Philadelphia Stories Fall 2012

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

Marguerite McGlinn National Fiction Prize Winner adam schwartz

THE REST OF THE WORLD jana llewellyn

IGLOO kelly george

NAKED AND UGLY

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

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Flourishes II by Rhonda Garland. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Rhonda grew up surrounded by art and the magical, natural landscapes of the American Southwest She was introduced to calligraphy in high school and has since experimented with color, pattern, texture and shape when combined with letter forms and calligraphic flourishes. Her work was most recently on exhibit at the 3rd Street Gallery in Old City and is currently available through the Tyme Gallery in Havertown, PA.

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2nd Humor, Number 7 by Russell Rogers.

CONTENTS FEATURES 4 16 24 26 28 29

The Rest of the World (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adam Schwartz Igloo (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jana Llewellyn Naked and Ugly (essay). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelly George Author Profile: Shaun Haurin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marc Schuster Musings on the Muse (Column) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aimee LaBrie The Do’s (and Some Don’ts) of a Successful Speed Date . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MM Wittle

Russell holds a BFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art and a Master of Environmental Studies from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He has spent the last twenty years as a wildlife biologist chasing birds and shellfish around the Pacific Northwest. He recently relocated with his family to West Chester, PA, where he still chases birds around.

Shellfish are in short supply.

16 Off the Grid by Kip Deeds. (see bio below)

POETRY 14 For Jennie Ketler: 1902–1982 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Robbi Nester 21 Sestina for El Barrio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Angela Canales 25 Road Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Tom Pescatore

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/ Editorial Director Carla Spataro

Director of Development Sharon Sood

Publisher/ Executive Editor Christine Weiser

Production Manager Derek Carnegie

Fiction Editor Mitchell Sommers Assistant Fiction Editor Amy Lug Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick

Web Design Loic Duros Social Media Editors Michelle Wittle Board of Directors Kerri Schuster, secretary Mitchell Sommers Alison Hicks Christine Furtek Michael Ritter Editorial Board

Assistant Editor Diana Restifo 2

Art Editor Melissa Tevere

Andrea Applebee, poetry Peter Baroth, poetry Deb Burnham, poetry Melinda Clemmer, fiction Sam Dodge, non-fiction Liz Dolan, poetry

18 Doll-Y by Diana Trout. Diana trained as a painter at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Trout exhibits her mixed media artwork at galleries and shows. She has been teaching journaling, bookarts and mixed media art since 1993 at various local and national venues. You can reach Diana through her blog/website at DianaTrout.com

Brian Ellis, fiction Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction 23 Couch by Suzie Forrester. Susie most recent work--of images taken with her iPhone-- was exhibited Melissa Foster, fiction as part of the “Solo Series” held at the Abington Art Kathleen Furin, fiction Center this past February. Those images will also be part Erin Gautsche, poetry of an iPhotography show at East Stroudsburg University in early September, and again at Blair Pat Green, poetry Academy, in Blairstown, NJ, in early 2013. Currently, Angel Hogan, poetry Susie is working with her Hasselblad film camera on a portrait series.

Aimee LaBrie, fiction Sam Lasko, poetry 24 Ali’s Garden by Jessica Baskin Taylor.

Jesse Loren, fiction Jessica is a third-generation native Philadelphian.

Chelsea Covington Maass, fiction Jessica has been creating art for all of her life. She was George McDermott, poetry an art major at Germantown Friends School, and took many art classes in a variety of media throughout Cheryl Grady Mercier, non-fiction college and beyond. Her work has been displayed at Crystal Mills, fiction the Nichols Berg Gallery in Chestnut Hill.

Deborah Off, non-fiction Aimee Penna, poetry Cover Art: Barbara Pernini, fiction Arrangement by Kip Deeds. Kip is from Bucks County.

Daniel Pontius, fiction He studied art at Temple University and later at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among other exhibits, Deeds work John Shea, non-fiction has shown at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, the Philadelphia Barbara Solem, non-fiction Art Alliance, and Saint Joseph’s University. This year Kip taught Michelle Wittle, fiction printmaking at Maryland Institute College of Art and was a resident artist at the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust in Pennsylvania.

Hillary Umbreit, fiction

Philadelphia Stories, founded in 2004, is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs such as writer’s workshops, reading series and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

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The Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Short Fiction 2012 Philadelphia Stories is proud to present the winner of our fourth annual prize for short fiction.

The contest honors late author Marguerite McGlinn, who served as essay editor for the magazine from 2004 until her passing in 2008. The prize is made possible with the generous support of both the McGlinn and Hansma families.

Winner Adam Schwartz

The first place winner receives a $2,000 cash prize as well as publication in this issue. The winning author will also be honored at an awards dinner, to be held on the campus of Rosement College, on October 12, 2012.

While I was never fortunate enough to have met Marguerite, I have heard those who had the pleasure of knowing her speak of her with love. The mention of her name always bringing a soft smile to the faces of family and friends alike—a sure sign of a woman who has left a mark on the hearts of everyone who surrounded her.

After beginning as an intern, the 2012 contest marks my third year with Philadelphia Stories, Nicole Marie Pasquarello and my second as Contest Coordinator. That Carla and Christine, as well as the McGlinn and Hansma families, allow me to be part of keeping Marguerite’s memory alive has been a tremendous honor. As a published author of travel stories whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, I can only hope the work presented here serves as a compliment to Marguerite’s tremendous talent.

With just over four hundred entries—our highest ever—the task at hand was not an easy one. After readers whittled submissions down to about forty stories, the nine finalists were chosen by Editorial Director, Carla Sparato. From there, the stories were handed over to our judge, author and professor Kevin McIlvoy.

McIlvoy was impressed with the quality of all nine finalists: “I’ve enjoyed reading and rereading the nine outstanding pieces...really quite wonderful.” After careful consideration, however, McIlvoy’s, chose “The Rest of the World,” submitted by Baltimore author Adam Schwartz. “[The] reader intimately experiences the vulnerable condition of the major characters,” says McIlvoy. “This unflinching story, written with remarkable sensitivity and skill, pours darkness into your heart at the very moments it pours in piercing light.”

McIlvoy also chose three runners up: “Finches” by Lones Seibe, “Train Stories” by Marcy Campbell, and “Igloo” by Jana Llewellyn.

Because Llewellyn is a local author and the story received such praise from both Spataro and McIlvoy, we have included “Igloo” in this issue.

The nine finalists included the stories, “The Girl” by Terrence Cheng, “House of Mirrors” by Corinne Partelow, ”Kaddish” by Sharon Solwitz, “Security Breach” by Nancy Mendez-Booth, and “Astronauts Anonymous” by Brad Beauregard.

A huge thank you to Christine and Carla for allowing me to be a part of a contest that recognizes talented local authors while remembering a lost one; to every reader who spent countless hours reading submissions; to judge Kevin McIlvoy for choosing this year’s winning author, and to the McGlinn and Hansma families, who have made yet another year of reward and celebration possible.

3 As for Marguerite McGlinn, thank you for allowing us to continue to celebrate your talent and honor your memory.

Nicole Marie Pasquarello Contest Coordinator

www.philadelphiastories.org

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THE REST OF THE WORLD The following story is the winner of the fourth annual Marguerite McGlinn National Fiction Prize.

Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details on the 2013 contest. igh rises, like towers made out of sidewalk. The minute they started talking about blowing us up, we forgot everything we didn’t like about Freedom House Projects.

No one fussed anymore about the spent lights, or sometimey hot water, or the elevator-jamming hustlers.

Pretty soon, graffiti cried through stairwells and across doors: Save Freedom House.

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I had a job at a seafood restaurant called Barnacle Bob’s. He’d hired me as a dishwasher. Straight away, though, he put me on his boat, working the crab pots. Out there, with the wind popsicling my bones and the boat tossing my stomach, I wanted to tell him to kick rocks. ‘Cept then I would’ve been right back in the house with Excuse. So five, six days a week I hit that first empty #11 and rode the flickering lights down to the harbor where the streets were made of stone.

Barnacle Bob was this old crusty dude with a fat face and a yellow beard and a really dirty hat that he called lucky even when it wasn’t, and he would be there waiting in the dark by the water.

Huddled down, chopping across that bay, gulls at our side, some days you couldn’t help from praying those pots come up light. But Barnacle Bob had taken a chance on me, so I worked

to keep his chains snubbed, the slack out of those cleats, his gaffs holstered, his ice iced, and everything else he wanted.

l One day, after work, I got off the elevator and I could see, way down at the other end, the little girl who lived across the hall, sitting on the floor, locked out, again. She was nine with a Mom probably wronger than mine.

Jay-Z was rocking in my headphones, and the long smooth hallway smelled like old mop and fried onions. I slipped off the headphones and stepped lightly, listening. I pictured the floor see-sawing, then dropping away. In my stomach I could feel how it’d be: all of us on seven kind of lifted together like wishes off a dandelion: Old Leopold practicing trumpet in ran-down Adidas and alligator pajamas, still pretending like he ain’t heard the news, that little boy Lopez tapping a soccer ball off his heel like it’s on a leash, Ms. B carrying around an old Campbell’s soup can calling someone want this grease?, the old heads playing spades at their table, and the strange part was that no one was unhappy, considering.

When I got closer, I saw that the girl was eating cornstarch from a box.

White powdered her chin. My key was turning the lock when I thought

I’d better ask her inside to wait. Inside was half upside down. Odds and ends that hadn’t been there that morning were at my feet: a couple dug up plants from somebody’s garden, too many fistfuls of still-good relish packets, and a stroller—one of those ones they got for running the baby—sleeping a tall orange cone in it. I stepped around the mess and went in my room to change into dry clothes.

My mother—the one I call Excuse—will inch the socks off your sleeping feet and I knew at once something of mine was missing, but I felt I was better off not knowing what she took until I needed it since it was gone now and wouldn’t be coming back, whatever it was. I put on button-fly Levi’s, Converse, and a red hoody.

Back in the living room, Maeya stood at the window.

“Where’s your Mom?” I asked.

“Out.” Maeya shrugged, unfazed.

She watched me as I gathered up my crabber’s gloves and yellow waders and CD player and locked them in my trunk. “You don’t go to school?” she asked.

“They put me out.”

“You must be bad,” she said, looking me over.

“The principal got robbed.”

Her mouth went slack. “Stop playing.”

“Psyche,” I said. “They got me for eating pop tarts in the bathroom.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m tired of school anyway. They always on you to write something.

Even after you do your answers.

They’ll even take your scratch paper.”

I walked to the window to see what she was looking at. Outside there were workmen everywhere.

Some dudes in hard-hats were wrap-

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Flourishes II by Rhonda Garland © 2012 ping columns in something. There was a trailer marked D E M O L I T I ON. Further off, other men in masked space helmets held blowtorches over manhole covers. I have no idea why.

Even Animal Control was out there unloading cage traps from a van.

“Dag,” I heard myself whisper, “they getting ready.”

“They’re sure in a hurry for something,” she said.

“If they gonna get rid of us, they better do it before it gets hot.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’ll be whatever then, Crayola.

People stay upset for nothing when it’s hot.”

“They’re upset now.”

“Upset crazy. Not upset bawling.”

From seven, the concrete square below looked split by green spider legs of grass, all hairy and tall. We could see people clutching plastic bags or humping boxes. Every so

often, people would stop and huddle, shaking their heads, hugging— might’ve even been crying—before stepping through that grass. They did not seem to be in a hurry, but kept on, going away. Some of these people I’d known my whole life and watching them gave me a funny feeling, like I was looking at something I might miss later.

