Issue 27: Glimpses

POET RY N ONFICTIO N FICTIO N V IS UAL ART

+

to the missionary who knocked on my front door • Brian Baumgart reimagining obituaries from glances to deep looks • Rachel Faldet watching from our windows • David Brendan Hopes these very threads •Lydia Larson

27 ISSUE

2013 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize Judged by Mark Richard winner: David Brendan Hopes’ “Saturdays he drove the ford pickup”

$

sprin g

9

ruminate?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder Ruminate is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. Ruminate was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward. Please join us.

FRONT COVER Mallory Moran. A little sleep, a little slumber. 35 mm color film. 11 X 14 inches.

OPPOSITE PAGE Derek Wagner. Relativity. Paper, oil, acrylic, and coffee on canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

27

contents

staff extraordinaire editor-in-chief BR I ANNA VAN DY K E

senior editor

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSCcertified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

S U B M I SS IO N S We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website. For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

AMY LOW E

poetry editor ST EP HANI E LOV EG R OV E

visual art editor ST EFANI R OSS I

review editor PAU L W I LLI S

associate readers J OHN PAT R I C K HARTY ST EP HANI E M I K K ELSON J ONAT HAN VAN DY K E ER I KA LEW I S

copyeditor BEC KY DAWSON

interns Aubrey allison kendall greenwood corinne winthrop

marketing and outreach K EI RA HAV ENS

print designer ANNE PAG EAU givestudio.com

web designer KAT I E J ENK I NS

S U B SCRI PTIO N RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this nonprofit and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid. Please consider subscribing to Ruminate.

One Year, $32. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at subscriptions@ ruminatemagazine.org.

Send all subscription orders and changes of address to Ruminate, 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521 or send an email to subscriptions@ruminatemagazine.org. Library subscription services are available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

notes Editor’s From You Artists’ Contributor’s Last

4 5 28 56 58

F RIE N DS O F RU M IN ATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Ad Lib Christian Arts, Steve & Kim Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Randy & Linda Randall, Dave & Kathy Schuurman, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, J.J. & Amy Zeilstra, John Zeilstra & Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

Patrons Kate & Dan Bolt, David & Terry Clark, Imagined Design, Judith Dupree, Duncan & Leslie Fields, Brad & Keira Havens, Ryan & Katie Jenkins, Tim & Katie Koblenz, Chris & Barb Melby, Brian & Anne Pageau, Mark & Michele Pageau, Chris & Becky Pittoti, Jesse & Carly Ritorto, Neal & Becky Stephens, Troy & Kelly Suto, Richard Terrell, Brandon & Kelly Van Dyke, Matt & Lisa Willis

Sponsors Helen Allison, Dale & Linda Breshears, Bryce Emley, Jennifer Stewart Fueston, Manfred Kory, Rob Lee, Janet Penhall, Cheryl Russell, Alexa Van Dalsem, Mary Van Denend Copyright © 2013 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

46

poetry Katherine L. Hester Cucumbers Susan Lane Shields Montana Haunting

9 12

David Brendan Hopes Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pickup

24

Terrence Cheng In San Francisco

10

Joan Biddle The Wasp in the Church

11

Andrew Johnson This Expanding Universe

21

Brian Baumgart Knot and Stitch How to Save Me: To the Missionary Who Knocked on My Front Door

Rachel Faldet Leaf Senescence

fiction

D ISTRIB U TI O N Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company and through direct distribution.

N O N F iction

22 23

Chris Anderson Paper Maple

39

Kristin George Bagdanov Ruach My Father Scrubs the Kitchen Counter

40 41

Andrew Morris Hiker’s Hut

42

review 44

Bethany Marroquin Review of Goliath by Susan Woodring

VIS UA L A RT Mallory Moran Cover Back Cover

29 30 31 32

Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover

A little sleep, a little slumber Like chaff and grain together

Lydia Larson Untitled The Stripping Self Portrait as Jonah Kite Derek Wagner Relativity Anesthetic Fog

Ruminate readers on Glimpses Send us your notes for Issue 28...

We love hearing from you!

editor’s note

I was driving to the airport to pick up a friend, a rare moment of being alone for precisely 75 minutes—no

I was naive to believe that I could type Grandma Grace’s diaries in one week’s time. There was only one shoebox full, and I wanted to preserve her faithful entries—eight small frayed diaries representing forty years of life as farm wife, mother, church member, friend. One single year took many hours to record. A year of egg-collecting and counting, weather commentary, trips to town, dinners with friends, the fevers and flu of children. So simple, yet profound. “Lavonne came home from school; peace declared with Germany.” I typed the dates, trying to decipher smudged, faded pencil scribbles. These glimpses of her at the kitchen table or feeding hens or mending socks, they made me pause and wait, wait for eyes to clear.

children, no email inbox, I think I had even turned off NPR—when it happened. A glimpse of a poem, my poem, began to unfold, making sweet knits and purls down the middle of my mind. I remember being startled by it—struck by the gift of a couple of good words strung together, an apt image, a simple truth.

I was late to pick up my friend, and there was no easy place to pull over and jot the words down. So, I begged my brain, please, please, hold this for me, like handing a sleeping baby to her crib, squinting your eyes, holding your breath, and tiptoeing out the door. Praying that the child won’t wake. And I thought my brain could do it, I really did. But when I finally sat with my pen in hand, it was gone. The poem had awakened, disappeared.

Which is why I had to write down what little I remembered: an innocent phrase from my daughter, a glorious line that began “like a . . . ” and something about the image of the oil drills I could see from my car window on that airport drive. I had a glimpse of something good, and although it never made its way out of my mind, it still marked me. It made me wonder about all the other glimpses that are out there. And, it turns out, there are plenty. I’m grateful to the authors and artists in this issue for sharing their glimpses with us, for sharing the work that, thankfully, made its way out of their minds.

Our theme of “glimpses” for this issue was inspired, in part, by our 2013 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, David Brendan Hopes’ “Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pickup.” Hopes’ story explores the impact of refusing to look closely, of seeing a glimpse or half-truth and mistakenly thinking we’ve seen the whole (the main character in Hopes’ story is always peeking through windows rather than looking at something straight on). I appreciate the reminder this story offers us, that we often can’t bear to see the whole truth—maybe because it’s too bright or too different or too beautiful to see. We are also pleased to share the second place winner from our Short Story Prize, Terrence Cheng’s “In Francisco.” Mr. Cheng’s story provides a glimpse of a mysterious man who is on the run and is haunted by his past and craving something real—real food, a real home, a real family. He is on a journey for sustenance, a journey we can all recognize. We are thankful for our wonderful finalist judge, Mark Richard, for selecting both of these bright stories. We hope you enjoy them!

Our poets, essayists, and artists in this issue give us many glimpses as well. For what is a poem, brief in its very form—at least in the form we publish here—if not an exercise in glimpsing? There are cucumber tendrils climbing a fence, a missionary knocking on the door, and moments, as Kristin George Bagdanov writes, that are “held like a vowel / inside the mouth.” In Rachel Faldet’s essay, we are given an alternative to the kind of obituaries that are mere glances at people’s lives. Instead, through many glimpses, moments, and memories, Ms. Faldet gathers and shares the rich story of two men whom she loves and who are leaving this world. Our artists in this issue grant us stunning visual glimpses into other worlds. Lydia Larson says of her work, “Each painting is a little world . . . intimately connecting to the next.”

It is this connection between all the glimpses that keeps me longing to understand the larger picture. This sense of longing is part of Ruminate’s mission statement, the place where we remind ourselves and tell others what we’re about. We say that “Ruminate was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward.” For us, art is a kind of glimpse into the good stuff—the beauty and pain and love that we all want to understand. The longing occurs when we’ve witnessed a glimmer of something truthful or something lovely. Is that not why we keep pursuing God? The glimpses give us hope. They make sweet knits and purls down the middle of our minds.

In the gloaming, in that odd transition when daylight withdraws and darkness envelopes, we glimpse Truth only through charcoal mists before the somber evening consumes her. But staring Truth boldly in the eye by daylight reveals nothing new. And waking Truth as she slumbers dreamlessly in the night proves futile. Only at dusk do we glimpse her, the burgeoning starlight soft in her eyes. Timidly Truth approaches, her misty cloak billowing with every step, outstretched hand starkly white in ever-descending darkness.

Grasping us gently, she leads us by the hand to the One she worships. As we surrender, sinking to our knees in His presence, she slips away, smiling softly, her task complete.

And we learn to worship, too.

To the glimpses we’ve all witnessed,

Susanne Barrett P ine Valley, california

Denise Vredevoogd Grandville , m ichi gan

What is a glimpse but a hint of the whole? From one corner window in my house, beyond the alley and our neighbor’s walkway, lined with red geraniums and tiny American flags, I catch a glimpse of the sea. The dune grass silhouettes the sky as the sliver of water shimmers in the morning sun. I can’t see the waves breaking; I can’t see the sand. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that the vast ocean is there, tides moving in, moving out. And that glimpse causes me to catch my breath, and I can feel my soul dancing, anticipating the moment my feet finally touch the sand.

Diane Selkregg Macun g ie, P ennsylvania

Labor Day. No school, no cars in the parking lot. I should p.s. We hope you enjoy our new format—we’ve improved the quality of our printing, paper, and binding— because we believe in the artists and writers we’re publishing, and we want to show off their work. Enjoy!

4

Notes from you

have gotten a better look at him, but I was lying on the warm concrete, shielding my head with my arms while he kicked my back and legs. I only rose when he rode away on my

bike. What I saw: he was strong, I was weak; he was black, I was white. When Coach saw me walking, he flung open his passenger door. “Which way?” he asked. We tailed him till we caught a glimpse. Later, browsing the yearbook, Coach pointed: black kid, a flat top. “That him?” the policeman asked. I wasn’t sure. The hairstyles had changed. I said yes. I thought I’d seen him. I thought I’d seen us both.

Brent Newsom shawnee, oklaho ma

Glimpsing eternity, seems a large task. Yet, it’s what I see when my six-year-old prays before bed. Glimpsing God, an impossibility. Yet, I observe it when my husband kisses me in kindness . . . after I’ve insulted him. Glimpsing hope, amidst failure, is difficult to assimilate and use. But it’s there, when we focus on God’s all-encompassing glory. And we realize that glimpses of Him are not only possible, but everywhere.

Heather Spiva sacram ento, california

Near my brother’s open coffin, we in his small family stood as a ragged receiving line for all the people who had come to pay respects. He had died unexpectedly, gone in the night.

“He looks asleep, except he’s not snoring,” his wife—now widow—said earlier, a small joke to ease our distress. Later I glimpsed her in the throng beside the coffin, chatting quietly with a friend. Maybe they were talking about his impossibly curly hair, gray now, but white blond when he was a boy in my memory of summers. Absently, she stroked his hair, curving her fingers lightly through the curls as she must have done countless times. In her gesture I saw love, grief, and the strength of ordinary days.

Rachel Cooper Canning, nova scotia

To my left,

a glass cylinder overflowing with Christmas cards and return addresses glares at me. To my far right, the calendar is refreshed with February because there is but one unlived day left to January, and today is the day my Dad died when I was so young I could only look forward. I had to turn the page. Just left of the ceaseless calendar stands a pink shaded lamp with a magnet on the base telling me to “Be the Change you wish to see in the world.” Filling the void between unanswered Christmas cards and the mandate of the pink lamp is the computer monitor, my window into and out of all the worlds I visit yet fail to inhabit.

Amanda Adams Fort Collins, colorado

5

2013

William Van Dyke Short Story Prize sponsored by the van dyke Family charitable foundation jud g ed by mark richard

finalists

first place David Brendan Hopes

second place Terrence Cheng

Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pickup

In San Francisco

honorable m ention Megan Malone Safekeeping

Daniel Casey • RE: Sentencing Peter Court • The Simple Art of Flight A. R. Gardner • A Mother’s Legacy Lindsey Griffin • Tenebrae Linda McCullough Moore • What a Lifetime Is Lisa Mikitarian • I’m Not That Girl Alexandre Puttick • The Fall

Mark Richard is the author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and a bestselling novel, Fishboy.

