Issue 30: The Body by Ruminate Magazine

ISSUE

POET RY briefcase body + fingers stretched toward the edge Rob Cook + Abigail Carroll N ONFICT IO N we wept together as we looked up into the ceiling Michelle Webster-Hein F ICTIO N nose to nose and eye to eye Eric Sheridan Wyatt

W I N T E R 2013-14

VIS UAL ART truth in the heart + painting all of it Steve A. Prince + Ashley Norwood Cooper + 2013 Kalos Foundation Visual Art Prize Judged by Joel Sheesley

the face, the fruit, and the hands Alla Bartoshchuk

WHY/ 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 Alla Bartoshchuk. Oбряд(Rite). Oil on Linen 14 x 19.5 inches. OPPOSITE PAGE Alla Bartoshchuk. Розмова(Conversation). Oil on Linen. 31 x 51 inches.

STAFF/ EXTRAORDINAIRE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR EDITOR

Amy Lowe POETRY EDITOR

Stephanie Lovegrove

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSC-certified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 1041 North Taft Hill Rd, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round. For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

VISUAL ART EDITOR

Stefani Rossi REVIEW EDITOR

Paul Willis WEBSITE EDITOR

Aubrey Allison ASSOCIATE READERS

John Patrick Harty Erika Lewis Kristen Thayer GUEST ART PANELISTS

Micah Bloom Susan Cowger Nancy Hightower INTERNS

Kendra Chester Haley Littleton MARKETING AND OUTREACH

Keira Havens FUNDRAISING

Kristin George Bagdanov PRINT DESIGNER

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DISTRIBUTION Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company and through direct distribution.

FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Fall 2013 financial support helped to make this issue of Ruminate possible. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Anonymous, Dan and Kate Bolt, Greyrock Realty, Steve and Kim Franchini, Kelly and Sara McCabe, Randy and Linda Randall, Richard and Louise Terrell, Ralph and Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra and Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra, Dr. Randall J. VanderMey

Patrons Judith Dupree, Brad & Keira Havens, Imagined Design, Brent and Maegan Duggar, Ryan and Katie Jenkins, Tim and Katie Koblenz, Chris and Barb Melby, Brian and Anne Pageau, Neal and Becky Stephens, Troy and Kelly Suto, Josh and Nicole Roloff, Brandon and Kelly Van Dyke, Matt and Lisa Willis, JJ and Amy Zeilstra

Sponsors Helen Allison, Steve and Laura Batson, John Calderazzo and SueEllen Campbell, Dale and Linda Breshears, Doug & June Evenhouse, Manfred Kory, Rob Lee, Jeff Parkes, Bruce Ronda, Cheryl Russell

Anne Pageau propermakes.com

WEB DESIGNER

Katie Jenkins

CONTENTS / 30

NOTES Editor’s Readers’ Artist’s Contributor’s Last

REVIEW

4 6 16, 35, 40 75

POETRY

NONFICTION Michelle Webster-Hein Counting Apples

FICTION Eric Sheridan Wyatt Dog Years

VISUAL ART Alla Bartoshchuk Oбряд(Rite) Розмова(Conversation) Рoздум(Meditation) Fertility Drop Sacrament Bearing Reveal Touch Partake Зүстріҷ(Encounter)

Steve A. Prince Prayer Corner Genesis: In The Beginning Behold Living Epistle Surrender Faith Faith: Sankofa Turn your light on Wailing Wall: Song for Quin Ashley Norwood Cooper Madonna of the Laptop Night Secrets No Vacancy The Bear The Letter

Rita Jones Review of This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon by Linda McCullough Moore

Marci Rae Johnson Jung’s Shadow and Matthew 4:16

12 14

Rob Cook The Last and Emptiest Day of Summer The Substitute Teacher

Rachel Heimowitz Forgiveness

Julia Cariño Sweetgum

60 61

Brad Davis The Yoke Self Portrait w/ Icon

David Faldet Salt

Kevin McLellan Hands

65 66

Abigail Carroll Vespers In Gratitude

70 71

Joseph Fasano Pilgrimage Shirt

John Blair The Idle Hours

Timothy Kercher On What We Wear, a Journey

Front Cover

Inside Front Cover 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 Inside Back Cover 5 36 37 45 46 47 48 63

41 42 43 44 Back Cover

Kit Soleil A Kitchen in Beaufort, NC, Following Your Father’s Death

EDITOR’S / NOTE This Advent season, I asked my friend, author and poet Judith Deem Dupree, to write a prayer for the artists and writers and readers of Ruminate—the body of people who make up this community. Judith has been with Ruminate from the beginning, and her prayers have helped carry us through our darkest and brightest places. So, it seemed fitting to ask her to “nudge a prayer in words,” as she put it. We join Judith in praying this collective prayer of light and thanksgiving, and we wish you all moments of peace and rest during this season. ~ Brianna Van Dyke

Dear Father Creator, you have created within us a yearning that is never fully satisfied, a longing that leaves us ever hungry. A spaciousness that is often cramped by life. Sorrow unhealed and joy beyond describing. It is You, oh Holy One, author and crafter of Life, Whom we seek—Whom we forever hide from and always search for beyond our heart’s own rubble and the world’s afflictions. Find us, where we hide. Coax our wizened souls out of the half-dark of our own thoughts. Grant us that inner Sabbath which was wrapped in the flesh and timeless consciousness of Your beloved Son. Teach us, oh Holy One, with the fine probe of Your Thought, that our very neurons will hum with the inner Life that Your Spirit solely bestows. In Him Who came in Your Name, solely for Your purpose, we see the fluidity, the audacity, the precocity of that hidden Life! Truly, we are meant to stand in the flow of such a steady and illimitable understanding. This is Your promise . . . genesis and fulfillment. This, this is our Genesis—to live in that endless Creation which flows from your heart. To be wrapped in the warp and weave, the seamless robe of Your Son. To lay our smallness against His brokenness, and grow large with His humility, great with His passion and compassion, timeless with His understanding. When we see more wholly, the gifts of Your imagining will become—will engender and struggle up within our own soul’s soil. We will not be afraid of life, nor death. Our pulse will hum with Your artistry and purpose. Here, Father—hear my own plea for my own completion: Oh, grasp my reluctant hand, and draw me into Rest! I pledge to forfeit all my heap of sin and sorrow, and to become a part of the Word spoken, an image of the Image of the Living Christ. Draw my portrait as You see it. Out of this great bestowal I choose to live and move and have my being. Cloaked in this comprehension, I will to walk into the world again, readied for life. Readied for giving more than is mine, purposed to evolve and evoke and to recreate Life in His Image, and yearning with your Father-heart over the broken earth. Amen.

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Steve A. Prince. Prayer Corner. Linocut. 12 x 18 inches.

READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON THE BODY FROM RUMINATE READERS

Once, at a party, a young woman said she admired the free and fearless way I danced. “It’s like you’ve hacked into this amazing part of your body,” she said. “I wish I could do that.” I sipped Coca-Cola, dabbed at my sweaty forehead with a napkin, and considered her compliment. Why would I ever need to hack into some aspect of my body? It’s mine. Like a castle with many rooms, or a website with multiple pages, my physical being is a vast expanse of discovery, but I don’t need keys or passwords to go where I want it to take me. I have no firewalls in my body. “I’m not sure I like the word, ‘hacked,’” I told her. “It sounds like I’m accessing a place where I’m not supposed to be.” Her eyes widened. She nodded slowly as though remembering something she forgot to tell herself. I wanted to pull her onto the dance floor so we could remember together.

Sophfronia Scott

SANDY HOOK , CONNECT I C U T

Around the table we named ourselves, and when I said personal trainer, the woman’s eyes went dull. A church of intellectuals, we expect to break bread with a professor of literature, not a gym rat. The thick-necked have been ridiculed, the athletes on scholarship appreciated, yes, but not ranked high. That God considered the human body the most worthy vessel for a grand story of hope and, finally, strength, is sometimes just that: a treasured story to ponder, not embrace with sculpted arms. Unexpectedly, later in life, I found a kinesthetic orientation that had lain dormant in me for decades. I never considered this contradictory to my academic leanings. This woman: she knew only that I worked in fitness. I wanted her to know I read poetry at home, and Zizek; I write plays, and there’s a book I’d like to get published. My clients, I wanted her to know, pinch their abdomens and cry about their children.

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If her gaze would clear, I’d rest my hand on this woman’s back and ask Whitman’s question: And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? For I have beheld the beauty of both, deep in my bones.

Amy Scheer

G RA N D RA P IDS, M I CH IGA N

My son Benjie had a perfectly kissable spot: that gentle valley between his eyes at the nexus of his forehead and the bridge of his nose. I kissed that spot each time I held him in the hospital during those three days after he was, in the careful words of our nurses, born asleep. We held him often, cradling him, noting that he had Mommy’s toes, that his hair was even thicker than his older brother’s had been, that he looked for all the world like a perfectly formed, beautiful sleeping baby, which he was. My kisses found perfect purchase in that soft concave curve, the loveliest spot on his paradoxically flawless baby body. I carry with me the velvety feel of his cool skin, the subtle scent of the hospital’s baby shampoo still lingering in his thick black hair, the irrational fear in each kiss that I might wake him up and the impossible dream that I actually could. We still have his pictures, of course, and I still see that lovely spot, and I remember how he felt in my arms, and on my lips.

Aaron J. Householder

A N D E RSO N , IN D IA N A

A whisper at the keyhole of my ear, not my interior voice and surely not God’s. Who, then? Auricular fibrillation, drum against heart. Hammer, anvil—indeed, a catalog of biologic tools synchronize in splendid mischief to allow tonight’s patio wonders: a twilight-rising wind, a purple cloud, and this secret message: a solitary chip from a male cardinal whose beloved dun bride guards the branch above . . . I hear you saying goodnight, imagining the riff of your feathers stroking my left lobe, for I have craned my

neck in anticipation. I do not speak redbird, but my ear tells you thanks—glad for the comfort of your soft percussion, beak to branch, and this gift, your sweet aubade.

Sandra Soli

EDM OND, OK LAHOM A

My hair just won’t curl, much to my mother’s disappointment. She was raised in the South with enough hairspray to stop a northbound fly. She married a gorgeous Jew 35 years ago, and they had me: a redheaded Yankee, daughter of a Shiksa and one of God’s Chosen People. My hair is sleek, straight, virgin, not a kink in it, and I burned my scalp for too many years trying to live up to my mother’s standard of beauty. My own daughter now has my hair, and I smile every time I smooth her ponytails—straight, glossy, beautiful.

Jessica Frank

W I SONS I N D ELLS, W I SCONS I N

I heard her before I saw her. She was in the bed next to my friend, behind a curtain, biting nurses and screaming. I peeked through a narrow opening and said to the nurse, “I’m a pastor. Do you think it would help if I prayed with her?” The nurse nodded and left immediately. “What is your name?” “Eleanor.” “May I hold your hand and pray with you, Eleanor?” She nodded. Her back didn’t appear to be touching the bed—maybe one shoulder and her pelvis supporting the rest of her thin frame. The gown had slid off one of her shoulders. Her mouth hadn’t closed in some time; there was a thin layer of dry skin clinging to her teeth. As I prayed she repeated, “my God, my God, my God.” She easily out-prayed me; I went quiet. Then she quieted while some internal pain ravaged her. I started praying again and she turned her head to me and, very gently, told me to shut up.

