Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #17

Issue # 2022Fall/Winter17 www.sblaam.com

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue #17 fall/winter, 2022 fiction Alexis Levitin Fading 86 B D Redding The Sea Flyer 50 Ernie Reynolds Migrations 110 Dennis Vannatta The Schneider Boys 20 non-fiction Jeanne Althouse Ghosts in the Grand Wardrobe 42 David Blumenfeld Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow 8 Jenny Falloon Sailing Lessons 68 Ann Levin Susan's Rembrandt 94 Elliot Margolies Wildroot and Beyond 80 poetry Holly Cian Pump 18 Revolution 19 Richard Dinges Jr Sounds of Home 106 Marianne Gambaro A Walk on the Dam at Sunset 78 Stuffed Monkeys 79 Martha Golensky Speaking of Trees. . . 93 Cathy Hollister Again 47 Fragility 48 Gavin Kayner A Matter of Details 108 Richard Kostelanetz Elan 37 Jerry Krajnak Seasonal 85 D S Maolalai Other untold stories 90 The hunt 92 Joan Mazza Snowed-In Sestina 6 Marda Messick Bedrock 4 Widow's Walk 5

cover: Geranuims (partial), by K J Hannah Greenberg

David P Miller Fenceless 104 Jay Nunnery Namesake 36 Paul Z Panish The Stone Carver 114 Poem on My Eighty-Seventh Birthday A Confession 116 William Waters She Closes Her Eyes 107 Harold Whisman The Prognosticator's Vision 35 images K J Hannah Greenberg Geraniums 105 Bill Wolak Fleeting As Daylight's Lipstick 49 Indifferent As Ashes 34

Editor's Note Since its inception, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine has encouraged and published senior artists and writers. This predilection naturally evolved from our founding as a magazine originating from a college for seniors in Asheville. And we are proud of our welcoming stance toward those in the "third age." We feel the works we present from our senior contributors represent only part of a wide spectrum of writing that we have always sought to publish. In this issue, especially, we are impressed by the quality and range of writings from our senior authors. Of the thirty-one poems, fiction, and non-fictions pieces, twelve deal directly with aging. But there is little discouragement, regret, or bitterness to be heard. Instead, readers will more likely witness a new appreciation of the world, as in Alexis Levitin's "Fading;" a new understanding and acceptance of life, as in Gavin Kayner's "A Matter of Details;" and even humor, as in David Blumenfeld's "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." The issue opens with a lively love song from Marda Messick, "Bedrock," and closes with a succinct autobiography of a singer/poet, "Poem on My Eighty-Seventh Birthday," by Paul Z Panish. We hope you enjoy these and all the works presented here, no matter the writer's or artist's age.

Bedrock I’m in the bed of the F150 unloading limestone rocks to border the flowerbeds, handing down to you all the ones I can lift. The rocks are pitted with shells from ancient seas, crusted with white quartz, geodes from Tennessee where you were born in my mid-century year. We also are weathered, composite of the past and fired in sorrow, yet enduring, strong for love and able for pleasure. I like to watch you move, your back like a young man’s, and when you smile up at me, grizzled and sweaty, I pretend to fly from the tailgate into your arms, and you lift me, laughing, down. Later our shoulders will ache and we’ll rock together in the bed we have made, rocking and rolling a bedspring rhythm in spite of all we know about the grinding of time, the empty bed to come. Now, now, now, old man, love me like the rock of ages. Marda Messick Marda Messick is a poet and theologian living in Tallahassee, Florida on land that is the traditional territory of the Apalachee Nation and other indigenous peoples. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century, Literary Mama, and Delmarva Review.

Widow's Walk, A Grammar Verb Widow uncurls to stand, One hand held by only air In the other, her Circumambulatingmitegone. Noun A circuit of the stations of the heart A turret by the sea No mariner charts. Adjective A particular gait of grief A hitch in the heavy step Of going on. Marda Messick

The temp has dropped to one degree. Too cold by any human standard. I’m thankful for the heat rising from the wood stove downstairs, too old to be making that round-trip for the beast’s feedings every two hours. It’s only six inches of snow piled up like Swarovski crystals, not an ice storm or a blizzard. Beneath the snow, ice lurks without intending malice. A day that’s cold enough to freeze my pond, wind to blow the snow off the surface. Seventy degrees inside, the heat pump not overworked as long as I feed logs to the black cast iron beast below. My old dog stays in bed, prefers summer. We grow old together. Nearly mobile as before I fell on ice four years ago, I’m making bread to feed neighbors, friends, grateful I don’t have a cold, for my full supply of pasta, grains, yeast, the heat flowing from the oven. In the forecast, no more snow in sight. But this half-foot of fluffy snow from yesterday will last a week before it’s old and turns to muddy slush. I miss Florida’s heat, glasses sweating on the patio, filled with icy drinks. I miss the plunge into ocean waves, cold water against hot skin, without the desire to feed on endless carbs. I hold a strand of words, feed them through my fingers like fabric strips, snowy satin on the edge when the phrase is right. Cold shoulders spur me to write and write, old habit since childhood. No, I won’t be iceskating on the pond. You’ll find me near the heat source with my cat, whir of the heat pump and wood stove fans. I’m over-fed with ravioli, challah, chicken soup, and icecold family. A white blanket of snow covers spongy, brown ground, oak leaves old and crumbling in this brittle cold.

Snowed-In Sestina

Joan Mazza Joan Mazza's work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and others. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self. She has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and seminar leader and lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes every day.

Endless cold days. I long for summer’s heat, no fear of snow. I could move back before I’m old, before I’ll need someone to feed me ice cream.

Anthropologists have discovered a wide variety of attitudes about the way our hair should be cut or configured and about the significance of its loss. A widespread attitude connects hair with strength and vitality and identifies its loss with the loss of these traits. Conquered peoples were often required to cut their hair as a sign of subjugation in the belief that hairlessness made them weak. When Genghis Khan conquered China, he required the women to cut their hair in order to keep them timid and self-effacing. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, virtually every school child learns that Samson, superhero of the Hebrews whose power resided in his long locks, lost that power when he received a haircut from the beautiful Delilah. Samson's haircut, which is surely the most famous one in western history, cost him dearly and literally brought down the Understandably,house.then, from time immemorial, people have sought methods to restore hair or prevent its loss. As early as 1550 B.C., Egyptian physicians devised a remedy for hair loss that included hippopotamus fat, boiled porcupine hair and the leg of a female greyhound sautéed in oil. Eleven centuries later, the Greek physician Hippocrates experimented with a mixture that included beetroot, horseradish and pigeon droppings, and there are many other examples of drastic or farfetched remedies for hair restoration. (See Jennie Cohen www.history.com/news/historylists/9-bizzare-baldness-cures).

Barring success in producing the real thing, balding people have resorted to wigs, toupees, perukes, hats and laurel wreaths to conceal their missing hair. Balding men, and in some cases women, have reacted against hair loss anxiety by embracing hairlessness, extolling it as beautiful and shaving whatever remaining hair they have.

Hair loss is one of the many changes that aging can bring about so gradually that it isn't noticed until an advanced stage. Occasionally, it isn’t gradual. I had a friend in college who was totally bald by the time he reached high school. He said it was as though it all fell out overnight. Another friend had alopecia areata universalis, which left him with not a single hair on his body. Bald head, bald chest, bald balls.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow or, How I Lost My Hair and Got It Back Again

And, of course, there is the misfortune of rapid and complete hair loss due to chemotherapy. But while hair loss can be sudden, and complete or incomplete, for most men it occurs gradually, leaving healthy hair only around the back of the head and along the ears, a condition known as male-pattern baldness. These days the most common remedy for male-pattern baldness is to shave your head completely and achieve the fashionable cue ball or “bald is beautiful” look. When I was in high school in the 1950s, the movie star Yul Brynner was one of the few men who shaved his head. Back then the Yul Brynner look was considered pretty exotic. Now the shaved head is so common there is a virtual Yul Tide. Apparently, I was born without a hair on my head and remained that way for many months. For my mother often told me that I walked and talked before I had a hair on my head or a tooth in my mouth. When I eventually did develop hair, it was a handsome headful of large, soft, luxurious curls. At my first haircut my mother forbade the barber from sweeping away my shorn, golden-brown locks, which she carefully preserved in a cellophane bag stapled to our family photo album. My nickname was “Davey Wavey.” When I reached puberty, my hair became coarse (as did my fantasies) and my curls tightened like a clenched fist. I was barber's nightmare and none of the local barbers were able to give me a decent cut. A friend of my father's recommended a fancy barber in Chicago who was said to be able to "work miracles" with even the unruliest hair. He took one look at me and said, "Son, I couldn't possibly do a thing for you for under twenty-five dollars," the equivalent of $250 today. I decided I'd stick with the local buck-twenty-five version. In high school in the 1950s, I wore my hair in a D.A. (Duck's Ass): the two sides in the back combed together with a sharp vertical line separating the "tail feathers." With very curly hair like mine, this took a lot of work at home. When I was an undergraduate, most male students were wearing fairly close-cropped hair, almost a crewcut, and by the time I was a philosophy graduate student in Berkeley in the 1960s, beatniks and hippies dominated the scene and very long hair was de rigueur. My long curly hair yielded a bon fide Afro. Or rather what would have been a bona fide Afro had I been AfricanAmerican. In addition to being in style along with sandals, shades and a hookah for

Armed with this idea, I’d move on to borderline cases of more consequential concepts.Here’s how I got myself into trouble. Back in the 1960s, when I still had a thick head of hair, instead of pointing to a student in the class, I’d often use myself as an example. After mentioning a famous person who was completely bald in the late 60s,

smoking grass my Afro was economical, since I almost never got a haircut. In the spirit of the time and place, I just "let it all hang out."

Eventually, my mane started to thin and I began a gradual descent toward baldness. My friends never pointed this out to me and, apart from a short period in my teens when I inspected myself for zits or other girl-discouraging blemishes, I have never spent much time gazing at myself in the mirror. Consequently, by the late 1970s when I was in my forties, my hair had thinned considerably, though I was more or less oblivious to it. After I became a philosophy professor, this led to an embarrassing encounter with my students. One of the things philosophers do is define concepts. How to define justice, truth and goodness, for example, are three important conceptual questions.

When introducing this sort of analysis, it's common to point out that some concepts have borderline cases where it isn't clear whether the concept applies. Running is an example. Did Jessse Owens run? Boy did he! Does your ninety-two-year-old grandfather’s gait qualify as running? Not a chance. What about my moderatelypaced activity on the track or in the road? Well, that’s a matter of dispute. It’s a borderline case. Baldness is another such concept. Someone who has just a little hair or no hair at all is bald. But how little? You can't draw a precise line. To get this topic going in class, I'd introduce the baldness example with this spiel: “Consider someone like Yul Brenner. He’s clearly bald. Next, take someone with a full head of hair” and I’d point to the student with the fullest mop in the class. “Joe over there in the corner is clearly not bald. But imagine that he loses a few hairs each year over a very long time. Eventually, he'll be as hairless as Yul Brenner. Yet you can’t specify an exact point where he becomes bald. Somewhere along the way he's a borderline case.”

it was Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or Lew Alcindor as he was then known I’d continue my shtick:“Now take someone with a really full head of hair. Me, for example. If I lost a few hairs each year, over a long time I’d eventually become as bald as Lew Alcindor. But you can’t specify an exact point. . . .”

One day after my hair had thinned very noticeably, I trotted out the baldness case but this time when I said, “Take someone with a really full head of hair, me, for example,” I saw a couple of students snicker. An innocent-looking young woman in the front row seemed astonished, even slightly frightened, as if to say: “Good God, has our professor lost his mind? He’s almost bald. Even my father, who is considering transplants, has more hair.” I gulped, realizing at last what had happened. Embarrassed, I pushed on to the end of the lecture but when I returned home, a look at the back of my head in the mirror made clear just how foolish I must have seemed to my students. I never used myself in that example again. Eventually, I became fully bald. Not a borderline case, typical male-pattern baldness: some frizzy, lackluster hair around the base of my head and a few flimsy straggling hairs on the crown. It had taken quite a while but I had finally gotten there. My father Max had gotten there at a much younger age than I and had sorely regretted his hair loss. Although Max couldn’t bring himself to consider a toupee this was long before the era of transplants he was acutely attuned to others who were wearing toupees, or rugs, as hairpieces were then often called. If your hairpiece was imported from Persia, I guess it would have been an oriental rug.

A couple of my gay friends claim to be able to spot another gay man the minute he walks into the room: They call the knack “Gaydar.” Max had "Baldar." Which was inspired, I suspect, by hair envy. Max wouldn’t cheat by wearing a hairpiece but, by God, others weren’t going to cheat and get away with it either. “See the guy over there at the corner table,” he’d say in a restaurant where we were having dinner, “he’s wearing a rug and it’s a bad one.” I'd look and see nothing. The man's hair

I used myself in this example for many years to come, laughably blind to the fact that along the way I was losing a few hairs each year, slowly becoming bald (or nearly so), and thereby living out my own example.

Despite Max's slick pate and sparse remaining hair, he was fastidious about getting regular haircuts and very concerned about the grooming of his hair. "That Fred Schimmer gives a much better cut than Steve Kappas, who I've been using," he'd say. "I think I'm going to switch barbers." Max had so little hair to work with that I couldn't see how switching barbers would make a difference. He always looked the same to me no matter who had trimmed his hair, Fred, Steve or anyone else. I thought I could do as good a job with our home scissors and save my dad a few bucks, though I knew better than to suggest it. It took so little time and effort to cut my father's hair that I wondered why barbers didn't give a "male-pattern" or "bald guy" discount.

seemed perfectly natural. Then I'd walk by the be-rugged man’s table, take a closer look, and realize that Max was right. Though I occasionally spotted a man I thought was wearing a hairpiece, I never developed my father's knack of Baldar.

I've always admired people especially ones in the spotlight, such as actors or actresses who gracefully accept signs of aging like wrinkles or hair loss and don't try to "fix" them even if they pay a price in the public eye. Ray Milland, a movie star who won an Oscar in 1945, had a gorgeous shock of lustrous black hair, which he lost in late life. Thereafter, he accepted his baldness. No toupee, no comb-over, just a plain bald pate. His look was colossally different from his look in the heyday of his career. In an interview on the Johnny Carson show, he reported with a laugh that one evening while he was seated at a famous New York restaurant, a diner passed his table, paused, and with a puzzled stare asked, "Didn't you used to be Ray Milland?" Now that's lack of vanity!

I’m convinced that whether a toupee is detected or taken as the real thing depends as much on the confidence with which the person wears it as on the quality of the hairpiece itself. This is no different from a lot of other things in which success is a function of the aura that self-confidence projects. Occasionally, homely people who act as if they are good-looking are so successful at pretending to be attractive that no one takes them to be homely. They dress well, are poised, well-spoken and walk with an air of owning the space they inhabit. I once knew a woman who was especially plain, yet her self-assurance and infectious smile lit up a room and

everyone thought of her as attractive. She always had a good-looking boyfriend. SometimesHeretwo.isan even more striking case. I once had a philosophy colleague, whom I shall call Morty, who was very nice looking. Morty was slim and muscular, had piercing dark brown eyes, high cheekbones and a headful of thick, beautiful, coal black hair. He was fastidious about every detail of his life: his lecture notes were flawlessly typed, without a smudge or penciled-in correction; the books on his shelves were meticulously organized by category and lined up neatly; his shirts and slacks were crisply ironed; and he never had a hair out of place. Everything about Morty was just right perfect.Mortywas also exceptionally intelligent and supremely self-confident. Most philosophers are intelligent but Morty was at the very top of a very intelligent heap. He was the smartest of the smart: razor sharp, aggressive in argument and invariably successful in philosophical repartee. He was also a little smug about it. Not quite obnoxious perhaps but close. His colleagues were intimidated by him and on guard if they had to take him on in philosophical debate for fear that he’d score a point, twist the knife, and they'd go down in ignominious defeat. Face-to-face argument among philosophers is sometimes like a school yard brawl and in it everyone knew that Morty could kick your ass. Because of the awe he inspired, none of us was aware, and only later learned, that Morty was bald and wore a toupee. The coal black hair around the sides of his head was truly his own but the bounteous black crop in the middle had once belonged to someone else. We never noticed any change in the length of his hair and perhaps assumed that, in his perfection, he got a weekly haircut. It would have been so like him to stay fastidiously trimmed. As time went by Morty began to grey at the temples and only at the temples. Yet we were so much in his intellectual thrall that we didn’t realize he was not authentically hirsute but completely bald beneath his luxuriant rug. This failure to recognize the obvious persisted even when the hair on the sides of his head began to thin and turn a little silver, though not a single silver thread appeared on his still sumptuous black crown. Yet even with the contrast between his real hair and his

toupee so plain to see, we still didn't see it. Until one day an outsider who wasn't under Morty's sway made everything clear for us. One semester a new philosophy faculty member joined our group and brought his wife, an academic from another department, to our weekly discussion sessions.

