Philadelphia Stories Summer 2014

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 1

free

Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

Ilene Raymond Rush

Worm of the Heart Kimberly Emilia

Waiting Room Fairies Anne Colwell

Holy Day (novel excerpt)

S U M M E R

2 0 1 4

I S S U E

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 2

t a b l e

o f

c o n t e n t s ART

Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

FEATURES 3 Worm of the Heart (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ilene Raymond Rush 8 Waiting Room Fairies (fiction). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kimberly Emilia 12 Judging a Story by Its Title (column) . . . . . . . . . Aimee LaBrie 14 Holy Day (novel excerpt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anne Colwell

POETRY 4 Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Helen Ohlson

3 A Land Beyond The Rainbow by Rashidah

Salam. Rashidah Salam was born and raised in Malaysia and is now residing in Philadelphia where she teaches at Drexel University and Philadelphia University. Salam’s current work explores collage, photomontage and layering techniques.

7 Around and Around by Lisa Kelley. Lisa’s work is inspired by nature – gardens, beaches, woods. Her bold surface patterns start out as drawings in ink on paper, and are then digitally colored.

Lisa earned her BFA at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, with a concentration in graphic design. She lives in Elkins Park, PA with her husband and young daughter. www.milkshakecrafts.com

11 Small Rooms, Seven Summers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Liz Solms 16 The Bike Shop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ed Granger 17 the old dogs of Karma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jim Trainer 19 Bad Dream of Arithmetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .David P. Kozinski

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/ Editorial Director

Web Design Loic Duros

Carla Spataro Board of Directors Publisher/ Executive Director Christine Weiser

Kerri Schuster, secretary Mitchell Sommers Alison Hicks Polia Tzvetanova

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

Production Manager Derek Carnegie

Contest Coordinator Nicole Pasquarello Editorial Board Peter Baroth, poetry Deb Burnham, poetry Liz Chang, poetry Melinda Clemmer, fiction Sam Dodge, nonfiction Liz Dolan, poetry Margot Douaihy, poetry Brian Ellis, fiction Ally Evans, fiction Kathleen Furin, fiction Brianna Garber, fiction Liz Gray, poetry Elizabeth Green, fiction Pat Green, poetry Darrah M. Hewlett, fiction Meredith Hritz, fiction Daniel Huppman, fiction Aimee LaBrie, fiction Andrew Linton, fiction Nathan Long, fiction

8 Ovals by Lisa T. Reed. Artist and educator, Lisa T. Reed, grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and earned her BFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recently, Reed was honored to have her work included in the Extraordinary Gifts: Remarkable Women of the Delaware Valley project. Her current body of work explores pattern while referencing textiles, the body, and systems. Reed is a member of The Artists' Gallery in Frederick, MD and an Art Instructor at Carroll Creek Montessori Public Charter School and Frederick Community College.

Chelsea Covington Maass, fiction Rachel Mamola, nonfiction George McDermott, poetry Walt Maguire, fiction 11 The Choice by Teresa Shields. Teresa Aidan O'Brien, fiction Shields is an artist living in Jenkintown with her Charlie O'Hay, poetry husband and three daughters. She earned her BFA Deborah Off, nonfiction from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA Donna Wolf-Palacio, poetry from Mass College of Art. She has worked in Aimee Penna, poetry several mediums throughout her career including Tracey M. Romero, fiction drawing, painting, fiber and others. She divides her John Shea, poetry time between her three passions: art, martial art. and family.

John Shea, nonfiction Carla Spataro, fiction Luke Stromberg, poetry 14 Academy Students in Plein Air by Maria Thiaw, poetry Catherine Quillman. Catherine Quillman is Sean Toner, nonfiction a former Arts journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Valeria Tsygankova, poetry Her years spent living in the Brandywine Valley Cassandra Visceglia, nonfiction have shaped much of her writing career, and Glenna Walsh, nonfiction has inspired her to return to a childhood interest Sarah Wecht, nonfiction in drawing and design.

Lena Van, fiction www.quillman-publications.com Che Yeun, fiction

18 This Way by Lisa Kelley. (see bio above)

Cover Art: Two Bathers by Ann Buss.

Support provided in part by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.

Ann Buss started to paint and sell her work in her 30's when she lived in South Africa for 10 years. Since returning to the States in 2010, she has developed her style in her Bryn Athyn, Pa., studio. See more at annbuss.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. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists, and readers through the magazine, and through education programs such as writer’s workshops, reading series, and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists. Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 3

i l e n e

r a y m o n d

r u s h

WORM OF THE HEART take at all, had been Del’s idea. Del, who spent his life studying zebra fish in the hopes of uncovering the cure for heart disease, embraced the many paths to post-twentieth-century immortality.

Throughout their marriage, he had tried to stick to a diet of healthful greens and fruit and had encouraged Lily to join him on hikes, bikes, and mindfulness retreats Despite his pleas, Lily often bowed out, content to watch Mother Nature’s plan for her thighs. Del told her she feared taking charge of her life.

“Your right hand never knows what your left is up to,” he said.

And here, in the swallowed heartworm pill, rested Del’s ultimate proof: Lily mistaking the multi-purpose vitamin in her left hand for the square, meat-colored dog lozenge in her right. Were these to be the final thoughts of her life?

Clutching what might turn out to be her Final Vitamin, Lily located her cell phone on the downstairs table and punched up Poison Control.

“Heartworm pills? Aren’t those for dogs?”

“Hence my concern.”

A Land Beyond The Rainbow by Rashidah Salam © 2014 n a Saturday morning in late September, while waiting for her estranged husband Del to arrive with the payment for their daughter Natalie’s final semester of college tuition, Lily Manheim accidentally swallowed her giant Schnauzer’s heartworm pill.

O

In the Chestnut Hill house she had once shared with her husband and daughter, Lily worked on hacking it back up. But even without water, the beige

bullet, taken in place of her daily vitamin tablet, had slipped down her esophagus into her digestive tract, bent on sending out evil dog worm killing enzymes.

Or whatever it was that a heartworm pill did.

Despite her 27-year marriage to a molecular biologist at Penn, Lily, with her masters in psychology and social work, had never been much for biology.

The vitamins, which she often forgot to

Cell phone pressed to one ear, Lily unclenched her left fist to reveal the damp violet vitamin that clung to her lifeline. For a moment, she considered feeding the pill to Britney Spears, the Schnauzer, a karmic trade-in that might stave off future bad luck, but then she dropped it into her own mouth and swallowed. Perhaps, she mused, the two might cancel one another out.

“Hmm,” Poison Control mused.

Fingers clacked across computer keys. “A real stumper.”

3

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 4

w o r m

o f

t h e

h e a r t

“No one ever did this before?”

“I’m sure someone has. Can you hold?” A blast of Death Cab for Cutie, then the voice resurfaced. “You’re not one of those urban legends?” the voice asked.

“I swallowed it five minutes ago,” Lily said, trying not to panic. “Am I going to die?”

“Well,” said Poison Control. “Let’s not get dramatic. I’d anticipate a little nausea, maybe some itching, but I expect you’ll be with us for a while longer.”

“No licking in inappropriate spots?”

Silence.

“We provide a very, very serious and important service to the community,” Poison Control lectured.

The flat sorrow of the dial tone filled Lily’s ear. Relief swamped her. She was not going to die, not today, maybe not

ever. This was immediately followed by annoyance. In this new century, the entire country appeared to have lost its collective sense of humor. You couldn’t blame them, really. It had been a very long summer full of serious and important issues. People sitting in emergency rooms without insurance coverage, nut jobs carting automatic rifles at open air rallies, unemployment a persistent plague. Her own job as a counselor at a clinic at Einstein Hospital was not exactly sound. And yet, here she was, toying with the idea of phoning back Poison Control to bark into the receiver.

(it was already the 15th) eating regular meals, and arriving to work on time had become more optional than required.

Not that she didn’t recognize in some back part of her brain that all of these activities were important, even vital. But, since she had asked Del to leave the house three months ago, time had taken on a peculiar shape, shifting in a manner that left less and less space for what once passed as regular, normal, organized life.

Hours slid by; but what filled them she could no longer precisely name.

