Mount Hope Issue 14, Fall 2018 by Mount Hope Magazine

issue fourteen / fall 2018

ISSUE 14 Fall 2018

Mount Hope is published bi-annually in Bristol, Rhode Island, by the Roger Williams University Department of English and Creative Writing. Individual subscription rates are: $20 annually or $35 for two years. Mount Hope ÂŠ 2018, All Rights Reserved. No portion of Mount Hope may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including all information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of Mount Hope magazine or authors of individual creative works. Any resemblance of events, locations or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental. Mount Hope cannot be held responsible for any views expressed by its contributors. www.mounthopemagazine.com Individual Issue Price: $10.00

Submissions Guidelines We accept electronic submissions of fiction and nonfiction up to 5,000 words, poetry up to 5 per package, and photo or graphic stories of 10-12 images or panels. Send a note telling us about your work. We take up to 6 months to respond; no paper submissions, please. We consider translated work. Submit via our online submissions manager at www.mounthopemagazine.submittable.com Contact us at mount.hope.magazine@gmail.com

STAFF EDITOR Edward J. Delaney WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE Adam Braver DESIGN EDITOR Lisa Daria Kennedy Massachusetts College of Art MANAGING EDITOR Nicola Alexander ADMINISTRATIVE INTERN Hannah Little ASSISTANT EDITORS Courtney Dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Agnese Gavin Thill

LONDON EDITORS Kyle Gravel Katie Battaglino EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Ryan Bonacum Cailin Burke Amanda Calderon Jillian Damiani Rachel Deangelis April Frederico Marie Gabrielli Eleni Karavoussianis Hannah Little Lindsey Lopez Skyler Moncada

CONTENTS FICTION 5 Shooting Gallery

by Darryl Halbrooks 45 Root by Naomi Shuyama 55 The Bog and The Invincible by Gene Christy

NONFICTION 19 An American Woman on the Streets of Havana by Sherry Shahan 37 Jermyn Street by Michael Patterson

INTERVIEW 28 Author Garth Greenwell Interview by Hannah Little

POETRY 43 Running the James

River Trestle by Robert Brickhouse 44 Neighbor by Robert Brickhouse 50 By Woodpecker Time by Peter Marcus 52 Coastal Daisies, Jonesport Maine by Peter Marcus 53 Tapestry by Peter Marcus 54 What the Owl Advised Near the End of Autumn by Peter Marcus

FICTION

Shooting Gallery by Darryl Halbrooks

A week after Jack was gunned down, ADMIN sent a crew over to clean out his desk. Before they did—before they shipped his stuff off to his daughter in Texas—I managed to salvage a few memories. Here’s the snapshot of the two of us in front of the LA County Museum, and another from the Art Institute, standing on either side of the Seurat. The last one, a photo I had often threatened to burn, was from a departmental picnic—back in the days when we had departmental picnics. He kept that picture just to piss me off. The final item I saved was Jack’s blowgun. At night when no one else was in the building, we’d put a target at the end of the hallway and play a sort of long-distance dart game. Beyond twenty feet, we had to allow for arc, but from under twenty, with a nice, flat trajectory we were both dead-on.

In the picnic photo, we’re playing a game of doubles with two of our students. I’m on one side of the net, and Jack, about a foot off the MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

ground, is on the other. The shuttlecock, obviously having been delivered courtesy of his very best follow-through, is suspended above my open mouth. My body is bent backward and my racket out of position. It’s on my desk now. After Jack was shot, I asked Dana to move me to the new building where all the new hires have private offices. Jack and I had shared an office for decades. “There’s no more room,” Dana says. “It’s really hard for me to stay in that office, Dana. I mean, it happened right there.” “There’s really nothing I can do,” she says. She shrugs and turns her hands skyward. “If there’s nothing else…” “Dana, look…Oh never mind.” I head back to my last class of the day.

I was a member of the chair search committee when we hired her hard ass, but I backed a guy who seemed more in tune with my own philosophy. Word must’ve gotten back. She’s had it in for me ever since. During her interview she wowed the rest of them. She projected images of her work: ugly photo-montages that formed a backdrop for collections of mannequins, ventriloquist dummies and automobile parts. The work made no sense whatsoever but my colleagues seemed to think—since they couldn’t understand what she was trying to say and the grad-school BS she used to describe the mess was incomprehensible—she must be brilliant. “Do you have any questions for us?” Sena asked her. Sena Bronson, our art historian, had already gone into deep swoon mode. “What is your MS?” Dana said. We looked at one another. “Your MS. Your Mission Statement.” We gave a collective shrug. “The first thing we’ll have to do,” she said, “after I—come on board—is form a committee to revamp your MS.” All that was before my friend Jack became one of five innocent victims of a black-clad, horribly beweaponed loner gone off his meds. That was before the latest round of random school shootings; before the state legislature, with backing from the NRA, passed the Safer Campus Concealed Weapons Act: SUCCWA. In my email, alongside invitations to enlarge my penis or 6

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refinance my boat, is a note from Dana. She wants to see me prior to my 3:15, but before I can make my way down to her office, DeMarcus, this kid from my beginning painting class, appears at my door armed with a scowl and a piece of paper that I recognize as his mid-term evaluation. “Yo, Bro. You got a minute?” “Sure, DeMarcus. About a minute.” Sometimes I wonder if my longtime insistence on informality has been a longtime mistake. Twenty years ago, students thought they were being brave the first time they called me Gordon, rather than Mr. Denny, or in the case of the ones who didn’t know that the terminal degree for artists is the MFA, Doctor Denny. Pretty soon Gordon became Gordo— and now I’m just “Bro.” I head back to my desk and DeMarcus starts to close the door behind him, which makes me a little nervous because he doesn’t look all that happy with me. He’s quite the specimen, six-three, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip. Although it’s winter, he shows off his perfection by his choice of attire: knee-length cutoffs topped off with a white T-shirt, or more accurately, two-thirds of a white T-shirt. The bottom third has been torn away to expose his abdominal ripples. “DeMarcus, please leave the door open.” He gives me a look before turning to nudge the door to within an inch of being fully closed, which I guess in his mind is good enough. I don’t want to make more of an issue so I motion him to the chair across from my desk. “It’s about this evaluation,” he says, flicking it with his fingers, his voice registering near his upset meter’s red zone. “Before we go any further,” I say, “you know the rules.” He rolls his eyes and pulls the Glock 9mm from his waistband and lays it on the desk. According to SUCCWA regulations posted prominently outside our office doors, weapons must be “in plain view” during faculty-student conferences. “What about yours?” he says. I’m not seein’ your piece on the desk.” “I’m not carrying.” “Say what?” “You can frisk me if you’d like,” I say, hoping he sees it’s a joke. “Whatever, man. But you crazy walking around campus with nothin’ in your pants but whatever you got ‘tween yo legs.” “Could we get to the point, DeMarcus? I have an appointment with our Chair.” I glance at my imitation Apple Watch for effect. Effect is about all it’s good for since I don’t have an iPhone to connect it to. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

He pokes a finger at the paper again. “Why you givin’ me a D at midterm? I gotta have a C to stay outta coach’s doghouse.” DeMarcus is on the football team. Our department isn’t generally a haven for athletes. As far as I know, he’s the only varsity jock we have at the moment. I’ve mentored a few basketball players in the past and almost without exception they’ve been trouble. Their coaches know me from noon pickup games and they figure I’m one of the few profs who’ll cut their charges some slack, which I usually do. In fact, DeMarcus’s rope is already so loose he could lasso a steer with it. “Of the three paintings I’ve required to date,” I explain to him in what I hope is a reasoned and deliberate approach, “you have finished zero. You’ve missed two of three critiques. You do not participate in the crits you do attend, as required on the syllabus, and you already have five absences. Really, DeMarcus, a D is more than generous.” “Come on man. You ever been in sports? And I don’t mean that shit you and them goofs you horse round with at lunch call hoops.” I raise my eyebrows. “Yeah,” he says, “I see you down there. You a ball hog, too. But anyways, I mean a real team.” Most of the students are aware of my habit, because I’m usually at least five minutes late to my 1:15, my post-shower second-sweat causing me to paper-towel my forehead well into the first twenty minutes. “We got practice and game travel and coach, he’s workin’ my ass off. Them other kids…” An expansive sweep of his arm indicates, presumably, the nonathletes. “They get off easy. And those critiques, man. Now that everybody’s armed to the teeth, I’m not putting my opinions out there to get blown away by one of them fruitcakes. I’m telling you right now, Doc, that little dude, he’s not right in the head. Other day, when you were comin’ down on him for usin’ too much yellow, I seen him fingerin’ his piece. I’m jus sayin’—that guy’s a loose cannon.” I’m wondering which little dude he means but don’t ask. “All right, DeMarcus. Tell you what, I’ll change it to a C but you’ve got to promise me you won’t miss any more classes, and by next Wednesday I want to see the previous three paintings—finished.” “You got it, man,” he says. “I promise. I been workin’ on ‘em. I just got about three strokes on the last one and I be caught up.” He thrusts his arm toward me for one of the handshakes he taught me the last time I caved to his charms. I oblige him with a half-hearted knucklebump and thumb-twiddle. 8

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He rises and starts for the door. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” “Oh, man! Thanks.” He picks up the Glock and stuffs it between the smooth brown skin of his ridiculously narrow waist and his rope belt. “Oh, by the way,” I say. “Which little dude?” He gives me a puzzled look. “The loose cannon you mentioned.” “Oh, that. Well, you know, white dude, brown hair, brown eyes?” I don’t say what I’m thinking, but I guess that lets out Cletus, the one other black guy and the one other boy in class who’s almost as tall as DeMarcus. “Don’t worry, Doc,” DeMarcus says, patting his weapon. “I got your back.”

