Rathalla Review Spring 2019

RATHALLA REVIEW Spring 2019 | Rosemont College

Kashyap Patel’s paintings capture wild, mysterious moments pivoted on personal connections between his dreams. His paintings are diffused with animals and self-analysis, and explore the themes of wild life importance, human intervention and comparative psychology.

He was born in India and moved to United States four years ago to become an architect. He was inspired to become an artist when he was exposed to sublime beauty of classical paintings in MET. Currently he is pursuing BFA degree at New Jersey City University with Drawing and Painting concentration.

Adorable Monique is an award-winning artist based in Southwest Florida, brought up abroad in Central America. Having the good fortune to be mentored by a renowned artist has enriched her artistic vision, prior she received her formal education in Fine Arts and Teaching. She has received numerous awards and the opportunity to exhibit in various venues.

Growing up surrounded by different cultures has broadened her overall view of life. She is continuously pursuing success in personal, professional, and artistic endeavors as well in the artistic experience itself.

Denise Barker is a fine art and portrait photographer living on Cape Cod, MA. Drawn to the ethereal beauty in our natural world she has been described as having “an aesthetic for beauty”. She is inspired by natural light, colors, shapes and textures found in nature, particularly at the ocean and shoreline. Her work highlights the beauty in the small details and the happenstance offering of light, colors and textures. She studied at The New England School of Photography and Rhode Island School of Design.

Ion Golubei is from the Republic of Moldova.

He had an personal art exhibition organized within Festival of the Romanian Film at Iași in 2015 followed by art exhibition in Chisinau at the National Museum of Fine Art and Brancuși Gallery in 2017. He is now working hard to do his best and to leave some traces in this world.

Rathalla Review | Spring 2019 rathallareview.org

Managing Editor

Production Manager

Creative Nonfiction Editor

Poetry Editors

Fiction Editors

Flash Fiction Editors

Christopher Eckman

Roma Narkhede

Watsuki Harrington Rachel Kolman

Stacy Wong Katie Pettine

Beth Moulton

Kyle Robertson Victoria Giasante

Art Editor

Riya Gandhi

Copy Editor Alex Ellis

Readers

Kimberly Grandy, Linda Romanowski, Megan Yates, Sarah Dintez

Faculty Advisor

Carla Spataro, Director of Creative Writing

Contributors Poetry Calvin Olsen holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship.

His poetry and translations have appeared in AGNI, Tampa Review, International Poetry Review, The Missouri Review Online, The London Magazine, and many others.

He lives in Chapel Hill, NC, where he is the poetry editor for The Carolina Quarterly.

Writer and photographer Marshall Farren is a senior at Indiana University studying Human Development and Psychology. His work has been featured in The Blue Route, Oakland Arts Review, and Mangrove.

Rasma Haidri is the author of As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay, 2017) and three textbooks. Her writing has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals including Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, and Fourth Genre.

She is a reader for the Baltic Residency program and her awards include a Vermont Studio residency; the Southern Women Writers Association emerging writer award in creative non-fiction; the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award; and a Best of the Net nomination.

Flash

Fiction

Joshua James recently published his literary fiction at Hawaii Pacific Review and has published other genre short stories. He studied fiction at Florida State University.

Lena Marecki is a graduate of Cornell University and an MFA candidate at UMassBoston. She is an ESL teacher to parents as well.

Her work has appeared in Fiction Southeast.

Destiny Smith is an emerging writer currently querying her third completed manuscript. She’s fortunate to work as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble which provides her the opportunity to work closely with her target audience. Born and raised in Northern California, she shares a loving home with her husband Justin, and their two fur babies.

CNF Kevin Ralph Bray studied at the Humber School for Writers in Toronto and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work is found online and in print. He’s a lapsed economist and retired teacher.

CONTENT 6 Flawers by Ion Golubei 7 Contracture by Calvin Olsen 8 Greek Gods with Machine Guns by Joshua James 10 Inevitable by Kashyap Patel 11 The Swim Lesson by Lena Marecki 15 Miami Sunrise by Denise Baker 16 & 17 Flock of Pipers by Denise Baker 18 Infinite and Finite Games by Kevin Ralph Bray 23 Reaching Dreams by Adorable Monique 24 I would not change if I could by Marshall Farren 25 Thinker by Ion Golubei 26 Since She’s Been Gone by Destiny Smith 28 Jewish Potrait by Ion Golubei 29 Cadaver by Rasma Haidri

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Contracture Calvin Olsen

The routine breaks the sky promises

fire and makes good by morning light I bid my loneliness goodbye receiving it doubled this is how solitude works hail and there it is

there

between trees between trees the color of night

Night falls, no one rushes to pick it up don’t be absurd

you would burn your hands.

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Greek Gods with Machine Guns Joshua James

In the grainy movie, soldiers trudged through a Vietnamese jungle while my father and I

watched on the couch.

“Son, those are what real men look like.”

Just eight years old, I held a shirtless GI Joe figurine—not a doll—and ran my thumb along the perfect abdominals, around a pectoral and across a chiseled bicep. A Greek god with a machine gun.