His short stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Paris Review, among others. He is the recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award. His most recent book is the memoir House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their three sons.

note from the jud ge: Mark Richard <<

6

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

7

Katherine L. Hester

Cucumbers << note from the jud g e : Mark Richard

It

was a pleasure to read this year’s submissions to Ruminate’s short story contest. In one story, grief is made real in images of rain and through music. In another, a woman hopes to find healing from her childhood, trying to accept love from those who often fail her and from a God who never does. A person of faith begins to have doubts during the prolonged death of a loved one, the meaning of the suffering proving elusive. A man struggles to keep the contents of his mind from spilling out at the end of his life. Another person of faith desires to surrender unto death, but the will to survive is stronger.

I kept coming back to one story in particular. It certainly wasn’t “spiritual” or “religious” in the way the other finalist stories were with literal churches, youth fellowship meetings, pastors, priests, and final rites. But David Hopes’ “Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pickup” spoke to me as a parable would, and I’m always inclined toward a parable. And on subsequent readings, it seemed a bit more layered than I originally thought. The things I first thought sentimental about the piece actually gave it ultimate poignancy.

A woman has a “different” neighbor, a mysterious man who digs in his garden at all hours of the day and night. He seems harmless enough at first; the only remarkable thing about him is his ability to grow flowers that bloom later than most, even into the first snow. Then a friend (a failed pastor!) remarks after dinner one night that decomposing bodies provide a special kind of warmth. A simple, flippant, wine-soaked party-exit wisecrack, but it finds a place in the narrator’s mind like a seed falling onto fertile ground. Soon the woman is convinced the mysterious neighbor IS burying bodies next door at night. So, of course she calls the police who arrive and destroy the man’s garden in search of what the woman begins to realize will never be found.

8

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Yet for me, it’s all there, in a Christian sense. A stranger, an “other” person appears whose only apparent crime in the beginning is to bring beauty into the world. But that’s too much for the Pharisee in us. There must be something darker, more dangerous, more threatening to this individual than that. He must be stopped. He must be sacrificed to protect “us.” Sound familiar? I won’t belabor the theology, but I think you can read as far into the story as you want to read. I did and I enjoyed the ending, the kind toward which all short stories should strive—surprise and inevitability.

My choice for second place is a strange little story called “In San Francisco” by Terrence Cheng. Again, the “spiritual” elements are not quite apparent on first reading, but like Mr. Hopes’ story, there’s something that resonates within us at the conclusion, or should, if we are a semi-careful reader half-awake trying to possess a peculiar Christian worldview.

In this story, another mysterious person arrives in San Francisco, and we learn that he has committed a terrible crime back in New York that the writer deliciously parcels out to us in just the right-sized bits. The key to the story is in the second sentence, the two bags in hand. The bags become (for me, at least) the burden of sin (the baggage, if you will) the man carries since the commission of his crime.

He believes he cannot go on his way without the bags and their contents (the money), and the things he buys with the money bring him no pleasure and never will, and he begins to know this. I won’t spoil the ending of this story like I may have the previous (though I don’t think I have), but I like the fact that sin hidden from the light of God’s forgiveness, like the bags hidden under the man’s bed, will forever keep us in darkness and uncertainty and compel us toward a slow march into real death.

Hand-over-hand, starry blooms climb the rigging of fence, toward the echo of themselves that exists in the invisible stars that pepper the bright blue bowl of the sky.

Inside, I sit back on my heels, silenced by the Jacob’s ladder of vertebrae in your back as you twist over your head the hand-me-down shirt.

These are the dog-days, the doldrums; here in the city, heat handles the pavement.

The day inhales, exhales; blue sky bulks into clouds, becomes showers.

In the backyard, tendrils of cucumber climb the rigging of fence, each bulge behind the blossoms become ballast. By afternoon, the morning’s flowers will be fruit.

Will perform their clever, botanical slight of hand, turning water that falls from the sky into seed and pulp, flesh beaded with condensation.

Tonight you will reach for the pale disks of cucumber on the plate. Every circle includes its own ghostly, starred symmetry, the seeds’ arrangement echoes the shape of the blossom, the shape of the sky, the morning sun, the afternoon rain, the hand that hovers over the plate.

9

Susan Lane Shields

Joan Biddle

Montana Haunting

The Wasp in the Church

On the road from the ghostâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s famous ranch, wands of light slip under a silver storm curtaining the Bitterroots, break over fields ochre and violet,

The wasp loved the beggars. It liked the Christ that rose and the candles and the singing, but it loved the most the prodigal who came in from deepest nowhere. He smelled the best. The wasp circled and circled the lofty beams, in time and out of time with the chorus. The music was no different to it than the colors projected by sun.

tinsels the wet power lines, pulling west like a Pied Piper to the canyon, background of a Renaissance painting, vibrating heaven.

The light leaps the dusty dashboard clear through me, leaving an ache on wingless bone. meanwhile The ghost knocks over vases the docents misplace, pouts the air in stale perfume if her desk is askew.

The canyonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s out her window, but she refuses heaven.

She circles, a vapor, weaving through her walls.

10

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

11

david Brendan hopes

Saturdays he drove the Ford pickup that he parked in the alley behind their houses. Weekdays, when he drove a Prius like everyone else in the neighborhood, the truck sat with a palpable air of anticipation. Its bed gathered leaves and twigs from the overhanging trees, and water from night rain in a rectangular pool up against the back of the cab. Saturday mornings the blue pickup came back loaded with shrubs, packets of bulbs, huge bags of dirt it was amazing one man could carry. Then he would start to dig.

In most ways he wasn’t especially mysterious. She lived next door, and had been informed by their common neighbors where he worked and what he did, and, though she had forgotten the specifics, she retained the impression that everything had been ordinary enough. This was important. Ordinariness was the door through which a new person could reach his neighbors in that time and place. The conviction of ordinariness, however, tended to be overwhelmed by the sight of him working in his garden. At work in the garden he seemed monumental, even otherworldly. He didn’t stop work for rain, or for such cold that even from her window she could see the redness of his hands, a rime of frozen breath on his collar and scarf. She would have thought the ground would be frozen as such times, but it wasn’t, giving forth steam from its newly-opened mouth even as he did. The digging was deep and fast, less like a mole or a dog than an elephant in the desert, hammering down toward water for her very life.

He was an abundant but not a meticulous gardener. The yard was sloppy in places, but in other places so spectacular with growth and bloom that the eyes were led, almost against their own will, away from offending passages toward the rough, big glory.

12

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Tools leaned against his outside walls sometimes for weeks on end, protected by the eaves. He was able to walk past bits of blown trash in his yard for several days without, apparently, noticing. When he did notice, whole sections could be set right in an hour.

He had to work fast. He was apparently a very busy man.

He’d invited her several times to come over and have a closer look at the flowers she was careful to compliment. “How beautiful everything is from our windows,” she would say, or “Your peonies are really quite remarkable.” Yet she refused his invitations to closer scrutiny. She refused, without ever articulating that refusal, to step onto his property. What she dreaded she wasn’t sure, but she did dread something. In places there was a spindly rustic fence between their yards, but in other places none at all, just an invisible line that neither of them heeded very much. She might have stepped right over. He didn’t hesitate at all to cross over and give her spare bulbs or pick up branches of his brittle sweet gum which had fallen into her yard. She wondered why she couldn’t take that as an invitation to mutuality, but she couldn’t.

She realized that she complimented his flowers in part as one coos and baby talks to a strange dog, not certain whether it were friendly or vicious. There was no sign of viciousness in him, but plenty signs of obsession and peculiarity. He talked to himself as he worked. He talked to worms unearthed by his spade, and to the bulbs he was setting in beside the repatriated worms. He attacked the ground with a pickaxe when the tangle of old ivy roots defeated his spade, and the sight of him then was as the sight of some god of the smithy, slamming opposition aside, hammering obdurate material into the condition he desired. It was best to be on the good side of that complex of behaviors.

Sometimes he dug deep and then merely—so far as she could see—filled the hole back up. Perhaps he was looking for something. Perhaps he was like that merchant in the Bible who buys a field because he suspects some great jewel lies hidden in it.

She had called him Richard several times before he corrected her and said his name was Russell. But she retained the conviction that he had in fact told her once that his name was Richard. Was he teasing her? Testing her memory? The mailbox said simply, unhelpfully, “R,” for the first name. He spent so much time away, with the lights in the house off and the structure unnaturally dark, and yet so much got done in the yard that she entertained the notion that he might be twins, one Richard and one Russell, who, for reasons of their own, obscured their particular identities.

Why did she spend so much time thinking about R from next door? Her divorce was a decade in the past, and except for a couple of failed overtures from men at her church, she had lived quite well without a dating life. Russell, or Richard, or whoever he was, was broad-shouldered and deep-chested, but also short, which gave the impression of stockiness. But when he worked with only a filthy t-shirt on, it was plain he was muscular, built for power rather than grace. Gorilla-like, an unkind analysis would suggest. Heroic, Herculean might be words supplied by a more sympathetic observer.

13

It was not impossible that some attraction had crossed over that invisible line from his property to hers. Did he reciprocate her interest? Whatever she was feeling would have to lie in abeyance until she understood him better.

Her husband, too, had been more attractive than herself, and that did not turn out well.

His flowers endured freakishly long into winter. He’d lived there less than a year when she realized this. He brought her roses for her table that first Thanksgiving, fresh-cut, from his own garden. They were pink, and pink at the threshold of white winter made it all the odder. She’d invited him to Thanksgiving dinner to thank him for the flowers, hoping he wouldn’t accept, hoping she wouldn’t have to think of a way to explain him to the people from church who constituted the other diners. She exhaled when he declined.

“Previous engagement,” he said, and indeed his house was dark all that night. She knew

because she kept on looking. He came home very late. She heard him laughing. There was another voice, too, but she couldn’t figure out whom it belonged to, or even be sure if it were female or male.

It was autumn again, and the pink roses she had learned to recognize were, in fact, in bloom, as well as yellow ones on the far side of his house, and dusty ivory ones from a great shrub he kept trimming back to keep it from invading the neighbors on the other side. Little orange flowers blossomed by his porch, and asters like lilac mist, and trumpet-shaped things which he called angel’s trumpets. Other yards had the brown spots of the first tentative frost, but not his. The tough flowers turned into the wind with defiance written on their rainbow faces. Standing next to him you realized he gave off a palpable heat. Maybe that was it. Maybe he stood in his garden on cold nights and radiated his own heat until the danger of cold passed.

One night she was entertaining, and, to draw attention to the prodigiousness of her neighbor’s gardening skills, she pointed out that he had flowers still abloom above the lace of snow that had fallen a few nights before, and endured to that hour in shady

14

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

places. Her guests were friends from church, as they often were; she didn’t like her friends from work that much. She had meant the comment as a kind of compliment to herself for choosing her neighbors cannily, but one of them, Brian, seemed to have misunderstood the offhandedness of it all. Brian had studied for the priesthood, and though that energy had been diverted into running his father’s portable toilet business, he still had about him a certain air of thoughtful sanctity. She was worried she had been misunderstood in some way, so she added, “Oh, I just meant you’d think that this cold would kill anything—” ”Corpses give off heat.”

“What?”

“Corpses give off heat. That would explain why some ground is more . . . uhm . . . summery than others.”

Being in the portable toilet business gave Brian a perspective on a number of things related to excretion and decay, and his decorousness in referencing these matters made his observations featuring them interesting rather than uncomfortable.

Everyone let the comment pass by with an appreciative titter—Brian could be so amusing at times—but some part of it stuck in her head. When the guests were gone and the things put away, she sat in her guest bedroom—practically the only part of the house without a perspective on her neighbor’s garden—and began to piece together a larger picture of something which, in fragments, bothered her a little, but not enough to take a step further. He dug so much. So much dirt was moved. There would be twilight digging, and in the morning a great patch of disturbed earth with nothing in it, so far as she could tell. She’d supposed he had simply been preparing ground for future planting, but perhaps that’s what he counted on her supposing.

With some hesitation, as though she feared to witness an atrocity unfolding at that moment, she crept to her bathroom window, which had the best view of the winterflower-studded front yard. It was featureless, dark—except, as she watched, for a faint glow which seemed to come up from the ground, uneven, sinuous, blue or white or some color between, a glow which she might at other times have attributed to diffuse city light glancing off remnants of old snow, but which, at that moment, she chose to imagine was some hideous radiation of decay.