After witnessing Morty hold forth a few times, pontificating authoritatively and laying down the law on various philosophical topics, she could abide it no longer. On her third visit, when Morty had to leave early, she burst out: “Thank God that smug little asshole is gone. I’d give a lot to snatch that phony looking toupee right off his head!” Toupee? Morty had a toupee? Suddenly the truth became obvious to us all. So obvious, in fact, that we felt like fools not to have seen it ourselves. It dawned on us, too, that Morty, who seemed so in command of everything, so invincible, was as vulnerable as the rest of us. It must have threatened him terribly to have such an imperfection as baldness. Eventually, he had his toupee "corrected" to produce a more perfect match between his rug and his greying temples but that was not until later. None of us ever let on to Morty that we had learned his secret and he certainly didn’t reveal it to us. We continued to respect him for his fine intellect and treat him as the friend that he was. But we never again thought of him as invincible or accorded him the level of deference that had blinded us. It was clearly a case of the Emperor’s New Rug.Even after I recognized that I was bald, I never considered getting a rug. Of course, by the time I was fully bald, toupees were passé. Newer remedies, like hair plugs, are far more realistic than even the finest toupee and can’t be blown away by a strong wind or snatched off by a practical joker. When a high school friend of mine eventually became bald, he remedied it with scores of plugs. He looked great. Seemed ten years younger at least. His new hair looked so much like the hair that had abandoned him that people like me who hadn’t seen him since he’d lost his original crop didn’t have a clue that he had been “plugged.” I wouldn’t have known it if he hadn’t told me. He also informed me confidentially that the process was so painful that if he had he realized the agony it involved, he never would have gotten plugs, even taking

1 For a closer look at my prostate and a laugh at its expense, see "The World's Biggest https://www.monofiction.org/post/the-world-s-biggest-prostate-by-david-blumenfeld-non-fiction.Prostate,"

into account their positive cosmetic effects. The pain I saw in his eyes as he described the excruciating experience of hair being sown into his scalp killed any thought I might have had of doing likewise. I just resolved to accept my baldness. It’s not so bad, I told myself, falling back on the idea that baldness is a sign of virility. This old saw no doubt is as much a myth as the opposing one that equates hair with vitality. There are men with mounds of hair on their chests and backs and shoulders and protruding from their ears who swear that, like Samson of old, hairiness makes them strong and virile. We choose our myths to suit our needs. I went on for a long time not giving my baldness a thought, when the saga of my mop took an unexpected turn. Like so many older men, I suffer from an enlarged prostate whose inconvenient effects include frequent trips to the bathroom and a less than copious urinary flow.1 Sometime in my sixties, my urologist prescribed a series of remedies, including the drug Avodart, which had some welcome effects like reducing the number of my potty visits and increasing my urinary flow. (Fellow sufferers: Don’t get too excited, I still get up a lot during the night and certainly don't piss like the waterfall of my youth.) To my great surprise, after a few months I also thought I noticed some short, flimsy hairs sprouting in the front of my head just above my forehead. There were just four or five tiny sprigs and they were such pathetic little things that at first I wondered whether they were real. Was I seeing things? No, when I looked again, this time more carefully, they were still there. In another couple of weeks, I saw a few more. They too were as spindly as the first few, just flimsy, fluffy peach fuzz, but now there was more fuzz than before, all clustered in a small spot on the front of my scalp. When the process continued unabated, I called it to the attention to my urologist, who said casually that, yes, this was sometimes a sideeffect of the treatment. He asked if it bothered me. Hah! I was pretty excited about it. I was on the way to getting my hair back. He also inquired with concern whether any new hair had emerged on parts of my body where I didn’t want it to be. He didn’t say which parts he had in mind but I imagined great, chemically-induced tufts of hair

protruding from my elbows or my nose. “No” I said, "just my head." I later learned that, in addition to its salutary urological effects, my medication is the leading drug used by cosmetologists for hair restoration. I was therefore getting a two-for-one bargain: a smaller prostate and a new crop of hair. Three-for-one, in fact: Since mine was a medical rather than a cosmetology prescription, the cost was covered by my insurance. Granted, my new growth wasn’t much to brag about but, damn it, it was hair and there was more of it every week. Soon, I happily assumed, I'd have all my hair back.Intime the peach fuzz gained body and encircled my head, leaving only a large, slick and shiny bald spot at the back, which I expected to fill in eventually. The problem was that I looked like a monk and even many more months generated no growth in the circular gap at the back of my head. Friar Blumenfeld: The look was not pleasing. I had looked a lot better bald. Yet I couldn’t let my new hair wither away by discontinuing my medication without foregoing its prostatic benefits. I considered returning to my roots and becoming an orthodox Jew. Wearing a yarmulke would cover the hairless gap and make it appear that I had a full head of hair! The futility of this dawned on me, however, when I considered the inconvenience of all those required rituals, the many trips I’d have to make to the synagogue and all the gefilte fish I’d be served. So, I considered going for the cue ball look instead. Before I could get the razor to my head, however, a friend suggested a more fruitful solution. He pointed out that the topical drug minoxidil was reputed to produce hair for 85% of men but only in the middle of the back portion of their heads. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if this marvelous chemical, this wonder drug, had been intended precisely for me. There was still, of course, a 15% chance of failure but, trembling with excitement, I raced to the drug store and purchased a year’s supply of minoxidil and immediately slathered a big, foamy blob of it where it was needed most. The directions said it normally took about three months for results to appear. And, yes, three months later, tiny sprouts exactly like the ones my prostate drug had produced in the front of my head began to appear in my monk’s gap. In the ensuring months the new crop blossomed and burgeoned and eventually filled the hitherto bare portion of my scalp. The new crop wasn’t the hair of my youth. It was softer, frailer and

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is a retired philosophy professor and associate dean who writes short stories, poetry and children's literature. His publications appear in a wide variety of magazines and journals.

mellower, as indeed I myself was. It was an old man’s hair but I was happy to have it.

The one-two punch of Avodart and minoxidil had done the trick. Shortly thereafter I joyously went for my first full-pate haircut in many years. And that's how I lost my hair and got it back again.

David Blumenfeld

Pump His square hips are a section of plate held out for the dog the fingers that waver like eel, the head at once beside itself, the cleft of an elbow, the crook of the moon, a calculus not discovered although he begged semicircles of words swiped from the center of his lip and the heart in his stomach like a misplaced comma wanting its space, chewing a tip of thumb the violet water a puddle of sun and over the sharp shade of yellow I am hearing a drum beat or the pump of my chest. Holly Cian Holly Cian is a writer and animal rescuer living in Asheville, NC. Her work has been published in Pinesong, The Great Smokies Review, and The Mountain Xpress.

In the beginning the Earth twisted compact in the universe. We worshiped a lone moon spinning too among stars lodged into the sky; we found Mars the way you might find a skeleton or a sweater haphazardly, when looking for something else, when something is not in its place: I remember the mornings I wondered if Venus was a star and tried to feel the exquisite movement of the ground as it turned. I whispered violence through my toes and by night I was tired in the body but also tired from wondering, that dark, dark space of prediction, and also from the press of skin. In the beginning the Earth took its tectonic plates and slammed them together like shutting a book just to open another. We stood in awe of what we could destroy: we mapped the earth with ideas we sucked at our blisters we peeled the paper of skin felt it flimsy between our fingers the parched piece of which was torn from home.

Holly Cian

Revolution

No doubt many of them did know that his last name was Snyder, but it was more fun to get in the spirit of things and claim otherwise. Phyllis Smithers, the retired grade school principal who’d let Billy live in the partially-finished loft over her garage, surely knew, a number insisted, crowding around her like a posse that’d corralled the guilty party, but she denied it, reminding them that Billy had lived most of his life on the Autreys’ farm and only with her the last ten years. No, he’d always been just Billy to her. Even if a good many of them had been aware of it, it was incredible that so many truly had not known that Billy’s last name was Snyder. Because Sheriff Billy was famous.Someone, in fact, had brought the clipping, brittle and yellowing with the years, from the Sunday section of the Kansas City Star. It was passed hither and yon through the crowd still gathered outside the Baptist church until it was torn in half by

The Schneider Boys: A Legend in the Making

Nearly everyone in the town of Sherman Junction came to Sheriff Billy’s funeral, and when, at the end of his eulogy, Reverend Boggs came to attention and saluted Billy in his coffin, almost all of them, even the most hard-hearted, flintsouled, Missouri-fractious farmers and laborers and tradesmen among them, were in tears. Billy had no relatives that anyone knew of, but he was one of the family to the entire town—better than family because he was so endearing whereas family, well. .

the funeral, at first it was the salute that everyone talked about, what a wonderful gesture from the reverend (who wasn’t much known for such, to be honest), at the same time that it was heartbreaking. But after they’d had their fill of the salute, they turned their attention to another issue.

.

“I didn’t even know he had a last name. I never heard him called anything other than Sheriff Billy.” “Billy Snyder!”

After.

“Did you know Billy’s last name was Snyder?”

some Yahoo so eager to get it he ripped it from the palsied fingers of poor old halfblind Jane Priddy. You’d think that none of them had seen it before, but two-thirds of them had a copy of their own. How often does someone from Sherman County get an article devoted to him in the Star, after all? And there in the color photo is Billy, standing at attention at the intersection of US 65 and State Road 312 (the eponymous junction), plastic silver star pinned to his shirt pocket, sternly saluting the photographer (who had to have been sitting in his car, locals noted, because Billy only saluted vehicles, never pedestrians).

The dozen turned back toward Odie. At least that many others, noting the dozen’s retrograde, reversed course, too.

“I never thought of that,” someone said, and Trudy Bakstrop said, “I thought of it, but I didn’t want to say,” and several nodded as if that made sense, ha ha. “Well, now we know he was a Snyder. But that doesn’t help any. There are no Snyders in Sherman Junction or in all of Sherman County, for that matter,” Gavin Leon said. Wes Petry, you could tell by the look on his face, didn’t know whether to laugh or“Listencry. to yourself,” Wes scoffed. “No Schneiders? Ever heard of a fellow by the name of Hal Schneider?”

“Whose people?” someone asked. Odie, a drinker, rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Sheriff Billy’s people. Who the hell else would I be talking about?”

Now, in this account of the birth of the legend of the Schneider boys, we run into a problem. On the little memorial cards given out at the funeral—paid for by Benny Twellman, town marshall, who had a soft spot for Sheriff Billy, being a fellow

The halving of the newspaper clipping seemed to deflate the crowd. They began to drift off toward their cars. A few headed over to Kelly’s Café, but not many since Tina Bolling, the cook, was right there amongst the mourners, which meant that J. J. Kelly himself would be doing the cooking. You had to be really hungry to risk J. J.’s cooking.Itwas at that point that Odie Wiltz said to no one in particular but loud enough that a dozen or so heard him, “I wonder who his people were?”

And the rumor began to spread: Sheriff Billy was Hal Schneider’s own son.

A few seemed a little doubtful about this, but then Malcolm Brothers, at sixteen the youngest person there by over thirty years, spoke up—“Yeah, I’ll bet it was Billy himself that spelled it like that. Probably it was way easier for him that way than the other. Billy didn’t spell too good.” Everyone, Gavin included, enthusiastically agreed. Indeed, Sheriff Billy not only didn’t spell too good, he didn’t spell at all. Afflicted with Down Syndrom or something worse, Billy didn’t spell, write, read, or speak except for “huh uh” for a negative. Otherwise, his vocabulary was limited to grunts, grimaces, tentative smiles, and expressions of astonishment.

lawman and all—it clearly spelled out Billy’s last name as S-N-Y-D-E-R. But the majority of the mourners ignored this and left the service talking about S-C-H-N-E-I-DE-R, Hal Schneider being the biggest landowner in the county. Hal and his wife, daughter, and son lived two miles south of town. “You’re confused. This is the name right here,” Gavin said, pushing the memorial card under Loren’s nose and jabbing his index finger at “Snyder.”

Loren swatted the card away and said, “That don’t mean shit. That’s what you call a proper name. They’re not in the Webster’s. You can spell a proper name any way you damn well please.”

Probably if the accusation had been leveled at some lesser personage, folks would have laughed it off and forgotten about it. But this was Big Hal Schneider, owner of half the county, all six-foot-five of him with cowboy hat and cowboy boots and silver buckle big as a dinner plate worn with suits made just for him in KC, and you didn’t want to know how much they cost. Naturally, he wasn’t liked. Didn’t make

Malcolm, clearly enjoying center-stage, volunteered, “Hey, maybe Sheriff Billy is Hal Schneider’s son!”

~ ~ ~

Whoops of laughter. But then Odie said, “What are you laughing at? Somebody’s got to be Billy’s daddy, don’t he? Why not Big Hal?”

. . . .

any difference if he was actually a pretty nice fellow according to those closest to him, basically just a Missouri farmer who listened to farm reports on the radio and kept a close eye on the weather and voted straight Republican like everybody else.

Hal’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that the high school basketball season wasn’t providing much of a distraction, the Cowboys’ tallest player being six-footzero-inches, and he played defense like he was dancing the minuet. What else was there to talk about? Hal Schneider and his boy, Billy, there’s your ticket.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for someone (it’s not recorded who) to drop the other shoe: if Hal Schneider was Billy’s daddy, who was the mama?

Briefly speculation turned to Ann Marie Wells, home ec teacher at the high school. She was single, neither too young nor too old, and had moved to Sherman Junction from the other side of the state, so there were no relatives nearby to hear talk and take umbrage and firearms. She was also, it was well known, desperate for a man, so desperate that rather than being easy prey for some rascal so inclined, she made men nervous. They kept their distance. Pretty funny. Had been pretty funny for years now, long enough that the funny had begun to lose its pep and something else— pity, or even something nobler, compassion—was occasionally felt when the subject came up. So, yes, the communal eye did fall briefly upon Ann Marie Wells, but then Look away, look away. If not Ann Marie, though, who?

A good time was had by all for a while as many amusing suggestions were made. Spinster Ida Smith, the first person to reach one-hundred in Sherman Junction in recent memory. Cecelia Smith (no relation, believe it or not) of whom it was said that when she wanted to haul ass, she had to make two trips. That sort of thing.

That was the problem, though: other than the joke suggestions, there was a paucity of eligible females. Most of the likely-seeming candidates were some man’s wife or daughter, and you had to be careful whose name you bandied about facetiously or otherwise. This was second amendment country, after all.

What did any of that matter when for all these years the arrogant son of a bitch hadn’t even acknowledged his own son?

. .

Debra Schneider, that is, Hal’s wife. Obvious as the nose on your face. Hal and Debra had had that child, who wasn’t quite perfect enough for the high and mighty Schneiders, so they’d farmed him out first to the Autreys and then Phyllis Smithers, then for all these years saw him standing at the intersection of 65 and 312 and never once went over to give their baby boy a kiss or even a pat on the head. Jesus wept. “It’s not like their other kids are so perfect,” someone observed, and every single other person nodded vigorously. “That Sarah Schneider, shee-it,” someone else said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.Sarah was easy enough to dislike, having been head cheerleader and class Miss Sherman County and finalist in the Miss Missouri contest. The clincher, though, was when, rather than going to the University and being a Golden Girl or something equally prestigious, she’d scattered heel dust on her home state and headed to Vassar right after graduation. Vassar, it was alleged, was in New York. That figured. New York. Shee-it. It was harder to determine what sort of attitude to adopt to her younger brother, Adam. How do you form an attitude to someone who is, essentially, invisible?

Possibilities were so few that talk threatened to dry up completely until. comes the dawn.

valedictorian,

If you asked around the community, you’d likely hear little more than a repeat of the comment Bob Bozarth, SJHS’s basketball coach, said about him at the beginning of this school year: “Adam Schneider. What a waste of six-foot-two.” Yes, at age sixteen, Adam was six-two by maybe 140 pounds, dripping wet. He was barely able to lift a basketball. Dribble it? Shoot it? Ha. Not only couldn’t he do it, worse, much worse, he didn’t seem to want to do it. Hard to believe but apparently true, so no use wasting more thought on him. That was the attitude of the community in general, if you could call that an attitude. How about among that more select community, his fellow students? Much the same, really. Oh sure, in grade school they’d tormented

It was Judy Britt who, over coffee and pie at Kelly’s Café, suddenly looked up, forkful of coconut cream halfway to her mouth, and said, “Well, if Hal Schneider is the daddy, who else would the mama be except Debra?”

him a good deal—he was the rich man’s son after all—but by now they’d outgrown that, and they rarely turned their attention to him enough even to tease him. They were aware of his existence but only as someone forever in the background, in class, in class photos, on the back row of the bleachers at basketball games looking bored, or at school dances leaning up against the wall of the gym avoiding eye contact and checking his watch.

In short, Adam existed, technically, but no one in the community had an inkling what his existence meant to him.

Adam nearly missed out entirely on any involvement in the Sheriff Billy affair for the simple reason that almost all the speculation about and interest in Billy was generated by the older folks in the community, the women in the church circles and Eastern Star, the farmers who gathered at Kelly’s Café and the MFA Co-op, and the like.

Rat-faced Malcolm was still riding an emotional high from being the one to suggest that Hal Schneider was Sheriff Billy’s daddy. Now he turned his attention to Adam, sitting on the row behind him in World History class, Mrs. Spears not yet in the room. “So, Adam,” Malcolm said in that sneering way of his that should and often did get him punched, “how does it feel to find out you had an older brother all these years?”Adam shifted uncomfortably as he always did on those rare occasions when someone took notice of him. Any elucidation was forestalled when Mrs. Spears waddled into the room, but the damage had been done. The Sheriff Billy affair, heretofore dismissed as a concern of the old folks, now became a cause celebre among the youngsters, too, the student

Young people were too busy for that. Facebook, Twitter, all that socialist media. Halo and Fortnite. Getting shit-faced. Getting acne. Getting laid. Trying not to get pregnant. For a few throwbacks to a simpler time: 4-H. Nevertheless, the student body was soon infected by Sheriff Billy fever, and the contaminating agent was none other than Malcolm Brothers who, recall, was the only young person at the urgathering after Sheriff Billy’s funeral from whence the whole affair sprang.

Indeed, the Sheriff Billy affair might have lapsed right there if it hadn’t been for Phyllis Smithers.

That evening at the dinner table, Adam could barely eat trying to work up the courage to broach the subject to his father. It took courage not because his father was unloving or intimidating—Adam had a loving relationship with both parents—but because, now that he was about to give voice to it, he had to admit the whole thing soundedUltimately,preposterous.though, he just had to ask: “Pop, have you heard this talk about Sheriff Billy? Being a Schneider, I mean.”

Big Hal slapped the table and guffawed, Debra joining him with that curious laugh of hers, mouth wide open and eyes rolling up in hilarity while no sounded actually issued forth. If he wasn’t quite satisfied with this as a response, Adam knew there was no point in pressing the issue.

body evenly divided between those who didn’t believe a word of it but found it hilarious and those who wanted to know more. Curiously enough, foremost among the latter was Adam Schneider himself. Even the perfunctory attempts at teasing he responded to not argumentatively but inquisitively: “What makes you say that? Is that a possibility, you think?”

~ ~ ~

Hal Schneider’s reputation for being arrogant and standoffish was hard to substantiate with specifics. True, he did not often grace the Baptist church with his presence, but he was hardly unique in this respect. And, yes, he did drive the family to Springfield or Sedalia quite frequently for Sunday dinner, but they also ate at Kelly’s Café on Friday nights with the hoi polloi, and he often could be found drinking coffee there mornings with the other farmers. The arrogant and standoffish label

By the end of the school day, piecing together the bits and pieces he’d gathered from various sources, Adam knew as much of the story as anyone else, young or old. Which, let’s face it, wasn’t much.

SHERIFF BILLY MEMORIAL FUND

“That’s for the monument,” Trixie said. “Phyllis Smithers’ idea. Most folks think she dreamed it up because she—” feels guilty about the way she treated Billy all those years, was what she was about to say. No one had anything but praise for Phyllis for taking Billy in and giving him a place to stay. But then he up and died and became a sort of saint and martyr, and a martyr needs somebody or something to be a martyr to. Of course, we have the Schneiders for that, but two targets of righteous indignation are even better than one. And didn’t Phyllis take half of Billy’s Social Security check every month in exchange for an unheated (it was rumored) loft above her garage and a bowl or two of oatmeal (rumored) a day? So now she’s trying to raise a monument to Sheriff Billy to salve her ravaged conscience!

Trixie was unable to finish her explanation, though, before Hal “dropped the box like a hot potato,” she said (while her husband, Gerald, said he “turned up his nose like it was filled with dog shit”).

received its severest test during basketball season. Hal never missed a home game and made it to most of the away ones, cheering on the Cowboys, calling into question the parentage of the refs. And let’s not forget it was Hal, all six-foot-five farm-workhardened muscle and bone of him, who’d starred on the only Pirate team ever to make it to a regional final. It was at the game versus dreaded Skyline of Urbana, on the night following the dinner when Adam referenced “this talk about Sheriff Billy,” that Hal noticed the Quaker Oats box sitting on the end of the long folding table where Trixie and Gerald Lomax sat selling tickets for the game.

The truth of the matter was that Hal sat the box down and rushed off when he heard the buzzer sound signaling that the game was about to start. The word that spread through the crowd at the game, and thence the entire community, was that Hal had rudely refused to contribute to the Sheriff Billy memorial fund.

“What’s this?” Hal asked, lifting the cardboard cylinder and squinting at the caption printed in Magic Marker on a strip of masking tape:

It was at supper that night that all was revealed—far more revealed than anyone in the town could have imagined.

It was Thursday morning, on his next visit to Kelly’s Café for coffee and a cinnamon roll, that Hal began to sense that something was up. There on the counter was another one of Phyllis Smithers’ donation boxes. He started to reach for his wallet, but before he could get it out, Carla Diefenbach, the waitress, came over and snatched up the box, saying, “Too late. We don’t need your money for this, Mr. Schneider.” Hal assumed she meant they’d already collected all the money they needed. So he sat and drank his coffee, none of the other farmers apparently in much of a mood for talking—probably that drop in prices for pork bellies, he figured. That afternoon he went to the MFA co-op to see about getting an anhydrous delivery. There was another donation box on that counter, which he barely glanced at, believing a further donation was now unnecessary. A couple of farmers noticed and barely acknowledged his greeting. He finished his business and was walking out the door when he heard from behind him, “What an asshole.” He kept on walking because, well, it couldn’t have been directed at him, could it? By the time he got to his car, though, he decided, yes, it could. And, yes, it was.

