Philadelphia Stories Fall 2013

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free

Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

Marguerite McGlinn National Fiction Prize Winners: che yeun

One in Ten Fish Are Afraid of Water Second Place Winner: annam manthiram

The Rules of Mending

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Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

Leaf by Rob Giglio. Rob’s passion for image making came from his father, who was a professional photographer. He works as a Colorist at NFL Films and plays drums for the bands Beretta76 and Creem Circus.

FEATURES 4 One in Ten Fish Are Afraid of Water (fiction) . . . . Che Yeun 13 The Rules of Mending (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annam Manthiram 24 Ariel in Flames (essay) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jorie Rao 26 In Suspense (column) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aimee LaBrie 28 Book Reviews

POETRY

8 Overgourd by Kevin Hogan. Kevin is a Trenton, NJ resident with a lifelong interest in photography and technology. His first camera was a mechanical Pentax K-1000, which he used to learn the basics of photography at Temple University. Since then, Hogan has subscribed to the photographer’s maxim that “the best camera is the one you have with you.” As he explores this emerging genre of iPhoneography, Hogan likes the idea that the digital photographer is not so much taking a picture but making a picture.

10 Turkey Vulture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jeanette Tryon 14 Black Walnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cleveland Wall 17 Poem in the Freezer Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wes Ward 20 San Francisco 1978-81 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Irene Fick

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/ Editorial Director

Production Manager

Pat Green, poetry

Derek Carnegie

Aimee LaBrie, fiction

Carla Spataro Web Design

Chelsea Covington Maass, fiction

Loic Duros

Christine Weiser

Board of Directors

George McDermott, poetry

Kerri Schuster, secretary Mitchell Sommers Alison Hicks Polia Tzvetanova

Deborah Off, non-fiction

Mitchell Sommers Assistant Fiction Editor Amy Luginbuhl Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick Art Editor Melissa Tevere 2 Director of Development Sharon Sood

Lovitz. Sandi Lovitz graduated from Penn State University with a BA in Art Education. Lovitz served as President of the Tri-State Pennsylvania Artists Equity for two years, continues to serve on the executive board, is involved in ARTsisters, a group of professional women visual artists, and teaches art classes at Main Line Art Center and privately in her studio. See more of her work at www.sandineimanlovitz.com

Nathan Long, fiction

Publisher/ Executive Director

Fiction Editor

13 Contemplating Attachments by Sandi

Rachel Mamola, non-fiction

19 Isn’t it Grand by Suzanne Comer.

(See bio below)

Donna Wolf-Palacio, poetry Aimee Penna, poetry Tracey M. Romero, non-fiction John Shea, poetry

Contest Coordinator Nicole Pasquarello

John Shea, non-fiction

Editorial Board Peter Baroth, poetry Deb Burnham, poetry Liz Chang, poetry Melinda Clemmer, fiction Sam Dodge, non-fiction Liz Dolan, poetry Margot Douaihy, poetry Brian Ellis, fiction Ally Evans, fiction Kathleen Furin, fiction Elizabeth Green, fiction

Maria Thiaw, poetry

Carla Spataro, fiction Sean Toner, non-fiction Valeria Tsygankova, poetry

22 The Judgement of Mr. Carson by Rachel

Dougherty. Rachel is a riproarin' Philadelphia illustrator, hailing from the northern suburbs, now residing a quick jaunt from the Rocky steps. She works with acrylic paint and a vibrant sense of humor, typically drawn to historical or educational subject matter.

Cassandra Visceglia, non-fiction Glenna Walsh, non-fiction Sarah Wecht, non-fiction Lena Van, fiction Correction: We misspelled artist Julia Rix's name on page 3 of the Summer issue, and the title of her work is Sophia's Chair not Sophie's Chair.

Our apologies.

Cover Art: Crest by Suzanne Comer. Suzanne Comer explores the use of digital photography as an art form.

She is especially known for using elements of her photographs to create award-winning photomontages.

These works, as well as her unmanipulated photos, are selected for exhibit in numerous juried shows each year.

See more work at: http://comersuz.home.comcast.net.

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. 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 2013

Winner Che Yeun

Philadelphia Stories is thrilled to announce the winner of our fifth annual short fiction contest, Che Yeun’s “One in Ten Fish Are Afraid of Water.” The 2013 judge—author and professor Michael Martone—had this to say about the winning story: “This story embodies, dramatizes, and transports osmosis and the permeable movement through boundaries and borders formally, in its content, and with its characters. The story is about betwixt and between, and its author handles all of the transgressions, transitions, and transmogrifications with grace and grit.”

The author of the first-place story receives a $2,000 cash prize and publication. Che Yeun will also be honored at an awards dinner, to be held at Rosemont College on Friday, October 11, 2013.

2nd Place Winner Annam Manthiram

The second-place winner is Annam Manthiram, who wins for her story ”The Rules of Mending.” Martone says of this story: “I like the ambition here, the sweep of time and place, all figuratively and literally stitched together by the rhetoric of advice and the X-Acto knife of collage.”

You can enjoy both of these winning stories in this issue, thanks to the hard work of our dedicated readers, who evaluated more than 450 stories, our Editorial Director Carla Spataro, who screened the resulting top 50 stories, and our judge, Michael Martone.

I extend my thanks to Christine and Carla for allowing me to serve for another year as Contest Coordinator for a publication that continues to shine the spotlight on rising authors; to every one of our readers who spent their summers reading submissions; to our judge, Michael Martone, for choosing our fabulous winners; and to the McGlinn and Hansma families, who make it all possible year after year—thank you. Cheers also to Marguerite, who brings us together each year to celebrate great writing and the remarkable beauty of the short story.

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Nicole Marie Pasquarello-Mancuso Contest Coordinator

www.philadelphiastories.org

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ONE IN TEN FISH ARE AFRAID OF WATER The following story is the winner of the fifth annual Marguerite McGlinn National Fiction Prize.

Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details on the 2014 contest.

Riko finds you in the swimming pool, chest-deep in HELLO TODAY THE TEMPERATURE IS 26.5 DEGREES. This is how you get through swimming lessons: clutching onto the edge, bicycle-kicking your legs. Water overflows around you into skimmer drains. Your knuckles ache.

Watch the clock.

Riko is unmistakable, even across an Olympic-regulation distance. For about a year now, acne has erupted into bright lesions across her jawline. You’ve heard other girls describe her scars as burning, bubbling plastic. Soon she’ll be close to you, and her goggles will come off. Look into her famous right eye. Riko turns to the side to keep it far from you, but you will still see the eye twitch and tremble under a fluttering lid. Altogether it’s a face that makes you feel grateful, even for your slitty eyes and moon cake cheeks.

She swims up to check the time on the clock. Touch her feet with yours.

When she breathes, you smell hot air coming out of her mouth, so unlike sterile chlorine fumes. You like the sourness, the smell of something living.

“They tell me it’s disappearing,” she says, as if you two were in the middle of a conversation. A rough scratch runs down along her voice.

“What is?” you ask.

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“My blemishes and discolorations.”

Riko dunks her head underwater and up again. Her hair clumps around her face like seaweed. She tells you diluted chlorine helps combat her outbreaks.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Do you think it’s working?” She tilts her head left and right to give you a complete view.

What you assumed to be her scars in plain sight were actually several coats of make-up. What you see in the fluorescent light, with all the powder washed away, is much worse.

Riko looks at you. “I’m just kidding,” she says finally. “I don’t need to know what you think. I’m not blind.”

2.

Your school stands on a hill, overlooking downtown Tokyo. Purchased for one American dollar by four nuns back in 1908, now your school is one of the most valuable slices of real estate in the world. Out back, the cathedral alone is worth ten billion yen. Every morning you bow hello to nuns in gray habits as they tend a garden. The ancient gates at the bottom of the hill are flanked by pungent camphor trees.

In 1944, the old school structure burned down when America firebombed Tokyo. The new structure, like the rest of this city, is prefabricated and fireproof

and gray. From your biology lab you see Tokyo Tower and the red light district of Roppongi and an old neon sign for Midori. In class you imagine how the sign looks lit up, a radioactive green. Imagine cold Midori sliding down your throat.

This is where all hapa girls come for their education. Most of them have Japanese mothers and white European fathers. This is the most ideal arrangement. From early on these girls dabble in modeling. High school brings contracts and record deals, thanks to round, neotenous eyes and European last names. If these girls aren’t practicing dance moves or promoting albums on radio shows, they are sitting in the back of class, mouths covered, yawning at formulas and equations they will never need to know. Look around and lose your thoughts in the rows of symmetrical faces and sparrow brown hair. Here they are, the prized pooches of Eurasian breeding.

Your hapa blood is all wrong. You have your father’s Japanese last name, Japanese black eyes and Japanese crooked teeth. Your legs fit regular Japanese jeans. Your white blood has sunk too far from the surface and can’t get you anywhere. Without any contracts or record deals, you will have to learn grammar, vocabulary, and the scientific method.

Riko, like you, is also the wrong mixture. After swimming lessons she often invites you over to her place. Her father is a famous composer often written up as the Brahms of this generation. When he moved away, Riko kept his tank of tropical fish in the drawing room. “I used to think he’d come back for them,” she explains, “but now I’m pretty sure they’re mine.” When you first walk into her

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Leaf by Rob Giglio © 2013 apartment, it’s that blue aquarium glow that greets you from down the hall.

Riko has two different men come in to take care of her fish. One in charge of feeding, and another for cleaning and maintaining water levels. The tank is as wide as a road, and it makes you dizzy.

Observe from a distance. Different fish occupy different depths, and once they reach one end of the tank they swish around and swim up the way they came before. Obedient little souls.

“Actually, some of them are monsters,” Riko says, as if she’s read your mind. “Look closer.” She points out missing chunks of fins and tails, the injured specimens flicking their bodies in irregular, asymmetrical rhythms. “I had a piranha for a while.”

“Why did you get a piranha?” you ask, still at a distance, not fogging up the glass with your breath the way Riko likes to.

“I wanted to see a live feeding. Can you imagine? It would have made quite a spectacle.”

“But then what?”

She shrugs. “It didn’t do much. Bite marks, that was fun to watch. But piranhas are mostly just timid and frantic.

Not as deadly as you hope.” Blue tank light washes over her. You imagine the fish swimming around her neck, down her uniform collar, and disappearing into mossy shadows.

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You and Riko will meet the same fate of all minor hapa: an expensive education, followed by an expensive university, to book a quiet, expensive wedding in a hotel ballroom. No billboards at Shibuya Crossing, no famous boyfriends, no rock and roll. But you are still part white. You could have just as easily been part black, or part Indian, or part disabled. The corporate uses for you and your languages are endless. There are many ways to have your existence appreciated.

When you can’t go over to Riko’s

apartment, spend your evenings with textbook problem sets. Take breaks with American movies. It’s better than talking to your mother, who has given up on learning Japanese, or talking to your father, who has given up on your mother.

Smooth highways continue forever on flat Nevada deserts. Young insomniacs lock eyes and smile at the grocery checkout. COLLIDE WITH DESTINY. An apocalyptic bomb ticks down in New York. Mouth the names of important faces—Richard Gere, Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz—and watch as they act out lives of nameless, faceless strangers.

That is the America to plan for. You will be of use there as well, where universities seek you out for your contribution to ADVANCING THE FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE WITH A GLOBAL SPIRIT. The land of excessive biodiversity, for fruit and cereal brands as well as people. COLLIDE with all kinds of climate, terrain, architecture. Stop wondering why beauty only comes to

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the same girls over and over again. Stop wondering why you look the way you do, how the same genetic recipe yielded such a different meal.

