Issue 31: Always We Begin Again by Ruminate Magazine

ISSUE

POET RY The word he whispers the softest Laura Sobbott Ross F ICTIO N Vision ending and beginning Kimberly Priske VIS UAL A RT Spending years with displaced books Micah Bloom

S P R I N G 2014

+ 2014 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize judged by Melissa Pritchard

First Place: Legacy by Lori Vos $

WHY/ RUMINATE?

ruâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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 brushstrokeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; longing for the significance they point us toward.

FRONT COVER Sarah Megan Jenkins. Jean Lafitte Swamp. Acrylic and mixed media. 40 x 40 inches. OPPOSITE PAGE Manik Sharma. Bulb. Photograph.

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CONTENTS / 31

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

REVIEW

4 6 16 76

POETRY

FICTION Lori Vos Legacy

Kimberly Priske The Art of Going Blind

Shannon Skelton Tree House

VISUAL ART Sarah Megan Jenkins Jean Lafitte Swamp Manik Sharma Bulb Lone Stander Micah Bloom Codex

Alea Hurst The Assumption Braving the Giant The Burning Bush Snow Yunxue Fu Pro Rachel Yurkovich Red Delicious (4) Red Delicious (2)

Zacheriah Kramer Through the Cracks

Sophie Petti Review of She Loves Me Not: New and Selected Stories by Ron Hansen

10 11

Alyse Bensel Caterpillar Poem After Tulipomania

Anneliese Finke Metaphors

Win Bassett Light of Light

Michelle Oakes Psalm Forgiveness

Richard Cole Rothko’s Chapel

Janet Atkins Relics of my father’s boyhood, circa 1940

14 Front Cover

Inside Front Cover

17-24, 44

Z.K. Parker the stroke of what makes us the house covers our nakedness

Larry D. Thomas The Art Preparators

Ryan Strebeck Sharecropping Mrs. Grace’s Plot Next Door

Miho Nonaka The Museum of Small Bones

42 43

47-48 45 Back Cover

74 75

Inside Back Cover

Laura Sobbott Ross Mount Pilatus Scribe

EDITOR’S / NOTE

I’ve been looking for structure, something to push back the chaotic hustle, busyness, and multitasking that can be so wearing. Somewhere I read a quote from a monastic who said multitasking was a kind of violence against the soul, and I remember being shocked by the severity of those words—especially in a world, okay my world, that honors efficiency and productivity—but I also remember feeling the truth of those words. Grasping for straws, I started with the tangibles: I made lots of lists; I tried out a new dayplanner; I hung a calendar on our kitchen wall to mark all the appointments and soccer practices and snack duties (in case the one in our hallway wasn’t enough); I searched for a magical app that would tell me what to do each day via my phone; I even bought a pretty clock, thinking it might help. Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends us from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” Yes, a clock and a calendar are helpful and practical tools, but they are not the end. My search for structure was and is a spiritual search, a search for how I am to spend my days. I first became acquainted with the Rule of St. Benedict through Robert Benson’s work on praying the daily office, which is how Benedictines order their days—pausing throughout the day to meet together and pray. The Rule acknowledges our deep need for structure and invites us to plan for times of rest, community, work, and prayer each day. And then begin again the next day. Saint Benedict writes in the prologue to the Rule: “The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.” This idea of balance and structure alongside the grace of daily beginning again was like a balm for my weary heart. Our theme for this issue is “Always, we begin again,” a phrase that is often attributed to Saint Benedict, but it is actually more a reflection on the spirit of the Rule than a direct quote. Saint Benedict calls the Rule a “little rule that we have written for beginners.” I love this embracing of both the “little” and the “beginners,” and it seems fitting that a little magazine like ours could give space and attention to what it means to begin again. The talented contributors gathered here will give you plenty to mull over, but first, let me tell you what I’ve found. First, repetition—that always and again part. The weight of repetition can sometimes feel like a burden or boring, but repetition reminds us of the beauty in our mundane tasks—like tucking the kids in at night, taking a shower, saying our prayers, saying I love you. Just as repetition in lifting weights shapes our muscles, repetition with our families and our work and our prayer life has the power to shape our hearts and strengthen our minds.

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Starting over also reminds us we will fall. In the preface to the 1998 edition of the Rule, author Thomas Moore writes: “We make mistakes, misspeak and misjudge, fail, fall down, and fall apart . . . Inferiority is only part of the picture, but to deny it is to set ourselves up for a lifetime of trying not to make mistakes and denying our faults.” When we fall apart, as we all do, there is so much grace in beginning again. I also love how beginning again defends us from the “not enough” lies—not enough time, not enough talent, not enough faith. Inhabiting a beginner’s spirit means we must remain vulnerable; we must trust. If always we are beginners, then the focus shifts from our achievements, and we are reminded there is enough and our pilgrimage will continue. In Zen Buddhism there is a practice called “Shoshin” or “Beginner’s Mind,” which is an attitude of mindful openness, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace the beginner as opposed to the expert. In a literature class in my undergrad program, I actually got to practice this by keeping a “Beginner’s Mind” journal. We were asked to do things like walk the dog slowly and playfully, pausing over things we would normally rush past. During these exercises, I found myself being much more attentive, playful, and curious, and I also found that having a beginner’s mind was a deep practice in humility, as it stretches you away from winning and being the expert and toward seeking and beginning. Another treasure I found on this journey is the book Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. Among other things, Norris writes about what she’s learned from the Benedictine community. In a section on beginnings, she writes: Because it impedes my illusory forward movement, having to begin again can feel like failure. It reminds me that work I thought finished must be redone, and I resent being reminded of the transitory nature of all things, including myself . . . As a writer I must begin, again and again, at that most terrifying of places, the blank page. And as a person of faith I am always beginning again with prayer. I can never learn these things, once and for all, and master them. I can only perform them, set them aside, and then start over. I’m grateful for Kathleen Norris’s insights, and I’m grateful for the structure and grace I’ve found in Saint Benedict’s little Rule. And I’m grateful that on this day I get to practice one of the core elements of the Benedictine community—hospitality. I get to welcome you, our dear readers, dear guests, to the lovely work gathered in these pages. I think you’ll find many little moments to continue pondering the gifts of beginning again. Warmly,

READERS’/ NOTES THOUGHTS ON ALWAYS, WE BEGIN AGAIN FROM RUMINATE READERS

Some people

over. “Twenty-four years is plenty of time to see enough of death and life,” I think. Then I look them in the eyes and tell them that maybe there’s something about me that needs redemption. Maybe there’s something inside of me that needs a new beginning every morning, every time I look in the mirror, every time I fall. And fall. And fall. Maybe they’re right. It would be easier to keep going, to believe the lies. Notgoodenough. Notsmartenough. Notprettyenough. Notstrongenough. And yet, redemption. The promise of a new spirit, a spirit not my own. The promise of strength, beauty, wisdom, righteousness. Hope in the fall, life in the rising again. Joy always, always coming with the morning.

There is an upside to being face down because it clearly causes the train to stop, to avert further collateral damage. And always, we begin again, don’t we? It’s becoming aware of the Achilles heels and being willing to start over despite our limitations. (Okay, my limitations. I’ll speak for myself!) Finding that moment where choice is made, that critical point just prior to undesired actions or words. Finding the weakness and linchpin that unravels the peace of God that had been prevalent up to that point. To not do so seems to be the greater weakness. For to error seems not to be the problem, but to error and not correct it by beginning again anew, having learned from the falls before, is perhaps the grandest mistake of all.

Hannah Kroonblawd

Ann Elizabeth Costantino

tell me I’m too young to have to start

S HENZHEN, C HI NA

I often wish that it were possible to set a DVR on myself. A way to record my descent back into old habits so that I’d have the opportunity to study them closely, to freeze the moment in a stop-frame, play forensics on my thought processes that lead me to fall flat, face down. I could rewind the moment just before the wrong turn. I could edit, change what I did or said which would, ultimately, change the direction of the story. Just change that one little thing, the critical factor, the tipping point that set me off into a cascade of various decisions that were prefaced by that initial one that I wish I could take back. Oh, how invaluable instant “take-backs” or deletes could be! But, instead, I seem to bumble around making the same mistakes. How I know I’ve made the same mistake is because I find myself at the same endpoint, but I was negligent in watching the exact moment at which my compass became reset in that direction (through a decision) to send me there in the first place. Despite the occasional mud or egg on my face, I do find a great upside in finding myself sometimes face down. DVR aside, introspection and deep, deep prayer is certainly as close as one can get to it, outside of installing cameras around the house or being on a reality show.

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PA RKTO N , M A RY LA N D

This is

something that’s easy to say but much harder to actually believe, isn’t it, that “always we begin again?” Over the last several years as I’ve dealt with life change after life change, that awkward growing phase that shoves you into adulthood after college, I have told myself in the face of a job rejection or a broken relationship, “tomorrow is a new day—things will be better.” Many days I think myself a liar. And yet, I continue to say it, not these exact words, necessarily, but the spirit of them - always we begin again. Because at the end of the day, who wants to believe that the road you’re on is a straightaway? Ben Huber

N EWTO N , N O RTH CA RO L I N A

My son just turned thirteen. Mind you, it has been a struggle just to be a mom, let alone a GOOD one at that. I’ve given, taken, given, tolerated, disciplined and given again everyday for the past thirteen years. I’d call that an accomplishment, of sorts. He is now a teen. And always, we begin again. I’m now in the next unknown phase with him. It’s new territory. I’m terrified. And also overjoyed. It is easy to take this phrase and feel slightly depressed.

After all, beginning again presumes we are forced to “begin again.” To start over because we have to. But is this really so? Should I be sad over this? I think not. We can take great comfort or discomfort in that phrase as much as we know we have to begin again in all things. I have to begin again not just later, but every day. Today, I will stick to my diet. Today, I will write 1000 words. Today, I will begin again and be the best mom. Today, I will try not to covet my neighbor’s BMW. While the previous day’s failures don’t define us, it should give us hope when we open our eyes, early morn, realizing we have another shot at it. Another shot at life, living, writing, and being. We’ve only failed when we stop trying, I suppose. And that’s the last thing I want to show my son, and it’s the last thing I want to give to my other son. I will try again, to stay on that diet, to write more than five words, and to ask forgiveness for my sins even if I have to—which I will—begin again tomorrow.

Heather Spiva

G OLD R I V ER , CALI FOR NI A

Spring is my favorite season. Long before the days begin to warm, and the light begins to soften and draw near again, I take walks with my children to look for signs of spring. As they run ahead and lag behind, poking at the ground with sticks, I find a thankfulness within me that there is a new beginning approaching. The plants will soon push their buds up from the cold ground, hearty and strong, and they will spread their petals and sound the trumpets. I walk and search, and I remember that their ability to begin again exists only because they have died. And with the shouts of tiny voices calling, “Mom! Here, over here! I found another one!” I fight back a sob that is rising in my throat, because this must be, in some small way, how the Father feels when we choose to die, and be made new.

Stacy Bustamante

My father, I loved him. I respected him. I feared him. He spoke deeply. Laughed heartily. Angered easily. He died and was gone. I was six. Our stepfather, I liked him. I appreciated him. I grew impatient with him. He spoke rarely. Smiled often. Smoked like a chimney. He died and was gone. I was fifty. Growing older with my sweet husband. Everyday brings new challenges and fresh awareness. We wake together. He lifts my spirit. He holds my heart. I smile. The men in my life. I am grateful.

Helen Allison

RI CH A RDSO N , TEXAS

We were recently watching the athletic feats of the Sochi Olympians, when my son, who is learning how to walk, suddenly stood up next to his dad without holding on to anything. He raised his hands in the air as if he’d just won gold, and we clapped wildly. A week later, the standing has progressed to one, then two, sometimes three careful steps before he plops down onto his knees again. Every time he manages this little dance, he raises his hands in the air, grinning as if it’s the bravest thing he’s ever done. And every time it is. I wish I could celebrate my own timid steps— in my case, it’s trying to get words down on paper—with as much enthusiasm. Instead, I’m usually disgusted with myself for not getting more done, for only accomplishing part of a project before getting sidetracked or bored. Instead of building on my writing, I’m constantly starting over, trying to find new fertile ground. Perhaps, though, I might get further if I learned from my son’s innocent spirit. Each modest phrase or sentence— this paragraph even—is a step in a journey. Why shouldn’t that be worth cheering for?

Jennifer Fueston

LO N G M O N T, CO LO RA D O

FORT COLLI NS, COLORAD O

SEND US YOUR NOTES FOR ISSUE 32. WE LOVE HEARING FROM YOU! 7

RUMINATE PRIZES

2014

H O N O RA B L E M E N T I O N Shannon Skelton • Tree House

F I R ST P LAC E Lori Vos • Legacy

F I N A L I STS Heather Goodman • The Communion of Saints Jessica Lynn Henkle • Safe Mary Makofske • Fair Game John Mort • Mission to Mars Orathai Rotphongkasem • You Are Here: A Directory Robert Vander Lugt • Blood Brothers Mary Yodzis • One Good Turn

S ECO N D P LAC E Kimberly Priske • The Art of Going Blind

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by THE VAN DYKE FAMILY FOUNDATION W I T H J U D G E MELISSA PRITCHARD

S P O N SO R E D

On “Legacy” by Lori Vos, Melissa Pritchard writes:

“Legacy” is an impeccably crafted, masterful story about a man finding within himself the courage to choose the right, if unexpected, successor to his land. In this story, each exquisite sentence leads beautifully to the next and finally, to an ending that both surprises yet feels inevitable. A gorgeous work of polished language and perfect form, “Legacy” imparts the uplifting message that no matter what obstacles face us, it is essential to choose, not from expediency or the fear of displeasing others, but from the higher wisdom of our hearts.