The next morning, we packed up fishing gear that took up a third of Dad’s gigantic truck bed that he’d bought just for these trips. We parked next to a river and waded in. The smell of rotting, soggy leaves from a nearby swamp filled the air while my bare feet sank into mud that promised to never let go. My line snapped tight, and I reeled in my first catch. The hook stuck through the small fish’s eye, and its scales squirmed in my hand.

“Take the hook out,” Dad said.

“I don’t want to. It’s gross.”

“Don’t be a queer.” He snatched the rod from my hand, ripped out the hook, and tossed the fish into a bucket.

I was lucky enough to catch a second, doing each step right. Dad evaluated my every move with a smirk. He ruffled my hair. “That’s my boy.” *** Rathalla Review | 8

Mom left when I was in high school. With her clothes stuffed into garbage bags on the sidewalk, she balanced a cigarette between her smirking lips. We watched her leave in a taxi through the open blinds of a window. *** In high school, the newspaper called me a coach’s son with a high motor and no scholarship offers. The bright lights over the football field blocked out the stars, and a canvas of darkness replaced the sky. Three dozen people watched from metal bleachers.

“Number twenty-three is killing us.” Dad slapped my helmet and talked through my facemask, his hot breath thick from Copenhagen chewing tobacco. “Stop fucking up and cover your man.”

The next play, before I even had a chance, my own teammate’s helmet slammed into mine while we both smashed into number twenty-three. The dark canvas in the sky wrapped around my vision. My belly turned inside out. The medical staff sounded far away, and they asked me something about a number.

“He’s fine. He just got his bell rung,” Dad said. Then they asked me who was president. “He knows it’s the black one.” He shoved my helmet back on, and I trotted back onto the field.

I sat in the passenger seat after the game with matted, wet hair, the air-conditioning a heavenly wind on my face.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “Proud of you.”

His touch sent a wave of warmth from my shoulder through the left side of my body, while the rest of me wanted to shiver and shake it away. ***

Just before my graduation, Dad and I stopped by the Army recruiter at the mall location between the pawn shop and Cinnabon. He called it the freedom sandwich.

The recruiter’s words sang in my mind as we sat on hard plastic chairs. A marketing poster had a woman in uniform saluting with “Courage” emblazoned above her. I signed the enlistment contract using the signature I’d practiced a hundred times.

“Now you’re a man,” Dad said.

We marched to the food court to celebrate.

Noodles spilled over the sides of our Styrofoam plates.

Double the lo mein and a large drink for an extra ninety-nine cents kept the price of getting diabetes on the dollar menu.

Adjusting an off-center wig, a tall woman passed our table with tears glistening on her face. A prominent Adam’s apple sat atop a body covered by a form-fitting dress, and wobbly legs unaccustomed to high heels stumbled into the women’s restroom.

Dad laughed. “Somebody should follow him in there and teach him a lesson.” His face was a carnival mirror, distorting my own into something I never wanted to see. Now you’re a man.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yes, son?”

“Shut—the fuck—up.” *** With my stuff shoved into a garbage bag, I waited on the sidewalk. Dad kept an eye on me through the open blinds of the front window. The taxi arrived, and I gave him a salute. My father shut the blinds. *** Many months later and halfway around the world, I sleep under a sky filled with stars, no bright lights around to obscure them. Together they weave a tapestry, all of them varying colors and sizes. All different but all beautiful. Beautiful together.

Still, those little lights are far away and aren’t much for conversation. I run a hand back and forth over my head, the crew cut a hedge of tiny needles bending under the weight of my fingers, much different than the shaggy hair I had when I was a little child.

That’s my boy. That’s my boy. That’s my boy.

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Rathalla Review | 10

The Swim Lesson Lena Marecki

S

wathed in towels, the children pad down the wet, tiled floor. The air is salty and warm.

The pool ripples an artificial blue. The mothers, watching from the stands, fan themselves with whatever they can pick from their purses: a magazine, a grocery flyer, a stray piece of mail.

Nearly every time the children march by, one parent reliably says, “There go our bundles of joy!” to which the others chuckle and nod.

The children march in a neat little line. Towels still snug around their bodies—some wrapped and others caped—they now wait for the Guppies—kindergarteners—to exit the pool.

One by one, the Guppies plant their palms on the edge of the pool and hoist themselves up, sending a whoosh! of water with each launch. Cold and wet, they scramble for their towels, trembling little bodies now clutching beach-and-bay themed spreads.

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“Okay, Fish, you’re up,” the swim instructor calls from the tall metal chair on which he sits.

The older children shed their towels, revealing a range of bodies. Some children stand straight and thin, ready to race, while others wait, comfortably full, arms hugging firm round bellies or soft supple sides. But they are still children, comfortable in their own skin for at least another couple of years. Or, perhaps, simply unaware of the bodies for which they live. But then there is Lynn. She is neither comfortable nor unaware.

Of this I am convinced. I watch her linger at the edge of the group, towel still turbaned like a cocoon about her body.

Her eyes flicker up and catch mine. She looks away and feigns comfort, disrobing now. I see myself in her: in her large brown eyes and thick black hair, shapely legs and soft, sloping hips. She adjusts the straps of her dark one-piece and turns to the pool.