“It must not have been as bad as everyone said,” Maeya said.

“Or we got used to it.”

She pressed her forehead against the window, looking down. “I’ve been waiting for them to say it’s all been a big mistake, they didn’t mean it and everyone can come back now.”

“They’re not gonna say that,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But they should.”

“You think so, huh?”

“I mean, don’t they feel bad putting

people out?” She turned back to me.

I stepped away, rubbing the cold out of an elbow acting like it thought it was still outside. “You don’t ask the hamster spinning the wheel when he’s had enough.”

She squinted at me, lost. She had a round face and little porcelain saucers for eyes. They were the kind of gentle eyes a little girl is supposed to have.

I stretched out on the couch. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. That Rent-A-Center left-behind was just right. I reached under the couch and grabbed two comic books, one Fantastic Four, one Hulk. I felt good, happy even. People had a lot to say about me and my comic books. Excuse said I was too old for them, but I’d never seen her read anything. Other people said comics ain’t real, but what I need real for? I had plenty of that right outside my door. Basically, people’ll tell you anything, if you let

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them. I closed my eyes. The heel and pitch of the boat were still under me.

Even now, with a whole bunch of cyclone fencing around the nothing where our home used to be, people still feel sad the way Maeya felt sad then, tattooing FHP Forever on their arms or necks. That was funny to me—inking up your body with a place that doesn’t even exist anymore. I guess they thought it’ll make ‘em feel a little less empty for the people that used to be there. My Nana called it nostalgia, like worrying about the Colts all these years later.

All of us—me, Excuse, Maeya— picked up and dragged ourselves to my Nana’s on the west side, which is where all this mess started. By then Maeya had been staying with us during those last weeks before they blasted our building to the ground. Nana said she’d get custody of Maeya when someone started asking, but no one ever did.

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Nana was sixty-three, worked for social security, and drank a prune-gin cocktail before taking out her teeth each night. At night the teeth slept grinning, ready to talk, in the water glass on Nana’s bathroom sink. I’d stayed with Nana before—once, when I missed a lot of kindergarten and the school sent the police and declared Excuse unfit. Duh. Once, when I was eight, and Excuse had me steal razors from Safeway, and they caught me.

Once, a couple years ago, after this Mexican maid at the Quality Inn let me hold that room with a Jacuzzi for nothing until I got found out. Bunch of other reasons I can’t remember right now. Nana was Excuse’s mother, but they weren’t nothing alike. Nana’s is where you went when you wanted someone to ask what you wanna be when you grow up. She was never one of those pinch-your-cheek grandmas, but she looked after me and took pride

in her house, hanging the windows with beige lace, feather-dusting the good china, which never came out the cabinet anyway, vacuuming when there was nothing to vacuum. She could cook too. Pans of lasagna, baked macaroni and cheese, big gravied roasts she served on egg noodles. And you didn’t have to play sick to get any of it.

About Excuse, Nana’d say she uses the toilet on us just like spelling her name. I think Nana wanted to be free of her daughter and I was the thing that stopped her. Nana never said this. It’s what I thought was all.

No one believed Excuse’s promises about getting herself together once we were on the west side ‘cause she never had herself together over east. That first week, though, we were counting our own shadows ‘cause Excuse had trouble running her little outside scams and she’d steal the soap bar out the shower to try to sell it.

It might’ve been the second or third night after we got to Nana’s. We sat around, trying to act normal.

Maeya was messing with a rainbow hula-hoop Nana had brought home.

Nana sat in her recliner, working the crossword. Excuse was smoking at the window, and I could see Nana clocking her over the top of the opened newspaper. There was a sour-sounding piano in the living room that Nana claimed Excuse could play once, but I’d never believed it.

I stepped over to the piano. “Play me a song, Ma.” Excuse acted like she hadn’t heard me.

“You can’t play, can you?”

She blew smoke out the window.

“Nana, she can’t play,” I said.

“She loved that piano. She was the only one that could play,” Nana said, “Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, even some Bartok.”

I pressed down a handful of keys. It jangled like an old toy. “You got jokes, Nana.”

“I wish I did,” Nana said, working the crossword.

I opened the bench lid and looked at the thin books of sheet music, the old scribbled notes on some pages. “I don’t care what Nana says. I don’t think you can play,” I said.

“And you can stop, Franklin, okay?

I got enough to forget without you bringing shit up, but there you go asking about a piano.” She twisted her cigarette into the brick sill outside and left it there.

I closed the seat lid again.

“It was a long time ago,” Excuse said, getting up. “I played then. I don’t now. What you wanna kick a can? I can’t change nothing what happened.

You ain’t Chopin yourself.”

She walked into the hall and was out there with her hands on her lower back for a minute trying to get herself together when she called me over, away from Nana and Maeya. We stared at each other, neither of us speaking. Then she said, “I’ma need something.”

I kept quiet.

She said softly, “You know it’s different over here. I don’t know these people like that.”

“What you expect—a marching band?” I said. “They out there, jamming.”

“I’m in the hole with that little crew already. I need help. I’m going sick.”

“I ain’t got no money,” I lied.

She searched my face, playing back the words in her ear. Then she said, “Can you ask your man Alvin to front you something?”

I let my gaze rest on Excuse’s face.

It wasn’t a pretty face anymore: a bony jaw, a droopy lower lip, two scheming dusty eyes. She could be charming or ugly, depending. This was charming.

“Can you do that for me, Franklin?” she said.

“I ain’t seen him.”

“I’m quite sure he’s on his little strip or whatever.”

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t h e I cut a quick glance over at Nana.

She was still eased back in her recliner, snapping her newspaper, making little humming sounds. “Then ask him yourself,” I said.

“He don’t know me from Ronald Reagan.” This was a favorite phrase of hers, even when it wasn’t true.

I’d known Alvin from all those times at Nana’s. We’d clicked since the fourth grade. Six months might pass without seeing him, then next time, there he was, a bouncy little guy with a smile so full of golds it stayed lit in there. We battled about anything—who could burp loudest, who had the nicest crossover, who choked on that first Newport and who didn’t, who could sweet talk a seven out the dice, who went harder, east side or west. I kept a box cutter up in the cupboard above the fridge, and now I reached up and slipped it in my pocket. When my coat went on, Nana

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plucked off her glasses, fed up. At the door I told Excuse, “Stay here.”

Nana’s was an old street, sunken in its middle like the power lines above, dip-strung, party-ribboned end to end, one block after the next. I walked up to the carryout with the sign that said “Mel’s,” but everyone called “Up Top.” Two boys, almost yellow under the streetlights, were posted up outside the store. I didn’t recognize them, and I had to think if I really wanted to ask these corner boys anything. I stepped in front of one. “You seen Alvin?”

The boy was blowing into his hands. A bin Laden coat swallowed him. On his head, a blue bandana.

His eyes were empty. “You gonna make his money right?”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” I said.

He sized me up, sucked his teeth.

“Yeah, you look like short money.”

I took him for one of those clowns

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that’ll come at you sideways just to impress his friends. In my pocket I felt for the switch on the box cutter. I started to say, “Tell him—” “You can’t read?”

He undid his bandana and wrapped it again, knotting it off in the back. “Yo’ illiterate,” the boy laughed, doubling over.

I didn’t move. Then I saw the white letters behind and above him eating into the red brick: RIP Alvin. Inside me something skipped and dropped away.

I backed up slowly, then turned and started up the empty street. A necklace of unlit doorways, boxy and empty, stretched up the block. Then I thought of his sister. I had not seen her for a long time, but remembered Alvin saying she’d gone to Philly to go to college for hair, and I knew she must be tore up, whereever she was. Later, I’d find out some of what had happened—he’d messed up somebody’s

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money, wouldn’t get low when most would’ve—but none of it mattered.

Alvin had always wanted to be hard.

Now he was gone and it didn’t get any harder than that.

Back at the house, Excuse was sitting outside on the steps, arms clasped over her knees, rocking. When she saw me, she popped up. “What you got?”

“Nothing,” I brushed past, opened the door and stepped into the house.

“Nothing?” She was on my hip.

“What you mean?”

“Alvin ain’t there.”

“What about them others down there—you tell ‘em you cool wit him?”

I stared at her wordlessly. “Alvin.

Ain’t. There,” I whispered, biting off each word.

“Oh shit,” she said, catching something final and done in my voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “Tish ho.”

“He wasn’t no older than you,” she said.

I put my coat on a hangar in the closet. Behind me I heard Excuse say to no one in particular, “It’s rough out here.”

I paused in the hollow of that closet, soft coats against my face. When I turned around, she was squared up with me and that lemme-hold-a-dollar hunger was back in her eyes.

“Let me have that little radio of yours,” she said. “I’ll pay you for it

after.”

“You can’t have my CD player,” I said, trying to brush her off.

“Then I’ll just take Maeya down the store.”

I laughed. “Yeah, okay.”

“I’ll have her back in five minutes.”

“Or five days.”

“You just being stingy now.”

I turned and hooked her elbow.

“Ain’t I always?”

She wrenched free, started clawing her neck, screeching Am I gonna be alright? Am I gonna be alright? Am I gonna be alright? Spit, like sparks, flew from her lips. I saw Maeya coloring with markers, spying the whole thing. I saw Nana, still resting in her recliner, set down the newspaper. Then I did the thing I swore I wouldn’t: I gave Excuse twenty dollars from my check I cashed the day before. The whole time I was thinking Barnacle Bob might as well be paying me in salt-water shivers for all this. I just wanted her out of the house. She snatched the money and was gone.

I stepped outside and watched her cut across the street and disappear around the corner. A sharp wind shaved the block of row houses.

There’d be times she wouldn’t come back for days. I used to worry she might be gone for good, but I learned that Excuse always made it home.

Might forget her own birthday, but she knew how to find home.

I closed the door. The house felt suddenly quiet. I let myself tip back, shoulders resting against the wall.

Nana had been sitting on her purse.

Now she stood, dug in her wallet, pulled out a twenty, walked it over and squeezed it into my hand. I accepted it silently.

I could tell you how awful it was having a mother who’s a fiend, but I’ve accepted it. I could tell you it’s just one side of her, but it’s not. I could tell you that she wouldn’t do anything for five

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t h e dollars, but she would. I could tell you that when I was little and I needed her like I don’t now, she loved me enough to stop, but she hadn’t. I could tell you that I never saw this happening to Alvin, but I guess I had. I could tell you that when Excuse started running the streets over here, doing her little shiesty dirt, that the dude she hooked up with wasn’t all bad, but Amon was.

l Excuse introduced me to Amon this way. I was folding a bundle of clean laundry Nana had left on the couch. They came in together. Over her shoulder, Excuse said, “This a friend of mine,” and breezed past, clattering down the hall, into the bathroom where she shut the door.

Excuse wore a lot of noisy hoop bracelets, which she thought made her look legit.

I turned to face him. He was big and missing one eye. This surprised me, but I concentrated on keeping my gaze level, pretending he had two good eyes and one wasn’t all milky with little smeary folds and creases that looked like they might be hissing.

I said, “Who are you?”

“The one and only, Amon.” It sounded like an apology.

“Why is it the one and only?”

“Why is what?”

“Why is it the one and only?” I asked again.

He stepped into the kitchen, real smooth, like it was his house and always had been, and he was helping himself to whatever. He came right out holding a can of peaches that had been in the cupboard and talking again. “How you gonna ask me a question like that?” he said.

I shrugged and continued separating clothes. I saw then that Nana had bought Maeya a lot of new clothes: Hollister Jeans, a yellow American

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Eagle sweatshirt, socks with moons on them.

