Philadelphia Stories Winter 2010

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

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

Fiction Prize Winner: kelly luce

THE OTHER AYA KAWAGUCHI jonathan kemmerer-scovner

BUNKER liz abrams-morley

HERITAGE TRAILS

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FICTION/POETRY/ESSAYS/ART

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

CONTENTS FEATURES 3 11 14 21

The Other Aya Kawaguchi (fiction). . . . . . . . . . Kelly Luce 11 Bunker (nonfiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner Heritage Trails (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liz Abrams-Morley How to Become a Writer, Part 1 (column). . . . . Aimee Labrie

POETRY 6 10 12 15 16 20

3 I Swept Her Words Away by Claudia McGill. Claudia McGill is a self-taught artist, coming to art later in life after years as a banker. She enjoys mixed media as well as clay and printmaking. She lives in Wyncote, PA with her husband and three cats.

Water, Communion.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Alexandria Gold (catalog of nightmares) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Rachel Eodice A Friend, Post-Treatment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Bed-David Seligman Burned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Gabriel Shanks The Fig Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Nina Israel Zucker Collision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Barbara Daniels

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/Fiction Editor Carla Spataro Publisher/Managing Editor Christine Weiser

Editorial Board Courtney Bambrick, poetry Anne Buckwalter, fiction Jacqueline Cassidy, fiction

Poetry Editor Conrad Weiser

Christine Cavalier, poetry

Essay Editor Julia MacDonnell Chang

Jamie Elfrank, fiction

Associate Fiction Editor Marc Schuster Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Loic Duros

Portrait of a Landscape by Marc Schuster. Marc Schuster is the Associate Fiction Editor for Philadelphia Stories and the author of The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl.

14 The Silent Body Melody by Orna BenShoshan. Orna Ben-Shoshan has been an auto dedact artist for the past 30 years. Orna’s life-long interest in metaphysics and mysticism has led her to study the Kabalah and alternative philosophies. Her artwork was exhibited in numerous locations in the USA, Europe, and Israel. See more of her artwork at www.benshoshan.com 17 Underneath by Kristen Solecki.

Kristen Solecki graduated from the University of the Arts in 2008 where she majored in illustration. She is now a freelance artist. Her work and more about her can be found at www.kristensolecki.com.

Liz Dolan, poetry

Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Marylou Fusco, fiction Pat Green, poetry Joanne Green, fiction Fran Grote, fiction Steven Harbold, fiction Matt Jordan, non-fiction Cecily Kellogg, poetry

18 Stream Off Route 82 by Deena Ball.

Deena Ball is a watercolor landscape artist and art teacher at Wayne Art Center, Community Art Center, and Main Line Art Center. She is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine and has additional training from the Tyler School of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and with prominent local artists. She exhibits at many juried national and regional shows and at several galleries.

Nathan Long, fiction

Board Secretary Kerri Schuster Interns Justin Davis Zeba Baksh Michael Pfister 2

Contest Coordinator Editorial Assistant Jamie Elfrank Diana Restifo

Walt Maguire, fiction

Cover Art: Sonnet #4 by Anne Buckwalter.

George McDermott, poetry

Anne Buckwalter graduates from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art with a BFA in Painting and Drawing in January 2010. She has been painting and illustrating imaginative landscapes since traveling around rural Italy in 2008 and being inspired by the intricate architecture of hill towns. Anne grew up in Lancaster County and now paints and lives in Philadelphia.

Julie Odell, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Mitchell Sommers, fiction Janice Wilson Stridick, poetry & non-fiction Valeria Tsygankova, poetry Michelle Wittle, fiction

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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THE OTHER AYA KAWAGUCHI

I Swept Her Words Away by Claudia McGill © 2009 he letter arrived in a handmade envelope sealed with red wax.

Flipping through the bills and junk mail, Aya saw her name penned in perfectly shaped characters, tore open the seal, and read:

T

Dear Kawaguchi-sama, I feel I must bypass the convention of commenting on the weather as I begin this letter because a more pressing matter is probably concerning you, that of my identity and purpose. I write in the spirit of greatest hope, and am aiming to reach the Ms. Aya Kawaguchi who was a student of Keio University in 1969. If this is not she, please ignore this letter.

My name is Shingo Oeda, Professor of Psychology at Keio from 1960 until my retirement in 1991. From 1969-1970, I ran a series of experiments, the goal of which was to design and perfect a device—dubbed the ‘Amorometer’— capable of measuring one’s capacity to love.

(‘Amor,’ of course being the Latin root of the word “love”…)

Of course, in 1969 there were no departmental regulations regarding the debriefing of experimental subjects. I assume you had no understanding of our research, let alone the extraordinary gifts these tests revealed: of all the subjects (439 in total) yours was the highest score in Lovingcapacity. In the Empathy measure you scored an astounding 32 points—more than two standard deviations above the mean.

I must come to my point: I would very much like to meet you. As a widower of two years, I have found the companionship available to me (my tomcat and my memories) to be inadequate.

The cat is unreliable and cantankerous, the memories often the same.

It may be true that regardless of a man’s age, there remains inside him a kernel of youth. As I have aged, my curiosity has not lessened, but has migrated from my brain to my heart. It is not such a bad thing.

With much hope,

Shingo Oeda P.S. This letter has taken me many years to write; the hypothetical results of my test on a ‘Cordometer’ (‘cord’ the Latin root for ‘heart,’ or ‘courage’) would likely be dismally low. I urge your quick reply, if possible.

Aya Kawaguchi raised the letter up to the lamp at her desk, revealing the watermark. The thick paper, and the surprising space it created between her fingertips, made her feel somehow important.

She had never been a student at Keio University. Since marrying Hisao all those years ago, she’d hardly visited Tokyo at all.

She ran a fingertip over the seal. She imagined the professor dropping the thick wax onto the envelope’s flap and pressing his stamp there. She imagined the wool of his jacket and the creased leather of his shoes as he slipped out of

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the house, and the long, slim fingers with which he carried the letter to the postbox in his tasteful Tokyo neighborhood.

Now that envelope was here, its wax like an exotic fruit, cut with a stranger’s name.

A stranger who believed her to be— what had been his word?—extraordinary.

She glanced at the clock above the stove. Hisao would be another hour, and dinner was already prepared. There was still some ironing to be done but it could go another day. She brought the stepstool to the closet and brought down the box with the good stationery.

She set to work:

Dear Oeda-sama, How nice it was to receive your letter, and quite a surprise! For the record, the rainy season has begun here but I will spare you the details of the weather since as you say, our correspondence is a strange one.

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She re-read her opening, then pulled out a fresh pink sheet and re-wrote it, replacing “nice” with “lovely” and “strange” with “most unusual.” She continued, I have not thought of Keio in a long time and I am delighted that you had the courage to find me.

She thought a second, then added, I would say your readings on the ‘Cordometer’ would be quite high!

She sat up, aware of Hisao’s arrival.

After all these years, the ritual of his entry was well-known to her: the yawn of hinges, the metal door slamming like a shout, her husband’s gravelly call of “I’m home,” not to her but to himself. The only missing element was the punctuation of his briefcase hitting the floor.

She tucked the letter in a drawer and sighed. It was just like Emiko had warned her: now that he’d retired, her husband was always underfoot. She’d had the run of the house from six in the morning to six at night for thirty-one years. Hisao was a good man, had provided a home to her and their son, but she never considered she’d have to spend

k a w a g u c h i this much time with him.

“You’re home early,” she said, standing to greet him.

“Driving range was packed,” Hisao grumbled. “Too many kids. This time of day, kids ought to be in school, or at work.”

“Mm,” she agreed. “Would you like dinner now? Or how about a cold drink?”

She glided toward the kitchen as he fell into his blue recliner. For as long as they’d been together, he’d come home from work, collapsed in this chair, requested food or drink. Now, however, he often wasn’t tired upon returning, and though he was still drawn by habit to the chair, he no longer looked comfortable there.

She put the finishing touches on her letter that night while Hisao slept, ears defended against his own snoring by green foam plugs.

