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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
d sprung kurilecz
MASTER PLAN nimisha ladva
THE ABSENCE OF FOG author profile
RANDALL BROWN
S U M M E R
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c o n t e n t s ART 3
FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART
O F T H E D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y
CONTENTS FEATURES 3 10 14 16 18 19 20
Master Plan (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D Sprung Kurilecz The Absence of Fog (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nimisha Ladva Clamming — Changing Tides (essay) . . . . . . . . Robert Freedman Summer School (essay) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C.G. Morelli Randall Brown (author profile) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicole Monaghan Little Magpie (novel excerpt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Randall Brown How to Kill a Story (column) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aimee Labrie
The Kuerner Farm by Annette Alessi. Annette paints mostly outdoors or from photographs. She studied at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and now teaches art at GV Gallery One, the Darlington Arts Center, and Chester County Art Association. See more at www.alessi creations.com.
10 Over the Hills by Liz Nicklus. Liz is an award-winning painter, mixed media and mosaic artist who resides in Millville, N.J. Liz studied at Stockton State College, the Ridgewood School of Art, Fleisher Art Memorial, with Pat Witt at The Barn Studio of Art in Millville, and with Philadelphia mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar. See more at www.liznicklus.com and www.independentartiststudios.com.
12 Dia de los Muertos by Paul McMillan.
POETRY 5 13 15 16 17
The Bachelor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Luke Stromberg Gifts That May Have Made a Difference . . . . . .Robbin Farr She Finds a Letter From a Future City . . . . . . . .Ephraim Scott Sommers Bicycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Amanda Hempel Red Carp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Robbin Farr
Paul is a professional award-winning artist with more than 30 years of experience. See more at www.paulmcmillan.com
16 Self-Contained by Suzanne Comer. The beautiful areas around her home near Philadelphia inspired Suzanne Comer to use digital photography as an art form. See more work at http://comersuz.home.comcast.net/
PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/ Fiction Editor Carla Spataro
Mitchell Sommers Christine Furtek Michael Ritter
Publisher/ Managing Editor Christine Weiser
Interns Peter Joyce Hannah K. Jones Daniel Pontius Jaci Hardgrove Sean Mulhearn Nichole Liccio Elizabeth T. Kerr Emma Eisenberg
Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick Assistant Editor Diana Restifo Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Loic Duros 2 Board of Directors Kerri Schuster, secretary
Social Media Director Adam Gianforcaro Contest Coordinator Nicole Marie Pasquarello Editorial Board Peter Baroth, poetry Deb Burnham, poetry Jacqueline Cassidy, fiction Christine Cavalier, poetry Liz Dolan, poetry Emma Eisenberg, fiction Sandy Farnan, non-fiction
Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction Marylou Fusco, fiction Erin Gautsche, poetry Adam Gianforcaro, poetry Pat Green, poetry Angel Hogan, poetry Hannah K. Jones, non-fiction Matt Jordan, non-fiction Elizabeth T. Kerr, fiction Aimee LaBrie, fiction Nathan Long, fiction Walt Maguire, fiction George McDermott, poetry Elizabeth Mosier, fiction Julie Odell, fiction Deborah Off, non-fiction Aimee Penna, poetry Daniel Pontius, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Mitchell Sommers, fiction Greg Silber, fiction Kristen Stenerson, fiction Diane Stopyra, non-fiction Janice Wilson Stridick, fiction Michelle Wittle, fiction Hannah K. Jones, fiction Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction Fran Grote, fiction
19 Nature/Invention-Intrusion by
Marge Feldman. Marge is a professional artist who has been taking classes since age 12, from the former Museum School of Philadelphia, Moore Institute, Syracuse University, and more. She has taught art in K-12 schools and is now a member of ARTsisters. She belongs to the Main Line Art Center, Philadelphia Tri-State Artists Equity, Center for Emerging Visual Artists and Tyme Gallery. See more at www.margefeldman.com.
Cover Art: “Goldfish Just Before Sun Up” by Jeanie A. Chadwick. Jeanie is a visual artist who has won national and international photography and art competitions. Her work is in private collections nationally and in Europe. She lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania with her musician/music teacher husband, son, two Cane Corsos, chickens, ducks, frog and a canary. See more at www.jeaniechadwick.com
PS Junior Stephanie Scordia, director Aileen Bachant, intern Inga Schmidt, intern Kerri Schuster, planning committee Emma Eisenberg, planning committee Jamie Elfrank, planning committee
Philadelphia Stories is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs such as writer’s workshops, reading series and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!
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MASTER PLAN olly scrubs sauce pans and three-quart pots and centers her attention out through the kitchen window, across the driveway until he emerges from his house and mobilizes, punches his fists on his hips, elbows poking right and left, surveying in his usual way. Holly always wonders what. What is he looking at? What precisely does the world look like from his viewpoint? At her back, the rustle of the local newspaper muffles her husband’s voice. “New cereal?” he asks, and then, like the path that their marriage has taken, he renders the question rhetorical with a non sequitur. “Still working on that artery project, if you can believe it.” The python curled inside her stomach slithers to her throat and she smoothes her hair with her hand, though her neighbor would be unable to detect a stray strand due to his lack of proximity and his misdirected gaze. They existed as neighbors for years and Holly barely noticed him, but all of a sudden this summer, whenever she sees him, she can hardly breathe. All her organs pulse and squeeze their various rhythms into erratic backwards and opposites. At some point, she couldn’t say when exactly, she started watching for him. Every day. As a housewife, approaching middle age, Holly maintains a youthful appearance, with pale smooth skin, strawberry blonde hair and a slight, fit figure. On the other hand, Mil, for whom she aches, resembles a well-aged Maple. His face, deeply grooved like gray bark, surmounts his skinny trunk. Limbs stick out at odd angles, and with their sprawling
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The Kuerner Farm by Annette Alessi © 2011 gangly grace, epitomize all the brave forbearance of a harsh winter before the promise of spring. In the midst of summer now, Holly reminds herself that the season delivered its potential, and she remembers her dentist, last summer’s crush, when she fabricated symptoms and scheduled unneeded extra appointments so that she could sit in his chair while he leaned close, spearmint-scented, gently touching her. Earlier that year, in the spring, there was a young man at the deli counter with dark hair and brown eyes whose long thin fingers handled the meats and cheeses with a sexuality she found difficult to resist. That crush engendered an unusually high number of cold cut lunches – nitrate, sodium, and fat loaded meals eventually making her believe that her indulgences were killing her family. So she bought the meats and threw them
away. Finally, the shame of wasted food drove her from the store and toward a moratorium on deli foods and cougar crushes. Those were playground romances compared to the intensity of her feelings for Mil, for whom she wants to abandon her marriage and race across their driveways into his waiting arms where he gathers her to him, his long bony limbs against her back. He presses his thin torso to her breast, his leg between her thighs, their bodies crushing together in an embrace so tight that neither of them can know, can feel, where one body ends and another begins. He whispers her name. “Holly...Holly...” The sound emanates from behind her, the newspaper insinuating itself into her moment and denuding her pleasure. “What.”
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Rustle, rustle, rustle, the newspaper speaks again. “Are you gonna pick up the invites today when you’re shopping?” She asks, “How do you know I’m shopping?” A jarring metal screech followed by a thunderous reverberation represents all that remains after Mil disappears into his basement bulkhead and slams the doors closed. Holly swings around and faces Scott. “You always go Tuesdays,” he says. “How do I know what invites?” Her voice rises as the newspaper lowers. She knots her arms across her chest. “What?” “How can you just say invites like that and figure I know what the hell you are talking about. You just say invites with no preamble.” Holly’s anger derails him. She watches as the tracks run out from under him. Finally, he says, “Well, I ain’t no constitution, baby.”