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America will prove you wrong.

There, you will fall in love with a white boy who asks you to speak Japanese in bed, dirty phonemes you string into sentences with no concern for making sense.

A Japanese boy who asks you to bleach your vagina into a petal pink. A black girl who, before you undress her, asks you to turn out the lights.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” you’ll say to persuade her otherwise, digging your fingers into her hair. “It’s nothing I don’t already enjoy.”

She will squint against the light and gather her arms over her chest into a pretzel twist. “What about my enjoyment?”

You won’t remember which one of you loses contact first. But by then you will have absorbed this trait of hers, and you will only touch another body in total darkness.

5.

Your plan gets you by. You learn to bargain with yourself.

For every hundred English words you memorize, you earn one year in America.

For every exam you ace, you earn two.

If you swim from one end of the pool to the other, you earn a lifetime.

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You never make it from one end of the pool to the other. Just paddle to the edge, cough it out, try to unswallow the water you just swallowed. You check back to see how far you made it each time, but it’s never even close.

Riko dismisses your plan for escape.

“So many girls leave,” she points out, “and then they can’t help but come back.”

It’s true. Shiina, who left for England to please her grandparents, returned one summer with half of her face paralyzed.

Jemma, who left for Sydney to find more drugs, came back just in time to die in her sister’s bed. Sachiko, who used to be the wildest one of all, lives in a suburb of Yokohama with her plastic surgeon husband and gets unintelligible at alumni cocktail parties.

“What if I make it?” you ask Riko one day as she smokes behind the cathedral at school. She has only recently picked up smoking, along with punk rock and combat boots, but the new Riko suits her.

Like her skin, the rest of her also looks better covered up, in layers of ripped shirts and studded leather.

You tell her if you left, you would never come back. “Maybe that’s why we don’t hear about the ones that get away, because they get away so clean.”

“How does that work?” She stubs out her cigarette, stained black on one end by her lipstick. She throws it over the fence into the garden for nuns to find tomorrow. “You have to make sure everyone sees you do it. Make sure they talk about it. Otherwise you might as well be dead.”

That summer, one of the J-pop girls in your class comes out with a song you can’t get out of your head. No one can.

It’s in a Honda commercial that plays twice every hour, and it fills every subway train. Only Riko remains unaffected.

Immunized by The Clash, headphones as big as dinner rolls shielding her ears.

6.

Final exams are coming up. National elections are coming up. You study harder than ever, and the fascist party protest louder than ever outside your school gates from eight in the morning. Climb out of your subway stop and onto the street, where the World War Two songs greet you from loudspeakers. In between songs, the fascists shout bullhorn lectures on the glory of imperial Japan and the war crimes committed by the Allied forces. Cloaked in wartime military flags, they explain to you that Asia will always belong to Japan and there is only one Dharma, only one true, pure Empire.

Your mother is a whore, your father has betrayed his ancestors and, in a perfect world, you would not exist.

Then the music starts up again. We are cherry blossoms, the singer warbles, we go in and out of bloom together in the garden.

Your headmistress orders everyone to stay home until final exams. Take the time to master chemistry. Picture molecular structures that you cannot see. Tear pages of the textbook and eat them, an ancient method you’d dismissed as a joke until now. Hold each crumpled ball of paper in your mouth. You have nothing to lose.

Your saliva softens the ball into a cookie.

Imagine all the exam answers seeping into your gastric juices, your pancreas, your bloodstream, your brain. For what this method promises, it doesn’t taste so bad.

Finish the year at the top of your class.

“All those nights studying with Riko are paying off,” you say, and your mother is too pleased to question your absence.

On some nights, nightclub bouncers let you in without checking your IDs, as long as you are huddled with the white hapa girls. But most nights they don’t.

When this happens, stay in Roppongi anyway with Riko, smoking on the street outside a dirty bakery. She promises you the right group of boys will come along.

They hook their fingers into the rips of her Ramones shirt and ask her for her name. Watch her follow their lead up an emergency stairwell. Wait on the sidewalk with a greasy kebab from a TURKISH DONER KEBAB 100% BEEF truck, and keep a tally of all the years of escape you’ve earned for yourself.

7.

Riko’s mother doesn’t mind having you around their apartment all the time.

She opens the door in silk slippers, gives you three cheek kisses and says you look stunning. She leads you in with sedated steps and then goes back to supping on wine and arranging flowers in a glass vase. Her words are always slurred, but her chignon on her nape has every strand

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swept into place. When Riko makes plans for the two of you to stay out late, her mother calls your mother and concocts another sleepover as your cover.

“What does your mother think you do when we go out?” you ask Riko one night. “What do you say to her?”

“I tell her the truth.”

“She’s okay with that?”

“She has to be.” She shrugs and rubs black eyeliner under her eyes into thick smudges. “It’s the least she can do after what she did to my dad.”

“What did she do?”

Riko’s reflection looks at you. Her right eye is moving again, and her gaze doesn’t line up right. “It’s a complicated history,” she says, and then tells you to never ask about it. “But I’m glad she’s messed up from it now. I’m glad she feels bad.”

More often than not, you are at Riko’s place when her fish handlers come by. The feeder comes every day

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and stays long enough to make sure food hasn’t sunk to the bottom to rot.

The tank cleaner only comes twice a week. He is the one you like to see.

Wrinkles are forming around his mouth, but you like his Kawasaki motorcycle helmet. He bows before coming inside and leaves his helmet on the floor next to his shoes. You and Riko watch for any reaction from her fish as he siphons in a fresh bucket of dechlorinated water.

“Can you get me another piranha?”

Riko asks him one day.

“Why would I do that?” He sounds amused. “To get myself in trouble with your mother?”

“No.” Riko watches his face. “To satisfy my curiosity.”

He smiles but doesn’t say anything.

He touches the surface of the water with three fingertips. He explains that humans can detect up to a quarter of a degree difference in water temperature then brings his wet fingertips to his

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mouth and licks them.

“What does that do?” Riko asks.

“Satisfies my curiosity.”

You look away. Riko does not.

Instead, she reaches out to dab some water on her hand as well. “Is that why you chose this line of work?” she asks him. To embarrass you further, she flicks droplets of water on your face.

“This isn’t my line of work,” he replies.

That weekend, Riko goes downtown to meet the tank cleaner at his real job. He manages a small S&M club in Shibuya. Pause the movie you’re watching, and listen to her babble and laugh about his establishment. It’s a place you’ve never heard of, even though she explains it’s not far from other clubs you know, the ones where other girls from your school get VIP tables every weekend. Riko’s definitely going back, and she wants you to come with her.

“It’s a complete joke,” she shouts.

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Overgourd by Kevin Hogan © 2013 “He think it’s crazy crazy S&M but it’s not. His floors are cleaner than my house. Pathetic. They even have chandeliers.”

Stare at your TV screen, where Julia Roberts and Mel Gibson are just about to open a refrigerator.

“Did he lie about your age?” you ask.

“Seriously?” You can tell she’s smiling, maybe even happy. “Of all the things, that’s what you want to know?”

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In America, you will wander through a street market fair and follow a fortuneteller into her tent. She won’t take your name or scribble down characters to ana8 lyze your stellar alignments, like the fortune-tellers back in Japan. She won’t even take your birthday. Instead, she’ll ask for something that belongs to you, an object you have kept with you for many years.

Look through your wallet until you

find Riko’s nipple ring, the one she threw away when her left piercing got infected.

The fortune-teller will take the ring in one hand and wrap her other hand around that hand. She will whisper incantations into the dark cave of her hands.

Try to ignore an orange price tag sticker on her crystal ball next to you. She’ll ask you to close your eyes and transport yourself back to the time when you first found this object, so that’s what you do: Sometime between The Clash and The Dead Kennedys, Riko asks you to pierce her nipples for her. Get a safety pin and a bottle of alcohol solution. Get close and turn her naked shoulders towards the light. A Ziploc bag of ice melts on a marble vanity top. Hold one of her brown buds between your fingers.

“Don’t get scared,” Riko coaches you, “it’s just like an earlobe.”

But her nipple feels nothing like an earlobe. It’s even softer, like sponge cake,

with the uneven cracks of elephant skin.

Tell yourself you can always stop if it hurts her. But, in practice, you can’t even start.

Riko loses her patience and pierces it herself. She slides the safety pin through and then pulls it right back out to secure her new hole with a ring. You hear The Dead Kennedys through her headphones wrapped around her neck. She repeats the procedure on the other side.

Afterwards the two of you sit in a Starbucks to kill more time. She keeps telling you that you have no idea how good it feels. A salaryman in the smoking section looks up.

The fortune-teller will tell you the ring carries great pain. You will not be impressed. Of course, you’ll think, of course a piercing carries pain. And shoes carry feet.

She will instruct you on some rituals to cleanse yourself of this pain—which crystals to wear around your neck, which direction to lay your head when you sleep, how to properly dispose of the ring without angering its spirit.

Give her the thirty dollars she wants.

Keep the ring with you.

9.

The tank cleaner offers Riko a job at his club as a cocktail waitress. She finds it funny and decides to accept. By the following month, she has completed his training program to work as a performer.

“Training program,” she says. “Like I’m a pastry chef.”

“Isn’t some of that stuff dangerous?” her mother asks.

“Maybe there’s a way,” you think out loud, “to make it less dangerous. Like a magic trick.”

Riko tells you you’re missing the point.

Her mother listens calmly, only making encouraging sounds. “It’s nice to see you happy,” she says, and combs her daughter’s hair with her fingers, careful not to rub any strands over her face and

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irritate her skin.

This is Riko’s new work schedule: the tank cleaner picks her up from school and takes her downtown, where she works an early shift and makes it home before the subway lines stop running.

Her bag grows every day with more and more things she needs for performing: PVC leather straps, chains, make-up, fake eyelashes, a shower kit, and a change of clothes.

The tank cleaner arrives at your school entrance on his motorcycle at three thirty sharp. You worry he will piss off the fascists in their trucks, since his bike drowns out their propaganda tapes.

But the young boys are in awe of his Kawasaki. Whenever you and Riko make your way down the hill, he’s handing out some glossy black and pink promotional postcards for his club to the boys, showing them free drink coupons attached to the back.

Riko takes her time saying good-bye to you. Her uneven eyes stare over your shoulder, towards the other girls passing under camphor trees. She makes sure they see her climb on the oil-black Kawasaki and wrap her arms around the tank cleaner’s stomach. Once she puts on her helmet she will be anonymous, so she takes her time with that too. She sticks her hands into his jacket pockets, and they circle away.

10.

Deena. You remember Deena one day, the girl who ran away to Iowa with her US Marine boyfriend when she was halfway through her eighth grade year. For a while, she was all anyone could talk about.

“What about her?” you ask Riko. “She never came back.”

“Deena got pregnant and fat and boring and poor,” Riko reminds you. “That doesn’t count.”

You’re standing at the crossing in Shibuya, waiting for a green light. Riko and the tank cleaner have been arguing a lot lately, and she’s asked you to be her

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escort to work and back instead. Most of her customers are sensible people, but alcohol changes everyone.

The light turns. Cross together, arm in arm. Even with all this noise around you, you can still hear the chains and buckles Riko has strapped on under her coat. They brush against each other and clink with every step.

