Issue 11: Passages

faith in literature and art

PASSAGES 2009 Short Story Prize Winners and throwing a strike

/.

poetry

from

/.

fiction

working out the tangles

Susan Woodring and Anna Maria Johnson

a wealth of dances and windblown wild carrots from Brett

Foster and Wally Swist

/.

art

from Brett Carter and Dan McGregor

projections and sacramental engines

11 ISSUE

Spring 2 0 0 9

$9.00

Brett Carter. Projection 5. Analog photograph from a projection.

why

ruminate ?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates 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. Please join us.

On the cover: Brett Carter. Projection 6. Analog photograph from a projection.

See Brett’s bio on page 61.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 11

Spring 2009

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.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website. For information on RUMINATE submission guidelines, artist groups, and RUMINATE resources, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

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.org. 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.org. Subscription services are available through EBSCO. DISTRIBUTION RUMINATE MAGAZINE is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company, 1402 Avenue B, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 and through direct distribution.

Copyright © 2009 RUMINATE MAGAZINE. All rights reserved.

RUMINATE is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Stefani Rossi, Stephanie Walker Megan Barnes, Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale, Libby Kueneke, Lacee Perrin, Nicholas Price, and Jonathan Van Dyke Edie Adams, April Berry Anne Pageau

editor in chief senior editor associate editors readers interns design

contents

Notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Last

4 5 32 60

Susan Woodring

Poetry

8 The Smallest of These

Anna Maria Johnson

Wally Swist Queen Anne’s Lace

17

20 Charlie’s Arm

18 18 19

39 Under a Cheerwine Moon

Steve West

Jennifer Merri Parker The Music Lesson Resentful of Necessity St. Alphonsus on a Weekday Noon

Fiction

Lydia Melby 48 And We Were Gone

Brett Foster Late at Night When I Consider You Sleeping

30

Art

John Savoie Willow

31

Lauren Schmidt The Unseasoned Earth

37

46

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Shades of Gray

47

John Dreyer Goose Summer

55

Katherine E. Schneider Lantern

56

Mary Marie Dixon Gone Broody

inside back cover

38

Kory Wells Christian Education

inside front cover

back cover

Richard Osler Easter

Brett Carter cover

57

Projection 6 Projection 5 Projection 2 Projection 1

Dan McGregor 33 34 35 36

Bloodwheel Exit Strategy (Rapture Engine 1) Exit Strategy (Rapture Engine 2) Mendicant Resurrection Engine

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

My husband and I are helping our five-year-old

son learn to read. We try; we really do. Night after night and sometimes, I admit, mornings before Dad takes him to school, we sit at the kitchen table attempting with superhuman patience to teach him to read. Sentences like “I like apples. They are red.” Books called Bill Goes to School or Hot Dog. He is distracted and visibly frustrated page one into the book. Often feigning illness and even claiming his brain has stopped working, he now looks upon our much-loved reading time with disdain.

For my son, reading has suddenly become utilitarian.

Something to get him to the next level in school or to please his teachers and parents. It has become a mere practical discipline of deciphering street signs, lunch menus, and library “quiet” signs. And although I know these are helpful things, reading, as you readers know, can be so much more, so much more than just a tool to get us something we want, teach us information, or simply satiate boredom. *** In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis says that reading should be more about “receiving.” If not, then we are simply “using” the story. We are not entering the author’s world; we are not allowing it to take us somewhere unknown or make us feel something we have not felt. We are not allowing it to take us beyond ourselves. And, in “We Demand Windows,” he says, “Here [literature], as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” Reading, for Lewis, was an exercise in Christ’s command: “You must lose your life to save it.”

This eleventh issue of RUMINATE has brought me great joy and joyful interludes of reading and losing myself. Our short story prize was so wonderfully judged by Bret Lott, and his choices for the prizes are both lyrical as well as captivating. He says of Susan Woodring’s piece “The Smallest of These,” The story has a kind of resonance to it; it is a quiet cameo, a beautifully rendered portrait that acts more like twin shards from some larger exquisite work that is

4

the lives of these two women. The language is ruminative and sharp at once, and the evocation of these states of mind and spirit is quite well done.

The little girl who untangles the hair of the lonely house wife next door; the son who is enthralled by his mother as he watches her leaned head in the light of dusk. The lost man finding himself under the dim lights of a bowling alley. The poignant images and the movement of each of the stories create little worlds for us to be enveloped by. A small space in our busy lives for something fresh, new, or something to be revisited and seen in a new way. Or, as for my son, a place and time to receive the joys, the pleasures, the intense anticipation of a life yet lived, yet filled with fear, can’t, and won’t. A safe place to lose and give himself to the art of reading. *** So, that’s it; I’m giving up. No more Bill Goes to School. We will digress and return to the books of his “younger years.”

We will revisit some of his favorites. We’ll return to that time when both my children sat wide-eyed in anticipation as I read the next chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, were giggly hearing the heroics of Skippy John Jones; we’ll pull out Green Eggs and Ham; Little House on the Prairie; we’ll read stories again; real page-turning, nail-biting stories. Please don’t get me wrong. I know we need to work on letters, sounds, phonics, word recognition, all of the technical stuff, but, honestly, what my kindergartener truly needs is a revival, a heart change, a renewed love of language and READING. And, my hope is that his love for his favorite stories and characters will inspire and encourage him through the technical discipline of reading.

And we at RUMINATE hope for you a little of the same.

A little revival of sorts; a space in your day to find passages worth reading and receiving, to be captivated, moved, and maybe, just maybe, changed.

Peace and grace, Amy Lowe

ruminato

rs

NOTES F

Send your thoughts, questions, and comments to

ROM YO U

editor@ruminatemagazine.org

I recently found an issue of RUMINATE in the unclaimed magazine pile at the Wyola post office. I want to make mention that RUMINATE contained much that one cannot find in other Christian publications. That is to say, your magazine allows writers to deal with real humanity in real words and with real situations.

The message must hold weight and the liberty you allow your writers gives the message that much needed weight. I would like to subscribe, so please send me a subscription notice.

Steve Yapuncich Wyola, Montana

* We were happy to hear that RUMINATE is finding new readers, even from the unclaimed magazine pile! And to our Montana readers, if you forgot to send us an address change and did not receive your most recent issue, there is a good chance that Steve may have found it.

I just discovered RUMINATE by picking it up at church and could not put it down. Love it!

Michael Dodson Lancaster, PA

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RUMINATE Reader Sunnyvale, California

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RUMINATE’s layout is beautiful . . . The magazine’s writing is equally beautiful, pieces which demonstrate faith inside literature as well as faith in literature, a faith that literature can explain and inspire.

Rachel King NewPages.com

5

Friends of

RUMINATE

We would like to thank our Winter 2008/20009 friends, whose generous financial donations have helped establish RUMINATE at the intersection of faith, literature, and art.

Benefactors

Scott Ackerman, Kim & Steve Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Jesse & Carly Ritorto, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra

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If you are interested in becoming a Friend, mail RUMINATE MAGAZINE 140 N. Roosevelt Ave Fort Collins, CO 80521 editor@ruminatemagazine.org 6

RUMINATE’S 2009

Short Story Prize

Judged by award-winning author Bret Lott.

Sponsored by Carly & Jesse Ritorto and the Friends of RUMINATE.

Prize Winner

The Smallest of These by Susan Woodring (page 8) Prize Runner-Up

Charlie’s Arm by Anna Maria Johnson (page 20)

Thank you

to all of our entrants for sending in your work!

7

Susan Woodring

The Smallest of These

Gwendolyn—not Gwen, not Lynn—doesn’t answer Mrs. Spencer right away. It is raining outside and the two can hear it inside. Hear its gentle slap, slap against the kitchen window, the newly reconstructed window, settled into the new wall; the old one has been knocked down, the room expanded to allow Mrs. Spencer a gourmetsized kitchen. Mrs. Spencer has asked Gwendolyn to guess how old she is and now is pretending she hasn’t, busying herself with wiping down the counter, sipping from her iced tea. Gwendolyn nibbles at a glob of cookie dough on the end of a serving spoon, considering.

“Eighteen,” she decides, “maybe nineteen.”

“Eighteen,” Mrs. Spencer repeats. She turns the faucet on, wipes the sink.

“Eighteen,” she says, shaking her head.

“Maybe nineteen. Twenty at the oldest.”

“Twenty?” Mrs. Spencer lays the dishcloth over the side of the sink, then turns to face Gwendolyn. The kitchen feels like a boat, cut off from the world. “Did you know I was just twenty when I got married?”

Gwendolyn shakes her head. She lays the spoon down on the counter.

Mrs. Spencer nods. “I married Jimmy Spencer. Everyone was surprised.” She takes the spoon and puts it in the dishwasher then leans over to shake the soap in, closes the door. “They were even more surprised when he became a doctor. In those days, he wasn’t very studious. He was curious, though. There are some who say that’s better—to be curious rather than smart.”

“Did he get down on one knee to propose?” Gwendolyn asks.

Mrs. Spencer turns the dial and they hear the machine fill up with water, start its cycle. “I don’t remember,” she says. “He used to sing, back then. He had a guitar.”

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SPRING 2009

“Did he sing outside your window?”

“It’s been such a long time, Gwendolyn. Really, a very long time.” Mrs. Spencer turns away, looking out the window, watching the rain. The dishwasher swishes. “He helped his uncle tend the bees. They were bee-keepers. Jimmy’s mother is a school teacher.”

“Mrs. Spencer?”

“Yes?” “You could be sixteen, you look so young.” The rain makes it feel like the kitchen is itself floating, buoyed on the waves. Gwendolyn can feel the motion of water swishing under the wood floor beneath her feet.

“Oh,” Mrs. Spencer moves away from the window, picking up her drink from the counter. “Oh, no. That’s not right.” She shakes her head.

“My parents only sing at church,” Gwendolyn says.

“Do you like to sing, Gwendolyn?” Mrs. Spencer begins taking apart the special gourmet mixer they used to cream the sugar and butter, to whip the dough creamy and smooth and rough with chocolate chips.

“Yes. Maybe I’ll be famous someday.”

“You just might.”

Gwendolyn smiles, twirling around. The timer goes off, and Mrs. Spencer pulls the cookies out of the oven, the warm-sweet smell of cookies wafting out. She bends over to slide in a new cookie sheet, closes the oven door.

They are too hot to eat, but Gwendolyn inspects them, fanning them with an oven mitt. Mrs. Spencer slides the baking sheet onto the top of the stove to cool. She frowns down at the cookies resting there and says, “I’m thirty-nine.”

They can still hear the rain outside but it is just drizzling by the time Gwendolyn leaves. She crosses the dark, wet lawn, moving through the February chill to her own house where there are six other children and a mother and a father. No dog. It is time for dinner; Gwendolyn brings the dessert. She carries the cookies inside a Ziploc bag, the water beading up on the outside, but the inside stays warm and fresh and dry.

“Time to eat,” Gwendolyn’s mother calls. “Kids, time to eat.”

Gwendolyn finds her seat among her sisters and brothers, helping one of the little ones into her booster seat. The baby is sleeping in the other room. Her father, a preacher, says grace. Around the table, everything is elbows and flashing eyes and clinking silverware and the swell and buzz of everyone talking. Gwendolyn passes the spaghetti and listens for her chance to tell about Mrs. Spencer’s new mixer that makes baking cookies as easy as one, two, three.

“I have a test tomorrow,” Bradley, who goes to high school, says.

“In which class?” Gwendolyn’s mother asks, turning in her chair to cut one of the little ones’ noodles. Little Sarah, next to Gwendolyn, eats her spaghetti with her fingers.

9

“There’s a soccer game on Thursday,” Catherine, the oldest tells their father. “Can you come?”

“Mrs. Spencer has a new mixer. It’s space-age.”

“It’s on the bones,” Bradley tells them. “All the bones in the body.”

“Bones?” Jeremy asks, holding his glass of milk in both hands. “Did somebody say bones?”

“You don’t even have to let the butter get soft.”

“What time is the game?”

“There’s over two hundred. Scapula, humerous, ulna…”

“Betsy Green told me a rumor today.” Rachel, who is in middle school, announces. She sighs. “It’s not true, though.”

“More milk, please,” Jeremy sings, holding out his empty glass.

Their father rises and opens the refrigerator. “I could probably get away for a few hours.

Who are you playing?” He fills Jeremy’s glass.

“It takes half the time.” Gwendolyn snaps her fingers.

“I’ll call them out to you,” their mother tells Bradley.

“I get down, Mommy, I get down.” Sarah wiggles in her booster seat, pulling at the straps across her middle.

“She said the new boy likes me.”

“I brought some home for dessert.”

“Kids,” their father starts, “we have something to share with you.”

Jeremy drains his glass. “Milk—it does a body good. It does a bone good.”

“Fairview. We’ll kill ‘em. It’ll be easy. We’ll clean house.”

“The thigh bone connected to the back bone.”

“Your father and I,” their mother says, “are praying about a call.”

Catherine puts her fork down.

Jeremy stops singing. “We’re moving?”

“We’re praying about a call.”

“There’s a church in Tennessee,” their father explains.

“Where’s Tennessee?” Gwendolyn asks.

