Permafrost Magazine Summer Issue, 36.2

PERMAFROST

vol. 36, issue 2 | summer 2014

university of alaska fairbanks

ACTUALIZATION Permafrost—the farthest north literary journal in the the United States—is published annually by the graduate students in the Department of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Subscription rates are $10 for one year, $18 for two years, and $25 for three years. Back issues can be purchased for $5 each. To order, make checks payable to Permafrost and send to: Permafrost University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of English, P.O. Box 755720 Fairbanks, AK 99775-5720 We accept unsolicited fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, drama, and art for our print issue from Sept. 1–Dec. 1, and for our electronic issue Dec. 1–April 15. Find us on the web at www.permafrostmag.com.

Permafrost would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for supporting the publication of volume 36.2.

Permafrost is funded in part through a University of Alaska Foundation People’s Endowment award. We also gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the following donors: Peggy Shumaker and Jim Perrizo.

Permafrost is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Copyright © 2014 by Permafrost. All rights reserved.

PERMAFROST editor-in-chief | Caitlin Woolley managing editor | Jaclyn Bergamino

poetry editor | Jonnell Liebl prose editors | Maeve Kirk and Craig Sanders art editor | Eric Parker web and design editors | Natalie Taylor and Maeve Kirk

editorial board | Megan Bush, Kendell Newman Sadiik, Caitlin Scarano, and Heather Warren

advisor | Daryl Farmer

CONTENTS poetry Murdered Child | Kathleen Weaver 1 Pupa | Maya White-Lurie 2 I Have Chosen a Guilt I Can Live With | Caylin Capra-Thomas 4 My Tree Line is Militant, But Deserted | Caylin Capra-Thomas

5

Aubade for Sesame Street at 3:27 a.m.

Ending with a Line from Snyder | Adam Tavel 6 A Medici Servant Recounts Leo X’s Coronation | Adam Tavel 7 Summer Storm | Donna Pucciani

19

Farewell | Donna Pucciani

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Visitation | Devon Walker-Domine

21

The Bruise | Christian Rees

22

“What Do You Often Lose?” | Ace Boggess

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In The Waiting | Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

39

Paperweights | Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

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The Shipcarver’s Art | Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

43

The Reckless Sleeper | Christopher Cokinos

44

Time Transfixed | Christopher Cokinos

45

fiction I’ll Call | Daniel Shoemaker

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Barefoot Woman Comes to Fire Town | Kenny Gordon

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Contributor Notes

46

MURDERED CHILD Kathleen Weaver How strange the lewd pose along the highway. The wind stopped and in earnest lifted and drew back from fanning her body.

Such nakedness can’t be clothed but must be taken away and clothed.

A dialectic stalled here. Can any question be posed in this wrong light?

A fault widens in our fault-filled world.

Yet how odd to have had in her pocket all her short life the very mirror that’s now raised to a human nature.

Surely a child just wants to play, to see a cloud or weathervane in a moving world whose moons faze her but don’t come too near.

Some children can’t accomplish being alive for all that long.

Clouds pass over the small body, the road darkens. There’s the lightest possible rain. She will keep her maiden name. Nor can the meadow’s night-flowering campion teach her any further thing about summer

Kathleen Weaver

|1

PUPA Maya White-Lurie Deforested land each shorn follicle screaming high-pitched, windy voices.

Fruity shaving cream slow strokes scratching, a spoon scraping inside a plastic bowl, the tipped edge stings loose a thin flap of my skin curse echoing against the shower walls, bitter on my lips, like unripe persimmons I was ten when Lindsey laughed at my hairy legs sprinting across the Elementary blacktop.

It grew early the hair the breasts I adjusted to bras to tampons to razors I practiced slipping cunt into phrases when no one was listening.

Jebediah spoke with a silver tongue: A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

Mom closed the meticulous chrysalis of womanhood around me smooth sandpaper, razor burn on my skin, she flew me away on her bespeckled wings the sun through their filmy surface, orange warmth on my face, Lindsey shrank on the newly paved blacktop.

But adult Maya Hope reads McIntosh and Anzaldúa she speaks behind microphones curses at will one day she’ll let the fine hairs grow in downy sovereignty

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Maya White-Lurie

The razor flashes its engineered teeth from its Showerpod速 tile-suctioned drifting down the drain clouds of shaving cream stubble droplets ready to fall.

Maya White-Lurie

|3

I HAVE CHOSEN A GUILT I CAN LIVE WITH Caylin Capra-Thomas There is evidence of ghosts in this house. The lights go on at odd hours. Penitent men crawl by to peer through the windows. To whistle & beg my pardon. They confess nothing. Crawl away on aching knees. * A balloon caught in branches is a halfescaped prisoner. Not a balloon, a voice said. What then?

I said. Not the point. Live in a place & it becomes a house. Die there, it ceases to exist.

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Caylin Capra-Thomas

MY TREE LINE IS MILITANT, BUT DESERTED I think sometimes about watching Full Metal Jacket from your hospital bed.

How real war felt.

Do you regret missing the fight?

I regret drinking your milkshake.

I know you offered, but still. * There is evidence of botched devotion. My other father built a tree house too close to the woods & I was afraid to go inside. The forest is a swallowing place.

Ask the fieldmice, the snakes.

Caylin Capra-Thomas

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AUBADE FOR SESAME STREET AT 3:27 A.M. ENDING WITH A LINE FROM SNYDER Adam Tavel

Winner of the 2013 1st Annual Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry Synchronized, the Muppet 1s sway peppermint canes with visible fishing line below their cardboard stage.

An off-key Frank Oz warbles how glorious it is to be a stroke, a streak, a floating bone, simply perpendicular to the earth and counted first, the carnelian match-head of infinity yet yourself divided by yourself is still yourself. The putrescence of formula puke wafts from two ruined towels heaped and sopping in the tub.

There is no other life.

originally published in Jabberwock Review, Volume 32.2, Winter 2012

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Adam Tavel

A MEDICI SERVANT RECOUNTS LEO X’S CORONATION Muted by stable doors, the fireworks thudded like a monger dropping pomegranates in a firkin.

Francisco whimpered as I scrubbed his foreskin with a mare’s brush.

I remember the gold flakes fell like flayed scales from baccalà and his wispy exhalations grew raspy when he retched, shivering, gripping the boards as he hunched inside a slushy trough.

Spattering, his inky bile across a pile of rags resembled a squid bashed repeatedly with an oar. I didn’t ask how it felt leaping from a cake naked and aurum-skinned to inaugurate His Holiness’ reign on the coldest dusk in Rome since the year’s first flurries.

Maria gossiped that she glimpsed the Duke of Ferrara kissing noble daughters at random and a troupe of shirtless Moors

Adam Tavel

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parading their scarlet banner through an alley’s crush.

We two maids were the only sober souls in Christendom on a night so gilded even a mute orphan from Mantua wore nothing but the pontiff ’s painted ore for clothes.

The jittery tolfetano neighed when the boy fainted with jonquil spit frothing in the shadow-gap of his first lost tooth. Three days his nightmare fever clung with waves of diarrhea soaking every quilt I owned. Their sour smoke from the burn pile ruined dawn.

Before the mourning cart creaked I pledged my matins scraping out the gold beneath his nails.

originally published in Bayou, Issue 58, 2012

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Adam Tavel

I’LL CALL Daniel Shoemaker

I

’m watching Jane

sled down the backyard when it sinks in, for the first time since she was born, that she is my daughter. Biologically she has half my DNA, but I never once saw myself as a father until now. I never was, really.

Her mother, June, and I sit on the back porch drinking coffee, steam from the cups and our breath swirling together. She’s just told me that Mel, her girlfriend for the past thirteen years and Jane’s second mother, left two days ago, probably for good. When she got home from work at four a.m., the bed was empty. There was a note on the pillow that read simply, “I’ll call.” Other than a few dresses, all of Mel’s clothes were gone, and it wasn’t until later that June noticed a family picture of the three of them at Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh was also missing. That was back when Mellon Arena was still standing. I vaguely remember being the one who took the picture.

“Mel’s usually the one who gets Jane ready for school in the morning since I get home so late. I had no idea what the hell was going on. When Jane saw me sitting at the edge of her bed,” June explains to me, “I nearly cried when I saw how confused she was. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to lie to your child first thing in the morning? It sucks.”

