Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #16

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine

Issue # 16 Spring/Summer 2022 www.sblaam.com

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue #16

spring/summer, 2022 fiction

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Dead Dreams

12

A Father's Son

52

Neighbors

34

Pam Munter

The Piano Player and the Singer

44

Shari Brand Ray

The Story I Should Have Told

74

Bill Vernon

Let Us Rejoice

24

Dmitry Blizniuk

A Yawn of a Butterfly, a Handful of Confetti

10

Barbara Daniels

Mushroom Armies

42

The Swarm

43

Patrick Theron Erickson

No Encore

73

Elder Gideon

Gnostic Triptych

28

Leslie Hodge

Martha Stewart Living

69

The Three-Dog Leash

70

The Old Neighborhood

20

O Happy Dagger

21

Nostalgia

22

Losses

66

Wonders

67

Earthbound

68

Babak Movahed non-fiction

poetry

Stephen Jackson

Sandra Kacher

Charlene Langfur

Al Maginnes

Don't Ever Let Go—Not Until They Make You

4

Moments of Infinite Value

5

The Full Moon on the Fourth of July 2020

6

Buddha Poem

7

What Is Always With Us

83

Cricket's Leg

84

Carrying Time

86

Elizabeth Mathes

Centrifuge

80

Red Giant

81

Shape Shifting

30

The Widow's Song

32

My Messy Self

33

In Church, I'd Never Sing

50

(True story #12) I asked my dad

51

George Thomas

Betrayal

72

James Tyler

Space Hero

Judith Mikesch McKenzie

Ron Riekki

8

images AD Anderson Jeff Davis

[untitled photograph]

64

[untitled photograph]

65

Financial District NYC

27

Sapa Vietnam

82

Noah Harrell

[untitled photograph]

Amanda Joy Meyers

Pollinator Paradise

31

Geothermal

49

The Cardinal

23

Marietta Modl

9

cover: Geothermal (partial), by Amanda Joy Meyers

Editor's Note This month—March, 2022—marks the two year anniversary of the World Health Organization's declaration of a COVID pandemic. We've all become used to having to cope with the stress, the depression, the heartache. It's not only fitting that the arts reflect these emotions that are lately so prevalent; it's also essential that they do so. As Hamlet says to a group of actors, the “purpose of playing” is “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

In this issue, we have such art and literature that reflect our times. Charlene Langfur's poetry deals with the dual stresses of COVID and age. In his photograph “Financial District NYC,” Jeff Davis conveys an atmosphere of turmoil. Bill Vernon recreates his feelings of helplessness in dealing with the literal push-and-pull of a hurried society. And Sandeep Kumar Mishra, in “Dead Dreams,” reminds us that our reaction to injustice, which can strike any time or place, requires patience, determination, and strength.

Our wish is that you find these and the other works in this issue a mirror that may help you cope. And may this next year see relief from our stresses and what brings them.

Don’t Ever Let Go—Not Until They Make You These days I read all the self—help articles and walk every day and get plenty of sleep and eat peas and red beans, always trying for more.

This is how it is in the kind of world where hope is an idea that needs holding on to, needs building up by each one of us, for whatever is needed, light or water, earth or air.

This is how I have built up a way for me now to grow older and keep steady day to day.

This is the way, trying to hold the morning in my hands at daybreak, keeping my eyes keen, looking out for bees and hummingbirds, and I am learning to be in love with ease, doing exactly what I know how to do in the physical world, surviving in the ruins of old loves, cheaters, the silence at the other end of the phone when I need to really talk to a friend.

Tomorrow I plan to transplant a cache of little aloe plants into small clay pots, and this will mean no matter what lies surround me, there is a garden, a new life, starting up from out of nothing at all.

And when I write under the full moon about love coming around again, it sticks as if showing up in the poem it takes on a real narrative on of its own, well-scripted, easily dreamt, all become part of short walks into the night under the stars and the blackness in a desert in earth changes in a tough time.

I am learning to make a go of it this way, with less, accepting so much conditional love as it is, taking to what comes back no matter what is lost, orange rose buds on an old rose bush out back breaking open, wild, nearly voluptuous with life, and I know in the moment this is as good as it gets, watching the palm leaves sway overhead over and over as I sway along with them, what blooms in its way and everyday I am watching for them to show up again and again, dressed in my blue cotton shirt the color of the sky. It is magic.

Charlene Langfur Charlene Langfur is a self-described organic gardener, rescued dog advocate, Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow, and LGBTQ senior. Her poems frequently appear in Weber—The Contemporary West, Inkwell, and North Dakota Quarterly.

Moments of Infinite Value This is what I tell myself now in the midst of the pandemic that everything I know is simpler than I once thought it was.

For me, I begin my day with my honey-colored dog, her leaping on our walk, her paws in the air, my walk easy, step by step, the sun on my face, the breeze kissing my forehead, this is how time surrounds us now as we are home most of the time.

Each day my dog and I stop under the old fan palm trees here in the desert oasis, the fat palm leaves draping over our heads, lizards running amok to warm up on the rocks, so small as if I dreamt them up to put them in a poem, to give me a sign, when the tiny ones run I think the path is the right one, the path I have learned to grown older on without concern for where I am going, only ahead of me, life tending to the aloe and the calendula, sweet peas covered with white flowers bending and rising to a new day, apace, as I am making plans for lunch as I walk along, walnuts and cheese, and I’m trying to figure out what I know of what I need today, using less, dreaming more, telling the truth, growing smarter, planting what I know will come back and how I may use it best, giant sunflower seeds in my pocket, sweet nasturtium, its petals good to put on my soup, the flowers will grow and live in the moonlight.

Nothing can stop us from getting on this way, learning what to give back, teaching ourselves how to do it again, how to sit quiet when we must, breathing in and walking and allowing the earth to heal again. This is how I find my way, the only way I know to live in the world we have now of earth and water, air and fire, with limited resources. I look for what is enough, stick to it, learn more, practice until it is time for another day.

Charlene Langfur

The Full Moon on the Fourth of July 2020 The fan palm leaves are still, no wind on them on a night like this, the land and the trees quiet as the country is as if it is time to quiet up everywhere that we’re simpatico with what is happening, the pandemic, the rise in voices about justice, change coming whether we want it or not, and if we are mindful, I think we can hear it, the duress, the way we need to stand up for each other, follow the rules for what needs doing.

I put on my kerchief as a mask, grab my blue cane, walk out under the giant moon over head, walking with my 13-pound honey-colored dog until we reach the edge of the canyon where the cactus is in bloom and the aloe grows tall and thick, past dreams of America and growing older and being a lesbian in a world where women rarely come first, and I am ready to try again, work at home reading essays, thousands of them and later write more poems, plant more in the garden, follow all the change around me as we go from day to day, the way we have learned to walk slow and watchful under the luminous moon from out of the shadows into the light, past the yellow trumpet flowers blooming in the heat, what is unstoppable, the two of us unflappable, undaunted, holding on exactly as we know how Charlene Langfur

Buddha Poem How far have we gone today past the little moon in the giant sky here in the deep of the dark, past the fluttering of the fan palms going out and coming back home, past the morasses and the desert grasses, past loss until it is gone off, the smallest birds over our heads, a compass inside them, flying beyond the thin air to life in the cool of the night, past a world of hurt in the pandemic, and the black crows are in the big old trees out back, and so far it feels like a new start all over again and again, no matter how long it takes, as late as this, taking to the world, planting seeds, doing no harm Charlene Langfur

Space Hero I will fasten rockets to my feet in order to go high up there, catch asteroids and comets like baseballs, drink solar flares and eat moon pies.

Who fears the black, open universe?

Probably me. Definitely me.

I’m old. I go all the way back.

You’re old, too. We all come from the same, ultimate orgasm. We’re family.

Sister, if it’s cliché to make metaphors of stars I will shut my mouth and look at them, whistle the opening tune from Star Trek.

I forgot how many miles it is from here to the sun, but I’ll head that way now, dream of floating in the hydrogen and helium hot tub. My mom tells me I should pack a lunch because the journey is long and bumpy.

And put on some sunblock. I might burn.

I suppose people will write books about me, sing anthems inspired by my courage, my name known throughout the solar system.

To be totally honest, I’ve shopped for a cape.

I think that would be proper attire for my mission.

I will fly up there, hum a John Williams tune ad infinitum.

James Tyler James Tyler has been published in such journals as Chiron Review, El Portal, Doubly Mad, and others. He earned a BA in English from Austin Peay State University and currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

untitled photograph

Noah Harrell

A Yawn of a Butterfly, a Handful of Confetti The flying snow outside the window— huge flakes, a slanted white fringe— made the room look like a firm soap bubble, or a capsule of a space ship.

We, astronauts of love, were comfortably settled in it, and the winter silence— the burlap wrapping Hannibal's elephants crossing the Alps of life— made us confident, while your cream-white, sleepy waterfall of curtains gave us comfort.

In such winter evenings, non-Euclidean, warped by the snowfall, you can feel your roots.

Like a pine, you let them touch the eerie depth of millenniums, go deeper and deeper, like black multi-armed lightning.

How big is the civilization?— just a yawn of a butterfly, a handful of confetti thrown on a piece of raw meat. . . .

Do you remember the evening BI (before the Internet), when electricity was cut in the whole building, and we suddenly became a thousand years older, got filled with animal wisdom and darkness, but were still lit by an inner light, usually invisible?

Like blind people who live by touch, by poking fingers, like sneaking wart hogs, we lit candles, searched for books, had mysterious conversations, listening to the rustles, whispers, drops of sound, which touched the surface of the lake of silence, to the flinching fridge, to the thump of the doors opening and closing in the stairwell, to flickering ribbons of the voices between the concrete walls, or to the murmur of our own circulatory systems, as if we were in a womb.

Do you remember, fifteen years ago, the chandelier suddenly went off,

as if a royal golden octopus had died of a heart attack?

The tape-recorder stopped working.

Paganini's melody came to a sudden end, as if the violinist's hand had been chopped off.

The whitened fingers were still clenching the bow tight, but the music grew out of itself and played on and on— in our minds, in the silence.

Who are we? shipwrecked, on the islands of souls, we don't venture into the depth of the jungle.

We stay put on the beach where we can be rescued (do you believe it?) and where there are no leopards.

We swim, fish, and sunbathe.

We argue and suffer from loneliness, but we never exactly know what's hidden behind our backs, how many ways can lead to other worlds.

Sometimes the starry hunger pushes us to a secret door, however no one but impostors has the key to it.

For we and only we are the keys to all doors, to all holes in time and space.

Dmitry Blizniuk (translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov) Dmitry Blizniuk lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch, Salamander, and others. The Red Fоrest, a chapbook, was published in 2018.

Dead Dreams In his dreams, Rajan searches for the ghosts. He hunts for them, tracing their footsteps in the dirt. He is back in his hometown—he knows these roads. The moonlight shivers on his skin. The crooked streets rattle around him. His heart burns in his chest.

Baba, mama. Where are you?

He runs, following the path laid out for him. The streets smell like smoke.

Everything is hazy and deserted, shuttered up and locked away. He knows his neighbors behind each door, but no one steps out to help him. They’re too scared. Rajan is terrified, too, but he keeps running.

Please, if I could just see you one more time. I didn’t know it would be the last time. I would have said so much more. Baba, mama.

When he looks up, the ghosts are farther away than before. They blur in the distance, like a poorly developed photo, but he can still sense the sadness etched upon their faces. Their feet twist backward from their bodies. Bhuta. Spirits. He should have known better—he’s been following their trail the wrong way the entire time. He won’t ever catch up now.

Grief sweeps over Rajan like a monsoon. He drops to his knees. The ground begins to crumble. A dark pit opens underneath him—a grave, cloying and sticky with the scent of death. The spirits watch from a distance, cold in the low moonlight.

Rajan falls.

He wakes up with a jolt. It’s still dark outside. Warm air filters in from the cracked window by his cot. The only sound in his cell is his own unsteady breath and what sounds like the rustle of paper. He looks at his journals, but they lie still across the room, untouched.

He looks out the window. Two beady black eyes stare back at him, then rise in the dark, unfurling into an undulating brown body. The snake’s tail lashes out and strikes the window. Rajan jumps back, heart hammering in his chest. The snake hisses, but it sounds more like a shriek of mocking laughter.