She concludes that he is missing a gene, always confused by her anger, perpetually wondering what he’s done wrong, unable to comprehend why they argue, drawing no conclusions about it after all these years. It must be a genetic defect, like a thyroid dysfunction, to believe that all anger is the same and that he can mollify her with a pun or a joke. “Okay.” Now Scott treats her to the slowed-down speech reserved for children and rabid animals. “Invitations for the fiftieth wedding anniversary party for my parents.” “Fuck you, Scott. I know what they’re for.” From her angry words, she extrudes a calm clarity. The whole concept of a couple staying together for fifty years eludes her, especially her couple, mismatched from the very beginning. She’s going to have to tell him, crack open the sophistry of their union, regardless of the consequences. She’s not sure when or
how, but Holly will confess Mil. And Brian, too. All of it. Holly liked to party with boys. Fifteen years old, an average student in a small, conservative, blue-collar town that proved, for many, tough to leave. Holly overlooked the pool of insouciant teenagers from which she could select her girlfriends. She gravitated to football players. Lured by their doctrine of entitlement, she admired their matrix of fundamentals; assigned roles, hard work, inevitable pain, measurable points and savored victories. She loved their rough voices and coarse words. And their smell, like fields of spring mud, intoxicated her. When she got high with them, she embraced the out-of-control feeling, her power stretched before her without horizon. Tacitly, she shared their glorious dreams of fame and fortune, fast cars and freedom. In a sober moment, alone, she devised the plan that would fulfill those dreams.
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Thanks to member support and a dedicated all-volunteer staff of passionate board members, Philadelphia Stories is happy to announce some exciting new programs for writers: Philadelphia Stories, Jr.: We are thrilled to launch this online quarterly literary magazine for local writers under the age of 18. Philadelphia Stories, Jr. expands our mission to develop a community of writers, artists, and readers through the magazine and educational programs by bringing these opportunities to young writers. Submissions now open! Publishers Christine Weiser & Carla Spataro The Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry: We are honored to remember our friend and poetry board member, Sandy Crimmins, with this named prize. The first-place winning poet will receive a $1,000 cash award. Submission period June 1-December 1.
And mark your calendars for our “summer celebration” at the American Swedish Museum on June 12 from 4-8. Our annual party and live auction promises to be another fun day of music, mingling, and readings. The family-friendly event will launch the latest title from PS Books, Randall Brown’s award-winning flash fiction collection, Mad to Live. 4
For more information on all of these events, visit www.philadelphiastories.org. And thanks to our members for making our participation in these events possible!
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m a s t e r Phase One began with an unwitting boy, all too willing to accommodate Holly’s desire. Even if he was in love with
her, he fell to Holly’s plan in a strafe of collateral damage. Her first time — was it his too? — they abandoned only
THE BACHELOR By Luke Stromberg We imagine him sexless — this wifeless, childless man with his false teeth and rumpled fedora; each article of clothing a different species of plaid, as if he hailed from a time before there were mirrors. How easy it is to imagine the happy bachelor on an afternoon walk, or alone in his armchair, his ancient television like a Rembrandt, everything surrounded by encroaching darkness. He seems to have never been young. One hears of years spent caring for his sick mother, while his sisters married, raised families — his own life a mere sub-plot in their on-going stories. And most accept this image because it is easy, because it frightens no one. Few care to know what his life was really like, what he most regrets in that long, gray hour when the day bleeds through the night. Forgive me if I imagine him young in bed with a woman, also young. It’s Sunday morning. He doesn’t feel guilty that he’s not at Mass. Her face is turned toward him, her cheek against her pillow, the strap of her nightgown off her shoulder, a softness in her eyes that says she knows him. This is what his life had to offer. This is his story, the one he will tell himself over and over. Who else will remember it? The way the light shone behind the blinds, the way they had no money and bickered all the time, the way he loved her. Luke Stromberg received both his BA and MA in English at West Chester University. In 2008, his poem “Black Thunder” was set to music by composer Melissa Dunphy and performed at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, PA. He was also recently featured in a Philadelphia Inquirer article about promising young poets in the Philadelphia area. Luke lives in Upper Darby, PA.
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enough clothing so that their bodies connected. Years later, Holly would forget his name and all the ancillary events of the evening. But memory of the sex imprinted; the stinging pungency of cheap cologne, his initial struggles, telling her to relax, just relax, then the brief, ripping pain, surprise when his body jerked and shuddered against hers, and finally, probably only minutes later but seeming much longer, his belt buckle digging into her thigh. For days, she wore the bruise from it, an odd shape that made her think of getting a tattoo there. She stopped at every mirror, examined her reflection, and the C student congratulated herself. “That’s an A, baby.” Fortune delayed her deployment of Phase Two because her frequent absences from home alarmed her parents and drove them to search her room. There, they unearthed an old baggie with a few joints Holly had neglected because there was something better to smoke. Infuriated, her mother flaunted her discovery at Holly, herbs trembling inside the murky plastic. Her father imposed the strictest curfew ever; home directly after school, no TV, no computer, no music, no, no, no, no…no! Okay, whatever. Holly didn’t waver. Her resolve deepened. The week of her eighteenth birthday, she met Scott. Scott, green-eyed, thick-lashed, dirty blonde, halted, at Holly’s request, outside Dave’s Liquors on Main Street. While she addressed the stranger, he stood by, his towering six-foot plus, muscled frame stuffed into a fresh-off-therack business suit. “Hey,” she said. “Buy me a six pack?” “Name’s Scott.” His low strong voice reminded her of a Great Dane. “Scott, buddy. You’re over twenty one?” “Twenty six.” “Yeah. Buy me a six-pack. I’ll owe you big time.” “And you are?”
