Temenos - Fall 2014: Mythos, Monsters, and Madness

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness

temenos Fall 2014

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness

within our Imaginative Spirits

temenos Fall 2014

© Copyright 2014, temenos All rights revert to the authors and artists.

Published by: Temenos Anspach 215 Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 temenosjournal.com

Cover art, “Temenos in Athens” by Julia Lichtblau. Cover designed by Regan Schaeffer. Book designed by Amee Schmidt and typeset by Regan Schaeffer, with temenos and poem title fonts in Rockwell, edition titles in Perpetua, and text in Adobe Garamond Pro.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 1

Temenos Staff Editor-in-Chief Regan Schaeffer Managing Editor Abigail Hollingsworth Fiction Editor Amanda Shepard Poetry Editor Hailee Sattavara Non-Fiction & Publicity Editor Samantha Dine Copyeditor Elizabeth Bauer Faculty Advisor Professor Darrin Doyle

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Table of Contents Temenos in Athens / Julia Lichtblau Cover Temenos Staff 1 Cloud Gate / Kennen White 3 The 12 Bar Blues / Daniel Corfield 4 Passage Through Time—Folegrandros / Shannon Cavanaugh 7 Lost Melody Blues / Joanna White 8 ewModern Religion / Jed Myers 10 SALVATION / Claire Scott 11 Bath Time / Anna Deur 12 Spring / Ginny MacDonald 13 on mornings my mother calls to say she’s quit smoking / Riley Nisbet 15 abzu / Kimberly Ann 16 Medico della peste / David Banker 17 London, Louisiana / Nick Farrant 18 Nirah / Kimberly Ann 29 Revelations After Watching Nosferatu / Zachary Riddle 30 Shopping for flower seeds / Hannah Fillmore 32 Goldfinches / Kayla Feldpausch 33 On the fear of becoming a statistic / Hannah Fillmore 38 after aubade in your morning voice / Riley Nisbet 39 Totally Normal Until It Isn’t / Melissa Grunow 40 Mannequin / Kennen White 48 TO C.C. (2008-2012) / Matthew Moffett 49 Obsessive / Zachary Riddle 50 Amanda Belle / Buell Hollister 51 My Dark Passenger / Anna Deur 55 Contributor Bios

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Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 3

Cloud Gate

—Kennen White

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The 12 Bar Blues It had come from deep down inside me—the bending whine of chords, the far-away train whistle, the sadness and the joy, all of it, slowly crawling towards the soul, or perhaps in my case, away from it.

I was locked inside a psych ward when it came around a second time.

Only now it was out loud. An orderly, a young, good-looking dude, sat down one night after visiting hours with a harmonica in his hand and started blowing.

“Let me try that thing,” I said.

Well, no, wait, that wasn’t it at all. Yes, there was this orderly there, but he wasn’t playing a harmonica; he was playing a guitar. I guess my head is still pretty foggy. Most my time in there been wiped out, zapped clear from memory.

Anyway, this orderly, a nice, quiet fella, would bring his guitar around in the evenings when all the therapy groups were done, the folding chairs stacked against the wall. He’d sit down on the rec room sofa, and then all of us would gather round, seeing as the sound of his gentle strumming broke up the monotony of the click-n-clack of ping-pong paddles and the worthless television that was always on.

One evening—boy, I must have been really down—I pulled my chair right up in front of him and said, “How ‘bout playing some blues. You know any?”

He didn’t even look up, but stayed bent over that guitar, and said, “Sure.

The blues is easy. Just 12 bars, like this.” And then he started strumming.

I tell you, I could feel them blues shoot all the way down from the top of my head, on down my spine, and then on through my toes. And, boy, did they feel good! I will never understand why some folks say the blues is depressing. Shit, the blues ain’t depressing; the blues is glorious. Give me the chills, anyways.

So I’m sitting there, listening, my entire body turning goosepimply, and I say, “Sure wish I had me a harmonica.”

Now remember, I ain’t never pressed my lips against no damn instrument of any kind in my entire life. But something just stirred in me and said, man, I need to blow.

“I think I have one,” said the orderly.

No shit.

“Be right back.”

So he gets up and goes behind the glass, behind the nurse’s station, where I can see him fumbling around for a minute or so. Sure enough, when he comes back, he’s got a harmonica in hand. “Here,” he says. “Try this.”

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 5 I take the metal gadget, turn it over in my grip, get the feel of the thing, while he sits down again, strapping his guitar around his shoulder, resting it on his knee.

“Ready?” he says.

“Ready,” I say.

Now, mind you, folks is all gathered round watching, sitting there in their pajamas, their feet all snuggly in their psych-ward slippers. They’re expecting some kind of show.

José, that was his name. A Mexican fella, slicked-back hair and brown skin, well, he starts to pluck. Then he lifts his head and says, “Now this here’s the 12 bar blues.” And then he strums.

Man, I could see that train rolling right on down the track. I could see them old cotton bales waiting to be a-picked. My mojo was a-jumping, the entire history of woe running through me. Mind you, I ain’t no sharecropper.

Hell, I ain’t even black. I’m just a white teenager from Irvine, California, who’s been so damn spoiled that he’s got a pain in his gut the size of the Mississippi, because he don’t think his parents really love him, I mean, really love him. All this I’m figuring out right then and there, as José is plucking away, and I’m a blowing right on time, the rest of them psych-ward crazies a-clapping their hands and a-stomping their feet, because we’s a-playing the blues, the real old-fashioned blues.

And then, when it’s over, José-the-Orderly is smiling as wide as can be, as if this is the first time in his whole psych-ward career that he’s done any thing worth a damn.

And I’m smiling, too, because all the folks are clapping now: the nurses behind the glass, the orderlies too.

“Wow, that was great. How did you do that?” They all want to know, but all I can say is, “Beats the hell out of me; I guess I just up and felt it.”

“You sure as hell did,” says José, and then he says, “Keep it,” meaning the harmonica. “You earned it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. You got the blues,” he says.

So I take that harmonica, and the next three days that’s all I’m doing, playing the blues, and jabbering on and on, like I just got off of a sixteenhour shift shucking cotton down on the old plantation. Folks ain’t no longer clapping but looking at me kind of funny. Some’s looking kind of angry, like they is annoyed.

“Don’t you pay me no never mind,” I up and tell them. “Even us spoiled brats from Irvine can be a-suffering just as much as anybody.”

Up and down the ward, I’m a-strutting and a-blowing. Funny thing is, it’s the same damn riff every time, over and over again, the one me and José-the-Orderly done played. The 12 bar blues, up four blows, down four

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blows, in and out, 8 more blows, then 8 again, and then 8 more blows a final time before the turn around, and then 4, 4, 8,8,8,4,4,4, again and again. The same train rolling down the track, the same bales of cotton plucked over and over.

All the time, them nurses is telling me that I been spending too much time a-playing and a-singing, so much time that they don’t even recognize me no more, say I’m looking a whole lot worse, too.

Well, maybe yes and maybe no.

And then one night this one orderly, a big black fella whose face I ain’t likely ever to forget, stops me right there in the hall, right there in the middle of my turn-around, places his hand upon my chest, and, blocking my way, says, “Son, now who the hell you think you is?”

And just like that, I’m right back in my white-boy skin, with my whiteboy lip, using my white-boy words. “What’s it to you, Bubba?” I say.

Now this is where it all gets really fuzzy. Coulda been that movie with Jack Nicholson for all I know, but folks have told me that it weren’t, and so I suspect it really happened this way. That is, my face pressed flush against the linoleum, a knee drilled into my back, my arms pinned down. Voices over the intercom: “STAT, STAT, STAT.” Footfalls slapping towards me, a needle plunged into my arm.

Shit, sure as hell weren’t no movie, for I suppose I threw a punch or two before I hit the floor, but that don’t mean they had to be locking me away in some padded room all by myself. There I was, staring at four lousy walls, waiting for the cart to come and get me and wheel me off to shock treatment. Why, I was down, ain’t no doubt about that, what with them orderlies ripping that harmonica from my hands and telling me I gots to get on back to them lousy groups where I belong, but I ain’t always the type to be kicking and a-screaming, not always, spoiled kid from Irvine or not.

And then I’m waking up on the rec room couch, a blanket wrapped around my naked-ass all the way up to my ears, my entire body shivering.

The TV is blaring some god-awful program about who knows what. How long have I been here?

And then I see it there, on top of the bookcase across the room: the old C harp. It’s just sitting there, smiling at me, but it isn’t making a peep.

I pick it up and start to blow. Nothing. No bend, no wine, no train. Not a soulful note is coming up from deep within me either, just the feeling of metal upon my lips, the taste of rust and steel. I blow a second time and hear a flat, annoying sound. I set the harp aside. Pausing for a moment, I look at that TV and then head on into the other room, hoping to hear what they are talking about in therapy tonight.

—Daniel Corfield

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 7

Passage Through Time—Folegrandros

—Shannon Cavanaugh

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Lost Melody Blues I think I’ll lose my mind if I can’t play those crying melodies.

I guess I’ll lose my mind if I can’t sing those sighing melodies.

Note by note they’ll wither into a heap of shriveled leaves.

If I can’t blow those hollow tones, jiggle them in…

If I can’t waft those mellow tones, ribbon them in…

I’ll let out a howl to blow breath across your skin.

If I can’t play for you, bend those notes of blue...

If I can’t sing for you, make you cry tears of blue… there’ll be nothing left but writing poems, nothing left to do.

Round and round, notes turn in my head.

Round and round, notes spin in my head, needle hugs record grooves, hiss, crackle, bump––until I see red.

Once I found my voice singing through the flute.

Once I found my voice blowing wind into the flute.

Then I lost that focused tone.

Suddenly I was mute.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 9 You used to listen to me play.

You were so kind.

Your face was rapt when I would play; to others you were blind.

If you can’t hear my melodies I know I’ll lose my mind.

One day I’ll find the voice I lost, find that lyric sound.

One day I’ll hear the voice I lost, reclaim its silver sound.

I’ll make it sing like poems, music unbound.

—Joanna White

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Modern Religion Knowing no gods, we prayed in secret to the nudes in our monitors.

We begged the crescent moon many times, in private, Do not disappear.

None knew the others’ pleas. Each cried in silence, in a transparent temple.

We left offerings of crushed cigarettes in the quiet chapels of the trees.

We carried out rituals in mirrors— methanol, tweezers, razors….

Spoke in sudden smart-ass tongues to all our mechanical creatures.

Our love songs, invocations of demons.

We called down angels we didn’t believe in.

And men, by the millions, threw themselves into the sputtering shredder.

Do you remember? It all goes back to before we broke any atoms.

Then they wired the stadiums. Then we came along. I can see us together, young, you telling the air about hunger. We had a club and initiation involved waiting naked all day in that tiny cave.