“Oh,” she said.

She was amazed by her own inattention. One could assume he gardened at twilight and night because he worked all day, but the normal assumptions of normal people would be something a psychopath would understand and use. She remembered with dreadful clarity the Thanksgiving night when she had heard voices, and there had been no lights, and then a voice had stopped, without the lights ever coming on, with no sound of starting engines in the back alley. Someone had come, and spoken, and not departed. She didn’t know if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s—or a child’s. She had not

15

thought the voice might be a child’s before, but when she did, her misgivings suddenly were fanned into a conflagration of dread.

She dressed and went to the alley for her car. His car was gone. The big blue truck sat with the thaw of the week’s snow refreezing in the gathering twilight. She heaved a sigh of relief, narrating that very action to herself as if she were writing a novel of the moments she was now living, “She heaved a sigh of relief.” She got into the car and drove to one of the few pay phones she knew of in a city of cell phones. She phoned the police and left an anonymous tip. She could not bring herself to say the words “murder” or “corpse,” but she trusted professionals to understand. She really expected nothing to come of it. How many calls of that nature did the police receive on a given night? Could they possibly follow up on them all? Did they have the resolve to follow up on any?

A day passed. The second day after the call the man went to work as he had always done. She was only a few minutes behind, waving at his Prius as it passed hers, outbound in the alley. But when she came home the alley was full. His car was in its place, but behind it, filling up most of the spaces and leaving her only a difficult-to-getinto spot far down the alley, were police cars. The nerves lit up in her arms, thrilled at the ability she had to invoke these powers even if nobody knew to give her credit. She walked around the side of the house with an elaborate look of surprise on her face.

Russell, or Richard, was leaning against his north wall looking at the police trampling his garden. His arms were folded. She wanted to see fear on his face, but what she saw was a mixture of confusion and sadness. She supposed a psychopath could summon sympathetic expressions whenever they wanted to, and she decided not to be taken in.

“What on earth is going on?”

Russell looked at her. His eyes seemed grateful for a familiar, a sympathetic face. He had been standing outside a while, evidently, watching the cops, and his lips were blue with cold.

“Someone said I’d been burying corpses in my yard.”

He laughed after he said it, as though the absurdity of it were just now striking him.

The laugh made the cops look over at the two of them. They were not smiling. One of them had an apparatus in his hands that looked not unlike a great mop or rake, the head of which was intended to detect decomposition as it swept over the ground. The monitors glittered with multi-colored lights. It was just like TV. “The problem is,” her neighbor said, “there’s so much fertilizer in the soil, manure and what not, that it’s difficult to sort that out from— you know—something dead. They probably think I’m very clever.”

Even as he was speaking, the great sweeps of the decay-detector paused, quivered, stopped. It hovered over one spot, moving slightly as if filling its nostrils with the faint, desired scent. The cops got into a huddle. The huddle broke. One of them began to dig.

The ones who weren’t digging stared steadily at Russell, as if expecting him to make

16

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

a run for it. She was uncomfortable. She needed to get away from the glare of those accusing eyes. She patted her neighbor on the shoulder and said, “I can’t stand this. I know you’ll get through it all right.”

Only half of that statement was really true, but he seemed to appreciate it. He tried to return the pat, but she had already moved and his hand waved feebly through empty air.

In her bathroom she could watch everything happening in his yard and not be seen herself unless someone knew exactly where to look. Spadeful after spadeful of rich dirt

came up. One spadeful brought up something small and white. Several of them. Even an amateur like herself could tell they were bones. In defiance of her own timid nature, she ran down the stairs and out into her own yard, steaming toward his. She wanted to be a witness. She wanted to own up to having been the anonymous tip. She wanted to be involved in a way that was, she recognized even as she ran toward the excavating cops, contrary to her reserved and rather timid nature.

The look on her neighbor’s face was wrong, though, to greet such a damning discovery. His amused smirk made her glance toward the cops around the hole. The white things still studded the dirt just eased down from the shovel. She looked at them, and then at the cops.

“Cat,” the digging cop said.

One beside him, who had a badge which might have identified him as a forensics expert had she been close enough to read it, said, “Cat. Dead five, ten years. Difficult to tell.”

The cops looked both sheepish and relieved. Russell had not been there five years.

He was not even responsible for the buried cat. She might have been relieved to find

17

her suspicions unjustified, but relief is not what she felt. She felt shame. She’d alerted the police over nothing. They didn’t know that, but she did, and shame burned down her neck and hands as though she had been scalded. It did not feel to her that her neighbor had been exonerated, but rather that he had proved too clever, had won a battle in a war he must not win. Where was the Thanksgiving visitor? She felt justice

leaking slowly away as the police began to pack up their gear. She walked a few paces away from her neighbor, fearing to be close enough for him to strike, cobra-like when he heard her words.

“I don’t know who phoned the tip in,” she began, in a voice low enough that the cops had to stop and turn to hear her, “but I know he digs all the time, in the dead of night.

The lights are never on. I saw people come to the house . . . who never left.”

She surprised herself by bursting into tears. She had not actually meant to, but on they came, and it was the tears, she realized, which made the cops take her seriously.

“Living next to that . . . I can’t . . . I can’t . . . ” Tears overcame her. She could speak no more. One of the officers walked over to comfort her. He hugged her and patted her on the back, in the way men do when they comfort each other. The officer turned her in the embrace, accidentally, so she could see Russell’s face. It wore not the hatred she expected. It wore flat astonishment. Maybe he was putting that on, too. One thing she divined from the first was that he was altogether too clever.

In the following days officers and workmen came and dug up the entire yard, front and back. They laid a grid of yellow ribbon tied to stakes, dug down a few feet in each square, and moved on. The flowerbeds came up, and bulbs and green anticipatory

18

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

shoots lay dying in the winter sun. Anywhere the ground looked recently disturbed, they entered with their shovels, and since he had been replanting everything, that meant everywhere. Young trees came up because the ground around them was new and recently disturbed. Roses lay like broken sticks on the ground, some of them still gay with their last blossoms. The exotic beds with flowers she had never seen and whose names she forgot as soon as he had told them were becoming trenches and ravines. She kept thinking that they must have had independent suspicions or they wouldn’t keep digging, but they came over to her house every once in a while asking for guidance— “Where did he dig the most? Can you give us an idea of when things began to be disturbed?”—by which she understood she was the one authority. They were going on nothing else but her say-so, her frightened tears.

Russell kept away. Maybe he was in custody. Maybe he had just gone somewhere so he didn’t have to witness the destruction. She watched from her various windows, waiting for the discovery that would justify her. Maybe if they dug deeper. They hit the gas line once, and she was made to leave her house in advance of the fleet of trucks which came to fix the breach before everything exploded. When they were done with every conceivable spot, they dug and sifted again. There was another cat, even older than the first. There was a coke bottle from the 30s. One of the cops kept that. One evening she came home from work and the ribbons and the stakes were gone, and the cops too.

Nothing appeared in the papers. Nothing on the evening local news. They had found nothing.

The yard was riven, furrowed, cratered, pocked. Clearly the cops hadn’t thought putting things in order again was part of their task. The yard looked like the yards of those houses which have never been lived in. Making sure Russell’s car was not in the alley, she made her first unaccompanied trip into the yard during his tenancy. She stood and looked at the ruin for a long time, until the cold got to her. She meant to go home, but she didn’t.

Instead, she gathered the bulbs she saw lying in the dirt. She included even the cutin-half ones, thinking she remembered something he said about them still being able to grow. Some of the shrubs were uprooted but unbroken. These she gathered too. She put her gleanings in a great basket and laid it on his front porch, so that he would come home to—something. Maybe he would remember this kindness instead of her . . . of her betrayal. She’d never used that work with reference to herself. “Betrayal.” It tasted like dirty coins in the mouth. She said it out loud, “betrayal,” so the cut bulbs and broken shrubs would be her witnesses.

She didn’t know what she would do when Russell came home. What could she possibly say? How could she look at him? Perhaps he wouldn’t come home. He had not been arrested. She’d checked. Beyond that, there was no knowing. Two days passed and still

19

Andrew Johnson he hadn’t returned to his house. Rain fell on the annihilated garden. She remembered how he’d said the bulbs and dry plants awaited winter rain so they could root and survive until the green rush of spring. She pulled a hat down over her head. She went up on his porch where there lay a selection of heavy gloves. She put a pair on. The fingers were crusted with dirt that crumbled away when she wriggled her hand inside. She took up a spade. She couldn’t believe how heavy it was, how he wielded it hour after hour as though it were a toy. She went out in the rain—it was quite hard now, and cold. She remembered what she had seen him doing. She began to dig. The cops had loosened the soil considerably, unintentionally, so that it was easier than it might have been. She dug a furrow as straight as she could. How deep? She didn’t know. Deep, she thought.

The bulbs were clearly different from each other, but she didn’t know one from another.

She laid them equally side by side in the mud. It would be okay. They could be whatever flower they were. She planted and planted until her fingers were stiff and the basket was empty, so in the spring he would have something.

This Expanding Universe I held the firmament up high with poles bound tight in bailing wire so we could pass beneath our sky and never worry what’s beyond.

But my arms were never strong enough to hold against a nova’s pull, so slowly I let down the tent and with it our dear families.

You stroked my arm and said to me that once you built a quiet fort from cushions pulled off sofa seats and sheets removed from larger beds.

I wanted something not too far and safely stretching over us, but can we find a way to live beneath this larger kingdom’s roof?

Come, my love, sketch out your plans, let’s share our notes and start again.

20

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

21

Brian Baumgart

Brian Baumgart

Knot and Stitch

How to Save Me: To the Missionary Who Knocked on My Front Door

When I was a boy, my mother ceased emergency room visits, instead focusing on sewing and the art of knotting. My chin popped wide after swan diving from the top of the split-wood rocking chair, face-first into brick fireplace. The stitches begun. Cheek torn, pop-can metal, bicycle crash: Listen to your father when he warns you to watch where you land. Tree climbing gone bad. Blood stains on carpet, walls, and the soft cloth of my sister’s pink-ribboned baby doll. All mine.

The knotting came soon as my mother tied hair to hair to hold rent scalp together: the trips to ER were too ordinary, artless, the stitch too mechanical. She practiced unawares of blood and bone and anesthetic, instead playing for the aesthetic:

Print my name on the back of a milk carton, but use another man’s face in the photo.

Buy more milk than you will ever use.

Call me at three o’clock in the morning to talk about the infomercial with knives that cut through cans and copper tubing. Tell me you, too, bought the knives and have never used them.

Shake hands with the owners of boarding houses over a glass of water that has never been in a bottle.

Tell them how much you care about humanity without talking about God or salvation.

Write a poem in the snow.

Write my name in the snow.

Wipe out my name with your hands. Feel the freeze melt into the crevices between your fingers and know that this feeling is me.

slipstitch and blind for hiding what she’d done; chains and backstitch her favorites for creativity, my head a map of textile arts born across scar tissue. In moments of playfulness, or perhaps daring, she played the sheet bend, sliding splice, and crown sinnet, lashing skin to skin, knot to knot, and thus she to me, the umbilical cord tied tighter than when shared.

22

ISSUE 27 Winter 201 3

23

terrence cheng

The trains were easy: two bags in hand, a seat by the window, the blur of land before the black whip of tunnels, eyes scanning until they burned.

When the trains stopped, he did not leave the station. He cleaned himself in the men’s room—washed his face, combed his hair, wiped down his shoes. He had bought a razor kit after leaving New York and made a point at each stop to shave. He wiped his glasses clean even though they did not help him see. As he went through his routine, no one looked at him with a raised eyebrow or a sneer the way they looked at the old and indigent going through the same motions. It was because of the suit and tie and glasses, and his good bags always at his feet.

The maps became easy. He did not know the names of the cities. He only knew how to point and babble, and people were eager to help him—old couples in particular, and middleaged women, friendlier, more approachable. As if there were no language barrier, all of them sharing the vernacular of the universal traveler. He made a conscientious effort to smile, like the suit and tie and glasses. When he was on line for his next ticket, he would shake hands or give a slight bow, always with a smile. He could not believe the ease.