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She hesitated. “Well, I am twentyone. It’s just I left my ID home.” He smiled a goofy, white-toothed grin. “I meant your name.” “Uh. Barbara.” She should have waited. All of a sudden, this guy seemed really extra tall. “I’m kind of in a hurry so if you — “ “Sick grandmother?” “Huh?” “Never mind. I’ll do it if you keep your word.” “My word?” “You said, you’ll ‘owe me’. So that’s your word.” Holly’s instinct said run, but something about his tone sparked her anger and she glared at him instead. “That was just a figure of speech, you know.” Plus, she would have liked to commission the job to someone else, but he was the only guy anywhere near the store in the last half hour who didn’t know her. “Look,” she said. “I’m not gonna sleep with you.” Although he did have a nice ass and all those muscles in just the right places. And when she saw her comment actually made him blush, she softened and considered the possibility. He said, “I meant I’ll buy your six pack if you have one with me.” “Is that all?” Holly couldn’t help but feel a bit of disappointment over not at least being forced to choose. “That’s all. I mean, if your plans can wait.” “My plans?” “You said you were in a hurry.” “Oh, yeah. Okay. Deal.” Holly realized suddenly that she wasn’t exactly showing off a spectacular vocabulary. A few minutes later, mission accomplished, they walked along the street. Scott reached into the bag and handed her a cold one. He unleashed the Great Dane voice. “You always drink Rolling Rock?” Holly struggled for something to say that would seem witty or, alternatively, sexy. “I’m usually a Bud kind of gal.” She pictured the horses with their regal white
booties. “Ever try Magic Hat?” Holly gave up on wit and squinted at him. “You’re not from around here.” “I was. Um, from here.” Then he said it. Medical school. Scott’s name preceded by the title, “Doctor.” She said, “You know, my name’s not really Barbara.” “Didn’t think so,” he said. Three months later, when Holly missed her period, she celebrated alone with a Thai stick and a bottle of Jack Daniels that she lifted from the same store where she’d met Scott. He didn’t hesitate with his proposal. She didn’t hesitate with her response. Holly didn’t know if the arrangement horrified her parents or bewildered them. But they probably preferred their daughter’s chances in a loveless marriage to a doctor versus single motherhood. On the other hand, Holly envisioned her plan miraculously unfolded. She pictured herself in a big house with a swimming pool, enjoying a pedicure while she lounged with a frosty drink and socialized with her wealthy friends. Then Brian was born. What a surprise, after waiting out an easy pregnancy in their tiny studio in Western Massachusetts while Scott, absent mostly, interned for barely enough pay to cover the rent. How unprepared Holly was, equally for the pain of childbirth and for the even more painful joy of intense love that she immediately felt for Brian, a love that torched in her a mortal fear for his well-being. The baby in her arms immolated all remnants of her plans and dreams, giving way to a steadfast devotion to every aspect of her family’s sustenance. She discovered a diversity of banal talents working nights on the computer at the library, clipping money saving coupons, haunting Salvation Army stores for used housewares, purchasing in bulk from BJ’s Wholesale and cooking to stock her freezer. Scott wore GAP while
she wore K-MART. Brian got Bauer skates and football camp and Holly got This End Up furniture, in southern yellow pine. “That’s the same wood they make floors out of. It’s guaranteed for life,” the sales clerk assured her. Long after it was necessary, Holly practiced frugal ways. When Scott suggested a cruise to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, Holly funded Brian’s college education instead. When Scott wanted to trade in their southern yellow pine, Brian’s budding musical talents warranted drums and lessons and his teeth required braces. And when Scott surprised her with the sparkling diamond anniversary band on their tenth “for the diamond I couldn’t afford back then,” he said, she snapped the box shut. She hugged him and insisted she’d be afraid to wear such extravagant jewelry. Besides, she needed a new refrigerator and she wanted Scott to buy that convertible sports car from the brochures he’d collected and studied for the past two years. Now, seventeen years later, Holly looks at Scott look at her and she sighs. Scott folds his newspaper and drops it on the table. He stands, strides directly to her and, inexplicably, he kisses her gently on the cheek. One soft, brief suck, Scott’s lips and Holly’s skin, a meeting arranged thousands of times before, now the incontrovertible truth of her life enfolding all of the dirty diapers and scary fevers, ABC’s, PTAs, Little League and MCAS. Math homework and meatloaf. After years of Scott’s affection, the steady performance of all of his obligations — all the qualities that drew her to him — she feels it only as this shabby, relentless taunt. She hates Scott for her own complicity in her privileged, even life, a life marked neither by great joy nor by great tragedy. Only Brian. When she sits across from Brian at the dinner table, Holly can still visualize her beautiful new baby burping formula all over her only fancy holiday blouse. But she recognizes her son, now licensed to
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drive, as a tall, athletic blond occupied with researching schools in California and Wisconsin. Brian’s presence obliterated her teenage dreams, what would his absence do to the rest of her life? Does she really have to tell Scott? Can’t he see for himself, the crumbling after-effects of a Brian-less house? “OK, honey. I’m on call tonight. Don’t forget.” Scott reminds her of his years and years and years of Wednesdays — half a day at the office with light morning appointments, on call all day and night, swapping with the other doctors in the practice only for vacations and emergencies. Holly clenches her body as Scott withdraws silently. She pictures the bruise on her inner thigh from when she lost her virginity at age fifteen. She wonders how it could have faded, how she failed to notice, how first the pain left, then she gazed at her skin one day and the bruise had vanished.
Mil and Scott converse outside in the driveway. Inside, Holly chops celery, peppers and cucumbers into threeinch strips for the fiftieth anniversary party. Her preparation of appetizers is a holdover from her frugal years, doing for herself when she can easily afford catering. She hasn’t told him yet. Tree leaves flutter in an eastward wind, and simultaneously Mil’s gray hair and Scott’s blonde hair lift in the breeze and now settle. In spite of their disparate appearances, their relaxed demeanor, side by side, makes them seem like brothers, as if they share a long history, not just the street. Mil gesticulates his description of some phenomenon; the fingers on one hand form the “O.” He pokes the index finger of his other hand in and out. Besotted by Mil’s innocent illustration with a lewd gesture, Holly momentarily perceives the heady, slightly rancid aroma of sex. At the same
time, she embraces the solace that her lust for Mil offers. “Ma, where’s the keys?” Her son’s voice surprises her, not by its interruption of her thoughts, but by its tone. She often forgets how strong he has become, how his strength has carried along with it a new voice, from flute to tuba. Holly turns slowly and raises her eyebrows. Brian, a tall, lanky teen, sports all of Scott’s features, as if Holly’s genes weren’t involved. “Ma,” Brian says. “The car keys.” “Where are you going?” “I’m in a hurry.” “I didn’t ask for your state of being.” Finally, he looks at her. “You’re so bizarre.” “Nevertheless…” “I’m meeting friends.” “Where?” “Ma…” Holly reaches into her pocket, withdraws a set of keys, and jingles them,
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playing the music of his independence. Brian swipes them from her hand but at the last moment, Holly clenches her fist around the keys. “Call me and let me know where you are.” “What for? Isn’t the tracking chip implanted in my head working right?” He kisses her cheek and runs out the door as Holly calls after him. “It’s not you I worry about.” She stretches over the sink and peers out of the window, trying to track Brian’s progress, but she sees only Scott. Mil has disappeared from view. Before Holly can return her attention to washing snow peas, slicing broccoli, and her dilemma, she sees Scott’s eyes widen. He jumps and shouts. Holly hears him through the glass. “Not in my car you don’t!” Brian trying to sneak away in his Dad’s sports car again. How will she explain to Scott that all this is just a lie behind thickening smoke and mirrored glass that Holly positioned long ago? The time Brian fell off the ladder and broke his finger, the afternoon Scott wrecked the car jockeying for position on Beacon Street near Fenway, the Thanksgiving Holly celebrated in the hospital with double pneumonia — none of it really happened. Insert Scott’s pun here. Holly arranges the hard, crisp vegetables on a platter. Green vegetables on a green platter. Torpid and green. Green, all green. Holly breathes deeply and musters myriads of magenta, violet and chartreuse, striped purple and orange eggplants, luscious swirls of royal blue and neon pink tomatoes. She giggles aloud. And that damn lifetime of southern pine will be the first to go. Through the window, the sun strikes the green plate and ignites a blinding emerald glitter. The harsh light intensifies and explodes into all colors. She concentrates hard on this bright anomaly as if it is a gift, useful but complicated and without instructions. Don’t stare at the sun! Don’t stare at the sun! The
warnings Holly delivered to Brian all through his childhood. He was eleven years old for the eclipse, and they constructed an elaborate pinhole device for an indirect view. But Holly stares and stares directly for so long that the light and the power of the light, all the power of the colors radiate inside of her, dig through her cells molecule by molecule. When she finally cuts away, her sedition cracks open the kitchen walls. From the cracks, the blood of her house oozes, a green slime, the blood of open circulation, insect blood. It streaks the walls with color, pools in the serving dish, runs in a jagged path down to the floor, snakes across the linoleum, and stops, finally, just before it reaches her feet. Well into the eighth decade of their lives, Scott’s parents celebrate fifty years together, along with a meager gathering of friends and family still alive and more or less ambulatory. From the kitchen, Holly spots Brian fading into a corner of the living room where a battalion of canes stands ready. He mopes, absorbed by his only companion, an overflowing plate of food. Holly sees him, and not for the first time, as Scott must have looked, before the burdens of life crossed his path, medical school and the family Holly forced on him. Over the years, Brian brought lots of friends by the house, but she can’t recall one particular girl — or one boy for that matter — in whom she suspected a serious sexual attraction. Music inspires Brian’s passion and in that also, she sees his counterpart in Scott. She envies both her son and her husband in a way that reminds her of the boys she envied in high school. Whatever they accomplish, however they succeed or fail, they begin at the rim of their lives and fearlessly eye the roiling fire of their potential. Mil is finally Holly’s very own desire, not one she borrowed from someone else. All she has to do is tell Scott.
