Philadelphia Stories Spring 2017

Cultivating a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

SPRING / 2017 / FREE

POETRY ISSUE! / BENCHED MICHELE LOMBARDO / DUTY PETE ABLE / THE FIX JENNIFER REIGER

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CONTENTS POETRY 4

FIRESTORM: CHECAGOU.........................................................................................................................NANCY L. DAVIS

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CONTENT WARNING: PANTOUM......................................................................................................ALEJANDRO ESCUDÉ

10 ADOCTRINADO................................................................................................................................................LILIANA LULE 12 EXTINCTION (I)..................................................................................................................................................E.A. BAGBY

Publisher/Editorial Director Carla Spataro Publisher/Executive Director Christine Weiser Fiction Editor Mitchell Sommers Assistant Fiction Editor Amy Luginbuhl Creative Nonfiction Editor Susette Brooks Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor Rachel Mamola Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick Contest Coordinator & Assistant Poetry Editor Nicole Mancuso Art Editor Pam McLean-Parker

FEATURES 14 BENCHED (fiction)..............................................................................................................................................MICHELE LOMBARDO 22 DUTY (fiction)..........................................................................................................................................................PETE ABLE 26 THE FIX (essay)......................................................................................................................................................JENNIFER REIGER 28 LET'S FACE IT (column)....................................................................................................................................AIMEE LABRIE

Art Director Derek Carnegie Executive Assistant Fabi Malacarne Marketing Assistant Dom Saunders Web Design Loic Duros Board of Directors Alex Husted Alison Hicks Concha Alborg Mitchell Sommers Will Woldenberg

ART Spring Fling by Lois Schlachter

COVER

As a graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lois Schlachter was formally educated. In the graduate program of life, Lois paints whatever comes into her head, working directly from her hand to the canvas with little to no planning.

With her love of line, handsome and vibrant color, Lois leads the viewer into her world of rhythm and comfortable composition. Visit www.fineartbylois.com

Courtroom Window by Arvid Bloom

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Arvid J. Bloom looks for unusual angles and perspectives in common situations. His photographic intentions spring from a calling to help expand his viewers’ mindfulness through awareness of beauty, patterns, and connections that surround them. When he is out with a group of photographers, he likes to aim his camera where others aren’t looking. flickr.com/ arvidbloom

For Sari by Cathleen Cohen

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Guardian Angels by Lois Schlachter

Dogwood by Paulette Bensignor

Paulette Bensignor is a contemporary American artist whose work combines abstraction and realism. Bensignor’s subject matter is the landscape, yet her concentration is focused on the hidden symbolic philosophic and political meaning in nature. Her technical work developed when she studied at PAFA, the University of Pennsylvania and abroad. Bensignor’s innovative work can be found in public and private collections around the world. Visit bensignor.com

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Cathleen Cohen is Education Director of ArtWell. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Baltimore Review, East Coast Ink, Ember, Four Quarters, Philadelphia Stories and 6ix. Her artwork has been shown at the Crane Arts Center, Rosenfeld Gallery, RiverArts Gallery, and Soho20 Chelsea Gallery. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from NAPT. cathleencohenart.com

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Life of the Party by Constance Culpepper

Philadelphia based artist, Constance Culpeper’s work is a study in domesticity and the commonalities of personal experience. She depicts heavily patterned interior scenes with vibrantly colored objects that she uses as a framework for conveying emotion. Culpepper studied psychology and studio art at Southern Methodist University and received an M.A. in Clinical Developmental Psychology from Bryn Mawr College.

She is Director Emeritus of 3rd Street Gallery in Philadelphia, where her paintings have been included in group and solo exhibitions. www.constanceculpepper.com

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Dish Soap #10 by Peter Seidel

Since 1992 Peter Seidel has taught art at Friends Central School, Wynnewood, Pa. He has also taught at Drexel University and Moore College of Art & Design. Seidel has been awarded numerous prizes for his paintings. He holds a B.A.degree (Honors in Fine Arts) from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. and an M. Arch from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. His exhibition record can be seen on his website: peterseidelart.com

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Hollyhocks from the Seed Packet Series

by Robert Stickloon

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Robert Stickloon draws or paints every day. Stickloon graduated from Kutztown University with a B.S. and M.Ed. in art education and from Idaho State University with an M.F.A. in 2-D art with a concentration in drawing. He has taught studio art courses at Penn State Schuylkill Campus since 1984. www.stickloonfinearts.com

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. The mission of Philadelphia Stories is to cultivate a community of writers, artists, and readers in the Greater Philadelphia Area. 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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Fiction Board Addison Namnoum Erik F. Cwik Aidan O'Brien Ilene Rush

Aimee LaBrie Jon Busch Alex Brubaker Kate Blakinger Alexandra Karpa Kate Centofanti Ally Evans Kathleen Furin Alyssa Persons Kerry Young Amanda Knight Surie Keysha Whitaker Andrew Linton Kristin Moyer Brenda Adey Lena Van

Brian Ellis

Leslie McRobbie Brianna Garber Melissa Foster Brittany Korn Nathan Long Carolina Ortiz

Owen Hamill Che Yeun Robert Kerbeck Chelsea Covington Maass Rosanna Duffy Cierra Miller Sara Asikainen Clare Haggerty Shelley J. Schenk

Daniel Huppman Tiara DeGuzman Daniel Pontius Tracey M. Romero Darrah M. Hewlet Victoria Calhoun Elizabeth Green Vivienne Mah Walt Maguiure

Creative NonFiction Board Andrea Vinci Deborah Off Jacqueline Massaro Julia MacDonnell Chang Rachel Mamola Sarah Wecht

Poetry Board

Colette Grecco Deborah Burnham David Kozinski Eli Tomaszewski Jennifer Rohrbach Katie Ionata Kristina Moriconi Maria Thiaw Monique Gordon Pat Green Peter Baroth Shira Moolten Vernita Hall

SUPPORT PROVIDED IN PART

BY THE PHILADELPHIA CULTURAL FUND.

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The 2017 Poetry Contest

The work submitted to Philadelphia Stories for this year’s Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry was ambitious and exciting. Poems were beautifully crafted, deeply felt, and provocative. In discussing many of the poems that he selected, judge Lamont Steptoe referred to the way that they interacted with history and with our current moment. At times sharp and pointed, at others lush and expansive, this batch of poems shows readers how vital and powerful poetry can be to navigate the heartbreaks and frustrations of life as well as to celebrate its great and small glories.

The winner of the 2017 Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry selected by Steptoe is Chicago-based poet Nancy L. Davis for her sprawling poem “Firestorm: Checagou.” Collaging song and poetry excerpts, Davis pits progress against exploitation in a broad, sweeping poem. Steptoe writes that the poem “resonates with origin/history/past present and future.” Nancy L. Davis receives $1000 and an invitation to join us at the LitLife Poetry Conference at Rosemont College on April 1, 2017.

Runners up receive $100 each as well as an invitation to join us at the LitLife Conference. They include Los Angeles poet Alejandro Escudé for his poem “Content Warning: Pantoum,” Liliana Lule of Skokie, IL for the poem “adoctrinado,” and E.A. Bagby, also of Chicago, for the poem “Extinction (I).”

Steptoe also selected as honorable mentions the poems “Duffey” by Will Jones, “The Diameter of a Ringling Bros. Circus Ring”

by Gail Comorat, “Changes to Your Itinerary May Affect Your Fate” by Hayden Saunier, and “Northbound Train” by Kathleen O’Toole.

These poets are also invited to join us April 1 at Rosemont College. Their poems can be found on our website at PhiladelphiaStories.org.

In addition to the winning and placing poems selected by Steptoe, we are also publishing “editor’s choice” poems from finalists Carlos Gomez, Harvey Soss, Maggie Lily, and Scarlet Gomez. These, too, can be found at PhiladelphiaStories.org. We hope that some of these poets will also join us in April.

More than two hundred poets sent us poetry submissions for this year’s Sandy Crimmins Prize. Our poetry board sifted through the submissions, narrowing down the bounty to about eighty individual poems from which I selected a few dozen for judge Lamont Steptoe to select winners. It is a long, but rewarding process. We at Philadelphia Stories appreciate the poets who generously share their work with us and encourage local writers to continue to do so. We thank Joe Sullivan for his continued support of this contest. We also thank Nicole Mancuso, contest coordinator and assistant poetry editor, for everything she does to keep the contest moving smoothly.

Courtney Bambrick Poetry Editor, Philadelphia Stories

JUDGE LAMONT STEPTOE'S COMMENTS ON THE WINNING POEMS WINNER: Nancy L. Davis,“Firestorm: Checagou” – “resonates with origin/history/past present and future.”

HONORABLE MENTION: Hayden Saunier, “Changes to Your Itinerary May Affect Your Fate” – ”brings up issues of fate destiny and history.”

RUNNER UP: Alejandro Escudé, “Content Warning: Pantoum” – “documents our current history of ethnic profiling and its tragic outcome.

HONORABLE MENTION: Will Jones, “Duffey” – “speaks to the issues of veterans returning from war and how they face post war issues of health and aging.”

RUNNER UP: Liliana Lule, "adoctrinado" – “opens up discussion about spiritual and ethnic identity and a as well as where we find ourselves in history.”

