Issue 23: The Stories We Tell

POET RY NONFICT IO N F ICT IO N VIS UAL A RT +

moths who know nothing of worms • Walter Wangerin, Jr. stream flowing uphill and other wonders • Jeanne Murray Walker telling the stories, all of them • Nahal Suzanne Jamir remnants of daily living • Aynslee Moon

23 ISSUE

2012 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize Winner: Nahal Suzanne Jamir

$

SPRING

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RUMINATE?

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CONTENTS

NOT ES Editor’s From You Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 5 28 58 60

NONFI CT I ON Jeanne Murray Walker 35 My Dead Brother Teaches Me to Travel

POET RY FI CT I ON

Sandra Soli Year of the Probable Boom 8 Heather Cousins An Old Tale 10 Jordan K. Walters The Thaw 11

Nahal Suzanne Jamir 13 Stories My Mother Told Me

Christopher Yates 46 Silo Factor

CJ Giroux Spring 12 Virginia Chase Sutton At the Shrine 22

R EV I EW Tamara Lang 24 Review of Faith and Other Flat Tires

by Andrea Palpant Dilley

Walter Wangerin, Jr. The Bent World Broods 23

V I S UAL ART

Judith Adkins Dowry 26 Fire Prevention Month 27 FRONT COVER

Niamh Corcoran Germ 33

BACK COVER

Jacqueline Kolosov Snow in April 34

INSIDE FRONT COVER

Ken Meisel Oil-Covered Murre Washed 42 up on Garnet Sands

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Sheri L. Wright Grilled

32

Aynslee Moon Hood Touch Red Cosmic

INSIDE BACK COVER

Angela Young Skin I

30 31

Jen Dempsey Song of Husks 44 Elizabeth Swann The Dog 45

Jodi Hays Tethered In Progress

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear Readers, Issue 23 is about stories. Of course, you might say, that’s why I bought the dang magazine. But we found this issue to be particularly about the power of stories, the significance of stories, the “why” of stories. The winning short story for this year’s William Van Dyke Short Story Prize is “Stories My Mother Told Me” by the talented Nahal Suzanne Jamir.

Our judge for the prize, Walter Wangerin, Jr., a master storyteller in his own right, says of the mother in this piece, “She might seem at the beginning scattered, thinking disjointed thoughts. But story is that way. And as we live longer with her, we find that the joints are an (unspoken) wisdom after all.”

I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around why stories are so important to us, and I believe it is these joints that Mr. Wangerin speaks of, these connections between parts of our lives, that get at the “why” of storytelling. In this issue’s “Notes from You,” Nathan Huffstutler writes, “Making these connections gives us our humanity. When our sense of story dies—when our experiences seem ultimately random and unconnected—we may lose the will to live.” (As a side note, after reading the notes in this issue from readers and contributors alike, I was tempted to make the editor’s note simply this: “Dear readers, SEE NOTES.” They are that good—thoughtful conversations about the meaning of stories. I commend them to you and hope you take some time to read them.)

What a powerful notion—that the desire to pull together the pieces of our life is so intrinsic, something we constantly do without even knowing it. It’s probably what keeps me up at night, trying to incorporate the day’s events into some kind of larger theme or purpose. And I think that’s why stories have meant so much to me. When I was a girl, my grandmother used to tell me this fantastical story of the time I was very sick, eighteen months old, and in the hospital. She said I was in a room full of beds with other sick children, and she was watching me through a glass divider. She said when I finally saw her, the electricity suddenly went out in the hospital. I love how she tells this story, no explanation, no qualifications, just that when our eyes met, a bolt of electricity went straight through her and the whole hospital shut down. Now that’s a story! And I don’t ask questions. My grandmother is a force of a woman, and I simply let her stories pour over me, even when they include telepathy or spaceships on dirt roads in Carlisle, Arkansas.

Another vivid story from my childhood is one my mother read to me—Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I don’t remember many details, just this overwhelming awe of the vast universe and its unlimited possibilities. And as Judith Adkins says in her poem “Dowry”(p. 26), “a heedless desire to put off, until the last breath, the story’s end.” I love that kind of anticipation, and I love that my mom, despite a difficult life, still believed in beautiful endings.

Like the icebergs on this issue’s cover, my life feels tethered by stories. They are not perfect connections, and I can’t tell you the “because of this, then this.” But, I see little fractures of these stories in details of my life now. Maybe I’m trying to live up to my superhero-electricity-bending ability, or maybe I just want to connect with my children and grandchildren like my grandmother did with me. And maybe I long to see lovely possibilities in all that I meet and hopeful endings for all that I know because of the book my mother shared with me. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that a life without stories would be pretty bland, and as Mr. Huffstutler suggests, possibly fatal.

We hope you enjoy the wealth of stories presented in this issue. And that each poem, each story, each work of art within the magazine encourages you and inspires you to make and see your own stories as important and meaningful, and ultimately, life-giving.

Happy reading,

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RUMINATE READERS & CONTRIBUTORS ON THE STORIES WE TELL Send us your notes for Issue 24 to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. We love hearing from you!

FROM YOU

Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We tell ourselves stories in order to die, too. I wrote a memoir for a master’s thesis. I gave the bound copy to my dad, and he read it on an airplane. After the flight, he called me from his cell phone.

With a quivering voice, wild, shouting above the wind, he cried, “I read your book! For the first time in my life, I feel somebody understands me. I feel like I can die now in peace.” He said it was the greatest gift someone could give him. In saying so, he gave me such a gift in return.

A story advocates, excavates, ameliorates truth; it redeems, heals, combs the frays of pain and loss and fear and imperfection into order, AN order, not THE order, but one that we can live with. And die with.

Ioanna Opidee MILFORD, CONNETICUT

My mom was not a storyteller, but she was a “story listener”— the rare type of person who delights in the art of drawing out and hearing the stories of others.

Polly Henry SEWELL, NEW JERSEY

What does it mean to be human? At the core, it means to need stories. God, the great storyteller, made every one of us in his image.

This image, the imago Dei, causes us to connect our experiences into thousands of inciting moments, trajectories of rising action, crises, climaxes, and resolutions—whether tragic or comic. Making these connections gives us our humanity. When our sense of story dies— when our experiences seem ultimately random and unconnected—we may lose the will to live. Our need to connect our experiences into story is more basic than our need for food and shelter. Jesus is the central figure in the Story of His chosen people. He’s the Hero who gave all to rescue us and transform our personal tragedies into His Divine Comedy. The Gospel—Jesus’ perfect sacrifice and His resurrection—is the Story that makes us fully human.

Nathan Huffstutler WATERTOWN, WISCONSIN

As a child, I was protected inside the safe world of stories. The head librarian of our public library, transfigured as superhero, saved me from the dangerous realm of my mother’s mental illness by allowing me to roam the stacks until closing time and check out as many books as I could lug home. Now, as then, my favorite stories always end And they lived happily ever after.

Sandra Soli POETRY CONTRIBUTOR

The words that change, restore or comfort, are the ones that we live, breathe, smell, and feel. They are our stories and for some they provide a voice where there was none. Stories can remind us of who we are and who we are not. They do not act as a hammer to our fragile state, instead the words create space and time to process and absorb. They allow us to come to resolution without feeling beaten. And because they are gentle in this manner, we tend not to run from them.

Becky Dawson FORT COLLINS, COLORADO

When I

was young, Christmas was simpler than children experience today; telling stories was a meaningful pastime. I would lie under the heavy-scented tree, and with each layer of decorations that were placed, one of my older brothers would begin a story. From an ornament box spilled a small gingercolored house, with a sandpaper-like surface, about the size of an old bottle of ink. The house had red cello windows, a tiny door, a red “brick” chimney. Written in pencil, inside the house was my mother’s name, “Ruthie-1919.” The little house elicited special big brother stories, for the owner of the house was never the same: a shy Prince, The Three Kittens Who Lost Their Mittens, or a magical gardener. Stories unfolding from the little house lasted for days, an advent tale of sorts. Years later, that little house still has a place in my home at Christmas. No more golden ringlets down my back or a hand-sewn blue velvet dress. But the stories . . . the stories are still with me.

Sally Giancola TUCSON, ARIZONA

Great storytelling

is a cooperative experience. Stories that stick with us are not simply those that contain great, self-revealing epiphanies, but those which naturally push us to discover those things for ourselves.

Justin Carlton SWEDESBORO, NEW JERSEY

My grandfather, a Texas sheep rancher, loved telling stories.

At suppertime, an almost living hush settled around the table, while my brother and I listened, enthralled, to tales about . . . sheep. One adventurous lamb or another, some especially troubled creature, a quirky member of the flock. Sheep are reputed to be stupid herd animals, but in my grandfather’s telling each was a sensitive, complicated individual. Grandad’s drawl slowed, searched, wondered. His eyes took on a nimble shine, like pasture grasses reflected in still water; his voice slid into a dark gold timbre. Each story, each errant ewe, became a singular mystery worth taking seriously. Among all else that it does, storytelling lifts up a being—caught in particular filaments of time, place, history—and beckons us to enter into its woolly conundrum. At my grandfather’s memorial service, I read the 23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” I recited tremulously, my voice brimming with all that those words might hold.

Judith Adkins POETRY CONTRIBUTOR Read more notes from our contributors on page 60.

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2012

F I R ST P LAC E Nahal Suzanne Jamir “Stories My Mother Told Me”

S ECO N D P LAC E Christopher Yates “Silo Factor”

William Van Dyke Short Story Prize F I N A L I ST J U D G E , WALTER WANGERIN, JR. S U P P O RT E D by THE VAN DYKE FAMILY CHARITABLE in memory of William Van Dyke, who always loved a good story

FOUNDATION

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Angie Netro, “The Wise Avenue”

WALTER WANGERIN, JR.

on Nahal Suzanne Jamir’s “Stories My Mother Told Me”

F I N A L I STS Kirsten Clodfelter “How to Prepare for a Disaster” John Fried “Destroy All Monsters” A.G. Harmon “For Your Listening Pleasure” David Hopes “First Full Night of Winter” Anneliese Schultz “Child” Britt Tisdale “Flower Pepper”

Stage by stage and story by story, Nahal Suzanne Jamir deepens our understanding of the woman who tells them. She [the mother] might seem at the beginning scattered, thinking disjointed thoughts. But story is that way. And as we live longer with her, we find that the joints are an (unspoken) wisdom after all.

As she goes, so goes Ms. Jamir’s whole piece.

“Stories,” she writes, “are nonsense and disappointment.” A good thing to remember.

Because the stories of “My Mother” embrace not only the narrator, but also his culture, his culture’s spirit, the whole business of behaviors and relationship.

Sandra Soli

Year of the Probable Boom The hands of the Clock of Doom have moved again.

— Movietone News, 1952

We follow each other like young lemmings,

crouch against hallway baseboards, elbows to knees in lumpy rows.

Miss Foster reads from the handbook as we wait for nuclear thunder, fire blossoms to fill a fifth-grade sky the puff to begin easy as Uncle Wally’s Lucky Strike cloud

on Johnstone Street.

Not lemmings, but gum-chewers, gossips,

marble-shooters with chalky pockets.

We want to look.

Miss Foster warns of flash blindness, but everyone knows the blast is overdue. We are sure to miss the whole thing. The sun blinks through windows. I squint, willing ceiling lights to explode. Now. On Saturday, after the yo-yo man, Movietone News reports a clock set by scientists in Chicago, two minutes to midnight. Close to toast now. Roasted toast, ta da dee ah— Doom rhymes with Boom rhymes with—Quiet, Fifth Graders.

We are counted, a useless efficiency.

Our sensible parents buy shelters out back with water for 30 days, TV dinners in the freezer compartment (Betty Furness in her shirtdress, smiling), and a Geiger counter.

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Will radioactivity multiply blistered peas, to feed millions?

Could we mend a shattered geography transformed by Duck & Cover rehearsals on alternate Thursdays?

Always we laugh to think of a body’s neon interior, our atomic bones— and before the spelling test Nicky Green carves his name on the classroom moon so Birdlegs Foster can see it with 3-D glasses.

Denying the prospect of death by ground water, we grin at her notion of global responsibility: how we will rebuild a pickled world, bring honor to Jefferson Elementary.

We understand fallout shelters tout à fait, certified only for approved occupant lists.

Who would choose us?

We don’t even come to dinner when they call.

Finally the All-Clear siren chases gigglers back to class, a dragon’s desk.

The fragrant nomenclature of wood

breathes in, breathes out and as we are after all to live we line up to sharpen pencils, remember to capitalize E-n-i-w-e-t-o-k.

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Heather Cousins

An Old Tale There’s an old tale about a town who thought the moon had fallen into their river.

With nets, they tried to bring it up again— but the moon kept breaking into pieces, slipping through.

When I found out I was pregnant, I stepped into the shower, put my hands on the river of my body, and slid them up my flat stomach, letting water braid over, trying to find the small glow of her, my first child, fallen from the sky.

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

Jordan K. Walters

The Thaw Upon entering March, the world seems withered and parched like a juiceless lime, still intact and within reach but completely void of its dignity. Snow neither glistens nor blankets but simply rots, malignant and mushed, a magnet for car exhaust and decayed leaves. But wait: this is the energy— the low hum that rises when the world is not itself but all at once is completely itself, as if it’d been alive and rushing all the while, and we’d forgotten to open the curtains.

Nearly silent, steady rain, greying the sky, silhouettes the still-bare branches of damp and patient trees; the dim, pale clearness of dusk frames the zealous green of newborn grass. And the world is now fully itself once more, drinking from its own mouth, not yet roused but no longer asleep, waiting for the first dogwood blossom to commence this new and dewy cadence.

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CJ Giroux

Spring On the west side of the soccer field, lilacs drape themselves over cyclone fences like debutantes, perfumed, corseted, lifting lavender skirts over hoops.

They stare east, beyond the uniformed children, their parents—in sunglasses, sweatshirts— to rows of garages, white with black trim, their peeling paint like the pimpled faces of gloved escorts, pomaded, sweating.

All await the signal to bow, join hands, waltz.

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

E M D L O T R E H T O M Y M S IE R STO NAHAL SUZANNE JAMIR

A picnic and a warm day, but my mother shivers. Eating outside has never appealed to her. She

removes food from the basket, and were it not for the soft earth beneath, her dissatisfaction would be heard.

My mother lives alone, and she prefers her outings to involve her grandson. She hates living alone, but since my father died two years ago, that has been her charge. And with it, loneliness and grief and frustration. Still, despite my son Faraz’s absence, she is here, mainly because I asked her to be. In her old age, my mother has become more eager to please me, even though she knows I won’t let her live with us. My family and I are moving to California, the other side of the country, in two weeks, and she wants to go with us.

My mother wants to take Faraz on long walks and to teach my American wife how to cook Persian dishes. My mother would tell my family her stories. But like me, my wife and son would realize the irrelevance of these stories. We are American, and we’re heading west.