Dana’s secretary gives me the evil eye before buzzing me in. “You wanted to see me?” “Yes, Gordon… um, have a seat.” She waves me toward one of the two uncomfortable rawhide chairs she brought with her from her last gig in northern New Mexico. Despite her high-tech alliances with the College of Information and Surveillance and the College of Fire Science and Property Risk Management, she likes to put on the public face of the old-school artist. Her office is all earth tones, Georgia O’Keeffe reproductions and kachina dolls. I wouldn’t be surprised one day, to see a fresh-baked loaf of bread cooling before a little kiva fireplace. “Look Gordon, I’m going to lay it MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

“

All that was before my friend Jack became one of five innocent victims of a blackclad, horribly beweaponed loner gone off his meds.”

on the line. I’ve asked you three times to turn in your test questions and assessment package… to make the adjustments we’ve all agreed to. We need to advance with the times. You’ve yet to do what I’ve asked. Why is that?” “Who’s we?” I say. “I never agreed to reducing my painting program to a service detail for the commercial art people.” “Your painting program?” she says. “They’ve already taken away our gallery and what did we get in return? Thirteen glass display cases. My students used to make six-foot paintings, work that had some visual impact. Now we’re forced to turn out little Thomas Kinkaids just so they’ll fit in those stupid cases. Look what’s happened to our program.” “Commercial art people? Did I hear you say commercial art people? I think you must be referring to the School of Static and Dynamic Design. You do realize that eighty percent of our students are SSODDS?” She pronounces it sods, but when she’s not within earshot, I usually express the acronym in the manner of a severe stutterer. You were on the committee to rewrite our mission statement, not that you were anything other than an obstacle. And you did sign off… however reluctantly… on the FYSPV.” She pronounces this one fizzpuv. The Five Year Strategic Planning Vehicle. “Mission Statement,” I say. “Our mission is to teach our students to be artists. At least that’s what I‘ve been trying to do for the last twentyseven years.” “And during those twenty-seven years,” she says, “we had no Quantifiable Assessment Tool. Now that we have the QUAT, we’ve made sound progress—with the exception of your area; the only one that has yet to provide this office with its QUAT test questions. The state legislature wants to see that our students are proficient in their subjects.” “Come on, Dana. There is nothing quantifiable about painting. How can I come up with test questions? If you give me the correct definition of scumbling, or tell me the formula for mixing rabbit skin glue, it wouldn’t prove you could paint your way out of a cardboard mailing tube.” “Our students come here to get jobs,” she says. “Jay, Oh, Bee, Ess.” She pounds her knuckles on the desk to underscore each letter. “Not to pursue some higher ideal for its intrinsic value, Pal. And since SSODD allied itself with the College of Information and Surveillance, our students get Jay, Oh, Bee, Ess. Good ones… well-paying ones. Where are your former students now? Holed up in some garret 10

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making pictures nobody wants. Those days are over, Gordon. Nobody majors in painting these days. If Jack hadn’t…” I narrow my eyes at her. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but one of you was going to have to go. Either through attrition or… or otherwise.” “I guess you lucked out then,” I say. “Otherwise.” “Face it, Gordon. Painting had a good run. But now? As a major? It’s gone the way of the dinosaur and there’s no Jurassic Park on the horizon. Wake up and smell the program.” I open my mouth to say something, but she holds up a traffic-cop hand. “I still want those assessment test questions on my desk by noon tomorrow. Oh, and one more thing. Where’s your weapon?” “I don’t carry a weapon.” “He doesn’t carry a weapon,” she tells the ceiling. “You know the rules. What if there’s another incident? I guess you expect the students to carry your water for you. Look what happened to your friend, Jack.” I stand and turn for the door. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that I care about your safety.” “Right, thanks. Thanks for your concern.” “Look, Gordon. For God’s sake, it’s not like it’s still 2017. What happened to Jack could happen again. There are still plenty of nut cases to go around.” “I don’t want to talk about it.” I say.

At the end of the school day I run into Ace for a faucet repair kit. It’s amazing the place stays in business. It’s overstaffed and so painfully bright inside, the electric bill alone must nearly break the bank. They sell power mowers, snow blowers, hoses, chain saws, generators—in short, all the same stuff the new Lowes sells for half the price, and I never see anybody buying anything bigger than my faucet repair kit. Unlike Lowe’s or Walmart where help is scarce, some ancient salesman limps right over. This particular helpful hardware man is not one of the regulars, guys who’ve been selling me nails or lithium grease since before they moved from their little downtown store to this new mega-Ace. This time it’s a different little old man who looks vaguely familiar. “Can I be of assistance?” “I just need a faucet repair kit,” I say. “Right this way,” he says. “Say, how’s things on the funny farm MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

these days?” “Do… do I know you?” I ask. “Ken,” the man says, extending his hand. “Ken Nelson. Used to be chair of English and Theater before the night of the long knives. Before they canned Dean Henson and moved us in with The Department of Mass Comm and Homeland Security.” I feel embarrassed for the man. I remember him now. He’s got a doctorate. He’s widely published. It’s like sitting down to breakfast at the IHOP and recognizing your server as your former neurosurgeon. “Um… yeah, how’ve you been, Ken?” “Oh, you know.” He waggles a hand. “Not getting any younger. But at least it’s safer here than over in the shooting gallery. Which reminds me. Can’t help noticing you’re not armed.” “Maybe you just can’t tell,” I say. “The weapons can be concealed you know.” “I know, I know. But everybody gets careless and I’ve trained myself to look for ‘em. Had to. After one of my faculty took one in the spleen—just because she gave some kid a B, I said to myself, self… it’s high time to get out of this bid-ness.” “B’s are always toughest,” I say. “Anyway,” Ken says. “I can spot ‘em a mile away. There’s always a bulge, even when they stuff ‘em in a sock. Truth is, most of the kids… they don’t even try to hide ‘em.” It’s true. Several girls in my drawing class have taken to wearing little holsters for their derringers, decorated up with pink rhinestones and little silver studs. While Ken Nelson and I sort through the various O-rings and washers, another fellow in a little red vest wanders over. I recognize this guy immediately. “You remember Jeffery,” Ken says. “Of course,” I say, extending my hand. “Jeff came out about six months after I did.” “Nice here, don’t you think?” Jeffery says, taking it all in with a glance. Jeffery was the gay costumer in the theater department’s stable of gay set designers, gay stage directors and gay choreographers. We shared our space with theater until they moved out with the rest of our tribe. “Listen,” Ken says. “That was too bad, you know, about your friend. I’m sorry. I can’t remember his name.” “Jack.” “Right, Jack. Anyway, I was very sorry to hear about that. Seemed like a nice fella.” 12

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“Thanks.” “I think we might have a spot for you here,” Jeffery says, touching my arm. “You know, should you consider jumping ship.”

Before heading home I stop in for my weekly visit to the facility. I enter through the main doors noticing that like campus, even after all that has gone down, there are no security checks. Any madman could walk right in without so much as saying Boo and shoot up the place. I cruise on down the hall with its antiseptic smells and polished linoleum, glancing into rooms as I pass. Some are quiet and dim; in others family members sit around the bed looking up at televisions. At the end of the hallway, a nurse posted at the station there, looks up, gives me a weak smile and a little wave. They all know me by now. I no longer ask if there’s been any change. I push the door to room 115, its gloomy interior illuminated only by the faint glow from a monitor. A machine somewhere in the room emits a steady beep. Another produces a hiss. The hissing machine provides the breath of life to my old friend. He lies curled on his side in the same position we all once assumed in the womb. Jack’s nearest relative is the daughter in Texas, who, as far as I know, has been to see him exactly once since it happened, back when he was still in the hospital. Kim’s a converted Catholic and refuses to cut Jack’s life support so now he’s here in this place and will be until she has a change of heart, or Jack’s heart gives out. I pull a chair up to his bed and as has become my habit, tell him the news of the past week. I am quite certain he can’t hear me but somehow it makes me feel better. Many’s the time I’ve considered unplugging the machine, but this isn’t a movie and I ain’t going to prison. Campus is bad enough. When I leave, I have to squeeze past smokers gathered outside the main door. Three attendants in white coats surround a semi-paralyzed woman who is sort of half-lying in a wheelchair, its foot and headrest canted to a near-reclining position. I got her story from one of the orderlies on an earlier visit. She came home to find her husband doing the next-door neighbor so he shot her. It’s cold out and she’s covered with blankets. Everybody’s in a good mood—laughing, talking local sports— all except the sick woman. The attendants, one woman and two men, hug themselves and stomp their feet, expelling little puffs of steam between little puffs of smoke. I shoulder my way through their fumes, trying not to breathe too

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“

It turns out the old coldwar mutually assured destruction deterrent doesn’t work if one or more of the parties is nuts.”

deeply but I can’t help worrying about this woman. It seems unfair that they should wheel this poor soul out into the cold so they can enjoy their smoke break. I turn to confront them on this issue when I notice the female attendant handing something to the woman. The patient takes the object, holding it vertically the way you’d carry a candle. It’s a fork. She can’t move her arm but she can bend her head down to the fork. As she does, she takes a long, luxurious drag from the cigarette pinched between its tines.

On Monday morning I turn in my objectified painting assessment questions, only three days later than Dana had demanded. They’re sealed in an envelope, and if she actually reads them she’s not going to appreciate my little joke. 1. What do we call the wooden thing with bristles on its business end? 2. What do you get when you mix black and white? 3. When you prime your canvas should you go left and right or up and down? Etcetera. That afternoon, when I show up my customary five minutes late for painting class, I’m still sweating. It’s crit day and the students who have finished their assignments have already arranged the easels into a semi-circle. They’ve lined up chairs in front of the paintings, leaving the center one empty for me. Three students are still working in the back of the room. One of them is DeMarcus. Before taking my seat of honor, I walk back to this group to persuade them to put their brushes down and join us in the 14

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crit. I have to tap Morgan Hancock and Anna Gutierrez on the shoulder to get their attention because as usual, they’re tuned in to their iPhones. “Listen, guys. You’ve had three in-class days and at least that many out-of-class days to finish this assignment. Now is not the time to paint. Now is the time to join in the critique with the rest of the group.” Hancock is his usual surly self and I’m forced to admonish him once again before he slinks his way over to the group. I sit with my grade book open, my ever-present cup of coffee and my laser pen, which they call my lightsaber. As a teaching tool, the laser pen is a godsend. You can use it to point out suspect passages or even to draw imaginary squares, lines or circles, all without leaving your chair. The first paintings up, the ones in the middle of the semi-circle are always easiest to deal with. These are the students who listen to what you’ve been trying to tell them, who work outside of class, who get their work finished on time. They’re the ones who take criticism and are not afraid to make suggestions to their classmates. “You might try neutralizing that yellow field by adding violet,” Samantha Sanders tells Chris Hatch. “And those implied textures would be more effective if they were actual. You know, like apply the paint with scraps of matte board or something.” Chris agrees. The first paintings go like this, quickly with helpful exchanges, some from me but most from their classmates. I try to be quiet so they’ll feel compelled to speak. Samantha is almost too perfect—beautiful, smart, a good painter and hard worker. Sometimes I have to give her a look, which she has learned means, “Shut the hell up, Sam, and let someone else talk.” I jot notes in my grade book and assign preliminary grades, to be finalized at the end of the semester after they have edited their pieces. At last comes the hard part. I have them remove the paintings we’ve critiqued and bring forward work from what I call “the reluctant four,” DeMarcus, Hancock, the mousy girl whose name I can never remember and must snatch a quick glance at my class roll every time I call on her, and Dennis Weid, whose sex is yet to be determined—was it a misspelling of Denise? Dennis is so untalented and strange that I have no idea why he (or she) picked art as a major. I decide to bite the bullet and do Dennis first. “So, Dennis, this shape in the far left corner is…?” Dennis mumbles something in a weak, feminine voice— something about an animal. “Yes we see it,” most agree. “It’s a horse?” “Dog.” MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

