Revolution House Magazine, Volume 2.3

Revolution House Staff Executive Editor Alisha Karabinus Managing Editor Elaina G. Smith Managing Editor, Poetry Staci R. Schoenfeld Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor Jaime Herndon Assistant Fiction Editors Karen Britten Carol H. Hood Sarah Kamlet Koty Neelis Katie Oldaker Assistant Poetry Editors Fati Z. Ahmed Jonathan Dubow Karissa Morton Cover Art Bryan Estes

We’re closing the door of 2012 with a brand-new issue, the last of our second year. Two years! It hardly seems possible; just yesterday we were late-night chatting about the fun in starting a new magazine. But oh how we’ve grown in those two years; this year saw not one but two successful contests, our first double issue... and our first hiccups in the production schedule. Graphic design duties have passed from world-traveler and incredible designer Sarah Kamlet to me. Big shoes to fill, and I’m slower about sliding my feet into them. If you’ve spent time wondering where the issues are, lay that at my door.

But I hope they are always worth the wait. Revolution House has always been a labor of love for us, and we pour everything into the issues. This magazine is our passion made tangible. We hope you feel it. The Winter issue has been long in coming; we held a few pieces over from the last issue, because we wanted to evoke a particular feeling here, the quiet sadness so common in winter, the hush of a snowy landscape, the hope of spring. We think it’ll be good reading for a night by the fire, with a cup of hot cocoa at hand. We hope you’ll agree.

We’d be remiss in not mentioning some of the honors we’ve been able to bestow this year. Though you’ve read about them already, indulge us in reminding you that Chelsey Clammer won our first contest, back in the spring, for her “Bodyhome.” Announced today as well was the winner of our inaugural flash fiction contest, “The Package,” by Jeffrey Kingman, chosen by Randall Brown, who was kind enough to judge the contest. We also nominated again for both the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the ‘Net anthology: Pushcart Prize From 2.1: Chelsey Clammer, “Bodyhome” Nick McRae, “Introduction to Czech Studies” and “Martin, Slovakia” Gwen E. Kirby, “Vectors” From Volume 2.2: W. Todd Kaneko, “The Sheik Likes to Hurt People” MK Miller, “Elbow Point: Welcome to Black’s Lodge, Number 13″ Sundress/Best of the ‘Net Creative Nonfiction: “Bodyhome” by Chelsey Clammer (from 2.1) “Thesis” by CL Bledsoe (from 1.3) Fiction: “Fatherhood” by Kea Marie (from 1.2) “The Rapture of Our Things” by Dan Hornsby (from 1.3) Poetry: “The, Warped Wholly” by Jake Syersak (from 1.3) “Martin, Slovakia” and “Intro to Czech Studies” by Nick McRae (from 2.1) “How To Politely Decline an Invitation to an Airport Lounge or How To Meet New People Without Being Creepy” by Carol Guess and Daniela Olszewska (from 1.3)

And finally, a little accolade for us. Big things are coming soon, not least of which is our first official appearance at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Boston in March. You may have seen us scattering postcards around last year, but this year we’ll have a table presence at the bookfair, where we’ll be sharing with the wonderful Devil’s Lake. Stop by and say hello. We’ll be looking for you.

See you in the spring,

Alisha Karabinus Executive Editor

Transmission Jeff Haynes

In the long-distance, past telephone wires and radio towers, satellites are still chattering with ancient audio broadcasts: short-wave signals of garbled speech and stuttered vowels.

I like the idea of it—of how we will always be heard—that this portion of our history will circle the globe as loops of language floating further and further from orbit. In the knowing that in far-gone galaxies, we can still pick up re-runs of Lucy—that Ricky will always enter stage-right, speaking a flurry of tangled Spanish.

That an unknown ear is pricking to the hard wail of a tenor sax, a shoe is ticking to the thump of a bass drum, the manic bravado of Babalu.

But science states that our universe is, in most respects, silent.

That what the astronaut tethered to the space shuttle would most likely hear is the sound of his own breath hammering inside his helmet as he dangles from the flight deck— suspended from the stars, and terrified of the ground.

On clear evenings, when my car stereo empties of static, I listen for the bootleg transmissions of the lonely— the fiery baritones of brimstone pastors cracking sunflower kernels between their teeth, waxing poetic about pure blood; the widows of auto parts moguls and forensic accountants who testify to alien encounters, stating that their lover took the form of Luke Skywalker; or the call-in survivalists who warn of impending doom, who tune in with homemade ham radios and never leave their name.

And sometimes I drive with these voices over county roads to forget that the quiet astronaut’s body has since come untethered.

That he is now moving at speeds previously unknown to the skin.

To forget that the end is like any beginning—sparse and dark, and that drift is what we first feared when the white moon rose over the Earth.

5

Summer-Father Rudy Koshar

Felda and Anna go to the train depot, where a huge crowd gathers. Cousin Heinrich and his mother are there along with several other relatives. A band plays. The crowd is so dense, Felda fears she’ll lose touch with her mother, who clutches her daughter’s damp hand. Felda’s hand hurts but she dares not tell Anna to stop squeezing.

Felda can’t see the train track or the band. She’s in a tall forest of gray and brown overcoats that threaten to collapse and bury her. Anna stands on her tiptoes, reporting that the train is still not in sight. Felda wears a new blue dress, made by her mother for this occasion. She likes the yellow stitching around the hem and high neck. She wishes the September day wasn’t overcast and windy so she could wear the dress without having to cover it with her coat.

The train is scheduled to arrive at three in the little city on the North Sea, but it’s already half past. Rumors spread that it’s held up in Hamburg. Or the treaty was cancelled in secret and the train never made it out of the Soviet Union. Fifteen minutes later, as small groups of two or three peel away from the station, a wave goes through the crowd.

“They’re coming! The train is coming!”

The crowd surges. A whistle hoots in the distance. Police officers hold people back, calling for calm. Noise. Smoke. Excited chatter. Some are shoving and a few people shout angrily. Enveloped in a gray haze, its brakes creaking, the train creeps into the station. It stops and the band starts up again.

Soon the crowd cheers as one, as if the chaos from just seconds ago dissipated like steam from the train. Men lean out of train cars. Some grin. Others wave at nothing in particular. Still others stare, as if amazed by the commotion. Felda sees that several men look skeletal, just as her schoolmate Christa predicted. Their cheekbones are sharp, like edges of a cutting board. Their eyes retreat into sockets. Some are clean-shaven, but others look as if they hadn’t seen themselves in a mirror for years. Felda can’t see her father. Maybe he’s not on the train.

Anna lurches forward, dragging Felda through the crowd. More laughter, shouting, tearful hugs all around. The crowd’s unanimity breaks down into multiple, parallel scenes of family drama as the returning soldiers descend onto the platform.

Suddenly Anna’s hand breaks free. Now Felda isn’t sure where her mother is. She’s lost both her parents. She wants to scream, she’s drowning in the overcoats, it’s hard to breathe and objects and people melt into each other….

Felda Schilling often forgot about her father. She no longer listened when Christa bragged, “My father escaped the Communists, and built the family a nice house once he’d saved up enough money. Too bad about your papa.” Felda didn’t listen because she’d become quite comfortable without a father, most of the time.

She and her mother had worked things out. Their apartment was neither as big nor as stuffed with new furniture as Christa’s place. But it had two south-facing windows from which they could see the pretty spire of the Catholic cathedral down the street. They even had a little mutt, Norbert, who would sleep at the foot of Felda’s bed and wake her every weekday morning at half past six so she wouldn’t be late for school. How many eleven-year-old girls could say that?

Felda tried not to look at the framed photograph of her father, unlike her mother, who put the picture on the end table by the easy chair. Anna wanted it there every evening when she sewed or read or fell asleep. Felda would often get out of bed in the middle of the night and tiptoe into the living room. She’d find her mother snoring delicately, her face turned toward the picture.

The picture always made Felda recall how hard it had been the first months after the war. She 6

hadn’t known if her father was dead or alive. Her Uncle Alf, her mother’s brother, had been killed.

That she knew. But even that didn’t make much sense. Uncle Alf gone? The joking uncle with the tiny mustache so popular back then who pulled pfennigs out of her ear and sang silly songs in falsetto?

No longer around? Impossible. Yet a lot of fathers and brothers and cousins weren’t returning, so it must have been possible. And what to make of that? Why fight a war when so many men can’t return from it? What good is that? Women must have more sense because they don’t go off to war and get themselves killed. That’s all she could get from Uncle Alf’s death.

They tried to get information about her father, but none was forthcoming. Was he dead?

Missing in action? All Felda knew was that her father had been a truck driver for the army. They waited for more than a year till they found out he was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. There was no telling when or if he would return.

Meanwhile, they had to eat. So they took long train rides out to the country. If the train was packed, she sat with her mother in a cattle car with dozens of others, or even outside on top as the wind blew their hair. They would take a lamp or some of Anna’s dishes—the beautiful blue and white ones she inherited from her aunt—and trade them for carrots, eggs, maybe a sausage if they were lucky. Felda was angry when Anna traded away her father’s heavy green overcoat. “We’ll get him a nice new one when he gets back,” she said. Felda recognized her mother’s statement for what it was— whistling in the dark. But the real point for her was that it was his coat, and it had his smell, a pleasant mix of pipe tobacco and aftershave.

For a while they lived in a little loft above old man Lehring’s shoe repair shop. Two rooms, cramped and stuffy, not at all as nice as the apartment with the cathedral-view and Norbert. A man started visiting them there. Anna called him Uncle Hermann, but Felda knew he was no uncle. No one had ever mentioned an Uncle Hermann before, and he didn’t look like a brother to either of her parents. He was too short, pudgy, he had a raw East Prussian accent, and he snorted rather than laughed. No one in her family snorted like that. Felda imagined a pig in shiny black and white wingtip shoes. Often he would bring Felda a game or a writing pad and new pencil. She liked the gifts but hated saying danke to him. For Anna he would bring a bottle of wine or nylons or fancy lingerie. Also money. One time he showed Felda a wad of American dollars, green and crisp. She could see he was proud of that wad. He waved it like a magic wand. He was like a potentate, a sultan, and everyone was his servant when he held the greenbacks in his swollen pink fingers.

He visited only in the evenings. Felda was sent off to bed and Anna and Uncle Hermann would stay up late. She heard them laughing and clinking glasses, but now and then they were very quiet.

Curious, Felda got up once to see what they were doing. They were on the couch. Her mother’s black skirt rode high on her white thighs. Anna quickly got up, smoothed her skirt, shooed Felda off to bed. Felda didn’t like her mother’s tone of voice or Hermann’s snorting laugh but there was little she could do. Grownups were grownups and you had to do as they say. Soon after, they moved to the new apartment.

Felda saw how tired her mother got in the evening. She had a job in a textile factory. She found it at the labor exchange, which was nothing more than a wall, a remnant of a bombed out building, with notices pasted on. She waited in line for hours for her turn to scan the postings and jot down addresses. Then she walked around making inquiries. Steady jobs were still hard to find, especially for women, since returning soldiers got preference in hiring. Despite the job, Anna had to take in extra sewing. She sat and sewed all evening, except when Hermann came over. Even then, she was up early and out the door, before Norbert’s wet nose rubbed up against sleeping Felda’s cheek.

They never went to the beach. That was another reason not to look at the photograph of her father. It reminded her of a past so happy that the present had to be sad. The photo showed her father wearing a lightweight cotton shirt. His broad smile said everything was fine. They’d spent the day at the beach. Felda remembered how tall and tanned he looked as he emerged from the water.

She remembered how pretty Anna was in her orange bathing suit and wide-brimmed sun hat. The hat made her look like a thin little helicopter ready for take off. Felda couldn’t have been more than four years old on that day, but she remembered everything. How they took the train across the Hindenburgdamm to Sylt Island in the North Sea. How they packed a lunch, spent the entire day on 7 Koshar

the island, returned home tired and happy. How her father whistled. And her mother giggled like a little girl.