Stationed in the kitchen, Holly avoids the party and observes her elderly guests. Aunt Greta, a widow for decades, always wears a frown. She readily and competently debates any political issue, and Holly could serve drinks off the old woman’s stooped back. Cousin Fred loves to flirt but Holly wonders if his viscous, clouded eyes can still deliver the distinctions between male and female. Cousin Harriet, the faded party girl, spills more than she consumes and insists on wearing fancy pumps in spite of swollen ankles and puffy feet. Brian catches Holly’s eye and she suppresses a smile. When she confesses to Scott, a celebration like this won’t factor into her future. Holly turns her back on the party and pirates a moment for her kitchen window fantasy. Mil’s red pick-up is parked in his driveway. Beyond it, on his side porch, he stands over his wife, who smiles up at him from an orange, plastic chair. Animated, he explains some mysterious concept that utilizes a full repertoire of his awkward, beautiful gestures. “Everything okay, Hon?” Scott interrupts. “Have we got any more toothpicks?” He opens and closes a few cabinets, hunches over the utility drawer and rummages. Holly says, “You should invite Mil and Dot over.” “Huh? Toothpicks...” “You should go over there right now, Scott, and ask Mil and Dot if they want to come to our party.” “Mil and Dot?” Scott straightens from the toothpick quest. “I’m sure your parents won’t mind a couple of extra guests.” Holly opens the drawer at her hip and from the clutter, produces a box of toothpicks, multicolored plastic spears with miniature sword handles. “Well, all right,” Scott says awkwardly, taking the box. He won’t go. She can picture Mil in her house, in
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her white house, sampling her green vegetables, sitting on her southern yellow pine. His cigarette ash falls to the floor and she drops to sweep it up, hesitates at his feet. He pulls her to him. But Mil is two driveways away, and might as well be continents away as likely as she is to convince Scott to get Mil over here. And before she absolutely explodes with her desire, she pulls Scott to her, meaning to say, “In seventeen years, I’ve asked you for nothing. Now all I want is for you to bring Mil to me.” Instead, what comes out is, “Brian wasn’t a mistake.” “What’s that?” Desperate now. “It’s Brian. It’s about Brian.” Scott pulls up, still in her grasp. “My god, what? What?” Scott guides her into the bathroom and searches her eyes so deeply that it blinds her. She composes herself by concentrating on bathroom fixtures, porcelain anchored to the linoleum floor, toilet tissue gripped by a cheap plastic holder and guest soaps molded into seashell shapes. She represses the urge to smash it all to unrecognizable bits, all the porcelain and plastic, especially the seashells. She says, with measured calm, “Brian wasn’t really a mistake. I never told you. Brian wasn’t really an accident.” “I know that.” He shrugs, inscrutable. Perhaps he didn’t hear her. She begins again, “I said...” His voice is hard. “I heard what you said.” His eyes release her. For the first time that she can ever remember, he seems angry and she can’t reference why. “What’s this all about, Holly?” “I just told you…” “I mean, what are you trying to say?” Holly remains silent. He shakes his head. “You want out? Now? You’re telling me now?” She tries to respond, stammers a few beginning syllables and trails off. “I was twenty-six, for chrissakes. I knew what I was doing.” Pale and shak-
en, he sinks down to the rim of the tub. He drops his head heavily into his hands. His voice is softer now, distant. “I stole your youth, your chances in life. You think I didn’t know? You think I didn’t know how much your parents hated me for it? Well, I didn’t care. Holly, you were so wild, unattainable. I was so damn in love with you.” His words linger, regroup, grab her by the neck, and choke off her air. The floor undulates and vanishes. Walls warp, twist, and jet away. The ceiling swirls, presses down, and crumbles. For a moment everything slams and crashes and in this one moment Holly sees her entire life burn in an unexpected way, caramelize sweetly. Scott looks up at her. His eyes glisten. “Please, don’t leave me. I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do anything. Don’t leave me.” “Shh, Scott.” She ventures toward him.
“Don’t leave me.” “Shhh. Shhh.” She reaches out, cradles his head against her breast. She feels Scott’s body pressed warmly to hers, her eyes open wide, not wondering, just feeling all of it. The thought makes her laugh aloud, a genuine laugh that climbs her like a vine. She says, “What more could I want?”
D Sprung Kurilecz grew up in Middletown Township, New Jersey. She frequently visited her mother’s family outside of Philadelphia including Grandparents in Conshohocken who owned a candy factory nearby in Norristown. Currently, she lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts where she teaches creative writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have received international award recognition and been published in numerous literary journals, including most recently, North Atlantic Review, Willow Review, The MacGuffin, American Letters & Commentary, Oyez Review, Blue Earth Review, The Jabberwock Review, The Broome Review, and West Wind Review. She has a Masters in English/Creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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THE ABSENCE OF FOG hen the fog got in, the mothers were making the rotis for dinner. My mother, because she was younger and less important, did the harder job of rolling out the dough into perfect circles. Usha’s mother, who I called Other-mother, got to stand in the warm aura of the stove’s blue flame while she roasted the perfect discs on the iron thawa. Roll, roast, flip, next: I thought of the mothers as one joined roti-making machine. Usha and I were waiting for our usual treat, a fresh, buttered, sugarsprinkled roti each. But then our grand-
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er away. “I can’t see you.” Then, she curled up on the floor and rocked and keened, terrified that the fog would not leave her room. The fog didn’t leave. Her diabetes had made Ba blind. Usha and I were the daughters of Ba’s two sons, who lived together as they might have in India, dutifully, under one roof with their wives and children, a son and a daughter each. Except that we weren’t in India. We lived in England, in an old Victorian row house. I knew that the children belonged to different par-
beginning of her petticoat. She began to snore. Usha and I looked at each other, a laugh threatening to expose us. But instead of laughing, the both of us reached out and at the same time, quick and sure and hard, we pinched Ba. “Aarrreh!” she yelled. We ran out and then, deviously, joined the general stampede of people coming towards Ba’s room. “They came to suck my blood, what is left of it in my poor fragile body!” “What happened?” stormed my father.