“And it’s sitting?” “Dancing.” “In front of a large… boulder?” “Cave.” The process goes on like this until I thank him and suggest further work. I jot down D, incomplete and—thank God—we can move on to Hancock. Hancock’s painting looks like something you’d expect to see from some soccer-mom-hobbyist painting circle. Very realistic landscape elements: disintegrating barn, rusting tractor, little boy playing in the dirt with a smaller version of the tractor. In the distance a worried looking mother watches the boy with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun and the other holding a younger sister by the hand. TCB. Total Clichéd Bullshit. I’ve been trying to get him off this mark since the beginning of the semester but he’s resistant. “Any thoughts?” I ask the group. “Can we give Morgan any suggestions?” Everyone fights his or her gag reflex and prepares to kick in, but they’re reluctant. It’s partly Hancock’s surliness and partly the fact that these crits are tiring and many of the students are already showing telltale signs of restlessness, zipping book bags, noting digital time readouts on cell phones. We still have DeMarcus’ piece and the other two god-awful unfinished paintings to go. Sam, at last, chimes in and this time I have no intention of stopping her. “Morgan, it’s a very nice painting. But what if, instead of showing us everything so…so realistically and, and you know, sort of spelling it all out for us, what if you zoomed in on the barn or the tractor? Just show… parts.” “Yeah,” Stan Robinson says. “You know, like let the viewer make some of his own connections. Leave a little mystery in it.” Once they get revved up, they start coming down on him with everything they’ve got—everything he has refused to learn—and I actually have to step in before things get nasty. Throughout the whole lambasting, Morgan Hancock says nothing but his red face speaks volumes. When we get to DeMarcus, the class agrees that his work looks very sophisticated. It’s abstract, heavy on texture. He’s mixed sawdust and sand with acrylic medium and drywall mud and he’s combined three separate canvases, attaching them with unseen bolts through the frames. “Can you help us, DeMarcus, with what you are trying to 16

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communicate here?” I ask. “It’s just an abstract,” DeMarcus says. “The painting speaks for itself.” Hancock jumps up, knocking over his chair. “This is SHIT!” he says. “All of it.” He waves a hand over all the paintings. “You only do this abstract shit because none of you can draw!” “Morgan,” I say. He pulls his gun from his waistband and holding it in two hands like a TV cop, fires. Girls scream. The cacophony in this echoey room is deafening. His projectile has punched a neat hole through DeMarcus’ painting. No one goes for his or her weapon, disproving, most agree later at the inquest, the safety factor of having everyone armed. It turns out the old cold-war mutually assured destruction deterrent doesn’t work if one or more of the parties involved is nuts. When Morgan turns his revolver on Samantha, DeMarcus leaps to tackle the little fucker, but Hancock swings and pops off another earsplitting round, catching DeMarcus in the shoulder. Students dive for whatever cover they can find as Hancock raises his gun again, presumably to finish off the football player, who now rolls in agony on the floor. Suddenly the gun flies out of his hand and his other hand leaps to the little orange-tipped dart, embedded an inch deep into his eardrum. Stan Robinson rushes him and knocks him to the ground. I sprint to kick Hancock’s weapon away. My blowgun, which for the last few weeks I’ve secreted in my pant leg, is still gripped in my trembling hand. “Lucky shot,” I say. By the time security arrives, Samantha and Anna Gutierrez stand spread-legged over the little prick, covering his slightest move with their derringers. When he raises his head, Samantha steps on his kidney. “Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” she says— appropriately. An EMT pulls the dart from his ear and slaps a temporary bandage over the orifice, but not until they have ministered to DeMarcus and led him away to an ambulance. Before they take DeMarcus away, he pulls me close to whisper something. “Doc,” he says, “That’s not the little dude I was talkin’ about.”

When I open the door to my apartment, numerous people yell MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

“Surprise,” just about giving me a heart attack. It’s not only the guys from work but also their wives and girlfriends. The new staff is considerably younger than before. Ken’s retired now but Jeffery’s still there, plus a few folks who migrated from English and Foreign Languages. I don’t know who let them all in but it looks like a damned good party. Red balloons are everywhere and there’s a cake, little sandwiches with the bread crusts trimmed away, chips and dip and a washtub filled with cans of beer on ice. Most of them have already been drinking for a while so I have some catching up to do. The party is to mark my first year on the job. “One Year and Counting,” reads a banner taped across one of my paintings. I look down and notice I’m still wearing my little red vest and my Ace Hardware nametag, which I don’t bother to remove. I crack open a Coors Light.

Darryl Halbrooks is a visual artist and writer. He is the author of nine books and his fiction has appeared in many literary journals including The New Delta Review, The Madison Review, Map Literary, The Raven’s Perch and elsewhere. His visual art has been has been exhibited widely in the US and abroad and is represented in many private, public and corporate collections. Darryl Halbrooks artwork and fiction can be viewed at www.darrylhalbrooks.com. 18

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NONFICTION

An American Woman on the Streets of Havana Words and photos by Sherry Shahan

A Friday in February, 2004, noonish and sweltering. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d flown directly from LAX to Havana as part of a cultural program, my third visit in five years. The purpose always the same: two weeks studying Afro-Cuban rhythms at Escuela Nacional de Artes. I left Hotel Palco in the municipality of Playa and walked through a potholed alley. If it was this hot and humid at nine in the morning, what would it be like by noon? The air carried odors from garbage cans, puddles of stagnant water, and dog shit. A security guard at the entrance of Escuela eyed my flimsy Permiso de Entrada pass. He had brown, wrinkled skin like a poorly-folded map. MOUNT HOPE â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 14

I couldn’t work out his Spanish in my head, even after faithful dates with Pimsleur. I fed his dog sausage pilfered from the hotel buffet; thereafter, I smuggling hard-boiled eggs for the guard himself and slabs of cheese and questionable lunch meat for our dance teachers. A fence capped with razor wire enclosed the campus, an exclusively whites-only country club during Batista’s dictatorship. It was still possible to make out a fairway here and there, though now high-school students ruled the grounds with drums, guitars, and polished brass. A first-class art education, tuition-free. The school even provided lunches. Ham and cheese, thinly sliced and weighed with precision on a small scale. A sliver shaved off if too heavy. A large cartoon had been painted on the wall outside my classroom, the Grim Reaper rising behind George W. Bush. The caption read Déjame eso a mi... ¿Quién ha visto en este país un terrorista sin trabajo? Translation: “Tell me…Who has seen in this country a terrorist without work?” Billboards all across Havana depicted Bush as a tyrant. One showed his name on the barrel of an oversized handgun with the caption La Injustica Tiembla (The Injustice Trembles). Anytime Bush’s name came up, Cubans merely shook their heads. Classes began at 9:30 a.m. under the direction of Isaias Rojoas Ramirez, who combined a smooth, classic style with vernacular movement from the island’s barrios. A graduate of the Instituto Superior de Artes de Cuba, he was also Artistic Director of an Afro-Cuban Folkloric Dance Troupe for whom he created dramatic works influenced by Haitian folk customs. The studio lacked central air conditioning. A cheap fan rattled loudly, bullying the smell of cheap cologne out the window. No mirrors. The floors, cracked and peeling. Bare walls except for water-stained photos of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara above a piano marred by wood-rot. No running water in the coed bathroom. No locks on the doors, no toilet seats—sacrifices for the Special Period, indicated by Soviets withdrawing financial support. A woman dressed in flowery cotton kept the bathroom as clean as possible with limited supplies, doling out squares of rough-hewn toilet paper. She was short and sturdy in a way that made clear who was in charge. I fished hotel soap and mini bottles of shampoo from my dance bag and set a U.S. dollar in her chipped saucer. A dollar being a fortune, used to buy foreign items on the black market, if you had the right friends. Later that year, the government desperately needed money to 20

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buy oil. Castro forced Cubans to hand over all U.S. currency, halting the circulation of dollars and hobbling an already feeble economy. We began our four-hour class with cha-cha-cha, blending fire and grace with the characteristic triple step that swept Cuba in the 1950s. Ramirez pressed a button on a relic boom-box and told us to listen to the music, and then find the beat with claves. These short round wooden sticks were held one in each hand and struck together as a rhythmic accent. The exercise was simple enough until we were asked, one at a time, to keep the beat with our feet. He shouted encouragement at our clumsy efforts. “Eso es! That’s it!” After class, I swapped my sweat-soaked t-shirt for a clean one, ditched the scheduled group outing, and flagged down a sixty-year-old Willys station wagon. Inarguably the world’s first SUV. Exhaust poured up through a hole in the decaying floor. I scrambled over a bumper held on by baling wire, and settled on a homemade bench beside the only other passenger, an older woman in a faded muumuu. She scrutinized my clunky dance sneakers over a grocery bag stuffed with carrots, eggplants, and yucca. I gave her hotel toiletries, a small gesture of friendship. Her gold-tooth grin said gracias. The driver spoke English and said he was a doctor. Not uncommon, since doctors earned about $10 a week, and even today still subsidizing their income by using the family car as a taxi. Or, teaching salsa to tourists. One of our teachers was a gynecologist named Frank. Cubans bolstered their incomes with a myriad of underground or “shadow economies.” Everything from selling stolen packs of pasta doorMOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

to-door, to refilling disposable Bic lighters or swapping high-quality rum for moonshine in hotel bars. We passed a foreign embassy housed in a pre-revolution mansion and turned onto Avenida Quinta (Fifth Avenue). I aimed my camera at billboard after government billboard: A profile of national heroes: Juan Almeida, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ché Guevara beside the caption “De estos hombres se hace un pueblo.” (“From these men came a people.”) I’d take dozens of rolls of slide film home to be developed and filed in dust-free Archival Safe-T Binders. The driver asked if we could stop by his apartment to pick up his son for soccer practice. “Sure, that’s fine.” His teenage son rode shotgun, a soccer ball in his lap. He fired questions at me about Bonds. I was confused at first, then realized he was asking about the baseball player. I admitted I hadn’t been to a majorleague game since the 20th century. We chatted about Madonna instead. “I have all her CDs,” he said. We dropped him at a field and I set off on foot, weaving through crumbling cobblestone streets where cement-block restaurants had reliable menus. Authentic, without English translation. Though it was easy enough to get tired of their bland rice. Laundry hung from a mélange of wrought iron balconies. Shirtless men sat in white plastic chairs playing dominoes or chess. Women in tank tops and Spandex shorts painted each other’s toenails. It seemed that everyone smoked a cigar. On foot, I wasn’t just watching the scenes but in them. 22

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Reactions of people away from busy tourist areas were immediate. Men glanced up from beneath dented hoods of classic American cars, nodding, “Olá.” Children paused games of stickball to ask for Chiclets. I passed out crayons and coloring books. The wind carried salsa, rhumba, and good ol’ American rock-androll. Little kids danced in doorways, poetry in their blood. I felt as if I’d stepped into the documentary Buena Vista Social Club, the sweet scene when Ibrahim Ferrer and his wife strolled similar streets greeting friends and feral dogs. I kept a similar route every afternoon, wandering with no particular purpose among ordinary people, passing lots subdivided into huertos populares (popular gardens), state-owned land offered to Cubans at no cost as long as it was used to cultivate food. I stopped a man to ask if he knew a good place to buy bongos. I didn’t like what I’d seen in government music stores, and so far no one at Escuela had come through. But even thigh-thumping pantomime failed me. Like most Cubans, this man had a gentle nature. He kneeled to unzip his grimy backpack and unloaded books onto the sidewalk. He said he’d been at Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana. I’d heard about the annual book festival held at La Cabaña, an 18th-century fortress on the eastern side of the entrance to the harbor. He flipped through one book, then another, pointing calmly at black-and-white photos of Castro and Ché. I smiled and nodded. “These are great.” They weren’t really. Grainy, prehistoric images on cheap paper with glue dotting oddly-stitched bindings.