Everyone said she looked like her father. Felda could believe her broad forehead and expressive eyes came straight from that father, the one that summer on the beach, her Sommervater. But not from another father that lodged in her memory like an infection, the soldier-father, the Wehrmacht man who looked into her eyes the last time she saw him. That was in January 1945. He looked scared or angry—she couldn’t tell. She cried because she was afraid and because Anna cried. When he wiped away the tears on Felda’s cheek, he didn’t say anything. Not “there, there,” or “everything will be okay.” No, he said nothing, which made Felda even more upset. Her eyes were not those eyes. She could do without those eyes.

So Anna worked and was tired all the time. On Saturday afternoons and sometimes Sundays too, Anna had people over for fittings. They were very demanding and often they had her do something over. Fix a hem or get the shoulders this way, not that way. Felda heard them order her mother around and it made her angry. Anna did everything without complaining. Met every deadline.

She rarely smiled, and even when she did, as when Hermann came over, Felda didn’t recognize it as her mother’s smile. The laugh Felda had heard on the beach in Sylt had disappeared. Factory work, sewing, the chair by the framed photo in the evening, Hermann’s visits—so went her mother’s gray life.

Not from Anna but from her teacher, Herr Wallner, did Felda learn details of the war and the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The Nazis had promised Germans the world, and for a time, a very short time, it appeared they would deliver. People had jobs and they could buy cars and drive them on the marvelous new Autobahnen. The movie theaters were packed. There were parades and red-white-black banners, as if every day was Christmas, or at least New Year’s. The regime saw to it that good times went on even into the early war years. People still had a wide choice of clothing and food and they could go on outings. Felda put two and two together: this explained how they could have such a lovely day on Sylt Island.

Herr Wallner also said there was a darker side. So dark it was painful to acknowledge it as the essential side, the reason for the regime’s existence. The dictatorship herded Jews, Socialists, Communists, Roma, homosexuals, even dissident clerics, into concentration camps. All for the sake of racial purity and unity. Eighty percent of all Jews in Europe were murdered. Eighty percent. What horror! thought Felda. Now she knew why Herr Feldstein never came back to re-open his stationary store. And why, after hearing about the Nazi regime’s treatment of Russian and Polish prisoners of war, everyone feared for the Germans still in captivity in the Soviet Union. Surely the Soviets would get their revenge.

Felda raised her hand once to ask if the army had helped the Nazis round up their victims during the war. Yes, said Herr Wallner, although the SS organized the mass killing, many in the German army contributed. Felda thought for a while, again putting two and two together, and concluded her father must have helped. He was that way. He never refused a job, not even a hard one.

Always willing to pitch in. A helping hand is God’s hand, he would say to her. Now more than ever, Felda hoped her mother would take away the framed photo on the end table. Or at least turn it toward the wall. But she dared not ask.

Herr Wallner told the class they must be certain never to let a group like the Nazis come to power again. West Germany now had a chance for a new beginning. The new government was committed to democracy. The economy was picking up. Felda respected Herr Wallner’s passion for the future. She liked his rich voice and how the light played off his black hair. He was as tall as her father, and though he wasn’t as funny, he was still approachable and friendly. He marked her papers with “very goods” and “excellents.” She concluded Herr Wallner would be a better father for her than her soldier-father, who had helped the Nazis. He belonged with the other war criminals.

One night at dinner, Felda asked Anna, “Mutti, how come he helped the Nazis?”

Anna looked up from her boiled potatoes and cabbage. “Your father? Helped the Nazis? Where on earth did you get that idea, child?”

“Herr Wallner.”

Koshar 8

“Herr Wallner told you your father helped the Nazis?”

“Not in so many words. He said the military was often as bad as the party and SS. They helped coordinate the train schedules and even transported prisoners in trucks. He would have helped, wouldn’t he have? You yourself said he never quit, and he was always willing to work extra for people.

Like you. And he drove a truck.”

Felda noticed that the creases on her mother’s forehead were deeper than she’d ever seen them.

Around the corners of her eyes were sharply etched crow’s feet. Lately her hands shook. She’d started to smoke cigarettes, thanks to Hermann, who supplied her with cartons of Lucky Strikes. She sighed a lot.

Her words came slowly. “Your father is still in the Soviet Union because they say he may be one of the serious war criminals. That much is true.”

Sitting at the table across from her mother, Felda felt her father’s field-gray uniform against her cheek the last time she saw him. She saw his pinched smile and the anxious strand of blond hair over his forehead.

“But all your father did was transport food. He wrote to me that he never once saw combat.

Never once even saw a corpse. He ended up in Russian hands by mistake. His commanding officer botched directions and he drove straight into the Soviet army’s advance in Poland. Took a wrong turn.

And now he’s paying for his officer’s stupidity. Your father did nothing wrong. I’m sure he never knew about any of the rest. That was Hitler and his gang. Die da oben. The ones up there, the big shots— they’re the ones that did it. And this is not something for an eleven-year-old girl to be concerned with anyway. And certainly not a girl of your background. We’re just workers. Arbeiter. We don’t have anything to do with politics. Dabbling in politics got Germans into trouble in the first place. Workers work.”

“But Herr Wallner said we all have a responsibility to know our history. To know who did what.

There are murderers among us, he said, and we should know how to identify them. So the courts can bring them to justice. And Germany can be a respectable nation again.”

“Herr Wallner is an educated man. He thinks about these things. And his father was a Communist who was killed in one of the camps. That must weigh on him.”

“He said I had special ability as a writer and student of history. He said people of my age will be important to the future of Germany. I should go to university. He said a lot of girls will have more opportunity now. My generation will have to keep the memory of the war alive, since the older generation won’t discuss it.”

“You at university, Felda? Well.”

Felda couldn’t tell if her mother was pleased with the idea of her daughter as a university student. Anna just sat and ate quietly, chewing every mouthful as if it were a dress pattern on which she needed to take extra time.

Normally an enthusiastic eater, Felda picked at her meal. She thought of how difficult it still was for them to get enough food even as times were getting better. The stores were packed with goods again. But they had to make their money stretch. They had enough potatoes, or the occasional beef or bacon, only because of Uncle Hermann.

“Why do you let him lift up your skirt?”

Anna looked startled, as if she’d been awakened by a loud alarm clock. She put down her fork with a metallic thud. “What in the world are you talking about?” It was the same tone Felda had heard the night she found Hermann and her mother on the couch.

“Uncle Hermann. How come you let him?”

“I don’t let him lift my skirt, or anything else for that matter. The idea of it. And that’s another one of those things young girls shouldn’t be thinking about. It’s my business what Uncle Hermann and I do anyway.”

Days after, a letter came. It explained that high-level political negotiations had taken place thanks to Chancellor Adenauer. The West German side was very encouraged, the Soviets unusually co-operative. Corporal Stephan Schilling was among those POWs who would return. Adenauer said this was another step along the way to making Germany whole again. Thousands of German families would be reunited. Normality was just around the corner. Anna’s hands shook as she read the letter 9 Koshar

aloud to Felda.

That night Felda’s stomach fluttered and her heartbeat seemed louder than usual. She went to bed early, but tossed and turned. An hour after her light was out, she recognized the sound of Uncle Hermann’s fleshy knuckles on the door downstairs. Felda heard her mother get up from the easy chair. The door opened. Then whispering, then Uncle Hermann’s voice became loud: “So that’s the way it’ll be!” Heavy footsteps down the stairs. The outside door slammed, but the apartment door closed quietly. The wooden floor creaked as Felda heard her mother walk six paces back to the chair and the photograph.

For two weeks, her mother scurried around the apartment cleaning. She scrubbed the floor, beat the worn living room carpet, polished her pots and pans till they shone like the fenders of Uncle Hermann’s Bermuda Red Buick, the one with the “dollar-grin” grille. Felda worried Uncle Hermann would take back the pots and pans. He gave them to her mother after discovering she’d bartered away all but two of her old ones. But they continued hanging over the stove.

Felda tried to escape Anna’s nervous energy at school. But several of her classmates also had fathers or older brothers returning. They chattered happily about seeing them again, planning to go the zoo or the new department store, playing card games. Felda had trouble joining in. She had a constant, dull stomachache. Babbling and gesturing with her hands, Christa was much more animated than she was. Of course, thought Felda, Christa gets excited over everything.

The day before they went to the train station, Felda and Anna sat at the kitchen table. “It’s going to take an adjustment, for both of us,” said her mother. “And for your father too. He’s had a horrible experience. Some men never recover. He may be very quiet at first. I’ll have to work hard to see to it that he’s comfortable. You must be on your best behavior. No complaining. And be sure Norbert is fed so your father doesn’t have to do it.”

“You’re happy he’s coming back, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am, Feldi. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Felda paused for a moment. “I’m afraid of him.”

“Liebling, you have no reason to be afraid of your father. You saw what he wrote about you. He loves you and misses you. He’s desperate to see us again.”

“Christa said the men who come from Russia look like walking skeletons.”

“Christa says too much.”

Just as she did the night they received the letter, Felda turned in early. And just as before, her sleep was fitful.

…but then she shakes her head and her vision clears. She sees her mother embracing a tall man in a tattered gray army coat that floats on a withered body. Felda can’t make out the face. He hunches forward as her mother holds the man’s head to her breast. Their shoulders shake, almost imperceptibly at first, then violently, as if in an earthquake.

Felda feels isolated in the midst of the uproar. Her mother’s embrace with the tall man seems to go on for hours. Felda fears her soldier-father would emerge from Anna’s arms. He would lean down and look into her face with the same confusing expression he had five years ago. She would not be scared. She wouldn’t cry even though her mother was. She would put up with it, just as she’d put up with Uncle Hermann. And bide her time till she could run away from it all.

The face that finally looks down at her is not the soldier-father’s. It’s thinner, more drawn.

Its owner is tall, but much more gaunt than the man she remembered. No wonder the long army coat looks like a ghostly shroud. Tears stream down his wind-burned cheeks. Through the tears, like someone appearing through a waterfall, comes a smile. Felda sees stained yellow teeth framed by blistered purple lips.

The eyes contain something different than the rest of the defeated face. Far off in those eyes, Felda sees sandy beaches and blue water. She makes out a train and a picnic basket and sandwiches. The glimmer of an orange bathing suit, the figure of a man in the background.

Like a sound from the heavens beaming through the clamor on the train platform, Anna’s voice Koshar 10

comes: “Feldi, it’s your father. Don’t you want to say something?”

Felda can’t think of a thing to say. She’s not quite there, like the time she ran into the flagpole at school. The man’s tears now seem to fill her eyes. The tears threaten to wash away the three of them. She raises her hand to his face, strokes the rough wet bristles. She takes the face in both hands, as if it’s about to drift away if she doesn’t hold tightly. Then he embraces her, drawing her into his tent-like army coat. And Felda smells the ocean.

11 Koshar

Poem For My Unborn Thomas #46 Darren Demaree

I was told a man’s arms should never grieve & the emotion of muscles was an invention of secrecy, like when a child asks about a dead relative, a parent’s response never unburies the body, but lifts it into science fiction.

That science fiction is where I read that a man, his heart, the muscle that powers all muscles of even the thickest torso, is a small rabbit, waiting for a strung carrot.

Son, strong boy, lament not your masculinity, lament that your chest cavity can only hold so much & know you are safe in mine.

12

In the Sadness Room Cameron Awkward-Rich

When I am a child my father drives for hours to sit with the bridge.

When I am still a child but full of hot tar, he tells me I am the only reason he did not jump.

My answer, pulled unflinching from the city I carried there-the river will so often open for another body, swallow it so gently, but the pavement would have ruined you.

