Rathalla Review Spring 2015 Issue by Rathalla Review

Rathalla Review

Rosemont College Spring 2015 Issue

Our Mission: Rathalla Review is the literary magazine published by the students of Rosemont Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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 non-fiction, flash fiction, poetry, and art, culled from a nationwide community of writers and artists. Rathalla Reviewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s staff, comprised of M.F.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Publishing candidates, merges the creative arts and the business of publishing into a shared voice and vision. All written work in Rathalla Review remains copyright of its respective author and may not be reproduced in any form, printed or digital, without express permission of the author.

Rathalla Review Spring 2015 Issue

Managing Editor Kara Cochran

Production Manager Monica Lopez-Nieto

Fiction Editor

Poetry Editor

Roseann Corey

Jennifer Rieger

Flash Fiction Editor Tori Bond

Creative Nonfiction Editor Art Editor

Rae Pagliarulo

Megan Hovermann

Assitant Fiction Editor Yolanda Rice

Assitant Poetry Editor Ashley Jimenez

Assitant Flash Fiction Editor Orey Wilson

Selection Staff Abby Lalonde

Jennifer McDaniel

Johnny Tucker

Trish Rodriguez

Susan Ruhl

Brandon Hartman

Monica Murray

Emily London

Donna Keegan

James McGurl

Ian Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neil

Elisa Sheronas

Table of Contents Featured Artists

Elena Botts

Fiction Sauna

Terri Brown-Davidson

A Burnt Offering

Fred D. White

Creative Nonfiction

Has Gravity Conquered Joan Snyder?

Terri Brown-Davidson

page 1

page 9 page 38

page 3

Tuesday in Morningview, Kentucky

page 25

We Endure

page 33

Ryan Kauffman Filipp Velgach

Poetry For J.F.

Mark Mansfield

page 2

Finding Space for Sleep

page 24

Waiting it Out

page 27

Wham, Bam, Thank You, Spam

page 32

Aphorism

page 36

Cutting Off Sources

page 46

Dan Lewis

Michael Phillips Mark Brazaitis Steven Babin

Carol Hamilton

Flash

In Orbit

page 22

What Might Come After You

page 28

Hunger

page 30

Eric Hawthorn

Rachna Kulshrestha

Featured Artist: Elena Botts Elena grew up in Maryland, and currently lives in Northern Virginia. She’s been published in over twenty literary magazines in the past few years. She is the winner of four poetry contests, including Word Works Young Poets. Her poetry has been exhibited at the Greater Reston Art Center. Check out her poetry book, “a little luminescence” at allbook-books.com. Her visual art has won several awards. Go to o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com to see her latest artwork. These works are part of a series of portraits she has created in an effort to capture the defining characteristics of individuals, as well as to explore the inherent and yet transient nature of identity. The piece feautured on the cover is “in love with no one in particular”.

For J.F.

Mark Mansfield No one has passed this way or will tonight. We’ve cut through here at least a hundred times. Up in the sky, I see the Bowl’s bright lights, but now the only steps I hear are mine. Ahead, the HOLLYWOOD’s glowing marquee mimes titleless above its vanished files of patrons, as if in a fantasy. But I am in DC, alone, and miles and years away from then; and you are dead. Walking up some icy alleyway that I had thought was our shortcut from Vine, I come out by a bright-lit bar on K as the crowd inside start singing “Auld Lang Syne,” while through the snow a stranger turns his head.

Mark Mansfield’s work has appeared in Bayou, Blue Mesa Review, Evansville Review, Fourteen Hills, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Magma, Salt Hill, Scrivener, Tulane Review, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. He holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins. Currently, he lives in upstate New York where he teaches.

Has Gravity Conquered Joan Snyder? Terri Brown-Davidson

I pause in the art museum, savoring “Wild Roses.” Other patrons press and throng; it takes a beautiful act of will to shut them out. Finally, though, the coughing behind me recedes, a wave lapping back, reabsorbed into the ocean. As is my wont, I render myself invisible—via ritual—in that heartbeat of silence, wrap my sinuous dark hair around one fist, disguise my neck. One with the monoprint—my favorite Joan Snyder. I adore Snyder’s art work because it exemplifies, for me, the beautiful, disintegratory process that is the journey into middle age. I’ve begun this journey myself. Sometimes I wake at two a.m., breathless, my nightshirt creasing the drenched area below my breasts. I stare into a darkness as pervasive as my thoughts, that rich, oily blackness everywhere, the blackness that will bury me, and wonder what happened this week, last week, the morning I was born. The slipperiness of time itself eludes some part of my consciousness; I can’t fathom that I was born and that I’ll die, just as I can’t quite comprehend what’s happening to my face and body, though it appears that I mourn the changes in each and deem them unacceptable. Subtle decays. A psychological song, internal, which the mad poet composes by herself, for herself, as that entity—the “self”—warps, transmogrifies, becomes irrelevant. Regardless, I long to embrace these miniscule disintegrations, to adopt a Zen attitude toward the entire aging process. And yet— Lately, in odd moments, I’ve become obsessed with my neck. Usually my obsessions are either solipsistic or trivial, passionate or inane; this one, though, strikes me as much worse, somehow—more compulsive and self-defeating. In the end, I tell myself, tracing the baggy contours of my throat with two fingers, gravity conquers us all. And, middle aged, I seem less and less interested in physical facts anyway. So why do I stare at my neck, suffused with longing, in any

available mirror, wishing for a tautness that will elude me, now, forever? In the midst of these contemplations, the “self ” recording each minute step on the path to its own erasure, Joan Snyder—the idea, and not the person—is what saves me, guides me toward a tenuous redemption glimpsed in moments of intense absorption in the prints, the paintings. It’s not that I’m deeply familiar with Snyder’s work. Before “Dancing with the Dark” went on exhibit at the University Of New Mexico Art Museum, I’d never heard of Snyder. And then I went to see her paintings. When I stepped off the museum elevator onto the exhibit’s third floor, wall after wall of paintings rose up to surround and engulf me, a red-tinged melange of chaos, madness personified. (And it’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m attracted to madness.) The paintings glowed rich crimson, siren-song seductive, as I walked and paused before each one to sample it, a glorious mess of scribbled hearts and dashed-off words and strangely collaged elements embedded in paint. I stood before each canvas and tilted my head back, jaw jutting forward, a signature tic when I’m self-conscious or terrified.

This time, I was both.

Sinking into a morass of abstraction so fiercely energetic I felt cannibalized by it, devoured alive. Joyous. What I feel for the paintings is nearly metaphysical, a veritable bulwark against death and decay. I savor their essence, which is cerebral. Ultrahuman. After all, the delight of any abstraction is buried inside its lingering remnants of pattern. Conundra Land! They’re oversized, these art works, meticulously messy, a glittering red-blend that gets the primal juices flowing. My brain can’t help intuiting patterns from the diverse splashes of crimson and black, green and gold. I’d love to turn my brain off, force it to stop making patterns, but I can’t. The paintings lack a traceable, rational process, which reflects my own experience of middle-aged creativity, and this—more than anything else—rivets and redeems me in the face of my own demise. I’ve been thinking about creativity a lot these days, how it affects me, us, how it fuels and spurs Joan Snyder toward the canvas. Why it seems so important for some of us, though not all, in terms of emotional health, especially the middle-aged. What makes Joan Snyder’s brain feel electrified when encountering an inchoate pattern, preconscious, that releases her only when she intuits it in paint daubs? Why

are some people soul-wired to become potters rather than painters; why are other people driven to work as electricians, pragmatic to the core, lacking some inner vision that compels them to create? What does it even mean to want to “make things?” Does it involve the brain, hand, ear, eye, and how much of each component is necessary? What is the actual connection between the need to create and the need for release? Is it tactile, internal, psychological? It has struck me, more than once, that I’m driven to fashion various objects in different genres, physical or not, the way others remain insatiable for orgasm. Long ago, when I was a little girl and it never occurred to me to worry about such nonsense as “impending turkey neck,” I experienced a period of such profound loneliness that, even now, it pains me to remember. My mother had taken ill and been loaded onto a stretcher while, eight years old and emotionally stunted in some way I still can’t fathom, I’d devoured the mashed potatoes and gravy my mother had prepared before she collapsed in the kitchen with terrific appetite, my father running to call 911. Even today, though I was admittedly just a child, I think back on my unawareness and feel despondent at how I continued to ply myself with food while burly firefighters in black-andyellow uniforms hoisted my mother. The red lights flared, synesthetic, and my mother was carried out, her face tilted toward me on her journey through our narrow, darkened living room. She was very beautiful then in a way that inspired hope and adulation, at least in me. Her face as white as the pillow firefighters had arranged under her neck; her eyes the unremitting shade of green, too intense, that mine would eventually become; her hair like some auburn horse’s mane, undulating and gorgeously chaotic as it spread in thickening tangles; her lips made redder by the fierce scarlet lipstick that shaped her lavish mouth. How could I dream, staring at her face before my mother disappeared, that one day I would become my mother’s physical twin, stunned possessor of a beauty so violent it would make strangers whisper and stare? How could I dream that I would become accustomed to that beauty, to the reactions it evoked, to the ways in which it cushioned my passage through the world, only to experience a near-strangling grief when I was finally forced to relinquish it? That day I knew nothing, of course, about the joys and terrors that would engulf me in adult life. All I understood was that the woman I adored, depended upon, was vanishing into some unknown country

