Sand Issue 9

BERLIN’S ENGLISH LITERARY JOURNAL

ISSUE 9 / ¤8

BERLIN’S ENGLISH LITERARY JOURNAL

SAND

BERLIN’S ENGLISH LITERARY JOURNAL

Contact: SAND Journal Prinz-Georg-StraĂ&#x;e 7 10827 Berlin info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com twitter.com/SANDJournal Connect with us on Facebook for news and events: www.facebook.com/sandjournal ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright Spring 2014 Designed by The Curved House Printed by Solid Earth Cover images by Erin Quinn from her series Breaking Point.

SAND is:

Christina Wegener

Yvonne Andreas

Editor in Chief

Administrative Manager

Lyz Pfister

Jayme Collins

Managing Editor

Distribution Manager

& Poetry Editor Chris Troise Florian Duijsens

Events Manager & Distribution

Fiction Editor Valentina Uribe Alex Bodine

Social Media Manager

Art Editor Kristen Harrison & Carly McLaughlin

Rowan Powell

Copy Editor

Design & Layout

Editor’s note LYZ PFISTER

Life is anything but solitary. Like water seeping into an empty riverbed, we find our own borders by discovering where they bump up against others.

“How we need another soul to cling to,” Sylvia Plath, that thorough explorer of the self, wrote in her journal. Our relationships – with mothers, lovers, or brothers – are as responsible for making us as anything we think truly springs from us.

Relationships can be obsessive and strange, filled with animalism or fear just as easily as with joy or comfort. In “Something Ugly” by April L. Ford, a woman is suddenly terrorized by her sweet, paralyzed husband. And in Jy Turin’s breathtakingly subtle story about two young brothers driving north with their mother, a simple game of hide and seek reveals a depth of frustration, fear, and intense, inexplicable love.

Like Marina Roca Die’s paintings of the insides of bodies, the stories and poems in SAND Issue 9 strip away protective layers to reveal raw emotions – those parts of ourselves we often try to hide away. The narrator in Jesse Kohn’s “The It Works” discovers more about himself through his neurotic dissection of a relationship than he does about the relationship itself, while the short, terse lines in Emma Wippermann’s poem “Wreck Beach” thud like a lusty heartbeat beneath a salty, beachside dinner party. In “Intercession” (Brodie), the narrator’s retelling of a memory reveals just how much he’s hiding. That story’s poolside setting provides the perfect counterpoint to Pablo Díaz Benzo’s pastel poolscape, in which you barely notice what’s wrong until it’s all you see.

All relationships ultimately involve loss. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the love in Adam Flint’s fluttering “Lichtung” has a predictable end: “Bloomed sky-whetted blade / pride of the puddle’s cutler / if you choose to will / sever / you from your vain craning love.” But there are other losses. The loss of country, language, and identity are themes explored by both Amanda Nowakowski and Celina Su. And then there’s the desperate plea to a longabsent Glenn in Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz’s poem “The Inscription Reads”: “Dear Glenn / I want to eat my way through hell.” As if by filling yourself with all that sorrow, you could contain it.

And so we keep looking for connections, keep pushing against the boundaries, keep forming relationships and breaking them. “Don’t linger, keep walking,” says the speaker in “Of Linens and Lungs” (Nacy), because whether they are tender or cruel or even indifferent, our relationships always leave us changed.

CONTENTS

9

Jeff Tigchelaar

Strategy

10

Jy Turin

Nothing Happens Here

17

Kate Nacy

Of Linens and Lungs

18

Adam Flint

Lichtung

25

Marina Roca Die

Female Inside

26

-

Male Inside

27

Stephanie Newman

[the new winter]

28

Valerie Cumming

Girls in Trees, a selection

37

Amanda Nowakowski

Lines from the Doll

38

Emma Wippermann

Wreck Beach

41

Alexandra Levasseur

Swallowed

42

-

Self-Sabotage II

43

April L. Ford

Something Ugly

59

Visual Verse

Introduction

60

- Erin Quinn

Breathe

61

- Sarah Howe

Gasp

62

- Pippa Chapman

STARE-&-STARE

63

- Peter Wallis

SPRING

64

- Liz Bahs

65

Chloe Jones

Perfect Symmetry Contour Drift

66

-

Disintegration

67

-

Asymptote

68

Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz

The Inscription Reads

73

Simon Perchik

Untitled

77

William VanDenBerg

Vessel

86

Kate Nacy

Here Is You

87

Celina Su

Aubade: At the Bus Shelter

89

Pablo DĂ­az Benzo

Flotar

90

-

A Vague Idea What a Sad Story Is

91

D.B. Brodie

Intercession

102

Rich Ives

Handbook for the Arrival of the Apocalypse

104

Jesse Kohn

The It Works

110

Ben Collas

A Soldier Returns

112

Contributors

Poetry

11

Don’t hesitate with the goodbyes

Strategy JEFF TIGCHELAAR

Early exits are excellent exits You mustn’t wait for the glowing signs to disappear

12

Fiction

Nothing Happens Here JY TURIN

When I was eight, I went away, with my mam and my brother. Unwarned, her job was cancelled, without recompense. I didn’t understand, but it was June and sometimes sunny and mam didn’t have to work anymore. She had other jobs, at a laundry, and worked somewhere on Saturdays, I never learned where. But she quit those too, stocked the car with canned food, drove us north. She rented our flat out (when we returned, everything we owned had been taken, my room was empty but for a bed slat). The car was capable then. Received some of its finest dents. We fought, in the back seats; my brother attacked me there where I was trapped. He was bigger, a year older. I would often repeat to myself my age, say: I am eight. I probably fell asleep, bruising with his kicking.