“Head bone. Now hear the word of the Lord.”

“We’re moving to Tennessee.” Catherine stares at her fork.

“Nothing’s decided, not yet,” their father says. “We’re praying about it.”

“Tennessee,” Rachel says.

“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.”

“Is it a long way away?” Gwendolyn wants to know.

“It doesn’t matter how far away it is,” Catherine says.

“Mommy! I get down!”

“Just don’t make me take biology again,” Bradley says, “at the new school.”

“I can’t believe this,” Rachel says. “I can’t believe what you’re telling us.”

“We’re moving?” This time it’s Gwendolyn who asks. “Is it far away?”

“Nothing’s for sure yet.” Gwendolyn’s mother rises to help Sarah down. The instant she is free, she runs away, as if she fears immediate recapture.

10

“We don’t know anything for certain,” her father says.

“Now hear the word of the Lord.”

Gwendolyn’s mother doesn’t let the other children go to Mrs. Spencer’s house. It is the next Saturday, mid-morning, and the air is cool, no rain. She comes outside and stands in the yard telling them, “Let her go. You all stay here.” They watch Gwendolyn crawl through the hole in the bushes, disappearing through the passageway. Then, they shrug at each other, returning to their game.

Gwendolyn can hear them calling to each other, laughing, but she goes quietly, shivering a little inside her jacket. It’s cold outside today. She doesn’t go to the door, but instead, to the place beside the door, between the bushes and the house. Scrunching down, she settles herself on a pool of white pebbles. She scoops them up and then holds them up to the sun. They are diamonds, she pretends. She lets them go through the spaces between her fingers; they trickle down her arms. She holds her mouth closed as they stream over her face. They are cold and wet from last night’s rain. Some fall to the ground; some are caught in the folds of her jeans. She takes another handful.

There’s a sudden noise and she dumps out the stones, holding her breath. The noise comes from the garage, a place she’s close to but can’t see. The noise stops. It was just the garage door opening.

“James. You never told me what you want.” It’s Mrs. Spencer’s voice, from the garage.

“Halibut? Grouper? I could make dilled beans. Rosemary chicken?”

There’s no other voice. Gwendolyn hears a car door open.

“Jimmy,” Mrs. Spencer says.

“I have to go, Sheila. I have to.” It’s a man’s voice. Dr. Spencer.

“Please,” Mrs. Spencer says.

“I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Spencer says, “Okay.”

Gwendolyn picks up more stones. She holds them. The sunlight slides over the car as it moves backwards down the driveway, then pulls out into the street. Gwendolyn opens her

the instant she is free, she runs away, as if she fears immediate recapture.

11

he says, “ANything is fine. you’re a wonderful cook,” and for some reason, this infuriates her.

mouth and begins to feed herself the diamonds, one at a time. Her cheeks fill up and she thinks of a squirrel. But they taste like dirt so she spits them out.

She is still for a minute. There’s another sound; it is Mrs. Spencer saying another word but it’s real quiet. Gwendolyn can’t be sure she hears her say, “wait,” but she thinks that’s right. She thinks that’s what Mrs. Spencer says. She hears the next words clearly, though. Mrs. Spencer says, “Dilled beans,” to nobody at all before the sound of the door inside the garage opening again, closing.

She fills up her pockets with smooth white pebbles and then leaves, crawling again through the hole in the bushes. She keeps the stones in her pockets, even though they bite into the soft place on the inside of her hips when she chases her brothers and sisters.

Later, she leaves the others and goes to the camellia bush in Mrs. Spencer’s back yard to pick a pink flower. She takes a few leaves for greenery and a few white stones to hold them down but makes sure the blossom shows. She leaves the arrangement on Mrs. Spencer’s front porch, presses the doorbell, then runs away.

Lila Spencer hears the doorbell from her bath and can’t decide who it is. It could be Jimmy, returned, but of course, he wouldn’t use the bell. It could be a neighbor or one of her old friends from the realtor’s office where she used to work or it could be the UPS man, delivering balsamic vinegar from a gourmet foods catalog.

“Christ himself,” she considers. Then, because it might really be her husband, she calls out, “Jimmy?”

There is nothing but the quiet of the house and the muffled yelps and squeals of the next-door children playing. She has been in the tub since Jimmy was called in at the hospital, an emergency, someone’s heart going bad in a hurry. Her fingers just break the surface of the water, and there is a washcloth laid over her face. Since she was very young, she has heard tell that Christ will return during her lifetime. She has never committed

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SPRING 2009

herself to religion in a way that felt strong enough to save her, and the idea that He could at any second set foot on this good, firm earth to call believers to the clouds makes her close her eyes, think of other things. Bake-able stoneware. The maneuvers of half-forgotten card games.

Once, while she was at the coast, she observed a dying jellyfish, washed ashore. She didn’t touch it—though dying or maybe already dead, she knew it was still dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous then, at its final hour.

She pulls the washcloth from her face and lets it settle on the water, floating steady at first, then, one corner grows too heavy, starts to droop, the rest, even more slowly, follows. Jimmy isn’t to blame for everything. It’s her choice, obsessing about the dinner choices. He says, “Anything is fine. You’re a wonderful cook,” and for some reason, this infuriates her. She decides now, her fingers wrinkling in the water, that tomorrow, he will have to choose something. He will commit to that much—deciding what they’ll have for dinner.

“He’d pick the chicken,” she says aloud and listens to her own voice echo thinly against the fogged tile, through the gentle slosh of water.

It’s the neighbor girl, she decides. It must be. She listens; has Gwendolyn already given up, left?

Lila slips down, submerging everything but her face and her knees, which jut out, bending her body compact enough to fit. Dead jellyfish are dangerous and so, she read somewhere, are human dead bodies. They carry the infections that killed the body to begin with, plus more.

Millions of bacteria and sicknesses descend from without, but more arise, having already been there, in calm, manageable numbers inside the organs, the intestines. Now, suddenly unimpeded, they swarm. Her mother, she remembers, used to caution her against handling dead birds.

Her own skin, like the gel of the jellyfish, is water-tight. It would have to dissolve away before water could seep in from the bathtub and pool into her pelvis, flood her insides, fill her heart. This was a physiological problem Jimmy handled daily: fluid in the chest cavity from a weak, spongy heart.

She strains to sit up and goes light-headed; the contents of her skull momentarily upended.

She closes her eyes, it passes, and she reaches for the faucet, turning on the hot tap, letting it go for a moment, closing it off. She’s uncertain how the fluid gets there, but Jimmy has told her how he alleviates it: it’s a simple as poking a needle in there and draining it. But dangerous too, a feat of utmost precision. Here, Jimmy bows his head, speaking of the vulnerabilities of the heart.

The water is too hot now. She leans back, bracing, settling in to acclimate.

The health of her own heart, in the purely physical sense, is sound. Her lungs are young and elastic, her blood vessels clear of debris. She has two functioning ovaries and a uterus devoid of obvious deformity. All systems go, the doctor has told her, and Jimmy, considering the blood work, seconded his assessment. But Lila knew even back then, when they first sought explanation, there was something wrong.

Beneath the water, spotted with white-gray soap bubbles, her stomach lays smooth and flat, distorted by the small wrinkles of water. Lila tries to sit completely still, to see everything clear.

“You’re a wonderful cook,” Jimmy has said, and it’s true, she knows certain tricks. Draining fluid from the heart requires a steady hand, but so does turning an omelet, pinching a crust.

13

Lila whips meringue to airy-silk perfection, and she wants Jimmy, who knows nothing of her quiet days, to beg for a pie. Please, she wants him to say, make the lemon meringue.

She recalls, from her childhood Sunday school days, that the Bible is full of saintly barren women who eventually, due to God’s grace and not a medically sound uterus, conceive. Lila remembers Hannah, who promised to give her child to God and made good on that promise, taking him, as soon as he was weaned, to the church, leaving him there and returning only once a year to visit and to bring him a new cloak. Lying in the bathtub inside her water-tight skin, Lila understands this much of the story: Hannah dreaded the day she would have to give her baby son away, even though she was giving him to God. She must have hoped those two years of breast-feeding would never end. Maybe she prayed that, having taken the boy at last to the temple, she would herself contract a quick, painless illness or suffer a sudden, tragic fall, and die herself before she returned to her home, where it would be too quiet now, too still—no baby.

Lila made the same sorts of promises, those and more, but it’s only now, having just watched her husband leave for the hospital and listened to the doorbell call of another woman’s daughter, feeling that ache, that she sees a new part of it. It’s only now that she sees the difference between her weak, desperate pleas and those of Hannah. Hannah was faithful to tell the truth of her sorrows, but Lila could not suffer through.

“He’d want caramel apple pie,” she decides, but doesn’t have the heart to say it above a whisper.

When she was in grade school, she had a Sunday school teacher who said smallest of these instead of least of these. Her teacher read, “Whatever you did for the smallest of these, you did for me.”

It was an old woman, feeble of body, and she spoke of all diminutive matters of spiritual significance: the little children at Jesus’ knee, the widow with her two coins, a sparrow falling from the sky. She gave out tiny illustrated New Testaments for prizes, small enough for Lila’s dolls.

The water, in time, grows cool again, but Lila, instead of adding more from the hot tap, rises to standing and peers into the mirror over the sink. She looks at herself. Her body, though not dead, has proven itself dangerous, inhospitable. If the bell truly is Christ, let her answer, and let him tell just how dry, how barren is that space inside of her? She wonders what is required. What help she’ll need, not only to pray the prayer, but also the prayer that must come before, the one where she admits she doesn’t even know what to ask for.

She is, after all, thirty-nine, not eighty.

The key to rosemary chicken is to first rub the skin with good olive oil. Rub it so gently, it’s as if you plan to keep the dead bird, to care for it. As if you won’t bake it, won’t destroy it, won’t lose it altogether.

“I’m not dressed for company,” Mrs. Spencer says.

“We’re leaving in the morning,” Gwendolyn tells her. She slips into the house, and Mrs. Spencer closes the door behind her. It is months later, spring now, and the trees outside are

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SPRING 2009

hannah was faithful to tell the truth of her sorrows, but lila could not suffer enough.

just beginning to green. Mrs. Spencer walks into the living room, and Gwendolyn follows, touching the picture in the entryway, the lampshade on the table. She lightly traces the molding running along the wall.

“We have to get up real early. It will take all day to get there.” Gwendolyn comes to sit on the chair next to the sofa where Mrs. Spencer has resettled herself. She’s wearing a pink robe and her face is bare, no makeup. There are books stacked on the coffee table and a yellow legal pad, opened halfway through and graced with the looping scribbles of Mrs. Spencer’s blue pen. Gwendolyn touches the cover of a book. China Road, it says. Another: Imperial China. Mrs. Spencer picks up her iced tea from a paper towel she’s folded into a square for a coaster.

“Leaving? You’re leaving?” she asks, holding onto her glass with both hands.

“Remember? Tennessee. We’ll have to drive all day,” Gwendolyn tells her.

“Tennessee,” Mrs. Spencer repeats. She squints, pulling her robe closer.

“Are you okay?”

She nods.

“Are you sure . . .”

“You’ll go through the mountains.”

“Mountains? I don’t know.”

“It’s the only way I know of to get to Tennessee.” Mrs. Spencer laughs.

“Well, I just wanted to come and tell you good-bye.”

“I used to live in the mountains,” Mrs. Spencer tells her. “Many years ago.” Her words sound thick and heavy, as if they’re waterlogged. “I used to walk across the river, the water splashing against my calves. Jumping from rock to rock, all the way across, like I was walking on water.” Mrs. Spencer looks at her hands, still wrapped around the glass.

Gwendolyn listens.

“I’d pick the biggest rock and sit down on it, watching the water skaters at my feet.”

“Water skaters?” Gwendolyn asks.

But Mrs. Spencer doesn’t explain. She just nods. “I was just a little girl then.”

“You should come with us,” Gwendolyn suggests, moving to sit closer to her.

15

“Oh, no. I guess I’ll stay right here. I’m planning a trip,” she says, gesturing to the books on the table. “China.”

“China,” Gwendolyn repeats. “Wow.” Mrs. Spencer smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Wow.” “You and Dr. Spencer?” Gwendolyn asks.

“No.” Mrs. Spencer wipes a loose piece of hair from her eyes. “Just me. Sometimes it’s a good plan, to take a trip by yourself. I have some important things to think about. And I want to learn how to cook lotus root, to make white tea.”

Gwendolyn considers. The day is breezy and blue outside the windows and her parents are putting the last boxes in the van. Her younger brothers and sisters are skipping through the empty rooms, playing a game, and the older ones are lying on the grass in front of the house, keeping their quiet.

“I don’t want to go,” she says. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“I know.” Mrs. Spencer sighs. “Neither do I.” Gwendolyn nods, as if it makes perfect sense for Mrs. Spencer to go to China even if she doesn’t want to. It doesn’t seem odd to Gwendolyn at all, to skip out to other places; Tennessee might as well be China, for how different it will be from home.

“Let me brush your hair,” she suggests.

“Oh, no, not now,” Mrs. Spencer says, shaking her bangs out of her eyes.

“Please.” Gwendolyn touches her hair.

“Alright.”