The cell phone in her palm vibrated; perhaps it was Poison Control. She stared at it, determined that if she were given the chance, she’d take any proffered advice, elaborate on her specific symptoms, explain more carefully how recently she had been becoming more and more forgetful. Taking the heartworm pill was not an isolated case. Little things, like getting Britney Spears her heartworm pill on the first of the month

Or maybe it was. She punched in the numbers on the phone.

Boundaries

By Helen Ohlson This poem is my clean porch.

That painting is my sparkling oven.

The sail to Bora Bora is matching chairs that don’t creak their age.

You cruise the linear life.

You straighten your curtains, plant flowers in rows, imagine your life all in order.

4

I splash through colors and throw words all around the room.

You can’t imagine what sails outside the lines.

Raised in Sharon Hill, PA, Helen Ohlson pursued several careers, and finally chose teaching. She taught middle school English and a Gifted Seminar until retiring after 29 years. She has been writing and publishing since 1995. In 2013 her poem "Peyote Sunrise" was chosen for Times They Were Achanging - Women Remember the ‘60s and ‘70s, and in 2014 she and her writing group, the TransCanal Writers, won a Delaware Press Association award for their anthology Five Bridges. Helen resides in the Utopian village of Arden, Delaware, where Utopia might be up for debate, but artists and writers enjoy unabashed community support.

It was not that she missed him, exactly.

“Lily? Are you ill?”

Her mother Ruth. Lily swallowed, noting an oddly beefy taste in the back of her throat.

“Why would you think that?” Lily asked.

“Because you were supposed to drive me for my iron tests,” her mother said.

On the Art Museum calendar before her, Lily stared at the boxes filled with scrawls beneath a very scary portrait of twin Frida Kahlo’s holding onto a single bloody heart. What had possessed her to buy this calendar? Why not puppies? On the square marked for the fifteenth she read: Take M to tests. 8:15. Don’t forget.

Important!

“I’m sorry,” she told her mother. “Del’s supposed to drop off Natalie’s tuition check this morning.” She shot a glance at the clock above the refrigerator. “He’s late.”

“In person?”

Lily imagined her mother’s face, her slightly Oriental looking eyes crinkling at the corners with unconcealed hope.

Like everyone who met him, her mother had loved Del from first sight of his curly

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 5

i l e n e hair and dimpled chin. She knew what had transpired with Joy, but she had all her chips placed on an eventual reconciliation. Everyone deserves a second chance, she preached.

“Are you eating?” her mother asked.

“Britney Spears and I take excellent care of ourselves,” Lily said. She caught her reflection in the toaster oven; a little lipstick wouldn’t hurt. She headed to dig it out of her purse. “We’re stocked up on kibble and fruit.”

“A dog is not a husband, Lily,” her mother said.

Lily hesitated. “But a husband can be a dog.” Immediately she was sorry, but it was too late.

“Lily, Lily, Lily,” her mother said.

“Stop.” And then she clicked off the phone.

Lily stared at her cell. The second frustrated hang-up of the day, and it was not yet noon. How could she stop? She wanted to cry. Wasn’t she the injured party here? Who said that everyone deserved a second chance? She started to dial back her mother, ready to argue or apologize, but before she finished punching in her number the patter of footsteps sounded up the brick steps to the back door.

At once, Britney Spears’ ears perked up and her tail transformed into a giddy metronome.

“Is a doggy in there?” Del sang. “I come bearing doggy gifts.”

Lily swabbed on the lipstick and dropped it into a utensil drawer.

“Use your key.”

“That seems a bit formal.” A moment later she heard the scratch of the familiar key. She had consulted with a lawyer friend about Del’s refusal to give up the

house key, but until the separation was formalized Del apparently had his rights.

“Some people are easier than others,” instructed the lawyer. “This one not so much.”

“Britney!” called Del as he bumped the door closed with his hip, his traditional bag of peace offering onion bagels in one hand, a rubber chicken dog toy in the other. Dr. Delmore Swann, the love of her life, sauntered into the kitchen.

Britney Spears, who spent most of her time indoors inert, nose pressed to the tile, staring at the back of the self-same door, possibly praying continuously for this very celestial revelation, rushed forward at once, trampling over Lily’s bare feet and straight into her beloved’s embrace.

“Baby!” yelled Del. “Oh, how I’ve missed you!”

An unexpected pang rose in Lily’s chest, but it was Britney Spears who made the leap into Del’s tender embrace, Britney’s pink tongue that freely swiped Del’s freshly shaven face. Del dropped the bag of bagels and the dog immediately went for the warm circles of dough, nosing into the bag, splitting the paper and sending them spiraling. Del bent to grab them, but before he reached a single one, Britney Spears sprang to grab the bouncy rubber chicken and knocked Del to the floor.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Del swore. “Britney, calm down. Calm the fuck down.” He waved his arms to ward her off. “What’s wrong with this animal?” Lily swallowed.

“She misses you?”

Del pushed to standing. As usual, he looked good – casual and rumpled. That was Del – rumpled casual. A pale blue button-down shirt that matched his eyes, straight-legged jeans that advertised his 33-inch waist, bare feet in penny loafers that held their shine.

Britney followed him as he retrieved the

r a y m o n d

r u s h

bagels. Strictly speaking, Britney Spears belonged to Del. Del had rescued her from a suburban SPCA at the tail end of their marriage, in part, Lily suspected, because his then-girl-pal Joy lived within dog-walking distance of their house and perambulating Britney Spears gave Del the perfect forty-five minute cover to escape from the house for a quickie with minimal suspicion. The dog, to put it bluntly, had served as Del’s beard. Del and the dog ran a mutual adoration society, but when Lily kicked him out – he had chosen a no pet/no kid apartment to share with Joy (who had – oh, the delicious irony! – abandoned ship after six weeks) and unmanageable, half-trained Britney became de facto hers.

Bagels gathered and regrouped across the kitchen counter. Del knelt back on the floor.

“Britney, my darlink.” Del talked to the dog in the voice of Natasha from old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. “How do I live vithout you?”

Months ago, pre-Joy, Lily might have provided the companion voice for Britney Spears: “Darlink, do not vorry.

You are my one and only lurve.” In those days, lured by Del’s love of the dog, and her love of Del, this dog and master act might have served as a kind of foreplay.

Lily would lean over to rub Britney’s taut belly, her own sloping hip accidentally hitting Del’s roaming hand. At such a moment, the two hands stroking the dog might have found their way to somewhere decidedly more interesting, and Britney Spears, sent to follow a bouncy tennis ball cast by Del into a faraway room, would have been all but forgotten as the two of them dropped to the floor.

Now, elbows perched on the counter top, watching Del make goo-goo eyes at the dog he had so easily deserted, Lily’s eyes welled. She knew that as long as Del focused on Britney Spears he didn’t have to deal with anything else,

5

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 6

w o r m

o f

t h e

h e a r t

such as their broken-heasrted daughter Natalie, who didn’t understand why he couldn’t come home. Or his infidelity.

Or Lily.

She straightened.

“Tuition check?” she interrupted.

Outside, someone started a leaf blower. Lily remembered the punch line to one of Del’s favorite jokes: “Sorry, I must be leafing.” But she could no longer recall the joke. With a natural grace, Del delivered a final pat to Britney’s head and then jumped to his feet, pulling a green check from the back pocket of his jeans.

But when Lily stretched over the counter to reach for it, he leaned back, keeping it from her reach.

“No games,” Lily said.

in Cape May. The origin of the tiny white scar on his right temple where Natalie, two years old and perhaps alert to future betrayals, had pinched him.

“Del.” Lily leaned towards him, her voice softening. “This morning I swallowed the dog’s heartworm pill.”

“Jesus.” The check dipped in his hand. “How pathetic can you get?”

Lily’s head snapped up. “You don’t mean that.”

“What would you call it?” he asked.

“Reasonable behavior? Rational activity?

The sign of a well-functioning, organized brain?”

“I don’t know what I’d call it,” she said. Everyone deserves a second chance.

“Maybe it doesn’t have a name.”

“But I like games.”

Lily made a second stretch for the check; Del again evaded her grasp. More than once she had asked him to mail the check rather than carry it over, but he refused.

“It’s more haimish this way,” he said.

“Down to earth.”

“Idiot,” she said. But for some reason she smiled.