RUNNER UP: E. A. Bagby, “Extinction (I)” -– “is fascinating for its ability to explain existence from our subatomic origins to our modern day world global in its vision.”

HONORABLE MENTION: Gail Comorat, “The Diameter of a Ringling Brother's Circus Ring” – “Given the fact that this circus will perform here in Philadelphia for the last time this year and the concern which has resulted in the sensation of elephants in circus acts [this poem] speaks to humanity’s growing empathy with other species and how humans do not have all the answers and must now and forevermore be more attuned to what nature has to teach us.”

HONORABLE MENTION: Kathleen O'Toole, “Northbound Train” – “speaks to how the act of traveling can elicit memory and history and resolutions for the future.”

Read these poems and more at PhiladelphiaStories.org

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WINNER

Firestorm: Checagou* a protest poem Poem by Nancy L. Davis

In the tall stalks of plenty where prairie meets plains a city is born. Wild onions, wild fantasies.

Rivers run through it. Strident streams of Great-Lake currents steady the flow of New-England merchant men: princes and paupers, land pirates build the inestimable sprawling of sweeping horizons.

Pelts fall to planks warriors to mayors dreams to currencies forests to sweatshops.

Steam horses spar with human life.

A river reversed a pestilence delivered downstream.

Necessity being the mother of invention, steel structures rise, trains loop and dip and the disassembly of beasts foretells the Second Coming: lean iron horses feeding scrap yards. Meanwhile,

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the torpid transmigration of souls transpires: dumped into Bubbly Creek later washed down the mighty Mississippi, generations later the river choking on silt.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers. “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.”** I’ve seen a lakefront open to parks and people, wetlands overfed with fill. The vanishing and the vanquished. Trains, planes, automobiles: the confluence a gritty grid of asphalt angles and granite canyons. Boats carrying the hopeful across the Great Dixie Divide. Mechanical men stacking flaxen into elevators of wealth. Driven creators the brilliant architects of modernity.

Flash forward to grim brick smokestack-like Habitats for Humanity. Distinctive Projects. Progress. Native Sons also rising. A Metamorphosis: onion fields to fertilizer beds to killing parks slashed to the quick with modern-day scythes and sickles; drug-sick shepherds keeping watch on their flocks to part rival weave from neighborhood chaff: flushing out futures like grouse in the grasses, flesh falling from bone; sacrificial lambs, our heads bowed to the heavens. Our Country ‘Tis of Thee.

The ages echoing one into another, aging with heartbreak, of thee I sing.

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Rapid-fire consumption our Gross National Product.

Metal scrambles, screams through tissue; just another Stormy Monday, the papers say. Strange Fruit falling from the popular to arms. Farewell. Hand to hand combat. Friendly fire. The gun runner wailing with the gospel choir.

“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, /But, baby, where are you?”***

A most uncivil war. Urban unrest. City of Big Shoulders, gangly adolescence.

Oh holy night. Violence begets violence. O say, can you see, by the dawn’s dimming light.

The rocket’s red glare the bombs bursting in air gives proof through the night that our hearts are not there.

For the land of the free and the home of deep strife: unsettled, unhealthy, unbidden. Rife with sorrow.

I speak of rivers fire and rain.

*Native American term meaning skunk weed, smelly onion **James Taylor "Fire and Rain" ***Dudley Randall, “The Ballad of Birmingham”

A retired English Professor, Nancy L. Davis divides her writing time between Chicago and Long Beach, Indiana, on Lake Michigan. Her poetry, short fiction, reviews and articles have placed in numerous competitions and appeared in such journals as Primavera, The Ledge Magazine of Poetry & Fiction, Route Nine and Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table. Prior to teaching, Ms. Davis wrote and produced award-winning educational films. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Literature from The University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

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GUARDIAN ANGELS by LOIS SCHLACHTER

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RUNNER UP

Content Warning: Pantoum Poem by Alejandro Escudé

We warn you this video may contain graphic images, the man is a blood-chalice, the woman is saying sir and the uniform stands firm as the camera captures the road, elbows and hands, the zip-zip of cuffs.

The man is a blood-chalice, an alphabet of red, sir you shot my boyfriend, she says, don’t tell me he’s gone.

The crying baby is somewhere suspended in dread over a road of hardened elbows, hands, zip-zip of cuffs.

You shot my boyfriend, she says, don’t tell me he’s gone, the uniform stands firm, the woman is saying sir on a road of interlocking elbows, the zip-zip of cuffs.

We warn you this video may contain graphic images.

We warn you this video may contain graphic images.

The policemen approach from angles, spider-like, the camera to the woman’s face, her voice unravelling as she summons the facts, “You shot four bullets…”

From angles, the policemen approach, spider-like, saying “sort” and “out,” as if death were not final.

The man is a man no more, a head-tossed savior, his body like a white bloody blanket over the seat.

Saying “sort” and “out,” as if death were not final, the uniform stands firm as the camera captures his body like a white bloody blanket over the seat.

We warn you this video may contain graphic images.

Alejandro Escudé’s first book of poems, My Earthbound Eye, was published in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

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DOGWOOD by PAULETTE BENSIGNOR

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RUNNER UP

adoctrinado Poem by Liliana Lule

indoctrinate: (1) to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs

god is hiding at the corner of my mouth. god is (hiding) on the corner of hudson and evergreen and watching two children bleed out. his eyes are wide open. did he anticipate this on the eighth day? does he hate all he’s created? my mouth tastes like iron. bleeds from the inside-scraping screams i’m not allowed to breathe. god is watching from the bruised insides of my thighs; does he want something back? let me cough up a lung. let me carve my heart out. let me sanctify myself, post-mortem. let me make myself anew in awe of him. god is listening. god is (watching) this pyre fueled by genocide. these relics of colonization. these survivors of enslavement. god is loving us (living) (starving) (dead). god is watching my father take a knee to the back by an officer who calls him spic. god is watching a man hemorrhage before his daughter. god is promising to steal back any lightning-born brown boys he finds hustling on clark in the night time. here. pray to him again tonight. watch him press his ear to the hospital room door of a woman whose son is dead. promise him a visit to la virgen. maybe she can hear us. god is hiding in the space between a kiss. he’s creating something holy. something promised. something doomed.

Liliana is currently working on a degree in English and Spanish, an endeavor made even more exciting by her constant forays into Latin America. In her spare time, she does research on Latinx liberation, aided by her constant efforts to save the world one protest chant at a time. She enjoys Ben & Jerry’s, Spanish rock bands, and dogs almost as much as she does poetry.

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DISH SOAP #10 by PETER SEIDEL

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RUNNER UP

Extinction (I) Poem by E.A. Bagby

Cyanobacteria in primeval waves found the young planet so immensely to their liking that they multiplied and multiplied— those carbon-gluttons at an endless feast— spread, turned oceans blue, and forced the world

to breathe From which it all followed: legs grew, and nerves and spines, fins, wings, antennae, tails; monocots pushed up, leaves uncurled; meadows flamed with color, brought forth

the humming seethe of bees; and, not incidentally, some enterprising double-jointed ape stretched out a fingertip and touched a thumb, and found the world was less

obscure —from which the rest of it proceeded: wars and Romans, contrapposto, dancing, letters, A-tests, pyramids and satellites, gunpowder, rock and roll, vaccines, banner ads, whisky, card games, fantasy leagues, traffic stops, Congress: well,

here we are.

Did, as cyan crept across the swells, as the holocaust of oxygen filled the air, some skeptical bacterium

demur?

Did it assert, The oceans aren’t changing; or, if they are changing, you can’t prove that we’re the ones changing them; and anyway, why stop progress, when cyanobacteriakind has come

so far?

E. A. Bagby, a Chicago-based writer, musician, performer, and illustrator, recently participated in the Arctic Circle Arts & Sciences Expedition, an arts residency aboard a tall-mast ship exploring the glaciers and fjords of Svalbard. Her writing has appeared onstage with Strange Tree Group and Sansculottes; in anthologies from Wipf & Stock, Press 53, and Chicago Review Press; and in numerous magazines. She also draws oddball creatures for The Forgiveness Monster, fronts Liz + the Baguettes, and plays bass for The Unswept.

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COURTHOUSE WINDOW by ARVID BLOOM

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Benched Michele Lombardo

Her daughter was in trouble. That’s all they’d tell her. Milena hadn’t received a call from the school since the time Kasey was in second grade when she’d accidentally mushed the class tadpole trying to “watch” metamorphosis. Now, as Milena and her husband Doug approached the high school office grumbling about hysterical teachers, uninformative phone calls, and dramatic power displays, she thought surely the news would be the tenth grade equivalent of the tadpole.

Kasey slouched just outside the office on a worn oak bench, incongruous within the school’s gleaming hallway. A sepia-tinged photograph of the school’s founder hung above her head, the founder’s expression slightly displeased, hard eyes glaring above a Hitler-esque mustache. Wells of wet mascara folded under Kasey’s blue eyes and she studied the wall beyond her, her expression resigned.

The bell buzzed. Classroom doors scraped open and students shuffled into the hallway. They traveled in packs, globs of spilling cleavage and exposed skin, shrieking as they poked and slapped at each other, clouds of hormones floating over their heads.