of sickness and fatigue. Racing alongside the stretcher, I couldn’t stop staring; supine, sick, she still reached for me, arms flailing; her pale face glowed, red-gold hair, and, as the stretcher passed, her long, elegant fingers lifted in a wave while firefighters carried her out the front door, down the porch steps—forever, I thought. As I drive to work in pre-dawn darkness, absent-minded and groggy, I’m thinking about my mother, I’m thinking about Joan Snyder, connections between death and creativity, loss and redemption. My daughter, in the back seat, soundlessly mouths the Eagles as she listens through her headphones: “Hotel California,” “The Boys of Summer.” Albuquerque. March. I park the car, egg-splattered Sable, in the dilapidated parking lot of the fringe college where I teach English to the underprivileged. The lot’s near deserted; fast-food bags, white and beneficently ghostlike, blow across the rubble; men in with sweep brooms in blue coats circle, their figures shadowy, hunched, perfectly anonymous, interchangeable—a fact I find depressing. We park under the dim orange flicker of a street light (one of the extant ones—many at my school are broken, smashed) and get out of the car.

I’m walking my daughter to school.

We stroll, she and I, immersed in a silence typical for these mornings. But I don’t mind it, the quiet. My daughter, adopted, is Chinese, lovely and uncommunicative. It’s who she is, these verbal voids are her nature. Down the street lies the baseball field where the Isotopes, an Albuquerque team, plays every summer. I can hear the games inside the sweltering classrooms where I teach college writing to students who struggle and sweat through their allotted prison time, the announcer’s booming voice, the crowd shouting in the muffled, amorphous way in which collective voices translate from a distance. Fragments, run-ons, comma splices—what do boundary errors matter for students who will go on to become welders, factory workers? I think about this every day and never arrive at any meaningful conclusion, though. Financially unable to retire, I’ll probably keep teaching til I die. Across from the baseball field, a football stadium looms fat and squat and gaudy, a specious form of architectural magnificence piercing the heavens, concrete reflection of easy money, mass pandering. Banners of star players for the Lobos, the University of New Mexico’s team, scroll up hundreds of feet, the players gods in an academic firmament, all of

which leaves me depressed. But my daughter, oblivious as usual to my moods, pursues her own mental games, leaps back dramatically from the imagined danger of a UNM shuttle speeding by. There’s a crack in the sidewalk that my daughter and I avoid. We skip around it now, a quick game of mother-daughter hopscotch, our fingers lightly brushing; we jump, land out of breath, glance at each other, my daughter red-faced, and laugh.

Then, we look up.

Across the street, over spring break, cherry trees have burst into blossom. Trees that were naked, scrawny, only a week ago. An assemblage of white, pearlescent petals, wind-quivered blossoms, push out from these trees now in splendiferous masses, little burning brightnesses that thrust up and up, igniting the cold gray sky. “Prettiful!” my daughter cries, and I nod, find her fingers, give them a quick squeeze, trying for some reason I don’t understand to appear disaffected, to not let her know how vulnerable I feel, cracked open by the pedestrian. We stand and gaze at the trees while I think about my mother. When the firefighters carried her out, I assumed she was going to die, and nobody told me otherwise. My grandmother, who came to care for me and my brothers in our “time of need,” was a woman I thought of even then as cold, and we never spoke about my mother, as if her illness and hospitalization had never happened. Though she didn’t die, of course, though my mother—shaken and pale, rendered quiet by her hospital scare—returned home merely a month later, that episode evoked my first genuine sense of grief, for I believed, at eight, that I’d lost her. After that, my losses multiplied. I moved, started teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and earned my Ph.D. A friend who sprinkled ashes on her forehead to commemorate a religious holiday, a colleague in the classics department more reverent and spiritual than I (woefully ignorant, then, of the most basic Christian tenets), made me wonder, when I boarded the elevator with her for a ride to our shared office, if her face wasn’t dirty, if she’d simply forgotten to wash. These trees make me feel as if I’ve washed. Make me forget my mortality, my sagging neck, the fact that my work may be unimportant. I step forward, clasp my daughter’s hand, and take the trees’ whiteness into some deep place in my being. My mother exists,

somehow, in this proliferation, as do Joan Snyder’s art works, as do all things of the spirit that we carry with us, invisible but never subject to erosion or decay. Fact: my mother could have died that day, but she didn’t. Fact: she will, someday, die, as all of us will, but this distant sorrow doesn’t diminish the simple gift which has been bestowed upon me, its unexpected blossoming.

“belle”

Sauna

Terri Brown-Davidson “Every time we work we commit suicide a little.” -Andrew Wyeth I love to touch women when my fingers smell rotten. Tempera, that’s what does it—makes your skin smell like rotten eggs though it’s great for painting, gives you a texture that’d wake you with a hard-on if you dreamed about it. Sometimes they run, Betsy does, or Carolyn, when they know I’ve had my fingertips dipped into the stuff and I start chasing them for sport. Christina loved the smell. Sometimes I’d sneak up behind her when she was dozing on her chair, splay my fingers open across her face just to startle her awake, laughing and gagging. Now Christina’s dead, and I can’t remember how to paint anymore, though the ghost of that stench lingers, wakes me in the night when I roll over onto my hands and it all comes wafting up: Christina’s guttural bray, the way she’d slap my ass, my boots, whatever she could reach when I’d misbehaved again.

Dead for three days—Christ. And me hopeless, aroused.

Months before Christina died, it started to happen, the slow slippage every painter dreads. I’d wake quietly, heart palpitating, pulse racing so fast I was drowning in my own blood. I never let Betsy know, though, just crawled out of bed, the sheet clinging like wet skin, crept into the bathroom full of Betsy’s pink roses, splashed my face with ice water, and thought: Andrew Wyeth, if you don’t want to die by the age of fifty-one, you’d better fucking find a new interest...now.

And I did. One day after Christina’s death.

It arrived unannounced, as does everything else in my life: Betsy and her bullying ways; Pa’s death in the car at the railroad crossing; Christina, a wreck of a woman, who made me one of the most famous

men in the world by rousing me from another attack of “blank brains,” by thrashing up a hill across some dead grass. Yes—everything dries up, and when I painted a pony in a field, and Lincoln Kirstein said, “Andy, that’s a horsey Christina’s World,” I realized that everything’d gone to shit and I’d better renew myself, fast. We were going to look at the chicken house: George Erickson’d made some renovations, though God knew why we had to see them, Betsy and I. It’s not as if we were farmers or knew anything about that shit. He’d done something with the roosts, he said, though I barely remember what. When we entered the henhouse, there was a storm of red and white feathers and a stench of decay and dust, eggs broken, rotten; my face was instantly covered with it, and I caught Betsy rubbing her mouth.

“I’ve added another row of roosts,” George said.

What the fuck did I care?

The car was still idling; he’d flagged us down in the road as we’d tried to pass, and Betsy made me stop to be polite. But I was about done with it. George never struck me as quite right in the head. Maybe it was that he was as old and sunburned as red dirt—over seventy—I thought, and looking at him reminded me of my own mortality, the last thing I’d rather think about. “That’s all,” George said, glowering at our reactions. He kicked open the slatted wooden door. Betsy fidgeting, magnificent in a black riding suit, a black pillbox hat: though the year was ‘68, she’d never quite recovered from Camelot, the elegance of Jackie O. We were exhaling, long and hard, the feather-dust in our lungs when we saw her. She was leaning against the porch railing, her arms crossed: a full-bodied girl of thirteen or so in a bikini, though it was November, and snow had been promised. Still, it was unseasonably warm, and there was no arguing with a young girl’s logic. The bikini was dark green, the shade of putrefaction, and at least one size too small. Her breasts swelled above the wire-rimmed top, her bottoms rode up on the insides of her thighs. I stiffened when I caught a glimpse of pubic shadow. I swallowed, found my entire throat had gone numb. Her lank hair, dirty blonde, obviously uncombed, straggled down each side of her face, dull looking with grease—it might’ve been weeks since she’d washed

it. I pictured my fingers dipping into the tempera, lifting it to my nose, inhaling that stench. Like rotten eggs or shit—pure, glorious acid. I pictured my brush dipping into the tempera and painting her blonde-haired body so avidly I could taste it. I glanced over at Betsy, her face shut down, then back at the nubile young statue. No expression there. “That’s Siri,” George said. “That’s my daughter,” and when he smiled, his dentureless face caved. We didn’t discuss her on the ride home. What was there to say? But as we wound down the road, dust coughing up from beneath the tires, a raw wafting lavish as the earth itself floating brown against my window, I knew what she was thinking, could tell from her blackgloved knuckles tightening over the wheel. I fell in love with all my models, including Christina, who’d also threatened Betsy.