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mother bellowed from upstairs. “Who let all the fog into my room?” demanded Ba. Fog? There wasn’t any fog outside; it was a sun-shiny autumn day. The mothers—faces tight with fear—stopped what they were doing. We all ran to Ba. “Come and shut the windows!” yelled our grandmother. “Get the fog out!” “Ba!” shrieked my mother. “What are you talking about? What happened?” Other-mother took Ba into her arms. My mother said something about an ambulance and raced back downstairs. “Oh Bhagwan, Bhagwan!” cried Ba, calling to God. She pushed Other-moth-
ents, but it didn’t matter much. Less than a year apart, Usha and I were almosttwins. Like everyone else in the family, we were afraid of Ba, even more so now that she was the first blind person we knew. Still, because it rained so much and we were stuck inside so often, sometimes we’d creep into her room to see how long it would take her to figure out someone was there. Once, during a long wet spell, we went too far. “Who’s there? Speak!” called Ba. We sat quietly, out of arms reach. As she pulled the sheet around her, a strip of grandmother flesh appeared between the bottom of her sari blouse and the
“The girls! The useless extra mouths we’re feeding. Who will take such shedevils off our hands, who?” Suddenly a slap came so hard and so fast across my face that my ear began to ring. Usha’s father, who I knew as BigFather, still had his hand raised in fury. I began to cry and braced myself for more. Instead, I heard a voice like cold water. “Don’t touch her,” said my mother. “You have no right.” It was an insurrection—words spoken out of the usual order of things. BigFather said nothing, but he let his hand drop. Up until this single exact moment, I had never heard my mother speak directly to Big-Father. Ordinarily, when
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he walked into a room, she would fall silent and cover her head with the loose end of her sari, looking out at the world through a thin, cottony fog. “Bas!” said my father, meaning enough. I knew my mother was in trouble and that I should stop crying for her sake. But I couldn’t. Worse still, I fell to the floor, and surrendered to the kind of tantrum I hadn’t had in some time. Ba spoke deliberately. “Why complain about your wife when you can’t control your own daughter?” My father pulled me up with a tug, his thumb poking into my armpit. “Ask your grandmother for forgiveness,” he growled. “And show your respect properly,” meaning that I should touch her foot when I spoke. I got very close to my grandmother’s sour foot and mumbled a near ‘sorry’, but I did not touch it. The diabetes was so
bad by then that she couldn’t tell the difference. “Good girl,” said my father. When it was winter, they took Ba to the hospital. Baby-Uncle, Ba’s youngest son who lived in Florida, flew in to see his mother. Soon after, a doctor called the house and said we should all come to the hospital. When we got there, Ba asked us one by one to forgive her. The oldest grandson sobbed like a baby, the mothers wept freely; noses were blown frequently. I was surrounded by the sounds of my family in grief. A witchthin nurse came by and snapped the curtain around us. “Quiet, please,” she spat, and then muttered, “Pakis always bring the whole damn tribe.” She left in a huff. “Hey!” Baby-uncle barked, but she was long gone. “We’re Hindus, not Pakis!”
“Brown is brown. We’re all Taliban now,” said Big-Father. “How do you stand this country?” continued Baby-Uncle. “Please, you’re Al Qaeda to the Americans, too” said Big-Father. “America’s different,” said BabyUncle. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” said my father, meaning only that it was time to drop it. The nurse came back. “I can’t move in here,” she said. “Some of you will have to leave.” Being the least important, Usha and I hadn’t yet had our forgiveness turns. Ba lifted her finger to let us know she needed someone to move her breathing mask. “Leave the monkeys here,” she said. Our mothers left us with the men and took the sons home with them. When it was my turn with Ba, I looked at her grey, unseeing eyes, and thought that I should ask for her forgiveness, too. But I didn’t,
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and neither did Usha. Big-Father began to sing a bhajan quietly, and his brothers joined in. “Govinda hare bole, Gopala bole.” Usha and I clapped along gently. Each verse seemed to take lines off Ba’s face. When we were done, she raised the mask herself, smiled, and said she wanted peaches. Couldn’t someone get her some peaches? The nurse said that the kitchen was closed, and that there were only canned peaches there, and anyway, rules were rules. She left us alone. It was January, damp and cold. Fog hung thickly between the streetlights. Ba wanted real peaches. It was impossible. “We’ll go,” Big-Father said, and he and Baby-uncle left. Usha and I fell asleep sitting on a leg each of my father’s lap. I woke to the stamping sound of feet trying to get warm. Usha was awake,
too. The peaches had arrived! There was a whole wooden crate with the words “Product of New Zealand” stamped on it. My father got up, stood us on the floor, and offered the chair for the crate. The nurse stepped in to check on all the noise. Big-Father spoke to her in his most polite talking-to-white-people voice. “May we kindly get something to open the crate?” he asked. “All right,” she said, probably too staggered by the sight and smell of fresh peaches to say anything else. She came back with a screwdriver and a paring knife. No one said anything for a while and Usha and I knew to be quiet. “Ba, we have peaches,” said Big-Father, taking the screwdriver. I could smell their perfume. I knew Usha wanted one as much as I did, but we didn’t dare ask. “I’ll get some tea, double sugar,” said
Baby-uncle, leaving. My father took the paring knife and started to cut a peach into small pieces. Baby-uncle came back with the tea. Big-Father began to read the Gita out loud. “The death of the body does not harm the soul.” My father started to feed Ba pieces of peach. “From body to body, air into air, the soul moves freely.” Now and then, Big-Father wiped the juice from around his mother’s mouth; Baby-uncle gave her sips of hot, sweet, tea. Usha and I just held hands and watched and listened. “Weapons cannot cleave the soul, nor can fire consume it. Nor can water drench the soul, nor can the wind, as breeze or gale, ever at all dry it.” It took Ba a very long time to eat her
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peach. I could hear the sound of soft fruit on gums, the drone of the machines, and the familiar cadences of the Gita, their poetry almost in time with Ba’s slow, scarce breaths. She finished her peach at the same time that Big-Father finished reading. A monitor beeped, and a thin, straight line divided the screen. In the days after the funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ba’s fog. Once, I asked my mother where Ba was now and she said that if she wasn’t with god, she was probably around somewhere. “What do you think she came back as? A cat?” I asked. “No. Eat your cereal.” “A dog?” “No. Put your bowl away, put on your shoes.” “A person?” “Too soon. Get me the comb.” “Could she come back as fog?” “No. It doesn’t work that way.” “Why not?” “Are your laces tied?” “Is fog alive? Can a soul get into fog?” My mother stopped trying to do
three things at once and looked at me. Then she bent down to hold me. “Sometimes we all live in fog.” “Did the fog get out of Ba’s room?” She didn’t answer and from the way she was breathing into my shoulder, I knew she was crying. “Mommy, am I going to get Ba’s fog?” It was summer when we moved. Once everything was loaded up into the truck and the moving men were ready to drive off, my mother and father stood waiting next to a taxi, the youngest boy from among us children standing at their side. I told Usha to hurry up. “She’s not coming,” said my father. “Not coming? Why is he coming?” I whined. “How would your brother not be coming?” said my mother. Usha didn’t come; she stayed with her own mother and father. She was my cousin. Inside, my heart began to thump against my ribcage. Things were starting to go wrong. I watched as Usha’s father came up to mine, waited for the familiar swoosh of my mother’s loose sari end against me as she
GIFTS THAT MAY HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE By Robbin Farr Molted feathers of parakeets Green sea glass One nettle A moss-covered twig Rain from the hollow of a rock A ribbon woven of winter grass The loon’s reflection An oak leaf pressed into my palm Hand-strung blue beads An empty cicada shell A capful of rust to tint my paints Your apology on the peeled bark of a birch Robbin Farr is a resident of the Queen Village. After completing her MFA in creative writing, she discovered the bookbinding arts and mastered parallel parking. In addition, she teaches creative writing and American studies to high school students in Montgomery County.
wrapped it around her head. But the swoosh didn’t come. I began to tug at the sari’s end myself to remind my mother of what she was supposed to do but she just batted my hand away. That was when the thud in my chest began to echo in my head as I realized that she was neither going to cover her head or step away. The closer Usha’s father got, the faster the thudding in my body. Why couldn’t my mother do what she was supposed to do? I took a deep breath and waited for the shouting to begin. Instead, Usha’s father folded himself at the knees and took me into his arms. My father gave his brother a handkerchief for the tears that stood in his eyes. “It’s a big move for her,” my mother said to Usha’s father, her voice quavering. The thud and echo of my heart stopped and gave way to something else, a feeling so unfamiliar that I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t put words to it. Standing back up, Usha’s father looked at his brother, then to my mother. “May God watch over you and yours.” “And yours,” said my father, looking over to my cousins and their mother. Then he bent down to touch his older brother’s feet. It was the last time I saw him use that gesture of respect with anyone. “I hear the weather’s always good in Florida,” said my uncle. “They call it the ‘Sunshine State,” said my father. “Just take care of everyone, and keep in touch,” said my uncle, “and don’t become too American.” Too American, I wondered? I saw that the sun around us was so bright and the air was so clear that my mother, my father, my brother, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousins were separate, lucid shapes. This was the absence of fog. Nimisha Ladva lives in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in the Connecticut Review and Stand. She has been featured in Philadelphia’s First Person Arts Festival.
