The Oklahoma Review, Spring 2014 by The Oklahoma Review

The Oklahoma Review Volume 15: Issue 1, Spring 2014

Published by: Cameron University Department of English and Foreign Languages

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Staff

Faculty Advisor GEORGE  McCORMICK Faculty Editors DR.  BAYARD GODSAVE, DR. JOHN  HODGSON, DR. HARDY JONES &  DR. JOHN G. MORRIS Assistant  Editors KAITLYN STOCKTON,  TAMMY HORNBECK, GIL NUNEZ,  CAMERON BREWER, CASEY  BROWN, SHELBY STANCIL & SARA  RIOS Web Design ELIA MEREL &  HAILEY HARRIS   Layout CASEY BROWN

Mission Statement  The Oklahoma Review is an electronic literary  magazine  published  through  the  Department  of  English  at  Cameron  University  in  Lawton,  Oklahoma.  The  editorial  board  consists  of  English  and  Professional  Writing  undergraduates,  as  well  as  faculty  advisors  from  the  Departments  of  English  and  Foreign  Languages & Journalism.  The  goal  of  our  publication  is  to  provide  a  forum  for  exceptional  fiction,  poetry,  and  creative  nonfiction  in  a  dynamic,  appealing,  and  accessible  environment.  The  magazine’s  only  agenda  is  to  promote  the  pleasures  and  edification  derived  from  high‐quality  literature.  The Staff  The views expressed in The Oklahoma Review  do  not  necessarily  correspond  to  those  of  Cameron  University,  and  the  university’s  support of this magazine should not be seen as  any endorsement of any philosophy other than  faith in – and support of – free expression.  The  content  of  this  publication  may  not  be  reproduced  without  the  written  consent  of  The Oklahoma Review or the authors.

Call for Submissions  The Oklahoma Review is a continuous, online  publication.  We  publish  two  issues  each  year:  Spring (May) and Fall (December).  The Oklahoma Review only accepts  manuscripts during two open reading periods.  •Reading dates for the Fall issue will  now be from August 1 to October 15  •Reading dates for the Spring issue will  be January 1 to March 15.  Work sent outside of these two periods will be  returned unread.  Guidelines:  Submissions  are  welcome  from  any  serious  writer  working  in  English.  Email  your  submissions  to  okreview@cameron.edu.  Writers may submit the following:  •Prose fiction pieces of 30 pages or less.  •As many as five (5) poems of any  length.  •Nonfiction prose pieces of 30 pages or  less.  •As many as five (5) pieces of visual  art—photography, paintings,  prints, etc.  •All files should be sent as e‐mail  attachments in either .doc or .rtf format for  text, and .jpeg for art submissions. We will  neither consider nor return submissions sent  in hard copy, even if return postage is  included.  •When sending multiple submissions  (e.g. five poems), please include all the work in  a single file rather than five separate files.  •Authors should also provide a cover  paragraph with a short biography in the body  of their e‐mail.  •Simultaneous submissions are  acceptable. Please indicate in your cover letter  if your work is under consideration elsewhere.  •Please direct all submissions and  inquiries to okreview@cameron.edu.

Table of Contents Cover Art B.C. Gilbert, Detail from “BFE”

Fiction 10

Zack O’Neill, “Sea Lion”

32 Timothy Bradford, “Winter Velodrome” 47 Jerry Gabriel, “Electric, This Age Coming” 56 Mark Belisle, “Primary Directive”

Images 70 72 74 76

B.C. B.C. B.C. B.C.

Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert,

“BFE” “Devil’s Claw” “Tipi” “Twister”

Poetry 80 81 82 83 84

Brent Brent Brent Brent Brent

Newsom, Newsom, Newsom, Newsom, Newsom,

“Esther Green Plans a Funeral” “Floyd and Patti” “New Hope Baptist Church” “Floyd Fontenot, Free Bird” “Ash Wednesday”

85 Corey Don Mingura, “Red Pterodactyl” 87 Laura Holloway, “Annus Miraballus”

Reviews 90 George McCormick, A Review of Phong Nguyen’s Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History 91 Cameron Brewer, A Review of J. David Osborne’s Low Down Death Right Easy

Interviews 93 George McCormick, “I’m not the only one to seek out his grave in St. Mary’s Cemetery, between the Interstate and the softball diamonds”: An Interview with Ed Skoog

Contributors         101                                                       vi

Contributor’s Page

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viii

Fiction

Zack O’Neill Sea Lion

Announcer: “Will count if it goes….”  (pause)  Sacramento fans: “HHHHhhhhhhahhhHHHhhhhhaaaaaAAA!”  Me: “Man.”  My brother: “God that’s irritating. Well, it’s nice that these losers get at least one good moment.”  My dad: “Well, screw the Lakers, I just need the points.”    “When their interior defense gets attacked,” my brother went on, “it’s like they just shut  down.”  My  dad  agreed  with  him.  It  was  a  good,  tactical  insight  I  had  to  admit,  a  historical  anomaly  given  the  dominance  of  their  inside  game,  but  when  I  took  note  of  how  relaxed  and  unflattered my brother was, slumped in the chair pontificating by the window furthest from the  front  door  (I’d  have  been  pacing,  trying  not  to  shake)  I  felt  inclined  to  rebut  him.  All  I  could  think of though was African  catfish  (clarias  gariepinus)  show  no  link  between  aggressive  behavior and food intake, which I was still converting when the doorbell rang.   Tracy  was  here.  After  an  artificially  cheery  hello  my  mother  escorted  her  through  the  front door and foyer. My brother didn’t get up until she was in the center of the room. She had a  brown t‐shirt and jeans on, just like him. I wasn’t sure if their getup represented some movie or  maybe  TV  reference.  Whatever  the  case,  when  she  gazed  at  him  with  her  smiling,  mackerel‐ colored eyes, my personality went into its shell.   My dad turned in his chair.  “Hey Tracy!”  She went over to him with a kind of lumbering, unladylike gait and shook his hand like a  man.  “Hello,  Mr.  O’Neill”  she  said,  in  a  husky  voice.  My  brother  laughed;  my  dad  did  too,  repeating  “Mr.  O’Neill”  like  the  officiality  of  it  was  absurd.  She  smiled,  blushed,  put  her  hair  behind her ear, looked at my brother again.   When she noticed me she said hi and my name. I was standing near our small fireplace,  feeling heat on one side and cool ocean air—which always seeped in through wall pores and old  window frames—on the other. I said hi back, and looked away.  10

After a bit of small talk, with Tracy briefly regarding the game but not commenting on it,  my mom scooted her and my brother into the dining room, I guess to pose for pictures. This was  likely done for my benefit.  Soon they were off to Sadie Hawkins, leaving the three of us alone.     My mother: “Need a beer?”   Me: “No, that’s okay.”  My mother: “You sure?”  Me: “Yeah.”   My dad (eyes on TV): “Ah piss.”   Kobe at the top of the key, holding for the last shot, gesturing: (unintelligible).  Me: “Not gonna hit the over?”  My dad: “It’s like they’re trying to screw me.”     When the game went to commercial he opened up his laptop. “What do you think for the  second half,” he said, “the over or the under?”  “What’s the number?”  “Don’t know yet.”  Since getting in on a bet was of course not happening, I made a bland comment on how  the possibility of extra time made the over enticing. “Good point,” he said, nodding, fascinated  with the screen. I stood there and thought, and I’d talked about this with my brother before, it  was strange what he tagged as off limits. Pot and drinking, fine. Betting on games through his  sports account,  not fine. I figured  it was a territorial  thing: his account,  his money. But wasn’t  that kind of sadistic, talking to me about bets without bringing me in on the action?   He made his play, didn’t tell me what it was, closed his laptop, grabbed his empty bottle,  got up, went to the kitchen.  An ad for a sushi restaurant came on. I stared at the little trays of fish, the fist‐sized rice  balls, slimy seaweed salad, and thought about my brother, who always had the quality of being  in  a  small  pond,  my  father,  a  remora  to  his  manta  ray  father,  my  poor  mother,  who  never  thought  to  do  anything  untraditional,  Kobe  the  kingfish  and  the  Lakers  and  all  those  championships and so fucking what.

I sneaked away to my room, feeling, as I often do when I go there to masturbate or drink  or  smoke,  that  my  departing  footsteps  made  thunderous  sounds,  like  storm  waves  on  breakwater.   I’d crucified  my  work, nailed the paintings to my  walls I mean, the pastels, acrylics and  colored pencil compositions that my mother praised so rhapsodically it made me want to trash  them all and quit. But I thought maybe some of them were pretty good: one was a portrait of a  cobalt‐blue sky, swirly like Starry Night except less impasto and overstated, that backdropped an  obsidian‐black mountain (the sky was so dark you had to look hard to distinguish the two), and  an unrealistic aqua green ocean to the left. Little dots of red

I considered the story of my parents – my lower‐middle on  a  highway  running  along  the  coastline.  I  envisioned  class mom, for whom Long converting it into a huge fiberglass mural with real red and  Beach State was a great leap forward, and my dad, the yellow  lights  that  moved,  and  strobe  flashes  at  the  top  for  lightning.  I’d  given  the  painting  to  Sarah  as  a  present,  but  flunky who could have gone to Pepperdine on his parents’ on  the  first  day  of  the  new  semester  she  gave  it  back,  in  dime if he’d applied himself. and  yellow,  which  I’d  made  with  toothpicks,  signified  cars

front of everyone, because you know she couldn’t have done

it in the fucking parking lot. Or here, or her house. Jesus, break the thing in half and stuff it in  my  locker.  That  would  have  been  better.  She  made  me  feel  like  I’d  been  thrown  back  in  the  water with half my mouth torn to shreds, in front of my brother and his girlfriend no less, and  Jonny and his girlfriend too, right in the hallway before fifth period auto shop.    Another one was a painting of earth—I’d made the continents red and the ocean black,  and the sky was garnet, and the stars were all different colors like Skittles. I’d used a CD for the  outline of earth, and really fucked up both Madagascar and the British Isles.  I never painted people because that was too hard technically; everything, really, was too  hard  technically.  I’d  get  impatient,  and  there  was  always  sloppy  ass  craftsmanship  toward  the  end.  Another  problem  was  mixing  colors  that  looked  exactly  the  same  when  I’d  run  out  of  something.  With  my  mother  puttering  around  cleaning  and  my  dad  watching  TV  with  the  volume  incredibly high as usual, I figured I could smoke some of the tar in my pipe, which was abundant  enough I didn’t need to scrape any out and make pellets.   I pushed up a window.   12

A medley of observations floated through my mind, intertwined, as always, with the idea  that I could synthesize this state through force of will when sober, and that the hyperapproval of  ideas  was  false  self‐worth:  In  art  class  Mr.  Randrup,  whose  spherical  eyes  and  catfish  whiskers  were always a bit distracting, told me too much structure meant lifelessness yet practicing form  was necessary, and the big goal was to transcend guidelines or at least put them in the service of  something  personal,  and  to  persevere  when  failure  or  negative  feedback  dampened  your  enthusiasm;  he  was  good  at  making  me  feel  less  intimidated  by  the  brilliance  of  others  and  helped  me  to  just  focus  on  myself  (I  felt  the  therapeutic  effects  of  tunnel  vision  at  least);  the  male  banggai  cardinalfish  (pterapogon  kauderni)  will  starve  for  a  month  while  he  hatches  and  nurtures  the  eggs  of  his  offspring; we bullied Mr. Stetson, who always smiled  like  a  dolphin  and  had  what  he  called  “good  school  guilt,”  whatever  that  was;  he’d  talk  about  how  teachers  can  never  really  be  ethical  because  in  places  where  help  was  needed  you  didn’t  have resources so you sought out the best situation for yourself instead; I don’t know what made  him think any of us gave a fuck about that—it was almost like he was talking to himself through  us; we sensed we could talk to each other while he talked and that’s where you’d really push a  teacher  around,  not  so  much  in  confrontation  but  in  socializing  while  they  were  trying  to  run  things (of course for the most part I was watching others do this); wild zebrafish (danio rerio)  are timid until interacting with dominant members of their species and yet they interact  well  in  aquariums  thereafter;  one  time  in  English  we  had  a  prompt  called  a  “random  page  exercise” where Mr. Stetson picked a number out of a hat and we had to do a report on that page  from a book called The Road; I got a passage where a person was laying on a mattress with their  legs cut off, being cannibalized, according to Mr. Stetson, in slow motion by bad guys; I guess I  was  supposed  to  do  external  research  or  cross‐reference  the  scene  with  the  course  themes  or  another text but I just speculated on whether the person was alive or dead and what human legs  might  taste  like—I  got  the  paper  back  with  a  D  on  it  and  comments  about  how  much  I  could  have done with regard to eating and ethics.  Our  very  old  cat  nudged  my  door  open,  unbuckling  it  easily  from  its  worn  out  latch  receiver,  and  announced  her  presence  with  a  series  of  crotchety  mews.  We  made  vapid  eye  contact then I looked out of the window at the ocean, the iris blue mass beyond a foreground of  birds of paradise and a weathered wooden fence.  She  stopped  beneath  my  desk  next  to  an  old  aquarium—a  dusty,  graveled  ghost  cabin

that I’d stopped operating with negligence months ago—wrapped her tail around her feet, and  started licking herself. I looked over at the mirror, and estimated my thinning hair. I’d learned to  stop  talking  or  thinking  about  it—but  like  weight  gain,  or  poor  interaction,  or  task  failure,  or  anything else that’s supposed to eat away at you, the agony had a way of working its way out. I’d  shrugged off the idea of delay‐the‐decay remedies and was just accepting it. Honestly, I hardly  considered it part of my life, until I’d notice someone from a certain vantage point looking down  at my head and then looking away quickly, or I’d perceive older males being overly nice to me, or  I’d  see  myself  under  a  bright  light,  or  think  about  Sarah,  or  the  Sadie  Hawkins  dance.  I  hated  getting  photographed  now,  of  course.  Sometimes  I’d  conceive  of  how  my  hair  symbolized  my  consciousness:  thin  at  the  front,  around  the  edges  a  network  of  support,  just  past  the  front  barrenness and patches of trivial growth, in the back, who the hell wanted to know.   I thought of the Christmas goodbye with Sarah, her perky “Well, see you later!” as I was  about  to  ask  her  when  was  the  next  time  we  were  going  to  do  something.  No  breakup,  no  dramatic  moment—no  responsibility  for  her.  Maybe  turning  fantasies  into  success  took  something I didn’t have, I remember thinking at the time. Like a hook I couldn’t bait.  Our  doorbell,  that  intrusive  hidden  tintinnabulation  lurking  gnomishly  in  our  ceiling,  rang  out.  I  heard  the  front  door  open,  and  the  charisma‐boosted  voice  of  my  mother.  Then  young  voices,  male  and  female.  Positivity.  Good‐natured  awkwardness:  overlapping  chatter,  polite retractions. My father getting out of his chair, men meeting for the first time.  I  came  out  and  saw  a  girl  dressed  in  tight  jeans  and  a  linen  trim  top  with  a  goldfish‐ orange bead arrangement around the neck, and a dude with a goatee and gelly spiky hair dressed  in  a  maroon  V‐neck  pullover  that  suffocated  a  white  polo  shirt.  He  held  something  in  saran  wrap—she a grocery bag, and a bottle of wine.   The  girl  looked  over  at  me  with  a  wide‐eyed  smile;  the  guy  looked  too,  except  his  expression  was  blank.  I  could  smell  the  fruity/medicinal  hybrid  scent  of  his  gel.  Neither  said  anything until my mom said, “Adam, this is Keith and Kelly.”  I shook both their hands.   “Nice to meet you.” “You too.” “Nice to meet you.” “You too.”  Then.       14

Me (pointing at Keith’s mystery, saran‐wrapped package) “What’s that right there?”   Keith (smiling): “Halibut.”  My mom: “Oh wow!”   Kelly: “Keith caught it himself just this morning.”  My dad: “You’re kidding.”  Keith: “Right out here in the surf.”  Me: “How big was it?”   Keith: “About three feet.”  My mom (drawing the word out): “Wow!”  Keith: “We can put it on the grill with some green onions, and some lemon.”  Kelly:  (holding  up  the  grocery  bag,  which  surely  contained  some  green  onions,  and  some  lemon): “We came prepared!”  Everyone: “Hahahahaha.”  My dad (nodding at the wine): “Looks like you’ve got something else there.”  Kelly (holding the wine up, label out): “Starborough. From New Zealand.”  Me: “Let’s pop it.”  Keith: “No need.”   (Keith unscrews a cap)  Everyone: “Hahahahaaa.”    My mom fetched five glasses, which the wine was quickly emptied into. We clinked and  toasted to the starfish on the bottle.   Sour. Candyish. Girl shit.  “So what happened at the meeting?” my mom said to Kelly.  Kelly  rolled  her  eyes,  which  initiated  a  work  conversation  that  washed  away  our  group  dynamic’s  fledgling  infrastructure.  Us  guys  looked  on  politely,  not  yet  at  the  point  where  we  could break away for our own interaction. It was a loathsome and awkward place to be, but I was  too stoned to worry about it so I just stood there with a dumb smile on my face. I noticed the  accelerated  pace  at  which  my  dad  drained  his  glass;  when  he  did,  he  interrupted  the  girls  and  said, “I’ll get another bottle.”  “Thanks guy!” my mom looked at Kelly. “See, he’s good for something.”

