone. Aunt Connie has occupied the little downstairs bedroom where Daddy used to be, and she’s sleeping. The question of the day is: Will I stay or will I go? After lunch Michael and Keith are going home, because Michael has school tomorrow. I can stay, I’m told; someone will get me home later. But I decide 108

to go, if for no other reason than to get my work and clothes and come back tomorrow. We leave after lunch. I don’t know what I was thinking. More than anything else, I regret leaving. I should have known not to. I don’t know why I didn’t. It just seemed impossible that my father would die while I was gone. We get back to Vermont around three. Michael wants to go to AppleFest, an annual event in our little town that will end at four. It’s a bright, blue, beautiful day. The crowd moves in waves up and down South Street. We do our usual routine of stopping at every flea market vendor and buying little. I get my traditional three potholders from the potholder lady, although she herself isn’t there today; I gather from eavesdropping on her husband that she’s sick. When I see people I know, I try to smile and not say My father’s dying! I try to have a good time with Michael. These are the things memories are made of. When we get back in the car, he says, “We missed AppleFest!” I say, “What are you talking about—we were just at AppleFest!” “But we missed most of it!” he says, and I know what he means. I explain that AppleFest happens every year, and next year we won’t miss it. What I don’t explain is that, next year, my father is not going to be dying.

Monday, October 9 Monday morning, around eight, I call home. Brian answers. He tells me that Daddy’s having a hard time breathing—he calls it “the death rattle.” I cringe at this, but then he tells me that he asked Daddy if he wanted hospice to bring something out to suction out the fluid and make it easier for him to breathe, and Daddy nodded, and Brian’s already called them, and they are on the way. I tell him I’ll be leaving shortly to come back. We hang up. I’ve just begun rushing around the house to pull my things together when the phone rings again. It’s Brian. 109

“Daddy just died.” I do that thing that people do—gasp and put my hand over my mouth. Tears spring to my eyes. “Just now?” I say. “Just this minute?” Then Brian says, “But listen, Giz.” (He still calls me Giz after all these years. My childhood name.) “It was a beautiful thing. I know that sounds weird, but it was….” And he tells me the story that I will hear later from Mom and from him, too, over and over. Their forty-first anniversary was to be October 16th. My sister Resy had been after Mom to read Daddy her anniversary card, but Mom had been delaying. Sunday night, Resy called and told Brian to remind her again, and Mom said, “I’ll do it in the morning.” In the morning, just before eight, she shooed everyone out—Aunt Connie, I think, and the night nurse and Mom’s friend Pat Campanella, who had spent the night helping— so she could be alone with Daddy. Then she took her card down from the mantle and read it to him: It’s been years since we started our voyage together… Years of learning, discovering, compromising and loving. The smooth sailing has been wonderful, and the storms we’ve weathered have drawn us closer. I love you even more today than I did all those years ago, and I’m so glad that I decided to take the journey of a lifetime with you. Then they exchanged a kiss. This is a very important detail: they exchanged a kiss. He was alert enough, there enough, that he could still kiss her. His eyes were open.

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She said, “I’ll always love you, Hugh,” and was kissing him a second time, on the forehead, when he inhaled sharp and deep, just once. She cried out for Brian, who rushed in from the next room and took Daddy’s hand, and whispered to him, “I love you, Daddy.” Then the breath came out, and he was gone. After the call, I cry as I tell Keith, as I get my things together, as I drive back to my parents’ house, alone again this time. By the time I get there, his body is gone, and they are telling another story, this one about the cat. Daddy was the one she liked, and his was the lap she always sought out. He couldn’t sit for long before she’d jump up, and as he got older and moved around less, their times together got longer too. The last few days of his life, it was too much for him, having Betty on his lap. So he’d begun to tell her “no, Betty,” and she’d learned that she had to stay away. But she was never far. When they moved him into the living room, she began to sleep on the coffee table. My mother, uncharacteristically, let her. Such niceties as “cats off tables” didn’t seem to matter any more. When the deacon came to say last rites over my father’s body, everyone gathered around the bed: Mom, Brian, Resy, Aunt Connie, Pat. And Betty the cat. Betty showed up too. At first she sat on the floor next to Aunt Connie. Then she rose up and put her paws up on the bed, and looked into my father’s face. Then she jumped up—the deacon is praying, try to imagine it, no one says a word to Betty—and walked up my father’s body, touched her nose to his chin, and lay down on his chest. Where she remained till the funeral home came to take him away. These two stories will be told over and over the next few days as we prepare for Daddy’s funeral. We tell them to the priest who will be performing the church service. We tell them to the people who come bringing food and condolences. We tell them to each other, over and over. We find solace in the stories, such solace as there is to be had.

