Oxford Magazine: Past ImPerfect, Issue 36: Winter 2016

Past imPerfect

Winter 2016

OxMag Issue 36

Dear Readers,

Winter has finally settled on the trees and in the soil, and the time for reflection has grown with the long nights. As we ponder our past, dwell on our successes and failures, acts of kindness and malice both done to us and by us, we realize that those experiences are invaluable to who and where we are in our present.

Pasts don’t need to be, nor should they be, perfect. What a dull, imperfect existence would we lead if that were the case.

In the pages that follow, we find traces of near and far pasts, pasts that cling, pasts that aren’t past. Hope, surprise, frustration, and regret mingle here in the slightly uneasy way a robin’s song touches snowcapped branches on calm winter mornings. If it’s haunting or hopeful depends perhaps on your state of mind.

All the best,

Evan Fackler & Jess Marshall Editors-in-Chief, Oxford Magazine

Masthead Managing Editor Joe Squance Editors-in-Chief Evan Fackler Jess Marshall Prose Editor Andrew Marlowe Bergman Poetry Editor Ian Schoultz Creative Nonfiction Editor Joshua B. Jones Events Coordinator Michelle Christensen Staff Readers Tammy Atha Justin Chandler Chris Cox Courtney Kalmbach Mosisah Mavity Sammani Perrera Isaac Pickell Carly Plank Katy Shay Tatiana Silvas Darren Thompson

Table of Contents Cover Art: Untitled by Taylor Meredith Ashley Tobin War Story .................................................................................................... 5 Saramanda Swigart Per Second Per Second ............................................................................... 10 Sharon Black Snow Leopard ............................................................................................ 17 Dennis Must Man in the Mirror ...................................................................................... 18 Meredith Davies Hadaway Gravity....................................................................................................... 25 Lynn Gordon The King of the Dinosaurs .......................................................................... 26 Helen Wickes Proustian, in the Desert ............................................................................. 30 m.h. burkett Limbo ........................................................................................................ 31 Vanya Erickson One Good Thing ......................................................................................... 40 Contributor Bios…………………………………………………………………………….44 Golden Ox Award Guidelines……………………………………………………………..46

Ashley Tobin Ashley Tobin War Story I am on the floor of a make-shift fort of tacked-together plywood walls in the far corner of the last garage on the road at the very perimeter of our Forward Operating Base in Tikrit, Iraq. We’ve been in the country for almost a year. My fort fits three soldiers comfortably, but right now I am alone and curled up on the floor with an LED flashlight in my hand and my face in a crisp copy of The Half-Blood Prince . The ground is covered with chipped slag, but the concrete feels cool and refreshing against my legs and elbows so I lie on it. The wooden walls are built to shield us from commanding officers’ hourly rounds, a place where we can hide when there isn’t much to do so we won’t be caught doing nothing. Not having shop orders is sometimes inevitable, but being seen not having orders is a sure way to get assigned to a convoy or an over-night guard detail.

Out in the shop, some of the metal workers are working on personal projects to appear busy. As Sergeant Rodriguez creates himself an impractical metal chair, I can hear the crackling of his electrode as it melts into the weld joints and can see the scattering sparks and dim glow of UV light from over the six foot-walls of my hiding place. The building is about fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long: vast enough to fit two five-ton trucks and a Humvee. Pushed up against the walls are shelves full of flux-coated electrodes and metal closets filled with coveralls and leather safety jackets, goggles, and face shields.

Throughout our half of the shop are heavy-duty chop-saws, plasma cutters, steel tables, and two arc welding machines that can be wheeled over to whatever steel drum needs to be sliced in half and fashioned into a combat barbeque grill for combat picnics. Thick wires from the welders cross the floor in every direction, and all of the machinery is covered with a consistent layer of dust. We share the building with the HVAC squad from third platoon. They

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Ashley Tobin lined their half of shop with wooden benches they built themselves. They use them as workstations when fixing broken wall unit air conditioners.

The entire structure of our shop is made of concrete. Though small rectangular windows line the top of the high walls, most of the light we get shines in through the open garage doorways on either side. Sparrows periodically fly in one door and out the other, leaving white splatters of shit to dry on the industrial machines.

The metal doors are rolled up on either side and the view is bleak: in our gravelly front yard are rusted bits of pipe, stacks of half-inch-thick steel sheets, and a galvanized-steel garbage can we use for burning confidential documents.

Beyond that are more shops—cement garages like ours—and various tan or brown or green painted military vehicles, all up-armored and convoy-ready.

Past the motor pool is a field of dusty rocks that stretches for miles, and the occasional man-made berm that elevates one level of dusty rock above another.

It is July 16, 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Midnight Release Parties have been happening across the world. Fans have been flooding bookstores, plastic wands in hand. They are dressed in cloaks and fake round eyeglasses and red-and-gold scarves (or green-and-silver, or blue-and-bronze, or even yellow-and-black). People paint temporary tattoos on each other: lightning bolts on foreheads, green skulls and snakes on forearms. Stores distribute concoctions they imagine to taste like Butterbeer and blast music of the franchise soundtracks over the loudspeakers. As it nears midnight in each time zone, lines begin to form. Some stores organize and distribute numbered tickets to make sure everyone receives a copy. Waiting in line is part of the celebration: children jump around, casting fake spells. Teenagers reread previous books or discuss with each other what might happen in these new pages.

This morning, hundreds of soldiers lined up at the door of the Army and Air Force Exchange Store (or Post Exchange, or PX), on our base. We were clad in our desert camouflage uniforms and Kevlar helmets, and assault rifles were slung over our shoulders. This Forward Operating Base doesn’t require us to 6

Ashley Tobin wear protective vests unless we are in vehicles, but half the soldiers are not from this base. They convoyed here on supply missions from somewhere else, were given a few hours to take advantage of our large PX. Those soldiers wore the vests and some wore kneepads and some had ballistic goggles stretched over their helmets.

As we entered the store, we walked past pallets stacked high with copies of J.K. Rowling’s new novel, and the brilliant green cover art popped against the beige wooden pallets, the beige dust on the floor, the beige uniforms, the beige country. These editions bare Marie GrandPré’s familiar artwork, making it apparent they’ve been shipped from the United States and across the Atlantic. Most of our goods come from closer countries like Kuwait, and our dining halls are filled with Arabic-labeled Pepsi cans and orange juices.

In New Jersey, it is three in the morning. The booksellers are closed; young witches and wizards have gone home with their Half-Blood Princes and I am sure many are still awake, resolving to read until the very last page, or reading until they cannot stay awake any longer. I imagine them in pajamas, lying in their beds with reading by flashlight or nightlight. I remember being seven or eight, reading an entire chapter book by the light that shone in from the streetlamp near my bedroom window after Mom and Dad enforced bedtime.

Courtney’s bed was closer to the door, and she read by the light from the hall.

In Iraq, it is ten in the morning. Outside our shop, the temperature rises to a hundred and twenty-something degrees. Inside, fans whir and occasionally a saw buzzes and metal clanks on the floor. I am only vaguely aware of the loud, sweaty world around me as I watch Harry peruse Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. In the first hundred pages, Harry hasn’t yet started his sixth year at Hogwarts. After an attack has been made on Brockdale Bridge—a magic hurricane collapses it in a mass-killing—the Minister of Magic meets with the British Prime Minister to inform him the country is at war, and that wizards and non-wizards must prepare. Pamphlets are sent to magic families describing how to protect homes against dark forces. At the Weasley house 7

Ashley Tobin where Harry stays, all hands on the enchanted clock indicate the family is in mortal peril.