Edward Hopkins

Children loathe fat bodies. I learned this in first grade when three older boys surrounded an ungainly, unpopular classmate named Tess. “Fatty, fatty, two by four! Can’t get through the kitchen door!” They chanted and ran away laughing. Their words slammed me in the stomach. “This is it,” I thought. “I will be next. This is what is coming.” I was not fat when I was six, but I was stocky. One grandmother had already called me “pleasingly plump,” a friendly description once but not now. That night I practiced walking through our kitchen door. I could get through, of course, but did my body come too close to the sides? Would the boys start calling me “Fatty” anytime soon? All of a sudden I seemed too big to fit anywhere. The fact is, I felt, that I was just too much. Too much talking to my neighbors, as my report card put it. Too many questions; too snoopy. Too messy. Too much burying my nose in a book. Too big. Too much, too much, too much.

Caryl Barnes

WE L L I N GTO N , CO LO RA D O

When my body was young: 1975. I always knew, from family history, that it was likely I would live into my 90’s. But nobody told me I would grow old. How strange to see that old person in the mirror while feeling thirty-five or so inside.

Susan Palmer

M O N TROS E , CO LO RA D O

R OC K FOR D, I LLI NOI S

Send us your notes for Issue 31. We love hearing from you!

RUMINATE PRIZES

2013-14

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Ashley Norwood Cooper

F I N A L I STS Robyn San Anderson Jonathan Aumen

F I R ST P LAC E

Rebecca Calhoun

Alla Bartoshchuk

John Chang Jenne Giles Susan Hart Zacheriah Kramer Janet McKenzie Barry Motes Sydney Sparrow Krista Steinke

S ECO N D P LAC E Steve A. Prince

Melissa Weinman Rachel Yurkovich

by THE KALOS FOUNDATION F I N A L J U D G E JOEL SHEESLEY

S P O N SO R E D

On the work of Alla Bartoshchuk Joel Sheesley writes:

“The human body is the empirical core in these paintings. By fixing states of being in deft representation of the body, Alla Bartoshchuk translates ethereal states into physical encounters. Thus psychological and emotional conditions are given an undeniable veracity, we feel them and know them as our own.”

Joel Sheesley is a painter and professor of art at Wheaton College. He has exhibited his work widely in solo exhibitions including Domestic Vision: 25 Years of the Art of Joel Sheesley, a retrospective exhibition at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in 2008, and Up is Down, at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010. He won an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council in 2002; he was a finalist for the Lilly Fellows Program’s Arlin G. Meyer Prize in the Visual Arts in 2006. Joel lives with his wife Joan, and they have three adult sons.

Kit Soleil

A Kitchen in Beaufort, NC, Following Your Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Death You are swallowed, your seaweed hair blocking your eyes, nothing solid, still you feel on every surface you are being touched. This is our habitat, this formica counter with the chrome trim, this speckled vinyl flooring. It has taken us. We feel its cradling as if it were permanent, a shock of freedom when the sheetrock suddenly drops and eternity pours in. Where did he go? What is this air coming into my lungs? Standing at the sink full of dirty cups, you gently grasp how lonely you are. You stand in the dim warmth of dishwater, listening for his voice. Look at your hands: one accompanied by its partner, joined in action, always separate. Yours, given to you by him. He lives in your knuckles. He rides your palm, squeezes the sponge across the plate, wipes away crumbled remnants of the food that gave itself to your tongue. Your hands will never leave you.

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Marci Rae Johnson

Jung’s Shadow and Matthew 4:16 Even in winter there was sun living in the green shoulders of the waves. I’d walk the beach alone with shadows: gulls in formation on the ground. Once the bones. Once a poem that wrote itself behind my eyes. When I’d come home he wouldn’t say how much he feared the way I’d carry words to the clouds and let them go. Everyone carries a shadow. Everyone breathes out fog in the cold. Even the living sun can’t melt the ice shelf that pushes up the sand, makes of this familiar scape a wild shape, a place that can’t be known. I walk the dunes above, misplace the old theologies. I suppose a light has dawned. The sun pushed high as it will get tapping the tops of pines my own shadow long among the others growing darker denser the more I call the light to me. The more I try to see.

Rob Cook

The Last and Emptiest Day of Summer Today the windows lack clarity, here where we live in the windows which are forms of listening. The plums end each place the light is soft, the tomatoes dried up on a plate that’s lost its crowds, the windows forming on bloodshot cabbages. A mother’s hand is the only animal. In one window the only food is a fork wailing for its flesh. In another, a taffy-haired girl cries with what’s left of the water and its maturing flaws. Today the windows lack clarity. The forest of blurred wigs continues to the mirror’s emptiest day.

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Something not yet marked by sun or moon or cloud drips from the leaves. Behind the only clear window, unknown birds flicker like machetes in the salads of the trees.

Rob Cook

The Substitute Teacher It took six workless years to remove the art rooms and homerooms from his briefcase body. His tweed armor damp with failure’s honest work. He filled his wallet with leaves to fool certain people. The day is for humiliation, he said. The night for remembering the encouragement of the chalkboard and the needs of his chalk, and the marks it left, heartbeats that belong to the chalkboard now. His eyes were puddles, one girl said when his name was Mr. Lovingood. One could see him almost everywhere in his face. It had its own hallways and locked doors and football slaughterhouses. There were places in his body that did not respect him, places he let the lights live too long. Everyone knew this, but without the words. It didn’t matter how many plants, how many snow shrubs survived above his hairline. He could always move his books into someone else’s desk. Or into what others might’ve thought about him, their view of the still creek and the mosquito grass running beside it. He could live there. With his study hall intelligence. A place without embarrassment or shame north of the moon that exposes the networked prom farms. He could open his eyes, those afternoons of false summer, and close them with no consequences. He could eat his own body and survive.

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Rachel Heimowitz

Forgiveness starts the moment your foot pushes you off, carrying the sandy shore caked between your toes; find it as you steady your way on your knees, push stern rudders head down into the water, or as you scramble forward, attach plastic shackles to the headstay, pull the jib’s formless shroud higher until it inhales air like a nylon lung. You can try to run: tack the wind to your back, your mainsail billowed portside like a grasping hand, your genoa, stretched in flight on your right, and you, the beating heart at the center, trying not to tip over. Head out— the boat cresting over the breath of silent speed, spray in your face, you pull each sheet tight, let them cut into your skin, until the boat rides up under you, lifts high on one pontoon. It’s then you hike out, the tiller’s wand in one hand, the sheets like the reins of a galloping horse in the other, your toes pushing you off, farther out into a wind that whips your hair, your back parallel to the water, just one hand holding on, your voice shouting freedom out over the salty ocean and up into the slap and slurp of the sail and the wet, uncluttered sky.

ARTIST/ NOTE

ALLA BARTOSHCHUK I think there is a certain sacredness in a painting. It is still and quiet in the nature of its objectness, but somehow it is possible to hear and see it move. I find it fascinating how static imagery can converse and connect with people, awaking a range of complex emotions, on the level that words do not. I also think that painting is a timeless and fluid language whose beauty lies in its composition—the geometry of the image that forms relationships between abstract shapes, light, shadows and color. In my own work, the compositional arrangement of objects is catalyst. My painting “Рoздум(Meditation),” at first glance, focuses on the details of the pomegranate resting on the table and a sitting contemplating figure. With closer inspection, it becomes clear that these nuances, yet important in contributing to the visual aesthetic, are not the core of the painting. The psychology of the image is carried in the triangular shape, which is formed in between, connecting the focal points—the face, the fruit, and the hands. This painting as well as my other work is constructed based on a contrasts of opposites. I balance simplicity and complexity of composition, color, and paint application: active detailed areas of painting balanced with simplified shapes that rest the eye, muted palette, and chromatic saturated colors; textured surface that makes the viewer aware of the physicality of a painting and the smooth paint application to enhance the illusion of space. Sometimes in my work I embrace theatricality of an image, like in my painting “Oбряд(Rite),” and sometimes the imagery as well as the narrative is more subtle. But my work is always contemplative in nature. My painting “Розмова(Conversation)” evokes a concealed tension between the two figures. One of them stares beyond the canvas into the unknown, expecting, waiting for something, completely unaware of someone else’s presence behind her. She is filled with a feeling of tension and anticipation, either because she foresees something in front of her, or because part of her is sensing that she is looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps whatever she is looking for is left behind. I find the painting process to be an intuitive one. When faced with a blank canvas, I do not always know where the process will take me. Painting is a search that primarily fosters not the rational, but the emotional interpretation of the world. I identify with Cezanne’s process, who wrote, “The landscape reflects on itself, is humanized, thinks itself in me. I objectify it, project it, fix it on my canvas.” I, too, attempt to analyze, internalize, and filter the observed reality in my work, rather than simply imitating it. For me, painting is very much a practice of self-discovery. It doesn’t necessarily provide me with a deeper understanding of the world, but helps me to unravel the the complexity of experiences I encounter.

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Alla Bartoshchuk. Рoздум(Meditation). Oil on Linen 14 x 19.5 inches.

Alla Bartoshchuk. Fertility. Oil on Canvas. 38 x 38 inches.

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Alla Bartoshchuk. Drop. Oil on Canvas. 38 x 38 inches.

Alla Bartoshchuk. Sacrament. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

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Alla Bartoshchuk. Bearing. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

Alla Bartoshchuk. Reveal. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

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Alla Bartoshchuk. Touch. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

Alla Bartoshchuk. Partake. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 12 inches.

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COUNTING APPLES MICHELLE WEBSTER-HEIN

Seconds before the truck smashed into the driver’s side of our car, I told my brother Rory to cross. Our engine idled up to the stop sign in front of our high school as I looked out the passenger window. “Go!” I said when I saw a break in the line of cars coming from the right. I should have said something else, something that showed I was speaking for my side of the road, not his. But I told him to go. And that is the last thing I remember before I woke up to find his head in my lap, the blood from his mouth spreading a red stain down my jeans, toward the tops of my knees. All these years later, I try not to think about the cause. My family says that it was the car—a black, beat-up Plymouth Reliant. They say that the car had been stalling for some time, which it had, and that my brother shouldn’t have been allowed to drive it. I try hard to believe this. Whenever I tell the story, I blame the car. People ask, and I say, “We got out into the middle of the intersection, and the car stalled. We were broadsided by a truck going sixty-five miles an hour.” I make a circle shape with my hands. “It had one of those big tires mounted in front.” Then I tell people that you could see afterward how the tire had struck Rory’s door with surgical precision, like a slug hitting a bull’s eye. Someone else must have told me all of these things; there is so little I myself remember besides looking out the window and telling Rory to go. I remember that I was fifteen years old and that Rory was sixteen. It was November 14th in the small country town of Hanover, Michigan, at 7:30 in the morning. I also remember that there was a thick fog. It was clear enough, though. Clear enough for the people to find us and pull us out and lay our broken bodies on the grass. Clear enough for the school office to radio my younger sister’s bus driver and tell her to take another route. My left kidney had split like a sausage popped open down its seam, and my spleen had exploded, a clot of raw hamburger squeezed from a paper tube. Rory’s aorta, the largest artery, had burst from the top of his heart like the rising jet of a fountain and was filling the two heavy bags of his lungs with blood. Later, I learned that the odds for surviving a puncture wound to the aorta are 3%. The wreck severed his. But I didn’t know any of that in the car as I looked down at his head in my lap and watched his red stain spread over my legs. I knew nothing; I could only watch as red drops dripped from my temples where my metal barrettes had dug like teeth into the soft skin there and