I am flattered that you should recall me and would love to meet you, she wrote, and took another sip from the heavy glass into which she’d poured some of Hisao’s good whiskey.

She printed the name “Aya Kawaguchi” at the bottom of the letter, marveling at how much nicer this woman’s handwriting was than her own.

His short response arrived three days later.

I’ll open this letter with the weather in my heart, and tell you that the sky is clear and warm, and the quality of light is thick and sweet like honey! I am pleased and surprised (good news does not often come my way these days) that you are in a position to meet me. I could travel to your town, or, if you like, we can meet here in the ‘neon jungle.’

Thick and sweet like honey! Aya smiled, amazed that there were such people in the world. It was time, she thought, that she met them.

She told only Emiko, who’d divorced young and never remarried, about her

plans.

“I’m not going to cheat on Hisao,” Aya said. “I just want to…bask. This man thinks I’m extraordinary. I want to know how that feels. I want to be extraordinary, in someone’s eyes, just for a day.”

“Oh, shut it! You’re a lovely woman.”

“Lovely, schmovely. I want to be extraordinary.”

Emiko rolled her eyes.

“Besides, the timing of it, with Hisao retired now and Ryo just moved out—it’s like a chance to reinvent. See what I’ve missed.”

“What if he’s rich and handsome?”

“He could be poor and crazy,” Aya said, but did not believe it.

“An ‘Amorometer!’ Whoever heard of such a thing? Wonder where I’d register.”

“Me too,” Aya said, recalling every selfish, unloving act of her lifetime. The time, as a teenager, she’d stolen an umbrella, the way she’d stopped breastfeeding Ryo after two weeks because she couldn’t stand her raw, chapped nipples, the gossip sessions with Emiko that often turned catty…

“Exactly—what if he can tell it’s not you?”

“I’ll come home,” she said.

“Only if he’s poor and crazy. If he’s rich and handsome, stick around.”

Their meeting had been set for noon on a Sunday on the top floor of Tokyo Station, in a restaurant famous for its view of the city. Though Shingo had repeated his offer to travel to her small town, Aya had insisted on coming to Tokyo. The person she was hoping to become could not exist in Iida; she could only transform with distance. And though it terrified her to think of herself lost on the streets of an unfamiliar place, she felt certain that once she arrived, she could be anyone she wanted. Anyone she might have been, had her life gone differently. She’d read enough books.

She felt a long line of Ayas inside of her, ready to be called upon. The thought brought a smile to her face, and while

k e l l y Hisao was out golfing she spent half the morning pawing through her closet, trying on clothes she hadn’t worn in years.

“Well, let me know what you find,” Emiko said as Aya went out. “And see if he has any single friends.”

She told Hisao she was joining a string quartet organized by an acquaintance of Emiko’s.

“Do you even remember how to play that thing?” he asked from behind his newspaper.

“Of course,” she replied, pairing a batch of socks she’d just brought in from the line. “It was practically attached to my hand in high school.”

“I see…so, are you going to practice now?”

She couldn’t tell if he wanted to her to bring out the old viola, or if he was checking to see whether his newspaper reading would be disturbed. “Maybe,” she said.

He nodded, mumbling to himself as he read. Then he said, “But in Tokyo?

Couldn’t you find a group closer to home?”

She continued matching and rolling the socks, never losing the rhythm of the work. “I don’t think so.” Then she paused and asked, “Do you think I’m extraordinary?”

He didn’t glance up from his paper.

“You’re lovely, dear.”

The night before her trip, she went to her bookshelf. She never left the house without something to read but her choice this time seemed of real importance. Finally her eyes fell on the dogeared copy of Anna Karenina she had not read since Ryo was a baby. She slipped it from the shelf into her bag. The weight of the story on her shoulder felt significant; this was a long journey and required a long tale, but more than that, she felt the characters themselves would

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be good company for this other Aya Kawaguchi.

But if anyone’s hit by a train while I’m waiting, I’m turning around, Aya thought.

It took her a long time to fall asleep that night and she woke up twice, certain she had missed her train. At five o’clock she gave up and took a bath. At seven Hisao drove her to the local train station, where she caught a two-car train to Nishiyama, her connection for the Tokyo bullet.

Safely onboard the bullet train, she shifted in her carpeted seat and let Anna Karenina fall open to a random page. She read: Anna hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.

She looked out the window. She took off her wedding ring, put it back on.

The scenery flew by. She found she

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Friends, When Carla and Christine asked me to administer Philadelphia Stories’ first nationwide fiction contest, I was extremely honored, excited, and (I must admit) a little nervous.

I began working for Philadelphia Stories as an intern, learning as much as I could while pursuing my Masters of Publishing at Rosemont College. As I helped organize the annual auction and sifted through submissions for the magazine, I saw that Philadelphia Stories is so much more than a literary magazine. It is a community of passionate readers, who are driven to providing a home for the finest works in the area. I felt that it was only natural to expand on that great idea and take our passion nationwide, searching for the finest work in the country.

Boy, did we find it. I was grateful that I was not a judge or a reader. The quality of stories submitted was astounding – and, thus, a challenge when it was time to narrow the submissions down to the finalists. Thanks to the dedication, time, and tireless eyes of our group of readers, we were able to make our choices.

We had the privilege and honor of naming the contest for our good friend and essay editor, Marguerite McGlinn, who passed away two years ago.

“Marguerite’s stories were always filled with characters who were restless, looking for things that they couldn’t define exactly, but ultimately driven to take some kind of surprising action,” says fiction editor Carla Spataro. “Our winning story features these kinds of characters, placed in an exotic setting against a fantastical backdrop.”

Our judge, Elise Juska, author of One for Sorrow, One for Joy, said this about our winning story: “This was an impressive batch of finalists—of higher quality across the boards than any other contest I’ve judged. My pick for the strongest story is ‘The Other Aya Kawaguchi,’ for a bunch of reasons, including: it’s surprising, moving, gracefully written. The revelations feel unforced. The language is unpretentious; it never gets in the way of the story. Every sentence is doing something on the page. There is a real story here—compelling and even suspenseful in its quiet, unshowy way. The story is about something more than itself and that larger meaning emerges organically and honestly. It’s well balanced. Emotionally complicated. And it’s a story I haven’t read before.”

I look forward to next year’s contest and am anxious to see what new challenges and works of art are waiting to be found.

Sincerely, Jamie Elfrank Assistant Editor

www.philadelphiastories.org

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could relax her eyes and let the images blur together, or she could focus and pick out the elements: futons lolling from windows like tongues, cascades of electrical wiring, a rooftop rice paddy, a Coca-Cola billboard. Each thing was gone, replaced by something new, before there was time to reflect. No need to think on a train this fast, she thought. We only reflect on things because the pace of life is too slow. If I could stay on this train forever, I’d never have to think about anything again, and life would just be an exciting show of what’s passing by on the outside. It was a comforting idea.

Water, Communion

by Alexandra Gold “My mother is a fish” As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

She’d anoint the dock with blood And baptize the gills to save my White mouth from swallowing Insolent sea religion.

Blame the fisherman for biting Silence and sanity and sin and The worm-bait that begged her Green algae kisses.

Marry the midwife that birthed The last tide change and she’d Steal the ebbing burden of Quiet pressing waves.

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My mother is a fish And when the weight of scales Scraped my eye like a hook, Did you ever doubt she’d fight To consecrate my water-grave?

Originally from Jupiter, Florida, Alexandra Gold has been living in Philadelphia for three years as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences double majoring in English with a Creative Writing/Poetry Emphasis and Political Science.

k a w a g u c h i Stepping off the train was like jumping into a river. She wandered through surging crowds in search of a place to store her viola, the case of which suddenly seemed unnecessarily bulky.

Couldn’t I have said I was coming for a book club? she thought.

So many people. She was struck by the purpose with which all of them seemed to be moving. A ribbon of song caught her ear, and she turned toward a group of musicians performing next to a bank of ticket machines. They were college students, most likely—two violinists and a cellist. She laughed aloud at the coincidence, she arriving with the missing piece to the quartet and no intention of playing it. The tiny girl on cello caught sight of the instrument and tilted her head in an invitation to join them.