Farmers eat their supper whenever the work allows them to. When their doorbell rang at 6:30—at a time when most folks had long since pushed themselves away from the supper table—the Schneiders were still having at their fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Debra went to answer the door, then came back and told Adam that Phyllis Smithers was there to see him. Immediately Adam rose from the table as if he wasn’t at all surprised by the caller.

~ ~ ~

Hal, on the other hand, was too astounded to move. He couldn’t remember anyone ever coming to the house to see Adam although he and Debra had prayed that someday there’d be friends to come, friends’ houses for Adam to visit. And when that caller finally comes, it’s Phyllis Smithers! “What does she want?” he asked Debra.

Phyllis looked embarrassed. “Actually, I’m not asking him for a donation. I’m bringing him the money—what we’ve collected so far.” “But—” Hal looked back and forth between Adam and Phyllis. “But why would you bring my son the money?”

Finally, Adam, who’d been staring at the floor, looked up at his dad. “Because I’m the one behind the collection—the campaign for Billy. It was my idea.”

By now Debra had come out and was standing beside her husband, who had a look on his face like he was trying to solve a differential equation but had forgotten how to add and subtract. So it was Debra who said, “Well, I’m proud of you for doing that, sweetheart, but why you? I mean, why are you especially concerned with Billy?”“Because he’s my brother.”

~ ~ ~

It took Hal a moment to get control of himself because what he obviously wanted to do, Phyllis reported, was laugh. But instead of laughing he put a hand on Adam’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. Then, real gentle like, he asked Adam how old he, Hal, was. Forty-seven, Adam said. And then Hal asked Adam how old Sheriff Billy was when he died. Adam said, “Sixty—” and didn’t even get the “one” out because sixty was enough. Adam didn’t reply what Ike Olds muttered later when the story circulated and it got to the math part—that is, “alternate facts,” which satisfied most folks in this bluest of counties in the bluest of states—but repeated that he and Billy were brothers, both born into a world where they never belonged, were never understood,

“I can’t imagine.” Hal couldn’t help himself. He got up and went to the foyer where Adam and Phyllis were talking almost in whispers. Then he noticed Phyllis holding one of the donation“Phyllis!”boxes.

he boomed out more jovially than he felt. “You should be hitting me up for a donation, not the boy. After all, I’m the one with the deep pockets.”

After Adam came home from dances and would just shrug when they asked him, hopefully, “Well, how did it go?”, they’d lie in bed in agony over their little boys’ loneliness. But they swore they’d never mention it to him because what good would that do? It’d only heap humiliation on pain. But Adam didn’t flinch at his dad’s comment, only said he’d been dancing for months now, ever since they’d given him the Jeep Renegade for his sixteenth birthday, driving in to Springfield and taking modern dance classes twice a week when they thought he was going to taekwondo lessons. “I don’t believe it,” Debra said, not because she didn’t but because those were the only words that would come. But Adam took her at her word and declared, “Here, I’ll show you.”

He started to dance right there in the foyer, really throwing himself around, all elbows and knees and big feet, while Hal, Debra, and Phyllis pressed themselves back against the walls to avoid injury.

the only difference being that Billy apparently enjoyed standing at the intersection and saluting cars while Adam hated Sherman Junction, the whole county, the entire state ofYouMissouri.couldsee the shock and hurt on Debra’s face, Phyllis said, and Hal put his arm around her and stared at his son like he’d pulled a gun on them. But Adam said it wasn’t their fault. He loved them and knew that they loved him. But that didn’t change the fact that he didn’t belong there, and the last thing in the world he wanted was to be a farmer. Hal said, “Why, we never said you had to be a farmer. We just want you to be whatever you’ll be happy being. Just tell us what that is.” So Adam told them: “I want to be a dancer on Broadway.” He had to repeat that two or three times, Phyllis said, because it sounded like the English language but couldn’t possibly be, at least not the English language spoken in west-central Missouri.

“How do you know you want to be a dancer? You’ve never even danced at one of the high school dances,” Hal said, then cursed himself for letting his son know that he and Debra had heard the sorrowful tidings (from teachers and dance chaperons).

It was Hal who paid for Billy’s monument, all but the $142.87 collected by Phyllis Smithers. It cost $5000 and was a life-size statue of Billy, executed by a longhaired art instructor at Green Prairie Community College. The consensus was that it didn’t look much like Billy. It didn’t look much like a human being, some said. But it did have a sheriff’s badge on its chest and an arm raised in salute, and it stood at the junction of 65 and 312 with a little plaque on the base that said BILLY SCHNEIDER, SHERIFF January 29, 1957 – February 16, 2018 LOVED BY ALL ~ ~ ~

Phyllis said she’d heard some of the kids talk about how comical it was watching Adam try to play basketball. Well, it couldn’t be any more so than this. “Think of an ostrich trying to do the Texas two-step,” she said. So, there they were, dodging around trying not to get hurt, when Adam suddenly stopped and, panting, said that there was this academy in Philadelphia where you could finish high school while at the same time taking classes in dance, or acting or singing, whatever performing art you were interested in. You didn’t have to audition for it like Julliard (whatever that is). As long as you had the desire and could pay the tuition, you were in. Adam had the desire. There’d be other kids there like him, he said. Maybe he’d make a friend. That’s when Hal and Debra started to cry. Adam didn’t even finish out the school year at SJHS. He was gone.

~ ~ ~

The foregoing took place just a few short years ago. Already, though, the statue (it was never clear what it was made of) looks a little weathered, and rarely anymore does someone have a photograph taken of himself returning Sheriff Billy’s

salute or take a selfie giving Billy a hug and fat kiss on the cheek. And if most now pass the statue without giving it a glance, a surprising number cannot remember when the statue was not there, was not a part of the community, what made Sherman Junction, Sherman Junction. What made them, them.

There’d been talk in the early, heady days of the statue’s unveiling of putting it on a postcard, but that never happened. Who was there to buy one? It wasn’t like Sherman Junction was a tourist Mecca. True, the town was on US 65, and many travelers passed through it, the operative word being through. Rarely did anyone stop except to buy gas, which is not to say it never happened.

Just yesterday, in fact, a stranger happened to be walking down Main Street (aka US 65). Who he was, why he was there, where he was going is unknown and irrelevant.Hepaused

to give the statue of Sheriff Billy the once-over and read the plaque. Immediately, Fran Roark issued forth from her establishment, Sherman Junction Antiques, better known as the junk shop. True, the statue did stand right in front of Fran’s, but as far as anyone could remember, she’d taken no part in the fundraising for the monument, hadn’t contributed a penny to the effort. But now she acted as if the statue, and the story, were herNow,own.she was on the poor bastard before he could make his escape and launched into her account, dramatizing, embellishing, interpolating a few wholly invented anecdotes of her own. Finally, though, she began to wind down, and her victim started to edge away. As he was about to turn his back on her, though, she added, almost a little reluctantly, it seemed, almost as if she were embarrassed by it, “There was a brother.”The man stopped. “A “Yes.brother?”Hewas a little younger. Still alive, last I heard. Now, what was his name?” She thought a moment, then said in a half-whisper, “They sent him away, back east somewhere. He’s in a home. There was, you know, something wrong with

collection of stories,

Only World You Get¸ was published in 2016.

him.” “Ah,” the stranger said. “It can be a terrible burden trying to live up to an older brother.”Franwinked as if to say he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know, but in fact she’d never thought of that. She couldn’t wait to start spreading theDennisword.Vannatta

essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and others.

Dennis Vannatta has had His sixth The

Indifferent As Ashes Bill Wolak

The Prognosticator's Vision everywhere i looked i saw soldiers; i saw them in the maddening jungles; i saw them in the fruitless valleys; i saw them in the cruel deserts; i saw them in the brutal mountains; i saw them on the chaotic seas; i saw the wars they fought—chaotic, brutal, cruel, fruitless, and maddening; i heard the shrieks of combat jets as piercing to the ear as the thrust of a razor-sharp bayonet to the flesh; i heard the explosions of homemade bombs as horrifying as satan’s laughter; i saw haunted eyes on faces as pale as the smoke rising from shattered cities; i heard anguished cries from voices as broken and bitter as a family’s grief; i heard malcontents and madmen shouting vengeance! vengeance! i saw the blinding lights; i saw the mushrooming clouds; i heard the screaming billions; i saw the ones i loved; i cried out; i— ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! but tell me . . . who sees the emptiness? . . . who hears the silence? . . . who Haroldweeps?Whisman Harold Whisman has had poems published in Your Daily Poem, Amethyst Review, Ancient Paths, and others. He is retired from teaching English and journalism for Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia and now helps babysit his grandchildren and writes poetry. Both pursuits, he states, are often frustrating but also rewarding.

Namesake The night slinks its desire and restless hopes of dreaming About morning deftly into time I hope for you and I want that free star in a sky That usually stays starless Those generations wheel The futureBluesentailingasspiritual BelievingLookRun In turns As systems revel I want you I have since you told me that you did run and look and believe I remember Different thoughts as though my thoughts were connected by doors and my memory was retractable You told me about a small frame over a tree You told me that the clouds smell like myrrh Jay Nunnery Jay Nunnery is a writer, teacher, and musician who calls many places home: Wisconsin, New York, Louisiana, and California. Recently, he completed Alms, Louisiana, a collection of twenty-one interconnected stories. Currently, he is working on a screenplay, The Circuses, when he is not teaching high schoolers or making music.

Elan KOSTKOSTELANETZ ELANETZ KOSTELANETZ KOSTELANETZ KOSTELANETZ KOSTELANETZ KOSTELANETZ KOSTELANETZ

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KELANZ Richard Kostelanetz Richard Kostelanetz’s work appears in Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, and others.

The immense Grand Wardrobe Box is big enough to hide a dead body. Its dusty, cob-webbed exterior, its crushed bottom corner, its brand “U-Haul” fading into the brown cardboard, remind me of the pale, shriveled skin of a dead person. Standing next to this huge packing box, rising up as tall as my shoulder and three times wider than my slim self, in my head I hear a suspenseful crime scene soundtrack. I imagine a dead human thing, curled sideways, head bent, bloodied hair, arms and legs folded, tumbling out from the opened box, the kind of surprise one expects on watching the lid of a car trunk open in a streaming police procedural. I do not admit to my young roommate, who is helping me sort out the garage, that I, a mature woman well into her third age, am afraid of opening a twenty-year old packingUsingbox.his always-handy Swiss army knife to cut the tape fastening the box closed, he says, “I wonder if a rat crawled in that hole in the crushed corner to nest. Remember, I had rats crawl up inside my Prius and eat the wiring cable.” “Lovely thought. So glad you shared that, Robbie.”

Ghosts in the Grand Wardrobe

As he unfolds and releases the top flaps, I prepare my nose for the odor of a dead rodent.Theopening reveals—not a rat—but the 24-inch metal hanging bar, sold as the prime benefit of this packing box. Crowded there, each covered in re-purposed plastic bags from a dry cleaner long out of business, are old clothes I saved when preparing my house for a remodel twenty-plus years past. Robbie waves me aside. “I’ll do the heavy lifting. You do the deciding. Keep or donate. Those are your choices.”

I seek my folding chair in the corner and settle back against the cushion comforting my arthritic spine, grateful for his energy. While he struggles to release the first piece of clothing from the packed interior, I indulge in wool-gathering, searching my brain for the memory of what I put in this box when I was that past woman, married to my favorite husband, in the thick

Robbie, always organized to perfection, has set up paper bags next to my chair in the hopes that I will use them to donate everything we find to the thrift shop. He dreams, he has said, that the big box and its contents will no longer hog space in our shared garage. To replace his Prius, he has ordered a red Tesla Model Y, to arrive next month, and has plans to install a wall charger where the box stands now. I find his contribution to stopping climate change with an all-electric car admirable. He doesn’t know it, but I plan to drive that car. He lifts a garment out of the box, shakes off its plastic covering, walks over to my chair and holds it up for my decision. “Keep or donate,” he orders. He’s smiling, with that quirky, lopsided look I love. I look up from my low chair, searching for his eyes, not noticing the clothing. “Did you know the word ‘wardrobe’ comes from the French ‘warder’ to keep or guard and ‘robe’ garment?” I admit I have mischief in mind. How lovely it would be to drop this chore immediately and go out for a coffee. He knows that look. “Stay focused. Keep or donate?” He presents a gray suit with padded shoulders, a very short skirt and executive collar rimmed in white, worn in a time my business cards read “Senior Vice President.” In those days I flew first class to make important Board-of-Director presentations. Sitting in my garage in my yoga pants from Athletica, a comfortable tee shirt bra, and my New Balance Fresh Foam shoes, I am no longer that suited woman, but she served me well during my work life. The wrinkled garment smelled sour, like an alley way downtown. The metal hanger, padded with orange foam, loosened its desiccated pieces all over the suit and the garage floor. The released plastic bag blew about the floor like a trapped bird looking to escape the room.

of middle life and its abstractions, making space in my brain for paint colors and kitchen tile decisions. I accept some level of cognitive decline as inevitable, but it appears I have completely lost track of the contents of this box. Not remembering has its benefits: I imagine I am on an adventure with C. S. Lewis, my own “Lion, Witch and Wardrobe” story. I am Lucy, the ordinary child who enters a wardrobe and finds the magical world of Narnia. As a girl, I peeked in every closet with hope in my heart.

“Donate,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief at the size of the shoulder pads.

the suit in a bag for me, sweeps aside the trash accumulating on the floor, goes to the box again and this time he holds up a summer dress, sleeveless, its flower print a potpourri of young-girl colors, pink, blue, pale violet. Saved from my daughter’s middle school graduation. I picture the family celebration afterwards, a meal at the Officer’s Club at the Presidio in San Francisco (closed now), brunch buffet, plates loaded with waffles drowned in maple syrup. Next, packed together, her white cap and gown with tassels in white and green, the Viking colors, from high school Igraduation.takeoutmy phone and snap a picture. “I’ll store the photo, not the clothes,” I say. I do keep the tassels. I will send them to her later, my adult daughter, who lives a thousand miles away, in the thick of her middle life and its abstractions, as I once was.

Next.“Donate.”ACamp

Next. A hand-made (no label) beaded dress, with a mid-calf length skirt, popular in the 1920s, often worn with a fascinator. Does this elaborate evening dress date from the dress-up chest that my mother kept with accessories from her past for my children to play? Memory fails me.

Fire Girl Uniform, brown cotton with leather fringe on the collar and bottom, vintage, from the 1970s. I do remember earning those patches and wooden beads and metal badges. They were awarded for different tasks completed: orange for home craft, red for health, brown for camp craft, green for hand craft, blue for nature, yellow for business and red, white, and blue for citizenship. “Donate?” he says. I hesitate as I finger the beaded headband separated from the dress. Later I will find a Camp Fire Girl Uniform offered on Etsy for $255. Mine is not in good shape,

It looked like something the actors wore on Inspector Morse episodes now streaming on Britbox. I confess I occasionally watch this classic, obtaining some relief from today’s hard news, by a visit with John Thaw and hearing the beautiful Barrington Pheloung music, its morse code motif spelling out the name “M.o.r.s.e.” a secret not everyoneRobbieknows.stuffs

The Grand Wardrobe Box is advertised to hold two feet of closet garments. It is stuffed with double that amount: winter coats with huge shoulders, a fake fur, party dresses with sparkles, another cap and gown (black, from my son’s graduation), a tee with son’s baseball photo, a Nehru shirt hand-sewn by my mother-in-law, gorgeous blue fabric around the collar, and many more. We smell like unwashed clothes; our hands are black and we begin to sneeze. The garage floor is littered with plastic bags, metal hangers, crumbs of foam and bits of paper. Robbie is anxious to get on with cleanup and recycling. My back aches and calls for this to end. While we are working here, the afternoon has passed; it is dark, time to prepare dinner. One more item remains. “Well, well, well,” he says. “I suppose you must keep this,” To show me, he holds it up with both hands, draping it between both arms because of the long train. Its fabric, yellow with a tinge of cream, shines like silk in the pale overhead light. I chose yellow rather than white, because it was my second marriage and those were the rules. Virginal white was appropriate only for the first time. My younger self was very conscious of following rules. As I reach out to touch the train, I smile. Along the side of the fabric is a faint brown stain. “Spilled German chocolate cake,” I say to Robbie. ‘It was an unusual choice for a wedding cake, but your favorite. Remember?”

I think some thrift-shop explorer will delight in finding this classic.

At this point I must make a confession: Robbie is actually my favorite husband and my best friend for fifty years. I like to pretend Robbie is my young roommate; it’s my way of mentally spicing up my love life like some couples wear costumes in the bedroom. No one has to know, not even Robbie. So, keep it our secret please. Later, I will hang this dress outside to air it out and then pack it carefully away in a cupboard with cedar balls to protect it. I have let go of all other garments, ready to donate them to the thrift shop for second-hand shoppers to discover, and the Wardrobe Box is now empty, ready for recycling. When my roommate has finished

torn from when Grandma wore it for Halloween with a painted face and head feather, pretending she was a Native American, unintentionally so realistic she scared my then preschool age children into tears. “Donate.”

cleanup, and we’ve packed all the bags in the car, ready for the trip tomorrow, we stand together at the door into the house, pausing to turn out the light. Finger on the light switch, I hesitate, looking back at the empty box.

Like the Ghosts of Christmas Past who visited Ebenezer Scrooge, each of these garments represented a different time in my life. Seeing them emerge from the Grand Wardrobe Box was like watching a movie with ghosts of my younger selves. I felt a mixture of grief and joy, inexplicable, yet liberating. Liberating to let it go. It’s only stuff I tell myself; I keep the memories. Robbie senses my mixed emotions and puts his arm around me. He says, with his quirky smile, “I know you plan to drive my Tesla.”Jeanne Althouse Jeanne Althouse has been published most recently in Catamaran Reader, Connotation Press, The Penman Review, and others. A retired business executive, she writes under giant Redwoods in Palo Alto, California.

Again for Nate Waters were deep and still in those pale blue eyes troubled and dark as the shallow Vietnamese canals infested by Swift boats swift to escape swift to patrol swift to kill swift to crush the rest of his days Those eyes, alone, floating in alcohol kindness born of a need to repent crude jokes and cold beer his camouflage theRedthreat that tripped dominoes triggered the nightmares Today, terror grows best in oil fields Dollar knows best to disregard the broken pieces littered ‘round the globe coveys of do-gooders smoke and sing but hide from the hawk rising from the fog who assuages our guilt stirs our patriotic selves into righteous justification swift to control to take and take again and again Cathy Hollister Cathy Hollister has had work published in OpenDoor Magazine, Beyond Words, and others. She lives in middle Tennessee.

Fragility Brittle spindle, my thoughts of glass that weave and shift behind the glass

Know

sequestered in

Cathy

The dawn, the dew, the morning’s chill reflected off the lake of glass Timid, quietly draining down sandy tears through the hourglass Porcelain dolls with painted face emit blank stares from eyes of glass Clear crystal daggers catch the light rainbows project through drops of glass Fury full spent in pools of might above the wicked shards of glass Saints and martyrs hover above painting clear faith within stained glass the beauty I cannot see the looking glass Hollister

Fleeting As Daylight's Lipstick Bill Wolak

The Sea Flyer The Sea View Home Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

Tilly turned from the window and stared at Jo’s nightstand, devoid of its Bible and box of chocolates. Jo had proven a good friend, but Tilly’s eyes watered only a second or two before she looked away. A sense of relief infiltrated her sadness as her mind’s eye ran through a litany of once simmering complaints. She would never again have to force a smile during the happy tumult of Johanna’s Sunday family visits, or endure the jockeying for space and unspoken territorial squabbles between the two of them in the cramped semi-private room.