“Well, how many people you ever been around named Amon?” he asked.

“No one, I guess.”

“Now, if you knew that you’d never known anyone named Amon, then why’d you ask the question?” He had a goofy way of talking, like his mouth was a gurgling drain, glub glub glub.

“Just something I said, I guess.”

He stepped a few steps closer and a sweet smell of talc came with him.

“You went and fucked up the origin, is what you did.”

I felt my back stiffen. I said, “I just never heard a name like that before.”

“It was my people’s inspiration.

My people are from Togo.”

You never knew who Excuse might bring in. In general, she was the type of person that could get you hurt—put

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you in the middle of something you got nothing to do with. But this jackass beat all. He was wild looking. Everything on Amon was too big. His hands were too big, his belly was too big, and his red, flappy-eared, peanut head was too big.

He had to cock his face to get any seeing out of his one good eye.

“You know about Togo?”

“No.” “Then speak up, boy. Don’t sit there like you Mr. National Geographic or some shit.”

My feet shifted a little.

He made a couple clucking sounds. “Think you slick. Your Mom must notta raised you right.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“That ain’t some soup du jour.

That’s your mother.”

“And I raised myself,” I said.

“Togo’s in Africa,” he went on, cutting me off. “It was German. A colony

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of it. That’s what they called it anyway.

A colony. Make it sound more proper for when they take yo’ shit. Comes to the same thing anyway. When your tea leaves and spices ain’t yours no more ‘cause the laws they made said so, don’t nobody care what you call it.” Now he began to raise his voice. “Yes, indeedy.

You looking at a hybrid. Dues paid. For keeps. Sweetened by the taker and the tooken.”

I was quiet, but in my head I was thinking, wasn’t they German in that movie they showed at school, the one where the dude saved the Jews? And this jackass didn’t look nothing like them. But I kept folding and didn’t say squat.

I heard the top pop on that little can of peaches and looked up. He sipped the syrup first, keeping the rim close to his lips, and lasering that one eye into me. “I expect you one of those ain’t no use explaining nothing to, ain’t you?” he said, smacking those peaches.

We watched each other, waiting.

When I did not answer, he flicked his face at me, and spoke through his teeth, “Thought not.” Then he turned and pounded down the hall, Diane!

l

10

A few days later, I came home from work and when I glanced out the window I saw Maeya standing in the alley.

I clanged down the back metal steps.

She was holding a shoebox. She stood beside some old tires and a torn mattress with popping springs. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for a butterfly,” Maeya said.

I breathed in. Spoiled milk soured the air. Junk was everywhere.

“It was from school. I had it in here.” She offered me the shoebox.

Dime-sized holes had been cut on top.

“Amon threw the whole thing out,” she said, pointing up to the window.

“Why’d he do that?”

“Said we don’t need no bugs in the house,” she said.

I stood there, mad.

“It was red and black,” she said.

I followed her as she picked her way deeper into the alley, stepping over a fan and plastic milk crate, looking behind a box spring. Then she stopped, turned around, straining to see between the spaces in all that junk.

Her hands flapped out from her side and fell back.

“C’mon now,” I said, “let’s go in the house.”

We started towards the mouth of the alley. “My teacher told us they don’t taste good to birds,” she said, hopefully.

Inside, Maeya sat down on the living room couch and I put on Oprah. I checked the rooms for Amon; he was gone. I dropped onto a cushion beside Maeya. Oprah was talking to dieters.

These people had been on some crazy diets. They’d show a before picture of some humongous man and then some skinny dude would walk out and everyone would clap.

“Do you think my mother hates me?” Maeya asked.

“No,” I said. “She loves you.”

“She hasn’t come looking for me, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“She knows you’re safe.”

“She knows where I am?”

“Yes.” “Did she ask you to take me?”

“When you were staying with us all those nights and she didn’t say nothing—that was like her asking.”

Maeya seemed to think hard about this. “That’s when my Mom knew I was across the hall. Now we’re over west.”

“You don’t like Nana’s cooking?”

“No, I do.”

“Doesn’t Nana keep your hair done?”

“Yes, she does.”

“You’d rather be with your Mom somewhere?”

“Not when she’s dropping me at

different people’s houses all the time.

Her little while never is.”

I didn’t say anything. On the television Oprah was cheesing for some man that had lost a hundred and thirty-seven pounds. “He did good,” Maeya said.

“Listen,” I said, “did you know that your Mom and mine are just alike?”

She squinted at me. “Sort of.”

“Oh, yeah. They have a lot in common.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, they’re both un-Mom’s.”

“What’s an un-Mom?” she asked.

“It’s a Mom that can’t be a Mom right now but might be a Mom again later.”

“Oh,” she said.

We were silent.

“You have a un-Mom?” she asked.

“Biggest in town.”

“For how long?”

“Pretty much always, might as well say.”

“Aren’t you mad?”

“Used to be.”

“Used to be?”

“I decided I can live with a Mom that ain’t a Mom.” “Well, I’m mad,” Maeya said.

“You gotta right.”

She was quiet.

“It lasts long?” she asked.

I didn’t have the heart to say “long enough to make waiting for a normal life pointless,” which is what I was thinking, so I just said, “Sometimes.”

She was biting her lower lip.

Oprah was talking about miracle berries and bloating.

“You know I used to fight for my mother?” The memory seemed sad and funny now, and I felt a grunting snort come up. “Other kids would get to talking about her, calling her “monkey fiend,” or “Junkie Diane,” or whatever and I’d take up for her. I’d be out there, seven years old, scrapping in the street ‘cause someone said she smelled like

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t h e dukey, which she probably did.”

Maeya was quiet.

“I was never too young for anything. That’s just how she carried it,” I said. “I wish somebody woulda pulled me up back then and told me, ‘this woman’s not changing for nothing.’”

“Who would’ve known that?”

“No one, I guess.” I brushed some dirt off my tennis and felt a sigh go out of me. “It’s just something you tell yourself in your head.”

We were quiet for a time.

Then Maeya asked, “How’d my mother look when you told her I was gonna come stay with you and Nana?”

“What d’you mean?”

“You know, did she have her regular game face on and everything?”

“Oh, that, “I said. “No, not at all.

She got real sad.”

“Is that all?”

“You could tell, it just hurt her real bad. But she was glad too ‘cause she

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knows Nana keeps a good home.”

Maeya was quiet. The truth is I admired the little girl. At her age, I was already half-sprung. This child hardly frowned. Might be scared of Freddy Kruger, but she was ready for whatever the world put on her.

I looked at her. “You alright?”

She nodded.

I held out my fist, “FHP.” I waited.

Then she balled her little fist, extended it and we tapped knuckles.

“FHP,” she said.

l Everything looked different from the water. In the harbor the boats were shiny with linseed or resin, bobbing in their slips, and the light on the water was creased and flinty, and the skyscrapers behind were struck glassy with sunlight and the city looked like a postcard a tourist might buy, and

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not at all like a place where anything could happen. Then, as the boat moved further out, drawing a tail of foamy wake, the harbor spread out and the picture held your whole view, and it could seem like a place you might leave one day, if you knew how, or someone showed you.

Barnacle Bob called himself an “old salt,” and I guess that’s how he talked too. When we got to the crab pots, he’d shift down to the little trolling motor and come out of his little pilothouse and start plucking my nerves with his sing-songy directions, Swing to now. Drop the brailer. Hook that float. Now heave. He would say the same thing three, five, seven times. His voice would be low and steady, like something he learned in church, and after a while it would seem like his little sayings were keeping time with the water.

There were heavy seeping chains and small anchors and big crab pots.

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Graduate Studies

PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 12

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These I hoisted up, hand over hand.

Every time I dropped a pot or pulled up another coil of chains, Barnacle Bob was right there with Swing to now. And it was kind of funny, but his talk did sort of help you bring the weight up and over the edge and on to the deck.

And Barnacle Bob knew that bay like I knew the streets. He’d look at the moon and tell you about the tide, listen to the water against the hull and tell you about the wind, tell you what trap was coming from which side way before you got your first glimpse of blue marker buoy, tell you where the grasses grew underwater from how the water sat, smell the wind and guess just where the northerlies would’ve dried out the marshes. He probably could’ve done it all stone blind. He didn’t fool with charts or sounding devices or tide tables. He knew the shoals and where the channels played out because he’d always known them. And if anyone ever cut his traps, Barnacle Bob was ready for blood.

Sometimes the pots were more or less empty, or had only a few eels, which we’d use for bait, and Barnacle Bob would get heated and start talking down the winter dredgers or the algae that had no business growing in the water or the government trying to keep him on the beach. But he didn’t stay mad. It was like Barnacle Bob hadn’t made up his mind about everything yet, which probably explained why he’d hired me to begin with, ‘cause I know I looked like a roughneck bopping through his door that first time.

If the pots were empty, we’d drive out Route 1 to buy Barnacle’s Catch from the freezers at Sysco. Along the way, he’d be playing Hank Garland or Chet Atkins in his truck, and it was as if those empty pots out on the water had been someone else’s. With his moon face and yellow beard and the sling shots going half up his back, Barnacle Bob was like something out of one of my comic books, except he never real-

ly wanted to get even with anybody.

One day, we were far out and, when I snagged the last float for the last pot and pulled it in, it was empty like the others before it. It had been another bad day, the fourth in a row. I reset the bait box with fresh chicken necks, raised it to the edge, and listened for Barnacle Bob’s swing to now as I set the pot in the water and paid out the line. Then Barnacle Bob did something unusual. He cut the engine and let the boat drift. He was quiet and didn’t seem in the mood for talking. I sat down on the rusty water breaker and zipped up my fleece hoody. Using my clenched teeth, I tightened my gloves and then crossed my arms against the cold. The bay was empty in every direction. There was little current. I felt that something might be wrong, like Barnacle Bob was hurting somehow and it made me feel bad for ever wishing his pots be light.

Barnacle Bob stood looking out beyond the stern. In the open water, drifting, time felt slowed.

“The sky looks funny, sitting on the water like that,” I said.

He did not answer for a time. “I suppose it does.”

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“A few shore towns gone so broke they’re more mud hens than people,” he said, still without turning around.

“What if you keep going?”

“You’ll be in the Atlantic.”

“And then, after that?”

“The rest of the world.”

The weather was turning. The sky was paper-mached in gray, a thousand shades of gray. It would be dead winter soon and the crabs would dig in and go in their holes and Barnacle Bob would pack it in ‘til spring because he didn’t believe in dredging. For a time, we drifted, listening to the bay slapping softly against the quarters. Then I said, “It’s a long ways from here?”

He had turned back to me. “What’s that?”

“The rest of the world.”

l Amon came to the back door, pounding. Excuse started for it, but I headed her off. “Don’t bring him in here again,” I said.

“What you getting ready for tea and crumpets?”

Nana had been watching Jeopardy, but now she was up, steady crossing the room towards us. I felt like Nana was aging before our eyes. She looked a hundred and three.

“I don’t like him,” I said.

“Sit your tail down,” Excuse said.

“He ain’t no harm to nobody.”

“No more than you,” Nana said.

“And that’s enough for anybody.”

“Whatever,” Excuse hissed.

He pounded the door again. Nana moved forward and slid back the dead bolt and pulled the knob. Stone-faced, Amon filled the doorway, one arm on the jamb.

“You’ll have to take your good times outside, sir,” Nana said. “There are children in this house.” The door clicked shut again.

On the way out, Excuse wheeled on me. “That’s the problem with you: you always think you better than somebody.”

l Sometimes I sang Maeya to sleep with I believe I can fly or I’m not your average girl on the video. I can sing a little bit, but only Maeya would know it. This night, I didn’t feel like singing, so I was searching for a good radio station.