Aya blushed, shook her head slightly, and hurried past.

With the help of a young man who looked like Hisao in his younger, slimmer days, she located the day storage lockers and stowed the instrument.

Then she headed for the escalators.

She wanted to arrive at the restaurant early. She’d read her book, drink some tea to calm her nerves. She looked at her watch: 10:03, one minute later than the last time she’d looked.

The escalator carried her out of the subway and into a multi-story mall arranged in circles that reached all the way up to a huge skylight. The sky beyond the glass was gray yet still bright enough to be cheerful. On the seventh floor she spotted a cosmetics store and stepped off the escalator.

After consulting with the heavylashed girl behind the counter, who assured her the color was not too suggestive but rather “elegant and agerepelling,” she purchased a tube of red lipstick in a shade called “Shhh” that cost as much as a hardback book. The makeup glittered like a ball gown and felt like satin on her lips. This reminded her of bed sheets, and she pushed the thought away. Afterward, in the department

store’s bathroom, she applied and removed the lipstick four times before reaching a compromise between herself and the other Aya Kawaguchi (who no doubt would have worn “Shhh” without compunction) and blended the shade with her functional chapstick. As a concession for toning down the lipstick, she removed her wedding ring. Then she washed her hands.

At the restaurant, she took a seat along the wall of windows and ordered a pot of tea. A light rain fell over the city, and in response the buildings and roads took on a fresh sheen and the colors of signs and cars brightened.

A moth on the glass caught her eye.

It was unlike any moth she’d ever seen, its wings rounded at the top and pointed at the bottom. An indigo spot decorated each orange-rimmed wing.

She shifted uneasily. The spots on its wings made her feel she was being watched. Her mother said that deceased ancestors came to visit disguised as moths, and she didn’t want anyone she knew, living or dead, to witness her activity today. She shooed at the insect with her napkin, but it did not move.

She tried to ignore it and focus on Anna Karenina, but it was no use. She watched the action in the restaurant instead. The place was beginning to fill up. At eleven-thirty, half an hour early, Shigeo Oeda walked in—a dandelion springing from his lapel as promised. He was not as tall as she’d imagined, but his clothes were professionally pressed and fit him well. Emiko would have found him handsome.

But what do you think, Aya thought.

Good-looking? Yes. His face was wide and mild, with gold-rimmed glasses riding atop a nose so flat it seemed a miracle the glasses stayed up at all. He sat across the restaurant, facing away from her. She admired his observation of table manners despite his lack of company, the way he placed his napkin in his lap immediately and sat straight in his chair, the warm smile with which he greeted

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­ the waiter.

She looked back to the moth. Its black, crooked legs moved slightly. A wing angled itself toward her. Abruptly she stood, cupped her hands over the thing, and closed them. She would carry it out into the mall, let its eerie eye-wings rest elsewhere.

The waiter had brought Shingo Oeda a small drink, which he threw back in one gulp, handing the empty glass back to the waiter. Emboldened by his nervous act, Aya walked toward the entrance, and him, the moth cupped in her hands. Its papery wings beat furiously against her palms. She would pass near his table, but since he didn’t know what she looked like, she would not be discovered.

As she approached, Aya watched his back, certain he could feel her eyes. His hair was cut very short, in an almost military style, and shimmered silver under the restaurant’s low-hanging lamps. His

hair was like the rain, she thought.

She passed him, careful to walk neither too fast nor too slow, and went out into the mall. She shook the moth free.

It flew toward the skylight. When she returned to the restaurant, she glanced automatically at Shingo Oeda and found his eyes on her.

Aya blushed, her heart fluttering like the wings of the trapped moth. There was nothing to do but approach him. As she drew near, he stood, a smile spreading across his face as he took her in.

“Oeda-san?” she asked.

“Please, call me Shingo. And you— you are the legendary Aya Kawaguchi.”

He bowed deeply.

She bowed as well, holding the position so that she might catch her breath.

His cologne reminded her of the forest behind her house.

His mouth was large, his smile a deep cradle. Up close, his gentle eyes and flat nose gave him the appearance of a wood

block print. “I saw what you did with that moth,” he said, and clasped her hands in his. “This is a great honor.”

Embarrassment washed over her.

“The honor is mine. And please forget about the moth; it was quite silly of me.”

“Forget? Never! I suspected your identity just from that gesture—such a compassionate act, freeing an insect others would ignore, or even worse, kill!”

Aya was unsure what to say to this; luckily the waiter returned and pulled a chair out for her. “A drink, miss?” he asked as they sat.

“Yes please,” she said. “I’ll have—” She thought about Anna, and Russian aristocracy.

“Vodka,” she said.

The waiter’s eyebrows twitched.

“Rocks?”

She nodded, certain that her order had been inappropriate.

Shingo slapped the table and laughed. “Vodka. Who’d have thought?”

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He grinned. “Make it two.”

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Shingo leaned back in his seat, his second vodka nearly finished. They had chatted about a number of meaningless topics—the weather, food, and train travel.

“I have to say, I never thought I’d be having a drink—a vodka—with Aya Kawaguchi. For so many years you were just a set of data…my imagination was forced to extrapolate from there.”

Aya did her best to sound well-educated. “Life takes all kinds of strange turns,” she said, finishing her vodka and enjoying the warmth it brought to her cheeks. “If you let it,” she added.

He leaned in and whispered.

“Forgive me, but—how is it you never married?”

Aya had managed to sidestep this topic but knew it would come up, and had prepared her answer. “I just never found the right man.”

He nodded as if he’d expected as much. “Extraordinary people have extraordinarily hard times.” She smiled at the word extraordinary.

He went on, “I’ve wondered for so long…I know now that my imagination is a feeble mechanism. You’re so different from what I imagined—” She glanced at him. “So much better,” he quickly added.

She smiled, finally relaxing a bit.

“You haven’t told me about your research. I have a right to a de-briefing, I think.”

He breathed deeply. “Simply put, we found a way to quantify a person’s ability to love. Their potential. It turns out that not all people are capable of loving to the same capacity. The idea was revolutionary.” He leaned forward, touched her hand. “Imagine being married to a person whose ability to love—whose Lovingcapacity—is far below your own.”

As he spoke the word Lovingcapacity, he tapped out the syllables with two fingers on the place her wedding ring had recently been.

k a w a g u c h i “From their perspective, a person may be loving to their fullest extent,” Shingo continued. “However, this isn’t good enough for the partner with the higher LC. It will never be good enough.

This causes the lower-capacity partner to feel inadequate, unappreciated, and their partner feels the same because, to their mind, everyone should love as they do.”

“Can’t people be made to understand, to accept their differences?”

“Perhaps. But it is very hard for people to truly understand. We have, it turns out, a tremendous blind spot when it comes to being loved.”

“And people can’t…improve?”

He shook his head. “Our research generally showed Lovingcapacity to be a fixed and immovable trait, much like eye color or IQ. Of course, when it comes to the mind, one can never be sure….”

“I can’t believe I did so well,” she said, and just then the waiter arrived, balancing two large lunch boxes and a platter of drinks. As he set Aya’s box in front her, a glass of Cola slid from his tray and crashed onto the table, splashing Aya and dousing her pork cutlet.

The waiter fumbled, apologizing, and promised to bring a new lunch. Aya grimaced at the idea of wasting so much food.

“There’s no need,” she said, dabbing at her shirt with her napkin. “I’ll eat it as it is.”

“Please ma’am—” “Really. Maybe you could discount the bill a bit instead.”

The waiter bowed, his face as red as “Shhh,” and hurried away.

Aya took a bite of her Cola-flavored cutlet; she was starving and the vodka had unloosed her appetite. Not bad, she thought. When she looked up, Shingo was looking her, his face shining. His food was untouched.

“Amazing,” he said.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, secretly pleased. “So tell me, what became of your findings?”

He shook his head. “In the autumn

of 1970 we lost our funding. The government classified our work as ‘unscientific and possibly dangerous.’”

“Dangerous!”