Does she see herself? Does the water reflect? I wait and watch this shy girl of twelve, my daughter.

This large chamber of a room echoes within.

The shouts and whistles and chopping of water create its own separate clamor, a busied garble above the swim lesson calm. My friend—another mother, Carol—adds to the noise, chattering beside me. I take it all in and nod, occasionally offering my bits and pieces, but my focus remains on Lynn, through and through.

One by one the children slide into the pool. The instructor climbs down from his chair and meets the swimmers. He leans over the pool’s edge, hands on knees, mouthing today’s warm-up. I cannot hear him but I’m sure it’ll be like any other week, one lap of freestyle, followed by one lap of backstroke. The Fish—three boys and three girls—tread water, arms coursing back and forth, heads tilting upward, floating, bobbing, like buoys in the sea. So begins their Saturday ritual—intermediate swim lessons for children ages ten through twelve.

The children divide into three lanes and begin their staggered warm-up. I watch Lynn hang back, fingers gripping the pool’s concrete edge while her lane mate takes off. Again her eyes flick up towards me, but I look away—surely she doesn’t want me to notice her nerves.

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“Do I have to go?” Lynn asked, pleadingly, that morning.

“Yes, hon,” I replied. I empathized but was used to her mild resistance. I brushed my hair quickly—we were late—and looked at my daughter in the mirror.

“C’mon, it’s already half past eight.”

“But Mom, my stomach hurts,” Lynn said, now leaning against the cold bathroom counter.

“Lynn,” I said, letting some edge slip into my voice. “You already woke up late, we can’t stall or else you’ll miss some of your lesson.” I put the brush back in its drawer and slid it shut. “Let’s go.”

“I woke up late cuz my stomach hurt! It was hard to get up,” she cried, but she knew I wouldn’t budge so we grabbed our things and hurried to the car.

I return my gaze back to the pool, but all I see is the chopping of water, frothy and white. In a few seconds the bubbles dissolve and revert back to that cool, strange blue. I see Lynn surface some feet away, halfway down the lane. Abandoning freestyle, she doggy-paddles to the end. Watching her paddle, hands cupping at the water, she looks tired, possibly out of breath, but she’s getting there, improving steadily.

“You’ll be a natural. You’re built for it. You’re buoyant,” my mother used to tell me. Like my daughter, I think. Except I learned to swim at the local lake, under my Mom’s tutelage. One morning, before the water even had a chance to warm up, Mom brought me to the lake and said, “Today, you’re going to learn how to swim.” And I did, in less than two hours, me wading in the tepid June water, and she standing, instructing, from the hard pebbly shore. I still remember mastering breaststroke. I remember the exact moment when my feet were no longer kicking off the rocky bottom. One leg would always do that, lag then launch. Lag, then launch. I thought I could get away with it, swimming like that for the rest of my life. It was very hard. I don’t know why I couldn’t just get my body to float straight, parallel with the rocks and the weeds. But I remember when I finally committed, how easy and right the process then felt, floating and pulling and swimming ahead. All limbs in motion, pulling, circling, in constant communication, the body streaming forward

as intended. I remember feeling so happy—and shocked—that I sprung out of the water after only four or five strokes and dashed towards my mother, nearly slipping on the slick brown stones that lay between us. I wrapped her in a hug.

“You’re wet!” she exclaimed. “Don’t touch me!” she said in a voice that was at once playful and serious.

When I unclamped she squeezed my shoulder and told me to get back out there, keep moving, go burn all that energy I’ve got. “You’re doing great!” she said as I trailed back in, the water slowly creeping to my chest. “Keep moving, keep swimming,” she called. It was always tough love with her. Tough, but more warm than not, I suppose, like the June waters that day.

Some thirty years later, when my Lynn brought home a flyer from school, the neon green paper peeking from her homework folder, headlining “Free Saturday Swim Lessons at the Chapton Pool,” I figured it was about time she learned and that the best way to do so was through formal lessons with peers her age.

After all, that’s what all the neighborhood children were doing. Learning to swim is, of course, a necessity here, but not as urgent—or enticing, I suppose—as where I grew up in the country, with its many brooks and streams and lakes and ponds.

I don’t know why Lynn was so resistant today.

She has never been particularly eager for swim lessons, I suppose being the oldest of the group and all, but she has also never been so ardently against it, either.

Perhaps something happened last time, last Saturday?

Were the drills too hard? Maybe the other children were teasing her? It’s strange; she seemed to be in fine spirits the first few weeks.

Once the children finish their warm-up, the instructor has them regroup. Again they gather and tread like buoys in the sea. The instructor has the children practice flip turns by tucking their arms in and somersaulting in place. They learned this motion last week. The six children spread out across a couple of lanes, and begin turning, turning in place, each child causing their own small sputter of white and blue. Lynn completes one, then returns to the edge of the pool. The instructor comes over, bends down, asks

something. Lynn looks up at him, and gestures towards her stomach. But then she smiles, shrugs it off, as if to say but I’ll be okay. He smiles and nods in return, and flashes a thumbs-up.