Tilly Larsen stood at her window scanning the Atlantic from her crow’s nest of a room. A freighter, the only real tonnage in sight, was just out of Lower New York Bay making its way east. Keeping her eye on the ship, she felt for a pair of glasses at her side to get a better look. They lay atop her nightstand amidst knitting paraphernalia, an unfinished children’s sweater and other possessions dear to her. She tracked the ship’s slow progress a while longer, then looked down at fishing charters in for the day. The boats dangled on lines tied to piers and pilings along Emmons Avenue. The waterfront road ran five stories below Room 405’s caulked, sealed window. Barely audible, a late onshore breeze whistled through a secreted hole she had pierced days before in a corner of the pane. It had been almost two years since her incident and a week after Johanna, the woman with whom she had shared her confinement, had passed away during the night in the now empty bed next to hers. Standing there, Tilly could still hear the nurses’ whispers and see their ghostlike figures hurrying about collecting Jo’s belongings, raising her body out of bed, and rolling the gurney away, the linoleum squeaking beneath their soles.

Some years ago. . .

“As long as Larsen doesn’t show up,” she said raising a parrying hand to her cheekbone, the other as a shield across her lap. Thief-like, she looked over her shoulder. Room 405’s door closed, she put a wad of crumpled plastic-wrap she used to plug her clandestine window hole on the nightstand. She concealed it after taking it from a ramekin of lime flavored JELL-O a week earlier. She rested the camouflage beside an idle knitting needle. The one whose point she had sharpened and then painstakingly turned in her hand to hollow out theThenglass.lifting the hem of her nightdress over her knees, she knelt before the opening. Closing her eyes, she put her nostrils against the would-be portal, savoring faint whiffs of sea air mixed with octopus and squid sizzling in olive oil and buttery garlic which rose from clam shacks along the avenue below. Reopening her eyes, she stood and hid her handiwork, drawing a window curtain halfway. She looked down again and watched cars below moving slowly as parade floats, crawling along looking for scant parking spots. Coming to life in the late afternoon light, reflections of the restaurants’ brash neon signs rolled in reverse over the passing windshields. At the foot of the docks, the declining sun’s golden red streaks glinted off the harbor’s lapping waters. They dappled the fishing boats’ white hulls and wheelhouses. Beyond, a pencil-thin storm band limned the southeast horizon. If, and when it arrived, Tilly thought, the day would long be over. She smiled. There was still no sign of a new roommate, or Larsen. She breathed easier. Larsen’s absence was always a reprieve. Still, his discontent always seething, there was never really a moment his menacing anger and

Most annoying were the nights she awakened in the darkest hours, groggy and disquieted by the unmistakable undulations of Jo’s dreamy self-pleasuring. She looked back at the vacant bed, now more anxious who her next cooccupant would be than regretful about the one who had departed. Seeing it clean, crisp-sheeted and readied for days, Tilly expected a new guest at any moment. Yet, as evening drew near without anyone appearing, she relished another night alone.

2 Catherine and David Jasper left Windsor, Ontario in their ’86 Caravan before dawn. They received the letter the day before. Hastily dropping off their daughter, April, with a neighbor, they reached Route 80 East just as the sun peeked above the horizon, soon blinding them and everyone else headed in the same direction. David flipped down his visor and one at a time, rubbed his bleary eyes. Catherine flipped hers too and looked in the vanity mirror.

the letter several times, Catherine refolded it, rested it between skirt pleats on her lap, and stared out the passenger window for another hour. She paid little attention to David, his voice nothing but aggrieved background noise these days. Ever since his layoff at the Chrysler plant and the secret stash of rippers she pretended not to have discovered, David was a changed man. Why wouldn’t he be? Catherine observed with some sympathy, watching the hands that once protected her clench the steering wheel. She reached for tender remembrances that only slipped through her fingers as the miles sped by; and knew having to remind herself was not a good sign. She turned to him.

By now she thought the discoloration would be unnoticeable to anyone’s but the most seasoned eye. She promised herself to put a little more concealer on just before they arrived. David promised he would never do it again. She wanted to believeRereadinghim.

belittlements did not guide her every step and word. She always slept with an eye cast on her door, even during the in between times, as she called them.

For the moment though, Larsen was not there. With each new day, Tilly spent more time dreaming of a way out, and looking to the sea.

A bitter inheritance, she knew long before Larsen’s first blow that, no matter what she bartered, his rage would always overwhelm any kindness, distraction, or self-debasement she invented to protect herself. “Pray,” she remembered her mother once saying to her.

Maybe it’s not really that bad. Besides, if not David … who? she suddenly feared—and looked away once again. By the time they were halfway to New York, she had taken the ride as far as she could go. She fingered a pocket, turned away, dropped a Xanax, and reclined her seat.

“We’ll get there when we get there. If not today, then we’ll talk to her tomorrow. Anyway, they’ll have this cleared soon,” he lied, knowing the traffic jam would probably last longer than he wanted to admit. They were both running out of time and“That’spatience.your answer for everything these days, isn’t it? No wonder you …,” she bit her tongue, frightened she might trigger an outburst. “That’s enough, beautiful,” he snapped back, and before she could get another word out, gripped her forearm to the bone.

“By the way, is there something you’re not telling me? You know what I’m talking about,” he taunted, squeezing more tightly. “You’re hurting me,” Catherine said, wincing. “Okay, later then,” he said, easing his hold.

It shouldn’t take long, she thought, as the pill warmed her from the inside out and took her in a different direction. From that point on, she barely noticed the pit stops or Wendy’s lunch along the way when, ten hours after leaving Windsor, she sat up as David eased onto the GWB off-ramp and they found themselves in a tie-up merging onto the southbound Westside Highway. The vista was beautiful. The Hudson unfolded all the way to New York Bay.Both saw the EMS vehicles’ lights flashing just ahead and heard their bonerattling siren screams blaring, bulling cars aside to reach the accident further down the road.“Itold you we should’ve left yesterday,” Catherine complained. “We’re supposed to be there before dinner so we can talk to the administrator. Now what?”

“Please don’t do that,” she pleaded, his beautiful having done the job, but knowing even as she spoke there was more to come.

He slid his fingers down her wrist, took her hand, and pulled it toward the passenger seat console. Catherine resisted but even as she tried holding back, willingly allowed her hand onto his lap. “Go ahead. Don’t worry. April’s not here,” he said, and seemed to her to glance reflexively at the pink sweater strewn across the empty child seat behind them. “Please, David. Not here. Not now. Let’s wait until we get to the motel tonight.“I promise I’ll make it up to you,” she said, trying to pull her hand back. He tightened his grip and pushed her hand against him; her moment to please or defy“Yes,him.

David,” Catherine gave in, faintly hoping that her enthusiasm for the task, feigned or not, might turn back the clock. It wasn’t always like this, she thought, but wondered if the man next to her now had always been there, lurking from the start; and if it had been her fate to find him all along. She hoped that no one in nearby cars would notice as she sat up straight staring ahead out the windshield. Well-practiced, she undid his belt and slid her hand down inside. Then, holding and kneading him until it was almost too late, withdrew one breath away from leaving him dampened. “Later,” she whispered teasingly in his ear and remembered, not without pain, the humiliating look he threw her before their last near intimacy when, she had just emerged from their en suite in the skimpy scarlet teaser that, until then, always did the trick. She wore it now beneath her skirt and blouse.

Twelve years in, they were living an uneasy truce. Both stared ahead in awkward silence when, Catherine looked down awakened to numbness in her right hand; and realizing she had gripped the letter nestled between her legs as if to choke the life out of it all the while her other hand was enlivening David. Looking at a couple in a car just ahead of theirs and having nothing to say, she unfolded the letter as traffic began to clear a few minutes later and they inched ahead.

“Look, the letter says, ‘in our best judgment’. That doesn’t sound absolutely final, does it? Maybe there’s a way we can persuade them,” Catherine offered a few minutes“Arelater.you kidding? That’s just their way of telling you she’s outta there. Look … she can’t stay there, can’t stay with us, so the only thing left is to go back with your dad or let them move her to the other facility they lined up for her.” “She’ll die there, David. It’s a God dammed warehouse,” Catherine answered, in a weary voice. “We can’t let that happen to her. And if she goes back with Dad, she’ll only try it again,” she went on. Then almost as an afterthought, reflected, “She should have left him years ago.” “Left him? Nah. The one time she tried that she had her breakdown or whatever you called it for chrissakes. Sorry, Cath, but you Larsen girls are all the same. It runs in the family. I’ll bet your grandmother was that way too. Besides, your mom had you to worry about and now you’ve got your kid, so what makes you think you’ll be any different?” he shot back, letting her know he got her point, daring her to make a “Anyway,move.she can’t stay with us. That’s for damn sure,” he repeated then, cast a sideways glance at her before going on in a quiet, almost menacing voice. “You think I don’t know about those pills of yours? Nice try. All that money wasted. What a shame. We could really use that dough right now,” he complained. “How the hell you keep that job of yours, I’ll never know. And by the way, does your mom the ex-head nurse know you’re a God dammed pill popper. . . huh? . . .what crap! She saved all those men but couldn’t save herself, could she?” he finished, adding insult to injury.“Fuck you,” Catherine said furtively, and looking away, stared at the river once again. She could not tell if the Hudson’s estuarial waters were flowing upriver or heading back out into the Atlantic. It was not long before the road emergency ended, and the Jaspers rolled on. If there had ever been a moment, she was long past the point of no return. Both knew she would keep him at any cost.

Though Johanna never said a word on the rare occasions Larsen visited, Tilly recalled how she hovered about the room like a big sister. Yet, as much as she welcomed Johanna’s instinctive kindness and protection, it discomforted her, as if she wasRememberingundeserving.one

“I was in a happy marriage, but I wasn’t happy,” Tilly remembered her saying one day as they stood looking out Room 405’s window, Tilly staring at the sea, Johanna below. “And it wasn’t only that I strayed. No, Til, it’s knowing I’d have done it over and over and over again. The longing, you see. . . never ends.”

It wasn’t long after Tilly began gazing out her window again that Johanna came back to mind. They were not always good friends but as people sometimes do when confined, they would share secrets from time to time. Tilly knew, for instance, that Johanna had taken a lover many years earlier and aborted their child.

of the fishing charters was still out, the memory of Johanna passed for the moment. She cast an eye toward a local she had seen earlier drifting over to a narrow shack at the foot of the last vacant dock. He was one of a dozen or so men—lost souls, people sometimes called them—who hung around the docks picking up day work on or around the boats. He, like the others, had a weathered, almost jaundiced look and seemed old beyond his years. He slouched against the side of the shack’s cashier window, a large wooden signboard affixed to its roof.

Sea Flyer Captain Angelo Bricci Blues, Porgies, Sea Bass, Other

But when it came to Larsen, Tilly sensed that Johanna knew the first time she laid eyes upon him that he was a cruel man—no matter how hard Tilly tried to cover it up. “He just has that look about him,” Tilly overheard Johanna whisper to her own husband when she thought Tilly could not hear her amidst the family noise during one of the Sunday visits.

3

Tilly guessed that Bricci cut the engine as final puffs of white smoke rose up and away. She watched him swing down from the starboard door of the wheelhouse,

Tilly looked out again and soon spotted the speck of a boat running in due north past the western tip of Breezy Point. Well ahead of the oncoming weather, its bow cut through the still-light seas. As if tracing the outline of jigsaw puzzle pieces, Tilly watched as it rounded the bight of the Point turning east then north again along Manhattan Beach’s eastern coast for several minutes. Finally, she bent west into Sheepshead Bay, a snug, narrow inlet between Brooklyn’s south coast and Manhattan Beach’s north side. Tilly could almost hear the sound of the engine’s slow gurgle as Captain Bricci throttled back and expertly eased Sea Flyer alongside her dock. A lone deck mate onboard tossed two lines to the erstwhile dockhand who hitched her stern and bow. Afterward, the mate ran a third line along her forty-odd feet and gathered its two ends amidships. He passed them to the dockhand who tied them around one of the pier’s foot-thick, splintery pilings. Next he retracted a small steel gangplank stowed beneath the deck and dropped it clanging onto the pier. Even Tilly heard its crash five storiesThenbelow.she watched the thirty or more sightseers and day fishermen, some with arms around their sons, walk down the ramp holding binoculars, and rods & reels. The anglers’ scaly catch glistened inside their grimy buckets swinging on wooden spooled wire handles. A squadron of screeching seagulls hovered overhead. Fearless, one after the other the birds dove at the buckets and bait scraps slicking Sea Flyer’s deck. The men and boys all scattered after shouts, brief waves, and goodbyes.

Chalk scrawls on a blackboard hung beneath the window were, Tilly guessed, that day’s sailing times. She watched the man glance at the clock inside the office and light a smoke.

Tilly could almost taste the cigarette and watched with envy until he took a long, last drag then, flicked the butt away. Though the boat was still unseen, a moment later Tilly watched him turn to Sea Flyer’s distant siren call. Tilly heard her too. Still a half-hour out, he took his sweet time before ambling onto the dock.

then climb easily over the bow deck and down the gangplank. He chatted briefly with the roustabout and handed him what appeared to her to be a thick clump of bills for his ten minutes’ of work. The vagrant left as the captain headed toward the charter shack. Tilly kept a close watch. Bricci put a key into a silver-colored steel u-lock, released it and slid open the window. Reaching inside, he rummaged about for something, then crouching down, rubbed away the earlier schedule with the heel of his hand, and scrawled a new message in large letters across the entire blackboard. Tilly put her face hard against the window. CANCELLED Bricci tossed what Tilly guessed was the piece of chalk back inside, locked the window and went back aboard. He climbed to the wheelhouse and hesitating before opening its door, looked up seeming to let his eye dwell high upon the Sea View Home. Tilly ducked behind the window drape but pulled it back enough to peek below, just as she had almost every day since she arrived. In all that time, she had learned a Sealot.Flyer was usually the first boat out and the last to return. Captain Bricci never bantered with other captains and seamen along the dock before or after their days’ work. Unlike the others, he lived aboard year-round and tended his boat even on the bitterest winter days. He’d often go to sea with one deck mate and on occasion, it appeared to her, alone. On those days, even Tilly’s untrained eye came to see how good a seaman he must be to sail Sea Flyer by himself. None of the other captains seemed so able. He appeared to survive almost entirely on his own catch and whatever provisions were in the brown paper bag he cradled in one arm when he walked back from the market a few blocks away every Monday morning. And as crowded and bustling as the docks and sidewalk might be, Tilly couldn’t remember when she’d seen another sailor or soul stop to say hello or shoot the breeze. It was almost as if he was unseen by one and all.

Though he stayed below in foul weather, on most non-charter days he sat high in his captain’s chair and watched over the other boats in the harbor or, at the unending comings and goings along the avenue. Sometimes he just turned and looked away.

Now close on six o’clock, Tilly heard the hum of dinner carts rolling along far down the corridor. When her door opened earlier than she expected, she hoped the person in the doorway was another patient mistakenly straggling into Room 405, not Johanna’sThereplacement.womancame into the room past Johanna’s bed. Only as she got closer did Tilly recognize her daughter and see herself in Catherine’s eyes. The concealer was not good enough. Tilly turned away and stared out the window. Catherine came to rest behind her on the edge of the bed.

“You didn’t bring April, did you?” Tilly asked, barely able to utter the words of the question whose answer she already knew.

Having watched him every day for well over a year, Tilly felt an affinity for the unsmiling captain. He was someone she knew she would likely never meet but who, in some strange way provided her solace, if not joy. She hadn’t studied him to spy or intrude, but felt entwined in an invisible, mending fabric that knit the threads of their solitary lives. It was as if they—and she wondered how many other souls—shared a realm in a dimly lit world all their own. The thought passed and Tilly kept watch. The Captain kept his eye on the Sea View Home a few moments longer, then turned his head away, entered the wheelhouse and took the companionway below for the evening. On the frequent nights she could not sleep, Tilly would look down to Sea Flyer long after the Captain had retired. Oftentimes a soft orange glow shone behind two small portholes along the cabin walls. Perhaps, she thought, Captain Bricci wasn’t asleep either. 4

“He’s still looking for a parking spot. He dropped me off so that I didn’t have to wait too long to come up and see you,” Catherine said, knowing David had already parked.In fact, they had just managed to catch Sea View’s administrator minutes before she left for the day. Catherine knew it was up to her to break the news. When it came to her mom, David left the dirty work to her. “If he finds a spot, maybe he can come up. How long will you be here?” Tilly asked.“I’m afraid, just two or three days, Mom,” Catherine answered. “I hope you’ll get to see your father. I’m expecting him any time now.”

Tilly turned from the window and looked into her daughter’s eyes. “Oh, Cath, will it never end?” she asked, in a resigned voice. She sat down beside her daughter. She wanted to put an arm around her. For her part, Catherine feared giving her mother the news but also knew that David would grow impatient. She was more frightened he would soon come upstairs to be sure she had delivered the message. Overcoming the lesser of two fears, she got to the heart of the matter.

“Why would I want to see him?” Catherine asked, folding her arms across her chest, unwilling to concede Tilly’s stab at normalcy.

Tilly did not move a muscle. She stared out the window hoping Catherine might say something or offer another solution; but the only thing she heard were the dinner trollies rolling down the corridor nearby.

“I’m sorry, Mom, but it’s already been decided. David just doesn’t think it’s a

“I’ve never seen your place in Canada,” Tilly suggested and gaining no response, tried again. “I wouldn’t be any trouble. Besides, I could babysit April for you. It would make your life easier, wouldn’t it?” she asked.

“No, Mom. David said it was best to leave her behind. He thought this might upset her,” Catherine answered then caught sight of the unfinished sweater on her mother’s nightstand, Tilly’s second knitting needle left entangled in its last purled row.

“Is David with you? Will he come up and see me?”

There was little else to say. Catherine remained a few minutes more. She wanted to come up with some thought or kindness that might ease the bad news. The damage done, she sat there knowing it was well beyond her capacity.

Tilly stood and went back to the window. Johanna came to mind once again.

good idea. There are also some other things I’d rather not get into. Look, David and I are going over to your new place to make sure everything’s done right. In the meantime, they’re sending someone over tonight or tomorrow to answer any questions you have before you go over there. I’m sorry, Mom, but all things considered, it’s the best we can do.”

One night as they lay side by side in the dark, Tilly called to her in a whisper across the narrow space separating their beds. “Are you awake, Jo?” she asked. “I need to tell you something.”

Johanna said nothing. Tilly turned her head and looked at her. Barely discernible in the dark, she recalled how Jo had once trusted her with her own sacred pain. Hidden under cover of Jo’s silence, she ventured a few more words, still unsure if she could complete her own unburdening. “Jo,” she called again, “do you remember the moment you knew you weren’t a kid anymore? You know what I mean, Jo, the first time you knew the difference between right and wrong and had to make a choice you knew would stick forever.”

Other than her steady, sleepy breathing, Johanna was silent. “Jo, please, it’s something terrible I’ve kept secret since I was a kid.”

Once more, Johanna did not answer. Tilly took a deep breath and felt as if she were about to jump off a cliff. Hesitant at first, her leap of faith soon cascaded uncontrollably.

