faith in literature and art
benedictio /.
fiction Priestly Horses, Crows, and Ravens from Lawrence Dorr and Linda McCullough Moore /.poetry Communion Wafers and Recipes from Josh Kalscheur and Diane Tucker /. interview Self-Interview of a Video Artist from Christopher Miner /. art room from Latifah Al-Attas
04 ISSUE
Summer 2 0 0 7
$8.00
why
ruminate ?
ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse
; to meditate; to think again; to pon
der
RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine for those who desire the space to share short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoirs and visual art that resonate with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. RUMINATE MAGAZINE was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward. Every RUMINATE issue has its own theme or focus with the hope of drawing rich connections between art, life and faith. Please join us.
On the cover: Latifah Al-Attas. spectroscopy. Oil on canvas. 54 x 46 inches. On the inside cover: Latifah Al-Attas. room. Oil on canvas. 36 x 20 inches. Latifah Al-Attas graduated from the University of Colorado-Boulder with a BA in fine arts and communications in 2004. Not soon after, she took a year-long stint at the University of CaliforniaLong Beach to continue exploring the meaning of art and color. Latifah’s fascination with color, emotion, and images evoking human response have driven her work both in the visual and audible arts. She currently resides as a musician outside of Boulder, Colorado, performing regularly with her band Tifah.
RUMINATE MAGAZINE
Issue 04
Summer 2007
RUMINATE (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by RUMINATE MAGAZINE, INC., 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. WHERE TO WRITE Send all subscription orders, queries and changes of address to RUMINATE, 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521 or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine. com. If you are moving and want to ensure uninterrupted service, please allow six weeks of notice. (The post office will not automatically forward magazines.) For information on back issues, advertising rates, RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.com. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art—you may submit online at our website. SUBSCRIPTION RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this operation and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to RUMINATE and supporting the quality work produced. One year, $28. Two Years, $52. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at editor@ruminatemagazine.com. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: RUMINATE MAGAZINE, 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Copyright
2007 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.
Much thanks to darwill press in Chicago, Il, for taking on the task of printing RUMINATE—without Darwill there would be no RUMINATE. RUMINATE is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.
s t
a f f
Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, Jonathan Van Dyke Shannon Smiley Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale Anne Pageau
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
editor-in-chief managing editor associate editors intern readers design
contents
Notes 4 5 55 56
Poetry
Interview
Jennie Mejan
Frankenblessed 6
Editor’s From You Local Last
Chris Miner
30 Self-Interview of a Video Artist
Patrick Baron
Caresses of Divisions 7
Fiction
Brett DeFries
At the Waco Baptist Church 8 Litany with Braille 9
Michael M. Marks
anger like Billy’s bedspread 15
Diane Tucker
Recipe 16 The Sudden Rain 17
Jason Jonker
Ms. Vredevoogd, Calvin Christian Jr. High 18
Linda McCullough Moore
10 Crows and Ravens
Lawrence Dorr
19 Thirdonesacharm
Daniel Gallik
27 His Angst Said, “Depression and Daughters
Cannot Be Dismissed Esoterically.”
Tony Woodlief
41 The Grace I Know
Josh Kalscheur
Visual Art
When the Communion Wafer Fell to the Ground 24 At Jesus Station 25 Purgatory 26
Aby Kaupang
self-pectations 38 heavier light leaves 39 A loner refurbishes some tangle in the loveseat 39
Jonathan Larson
Latifah Al-Attas
cover
Latifah Al-Attas inside cover
P.D. Gray
Stephanie Walker
back cover
goldfish 49
Manna 50 Among My Father’s Belongings 51
room
Christopher Miner 31 32 33 34
sun step 40
spectroscopy
Self Portrait Auction Burning Bush Best Decision
Jack Maxwell inside back cover
Jacob’s Dream Sunrise Ascending and Descending: Jacob’s Dream
ruminating
EDITOR’S NOTE
What does it mean to receive the benediction,
the priestly blessing, the ending, or in Greek, the good word? How do we lift our faces to meet His? Are there such things as literary benedictions? And if so, how do we create them, how do we add our small blessings to the definitive artistic canon?
The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee…
Those raised in the Catholic or Protestant traditions are probably most familiar with these words from Numbers, the way the priest or pastor calls us to stand, raises his hands up and outward and simultaneously blesses and dismisses the congregation. The repetition and holiness of this moment often quiets the coughs and shifting in the pews; my husband usually grabs my hand and breathes in, like this is the last good breathe of air to consume. And I am usually struck with chills, with shivers of peace.
The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
While researching our theme I found myself reading the Shemoneh Esrei, the eighteen Talmudic benedictions, and pausing over the eighth. It is a prayer prayed for healing, suddenly apt considering the submissions we had received, many of which were good words full of pain, of well-said grief, trauma and even horror. This was not what we had expected.
8. Heal us, O L-rd, and we shall be healed; save us and we shall be saved; for You are our praise. Grant a perfect healing to all our wounds.
It seems to be a quarterly lesson for us to suspend our assumptions, to consider that the only consistency in our “themes” may very well be this suspension. Perhaps because of the wars, the climate, the unrest and the urgency of now, for many of our contributors, benedictio was a blessing through pain—calling for ruminating, chewing, but also swallowing.
Your words were found and I ate them: Jeremiah 15.
In For the Time Being, Anne Dillard notices something about these eighteen Talmudic blessings. She says, “That number, meaning ‘life’ in Hebrew, corresponds to the eighteen vertebrae we bend when we pray.” Perhaps this is what it means to rise now—to stand with our wounded faces tilted upward, with all eighteen vertebrae, both receiving and creating the benediction, adding to the canon, healing, shivering. Blessings,
Brianna Van Dyke
4
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
ruminators
NOTES FROM YOU
Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to On finding ricke’s profit* the words drew me forceful insistent like wrenching images on the evening newscast from which no face could turn away brow shriveled bent page in hand, I kept reading and re-reading the very lines that scooped out great hollows from my chest scandalous breath-taking we are the whore unconscious and still His kiss lingers on our lips Steve France San Diego, CA
* Steve’s note is a thoughtful response to “Profit,” a poem by Joe Ricke, which was published in the Spring 2007 issue of RUMINATE.
editor@ruminatemagazine.com
I read about RUMINATE in the latest Westmont College Magazine and am so excited about your existence! Blessings on your staff, contributors, and readers. Jessica Shaver Renshaw Long Beach, CA I was having a really bad day, and just lying on my bed after work one evening. My sister came home and said, “You got RUMINATE in the mail today!” It totally cheered me up. RUMINATE really does brighten people’s day. Lucy Selzer Denver, CO While journeying through the seas of perception and perspective on the Internet, I came upon your website and magazine. I found everything to be a wonderfully enriching experience. The reservoir of authentic creative energy is a gift to all who view it, and my compliments on your inviting consciousness. Michael Teal Hamilton, Ontario Just wanted to let you know how terrific this last issue of RUMINATE is—this particular one has really captured my sense of wonder. I love having all three of the issues sitting on my coffee table and anytime I can take a chance to sit down, I always enjoy picking one of them up. I’m pretty good at the “ruminating thing.” Danna Nofsinger Cortez, CO Philippe and I have received our issue of RUMINATE. It’s gorgeous. The magazine is unique, not only for its welcome orientation, but in enhancing the impact of the words through its visual imagery––a distinct success. We especially enjoyed the editorial note, and the assertion of “reconstruction” in the bare context of the current literary landscape. Bravo! Ellen and Philippe Visson Montreaux, Switzerland
5
—
999999
6
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
4444444444444
8888
Jennie Mejan is a homeschool teacher and graphic designer, living in North Carolina with her husband and three children. Her work has appeared in the Guardian UK Poetry Workshop and Lily Literary Magazine. Besides running The Salt Stream, an Internet forum for poets, Jennie serves as a moderator at The Critical Poet.
8888888888
4
Patrick Barron is an assistant professor of
English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His books include Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto, published this year by the University of Chicago Press.
7
B rett D e F ries
At the Waco Baptist Church
I looked up and saw a man clothed in linen... his face like lighting, his eyes like flaming torches.
It’s hard to believe I came here for forgiveness. Your sleeves rose and water fell from your hands like faith. Then the microphone, fallen from its clip, swaying by its cord like a serpent’s head, and when you reached to adjust it your fingers curled, stiffened, turned white, and as for the sparks, had your linen robe not been soaked, you would have caught fire. Your eyes embered and would not rest; Your neck craned, hiding the jut of straining tendons from all but me who stood on the ledge at your side. The congregation watched as God surged through you at a thousand volts. They knew you were either praying or dying, but they couldn’t bow their heads as the lights flickered like a dying pulse, until only sunlight shone through stained glass. If it would redeem anything, I’d say apologies and prayers; I’d wear my remorse like sackcloth, but the baptismal is draining now, and not even water would take my sins.
8
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
Daniel 10:5-6
B rett D e F ries
Litany with Braille Because I fear her hands will see, because I fear her hands, folded in the pew at my knees, I don’t touch her hand to wish her peace. Why should she turn her broken eyes to me, her vanished sun? I cannot know her love of braille hymns, cannot taste when wine is only drink and is not red. I will not say that blood is always blood and bread is always bread. I mourn her folded cane, rejoice her careful kneel, and I let my prayer be this: May the darkness not be too heavy upon her. May I remember accordioned pages of braille, perforated, torn during homily, read for litanies and hymns. Because her eyes were never eyes to see but merely spheres to hold the dark, teach them to feel the sun and never close. Teach us to see and not to see. Forgive us what praise we could not afford.
Brett DeFries enjoys playing basketball and is cur-
rently the captain of the team called “And One Presents: The Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. (Too Real International Boo-Yaa Empire).” His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Flint Hills Review and Elsewhere. Brett’s poetry has also been selected as a finalist for the Paulson Poetry Prize and was recently nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Award. 9
crows and ravens Linda McCullough Moore
After the baby died, the crows came.
At first, just eight or ten enormous birds, haggard-looking, almost shabby in their shiny black. Janey called them the mourners and had an idea she might teach them to sing songs of lamentation. Paul caught her crooning to them late one afternoon out in the garden. She hadn’t realized he was in the shed. “What in the Sam hill you singing, old woman?” Paul asked his wife. “And where’s your sweater? It’s twenty-two degrees. You haven’t seen my pitch fork, I don’t suppose?” “I’m teaching the crows to lament, although I’ll be the first one to admit they have no aptitude. None whatsoever.” “They’re not crows. They’re blackbirds. Tell me you didn’t let that Deans boy at my pitch fork.” Janey swatted at the air in answer and went on inside. She knew full well a bird either wants to sing or it does not. There’s no superimposing of desire on to a bird or any other living thing. You have desire or you don’t. It’s that simple. Janey looked up crow and blackbird and raven in the dictionary. It said that crows were carrion birds. Janey let that be. “Regarded by some to be the most intelligent, the highest form of bird there is.” (The unabridged could be conversational like that, as though the author had been struck voluble in the face of certain words in particular.) Then it went on to mention Crow Indians and Jim Crow and crow bars. “Your own crow’s the blackest,” they used to say. It meant you loved your own child the best. No matter what. “A blackbird is different from a crow,” Janey said. “I told you that,” Paul said. “A raven can be two feet long,” Janey read aloud. “Look up bird brain,” Paul said. Feeding the crows got started by mistake. Janey put a pumpkin bread in the oven and went upstairs to find her glasses and fell asleep. She creaked out of bed, then ran down to the kitchen like a house afire once she smelled the burning bread. She carried it outside and put the hot pan down on the large flat rock they called the anvil. It cracked on contact, just like that was what it was supposed to do, like the pan was the shell you had to break away to get at the flat, black pumpkin slab. Janey picked it up with her oven mitts and tossed it like a crispy Frisbee out in the back yard, and brushed the glass into the trash. When she looked out from the den window, there were easily a dozen birds descended on the burnt bread. “This is stupidity in profusion,” Janey said as she slammed the back door and headed out across the yard. “Unadulterated foolishness from start to finish. Intelligent crows, my foot.” She swished her arms around and called out, “Shoo, shoo, get out of here,” then broke the charred pumpkin bread into tiny pieces and threw them off in all directions. “Wait your turn.” She eyed a squirrel she thought looked undecided. Janey wasn’t sure if squirrels liked sweets, though this offering might not be the definitive test on the subject.
10
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
“‘Sing for your supper’ means exactly what it says,” she told the squirrel, and if the crows troubled themselves to eavesdrop, well so much the better. By the time she was back in the den, the birds were huddled together in little groups like they had come for the company and were only nibbling at the refreshments to be polite. “The crows look like they’re putting their heads together,” Janey said. “Blackbirds,” Paul said. “They’re discussing boycotting the next choir rehearsal.” Janey wanted to tell someone besides Paul about the birds. Talking to him was much the same as talking to the porch swing. She could say to Paul, I think those crows might be the spirit of that dead child, or, she could say, I’m going to rent an airplane and sprinkle the whole county with Tootsie Roll Pops and Ding Dong Debbie cakes, and either way, Paul would say, Would you kindly tell the paper boy he hits the birdbath one more time, I’m having him arrested. She would have liked to tell Pauline, only it seemed those black birds with their vulture dispositions seemed more suited as the spirits of mean, old, black-clad, birdlike women. The spirit of a baby who died innocent should probably be something in the neighborhood of a single white dove, not a flock of midnight black, contentious crows. In church one Sunday morning, when there had been more talk than usual about the Holy Ghost—what nowadays they called the Holy Spirit, as if to make the Trinity sound more dignified and modern, less alarming—right after the hymn that went, “Come Heavenly Dove, descend upon your people here,” a white light, shaped exactly like the dove you see on peace symbols and Christmas cards, appeared high above the altar near the ceiling. And one person and then another noticed it and poked their neighbor and pointed up
till finally everybody there had seen the light, except the minister who didn’t have a clue, but smiled and nodded and pretended he knew what was going on. That’s most people’s idea of a good miracle today. Something that seems just a little holy, or at least otherworldly, that doesn’t last long or cost much or demand anything except your brief appreciation. Nothing that disrupts your life or messes with your daily habits. Like a flock of crows might. Like a pride of ravens. After the first burnt pumpkin cake, Janey started to bake them things on purpose. First, using regular recipes, then later mixing up ingredients as it occurred to her. Flour, baking powder, soda, water, lard, always the basics, but the rest was less exact. God knows the birds didn’t care. She added oregano one day, half a bottle of dried bits she’d meant to throw away for years. The crows pecked away. Dumb birds. Paid no attention. Once she added a can of baked beans she’d bought by mistake. She whirled them in the blender. Janey hated baked beans. “ Bean cake, here get your bean cake. Come and get it ‘fore I throw it out.” Janey cackled. It didn’t strike her as the sanest thing she’d ever done, but sanity might well be overrated, and regular, ordinary, ditch-water dull behavior for seventy years at a stretch might well be carrying the thing to excess. If Paul noticed the burnt offerings, he never said. Janey had to give him that: for all his fussing, he did give a person room to breathe. THE BABY’S DEAD, Pauline had e-mailed Janey and Paul three weeks ago. DON’T CALL ME. FOR AWHILE. I’M ALL RIGHT. I THINK. IT WAS A BOY. MATHIAS, I WAS GOING TO CALL HIM. Pauline had bought her parents a home computer and taught them rudimentary e-mail with the enticement, “You’d better pay attention. It’s the only way you’ll ever hear from me. I have a life now.” (Janey wondered what she had before.) I’M OUT OF THE BABY BUSINESS. Pauline e-mailed later the same day. AFTER THE CESAREAN THEY TIED MY TUBES. “What an expression,” Janey said. “Tubes tied.”