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He smiled and thrust the thickest book at me. I understood how important it was for him to share this gift. I smiled back, “Gracias,” and shook his hand. I continued, constantly lost, past twilight into darkness where the aroma of garlic and onions clashed with exhaust fumes. The sense of not knowing what might happen next kept the adventure alive. The camera kept me aware. That night I met my class in line at the box office at Casa de la Musical, a nightclub de Centro. I’d followed a friend’s advice and closed my pockets with safety pins to thwart pickpockets. We pooled funds and paid the cover charge for Frank, Isaias, and our teachers. I drank too many Cuba Libres, lost myself on the smoky dance floor with sweaty strangers, and bought condoms with funny sayings in Spanish from vending machines in the bathroom. Souvenirs for my friends back home. The headliner, Pellito Jr., came on near midnight. It was less a performance, more an opening of his heart. No one danced. Just crowded in like drunken back-up singers.

A bit hungover the next day, I walked farther down the Malecón than usual, dodging waves slopping onto the seaside boulevard, soaking cars and pedestrians. Old men perched on the wall, crude fishing poles in hand. Boys in boxer shorts diving into the oil-slick water. The heat was unusually oppressive. No matter how many times I showered in a day my t-shirt still smelled like a musty sheet. I sat on a curb across from the Embassy of Switzerland and drank from my water 24

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bottle. On the opposite side of the street in Dignity Plaza, a life-size statue of José Marti clutching a child protectively while pointing at the U.S. mainland. The child represents five-year-old Elián González, the lone survivor of a boat of Cuban refugees that capsized on its way to Miami in 1999. On the Malecón side of the boulevard, enormous billboards had been inserted into metal stands. I stood stunned by unbearable photos of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib detention center near Baghdad. A blown-up image of a man on a narrow box that looked about two-feet high. His arms drawn straight out, like a taxidermist’s scarecrow. His black cape fell featherlike, his head in a hood. Later reports confirmed U.S. Army soldiers had told him that if he stepped off the box he’d be electrocuted. When I raised my camera, Cuban soldiers guarding the Swiss Embassy yelled at me and brandished machine guns. No way I could unravel their rapid Spanish, but I knew they were telling me not to take pictures. I pretended not to understand. I captured FASCISTAS in bold red letters and Made in U.S.A. stamped beside an image of a naked Iraqi man obviously crying out while lying bloodied on a concrete slab. Military desert boots and camouflaged fatigues were clear in the bottom of the frame. This, more than a month before Sixty Minutes II broke the story about seventeen U.S. soldiers, including a brigadier general, being removed from duty and investigated for viciously torturing Iraqi prisoners. Eleven of our soldiers were convicted. I slumped on the sea-splattered wall with a sickened consciousness of being an American. Sad and embarrassed and unable to escape my own despair at this unwitting connection to terrorism. A Cuban woman came over, shriveled and grandmotherly. I could only imagine how very rich and white-bread I must’ve looked. The woman smiled into my eyes and rested her hand gently on my shoulder. No language. But communication in its purest form. Kindness. Then, a second woman walked up, asking in broken English if I knew any movie stars. Color transparencies of the Abu Ghraib billboards were added to archival binders in my office. Moments I want to remember, but may or may not want to share.

Four years later, February 2008. This time I traveled from LAX to Cancun and boarded a decrepit Russian plane for the hour-long flight to Havana. Remnant cigarette smoke seeped into the cabin and wires MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

dangled from the ceiling. I’d enrolled in the same dance program, with the same teachers, and was soon retracing my old routes on backstreets, walking for hours without boredom. I’d been on these streets dozens of times, yet they were never the same. I wanted it to last—the going nowhere. I gave away bottles of antibiotics to doctors I met. But for the lack of feral dogs, little had changed in Havana. Cubans still wanted Convertible Pesos, fearful U.S. dollars might be confiscated. The beat-up cars, poverty, and loving nature of the people were the same. Thankfully, the billboards of Abu Ghraib prison had been taken down. Dignity Place had been renamed Tribuna Anit-Imperialista (AntiImperialist Plaza). An electronic display directed messages about social and human rights at the U.S. Section Interests office. The bulk of ruin and rubble from the devastating 2005 hurricane season had been cleared from the main arteries. My Spanish hadn’t improved that much so I continued to play charades, bought peanuts in paper cones from vendors, and gave vitamins and toothbrushes to friendly locals. I was never in a hurry, never felt late. I still carried a film camera, eschewing the digital age. On one ramble, a garage door slid up as I walked by. Inside, a smiling, toothless woman behind a makeshift counter. Obviously unlicensed, she made and sold simple cheese sandwiches. A hard, tasteless roll sliced in half and sprinkled with salt. A swig of home-fermented rum, if you asked. Or a bottle full for about fifty cents a liter. But you had to provide your own bottle. A small revolution of her own. A friend of a dance teacher brought a pair of bongos to class,

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hidden under the flap of his jacket. The exchange for $50 took place in the murky shadows of a stairwell, like a surreptitious drug deal. These vintage beauties were made from same Siam oak as our claves, set in heavy chrome-plated steal, and covered in horse or mule hide. They have plenty of slap. Later that afternoon, I checked my email on an obsolete PC in the hotel business center. My inbox was clogged with messages from family and friends back home. Are you okay? Can you call us? Are there marches? Protests? Riots? What were they talking about? A French version of the newspaper Granma International, the official voice of the communist party of Cuba, dated February 24, 2008, lay on the counter. The headline read “Ce n’est pas un adieu.” A full five days had passed since Fidel Castro announced he would not accept another term as president, yet no one at Escuela had thought to mention it.

I’m now planning my fifth trip to Havana. Ten years later, it’s bound to be a much different place. President Obama had worked to end tense hostilities between nations ninety miles apart, a sign of hope for all of us. Now there’s Trump, intent on reversing Obama’s policies, restricting people-to-people educational travel, and blustering about border walls. Here’s what I know: Cubans will still find a reason to sing, a reason to dance in the streets, and a reason to smile at strangers.

Sherry Shahan has 35 books to her credit, including YA novels Purple Daze (Running Press) and Skin and Bones (A. Whitman & Co.). Her articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Backpacker, Oxford University Press, Confrontation, ZZYZYVA, Exposition Review and others. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches an ongoing writing course for UCLA Extension. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

INTERVIEW

Interview: Garth Greenwell British Book Award-winning author Garth Greenwell discusses the writing process and the importance of art with Mount Hope’s Hannah Little.

Garth Greenwell grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and now resides in Iowa City. He was a voice student at the Eastman School of Music and received his BA in Literature from SUNY Purchase. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and his MA in English and American Literature from Harvard University. Greenwell has taught high school in both the United States and Bulgaria. He is the author of What Belongs to You, a novel written from his first novella, Mitko. What Belongs to You won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Greenwell’s novel was selected for the 2018 Master Class for the Bermont Fellowship in Fiction or Nonfiction at Roger Williams University, during which he was interviewed by Hannah Little. 28

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HL: You’ve made it clear that this novel was very much meant to represent a specifically-queer model of life; however, certain readers of my generation, may not see it through this lens of sexuality. I don’t think cruising is something any of us had personally experienced, but we immediately accepted it as part of our narrator’s life and nobody questioned it. Did you expect this from younger readers?

bulk of experience that is in fact shared amongst all of us. That great shared inheritance or burden that is being a human being in the world. It makes me very happy that someone who’s never experienced cruising could read this book and have that not be a barrier to them. That, to me, is really what literature is for. HL: In the novel, Mitko is the only named character. Was this a conscious decision for the story or did it stem from its origin as a novella?

GG: As I was writing the book, I really wasn’t thinking about readers at all. Maybe it’s because this book was the first fiction I had ever written that I had no imagination of myself of as a novelist. Writing this book was really the most private experience of my life. And so I wasn’t imagining a reader’s response.

GG: Well, it certainly became a conscious decision. I don’t know how conscious is was at first. In that first section of the book, Mitko and the narrator are almost the only characters. And it’s very easy to have an unnamed character because the narrator’s name is just “I.” And there was a dramatic reason for the narrator’s loss of name, which is in that first scene, when it turns out that his name is unpronounceable in Mitko’s language. And that felt significant. There’s something initiatory about that opening scene, being sent into this space and having your name taken from you. I think I realized as I was writing the entire novel that I felt this great resistance to giving any of the characters full names. I did want Mitko to be the only named character. What I hope that does is reflect something that’s true about Mitko’s situation in

But I guess something that I take for granted in literature is that the whole point of it is to show us what another person’s life feels like from the inside. The literary imagination seems, to me, the best technology we have for doing that. And so I’ve always taken it for granted that of course, in books, I encounter experiences that are not my experience. In fact, that’s the whole reason I read. What is extraordinary about literature is that through a devotion to the particulars and the texture of a life that might be very foreign to my own, a book nevertheless teaches me something about that MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

the book and in the world, which is that on one hand, I think of a name as functioning as a spotlight, and on one hand, that spotlight is a place of privilege, really. I knew as I wrote this book that I wanted Mitko to be the most alive thing. I wanted him to leap off the page every time he appeared. And then, on the other hand, being in the spotlight is also a position of real vulnerability and exposure. And that felt true to Mitko’s position in his relationship with the narrator and also in his relationship with the larger world.

it. I think there’s a long history of pathologizing same-sex relationships and so I have an instinctive resistance to that idea. But I also think that a narrative of pathology is too simple for my understanding of what’s happening between these two characters. One of the things that I love about narrative is that I think narrative allows us to engage with the world in a way that is adequate to the complexity of the world. I think many of our other strategies of engagement tend to flatten the world. I think political thinking can tend to flatten the world. I think medical or pathologizing thinking can flatten the world and can actually make phenomena lose their particular texture. I certainly think there are points of contact between these experiences. The narrator certainly feels a compulsion to be with Mitko that’s something that he doesn’t control, but I actually think that’s one of the elements of this relationship that makes it like any experience of love.

HL: Reading the novel, I thought about how the narrator’s obsession with Mitko, despite knowing he is manipulative and potentially dangerous, could be compared to addictions to things like gambling, sex, alcohol, and other substances. Do you think this is a valid comparison? GG: I resist thinking about the relationship between the two characters in any way that pathologizes is, in fact, a fantasy. I would never want to tell the reader, “You can’t use this analogy that illuminates aspects of the book for you,” but to me, in my understanding or my experience of the relationship between the two characters, I would want that reader to always keep in mind that an analogy of addiction is illuminating certain aspects of that relationship, but maybe not the totality of that relationship.