I tell this story over and over. It is easy.

As if it explains something, anything about water or having once been my father’s girl. I will tell it again.

As if the telling will wear that cruelty into grief, smooth and plain.

But what I leave out, always, is that when I am still a child but the tar is cooling, is hardening into an unfamiliar body, I dream for years, every sidewalk rising to meet him like a swollen river.

What I leave out is the deep bruise of the city as he splays and opens inside me. It is only a dream.

The nightmare is the version in which his falling is perpetual.

13

When I am a child. When I am a child.

Over and over. As if. The wet tar smell the city carried, scraped and empty.

And I hate it, you know. My body.

Or my father. Often, I cannot understand that difference.

Awkward-Rich 14

En Dedans

Catherine Campbell

The hand on my back belongs to Anne. Anne was engaged once, before she came here. Never got married and never had kids. Her fingers are cold and ringless now, but not because it’s the middle of February. They’re not icy. Just cold like a relief. When she places her hand upon my back, her palm rests right between my shoulder blades. It’s a nice shape. It rests better than my dad’s hand, which is too big, but he hasn’t touched me since my thirteenth birthday, when I started filling out, and whenever my mom hugs anyone her fingers bend and she lightly taps down instead, as if she’s a butterfly, as if she was born nervous.

“Alex,” Anne says, “hold it right there for a moment.”

I pause in the outward move of my rond de jambe and Anne takes her hand off my back to gesture toward my leg. On her wrists run rivers of blue veins; they run all over, pulsing prominently above her heart, the bowl of her clavicle, around the mole on her neck.

“Okay girls, see how Alexandra keeps the heel forward? Remember: all the way around, heel forward. Let’s try it again.”

The pianist plays again the introduction I’ve heard for six years. In the mirror, down the length of the ballet studio, a wave of bony shoulders roll back and straighten, little ribs pulled in.

Scrapes across the floor from rosin-dipped shoes scuffling into fifth. When the main count begins, like clockwork the younger girls drop their elbows. Arms wilt into deeper Vs as each one concentrates fiercely on their lower halves. And Anne will glide around the room to each of them and remind them with a low nursery voice the necessity of strong port de bras and they’ll lift their arms for maybe two more exercises and, because they’re children, they will forget.

Sometimes they study me. I am aware of heads turning when the heads are not supposed to turn this way. But I am the oldest one dancing right now, and you always look to the oldest. When the boys join our rehearsal I lose my place as the student with the most experience. Scott is nineteen.

Irina wants Scott to stay, wants him take over Matteo’s position in a few years teaching the men’s class after Matteo retires, but Scott wants to get out of here. Just like me. We went to the Nashville Ballet audition together in January. Our resumes slid around the backseat. He drove because I won’t get a car until my eighteenth birthday. I jerked him off on the way home. “I hope we go to the same place,” I said. But my parents ended up driving me alone to audition in Atlanta and Greensboro.

Now we wait for the letters to come. Scott will probably get into the Nashville company. He is a boy with good technique. I’m the only girl graduating this year and I didn’t apply to any colleges. It isn’t just me who is waiting: it is puffy-cheeked Melinda, the studio secretary, my parents, the little bun heads turned toward me now, Irina who sits in a chair in the corner mentally taking notes.

“Eyes front!” she snaps. Shoulders straighten, noses point downstage, hips align, all of us finish the exercise. Irina stands.

She is a petite woman who still looks like a student. When Irina was in her eighth season with the Kirov she met an American named Gil. He had been backstage visiting a distant cousin. She was twenty-nine. Old maid. I don’t know if she fell in love with him all too fast but they still got married six months after meeting and that was how she came to the States. Then Gil died in a car accident.

Irina has no pity for Anne’s failure to get married. When we are in the dressing rooms I tell the younger girls about how Irina grew up. She lived in a tiny house with five brothers and sisters and she had to share a bed. In Russia, ballet is everything. Her parents needed her to become a dancer. They made her practice every day, told her they loved her so much. They tied her feet to the bedposts to make her hips turn out as far as they could. They left her like that for hours.

“You are all doing very well,” Irina says. Her accent is still very guttural and thick. Her chin is up; she addresses the top of an invisible opera house. “But you can do better. Don Quixote is no easy 15

task.”

I nod in agreement. The others watch me and nod. She claps twice to signal our stretch break and walks out of the room. We release our holds from our barres and across the room voices start up, backpacks and water bottles are dragged out from corners.

“I love Irina,” Jess sighs behind me. Jess is two years younger than me. Her arch is flatter than it should be, and she has to wear a whole case of hairpins to keep her curls from falling out, but her extension is, as I heard Anne once say, “just spectacular.” She will be the leader of the preprofessional program after I leave. Poor Jess. At fifteen, she is nowhere near ready to take my place.

“Why?” I ask.

“She’s just so,” she takes a breath, “inspiring? I don’t know.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Anne’s better. She teaches you how to really get into character.” I adjust my tights at the knee. “If you’re going to succeed, you need to learn how to be someone else.”

For three weeks I have been preparing for the prima role of Kitri. Today we hold placement auditions. As soon as the Nutcracker season closed and I was out of that sad Sugar Plum costume, every video of Don Quixote arrived within days, stuffed in the mailbox, bought under my mother’s name. Mariinsky, Royal, NYC. Inches away, remote in my fingers, I paused scenes to recreate jumps and grande battement at the miniature barre in my room. My dad told me to cut it out, he couldn’t work downstairs. Then in my mirror I practiced the faces people make when they are in love. Kitri and Basilio are deeply in love. They go through trials together. Irina once danced the role of Kitri so I purse my lips like she does when she smiles. My smile comes out looking more coy than happy. I try to channel the happiness, the aliveness Irina felt when she came to America. Scott will be cast as Basilio, this will be no surprise. At night I dream of where his hands go on Kitri’s body during our wedding pas de deux. After this spring performance I’ll be eighteen and we can finally have sex like he wants.

Irina arrives in the doorway with an open bottle of water. She takes a careful sip, then sets it down beside her chair. “Okay,” she claps. “Adagio. Let’s begin.”

The cast list for Don Quixote is pinned outside the main office on Monday.

Scott will be Basilio.

Jess will be Kitri.

I will be Dulcinea.

Scott runs his finger down the list. “Whoa,” he says under his breath. He turns to me. “Alex, what the hell is this?”

“I don’t know. Where’s Irina?”

“She’s in Studio Two.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, and pulls me into a hug. “It must be a mistake.”

Irina is sitting there alone, hands in her lap, waiting for me. The woman has been my ballet mistress since I was ten. She is ready.

“Can I talk to you?” I ask. “The cast list says—”

“Jess will be Kitri,” she cuts me off. “She has more energy for the part. More, how do you say, bouncy? Bounciness. More life.”

“More life?”

“Dulcinea is... ideal. She is a dream. A beautiful figure, just beautiful. You are beautiful, Alexandra,” she says and walks over to me. She puts her hands on my shoulders. “But Dulcinea is also controlled. Untouchable. Like an angel. It is a very hard part. We will need to work on technique.”

“But it’s just a solo. I don’t—”

Irina suddenly grabs me around the chin. “This,” she says, “cannot be done by anyone else.”

Campbell 16

Anne narrates aloud to the studio: “After fighting marionettes, Don Quixote, a hero disillusioned by the moon and mistaking windmills for monsters, is knocked unconscious by one of the mill’s paddles.”

Then she nods to Christopher. Christopher is thirteen. He straightens a long white beard fastened to his face before throwing one small hand up to the ceiling and falling to the floor, writhing a little and then, still.

Scott laughs. “Dude, Don Quixote gets knocked the fuck out. He doesn’t fry like bacon.”

“Crude way of putting it,” Anne scolds, “But he’s right, Chris. Just... fall. Okay?”

She thanks Christopher for his efforts and then looks for me to cue my place. I am already upstage left. Anne nods in approval and winks at me.

Scott and I haven’t been alone in three weeks. Last Nutcracker and the summer camp before that, and Giselle the spring before that, my weeks were the same: school, dance classes three days a week, rehearsal two days a week and then three, dinner at seven every night—grilled chicken, an apple, a bag of carrots; my mom stopped cooking for me a year ago after she found out Dad was sleeping with someone else—then homework, and riding around with Scott until curfew. He hasn’t called, he says, because his algebra class at the community college is kicking his ass. His roommate is helping him. Gives me a reassuring kiss on the cheek in an empty parking lot, after all the moms and their baby dancers have shuffled away.

Dulcinea is not real. She exists on a page in a man’s mind.

In the mailbox a letter addressed from Atlanta sits among the bills. I smile, bring it with me to rehearsal the next day. Pulling Anne into another room, I take a breath. “Ready?”

She nods excitedly. I tear open the envelope, pull out the paper and read it aloud.

Thank you for your time and your talent, it begins, we had so many wonderful dancers attend our audition. However, you have not been chosen to fill our corps de ballet for the upcoming season. Please send in another application next year, and happy dancing!

Anne takes me in her thin arms. I remember the first time she taped my bruised toes for me, it had been a spring day. Honeysuckle grew along the fence outside our studio. How her fingers pressed down. How blood pooled under my toenails. How she clucked her tongue softly to soothe me, her twelve year-old baby.

“It’ll be fine,” she whispers now. Her hair falls down below her shoulders and I put my face into it and smell her shampoo. When does she wear her hair like this? I wonder what it must be like to be Anne, to live alone in an apartment which isn’t too far from here, to live only for other people. She came to work at Irina’s dance school when she was twenty-five, inexplicably breaking her contract at Virginia. I imagine her living room is neat, with beige furniture, has little knickknacks from vacations she took with her fiancé. I can’t picture him leaving her.

There are twenty-three messages you can silently send while holding a Spanish fan. I pick up one of the fans from a corps girl and find Scott sitting on the floor. I slide the fan slowly down my cheek. I want you. He cocks his head to the side and shrugs at me, puts his slippers on. Jess sits down beside him and taps him on the shoulder. As they talk I watch Scott’s straw blond hair shake while he laughs. She must be very funny because I can’t make him laugh like that. I step lightly to the middle of the floor, strike my position and begin practicing Dulcinea’s finale, a possessed circle of tight turns around the room. But I don’t stop. After three rounds I finally pull in with a fast chain of deboulés to the center, ending suddenly with a thrust up on pointe, arms up in fifth, my eyes closed to the ceiling.

There is the sound of a few classmates clapping. One of the guys yells, “Nice!” When I open my eyes and turn around, Scott and Jess are on their feet, still talking and deep in their own turns.

One of the ballet barres splits during warm-up. We come in another morning to find a mirror in Studio Three cracked in a corner. “We can still use it,” Anne says. Irina crosses herself.

“I didn’t know you were religious, Ms. Irina,” I say.

17 Campbell

“I am not religious unless the Devil appears,” she says. The mirror is replaced that week.

After two messages Scott finally calls me back and takes me out for ice cream on a rainy March night. We run to the car with cones dripping in our hands. He ditches his ice cream in the gutter. I do, too. When we get into the car Scott takes my fingers and licks them. I have only one chance to kiss him before he pushes my head down.

A letter from Greensboro arrives, thanking me for my time and informing me they have filled the two positions for the upcoming season.

Poor Jess has had a bad rehearsal. During the first act of her jetes en tournant she fell twice.

Then she found one of the shanks in her lucky pair of pointe shoes is completely broken. “I don’t know how I worked them that hard,” she says. She sounds exhausted.

I ask Jess if she wants to come to my house for a sleepover.

“Really?” The girl looks delighted.

Jess comes on a Thursday, after she’s finished her homework. My mom lets her in.

“Hi, I’m Alexandra’s mother,” Mom says, but I shoo her away before she can say anything else, and she winces as an excuse to Jess and goes into the kitchen, where I can hear her messing around.