She holds the cup to her lips but doesn’t drink. Through the steam, her eyes follow her daughter down the steep slope of the yard.

“Did she call?” I ask, brushing snow off the railing beside me and packing it into snowballs.

“Seven o’clock last night. It was her mom, actually. Mel’s staying with her parents in Ann Arbor, and she doesn’t know if she’s coming back. Really, thirteen years we’ve been together and I have to hear all this from her mother.”

Jane makes her way back up the hill, exhaling into her gloved hands. The sled is a long, blue piece of plastic with a pull rope and thin foam seat. I picked it out at the toy store with June and Mel while Christmas shopping last year.

Mel had laughed and smiled and talked like she always had. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but I hadn’t been looking for anything wrong. I was looking at sleds.

“You never met her mother, did you?” June asks, her lips curling into a weak smile before flatlining. “She’s a sweet old lady. That woman spoils Jane more than we do. I wish I had a mother like that growing up.”

A strong breeze blows sharp flurries down my neck. It’s too cold for any of us to be outside, but Jane’s having fun. June wipes her eyes and takes a sip of coffee. Her face is flushed, but her cheeks always get red when it’s cold, just Daniel Shoemaker

|9

like they did back in high school when I used to watch her face redden as we walked home together hand-in-hand.

There are a few cigarettes left in my pack and I offer one to June, even though I know she quit years ago when she was pregnant. She declines, and I light one for myself.

“Does Jane know what’s going on?” I ask.

“For now, I just told her that Mel had to go see grandma and grandpa in Michigan. I didn’t tell her more because I really don’t know what’s going on myself. Her parents took her to see their family psychiatrist—that whole family’s nuts—and he diagnosed her with severe depression.”

June tips her cup back and takes a last drink of coffee before dumping the grainy bottom over the railing.

“Somehow, she had managed to hide it for years. No medication or anything. I never noticed, even up until right before she left. Guess she didn’t want to talk about it.”

She’s blaming herself. I can tell.

The wind blows my ashes across the porch. Normally, June would have yelled at me for this, but she only acknowledges the ashes as though they’re a bug skittering across the deck. Jane steps up on the porch, stomping snow off her feet before sitting down between her mother’s legs. June waves her hand in front of her face, telling me to put out the cigarette.

“What’s up, Twiggy?” I ask, crushing out the cigarette in my empty cup.

“It’s cold,” she responds, smacking snow off her boots and pants.

With her blonde hair and skin-and-bones body, my first thought for a nickname was of the ‘60s model. The reference is before both our times, but using it makes me feel older, more mature, more like what I expected of adults while growing up.

I toss one of the snowballs I made at her, and she replies with one of her own.

“You done sledding already?” I ask.

“I can’t feel my fingers and toes anymore.”

“Want me to make you some hot chocolate?” June asks.

Jane looks up with a wide, closed-mouth smile; a habit she developed after getting her front teeth pulled a few years ago.

“Let’s get you warmed up.”

We go inside the house that June, Mel, and their daughter had shared as a family ever since they became one. I’ve been here countless times for holidays, weekend babysitting, birthday parties, or just to stop and say hi. They were the kind of regular appearances a sort of father should make in his sort of daughter’s life. “Father” may not even be the right word for what I am.

Calling someone father has certain connotations and responsibilities that I’m 10 |

Daniel Shoemaker

not sure I’ve taken on. Do all parents feel inadequate, or is there a confidence that you naturally acquire as you raise a child? I know it can’t be that easy, but I also can’t shake the feeling that everyone knows what they’re doing except for me. I want to ask June what she thinks, but right now is not the time to ask her if she thinks she’s doing a good job at being a parent.

I grab the marshmallows from the pantry while June heats up the milk.

Jane scoops chocolate powder from the container into her favorite mug. We’re a well-oiled machine, the three of us. The mug has a picture of a grinning Garfield the cat holding a mug of his own plugged by an oversized marshmallow, chocolate drizzling over the top. Under the picture in black print is the sentence, “Everyone knows the marshmallow is the best part.” June sneaks a drink from the milk carton before putting it away, licking the runny white mustache off her upper lip. In the light of the kitchen, I see her eyes are red.

We move to the living room, mother and daughter huddled under a blanket while I sit in a recliner by the drafty window. Some cartoon I’ve never seen before plays on the TV, and Jane watches while blowing on her hot chocolate before each sip. June holds her daughter close, brushes her hand through her hair, chuckles with her at the cartoon. Every now and then, she sends a worried smile my way, turning her attention back to Jane before I can respond. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond, but maybe she doesn’t need me to.

Outside, the wind picks up, throwing snow against the window like sea spray breaking against a rocky coast. Winter is always the backdrop of my memories with June that my mind can’t seem to shake: watching her face turn red as we walked home from school, her chin buried deep in the collar of her jacket; taking her graduation picture as she and her at-the-time girlfriend huddled together atop of the Nittany Lion, the wind whipping their robes like flags, neither one of them knowing they’d be breaking up in a week’s time; the New Year’s morning three years later when she asked me to donate sperm for her and Mel’s baby. That one was unexpected.

I had awoken to the sound of my phone vibrating in rhythm with my fluttering eyelids. Light pouring in through the faded curtains made my head throb, reminding me of how shitty the previous night had been—parties I didn’t want to go to, people I didn’t want to see, a girlfriend I didn’t want to go home with. I rolled over and pressed my face into the pillow, hoping my phone would lose its will to go on. Fifteen rings later, it was still going strong.

It was too early in the morning for a test of wills. The phone mocked me with five more rings as I groped for it on my nightstand, and I finally found it after knocking my alarm clock off the edge. Something that might have been a “hello” slogged from my mouth.

Daniel Shoemaker

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“Want to get me pregnant?” June asked with the nonchalance of ordering a pizza or asking the time of day.

My tired mind tried to analyze the different ways I could have misheard what she just said, but even the wildest of imaginations would have a hard time misinterpreting June’s question. She didn’t say anything else, letting me take as much time as I needed to process her request. I was suddenly very conscious of my morning wood.

“You can be on top,” I finally said, rubbing my eyes until I could see patterns in the darkness. “I’m too tired.”

“You wish,” she said. “Mel and I want to have a kid, and we need some juice to make it happen. I’m going to be carrying the baby, and I don’t want some stranger’s DNA inside me. Who better than you?”

“Yeah.”

I sat up against the backboard and took a drink of warm water from the glass on my nightstand that I somehow avoided knocking over in the search for my phone. The wall clock might have read seven thirty. My vision was too blurry to tell. I turned up the volume on my phone and switched ears.

Her voice was barely audible, even through the stillness of the new year’s first winter morning.

“So, how are we supposed to do this?” I asked, still not entirely sure how serious she was.

“Artificial insemination. All you need to do is provide the sample, as the doc calls it, then Mel and I do the fun part. The doctor explained how it’s supposed to work, but I’ll spare you the details because I already forgot most of it myself. He did say that it uses a lot of the same techniques as animal husbandry. It makes sense, but it makes me feel like I’m a horse or something.”

“I always knew I was a stud.”

“You’ll do it, then?”

“Why me?”

I could hear June sighing over the muffled rustle of bed sheets. Someone else was breathing, quiet and steady as a dripping faucet. I could picture her hovering over Mel, brushing her hair aside as June matched her breath with her lover beside her. It’s the same scene the two of us shared our freshman year of college, lying in bed together in my University Park apartment as the snow closed the world down around us, back before June came out, or before she even knew she had anything to come out from.

“You know why,” she whispered.

“Want to get me pregnant?” June asked with the nonchalance of ordering a pizza or asking the time of day.

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Daniel Shoemaker

I promise June I’ll come back later tonight to watch after Jane while she’s at work. She says I can sleep on the couch, and I agree that that would be best.

Our chances of sleeping together again are long since passed, but there’s no room for anyone else on the empty half of her queen-size bed. I wonder how Mel has been sleeping.

Something I’ve never told June is just how close I had come to marrying the only girl I’ve ever been seriously involved with since she came out. I have since pushed the woman’s name to the bottom drawer of my mind, and this alone makes me realize I dodged a bullet. We met through work when I was 29 and dated for close to four years. It wasn’t until half a year into the relationship that she found out there was a child in this world with half my DNA. She knew that I babysat for June and Mel, and we had grown close enough for my friends to become her friends. The fact that Jane is my biological daughter never came up. If she was curious about how my two lesbian friends became parents, she was either too polite or not interested enough to ask. At the time, it didn’t seem worth mentioning, and I’m not even sure when or why I brought it up.