Melissa Pritchard is the author of nine award-winning books, including The Odditorium, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Stories Collection of the Year and an O, The Oprah Magazine Book of the Week and Summer Reading List selection. Among other honors, her novels and stories have received the Flannery O’Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, Carl Sandburg, and O.Henry Awards, as well as Pushcart Prizes. Two of her books were New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice selections, another was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great Writers” selection. Pritchard has worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, India, and Ethiopia, and her nonfiction has appeared in various publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune and The Wilson Quarterly. Her newest novel, Palmerino, published by Bellevue Literary Press, NYC, just released in January, 2014. www.melissapritchard.com 9

Alyse Bensel

Caterpillar Poem Just as the caterpillars transform themselves / They / who through their mortality / again become alive / just like the dead / in the ground â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Christoph Arnold, Introduction to Maria Sibylla Merianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Caterpillar Book (1679)

These origins of worms, butterflies, flies and moths are rearranged and ordered. Cabbage whites are like yellowed paper, nearly preserved but fading. Note every stage engraved in copper. Names mark decay sucked back to the roots of rosulate leaves, bittercress collected and placed in a dry cotton-lined box to feed those who live to eat. Painters fearing mortality rejoice in rebirth. One whitetipped body molts five times before the black-tipped butterfly can live. The most common insects destroy and build entire fields. This flesh is built into a life sanctified but not holy. Overnight, hunger will consume and leave by morning.

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Alyse Bensel

After Tulipomania The virus split the bulbs in two, gave spent halves for moneylendersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fortunesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a lesson of greed, a waste of beauty for beauty, crimson and white curled to points. Where does the break, like a wave against a barrier, mix disease and perfection? Even the silver-ground carpet moth keeps diligence perched on feathered petals. This mosaic is a flame that smolders away lives if left untended. Do not burn what has consumed you. Pray as the moth bows its antennae. Keep nature in its use, certain that God has watched and let these creatures live, knowing each is humble, knowing we are not.

Anneliese Finke

Metaphors I’m beginning to think that they’ve all been used before. The fireworks of the neurons that fire in your brain, the hands that flutter like wings and crack like bark, even the stars that shine in your eyes. Everything new is ridiculous. Should I say, your hands are flapping like carp drowning when someone reaches down to pull them into the air? That the fine lines on them are like tin foil that, once used, can never be smoothed out again? Maybe these metaphors work, somehow, maybe they’re just nonsense, your eyes are like the power indicator on my tv antenna. Controlled by a little plastic dial? Bright and surrounded by darkness? Keeping me awake at night? It all falls apart. There’s nothing else to say but this: There is a man. He looks sad. I saw him, lying in his white bed. When I saw his eyes, I thought, he must know something awful. But after all, I am no closer to it, I will never be any closer to him, than this.

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Win Bassett

Light of Light On mornings like these, when the bright blue house outside my front window is the sheet in his two hands that draws down, purposely, from the top of his head to reveal first his right eye, I know I can catch his stare through the grime-ridden window to watch the pirouetting dust in Morning Prayer if I sit three chairs in, three chairs back, to the south in Saint Luke’s Chapel. By the Venite, the reflection of the lit souls in his eye that bounced back to reveal the invisible ink dust, ghostwriters then swaying to the island’s orbiting tune, retired until the next mornings like these. The bright blue house down the hill tucked him but not before he left smudges on the soiled chapel window for his gaze to expose more the next mornings like these. No one noticed when one of the eight bulbs on the north chandelier hanging from the unfitting moulded ceiling flickers a pulse. The overabundance of light made its emptiness undetected and its sudden burst likewise unnoticed. There it goes again. And again. Thrice power lasts the benediction of dust congregations below before they’re kicked up, like when the pigeons hit the red clay, like when the dog shook to loosen his rough collar.

Michelle Oakes

Psalm A day at the creek, barefoot, shirtless, tan, George Timson, seven years old, the only one of us patient enough to catch the blue-tailed lizards. This memory, Lord, where has it been? Twenty-five years and not once did you deliver to me that George, never until today. Is it because I am waiting? Do you remember?â&#x20AC;&#x201D; George crouched at the bank of the creek and hovered his hand over the gravel. Let me hold it, I said, running off with the others, when you get one. and late in the long afternoon, when at last I saw him strike the ground and stand, I returned to him. In his handâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yellow stripes and live eyes; on the ground by his foot, the blue spark: the tail grows back, he said, but I did not want the thing without it.

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Michelle Oakes

Forgiveness It happens overnight. In the morning you open a book and the words are so small. The sun coming in through the blinds touches your breakfast your book your hand on the page. Your hair is warm as a cat in the yard. This is good, you say. This heat on my back— like the hot brick walls of the store down the street where everyone goes, where you sit on the ground so the wall meets your back—.

It comes as a pain in the neck, a pain you earned. It’s such a relief to locate a pain in the body and let it go away.

ARTIST/ NOTE

MICAH BLOOM: CODEX On June 22, 2011, the Souris River ravaged Minot, North Dakota. Forcing its way through homes, it seized thousands of precious items carrying them to new resting places. Foremost among the displaced were hundreds, possibly thousands, of books. Strewn in trees, across roadways, along railroad tracks . . . these books were pilfered from shelves, floated through broken windows, and recklessly abandoned to fend the natural elements. These books were vessels—surrogates of human soul, these shelters—housing our heritage—displaced, now driven over by boomtown commuters and shredded by oil tankers on their way from the Bakken oil fields. It was this surreal situation that stirred me to alter the fate of these books. When I was a child, my parents instilled in me a reverence for books. Books were not to be stepped on, sat upon or abused, because they contained something mysterious and powerful. Beyond their mere, physical composition of wood fibers and ink, they played some indispensable role that demanded respect and preservation. In a magical way, they were carriers of that which was irreplaceable; they housed an intellect, a unique soul. None was more protected than the Holy Bible and to cause damage to its substance was to denigrate its message. In our home, books were elevated in the hierarchy of objects; in their nature, deemed closer to humans than furniture, knickknacks, or clothing. Under these impressions I was forced into this relationship with displaced books. I’ve now spent over two years with these books: spring, summer, fall, winter, night, day, wind, rain, dust, snow, dew, nests, eggs, webs, sprouts, sticks, leaves, ice, snow, bulldozers, trains, trucks, duck weed, worms, spiders, birds, muskrats . . . they are becoming homes to animals, analogies for excess, progress, and harbingers of the encroaching digital age. Over days, weeks and months, they have persuaded me to tell their story: a story of necessity, ignorance, loss and valediction.

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Micah Bloom. Codex. Film frame. 2013.

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Micah Bloom. Codex. Film frame. 2013.

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Micah Bloom. Codex. Film frame. 2013.

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Micah Bloom. Codex. Film frame. 2013.

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LEGACY LORI VOS

Paavo paused at the top of the porch steps and looked out over the orchards. The order in the straight rows of slender trunks calmed him, as it always did. He shrugged into his jacket as the early morning mist settled on his face and the top of his head where the hair had thinned. The air was chilly and the stiffness in his knuckles was more pronounced than usual, but he would feel better when Sam arrived and they got to work. He let his gaze rest a moment longer on the fog caught in the trees’ uppermost branches, bare and black in wetness against the gray, sombre sky. He grasped the railing and lowered his foot to the first step, then stopped as he felt the uneasy flutter in his chest. Like the moths in the barn, during summer nights of packing peaches, beating their wings frantically, fatally, against the bare bulb in the ceiling. He inhaled deeply and tried to slow his breathing against the fear rising within him. He knew he should go inside and let Sam do the work without him. He should do as Helmi was always telling him to do—go to her, tell her of the awkward, stuttering beat of his heart, and allow her to lead him to the couch to rest. He thought of her instructing him in her crude English, “You say! You say! When you feel bad here,” she would thump her chest, “you say!” In her most fierce moments she abandoned the familiar Estonian for the syllables that still seemed new and strange to him. It was her way of bringing him to attention. But he needed the trees now, and here was Sam coming down the drive in his old green pickup, tires spitting gravel. Paavo carefully continued down the steps and walked over to the truck. “Hi, Sam! How are you today?” He lifted a hand in greeting. “Hi, Mr. Lippmaa. I’m okay. Should we finish the peach trees this morning?”

Sam was already on his way to the barn. A moment later he emerged with two sets of shears and clippers and handed one set to Paavo. They walked to the edge of the grass beyond the barn, then Paavo felt his boots sink into the muddy earth of the orchard. They plodded across several rows of trees, then down the rows they had begun yesterday. Paavo paused before his first tree, looking for its shape and the angles of its main branches. He saw the cuts he needed to make to keep the centre of the tree open to light and air. After flexing his fingers to loosen them, he grasped his shears and began to cut, decisively ridding the tree of dead wood and suckers growing from the roots. Then he reached into his pocket for his clippers and began trimming newer branches growing in the wrong directions. He worked to the sound of his and Sam’s tools incisively opening and snapping shut and the gentle thudding of branches hitting the earth. It was good work. Paavo felt in conversation with each tree as he handled its limbs and freed it from unwanted growth that would draw energy away from the coming fruit. He loved to see the trees clean and ready for the next stages of their lives: blossoming and leafing in spring, producing small, hard nuggets as the summer came on, showing the blush of ripened fruit in the days of high heat and humidity. He kept these trees healthy, guided them to give their best in beauty and bounty. He worked steadily down his row, only half aware of the increasing dampness of his clothes and the ache in his hands. The call from his wife when it came, “Paavo! Paavo! Come now!” startled him from the trance of trees and earth and mist. He turned in the direction of the barn, shouted “Ya, okay. Coming!” and felt apprehension waken in his chest again. But it would have to be done; he would have to go. First, though, he would talk to Sam. He moved to the next row and several trees down; Sam was faster now than he was. For a moment he watched the young man at work, assessing his tree, cutting carefully and deliberately, assessing again, and shaping until the tree resembled an open hand. A slight smile lit Sam’s face as he appraised the clean tree. Then Paavo stepped closer and Sam looked up to meet his eyes. Paavo didn’t speak at first but simply beheld Sam: this youth, who had worked for him for years, had become a man. His open face was lean and already ruddy from his days of pruning in the early spring sunshine, and his eyes regarded Paavo steadily, attentively. Sam had his own small farm, now, and a new wife, but still he came to work in Paavo’s orchards, partly for the old man’s sake, partly for the extra income he and Rebecca needed. As the men’s gaze held, the same smile returned to Sam’s face. “How goes it, Mr. Lippma?” Sam asked, removing his cap and rubbing his forehead. “Maybe time to call me Paavo,” the old man replied. “Anyway, have to go to town now.” “No problem. I’ll finish both rows and call you later this week.” Paavo raised a hand and turned to go. As he walked back toward the house, the face he saw in his mind changed from Sam’s to his grandson’s. He envisioned the grin that always seemed to charm Helmi, the glint in Gary’s eyes that made him wonder if the lad were mocking them. Though Gary was in his twenties, close to Sam’s age, Paavo still thought of him as a boy. It was for him he was going into town today. To sign a document that would immediately transfer the farm—not the house, but the orchards—to him.

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It was no use trying anymore to discuss the decision with Helmi and Annika. Helmi was resolute: they would keep their land, the land they had worked so hard for as immigrants, in the family. It was a blessing that Annika had had a son who wanted the farm; so many of his generation turned away from this kind of life. And young Gary had ideas that would improve things. He had been to business school—had done very well—and knew ways to earn more from the orchards. He would tear out the old peach trees and plant sweet cherries, which fetched a higher price, then open up the new orchards to families who wanted to pick their own fruit. Paavo tried not to think of sitting at the window in the farmhouse watching strangers among the rows, yanking fruit from the trees, allowing their children to climb up and into the branches, breaking off new-growth limbs that carried the promise of next year’s harvest. As he trudged up the row, his paced slowed and he felt very old. He rounded the corner of the barn and came in view of the house. There was Helmi, standing on the porch and waving urgently. “Hurry, hurry,” she called. “Move your feet! Almost time to go!” He absorbed her harshness, as he always did. He still admired her more than he chafed at her commanding ways. She had been so brave, a lifetime ago it seemed now, during the war. She had done what she could to defend their farm against the occupying forces near Tartu. One

HE LOVED TO SEE THE TREES CLEAN AND READY FOR THE NEXT STAGES OF THEIR LIVES. day, she had kicked their only horse to make it buck and stamp, so the German soldier eying it would think it too wild to take. In the end, though, they had to flee their home and join those on the crowded boats to Sweden. Once there, Helmi worked hard alongside him and young Ville at the looms in the factory, even while she was pregnant and then nursing Annika. Here in Canada, as they worked on others’ farms through seasons of bitter chill and heavy heat, saving for their own, she kept them all going with her fierce belief that they could make a better life. That they were making a better life. As he neared the porch and looked up into her impatient face, still pleasant in its planes

and lines despite the deepening furrows, he was reminded of how much this life had cost her, perhaps more than it had him. He had never stopped feeling bereft of his homeland— of the forests and seasides, the ancient cities, the melodic tongue of Estonia. But the hardships of the war and immigration, and the tragedy that had befallen them here in Canada, had cost her her softness and the easy laugh that was like music to him in their younger years. He passed her on the porch now and thought she gave him a little shove. “Fifteen minutes, Annika be here,” she said, continuing in English. Maybe she was as nervous as he was, though this was what she wanted. Despite her urging, he could not make himself go faster. Inside the farmhouse, he slowly mounted the stairs to the second floor and moved toward their bedroom. But he paused first to look in on Ville’s old room. Then he found himself going in and lowering