6

Del grinned back. For the first time since he had entered the room, Lily’s spine loosened. The truth was that no matter how much he had hurt her – and he had truly hurt her – she wasn’t totally sorry to see him. She had her own job and her friends and her life, but in many ways Del had been her life’s work. As he waved the check in the air, she thought about all she knew about the man. How he had held Natalie in the steamy shower when she had the croup, the surprise 40th birthday trip to Peru. Where he bought his ironic argyle socks. The time that this doctor who regularly dissected miniscule zebra fish hearts had sliced open his own finger parting salty oysters

“Sweetheart.” Del stepped towards her and set a hand on her shoulder. “Face it. You’re a wreck.” He smiled and massaged her upper arm. “You’re lucky I’m here.”

For the first time since Poison Control had suggested it, the tiniest rise of nausea clogged Lily’s throat. But before she could swallow, before Del had time to say another word, Lily leaned in.

She drew in a deep lungful of his familiar smell: a blend of Crest mouthwash, spicy aftershave, and an indefinable medicinal odor that he’d carried from the lab for all of their 27 years of marriage. Beyond her lips stretched his smooth collarbone, his pinkish nostrils, and his delicate earlobe, pale and juicy as a kumquat.

Closing her eyes, she considered her options. And then, with a quick snatch of breath, she parted her lips, bared her teeth and settled them into the curve of Dr. Del Swann’s neck.

“Fuck!” Del tried to jump back, but nothing budged. She held firm. Britney Spears stared, interested but strangely impassive.

“Lily!” Del cried. “What the fuck!”

Teeth locked, she stilled, unwilling to give up her place. She didn’t release him until the check, dangling in his loosened fingers, dropped to the floor.

Del sprang away, his face contorted, one hand clamped over his neck to staunch the pain.

“You’re certifiable,” Del told her. “You should be committed.” A dark bruise had blossomed beneath his fingers. From the floor, Britney Spears whined for his attention, but Del paid her no mind.

“Don’t think you’re going to get away with this,” he said. He stumbled to the doorway.

“Drop the key.”

Del turned. From here, her handiwork resembled a love bite, a high school hickey. Her incisors tingled; her lips burned. The meaty taste had fled, replaced by the damp sweetness of her estranged husband’s flesh. The metal key hit the tile. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, as she watched Del ignore Britney Spears to push his way through the door and out of the house, she believed that for a second she had tasted the center of things, wormed her way into the very heart.

The slam of the door echoed. Britney ran to the door and started to bark.

Lily studied the back of the door, her thoughts whirling. How could a man who studied molecules, who parsed strands of DNA, who published papers on the magical regeneration of the hearts of tiny fish that no one except those who published such papers might ever have a hope of understanding, be such a goddamn fool? Fool enough to throw away a good marriage, a solid marriage that she believed had been built on trust and love? All those songs about why fools fall in love had it backwards. The question

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 7

i l e n e

r a y m o n d

r u s h

was why do smart people fall in love?

Why don’t they know any better? Why do they refuse to see what inevitably comes next?

“He’s so not worth it,” she told the dog. For some reason she was crying.

“He’s not,” she said again.

The dog didn’t pay her any mind.

She kept barking and barking, bereft and alone.

Lily didn’t move. She went through everything she needed to do: catch up on her billing, give the dog a bath, and clean the kitchen, living room, and bathrooms. Think about her future. Get over Del. The dog howled and howled.

Ilene Raymond Rush’s fiction, nonfiction, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of national publications. Her short fiction has been awarded an O. Henry Prize and a James Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa.

Around and Around by Lisa Kelley © 2014

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 8

k i m b e r l y

e m i l i a

WAITING ROOM FAIRIES addy used to say it before he moved away to live with Vanessa.

“Your mother is a party and a half,” he would say. “But I’m not much of a partying man.”

My sister Anna and I knew how to party, too. We knew which shoes were party shoes and which were meant for rainstorms or school.

Daddy said we did a different kind of partying, but we believed what Mommy told us.

“If I can see your toenails, I’d better see that sparkle polish we bought last week,” Mom would say. “When we dance, we’ll see those tootsies twinkle!”

She taught us how to light up the floor and wag our fingers at spectators.

She said we should have so much fun dancing, we should encourage others to join in the fun. Mom could get people off their feet with a wink and a twirl. She told us we could learn to do that, too, if we had enough fun and spark in us, which she knew we did. Most days were practice days – so we could learn how to share our spark.

“Where does the spark come from?”

Anna asked once.

The answer was simple. It had to do with the fairies.

One morning just before Anna’s birthday, Mom told us to get dressed in our best church outfits. Matching hats and gloves, our pretty puffer coats, and closed-toe shoes. The black patent leather ones with the straps and bows we’d learned to fasten ourselves when we became “big girls.”

Anna wanted to know why we were dressing for church if we weren’t going to church.

“God sees you wherever you go. So, he’ll know that you did your best to look nice,” Mom said.

D

8

Oval by Lisa T. Reed © 2014

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 9

w a i t i n g Anna whined. She wanted to wear red glitter shoes and pink tights.

“God knows if you’re trying to ignore him for a party outfit,” Mom said.

Anna didn’t argue. I knew she was still upset, but she changed and I helped her with her black shoes. She wore sparkle underpants with The Little Mermaid on them and figured since no one could see, that was OK. Mom took us to a building we’d never been to before.

“Do we get to dance when we’re inside?” I asked.

“Do you dance in church?”

I smiled because I knew the answer. It was an easy one.

“I can dance inside my heart at church.”

Mom nodded and took Anna by the hand when we walked through the parking lot.

“These fuckers’ll run over anyone,” she said. Then she added, “Don’t repeat that.”

Anna looked at me and mouthed the words “run over” and tucked her chin to her chest for a muzzled giggle. I smiled at her and followed Mom’s footsteps.

Her clicks and clacks were tighter than usual, closer together. But I kept up. I knew how to keep up with Mom. Inside the building was an elevator, which was our favorite game to play. We’d race in one elevator and Mom would guess which floor we picked. If Anna was choosing, she’d always pick the fifth floor because she was five and said it was her favorite number. Mom told me it’s polite to let your little sister have the pick of things sometimes, because I’d usually do things first in life. Mom would race in another elevator and would always be sitting, waiting, on the floor we’d chosen.

She was really good at the game.

That day, Mom walked through the heavy gray doors and pushed a button.

Anna wanted to say something – I could tell. But I stared at her with eyes of ice, certain that almost anything might upset Mom today.

When the elevator doors slid open on our floor, two glass doors stood in front of us, covered with writing, like a grocery list.

“Mommy, what does it say?” Anna said.

Mom stared at the door for a long time before looking down at us. I wondered if she was translating the writing.

Maybe it was in another language.

“It says, ‘Danger ahead! Only the brave shall pass!’” Mom said. “And how do the brave prepare for danger?”

Anna rubbed her hands together and spread her stance. Then she said, “Elika zelika belika zoo!”

I needed to think on my feet, like Anna. So I rubbed static electricity between my hands and hair and stretched my fingers wide in front of us.

“I’m passing electricity through the glass door,” I told Mom. She smiled and told me that was a

r o o m

f a i r i e s

good idea.

She closed her eyes and told us she felt the fairies in her stomach. Fairies make you brave because they eat your fear. I’d forgotten about that, but Anna said she’d already thought about the fairies. They reminded her of the words to her spell.

We walked through the door, which opened to a room lined with chairs and tables stacked with magazines. The glossy covers had big writing and pregnant ladies on them.

That’s when I knew we were in a doctor’s office, but I didn’t know what for. I told Anna not to ask any questions because “all would reveal itself in time.”

That was the creed of the fairies.

We waited in chairs, sitting like perfect princesses on thrones while Mom spoke with a woman behind a desk and wrote things down on papers we couldn’t see.

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 10

k i m b e r l y

10

e m i l i a

We waited all together some more. I wasn’t sure why, but everyone in the room was quiet.

That’s when Anna figured it out. Our job was to be the special people in the room. The people who could make a difference – turn some frowns upside down.

She stood in the middle of the room and got up on her tiptoes. She started to twirl very softly at first, waving her hands gently through the air, and I hummed the music from Swan Lake. She pretended to be the swan and glided over the floor in soft sweeps, lifting her toes at the right moments for the perfect arabesque, the pique turns, and all of the pirouettes we’d practiced at home.