“What happened?” Milena asked Kasey.

Her daughter retreated into her sheath of shoulder-length blonde hair, her fingers pressed to her forehead and her jaw rigid. The tadpole theory wasn’t holding up well.

When the Principal’s door opened, Milena kissed Kasey’s forehead, reluctant to leave her there, but she clasped Doug’s hand nonetheless and entered the office. The decor screamed: Welcome to the inner sanctum of one of the most elite private schools in the country. Bathed in natural light. Rounded wood furniture. Stained a warm honey color. Dotted with brushed nickel hardware.

Mr. Frazier greeted them with a practiced smile, his breath tinged with coffee and the courtesy mint he used to conceal it.

He leaned back in his ergonomic chair. “Would you like a drink?

Juice, tea, water?”

Doug squeezed Milena’s hand. “We can just get to it,” he said, youthful despite the grey flecking his temples. His eyes swelled with purpose, like he still thought he could fix anything.

“We had an incident this morning,” Mr. Frazier said. “Kasey was discovered being intimate on school property with two seniors.”

And there it was, Milena’s worst fear. She picked at a hang-

nail, wishing she could grip it with her teeth and yank. Mr. Frazier had peered into Milena’s soul and extracted its ugliest secret, that Milena had been a sex addict since high school, and that this fact, which had pulverized her own existence, had spread to Kasey, even though she knew nothing of Milena’s past.

Doug rocked forward in his chair. “Excuse me?”

Milena kicked over her purse, spewing sunglasses and packages of sanitizing wipes onto the floor. She scooped the mess back into her bag, apologizing for no reason. She hated when she apologized for no reason.

“Define intimate,” Doug said.

“I’m afraid she was having sex on school property,” Mr. Frazier said.

Milena hadn’t even known Kasey was sexually active, so non-standard sex in a public place seemed impossible. But she couldn’t bring herself to protest, to offer explanations to this man about her daughter’s body.

Doug laughed. “How does that even happen? Wasn’t someone…watching her?”

Mr. Frazier cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

“We don’t run our school like a detention center. She was absent from Biology class and discovered under a stairwell shortly thereafter.”

“What happened?” Doug asked.

Mr. Frazier tapped a pen against his desk. “According to your daughter and the two other parties, it was consensual. In fact, Kasey insists it was her idea.”

Doug eased back into his chair, as though lowering himself into a boiling hot bathtub. “Using viruses to cure cancer is an idea. A threesome on school property is an administrative fuckup.”

“Is she okay?” Milena asked. “Is she in trouble?”

Doug pinched between his eyebrows. “Which seniors?”

“I’m afraid it’s illegal for me to disclose names.” Mr. Frazier delivered the statement fluidly, as if practiced before a mirror.

Or a lawyer.

“It isn’t illegal for older boys to take advantage of a young girl?” Doug asked.

Mr. Frazier folded his hands. “Certainly, you can speak to an attorney, but there’s a Romeo and Juliet exemption to the age of consent in New York. Typically, if the defendants can prove the victim’s age is at least 14 and the age difference is less than five

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years, it’s considered legal.”

Milena touched Doug’s arm. “We don’t intend to sue.”

Doug snorted. “The fuck we don’t.”

“What’s her punishment?” Milena asked.

“In public schools, the police are usually summoned and the parties are charged for indecent exposure. Being a private school, we have some leeway and I chose not to take that path.

They’re all good kids. I’d prefer to do what’s best for them, not worsen a bad situation. I’d recommend a two week suspension.”

He straightened his tie and held Doug’s gaze. He never uttered the word scandal, although it seemed clear to Milena that he didn’t intend to suffer one.

“I’m sure Kasey has an explanation,” Doug said.

Mr. Frazier rocked in his chair. “Nevertheless. It’s behavior we can’t encourage.”

Milena’s heart thrummed in her chest hard enough to pulse her shirt.

Mr. Frazier suggested guidance counselor sessions as well as outside therapy. He shook their hands and smiled encouragingly. “I’m sure with the right support at home, Kasey will rebound from this in no time.”

we’re talking to, here.”

Milena’s face flushed. It was the first time Doug had referenced her problem since they’d married. They met shortly after she’d finished her degree in music production, and was enmeshed in the kind of recovery that entailed consistent and predictable fuck-ups. She’d convinced him her rehabilitation had transpired, even though she still didn’t even own a computer for fear of what she’d do with it. Still, she was honest about her past. “I attend SLAA meetings,” she’d said. “I have a sponsor.”

She told him she no longer drank or did drugs or even shopped because an addict’s addictions could change. He dismissed it all as harmless promiscuity. He never even asked how many men she’d slept with. He saw her the way she wanted to be seen. The “new and improved” Milena with the yoga mat slung over one shoulder, armed with a cold-pressed juice and a purse filled with organic protein bars.

Kasey sighed and looked out over the filtered skyline. “I guess I never thought I’d be able to do it. I didn’t think they’d want to.”

Milena remembered thinking certain guys were out of her league. It didn’t take her long to learn that impossible unions happened all the time when it came to sex. Such achievements were unremarkable.

“Did you use protection?” Milena asked.

Kasey rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

“Maybe we should go to the hospital to get you checked out,” Doug said.

“Dad. Stop.”

Outside, Doug trudged along beside them, his hair blown back from the late autumn breeze. “Wow, Kase. I wasn’t expecting that.” He spoke without inflection, though his voice caught on the last word.

Over the past half hour, Doug’s understanding of their daughter seemed to have broken off and drifted far enough away that he couldn’t retrieve it. Kasey sniffled.

He leaned in and hugged her, his arms stiff and his hands floating just above her skin, as if touching her had become problematic. “Come on, now. No need to cry. Just tell me you’re okay.”

Kasey wiped her eyes and nodded.

“Great. Now tell me their names.”

“Enough!” Milena shot him a dirty look and hooked her arm around Kasey, steering her toward their loft in Riverdale, just a few blocks away.

“What? Am I the only one who thinks this is pertinent information?”

“It was consensual,” Kasey said.

Doug sunk his hands into his pockets. “So I’ve been told.”

They turned down a tree-lined street and Milena squeezed Kasey’s shoulder. “It’s going to take your father time to process.”

On this block of the Bronx, the old maples formed a tunnel overrun with birds. The caws, cheeps and trills rivaled any “Relaxing Sounds of the Rainforest” compilation. Milena always imagined herself somewhere tropical as she passed through.

Kasey pounded her head with her fists. “Fuck!”

A jogger veered to the other side of the street. Milena eyed the throngs of passersby, as though the women pushing strollers cared about anything beyond Kasey’s profanity in front of their newborns.

She yanked Kasey’s arms down to her sides. “What’s done is done.”

“I’m so stupid.”

Milena shook her head. “You’re 16, you’re supposed to be stupid. Within reason.”

“No, Milena,” Doug said. “She’s not supposed to be stupid.

She goes to the best school in the country. Let’s not forget who

At home, Milena changed into a belly shirt and harem pants while Doug finished some work and Kasey called friends. “Damage control,” she’d said. Milena perched atop a pillow to meditate. She visualized herself as a tree in an ancient forest, roots stretching down into the damp earth, leaves unfurling toward the sky and pushing through the open door of her cranium. The wind rippled her leaves and the sun melted her body into the tree’s trunk. She tasted the brown of her bark. Then, a vision of Kasey leaving for her Spring Formal last year; skintight strapless blue dress, the rounds of her boobs squeezed and protruding, small braids interspersed through her hair, a confusing mix of innocence and brazen sexuality, a lovechild of Marcia Brady and Paris Hilton. When Kasey came home at three a.m., Milena hadn’t questioned her daughter. She’d told herself she didn’t want to be a hysterical parent. That she was proud to be “on the level.” That it was a conscious choice, not a survival tactic.

Either way, she’d blinded herself to the possibility of their current predicament.

What if her daughter had inherited her promiscuity like it was encoded in her DNA? Milena pictured two strands coiled together, a twisting staircase stretching to infinity, repeating the same mistakes and unfortunate tendencies ad infinitum. Milena had been adopted and never knew her birth parents, or whether her addiction was inherited. And now she wanted to know whether the addiction gene was real and if she’d passed it on, or if Kasey was just experimenting the way, say, an All-American Girl with an edge might.

For Milena, it had started as a healthy appetite, then moved to her best friend’s dad when she was 16. Later, in her NYU dorm room, AIDS hysteria in full swing, unable to study, sneaking out to Washington Square Park, finding a stringy-haired boy in the

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dark, his jeans smeared with dirt, and wondering as she blew him if he was just skinny or a drug addict or actually infected, and whether it even mattered because she’d do it again anyway, countless times, whether she’d live long enough to expect anything different from herself, for her life. And then there was Ben Lumas, whom she’d loved, and whom she managed to live with for four whole months before she got caught. The consequences were never high enough.

Yet, she never parsed her motivations, other than sometimes she used sex as a weapon and sometimes as a shield and sometimes as a confidence boost and often as a knife to her jugular.

She was more certain of all that came after: the meetings, her sponsor, the program, a shrink. The nagging suspicion that her addiction had simply morphed to meditation, yoga, smoothies, a healthier existence.