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Wednesday, October 11 Brian and Resy have done most of the work of preparing for the funeral. By Monday night, the basics were in place. There will be a viewing tonight at the funeral home, and the service Thursday afternoon at the Episcopal Church. Daddy didn’t want a wake or a long service, and we are doing our best to respect his wishes. On the other hand, we are also doing our best to pay proper homage to him—it’s something we need to do for ourselves. I spend a lot of time at the computer, writing remarks to give at the funeral. I’m the only person who thinks she can hold it together to do it. Emphasize thinks. My brother John arrived yesterday from Colorado. He tries to be his usual, jokey self, but I can tell he’s as sad as we all are, and on top of that feeling sorry, and maybe guilty, that he didn’t come earlier. My friend Jo, Mom’s friend Pat, and my nephew’s girlfriend are the only non-family members going to the viewing. Jo rides in the car with me. The thing I like about Jo is that, as she puts it, she wears her heart on her sleeve. Her emotionality can be off-putting sometimes, even to those who love her, but the nice thing about it is that she feels what you feel—and shows it. You never feel alone in your sorrow or joy if you are with Jo. In the foyer of the funeral home, I find myself very reluctant to go into the room where Daddy is lying. I realize, suddenly, that aside from the funerals of my stepmother’s parents, I’ve never been in the same room with a dead person, and at neither of those events did I go near the bodies. This is going to be different, I can tell. I’ve avoided thinking about it till now, but now there is no avoiding it. The air in the funeral home smells peculiarly disinfected, especially after coming in from outside, where it is a wild October night, the wind knocking leaves and fruit from trees. You might expect there to be the smell of flowers, because there are many flowers, but they seem to be the sort that don’t have much of a scent, and the scent they do have is clean and dry.

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Next to the book where we sign in is a bowl of peppermints. I take one. My mouth, which had been dry, fills with saliva around the sweet, minty taste. I take a second one to put in my father’s pocket, along with the little foldedup note I keep touching in the pocket of my purse. Mom suggested that we all bring a little something to give him, that we all write him a little note. My note says that he should listen to the speech I’m going to give at the service tomorrow, the speech I’ve been working on over the last two days. And the note says I love him and will miss him. That’s all I could fit onto the little slip of yellow paper, which I have folded up tight. Finally Jo and I go into the viewing room. As soon as we enter, Patty, the funeral-home employee who has been helping Resy and Brian with the arrangements, rushes up and takes my arm and pulls me toward the casket. “Say a prayer for him,” she says. Tears come to my eyes and slide down my face. We’ve all been crying a lot, but even so I still feel as if I am crying the most. I can’t seem to stop. Jo starts crying too. I feel so fond of her now, so thankful for all she has done for me, for them, for him. I reach the casket and kneel down on the riser they’ve provided at the head of it. He looks good. He looks like himself, more like himself than he did the last few days of his life. He’s wearing his glasses over closed eyes. He’s wearing a white dress shirt, a sweater, a nice tie—I remember seeing these clothes on Mom’s bed upstairs, but it didn’t register why till now. I hope he’s wearing the shoes I gave him for his last birthday, but I can’t see his legs or feet—they’re hidden at the bottom of the casket, where the top is closed and buried under red and white flowers. Roses. I take the little note and the peppermint and slide them into his sweater pocket. I’m thinking how calm he looks, how prepared my mother must have been to have chosen these clothes for him. I look at his face. I notice that his lips are sealed together—there’s a dark, thin line between his lips, it must be some kind of glue. Of course, they’d have to do that. They couldn’t leave his mouth open, the way it was when he died. I touch his hand. It’s very cold, and surprisingly hard. I’ve never touched a dead person before. I cry harder. My face gets hot and my breath short.