I’d gotten tired of 92Q playing the same songs.

She said, “You’re like my father, Franklin.”

“I’m not your father, Maeya.”

“I think so.”

“Sixteen’s not old enough to be a father.”

“Yes, it is.”

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t h e “Not yours.”

“Then why do you hold my hand when we get on the bus?”

“So you don’t fall and bust your ass and everyone laugh at you.”

“Isn’t that like a father?”

“No.” “I think it is.”

“Look, Maeya, your father’s in Jessup. You know that.”

“So?” “So quit geeking.”

“But I don’t even talk to him.”

“That’s still your father,” I said.

“Not to me.”

“And he probably gave you those good smarts,” I said, “least you could do is act like you use ‘em.”

We were quiet while I fiddled with the radio dial. Bits of songs flew by.

“Amon says he knew my father.”

“That fool’ll say anything. He never knew your father.”

“He said you act like you’re grown

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when you’re not.”

I thought about how kids my age always think they’re grown and want to tell anyone who’ll listen. But I didn’t think I was grown. Instead, I thought about getting older and what my life would be like then. But I didn’t say any of this to Maeya. I said, “He could be two hundred, but that don’t make him grown.”

“He said he’s gonna teach me to kiss, since I’m gonna be a woman soon.”

I cut the radio off. “What?” “’ Someone’s gotta show you how a woman be’,” she put her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest, imitating the glub-glub-glub of Amon’s voice.

“A woman’s gotta know how to enjoy herself.”

I got up and walked a tight circle, my shirtfront in my teeth, cursing.

Then I threw open a window and spat. I asked Maeya a bunch of other questions, but she didn’t say much

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more and I just got madder anyway.

Afterwards she said, “You shouldn’t cuss.”

“Even that bastard knows better than talking like that to you.”

“I don’t pay Amon no mind.”

I said, “You stay by me or Nana.

Me or Nana. Okay?”

She was quiet.

I took her hands in mine. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You promise now?”

She nodded.

My bed had been in the very small room Nana always called a sewing room. Now, I dragged my little mattress down the hall and into Maeya’s bedroom. I plumped the pillows and arranged the bedding on the floor where I slept for a time after this. She watched me, her face still with worry.

I hadn’t meant to scare her.

“Look,” I said, “Amon ain’t right.

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Even when he does something nice— like gives you a whole box of Krispy Kremes, all your own—he’s really just plotting on something else.”

She said, “His eye—that ugly one—it looks funny.”

“Somebody told him no.”

l The next day Amon came in from the back. I was in the kitchen, making a bologna and Miracle Whip sandwich.

“You can’t be in here no more.”

“Say who?”

“This not your house.”

He looked at me, surprised. “What you tipsy?”

“Wouldn’t matter if I was,” I said.

“Your Mama’s already gave it her blessings,” he said, like that settled it.

“That ain’t even how she talks,” I said. “She ain’t church.” I placed my sandwich back on the plate and set it on the counter. “So you can bounce.”

“Oh, you big time now,” he said.

“You decided.”

“Maeya doesn’t need you anywhere near her. None of us do.”

Suspicion twisted his face. “You must be planning on keeping her to yourself.” He opened the refrigerator door, closed it and swung back to me, getting louder. “‘Cause you sure enough not running, what, an orphanage in here?”

“I’ll take that key.” My voice had gone tight.

When he moved closer, you could feel his size in the floor. “Nine ain’t what it used to be. Girls grow up fast nowadays.” And then he laughed, throat like a train tunnel.

“You make me sick,” I said.

“Okay,” I heard him say, swallowing a giggle. “Do you.”

I never felt him hit me. First, I was standing, then, laid out. Darkness pooled around me and the smell of bologna became electric, crackling and sputtering behind my eyes. I lay there, trying for breath. I heard him changing TV stations. Then I remembered the weight of his shoulder rolling towards

me before the fist shot out. High in the chest is where he’d hit me.

When I got to my elbows, he came over and put a heel on my throat, flattening me. “I seen so much I gave one of these sum bitches back.” And he pointed to the empty socket in his face. “You lucky I left you something to chew your food wit.”

I got to my feet and started for the bathroom. I was up and walking, but I was shaky. At the sink I steadied myself before the mirror. My wind felt small; it made a little rattle. Slowly, I cranked my head, right, then left, until my breathing got easier. I had not expected a warning and there had been none. I opened the medicine chest; the reflection of my eyes swung past. There was a box of band aides and some mouthwash. I didn’t need band aides or mouthwash.

I headed down to the corner where Alvin used to be. I thought of asking one of them that took his place to kill Amon, but didn’t. Then I went looking for Maeya.

l For Jennie Ketler: 1902-1982

By Robbi Nester

14

On New Years Day in Philadelphia when I was ten and you were seventy, the Mummers waved their plumes and stamped.

Ice fell in feathers from their capes.

Three boys would bear the Captain’s train down to the judge’s stand on Broad, a flask of whiskey at their lips.

My father lifted me above the crowd, the helium balloons.

His shoulders then seemed high enough.

I said that he should lift you too, and laughed; with smoke-black braid, thick shoes, you’d dangle almost to the ground.

But from your deckchair on the curb, the view was blocked. You worked your foot and said you’d seen it all before.

Robbi Nester is the author of a chapbook, Balance (White Violet Press, 2012). She was born and raised in Philadlephia, but now lives in California. Robbi has published poetry in Qarrtsiluni, Northern Liberties Review, Inlandia, Victorian Violet Press, Floyd County Moonshine, and Caesura, with poems forthcoming in Jenny and Poemeleon. Her reviews have appeared in The Hollins Critic and Switchback, and her essays have been anthologized in Easy to Love but Hard to Raise (DRT Press, 2011) and Flashlight Memories (Silver Boomer Press, 2011).

The next day I didn’t go to work.

Barnacle Bob would have to do it without me. I did hope the crabs were running for him, but I wanted to be in the house when Maeya came in from school, which I was.

The sun was gone from the sky. It was getting to be time for dinner. I’d gotten paid the day before, so I had some money. Maeya was eating cornstarch from the box, a habit I hadn’t been able to break her from. She looked bored, flicking jacks around her lap on the carpet.

“You keep eating that, you gonna turn into a ghost,” I said. “Watch.”

“I wanna bake a cake,” she said.

I was getting mad. “Fix your face.

You look a mess.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

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t h e “It’s not food.”

“You’re acting funny.” She sounded insulted. “And bossy.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I got things on my mind.”

She closed up the box and brushed off her mouth and cheeks.

“Anybody can bake a cake,” she said.

“Just follow the recipe.”

We were quiet.

“We don’t have no eggs, anyway,” I said. “I’m quite sure that recipe says eggs. I know that much.”

“Chinese people deliver,” she said.

“If you think I’m calling that Chinese man and asking him for two eggs.”

“Why not?” she said. “I don’t mind calling.”

I forced out a long breath, pinching the bridge of my nose. Maeya could argue if four quarters made a dollar when she wanted to. “You a nuisance,” I sighed, giving in. “Let’s go get what we need.”

We walked down to the corner store and bought all the ingredients in the recipe. By the time we got back and got started, Nana was home.

Later, after Meaya’s yellow sheet cake had cooled and she was icing the top and Nana dozed in her chair and the whole house smelled cake-sweet, I let myself fall into that butterscotched air where you could tell yourself nothing bad was going to happen.

I asked some dudes around the way about Amon. He’d done a lot of cruddy things. Stolen his uncle’s methadone so he could sell him real dope. Called the fire department once faking concussion for an Advil. Ran in the Arabber’s pockets and, when all he got was a peach pit and someone laughed, Amon killed the dude’s sable-back horse right there; after that, was like a fruit drought hit the whole neighborhood. Always ready to mix in. Always wants a Newport

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but never has one for anybody else.

Some of the old heads called him Mustah Bin, ‘cause after Amon bled some poor bastard, it’s always, Oh well, must’ve been meant to happen.

If I called the police on Amon, they’d come in here and take Maeya away, put her in some crazy foster home or group home or in DSS. Might even try to put me somewhere.

I thought of tricking Amon into coming out on the boat—telling him we can rob Barnacle Bob—then knocking Amon’s big ass in the water.

I doubted he could swim and no one would miss him. But I didn’t think Barnacle Bob would appreciate me using his boat like that.

I wished so hard that something would happen to Amon, but nothing did. Life was like that. Amon could rob and steal and scheme and get over and nothing hardly happened to him. But Alvin tries to sell a few pills for backto-school clothes, and he gets got.

l A day later, I went down the back steps to where Amon always came in. I slipped into the alley, beside the steps.

I turned a metal trashcan upside down, pulled it into a sliver of darkness, away from the streetlight and sat. Patience filled me. I’d wait ‘til next spring if it took that. I felt the grapple in my hand. It was iron, heavy, and had three small hooks. I did worry that I didn’t have it in me to crack his skull, or that I wouldn’t hit him hard enough, and then he’d just burn me up with the revolver he kept in his dip.

So many dudes say, “I don’t care if I get shot,” “Live by, die by,” “Real knows real,” But when they’re on that sidewalk leaking out of themselves, they care. Crying for their MamaGod-ambulance, they care.

Hours passed and the sun went down, and I set myself against these worries. There was an old head of cab-

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bage under the steps and the rats ate from it, taking their time. And I got to wondering about the things I always wonder about: the stars of course, and what’s so great about this country that everyone wants to come here for anyway, and Nana’s teeth in that water glass at night, and what Alvin saw when that cap went in his nose— maybe it just feels like clicking off the TV, that sucking sound and everything shrink-popping black. And the rats came out deep, scurrying here and there and I could hear a TV from someone’s house. It was a re-run of Martin.

Then I heard him, walking that shuffling walk, mumbling, re-living a bad turn he owed somebody. My ears pricked up. My breath dropped away.

I bent my knees and clenched back the grapple with my moisty grip. I could feel blood thumping my head. He got so close I smelled that sweet powdery talc he wore and I saw his face emerging from a curtain of cigarette smoke and at the last moment he turned that one good eye toward me and I swear I heard Barnacle Bob in my head.

“Swing to! Swing to! Swing to now!”

Adam Schwartz received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995.

His stories have appeared in Arkansas Review/Kansas Quarterly, and in 1999 he won first place in the Baltimore City Paper’s short story contest. In 2011, “The Rest of the World” received an Honorable Mention in New Letters’Alexander Cappon story contest and in 2012 it won the Poets & Writers 2012 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. For the last fourteen years, Adam has taught high school English in Baltimore City. The experiences he has with young people in the classroom sometimes find their way into his work.

The Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction is made possible by the generous support of the McGlinn and Hansma families.

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j a n a

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IGLOO Y brother killed himself one Saturday morning, just to spite my mother. It was late May, the weather unusually hot. I was eight. My mother was having a yard sale to make extra money a week after our stepfather, Bill, left “for good,” and she’d warned David that she’d sell his favorite video games, like “Contra” and “Pac-Man,” if he didn’t clean his room before Saturday. Her anger had been mounting for weeks, ever since David got kicked out of school. She had been surprisingly patient those first few days, smoothing his thick red hair and talking to therapists over the phone, asking frantically if they had a name for what was wrong with him. But when he kept acting out, randomly breaking dishes or toys, cursing at her and Bill, she tried being more strict. Suddenly, we both had a lot more rules.