11
“Down the tubes,” Paul said. “I’m going to move that hedge alongside the drive. I don’t care if it is November.” Paul and Janey had fou nd out about the pregna ncy by accident. Pauline’s chi ldhood friend, Kathy Mi ller, was back in town and Jan ey had run into Nancy Mi ller, Kathy’s pompous mothe r, who had said, “You mu st be so excited about Pauli ne,” and Janey said, “O h we sure are,” and went hom e and e-mailed Pauline. WHAT GIVES? I SAW KATHY MILLER’S MOTHER IN THE SUPE RMARKET. And Pauline e-mailed rig ht back. I’M PREGNANT . (SO NOW YOU KNOW.) “The person who invent ed e-mail had to hate the human race,” Janey tol d Paul that night. As the pregnancy wore on, Pauline e-mailed bit s and pieces of her story, often late at night, or fro m the eerie hours of the early morning. I BROKE UP WITH TH E FATHER JUST BEFO RE I FOUND OUT I WAS PR EGNANT. I WAS ON THE PILL, SO I’ll BE SUING SEVE RAL PEOPLE: MY DOCT OR AND THE DRUG CO MPANY AND THE PHARMA CY AND MS. MAGAZIN E. Paul said it was conven ient that Pauline was a lawyer.
I DON’T WANT THIS BA BY, BUT I’LL BE DAMNED IF I’M GOIN G TO KILL IT. “Well, tell her not to giv e it away,” Paul said. “S he never could hold onto any thing.” Janey was in charge of all the e-mail back and forth. And then the word the bab y was dead. No explana-
12
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
tion. No funeral. Just, DON’T CALL. FOR AWHILE. However long that was. Did that mean don’t e-mail? “Howl, howl for the misery that is come upon your heads,” Janey told the birds. “Weep, weep, for the time of tribulation is at hand. Raise your cry to heaven.” “You’re round the twist, woman,” Paul called out from behind the garage. “We’ve all got to be somewhere,” Janey called back. “I have half a mind to go visit Pauline.” “Not certain how welcome you’d be,” Paul said. He was right. Pauline e-mailed, NO, DON’T COME. I’LL COME THERE. I WAS THINKING OF IT ANYWAY. Paul and Janey picked Pauline up at the airport, even though she e-mailed twice she’d (RATHER) TAKE A CAB. She often e-mailed in parentheses. She e-mails like she talks, Janey always thought. “There’s our brown leather daughter,” Paul said when he spotted Pauline, dressed head to foot in rich brown leather, carrying a matching briefcase and a travel bag. “All she needs now is a brown leather husband,” which Janey took to mean that Paul was feeling as sad as she was. Pauline looked like death wearing too much makeup, like it was her and not the baby who had died. The cheek she held out for their quick kisses was all cold and clammy. Janey had kissed her own baby’s cheek as it lay cold and dead. A big mistake. “I told you not to come to meet me,” Pauline said by way of greeting. “When’s anybody in this family listened to what anybody else had to say?” Paul said. Pauline took long naps and longer walks, and at mealtimes told her mother she had gotten a bite to eat while she was out. On Thursday Janey made a pot roast with gravy and mashed potatoes and a Yorkshire pudding. “What’s the holiday?” Paul said. “I’m vegetarian now,” Pauline said. “A leather vegetarian,” Paul said that night. The next morning while Pauline was out, Janey made
a cranberry nut bread she baked at 475 degrees for two hours. Janey kept watch at the front window and pulled it from the oven just as Pauline walked in the door. “What’s that smell?” Pauline said. “Oh, can you believe it? I made this nice vegetarian cranberry bread and I must not have heard the timer ding. We’ll have to throw the thing away. Here, you’ve got your coat on. Take it out and toss it to the birds. Be sure to break it up in crumbs.” “What birds?” “They’ll come. Just you toss it out there. They’ll eat anything.” Pauline took the pan in her thick mitten. She looked for a minute like she might throw the thing across the floor, but then she turned and went outside. Janey watched her through the window. The birds were there before the last crumb hit the ground. Pauline backed away, but she stood watching for several minutes. “My mitten’s ruined,” Pauline told Janey when she came back inside. “It smells like charcoal.” “That’ll happen,” Janey said. “The crow is the most intelligent of birds, they say.” “Then you’d think they’d have the sense to migrate.” “I think Mom’s losing it,” Pauline told her father that night. “She nearly burned the house down with the bread she made today.” “She did it on purpose,” Paul said. “She’s as sharp as she ever was.” Janey checked for e-mail several times during Pauline’s visit, as though the daughter who sent e-mail and the daughter who came to visit were two different girls, as though Pauline might be sitting in her bedroom with her miniature, portable computer keyboard and sending messages down the stairs. “We don’t get any e-mail when you’re here,” Janey said. “I thought you hated e-mail,” Pauline said. “I do,” Janey said. “I do.” Janey baked brownies Friday morning. Pauline had acquired an allergy to chocolate in recent years. “Now dumb old me,” Janey said. “You’d think a
ies. her own daughter’s allerg person would remember father ories and for certain you Well, I don’t need the cal them s tos them to the flock. You doesn’t. I guess we feed turn off that dryer.” out for me. I’ve got to go the pockmarked basement Janey watched through after a long time by the shed window. Pauline stood had ead, long after the birds all the crumbs were spr colate. finished the last of the cho ins a new box of Wheat Th That night Janey opened are e hand of water. “Thes and sprinkled in a cupped point uline in the morning and stale,” she would tell Pa ards the yard. her jerking finger out tow arairs with her suitcase, we But Pauline came downst ng. rni thes, on Saturday mo ing her leather travel clo Pauline told her mother. “I already called a cab,” You just got here.” “What? You’re not going? eful n here four days. Be car “Hello? Mother. I’ve bee with that oven.” “But you can’t go yet.” in ht suit on.” Paul walked “I see you’ve got your flig He e.” fin l you, girl. You look rea the front door. “It suits dy. might be an old army bud clapped her arm like she “You take care.” the birds?” Janey had to “What did you think of know. said. “What birds?” Pauline ey said. Jan “The crows you fed.” ut?” abo “What are you talking ck birds are the risen bla “Your mother thinks the ing flight,” Paul said. spirit of her grandson tak
13
“I do not.” “She does,” Paul said. “Well, there’s the taxi.” For a moment Janey had the feeling Pauline might be about to pat her on the head. “Good-bye (then).” *** WHEN THEY FIRST TOLD ME THE BABY WAS BORN DEAD, I THOUGHT THEY SAID BORN HEAD, AND I KEPT WAITING FOR THEM TO FINISH THE SENTENCE, Pauline e-mailed the night after her visit. TOWARDS THE END I WANTED THAT BOY MORE THAN I EVER WANTED ANYTHING IN MY WHOLE LIFE. THEY DIDN’T TELL ME HE WAS GONE UNTIL AFTER I WAS SEWED UP AND BACK IN THE RECOVERY ROOM. AT FIRST THEY JUST TOLD ME HE WAS OFF IN SOME INCUBATOR ROOM WHERE THEY PUT ALL BABIES. HE WAS DEAD FOR HALF AN HOUR BEFORE I KNEW. BUT FOR THAT HALF HOUR HE WAS THE MOST ALIVE PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD. FOR THAT THIRTY MINUTES HE WAS WELL AND STRONG AND GETTING READY TO BE LIVING FOR A HUNDRED YEARS. “Glory be to God in the Highest,” Janey whispered to the birds. “And your night shall be changed to morning and your sorrow into songs of joy. A thousand ages in His sight are as an evening gone, swift as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun. And he shall wipe every tear from their eye. You’d sing all right if you had a lick of sense.” “Make up your mind, woman.” Paul crossed the yard towards her. “You can’t have it both ways. Are the vultures soul and spirit, or are they professional paid mourners who warble for your charcoaled baked goods? Myself, I’m for pie filling in nursery rhymes.” “Pauline says she loved her little boy.” “I’m going to build a high ridge of earth along the driveway. I don’t care if it is December. I’ll plant it in the spring.” “I was going to name our boy Mathias,” Janey said.
14
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
“What are you talking about? He was to be called Paul, Jr.” “That’s how much you remember,” Janey said. “I must have told Pauline the name.” I WENT TO CHURCH ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Pauline e-mailed during the early morning hours, just about the time the Virgin Mary must have felt the first, sharp, killing pain. IT WASN’T TERRIBLE (AT ALL). THEY HAD A CHRISTMAS PAGEANT. A CHILD ABOUT TWO YEARS OLD PLAYED THE BABY JESUS, CARRIED DOWN THE AISLE BY THIS FAT FOURTH GRADER. SHE ALMOST DROPPED THE BABY A HUNDRED DIFFERENT TIMES. PEOPLE LAUGHED TILL TEARS ROLLED DOWN THEIR CHEEKS. (AND) PEOPLE CRIED. A LOT OF PEOPLE DID. THEN, JUST AS THE THREE WISE MEN SAW THE STAR, THE BABY JESUS WIGGLED FREE OF ALL THE SWADDLING AND STOOD UP IN THE MANGER, RAISED HER ARMS HIGH LIKE SHE RULED THE WORLD. THE BABY JESUS WAS CHINESE, A LITTLE GIRL, WITH THIS MOST AMAZING FACE, AND BLACK, SHINY, RAVEN HAIR. Janey read the e-mail Christmas morning, before her oatmeal, but Jesus born already, in the manger, crows and ravens opening the skies.
Linda McCullough Moore, winner and finalist for
national short fiction awards, is the author of The Distance Between (Soho Press), and more than 200 shorter published works. She is currently seeking a good home for a literary novel, a short story collection, and two collections of essays.
M ichael M. M arks
anger like Billy’s bedspread anger like Billy’s bedspread hangs on in the night and falls off as he dreams
Starting in Cincinnati, Michael M. Marks was schooled during the cold war/fallout shelter era evolving to anti-Vietnam war college days, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones. A Midwest baby-boomer, he was the middle child of five born in a six-year span. His poems have been recently published in Mad Hatters Review, Perigee, True Poet Magazine, Voltaire’s Inkwell and Merge.
15
D iane T ucker
Recipe There is a path lined with rosemary, chives and sage, greens dark and light together and garlic’s tapered fingers against the trellis. There are her hands scented with rosemary. She’s cut it, bundled, rinsed and twisted it, wet on the board next to a warm lemon. There are the silvery garlic skins in a fish-scale heap beside the knife, and the cloves, the bed of garlic cloves in the pan. Now there’s the chicken stuffed with the rosemary and with the lemon, its skin all-over pierced, and the bird set down on the layer of garlic cloves. In the olive oil there are her fingers moving in small circles, spicing the skin with cracked black pepper and crumbled rosemary. There is the path lined with rosemary, chives and sage, and it’s begun to rain. There is the garlic, bending over by the trellis. There she kneels, laying down the kitchen shears. There are her hands.
99999999999 99999999999 16
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
D iane T ucker
The Sudden Rain Brisk November evening on the train platform, the view black, viewless. Then, the sudden rain. Just a sound, a pianissimo applause against the invisible leaves. The air chills, dampens at its edges in the dry station. The sudden rain delineates night-shrouded objects, lets the sound of its many small falling bodies make for us a picture of the night ravine, the overhang, the overpass, climbing slope of trees. The pearled sheen of every surface seeks us in our artificial light, portends the morning, when the rain’s murmur, its patter of applause, its many-mouthed staccato humming, will speak us open, our surfaces slick and wide as weeping eyes.
Diane Tucker was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Her first book of poems, God on His Haunches (Nightwood Editions, 1996), was nominated for the League of Canadian Poets’ 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second book, Bright Scarves of Hours, is scheduled to appear in September 2007 from Ontario’s Palimpsest Press. Diane’s recent appearances include The Mennonite, Event, The Antigonish Review and The Apple Valley Review. Diane lives in Burnaby, BC, with her understanding husband, two scandalously beautiful teenagers and a spotty dog named Doxa.
99999999999 99999999999 17
J ason J onker
Ms. Vredevoogd, Calvin Christian Jr. High You taught us not to covet the ways of the unjust—or the just barely legible. At the board, you taught us not to cramp our pens: jerking circles before you wrote, your arm jowls flapped like clean sheets on a clothes line. Oh, I envied you your handmanship. My snarled, barbed-wire words seemed so rude an offering for so polite a class.
For the last decade, Jason Jonker has lived in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife and their three daughters. He is a family therapist working with oppositional/defiant teens and their families, probation officers and schools. Jason has previously published in the McGuffin and Lily. He enjoys fishing, cold weather and the wearing of sweaters—all of which make Phoenix an uncomfortable place to live.
18
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
L awrence D orr
Thirdonesacharm .. .. . .. ... .. .. ..
.. .. . ..
... .. ..
.. .. . ..
... .. ..
.. .. .