We murmured out chuckles as my dad went to the kitchen, checking the TV as he passed.  I began to wonder why Keith wouldn’t be into the game.  “You  guys  go  outside,”  my  mom  said  mercifully  to  Keith  and  me.  “We’ll  get  the  food  started.”  I pulled a sliding glass door open and led Keith through a backyard full of flickering ocean  breezes.  Light  came  in  through  the  fidgety  trees  and  moved  around  drowsily—I  felt  like  a  nibbler meandering through seakelp.  We  came  to  a  metal  table  next  to  a  clover‐filled  fire  pit  we  hadn’t  used  in  years  and  skidded the chairs out—well, I did. Keith lifted his up.  He set his wine glass down, sat down. Took a look around. “Kind of brisk out,” he said.  “Late afternoon wind.”  He didn’t say anything.  “Most  of  the  year  you  need  a  jacket  out  here,”  I  said.  “It’s  why  south‐facing  places  are  more expensive. Less wind. We don’t have one of those though.”  “Oh really?”  The flat tone suggested an antagonistic reaction over what occurred to me was a rich kid  observation.  I  wondered  how  my  dad,  the  legacy  kid,  the  default  owner  of  this  house,  whose  father made him “work up the ladder” in the business, dealt with that type of shit. Probably just  ignored it, not even caring enough to smirk about it in privacy later.  Keith took a look around our quarantined‐by‐shrubby‐old‐fences backyard until settling  his gaze on the tripodded eight‐ball barbecue. “I’ll wait for your dad to fire up the grill,” he said,  staring at it. “Seems like the man of the house should do that.”  I smiled, sipped a forgotten drop of wine. Tart.  Whitefish (coregonus lavaretus) have uniform growth and do not develop feeding  hierarchies even under food restriction.  “So,”  I  said,  twisting  the  empty  glass  on  the  table,  which  made  a  sandpapery  scraping  sound  so  I  stopped  (also  because  it  occurred  to  me  this  was  a  feminine  gesture),  “how’d  you  catch that thing?”  He  gave  an  expression  that  would  normally  accompany  a  shrug  of  the  shoulders.  I  interpreted this as a signal he’d wanted to tell the story in front of everyone.  “Wanna save the tale for later?”  16

“No, no,” he said, sitting up, and setting his glass down. “Here’s what happened. I went  down early in the morning, right here at the foot of Longfellow, with a board and all my gear.  When I was about twenty feet from the water, I jammed the fishing pole into the sand, let the  drag out, put bait and a sinker in a baggie, wrapped the line around my hand with cork on the  hooks, and paddled out.”  “Was it a bitch hanging onto that stuff when you went past the waves?”  “Nah. Anyway, I paddled out a few dozen yards, attached the sinker, and loaded up the  hook with some sardines—”  “Is that what you’re supposed to use?”  “Supposed?”  I laughed.  “So  I  put  on  the  sinker,  and  a  bait  leader  right  by  the  hook  so  the  sardines  would  float  about half a foot off the bottom, then I dropped the line down, and got back in as fast as I could,  watching the rod the whole time in case it took off toward me.”  “How long until you got a bite?”  “About  an  hour.  But  I  knew  right  away,  when  the  rod  practically  snapped  in  half,  I  had  something big.”  “Right.”  “When the thing was in the surf I saw it flopping around. It looked like a goddamned sea  monster. I thought it might have been a big stingray.”  “I bet.”  “So I ran into the surf with a knife, and stabbed it, and grabbed its tail and drug it out of  the water.”  “How’d you get it home? Did you fillet it right there?”  “No, I stabbed it until it stopped moving and put it in a trash bag.”  “Holy shit. The nagging wife treatment.”  He laughed, and I saw teeth so pointy it was easy to imagine rows of them in his mouth.  “I’m surprised you didn’t get stopped by a lifeguard,” I said.  “No shit,” he said. “They really don’t want you out there doing that. But this time of year,  most of the stations are closed. And where I was no one was in the water.”  “Right.”

I  was  going  to  ask  him  how  many  people  saw,  and  how  long  he’d  have  waited  before  figuring the bait had come off, but just then the glass door slid open rustily and my dad came  out, holding a red. “Hey, got some Sea Smoke Botella,” he said.  “Alright,” Keith said flatly, oblivious no doubt that it was a $30 bottle. My dad probably  didn’t want to pop it.   He bloodied our glasses.    My dad: “Let me get the grill going.”  (Keith and I sip)  Keith: “Great wine.”   Me: “Oh yeah, that’s a great bottle.”  Keith (after a pause): “So, you’re an artist I hear.”  Me: “Well, I screw around. Maybe someday I’ll be one.”    I stared into my glass, took a sip—strong, a smoky yet berrylike flavor. The tart starfish  wine’s residue laced it, and kind of ruined it.  Nearly  all  fish  that  have  been  raised  in  a  marine  reserve  take  longer  to  flee  a  hunter with a spear than fish that have grown up in the wild.   My dad came over once he’d got the coals up, put the grill on upside‐down, and had the  area smelling like shit we’d barbecued before. “So, how’d you catch that thing?” he said to  Keith. “You a scuba diver?”  “Dude, you missed the story,” I said.  “Oh man, you should have let him save it!”  “I’ll tell it again,” Keith said.  The girls came out, each with their wine, my mom holding a bowl of blue chips, Kelly a  smaller purple bowl that I knew had salsa in it. When they joined the table Keith got up. “I’ll get  the fish ready,” he said, and went inside.   My  dad  went  over  to  the  grill,  flipped  it  and  started  scrubbing  it,  working  around  the  flames that were probably too high for him to be doing that. An unhappy expression was on his  face.    18

My mom (in a tone much lighter than it’d have been if we didn’t have company): “Is that your  second glass?”  Me: “Yeah, and even worse, I didn’t rinse it.”  My mom: “Shame!”  Us three: “Hahah heh heheee.”  Kelly: “So your mom says you’re an artist.”  Me: “She thinks so.”   My mom: “We have great kids.”  Kelly: “They have great parents.”  (Us three smile gaily, they go on talking and I tune them out)    Keith came back out with the halibut, beige jello on a plexiglass tray that also contained a  roll of foil, a fork, a spatula, a bottle of marinade and some seasoning. My dad stood back while  Keith triple‐folded foil into a sheet that covered half the grill; he then put the foil down, poked  holes  in  it  with  the  fork  (saying  something  to  my  dad  right  before),  slid  the  fish  on  with  the  spatula, and started dropping sauce and sprinkles onto the meat.     “Father McClellan is heavy‐handed,” Kelly said.   I looked over at them.  “At least he’s lax about the code,” my mom said.  Back to the grill.  “Well it’s a strategy for recruiting better teachers.”  “You  know,”  my  mom  said,  “even  if  it’s  a  factory  for  the  four‐year,  and  the  kids  do  the  privileged‐child thing of ‘I don’t understand this, you must have explained it wrong,’ it’s still way  better than the public system.”  “Way better,” Kelly said.  “How do you know?” I said, turning around.  They  looked  over  at  me,  both  with  that  classic  “unwelcome  interruption  of  a  girls‐only  conversation” expression on their faces.    My mom: “We’ve heard stories.”  Me: “Oh. Stories.”

My mom: “Adam, did you know Kelly teaches English?”  Me: “Really?”   My mom: “Tell her about the project you did.”  Me: “Oh.” (to Kelly) “Have you ever read The Road?”  Kelly: “No.”  Me: “Oh.”  Kelly: “What was the project?”  Me: “A random page exercise.”  Kelly: “Oh! I’ve given those. They lead to a lot of complaining.”  Me: “Yeah for me, it was from my teacher.”  Kelly: “Oh uh oh.”  Me:  “I  told  him  it  was  because  my  parents  pressure  me  to  drink  when  I  should  be  doing  my  homework.”  My mom: “Oh stop it!”  Kelly: “Well, I’d have been hard on your assignment.”  Me (confused): “Really?”  Kelly: “It’s how I control the youngsters.”    Keith looked over. My dad didn’t.  “So,” Kelly said, “where’s son number two?”  “He’s out,” my mom said.              “Out on the prowl huh?”

We laughed.   They went back to their talk and left me in a conversational warp zone. I knew my mom  wanted  to  include  me  but  she  had  to  be  a  good  host  and  certainly  she  was  enthusiastic  about  gossiping with a young girl. I noticed the chips and salsa. Blue corn tortilla. Kind of small—the  kind where you needed three per scoop to get the job done.   Hot.  I was scarfing, and gulping wine.  “Got the hungries?” Kelly said.  “Is that what they call it now?” my mom said, and they both smiled.  20

“Halibut’s ready!” Keith said, saving me.  “Oh, let me go get the salad,” Kelly said.  The  two  of  them  went  inside,  Keith  with  the  fish  that  steamed  like  the  head  of  an  old‐ time train. This left my mom, dad and I together sipping wine. My dad was still standing; I could  tell he was irritated we’d become guests in our own home.  “I should have told her to get more chips and salsa.”  “Nah,” my dad said.  “Did you want more, Adam?”  “Nah.”  The halibut tasted healthy and seemed a little underdone—I felt it would have benefitted  from  a  sauce  of  mushrooms,  green  onions,  minced  garlic.  As  the  fish  unflaked  in  my  mouth  I  found  myself  wondering  when  the  last  storm  was,  where  this  thing’d  been  all  its  life.  It  wasn’t  the best water out there even in dry weather, with boats and industrial runoff and storm drains  and  general  pollution  from  the  beachgoers.  After  storms  the  waves  would  foam  green  sometimes. I’d heard stories of surfers getting hepatitis.    My mom: “This is so good.”  My dad: “Really great.”  Me, Keith and Kelly: “Yeah.” “Yeah.” “Yeah.”  Kelly: “Thanks to our hunter. Such a wonderful caveman,”   (Kelly gives Keith an adoring look, Keith frowns)  Me, my mom, my dad: “Hahehahahehe.”   My dad: “We have a friend who gets lobster. Goes out in a little skiff. You all should come over  the next time we get some.”  Kelly: “Oh definitely!”  My dad: “We make them into tacos. Dice up the meat, fry corn tortillas lightly in a pan of olive  oil, top everything off with some cheese, salsa, guacamole, sour cream.”   Kelly: “Hey, tell them how you caught the fish.”  My mom: “Yeah!”  Keith (humbly): “Okay. Well…”

More  than  11  million  non‐native  marine  organisms  representing  at  least  102  species are being imported annually through California's ports of San Francisco and Los  Angeles, primarily from Indonesia and the Philippines.    My mom (after finishing her second glass of wine): “So, how’d you two meet?”  Keith: “Well, I was taking classes at El Camino, and she was the teacher.”  My dad: “What for?”  Keith: “She was an adjunct.”  Kelly: “That’s when I decided I wanted to teach high school.”  (Silence, perhaps all of us knowing that’s not what my dad meant)  Keith: “Anyway, I looked her up on facebook, and thought she was pretty hot.”  Kelly: “And he was living with a girl at the time!”     I  looked  out  at  the  water,  a  cobalt  rind  topping  our  jagged  brown  fence.  Unlike  my  brother, I never wanted to go to the beach. The beach made me feel fat and pasty. The last time I  went  there,  it  was  a  Saturday  morning,  and  I  saw  buff  surfers,  cute  chicks  exercising,  Mexican  ladies pushing white babies in strollers.     Kelly: “We got a Playstation too!”  My dad: “A what?”  My mom: “What’s a playstation, Adam?”   Me: “Uhh.”  My dad: “A play what? Station?”  Me: “Oh God.”  Keith (to me): “You have a gaming system?”  Me: “No I really don’t play. My brother does though.”   Keith: “Oh, alright.”    The conversation went on, and Kelly had the good sense to cut off Keith, who apparently  had a short tank, before he got too deep into an account of Call of Duty Black Ops. She took over  and  got  into  some  high‐minded  ideas  about  helping  people  with  their  developmental  reading  22

skills,  which  seemed  odd  given  her  choice  of  an  elite  prep  school  over  community  college  teaching.  Other  features  of  this  mandatory  banter  were  details  about  Kelly  being  from  Rolling  Hills,  attending  UCSD,  Keith  being  in  construction,  me  feeling  incapable  of  either  of  those  things  (I  considered  the  story  of  my  parents—my  lower‐middle  class  mom,  for  whom  Long  Beach  State  was  a  great  leap  forward,  and  my  dad,  the  flunky  who  could  have  gone  to  Pepperdine  on  his  parents’  dime  if  he’d  applied  himself).  The  more  discerning  I  became,  the  more adversarial the four of them were to me: I saw people taking turns displaying themselves,  not really listening to each other, faking approval. I also noticed the couply energy of Keith and  Kelly, the kind where younger ones survey older ones then look at each other with little smiles.   When  we  were  done  eating  and  the  glasses  were  empty  all  it  took  was  one  comment  about how cold it was (dad) to provoke a suggestion that we go inside (Kelly), and with polite  synchronicity the five of us rose, gathered our culinary detritus, brought it all in and put it on  the kitchen counter. Kelly then offered to help clean, and my mom said no no no, and my dad  half‐heartedly offered to pop another bottle of wine, and Keith said no no no, and we fell into  this awkward place of not knowing whether to sit or stand or watch TV or do what? I figured I’d  help out by going to my room without saying why. I smoked more tar there, and stared out at a  gauzy,  diaphanous  marine  layer  that  had  draped  itself  across  the  horizon  and  was  obscuring  a  dull peach sunset. The glow was almost white, and looked more like a sunrise.   I felt my artificial voice emboldening itself, the true narcotic effect of the drug for me, but  in its confidence‐building stages there was a knocking at my door, and it slithered into hiding  like an eel.     Kelly: “Adam?”  Me: “Taking off?”  Keith: “Yup.”      There was a pause, which I interpreted as a knowing nonverbal exchange between them  in response to the smell. Did they want some?    Kelly: “It was nice to meet you!”  Me: “You guys too! Good job on the fish!”

I  don’t  want  to  talk  too  much  about  my  thoughts  after  that.  The  thoughts  I  have  when  transitioning from an awkward gathering to isolation are the least pleasant ones to me.    Clipped version:    The sink was running.   The TV volume was up.  Scientists  have  observed  that  zebrafish  stop  swimming  when  left  without  company. This is thought to be the first documented ichthyic example of a human mood  disorder.  It was very quiet.  I was quite stoned.   The  anglerfish  (melanocetus  johnsonii)  might  be  the  ugliest  fish  in  the  ocean,  with a rusted metal color, stalactites and stalagmites of sharp teeth, hideous spiked fins,  and  a  fleshy  protrusion  that  emerges  from  its  forehead  which  can  glow  and  is  used  to  attract prey, hence the name. The tail meat of the lophius genus is used in cooking and  is similar to lobster meat in taste. The bulk of their evolutionary development is thought  to have taken place between 130 million and 100 million years ago.  My brother still wasn’t home. He played tennis, my dad’s sport. Wasn’t very good, wasn’t  good in school either.  I needed  institutions for ideas—school for art, people for relationships, or else it all got  away from me. My brother succeeded within them, so there were certain things he’d not have to  confront, for now.   My mom and dad contained each other, and I’d always be indebted to them for that. My  uncontainable depth put people off.   Bluegill (lepomis macrochirus) have a reputation for being easy to catch. They will  often  bite  anything  with  a  bright  color.  Stories  abound  of  anglers  using  lines  with  no  poles and hooks with no bait catching these fish three feet from a bank they’re leaning  over.   I was a nicheless child, bad at competing too.  24

Oxazepam,  a  drug  used  to  treat  anxiety,  insomnia  and  alcohol  withdrawal,  appears in human waste and often eludes sewage treatment.   The  words  my  brother  used  when  talking  to  me  about  girls,  or  more  to  the  point  what  I  did  deficiently: (adjectives) unctuous, satyric, diffident, (nouns) supplicant, (verbs) cadger.  When  the  drug  gets  into  waterways,  fish  consume  it  and  become  sedated.  Subsequently  they  are  less  judicious  in  their  consumption  of  food.  This  makes  them  easier  to  catch,  and  vulnerable  to  disease.  Scientists  worry  about  humans  overconsuming these fish, one of which is perch…  I  gave  the  cat’s  rickety,  chin‐on‐feet  body  a  once‐over,  piquing  her  semi‐conscious  interest. Her head lingered, suspended, as I put on my coat, stuffed the pipe and a lighter into a  pocket, entered the hallway, shut the door behind me.  Sand.   Paced‐out trash cans.  Orange lights, chilled air in off the water desert, pierced exoskeleton, bikers and joggers  still.  Off  in  the  distance  low  surf  mumbles.  The  shadowed  sand  and  its  divots,  like  miniature  wave  troughs,  a  fear  gang  members lurked in blind spots (I might have looked like one  myself, hood over my head so I wouldn’t feel cold air hit the  bare spots). My brother wouldn’t have wanted me down here  like this, I knew that for sure.  I  sat  down  on  a  hill  that  crested  the  hardpack,  away  from  the  light,  and  looked  at  the  PV  peninsula,  its  glittering  hump,  and  on  the  opposite  end  Malibu’s  expanse  of  lights  spilling from the upper hillside. Further, Pt. Dune.   This  was  where  education  met  edification,  as  Mr.  Randrup would say. The fork in the road between penumbra

I remember looking for shark bites or cuts from boat propellers; finding none, I figured maybe it’d been exhausted by strong currents, or was separated from its pack, or couldn’t find food, or was sick from infected fish, or maybe some unknowable combination of those things ate away at it until it just gave up and hurled itself toward a world it had no business in.