MAYBE SHE WAS AS NERVOUS AS HE WAS,

THOUGH THIS IS WHAT SHE WANTED. himself into a chair. The room was largely unchanged from the time of his son’s teenage years, except for the posters of James Dean, Ville’s hero, which they had taken down after Ville’s death and the clothes they had removed from closet and drawers. The guitar was still propped in a corner of the room; the bed was still covered with the old wool blankets that Helmi washed every few years. He let himself think about the son he had lost. His bright, handsome son—so smart, but so frustrated with the simple life on the farm and the often relentless work. Ville

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had found friends at the high school in town, was enticed by their music and dances, the places they liked to hang out, their clothes and hair. As he spent more time with them, his habits changed. He bought himself an old guitar and began to play. He also started to smoke, surreptitiously, behind the barn when he could steal away from the house or the orchards. Sometimes Paavo found empty beer bottles stashed in a corner of the barn. After high school, Ville had gone to work at an automotive factory in the city instead of planning for university, like Annika, or helping to build the farm, as his father had hoped. More and more often he stayed out in the evenings, sometimes waking Paavo in the night when he stumbled up the stairs to his room. Those mornings he rose very late and complained all day of headaches. Paavo wondered about his son’s increasing absences from work and the new signs of his ill health. But he couldn’t talk to the boy, so far removed had he become from the world Ville now inhabited. Then one morning after his son had been out all night, he and Helmi had received the phone call from the police. He remembered her sharp cry at the words she was hearing, her struggle to understand. He closed his eyes and felt the familiar wave of regret for the son he had lost before he lost him, irretrievably, to death. He wished he had been able to join Ville to the land, to teach him how to care for the trees beyond simply working them, to help him draw strength from the earth and the air and the clean ache of his own muscles. But he had failed to pass on to his son what he knew in his heart and his body— that to serve a simple good was to become a man. He had hoped he could teach this to Gary, but had given up the hope; it seemed already too late for the boy to learn this lesson. He put his hands on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, and walked out of his son’s room. In his and Helmi’s room, he found his only suit laid out on the bed for him with a white shirt and dark tie. Too formal, he thought—they weren’t going to a funeral. But he put on the clothes and was descending the stairs when he heard Helmi calling again. “Annika is here! We go now!” He found the women waiting at Annika’s car. “There you are, Isa.” His daughter was impatient. “We need to get going.” Both her words and movements were crisp as she held the rear door open for him and shut it firmly after he had lowered himself into the car. Then they were going down the driveway and onto the paved road. Paavo tried to settle himself and look out the front window from between the two heads: Annika’s hair was blonder now than it had been when she was younger, arranged in a neat knot at the back of her head, and Helmi’s lay in thick silver waves. He wished he could reach out and touch Helmi’s hair, put his hand on her shoulder and tell her how he felt, but Annika’s strident voice broke the silence. “It’s a big day, isn’t it Ema? Isa? Aren’t you excited? You’re finally going to retire!” Paavo could not speak. He coughed slightly and tried to clear his throat, but the words would not come. “Isa is tired from pruning. He work already too hard today.” Helmi paused. “But you no worry, Annika. Today is good day. Very good day.” He saw Helmi reach out to pat Annika’s

arm. Then Annika started to talk about Gary’s plans and the work he would soon take over from Paavo. “It’ll be best for Isa to stop working, now,” she said, “for everyone’s sake.” As if to confirm the truth of her words, Paavo’s heart again started its odd thumping. The moths were large, he thought, and they were beating hard against the light bulb now. To try to calm himself, he took slow, measured breaths and shifted his gaze to the passing orchards outside his window. They had just left Schenk’s farm behind and were moving through Philbrick’s pear orchard. Pruning hadn’t begun here, yet. The trees were angular and somewhat twisted, as pears were, not graceful like the peach trees he had left behind with Sam. Then he was jerked forward slightly with the sudden stopping of the car and he heard Annika’s frustrated exclamation. “A train! Just what we need today! We’ll be late as it is. I wish . . . ” Her voice was lost in the jangling bell of the gate as it lowered, then the clanking and rumbling of the freight train as it lumbered by. The blur of box cars and cylindrical tanks made Paavo dizzy, so he turned back to Philbrick’s pear trees, black and tangled against the still gray sky. Suddenly a fox came into view from between the trees. It stopped, barred from crossing the road by the small line of cars waiting for the train to pass. In its stillness, he could see its triangular face and ears, slender red forepaws, and bright eyes. It carried something in its mouth. Likely a rodent, maybe a rat that would make a good meal. But the animal caught in the fox’s mouth was black, not gray, and it seemed soft and furry, like a kitten. Maybe Philbrick had feral cats living in his barn. Something else was strange. The fox held the kitten by the loose fur behind its head; it did not have its teeth sunk into the mid-body. The kitten was not prey. This was an adoption. As Paavo gazed at the fox, his face almost pressed now against the window, the fox met his eyes for an instant. Then it turned in a flash of bushy white tail and disappeared back into the orchard. Annika’s exclamation “At last!” and the movement of the car startled him. But as the women started to chatter in Estonian and the country roads the car was traveling gave way to suburban streets, he sat alone with his thoughts. New thoughts. Thoughts that made the moths’ wings beat more frantically than before. He glanced ahead again at the backs of Helmi’s and Annika’s heads, the familiar smoothness of the one and the gentle waves of the other. Despite the struggles, they had made a good life here. These women were strong, determined, and he was proud of them, though sometimes he felt shut out by the inexorable forward motion of their lives. The thrust of progress, of bettering themselves, that they now channelled into Gary. He remembered Helmi and Annika’s quiet satisfaction the day Gary announced that he wanted to farm. Paavo knew the gift that day, that announcement, was to Helmi. All they had worked for would continue and would grow in the hands of one who was her own flesh and blood. He did not want to hurt her, hurt any of them. He put a hand to his chest to try to calm the shuddering beat. The force of Helmi’s will had carried them all into this present, this

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future they would seal today. Yet. He looked down at his hands in his lap and felt again the wet roughness of a branch between his fingers, saw the bright new wood of a clean cut. The fluttering of his heart grew fierce. Then he raised his head. They had made their way to the historic part of town at the city’s core, with its towering trees shading narrow

IN ITS STILLNESS, HE COULD SEE

ITS TRIANGULAR FACE AND EARS,

SLENDER RED FOREPAWS, AND BRIGHT EYES. streets. The car slowed and turned into the drive of the red brick two-story law office. Then it stopped and his door clicked as Annika opened it and extended her hand to him. He grasped it and got to his feet. “You’ve been so quiet, Isa,” she said. “Are you all right?” “Ya, ya. Just thinking. Let’s go in.” Now he needed to hurry. He moved ahead of the women and pushed open the glass front door of the building. Inside the waiting room, he approached the young woman at the front desk. “Lippmas, here, to see Mr. Moore.” His voice sounded gruff even to him. “Hello, Mr. Lippma. Mr. Moore is waiting for you.” As the woman rose from her desk, she glanced behind him and smiled. “Hi, Mrs. Lippma. And Annika, isn’t it? Right this way.” She led them down the hall, then left them at the door of the lawyer’s office. David Moore stood to greet them.

“Hello, Paavo, Helmi, Annika. How are you all? It’s a big day, isn’t it?” Normally Paavo would have shaken the lawyer’s hand heartily. There was something about the lawyer’s broad face and the smile lines at the corner of his eyes that invited his trust. But after Annika’s “It sure is!” he simply nodded curtly and sank into the nearest chair. The stuttering of his heart made him breathless. “There isn’t much to do, today,” David Moore said. “The paperwork is all done and ready for signing. Paavo and Helmi, please slide your chairs up to my desk. Now, Paavo, you can go first. Here is the land transfer form—I think you’ll find that everything is correct. Just sign your name at the bottom of the last page. I’ve marked the place with an X.” Paavo’s hand was shaking as he took the pen from the lawyer and scanned the form, searching for a name. But he forced himself to press the pen to the paper firmly and deliberately as he crossed out and wrote another name. Scanned again, crossed out, wrote another name, and finally signed his own. And as he passed the form to Helmi, heard her astonished cry, a new thought blossomed in his mind. They were not moths flapping their wings in his chest; they were birds. Birds that had been trapped in a cage, birds that were now breaking free into flight. They flew through the open window, rode currents of air—over the roofs of office buildings and houses, past the railway tracks and Philbrick’s pears—and settled in the clean peach trees, newly opened to receive them. He smiled a slight smile, looked at Helmi as his eyes clouded over, and did not say.

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Richard Cole

Rothko’s Chapel At first you see nothing, eyes adapting to the low light, sky light from above, and then, out of the dark plum, deep russet and oxblood so nearly black it’s more than black, emerges a slow radiance, a generosity of auras and barriers becoming thresholds, maps and open windows opening the night, art nailed to fourteen panels, each station one less terminal, each terminal our next arrival. Staring at God, these paintings, if that’s what they really are, become incarnate—beyond insight, definition, settled faith and powers of illumination, and you see the truth. This dark and ascending sacrifice, this patience, this mortal beauty will save the world.

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Janet Atkins

Relics of my father’s boyhood, circa 1940 Every man's memory is his private literature. ~Aldous Huxley Today, frustrated by inconsiderate folk trespassing on their property, mother took a sign and posted the gate. This used to be a place where anyone could come and go, but now black water recedes with drought and moves molasses-like to some larger tributary then seaward. Cypress knees jut much farther than usual above the surface laced with water spiders and overlarge flies. In the distance frogs chant, monk-like, a litany of concupiscence as they lay eggs in the marshy shallows. There’s the cry of babies—no, alligators—downstream where feral pigs have mutated into wild boars, and transplanted armadillos turn the soil rooting for food, but leave no seed to sprout. Once we rowed the john boat down the run to where it broadened into a natural lake—a bayou of shadows where Yellow Eye and Pitcher Plant waited to catch an insect or two in their sticky petals. Dad told me the lake was not so secret a place that those who came to take advantage of granddaddy in poker, strong drink, and a night of carousing couldn’t find it. He told me the story of how he and his brother hid in this swamp once when they caught wind that welfare people were coming to take them away from granddaddy. Three days later, they emerged to a resurrection of dire straits. Another story: Dad and Jack were hunting for squirrel and somehow—Dad’s gun misfired, and Jack lay in blood on the sandy ground. No one came to take Dad away that time. How often I am sucked down into the murky depths of his memories, obscured by his age and my uneasiness, brooding like the moss motionless in moonlight that sees but doesn’t tell.

Z.K. Parker

the stroke of what makes us for Robbie Jones

commissions are welcome. sent in the deep of the week, I sometimes forget their faces. I promise to find their eyes. the error of Indian ink came before the cut, the lasting of a loss needing a nameâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; â&#x20AC;&#x201D;all my wrong, the palette knife spread across the blank canvas of God not proven or innocent until proven guilty? even the hands of angels slip and what remains are colors without a visage to ground them, without a voice and I bow my head in prayer without it.

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Z.K. Parker

the house covers our nakedness Our nights bear the smudge of doused ash across cardboard, the sweaty wipe of the apocalyptic, dish grease slicking our touch. The first day and the next ends with the Fall, the collapse onto a bed where we remember deeds undone. hold me back, love says, we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the stars. our mornings make do with coffee and new excuses. the kids from next door build forts in our front yard. I leave the crisp bagel on the table with trenches cut deep in its surface. its black edges have softened after all our winters together, after nights with friends who leave earlier each time and claim itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too cold to feel their hands. our dreams share the same dead grandpa watching Jeopardy, snapping his coverall shoulder fasteners. what is sublunary? what is the moon? we remember our start and seek a path apart, into the thicket of lives not lived, a piece of sought-after fruit hidden behind splintered wood cabinets, behind candles on a sunken counter space. hold me back, love says, our walls need human breath to stand.

REVIEW/ 31

SHE LOVES ME NOT: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES by Ron Hansen Simon & Schuster, 2012

REVIEWED BY SOPHIE PETTI

Last week, while engaged in that long-forgotten pursuit so often overlooked by college students—reading for pleasure—I came across an unfamiliar word: anfractuosity. As a recent college graduate, newly minted English degree in hand, it was a little disheartening to discover that there are still an abundance of words whose definitions do not leap immediately to mind, despite said English degree clutched tightly to the chest like a small bird. It’s a beautiful word. Anfractuosity is defined, as you might guess, as the state or quality of being anfractuous; full of windings and intricate turnings, tortuous. The journey into Ron Hansen’s remarkable collection is indeed an anfractuous one. The convoluted, circuitous trip through the nineteen stories of She Loves Me Not leaves the reader feeling mystified, enriched, and occasionally wondering what on earth just happened, but the overarching feeling is of the profound mystery, heartbreak, and beauty that is the human experience. The magic of Hansen’s storytelling is his ability to provide stark, poignant pictures of that experience while maintaining a style that is subtle, unsettling, and unpretentious. Though the nineteen component tales of She Loves Me Not are diverse in the extreme, arguably to the point of disjointedness, common patterns of connection and disconnection pierce each character, relationship, and setting to bind the disparate into an imperfect cohesion. Ugliness, brutality, and violence hold enough prominence in Hansen’s collection that moments of human connection and redemption take on a precious kind of beauty. We encounter cows mysteriously eviscerated (“True Romance”) and a decapitation by chainsaw in the title story, “She Loves Me Not.” (The image on the cover of the collection, a black and white photo of a couple kissing, is almost playfully misleading.) These appalling moments of violence litter the pages, and in many of the stories, like “The Killers,” violence is not merely an accent but the axis around which the story turns. Hansen’s use of the element, however, is consistently an honest rather than indulgent one.