When the temperature creeps to the 130s I am still sprawled on the floor of my fort. I’ve skipped lunch to read, but Specialist Rice brought me water about an hour ago. It is in one of the warm, skinny, one-liter bottles with Arabic labeling that can be found on any of the pallets distributed throughout the base, pushed up against the six-foot walls of polypropylene fabric sandbags that wind around all of the roads and buildings. New shipments of water come in regularly, before the previous stacks are emptied, and the plastic bottles and shrink-wrap glisten in the sun until they are covered by the dust that seems to eventually cover every object in the country.

The ground of the welding shop shakes and far away past the berms, the rocks, the sandbag walls, and the coils of concertina wire that surrounded the base is a low rumbling. A cloud of dust and smoke billows from the horizon.

Our base is fairly large and rarely mortared and this is probably a controlled blast, a planned detonation of ammunitions by American engineers. These happen almost every day, just a few miles past the wire behind our motor pool.

I imagine for a moment that the explosions are magical, that perhaps somewhere there are sparks flying out of a wand and the dust cloud that rises in the distance is some dark wizard’s glittering mark. In this fantasy I’ve mobilized with great, brave wizards on the side of Good, saving the world. Our enemies are completely Evil, and this war is easy to understand. When I ask my sergeants what we are doing in this country—if they can explain the whole mission our Maintenance Battalion supports—they can honestly say we are here because someone has to do what is right, not what is easy (or some other inspiring Dumbledorism).

The Half Blood Prince is the first Harry Potter book written after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In it Harry is sixteen, nearing his coming-of-age by the standard of the Wizarding World. My generation has grown up with Harry, and with each new release he and I have matured together. In the summer of 1997, the first story was published in the United States. I’d just turned twelve 8

Ashley Tobin and when eleven-year old Harry and I faced Voldemort for the first time, it was an easy battle, guided by an all-knowing and loving headmaster.

At five o’clock it will be time to leave the welding shop. My squad will hang up welding gear, strap on flak jackets and Kevlar helmets, load onto the benches on the back of our Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicle. We’ll ride somewhat recklessly over the rocky terrain to old Iraqi Army barracks we’ve appropriated as our own. But in this last hour of the day, I remain hiding in my fort, watching as Dumbledore’s life is taken on the school’s Astronomy Tower, reading by the dying light of my tactical flashlight.

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Saramanda Swigart Saramanda Swigart Per Second Per Second One day there was a girl who climbed an overpass and looked down on the interstate. She stood at the edge, holding the railing. A squadron of police cars gathered below her, and a man called up to her with a megaphone, remarking that she ought to think about those who love her, and offering her various quid pro quos—Don’t jump and we’ll… His name, he told her, was Lieutenant Candy. Candy? Kandi? Khandee? No first name. She squinted. He was of ambiguous ethnicity. He had thick gray hair and black eyebrows and a mustache. Why do they all have mustaches? “I want a cigarette!” she called down. An officer of the law shimmied out to where she stood and gave her one.

He was sweating as he lit it. She held herself by her fingertips, suspended over the interstate, and because of that he held his hand up as though to say Whoa, whoa, and backed away. She laughed. She didn’t even smoke. The negotiator, Lieutenant Candy, said: Life is one tragedy after another—everybody knows it— everybody’s felt it, in a resigned voice, as though he himself had been up here above the interstate, contemplating a handful of pills, behind the business end of a gun, and had made the life choice. It was hackneyed, but she almost came down because of it. You are not alone, on the other hand, and she almost jumped from the sheer bullshit. How do you know? The traffic was backed up as far as the eye could see. Do it already! shouted a frustrated motorist, and a plainclothesman pointed at him sternly through the car window with his cop sunglasses. The sun was high in the sky. It could have been worse, traffic-wise: they were still a few hours from rush hour. She would be cleaned up by then, probably, but then again, what did she know? Maybe there was a chalk outline had to be made and then photos and whatnot, a whole bureaucracy. She wasn’t up on her police procedurals. It struck her with what little knowledge she had gone into this enterprise. Mr. Candy shielded his eyes with his free hand. He was the only one not wearing sunglasses, and the girl assumed this 10

Saramanda Swigart was because he wanted her to be able to see his eyes. He did have kind eyes, as far as she could tell from up here, the sort of eyes you want in a negotiator. All at once the woman wasn’t sure. Her resolve, so strong moments before—and hours and days and years—wavered, and she felt tears come hot and humongous and rolling, and she felt fright at her predicament.

But everything’s attracted by its own end. The girl let go. She experienced a thrilling, frightening moment of weightlessness. Then she accelerated. She remembered, ridiculously, from a physics class she’d almost failed, that she was accelerating at 9.8 meters per second per second. Meaning, she thought, that each second she was going 9.8 meters a second faster than the previous second (right?). She was surprised by how nice acceleration felt, and regretted all at once that she didn’t have longer, farther, to fall. It was a nice day she’d chosen. Sky bejeweled with plump little clouds. On the way down, she thought she heard the man who’d jilted her call out, Watch out for that…! But his voice failed to move her. He was, she realized with regret, not worth this gesture, this falling-off-the-overpass gesture. Then she thought about her parents, who’d been helpless in the face of her mountainous sadness, and she felt sad all over again, a sharp-pointed little anguish like acupuncture needles in her spleen.

They wanted to have been good parents, Maud and Dick. They’d been less interested in becoming good parents. They didn’t love the future tense.

Remorse, they’d wallowed in it. It was more fascinating to them than she was.

So stately, their self-mortification. Nevertheless, I love you, parents, she thought, as though giving a speech from a balcony, gesturing benedictions over the whole crowd, the freeway, the patrol cars with their spinning lights, her whole audience: I love you all!

Falling, and the sped-up air excited. Her shirt flapped. Her own heartbeat was in her cheeks, a heartbeat, she knew, that had a finite number of beats left. Sam used to take her pulse. He’d turn her toward him, catch her wrist, and lay two fingers against the blue veins there. She said, “What are you doing?” and he answered, “Shhh.” That was during his residency, when he came home forgetting that he still had a stethoscope around his neck. She’d 11

Saramanda Swigart put her fingers against her neck, and they stood still, listening to her heart.

“What’s it telling you?” she asked. He said, “Nothing unusual.” That was the problem.

The girl thought suddenly, with a twinge of anger, about getting kicked out of her ritzy high school because of the boy she’d been caught with up against a column at a school dance, her dress pulled up to her waist. (What was his name? Something biblical: Aaron or Ezekiel.) She didn’t notice the assistant principal coming up to them, because her eyes were closed in strain or rapture (she didn’t remember which: everything in high school was somewhere on that continuum). Double standard! Nothing happened to the boy, but it was Catholic school for her, where she didn’t get in trouble again because a woolly sadness had started to envelop her like a wet winter coat, and rebellion just didn’t seem worth the effort. At Catholic school she had a classmate, Margaret, who played the harp. She was some kind of a prodigy or some such, went on national tours, and the girl thought of Margaret’s face when she was playing the harp. It was almost goofy in its concentration, but hard to laugh at because it was obvious what Margaret was doing was deadly serious to her. Some boys laughed anyway, and the falling girl remembered feeling a deep despair in her soul that people could laugh at a serious thing, and if they could, what was the point of doing serious things, or indeed any things? She’d envied Margaret the harp and all its attendant meanings. She didn’t have the sense of a future that was worth working toward. And then at a party Margaret got her fingers caught in the garage door—going up, it lifted her clean off the ground—and after that her hands were too broken to play. They canceled her performance at the commencement ceremony. Margaret went to the same college as the falling woman. They didn’t speak once, aside from a hello here and there in the hall. The girl heard later that Margaret died of an overdose. It had been her first introduction to death and decay, and to be honest, she’d been a little romanced by it. “I knew her,” she’d said. “That girl and I used to be good friends,” she’d said, which hadn’t been strictly (or remotely) true. She didn’t remember being sad at the time of Margaret’s death, 12

Saramanda Swigart but now when she thought about Margaret and the one-by-one snuffing out of dreams and plans, she felt, well…it was self-evident, the falling girl thought, how she felt. The falling made it so.