He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night. ~~~

Dawn spills like pale pink soup over the horizon, bringing with it a searing heat that refuses to break. The prisoners queue up to receive sloppy rations of oatmeal ladled into their bowl. The cafeteria smells like vinegar and bleach.

Rajan sits down at a table and pulls out one of his journals. He’s made it a point to write every day he’s been imprisoned—it’s the only thing keeping him sane. A flip of the journal’s pages shows his journey: raw confusion, first, legal jargon for later lookup, then feverish thoughts of revenge as he realized what had happened. After, a dull acceptance of his fate, then a sudden jolt back to confusion as the pandemic hit and the world spun upside down.

He still feels all those things like an ache in the pit of his chest, a heartburn he can’t get rid of. Rajan used to take pride in his sensitive emotions—it made him a better poet, after all, and his poetry landed him a teaching position at a prestigious university.

Now, though, he wishes he could turn off his mind. There’s too much to feel. It’s overwhelming.

“Hey.” One of the other prisoners—a skull-inked man aptly nicknamed Bones— nudges Rajan’s side. “Stop writing, professor. What’s the point? None of us are ever getting out of here.”

Rajan does not spare him a glance, and continues writing. “The words are the point.” If he doesn’t write, then the words haunt him in the dark, and he doesn’t sleep.

Bones grunts. “That’s deep, man. I bet if I was that deep, my wife wouldn’t’ve left me.”

This is a ritual the prisoners go through daily, sitting around the table and wishing things had gone differently—a storytelling, of sorts. Rajan has heard it all by now. If I hadn’t met her. . . if he hadn’t pissed me off so much. . . if the cops hadn’t been nearby that day. . . . Rajan has never played their game. There’s no point in wondering about the past. He isn’t even sure about enough details about his case to wish differently.

All Rajan knows is this: one minute, he was an esteemed professor travelling internationally to attend a literary seminar. The next, airport security found a bag of white powder in his carry-on, and there was a global pandemic. The world was having a

collective panic attack, and his pleas of innocence were lost in the cries of a million others.

Rajan’s mouth goes dry just thinking about the horrors of that day. He takes a sip of milk, but it’s curdled, and stings going down his throat. He hacks up a cough.

Bones leans back. “Hey, get away from me, man. Is that contagious?”

“The sour milk? I hope not.” Rajan understands Bones’ anxiety. The fear of the plague is almost a second pandemic in and of itself. He sets the cup on the corner of his tray, as if it must be quarantined from the rest.

“Ugh.” Bones makes a face. “Why is everything here so rotten?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Rajan tells him dryly, and they both laugh. ~~~ Mid-morning, he gets a migraine, which makes him scream and kick his cot in frustration. He’s been plagued by headaches his whole life, but they got viciously worse when he came to Australia eight months ago: something about the climate, he suspects.

He’s learned that there’s nothing to do but wait them out.

Rajan curls up in a corner of the room, hands wrapped around his knees. White spots dance in his vision. It feels like a hammer is raining blows down on the back of his skull. When things got this bad, his wife used to soothe him with a cool compress, but now she’s a continent away. He passes out with her name on his tongue.

In his hazy, pain-filled sleep, he sees a snake. He can tell by the markings that it’s the same one from the previous night. Mottled spots of green blot the snake’s body like mold. No, not mold—it reminds Rajan of the diagrams of the COVID-19 virus he and the other prisoners were shown at the beginning of the pandemic.

The snake hisses at him. Rajan is distantly aware that this is a dream, so he does not flinch. The desert blurs around him. The prison at his back. He’s outside. He’s free, if he can just get past the snake in his path.

Rajan picks up a stick from the ground, intending to shoo the snake away. Before he can, the snake shrieks and flails, tail lashing on the ground. Rajan jumps back. The snake hurls itself towards him. He raises the stick and clubs it over the head. Its scales brush his wrist. He feels a pinch of pain. He pulls away, hits it again. It keens, wild and

pained. Adrenaline floods Rajan’s veins. He strikes the snake for a third time. It lies still.

Breathing hard, Rajan looks down at his wrist. Two pin-point pricks of fangbite are embedded in his skin. Poison seeps slowly through his veins. Dizziness overwhelms him, and he collapses.

He wakes up smothered in sheets from head to toe, like a funeral shroud. ~~~ The rest of the week flits by like a ghost in the mist. Time blurs, and Rajan struggles to find things to record in his journal. It’s just another day after day after day —what is there to write about when everyone is trapped, when nothing changes? He knows vaguely that this is momentous, that the world has never seen a pandemic of this magnitude, but he’s so isolated in the prison, he can’t even conceptualize how the outside world would be changed.

He is starting to forget the details of his family’s faces. He draws awkward, crooked pictures of them in his journal. Does his father wear two rings or one? Does his mother have a mole under her right eye or left? It strikes Rajan with a deep, tolling sadness that he will never again be able to look at them and remember.

With nothing else to do, Rajan starts recording his dreams. The doctor prescribed him sleeping pills to help with the migraines and insomnia—and they do help, but they make him dizzy, thick-limbed, unable to differentiate wake and sleep. In this halftwilight, he writes: October 18 2020. The ghosts came to visit me again. This time, it was my children. They danced around me in a circle, chanting, “Baba’s dead! Baba’s dead!”

I tried to tell them that I wasn’t dead, that I was just away temporarily, but they couldn’t hear or see me. I tried to embrace them, ruffle their hair, but I couldn’t touch them. It was as if I was invisible or a ghost. Am I becoming a ghost? My feet are straight, and bhuta are restless, transient things. I am not ever-moving. I am stuck. I hate being so stuck.

October 19 2020. Last night, I saw the snake—the same snake I always do. I killed the snake. But the snake returns. It bites itself—a perfect, pure, ouroboros. It behaves

like it also wants to die. I don’t know how to feel about this. The snake returns. The snake returns.

The rest of the entry trails off into unintelligibility, marked by a spot of sleepy drool at the edge of the page. ~~~ “What’s up, dude?” Bones prods Rajan’s shoulder. They’re in the exercise yard, Rajan crouching to pick up a dumbbell bar, Bones watching to make sure he doesn’t injure himself. “You look even more depressed than usual, which is saying something.”

Rajan focuses his efforts on squatting, then lifting the bar over his head. His muscles burn, but it feels good to sweat. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Really?” Bones arches an eyebrow. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“I am not—” A burst of light-headedness flows through Rajan. He sways unsteadily on his feet and sets the dumbbell down with a thunk. “I am not going to pass out,” he says, panting.

“Seriously, professor, you’re worrying me.” Bones offers him a water bottle, which Rajan gratefully accepts. “Is it the nightmares? Are they getting worse?”

Rajan blinks. Water drips down his chin. “How did you know?”

“You cry in your sleep.” At Rajan’s expression, Bones rushes to reassure him. “We all get the bad dreams, dude. We’ve all been through something heavy. If anyone judges you for it, I’ll beat them up.”

“Thanks,” Rajan says, flattered by the offer. He wipes sweat off his forehead. “I think. . . I might be cursed. I don’t know.” He gestures to his chest. “All my emotions are like water, filling me up, drowning me. There’s only so much grief a person can take.”

Bones sits next to him. “What do you see in the dreams? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“A snake,” Rajan says, holding up his hands. “About this big. We fight. I kill it.

The snake returns.”

Bones scratches his head. “The same dream? Every night?”

Rajan shrugs. “Pretty much.”

“Cool,” says Bones. “In my dreams, my wife always yells at me all the time.”

Rajan laughs humorlessly. “If you had the same dream every night, a spirit was haunting you. You needed to do something to appease it.”

“Like what?”

“Well, leave bowls of honey and milk outside for the fairies to eat, but you can’t do that here. Maybe just do something different to help it out? Hmm.” Bones taps his hand against the barbell. “Saying that aloud, it all sounds pretty nutty.”

Rajan gestures to the prison yard, to the barbed-wire walls and the world at large, where panic and a pandemic consume them all. “If you ask me, anything’s worth a try.”

“Or ask your doctor to double your prescription.”

“No, thanks. If I take any more sleeping pills, I might never wake up again.” The thought had been appealing, at times, but Rajan can’t go through with that. He has to find his way back to India, to his wife and to his children, to his parent’s ghosts and graves. He has to believe that someday, this will end. Giving up means he will end. ~~~ Rajan takes no sleeping pills that night. He lies on his cot, arms folded over his chest, and watches the moonlight seep like spoiled milk through the window. Some part of him thinks the snake might come to find him while he is awake, but the desert outside his window remains bleak and empty. In the end, he has to go to it, instead.

He closes his eyes. His breathing is soft and steady. He slips into sleep and dreams.

Here he is again. The jail behind him, the snake in front of him. Imprisonment or death. Are those his only options? Is he supposed to give up and let the snake poison him? Rajan refuses to believe it is so.

The snake bares its fangs, which curve like crescent moons in the light. Rajan picks up the stick. The wood is familiar in his hands, grooved from his grip.

“Back off,” he tells the snake. It hisses at him. “I mean it.”

The snake lunges for him. Rajan dodges away, swiping the stick out to protect his bare feet.

“What do you want from me? Just leave me alone!”

The snake writhes and coils. Its tail thumps in the dirt again. Rajan hits it with the stick. It howls.

This is his dilemma, the problem he’s figured out over many nights of mystic battle: he can wound the snake, but whenever he closes in for the killing blow, it finds a way to bite him. Slaughtering it only results in both of them dying.

Do something different. Break the cycle. Bones’ voice whispers in the back of Rajan’s head.

Rajan backs away. The snake follows. Blood drips from its abdomen.

“Stop,” Rajan says. “I don’t want to hurt you.” The snake ignores him. It seems compelled to attack. Its black eyes fix on the weapon in his hand.

So Rajan sets the stick down.

His heart is pounding in his chest. He raises his hands above his head. “See?” he says, mouth dry. “I mean it.”

The snake rises up, twists its head to consider him. Its eyes reflect the white-chip light of the stars above.

“Go,” Rajan says. “You’re released. You don’t have to die to be free.”

The snake places its body back on the flat ground, as if it is bowing to him. Then it slithers off into the desert, leaving soft plumes of dust in its wake. Rajan drops his hands, breathing heavily. He takes a step forward into the night. Nothing stops him. For once, there are no ghosts, no migraines, no spirit-snakes waiting to strike. He is free. ~~~ The next morning, a guard comes to visit his cell, rapping loudly on the bars.

“Hey. Wake up.”

Rajan hasn’t slept. This time, it wasn't insomnia, but indecision: he is burdened by his choice to let the snake go free. What has he set loose? The nightmare has so warped his life that he can’t help but imagine it will impact the waking world, too. For all his metaphors, for all his knowledge of spirits and curses and dreamscapes, he doesn’t know what he’s done.

“Get going,” the guard snaps. “You’re leaving.”

Rajan blinks. Sits up. “Leaving?”

“In three hours.”

He almost doesn’t want to ask. It’s too much to hope for. “Where— where am I going?”

“I dunno. Back to wherever you came from, I guess,” the guard sneers, but Rajan barely registers the jab. He’s going to get out.

He glances down at the page in his journal, where he has written the first scrawling lines of a poem: today I did not kill the snake / I set it free / it will return to the wild / I will wait for its mercy / and it will return to me.

He asks, though he already suspects the answer: “Why?” “Prison’s full—we need more space than usual because of the pandemic. You’re a minor offender. Your sentence was shortened. Congratulations.” The guard tosses a piece of paper at him, presumably some sort of official court document. “Pack your stuff.”

Three hours later, he’s out the door.

Two guards accompany him on either side, nightsticks swinging. A car idles a few yards away. Rajan breathes in the sweet desert air. The heat doesn’t bother him, and his migraine has faded. Clouds of dust bloom like flowers. The world is still. Even the tumbleweed has stopped its travels to watch him. It would make a good setting for a poem, Rajan thinks.

As he takes his first steps as a free man, a snakeskin snaps beneath his shoe.

Sandeep Kumar Mishra Sandeep Kumar Mishra is an outsider artist, a poet, and a lecturer and the author of the poetry collection One Heart—Many Breaks. He is a guest poetry editor at Indian Poetry Review. Among recent accolades are the Readers' Favorite Silver Award and the Indian Achievers Award.