“You’re perfect,” Mom said. “I can see your feathers!”

“They’re in your butt!” I said, seeing the sprouting tail myself.

Anna spun with bigger swooping hand motions, and Mom started to laugh. She knew the fairies were helping Anna, and I knew that, before long, others would join in the dance.

But they didn’t.

A woman walked over to the lady sitting behind the desk and whispered some things. Another joined her not long after that.

Then the woman from behind the desk walked over to Mom and told her that her daughter’s behavior was inappropriate, given the sensitive nature of their office.

“Well, it’s very dangerous here,” I told the woman. “Anna is coaxing out the danger.”

The woman raised an eyebrow, and a young woman sitting in a chair in the corner rubbed her stomach and shuddered.

I didn’t understand. Anna’s dance was perfect. It was sure to develop our bravery and make other people want to dance.

But Mom motioned for us to come close.

“The ladies in this room are delicate.

Not anything like us. Your dancing

reminds them of their own fear. They’re scared,” Mom said.

“What should we do?” I said.

“Well, I need to go into that room back there in a few minutes. It will take a little while. Maybe 20 minutes, maybe 30. I need you girls to be good and sit here quietly. You can say your spells and talk to each other, but no dancing, no playing on the floor, OK?” “But what about the fairies?” Anna said.

“I need you to tell the fairies to go to Mommy’s stomach. I need them there.

Can you do that?”

When Anna didn’t answer right away, I gave her a shove and told her I’d pick her nose later if she didn’t agree.

“I’ll put the boogers in your ears,” I said.

We nodded our heads, and a few minutes later the woman behind the desk called Mom’s name. She walked through a door, and we waited for a long time.

When Mom came back out, she looked white and tired. Her eyes were puffy and she didn’t look like she had any fairies in her at all. She picked up her coat and wound her scarf around her neck a few times before telling us it was time to go.

When we got into the elevator, we were all quiet.

“Are you OK?” I said to Mom. She looked down at me, and I thought she might cry. I wondered if

Anna’s dance had failed. If we’d lost our ability to make others want to dance.

Anna looked scared, and I thought she might cry, too.

Mom slid her index finger up and down the button board in the elevator, lighting up each number.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re fairy hunting today. Let’s check every floor.

They could be anywhere by now!”

Anna jumped up and down and so I did, too, and the elevator shook just enough to tell us the fairies were close.

“There they are!” Mom said. “They’re following us to every floor! I feel them in my toes!” And she started to tap her foot just slightly.

“If I dance too hard the fairies will fall out!” she said, and she asked Anna and me to dance for her, to conjure the fairies from each of the floors and into the elevator with us.

So Anna and I danced until we could hardly catch our breaths. And Mom told us if the dancing made our feet hurt, we could take off our shoes.

Kimberly Emilia has been previously published by Weave Magazine, Defenestration Moderator, Spirit Magazine, and Blue Lake Review. She holds an MFA from Arcadia University in Creative Writing and presently teaches writing and cultural studies for Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. She resides in Chester County with her supportive husband.

SAVE THE DATE September 20, 2014 Philadelphia Stories celebrates its 10th Anniversary!

Cheltenham Arts Center * 7-10pm * Cheltenham, PA MORE INFORMATION AT PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:02 PM Page 11

p o e t r y

w i n n e r s

Small Rooms, Seven Summers

By Liz Solms Anything that lives feels the earth flinch.

Even the things that don’t live cower in the heat— the pavement, the asphalt, the electric lines, slump

beneath the sky which seems brown or burned.

We’re all inside our small apartments, in whichever room has the air conditioner. Out on the street there are just a few

pigeons and crazy people who peck and wander slowly in the deserted heat town. With a towel over my head I inhabit my migraine.

My head and eyeballs sit down in their own small room that pulses

with a pain I can watch. Maybe this is the smallest room I will ever occupy.

In here, it is like slowing down the rain, seeing each drop.

The Choice by Teresa Shields © 2014

In here, I am unable to know anything except exactly how I feel.

If I can feel gratitude for this, to be a momentary prisoner in the cold air, locked inside my own high pitched darkness.

If I can feel gratitude for being stranded. Like when my brother

visited seven summers ago, the last time he came here.

It was a heat wave then too and we moved into our bedroom, all of us, my husband, my brother, the television.

We turned the only room with the air conditioner into our own little world with everything we could ever need. We ate dinner with plates and glasses set across the bed, slept three across our mattress.

I woke in the night to see my brother’s arm in a cast, dangling off the bed like a crescent moon. He had punched his arm through a wall the week before. My husband slept straight as a mummy on my other side.

For the first time I felt like the perfect place to be was trapped.

In a small room awake between two men where it was quiet and cold and outside the door the city was on fire.

Liz Solms is a writer who lives between Philadelphia and the island of Jamaica where she works in agriculture. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Post Road, The Naugatauk Review, and Diner Journal, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Liz's poem, an Honorable Mention winner in the Sandy Crimmins Contest, ran with an incorrect title in the Spring 2014 issue. We reprint the corrected poem here with our apologies.

11

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 12

a i m e e ’ s

T i p s

JUDGING A STORY

BY ITS TITLE

By Aimee LaBrie I confess that I frequently judge books by their titles. In some cases, this kind of snap decision works every time.

Like, if the paperback features a woman wearing a hoop skirt with a plunging neckline pressed up next to a man wearing a white blouse with a sword at his side, I know I’m going to love it! Just kidding. It means I know I will not be reading The Pirate’s Bride, because that book falls into the bodice-ripper genre and I haven’t read any romances since I stumbled on a collection of them as a kid during a

vacation at my aunt’s house. Those paperbacks pretty much ruined my expectations for how sex would unfold, though they did improve my vocabulary so that I was able to spell and define the word “tumescence” should anyone ask. But that’s a tale for another day.

read the whole thing, only that I am put on guard when the title is “The Day I Died.” (Side note: please do not kill off your main character in a short story, particularly if you’re telling a first-person narrative. Don’t make me ponder how the story got told by a dead guy.)

Similarly, I find that when I’m reading stories submitted for publication to Philadelphia Stories I often have a quick reaction based solely on the title of a story. This does not mean that I don’t

Good titles are difficult to create, but the title of your piece is the first thing an editor sees when she’s looking at your work, and therefore a bad title can set your story on the path toward

FIND OUT WHAT BEDFORD AND MAIN

CAN DO FOR YOUR COMPANY

With 30+ years of hands-on experience in building, growing, re-structuring and changing business lines, we provide highly customized consulting services to securities Broker/Dealers, individual Financial Advisors and industry related Financial Services firms.

WWW.BEDFORDANDMAIN.COM

609.707.1071

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 13

n a m e

o f

a u t h o r

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS rejection. Bad titles make the reader suspicious that the writer doesn’t know what he is doing. For example, any title that seems completely obvious, like “Returning Home,” or melodramatic, like “Feelings of Sadness,” or too weird, as in “Sebastian and the Ginkledork Cherry Blossom Pie Aliens,” has me on the defensive before I even read the first sentence, “Today was the day that Sebastian felt the saddest even though he was on his way back home.”

When in doubt, keep the title simple. Lorrie Moore, in her latest collection of short fiction (Bark: Stories), has stories called “Bark,” “Foes,” and “The Juniper Tree.” Those are straightforward nouns that don’t confuse or give too much away. Stories in some of Moore’s other collections have titles such as “Thank You for Having Me,” “You’re Ugly, Too,” and “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” The common thread among these examples is that they turn out to have more than one interpretation. In this way, the best titles do the same thing that good stories do. They have both a surface meaning and a deeper one. For example, the title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Temporary Matter” refers to the fact that the electricity in a house will be cut off for a short time and also reflects the state of the marriage the story explores. Often, a reader will fully appreciate a story’s title only after reading the entire piece. And a really good title will connect with the ending in a way that feels justified but isn’t easily anticipated.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a title, try going back into the story and looking for key words or phrases that you like and see if they can hold the weight of the story. The title doesn’t have to do all of the work – it doesn’t have to explain the whole story, nor should it – but it does need to be well thought out. You have so few words in a short story – make the title count.