Gwendolyn leaves to find a brush, and then returns to the sofa. She gathers up Mrs. Spencer’s long, pretty honey-blond hair while Mrs. Spencer sips from her drink, then sets it down. Her hair falls across her shoulders.

“Maybe I can come back to visit you sometime,” Gwendolyn says. “When you get back.”

Susan Woodring is the author of The Traveling Disease and Springtime on Mars: Stories. Her short fiction can be found in Isotope, Passages North, turnrow, Surreal South, Ballyhoo Stories, Quick Fiction, and more. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; she is the recipient of the 2006 Isotope Editor’s Prize; and her story “Inertia” received a notable mention in Best American Non-Required Reading, 2007. Susan lives in North Carolina with her family.

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Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

Wally Swist

Queen Anne’s Lace Every summer a specific species of wildflower has its season, grows in abandon to spread across the landscape, fills the meadows from Mount Pollux to the highway’s median strip, basks in the cracks of broken pavement buckling along Farmington Avenue in the restaurant district of Hartford’s West End and West Hartford’s borderline.

When you cut down two stems of Queen Anne’s lace at Kripaulu in the Berkshire Hills to exhibit elegance and strength in nature, you are drawn to the parasol that leans into the coolness of evening, that nods in the rain, that remains open beneath the sun and the moon. A whole field of it is a tapestry of flat white tops that italicizes the contrast of green meadow grass, sustained whimsy, silent applause. Walking the rise at dusk after thunderstorms in our crocs, we slosh through bedstraw, bladder campion, and fleabane, one of my hands riding on one of your shoulders, to look south across the Holyoke Range, then north toward Pocumtuck and Toby, to watch the spirals of mist clear the sides of the ridges below early stars. We do not want to let any of this go: what can only be spoken through the actions of our loving, the word made flesh, and our flesh spoken word; windblown wild carrot that roots in earth, and whose stalks rock in our summering.

Wally Swist’s poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, such

as Rolling Stone and Yankee Magazine’s 60th Anniversary Issue. His latest collection of poetry Mount Toby Poems was published in a letterpress limited edition by Timberline Press. A short biographical documentary film regarding his work In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist was released by the Emmy nominee-filmmaker, Elizabeth Wilda, through WildArts. He has recently finished writing a full-length play, in two acts, Epistles: A Love Story.

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Jennifer Merri Parker

18

Jennifer Merri Parker

The Music Lesson

Resentful of Necessity

The old guitarist wipes the strings before and after playing, explaining to me once about the acid from our fingers.

White-haired, liver-spotted, bent with age and varied illness, he frets about the frets till fine striations line the chamois.

And when he’s done, he goes to lay it gently in the case, lowering it slowly, as he might a sleeping baby, cradling it, right up until it rests upon its bed of crimson plush.

It’s hard for me to hold my Epiphone in front of him—just knowing how he prizes what to me was just a thing.

I blush. I feel my clumsy, sweaty fingers drip corrosion.

I feel myself profaning something sacred with my fumbling, right in front of one who loves it and knows how to make it sing.

All this discord is improper in the presence of such grace.

The only right response would be to hush.

These great black bottom-heavy birds in solemn congregation over scraps not long deceased are slow to scatter, slow, as if my passage barely matters.

Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

The gray you have to dye to hide has slowly taken over.

And I, the more fool I, believed for years in some anomaly that kept your dark hair dark.

These road signs, bright unnatural shapes, newcomers to our landscape are chiding me that times have changed that stops and yields exist where nothing slowed us down before.

The turn that leads into your drive is mine, at least this moment.

The County may think otherwise, may post, may update rusty signs, may pave across your grave and mine, but first they’ll have to catch us.

So scatter, oily-feathered shades.

Disperse! I’m gunning for you, perverse, pissed off and bearing down to spoil your little picnic.

Jennifer Merri Parker

St. Alphonsus on a Weekday Noon When you no longer come to play beneath these arcs and shadows and the echoes of your blest improvisations fade away, I may come again from time to time to see the sunlight streaming through these colored panes, or when it rains, to feel the hush and thunder alternating as the chords in me vibrate in tonic sympathy with those of that poor grand, no less abandoned. But I would not stay your hand from all God has for you to touch. There is such discord in the world, so much to do!

I have had you, and I have benefited more than I deserve and cannot say what it has meant to me, as often as I could, to come and bask within the prayerfulness and presence of that place or how that smooth, anointed music lives and moves in me for good.

Forever after this, though I may miss your voice, your touch, your face, I am attuned to something healing, high, and rare that makes of every quiet place I find a sacred space if I can but recall your music there.

Jennifer Merri Parker is a writer, teacher,

and children’s/young adult services librarian from West Point, Mississippi. She has a degree in English and American literature from Harvard University and is currently studying for an MFA in creative writing through Seattle Pacific University.

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Anna Maria Johnson

Charlie’s Arm

8888888888888 Just settin’. It was a phrase my mother used on winter evenings when the housework was done, but it was not quite time to turn in. Too numbed from the strain of daily chores to do anything much, but feeling the day had not gone on long enough to say it was done, she would sit still on the flowered davenport, long hands folded, eyes gazing into the wall. Mother had a slender frame and graceful sloping shoulders. She was fair-skinned and dark-haired, like her mother before her, eyes the color of honey. People used to say I resembled her, until years past the age when boys do not want to be told such things. Sometimes when I saw her sitting there, I would think she was about to rise and do something, or to ask me to fetch her knitting. I would stand at attention, ready to do her bidding, but she never said a word. If I asked her what she was doing, she would reply, “Just settin’.” She wore cotton print dresses and a red apron every day of the week, save Sunday.

I used to wonder if she were waiting for something, and I suppose she was.

She looked not out the window at the setting sun, but watched a particular patch of the mildewed wallpaper and waited till the light reached a certain sad quality.

Her profile, outlined in evening light, looked like a marble bust from the art history book we had on the coffee table, with forehead and chin perfectly aligned and aristocratic nose jutting between them. She had dreamed of studying art before my father came onto her life’s stage. After a while the sun’s fingers left off tracing her profile and went on to illuminate someone else’s mother. The mantle clock’s shadow would reach a particular sage green stripe, and the light would fade for a few minutes past the time when I was desperate to turn on the light, just to comfort myself. Then she would turn her head.

“Charlie, I’m ‘bout ready to turn in now. Good night, son.” She would rise at last, and if I was in the room, she would walk to me silently and kiss my forehead with her lips like peeling birch bark. If I was out of the room, she would call, “Charlie?” in a plaintive voice, more anxious than the situation warranted, as if she thought I were in danger, or feared I were roaming about in dark woods not noticing the lateness of the hour.

“Mama, here I am,” I always answered with as much courage as I could muster. Her anxiety made me ill with worry. I was too inadequate to be her only son. I caught her many a time casting covetous eyes on the prodigious Bramble family next door, six stair-step boys, every one of them enough in his own right to make their mama proud.

There should have been more children. My father went away when I was young, bound for seasonal work in Missouri, and never returned. This is our 20

legacy, I reckon. Gone away and ain’t never coming back. First my father, then my wife. I am not the sort of person to come back for. My father had not been cruel to me, merely indifferent. At six I was aware that I did not inspire paternal affection the way the neighbor boys did. Was it because I did not take after him? He was broadly built, topped with straw hair, quiet at home but gregarious with other people. Evenings he sat in a green upholstered chair with tattered armrests and read Reader’s Digest condensed books, a motel’s “Do Not Disturb” sign pinned to his shirt. Outside on the porch steps, elbows on knees, I sat and studied Bobby Watson across the street, his burly father strolling home from work roaring and charging to meet his son in the yard, scooping him in giant arms, hurling him into the air, and settling him onto broad shoulders for a ride into the house at suppertime. Would Father have treated me that way, had I been Bobby Watson? I am not the sort of person to inspire passion and excess, and perhaps do not want to be. How awful to be gobbled that way, no longer in control of one’s body, given over to the whims of another person. At their mercy.

After Father left, I spent evenings curled in his neglected armchair, reading his books and looking up words in the dictionary. Soon I tired of the dramatic narratives and read only the dictionary. The pages made a soft spspspsp as I turned them. Susurration. (soo-se-ra’shen) also su-sur-rus (soo-sur’es,-sur’) n. A soft, whispering or rustling sound; murmur. [ME susurracyoun<LLat. susurratio<susurrare, to whisper<susurrus, whisper.] —susur’rant (soo-sur’ent, -sur’-), susur’rous (-sur’es, ‘sur’-) adj. My spine tingled when I saw the orderly columns of texts, the pattern of word, pronunciation, part of speech, definitions, and best of all, etymology. I imagined Anglo-Saxons in ships, French in courts, Romans on horses, Germans on foot, all toting bits of text to and fro, meeting one another and smashing words together into modern-day English.

I began to write my own columns of words in notebooks, a sort of nonlinear poetry. The words were building blocks, and it was my task to construct something architecturally wondrous.

As I grew older, my mother encouraged me to apply to college and study poetry, but I could not bear to leave my house, my mother, the tattered green armchair. I hated to think what would happen should I arrive home from college to find everything familiar choked in dust and weeds.

In high school I started going with Susanne, and she wanted us to settle down together after we graduated. Susanne was chatty but found written words a bore. I stashed my poetry notebooks in the attic. I took odd jobs in town—dishwashing, cleaning stables, summer landscaping. For a brief time I wrote for the local newspaper, but was terrified of interviewing people. I mumbled questions, then averted my eyes while waiting for the interviewee to respond. They did or they didn’t. I struggled with putting words together in the right sequence for a tidy news article. It was nothing like poetry.

21

I still occupy the house in which I grew up. Susanne moved in the day after we married, and immediately set to work redecorating the place to make it seem like her home. Mother had moved out by then, leaving behind moldy wallpaper, faded light, tattered furniture. Shortly after I finished school, Mother had taken it into her head to get an apartment across town and start painting in oils. Maybe she was trying to demonstrate how easy it was to leave home. But I felt more attached to the house than ever.

Mother died later that year, and the house was all I could keep of my folks. It struck me that for the first time since I was seven, there was a greater chance of my father walking through the front door than of Mother.

Susanne stripped the mildewed wallpaper and replaced it with an orange floral pattern. Then in the eighties she redid the living room in peach and a color she called “mauve.” Flesh-colored walls and woodwork the color of lipstick. It was like walking over the surface of a giant woman’s face. She started a business selling make-up out of this room, and the women raved. They brought magazines called Vogue and Self, with bright pink headlines like “How to Please Your Man” and “Seven Tips for Fab

A mounted deer head looked balefully down at me where I sat at my desk, wondering when I would

fully embrace my manhood and learn to hunt or fly fish.

888888888888 Sex.” The whole enterprise caused my testicles to retract. I retreated to my boyhood bedroom, which Susanne now referred to as “the den” and had redecorated according to her impression of what was masculine: brown walls and avocado green trim, greenand-brown plaid couch, pictures of a river knee-deep with fly fishermen, and giltframed hand-tied flies. A mounted deer head looked balefully down at me where I sat at my desk, wondering when I would fully embrace my manhood and learn to hunt or fly fish. I had no interest in either. I shut myself in the den, and covered the deer head with a white bedsheet before retrieving my notebooks from deep desk drawers. Even after Susanne was long gone, the deer stayed.

Eventually I settled into a job bagging groceries because it required little mental energy. I spent my thoughts on constructing lines of poetry that no one would see. I knew regular customers by name and the make and model of their vehicle. I took pleasure in loading the customers’ groceries into their cars before they’d had time to pay. The same conversations occurred over and over, customers reciting their lines from one week to the next—the weather, their health, and How is Susanne? Each day after work I would first go to the den and record the day’s poetic lines, while Susanne believed me

22

to be browsing some magazines to which she subscribed on my behalf, hunting and fishing or auto mechanics or whatnot. Then I came downstairs and ate with her.

Six years ago last fall, Susanne left. Her large-boned, blond body had never felt like it was mine, and her heart was veiled in cobwebby mystery. She had been like the cat that wandered into my yard in search of food, and then abandoned me and my dry kibbles when the neighbor started putting out canned tuna. After my wife strayed, I thought of her the same as before, some autonomous one who might acknowledge me if and when it suited her, and at present, it did not suit. Now her physical absence matched the apathy she had always directed toward me. Not animosity, nor rage, nor betrayal. I wished now that there had been because that would have indicated the presence of strong emotion. It would have been a sign that she once felt passion for me. Instead there was only mild assumption that “good ol’ Charlie” would be right there on the other side of the couch, not needing anything from her, just settin’. And she was almost right, because I spent the next six years just settin’, wondering if the cat or Susanne would return. They say that a man grows up and marries a woman like his mother, but I married my father instead.

“Name?”

“Charlie Cooper.”

“Hi there, buddy. I’m Frank.” I took the large hand proffered to me and wondered whether there existed a bowling ball with finger holes large enough to contain those mighty sausages. Frank loomed.

“Pleased to meet you, Frank.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I waited for Frank to speak.

“So you’re after a job here at the alley, eh?”

“Yes, sir. I’m a steady worker.” I hoped I didn’t sound too eager.