The fact that the two of us stayed together for four years convinced me I was finally over June. We could go on dates, share a dinner, sleep together, and do it all without me thinking about what it used to be like when June and I did all those things. It had been years since she came out and we broke up, but the memories of our time together were a frozen lake waiting for warmer weather to melt it away. When I felt like the last bit of ice had finally melted, I went shopping for engagement rings.

I imagined things going much differently, but my imaginary self handles situations much better than I ever could. The proposal was going to be as smooth as every guy thinks theirs is going to be. We met at my place for dinner, just the two of us. This wasn’t something I’d do in public, same as scratching myself or having a phone conversation with my doctor. Rejection frightens me, especially if other people know it’s happened.

I dropped the ring at the bottom of her favorite wine glass. I’d tell her that I bought a kind of wine we’d never tried before; ask her to get it while I clear the table; hope she didn’t pour it in without seeing the ring. She’d grab her glass, find the ring, turn around to see me on one knee, become overwhelmed with emotion. Probably not the most original proposal, but it would fulfill everyone’s expectations when we lovingly recounted the story in our later years.

Then, while we were eating, she brought up Jane.

“She’s just so adorable,” she had said. “And you’re so good with her. Weird.

You never struck me as the fatherly type.”

Daniel Shoemaker

| 13

“It’s easier now that she’s older. When she was a baby, I still enjoyed taking care of her from time to time, but I was glad I didn’t have to take her home with me.”

“Give yourself more credit. I think you’d make a good father.” She took a long sip of beer, then stared at the bottle, her hands, the table, and after taking a deep breath, at me. “Think you’d ever want one of our own one day?”

Her question made me feel the same way I used to feel in school when unexpectedly called upon in math class. I was derailed. The answer, and even the question itself, eluded me. To this day, I can’t remember what I said. Probably, “I don’t know,” or, “It’s too soon to tell,” or something equally noncommittal.

After dinner, I didn’t mention the wine, and the glass stayed in the cupboard, the ring dull and dark at the bottom. We went to the bedroom and had sex for the last time. She had a slightly dejected look to her as she walked out the door, as if she had been expecting everything that didn’t happen that night or I just wasn’t very good. I finished the full bottle of wine after she went home, even though I never did enjoy the taste. With each finished glass, I stared at the puddle of red at the bottom where the ring would have been. Two days later, I called and told her we should see other people. Neither of us took it well, but I have a feeling I got over it quicker. Immediately after I hung up with her, I called June. Not for condolences or words of comfort, but just to let her know that it happened.

“Are you handling it alright?” she had asked. “You don’t sound too broken up.”

“This was a long time coming,” I said.

I had timed the breakup to when I knew June would be home. She would have just gotten back from picking Jane up from school, bed hair tied in a knot above her head, and dreaming of having time to take a shower before leaving for work. It was only after hearing Jane in the background that I realized I was interrupting what little time they had together before June had to leave. My problem wasn’t so important anymore. I apologized and told her I’d call back later. She said it was okay, moved the phone away from her mouth to ask her daughter what she wanted to dip her chicken nuggets in, and I used the pause to suppress my breaking voice and the feeling that I was a stranger in my own life. * I flip through all 500 channels while Jane takes a bath upstairs. The TV is muted so I can hear her in case she needs me, but I know she can take care of herself. One dim lamp lights a corner near the window. The curtains are closed, and it’s quieter outside than I imagined it would be, even this late.

June’s house is in the part of town where suburbs mingle with small farmland;

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Daniel Shoemaker

the kind of place where traffic can be slowed by a tractor or backhoe with a driver who can’t seem to figure out what the rush is.

To most people who ask, June claims that they moved out here so Jane could have a big backyard. This partial truth satisfied most, but she told me that the real reason they moved, which I had already guessed on my own, was to avoid the questions of neighbors who would begin to wonder why they never saw a man at the house. That was wishful thinking. Letting Jane live as normal a life as possible meant answering questions. Issues came up at times June and Mel never anticipated. When registering Jane for school, they had to explain why there were two names on the “mother” line and none for “father.”

They learned how to ride out the short yet uncomfortable silences at open houses after answering why Jane’s father couldn’t be there. They could have lied, but what example would that have set for their daughter?

I get bored with channel surfing and settle for the local news. The five-day forecast shows a pattern of snowing clouds and regular clouds throughout the week, and a large, full sun fills the box for Saturday. Icicles snap and fall in the wind outside, and I wonder how things can change so much in such a short amount of time.

I’m getting myself a drink in the kitchen when I hear Jane calling my name from upstairs. It’s not the kind of drawn out, inquisitive call that only wants a glass of water or to know when mom will be home. The call is quick and pained, like ice cracking under heavy boots, and I’m upstairs before she has the time to call again. Light peaks out from the open bathroom door, and I can hear the hiss of water refilling the toilet tank. Jane sits on the edge of the bathtub in her pajamas, eyes red and cheeks flushed just like her mother’s. She twists handfuls of damp hair in her hands.

“I’m sick,” she says, her voice rough and gargled.

A sour smell hangs in the steamy air. I touch her cheeks and forehead with the back of my hand, the same way they teach you in fire safety classes to check if there are flames on the other side of a door. Her face is warm, but she just came out of a hot bath, so I don’t jump to conclusions. I put her into bed with a thermometer, taking a good five minutes to figure out if it’s the kind that goes in the mouth or under the armpit. The temperature reads over 100 degrees, and I feel her face again, checking for accuracy.

“Must have been all that sledding,” I say, placing the thermometer back in its box. “Is there anything I can get you? Glass of water, soup, blanket? I’m sure your mother keeps some kind of medicine around.”

I realize after saying it that “your mother” isn’t quite specific enough in this case. That particular choice of pronoun is something I try to avoid using whenever possible, especially now. As far as I know, Jane still doesn’t know why Mel has left. Regardless, I don’t want to remind her that one of Daniel Shoemaker

| 15

her mothers isn’t here. I should be angry at Mel for abandoning her daughter and partner, but I can’t help but smile as I pick up the pieces she left behind.

June, Jane, and I are a family. We have a biological link that Mel isn’t a part of, which maybe wore on her over time. If I had just been an anonymous sperm donor, Mel wouldn’t have had any competition. At some point, June had to have mentioned our past together. You don’t ask someone to masturbate into a plastic cup for you without some personal details coming to the surface.

“I want mom,” Jane says. She pushes the covers off and lays an arm over her eyes.

Which mom, I wonder. Mel would’ve been the one home around this time.

“Isn’t there anything I can do to make you feel better?”

Jane moans and rolls over, pulling the blankets back up to her neck. I can see sweat beading on her brow and rolling over her tightly shut eyes. I doubt it’s anything too serious, but I remember the helpless feeling of being a kid with a high fever.

“Your mom can’t come home now, but I can call her if you want to talk to her on the phone. There’s not much I can do other than that.”

She nods, and I search for June in my phone’s contacts, hoping I’m calling the right mother and hoping that mother will answer. For a second, I scroll down to Mel’s name and number. Would she even answer? If she didn’t want to talk to her girlfriend of 13 years, why would she talk to me? Would she talk to her daughter? I feel Jane’s forehead again while the phone’s ringing, somehow expecting to feel something different.

June picks up after two rings. Forklift backup alarms beep in the background, and she waits until the noise dies down before she starts talking.

“What’s wrong?” she says more than asks, as if she was expecting this call all night.

“Nothing I can’t handle. Jane’s sick. Got a fever of over 100. I’ll be able to take care of her just fine, but she wants to talk to her mother.”

“I see.” It’s quiet on the other line. June must have stepped into an office.

“Put her on,” she says.

“Take your time,” I tell Jane as I hand her the phone. “I’ll go make you some soup.”

“Hello?” I hear her say as I leave the room, voice thick and congested. “Oh, hi.”

I stay by the door and listen in to see if she tells June what kind of job I’ve been doing. She gives a series of one word answers. Yeah, fine, okay, no, yes.