My mother can’t even remember her own stories. Many times, I asked her to retell a tale, and she said, “I don’t remember that one. It must not have been very good.” I always claimed, It was! She took advantage of my enthusiasm and told me a new story, which she would later forget. Though I only heard some of my mother’s stories once and only half-listened to others, they are returning now, pouring out from the recesses of my memory like they have something to prove. Stories are nonsense and disappointment—something your mother never remembers or cares about once you’re grown up.

It’s like your life as a child was a lie. I won’t let the stories out to contaminate my own son. I will rid myself of the anxiety these tales impose. Today, I will return these stories to my mother, and I’ll be ready to leave her and her cautionary tales, her happily-ever-afters, her family histories, her nonsense, her failed imagination.

Okay, one hundred birds walk into a sports bar. An old man in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on a stool turns to check them out, but he’s seen crazier. The bartender is bald and wears a t-shirt with sleeves ripped off. He looks like he should work in a tougher venue.

The birds rejoice because they basically have the place to themselves, except for the old man in the Hawaiian shirt. Party central—feathers and sunflower seed shells on the floor. Toilets filled with white shit. Birds perched on stools shoved around by birds behind them trying to get a drink. Hummingbirds piss everyone off by hovering behind the bar, drinking the beer straight from the tap. All the birds laugh at the clumsy men on the televisions.

The old man in the Hawaiian shirt can hardly stand it. He tells the birds that there is a bird named Simorgh who can grant them true happiness at a bar called Qaf. Qaf means mountain, which is a pretty

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bad name for a bar. Anyway, all of the birds quiet down, turn to one another with looks of delight. Birds are generally depressive creatures, which is probably why they drink so much. The birds spend hours discussing the idea of Simorgh. One says, “He’s a robot!” Another says, “No, he’s the mystic Rumi.” And another says, “A space child from another dimension.” Finally, the man in the Hawaiian shirt gives them directions to Qaf. The bartender remembers money, profit, and suddenly doesn’t like the idea of losing all these customers. Birds drink a lot, and they tip well. The bartender discounts all of his alcohol just as the birds are ready to leave. Needless to say, half of the birds decide to stay. To the old man’s dismay, most of the birds that remain are bluebirds and titmice. The other half of the birds shake their heads or bob them up and down in disgust and head out for Qaf. Halfway down 1st Avenue, the birds encounter a hot dog stand. Well, the sign says “Hot Dogs,” but the vender also sells hamburgers, pizza, and nachos. Nine drunk birds can’t resist, so they stay to try everything on the dry-erase board menu.

The rest of the birds hang a right onto MLK Boulevard. As they cross 2nd Avenue, they run across a Ben Franklin lying on the ground. A male redbird snatches it and declares he’s going to buy a new stereo.

Another male redbird doesn’t think it’s fair that one bird gets the money when they all found it together.

So, he starts a fight. The rest of the birds sense this conflict could last a while, and they move on.

On the corner of MLK and 5th Avenue is the largest nudie bar the birds have ever seen. It’s called Lavand, doves strut their stuff out front. Nine birds are lost.

NINE DRUN

BIRDS CAN’T RESIST, TRY EVERYTHKIN G ON THE DRY-ER SO THEY STAY TO ASE-BOARD MENU .

Thirty birds walk into Qaf. From the outside on 7th Avenue, it looks like a typical bar: neon sign that reads “Qaf” followed by a little neon mountain. Inside, though, is a glorious sight. The birds are surrounded by mirrors. Not just on the walls, but on the ceiling and floor. There is a lantern in the middle of the room, and its light dances all around them. The light also reflects playfully in the mirrors.

On and on. The thirty birds mull about, looking for this guy Simorgh. Even after hours, all they see are their own reflections. The birds are lost.

“No,” my mother says, “that isn’t right. It’s filthy.”

“I made it real.”

“It’s just like your baseball, Massoud,” she says. “You want to wear it like you’re proud. But it has nothing to do with you.”

When I was in high school, she burned my letter jacket because she didn’t want me playing baseball.

She’d put up with it for so many years. But that jacket pushed her too far.

As I protested the smell of burning wool and leather, she smiled nice and wide, and her eyes wouldn’t focus. She looked drunk, only she hadn’t touched a drink in her entire life. An act of heroism.

My father didn’t have much to say about it. He just shook his head in disgust, which was all he could do, really, not because he loved her but because my mother was what Americans call a force. I could never see through this power of my mother’s, to see her love for my dad or me. Surely, she must have loved us terribly, must have sacrificed a great deal. What else justified the anger that went along with that power?

“In California,” my mother says, “they are filthy. There are hippies and drugs.” I laugh at her, and she smiles. Then, she says, “I have a secret to tell you about your father.”

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

I ask her to tell me, but she says that I must wait. “Mother,” I say, “you must tell me.” But she refuses. She tells me to continue with my stories.

Qays and Leyli were in love. Both fathers were chieftains. Both families were well off and were respected.

Yet, there were rumors about Qays being insane. One night, the townspeople said that Qays sheared a sheep and ate the wool. Leyli’s father refused to have her marry Qays. She was only to see him one last time to say goodbye. Qays gave Leyli a ring and promised to love her forever. He said that he would go out in search of her and that eventually they’d be together.

Qays went on his own journey, one that he chose for himself. He knew he must struggle to earn Leyli. He refused food and stayed in the desert on the outskirts of town. The townspeople could hear his mad cries.

He sang songs of strange beings in love that were dying on the beach with no water. His words were odd, his sounds off-key. They said he ate the dirt and the rocks and heat. They said he spoke to the snakes. Qays became “Majnun,” meaning “crazy for love,” to all but Leyli.

Leyli wandered, too, but within the city walls. She stayed away from her family. Even when at home, she remained outside, secluded in the walled-in family garden. She spent her months alone growing the garden into astounding lushness. Her mother said to her father in privacy, “It is like she has found a child now that her lover has gone.”

After months, Majnun returned to the city. In its alleys, policemen beat him up, mistaking him for a thief.

When he arrived at Leyli’s home, her father still refused to let Majnun see her. Too tired to fight, Majnun turned away. As he rounded the corner of the property, he heard a song, like a nightingale. He listened and knew that it sang his sound.

He climbed the high wall. On the other side was the garden. And Leyli.

Clinging to the top of the wall, Majnun called out to her. She didn’t hear him. He fell, and the ground met him with a lover’s embrace. Leyli kept on singing. She became famous but never married. She died a very old woman.

“Is that one better?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s more like how I told it.” She stares at this ten-year-old playing Frisbee with his cocker spaniel. “But I told it better.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, it’s not your fault,” my mother sighs. “You just don’t have enough poetry in you. It’s your American side. So, so—” Her voice trails off, and she gestures toward the boy and his dog. “In California, you won’t let Faraz surf, will you? It’s dangerous.”

“Don’t worry. He knows how to swim.”

“Does he know how to stop an earthquake?”

“What is it about my father?”

“Was he really a father to you, Massoud?” She eats some torshi, and makes her sour-eating face. “My secret is for the end of the day, when you are done talking. My secret is not about childish things.”

A boy prince, the Prince of the World Before the World. He traveled the Great Blackness looking for something to fill the planet. He brought back a little bit of everything. Sparkling rings, nebulous clouds, novas, supernovas, black holes, wormholes. Dust and darkness. Everything in between. Except a sun, for he couldn’t hold onto any of the younger stars, which were slippery things. So, he returned home with all the splendor of the universe and no light to see it by, no warmth by which to feel its beauty. He swore to his people that he would return with the fire. That’s why the Prince of the World Before the World left again.

The Prince of the World Before the World discovered a planet made of water. When he came down onto it, he found women waiting for him. They told him they were sad, and the water of the planet consisted solely of their tears. But the water was fresh, the tears without salt. The Prince didn’t understand how that could be: sorrow was always accompanied by something else. No, the women said, that is happiness. Sadness is

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pure. He asked the pure ones where he could find a fire that he could take home with him. The women just cried.

The Prince of the World Before the World discovered a planet made of earth. The Prince found it strange, the dirt. On his planet, the ground was made of sand. Earth resembled sand but was darker and moister. The Prince relished its difference. He felt that fire must be nearby because this earth looked burned. He called out. The earth itself vibrated in answer. The Prince wrote out a message in the dirt.

The earth erased it, and responded in like manner: Fire is inside me. When the Prince asked if he might have some, the land began to break apart. Whether the earth was angry or accommodating, the Prince could not tell. He had to leave or die.

The Prince of the World Before the World discovered a planet made of wind that moved nothing. He found all the trees young because they did not need to grow, to age. The Prince listened and he could hear the wind. He could hear it well. He thought he felt it, too. He asked the leaves if they could feel the wind. Of course, silly, they said. He asked the leaves why then they did not move. We don’t know this word, move. The Prince jumped up and down. Only the wind moves. If we move, we become the wind. Perplexed, the Prince asked the leaves where he could find a fire he could take home with him.

The leaves asked their young trees, who screamed in horror. They told the Prince that Mother Wind had banished fire long ago to a place far away in the Great Blackness. The Prince asked where, and the young trees told him they did not want to know.

The Prince of the World Before the World hovered in the Great Blackness, facing everywhere the stars he could not conquer. He discovered there was no planet made of fire. This is why the Prince of the World Before the World never returned. But he was warm out there. And safe. Like the young trees, he had no need to age.

My mother wrinkles her nose. “When did I tell you that one?”

“In second grade,” I tell her. “I was home with the chicken pox, and you were feeding me four oranges a day.”

“Oranges are good for you when you’re sick.”

“Do you remember the story?” I ask.

“No, but does it matter?” she asks. “If you remember it, then it’s important, like a dream. Maybe Baha’u’llah wants you to remember for a reason.”

I recite:

O SON OF MAN!

Write all that We have revealed unto thee with the ink of light upon the tablet of thy spirit.

Should this not be in thy power, then make thine ink of the essence of thy heart. If this thou

canst not do, then write with that crimson ink that hath been shed in My path. Sweeter

indeed is this to Me than all else, that its light may endure for ever.” (Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words) “I’m glad you remember God,” my mother says.

And then I am my mother: “I met your father when I was at Baha’i school in North Carolina. I heard his voice even before I saw him. I knew, I knew I was going to marry him. His voice was so calm. I asked Elizabeth Green to introduce us. He said he fell in love with my hair.

“Then, I had to go back to Augusta. He was on a military base in Colorado because he was drafted. He wrote me letters. These letters were so beautiful. You can’t believe it, Massoud. I’ll show you if you want me to. He wrote letters for years until the army let him go.

“The letter when he proposed I read to everybody in the ER, and they all said, ‘No wonder you cry when you read these letters.’ Even the doctors said so.

“Still, your father wanted to ask my father for permission. So, he sent his letter to Iran. He wrote one to his parents. I also sent a letter to my parents and his parents. Everyone asked permission. We were

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worried the letters from Iran wouldn’t come back in time for May, but they did.

“It was the worst day. The cake melted. I should have known then.”

Having finished the story, I ask my mother. “Do you remember your own words?”

“Those are your words,” she says. “It’s true the wedding wasn’t so good, but I always told you I didn’t care. I loved your father.”

“Is that your secret? Or is the opposite your secret? You cannot keep this from me.”

“My secret has nothing to do with hurt. I loved your father.”

But her words killed him a long time ago, not with anger. With something else.

A woman in a hooded white robe enters. Everyone stares at her. She is the first goddess. Light and pain emit from her core, and seconds later everyone is dead. She is the last goddess. And the best.

When I was eleven, I dreamt that my mother died at the hospital where she worked. In my dream, I saw her walking down a hospital corridor, toward the white light of death, indiscernible from that of the hospital. My mother was wearing her white uniform, too. After this, I was certain my mother really was going to die at work. I was young enough to believe.

I’m not sure why I was so afraid of my mother dying, but often, I pretended to be sick so she would stay home.

When I got older, I pretended to be well.

Now, she is retired. I should be relieved because I still believe in that dream. I am not relieved. Now, I am afraid my mother will never die.

A barren landscape. People made of stone. What could wake them? They are still and cold if you dare to touch them. One day, a traveling salesman came through with a lamp. Whatever stone its light touched melted into flesh. The traveling salesman was so frightened he left without the lamp. The Stone People,

DAY. THE CAKE IT WAS THE WORST E WN THEN. O KN AV H LD U O SH I .

ED T EL M now melted, wandered aimlessly for a while, but after a few days, one of their young took charge. He realized the value of the lamp. After a few weeks, however, so did everyone else. Every merchant who came through wished to “pay respects” by adorning the lamp with jewels or gold.

One day a messenger came from the King. He told the Stone People that the King was confiscating the lamp because it was so precious. The Stone People possessed no weapons, so they couldn’t prevent the King’s men from taking the lamp.

At the palace, the King adorned the lamp with more and more jewels. He placed it in the court, inside a glass case. Followers came from far and wide to see the Wonderlamp.

The Stone People quickly turned back into rocks, boulders.

Eventually, the King tired of the Wonderlamp. It fell into the hands of merchants, then thieves who stripped it bare of wealth.

Then, one day . . .

A traveling salesman arrived with a lamp. People made of stone were warmed by its light. As stone, their dreams were light. Had they finally become their dreams? Perhaps, but we must wait for the King to come again.

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“I remember this one,” my mother says. “I didn’t write it. It’s a book you had. I think it was called The Wonderlamp.”

“You told me I didn’t have books when I was younger.”

“Well, one or two,” she says. “This one was good and clean. The stone people are the faithless.”

“So, God is a lamp?” I ask.

“No, no. It’s a story.”

“Can light make stone into flesh, the dead into the living?”

My mother sighs, and says, “If it’s supposed to be the light of God.” “And does the light of God make life?”

“Yes.” “And does it make love?”

“Yes.” She stands up with a little effort and shields her eyes so she can look across the sunny field.

After a moment, she turns to me to tell me about a news story that she saw about an earthquake, about

THE WIND IS SO ELEGANT TODAY. the poor and the poorly constructed homes. About how no one knows what to do. She asks me if I know what to do. I tell her that I know to stand in the doorway. Then, I just stare, still stuck on the field and this day. I wonder why no one is flying kites. The wind is so elegant today.

Mullah Nasr al-din was a rich man who would go to the public square and give away his money. Yet, he often borrowed items from those who lived near him. One day, he borrowed a pot from one of his neighbors.

In this pot, Nasr al-din cooked fesenjaan, which was very good. Then, he returned the pot.

Inside, the owner found a smaller pot. The neighbor said, “Nasr al-din, you only borrowed one pot.”

Nasr al-din replied, “Yes, but the pot was pregnant.”

Again, Nasr al-din borrowed a bigger pot, but from a different neighbor. He cooked ghormeh sabzi, which was very good. Then, he returned the pot.

Inside the owner found another pot, though this pot inside the pot was larger than the first one.

Again, the initial pot was pregnant.

And so, Nasr al-din kept borrowing bigger and bigger pots.

Until one day, he borrowed the biggest pot in town. He cooked many things, which were all very good.

Then, he returned the pot. But without another pot inside it. This neighbor said, “Nasr al-din, was this pot not pregnant, too?”

Nasr al-din replied, “Yes, but the child died at birth.”

My mother recites the punch line with me. “That one I love. It used to be my father’s favorite.”