sprung away upon impact. I watched the red drops land on his white cheek and paint pink paths toward his mouth. I found the barrettes weeks later. My uncle, who worked in construction, had the car towed to a construction pit a quarter of a mile from our house so that my family could salvage any belongings. But there was nothing to salvage, not really. There were my barrettes, dented and unclaspable; my brother’s unfinished homework, gouged with glass; our secret cigarettes, snapped and scattered across the floor of the back seat; a box of red hot candies that had ricocheted everywhere. I found them beneath the seats, stuck to the rubs of blood smeared into the upholstery, even lodged in the steering wheel column. After I returned home from the hospital a week after the wreck, I visited the car almost daily. I usually stood off to the passenger side because, since that side had not gotten hit, it looked like nothing much had happened. But then, on the way home, I couldn’t help but look back, and from the road I could see the car’s front end and how the driver’s side had been smashed in to half of its original size. The car’s grill, with its broken lights, looked like a caved-in face, and when I finally turned and kept walking, I could feel it watching me all the way home. In the long months that followed the wreck, I pulled explanations out of nowhere, explanations as bountiful as the candies I found scattered about the car. I am learning invaluable things, I told myself, things I would never learn otherwise. Things like how glorious it is to sit up on one’s own. Things like the singular pleasure of knowing that your brother is alive. I had told Rory to go. There could be nothing else if not redemption. Ambulances whisked us off to the hospital in Jackson, the nearest city, sirens whining and clanging. My belly bloated up with blood, a ripe berry. Mouths and eyes drifted in and out of my vision. Blocks of lights flashed down the ceiling like traffic stripes on the highway. I felt the vague sensation of flying. A ripping sound, the sound of fabric being snipped. The scissors between my small breasts, chopping. My jeans and shirt, underwear and bra, all sliced and peeled off my body. The cold as I lay there exposed. The urge to curl up on my side, the latex hands pressing me onto my back. The wet dab of iodine on the inside of my elbow, the cold hot sting of the IV needle pressing through to my vein. The warm exhaustion pulsing into my head. The beeps and clicks of the CT scan machine as I slid back and forth through the hum of its archway. Finally, the word surgery. “Will I be okay?” I didn’t ask in fear. It just seemed like a question to which I should know the answer. Something – Narcotics? Fatigue? Loss of blood? – was coursing through my veins and filling me with a comfortable, drowsy apathy. Later, when my need for reasons grew stronger, I decided it was the presence of God. The nurse smiled. “Yes, you’ll be fine,” she said. Only after I returned home did I learn how close I had come to death, how, had I reached out my hand, I could have touched it. I drifted out, then in, as hands prepared me for surgery. My aunt was sitting there, bending over my face as she squeezed my hand. She was saying a prayer, but I couldn’t hear separate sentences, only a stream of words. “God reasons don’t always know God protects He loves sometimes God things happen for a reason many people praying your whole church praying my whole church praying changes things change you are going to be ok.” Then she told me that my mother and father had to be with Rory, but that they were with

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me too, in their hearts, and I knew that Rory was hurt more than I was. But when I asked my aunt if Rory was going to die, she told me, no, that my brother was going to be just fine, good as new, just like I would be. Never had I been so grateful for a lie. God was with me then, I told myself afterwards. He knew what I needed to hear. After I returned home from the hospital, my mother told me what had happened to my brother. In a different room, the doctors scanned his chest. The image showed a clot cupping the gash on his heart and stemming the flow, but the doctors thought it impossible: Had his aorta ripped open, they reasoned, he would be dead. They wheeled him off to a rooftop, where EMTs helicoptered him and my parents to the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. There, my mother and father watched through a plate-glass window while doctors drained my brother’s lungs. They drove chest tubes in between his ribs like stakes, spurting plumes of red. My mother told me she couldn’t understand all of the blood then, only that they

I THOUGHT OF HOW FAST HE COULD RUN, HOW HIS FEET SMACKED THE FLOOR LIKE BULLETS. drained him from the same place under his arms where she picked him up as a baby. “That very place,” she told me, as she looked in disbelief at her hands. It reminded me of how we used to play Airplane on the living room floor, how she lay on her back and picked us up under our arms, how she placed our bellies on her feet and flew us up and down, over and across. My brother, when she lowered him to the floor, spread his arms like wings and ran in long, whooshing circles around the house. I thought of how fast he could run, how his feet smacked the floor like bullets. Back in Jackson, the doctor split the skin of my stomach down the middle, from between my breasts to below my waist. He weeded through my entrails and picked out all the bits of spleen, squeezed and stitched shut the open mouth of my kidney, and stapled me back together. Two years later, that same doctor was forced to leave Jackson because too many people had died under his knife in routine surgeries. I had emerged unscathed. See that’s proof, I assured myself, proof that God was there, that God had a plan. In Ann Arbor, they took my brother’s organs out and put them on ice to slow down his system. When my mother reached that point in the story, I imagined ice the color of strawberries, the Kool-Aid popsicles she kept in the freezer in summertime. I remembered

my brother standing in the backyard, ten years old, with sweet, red popsicle lips. “It looks like lipstick,” I had told him, “Ha ha!” “No!” He shot back. “It looks like blood!” And off he ran in the scorched grass with his bare legs, wild and gangly and pumping like the legs of a colt. In the hospital room, the doctor pinched off the currents of blood to Rory’s legs. I can almost see them wither like the fat stems of flowers in fall. He pinched off the currents of blood to Rory’s brain. It cringed and whimpered. Then he sewed a patch over the gash. We have years and years. Then one second. Cracks the skull. Slits the throat. Pops the heart. I realized what is important in life, I said. After his surgery, the doctors told my parents that Rory would most likely not survive and that, if he did, because they had pinched off his arteries, his brain would be damaged,

WHEN THEY ROLLED ME IN, RORY AND I LOOKED AT EACH OTHER AND SAID EACH OTHER’S NAMES. and he would never be able to walk again. I knew, at this point in the story, that my brother was lying unconscious in a hospital bed, but I could not imagine him sleeping. I could only imagine him jogging down our high school hallway in his red football jersey, his head higher than everyone else’s, his movements strong and decisive as he opened his locker, tossed in a stack of books, and slammed the door shut before they all fell out. In Jackson, I had woken up and begun to see angels. I saw them in the nurses. I saw them in the night, standing sentry at the foot of my bed. Out the hospital window, on the streets far below, I saw Christmas angels strung up with trumpets on lampposts, shining through the darkness. I saw angels in the visitors I received, in the flowers and cards. One card from my graduating class was signed by everyone, even the volleyball girls with newevery-day sweaters, even the boys who shot spit-wads during tests. I kept the cards close, I fell asleep reading them, I memorized each person’s words. One boy, a drummer I had a crush on, had written, “We need you back hear.” Even the misspelling was precious to me. I felt loved, I told myself. I felt protected, more loved and protected than I ever felt before.

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I stayed in the hospital for one week. My memories of that week are disconnected scenes. I am sitting on a chair in the shower crying from pain and humiliation as my aunt washes my hunched, shaking body. I am making my first trek down the hallway, staggering behind my IV tree, which I grip in one hand while a nurse holds my other hand in both of hers. I am sneaking over to the window ledge for the chocolates visitors left, trying to eat as many pieces as I can before the nurse comes in and makes me stop because I am only supposed to be eating through a tube. I am lying on my bed while they pull out the feeding tube, feeling it slide around in my ribs and slither up my throat for what seems like minutes. I am watching Sesame Street and laughing at the weimaraner in overalls who is counting the red apples that he pulls, endlessly, out of his pockets. I am laughing at that sheer nonsense but crying, too, because the laughing hurts so much. I am reaching my hand out toward my 10-year-old sister the first and only time she is brought in to visit, watching her turn pale at the sight of me, faint, and fall backwards onto the floor. I didn’t look at myself that week since I stayed primarily in bed and had my bladder drained with a catheter. On the wreck’s one-week anniversary, my father and mother rolled me out to the car in a chair, drove me home, and carried me into the house with my arm slung around my father’s shoulders. I stopped at the hallway mirror on the way to my room and gawked at my own face. I had gone from 115 to 95 pounds in a week. My cheeks had caved in toward my mouth, and my eyes were wreathed in shadow. I started crying when my father lowered me down to my bed. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I’m so ugly,” I said, but I was crying too hard, and he must have thought I said something else, maybe “It’s so hard.” “I know,” he said and began crying too. His calling me ugly would have been humorous any other time, but I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. We sat there, his arm heavy around my shoulders, and sobbed for a long time. I knew then how much my father loved me. I finally saw my brother on November 23rd, Thanksgiving Day, nine days after the wreck. I was wheeled up in a chair from the hospital parking lot because I couldn’t walk for more than five minutes at a time. On my lap, I carried a tin of watermelon candies. When they rolled me in, Rory and I looked at each other and said each other’s names. I held his hand for a couple of minutes. Then we fell asleep, he in his bed and I in a chair beside it. I woke up, opened the tin of candies, and let them dissolve on my tongue. I watched him sleep, thin and white as crumpled paper, sprouting a bouquet of mysterious tubes, while the candies turned my tongue from pink to red. God kept my brother alive for a reason, I assured myself. God will use his pain for good. Rory could not walk, but, beyond anyone’s expectations, his mind was clear and able. He knew everyone’s names, the date. He knew that he was missing the end of football season. He knew that he was hooked up to an almost lethal dose of morphine and that he

could press a button every fifteen minutes and receive more. Perhaps he suspected, also, that he would never walk again and that he would live the rest of his life in a constant state of pain. That he could know anything at all, I told myself, is a miracle. They tugged out the stitches that lassoed his chest. They drew out his chest tubes and sewed up the holes. And, in an act of almost idiotic hope, they brought him a walker and a physical therapist. First, he learned to stand and hold himself up by gripping the walker’s handles. Then he began to take the smallest steps, to collapse and to rise up, to fall into strangers’ arms. And finally, by the time he came home three weeks after the accident, he had learned to move his walker forward and shuffle after it by himself. On the evening he returned, my mother and I bought a cake that said “Welcome Home, Rory!”, and we strung crepe paper from the ceilings. That night, he shuffled his feet across the entire dining room using my mother’s arm in one hand and a cane in the other. My sister and father and I stood off to the side of the room and cheered like we were at a football game. By that time, I had gained back a couple of pounds. Each morning I ate my cereal with cream instead of milk, and I forced down second helpings at dinner. Although it sent a blade of pain down my abdomen, I could sit up on my own, and when I didn’t feel up to it, I could throw myself over and push myself up with my arms. A month after the car accident, I returned to school full-time, though I was still heavily medicated for the pain and wasn’t allowed to carry more than one book at a time. After he returned home, progress for Rory came much more slowly. He winced with each movement, and his pain medication knocked him out for hours. Still, he learned to maneuver three or four stairs at a time with assistance, and he began to walk by himself using only his cane. Three times a week, he worked with his physical therapist’s assistant—a round, joyful woman who refused to acknowledge limitations. Two months after the accident, after Christmas and New Year’s had passed, Rory returned to school. In addition to the cane, he used a rolling chair so that he could put his books in the seat and hold on to the back while he wheeled down the hallway. The football team waited for him to return before they held their end-of-the-season banquet. In the gym, the players all stood in a line with their parents at their sides. At the very end of the line stood Rory, thin as a ribbon in his red jersey, which now fit him like a sack, propped up on each side by our mom and dad. When the announcer called Rory’s name, everyone stood and applauded while he looked down at the floor and my mother and father wiped at their eyes. He could walk, but walking was difficult. He fell often and required help to get back on his feet. Rory didn’t fall down, like most people do, but sideways, like a tree falls. He was usually able to break his fall with his hands, but he still had to lie there afterwards with his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the pain to subside. As many times as he fell, I never saw him cry until one day after he had been attending school for a couple of