The Old Neighborhood There are pockets left, I may turn a corner to find the stage set fully intact, the actors, or should I say players, have all exited, gone— since the dozers came to disassemble the stages where once we pined —still, a line will come, long since stuck at the back of my mind, then I hear laughter gather in the rustle of leaves, dappled sun like stage lights upon memories of when we’d sit outside hip cafés, acting like our days or lives might go on forever, never expecting the twist near the end —the convoluted plot that returns me now to these lots, finds me strutting—then fretting, an audience of one.

Stephen Jackson Stephen Jackson lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Other work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Hole in the Head Review, and others.

O Happy Dagger for J. Mark

So dark, the air too was taken with the light until you ended up breathless, from the striving to build words out of letters that did not exist— to create a language as a gift, to say this was how you felt. You gave away all your belongings, said, They’re only things that were never enough to make you feel, praying to a God you never believed in, you’d try anything to alter the terms —to keep the skies from coming down on you with their unceasing storms. You offered to me your bracelet, and the cool Shakespearian dagger, both of which I have to this day, and every now and then, I’ll slip the bracelet on, though it no longer boasts the warmth of your skin, and more than once, I’ve held that dagger to my heart though my nights are not so dark, and I can still catch my breath, though barely, remembering you as you held it out to me, with your own hand.

Stephen Jackson

Nostalgia And here comes the Johnston boy, all blushed cheeks and Barbasol fresh from a shower to take his girl to the drive-in picture show— tonight, his clothes, a bit too tight, the way he likes them, he places a hand upon his crotch, gives a tug, as mama leaves to go rummaging for the Kodak, so she can capture an image of this lad, a dead ringer for the boy who she’d once loved.

Stephen Jackson

The Cardinal

Marietta Modl

Let Us Rejoice Our first step on the stairs, a flood of people washes us forward and down, then on through the tunnels. The power of their rushing propels me, nudges me aside, slows me down but shoves me on as well.

Oh no! My companion, my guide, my wife is also caught in the current, some kind of late afternoon riptide. We've done this trip before but never been so forcefully swept along as we are now. I yell but she can't hear me. And she doesn't look back, assuming I'm right behind her. I recognize this posture. That's definitely her, one-track minded when she makes up her mind.

It's one of those situations where you suddenly realize it's so out of hand you have to do something, but you can't do what you really want to do. What's around you controls you, and you can control yourself only a bit. These limits, I know, are so restrictive they would depress me if I consider them for any length of time. But I can't. The anxiety I feel is as strong as the force of these people's desires. A mass movement. A tsunami. Adrenaline confuses me too. I can't stop what's inside me any more than I can stop what's outside.

The din is part of the problem. Engines are shrieking, metal wheels are clacking and squealing on metal rails. Whistles are screaming. And echoes of them all reverberate. Amplified above all that, a God-like male voice is making announcements, arrivals, departures, track numbers. In French of course so I understand none of it. Mon Dieu! There is no choice. Give up and drown or keep swimming along after my wife who swore she knew the way.

Another problem is that I lug most of our baggage. In each hand's a hard plastic, heavy, awkward suitcase on wheels. They weigh me down along with 64 years of mistakes and misjudgments that have amassed rolls of fatty uncertainties. Catching my leader is not my goal. Not losing sight of her is. But it's like following a mosquito in a wind. Of course people intrude. They don't know I'm with her. I perspire heavily and my hands slip. I'd holler if it would help. If anyone might hear.

Up some stairs dragging my weights. Down tunnels. Down stairs.

And there she is ahead, boarding a train, pushing herself through the crowd, plunging inside a car. As I'm about to reach her, the doors slam shut. She finally looks back, holds a hand flat on the window. Around her are statues of people frozen in place with their backs to me, hands grasping seats or silvery vertical and horizontal metal tubes, bracing themselves as the dammed-up momentum builds and begins again. The cars shiver and bang together. My wife eyes me, and then she's shouting something, gone before I can read her lips.

She's carried away beyond my reach to the airport. To Charles DeGaulle where we have tickets for a Delta flight back home this evening so we need to check in soon.

She has our tickets in the big black leather purse slung over her shoulder. She's gone and I have to catch her.

I know where I am: where our train, I hope, docks to unload and load every 10 or 15 minutes. At Gare du Nord. In the city of love, my love has been carried away, and I am left alone in this underground chaos.

Imagining music. My near panic is making me hear things. I look around and notice my lack of movement, the crowd dissipating, drying up, trickling off on the train or in the tunnels that break off this platform on either side.

And the music seems actually here. It's not just a mental construct. A hundred feet away, around a curve from my platform, I find a clarinet, violin, and saxophone.

They're playing a classic song I can't name. I listen, just one among four others in this alcove, leaning against walls, a wide place where three tunnels converge. One of the others, a woman, catches my eye and points to a sign beside a donation basket: Emigrés from Ukraine. I drop in a few euro coins.

"Merci," I hear.

I nod, unable to think of one song to request.

The trio launches into "Hava Nagila." They are good. It's lively. I imagine doing the hora here underground. I'd like to do it here too, but a minute into it, a train whistles loudly so I wave to the musicians and hurry as fast as I can under my loads back onto my platform.

In time to see the name of my destination on the first car. So I step on board.

There are free seats and only three riders standing, holding a pole. I sit near the door

with room to put one bag on the seat beside me near the window, the other on my lap.

More than relieved, I'm confident now. The tricky part will be to check for my wife at the stop before the airport stop. We'd debarked there mistakenly once before and had to re-board to get to the airport. This time I will, holding the bags to block the doors open, step outside and see if my wife is waiting. If not, it's back on and ride to the airport and look for her at the Delta counter where I'll wait until she shows up.

The song the trio played for me repeats mentally all the way north, and my feet keep time, shifting slightly with the rhythms in my head and on the metal floor.

Bill Vernon Bill Vernon has studied and taught English literature. Besides writing, he enjoys exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction occasionally appear in journals and anthologies, and he is the author of Old Town, a mystery novel.

Financial District NYC

Jeff Davis

Gnostic Triptych Who can know What path one’s on Without walking?

Tau’s hazel eyes Surprised his brassy Asking a barrage

Tau is one Who long ago Journeyed off

Her death Diverted Everything

Of endless questions Of a stranger Feeling sparked in

The ego's geoCentric edge & lived to tell

Tiffany Her legacy Told him

Him to know what Was so familiar With this stranger

To serve people With AIDS Hospice agreed

Sense of solace

To train him Gathered in a room Of strangers he was Turned by a flashing Lure of golden light As underwater His eye darted To bite the ring On the finger He sat right next to the stranger & asked Is that The Alpha & Omega?

It is Is that A sword or a cross?

It is Is that a

Weeks later showing Tau Tiffany’s Picture her

One can’t think Their way out The skull A bowl Adrift ashore No more

Palms together Beneath her head Leaning to a stone

Tau often taught Him In his dreams Initiating

Buddha

The mystery of What always was Is will be to feel

Tau said I know that Being

With Yahweh Who is not Zeus But a verb To know as one Is fully known In Spirit in An apostle in Their disciple Grows from a

Serpent swallowing Its tail? It is He looked up unAware of A Tau who’d lift him out of water

Seed from a tree From an orchard Burning iridescent With Spirit is fire Consuming fire makes all like Herself Blazing blinding Is desire turned Inward upward Burning three Who gaze will die Go mad or lead astray But one in awe Will come & go In gnosis

Elder Gideon Elder Gideon is the author of Aegis of Waves and co-author with Tau Malachi of Gnosis of Guadalupe. His poems have appeared in over two dozen journals.

Shape Shifting We pace the storm at forty thousand feet it taps our wings and dances away to the horizon A mountain of clouds races us, fire-lit through the sky, its blaze reflected in my eyes daring me to follow when all I can do is watch, like the time I saw my first fireworks aching then and now to rise and soar with the colors, with the fire, fearless. losing me in wonder, my only regret that you are not here to love this as much as I “We can’t afford fear,” you told me on the day I asked, and finally now I know, the breath that is no longer mine as I lose it in the face of the only real power, the power I once hated because it could not save you, a power that I now worship, that I breathe in, so that it can save me.

Judith Mikesch McKenzie Judith McKenzie is a recent winner in the Cunningham Short Story Contest and Tillie Olsen Short Story Contest. Her poems have been published in Poetic Bond X, Halcyone Literary Review, Scriblerus, and others.

Pollinator Paradise

Amanda Joy Meyers

The Widow’s Song Autumn scrubs the ground like bristles on a broom The summer's giddy hills rubbed raw and clean in preparation for sleep Roads and byways blasted free of leaves and litter The burnished silken sky dims to lay down an indifferent blanket I have survived without you my windswept soul a testament to the quiet fierceness of your living Down waterways forgotten by westerly winds and on the crown of thrumming hills living to lay down on the wind and lift away ragged edges drag beneath and scour clean the passage through to spring.

Judith Mikesch McKenzie

My Messy Self She passes me as I amble down the street She, all trim and steady hair clipped in a tidy cap pressed capris white tennis shoes beneath slender ankles arms swinging, head up And I smile Because I like her I like her open sure gait her clarity and order her sense of purpose and cool poise And I smile because I like my messy self I love my friends of the carefully controlled lives the meticulous parties the calendars and charts I love their courage and their conscientious constancy And I like my messy self my frazzled braid my never (not ever) done nails the disorder of my desk the chaos of my life the mad, miraculous messiness of it all and the miracle of those who stride through my chaos with trim ankles and clear eyes We all have our anchors in this world whether chaos or order each a home built on the volcano’s edge each a daily act of infinite spirit Judith Mikesch McKenzie

Neighbors It was a Tuesday, and like every Tuesday for the past 124 Tuesdays, Phil Larsen watered the small yard in front of his unit. The gardener of the complex did this task every Friday, but Phil didn’t trust the gardener’s work because Phil didn’t trust the gardener. She never expressed her suspicions, but the landlord assumed Phil’s need to do the gardener’s job had something to do with either a love of gardening or racism.

The gardener was Salvadorian, and Phil was a 76-year-old white man. Phil Larsen didn’t care for gardening, nor was he a racist.

The landlord was descending the steps leading to the two units on the bottom floor of the complex. The unit directly next to Phil’s had been empty for some time, and despite the landlord’s efforts, she couldn’t find a suitable or willing renter. Phil heard the landlord talking to someone. He wanted desperately to avoid eye contact and the subsequent pleasantry of “Hi, how’s it going?” Phil shuffled behind the large oak tree nestled in the center of the yard to give the façade of watering some hidden away shrub.

Despite his effort, the landlord shouted, “Hey Phil, come meet these prospective neighbors.” Phil’s throat swelled up and his palms became sweaty. Who are these people? Why are they looking at this complex of all places? Oh God! Maybe they’re thieves looking for a low security apartment to rob! Phil was so absorbed in his paranoid speculation he didn’t notice the out-stretched hand of the young man.

He was some kind of Middle Eastern, presumably given his thick beard and dark features. The Middle Eastern was accompanied with what Phil determined to be his girlfriend, a fair skinned white woman with bright red hair. A cascade of judgmental thoughts poured through Phil’s mind as he reached out to shake the Middle Eastern’s hand. He didn’t introduce his name though; it was too soon for that. The landlord and the couple walked into the empty unit, and Phil distinctly noticed a smirk, grin, or sly smile come across the Middle Eastern’s face as he closed the door. ~~~

Moving day, and of course, the young couple had too many things and too many people helping them move. There were people coming and going across Phil’s yard for hours. He wasn’t able to go out and water, which deeply irritated him. The young couple seemed louder too. Phil was able to hear their hushed conversations through their shared wall. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was sure it was nothing good, and even guessed that they were talking about him. Phil thought there was something concerning in the way that man looked at him. It felt like he was eyeing me down, trying to get into my head.

As Phil was tapping the side of his head with his index finger, there came a knock at his door. The air was still, and the echo of the knock resounded throughout Phil’s apartment.

The terrifying realization occurred that perhaps the young couple had been eavesdropping on Phil. Rational thinking dictated that this was a ludicrous belief given that Phil was not saying anything aloud to be eavesdropped upon. However, Phil’s neurosis was getting the best of him, and although it didn’t overtake his entire mind, it did enough to make Phil sweat profusely. There was a second round of knocking at the door, which stirred Phil back to the reality of the situation. I have to answer the door, but if I don’t, maybe they’ll just go away, Phil persuaded himself.