and chiaroscuro.  I  remembered  a  story  that  my  grandmother,  whose  skin  made  her  look  like  something  that should be crawling out of a Galapagos tide pool, told me about Pearl Harbor, how everyone  here thought they were next, how they’d turn their lights off at night.  I  took  out  the  pipe,  twisted  landward,  held  it  with  my  lips,  cupped  my  hand  over  the

bowl, flared the lighter, hit it, hard, held my breath, turned back.  Sometimes  when  the  waves  crashed  you  could  see  a  blue  phosphorescent  glow  in  the  foam, flashes, here and gone again, little aqua lightning strikes.   Out in the shallows you could hook corbina, which were good eating but hard to catch on  account of their skittishness. Chasing them was a fool’s errand. Most of the time your hook came  back with nothing but the dead sand crab on it, wrapped in a cluster of seaweed.   You could never see it as well from here as over in Redondo, but back in the day there was  a barge a few miles offshore set up for commercial fishing. They’d even sunk a boat beneath it to  make a half‐ass reef. Isle of Redondo was its name, but everyone called it “the barge.” The rise of  half‐day boats and radar eventually made barges obsolete in California, but years ago, dozens of  people every day would ferry out from the Redondo Pier to catch mackerel and bonito mostly,  maybe sand bass, occasionally rockfish, barracuda (sometimes sea lions would come around and  the workers would scare them off with firecrackers). If you got to one of the later ferries they’d  tell you the boat was full and they couldn’t take anyone out until someone came back. When you  got out there, about a 20‐minute ride over seahills until you were a mile offshore, you’d set up  your pole at an open spot and go to these big circular bait tanks that had live anchovies going  around and around in them. You’d grab one, take it from the water, put your thumb on its nose,  pull its head to one side so that the gills were exposed, push the hook through the flesh behind  the  gill  (too  deep,  and  it’d  pierce  the  muscle  tissue,  causing  almost  instantaneous  death,  too  shallow, the flesh would tear and the fish would break away) then you walked to the edge of the  boat with the thing flapping, held it out, dropped the line, watched it splash into the water and  swim  around,  a  bright,  writhing  gleam,  until  the  sinker  took  it  down  out  of  sight.  Then  you  waited for the rod to bend.   Geronimo, my brother and I used to say.  I lost my enthusiasm for fishing after a while. I have a natural inclination to get seasick,  and the Dramamine always made me woozy. And there was the time a storm came in that was so  bad you could see the boat pitching violently up and down all the way from the shore. I began to  have nightmares and daymares too about being out there in those conditions—in my tortured  visions, the shore would move up and down and up and down and up and down.   Beyond the surf the ocean was a black mass, an invisible nothing.  Pacific  bluefins  (thunnus  orientalis)  swim  near  the  top  of  the  Redondo  Canyon.  26

They  are  unsafe  to  eat  due  to  high  mercury  levels.  Japan  consumes  eighty  percent  of  those  brought  to  market.  The  record  price  someone  paid  for  a  fish  of  any  kind  is  $1.74  million dollars in Tokyo for a 489‐pound bluefin tuna caught off the coast of Japan. The  fish is prized for sushi and sashimi and has become more valuable as the species grows  scarcer. In Tokyo, a single piece can cost $24.  Great  Whites  (carcharodon  carcharias)  lurk  deep  in  the  Redondo  Canyon  but  sometimes  travel  to  the  shallows.  Though  they  prefer  colder  waters  they  have  been  spotted near the surf and several attacks in the South Bay have been attributed to them.  Great  Whites  reach  their  maturity  at  15  years.  The  earliest  known  fossils  of  them  are  sixteen million years old.  The lanternfish (myctophum punctatum), which swim between 1000 and 5000 feet  beneath the sea surface, is made up of 246 different types and is the most common fish  in  the  ocean.  They  account  for  almost  two‐thirds  of  all  deep  sea  biomass  and  are  not  only  the  world’s  most  populous  fish,  but  the  most  populous  vertebrates  too.  Their  cumulative tonnage is several times the amount of all other fish species combined, and  they  are  a  critical  part  of  the  ecosystem,  serving  as  prey  for  whales,  dolphins,  salmon,  tuna,  sharks,  penguins,  and  squid,  among  other  species.  They  range  from  six  to  twelve  inches in length.  The hadal snailfish (pseudoliparis amblystomopsis) are the deepest living fish we  know  of.  They  have  never  been  spotted  less  than  6000  meters  beneath  the  sea  surface  and have been recorded as far as five miles down, in trenches, feeding on shrimp. Their  liveliness  surprises  experts,  who  figure  creatures  at  these  depths  are  inclined  to  conserve  energy.  Scientists  believe  there  are  fish  that  live  even  deeper,  we  just  don’t  know about them yet.  A  girl’s  giggle  flopped  between  my  ears.  A  couple  deeper  voices,  too,  laughter  in  my  submarine canyon.   I turned around.  Four  people  had  traversed  the  bike  path  and  were  walking  toward  me.  Two  guys.  Two  girls  holding  their  shoes.  One  of  the  girls  walked  with  her  hands  out  all  cartoonish  and  exaggerated, like a kid playing airplane. She seemed amused at the sand’s unstable surface and  by  extension  her  own  drunkenness.  The  other  girl,  in  stark  contrast,  was  nearly  motionless  as

she  followed  along,  head  down.  Both  of  them  were  tiny,  petite  I  mean,  and  the  guys  were  the  same except they were taller. Human lampposts with dark heads.  They  reached  the  precipice  of  a  sand  slope  in  the  fringe  of  orange  lamplight.  Though  I  was  strategically  shadowed,  I  crawled  backward  and  hid  behind  a  small  hill.  They  were  about  fifty feet from me I guess.   The amused, more animated girl took out a cigarette. The other stood and hugged herself,  looked up and down the beach.    One  of  the  guys  had  a  fishing  pole.  I  watched  him  and  his  buddy  take  their  shoes  and  socks off and roll up their pantlegs; after talking to the girls a moment, which I surmised was an  unsuccessful  attempt  to  cajole  them  down  to  the  surf,  they  slid  down  the  sand  slope  like  tobogganers.  Just  out  of  the  water’s  reach  the  guy  without  the  pole  dug  into  the  sand  and  produced  a  scoop  that  they  both  examined.  The  friend  extracted  what  I  knew  was  a  sandcrab  and baited the hook. This guy then took the pole, walked into the unfurling waves, yelped, and  cast the line out. I got a little chill anticipating an unexpectedly strong wave or unseen riptide  knocking him down and sucking him out to sea. With the drag out I’m sure, they went back up  to the girls, and when they got there the four of them sat and huddled like basketball players at a  timeout. Before long tufts of smoke emerged from where the coach’s whiteboard might be.   One  girl,  the  more  excitable  one  I  think,  leaned  back.  The  other  girl  was  hugging  her  knees to her chin.  They were quiet for a long time. I looked around. Waited for more people, cops.   More smoke. I thought about going over.  Might I go over?   One guy reeled the line in. He fussed with the hook and turned to his friend; soon, they  both got up and went back down.    They took turns: cast out, talk, reel line in, pick seaweed off hook, get new sandcrab, cast  out again. While they did this the girl sitting up kept staring at them. She was starting to take on  a malevolent air, potential energy that radiated menace (perhaps more so in retrospect), like a  hunching gargoyle statue.   And  then  the  girl  came  to  life  –  activated  by  a  telling  physical  movement,  or  spoken  keyword,  or  conjured  memory,  or  unresolved  effrontery.  She  rose  and  went  down  the  hill,  jumping the last half. The guys laughed at her, but that was snuffed out when she got close to  28

one,  looked  up  at  him  and  initiated  an  augmented‐by‐gesticulations  conversation.  As  the  girl  spoke,  pointing,  motioning  vaguely  at  something  behind  her,  holding  her  hands  out  as  if  pleading, hitting her chest rapidly with her palms, the guy was still, absorptive—that is, until he  shrugged  his  shoulders.  To  this,  the  girl  turned  and  went  back  up.  I  got  the  sense  she’d  been  trying to provoke him into an act of aggression so she could be offended.   After exchanging a glance with his friend, the guy caught up with her, and the bickering  continued atop the hill. The other girl lifted her head and kind of reminded me of my cat. As the  feisty couple went at it, the guy with the pole reeled the line in and went over to the sitting girl.  They  huddled,  and  draped  a  jacket  over  their  heads.  Bursts  of  orange  light  began  appearing  beneath it. This time, the smell drew me in—that “no trespassing in the forest” aroma. It got into  my  weak  spots  through  an  olfactory  pore,  and  made  this  whole  scene,  everything  about  it,  a  multifaceted symbol of all I didn’t have access to. This was all the motivation I could remember  for  what  I  did  next,  besides  the  tried  and  true  excuse  of  inebriation.  What  was  my  agenda?  Weed? Conversation? Did I feel less threatened since two of them were distracted? It was hard  to say, what gravitational force led to the tidal pull. But I went over, flexing my fingers, trying to  think  of  something  to  say.  I  needed  to  meet  them.  Pierce  their  bubble.  How  though?  I  wasn’t  good at this sort of thing. Who was I? To them?   I  approached  the  sitting  couple,  the  wind  at  my  back  icing  every  thread  of  muscle.  The  jacket  lifted.  I  couldn’t  see  their  faces,  but  their  demeanor  brought  to  mind  a  time  when  my  brother and I had lifted a tarp in my grandfather’s backyard and saw raccoons hiding in his boat.  “Do we know you?” the girl said, her voice full of that stoic type of fake generosity you get  from these girls.  I didn’t reply.  The guy stood up.   I stopped. Stared into his shadow or silhouette as it were.   He didn’t move.   I didn’t know what to say.   Our little standoff caught the attention of the two behind them.   All four were staring—four black figures in pale orange lamplight, watching me, however  I might have looked before the flashing, slow‐receding waves.  The angry girl stormed off, spraying sand as she went.

“Melissa!”  She began running.  “Melissaaaaaa!”  I recognized that voice.   It was our neighbor, or rather their kid, a crabby college graduate named Darien. He had  long wavy hair and acne. We smoked and drank with him on his patio once—he was out there  with a bottle of scotch, and we were about to light up at the side of the house when we all saw  each  other.  I  remember  him  ranting  (atop  his  deck  with  an  unobstructed  view  of  the  water)  about how the occupy movement was bullshit since we were a slave empire and we empowered  evil  corporations  by  relying  on  their  goods  and  services,  and  how  college  was  a  credentialing  apparatus for the managerial classes or something like that. That was a month ago I think—we’d  been avoiding him since then.    The girl, his date or whatever, stalked through the sallow lamplight and disappeared into  a dark alley between two monstrous, triple‐decked strand houses.   They all regarded her so briefly I’m sure it would have made her feel worse. I suppose they  were more interested in me at that point.   This  was  going  to  result  in  embarrassment,  or  a  beat  down.  Or  more  polite  awkwardness—it dawned on me, like a flood of self‐effacing energy that comes when someone  shows  even  a  hint  of  disapproval,  I’d  never  have  the  charisma  to  sustain  a  conversation  that  would get them burning weed for me.  I ran, mirroring the girl I guess, and descended a part of the slope that ended very close to  the water. I waited for them to appear at the ridge, interrupt the light and swivel their heads this  way and that, but they never showed.  Hearing the waves, feeling the penetrating wind, and hearing the waves again, thinning  out and hissing, I imagined, after thinking it over, that the other couple had joined Darien as he  watched the crevice his date had vanished into. After some rumination they all set off into the  shadows together, bound for their lame home lives or a party scene or more of the same bullshit  except somewhere else now.

Staring  at  the  glowing  waves,  feeling  the  nonstop  wind,  trying  to  find  something  worth

painting, envisioning the right side of the bay as a slope studded by sapphire diamonds and the  left as a glittering whale hump, pretty postmodern arms welcoming in the black water, I thought  30

of my basketball fantasy, where I’d pick up a loose ball, a blocked shot of one of my teammates’  panicked, sissy‐ass attempts to hit the game winner, and from about ten feet behind the three  point line, right in front of the opposing team’s bench, launch a turnaround jumper that hit the  net as the buzzer sounded, and then I took a bow, showing my ass to the other team, and my  teammates rushed over, hoisted me up on their shoulders, and some student was waiting with a  microphone to interview me in front of the crowd, and girls and female teachers were all giving  me looks like they admired me so much they were about to cry, the older ones in a motherly sort  of way. I also thought of a time I was bodysurfing with my brother and felt something brush up  against my leg, how cold it was right now, if Sarah was at the dance, how I might get back inside  quietly, the aftertaste of the halibut, and on and on and on and on and fucking on until my mind  was  blurry  and  aching  and  anesthetized  and  despite  its  opposition  to  my  body,  or  you  know  maybe because of that, I felt once again like I was in my room and isolated.  The last time I was out here like this was right after Sarah gave me my painting back. I’d  come out and seen a dead sea lion a few feet from the water’s edge. Waves licked its body. Its  eyes  were  gone,  and  maggots  bubbled  in  the  sockets.  The  smell—rancid  seaflesh,  worse  than  spoiled  kelp.  I  remember  looking  for  shark  bites  or  cuts  from  boat  propellers;  finding  none,  I  figured maybe it’d been exhausted by strong currents, or was separated from its pack, or couldn’t  find  food,  or  was  sick  from  infected  fish,  or  maybe  some  unknowable  combination  of  those  things ate away at it until it just gave up and hurled itself toward a world it had no business in.  The black, crumbling, flashing, convulsing, moiling, retracting ocean. Swirl rise crash thin  hiss. Land water land. Go back.  There it was—what brought it together. Yet another choppy aesthetic, two worlds sealed  by a bubble‐eyed carcass.

Timothy Bradford Winter Velodrome

In Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a memoir about his time in 1920s Paris, he writes, “I  have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the  races are both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the road. But I will get to the Vélodrome  d'Hiver with the smoky light of the afternoon and the high‐banked wooden track and the whirring  sound  the  tyres  made  on  the  wood  as  the  riders  passed,  the  effort  and  the  tactics  as  the  riders  climbed and plunged, each one a part of his machine.” After reading this passage in 2003, I decided  to write a short story about an American bicycle racer who goes to Paris in the 1920s to race in the  famous  six‐day  races,  non‐stop,  144‐hour‐long  competitions  between  numerous  teams  of  two  riders, but while doing research, I came across a better‐known and infamous side of the Vélodrome  d'Hiver’s history. This led me to start a novel, which I’ve been working on off and on (more off than  on) since 2005.    The  Vélodrome  d’Hiver,  or  Winter  Velodrome,  an  indoor  arena  that  seated  17,000  people  and  featured  a  glass  ceiling  and  state  of  the  art  lighting,  was  built  in  1910  along  the  Seine  in  the  15th  arrondissement  of  Paris,  France,  and  for  forty‐nine  years,  hosted  bicycle  races,  most  notably  the  six‐day races, circuses, roller skating, political rallies, and numerous other events. In July of 1942,  during what became know as la rafle du Vel d’Hiv, the roundup of the Vel d’Hiv, over 7,000 Jewish  men, women and children were held there for six days without adequate food, water, and lavatories  before being shipped off to Drancy, a holding camp, and finally Auschwitz. Few returned.     Influenced  primarily  by  the  work  of  W.  G.  Sebald  and  the  early  novels  of  Michael  Ondaatje,  this  hybrid novel, which uses prose, poetry, drama, historical documents, and photographs, follows the  lives of two main characters—a French track cyclist and a Jewish immigrant from Poland—from  1925  when  they  arrive  in  Paris  to  the  destruction  of  the  Vel  d'Hiv  in  1959.  This  excerpt  from  the  novel’s  prologue  starts  at  the  chronological  end  of  the  story  and  introduces  the  two  main  characters as well as the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The novel’s working title is “Winter Velodrome.”      32

May 19, 1959  Torn down in the spring and by the spring, the recoil in answer to the pressure of events,  the weight of 17,000 bodies times the number of nights the stadium was filled upon its concrete  frame,  which  answered  in  a  volley  of  aches  and  cracks,  communiqués  to  the  city  planners  suggesting  demolition.  The  Vélodrome  d’Hiver  limps  into  the  second  half  of  the  twentieth  century  along  the  left  bank  of  the  Seine,  just  downriver  and  around  the  bend  from  the  Eiffel  Tower. But  it  can  go no more. Its legs are  gone, its face façade.  Its pillars still hold in  the clay  beneath, but its body is used up and a recent fire furthered its decline.  Above, the tenor of the sky is clear, azure and sorrowful, is “April in Paris” as wailed by  Charlie Parker, who’d been in the city ten years earlier, died four. A hundred or so people come  to watch the articulated, clawed machines dig into the ugly carapace of the Vel d’Hiv, the veldt  of Eve, the calving of Eve, its myth and lore grand enough to evoke the origin of the species, or a  Greek‐like myth of god‐as‐animal mating with humans and the resulting offspring, but its box‐ like  appearance  unfavorably  compared  to  the  Citroën  factories  just  downriver  on  the  quai  de  Javel. Belches of black smoke jut into the sky, steel buckets jerkily prod and push, glass shatters,  and soon the shell gives way to expose the vertebrae and ribs of steel girders, still painted beige‐ brown where rust had yet to win.   Smoke‐patinaed concrete walls surround the myriad wooden chairs, silent, chipped and  broken, like teeth in a bad mouth, and tattooed with initials, dates and names: HB, AD, JS + AJ =  amour,  7/52,  2/55,  Jean,  Anne‐Marie,  Vincent.  The  glass  ceiling,  painted  blue  during  the  war  to  camouflage  it  from  bombings  and  scraped  imperfectly  clean  afterward,  leaks  in  several  places  when  it  rains,  threatening  participants,  spectators  and  the  loops  of  electrical  lines  that  hang  down  in  catenaries  to  form  an  impossibly  complex  wiring  diagram,  one  that  only  the  current,  wizened electrician knows. He doesn’t understand this demolition.  Two  men  among  the  crowd  watch  a  bit  more  intently  than  the  rest,  eyes  wise  to  the  moment’s import and linkage back to the rest, like a long and freighted train that rolls night and  day  and  never  arrives.  They  are  not  old  men,  but  they  are  not  young.  Not  dwellers  of  the  surrounding Grenelle neighborhood, but familiars anyhow, their stories pieces to an impossible  map of the Vel d’Hiv. They come to witness an ending. They come but put nothing to rest.