After the fifth answer, I start to feel guilty for eavesdropping, so I make my way to the kitchen.

It’s going on ten o’clock; past bedtime for Jane and only two hours into June’s shift. I heat a bowl of soup in the microwave and listen to sleet pelting 16 |

Daniel Shoemaker

the windows. Part of June’s job involves working outside, and somehow, she never gets sick. I was always the one to go down with a fever or cold. Jane ended up with the short end of the stick as far as inheriting immune systems.

With June’s shift schedule the way it is, and with no indication of when Mel might come back, if ever, this babysitting arrangement could become long term. I’d have to convince her to invest in a fold-out couch, or maybe have Jane sleep at my place a couple days a week. My house is nice enough, but I’ve never had to entertain kids there before. The extra room down the hall was meant to be another bedroom, anyway. It would be easy to convert it from the storage shack it is now.

I’m running an entire IKEA shopping list through my head when the beeping microwave brings me back to reality. The bowl burns my fingertips as I carry it back to the bedroom, where I can hear Jane still on the phone with her mother. Her answers are more than one word now, her tone brighter, and her voice even sounds less throaty. I put the bowl down and take a seat at the edge of the bed. After a few minutes of letting it cool down, Jane starts to eat and hands me back the phone.

“Mom wants to talk to you,” she says.

I take the phone, earpiece warm from her fevered face, while Jane goes to work on her food, undeterred by the scalding bowl or her weakened condition.

“She’s looking better already,” I say to June, standing back up and watching the snow fall out the window. “Still, what do you want to do about school tomorrow?”

“I told her she can stay home. Christmas break is coming soon, anyway.

I’m sure she’s not the only kid skipping.” June is silent for a moment. It’s still quiet in the background on her end. “She thought I was Mel,” she said.

I look back at Jane contently eating in bed. Her face isn’t flushed as badly as it was before and she seems to have some life back in her eyes.

“Well, she looks glad that she talked to you, at least. She was looking a lot worse before I called.”

“I know,” June says, her voice quivering. She takes three deep breaths, and I can even hear her swallowing hard through the phone. “I know. It’s just that it’s been a few days and she misses her mother. I’m going to have to tell her what’s going on eventually, but I have no fucking idea how.”

“Let Mel tell Jane herself,” I say, my voice sounding more bitter than I intended. “She’s the one putting all of us through this.”

June sighs. “She has it just as rough. Mel needs time and we need to give it to her. But you’re right. Hearing Jane’s voice might help. We’ll see.” I hear June sniffle and exhale deeply through the line. A moment passes and she asks,

Daniel Shoemaker

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“Are you sure you can handle this? I don’t think you’ve ever been alone with Jane for this long.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far.

Besides, it’s been 10 years. I think I know our daughter enough by now.”

June is silent for a long time; long enough to make me wonder if the connection has dropped. I’m about to ask if she’s still there when I stop myself and realize what I’ve already said. The weight of one pronoun—one “our” instead of “your”—hangs in the quiet between us, heavy with all the hurt and abandonment over the last few days coming back all at once with one slip of the tongue.

“I guess so,” she finally says, clearing her throat with a quick cough that sounds like a crackle of static over the line. “Listen, I’ll be coming home early tonight to take care of Jane. I should be home around quarter after twelve or so.”

“Alright,” I say. I’m wondering if I should apologize, if that would help anything, or if I even need to. I’ll still be here when June comes back. I have time to think this through.

“Can you put Jane back on? I want to say goodnight to her.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll see you in a couple hours, okay?”

“Okay.”

A hesitation. “Goodbye.”

I hesitate. “Bye.” I hand the phone back to Jane, tell her she can hang up when she’s done. Outside, snowfall swirls around the only nearby streetlight like a cloud of moths. From the hall window, I can see the road unwinding down hilly farmland, slowly disappearing under the snow. The roads get so deep with snow out here sometimes that they’re only safe to drive on if you know each twist and turn by heart. I’ll wait at this window until I see June’s headlights cresting over the hill, and when she gets home, I’ll see if she lets me stay until the roads become more navigable, or if she’d rather have the time alone with her daughter and send me to find the way on my own.

The weight of one pronoun—one “our” instead of your—hangs in the quiet between us. . .

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Daniel Shoemaker

SUMMER STORM Donna Pucciani Together we watch the storm roll in from the northeast, bending the trees earthward, hydrangeas whipping the heads of daisies into the garden’s hard thirst.

We need the rain, we murmur as we sip coffee at the kitchen table, penciling the daily crossword, gathering quiet from the ceiling light as the clouds grow dark and hail puckers the dahlias in a shower of stones.

When the sky brightens, a certain grace pervades the silent dripping of leaves, wrapping the lawns in ribbons.

Donna Pucciani

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FAREWELL After the funeral-laughter, tea in china cups steaming the windows.

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Donna Pucciani

VISITATION Devon Walker-Domine After hitchhiking many miles to my father’s house, I asked for a glass of water. He told me it was safe here. I have killed all the pests, all of the rats, and the flickers, and those iridescent beetles that used to move through the sky like a glittering rain cloud, he said. He handed me a glass of his perfect well water and informed me I would never find the like in the city. I nodded. The water was warm and smelled like soil. It tasted like nothing at all. I asked my father how he was making do and when he pretended not to hear me, I asked him if he had a cube of ice. Help yourself, he said. Feeling grown up, I opened the freezer and reached inside. But there was no ice. Only an ancient piece of wedding cake and my first pet cat sealed in a plastic bag. I opened the bag and ran my fingers through the rigid hair. Each notch in the spine felt like an angry knuckle. I could stay awhile, if you’d like, I said. But he was looking out the window at his freshly mowed fields, taking account of his labors. They were blank and golden and brimming with unwanted lives.

Devon Walker-Domine

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THE BRUISE Christian Rees of deer blinds of ragweed spore, thistle, burr latched to flank, of red on blackbird’s wings, every hawk’s faithful shadow, of car light and its deeper bruising and the passing bruises of a power line’s electric cicada hum of deer fences of the muddy footprint of air of fouled rain water of dead heat, of the world choosing not to rise at dawn, of stained glass bluebirds of cardinals, the red lips of pin-up girls, of the incapability of understanding deer, their raw, dumb animal figures, eyes wisps in the dark of the road of ears that hear the other music, the music of bones, of predation, of dew like a plague, of flattening tall grass circling a wide mile of steps that cut and bruise dividing what’s yours

and what’s theirs.

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Christian Rees

“WHAT DO YOU OFTEN LOSE?”

—Facebook post

Ace Boggess So many I forget their names, the ones I’ve sought & missed, those overlooked: gobs streaking, spit across the sky, blurring into absence of memory.

How many have I chased through clouds like granite gates that never parted?

Through rain & glare of orange city glow?

One almost led to my arrest for trespassing in a graveyard in Ashland, Kentucky, where darkness settled like a lover over cool but dirty sheets.

Two at once I missed for months, alone out smoking on a West Virginia hill, cigarette’s blade cutting its own gashes, scent muted by pollen everywhere. & everywhere was what I was after— straining eyes, retraining them.

Even as a child I lost Halley’s ghost horse that beat me by a nose.

Why do my arrows slip their mark?

Why does the alien taunt me so from behind a blind edge on higher ground? That awe escapes me, & the joy of witness.

I stand alone in a universe of dust.

Ace Boggess

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BAREFOOT WOMAN COMES TO FIRE TOWN Kenny Gordon Introduction: A Town Surrounded by Fire been surrounded by fire for so long that no one remembers any Tten,otherforgettable way for a town to be. Aside from that, it is only one of a thousand forgottowns, shabby and weathered, tucked in a crevice of the mounhe town has

tains. It does perfectly well without visitors, keeping to its own tasks, attending calmly to its own affairs.

The men of the town amble. They are angular. The women put up peaches and sweep the porches. There was a child, but he is grown. The people are waiting for the apple harvest. They go about with shovels and pails to extinguish any embers that blow to close.

Anyone who leaves, by any direction, will eventually come to the fire—at the edge of the fields, or a mile away, or ten miles. Perhaps smoldering grass, perhaps trees in flames to their tops. In all cases, impassable. The fire always finds a way to turn against the traveler. Those who cross into it are never recovered.