“That’s what I hear, buddy.” Frank chuckled as if it were a wide-flung tall tale. His shoulders waggled up and down.

“I worked at the grocery right up till its last day,” I said, as if to offer evidence of the truth in my earlier statement. Whitmore’s had just closed last week. Business had not been as good since Walmart had opened thirty miles away.

“That’s alright,” he smiled assurance that he would not hold the grocery’s recent closure against me.

“I will always get to work on time, sir.”

Frank suddenly stopped beaming and waggling his shoulders.

“Listen, Charlie,” he said, lowering his voice as if to tell me a great-kept secret.

“There’s something I gotta tell ya.” He leaned his bald head close to mine. “If y’gonna work here, ya gotta bowl. Have y’ever bowled before?”

I took a step back. Had I ever bowled before? I had expected the job would involve admitting customers, pairing them with shoes the correct size, and letting them pick a bowling ball. Becoming a professional bowling expert was not what I had anticipated.

23

“Err, well, sure. Not much, sir. My wife’s brother used to bring us here every now and again.”

Why did I have to mention my ex-wife’s brother in the first job interview I’d had in eighteen years? Next thing, he would probably ask me about my wife and her brother and how we all got along, and did we all bowl as a family to celebrate birthdays or what. Susanne’s brother was a cheerful chap, always slapping me on the back. I missed having him around, maybe more than I missed her.

“Well, here at Frank’s Alley, all my employees are on bowling leagues. It’s a requirement. I don’t charge ya, o’course. You just got to know a little something

I grew fond of the smell of the alley, of leather and perspiration,

the salty odor of the vending machine snacks.

8888888888888 about the game. Our customers want to get some tips along with the shoes and scorecards, y’know?”

Relieved that he had not asked any following questions on my family situation, I bobbed my head in agreement. I wondered if the employee bowling requirement was standard for bowling alleys or only at Frank’s.

The next several minutes were a blur of signing papers, and bewilderment at having been successful at finding a job. I had been dreading weeks or months of pointless interviews, and here I got the first job I applied for. If I had believed in miracles, I might have called it one. But I don’t. It must have been dumb luck.

“Charlie, you’re on League Seven,” he informed me ceremoniously, as if he were handing me a trophy. “Or, I like to call it, Seven Leagues Under the Sea!” His shoulders waggled up and down again at his little joke.

And so my training as a bowler began.

I grew fond of the smell of the alley, of leather and perspiration, the salty odor of the vending machine snacks. I liked the dim artificial lighting inside the alley, perfect in its ability to meet the moderate expectations placed upon it, serviceable for bowling, that was it. I liked the large, spacious feel of the building, evenly compartmentalized into lanes. I stood near the half-wall formed by the ball return and the space felt intimate yet uncrowded.

My scorecard improved week by week. After so many years since school, it felt strange to be marked numerically, yet stimulating too. I began to learn insiders’ vocabulary and skills associated with these terms—to pick up a spare, to throw 24

a turkey, to strike out. Each week as I drove home from practice, I repeated my new score in my head like a mantra. Seventy-eight, seventy-eight, seventy-eight, it began. Lousy score, but it was mine. There was something hopeful about it: odds were I could beat that. I set a goal of better than eighty next Wednesday.

The first time I broke a hundred, I scored one-eleven. Three of my teammates burst into laughter.

“Charlie, you’re in the shithouse!” Disappointed that they guffawed even as I had met my personal goal, I stared in bewilderment.

“It was much higher than last week,” I quietly defended myself.

“Aww, Chuck, it’s just an expression,” Gary said, thumping my back hard. “Anytime someone gets 111, it’s called being in the shithouse.”

“Where does that expression come from?” I was eager to collect the insider’s anecdotal history of bowling.

“My Uncle Jim is the guru of bowling knowledge,” Gary began. “He told me that back in the day when you had to keep score by hand, instead of on computer scoreboards,” he gestured broadly with his hand as if presenting a grand lecture to a class, “a 111 in the little box looked remarkably like a drawing of an old outhouse. Gimme a pen. See?” He quickly sketched a diagram to illustrate his point.

More laughter from the team. “Gary, that’s a crap-load for the shithouse if I ever heard one!”

The other teammates offered explanations they had heard or invented, equally implausible, and I found myself laughing hard for the first time in years. My sides felt stiff with the effort, and my mind briefly fought to retain control of my body. But the spirit of the bowling team overruled, and I let myself be overcome with mirth. To be surrounded by these—dare I call them my friends?—laughing not at my expense alone but at all of ours. It felt good. I thought I remembered this feeling, but when had it last happened?

I liked the weight of the ball in my hand, the feeling of the ball of my shoulder moving loosely in its socket, my upper and lower arms as the muscles tightened, the strength of my hand—all these parts functioning together as one complete unit, my whole arm operating in grace and perfection as it made an arc through the air, the ball pushing through air with power toward the goal. I had never experienced anything so perfect as my first strike. To see all those pins knock noisily down, and to know that I, Charlie Cooper, had done it. Yes, I and this arm. I held it up and looked at it in amazement. It was as if my arm were no longer mine, but its own entity—a new entity whose power I had underestimated and to which, from now on, I would render proper respect.

“See this arm?” I gloated to Betty, who happened to be standing close at hand.

“This is Charlie’s arm!” Betty smiled shyly. Her blue sweater was tight across her broad shoulders, small breasts, and rounded stomach.

“Nice strike, Charlie,” she spoke in her little voice, barely more than a whisper.

Betty herself was a terrific bowler, leastwise by my standards. She was short, plump, average-looking, but with gentle brown eyes that made you want to see them smile. I stared at her as if for the first time. I realized I knew nothing about her outside of her life at work. Was she married? Did she have children? Did bowling make her happy as 25

it did me? Her mousy hair was pulled back into a ponytail that flipped upside down whenever she threw the ball.

At home that night, I sat on the living room sofa and noticed the decor for the first time since Susanne had left. It was still all face and lips. I grimaced. How had I let it stay this way? I could have painted over it the day she left, but instead I let it cease to exist. I remembered the green-and-white-striped wallpaper my mother had hung long ago, and my heart stuck itself to the backside of my ribs like oatmeal. This was my house now, dammit. It should not be decorated like a boutique. I wondered what sort of living room a man should have. A man who could throw a strike. Not brown and green like the den, Susanne’s twisted parody of what a man’s style ought to be.

I suppose a man might choose blue. Blue flashed through my mind, like the sky or like Susanne’s eyes. No. Not that. My hands, supported on columns of forearms and elbows, swallowed my face. I could see why I had allowed myself to ignore the room for so long. Strike or no strike, it was hard to know what to do.

I recalled that Gary ran a small painting business on the side, and decided to invite him over for a beer.

As it turned out, I could not work up the nerve to phone him, so had to wait for an opportune moment at the bowling alley. I tried to sound casual as I asked him whether he was interested in having a beer after work.

“Why Charlie, you’re turning downright sociable!” he exclaimed, and I grinned back at him.

After three pints, I worked up enough nerve to mention that I had a dilemma.

Gary’s eyebrows became line drawings of mountains.

“My problem is,” I confided, “My wife painted the living room pink.”

He nodded knowingly. “That is a toughy. Why, Charlie, I didn’t know you was married!”

“Not anymore.”

Gary slapped his knee. “My wife knows better than to paint our living room pink!

She’d be out on the street too!”

“We’ve been divorced about six years. It wasn’t about the paint.”

“She painted your living room when she ain’t married to you no more? Hell, you gotta get that woman outta your business!” Gary was flabbergasted. I could see I had made a mistake in initiating this conversation. What had I expected? I found it difficult to talk to other men.

Slowly, I started again from the beginning.

“No. We got married back in ‘73. She painted the living room sometime in the ‘80s, I forget roundabout when she started her make-up business. Then she left me in ‘93, and it has stayed pink ever since. I didn’t know what to do.”

Gary looked thoughtfully at the counter, hands folded round the glass mug with an inch of yellow liquid remaining.

“You’ve come to the right place, man. Ol’ Gary’ll look after you. This sort of problem just happens to be my specialty.”

Next day Gary furtively handed me a keychain loaded with plastic tiles clicking to26

gether in every color of the rainbow. “Pick out one for the walls and another for the trim. Better yet, let me come over and see what we’re up against.” I nodded, pocketing the color swatches. I was glad for Gary’s company. “Today, after work.”

Gary and I sat on the flowered sofa in the peachy-pink room, case of beer between us, and stared. I told him how it was when I was a boy, how Mother loved that green striped paper, and the woodwork had been bare. We had my grandmother’s antique davenport, but Susanne hated it and sent it to the curb when she moved in.

The upholstery was faded and torn by then, but it still felt like a piece of my childhood. The couch she picked out to replace it was covered in a burlap-feeling material, all orange and rust sunflowers and avocado-colored leaves. It was still in good condition when she gave it away to make room for the pink floral make-up beauty couch. She said it was a sin to put the old sofa back after the room had been redone.

I have never understood Susanne’s ethical philosophy. I asked Gary, in jest, if he painted couches.

I liked the light gray, or maybe yellow, if it wasn’t too light. Like beer, not lemons.

I hated the idea of painting it white, as though it were mere absence. Erasing Susanne without anything new to take her place. I said we should bring down the couch from the den, and put the flowered couch out to the curb. Gary said that was a fine idea, and came upstairs with me to help carry it.

“I didn’t know you were a hunter.” Gary nodded at the deer head, whose bedsheet had slipped off.

“I’m not. Susanne put that there.”

“Do you fish?”

“No.” I did not confess that fish eyes made me squeamish. “Susanne put all this stuff in here.”

“That woman!”

For the first time in months I noticed the gilt-framed flies, and without thinking, snatched them and smashed them against the bookshelf. Shards and icicles skittered across the floor, and Gary looked up, surprised. Then he nodded with approval.

Without a word, I grabbed the deer head with both my arms, nearly poking my eye on an antler, and hurled it across the room. Part of its hair scraped off, but it was otherwise unharmed. It still eyed me with a long-suffering expression. I opened the window and autumn air stirred the papers on my desk. I had never used the paperweight Susanne had given me. I hurled the king of the forest out of captivity, into the yard. Defenestration. (de-fen-i-stra-shen) n. An act of throwing something or some-

I wondered what sort of living room a man should have.

A man who could throw a strike.

8888888888888

one out of a window. [DE- + Lat. fenestra, window.] Gary gave me a thumbs up, and gestured toward the couch in reminder of our task.

Over the course of the next week, Gary came by every day when we didn’t have to work or practice bowling, and the two of us transformed the living room. He removed the woodwork and brought it outside where I power-sanded rosy paint, revealing the chestnut wood of my childhood, and sealed it. Inside, Gary primed the walls with oblivion, then coated them the color of honey.

Seven Leagues Under The Sea had never won the Annual Frank’s Alley Tournament, which explained Frank’s humor at naming our team. The weeks leading up to the Tourney were filled with good-natured competition. Frank encouraged the “bowling spirit” but occasionally remarked in passing, “Just remember, after the tournament, we’ll all keep working together, regardless of who wins.” Everyone recognized the boundary between good fun amongst coworkers and making enemies. Our team practiced every day. I don’t recall wanting anything more than for our team to win.

I felt like I was in a trance all evening, the low rumbling sounds of bowling balls and intermittently crashing pins lulled my brain like one of those nature sound tapes that Susanne used to play when she had trouble sleeping. My arm was in its glory tonight, cradling the twelve-pound ball, rocking it, releasing it. Strike, and strike, and strike. If ever I would play a perfect game, it was tonight. My teammates were beside themselves, everyone holding their breaths when I was up, then everyone exhaling at once when the pins toppled, their collective breath generating a breeze that raised my arm hairs. The light cast the faces yellow. Everything ceased to exist but this swirling alley, the bowling thunder, my teammates’ gleeful cries, the smell of cigarette smoke and perspiration.

Sweating and spent, I stared at the scores, unable to process the reality that our own Seven Leagues had won! Betty stood silent, happy tears streaming down chubby cheeks. Gary and Mike chanted, “Char-lie! Char-lie! Char-lie!” and before I knew it, hoisted me onto their shoulders, shouting, “Give it up for Charlie, our MVP!” Frank made his way to us, wielding the trophy, and joined the men supporting me above their shoulders.

In my dreams, I had never been able to fly. But if I had, I imagine it would have felt like this: moving through air, carried along, the suspension of my disbelief in gravity propelling me forward in space, the ground distantly below. Too giddy to remember that I disliked being out of control, large arms suspended me in space, and I trusted them. Below was Betty, and without thinking, I blew her a kiss. She waved back.

The trophy! There was only one Frank’s Alley trophy, big like Frank. Each year the winning team chose one person to keep it for the year. It bore the figure of a man on top, mid-stride, ball connected to fingertips in that last semi-second before launching into space. As I looked at it, I knew I was that man. Perhaps I was even that ball—after so many years waiting in the 28

caddy, here I was, launching into the future. Charlie’s arm. I blew Betty another kiss.

As we all got ready to leave that night, I scribbled my phone number on a paper scrap, stuffed it into Betty’s warm fist.

“In case you ever need to call me for anything,” I mumbled, forgetting my recent victory in the awkward moment of offering up this little remnant of myself.