One of the things that is so disorienting about love and one of the reasons I think our culture is so apprehensive about desire is that desire is something that happens to us—it’s not something we choose. And it’s something that, I think, reminds us that our sense of ourselves as these self-governing wills moving through the world 30

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shapes of my sentences in a different way. I’ve never been able to write in a fancy notebook. Sometimes people have given me really nice notebooks to write in and they just sit unused on my shelf. I have to be writing in something that feels very casual, that feels like what I wrote most of the novel in: these little spiral-bound notebooks that I would get for 50 cents from a little shop on the way to school. I like that very much. I like the way that it feels. I know that what I’m doing is an approximation. I don’t need to worry about the final shape of a sentence. I can just try to get through something. And then, yes, I did start writing the middle part of the book because I felt very seized by it in a particular moment. I did start writing that in a cafe on the backs of receipts, and napkins, and little scraps of paper. And then it was very much to my surprise that I found even in a very cheap, spiral-bound notebook, I felt paralyzed for that section. Even a very cheap spiralbound notebook felt too permanent. I think I could only write that on pieces of paper that could be mistaken for trash. I think that allowed me to access material that was messy, and hot, and so obviously not something I was going to be able to make into a coollycrafted, impeccable piece of art. I needed the permission that writing on trash gave me to write that second section.

HL: Definitely. In discussing your writing process, you have mentioned that writing on scraps of paper or in spiral-bound notebooks has helped you because it doesn’t feel “permanent.” Can you expand on why you prefer to write this way? GG: I think this partly goes back to that privacy I was talking about before. I have different ways of writing for different things. And certainly, if I’m writing a critical piece or an essay of a certain kind, I’m probably writing directly into the computer. When I write directly into the computer, I have a sense of a public face oriented towards the world. This is very idiosyncratic. I don’t mean to say anything about composing in the computer. I think every writer composes in a certain way and it means a specific thing to that writer. So, to me specifically, composing into the computer feels like I’m doing writing that is intended for public view, a writing that asks for a process that is more pragmatic. It’s much easier, it’s much quicker to write and edit in a computer than it is by hand. One of the things that I like about writing by hand is that, again, it puts me into that place of privacy that, for me, is the place of writing, of literary writing. And it also slows me down. I like writing by hand because it makes me feel the MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

HL: Speaking of your writing process, you mentioned in an interview with The Guardian in 2016 that you were working on a collection of short stories set in Bulgaria with the same narrator. Are you still working on that? And if so, what was it like to recreate the world of the novel after such an intense revision process?

as I’ve been writing fiction. So it didn’t feel like I needed to re-enter a world. It felt like the world was already there and the chambers between What Belongs to You and this story collection, which is called Cleanness, were already open. The texts were already in communication with one another. And I was grateful for that.

GG: I’ve actually just turned that manuscript in to my publisher last week, so it’s about to enter into that intense editing process. The stories in the collection are very interlinked, they’re very interwoven—both amongst themselves and in relationship to the novel. Several of the stories concern the narrator’s relationship with R., the character who appears in the third section, and who’s an important character in What Belongs to You, but whom we hardly see.

There’s a mythical difficulty— not mythical in the sense of not existing, but mythical in the sense of its scale—of writing a second book, especially if a first book has gotten a certain kind of attention. And I felt very grateful that I had this project. When the novel came out, this project was at least halfway done. And I was grateful to have this other book I could feel that I was at work on because I haven’t felt the anxiety of the second book. I’m in Louisville right now. I’ve been doing research for the next book I’m going to write, which is a novel, and I may have to confront that anxiety as I write the second book, which is set in the United States. It’s not exactly part of the same world as the first two books. But it felt like a very comfortable thing to have this second book I could work on as the first book was moving into the world.

I knew from very early on that What Belongs to You was going to be a very streamlined container, that it needed to focus on these two men in an almost claustrophobic way. Of course, there were all sorts of other things I wanted to think about in terms of Bulgaria. From very early on in the writing process of the novel, I would finish a section of the novel and start working on one of these stories as a way of letting myself build up steam again for tackling the novel. So, I’ve been working on this book of stories almost as long

HL: You’ve shared how your experience as an openly gay teacher in Bulgaria led you to being approached by many of your queer 32

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or questioning students sharing their own experiences, but we hardly see the narrator’s experience as a teacher in the novel. Is this experience of being a role model of sorts for queer students something you might like to explore in your future as a writer?

had never suspected I possessed. I think attention and disinterested love are necessary attributes of the novelist. I also think teaching is a relationship that’s really fraught. The teacher-student relationship, who you are in a classroom when you teach, those experiences seem, to me, so much more rich, and so much more complicated, than the usual stories we tell about them or ideas we have about them. I think that’s probably a dynamic that I’m going to need to continue to explore, not just in this book of stories, but also in later novels.

GG: Well, I wouldn’t say role model. It is very much a subject of several of the stories. There was a story in The New Yorker last summer called “An Evening Out,” which is about the narrator and some of his students, and then there was a story a couple of years before that called “Mentor in a Public Space.” There are really three stories in the book that I think are very much about the narrator and his students. “Mentor” is a story about a Bulgarian student coming out to the narrator and the narrator’s failure to be able to respond to that in an adequate way or be what this student needs. The experience of teaching students, not just in Bulgaria, but also in the United States, spending seven years as a high school teacher, was a really fundamental experience for me. I think it’s part of what caused a shift from writing poetry to writing prose. I didn’t start writing creative prose until I was in Bulgaria—and I think Bulgaria was the other piece of that shift. But I think teaching caused me to attend to the lives of others in a way that I hadn’t at that point. It certainly made me discover resources for disinterested love in myself that I MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

HL: You’ve mentioned how writing has been accommodating of all your paths, since no experience is ever wasted when you’re a writer. Do you ever seek out experiences in order to inform or inspire your writing? GG: That’s a hard question to answer honestly. In some sense, yes. I think my whole orientation toward the world is affected by the fact that I’m a writer, and that one of the great gifts that writing can give someone is that particular orientation to the world. I think the way that one moves through the world as a writer or when one’s faculties are awake, I think that’s a better way of being in the world than the way many of us habitually are. I think one of the great functions of literature is to defamiliarize the world and wake us up to how strange and interesting the world is around us. So, 33

in that sense, I do move through the world in a way that I think is probably particular to writers or particular to artists. This is a really hard question to answer honestly because I also don’t want to be someone who tries to engineer experience to fit some pre-conceived idea of what a good narrative shape is. That seems to be disastrous. I am a writer who writes from life, which doesn’t mean writing autobiographically, but I do use experience in the world around me in the way that a visual artist might use readymade material as something to be processed and transformed and fictionalized in all sorts of ways, as building blocks of the things I want to make. And one of my core inclinations as an artist is that the material of art is already there, that it doesn’t need to be engineered, that literature is not about events so much as it’s about how one looks at events, so much as it’s about sensibility. That defines a particular aesthetic or school of fiction writing, but it’s the one I subscribe to. I am horrified by the idea of trying to engineer a narrative out of my own life, but I really don’t know.

more open to those experiences; my non-writerly inclination is to never leave my apartment. But I hope I would never make a big life choice. I hope I would never be like, “Oh, wow, if I had an affair, that would be a really cool story.” That horrifies me.

In some sense, I do think if somebody proposed to me, “Hey, do you want to go live in Santiago for a year?” I probably would, and I think part of it might be, “Oh, I wonder what I would find to write about there.” So, to that extent, I think yes. Being a writer makes me

I have a vexed relationship to creative writing pedagogy. On one hand, I think workshops can be really helpful—and I’m not at all anti-workshop and have not one, but two MFAs—but on the other hand, I do think there’s a danger in putting young writers in

HL: Shifting gears a little bit, this summer will be your second year of teaching at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, and you’ve also taught at several programs in the US and in Europe. What has the experience of teaching writing in different countries been like for you? GG: That’s an interesting question, too. I’m trying to think of how much actual teaching I’ve done in other countries. A little bit in the UK, obviously in Bulgaria with high school students. But professional writing teaching, I don’t know how much of that I’ve done in other countries. And this summer, I’ll be teaching in Lisbon right before going to Skidmore. But I think most of those students will be American students or certainly English-language students.

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a model that might seem like it’s saying success as an artist is when a majority of people or everybody in the circle likes what you’ve done. I actually think that making art is exactly the opposite.

think every writer fights that battle every day of her or his life. HL: Does your education in music inform your work at all? Do you still consider yourself to be a musician?

I love teaching, and I think a lot of good can happen. But I also feel when I’m teaching that my primary objective is to do no harm. I hate workshops that say the goal is having a publishable piece of work because I think nobody knows what that means. That doesn’t mean anything. A publishable piece of work just means some editor believes in it. And what I want as a goal—and the idea of international experience plays into this—is for students to have a bigger idea of what literature or art can do at the end of a course than they had at the beginning. And some of that means having my students read the Bulgarian novelist Georgi Tenev, who almost none of them have read, and who’s working in traditions that are different from the traditions that tend to dominate the American creative writing classroom. I also hope to try to affirm the value that what writers have to develop is a sense of when to accept correction and when to recognize that eccentricity is actually a distinctive feature and something to be cherished and nourished and when to stand one’s ground. And I think that earning an MFA does not mean you’ve learned that lesson. I MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

GG: The first question is really easy, because yes. I think everything I am, anything that’s distinctive about my style, I think all of that owes a huge debt to my training in music. Music was my first experience of art, certainly my first experience of myself as an artist. I think almost all of my aesthetic ideals come from music. When I think about my novel, I sometimes talk about the novel as a poet’s novel, but I also think it’s—maybe even to a greater extent—a musician’s novel. The original title for the book was actually Three Movements because I did think of it as a little chamber symphony. I think of the structure of narrative much less in terms of the cause and consequence of realist narrative or realist plot than I do in emotional intensity and the management of color and tension in ways that I think are more musical than they are strictly narrative. I stopped singing when I was about twenty-one, and in this very twenty-one-year-old melodramatic way, I made a vow that I was not going to perform in public again, which I actually never have. I have not made music in any meaningful way for a really long time. It’s true 35

that most of my closest friends are musicians and I still feel really connected to that world. And consuming music, listening to music and going to the opera, etc. is still a really important part of my life.

part of my life and a part of my creative practice. HL: That’s really interesting because that ties back to a conversation I was having earlier about having a creative outlet in your life, even if it’s not your career focus. Just having that to keep you grounded and whole as a person.

After I sold my book, which was the first time in my life I’ve ever had any money, the one luxurious purchase I made was a really nice electric keyboard with weighted keys so that it feels like a piano a little bit. It’s in my writing studio. I had to study piano when I was a voice student. I never played it well, I had no pretensions of playing it well, but when I’m at home, it’s part of my writing practice to begin with playing a little Bach. Again, I play it terribly. I wear headphones, which is the great miracle of this piano. I can put on headphones and my partner, 1) isn’t bothered by my playing, and 2), can’t hear how badly I play. And that feels really wonderful because it’s like I’m making art in this very humble way, but in a way that has no pretensions to professionalism, has no concern with the quality of an end product. It’s just a way of thinking or entering into Bach’s thinking, entering into a conversation with it. That feels marvelous and I think it really does feed narrative. The way that Bach reworks an idea feels absolutely like something that is meaningful to try to do in prose. So, no, I’m not a musician anymore, but music is very much a

GG: Absolutely. I think one of the things that really depresses me about contemporary culture— maybe especially in America but not exclusively—is we’ve become a culture that hates amateurs. Except when it comes to our politicians. But when it comes to musicians, this is one of the things that the miracle of recorded music has done for us. I do know some people who have Sunday afternoon salons in my apartment, but that’s because they’re professional musicians. I don’t know any amateur musicians who do that. I remember my father very explicitly telling me when I was a kid, “Well, if you’re not going to be the best at something, why would you do it?” And that seems to me like the worst possible attitude towards the world. I just hate that. I wish I had studied painting as a kid, I wish I were a bad painter. I think being an amateur absolutely enriches everything else you do. It makes you a better human being.