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weeks. He and I were talking in the kitchen, and he let go of his cane and leaned against the sink. He must have shifted because his legs suddenly slid off to his left, and he came down hard on his right side. I bent over to help him up, but he didn’t take my arm. He just rolled onto his back and lay there looking at the ceiling. Then, with a yell that began in his gut, he pulled the footstool from under the sink and heaved it across the kitchen, where it knocked over a small table and sent a set of glasses crashing to the floor. Sobs broke out in his delicate chest so vicious and heaving I thought it would burst. That is

FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, I BEGGED GOD TO LET ME CARRY RORY’S PAIN. when the veil dropped, and I felt everything I hadn’t allowed myself to feel all at once: that Rory would never move freely again, would never run, would never wake up to a new day without pain, without imagining his legs, his life before the wreck. I lay down beside him on the kitchen floor and wrapped my arm around his. We wept together as we looked up into the ceiling. To someone watching, it may have looked like we were searching for answers, but there were none to be found. There was only the yellow bowl of the light fixture and the shadows of dead flies scattered within it. For days afterward, I begged God to let me carry Rory’s pain. One morning in chemistry class, my mouth went numb. That evening I found out that Rory, at the same time, had been at the oral surgeon’s getting his new teeth drilled to replace the ones that the wreck had knocked out. After that, on Rory’s most painful days, my legs would throb through to the bone, so much so that I would have to sit in the armchair and elevate my feet. I considered all of this an answer to prayer and thanked God. I learned what it means to bear someone else’s burden. But none of my hurting seemed to help. The following spring, Rory started to drink heavily. He started driving again, too, like he was daring God to finish him off. One May morning, he was coming back from a friend’s house, where he had spent the night, when he ran my mother and her minivan off the road and into a ditch. She thought it was a stupid teenage prank. Later, when she reprimanded him for it, he couldn’t even

remember driving home. My mom suspected drug abuse, so she made him visit a therapist. The therapist told my mother, after the first visit, to hide my father’s guns. Throughout that time, many family members and friends told us how lucky we were to be alive. I would always agree, looking down and nodding my head with a sober expression. “Yes,” I would say, “Yes, we are.” But Rory would always look the person right in the eye. “I’d be lucky if the car hadn’t stalled,” he’d reply. And yet, despite his self-destruction, he continued to improve. One August evening the following summer, Rory and I were walking around the perimeter of our yard. His cane rustled the grass in rhythm with our steps. As we rounded the corner of the shed, we came across my bicycle, which I had left propped up against the shed’s side. Rory

MY HEART IS STRONG, MY ANKLES ARE FIRM, AND MY LEGS CAN CLIMB FENCES AND SCALE LADDERS. rolled the bike out into the grass and handed me his cane. He used his arm to pull his right hamstring over the bicycle’s seat and rested his foot on the pedal. Then, with a wobble, he pushed off and began to pump. I walked beside him faster and faster as he crossed the yard, then jogged as he turned out of our lawn and onto the road, then sprinted after him until I finally stopped and stood there in the dust, following him out of sight with my eyes. God knew all along, I said to myself, and I ran inside to tell my mom. Despite his odds, Rory passed his senior year and graduated from high school. From my perspective down in the orchestra pit, where I played clarinet with the school band, I looked up to watch him shuffle across the stage without his cane and receive his diploma. He had been able to walk without assistance for several months by that point, and his gate had gotten easier, his knees always bent and legs lifting to the side and then ahead to give him the momentum he needed to move forward. After the

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graduation ceremony ended and I brought my clarinet to my lips to play “Sine Nomine,” my eyes blurred up, and I couldn’t make out the notes. Through my senior year, Rory continued to live at the house. He was still living there when my mother sat me down to tell me the news. After the accident, without my knowledge, my parents had filed a claim against the insurance company in my name. Because I was a victim, a passenger who had been severely injured, they thought I might be entitled to a settlement. One July morning after I had graduated, I was getting dressed for my job at the nursing home where I worked as a dishwasher and prep cook to save money for the private school I wanted to attend. I had already been accepted, but my parents—my father a truck driver and my mother a stay-athome mom—would not be able to help me. I didn’t know how I could afford it by myself, despite the scholarships and financial aid I had received. My mother called me downstairs to the dining room and asked me to sit. I remember how drawn her face looked, how the wrinkle between her eyebrows creased deeper as she told me that the insurance company had awarded me the highest amount possible: $50,000. The accident was my ticket to two expense-paid years at my college of choice. But there was no singing and dancing. There was just the two of us, my mother and I, sitting at the table and looking at each other in shock, quiet lest my brother in his room downstairs should hear. Celebration would be wrong. I had my health, my legs, my heart, and then I had, in addition to all that, the hope of an education. My brother had received nothing. My life now gives me no cause for remorse. My heart is strong, my ankles are firm, and my legs can climb fences and scale ladders. The money from the wreck started me on a course to earn a BA in music and two Masters degrees and to discover a job that I love. Without my spleen, which is part of the immune system, I get sick more easily than other people, and my doctor tells me that I do not have the immunity necessary to work with children on a daily basis. I also have to get various vaccines and boosters, but that’s about it. I do not wake up in pain. I do not wake up and think, each morning, about my life before the wreck. But I do often wonder about the part I played—had I truly told my brother to go, or had the car simply stalled? And if it had stalled, why couldn’t God have shuffled events? Why couldn’t God have detained us at home one minute longer or allowed the car to stall twenty feet earlier? Did I truly suspect my own guilt, or was I covering for the God I so loved, taking his guilt upon my back, foregoing his blame to sustain my belief in something that could make sense of it all? And how would Rory’s life be now if God, in his mercy, had shielded us? I think of these things when I have to walk a long distance or when I sprint and leap over a puddle. I think of Rory when I wake in the mornings and lace up my shoes to run the trail that curls along the river. Sometimes, at that early hour, the river is so gray and flat, and there is so much steam rising that it almost looks, for a brief second, like a foggy country road. A couple mornings ago, as I jogged across the parking lot and ducked into the forest

trail, dodging tree roots and fallen branches, I thought, as I sometimes do, of the weimaraner I watched from my hospital bed, who pulled the red apples from his overall pockets and set each one carefully on the counter before him. I wonder how something so nonsensical has stayed with me for so many years and why, when I think on it, it comforts me. The dog, I recall, had the voice of a tired preacher, one who had given up saving souls. He just stood there with his patient dog face and counted each apple. The numbers themselves didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to matter, only that he kept on counting. He may as well have been reciting a prayer. He may as well have been confessing his sins.

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ARTIST/ NOTE

STEVE A. PRINCE I use the ancient process of block-printing in the form of linoleum cuts. I am intrigued by the multiplicity of marks, textures, and patterns that can be achieved in the process. Within those abstractions I am able to house Biblical truths, oral traditions, popular culture, mythology, symbolism and history. The improvisation and syncopation embodied in jazz and hip hop musical idioms collide in my work to create a didactic universal and contemporaneous vocabulary. My current series is entitled â&#x20AC;&#x153;Urban Epistlesâ&#x20AC;? which is comprised of large-scale allegorical linoleum cuts and drawings. In a similar fashion to the Byzantine stained glass windows, that visually communicated church tenets and stories, I am appealing to the dominant visual culture through my narrative work. My love for drawing is evident within my oeuvre, and it serves as the foundation of my creative process and output. I utilize a dense-pack design mechanism to alter viewer response timing. My audience must sift through the image to see its deeper meaning and look beyond the aesthetics of form to understand its function. This notion lies in opposition to our microwave culture, while at the same time mimics it because we are bombarded with several streams of information daily. Ideally, the prints operate to arrest my audience to return again and again and to plant a seed of truth in the heart of mankind.

Alla Bartoshchuk. Рoздум(Meditation). Oil on Linen 14 x 19.5 inches.

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Alla Bartoshchuk. Рoздум(Meditation). Oil on Linen 14 x 19.5 inches.

Julia CariĂąo

Sweetgum Days like these, the ones that stretch out into the thin rose of evening where only a few bright artifacts dangle half-heartedly in the pale sky; this corrugation of summer and the first dog-eared pages of autumn leavesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I adore these days: the glass thrown open after dinner, letting in the ripening silk of tree musk and asphalt steam in the florid swamp of last thunderstorms, and then the rain drizzling out white in a crepe mist, and in its dying, the feet of little girls next door, bare toes molding into the warm wet grass. I can see their mouths, saying nothing, agape as the breeze licks their curls back against sticky temples. In that breath of dusk, they turn their heads up to the moon as if daylight, the bottom tooth of one, poking out from behind a pink lip, a small and solitary history of faultlessness in that innocent protrusion of young bone. Their father following behind them with arms pushed out from his body

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in a cushion of watchfulness. His mouth, also saying nothing, curls in a dim half-smile as his girls tumble into the soft green banks, fall and streak their dresses with a wealth of sweet gum and winged seed, living in the wine of summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s black molasses.

ARTIST/ NOTE

ASHLEY NORWOOD COOPER I am quite literal and concrete when I start a painting. I paint families living in houses and neighborhoods like my own. If I run out of inspiration, I go for a walk around the small village where I live and usually see something or run into a neighbor who tells me a story that inspires me. I paint life in a small town as thoroughly and honestly as I can. We live with our families, protected from the elements in houses built on the bones of the past. The family dog gets skunked. Crows eat the garbage. The children play strange and sometimes dangerous games. All the while, I just keep painting, and as I paint I start to believe that these mundane details are fraught with mystery and meaning. What does it mean when the weeds in the garden refuse to be pulled? Is it a bad omen if a bird smashes itself into a closed window? Why do my children think that they can fly? Why is my daughter the only one in the neighborhood who wants to be Darth Vader for Halloween? I know that when it is all put together it means something, and if I can just paint all of it maybe someday Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll understand it.

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Ashley Norwood Cooper. Madonna of the Laptop. Casein on board. 18 x 24 inches.

Ashley Norwood Cooper. Night Secrets. Casein on board. 18 x 18 inches.

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Ashley Norwood Cooper. No Vacancy. Casein on board. 18 x 18 inches.

Ashley Norwood Cooper. The Bear. Casein on board. 30 x 40 inches.

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Steve A. Prince. Living Epistle. Linocut. 50 x 37 inches.

Steve A. Prince. Surrender Linocut. 6 x 12 inches.

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Steve A. Prince. Faith: Sankofa. Linocut. 9 x 12 inches.

Steve A. Prince. Turn Your Light On. Linocut. 36 x 50 inches.