After setting up the tables outside for the yard sale, Mom came in the house to monitor David’s progress on his room. She found him sitting Indian style on the floor, watching television while his Voltron pieces lay in separate pieces all around him. I bit my nails from the doorway. I had cleaned my own room the night before, then moved onto his, picking up dirty tissues and candy wrappers from around his bed, tucking stray clothes inside his drawers and closing them. When David found me, he grabbed me by the wrist and led me away. “I can help,” I said, but he shook his head and said lowly, “Get out, Shelley.” I always did what he said. David never hurt me because I knew when to back away.

Mom was clearly upset that he disregarded her warnings and waved her hands in front of her, saying “That is it!”

She grabbed his video games from the bureau and stormed out of the room.

m

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Off the Grid by Kip Deeds © 2012 David screamed and gripped her legs, and I followed behind, watching his body hit the cracks and corners of the old house every time she made a turn.

When we got outside, David’s face was wet with tears, but it didn’t matter.

Mom untangled his hands from around her ankles and headed for the front yard, where a few people picked up old records, vases, and crocheted baby clothes and set them down again. They looked up as we came out, first hearing

David’s yell, then watching as Mom stepped quickly across the lawn, the video games under her arm. What got him the most upset, it seemed to me, was when she let out a hollow laugh and said her son was “a little eccentric.”

The browsers chuckled nervously, giving us all sideways glances.

I felt David’s anger, and I almost knew what he was going to do before he did it. But I didn’t believe myself. I knew he wanted to avenge my moth-

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er, but he wasn’t sure how. He looked around with his large brown eyes, his cheeks flaming, teeth bared. His gaze stopped at me. He squinted, tilting his head a little to the side. I wouldn’t be much help in my flip-flops and terrycloth jumpsuit. My mother heard his heavy breathing as he focused on the street, but she chose to ignore him.

I wonder how often she looks back on that day and thinks of what she could have done differently. She might still have taken the video games, but maybe she would have locked David in the house afterward.

Or maybe she would have held him around the shoulders as she talked to approaching customers, the rattling gray cassettes safe in his room. She could have just smiled at him, told him it would be okay. Maybe something that small would have saved him.

Instead, he stepped quickly into the street where she always complained cars went too fast, right into an oncoming pick-up truck. At ten years old, he may not have known exactly what kind of damage it could do. The horrible, gnawing instinct in my gut, though, told me that he did.

In January, five months before David died, I walked out to the kitchen for breakfast and saw Mom and Bill— the man David and I secretly referred to as The Stepfather—standing in front of the counter in robes. They were laughing quietly, smoking cigarettes. Mom jolted when she saw me.

“Shelley. Hi.” I wore a Winnie the Pooh nightgown, and my legs grew suddenly cold. I didn’t know The Stepfather would be coming back. Not by the tone of their voices the last time he left, when my mother threw his clothes out to him on the lawn and he got in the car and started driving before his door was even shut. Because

he had been yelling about another person from the front lawn, a “she” who he was going to “live with, rent free,” who didn’t have “a crazy kid” and who gave him the “best head of his life.”

“Well, say hello to your father.”

When Mom married Bill and became Mrs. Middleson a couple of years ago, she said that we should start calling Bill “Dad.” Our real father left when David and I were really young, and whenever we asked about him, Mom said he was never going to come back, so there was no use talking about it. He had problems, she said.

Serious problems. Sometimes I looked at myself in our bathroom mirror and wondered if I got my blue eyes from him. “Hello,” I said to Bill, then turned back to her. “Can I have Apple Jacks?”

“How are you, Shelley?” The Stepfather asked. “I’ve missed you.” He walked over and put his arms around me, his brown mustache tickling my neck. I moved my hands quickly to his shoulders and back again so Mom couldn’t get mad at me for not giving him a hug, but she was too busy humming and reaching for my favorite blue bowl in the cabinet to notice.

“Do you want to watch cartoons while you eat?” she asked.

I nodded and smiled. This was unusual. Most days, she made me eat my cereal at the kitchen table, then dress before I could even consider turning on the television. She and Bill probably wanted to kiss in the kitchen some more.

“David!” She yelled happily as she set my cereal down on the coffee table atop a cotton checkered placemat.

“Come down for breakfast. Wait until you see who’s here!”

I ate the orange and green circles in my bowl and watched the milk turn peach, knowing that when David came down and saw The Stepfather, he’d be upset. I didn’t understand how my mother could forget about the

shouting at dinner or in the car, David always banging the TV while the Stepfather watched football, the pack of beer bottles David had taken from refrigerator and smashed on the cement driveway. Maybe my mother’s greatest flaw was her optimism.

My eyes were glued to the TV screen when I heard David shuffling down the stairs. By this time the Muppet Babies were planning an escape out of the playroom and into the den with the grownups. They were climbing on top of each other in order to turn the knob, just about to fall with a loud crash to the floor.

“David, honey,” I heard my mother say. Even though he was what my family called “difficult,” I thought sometimes that she loved him more. She talked on the phone about him all the time, but never about me. When I asked her about it once, she told me that I was being silly, that we were both wonderful children and she loved us exactly the same. Then she looked off to the side and said softly, almost to herself, that David was just the person who had made her a mother.

The sunlight from the living room window formed a halo around her as she turned off the television and held out her hands to us. Her wavy blonde hair fell to her shoulders, and she pulled us toward her. David wriggled away and scrunched his nose. She sighed, trying not to look perturbed. “I have something special to tell the both of you.” She looked at David, then me. The Stepfather lingered in the doorway to the kitchen, smoking his cigarette. “Bill is coming back to live with us. We’re going to be a family again!” David and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, and she pulled us to either side of her. “And there’s more. Bill got a new job. We’re moving to California!” She smiled, her cheeks a little too wide. “It’s so beautiful there. We’ll all be so happy!”

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Now Bill moved like a shadow behind her, and in the dimness, her cheeks became pale. My heart started to pound. She waited. “Don’t you guys have anything to say?”

I knew that California was where Michael Jackson lived, and maybe Cyndi Lauper, and most of the people we saw in movies. Still, I didn’t want to move. I liked our house, my school, the familiar state of Pennsylvania. I liked driving to my grandmother’s on Saturdays to see Aunt Clair, who made me chocolate milk and let me try on her make-up.

“What about school?” I asked, glancing over at David, whose lips were pushed so tightly together I could only see white skin.

“Well,” my mother said, sitting on the couch and tapping her knee for me to come over. “There are plenty of schools in California. And you won’t ever have to walk to the bus in the cold. It’s always warm.”

“Now, Tina, that’s southern California you’re talking about and we’re not going that far south…closer to San Francisco,” Bill interjected, then paced until he found an ashtray for his cigarette in a corner cabinet.

“Well, still, the winters aren’t as cold as they are here, right?” She said, turning back to look at him.

I stared at her, too startled to know what to say. The creases around her mouth dampened as the moments passed.

“I don’t want to go,” David finally muttered, and moved away from us into the kitchen.

I didn’t like when my cereal got soggy, and I didn’t like how The Stepfather came over and started to rub Mom’s back, so I followed David. I put my cereal bowl in the sink and went upstairs to get dressed, wishing I could have seen the end of my cartoon.

From my bedroom door, I listened hard to see if they talked any more about moving. But the whole down-

stairs was completely quiet.

I didn’t know much about death until I found our cat, Ruby, cold and still next to her water bowl one morning before kindergarten. Her eyes were like blocks of ice as she stared at the floor. I screamed and Mom came and picked her up and started to cry into her fur. We wrapped Ruby in an old blanket and I held her in the back of the car as we drove to the veterinarian. Why did this happen? I asked.

Where did she go?

That was when Mom told David and I about Heaven. It was where her father was, and a lot of other old peo-

ple, and even dogs and cats.

“But what if you die?” I asked her, my voice small in the backseat.

“Don’t worry, Shelley. I won’t die for a really long time.”

“Well, I don’t ever want to die,” I whispered.

“How old?” David asked. Mom put on her turn signal and pulled into the veterinarian’s parking lot.

“What?” she said.

“How old do you have to be?”

David repeated.

She turned to look at us. “Older than you can even imagine.”

The nights after Ruby’s death, I asked what Heaven looked like, and

Doll-Y by Diana Trout © 2012

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i g l o o why our bodies had to stop working.

Mom brushed the hair on my head with her fingernails and told me that even though Ruby was gone and we couldn’t see her, she was still around.

Mom knew this because she felt her father with her all the time. “Where?”

I had asked. “In my heart,” she answered, and said I should stop worrying and go to sleep. Nothing bad was going to happen.

David and I pretended to die for weeks afterward. We shot each other and fell to the ground, our legs splayed and our tongues hanging out of our mouths. Then we stood up, staggering from one end of the room to the other, haunting the furniture.

By the time dinner came, though, we were always alive.

Even though I watched it happen—the truck hitting David, my mom’s shriek, the driver getting out and falling to the ground, David’s body twisted and motionless under the tires as someone grabbed me and covered my face—even then, it didn’t seem possible that a boy, my brother, could really die.

The night before David’s funeral, I lay under covers and listened to my grandmother’s cough downstairs and my aunt Clair murmuring on the phone every time it rang. I stared at the butterfly border in my room until David appeared.

It was all a mistake, he said, his voice like a whisper, his arms and legs hidden underneath a puffy white snowsuit. (Heaven was cold.)

He wouldn’t be able to go to school anymore, he explained, but he’d always be here, hanging out and watching my life like I was on TV. That I can deal with, I said. Maybe you should tell Mom about this, because she’s been crying for days.

No, Shelley. He rubbed my back as I drifted into sleep. This is just between us.

The next morning, Aunt Clair

helped me put on the dress she had bought me at the mall. She wanted me to wear stockings, but I shook my head emphatically. The humidity had made it hard to sleep at night, and there was no way I was going to wear any more layers than I had to. Clair had promised to stay with me while everyone went ahead so we could talk. She was dressed in black pants and a jacket, her forehead sprinkled with tiny beads of sweat. I noticed a small gold angel pinned to her jacket.

She held my dress open and told me to step in. As she pulled the sleeves up over my shoulders, I pointed and asked her, “What’s that?”

She looked down. “Oh.” She touched the pin. “I got this when I was a teenager. A friend bought it for me when my father died.”

My grandfather, I almost said.

“Sometimes I think that maybe my father died, too, and that’s why he never comes to see us.”

Aunt Clair froze for a moment before smoothing the sleeves of my dress.

“Can I touch it?” I asked and pointed to the pin.

She looked at me with a frown, rested on her knees, and began to unclasp it. She then clipped it to my collar, trying hard to smile. “There you go. You can have it. How about that?”

“Thanks!” I said, and strained the muscles in my eyes as I went into the bathroom, still trying to get a good look.

Later, in the car, I asked Aunt Clair if angels really existed.

“Sure, I guess. It depends on what you believe. But a lot of people believe in angels.”

“Do you?”

Aunt Clair stared straight ahead before looking at me out of the corner of her eyes. She took a long time to answer.

“I don’t know.”

“Then why were you wearing one on your shirt today?”

We stopped at a red light and she rubbed her forehead with her left hand, leaning her elbow into the window. The light turned green.

“I hope, Shelley. But sometimes I don’t know.”

I had always thought of Aunt Clair as a happy person. She had a beauty about her, the way she walked with her toes pointed out, the way she laughed and her shoulders bunched up toward her cheeks. I still liked to step into her high-heels at my grandmother’s and walk around the dining room pretending to be her, my hips slow and graceful. Now, in the car, she seemed sad.

“Is it because of David?” I asked. I didn’t look at her as the words came out of my mouth. It was raining outside, and I watched the way the raindrops on my window slithered down like tiny crystal snakes.