If the earth didn’t eat you, you belonged.

—Jed Myers

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 11

SALVATION What joy! Today I discovered a dumpster in the next block. The first in weeks. And so close to home. A reprieve from city scouring. No, I don’t dive headfirst into the stink and gnaw KFC bones or nibble apple cores.

I walk after nightfall, my backpack full, telling housemates I am training for the Appalachian Trail. I have been training for the Appalachian Trail for almost five years without taking the first step. I don’t know where the nearest trailhead is. Nor do I care. The ruse suffices. Whose idea was it to recycle in open bins where neighbors can see your week in review: cans of Spaghetti O’s, boxes of mac and cheese, cartons of chocolate ice cream. How the hell are you supposed to cook for just one? After eight hours soldering small parts under a microscope? My eyes have a reddish hue. Then home to The Bachelor, wrapped in a blanket, heat turned up, glass clinking at my side. None would choose me, a bit too fat, a bit too plain. On the far side of forty. With red eyes. Tonight I will fill my pack and drop its load in the dumpster, returning home with a sigh of satisfaction. I will open another bottle of Two Buck Chuck and hide the empty under the bed. ’Til time to train again.

—Claire Scott

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Bath Time submerged in dingy water a bird clipped from flight she lets herself stay under burning to know what drowning is like

—Anna Deur

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 13

Spring She was having the murder dream. In this version, an excavator she had hired to dig a basement uncovered the man’s corpse, wrapped in black plastic. It came up in the bucket. The excavator swiveled to dump the load onto the rocks and the topsoil next to the hole; the body flopped and slid down the pile. She knew what it was without looking. A clammy mist beaded on her jacket. It was night. The excavator was working by the lights of his machine. He did not cut the engine, just kept digging.

She had dreams like this, even after days like this, when spring was ratcheting up her entrance and the gutters gurgled with the snowmelt off the roof. The yard squelched; four eager crocus had pushed up on the south side of the house. The snowbanks receded. She stood outside the garden fence and waited for the moment she could see the dirt.

In the woods, the pileated woodpecker screamed its primeval cry as it moved between trees, gouging holes like empty eyes in the living bark, littering the last snow with sawdust. She stopped raking to watch it hammer. There were no leaves yet, and she could see it clearly in the branches.

It did not seem to care if she watched.

It was always a man who was dead, and she always knew how he came to be buried in a place that couldn’t keep its secret. She knew who he was.

She didn’t need to see the face, the eyes, the broken jaw. In the dream last night, there had been a house half finished, one part old and lived in, one part being renovated. Pale plywood in the lights of the excavator. The plastic that covered the window opening snapped in the breeze, as if the house were breathing against the barrier, pushing the plastic in and out in sudden, irregular gasps.

She spent the morning splashing through the yard, shoveling up the piles of dog shit exposed by the withdrawing snow. She picked up sticks, a deflated football; it was too wet to rake. Everywhere were the bones she bought at the grocery store for the dogs to chew on. When the dogs were bored with a particular bone, she opened the door and flung it out into the snow. On a day like today, she would flip the discards into the edge of the woods. There were lots of them—hundreds—in the verge of trees circling the yard. Soon the trout lilies and ferns would hide them, the fall leaves cover them over.

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In the dream—no panic. She does not wake screaming. The dead man is exhumed and she watches, every time. She sees the body rise out of the dirt.

A hand, or a booted foot, escapes the wrapping. She does not run toward the excavator shouting, “No, no, no, not there!” She does not exclaim, “Oh my god, what is that?” She stands, she sees, she does not run away.

In the woods, under the two-track, the runoff is chuckling through the hollow log culvert and foaming away towards the cedar swamp. The seasonal creeks are in season. She wears her swampers. The bottom has fallen out of the winter trails, every step gives way. She can’t see the rabbit tracks or the snow fleas on the bare forest floor. Things have begun to burgeon.

This has nothing to do with her.

The first time she had the murder dream, it was the UPS man. Last night it was no one in particular, but someone. She doesn’t know why the man has been murdered. She doesn’t know if she did it. None of that matters. The body rises and rolls away, revealed. The yard lights—or maybe the moon—shine on the bundle. She is complicit. It’s the knowing that makes it that way, not the doing.

Waking, she shuffles to the bathroom, holds her face in her hands while she pees, sits on the toilet until she can feel the cold tile under her bare feet, until she can arrange her past. She remembers and wonders about metaphors, and about how long it will take for the concrete to cure.

—Ginny MacDonald

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 15

on mornings my mother calls to say she’s quit smoking I imagine the unswept laminate floors of my childhood home accepting her aging feet, and arousing a creak that reminds her of old vinyl records filed away in a stagnant basement-room, quiet and still as a tire.

In the washroom, I see her pick a toothbrush from a shell-pink ceramic countertop. Its bristles, bedhead frayed, scrape coffee from hoary teeth. Now, her voice aches through the phone, but she’s forgotten the name of the son she speaks with: It’s me, mother, I say, again.

—Riley Nisbet

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abzu Rain mists through the screen door. I watch the final hours of summer clap limb to limb, rivers scheming the gutters with trash and an oversized rack of twisted wood— everything dammed, shoved into the sluice. Branches finger through drains, reach, reach, the whole world rushing to the door of an ark, the whole world repenting.

I stand with my hand at my throat. A piece of tin foil escapes, races past the grating, its shiny body, like a minnow, whirling with hope that the ocean under the earth is safe.

—Kimberly Ann

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 17

Medico della peste

—David Banker

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London, Louisiana Cairo had been dead for eight hours, sixteen minutes, forty-five seconds.

He had died with the windows shut, and in the Louisianan humidity, eight hours was long enough for a body to begin to stink. London shut the door behind him and checked to make sure his shirt was covering the handle of the gun jammed into the waistband of his discount khakis.

The hotel room was small, even for Bourbon Street. A single twin bed, a lime green nightstand seriously in need of a new coat of paint, a yellow light. The walls were a study in purples: chaotic swirls of mismatched paints and coats, a large oak-framed clock hanging over the bed. The door to the bathroom stood closed in the back of the room.

Cairo had died in the bed. The man was tall, lanky in the way that implies starvation. The thin beard on his chin, which had once resembled a brush fire, now looked like grave moss. Guy had used a knife this time, Cairo’s throat split open across the middle, another stab wound in the chest. London uttered a disapproving tsk-tsk sound; he didn’t like it when Guy was messy like this. But nobody asked him what he thought; he was just the butcher.

The clock on the wall spoke with a small chime. Fifteen past six.

London checked the paper Guy had shoved into his pocket. It was a bar napkin from one of the nudie bars Guy liked to prowl. It had the outline of a woman on it, thigh crossed over thigh. He peeled the napkin open and began to review Guy’s tight, blocky lettering: instructions.

1. Open the windows. Normally containment was king, but in these little rooms, a guy could get sick from inhaling the fumes of a corpse. The front windows didn’t open. They were nailed and painted shut. The paint was purple, like the window frame. London tugged at them for a few moments before checking the bathroom. The sink was yellowed, filled to the brim with burnt cigarette butts. An apple core rested on the black floor of the tub, and the mirror was cracked down the middle. London studied his reflection. He looked like Satan’s unkempt asshole, two dark circles formed under his eyes. His family was originally from Romania, and he tended to look sleep deprived on the best of days, but this was bordering on corpselike. His cheeks were sunken, his complexion gone to a blotchy pale mask. He was tall and had his father’s wiry strength and scarecrow limbs.

He ran his palm over the rough black stubble on his chin. Twenty-five and he looked forty. He needed a vacation.

There was a small window near the ceiling that, with some effort, opened onto the terraced roof of the nightclub that shared a back wall with the

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 19 motel room. The air was tepid, stirring with the miasma of cigars, vomit, and jazz that always seemed to hover around the tourist sections of New Orleans. It had taken London two months to be able to sleep with the racket and odors that seemed to ooze between every pore and crack in the city. He had grown up in a suburb of Cleveland, where the only noise at night was your own heartbeat and the brewing sound of adolescent insanity.

The window open, he checked the napkin again.

2. The tarp. It was faded blue and tucked away under the sink. He laid it out carefully on the floor of the motel room and then, with delicate care, dragged Cairo’s corpse off the pleated bed sheets. Cairo may have been thin, but he was heavy, and by the time the corpse had settled on the floor, London was huffing, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. In his youth, he had always thought that he would be a professor by this age, or maybe a poet. He took in a deep breath and smelled apples.

London checked the napkin again.

3. Take the wire saw and dismantle Cairo. “Dismantle” the napkin instructed. “Dismantle,” like the man was an Ikea couch.

London thanked God that he had omitted breakfast that morning as he pulled the thin wire saw out of his pocket. Kneeling, he lifted Cairo’s pant leg to reveal the purple and mottled flesh underneath, like a rancid cut of beef. He ran his finger up the man’s damp skin, still warm to the touch, throwing up a sticky warm mask of life. London wrapped the wire under the leg just above the ankle and began to saw. Wire bites skin, steel beats muscle—seemed elemental, really.

There was only one small catch when the wire hit bone. He tried not to think about it. He had gotten good at not thinking about bodies. He pictured a snowy field, where nothing moved and everything was white.

London tightened his grip and sawed until he heard the brittle snap, after which only a bit of congealed, dark blood oozed out of the severed stump, while London pulled the garbage bag from his pocket. He fiddled with it for a moment and then flagged the bag open. He tossed the foot inside and tried not to think of the colors brown, red, or black. He tried white.

White was nice.

“Hey,” Cairo said. “What you doin’ with my foot?”

The clock chimed—half past six.

The gun was in hand and sweeping the empty room. Was he losing it?

He knew he had heard it. The purple walls knew it. The woman on the bar napkin knew it.

“Hello?” he called. Silence greeted him like a guest. He became aware of his own heartbeat; he became aware that he was thinking about a tree

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he used to play around back home in Ohio. It was an apple tree. His dog Clyde was buried at its base. The tree was brown. Facts turned slow and hard, like cement. London felt the ground sliding away from him. Every breath brought more of Cairo into London.

“Fucking corpse,” he whispered.

“Hey,” Cairo said again. “I’m right here, ya know?”

London jumped in his skin, saw the wire dropping from his hands with a soft patter onto the tarp. Cairo’s eyes were still closed, his lips frozen shut, his fists clenched. The walls were purple, the nightstand lime green. London rubbed his eyes. The sink was yellow and filled with butts. The gun was heavy. Cairo’s skin was gray, his hair red, all bad colors. London crouched and hoped that the tremor in his hand was from the hangover. Carefully, he pried Cairo’s jaw open to reveal his tongue, which had bloated into a great purple worm, swelling until it left no room for breath, let alone speech.

