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Editor’s Note SPRING/SUMMER 2014 Volume 2, Number 1 EDITOR

Steve Brannon NONFICTION EDITOR / EDITORIAL ADVISOR

Gene Wilburn

C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R

Place

Carole Brannon

COPY EDITOR

Linda M. Au

CONTRIBUTORS

Calvin Ahlgren Kevin Casey Michael Davis Marie Kane Denton Loving Steven Moore Robyn Ryle Peter Serchuk Raymond M. Wong

Small Print Magazine (ISSN 2328-9449 print; ISSN 2328-9457 online) is published quarterly unless published as a combined issue by Brannon Publishing Services, Inc., P.O. Box 71956, Richmond, VA 23255-1956. Services and products do not carry Small Print Magazine endorsements. The views of the writers do not necessarily reflect those of Small Print Magazine or the publisher. Regarding works of fiction appearing herein: names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Small Print Magazine reserves the right to accept or reject advertisements and assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. © 2014 Brannon Publishing Services, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the publisher.

elcome to the Spring/Summer 2014 issue of Small Print Magazine. It’s fitting that Denton Loving’s cra article “Your Most Important Character: Developing Place in Fiction” appears in this issue. e stories and poetry in this issue all use a strong sense of place to make a connection. ey pulled me in quickly and affected me in different ways: the rich visual imagery in the poetry of Calvin Ahlgen, Kevin Casey, Marie Kane, and Peter Serchuk; the fragmented place, time, and memory in Steven Moore’s nonfiction “Room Where the Story Is Told”; Raymond Wong’s disorienting and oen humorous “Foreign”; and the rising tension in Michael Davis’s short story “Ex Inferis.” Robyn Ryle’s seven editing techniques in “From ‘Good Enough’ to ‘Amazing’: How to Become a Better Editor of Your Own Work” can benefit every writer in the endeavor to create amazing work by paying attention to the important details. We are fortunate to have the artwork of Harriet Taylor Seed on our cover and the work of other accomplished artists and photographers inside. ank you Harriet Taylor Seed, Valda Bailey, Martin Cauchon, Kirsten Chursinoff, Karl Hurst, Jeane Myers, Rovingmagpie, Jorge Villaplana Sanjuan, Gene Wilburn, and Benoit Wittamer. Steve Brannon Editor

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Contributors

SPR I NG/ SUM M ER 2014 • VOLUM E 2, NO. 1

Calvin Ahlgren (“Old Year Psalm,” p. 19), Tennessee-born, migrated to Northern California in the mid-’60s. He is a former print journalist who gardens, cooks and teaches healing qigong and Yangstyle tai chi. His work has been published in the West Marin Review, Blue Pen, the travel poem anthology Through a Distant Lens, the flash fiction magazine Cease, Cows, various Marin Poetry Center anthologies and elsewhere.

terly Review, Willow Springs, The Normal School, Arcana, The Superstition Review, The New Ohio Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. He has an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from Western Michigan University.

Kevin Casey (“Lupine Field: Mooseheadlake,” p. 17) is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and received his graduate degree at the University of Connecticut. His work has been accepted by e Milo Review, Futures Trading, Tule Review, and others, and he has served as editor for Crosscut Magazine. He teaches literature at a small university in Maine, where he enjoys fishing, snowshoeing, and hiking.

Marie Kane (“I Can Say Now That Things Are Not What They Seem,” p. 26) is poetry editor for Pentimento Magazine and the 2006 Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Wordgathering, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and Adanna Journal, among others. Her work has won prizes in competitions including the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, Inglis House, and the Robert Frasier poetry contest. Her chapbook, Survivors in the Garden (Big Table Publishing), was released in June of 2012.

Michael Davis’s (“Ex Inferis,” p. 20) collection of stories, Gravity, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2009. His short fiction has appeared in Descant, The San Joaquin Review, The Jabberwock Review, The Black Mountain Review, Eclipse, Cottonwood, The MidAmerican Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Georgia Review, The Chicago Quar-

Denton Loving (“Your Most Important Character: Developing Place in Fiction,” p. 27) is enrolled in the Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, where his critical work is focused on sense of place in literature. His fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews are forthcoming in River Styx, Flyleaf and [PANK].

Steven Moore’s (“Room Where the Story Is Told,” p. 7) essays have appeared with The North American Review, The Southeast Review, Gravel, and DIAGRAM Magazine. Robyn Ryle’s (“From ‘Good Enough’ to ‘Amazing’: How to Become a Better Editor of Your Own Work,” p. 29) short stories have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, WhiskeyPaper and Cease, Cows, among others. She teaches sociology at a liberal arts college in Indiana. She is also the author of a sociology of gender textbook with SAGE Press, Questioning Gender: A Sociological Exploration (2014). Peter Serchuk (“On the Fern Canyon Trail,” p. 13) is the author of two collections of poetry: Waiting for Poppa at the Smithtown Diner (University of Illinois Press) and All That Remains (WordTech Editions). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Paris Review, North American Review, The Hudson Review, Texas Review and other places. Raymond M. Wong (“Foreign,” p. 14) earned the Eloise Klein Healy Scholarship and an MFA in creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. His stories have appeared in four Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, USA Today, U-T San Diego, and San Diego Family magazine. He is an assistant editor at Lunch Ticket, Antioch’s online literary journal. “Foreign” will appear in his memoir, I’m Not Chinese: The Journey from Resentment to Reverence, which will be published by Apprentice House in late 2014.

f CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS & PHOTOGRAPHERS

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY BY VALDA BAILEY www.valdabailey.co.uk

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Valda Bailey ........................................... 4 Martin Cauchon...................................29 Kirsten Chursinoﬀ ...............................17 Karl Hurst .............................................18 Jeane Myers............................................ 6 Rovingmagpie ......................................13 Jorge Villaplana Sanjuan ...............5, 27 Harriet Taylor Seed...................COVER, 5 Gene Wilburn.......................................19 Benoit Wittamer ..................................26 smallprintmagazine.com

Contents JORGE VILLAPLANA SANJUAN

SPRING/SUMMER 2014 • VOLUME 2, NO. 1

CREATIVE NoN f i C t i oN 7 Room Where the Story is told by Steven Moore 14

foreign by Raymond M. Wong

Does your character live in harmony with his environment, or are the two at odds? Many writers use a sense of place to work as an extended metaphor for other events and actions in a character’s life. “Your Most Important Character,” p. 27

f iC t i oN 20 Ex inferis by Michael Davis P oE t Ry 13 on the fern Canyon trail by Peter Serchuk 17

Lupine field: Moosehead Lake by Kevin Casey

old year Psalm by Calvin Ahlgren

i Can Say Now at ings Are Not What ey Seem by Marie Kane

On the Cover

CRAFT&TOOL 27

your Most important Character: Developing Place in fiction by Denton Loving from ‘Good Enough’ to ‘Amazing’: How to Become a Better Editor of your own Work by Robyn Ryle

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Wish You Were Here… by Harriet Taylor Seed Adapted for the cover.

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QUARRY BY JEANE MYERS www.jeanemyers.com

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Creative Nonfiction

Room Where the Story Is Told by Steven Moore

I am sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room. My back is against the couch, legs are stretched out on the gray carpet. I have my computer on my lap. e computer contains just over five hundred pictures of my deployment to Afghanistan, and the pictures are why I came here. My parents want to know what happened. I came here to show them. Sunlight is coming through the western window, to my right. e large dark television in the corner is not the one I grew up with, but it still gets only six channels so it might as well be. Of the two golden retrievers and two Siamese cats that accompanied my childhood, both of the retrievers and one of the cats have died. e other cat is now eighteen. Mom says he’s still alive because I spoiled him so much; I used to carry him up the stairs and around the house so that he expended so little energy over the course of his life he now has an unlimited reserve. In a way, I feel good about this, keeping him alive, but in another way it sort of implies that I killed the other one by not loving it enough. Currently, except for me, there are no people or animals in the room. e middle of the room is a large open space that does not contain a coﬀee table, which, of course, never seemed unusual until now. Centered on the wall behind me is a large colorful portrait of a boy leading a horse through a grassy field. e dark eyes of the animal are excruciatingly sad,

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but they are also patient, trusting. ere are photos from my brother’s wedding, family portraits, a white embroidered cloth with our family name framed over the entryway. ere is another large portrait on the western wall, to the le of the window. It depicts a small, unkempt farmhouse with peeling paint and a

They want to know what happened and I want to talk about it and show them and be completely honest.

utility shed. ere is a barren tree and long grass and a gray sky. Dad bought the picture for my mom because it reminded her of the farm where she grew up. When Mom describes a severe likeness, she uses the term spitting image. e room is almost quiet. is is the point of telling—the time and place of the speaker when he or she begins to speak. Begins to

tell the story, which I am getting ready to do. I am getting ready to show them. ey will be home from work soon, I think, though I don’t know exactly when. In stories, the point of telling is a kind of ruse. It makes the reader believe that somewhere in the physical world there is a storyteller and it is from this time and space where the story is coming from, when of course really, the story is coming from a writer who has written another writer to speak on his behalf. So, for the sake of transparency, I am on the floor of my parents’ living room, but I am also at the breakfast table in my apartment in San Francisco, two full years later, looking out at the darkness of early morning. So there is the person telling the story, and the story of the person telling the story, and then several thousand manipulations and changes before you get to the granules and shrieks of noise and the things people said and did and didn’t do. But it’s for good reason. Having the speaker of the story in the story helps convince the reader there is a purpose for the story being told in the first place, because the speaker is right there telling us why he’s telling us. In this way, the phrase point of telling is dutifully ambiguous: it implies the physical point, the spot on the map where the speaker is sitting and talking and telling, but it also implies the existential point, the reason, the purpose for telling. As in, What is the point? And Where? e what and the where are connected.