She emerges with a vodka tonic and heads for the bathroom. My mom stays in the bathroom for long periods of time. She keeps a radio on the vanity and a television on a step-stool.

“What’s she doing in there?” Jess asks.

“Dozing off,” I say. I grab Jess’ hand and drag her quickly into the kitchen, where we pilfer some of Mom’s booze to make screwdrivers. We run up to my bedroom with our drinks and I turn on my record player. She stands there with her pinky off the glass and watches me pull out a box of albums. “Wow, that’s so cool!” Jess says. Her mouth is a lip bite, innocent baring of teeth, inward take of breath, moving target.

As the sheer peach-colored curtains let in the spring evening light everything catches in warmth, and the room reeks of fruit and alcohol. When Jess lays across my bed, I concentrate on her neck. It has somehow stretched out like a giraffe between eighth grade and high school. Long, like Anne’s. She lounges on her stomach. Jess puts on a David Bowie album—“So cool,” she says again— and for the better part of an hour we are quiet, propping ourselves up on our elbows and making the bed squeak awkwardly. When our elbows ache we plop down on our chins and turn over to study cracks in my plaster ceiling.

Our screwdriver glasses are empty. I tip mine back and forth, my cheeks hot. I try not to think about the fact that I’m losing my buzz. With my tongue I swipe bits of orange pulp from the rim.

“So now what should we play?” Jess asks lazily, rolling off the bedspread. I roll off the other side and crawl around the carpet to meet her. A pile of records separate us. She looks at me for a moment and I know it’s too long. Looking down, I pick out Exile on Main Street. “These were my dad’s records,” I tell her. “He keeps giving me all these things from when he was young, but then he doesn’t want me to play them when he’s here.”

“Where is he now?” Jess asks.

“At work.”

The record player is on her side, so I hand the sleeve to her. We almost drop it between us. As she gently picks up the stylus I see her fingers have stretched out just like her neck. She is turning elegant. We lean our heads against the footboard. She taps her fingers on the carpet. I put my hand on hers. Those fingers, my tan skin eclipsing freckles. Her hand is much softer than Scott’s and her fingernails are shorter than mine, unpainted. She trimmed them for pas de deux practice.

“Have you ever kissed another girl before?” I ask her.

“No.” Her voice comes out tiny and pinched.

I look at her. “Do you want to?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“It’s not something you think about, you just do it.” I put my hand up to her cheek and stroke it Campbell 18

a little.

“Aren’t you and Scott going out?”

“Not really.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Maybe,” I say. And I smile like I’m trying to be Irina. “I want to with you.”

“Okay,” she says.

Jess lets me kiss her. We kiss with closed lips for a minute and then I gently part her mouth with mine so we can touch tongues. She takes little breaths, jerks slightly like she’s having a dream.

And then she lets me put my fingers between her bra, eventually unbuttons her jeans for me, and I unbutton mine for her, and she asks if Scott touches me like this, will a boy touch her like that and should she wait, and I tell her the choice is always hers as I move my fingers in and out of her, we talk sometimes, absently, while we slide our legs up and her lips chart out my neck, until the light is gone through the curtain, until our hands grow tired and her eyes close and I take my mouth off her bud of a breast and we fall asleep.

“I’m worried that Jess can’t pull off Kitri,” Anne confides. We stand alone together in the main studio.

It has been growing warmer so we lifted the windows, turned on a fan. Soon the honeysuckle will return. The show opens in three weeks.

In the middle of my arabesques I pause, trying to look thoughtful. “I think she can.” I resume moving across the floor.

“Did you watch her today?” Anne sits cross-legged against one of the mirrors. In her reflection the shoulder blades automatically correct themselves to posture. In her bare feet I note we have the same arches, arches so severe we were born for nothing else. We could have been sisters.

“When Scott dropped her in fish pose?”

“Yes, but that wasn’t her fault. I don’t think they click, that’s beside the point.” She gathers her hair and knots it at the nape of her neck with a ballpoint pen. “I mean, Irina thought she had the vitality to do the role. But she looks like...a ghost.”

I want to tell Anne about how Jess and I snuck into the studio eight days ago. I want to sit beside her on that floor and put my head on her shoulder while I tell her that I dressed up in a man’s white T-shirt and boy’s black tights and slicked my hair back to help Jess with her lifts and turns.

I want to tell Anne what it’s like to feel Kitri all over, what it’s like to see Kitri undressed, the way Basilio will never see her. She is not a ghost.

Gliding to the center on demi-pointe I pose to begin again. I will nail these arabesques. “She’s just off,” I say. “Jess will get it perfect at the last minute. You know how it is.”

Scott runs into the room, picks Irina up off the floor and spins her around. “I’m in!” he yells. Irina laughs a little, then says sternly, “Put me down.” She smooths the front gray pieces of her hair.

“Nashville?”

“Yes,” he says. A small crowd has gathered around them. No one is paying attention anymore to the fact that the bag of shoe rosin has gone missing and we have none for rehearsal that day.

Jess looks back at me. It is the first time she has looked me in the eye since we snuck into the studio. A frightened deer. She turns and pushes closer to hear Scott talking about how he’s in the company, how he could possibly be a soloist by mid-season if he plays his cards right, one of the established dancers might be leaving. A few of the guys high-five him. When she and I awoke together in my bed, she just got dressed and left. We don’t seem to be in the dressing room at the same time anymore. Jess slides next to Scott and he gives her a hug. I watch his lips brush her forehead.

Anne suddenly appears beside me.

“Did you hear from the Nashville Ballet?” she asks quietly.

“Yes.” “Oh.” 19 Campbell

Together we stand there, not saying anything, but perhaps we both project my next year at the same time in the forefronts of our minds, and there is nothing in there but an empty yard and stolen booze and records I can only play at certain times.

“I could talk to Irina. About you possibly teaching with me,” she says softly.

“You’re too nice,” I say. “That’s probably why he didn’t want to marry you.”

Our opening night, Irina and Matteo are rapidly stitching two torn tutus. Anne is herding the smaller girls into their places, fixing hems, plucking leotard leg openings down to re-cover their cotton underwear. Scott burns himself while hot-gluing a sole on his first act slippers. Jess is rubbing his back when I walk over to them. With two acts ahead, I am only in my robe. My hair is sprayed stiff high to my head and my lashes are in. Dulcinea is human a little longer.

I bend down beside Scott. “Need any help?”

“No.”

“Of course not,” I lean in. “You have Jess to assist you, right? With anything you might need.”

He looks up at me. His curious expression with eyebrows that should be plucked. I place my naked mouth upon his and put my hand on his neck, but there is no need. He doesn’t pull away. Jess breathes in sharply.

When we stop kissing, I stand, not looking at either of them. “Break a leg, Kitri,” I call over my shoulder.

Kitri does not break a leg. Nor does she fracture a wrist when she slips out of step in her fan dance, or break a nail when she stops herself from falling against two of the corps ballerinas. She ends her thirty-two fouettes at twenty-five. She knocks over two of the bottles during the village dance.

Basilio misses her hand three times during their wedding pas de deux and a few people in the front theater seats laugh nervously. Why, the newlywed couple is pretending to be drunk. But the corpswide flourish at the end, the swell of the music, brings it all back together, and I bourre across the stage, Dulcinea always to be chased by the dogged Quixote of old age and death. He will never have her.

The curtain drops. A sound of clapping, cheers, shouts, a wave of bravos flood the theater.

Several little girls run up and hug me. A couple of them are squealing. They didn’t screw up. Yes children, cheer for your victories. Bodies squirm in and out, back and forth, starting to line up for our bows, the tutus smash against each other and bounce back to their shapes, hands on my shoulders, brushes of lipstick just lightly now, on the cheek, everyone is careful not to touch each other’s hair, a familiar palm and there is Anne, once cool as the other side of my pillow, now a touch only out of habit. She really did love me, I think. She disappears into the dark at the back of the stage and we line up for curtain call. Irina gazes slowly back and forth over all of us. She will not smile, not tonight. Who knows what will happen with Jess after this crap performance. I scan the group for her. Surprisingly, she has already taken her place. The very middle, the very back. The cast will part like a sea to reveal her and Scott for their final bows. Under the dimmed light a wetness reflects down her cheeks, under her nostrils. She stares out at nothingness. Then Scott is there, tissues bundled in his hands, snapping his fingers in front of her. She looks at him like he is a stranger. He mouths something, she takes the tissue, dabs her face quickly, and lifts her head to meet eyes with mine. Kitri undressed. Like Irina, I cannot smile, only turn back to the thick cloth in front of us. The audience is just getting started with their cheers. I know my bow will draw a standing ovation, and there they will remain for only a little of my life, people once hungry, now moved to their feet, maybe even satisfied.

Yes, I will miss this. The curtain rises. The crowd breaks forth.

Campbell 20

The Hierophant Jesse Rice-Evans

Students at Creighton Prep attend mass two times a week, Wednesday and Sunday mornings. They recite the catechism in pews, divided according to grade, then by height.

They wear slate blue oxford shirts with ties red as the Blood of Christ.

The wooden pews creak under my father’s shifty knees. He taps his toes, drums the pew in front of him, flips pages of the hymnal, pages thin as silk in his rough dirty hands.

Scoops a handful of holy water on the way out of Mass, splashes it on his brother and darts away.

The Jesuits keep close tabs on my father. I imagine them tall, swathed in red on Palm Sunday and violet for Reconciliation. The vestments sweep the cold stone of some cathedral floor, swinging the thurible usually reserved for martyrs and requiem masses.

After school, kicking dirt in the parking lot, my father and his older brothers wrestle over the privilege to drive home. My father swears against God and yanks tufts of knee-high grasses from the dry Nebraska dirt. He pushes up his shirt sleeves and slouches towards St. Pius’s to watch the girls pour from the regal stone archway and into the street.

Their ponytails swing; they roll their socks down and sweat gleams against the poolside tan of their calves. My father leans heavy on the low slung brick wall just past the school gate, taps a cigarette from the soft pack in his shirt pocket and lights it, trying to look like he is waiting for someone.

What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?

My father thinks of Colleen’s long blond braid.

21

The Pieces Jill Talbot

It’s May, and she stands in a third floor classroom in a building on a campus in northern New York.

It took three flights to get here from Oklahoma. She reads from one of her essays, the one about the art of leaving. She thinks of the way she bares herself for these strangers, speaks of such private betrayals. She has lived in Stillwater for four years, longer than she has lived most places. But it’s enough, it’s time to go. She has become restless, wants not to start over, but to begin. She thinks of the way the word “may” means possibility, to be able.

The six passenger plane bobs and dips over the green of northern New York, and she looks out over the trees, the farms, the winding rivers. She is on the way back to her daughter, to tell her that they will be moving to New York. Her daughter knows the pattern by now, how they live somewhere until they live another. But this move feels different. She is not leaving out of frustration or failure.

She made the decision. It is not an act of going away. It is a going toward.

She rents a U-Box, 8’ X 5’ X 7’6”, about the size of the bathroom in their small apartment.

She will be able to fit everything they own into it after having a yard sale and selling the futon and some other pieces, and she will move her couch over to one neighbor’s, give her black writing desk to another. What she keeps is mostly her daughter’s belongings: the wood frame bed, the mattress, the white nightstand, her polka-dotted bedding. She wants her to have these things, a consistency.

She also keeps the vintage kitchen table and blue chairs she bought a year ago at an antique mall.

She looks forward to the way it will now sit in a kitchen instead of squeezed against a wall in the living room. Her vintage trunk is the first things she carries into the pod. She uses it to store extra blankets and the games—Connect Four, Scrabble, Uno—ones she and her daughter play together in restaurants. They have done this for years, the two of them sitting across from each other, setting up their game the servers stopping by to ask who is winning. She heaves the mattress, slides in the bedframe, stacks boxes of pots and pans, dishes, and her books into the pod during one of Oklahoma’s longest 100 plus streaks.