He shook his head. “Some people felt we were meddling in a place science ought not to meddle. A real shame, since long-term research is by far the most robust in fields like this.” He made a small motion with his hand and a minute later two more drinks appeared.

“Well, I’ve prattled on long enough,” he said, raising his glass. “Let’s hear about you. From the beginning. What did you study at Keio?”

She clinked her glass to his and took a long sip of her vodka. Aya Kawaguchi was a woman who could hold her liquor.

“Literature,” she said. “My first love was Soseki.”

“Kokoro,” he replied, naming the author’s first novel. As he said it he placed his hand over his heart. “Maybe that is why your kokoro is so big.”

“Or maybe my big heart is what drew me to Soseki.” She was feeling more and more comfortable, as if lying about her identity had rolled out the red carpet for other untruths to follow.

He sighed and sat back in his chair, smiling. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around a Keio girl. Don’t you miss city life?”

He focused on her completely as she spoke, his eyes wide, like a child watching a fireworks display. She felt—interesting. Extraordinary. “Well, college was a wild time,” she said, as if admitting something. “I didn’t always make it to class, let’s just say that.”

“Well now, do tell!”

“Oh, no. Well, for one thing there was the band—” “The marching band?”

“No, a rock band. Punk, really. I was the singer.”

“Ah—I played clarinet, myself.”

She nodded, slipping inside this invented life like a pair of old pajamas.

“We were called ‘Shards of Black’ and we wore only white, to be ironic.”

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­ While he was laughing she excused herself and went to the bathroom. Hisao had left a voicemail, a habit he’d acquired recently.

She returned his call, explained to him the significance of the toaster oven sitting on the kitchen counter, what each knob did, and how long to leave the bread inside. He didn’t mention her quartet practice, which she found annoying, but when he asked whether she would be home for dinner, his voice stirred pity in her. She imagined him eating burnt toast—plain because he did not know where to locate the butter and jam—and she could not say no.

Upon her return she found Hisao sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by a mess of bottles, boxes, and cans.

“What are you doing?”

“Rearranging,” he said, examining a box of fish stock.

“Why?” He looked up, irritated. “For greater efficiency.”

“You don’t even cook.”

He shrugged. She stepped over him and picked up the whiskey.

“Since when do you drink?”

“Since now. Why do you seem to think life is over, that it’s too late to try new things?”

He motioned at the mess around him. “I am trying new things.”

A letter from Shingo arrived two days later. He must have mailed it while I was on the train ride back, Aya thought. In the letter he thanked her for coming to Tokyo and expressed his excitement for their next meeting, the next Sunday in Ueno Park.

He closed with a line from Kokoro, the Soseki novel they had discussed: Words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived…

She reread his letters each morning

and began the day feeling like a plant just watered.

Autumn had set the trees in the park aflame, and Aya felt she’d never experienced such richness of color, even in the rural forests of her hometown.

He had bowed to her upon their meeting, a good sign, she thought, since a hug would have meant something she was not quite ready for. His face searched hers in a way it had not upon their first encounter, like a connoisseur re-evaluating a painting that’s been placed in new light. She thought it might be her lipstick: after locking up her viola, she’d applied “Shhh” without blotting it afterwards.

His unsure manner disappeared quickly and Aya wrote it off to nerves.

Her suspicion was confirmed when, after just a few minutes of walking, he grabbed her hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.

He led her out of the park, through a shopping area, and into a quiet neighborhood of old houses and narrow lanes.

“This is my house,” he said, and they stopped in the street. “Don’t worry,” he said, seeing her expression, “I’m not indecent. After all, we hardly know each other!”

She relaxed, and, seeing his childish excitement at whatever it was he wanted to show her, she followed him down a narrow path behind the house. A tiny shed stood in the yard and when they reached it he began unlocking it. There were four locks in all.

“Here we are,” he said, finally pushing open the door.

Aya stepped inside the dim little room, which smelled of wet wood and plastic. A large table cluttered with papers and metal objects filled the space.

It was not a room built for company.

“What is all this?” she asked, though she had an idea already.

“This,” he said, throwing out his arm

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like a magician, “is the Amorometer.”

She looked at the contraption, the central component of which was a metal box forced into an awkward heart shape and painted red. It looked like something Ryo would have built with his erector set.

“I was hoping…” he began.

She looked up quickly.

“I was hoping you’d be willing to, well, provide some new data. A longitudinal study, if you will!” And he laughed.

“Ah!” She imagined herself hooked up to the cold metal devices, the evidence of her fakery pouring forth, and shuddered. She sat down.

“Are you all right? Is there something you need?”

She shook her head.

“You see,” he said, opening and closing a clamp full of tiny metal teeth, “this way I can be sure...we can be sure…”

She thought of her lipstick, and touched a finger to her mouth, as if testing a wall one had regretfully painted.

“I think I should go,” she said.

Her train wasn’t due to for over an hour. She wandered the fluorescent underground corridors of the station,

k a w a g u c h i passing shops advertising souvenirs for places elsewhere—blackened eggs from Hakone, tiny limes from Shikoku, habu liquor from Okinawa. She wondered how many of the gifts she’d received over the years had come from places like this. Was everything so false?

She heard the music long before she saw the players; it came from nearly the same place as the first time, next to the ticket machine for the Hibiya subway line, which, she’d learned from Shingo, was the deepest subway in the world. If you stood at the bottom of the Hibiya escalator, it was said, you could feel the heat of hell and see the light from heaven.

She looked at the spot the quartetminus-one had been a week before but found it empty. She followed the melody with her ear. It was coming, she realized, from beyond the ticket gates, rising up the escalator.

She made her decision at once; or rather, she reflected later, her heart had made it for her—a luxury she had not allowed herself in many years.

Inside the stall of a nearby bathroom, Aya flipped the latches on her viola case.

(catalog of nightmares)

by Rachel Eodice

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asphyxiation; aliens, from mars of course; black cats, the bad luck kind; drowning, amidst those who drowned before me & the muck that is decay; falling, jumping off of swings, teeth, out of mouth; death (the dead), as if nothing was wrong; screaming, lacking the ability; rape; car crashes, witnessing demise; running, lack of speed; witches and warlocks, Grimm to say the least; tornados; babies, mine; losing, someone (close to me); getting caught, under sheets & in closets; nudity, exposition; bathrooms, no doors, filthy creatures; repetition; getting nowhere, though I try; cartoons, funny colors; breathing, underwater; high school, a test of wills again; weddings; zombies.

Rachel is a 2008 graduate of Temple University's Film and Media Arts program. Currently, she is working on two screenplays set in the Philadelphia area when she is not editing for Comcast Spotlight.

She lifted the instrument from its bed and, drawing the ancient bow across the strings, began to play.

The strings were old; the A and G were frayed along the bowline and she worked the tuning pegs, cradling the wooden body to her chest. Shoes clattered on the disinfected floors, doors slammed and hands were washed and for once in her life Aya did not care who observed her. These women were strangers yet they shared this city; maybe some had been students at Keio University, maybe the other Aya Kawaguchi was in the stall next to her, pants down. The thought made her laugh, and without realizing what she was doing, she began playing the solo she’d performed her last year of high school, Shubert’s Arpeggione. Heady, she watched her fingers land on the strings, and though the B was falling out of tune already, her rhythm was dead on.

It wasn’t perfect, but she felt it was good, and if she practiced it could be marvelous, better than it had been in school because everything she had lived through would go into the music. She was no longer a girl. Her fears and desires were known and did not bind her. She hit the final notes with this in mind, standing alone in the corner stall of the women’s bathroom near the Hibiya Line in Tokyo Station and when she was finished a small clap echoed against the tile walls, and a second later more applause joined it. Aya lifted her head. She nodded at no one, then played some more, thinking how the beadyeyed judge had nodded, even smiled, when he commended her: Even the space between the notes spoke to me.

Kelly Luce’s story collection received the San Francisco Foundation’s 2008 Jackson Award and was a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’s 2009 Hudson Prize as well as the McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. Next spring, she will be the writer in residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando.