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She Loves Me Not begins with a series of stories reprinted from his earlier collection, Nebraska, published in 1989. Hansen selects seven from the previous collection and places them among the twelve new ones; the result is not a hodgepodge of recycled space-fillers alongside new material but a dynamic discovery of new dimensions of the same place. One such reappearance is “Wickedness,” a brilliantly titled, episodic account of a terrible blizzard in 1888, which features Hansen’s most grippingly stark and sensuous attention to detail. The storm itself becomes a harbinger of naturalistic doom and intentional cruelty, a conscious, evil thing: “Wind tortured a creekside cottonwood until it cracked apart.” Yet the most unsettling element of the blizzard is the human response to it, as if the impartial brutality of the storm seeps into the farmers and townspeople and destroys something fundamental. Convinced they will all freeze to death, a father kills his wife and seven children, “stopping twice to capture a scuttling boy and stopping once more to reload,” driven, it seems, by the same sort of blind and vicious devastation as the blizzard itself. Hansen utterly divorces himself from sentimentality and all its vestiges, detailing every snapshot with the cold, analytical realism of a documentary. I was struck again and again by Hansen’s ability to convey what it feels like to be human, what it is like to be alive—the brokenness, the bitterness, and the relentlessness of beauty. In “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” we encounter a young man so paralyzed by his own spiritual deadness that he seeks almost literal resuscitation from Sally, a lonely nurse with a disfigured arm who lives downstairs: “’Kiss me,’ he said. ‘I’m dying. I’m dead.’” Hansen explores that common thirst for connection that both unites humankind and drives them apart, and he is at his best when he writes in the most realistic of veins. Perhaps this is why the fairytale-like magic realism of “Wilderness” falls a bit flat, cats and dogs weaving in and out, its characters switching places in a sort of disjointed Red Riding Hood archetype. You aren’t quite sure what’s happening, if it is happening at all. It pales in comparison with the raw emotion of a story like “The Sparrow,” which chronicles the grief of a family slowly recovering from the sudden loss of a mother and wife in a gentle, unembellished way that lingered long after I turned its final pages. Whether you choose to barrel headlong through the collection, drawn irresistibly from one story into the next as I was, or enjoy each one like a separate dish to be savored on its own, you will find a collection that is dense, artfully crafted, and doesn’t hesitate to look darkness in the eye, invite it in, and call it by name. Back to that word, anfractuosity, which has now become one of my favorites. I first found it in C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain: “If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that willful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith.” Hansen’s willful, unexpected, anfractuous storytelling opens a window to that core of reality, a gate to some fundamental truth of the human life and its deepest yearning, where flawed human beings somehow become vessels of redemption and hope.

Larry D. Thomas

The Art Preparators (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) To ready masterworks for an off-site exhibition, they take deep breaths prior to even touching the frames. They treat the deliberate gestures of their fingers, snug in latex gloves, as if they were turning the frail pages of the Gutenberg Bible. They cherish the instruments of their craft: the Oz Clips, plastic wrap, tape, glass for glazing, travel trays, foam-lined storage crates, and the intricacies of moving and storing the crates. Laboring in the radiance of angels, they secure the crates gently in the temperatureand-humidity-controlled cargo space of the truck, exhale their deep breaths, drop to their knees, and pray.

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Alea Hurst. The Assumption. Pen and ink on paper. 14 x 11 inches.

Alea Hurst. Braving the Giant. Pen and ink on paper. 30 x 22 inches.

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Alea Hurst. The Burning Bush. Pen and ink on paper. 30 x 22 inches.

Micah Bloom. Codex. Film frame. 2013.

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Rachel Yurkovich. Red Delicious (4). Digital photograph.

Manik Sharma. Lone Stander. Photograph.

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Snow Yunxue Fu. Pro. Film frame from animated projection. 47

Snow Yunxue Fu. Pro. Film frame from animated projection.

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THE ART OF GOING BLIND KIMBERLY PRISKE

Before the Sorrow, before God was a four-letter word—when we were whole, we go to church. Worship as a family. Mama sings a solo in the choir and makes the women cry. She sings like she whistles, like she knows bird-language, angel-like. Her eyes close on the final lines and I breathe in the sweetness of her voice, memorize the expression on her face. Isaac squirms and I put my hand on his knee to say, be still. He sighs and takes my hand, wiggling my fingers, tickling my palm as his small hands sandwich mine, turning it back and forth. Mama finishes and sits by Papa. Pastor begins his sermon and talks of harvest, of blessings. I look down the line at my family, Papa, his arm around Mama, Jenna Rae, Isaac resting his head against my arm. Only Méma Tutu is missing. I wish she was here holding my hand, blessing me with reassuring words, and her sight that needs no sight.

The first time I experience the darkening I am with my sister Jenna Rae, and we are where we always meet this time of year—the porch roof outside Jenna Rae’s bedroom window. School begins Monday, so Friday’s freedom is our last. We talk all night about Jenna Rae’s last year of high school, and my first. She has a boyfriend, Hilbert Venderkillon. We laugh, pronouncing his name different ways, adding hers to his. As the sun breaks over the horizon, turning the wheat field to gold, I face the eastern sky and my eyes go dark. I can’t say how long. When they find the light again I am shaking, the sun is full in early morning brilliance, and Jenna Rae is crying. Her gray-blue eyes stare into mine for a long time. She holds my unruly curls back from my face and has me blink, look side to side, as if there are answers on the outside. “Your eyes are tired. The sun is especially bright, blinding even. It hurts my eyes, too.”

Jenna Rae is three years older, so I would believe her, except my eyes didn’t hurt they just went dark. She holds her long dark hair over one shoulder, rubs her spine against the window frame, then leans back and closes her eyes. I lean back, too, but keep my eyes wide. I tell Mama and Papa at breakfast. Jenna Rae rolls her eyes, but Papa sends me upstairs to rest while he calls the doctor. I try to sleep with my eyes open, like Papa does on long car trips, but sleep is stronger than my resolve. I dream. The whole world goes dark, and I’m the only one who notices.

When I wake I do not open my eyes, afraid of what I will not see. I swing my feet over the side of Méma Tutu’s feather bed. The bed I begged Papa to let me keep when she passed. When she got too sick to get out of bed, we curled up in it, and she would tell me stories. Méma Tutu went blind at seventeen, not long after Papa was born. I asked her how she did it, how she mothered blind. She said she’d learned to see without looking, that things

THE WHOLE WORLD GOES DARK, AND I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO NOTICES. that matter don’t require eyes to be seen, or to be loved. Her stories were filled with smell and sound and touch, things the seeing miss, and with God and faith and hope, things the seeing neglect. Years of sleeping in the middle have turned the bed into a hammock-like nest, so sitting on the edge means standing first. I stand, then sit to get my bearings. I conjure a picture of the room in my mind and take inventory, just in case. The bed sits in the middle of the room, headboard against the inside wall. To my right, left of the bed, is a nightstand, another hand-me-down from Méma Tutu. Her Bible rests on top, and I reach out, run my hand over the soft leather cover, and hear her voice, See without looking. The late afternoon sun spills through the bay window opposite the bed. I hold my breath as it pours over me, like warm molasses and honey over pancakes. I move to the window using the edge of the bed as a guide. I know I can open my eyes now, because the closer I get to the window the more light filters through my eyelids. I go all the way though,

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placing my hands, then my forehead against the pane. I open the window, stick my head out, breath in summer’s end. The distant drone of a tractor from the South tells me Henry is still in the field. I can’t resist any longer. A breeze picks up and blows through the poplar tree by the barn with a sudden whoosh, and the leaves dance silver and green. The movement, or the sound, or the singular beauty of the moment inspires a goldfinch in its branches to call in response. Moments later the bird flies off. I watch it disappear behind the barn, a flash of yellow on red. Papa appears in the doorway, “The doctor wants us to go to Atlanta.” “What about school?” “You’ll miss a couple of days. It’ll be all right.” He starts to go, then looks at me, like Jenna Rae did, searching for something he can’t name. “It will be all right, Beth.”

We eat supper outside. Mama tries to keep the conversation light. Isaac chases fireflies. Papa tells a story. I say I’m tired and excuse myself before dessert. I cannot sleep. I listen to house sounds, naming them, giving them a home in my mind. The branch of the old cherry tree, brushing against the downspouts. The moan of the stairs, responding to farmhouse settling, a resigned creak and fade, creak and fade. The sound of my heart beating.

It’s two hours to Atlanta. Papa drives and Mama lays her head back, her arm hanging out the window. She hums a tune I do not know and Papa smiles, sweeps her hair back with his hand. Mama gave me a pair of sunglasses too big for my face, protection from the August sun. It’s the same sun I’ve been in all summer, but I wear the glasses. I like how they turn everything a yellowish-green, like washed out photographs. Six doctors poke and prod, x-ray and question me over two days in Atlanta. They can’t explain it. They want me to see a doctor in New York. On the way home, Mama sits in back. I lay my head in her lap, and she talks about Méma Tutu, reaching back in time for comfort. “She never let her blindness keep her from living.” Mama stares out the window, runs her fingers through my curls. “I always wondered how. How she lived, raised a family, managed a farm.” Her eyes are full, but she smiles. “Sight doesn’t come—” “—from the eyes alone, you know.” I finish Méma Tutu’s words, mimicking her playful voice. I picture her face, eyebrows raised, eyes dancing. Eyes that never looked blind.

When we get home I run for the barn. “Where are you headed, Beth?” Mama calls, pulling groceries from the trunk. “I’m gonna ride Sheba to Leslie’s and get Isaac.” “No. I want you to walk down.”

“He likes to ride with me.” “Beth, do as you’re told.” Papa looks across the field. He’s not angry, but he is serious. The North trail to Henry and Leslie’s cottage takes longer than crossing the field on Sheba, but there is more to see. First, a mass of magnolia trees, heavy with seed pods hanging from threads at the ends of branches, like it’s been decorated for Christmas. When the wind blows, I imagine I smell spring’s blossoms in the making. They smell like pineapples, their nectar dripping from yellow petals. Méma Tutu said the flowers stand for perseverance. She never let me pick them. She said flowers are meant to live and die connected to the source, and that we are the same. I picked one the day she died, though. I kept it in a bowl of water until the sweet smell faded. Then I dried it in the sun. The petals grew stiff, but kept their velvety texture, and I rubbed each one as I released them over the pond. Some settled on the water, some danced on the wind, one came back and landed on my shoulder. I pressed it in Méma Tutu’s Bible. Just before the cottage the trail takes a sharp turn, and there stands a cornered section of limestone wall, crumbling and covered by vines. I asked Papa about it, but he said the wall has always been there and he doesn’t know what it guarded. At its highest point the wall is taller than I. I can just drag my hand across the rough, grainy edges, gathering bits of limestone in my hand, rubbing them to chalk in my palms. As I round the corner I run into Henry. Henry is a big man, tall and strong. If he didn’t smile all the time, he’d scare me, but his smile changes everything. When I run into him, I fall back, nearly colliding with the wall. “Whoa there, Beth.” Henry’s laugh bounces off every solid substance, echoing back life. “I think we were both thinkin’ outta this world.” Henry fans himself with his field worn hat, offers me a hand up. “You okay?” “Yes, I’m fine.” “You just gettin’ back from the doctors?” “Yessir.” I dig a hole in the dirt with the toe of my sneaker. “Beth!” Isaac runs from the cottage porch, crosses the foot bridge over the creek, trips on the other side. He pops up with his arms high. “I’m okay,” he says, as he runs up the slope and wraps his arms around my legs. Isaac lives as if the earth’s motion requires his movement, and at breakneck speed. His shins and knees are covered with a summer’s worth of scrapes and bruises, and he spins away from me to climb the wall at it’s lowest point. “Be careful Isaac.” I run my fingers through his curly halo just before he tumbles off the back side, giggling and rolling in the overgrowth. “You won’t tame that. He’s all boy,” Leslie says, joining us on the trail, “absolute and beautiful.” She is smiling at me carefully. I wonder if this is how it will be from now on, everyone looking for signs. “Mama wants to know if you can help can in the morning. She’s got three bushels of

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tomatoes on the porch.” I reach over the wall and tickle Isaac, sending him into fits of laughter. “Too bad we can’t can that.” Leslie laughs and helps me lift Isaac up and over. He likes this game. He makes airplane noises as his toes skim the wall, sending limestone shards flying. When he lands, he hits the ground running, and I am on the chase. “Tell your Mama I’ll be over at seven.” Leslie’s voice calls after me. Isaac stops short of a rabbit ahead on the trail. He is tiptoeing toward it but can’t keep

SOMEDAY I WILL HAVE A FRIEND LIKE THIS, WHO SHARES MY SECRETS, PRAYS OVER MY SORROWS, REJOICES IN MY TRIUMPHS. WE WILL WHISPER TOGETHER QUIET AND LOW... from giggling, and the rabbit disappears into the brush. Isaac steps in as if to follow his prey, but I catch him by his collar. “Gotcha!” I sweep him up, and he wraps his arms around my neck as if he’s been waiting for someone to do just that. He is small for his age, but I feel the weight of his four years on my shoulders. Before we reach home, I set him on his feet. He takes my hand, swings the other by his side, counts our steps at the top of his lungs.

I have seen the way Leslie looks at Isaac with a mixture of joy, and sadness, and longing. Mama and I are washing canning jars when I ask her if she knows why. “Leslie can’t have children, they have tried, but lost every one.” Her face matches Leslie’s, but before I can ask her why, Leslie knocks on the door, swinging in with a basket of her own tomatoes. Mama admires them, deep red and dripping with dew, fresh picked this morning.