Aunt Clair turned her neck to see if anyone was behind her, and then pulled the car over to the side of the road. She put her flashers on and stopped, looking at me only after she took a couple of deep breaths.

She finally spoke. “I really miss your brother, Shelley. I know you do, too. Are you doing okay?”

I thought for a moment, wondering if I should tell her how David came to my room the night before and made me feel like everything would be okay. Maybe she’d believe me. “I think so.”

Aunt Clair unhooked her seat belt and leaned over to unhook mine.

Then she held me tightly, so tightly that my mouth was open against her polyester jacket, and I was sure I was drooling on it. She didn’t seem to mind. I felt her body shake and tiny sobs slip out of her throat. After a few minutes, she calmed down and let go.

I watched as she wiped her eyes and

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talked into the steering wheel.

“Shelley, this is going to be hard for you. It’s going to be hard for everybody, but it’s really going to be hard on you. You looked up to David.”

Of course I looked up to him, I thought. He was taller.

“Do you know what happens when a person dies?” she asked.

I nodded. When David came down, he told me Heaven was a large igloo in the sky. Everyone milled around with paper cups full of hot chocolate. He said he kind of liked it.

“He never comes back,” Claire said.

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t speak.

Clair swallowed. “No one can ever see him again, except in pictures. And memories.” By this time, her hand was on my shoulder, rubbing until I felt raw.

“But you live in people’s hearts,” I said, correcting her. “It’s just your body that’s gone.” I looked back at the windshield, at the glass-stemmed snakes floating toward the car’s hood.

Aunt Clair was silent next to me, and I thought she might never understand.

“Can we go?” I murmured. For the first time ever, I was tired of talking to her.

“Yes,” she whispered, and took her hand from my shoulder. I stared at the crystal snakes as they danced down the glass and melted against the windshield wipers. Clair put her blinker on, pulled the gearshift toward her, and drove back onto the road.

l 20

At the funeral home, a gray-haired man I’d never seen before was standing in a white robe at the front of the room. As people approached the casket, he took their hands and stared deeply into their eyes.

“Who is that?” I asked Aunt Clair and tugged on her hand.

She looked down at me and whispered, “That’s the priest. Father Martin.”

I had only gone to church a few times when I slept over my grandmother’s. I liked the pictures in the windows and the smell of burnt candles, but usually I was embarrassed that I didn’t know when to sit or stand, that I couldn’t get up with everyone else when it was time for communion.

Once, I fell asleep. My grandmom stopped taking me, said that it was my mother’s job to give me “a spiritual life.” When I asked Mom to go to church, she told me she didn’t like that church very much and she was going to find a better one for us. She must have never stopped looking, because on Sunday mornings, we all just watched cartoons and ate donuts.

Now, in front of the room, the priest looked like an intruder, and it bothered me when he started talking as though he knew David.

“Some children are not long for this earth,” Father Martin began, and Aunt Clair and I took our seats in the front row, next to Mom and Bill, who had flown back from California when he heard about David. I gazed around at all the people who dabbed their noses with tissues. As the priest spoke, I let my eyes drift to every corner of the room except the solid brown casket in front of me.

After Father Martin finished talking, I wandered into the foyer where there was a deep red rug with tiny flowers. When I thought no one was watching, I knelt down and counted them, knowing that this would be David’s favorite spot. He’d lie on his stomach and gaze at the patterns until Mom hissed at him to get up, that someone was going to trip over him.

I had never seen so many people that I didn’t know in one place, all of them crying.

Most of them stood in a line so they could kneel at the casket, then light a thin white candle. Old people I had never seen stood off to the side and shook their heads at how beauti-

ful the flowers were. My mom stayed in the front row with a tissue in her hand, occasionally lowering her face and blowing her nose. When I returned to my seat, she squeezed me to her for a few minutes and kept her eyes closed. I thought she was pretending I was David. He and I used the same apple shampoo.

After a couple of hours, people filed out of the room until it was only our close family left: Mom, Bill, me, Aunt Clair and Grandmom. Mom leaned over and asked if I wanted to see David before we went to the cemetery. I could feel everyone looking at me as we walked up together. I was scared, but I watched and copied as she made a cross on her chest.

Looking at David up close, I could see that he was yellow and wooden in a navy jacket and tie, not in the white snowsuit I had expected. His hair was flat on his head instead of messy, his eyelids closed, like a doll’s. It was almost as if someone had come with a vacuum and sucked out all of his organs. He was there, but he wasn’t. I wanted him to act like he used to, to get mad and leap up, screaming that we should all stop staring.

He wouldn’t, though. He was dead.

For a moment, everything was quiet and cloudy, but then I heard Mom’s sobs and heaves and felt her being pulled away, falling onto Bill’s chest. Now she screamed and moaned like an animal, and it made my mouth fall apart so that I sounded like a monkey, too. I ran out of the room and spread myself on the rug and put my eyes close to the flowery print, hoping that if I looked hard enough and long enough, it would erase the picture of my brother flat in the casket, the sound of my mother’s scream.

l Mom wouldn’t leave her bedroom.

Aunt Clair slept every night on the

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Sestina for El Barrio

By Angela Canales Under a pale sun, a dark-haired woman sweeps glass smashed in last night’s brawl. Scattered shards are edged in blood. Across the street a boy dribbles a ball—a steady beat like fired shots. The woman brushes silt and sings: mi amor volverá (my love will come back).

Around the corner, Pacho leans back and lights another smoke. His thick glasses make him look startled. A song crackles under a needle as he arranges scattered photographs. A solitaire hand that beats him every time. He wears his son’s crucifix.

His only boy, first caught in crossfire and then a crowded E.R. Shouts for back-up, a gurney, a god had filled ellipses beating from monitors. Finally, his son’s eyes had glassed over. Pacho gathers the pictures, scattering his ashes on the floor… Down the block a song rises from St. Michael’s church. A song about a shepherd who bled from a cross and promised salvation to his scattered flock. Two boys lounge in a back pew. Figures plead in panes of glass.

Candle shadows shimmy like girls. Qué ritmo, they crack, craving the bass beats that boom from cars. It’s always the same song.

The priest pours wine into the chalice studded with glass as voices climb the steeple’s cross and pierce the sky. On stone ledges, birds back away as a gust scatters dust and leaves. Then they burst—scattering up like cards after drunk fists beat down… Pacho sticks the needle back into its track. From idling cars, songs unfurl like skulls and cross-bones.

The woman at her window slides her glass.

Cross now, she beats the sill, scattering curses. (It’s always the same song.) The boys saunter off, caps on backward, the grooves of their soles glistening with stained glass.

Angela Canales is a high school educator, freelance editor, translator and writer. She earned her master’s in Writing Studies from St. Joseph’s University, and her story “Out of Nowhere” was included in the 2009 anthology The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2. Most recently, she was included in the 2012 cast of Listen to Your Mother, a national 10-city reading series exploring the bond between mothers and children.

couch, making me breakfast and lunch and filling up the tub for my baths. My grandmother, her gray hair in plastic curlers, came over every day to do laundry and eat dinner with us and take a bowl of soup to my mom.

Sometimes, I saw my grandmother wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and other times Aunt Clair stared straight ahead and didn’t hear the phone ring or me asking her a question. They took me to the park a couple of times, but I just climbed the wooden steps in my flip-flops and loosely gripped the monkey bars. It didn’t seem right to have fun when your brother was dead.

I missed David, but I still talked to him in my bedroom at night when everything was dark. He always appeared in his snowsuit, blowing into a paper cup. Steam rose in the shape of an O. I hate him, he said, referring to Bill, who had started to come over each day and spend long hours in Mom’s room. Why can’t he just go away and stop coming back?

Mom loves him, I heard myself whisper. Maybe he makes her feel better.

David shook his head. She has another kid, you know, and he nodded in my direction.

I stared back.

He’s not our real father, David said. She should stop pretending.

I shrugged. At least Bill comes back.

I’m going to find him, Shelley, David said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about Bill. He started to fade into nothingness again as I closed my eyes.

Maybe that’s why I died.

l My mom didn’t leave her room for days, but finally, on a Friday afternoon when Bill went to the store and Aunt Clair sat with me playing Legos, she appeared in the doorway to the living

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room and looked around nervously.

Mom had put on jeans and her favorite t-shirt, but her body looked like a deflated balloon. Her hair seemed to have grown since I last saw her.

“What are you guys doing?” she asked softly and sat down on the couch. I wondered if she’d ever get her normal voice back, or if it was something that had left along with David.

“Playing Legos. I’m making a house and a garage,” I told her. “Aunt Clair is making a barn.” I paused and leaned back on my feet. “Do you want to help?”

Mom shook her head, her hair greasy as she tucked it behind her ear.

“I think I’ll just watch you.” She gazed at me from the couch, her eyes falling to the floor. When I got up and went over to give her a hug, she held me so tight I thought she might not let go. It felt like I might stop breathing, but that would be okay.

l

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There was a reason we never went to California.

The day after my mother had made her big announcement to us in the living room, the sunlight streaming like tentacles around her, David’s school had called and said he was being “expelled.”

He bit a girl on the shoulder and then tried to hurt his teacher when she pulled him away. Security had to come and keep him in the principal’s office. As the bus dropped me off and I saw her car in the driveway, I knew something was wrong. Usually the babysitter, Theresa, stayed with us after school, watching soap operas in her bare feet with an algebra book open on the coffee table.

The first person I saw was David, sitting on the loveseat with his head down and his hands tucked under his legs. He didn’t look up when I came in, although I knew he heard the door.

His eyes seemed to be transfixed by a pull in the couch, cushiony white stuffing that bulged through beige

corduroy. My mother was on the phone arguing with someone, yelling about “this condition” and “What am I supposed to do with him?”

I put my backpack down and sat on the couch next to David, tucking my hands under my legs, too. “What happened?” I asked.

He shook his head and kept looking down. “I was bad.”

We both listened to Mom on the phone telling the story, her voice growing squeaky and desperate.

Finally, after a few minutes of my staring at David and his staring at the couch cushion, Mom came out of the kitchen and looked at us.

“Listen, Shelley. I’m going to drop you off at Mary’s, and I have to take David somewhere.”

“Where?”

“To a doctor. So you’re going to go to Mary’s, okay? She’s having spaghetti for dinner. I told her you love that.”

Mom knelt down in front of David and touched his knees. “David, we’re going to go talk to someone for a little while, okay? I think you’ll like him.” I was surprised by how nice she was being to him, treating him like a sick old person.

David looked up after a minute and nodded, then returned his gaze to the cushion.

“Come on, Shelley. Grab your backpack. Mary will help you with your homework.”

She got up and led David toward the door. He kept his head still, his eyes sad as a dog’s.

That night, I stayed with Mary Connors, our neighbor from a couple of houses over, until 10 o’clock. I watched TV with her kids, ate spaghetti, and helped put the dishes in the dishwasher. Mr. Connors even bought us milkshakes from the pizza parlor around the corner. By the time Mom came back to get me, I was sleeping on the couch in a pair of

someone else’s pajamas. I was only half-conscious as she led me into the front seat of the car and took me home. The next morning, Mom didn’t get ready for work as usual, because she said she had to stay with David. It wasn’t until I saw Bill sitting on the couch, after school, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the window, that I remembered our big plans. He looked over at me, but slowly turned his head again. Mom came in from David’s bedroom and asked me if I wanted a snack.

“Are we still going to California?” I asked, looking at her, then at Bill.

“Come on, Shelley. Do you want some pretzels? Or crackers?” She waved me into the kitchen.