He bought his tickets with cash. When the train roared late into the night, he would look up and down the aisle to make sure those around him were sleeping before opening his bag to take out money for his next ticket and some food. He ate only enough to fill him for each leg of the ride, did not need much, felt constantly bloated from the salt and grease; even the slop back at the restaurant had been better than this. He caught himself wishing for fried dumplings or steamed buns, cold noodles, simplicity his stomach would understand. He craved a cup of hot tea. Soon, he told himself. Soon.

The conductors did not bother him. They would simply take his tickets and move on.

Sometimes there was enough room to stretch out, and if he grew tired of watching the world unfurl, he would lie back and close his eyes. At times he thought of people from New York, the restaurant owner and his penny-pinching wife, or his fellow deliverymen, and whatever happened to them all? He thought he should be more concerned about this, but he was not.

It was the woman he would go to at night that he thought of most often, their lack of shared words and his appreciation for how she touched him so gently on the arm. Her soft

24

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

bronze hand on his skin and the smooth way of her body; it irked him that this was what most resided in his thoughts. He forced himself to remember beyond New York: first Hong Kong, and then the terrible boat that had brought him here. He tried to remember the fishing village from which he came and his parents’ faces but was not sure if the image was accurate.

The land changed, grew flat, turned green, gold, green, brown. Out the windows he saw mostly cows or horses, grass and fields, the sky and clouds endless. He could feel the cold creeping at times, knew the weather would turn harsh soon. He looked forward to his final destination, a place to work and grow but still stay in touch with your roots, a place with history for Chinese, but also possibility and foundation. Like New York, maybe even better.

But harder to penetrate because it was smaller, more insulated. Even though he was familiar, at least in his mind, he would have to be careful.

Within a day of arrival he wondered if he shouldn’t have just stopped somewhere in the middle, gotten out with his two bags and the clothes on his back and figured out a way to blend as he always had. Too late, he told himself, and this was the right thing to do. He would not like the cold, as he knew it would be in that middle stretch of the land; and a strange Chinese man stepping off a train, it would only be a matter of time before he attracted some kind of attention. In the city he would be safest, and on the West Coast it would be warmer when the winter months came. He told himself that the smell of the sea would remind him of his childhood, though he had no way of knowing if this was true. * Underground, he stared at the map on the wall, the city scarred and slashed by jagged multicolored routes that came together like the points of a star. There were people around, but no one seemed inclined to help him, even with his smiling act. He saw an old Chinese woman with a big duffel bag and a saggy coat. When he walked up to her, she did not look him in the eye. He spoke to her in Cantonese, and she traced her curled brown finger along the map as she counted three stops, helped him buy his ticket from a machine.

“Thank you,” he said, but she was already walking away.

But now he did not like the train, felt like a rat scampering through the holes of a building. He closed his eyes, tried to cocoon himself, but the train rattled and people bumped into him, white men in suits, and brown-skinned men and women in jeans and sweatshirts talking loudly. There were a handful of Asians who looked at him and looked away, and he did not look back long enough to discern Chinese or Japanese or Korean. He closed his eyes, clutched his bags, took in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled.

He got off the train and headed upstairs, felt a light buzz in the front of his brain, his arms and legs, loose and dangly. He wanted to feel sun on his face and fresh air in his lungs.

And he wanted a cigarette: for many days now he had only been able to sate himself with the occasional platform smoke by the train door, more often than not with a conductor who was generous enough to give him a cigarette and then ignore him.

25

In the street he took in the cars, the people, the sound of the city buzzing in waves. A high warm sun, his eyes awash in beiges and greens, he thought he could smell the ocean in the breeze. The sidewalk crowds were far less than the onslaught he was used to. He walked and watched people’s faces, could pick out the tourists from the locals just by the saunter or a piece of clothing, a camera hanging from the neck or wrist, or how they looked up at buildings slightly gape-jawed. He knew from life in Hong Kong that natives took for granted living among famous skyscrapers, walked by them every day with eyes trained ahead and not above.

After a few blocks he turned and walked up a series of hilly streets, manicured squares of grass in front of each house, small trees planted methodically. A red trolley car clattered past him. People aboard beamed proud happy smiles, something he had seen before only on postcards. He shook his head, then he thought, why not? He would ride a trolley car; he had promised himself that he would do many things for the first time.

Soon he was near a row of hotels, the fancy signs, and men in suits wearing hats and white gloves smiling at him as he passed. He walked into a lobby, took a map from a rack of pamphlets. He would have to stay in a hotel for a night or two, but after, he thought, he would find a decent place to live, though not opulent or extravagant. After New York it might be the kind of place they would be looking for him. He asked a middle-aged white couple on the street to find his place on the map, and they did. He smiled and bowed, and they walked away.

He came to a noodle shop, a toned-down version of the loud, fast all-night establishments he had known in Hong Kong. He sat at a small table, and was so happy to see a menu in Chinese. He ordered in Cantonese from a girl who spoke fast and scribbled on her notepad before bringing him a small pot of tea. The tea was weak and cheap, and yet he relished it.

Then the food came, and as he ate his noodles he forgot if he had enough cash, did not want to have to go into his bags. He peeked in his wallet, still had forty dollars. Okay. The busboy came and took his bowl and plate even though there was still a slurp of soup and a bite of pickled vegetables left.

He decided then that he would not work in a restaurant again—not as a deliveryman, as a busboy, as a cook or waiter. He tried to imagine what his life might be like. Had he ever not worked? He couldn’t recall a time. He paid and did not leave a tip.

Here, again, starting over. As if to this point his life had been a series of auditions. Would his existence always be one of flux and transition from one shape to the next? The legends and fairytales had different versions: maybe he was like the Monkey King, destined to be caged within a mountain for centuries before finally being released for his mission and meaning in life; maybe the life he was living now was his mountain. But he was just a man, and it was obvious that he had no powers, much less those of the Monkey King. *

Finding a place to live was easy.

In a convenience store he bought a pack of cigarettes, saw business cards on the counter, a woman’s pretty smiling face staring up at him, the writing on the card in English and Chinese. The picture was small but in color: her face tight, angular with big eyes and a thinlipped smile, creamy white skin, onyx hair swept up but he imagined it to be flowing. The card said, “Real Estate: Sell, Buy, Rent.” He took the card and went outside to smoke his cigarettes.

The first night he stayed in a hotel next to a massage parlor with purple neon Japanese characters in the small, barred window. He knew this was a brothel, but he did not go. He watched television, went downstairs to the restaurant bar and pointed at the menu and ate what was brought to him and drank two beers. He went back to his room and checked in his

bags to make sure he had enough money on hand. Then he stuffed the bags under his bed and wedged a chair beneath the door handle before taking a shower. He scrubbed his face, rubbed his eyes, felt good. He dried himself with a towel, laid down and fell asleep.

When he woke he did not remember dreaming. He looked at the bed stand clock, nearly nine in the morning. He told himself that this would be a good day.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number on the business card. He looked at her name, Feng Mei-Lin, a pretty name. It took him three times punching numbers before figuring out the phone and the call finally went through. It rang twice before he thought, what if she doesn’t speak Cantonese?

She answered in Cantonese: “Prosperity Real Estate.”

He paused, could sense her clock on the other end timing when to hang up.

“I need an apartment,” he said.

“Buy or rent?”

“Rent for now. Maybe buy later.”

He heard the scratch of pencil on paper, her soft breath in his ear.

“Wonderful. And what is your name?”

He felt himself about to pause, forced the word out of his mouth: “Chen.”

“Are you new to town, Mr. Chen?”

Continued on pag e 33 26

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

<< 27

artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; notes

Lydia Larson :

T hese V ery Threads I believe there are multiple realities that exist at the same time, that the physical world is not all there is. I imagine many simultaneous events that link together in a highly organized way, even though everything can seem so utterly random. Perhaps our everyday events fit among a higher order and just maybe, there is a common thread weaving in and out of the lines of every history there ever was, tying us all together. Perhaps, we are these very threads stitched into a colorful and profound synchronistic quilt.

I am interested in the visual possibilities that result from taking pieces of information that are seemingly not related and translating them into a new image. Within this process is my attempt to forge connections in belief that a grand connection indeed exists. My most recent work borrows from various histories, images, memories, and tales. Each painting is a little world, an isolated but necessary stage in which a story will unfold, intimately connecting to the next. I am engaged in an ongoing investigation concerning: rootlessness, voyages, spiritual forces, displacement, what it means to sojourn, place, time, and the great struggle and triumph of communicating.

â&#x20AC;˘

28

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Lydia Larson. Untitled. Oil on canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

29

Lydia Larson. The Stripping. Oil on canvas. 45 x 57 inches.

30

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Lydia Larson. Self Portrait as Jonah. Oil on canvas. 60 x 67 inches.

31

“Yes.” “And where were you living before?”

“New York. Hong Kong.”

“Wonderful. And what do you do Mr. Chen?”

No pause: “Entrepreneur.” He felt very proud of himself.

“Of course. Any particular neighborhood you are interested in?”

“I’m open.”

“Wonderful. And what is your price range?”

He was not prepared for the interrogation, the gathering of information. He remembered what he had paid in New York but that had been for a hole, a hovel. He did not want to sound cheap or like an idiot.

“Three thousand.”

More scribbling, more breathing. “You can get more than an apartment for three thousand, Mr. Chen,” she said, the tone of her voice businesslike, unimpressed.

They made an appointment for early in the afternoon. She gave him directions to her office, and when he said he did not know the city so well, she said, “Give the cabbie my card,” and he felt stupid.

He put his old stolen clothes and glasses on one last time and went downstairs. He bought himself another pack of cigarettes from the convenience store, plus a toothbrush and other bath necessities. Then he walked and found a men’s clothing store, went in and the woman behind the counter did not offer assistance. He pulled clothes off racks and held them up to his body and set them aside until he had a pile. He liked solid darker colors, plain, no patterns. He had gained some weight in New York, but those days on the trains had made him thin again. He brought the pile to the counter and added a pair of brown dress shoes and sunglasses.

Back in the hotel he tried everything on as he paraded himself before the narrow mirror.

He would let his hair grow back because he had shaved it after New York. But having a shaved head reminded him of being a poor fisherman’s son. He wanted big, lush, gorgeous hair. He thought of Feng Mei-Lin’s picture, chose his outfit for later that day—khaki pants, his new brown shoes, a collared shirt that fit loose in the shoulders and around the neck.

He put on his sunglasses. Perfect, he thought. *

Lydia Larson. Kite. Oil on canvas. 60 x 70 inches.

32

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

She was taller than he had expected, her face identical to the card: sharp chin and cheekbones, good skin, bright eyes. Her hair was pinned in back, revealing her slender neck.

She shook hands with a firm grip. He signed a form that said she would represent him, and she did not ask for identification. In the street in front of her office they got in her sporty little car. She drove faster than he thought she would.

“I’m going to take you to two of the best neighborhoods—definitely in your price range. Do

33

you have a family?”

“In Hong Kong.”

“So it’s just you then? The first place we’re going to is a house. Is that okay?”

“It’s fine.” Then he added, “People will be visiting.”

“Of course,” she said.

They went up a few steep hills before driving through what she said was the windiest street in America. Left turn, right turn, left turn, right, framed by sculpted hedge bushes and flowers, a slalom course garden he thought was beautiful.

“Have to drive slow,” she said, “so we don’t crash or hit a tourist.”

She was smiling, her long fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, arms tense. Had she taken him this way to impress him, or was this manic drive for her own pleasure? He

stole glances at her body: she was older than him, in her thirties, but lean and strong. Each time she pressed on the gas pedal or brake her foot made a thumping sound. He liked how she concentrated.

Then they were off the windy street, were soon parked on a steep hill. He followed her up the path and through the front door of a two-story stucco townhouse, the floors new and shining, the kitchen gleaming with polished black stone counters and stainless steel appliances. There were ceiling fans, chandeliers, mahogany doors, and stairs leading up. He had never seen so opulent a home in his life.

“Like I said, lots of space in this price range.”

He took a peek into the sparkling bathroom and said, “I’ll take it.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to see the other place?”