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ERIC SHERIDAN WYATT

Keith Hutchinson hated to see grown men cry. With the women, he anticipated the tears. He would smooth down the lapel of his white coat, take a deep breath, and deliver the bad news, the irrevocable verdict. When they brought the kids in to say goodbye to the lovable-but-obese golden retriever, or the oncescrappy terrier, he was ready. It was the big guys, the tough guys, the strong rocks of reason and emotional calmness that made his stomach flip the way it did when he had too many cups of coffee and no time for food. Big guys, like his mechanic—the automotive genius who kept Hutch’s twelve-year-old Corolla running—they were the real challenge. Hutch couldn’t look the broad, ruddy-faced man in the eye. As Hutch administered the initial sedative, he tried to focus on the slow push of the plunger and holding the needle steady in the vein. It was an automatic action. He’d done it almost every day for more than a decade. It was his job, his profession, his calling. He reached for the second syringe. With hands that looked like they could loosen rusted lug nuts without tools, the mechanic cradled the weimaraner’s head in his muscled arms; spent tears beaded on the dog’s blue-silver fur. Hutch cringed at the violent shaking, the gasping sobs, the man’s hands trembling as the dog’s breathing slowed, slowed, stopped. Stopped. Hutch looked away. Every time he put a dog down, no matter how justified and humane the act, Hutch had to bite his cheek, dig his fingernails into his skin, try to recall the plot of the movie he’d watched the night before, anything to keep his own emotions in check. At least, while he was in the exam room. He cleared his throat, lay a hand on the mechanic’s shoulder, round and firm as a basketball.

“You did the right thing,” he told him. “The right thing.” The mechanic nodded, gasped again, could barely say, “Thank you.” Hutch knew this man. He would take the dog’s body home because he felt responsible to dig a hole, to lay his friend in it, to place a stone as marker or plant a tree. This was the kind of guy who would crack open the cardboard doggy coffin to make sure the old girl was really in there, really dead. This man, the kind of man who no longer believed in miracles, would check and re-check, hoping, praying even, that it was all a mistake, that Winnie would open her glacier blue eyes, hop out of that box, beg for a treat, find the scent trail of that fat, taunting squirrel who had been her nemesis. This man would say, “It’s just a dog,” and then lay sleepless, worried the dog hadn’t actually been dead, that he’d buried his faithful friend alive. Hutch knew this man. These men. They were him. He was them. One more word of consolation and Hutch left the man in the exam room. He told his assistant, Janelle, to finish the appointment and he went out the back door of the clinic, past the boarding kennels, into the woods where he could cry. Like a baby, he cried. Like it was his own dog, he cried. Seven years of schooling and certification, ten years in the business, the senior vet of the four in the clinic, and he still cried. He cried more as the years went on. He cried so often that he was convinced it would never get better, now. He’d worn a path into the woods over the last year. He was thankful he could still hold it together until he was outside, in the woods, alone. When he regained his composure, Hutch walked back to the clinic. Janelle stood at the clinic’s back door, huddled between the white block wall and the dumpster, trying to find a spot out of the wind. She wore an Indiana University hoodie over her scrubs, the hood pulled up to cover her raven-black hair. The first two years of his practice, Hutch had gone through four assistants, until Janelle showed up, fresh from high school, inexperienced but eager. For eight years she learned and improved and Hutch was sure she could be as good a vet as he was, but she told him she didn’t think she could endure seven years of school. Janelle was kind and professional with the animals, stern and straightforward with the owners. She was the only one who knew about his trips into the woods. “You ever think you chose the wrong line of work?” she said. She stubbed her cigarette against the side of the dumpster, pulled breath mints from the front pocket of the hoodie. Hutch sighed, leaned against the wall, and considered asking for a cigarette even though he didn’t smoke. “Why would you ever ask that?” He tried to laugh. “We just got a walk-in,” Janelle said. She studied her feet, or the gravel around her feet, or the beer bottle cap half-buried in the gravel around her feet. “Blood work was a mess. Fifteen year old collie. Doesn’t look good.” Days like these, it seemed death was all he was good for. Tonight, staring into the depths of the bare refrigerator, he wouldn’t remember the puppy vaccinations, the neuter scheduled for after lunch, the routine annual heart worm preventative prescription. Hutch took a deep breath. The cold air stung his lungs. He held it as long as he could, then they headed inside.

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*** As the senior vet, Hutch had the best office hours, but the Midwest winter sky was already getting dark when he left at four o’clock. The clouds were heavy and gray, like oatmeal left to sit on the counter for a day, with that same, thick, oxidized skin. Hutch could almost feel the clouds struggling to hold back another round of snow. Traffic was light as he edged into town. The Kroger parking lot was full, another sign that the forecast was turning sour. He needed bread, or eggs, or something. He couldn’t quite recall—maybe all of it—but, he wasn’t about to battle the Blizzard Bettys for something he couldn’t even remember. A slow train on the tracks at Washington Boulevard blocked the main east-west road and Hutch watched the red signal lights alternating in time with the CD player. Sittin’ here resting my bones And this loneliness won’t leave me alone It’s two thousand miles I’ve roamed Just to make this dock my home The snow started coming down as Otis started whistling. It came heavy and wet, hitting the windshield with an audible splat. He let it build up until the windshield was opaque. By the time the train had cleared the tracks, the street was covered in a thin, slushy layer of white. His apartment was dark and cold and silent. For three years, Hutch had toyed with the idea of buying a house. It was a buyer’s market, but he couldn’t figure what he would do with a house. Mow the lawn? Plant some flowers? Get a dog? He imagined living in a house, alone, and then he imagined living in a house with someone else. When he thought of someone else in the house, he pictured Janelle sitting across from him, reading the morning paper, thanking him for warming up her coffee. It was a surprising thought. Their relationship had been predominantly professional. Sure, they were friends. Office friends. They worked well together, laughed easily, struck a balance between talking exclusively about work and talking about anything other than work. They bought each other gifts at Christmas—coffee cups with funny sayings and Cheesecake Factory gift cards. She told him about especially bad dates and asked him to remind her one more time why he wasn’t seeing anyone. He told her about his mother’s constant barrage of holistic cures sent via UPS from Florida to remedy ailments she imagined he had and quizzed her about the ten-year silence between Janelle and her mother. He knew she had two parrots named Calvin and Hobbes. She knew the only pet he’d ever had was a basset hound his grandparents kept at their home in Michigan. It wasn’t much. It certainly wasn’t a romance, but it was the closest thing he’d had to a relationship in years. The thought of Janelle living in a house with him was almost as depressing as the thought of living alone. He put the idea behind him.

There was mayonnaise, three eggs, a package of sauerkraut, and two bottles of A-1 sauce in the refrigerator. Not that he was actually hungry, anyway. Maybe there was time to order a pizza or Chinese before the roads got too bad. He was still staring into the nearly empty refrigerator when the phone rang. The sound of it, echoing in his apartment, startled him. “It’s your grandma,” his mother said. “You better get on down here.” The hour-long drive to Indianapolis took almost two, but the planes were still flying. Hutch was at the car rental counter in Sarasota, just after midnight. *** The thick coat and wool pullover sweater were stifling in the Florida heat. Hutch dialed the rental car’s air conditioning to full blast. Christmas lights looked out of place strung on palmettos and wrapped around thin trunks of tall palms. Giant blow up Santas and nativity snow globes littered residential streets. The eight-foot-tall snowmen seemed comically out of place.

In the trailer park, the outdoor decorations were less overbearing. He pulled into the driveway of his grandmother’s trailer and parked behind his mother’s car. Joseph and Mary waited in the matchbook-sized front yard beside an empty manger. The trailer was quiet. Plug-in night lights cast little blue halos in the hall, beside the door, next to the couch, like markers in the shipping channel. He put his bag on the table in the kitchen and found his mother asleep in the chair beside his grandmother’s bed. His mother had been reading and the clip-on book light cast an odd, upward shadow, distorting the features of her face as she snored quietly. She looked uncomfortable. Even in sleep her face held on to deep frown lines of anxiety. Her mouth—slightly parted—was pulled down into a scowl. Her eyes were closed tight, scrunched up, like a child refusing to look at the scary monster peering out from the open closet door.

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Hutch knelt beside his grandmother’s bed and allowed his eyes to fully adjust to the weak light. She was thin. So thin. The flesh of her once-round face hung loose from the hard line of her cheek-bones. She was taking oxygen from a thin tube, but her eyes were soft, relaxed. She breathed in shallow breaths. Wrapped in layers of sheet and blanket and quilt, she looked like a mummy from the neck down. Hutch followed the outline of her stick-thin arms, her hands clasped together at her chest. Lightly, he traced the lines of her hands with his fingertips. He could feel the lumpy beads of her rosary; he followed the string of beads to the crucifix resting on her ribs, rising and falling ever-so-slightly. It would be just like this, he knew, once they prepared her body, placed her in her coffin, arranged her for that final viewing. “Keith,” his mother said. “When did you get in?” She rubbed the back of her neck, groaned as she struggled to sit up. “A few minutes ago,” said Hutch. “You go on to bed. I’ll sit with her.” His mother stood, stretched, wobbled on her left knee that had never been right since she stopped going to physical therapy. After she was gone, Hutch took her place in the chair and opened the book she had left behind. Another book on alternative medicine and holistic healing. He knew she had a dozen similar books with the same author grinning on the cover. Whenever Hutch called, she had some new advice on what to eat or what to avoid or what combination of things, when taken together, would produce the most beneficial changes in his health. She overflowed with prescriptive advice to address ailments he never had. The advice inevitably contradicted some new breakthrough she had shared a month, six months, six years before. He dog-eared the page, closed the book, turned off the book light, unplugged the nightlight, and stared into the darkness, listening for the faint rustle of his grandmother’s breathing. *** The home health aide—a large woman, the color of a Hershey bar—came at nine a.m. She had to turn sideways to get in the trailer’s screen door because of the potting bench that took up more than half of the concrete square that served as the home’s front porch. Her name was Shania, but when she introduced herself to Hutch, she said he could call her Shay, like everyone else. Shay could pick him up and carry him from one room to another, if she needed to. “Good morning Miss Mary Louise!” she said as she entered his grandmother’s room. Hutch followed her, stopping beneath the arch of the door. Not many people called his grandmother by her given name. She had always been Marl, the nickname she picked up from her brother, Hutch’s great-uncle, Billy. “Only one week ’til Christmas,” Shay said. Marl didn’t respond, but Shay kept on this way, talking non-stop about what she was getting her kids and husband for Christmas, how expensive kids were these days with their computer game systems, and how she had to cook the Christmas Eve dinner for the whole family this year, now that her own mother had passed on. Shay straightened up the room,