11.

For every hundred English words you memorize, you earn one year in America.

For every exam you ace, you earn two.

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Neon wigs are the best way to stand out at work. It’s easy for customers to remember Riko and request her again when they return. Riko’s electric red bob unsettles you, as it does most people who

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stand close to her in trains. But you’re more shocked by the men and women who don’t flinch, who only give her a steady smile.

“It’s working,” she whispers when they pass. “They recognize me.” She tells you everything she recalls about these men and women: who enjoys getting whipped on stage, who prefers to be quietly handcuffed in the back corner, who leaves their personal email addresses hoping to receive close-up photos of her uneven eyes. Listen. Don’t be fooled by how normal they look in their businesscasual blazers and conservative office shoes.

“Do you ever get anyone we know?” you ask. “Anybody’s parents? What about our teachers?”

Riko turns slightly, from the one angle where her eyes line up dead square into yours. “I get everyone,” she says. “I have a pretty good reputation.”

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Turkey Vulture

By Jeanette Tryon a hunchback in a black raincoat face of black leather broken wing survives on cat food and leftovers from an apartment tenant who pities who also puts out a bed for him (a faux sheepskin hood of some sort) and a bowl of water he slinks under my daughter-in-law’s car in cold, nasty weather and defecates white splotches worthy of Kandinsky she wishes the neighbors would let nature take its course but I rather like the sight of the sad creature

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makes me think of a cold war spy in the cold Jeanette Tryon has resided in New Jersey all her life. She is a registered nurse and has worked in emergency, surgical, and intensive care settings. Her short fiction has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Literal Latte, and Clackamas Literary Review.

She recently completed her MFA degree at Rutgers-Camden. “Turkey Vulture” is her first published poem.

You finally visit her club. You are surprised by the décor. You’d expected a lot of transparent plexiglass and metal, a place obsessed with the future like the rest of Tokyo. Instead, you see a wide ring of private booths, each with a thick wood slab serving as a tabletop. This could be a TGI Friday’s.

You discover her reputation has been rightfully earned. Most nights she is so popular and behind schedule that she doesn’t have time to talk. She struts from booth to booth, swinging her whip to the beat of each song. In the dark, with enough make-up on, her skin looks all right. The boots stop just a few centimeters below her crotch, plump and tight in leather shorts.

When Riko is busy, she puts you in a booth with the newest hire, Suzume, who wears a neon blue wig. With only one week of experience, Suzume doesn’t have any regulars yet and she spends most of her time gossiping with you about other performers.

“Do you see the lady with green hair?” she shouts in your ear. “She masturbated too much as a kid and now she needs incredible amounts of pain.”

You study Suzume’s face and the small bones of her shoulders. She looks even younger than you and Riko, maybe not even fifteen. “What’s an incredible amount?”

“She always carries this special needle and thread,” she explains. “You can pay to sew up and down her arms and legs. And Riko-san,” she shouts when Riko passes by. “She’s the craziest.”

“How so?” you can’t help asking.

Suzume turns even further. She shouts less into your ear and more at the wall behind you. “She really likes the smell of urine and feces. She just rubs it all over herself.”

The song ends and mixes into another one. Think of something to say.

“That must bring in more money than anything else, right?” Look at the floor, which is just as clean as Riko had said it would be. “More loyal customers?”

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Suzume clasps her hands between her knees. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.” She pauses. “But Riko-san doesn’t need money. I think everyone can see that’s not what she’s doing it for. It’s just for fun. Maybe that’s why they like her.”

Don’t tell her she’s mistaken. Suzume is too young to properly argue with. Accept that whatever Riko does is her freedom to do so. As long as her mother doesn’t know, Riko can’t be ashamed. As long as the tank cleaner does his job right, she can’t be harmed. As long as you don’t say anything, there is no one to say anything.

13.

Keep her mother company when Riko is at work. Sit together in the dining room and answer all her questions about school that Riko doesn’t have time for.

Sometimes there’s silverware to polish, or a movie she’d like to see. Don’t worry about the problem sets from school in your bag. Halfway through her second

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bottle, she will fall asleep. Finish your homework early and spend your leftover hours looking into the aquarium.

Cratered rocks decorate the bottom of the tank. They remind you of Riko’s scarred face.

Look for signs of Deena online. She hasn’t logged into her MySpace since last year, but all of her pictures are publicly visible. Create an account to grant yourself access.

She hasn’t aged well—the white half, you think. Her husband is so white he turns red in the sun, and he only wears shirts that show off his military tattoos.

You can tell their child will not learn a word of Japanese. Click through Deena’s pictures some more, until it’s time to call a taxi and pick up Riko again.

The driver drops you off at Shibuya Crossing. With fewer people pushing into you at this hour, you look up at the buildings instead of down at your feet.

Just as you cross, a new music video starts

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on a billboard screen. The singer, another classmate of yours, is one of the whitest hapas you’ve seen, with naturally green eyes. It’s as bad as any J-pop music video, orbs of light floating through senseless dream sequences, but you watch it until the end anyway.

14.

Graduation takes place in the cathedral, with a stained-glass Mary and Jesus casting their colors on the audience. Riko skipped out. Sit in your designated seat.

Don’t turn to anyone. In one month, you will be in America.

Some famous girls in your class have invited their pop star boyfriends, who spend the three-hour ceremony posing for photos in the pews. They cheer for their girlfriends, their friends’ girlfriends, and their girlfriends’ friends, but no one else. No cheers for you, just some polite golf claps. Teachers play with their cell phones, anxious to get done and hit their

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expat pubs. In one month minus three hours, you will be in America.

For your going-away present, Riko plans a special night for you at her club.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be doing this,” she says. “I might as well show off all my tricks.” She instructs you to arrive at one in the morning, when the curious drunks have left and only familiar regulars are around.

Riko greets you at the door and blindfolds you. Don’t tense up. Give her your hands so she can lead you to a booth and sit you down. A wood post presses on your spine. When your blindfolds are removed, examine how tightly your hands have been cuffed to the post, over your head.

“I don’t like this,” you tell her, tugging at your cuffs.

“It’s okay,” she reassures you. “No one’s born liking this.”

When she gets close to breathe on you, don’t worry you’ll smell urine or worse on her breath, her wig. Think of her mother’s perfume. Relax and enjoy her company, even when the cold metal cuffs make it hard for you to breathe. Don’t squirm and plead until sweat rolls down your back.

Riko will do nothing. It’s Suzume, walking by, who panics and snaps you free.

Run outside. Have a greasy 100% BEEF kebab. Have a smoke and take a stroll through the deserted back streets of Shibuya. You will feel calm enough to make a big circle back to her club and wait for her shift to end. She eventually pushes through the metal doors, half of an electric red bob dangling out from her purse. She smiles at your punctuality. She walks towards you, scratching away at her scalp like a crazy person.

For every drunk backpacker she whips 12 For every CEO she puts out cigarettes on For every cup of human waste she consumes You never finish these thoughts.

Before you can decide on anything, she’s made it down the alley back to you, and she reaches out to link arms. Her hair is wet as always from her end-of-shift shower. Still you breathe in deep, searching for any unpleasant smells that might tell you the truth.

15.

The month you get to America, your father is hospitalized for an obscure liver condition. Your mother phones you every detail, mostly to convince herself there’s still hope. Even though you don’t need your five years of etymology drills to know liver must come from lifer.

When you talk to your father, only nod and answer with hai and wakannai.

His voice grows so unrecognizable and small that you have to press your burning cell phone to your ear to catch his words, but don’t ever promise to go back.

16.

“I’ll treat you big before I move,” you say to Riko. “Maybe we can go on a trip somewhere before then.”

But Riko is too busy, planning her final days at the club. She is done with that lifestyle which, she now realizes, held her back from finding likable qualities in other people. “But it was funny for a while,” she says, “I guess that’s something.”

She agrees to move in with her new boyfriend, one of the Nigerian bouncers from the club next door to hers. She says nothing about the tank cleaner, who hasn’t come by the house in a while, maybe weeks. A green film of algae now coats the aquarium glass.

You recall a joke you once heard your Biology teacher say to your English teacher. Something about rich Japanese girls rebelling against their families in a predictable sequence of actions. Fucking black guys is the final phase, the dangling head-first over the cliff, just before they crawl back home to settle down with a law student.

Do not repeat this joke to her. Watch her stuff all her PVC straps and gags into

a separate suitcase, to be dropped off at her club for Suzume. Help her pack her own suitcases and line them up by the elevator. Riko’s mother sends her off with three cheek kisses. You offer to go with Riko to her new place and help unpack them all, but she declines.

“Don’t bother. This will be better.”

She holds up one hand as the elevator doors close, whether to wave good-bye or to say stand back, you can’t be sure.

Riko’s mother stands next to you with a glass of wine as the elevator takes her daughter downstairs. She invites you over for lunch the next day, and you don’t know what to do but accept and say thank you, although this will be the last time you see either of them.

Leave Japan. The eggplant tastes like cucumber, and the cucumber tastes like eggplant. Household items come in unfamiliar shapes. Develop new habits of eating and talking and sleeping, and wait for Japan to leave you.

Che Yeun earned her B.A. in Biomedical Ethics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of New Orleans. She received the 2013 Stanley Elkin Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the 2012 Enizagam Literary Award, and in 2012 was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in The Pinch, Enizagam and Kartika Review.

Aside from her own prose, Che takes on Korean translations. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

The Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction is made possible by the generous support of the McGlinn and Hansma families. Learn about the 2014 contest at www.philadelphiastories.org.

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THE RULES OF MENDING

Contemplating Attachments by Sandi Lovitz © 2013 t was only after I left India—after I left my mother—that I began to sew.

My mother was a popular tailor in south India. Wealthy matriarchs commissioned her when they needed a fashionable blouse for their daughters’

I

bride-viewings. My mother then sewed their wedding trousseau, and later, their maternity salwar kameez, a loose-flowing tunic and pant set. She also salvaged remnants and made outfits for the little children and babies. There were always more women, more weddings, more

babies. She never suffered in her business.

Her sewing gave us food and shelter; her sewing gave me Bopal.

Never mistake the power of the thimble. Even the best seamstress will have cause for one; else she

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will be pricked by a very large and very unsuspecting needle.

I was nineteen when I came to the United States for school. When the taxi driver asked me where I wanted to go, I told him I needed a sewing machine.

He drove me to Joann’s. With traveler’s checks I bought my first sewing

machine: a Singer 10 stitch. It was clean and a very bright white. Later, when I got to the dorm for international students, I unpacked it onto a tiny folding card table in the corner of the room. My roommate, who was also Indian, had brought jars of various types of oil from Mumbai: jasmine, coconut, almond, and had set up along the other card table. She lis-

Black Walnut

By Cleveland Wall You do know their roots poison everything in their paths, don’t you?

— Melinda Rizzo

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Of all the magnificent trees under whose root ball I might lie, of all places to lose my last bits of self, poison or no, black walnut is for me, for I love her frondy leaves, her circumspect bark, neither too fine nor too rough, and good for colic.

I love her high, straight bole, how the eventual branching off is perfect cantilever for a swing. I love the citrus tang of her green pods, their heft in hand, thud on the ground. I love the muscular squirrels leaping limb to limb and the squirrels’ wile and their fierce chittering for sovereignty. I love the obdurate shells and their brain-shaped meat. I love dappled shade in summer, lacy silhouettes in winter. I love how they show where the water is, by refusing to be anywhere else. I love the satin grain of the wood, its raveling flow revealed at last, and even the toxicity, the loneliness, I love.