Later, I heard Mom and Bill shouting in the bedroom, Mom saying something about “stability” and Bill shouting back, “your promise.” They fought every day until the night he stomped out the door, David and I listening on our hands and knees from the top of the stairs. I don’t know if Bill would have come back if not for David’s funeral.

l Before David jumped in front of the truck, he looked at me. I thought it was an angry look at first, but now I think it was his way of saying goodbye. He wasn’t good at talking, at explaining why he got so angry all the time. Mom couldn’t figure out what it was that caused him to explode.

Maybe he knew that day at the yard sale that nothing would ever change.

Maybe he wanted to escape.

After school and during the summers, Mom often nagged David to play outside with the other kids his age, to start a game of kickball, to make friends. What she didn’t realize was I was his only friend in the whole world.

I talk to David each night before I go to bed. I tell him that Mom is doing

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better, that I even saw her laugh during a movie she was watching with Bill, that her giggle was like a burst of flowers in the house. I tell him that Aunt Clair and Grandmom left when Bill moved back, that I saw him hugging Grandmom in the kitchen and swaying back and forth with her, tears in his eyes.

You mean, you saw him cry? David asks.

Yes, I say, my eyes wide. It was weird.

I tell him that we’re planning to move to another house. A fresh start.

Hmm, he says, and listens. More than anything else, the white-snowsuit-David always listens.

l “My mother says it’s a tragedy that your brother died and your father still didn’t come back.” It is recess, September, about four months after David’s death. Even though Mom and Bill and I moved, I still go to the same school. Sometimes, I wish I could go somewhere else, a place where no one knows about my young dead brother.

his car every morning.

And he helps my mom make dinner.” My finger traces another line in the dirt, a boy with spikes coming out of his back, like a dragon.

“That’s your stepfather, though. Not your real dad. Not the man who made you with your mom.” She holds her palms up, her hip cocked to the side.

“See?” I shake my head and stand up to correct her.

I begin to smooth over my picture with the toe of my shoe. “No. Bill is my dad. All your dad Couch by Suzie Forrester © 2012 needs to do is love you to be a dad.” Mrs. Now, Molly Leonard corners me by Cohen, my new third grade teacher, the fence, where I am tracing pictures starts to ring the bell from the school in the dirt. She blows bubbles with steps, our sign that recess is over. her gum—which she isn’t supposed to “Well, that can’t be. Cause how is have—and waits for a reaction. he different from an uncle, then? Or a I wish our playground had swings, brother?” or even a sliding board, but all kids do The picture I made is gone, during recess is chase each other and smoothed over like sand. Tomorrow, I’ll stand in circles and ask stupid quescome to the same spot and make anothtions. “Well,” I say finally, my forefiner one, like I do every day at recess. ger drawing tiny clouds in the dirt.

“Because an uncle has his own family he “My father did come back. He bought lives with. And a brother is someone us the new house we’re living in.” your own age.” I run to the school steps “Oh.” She pauses. “But my mom to get away from Molly, and I look up said he lived far away.” into the sky and roll my eyes.

My heart stops for a second. And Molly Leonard, I whisper. then I remember what David told me Such a brat, David says. a few nights ago, that he flew around I get in line behind Judith Paulson the country for days, looking to find and in front of Gary Pullman, right where our biological father was. He where Peterson fits in, the name I even asked some old people while share only with David. they were shoveling snow in heaven.

Poof, they told David. Gone. Just like a magic trick. “Well, your mom is Jana Llewellyn taught English and writing wrong,” I tell Molly. for over a decade. She is now Associate Editor at Friends Journal magazine. She lives in Molly is quiet as she drags the side Havertown with her husband, son and daughter. of her shoe against the dirt.

"Igloo" was a runner up in the 2012 Marguerite “My father drives me to school in McGlinn National Short Story contest.

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g e o r g e

NAKED AND HUNGRY he first time you saw me naked, I was standing in front of the refrigerator. I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to get something to eat. It was pitch black except for the refrigerator light glaring out at me, illuminating my naked body as I hunched into the fridge to see what was inside. It was that tiny kitchen in West Philadelphia, with the cracked linoleum floors and the tin-topped kitchen table.

I thought you were sleeping, so I didn’t bother putting my clothes back on. Sure, we’d already had sex, but not so many times that I’d let you get a good look at me. Always, there’d been partial clothing or sheets or fast getaways. You, on the other hand, you couldn’t wait to be naked in front of me.

I remember you stood next to our first pre-coital bed and tore off your underwear as you asked, “Is this okay?”

You were naked and lying next me before I could answer.

This was back when I still went to your apartment with legs and armpits clean-shaven. I still surveyed the six or so moles on my body that grow very long hairs and dutifully kept them plucked clean for you. I protected you from my sulfurous morning breath and always darted to the bathroom to brush

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my teeth before we’d go again.

This was back when you were a bachelor whose bathroom window was a broken pane of glass. Your front door wouldn’t shut, much less lock.

You dried oranges and other fruits in papers bags all around the apartment because there was no one there to object to the strangeness of it or the potential for mold.

When I heard your footsteps on that old wood floor in the hallway, I considered hiding behind the refrigerator door, but it seemed childish, and there wasn’t enough time anyway.

Suddenly you were there, leaning against the door jamb, watching me.

I tried to pretend I was not at all bothered by your seeing me this way,

and I went about my business as if there was nothing at all wrong with midnight snacking. (The idea of hiding my body or my eating habits from you seems ridiculous to me now. My body has performed most of its basest functions in your presence. I have retched out sobs and vomit at your feet.) But then, you looked at my naked body, its unruly ripples, my bulbous inner thighs. You looked at me, naked and holding a carton of milk, scavenging in the darkness for a bite of old cheese or a jar of peanut butter I could dip a finger into. You looked at this thing, my body, lit strangely by a small, dirty light bulb, and you began to smile that upside down smile of yours, where the corners of your

Ali’s Garden by Jessica Taylor © 2012

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n a k e d

Road Poem

By Tom Pescatore There’s paint slapped onto my sky, thick like an impression on my aching—scratch ink into leather bound sketch journal one long poem out of love, want to take road poem and turn that into novella that’s effortlessly sad but beautiful and bring back those days roaring through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—breakfast, sausage gravy—bat factory—beer— Dave and Joe up front and me studying maps in the back, shouting directions—no GPS bullshit, horseshit—doing it ourselves, it’s been three months—three million years, the crops are shriveled junk melted down and shot into our arms, the city is torn down about my knees—I’ve nothing left but survival and words Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, he is an active member of the growing underground arts scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.

His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.

a n d

h u n g r y

mouth are turning down, but somehow it’s a smile anyway.

You looked at me as if I were the Pacific Ocean or a newborn baby or the goddamned pyramids in Egypt.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” you said. Like you could hardly believe it.

Like you were somehow proud and thankful all at once to God and me and refrigerator lights.

I stood up straight to meet your eyes. And suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

Kelly George is a doctoral candidate at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University. She is now married to the man who appeared unexpectedly to watch as she rummaged, nude, through his refrigerator.

Sandy Crimmins The

National Prize for Poetry First place: $1,000, an invitation to an awards dinner, and publication.

Second place: $250 and publication.

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Deadline: NOVEMBER 1, 2012 Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details.

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a u t h o r

p r o f i l e

SHAUN HAURIN

By Marc Schuster

Q: What’s the unifying theme of your collection, and how did you decide on the sequence of stories?

A: Love, of course! But other detectable themes include squandered talent and this driving need we all have to constantly reinvent ourselves, whether reinvention means sporting a new pair of spectacles on any given day or something more profound and truly life-altering.

Q: Public Displays of Affectation features a fairly long piece, a novella-length story titled “ Me, Tarzan.”

What’s it about, and what was behind the decision to include it?

A: “Me, Tarzan” is a coming-of-age story that deals with the question of personal fulfillment vs. familial duty. The adolescent protagonist is in search of a father figure, and he finds a flamboyant (though less-than-satisfactory) one in the person of Johnny Paradise. I included the story because it serves as a thematic microcosm for the entire collection.

This fall, PS Books releases its latest title, Public Displays of Affectation by local author Shaun Haurin. Marc Schuster interviewed Shaun to Q: Your book trailer features a young woman walking the streets of Philadelphia armed with a water pistol learn more.

Q: All of the stories in Public Displays of Affectation are set in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs. What’s your connection to the city, and what makes it an ideal setting for this collection?

A: Aside from my having been born and raised here, the stories are set in Philadelphia because this city is a perfect metaphor for two seemingly contradictory sides of my personality. I’ve long since tried to reconcile the dreamy artist in me with the working-class pragmatist who says I should be doing something more respectable or lucrative with my life. (Many of the characters in PDA are struggling or failed artists at odds with themselves.) Obviously there’s a thriving arts scene here in Philly, but in my experience there’s also a stigma associated with making art, as if it’s frivolous or somehow not hard work. As a fiction writer, I can tell you that all worthwhile fiction is hard work.

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and haunted by a pair of lovers. How does the trailer relate to the collection?

A: “Blondie Girl” (as she appears in the credits) is not a big fan of public displays of affection/affectation, although she too traffics heavily in the trappings of reinvention. There are quotations from the book interspersed throughout the trailer, but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously while shooting it. Once I had the image of her filling a water pistol at the beginning, Chekhov pretty much dictated how it would end.

Q: Are you working on anything new?

A: Yes, the novel I’m currently working on is another exploration of the theme of reinvention, only now the emphasis has shifted a bit to the ways in which we invent each other.

Q: Many of the stories in your collection are about love and the many forms it takes—as Liz Moore says in one of your blurbs, “ new love, old love, faithful and unfaithful love.” What draws you to this theme?

A: Walter Ego once said that all thematic roads, no matter how circuitous, eventually lead back to love.

To order a copy of Public Displays of Affectation, visit www.psbookspublishing.org

PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 27

n a m e

o f

a u t h o r

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS

Who are you?

Find the answer in your memoir Custom and scheduled workshops

by Jerry Waxler M.S.

JerryWaxler.com • memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/

Philadelphia

Great Books

Interested in joining a Great Books discussion group?

Creative Writing

There are over 50 groups meeting regularly in PA/NJ/DE using the Shared Inquiry Method for discussing significant works of literature or non-fiction.

Workshops

Contact us to find a Great Books discussion group in your area:

Express your unique voice. Find joy in

writing.

Evening and daytime workshops

phila1@greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see

www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

Ambler, PA • Center City, PA • Havertown, PA

Writers of all levels welcome Fiction • Non-fiction • Creative non-fiction • Memoir • Poetry

Visit Beauty for Philadelphia Citiscapes

Find out if the workshop is right for you.

Sit in on one workshop meeting for FREE, by appointment only.

Alison Hicks, MFA, Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio www.philawordshop.com • ahicks@philawordshop.com • 610-853-0296 Monday evenings in Havertown • Tuesday evenings in Center City Private Consultation for Manuscript Development

Visit us Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment.

Rachel Kobin, Philadelphia Writers Workshop www.phillywriters.com • Rachel@phillywriters.com • 610-449-3773 Tuesday evenings in Ambler • Sunday afternoons in Center City Private Consultation for Manuscript Development

3857 Providence Rd., Newtown Sq., PA 19073 610-353-4569 | www.beautyartgallery.net

Headhouse Market 15 x 30, oil on canvas by Paul MacWilliams

PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 28

a i m e e ’ s

T i p s

MUSINGS ON THE MUSE

by Aimee LaBrie

I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk about nurturing creativity on YouTube the other day. She focused mainly on the idea that we must listen to our muse, or our divine attendant spirits, as she defined it. We must be ready for him/it/her, trust that he/it/she will show up and we can then transcribe whatever genius the thing has to say.