The deck chair was set up in the breezeway of the stable facing the stall where Charm, a thirteen-year-old retired Thoroughbred mare with the racing name of Thirdonesacharm was stomping like a metronome set at a random tempo: two thumps in rapid succession, then nothing for a few minutes, then two more beats, then repeat the whole sequence. Charm was twelve days overdue. The old man sprawling in the deckchair under a horse blanket was half asleep. This was the twelfth time that he had taken the early morning vigil that began at four a.m. and ended at seven. For horses, nature usually decreed birth in the dark. The other ‘dark’ times were filled by Meg, his wife, Anne, his daughter-in-law, and John, his son. In the daytime a cursory glance at Charm in her large paddock sufficed. To fight sleep he turned on the overhead breezeway light and the one in the long birthing stall but Charm began to pace around and sigh. He didn’t like the artificial light either. It made him feel separated from the world, caught in a thick, white, cocoon that transformed the night noises into threats that he had to sort out as if he were listening for a developing attack, the clinking of equipment, and the slithering sound that crawling bodies made in the snow. He got up, switched off the lights and lay back down on the deck chair feeling foolish for transporting the snow and World War II Eastern Front horrors to North Florida in the year of Hale-Bopp. Once he got back his night vision he looked up toward the northeast sky, ten to fifteen degrees above the horizon, the position that the very loud TV astronomer had advised for a sight of the comet Hale-Bopp visible just before dawn. Now the sky was the dark blue of carbon paper with lighter hues around the edges as if it had been harder used there. He once knew an eccentric English lady, an anthropologist, who for some reason was on the nursing faculty of a large, redbrick teaching hospital in the Midlands. She blued her gray hair with used carbon paper that she afterwards pitched at a dented waste basket. Mostly she missed and it was his job to retrieve the wadded-up carbon papers when he cleaned her office. He didn’t mind. Staining his hands allowed him to become a tattooed Tuareg riding his camel in the warm, rainless desert. Anything was better than to be an all-purpose porter, one of the floor people. He was twenty-six years old then, an escapee from Communism, a European Voluntary Worker who had signed up in 1948 in Salzburg, Austria, in what was then the U.S. zone of occupation. The ‘Voluntary’ in the EVW scheme denoted the simple fact that nobody was physically compelled to sign on. It was only the circumstances that forced a stateless person not only to volunteer but even to cheat and lie for the privilege of being wholly owned by the Ministry of Labour and allowed to work in British coal mines, gas works, cotton mills, cement factories, hospital kitchens, or to fill any of the undesirable jobs the citizenry rejected. In his own case he told the labour recruiter, who was looking for simple, uneducated muscle, that his education had ended in the third form. The recruiter, who was paid three pounds sterling per head, was happy and so was he. Without papers there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be shipped back to the Soviet Zone, the first leg of a journey that either ended in torture and death during interrogation or a prolonged, excruciatingly painful life in the GULAG. The choice was not left up to the victims. One of the cats was pulling on the blanket’s Velcro fasteners. It was Casper, the black cat, doing his danse macabre, headless with only his white shirt front and his four white spats visible. With a clank the cellular phone hit the breezeway’s cement floor. Charm thumped twice and sighed. He picked up the phone, shooed Millie, the other cat, off a canvas folding chair, put
19
the phone on it and went into the stall. Charm blew into his face, then rested her head on his shoulder. He went back outside to look for the comet once more. It reminded him of his own age. He was not thinking in the abstract. He knew that in a few months Hale-Bopp would disappear from view, and would not return in his lifetime. This was the human condition, the natural law like the physical laws controlling the planetary orbits making them so predictable that astronomers can describe Jupiter accurately at its stationary point over Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Millie was back on the canvas folding-chair next to the phone. He stretched out again pulling the horse blanket tightly around him feeling slightly nauseated. It was the hour when prisoners were taken out to be interrogated or shot. He was thinking of the people of Heaven’s Gate, the sect that committed mass suicide believing that there was a spaceship just behind Hale-Bopp, waiting to take their souls to the next level. After the mass suicide The New York Times editorial said: “Some find it shocking that a technically gifted group, earning its keep by designing web sites for businesses, could fall prey to aberrational beliefs that blended far-out science fiction with elements of Christianity....Resurrection, the meaninglessness of the flesh, the primacy of the spirit, the conversion from the physical to the heavenly plane are features of several faiths.” He wondered if The New York Times editors knew that Christians believed not only in the resurrection of the spirit but of the body also and accepted as Truth that everyone which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. Casper jumped on top of his chest trying to get under the blanket. The temperature always dropped just before dawn. Horses had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember. On his family’s farm his grandfather had a large herd of cavalry remounts. Horses were also used for farming. For racing his grandfather bred Thoroughbreds. He himself learned to ride at the age of five on his father’s retired polo ponies. By the time he was nine, he was allowed to ride all over the family’s 1200 acre settlement. Tutuyka was usually with him. He never knew Tutuyka’s real name even though he was the head-gardener’s son and lived in the gardener’s cottage, closest to the Big House, with his parents and brothers and sisters. The people of the settlement had nicknamed him Tutuyka (a name they gave to half-wits) because he was slow. When talking about him they touched their foreheads, turning their forefingers like corkscrews. He loved Tutuyka, whom he saw only in summer, and at Christmas and Easter because when school started in September and parliament was in session his immediate family moved to the City. Tutuyka, unlike the other boys in the settlement, wasn’t embarrassed to play Red Indians or Ugor and Magor, the brothers who, while chasing the Magic Stag through hill and dale, swamps and woods, were led to a beautiful land. Though he was only nine and Tutuyka thirteen, it was he who made up the games. Often they replayed the Mongol invasion of 1241 AD. The people of the settlement, his own family among them, were descendants of Cuman steppe nomads. Tutuyka brought his lunch in a kerchief—a handful of mulberries and a slice of bread generously smeared with lard, seasoned with salt and paprika. For his own lunch his Austrian nanny, Fraulein Mitzi, put two croissants in his saddlebag. One was buttered, the other filled with goose liver pate that made him gag. They usually swapped lunches. After lunch Tutuyka always wanted to hear about the City, especially about the bridges and the changing of the guard at the Royal Palace. He himself hated city life where he had to go to school, take dancing lessons from an ex-captain of hussars, and fencing, violin and piano lessons from people he didn’t like. He cried every September when they loaded the carriage and a wagon for the journey to the dock where a side-wheeler was waiting to take them down river. In the City, sitting at his desk, instead of memorizing Latin declensions he daydreamed about
20
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
home, about galloping across the fields on cool mornings when the breeze made the trees sigh and nod their crowns and Tobruk, who generally required a lot of persuasion to move, would gallop past Star and the two horses would race each other. He was ten years old when Tutuyka was killed. He had just finished his first year at the gymnasium. It was June. School had let out. Cook, the Austrian nanny, he and his sister and her canary were going home ahead of their parents. At the newly painted gray and white dock a carriage was waiting for them. The smell of the horses mingling with the smell of grass was like his father’s smell, cologne mixed with cigarette smoke, Benedictine and brandy, saddlery and gun oil. He remembered the sound of the horses’ hooves accelerating, racing out of the turn then when they reached the dirt road skirting the river changing to a dull thud like drums at a funeral. He remembered the boys, Tutuyka among them, playing, pushing each other into the river between Ferryman Bandi’s two boats. He saw a boy untie one of the boats and push it into deeper water. By then he was off the carriage, running toward the river watching Tutuyka knocked under the dark-green, glinting surface, then Tutuyka’s arm rose looking as if he wanted to embrace the boat above him but changing his mind let his arm drop. There were people milling around then somebody called Ferryman Bandi. The cellular phone rang scaring Milly off the canvas chair.
His stopping to pray was really an act of putting his fingers into his ears... .
“It’s me,” Anne said. ”Any new developments?” “Nothing.” He was listening to Charm’s thumping on the rubber mat of the stall floor. “Will you just check the tail wrapping?” He went to check. The tail wrapping was intact. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep.” To his own ears he sounded like a gramophone that needed winding up. He folded the cellular phone and put it on the canvas chair next to Millie. The deck chair was low and when he lay down he felt as if he had been sucked under by a whirlpool. It was from the whirlpool that they fished out Tutuyka’s streaming body and laid it on the shore. He remembered at first wondering if lying on the stones had hurt Tutuyka. Because in his experience there was no analogue to the motionless body of a boy, then when they brought Tutuyka’s mother down to the river he was thinking of his mother’s singer friend who used to shatter wine glasses with her high notes. Tutuyka’s mother had shattered his world where he had always been able to find people in their accustomed places. The dead used to be only the stories told about the old family, portraits and photographs that had nothing to do with his own memories of shared love, sadness and joy. Tutuyka’s was the first dead body to be engraved on the endless memorial wall of his brain that sometimes threatened to overwhelm him. At the beginning he prayed their names mantra-like to uphold them, more for his own sake than as a reminder for God. Then with his father’s name added, everything accelerated; there was cousin Karcsi who was shot down because his ammunition had run out, then uncles and aunts and cousins who had been bombed, ripped apart and buried under tons of masonry, then the people in his own unit whose names he barely knew but whose torn bodies he had to identify in order to add their names to the report enabling the next batch of replacements. His stopping to pray was really an act of putting his fingers into his ears to halt the dissonance that the sound of names had made. When after the war, during the communist occupation, his sister was killed, there was no sound at all. He was alone in a hermetically sealed room, totally deaf.
21
He got up to check on Charm. For a moment his heart stopped beating. Charm wasn’t in the barn. But it was all right. She was peacefully grazing in the paddock. The firmament looked like an aquarellist’s pad barely brushed with a pale blue arc that left, here and there, uncovered white shapes. Hale-Bopp was not visible anymore. His mother who disliked fussy watercolors would have liked this bold, lightly touched sky. He knew that sixteen years ago she had died, believing like him, without question, in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. *** The phone rang beside their bed. The clock radio’s large, red numerals showed: 11:30. Meg wasn’t in bed beside him. “Hello?” . “We have a lovely angel on the ground, Daddy. Charm gave birth in the paddock just now. Anne is here with me. Mummy is with the children.” “Thank God. I’ll be right there.” For mares, the best place to give birth was outside on the grass as their cousins in the wild were doing and their ancestors had done for centuries. He put the phone down wondering if the lovely angel was a colt or a filly. He pulled on his socks, jeans, boots and shirt thinking how blessed he was to have a forty-three-year-old son who still called him Daddy. As a boy and a young man they were always close. Even now when John was often away on business, his absence didn’t create a gap between them. They were perhaps closer now. They shared the knowledge of what it meant to be a husband and father. On his way out the dogs in the utility room set up a great commotion. He gave them a biscuit each and closed the door behind him. The air on his skin was a light touch, the right temperature for the birth. The sky was a dark, velvety-blue with perfectly shaped stars resembling the dramatic night-blooming Cereus, a variety of cactus that one night each year devotes all its energies to the display of white, starburst flowers. He wondered why it was that pictures painted on black velvet depicting starry nights (usually sold from panel trucks at the side of the road) looked so revolting when all the elements in the painting corresponded to reality. He opened the gate to the paddock then closed it listening to the solid sound of the new latch. It reminded him of the sound of his grandfather’s safe door. After his wife had died, the old man moved an officer’s camp-bed into the farm office where he kept his cigars, pipe tobacco, and moonshine. They always met there or in the barn. The exceptions were Christmas, Easter and Grandfather’s birthday celebrated in the big dining room. In the office he was allowed to open the safe, take out some of the sheets of coupons that the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made worthless and clip them with a pair of solid gold scissors. Charm was standing with her neck stretched toward the ground looking like the depiction of Don Quixote’s horse after one of his famous charges. Not far from her was a small, black mound that began to move with the mechanical jerkiness of a daddy-longlegs. “It was a perfect presentation,” Anne said. She and John were standing at the other side of the board fence to give Charm privacy. “I’m going to get the children.” The foal tried to stand up but its hind quarters collapsed. It didn’t seem possible that those long legs could have been folded inside Charm’s womb. When the foal was up again he stepped forward and put his arms around him feeling the rapid heartbeat through the damp hide. “It’s a colt,” he said. Stepping back he watched the colt tremble with the effort then take a few hesitant steps and a half-hearted little jump that took him closer to his mother. Charm made a humming sound from deep inside her chest and turning her head nudged the colt in the right direction. They had become one shape, a tableau vivant of a mother and child. Then the silence was broken by a loud smacking and the picture was dissolved by the motion of the colt’s tail going like a windshield wiper in a downpour. Anne came back with John Gray.
22
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
“I didn’t wake Sarah. She can see him tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll go and relieve Meg now.” “Let’s name him Sir Lancelot,” John Gray said. “This year it has to start with an L.” “That’s a good name,” John said. “We’ll drink to it. I have coffee in the thermos and some B&B.” Over the smell of coffee was the aroma of Benedictine and brandy. Holding John Gray close to him he was overwhelmed by emotions. The lantern that had been turned on for the pouring of the coffee and the B&B betrayed him. “It’s all right, Daddy,” John said, and turned off the lantern. In the dark he could feel the loving presence of his grandfather who at the age of seventy-two on a very cold winter night fought off all alone a siege of wolves around the horse barn. At eightynine his cigar and pipe smoking and the moonshine he took to dissolve his kidney stones finally got to him. Five years later, his father, his beloved war hero and the best rider that ever was, died at the age of forty-five because a piece of shrapnel long embedded in his body had moved toward his heart. His father and grandfather had been saved from another Mongol-like invasion with its rape and killing sprees. They had been spared the agony of knowing that the horses had been taken by the Red Army to be hitched to crude carts and lashed by indifferent drivers, and that the land given by Bela IV in 1241 AD for services rendered had been confiscated by the Communist Party. He was crying because he realized that through him all these generations of steppe nomads had arrived at their final place of refuge. No more riding in terror, no more riding their horses into the ground, no more crawling under barbed wire, no more stepping on land mines, no more bureaucratic paper barriers. This was the land. They were home, here at SolTerra, building up the herd, selecting the right ponies for the right children, living in peace. This was the zenith of his life. He wanted to freeze this moment, to pin the moon, the stars, the comet to the velvet sky along with the dark shape of the barn that looked like a paper cutout that would never need repairing. He wanted this morning’s joy and peace to stay. He wanted to save himself from any further pain. There was no space left on his brain’s memorial wall. He understood the people of Heaven’s Gate, their desire to choose the time and place of their passing, to transcend their victim status and thus construct wings for themselves. He didn’t have to accept the prospect of being robbed of the only power he had ever really had. He didn’t have to accept it but he did because it was given to him a long time ago to understand the difference between chronos which slowly dispossessed him of his life and kairos that was life with endless possibilities. He knew with all his being that even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry and will deliver you. “John Gray is falling asleep, Daddy. Could you put the afterbirth in the bucket? The vet will want to look at it tomorrow.” “Of course. You all go home and have a good sleep. I’ll clean up.” After they left, he stood leaning against the board fence watching Lancelot suckling. When they both lay down he went over to the other side of the fence and picked up the B&B bottle. He drank feeling the hot liquid pouring down his gullet. The sky had become the painted ceiling of a tent, large enough to shelter all his family.