But that’s Betsy for you.

Always has to be in control—even though she could never fathom what real control is. She didn’t slam the car door when we got out, just went into the house, retreated to her room. We’d had separate rooms for a while now. Things worked out better that way: I didn’t want her on my mind too much. Smiling, I mounted the stairs behind her to my own private space, locked the door behind me. I lay down on the bed, touched the buttons on my shirt. Cold suddenly, I sat up, swung my shod feet beneath the covers, twitched the comforter up. I wanted to let that image of Siri, plump and delicious as a pigeon, pass before my mind, over and over, before I decided what to do with her. Betsy—of course—had to have known I’d go back. Christina’s funeral would take place in two days, and decorum dictated I stay away from the Ericksons’, though my thoughts floated over and around Siri in her pus-green bikini. I sat in the schoolhouse studio, didn’t paint while Betsy lounged on the window seat, kicking the pumps off her delicately arched feet, chatting on the phone about purchasing the mill which—in its state of utter rot—had long been my refuge. I stared at my dry-bristled brushes, gazed out the window, picked at an elbow scab. Finally, I

picked up my coat and left. Betsy, scrutinizing the receiver in her hand, never seemed to notice. I didn’t know what I expected to find. But Siri Erickson had already become, for me, that perfect combination of ripeness and rot guaranteed to hold my attention. It was a day so frigid both snakes and sparrows had taken refuge, my breath preceding me up the road, white, melting clouds. My chest clutched when I spotted the house. Like the Tower of Pisa it leaned, gray clapboard with a cracked stone chimney, dirty, coiling smoke. I hesitated, fingers coupling with my thumbs. Then, I walked up to the door. Mrs. Erickson answered. “Mr. Wyeth?” she asked, and I nodded. She looked like a SwissMiss hausfrau, though not at all attractive. Still, she had Siri’s longish face, gray-green eyes. She scrutinized me for a second, stepped aside. Mr. Erickson was seated in a battered armchair of some indeterminate pattern, sucking a pipe. “Andy,” he said. I caught a motion, a flash of whitened flesh. Siri was gone before I could see her. “What--?” I started to ask, and Mr. Erickson answered, “Puttin’ some clothes on. Makin’ herself decent.”

I gazed at him, wondering.

He was her father, after all.

I wouldn’t return till after the funeral. Couldn’t, really. It wasn’t right. All the way up to the burial site, as Betsy and I followed the hearse that bore that sad-legged, disintegrating body, I was fantasizing about Siri, gazing at the dense green pines that surrounded her house, wondering if I’d be allowed to penetrate that house more deeply and what I would find. Betsy in a black veil beside the grave, netting draped over her eyes. “Ashes to ashes,” the minister said, opening his fingers: a sprinkling. I passed the grave, gazed down at the coffin—they were always so big. I stared at the polished wood seconds longer than was seemly: a massive face, a wall-eyed gaze, Christina’s sailor bray, her heavy body writhing through dust toward the stairs, urine pooling, steaming beneath her favorite chair, images, images—the pale, protruding belly of a girl whose crossed arms couldn’t hide her breasts.

Pink nipples? Or red?

Maybe brown.

Betsy touched my back, urging me on.

I opened my hand, let my dirt scatter.

It was wrong to get up at dawn, I told myself, with Christina just buried. It was wrong to approach the house, but I did it anyway on cat feet that, even in boots, barely disturbed a leaf. I climbed the porch quietly, stood there, trying to absorb as much of Siri’s presence—her unabashed sexual energy—as I could.

Then, I crept closer to the unblinded window.

The sun slanting warm, watery, across the porch, simmering; the thick dust coating the window like a skin, making it difficult to see in. Still, I managed, one eye pressed against glass. There was the armchair from yesterday, one of George Erickson’s rifles propped against it, muzzle-up. I chuckled, studying it, certain it was loaded. George Erickson lived unblinking with blood all around him: battered kids, gutted deer, slaughtered pigs. Blood. I tested the knob: it turned. Rubbing my eyes, ashamed, I stepped away, gazed off to the left and spotted a building I’d never seen before, a ragtag assortment of rough-hewn boards. What the hell’s that, I wondered. George’d never invited me around to look.

I stepped off the porch.

When I entered the unlocked building, a smell of sweat and urine assaulted me, a mustier undercurrent of feces, so—for a minute—I thought I was in an outhouse. The building was very narrow inside, a white bottle of something on one of two wooden benches built in. I reached down, palmed the bottle, examined it: “Gelt’s Rubbing Lotion.” Then I saw the white towels laid out on both benches, the iron stove in a corner—rust-streaked, brown and red and gray—with a half-dozen fist-sized rocks inside. I laughed and sobered fast.

A sauna. I was in a fucking sauna.

A rush of white light against the far wall: I turned, bumped up against her. Siri, barefoot in pink pajamas with little pink elephants, her sticky blonde hair matted, had entered soundlessly behind me.

“Mr. Wyeth,” she said, and rubbed her sleep-gummed lids. “Oops,” she said, “wrong building.”

I studied her drugged, thick-lidded face. “Sleepwalking?” I asked.

She eyed me, yawned, covering her whole mouth with two fingers.

I hesitated. “Siri. I was just—looking around.”

She stared, eyes unflinching. “Why?”

She was so close I tasted the mustiness of her breath. Buttered toast before bedtime? A hit from George’s Jack Daniel’s bottle? Fingers between her legs, licked?

I gazed into her eyes. Her pupils dilated.

“Mr. Wyeth,” she said. “I have to take a shit.” The door banged closed behind her. I traced my finger along the roughened wood, mesmerized, hoping for splinters, anything I could take away. So crude, I thought. So crude...and yet so lovely. To paint a body is to own it. But I’d never been a painter of nudes, only landscapes. I blame my father for that. “Andy,” he used to say. “Don’t you ever paint a woman ‘down there,” and hell, I’d listened to that crap because what did I know? He was NC Wyeth, the great illustrator; he owned a Rolls Royce, movie stars visited him, and I was just another nonentity in that house crammed with Wyeths. By the time I’d figured out he was wrong, he was dead and I hadn’t forgiven him. Plus, I’d already perfected my artistic “sleight of hand,” painting objects into landscapes and then obliterating them though the charge of their presence still lingered, that indefinable “something” that blues the air, makes it electric, even if you’re only gazing at a bowl, a spoon, on a battered wooden table. I was older, though, now. I was an old man, it was 1968, and I wanted to take a chance.

Siri was my chance.

I wanted to follow her into the outhouse, visit her in all her naturalness, which I figured was sick though it’s the acid in life that attracts me. But George might encounter us, blow my sorry head to ash, and I wouldn’t have my few years left to paint. So I decided to do the

civilized thing: go up to her house, court her. George nodded as if he’d been expecting me, swung the door wide, lips sticky with cereal. “Siri,” he said, sleepily. “You want to see Siri?” and I nodded, ribs contracting. “Want to sit down?” George asked, “have some breakfast?” and I shook my head no. Already I’d accomplished my goal—penetrated the house. I walked across the floor, crossed the living room, and was standing beside the plaid armchair, threads hanging down. To my left was the kitchen, the walls mucky with cook-smoke, three filthy plates littered with sausage on the table, bluebottles circling over the mess. Where most people would’ve been repulsed, I was excited. Squalor I found fascinating for what it implied about the human spirit, and not always the obvious. And now Siri came in through a back door at the end of the hallway, hitching up her pajama bottoms as she strolled. To my surprise, I saw that the end of the hallway was, itself, a back door—one that opened directly into the outhouse.

I decided to test the brackwaters.

“George,” I said. “Mind if I take a leak?”

He nodded, indifferent. “Door’s in the back.”

I smiled at Siri, who stared up at me blankly. I ventured into the hall. Flies hung thick in a green-blue, wavering cloud, a feces pungency wafting in through the door.

Trembling, I approached.

I was afraid somebody’d catch me. Bust in, invade my privacy. For an artist and a voyeur, I was a surprisingly modest man. But I was determined to accomplish something while I was here, so I reached out, held the door closed with my foot. Crude, yes, and I reminded myself of nothing so much as a dog marking his territory. Minutes passed. A fly, wings lit green with the small splashes of sun through the slats, buzzed against my cheek. I swiped it away, glanced down for paper, discovered a small stack of drawings Siri’d made—stick figures in dance-attitudes of abandon—chuckled.

We were kindred spirits, after all.