“Thanks, Charlie, I will.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled. She had a hint of a dimple in her left cheek.

The trophy perched proudly in my car’s rear window. Where would I display it when I got home, in the den? Heck, why not the living room? In the place of prominence on the mantel, beside the clock.

“Good-night, Charlie!”

“See you tomorrow!”

I relished the farewells of my teammates and friends, and beamed as I started the car. My cheek muscles hurt with smiling so hard.

Driving home, I felt slightly muddled what with the drinks and the glory. Still okay to drive, just needed a little extra caution, that was all. Halfway home there was a dark woods, and I thought I saw a light flashing amidst the trees. What was it? Mother told me fairy stories when I was a boy curled in her lap. Three short blinks, and a longer one—fairy lights? My steering hand followed the trajectory of my eyes as I peered into the woods, and I jerked the wheel back. Not soon enough. The car lurched off the road, stopping abruptly against the rough bark of an oak.

Images of my life flashed before me. This can’t be real. Only in movies does death come in slow-motion images. I saw my father reading in his tattered green armchair, Mother staring into mildewed wallpaper, the dictionary’s susurrant turning pages, my house and its porch, Susanne brandishing her cosmetics catalogue, grocery store patrons lined up beside their vehicles, the deer head mid-leap through the window, Gary on the ladder painting, Betty and her tears flowing onto her tight blue sweater, my arm mid-throw, rumbling sounds and crashing pins, and the golden bowling trophy, large as the Stanley cup. The image of the trophy appeared before my eyes, but also in the back of my head as I felt its full, hard weight strike my skull, obliterating everything that had come before, and everything that might have come after. I felt the synapses of my brain firing, strike after strike after strike, every tensed muscle in graceful motion, awareness of every part of my body, that feeling of being lifted, being carried, flying, present to the absence of everything that was not here, not now, not me. All the moments of my life converged into the present, unified, gathered together in the knobby shape of the trophy and my skull as they became one. Charlie’s essence.

Anna Maria Johnson’s nonfiction has been published in DreamSeeker magazine and aired

on public radio, and she writes a monthly gardening column for The North Fork Journal. She leads workshops incorporating spirituality, storytelling, and the visual arts and is currently apprenticing with a fiber artist who keeps sheep and goats, spins wool and mohair, and weaves. She has also exhibited her visual art through venues in western New York and Virginia. Anna Maria studied art and English at Houghton College, and spiritual direction at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. She makes her home in the Shenandoah Valley with her photographer-husband, Steven David Johnson, their two daughters, a dog, a cat, and an enormous sheep.

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Brett Foster

Late at Night When I Consider You Sleeping You think yourself a child of God, and why not? Seeing you lie there asleep and peaceful on the bed, I can only wonder what more one could ask for if, when troubled, your face were present, some altar to kneel before in the dark room?

You fell asleep upon the Psalms tonight, would probably scold yourself for nodding off. How sovereignly your heart beats! How sweet your breathing!

It takes all my will not to turn from my small work and like the king you read of, exalt you with a wealth of dances, with songs from the harp.

But Davidic joy would wake you up, so I’d better not, and besides, I’d look so foolish, and have no harp anyway. But who needs one when even they, the gravest angels far from the marble realm you dream of, surely praise the sight of you, whose mere presence is felt as a vision holds an anchor’s weight.

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Brett Foster’s work has appeared in Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Image, Literary Imagination, Partisan Review, Southwest Review, and the anthologies American Religious Poems (Library of America) and Best New Poets 2007. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at Wheaton College. He recently enjoyed taking his kids to the Art Institute of Chicago; his daughter liked Seurat’s paintings, while his son liked Van Gogh’s bright bedroom (and any and all trucks glimpsed on the way there).

John Savoie

Willow Knuckling roots clench the rock so tight it cracks and crumbles; a single yellow leaf slips and twirls on the breeze, touches water, rippling, but does not break its sheen.

John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. His first collection of poems Body and Soul is ready for a publisher.

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ruminations

ARTIST’S NOTE

Dan McGregor lives in Abilene, TX, where he teaches drawing and illustration classes at Abilene Christian University. He received an MFA in illustration from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2000. He likes poetry, monks, and old airplanes.

Dan McGregor: Sacramental Engines My recent work consists of what I call “sacramental engines”—painted mechanical contraptions that are intended to represent invisible spiritual forces. Resurrection has been a big theme for me of late.

Bloodwheel taps into ancient traditions dealing with the legend of martyrs Erasmus and Catherine of Alexandria, as the torments of both involved wheels—Catherine being assailed by a spiked wheel and Erasmus having his intestines wrapped around a ship’s windlass. Exploring the Tertullian quote that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” I decided to combine this concept of wheel as torture instrument with the generally positive and motive concept of a waterwheel.

Mendicant Resurrection Engine is a catapult—a ballista, actually—for launching the bodies of dead monks (here represented by little paintings in coffins) into Heaven. It was inspired by a visit to the Capuchin cemetery in Rome, which contains the desiccated bodies of monks for visitors to see.

Exit Strategy 1 and 2 are contemporary re-imaginings of the eschatological events described in Matthew 24: “That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.” Each of the paintings shows an object left by the rapture “evacuee,” and a working wooden hand-cranked elevator is featured in the center of each.

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Dan McGregor. Bloodwheel. Oil paint on panel, soft maple.

49 x 16 x 14 inches.

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Dan McGregor. Exit Strategy (Rapture Engine 1).

Oil paint on panel, oak, string. 36 x 36 inches.

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Dan McGregor. Exit Strategy (Rapture Engine 2).

Oil paint on panel, oak, string. 36 x 36 inches.

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Dan McGregor. Mendicant Resurrection Engine.

Oil on panel, oak, brass, twine, gold leaf. 56 x 31 x 5.5 inches.

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Lauren Schmidt

The Unseasoned Earth Hers was the only one I saw in that orchard of faces before the nurse lifted her out of her blanketed bin like a nectarous fruit— flushed and rosed, the wrinkled skin.

And when I am prized with the weight of her first body in my arms, I watch her limbs roll out like blossoms’ leaves, curling and springing in a fitful mime, the slight stems of her ankles, her wrists.

My womb, an unseasoned earth, entombs twin seeds— my awe, my envy.

She is lifted out of my arms’ roots and brought to her bearer’s flowering breast so that she, not I, could know a mother’s love.

Lauren Schmidt is a high school English teacher in Eugene,

Oregon, and a student at Antioch University’s low-residency program in Los Angeles. This is her first publication.

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Richard Osler

Easter The yellow cut-flowers in their cut-glass coffin coruscate, all over the place.

All that finery blazing, brilliant in late morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sun.

How is it, this display splayed out, after record days of rain reminds me of you?

Your combed brown hair, blue dress, and your ghastly, white embalmed face?

But it does. Now, it comes back to me like the bulbs you placed so carefully â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this memory of your yellow daffodils.

Spring.

Richard Osler is a poet and semi-retired businessman

living on an island offshore Vancouver, British Columbia. His nonfiction writing has been included in a book of collected writings and letters by well-known Canadian author and radio commentator, Peter Gzowski. His poems have been published in Alberta Views, CV2, and The Other Journal. Richard leads poetry writing retreats and works with recovering addicts using poetry as a source for transformation.

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Steve West

Under a Cheerwine Moon

Today, like every day, he was taking the backyard beeline back from Elam, from the 7-11, where he went to buy a Cheerwine. In his faded jeans with his shirt-tail tucked neatly in and top button buttoned, Henry cast a neater appearance than his surroundings, a diminished neighborhood where junked automobiles were abandoned to rust in overgrown backyards. They sat higgledy-piggledy on uneven blocks, tires removed, staring abjectly into space like old folks. Behind them, in backyard corners castoff appliances and parts were simply dropped and left to age badly. Swingsets teetered with seats missing and chains all awry, their middles sagging. What patchy grass there was did little more than hold dirt together where it struggled to gain a foothold among the litter.

Henry had regard for these left behinds. The broken down vehicles and litter reminded him of how lost and alone he had felt in the days since his mother had died. He too had been left behind. He too was scattered and exposed. He did not know what to do with himself.

He tapped an old Ford as he walked by, admiring its leather interior, and he remembered riding in his mother’s Ford Fairlane on a cool night with the windows down and the heat on, gospel music pouring out of the radio and his mother keeping time by tapping the wheel. “Nice shine you have today,” he said, letting his hand fall along the hood of a rusty old Buick from grille to windshield. “Rest easy, Whirlpool,” he said to a refrigerator reclining by a fence, giving it a pat.

He paused for a moment by the McCaffrey’s garage and turned the bottle of Cheerwine up to the sky and took a long draw, letting it flood his mouth. Bringing it down again, he said “that’s good . . . man, that’s good,” shaking his head, making a mental note to check his supply when he got home. Reaching up, he took his cap off and let what breeze there was cool his head, the air wafting by carrying just a hint of magnolia blooms from the tree in the sideyard.

He leaned down to pet the Griffin’s dog, Chief, a mixed-breed mutt who badly needed a bath, his fur matted and dirty. Grif had hit Chief one time too many in the head with a rolled-up newspaper. “Poor ‘ol Chief. What’s up today?” And there he sat, looking up at Henry with his best nobody home look, tongue out, panting, eyes searching Henry’s eyes for a response. “Aw, I know what you want, you rascal.” He brought his Cheerwine bottle down and poured a bit into the dog’s open mouth. Chief lapped it greedily. “You the only dog I know likes Cheerwine, Chief. You’re smart. You’re no dummy.” He gave Chief a pat, and another, stroking his head for a moment, and walked on across the Griffin’s backyard, whistling, Chief tagging along expectantly behind him.

As he walked through the ankle-high grass, Henry remembered Josie Griffin, the little blond-haired girl with the eyes that flashed and the downright foul mouth, that teaser Josie-miss-big-mouth Griffin. He could hear her now—“Henry, you retard, you big 39

dummy. Don’t you come near me, Henry, go on back home Henry”—yabbering and jabbering, just being a regular pest. But that was a long time ago, he thought, and Josie grew up and moved away, and when she came home on that rare occasion, driving her shiny convertible, she wouldn’t even return his waves or smiles. Oh, the heck with Josie Griffin, Henry thought to himself. And yet, he stopped for a moment, the wind catching the seat on Grif ’s rusted old swing-set, and he remembered Josie laughing there, just a little thing, as he pushed her higher and higher into the sky, the sun catching her hair and making it shimmer, her yelling all the time “faster, Henry, faster,” and giggling on and on. Henry shook his head at that. “I’m going home, Chief. Get on now.”

As he turned the corner of Grif ’s house and made for the street, following the cracked front walk of the house down to the sidewalk, Henry looked down the street to where it dead-ended in a vacant lot, the power plant barely visible through the woods, and he remembered. He was on a sled this time, careening down an icy hill, with kids crying, “Go, Henry.

Go.” There was fire too, a big roaring bonfire, and kids yelling, “Turn, Henry. Turn,” but he couldn’t turn. He couldn’t stop in time. Just then his head began to hurt and, like a curtain dropping, the daydream ended. He felt something wet on his bare leg . . . “Chief, go on home, boy! You can’t be coming with me now.” Well, maybe he was a little harsh, he thought. He got that way sometimes when his head hurt, when he remembered things he didn’t want to think about. He looked up at the roof of the Griffins’ house and, seeing a lone sparrow there, watched until it flew away. He wished he could fly away too.

Meanwhile, Chief had started to slink away. “Aw, alright, one more sip.” Henry sat down on the curb, sticking the bottle right in Chief ’s mouth, him lapping up the drink. Then he took the bottle and poured it over Chief ’s head. “I hereby baptize you Chief Griffin, in the name of L.D. Peeler, Salisbury, and Carolina Beverage.” The cherry liquid ran down the mutt’s ears and into his face. His tongue lashed out, trying to catch every drop of it. “There, now it’s official. You’re in the family. But you definitely ain’t going to any church. Nope, that just wouldn’t do. Now, you better get on home, Chief.”

Henry stood and looked up at Grif ’s house and noticed the paint peeling, window screens lying propped up by the house where they had fallen out of windows, a rusty bike with an upturned wheel thrown down in the front yard. Looking across the street to his own home, he frowned. The unkempt flowerbeds and grass, the vacant carport, and the dead dogwood in the front yard only made him sad. “This place is looking bad,” Henry said, sighing. He took another sip of Cheerwine. Holding the almost empty bottle in front of him, he looked through the green-tinted glass at his own house. It looked blurry, like something in a dream.

He looked at the print on the bottle, the white seal and big red letters spelling “C-h-e-e-r-w-in-e,” and then let it fall to his side.