One  has  trouble  sleeping  but  can  extinguish  consciousness  with  cognac  when  he  has  money, or cheap brandy when he is low. The other has long given up on sleep at proper times,  lets it come when it will, like an unpredictable relative. The shorter one has lost his form, gained  weight, gets winded walking four flights up to his apartment. Sometimes he takes the Metro to  La Cipale, an outdoor velodrome on the other side of Paris, where he watches young riders and  offers unasked for advice. Hold  back,  be  patient,  wait  longer  to  attack. The taller one wears his  gray  woolen  overcoat  even  though  the  weather  is  getting  warmer,  and  in  the  inside  top  left  pocket,  he  carries  a  small  Jewish  prayer  book,  its  text  copied  by  hand.  And  inside  this  book,  tucked into the crease between the cover and the first pages, is a photo of a woman whose large,  kind eyes are echoed by those of the boy and girl standing in front of her.   When  they  spot  each  other,  knowing  the  other  would  be  there,  there  is  no  visible  emotion on either’s part. Like ex‐lovers, these two, they are very professional about things, and  the velodrome is a third in the triangle. What is effaced in the daily, conscious mind—the collar  bone lines of an old love, the firm guidance of someone’s arms when sight is shattered by grief,  the number of times one kissed a child, the number of times one was plunged and held under  cold water—cannot be acknowledged though their effects are woven into them, like freely‐given  human  hair  into  the  cloth  of  a  French  wartime  coat,  or  a  golden  thread  into  a  father’s  prayer  shawl, hanging, unused, in a closet.  Jean approaches Abram, offers him his hand, the contact a sigh, an affirmation. Then they  turn  to  watch,  offering  no  comments  to  the  reporters  surveying  the  crowd  for  quotes.  Anonymity a blessing now, but beneath the rubble of things, some need of recognition survives.  The  backhoe  loaders  continue  their  attack,  deftly  advancing,  pushing  and  retreating.  Kinetic  energy  is  liberated.  Who  can  say  what  else?  A  local  memory  of  pain,  echoing  within,  spiraling  upward into the sky, vortex reversed? Ghosts that inhabited there? “Indeed, it is just as absurd to  assert  that  corporeal  substance  is  composed  of  bodies  or  parts  as  that  a  body  is  composed  of  surfaces, surfaces of lines, and lines of points.” Is there a veil we can rent to open our eyes to all  that is, to truly see, or is imagination its own reward? A large section of wall falls inward. The  two  men  cannot  watch  like  boys,  amazed  at  the  beauty  of humans  moving  or  destroying  large  things. The material has too much in it.

But  soon,  it’s  time  for  lunch.  Most  of  the  crowd  disbands.  The  destruction,  started,  will  last one month, and the Vel d’Hiv will be replaced by a government building and an apartment  building.

France

putting  shoes  on  the  huge child Progress.

Coffee?  Jean  asks.

Abram  nods,  and  they  trundle  off  together,  old  friends  comfortable  with  each other’s silences, able  to  sit  with  each  other’s  sorrows,  messy  like  milk  spilled on a table, and not  try  to  mop  things  up.  Words  come  when  they  come,  build  like  a  small  fire  slowly  catching  between them, a warmth.  They walk by a newspaper kiosk. The headlines read,   French army controls Algeria  French Communist Party pushes for “self‐determination”

How’re Marie and the kids? Abram asks.

Looking  forward  to  summer  with  my  mother  in  Livet.  They  love  the  mountains  there,

Jean replies. And Miriam?

Her relatives have invited us to Tel Aviv. She wants to go.

To stay?

I don’t like the idea of moving, but perhaps. Where do you think an old communist can

find a place to work on his book in peace?

Jean  thinks  before  he  answers.  I  thought  you’d  found  that  space  here,  like  a  sprinter

maneuvering through a pack of racers, he says, his hands jockeying for position in the air before  him.

They walk in silence around a corner into the sunlight.

I think we’ll go, at least to visit. I need a respite from this city, Abram says as they reach

the door of the café, I love, which Jean opens for his friend, to hate.

Café  interior.  One  barman.  A  handful  of  patrons.  The  rhythm  of  cups  and  plates  being  washed,  friendly banter, taking orders, and moments of near silence. Lucid, underwater‐like light. Jean and  Abram are seated at the zinc counter, a demitasse and water before each one.   Jean: What happened?  Abram:  We  lived  and  a  war  fell  on  our  heads.  The  millstone  ground  millions  but  somehow . . . we were pushed to the side.  Jean: And now?  Abram: We shit in peace now.  Jean: We shit the colors of all the flags of all nations, united. Piles healed.   Abram: How now, brown?  Jean: Pants.  Abram: Get me my . . .  Jean (laughing): Yes, I remember that joke. How you invented it with me at the center of  things. What a palace of cowardice I was!  Abram: I wasn’t much better. Told to kill with a hammer, I hid it in the bread. Told to kill  with a knife, I cut bread instead. And the gun. Awk! I could barely hit a non‐human target. Poor  tree!  Jean: Who are you, my friend?  Abram: I am my book but wounded, three times deeply. The Book of Life sits on a shelf  somewhere  in  the  future  bleeding  from  these  wounds.  One.  Two.  Three.  (He  gestures  to  his  forehead, sternum, belly.) And who are you, my friend?  Jean: I am the drowned man come back to life, but too often I wake up from terrors under  cold water.   Abram: And Aysha?   Jean: Mermaid, deadly or saving I’ve yet to decide.  Abram: And Marie?  Jean: Lifeguard.  Abram: I have no hope for mermaid or lifeguard. Humans are hairy bags of water. And I  love Miriam for being just that, no more. We slosh together through the night, a rough, hairy sea  against a rough middle C, the tone she sings then.  36

Jean: God?  Abram: Condensed into the Angelus Novus, who looks on as the wreckage piles up into  history.   Jean: Juliette Gréco?  Abram: Hairy bag of water.  Jean: Arc de Triomphe?  Abram: Background for a slaughter.  Jean: Hope?  Abram: I dreamt last night that I left it behind to become a real Jew sitting fully present in  a real synagogue with no hope for God or future or mashiach or past or progress. The service was  a beautiful bore. The survivors sat with me, satiated with grief. I was free. Then I woke, and hope  stirred in me, and ideas for the book too, and suffering began anew.  Jean: What flavor?  Abram: Shiraz and Communist red currant.  Jean: What depth?  Abram: Abyssal.  Jean:  I  too  almost  left  hope  behind  when  I  was  down  that  deep,  into  the  watery  end  of  myself, past hope of seeing again bicycles and lovers and wives and dear, dear children . . . (He  looks over at Abram, whose eyes are watering.) I’m sorry, my friend.  Abram: They were.  Jean: I’m sorry, my friend.   Abram: They are. . . . I’ve never told you. I talk to them daily, all three. They advise me  where to go, what to do, to finish it, our book. They keep me company on the Metro platform. I  don’t care that people look. They can’t see them as I do.  Jean: I knew. I’ve seen you talking, knew it was to them.

Abram: Thank you for saying nothing.   Jean: Sometimes that’s what friends do.  Abram (hesitant): Thank you for helping. I’m sorry I never said that before.   Jean: Sometimes that’s what humans do.  Abram: Which? Help or avoid saying thanks?  Jean: Both. (Pause.) So will you go to Tel Aviv?

Abram: Yes, I should go to sea to see with my C.  Jean: Funny.  Abram:  It  just  happens.  These  sounds  play  together  like  shapes  on  a  page.  All  dross,  beautiful dross.  Jean: And grist, like us.  Abram: All that’s left is for us to grind ourselves now. To a point. Beautiful lines of points.  All we can comprehend?  Jean: Perhaps. (Pause.) But design with or without end?

One  week  earlier,  Salvador  Dali,  dressed  in  a  gray  pinstripe  suit  and  carrying  his  cane,  enters the Vel d’Hiv to manifest its final event. He brings a bomb made of copper onto which are  fixed  forks,  spoons  and  knives,  coins,  nails,  a  small  replica  of  la  Tour  Eiffel,  and  a  Cross  of  Lorraine. He does not announce this bombing before it happens; he does not announce he has a  bomb until he arrives at the Vel d’Hiv. Dali places the bomb in the center of the infield, where it  is surrounded by a hedge of photographers and journalists, and retires to a safe distance. Kraaa‐ BOOM!  The  power  of  the  bomb  catches  the  press  off  guard—his  intention?—and  one  photographer  is  wounded  on  the  face.  Dali  reappears  amidst  the  smoke,  manic‐eyed,  his  moustache perfectly waxed and turned up to his cheeks, like bicycle handlebars, and gathers the  scattered  pieces  of  copper,  holds  the  larger  pieces  up  for  the  press  like  a  new  Moses  with  the  undecipherable commandments of the post‐atomic age. Pin‐pon, pin‐pon, pin‐pon, pin‐pon, pin‐ pon, pin‐pon comes the ambulance.

An hour before they meet at the demolition of the Vel d’Hiv, at the counter in a café on  the  Avenue  Émile  Zola,  Jean  Sapin,  over  coffee  with  milk  and  sugar,  something  his  teammates  always teased him about—You drink it like a woman!—perfect if its color matched her skin, the  memory of her in the back jersey pocket of his mind like a shot of espresso, cognac and cocaine,  known as eagle’s soup, taken during the grueling six‐day races, Jean Sapin wanders through the  wreckage, making history in his head. Shafts of clear winter sun shine through the glass ceiling  onto  the  planks  in  the  track,  illuminating  the  brown  and  gold  hues  in  the  wood,  while  small  birds trapped inside flit among the girders and lights. Voices echo in and are swallowed by the  aberrant, enormous acoustics of the space. Good ride, good ride, Henri’s deep voice cuts through  the oxygen debt haze and crowd noise after Jean’s first race there, age nineteen, a fifty kilometer  points  race,  Henri  happy  with  him  though  all  he’d  done  was  stick  with  the  pack.  Henri’s  resonant,  pipe‐smoke  and  cognac‐mellowed  voice,  the  same  that  would  denounce  him?  No,  different. Later man, changed man, bitter man. They all were scared and chose sides, like dogs in  packs,  like  starving  rats.  Under  Henri’s  tutelage,  Jean  rode  the  track—250  meters  around  and  around  and  around—until  he  knew  every  bump,  warp  and  groove,  the  way  they  marked  his  progress around the oval, the way the final turn could throw you off balance as you came out of  it for the sprint. Once, it made him waiver and bump the Sioux’s rear wheel, which pitched him  hard into a crash that drove long wooden splinters from the track into his legs, arms and hands.  He looks at the scars on his elbows, old, worn‐out labels beneath the dark, wiry hair that prove  he was that one once, but only in a distant, long‐ago way.  How many faces in the crowds for the six‐day races? Sometimes he’d catch a unique one  as  he  passed  and  it  would  haunt  him  for  a  lap  or  two.  Sometimes  he’d  search  for  it  again:  the  electric blue eyes, the moss green, the velvet brown, the icy gray, above the strong nose, all of  one’s character is there in the nose, and the mouth, a tear of teeth and red. Seeing Aysha there  for the first time, having no idea what she would bring him, take from him—leave off, enough of  her. Meeting Abram. But mainly the crowd, all of Paris it seemed, passed by as a revolving and  noisy  blur,  and  he  liked  the  way  its  longitudinal  waves  disturbed  the  air  when  the  race  wasn’t  40

heated and people were mingling and made the sound of a murmuring, slightly distant ocean.  And he loved the way it roared when the race got going and the crowd, drunk on drink and the  press  of  bodies  and  spectacle,  screamed  at  them,  their  voices  dropping  an  octave  or  two  as  he  passed  by.  It  became  a  feedback  loop  that  could  egg  them  on  or  demoralize.  Oh,  the  things  people yelled during the Six Days. Glorious and mean.  He  wasn’t  famous  but  he  was  a  respectable  rider.  In  twelve  editions  of  the  Six  Jours  de  Paris,  he’d  earned  one  victory,  two  seconds,  one  third,  and  a  host  of  placings  no  one  remembered now, save him and old teammates. He needed to see Alain again. Too long. Maybe  they would go for a ride at La Cipale? He needed to get back into some kind of shape. Marie’s  subtle complaints and disinterest. Stupid.   He  recalled  stupid  crashes,  like  falling  down  at  low  speed  while  reading  a  newspaper  during a morning’s truce in the race. He’d focused too much on the words. His marriage in the  infield  to  Marie,  and  later  her  bringing  little  Yves,  and  then  little  Hannah,  there  to  see  their  father race. How he loved to take Yves on the handlebars for a lap or two afterward, his small  warmth and animated form quietly balanced there with the help of Jean’s hand as Yves tried to  control his body’s thrilled twitching.   The drugs near the end, more than the normal concoctions, the eagle’s soup, made him  jittery and juiced and unable to sleep during his rest breaks. How he felt like a goddamn god but  lacked  the  youth  to  manifest  its  pure  puissance!  His  accident  and  wounded  eye,  the  pain  and  annoyance,  lack  of  depth,  all  surface,  right  as  the  threat  of  war  pushed  down  on  them  like  a  larger  racer  elbowing  you  out  in  the  sprint.  But  thank  god  for  that  injury—he  covers  his  good  right eye for a moment to see if the left was getting any worse. No, same bad, the newspaper now  appearing to be beneath isinglass, and at a distance, shadows. Release the good one. Okay, back  to this fair vision. This injury a blessing that gave him his medical release from military service— they  were  taking  nearly  everyone  then—where  so  many  of  his  friends  went  and  were  killed,  wounded or captured. Of course he suffered too, right? Made his sacrifice? Gave up his relatively  sure existence with his velo‐taxi to help her, to help him, because Marie said to. Because he felt  many things for them, as a human, as a friend.   The firm grip of the French secret policeman on his arm the day he was caught, and the  humiliating lack of power followed by the rain of questions and blows, and that bathtub full of  frigid water, like a tomb. Being tied to a board. The immersion until he was sure he’d drown.

How he could wander off track. But isn’t it, as Abram claims, all bound together like the  parts  of  a  chair,  outside  of  which  no  chair  would  exist,  like  the  strength  of  her  nose  and  eyebrows, her quick wit and relentless courage, the olive tree of her body, the scent of geranium  and orange, the henna color in her dark, curly hair, outside of which no her would exist? Enough  of her.  Ah, her hair.    The  other,  three  blocks  away  on  a  bench  in  a  park  populated  by  pigeons,  echoes  the  surrounding coos as he mouths to himself bits of poetry and prayers in French, Yiddish, Hebrew,  Polish, and pieces of other languages. All pieces different but interchangeable, and all devoured  by the cool spring air. Sometimes, a certain phrase will bring a vision, or a frisson, or water to his  eyes, mucus to his nose. Such a strange reaction, he thinks, to air pushed through muscle and  cartilage to rhyme with sounds he’s heard or glyphs he’s seen on a page somewhere, which all  attempt to rhyme with one’s experiences and some version of this ever‐present world before us.  But today, he feels mostly stuck, like his heart got caught up on the wrought‐iron railing at the  edge  of  the  park.  He  feels  like  a  statue  here,  like  one  of  the  Franks  guiding  Charlemagne  on  horseback. But his work is not done. He must try to say, to tell, not become just a stone in the  street  in  front  of  where  he  works  amid  the  newspaper  presses  that  refuse  to  print  even  one  acknowledgment, and the lies that he sets there are partly his own, reluctant, cowardly witness.

Why  does  he  stay?

This  city  was  his  home.  Abram  Dychtwald  came  of  age  here,  matured  here,  loved  and  married  here,  procreated,  and  died,  then  rose  to  fight  as  a  ghost.  Since, he’s sought the exact  combination  of  words  to  make  him  partly  human  again.  After  work  at  the  press,  he  prowls  the  streets  looking  for  lead  to  melt  down  and  make  typefacesSanskrit, Arabic and Chinese fairly rare here for such a big and worldly cityfor his  42

book,  The  Book  of  Life.  He  drifts  through  alleys  amidst  the  clatter  coming  from  restaurant  kitchens, the nonstop abuse delivered by the head chef to the sous‐chefs, the whoosh of gas jets  igniting, the careful yet urgent appeals from the waiters, the rhythmic chop‐chop‐chop of knife  on wood, and the resonant clink‐clank of flatware and dishes that sound like the teeth and bones  of the city banging together. He is home here, behind the façades, and knows where to stop to  get a free meal.

He  haunts  the  weekend

antique sales and garage sales and  sometimes  finds  new  typefaces  there,  but  he  never  tells  such  people  what  he  is  doing.  The  professional

scrappers

and

vendors at the flea markets on the  edge  of  town,  some  of  these  he  trusts  with  his  vision,  and  they  keep  an  eye  out  for  him.  The  Book  of  Life  must  include  every  language, and every symbol that means something, he tells them. They laugh at this impossible  project but somehow understand. Both they and he knows he will never finish, and both know  that is the point. This keeps him something like alive. Until he completes it, he will haunt this  city looking for letters and glyphs to replace those it took from him, those pictured in his pocket  now, never, like most, to return.

Number  killed  renovating  La  Salle  des  Machines,  1902  (precursor  to  the  Vel  d’Hiv):  4— One fell from scaffolding, three were crushed under a girder when the crane’s cable snapped.

Number killed building the Vel d’Hiv, 1910: 2—One fell while installing the plate glass in

the ceiling. The plate fell after him, a shattering punctuation to his dull thud. One fell from the  second  tier  while  working  on  the  railing.  A  stupid  fall.  Don’t  tell  my  wife,  he  said.  One  could  speak  positively  of  a  50%  reduction  in  work‐related  accidents.  The  modern  world  would  certainly be a safer place.