checked Marl’s vitals, made some notations on the chart beside the bed. “It’s time for your morning medicine,” Shay said, and Marl responded, obediently opening her mouth. While Shay double-checked the chart, Hutch’s grandmother waited patiently, head back, eyes closed, mouth wide, like a hatchling waiting for its worm. *** When it came time for Shay to bathe and toilet his grandmother, Hutch went outside to work on cleaning the potting bench. There were six pots on the two shelves, each filled with a fine, powdery soil and the dry, brittle stalks of long-dead impatiens. The flat top of the work surface was cluttered with half-filled bags of potting mix, fertilizer, and an assortment of hand tools all covered with a thin, sandy layer of sediment. Hutch took the pots, two at a time, around back and dumped the contents next to the air conditioner unit on top of what had once been a modest compost pile. When he turned the handle, the hose sputtered and spit and twitched until a steady stream came out. He washed the pots until the water ran clean, then stacked them in an inverted pyramid beside the trailer’s aluminum skirting. He dug through the storage shed until he found the small red toolbox that had been his grandfather’s. The little silver hinges were dull and starting to rust where they were riveted to the box. The tools inside were heavy, but they would do. After putting the fertilizer in a trash bag, he began to disassemble the bench. “Thing always was in the way,” his mother said. She brought him a cup of coffee, then stood in the door, watching. “You could have moved it,” Hutch said. The coffee was bitter, too sweet, not light enough. “Not with this trick knee,” she said. “Should have had you move it the last time you were down here. That wasn’t just last Christmas, was it?” She knew it wasn’t. “No, ma. Two years ago.” “Marl sure would have liked to see you more.” Six trips to Sarasota in twelve years seemed like a lot, but when he saw Marl so weak, he knew it wasn’t nearly enough. Hutch downed the coffee, ignoring the taste. The screws in the graying wood were tight and several of them had stripped heads that would never yield to a screwdriver. He broke the bench down to two halves, took them around back, and looked through the shed for a hatchet to finish the job. After noon, his mother brought him a sandwich and another cup of coffee, this one more bitter than the first. They sat on lawn chairs and ate. The air was clean and cool, but the sun was warm. The sky was blue and unbroken. Hutch imagined the skin of his bare arms absorbing the sun like a solar panel, warehousing the rays, a stockpile against the next four months of Indiana gloomy gray. “I’m thinking about moving back to Indiana,” his mother said, between bites. She’d only moved into the second bedroom of the little trailer three years earlier, when Marl’s health began to fail. “There won’t be much reason to stay.”

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“That’s funny,” Hutch said. “I was just thinking maybe I should move down here.” His mother made the same sound she made when she got up from a chair. “Throw away all that hard work? Start all over?” Hutch shrugged. The bologna felt greasy on his tongue. He tried to imagine starting over. He had plenty of money saved, and the other vets would buy out his share of the practice. Especially Jordan, who had grand ideas for how to expand and draw in more business. Sitting beneath the Florida sun, the thought of living somewhere warm and bright was appealing. *** When Shay left at four p.m. she hugged Hutch like she was a member of the family and told him it was only a matter of hours, maybe days. “She’s not in any pain,” she said, “but things are shutting down.” His mother was busy in the kitchen conjuring up something for dinner he wouldn’t feel like eating. Hutch sat in the chair beside the bed. Grandma Marl opened her clouded eyes as if staring at the popcorn texture of the ceiling or at something far beyond it. Her voice was weak, and he could barely hear her over the noise of the evening news coming from the other room. “Who’s keeping after the dogs?” she said, and for a moment, Hutch thought she meant to ask who was covering for him back home, in Indiana. Then she added, “I can’t abide just anyone watching my babies,” and he knew she meant the champion poodles she bred on her farm on the Michigan border—dogs she hadn’t had in almost twenty years. “They are taken care of, grandma.” “Keith?” she said. He was her only grandson. “Did you come all this way?” Hutch reached out and took her hand and was surprised by the strength of her grip. She lifted her head as if to look. “Is Sydney there with you?” He had been serious with Sydney his junior year at Purdue. She had gone with him to a cousin’s wedding in the fall and spent three days with him at Grandma Marl’s over Christmas break. That summer, she helped the family load up Marl’s things into a moving truck and kissed Hutch and told him to be careful driving that big truck on I-75. By the time he got back to Purdue for the fall semester of his senior year, Sydney had met a grad student who was smarter, older, and better looking. “Sydney couldn’t make it,” he said. “But she’d send her love.” He said it fast enough that he hoped it sounded like, “She sends her love.” Grandma Marl closed her eyes and didn’t say anything else for a long time. His mother looked in once, pointed at her own plate, and motioned that his was in the kitchen. Hutch nodded but stayed put. He listened to the sounds of Wheel of Fortune vibrating through the thin trailer walls and watched grandma Marl’s slow breaths. Sometimes she would pause, and Hutch would count the seconds until her next breath, not sure if he should try to rouse her. “You remember Snoopy?” she said, just when he was sure she was asleep. When he said of

course he remembered Snoopy, she said, “I always thought it was a dumb name for a basset.” When Hutch was a boy, in the years after his father had been killed in an accident at the Chrysler plant, his mother would send him to Michigan to stay with Marl and Grandpa George for the summer. Snoopy was the hound Hutch’s grandfather bought him when he was ten years old. The poodles were skittish, and Marl was too protective of the pedigreed bloodline to allow Hutch to roughhouse and run with them, so his grandfather brought home a clumsy, playful basset puppy. Snoopy was too unrefined for the poodles, and Grandma Marl banished him from the house. Her greatest fear was a litter of mixed-breed puppies. The poodles had the run of the property, so Snoopy was confined to a dog house by the barn, a fenced play area, and occasional trips to town in the old pickup truck with Grandpa George. “After George died, and after I sold off the last of my babies, I used to let that old hound come up to the house,” she said. “He wouldn’t come all the way in, at first. He was afraid I was just tricking him, I guess. After the way I’d treated him. But I had some chicken pieces, and he got to where he would come on in and sit right by my chair. I’d rub his ears while I watched Lawrence Welk re-runs on the public broadcasting.” “He always had a sweet spot for you,” Hutch said. “Even when you didn’t like him so well.” “He had a sweet spot for anyone who had chicken scraps,” she said. Grandma Marl squeezed Hutch’s hand and smiled. She lay quiet again for a long time, then said, “When he died, it took me three hours to dig a hole, but I buried him right there beside my prince and princess.” Hutch started to ask if she had really dug a hole, at age seventy, to bury a dog she hadn’t really liked, but before he could speak she said, “Who are all these people?” “What people, Grandma?” “All the ones that keep coming in and going out,” she said. “I don’t think I know any of them. They don’t look familiar.” “It’s just you and me, here,” he said. “There are others here,” she said. “But I don’t know who they are.” Marl was quiet for a long time, then she said, “I’m tired. Tell George I tried to wait up, but I’m tired.” *** The day after Christmas, Father Raymond officiated a graveside funeral. The backhoe had sliced into the frozen ground to expose the plot beside Grandpa George. The wind blew in hard off of Lake Michigan, through the loose tent flaps, and dissipated the meager warmth radiating from the funeral home’s portable heater. The New Buffalo Catholic church was small, to begin with, and there were only a few St. Mary’s parishioners left who remembered Marl, none of whom were physically able to venture out in the wind and snow. Janelle had offered to come and Hutch first said he wanted her there, but then he thought better of it and told her not to bother driving in the snow all that way. Standing with his mother and the priest, Hutch was worried that it would be just the three of them until two of the cemetery

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workers in their heavy overalls and thick gloves ducked into the tent and stood with heads bowed and hands clasped behind their backs, quietly warming themselves behind two rows of unfilled seats. Marl’s name had been engraved beside George’s almost twenty years earlier, with her date of birth complete and blank space for the details of her death. It would be spring before the headstone was finalized. *** Another Monday, cold, with more snow on the ground and another winter storm charging across Illinois with Indiana in its sights. Hutch stopped at the Kroger and asked the man unloading cartons of eggs for more boxes. He’d done so for three days, each time thinking he had enough, and each night filling those with his possessions. These boxes would hold the belongings on his desk and the framed diploma and the small stack of files he wouldn’t leave behind.

He was the first to arrive at the office, and he turned on the lights in the waiting area. Janelle came in as he was watering the lone plant on the reception desk. She was bundled against the cold; he marveled that she could stand to wear mittens, instead of gloves. She joined him in his office and helped him fill the boxes with books. They worked quietly. She hadn’t spoken as freely since he had decided to leave. At first, Hutch assumed it was because she was afraid that his leaving would endanger her job, but the other three vets had assured her she was too valuable to let go. They decided to give her a raise and a new title and allow her to supervise the other technicians. They offered her an extra week of vacation and agreed to pay half of her tuition if she wanted to take classes part-time.

“I’ll be glad to get to warmer weather,” Hutch said. Janelle nodded. “That’s one good thing about going.” Janelle closed the lid to one of the boxes and stretched packing tape out to secure it. “There must be more than one good thing,” she said. There was a place to live. He had enough money to live for years, if he decided to stay in the trailer. He had time to sit on the beach and watch the sunset and decide if he wanted to be a vet, or if he was supposed to do something else with his life. “I had to stop Jordan from removing your name from the door, yesterday,” she said. “He was itching to show off the new logo.” “It’s his practice now,” Hutch said, though suddenly, the idea of his name no longer on the door settled in, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “He’s got a contractor lined up. The day after you leave, he’s cutting down the trees out back and expanding the kennels.” Hutch opened one desk drawer, then another, searching for anything else he might take with him. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” Janelle said. She folded the flaps of a box and taped it closed without looking up. “I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving here.” “It turns out to be the same thing,” she said. “Doesn’t it?” Janelle taped another box, then looked at him. Her eyes were deep brown and sad. Her skin was pale. Hutch decided she could use some sun. “They gave you an extra week of vacation,” he said. “You should come down for a visit.” “I should come to Florida for a visit?” “That’s what college students do, right? Go party in Florida for spring break?” “And non-traditional students go to the retirement capitol of the gulf-coast and hang out in a trailer, maybe find a Golden Corral with an early-bird special?” Hutch laughed. “Something like that.” “If you still feel that way in March,” she said, “give me a call.” The bell on the front door tinkled and Janelle went to take care of a customer. Hutch gathered a few items he wouldn’t need that last week and sealed the box. After a few minutes, Janelle put an orange patient folder in his “in” box and hurried out of the office. Hutch drank a cup of coffee and looked at the roster for the day. There weren’t many scheduled appointments, but Mondays were always busy with walk-ins. Scheduled visits were happy visits. Walk-ins weren’t. Janelle’s notes on the dog waiting in exam room three told him all he needed to know: pointer, lame back leg, nearly immobile, struggling to breathe. In exam room three, the pointer looked up, panting, thumped his tail once, twice. The owner was a big man, thick-necked and sturdy. He was a hunter, a fisher, a chopper of wood. His hands were folded, clasped between his knees, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. “She’s been limping a couple weeks,” he said. His voice caught, quivered. “Figured it was just a sprain. She’s hurt that leg before. I let her rest, but it didn’t get any better. Now it’s like she can’t breathe.”