She said that she had to learn to do this because of her own freakishly amazing success. I hated this advice, in part because I am jealous of that very success. But I also hated it because hearing a writer speak of her muse smacks a bit like pretension and faux modesty. It also mythologizes what I think is quite a much more basic process, the importance of the daily act of writing. But mostly, I objected to it because I don’t believe in THE MUSE. What does this muse look like? Does he wear a hat with

bells? Is he slightly amorphous, made of smoke, and prone to fits of Yeats in an Irish accent? Hearkening to your muse reminds me of theater majors I knew in college who did lots of mushrooms, lost themselves in drum circles, and talked about waiting for their characters to speak to them. And this, in turn, reminds me of Laurence Olivier’s possibly made up quote to an exhausted Dustin Hoffman, who had stayed up for three nights in order to be convincing in this role: “Try acting, dear boy.”

In the same vein, I’d advise you, instead of waiting for your divine being to show up and extinguish his hooka, try writing. By yourself. With Belle and Sebastian playing in the background if that inspires you, but not with a genie lamp on your lap.

There is no secret to writing, no mystical being who is giving you your images, your memories, your characters. It is the continual act of facing a blank screen, the empty page and moving forward word by word, even

PUSH

when you don’t really want to do the work. Imagining that writing must come from beyond ourselves or from divine inspiration by God or Allah allows for a ready excuse when we’re too tired or too bored or too distracted—we can say that our muse is vacationing down the shore and go make a sandwich instead. Here’s what I say: don’t wait for him. Write it.

However, if it helps you to believe that your writing is inspired by divinity, then that’s okay too. Do whatever you need to do to get yourself in front of computer or the notebook or the papyrus scroll. Write all the bad scenes where your characters behave in cliched ways and where you kill everyone off in the end in a fiery car crash. If you just stick with it, every day, all the time, I promise you, magic can happen. Magic that you make on your own.

Aimee LaBrie is an award-winning author and teaches a fiction workshop for Philadelphia Stories.

October 13, 2012 9:00am- 5:00pm Rosemont College | 1400 Montgomery Ave. | Rosemont, PA 19010 “This was the best conference of any type I have ever attended. I found both encouragement and very practical advice.”

— from a 2011 survey of PTP attendees

TO PUBLISH Strategies and Techniques to Get Your Work in Print and Online

Keynote speaker: Kevin McKilvoy

Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for complete schedule and registration information.

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The Do’s (and Some Don’ts) of a Successful Speed Date by MM Wittle I’ve been on both sides of the speed-dating table at Push to Publish. As many of you begin to prepare for your own special tenminute talk with an agent or editor, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned to do and what to avoid in order to get the most out of your ten minutes.

Do come prepared. As an editor, I had ten minutes to read an author’s writing sample and offer suggestions. I couldn’t read a fifteenpage story and give feedback. Come with three pages of your short story. If you have a novel, have an elevator pitch (a one-minute description of the novel) and a few pages of the work. You want your work read, but you really want the discussion. Make sure the bulk of your ten minutes is devoted to talking to the editor or agent.

Research the editors/agents coming to the event. As a literary fiction editor for a magazine that does not accept genre, I had someone hand me a sci-fi fantasy piece. Again, you have ten minutes with this person. You want to make sure you are sitting across from someone who really can advise you. Keep in mind, you are signing up for these editors/agents at registration. Do your homework to choose the best editor or agent for your work, and make sure to have a couple of back-up people just in case that person’s time slots get filled. All of the bios are posted on the website well in advance of the conference.

Do not request a speed date with an agent if you are not ready. I know this is hard to hear. Most attendees want to meet with agents. However, during the speed dates, agents want to meet with authors who have polished, edited, revised material ready to pitch to

prised no one thought to ask me anything else. While, yes, it is your time to discuss your work, you have an agent/editor sitting right there giving you her attention. Pick her brain. The goal is to help you feel ready to get your work published. Be your own advocate.

a publishing house. Agents do not want to spend this time listening to ideas for novels or reading unfinished material.

This does not mean agents don’t want to meet you or hear your ideas— just not during the speed date session.

Agents will be there most of the day, and they DO want to make connections with talented writers. Introduce yourself at lunch or say hello after the afternoon “Meet the Editors and Agents” panel. Get business cards.

Follow up as appropriate. Review all agent bios and make a connection with someone you think might be a good connection when you are ready.

Make a good impression by making the most of both of your time.

Also, consider attending Friday’s “Spend the Day with an Agent” workshop. Agent Sheree Bykofsky offers insider tips for how to find an agent, and provides the opportunity to review individual query letters.

Come with specific questions you want the editor/agent to answer for you. As an editor, I tried to make sure I left time for the person to ask me any additional questions. During this additional time, all of my speed date authors looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my nose. I was sur-

Put your best foot forward.

Have your work printed, held in a folder, typed, Times New Roam 12 point font, and double spaced.

Anything else will be very hard for your editor/agent to read. One of the authors I met with handed me a handwritten story. I wasted most of our ten minutes just trying to read the author’s handwriting, and the writer lost valuable time.

Smile, and relax. Remember, the editor or agent in front of you is a person.

As an editor, I was initially nervous when I had my first few “dates.” As a writer, I was also freaking out at first. Then, I smiled and cracked a joke. The tension dissipated, and we had a great conversation about my poem and my ability to be a poet. Basically, be yourself.

The bottom line is this: you are coming to this event to push yourself and your work into the publishing world. I have yet to meet a kinder and more welcoming community than at the Push to Publish conference each year. Relax and be prepared.

MM Wittle is a professor of writing with an MFA from Rosemont College in Creative Writing. MM’s work has appeared in Nailpolish Stories, Transient, The Bond Street Review, and is forthcoming in The Fox Chase Review, and Free Flash Fiction. For the past seven years, MM has been a fiction board member of the local nonprofit literary magazine, Philadelphia Stories and is now a PS Books Poetry and Creative Nonfiction editor.

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

Michener Level ($25 - $40) (1 Anonymous)

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Alan O’Leary Alison Baer & Jeff Hirsch Allan Heller Angela Speakman Anne Hunter April Fox Barb & J.J. Cutler Barbara Bloom Barbara Brignola Brian Kraft Carl Flahaven Carolyn Guss Catherine Stine Charles McGray Christine Nelson Christine Obst Christopher Mills Concha Alborg Damond Warren Debbie McFeelay Diana Krantz Diane Guarnieri Diane Mackelvey Dianna Sinovic Dolores Wilkinson Donielle Jones Dorothy DiRienzi Ed Kratz Elizabeth Bodien Faith Paulsen Fran Metzman Freda Egnal Gail Comorat Georgia Onart Helen Mallon Irene Fick Jane McGovern Jane Saunier Jeanne Gonzalez Jeffrey Klemens Jennifer Dally Jennifer Corey Jenny Williams Jessica Herring Jessica Taylor Jim Breslin Joseph J. Feeney Joseph Fleckenstein Josephine A. Graham Judi Brown Judith Ingram Judy Heller Julie Chinitz Kathye Fetsko Petrie & Michael Petrie Katie Braithwaite Katie King Katy McSurdy Kay Peters Kevin & Angela Cook Kristin McKeown & Henry Joy McKeown Linda Wisniewski Lisa Kern Lisa Meritz Lise Funderburg Liz Dolan Lois Rudnick Lynn Rosen & Evan Schwartz Mama~razzi Photography Marguerite Ferra

Members as of August 25th, 2012 Marilyn Carrier Mark Zettlemoyer Marlene Richter Mary Erpel Mary Gilman MaryAnn Miller Maureen Brady Melissa Sodowick Mo Ganey & Don Kates Natalie Dyen Nicole Monaghan Pam Pastorino Pamela Learned Patricia Pickup Paul Elwork Rex Sexton RFC Consulting Robert Sheppard Rosemary Cappello Ruth Littner Sandra Chaff Stefanie Levine & Steven Cohen Stephen Morgan Susan Balee Susan Chamberlain Susan Weidener Suzanne Carey Zielinski Suzanne Chang Suzanne Comer Terry Mergenthal Tom Molinaro Virginia Dillon Wesley Ward William Hengst In Memory of Colin Kirvy

Buck Level ($50 -$99)

Nimisha Ladva Richard Mandel Robert Cook Ronald Holtman Sharada Krishnamurthy Suzanne Kimball Terry Heyman Tim Kissell

Whitman Level ($100 - $400) (1 Anonymous) Aimee Labrie Annalie Hudson Minter Hermann W. Pfefferkorn James Zervanos Janice Hayes-Cha & Jang-Ho Cha John Higgins John Shea Joseph Wechselberger Judy Jones Kathleen Furnin Kelly Simmons & Jay H. Bolling L.M. Asta Martha & Tom Carroll Michelle Wittle Nathan Long Noble Thompson Jr. Paul & Cecie Dry Paul & Janice Stridick Rachel Simon Ralph & Lee Doty Randall Brown & Meg Boscov Sharon Sood & Scott Lempert Thomas Carroll Tom & Sandy Moore Virginia Reid

(2 Anonymous) Barry Dinerman & Monroe Buckner Betsy Haase Carlo & Sharon Spataro Christine & Tom Barnes Christopher Beardsley Dana & Chris Scott Daniel & Carolyn Barry David Sanders & Nancy Brokaw Douglas Gordon Ed Ruggero Eileen Cunniffe Ellen Reynolds Frank Diamond Jean Dowdall John Higgins Joanne Green Julie Cohen & Nigel Blower Karen Glick Karen & Dan Gruen Kevin & Beatrice Hogan Krista McKay Lawrence O. Spataro Leigh Goldenberg Lyndon Back Lynn Doerr Margaret Griffen Margaret Lockwood Maria Ceferatti Marlynn & Randy Alkins Martha Bottomley Martin Evans Mary Scherf

Potok Level ($500- $999)

Kerri & Marc Schuster Michael Ritter & Christine Furtek Mitchell Sommers

W.C. Williams Level ($1000+)

Heather McGlinn Hansma & Scott Hansma Joseph A. Sullivan Thomas McGlinn

Sustainer Members Courtney Bambrick (Buck Level) Julie Odell (Whitman Level)

Want to become a member of Philadelphia Stories? Please visit www.philadelphiastories.org

PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 31

A MAGAZINE THAT CREATES COMMUNITY

FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y

Thanks to member support, we have been able to accomplish the following to date: * Publish 32 issues without missing an issue. * Review more than 6,000 submissions of fiction, poetry, and essays. * Publish more than 300 local poets, essayists and fiction writers. * Distribute thousands of copies of the magazine through more than 150 locations. * Offer more than 500 participants professional development events for writers. * Introduce hundreds of guests to established and emerging writers through ongoing free readings. * Host events that have brought out hundreds of people to enjoy music, food, and fun in support of Philadelphia Stories. * Bring together hundreds of community members to support the magazine.

YOU can help keep Philadelphia Stories—a non-profit 501c3 managed completely by a staff of volunteers—in print and free by making a donation today! For as little as $25 a year, you can get home delivery and know that your gift directly supports the local arts community.

I understand the importance of providing arts and culture that is accessible to everyone through a publication like Philadelphia Stories.

□ Michener($25-$49) □ Buck ($50-$99) □ Whitman ($100-$499)

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Thank you for your generous support of Philadelphia Stories

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PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 32

fe ust be more to l i ere m “Th

ing everything n hav .” tha

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

poetry, creative nonfiction, short-story, novel, dramatic writing, or writing for children and young adults

Suburban Philadelphia