I don’t have a picture of my grandfather. I never met him. He died when I was six. My father answered the phone and silently handed the phone to my mother. I like to think in that silence I knew something was wrong. But it was my father who had the courage to hold my mother as she cried and shook. Part of her grief was knowing she couldn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t go back to Iran because she was Baha’i.

She told me once years later that the grave, like many Baha’i graves, had been lost, built upon. So if we ever want to visit his grave, we’ll have to enter an office building, a gas station, or maybe someone else’s home. This is what it means to have family. The dead require you to enter someone else’s home.

My family is my own. The dead are dead.

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Uncle Mahmed falls in love with an American girl. They have a beautiful baby girl and name her Jessica.

After many years of working hard, Mahmed slows down. He begins to look around. Jessica has grown.

Silky black hair, eyes like his own mother’s. But his wife, the American girl, won’t allow Mahmed to sit still. Money, she demands. He obeys because he doesn’t know what else to do. The American girl demands so rarely. So, Mahmed believes her actions sincere and justified. He works hard.

Years later, he has no friends. He works for IBM, and at home all he does is surf the Internet for odd pieces of knowledge. The American girl eats ice cream and doesn’t move when he touches her. Through Jessica, his mother’s eyes chide him: I told you to marry a nice Persian girl.

“Did you get the bonus?” the American girl asks.

“Yes.” “Did you get the bonus?” the American girl asks.

“Yes.” “Did you get the bonus?” the American girl asks.

“Yes.” When they have been married for six years, Mahmed notices the American girl spending many nights out with her friends. He knows her secret. Still, upon confronting her and hearing her confession, Mahmed senses the piercing pain of his mother’s god.

That weekend, while his wife shops and his daughter is at a friend’s house, he hangs himself.

“It was such a tragedy,” my mother says.

“You know,” I say, “in The Divine Comedy, the spirits of suicides are captured in young trees.”

“I don’t know anything about this comedy,” my mother says. “I don’t think it sounds very funny.”

“He was only your second cousin, right?”

“It’s a lesson,” she says. “His sisters and his mother told him not to marry her. They loved him and knew best. You should have listened to me before you got married.”

“But you married an American, too,” I say.

“It’s not about American,” she yells. “It’s about believing in God, being good and clean. That wife of yours, I need to teach her. She would probably go outside for ice cream during an earthquake.”

I tell my mother that my wife isn’t a child, and my mother says that we’re all children until someone we love dies.

There was a young girl who walked on walls. She proved thus her courage. Always, however, the young girl wanted to jump off the wall. Most girls her age wanted to fly up into the sky, but she wanted to fly down at the ground. The earth itself was foreign to her the way the sky was to many of her friends.

Day after day, the girl climbed up the wall and walked its perimeter. She stopped at various points to study the ground.

Earth whispered to her: Jump.

The father saw his daughter as some sort of bird, perched on their garden wall constantly. He knew you could not force a bird to come to you. Rather, you had to entice the bird with a treat. Over the next days and weeks, he scattered various seeds on the ground.

The young girl remained on the wall.

Earth sang her songs, melodious and in need of no words. She swayed in rhythm atop the wall.

The father became frightened for his daughter’s life. As he paced their home, his wife asked him what troubled him. He told her of the problem and his failed solution. She laughed at him. Little girls are not birds. The mother scattered apricot slices on the ground because she knew little girls liked apricots.

The young girl remained on the wall.

Earth increased the volume and speed. The young girl danced maniacally.

The parents consulted a wise man. He told them to leave their daughter alone. So, they did.

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The little girl remained on the wall.

Earth got tired and silent.

One day, soldiers came and took the parents away. They did not see the little girl atop the wall.

The little girl remained on the wall.

Months and months. Strange plants began to grow. The garden lost its shape. The little girl could no longer see the ground. Oh, Father, what have you done? She jumped to the earth, fearing she could not make it through the plant growth. And yet her body hit with such force that Earth shook, bled even as she bled. Like seeds and apricots, the young girl became part of the mayhem.

My mother has stormed off and now stands in the field underneath the sun at some distance from me.

Could she have heard my story, my whispering? I know she loved him. It’s myself I’m unsure of, my love for my parents I’m unsure of.

A postcard. Painting of an old conquest, which hangs in a building named for its pillars. Twenty pillars . . . forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred. No, just twenty but known for twice that. In a building made of mirrors, multiplication is necessary.

Math. Ayyám-i-Há. Days outside of time. On the postcard, Mother writes to Father about Baha’i holidays, about missing him, about love—in her broken English. Her English, like her stories, piecemeal. She buries my head in the sand with her stories. Down there, it’s silver and gold, pure blue, shattered glass.

Here and now, in a place much too close, a place surrounded by hills, a son and a mother picnic. She is old and tired but still filled with hopes. He struggles to understand too many things.

When the son was a child, his mother told him stories, as most mothers do. Except most of her stories didn’t originate in books. So, the son eventually came to believe his function was to remember these stories. He always thought he would need to pass them on. Instead, today he tries to return these stories.

The son himself became a father. And then the son’s own father passed away. The son began to wonder what the father’s duty was. The son was plagued with guilt at the frivolity of his mother’s stories and at his trouble remembering them. Making a story matter is impossible though, and trying to remember is like waiting for birds to eat from your palm.

His own father never told him a single story.

The son realized too slowly how much he loved his own father. The son realized too slowly as he viewed his father’s varnished body that the recognizable always eludes you. But the struggle satisfies.

He realized too slowly as he viewed his father’s varnished body that his relationship with his father was, is, as intimate as it gets. Neither God nor a lover can compare. He realized too slowly as he viewed his father’s varnished body that the father’s best duty is that of real absence. The mother is always telling stories. The father is always unknown. In death now, the father shows the son what a story is, desire. To know, not remember. Without the father here, his life opens to interpretation, and the father’s own stories scribble themselves out so slowly. And these tales are true and relevant, present and in the present.

Even as the son struggles to know his father, his mother’s stories interfere. He wonders how to keep his own son safe. He will tell his own son that stories never aid in reality, that the best stories are real.

Today, the son will return his mother’s stories, and he’ll be successful. Years from now, his own son will look at him and say, “Father, tell me the story of your life.” And the once son and now father will begin in language made of wood and earth, a language that his son cannot refuse.

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“Those aren’t my stories,” my mother says, returning to her seat on the blanket. She begins packing up the food.

“Then, where did they come from?” I ask.

She eats the last dolmeh and turns around to gauge the distance back to the car.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “All stories are unhealthy.”

“You’re doing good, and you heard plenty of stories.”

“I’m not doing well.”

S. DOWN ITH HER STORIE W D N SA E TH IN D EAD SHATTERE GLASS. E, LU B E R SHE BURIES MYEH PU , LD O G R AND THERE, IT’S SILV “What’s wrong?” My mother crumples a napkin, waiting. “You’re too serious,” she says, “like your father.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Stories,” she says, “they make it right.”

“Make what right?” I ask.

“Stories are for loneliness,” she says. “Like when you are going to leave me all alone. Like when your father did.”

“He died of a heart attack. He didn’t leave.” She confuses me once again. “You told me about that day, that day when he died.”

“But what is a heart attack?” she asks. She stares up at the sun and then rubs her eyes. “No nurse can tell you what you want to know. I’ll mail you his death certificate after you leave for California.

Then, you will have to come back and tell me the true story.”

My grandfather was fifty-two years old when he died. He died in the bathtub, slipped and hit his head. I think of how the last thing he saw was white plastic. Or maybe the bathtubs in Iran are stone, marble. Still, it was a good, clean way to die.

But this isn’t the truth. He died in a hospital.

What lie has she told me? What lie is she telling me? These things happen when you try to tell a story. Important details slip away, and eventually, you’re left not knowing what killed your father.

What will someday come for your mother, who has made herself the goddess of stories, the goddess of an irresistible story. She always wins.

My mother shakes her black hair, gray at the roots, and says with a mouth full of food, “Your problem is that you never listen.”

I try to listen to this world. I really do. But before my very eyes, my mother’s hair becomes the wind and carries her away. A stream of blood trails behind, whispering to me of old lives and new deaths—of her story. The lustful imagination of a raw grape leaf in one’s mouth. The hateful reality of a sunny day. And I know it is left to me to tell the stories, all of them.

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Virginia Chase Sutton

At the Shrine Deep beneath the streets of Buenos Aires subway trains clatter, trundling people along. At our third stop, we change trains, see a shrine to the Virgin Mary built right into a wall, yellow and blue small tiles surrounding her own tiled countenance. City planners, how many decades ago, decided to place her here as many pass her by, impatient for the next train. I have seen shrines to Mary before, mostly in Ireland where they were homemade rather than built into a looming permanent structure.

Twisted wrought iron holders circle around her for floral offerings. Each is occupied by a brace of shiny chrysanthemums or modest daisies, still wrapped in cellophane, purchased above-ground from street stalls and hand-carried to the underworld.

Not a hand raised to steal the bouquets, this place where children beg for change and the homeless simply stare into space. No graffiti either, though it is all over other walls. I remember years ago my new mother-in-law urged me to leave my bridal bouquet at the Virgin Mary’s statue in the ugly sixties Catholic church where I was just married.

Shocked, I kept it. Gorgeous peach and white roses with cascading ribbons. I did not yet know the nature of sacrifice.

A decade later, a traveling Virgin Mary statue arrived at my mother-in-law’s house, resting on a lace cloth and table while people prayed around her. As a non-Catholic, I did not guess the Virgin’s power. Hard lessons ahead. And as I stare at this long-standing shrine, a man approaches my daughter, wordless, his hand out and shaking. I frown but she, also a non-Catholic in this Catholic country, gives him money. I start to chastise her, but stay quiet, learning through her gesture generosity, grace.

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Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Bent World Broods i.

Among the branches of the wild cherry tent worms weave white stomachs of fog and the hungry air pouches of a visible digestion consuming green life and the evening leaf each worm unspindling the filament which in the night will draw it peristaltic back to its tent

ii.

Among the branches a white ganglion writhes in primitive thought suspecting soon a wrack of metamorphosis and this a dysphagic dying

iii.

Moths flying on an adipose of digested leaf know nothing of worms nor worms of resurrection

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REVIEW

FAITH AND OTH E R FLAT T I R ES : SEARCH IN G FOR GOD ON T HE R O U G H R OA D O F D O U BT

by Andrea Palpant Dilley ( Zondervan, 2012 ) REVIEWED BY TAMARA LANG

To discuss all that Andrea Palpant Dilley’s memoir Faith and Other Flat Tires is, I must first

mention what it is not. This book is not a script. It is not a perky depository of answers to all of the difficult questions of life. It is not a story of perfect fulfillment, of inviolable peace, or of ruddy children galavanting about in an orchard of ripe answers. There is nothing easy about this memoir.

Instead, this book is nothing more and nothing less than the story of an actual woman. Dilley allows us a passenger seat alongside her own struggles and tensions, her loss of faith, and her eventual finding of a melancholy peace. We move with her through stages of belief so subtle, and yet so unique and personal, that we cannot help but resonate.

It is the progression of these stages that lends Dilley’s memoir its greatest stamp of honesty. Dilley embodies past stages of her life in such a manner that we gain an intimate association with the many personas that she has adopted, from the missionary kid climbing guava trees in Kenya, to the mildly deviant English major sporting a red pixie cut, to the production assistant with a propensity for dysfunctional relationships. Each of these personas moves beyond a mere life stage to become its own vivacious character, a person whom we come to know almost as we know the transitive identities of our own friends.

Dilley writes with a perspective that, though informed by the final-page identity of her own present, is nonetheless defined by the narrative’s present. There is only the subtlest hint of self-judgment as she describes the illicit behavior of her past, for through this we come to see the extent to which she accepted these actions at the time. Our transition between identities is thus as smooth and natural as her own, guided not by some final end point but by the organic developments of her own life.

There is no preachiness in her story, for this would be untrue to her life as she lived it. The result is a narrative which is vibrantly genuine, defined by a stark honesty that does not incriminate Dilley but rather allows her to bring us into her own refreshingly imperfect life.

Dilley’s childhood is described in terms of a “third-culture” effect, in which her identity as a Kenyan missionary kid is put into tension with her later identity as an American teen. The result, Dilley tells us, is a state in which no culture is home. This effect can be extrapolated to describe Dilley’s adult life. Throughout this memoir, Dilley describes the identities through which she has sought to define herself: as a Christian, an ex-Christian, an English major, an advertising assistant, and so on. As these identities develop they come into tension with each other, so that the intellectual rebels against the false simplicity of the church, the young professional pushes against the black-and-white morality of her youth, and the comfortable American woman mourns the suffering she has seen in Kenya. Often, these struggles create a Christian/secular dichotomy. This book recounts the elimina-

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tion of that dichotomy. As Dilley cycles through these chapters we begin to see her self-descriptions break down, until she comes to know herself in the wholeness of these incomplete identities. At this point the gap between cultures and sub-cultures ceases to keep her from finding a home. Rather, this space becomes her home.

Dilley describes this quest for home through two different types of journeys. Structurally, she arranges her memoir around the story of Pilgrim’s Progress; her chapters are grouped under headings of landmarks from Bunyan’s tale. In arranging her story thus, Dilley has sought to show how her life story converges with the iconic allegory of the Christian life. However, although the parallels between Pilgrim’s Progress and Dilley’s story are notable, this structure can at times cheapen Dilley’s own story. Her faith journey is far more expansive than an allegorical formula, and the paragraph summaries of Pilgrim’s visits seem both out of place and limiting.

The second consistent metaphor within Dilley’s work is that of transportation. The cars that she drives are nearly always named, and from these names we can derive symbolic significance. For example, when returning from a young friend’s funeral, Dilley sits in the back of a Ford Escort as her mom explains how Losokwoi’s body was the “escort” for his soul. Dilley’s car is at times a shrine, at other times a manifestation of her anxiety. Through the motif of driving, Dilley has expressed the restlessness of her faith journey while emphasizing the hope of a destination. Yet, we are not meant to understand that this destination has been reached; the memoir memorably ends with Dilley driving into a desert, whispering the words, “Here we go.”

I read this memoir while seated firmly in my own desert. In terms of Dilley’s memoir, my current self can be found around page 89—like Dilley, I am a twenty-year-old English major harboring a secret resistance to the church, to faith, even to God. It seems, sometimes, that all that I used to believe is slipping through my fingers like drying sand. Paralyzed by dread, I sit unmoving within this slow, shifting absence. Dilley puts a voice to this silent decline. Scraping the Ichthus sticker off her bumper, she tells us that “I was purging myself not of faith necessarily, but of a particular kind of faith and of a Christian culture that I associated with spiritual certainty. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want a Jesus fish on my car.” From this initial point of resistance, Dilley moves farther and farther from the church until, for a time, she no longer identifies herself as a Christian.

Oddly enough, this admission resonated with me more deeply than any cheery word of promise might have done. There’s something good about words of encouragement, but there is something necessary in words of darkness and doubt. It is the silent companion who speaks to us most, the fellow traveler whose brokenness breaks into our own. Our shared story becomes a solid, soulful thing, a bond between camaraderie and despair. This is a special place, tinged with a touch of the sacred, and it is a space that I found within Dilley’s words.