Each season the men go out in a different direction to drive the fire away from the edges of the town. It is late summer, and they have just returned from the west, smelling of musk and smoke, with soot in their pores. They are preparing to go north, but will wait for the apples.

Part One: Perhaps a Woman It happened that a woman walked along a road, following two dirt furrows that wound through a high, mountainous country far from where she started. Perhaps she was barefoot. Perhaps she carried a bundle. The road crossed through a valley peopled with sagebrush and jackrabbits, by piles of stones and the gray smell of smoke. Sometimes distant, sometimes near, but always present in the back of her throat and pricking the corners of her eyes. Threads of smoke wove through the air behind the hills. A haze of smoke obscured the distance.

The road rounded a bend and the woman passed between two smoldering banks, the fire low and sleepy, barely nudging through the grass. She may have noticed the fire, may have nodded to it in passing. As she passed, it flared up, rattling in the brush. It may have loped alongside her for a short while, friendly and playful, but when she moved beyond it, the fire closed behind her like the walls of the sea. If she had looked back, she would have seen it 24 |

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stretched out to the edges of the valley, as high as the distant treetops, the only thing to see for miles in any direction. *** Two roads are strung across the valley, and in the middle, where the town is perched, they cross through a wide dusty space. A general store, a vacant church, a livery barn. A hotel with a dining room and a bar just off the small, tattered lobby, and six rooms and a bath upstairs. Clapboard houses scattered in small, whitewashed handfuls, with fruit trees and vegetable patches, all surrounded by fields of potatoes and pumpkins and corn.

Out in the valley they are two roads that cross, but from within the town they are four, each leading away from the center, from the broad dirt and gravel expanse of the square, two dirt tracks for wagon wheels, or two columns of men with pails and shovels, or one man alone, apace with a laden mule. The cattle go out in the spring along the roads, and return following paths of their own, down from the hills with a wave of brown leaves that washes over the town like a dry flood. (The fire ignores the roads, only sometimes pausing momentarily, as if perplexed, before stepping carefully across the tracks.) *** Men and women in the fields barely noticed her, hardly looking up from hoeing potatoes or checking pumpkins. Only after she had passed did they pause and ask one another whether anyone had been on the road. John Harper, checking the corn for earworms, glanced up briefly and almost noticed how little dust she raised, how quietly she stepped. But he turned back to carefully replace the papery husks, and forgot the sight like one forgets the flight of a bird.

At the outskirts of the town, people noticed her but then decided not to notice her. Was she someone they should know? Or someone it would be better they not know? To avoid the question they lowered their eyes and tended to the weeds in their sprawling yards.

In the wide square, though, blasted with noon, the people knew her to be someone new, a small but unmistakable ripple in the surface of the town.

They watched her cross the square and asked each other questions with their eyes. Lucy Harper, in the stifling shade of her porch, regarding her apple tree, saw the woman pass behind it, caught glimpses of her between the branches and the green fruit just beginning to blush. ***

The town has been surrounded by fire for so long that no one remembers any other way for a town to be.

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The woman went into the hotel and crossed the lobby. The hotel keeper looked up to see her against the bright windows.

“Molly?”

“I’m not Molly,” simply, almost blankly. Placidly, fluidly, without any weight at all. “I’m not Molly.”

“Why not?”

She gazed steadily until he cleared his throat. He led her up the stairs and guided her to a room with a window facing the street.

“This is one of the nicer rooms. We don’t get a lot of folks here. Men on the outs at home. Or, young folks used to stay before they married. Not so much anymore, though. The children all grown, you know.” He pulled up the blind. “Yep, it’s pretty quiet, so I can run the hotel and the general store. Tend the bar in the evenings. The post boxes are in the lobby, so in a way that makes me the postmaster, too. I suppose if we was ever to need a marshal or a judge I’d be the only one with time on his hands to do the job. God forbid we ever need a mayor.” He laughed feebly at his old joke. “The kitchen opens at four for dinner.” He closed the door silently, then stood in the hall for a moment, facing the dark door. He placed his palm against it as if feeling for a heartbeat. *** Inside the room, she stood for the space of a breath. If she had a bundle she placed it on the narrow bed. She crossed the room and gazed out the window at the town, over the roofs of little houses to fields of corn and potatoes, past the fields to the shifting, ragged wall of smoke that obscured the hills at that hour, and past that to the sun swinging low in the copper sky. *** That first afternoon, when the hotel keeper stumped into the kitchen, intending to stoke the fire and start the bread, he found the woman, perhaps barefoot, already at the stove pouring coffee. She brought two tin cups to the kitchen table and sat. She gestured toward the other chair, the other cup.

“Please.”

The hotel keeper sat and picked up the cup.

“I came to start the bread,” he said. He held his cup uncertainly.

“I made coffee.”

There was darkness in the cup. There was a kind of light in the room, a kind of unusual light, he thought, reflected somehow on the quivering surface of the darkness.

“It’s coffee,” she said.

He sipped at the cup and found it exactly dark and warm.

“Well. Well, so it is.”

He sipped again, and she picked up her own cup. *** 26 |

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She took to walking about the town. Sometimes she seemed to speak with the people she met, but those with whom she spoke could not later recall what she had said, having only a sense of her musical, somewhat fragile voice.

There were also many with whom she had not spoken, and among those people, opinions about her varied. She would pass silently, and smile, awkwardly or placidly, and those she passed thought her foreign, perhaps, or simple minded. She would wander through the narrow lanes, brushing her fingers along the pickets, absorbed in the texture of the wooden slats, and those who watched her thought her touched, or terribly sad. After a short time, certain women came to feel that a place must be found for her, that the hotel presented too much uncertainty.

“We don’t know what she has come for. She has not spoken.”

“But what will she do? The peaches are put up and the apples are not yet ready to pick.”

“We don’t know. She has not spoken.”

“But what will she do?”

(Lucy Harper, regarding her own apple tree, considered the woman and knew, as all the women knew, exactly what would bring a woman through fire to such a town, but there was nothing to be done.) *** She didn’t complain, or seem uncomfortable, but the hotel keeper was unnerved to have her step so silently through the lobby and along the wooden walks. So he asked the ladies of the town if they might have a pair to spare.

“No, her feet are too long and narrow.”

“No, her feet are surely too wide.”

“Her feet and mine are not the same size.”

“They are sure to be too small.”

“Too large.”

“The heel is unsuitable.”

“The toes too pointed.”

“Too high.”

“Too thin at the sole.”

“Nothing sturdy enough.”

“Nothing so dainty as she would care for.”

In the end, he worked up a phrase to say to her, at the right time, to his great regret—No, dear woman, there are no shoes in this whole town to fit you—but the proper occasion never presented itself, and eventually the project was forgotten. *** One evening, John Harper walked back through the pumpkin field, wondering if it should be planted in pumpkins again in the spring, or be allowed to Kenny Gordon

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burn and then planted in corn. He decided on corn, and started planning the right time to propose it to the townsmen, working on the phrasing for such a proposal. He noticed the woman walking along the edge of the field, away from the town, unaware of him. He slowed, watched the bright furl of her skirt as she climbed the little rise at the edge of the field. He stood down among the vines, and she stopped when she reached the top. She gazed at the sunset through the distant smoke. For John Harper, she glowed in that red light, shining through her and around her, flickering in the breeze on the hilltop. When the sunlight suddenly ceased, and she winked out into the soft gray sky, he turned and walked the rest of the way into town, trying to pick up the thread of his lost thought.

Interlude: Old Man in a Half Burned House Outside the main part of town, surrounded by potato fields, an old man lives alone in a half burned house. Seen by one coming from town, as the woman who stayed at the hotel sometimes came, the house looks whole and well kept.

But the back half of the house is burned away, and the man is left with only a parlor, an attic loft with a pallet bed, and half a kitchen open to the weather.

Each month a tongue of fire reaches down from the hills to lick at the charred beams and the broken ends of the floorboards of the back bedroom. He watches the moon and beats the flames back with a broom.

“Aagh! Back, you son of a bitch! Get back!”

The fire scampers away like a laughing dog.

“And stay away from my tomaters, you bastard!”

One day the woman came and made coffee on the little parlor stove. They sat in the remains of the kitchen, looking out over the valley that rose to foothills that rose in turn to crumpled mountains in the distance. The sky was clear chalky blue with an occasional breeze and acrid hints of smoke. He sniffed the air and squinted into the distance.

