The Ana: Issue #15 DAWN

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

London Pinkney

MANAGING EDITOR & POETRY EDITOR

Carlos Quinteros III

POETRY EDITOR

Oli Villescas

FICTION EDITOR

Santos Arteaga

FICTION EDITOR

TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter

ART EDITOR

Minhee Kim

THE ANA

\THƏ\·\Ā-NƏ\

PRONOUNCED: AH-NUH (NOUN)

1. A collection of miscellaneous information about a particular subject, person, place, or thing.

2. The Ana is a quarterly arts magazine that celebrates humanity. We act and publish in line with the notion that everyone’s life is literature and everyone deserves access to art. While all rights revert to contributors, The Ana would like to be noted as the first place of publication.

The Ana acknowledges that this magazine was founded on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.

We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and we actively seek to honor and respect the many diverse indigenous people connected to this land on which the magazine was founded.

And we honor the fact that they are still existing on this land, and deserve to thrive. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we encourage you to pay an annual Land Tax or to find a way to aid in the redistribution of land sovereignty to Indigenous folks.

Cover design by Minhee Kim

Typesetting and design by Carlos Quinteros III & London Pinkney

Set in Georgia (Matthew Carter, 1993), Futura (Paul Renner, 1927), Krungthep (Susan Care, 1984)

THE ANA

DAWN

Summer 2024

Editor’s Note

Dear Readers,

Welcome to Issue #15: DAWN. This is the first edition in our two-part publication series. For our latest reading period, we received 1,234 submissions. As writers and editors, we understand what it takes to send your work to a publication—bravery, determination, a love for the arts, and a desire to be part of the conversation artists have been having with one another for eons. We are deeply grateful for your contributions, and we recognize the effort and passion that each of you has poured into your work.

To honor everyone who took the time to send us their work, we decided to split all 1,234 submissions into two issues.

You are reading DAWN, an issue buzzing with all the potential and freshness of a new day. One of my best friends and fellow writer Nicole Schoonbrood mentioned that 1234 is an angel number, an omen signifying positive growth and an opportunity to deepen connections with others. As you delve into the pages of DAWN, I hope you feel the warmth of our shared love for art and the are inspired t of our collective growth.

much love,

London Pinkney Editor-in-Chief

CROSS-GENRE LITERATURE

POETRY

St. Tracy K., Our Lady of Poetic Symmetry poetry by henry 7. reneau, jr.

To name it gives the emotion its form, an energy, thus creating joy.

Tracy K. Smith’s poets.org bio pic is a smile as wide as a balloonburst of helium happiness (shiny Black woman) like she’s sharing an inside joke with Gwendolyn Brooks—got June Jordan, Paticia Smith and Evie (::) Shockley laughing their asses off. The punch line being : There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.

Hers is that inner voice that conjugates is right from was wrong. Her inner child sailing down behind the sun, praying for the healing rain to come—who is always watching, who judges, exonerates, or condemns all the choices we have had to make : How did I get here? What have I done?.

She is a small axe to fell a tall tree. The possible of impossibility glinting silvery as every last chance. An unthemed poetry collection that becomes an open flame in the hands of a child. The pages of all there is, always was, the fragile ash of a mind burning in the fire. An enlightenment of fireflies at dusk.

If I were ever to meet Tracy K. Smith I would want to know why? we devour the body of the world, where every day, in our hunger, we repeat our past mistakes. A repetition digging its ego into the sand. An intractability in pursuit of more. I would like to think she would smile, and offer a bit of country wisdom. A magic trick— the seeming nothing that can levitate our hope, our spirit, our endeavor to persevere. An ascension : A little screaming is probably okay. But when you’re done, what’s the point of committing suicide when there’s still a possibility? Her oh so radiant!! smile, the glittering of Bowie dust in moonage dreams.

To name her imbues her smile a certain poetry, thus creating joy.

For the complete Lixão do Roger work.

Guilherme Bergamini, Lixão do Roger

Under The Wings Of Something So Vast

poetry by henry 7. reneau, jr.