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Judith Adkins

Dowry You will need: resolute faith in story; many sweet things to eat, many salty ones too; now and then a flush or straight; one friend, preferably human, to whom you speak the truth; an eye on the calendar, especially in January; at least three tawdry but reliable fantasies; an oceanic forgiveness tank mainlining the Pacific, also the Atlantic; one shimmering memory of a perfect witticism from your beloved’s lips; the removal of certain cards from the deck; in the kitchen linoleum, speckles that remind you of a wheeling constellation or tropical archipelago; blooming interest in etched and shadowed faces; per annum, a deep draw of gardenia; a mindseed in perpetual unfurl; a pulsing blue luminescence that nobody has ever been able to pin down; and a heedless desire to put off, until the last breath, the story’s end.

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Judith Adkins

Fire Prevention Month This October the sugar maples flame out on schedule, and the empty church down the road burns. Slate tiles pop. Wood rafters roar. Ancient mortar drizzles and drips away. Stained glass kaleidoscopes into shards, like Mt. Zion in ’64, like Coventry after the Blitz. Marriage vows and words of last comfort plume upward . . . burnt sugar in the air. On porches across the street, awestruck jack-o-lanterns jostle, feel small. Their hollow eyes and silent mouths yearn—such inner light O! Loud flashes and bright barks and gleaming peals: like a carnival. Didn’t the children gather at the firehouse and play on these trucks just last week? Didn’t they practice the drop-and-roll as if it were a soccer drill? Stretch out skinny arms for 911 tattoos? Take, eat crisp Empires and Winesaps? Loud flashes and bright barks and gleaming peals: like a mortal collision on a highway, but nobody injured here. Afterwards, all souls passing the church see its cooling black spine and hollow ribcage. Some picture cow carrion beside a country road, or the skewed beams of two towers, or a neighbor’s kitchen turned inside out by a tornado a decade ago. For weeks, approaching joggers slow up and walk the final yards: kinetic respect for brokenness.

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ARTIST’S NOTE

AYNSL EE MO O N: REMNANTS O F DA I LY LI VI N G There is someone looking back at me. She moves her lips as I move mine, but never does she utter a word, or sing a song, or take a breath. She is my reflection; she lives behind the glass. I see her every morning, noon, and night, but I cannot reach her. She, however, seems to be able to reach me. She is how I daily realize and remember myself; when I see her it confirms my existence in that bit of time and that the fragile gift of an ordinary sanctuary is still present around me.

Through the mediums of encaustic and oil on panel I explore ideas of meditation on the seemingly minute events that construct the self. My inspiration is found in the remnants of everyday life, such as discarded clothing and passing reflections. In crumpled shirts and dusty glass I see apparitions that follow me, that speak of my becoming. I make my paintings in remembrance of the moments and sensations I have experienced in this space of daily living. In this space there are mirrors, both actual and metaphorical, of my daily presence in time.

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Aynslee Moon. Hood. Oil and encaustic on panel. 14 x 11 inches.

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Aynslee Moon. Touch. Oil and encaustic on panel. 16 x 20 inches..

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Aynslee Moon. Red. Oil and encaustic on panel. 18 x 23 inches.

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Aynslee Moon. Cosmic. Oil and encaustic on panel. 24 x 25 inches.

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Niamh Corcoran

Germ after Miró

An auspicious slip of blackberry jam on canvas to begin. Succor the sweet stain out of which geometric forms spring, biomorphic, in a wash of weightless color. A red balloon or seed drifts in ether neither microscope nor telescope can penetrate. I am impressed by what is withheld. I would probably give it all away, paint a literal sky with the red balloon rising, a child in the foreground crying, empty-handed. Or paint a chaos of apples, a woman’s cornucopian embrace.

But this isn’t about ripeness or loss, needing bodies I created for plot.

No gravity here. Still, I can’t let go of the spilled fruit. I imagine the artist holding up an open hand, spoon, brush, ravenous, genesis rousing.

Then the accident, the germ, gauging that phenomenal fall. Again, the letting go.

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Jacqueline Kolosov

Snow in April differs from snow in December.

One silts the daffodils in white, the other deepens each nesting creature’s slumber.

One delays lilacs. The other is a journey rather like a Victorian novel open to the first page; or a toddler trying to cross the gulf separating self from Mother. April is a pearl salvaged from a forgotten drawer; the toddler, now a teen, pedaling into sun, the near-sighted boy from next door following.

A woman sits amid the quiet of the house, remembering what she believed she had forgotten: the wind trying the latch of each room she inhabited as a child, the irrecoverable smell of her grandmother, a longed-for carnation sweetness that resurrects the collie who kept watch over the old summer house.

(Her girl self never knew who or what he waited for.)

Cold seeps in through the cracked foundation, those gaps her husband never sealed; and she laments the furrows harrowing her eyes, the startle of gray she managed to ignore until now.

How many years has her own mother been gone?

Winter intensifies, and she brings forth crayons, sparkles, glue; she cuts out crepe paper stars, a cardboard moon—these she decorates with spilled sequins, ribbons, even a snarl of hair from her daughter’s emptied drawer (the one that once housed the pearl).

The moon and stars become a mobile to enchant the wind into song.

Outside, mitten-fisted, she opens her mouth, the kiss of cold on her tongue more salt than sweet.

And at her feet, the yellow-sunned daffodils in their snowy sheaths.

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

JEANNE MURRAY WALKER

My parents never saw the point of traveling. They didn’t particularly care to alter their

perspective. Why change your point of view, especially if you’re pretty sure it’s right? They loved stability. Almost every Saturday night they spent with their friends, Ruth and Dave Saunders, telling jokes and eating ice cream. They genuinely enjoyed visiting their parents. We taped pumpkins and black cats to the windows in October and set off fire crackers on Independence Day. In the fall my mother and my sister and I shopped for one new dress each, and in the spring we broke the black soil and planted vegetables. Sunday was church, Monday was wash day, and my mother baked bread every Saturday. We sang Give me that old time religion. It’s good enough for me! My parents were fundamentalists. Repetition and certainty were what they wanted. Novelty and travel they didn’t trust.

This created a problem for their children, for whom time passed more slowly than it did for them. I was an antsy, impetuous child who often felt trapped in our house in Lincoln, Nebraska. By midmorning sometimes I found myself wondering whether I’d eaten breakfast last year or the year before. At the age of eight I began to hang out with Junior, the neighborhood juvenile delinquent, and I would often sneak into my brother’s room, which was forbidden, to drive his American Flyer train at derailing speeds.

On long afternoons I stared at the pictures in old National Geographics until I could see a miniature figure of myself beside Old Faithful or the Grand Canyon. Now when I feel caught in that kind of futile repetition, I sometimes think of my older brother. He taught me that when the periphery of life closes in and I’m having trouble imagining anything but my own predicament, it’s time to get out.

When I was six I would rush in from school, hot and sweaty, the screen door banging noisily behind me, my vision spangled from the afternoon sunshine. If the smell of Vicks Vapo-rub assailed me—then I knew. He had been laid low by asthma again. In the corner of Michael’s darkened bedroom loomed a cylindrical green oxygen tank with a nozzle on the top and a tube running to his nose. Walt Schamber, our town doctor, would be sitting on the bed, perplexed and frowning. On the other side, my mother would sit, cradling her chin in one hand, her elbow propped on her knee. They murmured heart rate adrenalin injection over Michael, who lay there laboring to breathe. If it was really bad, no one even noticed I had entered the room, because they didn’t dare lift their eyes from him. No wonder Michael could be grouchy and exasperated. Even when he wasn’t in bed, he lived in the center of my mother’s full attention. He had a much harder time than I did getting away.

For our family getting away usually meant visiting my mother’s parents in Pipestone, Minnesota, and while we were there my grandfather would occasionally take us to tour the nearby Sioux reservation. It was by no means a vacation spot, but it provided what my mother called “a change”. Centuries before, the Sioux had discovered how to quarry the soft red rock from the hills and to carve peace pipes, essential for sacred Indian ceremonies all over the Midwest.

Grandfather is tilting back his straw hat. He scratches his head and drives us slowly down the unpaved roads of the reservation. We kids briefly stop fighting over who has to sit on the hump in the middle of the back seat. We blink at tumble-down houses made of raw gray wood siding with small scabs of paint.

When Grandfather pulls over to the side of the road, we scramble out of the car to inspect the items for sale. Liver-colored pipestone turtles and bookends and peace pipes lie on dark green tarps. Indian women with carved bronze faces sit at the edge of the displays. They don’t raise their eyes to look at

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us, but watch the ragged children who dig in the dirt and chase one another around weed-filled lawns. Gas fumes from my grandfather’s big car dance across the yards in blurry waves. Even the soil smells hot.

When one woman unfolds her limbs slowly, gets up, and walks over to help us, we tell her we’re just looking, scramble back onto the broiling plastic seats, and drive off. Our silver Buick rocks into the red potholes and ridges of the dirt road.

I hate going to this reservation, but I am also enthralled by its mystery. The children don’t seem like children, the way we are, but like hens pecking in the dirt. I don’t understand why the young men sometimes stagger when they cross their lawns on Sunday afternoon. But the women seem noble, in an aggrieved way.

Not that they’re beautiful. They’re overweight and lumpy in their bright skirts and blouses, but I’m moved by their dignity in the hot sun on Sunday afternoon. I wonder whether I would stay under those conditions, even to take care of my children.

My parents taught us that the Sioux were poor because they didn’t work or save, because they drank, and they didn’t believe in Jesus. These were the facts I accepted. I knew that half a mile from the reservation, roads running by farms of white people were paved, but it took years before I understood the unpaved roads in the reservation were not the fault of the people who lived there. Their school was stocked with cast-off desks and textbooks from the white school in town. Their only curriculum consisted of auto mechanics and wood shop and home economics. Our trips to the reservation didn’t release me from my narrow horizons, but cemented me more rigidly into them.

The year Mother took us to the Badlands of South Dakota I began to learn what it meant to travel, in part because Michael had become more discriminating. By then he was seventeen, I was fifteen, and our sister, Julie, was twelve. We swam in a shallow, warm lake, and licked ice cream cones that dripped down our arms.

In a roadside park we climbed half-heartedly on jungle-gym equipment that was too small for us. I nagged my mother to see the site advertised on a roadside billboard: STREAM FLOWING UPHILL!!

With hushed reverence, the guide led a half dozen of us through the cool woods to a hillside overgrown with ivy and scrub pines. Occasionally turning to caution us about our footing, he climbed ahead of us in his brown shorts and heavy boots to a place where a stream cut through the underbrush, squirting and pulsing over rocks. Uphill. Well, kind of uphill. Working to believe it, I could imagine that the bed tilted up. Around the glade, several hills came together at different angles, so it was difficult to tell what was ascending and what was descending.

The guide removed his hat reverently, as if introducing us to his own personal favorite Himalayan Mountain, and waited for our response.

Because this was my idea, I felt I needed to react. “Amazing!”

Michael took off his tortoise shell glasses and squatted down to get a better look at the angle of the stream.

“It’s a trick,” he announced standing up.

The guide’s face turned flinty.

I could feel my face flushing with embarrassment. We had given the guide our fifty cents, which seemed to me like a promise that we would be a sympathetic audience. Moreover, I enjoyed the idea of a miracle far from church. The stream might not look exactly as the billboard pictured it, but it was better than anything we’d seen so far on this trip.

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

“That water isn’t flowing uphill,” Michael growled.

“Take as long as you like,” the guide said airily. “Just watch your step when you go.” He turned, jingling our coins in his pocket, and walked down the path.

Not to be taken seriously must have hurt Michael’s pride, which had already been battered from two years without a father, a period of steady attrition. No father to take him to baseball games, no father to help fly his model planes, no father to teach him to fight. Two years of watching his friends take their fathers for granted. Michael was blond and slight and he had a temper, which sent him into asthmatic fits.

He wheeled aggressively to follow the guide. He was beginning to wheeze. Mother trailed him and laid her hand on his shoulder. Michael whirled on her with a look of savage irritation.

“Don’t,” she pled.

He glared at her.

“Please.”

He hesitated. The guide’s brown shirt disappeared into the trees.

Michael must have known he couldn’t win a fist fight, but maybe he didn’t think it would come to that.

He had a fast mouth. And he didn’t like to be fooled. But more importantly, I think, even as a teenager, he grasped the difference between novelty and travel. Travel involves getting into someone else’s point of view and it requires empathy. When you see water flowing uphill you don’t feel empathy. Either you feel tricked, or you feel astonishment of the kind that doesn’t do a thing for your soul.

By the next day, the whole water-uphill experience seemed tawdry to me.

Michael turned his lethal irony against whatever hemmed him in—Mother’s increasingly careful, frugal, Midwestern habits, our church’s fundamentalist logic, the romantic notions of the Mother and sisters he lived with. He had to answer to the mother of three teenaged children, a young widow. She was often weepy, sometimes supine on the couch, hyperventilating, with fluttering eyelids. She feared for his life, quite literally. But she also feared for his soul. Michael would ridicule the arrogant, color-blind Mr. Sampson for wearing one red and one chartreuse sock to church. He would rail against Pastor Garland, who got the order of the planets wrong in his sermon. How could you believe a preacher about the Revelation of St. John, Michael demanded, if he didn’t even know high school science? Michael mocked the notion that he had a Christian responsibility to carry his Bible to public school on top of his books.

He chafed at my mother’s ten o’clock curfew on weekends. Sporadically he exploded at her, but mainly he smoldered in a long, sarcastic burn.

Michael’s physical activity was so restricted by his asthma that becoming a ham radio operator was his only way of getting out. Always geeky, he hit upon the idea at fifteen, soon after my father died.

He sent for the parts. He paid for them out of his allowance, stringing the wires, and rigging the thing himself. For once, Mother let him do what he wanted. In fact, I suspect she helped subsidize the project, though she never admitted it.

In the middle of one night about six months after he got the radio working, I woke up in the bedroom I had painted a sweet, hideous lavender, and heard static coming from Michael’s bedroom. Outside, the night was utterly black, because we lived on the outskirts of town, beyond street lights, next to farmland. The scent of lilacs drifted in my window. I threw my sheet off and stood up to get my bearings, then crept past our chairs and the couch, which bulked like young elephants in the dark next to the large split-leaf philodendron in our living room.

I knocked at Michael’s bedroom door. Knocking was a rule Michael invented; the rest of us barged in on one another. When he opened his door, I edged in the several inches I was permitted and slouched against his door jamb. He was a thin outline in striped pajamas sitting before the big, black contraption.

His blond maverick curls were illuminated by the radio’s faint light. On his head he wore a huge black headset, which made him look like an aviator. Human voices, sparks and splinters of words, shot from the machine.

“Come in, come in!” Michael called into the mike. He moved the dial slowly, as if casting a net to see

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what he might pull in from the darkness. The machine squirted light. Logging onto the radio, Michael had found people all over the world who talked to him in English at pre-arranged times of the night. He craved hearing their voices. He told me he was planning to travel to meet some of them.