Lawrence Dorr’s collections of short stories include The Immigrant (1973), A Slow Soft River
(1974), and A Slight Momentary Affliction nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (1987). His most recent collection of short stories, A Bearer of Divine Revelation, was the recipient of a Christianity Today 2004 Book Award for fiction. A retired University of Florida editor, Dorr continues to teach creative writing at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. He lives with his wife and son’s family on their horse farm, SolTerra, in Alachua.
23
J osh K alscheur
When the Communion Wafer Fell to the Ground I first thought of putting Jesus in my pocket, where he could get lost amongst the dimes, business cards, red pens. I could slip him into the bulletin, let him read how he saves us and how much quilts sell for, and when the Chili supper starts. I could find him a home under votive candles, under the Food Pantry boxes–– He’d have eternal macaroni and cheese. I could tuck him into a money clip, he could stare down Washington for awhile. At the Bellagio, he could be my token, at Chicago Tollbooths, my scam. I could seal him into an offertory envelope, where he’d be sorted away next to checks where he’d know he was loved by every signature. When I finally bend down to pick him up And I think of what sits on the bottoms of shoes–– fertilizer residue, used tissues, what’s left after a scraped knee, I reach down as if to genuflect, making the sign of the cross. I hold my breath as I eat the bread.
24
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
J osh K alscheur
At Jesús Station In the summer of 2006, a metro accident killed forty-one people in Valencia, Spain, a week before the Pope’s scheduled visit. The Pope gave a blessing at the station where the accident occurred.
Like Elvis, it is the fact of his presence that matters, his words like stage smoke, drift away as soon as the music ends. We care about how his hands move, where his eyes go, how his knees bend, if he sits or stands. So when he read the names off, all forty-one of them, Carlos Calderon-Segura, Estefania Aznar-Sanz, the German language fought hard against each tilde, against the accents, against the guttural G sounds, the rolling R’s, and the lisped Z’s. Each name with the rhythm of a Latin Mass, Sandra Martinez-Ruiz, Txema Galvan-Lopez, and who cares if it became routine, and the Amens came out like a list of restaurant soups, the abanicos pushing heatwaves, the crowd beginning to watch the pharmacy crosses flashing, and the police lights spinning, ready for a disaster, because when his hands rose up and he flung the holy water down into the underground, he stared down there, his eyes moving back and forth, as if searching for something, as if a rock had been rolled away.
25
J osh K alscheur
Purgatory
Like AA meetings, I’ll begin each sentence with what I’m ashamed of and the things that I love: the arched back of a married woman, the grind and drive of Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, how a Lexus can change your life. God will show up like a parole officer, to check pockets, ask if I’ve tried to leave, if the wavering rain is His fault, if I’ve let my blood run lukewarm. After introductions, questions: Will I have my choice of beige houses? Can I salt my tofu, pepper my eggs? Can I find the one-way streets? Will it be London everyday? Is bisexuality the way forward? Will the gloriosas be dried out, but clinging to color? The shoulder shrugs, the pauses, the shifting of feet, the mumbling, they all just drone like crumpled phrases, Who knows? Maybe then, maybe now, Maybe? That’s where I’ll be then, almost tripping, taking the roundabouts, pacing myself, looking for someone who has a complete sentence for me…
26
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
Josh Kalscheur’s work is forth-
coming at The New Delta Review and published at Words On Walls. In 2006, his poetry was nominated for an AWP award. Josh resides in Northfield, Minnesota, where he studies and writes poetry.
D aniel G allik
His Angst Said, “Depression And
Daughters
Cannot Be Dismissed Esoterically.” There’s nothing metaphysical about my gloom. The old man needed to talk. His wife listened as she cooked his dinner. But she did not listen well. She had, a long time ago, grown tired of his intelligence. Like it was getting boring for her because it had no outcome. His daughter, the two octogenarians found out, wasn’t coming over for supper that evening. Jim continued, I am a congested nationalist. America is sad. I am sad. I feel strongly American. But I am beginning to feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Like it’s too power-hungry or something. And the power has more to do with petroleum and not dictatorial reigns. Sweet Linda, his pretty, aged wife asked if he was interested in butter with his green beans this night. Jim responded, I feel an inferiority about the fierceness of my gloom. Others are more sad than I. Linda smiled, now dear, you know you are better about butter than others. Especially about the importance of a good dinner. Jim had another glass of water. He always did before dinner because he believed the more water he drank the less dinner he would have. And, also, of course, the more drainage he would experience. Jim was a strong believer in drainage. The water was from the tap. No bottled water for this man. He considered himself a manly intellectual. Linda placed a dab of butter in the beans. She pressurecooked the cheap piece of beef with one onion.
27
Ideas within Jim’s head swirled. Even though the reality of them pointed the two towards machine-cut blocks of solid phlegm. Every once in awhile Linda would wonder why she got married. Why she put her hopes into multi-sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Jim commented before the salad was made, I wasn’t always gloomy. I was once rollicking. Linda said, I remember the past well. All the dinners I have cooked in our thirty seven years. Oh, I wonder, by the way, how my
Sadness had made me clean shaven. sweet Gloria is doing on her new job. My gosh, it’s her fifth job this year. Our economy is so bad. I wonder when it’s going to get better. She’s getting to the age when she really needs health insurance and this new position with Dillard’s she told me doesn’t include it. Jim laughed, Most extremists are right about gloom. It indeed will be the end of our megarace as we know it. The country I love is too bland. Predictable. Un-alive. Just watch the news. Yes, I worry about our daughter, Linda was tossing the salad. And thinking out loud. I wonder, even though I haven’t asked her, why she hasn’t found a man. I feel, Jim smirked, that except for dying pardonable satisfactions are the essence of true civilization. Gloom is too gloomy to ever fix itself. A spiritual life is what I aim for. Do you? Linda was setting the 36-inch kitchen table. Jim got up to wash his hands. And face. At the kitchen sink right by the salad. Linda smirked. Said, when I was a child I looked forward to marriage. No, not for the sex. Just for the companionship. And love. And romance. And dinners. And having a kingsized bed.
28
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
Hon, this is going to be a good dinner. Tonight. Linda had a bright smile on her face. Jim sat down again. Ate and continued his discussion. I am indebted to sadness. It has taken me by storm and made me understand the meaning of my life in its latter stages. I have a clean shaven jaw. Sadness had made me clean shaven. I am orbital in my thought. Sadness has done that. I don’t need glamour. Because I have gloom. I feel like a scoutmaster without any troops because of my icky thoughts. I am learned. Yet old. And. I am chalk-dusty. And ready for the gloom of death. I am glad I have had you. Yes. Linda served supper during these deep thoughts and spoke only a few words before she sat down to say grace, I wonder where she is having dinner. Jim laughed. I’m glad we never moved to Canada. Food is so expensive up there. And gas. The phone rang. Linda wiped her mouth. Went to the old ring-style receiver, said, hello. Her eyes concentrated. A minute elapsed. She said, okay. And hung up. Jim continued, the injustice, the cruelty of sadness. It’s lovely. I must maintain my vigor. Not get lost within it. Study it and talk about it and not delve too deep into the subject. Because I know I shall never understand it fully. Linda said, she said she was in an accident. That she was going to be all right. That she had met a nice police officer. That he didn’t want to have babies. That he believed thoroughly in the rule of law. Jim left the dinner table. As he was walking out of the kitchen he said, I think I need to use the lavatory. It’ll be nice to have two for dinner. Gloom is a subject that needs further discussion. Yes, my dear, I promise not to delve too deeply into it. However, gloom is such an interesting topic.
After retiring from teaching in Ohio, Daniel Gallik has had poetry and short stories published by Hawaii Review, A.I.M., Parabola, Nimrod, Limestone, The Hiram Poetry Review, Aura, and Whiskey Island. Gallik’s newest work, Linn’s Poems, about the antics of a Zsa-Zsalike lady who relishes marriage, will be available in late 2007 (Deep Cleveland).
29
Self-Interview of a Video Artist Christopher Miner was born in 1973 and grew up in Jackson, Mississppi. His exhibitions have included a solo show at Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery in New York in 2006 and Bellwether Gallery in 2003. Other exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Videodrome II and the Queens International at the Queens Museum of Art in 2004. His work was featured in PS1’s Greater New York 2005 and has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as Tate Britain and other international venues. Miner is currently represented by Mitchell-Innes and Nash in New York.
Because of the limitations of presenting video art in printed form, we contacted Chris for an interview, hoping to get a little more insight into the medium and artist. Chris sent us a packet full of information, press releases, accolades, and a self-interview “for ideas, or whatever,” he said. We were initially taken aback by this step, but considering that Chris is the sole figure and voice in many of his videos (one of which is aptly titled “Self-Portrait”) it quickly became quite fitting of his work. For, it seems that Chris is both interested in the self and a kind of artistic economy—of paring things down and removing the intermediary. With this in mind, we decided a self-interview seemed entirely appropriate and equally lively and amusing as Chris tackles “the contradiction of man” and even calls one of his own questions an unfair generalization. So, we proposed using the self-interview. Chris said he was in. The following is Chris Miner’s interview with himself. CM: Why do you think some Christians have a hard time with art, or aren’t that interested, in general? CM: I don’t know if that’s a fair question, because it’s such a generalization and there are always exceptions out there you don’t know about. I definitely know a lot of “conservative Christians” who don’t have a place in their lives for art or anything that doesn’t fit squarely into their worldview. These are the people who claim to be right about everything they have an opinion about and who wouldn’t use the phrase “I don’t know” under any circumstances. By nature, art is subjective, so there has to be a willingness in the person to explore new territory (visually, experientially, emotionally). Understandably, that’s a difficult thing for closeminded people and unfortunately a lot of them pit conviction against the act of seeking. Not all people of faith are like this, though. There are a lot of Christians in the world who clearly aren’t what people stereotype as “close-minded conservative Christians”—so I guess it depends on which Christians you’re talking about.
30
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
Shelby Foote said something about this, that “art is by definition a product of doubt. I don’t think God would be hard on artists. We are the outsiders for the saints, we go beyond where they won’t go and tell them what we’ve found. If we burn for that, we’ll take pride in our burning, our pain: the triumph won’t be God’s.” I respond to that idea. CM: Have you ever heard the phrase “bad Christian art”? CM: Yes. But I think “bad Christian art” is no different from other bad art, in that it’s typically just an illustration or expression of an idea that the artist already believes to be true (about the world, himself, or whatever his subject is) and just wants to convey to the viewer. A lot of times the more interesting work is the result of some specific conflict that the artist was willing to endure and suffer through, understanding that he doesn’t know where the process is going to take him. He believes that place at the end of the process will be more interesting than wherever he originally set out from. At least, I think that’s what a lot of artists hope for. I know it’s what I hope for.
Christopher Miner, video still from Self-Portrait. 2000. 13 minutes. 31
Christopher Miner, video still from Auction. 2000. 7 minutes.
CM: How did you get interested in video art? CM: I studied photography and creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and then went to graduate school in photography at Yale a few years later. I realized in graduate school that I wasn’t very connected with my subject matter. I photographed people I didn’t know and used photography as an excuse to go out and try to get involved in someone else’s experience, always someone I would see while driving around. I was interested in the process of discovering things I didn’t know…but I wasn’t that connected to what ended up in the pictures. CM: Like what for example? CM: I basically just drove around in my car with my camera and would see what I could get mixed up in. Diane Arbus was a big influence on me early on. I loved the idea of her riding a bus in New York and trying to meet people and go home with them to photograph them. I’d ride around in my car and pull over for any situation that I didn’t have any business being in—somebody’s family reunion I saw from the road once or someone whose car had broken down. I just tried to get in their world, the stranger’s world, whatever it was. But it was pointed out to me in grad school that the stories I was telling about those experiences were more interesting than the pictures themselves, so video ended up being a way for me to put more of myself into my work, because it’s time-based and I could use music, sound, narration, etc. For a photographer, it feels like cheating because you’re not limited to a still image in the end. Photography is more demanding to me in that way. 32
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
CM: What are your influences? You’re living in the South now after living in New York for a while, is it hard to not be around the art world for inspiration? CM: I’ve never really been that inspired by other visual art in terms of my own work. That’s probably a character flaw, but I’ve come to accept it about myself. I definitely miss being stimulated, visually, in New York, just in terms of the quality of my personal life, but I feel like my work is more influenced by film and fiction than anything else. CM: What filmmakers and writers have influenced you? CM: It’s a pretty standard set of influences for a Southerner. I love Walker Percy and have read all his work a few times now. I don’t ever get tired of his world. Also, I take a lot of safety in his lifestyle of living in the South and trying to make work here. He had family money, though, which changes everything. Earning a living is a curse against my work, just because it takes so much time. I would kill to be able to spend forty hours a week on my work instead of at my job, but I try to deal with it as best as I can and just sacrifice in other areas of life in terms of my time. Usually that just means spending less time with friends and family. I think it’s easier for writers, though, not living in New York, because to whatever extent you do need to surround yourself with other people who have gone
Christopher Miner, video still from The Burning Bush. 2002. 5 minutes.