“Grass and sage. She’s in the flats, about ten mile, or thereabouts. Time to move the cows soon.”

She rose and stepped to the burned edge of the floor with her hands folded around her cup, standing as one stands on the end of a pier.

“The light here is so strange.”

Part Two: A Day of Ash There was a day of ash, with a white sky, then rain, then intolerable blue noon.

The day bloomed strange, the morning already stiff with late summer heat, the sun blind behind a white sky. Flakes of ash drifted down like dry snow.

The people of the town looked up and watched the swirling drifts wrinkle in

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the sky. They tried to see the mountains through the haze and brushed the ashes from their eyebrows.

In the houses, women closed the windows against the ash, then opened them against the heat, then closed them again to watch the ash cloud them up and seal the house in dimness. The ash was everywhere, and in everything, drifting in the streets and the narrow lanes, dusting the leaves of the trees and the vegetables, the shingles, and in the cracks of the floorboards, a film on the dishes and the tables, dry in the hair, gritty in the teeth, alkaline on the skin, in the nose, in the corners of the eyes, the back of the tongue.

They watched until there was no difference between the sky, the earth, the air, until they themselves floated like ash in a cloud of ash, clothed in ash, waiting in the doorways of ash houses, staring at ashy infinity with wordless, ghostless eyes.

And then, in the midmorning, a breeze strengthened and cooled, and found direction through the valley. A new, cold wind tore through the town, pushing the ash back into the mountains, pulling low black clouds across the sky. The people watched the ash wiped from the town. They opened their windows and doors to let the wind scour the ash from the houses. They gathered in the street to be blown clean, and to remark, how strange, how wild the wind, how dark the sky. The clouds bulged with thunder, and rain closed over the town like a curtain. The people turned up their faces and laughed, accepting the rain as their birthright, soaked to the skin and shivering until the wind pushed out the clouds, leaving the sun behind as hard as a bullet, high in the middle of an impossible, intolerable blue sky. *** After the rain, and after the brilliant noon, there was no smoke anywhere.

People wondered aloud if perhaps the fire. . .

The sun quickly hardened the muddy dust of the square, but the air stayed crisp and fresh into the afternoon. People delayed getting back to their usual tasks, found reasons to linger in the street and discuss whether or not, perhaps . . .

But by midafternoon, the familiar haze could be seen rising behind the mountains to the north, and the tang of smoke stuck in their nostrils. It was sharp, at first, and uncomfortable, but soon enough it passed unnoticed, like the smell of home. So they turned back to their work, their neglected chores, and by evening, when the sun was once again red, the strangeness of the day had dissolved, and only the hotel keeper thought to make a note in the day’s ledger: “A day of ash, with a white sky.” ***

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For John Harper, the day began before dawn, with the summer heat already pushing the nighttime chill from the air, and the fire gone out in the kitchen stove.

“Lucy?” He opened the iron door and knelt, fingering the ashes. “Did you not bank the fire last night?” He shook the woodbox and looked in his pockets. She came in from the bedroom unwinding her hair to find him laboring with flint and steel.

“What’s wrong?”

He sat back on his heels, absently flicking the ash between his fingers.

“No breakfast this morning without a fire.”

“And no matches?”

He shook his head. She took a bowl from a shelf and began measuring flour. He struck the flint several times, then struck his knuckles and cursed.

“Oh, don’t be an idiot, John. Just go out to the edge of town and get some fire there.” *** John Harper found the fire about a half mile past George Clawson’s half burned house, closer than he’d expected, nestled in a little draw like a pool of water, just smoldering, waiting for the turn of the moon to snake down the ravine and harass the place. He stepped to the edge, dragged his pail to scoop up some embers, threw some sand on top to bank them, singed a knuckle and kicked sand at the pool of fire.

“Son of a bitch.”

The fire flared up where the sand hit it, a sudden plume of light and heat in the bright dawn air. He stepped back, watched the flames die down, kept one eye on the fire as he turned and climbed back up to the lane. He headed back, carrying the smoking pail out away from his leg, switching it from hand to hand as his arms tired. Passing the half-burned house, he saw a portly, grizzled man standing on the porch in long underwear, gazing out across the valley. He stopped and set down the pail.

“Morning, Clawson.”

“She’s a strange one out there.”

It was past dawn, but there was no sun. The sky was white. Fine flakes of ash began to drift past. George Clawson turned to John Harper for the first time and gestured with his broom.

“I thought that was a water pail.”

“Fire’s out in the kitchen.”

“Ain’t there no fire in town?”

“It was made pretty clear to me that what was required was fresh fire.”

“Well. Ain’t no fresher fire than mine. That’s a fact.”

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John Harper picked up the smoking pail, nodded, and continued down the lane toward town, occasionally shifting the pail from one hand to another while Clawson’s place disappeared in the thickening flurry of ash. *** That same strange morning the woman was on the back porch of the hotel, sweeping away the ash as it fell, back and forth across the boards with relaxed, rhythmic strokes. The ash made a pale glaze on the worn wood, and she cleared a path for herself, from one end of the porch to the other and back again. She looked up at a shadow and saw him coalesce out of the fog of ash, carrying his smoking pail along the lane. She stopped sweeping and waited until he saw her.

“Hello, John Harper.”

“Molly?”

She shook her head, smiling, with the same direct, placid, deep, amused gaze she always wore. He set down the pail heavily.

“Fire’s gone out in the kitchen.” Not meeting her eyes, clenching and unclenching his fingers slowly.

“Come in for some coffee.”

He looked at the ash, bewildered.

“Into the clean air for a moment.”

The breeze picked up, stirring the ash, cooling the air. She turned, went into the kitchen and he followed her, leaving the pail on the packed earth at the foot of the steps. *** From her own porch as she swept, Lucy Harper could see across the town to the lane John had taken. It wound behind the hotel and up the far side of the valley, past the half burned house, up to the tongue of fire that waited to slither down toward town. The ash thickened the air and soon she couldn’t see past the pickets of her own yard. She retreated inside to open and close the windows. She had seen nothing but shadows moving on the lanes and through the streets. Some of the shadows passed the hotel, and some stopped when they reached it.

“He must hurry.” She continued opening and closing windows. “He mustn’t get caught by the rain. He mustn’t be detained at the hotel.” *** A flurry of ash followed them into the hotel kitchen and settled slowly down as she closed the door.

“You look like a ghost.” She brushed ashes roughly from his sleeves and shoulders, then crossed to the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. “Were you walking far?”

He sat at the table.

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“We needed fire.”

She put two tin cups on the table.

“You could have come here. There’s always fire here.”

The sky began to darken. As she stood briefly beside him he was aware, just for a moment, of a cool, living scent, wet grass and tiny wildflowers, clean and smokeless. The room dimmed like a half closed eye.

“The light here is so strange.” She looked out the window, touched the glass with her fingertips. “Don’t you wonder about the light in other places?

What the colors of things are like under different light?”

“I guess I can see well enough already right here.” He took off his hat, and a shower of ash made a film on the table. He looked at the tiny flakes of ash on the untouched surface of the coffee, shimmering like strange stars in a strange sky.

She didn’t speak, but turned her face exactly toward his, with a blank expression that could have meant anything at all. *** After she closed the windows the second time, Lucy Harper stepped back into the parlor and waited until she smelled the change in the air. The new wind began to blow tiny drifts of ash under the door. The little faceted panes of the window in the door were blown clean, and she peered out to see no one coming up the lane to the house, no one leaving the square toward her, no one scattering in advance of the black sheet of rain bearing down on the town. The rain washed over the house in a rush, tamping the ash down into the soil, flushing the ash from the crevices in the shingles, and then there was John, hunched against the weather, carrying his smoking pail of fire, his black hair, and soot in his pores. She turned through the kitchen and stepped down into the cellar, sitting on the bottom step with her arms around her knees. Rows of peaches in glass jars lined the shelves and caught the light from the open door. She pulled her knees tight against her body, curled around the secret pressure in the center. Her heart raced and she smiled fiercely, her eyes closed, pressed against her knees, basking in the glinting light of peaches that glowed like the sun. *** That the town should lay in the path of such a thing, that such a rain should come, and such a noon, what were people to think? ***

“Don’t you wonder about the light in other places? What the colors of things are like under different light?”