That restlessness lay behind our family’s dreadful Lady Chatterley’s Lover episode. In 1959 D. H. Lawrence’s novel was considered pornography by many people in Lincoln, Nebraska. It became a cause célèbre, with ministers and moralists railing publically against the novel until it became well known in that town.

Our minister, Rev. Garland, preached against it one Sunday. The book was pornography, he said, and reading it would contaminate us. I wondered whether he’d read it. If so, then why wasn’t he tainted? And if he hadn’t read it, how did he know it was pornography?

I wasn’t eager to be polluted, but by fifteen, I knew that not everything I had been told by adults was true. A person had to investigate. The trouble was, I knew that exploring could get me into trouble. I tried to assess the risk. What was the worst thing that could happen if I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Surely reading about something couldn’t be as dangerous as doing it. Still, it seemed like a slippery slope.

While I fretted, Michael bought and sneaked a thirty-five cent paperback copy of the novel into the house. I can’t imagine where he found it, and I don’t know how mother discovered that he was reading it. Maybe he taunted her with it during one of their spats. But my mother talked my younger sister into rooting the book out of our house before it corroded Michael’s soul. Enflamed with mission, Julie recruited me to help her.

When Michael was away one day, Julie and I ransacked his closet and drawers and desk. As I opened his closet and stared at his shirts and shoes, I realized for the first time that my brother might have a sex life.

He didn’t date much, so I’d thought very little about it. As I pushed back his trousers, I was punished by lurid, Dantesque visions of a deviant, monstrous, alternative brother feeding the furnace of his passions with smut.

I don’t remember where we found the novel, but the cover pictured a rawboned, good-looking male servant, reaching toward a lovely, pale, formally dressed woman. He was in the act of stripping away her chemise. I concluded that Rev. Garland had been right. Clutching the novel in my hand as my sister and I spirited it outside to the trash, I could almost feel its sexual throbbing. It was not until years later I learned that cover artists rarely ever read what’s inside the book they’re illustrating, and if they do, they always exaggerate the sex.

Now I think reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a way for my brother to hack open some space beyond Baptist youth group meetings, beyond our clean and bookless split-level family. The year he bought the novel, which used the f-word, the nation held its breath as the Supreme Court decided it was not pornography, but a work of literature with significant ideas. That didn’t convince anyone in our church.

The novel describes how an upper-class woman, whose husband is paralyzed and impotent, goes mad with frustration. She begins a long, slow affair with their gamekeeper. The two of them come to realize that sex is not debasing, but a way two people can mingle their souls.

I don’t imagine Michael ever got to this part. As far as I know, he never bought another copy. And he couldn’t have found the book in the Southeast High School library. He never even mentioned that his book had disappeared. Maybe he didn’t want to dignify our violation with a response. Or maybe he’d gotten what he needed from the book, a way of traveling, a way to find himself in a larger world.

Although I felt guilty about rummaging through Michael’s things, I suspected that he’d have been happy enough to rummage through mine. That, I sensed, might have been a lesser violation, because I did not protect my privacy as fiercely as he protected his. What I knew was that we were rivals. He was our mother’s first child, the chosen son, the sick one, the one our house belonged to before I arrived.

As soon as I could walk, Mother relied on me for help with her problematic, profoundly male oldest.

Honey, can you reach Michael’s medicine? Could you get him a drink of water? She would meet me at the door after school and warn me, Mrs. Gifford sent him home from school and Dr. Schamber will be here in a minute. Can you play quietly? I knew that Michael was smarter than me, but I could make friends better,

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and I was not as prickly. I worked to become useful, not only to my mother, but to others. I played the violin well enough to be featured in The Lincoln Journal. I sharpened my wit against Michael’s repartee. Then with a precocity that utterly outflanked him, I began dating, fell in love, and learned by experience about sex.

My brother often loudly claimed to pity the men who were snagged by my female tricks. He referred to me as “the brawling woman” and quoted Proverbs 25:24: It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman and in a wide house.

“So go live on the roof!” I would yell at him.

“Kids!” Mother would shout from the kitchen. “Don’t drag the Bible into it!”

My mother could not bear the idea of Michael going off to college after he graduated from high school. She had lost my father and that was enough. But Michael was brilliant. Her friends, the teachers who had plenty of trouble with Michael’s probing science and math questions at Southeast High School, told her so. What was she doing holding him back? they wondered. He might be the next Jonas Salk, who had recently beaten polio. For all they knew he might be another Einstein. So that fall we piled our Chevy with Michael’s

hypoallergenic pillow, his physics books, his adrenalin, non-allergenic snacks, until the undercarriage hung low in our driveway. Then all of us climbed in and my mother drove us from Lincoln to a suburb west of Chicago, where Michael would be starting Wheaton College. We carried his things into the dorm, and made his bed, and stocked his shelves, while he paced and scowled and grumped to get rid of us.

Then Julie and Mother and I drove several blocks to a room my mother rented for $15 in the basement of a professor’s house. That evening I gazed out the window at moonlight on the lawn, at the moon, itself, which was so large and round and perfectly white that it might have been a sheet-music illustration. The night was flawless. My stomach fluttered. I had seen freshmen talking, laughing, swarming on the quad, and I wanted to go to college, too, instantly, and eternally.

The next morning we left for home.

Michael, presumably, had gotten out.

The phone call came at 7 a.m. the next Friday. I could hear my mother clinking breakfast dishes in the kitchen. It was a sticky September morning, my windows flung wide open, and I could see a few reddening leaves in the crowns of the trees. I was just pulling on my Pep club sweater, the heavy black knit with a big wooly gold letter S on the back. As my mother talked on the phone, something in her tone alerted me. I stepped out of my room, glanced toward the kitchen, and saw her sink to the floor. She didn’t faint. In a real crisis my mother was never anything but solid and practical. She crouched like an animal in the corner, looking stunned, but asking questions. And I knew.

I knew.

It was her birthday.

We never learned the cause of Michael’s death. My mother had been required to watch four autopsies in nurses’ training, and she had vowed then that none of her loved ones’ bodies would ever be ravaged that way.

Over the years people who learn about my eighteen-year-old brother’s death have wondered why my mother didn’t need to know what killed him. But I’ve carried two children for nine months, kept them from running into the street, applied band aids to their cuts, watched their bodies change in puberty. I understand why

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she didn’t want to have to imagine for the rest of her life the knives plunging in, the sinews hacked, the heart torn out.

Still, without an autopsy, I have no barricade of facts to keep questions from swirling like angry floodwater. Michael was always pushing boundaries. About a decade ago, I began to wonder whether he committed suicide. By then the records were long gone, of course. But Chaplain Evan Walsh, who called that morning to break the news of his death to my mother, reported that the night before Michael died, he was having trouble breathing. He checked himself into the infirmary.

His asthma was profoundly worsened by anxiety. And he must have suffered the same nerves all freshmen feel. Will anyone like me? Can I do the work? For all his independence, he reacted to every nuance of the emotional weather around him. He must have felt both elated and threatened by the campus, which was so different from his uneventful life at home. He had been rescued from death many times by our mother’s gifted, intuitive nursing. This time she wasn’t around to save him.

But the irony of his dying on her birthday, was that coincidence? In the early morning, while it was still dark, he must have found himself in a strange bed in the infirmary, fighting to breathe. That kind of struggle would distort his face, turning his lips and fingernails blue. Like a woman in labor, he would get

caught up in the battle, lying motionless, with a faraway look in his eyes, acknowledging no one in the room. He couldn’t. I remember the hiss of the oxygen, the buzz of a fly, the mustard-colored afternoon light filtering through pulled shades. That morning in the infirmary if he even remembered that it was my mother’s birthday, I doubt that he cared. He was eighteen. He had been so bent for so long on separating from her. He was battling for every breath. And although I habitually attributed my own sentimentality to him, Michael was not sentimental.

As his body traveled on the train from Wheaton toward Lincoln, I drank my first cup of coffee. More than my first alcoholic drink, this was my entry into adulthood, the bitter, hot, aromatic taste of a new country. I was the oldest now; I was taking my brother’s place. It seems odd that I felt so little guilt about it.

Before we buried Michael, I felt him return briefly. Standing outside our church on the grass beside the hearse, I felt like I was losing my balance. The trees swam. I felt my brother moving beside me the way you feel the wind moving through a valley, and then I sensed him departing for good. I felt a great release, perhaps Michael’s release as he left his body, which had always given him trouble. But I was sixteen, and I thought mostly about myself. I experienced it as my own release.

Michael’s funeral was, they said, a celebration of his home-going. As was typical of Baptists at that time in the Midwest, the family, what was left of it, his mother and younger sisters, arrived at the church early. We spent a few minutes with his body which was lying in an open coffin. Michael’s lips had been rouged and his blond curly hair was parted rather than swept straight back with Brylcreme, which was how he did it. As I looked at him in the close, sickly-perfumed air, my hands began to shake. I trembled all over with fury at the men from the mortuary. All his life he had so easily felt violated. Even though he was plainly dead, I expected him to sit up and smash in the faces of the impudent morticians. In spite of their fake solemnity I suspected that for them this was just another fall day, sunny and pleasant. I wanted them to choke and clutch at the air as he had. I wanted to see their faces turn blue. I wanted to

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dredge up the bitter dark world by its roots and make them swallow it one piece at a time until my mother’s grief was gone.

I know now, as I didn’t know then, that these men are lightning rods for grief and anger. When my mother requested that they make an adjustment to Michael’s hair, one of them gravely complied. In the last moment before we were ushered away from the casket, my mother spotted a fly, stepped over, and waved her hand above my brother’s cheek, brushing it from his face. It was her last attempt to protect him.

Shortly after that, they closed the lid.

It was one of Michael’s friends, the only other student from our town who had gone to Wheaton as a freshman that year, who escorted Michael’s body home on the train. He did this with such grace that it now boggles my mind. He had never paid any attention to me because I was only his friend’s giddy younger sister. That weekend, as Mother received mourning visitors, he sat for hours in our living room, teaching me how to play cards.

Pulling a new pack from his pocket, he tore off the cellophane, cut the deck in half, positioned the two halves at angles to one another, and began fanning them to intercut them. We fundamentalists were not allowed to play cards. Cards were the Devil’s Bible, as my mother’s mother used to tell us. In fact, Wheaton students signed a pledge not to dance, drink, or play cards. But they had cleverly taken up a game called Rook, which is similar to Hearts, and that’s what my brother’s friend taught me: the subversive game of Rook.

“Watch,” he said. “You need to know this.” His bottom lip was tucked under his teeth in concentration as he shuffled the cards expertly several times while I studied him.

“Want to try it?” he encouraged.

The stiff cards fell to shambles in my hands.

He flicked me a look with his black eyes, took the cards from me, roughed them up a little, and showed me again. We practiced until I could do it. Then he began teaching me how to play. “You want to control the game,” he counseled. “You have to look the part. You should practice dealing. Pay attention. You’ll need this.” I think he meant when I started Wheaton. I was too young to apply and maybe not good enough to get in, so I was enormously flattered.

Though stunned friends kept stopping by to bring food and pay their respects, the two of us went on playing cards. My mother answered the door. My mother talked to our friends. I was sitting in a corner of the living room trying to understand how my brother could be gone, trying to comprehend that I would be taking my brother’s place as my mother’s oldest child. If I could learn to play cards, there would be a sign that I could do that. The game felt ceremonial, like a rite of initiation. My brother’s friend knew that too; we didn’t need to talk about it. We had both been raised with religious ceremonies. When he said goodbye several hours later, he left the cards with me. I have never known how to thank him for an act of kindness that left me capable of becoming my mother’s oldest, that gave me courage to face a world in which an eighteen-year-old could die.

Ironically, it was Michael, the one who didn’t even travel safely to college and back, who taught us all to travel. I have been writing this as though I have known all along how smart my brother was about getting out, but the truth is, until that night at Kinhaven it didn’t occur to me that Michael was the one who triggered my urge both to leave my mother and to travel to actual places on this earth that are strange to me. Sometimes I think about how precocious Michael was, how difficult, how perceptive. It wasn’t until I had a child that I understood what a great tragedy it was that he only lived to be eighteen. Most of us are still pathologically confused at the age of eighteen. If only he’d had time to sort things out. If only he’d been able to shake hands with the strangers he met on his radio. How did he know, after our father died, that he needed to practice traveling? Maybe he had some sixth sense. Maybe he realized that he would be taking a long journey. Maybe he was trying to imagine inconceivable distances, a little at a time. Maybe he was getting himself ready to go.

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Ken Meisel

Oil-Covered Murre Washed up on Garnet Sands We were driving on the Pacific Coast Highway

just south of Big Sur

when we heard the news that he had died. You’d pulled off to the highway edge

where you waited while I slid down

the dirt trail through a post-fire spectacular of California poppy and purple needle grass.

Below us, the ocean raged over gigantic rocks

and a small gopher snake wiggled under dry coyote bush and popcorn flower.

Above us, Santa Lucia fir dominated the hillside.

I worried that my knees would be scraped as I fumbled down to the wet rocks drabbled purple-green

with fingers of tangled marine algae,

but I wasn’t, I was lucky because the trail, massaged and protected by bush lupine and buckwheat

and California sagebrush was gentle, and pebbled

with small here-and-there stones, and below me, frothing with ocean surf and curtains of kelp

were the rocks of this private granite altar cove

where I stood watching the sunset.

And above me, I could see you looking down at me,

trying to locate me,

and I waved to you, nearly slipping off the slimy rock into the sea ooze.

Then, after, when the sunset fell

and I saw the ocean steal all the light again and seize it for the depths, for the blue nightfall,

for the swelling surge of mindless waves

overtaking all rock,

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overtaking all else here on the intertidal zone

I thought of them,

your father and mine— men who still wore suit coats to eat dinner,

and that they had died, had left us years back,

and I saw the oil-covered murre washed up on the garnet sands of Big Sur—

and it was lying there

asleep in its white and black tuxedo, a gentleman bird, resembling a former butler,

or a concierge at a hotel, or a state senator,

someone regal, well-mannered and not of this impolite world any longer,

someone like a relic, a personage

no longer interested in this world— dead here in the garnet sand, and he was beautiful

and restful and still,

and when I waved up at you and I pointed to it,

you waved back down again on me,

on my life, as if you knew.

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Jen Dempsey

Song of Husks Today our black walnut opened its underside to the shadowless light at noon. I never watched it happen until now—the way the fleshy pale leaves, like hands, flipped themselves over as if longing for something to calm them, your presence now that it’s gone. I’ve heard of plants bending toward a window, desperate for food in the dark, but this—with wind, each branch, a new rosary of leaves, betrayed its body by turning. The leaves will settle soon. I’m still in that day we pulled out maps of Ireland and plotted tours of Cork—planned, with a picture, to capture the same time on each side of St. Anne’s clock, the Four-Faced Liar— the day we said that the land wasn’t stationary: stolen and sold, broken, plates crashing, we agreed everything changes with a whisper.

