Revolution House Magazine Volume 2.2

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REVOLUTION HOUSE STAFF EXECUTIVE EDITOR Alisha Karabinus MANAGING EDITOR Elaina Smith MANAGING EDITOR, POETRY Staci R. Schoenfeld CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITORS Jaime Herndon

Jami Nakamura Lin

FICTION EDITORS Karen Britten Carol H. Hood Sarah Kamlet Koty Neelis Katie Oldaker POETRY EDITORS Fati Z. Ahmed Karissa Morton

Jonathan Dubow Susannah Nevison

EDITORIAL INTERN Cristobal Henao COVER AND DETAIL ART From Solaris by Ana Lesac

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Summer is fading. We’ve been here for a year and a half now, and it feels like we are always in flux, along with the leaves on the trees, changing and falling and growing again. Again, our editors have scattered to the four corners of the Earth, moving back and forth across continents, and across state lines within the U.S. We’ve lost one, a little, to the magic of Scotland; with this issue, Sarah will no longer be solely in charge of the gorgeous layouts we’ve featured in the past, and we’ll miss her more than we can say on that front. If there’s a bit of dust on these pages, if things aren’t as lovely as usual, well, give us some time to adjust. The rest of us aren’t as good with hammer and nail. Sarah will stay on as a fiction editor, at least, and we’re grateful for that.

We’ve also shuffled the staff a little; as people move on and up, others step in, and Staci has shephereded these poems as though they were her own. For this issue, we couldn’t have designed a better editor for poetry. Elaina has been re-titled as well, becoming the Managing Editor she’s been since we were first beginning, since we were a dream and a web domain and rough plans for a Facebook page. She’s just started her MFA program this year, in fiction. We hope they’ll still let us steal her for those last-minute crises.

We now have our first intern, too, a lovely young man named Chris studying down in the heat of Texas. He came on for a summer gig and will be staying for the duration. Seems he, too, has found a home here within our rickety walls, a place of comfort and joy. Chris has been a huge help in the building of this issue of Revolution House, and we’re happy to have him stay on until he’s ready for his next adventure.

Something is always lost, it seems, in the transition to fall, and this year I’ve lost my father to a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer. Words have always been my security, my shelter, but here I find myself without, my tongue dry, my fingers knotted. There is nothing to say, except that it’s affected the issue, as all life events are wont to do.

But we are here again, still, regardless, moving forward, shoring up for winter, preparing for whatever comes next. In these pages, there is warmth and fire, the unending heat of passion; you’ll find math and fear and mistakes. Wrestlers, too, because sometimes everyone needs to take an unexpected turn, and Todd Kaneko took us around the bend just as we were closing the issue.

We couldn’t resist ushering him in.

We hope you’ll like everything we have to offer. Snuggle in with the pages, pour a little cider, taste the first edges of autumn in the air, and enjoy.

See you before the new year,

Alisha Karabinus

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SUMMER/FALL 2012 New Hunting Grounds for Wahoo McDaniel The Sheik Likes to Hurt People Behind Every Man is Sensational Sherri

W. Todd Kaneko

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Universe! Universe! (I Am A Lonely Dwarf Planet)

Justin Carter

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Daphne 10

Erin Elizabeth Smith Elbow Point: Welcome to Black’s Lodge, Number 13 15

MK Miller example a: temporality 16

Fatimah Asghar How It All Turns Out 17

Jessica Barksdale Moa 20 On the Evolution of Ratites 22

Kitt Miller Day Stray Brackish

Steve Barbaro

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Upstream 24

Lindsay D’Andrea Painting

Gregory Zorko

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Old Pink Kitty

Steven Matthew Brown

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Fire Horse 39 K.Y. 40

Marc Vincenz Like Fire 41

Tobin F. Terry The Best-Natured Baby in the World

James Penha

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Contributors’ Bios

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Acknowledgments

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New Hunting Grounds for Wahoo McDaniel W. Todd Kaneko A man can take care of himself after death. All he needs are his hands and a new animal to hunt. The sky sleeps tonight, its voluminous body consuming what remains: a stone hatchet, an eagle feather—that leather strap that once lashed a man to Chief Wahoo McDaniel, wrist to wrist with hammer fists and tomahawk chops, old animals drunk on the scent of fresh blood and cigar smoke.

We are tethered to ancient things on the brink, beasts with teeth yearning for bare chests. We tie those knots like foxes chew at their limbs before vanishing.

A man can circle a beast in his arms and squeeze until it gives in to sleep.

He can wrap legs around his quarry, an Indian deathlock on the whole animal kingdom. Now, the antelope gather drowsy in Spring meadows, rivers churn thick with salmon and trout.

A man doesn’t need his old things to take care of himself. Let the wolves take anything left on the prairie.

Let the sky take care of the rest.

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The Sheik Likes to Hurt People W. Todd Kaneko Famous worldwide as the most insane, violent, bloodthirsty competitor in pro wrestling (and that’s saying something), the Sheik was ‘hardcore’ decades before anyone had come up with a term to describe his style.

—The New York Times What kind of man is this kneeling on a prayer rug, his hands outstretched to that savage kind of deity whose believers eat their enemies’ bodies after a fight?

Take from his palms a lash of starfire, a kiss of flame—but first, hear the crows speak in jagged tongues to bodies buried without ceremony for the Sheik. He forks a man in Detroit, punctures a man in Lansing with a pencil. Tonight, it will be the wild man’s heart that stops even now that he wears more scars than flesh. The buzzards know the kinds of men who pride themselves on their finesse in butchery, men who know the aches of war and desire. Those lamentations at his passing knife through the air, a spray of flowers, a wardrobe of blood-soaked rags.

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Behind Every Man is Sensational Sherri W. Todd Kaneko When he is at ringside, I make sure proper homage is bestowed upon him and proper respect… All the clothes he wears, every time his boots get shined, every time that hair is combed, every time that body is tanned, I am the one responsible for it. I am not a mere manager. I’m a woman.

—Sensational Sherri Martel When a woman wears the weather on her face to expose horses stampeding through her gory voice, men succumb to that gorgeous tornado. Sensational or scary, Sherri Martel waited ringside for so many great men: Macho Man, the Heartbreak Kid—even the Honky Tonk Man with his slick hair and filthy grin needed a woman to rile him.

My father used to shake his head, insisting it was Sherri who helped men become their nastiest selves. She held men’s crowns as they rumbled for war, mirrors as they groomed their bodies, their foes to be bashed over the head with a country guitar. Back then, he believed he was a solitary man free from the sway of a woman’s fingers, liberated from that storm of desire.

Back then, I was boy and my father was a man—all we had was the weather.

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Universe! Universe! (I Am A Lonely Dwarf Planet) Justin Carter There’s a planet made of burning ice & a planet circling a disco ball. If this does not make you feel less alone, what will? Non-fat lattes? An MTV Cribs marathon? I can’t buy you a dozen cheap roses because there are 3000 you’s & a sickly Sinead O’Connor mucking around inside me, singing Nothing Compares 2 U. Life doesn’t need to be fair. I’m reading Plath on Lisa’s front lawn & Sylvia wrote the moon has nothing to be sad about, but everything has to wane. I have to wane, have to spin in circles with a stomach full of vodka beneath a disco ball. Sometimes I want to write love poems about you. My professor says love poems are always about the ‘I’.

He’s right. Sometimes I want to do shit & other times I don’t want to do shit.

I put a Styrofoam box in my pool & sat inside & pretended it was a boat & that there was a you in it too, but if this is a love poem, then I guess there isn’t.

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Daphne Erin Elizabeth Smith Katie and I are on the road to Chicago. Or rather we should be on the road to Chicago, but instead I’m crying in my bedroom. Not the kind of soft-eyed, gentile weeping people do in Jane Austen novels, but rather the open-nosed, open-mouth, dry-heaving you don’t do in front of others. I’m sure you can hear me three blocks away, so it’s not really surprising when she knocks on my door and asks when I’ll be ready to go. She doesn’t ask questions like “Are you all right?” We are hockey players. We say “Get the fuck up and cover the goddamn point.”

What’s funny is I have no reason to be sobbing, fetal-style on my bed. It just burst after calling John, my boyfriend of the last eleven months. We’re talking about what he did today instead of having coffee with me—ran to the department to do some copying, cleaned his living room, checked his email. He doesn’t ask what I did today. This is good. I’d have nothing to tell him—stared out the living room window watching the cars roll along my street, drank an entire pot of coffee, and thought about killing myself. You know, Fridays.

I put on my shoes and it’s like I’ve been sucker-punched in the gut. Katie’s started her car and is standing outside on the phone. She is talking hockey business. She does this with one hand and opens her trunk for my gear with the other.

Katie and I are on the road to Chicago. It’s November, so the highway is dark and endless outside Champaign. We don’t say much. We listen to angry girl music. When we do talk, we talk shop. We aren’t saying anything today. I’m looking at the absence of corn outside my window. It rained earlier, and the soil is darker than the sky.

I’m thinking about last November when I was setting myself to leave Alex, my boyfriend of six plus years. It was a process like clay-baking, the wetness sucked up through the air till hard and rough and unmovable. All he needed to say was “Are you still happy with me?” and I could have told him “No.” He must have known this. He didn’t ask.

I’ve been reading Greek mythology this week. I’m teaching an intro poetry class and I’ve assigned them Jorie Graham. My students hate Jorie Graham, but that’s the way students are some times. I’ve been reading “Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne” a lot. Not because I like the poem since largely I hate Jorie Graham too, but because the first line is The truth is this had been going on for a long time during which / ____ they both wanted it to last. I keep reading this line. I keep thinking about Daphne.

How she ran and ran and ran only to become something else in the running.

John is an adjunct in the same creative writing department I’m studying in. Less than a year after moving here together, his wife divorced him. The first time we went out, he told me about the night she said she leaving, how she laid still and mute in their bed.

How he’d pressed about what she was thinking until she finally said “About what day

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I’m leaving. If Monday would be better than Tuesday.”

Katie and I have known each other for about a year. She’s the captain of my hockey team, a defenseman by trade. She’s tall and intimidating and doesn’t take shit on the ice. She has a soft spot for men though. Any men. The last guy she dated moved in with us for a month. He smelled like old cheese and didn’t brush his teeth. The last time I saw him, Katie had kicked him out and he was hovering. I was ironing a skirt for work.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Ironing,” I said.

“Is that linen?”

“Yep.”

“My grandmother loves linen. She always buys my grandfather linen shirts, but he doesn’t like them, but he wears them anyway. I guess that’s love.”

“So you’re saying tolerance is love? That’s stupid.”

“No. I mean. Well. Do you like kids?”

“No.”

“Well if Katie and I were still together, I’d want kids with her. I mean, I know she doesn’t want kids, but if she changed her mind. Or maybe I wouldn’t have them. I could just be the greatest uncle to my brother’s kids.”

He goes on like this for awhile. He doesn’t realize that my hand is clenched tight on the iron, and I’m pressing the folds of the skirt a touch too flat. He follows me down the hall when I’m done and I have to let him know I’m going to change before he says “Well, it was nice to know you” and leaves.

The day I left Alex, I’d made a list of the reasons why I should leave him: -unhappiness -boredom -sleeplessness -desire to sleep with others

After I’d made this list, I drove home and sat on the sofa facing the door. I waited for him to get home from work. When he did, he looked at me and asked “What’s wrong?” I sat and sat and had no answer.

It’s commonly believed that the Apollo and Daphne myth is a rape parable. This is actually untrue. The way I read it, it’s like this—upon boasting about killing a snake, Apollo asked Eros what he did to earn his keep. Why wasn’t he as intimidating and snake-killing? Eros was a little miffed and decided to whip out two arrows – one which struck Apollo making him love Daphne, the other, which struck Daphne, making her

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despise not just Apollo, but all men.