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NONFICTION

Jermyn Street Words and Illustrations by Michael Paterson

Jermyn Street is pronounced ‘Jermin.’ Like so many streets in London it is named not after some national hero but after the man–or the aristocratic family––who owned the land on which it was built. Henry Jermyn (1605-1684) was a wealthy politician who became the Earl of St Albans. He laid out the streets in this part of town, and was responsible for the grand and beautiful St James’s Square that forms the centrepiece of this district. Jermyn Street runs parallel to its bigger, noisier and better-known neighbour, Piccadilly. It has a church, one or two antique shops, agreeable cafes and restaurants, and a cheese emporium that your nose could find from some distance away. It is famous, however, for selling clothes. They are not cheap, and they are, almost entirely, for men. The district of St James’s is largely given over to masculine needs, for here can be found the majority of London’s MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

gentlemen’s clubs. You would not expect to buy a suit in Jermyn Street. Those––if you can afford it––are made a few minutes’ walk from here in Savile Row, Sackville Street or Clifford Street. This thoroughfare is for all the things that go with it: shoes, shirts, socks and underwear, braces, cufflinks, ties. The shops that sell them are old, the service is polite and the styles—give or take the odd tie decorated with a motif of pink elephants––is conservative. You would need to be aware, because it would help you avoid embarrassing mistakes, that our English is often entirely different to yours and that words do not always mean the same thing. ‘Vest,’ for instance, means a man’s undershirt. What you call a vest is known to us as a waistcoat. ‘Suspenders’ are not something for holding up a man’s trousers, they are for women’s stockings, because the term means a garter-belt (the British call men’s suspenders ‘braces’ and it is one of the rules of good taste that you never allow these to be seen. You should not take off your coat and sit around in them). ‘Slacks’ tends to mean women’s trousers and––please remember this––‘Knickers’ does not mean baggy trousers tucked into your socks, it means women’s underpants. The word ‘pants,’ in any case, is one you should never, under any circumstances, utter. It does not mean trousers but the item you wear beneath them. Please don’t try to amuse British people at a dinner party with a story about how you ripped your trousers climbing over a fence. They don’t want to know about the state of your underwear, and you will find that the very word ‘pants’ makes them wince. The firms that trade in Jermyn Street frequently have names that are bracketed together in pairs: Hawes and Curtis (Cary Grant, Fred Astaire and Clark Gable were all customers), Harvie and Hudson, Hilditch and Key, New and Lingwood. This last was founded in 1865 next door to Eton College, the great boys’ public school (with spectacular lack of logic, the term ‘public school’ in Britain means a private school!), by Miss Elizabeth New and Mr Samuel Lingwood. They later married and their business flourishes to this day, with a shop at Eton to make school uniforms for the boys and a branch in London to outfit them once they have joined the adult world. The School’s coat-of-arms is prominent over the door, and inside are Victorian photographs of its buildings and classrooms. Across the street is Bates the Hatter, presided over by a large tabby cat. His name is Binks. One day, in 1921, he wandered into the shop as a stray kitten and stayed for the rest of his life, spoiled by both staff and customers. When he died he was stuffed and placed in the window, seated in a glass-fronted wooden box. A cheroot is stuck nonchalantly in his mouth and a miniature top hat, made for him on the premises, sits at an angle over one ear. He has been admired for generations, and visitors are encouraged to put donations for charity into his box. He has adapted well to the modern world, for he can be Googled and has his own Twitter account (@binksthecat). 38

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Nearby is yet another pair of names: Turnbull and Asser. Churchill had his shirts made here, as well as the zip-up ‘siren suits’ that he wore throughout World War II. Prince Charles is another customer, as was Diana. She ordered feminine versions of their masculine styles, and thus started a trend that lasted for a few years. Not everything here is a clothing shop. There are two splendid traditional barbers—Trumper’s and Taylor’s. Their windows are filled with shaving-brushes and scented soaps and colognes that are made to their own recipes. Inside, they will give you a shave with a cut-throat razor. Shirts––or rather the ‘shirtmakers’ firms that sell them––are, however, what give this street its fame. Everywhere you will see the things, or the bolts of material from which they are cut. They may be traditional in style but their patterns are surprisingly bright in colour for a nation that thrives on subtlety and understatement- scarlet, sky-blue, egg-yolk yellow. The most eye-catching are patterned in fat stripes (these are known as ‘regatta shirts’) or gingham checks. And what if you were buying them? What are the hallmarks of excellence that would prove you have taste? First of all, a shirt should never be of more than two colours, and of those one must be white (no red-white-and-blue, no matter how patriotic you are!). Secondly, you should not wear shirts with buttoned cuffs. You must have double-cuffs that fold back and are secured by links––and as a further complication these should have a bar or chain and not a swivel-back. The stitches must be tiny, for the smaller they are the better the garment, and the tail at the back should be longer than that at the front, so you can sit down without crumpling it. Perhaps most distinctive of all, when the shirt is ironed the buttons must make a shrill squeaking-noise. This proves they are made from mother-of-pearl and not plastic. With this, you would expect to wear a tie (the word ‘necktie’ is unknown in Britain). It would be silk and, if it is striped, the stripes must actually mean something and not merely be a decorative pattern. In this country, where so many things are more formal than in the United States, there are many hundreds of different striped ties. Virtually every school has its own and they are worn by children as young as five as part of their uniform. There are other ties for use in later life to show people what school you attended, and further ones to indicate where you went to university, what regiment you served in, or what club you belong to. The best known of these––Eton, the Brigade of Guards, the Garrick Club––are recognised at once, but ‘What’s your tie?’ is a question Englishmen often ask each other. If your background is appropriate you will find the tie in Jermyn Street, though you may be––discreetly, of course––to show proof that you are entitled to wear it. There is even a book showing the designs of all these ties, though of course you would not want to be seen consulting it, for that would suggest that you lack the essential knowledge. But, to return to the street itself. At sidewalk-level (it is called a pavement in our language) is a bronze statue. A man, dressed in the clothing that Americans associate with the age of Alexander Hamilton, gazes up Piccadilly Arcade toward yet more exclusive shops. He wears a cutaway coat, riding boots and a ruffled shirt. He holds a cane and a top hat. If he displays a noticeable swagger this is only to be expected, for 40

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he is George “Beau” Brummell, the best-dressed man in history. Born in 1778, he epitomised that glittering era called, in England, the Regency––the time of Napoleon, Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Rich enough not to need to work (he was in the army, but resigned rather than move to a garrison in the unfashionable north of England!) he spent his life in perfecting his clothes and in uttering social pronouncements. He never left his house before the afternoon because it took him all morning––with the help of a servant––to dress immaculately enough to go out, and a crowd gathered at his door to see the spectacle. His afternoons were habitually spent at the very exclusive White’s Club (founded in 1693 and still exclusive), just round the corner from his statue. White’s has a bow window that looks out on St James’s’ Street and here Brummell would stand, making waspish remarks about the dress and manner of passers-by. His disapproval was so dreaded that many men avoided the street and used back-alleys to escape his scrutiny. He ultimately fell foul of gambling debts and had to flee the country, but he also lost caste by making a deliberately slighting reference to the Prince Regent at a society ball, loudly asking a companion, within earshot of the Prince: “Who’s you fat friend?” Such an insult could not be overlooked, and Brummell’s star fell. Nevertheless, he has left a glowing legacy both here and in the wider world, where his name is a by-word for male elegance. He even gains a mention in the Broadway musical Annie! Incidentally, the Prince Regent was not the only member of Britain’s Royal Family to find his weight a challenge. Decades later another heir to the throne––‘Bertie,’ the Prince of Wales who later became King Edward VII––found his clothes such a tight fit that he could no longer do up the bottom button on his waistcoat. Men in his social circle immediately left theirs undone too in order that his plight should not be noticeable, and the habit filtered down through the male population. It is still one of the signs of a gentleman that this button will be left undone on his waistcoat. Brummell is long gone. He died in 1840, but in this city time often moves slowly and in some sense it seems as if he had just left. He is the guiding spirit of this place, the spiritual ancestor of all those who hurry past with their hat-boxes and carrier-bags.

Michael Paterson is a lecturer in modern history at the University of Westminster. He is the author of a number of books on nineteenth and twentieth century topics, including World War II, the life of Winston Churchill, Victorian England and the British monarchy, on which he teaches a course. He is also a London tour-guide, and has for many years been involved with American study-tours both of the city and of the wider regions of Britain. 42

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POETRY

Running the James River Trestle by Robert Brickhouse Lynchburg, Virginia, 1956 On Schwinn Hornets and Wasps, twenty-four-inchers, army surplus musettes strapped to their backs, past the Piggly Wiggly, past their grammar school (named for obscure Confederate generals) they raced through the park, past their spring-fed pool (later filled with dirt so no black kids would swim), past the rotting husk of the mysterious “packet” (somehow famous for carrying Stonewall Jackson’s corpse) and on out to the tracks and the great bridge, a quarter mile of steel girders and scaffold for the Crescent and Southern freights that ran through the Piedmont to Spencer and Atlanta (the original lines built by slave labor, rebuilt by gandy dancers, the railroads now staffed by black trainmen, to whom reckless boys were a nuisance and a danger), fooling around near the bluffs, waiting to hear the low thrum of a diesel, far off, the air thick with the smell of creosote, then see the headlight rounding the bend with still plenty of time to place coins on the rails and hunt for them flattened, or if they had gone too far out, maybe time to make it to the Winesap side, the horn blasting, or at least to the middle and the water-barrel platform, with no railings, to stand with the whole world shaking, roaring, the river two hundred feet below, or like one kid, someone’s cousin, who survived in their legend, ride their bikes out into the air, pedaling all the way down. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

POETRY

Neighbor by Robert Brickhouse Transplanted to the city for a Road Department job he never lost his mountain speech or ways. His backyard garden was his pride. All weekend he’d work out there, tending his kohlrabi and begonias. He’d lumber across the street to chat your ear off if he saw you, insist you take a sack of chard. When we struggled to plant a rose in memory of our son, he hauled a bucket of manure from the stockyard, dug it into the bed. He said he’d seen many in his family die young. Wife gone, family far away, in later years he drank and sometimes wandered door to door for company. One summer night he showed up in muddy coveralls just as we had dinner guests taking their seats. I tried to steer him off but he had a basket of tomatoes to present. He stood among us, tipsy, smiling, always glad to share. This here’s a Cherokee. This here’s a Orange Beefsteak. This here’s a Better Boy. This here’s Aunt Ruby’s German Green. And this here yaller ’mater’s a Mountain Gold.