We stayed in a hut at the edge of a loch – a lake – wild and not warm; we must have been far north, I don’t remember the names, only the lake, the jealous forest hills sheltering it, its thistles and heather: a basin in the landscape. Perhaps two miles squared. We were alone; there was a village twenty minutes’ walk away. Not within sight. We had no heating or much else; I don’t remember. I don’t know how she knew about it. Perhaps she went there as a child.

She would row out onto the loch in a wooden boat smelling of terebinth, lie back in it, the oars pulled in, and let the current take her.

All day she lay there, nulled. We watched her from the shore sometimes.

We shared a room. Hyperactive the first night, he enforced unrest.

Fiction

Jy Turin

Between battles, he fidgeted, asked for jokes, riddles; I doubt I slept. In the morning we emerged to find her gone. We saw the boat on the loch, a half mile out, guided by the wind. Surrounded all by forest but for a dell on the opposite bank, over a mile away, lush with purple heather. I wanted to go there, for the heather. But we saw the boat and her arm over the edge. Wondered whether she was dead, until she twitched her hand to her head and back, to trail across the water. I’d never left the city before. A landscape that had not been made for us to be made by.

We devised a game: one would hide in the forest and the other would search, and when found, we’d swap roles. He ran in first; I counted to fifty before pursuing. There was little light, but I was afraid of insistent noises, not darkness: I heard a gurgling sound, beyond the first trees.

Trepid, I tried to retreat, but couldn’t find the edge of the forest. Instead, repeatedly I met a drystone wall decaying into the valley slope. I was screaming. The wild bating me. Soon I heard approaching help: my brother, brandishing an overlarge branch. At this sight I laughed hysterically: it became absurd to be scared of a wall. I can remember how it felt. The similarity of absurd to terrifying. He beat me with it until I was silent. I told him of the gurgling sound. We were still to listen for it again over my wheezing. And we heard it. He led us to its source: a stream issuing from the ground. We followed it, it flowed into the loch.

He demanded that I be unafraid, but I insisted on amendments: we couldn’t hide too far in the forest, and if undiscovered after twenty minutes then we’d yell until we were reconciled. Neither of us had a way to measure time, beyond knowing how a third of an hour felt. We began again: I counted, he hid. Searching for him, in increments I

13

14

Jy Turin

Fiction

learned to fear the stillness, its intimation of hostage, that the forest had trapped me, never to release. I couldn’t hear the stream anymore, and the wall had disappeared. I envisaged mam dead in the boat, unable to see her face but aware that she wasn’t breathing. I could design my nightmares and enter them passively. I imagined the loch as a fantasy shire, governed by grotesque logic. This shielded me from stimulated fear, altered my response. I added aspects to the game in my head: agents observing us, with agendas, teaching me rules of search; we played all afternoon, all evening, extending the allotted limits of ground and time.

We returned to the hut’s open shore by keeping beside the water. On the fourth day we had ventured to the opposite side, to the heather.

Mam didn’t know how our days were filled; she didn’t ask, probably never thought to. She lay idle in her boat, drifting. In the evenings we ate what she cooked in a saucepan and sat near the fire. On the fifth day we were woken by a strange summer thunderstorm, with no rain or lightning. Half an hour of vast rolling noise, penetrating the wooden walls and wooden beds, the floor’s bricks, the air’s damp, rocking through us towards paralysis. When it’d stopped we felt sucked into outer air as if by the sound’s vacancy. It was my turn to hide. I went in as far as I dared, tensed for more thunder, but was found before any came. While seeker, I met the lakeside at the mouth of the stream we’d followed on the first day. I saw mam floating distantly by the bank of heather. I watched her for fifteen minutes perhaps before returning into the trees. And I couldn’t find him. I’d been wandering along the drystone wall, without any thoughts, then realised it had been over an hour since he’d left to hide. I called for him. Whistled, shouted, screamed. I walked the length of the

Fiction

Jy Turin

loch for hours, calling. Not yet panicked, but only because I thought all had to be well if I still called. Like a substitute for his reply, the wall repeatedly appeared where unexpected.

Eventually, I came to the heather patch, dazed, the sky a single grey cloud, mam’s boat a few feet away: her arm limp over the side, stern knocking against the rocks on the shore. She was asleep, murmuring. I woke her, said that he’d gone missing, for too long for it to be a trick, and I’d searched for hours. I couldn’t go back into the forest; she said I had to. So I took her through it, half her size, clutching her, calling for him occasionally, out of habit. We heard nothing. I hadn’t cried; I was dulled. I told her of the wall, but we couldn’t find it; I said it was our game’s border, which we couldn’t cross, as with the heather field. She was frightened, but I couldn’t share her fear, I participated as if from far away, in a raven’s conspiracy. I kept claiming that he would reappear, although I wasn’t listening to myself, and neither was she. Only shouting his name continually until she said it without meaning him.