“You see, Jo, I was too scared of him but when I heard him yelling at her when he threw her treasured vase against the wall and then hit her I knew I had to run in there to stop him but I also wanted to run away and that it was like being on some terrible bridge and I didn’t know which way to go, do you hear me Jo, my choice to do something right or wrong for the first time in my life but it was my father, do you hear me, my father, Jo, so I just lay there, waiting ‘cause I knew he’d soon come for me, so I just lay there and lay there until the terrible noises and screams were

A little while later, she looked out again. The freighter she spotted earlier running east had anchored in the roadstead not too far offshore, perhaps having hoped but failed at beating the storm. She remembered other ships doing so to ride out foul weather. By the look of it, things had worsened.

finally over and only remember the cops’ voices as they held me and asked, ‘are you okay little girl?’ and all I wanted to do was save her Jo but my feet felt like they were stuck in sand and I couldn’t lift them out or break free to go in there and no matter how hard I tried something held me back Jo and I couldn’t rescue my …”

The storm band had thickened and judging by the higher pitch of the whistle streaming through her window hole, she knew winds had picked up. Even Sea Flyer began to strain her lines on the rising sea. Well tied, Tilly knew the craft was safe and returned to the freighter. With barely enough daylight left, she was just able to make out the vessel’s bridge castle and her merchantmen hurrying ant-like about her deck. There was an odd delicacy, almost a frailty to the lacework of deadly laden cables strung amidst the masts, winches, and derricks towering above them. The whole machinery swayed on the swelling sea.

She remembered gasping for air, unable to complete the terrible picture for Jo. Shaking in a cold sweat, she pounded one fist into her other palm until exhausted, one arm dropped to the side of her bed.

“Oh Til, my darling. There’s no blame,” Jo said quietly, and paused. “Don’t you know that… we’re all carrying the black bag?” She could still hear Jo’s gentle, absolving voice say as the memory ended and Tilly raised her own voice again. “Cath, take April away before it’s too late,” she begged, but turning from the window, saw that her daughter was long gone.5

It was a moment or two later when Johanna reached across the still, silent black void and took Tilly’s hand into her soft fingers and palm.

“Oh, Larsen, how tender was the flesh on those unkind hands?” she cried out toward the ship; remembering his singed hands peeling like onion skins when they first met as she nursed him back to health after they brought survivors from his ship explosion, a freighter long out of ‘Frisco, ashore all those years ago. She touched the ever-fading wounds on her face’s reflection. “You can just leave it,” she said a few minutes later to the orderly who brought her dinner in. She picked at one or two things on the plate before taking a deck of snapshots from her nightstand. It was the sort of old-fashioned, scallop-edged photo collection people once carried inside crisscrossing rubber bands. Tilly removed the first. The second crumbled in her fingers. She regarded several of the pictures before she turned one over and read its inscription.

Putting one photo after another aside, she finally found what she was looking for; the deep purple Iris her mother had taken from her vase, pressed perfectly, and given to her on that day. Faded, it rested beneath a clear parchment skin on a square

Recognizing her mother’s cursive hand, she turned the photo back over.

Looking at her parents, she wondered why people in pain always seemed to be smiling in family photos. She looked at herself standing on the beach between them, staring and unsmiling at the camera, the ocean behind.

Tilly spotted whitecaps and could almost hear the crack of the ship’s registry flag as it whipped from its 45-degree angled stern-pole in each new gust. Far beyond, charcoal squalls stood like the towers of a city skyline across the horizon in the otherwise clear, twilight sky.

The pale, steady glow of running lights dotting the vessel’s hull, bridge, and mast tops brightened as their incandescence soon outshone the fading daylight. The massive freighter, gradually enveloped in the oncoming night, soon vanished before her eyes. Only its lamps, the early evening stars and Tilly’s own reflection coming to life in the darkened, mirroring glass remained.

Matilda ‘’Tilly” May’s 10th Birthday Barnegat, New Jersey

of Ingres paper amidst the yellowing photo deck. She laid it back on the nightstand and soon turned her light off for the night.

“Have you come for me?” she asked, guessing he was the person from the new facility Catherine mentioned.

Tilly remembered little after that, only the sound of rain pelting the window as storm gusts drove sheets of water down the blackened glass. Unable to sleep, she turned her head sideways toward the window. The wind had grown fierce and now squealed banshee-like forcing its way through the tiny aperture, the window drapery billowing into the room. She lost track of time and did not stir for what seemed like hours. Motionless, she listened to the rat-tatting rain strafe the window like a hidden, mortal enemy’s volley of a thousand shells. It wasn’t long before the glass soon began to whine and seemed bowed to a breaking point in the brunt of the storm’s relentless winds.

The stranger did not answer but walked halfway into the room, stopping at Jo’s empty bed. He bent over slightly and ran his fingertips over the pillow. Tilly did not know why but somehow felt as if she was intruding. She watched him and daring not to speak, realized that he was not from the new place, after all. Then, almost in ceremony, he lay down on his side and nestling his head on the pillow, closed his eyes. When he took a breath as one might inhale the fragrance of a petal, Tilly realized it was Jo’s scent the stranger longed to find lingering in the down. Holding her own breath, she waited to say anything until she noticed a tiny smile crease his eyes. Soon after, he opened them and looked at her. They glimmered, even in the darkness. “You help Captain Bricci, don’t you?” she whispered, recognizing the dockhand.

“But“Yes.”why did you come tonight?” she asked.

At first, she thought it was the orderly returning to remove her dinner tray. Her eyes now accustomed to the darkness, she knew she was mistaken; but relieved that the man standing at her door framed in the hallway’s dim nightlight was not Larsen. She looked up at him. Tall but unrecognizable, it dawned on her who he must be.

A rush of salt laden air and rain splashed her face and welcoming, open mouth. She closed her eyes and stood still a moment longer before turning to him.

Nearing Room 405’s threshold, she heard a crackling sound like pond ice breaking underfoot. She looked back. Barely visible in the dark, the room’s window was splintering into a thousand fractals spreading from her wormhole across the glass. One by one, the tiny crystals began breaking off and fell upon the floor until the entire window was almost gone.

Tilly took it and rose. Once on her feet, she let go and gathered all her possessions save April’s unfinished sweater with its entangled needle.

He looked at her intently then, straightening, sat on the edge of the bed facing her, a hand still on the pillow. “Because she had my word I’d look after you,” he said and reaching out to her, “and told me that … all you’ll need is a helping hand.”

“Now,” she said, and he wrapped his rain jacket over her shoulders, then pulled open the door and let her by to reclaim, however brief the moment, her forfeited life. 6

Two glowing lanterns hovered moon-like fore and aft overhead. Seated at the galley table amidships, she peeked past a bulkhead into a forward compartment. She could not see anyone’s face. Two men with their backs to her hunched over a table

She stared at his swollen knuckles, blackened fingernails, and broken, puffy skin. Its brutal history all too familiar, it was Jo’s soft, comforting hand that came to mind.

The smells overwhelmed her. Tinges of diesel fuel, stale tobacco, dank rain gear, body odor, and a faint but distinct stench from the head further below-decks mixed with the smell of coffee brewing in a pot suspended on its gimbal and fish frying on a marine stove. The fish crackled in bubbling oil and crisped onion bits in the most blackened skillet she had ever seen.

looking at something she thought must be about navigation. She heard Captain Bricci— after all, it could only be him—instruct the other who she guessed was his deck mate. They paused to tune and listen to the tinny, automated voice on the marine band channel announce readings from Sheepshead Bay to the Barnegat Light and beyond.

Tilly heard Sea Flyer’s taut lines squeal eerily but hold her steady to the dock. Tending the stove, the dockhand, Jo’s mate, served her a cut of the porgy, bread, and hot coffee. As he sipped a cup too, Tilly noticed him eyeing her belongings on the galley table before she turned to get a better glimpse of Captain Bricci. A moment later he brushed by to rejoin the deck mate and captain. She watched and listened to Captain Bricci again before the three broke camp, heading up the companionway to the wheelhouse. Minutes later, the quiet thrum of Sea Flyer’s engine came on line. Tilly peered into the pitch through the dockside porthole above her. A pale glow cast down by Sea Flyer’s red and green running lights barely relieved the darkness. She did not see her rescuer but was able to make out the deck mate. He was on the dock hurrying back and forth until he had Sea Flyer’s lines well in hand. He looked up to the wheelhouse, nodded to an unseen signal, and braced himself ready to let them fly.

“What about, Larsen?” she asked, still fearful and looking up to him after a drag or two.

Then, moments after they heard a distant scream and someone shouting— Almost there!—Tilly saw Jo’s mate run up to help the deck mate as he let go the lines. She heard the sodden ropes thump onto the deck as both men jumped nimbly back aboard and were soon below. By now, the worst of the storm seemed to have passed. She relaxed to the engine’s steady, almost musical ground bass. A sense of readiness appeared to take hold onboard as Jo’s mate came aft and slipped in next to her at the galley table. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, slid one out, tamped it on the back of his hand and lit up. He took a few puffs before he put a brotherly arm around Tilly and passed the cigarette to her with his free hand.

Not long after, Tilly uncoupled his arm from her shoulder and headed for the companionway. As often happens after a storm, the air had freshened and the sea was lying down. Sea Flyer eased southeastward riding its quieting rollers, her thrusting bow only kicking up the faintest spray, parting one dark wave after another.

B D Redding, after careers in classical music and business, has happily reinvented himself through writing every day.

“You needn’t worry about him any longer,” he assured her, Tilly’s eye drawn to the silvery glow of her remaining knitting needle, unaware that its whetted tip, wiped clean, rested anew amongst her other possessions on the galley table. Her head sagged against his breast before she took another draw on the cigarette, silently troubling what burden had broken him. Tilting her head back, she exhaled and watched their smoke drift about the cabin before it disappeared and Sea Flyer cast off. ~

~ ~

Reaching out, Tilly took hold of Sea Flyer’s starboard rail, leaned back, and beheld a bejeweled night sky. Looking astern, she kept a faithful watch until, ever longing, they were beyond the freighter’s reach, and distance having extinguished her lamps, Tilly let go.

B D Redding

I knew from the start I would never be a first-rate sailor. I’d left it too late, and I lacked physical courage. But mainly, I lacked the instinct of the first-rate sailor.

Sailing Lessons

In two months, we had bought a 32-foot fiberglass sloop named Paloma, given up our apartment in San Francisco from which, if you stood in the bay window in the living room with your nose pressed against the glass and looked to your right, you could just make out Alcatraz and moved onboard. Now we had to learn to sail. ~ ~

I remember two things: Failing at Man Overboard drill. “You would have hit your man overboard with the centerboard!” Duane announced whirling to a stop beside me in a stink of gasoline. And the thrill of flying along with all my other little catboat friends, like dragonflies skimming a pond, while semis the size of small trailers roared by. When the class was over, Duane presented us all with little certificates, and Cliff and I celebrated with spaghetti and meatballs and chianti at a chaotic Italian place that is still there at the foot of University Avenue.

~

When I was young and living in California, and married the first time, my husband and I took sailing lessons at Berkeley Aquatic Park, a shallow saltwater lagoon that forms part of San Francisco Bay and runs alongside the Bayshore Freeway, also known as Interstate 580. There were nine of us, in little 8-foot long cat boats with a retractable centerboard and a boom that clattered back and forth in light airs like a demented toothpick. Both of us capsized, on separate occasions, whereupon the instructor, Duane, a cheerful pimply young man of about twenty, would roar over in his motorboat to where we stood in the murky water, soaked and alarmed and trying to right things, and announce loudly on his megaphone what we had done to cause this calamity.

never did master Man Overboard, and an anxious look would come over Cliff’s face if I suggested another drill. It was enough to have a wife who loved sailing. They are rare. We had a rule that anyone in the cockpit alone had to wear a harness clipped to a line that ran from the bow to the stern. It was a pain. The line or the harness was forever getting caught on something or other. But it lessened the fear of going overboard, always there on a small boat.

All the same, the Bay is daunting, and when we’d done three years of it, we were ready to cruise south. So one fine morning in September, after two weeks of preparation, we sailed forth out of San Francisco Bay under the fabled Golden Gate Bridge, along with Mike, a longshoreman friend of Cliff’s who worked on the waterfront.

People who sail on San Francisco Bay like to say that if you can sail there, you can sail anywhere, and it was not until I heard the skipper of a sloop say the same in the English Channel that I realized sailors say this everywhere. It’s part of the lore. We all want to think our own watery corner of the earth is its most perilous.

But I was serviceable, I was okay. I wasn’t frightened when we ‘buried the rail,’ and water was pouring down the deck, and things were banging below. I got the logic of sail, the power of the keel, understood that when the angle in the cockpit became unbearable, you could spill the wind from the sails, and the boat would right itself. It wasn’t efficient, no one wanted to do it, but it made things bearable.

I would go forward and reef the main. I’d rather do it myself than be at the helm while Cliff did. And to my surprise, I was good at the helm in a heavy sea. The concentration took my mind off my fear, and I could sit for a long time, transfixed by the compass, trying to hold course and minimize the yawing a small boat does. They say you should reef (reduce sail) when you first think of it. And we rarely did. Cliff was an aggressive sailor, and Paloma was often overpowered. But he was a good sailor and knew when to back down. We learned how to reef, to switch from working to storm jib, the points of sail, tacking, gybing, going into irons, docking and anchoring.ButI

It was our first day out. The breeze was good, we had a following sea, and we were heading south with Half Moon Bay, our first port of call. We were frisky with excitement as we sailed under The Golden Gate Bridge, packed with traffic as always, and turned left to slowly pass Ocean Beach, Daly City, Pacifica, those dismal towns south of The City, and the coast of California slid slowly away from us as we edged out to sea. Even Cliff, calm by instinct, was exuding a new energy. What an adventure we wereOurbeginning!firstnight out was uneventful, if fogbound, tied up to a buoy in Half Moon Bay, a small anchorage roughly half way between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, and we set off early the next day to make good time on the long passage between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, where we had a berth for two nights. We’d just eaten a late lunch a chicken and rice casserole that I had prepared ahead and frozen with green beans when we began to pay more attention to a wooden cruising ketch about 40 feet in length that had been sailing near us for awhile.Every time we looked over, the skipper waved, so we waved back. Was he alone? He seemed to be sailing closer to us, we were almost in tandem. The boat would disappear in the vast rolling swells, and we would think we’d lost him, that

Mike was a gentle giant of a man, 6 foot 4 inches tall, with startling brown eyes that always seemed to be popping with excitement, and a mop of wiry and prematurely greying hair that surrounded his face like a bush. In repose, which itself was rare, he could seem like a pensive Einstein, reading War and Peace in his bunk, say, or splicing a line, or drinking tea in the galley. But because of his massive size, any time he went forward – if I was below trying to get some sleep while he stood watch – I would feel Paloma wobble under his weight and energy, the sails shifting in confusion, until he was back in the cockpit and they could right themselves.

~ ~ ~

he’d taken off for the open sea, then there he’d be again when we peaked on top of another swell, closer.

“Are you in trouble?” I yelled, through the static. “Yes! Yes! Ve are in trouble. Ze boat, she is fine, she is okay, but my wife, she is sick. She has the concussion, I think is called. Ve are needing a hospital.”

“Why don’t you get on the marine radio and see if he’s in trouble?” Cliff said to me, as though we were routinely to be found cruising around the Northern Pacific rescuing foolhardy sailors. We were barely hanging on ourselves! In fact, I’d never used a marine radio before, and there followed a fraught and static-laden exchange as I stood in the galley trying to make myself heard above the roar of the wind and the sea and the rigging the dishes lying unwashed in the sink looking out at Cliff in the cockpit, in black beanie and foul weather gear, both hands on the tiller as he fought to keep Paloma on course. The weather had changed. Dramatically. Gone was the steady wind that had been carrying us gently over unbreaking swells in a kind of dreamy reverie. In its place was an ugly grey mass, breaking all around, sending up vast slapping curtains of spray, and dumping water into the cockpit. The bilge pump was working, but Mike had to manually bail every time the cockpit was pooped so the water didn’t reach the engine controls.Howquickly things can change at sea. How different from Bay sailing, from a leisurely lunch in the lee of Alcatraz and later, cruising along the Waterfront, Chardonnay in hand, picking out Nob Hill, Coit Tower, The Ferry Building, Market Street, Broadway, the Embarcadero. The radio exchange was made worse by the skipper being Dutch.

“Have you called the Coast Guard?”

“Yes, but they don’t come out. The weather is too bad. They will not lift her. Is that how you say it? Lift?

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

There was nothing we could do, obviously, other than provide psychological support. I said we were going on to Santa Cruz and hoped to be there in two or three hours. “Maybe less at this rate,” Cliff called out from the cockpit. One good thing for bad weather: You can make speed if you can hang on. “You can see it on the chart,” I added. I told him it was a good-sized town and there’d be a clinic if there wasn’t a hospital. Otherwise, San Jose was not far, and she could be taken there by ambulance.

There is something special about entering a place you know from the sea. It is the same but different, the land, the buildings, the streets, the hills, even the height of a place. How spread out it can be is one of the things that strikes you. Or how cramped. It was dusk by the time we straggled into Santa Cruz, exhausted, tied Paloma up to the dock, plugged in the electricity, and plonked ourselves down in the cockpit, beer in hand. Shortly afterward, Bart hurried over to meet us. He’d already called an ambulance to take his wife to hospital in San Jose, and he had no time. He also had no medical insurance for the United States and was worried about what this was going to cost him and how serious it might be. We never fully understood what had happened to his wife, due to the language limitations and the chaos of the moment. Only that she had taken a bad fall on the boat and had a concussion. There was no email then – no Internet – and no point in exchanging numbers as we were heading south in two days. They’d left Vancouver and had a long cruise ahead to Rotterdam. We never saw them again.

I would like to report that our time cruising the Channel Islands was uneventful. But you wouldn’t believe me. Things are never uneventful at sea. Twice we dragged the anchor and had to reset it, and then the fan belt on the diesel engine broke. A better equipped boat might have had a spare fan belt or two. As it was, we improvised with a pair of L´Eggs pantyhose.

Then, to cap it all, not only did the fog lift finally as we sailed out of Monterey Bay but we were joined by dolphins. They seem to Pop! out of the water by the bow, six of them, and spent half an hour bopping back and forth from one side of the boat to the other. Then, as smartly as they arrived, they left. Bored, probably. Mike watched it all from the bow, holding onto the pulpit with both hands, yelling at the wind and the sea, riding Paloma as if she were a horse on a plain. We were enjoying ourselves finally, and sailed on past Point Conception to Santa Barbara, where Mike had to leave us to fly back to San Francisco and his job. ~ ~

~

In Monterey Bay we lived for two days among otters, endearing creatures in response to whom the tendency to anthropomorphize is strong. I have a photo of Cliff rowing the dinghy through the fog which stayed with us the whole time we were there being followed to the jetty by a pair of them. They would come right up close while we were eating lunch in the cockpit and lie on their backs as though faintly amused by the noises we made, gazing at us smugly as they cracked open their abalone shells with a rock.

Two days later we did the long southerly run across Monterey Bay. We rigged the spinnaker, the first time ever, and what a fiddle it was to get the damn thing up on the bow and keep it there with the whisker pole, so it pulled Paloma along, like in all the glossy sailing magazines, not allowing it to drift to the side or get caught up underneath the bow.