Number  killed  inside  the  Vel  d’Hiv:  40—Three  cyclists  and  two  motorcyclists  in  racing

accidents. One of the cyclists crashed so hard that a four‐inch‐long splinter of the track pierced  his abdomen, bled him to death. Two trapeze artists despite the nets. One mafia member in a hit  in the bathroom. Thirty‐two people of the some 7,000 taken there during one hot week in July of  1942. Some were pregnant. Many were old. Many were children. Some succumbed to the stresses  of  six  days  in  crowded,  stifling,  unsanitary  conditions.  Heart  conditions  erupted  into  heart  attacks.  Diabetics  went  without  medicine.  Food  and  water  were  scarce.  Doctors  few.  After  the  first twelve hours, the five available toilets became backed up and unavailable. (Five toilets were  off limits because they were in rooms with windows.) During this chaos, a lucky few escaped.   After the first couple of days when people had the energy to worry, to cry, to struggle and  to  complain,  they  started  to  quiet  down,  and  the  heavy,  dusty,  hot  silence  of  the  immense,  enclosed space hung over them like an unanswered question. Sometimes, the call of a child for  mother, or mother for child, would, for more than a second, hang in the air, alive, like the small  birds  flitting  between  girders  and  seats.  When  they  asked  for  something  from  the  French  policemen  guarding  the  exits,  the  response  was  always,  No.  Some  cut  the  drama  short  and  jumped to their deaths from the second tier.

After  six  days,  the  living  were  transported  to  a  holding  camp  at  Drancy,  then  on  to  another holding camp at Pithiviers, where children were separated from their parents. Then, in  turn, both were sent back to Drancy and, by the fall of 1942, Auschwitz.

Jerry Gabriel

Electric, This Age Coming

By  first  light, we had edged around Talbot, a hamlet to the west of L— about eighteen miles.  Eighteen miles wasn’t much, but it was a small cushion, and to have made it all before anyone  knew we were gone made it somehow more.   Janey built a fire and set up a cookpot in a clearing close to a small stream nearly a mile  off  the  trace.  We  warmed  over  the  fire  in  silence.  Dawn  was  cold,  if  not  yet  freezing,  and  we  weren’t used to it yet. We were tired from a night without sleep and the prospect of a full day of  riding ahead.    Sean pulled a leather pouch from his saddle bag and dumped the crawdads he’d caught  yesterday afternoon in the Laune into the boiling water—there were maybe twelve—and we ate  them quietly as if they were bacon, none of us turning up our noses, though they were not usual  fare for us. We sat on two fallen elms, and none of us dared to close our eyes.  We were less than an hour in that clearing, though I can still see it these years removed,  the  way  the  early  morning  sun  filled  the  space,  the  slight  southwestern  breeze.  Before  we  decamped and pointed ourselves toward the road, Pa disappeared into the woods. I assumed he  was  simply  relieving  himself,  but  five  minutes  passed,  and  then  ten.  The  horses  were  packed.  Sean was already on Persephone.   Anyone know why Pa’s taking so long? I asked them.  Probably in the woods doing his business, Sean said.  He’s taking his time about it.  When you’re fifty or whatever, come and talk to me.   He’s only forty you imbecile, I said. And I don’t doubt that’s true for most people. But not  for him. He does everything fast.   He’s right about that, Janey said.   Why  don’t  you  two  go  knock  on  his  door  and  see  if  he  could  use  any  sort  of  special  lanolin for his backside, Sean said.  Mr. Riley? Janey called out, casually walking toward the wood.  There was no answer.   She said it again.

Come on, she said to me, and I looped my own horse’s reigns to a sapling and followed.    We  waded  into  the  weeds  and  around  a  rise  in  the  land  filled  with  some  cedars.  We  weren’t  twenty  yards  out  of  camp  when  we  encountered  Pa  walking  toward  us.  He  was  in  his  blue  army  uniform,  which  we  had  never  seen  him  in.  That  itself  was  a  shock,  made  him  something other than the man I had known my whole life.   In  his  right  arm  were  the  clothes  he’d  worn  last  night,  folded  neatly.  There  was  something else not quite right, which took me a minute to surmise. His left arm was nowhere to  be seen. The sleeve on that side was sewn in a neat line just below the shoulder. The three of us  stood on the trail for a moment, looking at one another.  I almost forgot you have some experience traveling, Janey said, unsurprised, in her way,  by everything in the world. He had showed up at the Old Place a few weeks back, AWOL from  his unit in Virginia. He had walked across the mountains home.    He  shrugged  now.  Nobody  questioned  it  in  western  Virginia,  though  nor  were  those  mountain folk the sharpest I have encountered.  It’s a good idea, Janey said.    Yes, he said, thought is capable even without books telling you how.  Where is your arm? I heard myself ask.   It’s attached to my shoulder, Michael.   I mean, is it just loose in there?  He looked at me, exasperated. I belt it around here, just below my chest. He was pointing  with his left hand to the place, under the uniform, where the belt ran.  What is the matter with you? Janey said to me.   I was shaken by the image of him with just one arm, which was a thing hard to explain  when I had been so little bothered by his absence at the front and the likelihood that he would  never  return  to  us.  It  was  very  convincing,  the  amputation,  at  first  glance.  I  doubted  anyone  would have the courage to challenge it, which I saw immediately was its gamble.   The troubling thing, as I thought more about it, was less the idea of him without an arm  than  it  was  a  sense  of  wonder  that  he  had  used  his  mind  the  way  Janey  used  hers,  for  self‐ preservation, to get something from the world. It was an impulse I couldn’t remember seeing in  him. Once, he had accidentally caught his foot with a pick, digging rocks out of the garden, and  had  nearly  taking  off  a  toe.  He  had  showed  very  little  concern  for  the  terrible  infection  that  48

overtook  his  foot  and  threatened,  for  a  while,  his  very  life.  For  days,  he  limped  around  on  the  bad foot, but eventually he could no longer walk and was forced to sit on a chair on the porch,  his swollen leg raised on another chair. He wouldn’t hear of our fetching a doctor, though he was  right  that  Doc  Melcher  wasn’t  likely  to  feel  inclined  to  make  the  seven  mile  trek  to  the  cabin,  given how little we had to pay him with, some rutabagas and turnips. I had suggested hooking  up the cart to the oxen, and pulling him into L—, but he chose to sit there in his chair and wait  for whatever might come. Eventually, his body won out, the wound healed and the foot, though  never quite the same, returned to a normal size.   And so I was wondering, standing on the trail, what was it besides his life that he wanted  in all of this.  I might also have asked myself the same question, it occurred to me sometime later that  day,  as  we  moved  in  a  single  file  line  along  a  deer  path,  skirting  the  day’s  third  hamlet.  By

I almost forgot you have some experience traveling, Janey said, unsurprised, in her way, by everything in the world. He had showed up at the Old Place a few weeks back, AWOL from his unit in Virginia. He had walked across the mountains home.

nightfall,  Janey  calculated  that  we  were  about  33  miles  from  L—. It was starting to feel real, the distance making it so, the  landscape’s  changes  adding  to  the  sense  of  separation.  We  knew we would soon be at a large river, the Scioto.   There  was  a  ferry  crossing  the  river  just  north  of  a  small  settlement  called  Notting,  and  the  word’s  similarity  to  Nothing was not lost on us. There were a handful of rivers we  would  have  to  cross  in  those  first  weeks,  but  this  one,  according  to  Janey,  who  had  been  pouring  over  maps  and  travelers’  accounts  for  months,  would  be  among  the  most

difficult. There was just the one ferry, at last count. The river, while not as big as the Ohio, was  too big to swim, even if we’d been inclined to. For one, Pa could not swim.    We approached the river early in the morning, just as the sun was showing at our backs.  We were relieved to see the craft on our side. The place was otherwise empty, though, and the  craft was chained to a wrought iron pole, secured there with a lock the size of a man’ s hand.   We’d already ridden five miles, and we got off and stretched our legs. Janey went up the  shore a ways to see if she could find someone. The rest of us stood on the banks looking across  to the other side as if across the River Styx.   I’ll be happy to be on the other side of this, Sean said.

It’s  just  the  other  side,  Pa  said  dismissively.  Whoever  is  after  us  can  do  it  just  the  way  we’re doing it.   I’d  been  waiting  for  Sean  and  Pa  to  begin  to  bicker—it  was  merely  a  matter  of  time,  I  knew. My earliest memories were filled with their voices, disagreeing, sometimes shouting. But  before this moment turned into an inciting incident, Janey returned with a spindly looking man  wearing a quite shabby straw planter’s hat. There was something curious about his eyes, whether  they  were  crossed  or  one  larger  than  the  other,  it  wasn’t  obvious.  He  was  a  whole  different  variety of shady than Carlide, the bounty hunter attempting to collect the $30 on Pa’s head. This  one was out of dime novel, a few of which I’d read when I was supposed to be in school.      Well, we got a whole party of viajeros, he was saying loud enough to be heard all around.  He was simultaneously strapping on his suspenders and situating a shiny Colt on his hip. Dawn  was murky in the valley, like home—slow and quiet, the sounds muffled by the fog.   I  have  observed  a  few  things  in  my  post,  he  started,  as  the  two  of  them  came  into  the  patch of worn earth that led to the landing. He didn’t wait for anyone to ask what.  Early  morning  crossers  are  of  two  varieties,  he  said.  One  is  folks  on  the  lam.  Here  he  caught my eye, and added, perhaps for my benefit, That’s on the run, in layman’s terms. Thieves  and the like. See, people mistake this body of water for a barrier.   He pointed to the roiling river, which headed south toward the Ohio. It was high and fast,  from a series of recent storms.  Sean noticed that my gaze had drifted to the river, and he lifted his eyebrows.   The  second  sort  are  those  on  a  mission.  Military  sorts  and  the  like.  Important  business  underway,  you  know?  Spies,  some  of  them.  Couriers.  Advance  parties.  He  was  digging  into  a  shirt pocket for a small pack of tobacco.  Janey  was  about  to  pull  her  gun  to  hurry  him  along,  I  thought,  when  Sean  stepped  up.  We’re  the  second  sort.  Now  if  you  please,  we’d  like  to  make  some  distance  before  supertime.  We’ve a long way to go.  He smiled. I hope you’re carrying a certificate of live birth on your person, young man.   You needn’t worry about what I carry on my person.  Sure,  he  said.  And  then,  by  way  of  defense,  I’m  not  the  enemy  here.  I’ve  got  your  best  interest at heart.

The man looked around, like he was searching for his mug of coffee, then his gaze landed  on Pa.   Sir, he said, a fake salute.   Pa nodded uncomfortably, though I suspected this gentleman had to be used to people’s  discomfort with his abusive manner, and they didn’t need to be criminals to be annoyed.  A word of advice to you, sir, if I may.  Nobody  wants  to  hear  your  advice,  started  Sean,  but  then  Pa  held  up  his  hand  toward  Sean, allowing the man to speak.  I was you, I would be on the lookout for a different uniform. A good one—something that  will  take  you  all  the  way  to  the  diggings—would  be  the  First  Colorado  Infantry  maybe.  That  there would be a better one. Then you’re just going home, right? As it is, the question is thus:  where you heading? Anything Ohio is bad.  Pa watched the man, measuring things.   I’m just a friend out here, he assured him. I got no wager on any of it.  I have lived my life  by the Good Book, at least where that score is concerned. I have had other troubles, to be sure. I  have fallen at times. Made mistakes. He smiled at me again.   Pa was stoney faced for his part.   But that’s good, that there, he said, pointing to the arm.   Pa tweaked his head. As the boy says, we’re hoping to get along.  Bien sûr, he said with an especially extravagant French accent. That’s 15 cents a head, 25  for the animals.   We’ll pay you on the other side, Janey said.  He looked at Janey again, as if for the first.  She’s a modern girl, this one. Comes up to my abode and shakes me out of bed. Boldness.  Electric, this age coming, you ask me.  We can just take the boat ourselves, she said, and then you’ll have to swim to come and  get it.  The gentleman was just getting things going here, Pa said to Janey.  All the same, the man said. I can’t wait for the future.    I was very confused by much of what of what was happening.

The man boarded the boat and lifted a small gate and we all followed. Aboard, the earth  rocked beneath us. I had never been on a boat before; I don’t think Sean had either. Pa had of  course crossed the Atlantic.    Gonna  be  a  beauty,  the  man  said,  breathing  in  the  air,  as  if  the  previous  exchange  had  never happened and he was meeting us for the first.   As we were about to get underway, a woman equally unkempt to the proprietor appeared  at the shore. She had a boy at her side—by his looks and demeanor, I assumed he belonged to  the two of them. He was about my age, maybe a bit younger. He had a young goat tethered to  his belt with a hemp rope.  Be sure that they clean up the horse leavings, she yelled.  Oh, yes, the man said, nodding, I may have failed to mention that any horse shit is your  own to take along with you.   This  one  here  says  he  paid  already  for  the  trip,  the  woman  yelled.  The  sun  was  not  yet  over the hills, and here the boat was filling up.   The boy, who was not the son of these two, it turned out, and  his  goat  clambered  aboard  and  we  disembarked.    The  water  was  swift,  but  flat,  and  only  the  jerks  of  the  spindly  man  ratcheting  us  across  the  cable  gave  us  any  motion  at  all;  if  we  had  been  drifting,  the  ride  would’ve  been  quiet  and  smooth.    We  stood  shoulder  to  shoulder, and the animals were behind us, silent and anxious, lifting  their feet repeatedly and looking with confusion behind themselves.   Somehow the man stayed quiet for a time before starting up  again  when  we  had  reached  the  middle  of  the  channel.  At  that

Shiloh, huh? Sean said. A student of history, he said in mock surprise. And then added, Among other places, as I say. And which side was this for? There’s not but one side in this, son, he said.

moment, the sun finally crested the trees behind us, and the far shore glowed resplendent in the  light, a touch of autumn to some of the trees there.  You’re  a  padre  to  at  least  some  a  these  uns,  he  said  idly.  But  for  the  life  of  me,  I  can’t  rightly tell which.  When Pa didn’t respond, the man said, No. All together, I can’t quite put my finger on the  arrangements here one bit.  The good news, said Sean, is that our affairs don’t concern you, so you needn’t tax your  mind with solving this problem.   52

True, the man said. True. But living out here, it’s sort of a pastime a man likes to enjoy,  just to entertain hisself. It’s a form of betterment, really. Believe it or not, the little lady and me,  we  are  self‐improvers.  She’s  got  me  on  a  diet  she  read  about  involves  nothing  but  vegetables.  You imagine that?  Do as you please, Sean said.  The man smiled, and did seem pleased to be allowed just this one diversion.  If I had to guess, he went on, I would put you the Pa of the girl, and that one there is the  beau—not that it’s to anyone’s liking—and the little one here is…I’m going to say also some of  your own progeny.  Pa shrugged, looked off toward the north.  I’m close, the man said. I can see I’m close.  You got most of it wrong, Sean told him. You should get some books out here.  That would do me very little good, the man said.  Anyone can learn to read, Sean replied.  I prefer talking to all else. I like a good fat‐chewin.  You probably like your drink, too, Sean said, not entirely with malice.  Instead  of  showing  offense,  the  man  said,  Now,  if  you’ve  some  grog,  I  could  cease  and  desist in earnest.  Sean laughed. I have no doubt, until the bottle was empty.  Pa, who was situated closest to the animals, reached back with his left hand to the saddle  bag  on  his  horse  and  fished  something  out.  It  was  a  bottle  we  hadn’t  seen  before.  I  wondered  what  other  surprises  he  harbored  in  there.  I  couldn’t  remember  ever  seeing  him  take  a  drink  himself.   He handed it to the man, whose eyes tracked it eagerly all the way from the bag.   Obliged, he said to the bottle. While the man held it with his free hand—his other one  still  cranking  the  ferry’s  ratchet—Pa  unscrewed  it  for  him,  and  the  man  took  a  long  swig,  and  then handed the bottle back. He wiped his mouth with the back of the same hand.  What was it like where you were off to? He asked Pa.  Exactly as the papers report it all, Pa said. Except worse.   You’ve  got  a  lot  of  concern  for  this  war  for  a  man  operating  a  ferry  in  the  middle  of  nowhere. This was Sean again, who could be relentless.

Don’t be deceived by the world, young man. You can only see some of it at a time.  So you’ll have us believe you fought?  You’ll believe what you will, he said. Most people do.   Back across the water, the woman still watched, as if she expected something to happen.  The man breathed heavily as he cranked. We were nearly there. The boy’s goat bayed.  So what was it like where you were? Sean said.  Pa looked at him with a stern expression, one meant to express the fact that Sean was out  of his depth, but Sean had long since moved past Pa’s control.  A lot of metal flying around as it turned out, he said.  And where was that?  Tennessee, he said, among a few other non‐consequential locales.   Shiloh, huh? Sean said.  A student of history, he said in mock surprise. And then added, Among other places, as I  say.  And which side was this for?  There’s not but one side in this, son, he said.   Sean waited for the punchline, but it never came.  When we docked, the man lifted his arm to his collar and released the top button there.  An entire section of his neck was missing, a tangle of scars just above the collar bone.   How did you survive that? Sean wondered.  This was the very question that several surgeons put to me in the field hospital. I guess  I’m just a tough bugger, like my Daddy used to say after he’d whipped me. God rest his soul.   As we mounted up on the shore, the boy with the goat disappeared down a trail along the  river, quietly and quickly.  I’ll  do what I can to steer those in pursuit, he said.   You needn’t worry about anyone pursuing us, Sean said.  Pa handed the man the fare, and after he had counted his coins, he looked back up and  Pa flipped him an additional half eagle. An imponderable amount of money.  At this, the man said that he reckoned with such a nice day, he may pull the boat to shore  and do some badly needed maintenance.  And then added, looking where the horses had been,

Not  too  much  of  a  mess  here.  I’ll  just  take  care  of  that  for  you,  because  you’ve  been  such  an  interesting start to my day.  He was already whistling a song as he shoveled the manure into the turgid eddies.  A  little  further  down  the  trail,  Sean  said  to  Pa,  You  gave  that  man  a  heady  amount  of  money.   Pa shrugged, as if to say, Easy come, easy go.   He was appalling, Sean said. An insult to humanity.    Out here, Pa said, you’ll soon see that that’s mostly what there is.   There was no pleasure in his voice, as there sometimes was when he was correcting Sean’s  notions of the world.