The instructor transitions the group to diving practice. He gestures for everyone to move to the first three lanes, right below where we sit. These lanes are equipped with diving boards. The children follow, making their way out of the pool, forming a line along the concrete edge.

“Alright guys, let’s see some dives. I’ll demo the first one, okay?” The instructor peels off his tank top and tosses it on a nearby bench. He mounts the diving board, which is no more than three feet above the water. He throws his hands up, bends over slightly, narrating as he does. His red whistle sways beneath him. His hands form a perfect point. Then the instructor releases—cleanly pinning the water.

“Okay,” he says when he returns, now matting his face with a towel. “Who’s up?”

One boy volunteers. Like the instructor, the boy crosses his arms, one hand on top of the other, the way one would in a pencil dive. He bends forward just a bit—but falls flat fast. Water splashes everywhere. The children spring back in near unison.

“Bellyflop!” someone yells.

“Ohhh man! That hurt,” the boy cries as he surfaces. But he’s laughing. Eyes squeezed shut, he scurry-swims towards the edge and climbs out.

“Ah! You have to be careful! Like this,” the instructor says, first matching his feet, then his hands, before leaning forward. “You okay?” he assures, to which the boy nods yeah yeah I’m okay.

“Alright,” the instructor says, now scanning the rest of the group. “Who’s next?”

When others hesitate, Lynn says she will go. She probably wants to get it over with; dives are, after all, notoriously difficult. She climbs the ladder’s metal rails and lifts herself onto the hard white board. She takes three steps, placing one foot in front of the next, and then stops, as one would a plank.

Lynn bends her knees, raises her arms, crosses her hands, and arches forward ever so slightly. Shaped like a lowercase “r,” Lynn waits, careful not to tip over Rathalla Review | 13

and flop. Even from the bleachers I can see that she is nervous, her wet body shivering, her toes curling hard over the diving board edge.

Beneath her, her body hangs shapely and defined, the pool water dripping from her budding breasts and thick, quivering thighs. As instructed, Lynn lowers her head, and tucks her chin in.

She doesn’t move for some ten, twenty seconds, and I begin to wonder what’s wrong. I see that she is inspecting her form — her waist, her legs, her feet, her toes. I see the instructor question if all is okay.

He is standing off to the side with the other children, watching form from afar. Maybe Lynn’s scared that she, too, will make a huge splash. Maybe the younger kids are being rude. Maybe she doesn’t like being up there, so exposed. I swear I see the boys sneaking looks at her.

And then, very quickly, Lynn straightens, turns around, and hurriedly dismounts. “Someone else go first,” I hear her laugh as she rushes for her towel. She wraps it around her waist. “Guess I got nervous?” she trails off, to no one in particular. The instructor, looking confused, starts to call to Lynn, but she moves quickly, already staring up at me from the bottom of the bleachers. The instructor looks at me, perplexed, and I put a hand up as if to say Hold on, give me a sec. I return to Lynn; her smile has faded.

“Mom,” she says, one hand gripping the towel, the other, her stomach. “Mom, I told you. My stomach… I guess I was having cramps—”

“What’s wrong, hon?” I say. “How come—” And then I see. Below the wrap of her towel, I see dribbles of red run down her legs. She does too, and bends down, using the corner of her towel to dab, dab, dab, along her shin and ankle and couple of toes. There is very little blood—just two thin diluted streams—but she keeps her legs locked together.

I make my way down the bleachers. We don’t say anything and instead hurry to the closest bathroom. She enters the stall and I explain what’s happening, what she’ll need, and slip my purse to her beneath the latched yellow door. I should have given her this talk earlier. I mean, I got mine around this age.

I should have known, been proactive. I want to ask if anyone noticed, see how she is feeling, but I decide, not Rathalla Review | 14

now; reliving that moment is the last thing she needs— and it won’t change the case at hand. Lynn is silent the whole time.

Before I learned how to swim, my Mom had taken me to the local clothing outlet store to buy a new bathing suit. The one I’d been wading in at lake parties and oceanside family functions was starting to wear.

That’s what I saw, and believed, at least. When my Mom saw me put on my old pink suit one morning, before racing to the sprinklers outside, I remember how she stopped in the hall, coffee in hand, pausing to assess my figure.

“Looks tight on you, hon,” she had said, her eyes slowing over me from the entryway. “Sure you want to go out like that? Especially if you’re playing with all the neighbor kids? Maybe throw on a t-shirt or something.”

I remember looking down at my body. The straps were stretched tight against my shoulders, and the scoops of spandex cut high above my hips. My stomach, my breasts, my perked nipples, all suddenly felt so grossly on display.

“We’ll get you a new suit soon, no worries,” my Mom had said, taking a sip from her mug. “And we’ll get you swimming, too. It’s about time. I can teach you, no problem. I think you’ll learn best that way. One on one. No distractions.”

And then Mom smiled, wished me fun outside, before parting from the doorway and continuing down the hall.

In the bathroom, I hear Lynn dry herself, press the towel to her skin, struggle out of the suction of her wet one-piece. I hear her sit and pull at the roll of toilet paper, and then begin to rifle through the mess of papers and jangles of change that make up my purse.