So Daphne spurned her suitors and asked her pops if she could remain chaste like Diana, and he was not so pleased with the idea, wanting grandchildren as so many impatient parents do. So she ran through the forest and Apollo, completely smitten, followed. Here her dad, luckily enough a magically-inclined river god, turns her into a laurel tree to keep Apollo from catching up. Why a laurel tree? I’m not sure. So she gets all branchy and still he loves her, pulling a wreath of laurel from her boughs and naming her a holy tree. And once she’s a tree, she can love him. And does.

I can see myself in the window of the car, just enough to notice how deep my eyes are getting. I look gaunt in the green light from Katie’s stereo.

John and I had been dating for over seven months before he told me he loved me. I was at a conference in Russia and paying fifty cents a minute to call, and he said it as naturally as if he’d said it a hundred times before. I said “I love you too” before I hung up. I spent the next day watching myself in the window of a bus on a tour of rural Russia. I watched a woman cutting a side of beef with an axe on a park bench and all I could think of was the naturalness of the words. The ease. As if they had been for someone else.

When I got back to Champaign, we were at my apartment. We were lying in my bed and I was running my fingers along his chest.

“What’s up with dropping the L-word when I’m 5,000 miles away?”

He stammered. He squeezed my hand. Two days later, we’re on my couch and he says “I love you, but I can’t fall head over heels in love with you.” I’m confounded by this. He counters that his shrink has told him that you can’t fall back in love until three years after you’re divorced. He says this like it’s a prescription.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what head over heels in love is. I ask him what it means and he doesn’t know either, so I assume whatever this is is good enough. I take off his clothes.

Daphne isn’t really a girl. She’s a nymph. I don’t know what the difference is except that nymphs live longer, I think. I think how nice it must be to not want to love anybody. To want nothing more than the spoils of the hunt, to run barefoot through the laurel trees.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” I mutter turning toward Katie.

“Whatever,” she says.

“I think we’re breaking up.”

“That blows.”

“I know.”

In the dashboard I can see the glow of the city in front of us. Katie drives fast, and I forget how quickly things move at 90. We’ve blown through the heartland, and the city

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rises up on us like a forest of light.

“What’s going on?” she asks. I can’t say anything.

The first night we’re together, we’re lying in bed and he says “What are we doing together if we don’t want the same things?” I say, “Maybe neither of us really knows what we want yet?” It’s my way of saying, “I know this is doomed.”

she would not give shape to his hurry by being / ____its destination, / it was wrong this progress, it was a quick iridescence, I read to my class. They were not impressed. They wanted to read the Tony Hoagland poem about giving head to a light switch again. They liked that poem.

“But this is about the distance in desire too!” I try to tell them. They’ll have nothing of it. One girl finally raises her hand and says she likes the lines ‘what did you do / before?’ or ‘will you forgive me?’ or ‘say / that you’ll love me for / ever and ever’ but that she doesn’t know who’s speaking. She says she thinks maybe it’s Daphne, that that need for affirmation feels too feminine to be Apollo.

Katie isn’t a talker on the ice. I’m always yelling things like “Get it out of the goddamn zone!” or “Get her out of my fucking crease!” She always hears me. Today she squares up to a girl who whacked at my glove after I’d covered the puck. I’ve already called the girl a sonofabitch and screamed that if she did it again I’d break her goddamn hand.

Katie tells me to calm down. She has it covered.

Since that one time, John’s never said he loved me. It’s been four months.

Earlier this week we went to see a film in a crowded movie house. I held his hand. He only moved to fidget in his pocket, turn on the green of his watch. That night he read a book about the Peloponnesian war and I finished Graham’s Dream of the Unified Field.

When he was done, he turned out the light on his side of his bed and rolled over. I was still sitting against the headboard, and I looked at him, his long back turned to me. I closed my book and turned off my light. I kissed him on the shoulder blade and said “Sleep well.” In the morning, he got up and made coffee. He smoked on the front porch, and I looked for my shoes.

I think, sometimes, that it would be nice to be the tree. Perhaps just one in a line on the long shelterbelts that dam the prairie wind. Or parked in some downtown landscaping, trimmed and tame along the college parkways. There is no illusion of control as a tree.

And the rain is something longed for.

When our team puts the puck in the net I bang my stick on the post and yelp.

“That’s it. That’s what I’m fucking talking about.” Katie gives me a little nod.

This season our team is keeping it out of our zone most of the game. There are times when I catch myself thinking things like “I hate my fucking life,” or “Where can

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this possibly go?” These thoughts are always punctuated by “Get your head in the game.

Watch the puck, Erin. Watch it.” When it does come at me, it always comes fast, the forward broken from our defense, and it’s just me and her. And I’m looking at her feet and she’s not looking at me but rather every inch I don’t fill. The way she kept slipping away was this: she cut toward the post and through the crease. I stretch the length of the goal line, and she buries the puck in what opened. She skates away. I stand up.

Neither of us say anything to the other.

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Elbow Point: Welcome to Black’s Lodge, Number 13 MK Miller i.

While I’m seeking a store for thread, Bergen dandles the button hole, my spent lapel.

Tender Creeper, he teases, let departure be. Arrival— butcher tools on wall pegs, oxidized from long non-use. Muse with a broken branch. ii.

A reconsidered last goodbye. Stairs a chambered nautilus up to the terrace. Snow’s erasable find, like wish book page trinkets. Three chapters of illumination in these woods. Fallen chinaberry tree. iii.

The pointer dog returns— from his maw deposits sparrow bones. Memories of yesterday's pleasures.

On the dresser—a see-through vessel chocked with bleeding hearts.

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example a: temporality Fatimah Asghar setting: a letter debate Assignment: Please graph the following equations if

q = quest, x = knowledge, n = art, y = truth, b= stories, r= happiness, d=life, h=history, t=temporality.

Didion adds that qb= d.

I believe qb= r, where r = d + n + x Weber’s grid dictates qx = q(y+r) Adorno states that h – n is impossible and irreversible, Later, he says that y cannot stand alone and needs to account for h and t Therefore, q (xn) = qb = q (y (accounting for h and t, respectively) + d + n + xn)1

1 Adorno also believes in an emphatic essay, thought gets rid of traditional y. If you were ever using y in the traditional sense in the above equations please think emphatically and reconceptualize.

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How It All Turns Out Jessica Barksdale You can’t explain how you did it, wisping into smoke and air, wheedling into the past like a crooked finger on cold, bare skin, alighting at the right moment, the apex, the arc, the place where everything can crack. This is not easy to do, so you have only one chance, one choice. You might do this for yourself, showing up at the exact, perfect moment and changing your own children’s lives. You imagine your younger self sitting on the edge of the daily sand box, itchy, sad, silent, miserable, broke, watching your two tiny boys play with plastic shovels and buckets. You remember how overwhelmed and empty you felt, how everything seemed horrible and awful, you full of shame and grief and upset.

Your later you would sidle up to your young self, sit down next to the slightly plump woman, and listen first. Then talk.

You might do this for your own mother, too, apparating into the dark boxy 1960s San Francisco apartment, sitting down on the couch and picking up her soft sweet hand, telling her the words that would fix some part of what is broken.

You know what words to say because you lived through the parts that come next in both these lives, two family sets under your skin like wildfire. You know the outcomes, the chain of events that led to you knowing how it all turned out. Despite warnings from Star Trek episodes and Back to the Future movies, you would change it all, like that, in a snap crack of time and flame. And maybe the nothing would be all right.

Once a friend told you that she wished she’d not married her husband.

You said, “But what about your kids?”

She shrugged. “I’d have different kids.”

You staggered at that, knowing that you want the two children you had, those specific boys now men. But really, if you’d turned left instead of right, you wouldn’t be conscious of that other turn. You couldn’t miss or regret the kids that weren’t because if you took the other road, you took the other road.

Which past, which road, what choice? And what to say? The woman in front of you now is a stranger, no part of her yours, at least not yet. She is different than your past self or your past mother because you don’t know most of the story, only bits and pieces, the story over fifty years old. Of course, you know about the child who plays in front of her. But you only know the man this little one will become. You don’t look at the child too closely at first. It’s important to keep your heart from cracking open and stalling your mission, for this is a mission. You want to save him, which might mean not saving yourself. But you love the man this boy became, and you want him to be happier.

Chances are—if the movies are right—you might disappear once you say the magic words. You might pass on the wisdom and flicker away like the ghost that you are.

One right—wrong-word and you won’t have married the man you married in mid-life.

He wouldn’t have been there, walking down the steps at the BART station, umbrella tucked under one arm. You would never have left the house that day, slightly depressed and tired after a very long weekend. He wouldn’t have asked you for a date because he

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would have learned the exact thing that would have kept him from needing you at all.

But don’t be sad about this.

Sit down next to her, this blond, pretty, slightly nervous woman, who watches her three-year-old. She’s thinner and anxious, the same anxiety you know from her later life when she will be your mother-in-law. But now her mood seems more like energy, a crackle of excitement on her skin like shivers. And the boy. Once you turn to him, you can’t stop looking. Tow-headed, freckled, thin little legs, so unlike the fat little thighs of your own boys.

He’s a smart boy, and he keeps looking back for his mother’s for approval, which she gives with half smiles. Agile and smart, he’s taking apart an old alarm clock and putting it back together. Even with his little fingers, he knows precisely where all the pieces go.

The woman looks at another clock, one that works. She pulls at the neckline of her new, stiff dress, fingers the beads of her shiny necklace. The story goes she kicked out her first husband or he left her. He either was expelled from Harvard or quit. He either owed money to the Mafia or left her for another woman. In any case, she’s alone.

And in an hour, another man will come to take her out on a date, and she will leave this boy and his infant sister with her own mother, who dotes on the boy, too. The boy believes that in this house he is god, king, and master, but nowhere else in his life will this ever be true. The man his mother waits for will not like this strange, intelligent boy though he will try, even though he prefers his own three sons who know how to play ball and don’t cry at everything. This little boy will be the child he lives with fulltime, this is the man who will be his father. But not quite.

As you sit by this woman, you will tell her the story of how it all turns out, and you will tell her how she might treat this boy. Instead of words, you tell her, hold him.

“Rough and tumble,” your first husband used to say as he rolled around on the floor with your two boys.

“King Mountain!” they used to cry as they jumped on top of him, a pile of male flesh.

He swung them around, flipped them over, taught them both to throw a ball and run and climb trees. He made their skin not as sensitive, their souls not as vulnerable, their hearts open. Your sons are men who can take in love without needing it to pay a toll. Even with the troubles in their lives, they trust love.

You yourself used to lie on your back, put a toddler on your feet, hold his hands, and bounce. Up and down, up and down, the toddler screaming with delight.

Breathless, you’d put him down and wait for the request, “More, Mama, more!”

You place your hand on the woman’s warm arm, and finally, she turns to you. You can tell she’s not looking at you, her life not in this room, even though her body is. Where is she? In a life she doesn’t have yet, at least not with the boy.

You open your mouth to tell her how sensitive he will become, how damaged by criticism, a soft shell crab in a world of plated lobsters. You want to tell her that she can

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relax. That no matter what she does, the future will come to her, whether it is the man she waits for or another man.

But the boy.

She blinks, seeing you but not caring. She will not hear you. Not now, and not in an hour when the man arrives. Not in a few years when she and her now new husband move to another town, the move that seals the deal on the boy’s life. You cannot tell her that something so seemingly insignificant would twist his heart, pinching it like a tight suture. She would not listen as the boy grows more inwardly twisted and sad, more confused and solitary, more eager to leave and never come back.