~ ~ ~

Our main adventure we saved for our return voyage, for Point Conception, known as “the Cape Horn of the Pacific,” where the coast of California seems to bend and, in a sense, Northern California becomes Southern California. Here the prevailing winds are north westerly and mostly ferocious, the rule for sailors from the south being: Get there early in the morning or early in the evening. In our infinite wisdom, we made our approach around 2 in the afternoon. The sea was wild and ugly, the wind howling, but at least we had reefed the main and were under storm jib. Even so, Paloma was heeled over massively and water was pouring along the decks. These were the worst conditions we’d ever been in. We probably should have doused the main and tried to fly on jib alone, but neither of us wanted to leave the cockpit, even wearing a harness, and go forward onto a roiling deck. Taking the sails down and going on under power seemed fraught with danger. We were taking on water; the pumps were straining. Were sailors ever so green? As we were wondering what to do and whether to turn tail and try again in the morning, a sudden gust of about 40 knots per hour pushed us even further over and one of the companionway doors came loose from its hinges and flew overboard. We were stunned. It had never occurred to us that a boat could even be so far over that this would happen. Once we had registered the shock, what it meant for the voyage, four more days, Cliff wanted to go back and get it. “Go back and get it?” I tried to make myself heard above the roar of the wind, my teeth beginning to chatter with fear. “Where? Where do we go back and get it?” We watched with horror as the door sped away from us. “But if we don’t get it, ¨Cliff yelled back at me, “we’re going all the way back without a door to the companionway. We’ll be soaked.” I could see his point, but I was having none of it. “We’ll put a tarp over it. We’ll figure it out. We’re never going to get close to it,” I was shaking my head madly, “and if we did, get close to it, how are we going to

And Mike was hooked, of course, on all of it, every single bit, drama included. He spent three years getting his Small Boat Captain’s License, and the last I heard he was delivering yachts in The Antipodes and The Caribbean. Big ones, I hope. Me, I’m an armchair sailor now. The shame of it coats me like clingfilm. Now I watch the sailboats from my home overlooking the Mediterranean. Sometimes there

Cliff and I parted a few years later, but we never tired of talking about our sailing adventures. He continued to single-hand Paloma well into his 70’s, heading out under the Golden Gate, the foghorns booming, to the Farallon Islands.

One minute it would appear and then there’d be a huge wave and it was gone.

Chastened, horribly chastened, we let out the sails and turned tail from our first attempt, Point Conception gazing blandly down at our debacle. We would try again in the morning. We anchored off the beach at Coho, where the sky was just bright enough for us to see the beached hulls of a small sailboat and a good-sized fish boat. Neither of us slept. The roar of the wind kept us awake all night, but at least we were out of it. And the anchor held. ~ ~ ~

reach into the water and get it on board? At least if it’s a person in there, they can help. We’ll bump into it or we’ll run it over. Look at it, it’s already gone.”

I flashed on Duane, bopping around the Aquatic Park, barking instructions: ‘Never let him out of sight! Keep him in view until the helmsman brings the boat back to him.’But it’s no Berkeley Aquatic Park out here. There are no lorries hurtling by on 580, no secretary in little black heels with a notepad calling us in when class is done.

It’s life and death! We watched the door whirl away from us varnished just before we’d left, along with its mate, so they’d look spiffy along with the handrails bobbing briefly into view now and then on top of a breaking wave until it disappeared forever.

are eight or ten of them, of all sizes, and it’s a race or regatta. Sometimes it is a yawl or a ketch from England or France or the States, weathered with voyaging.

Sometimes a small sailboat will come so close to our bluff that it disappears from view, and I will hold my breath, imagining old instincts die slow that something has gone wrong. The jib sheet is jammed or the sail itself is hooked on a forestay. And it all comes rushing back to me. I am there in the cockpit, my eyes glued to the sails, waiting for Cliff’s ‘Hard to lee,’ then the glorious moment as she heads up into the wind and the sails start to luff. I let go of the jib, then the rattle of the winch and that unique noise a sailboat makes when she’s tacking, the jib flapping on the bow like an angry seagull. Then cleated and quiet again, hearts can stop pounding as she settles on the new tack.

There was a solo sailor out there the other day, close hauled in a small sloop, the sails trimmed perfectly. She steamed toward us, slicing through the smooth water like a sabre. What was he doing? Eight knots? Nine? A sailboat under sail and many aren’t these days is one of man’s finest creations. It’s easy to remember just the horror stories of sailing, and we would spend hours doing just that at the end of the day, sunburned, wind-weathered, exhausted. So why do it? When there is so much drama, so much that can go wrong? Let me give you another memory: It is night, there is a full moon, and I am alone in the cockpit. The sea is calm, and we are on a medium reach, with the sails full. “Happy sails,” as Cliff would call them. Down below I can hear two able-bodied seamen snoring. I will do my best not to wake them for any reason short of death. They need sleep. We are standing three-hour watches the most we can bear and Mike is still with us. We are heading south east. We have roared past Point Arguello and Point Conception and, almost immediately, the water changes. The rolling grey chop is gone. It feels calmer, bluer even, southerly. I have my foul weather gear on, but I can feel the air change, becoming warmer.

All around me is the inconceivable immensity of the sea. I have my own little triangular visual routine: Compass, sails, sea. Compass, sails, sea. Compass, sails, sea.

Every few minutes I stand up and do a quick check of the horizon to make sure I haven’t missed a tanker. All around me is plankton, glowing in the moonlight. Now and then I see shark fins, two or three of them, but they don’t linger. Occasionally, there is the eerie sound of a ship. We are in the Santa Barbara Channel now, and there are oil rigs, huge complicated-looking things that make weird clanging noises.

Jenny Falloon Jenny Falloon has had stories published in The Writing Disorder, Belle Ombre, Tales From a Small Planet, and others, including San Francisco Bay area sailing magazines. She has lived in Canada, the US, The Bahamas, England and, currently, Spain. Genres include satire, memoir, flash fiction, and short fiction.

The immensity of the solitude, as I sit here with a mug of hot chocolate in one hand and the tiller in the other, is something I will never know again. It is frightening, of course. But it is also awesome, to be out here alone in this tiny vessel on the margins of the world, reliant on my own humble abilities. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Marianne Gambaro Marianne Gambaro’s poems and essays have been published in print and online journals including Mudfish, CALYX, Oberon Poetry Magazine, and others. She is the author of Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers. She lives in verdant Western Massachusetts with her talented photographer-husband and two feline muses.

A Walk on the Dam at Sunset As sunlight slides up the oak-leather November hillside above already leaden water, our shadows are giants on the buffer’s asphalt ridge, five times our true height at least and far slimmer than their owners. Stove pipe legs kick out an awkward gait. Shadow hand grasps shadow hand. Contrails make cat scratches between the setting sun and a fingernail-clip of moon impatient to own the sky. From the far end of the dam, now in shadow, a disembodied flute plays Amazing Grace, prelude to the á cappella, each soulful note revealing a lifetime. Straggly grey hair overhangs his shoulders nearly hiding the Semper Fi patch on once black leather jacket, now as faded as its wearer. We nod as we pass. He in turn salutes us or perhaps the coming darkness.

Was it our first Christmas together you arrived?

Marianne Gambaro

Other stuffed animals have moved through our lives over the years: the millennial kitten with its party hat and noise maker, the camel I gave him in the hospital to “get over the hump,” the koala a friend brought back from Australia now relegated to a high bookshelf. But you are the only ones who have shared our bedroom these 40 plus years. Oh, if those tight-stitched little monkey mouths could speak!

Stuffed Monkeys

You’ve been such a part of our home these many years I can’t remember which of us gave you to the other.

You witnessed those youthful years of passion and discovery, wept silently the occasional nights we slept back-to-back in unresolved anger, stood by in silent sympathy as we aged into those physical barriers to romance— mouth guard, carpal tunnel splint, that Darth Vader CPAP mask.

You were there the months after his surgery when we learned that intimacy is different than sex, a secret you’d known since your creation.

Now in a futile attempt to slow time, our own primate bodies cling desperately to one another as they age, ache and wrinkle, reaching for one another’s familiar hand in darkness while yours, a bit dusty but unchanged, stay locked in that eternal Velcro hug.

Two furry brown bodies joined by Velcro paws locked in wraparound hug, androgynous except for a single pink bow on one, beatific black thread smiles grace your faces, lashed eyelids closed in your own ardor and discretion for our privacy as you sit atop his armoire.

Wildroot and Beyond

A hospital bed with my dying, diminished father was now the centerpiece of what used to be his and Sarah’s overstuffed dining room. He’d begun the hospice stage two weeks before my visit. He lay with his eyes closed, mouth open like a small black hole, his cheeks suckedIinward.spentmost of my time looking at his face with my hand on his head or heart. His skin was still smooth. Sometimes I saw earlier versions of him a patchwork of dif ferent images that reflected different chapters of his life. Some I recognized from old Kodak-Brownie black and white photos before I was born. Wire rim glasses, the everpresent pompadour, the Zionist teen-ager, the 18 year-old in a top hat marrying my 17 year-old Mom, the hard-working, pushy guy unrivaled in willpower and determined to make it in the business world without even a high school diploma. “Ab” had to be shifted every three or four hours to clean a deep and spreading back-sore, re-pack it with honey and topicals, and change his position. It had become a large dark purple wound that was deep to the bone and smelled of rot that was pu trid to Ibreathe.assigned myself a minor job during those grueling 10-15 minute procedures. I held his face from going into his pillow as he was turned nearly ¾ over. These were the only times that he opened his eyes. It was as though we’d shaken him violently out of his halfway world and back into the room where his body was kicking his ass and evicting him. Though he no longer raised his voice to exclaim “OUCH!” or “DON’T DO THAT!” it was pretty clear through his breathy moans that he felt distress.

Every day I went to the YMCA and did a workout, savoring the normalcy of ped aling on a cardio machine while watching a TV program. One day, I was driving there and suddenly realized I’d left my gym shorts at their home. I drove back and when I returned, I saw that they had just rolled Ab over, so I ran over to hold his face. He locked eyes with mine. I gave him a kiss and a few seconds later, he puckered his lips and summoned a tiny breath to blow me a kiss. I was astonished and deeply moved

since there’d been no interaction since I’d arrived. Though it never happened again, it is as memorable as my first kiss in 7th grade. The affection for my Dad came so easily during his last years like iris blooms after a long winter. Who’d have thought I’d be so wholeheartedly present after decades of distance between us? We’d been wedged apart by our religious and politi cal differences for over four decades since I’d rebelled against the Orthodox Judaism and Zionism that was expected of us students at the Yeshiva High boarding school. It got worse when I embraced the Counterculture. He’d rant and pontificate against anti-Semitism, Israeli peace activists, and Hippies. As the decades passed, our conversations were increasingly fenced off from thorny topics including my family. His relationship to my sons was increasingly hollow and when they got engaged to wonderful women who weren’t Jewish, Sarah recom mended we not tell him. Consequently, he knew nothing of his beautiful great-grandchildren.But when Alzheimer’s invaded seven years ago it stripped away his opinions as though his mind was a blackboard wiped clean. It left him with laughter, songs, affection, and anxieties. Our time together shed its characteristic tensions and hurt re placed by a sense of play and connection. His expressiveness was child-like and innocent and it was a privilege to be “his best friend” as he called me during the last few years when he no longer remembered me as his first-born. Somehow a door at the back of my own memory vault sprung open and I could access visceral images of him doting on me when I was the little boy and he was my bigger-than-life dad. We’d play footsie as we lay on opposite ends of the couch; wrestle on the living room carpet; sing “Summertime” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”; make chopped liver together late Friday afternoons. On Shabbos morning before our walk to the synagogue, he’d drag a black ACE comb across my scalp like a rake, impervious to my grimaces. (Why would a comb be made with only microscopic gaps between its teeth and why would it be his comb of choice?) His smile in the mirror came when he flipped and primped the front into a pompadour like his. Sometimes he’d apply a few drops of creamy white Wildroot to hold the shape like he did with his own hair.

~ ~ ~

Saturday nights after Shabbos, he’d take me with him to the downtown post of fice and I’d open PO Box 1205 and hand him a stack of envelopes, most of them or ders for flyswatters, piggy banks, refrigerator magnets and rulers. Each plastic item would be branded with an ad in his factory promoting a bank branch, a gas station, and even an occasional baseball team, or a recognizable national brand. After my Bar Mitzvah, he and my Mom decided they should send me to a Yeshiva so I could see the way real Orthodox Jews live (as opposed to our more impro visational small-town version). It was a combative, irreverent four years for me. One evening Ab dropped by the dorm for a visit when he was in Chicago for business. It so happened, I was lying alone in the overheated infirmary room with the flu. The other six beds were empty and stripped to the mattresses. One of the college guys brought me meals on a tray that I mostly left untouched. When Ab was escorted to the bleak space, he seemed shocked and could barely speak. I remember the unfamiliar look of powerlessness on his face. Maybe he wished I was home, like I often wished. He started tuning in to the flies that buzzed around the room. Without a flyswatter in sight, he would snap out his hand like a frog’s tongue, and catch them in mid-flight, then throw them down hard to the floor.

Since Alzheimer’s, his memories flitted through the air like children’s bubbles popping into air after floating a few seconds. So too, his opinions had jettisoned from his mind. Unexpectedly, when we got together, we delighted in each other. We sang his full repertoire of Hebrew songs and African-American Spirituals over and over. We walked arm in arm through the air-conditioned mall, where we escaped the pressing south Florida humidity. We discovered that the mall’s acoustics were good for his mu sical medleys. I would bring something we could play at the kitchen table like a Bingo set or art supplies. Children’s books that he once read to me were a hit. Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop” on YouTube mesmerized him. I never ratted him out when Sarah would leave the kitchen and he would quietly open cabinets searching for a chocolate she may have hidden from his diabetic sweet tooth.

The Alzheimer’s passage was marked by phases. His vocabulary and his reper toire of songs dwindled. Lyrics escaped. His walk became wobbly and eventually he stayed in a wheelchair. Incontinence circled back from his infancy though the first time he wet his bed, he still had the vocabulary and embarrassment to tell his aide that the roof had leaked during the night. During his anxious stage he would tell us that we had to get out of the house before the real owners returned. . . a painfully obvious metaphor of the very real eviction his brain was imposing on him. I’d try to ease his worries with trickery a hastily penned “contract” that showed his ownership of the house. Somehow it calmed him every time we told him to take out the folded contract from his pocket. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of my head on top of his in the dining room’s wall mirror. It was poignant to me that both of us had white hair. Old man hair interwo ven as our lives had been for 67 years. It would be easy to remember the lapses and flaws when it came to his busi ness ethics, his husbanding, and his fathering, but they seemed far off from these fi nal days and the tentative, gentle nature I’d come to witness in the stripped down version that Alzheimer’s left him with. The vicissitudes of his lifetime seemed like in dividual cresting waves that had broken and returned into their vast ocean source.

The few times that Sarah or I turned on the TV to cable news, the talk was non-stop about the corona virus spreading from Wuhan, China to some European coun tries and even a few cases in the US. Some countries had canceled flights from other countries. This might throw a wrench into my Dad’s plan to be buried in Israel where he’d purchased plots years back. Then came his final Shabbos, a day when all the outside news arriving by TV, radio, and Internet was turned off. About noon that day, his breaths although not anxious gasps conveyed on some instinctual level that his time as “Yisroel” (to Sarah) and “Ab”(to me) was ending soon. At one point, Sarah and I laid our heads down against him and sobbed. Within an hour, we saw his story end just like that after nearly 92 years. One breath and it was there. Then no breath and it was gone.

Minutes before his final breath, I rubbed my nose into his stiff, white hair and remembered the smell of Wildroot that I’d loved. I remembered that it also radiated from his pillow where I laid my head on the nights I had clambered into his bed after a bad dream.Sixhours after Ab’s final breath, my grandson Levi took his first one bookend ing the poignant day with his birth three thousand miles away. The image of these two souls crossing paths – one coming and one going flooded my brain. Each one shar ing some of the very same genes. Maybe Ab and Levi did a quick double take from their respective escalators before re-directing attention on what lay ahead. “I know that guy from somewhere!”

I went into the dining room where Ab lay under the sheet and put my hands on his leg as though it was a pre-Alzheimer’s “everyday” morning and I was bringing him the Peoria Journal Star. I brought him up to date on my branch of our family. I hoped he could still take a few last messages with him on his soul-journey.

Though Alzheimer’s had detoured his path and robbed him of his mental-valuables, it had inadvertently returned an adoring son’s love to me. Perhaps on some level invisible to me, he had taken in the gift of Levi and smiled as he braved his passageway to the Beyond. Elliot Margolies Elliot Margolies lives in Palo Alto, California. He has produced video documentaries and storytelling events focusing often on immigrants and refugees.

Obliged to pause before he steps through all revolving doors or from curbs, he waits until the signs say Walk. He lets younger runners sprint, no longer strains from frantic need to hurry life along, halts with respect at every intersection as if to tell each one goodbye. Jerry Krajnak Jerry Krajnak is a Vietnam veteran who later survived forty-plus years in public school classrooms. He began sending out poems for other than close friends to see in 2021. Eleven have been published. He shares a mountain cabin with rescue animals and, when lucky, an occasional grandchild.

Seasonal A gray-haired man in faded trunks wades the shallows and hears the echo of a song that brings a smile of recognition to his wrinkled face. He recalls ecstatic dives from summer boards, the shrieks of heedless youth at play, the joy of youthful flesh on flesh. Cured now of that brief disease, he prefers more grace than noise in those things he loves: a rocker on a cabin porch, a pond below, a warmish one, to share with little fish who kiss his hairy legs, or poems and tea beside a sunny window.

Fading James awoke one morning and could not remember the name of the love of his life. He could remember the lovely wave of her shoulder-length, ash blond hair, the nobility of her posture, the elegance of her slender, tapered fingers, the fullness of her lips, often on the edge of laughter. But her name was gone. He felt a nausea as he wrestled with the filing cabinet, rusted shut in his aging brain. He felt as if part of his memory were being sucked down, as if into quicksand. Of course, he had been forgetting words for some time, especially names. Names of places, names of people. He had been told this was not uncommon. But the anguish when a name wouldn’t come was excruciating. And now the most cherished name of all hadHedisappeared.wenttothe kitchen to put the kettle on. Perhaps a cup of tea would bring back the missing name, or at least would assuage his suffering. He chuckled grimly to see that he had not yet lost the name of his favorite, simple tea: English Breakfast. The love of his life he could no longer name, but his familiar morning tea with its comforting aroma and disarmingly simple designation, that he could evoke from the tangle of dendrites and synapses that were beginning to fail him. As he waited for the water to come to a boil, he remembered a phrase from E.M. Forster that had more resonance now than ever: “Only connect.” He also remembered, as an ironic response from Yeats: “Things fall apart.”

Later that morning, in a long-distance phone conversation with his adult son, looking forward towards the summer, they started happily to exchange favorite vacation spots in Europe. They both remembered Sagres, of course, the southwestern tip of the continent, with its towering orange cliffs like sentinels above stretches of sandy beach facing the wild Atlantic billows and the wild wind. “But really my favorite place,” he started to say, and his heart rose at the memory, “my really favorite place, you know, son, is…is… that stretch of mountains in the interior of Spain,” and a cold sweat condensed on his forehead and on the back of his neck, “that small mountain range, you know what I mean, we went there together perhaps

However, though he was slower than in the past and walked in the woods now with the help of sturdy aluminum trekking poles, his forays into nature were still rewarding, perhaps even more so than before. It seemed to him that the swelling buds, the unfolding new leaves, the touchingly innocent light green of life reborn, the occasional red squirrel trembling in outrage or fear, the usual robins, blue jays, and cardinals returned for another season, all throbbed with a thicker life than ever and prodded his slowing blood to respond. When he heard a cawing overhead, he was pleased by the familiar sound, but was also pleased by the familiar old word: crow.

James could not deny that he was suffering the in-roads of time, but at least he could still read and take walks in the woods. Yes, reading gave him pleasure as it always had, though he ruefully noticed that a fine novel read six months before would now be mostly obliterated. He remembered a time in his youth when he could call to mind every character, every scene, in every book he had read. And the books that loomed large in his youth he still retained in his imagination. But Persuasion, which he had enjoyed immensely just a few months ago, had left him with the resonance of excellent writing, and a lingering awareness of the intelligence of the writer, but nothing more. Yes, a happy marriage in the end, indeed, but what were their names?