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BUNKER

Portrait of a Landscape by Marc Schuster © 2009 verything still worked that morning, one week into the New Year. The automated elevator sang, “Seventh floor, good morning!” The keycard opened the office door. Halogen yet buzzed like a life-support system.

Beside the copy machine sat a dumpster, old and dented, scratched with graffiti. It would have looked at home in a refuse-swept alley running behind a row of cheap storefronts, an emblem of

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decay normally exorcised from any modern workspace. Someone must have carted it in earlier that morning. It was, as yet – I could not help but note – empty.

People were huddled in their offices, whispering. They glanced up with intense faces, returned to private conversation.

This is it, I knew. It’s happening today.

The fax machine was warm, filled

with copyright forms to be scanned, processed, filed, forgotten. My computer turned on. The password worked.

The inbox filled up with panicked emails from production editors waiting for the next issue’s line-up, authors demanding to know what had happened to their manuscripts, notes about upcoming meetings, projects which needed completing. But all I could think about was that dumpster.

How would it come? An e-mail? A phone call? A trusted friend stopping by?

Beyond the walls of my cubicle, a voice said, “Grace, may I see you in my office, please?”

Grace was a stalwart of organized chaos, surrounded by stacks of journals, calendars, catalogues of office supplies.

If the question began with, “How should I...?” or “Who do I ask about..?” The answer was always, “Ask Grace.”

I heard Grace answer, “Sure,” followed by the slow creak of her chair.

A moment later, an office door shut.

Everything that happens beyond my cubicle is faceless, without form. Every day, there are private conversations, conference calls, inner-machinations, corporate politics. I hear without listening.

They don’t know my name. They don’t know I’m there. Usually, I drown it out.

On this day, however, I find that I am hyper-aware.

“Diane, may I see you in my office, please?”

Diane, my God. She’s the one who hired me. She’d been in the business nearly as long as I’d been alive. I caught a glimpse of her as she passed my cubicle, on the way to the back office. She looked afraid, but also professional.

Professionally afraid.

The office door shut.

All morning, that was how it went.

Each time they were led past my cubicle,

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b u n k e r dead-man-walking style.

The only one who stopped was Carl. He’d always been my favorite publisher. He had one kid and another on the way. He stood at my cubicle and announced, “Well, I got the e-mail!” all giddy with fear.

He told me everything he knew. It’s not just Philadelphia, he said, it’s Baltimore. It’s New York. He gave me names, and the list kept going.

That afternoon, I got a sandwich from the Wawa down Walnut Street, and the man who took my money was in his fifties, well-groomed, well-spoken. I could easily imagine him wearing a suit and tie, sitting in on board meetings.

A Friend, Post-Treatment

by Ben-David Seligman The problem is that I can’t tell him what I think about the fact that he died.

I’m against it.

I’d rather he inhale, exhale, repeat, et cetera, but, as things are, his parents, sibs and others confront his worldly assets, including a slow computer, loose papers, and an awful car kept alive by his constant care.

It all may sit untouched for years while loved ones deal with more important things.

12 Ben-David Seligman was born in New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and two boys, and where he works as an Assistant City Attorney. His poems have appeared in The Anthology of Magazine Verse, Midstream, Jewish Currents, The South Mountain Anthology and Surgam. A number of reprints appear at www.highbeam.com.

Perhaps a month ago, he did.

Outside the entrance, a woman sat on the steps - no way to get around her.

The layers of jacket and sweatshirt, coat and sweater, made her twice as large.

She demanded a dollar, real indignant.

And what will I do when it’s me who has to beg? I wondered. There’s a million endof-the-world scenarios to choose from.

Nuclear annihilation is the big one, of course, humanity forced into underground bunkers. I’d read all those books, watched all those movies. But maybe we’re all just meant to slowly go mad, slowly starve, slowly horde until everything is depleted.

On the other hand, why not imagine more utopian scenarios, wherein we turn our parks into massive gardens, feeding our families with all the food we’ll grow? We’ll use those green slips of paper - what in an earlier era had been known as “money” - to wallpaper our eco-friendly cob homes. We’ll live in socialist collectives, contributing equally and singing Hosannas to the God who in His tender mercy allowed those corporate towers of Babel to crumble, so that a new world would rise based on love!

Either that or cannibalism, hard to say.

“Seventh floor, good morning!”

The dumpster by the copy machine was half-full. Mounds of textbooks, folders, medical journals,

pens, pencils, staplers, all thrown together in a bubbling cauldron, a button-down Oxford witch’s brew.

People were no longer huddled, no longer whispering. They talked openly, stood around the proverbial water cooler. For two years, I’d passed some of them in the halls and never known their names, but a demonic presence had been lifted, we could all feel it.

“It’s over, that’s what I heard,” said one.

“They’re done.”

“We’re safe.”

Later that afternoon, Judy and I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in six months. I called my wife and told her I was fine. It was over. For now, we were safe. The relief in her voice made me want to cry. Many phone calls had been made that day which had not brought relief.

My friend Saul once gave me some advice. “You should be fine, Jon, at your level,” he said. “Just don’t get promoted.”

Blessed are we, the underachievers.

This one time in Tennessee, Jonathan KemmererScovner sang songs with Pete Seeger. Then, years later, found himself brushing snow from Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, MA, and thought to himself, What is this? Why am I here? This was not long after he had strolled nonchalantly into City Lights in San Francisco and the sudden sight of an aged Ferlinghetti nearly led him to void his bowels. Jonathan has this theory that everything is a story, all human expression a form of storytelling, something like that. It’s not very clear. Currently, he and his son make up stories together and tell them at the Glenside Farmer’s Market.

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HERITAGE TRAILS

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P Service: Dateline: Milan, Ohio

A break-in during cherry festival last week at the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison left the sleepy town of Milan, Ohio perplexed.

“Nothing appears to have been stolen,” George Conklin, chief of detectives said yesterday.

“In fact, we seem to be dealing with some kind of vigilante maid service.”

According to docents familiar with the historic site, papers placed on Edison’s desk had been straightened, and one mirror appears to have been wiped clean of fingerprints and dust.

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I’d been working the bar at Coltrane’s, in Ft. Myers, Florida for maybe two months before Alva and I talked. Alva was Coltrane’s, had been working there since the place opened, and no one—not the bartenders, not the big, slow-witted busboys, not even the owner, Mr. Harvey Synell himself with all his money, ever messed with Alva.

I was the new girl at Coltrane’s. I’d come down from Jersey for my grandfather’s stupid-ass wedding and couldn’t figure a reason to go back—Mom gone, my brothers all married and cheating, just like every guy I’d been involved with. I got sick of angry, big-haired wives coming by whatever CVS I worked in that week and getting me fired. I think I could have put up with the guys with the bad toupees and the smoker’s breath sliding their rings in their pockets before asking me out for coffee, but after Mom died, I couldn’t take the way there was never a woman to cry to. New Jersey’s a small state if you’re past thirty-five and you find yourself in bed with other people’s husbands.

The manager at Coltrane’s didn’t ask for references, only if I was strong enough to carry trays of drinks without

The Silent Body Melody by Orna Ben-Shoshan © 2009 spilling. I said sure I was. I have never been afraid to work up a sweat, I said. But I was thinking, just don’t ask me to deal with people or vermin.

“Well, will you look at the tail on that one?” Alva said to me the night a rat moved right out from behind the twelveburner stove in Coltrane’s kitchen.

I glanced at what looked to me like a line of thick electrical cord, bundled and

bound with gray electrician’s tape circled tight around and around until it came to one nasty little point what looked like yards from that nasty rat’s ass. That was my view from my vantage point up on a counter. I didn’t have a clue how I got up that high, one leap; the only time in my life I ever vaulted anything.

“Jesus. You scared of a little fourlegged creature of God that I could smash with a broom handle?” Alva

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­ laughed when she saw where I landed.

That rat was the size of a full-grown cat.

And then Joe’s screaming. “Freya!

Table four is waiting on their nachos and the guy with the scotch looks pretty damned hot about it.”