And do you really have the answer? How can you know the words that would fix anything? Whatever you tell her will only make things different, perhaps not better, maybe worse in a different, other way. As you watch the boy spill around the room, snotty nosed, smiling, you wonder who you are trying to save.

You sit back on the couch, waiting to disappear out of this time you don’t belong in. Until then, you watch the boy, hold back from picking him up, squeezing him despite his struggle and desire to get out of your arms, the arms that will hold him over fifty years later, the arms he will struggle to rest in.

Barksdale

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Moa Kitt Miller Day And inside, the moa’s absence: its call, relic-borne bird, nested in silence

its walk on those long, rallial legs. Pulse

of vena cava against atrium.

Case held upright by oak felled in some other century. The glass transposes you flightless wander collapsed trail of scaffolding

across the bones of moa. Above this staggered bone-bird, boiled to calcine spareness

the stutter-light

fluoresces, decades-old.

You genuflect before the phantom-feathered feint, faint trace

of bird, reptile intellect beyond

the need to feel. Hollow place where you might meet the bird’s eye the neck serpentine

as desire

on another continent, might know the untenable imaginary wings

their desiccation to breath the dry lightness

of lost flight, tinder-word for what wasn’t

sky-flung, incapable but for

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its wingless flight across dark fields.

The giant eagle—its only

enemy, who also disappears— wishes to wing upward just frame for the glyph

of feather: shadows you. tethered.

Day

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On the Evolution of Ratites Kitt Miller Day he understands: his own bones hollowed by longing ephemeral hold of cases, displays that telescope into windows through which flight might be tried hours on one side called outside, he presses in words for motion, words that hold muscle to bone fans of feathers into wingspan maps trace migration the shed skin of attachment stretched over its avian emissary he feels along, he curates the emissive properties of the body that wills itself to transparency he pencils in the tibial feathering he’s seen only in extremis he sketches a route of transformation, the long flight from one existence to this: euphoric departure into air

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Stray Brackish Steve Barbaro

Musty blur of hands wiping steam from bus windows…loose bugs getting lost in steep puddles…

A widow’s elbow at a depot, her daughter latching onto it mid-fall—balance, is it instinct or just reflex & the trains along the northern coast will remain on time with the daughter, downpour, the sweeping away of the height of puddles and some spray lurching ahead of itself to touch some spray lurching ahead of itself some spray some… The face of the eyes of three schoolchildren catch each distinct motion, catch with their teeth compressed sugars, plastic bottle brunts, a once-enclosed fizziness—straws, some, OK, yes, a coffee cart, check, and the forty feet between the track and Tyrrhenian. Cefalù, Termini Imerese, Bagheria, Palermo, the route this way the same, the scenery: laundry-linecrossed terraces, railings, a fox—its paws parsley-dotted, its mouth wet with tomatoes—hopping out of a compost bin, railings, twin car parks. Delfina, the widow’s daughter, asks the conductor about rope-lowered traps… “Allora, allora, aspetta, a— ” Let’s look at stuff like Delfina does, think what she thinks: an abandoned pair of house shoes, red shelves, a well-known Irish pub, its house stout watery, the patrons

welcoming, mumbling, the driver of a bus going back and forth from that pub every day and its passengers coming from all parts of the city, their parents from every part of the world, the pub’s taps totally capable of spitting out a glass full of the Nile, or the sort of liquid from which igloos are made.

Nothing fake…but short of the sort of steam tripping tips with tips against rainwater-filled scraps of these whole—all of these non-broken non-ships & stash where, exactly, objects culled from depths?

Delfina once saw consoling curls—curls straddling storm drains—

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Upstream Lindsay D’Andrea Kate brought a book, like she did whenever she was nannying Aiden, but she didn’t read it. Instead she watched the boy splash around in the water, worrying every time he seemed to disappear beneath the surface for a little too long. Sure enough, he’d pop up just as she would start to rise from her chair. Every day, at the edge of the sloping backyard, the thin green arm of the Delaware reached out to her with its lazy threat.

The longer Kate watched Aiden the more she feared the river that she once considered the best part of the job, one of her reasons for originally accepting the offer. Empty days to be filled, good pay (especially for her lack of experience with kids), plenty of time to prepare to go back to college, and the river’s company.

Plus, she had empathized with David’s situation: a single father, raising the child he’d taken legal custody of in the wake of his ex-wife’s vague substance abuse problem.

These things were all reasons why she started, but none of them were reasons why she’d been considering David’s request to stay on past her summer commitment, into the fall. She breathed in the damp air and warned herself against becoming too attached.

This must be why some people pray, she thought, if only for the comfort of hearing themselves name the things they want or feel guilty about wanting.

Kate studied Aiden’s clumsy solo-play, one of the many details she’d come to love about her job, about the boy. He lay belly down on the dock, examining the ripples made by his spit. Occasionally he’d get bored and jump in, swim around to the ladder, or pretend to drive the fishing boat where it knocked against the dock, fastened there.

Sometimes he would have friends over, but Kate preferred days like these, when it was only Aiden.

As the sun swung below the tree line, a few teenagers—having returned from early dinners—came screaming down the river on wave runners. Aiden hopped up and down on the dock, dripping, shouting out to the boys he probably wanted to become.

Kate looked forward to the appearance of the wave runners, because they signaled that David would be returning home soon from work. The only thing she looked forward to more than spending time with Aiden was spending time with Aiden and his father, the three of them together. Kate pulled the entirety of her waist-length bronze hair in front of her, unbraided it and braided it again. It was a nervous habit from her last life, when she would wait behind the curtains, anxious to perform.

“Aiden,” she called from her lawn chair, “come in, dry off. Your dad’ll be home soon.”

“I don’t want to!” He jumped back into the darkening water. The tall grass by the dock shivered under his splash.

“Don’t make me come over there,” she said in a mock-mother voice filled with the ridiculous uncertainty she’d been unable to shake, even after inexperience had become experience. It had taken a long time for her to get used to these necessary commands.

Aiden laughed himself out from the water. He smothered into the towel and against her, his hair soaked with the reedy river smell that never seemed to leave him.

If he were her child she would never let him be disappointed. He would grow up normal

24

(bright but normal), stay in public school, avoid expectations—all of the things Kate never had the chance to choose for herself. He would find his place, she would make sure of it.

Since April, Kate’s dropout from Julliard had drifted further into the distance than she ever hoped it could. She saw her early return home as if through the opposite end of a telescope, crisp yet tunneled in scene. A year ago she never would’ve guessed that she’d wind up nannying. She didn’t even think she liked kids, before Aiden. She didn’t think about them at all, or about the concept of family. There was only music and the potential of her hands, which had named her a virtuoso.

David walked in as soon as Kate started dinner, enough food for three. In the beginning of the summer she only made the right amount for David and Aiden and insisted on allowing father and son to eat alone together. Then David had entreated her to be the third wheel, and after a few weeks she felt that she was being rude by rejecting the constant requests. She sensed him peering around her shoulder as she stood at the stove preparing meat sauce for the pasta. Even over the kitchen steam he smelled like linen and dry sweat. She covered her smile with the back of her hand, another old habit.

He called her out on it and reached for her elbow to lower her arm. An awkward feeling squirmed below her stomach as his hand paused for a moment at her hip.

After dinner, Kate helped Aiden wash up and then gathered her things in the living room while David put his son to bed. She folded her extra t-shirt twice and checked to make sure all the dishes were done before resuming her slow exit. She was standing with her bag, thumbing through her unread book when she heard a high note tapped once on the piano—a C she noticed, her head webbing with chords. She looked up to where David leaned against the baby grand.

“What do you say to lessons?” he asked. He was still wearing his dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up.

This was a newer repeated question, one she’d been careful to tiptoe around. Kate had a fondness for tiptoeing but found it hard to do as well around David. Her words came out clunky and drew too much attention to themselves. She kept her head down.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean? It’s no secret that you’re wonderfully talented.” The words might’ve sounded sarcastic to someone who didn’t know any better, but after several embarrassing instances of misunderstanding, she’d come to learn all the tones of his seriousness. “Aiden would be lucky to have such a great teacher.”

“I’m no teacher,” Kate said. She didn’t know how to tell David that Aiden was lucky to be so normal for a boy of seven, that piano shouldn’t ruin him.

“Oh, no?” He sat down and started to play an awkward, paceless rendition of “Greensleeves.” He smiled in a sluggish manner fitting to his five-o’clock shadow, the lines on his on his face measured into soft folds. “Who taught me this, then?”

She pretended to rummage through her things one last time, remembering the night last week when David finally managed to convince her to play for him, the night

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she taught him that simple tune, long after Aiden fell asleep, even after David had coaxed her through several drinks (and several more for himself). Ever since, he’d been asking the same questions, and she’d been avoiding them.

“Why do you even have a piano like that? If you don’t know how to play it?”

“It was hers. She used to play at night, sometimes.” He shrugged and looked up at Kate. “I liked the idea of music. I still do.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said, uncomfortable with the way David had aligned her with his ex-wife, uncomfortable about the manner in which he’d done the aligning. She pushed her long hair to the side and pressed her book to her chest, thinking of the incomplete applications gathered upon her bureau. “Anyway, I’m done after next week. Not much time for lessons.”

“Don’t be sorry. You say that word too much.” Then he stood up again, facing her.

“Stay. Don’t go. Back to school, I mean. I’ll raise your pay, if you want.”

“No, that’s not it.” Kate wanted to study French, Latin, astrophysics, global economics, or even literature—the book in her hand, Jane Eyre. She wanted to have another chance at a formal education in a university, a place large and diverse enough to disallow loneliness. “I have to do something. With my life.”

“You’re doing something,” he said, pushing the piano bench away, stepping closer, “trust me.”

Kate could make out mint toothpaste on top of his usual linen scent. Something welled up in the parts of her she thought had been emptied out.

“Okay,” she said, wondering what exactly it was she was giving into.

She set her bag back down, the book. David leaned into her as if he’d lost his balance and then pushed back from her slightly, hands under her elbows. When she didn’t pull away, he took hold of her and swung her around against the piano.

The keys clamored into a dissonance that made Kate wince. She didn’t have time to wonder what was happening before David pressed his mouth against hers. She started to relax and David moved her again, away from the keys, to the side of the piano.

He slid his hand up the front of her shirt. His hands were cold, and Kate knew she was shaking. The edge of the piano creased into the small of her back as he pressed against her to unhook her bra. A second hand removed the hair tie from her long braid and started to loosen it. Kate thought of how she would only ever wear her hair down during performances, how she never let it show otherwise.

David breathed just by her ear, held there, as if about to say something. Then he stood straight to loosen his belt buckle. Kate’s thoughts collaged into strange patterns that seemed to spill out and into the room, distracting her. She barely realized that she was pulling her own shirt over her head and kicking off her pants. He was lifting her up onto the piano, she was guiding him inside of her. He held down her hands at the edge of the piano as he thrust. She lifted her head and met his eyes. They were open, directed toward her, unfocused, not quite seeing.

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D’Andrea

Afterward Kate changed back into her clothes in David’s room while he brushed his teeth. Kate found it unnerving, being brought into the bedroom only after sex, only to prepare to leave. The digital alarm clock said it was past midnight. She looked back at the curtain of golden light framed by the bathroom door and then started to leave.

“Wait.” David had the toothbrush in the side of his mouth, a towel around his waist. He took out a checkbook from the nightstand and wrote a check. He held it out to Kate. “You’re forgetting this.”

Kate took the check and then saw that the amount was too much, much more than a normal day’s pay.

“I can’t accept that, David.”

“Yes. You can. Here.” He stretched out his arm and shook the paper a little.