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Room WheRe The SToRy IS Told by STeven mooRe

I am on the floor of the living room in Iowa in the late summer of 2011. I am getting ready to tell the story because my family wants to know it. ey, understandably, do not want to wait for me to write everything down. (Given the two years that have passed between the point of telling in the living room and the point at the table in the apartment, they made a good decision.) I have pictures. ey want to know what happened and I want to talk about it and show them and be completely honest. I am waiting for them to come home so we can start. I am here pathologically early. I got that from Mom.

e house is on two acres of property and surrounded by cornfields, even though technically we are inside the city limits. Also technically, the zoning of our property is industrial, not residential, so the existence of the house is a kind of anomaly, and there are no other houses anywhere close to it. Our closest neighbors, aside from the cornfields, are a couple of factories, a warehouse, and the veterinary clinic where Mom worked for most of her adult life. e clinic is just down the gravel road to the west, visible from the living room window. It sits at the intersection with 12th Avenue, which is an access road connecting Highway 92 to County Road G36. G36 serves Highway 218 which is part of the Avenue of the Saints, connecting St. Louis and St. Paul, and which bisects Interstate 80 about thirty miles north of us. Interstate 80—bear with me—has its western terminus at the end of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, about six miles from where I am right now. Right now right now. A month or so aer the wedding, Jessica and I piled all of our things into the car and we drove two thousand miles across the interstate to get here. is is the same interstate that directly ser ves the college town

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where Jessica and I first met, plus Des Moines where she grew up, plus Chicago where we took our first road trip. I-80 is a kind of timeline, though the events are incomplete and spaced disproportionately and out of order. So it’s not a very conventional timeline. But still it is out there. It is never too far away. Two rights and a le. e house and the veterinary clinic are less than a quarter mile apart

…that’s what memory does to everything, a certain amount of editing. And this worries me.

but lie on diﬀerent routes for newspaper delivery. e clinic receives its newspaper on the correct day—the one printed on the front page in the masthead—while our house receives it a day later. Growing up, I always thought of the newspaper as a completely irrelevant project. e newspaper came in the mailbox talking about stuﬀ I had already watched on television the day prior. ings that Peter Jennings and I had already discussed. So sometimes I asked Dad why they couldn’t just deliver us a newspaper on the proper day, the way most people received them. “So you want to pay the salary of another

mail boy to deliver the paper especially for us?” he countered. But I didn’t. I just wanted our same mailperson to deliver our same mail, just one day faster. Like they did for everyone who lived in town. Like for the clinic that was visible out the window. I wanted to shorten the amount of time between the television saying what happened and that same thing existing in print that I could read. It seemed important.

Every year, the two biggest trees in the backyard were hacked into smaller versions of themselves by men with chainsaws so that the power lines that passed nearby wouldn’t get entangled or obstructed by the seasonal growth. Every year it seemed like the men who were dispatched by the city for this job took more and more liberty in how much of the trees they cut oﬀ. First, they were just trimming the nearest pieces; then they were cutting oﬀ whole systems of branches, until finally one year Dad observed the work and said to Mom, “Have you seen it? ey butchered ’em.” e power lines, in memory, glisten in the sunlight like a spider’s silk in dew; that’s what memory does to everything, a certain amount of editing. And this worries me. In fact, it’s why I came here. I came here to tell Mom and Dad what happened while my memory of it is still reasonably authentic, still adolescent with outrage and disgust. Before it starts to seem like everything had glistened. I want to tell them what happened before it changes. For my photography class in high school, I liked to go out to the backyard and take pictures of the two huge trees near the power lines. I thought they photographed well, the different kinds of harsh contours cutting past each other, leaving fragmented pools of blue sky and clouds. And I was scoring points like you wouldn’t believe for the

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Room WheRe The SToRy IS Told by STeven mooRe

commentary on industry and nature: harsh, linear power cables and jagged branches. If I was smarter, though, I would’ve gone out while the guys were in their raised buckets amputating the trees with chainsaws. I would’ve asked them to keep working until dusk so I could photograph their silhouettes, because silhouettes make everything easier to understand. For example, silhouettes of soldiers.

In the corner of the living room among some old children’s books there is a toy horse. e horse is made of a green plastic head attached to a straight wooden pole that represents the horse’s body. e side of the head features the design of a revolver, like the horse belongs to a cowboy. e butt of the revolver protrudes from the head so that the gun is a way of holding on.

e teddy bear collection that used to dominate so much of the living room has dwindled. Mom has been donating the collection to assorted charities. She used to have them all over the house, sitting along the floorboards and on the blue carpeted staircase, and on bookshelves. So many teddy bears that when my friends came over they thought our house was a little creepy, like a museum of some gratuitous childhood, but really it was just a collection she had. I’m not sure why she kept the stuﬀed bears around for so long then chose to stop, but in any case their ranks have slowly declined. Some of the charities, even, can no longer accept any more. eir capacity for teddy bear donations has been reached. ey are full. Which is comforting: the number of children in southeast Iowa who require their toys from charity is not unlimited. Another recent change is that my parents finally bought an air conditioner. It’s the kind that bulges from a

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window and it basically only cools that one room. In this case, the living room. We didn’t have air conditioning when I was growing up because Mom and Dad said that the floor plan of our house made it especially diﬃcult to cool, and it would be expensive to try. e design of our house didn’t seem any diﬀerent to me than the design of my friends’ houses and they all had air conditioning, but the matter was never successfully

that the heat is aﬀecting Mom and Dad more than it used to. e machinery in the window looks so strange not just because it’s new, but because it reminds me that my parents are aging, which seems somehow inappropriate or irresponsible of them. is leads to the reminder that my brother is aging, and I am aging, and everyone is aging, which induces the cliché of mortal urgency. But really, if there is anything to say, we should say it as soon as we can.

S The images are already changing. you are changing what they mean. noticing diﬀerent details. you are already lying to yourself and to other people.

argued. I remember in summers turning on the living room ceiling fan to its most aggressive setting, where the fan spun so violently that it shook, and just lying on the carpet, belly up, sweating. (ough I know I can’t rely on this moment to be fully true. It is probably edited.) e excuse my parents have now for installing the air conditioner is that my brother’s daughter comes to the house sometimes, and such an extremely hot environment would be bad for the child’s health. My brother and I agree that this excuse is obviously ridiculous because we also both used to be children. Which leaves us to conclude

ere is a painting that is oparodied now of a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a small white house with a Gothic-style window. is painting is the most commonly known depiction of my home state that has ever been produced; I have little doubt about it. ere are so many parodies that they are probably more famous than the painting itself. You don’t know the painting as a thing, but as a canvas that has been changed and which you can change if you would like to, a re-paint by numbers. You can take away the farmer’s pitchfork and give him a giant toothbrush or a pitching wedge or a string of dead fish. You can give the daughter a funny hat. Another famous depiction of the state is in the movie Field of Dreams. My family took a day trip to visit the field in Dyersville when I was a kid. It looked almost exactly as it did in the movie. I learned later that the baseball field was built on the farms of two diﬀerent families, so that for many years aer the filming was completed there were disputes between the families about whether to maintain the baseball field as a tourist attraction or rip it out so that the land could be replanted and an actual farm could exist there again. is dispute—over the practicality and purpose of a certain kind of

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Room WheRe The SToRy IS Told by STeven mooRe

field—was documented in both local and national newspapers. It is almost exactly the same dispute that occurred in the movie. In the movie the baseball field stayed. So too in reality. “Almost exactly,” here, suggests awareness of a diﬀerence between the two things, but a failure to say what the diﬀerence is. One more depiction is in the movie Saving Private Ryan. e character of Private Ryan is from Iowa, and there is a scene where we witness his mother inside their farmhouse. She is in the kitchen. A beautiful golden field is visible out the window. A car arrives and she goes to the porch, where she receives the news that all but one of her sons are dead. Again visible are the trademark Iowa fields. But they are quite obviously not corn or soy fields. is scene was filmed in Wiltshire, England. Similarly, the farmer in the painting was modeled by a dentist, and the daughter was modeled by the painter’s sister and is usually mistaken for depicting the farmer’s wife, which causes people to interpret the painting as a commentary on romantic love, which it is not, and the farmhouse was not really a farmhouse in the first place.