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CLAMMING — CHANGING TIDES hen I stepped outside this morning and smelled the cool air mixed with the mist off the Willamette, I knew we’d arrived, made it through another dismal Northwest winter. The feel of it took me back to the Southern Coast of New Jersey, where I worked as a commercial clammer in the middle seventies. The first thing I’d do each morning then, was to climb the stairs to an outside deck where I could catch a look at the bay, to see if there were any whitecaps visible, a sign that the wind was blowing hard and that working the bottom might be difficult that day. But as March rolled into April, the morning air would become softer, almost sweet. It was on those days that I felt filled with a quiet joy, a contentment that I’ve rarely felt since. The day on the water, working alone and working hard, stretched in front of me with a welcoming nod. I felt connected, without knowing exactly to what or why or even caring about giving it words. It was enough to be, to drink my coffee and walk on down to the boat. I hadn’t discovered meditation back then, but if I had, I might have noted that how I felt was the state that those who meditate aspire to reach. But maybe if I had known, it would have ruined the whole thing. The object of clamming was to catch as many clams as possible in any given day, then haul them back, sorted by size into burlap bags, and drop them off at the clam buyer’s shed. Two hundred clams to a bag; five full bags made for a good day’s pay. Five cents per clam was the going rate, but it could vary (mostly down) depending on the market. Each bag weighed well over a hundred pounds, but I didn’t worry about that. It felt good to sling the heavy sacks off the
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deck of the boat onto the dock. By the time I drove my flat-bottomed wooden work boat back to where I kept it moored in the bay, unloaded my equipment, and walked up 11th Street to our little cottage, I was physically exhausted, but not beaten down. My back might ache, I might have cramps in my hands, but my head was clear. I was never too tired to take a late evening stroll on the beach with my wife and our baby daughter. A word about catching clams. Maybe harvesting is the more accurate word, but what I heard around the docks was “catching.” I didn’t argue. There are two basic methods for East Coast clamming: treading and raking. (There’s also tonging, but only a few old-timers still did that.) In treading, the clammer jumps over the side of the boat, wearing a wet suit, into shallow water (three or four feet deep) and treads backward along the bay bottom feeling for clams with his feet (I’d say his or her feet, but frankly, I never came across a female clammer). When he feels one, a hard ridge in the muck, he dives down and picks it up. Some clammers have developed a technique of working the clam out of the mud and up their leg, so that they don’t have to dive each time. I found it easier and quicker to dive. Repeat this process over a thousand times a day, and you’ve got a fairly decent catch and a head full of salt water. Raking is the method we switched over to, once the water became too cold for treading. Even a wetsuit will only keep you so warm. The rake is used to pull along the bay bottom from the side of the boat. It has a head that’s about four feet across and long sharp teeth that sluice through the mud. Kind of a mon-
ster rake, the handle extends to over twelve feet in length. It takes a strong back to work that baby through the muck all day as the boat drifts through the shallows. Sometimes you can go hours pulling up nothing but mud, shells, and molting crabs; but then there are the times you find yourself over a rich bed. An experienced bayman can tell he’s on it by the ticki-tick-tick of the rake teeth as they slide over the clam shells. On board, the clammer smiles, grunts, and digs the rake even deeper. With a final heave, he pulls the rake head to the gunwales, shakes it a few times in the water to wash away the mud, and pulls his rake head full of dark cherrystones on to the deck. Nothing feels better. I had to give up clamming in 1976 when we moved to Seattle. My wife was tired of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, its cold winters and isolation. In many ways, the life of a bayman had not changed for hundreds of years. Except for the outboard motors, the rhythms were the same. We lived by the tides and the seasons. One long day after the next. It wasn’t what Cathy had signed up for. She needed friends and a social life, wanted a place where people talked about things other than the next storm or when the bay would ice over. We had college friends in the Pacific Northwest. They told us it was lovely, that housing was cheap, that cool people were moving there in droves. I tried to hold out, tried to build a case for life on this six mile long island. I couldn’t imagine selling my boat; I had just invested in a replacement motor, a spanking new 25 horsepower Johnson. But eventually I gave in. Seattle would be better for the children and C. was now pregnant with our second. I couldn’t be selfish, is what I
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thought. I feel trapped, is what I thought. Goddamn it all, is what I thought. I’ll tell you, I miss that boat to this day and think about it more often than seems natural. In Seattle, I put my education to use and found work as a high school teacher. It was a good job, paid enough to support our family of four, and allowed us to buy a nice old house in the Wallingford neighborhood. But somehow over the years, my life became more complicated. Teaching and writing did not provide the same sense of being at one with the seasons and the tides. I no longer felt like my own man. Everybody had a piece of me now - students, administrators, parents. Though more secure, pension and health insurance in place, I ended up feeling tense and worried. The work life
of a high school English teacher separated me from the throb of life by the sea, where the only imperative was to keep an eye on the horizon. And while the feeling at the end of a day on the bay was one of completion and exhausted satisfaction, the satisfactions, such as they were, of teaching were more nebulous. Who ever knew if you were doing the job correctly? It sometimes felt like steering without a tiller. Where were we all headed, and how would we know when we arrived? But there was no going back to the life of a clammer. That vocation was long behind me and, for the most part, had died away in my absence. It had been dying even back when I worked the bay. Near the end of my stay, more and more areas of Barnegat Bay and Little Egg
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Harbor were being closed to shellfishing because of pollution and the scarily named “Red Tide.” My brother, who still lives in New Jersey, tells me that maybe a dozen old-timers still make a living raking clams there. What’re you going to do? Time passes, and spring brings sweet reminders on the winds of what once was: the ability to get up in the morning and go out on the water and earn a living with hard work and an untroubled soul.
Rob Morrow is a native (West) Philadelphian who now live in Portland, OR. Clamming — Changing Tide explains how her got there. After teaching at West Philadelphia High School, he and his wife and baby daughter escaped to Long Beach island, where he became a commercial clammer on Barnegat Bay. He used to say, “I was the only clammer on the bay with a masters degree from Harvard; until I ran into a guy who showed me his doctorate.” He loved what he did in New Jersey, and misses that life to this day.
By Ephraim Scott Sommers It starts with a war Over a piece of candy. The world’s split open By the lips of butterflies. We stitch it back together With bluebirds, pull the ocean Like a bed sheet back onto the sand. —I got a job selling two-dollar paper suns To turn a twenty-five cent profit And loved on an empty stomach. Now we have rituals of fish, white wine, A first name, a look in the eye. And when there is talk of borders, We remind each other that one day, one hundred Years ago—your tomorrow—an orchid went off In Times Square, in Moscow, a box of chocolates. A singer and guitar player, Ephraim Scott Sommers has produced three full-length albums of music and toured internationally both as a solo artist and with his band Siko (see-co). Most recently, his poetry has appeared in New Madrid, Versedaily, City Works, and more. His work is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review and Columbia Review.