The doorbell rang. She’d forgotten that Sean, the film director for whom she was compiling a soundtrack, had promised to deliver the dailies so she could study the scenes she was to set to music. It was the standard indie fare – part drama, part comedy, limited release, film festival bound, probably direct-to-video.

Sean wore a silk scarf tied in knots around his neck. He loved vintage suits and accessories, each piece chosen for its ironic reference to someone or something else. But he could never pull off these wardrobe choices with the ease of a John Huston or a Fritz Lang. He smiled at Milena, his receding hair inexplicably parted in the middle.

He handed her the DVD, holding onto it a moment too long.

“Come to the set. I can’t stand you watching this bullshit.”

The tapes were boring; the same scenes shot again and again, sometimes over 20 times. Milena bit back an apology.

“Things are hectic. I’ll get there.”

Sean peered into the emptiness beyond Milena and raised his eyebrows, unconvinced. He took her in, his eyes drooping with sensuality. He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger and inhaled. She pulled back from him, but he seemed unfazed, smiling as the hair dropped from his fingers, misinterpreting her disinterest as reluctance. A family member rustled, footsteps and a creaking door, and Sean retreated, leaving just the ghost of his smirk.

Later, in her home office, she ran her hands over papers, speakers, wires, a lifetime in music and she felt the old restlessness. The fidgeting, uncomfortable twisting of her body. Without thinking, she palmed her phone and dialed her sponsor. Straight to voicemail and appropriately so; it had been at least five years since she’d called. Almost as long since she attended a meeting. She’d made the mistake every addict makes, the mistake of thinking her problem had shrunk to a manageable size.

“So it’s my fault.”

Doug slid his veined feet into slippers and stalked out of the room. She wondered if he’d changed his opinion about her past, if she were now to blame.

When Milena retrieved Kasey for dinner, the girl’s eyes were swollen to slits. Blotches of pink surrounding her lips stretched her mouth into a thing with no borders. Kasey’s room felt foreign to Milena, like she hadn’t seen it in months. A bookshelf scattered with fiction mostly assigned by school. Animal Farm, The Things They Carried, Native Son. Heavily doodled notebooks.

A pair of Converse (also doodled, resembling a yearbook page more than a shoe), a pair of platform heels, thigh-high boots.

Lace underwear she didn’t recognize wadded into a ball. A Justin Bieber poster with a penis drawn in. She should’ve seen this coming.

“What did your friends say?” Milena asked.

Kasey sighed and pushed past her.

They’d ordered Thai and, seated at the dinner table, Kasey reconfigured her food, tucking her chicken into her rice and disemboweling her spring roll. Doug took Kasey’s hand and she climbed into his lap the way she had when she was little. Then she lost it.

He lifted her chin to meet her eyes. “I wanna help, but I don’t know how.”

Beautifully chosen words, and as Milena smiled, Doug reached for her, and a murmur of hope swished inside her.

Kasey swiped the back of her hand along her nose and sniffed. She looked away, probably wondering how a father might help with such a thing.

Milena scooted closer to them and ran her fingers through Kasey’s matted hair. She wanted to confess her past, to apologize for her role in this, but when Kasey turned those big, watery eyes on her, she froze. What if their shared transgressions didn’t console Kasey, but sent her over the edge? What if she didn’t want to hear about it or, worse, what if she did?

Milena struggled to keep her voice even, the discourse flowing. “Let’s focus on why this happened. How well did you know those boys?”

“Not well.” Kasey slid off her father’s lap and dropped back into her seat. She trained her eyes on the wall.

Doug made a triangle with his hands and rested his forehead against it. “Did they talk you into it?” His voice sounded high and stretched, like a man reaching for things outside his grasp.

Kasey’s eyes darted to her mother and she stilled, an animal sensing danger.

Milena steered the conversation. “Think about what you were trying to gain. Did you want to feel prettier? More accepted? Were you feeling rebellious?”

“Sometimes boys can hurt a girl,” Doug said. “And at first it may not seem like they did.”

“They didn’t fucking force me, Dad.” Doug pressed his fingertips into the table. “It can be hard to understand when you’ve been hurt.”

Kasey sprung up from the table, nearly toppling her chair. “It was all me, okay? ALL. ME.” She seemed to reconsider a dramatic exit and instead leaned on the table and hung her head.

“And how do you feel now?” Milena asked.

Kasey bit her lip and closed her eyes. “Gross.”

Later that night, Doug relayed his conversation with their lawyer, who didn’t agree with Mr. Frazier’s conclusions, but believed the boys could get some jail time, or at least fines and a lifetime listed on the sex offender’s registry. He grinned when he told her.

Milena’s heart beat in her throat. “You act like you never had underage sex.”

“You of all people should understand. How would your life have changed if that pedophile that preyed on you had been locked up?”

“This doesn’t say what you think it says. It’s something else.

Low self-esteem, Daddy issues, I can’t be sure, but whatever it was, I promise you it had nothing to do with those boys.”

In their bedroom, Doug leafed through his closet, laying out

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FOR SARI by CATHLEEN COHEN

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a suit for the next morning. “What reason does she have to act out?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if there’s a baby or an STD?” “Then we’ll deal with it. But she used protection.”

“I just hope this doesn’t screw up her life.”

“It’s a short-term screwing. She’ll graduate and never hear about it again.”

“But there’s social media. And the Internet. Those things don’t go away.”

Milena considered this. “I’m not saying it’ll be easy.”

Doug clicked on the TV and settled in to watch his favorite show.

Milena turned her back to the TV. “I’m thinking about telling Kasey. Maybe it would help her confide in me.”

Doug squinted at her. He left the TV on. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

“No?” He stole a quick glance at the screen, then patted the bed beside him. She crawled next to him.

“Don’t you think it would upset her?”

Milena swallowed raggedly, her mouth dry. “Our mistakes don’t define us forever,” she said softly.

He turned off the TV and tossed the remote onto his bedside table. Gathering the soft folds of her into his hands, he kissed her. “Of course not.”

her chair but was too angry to sit. Doug continued to scroll and tap and before she could stop herself, she snapped his laptop screen shut. “Don’t fucking ignore me.”

He stood. “Grow up.” A moment later the front door slammed.

She was still staring at the door when Kasey shuffled in wearing a t-shirt that read, “Feed me and tell me I’m pretty.”

Milena didn’t greet her. “I’d like to know when you lost your virginity.”

Kasey groaned, plopping herself into a chair. “You don’t need to try to be my friend, you know. I have friends.”

“I can help.”

“What? Psychoanalyze me?”

Milena plucked an apple from the fruit bowl and sliced it thinly. “Sex isn’t love. It’s not respect, either. It won’t give you what you need.”

“Stop lecturing me. Can’t you just be my mom?”

Sixteen years of supposedly filling the role of mom, and she’d never even read the job description. Her throat tightened.

“Maybe it’s time for a curfew, then.”

“I’ve never had a curfew my whole life.”

“Things change when you get caught having sex with strangers.”

Kasey poured herself a bowl of cereal. Milena couldn’t see her face, but could tell she’d started crying.

Kasey slammed the refrigerator door. “Fine. I won’t have anyone to go out with anyway.”

Milena’s phone buzzed. A text from Sean: “Come to the set or you’re fired,” punctuated by a winking emoticon.

“A mistake is a mistake. But was it just a one-time thing?”

Kasey nodded and stirred her cereal.

“You don’t want to ruin your life,” Milena said.

“Does anyone ever want to ruin their life?”

Milena and Doug ate breakfast at the kitchen table. Milena, cross-legged in her chair, sipped a green smoothie and looked at the sunlight glinting from the forehead of a small jade Buddha in the middle in of the table. Like it was having an epiphany that might someday rub off on her.

Dressed in his suit for a day of futures trading, Doug shoveled cereal into his mouth and scrolled through his laptop. “You’re still not on Facebook?”

Milena shuddered at the thought. “Nope.”

“Kasey’s profile is private.”

“I don’t even think they use Facebook anymore. It’s something else now.”

“Do you remember what?”

“You’re not back to the names again, are you?”

Doug drank the milk from his bowl and placed it in the sink.

“I’d feel better knowing who these kids are. I bet their parents know. I bet everybody knows.”

“You can’t cyber-stalk her.”

“She’s not telling us shit.”

“You could be making her a therapist appointment. You could be reading books or articles. You could be talking to her right now. And instead, it’s this.” Milena slammed her glass down with more force than she meant to use.

“I’m gathering information.”

“The wrong information.”

“Now you’re schooling me on appropriate behavior?”

Instead of hurling her glass against the wall or, say, Doug’s face, Milena rinsed it, attempting to steady her hands as she watched a whirl of residue gag the drain. “Turning on each other isn’t going to solve this.”

“But you let her do whatever she wants,” he said. “I don’t even think you see a problem with any of this.”

“Why don’t you just say it’s my fault.” She strode back to

Milena opened Doug’s computer to check the weather, but his browser showed a list of articles about a senior from Kasey’s school, Gallagher Astor. This is one of them, she thought. She squinted at the face beneath the caged Lacrosse helmet and tried to interpret it. Dark eyes, nice skin, Roman nose. Athletic and popular. Probably the kind of guy who partied hard, who hosted people at his penthouse every time his parents stole a long weekend in the Hamptons or Nantucket. The kind of guy who ignored a girl until the bottles were drained and the rooms began to empty. The kind Milena would’ve slept with once, searching for something in the encounter she knew she wouldn’t get. She snapped the cover shut, cursing Doug.