Sam was the first man she made love to whom she loved. Confident, he was her first great lover. Good rhythm, that’s what he had, maybe because he was a medical student and well acquainted with the tempos of bodies, and well acquainted with her entirely average heart. But Sam, Sam was so long ago…the one who jilted her was fresher in her mind. A last straw is what she had told herself. He didn’t deserve this gesture.

(Here’s the ground, OOP. Not a pain exactly, but a not-rightness on the left side of her body. The arm, the leg, maybe she’d…)

No longer the falling girl. Now the fallen. All the thoughts in her head fell too, like type in a drawer that’s fallen, which the girl remembered was…“pied”?

Pied was the chaos of lead letters that have fallen out of the typesetter’s case.

At the ritzy school she’d taken an elective in which she learned to use a letterpress. Memories bled out of her, and as she struggled to gather them, to order them, she had a sudden thought: semaphore? Something she’d used to do? Flags and…legs and arms and a red and white outfit. A telegraphy system to convey information at a distance using—Could she really have already hit the ground? She wasn’t done falling! Words…come. Not easy—visual signals with hand-held flags, which… Yes, she’d done a summer of semaphore. There had been a patchy field, and mosquito bites on her ankles like Morse cold. Not cold.

Morse code. Transmission of messages around the field, and why on earth did her parents have her do semaphore? What makes people think of what they think of. Rhetorical. Question. Her right arm with the flag had gotten more tired than the left.

(She could only move her right arm. Her left was heavy as the deep.)

Sometimes she still thought words out in semaphore when she was especially bored, like in group therapy at the hospital. During every moment of her six hospitalizations, when the clock crept slow and the minutes mocked, she’d subtly lifted her arms, lowered them, as though they had flags in them.

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Saramanda Swigart The hospital seemed to have a philosophy about extending life by slowing it.

The hospital made life into an asymptote: it bisected the minutes into infinity.

Y equals one half X, where every second stretched out longer and flatter along the axis, but never met zero. She thought about the one who’d jilted her—his smell like hay in the sun, the smile that burst all over his whole face, his whole body, like a sun, warm, a life-giving force. In group she moved her arms in arcs: right arm straight, left arm left, angled down; right arm straight, left arm right, angled up; right arm straight, left arm left, angled down. SOS. She’d written a note this morning and posted it to her parents with a Save the Rainforest stamp. “I’m a waste of space and money,” she’d said. (Ugh: maudlin.) And, “There’s something wrong with my brain. It’s broken. I’d like to donate my brain to science.” She wished she’d written another fig. Another thing.

I love you parents, it’s not your fault.

Language leaked out and pooled around her head. Shapes—blurry.

Motes floated. So this is the end. Dust spread from a focus in her visual field and wiggled out of sight. (Focus, foci. Lat, N., masc. A hearth, a fireplace, an altar. Latin at the Catholic school. Catholic at the Latin school.) A sudden deep and dreadful sense of meaning flooded her, more lovely than any harp, and her heart lit up like a fireplace, like an altar. Bitterer because it might be her last.

And in a sense her first. A fatal fall finally makes life feel falluable. Valuable.

And it is, isn’t it? Valuable? Precious, even? See it drain—try holding it in cupped hands—but hands won’t cup.

Mother, Father, peace and blessings upon you. I forgive you. Do you forgive? Sam, are you there? Come and take my purse.

Pulse.

And you, boy who jilted, with the sun-warm smell, with the fingertip you kissed and pressed against my lips like my body was an altar, in whose pale arms I nestled, a child again. I loved. But this is hate. I’m sorry for this entirely wrong gesture.

There’s blood still surging around in here. In the donate-to-science brain.

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Saramanda Swigart In the entirely average heart. Lay your stethoscope against my breast. Be gentle. And Margaret. Play your…harp. And you, scorner, do I hear your voice?

Why did it take death to give life, finally, this gravitas? Life—stop unspooling.

Come back. I order you. *** And just like that, Lieutenant Candy was above the fallen girl. She stared in wonder. She’d never seen someone so beautiful and terrible. An angel made of pure light. A mustachioed angel. Death gives you this. It takes away semaphore and letterpress and Latin, lovers and doctors, sense and trajectory and words, but it gives you this: a huge rough-hewn angel of your very own, offering something. A choice. Lieutenant Candy had big pores on his nose. His lip was a little twisted, like perhaps a bar fight had gone away. Gone awry. His eyes, flashing with blind kindness, took her into a fierce embrace and squeezed like a boa constrictor.

He leaned in, squatting, supporting himself with his hands to get close enough to her face.

“That was a magnificent jump,” he said quietly. It was exactly what she’d been thinking, longing to be back in the jump.

“Lieutenant!” an officer behind him admonished.

“Step back,” said Lieutenant Candy over his shoulder. He came in close again. “I’ve never seen a jump so beautiful. You should go to the Olympics.”

If only I could do it again—different outcome. The life choice—she made it now. Too late for that, but there’s also this other. Something was pooling beneath her. Deliver me. From. She lifted her right hand partway and pointed at her lip.

“The mustache?” he said. Of course, angels read minds. “People always ask. We wear them so we can rub menthol into them. Sometimes things don’t smell so good. Not now”—he shrugged—“but sometimes.”

Gratitude flooded the whole right side of her body. She tried to nod.

“The ambulance is almost here,” said the angel. He pushed her bangs from her forehead and took her right hand. “The doctors are waiting. I’ve seen 15

Saramanda Swigart it all, so I know what will happen. They’re going to put you back together.”

His hand was hot and hard and full of purpose, and he laced his fingers in hers.

“You have to want to live,” he said. “Do you? Don’t nod.”

With her remaining strength, she squeezed the angel’s hand.

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Sharon Black Sharon Black Snow Leopard Who in the flutter of introductions remembers names with you on the sunporch scolding with boorish charm the window you closed on your own hand?

The concern is not for what’s floating in the broth or which color game piece to walk around the board.

Or even vigilance of the kind that is compelled to watch itself watch. It’s this tricky attribution— the number of items underneath you can’t even see, the spiderweb in the railing the breeze keeps blowing like smoke that won’t blow away. We are brave in the face of crouching similes: the long white leopard of remainder snow that stretches in the midweek shade—to think we think we are not afraid.

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Dennis Must Dennis Must Man in the Mirror

In the early light before sunup, looking perplexed, she stood nude in front of their bedroom’s full-length mirror.

Lucas feigned he was still asleep.

After the second and third mornings, he thought she had spotted a blemish that was causing her anxiety.

Lucas, will you look at this, please?

Except that didn’t occur.

A full week went by and for several moments prior to dressing, she would continue to stand motionless before the glass, not exactly basking in her reflection.