“A pad should be in the front zipper pocket,” I say.

“Okay,” Lynn says in a small voice. “Good thing… my suit, it’s actually barely stained.”

I say I’ll be back, that I’m going to retrieve her dry clothes and clean underwear. She says that she’s really okay, and I say that I’ll be quick. I walk down the

halls to the locker room. Spin the padlock. Open the door. Wash my hands. Gather her things. Go upstairs to the front desk and ask for extra towels. I hope she is okay. She seems okay, but how can you not be embarrassed, or at least self-conscious? When I return to the bathroom with her bundle in hand, I ask how she is, but the stall remains silent.

“It’s okay, honey,” I say. I wait, ask again how she is doing, and then knock on the door when I hear no response. The door tips open and no one’s inside.

I leave the bathroom and head back to the locker room; perhaps we missed each other. When I don’t see her, I run upstairs to the entrance; maybe she’s waiting for me in the lobby. I ask the front desk but the seated woman politely says, “No, I’m sorry Ma’am, we haven’t seen your daughter” before blankly returning to her screen.

I loop back to the bathroom. No luck. I return to the pool.

When I enter I hear my name. I look up. From the bleachers, Carol waves me down. I climb up the bleachers and she hands me my purse.

“Lynn asked that I give this to you… she didn’t want to miss any more practice,” she tells me.

“Wait… what?” I start. I can’t help the shock in my voice.

“She said she used a tampon.”

My mind races.

“What, how?” I stutter. “Okay… where’d she get it?”

“Bathroom dispenser, probably.” A pause. Carol looks out at the pool. “She seemed fine. Pretty okay.

Guess it wasn’t her first time.”

A stony weight hits my stomach.

“Oh… okay,” I say. “Right, right,” I continue, nodding. “Of course. Thanks Carol....”

I follow up with something kind and compliant, words that I know I won’t be able to later recall because my mind is simply elsewhere, and, at this moment, I need to not talk. I turn to the pool, this body, this large cerulean space, always rippling, forever in motion.

As one child takes center, perched on the plank, I see my daughter in line, studying her form, gauging her physique, readying herself for this very next stage.

Infinite and Finite Games Kevin Ralph Bray

L

ife is play. During our lives we play both finite and infinite games. Tennis and war are finite games. Finite games are played to be won; therefore, every finite game must end. An infinite game is played for the purpose of perpetuating the game. Friendship is an infinite game.

It’s 1976. I steal bikes and sell them. My profit calculations are a little wonky, a secondary intention in my business model; I am like a young restaurateur who loves cooking but has no head for numbers.

I belonged to a tiny gang (two people, me and my friend Bal, but we left space for other delusional profit-seekers and invited classmates to join us) stealing ten-speed bikes and singlespeed bikes with mustang handlebars, which we stripped, spray painted with Rustoleum metallic blue, then rebuilt and sold. Sometimes we tried to sell the bike to the rightful owner.

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The enterprise made no financial sense in my small logging town of five thousand people. Anyone should have recognized their stolen bike, even after we have transplanted our wanton desire onto the frame. The market for blue bikes was limited—maybe a few hundred kids lived in town—and most of them didn’t have money that wasn’t already being spent on pinball and air hockey in the arcade or buying Old Dutch potato chips and Jolly Ranchers in the convenience store.

I stole bikes because stealing pumped adrenaline, masking the anxiety that consumed my teenaged years. I took boys’ bikes leaning against the front of the arcade or the school or the chain-link fences surrounding the frigid outdoor swimming pool and the tennis court, all the bikes left by kids riding helmet-free and lock-less, and I rode them into the woods behind my house where Bal and I set up our chop shop. Bal, whose derelict parents bestowed malignant freedom on him, invited me to spend postschool afternoons melting cheese on Wonder bread in his blackened oven, looking at porn magazines, and recording bike-inventory data. We were friends in a tangential way, connected by our low-rent status in high school.

School constitutes a series of finite games.

A school provides titles and awards, and victors are ranked.

Our grade ten gym teacher, Mr. Moon, is heartless.

He splits the class into teams when we play basketball and labels the teams as either “shirts” or “skins.” He points to each boy and brands them. “Shirt, skin, shirt, skin, shirt.”

His command is autocratic. We are segregated by dignity and ego. Boys like me, who are small and less muscular than the boys who already have moustaches, pray for the shirt.

The bigger boys whoop when they take off their striped rugby tops. Mr. Moon yells at one boy who refuses to take his shirt off. The boy’s back is splattered with acne and no one wants to steal the ball from him. That boy would rather steal bikes. Mr. Moon sends him to the office. His parents don’t care about this.

The game begins. My hands can’t grasp the basketball. I can only deflect it if it comes to me, with a swat instead of a swoop, and the bigger boys, whose hands caress and contain the ball, pretend that I am not even on the court, not on their team. Mr. Moon benches me. I sit watching the other boys enjoy gym class and I wish I could

retrieve my shirt from the pile beside the bench. I like my next class, math, where I remain fully clothed and can factor a quadratic with speed and accuracy. In the afternoon, my science teacher returns tests in ranked order, so that the highest mark is returned first. I am almost always the first student to get their test.