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ou guys are gonna be late,” Mom said as she cleared the dinner table. Neither Dad nor I answered, even though we’d heard her just fine. We also knew our time constraints, just like we did for every Phillies home game. In all the years my dad and I had been going to games at the Vet, I don’t think we ever saw the first inning. Instead, we always picked up the bass-drenched voice of Harry Kalas as we motored down Route 42 in one of the many assorted Ford Tauruses my dad drove as company cars over the years. We liked it that way.
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I’d have my glove on my lap, and we’d pop a couple pieces of Doublemint gum into our mouths and talk about how crappy Steve Jeltz had played the week before or how pathetic Steve Bedrosian looked coming out of the pen. We’d laugh as Whitey and Harry the “K” dropped playful banter over the airwaves. We’d plan our post-game festivities, usually a much-anticipated trip to Pop’s Water Ice, where we’d double park along Oregon Avenue, me with a small chocolate and Dad with a cup of lemon (both of us munching on pretzel rods). And, we’d soak in the warmth of summer
BICYCLES By Amanda Hempel We sailed through the evening-cool crevices of Forest Hills, grass clippings and hawberries that popped like fire under our sneakers, barking dogs hidden in houses and distant shouts to invisible somebodies, coasting into intersections on found bikes, daredeviling down the steepest hills, pedaling toward some road that wouldn’t lead home. Amanda Hempel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, but has lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since 1986. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in several journals.
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along with the last few drops of baseball for the evening. At the park, we’d file in somewhere near the middle of the second inning and find our seats in section 325 next to my uncle. Then my father and uncle would teach me everything I ever wanted to know about the game. It was the most wonderful session of summer school you could imagine. “See, Frank,” Dad would say. “Runner at the corners and no outs, the infield will play the corners in.”
“Corners in?” I’d ask quizzically, munching on peanuts and tossing the shells on the beer-stained pavement under our seats. “Yep. That means the first and third basemen will play up and the middle infielders back.” “How come?” “Well, if it’s hit up the middle, they’ll turn a double play. If it’s hit to the corners, they’ll try to nab the guy at the plate.” I’d nod and stuff huge wads of blue cotton candy into my mouth. The lessons always RED CARP sank in, whether I was busy By Robbin Farr eating or obsessing over catching foul balls. I. Old koi pond On most occasions, the entire game flew by without Still they swim, the light radiant a foul ball coming anywhere on their bodies. They bend near us. After all, our seats into faint commas were pretty good. Right un-comma again, behind the plate, and in the again not resisting the water’s lower level, which meant a accustomed flow but forming pesky screen blocked just it, they enter it and with the ancients’ about any ball hit even alchemic knowledge, become gold. Always remotely in our direction. Whatever did make it over they swim, they are swimming through the screen usually came in my life, creating currents. the form of a screaming line drive that was liable to take your head off. Dad found II. Abstraction this out the hard way a few years prior when he stuck a I dream of swimming bare hand in the path of one with red carp, become, of those screamers and flash into orangebloom, watched it ricochet a full fifsunset brilliant scales teen rows in front of him as his paw ballooned to twice color blown like poppies its normal size. on the silk field of a kimono Regardless, I still found it or like quickflash red slipped necessary to bring my glove just in case the rare chance from a painter’s brush presented itself. One glorious night, my suspicions paid off. surface-bound by logic Darren Daulton was at the until the crimson blossoms plate and we were lulled into watery, to seek the place comfort by the wondrous of colors felt, slippery chatter inside Veteran’s or cold or swift. Stadium —“You bum!”, “You See Robbin’s bio on Page 13
guys suck!”— when an awkward crack of the bat brought us to our senses. A frozen rope shot back in our direction like a laser beam. Nobody in our section had the presence of mind to react, except for a guy at the end of our row toting a six-dollar beer. His presence of mind, however, may have been stunted when it came to unhanding his brew. The whizzing dart of a line drive slugged him directly in the beer mug. Suds splashed all over his shirt, and the ball dashed down the row behind us with a few hollow thuds. It camped under a cadre of old ladies who seemed afraid to react. Being the consummate gentleman, I did the only thing I could think of. I dove behind my seat and nabbed that baseball right out from under those geezers. I held it up triumphantly as if I’d snagged the liner one-handed. Everyone cheered because I was a little kid and they thought my exuberance was cute. Otherwise they would have booed me right out of the stadium. As I was enjoying my moment in the spotlight, a curious thing happened. I dropped the ball. It took one long bounce before it trickled two or three rows in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d just ruined the first chance I’d ever had at a foul ball. Probably the only chance I’d ever have. Disgusted, I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t want to face the game or my father or my uncle or any of the fans in my section that I’d let down. But when I finally lifted my head from mourning, something even more amazing had occurred. There was Dad, smiling and holding the ball between his thumb and forefinger. “You lose something?” he asked. That may have been the first time I dropped the ball, but it wasn’t the last time Dad was there to pick it up. C.G. Morelli grew up in the Philadelphia area and now lives somewhere in the back woods of Carolina. His work has appeared in Highlights for Children (winner of a 2010 AEP Award), Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ghostlight Magazine, Land more. He is the author of a short story collection titled In the Pen (2007).
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RANDALL BROWN I met Randall in October, 2009 at the Philadelphia Stories Push to Publish Writers Conference at Rosemont College. I’d scheduled a “speed date” with him after reading a couple issues of Smokelong Quarterly, his parting letter as he was leaving SLQ, and several of his flash pieces, which was all it took to be hugely impressed. When I pitched my story to him, I had not yet published any work, but had won a couple writing prizes (that I’d thought might be flukes). Although he didn’t think my story was right for SLQ, he was extremely helpful and managed–in exactly fifteen minutes–to give specific tips on how to improve my piece. After connecting on Facebook and becoming a loyal follower of his blog (http://www.flashfiction.net), I embarrassingly confessed (publicly) that Randall was a literary crush of mine. I then had the opportunity to attend his literary short story workshop at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference in 2010. I bought Mad to Live, his award-winning collection, which I devoured on the train to and from the conference and also purchased the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, which features his essay Making Flash Count. These reads sealed my crush into flashy permanence. I recently spoke to Randall about why flash matters. The new edition of Mad to Live from PS Books, a division of Philadelphia Stories, features four “ bonus tracks.” How did you go about selecting which additional stories to include? They were ones not previously imagined for the collection but, during readings, tended to get an insane response from an audience. These made the literary crowd get up out of their seats, hold their lighters up into the air, and chant “Randall! Randall! Randall!” You recently founded Matter Press and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. If Matter Press and Journal of 18 Compressed Creative Arts were the answer(s), what would be the question(s)? Well, here’s one for the (very) drawn-out journal name: What is the most ironic name for a journal that focuses on compression? And here’s one for the press: “Who will be publishing collections from Carol Guess and Kathy Fish?”