Oh, yes, black walnut—when I have grown past old, let me weave myself in your silken stem bite with your acerbic green stain the fingers of late scavengers with juglone ink drink deep through your taproot clearest water under bedrock, under tonnage of earth and flimsy bone cage. I will be a kingdom of squirrels, light-eater, shape-shifter, murderous as life.

Cleveland is a poet and mail artist from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a contributing editor for Poetry Writers in the Schools and hosts the poetry series for the New Bridge Group artists’ collective. Her work has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Möbius Magazine, and online in New Purlieu Review.

tened to me loudly sew shapes: sequined circles, zig-zaggy squares, polka-dotted rectangles while she layered her hair with oil.

“What are you going to do with those shapes?” she asked.

“Practicing,” I said. “What are you doing with that oil?”

“My mom has thick hair,” she said.

My mother called every week. She asked more questions about my machine than me. She demanded I call her right away when I had picked out a pattern, decided what I was going to make, and figured out when I would complete it.

In between classes I drove around the city looking for places that reminded me of home. The deadened shrub in front of the local library looked like the tuft of my father’s hair that my mother kept in a button box after he died. The convenience store window with the illegible scrawl reminded me of how quickly my mother could sew. The hospital with the steady stream of traffic felt like our house before a wedding: the half-naked women crowded in our tiny living room, comparing cup sizes and waiting to be measured.

One day I saw an Indian family go into the hospital. They were unsure of what they were doing there, so I parked and followed them inside. They made it to the ER waiting room, speaking to each other in a language I didn’t know, but I listened carefully anyway. After the daughter’s name was called, everyone left, but I stayed. Several hours later an older white woman came by and asked if I was there to help. I told her yes; she gave me a schedule, and I started volunteering.

My job was to help discharged patients leave the hospital. I started with minor cases: anxiety attacks, falls with no broken bones, overnight monitoring.

After a month they moved me to the major cases: stents, radiation, physical rehabilitation. I didn’t cry at first. But after I escorted Rosie, a giggling patient

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t h e who’d suffered a stroke, into a van, I hid in the storage closet and bawled. I couldn’t get her face out of my head: one side hung as though someone held an invisible string and was pulling it askew, testing how far it would go. I thought about my sewing machine.

My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw that I was not alone. A man was also crying, softly, his hands over his face.

His nails were chewed down, his knuckles like gaping bandages.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Why are you crying?”

I thought about my favorite stitch on the Singer, the one that looked like the arc of a bat flying home after a long night of hunting. “I can’t fly away,” I said.

He stopped and took his hands away from his face. He looked me straight on with bloodshot eyes. His chin was round, and I wanted to push on it, shape it into something else.

“What if people are better off dying?” he asked. His eyelashes dropped with wetness. I wanted to carry them in my skirt the way women carried mangoes in India, trying to sell them but not really trying to sell them because then there wouldn’t be any left to eat.

We remained silent until someone called for me over the intercom.

Another patient was going home.

On his way off shift he was sitting outside of the hospital smoking a cigarette, his shirt half-done so that I could see the curly black hair like mattress springs on his chest and the gold cross he wore around his neck.

“Hey,” he called to me. “What’s your name?”

“Rukmani.”

“I’m Bopal, a third year. You want to get some dinner?”

We went to a sushi bar, and by the time the rolls and sticks came, the back of my neck was soaked. He watched me stare at the food. He shoved the chopsticks aside and nudged a piece toward me.

“You have carpenter hands,” he said, but I didn’t understand. I picked up the

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roll with my fingers and swallowed. He laughed. Later in his shiny efficient car we kissed three times: one for chemistry, two for compatibility, and three for longevity.

“We will be together for a long time,” he said after the third kiss. He was my first kiss, my first in bed, my first everything.

That night I got on the computer, and after hours of searching I purchased my very first pattern. It was an old style of silk robes, long flowing, drape-y things with sashes cinching in the waist and sleeves like wings. They reminded me of fish that were not of this world.

I called my mother and told her. I also told her about Bopal. She begged me to get a thimble.

Though conflicted, Bopal continued with medical school and decided upon pediatrics as his specialty because someday he wanted children with me. He decided when it was time for us to be serious, when it was time to move in together. He told me I wasn’t capable of making those choices. “You are always changing your mind, Ruk. Stick to one point,” Bopal said when we were in a fabric store, and I was cycling silk in and out of our cart, but it was easy to go between, to not fixate on one stance. He called me peripatetic, his vocabulary extensive and freeflowing, and sometimes morigerous, but he didn’t mean it as an insult.

Bopal was blunt and forward and said I had gone too long without someone heady in my life. I thought it strange at first, but he liked to use my towel right after I showered, when it was wet and he said he could feel the places where my body had touched it. But later after I thought about it some I would wait for him to use my towel, and then I would use it again, feeling the places where his body had touched mine. On the nights he worked and didn’t come home, I slept with his towel, holding it underneath my t-shirt so that it would not dry. It smelled

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like the ocean.

He praised my ability with numbers, so the next day I changed my major from cultural studies to accounting. Sex made him so happy that I’d get on the internet and watch porn to learn. And I didn’t tell my mother but I converted to Christianity because of his gold cross.

When I touched it, it felt like Bopal, warm and hard at the same time.

To balance his rough demeanor, he bore a sensitivity that was light, but also deep. He cried during sad movies. He visited his elderly parents and cleaned their bathroom. He watched his friends’ kids when they needed a night out.

In my head I called Bopal narisimha: half-lion, half-man, an avatar of Vishnu.

My mother kept a tapestry of narisimha in the bedroom we’d shared; “the Great Protector,” he kept us safe from the things that my mother and I never talked about.

One night coming home very late from a surgical rotation Bopal had been doing at the hospital, a bonus shift he had taken from another resident so that he could celebrate an anniversary, Bopal fell asleep. His car had veered into oncoming traffic and killed two children on their way home from their grandmother’s house. Bopal was alive on the way to the hospital, but he died of a heart attack before the paramedics could even lift his body out of the van.

After I notified his parents about what had happened, I threw out the Singer, which had been giving me bobbin wind-up problems anyway, and purchased a Brother 25 stitch, which came with different feet. Some of the stitches looked like sutures. I finished the silk robe I had started and slept in it with a wet towel next to my waist.

Some fabrics require a high tension setting; other fabrics do not and will pucker along the seams if the setting is not adjusted properly.

Ensure that the thread can withstand the tension desired; too much tension may cause cheaplymade threads to break.

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My mother called me every day.

Sometimes I answered; sometimes I pretended that I did, and we would have real conversations that had nothing to do with sewing. She sent me scraps of fabric in the mail: squares of bubbly denim, seethrough chiffon, and rough polyester.

When she sent me a plane ticket, I called and told her to stop. After that she airmailed a pattern that she had penciled.

The parchment paper was dotted with charcoal marks. I could still picture her favorite pencil sitting behind her ear as though a watchful apprentice.

Her instructions indicated fleece. I purchased more than I needed, skipped class for two days to finish. It was a combination blanket and hood, but it didn’t have any arm holes. At first I thought I had sewed it wrong, but the instructions were clear. When I tried it on, my arms were kept snug against my body, but I couldn’t move them. My head was secure, my torso warm.

I stayed in this blanket for days until the one morning I woke up and did not turn away from the sun.

I finished school and took an accounting job at a large commercial bank. Every morning I got to work early and stood on the sidewalk and watched the flurry of people circle through the revolving glass doors, their bodies pressed against the transparent elevator that crept up the side of the building.

“I see you here every day,” a man said.

His cologne was loud. “What are you looking at?”

“Life,” I said. When he didn’t move from my side I turned to look at him. He was a large man, tall and hefty, with stunning blue eyes and an ethnicity I could not determine. My eyes moved back to 16 the people coming down the elevator, and it looked like they were falling. I held my hands up in the air, and he laughed.

His name was Chris, and he’d bring me bagels and muffins and donuts and

we’d eat breakfast while watching the working people go to their offices. On our first official date he took me to an Ethiopian restaurant. He tore the pieces of flat bread and dipped them in stew for me. We kissed afterward, in his house. I lost track of the number of kisses. I lost track of a lot of things when I was with him.

When I told my mother about Chris, she asked me what I was sewing. She seemed upset when I told her that I wasn’t working on anything. She wanted to know the settings on my machine and chastised me because I had put the tension on five without ever starting at three. “You will break,” she said. “You will break.”

During a run for fast food, as my car’s engine sat idling, Chris put his head in my lap and proposed. No ring, but he’d borrowed a crown at the window and placed it on my head. “My kingdom, my lady,” he said.

Chris and I married within six months. The wedding was filled with people from his family: those from his father’s American side, and those from his mother’s European side.

My mother could not leave her business to come. It was wedding season for her too. “When will you come visit me?” she asked. “I want to hold you.”

“Soon.” I wanted to bring her a child to sew for.

At the reception Chris drank too much and whispered in my ear, “It’s like you live to love me.” He felt up my gown and pressed me against the head table. I thought I saw my mother in the corner of the hall, holding up my old sewing machine. I left the reception to call her again, but she did not answer.

A few days later I received a letter from my aunt that my mother had died sometime on my wedding day, around the time Chris was sticking his tongue in my mouth.

My mother passed from a diabetesrelated infection that had begun in her pedal foot. The doctors had cut away

and found a large, brackish growth that smelled like a drowned rat. There was nothing they could do because she wouldn’t let them. Contumacious, Bopal would have said had he still been here.

As some sort of consolation, the family sent me a box with all of her old patterns, many of them ones she had drawn up herself. I closed my eyes and reached in. I pulled out a mock-up for a little girl’s party dress. It was new, articulated in her favorite charcoal pencil. I began sewing.

Pay attention to the needle thickness.

Thicker fabrics like denim, fleece, and suede require thicker needles, but more delicate fabrics like silk, velvet, and chiffon require thinner needles else the stitching will damage the fabric.

“Let’s have a baby,” Chris announced one night five months after our wedding.

“You’re not done with that thing yet?” He poked at the dress. I had gone back and forth on different choices for the material and had finally settled on a flattened black denim. The piping would be white.

Every time I finished stitching two pieces together, I used the seam ripper and started over again. The edges were becoming ragged. It was taking too long.

“Rukmani?” My neck hurt from bending over the torn seams. He took the ripper from me and looked at it. “It looks like teeth.”

I didn’t ask for it back but held my palm up, hoping he would just drop it in.

“I think the pharmacy is still open; let’s pick up some ovulation kits.” I was not ovulating. Bopal used to schedule the cleaning of the bathroom by my period.

Through the onion-skin walls I could hear the car starting, the engine idling, Chris waiting. My palm was still up when I stood from the chair. I used the inside to soothe my face, which was wet and smelled like Bopal’s ocean.

In the drug store, his arm around my waist, Chris whistled while he selected the kits. I watched him finger them as if they were legs. He paid the cashier who didn’t have a big enough bag for all of

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t h e our stuff and stuffed them inside the pockets of his cargo pants.

At home I took the test. Chris cursed and said it was defective and insisted I use another stick and another until we’d gone through the entire box. Until we’d gone through all of them. So we went back to the drugstore, his arm still around my waist, still whistling.