Oh great, I’m thinking while Alva’s leaning against the wall near the door by then, getting ready to light an unfiltered Camel even though any other waitress would be afraid of being fired if she broke the no smoking in the kitchen rule.

“You want me to take that table, Freya?” After that, Alva’s the one thing in

my otherwise dim life that shines.

For a town where the bulb and filament were perfected right in a lab on the main drag, Fort Myers surely is no bright light. Coltrane’s is smoky, blue-gray haze hanging over tables of desperate out-oftowners over-paying for cocktails. No jazz, despite the restaurant’s pretentious name. The usual night’s entertainment is some group of overweight bikers doing bad covers of Dylan songs. There’s always some girl channeling Janis Joplin, throwing back Southern Comfort and showing her navel ring to a bunch of guys who would probably rather be tak-

Burned

by Gabriel Shanks A course of action: to not think about that. Instead, find a recipe, one that calls for flour, salt, wounds, and tiny daggers.

In a mixing bowl, sift until snowfall covers the sinkhole entirely, in bitter perfection.

While it bakes, catch your breath.

Think of swampland.

Wait an hour, silently; when the sunken submersible of dignity rises from the deep, stick a pin in it. Inhale heat and its flavors.

While waiting, sponge and scrub countertops. They won't be clean, but good enough. Place in the window to cool. Eat with your hands.

Gabriel Shanks lives and works in the New York City area. An award-winning poet, playwright and stage director, he was one of the creators of The Village Fragments, which received a 2007 OBIE Award. His poetry has been published in From Now On, Spark, Chopin With Cherries (2010) and elsewhere; theatrical recognitions include the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award, the Southern Young Playwrights Award and the Theatre Project Honor for Outstanding Vision. He was recently named a "New Arts Leader" by the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

ing each other home.

“Just like every one else around here—a real riot,” Alva commented to me the day we saw the photos: Edison on a camping trip, Edison on the porch sipping lemonade, Edison fishing with one of his six children. Tie and jacket, pressed pants and straw bowler hat present in every shot.

It was my idea to tour the Edison and Ford estates. The only place I knew well was Jersey. I wanted to be a tourist when I was off work. Alva had lived in Fort Myers all her life, never bothered with the city’s stars: Edison, Ford.

“You’re a decent sidekick, Freya,” Alva told me. “But sometimes you have the strangest ideas of what constitutes a good time.”

Then she came into Coltrane’s one night and told me what I catalogued as one of her bigger whoppers.

“He’s no biggie,” she told me the fifth time I harangued her about how important T. Alva E. was. “Only really important thing he ever did was me, indirectly, I mean.”

She had me, I admit, though all I did was raise an eyebrow.

“Oh. Didn’t I tell you he’s supposedly my illegitimate grandfather?”

I thought she was humoring me. All either of us really wanted to do was get the highball glasses dried and put away before the first set started and the customers were screaming for service. It was the end of a particularly draining week, the chiropractors and Barcalounger salesmen in town at the same time for their conventions.

“No shit, your grandfather?

“No shit at all,” she said.

“Well, that just sounds good to me; I would give one of my flabby arms to be able to claim kin other than the ones I own. My grandfather? His last stroll down the proverbial aisle’s what got me down here. Too bad you couldn’t have

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come to the wedding,” I said. “A real psycho ward home movie.”

When my grandfather remarried, it was to Vera, a woman more than thirty years his junior and for sure, he wanted to please her. Vera wanted to get married by water, and though she and Granddad had moved from New Jersey to Florida by then, they lived in a trailer park in the flatlands in the state’s center. So Vera’s daughter set up one of those blue plastic swimming pools in their backyard, and, to mimic those fancy old hotels in Miami, her son put a spouting whale in the water.

The gray plastic whale swam in circles, growled its mechanical little wind-up toy growl, and every few seconds spouted a stream of not so clean water onto the hems of the wedding party.

Even now I can hear how, over that growl, my relatives talked about Vera, about what a gold-digger she was to marry this deaf old man and him with Parkinson’s pretty advanced. Really they were angry, my three brothers especially, because we all learned the morning of the ceremony that Vera had been having an affair with Granddad for twenty-two years before Grandma died.

“Jesus Christ.” Alva hooted, when I described the scene. “As if she wasn’t going to get the worst maybe two years of your grandfather’s life and end up wiping his butt to boot.” Alva is my go-to girl for perspective, alright.

Later she admitted she only confided her grandfather thing to shut me up about going on a house tour. A house

The Fig Tree

by Nina Israel Zucker The fig tree has fallen in love with the place in the yard that separates neighbor from neighbor. I didn’t ask permission to plant that stick of wood between the two houses. It seemed small and innocent, a foot of broken branch with the only life visible in the veins of a small white root poking from one end.

What did I know of the soil and its minerals, only that I could scoop it with one hand like cake, and drop the branch into a small warm hole, pat the sides upright, and go on with my laundry.

And here it is now, eight feet tall and wide enough to hide me, full of a ruby-centered fruit, tentacles of crystals, green rocks dripping with white liquid. If I am too late the head gets so heavy that birds call to me to pick up the over ripened broken flesh. I carry the warm

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tear drops into the house and place them on the table. Here is my still life, lush and desired. The neighbor has no idea.

Nina Israel Zucker is a poet and teacher. She has taught Creative Writing at Rowan University and has been a leader for the Spring/Fountain series offered to educators in New Jersey for 10 years. She also teaches Spanish for the Cherry Hill School District. Her work has appeared in US1 Worksheets, the anthology POETS AGAINST THE WAR, ed.

Sam Hamill, the New York Times feature on the Dodge Poetry Festival and many other publications. She received her MFA from Columbia University.

tour of the Edison winter estate was Alva’s idea of how God would punish a truly shitty bar waitress on her one day off.

Somehow I prevailed. “Well we gotta see if you have his eyes.”

Edison on the docks with his straw bowler and a white linen jacket. Edison with the President of the United States and his friend, Henry Ford, sitting by a campfire his servants built, the great inventor in that white jacket even here.

“You think he left his jacket on and had the servant press his pants while he boinked Grandma?” Alva said, like she knew exactly what I was thinking. I remember how two white-haireds moved away from us then, looking at us like we were something they’d scraped off their shoes.

But when we got to the inventions room Alva got animated all of a sudden.

“Freya,” she said, dragging me from phonograph to bulb, from display case to display case. “You gotta’ see this.”

Turns out Alva was a bit of a science freak as a kid, before her father beat it into her that she was a girl and that it was her destiny to wait tables to salesmen for the rest of her life. “Think I could be an inventor?”

That question stayed with me. Alva with ambitions. Who’d have thought?

“You really wanted to be an inventor?” I asked during our next shift. “I mean, I know you’re smart enough and all, but inventor?”

“Sure,” she said, coloring a little and then looking out over the usual crowd.

“Right now I’m inventing full heads of hair and decent sports jackets on those guys at table three. This morning I invented a deeply satisfying mouth feel and taste for my Special K and diner coffee.”

I know she was embarrassed, but I watched the way she held her tray after that. I watched the way she carried her

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­ head up, too. I thought she was maybe inventing some truth in her being descended from T Alva himself, and I felt something. Pride? In my most secret heart I guess I also have one ambition; I always thought I’d make a good one of those what they call motivational speakers. Look at that, I thought, watching Alva that night. She seemed to grow a couple of inches taller after that smart enough remark.

Now, back in Jersey, I’m wondering when did my motivational speaker’s triumph turn so crazy. I have to park back of the Oasis, unlock the kitchen door, and drink my first cup of coffee in quiet before I can face that question.

“You sitting here in the dark for a reason?” Gladys says, flicking on a light.

Gladys is my first waitress to show up every morning.

“Yeah,” I say and get up off my stool, top off my coffee with hot and sit again.

“I was just thinking of Alva.”

“What’s got you thinking about that nut-job friend of yours?” Gladys is saying. Everyone in my diner’s heard a bunch of Alva stories. I flip her the paper, that Ohio thing.

After that first trip to the estate, Alva wanted to go back and then go back again and again. Visiting the relatives, she called it, smirk-faced, while Gee at the bar thought she’d become all saintly spending so much time with family. I was the only one at Coltrane’s who knew.