The last two pieces are the bikes, the ones they ride every afternoon to the university swimming pool. When the pod is filled, she pulls the door shut. She lets her daughter hook the lock through the loop and secure it. The box will be shipped to New York the next morning, and she and her daughter will begin the fifteen hundred mile drive, passing through seven states over a period of five days.

They will stay in a Motel 6 in Indiana, a Super 8 in Ohio, a Holiday Inn Express in Buffalo. On the last night, they will be the only occupants at a Travelodge in Polaski, New York, only ninety-two miles from their new home in Canton, New York. She will decide she needs to stay one more night, swim in the hotel pool, read in the sun, pretend they are vagabonds wandering the country. She wants to linger in this state of between here and there.

The next afternon, they pull into the long gravel drive and get the keys out of the mailbox.

She lets her daughter unlock the front door, and they step up into house, rush from room to room, wonder what they will do with all of this space. They bring their suitcases inside, put them in the back bedroom, lay their sleeping bags on the living room floor, and plug in the small television. She thinks of the way she wrote a similar scene, one of the house in Utah, years before: “The first time I walked through the spacious house, I didn’t see possibility or a new start. I saw a big, empty space.

Those rooms looked like all I did not have, every room a challenge.” She does not feel that way here.

She embraces the sparseness. The emptiness a clearing.

That first night, she steps outside onto the back deck, her phone in her hand. She has not spoken to him in years, but she still knows his number, dials into the dark. She wants to call from out here, not bring him into this house. According to the court, she must inform him of every move, 22

every address change, and even though he follows no orders, has never paid child support or held up one visitation in ten years, she complies. Such futility, she thinks. Adhering to her side of the order, the one she always keeps tucked away in a drawer, feels like calling the number of a house where she once lived and hearing that it’s been disconnected. The ringing cuts to voicemail. She speaks out toward the trees behind the house, wonders if he’ll write down what she tells him, knows it makes no difference where the two of them live. Or how. But she wants to end it here, to call him now, to say goodbye. When she says the words New York, she feels the distance, the faintness of her feelings for him like the smoke from a firework that quickly fades, the blank sky where there had once been a bright explosion.

She hangs up, turns to go inside, finds her daughter in the back room leaning over her suitcase, searching for her toothbrush. She looks at their bags on the floor, the disarray that will eventually settle. In two weeks, their suitcases will be on shelves in the garage along with a few boxes, ones she never opens but carries from house to house. In one of those boxes, there are photographs she’ll someday show. In the years that follow, everything that happened will become just pieces of a story she tells now and again.

23 Talbot

A Cubist’s Grandmother Contemplates Her Second Portrait Rebecca Peters-Golden

There has been a slow demolition with horsehair and pigment, pipe tobacco and gin. It wasn’t always like this, English twisting every corner and renaming every line.

He comes with an American friend and paints as I make them ajo blanco, jesting at my mortar and pestle as he squeezes Paris green from a tube.

The American boy imitates the tern’s trill and straightens my grandson’s collar. English makes for complex loyalties, I think, for with one effortless pronoun it can whisper to a lover or address a whole town.

I sat for my first portrait as a girl, in a dress so purple it absorbed the light and we had to begin again; emerged over weeks, to a young man with juniper berry eyes who lisped my skin onto canvas coated in rabbit skin glue as he prayed, I know now, for his painting’s erasure— for brushstrokes to undo themselves, Penelope-like, in the night, cedar bark cleaving for a runnel of rain that would wash it to smear; I sat so still a caterpillar wound its way around my heart and stayed there like a husband all these years. In two days I will be seventy and the world describes itself in colors I have no name for, shapes I cannot see. I look for Noé beneath willow trees and in constellations as my grandson tells me there is no heaven anymore; but how ever will I find my love when I have been painted so my lips, which he once spun of silk and petals, now obscure my eyes?

24

Sometimes the Lake Sounds Like an Ocean Matthew Fogarty

Paul stands on the wood-planked deck above Lake Erie trying to explain what he calls the interconnectedness of unrelated events. Except that he’s drunk and slurring his words into illogical fountains of vocabulary. “I’m not disputing that one thing’s gotta be caused by something before it, I get that, you know, I’m not stupid.” He takes a breath. “But sometimes, you can just know that something bad’s about to happen, that it’s imminent. Sort of this confluence of things and events that we can’t escape. And you can just see it out there on the horizon,” he says, sweeping his arm over the lake toward the far southern shore for emphasis.

“That’s Cleveland,” I say. I’m the only one left listening. Shannon and Rob gave up, put on their swimsuits, and walked down the forty mossy wood steps through a jungle of maple trees and poison ivy to the beach to look at the clouds gathering over the lake. I stayed behind to watch Paul, the two of us sitting out on the deck in plastic wicker chairs, and me smoking a cigarette dotted brown with the first drops of a July afternoon rain. Allison’s still asleep. Since we arrived, I’ve been wishing that she and I had come alone.

I only smoke cigarettes when I’m outside the country or talking to Paul, and the nicotine and the Molson join forces inside me to produce an absentminded, head-lightening glow that helps drown out Paul’s mad theories of devastation and entitlement. Every few minutes I stand, propped against the deck’s wooden railing, suspended over the side of the hill, to float and feel weightlessness. “Like an astronaut or a space tourist,” I say.

“Be careful. Everything here slides down the hill, toward the water,” he says, before continuing on about oil refineries and trust funds.

Earlier we re-watched a royal wedding on the tiny Zenith television in the corner of the greenpainted wooden lodge. It was still cold, and so Shannon turned on the oven and left the door open for heat.

We have nothing in common, I thought of the men in their crusty regalia and jewels, other than being alive at the same time. Although, I thought I had known those women (or at least women wanting to be like them), the ones with the hats and the fancy dresses and stepping carefully in high heels to avoid falling.

But we were all really taken by the bells—we sang them over and over during the commercials—a cascade of thick notes from the top of the Abbey, the same bells that tolled the death of Diana, musical anchors in time. That was my first night at college after my parents had left, there in the too-small room with that sick feeling. That empty feeling that something’s ended, some great old time of youth is over and’ll never be repeated. As though I’ll never again feel comfortable, that eventually there’ll be nobody and nothing left but me and my unfixed, inadequate home.

That’s the feeling I had on September 11, too, and the bells played then, I’m sure. Or maybe it’s the whistles I’m thinking of, beacons in the dust, shouting from firemen’s jackets, “This man is no longer moving.” I drove to New York, then, in the dark with my eyes closed, and felt guilty to be living in a city with short buildings. The bells came later, not happy or sad, but just announcing impassively that something had happened and those that care should come look.

“Hey do your parents have a lock on their liquor cabinet?” I ask Paul, who’s quiet now—thanks be to God—and listening to the cicadas.

“What are you, thirteen?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like stealing something.”

“Ha.” He points to the healing tattoo of a man in a rocketship stretching up the underside of my right forearm. “That’s a permanent tell. You realize you’ll never be able to commit a crime now? You’ll never be able to rob a bank.”

“Why would I ever need to rob a bank?”

25

“You never know. Sometimes people get desperate.”

“I’ll wear long sleeves,” I say. I stab my cigarette at the green deck, and toss it down the hill toward the beach into the mess of undergrowth.

“In the summer? You’d stick out. People’d notice you. You’d be caught for sure.” I’ve been friends with Paul since college, and have never heard him abandon an argument. He’ll keep talking until either you’re convinced or his point becomes so self-evident to him that he feels put-upon having to explain it.

Allison, one of two women with whom Paul and I have both had sex at different times, was the first to observe this late at night in a doctors’ bar across the street from the hospital. We’d decided to visit him together, and, delirious after an hour, we raced each other to the nearby pub, populated by men in blue scrubs and still smelling sickly medicinal. I suggested that trying to kill himself was contrary to his character.

“I don’t know,” Allison said. “Perhaps he just kept at it and accidentally convinced himself it was a good idea.” Allison uses words like “perhaps” in regular conversation—words that you write and rarely say—to make herself sound smart. It usually works. That’s part of why Paul was attracted to her, and me too, and why we’ve since been playing human chess trying to be with her. It’s the sort of reckless game that only good friends can play and stay friends.

Later that night, after the bar closed, I followed her home and we lay there drunk and awake on separate sides of her white bed. I could hear her breathing and I think I heard her cry as the sun came up. I know I’m wrong for thinking it and I know it’s not why he did it—there are plenty of other reasons, like, I think, he thought he would grow up to be a different kind of man—but even so, Paul’s trip to the hospital was a well-played move.

The rain starts in earnest, though we can see a break in the clouds to the west. Paul tosses his beer bottle down the hill, turns to me, and grins his mad grin, like he knows he’s made me feel guilty. “Shouldn’t last long,” he says. Dark streaks appear in his thinning blond hair as it gets wet.

“Let’s get some champagne and fireworks for later,” he says.

I drive along the private dirt and gravel road running under a canopy of trees, over the one-carwide stone bridge spanning the runoff creek from the lake and leading to a paved road bisecting a corn farm. I turn left onto the main road into town and right again into the lot of the governmentrun liquor store identified by a bright red plastic sign: “Beer Store.” Inside, we find a bottle of cheap champagne and buy another case of beer, as well, and I wait while Paul drunkenly flirts with the teenaged girl behind the counter. He invites her to our deck for the Fourth of July fireworks.

“Thanks, I think, but I’m not allowed out after eight,” she says through a forced smile, and I think to myself that they probably don’t talk about the Fourth of July in Canadian schools.

We stop at a stale-smelling grocery store at the side of the farm, and I buy a side of Canadian bacon coated in peameal. Paul gets a bag of marshmallows to roast on the grill. Back outside, the rain has stopped and we buy fireworks from the plywood roadside stand at the foot of the corn silo. “Give us the largest pack you’ve got,” I say, and the squirrelly guy pulls a human-sized box of fireworks from the back of the stand.

When we return, Shannon and Rob are on the deck wrapped in towels. “We went for a swim!” she says as Paul and I reach the top step from the country side of the hill.

“In the rain?” I say.

“It was fantastic!” says Shannon. Rob and I met her in college. She was a swimmer two years ahead of us, and I remember Rob was attracted to the way her long red hair would gather in what seemed like cornrows or dreadlocks as she emerged from the pool. They moved in together during our senior year while she was working on her thesis and in the ten years since have come fused. I haven’t once seen either of them apart from the other. Paul and I both expected Rob to propose a while ago, but he never has. Nor have they had kids. As Rob told me one night at the bar, drunk, “Kids are like the Congo, the river that swallows all rivers.”

It can’t have been the only cause, but Rob losing his job had to have had some impact on Paul, had to have at least been in the back of his mind. Rob was fired just a week before I found Paul Fogarty 26

on the floor of our apartment, unresponsive. Even in college Rob was the guy who was in total control of his life, who got every job he applied for, who slept with a woman much more beautiful than his gas-station-attendant looks warranted, whose clothes were always crisp and coordinated though we had never seen him do laundry or return from the dry cleaner. When Rob – of all people – got laid off, it seemed to all of us that our world had become more bleak, like seeing our invincible big brother paralyzed in an auto accident.

Though, Shannon reacted somewhat differently to the layoff. She didn’t even wait for Rob to ask her to set aside her online craft store. She just did. The next day she was in line at the temp agency asking for work. “We’re staying afloat,” Shannon said to me, though, according to Allison, she told her that she felt like they were drowning. Which makes sense: Shannon loves to use swimming metaphors.

“We swam all the way to the boat dock out there,” Rob says. “It started to rain and we pulled ourselves up onto the floating platform and pretended like we were still in the water. It was like we were rising, like the dock was being displaced by the rain.”