Robert Brickhouse’s poems and stories have appeared in many magazines, among them the Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, Poet Lore, Louisiana Literature, Chattahoochee Review, and Front Range Review. He worked for many years as a journalist in Virginia and as a public affairs writer at the University of Virginia, from which he is now retired. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. 44

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FICTION

Root by Naomi Shuyama

He had never had a daughter but remembers the time he’d met his oldest child’s girlfriend over dinner. Loretta was pretty enough, with big brown eyes and a very pale complexion. Before she had even tasted the food she’d asked for a fork and salt. Dinner resumed in silence until she’d asked in her flat accent, “What was the war like?” He stopped chewing and left the table. Later that night, he called his son into the living room and told him, “Never bring her back.” His son obeyed.

In the summer of her tenth birthday, Eimi is shipped to her grandparents. They dress Eimi in faded family yukatas, and keep her out of the sun. Proudly, her grandfather introduces his granddaughter to his friends from Tenrikyo Church. They say, “Few freckles and small lips. Very pretty. Looks like your mother.” Eimi has never met her great-grandmother, but she hears she is MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

still alive. Somewhere in a room on an island in Okinawa. She knits colorful flower shaped potholders. Eimi wonders what the old woman can see from that window.

“

In the mornings, before their daily walk, her grandparents drink a tiny cup of komezu. They could not coax her into tasting the health tonic, despite assurances that, the samurai would drink this before battles. It had taken them years to learn how to savor its refreshing sweetness. Eimi likes to watch her grandfather during dinner. She admires the way he spoons perfect oval portions, the way his lean hands gently dismantle a roll. How his chopsticks click carefully. At the table, her grandmother says things like, “You must learn how to cook.” Her voice grating like the strings of a violin. Her grandfather says things like, “A man is not a plan.” Eimi says nothing as she ties up her hair behind her ears.

Eimi screamed out numbers 1-8 as her yellow overalls turned mustard. Her head and clothes impossibly cold.”

All the grandmother knows about the war was through onions. They were rationed daily, peeled thinly. They were prepared in broth and later eaten raw. A daughter-in-law had once left them in the corner of her plate. “The food was delicious,” she had said. “But I do not eat onions.” Her husband had then replied, “You would eat them if that were the only thing you had for months.” Every time the Santoku knife kisses the wooden slab it sounds like 46

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another door closing. Blade to block, the grandmother chops the onions with a steady hand. § The grandfather has recently retired after working for fifty years. He has a modest house, knows just where to place his foot as he climbs stairs so that they don’t creak under him. His wife of forty-five years dresses and speaks modestly. His four male children are modest in their own way, with careers, wives and children. His granddaughter, he thinks is too modest, and perhaps lazy. He does not like that he has so much time to think. The grandfather remembers his own father’s warning, Japanese die when they stop working. He decides to teach Eimi something practical, something of value. “You must learn how to make rice,” he commands, his voice low and guttural as if gravel tumbles around in his mouth. Eimi nods. He brings out the opened bag of rice and begins to measure out two cups into the mesh colander. Eimi’s skinny wrists struggle with the weight of the rice and she lets a few grains skid across the table. The grandfather stops. “It takes the work of a thousand people, to produce a grain of rice.” He picks up every grain meticulously. “Discipline is taught this way.” She continues to wash the rice until the milky water runs clear. When she plunges her hand in the rice, Eimi closes her eyes. She thinks about the time she sat on a lever in the laundry room. The laundry room was musty, a steampunk’s wet dream—decorated with levers, wheels and valve handles. Eimi was not allowed to play there; she was not even supposed to peek inside. She couldn’t resist and followed her mother talking loudly on the phone with her sister. If she hoisted herself, Eimi could dangle her legs just high enough that it was exciting. Eimi poked her mother with the tips of her gray-soled socks. Her mother waved her hand and gave her the eyebrow raise, which caused her upper lip to tremble. Jumping off her makeshift seat and dashing out of the room, Eimi began to play by herself upstairs. She counted the seconds in increments of eight. This is what Eimi returned to when her parents realized that her acrobatics had flooded the whole first floor of the house. Her father sunk his hand in the sloshing brown carpet and whisked her to the shower. Turned the water on cold. “She needs more discipline.” He blamed her mother. Eimi screamed out numbers 1-8 as her yellow overalls turned mustard. Her head and clothes impossibly cold. With the grandfather still muttering about discipline, Eimi looks down to her arms where the wet sleeves cling to her wrists. Her hands are MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

cold, her fingernails blue. § When the grandfather was twelve, he lived in the countryside with his father and siblings. The war had ravaged his fields and family. When they contracted lice, he remembers his mother working her weathered hands into their hair with kerosene. It was like a mini oil spill in the kitchen sink. He watched as his father carefully collected the corpulent bodies of lice. The father would stay behind while he left on a boat at eighteen with a hunger for salt. Rice was cooked on a stovetop then. Now, in his kitchen, Eimi swirls the oil and salt in the rice cooker. The grandfather presses his hands at the center of the lid firmly and sets the timer. They go on their walk around the park and each of them hold a hand, despite the fact that Eimi was more than capable. Then they return to shower and dress for the day. Sometimes the electricity is off and they are forced to stand under stinging water, skin worn raw from the cold pressure. They follow breakfast with reading. They retreat into different rooms with their respective books. Eimi half-heartedly follows Don Quixote’s archaic Spanish dialect and sympathizes with Sancho’s willingness to believe. Eimi watches the fans whirl lazily and thinks about her next adventure. Every night the grandmother sighs as they sit in front of the television and watch the news at eight pm. She brushes Eimi’s hair, smoothing the dark silk at least one hundred times. She counts very slowly, savoring as the bristle brush detangles and flattens out every hair. “Discipline,” he repeats. Eimi surprises him by asking, “Can we make sushi tomorrow?” “We will both have to learn,” he replies. She would turn out just fine, he thought to himself, carefully concealing the smile arching his lips.

On the last day of her summer visit, the morning her mother is set to pick her up, Eimi goes into the bathroom with scissors. She gives herself a hard look. Her eyes are very dark. Choosing a strand, and bringing the scissors to her chin, she snips and snips, chopping jaggedly. She hopes it will look terrible, maybe if she looks ugly enough she can stay. She can keep her own room in the house overlooking the garden, and make rice or knit potholders to send to her parents. She would be disciplined enough then. It takes a shorter time than she expects. The grandfather catches her standing in front of the mirror. He 48

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freezes and quickly leaves the corridor. If she were one of his sons, he would have taken the electric clippers to their heads, had them sport the haircut in shame. Eimi begins to push the hair clippings with her socked feet under the bathmat. Minutes later, he returns with a Ziploc bag. “Pick up every strand!” She kneels on the floor, legs tucked under her firmly. Tears begin to drip onto the floor. When she begins to shake, he puts a hand on her shoulder. The gesture reminds Eimi of the time her father shook her shoulder gently, to check if she was asleep. When she became conscious, Eimi recognized her father’s hand. There was a weight to his touch where even his tenderness felt harsh. They had been at a restaurant and her parents had begun to argue. They were insulting each other across the table, spitting through their teeth. The waiters shifted uncomfortably. The patrons pointed and whispered, some even laughed behind their napkins. She was so embarrassed that she began to scream. It seemed the whole room had turned to look at her. It was not until they left that she stopped. Spent, she had fallen asleep in the car ride back. She had wanted so badly to be held by her father, that when he awoke her with his shaking, she had kept her eyes shut. She hoped he would pick her up and carry her home. The grandmother watches the scene unfold from the doorway. She sees her troubled granddaughter crying into her knees, fingers twirling the ends of an irreparable haircut. And she sees her husband stooping laboriously, beginning the slow work of raising and dropping the shaky fistfuls of coarse locks from his favorite son’s only child. It looks to her as if he were uprooting onions.

Naomi Shuyama is an English M.A. Creative Writing candidate at Seton Hall University, where she works as a teaching assistant in the undergraduate first-year writing program University Core Curriculum. She was a 2017 recipient of a full-tuition scholarship from New York State Summer Writers Institute for the intermediate fiction workshop and a 2018 recipient of a partial tuition scholarship for the master fiction workshop. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Florida Review, Reflex Flash Fiction and Rigorous. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

POETRY

By Woodpecker Time by Peter Marcus I. The Pileated woodpecker’s hard-hollow knockings on the borders of the summer meadow indicate the hurry they’re in to complete a good day’s work. With dusk sieving through the treetops, and crickets ringing their jamboree bells, the woodpeckers fly above the scraggy back roads to deliver their finished caskets to the rustic hamlets, where grim morticians wring their hands, envisioning ripe apples falling with the snow. Boxes of varying lengths and widths strictly measured to actuarial specifics. I want to ask if I’m a recipient of one of their newest models or at least be kept abreast of my number on their waiting-list. I watch as the twilight enlarges space, and what seemed near, appears indelibly far: sawmill dust, tin roof rust, the lungs of toppled chimneys. I can see from this distance: a copse of birches kneels to gather up their shadows. I will not move until they recede back into the forest: huge arboreal swans.

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II. Woodpecker, coffin builder, whenever I’ve asked you for a timeline, you’ve turned away, showing only your ashen shoulders and bloodstained head, favoring again the reticence of hemlocks. I’m certain it was you who wrote the secret liturgical calendar, entitled The Nails of Days. Bony shafts of sunlight pin me to the forest floor, a half-conscious object, inevitably consigned to sleep. Woodpecker, coffin builder fly from your lifeless cedar, join me in the green decay. Come see these half-free morels that have sprouted a tiny graveyard on this path to the abandoned dollhouse where I was born.

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POETRY

Coastal Daisies, Jonesport Maine by Peter Marcus The dirt road to the harbor is bordered by copious daisies. Floral discs absorbing sunlight, swaying like cheerful drunkards. They gesture when I pass in that slowness when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m stunned by all things that brighten the world. How these petals mimicking pliant wings bonded to a dot of sun. Walking inland I hear the daisies laughing at this foolish man, then return to contemplation: transmitting their radiance back towards the sun.

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POETRY

Tapestry by Peter Marcus Beyond the natural fencing of dense pines, within the hortus conclusus of birches, I glimpsed a newborn unicorn in a crib of silken grass. Its lone horn emerged torqued as a cerith. I watched him strain to stand on earthly legs, unsteady as infants are with first words. The humid night holding the sodden moon aloft to help the wise, nearly blind pearlescent moths to find their way, to bringing notice of the wondrous to every bone-white door.

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POETRY

What the Owl Advised Near the End of Autumn by Peter Marcus No time to be bereft with each of us a midwife to our death.