“You got any family to speak of, Alva?” I asked once when we were hanging at her place.

“God forbid!” The line of ash from her cigarette glowed when she took a pull on it. It dribbled onto her kitchen floor, just missing Leon, her part dachshund, part hell-knew-what, who stood as close to her leg as he could without going up her jeans. “Except, of course,” and she got hyper-smirky here, “Grandpapa Edison. How about we head

off and catch the last tour, Freya?”

Jeezus, but how many times did Alva take that tour, I’m wondering as the first customers settle into the Oasis booths. I could have spoken the whole guided flaptrap with the docent after my third trip, but Alva went back every Thursday.

After a while, even I began to believe it when I heard Gee and the others at Coltrane’s talking about how Alva must be at the nursing home visiting that make-believe failing aunt she told Gee of; what a saint she was for putting up with that old woman. It seemed more logical than believing she was back at the estate. How was I to know she was casing the place?

By the time she found the photo, she knew the schedule of every guard and tour guide, knew which bathrooms were locked up first and by when the gate snapped shut. She knew the first moment of opening time and a quick route out while the first visitors came in. I don’t know how she learned these things, or how she came to evade security. God help me but there are things you don’t want to know, even on behalf of a really good friend.

“It’s important,” she said. “Otherwise, you know I wouldn’t bug you.”

I admit even if she hadn’t said that, I would have been made curious by her tone. Serious. Excited. So Not Alva.

I drove directly to Alva’s and found her wide-awake, her kitchen table strewn with old black and white pictures.

“Look here,” she said before I had even parked my tired ass in a chair.

“Evidence.”

She stuffed an old photo of a grayhaired woman—sharp, but not too young—under my nose. “Evidence of what?” I asked trying to see the photo like a detective might. It was taken by a cheap camera; that much was for sure.

The edges were serrated the way photo edges always came out a long time ago, before processing got so fancy. The woman was pretty, looked a little like

“You got to get here quick.” When Alva called about the photo, it was past midnight and I was just off a shift serving Venetian Blind salesmen and tolerating blue-grass covers. I hadn’t even pulled out of the Coltrane’s lot.

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Underneath by Kristen Solecki © 2009

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Alva around the eyes and had a sneer on her lips, like whoever took the photo she was probably flirting with.

“Look. Here. And here.” She pointed to the hand the woman had laid in her lap. She held a magnifying glass over that section of the photo so I could see the ring on the woman’s finger. It was a signet with a big E on it.

And under the hand lay a straw bowler hat.

“Who is she?” I asked, though my head told me the answer.

“It’s my infamous grandma,” Alva said, “And look. His ring. His hat.”

I knew she wouldn’t hear any contradictions or what ifs, so I didn’t offer any. “What are you going to do with this— evidence?” I feared a big scene: Alva chaining herself to the gates of the TAE winter estate until someone acknowledged her genealogy, or Alva hiring a fancy lawyer and taking the family to court, but what she did, well, that just plain astonished me.

“I’m putting my grandma where she belongs,” she said.

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When I tell this story at the diner, someone always asks didn’t I ever find out how she pulled it off and the answer really is no.

There are times you don’t ask for too much information. I know Alva left for the Edison estate one late afternoon, telling Gee the old aunt was sick as hell and she had to take off early. And I know she wasn’t home all night because I did like she asked and went by to feed Leon.

Knowing there was no old aunt, I decided I’d better wait at her place till she

came home or till the police called, but the police never called. I fell asleep with my head in my hands on her kitchen table and she woke me sometime after 9 a.m., wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before.

She never breathed a word of what she did and I didn’t ask. But the next time

cruised right by the picture and for all I know, it hangs there still.

I was afraid Alva couldn’t leave it at that, and you know she wouldn’t have, but as luck would have it, before she got herself arrested, I got handed an opportunity to get her out of town.

“Holy shit!” I think those were my exact words when I opened the official-looking envelope that was special delivered to Coltrane’s during one of the few really crowded lunch rushes I ever recall serving. “Holy good God damn.”

It turned out my grandfather, who’d passed—not quietly—a year after the infamous nuptials, hadn’t left everything to his child bride Vera, like the family feared he would. Nope: The Oasis Diner came to me.

I’d forgotten about the Oasis, nearly forgotten Trenton, New Jersey. Turns out my grandfather’s wife was more than happy to forget Trenton herself once she found herself in Florida, even in the ugly part in the middle. “I told him I’d give away the business rather than have anything to do with that butt-hole city Stream Off Route 82 by Deena Ball © 2009 again in my life,” I think the lawyer said were her exact she went to the estate for the tour, she words. So there I was, an heiress. dragged me along and there it was: a I wasn’t too crazy about making the really sharp 9 by 12 reproduction of move north myself, but Alva told me I’d Grandma, ring, hat and all framed and be crazy not to. parked along one wall in the photo “Freya,” she said, maybe a dozen room. Edison on the dock in a hat and times before I finally agreed to it. “You jacket. Edison camping with Henry Ford. can’t pass up this opportunity to get out Alva’s grandmother laughing into the from under. Look, Kiddo, your very own camera. I had to cough to keep her from business.” We could both be motivators asking the docent giving us the tour who when we wanted, Alva and me. the woman in the photo was. The tour “Imagine me as someone’s boss,” I

L i z

A b r a m s - M o r l e y

­ said. Alva was probably the only soul who knew I’d actually imagined that once or twice myself. “But you come too.”

I wasn’t sorry to quit Coltrane’s but I knew I was about to miss Alva something fierce. In the end, it took less convincing than I thought it would to get her to at least drive up with me. I guessed she was going to miss me too.

God we had laughs on that drive, the U Haul towing my Nova behind it and so many really bad songs on the radio. Alva insisted on playing the worst oldies station in every state between Fort Myers and Trenton. “So you won’t miss the bands at Coltrane’s just yet,” she’d say.

I put her in charge of the AAA books and finding cheap motels, which is, I’m afraid to tell you, how she found out about Menlo Park.

The breakfast rush is over. I’m thinking about Milan, Ohio. Too early to call Alva. If she’s back in Florida, she’ll be out cold after a late night on the drunkards shift. Worse yet if she isn’t home to answer.

“Alva, you take too many chances,” I told her when she told me about her plans for Menlo Park and she snapped right back, “What do you mean you? It’s we, Babe. You’re driving the get-away car.”

Thomas Alva Edison’s known in New Jersey as “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” I wish I’d remembered that when I gave Alva the Mid-Atlantic AAA book. By the time we got to Maryland, she’d picked up every cheesy brochure on the Edison labs up there in North Jersey and was determined to go. The moment we unloaded the U Haul into my new mobile home out Route 1, she left me to unpack the kitchen and took off for her first tour of what she called “Edison’s North.” The second tour she took me on, and the third, but at the end of that one, at just about closing time, she said for me to go ahead, she’d meet me outside.

“Just wait by that back alley I pointed out when we came in this time. I’ll be

there,” she said. The voice on the P.A. had announced closing time already and I knew this was not a good sign.

“I just have to go to the bathroom,” she said. Her eyes were glinting like they were throwing sparks off a disco ball.

She had brought a bigger handbag to the labs that day, I noticed, big enough to hold a framed 9 by 12 photo.

“Don’t go getting yourself arrested,” I said to Alva. “I hear Jersey cops can be mean sons-of-bitches.”

There are two of Jersey’s finest at my counter for lunch, nice guys really. One of them notices I’m distracted and even asks if everything’s okay.

“Yeah, where are you today, Freya?”

Gladys comments after I put the wrong sandwich down in front of the wrong cop.

I don’t tell Gladys that I’m back in Menlo Park, watching from the back alley into a locked historic site and praying my best friend doesn’t find herself in Rahway State Prison by morning.

I watched Alva’s shadow pass around the flashlight lit room, saw through the gauzy curtains as her shape moved to the wall opposite the front window and stopped in front of a painting hanging there. For a moment I thought she was about to remove it, but she just straightened the picture, stood back, and straightened it again a couple of times until it appeared she was satisfied and could move on to another part of the room.