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

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 14

a n n e

c o l w e l l

HOLY DAY

(NOVEL EXCERPT)

Academy Students in Plein Air by Catherine Quillman © 2014 he Mass is ended. Go in peace.” There was a physical release in the crowd like a sigh, barely audible, as mothers tugged mittens and hats back onto their squirming children and opened purses to fish for keys. On Holy Days, men weren’t expected to attend the Mass. There were a few, of course – retired, white-haired businessmen still wearing suits and hats as they had every weekday for years – but most of the congregation was made up of the women and children of the parish, the understanding being that men had more pressing obligations than holy days.

Maxine followed the children to the door, hoping to get to the car before she’d have to talk to any of the other mothers. But Susan Duffy touched her

“

14

T

on the shoulder. “Better late than never!”

Susan laughed. “We just made it in time to get the last seat in a back pew.” The jeweled corners of Susan’s cat eye glasses caught the light as they stepped out through the door.

Maxine’s smile surfaced and disappeared. She never knew what to say to women like Susan. She imagined her as one of a type, a category of person that she’d internally dubbed “Good Housekeeping women.” They rolled through domestic life like they were born on roller skates: making cupcakes for bake sales, sewing new dresses for the dance, cleaning the bathroom grout with a toothbrush.

Beside them she felt at a loss, always.

When they talked about window treatments or teething babies or the relative merits of frozen over canned, she would

smile and nod and stay quiet. Maxine looked down at Susan’s suede maroon pumps that matched her suede gloves.

“Cereal spilled. That’s why we were late. Fruit Loops.”

“Oh.” Susan laughed. “It was one of those mornings! Poor you! I know just what they’re like.”

The hell you do, Maxine thought, but she smiled and nodded.

Maxine’s daughter Jenny jogged down the marble stairs and Susan’s daughter, Betsy, followed her. The two moved toward a group of girls from their grade who were standing in a small knot, all pony tails and bent heads and secrets.

One of the girls held out a pastel candy necklace that she had just pulled from her patent leather purse.

“Jenny,” Maxine called after her. “We

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 15

h o l y can’t dawdle now. We have to go.”

“Just one minute, Mom,” Jenny pleaded. “One teensy tiny minute.”

Maxine felt the flask in her purse bump against her ribs as she reached down again for Petey’s hand.

“And so it begins,” Susan said, looking down at their daughters. “Pretty soon they’ll be pulling lipsticks out of their bags and giggling and whispering about boys just like we did.”

“Dear God, I hope not.” The bitterness that filled her voice surprised her and Maxine watched Susan spin around and stare with eyebrows raised. Maxine corrected herself. “I mean, I just hope it doesn’t come too soon, the whole teenage thing.”

As Maxine pulled in, Rita was walking down the long curved driveway to meet her. She carried two juice glasses with thick red tomato juice and Maxine focused on them and felt herself begin to

relax. Bloody Marys. The only good way to observe The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. She imagined Rita saying it, letting the smoke curl out of her mouth and nose, before they clinked glasses and sipped. Maxine lifted two fingers from the steering wheel to wave. Rita raised one of the glasses in return as she picked her way down the drive like a thinlegged water bird on an asphalt stream.

She wore red plaid pants with a wide leg and a beige turtleneck sweater with red beads that swung a little with her motion. Her hair, a blond pageboy with dark roots, lifted in the December air, and she lowered her pointed chin against the cold and kicked dead leaves into the grass with the inside edge of her foot.

Maxine could see Rita’s breath. She must be freezing, she thought.

Maxine watched Rita move, envious of her hipbones. When she was six or seven, Maxine had found a deck of cards that her father had hidden in the drawer

d a y

of his nightstand with pictures of naked women on them. One of them, a very tall blonde, was stretched out on a bed, her legs opened, her hipbones jutting out of the dark valley of her spread legs like dolphin fins, geometric, sculptural.

Maxine had feared the softness of the breasts, the mossy hair at the crotch, but she’d thought this blond woman was beautiful because of those bones, imagined these long clean lines and the triangles jutting above a smooth flat belly.

Sometimes Rita and Maxine discussed their different bodies, both always self-deprecating, complaining – how hard it was to buy clothes, how much better life would be with bigger breasts or a smaller ass. Rita told her she was lucky to be so curvy.

“At least you’ve got a little something where it counts. Me, I’m the white cliffs of Dover. Flat in back, flat in front.”

But Maxine saw nothing admirable in her pale protruding belly, her round pink

Master the Art of Writing t t t t

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

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

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 16

a n n e

c o l w e l l

arms. She was always vowing to reduce and announcing her intention to eat nothing but cottage cheese for two months.

Inside the house, sitting at the kitchen table, Maxine watched Rita frowning at the clean laundry she folded into piles on the stained and crumb-cov-

ered tablecloth, curving her shoulders over her flat chest and jutting her hips out in front so that she looked almost Sshaped from the side. Maxine sat up straighter in her chair as she finished off the Bloody Mary that Rita had handed her in the driveway.

“That’s the problem with these damn

The Bike Shop

By Ed Granger The plows have done their work and then some as I coast the washboard lane to a bike shop where the sign on the main road says I can also purchase peach preserves and tractor parts.

A bell on the door brings a black retriever and the sound of slackening metal pawls that means a wheel has just been left to friction and its own kind of true. As the owner goes to the rear storeroom to dig out the tire I need – “we don’t get many Italian bikes in here” – the room regains its equilibrium.

Behind the counter around a repair stand sit a space heater and a knot of men on folding chairs. Their Pennfield caps predict laments about the price of milk or scolding spouses, but it seems they are debating when to stage a bike race for the younger kids up Pump House Road to an apple orchard.

A kind of liturgical calendar is unfolding with a bicycle feast made moveable by an annual Florida vacation when two border collies with the run of the hill will be at a kennel, which means in turn that the date for a mud sale is on hold, and maybe an April wedding.

16

A few deft twists secure my new tire to its rim, and I push my bike back down the aisle and into the cold with a slice of warm air against my chest and a fresh sense of the merits of invisible fences.

Ed Granger lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he was raised. He has worked in the non-profit healthcare field for the past two decades, following a stint as a professional journalist. He now writes as a serious avocation while also serving as half-time dad to a nine-year-old daughter. He has had poems published in Little Patuxent Review, River Poets Journal, and The Heron’s Nest.

Catholic schools,” Rita was saying.

“They’re off every other day. St. Stanislaus Day and next it’s Our Lady Patron of Mothers Celebration or whatever. And do you think they’d give a mother a break to show they understood? No way. You’ve got the kids all day on a day that celebrates mothers. I mean, what the fuck?”

What the fuck? There it was. Just one of the many things Paul hated about Rita.

“She doesn’t talk like a lady,” Paul had said after the first time they’d met.

Maxine had talked him into going to a party at Rita’s on a sweltering night in July. On the drive home he’d given the post mortem as sweat rolled down Maxine’s sides – even with the window open. He’d hated the whole evening.

“Who is she trying to impress, tossing around those words?” Paul never cursed, except when he was furious or drunk.

“And what was with the cigar? What did that prove? Why does she need to stand around with all of the men instead of in the kitchen with the women. And it’s her house! She’s supposed to be the hostess, not smoking cigars with the men, making everyone comfortable.”

Maxine hadn’t seen the cigar smoking, but she’d pictured it as she stood in the kitchen with her back against the counter, listening to Rita’s laughter in the other room when Henry Oppenheimer offered Rita the Cuban. Maxine had pictured the smoke wreathed around Rita’s head and the drink in her hand and all of the men circling her, admiring her, afraid of her. Maxine had heard it so clearly and imagined it so keenly that she kept losing the thread of her boring conversation with Tracy Knight about the problems Tracy was having with her son’s kindergarten teacher.

Paul had been quiet for awhile as he drove into the starless night, heat lightning ghosting the horizon, and Maxine watched the muscle in his jaw working.

Finally he’d asked, “You don’t think she might be one of those lesbians, do you?”

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 17

h o l y Maxine had taken a weary breath and laughed. “She’s divorced. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t like men; it just means she didn’t happen to like that one.

She’s high-spirited. Good God, Paul, women have been smoking since the twenties. This is 1969.”