“No, I like this one.”

“Wonderful,” she said, though he did not believe she was surprised.

Back in the car he asked if cash would be okay.

“Of course,” she said, again with that smile he was beginning to appreciate.

He gave her the hotel business card and she took him back, suddenly worried that she might wonder why a man who could pay so much in cash would stay next door to a brothel.

When they pulled up in front, she did not seem to notice or care. He fought the urge to invite

34

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

her for a drink. Instead he watched her drive away, spent the night as he had spent the first— eating bar food and watching soundless television in his room and laughing aloud.

He reached underneath the bed and felt for both bags before digging one up and counting out the money he needed for the apartment, a part of him still telling himself to be careful, that this could go wrong any second in a number of ways. They would know by now that he was a long way from New York. But it would have been hard to find him on the trains, and if he had been followed, he would have known. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out where he had gone. But if he did what he had to do, things would be okay. Soon they would be able to walk right past him in the street like any other stranger.

He wondered how to carry so much money to her office as he picked out the next day’s outfit and went to sleep, and now he did dream: of Feng Mei-Lin, of the new house and the people who had once lived in that house or on that land, and did those spirits know him from his past and would they judge him?

The next day he took the cash in a neat bundle inside a plastic hotel bag given to him at the front desk. He signed the lease in Chinese though he did not know anyone by the name he put down; maybe he had at some point. It did not matter when he gave Feng Mei-Lin the first and last month’s rent and a security deposit.

Someone in her office counted the money in a different room. For a minute they sat smiling at each other before she said, “Excuse me,” and picked up her phone. She made calls in English, and it surprised him how animated she was, the changing expressions of her face and the natural lilting pitch of her voice. Like watching television he pretended to understand her words, and this made her even more attractive. Able to shift form for any person or situation; like me, he told himself, though he knew Feng Mei-Lin was far more talented.

When the money was counted, she got off the phone and drove him back to the house— the finishing touch, a true professional. She was wearing a black pantsuit with a white shirt and a diving pointed collar. Her neck jewelry shined in the sunlight, and he could see a small mole on her collarbone. At the house she walked him to the front door.

“Congratulations.” She handed him the keys, and he took them with both hands and gave her a slight bow.

“Ms. Feng,” he said.

“Yes?” “May I ask a favor?”

“Of course.”

He expected her smile to shrink, her eyes to dim, but they did not.

“I want to ride on a trolley car. Would you come with me?”

She wrinkled her lips at the corner, looked at her watch. Then she said, “Only for you, Mr. Chen.”

They walked for two minutes in silence as he pounded himself inside to make small talk: Where was she originally from? How long had she lived in the area? Did she have family close by? He wished she would ask him questions, and he started to feel insulted that she

35

was making no effort. She could probably see him squirming by now, and maybe she had seen through him all along, knew he was an impostor.

They stopped at a pay phone. First she spoke in English, then in Cantonese. “Okay, an hour or two,” she said. Then they were walking again, still no small talk, before stopping at an empty street corner.

“Here,” she said. She looked at her watch, then at him. Her face was calm, pleasant; he thought she might be nervous on an excursion such as this with a man she did not know, but he was the one feeling jittery in his stomach and legs.

“A beautiful day,” he said, and she just nodded as she looked down the street.

They heard the bells and the scratch and roll of the trolley pulling up before them. He and Ms. Feng decided to stand. The rumble reminded him of the trains, but he enjoyed the wind in his face, smelling the city’s smells and Ms. Feng’s perfume all at once. He marveled at the polished wood inside the car, leather straps and golden rails. Old and young in high straight-backed booth chairs, leaning forward, snapping picture after picture. He watched the buildings and the people in the streets float by. He and Ms. Feng were the only ones without a camera or video camera, and maybe people looked at them and thought them a couple on a romantic journey.

He tuned out the conductor’s voice, but still he wanted to know where they were going, what they were seeing that evoked such oohs and aahs.

He asked Ms. Feng, “Would you mind translating? I don’t understand a word.”

She nodded and said, “Of course.” They had to lean shoulder to shoulder for balance even as they held on to their straps. She pointed out buildings and parks and statues, talked about neighborhoods and local history, and he knew he was getting her realtor’s speech and not the tour guide’s information. He was half listening to her anyway, appreciating the feel of her arm pressed against his, the smell of her hair when she leaned close to him. He was not nervous anymore, was glad to have the distraction of sightseeing, something they could share. As she prattled he marveled at rows of trees with giant leafy tufts, felt the slight roll in his stomach as they went up and down the big hills, nearing with each stop the horizon where the sky and water came to an edge.

But the streets were not as pretty as he thought they would be. He knew this was a good city, but far from magical as he had imagined. Then he saw the change, the signs and storefront windows in Chinese, the people and faces familiar. He did not know how to respond in front of Ms. Feng. He tried not to stare, as if he might recognize or be recognized, though the odds of this were unlikely. This did not look like a Chinatown to him, much less Hong Kong or any city in China. This was simply a neat cluster of stores and restaurants with Chinese signs, the transplant of a thin façade, distinctly American, yet he felt a connection.

She said, “Don’t go to any of these restaurants. I’ll tell you where to get the best food.”

Two blocks later they passed that invisible barrier back into the main city. The trolley let them off near a dock where he saw rows of shops and restaurants plus vendors beneath

36

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

tents devouring the open space plot by plot. Families and couples and clusters of guided tours, the masses milling and streaming. He knew where they were, the famous wharf. He thought she might turn and say good-bye, her duty now officially over, but she did not.

On a corner a skinny black man played the saxophone, a hat at his feet sparkling inside with coins. Next to him was a Chinese caricaturist calling out to passersby. Deeper in the

crowd were dancers gilded in silver from head to toe, preparing to perform. Every few feet there were new entertainers each with a new audience. She led him through the crowd, her hand on his wrist, pulling him like a child.

Closer to the water he saw dozens of white boats like toys floating in the docks, the smell of sea mist now reaching him, and it did remind him of home. Next, he saw big wooden flotillas covered with fat sea lions, their dark gray coats blending into the water and wood, cacophonous barking like the sound of choked horns. He had never seen a sea lion before, wanted to stand and watch and listen, but Ms. Feng squeezed his wrist and he followed.

Soon they were walking the dock along the edge of the pier, the crowd thinner now as they watched a ferry steaming its way through the light fog toward a small island in the distance.

A grime-faced man in torn clothes with no shoes approached them. He muttered with a cup held out and Feng Mei-Lin shooed him away and the shoeless man moved on.

“I hate this place,” she said. “So many homeless. But I thought you might like the scenery.”

She pointed out to the bay, the water shimmering with ripples, the breeze in their faces, her hand now firmly in his. She told him the island across the way was once a famous prison. He wondered why she had thought he would like this place, but he appreciated the fact that she had thought of him at all.

“Would you like to see?” she asked, and he said, “No, prisons make me nervous,” and they both laughed and he knew that he had made the right decision. If he had asked her

37

to go with him before signing the lease, it would have been like bait, entrapment, a sign of disrespect. But now things were equal: nothing uncouth or unfair, no confusion or coercion, no stakes, only want. Just a man and woman sharing space and time.

That evening they went back to his house, and he could feel in her kiss things he could not imagine or could not remember. She was sculpted, hard in places he did not know a woman’s body could be. With strong hands and wiry arms she held him around the neck and squeezed her thighs around him until he lost his breath, and he grabbed her roughly in return as if to prove he was worthy. He looked into her face, but her eyes were closed all the while. He listened to her breathing, watched her eyelids flutter, their sounds echoing through each room of the house: first the big living room, then the kitchen, then upstairs in what would be the master bedroom.

When they finished, they trailed their way through the house picking up their clothes.

It was night now, the city aglow in wan light. She said, “I have to go,” and he nodded. She dressed, then fluffed her long thick hair, did not re-pin it, did not try to hide the fact that she had been there.

He had her card, knew where to find her, and she could, if she wished, do the same.

Would she try to check on him, find out who he was? Would she care? Did it matter?

She pulled her heels on with a click against the new wood floors and walked out to her car. He thought to escort her out, but already he felt silly and weak beside her and he just wanted her to go.

The engine started, the lights came on, and she sped away.

If this had truly been his home, he would have asked her to stay. They would have showered, made dinner, sat and talked, and he would have asked his questions and she would have asked hers. They would have made love again, and again. Maybe he would have told her how he had come to be this person in this place: bags of money and secrets that were not his, no family of his own, no home. Just a matter of time before the next place.

Maybe she would have tried to help him; maybe she would have understood.

He sat in the middle of the living room floor, staring, wondering if she had hopes for herself, if they might ever mesh their dreams. But he knew the answer and sighed and the echo within the emptiness felt booming. He didn’t even know what time it was, no watch, no clock on the wall. He stood and walked each room again, upstairs and down, all of it feeling smaller now. He opened the windows in every room to let in the air, heard the faint distant hum of life outside and around him. He felt stupid, clothes in a hotel room, and now a giant empty house to call his own, though it was not his and never would be.

He put on his shoes, found the card for the hotel in his wallet, turned off the lights and locked the door behind him. In the street he hailed a cab that took him back to the hotel. There he would spend the night, if not a few more nights, before he would figure out what to do.

38

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Chris Anderson

Paper Maple We bought the tree with the money I made when I baptized Stan, who had nineteen confirmed kills in Vietnam. He’s an old man now, in a wheelchair, shriveled and pale, and he wanted to be cleansed of his sins. “I’ve been in hell,” he told me, “and I want to be free,” and though he didn’t talk much, and could hardly move, when I started to pour the water on his head, and I began to say the words, “I baptize you in name of the Father”—“and of the Son,” he said, “and of the Holy Spirit,” and the water dribbled down his face and dripped off his chin, wetting the front of his pale, checked shirt.

We planted the tree on a fine spring day. The earth was soft and warm. We dug the hole, scored the matted roots, and gently set it in, then filled the hole with amended soil and watered, thoroughly, soaking the ground until the bed had turned to mud.

It’s a pretty tree. A Paperbark Maple, they call it, because the bark peels off in curly strips almost smooth enough to write on.

39

Kristin George Bagdanov

Kristin George Bagdanov

Ruach

My Father Scrubs the Kitchen Counter

Reed unflexed by spit held like a vowel inside the mouth.

My life a place

Teeth grit, he drags the sponge between lines of grout until tiles shimmer and rise like trout

holder, a canyon that opened for river.

But then the wind, the slow ache a music.

40

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

at nightfall. Head bent over the sterile expanse, he wipes that counter clean as an avalanche. Once, those hands washed my pale hair, wove it into braids.

With a pair of silver scissors, I cut each one at the root so he might return and linger there, impossible to smooth, drag his fingers through my hair.

41

Andrew Morris

Hiker’s Hut Bent over their food and Bibles, The theists seem more Teddy Roosevelt than Aquinas, more tumbleweed than lily.

They look like pugilists, farm boys, Lord Byron’s illegitimate brood, seated in the middle of the room, their shoulders raw, ribs grinning.

We’re close enough to their beards to see the white grime at their temples where the sweat dried.

Their presence is burdock, beggar tick, sandbur.

All afternoon, their talk twists back and forth like a murmur of starlings: . . . a fir sapling growing in the lung of a Russian man . . .

. . . mountains reject the false self . . . . . . a dead Chinook salmon the size of a small woman found in California . . .

. . . in emptiness we meet God . . .

They sup on borage blossoms and bread, roll cigarettes, rub the smalls of their backs, yawn like dogs, praise, always praise until they grow as quiet as candle wicks, as if they’re waiting for us to tell them that our walking sticks are holy staffs.

We must look like beasts of the Apocalypse brooding in the shadows with our lesser gestures, reading Beckett and Kafka, mending blisters, studying maps, snoozing, trying to avoid contact, staring out the large window at smudges of light on the warped decking.

Inside them

an Ecclesiastes.

Inside us

an absurdist drama.

One by one we walk out into the White Mountain forest.

The fading light still pulling the trees upward.

We take separate trails, but are headed home all the same

our bodies disappearing into the dark floor of the forest.

We sit there like injured suns while they brighten into hymn.