Yet still, London’s stomach flipped and his heart refused to slow. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whined, forcing himself to stand.

Air, London thought, just some air to clear his head. He flung open the front door and stepped out onto the small portico overlooking Bourbon Street, bile in his throat. Sound slammed him from the crowds below. It was festival time. Down there, a veritable sea of hands and arms and hats and tits and beads surged around each other. Heads tilted back in exultation and hands greedily grasped flimsy plastic cups sloshing with frozen daiquiris and margaritas. Many in the crowd were dressed in tropical colors, mostly good. He stood on the portico, leaning heavily on the iron-lace railing and studying the throng below. Below, a small, red-faced woman looked up to him, freckles sprinkled all over her skin in a way that seemed perfectly symmetrical, like she was airbrushed. Not a real ginger, a pretend one. She lifted her shirt and called to him, her boyfriend tugging urgently at her arm. London looked down at her, and when their gazes touched London wondered if he might be God. She had freckles, her nipples were pink, the walls were purple, the side table, lime green.

He left her down below waiting for adornments from God, and went back inside. He shut and bolted the door behind him. Just finish the job, he told himself. Like the others before. Nothing special about Cairo. Just pretend it’s a cut of meat and finish the job. His dad had been a butcher for twenty years, until an errant semi had smashed his car and reduced him to kibbles and bits on I-95. London had gone to the funeral. The casket had been brown. The body inside had been in a black garbage bag. It had been buried next to a mother London had never known. London had pulled out too much of her when he was born. His Dad had once commented that he had named him London because he was pale, like a British babe. London suspected otherwise. Better he be inhuman.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 21 He knelt back down next to Cairo. His eyes watered—it was the smell.

“You know,” London said, taking up the wire and wrapping it under the thigh, just above Cairo’s right knee, “my father was a butcher. He always used to take me down to the shop.” He began to pull the wire tight. “Had all these great big sausages hanging from the back peg board. I always wondered why they didn’t rot like all the other meat he kept in the freezer.

Seems to me, you can’t trust meat that doesn’t rot. Suppose that means I should trust you, Cairo, huh?” He pulled tight, beginning to saw through bone that popped and cracked, providing percussion to his lullaby.

“Beats me, man,” Cairo said, his lips not moving. “You planning to eat me?”

The clock chimed—eight past the eleventh hour.

The walls were lime green, the bedside table was purple, and the gun was heavy in London’s waistband. He stared at Cairo’s face for a long moment, inhaling deeply. Funny, he didn’t even smell the corpse anymore.

“Are you talking, Cairo? Are you talking? Because if you are, you have to tell me,” he said. He waited; muffled shouts and cheers echoed in from outside and errant shafts of light from the window caught motes of dust.

Cairo remained still, the sink in the bathroom was blue, and everything smelled like apples.

Keeping his eyes on Cairo’s face, he removed the leg at the knee, bagging it and moving on to the other foot. Foot, knee, foot, knee, thigh, thigh, wrist, arm, wrist, arm, head, torso in eight sections. Guy was very specific. The wire was getting slippery in London’s hands; the gelling black blood was now beginning to mix into a creamy soup on the tarp between London’s knees. He took the other foot in hand and began to cut.

To be honest, he was still surprised at how easy it was to get through the bone. Once the wire bit into the skin, the muscle parted easy enough, the bone no worse than breaking a stick in half; even easier, if he had leverage.

The day he was hired, he had asked Guy why he didn’t simply cut through the joints, rather than sawing straight through bone. Guy had hit him in the mouth. He never got an answer.

He looked back to the face, searching for pain, for a flicker of life. He laughed when the foot popped off, landing heel-down onto the tarp.

“No, no I suppose you can’t talk. You’re just a dummy lying here, too stupid to realize you’ve lost your damn feet.”

His laughter was hollow. The walls were lime green and printed with theater masks; their eyes followed him around the room, the comic and the tragic mocking him in whispered volumes. The bedside table was purple.

He had a knife tucked into his waistband.

“Come on, you big dummy. Speak up!”

He wrapped the wire under the other knee, and it bit into flesh.

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“I’m cutting your damn legs off, and you can’t even protest? Ya know, sloth is one of those cardinal sins. I guess that means you’re going to hell.

It’s all right, my brother was a dummy. He died with my father. My dad, he got turned into paste along the median, but my dummy brother was thrown clear. He died in the middle of I-95 when an SUV full of kids rammed into him while he was mid-flight. Dummy never did wear his seatbelt.”

Cairo remained silent, his bloated tongue seeping slowly out of his mouth.

“Good riddance, anyways,” London said. “Dummy always hated me, ya know? He was a few years older and I guess him and my mom had some kind of special connection. He had this little metal flower she made for him, looked kinda like a daisy. Used to clutch it to his chest when he slept. You know he hit me? I mean he was just a dummy, but he was strong.

When I was eight, he broke one of my ribs, but did he ever get in trouble?

No. See, it was my fault. He was just a dummy, I was smart. I shouldn’t have provoked him. Can you believe that? Only makes sense I end up here doing stuff like this, right?”

“No, not my legs,” Cairo responded.

London paused. Had he been watching the face? He had been so focused. He had been thinking about how stupid this all seemed. He had been thinking about the pear tree he used to play in at home. Or was it apple?

He had been thinking about how the knife jabbed him uncomfortably when he kneeled down. He had been thinking about a fake ginger with a coy smile and an impatient boyfriend who London could steal her from.

Had Cairo’s face moved? Had those pale blue lips twitched and his voice filled the air? London stared at the corpse for a long moment, considering breaking Guy’s edict and just cutting the head off now. Maybe with it gone, it couldn’t talk to him anymore.

“Not my legs,” Cairo said, lips not moving. “My legs are gone, can’t you see?”

The clock chimed—halfway past perdition.

Tongue. Guy never said a goddamned thing about the tongue. London was hovering over Cairo, knife in hand as his fingers pried into the Cairo’s rigor-stiff mouth. The tongue was swollen and wet with ichor. London’s blood-slicked gloves made him lose his grip twice before he tore them off, pulled the thick wet eel from Cairo’s mouth, and without ceremony, sliced it off. Throwing the bit of meat to the floor, he kicked Cairo in the head, then again, just to be sure. Dead, dead, the man was dead. Just like the napkin was a woman and a set of instructions. No, not a man. Cairo. Cairo was dead. London punched himself in the temple hard enough to make the world blur. He had to be more careful with his thoughts.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 23 London collapsed onto the bed; Cairo’s face and smile-shaped throat slash seemed to leer up between his legs. He took in a deep breath, then two.

He should take a break, he told himself as he pulled out the wire. He really should just take another break and go outside. Maybe the fake ginger was really still out there. Maybe the red hair was real and her freckles just a lucky miracle. He could find out once her pants were off. He hadn’t been with a woman since...hell, since longer than he could remember. He wondered what a living woman smelled like. He doubted they smelled like rotting lilacs, but he was damned if he could remember it any other way. Or maybe, they smelled like apples. London wrapped the wire around Cairo’s upper thigh, just below the pelvis. This was going to be the hard one. The femur was thick. He began to saw and thought about a pretty blond girl he had cut up. She had been lying on the white carpet of a Lagrange Street studio, her cherry-red lips parted slightly, still trying to whisper her passions long after her corpse had gone cold. She had smelled like apples. She had been the first whole corpse he had ever seen, and he had been concerned with respecting her. So he had brushed her golden hair until it fanned out over the carpet; then he had painted her nails red. Had he thought of how the red would soon blend in with all those bloody bits, he may have selected a different color. Amy, her name was Amy. When Guy had found him, London had already been in the city for three months, wallowing as a file clerk by day and a burgeoning alcoholic by night. It had been three years since Dad and Dummy died and London had been in bad sorts. The funerals had been easy enough. Cry a little, hug some extended family that had never cared to know him before, get drunk off his father’s flask. Most of the people who showed up were from his mother’s side. Dad didn’t have any people to speak of. They loved his father as much as they hated London for killing his mother. London had taken their lashing gazes and whispered maledictions with a stone face.

But it was the life after the funerals that London hadn’t been able to handle. His dad’s house went to him, along with the butcher shop. He had tried to accept that life. He had manned the shop, working the meat just as his father had shown him. He had gone to bed in his old room. He had listened to the way emptiness can echo when the house doesn’t think you’re awake. After a week, he had taken down all the family photos, but their white afterimages remained on walls stained yellow by his father’s cigarettes. He tried to burn their things and replace them with new, but the house would not let him forget; little things haunted him, like knickknacks shoved into a forgotten drawer or marks on the dining room walls where Dummy had banged his chair during dinner. He didn’t remember consciously making the choice to leave. He just got in the car one day, emptied his bank account, and took to the road. Like a jackrabbit fleeing

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a forest fire he can only sense in the barest whiff of smoke on the wind.

When the money ran out, his journey ended. He was in New Orleans. No one had told him what to do next, so he had settled.

Once he stopped moving, he had to face the depression that had nipped at his heels every inch of his flight. London never considered killing himself in earnest, although he would sometimes entertain the thought while stewing over tumblers of cheap vodka in the dim blue neon lights of a local dive. He considered using gas like Sylvia Plath, but the oven in his dingy, cinder-block basement apartment was electric. He could go like Hunter S. Thompson and use a gun, but he had always hated Thompson and found him undeserving of the flattery of imitation. In the end, he decided he would go out like Virginia Woolf. He would load his coat up with rocks and just jump into the Gulf. It sounded peaceful. He supposed he just needed someone to tell him to do it and then…splash. It had been late August then. The daytime heat had lingered long into the night and had invaded the bar. London had been thoroughly drunk, stewing in his suicidal reverie.

London never saw Guy enter the bar, but he had felt him. Like a sudden chill, or a scary thought that keeps you awake at night, listening for footsteps in the closet. Guy had slid onto the bar stool next to London. He had blond hair and a scar, which carved a swirl on his right cheek. He had worn a polo shirt and polished brown leather dress shoes. He had ordered iced rum and had taken a long drink. Then Guy had turned to London, his face split with a grin.

Maybe in another life London wouldn’t have taken up Guy’s proposal, or maybe Guy just would have taken a left to the Cuban guy sitting at the far end of the bar and recruited him instead. Maybe, but he hadn’t. Guy had come and told London that he was looking for a desperate man. Hell, at least someone had been pointing London somewhere other than the grave.

Snap! Just like a rotten stick, the rest of Cairo’s left leg came off, and a small spurt of corroded bone marrow spilled out like sewage onto the tarp. The stench in the room intensified. London coughed, so did Cairo.

London stabbed Cairo in both eyes.