As a kid I broke my le wrist on two diﬀerent occasions. e first time was in junior high, in gym class, playing kickball indoors, where the home plate was marked by the padding on the wall beneath the basketball hoop that was supposed to soen the impact for players aer a really intense layup. I was running to the pseudo-home plate as fast as I could and reached out to touch it and score and the impact was too fast or awkward and there was a terrible pain and I said FUCK in the presence of an authority figure for the first time. At the hospital, I had

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Room WheRe The SToRy IS Told by STeven mooRe

to inform the doctor, rather embarrassingly, that the impact happened against a surface specifically designed and installed to prevent these injuries. But in my defense, the game had required us to sprint as hard as possible toward a wall. And I had scored. e doctor jammed the x-ray into its light box and traced a line in the chalky glow with the tip of his ballpoint pen. “Riiiiiiight here is where it is,” he said. “But the important thing to remember is that it’s only a hairline fracture, which is good.” So later, when I wore the red cast to school, and people asked if my arm was broken, I said no. I said it was only a fracture. Teachers and fellow students both sought to inform me that this was the same thing. I refused to believe them because of how small it looked on the screen. e second time I broke my wrist I was a sophomore in high school. It happened during basketball practice. We were on a fast break and I got tangled in someone’s legs. I went down. Somehow I braced for the fall improperly and the damn wrist broke again. Only reason I say this is because during the part of the season where I couldn’t participate in practice, I stood oﬀ in another part of the gym, shooting free throws. It was the only thing to do, since your oﬀ-hand isn’t supposed to be involved in the form of a good free throw anyway. And so I became a machine at free throws. In basketball, the free throw is the part of the game where, if given no direct immediate opposition, you are supposed to perform the sport’s most basic attribute, and you are supposed to be able to do this repeatedly, over and over, the exact same motion and form, using the same control and rhythm, over and over, perfectly. e curiosity of the free throw is that, to be allowed this opportunity to perform a basic exercise to a degree of perfection, there has to be an occurrence of violence that the game determines to be

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passed. And now you have to fight for the idea that something really happened once, something true. e images are already changing. You are changing what they mean. Noticing diﬀerent details. You are already lying to yourself and to other people. Lies you could not have imagined before. And so already there is the question, Do the stories we have, the things that really happened, do they mean anything? And would they mean more if they hadn’t happened? Are the stories we freely invent more permanent? And if they are, is it because they give us the idea that equilibrium is possible? at it is possible to come back?

Say there is an occurrence of disequilibrium. One way to understand it is to describe what life was like before. Describe order. It started out just like any other day. Go back to a moment before the event when civilization was on its most admirable behavior. Describe the image before. Describe the overall happiness of the family. e family was extremely happy. e only problems were those of the tree and the belated newspaper. en descend. Describe the occurrence. Maybe the really important thing to say is that none of it seemed all that strange at the time. e descent, a slow progression, felt natural. And crawling back out, there are pictures, images. ere are hundreds of images. It seems like all you have to do is show them to someone and that person will understand. ey will think, I, too, would have wanted to shoot those people. e occurrence of disequilibrium is not what happened but the problem of transcribing it into language, communicating it, taking anyone with you, of going back there. Of leaving someone else alone on a road covered in dust. Coming back, even, didn’t seem all that strange at the time, but it got stranger the longer it went on. Years

I am looking at the pictures. I am beginning to edit the things that happened into a version that I can share with my parents while being honest, but not upsetting them more than is absolutely necessary. I am trying to craft the right story. It is not possible or advisable to share everything. The contractors looked like poachers and always went by their first names. Millionaires who never showed up on time to the mission briefs and never seemed to be doing anything once the missions were under way. Two occasions where the remote-controlled machine guns atop the trucks fired off rounds when no one was operating them. The history lesson that my team conducted with a few Afghan soldiers who had never heard of World War II. A thousand hours cleaning weapons. Another thousand hours doing preventive maintenance checks on the trucks. The exact profanities that were spoken about the Director of Homeland Security when she visited our base, which required that we triple security for her protection, hike up mountains to have better overwatch positions, shortly following her statement that military veterans, because of their residual bitterness from having

unacceptable. Someone has to hurt you. So the condition for the attempt of the simple is always a state of some disequilibrium, which is one reason why a free throw is always harder than it seems it should be. Which is why anyone can be a machine at shooting free throws in the corner of a gym with no one looking. It removes all the conditions and purposes for which the act was invented in the first place. But it seemed to me like it was still something to be good at them. at it was worth doing.

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deployed, were at a higher risk for becoming terrorists. Terrorist was her word. Cunt was ours. The extraordinary meal on Thanksgiving. The meal on Christmas. It is all a choice.

I am at the table in the apartment. It is five in the morning, still dark out the eastern window. The streetlights over the boulevard are a pinkorange color. Each light has four distinct points, like a compass, that are caused by the lines in the screen of my window. The screen diffracts the shape of the streetlights so that each one seems especially perpendicular. Even the nearest streetlights appear to me different than they really are. This is the same effect that happens in photographs of stars, where the aperture of the camera diffracts the shape of the glow into quadrants. The effect in those pictures is amplified because of the sheer distance between the star and the camera. But the same effect is possible at one hundred feet, or less. The trees on the median of the boulevard are cast in the orange glow of the streetlights. Passing cars swim in the glow for just a moment, reflect it, then pass on. The buses so far must all have zero passengers because they haven’t bothered to turn on the interior lights. They go by almost fully dark, only tiny insignificant headlamps. Low heavy clouds over the neighborhood work to conceal the effects of the sunrise. e tallest point in the neighborhood is the Russian Orthodox cross atop the golden peak of the church two blocks down. e dome is shaped like an upside-down teardrop, opaque gold, rising into a cross that seems to almost touch the clouds. ere are four additional crosses marking the corners of the building, set upon similar but smaller golden towers. e distinction of the Orthodox cross is the horizontal beam near the bottom, which, depending on the

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sect, may indicate where Christ’s feet were nailed. e beam is set at an odd angle, slanted down to the right, the only non-perpendicular line in the symbol. And depending on the sect, the beam’s slant may indicate the bodily slump of Christ’s final breath. A few beads of orange are scattered out in the hills of the distant neighborhoods. My every slightest

…there are inﬁnite choices to make about what is important and how to put it down, and the choices are made by a person who is fallible, who is sometimes even more fallible because of the events themselves.

movement changes which hole of the window screen they are visible through, so that they appear to flicker. In the far distance, past the rooftop machinery of the building across the street and between the power lines, there is an even smaller red light which is actually blinking. The red light comes on slowly, as a healthy pulse, and marks the top of the TransAmerica building, the

iconic part of the downtown skyline. With all the clouds there is not a brilliant sunrise, only a slow, gradual lightening, like your eyes are simply adjusting to what is already there. It is necessary to expose the place and time of the narrator since it is not advisable to share everything— ever y fragment of a second and what it felt like—and since that is not advisable, there are infinite choices to make about what is important and how to put it down, and the choices are made by a person who is fallible, who is sometimes even more fallible because of the events themselves. A person who is tremendously, suspiciously unreliable. It is necessary to expose the point of telling because the telling, in these cases, is therapeutic, is the attempt at a restoration of balance. The belief that before the events, there was order, and order can be found again. So the primary fallibility is not of memory, but of motivation: I want something out of all this. And my wanting something creates a screen that diffracts the real events, skews them into particular shapes. The exposure of the point of telling is an attempt to admit the specific nature of the speaker’s fallibility—my fallibility— to say with as much certainty as possible what is true right now, so that you can see what I might have unknowingly skewed in the telling and why I needed to. The changes were mere selections, no doubt, telling one fact while omitting another. The selections were imperfect. What happened, however, is not damaged or lost; fallibility is a crucial part of the truth.

I am on the floor in the living room, looking at the pictures, making selections. It seems that if I can take them there somehow it can be over. I am trying to arrange the facts. I am trying to give the stories some order. When finally they are home. ■

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On the Fern Canyon Trail by Peter Serchuk

Mendocino Redwoods

RUSSIAN GULCH FALLS BY ROVINGMAGPIE

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It’s best to hit this trail twice. First in April, when the season’s last storm has likely passed, already hiked across the great central valley and laid its head on Sierras’ slopes. In April, you’re still taking a chance with the Pacific magician, but the odds are good. Not so the trail. Everything’s slick. Every step rides a muddy glaze hungry for a slip. Still, if you’ve got half a day, a reliable stick and patience waterproof as your boots, you can hike the whole of it, see what misery nature wreaks upon itself. Whatever’s le of ferns is a trampled mess, as if the storms knew you’d follow, suspected a spy and shredded the secrets you hoped to find. And the redwoods, giants to men, are pick-up sticks when lightning has its way; torched or exploding, limbs amputated, uprooted, bodies sliding down the oily slopes or falling into the arms of brothers still lucky, still standing, against wind and rain. Lesson learned? Every year, nature wages civil war. But come back again, in early July. Come back when the trail is dry and the canyon blooms with ferns of every kind: Five-finger, bird’s-foot, stamp, sword and deer. When the big leaf maple and Douglas fir dapple light and scent the air. When underneath, wild cucumber and berry bush paint a path beside the Little River’s song. Yes, come back again in July and look up, as far as the soul may tilt. Look up and see the redwoods, lords again of ground and sky. See them point you past heartache, past doubt and shame, point you to forgiveness, heaven and beyond; to all you might endure and all you might become.