“No.” Kate drew in her arms as close as she could to her body. “Can you write another one?”

David strode back to the bathroom and spit in the sink. It wasn’t about the money anymore. She wanted to tell him that, but she didn’t know how it would sound out in the open, naked, with nothing to cover up its intentions. Kate dawdled near the bedroom door until David returned, tied his towel tighter and held out the check again.

“I want you to take this from me.” He ran the other hand through his graying hair.

“But Aiden’s been asleep for hours already and—”

The hand through his hair became a fist, and he pounded it once against the doorframe. Then he opened the fist again and brought it down to his side.

“God damn it, Kate, I’m not in the mood for this. Just take it. Take it.”

He didn’t look at her. Kate took the check and stood there for another second, wanting him to say something more, apologize, reach out to her. Instead he shook his head, turned, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door.

Kate hurried downstairs and left through the garage. From the backyard rose deep, wet voices of myriad bullfrogs. Kate pulled away in her car and drove the hour north to her childhood home outside of Newark. The frog song followed her the whole way, straight into sleep, where she dreamt that the house slid down the backyard and into the Delaware while she was locked inside.

Every day the following week—the week that was once supposed to be her last—Kate continued to stay for dinner, and after dinner, and she never looked at the checks David wrote her before she left. On Thursday, as he handed Kate her pay, David asked if she could work the next day, Friday. Kate hadn’t nannyed many Fridays, since David usually worked from home and managed to take care of Aiden in addition to making his calls.

This time David explained that he would have to attend an emergency meeting. He apologized for the late notice, but Kate assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem. She would be happy to watch his son.

Without Aiden, Kate usually filled her empty Fridays and weekends with projects

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in preparation for the next week with Aiden. More than anything, the projects offered a way for Kate to cope with her parents’ continual requests to go back to school. She might keep herself busy by making a bird feeder to help Aiden hang in the backyard.

Or she would go to the library and research an interesting place or idea just to see the boy’s reaction when she had the foreign fact ready for him. Last week she read up on the Namib Desert, the oldest desert in the world. Aiden’s face had contorted as he tried to process the idea: But what d’ you mean deserts can grow like people? She smiled at his logic, welcomed it. Her first impression had been that the desert didn’t grow so much as it spread sleepily over everything, drew a single heavy eyelid over the past.

The Friday of David’s meeting was especially humid and clouded in river bugs.

The temperature had swelled into a dizzying heat. Kate sat on the dock with her legs in the water while Aiden bobbed around, at times flopping his arms like sea monster tentacles, at times grabbing onto her legs in an attempt to pull her under. When it got too hot she shuffled him inside for lemonade and a new application of sunscreen. The afternoon progressed by this pattern until Aiden ran out the back door after a late lunch, and Kate decided it would be okay to watch him from the kitchen window rather than continue to sweat it out. It wasn’t often she allowed herself this distance, but the river wasn’t so far off, after all. She would simply have to make up for the extra ten yards by being more alert.

When she heard the knock, she thought it was UPS or a Jehova’s Witness or someone she could ignore. Then the knob jiggled a little, followed by more knocking.

Something caught in her throat. All of the old anxiety of inexperience rushed back to her, and she wondered how David had ever trusted her with his child. Should she run out to Aiden? Risk a peek through the front window? She crept to the door, tried to laugh at the idea of a burglary at 4:00PM on a weekday, and opened it part way to find a woman with cropped blonde hair and bluish creases under her wide eyes.

“Hi there,” she said, leaning around to see behind Kate and inside the house. Kate shut the door a little more, then opened it again a little wider. She didn’t want to come across as rude.

“Hello.” Kate didn’t think the woman one of the neighbors, but she could’ve been a mother of one of Aiden’s friends. “…Can I help you?”

The woman stared at her, blinked often and nodded over and over, studying Kate.

She stood, hand on hip, nodding, smiling.

“Yeah, I think so. I’m looking for my son.”

“Oh. Well, we haven’t had anyone over all day.” She fidgeted with the knob on the inside of the door. “It’s just me and…my boy.” She forced a smile to cover over the obvious lie.

“Is that right?” The woman stopped nodding and drew herself straight, her shoulders even, neck stretched to its full length—a player’s posture. “So you’re her, then.”

A little panic twisted in her stomach. This had to be David’s ex-wife, though

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D’Andrea

Kate knew only the basics: that she had spent time in rehabilitation for some kind of substance abuse, that she had been denied custody.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. Maybe you have the wrong house.” Kate fought the urge to look down at the ground, kept her eyes on the woman and a firm grip on the doorknob.

She hated her for showing up like this, where she wasn’t needed, not anymore.

“I’m sure that this is the right house.” She tossed her head back a little and laughed at the sky. “Then again I thought that I was Aiden’s mother, but looks like I’m mistaken there, too.”

“I was never told to expect anyone,” Kate said, starting to shut the door.

The woman held out a long arm to press back.

“I don’t care if you weren’t told. Let me in.”

“No,” Kate said, all sense of uncertainty gone. Her voice didn’t dress in mockmother tones, it didn’t sound like her at all. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

As Kate tried to slam the door for a final time, the woman threw her shoulder into the door’s edge and forced her way inside.

Kate rooted herself in the foyer, caught between all directions of movement. This was how it happened, the stage fright. Upon the moment to act, turned stone as if by a curse. She remembered her last attempt at a performance, the way the faceless audience leaned forward muttering as the music in her head turned to mush. Who was she to perform these great and impossible tasks? She couldn’t handle the music, she had failed, but she didn’t want to fail David or Aiden.

The woman was stalking through the kitchen, the den. She circled around the baby grand, calling Aiden’s name. Kate gathered all her senses back to the present and tried to sneak around to the back door. She managed to slip out just before the woman spotted her.

Kate picked up her pace and ran to Aiden, goggles in hand on the dock. His eyebrows pulled together. Even behind a mask of crumpled fear the boy was handsome, with all the features of his father, and no conceivable trace of the woman who called herself his mother.

Near the water, the woman caught up to Kate. They reached the dock together, running side-by-side. Kate shoved the woman into the water, grabbed Aiden by the arm, unhooked the fishing boat from the dock and yanked the cord to start the engine, which grumbled alive on the first try. There was no time to admire small successes, just time enough to get away with Aiden.

The boy flailed against her, sobbing. The woman was regaining herself in the water. Kate let Aiden free so she could steer. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t too sure how to maneuver the boat. The sound of the engine drowned out the woman, who stamped her feet on the dock and pulled at her hair like a cartoon right out of one of Aiden’s shows. In the boat, the boy opened his mouth, but all that came out was the sound of the motor.

Only when they rounded a bend upstream—where the river’s inlet thinned even

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more, where the edges crowded with fresh green waterweeds and a moist muddy smell packed tight into the air—only then did Kate lower the speed on the motor. The way her heart moved reminded her of all the piano’s hammers striking at uneven intervals.

Aiden scrunched into a ball at the prow of the fishing boat as Kate steered into a marshy area, where they could be hidden in case the woman tried to run along the bank to find them.

“Aiden,” she coaxed after pulling the boat under cover of a willow, “are you alright?”

He said nothing and curled tighter into himself.

“It’s okay, she’s not going to find us.”

Still, Aiden balled up. Kate moved forward to touch him, but he whimpered at her hand.

“What’s wrong? It’s okay. I’m here.” She had never seen him so bothered. She turned the motor off, and her head began to unfog in the silence.

“Are you gonna take me back? I wanna go home,” he said in between sobs, lifting his head a bit. “I want my mom.”

The wet air made a trap for Kate. She wondered what just happened, if Aiden had seen the same thing she had seen. The woman was violent, crazy. She couldn’t be trusted, she wasn’t trusted—she’d lost custody, her chance at motherhood.

“I’m protecting you,” she said, more to herself than to Aiden, stunned by the possibility that she had crossed some line.

“Daddy likes you,” Aiden said, still scrunched up as far from her as he could get.

“Don’t hurt me,” he added, sensing her confusion, the sharp rise in breathing that even a young child could recognize as panic.

Kate reached out to him for a second time, wanting him to believe that she never meant to hurt him, but he kicked away again as if he hardly knew her, as if their summer together meant nothing. To someone else it would’ve been easy to turn around, to go back and admit defeat. But Kate wasn’t ready to go on, wasn’t ready for everyone who had been expecting something else, something that she couldn’t be. Kate started to lose track of Aiden’s pleas to be taken home, of the sun’s movement downward into the sling of an endless cycle.

On one of those remote Fridays, she had read up on petrified forests for Aiden. As wood aged, its living tissue could be replaced with mineral deposits that would render it rocklike, the best response against time. Kate pulled the elastic from her long braid.

She filled herself with the memory of David’s hands, let his flattery replace the cells in her body and harden them until she convinced herself that he would forgive her, that he loved her. Then something apart from her turned the motor back on and guided the boat back to the house. Red and blue lights blurred through the willow trees on their approach. Kate sunk into the motor’s sound. She thought her hair waving out behind her might look like a flag rose in surrender.

She eased the boat back into its place as Aiden tumbled out onto the dock,

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relieved to be away from her. Kate scanned the cluster of shadowy people gathered in the yard for David. Aiden’s mother hugged her son. Kate noticed the flexibility of the woman’s hands as they stretched against the boy’s back—a player’s hands, not much different from her own. Then David approached from some hidden corner of the backyard, lifted Aiden up to his shoulder, closed his eyes. Kate tried to call his name, but her voice fell like a bird from its nest.

David set his son back down and started to walk over to where Kate stood, his eyes trained upon the wild edges of the river just beyond her. His mouth strung in a straight, tight line. She knew what he would say when he reached her. Maybe she tried to do the right thing, but feared by his son, loathed by his son’s mother, how could he allow her to come around any longer? Probably the woman had told David that Kate had called herself Aiden’s mother. Kate gathered her hair around her like a veil, and turned away from David. She sat on the dock and eased herself into the water. The bottom of the river, where her toes hit, was cooler than the top and slimy. She lifted herself and floated on her back upon the warm surface, ears submerged. Though there had never been any current in that part of the river, Kate let herself go limp, closed her eyes and waited for the water to carry her all the way to the ocean.

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Painting Gregory Zorko Two nudes and an open window, as minor as white onions in a sown field. Little pieces of masculine light bother their underarms. They are so useless, hidden in a straw canvas. Their bodies ever present, but their eyelids drop to shadows like the shy edges of a lake. Plump coquettes, paired in a window frame.

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Old Pink Kitty Steven Matthew Brown After helping Ma box up canned goods collected by the church on our behalf, I go into the bare living room to play with the frayed edges of the loop rug. I crawl underneath it, smell the ash residue from the fireplace, desiccated soil brought in on the soles of our boots. When I emerge from underneath the rug towards dark, the sour-sweet musk of rancid honey strikes me. It is dripping again, I yell. There is a pause in Ma’s activity. I can imagine her looking up, canting her eyes back as my voice moves over her shoulder.

She sets down what sounds like a giant can of applesauce and crosses the house, making it rumble. She looks at the broad wall, the front wall, the back wall and the wall halved by the stone hearth, and she shakes her head. My dad is working on the shelter, or something in the barn, and we hear hammering, look together through the length of the gray room and out the back window to the red barn gone purple with evening. Moments like these, when everything she and I do to make noise ceases, we hear the bees, or worse, my father’s slow going away.

It is such a tall barn and flanked in such tall maples and white pines that together they wall off the circular head of our dirt driveway. Pa said that is where we should build the shelter, there under the driveway in the middle of things where no one would ever look.

Ma preferred we move to town. Pa said no. I believe secretly that he will not stray too far from the house, the barn, the things his grandfather and father built. I had never heard him say no to my mother before. She looked away, let it go.