I walked back in hitching up my pants. Nobody was watching for me, waiting. Siri’d changed her clothes, was sprawled on the wooden

floor in a halter top and shorts, shockingly short, that’d reminded me of Betsy’s get-up when we met, when I stumbled up to the wrong house and Betsy came up behind her mother in these shorts up to there and high heels, for God’s sake. Siri had a book spread open on the floor, pressing the pages flat. George was sitting in his recliner, stroking his pipe. “Where’s Mrs. Erickson?” I asked. Both of them shrugged. Then I heard it: a distant, muffled sound, and I guessed where she was though I needed their permission to look. I leaned behind George’s chair, grasped the headrest, gazed down at his dime-sized bald spot, his thinning, wispy hair. “Andy,” he said. “You know what we should do? Go get us a buck.” Fuck that, I thought, but found myself nodding though my gaze stayed riveted on Siri’s half-nude back.

“Sure, George,” I said. “That’s a plan.”

George stood up, switched the TV on to a program about fishing: I watched a trout being gutted then asked, “D’you mind if I paint Siri? Visit her mother?” and he nodded. “Ever watch this show?” he asked. “It’s got all kinds of shit about tackle and shit.” I didn’t respond, just headed upstairs. Because this was how I felt free—traveling the house at will. I didn’t have a key to the front door but soon would, an attic where I might set up supplies. Since Christina’d died, I’d kept painting at the schoolhouse, though Betsy wanted to sell it, barter—Christ!—my entire fucking life. Wanted to buy that dilapidated mill, move us in once she’d renovated it.

Stupid woman. Love gave a person too many rights.

But now I was living in the moment, moving up the Ericksons’ splitting wooden stairs, the boards squeaking like animals, nails sticking out everywhere. I knew which room would be hers. I had a very keen nose, and her perfume—Tabu or something equally cheap, sordid—came flooding under the door. I could guess why she’d put it on. To comfort herself, living with that ridiculous old man and her too nubile daughter. Plus, I understood about sick rooms. Depression. I’d been a sickly boy growing up, stayed

in bed half my childhood, and—after Pa died on the tracks, that train bearing down too fast for him to breathe or scream—I’d fallen into a hole.

Everything was black in there—muddy walls, a fetid stench.

I’d fallen into that hole, and some days I went right back in.

I rapped with my knuckles. “Mrs. Erickson?”

No response. I pushed the door open. The shades were drawn, the room dark. It took moments for my eyes to adjust, to see her little form heaped under the blankets, her blonde hair on the pillow.

I approached.

“I’m Andy,” I said, sitting on the bed beside her. She stared back, her eyes a wash of black pupils—valium? “I’m going to be painting Siri for a while. In and out of the house. So...I didn’t want you to be startled when you saw me.” She looked at me with those pupil-drowned eyes. Her thin hand rose from beneath the blanket toss, traveled closer. I kept staring. “Make sure she eats good,” she said, and I smiled. “Her father don’t look out for her much.”

Then she rolled over, dragging the blankets behind her.

I went downstairs with an air of greater authority. A rainbow trout studied me one-eyed from the TV. “Siri,” I said. “Let’s go out to the sauna and paint. Have you got a towel?” She nodded, scrambled to her feet, obedient as a puppy. I still felt cautious, though, around George and his goddamned gun.

“George,” I said. “Sure that’s okay with you? That I paint her?”

He waved one hand in reply.

“I’m here, Mr. Wyeth,” Siri said, clutching a colorless towel she dragged across the floor. “You need anything else?” “I just need to walk back home and get my paints. Wait for me in the sauna, all right?” me.

“I got nothing better to do,” Siri said, and headed on out before

It was easy to evade Betsy; I’d been doing it three-quarters of my life. I gathered up my supplies. It was starting to snow when I hiked back to the Ericksons’. I’m a man addicted to contrasts, and this one was delicious, snow heaping up slow and white as a dream, and—inside the sauna, I conjured—Siri sitting on the bench, though I didn’t dare picture her naked. And then I was walking up to the sauna, not dream-walking anymore, the door ajar. Siri, smaller-looking than I expected, was sitting with her back toward me, leaning forward to stoke the rock coals in the stove, clutching one of the white towels against her breasts. She didn’t hear me come in. The curve of her spine, the delicate pale vertebrae, the tiny pad of flesh at the top of her buttocks, the buttocks themselves, high, tight, reddened and slick-looking, the muscles coiling as she leaned forward so I caught just a glimpse of the sway of her breasts—I picked up a towel, positioned it in front of me. Coughed. She dropped her own towel, leaned over and grabbed it, turned around, seated herself facing me on the bench, double-wrapped the towel under her armpits. “Mr. Wyeth,” she said, and stared at where I’d placed my towel, her cheeks glistening, her hair running rivulets onto her narrow, shiny shoulders, her legs thinner than I’d hoped for, little sticks. “Siri,” I said, and gazed into her eyes until I felt I could drop the towel. I didn’t care about my reaction, though Betsy’d shoot me if she found out. Between Siri and me, I figured, it was only the first stage of intimacy. She smiled, her lips twitching gently. I smiled back then covered my mouth with my hand: conspirators. Still scrutinizing her, fingering the wool padding on my coat collar, I sat down on the bench opposite: if I shifted forward, our knees would brush.

“Mr. Wyeth,” Siri said. “Mr. Wyeth?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“The sauna’s going,” she said. “You’ve got a coat on.”

“Oh. Of course,” I said, and unbuttoned it rapidly, shrugged it off, wondering which one of us felt more naked.

As the sauna grew hotter, the towel grew damper, and the outline of her body emerged: I could just see, though in the most shadowy way imaginable, the buds of her breasts, the bones tracing her hips. Her face’s mottling spread until she looked ill, sallow and wet. But her eyes never wavered. Locked against my gaze, they seemed to float toward me out of the steam, gray-washed and whispering of an ocean, dark green as a forest swept by rain; they shifted color, those eyes, that chameleon-stare unnerving me. I’d glance up and her gaze wouldn’t lift to meet mine. She’d been staring at me all along, at the top of my head or at a damp place on the wall behind me. “I have to go home,” I said suddenly, and she nodded. “But it’s been marvelous. Marvelous. Would you like to pose for me again, Siri?”

She hesitated.

“Maybe,” she said, and my heart swam in its blood.

I completed the first painting in the schoolroom studio, Siri wrapped up to the armpits in that near-colorless towel. Sometimes, in between bouts of a trance-state so deep I’d find myself wandering like an automaton toward the window, my fingers peeling the shade up to brown rolling hills which reminded me of my father, stolid like him, breathing like him, the oxygen of their soil mingling with the ghost of his blood to produce a new ether. I realized that his bones must have split, yellowed, gone to rot, and yet—whenever I looked at those hills— he was with me again. And it struck me, as I swirled my brush in a new terra-cotta hue I thought just right for the towel, that what I was doing wasn’t so different from what Charles Dodgson had done when he photographed Alice in a red kimono, with a parasol, or posed his other subjects naked on an overstuffed sofa. Was Dodgson a pornographer? Was I? My father would think so. But I needed Siri to keep my cells charged, to convince myself I hadn’t fallen into decrepitude. Betsy at breakfast: I looked at her and wished she hadn’t brushed her hair, that she’d come slouching to the table in a blue terrycloth robe with tacky gold stars. She must’ve felt me scrutinizing her, looked up from her hard-boiled egg, still clutching the spoon. Her business suit was perfect: a delicate shade of cream, her red lipstick exquisite.

I wanted to kill her.

“Andy,” she said, “I looked at your painting.”

“You did?” I’d covered it with a dropcloth. She had no right. “It’s not what you think,” I said. “Betsy—her father gave me permission.” “What I think,” she said, rising with her drained coffee cup, walking in high heels toward the sink, “is that you’re a chickenshit, Andy.” I stared. “You think Olympia was painted with a towel?” She leaned against the sink, one leg arched forward. “Cat got your tongue?” she mocked, then said, “Strip her bare, Andy. Fuck it, man—paint her nude or not at all.”

I was examining my toast, its buttered crevices devourable.

I decided to pretend I was one of the family. So this time I didn’t knock. If they were lions and I looked like a leopard, I’d never blend in. I lifted the latch, opened the door, stepped into the living room. George was in his recliner, rifle across his knees. Siri, topless and in shortshorts, lounged beside the chair. I stared and then looked away.

“George,” I said. “What’re you doing with the gun?”

His sleepy eyes lifted, booze-bloodied, veined.

“Andy,” he said. “Thought you and me were going huntin’.”

“George,” I said. “I have to paint.”

“All the time?” he asked.

“All the time.”

He seemed to consider it.

“Well,” he finally said, “s’pose you and the girl had best run along.” He looked at her and said, “Get going,” like it was an order. She looked at him, not blinking. But I couldn’t leave with her yet. It wasn’t finished: where I could go, what I could do. Tugging my ear, I said, “Do you mind if I paint her as she is? I mean—you know—natural.” He shifted in his chair. His blue eyes taking in her aureoles: while he looked, I looked, too, then felt ashamed. “That’s fine,” he said. “Show her as she is. Show the world as she is. She’d like that, the little whore.”