One daybreak he sat up in bed. “Alana, what is it? What’s troubling you?”

“When did she leave?” she asked.

“Who?” he said.

“My youth.”

He tried to suppress laughing since he could only recall his in photographs. “Why, she’s standing there, staring back at you, love.”

“Please don’t humor me.” Alana pointed to her thighs. She cupped her flaccid breasts, then brushed graying strands of hair off her forehead with one hand while tracing dark circles under her eyes with the other. “The woman you 18

Dennis Must fell in love with and married—when did she leave? The one who has shared your bed all these years. And why haven’t you been man enough to tell me?”

“What are you talking about?” he cried, bounding out of the bed. “For Chrissake, look at me!”

Paired nude they stood before the looking glass.

The irrefutable evidence glared back. Years her senior, the contrast between their bodies was indeed stark. He was an old man.

Yet she wasn’t inquiring where his youth had disappeared. Moreover, he surmised that over their time together, relative to his evident aging, Alana surely had taken comfort in remaining forever young. While he, you might say, sunned in her vernal radiance that subliminally acted as a governor to his growing older.

Still, he could see her point. Why hadn’t I noticed?

“What are you staring at?” she asked mildly accusatory.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” he said. *** But Lucas realized there was something he probably couldn’t share with his wife.

Just as she was now preoccupied with her body image, through the countless nights of their harmonious matrimony, he, too, was obsessed with what he saw when she lay alongside him in the pale ochre light of the bedside lamp…or when they made love.

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Dennis Must It was, indeed, her youth that had both beguiled and haunted him. Most can appreciate the former, but it’s men who fully comprehend the latter. Quite simply, he was fearful that on any given day she might abandon him for a younger man. He sought to pretend that he was above jealousy; yet when they entertained couples closer to Alana’s age, he seldom let her out of his sight, always solicitous for her look of reassurance.

The prospect of being cheated on terrified him.

Except hadn’t he set himself up for that the day he married a woman who when he entered manhood was still a child?

What was I thinking?

He was convinced she had asked herself the same question. *** Lucas had once accompanied Alana to a former college roommate’s wedding party, a festive affair held in a beachside Long Island country club.

She’d already consumed two flutes of champagne when the dinner tables were moved for dancing and the bride’s brother approached, gesturing if Lucas minded his asking Alana onto the floor.

He mouthed, “Enjoy!”

She never once glanced in his direction. He watched her titter as she and her partner circled the floor, executing steps that were of a younger generation’s than his. The band played as if the song had no ending. Along with a few other loners, he stood at the periphery of the dancing revelers—and

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Dennis Must at each burst of laughter, he was convinced it was Alana’s and had been provoked by how increasingly absurd Lucas looked in his cuckold’s costume.

Wasn’t she now confessing to this young man, What was I thinking? *** On their drive home that evening, he addressed her as if she had been unfaithful.

Then chastised himself the sleepless night that followed for denying her the right to trip to her heart’s delight. The couple hadn’t slipped out of my sight.

Maybe he had entertained a libidinous urge regarding my comely bride, but when the marathon fast-tempo dance ceased, he thanked me, shook her hand, and moved on.

Except Lucas continued to shadow her in social gatherings. He’d question Alana about her work in which he was genuinely interested, but always with a jaundiced eye to her male associates. Was one of them amusing her more than he thought appropriate? Did she speak of her employer, only a couple years her senior, in a manner that suggested something more than business matters might be occurring between them? It was only when Alana and he were alone in the confines of their apartment that he felt secure.

But, never, not once in all their married years, had there been one scintilla of evidence of an expressed desire of hers to begin wandering outside their marriage.

21

Dennis Must Given a jealous man’s propensity for pushing his betrothed into a compromising situation so that he doesn’t have to obsess over her infidelity any longer, Lucas tried. *** Watching Alana stare wistfully into the looking glass, embracing the gravity of what had abandoned her, he began to contemplate his own naked reflection and quickly realized he would never again have to suffer the insidious taunting of that voice inside him.

She’s too lovely, too beautiful to waste her youth exclusively on you, Lucas Wright. Hasn’t she been working a bit late of recent? What about that business trip she took last month to LA? Didn’t you notice in the convention’s brochure there was a scheduled social with live music for dancing on the final evening? A business meeting?

Instead, he could turn his mind to spring chores in the yard and their perennial garden. It would soon be time to fill the planters with pansies, bright purple and yellow ones, and blue lobelia in honor of Easter Sunday just two weeks away.

Free, he thought. An aging woman now stands alongside an aged man.

Frank, Tom, Larry…yes, absolutely you may dance with my wife. Circle the polished oak…cause her to laugh because she’s growing old just like me. Those dark circles under her once sparkling green eyes? Return élan to her face, blush to her cheeks.

22

Dennis Must Always at daybreak, fearing that a neighbor walking his dog might glance up and see Alana, Lucas had waited until she was fully dressed before he raised the blinds in their bedroom. Now with abandon he let them clack to the top of their sashes. *** “Look,” he enthused. “We’ve much work to do outside. It’s been a deathly long winter. Get dressed, dearest. I’ll hurry downstairs and put the coffee up.”

Alana reached out and pulled him close. “When did she go?”

“We’re always the last to know,” he said.

“Why couldn’t you’ve alerted me?”

“I don’t look at you in the mirror. I never have.”

“You did moments ago.”

He hesitated.

“Please. Tell me, Lucas, When did she leave. And why haven’t you been man enough to tell me?”

Only in those seconds of reading Alana’s tormented expression as to why, did he grasp his own perfidy.

“Because I stole her,” he confessed.

“You? I don’t understand.” *** Lucas sat on the side of the bed, glaring up at her. “I stole your youth, darling, when I obsessed that a colleague might entice you to ignore his prattle and admire, say, the bushy eyebrows that shaded his hazel eyes or the curl of 23

Dennis Must his lips…how they hinted a sally was poised on the tip of his roseate tongue. I stole it each time I imagined you in another man’s company, or when you walked out of here each morning with the sorrel plait caressing your back like a metronome that clicked on once you left and only ceased when you returned home after dark—while inside me burned the recall of buttoning twelve bonewhite buttons up the spine of your blouse as you faced the mirror, lining your lips with persimmon.

“I stole it so as not to obsess losing you any longer.

“It’s why I kept reassuring you each sunrise, repeating every night, how lovely Alana is. Why did I call you ‘my beauty’? So you wouldn’t notice me stealing it out from under you.

“Now I no longer fret having to stand on the street corner in that mortifying outfit. The one with the feather hat that grabs passersby’s attention.

‘Oh, there’s the fool. He’s the old man who married youth. “‘What was he thinking?’”

24

Meredith Davies Hadaway Meredith Davies Hadaway Gravity You probably already know how this one ends…

—Human Universe, BBC The feather, in slow motion, rides resistance, an unseen force that curls each ruffled spine into a beckoning finger in a fall that looks like flight, though it ends at ground level. Contrast this with the bowling ball that drops straight down, despite the intervening elements.

Repeating the release in an airless chamber, our testers prove that gravity will pull down both at equal speed.

My mother’s bones, hollowed by nine decades, still hoist her up to walk to dinner.

Cane first—fingers in a crooked wrap around the handle—she tests the weight of every step before it’s taken.

25

Lynn Gordon Lynn Gordon The King of the Dinosaurs Tim Meservy was eight years old when his father said he was as dumb as a ball peen hammer. Tim had knocked over a can of Shasta that his brother Joe had been drinking. A ball peen hammer. Joe said, “A claw hammer is better because you can take out nails with it. Anybody knows that.” But a hammer didn’t even think, it was just a thing. It didn’t make sense to talk about it having smartness or dumbness.