We returned rounding the loch’s shallows to the cabin, racing almost, me wading water up to my waist. She telephoned the village pub. And we waited. We didn’t sit, we couldn’t think: poised before acceptance, gazing at the forest for him to walk out. But nothing stirred and day became darker: the clouds lowered, scuffing the lake, humped for thunder. Men arrived, and women with torches, two-way radios, yellow coats, and then a police car, and later, another. They questioned her, everywhere people speaking: practicalities without judgement.

I separated from them to sit by the shore. The loch, tideless, infinite, a scudding inkscape; I thought I was watched by unseen eyes, scaling

15

16

Jy Turin

Fiction

trees and riding the windtipped ripples of the water. I saw the empty boat spinning in its centre, guided by a breeze I couldn’t feel. It skimmed a wide circle. The clouds charcoaled, fattening. Then, thunder. As before, omnipresent, reverberating through the forest, the earthed acoustic bowl of land, through the air and through the water. Lightning came later: when the search had stopped. I didn’t go back into the forest.

Dozens entered the trees we had blithely run through. No one spoke to me. I gazed at the heather dissolving from purple into wistful grey, a coarser texture to the clouds’ grey, softer to the woods’; before the water, graver, its umbral boat spinning into lovat.

Many memories as sounds: voices shouting into the evening, barking dogs, searching, roused birds calling too, foxes screaming, and by night, the slur of a helicopter. Thermal imaging, but with no success. Nothing of him was discovered. The dogs failed with his scent: a fungus afflicted their olfaction; the helicopter saw only animals: perhaps by then he was too cold.

We never found him. So he won the game, at a price. Mam was removed to a police station; and for a while might have been taken from me, or I from her. But she was discharged with nothing. They concluded he’d run into the forest, and she’d gone to find him, couldn’t, so sought help. No mention that we’d been left to do this for four days while she’d slept in a boat. No mention of a little brother. I said nothing to them.

They diagnosed my silence as shock. We were awake into the early morning; I sat under a blanket with an untouched cooling mug of soup in my lap, straining to distinguish the boat from the lake in the dark. I thought I glimpsed it spinning sometimes.

Lightning came, stretching from the clouds in forks of static fire,

Fiction

Jy Turin

pursued by a quieter farther thunder. They twisted around each other, light and sound, fading as I fell asleep.

My dream was of the drystone wall, which I couldn’t cross, penning me in the heather, so I couldn’t reach the forest where my brother hid in a tree, afraid to descend because foxes surrounded its trunk screeching.

And not caring; wanting to be prevented. Mam lay in the spinning boat, her arm craved by the water alive with lightning rising slowly through it to its surface. I couldn’t look at the sky, and heard only the foxes, and the stream gurgling; but I knew there was thunder shaking around me, deeper, negating other sound.

When I woke, I was before a fire inside the cabin, wet with sweat under heavy tartan blankets. Frail embers under logs. The party slept around me, on the floor, dressed in dayclothes. I rose and went to the window: mist reduced the view to a range of a few metres, purifying the land of the storm. Awake alone, I stared into the vapour, draped over the loch and its trees, to capture the moment to mind more forcefully than in a memory. His last words, I have heard others’ since: You won’t find me this time. The sentence we said before hiding. His last words to anyone but himself, perhaps. I dreamt it from different perspectives for years; until puberty. Then ceased to. And sleeplessness replaced them.

But not a sleeplessness caused by him. My dreams of his end were permeated with a frantic pleasure.

She didn’t speak on the journey back. Nine hours. On return, my room, our flat, was as empty as she felt, through the burglary of the men she’d trusted it to. She retreated into routine. I told no one. She obtained new jobs. Sometimes she woke at night calling his name; she rarely

17

18

Jy Turin

Fiction

mentioned him to me. But perhaps she forgot him. She was twenty-five; she had unconstrained friends, diversions. I wonder whether his end was peaceful.

Six years later, she too disappeared. So I left also. A relative trend.

Perhaps we passed him and he watched but couldn’t move or speak; that was one of the dreams: I’d see him see us not seeing him. And I’d wake with the same impression as I had when I woke to see embers and mist.

Fiction

19

Of Linens and Lungs KATE NACY

Collect the heavy things you’ve been meaning to carry downstairs. Collect a broken chair, an old bed frame, and jars of rotten cherries. Carry them down in trips and place them where they need to be placed. When you finish, step out into your neighborhood. Pass a fruit stand, a maternity shop, and a porno theater. Notice that today is Halloween.

(Halloween makes it hard to guess things).

Enter a store through a set of automated doors. Fill your hands with new things, pay, and leave. Pass hundreds of windows illuminated by systems of decorative lighting. Admire glass baubles dangling from string and wood. Admire antique chandeliers and contemporary suspensions. Admire a transparent wash of draperies. Imagine your own space, swaddled in draperies. Imagine your own space, filled like a lung.