Erosion. We tried to stop it. Our tree, when we planted it, was only nut—to give it a chance in the ground, we stomped the green husks till they cracked, then peeled back the hulls with our fingers. They stained our hands for days. It’s that cracking, that constant rattle of shell against the road, that echoes, an endless refrain. And when the sound is beginning to fade, I will press my hand against the bark to listen.

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ISSUE 23 Spring 201 2

Elizabeth Swann

The Dog plaster cast, Pompeii

He must have sensed it first, though his master no doubt dismissed the dog’s impatient whine. Soon enough, Vesonius Primus fled the gasp and grumble, billowing black smoke. He left behind the guard dog’s bark and howl, the bronze-studded collar chained to a plaster wall. The roof fell in minutes, crushed under scalding ash and cinder crust.

The dog died writhing on his back, paws to the implacable sky— against all hope, he claws.

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Silo Factor CHRISTOPHER YATES

“Don’t get me wrong,” Kendall says, “I’ve always believed in God.” I stop and pick up a piece of brick, slinging it out into the wet darkness over the ocean then listening.

“Silo Factor,” she says, watching, and I turn to face her.

“Silo Factor,” I smile back.

Kendall is not my girlfriend but Pete’s girlfriend, maybe soon to be Pete’s fiancé. And Pete is my best friend. He’s been away on business in New York and tomorrow is his birthday. I flew in this afternoon to surprise him. It was Kendall’s idea, that part of it anyway, the surprise. But she and I both knew without even saying it that as Pete’s best friend and Pete’s girlfriend, it was high time we met each other. When you have not met the ones who are closest to the ones close to you it feels as though something is misplaced, something has gone awry, and the stage directors of history are saying “Hey, people, we need to remedy this!”

We are in the Presidio, the gallant king among San Francisco’s old hilltop forts. The fortress. The mission. A finger of moonlight stretches out across the sea, across what the old Spanish Father called “the harbor of harbors,” and I stand with Kendall on the broken cement path where artillery sergeants once watched for submarines.

“I’ve even prayed on my own a few times,” she continues.

“I see.”

I struggle to get a rain-soaked cigar going. *** Right as my plane came in from Vancouver that afternoon and I stood waiting for Kendall (brown hair, navy suit, driving a crimson Camry), she got the call from Pete. He had missed his connection in Chicago and would get in on a later flight. With our little scheme on hold and time to kill, we ventured to a patio café where Crissy Airfield sidles up against the water. We had veggie wraps and beer, and I made a toast in Pete’s honor.

To donPépe.

To donPépe!

All through dinner some mother of a storm was threatening. Wind tugged at the patio umbrellas, table cloths lifted on the edges like skirts, the blue bay water darkened and freckled over with quick turns from the gusts.

“Tell me about your family,” I asked, pinning my napkin down with a bottle.

She told me about her younger brother (“oh, the confused boy . . . ” loving sigh), about her parents and the California ranch that’s been in the family for four generations. I’d heard it all from Pete already, just as she’d heard all my stories, but we had to start covering this ground together.

“So the two of you may as well be brothers?” she said.

I nodded. “I think our moms even swapped us around at nursing time,” I said, oozing sour cream onto my face in a huge bite. She laughed. “Not that Pete would admit to it.”

There was lightening over above San Quentin, and thunder boomed behind us on the Presidio hills. “Oh shit here it comes,” she said, buttoning her coat. A dense fog filtered through the harp-like span of the

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Golden Gate, and I straightened my collar against the mist. People in the park started packing up their yoga mats and Frisbees. “I need a coffee,” she shouted, stacking our plates and standing to head in for cover. “Want one?”

Then the thunder and lightening suddenly went quiet, calling a truce of sorts. The sun appeared behind the swirls of fog, and the tension drained out of the umbrellas. We stopped and watched as the sky unfolded into a soft blue and green.

“Yeah, good idea,” I said over the last tail of gust.

“Cool,” she turned. “And let’s go for a walk.”

Walking brings a measure of practical purpose to a situation. We pointed ourselves toward the Golden Gate, then swung high up this border path along the coastal bluffs and their waves of early iris, the Marin Headlands easing upward in the distance across the water. Clouds returned to curtain off the sunset but the rain came mercifully, content to push us gently from one small cover to the next.

Pete and I are almost twenty-nine. He’ll get to it six days before me. When we were kids our moms used to plan elaborate scavenger hunts for our birthdays. Turning twenty-nine means you acquire a legitimate human history and get to start practicing autobiographical reflection. You’re just old enough to realize you’re not going to be who you expected to be by the time you hit thirty; that and the fact that your body has begun to die.

Historically speaking, we are the kind of guys who are serious about God. Everything, women included, has revolved around faith one way or another since we went off to summer church camps together. And so when I call Pete and we talk about Kendall, we often talk about his talks with Kendall about God. Kendall never went to church till she met Pete. Now she is supposedly reading a lot of books on the topic.

-Well, King, he says, it’s complicated.

-Yeah.

-Anyway, you probably think I’m making a huge mistake here, huh?

There was a time not too long ago when I would load up my pagan friends with books to read about God. These days I study God and philosophy at the seminary in Vancouver, and the combination of the two seems to throw people off. Like Pete says, it’s complicated.

I kick around the crumbling walkway and select another disc of brown brick while Kendall stands, lolling her umbrella on her forearm like a pendulum. I step into a side-armed throw and out it goes, sailing high and right then slicing back left as it spins and falls out of sight.

“Don’t you think that when people start meeting together formally, weekly, whatever, that it all begins to get a bit . . . social and institutional?” A wrought-iron fence keeps us back from the cliffs and their mossy skin. Above us is a narrow overhang left over from some chapter of Presidio history, now suffering from time and hasty rebar repairs. I lean my arm against a tree and look down into the steep abyss. Usually, when it comes to meeting close friends of best friends, which is to say, on occasion but always weighted with a strange significance, usually I’m the one who gets the God talk going.

“Sometimes,” I say.

“I mean, last week when I went to Pete’s church there was this guy who got baptized—right there in front of everyone! Isn’t it meant to be personal, you know, between you and God? It’s the same with Communion for me, like all these people have some kind of secret agreement.”

She treads over to a bench backed up against the cement wall, checking it with her palm for water, then smoothing out the tail of her coat and perching herself on the edge.

“The service sheet, the bulletin,” she continues, her arms folded, “it says you have to believe this and this and this about God, and then you get to take Communion. Otherwise, it doesn’t measure up.”

“So you don’t like Communion or Baptism. I guess we can rule out Catholicism.”

“And the songs,” she exclaims, “ugh, the songs . . . they’re like these bad eighties lines that we sing over and over again.”

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“Seven-eleven songs.”

“What?” She drops her hands into her jacket pockets.

“Seven lines, eleven refrains.” She laughs. “I heard a crusty old usher complain about them that way once.”

“Nice.”

“But c’mon, what else?” I squat against the iron railing and revisit the cigar lighting. “I mean, I could loan you some of my gripes if you like.”

“Well, no, it’s just, I don’t . . . I think it all works better as a, you know, something private as opposed to this weekly pep rally.”

“Here, open that a sec.” I nod to the umbrella and go to crouch beside her with the cigar between my teeth. At last, behind my makeshift wind blockade and on about match number six, I get the smoke going again.

“Pete would call that shameful, King. Shame. And look, you’ve already soiled the damn thing drooling all over it. Shame.”

I take a few mighty puffs. She shakes her head. “I know,” I say. “It’s a bit shameful, but hey, we’re burning now, and that’s glory.”

I love the fact that she’s already calling me King. It’s an old nickname, and one not without a certain dose of irony. (When we were eleven Pete said he would call me “King” for the rest of my life if I went

She stops and turns to look over the city.

The flowerman disappears slowly into the dark down the hill.

buck naked under my acolyte robe while dad was preaching at the Easter service.)

“Ugh,” she shivers, “I’m going to be soo tired in the morning.”

“Here, you take it for a while,” I say, cleaning the butt on my hank and passing it over.

“Oh, Lord,” she says, “I was warned this would happen.”

“C’mon,” I stand, “let’s walk some more.”

I often refer to tobacco as “the pious weed.” Someone gave my dad a box of Cuban petit coronas when I was about thirteen, and that did it. Fishing, cutting grass, sitting around a campfire at our little farm in Virginia, every good thing got better when you were smoking. Pete and I have probably smoked a thousand stoges together. Young guys need something else to do when they are talking about serious stuff.

Of course, maybe almost-twenty-nine-year-olds do too.

When our little pathway begins to fade toward a dark stand of evergreens we bank inland toward the curvy Presidio roads and the two or three corner lights beside what must be the old barracks. The city started re-developing homes on the far side of the parade ground a few years ago—original officer’s quarters that now go for a million-something. But the whole area is still caught in that vague emptiness, not yet a neighborhood but no longer a place where folks are “stationed” either.

We cross Lincoln when a short, bearded man shuffles out of the World War Two memorial. His plaid shirt is soaked and tight against his thin frame, and in his right arm he cradles a bundle of tiger lilies on long stems. He gives us a slow nod with wide eyes and makes like he’s going to pass by, then checks his course and bounds around toward us in short quick steps. I hear the whisk-whisk pitch of wet denim. We stop.

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“Yes sir, yes sir,” he begins, “a night for the umbrella I’ll be sure,” and rocks back to face the heavens.

“But I got these flowers,” he snaps back level with us. “One two three four,” he counts, making quick nods over each blossom. “Uh-leven. ‘Leven flowers.” He looks up over them at Kendall, not blinking.

“Those are beautiful,” she says.

“Nice nice flowers. Spuh-uh spring flowers” he says. “One at a time, one at a t-or two or three, or five sometimes. So’s soon we’ll get dry ‘nuff.”

There is a shadow-like smudge on his forehead. Judging by the other dark smears across his neck and knuckles I wager he’s been clawing through the soil of the Presidio’s nursery to harvest his lilies.

“A good night for gardening?” I say, wondering when he’ll name his price and make his case. He looks dumbly at me as I suck hard on the bitter cigar. Then he drops his beard to his chest and starts bobbing over the flowers again.

“Two three four . . . ‘Leven. Uh-leven left. Not too good a day for flower buyin’ ah guess.”

Kendall looks at me. I puff again. When she turns back, he’s straightened his arm out holding one flower toward her.

“A flower for the lady?” he says.

“Oh, thank you . . . It’s lovely.”

“That’s one flower for the lady,” he nods.

“What do people pay for lilies around here?” I ask.

“Same, same as roses, so, so that’s two for one or three for five. So’s, so a three-bunch’s better.”

“Three for five huh?”

“Three for five. It’s more than the daisies, but, uhh . . . ” He starts untangling the stems, gently. Then he turns and, looking down toward the old airfield, starts pointing as he figures. “I try an’ go three for five ten times a day, so that gets fifty a day, so, let’s see, so’s about six days a week makes three hundred, three hundred minus ten a day for food . . . ” He scratches his beard. “Comes to about two-forty to two-fifty a week which means ‘round one thousand a month.” He points again, figuring on an invisible calculator. “No, wait, carry the—yeah, ‘bout three zeroes for a month so long as the flowers are there.

Takes twelve hundred to get the savings account going, but there’s the bus fare trickling away so . . . ” The amounts float through his mind, and I wonder how far the numerical stream will carry him. I dig in my pocket, remembering the five that came back with our dinner change. My bills are bunched and wet. I tuck the cigar in my mouth and peel out the five. He looks at my cigar and smiles.

“You, ah, you a young man to be puffing on one a dem,” he points with the flowers. Kendall laughs.

“Sometimes I feel old,” I hand him the five.

“The father, uh, the minister back over here,” he points behind him with his free thumb toward where I imagine the chapel is, “he, uh, he likes to puff on a cigar now and then,” he smiles then, his eyes bright, “even in the Lent!” We all laugh. He tucks the five in his shirt pocket.

“Sounds like a good man.” I say. He looks at me again, his eyebrows still high.

“Oh yes. Oh yes.” He nods, “Very good man,” then starts counting his flowers again. A car approaches so Kendall and I scoot out of the road. The flower man, taking no notice, meanders into the middle and the car slows, catching him full in the headlights. He stops, turns, and stares blankly over his flowers into the car. “Puff-puff, even in the Lent!” he again exclaims, then walks on. “One two three four . . .”

“Thanks, King,” Kendall says, nudging her shoulder into mine as we cross into the thick, wet grass of the parade ground.

“My pleasure.”

She stops and turns to look over the city. The flower man disappears slowly into the dark down the hill.

“I still don’t get it. Sometimes I wonder if Pete even gets it.” She shivers. “God it’s cold.”

“Here, I have a sweater on. You take my coat.”

“I’m such a pansie,” she says. “Thank you.”

“I don’t get it either Kendall.” She waits for more.

“But that’s the point, huh?” she asks.

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“Sure,” I sniffle, “I guess that’s one point.”

“One point.” She looks at me intently, then motions for the smoke, which is nearing the midpoint now.

“So how many will it take?”

A nearby row of sprinklers choke and sputter then peter out with a hush. The fresh void of quiet fills with the soothing chant of crickets all around us. I throw my head back and close my eyes.

Silo factor. There’s bound to be some scientific term for it, but ours was silo factor, for no real reason that I can remember. When you grow up around oak trees you come to expect the harvest of acorns each fall.

Some years those things fell and fell and must have been the size of plums. Pete and I used to pile them into the fronts of our shirts then take up position about fifty feet opposite each other. That’s how it would start anyway, with us just hucking them at each other. You would hear the whip of the other guy’s arm in the dark, and then you’d wait a long second, bearing up for the hit or hearing it go whistling by. But that moment, that eerie moment of anticipation, knowing this little nugget of oak was en route, that was the silo factor. When we were through battling, we’d join what was left of our stockpiles and sit together, comparing welts, and taking turns lobbing the leftovers in big arcs at distant fence posts or the roof of the barn . . . lighting our cigars and waiting through a hundred silo factors.

A perimeter of white-washed adobe outbuildings set on old oak timbers runs along the far side of the rectangular field where we walk. The officer’s club and the chapel of St. Mary are ahead atop a slow rise.

Kendall has been quiet for a while.

“Look,” I begin, “I’m just curious.”

“Yeah?”

“Did Pete lead you to believe I would just start preaching at you or something once we finally met in person, because—” “Easy now,” she laughs, pulling me back from my moment of awkwardness, “No no, nothing like that.

It’s just that you always seem to come up when we have our faith talks.”

“So I’m like a reference or something?”

“Yeah, in a way, and look, now you’re here, like a captive audience.”

I stop and bend down to roll up the cuffs of my pants.

“Well, who’s to say you’re not the captive audience?” We both laugh at this, and it feels good to share the self-consciousness of the moment. “Anyway,” I continue, “seeing how we’re both content to be captives here, why don’t you tell me what you expect me to be telling you?”

“Oh please.

“I’m serious.”

“Okay. Okay then. So here’s the deal: I’m a bastard sinner. Jesus, meaning the son of God, a.k.a. the Messiah, wants to give me another go, I take up my own cross and get born into a new life. . . That sound about right?”

“Not bad.”

“Thanks.”