The colonized :: still burdened with the conqueror’s economic exploitation and extractive practices ::: The odds of us being here :: at this time :: was improbable :: yet here we are :: a mathematical subtraction of diaspora tunnelling into a vanishing point :: both the fear of falling and the desire to climb ::: When I think about human-being :: all that comes to mind :: is that life will flaunt its many possibilities :: but does not give you second chances ::: This is not a doomsayer’s pessimism :: or a fear-induced panic attack :: but a promise that things will get a whole lot worse :: if they don’t get better soon ::: From the evacuated depths of our throats :: as in voicing our last words :: when desperation animates our lips to gasping for a last breath :: perhaps one small clue about what comes next :: in the Aftermath ::: Our life’s blood :: is a divination with a human heart attached :: the elements of sodium : potassium : and calcium combined in roughly the same proportions as sea water ::: The teaspoon of happiness allotted to each of us :: is rose-colored as a better way to look at the world :: and spooned into our expectations of happiness we believe we deserve :: the joy of something beautiful :: that we can always carry with us ::: But lurking :: ever so stealthily :: is the self-sabotage of our crippling delusions :: that we cannot improve our lot by our own effort ::: The drugs and alcohol and specific devastations of colonial occupations :: backward and forward in time :: all written in the hours before our world awakened ::: The colonized :: still burdened with the conqueror’s economic exploitation and extractive logic ::: The men who are said to shirk employment :: and the women :: said to lack any shame for their illegitimate children who populate the poverty of their world :: like the traditions that package female sacrifice as a virtuous given ::: And the patriarchal hydra-gaze of all history :: in all its omnipresent and omniscient megalo-magnificence :: never bats an eye :::

They ::: The Monopoly-token fetishism of Capitalism : Imperialism : and Global-I-zation :::

They ::: A non-Native : invasive species :: takes the best of everywhere :: and sends it back worst for profit ::: Crumbling is not an instant’s act :: a fundamental pause ::: Is not the symptom :: but the disease ::: They colonize and commodify everything :: the sacred and profane :: you : me : yo’ mama : yo’ brothers and : yo’ sistas ::: They ::: Instead of virtue :: idol worship material desires beyond their means :: and use corruption and gun-shot violence :: in the service of their deranged pursuits ::: Such deadly accuracy :: such measured control ::: Consecutive and slow :: Fail in an instant : no man did ::: Slipping : is Crashe’s Law ::: The a/massed :: herded together in urban : industrialized areas :: believe it will make it harder for the predator to select its prey :: and everything is unprecedented :: until it happens the first : second : third time ::: The hierarchal command structures that don’t allow the considerations of alternative options :: is God :: who exists in the loophole spaces between the Law :: and the dark matter that makes up most of Amerikkka ::: Is a rapacious vine clawing its way up : over : and through the brickwork of a poorly supported constituency ::: Dilapidation’s processes are organized Decays ::: ‘Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul :: A Cuticle of Dust ::: The erotic flowering beauty :: a shine and sparkle concealing the truth of decay :: that if unheeded : or denied as an impending doom :: will eventually bring the whole building tumbling down ::: A Boer in the Axis :: an Elemental Rust ::: Ruin is formal :: Devil’s work :::

They :: sacrifice the permanent on the altar of the immediate :: are dangerous and hypnotic as a candle’s flame to the moth ::: 3

Paula Praeger, Morining Walks II #6

The

Greatest Story Never Told fiction by

Robert Leone

An assistant fluttered in with a punch list running to five pages. Paneled in handrubbed mahogany, the room was piled with unopened Amazon boxes; there was no ceiling. An 84-inch flat screen hung crookedly on one wall. Even unplugged and with numerous colored wires leading nowhere, Family Feud played on low volume.

Hair-on-fire COVID, contractors who deserved to be crucified, and an interior designer with a vision for the master suite that included a bed constructed from pieces of the true cross. These were the things that kept Jay awake at night and caused his digestive tract to light up like a Christmas tree. Being the son of God was no bed of cala lilies.

The house in Vista Las Palmas was almost finished. Finally! Jay, tall, timeless and ethereal, hastily pulled on an embroidered white caftan and ran a comb through his shoulder length hair as he logged into the call. As always, he was bathed in sunlit golden rays emanating from a bank of clouds somewhere above his head.

“Here you go Mr. Jay sir, anything else I can get for you?” The platinum blonde, dark-skinned intern asked.

“Stop calling me Mr. Jay and bring me a glass of that Italian fizzy water, the one Francis always serves, with ice.”

“San Pellegrino, yes sir, I mean your lordship, I mean…”

“Look, kid, I know this is all new to you but just try and think of me as your kindly bachelor uncle, the one who only wants to help, not the one who’s trying to get into your pants. Understand?”

Mario just looked at him dumbfounded.

“What was I thinking? Let’s pretend I never said that, OK? Fucking HR,” he whispered under his breath while making a mental note to review the budget item he privately called Altar Boy rehab.

Mario backed slowly out of the room with his butt cheeks clenched.

That was Jay all over. He could heal the sick, breathe life into a stone-cold corpse and manifest an excellent bottle of red with just the snap of his fingers. He also had an unerring talent for sticking his foot way into his mouth at exactly the wrong time. “All I know is he didn’t get that from me,” his father would say to basically anybody who’d listen.