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Much later, the hotel keeper looked through the empty kitchen and found the woman sitting on the steps of the back porch, gazing calmly at the distant plumes of smoke in the evening, rising through the sunset, copper and scarlet and white beams of sunlight, like giant hands covering the face of the sky.

“Can I get you something?”

She didn’t speak, didn’t move, barely breathed.

“Some coffee?” He waited, rested his fingertips on her shoulder. She covered his fingertips with hers.

“Don’t you wonder about the light in other places?”

In the kitchen he took two unfinished, unstarted cups from the table, poured them in the waste bucket, wiped them out and set them back on the shelf. There was no bread in the oven, no stew, and no one in the dining room to serve. He took half the heel of yesterday’s loaf for his supper and quietly crossed the lobby to his own room behind the counter.

Interlude: The Man Under Stones They found him by the circling birds, the burned man, in the pastures to the south, among the sagebrush where the fire was not due until spring. There were no footprints in the loose soil, and nothing around was burned.

“Who is he?”

“Why is he burned here so far from the fire?”

They turned him over carefully, the grass beneath him still green, even slightly moist.

“What brought him here?”

“Was he leaving town or coming in?”

He lay as he had fallen, twisted and charred, still smoking faintly. He was unknown to them, a stranger, or else he was known to them but had gone too far into the fire and so was beyond their reach. With no name for him, they buried him where he lay, gathering stones and heaping them until they stood waist high, as was the custom at that time. Someone said a few words.

In the summer, jackrabbits dig their burrows under the heaps of stone that surround the town, and on moonlit nights coyotes choose one or another heap to circle. The people of the town consider it a complicated omen to have a coyote howl from a loved one’s cairn.

Part Three: The Apple Harvest In the days leading up to the apple harvest, a growing nervous excitement pervades the town. The day itself is something like a festival, with each household bringing its best apples to the center of the town, comparing crops, trading Jonathans for Macintoshes, sweet yellow apples for tart green ones. The men chat and smoke, and gather later at the hotel bar to drink and brag, while the Kenny Gordon

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women linger outside. The conversation ranges widely, but always eventually turns to the inevitable march north for the men to beat the fire away from the fields and back into the foothills so the cattle can come down from the mountains before the first hard frost. The men stand at the bar, drinking whiskey or black ale, and arrange to repair their tools and patch their rusted tin pails.

The women trade ideas of what food to pack for the men, and what to prepare when they return, the soot and sour musk of them, the blunt pressure and hot living weight of them, and red streaks of sunset in the smoky sky. So in the days before the harvest, smiles are strained with anticipation and apprehension. *** One evening Lucy Harper placed bread and bowls of stewed beef and seated herself carefully facing John across the table. She watched him eating, studiously, silently.

“John. This woman, the woman at the hotel. Do you think she will come and help us with the apples?”

John Harper swallowed, paused, took another spoonful without looking up.

“Why would she do that?”

Lucy clenched her hands together in her lap, beneath the table.

“Because I wish it.”

John chewed, swallowed.

“Then she will come.”

He took another bite, without looking up, and reached for the bread. She smiled quietly, pressed her hands briefly on the tabletop, took up her spoon.

“Good. Thank you.” *** The woman watched the town preparing for the harvest from the back porch of the hotel kitchen, from the window of the dining room, from the dark hollow little lobby. The faceted glass of the front door fragmented and repeated the goings-on. Disembodied torsos and feet crossed the square, people flickered from one place to another in an instant, the same faces would pass twice or three or four times within seconds. It left her bewildered.

The few that still came to dine at the hotel were quiet, barely speaking above a whisper, and she could hardly recognize them as parts of the bright whirling busyness outside. They only seemed real when she watched them in the big mirror behind the bar. Then they moved silently, like creatures under water, and she felt something like kinship. *** One afternoon, Lucy Harper stepped through the lobby and found the woman in the kitchen.

“Hello.”

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“I’m Lucy Harper.”

“Yes.” “I wonder if you wouldn’t join us this Saturday. For the apples.”

“Yes, please.”

“I don’t know whether my husband has mentioned it.”

“He has not.”

“I thought not. Still, you will come.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“Good.”

Lucy turned back toward the lobby.

“Would you like some coffee? Before you return?”

A pause.

“Thank you. But no. I’ve a kettle on my own stove.”

“Yes, of course.”

The autumn sun pressed at an awkward angle into the packed earth of the square as Lucy Harper hurried back to the cool of her parlor. *** The night before the harvest, however, many townspeople came to the hotel for dinner, perhaps too busy with preparations for the next day, or perhaps simply because it was the last Friday before the real work of the season set in. All the day’s bread was soon gone, and the woman dashed between the dining room to serve bowls of stew and the kitchen to pull batches of baking powder biscuits from the oven. She didn’t speak to be heard above the clamor of chatting neighbors, but she seemed to smile, was perhaps slightly flushed, and sometimes pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead with the back of her wrist. The women remained at the tables over coffee while the men gathered at the bar, leaning across to draw themselves mugs of black ale, until someone called for whiskey and John Harper went behind the bar to find the bottles and the cork puller. *** That Saturday, the apples hung blunt and heavy among the leaves. Their blush timed with the first frost. John Harper, coming to fetch the woman from the hotel, met her in the square.

“Mrs. Harper has asked you to come.”

“Yes.” “Our house is this way, then,” turning back, heading up the narrow lane.

They walked silently, between houses and yards and vegetable patches tattered by the late summer harvests. Up a gentle rise, she first saw the apple tree, bulging with fruit, then the trim little house, whitewashed clapboard, with Lucy at the center, waiting on the wide porch. She waved when she saw them.

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“Hello,” stepping down from the porch. “Thank you for coming. You can see there’s more here than I can manage on my own. John, you ridiculous man, don’t just stand there. Go and get the ladders.” *** Two ladders at the tree, and two empty bushels on the porch. John Harper and the woman climbed up into the tiny cultivated wilderness of branches while Lucy plucked from the lowest boughs.

“I’m so glad you would come. I can’t abide the climbing. Don’t hurt your feet on the ladder. John, why are the rungs so rough?”

John clambered down to empty his pail into one of the bushels.

“No, John, the other one. Put all that are sound in that one and any with worms or spots go in the other. For the horses.”

The woman among the branches spied an apple, but when she reached for it her hand couldn’t find it among the shifting leaves. *** The Harper’s apples were a deep burning garnet, and Lucy wandered among the low branches and rummaged through the bushel as it filled.

“All the nicest go in my pail.” She took one from John. “It’s lovely, isn’t it? To show the neighbors and to trade for some of the Winslow sisters’ gravensteins.”

The sun angled toward an awkward noon, the sound of voices began to rise from the middle of town.

“Hurry down. We should go to the square with the others.”

Townspeople began to pass the house, carrying baskets and pails. The woman stepped off the ladder and looked up into the branches, slightly puzzled, slightly pained.

“John, that bushel for the horses, help her to carry it down to the livery barn.”

John Harper and the woman each took a handle of the basket and carried it down the lane toward the square, with Lucy following serenely and gracefully, carrying her apples like a bouquet, her skirt barely stirring the dust.

They stopped in the middle of the square, surrounded by the loose crowd of chattering townspeople. The woman furrowed her brow, looking at the ground, clinging to the handle of the bushel. Perhaps she was trying to remember something.

“The barn’s this way.”

“Yes.” But she did not move. Perhaps the crowd began to spin around her, or perhaps it was the sun. There was a shout from behind the hotel. They looked up the lane and saw George Clawson shuffle into town with an old man’s portly trot, holding his hat down with one hand and clutching his singed broom 36 |

Kenny Gordon

with the other. He stopped in the middle and stood, addressing the crowd, pausing between every few breaths to let out a few words.

“She got the house.

“Son of a bitch.

“The whole goddamn house.” *** The first jackrabbit came skittering from between the houses and loped across the square like a spastic colt, skirting the growing crowd and disappearing up Clawson’s lane. Another came from the other side, then two, three from another. Another came back down Clawson’s lane, or perhaps the same one, and the people became aware of a long, fluttering rumble.