Tim reached into his pocket, felt for his steelie marble, and rolled it between his fingers three times for luck. Then he went back to his project, which was going to astound people. He was cutting up pages from magazines into little triangles, then gluing the triangles on a white sheet of paper to make a tyrannosaurus rex, the king of the dinosaurs. He had finished most of the head; now he was mincing an ad from Popular Mechanics into extra-small triangles to make the front feet. The ad showed a big life preserver with Quaker State Motor Oil in green letters. In the background, a woman in a long dress leaned against a good-looking car. Tim snipped mainly from the dark areas near the corners of the page. He used Elmer’s glue to stick his triangles on.

Sometimes, after working on the project, he liked to smear Elmer’s all over his palm and let it dry. Then, very carefully, he peeled the glue off in one piece and held up the clear membrane, a ghost copy of his own palm.

At Cooper Elementary, Mrs. Pilarski did not say Tim was smart and she did not say he was dumb. Once in a while she would smile at him in class with her squashy lips. His father had not even met Mrs. Pilarski because he did not go to parents’ night in October. On Tim’s report cards, most of his marks were Average, except he got Superior in art and Needs to Improve in social skills and sports. He was not dumb like Doug Bobrink. Doug always had scabs on his fingers. He could not add or subtract, and once when Mrs. Pilarski moved the black clock-hands and asked what time it was he said eleventeen.

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Lynn Gordon Tim was surprised, on the day after he spilled the Shasta, when Doug Bobrink came and stood in front of him at recess. “Wanna shoot? I got puries.”

He held up a sack of marbles in translucent blue, red, and gold. They were beautiful, more to be wished for than a fountain pen, an enameled St. Christopher medal, or even a packet of Jell-O powder that could be tapped into the hand and licked up.

“I only got cat’s eyes.”

“I’ll still play you. Three cat’s eyes for one purie.”

Tim looked down at the blacktop, which was marked with a big white circle for dodgeball. Then he heard a voice that did not belong to Doug: “You playing with Meservy?”

Tim raised his head. Haggerty stood behind Doug, his arms thick inside his plaid shirt sleeves. His freckles were so big that they overlapped each other and made a leopard pattern on his red face.

“He only gots cat’s eyes.”

“No he ain’t. He got a steelie he keeps in his pocket. Ain’t that right, Meservy?”

Tim didn’t speak, but his hand snaked into his pocket.

“Lookit him reaching for it! What a mentally retarded spaz!”

Doug’s mouth dropped open. “You liar.” He gave Tim a shove. “You big lyin’ liar. We’re gonna get it off you.”

After they had turned Tim upside down—after they had torn open his pocket and seized his good-luck marble, then punched him in the stomach— after those things, they dropped him head-first and let his arms and legs follow like sticks in a sack. They walked away with his steelie and let him be.

For the first moment, Tim felt like throwing up. He was lost in the impact of the punch, the harsh sound of the pocket’s stitches ripping one by one. His head hurt. He imagined that blood was dripping out and tinting the white paint of the dodgeball circle. It would leave a stain for months, maybe years, and kids would point at the spot as they walked by.

27

Lynn Gordon He sat up as soon as he could, holding his scalp with one hand. Mrs. Pilarski had not seen; she was inside the classroom as usual. Joe was down at the other end of the playground with the fifth-graders. The white dodgeball paint showed not even a spatter of red. * At home Tim moved from room to room, hunting and searching for his tyrannosaurus. His father was a few blocks away, fixing the Hootens’ front porch. Joe’s class would not let out for another forty minutes. Tim cast his eyes over the card table where the scissors still rested half-open, then checked the drawer near his bed and the pile of Popular Mechanics magazines that seemed to shore up his father’s chair. He leaned against the wall outside Joe’s room.

Would Joe have taken it? The thought crept back and forth in his brain before he swung the door open and began to look. He opened the drawers one by one and took care to leave each of them exactly as it had been before: crooked, gaping, or closed. He lifted and set down each stack of comics without disrupting its untidiness, peered beneath accretions of dirty clothes and put them back just so. He could leave no mark in Joe’s room.

Walking past the card table again, he saw something below him and stood still with his head bent at an angle. He put his hand on the seat of the chair and dropped to his knees. Again he felt like throwing up, just for a moment. The white sheet of paper had been pierced through, with little wrinkles radiating from the tear, as though something had rubbed it every which way. Now that he had a closer view, he noticed a bunch of his triangles scattered nearby. He picked them up, one at a time, and laid them on what was left of the tyrannosaurus rex.

He folded the sheet of paper into quarters, holding all the triangles inside, and stood up in stages. He reeled his way out the back, yanked the door shut, and kicked the screen behind him. In the alley, he knocked the lid off the garbage can and threw the paper inside. He found a fence stake and shoved the king of the dinosaurs through layers of drink cans, cereal boxes, and crunched-up cellophane, all the way down so that the fence stake made a clang 28

Lynn Gordon as it struck bottom. He forced the lid back on and kicked the garbage can twice, hoping to leave a dent.

He would work on another project, but he would never again make a tyrannosaurus rex. It had been a great dinosaur and now it was lost before he had even finished it. He slid down next to the can, his back against the garage.

Probably his father and Joe would never notice and he would never tell them what had happened. “Here.� Doug Bobrink stood in the alley, nearly close enough to punch Tim again. He held out a hand, and Tim could see that one of his scabs had scraped off, leaving a pink, oozy patch of skin on the thumb. Bobrink dropped something that ricocheted off the garbage can and rolled to a place in the dirt.

He left the alley at a slow run, not speeding up as if he feared that Tim might catch him, just wanting to be gone.

Tim stared at the steelie with frozen eyes. His mind had snapped down on a thought and he could not pry it loose. He looked up to see a jet airplane chalking a line in the sky above him, a line that was disappearing at one end even as it grew at the other end. He was not dumb like Bobrink. The awful part was that he would remember Bobrink much longer than Bobrink would remember him.

29

Helen Wickes Helen Wickes Proustian, in the Desert We know by now we’re meant to be astounded that Marcel has found his way, and here we are, deep at last in volume seven.

But the mourning doves here are quite strange, not like hometown doves; they’re aggressive, commandeering the mesquite tree.

Meanwhile, Marcel, he’s trapped by the butler, in the library, having arrived late, late, and he takes time in his stride, and, yep, so much of mine.

Odd, how the mockingbird chooses to hunker here all morning, and you get his lines, his revisions, his semi-apologetic changes to another key, while Marcel mines his lost moments that flared all of a sudden as he stumbled on paving stones, heard cutlery rattle, and was agitated by the feel of rough linen, all of this plummeting him into his vocation, until, concert done, our butler sets Marcel free to join the party, to be astounded at how old everyone has grown. And now, here, in Borrego Springs, evening’s come, our doves owning the west, our mockingbird the east— adapting, repeating, and bursting forth with, I’ve invented it all; I’ll dazzle you tonight.

30

m. h. burkett m.h. Burkett

Limbo

Limbo is a state of uncertainty.

Howard Ryan stared at the emergency room insurance form, at generalized questions followed by blank lines, at medical history with hollow boxes to be checked or left empty. These pages—once stately wood, now shredded and pressed—were meant to encapsulate the history of his wife and unborn child. An impotent user’s manual, an airplane’s black box, halfremembered information useful only long after the moment, and then only to bookkeepers. Nothing Howard could remember bore any impact in the operating room.