One night Bopal and I had gone to see a movie about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Throughout the entire film Bopal was stiff, straining against the armrest as though it were paining him. His hand was on my forearm; it grew numb. After the movie ended, as we walked under the bright lights of the marquee, I tried to jiggle my arm back to life. When I looked at it, I saw a purplish thumbprint marking the skin.

When I showed it to him he said,

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“Ruk, your arm … vitiated by my lack of emotional control,” and I thought he was quoting from a book or something he had read or even something I had missed from the film. But they were his words: elegant, formal, but still reeling of feeling. I told him it was all right, but he didn’t listen and took me dancing at my most favorite club even though he had been scheduled for a five AM shift at the hospital the next morning.

After twelve boxes of ovulation predictor kits and almost one hundred tests later, my stomach heavy from water, Chris went to bed with his shoes still on.

I stripped, and though I had taken a bath earlier in the day, I felt I needed another one. When I looked in the mirror I saw finger marks the color of blackened coffee along my waist. “Vitiated,” I whispered.

Poem in the Freezer Section

By Wes Ward I would have remembered the grocery list but the smell of the coffee spoon this morning, just, well, the way it entered membranes I didn’t know existed, the way it swirled with a sign above its head that read “This is the best smell a Tuesday has ever known” made me forget.

And yet I’m doing okay in the aisles at Super Fresh, not as disjointed as you might expect, listless and all. The cart is almost full and the bananas, bread, and peaches are cradled in the seat where a child might sit, a child with clever eyes who’s buying “this, this” in every aisle with the point of a small finger.

And I would buy him something in every aisle: a stringed box of Animal Crackers, a pack of fluorescent straws, a box of cereal with a robot inside, an air horn.

But until I remember what it was you wanted, I’ll be in the freezer section, writing lines to a poem on twenty foggy doors.

Wes Ward holds a Master’s of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals, including North American Review, Sewanee Theological Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review. Wes teaches high school English in York, PA and lives with his wife, Karen, and his children, Ethan and Isley, in Newville, PA.

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It is best to sew during lunch time when the sun is highest in the sky and the light is most ample. Using your machine at night or too early in the morning can render you blind.

Once I got pregnant, Chris asked me to quit my job. They threw a party for me at work, but Chris said he was too busy to come even though his office was only one floor up from mine. Afterward, I sorted through the cards and everyone had written the same thing. We will miss you, which made me think that they didn’t know me at all. I packed up my small box of stuff, tucking away the one photo I had of Chris on my desk. It was a picture of him before he’d met me, a picture of a time when Bopal was still alive. In it he is leaning on the hood of a car, cupping a pair of keys.

During the day I slept; at night I sewed. The dark scared me—it seemed too large and our house too empty— and Chris would not let me leave the light on, so I moved my sewing machine to the guest room and worked. The dress was not finished, but it would be soon.

“You ever get scared, Ruk?” Bopal had asked one night when he had insisted on leaving the light on in the bathroom.

“Of dying,” I said.

“I mean things like the dark, tenebrosity.”

“Dying is like being in the dark.”

“Nah,” he’d said. “Dying is like being in the light.”

I finished the dress the morning after Sarah was born. She was too small for it, but her eyes bugged when I showed her the contrast between the piping and the skirt.

Within a few weeks of her birth Chris began complaining. He wanted more time for us to talk. He wanted me to try to look decent sometimes instead

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of the usual salwar over sweatpants that was just easier. He wanted more sex.

“I feel like we are slipping,” he said.

I went to the hairdresser and got my hair cut short—got rid of all the thick, black dregs that hung around my face— and when it was styled, the hairdresser clucked, and the old ladies who were watching Sarah sleeping in her car seat turned to stare at me. At home I put on a dress from my time with Bopal, a tight black jersey that clung to what he called “my planets.” “You are spectral,” he’d said with his eyes closed, his face pressed next to mine.

The dress didn’t cling as tightly as before, but it still looked decent. While nursing I put on lipstick and blush and tried really hard not to kiss Sarah.

I nursed her three times before Chris came home flushed with heat and triangles of sweat on his chest.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “She still up?” he pointed to Sarah whom I had brought into bed with me. Her tiny hand grabbed a hold of the jersey material, and she snuggled against it.

When he finally came to bed he gently removed Sarah from the bed and roughly removed the dress from my body.

He placed his elbows on my breasts while he went inside of me, his bones poking at my nipples. I tried to turn, but he forced me upright, and when he was done, he went into the den to watch TV. I sat on the toilet; the urine burned across my stitches. I cried silently.

In bed I thought about Bopal after the accident. His smashed forehead, the bulge at the back of his head where his brain had swelled up, his teeth shattered. I wanted to turn my brain off, but I couldn’t.

Winding the bobbin takes practice. Ensure that both sides of your bobbin are filled evenly for 18 solid, smooth, and secure stitches.

Chris had taken Sarah out for his morning run, and I stood near the sewing machine, running my finger down the side and coming back with a line of dust.

I pulled out my mother’s box of patterns and dug through, not sure what I wanted to make, but needing to make something. My hand came across an envelope at the bottom—something I had missed when I had first gone through it. My name was written across the top in my mother’s cursive writing.

Ruk. Inside was a pattern for a maternity dress. It wasn’t finished yet; only half of the pieces were sketched. There were no instructions. She had started with the bust, which was smocked, and the sleeve ran straight down to the bicep.

I put the pattern back into the envelope and sealed it tight. I left it in the box.

I began sewing something free-form.

I had a small amount of emerald organza from the underside of Sarah’s dress, so I traced and cut a bust and small skirt piece and sewed them together. After I was finished, I blushed. It was a see-through tankini, but I never swam.

“People really are just lenocinant animals, Ruk,” Bopal had said one night when, at a restaurant, I’d come upon two people having sex in the ladies’ bathroom.

The extent of Bopal’s savagery in bed had been me on top with all of my clothes on.

I posted a photo of the tankini on eBay and within minutes someone had bid on the outfit. I took out the rest of the organza and made two more outfits, adding white ruffling at the edges, which I then sold for a little bit more.

I went to the fabric store and came back with bolts of material. I sewed for the next month. I did not tell Chris about the money.

Every machine is different; read the owner’s manual before attempting to thread your machine.

Older models tend to be more difficult to thread, but have a longer shelf life; newer machines are easier, but require more maintenance.

Chris worked as a loan officer at a large commercial bank. Over time he moved up in rank. His job was lucrative,

with raises every year and bonuses or promotions twice a year. We were moving to a larger house again—this was our fourth in less than two years. I had learned not to accumulate much, only what was absolutely necessary.

We were in the middle of packing, and Chris asked me to get rid of the sewing machine. He said it was getting old. “You don’t sew anyway,” he said when I took a protective step toward it.

I went for a walk with Sarah and when I came back I found it in the trash.

The white arm was hanging over the side as though it were desperately trying to climb over the edge and spare its life. I laughed and touched the spool.

“What’s so funny?” Chris called from the other room. He was packing our bedroom.

“Trash.”

He didn’t say anything. I moved the trashcan into the den but didn’t take the machine out.

While I was emptying the storage closet, I came across a box of old photos.

In it were pictures of me and Bopal early on, when he would take digital shots of me and make prints. Before giving them to me he’d write obscure words on the backs like a game, quizzing me to see if I could make the connection between the word and the photo.

Jongleur. A picture of me during karaoke, blazing drunk, mouth open wider than the microphone. I was probably trying to rap, which Bopal had dared me to do.

Sui generis. I was unaware that he’d taken a photo of me. I was standing with my back to him, my hair flying this way and that, giving a homeless person a dollar bill. We’d gone to the symphony that day, and our tickets had cost a fortune.

Mephitic. I was asleep with Bopal’s hand over my mouth. He always said I had the worst morning breath, made me sleep with fennel seeds in my mouth, though that didn’t help.

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He moved toward me so quickly that I didn’t have time to defend myself.

He slapped me hard on the face and then walked away, slamming the front door, the noise waking our daughter from her nap. I went to the mirror and saw that my dark skin had simply absorbed the shock of the slap.

“Men who hit their wives are execrable.” Bopal’s words when he’d told me about the abuse his mother had suffered at the hands of her first husband.

Bopal had been the product of her second wedding: a love marriage to a halfIndian, half-white man. “If she would tell me his name, I’d find him and …”

He had never finished these thoughts, but in my head I filled in the blanks for him. Shoot him. Cut off his balls.

Sew his penis shut.

I took my sewing machine out of the trash and packed it in a suitcase of its own.

Isn’t it Grand by Suzanne Comer © 2013

“Are you still in love with him?”

Chris was behind me. He knew a little about Bopal and how he had died, but that was all.

“Why do you still have them? Why not throw them away?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t compete.”

“You are not.”

“Okay then throw the pictures away.

Right now. Give them to me, and I’ll do it.”

Behind me, through the window, the sun was going down, and when Chris stretched his hand toward the box of

photos, his limb made a shadow against the wall. It looked like a hook I’d found in an alley in India once. It was rusty and red and lay buried underneath the dirt. I had tripped over it in bare feet while running, and my mother had to use her sewing needles to stitch up the skin because she did not want to pay for a doctor. The wound had healed, but I still had a scar there that looked a little like the hook that had caused it.

“I can’t,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“I can’t.”

The larger house had more rooms. I claimed my own near Sarah’s and stayed there with my sewing machine. Chris left me alone.

When women began calling the house asking for Chris, I made my business official. I called it Racy Ruk’s (Tasteful Lingerie) and hired a webmaster to design a site. I applied for a license and paid a marketing consultant to promote the business. Because I filed our taxes, Chris didn’t know how much money I was saving. Sometimes I even sewed after I tucked Sarah into bed.

The walls were thick, and she couldn’t hear me.

“When will you stop?” I’d asked my mother once. She was sewing into the night, making last-minute adjustments for a wedding in two days. I was seven and sleepy, and the machine made a noise like it was unzipping something, which kept me awake. It was time to get a new machine, and she was simultaneously cursing it and goading it on so that it wouldn’t break in the middle of her projects.

“Amma?” I went over to her side, and

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her eyes were scrunched like they hurt.

“When will you stop?” I asked again.

“Until,” she said.

“Until when?”

“Until I feel safe.” When she unscrunched her eyes, tears ran down her face. I tried to wipe them, but she gently pushed my hands away. “I shouldn’t sew at night,” she said. “Ruk, go to bed.”

I fell asleep, and when I woke in the morning, my mother was still sewing.

The outside of a piece is important, but equally as important is the inside. The underside of a garment should always have finished seams.

Finished seams look polished and neat, and they prevent unraveling or shredding, which can show through to the front.

One night Bopal found me surfing lollipop sites like some women surf for shoes. I would add them to my cart and then close the window down to avoid the temptation of buying any. I tried to

click away, but he had seen. After that Bopal used to randomly leave lollipops underneath my pillow, calling himself the “fairy popmother.” (“I know, the pun isn’t exactly right,” he’d tease.)

The first time he left me a lollipop that was olive green with a bit of red in the middle. “Like your mother’s sewing machine,” he said. When we first started dating, he had asked for pictures of my mother, but my mother didn’t allow anyone to take pictures of her. I had showed him a photo of the machine instead.

The second time he left an even larger lollipop shaped like mouse ears. In the middle it said, “You’re sweet.” He nibbled on my ear while I unwrapped it and took a lick.

“You can eat it all,” he said when I put it away for later. It was hard to be angry.

But when they kept coming, one every day, I told him to stop.

“Please, Bopal, I don’t want any more.