By Nicole Monaghan What is the worst mistake you’ve ever seen a flash writer (or would-be flash writer) make? A number of unpublished flashes I’ve read lack an understanding of very short fiction beyond the idea that “it’s very short.” These pieces don’t rise to the challenge of compression and don’t push against the boundaries of the form, don’t take on the implied and explicit rules of fiction and narration, and don’t surprise with what discoveries in terms of language and form they’ve made by writing in such a tiny space. What can be learned from them? Don’t just think of flash as a word-count; think of it as encompassing an attitude about fiction, a chance to do something remarkable, to achieve what cannot be achieved if one is given all the space in the world within which to work. Many writers are teachers as well. Can you explain the relationship between your teacher-self and your writer-self? The teacher-self is player turned coach, trying to make those around me better; the writer-self is Allen Iverson. Do you see yourself writing flash as an old man? Might you ever tire of the form? The form might become tiring if one doesn’t work to reinvent it with each successive piece. That process seems endlessly interesting and engaging to me. In your elucidation of other writers’ flashes, you often consider the first word and the last. If you could be one word in a flash, which word would it be, the first, last, or some word near the middle? Why? If indeed every word counts in flash fiction (an idea I’ve seen everywhere but have begun to doubt), I’d like to be the one word that snuck in there somehow without counting. It’s cool to be the one that doesn’t belong. Isn’t that what writing flash is all about? Setting yourself and your writing against the world that would have those things not matter? Nicole Monaghan’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Used Furniture Review, Storyglossia, PANK, Foundling Review, and Negative Suck. She lives with her husband and three children outside of Philadelphia and keeps a literary website at www.writenic.wordpress.com.
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LITTLE MAGPIE find Maggie squatting on the kitchen floor beside the door to the garage. My eyes always go to her belly first, as if she has swallowed a globe. There’ve been two miscarriages, both early. Never have we gotten so far. Then I notice she’s picking something off the floor, putting it in her mouth. Get closer. They surround her. Hundreds of them. Ants. Maggie is eating ants. A lifetime of sitcoms has prepared me for cravings—pickles, hamburgers. Running out in the middle of the night for a pint of Haagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond. Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts. But insects? Maggie looks up. She removes the finger from her mouth. “Must be the baby,” she says. Her hand follows the curve of her belly. “She wants bugs.” “Really? They sell crickets at pet stores. I could get some.” “Crickets?” She purses her lips, gazes up to the ceiling. Then nods. “Okay.” The girl at Pet World brings them to me in a clear plastic bag, twist-tied at the top. She holds them up, dozens of them, hopping against the plastic. “You’ll have one happy lizard,” she says. “Yeah. That’s all one can really hope for in life, isn’t it? A happy lizard.” She nods, a sign that we share some deep understanding. She tells me she threw in an extra dozen, then winks. In high school, Maggie wrote a piece about the opening of fishing season and the senseless slaughter of the earthworm. In graphic detail, she captured the wriggling on the hook, the oozing entrails, the practice of cutting them in half to double the bait. Together we collected money, went to bait shops, released nightcrawlers, earthworms, grubs back to the wild of gardens. At home, in the garage, I hold up the
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Nature/Invention-Intrusion by Marge Feldman © 2011 bag. A cricket stares back; all eyes, bugs are. Crunchy. Gooey in the middle. Like pretzel snacks with cheese in the center. I picture the bugs skittering down her throat, at the bottom, a baby openmouthed—a miracle baby. Dozens of times, the brown bleeding began, and we were told she was lost, only to see her on the ultrasound, hear the beat-beat of her heart. How useless and helpless I feel during these races to the hospital, as if there’s nothing I can do for them. I carry the bag of crickets upstairs, find Maggie lying among the dozen flower pillows, her face the center, the cushions as petals. I swish the bag back and forth, imagine her sitting up, tossing cricket after cricket into her mouth, as if chomping on popcorn. But instead the crickets bring tears. “What?” I say. “Beetles? You want beetles?” The crickets pop in my ear. “I’m bleeding again,” she says.
“Heavier this time.” A blur—the car ride, Maggie holding the bag of crickets, tapping against the plastic, then opening it, taking one out. “She’s still hungry.” The breakneck drive, the crickets, the hospital waiting for our arrival—it’s all part of the blur, something to hide the truth from both of us, that nothing matters except the desires of Fate for our baby to live. But that’s nothing to tell Maggie. “It has to be a good sign,” I tell her. “It does, doesn’t it?” Maggie answers, then opens her mouth and feeds our baby’s desire.
19 Randall Brown directs and teaches at Rosemont College's MFA in Creative Writing Program. His work has been published and anthologized widely. He is the founder of Matter Press, its online magazine The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and the blog FlashFiction.Net. “Little Magpie” appears in his flash fiction collection Mad to Live.
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HOW TO KILL A STORY by Aimee LaBrie Some famous writers are said to be made by their editors— I’m thinking of Raymond Carver (whose editor significantly cut back his prose to help develop the Hemingway-esque, tip-of-the-iceberg immediacy that defined Carver’s style)—and I can tell you from reading short fiction for the workshop I teach that there are some things that just should never happen in a short story. I’m referring to line-by-line edits, but then also to overall mistakes to avoid if possible. Of course, for every approach I suggest you not take, there is a published author who has done that exact thing with great brilliance and aplomb. That said, here are five general writing blunders that will ensure your story expires in the slush pile of any reputable literary journal: That said, here are five general writing blunders that will ensure your story expires in the slush pile of any reputable literary journal:
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1. Never write a sentence without inserting an adverb or a generic adjective, preferably both and multiple times. Example: She perched prettily on the lovely red chair, daintily sipping from a cup of weakly-made, hot and steaming tea while she lightly stroked her left eyebrow with a yellow pencil. Adverbs and generic adjectives are the cheat sheets for writing vivid and specific descriptions. 2. Combine the overuse of adverbs with innocuous and unnecessary dialogue with too many dialogue tags and sentences that neither advance the
plot nor reveal character. Example: “I don’t know what time it is,” he said happily. “You don’t?” she responded hastily. “No, I don’t.” he replied suddenly and savagely. “Well, can you find out?” she talked wonderingly. Mundane dialogue with no real description helps to slow down the pace of the story until it’s crawling across the page. 3. Make sure the story’s first few paragraphs confuse and befuddle your reader. Don’t give her any sense of time period or season, location, and, above all, don’t reveal the gender (or species?) of your narrator until well into the piece. This approach is especially important if you’re writing a story wherein things like the decade and setting are essential to understanding what’s happening (i.e. a science fiction piece that takes place in the 1800s on the planet Mars). 4. Be sure to pepper your story with clichés. Don’t limit yourself to just textual clichés (sighing with relief, panting like a dog, running at lightning speed), be sure to have clichéd situations and stock characters (innocent young girl meets handsome football player…but evil drug-addled, Mustang-owning hoodlum thwarts the affair). By not writing anything that’s refreshing or surprising, you enable to reader to more easily skim the story to see if it ends as she expected (running off into the sunset/mass suicide).
5. Why write a story with one central narrator when you can head-hop among everyone in the story, from the grocery store bagger to the dog walker to the pine tree in the park? By giving readers access to every stray thought or memory experienced by even minor characters, you are able to build on Rule #3, allowing the confusion about who and what we should find important to grow and grow until no reader can be sure what the story is about. These are just a few of the mistakes I see—as well as mistakes I’m certain I’ve made in my own fiction writing. Your job as a writer is to continually strive for what is compelling and complicated—in your story, in your descriptions, in your dialogue, and in your characters. Avoid the obvious or the unclear and search for what is vivid and true. Aimee LaBrie is an award-winning author and teaches a fiction workshop for Philadelphia Stories.
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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
Great Books Weekend at the Inn at Pocono Manor
All readers welcome! Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness: * Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah * The Awakening by Kate Chopin * Freedom by Jonathan Franzen Cost: $345 per person double occupancy, $410 for single occupancy: meals, accommodations, books included.
For further information about Great Books events on the East Coast, see
November 4-6, 2011
www.greatbooksdiscussionprograms.org
For more info, contact John Dalton at (610) 525-8875 or jd5258875@aol.com
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