33
Christopher Miner, video still from The Best Decision Ever Made. 2004. 17 minutes 14 seconds.
before you in your field—it’s easier to own books in Mississippi than it is to watch video art. But other than Walker Percy, I really love Richard Ford and Raymond Carver. In terms of film, I was really influenced by Ross McElwie’s Sherman’s March. I watched it during my first week of graduate school and I must have had a conversion experience when I saw it, though I didn’t know it at the time, because now I can see its influence in a lot of my work. CM: So what does fiction have to do with your video work? CM: I started writing short stories in college and taking creative writing classes at the same time I was getting interested in photography. My subject matter didn’t really cross over much. I wrote a story that ended up being published in New Stories from the South put out by Algonquin Books. I felt like my life as a writer was secured forever after that, until I realized that it was basically the only decent stand-alone fiction piece I’d write for ten years.
34
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
The connection to video is that I started writing narrations for some of the longer pieces at some point, which I use as a conventional voice-over. I try to meld the images and language together so that they come across as a singular experience to the viewer. CM: What’s your ideal response to one of your videos? CM: Well, the worst response is for someone to be able to get up and walk away from it (or walk past it) and not be stimulated enough to stay and watch. I just want the viewer to have a unique experience with the piece that they wouldn’t be able express in words too easily. Depending on what the piece is about, the nature of their response would differ. I just want the viewer to be moved in some way. I’m definitely not interested in determining the exact nature of their response. The idea of specificity is a very talked-about issue in photography and it’s very important to me, in terms of my content and what the viewer actually sees and hears in my work. The more specific I am with what I give the viewer (visually or otherwise) the wider the range of possible response—the more accessible the piece is, usually. CM: Is there an overall theme or pervasive issue that ties all your work together? CM: Maybe the idea of contradictions—how two seemingly contradictory things can co-exist and not cancel each other out. It comes up a lot in Christianity, obviously—Christ as man and God at the same time…God is loving, but also just, etc. Mainly, I’m interested in the condition of man in that regard—fallen and forgiven at the same time—the old man and new man living inside the self. CM: Can you give a specific example of this? CM: The Auction video does this, I think. It’s basically a seven-minute performance piece where I took the generic phrases of the altar calls I heard growing up in the Baptist church and used them to create an auction (like a cattle auction) from behind the pulpit of a church. The idea is that the viewer is both mesmerized and drawn into the sounds, but also pushed away by the belligerent content. CM: You make the distinction between video art and film. What’s the difference? Why video over filmmaking? CM: The distinction, as it most relates to my work is about the duration and the narrative structure of the piece. Most video art is short and doesn’t have a literal story, like most films do. Films/movies are generally longer, with a clear narrative structure. An art video can be anything that’s shot with a video camera. Some of my longer work could fall into either category, depending on where it’s being shown. I
35
have some half-hour videos that have clear narrative structure to them. For video art it’s probably a little longer than average and a little more literal in terms of the story, but in the context of a film screening, it’s a little short and not as straightforward, in terms of the narrative. The Burning Bush video is a good example of an art video that could never be mistaken for film. It’s just a five-minute loop that shows a male figure standing in a field at twilight watching a sparkling fire continually burn in front of him. This would be a very boring (and short) “movie,” but it’s not made to be seen in a movie or theater context. I’ve shown this piece in the storefront window of a gallery, facing the street, so that it could be seen from outside. I wanted the viewer to be drawn into the moment, where the figure is clearly waiting for something to happen (though nothing does) and the fire just continues to burn and never goes out. I wanted the title to connect the video to the story of Moses hearing God’s voice in the burning bush in the Bible. The difference being that Moses had a transformative experience in front of his burning bush, while the figure in the video is perpetually waiting in silence, just like the viewer watching the video. I wanted the piece to connect with that experience of waiting for revelation—which is specific and different for everyone, some mix of longing, anticipation, disappointment, wonder… Back to the question, though, about why video over filmmaking, the Burning Bush piece is a good example of that for me. Filmmaking typically involves other people (actors, technical crew, financing, etc) and that doesn’t really appeal to me. I like the control and limitations of doing everything myself with just a video camera and a computer. There’s so much that changes throughout the process of making each piece for me and I can’t imagine having other people involved in that. The Burning Bush video started out with me going into a field at my dad’s deer camp to get some footage of me firing the gun aimlessly at some giant white birds that are always flying around near the lake there. (Egrets, maybe?) I knew I wouldn’t hit them with the pistol, but I liked the juxtaposition of man with gun trying to kill something beautiful, but not really trying that hard to kill it. I liked the idea of being motivated by something that doesn’t make sense. So I got some footage of that and it looked completely ridiculous. It looked like a guy standing in a field shooting at birds—and nothing more, the meaning didn’t really translate. As it got darker outside I found some fireworks that I had left in the back of the four-wheeler and just shot some footage of myself setting them off. When I got back home and watched that footage it all looked pretty useless too, except for this one ten-second clip—with the fountain of firework sparks going off—that looked so beautiful to me. I kept playing that clip over and over again and realized that I could edit it so that the fire just burned continually. I thought that moving image was very powerful.
36
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
CM: You’ve shown your work in gallery settings and at MoMA and other museum theaters, what’s the difference? CM: As an art object, video is weird because it doesn’t really exist anywhere. It’s a tape—it’s not like a painting or a photograph. So, how you show it is really important. When you watch it on a nineteen-inch TV, from four feet away, by yourself, in a dark room, you have a totally different experience than watching that same video projected on a wall, thirty feet wide, in a gallery, with twenty other people walking in and out of the room or whatever. Some videos can be hard to manage in a gallery setting if you want the viewer to actually see the entire piece, uninterrupted, from start to finish, because people can walk in and out of the gallery at any point. So, to answer your question, the screenings at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) were nice because the videos were shown in a movie theater, with a captive audience, which is a normal context for film people, but is not as common for video art. CM: Why did you leave New York? CM: I just believe I will make more work down here, long term, without having to deal with the complications of living and making a living there. Money goes farther here, you have more time, less stress, less distractions. I spent a lot of time in front of my computer making work in New York, and in the end, didn’t get out as much as I should have. The great thing about living there is that on Friday night after work, when you do get out of your studio, you could do anything you wanted. You have to be a little more ambitious in Mississippi, or you’ll end up at Chili’s at 7:30 eating an onion blossom like everybody else in the state who doesn’t know what else to do with themselves. CM: So what do you do on Friday nights? CM: The worst thing we’ve done is gone to Chuck-e-Cheese. We thought it’d be fun to play skeeball, but it was horribly depressing. The whole place smelled like kids and sweat and grease. There was grease everywhere on everything. Also, someone had stolen most of the skeeballs. The best thing we’ve done, though, is play bingo at the American Legion. It’s the oldest American Legion post in the country. Post #1. It’s an amazing place—and they have a bar. I won one hundred dollars last week on my birthday. Playing bingo is fun, but hopefully I’ll make a video there at some point.
37
A by K aupang self-pectations 1. like how the rosewood ivoried in essence within the hollows of this chestual womb (stretch out my heart on four throw pillared posts—the bearing of lightness no burden) my gratuitously essential self, clotheslined in parallels between second and sixth ribs is a rectangular box which, when incinerated (is still a six-lidded box) is not full and it does clatter with a blue thin thread and a pearl or two and any number of ten-thousand hollowed birdbone wings. 2. fade. hope. it’s a tomb Love. all the wall-flower visceral vestiges of loneliness remain as ash. 3. See my sok-shing? be patient, linger, watch awhile. spine awhile. the fire’s affectionately balmy. see my sok-shing? my blazingly bare madrone (my final stand in a slow blue heat) it grows high in precipitous countries where, near the hearth, even the thick-pearled fog is not so deathsome. 4. ash is not ash `til you give it away don’t object to my rented womb on bonewing ave. it’s all I won of levity.
Aby Kaupang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review,
Matter, Verse and Oregon East. A chapbook, Scenic Fences, was just listed as a finalist for the Laurel Review/Greentower Press Midwest Chapbook Competition. Also, she has been twice nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project and once for the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize.
38
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
A by K aupang heavier light leaves in enormous all wings greatly flows off somewhere I knew good back then the man praised flows late is grievy behind almost fall Fall rouse us my made its made well unlike us ground between things soulsky resembles seascold my Heavy—
A by K aupang A loner refurbishes some tangle in the loveseat How tonight is language anything but tincture. punctured? Lovely too— the loner refurbishes some tangle in a loveseat. A river forced under returns. It wants to undrown. To iIntroduces its milkteeth. So invisible, the clay hours groan. When stillness slips to gift’s visage, a crash slithers, an estimated reach exhales.
tounges and fiddleheads curling find fiddleheads tounges unfurling come
The loner is an awful salesman. Actually, the condition of water prediluvian. Its heaving, drawn up. Leafing. Lonely waters. Suddenly flowing and wronged. Lovely, the respondent, you, are the lamb spilling out—
39
J onathan L arson
sun step i trudge uphill homework in hand as needlepricks nip down my back like stilt steps. i strain against the opening of my pores as if sweat were a secret. i stop— pull my palm out of my shirt: it’s still dry. atop the hill, i find a spot to sit, pick up the poems and browse rhymes and eloquence. rhythm, tone and diction— an iamb here, a few scattered trochees there— till the sun tilts me back.
sprawled out prostrate on this porch its two-by-fours coarse, paint-stripped and rain-rinsed. nailheads peeking from their holes like old hermits thorns poking through cracks— house abandoned. head resting on the Romantic Anthology— pipings of Innocence steal into my ear like pickpockets unnoticed. there they prance in the twilight squeezing out the last of the green juice— then the brass-knuckles of Experience crack my skull. Jonathan Larson is finishing up his undergraduate degree in English literature at Seattle Pacific University and listens to a lot of Nina Simone, Ray Lamontagne and De La Soul. Jonathan also enjoys Tillamook Mudslide ice cream with Crown Royal and Oreos. And if possible, he tries to read Mary Oliver when it’s sunny outside and Paul Celan when it’s rainy.
40
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
the sun dips into the water and i awake heavy and wet to walk home; sadder, wiser.
The TheGrace GraceI Know I Know T ony W oodlief
T ony W oodlief
Grace comes for me in the loneliest part of the night, the way she used to do. Her steady tapcomes on the pulls from sleep, shethe stands in the dim Grace fordoor me in theme loneliest part ofand thethere night, way she used to do. Her light ofsteady the hallway, wearing her cotton nightgown embroidered with purple tap on the door pulls me from sleep, and there she stands in the dim light flowers.ofHer is fixed on the where my headembroidered emerges from thepurple dark- flowthestare hallway, wearing herplace cotton nightgown with ness of ers. ourHer bedroom, as if her eyes can divine the black. I know what she stare is fixed on the place where my head emerges from thewants darkness of before our she raises her arms. Sheeyes wascan always mythe little spoolI know of thread, outbefore bedroom, as if her divine black. whatspilling she wants of her she bed raises and down the hall to bump against my door, to wait until I cradled her arms. She was always my little spool of thread, spilling out of her her andbed rewound the invisible string between mine, returning herher and and down the hall to bump againsther mydoor door,and to wait until I cradled to rest.rewound the invisible string between her door and mine, returning her to rest. So I liftSo her to my sheand laysshe herlays head my on shoulder. Her soft dark I lift her chest to myand chest heron head my shoulder. Her soft dark curls tickle my nose as they always did, even when only wisps remained. “Do curls tickle my nose as they always did, even when only wisps remained.you “Do you remember,” she whispers in a voice is still out how tohow formtowords, remember,” she whispers in athat voice thatworking is still working out form words, “the time was sick from medicine you let you them me, and how you “thewhen timeIwhen I was sickthe from the medicine letgive them give me, and how you yelled at me because I messed myself ?” yelled at me because I messed myself ?” “Yes.” “Yes.” My voice thin because I am ashamed, and because I don’t Iwant Myisvoice is thin because I am ashamed, and because don’t want HanHannah to hear. It frightens her that our daughter still comes to me. “I “I was so so tired.” nah to hear. It frightens her that our daughter still comes to me. was tired.” She tightens her grip. Her muscles feel coordinated and purposeful, like that Sheoftightens herand grip. muscles feel coordinated likeHer thatlips are a snake, forHer a brief moment I imagine sheand willpurposeful, strangle me. of a snake, and for a brief moment I imagine she will strangle me. Her lips close to my ear as we walk down the hallway. “You promised I wouldare get better.” close to my earshame as we walk theand hallway. “You getI stumble, better.” then The is an down icy wind I close my promised eyes to it. I“Iwould know.” Thestop, shame is anoficywaking wind and I close my to it. “Ihis know.” stumble, then fearful Benjamin. We eyes are outside door,Iso close that I can hear stop, fearful of waking Benjamin. We are outside his door, so close that I can a catch in his breath, as if he feels the same cold gust probing his skin. I don’t hear a know catch what in hisIbreath, as if he cold gust probing his skin. I am waiting for,feels onlythe thatsame we should wait. don’t knowI can whatfeel I am waiting for, only that we should wait. her peering from beneath her hair, through Benjamin’s door, and I can feel herIpeering fromthat beneath hair, through Benjamin’s door, and suddenly am certain she isher examining him with those relentless eyes. No, we suddenly I am certain that she is examining him with those relentless shouldn’t wait here. My instincts have been unreliable for years.eyes. We No, move quickly we shouldn’t wait here.door My instincts been unreliable years. Weyou move past Benjamin’s and I tryhave to explain my lie. “I for didn’t want to be afraid.” quicklyHer pastthroat Benjamin’s door and I try to explain my lie. “I didn’t want you to be extrudes a grim chuckle. afraid.” Her throat extrudes a grim chuckle. We are at the doorway to Grace’s room, which is closed, so I open it. Inside We there are atisthe doorway which is closed, so I open it. Inside a small bed to of Grace’s painted room, white wood, and a matching dresser, and a child’s there isrocking a smallchair bed ofsurrounded painted white wood, and a matching dresser, and by dolls. The smell of her is gone; thereaischild’s only a faint rockingmustiness, chair surrounded dolls. IThe hertois conjure gone; there only a an odor by of dust. usedsmell to beofable her is scents—baby shamfaint mustiness, an odorgum of dust. usedplaying to be able to conjure her scents—baby poo and bubble and, Iafter outside, something like a wet puppy rolled shampoo and bubble gum and,inafter playing something like a wet puppy in flowers—but the girl my arms hasoutside, no smell. rolled in flowers—but the girl in my arms has no smell. She doesn’t resist as I pull back the blankets and lay her body on the bed, but Sheher doesn’t as I pull back her on theexactly bed, but gazeresist is a reproach. I sit, the andblankets she takesand mylay face inbody her hands, the way her gaze is a reproach. I sit, and she takes my face in her hands, exactly the way“how you she used to do. “Do you remember,” she asks, her eyes bright and cruel, she used to do.me “Do she asks, eyes bright and it?” cruel, “how wanted toyou die remember,” in the end? How you her daydreamed about you wanted me to die in the end? How you daydreamed about it?” A moan forms in my throat. I pull my face from her hands and stare at the A moan mymy throat. I pullgathered my face themselves from her hands at the floor,forms at the in way feet have at theand sidestare of her bed just as floor, atthey the would way my feet have gathered themselves at the side of her bed just as do when I sat here and prayed. No prayers remain. I close my eyes and pretend that the creature tugging at my arm is Grace. 41