An hour later she exited a cab in Coney Island where Sean greeted her wearing a ridiculous plaid bowtie. The place was like something trapped in another era when carny kitsch was an attraction, when seaside resort areas were marked by Ferris wheels and vaudeville theaters rather than McMansions.

Sean squeezed Milena’s shoulder and winked. “I thought I’d never get you here.” A nearby cooler contained several airplane-sized bottles of champagne. Sean handed her one.

“I don’t drink.”

He crimped his face at her like she was insane. “You’re going to have an aneurism if you don’t lighten up. It’s just life, Lena.

Enjoy it, would you?”

She tried to hand it back, but Sean refused. One by one, the crewmembers turned to watch. She was making a scene, when

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she only wanted to feel invisible for a few hours. To leave her house, transcend her brain, and hone in on something she was good at.

Sean sighed and shifted his stance. He was impatient, annoyed, possibly embarrassed. The idea that she’d systematically eliminated all pleasure from her life bloomed within her like an ancient truth. She hesitated, then popped the cork.

She hadn’t had a drink since she met Doug and became tipsy immediately. She tripped over a microphone and giggled like an idiot afterwards. Her shoulders loosened. Her nerves and muscles seemed to unfurl, a delicious sensation that almost tickled.

Sean introduced her to the leads. The actress chewed gum with her mouth open, hair pulled back in a ponytail, barely older than Kasey, and chattered on about music and how in high school she listened to Pop but was into EDM now. Last year she’d met David Guetta when she was “tripping balls” at Coachella and “hung with him” at a “fucking off the hook” after party. The actor tried to interrupt, but only managed a word or two. He smoked a cigarette, his mouth wetting the filter and tongue curling against the smoke. Milena laughed, pausing each time she glanced at the actor, whose face she’d transposed to Gallagher’s obscured visage beneath his Lacrosse helmet.

When filming resumed, Milena watched from a plastic chair close by. Each time the clapperboard snapped, the man and the woman changed everything about themselves; their posture, mannerisms, expressions. As if they’d received an electrical jolt, the man became more assertive, and the actress morphed from a gum-chewing child to a woman, seductive, her movements languid, her lips parted. She practically shimmered. If only real

change was that easy.

The performance unsettled Milena, as if some delicate membrane separating fantasy from reality had been compromised and she no longer understood her own struggle. She got herself another bottle of champagne, knowing she shouldn’t, but no longer convinced it mattered.

Afterwards, Sean offered to drive her home.

“It’ll take you half the night this time of day,” she said.

“I insist.” He nodded toward a white trailer. “Let’s grab my keys.”

Milena knew why he wanted her inside the trailer. His keys were probably in his pocket. Still, she followed him.

He motioned for her to enter first. Her fingers danced above the door handle, toying with the feeling, the old sensations, being swept up in something larger than her, a gust of irresponsibility. She was conscious of the remorse then, conscious it would grow, conscious of its crippling power, and yet, she opened the door anyway. She did it all anyway.

During, he kept his eyes open, scanning her face, searching for hers, which were trained on the fluorescent lights overhead.

The sofa, rough like burlap, chafed her back. The sound of water sloshing back and forth in a dispenser with each thrust, gave it the whiff of comedy, though Milena no longer laughed. Afterwards, he kissed her wrist and told her she was beautiful.

Milena walked Kasey to school for her guidance counselor appointment. It was the last day of her suspension.

“Maybe we should talk about next week,” Milena said.

Kasey pulled a leaf off of a tree and shredded it. “I just go

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LIFE OF THE PARTY by CONSTANCE CULPEPPER

back and take the abuse and try not to kill myself. I mean, I already know what people have been saying. They’ll just say the same shit to my face.”

“It’s all over social media.”

Kasey snorted. “Are you kidding me?”

“Can I see?”

Kasey crossed her arms. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

Her pace quickened. She was walling herself off, the iron latches of her defenses locked tight. It opened Milena’s heart in a way she hadn’t expected. With the imprint of Sean affixed to her, a film on her skin she couldn’t wash away, she felt the same impulse. Hide. Deflect. Run. Milena blinked back tears. “People are called sluts all the time. They’re called sluts because they have big boobs or because they flirt or while they’re being raped. It’s not who you are.”

“Maybe it is. I got passed back and forth between two guys.”

“We are more than our mistakes.”

The school came into sight and Kasey took a deep breath, facing the entrance.

She yanked her off-the-shoulder shirtsleeves farther off-theshoulder. “Let’s just do this. Okay?”

Milena waited on the worn oak bench beneath the founder’s picture. She didn’t want to stifle Kasey, or align herself with the mothers who were too much of a good thing. Who wouldn’t

let up. Who weaseled their way into the places they were least wanted. And yet. She had to be there for her. There had to be a way her experiences could help.

Doug, who’d agreed to meet them, slid onto the bench next to her. They’d been avoiding one another since the fight.

He touched her knee lightly. “Sorry about how things have been.”

“Don’t be.”

He hitched her closer, his leg touching her leg, his eyes searching hers. “I shouldn’t have made you feel like it was your fault.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“I’m her parent, too.”

“Doug.” It was a prelude to so much more, yet saying what followed felt like too great a distance to traverse. And then Kasey emerged from the counselor’s office and Doug had jumped up, peppering her with questions. How was it? What did she say?

Are there things we should be doing? Does she want to speak with us? How can I help? They’d gone from lovers to parents, from people to ideas. Or maybe they’d always been ideas to each other.

Kasey took a deep breath. “Can I just get a hamburger?”

They went to a burger joint around the corner and ordered milkshakes. Kasey talked about summer break. About how they’d go to their house in Maine again this summer, where she

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had different friends, a different identity.

Milena bit her cheek as she listened. She rung her hands, cracked her knuckles and cleared her throat. She had to tell them everything and refuse to let them dismiss the problem that didn’t go away no matter how she dressed or colored her hair or carried her yoga mat.

“I have to speak and I need you to listen.”

Kasey and Doug stopped talking mid-sentence and stared at her as though she was a stranger, as if they had no idea what she’d say next.

Kasey reached out to her, resting a hand on her shoulder and squinting with concern. “Mom, what is it?”

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And Milena thought she saw a spark of recognition in her daughter’s eyes.

-THE END-

Michele Lombardo is a Pennsylvania-based writer of fiction and screenplays, as well as Co-Founder of Write Now Lancaster. Her work has appeared in Permafrost Magazine, Youth Imagination Magazine, The Journal of Crime, Law and Social Change, and others. She is a graduate of UCR Palm Desert’s MFA Program and is married with one daughter.

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Duty Pete Able

The parameters of the assignment were not at all clear. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was to live alone in a house outside of Buffalo. The unspecified length of my stay worried me. I thought perhaps after awhile without human contact I would begin to unravel. I’m a social creature. During the first few days I drafted a checklist, which, if adhered to, would help stave off any peculiarities of the mind. Some were obvious. Others seemed silly. #1: Avoid pacing to and fro. Madness is always accompanied by pacing to and fro. #2: Refrain from talking to myself. At times it might be comforting but it is a risky business. #3: Don’t cut corners. For example: continue to pee standing up.

#4: E ngage in mental exercises. For example: think of ten green things before breakfast.

#5: Steer clear of OCD-like behavior, touching knobs and faucets only when necessary et cetera.

The list went on. I was happy with the first twenty-four rules and I would add to them when necessary.

The two bedroom, two bath house, replete with hardwood floors and white walls, boasted a single mattress, no box spring, in the master bedroom, and a single collapsible chair in the living room.

On the wall in the kitchen hung a clock, a calendar and an old phone with a coiled cord. Those were the essentials. A yellow tennis ball and a children’s coloring book had been thoughtfully provided for diversion. Unfortunately no crayons were included.

The rumor had it the Agency was experiencing cutbacks.

I was not to leave the house. They were clear on this point.

They said the full extent of my mission would be made known to me when it became necessary for me to know. I dreamt up different scenarios but none of them seemed plausible. The closest I got to anything at all realistic was imagining there could be a sleeper cell of local housewives who were all set to be activated in the near future. It wasn’t much of a hypothesis as far as they go.

I bounced the tennis ball against the wall for hours thinking about the Agency and what my mission might be. The Agency liked to be mysterious. No one knew exactly what they did. I guessed this was what gave them the peculiar amount of clout they seemed to command. The mystery was what drew me to

them right out of college. The sense of adventure had tantalized me. Now I was starting to wish I had gone in another direction.

I wouldn’t quit mid-mission though. I was afraid to. They might make me pay for it.

Having an unknown job to do at an unknown time provoked anxiety. I couldn’t help but feel on edge. I felt the Agency was toying with me unnecessarily. I didn’t understand it. I started to curse them under my breath but I always caught myself before breaking my ‘no talking to myself’ rule.