If I wanted them, I would buy them

San Francisco 1978-81

By Irene Fick

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Adrift in my twenties, I dropped anchor at a jelly bean house perched high on a slope, stroked by fog, straddling salty bay bridges.

Stripped to my senses, I strolled into North Beach cafés to hear Puccini crooned by paunchy old men in spaghetti-stained aprons, sipped Pinot on bare-bodied beaches, spent soulful afternoons caressing Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, flushed nights at fern bars downing drinks under fuzzy lights. I plunged on two wheels through the Presidio, sucked in the sea mist, gazed into open-air bars jammed with wiry, wired men’s men. I clung to the margins of cable cars, leaned into the sultry curves of fabled streets.

The City was on edge, caught between the disco beat, and the hushed unease of a deadly new virus.

Yet, I lingered, hoping to land on solid ground.

Irene Fick’s nonfiction has been published in newspapers and magazines in Chicago, San Francisco, Tampa, and Philadelphia. Her poetry has been published in The Broadkill Review; Third Wednesday; No Place Like Here: An Anthology of Southern Delaware Poetry & Prose; and Adanna, a Journal for Women, About Women (forthcoming).

She lives in Lewes, Delaware.

myself.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Yes, I would.”

“Ruk, you’re being neanic.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re being childish.”

“I’m not.”

“Tell me really why you want me to stop. Speak your mind.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of?” “Too much happiness.”

Bopal laughed. “There’s no such thing. Happiness is not like energy; it can be created. It’s limitless.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve never had an unhappy day in my life.”

“But the day I met you.”

“I wasn’t unhappy, Ruk. It was an epiphany.”

I didn’t agree with him. I also didn’t tell him what I really believed—that happiness was like water. There was only a certain amount of it to go around, and if you used too much there wouldn’t be any left for later, even for your own children.

And that disappointment, hurt, and betrayal were all distractions to happiness, which weren’t always bad because that meant you didn’t use too much happiness too early on.

After our discussion, Bopal stopped putting the lollipops under my pillow every day. He did so randomly, sometimes once a week, sometimes more than that. But he always remembered, and though I threw them in the trash without him knowing, I appreciated them.

After five years of Chris’s infidelity, Sarah determined our arrangement wasn’t working and that we should split.

“You don’t love each other anymore.

Divorce. That’s what Jane’s parents did.”

Jane was her best friend and classmate in first grade. Sarah had the keen insight that many children had, yet she had something a little extra—the emotional

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t h e capability to deal with the ramifications of this insight. She could handle it.

“Dad said that he doesn’t love you anymore.” She was a transparent little girl, unable to keep secrets, and I was thankful that her life was still simple.

“He did? When?”

“I asked him if he loved you still. He said no.”

“Oh.” Various sewing patterns were arranged on the dining room table for Sarah. She’d asked me to make her a special dress for Jane’s birthday party on Saturday. I had selected about ten for her to choose from, and now I pulled one of a girl in a red sleeveless chiffon dress with a thin sash and a gauze top and showed it to her.

“No,” she said. “Jane’s wearing red, so she told me that I can’t.”

“I can make it in any color you want.”

“Mom?” “What?”

“Don’t you care that Dad doesn’t love you anymore?”

The pain was dull and old, the way an achy bone feels when it’s been overused slightly. We lived like respectful roommates who didn’t know each other very well, sharing in the domestic duties and each spending as much time as we could with Sarah. When we had occasion to speak, it was most always about Sarah.

“No,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” Sarah said.

“Pick an outfit,” I told her.

“Be right back,” she said. She ran down the hall and into my bedroom.

When she came back she was holding up the dress I had made before she was born: the black with white piping. It would fit her perfectly now.

“I like this one. Do you?”

I held her on my lap and nodded.

“Perfect.”

After I read her a book and she had fallen asleep, I went online and surfed for lollipops. I added a few chocolate ones for me, and ones that had frosting for

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Sarah. I had a total of ten lollipops in my cart when I made a move to close the window. I paused. My heart raced as I dug into my purse for my credit card. I purchased the pops. They would be here in a few days.

I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. I could feel Bopal’s arms around me.

Sewing is always about the end product— the finished result. It teaches one to think about how minor details will affect the grand outcome, and how subtle changes in pattern shapes and sewing lines can produce varying results. Sewing requires foresight, not hindsight.

When Sarah was thirteen, Chris decided that he was going to teach her how to drive.

“She’s too young,” I said, but I didn’t do anything.

For the entire hour they were gone, I gathered all of the little scraps of fabric that had no place and began piecing them together on my sewing machine. I didn’t bother changing the thread or adjusting needle thickness; I sewed and sewed and only stopped when the needle broke while I was trying to attach two squares of denim. The needle was thin—the same type that I had used to sew Sarah’s party dress. The machine jammed, flashing an error message. I tried to unscrew the needle to replace it, but the screw would not turn.

Frustrated, I threw my bag of sewer’s tools against the wall and began to cry.

I cried so hard that I almost missed hearing the telephone. It wasn’t until the answering machine picked up that I ran to the phone, breathless.

“Hello?” I screamed into the phone.

“Ouch, Mom. Why are you yelling?”

“What’s the matter? Where are you?

Has something happened?”

“Chill, Mom. Dad and I are at the Dairy Queen. I wanted to know if you wanted something. Dad actually wanted to know.”

“No, I don’t want anything.”

“Are you sure, Mom? I mean, Dad’s

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asking.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Bopal once told me a story about a very particular, very orderly resident who was divorcing his wife over a fork. I didn’t believe him until he explained that what she’d done was a form of deray, disorder.

“She’d mix up the utensils, Ruk. So sometimes there’d be a lone spoon in the forks tray. Other times a lone knife in the spoons tray. It was the lone dinner fork in the salad forks tray that did it.”

Bopal said that most people were like that. We all held a world order in our mind, and if something was off in that world order, it could cause us major upset. He said we often didn’t know what would disrupt it: sometimes something as simple as a fork, other times something as monumental as a death. And sometimes something as commonplace as a husband thinking of his wife at a Dairy Queen.

By the time they got home—safely and in one piece—I had replaced the needle and was well on my way to a king-sized quilt. I hung it up to show Sarah, who wrinkled her nose in disfavor.

“Love you, Mom,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks and heading to her room.

After Sarah had gone to sleep, I went into my room and shut the door. I took out a scrapbook of convincing opinion columns I’d cut from the local paper. I read them every night before bed; I admired these people’s beliefs, how they could believe in something so strongly.

They were the types of letters Bopal might have written if given the chance.

When I finished the last letter— from a woman upset that the city council had voted against building a park for disabled children—I closed my eyes and drifted off. In my dreams I was in the car with Bopal; sometimes I was the only one in the car.

“Wake up, you’re dreaming. Wake up.”

I opened my eyes and shrieked.

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“It’s me, it’s Chris.”

I rubbed my eyes and looked at him in the dark. He’d never come into my room before unless he needed to ask me something, and even then, mostly he’d stand outside in the hallway and ask across the threshold.

I turned the light on so I could see him well where he sat near the window.

It had been a long time since I had really looked at him. His blue eyes were the color of breast milk, his build fatty. His hands that had at one point seemed menacing were still menacing but now etched in wrinkles and blue veins.

“I can’t do this anymore.” He grabbed me by the wrists and kissed me.

I should have pushed him away. I should have stopped it. Deray, deray, deray, deray, a voice droned, but I covered my ears. I gave in to what he wanted, in the way I had done before.

The next morning, he hardly said a word other than to ask me to pick up

Sarah after basketball because he was going to have a late night. His eyes avoided mine.

For the next six months I sewed nonstop. Within weeks I had sewn an entire new wardrobe for Sarah, which made her popular at school. I dug out the pattern for the maternity dress my mother had started and sewed it, even though I knew that I would have no use for it again. And when I felt a pain so deep that it was like something was plunging my heart of its blood, I talked to my machine, asking it questions that I would have asked Bopal.

How many stars are in the sky? Why do newborns need to be held? What is the purpose of a convict? That there were so many ambiguous questions like these—limitless, unlike happiness—provided me comfort. And then, as quickly as this brume set in, it vanished.

Chris tried to come into my room one other time, but I kept the door locked. Though he knocked, I held onto

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The Judgement of Mr. Carson by Rachel Dougherty © 2013

my scrapbook, lying naked underneath the spread of the maternity dress, and did not answer.

A weak machine is better than a weak operator.

“We are all doctors manqué, failing to prolong the inevitable,” Bopal had said to a friend of his who’d killed a patient in surgery. I remembered thinking it cold, detached, wondering how Bopal could get away with saying things like that and still have so many friends by his side.

Hundreds of people had come to his funeral. But thinking about it now I found it reassuring—a comfort that, in whatever we did, we would never be good enough, but that was okay as long as we were self-aware. Bopal knew this truth, and he was not afraid to live an imperfect life.

Earlier Chris had taken Sarah out for another driving lesson. I had seen Sarah drive; she was learning well. They continued to go for ice cream afterward, though Chris never asked me if I wanted any. I was close to finishing the quilt, which I worked on in between lingerie for the business. It was large—bigger than the size of my room—and so colorful. It had come to symbolize different projects that had been important in my life and was composed of scraps from that time. I remembered the trips to the fabric store: in college, after Bopal died, when I got married, after my mother passed. I remembered everything.

I was digging for more scraps in the closet when the phone rang. I smiled thinking how, though her father had stopped, Sarah never failed to call and ask me if I wanted any ice cream. The answer was always no. I answered, still smiling.

“Sarah, no ice cream for me, love, I—” “It’s Chris.”

“Oh.” All I heard was “hospital.” I dropped the phone, couldn’t find my car keys, and ran the entire two miles uphill to the hospital.

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t h e Chris and Sarah had been driving together; he said he was driving. He wanted to take her to a little café tucked in the mountains. It was winter, and though it hadn’t snowed recently, the roads were icy and slick. Around a bend one big deer and two little deer had been standing on the metal grates along the pavement. Chris swerved, the car spun, and they hit a thick cottonwood tree head on. The passenger-side airbag went off. It broke several of Sarah’s ribs, her nose, and gave her a head injury that had her out. The doctors still couldn’t tell if she’d suffered any trauma to the brain. The driver-side airbag had also released, but Chris’s face had hit something hard. His front teeth were shattered. He held an ice pack to his lips, which were swollen, and when he talked, I couldn’t bear to look at him.

It’s Bopal. Bopal Reddy.

It’ll be all right, Miss.

“Stop talking,” I said to Chris, but he kept going on, about how sorry he was, about how they should have stayed on the freeway, but she’d wanted to be a little adventurous, and he couldn’t say no.

“Stop talking!” I screamed.

I had never yelled at Chris or anyone before. He went quiet and sat down. He held the ice pack to his head, and I saw where the blood from his mouth had caked. He was crying.

“Father manqué, mother manqué,” I consoled myself. “Family manqué.” The vocabulary soothed.

When Sarah finally opened her eyes, the doctors said she would be fine. She had suffered no injuries to her brain.

Her broken bones would heal over time, but her nose would have a lasting bend to the right.

“Nothing major, you will always be a very pretty girl,” the doctor said. Even with the bandages on her nose and her forehead bruised, she was stunning. A perfect mix of everything and nothing.

“I’ve decided,” she said, holding my hand with her right and Chris’s with her left, “that it’s time for you two to get

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divorced.” I laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“If you want me to, I will,” I said.