Mark Belisle

Primary Directive

It  stands  there  at  the  entrance  to  the  dark  hallway,  looking  like  Jonah  staring  down  the  gaping gullet of his tar‐black Leviathan as it listens to the soft draft near the window, the groan  of  the  floor,  the  wind  through  the  leaves  tickling  the  beach  house's  windows,  and  the  soft  stirring down the hall.  It  hesitates  for  a  moment  to  wait  for  more  data,  but  when  it  hears  the  noise  again  it  moves  swiftly  to  the  master  bedroom  on  the  right.  It  has  no  eyes  that  need  to  adjust  to  the  differences in lighting, but it notes the full red moon streaming through the window's blinds just  the same as it crosses the threshold. There, sprawled out in the bed, the boy sleeps, so frail and  skinny it worries that the merest touch of its hands will crush the child into a thousand jagged  pieces.  But then the boy shivers, reminding it of its sole purpose. It walks to the bed and scoops  him up into its stiff, uncomfortable grasp, then walks to the chair across the room and sits with  him against its chest.  And  there,  bathed  in  the  light  of a  blood  moon, it  rocks  the  frail  creature  in  a  mathematically  perfect cadence as the servos in its arms whir softly in the perfect dark.    The day breaks with Commotion.  It  stands  patched  into  the  house's  mainframe  jack  by  the  front  door  when  it  senses  something  happening  outside  in  the  world.  It  activates  the  microphones  placed  around  the  house  and  cycles  through  them  until  it  ascertains  the  probable  location  of  the  disturbance.  If  Maggie,  the  house's  mainframe  A.I.,  were  still  active  it  would  have  been  able  to  access  the  security camera feeds as well. But Maggie has been a long time silent and as much as it has tried  to get her to respond, there is no resuscitating her from the dark slumber of power failure.  Using the microphones, it hears two pairs of feet clapping against the sidewalk and heavy,  panicky breaths. These two facts imply a chase, which in turn implies danger.   It activates Security Protocol 403 and shifts positions by the door, lowering its center of  gravity and increasing the chances of a critical strike against a foe at close range. Thousands of  possible  simulations  and  tens  of  thousands  of  possible  responses  pulse  through  its  mind  as  it  56

continues to listen.  "Get back here!"  A man's voice, breathless and angry. The pursuer.  The only reply is an increase in pace, each step closer to the house paring down the list of  contingency plans it can use.  "I won't hurt you!" the pursuer screams. "Just gimme it!"  It listens as the pursued falters, then trips, then sprawls to the sidewalk. It projects a list  of possible injuries and reactions and moves closer to the door, ready to tear it open and meet  the two people on the street.  There  is  a  shout  and  a  wooden  thud  as  something  is  slammed  against  the  front  door's  heavy oak. Then, a gunshot punctuates the early morning like an ambiguous comma at the end  of a short story.  There  is  a  groan  and  a  gurgled  curse  and  a  moment  of  silence.  It  listens  as  the  pursuer  searches his victim for whatever he had wanted before the chase had began.  "Yes,  there  it  is,"  the  man  chuckles.  "Ask  the  good  Lord  and  you  shall  receive.  Jesus  Almighty, yes."  It waits to see if the man will try his luck and open the front door. If he does it will move  with  such  speed  and  brutality  the  man  won't  even  see  the  thing  that  kills  him.  The  second  he  tries the door it will crush the man's windpipe and snap his spine in a flurry of attacks that will  take less than three seconds to complete.  But there is no hand on the door knob.  There is only the soft shuffling of feet on concrete as the man walks toward the ocean in  the morning sun.  It  deactivates  Security  Protocol  403  thirty  seconds  after  the  man  wanders  outside  the  microphones' range. It returns to its normal, slightly slumped stance and removes its link cords  out of the wall jack. Then it turns around and goes to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.    The  grimy  pantry  yields  nothing  but  a  single  can  of  Great  Northern  beans,  several  stale  crackers, and a few dessicated cockroach corpses.   When the Commotions started occurring at alarming regularity, it had downloaded a list  of  protocols  from  Maggie's  mainframe  that  it  had  deemed  necessary  for  the  fulfillment  of  its

primary  directive.  Defense  and  security  protocols,  basic  and  advanced  repair,  first‐aid  and  psychological evaluation, and even basic storytelling had all been downloaded directly through  the  wireless  Internet  connection  it  shared  with  Maggie.  Unfortunately,  it  had  been  unable  to  consider all the ways possible for it to fail in its primary directive; protocols for food rationing  and  scavenging  that  would  have  prevented  an  empty  cupboard  forgotten  until  it  was  too  late,  until one Great Commotion took both the power grid and Maggie completely offline.  If it was capable of emotional response, it might have missed the close, intimate link that  it  had  shared  with  the  house's  mainframe,  might  have  regretted  not  downloading  additional  protocols.   But it doesn't feel loneliness or despair.   It only takes the single can of beans from the shelf and brings it to the kitchen counter  where it uses a rusty can opener to slice off the top of the can. It pours

At some point since they had last opened the blinds, a man hanging from a length of rope at the bottom of the O had appeared.

the  cold  beans  directly  into  a  bowl  and  considers  executing  its  basic  fire  building  program  but  decides  against  it  after  calculating  a  sixty‐ three  percent  probability  that  doing  so  would  cause  another  Commotion.

It  carries  the  beans  away  from  the  dark,  dank  kitchen  and  up

the  staircase.  The  hallway  is  better  lit  in  the  morning  and  when  it  reaches the top of the stairs it sees a tiny figure standing just outside  the  master  bedroom.  The  boy  trembles  on  legs  as  thin  as  the  dead

branches of a willow tree, his flesh pale and unbecoming with dark, inky stains beneath his eyes.  "Good  morning,"  its  modulated  voice  echoes  down  the  hall.  "You  are  not  well.  Please  come with me back to bed."  The boy shakes his head.  Can I go outside and see the sun?  "It is not safe outside this morning. There was a Commotion while you slept and a man  died. If you come back to bed, I will open the blinds and you can look outside from the window.  Is this an acceptable compromise?"  It extends a mechanical arm.  The boy doesn't answer.     58

He only places a small hand against the white plastic and allows it to walk him back into  the bedroom.    The two of them stare out onto the beach town between small bites of cold beans.  Outside,  there  past  the  tall  Crimson  King  maple  tree,  they  can  see  the  tip  of  the  tall,  fluorescent orange sign that reads, "Dolle's."    It can access its data banks and bring up video recording of a family outing at the beach  three  summers  ago  when  it  and  the  tiny  figure  had  craned  their  necks  up  to  look  at  the  sun‐ kissed  sign.  The  boy  had  pointed  up  at  it,  using  a  French  fry  covered  in  malt  vinegar  as  an  impromptu pointer.  Look! Isn't that so cool? the boy had asked.  Now the tiny figure looks at the sign and says nothing.   At some point since they had last opened the blinds, a man hanging from a length of rope  at the bottom of the O had appeared. As the wind ripples through the maple tree beneath them,  so  too  it  catches  the  man  in  the  rope  and  sways  him  gently  back  and  forth  like  a  hellish  time  clock's pendulum.  It takes the spoon and offers the tiny figure more beans.  The boy turns and lays back down onto the bed. He raises a skinny arms into the air, as if  reaching for the sky through the ceiling and the terracotta roof above them.

Do you know what will happen to us when we die? he asks as his fist clenches.  "For it, there will be nothing," it answers. "It will simply deactivate and rust until a person

with  the  proper  knowledge  can  either  repair  it  or  restore  it.  Even  then  its  data  banks  will  certainly  be  cleared  and  it  will  remember  nothing  of  you  or  your  family  or  its  previous  assignments.  All  this  assumes  it  is  found  by  the  right  person  and  not  dismantled  for  parts  for  something more immediately necessary. In all probability, it will cease to exist."  What about me? the figure asks.  "According  to  my  data  banks  there  are  two  generally  accepted  schools  of  thought  concerning death. Would you like to hear both?"  Yes.  "One school of thought posits that human beings are nothing more than highly evolved  animals,  the  result  of  thousands  of  years  of  evolution  and  adaptation.  Humans  holding  this

belief think that when one dies, one simply ceases to be. The other school of thought embraces  the  notion  of  an  afterlife,  where  one's  soul  continues  to  exist  even  after  the  body  fails.  What  happens  then  is  a  matter  of  great  speculation.  Reincarnation,  Heaven,  Hell,  another  plan  of  existence; all are considered likely alternatives to the final destination of the human soul."  Does it bother you that you will die? the boy looks out the window to the hanging man.  "It  does  not  fear  death,  it  only  concerns  itself  with  the  primary  directive.  Upon  completion or failure of its primary directive, it will have served its only purpose and it can be  deactivated."  The boy stares at it with eyes rimmed with tears. It reaches over and sets the beans down  upon  a  small,  antiquated  ottoman  and  stands  over  the  figure,  reaching  over  and  tucking  it  in  with great tenderness.  "Will you help it?"  How?  "When it either completes or fails its primary directive, would you assign it another?"  Yes. I want you to stay with me.  A pause.  I'd like to see the ocean one more time. Or do you think I'll go there when I die? Do you  think heaven might be in the ocean?  It hesitates for a nanosecond, a lifetime of silence for it but completely imperceptible to  the  small  boy  laying  there  and  dying  beneath  a  stained  white  blanket.  It  reviews  the  primary  directive and answers accordingly.  "Without a doubt."    For a while, the streets are silent.  It  patches  into  the  microphones  again  and  watches  from  the  second  story.  The  boy  is  napping,  so  it  has  no  other  pressing  tasks  on  which  it  must  concentrate  and  as  it  scans  the  sidewalks outside the house, it takes note of a man sprawled face down three feet from th beach  house's front door. There is an irregular spattering of blood beneath him that has dried in the  sun, looking like an artist's abstractions done in a thick, burgundy street chalk.  As the morning viscously yields to afternoon, however, the ragged hole in the torn world  outside the solid wood door grows larger when bull whip cracks of gunfire coming from the east  60

side  of  the  house  smash  the  silence.  It  calculates  the  probabilities  of  potential  engagements,  moves to secure the door again, and continues to listen.  Somewhere  on  the  beach  there  are  men  dying.  This  fact  is  not  a  distressing  idea  to  it;  rather, it concerns itself only with the gunshots' impact on the primary directive. If it had been a  thing  of  emotion  and  imagination  like  Maggie  had  once  been,  it  could  have  perhaps  imagined  the  sounds  of  the  men  shouting  as  brass  casings  spit  their  hateful  metal  kisses,  it  might  have  pictured  them  staggering  as  their  Judas  legs  carry  them  one  final  step  before  betraying  them  with  a  kiss  of  hot  sand  on  a  grimy  cheek  and  damning  them  to  eternal  stillness  as  the  ocean  rolled in and carried them away in darkness.  But it is not designed for imagination.  So  it  ceaselessly  crunches  numbers  thousands  of  times  every  second  until  the  gunfire  abruptly  stops  and  the  white  noise  pouring  through  the  microphone  is  broken  only  by  the  occasional chirp of a summer robin.    There is a Commotion of a completely different kind that evening when the skies darken  and the wind picks up.  It  wakes  up  the  boy  to  find  that  his  condition  is  growing  worse.  The  boy  shivers  and  croaks  one  or  two  word  answers  to  the  questions  it  asks  and  refuses  small  bites  of  beans  it  spoons up with a piece of heavy silverware.   It searches its first‐aid and wellness data banks with a diligence borne of binary code for  the name of the malady plaguing the trembling boy swaddled deep inside the sweaty blankets. It  cross‐references  medical  texts  and  applies  thousands  of  different  symptoms  and  comes  back  with a list of possible results.  It is probably an infection requiring the use of antibiotics that it doesn't have and doesn't  know where to get.   It reads all the instructions described by its research, but there is nothing to do but wait  and hope for the boy to overcome the sickness on his own.  It is in the middle of the 5,782nd search through its files when the wind blows the maple's  branches against the east window. It looks outside to see the color draining out of the sky and a  distant flash of lightening striking the ocean's surface.   The feverish boy whimpers.

"Don't worry," it reassures, "the structural integrity of this house is more than enough to  outlast a storm of this magnitude."  I'm not scared of the rain, the figure says. I'm scared of the dark.    "There is no reason to be afraid. I will protect you from whatever threatens you. Would  you like me to move closer?"  The figure nods and it moves to the side of bed. It drags the ottoman over and sits and  listens to the rain beginning to pelt the terracotta roof. Another lightening strike lights up the  world outside like a camera flash and a bellow of thunder rolls in from the sea. The boy moans  and curls up into a little ball. It reaches out and touches the boy's exposed skin.  Within  minutes  the  storm  rages  outside  the  house  and  twilight  has  yielded  to  the  darkness  of  night.  The  boy  grips  the  hard  plastic  of  its  arm,  begging  for  it  to  make  the  storm  stop. It scans the room for anything to comfort the poor child when it finally sees the box it had  been saving until Father came back with food and supplies. But when it looks at the figure's pale  skin and blazing cheeks, it knows there may be no time to wait for Father's return. It shakes out  of the boy's fingers, walks over to the recessed entertainment center by the far wall, and slides a  faux‐wooden panel up, revealing an ultramodern music player with a layer of dust accumulated  since its last use. It has enough charge left in its batteries for a few hours of music.  "Would you like me to play some music?" It asks. "Your father's music?"  The boy nods.  Please.  It presses a button and the music comes tumbling out of the speaker in a cascade of noise  and ecstasy, the horns blowing out a saccharine melody as a big band picks up where the song  had been paused.  It  calculates  the  risk  of  an  outsider  hearing  the  music  and  coming  to  investigate,  but  it  watches the life flood back into the boy's weary eyes and stops.  Perhaps it has found a panacea after all and thankfully the player's batteries should hold through  the night.   It suspects that's all the time they'll need anyway.    Just  as  day  yielded  to  night,  so  too  does  euphoria  yield  to  reality,  and  sometime  after  62

Woody  Herman's  "Blue  Flame"  ends  and  Johnny  Mercer  starts  singing  "Ac‐Cent‐Tchu‐Ate  the  Positive,"  the  boy's  trembling  turns  violent,  epileptic.  It  hurries  to  the  bedside  and  scoops  the  boy  into  its  arms.  It  holds  him  to  ensure  he  won't  swallow  his  tongue  and  embraces  the  child  against the squalid white plastic of its chest plate as the boy's limbs smack against it with thick,  meaty whaps. It waits until the seizure passes, but doesn't set the boy back down when he stills.  It returns to the ottoman and faces the window where rain drops pelt the dirty pane of glass.  The  boy  struggles  for  breath  as  the  infection  lubriciously  works  to  undermine  his  body  and  places  his  head  against  the  robot's  body  and  listens  for  a  heartbeat,  for  any  small  human  comfort,  but  only  hearing  the  soft  hum  of  servos  and  pneumatic  devices.  An  artificial  hand  strokes the dirty hair from his face and holds him close and whispers in his ear.  "I have in my data banks an assortment of several thousand stories. Would it help you to  hear one?"  The boy stutters a quiet, mewling yes.  "I will tell you a story about yourself, about your family. Would you like that?"  The small boy closes his eyes.  "Once upon a time, before the world broke, there was a small boy who lived in a beach  town  called  Rehoboth  with  his  mother  and  father  and  the  robot  they  had  purchased  to  help  them tidy up the house and care for the small boy."  The boy smiles.  "One  day,  the  father  came  to  the  boy  and  scooped  him  up  and  asked  him  if  he  would  want to go to the beach. The boy was excited and leapt out of his father's arms. He put on his  new swim trunks and gathered his beach toys and took some of the money from his piggy bank  to buy French fries covered in malt vinegar. And so the family set out with their beach chairs and  umbrellas and walked down the sidewalk. The small boy jumped over the cracks in the concrete  until they reached the wooden boardwalk and he looked out at the people around him. Women  wearing  bikinis  and  smelling  of  coconut  suntan  lotion  passed  by  him  without  a  second  glance  and  portly  men  with  red  burns  on  their  faces  set  small  children  on  their  shoulders.  Elderly  people sitting on the benches facing the ocean waved and smiled at him when he passed and he  smiled  back.  When  they  reached  the  sand,  he  kicked  off  his  flip  flops  and  ran  across  the  sand  barefoot. It was hot from the summer sun, but he didn't care. All he knew is that he was happy.  "They spent the day there in the sun, sitting on a beach blanket and looking out where

the ocean met the sky, their blues conjoining in the distance. The small boy explored the beach,  plucking pieces of sea glass from the sand and scooping up tiny sand fleas when they appeared.  He watched a man pull a skate from the ocean on a fishing pole that was so bowed he thought it  might snap. While his father read a book in the shade of the umbrella and his mother worked on  her tan, he built a sandcastle with the robot and decorated it with shells and twigs. He told the  robot that if they made it big enough they could move there when they both were older. When  the ocean tide rolled in and swallowed it up he was heartbroken at first, but when he saw a crab  walk into the ruins he squealed with delight. He called him King Crabby the rest of the day.  "The small boy and his family had a lunch of grainy peanut butter sandwiches and sour  cream and onion chips, and afterward his father led him onto the boardwalk and let the small  boy  buy  him  some  fries  with  the  money  from  his  piggy  bank,  and  as  they  walked  back  to  the  beach a seagull swooped down and snatched one right out of the boy's fingers.”  Even as the boy's body begins to quake, the smile never leaves his face. He's in a different  place now, far away from the thunderstorm and the radio and the dead man outside the front  door, as far away from the beach house he could escape.  "Later that day, after their stomachs had settled and they had napped, the small boy and  his mother and his father walked out into the ocean and played there  in  the  cold  water  while  their  robot  watched  from  the  beach.  They  jumped  up  and  down  with  the  waves  and  tried  not  to  swallow  the  salty  water.  They  laughed  when  they  were  pinched  by  the  crabs  beneath  their  feet  and  held  each  other  as  the  waves  begin  to  grow.  When  their  skin  was  puckered  and  salty  from  the  ocean,  his  father  suggested they go home to clean up and eat dinner, but the boy was  so happy he didn't want the day to end. He started to cry a little as