Her gaze never wavered.

We were seated across from each other when I thought, I wish I were religious. Because—the way I figured it—you had to feel something more for God than you did for a young girl’s breasts. A more profound sensation of—what? Beauty? Loss? I didn’t know. But, when I gazed at those pink aureoles, the lightly erected nipples, those breasts that weren’t even fully developed yet, I felt some part of myself go sliding out of my body, float toward the ceiling, squeeze out between a crack, and then I wasn’t Andy anymore but this something, this incredible something, streaming out into the bright blue, cloudless sky over the outhouse and the long reeking hallway and George Erickson’s gun and the TV tuned to the fishing channel and Mrs. Erickson, asleep, finally asleep, alone in a darkened bedroom. I drew in my breath. My painting hand never wavered. Her towel slipped off her lap and I rose, quietly, to adjust it.

Terri’s Brown-Davidson’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than 1,000 journals, including Triquarterly, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto Del Sol, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She’s received, among other honors, an AWP Intro Award for Poetry and the New Mexico Writer’s Scholarship for fiction.

“greaser”

In Orbit

Eric Hawthorn Out the window: Mars. They saw Earth a little while ago. Mercury and Venus are tucked into the sunlight somewhere behind them. The wife sits up in bed with her husband zonked out beside her. They have been in orbit for one year and one month, Earth time. Every room of their spinning home goes through an entire day/night cycle in about 60 minutes—each room subjected to a time-lapse sweep, shadows stretching and diminishing, the house a lantern in reverse. Their house plants have more or less adjusted. The wife gets up and looks for her slippers as sunlight leaks into the room. Clothes are strewn about: sweatpants, socks, the negligee she wore earlier at her husband’s behest for just a few minutes of rote foreplay. Her husband breaks wind and mutters something in a chewing way. She draws the blinds. There’s a smell, not her husband’s, creeping into the bedroom. The cat. Probably their cat left another mess down the hall. (Her husband’s snoring recedes.) There it is, waiting for a hapless foot at the top of the stairs. It’s solid, at least. Where did she leave the air freshener? The wife goes downstairs for a paper towel. The dark kitchen is bisected by a slot of light coming in from the den. The stripe shines across the stove and linoleum, lights up the canister trash can and traces the dent her husband kicked in its side. There are dishes in the sink and a swarm of stars out the window. They pass other stations out here, each one spinning in its own quiet orbit. (Creaking steps above: her husband is up.) Sometimes, the wife will sit at her telescope and watch their distant, temporary neighbors in their single-family orbits. She’ll see these couples through their windows, cooking or eating, doing laundry or fighting or fucking, always orbiting, always spinning. Now and then, a neighbor will stand at the window and look out at the solar system, palms pressed to the glass like a trapped animal. Eric Hawthorn studied writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which is a real thing. It’s a writing program out in Colorado. Now Eric lives in Philadelphia, where he writes disembodied fiction and works at a real estate company. His stories are published or forthcoming in such journals as LIT, decomP, Thrice Fiction, and Spork. He is the founder and curator of FictionFeed.net, a showcase for the internet’s most interesting flash fiction.

Finding Space for Sleep Dan Lewis

Why the cerebrum is severely folded. A map so mutable we are unable to name it. Can you recall what happens next? If it is true that forgetting has not been proved, then the smell of lamb roasting in the oven is my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s San Francisco apartment in 1954. The dead persist in remembering Thursday. The old dog, blind in one eye, descends the stair backwards. Not everyone hears what is seen. Spilt milk could just be the beginning of redemption. One closet full of brooms, another of dead birds. To maintain the lucid dream, move always in an upward direction. There is nothing that is not metaphor.

Dan Lewis lives on the edge of the Patch Reservoir in Worcester, MA. Winner of the 2012 Frank Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hara Prize, he is the author of two chapbooks, Tickets for the Broken Year and Iconospheres, as well as a full-length poetry collection, This Garden. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bombay Gin, Diner, Blue Unicorn, and others.

Tuesday in Morningview, Kentucky Ryan Kauffman

What can you do in 10 minutes? I can read the chapter about Lucie standing outside La Force prison in the A Tale of Two Cities paperback I couldn’t finish in tenth grade, or stare at the Live, Laugh, Love stencil on my kitchen wall as I walk on the Pro-form treadmill I’ve turned on only once since I placed it beside the stove. I can revise a crumpled letter about my feelings I never gave to Krystal before she died—the one with words like heartbeat and Erato and destiny, and pick my Takamine 6-string, pretending I’m writing a song worth hearing— one not titled “Hold On” or “Without You.” Or, I can do nothing. Just sit here and listen to a coal train rumbling over the metronome of crickets. Sit here and inhale dewed grass and bark set aflame with motor oil. Sit here and feel the sticky valley air rush my skin like a flock of geese taking flight. Sit here and watch as the stars begin their nightly show above the turning leaves of my backyard’s giant oaks, renaming the constellations Blackjack and Wally after my childhood pets. The moon comes out from its nest of clouds, says that darkness is defined only by its contrast to light, that the moon itself is more than just a mirror reflecting yesterday’s sun. It makes a silhouette of the raccoon raiding my trashcan filled with worn out t-shirts, a dirty aluminum lasagna pan, and empty Samuel Adams bottles. And I watch him—how he tips the can with habitual precision, rips the bag with his razor nails, plunges headlong as if mining a blasted nook for black gold, and emerges with my old Big Pete’s House of Munch softball jersey clutched between his scavenger’s teeth. He sniffs at the breeze, nostrils flaring and constricting as he takes in the valley air. The distance between us closes. His eyes seem to announce some forgotten raccoon truth—that food should always be washed before consumption, perhaps, or that our lives are products of habit. Surely, though, an animal without upper-brain function couldn’t

possibly understand the memories evoked by the ragged co-ed league shirt in his mouth. I wonder what he remembers: the rusted dumpster outside P.F. Chang’s Chinese Bistro on the north side of Cincinnati filled with day-old lettuce and cooking grease, the Ford Explorer’s tires squealing as it swerved to miss him on US 27, the coyote’s piercing howl, my sister’s attic. Still, he stares at me as if I am no longer the observer, as if I wasn’t from the start. Another coal train sounds its horn in the distance. His head jets in its direction, then back at me. Then, in one movement, he slams his dexterous palm down on the corner of the shirt and snaps his head toward the sky. The first rip is a sudden scream of white noise. He rips again, and again, until shards of blue shirt, some with orange letters, lay in front of him in a heap of useless fabric. When he’s finished, he buries his snout in the trash bag one more time, finds nothing of interest, and scurries through the cornfield in the darkness. I can do this, but I choose one of the six fat-burning workouts on the treadmill. I walk four miles per hour on a five percent incline and run through chord progressions in my head; D to G to A, Cm to Fm to Bb, Em7 to Dsus2 to Cadd9. I listen to Jane Aker’s smooth voice intone “gone, like a shadow over the white road” as I follow the swooping letters on the wall, still trying to find the right words to say what I once meant, and the timer slowly ticks backward from 10.

Ryan Kauffman studies in the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. His previous work has appeared in New Plains Review, Punchnel’s, and Poetry Quarterly. When he’s not writing, he walks the shore of Lake Superior with his trusty shih-tzu sidekick, Dr. Watson.

Waiting It Out Michael Phillips

The power’s out and not coming back. We watch the lightning from bed, arms folded under chin, facing the window onto the yard. We hold our breath in the hefty silence between flash and boom, counting the storm’s distance by seconds. A gust rips through the chestnut. If it falls, let it fall that way, away from our new home. I think of the places we’ve lived and left, the rooms decorated and deserted, all the places we’ve shed layers of ourselves. Each impermanent and essential as a breath. We wait out the night, through wind and bottomless dark, as we have on so many nights, and in the morning start again. Michael Phillips has published work in the Roanoke Review (forthcoming), Stone

Highway Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Monongahela Review, Pebble Lake Review, and many others. He holds an MA in English and works as an editor

for a nonprofit healthcare research institute outside Philadelphia. He lives in Downingtown with his wife and will be welcoming a daughter this spring.

What Might Come After You Rachna Kulshrestha

It is early afternoon when I decide to re-arrange your closet. The sun is kilted with clouds, spouting heat on the far end of the horizon. I glance at the bathroom mirror and see the dust assembling into a portrait of our relationship. I fold your slacks, pair the slippers, and pick up newspaper cuttings. I imagine you standing here not too long ago with frowned eyebrows over round, gold-rimmed glasses settled on your Afghani nose and striped pajamas below your dense belly, holding a bunch of pages and a pair of scissors. For me, you were not made of bones and blood but alive with head-to-toe contradictions and rare, loving glances in your curious eyes. Your long torso and broad shoulders carried the weight of our dead and only son and later, my pounding fists when you could not bear to see me beating my chest anymore. Your feet occasionally scratched and bled my skin, waking me up when I sobbed in my sleep. You soothed me with plush fingers that wove intricate designs on high quality wool and silk. Your rugs were as conceited as your glare after a hot day had passed with good food and satisfying sex. Often, you looked like my father, bulging with the confidence of knowing everything. You had strong hunger and it reflected every time you got up from the dinner table blurry eyed and confused, even after consuming a full meal. I sift through the shirts that are older, and dear to you. One of them has a blood stain from the day when you accidentally cut yourself. It was the same day you found out you had diabetes. You cried like a baby. You said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was fighting the unfairness of life with sugar and Allah took my candy.â&#x20AC;? I watched you the entire day; I followed you in your studio as you pulled and pushed silk between spaces where stubborn air accumulated. As far as I know, it was the only day when you did not pray.