“Mom, stop being so morigerous.”

She held up a book someone had left on the end table. A dictionary. I felt a little flutter inside the way a catheter feels after it has just been inserted.

It was Sarah who finally decided for both of us that it was time. After her release from the hospital, we filed for divorce. Chris moved out of the house and, with the money I had saved, I paid off the mortgage in full and Chris signed the deed over to me. I had more time for my business, and I worked to replenish the money I had used to pay off the house.

An expert seamstress understands that there are always lessons to learn, new projects to tackle. If willing, the job is infinite.

I finally finished the patchwork quilt; it was over twenty feet long. It had to be folded and weighed too much to carry.

At night I wrapped myself in it several times and felt my mother near me. It was as though her fingerprints were everywhere. If I fell asleep in the quilt, I didn’t have the terrible nightmares. Instead my dreams were filled with light and music. Sometimes Bopal was there, loving me so hard it hurt—like someone was cutting open my body and then placing a warming salve under all of my joints, squeezing until that warmth radiated throughout.

When my daughter fell in love for the first time, she called me from her dorm room at college and asked what it felt like.

“Like a blood massage,” I told her.

She laughed.

“That sounds about right, Mom.” She giggled and told me that he was an aerospace engineer, a soft-spoken man from Kansas who packed her lunch and left little notes inside and sometimes index cards with one or two nonsensical words like jiggledy-jamz or potter-putter or

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whamdom. “He likes to make up words.”

“Love him, Sarah. Love him more than you think you are capable of.”

“I want you to meet him.”

“I want to meet him too,” I said.

After we hung up, I thought about Bopal. The only remnants I had of him now were photos, memories, and a dictionary filled with rare words—words that he’d used in his regular, colloquial life. Inside was a random note he had posted on the refrigerator after a rough night at the hospital. He had come home silent.

There will always be the inevitable. And there will always be words.

I was lucky to have loved him so much. I was lucky that he had loved me as much as he did.

After talking with my daughter, I sat on the porch looking at the moon.

I wanted to give away my sewing machine. It was time. The business had grown enough that I was ready to hand it over to someone else; I had no need for money any longer.

My eyes tried to find shapes in the moon’s textured surface, but there was nothing. Just a buttery-colored circle emanating the light that I imagined my daughter was feeling in another person’s arms. I covered myself in the quilt until I couldn’t move any longer. I felt safe.

Annam Manthiram is the author of the novel After the Tsunami (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), which was a Finalist in the 2010 SFA Fiction Contest and in the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and a short story collection (Dysfunction: Stories, Aqueous Books, 2012), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest.

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j o r i e

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ARIEL IN FLAMES he fan whirs above our heads. It is strong, but the heat still creeps up our legs as we sit in my room. Ally is sixteen this year. She keeps telling me that I need to treat her like an adult, that I should trust her with the same things I trust Belinda with, we are sisters after all.

T

She looks at me, begging for something to call her own. A secret that even the almighty Belinda doesn’t know yet.

Belinda and I have shared a room and secrets for 19 years; she is only two years younger than me. I dig. I dig deep for something to tell Ally. She has always been so young; I never considered entrusting her with my life. Six years can be a world of difference if you let it.

And I let it. I always thought it would be too difficult to trust both of them. But now, with Belinda gone for the summer, Ally and I have been spending more time together. I want to feel as close to her as I do to Belinda.

The heat is unforgiving. It bangs on the windows outside, reminding us that even in the nighttime we can still sweat.. The fan overhead wobbles from overuse. I’m sweating. Sweat falls in tendrils around my eyes.

was thirteen, too old to get a doll as a gift, but too young to realize it. The Ariel doll stares at me, her eyes wide and her hair a fiery mess. I stare back at her. Janine gave me that doll. She handed it to me and said, For my new daughter. I just know we are all going to get along so well. After whispering these words so only I could hear them, Janine walked over to my dad and entwined her fingers into his. A smile crept across her pale face. Her eyes blue as the ocean, blue as Ariel’s, watched me.

The doll is still here; Janine isn’t.

Ally waits. Her legs are crossed and her hands sit in her lap. I clear my throat. The noise sounds awkward as it swims through the thick heat towards Ally.

Janine casting a spell on us isn’t so farfetched. For years she kept a shrine in our basement. Pentagrams, candles, strands of people’s hair, knives for sacrifice, and even crystals she claimed healed people’s wounds. Janine didn’t know Belinda and I had found that shrine. Hidden in a cabinet, there but not really there. We didn’t tell anyone until we knew Janine would be out of our lives forever. We were scared that we’d be the next lock of hair, tied neatly in a bow, resting next to the knives.

“It’s been so many years. You haven’t even opened it.”

“I’m afraid.” And there it is; my secret.

I’m 22 years old and still scared of Janine.

“Of what?”

“Okay, I got one,” I say.

“Janine.”

“Well?”

“Me too.”

I can tell she is getting impatient. She is not going to sit in my doorway forever, and I don’t blame her.

“See that doll?” I point to Ariel.

We sit in silence a while. The heat, choking the words in our throats, makes it hard to talk. Ally stands up and crosses the room.

She stops directly in front of Ariel. She grabs the plastic case and holds it towards me.

“Yep.” “Let’s burn her.”

“Janine gave her to me.”

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My bedroom is full of secrets, most of which Belinda knows. She was a part of most of them. They’re her secrets too. Ally sits on the floor near the door. When she was little, Belinda and I made her sit in the doorway to watch us play pretend. We never let her play. Just watch. From that spot in the doorway. There, but not really there. Somehow she is still on the outside of things.

There, but not really there.

I glance around my room and spot it.

The Little Mermaid doll still locked in her plastic prison. I have had that doll since I

“What?”

“Why the hell do you still have it?” Ally looks at me, shock and disgust in her eyes. I can hear her thinking, You kept something that nasty woman gave you? The woman who tortured us?

The woman who made it a point to hurt us every day?

“Look, I really never thought about it till today. I guess I kept it as a reminder. The day she gave it to me is the day she moved in.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, I guess it holds some kind of spell on me. Metaphorically speaking of course.”

I add that last part on fast. The idea of

“Let’s. Burn. Her.” Ally looks at me, waiting for me to comprehend.

“Al, no…”

“Come on, Jo. It will be our secret.” The emphasis she put on the word our makes me want to burn it. Ally wants to share a secret with me and I want to share one with her. I stand up and search through my purse. It sits dead on my nightstand. I probe it, sliding my fingers across the inside lining until I feel the smooth, cold plastic of my lighter.

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a r i e l “Okay, don’t tell anyone. It’s our secret.”

I emphasize the word our just like she did and smile. The idea of setting fire to something Janine gave me makes my stomach flop. It is the kind of flop you get before doing something exciting, but terrifying.

“It will be like we’re burning Janine out of our lives. Like we’re burning her soul.”

Ally’s eyes narrow and for a second I’m scared of her, too. “If she even had a soul,” she finishes the thought.

I laugh. I think Ally’s making a joke, but I can see that she truly believes that Janine is at least part-devil. And again, I don’t blame her. Janine shaved off all Ally’s hair when she was nine years old. She told Ally that she was ugly. I tried to stop it, but Janine was more powerful. She’d also cast her spell over my father.

We tip-toe down the hallway. Dad is snoring into his pillows, so we close the door quietly behind us. The night sky is clear, the

air heavy. The moon hovers over us as we grab lighter fluid from next to Dad’s grill.

I drop the doll onto the grass. Even in the dark you can see the decaying brownness of the blades, the unforgiving heat.

Ally grabs the doll back up and begins to tear her out of the package.

“What are you doing?”

“What she did to me.”

Now I see the scissors poking out of Ally’s back pocket. They glisten in the white moonlight. She grabs Ariel and cuts the doll’s red hair. It falls to the ground in clumps. When she’s done, she throws down the doll. Ariel lands upon her cut off hair as if it is a bed.

I douse the doll in lighter fluid. I see her drown in it. Ally hands me a piece of paper.

Janine, is scrawled across it. I light it and the flames start to spread from the bottom corner. I drop the paper onto the doll. We

i n

f l a m e s

watch ashes float up toward the sky.

The smell of burning plastic surrounds us. We cover our noses, but we don’t move.

Ariel’s face begins to melt. It is barely a face now. No more blue eyes, no more red hair, no more Ariel. The Little Mermaid has drowned in flames that dance around the pool of plastic. Elated at being freed into the night, the flames slither across the lawn, turning brown whatever green grass we had left.

Ally grabs my hand.

She is smiling.

I hug her as the heat of the fire pokes at our legs.

Jorie Rao is a graduate student at Rowan University in the Writing Arts Master’s Program, where she wrote this memoir. The story takes place in her father’s backyard about two years ago. Janine is not her stepmother’s real name.

Sandy Crimmins The

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

Second place: $250 and publication.

Deadline: NOVEMBER 1, 2013 Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details.

PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 26

a i m e e ’ s

T i p s

IN SUSPENSE

By Aimee LaBrie I did something the other day that I’m not proud of. I was in the middle of reading a novel and I couldn’t stand it any longer—I had to know how it turned out. I had to know if the main character ended up with or without the man she loved. I had to know if her big secret was ever discovered. I had to know if she was left lonely and regretful or if she somehow managed to overcome her own fears to live honestly. So, I casually flipped to the last pages, as if just searching for a bookmark, all the while allowing myself to skim the words of the final chapter. I’m a good skimmer and I got my answer; it was something of a surprise, though it made sense overall. And then I was angry at myself for having ruined the satisfaction of discovering this as the author wanted me to, page by page, scene by scene. I will keep reading the book, because I love this author and he is a master of the first-person narrative, and a master of creating in the reader the all-important desire to know how the story ends.

26

As fiction writers, how do we capture and maintain this level of investment?

We certainly know that we don’t want to tell the story of the day that nothing happened—that slice-of-life story wherein we get an insider’s peek at a farm woman going about her day. At the same time, our readers may not care either if our stories are always end-of-days tales. Somewhere in the middle, we have to find the excitement needed to keep the eyes moving across the page.

Do we need to start with a hidden explosive under the front tire of the John Deere tractor the main character will be plowing across the fields? Yes,

in a way. We need to give the reader the feeling that something important is at stake; it doesn’t necessarily have to be life or death, though it should be potentially life-altering.

We find ourselves needing to invest again in character. What does this farm lady want more than anything?

What stands in her way? What is she made of and how will she go about getting what she wants? What are her main weaknesses, the impediments to her desire, and will she be able to overcome them by the end?

In her book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott puts it this way, “Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will discover what’s at stake. Find a way to express this discovery in action, and then let your people set about finding or holding onto or defending whatever it is. Then you can take them from bad to good to bad and back again. But something must be at stake or you will have no tension and your readers will not turn the pages. Think of a hockey player— there had better be a puck out there on the ice, or he is going to look pretty ridiculous.”

One other key thing to think about is how the start and the finish of your

story relate to one another. A good ending in some ways returns us back to the beginning of the story, like a snake eating its tail. The two moments should speak to each other in some way to give the narrative a fullness—a sense that all is right in the world the writer has created. Not right as in good, but right as in justified; we can see now how the author carefully chose her first sentences, her opening image of the clapboard side of the barn, because she was skillfully setting us up for the final image of the cow standing still in the pasture (or something like that—always end with a cow, is my motto).