Maxine raised her glass and the last of the thick cold juice filled her mouth with a taste peppery and flat, almost

metallic. On the television in the next room, a woman’s voice grew frantic, pleading, “What will you do? Where will you go?” A man answered, “What’s that to you now, now that you’ll be married to him?” Then a great swell of music erupted as they went to commercial. Maxine pictured the three children sitting in that dark den just the way she’d left them, slumped into the overstuffed furniture with the blank looks children reserve for

the old dogs of Karma

By Jim Trainer with their past glories sheared off the old dogs of Karma come sniffing around I had left them in the backyard laying around I was spending my sotted nights trying to remember a song I had no melody, no radio time was pecking away at my bones &wisdom’s sand was wearing away the bulwark of decades with gentle annihilating breath the old dogs of Karma come in like it’s New Year’s Eve like maybe we should settle they want more than the meat of my youth. with sad, oil-black eyes and tongues dry&white the old dogs of Karma come sniffing around for what’s left.

Farewell to Armor, Jim Trainer's full-length collection of poetry, is out now through WragsInk Press and available on Amazon.com. Trainer is the founder of Yellow Lark Press. He currently lives in Austin, Texas where he serves as contributor, curator and editor of Going For The Throat-a twice-weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance. To read and find out more about Jim, please visit jimtrainer.net.

d a y

conveying the most inexpressible kind of accusation or anger. Back in the car after church, she knew the children wanted to go home, to play, to have their day together, just the four of them. But then, they never wanted to go to Rita’s house.

There was nothing and no one to play with; they were bored and uncomfortable. Maxine had tried to cajole them.

“We’ll only be a few minutes. I have some things I need to talk to Mrs. Pyles about and then later we can go do something fun.”

“What, Mommy?” Petey said. “What can we do fun?”

But Jenny threw her head back against the seat and frowned out the window. “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want to go. Her house smells funny.”

“Jennifer,” Maxine snapped. “That’s unkind. I don’t want to hear any more of your nonsense and I never want to hear you say that again, especially in front of Mrs. Pyles. It’s a terribly rude thing to say and it would hurt her feelings.” Maxine thought it, too, so Jenny’s saying it made her angrier. The house had a strange, sharp smell, like Lysol and cigarettes and dust.

The smell seemed to have cooked down over time, coalesced, as if no window in the house had been opened for years.

Maxine caught Jenny’s eye in the rearview and frowned. Jenny turned toward the window again and Petey slid headfirst into the front seat, the stuffed dog he’d named Buddy clutched in his hand. He moved close to her and looked up into her face until she focused again on the road and then he whispered, “Mommy, what can we do that’s fun?”

“It’ll be a surprise,” she said.

“But what surprise will it be, Mommy?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?” Maxine laughed and cut her eyes to the rearview to see if Jenny had softened at all, but she was still staring resolutely out the window.

Laura sat beside her, turning the pages of her favorite book, Pippi Longstocking, and keeping her own counsel. Her dark hair

17

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 18

a n n e

c o l w e l l

This Way by Lisa Kelley © 2014 fell down around her face and Maxine watched the sunlight and shade stream over the curtains of her hair where it made a world for her alone, a world of peace removed from the tension of Jenny’s anger and Petey’s desire.

“Is it ice cream?” Petey asked.

“Mom, will you braid my hair like Pippi’s?” Laura said.

Maxine laughed again, trying to be light, trying to make it a good day. “We’ll see,” she said. “Maybe later tonight.” And to Petey, “Will you be a good boy while we visit Mrs. Pyles?”

Petey nodded solemnly.

“Can I have a horse, like Pippi?” Laura asked.

18

When they arrived, Rita had barely looked at the children. But once they were in the house, Rita offered them snacks and drinks as they’d settled in front of the television. They each said “No thank you” automatically. After several visits, they had learned to refuse her offers despite Maxine’s frowns. Rita’s kids

were older, almost grown, and somehow she’d forgotten – or maybe she’d never known – that things like Brazil nuts or garlic-stuffed olives were not snacks that would please children ages six, eight, and nine. It never seemed to matter to Rita whether they ate the food she gave them or not, just as it didn’t seem to matter to her that the girls never smiled at her unless told to, never said a word to her unless prompted by Maxine.

Rita’s attitude toward children, all children, was another thing that Maxine found impressive. When she was trying to explain it to herself, though, she thought “impressive” might be the wrong word. Interesting? No, it was more than that. Rita didn’t act like any woman Maxine knew around children, and she certainly didn’t act like any mother she’d seen. She’d never exclaimed over Jenny’s hair or noticed anything they were wearing or commented on how they’d grown.

She didn’t ask them about school or what grade they were in or if they liked their teachers. Nothing. Rita always seemed

surprised whenever any of the kids spoke, mildly annoyed at their presence.

She’d apologized one day after snapping at Petey for interrupting their conversation. “I’m just no good with kids,” she’d said. “You probably think I’m terrible.”

But Maxine didn’t find it terrible, somehow – just curious. To say, “I’m not good with children” out loud. It was the kind of thing she would never dare to admit – like saying she had a favorite child, or that she sometimes found them disgusting when they were sick – and it thrilled her somehow that Rita could just say it. Rita had had three sons of her own – big, sullen boys – and the oldest two lived with their father. The youngest son was a ghost in the house, passing through on his way to somewhere else – to lacrosse practice or to meet a friend – grabbing something from the refrigerator, saying as close to nothing as possible. Maxine wondered for a long time why the other boys lived with their father, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Rita had only mentioned it once, in an offhand way, when she began a sentence, “When the oldest two decided to give up on me altogether and move to ‘Man Island’…”

“I’m sure they didn’t give up on you!”

Maxine protested.

Rita looked at her sidelong and grinned a little. “It’s okay, Maxine, you don’t have to fix it.” Maxine had no idea what to say then. Rita was the only divorced woman Maxine knew.

There were rumors in the neighborhood, of course. Her sons had left because she’d been bringing home other men, sometimes married men. People whispered about cars coming and going late at night. Though Maxine believed this might have been the case, she hated the sharp bright eyes of the people who gossiped about it. The same people said sometimes that the boys left because Rita neglected them, refused to feed them, finally put them out. Maxine knew this charge was false and thought it mean and unwarranted. When Mrs. Palmer, stand-

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 19

h o l y ing in the long line at the Acme Grocery, had suggested this, Maxine had called it “ludicrous.”

“You’re friends with her, then?” Mrs.

Palmer’s pink lipsticked mouth settled to a small, pursed “o.”

Maxine felt like the grocery store hushed around her. She lowered her

Bad Dream Of Arithmetic

By David P. Kozinski

d a y

voice and began to dig for her wallet in her purse, but she tried to keep her tone matter-of-fact. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. We talk, that is.”

“Well, I guess you would know, then,” Mrs. Palmer said, and she turned on her heel, putting her groceries on the belt in silence. She didn’t even wave at Maxine when she paid and left.

“Frail is the royal barge, / Autumn the cargo.” from Robert Hillyer’s “The Leaf”

In those last hours or days you’ll negotiate spheres and rays with Galileo, finally bend the ear of the brother who forever raced ahead, revisit an evening on the rock with the girl in micro shorts and long socks shivering on the billiard table as the ocean rolled back and surrounded you, the steeple zeroing in on Vesper.

How have our pomps decayed! goes your song reprised: the chords ringing from a practice room Bösendorfer count moments liked stacked dominos.

All those fingerings worked out until each arpeggio, each eighth note, quarter or triplet struck like a printing press key; hours curved by the metronome and the clarinet’s corkscrew until the piece walked itself with a sailor’s gait return like the restless night before the audition –divisions gathered in an armada awaiting subtraction –and all the lives in a small world hanging tight on its result.

David P. Kozinski has been the featured poet in Schuylkill Valley Journal. He won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, which included publication of his chapbook, Loopholes. His poems have appeared in Apiary, The Broadkill Review, Chiron Review, Confrontation, Fox Chase Review, glimmertrain.com, Margie, and The Rathalla Review, among others. Kozinski was one of ten poets chosen by Robert Bly for a workshop sponsored by American Poetry Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. He received Honorable Mention in Philadelphia Poets’ 7th Annual John & Rose Petracca & Family Award. Kozinski lives in Wilmington, DE with his wife, actress and journalist Patti Allis Mengers.