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I stand up. My family is all there, except my husband Keith, and Michael, and my nieces Ali and Kimber—we didn’t think the children should come. Everyone is in various states of mourning—crying, sad, silent; talking, smiling, even laughing. We hug a lot. We say a few words to each other. John makes a joke to me about what he’s going to do at the service tomorrow—something about singing Daddy’s favorite song instead of reading the psalm he’s been assigned. I ask Brian to hit him for me. They look at me strangely. Everything is disjointed, ragged. Nothing makes sense here. We are in the room with our dead father, saying goodbye to someone who is no longer here with us. Brian’s wife, Heather, is having the hardest time. She won’t go near the body. She’s not crying, but her eyes have a distracted, shiny look. She won’t look at him. I talk to her for a while. I don’t know what I said, but it seems to console her a little. I feel closer to her than I ever have. We’re there for about an hour. Mom lets it be known that she wants to leave last. Jo and I go back up to say goodbye to Daddy. I give him a kiss on his lips. They are cold and hard. It’s very hard not to cry—I don’t bother trying not to. Brian lets me know that Heather is going to go up after most everyone else has left. So we leave first, others close behind us. We’ll all meet back at the house, where multiple desserts, too sweet, await us.

Thursday, October 12 The morning of the funeral we spend preparing as if for a party. I’m sent downtown twice, once for food and later again for some little cocktail napkins. My mother is quite specific about the napkins: which store to buy them in, where they are in the store. I choose some that have a blue paisley design on them—Daddy liked paisley—and I buy all kinds of finger foods, sweet and not sweet, for people to eat after the service. We’re not having an open house, but people are invited, mostly my mother’s extended family. Keith and Michael arrive, along with my best Vermont friends, Barbara and Larry. It seems strange to see them here, where they have never been before.

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My cousin Nell arrives from Maine, the only one representing Daddy’s family, aside from Aunt Connie. Then we are all assembled. The men who are serving as pallbearers leave early, all of them nicely dressed in dark suits. A half hour later, we women and Michael are picked up by a limousine. Michael is thrilled to get to sit in front. Keith, Nell, Barbara, and Larry drive to the church in their cars. First we hear the bagpipes. Daddy wanted bagpipes, and a single piper is playing on the sidewalk in front of the church, a deep, full, mournful sound. And loud. As if proclaiming to the whole neighborhood that a man is dead. People are standing in clusters out front. I see Resy’s ex-husband, Bob. The rest of the people blur together. I can’t tell who’s friend or family and who’s from the funeral home. It’s warm but overcast and breezy. I don’t remember much from the funeral. I remember, set up in the vestibule, three easels displaying the pictures we chose, and pausing to look again at the picture of me kissing his cheek at my wedding. I remember there were two Green Beret officers flanking the entry to the inner sanctum—I remember Brian being proud he managed it, he somehow got Daddy military honors. I remember ten-year-old Allie in her white satin blouse and black velvet gauchos, burying her sobbing face into Heather’s body when it finally became clear to her that her beloved Grampa was inside that casket. I remember looking out at the crowd from the pulpit as I read the little speech I’d been writing these last three days, telling everyone about my father’s appetite for food, for life, for love, telling them little stories about what made him the beloved citizen, doctor, father, man he was. I remember that, at the end, I gave Daddy’s whistle. Two tones—high, then low. I remember Mom whistling it back to me….

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I remember the sound of taps being played, so clear and sad in that massive, open space, the notes flying up to the blue-domed ceiling. I remember the soldiers folding the flag and presenting it to my mother. I remember standing shivering in the cold foyer, shaking hands and hugging and thanking all the people who came. I remember wishing that I believed in heaven, in God. The day has turned cold while we were inside. In the front yard, the wind grabs at our clothes, stings our cheeks. We stand in a circle. My mother instructs us. â&#x20AC;&#x153;One, two, three,â&#x20AC;? she says, and we all whistle, two tones, and release our balloons. They dance around uncertainly, and then, as if responding to a call, speed off together into the sky. I stand and watch them as they recede. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s over. It will never be over.

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Dinner Party by Bianca Stone

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CO2 John Keene

An engineer fires up a new power plant. A city on the grid flares like the surface of a star. At the border, a small army masses and husbands its arms. We fail to grasp that we are always grasping and mostly feeling, which eludes the plotted axis. The mother tortoise sweeps beneath the silver wave and the axes, if not the plastic nets. Will we eventually dream of tortoises when there are no more tortoises or mothers to dream of?