“Ah, yes, of course, how could I forget the Picos de Europa. Of course, son, I haven’t forgotten them at all, the stone huts, the steep green hillsides, the placid goats and sheep, the great mass of granite rising straight above us, the snow-covered peaks above it all, of course I haven’t forgotten.” There was a pause and in a chastened voice he added, “Just the name, son, that’s all I forgot, just the name.” His son, growing wise in middle-age, said nothing.

ten or fifteen years ago, deep gorges with icy clean water rushing over the rocks, towering granite cliffs, and snow on the peaks above, sheep and goat bells in the valleys, I can’t believe it, my favorite place, I just can’t remember the name.” Before the nausea of helplessness could establish itself, his son came to his rescue: “Picos de Europa, Dad, Picos de Europa.”

And when he heard the piercing cry of the blue jay, it, too, was a double joy, the

For the life of him, they were lost; he couldn’t dig them up, drag them forth, expose them to the light of day.

harsh music of that aggressive creature and his memory of its name. So, too, with the red squirrel. However, as he ambled on through the awakening woodland of early spring, he startled a large and clumsy bird in the undergrowth that made a great deal of noise, but, instead of escaping, limped ahead of him on the path, trailing a wing.

He knew the bird and its ploy to lead him away from its nest, but familiar as the creature and its instinctive cleverness were, he couldn’t find the name. He knew it was a double name, a something something, an adjective and a proper noun, but they simply were not available. A door was shut, a cabinet was locked, a file could not be opened. Only when he had returned to his car half an hour later and was easing himself into the driver’s seat did it suddenly come back to him, like a gift, a gift he knew he could never force, but could only accept with gratitude when it came. Like love itself, he thought. Like love itself. “Ruffed grouse,” he muttered, torn between chagrin and a sheepish pride. But this morning’s discovery was a shocker. His first love, his greatest love, the love he thought would last forever. And now, the very name that had been the receptacle for all that was precious, the name had disappeared. How vain those grandiose words like “forever.” How vain the passion that provoked them. He had lost her as a lover more than fifty years before, but he had only lost her name today. He wasn’t sure whether he was the betrayer or the betrayed. He knew things would not get better. He was not surprised when things got worse. But he still took great pleasure in strolling through the woodlands, occasionally catching sight of a calm deer on the edge of a field, chewing its cud and staring at this slow-moving interloper. Somehow, he was certain he would never forget the word “deer.” And he loved seeing the small brook tumbling its clear water over the brown pebbles and stones in its bed. Though his joints ached, he would stop beside the water and, bending down with a sigh, would lean upon the cushioning moss, his weight settled on the one knee that still had some cartilage. From there, he was able to touch the cool surface of the stream, able to cup a bit of water and rub it into his face. That pleasure was still available, and it was profound. Then there came a day when, to his deep embarrassment, he forgot his granddaughter’s name, even though he had called just to speak to her, to be bathed

Spring turned into summer and summer began to fade into fall. James continued to visit the woodland almost every day and he felt it gave sustenance to his soul. And as he walked beneath the pines, the tamarack, the birches and the oaks, he would visit the brook, still clear, still cool, though not as sharply cold as it had been in early spring. And one day, laboriously he got down on his left knee, then the right, and leaned towards the flowing water. He reached out and sank his hand in up to the wrist and left it there. Then he sprinkled some water on his face, dried himself with his pocket handkerchief, and sat quietly and thought. Then he reached in again and grasped a smooth, rounded stone from the bottom, felt its heft in his cupped palm, and took it dripping from the stream. He squeezed it gently in his fist, gazed at the worm-like blue veins wriggling across the back of his hand, held the stone firmly, with reverence, and suddenly was filled with gratitude. For now, at last, he understood that even as the words disappeared, the reality of this world of miracles would remain, this world of trickling water, soft moss, and beloved things that he could feel and weigh, dense, solid, and good, in his gratefully cupped hands. Alexis Levitin Alexis Levitin has been a translator, mostly of poetry, for the last half century. His forty-seven books include Clarice Lipsector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words. During the pandemic, he found himself writing short stories, many of which have been accepted for publication.

in her four-year-old exuberance of being. He squirmed out of the difficulty by adopting a tone of high civility, perhaps a touch of self-mockery, as he said to his son: “And your lovely daughter, the princess, might I speak with her now?”

The conversation went well, as he asked about her paintings, her backyard garden with its tomatoes, zucchini, peas, and lettuce, her breakfast of yogurt and raspberries, her new pajamas of pink and blue. But once he had said “Good-bye, Princess,” he hung up in a kind of panic, for he still could not call forth her name.

Other untold stories my mother's favourite uncle: hard wood as black piano keys with one foreshortened finger of which he nibbled the knuckle continuously, the remainder torn off, forgotten in an accident of childhood and unsurprising myagriculture.mother's favourite uncle, born in Free State Clonakilty and spent 40 years moving otherfullshortlyandreligions.ofwithbramblebrewinginbutofandIwhenbecausewhowithandinstorednearandbetweenuncomfortablythereaNewYorkbrownstoneFrankMcCourt.hislonghandpoetryvarioushardbacknotebookshadapoeticlongrelationshipahardenedformernunhesaidrefusedtomarryhimhe'dwanteditdonebyapriest.Iknewhimwas8yearsold,he8yearsshortbeingtheoldestmanlivinginIrelandstilllivedonhisownahouseinClonakiltysweetblackberrywinetheflavoursuspicioushediedinthathouseafter,aloneofuntoldstories,

surrounded by hardback notebooks and the ofcigarettewindblownashapple-orchards.

DS Maolalai DS Maolalai has released two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (2019). His third collection, Noble Rot, was released in May of this year.

DS

The hunt almost as if she were under a gun barrel shots in some distance cracking like apples on rocks. her nose perching high and her legs arched and sunken in grass in the manner of ducks going hell underwater. she leaps over barriers and the wind moves her forward you see it lap downward and scale out like waves. trees shake constantly but the lawns flip low and go up, careful as hair in a mirror. the breed was made apparently as a lapdog, but she dives all the same. all joy and barking at birds which take off, unalarmed.andcasuallygloriously Maolalai

Martha Golensky Martha Golensky is the author of the poetry collection Pride of Place

Speaking of Trees. . .

On the far horizon, they shake denuded limbs. I envy the trees, even in their bare winter trim, for all they need are the basics, in good supply, so this church-like choir can offer its hymns.

Alas, our spirit withers when pickings are slim. We must believe there’s hope on which to rely.

What do they talk about as the light dims, these somber sentinels watching from up high on the far horizon, waving denuded limbs? Do they comment on our petty whims, which as observers must surely mystify this black-robed choir offering hymns? Or perhaps they grasp our fears so grim that we hide behind greed, an urge to deny.

On the far horizon, the trees’ denuded limbs resemble a church choir offering hymns.

. Her poems have been published in literary journals, anthologies, general-purpose magazines, and online. She is also the author of numerous articles and a textbook on nonprofit management, her professional field for over thirty years until retiring to Greensboro, NC in 2007. She has taught poetry writing on behalf of the Shepherd’s Center of Greensboro and is currently the facilitator of a poetry group at her retirement community.

On the far horizon, their denuded limbs, robed in black against the leaden sky, resemble a church choir offering hymns.

In our class of eleven trainees, Susan was my BFF. I like to think she still is, even though we haven’t seen much of each other since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the guided tour schedule. It’s made me wonder, off and on, what might happen to our friendship because unlike other kinds of friends, BFFs have to be together in real life.

Susan’s Rembrandt

All the Zoom cocktails in the world can’t approximate the euphoria of standing on a grimy subway platform at midnight, bitching about the 6 train.

One docent I knew was obsessed with John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a French gynecologist portrayed at home as a darkly handsome heart-throb in a long crimson dressing gown and Turkish slippers. “I wish I had a doctor like that,” she sighed. “I’d be sick all the time.”

At the same time, that year of docent training was like being thrust back to junior high school, when you ran around with your posse of girlfriends, knew which lunch table you were supposed to sit at, and spent most of your time talking about the boys you adored, only in this case, they weren’t boys, they were works of art. Sometimes both.

“His gaze is introspective and contemplative,” she’d say in her thick New York accent, voice laden with emotion, “perhaps meditating on the meaning of his life as it falls into perpetual shadow.”

One of dozens of self-portraits he made during his lifetime, Rembrandt painted it in 1660, nine years before he died. It’s a devastating picture of what it means to get old, unsparing in its detail. We are confronted with what Philip Roth once called the

The year I spent training to be a volunteer guide at the Metropolitan Museum was like being put out to pasture. I’d had a high-pressure job for many years, then took early retirement, and suddenly I wasn’t working at all—except that I was. In some ways, harder than ever. But for free, and with no benefits, other than more access than most people have to some of the greatest art in the world.

The first time I remember thinking that Susan was unusual, possibly brilliant, with great, dark stories hidden in the depths of her soul, was listening to her practice in front of “her” Rembrandt in the Dutch paintings galleries at the Met.

he was only 54 when he made it. By contrast, Susan was 65 when she started training to be a docent, already two years older than Rembrandt when he died. But she had no wrinkles and creamy skin, something you could chalk up to improvements in the material conditions of life over the 350 years since the so-called Golden Age of Dutch Painting or just the fact that she had kickass genes.

“massacre” of old age: sagging flesh, mottled skin, furrowed brow, drooping eyelids, bulbousUnbelievably,nose.

I was friends with other people in our class too, and so was she, but I spent the most time with her because she was always up for an adventure, even willing to get in the senior citizen line at seven in the morning outside the Delacorte Theater for free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. “I’ve been up since 3,” she said. “I might as well.”

Then she’d bring back hilarious stories about all the other alteh kakers in line, including the Upper West Side guy who, two years into the Trump administration, opened up his newspaper and said no one in particular, fully expecting someone to join in, "So, what did that idiot say today?”

She grew up in a tough, working-class neighborhood of the Bronx, went to City College, married and dumped a husband after having a couple of kids, joined feminist consciousness-raising groups in the seventies, and eventually, trained to be a psychotherapist—because what better profession was there for a smart Jewish girl from New York? But in her secret life, she wanted to produce plays. “I never get tired of it,” she told me one night when we were standing in Times Square after the theaters let out, gazing up at what to me was the soul-crushing display of LED billboards eight stories high that were turning the night into garish day. “I feel like I’m in a movie.”

Before I started docent training, I never thought I’d have BFFs again. At the Associated Press, where I’d worked for 20 years, I’d had assorted bosses and mentors and colleagues and friends, but everything we did always revolved around work. If a bunch of us went out to a bar after a huge breaking news story, another plane crash or a bombing, all we ever talked about was who got it first, whose lead was best, who had the most colorful background and quotes. Even if we did something outside of work like

go to dinner or a movie, we’d start off the evening by saying, “Let’s not talk about work”—but of course we always did. It was pretty much the same at the three newspapers where I worked before I ended up at the AP, with the major exception being the San Diego Tribune, where I met my future husband, Stan, who also worked for the paper. We started dating and eventually moved to New York and got married, but even though he was my boyfriend and then my partner-for-life, he was never my BFF.

My very first BFF was Judy, the daughter of our housekeeper and Best Friend Forever from fourth through eighth grade. She used to stay overnight at our house every Friday, and we’d play Office with my younger sister, Rachel, which consisted of lying on the rug in Rachel’s room and pretending we were secretaries. We adopted alluring names like Rebecca and Michelle—nothing as prim or boring as Judy and Ann. Then we’d turn off the lights and fantasize about falling in love with the boss, who was always tall, dark, and handsome, Rock Hudson to our Doris Day. That was it. We didn’t have to buy anything or go anywhere or really do much of anything at all except to dream—of a sturdy typewriter, sheafs of pristine white typing paper, and all the scotch tape, staplers, and pens and pencils that a girl could desire.

Why we got along so well, why we were so fiercely loyal to each other, why we truly loved one another, I don’t know, except that is the way of BFFs. The bonds, if and

Next came Priscilla, my roommate in prep school. Unlike Judy, she’d grown up with money—her dad was a banker, her mom wrote children’s books, and they had a place on Fishers Island. But she wore her wealth lightly, going home from our boarding school outside Philadelphia to her parents’ gray stone pile in Westchester with her dirty laundry in brown paper grocery bags. Tall and statuesque, with honey blond hair, dark eyebrows, and legs like Ann Reinking’s that seemed to go on forever, she strode through life leaving a trail of thunderstruck boys and men behind her. She was extremely close to her mother—they were almost like sisters—and since I was furious at my own for all the usual Holden Caulfield-esque reasons, I often wondered if that relationship had given her the preternatural confidence with which she navigated the world.

In my experience, BFFs show up in your life when you need them the most and disappear when your paths diverge. When you’re young, they help you navigate the treacherous world of boys and men. By the time I met Susan, we were long past needing

Supposedly, we went out to meet guys, but if we came home alone, well, that was okay because each of us thought the other one was just about the smartest, funniest girl in the world—practically the definition of a BFF.

when they form, have the potential to transcend everything from class to religion, temperament to taste. Especially taste.

The first day I walked into our dorm room, my heart sank. She’d gotten there first and covered the bunk beds with faux velvet leopard print bedspreads. Then she’d gone off to meet boys. I’d grown up in a house tastefully decorated with an eclectic mix of mid-century modern and high-end knockoffs of traditional Yankee furniture, and those bedspreads struck me as hopelessly tacky. It would take me until college to realize the truth of what the fashion designer Mary Quant once said: “Good taste is death; vulgarity is life."

The high point of our relationship was the summer after graduation, when we traveled through Europe on $5 a day. Once, on an overnight train ride to Spain, I polished off an entire cake, and she didn’t say a thing. Another time, after she’d stayed out late drinking with some guys she met in Paris, she got so shit-faced that she peed herself on the way to the bathroom in our hotel. I didn’t say a thing. Why would I? We were BFFs.After that summer, I never saw her again, not because we had a falling out but simply because we went to different colleges, which was where I met Eileen. She lived down the hall from me my sophomore year at Smith, and like Judy and Priscilla, was the exact opposite of me, but a different kind of opposite. She’d grown up in inner-city Newark, the feisty, freckled daughter of an alcoholic dad and a mom who was a cop. A rabid Knicks fan who ran track in high school, she was the first girl I knew who loved the NBA. We used to stay up half the night together, getting high, smoking Kools, and practicing dance steps for the discos, where we wore each other’s clothes, including platform shoes, rhinestone belts, and slutty T-shirts that said “10 cents a dance.”

I didn’t know anyone else who did the self-portrait, which is all muddy browns and blacks except for the famous “Rembrandt light” coming down from the upper left corner, casting his lumpy face in enigmatic shadow. By the time he made it, he’d lost a wife and three children, known success and scandal, been wealthy and bankrupt, and may have sensed he was entering the last decade of his life. Susan described his

to negotiate that particular hazard. Both of us had been married for many years and enjoyed the exquisite boringness of long-term fidelity. Susan once told me it took her and her second husband, Ron, an hour and a half to make up a shopping list.

“Should we get green beans?” she’d say, still in her pajamas, reading the paper at noon.“We had them last week.”

“How about broccoli?”

No, we were facing something even more terrifying than romantic love, something so scary that we rarely ever talked about it. Tried, in fact, to ignore it, or, if absolutely necessary, joke about it. And that, of course, was getting old and falling apart. Losing your mind—to Alzheimer’s, dementia or some other long-term, degenerative illness—then life itself. Sometimes I thought the frenzied activity of the docents, or at least those of us at or near the age of retirement—all the endless hours spent researching new objects, memorizing our tours, going to lectures, taking in exhibitions—was merely a hedge against mortality. A reminder to ourselves that even if we no longer had a corner office and fancy job, we still mattered. For my part, I knew I was irrelevant, superannuated, nonessential. Otherwise, what was I doing in a dark auditorium at ten in the morning, watching a slide show about Caravaggio? That’s why I think Susan picked Rembrandt’s self-portrait for her highlights tour— to help her deal with the difficulties of getting old. Just to stand in front of it and calmly talk about it bore witness to the stamina and fortitude it sometimes takes to be alive. Of course, you can’t go wrong with Rembrandt. He’s one of the top two or three draws at the Met, right up there with his fellow Dutchmen Van Gogh and Vermeer. A lot of the docents included one of his works on their tours, but more often Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, with its flashy white sleeves and gold medallion.

expression as introspective and contemplative; to me, he looked like the men you see at last call in dark, smoke-stained taverns, their faces filled with alcoholic regret.

Once, while she was talking about the painting, an older woman in her group burst into tears. Afterward, she came up to Susan, clasped her hands and thanked her, and said she’d come all the way from Scotland and had always wanted to see it. The objects we talked about had that effect. The art critic Jerry Saltz once described a similar experience while looking at a different Rembrandt, Portrait of an Elderly Man, which Rembrandt made just two years before he died. “This painting didn’t sweep me off my feet,” he wrote. “It swept through me, a crack of existential thunder.”Susan hated getting old. I wasn’t happy about it, but she took it personally. It just pissed her off that anything, the coronavirus or death itself, could interfere with her voracious consumption of life. When Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, said during the lockdown that people over 65 should just stay home, she was incredulous. “Just stay home?” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Really, de Blasio? Really?”A few years earlier, she’d told me with indignation that a man on the crosstown 86 bus had offered her his seat. “What’s the big deal?” I said. “I would have taken it.” To her, that was inconceivable. “Just wait until it starts happening to you,” she said bitterly. “The first time is mind-bending and often life-changing, like when you get your first period. Only sadder.”

you,” I’d want to say, although of course I’d restrain myself, planting my sneakered feet more firmly in the aisle and gripping the overhead bar a little tighter. In

I didn’t agree. In fact, it already had started happening to me, and I was ten years younger than she was. I’d been treated for cancer when I was 50, and ever since, I’d been happy to take any proffered seat on a subway or bus, depending on how I read the intention. If a young person offered, I was secretly pleased to discover that good manners still existed. If a man offered, especially one who wasn’t that much younger than me, then I became incensed, reading it as yet another dreary sign of the patriarchy.“Fuck

his defense—and that of all the others who have ever made the gallant gesture—I don’t think I truly grasped the disconnect between the way I looked and the way I felt. Day to day, nothing seemed that different at 55 than it had at 45, and 35 was just a dream. Then I’d catch a reflection of myself in the subway window—the wispy hair, disappearing brows, and fading light in my eyes—and I’d understand. But being with the docents was an antidote to all of that, like drinking a magic potion that made me feel young again, inducing the delirium of junior high, when I couldn’t get over the good fortune of being named to the committee to decorate the gym for the Sadie Hawkins dance. After our year of training was over, four of us in the class—Susan, Sheila, Barbara, and I—would meet for lunch in the ground-floor cafeteria of the Met after our tours. We’d get our food and gravitate toward the back of the long room, where all the docentsFirst,sat. we’d talk about all the strange and funny things that had happened on our tours. The visitors who wanted to know if the art was real. The high school kid on a class trip who awkwardly asked me where in the museum he could see more paintings like Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. And his class chaperone, a harried, friendly woman with a strong Southern accent, who walked beside me through the galleries of French decorative art, telling me about her hot flashes. Then we’d move on to what everyone was reading and watching. All the docents I knew subscribed to the theater, opera, symphony, or dance; belonged to one or more book groups; were experts at cross-stitch, knitting, embroidery, or all three, executing their intricate designs while binge-watching the latest series on Amazon, Netflix, or HBO. They took classes, taught classes, learned foreign languages, even volunteered at other institutions. Among them all, none was more passionate about the dance than Susan, who’d been a season ticket holder to American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet for so long that she knew everyone in her section on a first-name basis. The year she turned 75, she told me she’d seen a performance by Alvin Ailey that was so thrilling it made her glad to still be alive. I took note of the “still” and understood it to mean that there were times when she wasn’t. And it was moments like

Barbara kept at it, even tried a few more feints, but when Susan refused to budge, she uncharacteristically gave up. “Still, she’s a baby for them to love,” she said quietly. “Yes, they love her.” I was with Susan. To me, the real girls’ talk was never about the grandchildren—it was about truth, justice, and whether mercy shall prevail. One of the things I loved

“All babies are cute,” Barbara admonished her sternly. “I guess. But she’s not going to be a beauty.”