Rita gathered all the laundry off the kitchen table and into a white plastic laundry basket. The cold sun came slanting through the big picture window behind them and Maxine looked at her shadow, a strange rounded triangle on the checkered tablecloth.

“What’ll you do with them all day?”

Maxine felt the weight of it again.

The day stretched in front of her, so many hours until Paul came home and dinner and then the relief of putting them in bed. At bedtime she knew what to do. She had a routine: jammies, brush teeth, one song, two stories, lights out.

Peace. In the summer, there was camp, and the swim club, the playground, places to take them. But now, in December, the day seemed so long and she had no idea how she would fill it.

She fished the cigarettes out of her purse and pulled the half-full ashtray toward her.

“I think I’ll take them for ice cream.”

She inhaled deep and blew a white breath toward the ceiling. “It’s a secret; I promised Petey a surprise for being good. And then I guess I could take them over to the mall with me. I need to do some more Christmas shopping and they could run off and look around.”

Rita topped up her Bloody Mary from the big pitcher on the counter and Maxine began to calm down as she felt the drink softening the hard edge of her fear. It was a good plan. They could go to the King of Prussia Mall and look at all the Christmas decorations, at the big tree in the middle of the plaza. They could walk around the enclosed part and

19

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 20

a n n e

20

c o l w e l l

stay warm. Maxine would try to find something to give Paul, maybe even browse through the jewelry and purses while the kids went off to look in the toy store. Maybe she’d even pick up a little car for Petey and some small things for the girls, headbands with flowers or little barrettes. She thought of their faces in the car, their silent accusations. She thought that maybe little gifts could make up for it, could turn the day around. Another swell of music spilled in from the next room. “Like sands through the hourglass,” the voice-over announcer said.

“You watch this one, don’t you? Days of Our Lives?” Maxine said. “Do you want to go in? We can shoo the kids to the living room.”

“Never mind. I can miss a day, God knows. Nothing ever happens on those things. Besides, what’ll they do in the living room? They’ll just break something.”

Rita laughed, but Maxine knew she meant it and it made her bristle. They were good kids, after all.

“They don’t mean any harm,” Maxine said, getting up and going to the door to look in on them. A heavy red curtain always drawn over the only window darkened the den, and the children’s faces shifted blue and green with the changing color on the TV, a laundry detergent commercial. None of them looked at her; all seemed transfixed and absent, as a smiling woman holding an iron announced, “Your family counts on you for the whitest whites.”

“I guess I better finish this drink and go,” Maxine said, turning around just in time to see Rita drain hers in two big gulps.

“No,” Rita protested. “Come on, stay a little and chat. Have one more after this. You’re the best part of my day, you know?”

Rita had been Maxine’s best friend since their first real conversation three summers before. It happened on Rita’s

back porch, sitting across the picnic table from each other as their cold gin and tonics sweated into the wood and they sweated into the summer night. They’d met just that afternoon at a neighborhood Tupperware party. Those things always made Maxine so sad and nervous.

She’d tried to tell Paul what they were like. “You do nothing,” she’d said. “You sit around someone’s kitchen table ooohing and aaaahing and it’s just nothing . . . different sized plastic bowls . . . and it’s all very modern and maybe the astronauts use them or something. Tupperware calls them ‘the bowls that burp‘ because you press out the air and food stays fresh and . . .” Maxine had rubbed her fingers into the corners of her dry eyes. Just talking about it made her feel exhausted. “After awhile it’s just a bunch of plastic bowls.”

“Other women seem to enjoy it,” Paul had said.

But Maxine knew right away that Rita was different. When the first of the cake holders came out, and the other women caught their breath, Rita caught Maxine’s eye and held it, then did a long slow blink that had Maxine stifling a laugh and poking around her purse for a Kleenex. They spent most of the next hours in mute conversation – barely lifted eyebrows, nearly suppressed smiles – sharing the insanity of this ritual, the absurdity of their plight. At the finale, when Denise took out the condiment caddy and everyone broke into applause, Maxine looked at Rita and nearly collapsed with glee at having found another soul who seemed to understand.

When they left, each holding their obligatory purchase, a mustard and catsup set, Rita said, “I’m two blocks away and no one’s home. Come have a drink.”

Two hours later, sitting in Rita’s yard, Maxine felt grateful and oddly comfortable with a relative stranger. The last time she’d talked with another woman like this was the night before she got married when, for the last time, she and Barbara sat up late on the old screened-in

porch of her mother’s house. It was a soft June night and the fireflies rose and fell in the tiny row house yard as they talked the way they always had, and never would again – about the boys at the factory they used to date, her wedding the next day, their parents and what they wanted for their own futures. How much better it could be for them than it had been for their mothers. Barbara had been her best friend. How could she have lost touch with someone who had been that close?

Maxine told all this to Rita that night.

Another June night, but hotter, closer.

The fireflies still rose and fell in the dark yard, but the other houses around them were distant points of light behind manicured hedges, not neighbors she knew whose shapes she watched behind their curtained yellow windows. Maxine told Rita that she sometimes wished she still lived in the city, still had a job.

“I miss . . .” but Maxine couldn’t finish the sentence because all of the things she missed came pouring in. They became a kaleidoscope, colored blocks of memory shifting – the house she’d grown up in with the creaky stairs and the blue door, her mother’s striped aprons, Barbara’s upturned freckled nose, being young on a summer night and sitting on the front stoop with bare toes curled around the concrete step and the whole world stretching out from that one cool inch of stone.

Telling Rita her stories, Maxine felt like the world she’d known growing up was right there beyond the manicured hedges and the suburban summer hum – 1949 was out there in the dark, and with it the streets and the houses and the people she’d known – the girl she’d been, Clearfield Street and her Aunt Helen’s three-story corner house, the sound of the old Ford delivery wagons. She could see Barbara walking beside her, the lights from the windows of the butcher’s and the five and dime shifting behind her, shadowing her face and lighting up her

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 21

h o l y dark red hair. She remembered faces of boys – they rose from the dark pools of 1949 like strange pale fish – not the ones from their high school, St. Theresa’s, but older boys who’d never gone to college or who left school when they hit sixteen to work at the National Biscuit factory, at the corner of Kensington and Alleghany, where her mother worked. These were the boys she and Barbara sought, the ones they dressed for and talked about.

That was when Maxine had first felt like a real person, like she had a real life of her own, with lipstick and cigarettes hidden in her purse, a flask tucked in the inside pocket of her jacket. Maxine and Barbara would make up some story about prom committee meetings or decorating the gym for a pep rally and then meet the boys behind the factory or in back of the pool hall when the boys got off their shift. She thought again about the hidden bottles, the ever-present rot-gut booze the boys drank.

“Sometimes,” she told Rita, “I imagine talking with Jenny about dating when she gets older and telling her my dating stories and I realize that I’m going to have to edit, erase the whiskey and the lies.”

Coming home after nights out with the boys, she and Barbara would suck a striped peppermint and rehearse cover stories about what had kept them so late.

The taste of peppermint still made her think of those nights; every corner felt like an opportunity to see someone new.

They marveled at how easy it was to get by their parents and talked about what Barbara’s father would do, especially if he knew about the dark boys in the dark corners of the pool hall parking lot.

Maxine remembered all of it. The sweaty wrestling in the back seats of cars, the furious whispers in her ear, the hands that pushed and pushed – she learned to go absolutely still, to fold in on herself, cross her legs and arms, duck her head, and then they would stop and apologize and she would rehook her bra and kiss them again. “Nothing below the waist,”

she’d say lightly, and then she’d turn away before she could see their eyes.

Sometimes, though, when Maxine came home late, her mother would look up from her magazine with eyes so flat and full of defeat that Maxine understood that her mother knew it all and was terrified that Maxine would end up pregnant by some neighborhood boy, end up staying there the rest of her life.

“That was the only thing I ever saw my mother afraid of,” she told Rita. “Me staying there and becoming her.”

That she’d graduated from secretarial school, married Paul, had a house in the suburbs – this was everything her mother had ever dreamed for Maxine.

Everything she’d taught Maxine to dream for herself. Just before she and Paul bought the house, Maxine drove her mother out to Bridgewater to see it.