Pregnancies took precedence over all other emergencies. He had been told Psy was admitted immediately, that the ambulance had been close to the scene and quick to respond, had begun care for her en route. This information did nothing to assuage Howard’s worry. She had been unconscious from the impact. No further updates. The admit nurse was merely firm in her faith in the doctors’ skills. She had given him a clipboard with forms and a pen that had since rested, unused, in his sweating palm.

Howard rose from his chair and dropped the clipboard onto his coat, scarf, and sweater piled in a near seat. He rubbed his hands along his thighs.

He ran a hand through his hair, hand resting unnoticed on the back of his neck, pulling his head down as Howard paced the empty emergency room.

Back and forth, back and forth, from the T-intersection perpendicular to the nurse’s counter, an Authorized Admittance Only sign posted by the double doors, to the plastic shrub planted in an oversized pot by the automated doormat. Howard’s eyes traversed this fifteen feet of tile a thousand times, at least once for every small, speckled streak embedded in each square. His feet ground the halite crystals littering the entrance into a fine salt, spreading them deeper into the interior.

Howard flexed his free hand, feeling skin pull across his knuckles. Psy

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m. h. burkett tried to send him with lotion for his hands and face…but Howard always forgot it. The lotion rode shotgun, then got locked in the cab when Howard returned home.

Howard pulled the cell phone out and idly checked it. He stopped dead when he realized the last call he had received.

He’d been on the phone with Psy when she crashed.

It was wrong. It was all wrong.

Howard’s phone showed a grainy, black-and-white, computer-generated photo. It was rectangular with an obtuse, conic projection, a series of graphed numbers listed in white against black type in the upper left-hand corner. In the right-hand corner were the letters J Ryan and the date from two months earlier. Within the cone was crammed a pointillist’s depiction of a baby doll compressed into fetal position. Jellybean.

“Look, I need to go back there.”

Howard stood at the desk. The nurse shook her head.

“Can somebody give me an update?”

The nurse pursed her lips.

The seating area was carpeted. Howard saw the damp stain on the carpet, saw the receding watermarks on his boots. He saw the vinyl armrest crack at the end. He felt the earlier mold of his body, the foam never having recovered. He felt the chair’s frame through the back cushion, felt his steaming, shriveled toes within his boots.

Psy and Howard had long joked that they needed each other for time management. He was always late; she was always early. It took them both to be on time.

Psy was early. About a month early. Howard had been late. He had been working. Extra cash plowing roads all night.

The snow was thick this season. Howard hired on as an extra salt truck driver—good money, despite being intermittent and the graveyard shift. The money would help. Shouldn’t have been important. They had time.

When Psy called, she was calm. Howard hyperventilated. But he 32

m. h. burkett remained focused, kept talking to support her as he himself abandoned plowing to start back to his own truck. They discussed her progress block by block, Howard pacing her on his own internal map. He’d had a weak premonition of just this emergency and had allowed additional time every night to clear the route from their house to the hospital. He did this at the beginning of every shift, just in case. Except he’d failed the one time it counted, somehow.

Oh, he’d cleared the path, but hours before Psy needed them. Snow and sleet had turned roads treacherous.

It was only this intimate knowledge of the trip that allowed him to call 911 and give them Psy’s location. Perhaps he’d been too slow to call: the shriek, scream, crunch, the unending horn…Howard yelled forever, pleading for response. The same roads prolonged the ambulance, delayed Howard from getting to his truck, prevented Howard from rushing to the scene, persuading him instead to go directly to the hospital. Where he had not been allowed to see his wife.

Howard should have plowed the route, the route and nothing else, over and over, all night long, to the point where the heavy salt truck crushed any snowbanks and the salted tires liquefied any black ice. He had not. He had failed.

How long had he been waiting? How long had he been pacing?

Howard dropped back into the seat, grasping the paperwork for distraction, fumbling, knocking everything to the ground. He awkwardly placed the clipboard in his lap and gathered his coat. Beneath these lay his crumpled gloves, smashed into anatomically impossible positions, the thumb bent double-jointed on the left, the right truncated against flattened knuckles.

Howard reclaimed these, brushing rough crystals clotted into the fingertips’ fraying seams. The salt burned his cracked skin. Bundling gloves together, he searched for a coat pocket, lifted the flap, and shoved them deep enough to stay. His index finger rammed a small, plastic tube. Surprised, Howard squeezed his hand around the gloves to pull the object out. It was travel lotion.

Psyche Olivia Ryan. Howard didn’t recall filling out the top of the form.

33

m. h. burkett He did not recognize the handwriting, for his bold, decisive script had been replaced by quavering lines. This unsteady hand had filled in similar trivia: his wife’s birthday, Social Security, address. Under health insurance were written the words “On File,” for this was the same hospital the couple had visited for countless doctor visits, check-ups, measuring, counseling, and advisement.

Eight floors up and on the opposite side of the hospital was the maternity ward Howard and Psy had toured a month and a half ago, familiarizing themselves with the confounding twists and turns of colored arrows and carpet shades.

It was in the waiting room for the umpteenth ultrasound that Howard had first seen the baby move beneath his wife’s flesh. They had discovered the gender here. It was in the cafeteria over coffee and Jell-O that they had decided upon the name: Julieanne Beatrice Ryan.

Howard gripped the pen.

Allergies: Cortisone, strawberries.

Howard’s breath exploded. He scanned further down the page.

Emergency contacts. Primary care. Date of last vaccinations. Any history of problems with anesthesia. History of trauma or broken bones. At the bottom of the page, he found a box listed as Medical History. He gratefully put an X in the box marked “Known.”

The phone buzzed at the administration desk.

Howard watched closely as the nurse listened into the receiver.

The nurse replaced the handset into the cradle, met Howard’s eyes.

Howard made to rise.

The nurse made a staying motion.

Her eyes fell back to paperwork.

Howard shuffled the first page angrily and moved onto the second.

Reason for ER visit today. Howard wrote “Automobile accident,” then stared blankly at the large box that followed. Here was a long list of possibilities for condition at time of admittance: Communication, Medication Administration, Ambulation, Vision, Hearing…the list continued. Beneath each division ranged a number of descriptions, running from full capability to worst possible 34

m. h. burkett condition. Howard was stymied. His breath caught in his chest. He was unable to answer these questions. He knew what he should enter, what he would normally enter without second thought, what he would optimistically like to enter now. But the reality was he just didn’t know what his wife’s condition was. No one would tell him. Likewise, the list of special needs beneath this box…the possibility that any of these might now apply to Psy paralyzed him.

Beneath this was a category listed as Resuscitation Status, followed by two boxes: one with the letters DNR, the other, Full Resuscitation. Howard almost bore through the paper scratching an X through the second box. As if that would assure it. There was no alternative. His eyes welled. He continued marking X. Psy could not die.

Under Women’s Health, the first question: Currently Pregnant?

The dam strained. Ducts flowed.

Howard had no form for Jellybean.