“Then we swam all the way around the point,” says Shannon.

Rob says, “Did you realize there’re all kinds of dinosaur fossils out there? It’s amazing to think we’re swimming in the footsteps of the dinosaurs.”

“The lake was formed by a glacier. They could have come from anywhere,” says Paul, dampening Rob’s excitement. He’s good at it.

“Still, it’s pretty cool,” Rob says.

Before Paul can speak again, I say, “We bought fireworks and marshmallows!”

Allison’s alone in the kitchen chopping vegetables with a dull, rusting knife. (When we got to the cottage, we found that all of the utensils were rusting. According to Paul, evaporation from the lake in the summertime throws off humidity and moistens everything in the house. His alternate theory was that, during the winter, the waves from the lake can reach the top of the hill and can even reach the utensil drawer, apparently.)

I close the screen door softly and sneak behind her and grab her at the waist. Startled only a little, she sets the knife on the wood block cutting board, turns on her toes, and kisses me on the cheek.

“I bought some bacon,” I say. “Some Canadian bacon.”

She volunteered for the late shift last night, watching Paul, and fell asleep on the wicker couch in the great room after the wedding had ended and the bells were done. “That was a good sleep,” she says, exhaling.

I hold onto her for an extra second, her thick black glasses pressed into the side of my face, and she doesn’t pull away. We’re in that post-breakup stage where each of us wonders in secret whether we made a mistake, like driving a stick shift up a hill, that little bit of rolling backward as the light changes before the clutch is thrown, the transmission catches, and the engine powers you up the hill.

Much as she might claim to be bored or numb, I know she feels stuff very deeply. For example, she was personally offended when Paul did his thing. I think she assumed she was mentioned in the note, though I didn’t see a note that morning and none of us has been able to confirm there even was a note. In bed that night after visiting Paul in the hospital, rolling out from under my arms, pulling her underwear back on under the covers, she said, “I’m sorry. It just feels inappropriate, disrespectful somehow,” and it felt to me at the time like an excuse. She looked at Paul the same way Paul looked at Rob and that I looked at her, and I wondered whether we were all one long lineup of human dominoes and I’d be the next to fall.

Still, she holds a presence in my mind, beats a pulse from the corner of the room. And I think I saw her looking at me in the car during the trip from Philadelphia. Now she’s in socks. Her iPod is on the counter, playing through the earbuds, which are dangling toward the floor. I can’t think of anything funny to say, and ask, “What aren’t you listening to?”

“The Pixies. ‘Where Is My Mind?’ It was going to make me cry, so I took them out,” she says. I can faintly hear it shuffling to the next song under the noise of the motor of the antique refrigerator.

27 Fogarty

“Yeah: It was playing that night at that dirty old punk bar near the river,” I say. “You were wearing your Cure shirt.” It was dark and loud. I saw her first, but Paul was on a streak that had started soon after he found seasonal tax work and he stepped between us. Sex was his creative outlet, the only everyday activity toward which he could direct his passion.

She turns away from me, back to the cutting board, and I can feel her smiling. “I loved that shirt,” she says. “My friend Zooey and I saw them in concert. Skipped out of the class trip to the Liberty Bell to stand in line for tickets. All we could get were terrible seats at the side of the stage. The strobe lights almost blinded us. But still, it was The Cure.”

“Sure, but think of the history you missed. Independence Hall. The Liberty Bell.” I move to the counter next to her.

She looks up at me. “It’s a bell. It cracked. What’s there to see?”

“I love that name: Zooey. She sounds like a Disney character.”

She has that flabbergasted look she sometimes gets, her mouth tight and contorted. “Yes. But that wasn’t—You’re always off on a tangent.”

“Dinner looks good,” I say.

Smiling Rob enters through the screen door, leading with his beer hand and letting the door slam into the wooden frame of the lodge behind him. The floorboards rattle beneath us. “You guys see glue around here anywhere?” he asks. “Shannon wants to make something artsy out of driftwood and beach glass and acorns.”

Among the expatriate cabins on the Canadian side of the lake, the Fourth of July starts just as it does at home: the smell of smoldering charcoal grills, the sizzle of drippings from hot dogs, the beer can hiss, the Is it dark enough yet? of eager children. And as the sun fades, in that gray sky moment between light and dark, the khawhoosh and tssssseeee of the first bottle rocket followed soon by the ffooopp of Roman candles and then the lid is off and the night begins to alight with stars and fire.

The last warm coals of the grill glow red through gray ash, and Allison holds near them a marshmallow on a thin metal spear. She’s wearing an old sweatshirt I left at her place a couple of months ago. I had forgotten about it until I saw it laid out on the bed in her room our first night in the lodge.

Rob and Shannon are down on the beach watching the neighbors’ rockets sail out over the water and waving at the mosquitoes, which swarm to the rotting seaweed at sundown. “Hey, are you guys coming down?” shouts Rob. “We’ve got everything set up. Bring the bug spray.”

Paul leans forward, stressing and twisting the frame of the white plastic deck chair, and bends over the railing. “It’s not dark enough yet. Besides, we’ve got a better view up here,” he says.

“Come on, get your ass down here,” says Rob. Paul’s been stretching Rob’s patience all afternoon. Paul was the one who suggested that we all gather on the beach to watch the fireworks. He also said, Don’t worry about paying us back for the champagne, or something like that. I couldn’t hear it exactly. I was in the kitchen and Paul and Rob were outside hosing off their feet from having been on the beach. But it was one of those glib, passive aggressive statements that can grind on you when you’re drunk and out of work and that would certainly grind on Rob. He was particularly sensitive about having lost his job, like somehow he’d failed his parents, his family name, by having been laid off, and he’s been overcompensating all weekend. He even bristled when I offered to buy a tank of gas for the drive back to Philly.

“Hold your horses. I’m still burning your marshmallows,” Allison says to Rob amid a sudden whirl of wheeee’s and sshhwweeee’s and pop-ppopp’s from the beach in front of the house at the point. “We’ll be down in a minute.”

The beach is a hazy dark blue and grey, like it hasn’t chosen sides yet between light and dark, and the sand is cold. Allison takes off her sandals and hands them to me, and I drop them at the foot of the stairs. Paul lags behind us, and when he reaches the bottom of the steps, he’s carrying two pairs of boxing gloves in one hand and another bottle of beer in the other. “I found them in my dad’s shed. He Fogarty 28

used to box,” he says. “Let’s have a match while the sun disappears. Who wants to fight?”

“Why don’t we just do the fireworks?” asks Shannon, who presumably can see that Rob is eager to accept the challenge. He’s already set his beer on a rock next to the box of long matches we bought to light the fuses.

“It is still pretty light out,” Rob says, smiling as he grabs the gloves from Paul.

“Okay: two minute rounds,” says Paul. “Nothing below the belt. Nothing above the neck.

Everything else is fair game. Somebody keep time.”

“Sure,” I say. And they start, both hesitant, dancing around each other with the left-right-left three-step that everybody learns from real boxers on TV. “If you’re going to fight, fight,” says Allison. I look back at her by the launching pad—really a pyramid formation of flat rocks—that Rob and Shannon set up for the fireworks. I wouldn’t expect Allison to approve of a boxing match—she’ll carry a spider out of the house rather than squish it—but she stands atop the pile of rocks and shines the broad beam of a flashlight on the two as they dance.

With just a few seconds left in the round, Paul says, “Don’t you want to hit me?” and, just as he says this, Rob lunges toward him with a strong overhand right that lands on Paul’s chest. Paul stumbles backward and gasps for air.

Rob appears immediately apologetic and steps toward Paul out of concern. But Paul moves forward toward him and throws his left arm into a hook that comes round and glances off the right side of Rob’s jaw. Rob tries to retreat, but his feet tangle in the thick sand and he falls backward. Paul continues his advance, carried forward by momentum and resentment, and his feet become twisted within Rob’s and he stumbles to the beach as well, his knees imprinting half spheres in the sand near Rob’s head.

“Ding!” I say.

Paul laughs, but Rob looks sore. “We said nothing above the neck, you dick.” Rob wipes a trickle of blood from his lip.

“I was aiming for your chest. You moved. Sorry.”

“You always take things too far,” says Rob. He shakes sand out of his trunks.

“I said ‘sorry.’ It was an accident.”

“No such thing as an accident—” “Boys: Let’s blow some shit up,” says Shannon, and the gloves are dropped and forgotten and as the last of the sun disappears to the west, we turn fire into joy and shoot flames and sparkling flowers into the night sky.

After the ffooopp ffooopp ffooopp of the last Roman candle, Rob pulls the cork from the champagne bottle and pours five overflowing glasses into crystal flutes we found in the cupboard.

“Shall we toast?” asks Allison.

“Yes,” I say. “Cheers to all of us. That we may live to do what we love.” And immediately I wonder if I’ve said something bad. Like praising a city to someone that’s desperately trying to leave it and failing. I can see Allison wince a bit, I think, and Paul sort of turns away from the circle, though I’m thinking that in his head he’s probably no longer on the beach; he’s probably swimming around the point and laughing at the origin of fossils and fighting off seaweed grabbing at his feet and bones of dead trout floating out near his arms, their shiny green and gray eyeballs staring back at him in the late night current; and not present enough to be offended.

“Cheers,” says Rob, and we drink and I hope it’s erased.

“Cheers to the happy couple, the prince and the princess,” says Shannon.

“Fuck the prince and the princess,” Paul says in a surly British accent, apparently still with us, though I can tell he’s very drunk now. And his face is still a little red from the stress of the fight.

“What’ve you got against them?” asks Shannon.

“They’re bullshit. They’re not people. They’re cardboard distractions. All that. We don’t get shit. We gotta reach out and fucking steal it. We gotta take these fucking extraordinary—the fucking— extrafuckingordinary—these extraordinary measures just to give ourselves a chance to be great, to not 29 Fogarty

have to eat out of a damn garbage can. That’s living. They don’t fucking deserve shit.”

“I liked her dress,” says Shannon from the side.

“Oh, is that what it was? Extraordinary measures?” says Allison to Paul. Sometimes if she’s got something to say and doesn’t know when else to say it, she’ll manufacture a confrontation.

Paul lifts his glass. Just above the collar of his t-shirt, his neck has turned red, too. “Hey I’ve got a—a toast here—A toast—Cheers... to Allison, to my babysitters. Protecting me from myself.”

“You fucking just—” says Allison.

“Yes! Brilliant! Fucking Allison,” says Paul. “You of all people, all mad—” like mmaaaadd “— and shit.”

“I’m not mad at you Paul. I’m disappointed. And scared,” says Allison, now fully engaged.

“Stop sounding like my mother.”

“Seriously. I don’t get it,” she says. “Please: Explain it to me.”

“Allison,” says Shannon, but Allison can’t hear her. She likely can hear only two things now: Paul and the internal radio play she scripted weeks ago.

“I mean, I wouldn’t even think of it,” she says. “I’ve got things I want to do. I want to drink in every bar on Bleecker Street. I want to ride a camel in the Valley of Kings. I want to learn Spanish and read the original Borges—” Paul’s mad grin. “That’s lovely. But you’ll never do any of that.”

“Sure I will someday.”

“Allison, here’s some news for your world: ‘Some day’ never comes. This is all there is,” he says.

“It’s called planning. I thought you had stuff like that, too, Paul. Things you wanted to do. But apparently not. Fuck you and your sadness.”

“Ha! I fucking get it now. This is jealousy! You’re fucking—you’re—you’re jealous cause I can see the world as it is, ‘cause I got some insight that happy little dreamcloud Allison never had.”

“You are such an asshole. You’re so covered with this layer—this—this patina—of vanity, of vainness that you can’t admit that you’re really sick,” she says. “You’d make a terrible martyr. Do you even realize how much we all love you?”