“Sounds like bunk though.” I wipe my nose with the cuff of my sleeve.

“What!” She jabs my chest with the umbrella. “This is what you guys believe, is it not?”

“In a way, yes, but I’m still entitled to say it sounds like bunk.”

Kendall is somewhat baffled.

“Not to a lot of people,” she says.

“A little formulaic if you ask me.”

“Again, not to a lot of people.”

“Meaning, not to the weak-minded?” I reply.

“Hey, I didn’t say that.”

“No, but that’s what you’re thinking, right? I mean, that’s the fear that’s holding you back: Lord, please do not turn me into some big-haired, weepy woman, groveling her way forward to sit at the televangelist’s

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feet, fanning herself with a service leaflet!”

“Look,” she stops me, “you do believe it though, right?”

I hold her gaze. Her eyes are dark, unmoving.

“Are we still role-playing?”

“No.” “Then yes.”

“Yes you believe the bunk?”

“Yeah. Yeah, me and all the other suckers.”

She folds one arm under the other and motions with her palm to the sky.

“But King, honestly, why? How? I ask Pete this and he . . .”

I put my hands on my hips.

“Do you believe you and I are here right now, here in this old place, here having this conversation even though we’re practically strangers?”

She looks around, growing exasperated.

“Of course I do.”

But that moment,

that eerie moment of anticipation, knowing this little nugget of oak was en route,

that was the silo factor.

“Well, it’s hard to dispute the things that are obvious to you, very hard.”

I bow my head and begin to walk on.

“But it’s not,” she yells. “It’s not obvious to me!”

I stop with my back to her, feeling the wet air press on my neck as I kick through the grass.

“How can it be obvious and ridiculous at the same time?” she persists.

I turn around.

“King, do you want me to believe?”

A low-flying jet shakes the air above us, screaming toward the coast.

“What kind of question is that?”

“Do you want me to believe?”

“I can’t answer that without sounding superficial. Maybe we should wait on—” “Let’s agree, you’re not.”

“Well, or like I’m selling something.”

“Again, you’re not.”

“Or like I’m in it for Pete’s sake.”

She looks down and evens out the flower stems, shaking her head.

“Then yes. Okay? Yes.” We walk on in silence, moving north around the golf course then looping back toward the officer’s club and the chapel. Millions of God thoughts echo through my mind and I shudder, feeling grateful for the darkness and the rain, the way they blanket the world in anonymity. Behind the club we come across

51

an exhaust vent pumping warm air out into the night. We stand on the grate and I kick off my shoes to dry my feet. We are still two hours from Pete’s arrival.

“I wonder if I should get these poor things into some water?” Kendall says, caressing the fragile petals, the stems tucked against her stomach in the front pocket of my coat.

“Nah,” I tear a strand of cedar from a low-lying branch and hold it to my nose. “They’ll be alright.”

One of the remaining virtues of chapels, even monument chapels, is that they remain unlocked at night.

“The doors of the church are open,” a minister of mine used to say with his arms raised wide at the end of every sermon as he was moving toward the call to come forward.

We move in slowly, pausing for a moment before the line of empty pews, the huge wood beams arching overhead. I rustle my hair, trying to dry it. Everything is still, and the dimmest of moonlight makes it through the stained-glass depictions of biblical narrative and military virtue. Boards creak beneath the

“So how does it feel to be a witness?” she asks.

“To be someone elses witness?” thin carpet. Down the aisle is the sanctuary space with a step up to a simple altar. Two benches run like brackets along the side walls for the clergy or the choir, the readers, and all this moves back, opening and opening into a great wall of clear glass with a simple cross standing before it. Behind the glass wall there is a small garden and a stand of trees, the kind of nature scene that smart preachers know will only distract their congregation from the sermon.

I sense all around me the marks of well-kept simplicity, the cleanliness that old ladies of the altarguilds so often bring to churches. We sit near the front, divided by the aisle, in pews that smell of Murphy’s soap. My eyes now adjusted to the Chapel’s faint light, I see that etched across the pewbacks, over the walls, along the beams . . . are phrases from Scripture: God’s words to the people of Israel, lines from Mary’s song, the humble imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount.

“Where are the Bibles?” Kendall asks. I scan to my right and left. Everything is empty. Not even hymnals. No book slots beneath the pews.

“Strange.” I respond.

It was strange, almost like an excessive bareness. The words of God written all over the structure of the place, but not a Bible to be found.

“Maybe they just use it for weddings now,” Kendall says.

I lean my head back and cross my arms. Up on the main beam, in the dead center of the room, is carved that declaration Jesus gave to his apostles: You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and to the ends of the earth . . .

I think of the great trail of Sans and Santas coming up the California coast like a Franciscan supply line. It all started with that Italian kid, young Frances, who stripped naked in front of the cathedral, then went to live with God among the birds in the ruins of a country church . . . eventually they made him a saint for it.

“So, suppose God were to give me a miracle,” Kendall says, setting her umbrella open on the floor and the flowers on her lap. I breathe deeply and lean forward. “Just a small one,” she continues, “just a little something so that I know God wants me to keep an open mind.”

“It’s funny,” I say.

“What’s funny?”

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“California: San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara. This state is full of saints.”

“Well, their ghosts maybe. I grew up here and I never met any.”

“Even the San Andreas, the fault that may mean death for everyone, even it’s a saint.”

“You’re right,” Kendall sighs. “Well, it takes a lot of faith to live on a faultline, so maybe the Spaniards were hedging their bets.”

“In the land of saints, real estate soars,” I say, like I’m reading a headline.

“In the land of saints, King,” Kendall persists after a moment, “where are the miracles?”

“You know, that too is funny,” I say rocking my head left and looking across the aisle toward her.

“How so?”

“I used to pray for miracles all the time, but I already believed.”

“Meaning?”

“You want one as evidence that the Old Man exists, right? I guess I wanted them as evidence that he still likes to get dramatic from time to time.”

“You mean that he hadn’t slacked off?”

“Maybe that was it.” I look back toward the cross.

“And?” “And well, I felt bad about it.”

“You felt bad? My goodness, another guilty conscience. Please tell me: why?”

I arch my neck again to the words on the center beam. Kendall, getting no reply, follows my eyes.

“So how does it feel to be a witness?” she asks. “To be someone else’s witness?”

I prop my feet on the pew back in front of me.

You will be my witnesses . . .

“Hard to say. Maybe like I’m asked to do what I can’t do.”

“You can’t talk about Jesus?”

“I can’t talk a person into following Jesus.” The grain of the pew is smooth beneath my palms. The rain comes again, this time good and hard. Wind rattles long-fingered branches across the stained glass.

Through the massive wall at the back of the sanctuary tall flowers and early tomato vines sway and jitter in the garden. The top half of an old barn door swings loudly on rusty hinges, banging awkwardly against a gardener’s shed. Lightening flashes on the white arms of a wheelbarrow turned upwards against a pile of lumber.

“Anyway,” she continues, “if you are the witness then who is on trial? Is God on trial?” she points a lily toward the cross and the great windowed wall. “In which case you are defending him—” “In part,” I fold my hands on my knees.

“—Or am I on trial, with you defending me?”

“In part.”

“Are you defending me?” She turns toward my pew.

I wipe my nose with the hank then meet her gaze. “I hope so.”

“Thank you.”

“But I’m not a mediator here.”

“No, just a witness.”

I yawn. “Something like that.”

“So why does God need a defense? He’s the judge, right?” She bobs one flower in a pool of soft light landing before her.

“No one gets accused more than God.” I point the toe of my shoe to the cross. Kendall laughs. “Seriously. He’s accused of letting shit happen, accused of not existing . . . It all depends on the mood we’re in.”

I cough loudly then clasp my hands behind my head. “One day we’ll mutter some prayer for things to go our way, the next day we’ll give him the finger.”

“So that’s why you felt bad, asking for a miracle?” She leans her head forward against the pew and looks toward me.

“Maybe so. I have a pulse, right? That should be enough.”

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Kendall stares at me. I feel her confusion. She then looks down, lays her left hand along her throat and holds her neck still, counting softly.

I think of Pete coming down off the Sierras into salty winds, his plane lurching ahead through black clouds on a descent toward coastline lights. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve . . . Kendall whispers.

Maybe we have come to the “ends of the earth.” Maybe this is the westward end of the long echo of witnessing words, the distant edge where shuddering whispers of miracles at last give out and fall sleepily into the sea.

Behind the beam the ceiling slopes downward, and where the roof pitches into the bottom corners the downspouts behind the glass are dislodged, teetering on their mounts. Water, welling down from the gutters, funnels through the gaps in two heavy fountains to the ground below. The heavier gusts bow the streams leftward, then rightward.

“Was that a dog?” Kendall asks, raising her head.

“Huh?” “I thought I heard a bark.”

We both sit and listen.

“There!” She looks toward the glass wall.

“I don’t think—” I start to say, but then there is a sound like a bark, and a kind of murmuring coming from outside the wall to my right.

“Now it sounds like someone humming.” She says.

Someone is walking on gravel outside. We tilt our heads. More humming. Then, yes, two quick barks from behind the chapel. The footsteps grow heavier, crunching their way toward the back area. I expect to see the beam of a security warden’s flashlight come around the corner.

There is another bark and Kendall catches her breath. The humming gives way to an “Easy now, girl,” and then there is the familiar beard, bent slightly against the small chest. Light from a floodlight falls on the smudges. “Easy now.” He swings a bag of some sort from his right arm to his left, then hoists it up in the direction of the shed. “That’s right, that’s right.” A small head and two paws surface on top of the bottom half of the barn door, and our flowerman shakes the bag excitedly. He opens the door and bends over the dog making high-pitched jibberish sounds. “Okay now, okay girl.” We watch through the glass as he gets on his knees and pours out the dog food. The wind rushes in again, smothering their sounds and knocking the doors about. Kendall sits upright.

Suddenly a thunk! sounds above us, then a thump thump, and the sound of something rolling. She mumbles a what the . . . then again, Thunk! thump, rummmmm. I watch the ceiling, wondering what heavenly objects are assaulting the roof. Down below the flowerman is still hunched over his dog and pays no mind. Thunk! again, then rolling, and down off the back roof arcs what appears to be a persimmon, landing on the muddy soil. Hail would reflect more of the glow from the floodlight, so I rule that out. Besides, we had a big persimmon tree in our front pasture in Virginia that the deer loved to raid, and right now I am picturing that tree being sucked clean by the tongue of some god-made tornado, and that tornado running like a cyclone high into the heavens, darting west, then vomiting all its fruits onto this little church.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kendall laughs, “donPépe should not be missing this.”

You will be my witnesses, I say to myself and begin to stand.

“Do you think he’s seen us?” she continues.

“Flower man?”

And right then our bearded friend begins to disrobe beside the shed.

“Nope.”

“Oh my,” Kendall exclaims, putting her hands to her mouth. Off comes the shirt, the jeans, everything.

He pets the dog and strides right over to the glass wall where he stops, looks at the water gushing on the right, then the left, and opts for the latter. The dog is right on his heels. Slowly, I sit down in the front pew. For a moment his naked body goes rigid under the water. He utters an ooooeeeee! And starts bobbing under the heavy stream. The dog barks and wags her tail.

All around the wind is throwing branches into branches and the rain is dumping. The flower man

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retrieves an old bar of soap from the ground around his feet and through the gusts I hear him chanting one two three four, then switching to scrub the other arm, one two three four, and the legs, the chest . . .

He commences doing the same for the dog. Both shiver happily.

“Let’s say he did do it,” Kendall theorizes softly, “the resurrection. Was it in order to secure some kind of proof, or more just for the hell of it?”

Maybe this is the westward end of the long echo of witnessing words, the distant edge where shuddering whispers of miracles at last give out and

fall sleepily into the sea.

The dog, scrubbed and rinsed, laps at the water gathering around her master’s feet. Again upright, he turns in slow circles beneath the stream with his arms folded, counting gruffly each time as his beard passes by the glass one two three . . . Kendall echoes the count softly till seven turns are made. His back to us, the man sits in the pool of his shower and leans his head against the chapel’s glass, the gutter water spraying against his forehead.

“I think he did it because it came naturally. I think the dying must have been harder.”

Thunk! thump thump, rummmm. The dog’s ears and neck go stiff. Klumph goes the projectile into the soil. Up goes the dog, darting after it. Thunk! again, rummmm, the dog crouches with her forelegs rigid, Klumph, pounce, and it’s in her jowls. Our man claps and yells, “Oooeeee!” Kendall steps gamely across the aisle to sit beside me and we both crouch as a barrage of thunks! “What the hell, King!” Branches scrape on the walls. The dog is bounding right and left, eyeing the roof line and the lip of the gutter, grabbing the balls in her mouth then shucking them out in time to recover the next one. The flower man is up now, cheering his dog and swaying back and forth while timing out the estimated descent from the thunk! to the klumph! A stillness between gusts and both have their eyes peeled. Then another barrage from the void and the excitement continues.

Our man takes several long steps through the mud to the shed where he reaches inside and returns holding a container of sorts. Thunk! thunk! Pounce pounce. “That’s right girl, that’s right!” He unscrews the cap and, holding it high above his head, dumps cloud upon cloud of white powder over his nakedness. I remember the talcum powder my grandfather used to keep beside his shower. The dog barks and bobs her head in delight. Her master claps and sways some more, then both of them are diving after the hard fruits until the rain begins to wane and the trees wear a soft sheen.

“Did you give anything up for Lent?” Kendall asks, still staring ahead.

I rub my palms together slowly. “Nah, not this year. You?” “I told Pete I’d give up doubt.”

“Wow. And Pete?”

“He gave up chocolate, but he cheats on Sundays.” Then, she adds, “Me too I guess,” and eases herself up out of the pew.

Flowerman walks over to the shed then returns past the dog and stands before the glass, facing us, carefully parting his hair with a comb. Kendall steps, then pauses, then takes another stride up the

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short step into the altar area. Our man sets his comb down on some drainage gravel and kneels. His hands are folded in front of his crotch and his eyes, wide as they were when we talked with him, are fixed on the back of the cross through the glass. Kendall, unseen, kicks off her shoes and continues her slow steps. Behind the flowerman the dog licks and pulls contentedly at her fur. The gutters drip.

Kendall stops behind the altar table, still facing him, now just a yard or two from the cross. The floodlight glow softens on the man’s head and shoulders. His lips move steadily. Without shifting his gaze he scrapes in the mud with his left hand and smears some across his forehead, then clasps his hands before his bare chest. Kendall slides an elastic down the length of her ponytail and draws her hair around her shoulder, leaning forward and crouching on her knees. I hear her knee joints pop. The dog cocks one ear, but the man’s eyes do not move.

At the seminary they teach us to read the liturgies with a reverent cadence. Cranmer’s prayers, says Dr. Otto, as though he is sharing a secret, are built with theological clarity, but hewn with a craftsman’s poetry. “And your cadence, my friends, is a calling forth, an appeal to the utterances buried deep in reverent souls.”