Unfortunately, he mechanically stepped to the door and swung it open with his best attempt at a welcoming smile.

“Hi! My name is Renee. You probably remember my boyfriend and me from last week. Clearly, we fell in love with this complex, which is why we wanted to move in as soon as possible. Annette told us that you help upkeep the garden. It looks great, again so much so, it forced our hand to move in here. I love gardening too, so if there’s anything I can do to help out, I’d be more than happy to. I guess I’ll start off by just putting out a few potted plants on our patio to match the vibe of the garden. . . .”

The young lady continued to talk about planting something or the other, but Phil wasn’t totally sure. Phil couldn’t shake the feeling that she was sizing him up, taking quick mental notes on the details of his apartment. She must’ve memorized the layout of the couch, TV, work desk, and who knows how much more. She’ll likely

report this back to her boyfriend. Instinctively, Phil started closing his door, but remained still in the open part of the frame.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to keep you! I’m just excited about moving in is all and just started going. Anyways, I wanted to give you these cookies as a gift.”

Phil reached down and took the tray of cookies.

“Thank you.” ~~~ Every day of the week, at the beginning of every hour Phil was awake, he made some rearrangement to his apartment. The pattern became fairly consistent after the first day: focus on the larger items first, move them very slowly as to not make a racket, shift to smaller pieces of furniture in the afternoons, and spend the evening moving small items and decorations.

Phil was meticulous about the process, but never the placement of the items.

On his first go at strategic decorating (a term Phil coined to relay both the action and its purpose; this was not for pleasure, but for protection) Phil essentially flipped his entire apartment. The result was impressive for an elderly gentleman. Although initially elated, Phil noticed an obvious flaw in his design. Those young hoodlums have already found out that I was going to shift things around, Phil thought. They knew!

I’m sure of it! I saw the way the girl was scheming. Pretending to be friendly.

Blabbering on about gardening to. . . to gain my trust. That must have been it!

Distract me and get me to trust her, only so she could case the joint. They must be planning on something.

Phil’s confidence in his neighbors’ “casing” abilities forced him to be more cunning about his rearrangement routine. The strategic decorating had to be somehow different each go. After completing each round, Phil’s apartment became more and more of a nonsensical hodgepodge of furniture and knickknacks. The odd assortment of objects each held a significant ulterior meaning personal to Phil. A collectable set of state spoons Phil purchased on Flag Day. A specific style and design of each MLB team’s baseball caps from 1983, Phil’s lucky year. His stockpile of oddities wasn’t exactly like a hoarder’s, but Phil’s obsessive attachments and need

for personal comfort was just as concerning. His carefully curated home resembled Peewee’s Playhouse, but with less childlike whimsy.

By the end of the evening a full week later, Phil had to shuffle around numerous obstacles (some of which, like his collection of crystal crosses, were placed directly on the floor, a potentially dangerous and effective booby trap) to get to his kitchen. The bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom remained intact, mostly because there was no way those nosy neighbors were able to see into those rooms. Phil always kept his blinds shut.

Although the strategic decorating was finished for the night, Phil had one precaution left to finish. He stepped over to the countertop where a box of blue latex gloves was next to the tray of cookies Renee delivered last week. The cookies were untouched with the exception of one. Phil removed two fresh pair of gloves from the box and snapped them on as if entering an operating room. He grabbed the halfdestroyed cookie and snapped off a small piece.

“Skittles! Skittles! Come here boy!” Phil called out.

He waited a few minutes but gave up on the hope that his cat would come when it was being called. Surprisingly, Skittles was even more distrusting than Phil.

Skittles was sure that Phil was trying to poison him. The cat was only partially correct in his assumption. Phil wanted to use Skittles to test how poisonous the cookies must’ve been. If Skittles were to perish from the laced cookies, his death would be on the young lady’s hands, not Phil’s. To Phil’s disappointment, Skittles always refused to eat the piece of cookie. ~~~ After running low on daily essentials, Phil needed to restock. However, his mounting paranoia left him feeling too vulnerable to settle with his usual three-week three-day supplies written down on legal paper. Traditionally, Walmart would be the only store he would visit. The prices were fair, it had everything he needed, and they were sympathetic to the elderly, an opinion that made Phil feel safer during his shopping experience. However, he needed bulk canned goods with extended shelf lives. I’m in this for the long-haul, Phil thought to himself. There was a military

surplus store not particularly far that Phil decided to pay a visit. He stockpiled a sixmonth cache of human and cat food/toiletries (the surplus store did not have kitty litter, but Phil figured the industrial sized bags of sand would suffice as a substitute, a sentiment that Skittles did not share). Since replenishing his inventory, Phil had not left his apartment, not even to water his once precious garden. The uptick in precaution occurred one evening as he was performing his daily ritual of reconfiguring his living room. As Phil was scattering his tchotchkes in new locations, he heard a tapping against his shared wall. He stopped what he was doing and pressed his ear against the wall. Sure enough, there was a slight tapping. It had a persistent cadence, not overly loud, but seemingly coming from multiple points. Phil scuttled along with his ear smashed flush against his wall. He tried to discern its origin, but it was impossible. The closer Phil believed he was to the mysterious sound, the faster it teleported to the other side of the wall. This cat and mouse game repeated itself for an hour, and even then, the only reason Phil ceased his pursuit was because his ear was in pain from being rubbed raw.

Phil backed away from the wall and in a fury, he kicked a set of commemorative Forest Gump plates. The cheap china went flying and exploded in a flurry of ceramic shards. Phil thought the plate pieces looked like shrapnel, a comparison he deemed apropos considering this was war.

The young couple constantly made out the faint noise of things being moved about. They figured it was simply a kooky compulsion of the strange old man.

Regardless, the never-ending hubbub was not a bother; they just turned up the volume on their TV. This time they heard the crash and grew concerned.

“Do you think he is OK?” Renee asked.

“Probably? He must’ve just dropped some shit on accident.”

“I don’t know. He’s old, babe. He might be hurt. Think of those Life Alert commercials. All an old person has to do is fall and they could be really fucked. Go check up on him.”

“Fine.”

The Middle Eastern man aggressively knocked on Phil’s door. He wanted to convey a sense of urgency at having to check on the old man’s wellbeing. Phil did not pick up on that intention. On contrary, Phil knew beyond a doubt that if he opened

the door, he would surely be killed, or mugged at the very least. He froze, not even taking a breath, in the hopes that the dangerous man would assume that Skittles dropped the plates. Cats enjoy being mischievous that way. But the Middle Eastern man knocked again, even harder this time, and shouted, “Hey, are you all right? We heard a crash.”

Oh my God! Oh my God! Phil panicked and desperately thought, What should I do? I can’t do nothing! That bastard will break the door down and catch me totally unprepared. His heart was beating out his chest.

“Hello?”

“I’m fine. Thank you,” Phil replied back.

“All right. Just checking” Phil tiptoed to his window, pulled back the blinds, and checked to see if the violent neighbor had truly left. Next time, Phil thought, I’ll be ready for them. ~~~ He was done waiting for them to strike. Too much time had passed and the only discernible changes to the vicious young couple’s behavior was that they were causing more of a racket. There were always strangers strolling up and down the shared yard. These people were worse than expected. Clearly, they were running some debauched drug house. It was only a matter of time that the drug dealing couple bribe a junkie to attack Phil in exchange for an amount of drugs equivalent to the value they placed on Phil’s life.

Phil needed to gain the upper hand. His solution was simple, lure them into a trap and use the element of surprise to strike first. But Phil was sure that the plan would fail if he left his sanctuary. The floor was riddled with booby-traps that would be useful if they counterattacked and charged into his home. Phil had to draw them to his door and make his move from close range. After some consideration, he had conceived his attack plan.

On a dull weekday evening, Phil was prepared to spring his trap. He paced impatiently back-and-forth in his bedroom, only taking periodic breaks to listen for sounds of movement from the devious young couple. They needed to be in their

bedroom for the plot to succeed. Finally, Phil made out the noise of someone shutting a closet door. Without a moment’s hesitation, Phil slammed a pill of books onto the floor and screamed, “Oh! Oh! My back! My back!” at the top of his lungs.

Phase 1, right after Phil’s deception of injuring himself, the Middle Eastern man exclaimed, “Don’t worry! I’m coming over to help!” and was heard rushing out of his bedroom. The door to his apartment was left unlocked, which would allow for the Middle Eastern man to enter right away, something he will certainly do given his rushed effort to “save” Phil.

The young man swung open the front door and called out, “Hey, where are you? Are you ok?”

“I’m in the bedroom! And ooohhhh ahhh, please hurry!”

Phase 2, Phil had turned off all the lights in his apartment. While trying to find the light switch, the young man stepped on one of the many sharp snares Phil carefully laid down. It was a vintage looking Snoopy ornament that immediately burst into pieces under the weight of the young man’s foot. Although Phil was expecting to hear some of pain induced wailing, all was quiet. He had placed his most fragile and jagged items nearest the door and along the path to the light switch. Phil anticipated that the villain would barge in and head straight for a light, only to be immobilized by a sharp object impaling his foot. Despite the lack of shrieks in the air, Phil knew his window to pounce was limited.

Phase 3, Phil rushed out into the living room, carefully avoiding the litany of items on the ground, wielding a large replica knife from the classic horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer. He ran at the young man, who had just turned the light on (wearing sandals made crushing the ornament a deterrent in that the young man paused for a moment out of utter confusion).

“I got you now!” Phil cried out!

Unfortunately, Phil did not account for what was to come next. Skittles had grown weary of his owner’s efforts at poisoning him. Even worse, Phil had completely neglected tending to Skittles’ needs beyond occasionally feeding him. The litter box was in disarray and Skittles hadn’t been allowed to go out for weeks. His tiger blood pumped, and the vindictive cat lunged at Phil’s leg. Skittles claws dug straight into Phil’s calf, which caused a lightning bolt of pain to shoot up his body. The two former

compadres proceeded to get into a skirmish. Phil swung an open palm slap across the side of Skittles’ body. The impact did little to penetrate Skittles’ dense coat courtesy of his Persian ancestry. However, this was the first time Phil had ever raised a hand to him, which caused Skittles to release his leg more out of confusion than pain. The two locked eyes for a split second that seemed an hour before their silent stare down was broken by Skittles’ fierce shriek. The rogue and vengeful cat dove once again and bit into his owner’s thigh. Phil cursed from the excruciating pain and stumbled back. He tripped onto one of the crystal crosses, and to Phil’s dismay, he was not wearing any shoes.

The cross impaled Phil’s foot. He fell backward, crashing on top of numerous other household possessions. Phil was falling into unconsciousness from the agonizing pain. But before his mind plunged into that black abyss, he distinctly remembered the young man staring down at him with a diabolic grin, like he had intended for this to happen all along.

Phil’s eyelid flickered open ever so slightly with the stubborn determination of survival found in wild animals before they fall prey to a predator. Through waning vision and subdued hearing, he was able to make out a form crossing his doorway. Phil forced his eyes open just long enough to see the treacherous Middle Eastern and his conniving concubine hovering over his fading body. Phil fainted right before a brief exchange.

“He’s really hurt, Renee. I mean that foot is just pouring out blood. I think he might bleed out.”

“Oh, babe! We finally got him. That was easier than we thought it would be.”

Babak Movahed Babak Movahed works as an Assistant Director for a private school. Recent works have been published in the The Hungry Chimera, The Blue Mountain Review, The Main Street Rag, and others.

Mushroom Armies Raked out, they bulge back— new breasts, cancerous brains.

A fungus big as a plate falls to ruin, sprouting a brush of soft blue hairs. Every night a fierce brigade lifts pallid arms, spotted fists. Which can be eaten— beige umbrellas or pancakes sprinkled with cinnamon?

The newest mushrooms sprout rose caps. When I break their skin, they bruise at once to Prussian blue.

This means they’re poison.

Yellowing jellies spill out over dirt. I touch a puffball, releasing a breath of smoky spores. I won’t touch the corpse plant’s clammy flower. A bee hurries into its cold white mouth and blunders away, stunned by the waxy permanent chill.