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Creative Nonfiction

Foreign

MARS 2009. IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

by Raymond M. Wong

Author’s note: Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

1996

y father and Uncle Number One’s son, Hoy, accompanied my mother and me on the hourlong train ride from Hong Kong to mainland China. Skyscrapers and congested streets had given way to flat, open country. We skirted long stretches of crop fields and vast plains, and patches of scraggly, gnarledlimbed trees pocketed the landscape. I turned to my mom beside me and asked, “Who are we seeing again?” “We go visit your uncles in Canton. Uncle Number One have house.

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Number Two, Number Four, maybe they come visit.” “What about Number ree?” She shot me a scathing look. “Your father Number ree.” “Oh.” A moment later I said, “Number Six is Uncle Chun-Kwok, and Number Seven’s the one who talks a lot.” Surprise surfaced on her face. en she nodded. “Number Five die last year.” “What happened to him?” I asked. She shrugged. “I not hear yet, but maybe they say something later.” My mom’s uncanny knack for obtaining information: aer she introduced me to customers at her restaurant and when we were safely out of earshot, she would recite their edu-

cation, occupation, marital status, major accomplishments, the size of their house, number of children, and usually a defining characteristic such as a teenage son in drug rehab. e amazing thing—and I witnessed this on many occasions—she asked the most personal questions and they answered! Not me. I tended to keep things to myself, but more so with my mother. I had seen her torpedo my stepfather with information he freely provided. Her aim, always true, resulted in the target’s surrender, or annihilation. “Your father ask what you think about Hong Kong.” My mom’s voice jarred me from my thoughts. I looked across the aisle at my father.

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F o R e I g n b y R Ay m o n d m . W o n g

“It’s diﬀerent from America, the people, the customs, everything. It’s kind of overwhelming,” I said. She translated this into Cantonese and he spoke again. “He say sorry he not have enough room for us. He ask if okay for you stay with Uncle.” I gazed at my father. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s been wonderful staying with your brother’s family.” As she relayed this, he smiled. A moment later he posed another question. “He say you thirty-three. Do you get marry soon?” My mother trained her eyes on me. “I don’t know about that,” I said. Hoy, cheeks drawn into a devious smile, commented. He gestured to me and his booming voice drew the attention of nearby passengers. Mom responded as if he had insulted her taste in living room furniture. A disquieting feeling accompanied the fact that my Chinese name kept popping up in their debate. Aer listening to their interminable argument for as long as I could stand, I said to my mother, “What are you talking about?” She looked at me, to Hoy briefly, and back to me. “Hoy crazy. He say you still young, should go out, have fun before get marry. He say life short, have to enjoy. I think he loco.” Hoy flashed a gaping grin, giving me the thumbs up with his thick hand. I shrugged. He nodded at me and said something in a tone rife with conspiracy. Mom swiped the air as if trying to repel mosquitoes. Hoy didn’t let up. He kept egging me on, as if I understood his every word. My mother reprimanded Hoy again, and he splayed his hands wide, palms raised in a pose I could picture him using at an arraignment hearing. In a point-blank interrogation befitting a prosecuting attorney,

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she pressed her attack—short sentences slamming the opposition in rapid succession so as not to allow rebuttal. To his credit, Hoy seemed to manage some de sidesteps, squeezing in a few retorts. My father watched in silence. e combatants continued, moving ahead, I suspected, to philosophical and value diﬀerences unrelated to my relationships with the opposite sex. e glint in Hoy’s eyes told me he was in his element. He goaded her, leaning forward to speak in loud, short sentences, then propped back in his seat, smiling in silence as

A disquieting feeling accompanied the fact that my Chinese name kept popping up in their debate.

he waited for her reply. Mom retaliated with her bludgeoning force of will and I wondered if Hoy realized what he was up against. ey were still at it when the train came to a halt. If my father hadn’t called their attention to this, they might’ve battled right through our stop. As if the fray with my mother amounted to nothing more than chitchat, Hoy lied the two bags from under his seat and proceeded to an exit. Once oﬀ the train we walked through a station much diﬀerent from the one in Hong Kong. Here, barren stone walls, absent of billboards or advertisements, surrounded

us. e signs above displayed only Chinese characters. e empty walls and concrete floor didn’t extend a warm greeting—just the opposite; I felt a palpable trepidation. I looked at my mom, who stayed silent. Did an unsettling tension grip her as well? We followed the wave of people through a long corridor and climbed a set of stairs to another hallway. My father stopped at a counter and tore oﬀ four sheets of Chinese-printed paper from a pad. He gave one to each of us, but I saw nothing to write with on the counter. My mother reached into her purse for a pen and filled in her document and mine, her hands fashioning Chinese characters with ease. I asked about the forms. “Arrival papers, like the ones in Hong Kong,” she said and handed one to me. I folded and inserted it into my travel belt. We started for ward. My mom surveyed the surroundings and said, “Have to be more careful here. Uncle Chun-Kwok tell me before that China even more dangerous than Hong Kong.” ree lines formed ahead. Hoy and my father went to one, my mother and I to another. I set the travel bag down. Mom peered at it, so I reached for the strap. She said, “Prob-ly check the passports here.” I looked around, and people averted their gazes. Why had they been staring? en it registered. We were Chinese communicating in English. My mother once hired a waiter, an American student with military-length, reddish-blond hair and a youthful face that reminded me of Ron Howard. e guy studied Chinese and oen traveled to Hong Kong. When I ate lunch at the restaurant, the new waiter served me. My mom, ringing up tickets at the cash register, gave him instructions in Cantonese. He responded in kind! ere aren’t many sights stranger than a Caucasian face vocalizing

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Chinese sounds and inflections. My mother went out of her way to speak loudly and oen to him while I could only gawk in amazement. In the center line travelers carried department store bags stuﬀed with merchandise. Some lugged packages of clothing, boxed candies, dried fruit, and even carts containing small appliances and stereo equipment. An old, hunched man supported two heaped baskets on the ends of a bamboo pole across his shoulders. I asked my mom, “Why are they taking so many things to China?” “Some people not oen get chance go to Hong Kong, so they bring back a lot for family,” she said. At the front a soldier wearing an olive-green uniform and hat stood ramrod straight next to the man inspecting passports. His hat displayed a red star against a gold leaf-cluster insignia. Red stripes ran down the sides of his tight-pressed pants and a holster attached to the thick black belt at his waist held a handgun. Unlike the Hong Kong airport, the man checking passports here didn’t have the benefit of protective glass. He stood at a simple wooden podium with no computer console, yet the guard stationed by him posed a more formidable obstacle than anything in Hong Kong. e visa inspector studied each person as if fitting him for a uniform. He thumbed through the individual pages of the passport, stamped it with force, and handed it back in an abrupt and firm dismissal. e checkpoint consisted of a chrome metal gate. Instead of a turnstile, a section of the bars swung forward to allow entr y. My mother passed through without incident, and to my relief, I did too. Beyond it I glanced back at the soldier. He stood impassive, his face betraying no hint of emotion. Hoy and my father waited for us, and my mom spoke to them in a serious tone. ey nodded. We contin-

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ued down a series of long, endless corridors. e concrete floor, a shade darker than the walls, added to the sensation of marching in a dungeon. At an intersection of hallways a man wearing overalls the color of mold sloshed soapy water along the concrete with a mop. No signs warned of a wet floor and people trudged through, creating a dirty, swishy trail of footprints. I saw a set of restrooms. “Hang on a minute, Mom. I’m gonna use the bathroom.” She relayed this and said to me, “You leave bag with them. I need use, too.”

Fabulous. I’d expected to experience new things on this trip, but potty training wasn’t one of them.

She went to the door depicting a small figure wearing a triangleshaped dress and I entered the one with a straight stick figure. e smell of industrial-strength ammonia didn’t disguise the odor of urine. I held my breath. e stone floor and walls without mirrors matched the exterior decor. ree sinks with rusty faucets extended from the far end of the restroom. Adjacent to them stood four enclosed stalls. I lied a door’s corroded metal handle and opened it to discover a tiny, sunken concrete floor basin. No toilet or tank. Maybe this was a urinal. I checked the adjoining stall and encountered the same thing. And so

with the next. All of them were like that! A hole in the ground was fine if a guy wanted to take a leak, but what if he had more pressing business? Where to sit? I released the breath I had been holding and inhaled through my mouth. A hole. What in the world? It reminded me of high school math when they gave you the schematic with forty-two brokenlined flaps, and you needed to fold them into a four-dimensional, obtuse, equilateral parahexagram. I contemplated the basin a while longer and decided the problem was beyond my powers of analytical reasoning. I walked out of the stall and exited the bathroom. My mother already stood with Hoy and my father. I went to them and slung my travel bag on my shoulder. As we proceeded onward, I whispered to my mom, “Did everything go okay in there?” “What you mean?” “You know, in the bathroom?” She looked at me as if I had been guzzling cheap bourbon straight from the bottle. “Did anything seem kind of strange to you in there?” en recognition appeared in her eyes and she let out a laugh. She said, “Many bathrooms like that in China. Even in Hong Kong, some like that.” She chuckled again. At least one of us could see the humor. “Well, how are you supposed to use a toilet with no seat?” “Have to bend down.” It didn’t create a pretty picture in my mind. “I didn’t see anywhere to hang up my pants.” She couldn’t contain herself as fits of laughter spilled forth. She was going at it so good tears welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She wiped her face. “You not take pants oﬀ. You put down by your leg and bend to use.” e picture didn’t get any prettier. “at hole in the ground wasn’t very big. What if I miss?” More laughter. “You try your best.”