The town imploded with rabbits. They sprang bursting from between the houses and streamed down the lanes. Waves of rabbits rushed up each road and converged in the center of the square. The crowd was engulfed in a flood of lanky, furred panic, springing long limbed and wild eyed over every obstacle. The women snatched their skirts away, the men waded knee deep through the scattered animals, the tethered dogs barked with distraction at the wild madness in the street. *** “Look at the smoke,” someone cried. *** The smoke was all around, closer than ever before, obscuring the fields and the vegetable patches, bulging along the ground like a tide, flushing out rabbits, still more rabbits rushing into the maelstrom at the center of town.

Behind the smoke, the fire rose like a wall, moving into the town in a descending spiral, circling the town, tearing through it like frantic horses, constricting around the center, exploding the houses, tearing up the gardens, blasting the fruit trees and the lilac.

The townspeople backed against one another in the middle of the square, without shovels, their pails full of apples. The fire loomed closer and higher, dissolving the town and throwing the scraps up into the sky in a plume of ash and sparks. John Harper let go of his side of the bushel. It toppled sideways and scattered the apples in the dust. He took Lucy’s arm and guided her toward the hotel.

Barefoot Woman knelt to gather the apples back into the basket. The rushing crowd and the panicked rabbits scattered them and she had to dodge through their feet to grab the rolling fruit. The other townspeople dropped their apples as well, all colors, and she couldn’t tell in the rising dust and trampling feet which apples were hers. When she had the bushel half filled,

“Look at the smoke,” someone cried.

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someone tripped over it and scattered them again. She cried out in frustration and anguish, stood up and pushed the hair out of her eyes, tears tracking through the dust on her cheeks. She watched John guide Lucy into the hotel just as flames surrounded it. The people rushed without direction, almost without moving, surrounded by spiraling walls of flame closing like a fist.

She dropped the basket, covered her hair with her hands, and rushed into the fire, running blindly, holding her breath, feeling its hot fingers at her face, her feet alternately singed and icy, feeling their way along the road through the town until it burst, she burst, her lungs, her heart, her brain, the town, the sky.

Behind her, the fire spun and grew taller, gathered itself into its own center, narrowed until it was a tower of flame reaching straight up into the air forever, until it was the same thing as the noon sun, a constant hammer straight down at the crossroad. She fell headlong and the wind blew away the ashes of her clothes, leaving her naked and ice cold, burying her face, sobbing for breath, clutching at the soft grass and the tiny purple flowers.

Coda: The Voice This story should be told in the voice of an old, old woman. Perhaps it is Barefoot Woman herself, years and years after, or perhaps it is someone who knew her, or heard the story as a little girl.

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Kenny Gordon

IN THE WAITING Natalie Bryant Rizzieri The babe’s bruised arms, pale daffodil petals on white sheets. I do not want to let him sleep on sheets crisped with pain so I carry him into creases of horizon while children’s panic ricochets like stones off every clean white right angle.

At home the clothes are piled high like the last of melting snow layered with grime and stench and city—since he had the first seizure, there have been two electrical storms. It is finally night; we are alone trembling for doctor’s words to tear the veil.

This test is the weight of the dark Spring sky. Across the East River, water pools like blood on the bathroom floor where my firstborn secretly pours it out of the bath while my husband is not looking. I breathe into his hair, twist curls around fate reckoned with since he was born. Forgive me— I thought we were here: It wasn’t long ago when another boy I loved wrestled with tubes and veins

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and breath and lost. The hospital has the same antiseptic smell sharp as bee stings. In the last few hours the mold in the window frames at home has become a pressing matter. Pacing, I carry the worry of every mother— those (my sister) who were pinned (forever) into hospital corners where children bleat under long rungs of florescent lights.

The babe wakes from needled dreams when the doctor comes in to say go home to your overturned life. To dishes fragmented across wooden floors.

Drive carefully over the caressing bridge.

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Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

PAPERWEIGHTS

—for Liam Gray

i.

The pale sky is washed clean of snow and tangle.

My cold hands can’t untie the chest knot.

A shadowed creature rages.

The sun should not have risen.

Not today—nor ever simply after the death of a child. ii.

Again I dreamt my son drowned at a pond’s algal edge.

I could see his eyes, color of sludge, wide and shocked by the density of water.

My limbs

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were fixed boulders.

All the time, I was within reach, unable to save him. iii.

I gather two cumbrous stones from the chasm of that pond.

I want to paperweight the book of life to the page that was open yesterday.

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Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

THE SHIPCARVER’S ART I dream of blank seas, waves wearied against a cedar hull.

The compass spins awkwardly each night. The figurehead dangles from a rope I lassoed around her bodice just above violet-at-dusk, dark mica at midnight.

She grinds the hull like pestle against mortar in pitch-black kitchens. I don’t know what will come of this— the way I can’t turn your body toward mine. I want to sail toward morning even water-logged, even mended with your amateur hands, even, if nothing less, broken apart.

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THE RECKLESS SLEEPER Christopher Cokinos inside a box a bald head a pillow eyes closed red duvet not a coffin not a bed inside a box churning wood above sky-dark-sort-of-blue moon hidden outside the box lighting cloud for measure what’s inside the box lit taper sad pigeon girly mirror black hat rotten bow girly apple beneath the box the day spent sorting prone quite inside the box perched where plunging is where dreaming’s not not bridge or net or floor or vault or earth or ship or room possessed of only and just because and made by stranger hands

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Christopher Cokinos

TIME TRANSFIXED you pushed she said a black engine on tracks laid through woods and fields a locomotive ahead of which the mind-man ran the wind was scientific he wore the lab-coat of the lonely genius who hates himself some coma and amber he smiled at you before he fixed you in amber she cried you crawled a beetle guided by the stars to roll your zero into a ball stopped stop she cried for help the black megaphone that was the engine that gathered the squad that raised their edges to cut your shadow the train smokes there still empty room mantle as ever without us | its own motive

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CONTRIBUTOR NOTES Thank you to our contributors: Poets, Fiction Writers, Essayists, and Artists.

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poems: The Prisoners (Brick Road, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire, 2003).

His poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Southern Humanities Review, River Styx and many other journals, including a previous issue of Permafrost. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of a chapbook, The Marilyn Letters, available through dancing girl press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Sixth Finch, Phoebe, The Boiler, Yemassee, and Thin Air Magazine. She lives in Missoula, Montana, where she’s pursuing an MFA in poetry.

Christopher Cokinos is the author, most recently, of Bodies, of the Holocene and Held as Earth. These poems are from a manuscript called “Sweet Lesion.”

Work from that collection is recent or forthcoming in New Delta Review, Western Humanities Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, District Lit and elsewhere.

Kenny Gordon lives and works and writes with his family in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah. Everything you’ve heard is true.

Donna Pucciani’s poetry has appeared on four continents and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Italian. Her fifth and most recent book is Hanging Like Hope on the Equinox (Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago 2013). She writes from Chicago and Manchester, England.

Christian Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published online in JMWW, Row Home Lit, & Pithead Chapel. Recently his poem ‘The Bone House’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He divides his time in Austin working in prison outreach & running long distances.

Natalie Bryant Rizzieri’s poetry has appeared in various journals, including Salamander Review, Crab Orchard Review, Redactions, Calyx Journal, and Sugar House Review. She is the founder and director of Friends of Warm Hearth, a group home for orphans with disabilities in Armenia. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Contributor Notes

Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award and is the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, forthcoming) and the chapbook Red Flag Up (Kattywompus).

His recent poems appear or will soon appear in The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Salamander, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Daniel Shoemaker is a graduate of Penn State Behrend’s Creative Writing B.F.A. program with a focus on fiction writing. While attending, he served as a student editor for the program’s literary journal, Lake Effect. He currently works as a television captioner in the Pittsburgh area.

Devon Walker-Domine is an assistant editor with Narrative Magazine. Her short stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kitsch Magazine, Dance Spirit Magazine, The Silo, and Tin House Online.

Kathleen Weaver’s poems have appeared in Chariton Review, Arts & Letters, Cimarron Review, Cutthroat, Permafrost, and other journals. A book of poems is forthcoming from Post-Apollo Press. She is also a translator from Spanish.

A biography with poetry translations, Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal, appeared 2009, Penn State University Press. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Bob Baldock.

Maya White-Lurie lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she recently received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing has been featured in Amendment and The Commonwealth Times.

Contributor Notes

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