A finite game gives the winner a title. You are the fastest runner, the smartest student, the CEO, the President of the Legion, the superpower nation. But these titles have value only if acknowledged by other players. A private title holds no value in a finite game.

I have taught high school for thirty years. I freely chose this career, fully apprised that my financial remuneration and public status would pale next to friends who graduated with advanced degrees in economics.

In social gatherings where I meet accountants, lawyers, editors and bankers, I am asked, “What do you do for a living?” The men pretend not to hear anything I say and they start a conversation with someone else. Once, at a cocktail party, a Master of the Universe from the financial industry said, “Good for you, someone’s got to teach these kids.”

When a principal retires, their photograph is hung on the wall of the last school they administered, like a Dear Leader portrait in North Korea. After a few years, no one remembers them. The teachers who have long left, and who might now be golfing or dead, are remembered by former students. Students remember their favourite teachers and their worst teachers; they remember the ones who had heart or vengeance. Teachers don’t win titles; they only have their names.

Every family is a team playing in a larger finite game. Families encourage and motivate their members to compete for public titles. Every parent wants their child to be a winner.

Until grade eleven, my grades never broke past a C-plus. A family member called me the “C-Plus kid.”

My aunt attended every parent-teacher interview, asking teachers what could be done with me, how their collective effort might bring me to water and make me drink. She’d come home from the interviews and demand that I try harder, work longer, get better grades, telling me that “life is not a game” and enumerated my varied deficiencies. I promised to try harder, study more, listen in class. When I Rathalla Review | 19

did get a higher mark, she’d ask for more. She kept raising the bar to heights I could not reach. I looked for a way to go under, not over, the bar. I wanted to limbo, not pole vault.

As a teacher I sit on the other side of these interviews. More often than not the students come in with their parents. Sometimes the students plead with their eyes, like hostages.

Parents have ten-minute appointments to discuss the past three months their child has spent with me and I have the same ten minutes to wonder about the past sixteen years the child has spent with them.

“How can we move his mark higher?” a mother asks me.

The kid’s mark is ninety-five percent.

“What does one get from squeezing a stone?” I reply.

A father marches in with his wife and three daughters. The females follow him single file. I have taught, over consecutive years, all three of his daughters.

I taught them math, without controversy, unlike the English teachers who are pilloried for teaching To Kill A Mockingbird or Life of Pi. I welcome the family and invite them to sit across from me at the long table.

“You will speak only to me,” the father says.

He looks directly at me and the wife and daughters look down at the floor. He’s done this before and this time I am committed to refusing his demand, but the administration has told me the rules. His daughters are not allowed to play.

To succeed in a finite game a player must anticipate and challenge every possible move of their opponent. Failure to do so greatly increases the chance of losing. An opponent’s greatest advantage is surprise.

I’m twelve years old and sitting in my friend’s backyard on a Saturday morning, waiting for him to come out so we can continue building our tree fort. I sit on a concrete step, staring at the moose carcass hanging from a three-story-tall Douglas Fir tree at the edge of his property.

His dad hunts and every fall he hangs the carcass to improve its flavour, allowing the enzymes to drift and season the flesh. I’ve seen something similar, less wild and much smaller, through the window of the Costco butcher.

While I sit on the concrete step I hear branches snap and crack. They say you always hear the bullet first, Rathalla Review | 20

or the heavy footsteps of the approaching killer. When the bear emerges from the forest I don’t even twitch.

If a black bear attacks, you fight back, because a black bear will kill and eat you in consecutive acts; a black bear doesn’t contemplate the meal. But cover your head and close your legs and play dead when a grizzly attacks, because they will bury you and come back later to eat your body. The bear was black. He wasted no time with the moose.

Every player in a finite game assumes a role: they become the marathon runner, the father, a banker, or a teacher. The role becomes paramount, so much so that the player believes they must commit to it, without question.

I am a bike thief. My teeth are congenitally deformed. One of my top incisors is laterally rotated and thin, like an almond sliver. The other top incisor is a peg tooth, a half-assed little thing that serves no mechanical purpose. I almost never smile, and I’m careful not to open my mouth too wide in front of people. Only my bedroom mirror has seen my impoverished smile. The world sees my smirk.

I am quite good at tennis, having taught myself by playing against the garage wall on an empty house across from mine. On the tennis court I yell and unhinge my jaw and bare my nutty teeth. I am a fierce competitor. I play tennis all summer and look at the bikes leaning against the fifteen-foot-high fence that contains our errant shots.

I pretend that I am Jimmy Connors and my opponent pretends he is Bjorn Borg. My opponent is blond and athletic and muscular and volunteers to be a “skin” in gym class. In school we call him PB. I learned the periodic table of elements in science class and PB represents lead. PB also stands for “pretty boy” and he is pretty, like a Beach Boy. One day my rage is so focused that I beat him in tennis and he never plays with me again. Later in life I spend a lot of money to fix my teeth and see on Facebook that PB is bald.

For years I was the “guy who never smiles.”

Sexual attraction is a game played to be won and players will hide their intent with affectations, pomp and pageantry, and bold promises. The best players are masters in courtship.