“David?” Hannah stands in the doorway. For a moment I think perhaps I have become Grace, they would do when I sat here and prayed. No prayers remain. I close my eyes and sitting alone on this little bed. There is pity and sadness in Hannah’s face, and the slightest fear. Her pretend that the creature tugging at my arm is Grace. pale blue eyes can fill up so quickly, even now. She cradles my head against her stomach, which quiv“David?” Hannah stands in the doorway. For a moment I think perhaps I have ers with the cold, and she kisses me. Her tears drop onto my skin, warm at first, but quickly becombecome Grace, sitting alone on this little bed. There is pity and sadness in Hannah’s ing cold touches, like the fingertips of a corpse. Hannah thinks I came here alone. face, and the slightest fear. Her pale blue eyes can fill up so quickly, even now. She We squeeze onto the bed together and lie down, the way we used to do when we believed the cradles my head against her stomach, which quivers with the cold, and she kisses me. lingering smell would spark dreams of Grace. Each of us was secretly treacherous back then, silently Her tears drop onto my skin, warm at first, but quickly becoming cold touches, like the fingertips of a corpse. Hannah thinks I came here alone. We squeeze onto the bed together and lie down, the way we used to do when we believed the lingering smell would spark dreams of Grace. Each of us was secretly treacherous back then, silently pleading with God that if only one of us could see her, that it not be the other. You think that you will dream about your child all the time, pleading with God that if only one of us could see her, that it not be the other. You think that you but that’s a lie. You hardly dream of her at all. will dream about your child all the time, but that’s a lie. You hardly dream of her at all. Only lately I needn’t dream, because she comes for me in the blackness. I know Only lately I needn’t dream, because she comes for me in the blackness. I know she isn’t my she isn’t my daughter, but I didn’t know it would be this way. I didn’t know that the daughter, but I didn’t know it would be this way. I didn’t know that the days would stack themselves days would stack themselves end on end, and shape themselves into months, and then end on end, and shape themselves into months, and then years, until they became a relentless wave, years, until they became a relentless wave, carrying me away from that last moment I carrying me away from that last moment I held her. Sometimes my arms ache from it, from the held her. Sometimes my arms ache from it, from the absence. It is too much, and so absence. It is too much, and so when she comes I always open the door. when she comes I always open the door. *** *** I smell the beginnings of dinner as I enter the kitchen. Hannah is there, slender and I smell the beginnings of dinner as I enter the kitchen. Hannah is there, slender and fragile-seeming, fragile-seeming, yet with something hard and durable running through the core of yet with something hard and durable running through the core of her. She is humming. Benjamin is her. She is humming. Benjamin is on the kitchen floor with his cars and a macaroni on the kitchen floor with his cars and a macaroni box. The box is a gas station. Benjamin is humbox. The box is a gas station. Benjamin is humming too, a little sing-songy hum that ming too, a little sing-songy hum that is out of time with his mother’s tune. In between humming, is out of time with his mother’s tune. In between humming, he enacts both sides of an he enacts both sides of an imaginary conversation between a driver and the gas station owner. The imaginary conversation between a driver and the gas station owner. The driver comdriver complains about the price of gasoline, and the station owner tells him that if he doesn’t like it, plains about the price of gasoline, and the station owner tells him that if he doesn’t he can buy his gas somewhere else. like it, he can buy his gas somewhere else. We forget that Benjamin is always listening. He was a baby when his sister died. He has her hair We forget that Benjamin is always listening. He was a baby when his sister died. He and he laughs like she did and sometimes I squint at him from across the room and imagine that he is has her hair and he laughs like she did and sometimes I squint at him from across the Grace. Benjamin remembers everything else; I wonder if somehow he can remember her. I wonder room and imagine that he is Grace. Benjamin remembers everything else; I wonder if if he can sense her absence. somehow he can remember her. I wonder if he can sense her absence. “Why home so early?” Hannah asks. “Why home so early?” Hannah asks. “Finished up quick today.” I sit down at the kitchen table. I sat in this chair the night we had to “Finished up quick today.” I sit down at the kitchen table. I sat in this chair the call Grace’s grandparents, to tell them she was finally gone. night we had to call Grace’s grandparents, to tell them she was finally gone. “You told me you’d be late. Wasn’t there the inspection over on Grove?” “You told me you’d be late. Wasn’t there the inspection over on Grove?” “Didn’t happen.” “Didn’t happen.” Hannah puts down the spoon she’s been using to stir food, and comes over to the table. She leans across it, so that her face is close to mine. “Hey,” she whispers. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” I lie. “Something happened.” Hannah has possessed this ability from the beginning. So did our daughter. They can peer into me like I am glass. “Bob sent me home,” I say. “What in the world for?” “The realtor at the Murphy Street house complained.” “What else is new. You’re too picky about the electrical here. You missed a leaky roof there.” She takes my hands. “David, what happened?” “I just started fixing things.” I close my eyes. There’s never any use in lying to Hannah. “There
Sometimes my arms ache from it, from the absence.
Sometimes
my arms ache from it,
from the absence.
42
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
was a loose board at the top of the stairs, and the Hannah puts down the spoon she’s been using to stir buyers have kids, and I thought one of them could food, and comes over to the table. She leans across it, trip, you know? So I started hammering it.” so that her face is close to mine. “Hey,” she whispers. “They ought to thank you.” “What’s wrong?” “The one below it seemed a little loose. I took a “Nothing,” I lie. few whacks at it, too.” “Something happened.” Hannah has possessed this Hannah smirks and shakes her head. Smirks are ability from the beginning. So did our daughter. They ugly on most people, but something about Hannah can peer into me like I am glass. makes her prettier when she wears one. “You ham“Bob sent me home,” I say. mered every fricking step, didn’t you?” “What in the world for?” I nod. “The realtor at the Murphy Street house com“Did it make you feel better?” plained.” “A little.” “What else is new. You’re too picky about the electriShe stands up straight, still wearing that pretty cal here. You missed a leaky roof there.” She takes my smirk-face. “Well I don’t see what the problem is. hands. “David, what happened?” You can hammer my stairs any time you want.” “I just started fixing things.” I close my eyes. There’s I offer her a meager smile, and she returns to the never any use in lying to Hannah. “There was a loose stove. I wish that this could be all. I wish that I wasn’t board at the top of the stairs, and the buyers have kids, made of glass, and that she couldn’t see into me and and I thought one of them could trip, you know? So I know that there is more, even from where she stands started hammering it.” prodding our dinner. “They ought to thank you.” “David,” she says. “The one below it seemed a little loose. I took a few “Yeah?” whacks at it, too.” “You know I’ll love you even if you burned the Hannah smirks and shakes her head. Smirks are ugly house down.” on most people, but something about Hannah makes I nod. her prettier when she wears one. “You hammered every “Tell me what else happened.” fricking step, didn’t you?” “I burned the house down. It was an ugly color.” I nod. She chuckles. She is the most beautiful woman I “Did it make you feel better?” have ever seen, but she doesn’t know how deep the “A little.” fault runs through my soul. She loves something betShe stands up straight, still wearing that pretty smirkter than what I have become. “There was a crack in face. “Well I don’t see what the problem is. You can the wall beside the stairs,” I say. hammer my stairs any time you want.” “And so you fixed the crack too.” I offer her a meager smile, and she returns to the “Not at first. I felt stupid about the stairs. But I stove. I wish that this could be all. I wish that I wasn’t just couldn’t stop thinking about it. In my mind there made of glass, and that she couldn’t see into me and was that crack, and I could see it spreading right know that there is more, even from where she stands down to the foundation. I could see the whole house prodding our dinner. splitting open.” “David,” she says. “So you patched it up, right?” Hannah’s voice is “Yeah?” stretched tight. She is stirring harder, corralling the “You know I’ll love you even if you burned the house simmering vegetables with short, tense strokes, and down.” then spreading them out again. I nod. “I tried, Hannah. But I couldn’t get the mud to “Tell me what else happened.” set right. It’s like no matter how much I spread it, “I burned the house down. It was an ugly color.” that goddamned crack kept showing through.” She chuckles. She is the most beautiful woman I have Hannah is very quiet now. Benjamin is quiet, too. He pushes his cars around the macaroni box and listens. I try to sound indignant. “The realtor
didn’t evenbut talkshe todoesn’t me. Sheknow just called Bob,the andfault then ever seen, how deep she stuck the phone in my face, and Bob told me go runs through my soul. She loves something better to than home.” what I have become. “There was a crack in the wall Hannah and Benjamin are staring at me just like beside the stairs,” I say. the“And realtor did. It is the look wetoo.” give to people when so you fixed the crack we “Not are deciding between pity and Sometimes, at first. I felt stupid about fear. the stairs. But I just when Hannah looks at me, I am afraid she can seewas couldn’t stop thinking about it. In my mind there past the glass skin and broken flesh to that dark cavern that crack, and I could see it spreading right down to at my center. I put my face in my hands. “I don’t know the foundation. I could see the whole house splitting what’s wrong with me.” open.” “Youyou sawpatched her again, didn’t you? That’s why you “So it up, right?” Hannah’s voice is were in her room last night.” I am glass to Hannah. stretched tight. She is stirring harder, corralling the “You saw her.” She says it as if I have simmering vegetables with short, tensecheated strokes, on andher. “Yes.” then spreading them out again. I hear woodenBut spoon furiously “I tried,the Hannah. I couldn’t getscraping the mudand to set pushing vegetables in the pan. I look up to study right. It’s like no matter how much I spread it, that Hannah’s face while sheshowing works atthrough.” the stove. I wish she goddamned crack kept would smirk again. She smirks when everything goHannah is very quiet now. Benjamin is quiet, istoo. ing to be okay. But now her forehead is forced up into He pushes his cars around the macaroni box and lisitself,Ileaving deep furrows. It is whatrealtor happens when tens. try to sound indignant. “The didn’t even she is about to cry or scream, or when she is considertalk to me. She just called Bob, and then she stuck the ing all in themy things say to searching phone face,she andmight Bob told meme, to go home.”for a word that she can throw like a knife. “You’re always Hannah and Benjamin are staring at me just like like this after you see her.” the realtor did. It is the look we give to people when understands thatand nowfear. it isSometimes, time to be very we Benjamin are deciding between pity quiet, because peace has slipped from the when Hannah looks at me, I am afraid shekitchen. can see He feels it in the same way he knows that something misspast the glass skin and broken flesh to that dark cavern ing can have a presence of its own. at my center. I put my face in my hands. “I don’t know Lying never works, what’s wrong with me.”but I try anyway. “It’s strange, how I’ve been dreaming aboutyou? her so muchwhy lately.” “You saw her again, didn’t That’s you “You’re seeing her more and more. That’s why were in her room last night.” I am glass to Hannah. you’resaw acting work.” “You her.”crazy She at says it as if I have cheated on her. “They’re just dreams.” “Yes.” lie wooden to me. You hearfuriously her andscraping you sneak off to I“Don’t hear the spoon and have her all to yourself, and it’s making you crazy.” pushing vegetables in the pan. I look up to study “I don’tface sneak.” there’s Hannah’s whileMy shevoice workssounds at the weak, stove. like I wish she no air left in my lungs. would smirk again. She smirks when everything is gois quaking sheforehead pokes her spoon up at the ing Hannah to be okay. But nowasher is forced into bubbling food. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, itself, leaving deep furrows. It is what happens when David. I don’t you’re or losing your or if she is about to know cry orifscream, when shemind, is considerit’s really her. But you never tell me. If she is real, ing all the things she might say to me, searching foryou a keep her me.” word thathidden she canfrom throw like a knife. “You’re always her. She real.” like“It thisisn’t after you seeisn’t her.” “You see her. She comes to now you. itYou touchtoher.” Benjamin understands that is time be very Hannah slams down the spoon and it slings tiny He quiet, because peace has slipped from the kitchen. splatters the wall thethat stove. She leaves the feels it in onto the same waybehind he knows something misskitchen, her face lined and tight. ing can have a presence of its own. “Is Mommy going to cry?” “I don’t know, baby.”
43
“I don’t know, baby.” “Will she die?” “No, sheLying won’tnever die.” works, but I try anyway. “It’s strange, how I’ve been dreaming Benjamin asks if people aboutoften her so much lately.”will die. He points to different things and asks if they can kill you. I tell him that people die from crying,That’s and I why feel like a liar. “You’re seeing can’t her more and more. you’re acting crazy at work.” “They’re just dreams.” “Don’t lie to me. You hear her and*** you sneak off to have her all to yourself, and it’s making you crazy.” “Do you remember the timeMy I couldn’t sleep because of there’s the pain, youinturned your back on “I don’t sneak.” voice sounds weak, like no and air left my lungs. me so you could rest?” We are in I don’t like how voice is supHannah is quaking as the shedarkened pokes herhallway spoon atagain. the bubbling food. “I this don’t planting know Grace’s voicewrong in mywith memories. But how canknow I not ifanswer knocks? what’s you, David. I don’t you’rewhen losingshe your mind,How can I leave her thereally darkness room? or in if it’s her.outside But youmy never tell me. If she is real, you keep her hidden “I couldn’t give any more,” I say. There is a ripple of muscle from her legs to her arms, and from me.” again the sensation of being gripped by a serpent. She is so small, and almost weightless, but it feels like I am the one being held. “Please forgive me,” I ask. “Do you remember that the doctor told you to use more morphine?” It was a month after we brought her home to die. The first of the real pain set in with the sun, the pain you think isn’t possible in a modern world, pain that leaves you helpless as it twists your child into a screaming, pleading creature. I remember the doctor on the phone with his casual advice. What did he care if it was me or the tumor that did it? “I almost killed you with the larger dose. I couldn’t bear to be the one to kill you. I just couldn’t.” She is in“It herisn’t bedher. again, is staring at me with those eyes that aren’t hers, sorting Sheand isn’tshe real.” through words to see spither. at me. put mytohand hertouch cheek, theHannah way I used to do. It feels “You SheI comes you. to You her.” slams down the like it did when shespoon lay inand thatitbed of tiny a coffin, taut onto and unnaturally cool,the so stove. that when I kissedthe her slings splatters the wall behind She leaves kitchen, her face lined and tight. “Is Mommy going to cry?” “I don’t know, baby.” “Will she die?” “No, she won’t die.” Benjamin often asks if people will die. He points to different things and asks if they can kill you. I tell him that people can’t die from crying, and I feel like a liar.