I watch these two women who have always been here. One fair and freckled, the other caramel brown, like the sun couldn’t stop kissing her and left her that way. There is something so alike about them, the way they talk with their hands, exaggerating the simplest of stories, confirming the truth of the other’s telling. Someday I will have a friend like this, who shares my secrets, prays over my sorrows, rejoices in my triumphs. We will whisper together quiet and low, like they did as Leslie taught Mama how to throw clay. They bent low over the potter’s wheel, Leslie’s hands over

MY FOURTEEN YEARS FEEL TOO SHORT, AND I FEEL TOO SMALL, TO COMPREHEND WHAT HE IS SAYING. Mama’s, feeling their way to unborn vessels, until Mama could find her way on her own. Leslie’s voice was muffled by the churn of the wheel, but they made Mama smile, and the products of the whispered words sit in our kitchen, and in the homes of those who buy their creations at the Farmer’s Market. “Let’s go, Beth! We’re going to miss the bus.” Jenna Rae bursts into the room, kisses Mama, waves to Leslie with one hand, grabs our lunches with the other. I hesitate, hoping Mama will tell me to stay home one more day. I would rather be here listening to Mama and Leslie. Mama rests her hand on my arm. “It will be all right. If anything happens, tell a teacher. I’ll come for you if you need me.” She pulls me close, and I blink hard, knowing I can’t hide here forever. My best friend, Sara, makes jokes about my other senses being super powers, how I can hear like a wolf, so they better watch what they say. It puts everyone at ease, except oddly, her. For all her protecting, she can’t seem to protect herself. Eventually she distances herself, though she tries to make light of it. That’s just her way, I guess. The darkening never happens at school, however, and soon there are other things to talk about. It happens two more times at home, though, before we see the specialist in New York. The last time, just three days before we leave. At the bus station, I tell Papa I can’t see sideways. At first he laughs, but then he looks at me. I am looking ahead, but my eyes are moving from side to side in their sockets, looking for the light.

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In New York the doctor says I have lost my peripheral vision for good. He cannot say why the darkening is happening. He asks the same questions the Atlanta doctors asked, pokes and prods in all the same places. He wants to run more tests, to keep me at the hospital, but he cannot tell Papa it will make any difference. Papa stirs sugar into his coffee. I stir sugar into my oatmeal, and we sit, synchronized, stirring and staring. I can only see straight ahead, and it’s as if the loss of my sideways sight has affected my ability to think, to see all the options. “Can we just go home?” “Yes, we can.” Papa’s voice is pained, but he repeats with conviction, “Yes, we can.”

“If there are more tests, why didn’t you stay?” “He couldn’t say they would make a difference.” Papa seems unsure of the decision now. “I wanted to come home,” I say, thinking it will help. Mama stares out the window, then walks to the pond. Mama prays out loud. She thinks no one else can hear, but the wind carries her voice to where I sit on the porch. She asks why, mostly. Why her daughter has to go blind, why she is having trouble trusting, why God isn’t listening. I pray too, alone in my room, Méma Tutu’s Bible in my hand. Inside the front cover I trace our family tree, read Méma’s favorite verses, and quotes from poets she loved. Thoreau’s, ‘The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see,’ dares me to hope that I can persevere, but I’m not sure I’m that strong.

November 27, 1966, the day before Thanksgiving, Mama goes to Leslie’s to finish pieces of pottery they will sell at the church Christmas bizarre. She leaves before daylight, leaves me in charge of Isaac. I stare out the window, watching Papa lean over baby brother’s body, the delivery truck driver stands, head in hands to the right. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see him. Oh, God. I’m so sorry. Papa’s lips move, too, Isaac. Isaac. My Isaac. But he does not answer Papa’s cry. Sirens wake my frozen feet, and I move from the window to the door. The paramedics gently pry Isaac from Papa’s arms so they can see the damage. The officer kneels by Papa and talks quietly. Papa nods. The officer takes the driver to the side of the house, so he won’t upset Papa with his questions, and I move closer and wait for him to see me, to tell me what to do. They lift Isaac into the ambulance. I want to run to him, to ask him why he didn’t listen. I wait for Papa, but he gets in the ambulance with Isaac. The officer tells me he will stay until Jenna Rae comes, tells me he is sorry I have seen all this. My fourteen years feel too short, and I feel too small, to comprehend what he is saying.

The officer picks up Mama and takes her to the hospital, but Isaac is already gone. The night passes in silence. Shattered by Sorrow, fragments lie awake in separate rooms. Thanksgiving morning I dress for church because that is what we do. But there will be no giving thanks today. When Jenna Rae and I come downstairs the officer is there, and Mama tells us to go upstairs and wait. I go until they cannot see me. It was an accident. There is nothing to be done, and Mama cries in gasping breaths, “I should have been here . . . I should have . . . I should have . . .” Papa is silent. When Papa comes to find us I ask him when we will go to church. He does not answer. He shakes his head, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he speaks his voice is husky, weighted, shaken. “The funeral will be here . . . ” I do not hear the rest of his words. I am deafened by the Sorrow behind them. It is final.

We do not go back to church. We do not worship as a family. I do not understand, but Papa will not talk about it, and Mama can’t. Pastor stops by for weeks and talks of healing. Papa lets him, but he sits in silence. It has been months since Mama has been to Leslie’s. She stops making pottery, stops letting her be a friend. At first, Leslie walks over every morning, but the screen door is locked. When she stops coming she sends Henry with baskets of squash and canned jelly, banana bread and chicken soup. One day Henry leaves a beautiful blue bowl no bigger than a child’s hand on the bench outside the kitchen door. Inside is a bluebird feather, Mama’s favorite. It disappears from the bench, but I do not see where it lands. That afternoon I find Mama throwing pottery against the pantry wall, the floor a sea of fragments. I pray the bowl and the feather, the remnants of friendship, are safe somewhere. Papa takes down the special shelves that held Mama’s pottery, and life is lived in slow motion, dragging the Sorrow behind it. The fragments walk around, do chores, work fields, groom horses, go to town, make meals, but do not live. I am sad. But I am angry, too. Eight months is a lifetime to dwell. It is June 13, 1967. In four weeks I will turn fifteen. Jenna Rae spends all her time at Hilbert’s now, and in ten weeks she will leave for college in Atlanta. If healing is coming it needs to come soon, or I fear the fragments will be lost forever.

I do not return to school after Christmas. My sight has dimmed too much. Papa hires a tutor to come to the house every morning to teach me, leaving my afternoons free. It rains almost every day through February, so when the sun finally reappears, I talk Papa into letting me walk the trails again. Mama doesn’t like it, but then Sorrow never does. If Mama knew I was spending time with Leslie, I’m afraid she’d put a stop to it. I don’t know why I feel this way, but I am afraid to ask, and I don’t want to have to lie. I walk to Leslie’s every day, and she tells me Mama will come around; I just need to have faith. I have not heard that word since the Sorrow.

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Mama is at the kitchen sink, staring out the window. I slip in quietly and watch her. Her right hand dips a washcloth in and out of the soapy water, but the dish rack is full so she washes invisible dishes. I find her this way often, staring into emptiness, into a space between no one else can see. I move to the screen door and wish for her to turn her head, to see me, but she is somewhere else. Inside the barn I hear voices from the tack room and listen in, but all I hear is the rumble of Henry’s deep southern drawl against Papa’s whisper. He lost his voice the day of the Sorrow and hasn’t been able to find it. I wander through the barn, rub Sheba’s nose, and feed her a carrot from the bucket by her stall. I press my cheek to hers, take in her freshly groomed horse smell, speak softly in her ear. “Sorry we haven’t ridden in so long. Maybe after my birthday. Will you wait for me?” Sheba snorts in response, and I bury my nose in her mane in thanks. “Hey there, Miss Jacobs. You’re looking lovely today. What is your secret?” Henry smiles and pats Sheba’s nose.

IT RAINS ALMOST EVERY DAY THROUGH FEBRUARY, SO WHEN THE SUN FINALLY REAPPEARS, I TALK PAPA INTO LETTING ME WALK THE TRAILS AGAIN. “Why Henry, you know I can’t tell you that. A woman’s got to have her secrets. I could ask you how you stay lookin’ so young?” Henry tells me he has a special potion that takes two years off every time he adds one. He’s been telling me that since I was six. I almost believe him because he looks the same. Henry tells Papa he will see him later, then tips his hat to me. I push the tack room door open. Papa is oiling horseshoes and nails to keep them from rusting. Papa is the same age as Henry, but looks much older, and I trace the dark circles around his eyes to the deep furrows between. He needs a haircut, and I try to remember the last time Mama sat him on the porch for a cut and shave. “Lunch ready?” Papa does not look up. “I don’t think so.” I want to talk to him about the darkening. I think of Isaac and the furrows in Papa’s brow and worry I will wake memories, stir the Sorrow.

“Papa? I was wondering about Méma Tutu. How long did it take before she went blind?” “It just happened over time, I guess. I don’t think the doctors could tell her why either.” He tells me to check on lunch. I take my time leaving, wanting him to see what I need to know. “You all right, Beth?” he whispers. I weigh his question against my need and nod. The house is quiet. The dishwater stands stagnant in the sink. I pull the stopper, then follow a faint creaking sound coming from the front porch. It is Mama, rocking steady in the rocking chair, humming the tune she was humming on the road to Atlanta. “Papa wants me to check on lunch.” “Is it lunch already?” Mama gazes past me. “Seems like we just had breakfast.” I watch her watching the birds at the feeder by the pond, waiting for her to whistle like she used to. I go to the kitchen and heat leftovers on the stove. At the table I realize Isaac’s chair has been pushed in from its place in the corner. I move it back before Papa sees.

It rained in the night. I stick to the edge of the trail to avoid the deepest holes. The going is slow and as I near the cottage my world goes dark again, and it’s as if I’ve run into an invisible wall. I am knocked back and my boots, sucked into the mud, do not follow my feet. I’m alone in the dark, and this time it hurt. Time draws Leslie outside, calling my name. I shout back, and she finds me stuck in the mud. She starts to laugh, but I am not looking at her. I am trying not to cry. “Beth, can you see me?” She says this slow, like she knows the answer. I can only shake my head from side to side. I feel her arms behind me, lifting me. I try not to be a burden as

THE HOUSE IS QUIET. THE DISHWATER STANDS STAGNANT IN THE SINK. she helps me to the porch and into a chair. She tells me she will return and I reach behind me to say, don’t go. She cleans my face and hands with a warm, damp towel. “I need to get your Papa.” “Please don’t leave me.” “Can you tell me what it feels like?” Leslie’s voice sounds far away. “It’s like clay on a wheel, you think it’s working then it collapses in on itself and you can’t figure out why.”

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I begin to see shadows. Shadows become shapes. Leslie sees and smiles, but is determined that I tell Papa. I know she is right, but I am thinking of our lessons. Suddenly I want to learn to be a potter more than anything else in the world. “Can you walk? Or do you want to wait here?” “I can walk.” She puts my boots on. I could do it, but I let her because I have stumbled into her desire to mother. Something I didn’t understand before the Sorrow.

It is Papa who tells Mama. He calls the doctors in New York. They want to see me. Papa makes an appointment for the week after my birthday. I ask Papa if I can go back to Leslie’s. “No!” Mama cries. Papa lays his hand on her shoulder, strokes her back, pulls her close. “Why don’t you let Mama and I talk, Beth?” I wait in my room, leaning against the end of my bed, until the sun is on the horizon and shadows begin their trek across the floor. They are swallowing my feet when Papa comes in. “Come on down, Beth.” Papa’s voice is strong, and I wonder where he found it, but I am thankful. We walk down the stairs in silence. In the kitchen, Papa opens a box sitting on the table. Inside are the fragments, the pieces of pottery that formed a sea on the pantry floor. “I saved them. Maybe you can figure out why . . . ” he begins, but he is far away, holding his wife at the door to the pantry as she sobs and tells him again, it is her fault.

Over the next two weeks I go to Leslie’s every day. Mama walks me, but does not go in; she waves from the trail. I still don’t know what to do with the fragments, but I bring them to Leslie’s, and we turn the pieces over in our hands, shadows of memory in shades of blue. My progress is slow. Leslie says I am looking too long, too hard at the what and missing the beauty and potential of the how. Her words remind me of Méma Tutu and I tell her so. “We both know Méma was a wise woman. We’ll try again tomorrow.” I am discouraged and tell Mama so on the way home. She offers little, and I want to ask her why, but I don’t.

The darkening happened again last night. I fear my world will completely collapse when my world goes dark. In my dreams Méma Tutu holds my hand to her heart, paints pictures with words, reminds me there is more. I wake with an idea forming at the edge of my mind. Mama and I walk to Leslie’s holding hands. She is quiet and squeezes my hand like a thought has just occurred to her and she wants me to know. I feel the same way and squeeze back. Today Mama walks me to the door. Leslie tries not to look surprised when she sees her standing there, and for a moment I am back in the kitchen on canning day, witnessing friendship’s knowing. But Mama looks down at her feet when Leslie asks her to stay. “Not today. Not yet.” She nods to herself before brushing past me.

Leslie turns to me with a secret-filled grin. I ask her how the canary tasted and she laughs. Mama laughs, too. She is still laughing as she rounds the corner, and in an instant laughter no longer feels like a sin. “Come.” Leslie pulls me inside. I sit at the wheel and run my hands over the surface, dried clay forming a barrier that will dissolve with fresh moisture. When she ties a blindfold across my eyes, I protest. “Hey, I don’t need any help not seeing!” Leslie whispers words from the day before as she guides my hand from the bucket of water to the cup at its side, to the wheel, to the clay.