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The Sea Is History; We Have Not Learned from It Jasmine Nikki â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Nikayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; C. Paredes

As we die we become lighter. We are held by a bruise-like dark. On the surface the sea foams obscenities. We engine into the horizon then sink unfathomed. Drowning is like being in another country is like being stabbed in another country.

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Flood by Phlegm 120

CONTRIBUTORS

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and Companion to An Untold Story, winner of the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her website is: MarciaAldrich.com. A. H. Jerriod Avant, a native of Longtown, MS and graduate of Jackson State University, was selected to participate in the 2012 and 2013 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University in Providence, RI. A 2013 Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, PLUCK!, A Narrow Fellow, The Rumpus, Callaloo, H_NGM_N, Pinwheel and are forthcoming from Lumberyard. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and is an MFA candidate and Writer in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. Cecile Ceuillette Berberat is a bookbinder and Super 8 filmmaker in Missoula, Montana. She has both her MFA in fiction and her MA in Literature from the University of Montana. This fall, she moves to France to teach English composition to university students in Toulouse. Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, a 501 (c) 3 arts organization based in Oxford, Mississippi. Bourgeois is also the founder and co-instructor of the Prison Writes Initiative, a writing program set-up for Mississippi inmates. Christopher Derek Bruno is a maker above all other things. After his education in industrial design, Derek has moved about the United States cultivating his approach to the design/fabrication of furniture and sculpture based imagery. Currently residing in his hometown of Atlanta, his recent work intends to explore the cognitive visual experience. Justine Champine recently received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fiction program. She lives in Manhattan where she is at work on her first novel.

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Adam Cicchini is an illustrator / designer from Perth, Western Australia who works predominately in graphite. His works center around the human form with plays between the feminine and masculine or the perceived dominant and submissive. Shebana Coelho is a poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her poems have been published in Chronogram, WordRiot, the Malpais Review, Sin Fronteras and Lummox. Her website is www.shebanacoelho.com Allen Davis is completing a novel of interconnected stories about people in crisis. He works at a bank and is an avid photographer. Bill Derks is a small town Michigan writer currently living in the bosom of Brooklyn. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University, holds an MFA, and his work has been published in Lumina, The Laureate, Display, and online through Carte Blanche. Dylan Egon, from NYC, lifestyle artist, represented by the Jonathan LeVine gallery. Social political pop art. Functional, multiple and one of a kind objects. Elif Varol Ergen is a graphic designer and illustrator from Ankara, Turkey. She received her master’s degree in graphic design from Hacettepe University, and her PhD from Hogeschool Gent Fine Arts Academy. Her work has been shown in galleries around the world. She currently works as a lecturer and is represented by CDA Projects Gallery. You may find more of her work at: http://www.elifergen.com/ Ever has always been fascinated by the human body, the meat that hides the bones, by what we hold inside. This is the nature of his work, to give importance to the inconsequential, to “deify” an unremarkable person. His work may be found at http://eversiempre.com/ Faith has been known to paint walls and canvases that dig into the dirt and fire of existence with parables and images that somehow linger well after one has closed one’s eyes.

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Maria Flaccavento is a poet from southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California San Diego. Her work can be found in The Apiary, Bedfellows, The Fanzine, and online. Elizabeth Inness-Brown is the author of the story collections Satin Palms and Here, and the novel Burning Marguerite. She teaches at Saint Michael’s College and lives in the Champlain Islands of Vermont, where she gardens and nurtures two cats, one son, and a husband. John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations; Seismosis, an art-poetry dialogue with Christopher Stackhouse, as well as the forthcoming short story collection Counternarratives. His translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer appeared earlier this year. An artist whose work has been exhibited in Brooklyn and Berlin, he teaches at Rutgers University in Newark. Alison Kinney, like Jonas Kaufmann, can rewire a dishwasher to her liking. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Avidly (L.A. Review of Books), New Criticals, Salon, Narratively, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories, The Literary Review, The Hairpin, The Blue Mesa Review, Gastronomica, and The Inquisitive Eater. She received an M.F.A. from The New School. Steven Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Three collections appeared in 2013: Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press). His e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, was just published by Kind of a Hurricane Press. Jessica Lilien has work published or forthcoming in LUMINA, Clackamas Literary Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art Online, Morpheus Tales Magazine, the anthology Night Terrors III, and TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism. Her short story “After Saco River” was one of the winners of the LUMINA XII 2013 Fiction Contest, judged by George Saunders. He called it “very strange.” She lives in Brooklyn. 123