Now, if you go into the center of the driveway and pull on a particular lobe of a particular clover leaf the door will open. You go down the stairs, and when you come up above the barn, look around: you are in the shelter. It isn’t much to look at now, just boxes of dry goods and candles, but the view is incredible. From way up above the barn you can see the house, the lights on yet while Ma packs the things Pa likes to pick fights about: quilts, rag dolls, and dictionaries. The metal roof isn’t that old but the gutters are filled with helicopter seeds and pine needles all the same. The grass in the small open areas between the collapsed trailer and honor-box fruit stand in the front yard is long.

It falls over itself in cool waves. Beyond these things is the view over the forest and the few fields still planted in soy and hemp. Off along the horizon—that’s where we may see it coming, though there is no guarantee—the sun sets. Most nights we watch these. They watch. I turn my back to the setting sun so I can see their faces above me all glowing.

In between their amber heads is a very special view, a dark blue that darkens further to purple toward the horizon. My parents don’t say much, and neither do I. Ma will poke her index finger between the ice cubes in her drink and then lick her finger and raise the glass to take a sip. Sometimes, when she has just taken her sip, Pa lifts his hand and she relinquishes the glass to him and he sips. They pass it over my face and back and it is clear and sparkling, and they are orange and amber, and the sky beyond us is dark blue approaching purple, and we lay entangled toward dark, and I have taken to humming.

Last winter we planned the shelter, made lists, calculated costs and dimensions.

33

We have to be ready before winter, of course. Cotton wood tufts drift on the breeze, gathering into even larger balls that sink toward the lawn or gravel and roll to rest in swales like snow. Last night, in the shelter, watching the sunset, Ma swept her hand out at the fat red sun and horizon and all the tufts drifting up and pausing in whorls. She said, This is it. Then she sipped. She tilted her head and asked, Is this it? Pa said no.

I’ve told you, he said. You’ll know. It won’t be pretty. This is most certainly not it. She lowered her hand onto my head gently and combed her fingers through my hair. She combed gently from front to back and lifted her drink and sipped.

Sniffy needs more training if he is going to be any help to the family this winter. We all know it, and he seems to know it too, in that way dogs know. Today, I have hidden an old picture of myself out in the sandy hill country beyond the pond. He will have to sniff this out. It is a picture of me in full regalia that he should recognize. I have a pair of superhero underpants pulled over my face like a mask with the leg holes as my eye slots, a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, and a Detroit Pistons sweatband over the hood.

The hooded sweatshirt is generic, dark in color, like what a burglar would pull from the trunk of his car for an impulsive kind of robbery. I have reconstructed the costume today, minus the missing sweatband and underpants, and present myself to Sniffy for sniffing. He isn’t very good at tracking, for a bloodhound, but he was almost gray in the muzzle when we began training, so it is understandable.

He is happy to see me. Approaching the cage can be tricky because the moles have entirely conquered the ground under the yard around his pen and you can sink almost anywhere unexpectedly. Pa laid a few rough hewn boards from the house to the pen. The sound of my boots on the wood gets Sniffy excited before I have even rounded the lilac hedge. He slobbers my hand and wags his tail so fiercely his ribcage swings under his spine. He prances on tiptoes as I fasten the leash to his collar. We set off away from the house, diving down the path into the pine forest trampled by Grandpa’s horses and Pa’s old dirt bikes and my feet and Sniffy’s paws. Here, because it is dark and quiet and because the mushrooms erupt with such violence through the pine needles, and because the house is still just visible among the trunks of the furthest pines, it is tempting to think that this is where someone would lay on his belly and watch the lights upstairs go out, one by one. From here, the moon would guide a man to the barn, the house. Sniffy wouldn’t bark because he doesn’t, never has. He just prances, like he’ll pee his pants, like when the white Labrador appears from the forest. Her owner is a big man I see sometimes when I am at the extreme far edge of the hill country, the furthest one can travel to and return from in the light of one day. This man doesn’t look right at me but continues working, digging a shallow trench through the sandy hill country and burying something as he goes along, a hose or cable. I am not sure it is his property, but okay. I say howdy, and he waves. His Lab sits and pants.

Sniffy is on to something now and pulls me into the dry field beyond the pine

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Brown

forest to the shore of the dried pond. He zig-zags and stops and starts with his face held firmly to the layer of air clinging to the Earth. For a while it seems like he could be on the right scent trail. We are headed to where I hid the photograph. After a while though, he veers off toward the old rabbit burrow. We stop for the day. I tell him we need to learn where the new rabbits are. I slap his haunches and scratch his ribs and rub down his shiny legs. We take the long way home, through the gravel pit and car graveyard. The chassis are door-less and shot through with sumac and birch trees. When I was younger, around the year that picture was taken, I would follow Pa’s instructions to go learn the property around the house. You will need to know this like the lines of your own body, he said. Like hunger. Do you ever not know when you are hungry? When you have to poop? It will be like that. Soon enough, it was. On the scarier days when I was lost out here, I would climb the tall bluff and look for the car graveyard, I could look down on the cars, parked and left in a radial pattern, pointing toward the house off through the pines.

Bumblebees are in the hedge roses under the kitchen window. These are not the colonists. They are not honey producing bees as far as we are concerned. I hear a noise and turn, see Pa move into view from behind the barn. He stays tight along its face and ducks into the big sliding door, which is opened just as wide as a human head. I cross the driveway, careful not to step on the clover that leads to the shelter, and go to the opening. The sun is behind me. Sunlight cuts into the blackness of the barn and falls on my father’s face and body. He is standing so that I cannot tell if he is warming himself or has gone insane. We’ve had some scares. Ma’s car is there at the foot of the drive, and the kitchen window is open. These are good flags.

Dad? I whisper.

Yeah, Son. His voice is absent like I have found him reading instructions for the generator. What’s going on?

Just thinking.

What about? He groans. I can understand him completely when he groans. But there is nothing right or good about him standing at the pinhead of setting sunlight in the barn alone. He says, Come here.

Why?

Come here for goodness sake. I’ll show you what I am thinking. That’s what you want, right? Then you can tell your mother I’m not lost again.

Ma’s gonna Just come here, Son. Come here. The beam is long enough to draw a strip of gold across the dry barn floor and up his body to the base of the darkness over his head. It is wide enough to show me his yellow-green eyes, mad-looking and still, riveted to the sun.

What? I say.

His hands appear in the light and rise to my shoulders and he takes them firmly

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in his large hands and turns me around and pulls me into himself. His arms fold into an X on my chest. I can hear the microscopic hooks of dead skin of his calluses tearing apart the fabric of my shirt. One hand flickers up, settles back on my chest.

What? I say.

What do you mean, What? Silly boy. My silly boy. Look. Look right at it. The sun is right atop the bar of light amidst the blackness of the barn. It is all the things the sun is when we try to look at it but cannot because it’s impossible physically.

What I see are the two walls of dust scintillating up and down in waves along the edges of the blade of light and fibers of light radiating against the black. I notice the pebbles and old hay stems on the floor, how they are cut in half or quarters by the light.

I say, It is warm, and hum once deeply. He squeezes me just momentarily to his belly, and then ever so gently. But that and the dust make me feel a little hungry, a little claustrophobic, and I step out of his arms. I turn. He is still looking at the sun and his eyes are all yellow-green. There are no pupils in them and tears are streaming down his face. That is the exact phrase for it. There is a wet spot on my head, I realize. Now the dust at his feet shudders to envelop the water that falls there.

It’ll set soon, he says. Go see Ma about eating. She will want some help.

We’re microwaving pizza, or something.

Go see. He pivots off into the absolute dark of the barn and I hear him stumble into something heavy and stop.

You okay, Dad?

He sings, in a way that makes me think about having to once again prepare myself for being concerned about him all the time, I’m okay, Son.

The bumblebees are restless, loud, many. They are like a siren on its swelling first long cry as I approach the house. I stand there by them, by the open kitchen window, and call quietly for my mom. She is as far away as she can be in the house, while still being in the house, where she cannot hear the bees or Pa. Ma teases a hair from her tongue and looks at it and frees it onto the wind. She goes on chewing her pot pie, watching the sun set.

Tell me about the forest. What did you see today? I don’t answer right away and she starts mumbling about Sniffy.

That dog will have to be put down some time. Soon, maybe. He’s getting weird.

My father seems to look at the sunset with disappointment. He leans and takes her drink and downs it and throws the glass over the edge of the barn’s roof into the bushes. Don’t be cruel, Jill.

She gets up and goes about the business of compacting our paper plates and cups into the cubes we will burn in the winter. Stars speckle the blue at its darkest edge near the horizon. It gets chilly. Ma says my name and smiles. She says it calmly and tenderly.

I have not heard it said in a long time. She says it again, and again asks me if I will tell

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her about what I did today.

Sniffy’s getting better, I say. He gets the trajectory better each day.

Out to the old burrow? Pa asks.

There too, yeah. I have had him looking for a new one all week. We still haven’t found that photograph though.

Can he find the new burrow alone?

He cannot find it yet at all, like I said.

If you train him to take you there, Pa says, and he remembers the way after you have forgotten, that is still something. That’s the difference between starvation and not, well, you know what I mean.

Your father’s right, Ma says.

He smiles briefly. The sun sets in his yellow-green eyes. He says, Keep at it.

I will, I say. Oh! I have some good news though. Today Sniffy found Old Pink Kitty. You remember?

My father awakens to us more than before and he leans over to me. My mother dries her hands and comes and kneels beside us. I retrieve Old Pink Kitty from my pocket. He is worn and filthy and missing his signature T-shirt, but he is the Old Pink Kitty we all remember, the one we identify in family photos.

Wow, Ma says, chuckling. She touches his glass eyes.

My father reaches over and picks the crust from his matted fur. We will wash him for you, Son.

No! Ma sputters.

I stroke him, and agree with her.

That is a... a bad idea, she says.

He nods, purses his lips knowing she was going to say crazy. He brings his hands back toward his body and sits. After a moment he stretches his neck slightly as if to look over the edge of the barn roof to where the glass landed. He chuckles.

Don’t laugh, Ma says, that’s our last glass glass.

It didn’t break. I’ll get it. His head settles back inside his shoulders, he chuckles: Old Pink Kitty. What else did you find?

We saw the man digging again.

What man? Who?

Some old guy out digging and laying a line in the dirt and putting something in it.

I’ve told you about him.

No, Son, you haven’t.

I’m sure it’s nothing, my Ma says.

Oh, my father groans, standing. Oh.

Cable, maybe. Something like a cable. He’s real nice.

You didn’t talk to him, did you, Son?

Ma draws her hands in to herself and looks at them, then at Pa, then back at her hands and shakes her head slowly.

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37

His dog’s real polite. He wouldn’t have a polite dog if he was trouble, Pa. Isn’t that right, Ma? Ma blinks at me and nods for me to come away from him and sit down by her. He paces, looks down to where the glass is, and brings his hands together in front of his chest.

Ma is crying. This is it, isn’t it?

Pa doesn’t answer her but looks back to the sandy hill country. I stand, even though she is holding my hand, and go to him and touch him. When he turns around the sun burns in his eyes like wood fire in our stove. I can almost see movement there.

He moves away and Ma won’t stand up at all. She is crying quietly so he cannot see. She breathes and slowly asks him, real quietly, Conrad Feuerwach, did you see it coming and not tell me?

And I know now that we will have to start worrying about him again, moment to moment.

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Brown

Fire Horse Marc Vincenz

Hong Kong, 1966-1969

The years of the Cultural Revolution & over the border children are soldiers.