“You don’t love me. You don’t even fucking know me.”

She looks away from Paul and up toward the cabin. “I know this isn’t you. You aren’t this much of a prick.”

“You’re fucking thinking that I owe you something,” he says. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to grow up and be a man.”

“Well I’m sorry my almost dying is such a burden for you. Cunt.” Paul’s eyes meet hers as he says this.

“Ally,” I say, and I step between her and Paul and break the rhetorical grip that has held them in place. And Paul fades back, off into the dark of the beach toward the stairs to the house, out of the glow of our candles and the beam of our flashlights and toward the last embers of charcoal on the grill.

The beach is still now. Allison sits on the pyramid of rocks—or really, collapses, probably from exhaustion. Shannon pulls at the dangling drawstrings from Rob’s swimming shorts and kisses him. I watch the water and drink the last of my glass of champagne.

The house is quiet and Allison’s on the deck sitting next to an empty beer bottle and a citronella lantern. All that remains of the earlier rain is the sweet mossy smell of wet wood. Her knees are pulled up onto the chair toward her chest. She’s stretching my sweatshirt, I think.

I go to her. She looks up at me. She’s been crying.

“I keep thinking of that line from Nabokov: ‘No free man needs a God,’” she says. “But we’re not free. We’re imprisoned by beautiful things, beautiful things created by God. Therefore we need God. At least, that was his point.”

“This is a religious thing now?” I say.

Fogarty 30

“No,” she says. I pull a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and light it. “I just... I mean, why doesn’t he see how beautiful things are? If creation is a religious thing, then surely destroying creation is, too. It’s not logical. Why doesn’t he understand that?”

“I think you’re giving him too much credit,” I say. “Bad things happen. He was depressed. He didn’t see another way out. It’s not unreasonable.” A last bottle rocket explodes further up the beach.

“It is unreasonable. He’s past the age at which it makes sense for a person to kill himself. Either you’re living or you’re not.” She pauses for a moment and then says, “It’s like he thinks he’s proved something to us, like he’s better than us or more courageous.”

“Well, then stop—”—admiring him—loving him—I stop myself.

“Stop what?”

“Stop letting him... hurt you.” She doesn’t look up after I say this, and I know then that she’s done with me, that the car’s crested the hill; otherwise she’d have looked up. That’s alright, I’m done with her, too, I decide. I hold my cigarette to the sky, looking through one eye, trying to scar the moon. The rocket man on my forearm flies backward.

After a moment, she says, “You know that movie—that scene—you know, ‘Go to lunch. Will you please go to lunch?’”

“Glengarry Glen Ross.”

“Yes. Yeah. That should be a thing people say. When they’re angry. ‘Go to lunch.’ Instead of ‘Go to hell’ or... ‘Fuck you’ or... ‘Cunt.’”

“He didn’t mean it. He’s just... you know....”

She pauses again for what seems like a long time, and I wonder if I’ve said something wrong or if I’m supposed to say something else or if I should hug her or go away and leave her alone. With Allison, I often feel like I’m not saying or doing something I should be.

“I just want to be great at one thing,” she says. “Just one thing. That should be enough. And it doesn’t seem like too much to hope for.” And I’m relieved that she talked.

Later, we gather around the TV, all of us silent and wrapped in warm blankets against the cold night wind blowing in off the lake, the waves coming in with the tide and slapping seaweed and driftwood against the beach. And we watch Key Largo, Bogart and Robinson, black and white gangsters out on an island, out on the keys, a hurricane’s coming, and the old man’s tied up. And I fall asleep halfway through, before the good guys win, and wake again in the middle of the night. The TV’s off and I’m alone in the great room, with only the sound of the waves and the light from the moon reflecting off the lake, through the picture window, and onto the ceiling. And I watch it there, the waves in a rhythm, recasting the reflection, drawing and redrawing, and talking to each other in their own unfamiliar language.

31 Fogarty

Río/River

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Río En Minnesota, crucé a pie el nacimiento del Mississippi En Salto, tomé un ferry para cruzar el río Uruguay Nací en las orillas del canal Saint-Martin que desemboca en el Sena Hoy estoy en el río de la Plata Pero el río es el río y estoy de pie en un agua un mitad dulce y mitad salada Las gaviotas vuelan por encima pero el río esta volando también-pasa por la rambla pasa debajo de los aviones que siembran las nubes con la oscuridad de nuestro futuro Estoy parada en el río Estoy caminando a través del tiempo y detrás de mí, llorando, están mis madres y delante de mí, están mis hijos ¿o es al revés? un hombre nada el Amazonas una mujer nada a Cuba sabiendo que no se trata del destino sino de estar en el agua La natación. Siempre he sido buena en natación

32

River In Minnesota, I stepped across the Mississippi In Salto, took a ferry across the Uruguay I was born on the banks of the Canal St-Martin which flows into the Seine Today, I arrive at the Rio de la Plata But the river is the river and I am standing in the water half fresh, half salt The seagulls fly overhead but the river is flying too past the rambla below airplanes seeding the clouds with the darkness of our future I am standing in the river I am walking across time & behind me, crying, are my mothers & before me are my children or is it the other way around? a man swims the Amazon a woman swims to Cuba knowing it is not the destination but being in the water Swimming. I was always good at swimming

33 Kercheval

The Spring Here is the Most Beautiful Jenny Tinghui Zhang

May writes Tian many letters these days. All of them begin not with the date that she writes them, but the date that she expects him to receive them. Her last letter to him was dated August 4th, 1992, but she wrote the letter eight days before. She likes to imagine him reading it as she writes—the closest to a conversation she will have with him for a long time. May does not know the time it takes for post to travel from America to China, but eight days seems like long enough. It certainly feels like it.

May lives in an efficiency apartment on the University of Mississippi campus. It is right up the street from a grotto of fraternity houses, all of which light up at night and stay lit until four in the morning. That is when May wakes. She makes herself porridge by heating leftover rice in water and eats it with rousong, a cheap dry meat product she buys from the Chinese market. It tastes pork-sweet and looks like shredded cotton.

Every morning after breakfast, May studies for four hours. She is an exchange student studying English Language and Literature. Her thesis, a creative one, is a series of short stories based on her childhood. She calls the collection, The Sparrow Was Dead. So far she has written two stories: one about growing up during the Cultural Revolution and the other about her third sister. Her supervisor tells her that she needs one more story to complete the project. “It’s a wonderful piece of work,” he says. “Very compelling and interesting to see life from another perspective.” She complies, but does not value his judgment, not when he uses the word interesting. After all, he is professor of linguistics.

May’s efficiency is in a building that houses only international students. The building itself, an ashen red, has no interior decoration or indulgences save for the screen doors lacing every individual apartment. The girl next door, a pretty Russian student named Sasha, tries to greet May with a different American colloquialism every day, but her accent is so thick that May has learned to just smile and nod. She too left her family in Russia to study computer science in America. Both greet the other with an understanding of mutual sorrow. The apartment teems with it; behind each screen door was another door hiding someone lonely, someone far away from home.

May does not have much in her apartment. Everything she owns is secondhand, and nothing matches. She did not want to get comfortable here and did not want the apartment to get comfortable with her. When her downstairs neighbor Razan, an exchange student from Afghanistan, moved out, she acquired a cheap table with rusted metal drawers. The fourth leg is slightly shorter than all the others, and the table trembles when she puts her elbows on it. This is where she spends most of her time. It is where she eats, where she studies, and where she writes letters to Tian.

This morning, like past mornings before it, May wakes up at four. She makes porridge, but is out of rousong. This means that she must wait until her classmate Jo tells her she’s going to the Chinese supermarket. May does not have a car, and the nearest grocery store that caters to Asians is in Memphis, Tennessee. The Chinese supermarket, in all of its pungent fish-smell glory, is the only thing remotely close to the morning markets at home. She watches the Chinese mothers picking clumps of bok choy, tomatoes, and mushrooms from the crates as their husbands stand dutifully in their socks and sandals, their rapt silence emphasizing the importance of this sacred exercise. Oftentimes their miniature children trail behind, dressed in extra layers—a sweater beneath another sweater beneath a vest. Chinese mothers always worry that their children will be too cold, even in places like the South.

This morning, May sits down at the wobbly table, but does not write her thesis. Instead, she writes another letter to Tian, this one dated for next Tuesday. Today is a Monday.

Tian, she writes in Chinese. Today was the first day of fall. This is the third day in a row I am writing to you. I woke up this morning intending to write my stories, but I am writing you instead.

Last night I could not sleep. I was thinking of our family. Did you know that your name and mine combined means ‘everyday?’ Mei Tian.

34

I miss you and I miss Ai-ling. I am sending 100 American dollars with this letter.

The money is spread out in front of her on the table, five tens and ten fives. She divides the bills into two piles and stares at them for a long time. She then moves some bills from one pile to the other, considers the overall effect, and rescinds her action. She sits for some more time, eyeing the piles.

The fraternities are quiet now, their white throbbing mansions blanketed by boy-sleep. The only thing May can hear is the droning insistence of cicadas.

May met Tian in 1988. They were introduced by mutual friends, the only respectable way to be acquainted with people of the opposite sex in China. Both attended Beijing Normal University and were extremely bright; May studied English Language and Literature while Tian studied engineering.

On their first date, May remembers Tian did not smile. His lips never pleated upwards, nor did they open to laugh. May remembers wondering if he was ashamed of his teeth. She came away from the date unsure what to think. He was nice, but a little too tight. When he called her that evening asking to see her again, however, she accepted.

May did not like Tian’s family. She did not like the way he yielded to his mother or the way his father preached antiquated views. They were very traditional people who still believed that Old China was better than New China, and that China should remain closed to foreign influence. They could not understand why May was studying English. Ni she zhong guo ren! You are Chinese! You are a child of China. Wasn’t she proud to be Chinese?

May came from a poor family. She had three older sisters and a father who did manual labor ten hours a day. He beat them all frequently not out of malice, but out of necessity, something they all came to understand and accept. Her mother, the daughter of a relatively richer family, did not know how to work. Her hands retained a white softness that her husband’s leathery paws did not. Because she was the youngest and the smallest, May was her mother’s favorite.

The cicadas have stopped now too. It is eight o’clock, and May must leave for work soon. She looks at the two piles of bills once more, before rearranging them one final time. Then she adds to the letter: Tian, please give 50 to my parents and keep 50 for you and Ai-ling.

May and Tian wed in 1989. She wore red to her wedding, a sign of good fortune for Chinese brides.

She had curled her hair with her roommate’s curlers and put on a deep crimson lipstick that distracted from her teeth. When she was younger, she had scraped her teeth every night with a knife in order to whiten them. She would crouch in front of her mother’s oval handheld mirror with the blade in both hands, combing her teeth over and over until she was satisfied with the line of white gunk that accumulated on the knife’s edge. She could catch it all with her finger, roll the gunk around delicately, and then smear it into her palms. But now, at twenty-six, her lower left canine was a noticeable shade greyer than the rest of her teeth. She had learned over time to hide it with her thick lower lip. Thick like the sole of a shoe, her mother would often remark.

She and Tian were very happy. He had just finished his degree at the University, and enlisted in the local police force. The thing about Tian, she came to realize, was that he was practical, not romantic. He knew how to craft and repair things, and for that she was grateful. He built them a table, a bookcase for all of her schoolbooks, and a crib. Everything in their apartment was the color of yellow wood. He still did not smile, but only, he said, because he didn’t know how.

May became pregnant two months after her wedding. Her in-laws were worried about her body’s ability to carry a child. They thought she was too scrawny and believed that daughters of manual laborers were inherently likely to diseases. The only thing they liked about her body was her flat behind. As flat as a scallion pancake.