I am motionless. Kendall is motionless. Then, from the pew across from me, a shrill ringing erupts in Kendall’s purse. I jolt to my right, then freeze. Kendall is leaning on her palms, her face just feet from the glass. The man lowers his eyes and stretches his neck, squinting around the cross. Another ring sounds, echoing through the room. I bolt up and go to grab the purse, fumbling inside it. “Kendall!” I whisper. She straightens onto her feet and begins to ease herself backwards, still watching as the man puts his hands and forehead against the glass. She stumbles on her shoes. I swear under my breath as it rings a third time, then jump the steps and offer it to Kendall. She sweeps an arm back and pulls it to her ear. “Hey,” she says numbly, still fixed on the figure behind the cross. I hear a grainy voice chatter some enthusiastic greeting.

The kneeling figure, confused but unshaken, returns his eyes to the cross before him and reaches one hand back, smoothing the hair of the dog’s neck. His lips resume their rites and he signs a slow cross across his chest and shoulders, running a line through the pasty white powder. He closes the ritual with a nod, rises and walks back through the shadows to the shed with his dog.

“Yes, yes, I’m here,” says Kendall, “Sorry.”

Backing down off the step I feel nothing but the urgent need to leave this place. I retrieve Kendall’s purse, trip over the umbrella and begin moving toward the back of the room. When I turn Kendall is seated on the step in front of the altar table.

“No babe, just a bit—No, I’m fine. What do you mean? Where are you? . . . My place, when did you . . . ” I set the purse down and lean against the back wall, marveling at Pete’s timing.

“We, I thought the flight was coming later,” Kendall continues. She puts her hand to her forehead then looks back over her shoulder. The clothes are gone. The dog, the man . . .

“I’m at church . . . Yeah . . . The little one, up in the Presidio.” She walks back to the glass and scans all around the garden area. “No, I’m fine . . . Look, just go get your car and come up here, okay?

My world is full of distances. There are the small ones, like seconds between phone rings, or the air drawn through the length of a Churchill, the pause between the minister’s prayer and the congregation’s response. And there are the impossible, seemingly impassable ones. I wonder at the piles of crust and soil between the earthen aquifer and the sun-warmed blossom.

Here, now, in this chapel in the Presidio, in a town where I do not live, on the brink of another birthday, and with moments passing before my old friend will arrive. Here I rest against the wall near the entrance and look down the rows to the altar floor where Kendall sits, the lilies laid flat beside her. She faces the glass wall with the cross before it, the small space beneath the crossbar where two handprints and a streak of mud are aglow in the floodlight.

I stand here, remembering myself in my white robe, the boy acolyte, the crucifer. I remember those

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still moments at the rear of the sanctuary behind the pews, where I held the bronze cross before me and waited for the nod from dad, the nod that meant I was to begin the processional down the long aisle, that I was to lead everyone forward into worship. I see the heads of older parishioners bowing as I carry the cross past their pews.

From outside there is the sound of the wind and the intermittent clank of the shed door. I look again to the phrases etched into the structure of the church. Kendall’s head is bowed, and she takes the long hard breaths of one who has begun to weep. I step back, moving into the church’s small entrance area and let the sanctuary door close slowly. There, in the dark, I pray.

Moments pass and I hear a car pull in. A door shuts, then footsteps, and Pete steps in out of the wind.

“Hey bud,” I say softly. He stops. His eyes adjust.

“King?”

“Happy birthday,” I whisper and reach for his hand.

“I don’t—” he starts, and I pull him into an embrace. “Kendall?” he asks. I nod toward the sanctuary door. He lays his hand on the latch and opens it a crack. The altar area is empty, and he looks at me. We both look in again. There, beneath the cross, are the flowers, and outside, behind the glass wall, there Kendall appears in the faint light with her back to us where the flowerman had stood. She takes off my coat, then her coat, and with her head bowed unbuttons her blouse. A finger-width stream of water falls down from the gutter, washing through her hair and running over her back.

We let the door close again, and from the wall above the gun batteries Pete and I launch persimmons out over the San Francisco night, each time waiting together, hushed beneath the in-between of their brave flights.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Judith Adkins has a PhD in history from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. When not earning her daily bread at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., she writes essays and poems. She lives on the campus of Virginia Theological Seminary with her partner and young son. Although her obsessively honed footnotes have appeared in several volumes of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, these are her first published prose poems.

Niamh Corcoran’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Cream City Review, The Los Angeles Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an individual artist grant in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. Also an occasional visual artist and an avid tomato gardener, she lives with her family in between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Heather Cousins lives in Monroe, Georgia, with her husband and her daughter Anna. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Georgia. She has been previously published in Pleiades, Cold Mountain Review, and the Sycamore Review. She is currently working on a book of poems inspired by the landscape of her home state, Michigan.

Jen Dempsey lives in Traverse City, Michigan, where books mysteriously accumulate in mounds around her. A graduate of University of Maryland’s MFA program, Jen has worked as poetry editor on several literary journals. Her poetry may be found or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Long River Run, Santa Clara Review, and others.

A lifelong resident of Michigan, CJ Giroux continues to find inspiration in the peninsulas that surround him, his students, and his family. He teaches English at the college level and is working on his dissertation. His work has been published, among other places, in Bear River Review, The Prose-Poem Project, and Grey Sparrow Journal. He is extremely happy to have another poem featured in Ruminate.

Jodi Hays’ paintings are informed by the physical and the psychological landscapes in which we live. She has been a resident at the Cooper Union School of Art and the Vermont Studio Center and has exhibited her work at venues including the Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, TN) and Boston Center for the Arts.

Public collections include the J. Crew Company, National Parks of America, and Gordon College. She studied foundations at School of Visual Arts and graduated from the University of Tennessee School

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of Art with a BFA in drawing. She pursued studio and curatorial projects in Boston where she lived, earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art. She currently lives in East Nashville, Tennessee.

You can see more of her work at www.jodihays.com Nahal Suzanne Jamir obtained her PhD in creative writing at Florida State University. Her work has been published in The South Carolina Review, Jabberwock Review, Meridian, The Los Angeles Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Carolina Quarterly. She has a very bossy but loving Persian mother who requires a lot of attention.

Jacqueline Kolosov has a new chapbook, Hourglass, from Pecan Grove Press. Her third full-length collection, Memory of Blue, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry early next year. She lives in West Texas with her family.

Tamara Lang is a Southern California native with a joint passion for words and the ocean. She studies English and Biology at Westmont College and is currently studying abroad in Kaikoura, New Zealand.

Ken Meisel is a poet and a marriage and family psychotherapist with publications in over seventy national magazines including Cream City Review, Rattle, River Oak Review, Boxcar Review, and Controlled Burn. His most recent poetry collection is Beautiful Rust (Bottom Dog Press, 2009). In addition to writing poetry, he gathers together with his nephew and his two brothers each November to make a music CD. Last year the boys did a stupendous version of Neil Young’s “Harvest” as well as a dandy country punk version of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Aynslee Moon is originally from Amory, Mississippi, and her work has been exhibited both locally and nationally. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Mississippi in Oxford and is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she has also taught beginning drawing classes. More of her work can be seen at www.aynsleemoon.com.

Sandra Soli’s poems, short fiction, and columns have appeared in more than sixty journals including the New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and New Delta Review, where her work received the Eyster Poetry Prize. Anthologized most recently in Broken Circles, a project benefiting food pantries across America, and Shifting Balance Sheets, focused on immigration issues, Sandy enjoys collaborative projects with artists in other disciplines and often serves as visiting faculty and poetry recitalist. A staunch Anglophile, Sandy was born in wartime England, the subject of her new book-in- progress.

Virginia Chase Sutton loves to travel and has recently returned from her third trip to Buenos Aires, which she is beginning to think of as her second home. She collects vintage evening bags and costume jewelry and has amassed quite a lot, thanks to secondhand stores and yard sales. Her first book is called Embellishments (Chatoyant) and her second is titled What Brings You To Del Amo (University Press of New England), which won the Morse Poetry Prize. She has been the Louis Untermeyer Scholar in Poetry at Bread Loaf and won the National Poet Hunt. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review and Ploughshares among many other literary publications, journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Elizabeth Swann lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her family and her writing buddy—a big yellow mutt named Biscuit. A former high school English teacher, she’s currently working on a young adult novel in which science, myth, and religion intersect. She earned her MFA from Queens University, and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Southern Poetry Review, Liturgical Credo, Imagining Heaven, and Luck: A Collection of Fact, Fiction, Incantation and Verse.

Jeanne Murray Walker was born in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, a village of 700 people, and she still subscribes to the town’s newspaper The Parkers Prairie Independent. Her latest book is New Tracks, Night Falling (Wm. B. Eerdmans). She is excited about being included in the anthology representing Poetry magazine’s first 100 years: The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine (forthcoming, October 2012). She has been honored with many awards and prizes, including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and an NEA, and her poetry has appeared on buses and trains. She does readings and talks around the world in venues ranging from The Library of Congress to Oxford University to Babs-Bolyai University in Romania to Texas canyon country. Jeanne currently serves as a professor of English at the University of Delaware and as a poetry mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program.

Jordan K. Walters, a native of Austin, Texas, currently braves the bitter winters of Holland, Michigan, to study writing and theology at Hope College. When not writing or reading, Jordan enjoys throwing dinner parties, making music, hiking, traveling, and advocating on behalf of those affected by AIDS and human trafficking.

York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel. Wangerin’s most recent work, Naomi and Her Daughters, is a historically accurate telling of the ancient narrative, cast in new light and filled with rich description and gritty realism. Another recent book is Letters from the Land of Cancer, a series of letters in which he explores his own illness and mortality. The author of more than forty books, Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is senior research professor at Valparaiso University.

Sheri L. Wright’s visual work has appeared in numerous journals, including Blood Orange Review, The Single Hound, THIS Literary Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Blood Lotus Journal and Subliminal Interiors. Ms. Wright looks for what is hidden amongst the discarded, what may be overlooked in abandoned places thought to have no value, knowing that there are stories waiting to be heard if we slow down long enough to listen. Through her poetry and images, she seeks to create an enhanced awareness of the ordinary. More of her work can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/sherilwright/.

Christopher Yates grew up in Virginia but now makes his home on the New England coast. He teaches philosophy at Boston College, where he recently completed his PhD. His writings have appeared in journals such as Religion & The Arts, theotherjournal.com, and Contemporary Aesthetics. A scholar by training and a storyteller by habit, his creative work shares in common with recent phenomenology that effort to appreciate and discern the interpretive nature of human experience and narrative.

Angela Young received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls in Spring 2008. She is currently an MFA candidate in printmaking at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University where she will graduate in Spring 2012. Her work currently addresses the issue of Objectified Body Consciousness, which is a term used to express the experience of viewing one’s body as an object separate from one’s self and a discipline to understand the beliefs and behaviors that support this experience. Young has thus far participated in eighty-nine national and international exhibitions and is published in various articles, magazines, and books. Her work can be viewed at www. angelayoungart.com.

Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s writing career has encompassed almost every genre: fiction, essay, spirituality, children’s stories, and biblical exposition. Wangerin has won the National Book Award, the New

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THOUGHTS ON THE STORIES WE TELL FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

LAST NOTE

I must

believe that there’s always another story to tell, or always a way to rebirth the same story again. That we can perpetually discover love, grief, and the self through varied colors and places, and with each return, maybe we get a little bit closer to delineating what it is to be human.

Jen Dempsey

POETRY

Some years ago I was studying late at one of those coffee shops where college students pull their all-nighters amid laptops and small votive candles. An old man in a tattered three-piece suit and wire-rimmed glasses appeared before me and stood stock-still. He waited through my puzzled stare. “And what is it, this reading?” he asks through a French accent. “Well, ah, so it’s by an old scholar, a man named John Henry Newman who was—” He nods his chin and interrupts gracefully: “Hmm. Yes, John Newman and the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement.

Marvelous.” Then he turned, as if satisfied, and recessed into the night. Today the moment (more than the topic) sticks to that part of my mind where half-secrets are kept and never resolved.

I’ve no idea as to the gentleman’s story, or if it were ever heard.

And I confess that I wonder if such an exchange could ever again occur in the history of this world.

Christopher Yates

FICTION

My granddaddy was a rascal—and my favorite person. He’s passed on, but we still laugh and tell many of his crazy stories, like the time Aunt Honey got up in the middle of a moonless night when staying at the family farm, picked her way to the out house, pulled up her night gown and sat—on a hysterical hen someone had trapped in there. I don’t know who made more noise, but lights came on all over the house! And then there are inspirational stories—when my mother’s sister contracted polio, and Mom had to stand outside Kosair Children’s Hospital to glimpse her little sister through the window while the blonde, cherub-faced five-year-old was quarantined. She never walked again, but my aunt has accomplished more than anyone I know.

The stories of my family’s struggles and survival, their examples of faith and determination carry me through desperate days, and the funny ones break through the darkest shadows. They help me to remember where I came from, and who I am.

Elizabeth Swann

POETRY

I love Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” because it is a perfect story. The young main character, Laura, undergoes transformation via class distinctions, the beauty and perfection

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of death. At the end, she says “Isn’t life . . . isn’t life—” and her brother answers, “Isn’t it, darling?” She has grown up through transformation and coming of age. When I read Mansfield’s stories for the first time, they really spoke to me as a young woman. I was excited to read what a woman wrote and responded to the perfection of her themes and settings and characterizations. Yes, perfection.

Virginia Chase Sutton

POETRY

A few years ago in the middle of a hot Southern summer, my mother gave me love letters that she and my father had exchanged before they were married. She wanted me to transcribe them, get them onto the computer. I made her sit with me on the bed in my childhood room as I tried to put the letters, some undated, in chronological order. I came across one letter in which my father had evaluated my mother. He had broken her down into categories—physical, spiritual, intellectual—and he gave her a grade (out of 100%) in each of these categories. She didn’t make all A’s. I was outraged and asked my mother why she hadn’t gotten furious with him. I’m not sure that my mother ever understood his letters. Certainly, I felt shame for her. I continued to order the letters. But of or in what order is love? And I cannot simply transcribe. I think that my father loved her. I think that she loved him. I think that she loves me. After all of my listening and gathering, all I can do is approximate—and believe. I tell her stories as my own.

Nahal Suzanne Jamir

FICTION

The story goes that Sir Philip Sidney died at 31 in battle partly because he had loaned some of his armor to a friend.

As his life ebbed away, he handed his water bottle to a fellow soldier. According to legend he said, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” I can’t help but think about Sidney when I consider the strange business of telling stories, because he was the first writer in English to defend storytelling. In the early 1580’s the Puritans had already started writing broadsides which attacked fiction writers and poets as liars. (The Puritans would later close all the theatres.) One of those Puritans had the audacity to dedicate his scathing attack on theatre to Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney retorted with his “Defense of Poetry,” which more than four hundred years later still makes fabulous reading. Fiction writers and poets, Sidney argued, tell “a tale which holdeth children from play, old men from the chimney corner, and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.”

Jeanne Murray Walker

NONFICTION

Angela Young. Skin I. Spray paint, powdered graphite, and graphite pencil. 42 x 75 inches.

Jodi Hays. In Progress. Oil on board. 8 x 10 inches.