Then she was out of my view altogether.

The second hand on my watch jerked in large, exaggerated motions, each minute passing as if it was a decade until Alva suddenly appeared at my passenger side.

“Drive.”

I remember she said it like it was nothing, and then I was off onto the open road.

“What happened?” Silence.

It’s like a movie in my head when I

replay it now: Alva’s bottle-red hair has come loose from its clips and is blowing wildly around her face. I’m afraid she’s going to catch a piece of it in the ash of her cigarette but I know better than to say anything about that. I merge us onto the New Jersey Turnpike, am halfway back home before I try again.

“What happened back there?”

Alva’s finished two Camels, lit one off the last, and started on a third.

“You do not want to know, Freya.”

And yeah, I tell my regulars when I retell the story. Yeah, after the tearful goodbye, after Alva took the train ticket I bought her and headed back to Fort Myers, I did drive back up to Menlo Park, and no, I don’t know how she did it, but sure as shit, Grandma was there.

I turn the dinner hour over to Carmen. She’s old and doesn’t want to do early or late hours; serving up stewed tomatoes and macaroni and cheese, the AARP special I added to the menu, is just about her style. On the drive home, I’m sitting in traffic as usual, so I’ve got plenty of time to figure what I’ll tell Alva.

“Hey, Alva,” I’ll start, casual like, if she happens to be, by some miracle, sitting at my kitchen table when I come home for the day. When she left to go back to Fort Myers, I gave her a key. You never know when someone like Alva’s going to need a place to sleep, or maybe hide. “Hey Alva, what’s new?” I won’t let

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on at first about how worried I’ve been for her; I wouldn’t want to drive her away. I haven’t met too many people I can really talk to yet in Trenton and Alva sure would be a sight for sore eyes.

“You got anything worth eating in this place?” That would be her idea of a

20

greeting and I’ll say, “Well, hello to you too.”

But sure she’ll be hungry. Milan, Ohio’s a long way from Trenton. Not just in miles but as to a whole life, I’d like to tell Alva. Here you’ve got Formicaboothed diners and traffic circles, guys in hoody sweatshirts coming off a night shift road crew out Collision Route 1, coming in for a cup of coffee black, and as hot as you

by Barbara Daniels can serve it. At the counter of I myself see the car crash as a tremendous the Oasis they’re like as not to sexual event really.

J.G. Ballard be sitting next to some hotshot MBA with his first job up there in the State House, his I blame chance, that reprobate, suit jacket shoulder right up for my slide and spin and slow-motion against that construction carom across both lanes. I’m lost worker’s shoulder and him in an icy lot full of damaged cars, asking for a skinny latte. mine among them, towed by a trucker Better make that decaf, the hotshot kids always say here who had a tremendous day. At least in Trenton.

I’m not in love with my car. What hurts “As opposed to?” Alva will is not that stubborn muscle the heart, say. She hates when I prebut only my ribs and back and foot, sume to know a place I don’t.

As opposed to how I see a humble list of injuries. My witnesses Milan: lily white, cream and two sugars and Alva crazy got on their cell phones to call police enough to think she fits right who filled out forms in neat block letters. in, her with her fire engine If crashes are sexual, who has the fun? dye job and those stilettos she I think drivers who lived through today always wears when she’s servare turning up music to induce sweet ing anything with three olives in a stem glass to a regular. amnesia. I clutch ruined cars as I slip When I tell her my picture, from one to the next, find my own Alva will say, “Freya, I swear with one door working and papers you have become a cynic since I need inside. Is this like after a funeral? you came north. You lacking People go home to love and trouble, sunshine or just sad you went missing the Barcalounger quarts of gin, a woman kissing another salesmen in February?”

In no time at all she’ll woman, a woman so drunk she can’t have me laughing as she’s stand up. Some must call friends and spinning the scene: all that tell their crash stories; some call strangers polyester in light blue and and whisper into their quiet machines. who knows how many hair pieces sliding further and furBarbara Daniels lives in Sicklerville and taught English at Camden County College from 1976 through 2008. Her book Rose Fever: Poems ther with each round of was published by WordTech Press. She received two Individual Artist drinks.

Fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and earned an “Stop it before I pee MFA in poetry at Vermont College.

myself,” I will have to say. I’ll be laughing but inside I’ll feel a little sad, thinking my way back to all those smoky blue nights at Coltrane’s.

A bar in Fort Myers is a long way from a diner in Trenton. I’m missing Alva, missed her the moment she went back to serving martinis and left me here to serve up two eggs, scrambled, but keep them dry and rye toast, jelly, no butter.

Trenton’s even a long way from the Trenton I remember when I was a kid, the place my grandfather cheated on my grandmother for twenty-two years, the place where any self-respecting diner customer never met a cholesterol he wouldn’t shove in his face.

I pull into the mobile home park—no rental cars with Ohio plates in sight— and I’m sad to say no lights on in my unit.

Alva’s out there somewhere and who might that be driving the get-away car?

Alva’s crisscrossing the country leaving her mark in state after state. Claiming my heritage, she calls it. I’m unlocking the door and getting set for a quiet night, all the lives I’ve left behind me spooling out over highways—Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Ohio Tollway, or straight down 95 to Florida. All the lives I’ve left behind.

“Cut the violins and shit, Freya.” I hear that husky smoker’s voice in my head. I pick up the phone and dial a number more familiar than my own.

Liz Abrams-Morley is the author of Learning to Calculate the Half Life (Zinka Press, 2001,) and What Winter Reveals (Plan B Press, 2005). Her second fulllength collection, Necessary Turns, is due out from Word Press/WordTech Communications early in 2010. Liz’s poems and short stories have appeared in nationally distributed journals and anthologies and have been featured on National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council and the Ragdale Foundation. Co-founder of Around the Block Writing Collaborative, (www.writearoundtheblock.org) she is an adjunct gypsy, part of the MFA in Creative Writing faculty of Rosemont College, and serves as a poet-in-residence in area schools.

a i m e e ’ s

T i p s

HOW TO BECOME A WRITER, PART 1 (BIRTH THROUGH 7

TH

GRADE)

Aimee LaBrie First, you must experience an early trauma. It can be as dramatic as a kidnapping, a house fire, or abuse from a trusted adult or something as simple as being an only child to an absentminded mother. The degree of trauma doesn’t matter; it just helps that you experience it and tuck it away in the sleeve of your heart to unpack later. This trauma must happen before the age

of four, so that it can imprint on your still-forming self.

Next, you must feel a sense of loneliness and isolation from others. This sensibility can be manufactured if necessary. You can force yourself to hide in the closet under your mother’s winter coats for hours on end. You can give away all of your toys to the rowdy neighbor boys and then stare out the living room window, feeling sorry for yourself. The critical thing is to somehow disconnect from others, but also from yourself, so that you can start thinking about your life in third person as in: “The girl played alone in the basement with her broken porcelain doll while her mother baked a cake and didn’t offer her any of the batter.”

Now you must start reading books that are too old for you, preferably books about misunderstood, sensitive girls. Not Nancy Drew, in other words.

Nancy Drew could set any potential writer toward the exact opposite direction away from dreaminess and into practicality and sensible, rubber soled shoes.

Daydream in school. Make up entire conversations between

you and people you’ve never met—movie stars, Austrian royalty, jockeys. Invent a plausible situation or an implausible situation, but be sure that you come out on top in the end.

In junior high, stumble upon the poetry of Sylvia Plath and believe for a time that you are the only person your age to discover this dark, tortured genius. Do not think of yourself as a cliché (that will come later in writing classes where the word “cliché” is spit out with great venom during workshops). No, you are thirteen and the world is horrible and you will never fall in love or kiss a boy and no one understands you and for God’s sake, all you asked your mother was for one pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, is that too much?

Write about your tortured life every day in your brand new Hello Kitty diary, a gift from your grandmother who lives faraway and seldom visits, but who gave you your first real book about lonely girls, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Make sure to lock your diary tight and slip it between the box spring and mattress—this secret thing that’s all your own.

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