Henry thought to himself that that Mr. L.D. Peeler must have been a genius. He read that Mr. L.D. Peeler invented Cheerwine right there in the basement of his grocery store. A man with a dream, that man. One night at home, he pulled out the 1999 Rand McNally Road Atlas and found Salisbury, North Carolina. It took him awhile. He remembered looking for a long, long time at the small dot on the map that was supposed to be Salisbury, with all the squiggly red, blue, and black lines going through and around it. It was beautiful, and confus-

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ing too. He couldn’t figure out why such a famous place would be so small. He imagined Mr. L.D. Peeler’s house. Must be a big one, Henry thought, with a Cheerwine drink machine in every room, little ladies in gray outfits with aprons on bringing a bottle of the red ambrosia (his Mama’s term, not his own) out whenever you wanted it, whenever you called. Yes, Mr. Henry, they’d say, if he visited. Two drinks Mr. Henry? Yes, certainly Mr. Henry, as many as you want Mr. Henry. He imagined Mr. L.D. Peeler, still working away in the basement, perfecting the already perfect formula for Cheerwine. He’d say “Come on in Henry. Can you hold that Henry? Glad you could come, Henry . . .”

“You plannin’ on moving in?”

Henry turned to see his neighbor, Vince Griffith, staring at him, his undershirt riding up on his fat belly, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. While Henry was thinking, Grif had walked up unnoticed behind him on the sidewalk in front of his house. “Huh—oh, hello Grif.

Just messing with Chief. That’s a good dog you got there.”

“Ain’t worth a lick, Henry. And stop giving him that Cheerwine. Bad for his teeth.”

“Nah, it ain’t bad for his teeth, Grif. Good for fleas, too.”

“You’re crazy, Henry. You get on home. I got things to do and I gotta give this dog a bath.

He’s got something sticky all over him.”

“Yeah, OK Grif. Be seeing you.”

Henry stood up and walked on across the street, mumbling under his breath, “Crazy? I’d rather be crazy than a slob.” He began to whistle again. It was rhythmic, the song, his arm swinging the now-empty Cheerwine bottle back and forth in time, back and forth, his feet slapping pavement, as he headed for home.

As he turned into the drive of his house, Henry stopped whistling and started singing.

He sang hymns, mostly, and today he thought to himself that given his newly formed bond with Chief, “Blest Be the Ties That Bind” would be appropriate. The song had the additional reputation of being his Mama’s favorite hymn, particularly that verse about “When we asunder part, it gives us inward pain, but we shall still be joined in heart, and hope to meet again.” He didn’t know what “asunder” meant, but it didn’t sound good. He stopped to check his mailbox and, finding nothing, he broke into song, his pure tenor voice ringing out, echoing from the carport. When he reached “and hope to meet again,” he felt his throat tighten and he sang softer, and then he stopped just short of the door. There, taped to the window pane by the side of the door, was a white envelope. He pulled it off the glass, turned it over, and looked at its front. “Department of Social Services,” it said, in the corner, and there, right in the middle, it said “HENRY DAVID ASKEW.” The back of the letter was sealed up tight, with an extra piece of tape over the flap.

Henry raised the envelope to his nose and took a good whiff. “Hmmm. Smells important.”

He imagined an office somewhere in a big city with a man leaning confidently back in his desk chair with a good looking secretary, like Josie Griffin, maybe, writing down what he said, just like in one of those courtroom TV shows. He grimaced. That made him worried, thinking about lawyers and men in black robes and big dusty books with lots of important words stacked up on the desks and people arguing over things he didn’t understand, long strings of words punctuated by a “Henry” here and a “Henry” there. “Just my luck it’s some lawyer,” he

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said out loud. He stuffed the envelope in the pocket of his shorts and opened the screen door and front door, letting the screen door make a whack-whack-whack on the door frame as he dropped it.

He never tired of walking into his house, from outside to inside. He always marveled at how different it was inside from how it was outside, and how he even felt different inside.

Outside it’s hot, inside it’s cool; outside he smelled mown grass and hot steamy asphalt, inside he smelled an old smell, slightly musty, and yet somehow reassuring. He remembered the time he got the tape measure and measured and figured out that the walls were only around twelve inches thick, and he marveled that such differences could exist within twelve inches of each other. He felt safe inside, protected from people like the Maniss boys who used to play tricks on him and sit on him, making him name twenty-five brands of cigarettes before they’d let him go. He shook his head and smiled, reaching down and plucking his elderly tabby cat from the den chair, stroking its fur, eliciting a gravelly vibrato of a purr. Walking to the fireplace mantle, he pulled the empty Cheerwine bottle out of his pocket and added it to the row of bottles already there. There were Cheerwine bottles on the mantle, stacked in cases in the corner, filling the basement downstairs, and lining his bedroom wall. He gave up counting them, though sometimes he tried to, just for something to do.

Sitting down in a brown recliner, he situated himself so as to cover the rip in the seat of the chair. He needed to get that rip fixed, though he couldn’t figure out just how to get it fixed. Lots of things were like that. Like the bathtub that wouldn’t drain, or the peeling wallpaper, or the broken furnace. He didn’t know what to do about them, who to call.

Since his Mama died it was all too much for him.

Leaning back, Sam rolling on his back in his lap, eyes closed, he took the envelope out of his pocket and laid it on the table next to the recliner, smoothing it out where it was wrinkled. “HENRY DAVID ASKEW,” it said, and “Department of Social Services.”

Closing his eyes, he let his head rest on the back of the chair, and before long his chest was rising and falling, rising and falling, Sam oblivious to his motion, his arms dropping to his sides languidly, a slight snore starting, the rays of sun streaming through the back door window getting longer and longer until they were gone, darkness wrapping Henry’s house, a darkness with only the light of a full red moon. *** “Mr. Askew, can you stand up please?”

Henry quickly rose to his feet—too quickly, maybe, because his legs began to quiver, and for a minute he thought he’d fall. Looking down at his feet, he realized to his surprise that he had no shoes, and his lily white feet stuck out of the ends of his pants legs. Looking up he saw an enormous podium about twenty feet away from him, only much, much higher than him. There was a person behind the podium who had no face, just an enormous mouth on a white sphere, as if the face had been erased, and sounds were coming from it, angry sounds. He scared Henry.

“Is there something the matter, Mr. Askew? Are you listening to me?”

Henry’s head began to throb. He put his hands on each side of his head to try and stop the pounding. Looking down as he did it, he noticed the table he was seated at was like those you find in a preschool, and his chair the kind little kids sit in as they play with puzzles and color, the kind Mrs. Holshouser had in her room at the Center, the kind he used to play on.

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“Mr. Askew? MR. ASKEW?” Henry looked up, and when he did he saw Cheerwine bottles, no kidding, cases and cases of bottles flying past him and that mouth, that enormous mouth, shouting something that sounded like gibberish to him, all the time getting bigger and bigger. He felt hands on him, squeezing him, shaking him, hurting his arms.

“No, leave me alone. Leave me alone!” He began to struggle to get free, thrashing around wildly. “I won’t go. I won’t. You can’t make me.” People were talking and saying things he couldn’t understand, while a smiling man with a pale face and a needle came towards him. *** Henry woke to find himself in complete darkness. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was.

Listening, he thought he heard a clock ticking loudly, only he realized it was his heart beating out an exaggerated rhythm. He was breathing heavy, his chest heaving, his body drenched with sweat.

Sam was oblivious, still asleep in his lap. “Oh, Sam, that was a doozie, a real bad dream.” Sam twitched a bit, enjoying one of his own dreams, apparently. He wondered what kind of things cats dreamed of beyond the usual mice, food, climbing trees, being chased. Whatever they dreamed, it couldn’t be as crazy as the things he dreamed. At least that’s what he figured.

Carefully laying Sam on the sofa, he walked into the kitchen, turned on the light and opened the bread drawer. He unwrapped the bread and laid two slices of Merita Enriched on the counter.

Reaching for the Jiffy peanut butter, he unscrewed the lid and, with a dull knife, began to spread

Any person, and beast, who didn’t like Cheerwine must not be too smart. big globs of it on the bread. He carefully slapped the two pieces of bread together and took a bite of one corner. He felt his body calming as he began eating, leaving the dream behind. Henry thought to himself that peanut butter must be one of the finest foods ever developed. “It’ll stick to your insides,” Henry’s mother used to say, glancing back at him from her place at the kitchen counter, flashing a smile as she did, a loose strand of grey hair curling on her cheek. Henry smiled at that. He figured he could eat peanut butter sandwiches for every meal, and sometimes he did.

He tried to interest Sam in peanut butter, but he wouldn’t touch the stuff. In that uppity cat way, he merely sniffed at it and walked away as if he was saying “I can’t believe you eat such stuff, Henry. It’s beneath me.” He liked Sam OK, he guessed, but for an animal that was supposed to be intelligent, he figured he sure was dumb. Any person, and beast, who didn’t like peanut butter and Cheerwine must not be too smart.

Finishing his sandwich, he opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a Cheerwine. “Ambrosia,” he said aloud, savoring his mother’s word. Medicinal. That was another of her words, he thought. Make you wanna fight your granny, she sometimes said, and he laughed aloud at that, as he always did, imagining a white-haired grandma ready for a fist fight. No sir, he thought, nobody messes with their grandma.

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For a moment, he just stood with the refrigerator door open looking at the row upon row of bottles lining the shelves, and he felt better, just knowing that he wouldn’t run out anytime soon. I suspect in Salisbury everybody’s got all the Cheerwine they need, he thought, and maybe even use it for shampoo or oiling squeaky doors or such. He liked thinking about such things. He called it his “L.D. Peeler” moment, because he imagined that Mr. L.D. Peeler lived that way and, inventor that he was, he for sure was busy developing other uses for Cheerwine.

Sitting back down in the brown recliner, he saw the envelope again. He set his Cheerwine on it. “Do you mind if I use you for a coaster, Department of Social Services?” he said out loud.

Sam looked up at him from where he reclined on the sofa, as if he wondered to whom Henry was speaking. He reached over and stroked Sam’s gray fur absently. He thought to himself that it’d been a long time since anything good came to him in a white envelope. There was a time when bills came to him, papers with numbers on them that confused him. He’d stare at them, not knowing what to do. Then the lady from the DSS, Mrs. Landry he thought, came and grabbed them all up off the kitchen table where they were littered and took them all away. He never saw one again.

No one else wrote him. He didn’t get mail.

Sighing heavily, he reached for the envelope, tore the end off, and pulled the letter out, carefully unfolding it and laying it in his lap. As he read, words began jumping off the page—words like “inform,” “terminate,” “move,” “no choice,” and that last phrase, “must reluctantly . . . institutionalize you.” He didn’t understand it all, but he got the gist of it. They were going to take him away. They were going to make him move away from his home. The words began to blur and run together, swimming in front of his eyes, and his head began to throb and his ears began to ring. Even his head felt hot. He put the paper down in his lap and laid his head back in the chair, remembering green walls and locked doors and his mother crying. God, he missed his mother. *** He slept fitfully that night, his legs splayed over the bed where he had fallen asleep in his clothes, momentous things happening in the world outside. Sam was perched on the windowsill outside Henry’s bedroom, ears alert, eyes flashing the moon’s red glow. In his cat-sized soul, Sam could feel it—the change coming on, something wafting in on the breeze, a blanket of otherworldly change, not evil but altogether mysterious. Sam sniffed at the air, whiskers twitching, intuitively sensing an inarticulable and slight seismic shift in space and time.

In his dream there was Josie Griffin again, laughing, blond hair flapping in the wind as he chased her round and round her house, in and out of the branches of the magnolia tree, and then, there was Josie chasing him round the house, him running in his stumbling clumsy way, only when he looked back he saw it wasn’t Josie at all but a white coated, stern Mrs. Landry who had him by the collar saying, “Take these, Henry, now, you’ll feel better, Henry,” with Henry trying to pull away only to find he was paralyzed, unable to move away. “Now, now, Henry,” said Mrs. Landry.

He woke to find himself alone in the dark, his hands clenched, his breathing labored. His chest felt tight. He remembered the letter and was scared. “God, it’s me, Henry,” he said aloud. “I need some help down here. I need a sign. What can I do?” It took a moment before he even realized that he had said this aloud, the sound of his own voice seeming to echo off the bare walls of the bedroom. 5:15 flashed the oversized numbers of the clock. Henry sat up, lifted the window shade,

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and pressed his nose to the cool glass of the windowpane. Two yellowish cat eyes stared back, startling him until he realized it was Sam—Sam the mystic, the seer, the cat who knew all but said little. That was what his Mama used to say. “Mama, what’s ‘mystic’ mean?” And she’d just say, “Special, Henry, just special. Sort of like you, Henry.” Henry never did quite make the connection between himself—a pale-skinned two-legged being, and Sam, a furry fourlegged creature much given to sleeping and eating. And yet when he looked in Sam’s eyes, he knew what to do. Then he knew what he had to do.

Standing up, he switched on the light and quickly dressed—jeans, shirt, topsiders. He pulled down a jacket, just in case. Then he grabbed his backpack and stuffed in an extra change of clothes. Finally, he reached up to the top of the closet shelf and carefully brought down a wooden box, handmade just for him. Opening it, he pulled out all the money inside, counting about $400, and stuffed it in his pocket. It was a large part of what Henry had saved from the check he received each month. He hesitated before putting it back, taking out a fading picture of his mother smiling at him, her glasses perched on the end of her nose like she’d been reading, and he stuffed it into his shirt pocket giving it a reassuring pat. Underneath the picture was a Cheerwine bottle cap. A sign!, he thought. He picked it up and placed it in his shirt pocket where he could feel its edges against his skin.