42

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

43

Review

Goliath

by Susan Woodring • St. Martin’s Press, 2012 reviewed by Bethany Marroquin

Goliath is a story of grief and connectedness, corporate identity and responsibility, leaving and being left behind. In the first chapter, the small North Carolina town is struck by tragedy: the suicide of Percy Harding, the prominent and beloved owner of Harding Furniture, businessman and backbone of the little town. Yet there is a reason that Susan Woodring’s novel is named for the town and not the man. For while Goliath touches upon the motivation behind Harding’s suicide, its focus is the way that one man’s death ripples outward to touch an entire community, disrupting the familiar routines of its inhabitants to bring change and redemption.

Like any small town, Goliath’s cast of characters covers the spectrum of personalities— from the respectable to the eccentric, the wounded, and the weary. High-schooler Vincent Bailey, who discovers the body of Percy Harding by the train tracks, detaches from his family and becomes sullen and reclusive as he spends more time with Cassie Stewart, a morbid teenage poet from the trailer park. Clyde Winston, Goliath’s retired police chief, struggles to comfort Percy Harding’s widow and dreams of uniting Goliath with a citywide baseball game. His gentle and dedicated son Ray is the city groundskeeper and selfappointed revivalist, preaching the gospel and pursuing college drop-out Agnes Rogers, who longs for nothing more than to escape the dead end of a future in Goliath.

The lynchpin of the story and the town is Agnes’s mother, Rosamond, the abandoned wife of a traveling salesman, who for a time finds meaning in her role as Percy Harding’s personal secretary. Lonely, peculiar, and increasingly desperate, Rosamond is accustomed to being shunned by Goliath society. But after Harding’s death, she finds herself the bearer of the town’s sorrows, as one by one the people of Goliath begin to seek her out to confess and confide in her. Ever since the collapse of her marriage, Rosamond has lived with the crippling fear of being left behind—by her husband, by her restless daughter, and even by Percy Harding, the man whose confidence in her once gave new purpose to her life. Yet this newest abandonment, and the loneliness she has carried for so many years, endows her with an inadvertent empathy at a time when the community that has rejected her needs it most.

44

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Woodring weaves these stories together seamlessly, displaying the bond that comes from shared loss in the montage of characters and points of view. In the town’s moments of crisis, Woodring can pass through half a dozen characters’ minds and hearts in the span of a page, narrating each from a contemplative third-person perspective. While the constant switchbacks are unsteadying at first, it is Rosamond—closely aligned with the reader, as an outsider looking in—whose brief epiphany brings clarity to the narrative style: “Rosamond realized they were missing something. Each one was acting out a half reality, and they didn’t know there was a full meaning beneath it all.” We see the scattered “half realities” of Goliath’s inhabitants in quick succession, leaving us to find the notches and grooves that hold one person’s puzzle piece to another’s.

Yet none of these characters would come to life if not for Woodring’s durable construction of Goliath as a town. From the potlucks and heavy red carpet of the First Baptist Church, to the Tuesday Diner where the retired “Morning Glories” come to drink their coffee and discuss the newspaper, Woodring brings charm to the commonplace details of smalltown life, without falling into stereotypes. Her prose, thoughtful and poetic without being ostentatious, lends credibility to the imagined town. Descriptions expand into the atmospheric—the changing of the seasons, the weather, the sky. Even at points of climax in the story, the movement of the trees may be given just as much significance as a death or a reconciliation. The writing is rife with emotional undercurrents, with each character’s private pain, while dialogue is sparse.

Although I appreciated Woodring’s narrative style, I found that it held me at a distance from all of her characters, like watching a movie filmed entirely with a wide lens. While there are several scenes that zoom in on day-to-day details, personal encounters, and private thoughts, the lack of dialogue and responsiveness created an intangible disconnect between the characters and me. I felt this most strongly with Agnes, wanting to relate to her desire to be free of Goliath and travel the world—but ultimately I felt detached and uncertain about her driving motivations. The pensive, observant narration served as a glass wall, revealing the characters’ thoughts and feelings while simultaneously acting as a barrier, blocking me from connecting with them.

Goliath is a book for those who enjoy the slow unfolding of a story, those who prefer slow and steady character development to a fast-paced plot. Woodring’s atmospheric storytelling is like recalling a childhood memory—sometimes what sticks with you is not the specific phrasing of a sentence, but the resulting lift in your spirit and the changing colors of the clouds. Like the grieving process which it depicts, the book takes its time. But the concluding chapters are worth the wait, gathering the scattered plot points from throughout the novel and uniting them in a purging, bittersweet, but ultimately cathartic climax.

45

Be printed in black on white.

Be colorful-bright in someone’s mind.

Leaf Senescence rachel faldet

I am part of an arc of people contemplating leaves chosen from an airy heap. One leaf falls from a hand, landing on a worn shoe. My small, blood-orange-red maple leaf lies curled on a desk in this gray room where college students, writing with pencils and pens on white sheets of paper, accept an in-class prompt.

The boy who dropped his leaf shifts his posture, retrieves his leaf, jiggles his right foot, twirls the leaf between two fingers, floats it to the floor. Over a long-sleeved, coral-orangey tissue tee I am wearing a black jumper; maybe my students think I planned this outfit to mimic October trees. Where do our thoughts ferry us, when we write, looking at these leaves that mark change, the lull between hot sun and early darkness?

I need to skip a line, wait for a topic to tell me its name.

Maybe its name is Tim, my husband’s best man, who says he won’t be around to see the holidays. Tim is dying, he knows, we all know, of cancer. He’s a doctor, doesn’t pretend. More than thirty years ago, in the sacristy of my father’s church, he asked my husband-to-be if being the best man meant that he would have to marry me if the groom died. The obligations of standing in front of a church on a steamy day, remembering some bad luck Bible story where that might have happened with a bloodline brother. A joke to ease nerves before the ceremony: ‘til death us do part.

Lucky earrings. I vow to wear them once a week until I receive a yes or no from a woman, an agent who might help me, if she decides I’m worth her time. These earrings are burnished wire and threaded together, earth-tone beads. Shaped like the long, grass-green leaves of a pagoda dogwood tree that remain, not chosen, on the built-in front desk. During a last phone conversation, Tim, who critiques my manuscript before I mail it, asks my husband if I have heard an answer.

If the earrings are lucky, she will read all my words.

My words will fall into other hands.

46

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

I am the teacher, the gatherer of leaves. I am the teacher dishing out opportunities for people taking an introductory course in creative nonfiction. They are not all English majors dreaming of publication. Even biology and history and psychology and communications majors are excited, nervous as they try a slippery genre: operating in the world of truth and artistry. Hope and memory. Research. Earnest attempts to figure out what they want to say.

I am the teacher, the one who writes on other people’s worlds/words with purple. Today three people are absent. One has a migraine. One is feverish. Did I scare the other one away? She didn’t send an email. Is she skipping? Maybe she’s sick and just forgot.

My father forgets. Memories—short, long, yesterday, today—are leaving him bit by bit.

I don’t know why I am so confused, he says.

I don’t know the answer, he says, looks at his hands.

His hands are cold, always, now.

Before his mind shifted, he raked downed leaves with sturdy ease. Brown work gloves protecting his hands, he encouraged three kids to jump into heaping piles, toss color and lightness into the air. Rake and jump. Rake and jump. Repeat.

Now he rakes for brief spells, mostly uses that worn tool to steady himself.

I am in charge of black plastic bags, the big bags to capture those crimson leaves, to get them out of the way. He’s dizzy, bends over to let blood rush to his head, waits, but wants to push the leaves against the rake and dump them in the bag I hold open. We manage, eventually, one bag full, and then he rests in a lawn chair, by the garage door, near a small pile of sticks he has broken into pieces of nearly uniform size.

My father worries about trees falling, about eaves that need cleaning, about whether I can remember the way home.

Home, for me, is at the edge of a wood only a short drive from my father. My parents, a lone pastor and his wife, retired to the town where my husband and I live, settling on the other side of the Upper Iowa River. They didn’t stay where they served a Wisconsin church for a duet of decades. They owned two cars—one for him and one for her, parked side by side—like those twin beds in 1960s movies. Now when my mother wants to leave the house for a few hours and drive the only car left, she asks me to come over.

Keep an eye on Dad, she says.

One day I show up after she leaves, open the door with a quiet turn of the handle.

Midmorning. Rainy. My father has eaten his breakfast and is in bed, taking a nap. He’s not flat on his back, but angled and bone-thin under a gardenia-creamy quilt. A note on his night table says Rachel will be here around 10:00 a.m. to check on you. I will be back around noon. Don’t go outside.

47

He is breathing, slowly in rhythm, so I head to the basement, look around.

Remnants of my parents’ fifty-plus years of marriage have sifted down into this houselength room, edging concrete walls, occupying shelves.

On his old desk is a ridged, but smooth, deer antler. Putty-gray, four prongs. By the base of the antler, once attached to the animal’s head, is another prong, like the little finger of a ghoulish hand. Under the antler, which splays across the desk like a wide rake or a fancy

Remnants of my parents’ fifty-plus years of marriage have sifted down into this house-length room, edging concrete walls, occupying shelves. fork, sits a small red rock-carved turtle, smooth, too, except for twelve divisions etched to mimic a shell. Pipestone. On the underside, the artist scratched a signature: Sitting Star.

The turtle is cool, chilly to the touch. A round, small, open Native American-made basket holds shell fragments from vacations, driftwood twigs, fossils, and dull rocks that would transform into eye-catching shimmer under water.

Later, when my father wakes, he will ask what I was doing while he was sleeping. When I mention the antler, he tells me my brother shot the deer.

Inside his desk are bags of random keys, skeleton, Yale. A 1970s plaque says You are entering the nonsmoking section. Please extinguish all cigarettes. He kept that message on his desk in his home office, before retiring. Smoke, grass clippings, perfume, dust are still his worst allergies.

Often parishioners came to our parsonage, closed my father’s office door, talked about their troubles. Pastor, help me.

Long ago in Wisconsin, to relax, my father explored Ernie Schuppner’s woodlands, a few miles away. Small-town pastors were not supposed to get too close to anyone in the congregation, play favorites, but the farmer figured my dad needed companionship. A place of retreat. Sometimes, when Ernie’s trees unfurled palettes of soft spring-greens or morphed into scarlet-reds, we—daughter, son, daughter, wife—followed Dad to look for small chunks of sugar quartz gleaming in a dried-up creek bed. And count birds, if we could see through foliage and branches to where Dad pointed. Quietly, he handed us binoculars.

Quietly, he told us to listen to bird songs. In hushed tones, he named them: Chickadee.

48

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Robin. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. Red-eyed Vireo. Oriole. Nuthatch. Brown Thrasher. Gray Catbird. House Wren. Common Crow. Bluebirds, we always hoped to see bluebirds.

Dad loved bird song, the sound of companions no one would resent.

Often he went into the woods, solo, talking with the aging farmer first. Ernie’s hip pain predicting weather shifts. Ernie’s crops. Rodents and deer. Dad’s garden on a patch of Ernie’s land. Peas he planted near Ernie’s shed. Our dog Andy, a mutt, held garden peas in his paws, shelled and ate them fresh on our kitchen floor.

In the Iowa basement, I open my father’s desk drawer wider and undo a paper clip that holds together half sheets of paper, from eleven years ago, when he was a speaker at a dinner for a gathering of pastors and their spouses who retired to this college town. I read his words, in sentences, long and fluent. I imagine him tall, standing without the vertigo doctors can’t coax into submission, knowing the names of everyone in a room, speaking in a confident voice.

Am I trespassing?

I pull out a gummy black-inked pen. On a musty sheet of his lined paper, I copy his words: One of the most enjoyable times of my years in the ministry was selecting the hymns at the beginning of each month for Sunday worship service.

There are so many meaningful, familiar singable hymns available to us in the hymnal.

(Many are unsingable.)

Most of us tend to forget sermons we’ve heard over the years—but hymns stick with us even when our short term memory is shot.

If you are like me, you’ll find hymns creeping into your day from time to time—in garden, house.

I can’t stop.

Behind the half sheet of these sentiments are lists of hymns, their numbers and background. The first is Dad’s favorite, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” #474 in the green-cover hymnal, the one he adjusted to after decades of using the red-cover book.