On day eighteen I emptied out some cereal on the kitchen counter in the hopes it would attract mice. I thought if I could get one to hang around it would give me an excuse to hear my own voice. I’d name it Jerry and chew the fat. “How are you? What’s it like living in the walls?” That sort of thing. A mouse infestation would greatly increase my quality of life, I thought.

Before this I had always wanted more time to sit and think, but now I longed for something to do. Even the most monotonous, mindless chores would have been welcome. I would have gladly scraped the barnacles off a ship’s hull with a spatula, or counted the cars in a train station’s parking lot. Even cleaning the kennels of an inner city animal shelter wasn’t out of the question.

I would have done all this for free. Instead I was getting paid to throw a tennis ball against a wall.

Once, I bounced the tennis ball against the wall five hundred and thirty-four times without dropping it. This record stood for weeks. Afterwards whenever I reached four hundred I got nervous. Once I got really close to breaking the record. I got to five hundred and twenty-nine and I bobbled it. As the ball rolled away from me I put my face in my hands and cried.

At precisely 2:22 pm on the thirty-fifth day the phone rang.

I dropped the tennis ball mid-throw and ran to the kitchen. I yanked the phone from the receiver before the end of the second ring.

On the other end of the line I heard a man’s voice. “There will be a job for you at 19:42 on the eighty-fourth day,” it said. The man’s voice was chilled like a glass of ice water. “In the meantime,” he said, “you are to learn Spanish.” I felt I had missed a beat.

“How do you expect I do that?” I queried. But just then, true to the cliché, the doorbell rang. I asked the man on the phone to hold on and answered the door. I was wringing my hands. I opened the door wide, glad to see another living soul, and said hello.

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I took to spying on my neighbors. I didn’t want to think of myself as a Peeping Tom but I was too desperately bored to worry about whether I fit the label or not.

In the house on my left lived a young woman who I decided was a widow. The middle aged man in the house on my right tooled around in a sports car. And directly across the street a young couple and their two young children made their home.

I spent a good chunk of my day spying on them. I took the mirror from above the bathroom sink to ensure I wasn’t caught.

I would lie on the floor and hold up the mirror at a good angle sometimes for an hour or more just to catch a glimpse of the man backing out of his driveway or the two children playing games in their front yard.

Sometimes I felt like a creep. The first few opportunities I had to see the young widow undress before getting into bed I looked away. I commended myself for my fortitude. Eventually I started looking of course. It wasn’t hard to justify—I convinced myself I was watching with an artistic eye.

The eighty-fourth day came and my eyes were glued to the clock. I couldn’t wait for it to read 7:42 when the Agency was supposed to call with the job. At one point I took the clock down off the wall for inspection. I held my ear up to the back where the battery was. I heard ticking but only faintly. I would have hoped for a stronger sign of life. As it was I continued to eye the cheap clock with a certain amount of skepticism.

I played the Desert Island game to kill time. If I had to limit myself to one movie I would choose Castaway. If I could listen to only one song I’d choose Message in a Bottle. If I were stuck with one book I decided on Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. I went down the line pretty far. Eventually I chose a kind of car, a brand of sneaker and a type of scented candle. I went as far as I could then started over and chose the next best whatever. This killed thirty-eight minutes, which wasn’t as much as I had hoped.

The phone rang at 7:41, and I was alarmed. The Agency was a minute early. This type of sloppiness was unheard of. I let it ring several times and contemplated the development. After several harrowing seconds I decided not to answer until the clock read 7:42. That way it would be like the mistake had never been made. I let the phone ring and ring.

When I finally took the phone off the receiver the same man’s voice as before said he had a job for me. A warm sensation washed over me. It felt as thought I had just been plunged feet first into a heated pool. I thanked him and asked him how his day was going. I was starved for human interaction. I would have been grateful for any small personal remark, but none came.

“Assemble the crib,” he said flatly.

I would have asked ‘what crib?’ but instead I just waited for the doorbell to ring, which it did momentarily. I padded barefoot to the door. As before when I picked the phone back up the line was dead.

I put the large rectangular box in the corner and regarded it from the corner of my eye. Learning Spanish I didn’t mind, I had always wanted to learn a second language, but where there was a crib there was likely to be a baby and that troubled me. It seemed a messy business. I had no desire to be a single dad. For the moment I left the disassembled crib where it was.

A few days went by with the box sitting there. I continued on with my normal routine. I studied my Spanish, I bounced my ball, I spied on my neighbors and I colored the coloring book with my imagination. For exercise I decided to take up yoga. I knew

I spent a good chunk of my day spying on them. I took the mirror from above the bathroom sink to ensure I wasn’t caught.

I would lie on the floor and hold up the mirror at a good angle sometimes for an hour or more just to catch a glimpse of the man backing out of his driveway or the two children playing games in their front yard.

The woman wore a frown with a pouty lip. She was either in a bad mood or didn’t like the look of me because she didn’t offer me a single word. Still, being snubbed by her was far better than not having had anyone to be snubbed by. She gave me a yellow box with big black letters on the top that read “Rosetta Stone” and piled an old, used laptop on top—a real clunker.

I went back to the phone to question the man further, but the line was dead. I wasn’t at all surprised and I was too excited to be very disappointed.

Like a kid opening up a new, much-desired toy, I tore open the box and started on the Rosetta Stone immediately. I sat in the corner of the small room off the living room, which I had decided was the study, and plugged right into it. In a few hours I had mastered Level 1.

Rosetta Stone said, The woman is pretty, and I said, La mujer es bonita.

Rosetta Stone said, Asparagus is a vegetable, and I said, Esparragos es un vegetal.

Rosetta Stone said, The bus arrives at seven, and I said, El autobus llega a las siete.

Rosetta Stone had several things going for it. One was that it proved to be considerably more rewarding than bouncing a tennis ball against a wall. Two, it had a pleasant female voice which spoke to my loneliness. And three, it allowed me to use my voice without technically talking to myself. I was immediately hooked.

I just hoped my tennis ball wouldn’t feel too neglected.

During study breaks I fantasized about moving to South America and living a simple life near a beach someplace. I’d marry a forty-something woman with thick black hair and a thick rear-end. I’d have a grown stepson and we’d become friends. It would be a simple life but it would be a full one. I’d think about this for several minutes each day and it conjured up a very pretty picture.

On the fifty-sixth day I leafed through the children’s coloring book like I had dozens of times before. This time I imagined using mostly a blue crayon to color it as if I were a big shot like Picasso. It started off with a blue car and a blue house, which was plausible enough, but ended with a blue bear and a blue lobster.

I told myself that I was an artist and that this was artistic license.

I imagined smiling happily at the scathing critiques of my debut gallery.

The food in the cupboard was plentiful but there was little variety. Whoever had made the selections had little imagination.

After awhile you stop looking forward to meals. Clam chowder ceases to make the mouth water. The thought of baked beans makes the stomach feel queasy. Dried banana chips trigger a gag reflex. When I was studying food items on the Rosetta Stone I experienced hunger pangs. Yo quero hanburguesa con queso y papas fritas. Por favor, por favor, por favor… I hugged my legs and rocked back and forth.

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nothing about yoga however so the poses I did were all completely original. I invented a pretty serious routine with a series of twists and stretches and named all of the poses after my favorite comedians. I always ended the routine with a pose I named The Bill Murray. It was essentially a crab walk but with twisted arms and legs. You knew you were doing it correctly if your shoulders felt on the verge of dislocating.

From day one I had taken it as a matter of course that a camera had been installed in the fire alarm. For a long time I just ignored it but sometimes I found myself standing there in the hall gazing up at it. Often I lost track of time in that position.

As time went on my relationship with the fire alarm progressed. I began standing in front of it gesturing with a series of intricate hand movements that I imagined could be interpreted.

If there really had been a camera there, and if there was someone watching, the only thing he or she would have gleaned by my hand contortions was that I was losing it, which I myself already suspected.

Eventually I made up a new rule concerning the fire alarm. I was to start ignoring it again. If I gave it no power it wouldn’t matter if there were a camera or not. Still, if I had had a ladder I would have torn the thing apart in an instant. I tried the chair, but it was too short. I could just graze the circular box with my fingertips but I couldn’t get ahold of it. It still troubled me. Either I was clever or I was paranoid—I had a vested interest in knowing the truth.

Another day started with me rolling off the mattress onto the floor and beginning to count green things in my mind automatically. Mostly I used the same ones over and over. Trees, grass, leaves, celery, Granny Smith apples, marijuana, my Puma’s, Irish Spring soap, the Incredible Hulk… Often I didn’t make it all the way through. I kept getting lazier. I gave up easier and easier. I thought maybe I should change the color but that would mean changing the rules and if I changed one rule there was nothing to stop me from changing another and another and I would wind up with total anarchy on my hands. The rules were all I had to hang on to.

Finally I couldn’t ignore the contents of the cardboard box any longer. The idea of a baby still hung in the air like a bad omen, but the prospect of having a project to immerse myself in trumped all forebodings. I cracked my knuckles and danced around the room like a boxer warming up for a bout. I felt relatively well physically.

I took out all of the pieces and spread them out on the floor.

The instructions outlined fifteen steps with pictures included. It looked misleadingly complicated. Everything “male” about me cried out to crumple the paper up in a ball and toss it into the corner. I fought off this urge and instead folded the instructions into an airplane and sent them sailing into the kitchen. It was the mature thing to do.