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F o R e I g n b y R Ay m o n d m . W o n g

Fabulous. I’d expected to experience new things on this trip, but potty training wasn’t one of them. “You need go back?” e image played in my head again. “No, I’ll wait.” We strode down concrete stairs to an area that reminded me of the border between Tijuana and San Diego. A wide, tarred road, blotched with dirt and sand, stretched in front of us. No lane lines, but grungy cars, old platform trucks with wooden crate beds, and flimsy bicycles traveled on the right half of the street. A squadron of red taxis formed lines in both directions in the middle of the road, making it necessary for pedestrians to brave the journey across to hail a cab. Clear to the other side of the strip—a good hundred feet wide—merchants sold goods at cluttered stands underneath faded canopies. It was filthy here. Dust and grime caked the streets and sidewalks. Even the air smelled dirty. And it was hot. e intense, unyielding late-aernoon sun blanketed the earth in an arid heat reminding me of the Mojave Desert. No towering buildings loomed over us. Only naked dirt fields, dry grass, brush, and a few desolate trees dotting the horizon. Sweat poured down my legs and I cursed myself for wearing jeans. e three of us waited at a curb littered with empty wrappers and cigarette cartons while my father waded into the street toward the taxis. e bag on my shoulder felt as though it contained boulders. I dropped it at my feet. At the center of the road my father talked to a cab driver who dangled a cigarette from the corner of his mouth. Aer a discussion my father went to another taxi. Seeing this, Hoy put down his bags and jogged over to help. ree drivers later, the pair returned. My father conveyed something to my mom and she said to me

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Lupine Field: Moosehead Lake by Kevin Casey

ere is a picture that shows my daughter in a field of lupines: mauve cobs piled in waves, receding back to the ring of birches; above— a blue as clear as a sacring bell. My daughter stands with their leaves about her knees like petitioning hands, a nest of palms opening to the sky, and these amethyst spires rise to the height of that bright, impatient smile. rough the cloud of black flies we dodged running back to the car, and through the smudged lens of the drugstore camera that sought to show, and this mess of symbols that seeks to mean, still—she was there, she and I, and we shared those flowers.

LUPINES, TEXTILE ART BY KIRSTEN CHURSINOFF PHOTO BY ERNST SCHNEIDER

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F o R e I g n b y R Ay m o n d m . W o n g

in a tone of unconcealed indiﬀerence, “We follow them.” We gathered our bags and headed in the other direction. I climbed the stairs and felt the sweat on my legs seep down to my socks. e boulders in my travel bag were getting larger by the minute. On the steps an asphalt strip running through the middle allowed pedestrians to roll their luggage on the stairs. I rued the fact that none of our bags had wheels. At the top I caught my breath and said to my mother, “Why are we going back?” “He say the taxis not want to take us. Where we go too close for them.” Exasperated, I asked, “You mean they won’t accept our money because they’re waiting for people who need to go farther?” She shrugged. “at what he say.” “at’s ridiculous. How can they refuse a fare? ey could just take us and come back.” “Maybe they lose place in line for more money.” “I thought this was a Communist government. Money’s not supposed to be that important.” “You tell them.” We retraced our route through the dungeon’s maze of corridors to the bathrooms.

As we approached them my mom said, “You need use? I not know how long before you have another chance.” “No,” I said crossly. Beyond the restrooms we came to another set of stairs. ey led down to a huge parking garage that trapped the heat like a coal-burning engine room. A dozen people waited at a curb as an arc of red taxis circled down a ramp to pick them up. We got in line behind an elderly woman wearing an old-style, loosefitting, gray tunic top and pants. My father signaled for me to drop my bag and I unloaded it on the dirty concrete. Only when my father spoke to him did Hoy relinquish the bag from his strong shoulders. He must’ve been Hong Kong’s version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. At least the moistness at his brow indicated he wasn’t a machine. A cab with squealing brakes pulled up to a guy in a business suit. With sweat drenching my polo shirt and jeans I couldn’t fathom wearing a coat and tie. We dragged our bags along in the line. My mother said, “See that in the taxi? More dangerous here than Hong Kong.” Two steel mesh screens closeted the driver from passengers.

FROM THE SERIES "ELAINE" BY KARL HURST, 2014. www.flickr.com/photos/karl_hurst

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I placed a hand on my travel pouch and bent down to get my bag. “Are these taxis diﬀerent from the ones outside?” “Hope so.” One aer another they edged up to the curb and drivers negotiated with customers at the head of the line. A cab inched forward and the woman ahead of us wheeled her bags on a small steel basket to the passenger door. A brief discussion ensued and the driver waved her in. She lied the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. Hoy went to help yank on the latch. It didn’t budge. Horns blared as he shook the handle and banged on the door. e driver got out and approached them. He tried with the same results and the whole place sounded like a New York City traﬃc jam. e man tugged on the handle as irate drivers shouted and honked at him. e noise echoed throughout the parking structure. Finally, the driver entered his taxi and moved it out of the way. e woman took another cab and my father spoke to the driver of the one behind her. I was relieved when my father called for us. Hoy loaded our luggage in the trunk and climbed into the front seat. I sat in the rear between my mother and father. We started forward and I caught a glimpse of the other driver working on his passenger door with a screwdriver. As we exited the station Hoy spoke to the driver. I turned to my mom. “Where are we?” “is Shenzhen. We in China, but close by Hong Kong.” “is is where my father’s family is?” She shrugged. “All I know is hot here.” Either the taxi didn’t have air conditioning or the driver didn’t want to use it, because the windows were down. Hot wind whipped against us as we entered the city. ■

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Old Year Psalm by Calvin Ahlgren

Shuﬄing and crab-stepping out of sight, the Old Year plays a pissy music— downpours, thunder tantrums, ninja-wind that prowls and growls and slaps loose shingles on the roof. Two fences over to west, bronze and granite headstones hunker down above the settled dead. Stone mushrooms brooding over bone mycelia. Overhead in the blind sky a prop plane labors through a gap of silence gradually plugged with engine drone.

LEAVES BY GENE WILBURN

What can the pilot see, buﬀeted in that thunder-blanket? What’s he doing up there, at a time sane folk seek shelter? Tossed literally in terror, maybe flushing up his past (the kind that wracks us all inside). He can’t look down and spot the backs of mule deer, wet fur snug in brush somewhere, or see coyotes, foxes, bobcats, pumas. Raptors furloughed by the storm. All hidden from the man-thing in the wilderness above, dragging an unstable sky for clarity. e young dog on the counterpane at my feet calmly tracks the turbulence, head high, eyes vigilant. What she hears I’ll never know, and neither can she reckon the walled thunderheads and lightning gashes in my heart, my skies that gall with what the wind gods make from my illusions: an insistence I can scour memory to change what I know can’t be changed. Small-town Lear muttering back. e grand thing about storms is, they move along, dissipate and leave a high-pressure high-note relief. So, you blooming sky fields of primordial wreck, boom and bang away, but as you haul the old year’s putrid carcass out to sea, do this for us: wash the past with your healing grace. Blast us all out of this dark time’s lambent failures, into a fresh year of whole and hopeful presence. Help us learn to move through any weather and not take it on as our own.

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fiction

Ex Inferis

©I ST OC K.C OM / WI L L I AM C R ESWEL L

by Michael Davis

strid climbed the spiral staircase and, keeping her knees bent, made her way to the back corner of the train’s deserted observation deck where her mother sat knitting and frowning at Nebraska. “is state is endless,” her mother said, an expression of abject disgust in the turned-down corners of her mouth. “And boring. I have to agree with you on that.” Astrid sat down with a sigh and pulled her brown hair back into an elastic band. “You’re the one who wanted to take the train. I wanted to fly, remember?” She looked at the cornfields sliding past, a carpet of unruly green to the horizon. In the dis-

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tance, a miniature water tower proclaimed the existence of yet another small town. e name had faded from the side of the cistern. Only the red diamond-shaped background was visible. Astrid wondered if the town was named “Diamond” and if there were hidden diamond mines under the corn. e thought made her smile, but her smile vanished when she looked back at her mother. “I’d rather be bored than be dead,” her mother said, returning to the indeterminate woolen something she’d been knitting since before they’d le San Francisco for Virginia two weeks ago. ey were on their way back to California from visiting Astrid’s father in Arlington National Cemetery.