Jellybean had already lived a thousand lives in every hope and dream her parents had planned for her. Howard and Psy had lain together on the bed, Psyche’s arms nesting her belly while Howard’s fingers traced a spiral above the unborn head…before thumping to check for ripeness. Jellybean would be a doctor, a painter, a gardener. Astronaut, teacher. Happily married, committed to some partner, surrounded by loved ones. Freckled; no, tan. No, first tanned, then later freckled. She would learn to bicycle in one try. She was a safe driver and wise investor. She would have more joy than sadness in her life. She would have several children, all even more gifted than herself, who herself surpassed her parents. One day she would have children. One day she would have her first kiss. One day Howard would walk her down the aisle and dance the dance he had taught her as a little girl. Howard’s hair…thinned and graying. Psyche’s own curls springing from behind a camera, joining the dance. Then the groom, taking hands, joining the circle. Howard and Pyche, withdrawing, enlacing fingers with the groom’s family. Circles bound and released, spiraling intricate links of history and future, communion and continuation.

Would the bunny still go around the tree and through the hole? Would 35

m. h. burkett there still be shoelaces to teach? Dances? Cocoa? Bedtime stories?

Howard envisioned new scenes.

A single pot of noodles, bite-sized vegetables haphazardly tossed into the mix. A child in a booster seat, elbows on table, waiting as Howard brings the plates. One for the girl…one for himself. Himself in a rocking chair, swaying back and forth with the girl in his lap, her knees against her sobbing chin, with her arms hugging her legs to her and his arms wrapped around her frame.

Standing behind her in a grocery aisle before a wall of feminine hygiene products. The girl opening the front door with her own key to an empty household. Howard, hunched beneath a small lamp, going down a phone list to try and track down his daughter. Written notes and reminders falling from the refrigerator when opened or shut. Meals filled with restrained laughter or no laughter at all. Smoldering, unwarranted resentments. Too much silence.

Howard envisioned a pile of toys by the curbside: a wagon, a pile of diminutive chairs atop a plastic table with bent aluminum legs. A box of carefully folded, sharply creased infant clothes left at the Salvation Army door.

Psy, bandana over hair and paint-smudged chin, hands on hips, regarding the first somber brown tones of paint and how they contrasted sharply with the three pink walls remaining. Involved dinners, painstakingly arranged, for two full-sized plates with proper dining forks, eaten over a dimly lit table. Silence fell into the hole. Howard, reposed in a leather chair and pool of light, reading late into the night, turning off the light, slowly moving to the bedroom, where the light creeping through the blinds indicated Psy’s prone form moving imperceptibly with each breath, her back to him. Howard lay on his back, staring into nothingness, when he would feel the first tremor through the mattress. He could not reach out.

There are no birth pangs like those of unwanted imagination.

The phone buzzed at the administration desk.

The nurse listened to the earpiece, nodded, replaced handset in cradle and rose. She made to leave through the door behind the desk.

“Please.” Howard rushed to the desk and thrust the clipboard into her 36

m. h. burkett hands. “Please let me through. Please let me know something…”

The nurse met Howard’s eyes, then pursed her lips and glanced at the clipboard. She turned and disappeared through the door.

Howard was unsure…had she nodded?

Howard slumped against the straining chair, exhausted, legs strewn out before him. His head lay in one hand, elbow buttressing his chin from the creaking armrest. The room surrounding him was lit by dim fluorescent, caged light bars in varying degree of brightness: some glowing solidly, others struggling to emit haphazard radiant bursts. Some had surrendered entirely.

Maintenance was poor.

The lighting left Howard half illuminated.

The admittance desk had better lighting. Beams pushed into the waiting area, combating the icy cold seeping around the black glass outer doors.

Howard avoided the light; it hurt his eyes. His eyes instead found the monitor mounted high in the corner. Its blue-screen halo glowed. Howard stared at the newscast: anchors behind desks, animated weather system screens, reporters bundled against the elements beside empty streets, random interviews of strangers obviously filmed earlier in the day. Anchor, weather, traffic, witness.

The cycle repeated with slight variation…not that Howard noticed. This held no information nor interest to him. Instead his eyes were attracted to it as the only movement in an inactive environment, a stagnant closed system. The television was complete chaos in a controlled field, fractal in promise, but energy nonetheless. Howard’s eyes unfocused on the picture, or rather focused on the pixels, accepting the randomness of dark dot against light dot, his body rocking with each wave of forgotten breath, synchronizing with the horizontal scratch of static interference that crept, rung by rung, downward across the screen.

The television gave Howard a focus, a moth meditating upon a candle flame. It gave no comfort. But neither did it offer distraction, for it was muted, and the only sound Howard heard came from the bottom of his eardrums. His breath was long and labored. The slow stride of its pace dragged his heartbeat fluttering behind it, bouncing roughly like a Just Married can tied to a bumper, 37

m. h. burkett dragging like a broken pull toy.

The silence of the moments, the pounding of his blood…these made Howard aware of a murmuring, a constant for some time, something he’d not allowed himself to hear before but, now aware, came leaping to the fore. A desperate plea from deep within, an unsung orison flung bodily out so violently it threatened to rack his frame asunder.

Howard was not religious but, at that moment, he was willing to believe in any religion ever created. Any entity above that could exert any influence on the outcome of Psy and Jellybean, he would praise forevermore, trade himself entirely so that they might live, barter whatever need be bartered to make this arrangement happen. Someone to hear. Someone to take pity. Someone to break this horrific solitude. Even in the absence of a higher power, surely the focus of his concern would transmit from this corporeal form, its healing energy launch and fly throughout the halls in search. An invisible hummingbird that flitted though passage after passage, that skirted round corners, dodged surgeons’ knives and cut through clouds of electronic beeping to land unerringly upon wife and child. This tiny grapple would provide a channel for all of Howard’s energy to flow directly into his loved ones and bolster those too weak to bolster themselves.

There was an external noise. Howard sat through several lifetimes before he could distinguish it. He stared upward for an eternity before pinpointing the disturbance.

The fluorescent tube above him was malfunctioning. It was on but randomly struggled to shine. It crawled within, buzzed angrily as though it contained a multitude of winged creatures racing from one pole to the other. It hummed, ticked even, waiting to explode at the first chance of energy shift.

What if the energy Howard was providing proved unbalanced? If both his wife and child were at the apex of life, the edge of the precipice, then the weight of his love might drop the scales back into the realm of the living. But what if the scales of one had slid too far into death? By channeling too much energy to a hopeless cause, might he lose the other by not favoring them enough? What if 38

m. h. burkett he, in essence, prayed wrong; or rather, too much for one and not enough for the other? How could one weigh accomplishment against potential? Must he choose? Could he? Howard could offer himself but not one of them. It was an impossibility for him; he could only beg the survival of both. He tried to plead them as one entity, unable to sever the cords that connected them to each other, and them to him. And should his need prove their undoing, should he have truly sent more love in one direction than the other…well, then…Howard would have failed again.

“Mr. Ryan?”

Howard uncovered red-rimmed eyes. Before him stood a doctor, starched white coat wrapped around blue scrubs, holding clipboard to chest and pen behind ear. Howard blinked and looked around the waiting room. Nothing had changed.

39

Vanya Erickson Vanya Erickson One Good Thing My father was a self-proclaimed atheist, but he had a secret place of worship beneath the trees. His temple, an old army cot dragged under a massive avocado tree he named Susan. Her branches, heavy and abundant, leaned close and enveloped him, offering protection from the world outside. His religious canon varied, but Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemmingway, and John Steinbeck come to mind. In that hushed green sanctuary with his sacramental whiskey bottle, surrounded by words of power, he found peace. Throughout my childhood, other trees received his affection as well: our orchard’s fruit trees.

They were adored and sung to, these carefully grafted peach, apricot, and Valencia orange trees. They held his fascination like no human could, and I envied them. Eventually I grew to admire Dad’s love of green things; he passed this quality on to me.