THE FREEDOM MAKES ME DIZZY, BUT SOON THERE IS ONLY THE WHEEL AND THE CLAY AND THE SMELL OF SPRING AND THE VISION. “Picture the vessel, Beth. The size and shape. The contours and ridges. Picture it rising from the mound of clay.” When it collapses again Leslie still won’t let me take the blindfold off. She whispers, “Imagine it again, Beth.” “But it’s lost.” I try to push away from the wheel, but Leslie stands firm. “No, not lost. It just needs a new beginning. There’s more than one kind of vessel. More than one way to see it.” I sit in the dark and try to see. Fragments swim in my mind and an image takes shape. I whisper what I see to Leslie as if whispers will preserve it like calling out can’t. I know the rules. Keep it centered. The wheel speed constant. Don’t rush. I start pumping. The wheel gains speed, and the clay fills my hands. I dip my left hand in the cup of water at my side and return to the clay, massaging the surface. I wrap my hands around it and a squelching sound pops and splatters as it releases excess moisture. Water spins off the sides, slaps the wheel, covers my face. I am tense, breathing in short, anxious bursts. Leslie places her hands on my shoulders, willing them to release, willing my mind to do the same. I breathe in, then let go. The freedom makes me dizzy, but soon there is only the wheel and the clay and the smell of spring and the vision.

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Thumbs at the center. Pulling outward, shaping with my fingers, feeling my way. Short, wide-bottomed, slowly working out the distance between the center and the edge. My hands are sticking. I need water, but I’m afraid to interrupt what my hands are trying to say. “You need more water. Don’t be afraid. Keep your right hand steady, you know where it is.” Leslie’s voice is a steady hum in my ear. What I couldn’t hear her say to Mama, I hear her say to me. Stop looking for it. You don’t need to see it to find it. Then it is finished. I release the pedal and the wheel slows, thumping to a stop. Leslie hands me pieces of pottery from Papa’s box, and I press them gently, burying sharp edges. Fresh clay welcomes fragments, heals their brokenness, makes them a new thing. It is an imperfect vessel, but it is whole.

Ryan Strebeck

Sharecropping Mrs. Grace’s Plot Next Door Neighbors are inherited, like dirt. Topsoil improves with organic matter but clay will never be sandy loam, so we work with what we’ve got. “My husband died two years ago, Easter” turns my share of our first conversation into shabby shop talk. Now each hello instills reverence. My ears rake a smooth bed for fertile recollection. The soil has its own memory— obscured by weeds of fallow years but never extinguished. The story lives with keys to the east gate. “Lloyd kept this whole area in a garden: squash, peppers, beans, and okra.” The soil leapt as she spoke, and earthworms remembered bull markets. Who am I to betray their history? My hand reaches for the rusty hoe.

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Miho Nonaka

The Museum of Small Bones Toshimi was my friend. One summer she took me to the Museum of Small Bones near her house; she was happy I called her as soon as I returned. Even for downtown Tokyo, the space was tiny. Visitors bumped into one another while admiring what once was a bird, a fish, a mole, maybe a lizard, kept intact architecturally. I was glad that in the crowd, I didn’t have to speak much: I didn’t have to sound like translating from another tongue. I was glad to be back home where I could skip “I” to start a sentence, where small, imperceptible things were made perceptible, like the design of a bat’s bones at flight. That was more than three years ago. Her last letter tells me she is sorry I no longer write poems in Japanese, and that I am no longer on the “edge” of things. I still remember how later that summer her kitten died and we buried it together. We were going to dig it up someday when all the unnecessary flesh had fallen away, and clean it with water and alcohol until luminous, like a museum specimen. So as not to destroy our lace-like shrine of bones.

TREE HOUSE SHANNON SKELTON

My husband is outside building a tree house in our backyard. I am sitting at the kitchen table trying to cut out bookmarker rulers for my students, and the vibrations he’s making out there with something—a drill? a saw?—are shaking down the stacks of paper rulers I’ve compiled. I’m not sure why he’s doing it, and frankly, I think it’s weird. I am trying to ignore him. But it’s hard to ignore. He’s been bringing home loads of scrap lumber—and there’s the question of where it came from and whether or not it is infesting our yard with termites. And then there’s the Saturday hammering. And worst, the neighbors asking me what he’s up to. I just look at them and mumble something about men and you know how they are with their projects, and then I hope that they will leave me alone. They’ve never been especially interested in us before, only when something weird is going on I suppose. They were interested when I lost the baby. That was the last time they were very interested in us. They brought us warm casseroles and Tupperware containers full of cookies with oats and cranberries. Healthy stuff, that’s what our neighbors are into. We eat healthy stuff. But I think deep down we are the kind of people who like to go to big buffet restaurants, the ones where you can get fried chicken and also Chinese noodles and also golden, buttery rolls, and then you can go back for an ice-cream sundae or peach cobbler or both. But we usually only go somewhere like this when our parents are in town visiting because we know they like it and we don’t want to admit to each other that we like it. Or at least, that’s how I feel, but I think that secretly Ben feels the same way. This is because, when we have family in town, he rolls his eyes and says to me, “Well, I suppose Mom and Dad are going to want us to take them to the Barnyard Buffet.” But then when we go he loads up at least three plates and finishes up with hot bread pudding topped with vanilla ice-cream. “Might as well get my money’s worth.” This is what he says to me.

I’m still cutting the rulers, and I’m thinking about why the tree house is bothering me so much. I think it’s because this is clearly a sign that my husband has lost his mind. Obviously, he is unable to cope with the fact that we can’t have children and is building a tree house for the child we don’t have. I even did the math, and it all works out. It has been four years since everything happened. Four is just the right age for a tree house, I

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think. So like I said before, I am guessing I should ignore him with this whole thing. Or maybe I won’t ignore him, but I will just act like it’s no big deal. (You want to build a tree house? Fine. Go ahead. Everyone needs a hobby.) Also, I think I’ll try to get him to transfer his energy.

“Do you think you could take some of that wood and build me a desk?” I yell at him as breezily as possible, trying to be nonchalant when I walk out onto the back porch and set a glass of lemonade down. He stops what he is doing. “That for me?” I nod, and he looks surprised. Actually, it wasn’t. It was for me. I was just setting it down so that I could water the plants that are probably going to die soon anyway, but I realize when he asks that it would have been a nice gesture to bring him out a cool glass of lemonade. I glance down at the glass to see if my lips have made any smudges. Nope. And it still looks mostly full. Ben is suddenly standing beside me, holding the power saw that my dad gave him for Christmas last year. He sets it down and takes the glass and says, “Yeah, I think I could do that.”

On Monday, I am at my desk at work and the students are writing the stories they are going to make into books for our unit in language and spelling. I do this every year, and we “publish” the books with this company that takes the pages my students submit and re-prints them and binds them on glossy cardstock. Sierra Matson is approaching my desk, and though I can see her out of my peripheral vision, I keep looking down because she really gets to me sometimes, and I don’t particularly feel like answering one of her pedantic questions. I notice the kids in my class are getting on my nerves more than usual this year. Is it for the same reason my husband is building a tree house in the backyard? The sheer number of them is overwhelming. Not just in my class I mean, but the number of kids who come through the school, the number of perfectly normal children who were incubated in the miraculously successful wombs of their mothers, who came through the birth canal and into the world smooth as honey. And here they are, learning to read and write, sitting at desks with name tags that I have printed and laminated. When I was pregnant, I wanted a little girl. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t want a little boy; I promise it wasn’t that. I just wanted a little girl first. I’m not sure why. It might have been because I liked the girly clothes better—the bows, the little dresses. It might have been that I had lots of ideas for how to decorate her room—with tulips lining the bottom of one wall, and maybe with pink elephants. It might have been because I could imagine myself reading to her from all of my favorite childhood books, and I was worried that maybe a boy wouldn’t really get into The Secret Garden or The Little Princess or Alice in Wonderland. When I was pregnant, the new thing was having these parties and revealing the gender of your baby. My mother-in-law wanted to throw me one of these on the night after we were to find out what the baby was. The thing was to have a cake made with a neutral colored frosting on the outside, vanilla or chocolate for example, and then to have the inside colored pink or blue.

If we wanted to be surprised, we could take a note from the doctor to the bakery and have the cake made without us knowing what color the inside would be until we cut into it at the party. Ben’s mom was really into this because all of the girls our age were doing it and the pictures were all over the internet. I remember being terrified to have a party like this. What if I sliced into the cake and saw blue? I studied the pictures other girls had posted online. Some people had opted to open a huge box at their parties, and colored balloons filled with helium came bursting forth to announce the baby’s sex. The pictures had usually been taken just as the balloons were released, and the party guests were smiling and clapping. Others used the cake method we were planning to go with. Photos and videos were usually taken at the critical moment—just as the soon-to-be mother held up a freshly-sliced cake triangle and showed the world the strawberry inside. It was funny to me then how everyone burst into smiles or shrieked with delight either way, boy or girl. As though no matter the outcome, it was just what everyone had been hoping for. There were no pictures or videos posted of gender reveals in which all of the guests wore expressions of disappointment or even vague indifference, or patted the couple on the back and said things like, “That’s okay, maybe next time.” Maybe, I thought, it was a supernatural kind of thing. Maybe as soon as you found out what you were having, it turned out that was what you wanted all along. I remember studying the mothers’ faces in these pictures, trying to see if behind any happy smiles, maybe in the eyes, I could detect a heart sinking just a little. Anyway, I did not get to have one of these parties. Almost, but not quite, and still sometimes I look at the little boys in my class and I think, was it one like this that I didn’t want? Was my wanting a girl so strong that the little boy I was supposed to have was taken and given to someone else, someone whose eyes would not have betrayed her smile when she held up that blueberry flavored slice of cake?

Sierra exhibits obnoxious patience as she stands at my desk with her tiny, pressed uniform and her short, oddly grown-up haircut. She is very cute and very smart, and perhaps this is why I don’t like her. I know that I should like the smart ones. Well, I should like all of them. But when I look into her eyes, eyes that seem to be always questioning me, I feel certain that she knows things about me that a first grader shouldn’t know. For example, when I announce to the students that we are going to start the day with forty-five minutes of silent reading and I am even so generous as to offer them the option of sitting in one of the bean bags in the corners of the classroom or lying underneath their desks to read—they are very attracted to lying underneath their desks to read for some reason—it seems that this little girl knows that I am providing this silent reading time not because of the fact that studies continue to support the value of sustained silent reading, but because I need some extra time to get myself together for the day. Either I have not thoroughly looked over the math pages to be covered for the morning, or Ben and I have had an exchange that has left me frazzled and I need some time to compose myself and get my heart rate settled. She looks at me like she knows just what I am doing, the same way an adult would know.

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This little girl also does perturbing things like ask a million questions that make me feel like maybe I don’t know what I am talking about. This is probably why she is standing at my desk. I finally look up at her. “Mrs. Winters, I have a question for you,” she says. “I was thinking you did,” I tell her in my most sugary voice. “I know that you said we have to create a character, give them a problem, and solve the problem, right?” “Right. Good!” I give her a confident thumbs up that will hopefully swish her away from my desk. “Well,” she goes on, “What if the character’s problem doesn’t get solved?” I look at her and feel so tired. Yes, I had instructed them to create a character who has a problem. Then, figure out a way to solve the problem. I told them I would grade them on neatness, creativity, and following the formula. I am wondering why she can’t just stick to the plan like everyone else. I sweeten my voice even more and say, “Don’t you worry. I’m sure you can come up with something!” I pat her on the arm, and she just looks at me and wanders back to her desk. I wonder whether or not I need to explain to her that every story won’t work out that way, but that for now this is the

THIS LITTLE GIRL ALSO DOES PERTURBING THINGS LIKE ASK A MILLION QUESTIONS THAT MAKE ME FEEL LIKE MAYBE I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. formula that we are using to learn how stories are supposed to go. I decide not to explain myself. That’s the problem with this girl. She makes me feel like I have to explain myself, that I have to tell her you must learn the rules before you can break them. But do I owe an explanation to a first-grader? I don’t think so. Plus, I am thinking irritably, why wouldn’t you want to see your character’s problem get solved?

One afternoon I come home from work, and there it is. The desk I asked for is sitting in the only space we really have to put it—the wide section of the downstairs hallway. There’s a cup of coffee sitting on it, along with my computer. A large, flat piece of wood has been sanded and finished with something a bit shiny. It lays neatly and simply over dowels formed into an x shape on both sides and on the back.