“Mr. L.D. Peeler will know what to do, that’s for sure,” said Henry to himself. He imagined a kind, grandfatherly kind of man, greeting him at the door of an important looking house, one with big white columns and lights in every window. After all, he’s a genius, he thought. He could fix anything.

Turning off the light, he walked down the hall, moving by memory in the dark, letting his hand fall along the wall as he walked. Opening the front door, he shut the screen door slowly.

Pausing, he let his hand rest on the door for a moment. Then he jumped the three steps from the porch in one stride and brushed against the grass as he made for the street. Looking back, he saw Sam sitting on the porch now, watching him with his wise cat eyes. “Sam, I’m going. You’ll be OK now. I’ll be OK too.” Sam just turned and walked away. He put his hand to his chest and felt the Cheerwine cap against his skin. Of course he’d be OK.

Steve West lives and writes in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he practices law, dabbles in the music business, and blogs at www.outwalking.net. His poetry has appeared in Studio: A Journal of Christians Writing, where he was a poetry contest winner, Inklings, Mars Hill Review, and The Independent, among other journals. He credits Frederick Buechner as his greatest influence. “Under the Cheerwine Moon” is his first published short story.

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Kory Wells

Christian Education At church Sunday, the white haired teacher told the youth that Muslims don’t go to heaven.

Told them even Gandhi didn’t go to heaven.

Unkempt young men and doe-eyed young women tossed and turned the teacher’s words against him, the most alert they’d been all year.

Later he called me to testify. I confessed I’d find no comfort in such a God. Then what did Jesus die for, he asked. What’d he die for? I had no scripture-smooth reply, but now I crawl into bed by my man who believes in family and me and Kory Wells lives in Tennessee, where her “real a vague something, job” is in software development. Her poetry and prose and he pulls me so tight, have appeared or are forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, Rock & Sling, Now & Then, New Southerner, and others. Wells’ there’s no space for any answers essay “Really Good for a Girl,” labeled “standout” by Ladies’ Home Journal, leads the book She’s Such a Geek. except the one.

Her novel-in-progress White Line to Graceville was a finalist in the William Faulkner Competition. One of her favorite books on faith is Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church.

46

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Shades of Gray Call down

not winter’s cold

not winter’s dark

but winter’s palette Light gray of shadows on snow Medium gray of about-to-storm sky Dark gray of the bones of sycamore trees Yellow-brown beech leaves cloaking the trunk object Pokeweed berries staining the snow object Holly trees declaiming Christmas object Cardinals getting caught object

to grays

not ambiguous but absolute

object

to grays

and lose Light gray, the bleak landscape of heartbreak Medium gray, the satisfaction at survival Dark gray, the pleasure of repentance

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is a research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, where she lives with her husband Andrew and their son Zeke. She is also the editor of the theological quarterly Lutheran Forum. This poem was inspired by the past five winters she spent in New Jersey.

47

Lydia Melby

And We Were Gone Summers in the Flats were always hot, in some sneaky, oppressive way. We were just one step down from lower middle class, living in our run-down, not-quite-the-suburbs-neighborhood, but we didn’t care because, really, money is nothing until you grow up. Our fathers all worked together at the main power plant just outside our part of town, and most kids that lived in the Flats had lived there from the day they were born. We spent our days in the streets because our parents’ tempers were short and air conditioning was still new enough to be a luxury. We played lazy sidewalk games and frantic street games. We played in the yards, we played in the trees, we jumped the fences and jumped the bright lines of hopscotch squares we had scratched into the cement. We hid and found and baseballed and four-squared, and then finally, the last event of the day, we raced.

The races were the biggest thing in the Flats, at least for us boys. All the kids would gather on Coughton Street, once a day, when the bells from the Catholic church started to ring five o’clock. The girls would line up on either side of the street while we pretended to ignore their self-conscious giggling. The under-ten boys were told to block off our part of Coughton and Blacker Street to keep the cars from getting in our way. Every boy old enough ran, no matter how slow he was, or how hot it was, or even if he didn’t want to. It was what we did. We raced in heats, organized and serious, no kidding around; first the two heats of ten-year-olds, then the elevens, and last, the twelve-year-old boys. Finally, the winners from each heat would all race as the rest of us stood on the sides and wished we had run just a step faster. Most boys thirteen and up had already started at South Point Junior High and either smoked cigarettes in old lots and alleyways or worked summers to help out their families, so the twelve-year-olds were in charge.

This summer I was twelve. We held court through our races, and I was king. I was the fastest boy in the Flats.

We were still eating the leftover cake from my twelfth birthday party when my father had his accident. Some people he worked with called my mother and her face turned grey as they explained to her, very carefully, that a pressure hose had snapped and swung around and hit my father, very hard, in the back. He dropped instantly, they said, and as soon as they got the hose contained, they took him to the hospital. I don’t remember much about the hospital visit, just that my mother’s hands were shaking too bad to lock the front door behind us, so I had to do it.

Someone, sometime, came to us very late at night or very early in the morning where we were sleeping on the waiting room chairs. He was clean and kind but I can’t even remember what his face looked like. He told us that my father would probably never walk again. My mother held my sister, and I held my mother.

Looking back I realize that the summer when I was twelve was a huge summer for the rest of the world too, that lots of huge things were happening, like Stalin’s death and the nuclear test and the polio vaccine, but all I remember from that summer are things like school ending, and my mother on the phone for hours with the plant, and that my father needed help to take himself to the bathroom.

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Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

I had never told my father about the races. I had decided that as soon as I won, as soon as I had something to tell, that I would go home, walk straight into the living room, and announce to my father that I was the fastest boy. But I didn’t want to tell him until then. So the fall after the summer when I was eleven and still losing, I started to practice, running the streets near my house every morning before my parents had even put on their bathrobes. I practiced all year, even through the winter when I could see every breath I puffed out and my skin was constantly chapped raw from the cold. And it paid off. I won the first race of the summer. And then I won the next one, and then the next one, and then I kept winning. But I didn’t tell him then. After the accident I didn’t tell him anything, really. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but I still hadn’t told him by the time Luke came.

I don’t remember the first day I heard of Luke Henders. If he had moved in during the school year, then our massive old teacher Ms. Attley would have made him stand in front of the firing squad of our homeroom and introduce himself, say where he was from and say one interesting thing about himself. And that would have been that, then he would have been just a regular kid like the rest of us. But he didn’t, and he wasn’t, and when he moved in toward the beginning of that summer, not one of us saw the moving truck, not one of us knew or thought anything about him until he exploded in our faces like the firecrackers we set off on the tenth of July as an afterthought.

He was a skinny tow-headed boy, just moved in from the country. You could tell he was going to be tall, by the way he walked and swung his arms. His father worked at the plant with most of our fathers, but our fathers never talked about “the new guy,” so we didn’t either. He wasn’t like us, with his easy confidence and lazy drawl. He said “Yes’m” and “Yessir” and supposedly ate with his elbows off the table. He had this slow, cocky walk, not like us, bouncy and tense, ready to run or fight, but like he had all the time in the world to look around and toss his head to get the hair out of his eyes. He was different, but we didn’t really think much of him until he joined the races.

It was late afternoon sometime in early July and the air shimmered with heat as we were setting up for the final race of the day. I was standing on our fresh chalk starting line, on the inside, the position everyone knew was mine by right. Just before Diego Marquez shouted “Bam!” to set us off, there was a commotion at the end of the line and freckle-faced Luke Henders elbowed his way in past the two ten-year-olds.

“Hey, stupid, get off the line, you can’t do that!” Diego ordered.

Luke shrugged and didn’t move. “Why not?”

“Cuz you di’nt run a set!” one of the ten-year-olds hollered.

Luke blinked. “So? I’m twelve. Why can’t I run?”

“You just can’t okay? Come back tomorrow and do it right,” Diego said.

Luke smirked at him. “You lemme run, ‘less yer scared.”

Well that was it, then we had to let him run. Diego, who had long ago named himself our officiator, grunted ferociously for few minutes, pretending to consider it. He finally waved at Luke to move to the end of the line, the outside, the worst place to start, and went back to the sidewalk to be official again. Luke marked up, keeping his lead toe on the edge and ignoring the glares of

49

the offended ten-year-olds. I tried to make eye contact, then looked away from him. He had no idea what this was.

Diego made a gun with his pointer finger and yelled, “Bam!” I was the fastest boy. We all knew that. But that day I flew. I ran wildly, swallowing fire, my fists punching through the air faster than it could move out of my way. But, fast as I ran, I felt someone behind me. I could hear his ragged breath and the bottom of his shoes slapping the pavement out of time with mine. We ran the whole way like that, up Coughton, past South Water, down Blacker Street, and around again to the finish. I won, but collapsed into the skinny line of grass by the curb the second I crossed the line. Luke was there, bent over, hands on his knees and breathing hard.

He grinned down at me and I wanted to hit him. Neither of us said anything, and as I stood Diego triumphantly declared me the winner. Luke turned around, still grinning, and walked away slowly, like it didn’t matter.

I went home that evening, as always, when our mothers started appearing on doorsteps and our streets began smelling of the beans they were cooking. Baked beans, buracho beans, bean soup or beans and rice, it didn’t matter; somehow, it was always beans. I drug my feet across the mat on our porch, even though they weren’t dirty, just so I could tell my mother I did. She smiled at me in her distracted way as I came in, her hands full of plates for the table, and told me to go wash my hands and face for dinner. I nodded but then went into the living room instead. My dad was sitting on the couch with a beer, watching the beginning of the six o’clock news, his wheelchair that had cost so much collapsed at his feet. My little sister, Becca, sat by his feet and waved her doll at me as I came in, but my father didn’t move. I sat down on the other end of the couch, and watched the TV. “Well, what did you do today?” he eventually asked, not turning his head.

“Nothin’.” I stared straight at the TV, then added, “We played baseball.”

He took a drink. “Good. ‘D’ja win?”

I shook my head. “We didn’t play like that.”

He was silent for a minute, nodding. “You didn’t go play down by the plant, did you?”

I shook my head again. “No. We don’t go down there.”

“Good. Don’t ever let me catch you down there.” He took a swig, and we were silent with his pointless, impossible threat hanging in the air. And that was that, the end of the same conversation we had been having every day for a month. We were silent until my mother called us to dinner.

The races were everything after that. Kids from other neighborhoods, kids we had never seen before, started coming to watch. Boys that never won starting talking about beating Luke, and they started trying again. All the boys who weren’t racing would stand at the finish line with the little kids and the girls and hold their breaths as Luke Henders and I came pounding around the corner. The races became everything. All week long, everything we did revolved around what would happen later that day, at five o’clock sharp. And I loved it. I knew I was faster than Luke, and I knew I could beat him, but there was just enough of him treading on my shadow to make me really run. And he changed things for me, too. I wasn’t just king anymore, the fastest boy that no one would ever beat, the fastest boy that every other boy secretly wanted to trip. I became something else, a champion, our defender from this cocky, unwanted invader. I was sort of a hero, as long as I beat Luke.

It was late July the day my mother looked at me over breakfast and announced we were going to spend the morning shopping for school supplies and clothes. School didn’t start for another three 50

Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

weeks, but the sales were starting the ominous countdown and my mother wasn’t about to be left behind.

I hated shopping. For some reason, I couldn’t ever go without getting sick. I hated it, I hated all the crowds and the noise and the grabbing, but most of all I hated the checkout part where you had to bottleneck in with all the others and wait and think and worry about how much it would be this time. I never made it through the annual back-to-school checkout lines without running to the bathroom to throw up, and even in the supermarket, I had to plug my ears so I couldn’t hear all the ka-chings and baggers announcing the totals. My mother would leave me at home if she could, even if she needed me. I felt stupid, but I couldn’t help it.

And this year was worse. I had heard the low voices each night when my parents would talk about money while they thought my sister and I were sleeping. I knew things were bad. My sis

I hated shopping.

For some reason, I couldn’t ever go without getting sick. ter would be starting kindergarten, and we would both need new things for school. I knew my father got a little money for being disabled and my mother brought in a bit with her ironing for rich people, but I still worried.

While we waited for the bus that morning I asked her if I couldn’t just wear my clothes from last year. She gave me a little sideways look, like it was funny but not enough to laugh.

“Sweetheart, you can’t do that, your pants are too short already, and you’re going to keep growing.”

I didn’t say anything, I just watched Becca stab dead leaves onto the end of a stick.

“Are you just worried about getting sick?” She ruffled my hair when I didn’t answer and said, “I’m sorry, we’ll try to make this quick. You just have to come because I need you to try stuff on and pick out some notebooks.”

I nodded. “Yeah. And it’s okay, Mom, you only have to buy me one pair of pants this year, I can be careful and keep them clean.”

She smiled at me, but the corners of her mouth didn’t move, and she didn’t say anything else until the bus came.