If you have given your character something important to want, and if you have set her up properly to have to fight for that thing she longs for, then your readers will move along with you the entire way, experiencing twin feelings of anxiousness and pleasure as they are both worried about the ending and enjoying the ride there.

Hopefully, they will also be more mature than I am, and able to delay gratification until the very last words appear.

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

This new litmag from Philadelphia Stories publishes:

fiction * creative nonfiction * poetry * art a community of young writers

and artists from the Delaware Valley

JR.

Find out more at www.philadelphiastories.org/junior

PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 27

n a m e

o f

a u t h o r

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS Philadelphia

Great Books

Interested in joining a Great Books discussion group?

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.

Contact us to find a Great Books discussion group in your area: phila1@greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see

www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

Creative Writing

Workshops Express your unique voice. Find joy in

writing.

Evening and daytime workshops Ambler, PA • Center City, PA • Havertown, PA

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

Philadelphia Stories Hosts Free Workshops at Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College September 14, 11:00-1:00: Curt Smith November 16, 11:00-1:00: Maria Thiaw December 7, 11:00-1:00 Publishing Panel Bowers Writers House provides an interdisciplinary space for presentation, performance, expression and study.

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

Bowers Writers House • 840 College Hill Lane Elizabethtown, PA 17022 • 717-689-3945 www.etown.edu/writershouse

Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for details.

PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 28

books you might have missed!

POETRY BOOK PICKS

Tips for Domestic Travel

by Hayden Saunier (Black Lawrence Press, 2009)

Hayden Saunier’s Tips for Domestic Travel is a tour de force of fifty poems.

Perhaps it is the author’s acting experience that makes her able to inhabit so many prismatic voices so convincingly.

Although there are many poems in this collection that allude to the grief of losing an aging parent, each poem walks a new path, and none of it feels overwrought. Saunier’s careful eye scrutinizes every angle of life through the lens of history, domesticity (removing carpeting from stairs, pulling shirts down from the attic), and travel. “I’m used to living/with the dead; they’re everywhere,” says Saunier in “Beach.”

These are varied poems in length, form and seriousness. The speaker has a frank, charmingly unvarnished voice: in the world of Saunier's work, neglected puppets sport "...the universal poses of the hanged" ("Untangling Marionettes") and a watch found in the garden ("the night before the war began...") is a ticking reminder of "so many things that do not belong to us,/but they are here, and ours."

28

Saunier appears to take us to the edge of mortality, daring us to look over the edge, before pulling us back with some small redemption.

— Liz Chang

He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs

by Leonard Gontarek (Hanging Loose Press, 2013)

In contemporary poetry, there is a tradition of sparse, conversational language with a twist (James Wright, Louise Gluck). Leonard Gontarek’s new book of poetry, He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs is very much in this tradition, while adding brilliant moments of humor that are all his own. His poetry is not sad or morbid, but he is in love with the slanted image, the unexpected phrase.

In his first poem of the book, he writes, “Jackson Pollock is afloat in his life/with a view of burning cruise ships.” He doesn’t back off from adding his own compelling voice to the image: “I think of Pollock when I am walking the edge /of a field in autumn imprinted with shadows of leaves.”

But he doesn’t stop with the image and the personal voice. Gontarek has a wonderful knack for shaking things up to make sure we don’t become too sentimental. His poems don’t ask for compassion, much less pity, for the poet.

They are not pedantic or trying to show off. But they are very human and wonderfully imaginative. They just seem to say, “Follow me, and if I stumble, bear with me”, and the laying out of their vision is worthy of the reader’s most attuned and human attention.

— Donna Wolf-Palacio

i would ruby if i could

by Margot Douaihy (Factory Hollow Press, 2013)

Margot Douaihy’s chapbook i would ruby if i could takes its name from a line in one of the poems in the collection called “Text Me.” A sort of double cinquain, the first part consists of lines that could be generated by the predictive typing on a cellphone, while the second part repeats the same lines with the actual intended language.

Awakening sexual relationships between women and the universal experience of coping with the end of a relationship are two themes that appear throughout much of the collection, but the range of lenses through which these themes are viewed is impressively broad. While there’s plenty of longing for lost love expressed here, there’s also a sense of trying to achieve closure, as in the two triolet poems “Late Winter” and “Too Late,” which nearly bookend the collection.

Both echo the idea that, just as in the natural world, sometimes there are places between two people “where nothing will grow.” The final, sonnet-like poem, “Game Over,” declares a change in the speaker’s past relationship patterns of being the first to leave. The “turn” comes in the final line and a half: “This time, I’m writing myself Awake./ Fuck The End; it will tell itself. In this story I kiss you. I stay.” These lines may also be a declaration of Douaihy’s presence as a writer, remaining awake and open to where her poetry may take her next.

— Aimee Penna

PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 29

Talking “White”

by Maria James-Thiaw (postDada Press with iUniverse, 2013) Maria James-Thiaw’s most recent collection of poems, Talking “White,” compels its readers to sort the knotted threads of race, gender, sex, work, family, and language. It sounds heavy —and, at times, it is. James-Thiaw uses a confident voice throughout her collection and relies on direct, unambiguous language.

The poems in Talking “White” locate their writer in the contemporary posi-

tion of a black woman in academia.

Some poems look at race through the prism of family history. In the poems “Big Mamma Blue” and “Virginia Slims,” we meet a female saxophone virtuoso and a pair of “dapper dans”: “sons of house slaves [who] don / three piece suits, patterned silk ties…” Both of these poems are printed next to reproduced photographs of the subjects they discuss. JamesThiaw challenges expectations based on gender and race while linking herself to a long, complex history.

In Talking “White,” Maria JamesThiaw resists too-simple dichotomies.

Her poems are prickly and a little unsettling—and they don’t offer the reader easy, definitive options.

Instead, she demands that her readers examine the knots made of so many threads that wind through our own lives and experiences.

— Courtney Bambrick

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

October 12, 2013 9:00am- 5:00pm Rosemont College | 1400 Montgomery Ave. | Rosemont, PA 19010

“I loved it. From the keynote speech, to the agents/editors panel, it was perfect.”

— 2012 attendee Keynote speaker: Michael Martone

Visit www.philadelphiastories.org for schedule and registration details.

Master the Art of Writing t t t t

Rowan University offers an M.A. in Writing for writers who are serious about perfecting their technique. This interdisciplinary program features: Classes in Creative Writing, New Media, Journalism, & Composition Studies Individual Attention Small Seminars & Workshops Professional Development Opportunities Graduate Certificates are also available in Creative Writing, Editing & Publishing, Writing & New Media, and Writing: Composition & Rhetoric.

Apply Now! For more information visit RowanCGCE.com/Communication or call 856.256.4747

PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 30

Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

Michener Level ($25 - $40)

30

Adrienne Jenness Alan O’Leary Angela Speakman Anne Hunter Barb & J.J. Cutler Barbara Bloom Brian Kraft Carlo & Sharon Spataro Carol Towarnicky Carolyn Guss Charles & Kathy Shattuck Charles McGray Christian Thompson Christine Obst Concha Alborg Constance Salidis Dana Lotkowski Dave Stiles Deborah Burnham Diana Krantz Dianna Sinovic Dolores Verdeur Dorothy DiRienzi Ed Kratz Ed Ruggero Eileen Suzin Odlen Elizabeth Bodien Elizabeth Cosgriff Elizabeth Ticknor Eve Hoyt Faith Paulsen Fereshteh Herrman Frances Metzman Freda Egnal Helen Mallon Jacqueline Hopkins James Fratto Janine Pratt Jeffrey Klemens Jennifer Corey Jennifer Ward Jessica Herring Jill Belack Joseph Cilluffo Joseph J. Feeney Josephine A. Graham Judy Dinnerman Judy Heller Julia Aislinn Bohren Karen McLaughlin Kathleen Carlin Kathye Fetsko Petrie/Michael Petrie Katie Braithwaite Kay Peters Kristin & Henry Joy McKeown Linda Wisniewski Liz Dolan Marilyn Carrier Mark Zettlemoyer Marlene Richter Mary & Owen Gilman

Members as of August 21st, 2013

Mary Clarke Megan Greenholt Melissa Trask Davy Michael Neff Mo Ganey & Don Kates Nancy Capizzi Nancy duPont Natalie Dyen Nicole & John Monaghan Patti Nagel Regina Hastings Rich Casamento Robin Bonner Rosemary Cappello Ruth Littner Sandy & Jean Hofer Suzanne Carey Zielinski Suzanne Chang Tara & Andrew Smith Thomas Baroth Tom Molinaro Veronica Stickelman Virginia Dillon Xio Axelrod

Buck Level ($50 -$99) (2 Anonymous) Alison Baer & Jeffery Hirsch Barry Dinerman/Monroe Buckner Betsy Mckinstry/Joel Edelstein Bryan Wang Christine & Tom Barnes Christopher Beardsley Dana & Chris Scott Daniel & Carolyn Barry Daniel Gordon David Sanders & Nancy Brokaw Douglas Gordon Eileen Cunniffe Frank Diamond Gillian Bedford Hugh & Trina McCauley Irene Fick Joanne Green John & Karen Shea John & Phyllis Taylor John M. Williams/Marie Davis-Williams Julia Rix Julie Cohen & Nigel Blower Karen & Dan Gruen Kevin & Beatrice Hogan L.M. Asta Lawrence O. Spataro Leigh Goldenberg/Aaron Bauman Lise Funderburg Lynn Doerr Lynn Pompa Lynn Rosen & Evan Schwartz Margaret & Craig Griffen Marlynn & Randy Alkins Martha Bottomley Martin Evans

Mary Scherf Rachel Simon Richard Bank Richard Virtue Robert & Helen Cook Ronald Holtman Sharon Sood & Scott Lempert Stephanie Scordia Suzanne Kimball Terry Heyman Thomas & Meriam Rush Tim Kissell Virginia Lofft

Whitman Level ($100 - $400) Annalie Hudson Minter Barbara & Eric Holmberg Carol Oberholtzer Conrad Weiser & Barbara Holmberg Hermann W. Pfefferkorn James Zervanos Janice Hayes-Cha & Jang-Ho Cha John Higgins Joseph Wechselberger Julia Chang Kathleen Furin Ken Rodgers Margot Douaihy Nathan Long Paul & Cecie Dry Paul & Janice Stridick Polia Tzvetanova Richard Mandel Robert & Judy Schachner Stefanie Levine & Steven Cohen Sue Harvey Virginia Reid

Potok Level ($500- $999) Judith & Walter Jones Kerri & Marc Schuster Michael Ritter/Christine Furtek Mitchell Sommers

W.C. Williams Level ($1000+) Cheryl & Ross McLaren 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_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 31

Building a community of writers, artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley A MAGAZINE THAT CREATES COMMUNITY

Thanks to member support, Philadelphia Stories has been serving the writing community of the Greater Delaware Valley since 2004 in the following ways: * Publishing 5,000 print copies of a free quarterly literary magazine, featuring writers and artists from the Delaware Valley, and making this free publication available at more than 200 locations, including all branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia. * Offering reasonably priced conferences and workshops for writers. * Hosting readings and other social events for writers. * Publishing books through our boutique imprint, PS Books. * Hosting two national contests, one for fiction and one for poetry. * Supporting a community of young Philadelphia-area writers through Philadelphia Stories, Jr., a new print and online magazine by young writers.

YOU can help keep Philadelphia Stories—a non-profit 501c3—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.

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PS_Fall_2013_PS Summer 8/24/13 6:30 PM Page 32

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