I fell in love at fourteen with a girl I didn’t know. I was camping at a provincial park with my family and I saw

her at an adjacent campsite with her family. Living in a small logging town meant I knew all the girls since grade four. We watched each other morph from caterpillars to butterflies, but no one was titillated by the outcome. The camping girl was another species. On our last day camping I spoke to her. She told me that she lived in a much bigger town two hours away from mine. She gave me her name and address and when I got home, I wrote her a letter.

My uncle had an old Underwood typewriter on which I constructed a formal and important-looking letter, properly formatted according to the rules I’d learned in typing class. I wrote to the girl that the distance between us was as nothing when the moonlight I saw travelled in an instant to shine down on her bedroom. We would meet next year, I said, and hold hands while walking on the trails, and snuggle by a campfire. I told her my plans for life, that I wanted to be a journalist or a dentist, and I asked her if she thought about living in a city.

The letter never got to her. I had the wrong address and I didn’t put my return address on the envelope. I thought prudence required withholding this information.

“Forever, your campground admirer,” I wrote and appended my address to the bottom of the letter. The post office in her town opened my letter and read it, then sent it back to the small post office in my town. My uncle picked up the mail everyday on his way home for lunch and gave the letter to my aunt. When I got home from Bal’s house that afternoon, stuffed with melted cheese and Wonder bread, my aunt was sitting on her stool at the kitchen table with the letter open on the Formica surface.

“I had no idea you were so romantic,” she said.

“You must really like this girl. Who is she?”

“No one. I just wanted to practice writing a love letter.”

Players in a finite game don’t always recognize their freedom to play. Players will often believe that the strategies they employ, even the game they play and the role they assume, are inevitable.

At nine p.m. Bal spotted a white CCM ten-speed propped against the wire caging around the tennis court.

The bike’s handlebars were wrapped with white tape and the kickstand didn’t work. I mounted the bike and rode it around the perimeter of the cage and Bal took a turn and pushed the bike into a lamppost. The bike’s delicate

frame crumpled and we hooted and hollered to celebrate his accuracy and our anger. The lamps around the court illuminated the adjacent playground and path winding towards the town’s shopping mall. The mall had a COOP grocery store, a Hudson Bay outlet (we stole a Pocket Fisherman and five record albums there), a music store (we stole cassette tapes from them), a few clothing stores, and a convenience store (we stole Chocolate Chunks and toffee) that connected to a hotel, the Greyhound bus depot, and the RCMP detachment office.

We left the bike crumpled on the path. I was late for curfew and Bal wanted get home and go to bed before his parents came back from the bar. I had homework. I was learning to factor trinomials and find the precise centre of a triangle.

My aunt’s monthly bridge club was bidding when I got home. The eight women played at two tables and ate asparagus-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and sipped sherry. They ignored me when I walked past to my bedroom. I sat on my bed and opened the math book and worked on a simple question. I ignored the easier problems and tackled the hardest question, the one not assigned.

For ten minutes I toiled, repeatedly breaking the pencil lead and sharpening it, but I couldn’t do the question. I checked the answer at the end of the book and tried to work backwards to the solution. Sometimes you can solve a problem by working in reverse order.

The doorbell rang a half hour later. I heard voices and my aunt opened the bedroom door and commanded me to follow her. The bridge players stopped the game and intently stared as I walked out to a police car. An RCMP constable sat me in the back, behind the glass partition that restrained violent or drunk passengers. He didn’t say anything in the five minute drive to the detachment and gave terse instructions to follow him into the building.

My face flushed red and even though I was in shorts and a t-shirt, I needed fresh air or a fan.

“OK, you’re going into a cell to think about what you did,” the RCMP officer said. “I’ve got your friend in another cell, doing the same thing.”

“Why? What did we do?”

“Bike thieves.”

I sat on a wood bench that ran along the entire perimeter of the cool cinder-block wall and leaned against Rathalla Review | 21

the concrete. I thought about my strategy. Bal would never confess, would he? If I didn’t confess and he didn’t confess then we could walk out and I’d get back to math and playing tennis and planning how I might one day leave this logging town and move to the city with the girl from the camp. But if I confessed, and he didn’t, Bal might beat me up or tell kids at school. I was caught in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game I would learn about later in graduate school.

I sat alone for fifteen minutes. The constable returned. He opened the cell door and sat beside me.

“Your friend told us everything. We know about the bike, so you might as well be honest.”

My life’s tree appeared and I saw the withered end of one branch that led to failure and monotony and a job piling lumber in the sawmill. Maybe I subconsciously worked my way along those branches, following a path to the trunk, to that jail cell.

“I was there. I stole the bike.”

“Good. That’s the best thing you can do.”

The RCMP constable reached out to shake my hand and I cried. I can’t tell you if relief or fear or remorse made me cry, but I cried a bucket of tears.

He drove me home without telling me about Bal and I didn’t ask. My aunt’s bridge club was gone and she ushered me to my room without offering me a leftover sandwich and grounded me for two weeks.

A finite game can be played within an infinite game, but not vice versa.