At a certain point in the lunch, the pictures of the grandchildren would inevitably appear, and that was when I knew it was time for me to go. Stan and I didn’t have kids, so we didn’t have grandkids, and while in theory I understood their appeal, I didn’t find them nearly as interesting as my friends did.

Susan had grandchildren too, but she was as unsentimental about them as she’d been about her own children, as unsentimental as my parents had been about us. When her daughter’s first child was born, Barbara was more excited than she was.

that that set her apart from Sheila and Barbara, who were weirdly cheerful and optimistic about life. During those meals, we also spent time dishing on other docents, particularly the Ladies Who Lunch, also known as the Park Avenue Ladies. All of us were privileged—you had to be to devote untold hours of your life to a volunteer gig—but some were more so than others. At a minimum, we all had a house or apartment within commuting distance of the city. The Park Avenue Ladies had a lot more than that: the beach house in the Hamptons, the ranch outside Taos, the mountain aerie in Aspen, the Learjet to get there—and for the most elite of the elite, an art collection good enough to someday bequeath to the Met.

“Is the baby adorable?” she said eagerly, leaning into the table to see the pictures.Susan shrugged. “She’s okay.”

Even I was taken slightly aback by the lack of enthusiasm, but Barbara simply refused to accept it. Again, she insisted that all babies are precious. “Not really,” Susan said. “Not all babies.”

A couple years after we started giving tours, Susan and I signed up for a class at MoMA on feminism and modern art, which met in the evenings after the museum was closed. The instructor, a grad student in art history with a mop of dark curly hair, who showed up for class in black leggings, lace bodysuits, and high-heeled leather boots, would take us into the solemn galleries and point out great works of feminist art from the sixties and seventies. I don’t remember what, if anything, Susan or I said during class discussions, but it must have been nostalgic, or even wistful, or possibly angry that nothing much had changed in forty years, because on the last night of class, two young women seated across the table from us spoke up in unison. “We just want to thank you for your contributions,” they said sincerely.

about her most was that she never outgrew the radical politics of her youth, which overlapped with mine. It killed her when her daughter, whom she’d dragged to countless Planned Parenthood marches as a child, started wavering on a woman’s right to a legal abortion. Her son, meanwhile, had taken a turn toward Orthodox Judaism, despite having grown up in her fiercely secular house. She agonized about having to wear a skirt and sit in the women’s section of the synagogue when his son was bar mitzvahed. I told her to just say no, but she wisely ignored me and went.

Susan and I were speechless. The implication was clear: Your time is over. No gold watch but we’re grateful for your service. Neither of us had the presence of mind to say, “Wait a minute! We’re not done yet!”

I never asked Susan what was going through her mind when she practiced for all those hours in front of her Rembrandt—I just listened to her talk and heard the pathos in her voice. I think a lot of us used to work out our issues in front of the objects we loved in the museum—I certainly did. For me, it was always Bruegel’s The Harvesters—there was nothing like those miniature figures of Dutch farmers circa 1565, the golden fields of grain and tiny ships bobbing in the distant harbor, to get my old empathy machine cranked up again. I often sat on the bench in front of that painting, feeling as though my heart was about to burst.

Ann Levin Ann Levin is a writer, editor, and journalist whose book reviews and articles have been published by the Associated Press, USA Today, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her memoir writing has appeared in Sensitive Skin and Southeast Review. She has also performed on stage with the writers’ group Read650.

I considered the possibility that Rembrandt wasn’t as great as he was cracked up to be—even curators in Amsterdam have been rethinking the use of the phrase “Golden Age of Dutch Painting” to refer to the cultural heritage of the 17th century Netherlands because it glosses over the role of colonialism and slavery in creating the wealth that supported Rembrandt and his ilk.

Susan saw all that right away—she was always a quicker study than I was. In all the years I’ve known her—and it’s been almost twelve since we first met in docent training—I’ve never stopped being amazed at our late-blooming friendship, and the fact that after so many years, I had a BFF again. And because she loved the Rembrandt, and I loved her, I loved the Rembrandt, too.

During the long months of the lockdown, when the country was convulsed by protests over the killing of George Floyd, I read an essay by Hilton Als about the casual racism in the supposedly liberal bastions of publishing and the arts, and how it manifests itself as a smug feeling of cultural superiority. He summarized it like this: “You may have blackness, but we have Rembrandt,” then suggested that white people might benefit from asking themselves, “Who is this man to you?” So I did.

If I looked at the painting from that perspective—shorn of its assumed greatness, asking myself the simple question, “Who is this man to me?”—I realized that it didn’t have to contain any universal truth, and that not every person, from every place, at every moment in world history, would have to agree that it was a masterpiece.

For me, it was enough that Rembrandt had depicted a man circumspect and a trifle weary, whose time-worn face suggested that he’d had his fair share of joy and sorrow, his own version of excruciating bar mitzvahs, ugly babies, and humiliating rides on the crosstown bus. And now, that life was nearly over. There were blobs and slashes of paint on the canvas, and there was suffering, and the fact that the first could show the second was absolutely incredible to me.

David P Miller David P Miller has poetry published in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and others. Collections in print include Sprawled Asleep (2019) and Bend in the Stair (2021). A librarian at Curry College in Massachusetts, David retired from that position in June 2018.

Chance evergreens cluster behind where a house’s wing once stretched. One branch swoops to knock trespassers. So forgo the latch, tromp the vegetation either side. There’s your permission. See those first neighbors, inclined to visit over the rail. Gate swung to admit a first visitor across flagstones now buried under the crumble. That owner on the sidewalk, admiring the welcome before his front door.

Fenceless A gate squared to frame April’s carpet, leaf duff sifted through winters. Nautilus curls meet at their foreheads, filigreed along the top rail. The shouldering fence has absconded. Tan weeds flicked with first leaf buds flank both iron posts. Tangles flail out of sleepy thaw, trace curved paths like firework trails in long exposure light.

Geraniums KJ Hannah Greenberg

Sounds of Home Hollow clop of heels on wood, cupboard door bangs and oven door clicks, water rushes its short shouts down a drain and glass rings a tiny bell to wake me from my afternoon dream that I have wandered too far from home, now drawn back into it clutter and chatter, its slightly stale notes of a never lost soul.

Richard Dinges, Jr Richard Dinges, Jr lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and five chickens. He is recently published in Willow Review, Oracle, Writer’s Block, and others.

interests are in writing theory and

Outside,

She Closes Her Eyes the wind pushes dead leaves along the avenue; Inside, she closes her eyes, leans against the pane and dreams of him. ripping her robe kissing her shoulder.

Dissertation:

.

. .

William Waters William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation His research and teaching modern grammar.

While my wife is on the phone in the next room With an acquaintance too often incommunicado The luminescent white and silver dollar-sized flower Has a fingernail of deepest burgundy atop each pointed petal Such an unnecessary flourish I think A bit of showing off It makes me wonder about omniscient things Richard, I hear my wife declaim from the next room Oh my god In an accident I’m so sorry How did it happen Having lived so long I understand what that conversation means It’s the call and response of a death And a matter of details now How he died A matter of serendipity Which, of course, is too frivolous a word For the last seconds of horror and pain any misfortune Would have allowed him But it is the truth We are all subservient to the vagaries of chance Still, how seriously we live As if it means something The flower I’m holding is as delicate and sweet As a child’s breath Richard was vigorous vibrant A dynamo of a person Both bloom and man share similar fates Casual casualties of an indifferent nature The how, when, where and what will have their answers But the why remains illusive Despite our theologies Despite libraries full of ruminations Despite telescopes and microscopes I wonder how the same essence which takes such infinite care With its flowers

A Matter of Details Nature attends to the details I note this as I consider the flower in my hand

Even though life is unconscionable It shifts from sublimity to savagery Without shame or hesitation I see in this fantasia flower something of a miracle I heard in Richard’s quick and explosive laughter

This tenuous nature of being drives us to our knees Where we can worship flowers or beseech a deaf universe For Seekmercysolace from an omnipresence who considers Life and death the choice between two different hats A Thewhimblossom I admire is exquisitely wrought Richard was wonderfully exuberant If neither one is the answer, there is none My wife enters the room where I sit with my flower It’s Richard—she says—he’s been in a car accident I Thenodflower chimes in my hand I slowly close my fingers around it and squeeze Now it’s a matter of details Gavin Kayner Gavin Kayner's poems, prose, and plays have appeared in a variety of publications.

Puts so much of itself in harm’s way Arms predators with their teeth

While gracing orchids with intricate architecture I hear my wife murmuring consolations

Something of joy Neither wards off inevitability Both can be crushed in an instant

He arrived in dogwood season, the same afternoon she’d spotted the first returning junco come to feed after a winter in the coves. She was chain smoking Newport menthol kings on the porch, considering should she change out of the Winn Dixie poly blouse and walk to the point for a sunset cocktail or just take it easy, get dinner started, when he halted the old truck right in front of her trailer. Calming Jack’s bark, he waved his way onto her porch that day. Admitted he was lost. Needed water for the rusty pick-up’s radiator.

The first stranger of any variety Jack had let pass so freely. Too, he didn’t have that cocksure swagger of a government-issued man. No, he was searching, or perhaps just wandering, following the breeze. Aside from the matted red beard and freckled skin, she’d seen his look in Eastern Band cousins and old classmates back from Vietnam. Thirty-somethings now who left the rez as horny teenagers to return hazed stoners who’d been taught seven ways to kill but couldn’t conjure the energy or intent these days to do more than tend a patch of Easy Buds and maybe a few rows of corn and potatoes.Next afternoon, he stopped back by, offering a six pack for yesterday’s directions. Jack greeted him for a belly rub, didn’t bark at all this time. They visited, she and he, got to know each other sharing the beers. She liked his easy way, the bushy beard and army tats, the weed he’d rolled when the six was drunk up. They walked out to the point together, sat in the heath bald, finished down a Smirnoff tenth she’d lifted from Winn Dixie. She told him of the sunset point’s history in Cherokee culture, its name Dough nad agave “til we meet again” a generations-old “goodbye” to the sun. In a few days, he became familiar, then more. Capricious, but dependable, somehow. Expected. Like the mountain wind. He introduced her to Joplin, Hendrix, the Dead. Woke her up some nights in fits of scream. In June he drove to Asheville, returning with lumber to rebuild the trailer’s rotting porch.

Migrations

This Anglo, she sensed, was different. The only one she’d seen so deep in the reservation not driving a white DOI sedan or garbed in a blue Health Services uniform.

~ ~ ~ Come an early October morn, he was gone. Stepped over the squeaky floorboards, stashed his trash, gave Jack a sturdy goodbye pat, surreptitiously rollstarted the truck. From the rear view, he caught a glance of the trailer disappearing into scarlet dogwood and maple leaves in the false sunrise’s incandesce. Jack sitting upright, watching him go. He couldn’t have told her why. Just had to leave. It was easier just to leave, save whatever sorry ass explanation he might trip over. Whatever fray she might conjure. Maybe every place was haunted. Maybe the haints lived in his head, would be at the next stop, too. Or, maybe, there was peace he hadn’t found yet further north of the 17th parallel. Up there, out there. Somewhere. But not here. He drove the reservation’s Jeep trails, never getting out of second gear, careful not to break an axle, flatten a tire in the deep washouts. Entering federal land, the road improved to macadam so little traversed that kudzu vines encroached beyond its shoulders in jagged advances. Breaking daylight made the enormous carcasses of long dead yellow chestnuts and eroded mountainsides even more grotesque, like God’s personal apocalypse on Cherokee country. Descending into the coves, he upshifted, passing the occasional trailer or clapboard homes, their windows dark, yards strewn with toys, cannibalized cars, other sundry projects forgotten but by their incompleteness. By mid-morning, he’d made the little town of Cherokee, pulled into a small truck stop for fuel, oil and coffee. Glimpsed an elder brownbagging under the counter. Back on the paved Cherokee four lane, he followed signs towards the new Interstate 40. Dialed up an AM station, snow was expected in the elevations a twangy disc jock announced after spinning a hit. The timing was good. He took the west ramp. Bigger mountains, he’d heard. Maybe Canada. Hell, a five-day bender at a roadside motel’d be a good start. He’d think it over at the first open bar. Think over the perils of having lived too long to die young, of having nowhere to go and every day to get there. ~ ~ ~

In waking she was slowly surprised. Worry, then anger his gear was gone melded into a well-acquainted melancholy. Gloom, somehow consoling like a wellworn enemy. She squandered the day in the blues no-showed work, ripped off the bedsheets, broke into the Jim Beam before noon. As afternoon waned and cooled, she drew herself from the couch, pulled on an old barn coat, pocketed the dwindling fifth and stumbled outside across the porch’s broken promise. Jack fell in pace, the two meandered the short walk to Dough nad agave. Crouching behind a windbreak boulder, she drew down on the Jim Beam, lit up. Jack stretched his long spine, first dipping his forelegs, then reversing, like a rider-less seesaw. Content, he circled into a ball on the soft humus, backside drawn to her hips for warmth, his nostrils flared toward the north winds. Surely, he could smell them. The seeded clouds. Fall’s first snow in the horizon. She came to rest on her backside, leaned against the boulder, pulled the coat’s worn cord collar under her ponytail, rested one cool hand in its flannel pocket, another on Jack’s furry neck. For distraction, she studied the familiar shapes of ancient mountaintops, sketched them in her imagination. A buck snorted and wheezed somewhere in the near woods, Jack raised to his hind legs, ears up for a moment, and with a short grunt of his own settled back in. As the sunset’s colors waned, the world diminished into skeletal shadows of yellow birch and mountain ash, the ghostly sound of a rambling night breeze searching, too, perhaps, for a place to settle.Having nodded off, she woke in the diminutive light of a crescent moon. Rising for retreat to the trailer, she staggered for a moment, caught herself. Took a brace from the fifth. Her mind was placid, sleep gently beckoned her back. But first, dinner. She stoked alive a fire in the little stove, put on beans and wild onions. Tonight, like too many others, she’d lie alone, still a little hungry, drunk. Morose. Tomorrow, maybe she’d believe again. She always had. Believe as her ancestors in the certainty of hearth and home, the absoluteness of love eternal, in the juncos’ return. It was only October, each winter grew longer, each spring shorter. There were

dead, she believed, who longed for her, who would have taken her on their passage could they have. Ones to meet again. Migrations to make. Ernie Reynolds Ernie Reynolds teaches creative writing, literature, and composition and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has read or published short fiction on NPR, Vanderbilt’s Nashville Review, The Writer’s Loft and other places. Prior to his studies, Ernie coached professional and NCAA athletics and was a certified arborist. One of his favorite places is the Tennessee backcountry.

But who was the boy, the mother? Gone in the crowd. I have paced those hard streets, the shops and alleys, but never since have seen nor heard of them, nor heard again that wild trill of glee. The people, they wander in to watch that head, to warm themselves at the boy, my laughing boy. Look! How they stare at his eyes that are gazing up to his mother’s smile. They straggle in from the street just to look. They tell me his eyes are fixed on God, on Jesus, on ranks of angels aflame— on all their hopes, on all their vast loss. They call him The Prophet Child.

The Stone Carver I call it Laughter’s Child, this marble head.

One flash of a face in the street he was, one glimpse as he passed my open workshop door—one blink, lit by a shaft of sheerest dazzling joy at his mother’s hand— so bright with love complete, he blazed me awake to vision. Just that glimpse, then gone in the dust, in the noise, in the faceless crowd.

More than a year I worked, chipped and carved, for the boy’s face to rise out of the stone, as though that stone were the soil and seed of joy. A shapeless lump of rock, but the face was there, those lips pulled wide with glee, his eyes— those hunchedeyes—inthe marble, waiting for me to strike, poised for that flash of terror down my hands, down to the gravid rock, my midwife stroke— burning to crack that stone-bound laughter awake; then steel on stone, chisel and point and rasp—

Who was the boy, you ask? Who knows! Who knows!

My vision knew, as a falcon knows its prey, gave me the boy for the sake of the old man’s gaze at the boy’s eyes, the Prophet Child’s eyes where the old man caught some light that you nor I, nor he, nor all our worlds could ever bear except as a flash, except as a glimpse of love in the roaring crowd, somewhere, a blink in the dust.

Step here, where we can speak. That older man who stands there still, staring at the boy’s face, his eyes fast to the boy’s eyes, his hands tremulous, clenched—do you see? He has fallen to me, and now he is mine. Alert, alive in my gut, his image snared—no longer lost in the world, bur seized and saved as once I seized that boy— his image cries to me: This! This is your task. Do you see? Beneath this cloth—no fine white stone, clear, like laughter’s pure boy—but gray and laced with darker lightning? Right! That man, that sum of all those wanderers wandering in from the shrill streets, he will join Laughter’s Child.

Paul Z Panish Paul Z Panish has had poetry published in Signal, Bluestone, The Formalist, and others. His short opera libretto, Marry Up, Marry Down, was performed in 2017.

It is March—I have stumbled into my eighty-eighth year since that winter of nineteen thirty-five when I twisted my soul into the squealing flesh of a frail, new-born body on a new-born earth. My world was me; a patch of desire, an island, a safe, wondering land in a warm sea. I sucked at the breast and sucked at the sun and the songs, my mother’s gentle songs she sang to herself like a tiny bird.What else fed my life? Music there was, sounding throughout the house, and father’s voice—I can hear it—reciting Shakespeare— Oh, it was light, it was luminous, bright with love! But later—a dreamy boy, in school and out— the squawk of teachers shrilled into my daydreams hauling me back to the school day. Then those boys, their fists beating me down for the sins of the Jews and the death of Jesus, shouting, You killed our god! I didn't.Weeping homeward: They killed God! But all through my life, there are moments—unforeseen and sudden—they hold me, dazzle me, force me to see; moments of beauty, moments of silent assent. Even now, in the darkening world, a light will burst, surpassing the light of common day. How to seize it, own it, tell it, sing, embody it in some shape or sound or act, spin that word-web, shining, out of my blood? Any excuse to pluck that moment’s fruit! to shape some full, ripe shape of words to save, preserve from going, all that goes and goes. Hard! Hard to keep my gaze on the light and still maneuver the concrete-gray ways. And so I became a man-of-a-hundred-mistakes, blundering on, trying a hundred trades, ever distracted by something not in the rules—

Poem on My Eighty-Seventh Birthday—A Confession

as a soldier, mumbling Shakespeare on maneuvers, lost in the sessions of sweet silent thought (those words I mumbled), how could I hear the command Gas masks on! The scandal! The shouts of the sergeants! The curses! You! The deaf one! Twenty pushups! There! In the mud! Or the jobs and jobs and jobs, stealing time on the job to command an image, a metaphor, a rebellious gang of words that struggle against the stern demands of song— Ah, once more it is March; I dodder along, warming my hands, buying too many sweaters.

Another birthday declares this old guy lives, has not yet stumbled off to the World of Truth— he still spins out those webs of words to trap that light. This old poet still walks the sounding world—humming his own song.

Paul Z Panish

fictionBruce Spang, editor

BruceSoletSpang art &TerryphotographyJohnson, editor editor-in-chiefJohnHimmelheber Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue 17 Fall/Winter 2022

Alterman Gail non-fictionStanHipkinsWerlinPeterAlterman, editor Emily Cain

Steve

Wechselblatt poetryJohn Himmelheber

Peter

Pete