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The dog was thin. Twelve years, maybe more, judging by her teeth. Her rib cage expanded and contracted rapidly, like she’d just flushed a covey of quail. Her eyes were closed. “I’m afraid I waited too long,” the man said. “I think I’ve ruined her.” Hutch put his hands on the dog, checking, but he’d seen this enough to know. “She likely has cancer, in the bones. It’s spread to her lungs, and she can’t get enough oxygen. That’s why she’s panting. Eventually, she’ll suffocate.” Tears gathered in the corners of the big man’s eyes, paused, began to flow over the blond stubble of his round cheeks. “I didn’t know,” he said. “If I had known it was that, I could have brought her in. I didn’t know.” Hutch told him it really didn’t matter, that by the time she started showing symptoms with bone cancer, it was already too late; it spread too fast; it showed no mercy. Hutch rubbed the dog’s head. She opened her eyes, looked at him, confused. Her breaths were shallow. He cleared his throat, pushed the fingernail of his thumb into the meaty part of his palm, and said, “She’s having trouble breathing. You can take her home, but it will get worse.” “I don’t want her to suffer,” said the man. His flushed face turned white. Hutch imagined he was considering the prospect of his dog struggling in his arms, gasping and wild-eyed, weighing that scene against the decision hanging unspoken between them. “If she were your dog?” “I’d let her go peacefully.” The man nodded, the slow nod of resignation. Hutch went into the lab and gathered the syringe, the vials, the tourniquet. His hands were shaking as he made notes in the file. Back in the exam room, Janelle had shaved a patch on the dog’s front leg. When he tightened the tourniquet the vein rose up, ready. “This first drug will relax her,” he said. “She’ll become unresponsive, but she’s still here. She can still hear you. She’ll know you are with her.” The man had the dog’s head in his arms, his face close to hers. Nose to nose, eye to eye, he whispered to her, “Good girl, such a good girl, my Maddie girl, always be my girl.” Hutch could see the grief ripple through the man’s muscled back, his shoulders heaving against the thin fabric of his t-shirt. Hutch didn’t look away. As he injected the final syringe, he said, “This will slow her heart.” The man sobbed. The words of comfort continued, but he stuttered and stammered. Hutch put the stethoscope to the dog’s chest. Her heartbeat slowed, slowed, stopped. “She’s gone,” he said. A hot tear slid from his own eye, stalled at the cleft of his chin, and dropped onto the smooth aluminum of the exam table beside the pointer’s lifeless paw.

Brad Davis

The Yoke Neither a chocolate egg’s yellow heart nor childhood punch line for a set-up I’ve long forgotten: Get the yoke? But a handmade thing whose name shares a semantic bed with Sanskrit yuga, body of instruction caring less for sculpted postures than a way to align one’s life with liberating wisdom. Take my yoke upon you. Noun metaphor, assuming specific knowledge and eyes to see an ancient harness fit for tilling fields, transporting families, hauling bales, or, in an emperor’s parade, mocking prisoners marked as beasts of burden. My yoke is easy, my burden light. Count on him to play the irony card: hard artifact of servitude as emblem of freedom. See him saying this to any two followers, one on each side, held close, his dark carpenter arms laid across their shoulders— I no longer call you servants, but friends. See him grab firmly to himself those two fiery sons of thunder and subdue them with a word of peace; see him fold his infinite wings around the despairing pair on their way to Emmaus, and around the Marys, the inconsolable, the least.

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Brad Davis

Self Portrait w/ Icon This shed, a three-season studio, these heavy eyelids. Here, an icon reads me, tattered image, of a cloth with dark matter and that cardinal in the Rose of Sharon I hear but cannot see. What is more: a dragonfly or the shadow of one? This icon spies me entireâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;sin and loose cobbled sanctityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;morning to morning welcomes me whole, and so where I work I am the work worked over by a grace as beyond me as I to these cramped letters here. In the icon, three sister angels at table take counsel for the world, for every habitation, grand or found or piecemeal, and for the heavy-lidded son of a wandering Aramean for whom it is far better and sadder to be here than he can bear.

David Faldet

Salt Tongues have lapped it to a lump of waves. The snow around it is packed and dimpled. Trails ray out through the wood. Evening and morning deer return here, tugged by an old claim inscribed in every cell. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m in this clearing by chance, but its contours feel familiar. The tang of piss and blood, the taste of tears that well up in whipping air, recall the sea. How many years since we left? I carry it still: swells of longing for salt and mineral, the tide eroding the block on this bleak hill.

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â&#x20AC;˘Steve A. Prince. Wailing Wall: Song for Quin. Linoleum Cut. 24 x 36 inches.

Kevin McLellan

Hands To carry the notebook like a vessel of water yet inside there is a current and a fixed point a seed where our eyes can settle in the whites of each other

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Abigail Carroll

Vespers Incense and stone: the mountains rehearse their certitudes, enter the ancient contours of their vigils. They hold up what remains of the day’s undoing; these are the offices of the evening. I sit at the grassy edge and watch a cormorant’s low descent, the black sentence of her wings skirting the water’s quiet lip. The sky is a prayer repeating across the lake in cindered grays— a dash between the fragile lease on light, the question marks that constitute the dark. A graphite scrawl of dusk retreats to where the mallards look, slips past the rim to where the tenses sleep. The pause begins: cold stars appear; they spell night’s contract with the air, spit and blink their little codes. Who knows what secret vowels are theirs? And what the splintered moon implies?— white comma in the breath of space, mute trace of lost vernaculars.

Abigail Carroll

In Gratitude For the dash— a dancer’s arm lined out from the anchor of her shoulder, fingers outstretched toward the edge of the curtain; flight-path from one idea to the next, this journey is overnight, express— no layover, no browsing duty-free watches and pens, scandals in tabloids, breaking news; There is a horizon to cross, business to do. Arrow without a point pointing toward the exit, which is, of course, an entrance, but this is more than a door—it is a walking through. It is the crossing of the stage, a river,

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the promise of a moss-green bank thick with onion grass and clover. Though the passage is no race, it is thinly quick, knife-edge straightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; elegant as the cut of a swift white sail across a lake, silent as a moment, a word before it is spoken. There is no uncertainty about its direction.

REVIEW/ 30

THIS ROAD WILL TAKE US CLOSER TO THE MOON by Linda McCullough Moore Hawthorn Books, 2011

REVIEWED BY RITA JONES

Someone told me once that the worst hell that they could imagine would be the experience of being visited by the most flawless version of oneself: accomplished, content, confident and fully realized. In that moment, hell would be the great chasm between what you are, and what you could have been. The hell would continue as you lived the rest of your waking moments plagued by self-doubt, by questions, by the paralysis of this fragile life, a life of seemingly infinite possibilities. I understand that it is not standard protocol to begin a book review with such a morbid and curious picture, yet I think the scenario holds great weight. Many of us are trapped in the “what ifs”: what if that abuse had never happened, what if I had taken a different job, what if I had married someone else? What if I took a wrong turn four steps back, and it’s just too late to change? There is a dark suffering there, and not a simple one. Somewhere out there, in a parallel universe, lives the you whose father did not die, who did not get leukemia, who was not haunted by depression, self-deprecation, or blinding pride. I believe it is into the chasm between our hopes and regrets that Linda McCullough Moore writes. In her collection of short stories This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon, she is crafting the suffering of the past and making of it something told, something communal. She allows the pain to be incurable, yet deafeningly beautiful. The linked stories move along in a loose chronological pattern, following the perspective of a woman named Margaret McKenzie. Margaret’s stories begin with the childhood witness of deep flaws in family systems and end with the feebled, halfcrazed, and touching antics of an elderly woman. Moore’s work is delightfully imperfect, somewhat awkwardly moving between moods, motifs, and characters. The reader, however, is reminded that we are messy people, moving among strangers with strange

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words. Moore’s wit and style describe this world well: sometimes quick, brief turns of thought and emotion are all we can muster; sometimes, merely standing seems to be an act of courage. Moore’s work is not presumptuous or assuming. She begins from her character’s rock bottom, from a foundation of failure that many will find honest. As her work continues, Moore progressively raises the stakes. Images add together as, timber by timber, a small and cozy shanty is built for the reader. Just a little bit of shelter is all we need, a place where we can feel comfortable enough to admit things like this: You don’t know anything is happening while it is going on. You can stop the clock a hundred times a day, but when you wake up the next morning, it will still be 7:45 and there will be an odd tapping on the roof, and you’ll be late before you’ve ever gotten out of bed. The stories in This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon lead the reader through a myriad of scenarios: Margaret’s final day at work, Christmas with an immigrant family, the beside of a dying Episcopal priest, a visit to a childhood home, and the terse discomfort of time with in-laws, just to name a few. Moore describes in the most poignant ways how each day can simply be the story of trying to hold all the pieces together. Yet Moore’s work is far from disheartening. In surprising moments Moore shares with the reader delicate “half-truths” that only she can so magically offer. “Change does not come easily,” she writes. “You want to tip your hat to anything that slits the seam of your life open, even just a sliver-width, to allow for the possibility of rearrangement.” It is the embrace of mottled light, of chinks in the playground fence, in which our imagination flourishes. In such moments, Moore writes, “you want to bow and curtsy, even if you cannot give the thing a name.” The work as a whole reminds us of the gentleness we must show ourselves, and that there is no greater antidote to despair than gratitude. With a subtlety that I have rarely seen in literature, Moore confronts deep lies that keep many in psychological bondage: lies about worthlessness, about social value, about permeating loneliness, about inescapable cycles of human pain. We may be broken, sooty, a pile of brown leaves—a rag doll made of rubber bands and old twigs—yet hopelessness only serves as an affront to whatever God may exist. Moore does not offer clichés, just a mere nudge to enlarge our thinking, to “Let it out of this room. Take it for a walk. Buy it a kite.” The reader is shown that mercy is not a do-over, and that grace sometimes means not going back. If you’re on Plan C, or Plan X for that matter, that plan will get you where you need to go. With a whisper, we will thank her, and slowly let our kites soar.

Joseph Fasano

Pilgrimage That winter I walked the garden path. Lord, I said, meaning the miles, meaning the way the wind and the winter will nothing. Cedar-light. Unkindness of ravens. Out of feast days, out of deep grasses the ghost horses came, broken by thistle and fire. No loom. No room in the moon now. Fury was the flavor of the feast there; no hymnal, no psalter, no sire. Winter, take me back there, wholly, where the first of the fiction approached me, deathless, all bridled in briar, in the odors of clover we may enter, when surrender has taken us there.

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Joseph Fasano

Shirt Winter in New York, and I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember the case for reverence. Here is the preacher; here is the steeple; here is my body and the ruined body of my father curled together in the deep linens of his illness. Here, he whispers, and holds up the gospel of his marrow, written in raptor. I walk out through his pastures tonight and discover them: sixteen horses panicked in the billowing blankness of December, their rusted and wild manes tousled. Say it: April is true, too. But what about these ignorant animals bridled in ices and briar, kneeling to the odors of a lost manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cotton, believing their breaker has come?

John Blair

The Idle Hours I have spent whole days scribbling down nonsense. Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness Every day we fill. Every day lucky stars and skin grate into tender praise and tarry ash, and eight cylinders of flesh buckle in and clench like a fist. Kenko before his inkstone scribbles what a strange, insane feeling this gives me, every day pearls of grieving, yellow like puss, like heart-grease, silting past his tongue and under his bones. Every day, he finds something new he does not need and shelves it gently with the thousand things he does not deserve. And every day he walks the random self that falls from his mouth among the subdued cattle and swine and becomes them all, hoof and hair and fate. The longer a man lives the more shame he endures.

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In the small wounded copse of trees beyond the road, a young housecat stalks thin streaks of perfect being through the yellowed grass, where broken bottles scalpel every day into slivers of breath and purest joy. Soon, her feral heart will flare in someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sobbing headlights, or in the yellow mendicant grace of a coyoteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s teeth. But in this moment, in this one perfect idle hour, the invert vulval bell of her ear cups the windy strum of sky, the cosseted nothing that is a kind of pity, and a kind of love, lost to the grinding weeds and snailed vacancies of every place that shines her off into the deft glissando of her abandonment, gift to the great wide world that is ours and never ours.