Don’t linger, keep walking.

Return to the building in which you live, alone. Enter your apartment, passing in and out of four rooms. Enter and exit. Walk 70 kilometers in the space of 70 meters, tabulating. Sit on an unbroken chair. What were you meant to be doing? When you can’t remember, push a rag over countertops. Empty a trash bin. Arrange the refrigerator, intuitively.

Rank your lies in order of obviousness and try filling yourself.

Like a lung.

20

Poetry

Lichtung ADAM FLINT

The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent. – Martin Heidegger The other field gleams forth from its background the slippage concealed by the light and this is the clearing

Kind step to it the unlit edge where ash-fruit keys hang in bunches single-winged words circle locks

Poetry

Adam Flint

Circles hasten to overtake circles take over the water surface

Bloomed sky-whetted blade pride of the puddle’s cutler if you choose to will sever you from your vain craning love

21

22

Poetry

Adam Flint

Boughs over needle-water usher cloud and heal the riven surfaces I slant echoed in the clearing

A woodpecker sounds latent beams out repeating creaks The clearing exists only when the space it breaks rhymes I confront, again, the blunt silence and I

Poetry

Adam Flint

Call leaves down from their thin billets autumn winds for winter wants a loss to forget

Falling night-snow set the ground free Road and only these feet to get to Where the lights ran out

Know this that there is a clearing of arising and perishing visitors skirt with their children

23

24

Poetry

Adam Flint

where cold leaves buoy a dead stump for one to sit and drink distilled WaldblĂśĂ&#x;e naked splinter pine light draped in wood

Ferry hull Rain I can see the tremor I thought was me take form in the water and shatter in flashing diagonals Blooms

Poetry

Adam Flint

little petal litter rapture standing flush with standing water made blink and shone

Your face was there where the wood gave out I followed like a moth would the light stood in the clearing

25

MARINA ROCA DIE

Female Inside (right) Male Inside (overleaf)

40

Poetry

Molly all beach clean came over in the evening I didn’t know her but she

Wreck Beach EMMA WIPPERMANN

looked at me that way that said I could All curly red long & strong sandy lean Molly who swept the patio while I lit up coals cut vegetables talked to all the others the blueing evening through but how when she said Goodnight Molly hugged

Poetry

Emma Wippermann

me all the way down how hard like sea salt I was soft & small against salty Molly Ha! how Molly came naked from the beach put on clothes to come eat my grilled portobellos

41

Poetry

67

Contour Drift CHLOE JONES

68

Poetry

Chloe Jones

Disintegration

Fiction

79

Vessel WILLIAM VANDENBERG

When did you know we were here?

I first saw traces of you in October, when the topsoil froze hard. The sound of your footsteps rushing down the hallway passed into my dreams – I dreamt them as rain falling on the roof. Later I woke and saw your shadows projecting from the crack beneath the door. For a long time I thought I dreamt them.

How did you find us?

Twelve years ago I bought an abandoned, bank-owned hotel in northern Canada, just inside the Arctic Circle. I owned a large amount of property back then.

The structure was intended to house workers for a planned natural gas operation, but the company pulled out at the last minute. The hotel was effectively useless – it’s 150 miles from the nearest town. The first owner vanished shortly after that. This was all back in the early eighties.

The gas company retained the mineral rights to the land and said they’d return when the operation became profitable. I bought the hotel sight unseen, speculating that they would one day return.

80

William VanDenBerg

Fiction

Now they’re scheduled to begin drilling in the spring. I came to repair the place over the winter. My wife and children plan to join me once the land thaws.

Will they come?

Before I left, my wife began using the word “if” instead of “when.” She justly holds me accountable for the wreck of our finances.

How large is the hotel?

Twenty-four rooms all on one level. Also a lobby, an office, and the manager’s suite. I tried to sell my kids on the place – I told them it’d be like a vacation all the time. “Any room you want,” I said, but they’re old enough to see through that ploy.

What about the surrounding area?

The hotel sits in a large, empty basin of permafrost. Every window provides the same view – you see only the blank tundra and the slight rise of the outer rim.

The high amount of salt in the soil keeps the caribou away. No caribou, no Inuit. The man who drove me up here explained that I wouldn’t see another human before spring.

The layers of ice and dirt move with the shifting temperature. Sometimes the soil lifts objects up to the surface; sometimes it pulls them under, buries them in sheets of frozen earth.

Fiction

William VanDenBerg

When did you arrive?

Late August. The bank provided me with photos of the damaged areas: a collapsed ceiling on the northwest corner, two carpets black and molded with water damage, holes in the walls (some jagged, some perfectly round), and wide heaps of debris. I paid a contractor to instruct me on the necessary repairs.

I hired a trucker in Inuvik to transport me and the materials required.