Barbara Daniels Barbara Daniels has received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the most recent in 2020. She has had poems appear lately in Permafrost, Westchester Review, Philadelphia Stories, and others. A collection, Talk to the Lioness, was published in 2020.

The Swarm A boy carries a lump of bees in his hands. He lifted them from a white plastic chair.

They spent all night in the yard, clumped together, quiet.

Some dead bees drop near the leg of the chair.

The boy steps through them.

He watched the bees from inside a glass door, slid the door back and forth a little before he went out to them.

He’s not afraid. Bees hear with their whole bodies.

They whisper a secret language.

He thinks each bee is God’s single syllable—love, he thinks.

Life. The bees are light in the boy’s hands because they are lifting already, because they are gone.

He thinks scout bees found a new home, and all the rest are going there. He sweeps dead bees into a trash bag and sits in the sun in the white chair.

He believes he walked through a hidden door, bowed down to get through, addled, frightened, but saved by vibrating bees.

Barbara Daniels

The Piano Player and the Singer She wasn’t the best piano player, though at 85, she had worked at it most of her life. Even so, she loved the music and relished playing with the boys in the band. During the past dozen years or so, she couldn’t quite keep up reading those arrangements that seemed to chug by way too fast. But she would pick out the appropriate chords now and again, if inevitably coming in just a hair too early. Her fear of improvisation kept that particular demon at bay as a viable option and she was in awe of anyone who could pull that off. She called the performance of any musician whose playing style moved off the page “in the ethers,” and “amazing.”

We met when I auditioned to be the singer with a big band in Palm Desert, California. I had moved there a few years earlier from the Northwest after a hiatus from a singing career on the road. I was eager to get back into it and knew that singing with a big band was akin to riding the cowcatcher on a noisy, speeding freight train. It’s an exhilarating challenge with all that syncopated power behind me.

There had been other candidates, none of them suitable. The band’s bass player played in my Dixieland septet and asked me to audition. “They need you,” he said. The leader left a cryptic message on my answering machine, setting the time for the audition and told me I’d sing “a couple of tunes.”

Upon hearing that, I wasn’t surprised others had failed this vague, anxiety-provoking pressure test. To allay my concern and satisfy my usually compulsive preparation, I took advantage of my bass-playing friend’s insider status to find out the likely songs and the keys. Then I got the phone number for the big band’s piano player and asked her to meet with me beforehand to rehearse. She was the only female musician in the band. I was hoping for kinship and support in this.

Irene lived in a triple-wide manufactured home in a gated senior development. As soon as she opened the door, her diminutive body seemed to vibrate with tension. Yet she was welcoming as she led me through her fussy, teddy-bear-littered living room into the stuffy music room. She pulled out a vocal chart she thought likely to be called and started the intro to the uptempo Gershwin standard, “’S Wonderful.” Fortunately, it was in my key and I had sung it many times before. When I finished, she said, “Oh, you’ll get the job.

They’d be very lucky to have you.” We went over a few more possible charts and she

declared I was “in the ethers.” The next afternoon, I killed the audition, joined the band, and we became instant friends.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say we became email buddies. Irene spent many hours a day exchanging messages with her friends and I became one of them. In addition to band events, we met now and again for a celebratory meal or a quick visit but we did best at a distance.

As the emails progressed, she gradually—and I sensed reluctantly—revealed herself, perhaps in ways she had not done with many. After a few years, she confided that 12 years earlier, she had been diagnosed with stage four metastatic carcinoma and hadn’t been expected to live. No one we both knew had any knowledge of this, and she asked me more than once to keep it between us. She proudly described herself as being made of “concrete and nails,” but that wasn’t my impression at all. She seemed a tightly wrapped bundle of nerves, barely glued in place, closed off to any possibilities but polite palaver.

She never opened her front door unless she was fully made up—always with her habitual bright blue eye shadow and heavy Giorgio cologne. Her outfit was completed with big, clunky earrings.

After her abusive, alcoholic husband died a year or so into our relationship, she seemed to become more joyful even while increasing her airtight denial. She started telling me funny stories about how she had taunted her husband, who was often in an alcoholic stupor. He would drink while sitting on a bar stool in their kitchen which overlooked the piano room. His unwavering glare annoyed and unnerved her as she practiced, so she bought a portable folding screen and erected it between the piano and his line of sight. We both laughed at its visual impact and message. Dealing with conflict indirectly was her preferred m.o.

Living constantly under the threat of a recurrence of her disease, she was protective, not only about disseminating information to others but about merely hearing other people’s medical traumas. She did not allow anyone to voice physical complaints around her. Negative thoughts and words were anathemas, feared as potentially powerful emotional antecedents to bad medical news down the line. To her, words could be causative. She would flippantly describe her own feelings using song titles or hyperbole, lacking both authenticity and genuine disclosure. “I’m just ‘Breezin’ Along With The Breeze’ today,” she would say on a good day. It was as though she couldn’t find words to

describe her inner state. Cliches were so much safer. It kept real life and her own fears at bay. If she had a medical appointment, she would write, “I’m sure everything will be perfect.” She added a benediction. “May nothing happen to the contrary. Then I can come home to ‘Something Cool.’”

She often emailed about wanting change—in her yard, her furniture, her friends or her doctors—but nothing ever came of it. Easily overwhelmed by the steps involved and the fear of making a mistake, she comfortably left things as they were. She preferred her own discomfort to the possibility of conflict.

We were of different generations and backgrounds, revealing occasionally jarring contrasts. If either of us mentioned a project that needed doing, she would quickly quote the song title, “It’s So Nice To Have A Man Around The House,” a direct and ironic contradiction to her long and hellish life with her dead husband and to my well-known feminist views. Her best friend was a married man in her complex who would visit each week, performing minor handyman tasks while bringing her food and good cheer. But she was hungrier still for what she called acknowledgement, as if she didn’t really exist unless someone else infused her psychological fragility with praise. As a result, she maintained several lengthy relationships with unkind people who would compliment her just often enough.

The dependence on clichés and the brittle Pollyanna demeanor were easy to sidestep in email, but not so much in person. When we’d meet, she would enthusiastically repeat favorite stories, mostly about musicians and singers we both knew, dominating the conversation with chirpy monologues about them. “Ted is just such a fine musician. You know he was with Benny Goodman’s band in the 40s. He has a lifetime contract at Willard’s club now. And he’s 93.” She loved to reminisce and romanticize her past, spinning familiar stories about life as a “working girl in a man’s world.” She told me about her boss “chasing me around the desk. He was so handsome but I never let him catch me. By then I was in love with Rodney. Boy, was I stupid or what? ‘Stupid Cupid!’” As a rule, she sought out others who spilled out long-ago third-person tales, too, never seeking a genuine encounter.

Neither truth nor accuracy was important here, and certainly not interactive conversations.

She wanted to be entertained and distracted, if only by herself.

Once I had somehow earned her trust, she told me her truths more often, always in email. If she wasn’t feeling well or having problems with family members, she shared some

of the details, which I understood to be rare disclosures in her world. She knew she would get an honest and nonjudgmental response. Reciprocally, I found myself telling her things I had not shared with other friends. We had become a reassuring part of each other’s daily infrastructure, exchanging several emails a day.

On occasion, when her frequent emails dwindled, I knew something was wrong. She often struggled with her computer, dependent on her nephew who lived out of state to unlock its mysteries and to repair what inadvertent damage she might have done with a misplaced keystroke. Technology was not her friend. For her birthday one year, I bought her Macs for Dummies, which she kept on her desk for reference. Each time there was a time lapse, I patiently waited until she resolved the silence.

I began to think about her death. She lived alone, so how would I know? Would it be the sudden disappearance of her emails? A telephone call from the nephew? I thought about how much I would miss those frequent emails, always full of chatter and trivial news, the kind of interaction I could never pull off for long in person. In spite of myself, she had become an affirmative force in my life and, as I considered it, sometimes the only one during the years we had known one another.

~~~ Inevitably over time, Irene began to experience age-related physical problems she would not discuss in detail, so characteristic of her. Apparently, a gardener had found her lying on the patio and called 911. Her family, who lived 75 miles away, helped her move out of her beloved triple-wide Eden, first into a nursing facility, than into a care home close to them. Other than the times she was very ill, she kept up our daily email correspondence, now all in capital letters. She apologized because they weren’t longer, lamenting her lack of energy to be upright too long. I could sense she knew her life was winding down. She expressed little regret about putting down the beloved cat she had adopted a few years earlier, as if she were clearing out anything that might cause others any inconvenience.

One morning following another medical crisis, she emailed that she had opted for palliative care. She was enjoying sleeping a lot, she said, seldom hungry, feeling no pain.

Her family had bought her a comfortable recliner for her room, but she still struggled to

slowly edge to the table to answer any emails that might be awaiting her. Though she was surrounded now by family and caregivers, she would not give up on her friends in cyberspace. The weeks passed and I waited.

Her daughter-in-law emailed me to say she was sleeping nearly all the time now and that she was now reading my emails to Irene aloud every day. She encouraged me to keep writing them, as Irene seemed to perk up when they came. With careful thought, I wrote about what I was enjoying, what I was planning to do, trips I might take—all consistent with the upbeat personality I had come to know. I knew continuing our connection even in this odd manner was her way of saying, “Goodbye.” Mine, too.

Her memorial was held at the clubhouse in the complex where she had lived for years. The room was full of friends, old and new, who reminisced about her piano playing, her unflinching support of other musicians, her loyalty no matter what. Her nephew, a professional piano player of whom she was very proud, entertained in the background with Great American songbook tunes while we all shared a buffet lunch.

A niece recalled with glee that Irene loved Halloween so much that she seldom waited for that holiday in order to dress up as a witch. In fact, I had seen her in her full regalia at a dinner party at my house. Fortunately, she had warned me beforehand. She entered with a flourish of her cape and a wicked cackle, removing the costume only when dinner was served. It had become her calling card.

Still, it was a bit jolting when the event full of warm reminiscences came to a close with her nephew playing—and animatedly singing—“Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” from “The Wizard of Oz.” We all laughed through our tears. It was just the kind of send-off she would have loved.

Pam Munter

Pam Munter is a former clinical psychologist, performer and film historian. She has authored several books, including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (nonfiction), and, most recently, Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood (fiction). She has also written essays, book reviews, short stories, and plays. Pam has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, her sixth college degree.

Geothermal

Amanda Joy Meyers

In Church, I’d Never Sing I was too nervous.

I thought if God was listening, He’d be happy I wasn’t singing.

I told this to my mom and she said that God doesn’t judge.

I asked about Hell and she got silent.

I said, “I’m worried my singing is so bad that I’d get sent to hell.”

She said that since I put it like that I wouldn’t have to sing.

Thank God. Ron Riekki Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction, Posttraumatic, and U.P.

(True story #12) I asked my dad if rear-view mirrors were meant to look at rears.

He told me if I wasn’t careful there was a belt that would be looking at my rear, several times.

Ron Riekki

A Father's Son The mourners were not plentiful the day of the funeral. Charvik Sharma had not been a popular man in this life, having dedicated very little time to cultivating and maintaining relationships. Sahil, his eldest, watched the people move about in respectful silence, occasionally stopping at one of his siblings or mother to offer quiet condolences while the chanters continued through their mantras. Some made their way over to him, but he had nothing to say to them in return. Everything was too fresh—Sahil wasn’t sure how he felt about his father’s death yet. He hadn’t even seen his father for at least ten years before now, having gone off to live with his aunt while still a boy.

He looked over at his mother, his brother Ishaan, and his sister Shaleena. His mother looked sad at least, but Ishaan and Shaleena looked about as numb as he doubtless did. He wondered what the past ten years had been like for them. If their father had changed at all since failing Sahil. ~~~ He would never forget the first time his father struck him. It was a miserable, humid day, the air so wet that you could almost taste it. Charvik was home, classes having been let out, and he was especially short of temper.

Sahil, still a small child at the time, refused to go outside to play. “It’s too hot,” he remembered protesting. “I’ll melt!”

His mother had gently but firmly encouraged him to go outside anyway. “You won’t melt, I promise. But you really should go outside. The sun is good for you.”

“I don’t want to!” His little voice rose in aggravation.

“Sahil, my darling, please go outside.” His mother looked around, fear coloring her face. It was the first time Sahil could recall seeing his mother afraid, though it would not be the last.

Charvik appeared around the corner, his face an oncoming storm, and Sahil instinctively understood his mother’s fear.

“What is the meaning of this noise?” It was less a question than a demand.

Sahil ventured a reply. “I don’t want to go outside.”

The baleful gaze Charvik leveled at his son burned into the young boy’s soul. “I heard your mother tell you to go outside. Why do you stand there mewing?”

“I—” SLAP. “Do as you’re told! If I see you in the house again before supper you will get twice as bad!”

Tears ran unchecked down Sahil’s face, and he bolted through the door before his father could rebuke him for those, too. Oblivious to his surroundings, he fled off into town and did not dare return home until well after dark. ~~~ “Sahil?”

Sahil glanced over to find his sister standing beside him, her previously numb expression now one of concern. “Yes, Shaleena?”

“I just. . . I wondered if you were all right. You’ve barely spoken a word since coming home.”

Home. This was not his home anymore, hadn’t been his home since he had been sent away. “I’m fine. Just a little impatient to be done with this.”

Shaleena nodded. “You and father never did get along.”

Sahil gave her a glance. “You say that as though I am unique in that respect.”

She shrugged slightly. “He. . . tried, I think, to make some small amends. He never apologized, not in as many words, but he was. . . softer.” She hesitated, as though weighing her words. “I think he missed you.”

Sahil scoffed. “I find that unlikely.”

Shaleena was quiet for a long moment after that. “Well, I missed you at least. And I’m glad you came back, even if it’s just for this.” She briefly touched his arm, then

moved back towards their mother without further comment. He allowed his mind to wander again, passively listening to the chants and watching the dancing flames of a candle.

“I know your father was very cruel.” Sahil shook his head and looked over to where his Aunt Shashi was addressing him. “Perhaps he will be kinder in his next life.”

Sahil couldn’t reply to that. He wasn’t certain his father deserved another life.

“I am sorry you did not get to say goodbye,” his aunt ventured again. She was a kind woman, almost a second mother to Sahil, but she was too forgiving.

“I am not.” The first words Sahil had spoken since the funeral began. “We spent all our words to each other a long time ago.” ~~~ A young Sahil stood nervously in his father’s cramped office. Their small house afforded little enough space for their steadily growing family, yet Charvik refused to give up this room. Sahil had no idea what it was for, he just knew that his father’s claims to it meant that he and his new brother Ishaan would be sharing a room.

“Your brother will be your responsibility,” he remembered his father saying sternly, eyes intense and hard. “I expect you to take the responsibility.”

Sahil didn’t speak. He knew by then that discussions with his father were not truly discussions; they were just brief moments when his father bothered to remember he had a child long enough to impart specific instructions. Any words on Sahil’s part would earn him a backhand, and that was if his father was in a decent mood.

“That means helping your mother feed and change him, teach him, and—” “Keep him out of your way?”

The words were a mistake—Sahil knew that before he said them, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He stood defiantly as the fury entered his father’s eyes. He would feel the repercussions of that remark for a long time, and remember them even longer. ~~~

Sahil wasted no time after the traditional ten day mourning period to get back to his life. The fact that he even had to take ten whole days off irritated him, and he was unreasonably short with his family because of it. He wanted to leave this house and its memories, wanted to get back to his own wife and child and job, and wanted to burn the past away just as the body had been burned.

On the tenth day his brother found him alone and sat beside him. Sahil looked over skeptically; he and his brother had never been close and disagreed often and had hardly spoken to each other these past days.

“I assume you plan to leave with the sun,” Ishaan began, not looking over.

“Before the sun, if I can manage it. I have a long ride home and the earlier I start the earlier I am back where I belong.”

Ishaan shook his head. “You never cared for home.”

“You make it sound like I chose to leave in the first place,” Sahil countered, frowning.

“Perhaps not. But you did choose not to come back.”

“Father.”

“Damn it, Sahil, this isn’t about Father!” Ishaan stood suddenly with this outburst, spinning so he looked down at Sahil. “You left more than Father behind! You left Shaleena and Mother too, or did you think being sent away to school freed you from your responsibilities as eldest?”

“I checked in when I could. Everything was under control, and Father didn’t want me back besides.”

Ishaan threw his arms in the air. “Typical Sahil. Always running from Father. If you only gave him the respect he deserved, perhaps.”

“You want to talk to me about respect?” Sahil was standing now. “You call abusing behaviors worthy of respect?”

“He was our father. He deserved your respect regardless.” Ishaan began to head back inside, but paused in the doorway. “But I don’t see you’ll listen to me. You’ll just run, like you always have.”