is was the third summer they’d made the trip. “What’s the diﬀerence?” She stood up again and had to catch herself on the metal pole beside their booth when the train lurched. Astrid never met her father. In fact, most of what she knew about him, she’d learned from the movie that showed how he and his buddies crashed their helicopter in the desert and fought their way back to a US outpost. Sean Penn had played her father. And as much as Astrid felt it was probably a good thing that people paid their respects to men like her father who’d died serving their country, she suspected her mother made her come wholly because she

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e x I n F e R I S by m I C h A e l d Av I S

hated Astrid’s boyfriend, Julian. ey could have flown just this once. But she knew her mother had insisted on the train again because it took up more summertime that Astrid could have been spending with him. “You want some money for the dining car?” “Save it.” Without looking back, Astrid made her way to the other end of the observation deck where the little spiral staircase led down to the main body of the train. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her and a faint smile passed over her face. It wasn’t over. It wouldn’t be over until she called her mother stupid and desperate, obsessed with a dead man who’d never loved her and wouldn’t marry her. Astrid was saving the words up, rehearsing them over and over in her mind. It had become a way to pass the time while the Midwest slipped behind the train hour aer hour. Ever y time Astrid imagined her mother’s reaction, a spark of malicious joy flared in her heart. is was the third time she’d walked the length of the train from their sleeper compartment to the observation car behind the forward engine. She had a key card that opened the sleeper, but there was only so much sleeping a person could do. And whenever she sat in there by herself, listening to music or to the faint hiss of the air circulating through the vents and the thumpclack of the rails, all she could think about was Julian. She’d written him three letters during the trip, each about fieen pages in length. When she got back, she planned to give them to him in a big envelope with a red bow on it and say, read these— then we can talk, because otherwise they’d be out of synch and things would go bad and she’d feel stupid, like her mother had won. She bought a Coke in the concession car and sat down at one of the tables. In the evening, the observation deck would be crowded by those

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who hadn’t paid for sleeper compartments and couldn’t get comfortable enough to fall sleep in their seats. But, during the day, people would linger at the concession car tables— all long-distance travelers, all bored to death and willing to make temporary friends in order to pass the time. It could become a party atmosphere, especially given the number of marines onboard, and Astrid wondered whether the train made more money from alcohol than it did on tickets. Sitting at the table across from her, a man in a wrinkled green suit drank canned martinis with a fat redfaced biker sporting a gray ponytail

Astrid watched the marines, pretending she was looking past them or at the writing on her Coke can… and a Harley Davidson muscle shirt. She counted six of the thin white cans on the table between them. ey spoke but hardly moved their mouths, as if they’d been injected with slow-setting concrete. At another table, three enormous marines played cards and took cans of Budweiser out of a large baby blue Playmate cooler they kept in the aisle. eir voices filled the car and when the blond marine with the scar on his jaw won a hand, he half-stood and whooped like a cowboy. People had to edge around their cooler to get to the concession counter, but no one complained. No one even looked their way, except for the man in the white button-down and khakis sitting by himself at a far table, who’d look

up from his laptop with a level stare whenever they got particularly loud. Astrid watched the marines, pretending she was looking past them or at the writing on her Coke can, which she held in front of her face from time to time like it was a fascinating alien artifact that required further study. She decided that none of them were handsome, exactly. But they had an unstable, rollicking energy that magnetized the air around them—an invulnerable wall of sandcolored fatigues and muscle. If the train derailed and everything turned sideways, she imagined they’d still be sitting there, laughing and tossing each other beers while everybody else screamed for their lives. “Fuck oﬀ, Smits. You got shit and you know it.” at was the one who had stubble and squinted a lot like he didn’t believe anything at all. His name was Leitner. Smits was the big blond with the spiked-up hair. And the other one—shaved completely bald, even his eyebrows—was Johnson. at’s how they addressed each other: Smits, Leitner, Johnson, not private or lieutenant. Astrid wondered if they were old friends from high school who’d met up in the Midwest aer being on duty in diﬀerent parts of the world and decided to ride the train somewhere together and play cards all the way. Julian’s last name was Kettlefield. She tried to picture him sitting at their table in sandy fatigues with Kettlefield on a rectangular patch over his heart, saying Fuck you, Johnson or Gimmie two, ya cheatin’ bastard, but she couldn’t. Julian was wiry, an inch shorter than her, with beautiful eyelashes and long black hair. His two deepest secrets were first, that next year, aer they graduated, he planned to steal a bunch of money from his dad and move to Hawaii so he could go in on a skate shop with his cousin, who was a pro skater. And second, that he’d gotten Astrid in black cursive tattooed on the flat smooth place right above his pubic hair.

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e x I n F e R I S by m I C h A e l d Av I S

There isn’t an app for this.

Live, learn, and work with a community overseas. Be a Volunteer.

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She couldn’t imagine Smits with a tattoo like that. He’d have a name like Rosy or Sheresse or I Love You Mom in barbed wire around a bleeding heart. And it wouldn’t be above his pubic hair. It would be on the hard slab of his thigh or the side of his neck or high up on his shoulder above a skull with a knife in its teeth. She noticed that Leitner had a blue scarab tattooed in the webbing between his le thumb and fingers. Johnson had a black thorn pattern inscribed around the back of his neck, the kind she’d seen posted up as examples in the windows of tattoo parlors in Berkeley. Smits won again. is time he jumped out into the aisle, gyrating his hips like Elvis, saying, “at’s right! at’s right you sonsabitches! Keep makin’ me rich!” e other two tossed their cards down and cursed, but they were still smiling as if it didn’t mean a thing. Smits sat down and scooped up the pile of dollars on the table. e scar on his jaw was long and pale. e rest of his face shone red with beer and joy. ey traded up more cans of Bud from the cooler. And she noticed that the biker and the businessman had also reprovisioned with six more little white cans between them. Now they were slouched way down in the circular booth seats around their table, looking sedated and completely unaware of anything in the world, least of all the soldiers directly beside them. Astrid smiled at her empty Coke can. is was far more interesting than staring at Nebraska with her mother or listening to sad songs on her iPod in the sleeper while she worried about Julian. It got even more interesting when the man in the white button-down cleared his throat and said, maybe a little too loudly, “HEY GUYS. You think we could dial it down? I’m doing some work over here.” Leitner and Johnson turned around in their seats and looked back at him. Smits just sat where he was,

his enormous freckled hands folded on the table beside his beer. And there was a moment of silence in which the air in the concession car seemed to have solidified in a way that would hold them all there forever: the businessman and the biker with drooping eyelids, the old train guy sitting over behind the concession counter, the marines glaring at the man in the white button-down, and Astrid. en Smits frowned. He knitted his eyebrows in a look of intense deliberation and said, “Fuck it. He’s right.” Johnson nodded slowly and scratched the top of his bald head. “Excuse us. Sorry to have bothered you.” Leitner just turned back around. e three of them looked at each other for a moment. en they burst out laughing just as loud and as violently as before. ey laughed for a full minute with Smits slapping the table and Leitner losing his unbelieving squint while he rubbed a hand over his stubble and listed against Johnson. at was when Smits looked across at her and said, “at’s some funny shit. I love this train.” Astrid felt a bolt of white hot electricity explode in her chest. e three marines were looking at her, grinning, expecting her to say something. But her mind was blank. She was now a senior at North Beach Preparatory Academy, and Astrid felt she had better judgment than most girls she knew. She could certainly call things better than her mom, who was a sad stress case most of the time and only seemed to come alive on these miserable summer trips to Virginia. Astrid felt she had an extrasensory awareness of when guys were looking at her like that. And she didn’t mind when they did because looking at girls like that was part of being a guy. But the like that of Smits, Leitner, and Johnson seemed overwhelming in its suddenness and their good humor did nothing to lessen its impact.

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Astrid knew she was blushing and hated herself for it. “Yeah,” she said, giving them a weak smile. e man in the white buttondown stood and slammed his laptop shut. Leitner and Johnson turned to watch him go. “Have a nice day,” Leitner said to his back. e man didn’t turn around and the far door of the concession car hissed shut behind him. Smits was still looking at her. He thought for a moment, then made up his mind and slid into the circular booth on the other side of her table. “What’s your name?” Johnson slid into the booth next to Smits. And Leitner moved in next to her, shiing the Playmate cooler two feet to the other side of the aisle. He handed out a round of beers and smiled at her with the squint back in his eyes. “Drink?” She gave a half-nod and Leitner immediately replaced her empty Coke can with a full can of Budweiser, opening it for her with a flourish. “Astrid,” she said to Smits. “Astrid,” Smits repeated as if he were savoring the way it felt on his tongue. “Ever hear of a name like that?” he asked Johnson. Johnson scratched his head and said, “Can’t say that I have. What is it, a name of a flower?” She smiled and shrugged. She touched the side of the beer can with her thumb and felt the little nubs of ice stuck to the metal. “She don’t know,” Leitner said. “Right on. Americans don’t know that shit.” “Yeah,” Smits said. “Well, if it’s a flower, it’s got to be a pretty flower.” His face was wide under his short crown of spiked blond. He had lines on his forehead and a dusting of freckles there and over the bridge of his nose. Astrid looked at his pale blue eyes and smiled down at her beer. “I’m just fuckin’ with you, Astrid,” he said with a shrug and another grin. “Let’s play some cards. You play cards?”