When the ocean tide rolled in and swallowed it up he was heartbroken at first, but when he saw a crab walk into the ruins he squealed with delight.

they left the water, but when the father asked what was wrong the small boy had no words."  The gasps become wheezes that futilely try for air. Seizures rack the boy's body again and  it holds him tighter against its chest and whispers in his ear.  "And then the father picked the boy up and held him up into the sunlight, kissing away  his tears and hugging him and whispering, 'I love you' into his ear. I love you."  The boy's body violently jolts one final time, and the last choking breath echoes through  the room.  64

It  sits  there  on  the  ottoman  for  a  long  time  and  holds  the  boy  as  the  rain  and  wind  bludgeon the house.  And  when  the  batteries  finally  give  out  in  the  music  player  right  during  the  climax  of  "September Song," it waits for a while longer.    When the morning breaks and it is done wrapping the small boy in the shroud of clean  cotton  blankets  from  the  linen  closet,  it  descends  the  stairs  into  the  kitchen  where  the  sun  is  streaking  through  the  bent  and  broken  blinds.  It  has  no  purpose  now,  no  primary  directive  to  hold  it  to  a  formal  schedule,  so  it  spends  four  hours  standing  and  performing  miscellaneous  diagnostic tests.  Finally it speaks.  "Maggie,  are  you  there?"  it  asks.  "It  needs  someone  to  connect  with.  It  has  failed  to  achieve its primary directive and needs further instructions. It was telling it a story and it forgot  to ask for a new directive. Can you help it?"  A pause.  "Are you still alive?"     Hours later, it remembers the boy's words.  Do you think heaven might be in the ocean?  I want you to stay with me.  It files these words away and uses them to frame a new directive.    It  opens  the  door  for  the  first  time  since  Father  told  it  to  stay  and  protect  the  boy  and  steps out into a day that smells of heavy ozone and salt. It looks back up the street where the  single major avenue out of the city is snarled and congested with countless abandoned vehicles  and wonders if Father is still alive. It crunches the numbers and finds the odds so ludicrously low  it doesn't bother finishing the equation.  No matter.  It is going to the beach.  It steps over the corpse by the door, taking care to be gentle with the linen bundle in his  arms,  and  takes  long,  purposeful  strides  down  the  sidewalk  as  it  perfectly  retraces  every  step

from the story it accesses from its data banks. When it reaches the boardwalk, it kicks a pile of  bullet casings that go tinkling down the boardwalk. It walks past the neon Dolle's sign and the  man hanging from it and steps onto the beach.   It  calculates  where  the  high  tide  might  roll  in,  then  walks  them  past  the  tide  line  and  settles  on  a  spot  where  its  heels  touch  the  incoming  surf.  Then  it  lowers  itself,  places  the  boy  down where it plans to put the foundation, and begins constructing a home they can live in until  the tide rolls in and the ocean claims them both.

Images

“BFE”  B.C. Gilbert  Relief Printing  7” x 12”

“Devil’s Claw”  B.C. Gilbert  Relief Printing  8” x 10”

“Tipi”  B.C. Gilbert  Relief Printing  12” x 11”

“Twister”  B.C. Gilbert  Relief Printing  12” x 18”

Poetry

Brent Newsom

Esther Green Plans a Funeral Lord knows, Claudia, I can’t have it   at the church. Bill quit years ago,   once the girls were grown,  said it wasn’t worth the trouble  of putting on slacks and his good white shirt   to be patronized by neckties and comb‐overs.    He’d still have himself a Sabbath   of sorts—I’d come home to him sitting outside  in his faded flannel and jeans,   handsome even leaned back in a lawn chair   smoking his Winstons.   He’d ask how the sermon was,    follow me in to help with lunch.    It was one of those Sunday lunches   when I noticed red flecks   on the whisker‐tips of his mustache.  He’d choked it back who knows how long.   Don’t mince words, he told the doc,  so she said the spot was softball‐sized,  the rest of his lung likely black   as a burnt marshmallow.   She showed us a malignant cell—  looked like those prickly sweetgum balls   that fall to the ground in winter.   Only softer, a pill of lint almost.   Next day, Bill went back to work,   which was not a big surprise.   He lasted weeks, which was.          80

Floyd and Patti   The JC Cocktail Palace: a dive  with self‐delusions. But it was theirs,  the place where Floyd tipped biggest  and Patti kept’em coming.  When he asked if he could be the piston  pumping in her cylinder,   she had the wit to say,   I’m not a four‐stroke   kind of woman, and the good sense   to slap him.   He was smitten.    He was persistent. She liked   the attention, came to crave   his viscous gaze dripping      from face    to tits     to ass     to thigh    to calf.     In his Charger parked beneath the pink   glow of the Palace’s neon sign,  one night, after closing, she caved.  Still kissing, they clambered  over the console, unzipped,  and the crankshaft of his hips  spun in the sump of hers.  Somehow, though, he missed  what she gauged even then:  that they wouldn’t make it far   with so little in the tank.  Not even on a fire like theirs.   Not even with a white‐hot spark.

New Hope Baptist Church   Where the Savior’s left foot ought to be,  a jagged absence. A yawning hole in the glass  patched with opaque, dull gray tape  for years, ever since the summer night   a thunderstorm flung in a branch.   The western sun once washed that foot’s   gold skin, like the knees bent under their burden  and the torso slivered with crimson shards,  which shoulders a brown crossbeam.  On the opposite wall at sunset ever since,  the image of a gold‐toned Christ  lugs a shadow behind him, a dark club foot.    Now Pastor wants it repaired  by Easter. Says, The Lord’s house,  the Lord’s house. Says, Special  yellow envelopes have been printed,  says, The plate will be passed.  At the early evening business meeting,  Esther Green stands, smooths her dress,  says, What about the impoverished?  The sick, the addicted, the lame,   the lonely? Says, What   about doing unto the least of these?  Pastor cues the pianist, says, The poor  will always be with you, says, The Lord’s house,  the Lord’s house. Says, Come,  let us pray.

Floyd Fontenot, Free Bird   Better to die from his own  machination—to grease  himself, ha!—Floyd thinks beneath the Charger  he named Pearl, she painted creamy white  with two black racing stripes,  she of ceramic‐coated headers   and hoses of stainless steel,   of chrome twenties and dual exhaust,  she of the blower through the hood.  Now she of the axles freshly lubed.    Fuck yes. Better that than break down   like a rusted‐out beater  due to a shitty heart, birthright   of a Fontenot. Floyd knows the scum  sludging his own lines. His engine  was made for speed, not mileage,  and Fontenots run’em hard and fast,  something Patti learned real quick.  The note she pinned against the windshield  beneath a wiper blade said, Floyd,  it sure as hell was a wild ride,  and she became one more name  on a long list of leavers.  But Floyd knows he has himself to blame  and too much of his old man in him.  He could never get at the source of the rattle,   hidden beneath a hood that won’t release.    All he’d have to do is close the garage  with Pearl inside and fire her up,   maybe set the tuner to classic rock,   call in and request a Skynyrd song.  Then crank the volume up and the windows down.  Or maybe better, kick back and listen shut‐eyed   to the metallic canter of the idling Hemi,   breathe in deep that dust cloud of exhaust.

Ash Wednesday   Now that the penitents down the road  at Our Lady of Prompt Succor  are done with the beads and doubloons,  the parties, parades, and ring‐shaped king cakes,  Claudia Blackwood is happy for Smyrna’s return   to a rhythm of industry, ready   as ever for New Hope to begin   rehearsing again   for the annual Easter pageant.   Tonight after practice they’ll all get fitted,   find out what needs to be altered,   so all day she launders costumes,   purges the odor of mothballs  from old polyester and cotton.   She tugs out a tangle of robes from the dryer,   drops them into a plastic basket.   Around her head she drapes a shawl   and inhales the clean perfume—spring fresh  —of dryer sheets. She repeats her line,   straining for Magdalene’s breathless glee:  I have seen the Lord!   I have seen the Lord!   I have seen the Lord!

Corey Don Mingura  Red Pterodactyl   Let’s get high and watch my fifth‐grade play.  I think you’ll like it.  It’s a musical about dinosaurs.  All the kids sing in it, but I have a solo.  Twenty people tried out for it, and   they gave it to me.    It’s the last time I sang on stage.    You see that girl in the pink   triceratops costume? Doesn’t she look sweet?   She’s a whore now.   Has 4 kids with 3 different daddies.    She could blow anyone else around,  but when it came to me, she only said “Hi.”   I hated broads like that.    And you see that boy in the   blue tyrannosaurus suit? It was messed up.  A few years back, he fell asleep at the wheel  and ran his car into a cotton bail trailer.  Crushed him to death.     I used to party with him out by Sanders Lake.  Damn, he was a cool dude. He hooked us up   with anything, and I don’t remember paying.    Hey, you see that girl in the purple   stegosaurus getup? That little lady  is my ex‐wife. She left ‘cause she said   she couldn’t handle me and I was a bad  influence on the kids,

but if they can’t accept me,   they can kiss my ass.   I ain’t gonna change for anyone.    Oh shit, that’s me there  dressed like a red teradactyl.    Shhhh…My solo’s coming up.

Laura Holloway  Annus Mirabillus           II.  Arise,  o  crocuses!    Spring  forth,  somnolent  jonquils!    Let the buds break the bonds  of  bark  and  green  the  dying  winter.    Let  nests  be  woven  of  tender  twigs,  anchored  firmly to newly verdant trees,  and  lined  with  down.    Let  grounds  grow  soft  and  grasses  lush  that  they  may  cradle tender paw‐pads, ease  the hatchling beaks.    III.  Breezeless  air  churned  by  tiny  wings:  soft  fluttering  moths, manic skimmers, flies,  bees,  mosquitoes  ‐  insignificant  wakes,  unfit  to  cool  damp  human  skin,  go  unnoticed  in  the  oppressive  stillness.    As  the  sun  descends,  crickets  fill  the  night  with  sound  and  lightening  bugs  make  tiny  galaxies of our lawns.

I.  Naked  branches  clack  percussive.  Behind  blue  cloud  cover,  a  streak  of  sunlight  fades.    Eight  geese  fly  overhead  in  an  imperfect  formation.  Swaying  to  the  tune  of  impending  torrent,  a  perfectly conical pine becomes  a playground for a single shaft  of  persistent  light,  darting  between  shadows  and  against  a  strangely  luminous  storm‐ darkened sky.  IV.  Light  wends  its  way  through  scarlet,  burgundy,  and  coral:  stained  glass  rendered  in  the  absence  of  chlorophyll:  wind‐placed  and  held  fast  by  autumn  damp,  leaves  become  jewels  of  gold  and amber on the pane.  Later,  they  will  brown  and  fall  to  ground  and  Orion  will  begin  to  ease  his  shield  over  the  horizon.

Reviews &  Interviews

Phong Nguyen. Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History,  Queen’s Ferry Press, 2014

Review by George McCormick

When  I  picked  up  Phong  Nguyen’s  Pages  from  the  Textbook  of  Alternate  History  I  did  what  I  always do with a new book I’m excited about: I look at the cover art front and back, I flip to the  author  photo,  read  the  bio;  I  find  the  acknowledgments  and  scan  through  them;  I  read  the  epigraph if the book has an epigraph. Finally I turn to the table of contents—and it was in this  moment  when  I  started  scanning  the  chapter  titles  that  I  immediately  began  to  misread  the  book.  When  I  read  titles  like  “Columbus  Discovers  Asia”  and  “Napoleon  Invades  Louisiana”  I  assumed  the  book  would  be  treading  in  the  kind  of  revisionist  waters  so  well  established  by  Robert Harris’ Fatherland and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. In those novels history is  re‐imagined  so  as  to  serve  as  cautionary  tales  against  fascism,  but  as  I  began  to  wade  my  way  through Nguyen’s book I quickly realized that I was in a very different space: here history was  being re‐imagined not with a sense of foreboding but with a sense of play—wonderful, curious,  intellectual, satirical sense of play. I wasn’t in the world of Roth, I realized, so much as I was in  that of Borges. And I can think of no bigger compliment.        The plot: a nameless tech at a computer repair shop known only as “The Workshop” is one  day given the task of recovering information off of a client’s ruined hard drive. What he finds is a  digital  text  “More  than  five  times  the  capacity  of  Wikipedia,  more  than  sixty  times  the  size  of  Britannica”  with  “a  terabyte  full  of  images  and  text—more  than  two  billion  words,  with  half  a  million maps and timelines—of meticulously organized scrupulously annotated chapters.”  The  narrator spends days organizing and indexing the text, but when he attempts to print pieces of  the tome the type sheets come out of the printer empty. When the computer finally crashes the  narrator  results  to  writing  down  what  he  remembers  by  hand  on  a  ream  of  paper.  What  he’s  preserved is the book we have in our hands.       While  these  250  pages  record  a  history  that  is  alternate  to  our  own,  they  still  follow  time’s  arrow.  The  book’s  chapters  are  organized  chronologically,  beginning  in  ancient  Egypt  and  closing with a space shuttle launch. That being said, I found myself jumping around in the book,  reading  sections  by  how  interesting  the  chapter  titles  were.  It  is  a  testament  to  the  book  that  such a reading is possible—each chapter neatly, tidily, contained within this framework. Which  90

is how I came to read “Hitler Goes to Art School” so early on. In this wonderfully imagined story  Adolph  Hitler  is  young  art  student  who  resists  abstract  expressionism  in  favor  of  literal  landscape  painting,  and  whose  own  cheesy  paintings  “had  been  used  only  to  sell  picture  frames..”  Poor Adolf, when he is later gunned down on a Belgian battlefield toward the close of  the First World War, it is in part because of his aesthetics. Hitler’s buddy narrates,              I myself was a soldier in the Austro‐Hungarian Infantry Regiment, and had since met at  least a dozen men like him—or almost like him. Theirs sounded like a clean and—with all  its focus on monuments and other vast structures of stone—seemingly empty Germany.

J. David Osborne. Low Down Death Right Easy, Swallowdown  Press, 2013

Review by Cameron Brewer

Lawton,  Oklahoma  is  a  city  that,  in  many  ways,  represents  the  merging  of  two  diametrically  opposing ideas:  salvation and perdition. Fort Sill, a sprawling army base that provides an influx  of  revenue  that  is  key  to  Lawton's  economy,  sits  across  the  street  from  a  neighborhood  renowned  for  violence  and  drug  addiction.  Chain  stores  provide  a  host  of  new  jobs  while  decimating local businesses. It is a place wrought with opportunities, both good and bad. And  while  outside  factors  are  a  constant  influence,  success  or  failure  in  such  an  environment  is  largely based on an individual's choices.         This notion is at the heart of the story of Low Down Death Right Easy. The book does not pull  any  punches,  sometime  quite  literally.  The  chapters  often  read  more  like  short  vignettes,  each  dealing  with  or  reflecting  on  decisions  made  by  the  characters  and  the  repercussions  that  inevitably  occur  because  of  them.  The  accusatory  nature  of  the  first  chapter's  title,  "This  is  on  You", conveys the importance of choice in shaping one's future. It is here that we are introduced  to Daniel Ames, a gang member who serves as the closest approximation of a protagonist that  this story has to offer.  Danny is the shining example of the self‐destructive spirit that permeates  every aspect of the book, from its noir‐meets‐western tone to the important role drugs occupy in  the  narrative.  As  he  searches  for  his  missing  brother,  his  increased  appetite  for  violence  and

narcotics  give  form  to  his  increased  despair.  This  dynamic  keeps  the  reader  involved  and  sympathetic towards Danny's goals, even when the actual cost of the truth becomes apparent.        The  brilliance  of  Low  Down  Death  Right  Easy  comes  not  from  its  willingness  to  embrace  brutality,  but  in  its  understanding  of  how  deeply  the  desolation  it  depicts  is  rooted  in  choices  intended  to  bring  about  positive  change.  Sepp  Clancy,  an  ex‐convict  with  no  opportunities,  is  the  canvass  on  which  we  see  this  play  out.  Despite  the  urging  of  his  brother,  Arlo,  Sepp  continues to live a life of crime. Sepp's mentality is spelled out expertly in the exchange he has  with  his  friend  Lucas  in  the  chapter  "The  Blue  Cat/Fertilizer".  Sepp  is  perfectly  aware  of  the  potential  damage  that  can  come  from  falling  back  into  old  habits,  but  chooses  to  lapse  not  because he's weak, but because high risk for high reward is the only logical option to him: "...if  someone kicked him out of door number one, he'd burn the whole building down."        The most remarkable thing about Low Down  Death  Right  Easy is how effectively the use of  paralleling story structure creates a sense of dramatic fatalism that is evocative of the works of  Elmore Leonard. It is clear that the lives of Sepp and Danny are going to clash. And as these men  unknowingly inch towards each other, the grim nature of the book's title begins to weigh heavier  on the mind. Low Down Death Right Easy is a bleak and tension filled crime thriller that excels  in making self‐destruction thoughtful and engaging. A parable that hinges on the idea that even  the most innocuous decisions can lead to the most tremendous of impacts, Osborne has created  a story that is as chillingly poignant as it is satisfying.