“Just stop that,” London ordered. “I cut up girls who didn’t complain this much.” He was talking to the corpse. Tongue or no. The walls were red, the nightstand red, the sink red.

“Who? Amy?” Cairo said.

“You don’t get to say her fucking name! You, you didn’t know her,” London said.

“Neither did you. Besides, what are you going to do, kill me?” Cairo laughed. London kept sawing.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 25 Amy, his first. She hadn’t smelled like this. She had smelled like apples.

Red apples. He had thrown up six times while cutting her up, each snap of bone and sinew sending reverberations up his inexperienced arms, like striking concrete with a metal bat. He had cried when he had taken her head off. He had laid in her bed, cradling it. Guy had killed her inside her own home. He knew her name from her mail. She had received two bills and a birthday card from someone named ‘Gram.’ He had read it to her.

When he had tossed her over the railing of his boat, he tried to offer up a prayer, but the words were fat in his mouth. He had gotten confused—too many prayers, too many words. Instead he just said her name again and again until he nearly fell overboard.

He had tried to quit. He had called Guy and told him that he was done. Guy hadn’t accepted his resignation. What was London to do? He had gone on to the next body. His name had been Randy. Randy had been left in one of the houses abandoned since Katrina wrought her terrible toll on the city. His corpse had been lying on the dusty concrete foundation of a former family home, his limbs splayed out, and his belly opened up down the middle. Initially, London had managed to keep it together, but while he was cutting him up, Randy had farted and frightened London so badly that he lost control of his gut and vomited into Randy’s open stomach.

After that, he couldn’t stop the shaking.

Randy. Amy. Who were these people? Did they have friends or families?

Where did they work; were they liked? What were their hobbies? How often did they masturbate? Were they happy?

He had tried opening Randy’s wallet to find the answers. London had prayed that Randy was a loner, or maybe a pedophile. Instead London had found that Randy was an investment banker, a family man. Three smiling brats, a wife, fuck—even an all-American golden retriever. London had spread the pictures out on the concrete floor. What leads a man to become a split turkey on the cold floor of an abandoned house? London had looked from the smiling fat face of Randy in the pictures to the cold grey-faced corpse.

“Randy,” he had asked. “You in there?” Randy had never responded.

London wondered if a gray floor was any better than a brown casket or a black garbage bag. Randy was dead. No, not Randy. This was Boston, and Boston was dead. Randy was a father but Boston was just meat and bones and shit. London remembered laughing, although he couldn’t say why. London cut up Boston, a butcher’s job.

Cairo spoke: “Jesus Christ, man. You could at least make conversation with me.”

His lips did not move. The walls were purple and covered with seagulls, the side table lime green.

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“Shut up, Cairo. You’re dead…man,” London responded, wrapping the wire under the other thigh.

“Dead? Me? No, big misunderstanding. See, I promised Guy I would pay him on Tuesday, but I guess I just got a little too stoned. Forgot it was Tuesday. We talked it out. We’re pals, ya know?”

“Guy isn’t a drug dealer,” London said. He pulled tighter; wire bit flesh.

Cairo laughed, “And what is he? What do you know about him?”

“Nothing. He kills people. I clean them up. Easy money. Now just shut up, Cairo,” London said.

“My name’s not Cairo,” Cairo said.

“It is now,” London said.

“Don’t be so callous, man. Can’t you see I’m in pain?” Pop went the bone. “Aw, dammit! I liked that leg.”

“I thought you said they weren’t your legs?” London responded; his voice was a dry whisper. God, he could use a drink.

“They aren’t, or they are. Does it really matter? It’s a leg. It doesn’t need to be anything else, does it London? Can it?”

The clock whispered. It spoke only in imaginary numbers.

The walls were purple and bare, the bedside table lime green, the gun heavy in his waistband, and Cairo had just lost his head.

The arms were still attached and the head was off. Wrong order, Guy would be mad. London sat on the bed and cradled Cairo’s head. He had never met the man in life, but had seen him before. Crouched in alleyways with venomous eyes and a greasy smile. An addict all told. One of the countless living dead who prowled Basin Street by night, their lips and hands open for service in hopes of scoring one more hit to drive off their own self-conclusion. Their names—their names once made them special.

After all, without names they were just masses of flesh and bone and hate and hope. But now, Cairo was just Cairo. He pushed a bit of dirty hair out of Cairo’s mutilated left eye socket. The wound looked like a CD drive.

“So there it is,” London said.

He thought about his father, standing behind the curved glass countertop, his hands covered in pig’s blood, a genial smile on his face.

“No more, you hear me?” His dummy brother turned into a smear down 95. He thought about the police report. There had been whispers that his brother had popped like a balloon at the moment the SUV made contact.

“I am sick to death of hearing you talk,” he said aloud, then thought about the press who had come to the funeral. Sharks love chummed waters.

Cairo would have no such coverage.

“And you stink to high heaven.”

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 27 He thought about the way Amy had looked, so peaceful, the first whole corpse he had ever seen. He didn’t even know if she liked the color red.

“So just lie down and rest. Can you do that for me, Cairo? Just… just say yes.”

He tossed the head into the garbage bag and continued to cut, while the room echoed with the cacophony of music and voices in the crowds below.

The clock howled in snapping gears.

The temperature in the room had picked up another ten degrees, and London was laughing. Cairo was in the bag, the small bits of viscera and intestinal leakage smeared over the inside of the tarp he now folded up on the bed.

“Ya know,” he said, shoving the tarp into the black trash bag with everything else, “You’re in good company, Cairo. I am going to throw you into the Gulf. Look up a girl, Amy, when you get there.”

He took in another deep breath and listened. His heartbeat, the crowds below, and the pop slam miracles that echoed through the room from the club next door. Music in the street, music in the rooms, music in the chests of the living. He inhaled, the putrid smell of cooking pork and decay making his head swirl. And…apples? He coughed.

He wondered, briefly, what would happen if he went out onto the balcony. London would, he thought. He would run outside and toss the bag out over the crowds below. Maybe they would be showered in gore, maybe some wouldn’t notice, maybe some would think red and black went well with their outfits. Maybe a pretty ginger with a coy smile would lift her shirt and welcome his gift. Or maybe Cairo would emerge. And Amy, Father, Dummy—reassembling themselves from bits of blood and chaos to mean something again. They would land on the street below, and without a word, enter into the stream of drunken tourists and con artists. They would be whole and meaningful and entirely unimportant.

From the bag, Cairo spoke. “Hey, London?”

“Yeah?” he responded.

“Do you think any of this is real?”

London sighed, “Probably.”

“Oh… London?”

“Yeah?”

“Do it.”

“If you insist.”

London groaned as he lifted the bag. Guy would find him and kill him, and to London, that seemed like an alright sort of thing. He would go to the Gulf now. He would sink down and wrap his arms around Amy. Her and the others. They would remake the world at the bottom, cities for

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souls. He pushed open the door to the portico and stood out above the crowds. Below, several eyes turned up to him. His face was streaked with gore and his hair matted with sweat. They would talk about him. In the news. In their legends. The butcher. Would they ever know that someone else had told him to do it? Would they ever know the screaming sound silence makes in an empty house? London arched his back, tensed his arms, and tossed. He watched the bag fly over the railing. The lime table was lime green; the bag began to pitch and roll in the air; the walls were purple; the bag’s mouth pointed down and opened up, and...

The clock on the wall was silent.

—Nick Farrant

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 29

Nirah Your tongue has slipped an amulet around my neck to keep me starved, a cord that bites into my flesh and tongues a slippery amulet— it burns like hungry pirouettes against my skin, your skin is marked with tongues slipping the amulet off of my neck to keep you starved.

—Kimberly Ann

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Revelations After Watching Nosferatu Act I As a boy, I was always obsessed with transformation. My grandmother was the first to know that I hated the idea of my body. She swatted me and sat me on my grandfather’s lap. He was built of clay—he postulated that I was built of crowfeathers.

That night, I saw his shadow, thinboned and fanged, crawl into the kitchen. He opened his mouth and swallowed moonlight as it poured through the window. I think he knew I was watching.

I think he knew I was made of ink.

Act II I hadn’t seen a blackandwhite film until I was older; I watched as the door creaked open and the ratfaced, crackednailed phantom floated into the guest bedroom.

I don’t understand why you watch this shit, my mother said.

I gestured to the fractures in her forehead, to the bodies sewn into the walls around us. My brother sat silent on the floor, crosslegged and gapemouthed, staring at the television.

Act III On his deathbed, I told my father that I was the last of his line—that I lived in a self-discovered cataclysm—I couldn’t promise him grandchildren because I wouldn’t be able to bear them.

I told him that he wasn’t forgiven, that god had devoured much smaller bodies than his. The nurse explained that his wings were lost in surgery. She handed me a jar of ash, and smiled.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 31 Act IV After the funeral, my brother cried for the first time since he was wombridden. I said, The casket felt weightless.

He shouted, You’re always going on and on about being haunted.

I left during repast. Between the stars, burning locusts—in the middle of the highway, an emaciated wolf gnawing at the brittle bones of a deer. It looked at me, and snarled as I passed: Wingless.

Act V It wasn’t long before I started staring into bodies of water. I dreamt I saw a girl’s face, pale and emaciated, pressed against the side of a bathtub.

I wrapped my hands around her skull, thumbs pushed to her temples, and strained to save her.

—Zachary Riddle

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Shopping for flower seeds Do birds grow from birdseed she asked, picturing paper packets labeled finch, chickadee, nuthatch—imagining taking each seed between thumb and forefinger and tucking it lovingly beneath a coverlet of soil.

Her mother smiled secretly thinking of the horror of a larger bird knifing its beak into the loam, snatching each unfledged seed from its earthy bed.

—Hannah Fillmore

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 33

Goldfinches -17 degrees Fahrenheit, and there are still finches on the bird feeder today.

I’m impressed with the birds, but I can’t look out the window for very long. How can they stand it out there?

I’ve always been susceptible to cold. If Mom were home, she would jump at the touch of my hands, mottled purple, red, and blue from my body’s struggle to fend off the cold.

“Goodness!” she always screeches when I sneak up on her and put my chilly hands on her neck. “Your hands are freezing! Put some clothes on!”

But upon turning around, she’d always start laughing at the sight of me, absolutely pathetic in my sweaters and hat, even inside the house.

Then she’d put a blanket around me and curl up next to me on the couch.

“You just need someone to warm you up, now.”

The problem is, most of the time, I don’t just feel cold. I feel like I am cold. The kind of cold that seems to start somewhere deep within you and suffuses your very bones with chill. It starts in me and I can’t warm up ever, it seems. This isn’t something that other people can just fix with their body heat. But my mom’s laughter and her embrace are a comfort, at least.