The hotel didn’t match the photos I’d been given: the blue exterior had switched to green; in room eight an oval hole had relocated from the wall to the ceiling. The debris had grown. Someone else owned the building between the original owner and I. The used satellite phone I bought in Whitehorse refused to acknowledge a signal, so I had no way of asking the bank about who made the changes. I had no way of contacting my family. After helping me unload my supplies the trucker left and I was alone.

What did you find in the debris?

A lot of paper covered in illegible scrawl. I don’t know if it was English or not. Scraps of food, table legs, a globe, seven pairs of gloves, batteries, four men’s shirts, even more paper, two empty gas cans. There’s more if you’d like to hear it.

That’s enough. What was written on the walls of the office?

I couldn’t understand it.

81

82

William VanDenBerg

Fiction

When did you start seeing the people on the horizon?

Late September. The repairs went well and I was lulled into a routine. I patched all the holes leading outside and rebuilt the collapsed section of roof. The newly painted exterior of the hotel glowed light blue in the arctic dawn. The property was ready for winter.

Once, I saw black dots on the horizon where none had been before.

At first I thought they were trees, but that couldn’t be – I’m certain that the horizon has always been empty.

Then the dots moved. To the left a ways, then back to the right. They moved quickly and never toward me, just skittered around the lip of the basin.

I waved, and I swear to god one of them waved back.

What did you do during the days?

I put off working on the interior of the hotel. The winter made me restless. I walked around in the tundra and tried to get lost, but nothing obscured my view of the building.

I found little holes out in the ground, like burrows. Never more than two inches wide. I brought a 100-foot coil of twine out with me and ran the whole thing down one of the larger holes. When it ran out I detached the twine from the end of the reel and it fell down the hole and out of view.

Fiction

William VanDenBerg

And then?

The crawling man.

Tell me how you found him.

I heard him thump and drag down the hallway. This was in late November. I got up and left my room. He was on the ground, pulling himself forward with his hands. He crawled slowly toward the front entrance.

He reached for the door, twenty feet away. By the time I got to him he was stopped – all motion had left his body.

It was as if something had taken him apart and then lacked the knowledge to correctly reassemble him. His fingers were ribboned and his face was hastily lumped on itself. All over I saw white flashes of bone. His nose was pulped – twin holes led into his nasal cavity and they leaked blood.

And the journal?

Ah. It was about ten feet behind. A little black spiral-bound thing.

What did it say?

I thought you already knew.

Please. Tell me.

83

84

William VanDenBerg

Fiction

The author wrote about being trapped underground. He wrote about his dreams and the act of coming home in them. He mentioned some kind of being – the only word used for it is “vessel.” It came here a long time ago and the earth took it. He talked about the vessel and when it realized it would never see home again.

Then the occupants. The vessel removed their bodies but left the soul – that is the word the author used: soul, singular. The vessel saw the land and made a connection. It rotted and holes shot up to the surface.

The book explained: when the occupants of the vessel rise out of the ship they pass a fulcrum and get their bodies back. In doing so they lose their memories. Or the memory is the soul – by this point the author has lapsed into incoherence. The last intelligible word is “returned.”

And the stairs leading down?

I saw them immediately after I found the journal. The crawling man’s blood provided a clear path back to a hatch in the floor. It had previously been covered by carpet – the crawling man tore through it to get to my level. I lifted the hatch up a few inches and saw thin stairs descending into the hallway below. The carpet on that level matched the one on mine. I didn’t go down just then.

I ran the heater too high. I ate too many rations and took prolonged walks in the snow. On December 1st, I took the man’s body outside and covered it in a plastic tarp – the ground was much too hard for a burial.

When I returned my hands were blue and the stairs remained.

It didn’t even feel like a choice.

Fiction

William VanDenBerg

What was on the first level?

It mirrored the hotel above ground, although the rooms were better preserved. Everything looked untouched except for the trail of blood on the carpet. The blood led to another hatch, and then the second level.

What was on the second level?

The same, but I found you in a room down here.

Will you continue down?

Yes. I can hear it calling.

What do you expect to find?

Can’t you hear it?

You have to understand – I have been in this room as long as I can remember. There is nothing past it.

I’ve been to the surface. I’ve seen stairs leading down further than this level. Where do you think you come from? Do you even know how long you’ve been here?

I can’t answer any of your questions. Please leave. Our bodies in here are too much for me.

Fine. I’ll go alone.

85

86

William VanDenBerg

Fiction

I wait until he closes the door and the door sounds. Faintly down the hall I hear his footsteps on the stairs, down, down. I follow him at a distance but the body clinging to me takes up most of the hallway and my limbs do not work in concert with each other. I topple and slide down the stairs.

He looks back and I press myself small and try to shed the excess I gained up there, try in vain because he looks right back at me and shakes his head. He searches room to room and slams each door after finding nothing. On the third level all the lighting fixtures are gold with green shades. Dark wood panels line the walls. Everything is brand new as he goes down to the fourth, then fifth level and still I follow him.

My body deflates and parts of it go translucent and it sheds and sheds.

The architecture shifts – the floor bucks and the doorways lack doors, gain arches. The straight hall bows in and in a few levels the hallway will arc back on itself into a bent circle.

By the time we get to the final level I am nearly unmade and so is he.