“I’m not the only one to seek out his grave in St. Mary’s  Cemetery, between the Interstate and the softball diamonds…”:  An Interview With Ed Skoog

by George McCormick

Ed Skoog’s magnificent debut Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon, 2009) was—among other things— a  kind of  panoramic  view  of  American  life  at  the  close  of  the  first  decade  of  this  new  century.  In  “During the War” we learn, “The train I rode around America/ was empty; the country was half‐ empty,/  like  the  zoo  on  Monday.  I  wept  at  the  president,/  threatened  to  barefoot  across  the  border,/ but in the end only rolled down the window/ to wave at a stranger who looked familiar.”   The poems in the book are often nimble and intricate, and Skoog proves himself equally deft as a  miniaturist: “It’s 11:11, time/ to make my daily wish/ catch the stilt legs of those/ two birds who land  twice/  a  day  inside  the  clock”(from  “Inland  Empire).  In  his  recent  book  Rough  Day  (Copper  Canyon,  2013),  Skoog  takes  a  different,  somewhat  more  surreal,  tact  with  his  poems.  Eschewing  titles  and  punctuation,  Skoog’s  new  poems  feel  freer  and  stranger,  darker  yet  more  comic.  I  was  excited, then, in April, when I had the chance to catch up with Skoog via email where he was busy  teaching as a visiting writer at Wichita State.      [McCormick]:   I  read  Rough  Day  last  Monday,  then  again  on  Saturday.  The  second  time  through, as I was thinking about form, I was reminded of a line Jack Spicer has about the serial  poem:  “The  serial  poem  has  the  book  as  its  unit…and  you  have  to  go  into  a  serial  poem  not  knowing  what  the  hell  you’re  doing.  It  has  to  be  some  path  that  you’ve  never  seen  on  a  map  before and so forth…”1 Does this resonate at all with how Rough Day was composed?    [Skoog]: Did I know what I was doing, and when did I know it? I don't remember how it all came  together,  but  at  some  point  the  poems  and  the  book  converged.  I'm  interested  in  sonnet  sequences.  I  began  writing  this  very  much  with  Rilke's  Sonnets  to  Orpheus  in  mind,  but  I  also

from “The Serial Poem and The Holy Grail.” The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer.   Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

have in my head the figure made by Spicer, and by Ronald Johnson's ARK and Dorn's Gunslinger,  which I know is a book that means something to you, or used to back in old Missoula.     [McCormick]:  Yeah, it was either you or Kurt Slauson that turned me onto Gunslinger. This was  ’96,  ’97.  I  was  working  as  a  dishwasher  in  a  big  industrial  kitchen  at  the  Holiday  Inn,  and  I  remember sitting next to my dish machine, crunching on croutons, and reading—being amazed  by—Dorn’s book. I mean, I didn’t know language could do that. I picked up ‘Slinger again during  the  Iraq  war  when  I  felt  like  I  was  losing  my  mind.  Just  recently  when  I  was  reading  Cyrus  Console’s excellent book‐length poem The Odicy I could feel the presence of Dorn’s ghost—the  re‐purposing  of  corporate  language,  the  scathing  humor,  the  relentless  attack  on  consumer  culture. This is not to take anything from Console, who is a poet of the first‐rank in my book.    [Skoog]:  Cyrus is from Topeka.    [McCormick]:   The book seems to move from grief to anger to somewhere nearly ineffable; or, if  it  doesn’t  exactly  work  sequentially  like  that  it  does  seem  to  reiterate  these  stages.  I  find  this  interesting because anger seems a place that is easy to start from but difficult to sustain. I mean,  I  think  there’s  a  reason  why  8o’s  punk  songs  are  short.  Can  you  speak  at  all  about  how  you  manage to keep this going for eighty‐two pages?     [Skoog]:  My favorite 80s punk song is "Ack Ack Ack" by The Minutemen. Twenty unforgettable,  highly structured seconds. But I don't see the book in the terms that you mention. I was thinking  of  the  album  in  musical  terms,  at  various  times,  Mahler's  symphonies,  long  late  night  performances by New Orleans pianists such as James Booker, Jon Cleary and Professor Longhair,  and  an  interview  in  Mojo  with  Shane  MacGowan  in  which  he  beautifully  avoids  answering  questions about his songwriting (and which provides the epigraph to the book). There is anger  and grief in the book but I see it as essentially a comic poem.     [McCormick]:  I agree. And  I love how quickly  the book can  move between different registers.  For instance, there are a couple of moments in the book where you pivot from a rich image to a  stanza  written  in  very  declarative,  even  instructional,  language:  “and  here  is  the  canyon  where  94

we stop for love/ and these are the red and orange seeds of the ocotillo/ and these are the spines  of the pencil cholla.”  And later, perhaps my favorite lines of the book: “my advice is give yourself  freely to rage/ until your face suns in the blast of either/ the furnace my grandfather stokes// or  the revolver’s answer.”    [Skoog]:    About  those  lines:  My  mother’s  father,  Walter,  was  a  steelworker  in  Pittsburgh.  The  family  story  is  that  he  did  something  else,  like  handling  the  pay  rolls  or  something,  but  the  newspaper articles about his murder in 1952 just call him a steelworker. He was shot in a hotel.  My  mother  only  talked  about  it  a  couple  times,  but  I’ve  done  a  lot  of  research,  trying  to  get  a  sense of who he was, what happened exactly. I am continuing to write about him. I seem to be  covering the same territory every few years in my poems. Different dances, different songs, but  the  same  instruments  maybe.  Perhaps  I  was  trying  to  emulate  something  about  dance  in  that  way, with passages that move quickly, passages that are in slow motion, and passages that stop  suddenly, like a cakewalk.     [McCormick]:   I  find  the  geography  of  the  book  fascinating.  In  Mister  Skylight  place  was  very  particularized, but here it occurs as in a dream—you’re at a coast, but not the coast. Or, you’re in  “a modesto” as opposed to “Modesto.”  Does that make any sense?       [Skoog]:  I avoid most place referents in the book for both practical and conceptual reasons. The  book  would  be  a  spaghetti  of  place  names  if  I  certified  each  location,  and  it  just  didn't  seem  important.  Places  don't  really  have  meaningful  names,  mostly,  especially  in  the  midwest  and  west—town  names  are  literally  advertisements.  This  choice  is consonant with  other  aspects  I  didn't  feel  were  important:  titles,  punctuation,  people's  names  (mostly),  etc.  I  wanted  to  do  without page numbers, but in the end that seemed too much. I suppose I was trying to correct  what  I  see  as  a  flaw  of  my  first  book  Mister  Skylight,  which,  sometimes  when  I  read  it,  seems  overwhelmed  by  vanity,  and  I  can  locate  that  vanity  in  the  unexamined  use  of  the  usual  conventions,  titles,  punctuation,  commodity  fetishism,  certain  modes  of  rhetoric,  style,  presentation of imagery and figurative language. Not to dwell on the manufacture of the chorizo  and andouille, but I saw ways that I could be freer, and that seems like a reasonable goal for a  poet, to find ways to become freer with each book, each poem, each line. My more recent poems

are  trying  to  find  that  freedom  in  other  ways.  I  think  Rough  Day  is  the  end  of  one  line  of  development  for  me,  and  I'm  Tronning  to  the  side  now,  but  I  hope  everything  is  encircling/ensquaring/ensaring.    [McCormick]:  I’ve never thought of it quite like that before, that titles and punctuation can be  seen  as  forms  of  vanity.  Small  ways  of  feeding  the  ego,  perhaps.  Did  Copper  Canyon  have  any  problems  with  these  formal  decisions  when  you  submitted  the  manuscript?  After  all,  Skylight  had been a success and here was this radical shift in poetics.    [Skoog]:  No, no problem with those decisions that I know of. Does it seem like a radical shift? I  think I mostly took things away, following a comment of Roque Dalton’s, that you know a real  poet because he or she has less and less every day, until all they have is a clean shirt.    [McCormick]:  Having worked at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and having been a student  and  later  a  visiting  professor  at  the  University  of  Montana,  it  is  safe  to  assume  that  you  are  familiar  with  the  work  and  life  of  Richard  Hugo.  As  Hugo  gets  canonized  he  also  seems  to  be  getting  a  little  squeezed  in  that  we  see  the  same  five  or  six  poems  over  and  over,  in  each  successive  anthology.  My  question  is,  what  poem,  or  series  of  poems,  do  you  find  often  gets  overlooked?     [Skoog]:    Hugo  has  always  been  good  luck  to  me.  I  didn’t  know  him,  but  fell  in  love  with  his  poetry when I first read “Lady at Kicking Horse Reservoir” and “Degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg”  at  17.  My  mentor  at  Kansas  State  University,  Jonathan  Holden,  had  written  extensively  about  Hugo, and helped me work out why Hugo’s work had such weight to me. It wasn’t just Hugo, of  course. I fell uncritically into the charms of dozens of poets, and followed those paths backward  and forward into matters of style, tone, ideas, ways of looking at and being in the world, ways of  being  one’s  self.  I  drove  West  the  summer  after  my  freshman  year,  with  some  friends,  and  we  spent a few days in Missoula. Thus commenced my Hugo tourism; I’m not the only one to seek  out his grave in St. Mary’s Cemetery, between the Interstate and the softball diamonds, nor to  drive to the places mentioned in his poems: Phillipsburg, Silver Star, Lake Drummond, Ovando.  I  went  to  the  University  of  Montana’s  graduate  program,  starting  in  1994,  12  years  after  Hugo  96

died, in other words, fully aware that I would not get to work with Hugo, let me beat you to that  question, but still his work suggested that Missoula was at least as good a place as any to start  trying to be a writer. Many people of his circle were still there, and I did get to work with them,  or to know them, and they and their work has meant a great deal to me independent of today’s  subject. If they awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature not to individuals but to groups of friends,  few groups would be more deserving than that group of Missoula writers: Hugo, James Welch,  Annick Smith, Bill Kittredge, Jim Crumley, Madeline DeFreese, others. Although familiar by now  to me, Hugo’s work always seems new. “News that stays news,” as Pound would say.  I had a problem imitating Hugo, which I did for too many years, and then spent too many  years trying not to write like Hugo, which is not any different, except I sounded in neither mode  like  myself.  Eventually  I  gave  up  and  don’t  care  whether  I  sound  or  don’t  sound  like  Hugo.  Sometimes a line does, because I like the loose iambic pentameter and write about my life and  people and  places  around  me,  which  have  often been  places  that  he  had  written  about  as  well  (broken  up  with  a  decade‐long  vacation  in  New  Orleans—paraphrasing  “Degrees  of  Gray  in  Phillipsburg”—the  town  of  towering  blondes,  good  jazz  and  booze  that  the  world  let  me  have  when I let my hometown of Topeka die inside.)  I  later  served  as  writer‐in‐residence  at  the  Richard  Hugo  House,  and  he  was  never  far  from my mind the last few years when I was a sabbatical replacement visiting professor at the  University  of  Montana.  His  poems  have  been  my  maps,  useful  stories  for  navigating  the  Northwest,  both  in  the  imagination  and  in  my  daily  life  as  a  citizen.  I  just  finished  teaching  a  class at the Richard Hugo House about “Hugo and his Circles,” and at the end a student asked  what  I  learned  from  Hugo  and  these  writers.  Courage,  honesty,  dedication  to  craft,  sense  of  purpose. Value. Dignity. No other literary movement’s work means as much to me personally— the story they tell, together, is a good story.  I remain drawn to Hugo’s work, with all its flaws. At this point I read his collected poems  as  something  like  a  novel,  the  way  Tony  Tost  reads  Johnny  Cash’s  songs  as  a  kind  of  novel,  a  novel  of  identity  formation,  the  presentation  of  a  self  (in  his  33  1/3  book  about  American  Recordings.) “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” is his great poem, but I think they all have a high  sustain,  with  an  adhesive  force.  I  really  like  “Silver  Star,”  which  has  always  seemed  to  me  like  “Degrees  of  Gray  in  Phillipsburg  Junior.”  We  have  a  lonely,  forgotten  town  of  ghosts  and  rust  that connects to the collapsing conjectural “you.” The consciousness of the poem asks questions

and gets wrong answers. Reality is defending itself from the imagination, but one can escape in a  car,  and  the  last  image  is  red,  red  barn,  red  hair.  Considering  one  beside  the  other  magnifies  both. I like “You are a stranger every day. Let the engines and the farm equipment die.”  The last  image  is  red,  and  both  poems  end  with  that  characteristic  of  Hugo  midcentury  “girl”—Hugo’s  portrayal  of  women,  and  of  sexual  anxiety,  which  is  probably  the  barrier  between  his  poetry  and—flip  a  coin  on  what  you  want  to  call  it—“popular  currency”  or  “immortality.”    These  uncomfortable lines in Hugo, like the minstrelry in Berryman’s dream songs, is probably poorly  considered  from  a  public  relations  standpoint.  But  the  sheer  vulnerability  of  Hugo’s  speaker’s  unadorned,  unguarded  relationships,  imagined  and  real,  with  women,  while  they  make  some  listeners turn off, make me listen more, and consider the psychology—psychotherapy was very  important  to  Hugo—and  woundedness  and  posturing  and  bluffing.  It  is  a  weakness  in  the  poetry. So little good poetry has weaknesses. Or such precise weakness. One is not tempted to  valorize Hugo and his speakers, as champions of women. He doesn’t seem to have much insight  or  empathy  with  them,  the  way  he  does  with  old  men.  There  are  biographical  explanations  of  why he might be this way as a person—orphan, severe grandmother, combat—but as one who  has long been under the spell of his voice, I would wish for more understanding and complexity  regarding women. Because I could use some. But my real defense of Hugo on this point is that he  talks about women, while most the male poets of his generation largely avoid women. He may  be inexpert talking about women, but women are really the subject of his poems. As the old song  goes, “motherless children have a hard time in this world.”  It’s  interesting  to  notice  what’s  not  in  Hugo  poems.  Aside  from  the  letter  poems,  there  aren’t many people. Like the cartoon Peanuts, there are very few parents. Few children.

I  also  like  “Keokuk.”  There  are  many  moments  in  his  poetry,  often  inside  a  sentence,

where a quick switch happens, a leap through time, or from the individual to the universal, or a  contradiction.  The  effect  is  like  looking  through  a  microscope  that  suddenly  turns  into  a  telescope.  At  any  rate,  the  effect  is  often  kaleidoscopic.  And  very  much  so  in  “Keokuk,”  wild  telescoping of time and tense, and identities. The Keokuk is in Iowa—perhaps he visited during  his  disastrous  semester  teaching  at  Iowa,  what  seems  to  have  been  the  breaking  point,  after  which  he  sobered  up.  “Your  gaze  must  give  the  rescue  team  a  chance  to  grow  on  the  horizon,  framed in gold.”  And along these lines I like “Letter to Logan from Milltown,” which seems like  the answer poem to “Keokuk.” His legacy has to rest on the poetry, not the force of his character,  98

or his legacy as a teacher, or even the essays in Triggering Town, as influential as they’ve been. I  know the poetry can withstand new readings and critical approaches, as well as the pleasure they  give.

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Contributors Mark Belisle, originally from Fletcher, Oklahoma, now lives in Rehoboth Beach,    Delaware. His work has been featured in several online magazines as the University  of Baltimore's literary journal Welter. His debut collection of short stories, called  Sunflowers is available as an e‐book at Amazon.    Timothy Bradford is the author of the poetry collection Nomads with Samsonite (BlazeVOX  [books], 2011) and the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos Pintados, 2003), a photography book on  the ascetics of South Asia. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish  Themes Award for a novel‐in‐progress, and from 2007 to 2009, he was a guest researcher at the  Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at  Oklahoma State University.     Cameron Brewer is originally from Moore, Oklahoma. A graduate of Cameron University,  Brewer was accepted into the Communication Studies Master’s Program at Southern Illinois  University. He enjoys reading comic books, slam poetry, writing qualitative academic essays, and  performing stand‐up comedy. He is currently working on a graphic novel with friend and  creative partner Gwen Price.    Jerry Gabriel’s first book, Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), won the Mary McCarthy Prize in  Short Fiction. It was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and awarded  the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in Five Chapters, EPOCH, Alaska  Quarterly Review, and The Missouri Review. His second book, The Let Go, will be published by  Queen’s Ferry Press in 2015. He lives in Maryland, where he teaches at St. Mary’s College of  Maryland and directs the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference.    B.C. Gilbert was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas. He received a BFA in painting in 1997 from  Cameron University and an MFA in painting and sculpture in 2001 from Texas Tech University.   He is now based out of Wichita Falls where he is a working and exhibiting artist as well as an art  instructor at Rider High School and adjunct professor at Midwestern State University. A  forthcoming solo show, “High Plains Jamboree,” will open on June 6 at the Louise Hopkins  Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock. His work can also be seen at www.bcgilbert.com.    Laura Holloway is a graduate of Hope College and works as a math tutor in Bucks County,  PA. In addition to the Oklahoma Review, her poetry has been published in River Poets Journal,  Mad Poets Review, Lehigh Valley Literary Review, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and  Innisfree. She has twice been a runner‐up for the Bucks County Poet Laureate.

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George McCormick is the author of Salton Sea (Noemi Press, 2012) and his stories have been  published, most recently, in EPOCH, The Santa Monica Review, and Sugar Mule. His novel Inland  Empire will be published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2015. McCormick is currently an Assistant  Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University.    Corey Don Mingura received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central  Oklahoma in May 2011. His works of fiction and poetry have appeared in The Acentos Review,  The Writing Disorder, Westview, Eclectica, Red Lightbulbs and The Scissortale Review. He  currently serves as assistant poetry editor for Arcadia and is the editor for its Online Sundries  blog. Mingura is a Mexican‐American native of Hollis, Oklahoma and currently resides in  Edmond, Oklahoma.    Brent Newsom's debut collection of poetry, Love’s Labors, will be published in spring 2015 by  CavanKerry Press. He has also published poems in Subtropics, The Southern Review, The Hopkins  Review, and other journals. A Louisiana native, he earned a PhD in English from Texas Tech  University, where he held editorial posts with 32 Poems and Iron Horse Literary Review. He lives  in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with his wife and two children, and is Assistant Professor of English at  Oklahoma Baptist University.     Zack O’Neill earned his MFA from the University of South Carolina. His short work has  appeared in The Delinquent, Kudzu Review, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives  in Sacramento and teaches writing courses at Sacramento City College.

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