A Fire Horse like your son, or so the Venerable Chan intones, would burn a thousand bridges like Stalin or raise them high over galactic distances like JFK. In those years when over the border children are soldiers, fathers & mothers are paraded and paddled as examples of proletariat degeneracy & we move to Stanley, beyond the Happy Valley, on the edge of a fisherman’s market where they sell sea snakes by the dozen & clams the size of dinner plates.

It’s here my old man smokes cigars & learns strategies in the art of war & Mother to bake apple pie with flaky Danish pastry from my nursemaid, Amma Lui, who’s worked in the kitchens of the Jockey Club.

While they plot & bake, the AC vent spits hot air into our tropical garden. Outside among the rhododendrons I ride my stick horse, Lightning, running spears through hearts of cacti, eagerly watching the thick white blood run all over the earth.

39

K.Y. Marc Vincenz

at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, Beijing, 1992

Kwok Ying thinks people of a certain kind will find it easier to remember him. He’s right.

But as if his name were so hard to inflect— plenty of other things come to mind.

Memory works in flashbacks, scraps of trailers, web-bytes, top ten charts, ding-a-ling.

Still, he’s called me here for a reason, not just to watch him plough through a 15-oz steak, French fries, Brussels sprouts all doused in Béarnaise, slurping and sucking like he’s got to get it all in before it’s too late.

I sit back, watching it all unfold: genius at the dinner plate.

Twenty minutes in, chewing for his life, he rustles it out of his jacket pocket: typewritten on carbon paper.

Here. For you. Careful. He says.

Inside there’s a number with five zeros.

An ooze of sauce drips onto his sleeve.

We have coffee. He has a crepe suzette, flambéed with cognac.

At the end he reaches for the bill, says: So? We have deal?

40

Like Fire Tobin F. Terry When I first suspected my father of being an eco-terrorist, I shrugged it off as another activity to occupy his new-found free time. He’d just retired from the mill and after thirty-two years of twelve-hour swing shifts, overtime, and holidays shoveling coal, he needed a break. I was driving him to a doctor’s appointment—routine checkup, nothing serious—when we passed a vacant steel works in Warren, Ohio. He said, “A Goddamn eyesore.”

It was winter, and the bare trees that once worked as a fence between unaware passers-by and the plant looked dead against the overcast sky and the steely blue walls of the abandoned buildings. “Yes,” I said. “A shame isn’t it?”

My father let out a grunt, one I’d come to learn meant he was thinking something not appropriate for sharing. But this time he followed it with, “I’d like to blow it up.” I laughed. “Seriously.”

The following week I came to visit my parents and sat down in the kitchen with my mother. At the time I was a struggling real-estate salesman in Youngstown, a job I’d fallen into. I’d taken on several clients whose homes had been on the market for months, prices reduced to so low they’d actually lose on the deal, and still no takers. My parents told me a friend of theirs was having a hard time selling their home. A real sweet Victorian number. Three bedrooms and two and a half baths. But it’s hard to sell a real sweet Victorian home when it’s on an entire street of real sweet Victorian homes for sale.

I told my parents that the Youngstown market was on the rebound, but I could use the break to come see them. I would help their friend. In fact I was broke, except for enough money to afford an efficiency apartment in Newton Falls. I was going through a rough patch in my financial life and so sold my pride for dinners at my parents’ on the weekends. My mother was preparing poor man’s soup: a puddle of ground beef, potatoes, onions, and whatever else came to her mind.

“You know,” my mother said, “I saw Molly Miles today.” “That’s good,” I said.

Molly was an ex-girlfriend from high school and the first year of college. We were completely wrong for each other, but I really did love her. She was idealistic, politically active. I was complacent, socially awkward. She had red hair and I have black. We were like a couple of sticks of licorice. That’s what I told her: I love red licorice. It’s fun, and sweet. She hated the black, said anise flavor wasn’t versatile and was boring. Besides, she told me, red licorice isn’t really licorice, that I should read the label.

“She’s staying with her father for a few weeks. She asked about you.”

“Where’s dad?” I asked.

“Oh, you know your father,” my mother said, pouring black pepper into the soup.

“He’s out in the shed working on his plans.”

“Mom, you going to put some soup in that pepper?” My mother glared at me. “Do you want to cook?”

I conceded to the pepper. “Plans for what?”

“He’s going to blow up the old plant. He said he’d told you. I knew he didn’t tell you.” My mother began ladling the soup into bowls. “Will you please go tell your father dinner is ready?” I stood up, eyeing my mother. She was calm. “Will you?”

41

“Yes, mom,” I said, keeping an eye on her as I walked away.

As I walked out the back door, I noticed a tear in the screen, rusty hinges, a roof that needed new shingles, a drainage system that leaked from every crux. In the summer the backyard became overrun with crabgrass and dandelions. The shed itself was in shambles, old cracked and gray wood, leaning to the left.

I put my hand to the door; the latch fell off and the door eased open. Inside, to my relief, my father was hunched in his chair next to a kerosene lamp and oil heater, asleep with a stack of papers in his hands. The shed was cluttered with ancient unused yard tools and mounds of empty kerosene cans.

I touched him on the shoulder, prepared to wake him when I noticed that the papers he held were wrinkled topographical maps and architectural drawings. I jerked my hand away from his shoulder and he woke. “How are you, Junior?”

“Dad, what are you doing with those maps?”

“Planning.”

There I stood looking into my father’s aged gray eyes, his deeply wrinkled face, his frail frame of a hundred and twenty pounds. With his untrimmed beard and flannel overcoat, I imagined a tattoo of the Anarchy symbol on his balding head, a bandana masking his face. I felt a sudden sense of pity. I had let my imagination run with the idea of him being an eco-terrorist and blind me to the reality of the situation. The plant stretched for about a half mile along the outerbelt. There was no way this man could orchestrate an explosion of that magnitude, nor acquire the necessary materials for such an endeavor. He was clearly losing his mind. I placed my hand on his back.

“Okay, dad. Mom says dinner’s ready.”

At the dinner table my mother kept the conversation mostly to the typical parental un- pleasantries. How was work going? When was I going to find a good woman and settle down? When I answered “terribly” and “probably never,” she changed the subject and asked my father how his plans for blowing up the plant were going.

He answered with youthful vigor. “Old man Miles said he can get me all kinds of potassium chlorate pesticide.” I gave a hesitant smile, wondering why my mother would encourage his debilitating state of sanity, but reassured myself that she was a good woman and that she loved my father dearly. My mother would support him to the very day he lost his mind completely. She would tell him that blowing up the plant is the right thing even as he sat babbling and drooling in an asylum.

“I hope you don’t plan on storing all of those explosives here,” my mother said.

My father waved his hand in dismissal and slurped his soup. “Janet, where do you expect me to store it? My ass?”

I smiled and remembered a time when my parents fought over real issues. Which college I would go to, fail after a semester and end up at the local college anyway, why my father should stop smoking, why he should retire. “I don’t know, Gerald. Maybe Junior knows of a place.” She looked at me. “One of the houses you’re not going to sell?”

I gave her the “Don’t drag me into this” look.

My father appeared intrigued. They waited for my answer.

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“No, no, I couldn’t. You never know when someone will be interested. I’ve got a few real sweet Victorian numbers. They’re big sellers right now.” My father focused on his soup. My mother shamed me with her eyes. And so ended the discussion of my involvement. In fact, that also ended any conversation from my father for the remainder of dinner.

After dinner my father went back out to the shed without a word to me. “He thinks you don’t believe in him,” my mother said.

“He wants to blow up a factory, mom.” I moved the dirtied bowls to the sink.

On Saturday I set up an open house for the Victorian home on Paige Court.

After an hour no one showed, so I took the liberty of seeing what my parents’ friends left behind. I walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinets. They had pretty much cleaned the place out, save for some disposable utensils and a half bottle of Bombay gin.

I filled a Styrofoam cup with gin and stood at the sink, looking out the back window at the twenty-four foot above-ground swimming pool. The owners didn’t empty it for the winter, and ice had formed on the cover. Behind the pool was a ten by eight Woodbridge vinyl storage shed. Behind that, a thin strip of wooded area, and behind that, the high school. I could hear the band practicing. They were playing something I didn’t recognize and I wondered why in the hell anyone would conduct band practice outside in February. I swallowed the gin and filled another cup before taking the bottle and sitting down at the dining room table.

The dining room was decorated in old-time photos, a baby in a wash tub, black and white pictures of men in overalls. Then there was an oversized reproduction of the Sistine Chapel. Not the whole thing. Just the part where two fingers are almost touching.

The Creation of Man, I think they call it. Those two fingers. It’s like life. No matter how hard we try to connect with each other, there’s always that space. Two fingers just out of reach. It didn’t match the theme of the room, but it still looked good. Some things that don’t match look good together, like Molly and me.

Once, in college, Molly organized a war protest. The protesters ended up blocking traffic. The town police, with nothing better to do, found out who organized it and served her a subpoena in the middle of class. She said they wanted to send a message, quell any kind of dissension among students. I said they were just doing their jobs. That was the end of that.

I heard people talking in the other room. I walked out to the front room, taking the gin, and saw a young couple putting on their shoes. The man was tall and lanky and the woman was way out of his league. A high maintenance type, I guessed. I greeted them and asked if I could show them the place. They said no, they’d seen enough. “But didn’t you just get here?”

“Yes.”

The couple left and I put the bottle of gin in the inside pocket of my suit jacket before locking up and leaving. I took the back roads on the way home. I stopped on North River Road at a pull off next to a cooling plant. Behind the plant was a containment pond. I got out of the car and walked across the street. On the other side

Terry

43

of the road was a gray slag dump and a stretch of hard brown barren land before the tin-looking buildings of my father’s target. The smokestacks reminded me of when my mother and I used to take my father his lunch on midnight shifts at LTV Steel when I was a boy. The smell of sulfur. An exhaust flame at the top of a tower. I remember a man crawling out of the passenger window of his car. The driver’s side window was broken out and replaced with a section of blue tarp held by duct tape. The man walked to the clock-in station with his head hanging and shoulders slumped, resigned to the fate of his twelve hour shift. It was winter, he was wearing shorts, and my mother told me not to stare.

We waited for my father at the entrance to the plant, watching shifts change and men in jumpsuits clocking in. I marveled at the tangled webs of knotted steam pipes, dulled and rusted metal hidden, blurred behind the visible heat coming from them.

I remembered the ever-present dirt that became thick grease in my father’s sweat and smeared on his once-white hardhat, the light of orange lamps overcasting gray concrete and metal and the ash that covered them. I hated the smells of sulfur and coal byproducts permanently seared into my nostrils, my father’s hair and clothing. It was a flawless wasteland of precise machinery, exact gauges and overbearing furnaces with clouds of glistening red cinders, lumps of slag, molten metal, and dust mounting out of them.

Six years later, when I was twelve, my father took me hunting. By then I’d fired a gun. Both handguns and shotguns in fact. I’d killed things too. Mosquitoes, flies, and spiders mostly. Yet I never fired a gun and killed something at the same time. It was November and fallen leaves covered the ground. They were already dead, faded into dirt and mud, lacking the vibrancy they held only weeks before when the trees of Northeastern Ohio went out with a colorful bang of reds, oranges, and yellows. I was afraid to kill. We sat down with our rifles unloaded and propped up against a tree, and we ate raisins.

My father pointed to a deer that had been watching us from maybe ten yards away. It was really something, like a statue, almost. I remembered my rifle, looked from the corner of my eye at it sitting against the tree, still unloaded. “It’s a twelve point,” my father said, smiling. We watched it watching us until it leaped away, silent. On the way out of the woods we stopped at the base of a standing dead twelve foot scotch pine.