He’s researched the song: words by Carolina V. Sandell Berg (1832-1903) and Swedish folk tune. She was a Swedish pastor’s daughter who, when 12 yrs old, was stricken with a paralysis and doctors said she would never recover. When she was twenty-six years old, he wrote, she and her father in a boat—father fell into the H20 and drown before her eyes. 2 yrs later her mother died. Wrote this hymn text when she was in her early teens.

Hymn sung at both my mother’s + father’s funeral—and to be sung at mine.

Upstairs, Dad is stirring. Through the ceiling, I hear him coughing. I put his/my words in my pocket, walk upstairs.

Hi, I say, are you awake?

Where’s Willoughby? he replies. My dog usually accompanies me when I stop by, and comes over twice a week to keep him company. On those days, Willoughby curls next to my fragile father when he is sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

At home, I answer. It was raining when I came over, and I didn’t have a car. I didn’t want

49

Willoughby to walk in the rain, I explain.

Where’s Willoughby? he asks, again.

For a series of weeks, my father has said, I hope I die before Willoughby dies.

He can’t stand the thought of losing that companion.

Dad sits on the side of the bed. He wears blue and red cotton pajamas that remind me of Star Trek. He makes a move to get up, grab his walker. It has two cookie cutters tied to it with string, so my mother can hear him if she’s in another room, or lightly sleeping.

But he sinks back down, says, I just don’t know what I should do.

Do you need to go to the bathroom? I ask.

He’s not sure.

Do you want to get up? Go into the living room?

Maybe, he’s not sure.

I open beige curtains to the rain and wind, the gold-leafed branches of a thriving paper birch planted a decade ago to replace one blown over during a storm.

I leave him alone, breathing while his eyes close, let him decide.

Downstairs, I copy more of his words.

On paper, under #554, “This Is My Father’s World,” he writes I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. First article of Creed. My first crisis in college came with this article. He jots down fragments about a professor reciting evolutionary theory to a biology class, where my father—a pastor’s son who believes it is an Insult to say people descended from apes—has an assigned seat. My background was God created it, seven days, twenty-four hours. In front of Took me a long time to be comfortable is a handwritten *. He studies Genesis in the Bible, decides the important debate is not how the world was created, but by who.

Last, he names readings about creationism, evolution, and miracles.

My mind jumps back to an evening when my junior high science teacher, who doesn’t belong to any church, rings our parsonage doorbell. I answer, surprised because I only see him at school. Rotating planets in a model of the solar system. Decoding colored slices of the earth’s crust. Building baking soda volcanoes. He asks for my father. Murmuring, they head into his office, close the door. I want to know what’s going on.

Later I learn that this teacher is in trouble with the school board, or administration, maybe parents, for words about fossils, dinosaurs, ice ages. My dad comes to his defense, somehow helps my teacher keep his job.

A pastor, long past his first crisis, on the side of a scientist. A pastor who has fossils plucked from dried-up creek beds on his desk. A pastor who whistles bird calls. A pastor who enjoys “walk-across-my-swimming-pool” humor and raw anger in Jesus Christ Superstar more than the melodious piousness of Godspell. A pastor who helps people when they are falling, falling, falling into troubles. Wearing a clerical collar, he celebrates other people’s milestones and has eaten thin slices of many velvety wedding cakes.

My mother, the pastor’s wife, is his unpaid helper.

50

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

My father leaves his town of nearly thirty years when he retires, moves to a place where he can go to two libraries a day, reading newspapers fastened to wooden poles. Play with a grandchild. Pheasant hunt when it doesn’t matter whether or not he takes a shot. Traipsing through fields and woodlands is what he craves.

But now he is upstairs, his world small, spinning.

Begins to fade when he stands up.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, he says.

Sometime, I decide, I will play those hymns on the piano for him.

Light-headed mornings are barriers to church.

Only my mother knows where his car keys are hidden.

He doesn’t ask.

His hands are empty.

I am considering my hands. How did they get so worn, the knuckles pronounced?

Through a hazy memory, it seems I read that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wore gloves to draw attention away from her aging hands.

During dark times when love produces sharp heart pain, I move my hands, make quilts.

Put bright colors up against the uncontrollable. Deep violet. Robin’s egg blue. Tangerine.

Wearing a clerical collar, he celebrates other people’s milestones and has eaten thin slices of many velvety wedding cakes.

Fiery red. Peony pink. Amethyst. An array of fruit greens. Cobalt. A peacock palette. I rip and measure Indonesian cotton batiks into usable pieces. Machine-sew long strips, squares, zigzags of triangles, and asymmetrical surprises of geometry. Making up the design of quilt tops as I go is the pleasure, the tug out of sorrow. Psychology researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call this flow: the all-consuming space I enter when handwork temporarily carries me away from emotional pain.

When I ask about bone pain, Tim says it feels like being gouged with a chisel.

David and I see Tim through a picture window. Our best man holds back Nico, a black labradoodle, so we can enter without paws on our shoulders, a tongue licking our faces.

51

Tim hasn’t left his house much. A strain of aggressive prostate cancer typical for men thirty years older than Tim attacks his body. Working, being a father and husband, coping with treatments consume his time. We hug, and he offers us sparkling juices from the food co-op. His wife is not home yet—she works as a nurse in a clinic’s psychiatry department.

She is Tim’s nurse, but he has recently quit his position. Cancer is replacing cells of his bones and liver.

Whenever we visit Tim, he feeds us. Mango salsa. Tortilla chips. Heated-up soup. Salad greens. Bread dabbed with olive oil spread. Cake and cookies he’s not sampled. A mixture of homemade food that friends bring to the house and downtown groceries. Usually, someone has brought him a lush bouquet of store-bought flowers. It’s never on the table, but on the

I do not yet understand that the dead never truly leave you, that you breathe them into your mind, heart. counter, amidst empty mugs and junk mail. On the wall hangs a small quilt made from hand-dyed muted fabrics. Circles are sewn atop squares, a technique I have not yet followed.

As we eat, we tell stories and laugh.

For years, Tim has been working on a novel.

He hasn’t written the ending.

We stay for a few hours at Tim’s kitchen table, leave well fed.

Home for us is a two-hour drive, across state lines.

Burnt-black sky lit with stars.

Because of my father, I am teaching in this gray classroom, with these students, with autumn leaves. I check the wall clock, note that no one is staring into space or acting done. I’ll give us more time. This exercise unfurling like a showy fern on the forest floor.

In December, when pine needles and brown oak leaves cling to silhouette branches, these young writers should remember this out of the ordinary, yet ordinary request which urges them to look outside themselves and pay attention, and look inside themselves and pay attention. Sometimes that means travelling to loss. And transformation.

I write along with them, contemplating this small maple leaf I chose from an airy heap.

Mine is blood-orange-red, its veins reminiscent of the circulatory system of the skinless model in a child’s science textbook.

52

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Let’s name October’s new collection.

Sugar Maple. Bur Oak. Pagoda Dogwood. Redbud. Fast-Growing Cottonwood.

When I am in college, decades ago, I plan on a newspaper career, writing human interest stories. In preparation—the summer that Elvis Presley dies, the bowling alley catches on fire, and the hospital hires a respiratory therapist who smokes cigarettes—I intern at my hometown newspaper. Their first, I charm them with a take-a-chance-on-me plea.

But what should they do with me?

One June afternoon, the editor hands me a sheet of facts. Date of birth. Name of spouse.

Name/s of children, if any. Occupation. Organizations a member of. Relatives already dead.

Survivors. Funeral service. Funeral home.

You can write up this obituary, the editor says.

The name is familiar, a man in our congregation.

The night before, this farmer is in the pasture, coaxing black and white cows to come home for milking. Standing along the fence line, he falls to the ground, heart stopped. My father is called to drive over to the house. It’s a few miles from town. He spends the evening with the shocked family. How can our father/my husband be dead? How could God do this to us? What will we do, we do, we do?

My father returns home, spent.

A girl my age has no father.

Will she ever stop crying?

I do not yet understand that the dead never truly leave you, that you breathe them into your mind, heart.

My mother cries about this man, choking about his family left behind.

In the newspaper office, I stare at stark words pulled from fresh grief, written by the hand of the funeral home director. Connecting to the heart, rather than cold facts, seems a better use of time and talents, I think. I don’t want to write facts for deadlines, but what could I do instead to be more like my father? My father eventually accepts that the world was created in a way that defies his upbringing.

I obey the newspaper editor. The name and lifeline sketch appearing in paragraphs on alabaster-pale typing paper in front of me seem icy, ready for a tomb. But still I am accurate, deciphering someone’s messy handwriting. I don’t want mistakes in final words printed about a man. My work seems without music, deadened.

My father helps the bereaved—the deceased’s wife and children—pick out hymns.

With hands and feet, I play the pipe organ for the farmer’s church funeral, glancing from the balcony, hoping the family comes in soon, so I can stop repeating the prelude.

The chancel overflows with sprays of greenhouse gladiolas, carnations, chrysanthemums.

Later, my mother gathers flowers left behind into small bouquets in cheap glass vases and presents them to people trapped in the nursing home, clinging to life. Thank you, they say.

But first is the order of service in the red hymnal.

Voices choke on hymns.

53

Several years later, I decide to be a teacher.

Let’s make sentences sing out meaning, I could say.

It doesn’t matter if I agree with what you are saying or not, I say to my writing classes.

My job is to help you say well what you are trying to say, so readers understand what you are talking about. So readers care to listen. So your words can be colorful-bright in someone’s mind.

Today’s class is nearly over, my blood-orange-red maple leaf still.

Please finish up the sentence or idea you’re on, I say.

Students slide their hands’ work into folders or close them in spiral notebooks. I will not see these writings except in the end of the semester’s categorized portfolios: responses about books we read, peer workshopped drafts, as-finished-as-they-can-be essays, in-class exercises. My companions may have come up with a thread of an idea they want to follow, shape into a polished essay. Many still struggle to work without a thesis statement or the passive voice of lab reports. What exactly do you want me to do? How do you expect me to remember details? What is creative nonfiction, anyway?

I can describe, model, explain, question, but they need practice, space to analyze published writers’ words. Gain true desire to revise. Give and receive responses. Take risks. At the end of the semester, this arc of writers should feel more at ease with the slippery genre, should have produced bodies of work worth keeping. Will realize that shaping ideas in prose is thinking.

See you next time, I say.

Those students who don’t want their leaves drop them on the front desk which is abundant with leftovers no one chose. Pagoda dogwood, green, mostly. Some fractured maples. Extra redbud, heart-shaped, ripped. Most people take their leaves, tucking them into a notebook or the memoir about being shunned as a teenage mother we are reading. Or grasping them between fingers. I don’t notice what the boy who dropped his maple leaf on his shoe decided.

Busy, I am answering questions about their essay-in-progress rooted in a place, erasing phrases from the chalkboard, scooping the left-behind leaves into a clear plastic bag.

Perhaps I have seeds of an essay.

Thoughts about transformation.

Exactly how summer-hued leaves on deciduous trees and some shrubs change to the color of a blood orange or a dulled-yellow sunflower or a tart pomegranate, I learn later from websites, is a bit mysterious. Leaf senescence: “the growth phase from full maturity to death.”

Chlorophyll green—that masks always present, but not yet visible colors—begins to fade. A hibernation mixture of shortened sunlight, colder weather, and disappearing pigments: science my father studied before he shifted from a graduate student in forestry to seminary training to be a pastor.

I slip my maple leaf into the pocket of my corduroy blazer, new this autumn. Its fashion color name is purple dawn. Soon I will visit Tim, the best man in our wedding, this dying man who hopes my lucky earrings work, that the agent will accept my pages and chapters of words

54

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

and help them get into the world. I sure hope this book gets published he says, holding my hand while we stand in his kitchen. Later, he taps out an email that says I will fiercely miss you. Future tense. He knows that I will miss him fiercely. He keeps his sense of humor—call to make sure I am alive before you come.

Generous of spirit, this man my husband chose to stand at his side. Generous of spirit, this pastor-father who married us. Fading, these men whose chests rise and fall with labored breath. One in his mid-fifties with ginger-red hair, grown back into waves after chemotherapy, a man whose cancer decline has burned away the leaf-green in him, better revealing the true color of his fierce love and sharp wit. One in his mid-eighties with white-gray hair, changed from black, who remembers me, holds my hand, but whose world is shrinking like a curled leaf unable to unfurl without crumbling.