Usually, our home is filled with the sound of her laughter and reminders and anecdotes, alongside the tinkling notes of my piano. However, except for me, the house is empty this afternoon. And my fingers haven’t touched the keys yet today.

None of the house lights are on; the only light is from the bright white snow outside, which casts the house in grey-blue. I suppose if I stepped in directly from the bright wintry outdoors, it would seem dim in here. But I can see; I’m used to straining for light in the darkness.

It’s cold in the house today, too. My parents always turn the heat down when they leave on winter vacation to conserve money and energy, and I’ve done the same today. It doesn’t feel right to use so much, just for myself.

So it’s cold and it’s dark, and I can manage that. It’s what I’m used to.

It has been one of the chilliest winters by far, and I wonder if there will ever be enough light to break through the cold and dim. It doesn’t truly matter, though. I’ve been in my own winter longer.

But it’s different, experiencing this December day alone. It isn’t as if the cold is any colder, or the dark is any darker; these elements simply overwhelm me when I have no one to share the winter with.

I step away from the window and begin to wander. As I step through the hallways, I feel as though I am observing a museum exhibit. The furniture is the same, but it says different things to me. Chairs in occupied houses welcome you to lounge. But I’m afraid to sit in mine—they remind me that

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no one will sit down next to me today. Surely, tomorrow, Mom said, but not today. I wander to the large glass windows in the walls of our sunroom.

The sky is grey and the snow sits under it, an icy shell over the earth. There isn’t any wind, no falling snow, just cold underneath the day’s winter sky.

The only movement comes from the feathered creatures gathered at the bird feeder just outside the window. They peck at the birdseed that has fallen from the perches, gleaning the rare winter nourishment. There are only two chickadees today, and a goldfinch. I’m sad that there aren’t any more. Even in the winter, we usually have up to 20 birds at the feeder.

Dad says that this winter has been too hard for them. They sit still, rarely venturing out from their birdy hideaways.

How long has it been since I’ve ventured from my hideaway? Surely it has been too cold a winter for me to submit my own feathers to the everpresent chill. I shudder. I’m not ready. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.

The goldfinch still hops about, chirping and scratching at birdseed, but I can’t hear it through the glass panes. Suddenly, the house seems too painfully quiet. God, why did Mom and Dad have to go away today? I need to be able to hear the duet of their chatter and the vibrations of the piano strings as the hammers strike them under my touch.

My hand glides gently over the kitchen table and chairs as I pass them on the way to the living room. Even the wood of the furniture is chilled to its core. I could turn the heat up, I suppose, but I’m the only one home.

The lid of the piano is open, and faint light reflects off the gold strings, a gleaming bit of gold against the dull blue-grey of the room. I sit down on the cushioned bench, my fingers hovering over the keys. The white and black keys look strange in the semi-darkness, almost as if they too want to join the frozen silence of the day. I draw my hands back a little, but a strange burst of determination courses through me and I press the keys down gently in an E-flat major chord.

Sound fills the room, and I jump a little. I’ve almost forgotten that sonorous vibrations like that can exist when all other sounds of life have frozen in time. But the notes are still pulsating along the gold strings, sending out a hopeful flicker of warmth and light. I smile, and begin to play.

I have been playing piano for exactly nine years, and I can’t stop.

When I began to play, I was quickly hooked on the instrument. The notes I played floated through the air like the white flakes of a drug passed between street-dwellers, and when I played, I played as long as I needed to, lost in the resonance of the sound. I could go on for minutes or hours, whatever it took. The piano responded to me more than any person ever had. I poured every drop of emotion I wanted so badly to share with someone into the instrument, pounding out the anger I wanted to relay

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 35 onto the keys, substituting a friend’s embrace by lovingly coaxing a dolce melody from the strings, chatting through scales and arpeggios, demanding the piano to be for me what no one else would, as I leaned into the music.

I demanded too much, though. After a few hours, I’d stop. The piano accepted, but it did not reciprocate. Weary after a length of playing, I would pick up my hands and wrap them around myself, feeling strangely hollow.

I’d poured myself out, but no one was there to fill me back up again.

Today, as I play in the wintry chill pervading my empty house, the piano fills me up in a different way. Not in the way I’d wanted it to for so many years, but as a silent agreement. To fill up the silence as long as I need, to keep me company while the cold eases slowly in.

I labor from Chopin’s nocturnes to modern, ornamented reflections. I finish my current favorite—a contemporary nocturne that requires a touch so soft the piano merely senses that it must respond. The notes hang in the air, falling softly among the icy crystals of oxygen.

I turn over my hands slowly and observe them. They’re growing white— the air is still too chilly to keep them warm, despite the musical exercise. I caress them curiously and draw them close to me as I rise from the bench to observe the snow-crusted world from the window.

The birds have stopped flitting from tree to tree. Instead, they sit on the brittle, snow-dusted branches, their eyes shut tight. Their feathers are puffed delicately, and I imagine how much their little bodies must tremble in the frigid air. I, too, tremble a little as I watch them. My fingers aren’t steady when I lift them back to the keys.

F-sharp minor. I love playing in any minor key, but I love playing in F-sharp minor most, because my fingers have to learn to glide unapologetically between the black and white keys. It’s difficult. It requires concentration; there isn’t room for anything save the rocking 1-2-3 4-5-6 of my left hand’s movement as the chords entwine with my right hand’s legato melody. Still, it seems somewhat ridiculous to be playing a “Venetian Boat Song” when anything resembling a canal is frozen right now. No gondolas float elegantly over watery pathways here. I suppose sleds soaring down snowy hills are a near equivalent, but it is too cold even for that. No rosy-nosed faces peek out from scarves and hats on winter days this year.

It’s too cold for anything. When I look down, purple color has begun to evidence the life draining from my fingers, and I rub them together absentmindedly. It is so very quiet. The goldfinches aren’t singing today.

I walk back to the window to make sure that the birds are still there, that even if they are not singing, they will stay. There isn’t a single bird on the tree branches outside, and I feel a lump rise in my throat and tingles spread through my toes as I begin to desperately scour the lawn.

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Where are they? A sensation of cool ink spreads through me, and I grip the windowsill. Something solid. The wood is frigid.

I squeeze my eyes shut tight, taking slow, deep breaths, trying to focus on a beautiful scene, as I’ve been told. But my mind will only let me see the little birds, small, trembling creatures in a frozen, still world. Now I feel as if I’m floating in ink, and I breathe through my nose.

When I open my eyes, I notice that there are birds on the feeder. Right in front of me.

I sigh and squeeze my fists. God, I need to get it together. But I’m so damn cold.

I need to go outside.

I wander back through the grey-blue of the dark house, making my way to the closet. Boots, scarves, hats, extra sweaters, a fluffy winter coat; all make their way onto me until I am bundled tight. A barricade separating cold from cold.

Before I walk out the door, I catch sight of myself in the foyer mirror.

My face is pale, my eyes large. I imagine I can see the vibrations coursing through me, setting me shaking ever so slightly. I turn the doorknob.

The sun isn’t shining, but the white snow sets everything else in stark contrast. I start walking, making circles through the pine trees, directionless.

God, but it’s cold.

I pause when I round the house corner. Because there is a single goldfinch nestled in the snow under a nearby pine tree, scarcely moving.

All I hear is the crunch of the snow under my boots and my own heartbeat, so painfully and surreally loud in the vacuum of the earth. I hate its sound, but I also try not to hate it, to focus on the fragile bird in front of me. Then, all I feel is the sensation of the soft bird feathers under my fingers, because in a swift motion, I’ve stripped off my mittens and dropped them in the snow, to slowly cup my hand over the bird.

“Come on, little sweetie, get up! It isn’t so terribly cold now, is it?”

But it’s scarcely even blinking.

“You just need something to warm you up, now.” I start caressing the bird’s body, but then pause abruptly when I look at my own fingers, white ice against its golden feathers.

“Dammit, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” My breath is ragged and the pain in my throat expands. “Let’s get you some food. Come on birdie, fly.”

I’m nudging it gently, poking, feeling my own panic rising. I can’t tell if the trembling is coming from me or the bird, because suddenly I am screaming, and I scoop the creature up and run to the feeder, setting it gently on the ground by the seed that has spilled over from the perch above.

“Some food will warm you up.”

I sit directly under the feeder, my back against the siding of the house.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 37 And I wait.

A few snowflakes float down through the air, feathers in a vacuumed space. Each lands on the snow, fragments of glass on glass, sharp noise against the smooth liquid fear and uncertainty flowing through me.

And there are flakes on my eyelashes, distinctly tangible bits of beauty through my swimming vision, a vision too long scarred by a distorted view of myself, and what the world is.

Mom said to snuggle up inside, and she’d be back later.

But it’s gotten too cold for me to wait any longer.

More snowflakes begin to fall, and on the ground in front of me, the finch wearily pecks at spilled over seed from the feeder above us. I reach over to stroke its feathers.

It stops, closing its black eyes. I continue caressing it as the snow thickens and falls around us. White glass covers my fingers and its feathers, and I lift my hand to shake it off.

When I return my hand to the bird, it is unmoving.

It’s cold today. Much, much too cold. Too cold for little birds. Too cold for a fragile body to fight it away.

The little bundle of golden feathers on the ground in front of me lies lifeless. A nauseating hybrid of a laugh and sob form a lump in my throat, as I remember that my parents always told me not to touch the yellow snow when I was younger. I never considered that this could be because the yellow snow was too sacred. A pure, icy substance bearing up the body of something equally pure and beautiful.

How long has this little bird known that the cold would be too much for it?

The flakes drifting through the air are thick, demanding.

The earth allows this, allows the flakes to cover and consume it.

I close my eyes.

The goldfinches aren’t singing today.

—Kayla Feldpausch

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On the fear of becoming a statistic I lie

awake—jaw flexed

halfmoon scars on my hands where my nails have slept I answer what no one asks I

would never hurt—I would never do anything like that

I love to cut my hair the way it does not bleed I am pregnant with this briny pearl feeding when I feed no cord to cut

—Hannah Fillmore

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 39

after aubade in your morning voice your belly beneath my fingers feels like grape skin, and when we wake this morning I remember our first time together when i was too afraid to touch you. but it isn’t until i have left your bed that you say anything at all, and when you do, i almost don’t recognize the voice as yours. you tell me i have left an outline in your mattress that reminds you of those chalk lines forensics draw around the murdered. when i turn around to fill it in, i see you lying there, still, like your own dead body. afraid they will think it was me who killed you, i leave—taking mine, leaving yours.

—Riley Nisbet

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Totally Normal Until It Isn’t This is humiliating. I try to relax my shoulders and back against the table, my heels in stirrups, my knees reluctantly moving apart, spreading my legs open.