Once, I had a dream in which your desire swelled like a huge tongue devouring a mountain of sweets in one swipe. When I woke up, you were unusually calm, as if the dream was real and your willingness to indulge was a way to convey your grief. Diabetes did get the best of your body. You filled the studio with unfinished designs, aimless threads. You stayed in bed most of the time, pretending to be asleep. When the midday glare settled into soft pink evening, you asked for minted ice tea and speculated what you might like for dinner. After a month, on a quiet Ramadan evening, you passed away, your eyes half-open, staring at the picture of our son with a faint hope. I stood next to you watching your frame as if I didn’t know who you were. As a couple, we led each other into our hearts and stayed there for a while. And in some frivolous moments, I realized my love for you. The rest of the time, I tried to understand my devotion but took it as a by-product of being married to someone for a long time. However, you always loved me with a constant fervor, sarcasm, and anger. During my frequent outbursts when I cursed our marriage, you always corrected me: “Fight with me Begum, not our relationship.” I open the trash bags and stuff your belongings inside, catching the sight of the chenille duvet we bought in Cairo. The one on which you bargained for hours. When I called it a labor of someone’s love, you exclaimed, “Begum, it’s just a duvet!” “It is more,” I fumed, trying hard to dismiss you. “But what would a rug weaver know of love?” You wrinkled your nose. “How else would a weaver push those threads into places where it hurts the most? But in the end, it’s just a rug, sold for the right price.” I push the duvet into the trash bag. And like a torn page from a history book, I try to anticipate what might come after you. It’s like following dappled sunlight play across a dense forest floor, not knowing which leaf will blaze and which will stay in shade, hoping to be discovered.

Hunger

Rachna Kulshrestha

Standing near the vending machine, I count coins. I remember stuffing a mutilated dollar in my back pocket. But for someone like me who weighs over two hundred and eighty pounds, it’s an impossible task to reach my rear without getting out of breath. “Mouth big enough to swallow a ship, appetite as much as a starving hyena,” my father used to say.

Spicy Doritos or sour cream onion chips?

I jerk my chin towards the soda machine, licking my lips. Reminds me of Mama. She used to lick her lips in her sleep. Those days after she fed all of us and slept with a droning stomach. Her mouth opening and closing in her sleep as if she was chewing cud. The next day, she’d work without eating much. I can still smell the kerosene. I can still hear the slight hiss of gas near the flame of a stove as I push the Doritos in. I sense a layer of red dust settling over my teeth. I remember how I sat near the broken steps and waited for dinner—how the first bite tasted, the next, and the last. Especially the last bite that I always delayed to convince myself that I was full. “Hunger is in your mind,” Mama often said, looking at me. “It isn’t feeding but craving that keeps you going in life.” I’d nod and disappear, and think of her clicking tongue with those rising buds—stuck on the ceiling of her mouth like crawling insects feeding on stale air. And it calmed me for a few seconds. The last supper I had with her was in her hospital room, six months ago. I ran out of patience watching her chemo-sucked fingers struggling to open a sealed yogurt. I wanted to stuff it into her, making up for those hungry nights, all of it—the small heap of peas, the light butter over the potato skins, the invisible salt tickling between spaces— waiting for her. Instead she stared at her plate with indifference as if she

gained control of her craving long ago. I wipe my pulpy fingers and my pale nails. Food stuck in edges. I touch my face. It hurts. I try to smile but I cannot. The layers of skin, the folds of fat, absorb it. Whether absence of food or surplus, hunger has its way.

I lick my lips.

Rachna Kulshrestha lives in McKinney, TX with her husband and two teenage kids. She moved from India to the United States two decades ago and is an electrical engineer by profession. Her work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in

Redactions, Jersey Devil Press, Prime Number, Dewpoint, FlapperHouse, 2 Bridges Review and Columbia Journal of Literature and Art Online.

Wham, Bam, Thank You, Spam Mark Brazaitis

They come to me with their misspellings and their blatant broadcasts of my deficiencies. I cannot be angry—they are right, all of them: BestLayEver@behardforoncetonite.com and LongTimeNoSee@LilliputianPenis.com and HeartAttack@avoidnow.com. All I can say to my screen is, “How did you know?” How do the masters of spam know that I am suffering simultaneously from cancer, colitis, cystic fibrosis, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and low self-esteem brought about by all of the above plus a titanically small penis and a case of erectile dysfunction so severe all my underwear are stitched with the words “Out of Order.” It’s as if they not only see my soul but my CAT scan and my PET scan, my bedroom and my bowel movements. They know me like no lover could. No, I wouldn’t confess to my best friend half of what they understand about me. Yet despite my failings of body and in bed, they love me. They will never forsake me. And in return I needn’t do anything but be colossally imperfect and buy, buy, buy— or hit delete.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of six books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and a book of poetry, The Other Language, winner of the 2009 ABZ Poetry Prize. His latest book, Truth Poker: Stories, won the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Competition.

We Endure Flipp Velgach

I have a permanent sensory file labeled “that staircase on Devon Avenue.” Even Chicago’s cockroaches knew to keep their distance. But I didn’t have that liberty. The steps were lined with a thinning carpet, the green of a once-cheerful Christmas tree, its paisley pattern a cluster of deformed teardrops. Aesthetics aside, the carpet had absorbed every odor that’s graced the stairway since the day it was laid down in the 70s, back when my parents were still living in the Soviet Republic of Shortages and Propaganda. The narrow and unventilated space smelled like human must, faintly masked by the chemical tinge of failed attempts at cleaning it. Twelve years later, the stench is still firmly and accurately lodged in my mind. I dreaded the thought of laboring up that narrow staircase, too small for a child in a puffy winter coat—it’s an unsolved mystery that the very rotund Mira Petrovna made her way up without getting stuck. Each Saturday between the 4th and 7th grade, I took one breath at the bottom of the stairs and did not—for the love of God—exhale until I was all the way up and safe. Safe was a relative term. Mira was an archetypal Soviet woman. She was also my math tutor. Her disciplinary style was forged in the classrooms of a hardnosed Soviet system, and her roundness was inherited from the motherland’s exclusively carb- and starch-bound diet, all bread and potatoes. She was as compassionate as winter in a post-War gulag, governing our meetings with the iron fists of a mustachioed dictator: “That’s not how it works!” she’d shout in Russian as she ripped the pencil from my hand and stabbed out the equations. Every Saturday morning was a two-hour sentence that, for a prepubescent, was not much different than the barbed wire-enclosed wooden prison in Siberia that I heard too many horror stories about. Her preferred form of torture was an intense experimental mental drubbing—algebra. I was not seeing Mira because I was falling behind; quite the contrary. As most kids with immigrant parents can attest, I was there to

excel at math in order to show up my American classmates. My mom worked overtime to cover the twenty-dollar weekly fee. It was a lot of money for a family that shopped at Aldi. The tutoring—or preparation for mathematic genius, as my mom saw it—paid off. I could work out inverse functions and do some complicated stuff with circles. My public school curriculum was at least four years behind. But the motivation to out-math my Midwest-born classmates did not make Mira Petrovna and her breath of cured meats any more bearable. I hated going there. There were only three ways out. The easiest and most frequently used option was to fake a serious illness. Many Saturday mornings were spent with stomachaches, debilitating migraines, and puppy lips, always followed by a swift midday recovery. A second and more long-term option was to move on to calculus, which was taught by Yuri, Mira’s benevolent yet equally stern husband. The third option would involve a phone call to my mother from the local morgue. Quitting was not an option. I dreaded seeing Mira, but agonized even more over letting down my mamochka. I loved my mom—how could I possibly not go, or even entertain the thought? She always invested in my schooling and even took the blame for my affinity to tardiness; school administrators thought she could not work the American alarm clock. Polishing my elbows on the sandpaper-like plywood that Mira called a desk—that was a testament to my love for my mom…or perhaps fear of letting her down. Breathing the poisonous air trapped in that carpet was a small price to pay to show my mom that I appreciated what she did for me. But every time a piece of bologna sandwich flew out of Mira’s mouth and onto my notebook, I questioned that commitment. I hated spending my Saturday mornings challenged to think. I was envious of my classmates who were watching cartoons or playing basketball on the uneven pavement of our back alley, even if they were mathematically behind. I remember the day we captured that son of a bitch Saddam well! I was hyped up on acquired patriotism that I did not understand. But that glorious swing by the American hammer of justice was only the second best thing to happen that day. After months of deliberation, I finally braved up to ask my mom to quit. In the kitchen, she was stuffing chunks of beef through a meat-grinder.