I wasn’t really expecting anything when I asked, but it’s just the sort of desk I would have picked out. Ben walks up beside me, wiping his hands with a dish towel as I am inspecting it. I give it a jiggle. It’s sturdy. I am impressed. Amazed actually. I tell him this, and he goes into the no-nonsense mode that he uses when he wants to cover up his pride and be selfdeprecating, asking me about the spot where he’s placed it, if it’s okay, and continuing on to other subjects. What happened at work?, etc. Then he rushes outside before I can really get into anything. He says working outside helps his creativity. He works at home as a financial planner. I didn’t realize this required so much creativity, but anyway. I think he just feels claustrophobic in our house. I sit down at the desk to test it out. In the past, I have sort of needed a desk for planning lessons and grading papers, but I usually just do these things while sitting on the couch and watching television. Planning and grading for first graders can be done with about oneeighth of your total brain involvement, so I use the other seven-eighths to watch television

I TRY TO SAY THE WORD IMAGINATION A LOT. BUT THEN I TEND TO GIVE A LOT OF RULES. and drink a half glass of Coke. I used to drink Diet Coke, but then I read up on artificial sweeteners and decided that it would be better in the long run if I got a little pudgier than if I gave myself brain damage. Or gave a baby brain damage—on the tiny off chance at any time that we have defied science and a microscopic little human is inside me. I only drink a half glass a day though because Coke isn’t good for you either. Really, almost everything isn’t good for you. Which is why I look at all these women who are having healthy babies and eating terribly and ordering caffeinated beverages at Starbucks, and I wonder what my problem is. And I wonder if Ben is wondering the same thing, thinking couldn’t he have married someone who didn’t think his tree house was stupid and who could maintain a healthy environment in which a baby could grow. The reason I need a desk now is that I am going back to school at night to get my library science degree. So I have a good bit of paper-writing that needs to happen. My school is working out a deal with me, and they are going to let me be the assistant school librarian after Christmas break. They will hire a new first grade teacher because those are easier to come by than people who have or almost have degrees in library science.

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This is perfect because I need a break from the kids. I know I’ll see the kids in the library but not the same ones every day and not all the time. Sometimes I’ll enter the books into our online catalogue or set up the Accelerated Reading tests. I feel like I could do a better job with kids if I had some breathing space. When I was a baby, my mom said the library was one of the few places she could for sure get me to sleep. So when I was being fussy she would take me down to the public library, pick out a book, and sit in one of the cozy reading chairs while I sat in my pumpkin seat in the floor beside a shelf of science fiction and fantasy novels. She would read, and I would fall asleep amidst spacecrafts and wizards, and then she would take me home and get a chance to sleep herself. I wonder if my own child would have had a similar quirky thing. Either way, I tend to think libraries have a calming effect on people, which is why I think I would like working in one. I would be calm, and I could spread that calmness to others by running a nice library with frequently updated bulletin boards and well-organized shelves and displays. When it comes to my classroom, everything is not so organized and so the calmness tends not to happen. This is because there is never any time for me to update the bulletin boards with new borders for new seasons or to organize the measuring and counting stations and clean the rice granules off the floor—because the only time I can really do these things is after school, and Ben happens to think I stay too long after school as it is.

The tree house is coming along. It is actually beginning to look like a tree house. Ben has built the floor and the sides of it so that three thick branches of the oak tree in our back yard go up through the floor and out of the walls. The tree house is nestled into the tree, and I wonder if the tree will just grow around the house or if perhaps the house might burst at some point. The truth is, I assumed he wouldn’t finish it, that this whole woodworking phase would pass. And now here he’s built a successful desk, and also the tree house looks rather like one that will not fall out of the tree, one that could hold human beings. What is going to happen when we have a large tree house in our backyard (one that is, by the way, visible from the road due to its position and the angle of our property)? Are people going think that we have both gone mentally insane? That we think we have a child? That we are maybe growing or smoking marijuana up there? I am trying to think of how to handle this.

At work I decide to try something. My husband’s behavior has given me an idea for a class assignment. I have to get ideas where I can. For creative thinking time, I tell the kids to get out a piece of paper. They shuffle around for a bit. “Okay everybody. I want you to write your answer to this question.” I pause dramatically. They like that sometimes. If you had your very own tree house, what would you do with it?” A couple of hands shoot up, and I anticipate their questions. “Now if you already happen to have one or something, then just tell me what you would do if you could use it for anything you wanted. Or, I suppose you could tell me what you use it for now.” Then I add,

“Feel free to use your imagination.” I try to say the word imagination a lot. But then I tend to give a lot of rules. Like with the stories they are writing for language and spelling. The rules have sort of evolved over the years, after it seemed like they were needed. People feel nervous using their imaginations I guess. The kids like rules sometimes. They ask a million questions, they give baffled looks. So I go ahead and make rules for assignments that started out more simply, and then I end up annoyed when they don’t follow them. I try not to do that right now. “Just answer the question however you’d like,” I say as I walk around the room. I hand everyone a plain white piece of printer paper while they use their lined paper to write. Sierra raises her hand. “How many lines should we write?” “As many as you want.” Some kids write one line, and others write all the way down the page, and I’m thinking, Good Lord, what all can you do in a tree house? And all of the sudden I’m really interested. “Okay,” I announce, “Now I want you to get out your markers or colored pencils, and I want you to draw your tree house on the white paper I put on your desk. Just take your time. We will draw until lunch.” They get to work. I see some greens and browns, some blue skies. Then I see oranges and yellows, some birds. A zebra seems to be in one tree house, a lady that has wings in one. Some ballet shoes are tied onto the bars of an oval window, dangling out by their pink ribbons, and one tree house sits amidst a bunch of brightly colored balls—I’m pretty sure these are the moon and some planets—right up in space. Some are round, more like tree pods; others have what might be thatching on the roof; and one looks just like a miniature mansion sitting on an oddly flat canopy of trees that makes a sort of second layer of ground up in the sky. One looks like it is topped with a Chinese hat, and another rests atop the head of a giraffe whose neck goes down, down, down, and disappears off the end of the page.

I am at home sitting at my new desk and trying to get some work done before dinner. Ben is in the other room. We used to always eat dinner together, but now I’ve gotten on this thing where I don’t really feel like I deserve dinner until I’ve been productive. Ben thinks this is weird. “A person shouldn’t have to deserve to eat dinner,” he says. “Well, it’s not just dinner,” I say. “It’s more like the whole process of settling down and resting for the day. I want to feel like I earned it.” Of course, I feel fine to settle down for dinner on days I worked really hard. Like maybe on days I taught a good lesson that involved me standing and talking and not just sitting and letting the kids do a worksheet. Or on days I graded some spelling tests after work and then did four miles on the elliptical machine. On those days, I feel an ache in my calves and in my neck, an ache that says I deserve to sit back and eat my egg burrito and drink my half glass of Coke. Anyway, today hasn’t quite been so productive, so I am trying to get some of my own schoolwork done before dinner, and I’m feeling guilty for several reasons. One is because I’m not actually getting any schoolwork done, and another is because I haven’t done my lesson plans for the week and that’s another thing I need to be doing. This is another reason I’d like to be a librarian. The third reason I am feeling guilty is because Ben has built this nice desk and

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I’m not sure if I like it. I didn’t even really want it. My elbows are resting on it funny because I am holding my arms carefully because I don’t want to scratch it, and it smells so newly finished that I feel like I am breathing in toxic newness. I don’t have to worry about this when I sit on our old couch and do my work balanced in my lap on top of a binder. The main thing though, is that when I’m sitting at my new desk I’m not in the same room as Ben. Like right now, he’s in the living room eating his dinner on the couch, and if I didn’t have this new desk I would be working where I could see him. But now I’m around the corner and out in the hallway, all far away—and will it be like this always? Me working in the hallway

“A PERSON SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DESERVE TO EAT DINNER,” HE SAYS. and him eating or reading or watching television in the other room? Technically, it’s not very far. Technically, he’s right on the other side of the wall. For example, if I took my pen and used it to jab a million tiny holes in the wall, there would be a little window through which I could look and see him, see the way he sits on the edge of the couch and holds his plate on his knees with both hands like he could be called to jump up and run at any minute, or the way he squints one eye closed while he is reading, or the way, when he starts to fall asleep, he gets to using one foot to mess with the sock on the other foot until it’s almost all the way off— dangling from the top of his toes like an on old-fashioned kerchief.

My students are finishing their books, the ones we will send off to be “published.” Most have completed the stories and are beginning the illustrations. As soon as I tell them to go ahead and get started for the day, Sierra is zooming straight to my desk, gripping a fistful of flopping pages. “I’ve figured out a way to solve my character’s problem,” she tells me. She’s kind of shaking the papers at me, her face all full of shine. “Good. How did you do it?” I realize I never have known what her character’s problem was in the first place. “Well, it’s about a little girl and her dad is sick. There’s no way to solve the problem because he has a sickness that won’t go away. No matter what.” “Well, what happens?”

“Well, no one can help him, because the sickness is incurable.” She says the last word with some effort. She waits. I look at her. “And then I got my best idea yet.” She is jiggling her small, angular frame, and her feet are shifting from side to side. She’s clearly dazzled herself. “Magic!” She bursts out with the word, using her free hand to bop herself on the forehead as though this is the most obvious answer and she is so silly for having overlooked it beforehand. And she thrusts the papers toward me so forcefully that I feel like a strong wind

STILL HOLDING HER STORY CLOSE, SIERRA TURNS BACK TOWARD HER DESK WITH ALL THE HOPE AND SATISFACTION OF SOMEONE WHO HAS JUST HAD HER BIGGEST PROBLEM IN LIFE SOLVED. has blown me backward. Then she pulls them back to her chest. I can see that on the front cover page of her book is a woman with glittery purple wings. It’s like the woman she included in her tree house drawing. I’m not sure if it’s an angel, or maybe a fairy woman. The woman has those funny fingers kids are always drawing, so that her hands look like big round sunshines. Still holding her story close, Sierra turns back toward her desk with all the hope and satisfaction of someone who has just had her biggest problem in life solved.

Ben is in the living room, and I am sitting at my desk again. It’s getting late, and I am trying to finish an assignment. But instead, I am staring at the wall and thinking of my grandmother and her widow friends. I am wondering if ever, when they sit alone at night now—when they go to watch a Hallmark movie or study their Sunday School lessons or eat some oatmeal—I wonder if they ever feel this heavy feeling on their chests, so heavy like someone dropped a big stack of spelling books right on their lungs. And do they ever wish, while suffocating under the spelling books, that they had jabbed a little window through the wall forty or fifty years ago, so that they could have seen their husbands while they sat

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watching golf or holding the dog or doing the crossword puzzle from the newspaper? Or does any woman ever wish she’d never ever had her own desk or sewing table or recliner—that she had just stayed right up close to the person she loved? Just in case, years later, she was to regret not having spent a few more minutes with him—a few more minutes listening to the wisps of his breath or resting her palm over the creases in his stomach? I get up and go to the bag I carry all my work stuff in. I take out the stack of tree house drawings and go into the living room where Ben is reading on the laptop. I sit beside him with the drawings. “I had my students draw tree houses,” I say. He looks kind of bewildered by this. “Why?” “I don’t know.” I am so sleepy, suddenly, when I say this. He sets the computer down and takes the stack from me, and I lean over toward him. “Maybe you can use the ideas,” I try to joke, closing my eyes. “Have you considered adding a peppermint fireman’s pole?” My eyes still closed, I am leaning half on his shoulder and half on the back of the couch, and I hear him looking through the drawings. I hear each page sifting as he lifts it—and it flutters up, slicing through the air before he sweeps it back in with the others. I am imagining all of the drawings in the air, floating all around us like paper snow in a globe— with the zebras and the planets and the thatched roofs. I say into the darkness, and it takes all of my strength, “If we were able to have a little boy—I know it’s not possible—but if we did, do you think you could ever look away from him?”

I don’t remember hearing his answer, but I wake up on the couch, a pillow under my head, and a blanket over my feet. And Ben is asleep beneath me on the floor with the stack of tree houses beside him.

Laura Sobbott Ross

Mount Pilatus Lake Lucerne, Switzerland

Beneath café umbrellas, the patrons sip coffees from highball glasses, a swirl of cream undisturbed by the current of their lips at the rim. The Alps, across the baby blue glass of Lake Lucerne are a silhouette, a nuance of fading tinctures etched and rising. We keep our carry-on bags close as toddlers, while we wait for our hotel room, not too jet lagged to be distracted by the diluted palette of blues splattered brazenly in flowerbox-brights, or that crest of limestone that looms above it all— Mt. Pilatus, a legacy of dragons, of souls’ eternal unease. Even the swans at the edge of the lake that drift and preen their cloud-thick bodies, hiss like savages at those who lean in too close from their midday strolling. They say Pontius Pilate’s body was buried on the mountain and blamed for conjuring drastic weather (and dragons?). His ghost sealed inside the cloud-tumbled incline where tourists trek a vertigo of wildflowers and chiming cowbells. The locals swear Pilate rises every Good Friday to wash the blood of Christ from his hands. Does he think about his wife, Claudia, and lament not heeding her warning, her tactile petition of dreams? Cloudy, he might have nicknamed her, remembering how her throat at his torso had trembled that morning, how the wisps of her hair were a plea against his skin.