I put all of the pieces into categories, sorted by size. I saw a picture of how to proceed and put pegs into holes and bolts into smaller holes to hold the pegs in place. I progressed quickly through the steps. I had to backtrack once, but it seemed to come together okay afterward. When I finished there were two pieces left over, but in my experience that often happened and it didn’t worry me. I threw them into the kitchen to where the instructions had landed and put the crib in the guest room. I felt satisfied to have put it together, but looking at it there gave me the willies. I turned away and shut the door behind me. I decided to keep it closed.

My one hundred and seventeenth day in the house came without any more missions. I was up to Level 4 on the Rosetta Stone. I became more and more attached to the woman’s voice. If I was being honest with myself I was completely in love.

I feared it would be an unrequited love.

The woman’s voice said, Mi hermana esta ordeñando la vaca, and I said, My sister is milking the cow. The woman’s voice said, Hace mucho tiempo yo solia jugar al futbol, and I said, A long time ago I used to play soccer. Eventually I built up the courage and asked the woman her name. I waited several moments for a reply but none came. In spite of the ridiculousness I found it to be heartbreaking.

On sunny days butterflies flew around, and on rainy days my neighbors left their houses in raincoats and carrying umbrellas. The weather didn’t concern me much. I bounced my ball against a spot on the wall to the right of the clock and scratched my long, scraggily beard rain or shine. If I could have traded five cans of clam chowder for a razor and some shaving cream I would have gladly done so. Having a shave would have greatly helped my morale.

In my former life I would normally drink coffee and eat toast and jam in the morning. Now I drank questionable tap water and ate dried banana chips. I paged through the coloring book as I popped the chips in my mouth. If I could have had only one color crayon I would have chosen purple. On page seven, a unicorn’s mane was just dying to be made purple. I would have gladly offered up a month’s salary for a purple crayon. I would have taken half a crayon, or even taken a nub. Anything to put a mark down on paper. Anything to prove I wasn’t a ghost.

I felt cross with the calendar. It wasn’t being completely honest with me about the way time was passing. Sometimes it careened too fast. Eventually I took it off the wall and put it in the kitchen with the crib instructions and left over crib pieces. We would be spending some time apart.

Somewhere around the one hundred and forty-third day my doorbell came alive and spoke to me. I almost tripped on my dash toward the door. I pulled the curtains aside a crack and saw a pretty, strikingly-pregnant young woman standing on the porch. I took a deep breath and opened the door. I was surprised by her presence but I was not surprised when she greeted me in Spanish. She handed me a note and smiled. I smiled back and opened the note. It said, Look after the pregnant woman. She speaks Spanish.

I was glad for the company, of course, but I wished I had had a little notice. I had been experimenting with degrees of filth, and she found me at an all-time high. I hadn’t showered for more than six weeks. My odor was stiff. I saw that it had hit the woman as soon as I opened the door but out of politeness she had fought the urge to pinch her nose.

I gestured the woman into the house and ushered her into the chair. I hadn’t learned much Spanish vocab about babies and pregnancy, but managed to work out that she was nine months pregnant and that the baby was due any day. We shared a chuckle about her size, but I wasn’t sure about much of what she said.

She didn’t yet realize how little Spanish I actually knew and threw out too many words at a time.

“Mi nombre es Inez,” she said with big wide eyes. I had never met anyone with that name before. It matched her face well, and the combination struck me as painfully beautiful.

I told her my name was Joe, but it sounded like a lie. I felt

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HOLLYHOCKS FROM THE SEED PACKET SERIES by ROBERT STICKLOON

changed from the Joe who had existed before starting on this mission. Maybe I’d go by Joseph once I finished here. Maybe I’d take myself more seriously.

In a lull in the conversation I said, Hace mucho tiempo yo solia jugar al futbol. Inez nodded and smiled. I offered her some banana chips and she said they were one of her favorites.

“Chips de platano son mi favorito,” she said and blinked twice. She was indeed very young.

When the phone rang I ran to it hoping for some kind of instructions. What was I supposed to do with this pregnant girl?

Instead all the man said was, “Open the front door,” and hung up. I did as I was instructed, and in an instant two men were carrying a queen size mattress up the stairs into the guest room. I was jealous of the size and I wondered if it had lumps like mine. It was clearly used but looked close to new.

I didn’t want Inez to know I had been spying on the neighbors so while she had a lie down testing the mattress, I put the bathroom mirror back on its hinges to avoid suspicion. I would miss the spying. Though we had never spoken I felt as though my neighbors and I were close friends. Giving them up would leave a big gap in my life. My eyes moistened. I hand tightened the bolts of the mirror as best I could.

The day after Inez’s arrival I got another call from the Agency, and they told me to take notes. I had no writing implement, as they well knew, and did my best to listen carefully as I could.

They communicated four items to me.

(1) I was not to speak English to the woman or the infant. (2) I was to ration food for the sake of the new residents.

(3) I was not to, under any circumstances, have intercourse with the woman. (4) I was not to use the crayons as they were for the infant.

Three things happened in the next few moments. First the line went dead, then Inez started moaning and, lastly, the doorbell rang. I went to Inez first but found her to be screaming strings of unintelligible Spanish words so I went to the door. I swung the door wide and found a short bespectacled man standing there.

I could tell he was a doctor because he was dressed in blue

scrubs, he wore a surgical mask and said, Soy médico. Given the situation I decided to let him in without interrogation.

He crossed the threshold and slapped a pack of crayons into my chest. I took a glance at the box then clutched it to my heart.

Not sleeping with the woman would be difficult to be sure, assuming she was into it, but not using the crayons would be nothing short of torture. Things were looking up though. And I was beginning to get an idea of what the Agency had in mind for me. My guess was the mission would be another eighteen years.

Others should be so lucky, I thought.

Pete Able’s work has been published in Forge Journal, Lost Coast Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Prime Number Magazine, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, among others. He is 34 and lives in Philadelphia.

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The Fix Jennifer Reiger

Nestled in the back corner of my classroom, perfectly adjacent to my much nicer, high-back teacher chair, is a tattered, blue office chair. Before the chair’s sad and shabby state, it lived in my extra bedroom, the room I temporarily deemed an “office,” while patiently awaiting a whitewashed cradle, changing table, and pastel rocker that were never needed. The chair comforted me and took a beating as I immersed myself in the life of an English teacher and was transported from new house to new house before permanently residing here, in its cinderblock, academic abode, for the past fifteen years.

It’s a comfortable swivel chair—cushioned and adjustable, with just the right give for teenagers rocking themselves into a state of peaceful, if somewhat resistant, contentment. That chair has held students struggling with college essays, and students fighting with parents. It’s heard stories of learning disabilities, failing grades, unexpected A’s, and unplanned pregnancies. The dingy armrests and faded upholstery have supported the most confident and most vulnerable—those reveling in their teenage years and those contending with them.

Somehow, I became a mother to many of the chair’s inhabitants. Give me a kid whose problems I could solve with the skills acquired through my English degrees, and I’ll give you my new project. Family struggling financially? Have a seat and let’s open a Google Doc. We’re going to have fun writing scholarship essays. Math teacher giving you a hard time? Let me take a trip downstairs and schmooze him a bit. First love break your heart?

I have tissues, chocolate, and a free afternoon of grading procrastination. I hold their hands, wipe tears from their eyes and snot from their faces, and love them as my own. This is the side of teaching they don’t tell you about—the side that makes the headaches, heartaches, and the dual caffeine-wine addiction worth it.

My own son, Evan, a grown man now, spent many childhood years watching me compose research papers, literary analyses, and later, lesson plans in that very home office and from the tattered, blue chair. He recently graduated from college with a degree in vocal performance, and he’s trying to adjust to the life of a young, struggling artist. My husband, Ryan, and I, having had him at the oh-so-grown up age of nineteen, sometimes wonder where this child came from. He was a funny little kid of intellect and creativity, but also possessed an introverted nature that embraced the adult world, dismissing childhood frivolities.

As he got older, Evan became increasingly contemplative.

He’s a skeptic—a thinker and a worrier. He holds his cards close and most days you need a chisel and a pickaxe to reach his softer side. But, it’s there. In moments of either sheer happiness or extreme disillusionment, when only a mom can suffice, he lets me in. And I love it. These moments are rare though, so when I come across students who I connect with, students who need me, students whose doubts and fears spill out from the safety of that chair, I can’t help but make them my own.

I never believed I was supposed to be a mother. How I got pregnant in the first place, the odds were ridiculous! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear of all the fertility treatments my friends have had to endure, while Ryan, in his dashing potency, barely sneezed on me and low and behold, it’s a boy!

As we juggled the new and peculiar responsibilities of young parenting in a sea of our own college antics and anxieties, we treated Evan as more of a sibling than our child. He attended concerts and parties with us, watched Friends and Seinfeld on Thursday nights, insisted on calling us Jen and Ryan during his entire second year of life, and learned to tap a keg at the age of three. Even in our youthful naiveté, he was loved, intellectually stimulated, and a tad spoiled. But I was also the mom who forgot about show and tell, felt frozen chicken nuggets qualified as a suitable dinner, and spent more time on my career than playing in the yard.