I almost made it through the shopping trip. It wasn’t quick after all, though, and by the time we got to the checkout line, I already had a headache from the loud cash registers. I helped my mother pile the heavier groceries and things on the end of the conveyor belt, and then took Becca to sit down far away enough that I couldn’t distinguish anyone’s voice from the noise. I could see my mother’s face, though, and as she carefully counted out the right bills from her wallet, and I saw her bite her lip. I felt sicker. I looked away, and stared at the other people in the other lines. One of the bag boys looked familiar, and as I watched him, I realized it was Luke Henders. I guess it didn’t really surprise me to see him. He never played with us during the day, and I had heard things about his dad drinking all their money away, so it made sense that he had to work. I watched him carefully stack things into a paper sack, fold the top down, 51

brush the hair out of his eyes and smile as the person took the bag off the turnstile. He made it look easy, like he made running look easy, and I envied him for it. After a minute, he looked up and saw me. I lifted my hand in a little wave, and he grinned at me, then went back to bagging.

I decided while I was sitting there that next summer I would bag groceries with Luke instead of getting sick in the checkout line.

Finally my mother was done paying and we helped her carry all the bags out. I thought I was ok, but I threw up while we were waiting for the bus.

I still felt sick by the time we got home. My dad was there of course, in his usual place on the couch. I wondered if he would ever go outside again. For some reason, the sight of him lying there asleep, sunk into the couch with a bowl of chips in his lap, and the TV blaring and forgotten, drove me crazy. I helped my mother take our school things to her room and took Becca, who was sleeping, to our room, but then ran outside as soon as I could. It was four thirty.

I wasn’t thinking about the races, I just had to get out of the house before I threw up again. I walked down the street and turned onto the next, and found Diego and Johnson, and a few boys I knew. They were aiming rocks at some old bottles they had set up on someone’s fence, and they waved me over. My friend Johnson, a hard, bouncy sort of boy with thick hanks of dark hair that stuck to his sweaty forehead, smashed his bottle, then spat and turned to me.

“Where you been all day? We thought maybe one of us was gonna race Luke.” He grinned.

“Dunno, maybe we mighta beat him, but prob’ly not, huh?”

I tried to smile back, but didn’t feel like it. Diego noticed.

“Whatsa matter with you? You look kinda sick…”

I laughed and shook my head. “Naw. I’m not sick.”

“Huh. Okay.” Diego looked confused, but the bells down the street at the Catholic church started to ring five o’clock, so we automatically turned and began walking toward Coughton. I started feeling worse. When we got to the starting line, I looked around and saw as many people there as usually came, all hungry for excitement, maybe a fight, maybe a downfall. I looked at them all and realized that they didn’t want me, they just wanted a race. I swallowed the urge to throw up again.

Diego stepped up to his place on the edge of the sidewalk and officially cleared his throat.

Diego was thirteen, by our rules too old to run, but he liked telling everyone what to do, so he stuck around. I watched him, prancing around by the starting line, ordering the ten-yearolds here and there, shouting “Bam!” instead of just counting to three. I had never liked him much, and I wondered who he was that he could be here with us, instead of working to help his parents like the other older boys. I hated him then, and told myself that this would be my last summer racing.

My heat went okay. I won, of course, but I was breathing hard and my head felt funny when I crossed the finish line. I sat in the grass and watched the other heat of twelve-year-olds and Luke run, and then it was time for the last race. I marked up with the others, in my usual place next to Luke. He looked at me weird, but I turned my head to stare straight ahead, so he did too. Diego yelled, “Bam!” once again, and we began to run.

I couldn’t do it that day. I couldn’t gut everything out of me so I was nothing more than an empty person full of energy, running faster than everyone else. I couldn’t leave everything at the 52

Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

start line so I could run. Or maybe I just felt too sick. Whatever it was, somewhere on the turn from Coughton to South Water I felt Luke bearing down on me. I ran faster but it felt like there was too much air in front of me and my lungs were sticking together from the heat. I ran faster than I could breathe, my pumping arms trying to speed up ‘til my legs felt like they had no blood flowing through them, but Luke pulled even with me. He passed me towards the end where Blacker curves around to Coughton again, and for the first time that summer, I got to see what a person looks like when he’s running ahead of you. The blank faces of so many kids I knew and had grown up with turned toward me as Luke crossed the finish line.

No on knew what to say, at first, and then a few boys went over and congratulated Luke, high-fiving him and grinning with him. No one said anything to me, where I was sitting on the pavement, but my friend Johnson patted me on the back as he walked by, and I thought that was worse than anything else. I got up and started walking. I had an hour before I had to be home, and I didn’t want to stay there with people I didn’t know anymore. Halfway down the street, I felt someone walking beside me. I turned my head and Luke said, “Mind if I come with ya?” I shrugged and he didn’t leave and we kept walking.

The stream that lay down by the edge of the plant was higher than usual, and dirtier. I imagined that somewhere up the creek, in some little town far away enough that I didn’t know about it, it was raining real hard and the kids there were trapped in their houses.

I picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could. It landed in the river, almost on the far side. I was surprised, and pleased. A month ago it wouldn’t have gone past the little sludge island that was dredged up in the middle.

“I’m not allowed to play here,” I announced to Luke, who was climbing, barefoot and monkeystyle, up the trunk of one of the trees that hung out over the stream. He waited until he was sitting comfortably on a thick branch, legs slung on either side, to answer me.

“Why not? Do they think you’re going to fall in this little puddle and drown?” He laughed at his own joke.

“No, it’s not that.” I watched the swollen creek muddy its way around the rocks that were sticking up from the bottom. “My dad used to work here. He… He got kind of hurt a few months ago. He can’t even walk now. I think he said I can’t play here because he’s mad. Maybe he’s worried I’ll get hurt too. I dunno. I’m just not allowed. I do anyway, though. I’m not gonna get hurt.”

“Grown-ups worry too much I reckon,” Luke said to the end of his tree branch, “They think all we do is stupid-people stuff.”

I threw another rock, aiming for a branch sticking out in the middle of the stream, the water bunched up around it. “Yeah.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. Then I turned to him.

“I was sick today,” I announced, sheepishly. “I didn’t feel good.”

“Yeah, I figured you wasn’t your best.” Luke didn’t look at me. “I shoulda just not raced you, so’s it’d be fair, but I really wanted to beat you. Just once. I was gonna tell my dad that I was finally fastest, but he’s real into that honor and big-man stuff, you know, that sort of thing. ‘What doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger’.” He snorted. “He’s been teachin’ me that one real good lately. He wouldn’t like that I beat you when you was sick.”

I shrugged. “Well, you just gotta practice. I did. I got faster. You’ll prob’ly be faster next summer.”

53

Luke shook his head. “Naw, my dad and I are cuttin’ out day after tomorrow. This was my last race. He said the plant only gave him a ‘seasonal position’ or somethin’. I won’t be here next summer.”

One of my rocks finally hit the branch and it cracked. I didn’t say anything, just nodded. I picked up a really big rock and heaved it into the creek, watching the heavy ripples spring away from its splash.

“Who knows?” Luke started peeling the bark off a still-attached twig. “Could be the next town we move to, I’ll be the fastest boy there. Could be I’m not. I dunno. Could be they don’t race there, and they do something else.”

I looked up at him. “I’ve never told my dad about the races. I was gonna, when I won the first time, but then he got hurt, and then I didn’t wanna tell him. I don’t know why, I just haven’t ever told him.”

Luke kept peeling, but glanced down at me. “Yeah. I dunno. Maybe you should.

Maybe I’ll tell my dad too.”

“Hey,” I said, “Let’s race again. I feel better. We can race without everyone standing around yelling and hollering and betting and ruining it all. We can race by ourselves.”

Luke nodded, a slow smile growing on his face. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. We can.”

We walked up the gravel drive to the street that lay parallel with the river. It was silent, and so were we. I picked up a white, jagged rock and drug it across the pavement in a thin white line, our starting line and our finish line. Luke said “from here to the train bridge and back again?” and I nodded. We marked up, I gave Luke the winner’s spot, and he said “Okay, on the count of three.”

“One…” he breathed. I tensed and looked straight ahead.

“Two…” A bright leaf fell from a tree fifty yards down the road.

“Three!” And we were gone.

Lydia Melby is currently an undergraduate English student

at Abilene Christian University. She writes for class, for her school paper The Optimist, and for herself. This is the second time she has had her short fiction published in print, and she hopes to begin making this a habit. She enjoys the work of Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and Aimee Bender, among many others, and wants to someday own a ranch and a pack of Russian wolfhounds.

54

Issue 11 //

SPRING 2009

John Dreyer

Goose Summer She spent summer riding silk, a spider on the morning breeze soaring, diving, carefree as a kite, half wishing the string would break, half afraid it would.

But come apple-picking time, she severed the string herself, put gossamer things aside.

John Dreyer is a writer currently living in Southern California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Christian Science Monitor, War Cry, Polishing Stone Magazine, Spring Hill Review, Redeemer Writes, RUMINATE and Radix Magazine. His articles and essays have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Grayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sporting Journal, Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, and HomeLife Magazine, among others. In a previous life, he was the head of corporate communications for The Walt Disney Company.

55

Katherine E. Schneider

Lantern Suddenly all I see is the lantern in my hand; assaulted by rain, its flame alive.

Midnight came fast, and darkness edged in between the trees, across the leaf-layered ground, and left me lost.

I remember the evening, how the sunset flashed on my eyes like an old filmstrip; bright and silent, light as breath, and ancient, etched onto my memory.

Hypnotized, I fell asleep.

Later, when the storms rolled in, they washed those watercolors awayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; bled every image wet and heavy, ruined that ethereal page and woke me in a flood of gray.

I almost drowned for shock and sadness until I lifted up my arm; and I could see the step before me, and the next one after that.

I must move to be rescued, to find a way beyond this place.

The flame defies the dark, and I see I am not alone; there are others waking in the night, and lifting their lanterns, walking home.

56

Katherine E. Schneider is a graduate of Fairfield University and is currently pursuing an MFA in writing with a concentration in poetry at Fairfield Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s low-residency MFA program. When she is not working at a publishing company in New York City, she can be found in either suburban New York or Connecticut spending time with friends and family or enjoying other creative outlets which inspire her writing, such as playing the guitar or classical double bass. She is working on a collection of poems about Biblical figures, faith in daily life, and good reasons to rejoice.

Mary Marie Dixon

Gone Broody the spring of my sister’s twelfth birthday, when gray spurs the willow, and yellow scales the forsythia, she carries her speckled Sussex to roost in a covered basket, its rose comb laced in the weaving. my sister and her hen slur polyphonies in clucking tongues. she plays her violin from the haymow; arpeggio rays pass through the sun’s chording. gone broody, my sister rearranges bale blocks into compartments, and blankets these rooms with feedsack. she reads cover to cover, under the flashlight’s beam. four times daily, she uncrates the hen to feed, and closes her back up again. breath, alfalfa and purple clover, fills the chambered mow and rises in straw towers. cadent pecks inside the eggs accompany my sister’s Kyrie; over and over, the chinned violin throbs with timbred weight.

Mary Marie Dixon, a visual artist and poet, is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with an MA in theology and an MFA in English creative writing. She has published creative works in periodicals and a collection of poetry, Eucharist, Enter the Sacred Way (Franciscan University Press, 2008). Her focus on women’s spirituality and the mystics combined with the Great Plains and the spiritual power of nature makes for an eclectic mix. She has exhibited her visual work and accompanying poetry in galleries and explores the visual and poetic intersection in her creative life.

57

REMEMBERING

THE FUTURE

THE OTHER JOURNAL

Anthology:2004–2007

A Collection of Essays, Interviews, and Poetry at the Intersection of Theology and Culture EDITED BY

Chris Keller and Andrew David

ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-908-8 | 208 pp. | $23 | paper

ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-908-8 | 208 pp. | $23 | paper

Remembering the Future is a collection of poems, essays, and interviews that ask readers to see their world with double-vision—to imagine the redemptive consequences of engaging the world with a fastidious awareness of both the biblical tradition and the cultural moment. Remembering the Future is gathered from the first years of The Other Journal, an online quarterly positioned at the intersection of theology and culture. The Other Journal examines theology with fresh eyes, probing faith with passion, authenticity, and creativity; and this anthology represents the highlights of that endeavor, including content from some of the most important voices in the field of theology today. Remembering the Future offers readers an engaging, thought-provoking picture of what sound theological thinking can and must offer today’s Christians giving witness to Christ in our contemporary cultural landscape.

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uP Poem.

$15 per entry; three poems per entry. The deadline is may 15th, 2009.

Enter online at www.ruminatemagazine.org. contest@ruminatemagazine.com OR

RUMINATE MAGAZINE Attn: Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize 140 N. Roosevelt Ave Fort Collins, CO 80521

ruminated

LAST NOTE

ruminate has been through many passages

in our past ten issues and two and a half years of publication. we have certainly enjoyed the chance to chew on life with you all, our readers, and we pray for many more journeys together.

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*ruminate staff

Brett Carter. Projection 2. Analog photograph from a projection.

Brett Carter is a working artist living in Fort Collins, Colorado. He attends

Colorado State University, where he finished his studies in photography in 2007, and is currently studying the art of metalsmithing. He also enjoys various drawing and printmaking processes, but cannot paint to save his life. He is suspicious of all things digital. His photographs are an attempt to reconcile the physical world with the one inside his head. More specifically, he is interested in the function of memory and its ongoing transformation and degradation due to the effects of time and perception.

Brett Carter. Projection 1. Analog photograph from a projection.