Worlds/words changing.

I walk out of our classroom into sunshine where leaves are falling.

55

contributors

Chris Anderson is a professor of English at Oregon State University and a Catholic deacon. His second book of poems, The Next Thing Always Belongs, was published last year by Airlie Press. He has been a deacon for fifteen years, and much of his poetry comes out of his experiences in ministry. He has done many weddings, baptisms, and funerals—this poem describes his first experience baptizing an adult.

Kristin George Bagdanov is an MFA student in poetry at Colorado State University where she is also a Lilly Graduate and Phi Kappa Phi Fellow. As California natives, she and her husband are currently trying to comprehend how weather can be measured in negative numbers.

Recent and forthcoming poems can be found in Redivider, Rattle, and Cutbank, and in her chapbook We Are Mostly Water (Finishing Line Press). You can find more of her work at www.kristingeorgebagdanov.com.

Brian Baumgart is coordinator of creative writing and English faculty at North Hennepin Community College just outside Minneapolis and holds an MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. In addition to the writing and teaching life, he is engulfed by his love for good, natural food and the great outdoors.

He is proud to say that he has fostered creative and independent thinking in his two young children, although they both do a mean zombie impression. His writing has been published in or is forthcoming from various journals, including Sweet, Tipton Poetry Journal, Blue Earth Review, the Conium Review, and previously in Ruminate.

Joan Biddle lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband and twin boys. She is a writer, editor, and dancer with the modern dance company Project: Motion. She holds a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in writing from The New School. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Gently Read Literature, Half-Drunk Muse, Yalobusha Review, Red Booth Review, the Country Dog Review, Small Spiral Notebook, and The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Spirituality. An audio podcast of Biddle reading her poetry can be found on apostrophecast.com. Her website is joanbiddle.net.

56

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

Terrence Cheng received his BA in English from Binghamton University (State University of New York), and his MFA in fiction from the University of Miami, Florida, where he was a James Michener Fellow. He is the author of Sons of Heaven (HarperPerennial, 2003) and Deep in the Mountains (WatsonGuptill, 2007). His work has appeared in Bronx Noir, Glimmertrain, Nimrod, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He teaches at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York, where he is associate dean of the School of Arts and Humanities.

Rachel Faldet enjoys travel to art museums and stately homes where she buys wooden pencils as souvenirs. Coeditor of the anthology Our Stories of Miscarriage: Healing With Words, she made guest appearances on NBC’s Today Show, discussing the emotional aspects of pregnancy loss.

Her nonfiction has appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Carolina Quarterly, and Wapsipinicon Almanac, among others. A graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Rachel teaches writing at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she lives with her husband. They are parents of two grown daughters. She dedicates her essay, “Leaf Senescence,” to the memory of Tim Twito, who died on Christmas Eve 2011.

Katherine L. Hester was born in 1964 in Dallas, Texas, and raised in Athens, Georgia. Much of her life has been spent shuttling back and forth between Texas and the Deep(er) South. Her collection of stories Eggs for Young America was a New York Times Notable Book, and her fiction has been published in Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, Best American Mystery Stories, the Yale Review, Brain, Child and elsewhere. She recently resumed writing poetry after a hiatus of twenty-five years; her poems have appeared in Southwest Review and online at Places@DesignObserver.

She currently lives south of Interstate 20 in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two young daughters.

David Brendan Hopes teaches, writes, and gardens, in Asheville, North Carolina, where he and his students have recently opened a scruffy downtown performance space called Apothecary. His play, The Loves of Mr Lincoln, opens in New York in May.

Andrew Johnson lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife and two sons. He has finally conceded that he’ll never be a successful vegetarian so long as he lives in one of the nation’s best barbecue towns. His work has appeared in New Letters and Midwestern Gothic, and is forthcoming in Red Clay Review, Passages North, the Pinch, and Sonora Review.

Lydia Larson was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, in 1987. Growing up as an American nomad, art making was initially a means of documenting constant change. In May of 2009, she received her BFA from Montclair State University where she studied under Julie Heffernan, Alyssa Monks, and Peter Barnet. Lydia received the Excellence in Painting Award of the 2009 graduating class. In 2011, she completed her MFA from Kendall College of Art and Design and also studied at SACI in Florence, Italy. After graduation, she was awarded a Guest Studio Residency in Amsterdam and the following summer, in Toffia, Italy. Lydia has exhibited across the United States and internationally. She is currently represented by Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago.

Mallory Moran was born in Denver, Colorado, and now lives and works in Savannah, Georgia. She obtained her BFA in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design and has shown her work in several local printmaking and photography exhibitions. The lyrical character of her work, whether nonsensical and quirky or quiet and melancholy, keeps her living in wonderment of God. The featured photographs are a part of a larger body of her work that reveals that thread of wonderment. The series, Lo, I Tell You a Mystery, is about a search—full of longing and lament in equal parts. The odd and secretive nature of the imagery was prompted by the parables of Christ as well as the book of Proverbs. The photographs suggest wonder in our world, certainly, but also hints that there is something that eludes us, something just outside of our grasp. Something we can only throw our wildest imaginations at, only hoping to explain this inconsolable mystery of God. Andrew Morris lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York State where he teaches high school English and history. He’s excited that Jim Harrison’s latest novella, River Swimmer, arrived in the mail yesterday. He’s also been planning an outdoor adventure to Joshua Tree National Park with his girlfriend who teaches across the hall. They hope to bring their basset hound, Scrabble, if she agrees to keep her nose away from rattlesnakes and cacti. Andrew’s work is

forthcoming in Redivider and has appeared in NPR’s ThreeMinute Fiction Contest, Wilderness House Literary Review, Eclectica, Otis Nebula, NAP Literary Magazine, and EarthSpeak Magazine. He’s also a member of the Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, New York.

Bethany Marroquin received her BA in English from Westmont College in Santa Barbara and is currently pursuing a teaching credential while working at a Christian international school in Pasadena, California. When she is not studying or solving the problems of the world (or, more frequently, the problems of over-earnest junior highers), she enjoys reading the poetry of Franz Wright and Gerard Manley Hopkins, teaching her dachshund terrier Dapple how to walk on two legs, and walking the tree-lined streets of Pasadena.

Susan Lane Shields is a third generation Angeleno who recently relocated to a farm in Northern Virginia. She formerly taught poetry workshops in Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall and was the editor of publications for InsideOUT Writers. Susan’s essays have appeared in Burnside Writers Collective and in the book of collected youth writing What We See. Her poetry has been published in the Northridge Review. In her new locale, she writes, paints, feeds donkeys, substitute teaches, and is looking forward to seeing a firefly.

Derek Wagner writes: “I became serious about my faith after reading Mere Christianity while attending art school at the University of Florida. These paintings are loosely inspired by C.S. Lewis’ writing. They are part of the Chewy Lewis Project, which aims to put one thousand copies of Mere Christianity into the hands of college students searching for truth. The books will be bought using funds raised from the sale of prints of the paintings within the project. I’m interested in visually synthesizing the truth that’s contained in traditionally delineated subjects like physics, religion, psychology, art, and mathematics. The Chewy Lewis Project is an effort to combine my interest in both art and faith in a meaningful and practical way.

57

thoughts on Glimpses last note

The world

would be altogether different if glimpses didn’t exist. I’d rather have a glimpse of a bobcat or a scarlet tanager than a daily encounter; glimpses ensure that the mystery and awe remain intact—anything more than a glimpse would involve a different relationship, a different judgment, a different experience.

Glimpses save us from full disclosure. Too many details flatten the poetic oomph. I’m thinking of “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.

There’s just enough of an object and a partial view in that poem to capture our attention, to captivate us.

Imagine if he gave us the full view, the full story, all the details.

Some things are suited for a glimpse: an exgirlfriend in the grocery store, your best friend lying in a casket at calling hours.

Andrew Morris Poetry

I used to hate writing stories: the same demands and challenges of writing a novel, with a much smaller canvas. Stories had no flexibility, no forgiveness.

But I don’t hate them anymore. Stories now give me reprieve from the interminable novel I’ve been working for over ten years. The economy of language keeps me focused, but with a new freedom of vision.

Since 2007, I’ve gotten out about one story a year (as a graduate student I mocked those writers who took ten years to publish a collection, but now I get it).

Stories allow glimpses into the lives of characters, spliced visions of the greater human landscape. All

from the contributors in this issue

fiction is journey, discovery. But the glimpse of a story satisfies like an epic, is as vibrant as a song, as quick as a flash of beauty arresting the eye.

Terrence Cheng F iction

The word glimpse suggests that there is a larger reality that is not seen in its entirety, but understood that it exists. A few summers ago, I visited the house of Corrie ten Boom in the Netherlands. As I was leaving, I spotted a take away card on a table of many other cards and pamphlets. On it was written a poem she wrote that spoke of life as only seeing the underside of a weaving; its threads tangled and without logic. However, on the upper side of the tapestry one may behold the image, woven by the “Weaver’s skillful hand.” In my own life, I so often catch glimpses of individual threads to follow and sometimes see where they converge with others.

The whole image I cannot see, but I believe it exists. Yet, I know someday I will.

Lydia Larson V isual Art

I’m a firm believer in literature as a way of seeing things from angles, as a way of understanding the complexity of a world that defies understanding at every turn. With each work we write and each work we read, we glimpse something new, something that tickles the nose or brushes against the eyelash so that we are pressed to move closer and look deeper, to turn our heads just so.

Brian Baumgart Poetry

In unfamiliar opulence, I tourist-travel through rooms of left-behind objects—1765 sofas adorned with golden mermaids, canopy bed swathed with gilded ostrich plumes, crystal chandeliers. “Who is she?” I ask, pausing at a woman’s portrait on a wall in Kedleston Hall, a centuries old stately home in rural England. “She’s just like you,” the docent answers, “an American girl.” My accent betrays me. “This lady of the house was an heiress from Chicago who married Lord Curzon in 1895. Queen Victoria appointed him Viceroy of India.” I try to memorize Mary Curzon’s face, pose.

Elsewhere, I circle Mary’s enshrined-in-a-showcase gown, embroidered with metal thread and jewels to mimic peacock feathers, that the girl-like-me wore as Vicereine of India. In those shimmering moments, I try on her life.

Rachel Faldet nonfiction

My neighbors and I do not shut the blinds. I have to remember not to prance around naked when the lights are on, but that’s a small price. I see him coming to the porch to smoke, so he doesn’t smoke in the house.

I can see into their kitchen. I try not to stare. A glimpse is usually enough. Where I can see is a place which cannot be seen from any other part of their house, a cubby at the top of the basement stairs. One time she was standing right there in the window, hiding from the rest of the house, and she was crying. Sobbing with her face in her hands. Of course, there was nothing I could do to comfort her, or even ask if I should. Then they would know, and close the blinds.

My glimpses: Fog tearing in the tops of the trees.

Hooded mergansers on the pond. A face. A dream. “By the grace of God, I am what I am!”

Chris Anderson P oetry

For writers, day jobs are sometimes resented, but day jobs can teach heart lessons. I recently began substitute teaching, and I signed on for the gamut: K-12, all subjects (except math), assisting, special needs, special ed., at-risk. One day I helped out in a class of severely disabled children and it was a gift of experiences, like reading a train picture book to a ten-year-old boy whose only movement was his eyes wandering the acoustic ceiling, but who gleefully conveyed through his wordless sounds that he really liked that book. The permanent staff had me do the easier tasks while they shouldered the heavy duties with competence, grace, and love. It was a one-off day, as most sub days are, and I ran home after to reflect, and cry, while the staff returned to shoulder the work again.

Susan Shields P oetry

David Brendan Hopes F iction

58

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3

59

OPPOSITE PAGE Derek Wagner. Anesthetic Fog. Paper, oil, acrylic, and coffee on canvas. 30 x 40 inches.

BACK COVER Mallory Moran. Like chaff and grain together. 35 mm color film. 11 X 14 inches.

60

ISSUE 27 Spring 201 3