~~~ By sunrise on the eleventh day he was packed and ready to go, not even staying for breakfast. He had nothing more to say to his mother or siblings, and they had lived the past ten years without him; there was no reason to stay here any longer. So he quickly and quietly slipped out of the home of his childhood to catch the first train of the day and refused to look back.

As he walked, his thoughts wandered. He looked forward to home, hoped the train was running on time, hoped his wife Viha had set aside some dinner for him, and a thousand other thoughts like these, anything to get his mind off where he was and what had just happened and get him moving forward. He was so focused on putting the past behind him that he didn’t notice the football until it was almost too late.

With a small yelp, he bobbed his head to the side, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with the flying ball. He shook his head, startled and confused, and looked around for the ball’s owner. He spotted them easily enough, a young boy who was smiling apologetically and his father who was laughing just down the road. The father jogged towards Sahil.

“My apologies,” he began, still laughing a little. “My son and I like to come out for a little game before I have to go to work, and we are unaccustomed to sharing the road so early.”

Sahil took a moment to gather his wits before answering. “Ah. . . it is all right. I was not hit, so no harm.” His eyes drifted back to the boy. “You two do this. . . often?”

The father nodded. “Most mornings. I work long hours, so I cherish the moments I can. Surely you can understand this?”

Sahil looked back at the father. Such genuine happiness, speaking about his son, was something Sahil did not understand at all. ~~~ “Sahil, why does father never come out to play with us?”

Sahil didn’t turn to look at his little sister. Shaleena was barely five, but already she was noticing that their house was not like the houses of some of her friends. Her father was practically a stranger to her, only seen at meals and on holidays. No great loss there, Sihal thought with no small measure of distaste.

“Because he is too busy,” Ishaan said when it was obvious that Sahil had nothing to say.

“Busy with what?”

Ishaan paused. “Work, I guess.”

Shaleena clearly didn’t understand, but filed the information away nonetheless and pressed on to her next question. “And why is he so sad?”

This got Sahil to speak. “You think he’s sad?” Shaleena nodded and Sahil scoffed.

“Why do you think this?”

“Because he never smiles. Sad people don’t smile.”

It made sense, in a little kid logic sort of way, but Sahil had trouble picturing his father’s constantly dour expression as anything but angry.

“He isn’t sad,” Sahil said finally, frowning at the football by his feet. “I don’t know what he is, but he isn’t sad.”

This confused the little girl more but Sahil chose that moment to kick the ball and she took off after it, screaming with joy. Ishaan looked at Sahil and frowned. “Don't speak of our father like that.”

Sahil rolled his eyes and watched Shaleena run. “Why not? It isn’t like he’s around to hear us, and even if he was he never listens to anything we say.”

“But—” “I don’t want to hear it, Ishaal. Come on, let’s catch up to Shaleena.” ~~~ Given the early hour, the train station was thankfully quiet, and Sihal managed to purchase his ticket and board with minimal wait. He also had his choice of seats for the long ride ahead of him. Settling his luggage above him, he sat heavily and sighed, thankful to be on the way home at last. The rest of his day promised to be an easy

one, as it was nothing more tedious than waiting until he reached his stop that evening, then getting a cab to take him home. Comforted by these thoughts, he drifted into a light nap as the train began to move.

When he stirred a few hours later, he noticed the car was significantly more crowded than it had been, with nearly all the seats outside of the one directly beside him taken. He also noticed a lone man who, noticing that Sahil was awake, headed his way.

“A thousand apologies, sir, but is that seat taken?” He indicated the seat beside Sahil.

“No. Please, sit.” The man nodded his thanks and situated his own luggage, pulling out a well-worn book before stashing the bags, and settled into the seat. Sahil’s eyes were instantly drawn to the cover.

The man noticed Sahil’s attention and held the book up for better inspection. “I take it you are familiar with Songs of Kabir?”

Sahil startled at the man’s question as though shocked. “Oh, ah, not as such. Or rather I have not taken the time to read that particular collection myself.

Someone. . . I knew, they did. Spoke of it very highly.”

The man nodded understandingly and began flipping through the pages. “It is a good book. If you have any love of poetry, I highly recommend it.”

“I. . . shall keep that in mind.”

“Are you a student of poetry?”

“I teach a high school literature class and occasionally write my own pieces.

Nothing worth publishing, but. . . ” The man nodded. “It’s nice to put thought to paper?”

“Exactly. And poetry has always been special to my family.” ~~~ “What are you reading?”

Sahil looked up from his own perch across the room from the conversation, watching where Shaleena had approached their father’s armchair and interrupted his

reading with her question. He instinctively tensed, waiting for the cold dismissal or fiery rage at being disturbed; the first would cause Shaleena to run away hurt and Sahil to follow so he could calm her down, and the second would be directed at Sahil for not keeping her distracted in the first place. Either way it was about to become Sahil’s problem.

Yet Charvik did neither. Instead, he looked up slowly and studied his daughter for a moment, as though trying to remember who she was and how he should react. Then he closed, actually closed his book in order to show her the cover. “This is a book of poems. Can you read the title?”

Shaleena squinted at the letters. Songs of Kabir?” She spoke slowly, careful to get every word correct. Sahil couldn’t help but be a little impressed. He hadn’t realized her reading skills had progressed so far.

Charvik smiled at her, and Sahil frowned in confusion. “That’s right,” their father said, sounding pleased. “Would you like to read some poems with me?”

Sahil looked back down to his own book, but he couldn’t focus on the words anymore. That was the kindest he’d ever seen his father behave towards anyone outside of their mother. He watched and listened as Charvik read to Shaleena, poem after poem after poem. He didn’t seem to grow tired, or annoyed, but rather he seemed almost. . . happy.

“Are any of these by you, Dad?” Charvik paused at that question. “No. I have written poems, but I have not been so blessed as to have them published.”

“Maybe someday?”

“Yes,” he said, a wistful look in his eyes. “Maybe someday.” ~~~ Hailing a taxi to take him from the train station to his home didn’t take long, thankfully. It was already much later than Sahil had hoped to arrive home, as a scheduling mixup with a different train had caused a delay of nearly two hours, and he was now more anxious than ever for the comfort of his wife and bed. As he was

driven across the city, the driver made occasional attempts at small talk, most of which Sahil answered with polite but short replies, doing his best to avoid a protracted conversation. One comment, however, caused him to pay attention.

“Are you excited for the start of Onam tomorrow?”

Sahil blinked. “That’s tomorrow?”

The driver nodded. “I love Onam, personally. Well, specifically the Onasadya Feast, but the entire festival is fun.” Sahil glanced at the driver’s bulky figure and guessed that the man did not save feasting for the festival alone. “Do you participate?” ~~~ “Hurry, Sahil! Father wants us to be among the first visitors to the temple!”

Sahil groaned, stretched, and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. “The. . . temple?”

“Yes, the temple!” Shaleena was entirely too excited and loud for this early hour.

“It’s the first day of Onam!”

Sahil shook himself more fully awake and swung his legs over the side of his bed.

Onam. . . he smiled a little as Shaleena scampered off, her mission accomplished.

Father was always in high spirits during religious festivals and holy days, his usual dour expression lightened and stormy mood calmed. He might even be persuaded to give his children treats, so long as all the proper observances are met. “It is a holy day first and a festival second,” he would solemnly intone. “Be respectful of that.”

And they were. They were quiet and respectful, said the correct chants to the best of their abilities, and answered every question Charvik had for them about the origin of Onam. Then, finally, the religious observances were finished and it was time to decorate.

Their house was never so clean as it was during Onam. Everything practically sparkled with the effort put into cleaning. And between Shaleena and Charvik, it was harder to find a house more thoroughly decorated, either. A veritable hillside’s worth of flowers were braided together and hung on every door frame and window. Sahil

looked at the flowers and frowned. What was it about flowers and a stupid festival that suddenly made his father so cheerful? Why couldn’t he always be like this?