There are cracks in the flooring and holes and I can see that there is no further level, just a long, straight drop with seething lights blinking out an unfamiliar color at the bottom – even I don’t know the name of the color, but it talks to me, talks to us, although he makes no sign of understanding past a low moan.

The man struggles to reach the final set of stairs, the dropoff. The vessel has taken the first few layers off him and I see his fingers burst and wide rectangles tear back. The vessel doesn’t know how to unmake him, but it tries in and out and tries in earnest.

Fiction

William VanDenBerg

I must go back up before my body vanishes. I must make a place for myself on the middle levels – he used the right word earlier: There I will find a fulcrum.

The man now drops to his hands and knees and might fall flat and stop there – the vessel might fail to pry him out. He can’t and won’t stop yelling a word over and over that sounds like home but comes out as a wet rag of a word that resembles foam or loam or comb.

I wait and hear him. That act is important – I know the word witness has many of us in it. I wait until I am nearly gone and then I climb the stairs and do not go home but become a body again.

87

PABLO DĂ?AZ BENZO

Flotar (right) A Vague Idea What a Sad Story Is (overleaf)

106

Fiction

The It Works JESSE KOHN

How It Starts I was on an escalator going down. I usually walk down but not today.

Usually I say to myself, Why just wait when you can go down twice as fast with a little effort less effort in fact than going down a staircase of similar dimension half the effort in fact as you’ll face half as many steps?

But not on this particular day. On this particular day I just stood there.

There I stood going down. This was twenty-five or maybe thirty or probably more like twenty-five but between twenty-five and thirty years ago though not exactly between not in the middle I mean but nearer twenty-five definitely nearer twenty-five than thirty years ago. Learning how it’s done – how it’s really done – I mean learning how to love you has meant learning how to notice that this escalator is a staircase.

Meaning It Kiss me, I say, like you mean it. Then stop making me laugh, she laughs.

Stop laughing, I say, and kiss me, and kiss her wet teeth and her wrinkled forehead creased in laughter as she ducks down to dodge it. You’ll make me miss it, she laughs, you’ll make me miss my bus. You won’t miss it, I

Fiction

Jesse Kohn

say, I’ll let you go and you’ll make it and make it fine but only if you kiss me, I say, stop laughing and really kiss me. She kisses me but not really. Really, I say, I mean it. I mean it, she laughs, I’ll miss my bus. Another bus, I say. I need this one, she laughs. I’ll let you go, I say, if you just kiss me, stop laughing and kiss me like you mean it. I mean it, she laughs, you have to let me go. Then kiss me. I can’t. Stop laughing, I can’t. Then I can’t let you go.

Then I’ll miss my bus. So be it. I mean it. Another bus. I need this one. Then kiss me. I did. Like you mean it. I can’t. Stop laughing. I can’t. Just kiss me.

I mean it. Then kiss me. I can’t. Then I can’t let you go. Let me go. I can’t.

I mean it. Then kiss me. I can’t. Stop laughing. I’m not. She isn’t. I can see it. She’s not. You’re not. I mean it. I love you. I mean it, she says and closes the door behind her. I laugh and wait for her to open it.

Doing It Nothing worth doing is easy I had come to accept but that several things not worth doing should be no less difficult I found more difficult.

What I found difficult was that nothing – whether worth doing or not – seemed easy and that the worth or worthlessness of it in no way seemed to diminish the difficulty involved in doing it.

Now doing it came more naturally so naturally we found ways of not doing it. It being more difficult to abstain we assumed abstaining was more worth doing.

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108

Jesse Kohn

Fiction

It may not be worth stating that these were difficult days – thus worthwhile days – days reigned by the grave misconception that the worth and worthlessness of doing something had something to do with intensities of difficulty.

A difficult misconception to maintain – a misconception therefore worth maintaining – to say nothing of the graver misconception that we knew what worth was anyway.

Anyway we didn’t really abstain. Abstaining would have been easier – easier and therefore worth less than what we in fact did.

We did in fact do it but less often than we once did. Once a day at best and often less often. Only when I was so hard I was worth doing.

It got harder and harder to find work which proved finding work worthwhile while counter-intuitively the hardness made me hard less often which made abstaining much easier and therefore less worth doing.

I brought this to her attention by not making her breakfast which I meant as a suggestion we try doing it more often. Often I’d opted to communicate this way – this way being more difficult therefore more worthwhile.

Meanwhile it was communicating this way and the repetition of communicating this way and the obvious worthlessness of the repetition despite the difficulty of the repetition of communicating this way that first brought to my attention the possibility that our misconception was misconceived. That is how I began to piece it together or rather take it apart.

I took apart the misconception and we pieced our parts together.

Which wasn’t as chance would have it very difficult – not once we’d softened our determination to make doing it so hard.

Fiction

Jesse Kohn

The ease with which I got hard confirmed just how grave was our misconception but graves and conceptions were likewise confirming – conceiving and dying had to be worth doing if anything in between could be considered worth doing.

If anything in between could be considered worth doing doing it had to be worth doing since doing it led to conceptions and graves.