It is as if by laying herself open for me she draws
strength, from the
weakness itself.
It is as if by laying herself open
for me she draws strength, from the weakness itself.
*** “Do you remember the time I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, and you turned your back on me so you could rest?” We are in the darkened hallway again. I don’t like how this voice is supplanting Grace’s voice in my memories. But how can I not answer when she knocks? How can I leave her in the darkI realizedness sheoutside wasn’t my girl at all. They had done something to her in the bowels of the my little room? mortuary, something her notImine any more. But if ofI close myfrom eyes,her in this “I couldn’tthat givemade any more,” say. There is a ripple muscle legsdarkness perhaps to sheher canarms, be Grace. and again the sensation of being gripped by a serpent. She is so I am small, on my and knees besideweightless, her bed now, hands herthe head chest the“Please way I used to almost but itmy feels like on I am oneand being held. pray overforgive her, thinking that God would work some miracle through me, only instead of begme,” I ask. ging God, I“Do am begging her. Shethat watches in silence, just to likeuse God. It occurs to me that perhaps you remember the doctor told you more morphine?” I am in hell,Itand sheafter is God. the Bible, the tears of God’s people arereal worthy wasina hell month we In brought her home to die. The first of the painofferings, but mine are not, because nothing changes. Grace is gone, and this is all that remains. Tears change nothing, which is why we offer them up in darkness. Hannah is beating my back with her fists and screaming that it is not fair, that she wants to
44
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
hold her daughter, that I am wicked and selfish and that if I loved her I would let her answer the door, that if only I would wake her when I hear the sun, knock letyou her think be theisn’t onepossible to openinthe door, then she could holdleaves her you set in with the theand pain a modern world, pain that little girl again. She is on her knees behind me and she is fast losing strength, helpless as it twists your child into a screaming, pleading creature. I remember the doctor on so that heradvice. blows are only words stingtumor worse.that I plead the phone with hisnow casual What didpunctuation. he care if it Her was me or the did it? “I with her that the creature who knocks isn’t Grace, and she calls me a liar. couldn’t.” almost killed you with the larger dose. I couldn’t bear to be the one to kill you. I just she and saw she my is hands resting bed, resting on thehers, placesorting She is inShe hertells bed me again, staring at meabove with the those eyes that aren’t where our child had been. through words to spit at me. I put my hand to her cheek, the way I used to do. It feels like it Hannah what taut visitsand in the dark, but cool, she can see through did when she lay in thathas bednoofidea a coffin, unnaturally so that when I kissed her me like always, and as the fury drains from her pores, she tries tothe undo the of the I realized she wasn’t my little girl at all. They had done something to her in bowels words. She begs me to forgive her, so I do. It spills so very easily from my mortuary, something that made her not mine any more. But if I close my eyes, in thislips darkness wonder perhaps shethat canI be Grace.at it, as I do at the ease with which she returns to sleep once back in ourher bed. onlymy I could thathead way, and perhaps wouldn’t I am onwe myare knees beside bedIfnow, handssleep on her chestI the way I used to awaken when the knocking comes. Perhaps there would be no knocking. pray over her, thinking that God would work some miracle through me, only instead of beg-
ging God, I am begging her. She watches in silence, just like God. It occurs to me that perhaps I am in hell, and in hell she is God. In the Bible,*** the tears of God’s people are worthy offerings, but mine are not, because nothing changes. Grace is gone, and this is all that remains. Tears Sometimes, myindoor, I am sleeping like dead people change nothing, which when is whyshe we approaches offer them up darkness. sleep. Other times I am already awake, my heart pounding, Hannah is beating my back with her fists and screaming that it is notknowing fair, thatthat she she wants to is coming. On this night I am like the dead. The slow, steady tapping enters hold her daughter, that I am wicked and selfish and that if I loved her I would let her answer myifdream, am walking in Ia hear housethe I’ve neverand seen the door, that only I where would Iwake her when knock letbefore. her be All the the one to open bedroom doors are shut, and it is quiet; I can’t even hear them breathe in she is fast the door, then she could hold her little girl again. She is on her knees behind me and their rooms. I try to go into the rooms, but the doorknobs are too slippery. I losing strength, so that now her blows are only punctuation. Her words sting worse. I plead knock and knock, and no one answers. It is quiet, except for my pounding on with her that the creature who knocks isn’t Grace, and she calls me a liar. She tells me she saw the doors. I thump them harder, butplace nobody will our come to me. my hands resting above the bed, resting on the where child had been. I am awake, and Benjamin is standing outside my door. up at and as Hannah has no idea what visits in the dark, but she can see throughHe mepeers like always, me, eyes half-closed. “You were knocking on my door,” he says. He raises hisso I do. the fury drains from her pores, she tries to undo the words. She begs me to forgive her, arms, and I scoop him up. He fits his delicate shell of an ear against my own, It spills so very easily from my lips that I wonder at it, as I do at the ease with which she returns as we if he listening to my did you wake up?” he asks. to sleep once areis back in our bed.thoughts. If only I “Why could sleep that way,me perhaps I wouldn’t awaken “I didn’t, buddy. You had a dream.” when the knocking comes. Perhaps there would be no knocking. “Wasn’t either a dream. I was dreaming about cake.” “Cake?” *** “Bigshe chocolate cake my thatdoor, we could on.like It was yummy. youOther woke times Sometimes, when approaches I am jump sleeping dead peopleBut sleep. me up.” He yawns. “I don’t like it when you knock on my door.” I am already awake, my heart pounding, knowing that she is coming. On this night I am like shiver. “Have I knocked your doorwhere before?” the dead. The Islow, steady tapping entersonmy dream, I am walking in a house I’ve never “Sometimes.” seen before. All the bedroom doors are shut, and it is quiet; I can’t even hear them breathe in openthe therooms, door?”but the doorknobs are too slippery. I knock and knock, their rooms. I “Do try toyou go into “No. It’s scary knocking.” and no one answers. It is quiet, except for my pounding on the doors. I thump them harder, I squeeze and he squeezes me back with his little boy’s slender but nobody will come toBenjamin, me. strength. “Don’t open the dooroutside when you I tell him.eyes “Stay in I am awake, and Benjamin is standing my hear door.knocking,” He peers up at me, half-closed. your bed.” “You were knocking on my door,” he says. He raises his arms, and I scoop him up. He fits “Okay. thatmy knocking.” his delicate shell of anBut earstop against own, as if he is listening to my thoughts. “Why did you I place him gently on his bed and tuck the blankets all around, like he wake me up?” he asks. a pastry. Hehad likesa for me to call him my pig in a blanket. He is already “I didn’t,is buddy. You dream.” mostly asleep, so I rest my cheek about againstcake.” his cheek. I listen to him breathe. “Wasn’t either a dream. I was dreaming There is no better sound in the world than that of your own child breathing. Benjamin lazily smacks his lips, and mumbles something about frosting. As I quietly close his door, I pull it hard against the frame, until the wood groans. I pray that Benjamin will never open the door. 45
*** Later, in the darkness, she demands that I come out. “Cake?” She“Big usedchocolate to come only but nowon. it isItevery cakeoccasionally, that we could jump was night. SheBut hasyou become wedge thatyawns. hammers and like yummy. woke ame up.” He “I don’t hammers at the fault through me, driving it when you knock onrunning my door.” it deeper, threatening to lay me I shiver. “Have I knocked onopen. your Her doorknockbefore?” ing “Sometimes.” grows louder, because I won’t answer. For some reason, I am she can see through all “Dothough you open thesure door?” things made by man, she needs someone to let her in. “No. It’s scary knocking.” Hannah sleepsBenjamin, soundly despite banging, is I squeeze and hethe squeezes mewhich back with louder and harder thanstrength. a little girl couldopen everthe be.door I sit his little boy’s slender “Don’t and lean the door asI iftelltohim. stop“Stay her from enterwhen youagainst hear knocking,” in your ing, but it’s to stop myself. Maybe if I stop answering, bed.” she’ll finallyBut sleep. “Okay. stop that knocking.” The pounding reverberates inside and I place him gently on his bed and my tuckchest the blankets head. “Do you sheHe hisses thecall all around, likeremember,” he is a pastry. likesthrough for me to wood, “how I gasped in those seconds, andasleep, you him my pig in a blanket. He islast already mostly couldn’t me breath?” so I rest give my cheek against his cheek. I listen to him “Please,” I whisper, “whatsound do you breathe. There is no better in want?” the world than “Do that of you yourremember?” own child breathing. Benjamin lazily “Please.” smacks his lips, and mumbles something about frostremember imagining what the boy would ing.“Do As Iyou quietly close his door, I pull it hard against grow to lookuntil like,the even as Igroans. wasted Iaway?” the frame, wood pray that Benja“You notopen my daughter. min will are never the door. You are not Grace.” “I am what you let me become.” “Please.” *** “Please.” mocksshe medemands with this that stolen word.out. But Later, in the She darkness, I come now doesonly begin to plead, and She she usedreally to come occasionally, butshe nowsounds it is every just likeShe my has flesh. She is abegging me to open theand door. night. become wedge that hammers Please Daddy, help me,running don’t leave me in thedriving dark. hammers at the fault through me, Iitfeel thingsthreatening in my mind and Her popping and deeper, tosnapping lay me open. knockbreaking from their moorings, and I am ing growsloose louder, because I won’t answer. For certain some she can see all ofI this, because nowsee there is a slight reason, though am sure she can through all hunger in theby pleading voice. I reclaim mytoword; I in. things made man, she needs someone let her am screaming andthe over, the only wordisI Hannah sleeps“Please” soundlyover despite banging, which have, though I don’tthan know whatgirl I am asking louder and harder a little could everfor. be.HanI sit nah overthe to where against the andstumbles lean against door asI ifamtocrumpled stop her from enterdoor. Sheit’s is to coming to helpMaybe but now understands, ing, but stop myself. if she I stop answering, and her face changes, she’ll finally sleep. growing as hungry as the voice on the side. “She’s out there, isn’tmy she?” Theother pounding reverberates inside chest and “Don’t.” head. “Do you remember,” she hisses through the “Isn’t“how she!”I Hannah and you wood, gasped ingrabs thosethe lastdoorknob seconds, and claws me give away.me She tells Grace to wait, that Mommy couldn’t breath?” is coming. I should stop “what her, because not Grace “Please,” I whisper, do youit’s want?” waiting other side, but something ugly in me “Doon youthe remember?”