The house was on the top of a hill, with a two-car garage and blue shutters and two stone posts at the entrance to the drive. Maxine could feel her mother’s emotion as she turned the car at the pillars and they neared the house; it felt like the air around her was suddenly electrified. When Maxine opened the front door, her mother turned tear-filled eyes up to the high ceilings in the entranceway. “You’ve got the perfect life now,” she said. “Oh Maxine. You did it.”

“The perfect life,” Rita said, dragging her finger through the wet ring her glass made on the wood. “Is that what this is?

Out in the dark yard, cicadas had begun their furious metallic chirring and the crickets’ voices opened and closed like rusty hinges. “What did you really want?” Rita met her gaze then and held it. “Did you have any idea what you wanted back then?”

“I . . . .” Maxine tried to think of a word to describe how she’d thought about her own life, if she ever did think about her life.. “No one ever told me I should wonder what I wanted. I don’t think I even knew how to ask myself the question.”

d a y

“Do you ask yourself now?”

Maxine shifted on the wooden bench and laughed a little. “Do you?”

“Nope, my gin, my question. You first. When it’s your gin, you can turn the tables.”

Maxine lit another cigarette and watched the flame bow low as she drew in a long drag. She looked out across the dark lawn and watched the yellow porch light come on in the house next door.

Then she did something that she hadn’t done in a very long time. She told the truth.

“Some mornings,” she said, “the bars of sunlight slanting through the blinds look like knives. I open my eyes and I think the day will slice me open, cut me right down to the bone. Some nights, especially if Paul is working late, I wander through the house after I put the kids to bed and I pick up the knickknacks, the books, all the stuff I’m always dusting and arranging, and I wonder who could possibly want this, care about it. I wonder what the hell happened to me that I have a collection of Royal Doulton figurines and a husband who buys me a new one for every birthday.”

The soap opera ended and Maxine heard the music again, the segue into a commercial, and the children shifting and whispering in the den. Just as Maxine poured another Bloody Mary, Laura came and stood in the kitchen doorway. In the smallest voice she could manage, avoiding Rita’s pointed gaze, Laura whispered, “Are we going to go soon?”

Anne Colwell is a fiction writer and poet and this excerpt comes from “Holy Day,” a novel in progress. She has published two books of poems: Believing Their Shadows (Word Poetry, 2010) and Mother’s Maiden Name (Word Poetry, 2013). She won the 2013 Experienced Artist in Fiction Award for her novel “Holy Day” through the Delaware State Arts Council and has been a Work-Study Fellow at Bread Loaf and a MidAtlantic Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

21

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 22

Building a community of writers,

artists, and readers across the Delaware Valley

Michener Level ($25 - $40)

22

Amy Punt Angela Speakman Ann Maebius Anne Hunter Barb & J.J. Cutler Barbara Bloom Barbara Grey Brenda Howell Brenda Leon & Pat Bambrick Cara Schneider Carlo & Sharon Spataro Carolyn Clark Carolyn Guss Cassandra Wilt Catherine Stine Charles Glackin Charles McGray Cheryl Mercier Christine Obst Colette Tomeo Constance Garcia Barrio Dave Stiles Diana Krantz Diane Davies Dixon Dianna Sinovic Dolores Verdeur Ed Kratz Eileen D’Angelo Eileen Suzin Odlen Elizabeth Cosgriff Elizabeth Mosier Elizabeth Ticknor Fereshteh Herrman Frances Metzman Freda Egnal Janine Pratt Jennifer Hudes Jennifer Ward Jessica Herring Jim Breslin Joanne Leva John M. Williams & Marie Davis-Williams Joseph Cilluffo Josephine A. Graham Judy Dinnerman Judy Heller Kathleen Kopp Katie Braithwaite Kim Lawrence Kristin & Henry Joy McKeown Linda Wisniewski Liz Dolan Lois Rudnick Lynette & John Byrnes Maria Keane Marie Piech Marilyn Carrier Mary & Owen Gilman Mary Erpel Mo Ganey & Don Kates Nancy Lubow Nancy Sakaduski/ Cat & Mouse Press Natalie Dyen Pamela Fox Patti Peet

Members as of May 23, 2014

Peggy & Doug Gordon Richard Dennis Robin Bonner Ruth Littner Sarah Cain Sheila Sherwin Susan Nelson Suzanne Carey Zielinski Suzanne Chang Terry Mergenthal Tom Molinaro Vernita Hall Virginia Dillon Xio Axelrod

Buck Level ($50 - $99)

(2 Anonymous)

Alex Husted Alison Baer & Jeffery Hirsch Alison Hicks Barry Dinerman & Monroe Buckner Betsy Anderson Sullivan Bryan Wang Christine & Tom Barnes Christopher Beardsley Concha Alborg Dana & Chris Scott David Sanders & Nancy Brokaw Diana Post Douglas Gordon Ed Ruggero Elizabeth Brandt Erin Entrada Kelly Hugh & Trina McCauley Irene Fick Jennifer & Erik Streitwieser Jennifer Corey Karen & Dan Gruen Kay Peters Kevin & Angela Cook Lawrence O. Spataro Leigh Goldenberg/Aaron Bauman Lise Funderburg Lynn Doerr Lynn Rosen & Evan Schwartz Margaret & Craig Griffen Marlyn & Randy Alkins Martha Bottomley Mary Scherf Maynard Seider Nancy Allen Nimisha Ladva Patricia Pickup Rachel Simon Richard Bank Richard Virtue Robert & Judy Schachner Ronald Holtman Susan Karol Martel Suzanne Kimball Tara & Andrew Smith Thomas Baroth Thomas Childers

Whitman Level ($100 - $400)

(1 Anonymous)

Barbara & Eric Holmberg Betsy Mckinstry & Joel Edelstein Charlene & Nathaniel Mayer Cheryl & Ross McLaren Conrad Weiser & Barbara Holmberg Deborah S. Burnham Elizabeth Larsson George D. Murphy Hermann W. Pfefferkorn James Fratto Janice & Paul Stridick Janice Hayes-Cha & Jang-Ho Cha Jason Shu John & Karen Shea Joseph Wechselberger Julia Chang Julie Cohen & Nigel Blower Kristina & Steven Moriconi Martin Evans Nathan Long Sandra Sampson Stefanie Levine & Steven Cohen Stephanie Scordia Sue Harvey & Scott Jahss Susan Robbins Tim Kissell Vera & Tom Haskins Virginia Reid William Black

Potok Level ($500- $999) Judith & Walter Jones Kerri & Marc Schuster Michael Ritter & Christine Furtek Mitchell Sommers Polia Tzvetanova Bill Weldon In Memory of Dennis Oberholtzer

W.C. Williams Level ($1000+) Heather McGlinn Hansma & Scott Hansma Joseph A. Sullivan Thomas McGlinn

Sustainer Members

Charles McGroaty (Whitman Level) Christina Carter (Whitman Level) Courtney Bambrick & Peter Baroth (Buck Level) Erin Cormier (Buck Level) Julie Odell (Whitman Level) Lyndon Back (Whitman Level)

Government Grants & Foundations The Philadelphia Cultural Fund The Hassel Foundation

Matching Gift Partners Merck Partnership For Giving Robert Wood Johnson Foundation The Philadelphia Foundation Bergan County United Way

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

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 23

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

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

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

I would like to support local art & literature by making a contribution today.

Monthly Pledge:

 $5/month

 $10/month

One-time member pledge:

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

 $20/month

 Other ________

□ Potok ($500-$999) □ W. C. Williams ($1,000+) □ Other _______________

Name:_________________________________________________________________________________________

Address:________________________________________________________________________________________

City:______________ State:_________ Zip:_______ Email:_________________________ Phone #:______________

Card Number

(MC, V, Discover):_______________________________

Security Code:_________ Expiration:__________

Thank you for your generous support of Philadelphia Stories

To donate online please visit www.philadelphiastories.org, call 215.635.0195, or mail to: Philadelphia Stories, 93 Old York Road, Ste 1/#1-753, Jenkintown PA 19046

PS_Summer_2014_PS Summer 5/28/14 4:03 PM Page 24

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

M.F .A. in Cr eative W riting and M.A. in Publishing M.F.A. Creative Writing at R osemont College Rosemont