Being led to conceptions and graves wasn’t difficult but learning how to be not difficult was somehow still easier said than done.

How It’s Done Close your eyes. Good. Keep them closed for the duration of this lesson which isn’t really a lesson but a holiday – a holiday from lessons and a break from books. You will be reminded sporadically not to open them – eyes that is – but disregard these redundancies should you be in no need of reminders.

Great. We can begin. With your eyes closed, see yourself at the house of a dear friend. Is it a friend you grew up with? A house you know well?

Or is it an oddly modern cookie-cutter condo in a Colorado suburb where your friend Dylan lives with his older brother Matt and Matt’s friends from college? Let the room you imagine yourself waking up in – a small nearly windowless room next door to Dylan’s on the basement level – be a specific room from your past a place of comfort and communion and solace and not a room you might wake up early in not knowing whether it’s day or night out and unsure of where you are or what you’re doing there in this break from your life – a holiday from a

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Jesse Kohn

Fiction

home you are not eager to return to – a home as insecure as this precarious vacation you are on.

Do not open your eyes and refrain from imagining that after an interminable period of restlessness you at last rise from the worn-out pull-out on which you are lying and exit the room to empty your bladder in the adjacent bathroom and utility closet with unfinished floors and a bare light bulb hanging crooked from the water-stained ceiling – a rusted brass chain attached which slips through your fingers and slingshots around the light bulb stranding the chain end to jeer and dangle just beyond where you might reach it. Grope calmly instead through the darkness you are in and try to discover the mutter of your own inner music.

Keep your eyes closed and see what it sounds like. Speak it aloud and write it as you speak it. As you read with eyes closed and see yourself speaking it and writing it also see yourself reading it for it contains wisdom from unconscious reservoirs.

Now as you penetrate the perfidious surface of this prose circling or underlining (the choice is yours) the ubiquitous but camouflaged slips of the pen remember that you have not forgotten not to open your eyes – your eyes that are closed and not the eyes which would like to keep opening as you struggle to settle on the paper-thin pull-out and wrestle the blanket over fidgeting limbs.

While keeping your eyes closed – reading and seeing yourself hearing and speaking and writing and reading in the solace-filled room in the house of your friend – know that you are enjoying a much-needed holiday from all the reading you’ve been doing and that on this holiday you are finally hearing your music and sounding your reservoirs. What do

Fiction

Jesse Kohn

you see? Can you see your need to rest? To find comfort? To fall back asleep? To keep your eyes closed as you contort your body to conform to the threadbare pull-out – this pull-out which is just thin skin along someone else’s backbone – a scrap of paper wrapped around a row of knuckles…

No. That’s not what you see. Not when you really read it. You know you cannot lose yourself. Not on a pull-out. Not here. See yourself desisting this impossible exercise. See your spring-coiled eyes open like they’d like to. See the condo of somnolence in which you alone are not sleeping. With your eyes closed see yourself alone with eyes open. See what has so dogged and bothered you – see it glow. See how it’s done.

Keep your eyes closed. See that it’s morning. See crystalline light through rattling leaves echo clatters of your tattered footwear – worn to the bone – see how it clarifies your flight from front porch to park bench and illuminates the utility box set in the center of the park – see that utility box plastered with stratified graffiti – see how it changes – with eyes closed see – see the spray-paint liquefy to imitate the children and their laughter and the music from the reservoir that resounds about the playground and tells you how it’s done.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Liz Bahs is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Jo Shapcott. Her poetry has been published in a wide variety of magazines in the UK, Europe, and the US. Her poem “Okapi” won third prize in the 2013 Magma Judge’s competition; other poems have been highly commended for the Wasafiri Prize 2013 and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize competition in 2011.

D.B. Brodie was born in Kansas City, Kansas. After school he moved first to Boston, then to Los Angeles, where, in addition to writing, he works as a film and video editor.

Pippa Chapman is a Cardiff cuckoo egg, GI father – Pigeon Service mother. Raised as a deceptively-only child in Sussex, now in Norfolk, UK, where blackbirds, no other, unpick her confidential shreddings.

Everybody nudges up lovely – the tree is in the air again and we’re off to Wales.

Ben Collas is a poet/writer based in Berlin. Seeking to interfuse rhythmic intensity with philosophical depth, he plans to release his first collection of poetry/essays later this year.

Valerie Cumming received her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan; since then, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in over a dozen publications. Currently, she works as a freelance writer, teacher, and editor based in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and four daughters.

Contributors

Pablo DĂ­az Benzo is a graphic designer and artist whose career has been marked by the influence of graffiti and street painting. His work is characterized by the construction of confusing and unreal situations where mysterious places, furniture, and collections of objects are mixed with abstract images, often with a lack of coherent perspective.

Currently he is working with acrylic as a technique, and canvas and paper as support for his paintings in studio. While on the street he mixes all kinds of paint types, then applies them with a roller and spray cans. Benzo is a member of the WSDM Crew from Chile and a collaborator with Graffitomag.cl.

Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz is a poet and translator from Carolina, Puerto Rico. He completed his first book of poetry, Phenomenology of Brother, in 2012, and is currently working on a nine-book epic poem about the Puerto Rican criminal justice system, cockfighting, Sufism, and euthanasia. His poetry has been featured in The Acentos Review, Sargasso, Entasis Journal, Why I Am Not a Painter, and SAND issues four and six.

He lives and teaches English in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Adam Flint is from England and currently based in Berlin. He continues to be inspired by minerals, moths, and the music of Bark Psychosis.

Past poems have appeared in The Rialto and The Journal, among others. A chapbook collection is forthcoming from Bitterzoet Press.

April L. Ford’s first story collection, The Poor Children, received the grand prize of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program

Contributors

for Fiction in the fall of 2013; the collection is forthcoming with SFWP in early 2015. April serves as Managing Editor of Digital Americana Magazine and teaches Creative Writing at State University of New York at Oneonta. She’s presently working on her second novel and enjoys her spouse and The Smiths as company (april-l-ford.com).

Sarah Howe teaches English at Cambridge University. Her first book of poems is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus in 2015.

Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2014 at silencedpress.com. Tunneling to the Moon and Light from a Small Brown Bird (poetry, Bitter Oleander Press) are both due out in paperback in 2014.

Chloe Jones was raised in the California valley and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2012. She currently studies Art History as an undergraduate student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Jesse Kohn is a reader, writer, and editor of long and short stories. He is based in Brooklyn, but hails from Santa Fe. His writing has appeared or is scheduled to appear in The Atlas Review, Bombsite, Bookslut, Quarterly Conversation, HTMLGiant, and The Hairy Dog Review. His reading has appeared in many places, from his own kitchen table to an abandoned airplane runway in Berlin.

Contributors

Alexandra Levasseur likes to draw, paint, and make animated films.

She lives and works in Montreal (alexandralevasseur.com).

Kate Nacy’s work appears or is forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, Fiction International, Juked, McSweeney’s, The Prague Revue, Revolver, and other publications. She helps coordinate the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and can be found online at katenacy.com.

Stephanie Newman grew up in Connecticut and moved to Berlin looking for adventure and inspiration. Her book reviews and criticism have appeared in The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Stephanie studied English and was publisher of the 168-year-old literary magazine The Harvard Advocate. She currently runs Reading for Pleasure, Berlin’s weekly e-newsletter covering all things literary. You can subscribe at berlinreads.com.

Amanda Nowakowski grew up in rural East Tennessee, went to high school in Karlsruhe, Germany, and studied at the University of Tennessee and Leningrad State University before earning her doctorate in Russian Literature at UCLA. Her poetry has been published in The International Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Poetry/LA, The Mochila Review, Red Rock Review, The White Pelican Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Jacaranda Review, The Coe Review, Amethyst Arsenic (online), The T. J. Eckleburg Review (online), and War, Literature & the Arts (forthcoming). She lives with her family in Woodland Hills, California, and teaches English at Viewpoint School in Calabasas, California.

Contributors

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, including free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at simonperchik.com.

Erin Quinn is an award-winning Canadian visual artist who has lived and worked in Dublin, Ireland, since 1998. Erin’s work has been exhibited and published around the world, including at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s annual exhibition in 2011, where she was awarded the prestigious Curtin O’Donoghue Photography Prize for Breaking Point 2.

Marina Roca Die, born in 1988 in Madrid, is a visual artist who primarily works with painting and drawing, often combining these with materials such as textile and string. She studied Fine Arts, Painting, and Sculpture at La Palma School of Art and at Estudio Arjona in Madrid as well as Artistic Anatomy Drawing at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Marina currently lives and works in Berlin.

Celina Su (celinasu.net) was born in São Paulo and lives in Brooklyn.

Her writing has appeared in a poetry chapbook from Belladonna*, three books on social policy and civil society, and journals including n+1, Aufgabe, and Boston Review. Her honors include the American Academy in Berlin Prize, the Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching, and an Academy of American Poets prize. She teaches political

Contributors

science at the City University of New York. She co-founded the Burmese Refugee Project (burmeserefugeeproject.org) in Thailand in 2001 and received her Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT. Jeff Tigchelaar’s poems have appeared in publications including North American Review, Pleiades, Phoebe, Gertrude, LIT, Handsome, Harpur Palate, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, The Offending Adam, Best New Poets 2011, and Verse Daily. His blog, Stay-at-Home Pop Culture, is published by XYZ Magazine of Topeka.

Jy Turin is a recent graduate from Oxford University, now living in Berlin and working on a novel.

William VanDenBerg is the author of Lake of Earth (Caketrain Press, 2013). Recent stories have appeared in The Collagist, Spork, and Pear Noir. He lives with his wife in Denver, Colorado.

Peter Wallis is a UK-based poet. Born an identical twin in 1954, he is currently Submissions Editor for Poems in the Waiting Room, Britain’s widest circulating poetry periodical, and poet in residence at Little Plumstead Primary School. His prizewinning work has been published in Great Britain and New Zealand.

Emma Wippermann is from the only hilly part of the Midwestern US. Currently a bookseller in Berlin, she will soon be bicycling up the coast of Norway.