“Mama…” I began.

“What?” She asked, turning at me, but skillfully continuing to push the meat through the filling tray.

After a painfully long pause, I asked the most important question

I would ask as a teen: “Can I please stop going to Mira’s?” “Sure,” she said unflinchingly and went back to turning the hand crank. I was caught off-guard with her response. Was her decision genuine or forced? Was her reply one of disappointment or indifference? Did my mom regret paying for my tutoring all those years? What was she thinking? I agonized again over my decision to quit Mira. It’s strange that what we put ourselves through for love and because of love are seldom the same. Only years later, when I was deciding which fraction of my granola bar to save for dinner, or whether it was worth paying the extra forty dollars to fly home versus taking a train, did I finally understand my mom’s reaction as she was churning out ground beef. She was relieved to save the weekly tutoring fee: our rent was on the rise, the Laundromat started to charge two dollars per load, and the quarters in the vacation jar slowly disappeared. My sister kept growing through sneakers and sweaters. Aldi’s bills kept growing into a melting pot of Wonder Bread and borscht. My parent’s paychecks never grew. They always stayed the same.

Filipp Velgach accidentally stumbled into writing, just like he stumbled into film-making and teaching. He could never hold a hobby or an interest and went where the wise winds took him. Trusting his intuition and seldom following logic his life has been challenge-filled but rewarding. Filipp now teaches social studies in Chicago, his hometown, and makes wood furniture from things found in trash bins and at thrift stores (a hobby he’s sure to give up on in the coming months).

Aphorism Steven Babin

Doctors confirmed my love’s death. I sulked. I sulked for days, days that turned into weeks spinning into months across nowhere. I barely left the couch. Missed her wet breath misting the back of my neck. I gulped a heavy weather, filled my earthly lungs. I became a hurricane blower and a terrible gale gasper. From a still moon zephyr Cassiel watched the world huffing and puffing and sucking. He saw me cursing God, fighting mortality with air. He whispered to me, “Hell is perpetual inhalation.” No one breathes in heaven, everyone is breathless.

S. Babin holds a BA in English Literature from the Ohio State University, and a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He lives with his family, and works in Columbus, Ohio. His work has been featured in Spark: A Creative Anthology; Bop Dead City; Cactus Heart; Star 82 Review; Bread & Beauty; and many more.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;give us something to dream aboutâ&#x20AC;?

A Burnt Offering Fred D. White

So what does it mean, I kept wondering, that a dealer in postage stamps for collectors wears a yarmulke, a beautifully embroidered one at that, as if this business of marketing philatelic stock and helping customers identify elusive varieties (differing watermarks, grills, perforations, frame-designs, coloration, whatnot), or haggling over a price? Did it convey for him some deeply spiritual pursuit akin to meticulous Talmudic textual exegeses? Or did he wear a skullcap on the job merely to let potential customers and browsers know he was a Jew? Who would care? Well, possibly Jewish collectors uneasy about doing business with non-Jewish dealers, or even non-observant Jewish dealers. His booth, one of three dozen so at the biannual stamp show hosted by one of the hotels in my city, sported a dark blue banner with white lettering: ABE BECKMAN, A.S.D.A. (American Stamp Dealers Association, members of which pledged to adhere to shared ethical philatelic business practices such as fair appraisals and accurate descriptions of material for sale), consisted of a cloth-covered countertop stacked with shoeboxes filled with acetate envelopes containing United States singles (mint and used), plate-number blocks, booklet panes, and coil strips. I pulled up a chair and greeted Mr. Beckman, who nodded with recognition (I’d first met him at the previous show four months earlier) and returned his attention to a customer’s collection he was in the process of appraising. “Take a good look at this gorgeous mint two-dollar Columbian” said the customer, pointing to the stamp in question. “Ever see such wide margins on that sucker? And make sure you don’t overlook its original-gum, never-hinged condition.” I understood the man’s obsession with the stamp’s gum: back then, a century before self-adhesive stamps, the glossy, age-toned original gum (as opposed to fake re-gumming of used but uncancelled specimens), possessed its own aesthetic appeal.

“In this business fifty years I don’t overlook,” mumbled Abe Beckman. He reached for a pair of tongs and carefully removed the stamp from its acetate mount. It was one of sixteen stamps that commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World; it also commemorated the Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, where the stamps had first been placed on sale. I craned my neck to get a closer look at the rarity. I had drooled over these stamps at stamp shows many times; most collectors of U.S. stamps dreamt of owning a complete set. The two-dollar issue depicted Columbus bound in chains after being arrested for misconduct by the Spanish judge Francisco de Bobadilla. The engraving was based on a famous painting by Emanuel Leutze (whose masterpiece was Washington Crossing the Delaware). It was a gorgeous stamp, post office fresh, as dealers would say; and N.H. (never-hinged; i.e., no gum disturbance from a glassine hinge that had been used for mounting the stamp in an album) as a dealer would say. “What a great set them Columbians are, huh?” said the man to Beckman. “My old man gave me that one many years ago when it wasn’t worth all that much.” He snickered—and suddenly shot me a mindyour-own-business look—but Beckman positioned his magnifier so I could inspect the stamp more easily. “Attractive set, yes, but not exactly my idea of a hero, if you ask me. This happens to be my favorite: ‘Columbus in Chains.’” Beckman chuckled, but the man only scowled at him.

Then Beckman turned the stamp over to inspect the gum.

The customer leaned forward. “Original gum, never hinged, as you can see.” He was high-strung with stringy, mouse-gray hair and a splotchy red face.

“Original gum, yes; but L.H., my friend; lightly hinged, not N.H.”

“What? No, you’re wrong. I—”

“See for yourself.” Beckman handed him the magnifier. “Light hinge mark, you can tell a mile away. What made you think never?” “My old man assured me...” The man squinted as he peered through the magnifier. Shit,” he muttered. “And here all this time I assumed...” “Not the end of the world; it’s still a beaut of a stamp, unusually well-centered for this issue, with boardwalk margins like you pointed out. Bright color. But of course the hinge mark...” Beckman shook his head. “That, as you must know, devalues it by quite a lot.”

“But the hinge mark is barely noticeable.”

“Nevertheless, a hinge mark is a hinge mark; it mars the gum. Never-hinged stamps from this era are rare.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Tell you what: I will give you two-thirds Scott for it—more generous than you’ll likely find anywhere else.”

The man harrumphed. “So you say.”

Beckman carefully replaced the stamp in its mount and returned the album to the customer. “I wish you luck finding a buyer.” There was a stunned silence. Then: “What’s this? You’re brushing me off, just like that?” Beckman abruptly turned to me, smiling. “And how may I help you, young man?”

“Well, I was wondering if you still carried—”

“I’m not finished here!” the man snapped.

Beckman turned his head.

“Two-thirds Scott? For a gem like this? That’s an insult.”

“I do not wish to bicker with you.”

“Make it full Scott.”

“Two-thirds.” Beckman returned his attention to me.

Suddenly the man shot to his feet, knocking over his chair. “Kike,” he spat. I prayed that Beckman had not heard it, but his darkened countenance made it obvious that he had. I suppressed the urge to smash my chair over the man’s head.

“I-I was wondering if you still carried Israel,” I said hastily.

Beckman continued to stare at the man as he stalked away; then he pointed at the banner behind him. “I sell U.S. exclusive. Some U.N.” “But at the last show,” I explained, “I purchased Israel tab singles from you.” He shrugged. “That was, what, four months ago?” He shifted attention to a new customer who had seated himself and begun riffling through a shoebox of plate blocks. “Let me know,” he chimed to the new customer, “if there is anything in particular you wish to see.” Then back to me: “It just so happens... Mr. Levy, is it?”

“You have a good memory.”

“It pays to remember my customers. Besides, I recall our lively conversation.” “It was mostly one way. You kept telling me fascinating stories behind the stamps I bought.”

“Stamps are a terrific way to learn about the world.”

“Yeah, I wish teachers would agree.”

He smiled. “Some teachers do. My daughter is one of them— works stamps into her history lesson plans. So, you say you collect Israel tabs?

I nodded.