He wanted to tear all the flowers down. ~~~ Sahil slipped quietly into his home, unsure if his wife was still awake and knowing their infant son was not. He paused just inside, seeing the flower decorations all prepared for Onam. A frown tugged briefly at his lips, but he shook it away; the holiday had never done him any harm. Setting his luggage down in the entryway and taking off his shoes to make as little noise as possible, he made a quick walk of the house.

Everything was spotless. His wife had done an excellent job keeping up with the cleaning, even with the added responsibility of their newborn. He smiled slightly as he paused by the dining room table, laying a hand on their son’s highchair. She is a good woman. I hope I am a good husband to her. He wondered briefly if his father ever had the same concern.

He moved into his office and saw everything was just as he had left it. It was, by agreement, the only room she didn’t routinely clean, as Sahil had his own method to the seeming madness. He knew where everything was and that was the important part. He looked over his papers, his bookshelf, the grading pens and the half-finished poems, and he frowned. It looked remarkably like how he remembered his father’s office being laid out. How had he never noticed that before?

“Am I becoming my father. . . ?” The question was asked quietly, barely even whispered, as though Sahil was afraid of the answer. In a way he was; were not all men their fathers’ sons? What hope did he have to build a better life for himself when he mirrored his father in even this tiny detail? In what other ways had he shaped himself after a man he. . . he what?

He missed. Here, in the darkness and the silence, he could admit it. He missed his father. Or, perhaps put better, he missed the idea of his father. He missed the connection he saw so often, even just coming home from the funeral. Someone he

could talk to, someone he could play ball with, someone who led by example and listened to the worries of his children. Charvik had never been any of those things for Sahil, but he’d seen glimpses of that man in the way Shaleena interacted with him, and wondered if he had changed at all after Sahil had left. If he really had missed his son as much as his son now missed him, as Shaleena had suggested.

“It’s too late for regrets,” Sahil told his ghosts, trying to push them away. “He’s dead. Whatever that may mean for him, it means to me that he is beyond reach.”

Forgiveness and healing were beyond Sahil’s reach; there was no saving Charvik’s memory or salvaging the relationship. The abuse, the neglect, and the fear were all Sahil had to remember his father by, were Charvik’s only legacy to his son. But Sahil was more than his father’s legacy, more than the abuse and neglect and regret. He would prove that, to himself and to his family.

Sahil left his office and its ghosts and headed up the stairs. He paused midway up to look at the pictures hanging from the wall of him and his wife on vacation, on their wedding day, on the day they brought their son home for the first time. They were happy in those pictures. Sahil knew true joy in every moment captured and it showed.

He thought back to pictures of his father; Charvik had rarely smiled in person and never for the camera. Even in the oldest photos he looked serious and stoic, never expressing joy in his life. “I am not you,” he whispered, wondering if Charvik’s spirit could hear him from wherever it had gone. “I will not be you.”

He finished climbing the stairs, bypassing his own bedroom to check on his son.

The child was sleeping soundly, completely oblivious to the presence of his father, and Sahil smiled down at the small bundle. Resting a hand on the side of the crib and nearly crying for reasons he couldn’t explain, he made his son a promise. “I’ll do better. I swear, I will do better.”

The floor creaked softly, and Sahil looked over his shoulder to see his wife, wrapped in her dressing robe, squinting sleepily at him. “Sahil?” Her voice was barely audible, and he quietly crept over to her after a final look at his son. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She squinted at him again, then reached out and touched his face, concern taking over her expression. “You’re crying! What’s wrong?”

Sahil cupped her hand and smiled. “Nothing. Come, let us go back to bed. I am ready for today to end and tomorrow to begin.”

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

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AD Anderson

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AD Anderson

Losses Some mornings there is only confusion and a search for keys disappeared in the night.

They should be in the leather purse I bought at a Paris market, back when I could follow a map.

Impossible to retrace those steps but the memory of charcuterie guides me to the kitchen.

No purse in the refrigerator and where did I lay my brush?

My hair would nest a rat.

It’s not death but this slow dissolve that terrifies me.

Sandra Kacher Sandra Kacher's poetry springs from years of hearing about the inner lives of hundreds of therapy clients. She lists Mary Oliver and Billy Collins as influences on her writing.

Wonders I’ve seen sparrows soar like eagles and eagles humbled by the wind.

I’ve seen grass, mowed flat in a buffalo stampede, rise again when the herds have crossed to North Dakota.

I’ve seen land so desolate it dries the tears of angels.

Do you know flowers through the eyes of butterflies, how they glow beyond purple and invite bees onto their bullseye landing pads?

How butterflies nibble with their feet and sip salt from mud puddles?

I watch clips from the long unspooling and can’t know what happens next. We dream our horns of plenty, imagine we are captaining our souls even as we watch eagles driven down by pecking crows.

Sandra Kacher

Earthbound Why don’t aliens ever choose me for an abduction? Sad to be left behind in this ordinary world.

I’d like a few chips implanted— one for teleportation, one for telepathy, a third for merging with the Everything.

Where is my near-death experience?

So transformative, so elusive?

It isn’t earth that limits me as much as this suitcase of skin that claims to be all I am.

Hard sides and zippers encase me, my vision is dim, sounds are muffled. Outside, mandalas spin the universe into wholeness.

If not space travelers, who will help me escape this old valise?

Sandra Kacher

Martha Stewart Living Arriving late at Turkey Hill, milky moon, no snow yet.

Inside the house are candles set at each windowsill.

What shall I do this fortnight?

Picking up an antique quill, I dip it in the inkwell and write by candlelight.

Shear the shy alpacas; spin and dye the yarn.

Rake and dry the maple leaves. Save for the Bonfire.

Embroider spring scenes of Mt. Fuji, cross-stitch and French knots.

Butcher poor old Wilbur—such an unfortunate name.

Start the hams in the smokehouse, make sausage with wild sage.

Oil the treadle sewing machine, stitch masks from old linen.

Gather chicken and turkey eggs, save the shells for gilding.

Bake dog treats for Genghis Khan. Ask him, who’s a good boy?

Don the gold kimono; write haikus and tankas.

Curry the Shetland ponies. Curl and color the manes.

Make the giant marshmallows, heat the hand-pressed cider.

Invite Cook and Maid and Gardener to the last Bonfire.

The magazine slips off the bed, life luxurious and sweet.

I pull the Martha Stewart sheets up over my head.

Leslie Hodge Leslie Hodge began writing poetry again after 40 years in business. She has been published in the San Diego Poetry Annual and the San Diego Union Tribune.

The Three-Dog Leash 1981 It seemed like a good idea. Three mini dachshunds, short hair black-and-tan.

Low to the ground tripping hazard tangling a handful of leashes to the handles.

“Here’s your Christmas present, boys,” said Dad, holding up the single leash that split into three snap-hooks at the bottom.

The hot dogs barked and jumped vertical.

Gork, patrician, with AKC papers, named for the famous racing greyhound Gork Lindsay.

Younger adopted brothers Zach and Cy, ruffians—no papers.

At first glance the tumbling wiener dogs are identical, except for the colors of their collars: red, yellow, black.

Dad snapped on the three hooks— instant dog-fight-on-a-leash.

2016 “Do not,” my sister said, “Put the dogs in with Mom and Dad.” Okay I said, thinking What difference does it make?

Then, They’d be glad to have them along.

2017 The pilot and the assistant pour ashes into their containers, breaking open the dogs’ urns.

The runway rises to the west.

The plane turns, flying south along the coast. Near the Del Mar racetrack, a smoke-gray plume floats toward the blue water, followed a minute later by a smaller plume.

2020 I hold the collars, jingling with tags.

Red for Gork E. Baba.

Yellow, Mr. Cy. And Zachy-Boy? Well. Zach is black.

Leslie Hodge

Betrayal Old age has come at last to take revenge, Hanshan.

I’ve found a disconnect between hand and heart.

It’s a scientific fact, you know, and we can’t deny it.

Now we know the heart is not the seat of our emotions.

The brain is, that mess of wires and chemical reactions.

They lead our lives for us—our secret selves in action.

At brain’s command, I filled myself with written words.

Now, betrayal! It hides so many of them away from me.

George Thomas George Thomas, who holds an MFA, retired in 2003 from being a CNC machinist in a job shop in Spokane, Washington. Eighty-three years old, he's been writing most of his life. In this last year, he has been published six times.

No Encore From whose light does light break forth?

From his light to whom light is given the acolyte lights the candelabra without which no virtuoso dare perform though lit from within from whose fingers the grace notes drip like hot wax grace upon grace without which the light is extinguished and the hot wax congeals wicks untrimmed sputtering no encore.

Patrick Theron Erickson Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, is a retired parish pastor. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, and others.

The Story I Should Have Told The January wind tore an icy path through the flatland of the bluff city where I live, determined, it seemed, to rip the blooms right off the bundles of flowers I wrestled from the back seat of my car to haul into the church. Protecting myself from the wind’s bite, I lowered my shoulders and slugged back to the car to lug out heavy armfuls of old framed photographs and the thin black purse my mother left on the passenger seat.

In a crisp manila folder on the passenger’s seat lay my father’s eulogy, written on clean white sheets.

I slid onto the driver’s seat and leaned my head back for a quiet minute to catch a quick breath or two before the service began, but the cruel winter wind breathed the pleasant memories of my childhood into the car to vex me—my father’s easy grin the night I won the talent show for piano, his daily predawn Bible reading, our corny sayings no one thought were funny but us—fine memories far too tender for me on the day I was to deliver his eulogy.