Duane Locke lives hermetically near gallinules, anhingas, ospreys, herons and alligators in Tampa, Florida. He has had 6,870 different poems published. He believes in the transvaluation of all beliefs and values. E. E. Lyons has a Sharpshooter badge in junior riflery and a Yeoman badge in archery. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Fiddleback, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Washington, DC and is working on a novel about the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Jaime Mathis currently writes from Portland, Oregon where she is inspired by a Dane, a half-Dane, sixteen chickens, and an ex-Mafia cat. She received a BA in English Lit from Newbold College, England and her graduate degree at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Bruce McRae is a Pushcart-nominee and Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: http://www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on Youtube. Nick McRae is the author of The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2014) and Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), as well as editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Publications, 2013). His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Nick serves as associate editor of 32 Poems and is currently a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas. Jasmine Nikki ‘Nikay’ C. Paredes received an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a BFA in Creative Writing from Ateneo de Manila University. Her poetry chapbook, We Will See the Scatter, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She was born and raised in Cebu, Philippines.

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Emmet Martin Penney is a recipient of The College Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets and an alumnus of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. His work has previously appeared in The Bad Version. Born in Chicago, he now resides in Brattleboro, VT. Phlegm is a Sheffield-based muralist and artist who first developed his fantastical illustrations in self-published comics. His work now extends to the urban landscape, and can mostly be seen in run-down and disused spaces. Phlegm creates surreal illustrations to an untold story, weaving a visual narrative that explores the unreal through creatures from his imagination. His storybook-like imagery is half childlike, half menacing, set in built up cityscapes with castles, turrets and winding stairways. Jacob Powers was born and raised in the woods of Western Massachusetts. He recently earned his B.A. in English from Amherst College, and will be relocating to Oregon this summer to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. In his fiction, Jacob explores issues of trauma, class, and race, considering the ways in which these issues are interrelated and work together to create a sense of place. Juan Eugenio Ramirez lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His interests include ancient mythology, euphony, and dissonance. He teaches English at St. Francis School, a progressive preparatory school in Louisville, Kentucky. Pamela Rivas enjoys working with graphic design, illustration, photography, and lettering. She is interested in all kinds of commissions and collaborations. You may find her work on facebook, cargo collective, or instagram, and you may contact her at pamelarivas.gd@gmail.com Rone attempts to locate the friction point between beauty and decay, the lavish and despoiled, creating an iconic form of urban art with a strongly emotional bent. A key individual in the Melbourne street art scene, Roneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images have not only appeared all over his adopted city, but have increasingly begun to appear around the world. www.r-o-n-e.com

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Marin Sardy’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Post Road, Bayou, Hot Metal Bridge, Luna Luna, LUMINA, Phoebe, and other journals, as well as two books published by the University of New Mexico Press—Landscape Dreams (2012) and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby (2009). In 2013, Sardy received an M.F.A. in Nonfiction from Columbia University. She is currently the nonfiction editor of Cactus Heart and is writing a memoir. Tufik Y. Shayeb’s poetry has appeared in various publications over the years, including Blinders Journal, Watershed Review, Muzzle Magazine, Heyday Magazine, and The November 3rd Club. To date, Shayeb has published three chapbooks and one full-length collection titled, I’ll Love You to Smithereens. Currently, Shayeb works as a full time attorney and studies law, genomics, and biotechnology at Arizona State University. Sten & Lex have been doing stencils on the street since 2000/2001. All of their work results from an individual path that developed far from art academies and design institutes and far from a classic writing and graffiti background. The duo are best known in the history of stencil making for developing the halftone stencil technique where the main part of their stencil portraits are composed by thousands of lines. They usually produce portraits from people they have photographed themselves or found in family photos albums, anonymous people. Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist, the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, and the co-author of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson. She lives in Brooklyn. Jane Wunrow is an illustrator and mixed-media artist. Through the process of dismembering illustrations of animals and juxtaposing them with images of stratum formations she hopes to reveal the potential for a hidden metamorphosis. http://www.janewunrow.com/ Tara Zanzig, under the moniker Tararchy, is a multi-disciplinary artist with an emphasis on non-traditional screen printing. Her work explores the concept and connection of mind-body-spirit to human existence and the natural world. The practice of yoga greatly informs her work, however the literal representations are symbolic of universal concepts. 126