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Laura Sobbott Ross

Scribe Like a field of snow—an element this boy has never seen or touched, the white page waits for him to lay down his words— awkward as angels flapped in the drift— images I scribe for him with my workable hands. His have gone slack, no pencil grip honed between baby fingers left flimsy with tactile cravings. Abandoned in his crib for days at a time, he’s learned to hold things loosely. Illegible— the word sounds like a transgression, I think as I listen to him write out loud and hope at least there were patches of sun that flickered across a quilt. And music. The other kids wishing they’d built a snowman as gigantic as mine, he tells me to write, adding a carrot for the nose. He stutters on the word dance, tells me when to indent and when to pause. He smiles without making eye contact, as we move together, an uncertain syncopation across the page, my pencil point adhering to the lines and margins he cannot keep himself from scrawling over. The word he whispers the softest: because

CONTRIBUTORS / 31

Janet Atkins loves to plant things and watch them grow: flowers, trees, herbs, her students, herself. She has a sunny room in her house where she practices yoga and meditation, paints, and writes. She lives with her husband in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina and is owned by three dogs. She loves all things art and all things to do with travel, especially to England and Ireland where she would like to retire someday. Micah Bloom is an artist. He was born and raised in Minnesota, earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, and currently teaches at Minot State University in North Dakota. Bloom has been selected for numerous artist–in–residence fellowships and published his work in literary and art journals. He has shown his work nationally and internationally including private galleries in China and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Bloom is currently working on a multi-media project with some flood-dispersed books. This work, titled Codex, involves film, photography, and installation, and explores various cultural themes using the book as subject. Married for twelve years, Micah and Sara share four daughters and one son, and they all love to make things. More at www.micahbloom.com. Win Bassett’s essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica. His stories and poems have been published or are forthcoming in PANK, Ruminate, Trop, and elsewhere. He’s a former assistant district attorney and serves on the PEN Prison Writing Program Fiction Committee. He is the fiction and poetry editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, managing editor of Yale’s LETTERS journal, and assistant for Bull City Press. He’s also appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to discuss the Christian publishing industry. He’s from southwestern Virginia and studies at Yale Divinity School. Alyse Bensel is the book review editor at the Los Angeles Review. She is the author of Shift (Plan B Press, 2012) and Not of Their Own Making (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2014). Her poetry has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Blue Earth Review, and the Fourth River, among others. A transplant from Pennsylvania, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas and lives with her two calico

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rescue cats in Lawrence. Richard Cole is an American poet, artist, and nonfiction writer. His latest book, Catholic by Choice (Loyola Press) is a memoir about his conversion and entry into the Catholic Church. He has also published two books of poetry, The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press) and Success Stories (Limestone Books). Honors include an NEA fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series award and a Bush Foundation grant. His work has been published in journals and magazines including the New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, the Sun Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal—Good Letters. More at www.richard-cole.net. Anneliese Finke lives in Northern Michigan, working as an adjunct at Kirtland Community College. But many of her fondest memories are of living, working, and writing in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She was baptized in a hole cut in a frozen river while the temperature was -25°C. She memorized Mayakovsky even though she could barely speak Russian. But she could never quite convince her friends and students that throwing an American football was more fun than a frisbee . . . or that free verse could compete with formal poetry. Snow Yunxue Fu is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. Her work approaches the subject of the sublime using topographical computer rendered animation installation. She examines and interprets the world around her through virtual reality, where she draws a parallel to the realm of multi-dimensionality and the spiritual. Fu has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in Chicago Filmmakers, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA Online Screening, TEMP Art Space in New York, Currents: Santa Fe New Media Festival, West Village Art Gallery in Chengdu China, and 9:16 Film Festival in Australia. Fu is an MFA candidate in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). View more of her work at snowyunxuefu.com Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Alea Hurst began her journey into drawing and painting eight years ago. She produces

two-dimensional works, particularly drawings and paintings, which range from traditional to experimental and mixed media approaches. She recently received her BFA in painting and a BA in business adminstration from the University of Georgia in Athens. Her work has been exhibited various places including Hartsfield-Jackson airport, the University of Georgia, and the Henry County Performing Arts Center in Georgia. Her work also has been featured multiple times in Literacy Head online magazine and purchased by the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. She received the Coca-Cola Fine Arts Award in 2009 for both her artistic and academic achievements. Native to Oxford, Mississippi, Sarah Megan Jenkins studied painting at Memphis College of Art in Tennessee, completing her degree in 2010. Sarah relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she lives and paints full time. Engaged by nature at a young age, Sarah Megan’s work represents the natural energy flow found within oneself and with the Earth. Pulling imagery from her own experiences and travel throughout North America, Sarah’s world searches for a rhythmic nature, striving to be courageously pure and leave the viewer embraced by the emotional quality in her paintings. More at www. SarahMeganJenkins.com Zacheriah Kramer grew up in Northern Colorado. He received his education in art at The Florence Academy of Art in both Gothenburg, Sweden, and Florence, Italy. He was made an assistant instructor in classical drawing at FAA in 2010 while he was still a student, and continued to teach at the school until 2012. Zacheriah received the 20th anniversary 4th year scholarship from The Florence Academy of Art, Florence, for the 2011-2012 academic year. He has a broad interest in the arts and humanities, and has formally studied philosophy, theology, and language. He resides with his wife in Sweden. Zacheriah writes: “‘Through the Cracks’ is a self portrait wrestling with the idea of what it means to be a foreigner settling in a strange country—in my case, Sweden. Can I learn to see it with knowing eyes? Who will I become in it? This lump of clay given the dangerous freedom to push back.” Miho Nonaka is a bilingual poet from Tokyo, Japan. Her poems and essays have appeared in various journals and

anthologies, including Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, American Letters & Commentary, Iowa Review, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, and American Odysseys: Writings by New American (Dalkey Archive Press). She teaches creative writing at Wheaton College. She lives with her husband and her infant son in a tiny house behind the museum where C. S. Lewis’s legendary wardrobe is kept. Michelle Oakes is a third-year MFA candidate in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. During her almost three years in Houston, she has managed not to drive on the freeway even once, and she intends to continue not driving on the freeway for as long as she stays here. If she stays long enough, she will discover a way not to drive anywhere at all, and yet she will manage to explore Houston as well as any good resident ought. Michelle’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Laurel Review, RHINO Poetry, and Owl Eye Review. Z.K. Parker lives in northeast Louisiana where he works as the news editor for a local newspaper. He spends his early mornings with a cup of coffee perusing newspapers, doing the crossword puzzles and reading poetry. Instead of doodling during long local and state meetings, he writes lines of verse in between and around his meeting notes. For two straight years, he was the editor-in-chief of the Helicon, a student literary journal, at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Sophie Petti received her BA in English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She currently lives in Denver and works at University of Colorado Hospital, and she is looking forward to starting at the University of Colorado College of Nursing in June to pursue her BSN. Though she can’t wait to begin her journey to become a nurse, she also loves to devour books, pen occasional poems, drink copious amounts of coffee, and paint monsters into thrift store art. Kimberly Priske’s favorite claims to fame are marrying her best friend and mothering two brilliant offspring. She currently lives in Wisconsin and recently earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin,

CONTRIBUTORS / 31

Madison. Kimberly’s stories are born of experiences as wife, mother, singer, actress, small business owner, teacher, ministry leader, and encounters with countless interesting, and not so interesting, people. When she isn’t noting the quirks of friends and family for potential characters in her stories, she loves to spend time with loved ones, read, sing, play, and laugh out loud. “The Art of Going Blind” is her first story submitted for publication. Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and writing coach for Lake County Schools. In addition to writing poetry, she loves photography and redecorating her house with the help of her contractor husband of eighteen years. They live with their two teenagers in a small town in central Florida, where the land is hilly and the oaks are draped in Spanish moss. Her chapbook, A Tiny Hunger, is from YellowJacket Press. Manik Sharma was born in the hill state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Poetry caught his fancy at an early age, and since then it has continued to manifest in ways explained only by a lack a restraint, prematurity of the faithless-addictive, and the magnitude to which he can easily piss people off. He has been published elsewhere in The Bitter Oleander, Splash of Red, Squalorly, 50 Haikus, Frogpond, Bones journal, among others. He has published a collection of poetry, titled “The Land Above Water.” In addition to writing poetry, he also likes to hold the lens once in a while. He hangs around at Thelandabovewater.blogspot.in. Shannon Skelton is from Birmingham, Alabama, and returned to school this fall after teaching middle and high school English for six years. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Georgia College and State University and lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, with her husband and their new daughter. She is currently learning how to be a mother, working as a writing center consultant, and writing a collection of stories—but mostly learning how to be a mother. Her work can be found in Relief and in Issue 26 of Ruminate. If you would like, you can contact her at shannon.skelton3@gmail.com. Ryan Strebeck lives in Abilene, Texas, with his wife, Amberly, and their three children. He is a Methodist pastor who grew up as a rancher and enjoys building just about anything—most

ISSUE 31 Spring 201 4

recently a pair of old-fashioned sawhorses. Four of his friends keep him reading and writing poems as a pastoral practice, and his kids have taught him the joy of reciting them. Ryan’s stubborn streak and dogged work tendencies have earned him frequent comparisons to Woodrow F. Call of Lonesome Dove. Larry D. Thomas currently resides in the Big Bend region of the Great Chihuahuan Desert where he writes poetry, enjoys the high desert mountain views, and listens to the wind. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, he has published several award-winning collections of poetry the most recent of which is Uncle Ernest (Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2013). His New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2008) was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award. Thomas’s poem in this issue of Ruminate Magazine is part of a recently completed chapbook manuscript titled Art Museums, to be published by Blue Horse Press in early 2015. Though Lori Vos enjoys teaching academic writing skills to university students in Kingston, Ontario, what excites her most is creative writing. Six years ago, Lori began steadily writing short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. In 2012, she was a finalist in Ruminate’s Vandermey Nonfiction Prize. She recently had her first publication, a short story appearing in Descant magazine, and gave her first reading at Descant’s issue launch in Toronto. She is also working on illustrations for a set of children’s stories she has written. When not teaching, writing, or drawing, Lori loves to share long evenings with friends and the wine that she and her husband make from their own small vineyard. Rachel Yurkovich is an artist/experimenter who grew up in Prague, Czech Republic, and is about to graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art ‘14. Rachel has shown work at Cleveland venues such as the Reinberger Galleries, Arts Collinwood, and Forum Artspace. She was selected to participate in the live performance directed by Kate Gilmore at MOCA Cleveland in April ’13. Rachel is currently working on a lot of time-based video work that captures instances of uninhibited consumption. These are based on the story of Adam and Eve with their consumption of the forbidden fruit that brought sin and death into the world. Ultimately she seeks to expose the ability one can have to counteract present temptations. More at www. rachelyurkovich.com.

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LAST/ NOTE THOUGHTS ON ALWAYS, WE BEGIN AGAIN FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE

I recently had one of those days that made me want to give up. And I did. Not on life, but just on that one day. And by that I mean I just quit trying to make it better. Usually I do the opposite. I keep trying to improve a bad day. I make a to-do list or take a hot shower. I try to do something productive so that I can at least say that I did the dishes (my husband is laughing) or wrote for thirty minutes or sent an email. But on this one day, I just said to myself, nope. This day is done. And I sat on the couch watching an episode of The Office and waiting for the day to end. For some reason, this made things better. The lack of expectations for myself and the day took some pressure off, and I felt relieved and peaceful. And while this may seem rather antagonistic, to give up on the day, it made me think to appreciate this small but beautiful act of grace God offers us over and over again—the fact that he created life for us in such a way that we constantly get a new beginning. How we need this! How we need to be able to say something as simple and as profound as, “Well, tomorrow is another day.” How we need, I suppose, to understand what it means to wake to a new morning.

Shannon Skelton

FICT I ON

One of

my earliest memories is of watching a tadpole my Dad caught turn into the beginnings of a young bullfrog in a large clear wine jug on our kitchen table in Colorado, the yellow morning light filling the suspended ball of pond water and enveloping that strange wobbling creature with a fitting radiance. Now, in my mid-thirties on a new continent, I go to the ditch, and I catch tadpoles, and I repeat the ritual, accepting the gift as a child all over again. It is one of those glistening instances of life that conquers my heart ceaselessly, always anew, always with greater weight. And this year I’ll begin sharing these moments with my own first born. Zacheriah Kramer

“Always, we

VI S UAL ART

begin again.” This phrase has a sense of inevitability about it, but new beginnings don’t always seem inevitable. A year ago, when I was struggling personally, the thought crossed my mind for the first time in my life that perhaps spring wouldn’t come—externally or internally. Then, as now—waiting for this interminable winter to end—I was and am comforted by a story my mother-in-law told me.

Many years ago, she urged her teenaged daughter out to the garden to lift piles of snow from the beds, so sure was she of the crocuses underneath. Sometimes, when a new beginning seems a hardly-hoped-for gift of grace, it’s good to know that someone knows it’s coming.

Lori Vos

F I CTIO N

Our daughter

was born in August, nine years after her older sister. Nine years on paper, but forty seems more accurate judging by everything I forgot: the diaper folds, the two-hour sleep shifts, and is it “sing, rock, wrap,” or “sway, shush, sling?” New blankets arrived, along with something Hannah made called a Moby Wrap. The car seat we borrowed was new to us, and so was the crib we bought on Craigslist. So I appreciate that this morning’s coffee is familiar, along with the voice saying, “Hey . . . we started over.” Ryan Strebeck

P O ETRY

The hardest part of any new endeavor is the beginning of it, the stepping out in faith, the setting aside of fear, or the I-haveno-idea-where-to-start obstacles, and just beginning. Often, the difficulty is that I am beginning with me. Overwhelmed by the task of sifting through abstractions to find a bit of clarity, a bit of peace, I become the obstacle. The beauty of beginnings, however, is their frequency. Every day I wake to new mercies, new opportunities to find the story I am born to live, again.

Kimberly Priske

F I CTIO N

I think of myself as a fairly competitive person, especially in sport. So on my colleague’s invitation to exhibit my skills on the racquetball court, I accepted and the date was set. Prior to our first game, I was excited, imagining the impression I would leave on my competitor (ten years my senior) when my understated athleticism was revealed on the court. As we walked to our first match I was sizing up my opponent, knowing that first he’d be teaching me the rules of the game . . . and then I’d teach him about hustle. Things didn’t go (and haven’t gone) as I anticipated. After seventeen games, I persist and perspire, but haven’t beat him yet. Defeat looms large but there is always that moment when I first step up to serve . . . “o-0” feels so good.

Micah Bloom

VIS UA L A RT

Zacheriah Kramer. Through the Cracks. Silverpoint on prepared paper. 7 x 7 inches.

Rachel Yurkovich. Red Delicious (2). Digital photograph.

Issue 31: Always We Begin Again

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