Memories must tear us apart before they can heal us, I reasoned, but a gust of cold wind blew the exquisite pain of our more recent past into the car as well— my father’s last labored breaths, the impotent IV pole standing beside his bed, hospice nurses checking his bluing feet, his parched mouth—these newer more torturous memories whipped in to blend with the fine old ones, and together joy and suffering joined inextricably as one breath and blew the pages of my father’s eulogy onto the floorboard in careless disregard. I slammed the car door against the onslaught, but some memories refuse to be shut out; mine whirled above me in the cold, bitter air, very much alive.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins penned, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”

~~~ I’d wrestled with the writing of my father’s eulogy, the last few days spent in an ancient, desperate struggle between control and abandon, my trash can brimming with frustrated half drafts. I felt my words needed to be sophisticated, graceful and dignified, like my father. The desire to honor my gentle father with the same nobility with which he lived consumed me.

In the end, I chose composure and elegance as the tone for my father’s eulogy and set my passions aside.

While my preacher-brother would man the receiving line (his specialty), thank the people for coming, and make a speech of his own—my mother’s only job for this day was simply to survive it—who then would arrange for food for the aftermeal (for in the South, funeral food is a most important thang)?

Who would keep the group on schedule? Make sure everybody was in the proper place at the right time? Communicate with the funeral director about my father’s makeup, smudged during transport to the church?

I am a Southern woman, a Tennessee daughter, and for the likes of me on funeral day there is much to attend to. Important moments demand decorum, I concluded. Thus I needed to tend to (what I perceived to be) the proper role of the first-born on her father’s funeral day: to keep my emotions decent and in order so that others might lose theirs. This was my duty and my calling.

As far as my eulogy was concerned, the recalling of stories about my father before an audience——the way he rubbed his thumb on the back my little hand, how he called me his darling daughter—seemed too vulnerable for both the current state of my grief and my felt duties of the day. So I wrote a careful, well-crafted eulogy instead. I avoided personal story, and, in the place of intimacy, I chose lovely words from other’s pens—Tennyson and Steinbeck and C.S. Lewis and King David, my kin in a long career as a reader and an English teacher. In my grief I trusted these folks more than I trusted myself to eulogize the finest of men who, for me, was beyond description.

Yet, in compiling the grander words of other writers, I neglected most of my own. The borrowed sentiments on the final draft stood on their own sound merit, make no mistake (“‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”), so I simply set aside the fact that I’d made a lesser choice. ~~~ The air in the car was cold; I glanced around at my inky pages littering the floorboard, blown all akimbo by winter’s angry gusts. I took a long glance in the rearview mirror and observed an older face looking back, a face who understood that, in just a few minutes, she would make the same choice again because there remained no time to alter the words written on those sheets, and the reflection in the mirror was in no emotional state to “wing it.” By choosing to play it safe, that starched face would miss a vulnerable moment of intimacy.

She would miss abandon.

Well anyway, I reasoned with the mirror, who could expect me to tell a socially distanced, COVID-mitigated, masked-up group of mourners about the time my father, in the excruciating throes of dementia, raised a bottle of olive oil in one trembling hand and vegetable grater in the other and threatened the life of his caregiver? How I FaceTimed with him as my husband sped me to their house, my constant shouting “I’m coming, I’ll be right there!” through the phone, and how it took almost an hour to rid my father’s shaky hands of their weaponry. How, when he finally calmed down a bit, my usually-gentle father looked into my eyes as his tears fell and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if I just went on and died?” Wild with abandon and unrestraint that painful night, my father seemed ready to take the next steps on his journey.

But I, (the one who knew that underneath my mother’s grieving clothes she wore the thin, blue-silk necktie my father wore on their wedding day, the lovely remembrance she kept with her all these years), I chose to protect myself and my emotions on my father’s funeral day (there’s simply too much beauty here! so

much love!), by wrapping myself in the careful words of other storytellers. I chose sophistication over abandon and control over vulnerability, and in so doing I joined the throng of weary travelers before me who also succumbed to the siren song of self-protection. ~~~ This is the story I should have told.

Before my parents’ move to a retirement village, my family spent weeks sorting through the accumulation of their sixty-two-year marriage. We packed up their life.

On most of those long afternoons my father—affectionately called Geezer by us and everyone we know—mostly snoozed, quiet in his worn leather recliner, waking only to ask again and then again, What are we doing? and Where are we going? and Am I going too? But on one of those busy days in early spring, my father shuffled behind his squeaky metal walker to where I stood among the packing boxes. Can I help? By this time in his long journey with Parkinson’s, Geezer had forgotten our names, but not us. Of course you can help. I handed him a pair of dull scissors. He smiled and began to cut tiny pieces of duct tape from the roll and place the thin strips in neat little rows along the edge of the table, his engineer’s mind still geared toward tidiness and order.

We worked together in the pleasant quiet until I noticed his tears.

“Geezer,” I whispered, taking his shaking hands, “why are you crying? Do you know why you are so sad?”

For the past months it had become clear that Geezer was taking care of his emotional affairs with what little locution he had left, speaking his last feeble phrases as his words betrayed him like his muscles had.

He grasped my little hand in his large, wrinkled one and rubbed the back of my hand with his thumb. His weak lips labored to speak. Searching around in the

darkening well of fading vocabulary, he looked at my little hand and found a few words to articulate his apprehension. “Did this get worse?”

I was born with a limb difference—a short left arm with only three fingers.

Just after my birth, with my mother still in recovery, my father stood alone at the hospital nursery window to hear the doctor say, “New Dad, can I speak with you? There’s an issue. . . .” Geezer worried about paying for doctor’s visits and physical therapy when I was young—so little money, so many bills—until an older orthopedic doctor took my father aside and said, “Take this baby home and try not to worry. Teach her to ride a bike and turn a cartwheel. Things’ll work out like they’re supposed to.”

There was less support for mental and physical differences in those days; the language was harsher, words like birth defect and deformed and weird. A young child once told me my hand looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s claw, and that kid was not too far off base. No one can deny the cruelty of children on the play yard and the meanness in the girls’ locker room as children learn about showing kindness to others, or not, for we acknowledge that some folk never develop empathy, and in its stead choose violence and hatred to fill the void left by the absence of compassion. And for all this, Geezer worried.

But things worked out. I grew up a happy kid who married and bore a healthy child with ten fingers who in turn married and bore her own healthy child with ten. The mystic Julian of Norwich was correct in her reminder that “All will be well and all manner of things will be well.” When we suffer, we participate with Christ in addressing the suffering in the world, and I realized only in the late stages of my father’s life that he had borne my childhood suffering for me, vicariously.

And now, before he forgot everything, Geezer sought the assurance that there was nothing more for him to do, to tell me he loved me by rubbing my little hand in farewell. To say goodbye.

“Did this get worse?” he asked again, his face faded in pain.

“No, Geezer, it did not get worse,” I whispered. “It stayed the same. I grew up fine, I’m just fine.”

He nodded. “I knew you would be.” His face relaxed into that old grin I loved so. “I just knew it.”

Joy and suffering, in their extremes, are twin arms of the same steady compass, connected at the edges of love and abandon.

Geezer sat back down in his chair and closed his eyes.

Shari Brand Ray Shari Ray has been a teacher of English Literature and creative writing for thirty-five years. She has published a number of inspirational essays in Moody Magazine and writes locally in Memphis, Tennessee. Her novel, Nannie, examines the extraordinary power of forgiveness.

Centrifuge In the bluing of my morning computer the meter and line of last night’s pre-sleep dreams dart in and out of cerebral fissures. I follow.

Dry river beds snake through the bear grass of the Bitterroot Mountain, or, is it the sage of Chaco Canyon? My first cousin Mary Sue and I play with chalk. Draw hop scotch lines and Prairie Elementary Sucks on the school basketball court.

Our giggles dissolve with autumn rains.

Same cousin swears she was there, she wasn’t when winged soldiers knocked on our door and announced that Dad was now memory.

Folded into frontal lobes by white-gloved honor guards.

God created death so we can live again.

The priest’s words hung over mourners like No-Pest-Strips. Was this the first time I questioned God? Omniscient who created light.

Then what? Forgot. And darkness crept in again.

Falling airplane parts reflected off the South China Sea, forty years later, still, the precipice of all thought.

Elizabeth Mathes Elizabeth Mathes is a counselor who specializes in autism. Married to a retired music educator and composer, Elizabeth has a 30-year-old adult son with autism and is often inspired to write when walking with her son in North Idaho’s alpine and glacial beauty. She has published poetry in small literary presses across the United States.

Red Giant I lost my director today.

She who picked out my prettiest slip, the one with the lace neckline, stitched on my cardboard wings and helped me rehearse my lines.

I was an angel heralding hope in her neighborhood passion play.

She was our DJ, too awkward, she’d said, to dance.

Cousins and sibling learned to groove to her 45s.

The stars in our eyes, we took off with Lucy in the Sky, soared with Jefferson Airplane.

I lost my story teller today.

Her eyes squinted, inflamed with so many pages read.

Her body smelled musty like the best of old hardbacks.

She’d tell tales of Marco Polo, Greek myths, Tudor treachery, American politics hopeful, whimsical and unsightly.

She’d embellish common time, B.C., evolution and the universe.

Her stories always came with a tug on her sleeves to hide the scars on her arms.

I lost my teacher today.

She could find the sparkle in any quadratic equations the logic hidden in the corners of triangles, rectangles and squares.

Imprinted on me a love for the Bard.

I’d write her first after walking the streets of Antigua, York or Athens.

Try to describe the texture of history brushed that day.

A history I only knew through her. She, too often broke or broken, a history she only touched through me.

I lost my sorceress today.

She conjured the world in rich hues.

Sprites and witches danced in her light and destruction.

A star dims.

I lost my sister today.

Elizabeth Mathes

Sapa Vietnam

Jeff Davis

What Is Always With Us Language is our problem child, forever refusing to confess what it knows, or connect the frayed ends hanging between us. Maybe that’s why there’s comfort in a dialect you don’t know, in the angles of their mysterious grammars, the blunt stones of sentences.

The wrong word forever waits to be said, but today I listened to a woman sing ballads in French and understood each note she intoned in a way allowed only in the most perfect conversations.

“Toujours le temps,” she murmured, and I shivered at the small table in the small tavern her voice built.

Between sets we might exchange those low, knowing sentences spoken by those who know themselves so well they have no need of translation.

A trucker who picked me up thumbing said, “Start talking and I’ll put the hammer down,” and we highballed through two states.

That was one night. But another night I got in the car, frantic to reach the hospital four hours away where my wife lay.

There was no one to talk to but I found a radio station with a signal that stretched from there till dawn. I can’t recall one song that played that night, but if I heard them again, I would know every word.

Al Maginnes Al Maginnes has published four chapbooks and eight full length collections of poetry.

His ninth, The Beasts That Vanish, will be out fall of 2021. Recent poems have appeared in Lake Effect, Xavier Review, American Journal of Poetry and others. Al lives in Raleigh and teaches at Louisburg College in Louisburg, North Carolina.

Cricket’s Leg Broken punctuation, this elongated comma, stiff parentheses with no partner to close the deal.

Headless arrow, it points to a day I can’t recall, but I was outdoors or this tiny limb would not rest on a page I don’t recall turning. It was warmer than this day whose draperies of rain wants to slow into ice. Each summer a cricket gets in the house, camps under some piece of furniture too solid for my back, then grates forth a song whose notes are insomnia and the grave.

I forget the name of the pond where we were fishing when Billy Dale pinched a cricket behind the head and slid the book between carapace and soft body.

“That’ll make your skin crawl.” He held the head to my finger so I could feel the little mandibles work against my flesh.

I’ve never heard of anyone gnawed to death by crickets, but I developed an interest in artificial lures the next time we stopped to buy bait.

Like a road aiming beyond the map’s boundaries, that non-kicking leg always points backward, no matter that our focus is always forward.

Ahead, there will always be disaster—potholes, cars overheating, a wallet’s absence. There will always be the grinding you hear when dark gauzes our vision and all we see turns strange.

In Sunday school, there were plagues, clouds of insects blocking the sun, fields devoured in a frenzy of minutes.

There were always reasons; they always felt small: failing to recognize an angel in the doorway, an offering of fruit instead of meat, a son punished incorrectly.

In a few months I’ll walk out into the humidity and the one endless note of cricket-song, all of them rubbing their legs, like small demented fiddlers ushering us through half a year of nights, then going still with weather or loss of a limb that lies silent as shadow between pages of a book I’m not done reading yet.

Al Maginnes

Carrying Time I’ve never been able to embrace the holy inevitabilities, the smoky prayers mystics lean on. I always choose the three-dimensional, even something evanescent as water. Faith will cast great architectures, domed cathedrals, mosaics of stained glass, to pray to the unseen hand, the unripe future such work requires.

Better, perhaps, to live in the present-tense awe of those who delight in the eternity of a leaf-bud, in moss softening the dark side of a branch, in brush-wisps of clouds. These seeds, kernels of concentrated time, tremble in the soft dirt of the body, unsure which direction allows it to branch and flower. We were raised with rules, schedules to follow, gifted watches to count the expiring hours. The bargain we get is nothing lasts forever, caveat that lets us linger over coffee or a final drink while wind lifts the scent of water and slow ruin past us, floating toward a horizon we trained ourselves not to see. But today, with clouds unraveling above me and the ocean busy with the task it has always performed, it seems like a small thing to leave my keys and shoes on the beach, to walk knee high, chest high into the water and into whatever fate will have me. More questions than answers in this incarnation, where scientists recently revealed that the future might already be happening in some unseen pocket of the universe we don’t fathom. Which might mean some walk with us and, unconsciously, inside an afterlife as well. The notion that we labor toward a future

that has already happened is enough to inspire some truly humbling, hold-my-beer lunacy, some seize the day stuff that will rattle even the mystics most immersed in the preordained future. Maybe we’ve come to a crossroads where science and faith intersect. And from this beach, following the curve of an unclosed circle, I could be caught in a riptide carrying me from the sand-shouldered shore of the present tense out toward a future or a past dark and bottomless, one impossible to resist or shape. If this could happen, it is not likely it would happen as I describe it. However far I walk, I will come back to my homely shore, let my keys anchor my pocket with familiar weight. Our constant is that our bodies keep moving forward, displacing our mass as we move. Time changes because we walk though and are marked by it. And as we walk, the future takes souvenirs, grains of skin, wisps of hair until we are only breath woven to tides of air, fine scatters of air touching the lip of a stranger who might inhale our former body and release it as word or prayer or, God help us, song.

Al Maginnes

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue #16 spring/summer 2022

fiction Bruce Spang, editor Peter Alterman Gail Hipkins Stan Werlin non-fiction Peter Alterman, editor John Himmelheber Steve Wechselblatt poetry John Himmelheber Pete Solet Bruce Spang art & photography Terry Johnson, editor editor-in-chief John Himmelheber