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When she hesitated, Johnson said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll teach you.” And he slid a small square of lined paper across the table to her. It had a fairly realistic line drawing of her face in the center of a sunflower with the sun laughing down at her from one corner and the moon weeping from another like comedy and tragedy. Under the drawing, he’d written Astrid in over-exaggerated script. “Oh my god. ank you. at’s beautiful,” she said. “Did you do that just now?” “I did.” Johnson bowed, clicked his ballpoint, and put it in his pocket.

Smits held up his hands, palms open, in the universal gesture of diplomacy and reason. “All I’m saying is this is a pure game. you don’t bet, you’re not really playing.” She noticed a Gothic E.I. tattooed on the inside of his wrist. “I’m quick on the draw,” he added. “He’s a quick shooter,” Leitner said. “A real speed demon,” said Smits as he brought out the deck of cards and started shuﬄing them. Astrid took a sip and remembered she hated the taste of beer. She swallowed it anyway and pushed a loose strand of hair away from her face. “What’s that tattoo mean?” Johnson looked down at his wrist then back up at her and smiled. One of his eye-teeth was dark silver.

“at? at’s Latin. Stands for Ex Inferis. All you need is love.” “at’s the goddamn truth,” Smits said, drinking half his beer and dealing cards around the table. “at’s all you ever need. Right, Astrid?” She laughed. “Right.” “And beer,” Leitner said. Johnson pointed at Leitner and made his eyes big and round. “Truth. Cold beer and warm women.” en he winked at her. For her benefit, they played a few test hands of hold’em, described by Smits as “the purest game of cards given to man by god.” But when they started to take out their wallets, she still felt hopelessly lost. e way they spoke was so full of inside jokes and loaded references that when they’d gone over the rules, it was like they were trying to explain the grammar of one foreign language by using another. e half-can of beer she’d drunk in polite sips had made her woozy and tired. Astrid thought she might want to crawl back to the sleeper compartment and take a nice long nap until dinner, but the incomprehensible bulk of Leitner was blocking the way—a squinting, beery pile of cinderblocks dressed up like a marine. And now they’d been debating something and they were looking at her, expecting an answer. “What?” She raised her eyebrows and tried not to burp. “Do you have any money?” Smits asked, leaning back in the booth and gesturing to the freshly shuﬄed deck on the table between them. “Look,” Johnson said, “she don’t have no cash. How old are you anyway, honey?” “Twenty-one,” she lied. “Exactly,” he said to Smits, “you can’t take no money from a sixteenyear-old girl.” “But you can give it.” Leitner nodded at her, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. “You can sure as hell give it.” Smits held up his hands, palms open, in the universal gesture of

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diplomacy and reason. “All I’m saying is this is a pure game. You don’t bet, you’re not really playing. Might as well play checkers. But, shit, I’d want to bet on that, too.” e three of them laughed and Astrid laughed along with them, thinking that she should have understood why it was funny. She noticed that the businessman and the biker and all their little canned martinis had gone. eir table was deserted as if they’d never existed. e sun had slipped farther toward the cornfield horizon on the other side of the train, and the shadow of the concession car had gotten deeper and thicker on the gravel beside the tracks. How long had she been sitting here? She wondered if her mother were angr y, walking through the train looking for her, holding her cloth knitting bag in front of her like a Geiger counter as she swayed down the aisles. “Alright. I have a solution.” Johnson took out more of the paper that he’d used when he drew the picture of her. Astrid saw that it wasn’t a pad but an extremely long sheet Johnson had meticulously folded into threesquare-inch sections. When he put it on the table, it expanded like an accordion. He carefully tore oﬀ the top section and then tore that into quarters. He did the same with two more pieces. en he wrote Astrid Chip $5 on each little square and pushed the pile towards her. “is is Astrid credit,” he said. “Every twenty dollars you’re in for pays out a kiss. Okay?” “Always thinking, Johnson.” Leitner smirked and replaced Johnson’s beer. Smits sighed and held up his hands again. “Well, it’ll fuck up the natural rhythm of the game, but I guess it’s better than nothing. What do you say, hun? You okay with that?” Astrid hesitated. But this time Smits didn’t shrug and grin like a schoolboy or say he was just fuckin’ with her. He waited for her answer along with the other two, the new breath of seriousness between them completely unlike the mock solemnity

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they’d shown the man in the white button-down ages ago. Was it ages? It felt to Astrid like a diﬀerent lifetime. She thought of Sean Penn playing her father in Fallen Arrow, a film Astrid had seen many, many times because her mother watched it whenever she was feeling depressed. ere was a part where Penn and his surviving chopper crew—a farm boy from Missouri named Lieutenant Barnes and a British intelligence agent named Mr. Streeter—are captured and held in a cavernous dungeon by the Taliban. e night before they’re scheduled to be executed, the local village girl tasked with feeding them and tending to their wounds helps

he said you never knew how deeply you were going to be cursed before you started winning again.

them escape—but not before liing her veil to share a passionate kiss with Penn, who swears he will return for her someday. Only he doesn’t. He dies in a firefight, sacrificing himself to save twenty men pinned down by a sniper in the last scene. Her father got a bronze star for that. “Okay,” she whispered. “Atta girl,” Leitner said, drinking the rest of her beer and putting a new one in front of her. “Game on.” “Game on,” said Smits. ey played a few hands and she was surprised that she’d won more than she’d lost, always folding before having to contribute more than fif-

teen dollars in Astrid credit. Finally, Johnson threw down his cards in disgust. “Beginner’s luck,” he said. “us, I must go take a piss.” “Don’t be a sore loser.” Leitner came back to the table from the concession counter with three six-packs of Budweiser to restock the cooler. He started pulling the cans out of the plastic rings and placing them in the ice, which was now floating in a miniature arctic sea. e cans made a koosh sound when he dropped them in. One of the cans slipped out of his hand and missed the cooler, rolling down the floor to tink against the base of the concession counter. e concession man brought it back and handed it to Leitner. “Concession’s closing now,” he said. “You want to eat dinner, the dining car’s opening back that way.” He nodded, put his hands in his pockets, and then paused to look at them. He had a white handlebar moustache and a shock of unruly white hair. It took Astrid a moment to bring him into focus but, when she did, she thought he looked like Mark Twain—a guy who’d stepped out of a diﬀerent time, someone who seemed right at home standing around on a train with his hands in his pockets. All he was missing was a pocket watch on a chain. He looked at her. en he looked at Leitner and Smits, who gave him a blank stare in return. “Check,” Smits said. “Sounds good,” said Leitner. e concession man looked at her again and raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever.” en he was gone and Johnson came back. “What’d I miss?” Johnson looked from Smits to Leitner. Smits shook his head. “People never cease to amaze me.” Leitner dropped the last can in the cooler. “Which is the source of your troubles,” he said. Astrid had never drunk three beers on an empty stomach. And though that might have explained her eventual losing streak, it could also have

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been due to what Smits called the “beginner’s curse”—the moment when your beginner’s luck runs out and you have to pay your dues. He said you never knew how deeply you were going to be cursed before you started winning again. By the time the sun disappeared completely and the train’s interior lights turned the windows into scuﬀed black mirrors, Astrid had been cursed enough that she owed both Leitner and Johnson a kiss. When she kissed Leitner, that sense of him as a mountain of bricks returned, the roughness of his stubble, the smell of beer and deodorant. en there was Johnson, who bowed to her over the table and let her give him a peck on the top of his bald head—grin, tattoos, dark silver tooth. But it was Smits who took her back to her compartment when she fell asleep. Later, she’d have a vague memory of holding onto his enormous neck while he carried her through the darkened coach cars. People were wedged uncomfortably in their seats, trying to catch a few hours before the next stop, and he’d said, “You gotta be quiet now, hun. ere’s people trying to sleep.” But she felt it was important that she explain to Smits about her mother and their trips to Virginia and how Sean Penn was probably nothing like her father and how he’d gotten the bronze star even though he’d never come back for the woman he loved. When she woke up at 10 a.m. the next day, her mother had already eaten breakfast and taken her place on the observation deck. ey’d le Nebraska far behind in the night and were now well into Utah, the noticeable diﬀerence being that an endless broken scrubland had replaced the fields and the water towers were closer. She would no doubt have to work up an explanation for being carried to the sleeping compartment by a strange beer-doused marine. But that could wait. Astrid walked through the upper and lower decks of the

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train several times, looking for her three friends, lingering in the concession car just in case one of them came back to restock their cooler or even look for her. Astrid waited there most of the day before she realized that they must have gotten oﬀ at one of the nighttime stops. And although she tried to focus on Julian that day, she couldn’t. When she discovered a few

of the little pieces of paper that said Astrid Chip $5 in her pocket, she felt that something precious had come into her life and then disappeared forever before she could understand it. She looked at the little drawing Johnson had done of her as a flower between a laughing sun and weeping moon and wondered where he was and whether anyone had ever given her mother something like that. ■

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FROZEN LAKE, SHANGRI-LA COUNTY, YUNNAN, CHINA BY BENOIT WITTAMER

I Can Say Now That Things Are Not What They Seem aer “Velocity Meadows” by Mark Strand by Marie Kane Standing on the porch and hearing your shovel move early snow to the rocky side of the driveway, I feel December’s cold flicker like a tossed mane. Moon’s light reveals our slanted snowfield, while the drawn-out call of a train dris over early winter. Wind spins a frieze of clouds that briefly close the light. You interrupt your labor to watch me test my quad cane on the snowy step. Our neighbor’s muted lamppost tempts me across driveway’s icy chasm. I think of all that I have lost. What comfort is there when life puckers its lips as if to kiss, then steals away, taunting? I step oﬀ the porch into snow’s white lines that si, whisper, revise the world. An owl cries from snow-tinged trees out back. Slim light from stars gathers at the gray fence line. Your windswept warnings. My precarious footfalls on fresh snow.