Timothy Kercher

On What We Wear, a Journey We buy the first clothing— two bags full and lightly-worn for two children still wearing their mother. Through this act the growing arms and legs, head and torso take on shape otherwise lost in a belly. Hats still hang in the hallway, boots line the floor belonging to a man whose body wears the earth. When I hold two pairs of pajamas, there are snowflake prints, bear track prints, trees and a trail— I’m not holding clothing, but our future, the path through which a body grows. When I put on Charlie’s hat, I’m not filling it up but weighing the absence, miming the form that is no longer his. The body’s journey, through the tunnel of pants and shirts, through socks and blankets, hats, boots, and shoes— from a presence out of nothing to absence, unbounded.

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CONTRIBUTORS / 30

Alla Bartoshchuk writes: “My artistic development was paved and fueled by the simple passion for creating. The artistic expression in my nascent years found its place not only on the walls of my room, but also on the neighbor’s fences. This early passion for art led me to enter the Youth Art Academy in my home town Rivne, Ukraine, and later propelled me to move across the Atlantic Ocean to study fine arts at Memphis College of Art. I graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in painting in 2010. In June 2013, I received my Masters of Fine Art degree from the Laguna College of Art and Design. I have been honored to be the recipient of numerous scholarships, among which is Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant ( 2012 and 2013). My work is represented by Hall/Spassov Gallery in Bellevue, Washington, where I am scheduled to have the second solo show in December, 2013.”

Rob Cook lives in New York City’s East Village where, somehow, and for the moment, he is almost happy. He is the author of six books, the most recent being Blueprints for a Genocide (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013).

John Blair writes: “I’ve published five books, including two poetry collections, The Occasions of Paradise (U. Tampa Press, 2012) & The Green Girls (Pleiades Press, 2003), and I have published poems with various magazines, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and New Letters. I teach at Texas State University, I am a Buddhist, and in my spare time I make Scottish sporrans by hand from old repurposed coats bought from eBay and Goodwill and tend a couple dozen bonsai trees.

Brad Davis lives three hours from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. In the next few years, he intends to move closer. When he does, his spouse Deb and their cat Mr. Bibbs will move with him. Once nearer or actually in Brooklyn (jobs and housing required), Deb and Brad will no longer be three hours from their son, his wife, and their three cats, Muffin, Chelsea, and Pickles. Until then, Brad (MFA from Vermont College, with several books and many journal publications) will continue to counsel, coach, and teach at Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut. He has also taught at College of Holy Cross and Eastern Connecticut State University.

Julia Cariño has also been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and in The Quotable: The Quarterly Publication of Quotable Writers. She was also recently named one of the semifinalists for the 2012 Crab Orchard Series First Book Award competition for a manuscript entitled “Cinnamon, Clove, Smoke.” She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Virginia. These are the things that she holds dear: poetry, film, music, chocolate, magnolia trees, paper-winged moths, crescendos, decrescendos, memories, synonyms, pieces of twine, bicycles, carnivals, glaciers, and sunlight catching on unexpectedly reflective surfaces. In her free time, she loves to cook and paint. She is also unrelentingly teased by friends and family for her undying love for crochet. Abigail Carroll is author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, 2013). She has published prose in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and her poetry has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Dappled Things, and Clapboard House. She makes her home in Vermont where she enjoys farmers’ markets, poetry workshops, and swimming in mountain streams.

Ashley Norwood Cooper lives with her husband, children, and pets in the Catskills. Her studio is in the attic of her crooked old house. In her paintings, she depicts American life with sincerity, nostalgia, and dark humor. She draws on a wide range of influences from art history and contemporary narrative painting to music and folklore. Ashley holds an MFA in painting from Indiana University. She is a member of First Street Gallery in NYC. More of Ashley’s work and updates on her latest projects can be found at ashleynorwoodcooper.com.

David Faldet makes his home in the Upper Iowa River basin where his family has lived for seven generations. His book Oneota Flow, published in 2009 by University of Iowa Press, explores the natural history of the river. David works at Luther College. His poems have appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Ekphrasis, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Joseph Fasano is the author of two collections of poems: Fugue for Other Hands, which won the 2011 Cider Press Book Award, and Inheritance, due out from Cider Press in May, 2014. His poems have appeared in the Yale Review, Southern Review, Boston Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, FIELD, Passages North, and other journals. He won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize, and he has been a recent finalist for the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Autumn House Press Prize, as well as a Pushcart nominee. He teaches at Manhattanville College and in both the undergraduate and graduate writing programs of Columbia University.

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CONTRIBUTORS / 30

Rachel Heimowitz is an emerging poet living in Israel. Her work has appeared, or is due to appear in Spillway, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Oberon and Poetry Quarterly. Her poems were nominated for The 2013 Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Marci Rae Johnson teaches English at Valparaiso University, where she serves as poetry editor for The Cresset. She is also the poetry editor for WordFarm press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Redivider, Books & Culture, The Curator, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, The Christian Century, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and was recently published by Sage Hill Press in 2013. Marci lives in Southwestern Michigan very close to Lake Michigan, with her two children and a hamster named Scabbers. Timothy Kercher lived abroad with his family from 2006 to 2012—four years in Georgia and two in Ukraine—and has now moved back to his home in Dolores, Colorado. He continues to translate contemporary poetry from the Republic of Georgia. He is a high school English teacher and has worked in five countries—Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others; he and his wife are kept busy by their toddling twin daughters Ani and Ketevan, and the most recent addition, Keats, their son. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of recent literary publications, including Crazyhorse, Versal, Plume, upstreet, Bateau, the Minnesota Review and many others. Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, forthcoming), runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in books and journals including: 2014 Poet’s Market, American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Hawai’i Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ruminate, Sixth Finch, Western Humanities Review, Witness and numerous others. Kevin is a native of Conway, New Hampshire, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island. Steve A. Prince is an artist-in-residence at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana and his MFA in printmaking and sculpture from Michigan State

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University. He is represented by Eyekons Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is owner of One Fish Studio, LLC. Prince’s public works include a 15’ stainless steel kinetic sculpture titled “Song for John”, and a 6’ x 6’ x 10’ welded aluminum sculpture titled “Open Expressions,” in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia, respectively. Prince is a 2013 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize semi-finalist, 2010 Teacher of the Year for the City of Hampton, and a Best in Show winner at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia Beach. Kit Soleil has two true vocations: writing and raising a teenage son in New York City. Her day jobs have included helping homeless men and women re-enter the workforce in San Francisco, creating training software in Silicon Valley, writing instruction manuals for microchips (also in California), and teaching high school English in Brooklyn. She currently writes instructional curriculum for radiology software at a Manhattan teaching hospital. Somehow she manages to also produce fiction and poetry and (sporadically) maintain a blog called The Agonist. An occasional procrastinator, Kit has been learning the ukulele and studying Greek, which is slowing down the fourth revision of her novel. Michelle Webster-Hein lives with her husband and daughter in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she writes, reads, teaches English, plays piano, and delivers exhilarating performances of the Dr. Suess canon. Though she believes wholeheartedly in inhabiting the present moment, she dreams of someday raising chickens and vegetables in the Michigan countryside. You can find her most recent work in River Teeth, upstreet, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Midwestern Gothic, where some generous folks nominated one of her stories for a Pushcart Prize. If you’d like, you can contact her at m.websterhein@gmail.com. Eric Sheridan Wyatt is a writer and educator currently living in Palmetto, Florida. As the owner of a loving beagle, named Joy, Eric sees a little bit of himself in almost every character in this story, “Dog Years.” Eric received a BS in education from Ball State University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte (NC). His short fiction has appeared in New Plains Review, Eunoia Review, Ozone Park Journal, and The First Line (among others) and in the non-fiction anthologies Letters to Me and Can My Marriage Be Saved? In May 2012, Eric was a writer-in-residence at the Brush Creek Foundation in Wyoming.

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LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON THE BODY FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

Of what body am I a member? In my childhood the answer to that question was offered every Sunday. My rural Lutheran church, with its farmers, farm wives, and restless kids, was a body. All churches together, from our hilltop parish to the great churches of Europe, to our mission in Madagascar were a body: the living body of Christ. Research teaches me that my body is 75% water. That water is drawn by cup and glass from a river system, connected to the world’s oceans, filled with water that has migrated through animal, plant, river, and cloud over the course of billions of years. Of what body am I a member? Today I would answer, the body of water.

David Faldet

POET RY

I fret about my hands. There is always paint under my fingernails. They look older than they should. In the winter they crack and bleed from too many scrubbings with lava soap. Do the manicured moms at the PTA meetings notice them? Do they smell the turpentine and and stare at the paint stains on my jeans? In an increasingly virtual world, paint is real stuff. It’s messy and slow, but that is what draws me to it. I accept my painter’s hands like I accept my stretch marks, because the process of creation isn’t just cerebral. Art making involves mind, body, and soul, and all three are forever changed by it.

are starting to go, my fertility is quickly becoming a memory, and I’ve had a recent cancer scare. It’s plain that my own body is not under my control. So my body is pushing me to get more comfortable with surrender and faith.

Kit Soleil

I was looking at his body with a detached fascination and a hint of surgical curiosity. Just a few days ago I was admiring the translucency of his face, how it was catching the light passing through every layer of skin, revealing the myriad of radiant yet subtle complimentary colors—the range of warm reds with a touch of cool gentle turquoise dancing and shimmering. Now the reds that used to give the skin its vibrancy were gone, replaced with muddy alizarin coupled with gray green and yellow . . . I couldn’t recognize him anymore. I think it was the color that defined him, not the lines or planes of his face.

Alla Bartoshchuk

VIS UA L A RT

When my grandmother died, I found this written

dreams in which I am a bird or fish, and the rules have been suspended, and I can fly or breathe under water. I wish we could pass from A to B without having to go to sleep. I think I’d love that most of all.

inside her small, edge-worn New Testament: The soul suffers more diseases than the body. It was a sentiment made more poignant by the arthritic, wasted, frail state her body had slipped into those last years. Standing beside her casket, just before it was shut a final time, I thought, “Imagine a soul more assaulted than this body!” When I teach any sort of writing, I emphasize the need for our words to convey both inner and exterior realities. The parallels between the physical and the spiritual, as demonstrated by the juxtaposition of the glorious creation evident in every human form and the finite limits of our bodies, has always fascinated me.

Brad Davis

Eric Sheridan Wyatt

Ashely Norwood Cooper

V I S UAL ART I ST

I love gravity and its effect on bodies. I love too those

POET RY

My grandparents were painters; in our home, every room had naked women on the walls. Yet these same grandparents were scandalized when, at age eight, I put a ball under my nightgown to look pregnant. When I was pregnant for real in my late twenties, I was amazed at what my body did with no instructions from me. This was when I decided to trust in the wisdom of my body. Now I’m older and my eyes

F I CTIO N

For Buddhists, body is just an aspect of the whole Buddha, and not essentially different from spirit. That said, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the body portion of my Buddha nature grows, like the bonsai trees that are both my hobby and part of my practice, ever more gnarled, rootbound, and fond of sunny afternoons full of nothing much but sitting there.

John Blair 80

P O ETRY

Alla Bartoshchuk. ЗүстріҶ(Encounter). Oil on Linen 23 x 32 inches.

Ashley Norwood Cooper. The Letter. Casein on board. 20 by 18 inches.

Issue 30: The Body

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