I flinch as the ultrasound tech puts the gelled wand against my abdomen and searches for my empty uterus. “How long will this take?”

“If it goes in, less than five minutes.” My doctor pulls on her gloves and sits down on a stool at the base of the exam table.

She doesn’t answer the unasked question, “And what if it doesn’t go in?” I tilt my chin upward and stare at the ceiling. There’s not much else to look at.

My body is aching all over, but is most especially tender in my abdomen and lower back, since I’m just two days into my period. It’s this unbearable pain that has brought me to this procedure in the first place. I take a few deep breaths and try to relax, but the discomfort stays. I try not to think about the menstrual blood that is inevitably leaking from my body, menstrual blood that my gynecologist needs to navigate to guide the tube up my vagina and through the opening of my cervix to implant the IUD securely in my uterus.

Even in my thirties, lying on the table with my feet in stirrups is embarrassing, but to do so on my period is downright mortifying. However, the cervix is more relaxed during menstruation, which makes it easier and less painful to insert the IUD. That’s the theory, anyway.

“I’ll talk you through it,” the doctor continues, and I notice she’s not wearing a mask. How is she not just a little grossed out by the sight and the smell in front of her?

“Okay.” I close my eyes for a moment and try to remind myself to breathe. Holding my breath will just make this experience even more unbearable, even though it seems to be my body’s natural reaction.

“You ready?”

I nod a little and then realize she can’t see me. “I think so.”

The top of her head bobs a little above the paper drape across my bent knees. “Your cervix is tilted to the right, which is totally normal, but it might make insertion difficult.”

The words “totally normal” coming from a doctor never seem to mean actually normal. My cervix tilts to the right and my uterus tilts forward.

My entire reproductive system is like a Tilt-a-Whirl, but this experience is no carnival ride.

“You’re going to feel a little cramping.”

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 41 It’s as if I’m being impaled with a giant metal rod, as the tube slides through my cervix and deposits the IUD into my uterus. I draw in my breath with a gasp and release it with a whimpering moan. I’m surprised to find that I’m crying. How do women possibly handle having babies?

“Here it is,” the ultrasound tech says with the wand pressed into my abdomen. “It’s secure.” I want to argue with her because the wand is closer to my left hip than in the middle, but I can’t think with the tube in my cervix.

The doctor says something, and then I feel her pull the tube out slowly.

The speculum closes, and she’s telling me to push back, that we’re finished, that she’ll see me again in a month to make sure everything is still in place.

“I left the strings a little long because they’ll coil, and we don’t want them to go up into the cervix. If they’re bothering you or your partner, I can trim them a little when you come back.” She picks up her laptop that’s open to the screen with my medical history. “Any questions?”

“Not that I’m in the mood right now,” I say, still crying, tears streaming down my temples and puddling in the grooves of my ears. “But when can I have sex again?”

She smiles a little. “Whenever you want. But if you want to wait a few days because you’re not in the mood, you can use me as an excuse.”

There is a pulsing pain burrowed into the center of my body. The ultrasound tech leaves the room so I can get dressed. I make the mistake of peeking under the discarded paper drape to find two thick smears of my blood soaked into the cover secured to the exam table.

The doctor had assured me that I would be fine, that maybe I would feel a little discomfort, but it was nothing that an over-the-counter painkiller couldn’t fix. Yet, I move slowly through the waiting room and down the stairs, the aches pulsing throughout my entire core.

A child sits in front of me on an airplane, her mother next to her, and her father across the aisle. She drops her blanket on the floor without realizing, the plush fabric landing on the tired blue carpeting without a sound.

Passengers continue to push through to their seats, stepping on or over the blanket, each looking down at the obstruction, and promptly ignoring it.

I lean forward and pick it up. It’s lime green and soft, a perfect travel blanket, especially for a five- or six-year-old, as this child appears to be. I reach over the arm of the girl’s chair and dangle the blanket, trying to get her attention. Her father takes it from me and places it in her lap with a quick nod to me.

“Thank you,” the girl says in a little voice.

I giggle at the sweetness and her gratitude. “You’re welcome.”

She again turns to smile at me. I can only see half of her face around the edge of the chair.

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temenos For a moment, I imagine she is mine and picture her climbing into my lap, pulling her soft blanket over us, and dozing together as the plane taxies for take-off.

Instead, she turns forward in her seat, and all I see for the rest of the flight are the portions of her long, dark hair that fall behind her shoulder whenever she adjusts in her seat.

Months later, I find a blanket made from the same color and material.

I open the package and run my hand along the inside, feeling the softness of the fabric. I don’t need another blanket, but I buy it anyway.

My cycle is confused, and at nineteen, so am I. Three days on, four days off, a week on, a month off. It goes on like this for about six months before I tell my mom, because I knew she would tell me to see a doctor, her doctor. I was dreading my feet in stirrups more than any kind of diagnosis, my body an embarrassment that was better kept hidden.

“He’ll probably just put you on the pill,” my mom says, as the pill is an easy answer to any woman’s issue. “It will help regulate you.”

After a brief physical exam and a round of blood work to test in a lab, I sit on the exam table fully clothed, swinging my legs back and forth, listening to the paper cover beneath me crinkle with each movement. I’m wishing I had brought the magazine from the waiting room. I’m wishing I had something to look at besides posters diagramming the fetal growth during a 40-week gestation.

The doctor walks in while scanning my chart. He looks first at the lab numbers and then at my face. I always suspect that, without a chart, doctors have no idea who I am or why I’m there. I remember every detail, every spoken word from the previous visit. They remember nothing. To them, I am just another body in an exam room.

He rolls his chair over to me and shows me numbers in various columns, explaining the range for each.

Normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. Elevated.

“It’s a slight variance, but still beyond the normal range.” He moves the tip of his pen from one column to the next as if I can’t see the correlation for myself. “What this tells me, is that you have something called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.”

I only recognize the words “ovarian” and “syndrome,” without any real understanding of what a syndrome is. “Is that a disease?” I ask.

“It’s a condition.” He scribbles a prescription on a pad. “I’m going to start you on oral contraceptives.” He hands me the piece of paper.

“But what does it mean?” I don’t have the words I need to ask the right questions. I can’t do anything but stare at him and try to read his body language.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 43 He writes something again and rips the page from the top of the pad.

“Here,” he says. “You can research it.”

I look down and see the diagnosis in dark blue block letters: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. PCOS. The doctor is gone before I have the chance to think of another question, the door quietly clicking shut behind him.

I’m sitting on the carpet, banging a toy drum stick against a toy drum and belting out the Alphabet Song at the top of my lungs while Ryan squeals in delight. Even Jaren—who is a few years older and sensitive to noise—joins the band by picking up a plastic trumpet and blowing into it full force.

The other adults are in the kitchen, hovering around the refrigerator and sipping beverages, as Nancy moves from counter to sink to stove to counter, lining up the many dishes of Thanksgiving dinner in a buffet.

A few of them peek into the living room, and I overhear someone telling my boyfriend how good I am with kids, how I’ll make a great mother someday.

“She’s so patient,” his aunt tells him. “The boys just love her!”

I bang the drum harder and move on to “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” getting Ryan and Jaren to join in with me until our voices overcome the kitchen chatter.

I move my fingers across the keyboard, and hundreds of thousands of websites and discussion forums generate when I hit the search button. I click on various links, skim, move to another.

I don’t know what I’m looking to find. Causes? Description?

Implications? What is this supposed to mean for me? I jot down symptoms as I find them, and check off the ones that apply to me.

• Acne.

• Difficulty maintaining or losing weight.

• Extra body hair (chin, chest, belly).

• Thinning hair.

• Irregular periods.

• Depression.

I keep reading. So far, nothing I can’t live with, nothing that I haven’t already gotten used to living with.

Then, the grand finale: Infertility.

I sit back in my chair and stare at the words. Women with PCOS may have difficulty getting pregnant and PCOS makes it difficult to conceive.

One website describes a defective pituitary gland center in which

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temenos fertility begins to resemble a man’s (constant), rather than a woman’s (cyclical). That hormone imbalance prevents ovulation, which affects the likelihood of conception. Birth control pills are used to balance these hormones, but one very intentional side effect to contraception is the inability to get pregnant. That’s where the cycle fails. I decide to stop taking the pill, as it seems unnecessary to fake a hormone balance.

There is the assumption that when a woman reaches adulthood she will—at some point—have a child, maybe even a few children. There is also the assumption that within all of us there lies an inherent desire to have children, that the proverbial clock begins to tick because our bodies were designed to breed.

My fertility clock doesn’t sound on the hour anymore.

I stand in the parking lot, talking to Heather after our yoga class, our rolled mats snug in carrying cases slung over our shoulders.

“Avery’s colic isn’t so bad anymore,” she says. I’m pulled from distant thoughts and realize we are—again—talking about her baby.

“That must be so hard.” I don’t know what else to say.

She nods. She’s grateful she has maternity leave from work at a special school for deaf/hard-of-hearing children. She teaches kindergarten.

“We’re lucky,” she says.

I had made the traditional visit to their house to meet the baby a few weeks prior to our class. Heather’s daughter, like her, is small and blonde.

When I pulled her into my cradled arms, she had squirmed and fussed.

Finally, she settled into sleep, as I tickled her lower back with the hand propped under her body. I immediately loved her.

Heather had sat across from us and smiled a new mother’s smile, though she admitted that she felt her once-slender body had betrayed her and the lack of sleep was making her impatient and often angry. I had coaxed her to come to yoga with me every week, and Steve had agreed to stay with Avery.

I had also invited her to come to class with me in an effort to maintain our friendship. She would not be the first, or the fifth, or even the tenth friend that I’ve lost to motherhood. Heather shifts her mat to the other shoulder. “It’s such an incredible thing, being a mom.”

I smile. I’ve heard this before. Motherhood is such an ordinary concept in general, but an extraordinary experience for the woman. Every friend of mine who becomes a mother acts as though no one else has ever done it before, that it makes her unique.

“I think back to who I was before Avery,” she continues. “I was just so… selfish. Everything was about me. Nothing is about me anymore.”

I do my best to keep my posture, but the statement cuts through every part of me. I am not selfish, I want to say, but the words don’t matter. Instead,

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 45 I lean in to hug her good-bye and tell her I’ll see her at class next week.

I haven’t seen her since.

I’m at a bar in a small town in New Mexico, snacking on pizza and sipping a watery draft beer. There is music reminiscent of high school blasting from the jukebox, and most of my friends are taking advantage of free pool night, playing game after game, and dropping plastic shot glasses into plastic cups to make Irish Car Bombs.

I’m seated at the bar, sharing a pizza with Bethany, listening to her story of how she ended up in New Mexico after growing up in Florida. Stories of a failed relationship with a man who sold her belongings to repay money she loaned him, and others of growing up in foster care and trying as an adult to establish a bond with her once-estranged father.