Peter Marcus’s book ‘Dark Square’ was published by Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press (2012). His has poems upcoming in Miramar, North American Review and Notre Dame Review. He’s been a recipient of a Connecticut State Arts Grant and residency fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, Marble House Project, Norton Island and PLAYA. He works as the Off-Campus Academic Program Coordinator at Elms College Accelerated Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology Programs at Holyoke and Mount Wachusett Community Colleges. 54

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FICTION

The Bog and The Invincible by Eugene Christy

The tractor. The tractor was my brother-in-law Pat’s prize possession. A British Leyland Invincible, painted royal blue, with a pretty chrome-plated smokestack gleaming silver and beaded with raindrops. It was the foundation of all his business sense, the symbol of his youthful acumen, the key to all his projections of success as a dairy farmer in a village of 178 in the West of Ireland. Most were up against it as subsistence farmers, mired in the past, immured in their poverty, inured to it from generations past. The Blake’s house was not the only one in Kilcross with children who had grown up only to emigrate to the States, to England, to Glasgow, to Hamburg, to Adelaide, Australia. The children of the place were like a crop grown for export. Porrig Gilboy was one of these. And he resented it. On a good day he was sullen and cross. You could see the envy in his watery eyes, with the dirtyMOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

blond hair hanging down in them, every time he looked at Pat Blake. You would think Porrig took Pat for his personal oppressor, when all Pat had done was to give him a job when nobody else would. I didn’t like Porrig much. He was always pushing. And he had needled Pat into letting him drive the tractor. It suited Pat to let him when it came time to hunt for a few dry days in late September to get the turf up from the bog. Everyone in the village was dependent on it for heat for the winter. Pat used his tractor to help Mrs. Cochran and Jack Ryan, his neighbors in the boreen, as well as some of the elderly and infirm in the village, and a widow or two, by bringing their stack up to their houses for them. But he needed time better spent on his cattle and sheep, so here was the time and place to let Porrig get a bit of experience handling the British Leyland. And maybe then the pestilent boy might shut his gob once and for all. Kilcross was fortunately placed by not only Lough Conn and Nephin, the mountain, but also by the blanket bog in the lowland just below the village on the Castlehill road. This bog was called the Conlatristan Fen. Ever since the end of the war between England and Germany, this bog had been under ownership and worked by Bord na Mona, the national Turf Board. They built the bog roads into it, which were laid out in a rectangular grid pattern like the streets and avenues of New York City. In Conlatristan they were narrow causeways perched on top of embankments. Nowadays people did not cut their own turf by hand; it was done for them by machine by the Turf Board, but each family in the village had their own assigned plot of turf. The families were still responsible to stack the turf beside the bog road in spring so that it could get a chance to dry out all summer, hopefully. Then in the fall, they had to fetch it up to their houses. Young Matt Blake was out helping his brother Pat on the farm, so Pat asked me to go along with Liam MacGowan and Porrig Gilboy, and the three of us spent about a week before we finally got ‘round to bringing up the Blake’s stack, on Friday. That’s when it happened. The bog had the look of a townland of brown cottages, as it was so flat, with turf-stacks that stood six to eight feet tall standing at intervals everywhere along the causeway roads. It was large and level, big enough to fit three villages the size of Kilcross. Up close, down in it, it was a different world. Not the somber brown waste that could be seen from the Castlehill road, but a panorama of hues, pinkish-purple to clover-green to tints of yellow. Tall wisps of cattails and the tufted heads of sedge, rushes and reeds and nameless bushes grew in the wet bottomland. Bog-cotton, silky and spidery on wisps of stalks. Patches of purple heather proliferating with bunches 56

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Porrig wouldn’t listen to Pat at the best of times; why would he heed me now, when we were sweating, tired, and plagued?”

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of tiny flowers. Spiny, thorny whin-bushes crawling over sections of turf-weed, still green in their shade. Buttons of butter-yellow buttercups over bright green stretches of clover, islands of an archipelago. We weren’t the only ones there. Several parties were just as busy as we were, some with a horse and wagon, some with the ass’n’cart. Even the children were not too young to lend a hand. The bog roads were too narrow to allow two vehicles to pass so occasionally you had to wait. Liam and I were sitting back on top of a sheet of plywood in the trailer during downtime when our turn came. Porrig was napping in the tractor-seat with his head in the crook of his elbow. Farm life was full of stop and go, sitting and waiting, and boredom. I yelled at Porrig. “We’re up, Porrig, let’s go!” It was the end of a long day, the end of a long week of frustration. We’d already brought two-thirds of the stack up to the house, and it was now seven o’clock, and noontime since we’d had anything to eat. My hands were reddened and rough, torn by the tough, knotty, machine-cut sods of turf, sliced by the razor-edges of the dried turfweed that grew out of the sods, making them look like a loaves of hard bread crusted with hair. Death by a million paper-cuts. And then there were the midges. Clouds of them rising every time you touched the turf-stack, clawing at the corners of your eyes and mouth, lodging in your ears, gathering in a complicated, whizzing halo around your head. A sane man could go mad from the midges, sniping at your nostrils, under your collar, up your sleeves. Now we had to hurry as it was beginning to mist over. I looked up at Nephin to check his worried brow. All we needed now at the end of this long week was a cloudburst. We only had the last third of the Blake’s stack 57

to load, and we’d be done. Porrig pulled up alongside the stack, just beyond it, and left the tractor running. The accelerating mist did nothing to discourage the midges. The three of us getting out of each other’s way kept throwing sod after sod into the open back of the trailer. Now it seemed to be drizzling. “Pile it high, pile it high,” I said, hoping we’d not underestimated the remainder and had enough room. The last thing any of us wanted at this point was to have to make yet another trip. I waved my arm uselessly at the cloud of midges and wondered why I’d bothered to say anything. Porrig wouldn’t listen to Pat at the best of times; why would he heed me now, when we were sweating, tired, and plagued? When we were actually finished, we kept on, hunting and pecking the odd, stray sod here and there, and throwing that one up, too. Held in by the high sides of the trailer-slats, our pyramid of turf looked oddly like Nephin itself. On the embankment, there was the satisfying sight of a clearly-outlined damp rectangular patch, where, that morning, wet sods were rotting at the bottom of the Blake’s turf-stack. It was a thing to stand back and admire. “Oh, no,” said Porrig. Liam said, “God above.” Then it struck me. We’d forgotten to take the empty trailer up to the right-angle intersection to turn it around and head it nose-out on the bog road before we pulled up to the stack—before we loaded it with a mountain of turf. As we’d been doing all week. “Shit, fuck and piss,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something, Yank!” said Porrig, tugging wildly at his disheveled blond hair. “Me? You were driving, Porrig!” “A lot of good you are. Jesus Christ—what are we gonna do?” “You’ll just have to back it out to the main road!” “Are you mad?It’s nearly half-a-mile, if I measured. I’d never make it. You try backin’ this thing up with a load of turf behind it, see how far you’ll get. You must be daft.” “Well, what are you gonna do? Never mind. I’m going up the house and get Pat.” “No, no, no! Wait. I can do it. All we have to do is make two turns. I’ll go down to the intersection, turn left, get her straight, and one more turn at the next intersection, and we’re out! I can do it. Don’t get Pat, I don’t want him to hear of this, give me a chance, would you, to just fix it. Anyway, I 58

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need you both here to help.” “What can we do, Porrig?” “You can steady the back of the trailer for me!” But he was already in the seat, and starting up the British-Leyland. I threw my cap down on the roadway, I was so mad. Then I kicked it uselessly down the causeway, as Porrig set the machinery groaning into motion. “Hold on to the slats, one on each side, and push if she slides!” yelled Porrig, as he nosed the tractor left at the intersection. He had to judge it nicely and veer out without sending the big right-rear wheel over the edge of the embankment. Or the left one, for that matter. I was holding my breath until it appeared, by some miracle, he made the first left turn. Now if he could only straighten it out. “Slowly, slowly!” I cried, as Liam and I were both pushing the back end of the trailer rightwards with every ounce we could muster. The heavy load made it wobbly, and the whole shebang was perched precariously on the two wheels in the mid-drift of the undercarriage. At that moment when I knew we’d made the straightaway again without a disaster, I remembered my cap, as it was now coming down steadily. But this was not time to go back and get souvenirs. “Listen, you two! Climb up on top and both of you get your weight over on the right side of the turf-pile, up against the slats, and give me some balance for the next turn. I could feel her wobbling. We must have too much weight on one side.” By this time I, too, was so worried about Pat’s reactions that I couldn’t think of reasons to object and so Liam and I both clambered up there. I looked at Liam and he was terrified. “Say your prayers, Liam. And whatever you do, be ready to jump.” Slowly, slowly, at the next intersection, Porrig leaned into the turn, urging, coaxing the thing with his body. The Invincible coughed and chugged as he nearly choked her out. Then it leapt forward with a jerk. It groaned; it wheezed. Puff-balls of smoke came from the stack. Liam and I were pushing as hard as we could up against the slats, but we had piled the stack on which we were sitting so high that we had little purchase with our tailbones. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it. It wasn’t the trailer-wheel that slipped, but the tall left-rear tractor wheel, with its giant treads. The mountain of turf shifted abruptly in the trailer, towards the front, and we yawed to the left. “Jump!” Liam and I landed on the roadway. MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 14

People were running towards us from two intersections away. I couldn’t see Porrig. The trailer was dragging the British-Leyland down the embankment. A long way off, someone was exiting the bog and heading at a run uphill towards the village. As we got up, Porrig was coming toward us with woebegone anguish all over his face. “He’ll have my skin, Pat will.” The bog was gasping and chortling as it sucked down both ends of the rig. It couldn’t have been five minutes gone by when I saw Pat, up at the village, followed by Matt, rounding the corner at the hook in the road by the church, Pat leading a saddled horse of Jack Ryan’s by the halter, the three of them moving as fast as they could, followed by the whole village, who, by this time, had heard, and wanted to see for themselves if it was true what they were saying up at Delaney’s about the Bog That Ate the Tractor. By the time young Patrick Blake had thrown his lasso, the only thing showing above the bog was the Invincible’s silver smokestack. There was nothing he could do with a horse and a rope, however. Nothing to do but wait for a tractor or two that had been sent for to arrive from outlying farms. “Pat,” I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t know what to say—I didn’t know what to do!” To my immense relief, Patrick looked me in the eye with a twisted grin, as if he took some perverse pleasure in all the excitement, and said, “We’ll get it out, sure, we will, we might have to get help with that, and when we do, we’ll try and clean it up, but if that doesn’t do, well, isn’t that why the bank told me I had to have insurance on it? Meanwhile, Nick, I’ve a good excuse to sack that little bastard Porrig, don’t I? Would you look at them?” Pat gestured at the breathless villagers arriving to gape at the sight. “The biggest thing that’s happened in Kilcross in the past ten years. They’ll be telling the story for the next twenty-five. Your granddaughter from Aisling when she’s grown’ll be hearing about it as if it was yesterday! My grandchildren, if ever I have any, they’ll be hearing about it as if it was yesterday!”

Eugene Christy is a poet, musician and novelist currently enjoying retirement in his home in the Berkshires. He has studied under Seán Ó Faoláin, George Garrett, and Larry McMurtry. He has been working on a trilogy of novels, historical fiction telling the saga of an immigrant American family from 1899 to 1972, and is nearing the completion of its third volume. 60

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