But there is one memory I have that stands in stark contrast to all the others. It was the summer of 1965, and I was flopped on the floor of our little library inhaling the decaying pages of Black Beauty, the one with the missing dust cover and stains on page seventy-four.

Dad suddenly entered the kitchen, his boots impatient. His disdain for life had been translated into a sort of boot language, and I swear they spoke to me. I could discern different heel pressures, balances, and gaits. Dad’s boots alerted me to his moods and gave me time to prepare. But right then, as they paced in the kitchen, his boots reminded me of a rodeo bull pawing in the holding pen, waiting to be released into the arena. Loud. Powerful. Wild. They instilled uncertainty and fear with just one heel-step. They commanded attention.

More noises spilled out from the kitchen while the boots rested. These sounds were friendly and inviting. Something being sliced on the cutting board; reassuring metallic clatter of measuring cups being used and then nesting; ice

40

Vanya Erickson cubes resisting release from an ancient metal tray. Should I go help? The boots said no. They cut short the pleasurable sounds in such a way that I couldn’t get up from my cushioned spot on the floor. Instead I willed myself to be invisible as his toes turned in my direction.

I am not sure what I expected, but I steeled myself for his intrusion.

Would he tell me to head out into the blistering heat of the day to sieve rocks from the orchard soil for three hours? Or command that I crawl into the sweltering attic and install itchy pink insulation between the floor joists? More likely he’d insist that I edge the lawn with the earsplitting, rock-spitting edger, the one that had terrified me since I was six years old, when he had described what would happen if I didn’t follow his orders exactly. I imagined bloody, disembodied toes as I waited for him to find me. I pretended to read.

Why had he returned so soon? My entire family sighed a collective breath every time he left for the mountains. And like freed birds when the cage door opens, we soared in his absence, laughing till we cried, harmonizing around the piano, throwing slumber parties and scrounging in the fridge for “every man for himself” meals. But none of these experiences ever let me forget Dad’s chores, his two-hour interrogation-dinner-lectures, or the embarrassment of his body stumbling out of some stranger’s car, lurching sideways through the front door late at night.

Whenever Dad returned from anywhere, it was too soon. His entrance back home was like a cloud of noxious fumes following a bomb, and I could barely breathe. All at once I wanted Mom and my sister KK to come home, as their strengths had a way of working their magic on him. Although KK and I were affected the most by his maniacal show of power, her young age and quick wit charmed him. And Mom was such an actress—she could mask her emotions, flash that Hollywood smile, and say, “Oh I’m so glad I was invited to this party!” no matter what scene she was walking into. *** The boots announced Dad’s arrival. “Fresh-squeezed orange juice?” he said, standing in the doorway, like a father who had repeated this scene a 41

Vanya Erickson thousand times before. “It’s from our Valencias.” His hazel-eyed gaze took in the pillowed scene as he bent over and his calloused hand set the glass on the floor, an inch from my own. Words gathered in my head but couldn’t find their way out.

Who was this man? I was transfixed by his every move. Was this the same father who last week had slowly taken off his belt to punish me for laughing on my way to stack two cords of wood? Or who had recently announced at the dinner table that he didn’t love me—that I was, in fact, unlovable? I ached for his tenderness, but couldn’t fathom what was happening. A fleeting thought that something was “wrong” with the juice ran through my mind. A sprinkle of chili pepper, perhaps. A little trick to catch me off guard. But I refused to believe it.

I lifted the glass and sipped, orange pulp tickling my upper lip.

“Thanks…” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t prepared for this gesture. I pretended to be so absorbed in Black Beauty that I couldn’t be expected to leave the fields of England to respond.

I didn’t have one of my chronic stomachaches, the chicken pox, or even a sore throat. He just walked into the room and gave me a gift of juice. This was more than a little unsettling. I had padded my life full of self-protective acts when dealing with Dad, and suddenly—wham! No protection needed.

He turned to leave and said, “Best crop yet. Must have been all that rain.” My heart soared at his attempt to share his thoughts about something so ordinary. And when he left, I heard his boots hit the kitchen linoleum. They sounded almost kind.

Why hadn’t I responded? I stood up, clutching the sweating juice glass, and walked down the hallway, passing the now empty kitchen. He was gone.

Peeking inside, I saw evidence of his efforts, proof that it really had happened: a crate of oranges on the counter; the clean juicer dripping on the dish rack; a mound of peels in the compost bin.

Had he recognized the importance of this event? Could he have guessed it would forever alter my life and how I would remember him? I stepped into my 42

Vanya Erickson bedroom and closed the door, savoring this one good thing

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Contributor Bios Sharon Black is the librarian at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is published in a variety of journals including The South Carolina Review, Slipstream, Mantis, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Confluence, Mudfish, Rhino, GW Review, Femspec, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She lives in Wallingford, PA escaping, with her husband, to the Adirondacks whenever possible. m. h. burkett swore one day someone would be impressed by his origami skills. His wife and two children remain unimpressed... but are occasionally entertained by what he can write. He has published in Stirring, Forge, Buffalo Art Voice, and has more pending. He is working on a first novel.

Vanya Erickson is a veteran writing and performing arts teacher, and has spent her life teaching children to stand up and be counted. she bears witness to the transformative power of words on a daily basis. She lives in Santa Cruz , California.

Lynn Gordon's fiction has appeared in Baltimore Review, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, Hobart, and other magazines. Lynn lives in Northern California.

Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently At the Narrows, winner of the 2015 Delmarva Book Prize for creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, poemmemoirstory, New Ohio Review, Mantis, and Valparaiso Poetry Review,among other journals.

Taylor Meredith is a 27-year-old freelance photographer from Florida. She's enjoying her second year in Oxford, OH where she runs around taking event photos for the local visitor's bureau. Along with photography, she enjoys horror movies and TV shows about tiny houses. You can find her on Instagram under @taytakingpics and see more of her professional work at taylormmeredith.com Dennis Must is the author of two novels: The World’s Smallest Bible and Hush Now, Don’t Explain; plus two short story collections: Oh, Don’t Ask Why and Banjo Grease. His plays have been produced off-off-Broadway and he has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals.

Saramanda Swigart has an MFA from Columbia University, with a supplementary degree in literary translation. Her short work has appeared in Superstition Review, Fogged Clarity, Caveat Lector, The Literati Quarterly, Ragazine,The Penmen Review and Thin Air. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at City College of San Francisco.

Ashley Tobin is a writer living in New Jersey. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Word Riot.

Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California. She grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. She has published four books of poetry, In Search of Landscape (2007, Sixteen Rivers Press,) Dowsers Apprentice and Moon over Zabriskie (both books in 2014 from Glass Lyre Press,) and World as You Left It (2015, Sixteen Rivers Press.)

Golden Ox Award Guidelines

Golden Ox Award for Prose and Poetry Tell your friends: All submissions to Oxford Magazine will be eligible for our Golden Ox Award for Prose and Poetry.

What is it? Well, it’s cash money, people. Who couldn’t use a little more of those sweet, sweet greenbacks? How it works: From our Winter and Spring issues, our editors select the very best published work from poetry and prose (fiction and nonfiction). These two authors will be awarded $100.00 each. In addition, the two winning pieces will be republished in our Summer issue.

The submission window is currently open for the 2016 Golden Ox Award.

Guidelines: All submissions to OxMag will be considered for the award. Please let us know in your cover letter if you would like to NOT be considered.