“It just so happens I have tab singles from the mid-fifties and after; earlier than that, don’t even ask.” He retrieved a fat blue leather stock book from the bottom shelf. “A weak market for Israel right now, should improve soon, which is why I’ve put my Israel on ice. But for you I’ll make an exception. Here, browse. Everything is in reverse chronological order.” He watched as I opened the stock book and began studying the stamps; then he handed me a pair of tongs. “Be careful you do not snag the perforations on the pocket edges.” Since its establishment in 1948, Israel had been issuing, to my mind, exquisitely designed stamps with fascinating archaeological and biblical motifs, political heroes, scientific and humanistic enterprises, Shoah memorials. For each issue, the bottom selvage—the so-called tabs prized by collectors—of each pane bore quotations in Hebrew. When the stamps were used for postage, customers almost always discarded the tabs; hence many of the stamps issued before 1960 with tabs intact became scarce—and in a few cases prized rarities worth thousands of dollars. I began collecting Israel out of defiance: I had overheard a dealer say to a customer who asked to see Israeli stamps, “No Israel here, bud,” not looking up from a magazine. It sounded like a boast.

“Oh? And may I ask why?”

“Nothing but crap,” the dealer had said. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken once or twice. “Ain’t worth the paper they’re printed on.” The customer had stared at the dealer for a long moment, trying without success to meet his gaze; he then walked out, slamming the

door as hard as he could. Because of the contempt I felt for bigots who continued to walk the Earth, who had made my life miserable in more ways than I cared to remember, I made Israel my specialty. At the last stamp show I had told Beckman that story. He merely shrugged. “A Jew hater, one among millions. Why should that surprise you?” “In this day and age of presumed heightened multicultural awareness it surprises me.” I remembered how Beckman jerked his shoulders—his minimalist way of scoffing at my naivete, I’d assumed. “Then you have a great deal to learn about this day and age, Mr. Levy.” He opened his Israel stock book reverently and swiveled it around to face me. My eyes fell on a narrow rectangular stamp depicting the S.S. Shalom. “The Shalom was a lovely transatlantic liner,” Beckman explained then. “Haifa to New York, but it accidentally rammed a Norwegian vessel—several lives lost. Difficult to find with tab attached. It paid the international postcard rate back then, so no room on the card for the selvage, you see; people just tore it off. Fifteen dollars Scott, yours for twelve.” Before I’d had a chance to reply, he whisked the stamp out of the stock book with his tongs and slipped it into a glassine envelope. “What else may I show you?” I’d wound up purchasing several additional relatively inexpensive sets during that first encounter with Abe Beckman. With each set I selected, he shared an anecdote: The Operation Ezra and Nehemiah issue: “To commemorate the exodus of Iraqi Jews”; the Africa-Israel friendship issue: “The occasion for one of Israel’s greatest philatelic exhibitions”; the stamp honoring those who helped Jews during the years of darkness: “A smear of ash—did you ever see an image on a stamp so ugly and yet so moving?”; the Albert Einstein memorial issue: “Chaim Weitzmann David Ben Gurion invited him to be Israel’s first prime minister president after Chaim Weizmann’s death!” Then Beckman added, sotto voce, tapping his cheek, “A slight resemblance, except for the crazy hair, yes?” If I’d had more money to spend at the time, I would have continued picking out sets just so I could listen to the stories Abe Beckman would surely have told me about them. I continued to page through the stock book anyway.

Now, four months later, as I once again perused Israeli stamps, I

recalled some of the stories about them that Beckman had shared with me. I also began to reflect on the magical way in which a simple postage stamp could open a window to a moment in history, or to a facet of knowledge. About half an hour later the man with the two-dollar Columbian, mint L.H., not N.H., had returned. I felt my gut tighten. He looked to be in his late fifties, with sunken cheekbones and a thin, lipless mouth. He stood rigidly behind one of the chairs, stamp album pressed to his abdomen, and did not seem to focus on anything in particular. I could sense Beckman tensing up. Finally, Beckman turned to him sharply. “I will ask you to do your business elsewhere.” The man’s face began to twitch; it seemed as if he were trying to get his mouth to work. Finally he said, “I-I came back to apologize to you for the offensive remark I made.”

Beckman waved a hand and turned away.

“Mr. Beckman...” said the man.

“Apology accepted; please go away.”

But the man sat down, placed his album on Beckman’s counter, and folded his hands atop the album. His eyes were wide, unblinking, pleading.

“Don’t make me call security, mister.”

The man raised his hands defensively. “All I ask is that you accept my two-dollar Columbian as... as reparation.” “I don’t accept gifts or whatever you call them from bigots. One last time: leave my booth.” With trembling hands, the man opened his album, pulled out a pair of tongs from his jacket pocket, removed the Columbian from its acetate mount, and placed it gently on the counter. Then he stood up, bowed slightly, and walked away. Beckman gazed in disbelief at the stamp. I could see the tendons in his neck tighten. Now the other customer, an elderly gent with a carefully trimmed goatee, looked up from the shoebox of glassine envelopes. “Excuse me, I collect premium nineteenth century U.S. and am willing to purchase that Columbian, now that it is yours to sell.”

“This is an agonizing situation for me,” said Beckman, reaching in his pocket for a vial of pills and swallowing one. “A prized stamp, worth a couple grand, but befouled by its owner for all time. Does that not bother you?” “Provenance means nothing to me, sir. I ask you: what can rub off on a stamp like that? It’s too valuable to be handled directly. With books, say, it’s a different story: the owner has held it, turned its pages, sneezed on it, perhaps affixed a bookplate to it. A book practically carries its owner’s DNA! Not so with stamps.” Beckman suddenly turned to me. I’d made no attempt to disguise my eavesdropping. “Young man, given your intolerance for bigotry, what is your opinion?” The customer and Beckman waited expectantly for my reply. Who would have guessed by merely attending a stamp show I would be asked for my insights into such a bizarre moral quandary? I cleared my throat. “I can only speak for myself. Part of the pleasure of owning a special stamp—or a book, or a painting, is to recall its provenance.” I gestured at the Columbian, appearing suddenly vulnerable without its acetate mount. “If I were to buy it, every time I looked at it, I would see the face of that bigoted owner, hear him spitting out the word ‘kike’ to someone who had been treating him with respect. That to me makes for a more palpable owner presence than mere DNA.” “But the man apologized,” persisted the customer. “And Beckman accepted the apology, as you heard.” “The man was becoming a nuisance,” I shot back. “And besides, apologies are—” “Enough of this!” Beckman said. He snatched up the stamp with his tongs and held it up to the fluorescent ceiling at arm’s length, as if proffering it to God. “Gorgeous, reddish-brown color... flawless perforations...” He turned the stamp around. “No gum irregularities other than the hinge mark—if not for that, a superb gem worth ten times scot... So: nearly a gem, almost endearing for its blemish, like a person ...” He continued gazing at the stamp for at least another minute; then he shook his head. “My apologies, gentlemen,” he said, his expression placid. Slowly, carefully, he tore the stamp in half, then in quarters, then in eighths, and let the confetti fall to the counter. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. The other customer shrieked.

“And now, if you will excuse me, this booth is now closed.” Beckman turned his back to us, pulled down his banner and began packing his materials into plastic crates. “You fool!” The other customer cried. “You pathetic, sanctimonious old fool!” Beckman continued packing in silence, adjusting his yarmulke as he did so. Suddenly he turned to me, his face contorted with grief. “The pain, Mr. Levy— it doesn’t go away; it won’t ever go away, not for a minute.” He stared at me with wide, glassy eyes, as if waiting for me to respond. I could only nod. “Even after seventy years,” he continued, “the colossal tragedy of it all eats away at me like a cancer.” I bowed my head and, against my will, fixed my gaze upon the pieces of what was once the two-dollar Columbian, “Columbus in Chains,” extra-fine centering, original gum, lightly hinged, that still lay scattered on the table like ash from a burnt offering.

Fred White’s fiction has appeared most recently in Atticus Review, The Brooklyner, Burningword, and Mad Hat Lit. His books include The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus (2014) and Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (2012)— both from Writer’s Digest Books. He lives near Sacramento, CA.

Cutting Off Sources

Carol Hamilton

She said there really is magic still in Mexico. Tibetans trance into wisdom. Gypsies tap into duende, and the hordes of humanity lifted voices with me rising above the packed aisles of the Patzcuaro cathedral, flowed into the river of forever. Swallows swooped our sleeping bags as we awoke along the barbed wire barrier to a Texas wheat field, we tentless, under only sky. Borders, fences, walls, good manners, clean sheets, wooden floors all covered with soft wooly stuff, obstructions all. The firepots in the night gardens at Lake Titicaca filled the air with smoke as we descended back through the museum coils to visit the Aymaran fortune teller/ medicine man with his silver-backed coca leaves. Can I snake a passage down into the brain stem? Magic whispers below the scrubbings with our safe disinfectants, so I wonder how far can I descend, and I wonder, is there a map for the way out? Carol Hamilton has recent publications in Louisiana Review, Tribeca Poetry

Review, Boston Literary Review, Iodine Poetry Review, Bluestem, I-70 Review, U.S.1 Worksheet, Colere, A Narrow Fellow, Lilliput, Flint Hills Review, Hubbub, Blue Unicorn, Sowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ear Poetry, District Lit and others. She has published seventeen books: childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s novels, legends and poetry, the latest Such Deaths. She is a

former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize.

rathallareview.com rosemont.edu