The bartender brings us a round of drinks and points to the dusty construction workers a few stools away. “These are on them,” he says.

Bethany leans in and smiles. “You must be ovulating,” she says, as if my fertility has radiated throughout the room.

I smile softly at her joke, and together we raise our glasses to the generous men, but we leave our interactions at that.

My body continues to empty my womb on the third week of every month. There is no risk when there is nothing at stake. It’s the wash cycle and then the rinse cycle.

I’m in a basement bar in Petoskey, seated across from a man I’ve known for less than a month, and yet here we are on vacation together in a romantic northern Michigan town. It’s our last night out before our drive home in the morning, and the conversations now include visions of the future.

It’s the conversation I never want to have, yet it’s the conversation that I always need to have.

“Do you want kids?” His question is gentle. He is gentle.

I lift the pint glass to my lips and take a long drink before I answer. “No.” His face relaxes. It’s the most pensive I’ve seen him since we met. “No?” I shake my head, my eyes looking at anything but his. “I can’t.”

He looks uncomfortable, and I feel obligated to elaborate.

“I have this condition,” I say. “It will be difficult to conceive. I’ve known for fourteen years, so I’ve just kind of accepted it. I don’t really have the desire. I understand why people have kids, but I don’t see a place for them in my life.”

He’s quiet. This isn’t what men like to hear, even men who themselves aren’t ready to start a family. Every man I’ve known imagines himself as a father someday.

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temenos “Men have left me because of this before,” I say. “I’ll understand if it’s something you can’t live with. It’s something you would have to give up to be with me. I won’t change my mind.” I press my fingertip to base of my eye to prevent tears from smearing my makeup.

Chris puts his hand to my face and takes my hand. “I like you,” he says and his lips curl upward in the way that they do when he is being genuine and feeling true happiness. “I want to see where this goes.”

I nod and force a tired smile. It won’t be the last time we have this conversation.

Another doctor. Another prognosis. This time the periods have become so heavy and so painful that I’m either missing a day of work each month or giving lectures while seated at the front of the room to prevent myself from fainting in front of my students.

I have an expensive ultrasound to screen for polyps, and everything is normal. It’s all normal, normal, normal.

I go in for a consult to discuss my options. I refuse the pill. The other two choices are procedural: uterine ablation, which is to cauterize the uterus lining with a laser. The other is implantation of an intrauterine device that would stay in for five years. Both prevent pregnancy. With the first option, though, pregnancy prevention is absolute, and the rare chance of a pregnancy could cause death.

It takes me months to make the decision. Publicly, everyone who knows me knows I don’t want children. Privately though, I can’t help but listen, at least a little, to the persuasive voices of others who insist that someday I’ll want children, that it’s unnatural to not want them, that I will change my mind eventually. The idea of scarring the lining of my uterus is too absolute for comfort. An IUD would give me some relief and a little more time.

The week before my IUD procedure, I ask Chris to drive me to my appointment. “They tell me it’s not a big deal. It only takes a few minutes, I guess, and I’ll be OK to drive. I’m just not so sure that I’ll want to drive.”

“Yeah, I can do that.” I can see the introspection move across his face like a shadow. “What’s the procedure?”

It’s easier to have awkward, medically technical conversations in the shower when you’re both naked and vulnerable and neither one of you can just walk away. I choose the moment when I have my eyes closed while washing my hair as the moment to explain it to him.

After the procedure, I meet Chris in the waiting room and barely make eye contact as I motion to him to follow me out the door. I take the stairs without thinking, and wince with each step, with one hand cradling my lower back and the other resting on my abdomen. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He can tell that I am not.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 47 When I get home, Chris prepares a heating pad for my abdomen, and he rubs my back until I fall asleep, the caregiver in him natural and benevolent.

When I wake from short naps, he brings me water and painkillers, and hugs me when I cry from the unrelenting pain. I am cradled and comforted.

At my aunt’s surprise sixtieth birthday party, children untie helium balloons from centerpieces and chase each other around the room with them. Eventually the strings come loose, and at the balloons float to the ceiling. The kids climb up onto chairs and jump as high as they can, but it’s still not high enough to reclaim their balloons.

Chris and I are standing near the buffet table as my cousin talks incessantly about her all-natural, herbal weight-loss enterprise, which sounds more like a pyramid scheme to me than a successful business. I listen to her pitch and vacantly nod, while Chris is quiet, but attentive. My niece Madison marches up to him, her elaborate dress rustling, and points up to the balloon.

He reaches to the ceiling and brings it down for her, a giant red one that she clutches with both arms. She runs off to play again until someone else lets go of their balloon, and the process repeats itself.

For the next hour, he patiently obliges each child by reclaiming a balloon that has stuck to the ceiling. He smiles each time and stretches upward, balances on the balls of his feet, retrieves the balloon, and hands it down. The rest of us are a little annoyed with the requests. Some dismiss the kids and tell them to go play something else, while others retrieve the balloons, but not before first rolling their eyes. All of us, that is, except for Chris.

I watch Chris as he moves around the room to follow a child’s runaway balloon, responding patiently and thoughtfully to each request, smiling each time a new child shyly approaches him. He’s comfortable in this role, more comfortable than making small talk with distant relatives, yet he’s not fussy and overbearing. He lets the children come to him, and offers assistance when he notices the younger ones about to cry whenever their balloons escape. I feel a pull in my gut that I don’t recognize. I know in that moment that I want a future with this man, and perhaps it’s a future that I have not yet been able to imagine.

—Melissa Grunow

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Mannequin

—Kennen White

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 49

TO C.C. (2008-2012) Pale bones beneath the porch, pale skin beneath the sun: you are my child, you are his fluttering breath beneath the naked curtain, you are

—Matthew Moffett

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Obsessive Squids retain the power to inseminate your mouth even after they’ve been killed, cooked, and deep-fried. - Matthew Gavin Frank

It is snowing—we run across the street, sliding past parked cars and stop signs. I halt, and you sigh, shiver, and brush against me. I imagine a giant squid beneath the city, its limbs crawling from cracks in the concrete. I am engulfed, a single shadow pulsing in a body of tentacles.

Through a fissure in my new sanctuary, I mistake a streetlamp for the moon—through a fissure, I can still feel the ghost of winter as you walk further into the white night, leaving me to fend for myself in a world built of gods.

—Zachary Riddle

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 51

Amanda Belle A boat builder in Maine with a good eye carved her model in 1928 using soft pine—his thumb on the wood and a carving knife tucked inside his fingers so that he could bring thumb and fingers together as if he was milking a cow. He was a holdout, didn’t like the scientific ways of waveform theory and testing tanks. His hands knew best, better than those guys with the slipsticks for damn sure. He had an eye for the sweet curve in a boat, especially its sheer line, or the precise outline of its deck seen from the side. His wife once said that an elegant shoe was like that, and ever since, he looked at women’s feet, not lustfully, but with a curious sense of appreciation for the occasional beautifully shod appendage, the keel of a woman, so to speak.

Around two years after he had first carefully set up her frame, her bones chocked and braced from the floor and the crossbeams overhead, then started hanging the planks, he called for a heavy truck and pulled the new boat along skids and rollers out of the building shed, leaving a woody placenta of bits and pieces and scraps. When she was launched in the early spring of 1930 with great celebration and the blessing of the town’s Congregational minister, she floated in level, serene peace, the waterline just where he figured it would be. Her name, Amanda Belle, was painted in gold leaf on her transom.

Her owner—the man who commissioned her—was a man of lifelong experience with the sea, understated wealth and honed taste when it came to boats. He and his family summered in Maine in Dark Harbor, and soon Amanda Belle (named after a python in a book he read as a child) was a familiar sight in Penebscot Bay. Sometimes she could be seen emerging from fog banks with a bone in her teeth under the press of a southwest wind or, at other times, just ghosting along in the faintest of breezes, every stitch of sail set, filling and collapsing when little ripples came and went on the glassy water. In those moments, sometimes the liveliest thing about her was her reflection on the surface. She was beautiful, even when she was still as a stone.

When the owner died, Amanda Belle was left to his children. By then they were all married and with children of their own. Eventually, to end the inevitable and now more frequent quarrels that came up whenever something costly had to be repaired, not to mention the labor of keeping her varnish bright and her brass bell shiny, they decided to sell her. It was wartime now, they told themselves, and no one went “yahtin’” any more with a good conscience.

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temenos Since her builder had only used the best of materials, Amanda Belle didn’t lose even a quarter-inch of her shape in the years that followed while she was on the hard. A young man finally bought her for way too much money, a former naval officer who had been discharged in the great shrinking of the military that followed right after peace had been declared. He was in love—what else can you say? He stripped off her old paint and dressed her in perfect dark forest green, with a gold stripe just under her rail, setting off that sinuous sheer. The stripe ended with a grape-leaf cluster at the bow, giving her a necklace that might have been made of the finest pearls.

And could she sail? Can a fish swim? Can a bird fly? She was in her element in a stiff wind, heavy weather that would keep most boats at the dock. Then the young man would stand at the helm almost dancing, his knees flexing and his body thrilling to her motion, the way she would meet and rise to each sea, throwing spindrift over her weather bow and letting it rattle along her deck, just as Katharine Hepburn might carelessly toss a long cashmere scarf over her shoulder.

Even after he reached middle age, that thrill never left him. He never married, although there were several love affairs. They all ended at one point or another when he had to make a choice: “Either the boat goes or I do,” the woman would say. After they went, they would talk sadly to their friends and their mothers about this idiot who threw away a good thing because he was so selfish. “You’re better off without him,” and “good riddance” they would hear from their mothers and friends. “Plenty more fish in the sea,” they would say with a hug.

They didn’t understand a certain kind of love.

He began to spend less and less time in his office in Manhattan and more time aboard Amanda Belle as he got older. Without a family, he had nothing else to spend his money on, and finally sold his house and moved aboard, selling most of his possessions so as not to be burdened by them.

He only owned one thing now. When he was in his late 70s, he broke a hip climbing ashore, and after he came back from the hospital, he never took her out again but stayed aboard, tied to the dock, winter and summer. Then, one deep winter day, a marina employee noticed some broken ice between the boat and the dock—they found his body a few weeks later after a thaw.

A short obit appeared in the New York Times saying that he “died suddenly,” and mentioning his war service and his business career. Amanda Belle, by now in bad need of paint, was seized by the yard for back-bills and hauled out. She stood on jack stands for a couple of seasons, next to a few other abandoned boats, her once-bright teak trim now gray and shabby and, here and there, a stain of rust running down her side from an old, oxidized nail.