Bal never did confess. He didn’t beat me up or taunt me in the halls. In the last two years of high school Bal took his shirt off and played basketball and earned his reputation. Bal fought a grown man outside the liquor store. Bal could get you beer and weed for parties. Bal held up a drugstore using a hunting knife.

I left town after graduating and moved to bigger and bigger cities. I did not keep one friend from high school.

Over the years I have had three bikes stolen from me. ________ * In 1986 James Carse published Finite and Infinite Games. The bold type in this essay are paraphrases of passages from his book.

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This train leads to the ocean Not a station – the water When we sink we will be famous for a day Our names in the papers Our faces on the news like we always dreamed We play with matches We stare at the sun We are forgiven until we turn to ash like all the fools before us The ones we idolize The ones we mourn The spotlight dims The curtain falls The audience clears We become warnings given to children – warnings that go ignored No remorse No pain One-way tickets only– Rearview mirrors are cancerous

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I would not change if I could Marshall Farren

Since She’s Been Gone Destiny Smith

I still remember the chill of that night. Temperatures so low it’d fuse your bones and sting your lungs. That was when I finally accepted the truth. There, hidden amongst a scene of shattered ice that mirrored the state of my heart. She didn’t love. She never would. At least, not how I loved her.

Another drag of smoke, another mouthful of whisky, another stabbing memory I yearned to cast off. Her eyes, bluer than any I’d ever seen and have yet to see since, stared back at me behind a frame of chestnut locks. And that smile…god, I swear it produced its own gravity! She drew you in like that, anchoring you at her side with her effortless dark humor and witty comebacks. I saw it from the outside once. The way she pulled in her victims with a well-timed giggle, lending a seemingly helpful hand.

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The truth? She never had me fooled! I knew what and who she truly was from the first time I held her hand in mine. She was a huntress dedicated to the thrill of it all. The second her prey stopped running, she stopped chasing. But what she never took the time to see was that I myself was a huntress just the same.

Before her, I’d devoured my way through relationship after relationship. I’d lied, cheated, abandoned as if my life depended on it. I was the definition of a tortured soul. That is, until she walked in.

Ever the spitfire, with an all-consuming energy to match, she stole the show. And I let her in. Just like that. But even true vulnerability wasn’t enough to make her stay. I’d become…dependable, and the goddess didn’t do dependable.

That fateful night when she walked out, taking my heart along with her, it reverberated in the depths of my mind for weeks. The way she bit her bottom lip as she tapped her ruby nails against the bar-top, just the same as she always did when she was nervous.

“You just don’t excite me anymore, Nel. I’m sorry.”

Who knew a person could shatter over a single sentence. But I did. Right then and there, I died inside.

My feet led at that point, out to the dock with little regard for the winter chill carrying on the wind.

“Pretentious,” I muttered to myself as I narrowly caught my drunken frame, sliding on a patch of ice. “She was freaking pretentious anyways. Eh, who needs her!”

I did. Without her, the world felt void of color and sound. I drifted through my days just waiting for night to come so I could close my eyes and forget.

But the next morning always came, faithful and monotonous as the day before. And the day before that. Even after she’d left, I was still a slave to her, to the memory of her touch.

Liza, ever the vindictive lover. Wrong for me in every sense, and yet the only thing I craved. She was the ember that singed my wings. My most revisited scar.

But that was then.

Now look at me! Eleven years later and I’m a new person. Hell, I hardly recognize myself compared

to the zombie I was back then! Sure, I still dream of her sometimes, think of her on occasion; maybe even imagine I smell her perfume as I traipse down the hallway now and again. But she’s no longer the commanding force in my life, and for the first time, I can say I actually feel…good! Free!

How I got a drug like her out of my system at all is still a bit of a mystery. If I had to take a guess, I think it took falling in love with someone else to fall out of love with her.

You see, I’ve met someone. Someone with strange ideas, aspirations, the desire to make a real difference in this world! She’s kind, and lends a helping hand because she actually wants to. She doesn’t prey on the weak.

She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. She just…is. Content and eager to be the best she can be, no matter how much she has to work on it.

And I love her. More than I expected I could ever love someone again. I’m happy, thriving even!

Since Liza left, I met…me.

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Cadaver

Rasma Haidri

His yellowed hands are cupped loose as if the surprise of death came too quick for fists.

How perfectly the retracted lungs and raised diaphragm track his last breath.

No sign of worry in his gut, no arrows in his heart, no scars of love, no hollow to show where he hungered in the end.

It would all fit back, the jagged skin and scaffolded bones, his latticed tendons, the jigsawed organs, the ribboned testicles slung across his thigh from an arrow-tip penis, smooth and black as a river stone.

Only his hands are intact, each brown hair rooted where it always grew, the fingerprints his alone, as are the cupped palms that hold only air, and that small break in his line.

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Rathalla Review is the literary magazine published by the students of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate Publishing programs. Our mission is to give emerging and established writers and artists an outlet for their creative vision in our online and print publication. We publish the best fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry, and art, culled from a nationwide community of writers and artists. Rathalla Review’s staff, comprised of MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing candidates, merges the creative arts and the business of publishing into a shared voice and vision.

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