46
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
wants her to see what’s become of our daughter, and so I let her open the door. The hallway is empty. “Where is she?“Please.” Why does she only come to you?” “It wasn’t her,” I say. imagining Explanations arethe useless. Han“Do you remember what boy would nah shaking as Ieven fold her me,away?” and I tell her that I growis to look like, as I into wasted am “You sorry, are for not all ofmyit.daughter. Even though hasn’t the You Hannah are not Grace.” power to forgive me,letI think she loves me nonetheless. “I am what you me become.” In our bed, Hannah makes love to me. “I won’t leave “Please.” you “Please.” no matterShe what,” sheme whispers, over andword. over. “It mocks with this stolen But will okay,” promises. seems fragile, but nowbeshe reallyshe does begin toShe plead, andsoshe sounds that core of strength runs through her, even here, just solid like my flesh. She is begging me to open the door. at the moment whenme, shedon’t is most vulnerable. is as ifI feel by Please Daddy, help leave me in theItdark. laying open snapping for me sheand draws strength, the thingsherself in my mind popping and from breaking weakness suddenly realize thatcertain she canshe seecan right loose fromitself. theirI moorings, and I am into that place innow my chest, yet she sees past see all ofempty this, because there isand a slight hunger in it, what Ivoice. once was, or perhaps whatI am I will be. theinto pleading I reclaim my word; screaming This isover a mystery. Thethe heart forgiveness “Please” and over, onlyfilled wordwith I have, though is I adon’t mystery to what me. IIwonder if Grace would have carried know am asking for. Hannah stumbles over as beneath her skin. the I wonder if there is tomuch wheremercy I am crumpled against door. She is coming forgiveness theshe hollow chest of that to help butin now understands, and creature her face who changes, comes calling at my as door, is Grace. growing as hungry the pretending voice on theshe other side. “She’s out there, isn’t she?” *** “Don’t.” “Isn’t she!” Hannah grabs the doorknob and claws Days passed and there wastoa wait, tenuous in our me away. She tells Grace thatpeace Mommy is comhome, and then Grace came toit’s menot again in the darking. I should stop her, because Grace waiting ness. This time thebut darkness shrank from her,wants and Iher on the other side, something ugly in me remembered the things I had forgotten: to see what’s all become of our daughter, and the so Itiniest let her creases at door. the corners of her is eyes, the freckle open the The hallway empty. “Whereonis her she? earlobe, theshe delicate, rounded tip of her nose. I don’t Why does only come to you?” know sheher,” choseI this except that perhapsHan“Itwhy wasn’t say. night, Explanations are useless. there no room replaced as she nah iswas shaking as I for foldher herbefore, into me, and I tell her was that I by creature a the amthat sorry, for all with of it.preternatural Even though strength Hannahand hasn’t merciless SheI didn’t demand I come to power to whisper. forgive me, think she loves that me nonetheless. her; instead was here where in “I mywon’t brokenness, In our bed, she Hannah makes loveItolayme. leave and looked what,” at her Ishe realized howover faithlessly I had you as noI matter whispers, and over. “It recalled her face. will be okay,” she promises. She seems so fragile, but This time it of wasstrength she whoruns prayed over her, me. even It wasn’t that solid core through here, like themoment prayers Iwhen haveshe known, because she seemed at the is most vulnerable. It is astoif by believe every word, theshe very speaking of things laying herself open as forifme draws strength, from can the make themitself. true.IThe wordsrealize had been for right me weakness suddenly thatintended she can see my life, and hereinwas littleand spool intoentire that empty place mymy chest, yet of shethread, sees past spilling out towas, stitch the places it, into herself what I once or up perhaps what that I willhave be. come undone. This is a mystery. The heart filled with forgiveness is I could smell she wasif so close,would and ithave was carried exactly a mystery to me.her, I wonder Grace her, and like nothing I remembered. I askedifher to as much mercy beneath her skin. I wonder there
forgive me, and she smiled and tilted her head to the side as if to ask, what could ever need forgiving? That’s how I knew it was Grace, because of course she wouldn’t is forgiveness in the anything hollow chest comes somehow calling at my door, pretending remember but of thethat bestcreature parts of who me, which to her is every part ofshe is Grace. me. I realized then that I was so *** tired, that I’ve been tired for years. I wanted to stay Days passed andtothere a tenuous peacethat in our home, and thennow, Grace came to me awake, hearwas more of the words I can’t remember even though theagain taste in the darkness.and This time darkness her,sleep and Iinto remembered allsinking the things I had forgotten: feel of the them lingers.shrank But thisfrom syrupy which I was whispered that the tiniest creases at the corners of her eyes, the freckle on her earlobe, the delicate, rounded tip of her nose. I don’t know why she chose this night, except that perhaps there was no room for her before, replaced as she was by that creature with preternatural strength and a merciless whisper. She didn’t demand that I come to her; instead she was here where I lay in my brokenness, and as I looked at her I realized how faithlessly I had recalled her face. This time it was she who prayed over me. It wasn’t like the prayers I have known, because she seemed to believe every word, as if the very speaking of things can make them true. The words had been intended for me my entire life, and here was my little spool of thread, spilling herself out to stitch up itthe places have undone. was time that to rest, forcome everyone to rest, for all of us to have peace. As I gave myself I could her,Grace she was so close, it was her, where and like nothing remembered. to smell it, I saw cross to the and other side exactly of the bed, she sang a Iprayer to her I asked her to forgive me,Hannah and shesighed, smiled as and herdown headsomething to the sideheavy. as if to ask, what could ever need mother. if tilted putting forgiving? That’s I knew was Grace, because hands, of course she wouldn’t remember Beforehow we slept weitfound one another’s Hannah and I. We used to anything but the best parts of me, somehow to who her islove every part of me. promise, the which way young people each other do, that somehow we would die I realized then We thatdidn’t I was know so tired, that I’ve tired for years. Iknowing wanted all to stay awake, to hear together. then that it’sbeen the living together, the same things more of and the words thatallI the can’tsame remember now,that even though the taste of that themislingers. carrying memories, must be borne. It isand thefeel living hard. But this syrupy sleep into hold whichofI my washand sinking that was that timeweak to rest, fortired everyone to rest, for She took andwhispered I took hold of ithers, and hand of all of us hers, to have myself to I sawduring Grace all cross the other side of the thepeace. hand As thatI gave had seemed so it, certain thetoweeks and months andbed, yearswhere she sang when a prayer to her mother. sighed, putting down heavy. I thought I was theHannah only weak one. as Weif held hands thatsomething way, and the things we must bear became lighter. We were weak and broken and needful, the two of us lying there in something like a dream, and somehow this made us strong.
I used to think of miracles as wonderous unmakings of harm.
I used to think of miracles as wonderous unmakings of harm. ***
The one who isn’t Grace comes for me now, in the blackest part of night. There is no light in her; I know this even though I won’t open the door. I wonder if miracles always leave a bitter aftertaste as the world crowds back in on us. I used to think of Beforemiracles we sleptaswe found one another’sof hands, andis I.another We used to promise, the way young wondrous unmakings harm.Hannah But there kind, I think, the people who love that eachleaves other us do,limping that somehow we would die together. We didn’t knowwhispers: then that it’s miracle where once we crawled. The limping miracle the livingittogether, knowing all but the same is better than it was, not asthings it will and be. carrying all the same memories, that must be borne. It is the living is hard. I think shethat senses that Grace visited us, because her tone is resigned, and the voice She took my ishand and I took hold of hers,tothat weak and hand to of its hers, the hand thathold is notofhers unlearning itself, returning its home like tired a creature hole. that had “Do seemed certain during all the weeks and months and years when I thought I was the youso remember that you let me die?” only weak one. heldThere handsare thatnoway, and the we must bear became lighter. We were weak I amWe silent. answers thatthings will undo things. and broken “Do and needful, the two of us lying there in something like a dream, and somehow this you remember?” made us strong. There are no answers. *** “Speak to me. It’s dark out here. Daddy?” I think for a moment that she is telling The one the whotruth, isn’t Grace comes myself for me that now,this in the blackest part of night. There is no light in her; but I remind is not the Grace I know. I know this even won’t open door. I wonder if miracles leave aasbitter She isthough crying Inow, but if I the listen closely I can hear a rasp always in her voice, if heraftertaste as the world crowds back in on us. I used to think of miracles as wondrous unmakings of harm.
47
But there is another kind, I think, the miracle that leaves us limping where once we crawled. The limping miracle whispers: it is better than it was, but not as it will be. I think she senses that Grace visited us, because her tone is resigned, and the voice that is not hers is unlearning itself, returning to its home like a creature to its hole. “Do you remember that you let me die?” I am silent. There are no answers that will undo things. “Do you remember?” There are no answers. throat is crusted with dirt. I concentrate on this, on how it sounds like “Speak to me. It’s dark out here. Daddy?” I think for a moment that she is telling a grave might, if graves could speak. Grace’s voice was honeyed and the truth, but I remind myself that this is not the Grace I know. bright when she came to me. There are more questions, but I do not She is crying now, but if I listen closely I can hear a rasp in her voice, as if her answer, because to answer is to feed the creature on the other side. throat is crusted with dirt. I concentrate on this, on how it sounds like a grave might, Now it utters a curse against me. Its voice has returned to a native if graves could speak. Grace’s voice was honeyed and bright when she came to me. tongue, so I can’t understand it, but the words are thick and rhythmic. There are more questions, but I do not answer, because to answer is to feed the creaThey are ancient things, born in death. I close my eyes and remember ture on the other side. Grace in my arms. We can imagine any number of vile things, but we Now it utters a curse against me. Its voice has returned to a native tongue, so I can only remember what is real. can’t understand it, but the words are thick and rhythmic. They are ancient things, The voice outside my door grows smaller now, as if my neglect born in death. I close my eyes and remember Grace in my arms. We can imagine any causes it to diminish. It weeps, trying to conjure the sound of her cries. number of vile things, but we can only remember what is real. My skin responds to this, as it always does to anything evoking that terThe voice outside my door grows smaller now, as if my neglect causes it to diminrible sound, and every part of my flesh wants to throw open the door. ish. It weeps, trying to conjure the sound of her cries. My skin responds to this, as it My body still believes it can help her. I think it always will, in the way always does to anything evoking that terrible sound, and every part of my flesh wants that a legless man feels what has been taken. Something outside the to throw open the door. My body still believes it can help her. I think it always will, door senses my weakness, and its cries grow louder, greedier. in the way that a legless man feels what has been taken. Something outside the door I think on Grace, because she is all I have in the blackest part of senses my weakness, and its cries grow louder, greedier. night. I recall her smell, her voice, the feeling of a prayer I can’t quite I think on Grace, because she is all I have in the blackest part of night. I recall remember. But I remember all of her, every toddle and curl and cry her smell, her voice, the feeling of a prayer I can’t quite remember. But I remember and whisper, and these are the true things. I linger over each in turn, all of her, every toddle and curl and cry and whisper, and these are the true things. I and together they are who she was and is. The miracle is in rememberlinger over each in turn, and together they are who she was and is. The miracle is in ing without the memory killing us. It is in hearing that knock outside remembering without the memory killing us. It is in hearing that knock outside the the door, in the blackest part of night, and not answering what beckons door, in the blackest part of night, and not answering what beckons from the other from the other side. Something claws at the wood of my door, but I side. Something claws at the wood of my door, but I won’t let it in. It is not the Grace won’t let it in. It is not the Grace I know. I know.
Tony Woodlief is an MFA student in in creative Tony Woodlief is an MFA student creative writing writing at Wichita University a regular at Wichita StateState University and aand regular essayist for essayist World magazine. of Tony’s Worldfor magazine. Some of Some his current essay interests are current interests are faith, things children faith,essay children and annoying likeand McDonald’s inannoying things like McDonald’s to ability to properly place picklesinability on a cheeseburger. Tony properly place picklesstory on a in cheeseburger. Heshort has memoir has a forthcoming Image, and his a forthcoming in AImage, andDad’s his short Raising Wild publication Boys into Men: Modern Survival Guide is memoir on fathering boys is soon to be released soon to be released (The New Pamphleteer, 2007). Tony by lives The in New Pamphleteer. liveswife in Wichita, Wichita, Kansas, Tony with his and four sons. Kansas, with his wife and four sons.
48
48
issue 04 //
issue 04 // SUMMER 2007 SUMMER 2007
P.D. G ray
goldfish once, a fairground bag of beauty won salvation, bowlfully capturing my cluttered domesticity, bringing peace to mantel, showing snapshots of a quiet marble world not quite here. since, like an old beached whale in thrall to a moving star, reclining on regurgitated bits of rotten wood safe saved unsaved, I wish to wash away from doubt my traces of existence. P.D. Gray is a thirty-year-old trainee high
school teacher who has lived in four different countries (the UK, Denmark, the US and South Korea). As well as holding an MA in American studies, Patrick has had poems published with Forwardpress and Utmost Christian Writers. His favorite poets are George Herbert, William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson.
49
S tephanie W alker
Among My Father’s Belongings
We undertook the goliath task of sorting through his possessions— our father’s life through his things— parsing them out like rations of memory. Here was every birthday card and crayoned letter, mixed in among every kind of saw and shovel, a wooden carving of a shepherd, and there, in the dark corners of his desk, his chemo pills and five smooth stones. The pills he refused, as David had done with Saul’s gilded armor—their faith lay instead in a hope for psalms and in those stones, polished by the current of an Israeli brook. We rolled them over in our hands. That day, we left a little heavier, stones in our pockets for our own raging giants. I thought of those stones when old-testament hail fell, grief-heavy and fist-sized, on my late summer garden. The winter vegetables, which I had hoped for like the rain and patience that promised them, were gone. I pulled their severed vines weeks later, tugging, following them like a prophecy across the path, into the shade of a sturdy bush where I discovered five green and golden-red acorn squash, smooth and cool—five rare and singular mercies.
50
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
S tephanie W alker
Manna This morning, we woke to find thousand-flake towers balanced white on every surface, delicate as a neighborhood of card houses through our bedroom window. Still in the heavy mouth of sleep, I blinked and looked again to see Christian ambrosia, divine flaky hoarfrost which melts on your tongue with a flavor like the payoff of forty wandering years, like promises, like a golden calf. Hebrew what-is-it from the gods, a holy breakfast. Like Eve, I ventured a taste and found it light as spun sugar, thick as down blankets, sweet as mouthfuls of wind, head out the car window; sweet as the mouth of someone who never lies to you. As coriander and orange, a curious nectar. As good mail. Only a moment had passed in my drowsy Canaan, and outside even the brittle Black-eyed Susans wore snow caps high as British guards. The coffee was weak, but I swear it tasted like heaven.
Stephanie Walker lives in Minnesota with two very charming
cats and one occasionally charming man. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast and Swivel and is forthcoming in So to Speak.
51
54
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
ruminative
LOCAL NOTES
On the final day of the Lighthouse Writer’s Lit Fest, Saturday, June 23 from 1:30-3:00 p.m. at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Colorado, come and listen to a panel of editors discuss the ins and outs of the literary journal business, including what you might not know about their publications, how you might appeal to their better natures, and more. Panelists include editors from RUMINATE, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner,
Many Mountains Moving, Wazee, and Copper Nickel.
Join us on June 30th, July 28th, and August 25th at Everyday Joe’s Coffee House for the monthly Open Mic Series and Reading hosted by RUMINATE from 7-10 p.m. in Old Town Fort Collins, Colorado. Each month will feature a RUMINATE artist and readings from the current issue.
Save the dates: September 27th - September 30th Annual Ad Lib Retreat for Literary, Visual, & Performing Arts held at the Franciscan Retreat Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. RUMINATE editors will lead an on-site writers’ workshop entitled “A Leap of Faith.”
55
ruminated
LAST NOTE
To those who see creation in sunrise And rapture at sunset: To those who drink in the ancients with savor Like a parched mouth meeting the river’s source, And consume the wisdom of antiquity Like the freshly arrived soul in ecstasy At the Wedding banquet; To those who are compelled to the madness of the breaking waves And refuse to stay dry and composed upon the shoreline; To those who sit with sorrow As with an old sage Knowing there is a lesson to absorb; To you who resonate with laughter’s rejoicing And will not give up on the meaning of silence, Come. Ruminate with me.
a last benediction from editor Lacee Perrin
56
issue 04 //
SUMMER 2007
Jack Maxwell. Jacob’s Dream Sunrise. Bronze and limestone. Dimensions variable. Photo: Matt Maxwell 2007.
Jack Maxwell was born in Houston, Texas. He received his BFA in art at Abilene
Christian University and completed his MFA in sculpture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He currently chairs the Department of Art and Design at Abilene Christian University where he has taught for over twenty years. The Jacob’s Dream sculpture was dedicated September 9th, 2006, and is located on the campus of Abilene Christian University.
Jack Maxwell. Ascending and Descending: Jacob’s Dream. Bronze and limestone. Dimensions variable. Photo: Matt Maxwell 2007.