“Let’s knock it over,” my father said. We set down our rifles and rocked the tree until it snapped loose from its base and fell heavy on the forest floor. Maybe this abandoned steel works was like that.

I pulled up to my parents’ house for dinner. There was a car in the driveway I’d seen before, a white Ford Crown Victoria. Inside my mother was making flapjacks with meat filling, a kind of thin pancake and Sloppy Joe wrap. Sitting at the dining room table were my father and Police Chief, Jim Laughlin.

“Junior,” my mother said, “you remember Chief Laughlin?”

I nodded and Chief Laughlin stood from his chair to shake my hand. “Hello Junior, how’s the housing biz?”

“Just like anything else, I guess.” I hadn’t seen Chief Laughlin since a year before, 44

Terry

when he pulled me over at two a.m. and asked if I had been drinking. I had, and I told him so. He told me to head straight home and followed me all the way. I remembered the bottle of gin in my inside pocket.

“Chief Laughlin is here to ask about our neighbor, Mr. Miles,” my mother said, “and I invited him to dinner.”

“Oh?”

“Well, just a few questions,” Chief Laughlin said, tucking a napkin into his wide khaki lap.

My mother placed the flapjacks in front of each of us and insisted that we say grace first. She gave a long drawn out plea to God to keep our neighborhood safe, to bless our upstanding family, our good-natured neighbors, and our dedicated Police Chief.

We began eating the flapjacks and Chief Laughlin spoke. “So, about Mr. Miles.”

“I hope everything is alright. He’s a wonderful neighbor,” my mother said.

“Let the man talk, Janet,” my father said.

“Everything is fine Mrs. Jones. Just some questions is all. The flapjacks are terrific, by the way.” Already I knew Chief Laughlin was suspicious of something. My mother’s cooking was not only strange but absent of flavor other than black pepper.

“It’s just that I wondered if you knew why he might have an interest in acquiring a large amount of potassium chlorate.”

“Pertassim Clarol? You mean for swimming pools?” my mother asked.

“No, it’s found in a pesticide. But sometimes people use it for other things. Things like bombs.”

The room went silent except for my father, whose chewing could be heard from the street.

“Why would Miles be making a bomb?” I asked. “He’s a farmer.”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what I’d like to find out. Do you know if he was moving a stump or anything like that?”

My father chimed in that Miles might have said something like that, but he wasn’t sure. He asked if Chief Laughlin knew for sure that Miles was after large amounts of this particular pesticide, and if so, did he even have it on his property. Chief Laughlin said that it wasn’t a formal investigation that he had no reason to think Miles was up to no good. In today’s world, he just had to check when that much pesticide was involved.

It made sense for Laughlin to be suspicious. Miles had a Unabomber look to him, long scraggly beard with tobacco stains and dirty hands, though Laughlin wasn’t the type to profile based on looks. But Miles had been a farmer for his entire life as far as I knew. He had inherited the land from his parents and rented my parents the home next door for only four hundred a month, utilities included. He was a good person.

After dinner Chief Laughlin thanked my mother again for the food and thanked us for the hospitality then left. He told us to call if we saw or heard anything unusual. We said we would. My father and I sat down in the living room for a smoke and a glass of brandy. “Dad,” I said, “don’t you think this is getting a little out of hand?”

“Out of hand?”

“The Chief of Police was at your home today.”

Terry

45

“I was here, remember?” He slammed his brandy and asked if I wanted a refill. I said sure.

“I stopped by the plant on the way here today. I got out of the car and walked over by the slag dump.”

“You were trespassing?”

“You want to blow it up and you’re worried that I was trespassing?”

“That’s illegal.”

“So is blowing things up.”

My father turned on the radio. We sat there in the dark, smoking and drinking, and as the liquor went to my head I started thinking about Molly. I wondered what she would think of my father’s plan, how it involved her father, and decided she’d probably be for it. I thought maybe I’d give her a call.

I was dozing off when the doorbell rang. It was old man Miles. He was wearing overalls. I pretended to sleep. Miles and my father went out to the shed. I soon followed after them, careful not to bump into anything, as my sense of balance was seriously jeopardized by the gin and brandy. I stopped at the door of the shed where light from the kerosene lamp leaked out, and listened.

“Laughlin stopped over today. You have to drop out now, and we have to move the chemicals someplace safe,” my father said.

“Goddamn it. I went through all of that trouble. I’m not out,” Miles said.

“You have to. Too risky.” The men were quiet.

“We’ll need someone else.”

“We can’t risk getting anyone else involved.”

After Molly organized the war protest on campus, as we lay in the bed at her dorm room, she held on to me and I was still. She asked what I thought about the war. I said, “I don’t know. Is anybody really pro-war?”

“So you’re against it?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

She asked if I believed in anything. I told her, sure. I protested the protest. I didn’t show up to it. I told her I watched from a parking lot. She said it was just like me to stand still while others were out making a difference.

I opened the door to my father’s shed. “I’ll do it,” I said.

The next evening my father and I went to Miles’ and picked up the explosives: sulfuric acid Miles had distilled from car batteries, gallons of kerosene, the potassium chlorate, and bags of sugar. I drove it alone to the house on Paige Court. I figured the basement would be the best place to store it. The heat had been turned off and no one would be there. I wasn’t going to hold another open house until the owners, who informed me they were staying in Florida, started to ask questions. For the next week my father filled me in on the crucial points he wanted to explode. Some of the tanks were bound to contain flammable materials, and he didn’t actually plan on burning the

46

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whole thing, just enough that the authorities would have no choice but to clean the entire area. It was premium father-son time. He put me in charge of learning the chemical procedures from Miles for the firebomb. I had received a “B” in high school chemistry.

Miles was an explosives specialist in the military.

I spent my weekends with Miles studying the procedures. The first day I went over, Molly wasn’t there. Old man Miles was adamant about the precautions. He made me repeat them out loud and write them down. “Careful now. Sulphuric acid will burn your skin clean off. If you spill it, wash it away with a shit load of water. If you breathe it, well, God help ya.”

“Okay.”

“Say it.”

“God help me.”

“Alright. Kerosene into the bottle to here.” Miles pointed to a yellow line one-third from the top of the bottle. “Not about here. Right here. Acid into the gas. Do that slow.

An inch or two from the top, put the stopper on. Wipe bottle clean as green ‘less you want less arms.”

“No less arms.”

“Towel around the outside, tie it off.”

“Tie it off.”

That night at my apartment I looked up Molly’s cell phone number. It had been three years since I’d talked to her and I wasn’t sure if she’d even still have the same number. I felt like blowing something up. I decided to call her. She answered on the third ring.

“Hello. Molly? It’s Gerald.”

“Who?”

“Uh, Junior. From college.”

“Oh, Junior! Is everything ok? How are you? It’s been a long time.” Molly told me about how she had a job with an internal review board. It wasn’t the kind of work she ever expected to be doing, a corporate job, but it paid the bills.

I found myself nodding and saying “Uh-huh,” but realized she couldn’t see me and stopped the nodding. She asked about me. I told her I heard she was in town, and since I was too, maybe she could meet me for lunch sometime. She said it probably wasn’t a good idea.

“Molly, I’m a different person now,” I said. “I’m motivated. My dad and I started a big project. An environmental activist type thing. Right up your alley. You’d love it.” She was quiet. “I just would really like to tell you about it sometime. How about now? Are you free?”

“Junior, it’s too late.”

“Things are different now.”

“No, Junior, it’s too late.” I looked at the clock. It was 10:04. “It was good to hear from you. Take care of yourself.” She hung up.

Terry

47

One solution was required to be stored away from the other. When they came into contact with each other, as Miles said, “There’ll be more fire than Hell.” My involvement filled me with adrenaline and pride. I felt as though I was part of something larger than myself, that I was finally acting, making a difference. “Now, one hundred grams potassium chlorate and one hundred grams sugar in one cup boiling water. Let it cool.

Alright?”

“Alright.”

“Say it.”

“Let it cool.”

After setting the demolition date, I drove to the Paige Court home and mixed the solutions. In the basement there was a wooden workbench and two rows of homemade shelves for storage of the glass bottles once they were filled. I lined up the bottles according to their type, making sure that one was not next to the other, just as Miles had said. One was on the top row, the other on the bottom. I locked up after dark and left. In my rear view mirror, I saw a white Crown Victoria following me. I pulled into a convenience store and the Crown Vic did too. I got out and went into the store. I held the door for an old woman. I bought a six-pack of Molson XXX and the most expensive pack of cigars. I walked out to my car, standing beside the driver’s side door, lit a cigar, and opened a beer. Laughlin got out of the Crown Vic and walked over to me. “Evening, Junior.”

“Good evening, Chief Laughlin.” I took a drink.

“Rough day in the housing biz?”

I hated it when people called it the housing biz. I blew cigar smoke in his general direction, finished the beer and tossed the empty bottle into the trash. “You could say that.”

“You know you can’t drink that here.”

My ears were hot. “Why were you following me?”

“Look, I don’t know what you been up to in there, but you’d better knock it off.

You and I both know your folks wouldn’t be too proud if I took you in for drinking that out here. Now I want you to head straight home and leave the rest of those beers in that box or else I’ll have no choice. Understand?”

He was serious, and I realized I was being a fool. I blushed. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I don’t know what got in to me.”

Laughlin said it was okay, that everybody needs to unwind now and then, especially nowadays. He told me he was going to follow me home just to make sure I made it there alright, and he did. The night before demolition I decided to stop by Miles’ to run over the procedures one last time. Molly answered the door.

“Junior?”

“Uh. Hi, Molly.”

“Now’s not a good time.”

“I’m here to see your dad.” I squeezed past Molly into the living room. Old man Miles was sitting on the couch next to a tall, fit man about my age.

Miles stood up. “Junior. Surprised to see you.”

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Terry

“Sure. Sorry. I just wanted to stop in. I didn’t know you had company.”

Molly sat down next to the man. “Junior, this is my fiancé, Michael.”

I shook Michael’s hand, said, “Hey, Mike, if you take Molly’s last name, you’ll be M&Ms.”

Michael laughed. “Junior. Is that a family name?” Molly punched him in the arm.

Old man Miles, who had disappeared into the kitchen, returned with a cup of coffee and handed it to me. Miles sat down in a recliner across from the couch. I stood still in the middle of the room, my ears burning in the quiet. Michael’s presence made me acutely aware of my own, and I was consumed by a sudden sense that I didn’t belong. I gripped the handle of the coffee mug tight, and my knuckles turned white hot.

“Molly was just saying her and Mike are looking to move closer to town,” said Miles.

“My work is on the Internet,” Michael said. “Business is picking up, so there’s no need for Molly to stay at her job. I know she wants to be close to her father.”

“Great. You two seem great.”

“You’re in real estate, aren’t you, Junior?” Molly asked.

Michael looked at me. “Oh? Maybe you could show us something. They say it’s a buyer’s market.”

They waited for an answer. The silence roared in my ears. I choked. I felt as if all oxygen had been sucked from the room. “Sure.” I placed the coffee mug on an end table.

My mouth was dry.

“I have to go.”

I felt as if something inside me were about to explode. I refused an offer to stay, finish the coffee, and chat, quickly gathering myself and walking out the door, all the while feeling Molly and Michael’s eyes burning on my skin.

I drove straight home to my efficiency apartment. The following silence inflamed me. The empty gray walls of my apartment, the hardwood floor, my blood, all reaching a point that felt like fire. I piled everything combustible in the center of my apartment, real-estate papers, too big sports jackets, paper plates, my sheets, the curtains from the windows, and poured over them colognes, rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, and the remainder of the gin. Everything was gray. I lit a cigar and lit my business card, Gerald “Junior” Jones, Real Estate Sales, life-long standby, and tossed it onto the pile. The flame went out. I lit another and this time carefully bent over and held the flame to the pile. It finally caught. I opened all of the windows for oxygen and left the room as the flames grew higher and the fire alarm went off.