Despite our unconventional parenting style, Evan was still a sweet boy. I read everything to him, from Mother Goose to Shakespeare. He’d climb onto my lap as I worked, sucking his pacifier, curling my hair around his fingers, and ask me to read what I was writing. “Well, you see Evan, once upon a time there was an old king, King Lear, who really wanted people to tell him how great he was. Two of his daughters lied about how much they loved him so that they could get his land, but the third kind and lovely daughter remained loyal and true.” His brown eyes would glance up to my face to gauge my seriousness. I’d wink, and he’d go back to weaving his chubby fingers through my hair.

My career progressed and years seemed to merge, along with many student faces. I devoted the majority of my time to them, whether it was helping with assignments, attending their games, or listening to their problems. Time passed. At the age of thirty-four, my window was closing. I knew if I wanted another baby, I couldn’t wait. I read books, I talked to other mothers, and I went off the pill. But instead of a baby, doctors found a tenpound tumor in my uterus—a mass slowly taking over my body,

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and destroying a decision I had put off for years.

It hasn’t been until recently, after turning forty, when I started pondering that closed window once again, paying attention to this older body, hearing the whispers I’ve tried to block out— aged eggs that I still possess haunting me from the very ovaries I decided to keep when the surgeon took my uterus. I can hear them, small baby voices, ticking off every hour, every day, every year, trying so hard to team up with errant sperm. Those baby-ghosts love to whisper, hypnotizing me every time I smell a newborn’s head or look at Facebook posts of toddlers splashing in bathtubs and playing in pumpkin patches. But the truth is, those whispers are small echoes of a life that wasn’t supposed to be, a life I unknowingly abandoned when I stepped foot in a classroom and used my time to start caring for other people’s children.

Those whispers taunt from some innate, ancestral, maybe even mystical place of wonder that, surely, I’ll never understand.

What I do understand is the transformative value—how to use those voices to repair others and bring meaning to my life. For every Chloe, Anna, Brian, Andrew, and Alex rocking in that blue chair, I have purpose. I am able to fix the naïve transgressions of young motherhood with a kind of cosmic redo. I take in their doubts, their pain, their love, and relish their comfort and happiness when I console and dole out advice. They hug me, and thank me, and tell me that I’m the one who got them through.

I laugh. If only they knew.

If only they knew that at night, when I contemplate all of my inevitable graduation goodbyes, all of my children who will leave me, I wind up curled in Ryan’s arms. He strokes my hair and re-

minds me that I’m loved, that there will be other kids who need me, that this isn’t the end. If only they knew that in the dark hours of sleepless mornings, I sometimes find myself sitting in my home office, the room I had hoped would be a nursery, and I stare out the window thinking that while I do love my students, all 2,323 of them, I’m no hero. I’m just a mom looking for a way to quiet the echoes.

Jennifer Rieger is the English Department Chair at Upper Merion Area High School in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and teaches 12th grade Advanced Placement and creative writing courses. An advocate for her students, she dedicates her time to empowering young people through reading, writing, and acts of love. Jen holds a BA in English, an MA in Literature, and is currently finishing her MFA with a hybrid concentration in poetry and creative nonfiction. She has been published in BUST Magazine, The Sigh Press, Role Reboot Magazine, and The ManifestStation. Jen lives in Chestnut Hill with her husband and two tiny dogs.

Join Philadelphia Stories editors and top-name poets for the LitLife Poetry Conference for a day of master classes, discussions, readings, open mic, poetry book fair and more — including a celebration of the Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize and Montgomery County Poet Laureate winners.

WHEN: Saturday, April 1, 2017 WHERE: Rosemont College MORE INFO: www.litlifepoetry.org

Philadelphia Stories is pleased to announce the

201 7 Ninth Annual

Marguerite McGlinn

Prize for Fiction PRIZES: $2,000 cash award — $500 2nd place prize — $250 3rd place prize Invitation to an awards dinner in October

Deadline: June 15, 201 7 For more information, www.philadelphiastories.org 27 PS_Spring_2017.indd 27

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Let's Face it Aimee LaBrie

Pretend that you find yourself in a scary situation. Not temporary fear, like the jolt you get when you imagine you hear someone creeping up your staircase at night. I'm talking about a low-level, constant fear, the kind you that comes when you have a serious health scare or maybe it’s how you felt all through junior high gym class (or really, the entirety of adolescence if you were anything like me) or perhaps it’s the back-ofthe-neck, encroaching fear you would experience if you had a political leader who appeared to exhibit impulse control combined with a need to be adored and a trigger-hair temper. And then let’s imagine that your fears keeps getting reinforced and possibly even escalated? What then?

If you're a writer, you write about it. You write about the disbelief you experience as something new and unexpected develops, or you write about listening to a transcript wherein your leader appears to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive and maybe living somewhere in a blighted urban community.

That doesn’t mean you have to keep a journal, though you should probably do that to.

If you're a fiction writer, write about a tense family dinner or a dissolving relationship (see Nathan Englander's "What We Talk about When we Talk about Anne Frank"), or a dystopian society (see Brave New World) or create a war between farm animals to mirror a political movement. If you write poetry, carefully assemble your words to create an arsenal of images that encapsulate your concerns, your experiences (the Poetry Foundation offers a list of poems for inspiration at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems-and-poets/poems/detail/58014). For nonfiction writers, describe the worn face of the woman standing next to you in Shop Rite, wearing whatever button she's wearing and the assumptions you make about her (good or bad) based on this minor detail. Write about your grandmother's immigration experience fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and how she had to walk over exploded bodies to avoid land mines.

possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: AR IS PEACE W FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” So much more potency in describing the vivid and particular than you could ever achieve by ranting on Facebook.

Speaking of this: don't squander your creative energy on social media to combat the views of the high school friend of your sister-in-law. We want so desperately to be right and to set straight those we don't agree with. But social media can quickly devolve into ad hominem attacks and you can find yourself shouting at your laptop (this has never happened to me, of course) or spending enormous mental space searching for the perfect, searing retort.

Click that box shut. Open a new file, and write the first scene to your new novel instead. Put your energy forward, use all of your heart, and begin filling the page. That is how you fight the darkness.

Great Books Weekend at the Inn at Pocono Manor

All readers welcome!

Distinctive Voices:

Like it or not, we are living through a time in America that is unprecedented. Your observations and your stories are need to capture these moments. Write it all down, or at least allow yourself to channel whatever you're feeling into your work; use your artistic expression to fight this nebulous sense of fear and dread that seems to want to grip us by the throat. Let this sentence from Chapter 1 of Orwell’s 1984 be your guide:

“The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just

* Selected Lyrics, Bob Dylan

* The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald * The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen * The Red and the Black, Stendhal

Cost: $370 per person double occupancy, $450 for single occupancy: meals, accommodations, books included.

November 3-5, 2017 For more info, contact John Dalton at (610) 608-7711 or JD5258875@aol.com

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RESOURCES 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.

JAMES BRECKENRIDGE

June 9, 10, 11, 2017 Wyndham Hotel, Independence Mall, Fourth and Arch Streets Philadelphia, PA 19106-2170

RANDALL BROWN SHEREE BYKOFSKY AUSTIN CAMACHO

Keynote Speaker: J.H. Sullivan

DENISE CAMACHO

Author of Against the Tide: The Turbulent Times of a Black Entrepreneur

ERIN ENTRADA KELLY

Opening Speaker: Yolanda Wisher

SALLY GROTTA

Poet Laureate of Philadelphia

TERESE HALSCHEID DINA LEACOCK

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

JON MCGORAN DOREEN MCGETTIGAN HARRIET MILLAN

phila1@greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

PETER MURPHY THOM NICHOLS

For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see

Workshops: Novel, Short Story, Poetry, How to Get Published, Memoir, Middle Grade, Storytelling, Thriller, Screenwriting, Nonfiction Special Features: Tips for Writers, Flash Fiction, Grant Writing, Creativity, Reveal-Conceal Master Classes: Adaptation, Flash Fiction, Poetry Other Features: Appointments with Agents and Editors, Manuscript Raps, Manuscript Critiques, Manuscript Contests, Words on the Wall Contest, Writers’ Resource Table, Book Fair, Keynote Banquet, Buffet Dinner with Agents/Editors Panel, Sunday Awards Ceremony

Scholarships are available

CHRYS TOBEY ROBERT B. WHITEHILL

For more information and registration visit www.pwcwriters.org

www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org

Creative Writing

Workshops Express your unique voice. Find joy in

writing.

Porches Writing Retreat

Evening and daytime workshops

overlooking James River Valley in the Virginia Blue Ridge open all year to artists | www.porcheswritingretreat.com

Flourtown, PA • Center City, PA • Havertown, PA • Wyndmoor, PA

Writers of all levels welcome Fiction • Non-fiction • Creative non-fiction • Memoir • Poetry Find out if a workshop is right for you.

Sit in on one workshop meeting as a guest, by appointment only.

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

Rachel Kobin, Philadelphia Writers Workshop www.phillywriters.com • Rachel@phillywriters.com • 610-449-3773 Tuesday evenings in Flourtown • Thursday evenings in Wyndmoor Private Consultation for Manuscript Development

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