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Your Most Important Character Developing Place in Fiction by Denton Loving

JORQUERA, ALBACETE, SPAIN BY JORGE VILLAPLANA SANJUAN

haracter and good characterization in writing are so important, for obvious reasons, that we often categorize stories and books (as well as television shows and movies) as plot-driven or character-driven. Readers love characters that they can learn to know intimately. The most memorable of these characters are carried in readers’ memories long after they’ve finished reading. Too many writers, especially in the beginning of their careers, forget about the most important character of their narrative: place. Or, perhaps the problem is that not enough writers think about the places they write about as characters. Place is so much more than providing the reader with the story’s physical location. Place, or sense of place as some would refer to it, demands that a writer closely and deeply examine the physical world

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that provides the stage for a story’s characters. Particular attention can be paid to natural landscapes, but the man-made landscapes of the world are just as essential. Those landscapes—both natural and man-made—affect characters, their dialogue, their actions, and therefore, their stories. These are the details that inform the reader about the spirit of a character’s location. One way to think about this is in the context of other works of literature. In his book Naming the World: and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, Bret Anthony Johnston writes, “If a story would unfold in Costa Rica just as it would in Siberia, then the author hasn’t yet fully developed the characters or their environs. Try imagining Huck and Jim f loating down the Rio Grande or the Amazon and the novel not being changed.” Likewise, try to imagine Leo Tolstoy’s Anna

how landscapes and cities are formed is the equivalent of knowing when and where and under what circumstances your character was born.

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Y O U R M O S T I M P O R TA N T C H A R A C T E R b y D E N T O N L O V I N G

Karenina set outside of Russia or Willa Cather’s My Antonia somewhere besides the Great Plains of Nebraska. These examples are from classic pieces of literature, but the best contemporar y writers also know that good stories are set in unique places. Ron R ash writes about the western mountains of North Carolina in novels like One Foot in Eden and Serena. Philipp Meyer’s novel American Rust is set in the rusted-out steel belt of Pennsylvania, and it wouldn’t be the same story if it happened anywhere else. What these writers, from Tolstoy to Rash, do so well is depict a world that is unique to their story. What is it about the world of your story that is unique? Scan the world as if you were looking through a camera lens. Envision the location of your scenes as if you were filming a movie. What’s

in the foreground? What’s in the background? If you’re writing about a place that is based on a real location, use a real camera to photograph locations and study those pictures for details later. While you’re on location, pay attention to the moment in real time. A photo is often nowhere near as good a substitute for the real thing. However, the benefit of the photo is that it allows you to slow down your investigation of the scene. Draw a map of places important to your character. The first time I did this was in a workshop with the writer Darnell Arnoult. It was an insession exercise that I didn’t like, and the reason I didn’t like it was because I didn’t know enough about the place where my character lived. Over time, though, I’ve gone back to that map again and again, adding locations and often changing details as

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they changed in the story. Your first map doesn’t have to be exhaustive. Rather, the map, like your narrative, will grow and change. When you think about the natural landscape in your narrative, consider the forces that formed that physical world. It’s not necessary to become a geologist or a botanist, but if knowing certain details about the natural world can add depth to your story, so much the better. Does it matter why your character’s home sits on a hill or a plateau? Does it matter why the woods behind your character’s home contain more white oak trees than yellow pines? That’s up to you to decide, but a little basic knowledge and some thought into areas such as these might aid your story. This question shouldn’t be limited to rural settings. If your story is set in an urban location, think about how the history of the city might influence your character. How landscapes and cities are formed is the equivalent of knowing when and where and under what circumstances your character was born. Does your character live in harmony with his environment, or are the two at odds? Many writers use a sense of place to work as an extended metaphor for other events and actions in a character’s life. Other writers use a sense of place to thicken the plot and cause action. Both are powerful tools that will strengthen your writing. By answering these questions, you’re building a distinct fictional world that will be memorable to your readers. The details of your fictional world will vary greatly depending on the writer, the character, and, among other factors, the place being described. Ironically, the more attention you pay to the place of your story—no matter how unique or unusual—the more universal experience you provide your readers, and really, that’s what all readers of good literature are looking for. ■

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From ‘Good Enough’ to ‘Amazing’ How to Become a Better Editor of Your Own Work by Robyn Ryle

usan Orlean, author and staﬀ writer for e New Yorker, recently wrote on Twitter, “Being a good editor of your own work is almost as important as doing good work the first time around.” Editing matters. ere is an almost irresistible temptation as a writer—especially a new writer—to stop at “good enough.” “Good enough” can look pretty amazing, especially in the giddy rush that comes aer finishing a first dra. In reality, for most writers, the distance between “good enough” and “amazing” is much farther than it seems, and the best route between the two requires patience and a serious editing plan. Below is a list of seven diﬀerent editing techniques and tips I’ve found crucial to traveling the long path between “good enough” and “amazing.”

i-SPy

Especially if you have scenes that are written from multiple perspectives, edit to make each voice distinct. Pay attention to unique things your characters are likely to notice. Make a list of the things your main characters are likely to see and pay attention to within their world. If your character is a musician, she’s probably going to notice the music that’s playing or the way someone’s voice sounds. If a character is a notorious womanizer, he might keep a running commentary on the bodies of the women around him. If your characters were playing I-Spy, what things would they see?

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ART OF WRIT ING B Y M AR T I N C AUC H ON

Do you SMELL tHAt?

It sometimes seems counterintuitive to writers, who are mostly word people, that senses are what really put people in a story. We live the stories we read when we feel we’re there, and our senses—smell, touch, sight, taste, and sound—put us there, inside the story. Go back through your manuscript and imagine what your characters might be seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and feeling in each scene. Keep in mind that diﬀerent characters might rely more heavily on one sense rather than the other, another thing that makes each voice unique.

A DARK AND StoRMy NiGHt

The best villains are not evil simply because they need to be in order for the story to work. They have their own history and their own trajectory.

Find the clichés. All of them. en find a better way of saying the same thing. I read about a writer who would circle every word

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F R o m ‘ g o o d e n o u g h ’ T o ‘A m A z I n g ’ b y R o b y n R y l e

in his manuscript that wasn’t specific and evocative enough. en he’d go to the dictionary and look up not just synonyms, but the definition of the word. All of this in search of a better way to express the original idea. It sounds like a lot of work, but it could mean the diﬀerence between mediocre writing and really amazing writing.

PAPER DoLLS

Every character has the potential to sparkle if you’re willing to put in the time. No one has to be one-dimensional. e best villains are not evil simply because they need to be in order for the story to work. ey have their own history and their own trajectory. ey have mothers and fathers and annoying younger siblings. Take the time to give each of your characters some layers and it will pay oﬀ in a more believable and enjoyable story.

you’RE READiNG too MuCH iNto tHAt

A collection of letters to a high school student from famous authors on the subject of symbolism in

/LHK P/LH

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their work recently made the Internet rounds. In order to win an argument with an English teacher, the student had sent a rudimentary survey to the likes of Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac, many of whom admitted to being baﬄed by what some people read into their stories. It’s true that once you put a story out into the world, the meaning it may acquire is beyond your control. But it is a good idea to think about whether there are any potential themes in your early dras. Are there some themes that seem to come up, whether you intended them or not? Are there themes you’d like to keep and perhaps amplify? Are there others you’d like to drop?

as close as you’re going to get. Walk away from your story until you’ve pretty much forgotten what happens next.

DiD i WRitE tHAt?

Put it aside until, as Stephen King suggests, you kind of forget that you even wrote it. is is the hardest part, but there’s a reason this is an important editing step. If you’ve done even a few of the edits listed here, you are now drowning in your own words. You may no longer be able to tell if they even make sense. Time turns you back into a reader rather than a writer, or

BRoWNE AND KiNG

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King is quite simply the best book on editing I’ve read. Buy it. Read it. Read it again. Read it once more and then print out a copy of your manuscript, grab a pencil and go to town.

Patience is important. It’s a lot of work, and you might be asking yourself if it’s all worthwhile. Are readers really going to pay attention to these details? Maybe not on any conscious level, unless they’ve been through their own editing odyssey, but these details might make the difference between a reader who stops after a couple chapters and the reader who can’t put your book down. These edits can be the thin line between what makes a book “amazing” compared to “good enough,” even if the average reader can’t really explain why. ■

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“She says what everyone is thinking and it’s FUNNY . . .”

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