I walked outside and stood on the street. The other tenants started filing out in their pajamas. I thought about the exhaust flame at my father’s work, the red hot furnaces he smelled like, the idea of an entire factory, half a mile long, going up in flames, and me, standing there, still, as it all came down.

Terry

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The Best-Natured Baby in the World James Penha

“He’s the best baby,” Maria told her mother. “The best-natured baby in the world.”

Maria sat at the dinette table with the cell in her left hand and the handle of the stroller in her right.

“He doesn’t wake you up at night?”

“Never.”

“Oh, come off it. Never?”

“Never. He doesn’t cry.”

“He never gets hungry? Wet?”

“Of course, he does, Mother. But he doesn’t cry about it, that’s all. Hard to believe... since he’s your descendent.”

“Here it comes.”

“Here it is. He’s a healthy baby. A happy baby.” She looked lovingly at her son and so rocked the stroller gently despite her growing tension. She knew her mother wasn’t going to let this go.

“But he really never cries? Never. Never? You’ve never heard him cry?”

“Never,” insisted Maria.

“Not when he was born?”

“I was out of it, but, no, not even. I mean as soon as I saw he was whole and well, well, I didn’t wait for him to cry!”

“Ask Henry. Ask the Doctor.”

“Yes, hang up right now. I’ll call Henry in London. Wake him and ask him if Robbie cried when he was born. I’ll get right back to you. Oh no, then, I’ll call Dr. Rumsey. I’m sure, out of the four million babies he’s delivered, he’ll remember if Robbie cried.”

“He’ll remember if he didn’t.”

“He didn’t.”

“That’s—”

“Yes?”

“That’s—”

“Yes? Go on. Say it, Mother.”

“That’s not normal, Maria.”

“Jesus, you are so damn negative!”

“Maria, what if you slapped him?”

“You want me to slap a nine-week old infant? Just to make him cry? God, I hope the FBI is taping this call.”

“Slap him.”

Maria terminated the call.

Maria stared at her baby and wondered if she should, after all, worry. Her mother had a point, though Maria was loath to admit it. Babies do cry. She dialed Dr. Rumsey, and, after a few persistent minutes with the clinic’s staff, was put through.

“Of course he cried,” Rumsey curtly replied. “All babies cry.”

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“Not Robbie.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

“That he never cries.”

“You actually remember hearing him cry when he was born? Him. Robbie. Baby Fitzlewis?”

“I’d remember if he didn’t.”

“He didn’t.”

“What can I say, then? I need to get back—” Dr. Rumsey cut himself off only slightly less demonstratively than Maria had earlier ended the conversation with her mother.

Maria had by now been rocking the cradle in consonance to the vehemence of her discourse. She rose to return the receiver to its cradle on the wall and looked intently at her child peacefully sleeping.

“Shit!”

She inched her left thumb and forefinger toward his nose and pinched it shut.

The baby opened his eyes and mouth widely. As he focused on his mother’s familiar fingers, even though he couldn’t smell her scent, he gurgled in ebullient suspiration.

Maria stuffed the fingers of her right hand through the baby’s lips. Robbie rolled his eyes. He couldn’t see what was happening, but coughed and sputtered for air. Maria let go of Robbie who flailed with both his arms. Maria let him flap until, exhausted from the calisthenics of his thrusts, he fell back asleep.

Maria looked at her watch. It was 6 AM in London.

“Room 1322, please.”

After eight rings, she heard a groggy Henry. “Wake-up call?”

“Obviously.”

“Oh, hey, hon, what... oh, oh, 6:10... okay, yeah, good time to get up anyway.

Yeah. Hey? How nice.”

“Henry, have you ever really heard Robbie cry?”

“Oh, wow, is he giving you a hard time. Oh, gee, I’m sorry I’m not th— Is he sick, do you think? How about call—“

“Henry, he’s not crying. That’s the problem.”

“Uh, wait a minute. Can I call you back in like five minutes? I need some coffee.

They have one of those coffeemakers in the room. It takes no time. Okay?”

“Henry, have you ever heard Robbie cry?”

“Ever? Of course.”

“When?” Maria wanted to know.

“When you get up in the night.”

“No, you don’t. Because he doesn’t. I just get up.”

“Why?”

Penha

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“Why what?”

“Why do you get up when he’s not crying?”

“To look at him,” said Maria.

“Oh... gee, that’s so... sweet. You’re something. Really.”

“So you never actually heard him cry?”

“Okay, wait, I’m just pouring the water. It’s already ready, see? Did it while we’re talking,” Henry explained. “So what exactly is the question?”

“Have you ever heard Robbie cry?”

“And, like, I have to remember a particular moment?”

“That would be good.”

“How about when he was born? When they slapped him.”

“Did he?”

“Of course, they always do. That’s why they slap them.”

“Henry, I’m not asking about they or them. I’m asking you if you remember Robbie, our son, our son in particular. I’m asking if you remember him crying when he was born!”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You do?

“Yes,” Henry repeated.

“And he did?”

“Cry?”

“Yes! Cry!”

“Hon, I said I remember it. Are you okay?”

“No, not really.”

“Because?”

“Because,” Maria answered slowly, wearily, “if he never cried, that’s not good.”

“No? I would have thought not crying was good and crying was not good.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No, honey, no, really. Help me here. It’s hard for me to catch up with you. Must be the jet lag.”

Maria said nothing.

Henry broke the silence after finishing the Nescafé. “Hon?”

“It’s me, Henry. I’m sorry. I’m the nut today. Must be the responsibility. First time all alone with him all day. I don’t... No, the baby’s great. Just great. Sweet as ever.”

“Why not get your mother to come over and keep you company?”

“Yeah, maybe I will. So you’re ready for your lecture?”

“I can’t wait, actually. Practiced it to perfection on the plane. The woman next to me thought I was schizophrenic—talking to invisible audiences. But, yes, I’m ready, itching to perform!”

“You’ll be great.”

“I know. Talk to you later. Love you. Love to Robbie.”

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Penha

“Love you. Bye.”

Maria snapped closed her cell, removed Robbie’s pullover and his still-clean diaper. She held him over her left shoulder where she could hear his every murmur. She served her right hand sharply to the baby’s bottom.

The cooing stopped. Maria grabbed the baby and held him by his underarms so she could look at him face-to-face. Robbie’s stunned expression turned to something like a smile.

“Ahhhhhhhh! What’s wrong with you!” Maria screamed.

Robbie googooed.

Maria strapped the baby back into the stroller. “You’re not going to eat until you cry, you little freak,” she said and left Robbie in the kitchen. She walked upstairs to the bedroom, slammed the door hard, listened for a moment to nothing, lay down in bed and turned on the TV.

She awoke during the evening news, shut down the TV with the remote, and listened. Nothing. “Jesus Christ!” She swept downstairs and into the kitchen where Robbie snored sweetly in his stroller.

She undid the straps and raised the baby above her head and let him drop to the floor.

After the thud, there was a silent second, and then a scorching siren of a cry that never stopped.

Penha

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Fatimah Asghar is a poet, performer, photographer, writer and thinker who is almost always in-between two places. Currently, her heart is in Cambridge with her sisters while her body is in Sarajevo, where she is on a Fulbright grant, writing, researching, exploring and constantly tripping over herself. In her time spent not being the clumsiest person in the world, Fatimah enjoys using different artistic mediums to play with traditional storytelling. Her literary work hovers between prose and poetry, examining fact through a lyrical lens, and uses the page as a stage and the body as a page. You can find her at www.fatimahasghar.com.

Steve Barbaro’s work appears in such journals as American Letters & Commentary, WebConjunctions, Washington Square, Lo-Ball Magazine, and Denver Quarterly.

Jessica Barksdale is the author of twelve novels including Her Daughter’s Eyes and When You Believe. She is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College and teaches online novel classes at UCLA Extension.

Steven Matthew Brown is from Michigan and has lived since 2006 in the former East Germany. His essays and stories can be found in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and Word Riot, and in German in the magazines Dummy and Heft, and the seventeenth edition of the MDR’s famed anthology, Frühstück mit Axt. Justin Carter is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. His work appears/is forthcoming in lots of places, including The Good Men Project. Check him out: http://thewateriscontaminated.tumblr.com.

Lindsay D’Andrea is currently an M.F.A. candidate for creative writing (fiction) at Iowa State University. Work of hers has appeared recently in InDigest Magazine, Stone Highway Review, The Emerson Review and others. She is originally from Medford, NJ. Kitt Miller Day voted in the most recent presidential election and lives in Kentucky.

W. Todd Kaneko lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Lantern Review, NANO Fiction, the Collagist, Blackbird and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches at Grand Valley State University. Visit him at www.toddkaneko.com.

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Ana Lesac is a Croatian painter and doctor of medicine. She paints mainly abstract and abstract-surreal paintings and has so far had several art exhibitions and worked on several projects, including “Modern woman - be silent and beautiful,” in which she sarcastically addressed the subordinate position of women in modern society. Her art was also donated to help raise founds for landmine removal in her country. In her newest humanitarian art project, she will try to introduce the public to secrets of Croatian mythology. All funds from the project will be donated to a rehabilitation center for children with developmental disabilities. You can contact her on DeviantArt http://ana-lesac.deviantart.com/, and at LesacArt on Facebook.

MK Miller has two degrees and limitless curiosity. She has written about a wide array of topics—including the cultural significance of go-go boots and authentic communication tips. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared most recently in Thick Jam, Revolution House, Verdad Magazine, Tawdry Bawdry, and Tiny Buddha.

A native New Yorker, James Penha teaches abroad. Snakes and Angels , a collection of his adaptations of classic Indonesian folk tales, won the 2009 Cervena Barva Press fiction chapbook contest; No Bones to Carry , a volume of his poetry, the 2007 New Sins Press Editors’ Choice Award. Waterways has selected lines from his many contributions to that litmag as its 2011-2012 themes for submissions. Penha edits The New Verse News , an online journal of current-events poetry.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American Review, The Florida Review, New Delta Review, Water~Stone, Cimarron Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches creative writing and literature in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Stirring: A Literary Collection and the Best of the Net Anthology.

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Tobin F. Terry is a full-time Instructor of English at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio.

Tobin spent most of his life in Northeast Ohio where he graduated from the NEOMFA. Before finding his home at Lakeland, Tobin taught English at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio and served as a communications coordinator for the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Tobin is also an editor for Chagrin River Review.

Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British, was born in Hong Kong, and currently lives in Iceland. His poems and translations have appeared in many journals, including Washington Square Review, The Bitter Oleander, Exquisite Corpse, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Guernica. Recent publications include: The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (Argotist, 2011) and Pull of the Gravitons (Right Hand Pointing, 2012). A new English-German bi-lingual collection, Additional Breathing Exercises, is forthcoming from Wolfbach Verlag, Zurich, Switzerland (2013). Two collections of translations are also forthcoming: Secret Letter by Erika Burkart (Cervena Barva Press, 2013) and Kissing Nests by Werner Lutz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012).

Gregory Zorko is a poet and history student. He recently graduated from Plattsburgh State University. Right now he is working and preparing to apply to graduate schools. He likes to travel and enjoys studying European languages. He reads all sorts of things. He loves Lorca, Joyce, The Quran, and Khlebnikov.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This issue would not be possible without the generous support of our benefactors: TROY BLACKFORD CHRIS GREENHOUGH We would also like to thank everyone who continues to take a chance on us. Thank you for sending us your work. Thank you for your faith and kindness.

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