Then one sunny, gusty February day, yet another young man saw her,

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 53 with her torn canvas cover flapping like a short skirt on a windy street.

That sweet sheer showed through everything—it couldn’t be concealed.

The breeze was cold and invigorating, and the light was a living light, full of life. He came across her by accident as he was wandering through the boatyard because it was by the sea, and the sea just smelled good, as did the yard itself, with the odors of paint and pine tar coming through the nearly melted snow.

He found a ladder nearby, set it up, and climbed aboard. Under the canvas, sitting in the cockpit, he discovered that he was blissfully comfortable. The coamings at his back were just the right height and angle, and her bronze wheel, now a weathered green, was perfectly stationed. After a while, he shoved the sliding hatch forward and went below. Even in the gloom, he could see the elaborate cherrywood paneling, the gimbaled oil lamps. The cushions were all gone, and there was no trace of mold. Standing there, he knew he was home.

He didn’t have a lot of money—still owed the bank for his tuition—and was on the bottom career rung in a large architectural firm, spending ten hours a day at the office and quite a few weekends also, but the path forward was clear and the promise of advancement and a much higher salary was implicit. He had been told—and believed it himself—that once he had paid his dues, he would be able to finally relax and enjoy life. On the other hand, as he was sitting in that cockpit under the canvas, he knew life itself was right where he was. He didn’t have to move an inch.

The yard practically gave her to him for a very low price, with the provision that he start paying for her storage. The cover came off in early March, and the young man spent every spare moment aboard, sanding and painting, but here and there she needed some more serious work. After she was launched, it became obvious that some of the planks along the keel— the garboards—were allowing a steady trickle into the bilge, even after she had soaked up for a week and should have been tight by then. There was no getting around it; Amanda Belle was a tired, old boat.

The young man was now drawn in opposite directions by his job and the Amanda Belle. He doubled down on everything. Now he had no time for any kind of social life. He ate quickly and cheaply whenever he had time. He moved aboard to save money and connected to the world only through his cell phone. Fortunately, he was within biking distance of the train, so he could get to work without a car. Every spare dime, after paying down his tuition loan and the docking fees, went into the boat. Yet, when he could find a few hours and the weather was fine, he would cast off and under old and patched sails, glide on the water, balancing in the most joyous way between wind and water. Amanda Belle was yet alive, and could

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temenos still give happiness to those who loved her. In those moments, the young man forgot all the hardship that he had willfully chosen from the moment he first sat in her cabin.

He grew older, and like the last owner, remained single—and for the same reason. She was getting older still, and despite constant patching below the waterline, her bilge pump ran more and more frequently. That lovely sheerline began to sag. When it rained, the deck leaked and forced him to move his bedding now and then. When there were no other places to move, he discovered that by pushing a thumbtack into the leaky spot overhead and running a waxed thread off to the side, he could deflect the drips harmlessly away. Before long, the cabin resembled a spider’s nest. Now sensitized to the sound, he would wake whenever the pump started—and it had begun to run almost constantly. He could finally sleep only after several drinks at night, and after a few months, several more. He started showing up at work late, unshaven, rumpled and even slightly odorous, until his boss finally had to talk with him. Rather than changing his habits, he began missing days in the office, calling in saying he wasn’t feeling well. His firm, besieged every day with newly licensed job applicants who would willingly work for less, finally and not so regretfully terminated him one Friday morning. They allowed him to empty his desk and provided him with a large cardboard box for his personal things. They were mostly photographs of his boat.

Back aboard that day, even though it wasn’t even lunchtime, he opened another bottle of vodka and, dropping heavily on the settee in the main cabin, took a long drink. And another. The pump was never quiet now—he stopped even noticing it. Finally he fell asleep, his head on his arms and the empty bottle on its side. That was when one of the garboards next to the keel finally jumped free of its screws, 80 years since it had been carefully, yet forcefully, bent into place, and its forward end spewed suddenly and noiselessly out from the stem. The water started to rise much faster now and climbed quickly in the cabin. He didn’t wake up until it was neck high, and by then his head was under water and he was confused and disoriented.

He thrashed and struggled, but at the last moment, he knew that it was the most natural thing in the world. He relaxed, finally, and he smiled.

—Buell Hollister

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 55

My Dark Passenger does my writing for me.

He entered me some years ago p r i e d apart my lips slipped between the g a p of my slight overbite bounced around on my tongue until I rolled him over.

He swam in my saliva and I tasted him.

Bitter dark chocolate the succulent juices of strawberries.

He bit into my bloodstream and floated on the river of my veins until he reached our destination.

We lurked among the shadows fed on their hungry ideas.

I made love to the darkness.

The pen jabbed into the fleshy white paper and we watched as the monsters crawled out from underneath my fingernails.

—Anna Deur

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Bios Kimberly Ann has learned, as a Michigan native, the intrinsic value of fleece, fire, and hot coffee—the elemental reasons she writes poetry wrapped in blankets on a well-worn cushion as a crackling fireplace DVD plays on her TV screen. She lives with her children and a small dog, and goes to class, studies, and works as a teaching assistant at Central Michigan University. Her poetry has appeared in the Central Review, Ruminate Magazine, and on Narrativality Coffee Bags.

David Banker is currently a graduate student at Central Michigan University where he is working to complete his MSA in Human Resources. David has been a freelance graphic artist for over 20 years, though he never became an artist full-time because he likes to eat, and he can’t stomach the famine part of “feast and famine.” While he enjoys working with a varied selection of media, he particularly enjoys working in black and white. This edition of Temenos is of particular interest to him as he has a passion for science fiction and mythology.

Anna Deur once had the dream of becoming a cactus farmer, but sadly that dream was cut short when she realized that cacti do not grow that well in Michigan, that and the fact that she lacked a green thumb for keeping any type of plant alive. Anna works full time with dogs, she contributes to the blog where she writes about the dogs and their day.

Anna’s poem “My Dark Passenger” received the PoetryJett Honorable Mention.

Shannon Cavanaugh grew up in the Ozarks on the family farm and held her first “hand-me-down” camera at age six. It was a 1957 Kodak Bullet Box, all manual, and shot black and white film. As a photographer and writer, Cavanaugh has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction and photography. She currently lives on the East Coast, but when she has the money, travels to Greece to hike the goat trails from village to village where she practices her Greek with the locals, picks grapes, and learns to make baklava.

Daniel Corfield teaches writing at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. His fiction appears in various literary journals and his poetry can be found in Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry. He enjoys surfing and playing beach volleyball in his spare time.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 57 Nick Farrant is a graduate student at CMU studying creative writing and working as a graduate assistant composition instructor. His fiction has appeared in 1029, and he was the recipient of the 2012 Gow Litzenburger Award for outstanding fiction. When not writing, Nick enjoys reading, napping, getting lost in the woods, and spending too much time sitting around a table rolling d20s.

Kayla Feldpausch is a sophomore English-creative writing major, whose cousins used to bully her into telling them stories at 6:00 am. Now, since she’s planning to write stories as a living, it’s probably a good thing her cousins were so obnoxious. When she’s not writing, Kayla loves playing piano, singing, drinking tea, and participating in any manner of shenanigans.

Hannah Fillmore is a recent graduate of Central Michigan University with a degree in creative writing and music. She teaches yoga and music lessons and once kept a gourmet cupcake blog. Hannah has traveled extensively, most recently on a European backpacking adventure, following her graduation. Hannah plans to pursue an MFA in creative writing and a career in academia.

Melissa Grunow’s writing has appeared in New Plains Review, Yemassee, The Quotable, 94 Creations, The Dying Goose, and Wilderness House Literary Review, among others. She has an MA in English from New Mexico State University and a BS in English-creative writing from Central Michigan University. She teaches composition and creative writing courses in southeastern Michigan. Visit her website at www.melissagrunow.com Buell Hollister has been a journalist, a sailor, and a marine biologist. A non-fiction writer for years, he has recently gone through a door into the larger room of fiction, a space big enough for him to swing the cat of his imagination. He has many stories to tell, and now, the time to tell them.

Julia Lichtblau’s fiction and essays have been published in the American Fiction Prize 2013 anthology, Narrative Magazine, The Florida Review, Best Paris Stories, Temenos, and Ploughshares blog, among other places.

She was a finalist in the Narrative Winter and Fall 2013 Story Contests, and won the 2011 Paris Short Story Contest, and 2nd Prize in The Florida Review’s Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest. She has an MFA from Bennington College and was a reporter and editor for fifteen years at BusinessWeek and Dow Jones in New York and Paris. She is book review editor for The Common.

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Ginny MacDonald lives, gardens, works, and snowshoes in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her husband and their dogs.

Matthew Moffett lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, with his wife and two kids. He has had poems published or are set to be published in the Central Review, Open Palm Print, and Modern Haiku. He thanks you for reading his poems.

Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are 2014 publications. Recent recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award, the Literal Latte Poetry Award, and a Puchcart Prize nomination. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, JAMA, Fugue, Atlanta Review, I-70 Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Blast Furnace, Crab Creek Review, Assisi, About Place Journal, and elsewhere.

He works as a psychiatrist with a therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington.

Riley Nisbet, a graduate of Central Michigan University, now occupies pre-graduate-school limbo. In the interim, he makes sandwiches and lives below the poverty line. His work has appeared in The Central Review, The Blue Route, on WordsDance.com, and, perhaps naively, in a lingering Facebook “Note.”

Zachary Riddle is a senior at Central Michigan University, majoring in English literature with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in psychology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Central Review and president of The Poets’ Collective. Zachary believes sleep is for the weak. He is fond of long, foggy walks in cemeteries at night, and the occasional Ouija board session. When he’s not writing, he’s sifting through horror films to find the right inspiration. He hopes to attend CMU’s MA program for creative writing in the near future, but until then, sleeplessness and writing will run his life. At least, Cthulhu won’t be able to eat his dreams.

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has published in numerous literary magazines. She was nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize and was a semi-finalist for the Pangaea Prize. Her forthcoming first collection of poems, Waiting to be Called, was published by IFSF Publishing in January of 2015.

Mythos, Monsters, and Madness 59 Joanna White is a professor of flute at Central Michigan University.

After performing in concert with a poet, she returned to an early love of creative writing.She has pieces appearing or forthcoming in the Examined Life Journal, Ars Medica, Pulse, Grey Sparrow Journal, Milo Review, Chest Journal, Imitation and Allusion, The Flute View, Central Review, Minerva Rising Literary Journal, and as a finalist in poetry contests in both Snow Jewel, and Naugatuck River Review. She lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with her husband and has a daughter and son in college.

Kennen White, a professor of clarinet at Central Michigan University, is also a photographer. His work can be found at Art Reach in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and has been published recently in the Grey Sparrow Journal, The Flute View, and Minerva Rising.