May did not believe them. Instead she believed that her body was most capable of giving life.

She showed her growing belly pictures of American celebrities so that the child would be beautiful.

35 Zhang

She walked an hour every day in the sun so that the child would have enough nutrients. She made Tian buy her four oranges every day, one for her and the other three for her child. When a rash began to grow beneath her eye a month before she was due, she refused to take medicine or use ointment for fear that foreign substances would affect the child. The rash spread from the outer corner of her eye across her cheek, erupting in pus and weeping every so often during the day, but she let it grow unchecked until she lay in the hospital bed after an hour of labor with her daughter in her arms. May named her Ai-ling, a combination of smart and kind.

May arrives at the blond woman’s house precisely at 9am. The blond woman, named Linda, works in real estate and wears a pencil skirt the color of charcoal. She leaves May a set of instructions on the refrigerator—clean house, water plants, look after Charlie. Call me if there is any trouble. She pays May two dollars an hour.

The blond woman’s house is filled with things May does not understand. There are two different machines that make coffee and four kinds of silverware for specific occasions. A room exists solely for the purpose of reading, but May does not bother to clean it thoroughly; the blond woman does not use it very much.

She does not seem to have a husband, although May found a picture to suggest that perhaps once she had. The photograph was tucked between two books and depicted the blond woman, Charlie, and a handsome man with a brown beard. They were all laughing and gazing not directly at the camera, but on some fixed point just above it.

The blond woman’s child, Charlie, is ten months old. He has wandering blue eyes and lips like petals. Spittle cobs his mouth, and when he cries, May picks him up and holds him. She covers him with her body, so that her black hair curtains his face, her torso a weeping willow bent upon something beyond Charlie even, bent upon some unseen center in the earth. She cradles him, a bouquet of blankets spilling out from her arms, and rocks him back and forth with her eyes tightly closed. She imagines that she is holding Ai-ling, who would be two now, who would be too big to hold like this. There was one point in May’s life when the crooks of her elbows could encase Ai-ling from her head to the curls of her toes, when her own body was blanket enough for her child. But she is here now, in some other woman’s house holding a stranger child, trying to grasp a fleeing memory of the feeling, the sight, the scent of her own child. Did Ai-ling make cooing noises like this?

In 1992 Tian was attending the local police academy, and May was finishing her degree. Her American Literature class invited a professor from the University of Mississippi to give a lecture on William Faulkner and the South. He was a tall man with straw-colored hair that also coated his chin and neck.

May sat in the front and asked him many questions. What is the South? Why do they call it the South, with a capital S? Why do they tell stories about the South? Why do they hate the South? After class, the professor approached May and told her he was impressed and excited by her interest. He told her about the exchange program, and urged her to apply. Study for four years in Oxford, Mississippi and earn an American degree. Indulge and cultivate your mind!

“I have a family here,” May replied. Her words had a British inflection, because all Chinese studying English learn proper pronunciation. “I have a husband and daughter.”

“Send for them when you are finished,” the professor told her. “By the time you graduate, you will have found a job and can legally stay in America. Then you can send for your husband and daughter. The time will fly by.”

Tian encouraged her to go, “for our daughter’s future,” he said. “Maybe I will apply as well.”

Maybe, May thought, but what would he do in Mississippi? Her in-laws saw this as a final indicator of her disloyalty to her own country. They feared she was deserting Tian to marry a white man. “What about your daughter? How do you expect her to grow up without a mother?”

Her own father’s response, however, surprised her. “If you can leave, leave. You must do it not for yourself, but for your family.”

She applied for the exchange program. The university accepted her on the first day of February, Zhang 36

offering her a full scholarship and free housing. May bought her plane ticket the next day.

Ai-ling, however, could not understand why her mother was deserting her. May deciphered her daughter’s desperate sobs and tears, sung as she clung to her mother’s hands. Because how could I ever live without you, mother? Because you are my only mother, you love me better, because you peel me oranges and apples and you even peel me pears. Because your skin is the softest, your smell the safest, your body the warmest. Because you leave and say you’ll come back and you always do.

She took Ai-ling into the bedroom and wiped her swollen face. She put a cassette into the tape player, the recording of a story about a monkey king named Sun Wukong. They had listened to it many times before. He, a pig, and a man served as the protective guard for a Buddhist monk traveling to India.

May listened to the tape with her daughter and watched as she bounced with laughter, her little red mouth, still slightly caked with dried tears, parting into a smile. Her daughter looked at her as if she thought May would stay forever.

But she could not stay forever, not for the moment at least. Her plane left in two hours, and it took forty-five minutes to get to the airport. She stayed with Ai-ling until she was tired from laughing, until she drooped and curled into herself. May inhaled this face before her, the naive felicity of its sleep, the small spiky black lashes fencing white skin underneath, the pillowy lips in an almost frown, still ponderous, watching her tiny dumpling hands slowly loosen their grip on her fingers, hoping that she would not wake up but all the while wanting her to, if only to say to her one more time, wo ai ni.

I love you. She was perfect here next to her child, the flesh from her very own body, the small entity that she bore for nine months and cared for, that she loved very much, that she knew one day would forgive her for leaving her in her sleep when she promised she never would.

May had then made her way down the stairs, those concrete grey blocks that she so often cursed, realizing only then that she had taken their hindrance for granted. She wished for more steps, for all the steps in the world. She could walk all the steps of the Great Wall if only to know that she was not one more step away from her daughter, but taking one more step in delaying her departure.

That in perpetually climbing down these steps in the apartment building where they lived, she had never really left Ai-ling at all.

But now her daughter is an ocean away, and May is inexplicably sad everyday—when she wakes up, when she eats porridge, when she listens to the sound of the fraternity boys yelling and blasting their lewd music, when she hears the girls who shriek and call in the night like wounded animals, when the rattling of the cicadas overwhelm her, and when she writes her stories. She is sad when she goes outside and the sun is boring down in that blatant August heat, when everything is maliciously green and the magnolia trees cast their elongated shadows on park benches and sidewalks. She is sad when she comes home at night to the soft guidance of lightning bugs hovering around the parking lot, their gentle glow taunting the unsettled misery inside her.

Most of all, she is sad when she is at the blond woman’s house. She sings Charlie a song in Chinese, one she used to sing her daughter. It is a traditional children’s song called Xiao Yan Zi. Little Swallow: 小燕子，穿花衣， 年年春天来这里， 我问燕子你为啥来， 燕子说，这里的春天最美丽。 小燕子，告诉你， 今年这里更美丽。 我们盖起了大工厂 装上了新机器， 欢迎你长期住在这里。 Little swallow, dressed colorfully, Comes here every spring, 37 Zhang

I asked her, “Why do you come here?”

She said, “The spring here is the most beautiful.”

Little swallow, let me tell you, It’s more beautiful here this year.

We’ve built large factories, And equipped new machines, Please live here forever.

May sings the song to Charlie many times a day now. She holds his warm little body with one hand and cradles his head with the other. It is pink and beginning to sprout a silken patch of blond.

May grows more familiar with Charlie’s body every day. His weight, his eyes, the feeling of his blue fuzzy jumper. His smell, a mixture of American lotions, oils, and perfumes, is much less foreign to her now than Ai-ling’s faint milky one. She tries to teach Charlie a word in Chinese, ping guo. Apple. He makes a noise that sounds like bingyo. The word means nothing.

Zhang 38

Triptych

Lori Lamothe

1.

It went to someone in California. someonedemonsomething@aol.com for $5.25—the soul sealed in glass and brown paper, flying FEDEX via LAX. Clearly labeled.

Intangible, the auctioneers said, pulling the plug before bids could go any higher.

Because you can’t sell what you can’t see.

Everybody knows that.

2.

Put your money where your mouth is and if the price is right you just might stand a chance to win our showcase and if you’re not already aware that reality is the key to mobility, that debates make men safe for democracy and that the banana is the only food that won’t kill you eventually then I recommend you sign up for DSL ASAP; there are miracle bubbles that last three days and if you’re wondering whether you can afford to take that course in technology let me offer you a bit of firm advice: don’t waffle don’t waver don’t wait just do it.

3. veiled light of snow/words that sift clear with meaning/ friend who walked into your studio and showed you the proper way to hang a noose/ a house empty across the street/light left on all night/ ghosts of curtains/motionless hands of the dead/ your thoughts burning through mine/our bodies speaking new graffiti face on a bus/wrong message on voicemail/ storm that holds day in its jaw and shakes/ a kid waiting alone after dark/ sound of muffled sobbing/girl laughing behind the counter/ man in an emergency room/body thin with pain/ an argument rising through an open window/ yarn in a basket/fire behind glass/meadow remembering green covered bridges embroidering geometry on afternoon/ why did the dragon wear seamless garments/ carry an umbrella inside out

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Contributors Cameron Awkward-Rich is a kid who sometimes sends poetry into the abyss for the hell of it. He is currently a PhD candidate in Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature. His work has appeared previously in The Polari Journal, Breadcrumb Scabs, and Write Bloody’s Aim for the Head anthology of zombie apocalypse poetry.

Catherine Campbell’s writing appears in PANK, Drunken Boat, Prick of the Spindle, Matchbook and other journals. She lives in Asheville, NC. Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his first collection of poetry, “As We Refer To Our Bodies”, will be published this winter by 8th House Publishing.

Bryan Estes is responsible for the beautiful cover.

Born and raised in the square-mile suburbs of Detroit, Matthew Fogarty currently lives and writes in Columbia, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina. His fiction has appeared in such journals as Zero Ducats, Utter Magazine, and Nanoism, and he is a founding member of the Washington-based sketch comedy group, Orbit Chef.

Jeff Haynes is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, where he served as Poetry Co-Editor of the minnesota review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Mixed Fruit, and The Hollins Critic.

Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is the author of 12 books of poetry, fiction and memoir including the poetry collection Cinema Muto (SIU Press, 2009), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; The Alice Stories (U of Neb. Press, 2007) winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; Film History as Train Wreck, (Center for Book Arts, 2006) winner of the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize; and the poetry collection Dog Angel (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Her novel, My Life as a Silent Movie, is forthcoming from the University of Indiana Press.

She is a a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin. She currently divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin and Montevideo, Uruguay.

Rudy Koshar is a professor of modern European history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s published four books on modern German history and won Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, European University Institute, and other fellowships. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Thunder Sandwich, Forge, Avocet, Eclectica, Blinking Cursor, and Sleetmagazine. He lives in Madison with his wife of forty years and their nine-month-old Yellow Lab. Lori Lamothe’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bitter Oleander, Extract(s), Linebreak, Medulla Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Otis Nebula, Seattle Review and other magazines. She teaches part-time at Quinsigamond Community College and mentors for The Afghan Women’s Writing Project. You can find her blog, Diary in Irregular Ink, at inkdiary.blogspot.com.

Rebecca Peters-Golden co-authors the young adult book blog Crunchings and Munchings and writes about food and literature for Good. Food. Stories. She lives in Philadelphia where she once won a chili 40

cookoff.

Jesse Rice-Evans is a poet, critic, cook, and writing consultant from North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Mississippi Goddam, Glass Mountain, and Redaction!, among others. She co-curates the Juniper Bends Reading Series in Asheville, NC and blogs with her colleagues at juniperbends.com Jill Talbot is the author of Loaded, a memoir. She is the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, South Loop Review, Under the Sun, and others. “The Pieces” is from her forthcoming memoir, The Way We Weren’t.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang first began telling stories to her fellow preschoolers in China. She used the phrase “and then...” a lot. She currently lives and writes in Austin, Texas, and holds degrees in Plan II Honors and English Honors from UT Austin. She loves Faulkner, pilates, and eating.

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Acknowledgments Oliver Bendorf Troy Blackford Randall Brown Chris Greenhough, always.

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