At that moment Jay’s computer screen sprang to life and the face of Veronica Cortez appeared; behind her, floor to ceiling plate glass windows revealed a skyline view of Lower Manhattan at dusk.

Jay took a breath and lit one of his special clove-scented cigarettes, then slapped another nicotine patch on his left arm, for a total of three. He exhaled to the sound of Gamelan music floating gently over the deep green rice terraces of Bali. In his mind’s eye the red roofed village of Ubud shimmered into view—streets littered with frangipani blossoms and the drowsy squawking of geese. He inhaled again and saw a line of women with fruit and bright orange marigolds piled high on their heads as they made their way to a temple ceremony on the outskirts of town.

“I know the first thing on that list of yours is the helicopter landing pad,” Veronica began. “So, let’s get that out of the way. I met with the mayor of Palm Springs three times offering to fund, at your expense, his run for the presidency in 2024 and buy everyone in Vista Las Palmas a new Bentley Flying Spur.

“They get pretty good gas mileage,” Jay murmured as his Balinese dream vanished into the mist. “Wrong religion but the right vibe,” he murmured, taking another sip of his San Pellegrino and examining the split ends on his wavy brown locks.

Veronica Cortez frowned. “Jay. Can we keep this discussion on track please?”

“Oh yeah sure, no problem. So, what are the damages?”

“The good news is it won’t cost you anything. The bad news is that in spite of my generous offer on your behalf I got a hard no all the way down the line. One of your neighbors called the Flying Spur the Hyundai of luxury cars. I’m sorry to say that your landing

pad is off the table so to speak. You can fly into the Palm Springs airport but after that you’re on your own.”

“I just don’t get it V. It’s not like I’m some flash-in-the-pan Tech bro throwing his money around. I’ve been on the scene for an ungodly amount of time. I’ve done a lot of good and now I ask for one little favor and I get nailed for it. And you can tell that neighbor of mine, whoever he is, to read Car and Driver, and I quote: ‘With a luxury-lined cabin and an expertly tuned chassis, the Flying Spur is satisfying for both the chauffeur and the chauffeured’. It just so happens I have three of them myself.”

“That’s great,” Veronica said. “You can use one to get in from the airport.”

One of Jay’s problems, and he had many, was his inability to relate to people, encased as he was in a bullet-proof celestial bubble. Gone were the days of riding into Jerusalem on an ass, sleeping in some seedy outhouse wrapped in hay with a reputed prostitute for a mother. His work as a carpenter? An exaggeration. He was more like a glorified handyman. Now, when Jay dropped off to sleep on his 1,000 thread count Frette sheets his dreams were filled with Rolex, Gucci, Tiffany and a penthouse suite at Caesars Palace. Sadly, there was almost no one around to set him straight.

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Jay said. “Help me out here.” Although no one had ever dared call him on it, Jay had a tendency to feel a little sorry for himself when things didn’t go according to plan. Often there were sniffles and a few well-chosen tears accompanied by a trembling lower lip.

But Veronica was having none of it. She pushed back her straight, severely cut dark hair and tapped on the computer screen with one slender manicured finger.

“I’m not a PR advisor, Jay, but your social media profile is in the toilet. Where’s your Instagram? Your Tik Tok? Your Twitter, or should I say X? Get an Iphone, post some pictures. How many times do I have to say this?”

“Pictures? Those dramatic, emotionally unstable Italians have cornered the market on anything Instagram worthy,” Jay said, blowing his nose into a Kleenex. “St. Peters,

the Sistine Chapel, St. Marks Square in fucking Venice. The little white church in the wild wood isn’t good enough for them? And let’s not forget the costumes. Capes lined in red satin, little embroidered slippers, amethyst rings as big as golf balls. Are they performing in a drag show? Who put them in charge anyway? And none of them fly commercial, you can bet on that. How am I supposed to compete? I’m this close to sending all of those red hatted posers, those, those…

“Cardinals?” V. interjected.

“Exactly, Cardinals. I had a vision of them the other night all dressed in greasy aprons stained with tomato sauce. They’re behind the counter in some dingy hole-in-thewall joint with a sign in the window that says ‘Pizza by the slice $2’, cash only. I’m thinking Hell’s Kitchen or maybe the sketchy part of Newark.”

Just thinking about it made Jay laugh. A deep booming laugh that splintered the mahogany paneling and sent the flat screen crashing to the floor. Family Feud continued unabated. The rice fields of Bali made another appearance in Jay’s head but this time the Gamelan music grew faint, the flowers withered, and the fruit gone to rot.

At least get on Facebook, which would be ideal for someone your age,” V. said. The expression on her smoothly chiseled and perfectly made-up face, indicated that she had heard this rant more than once.

“No one is my age, V. And no one has a resume like mine. I can multi-task the pants off anybody, including Elon Musk. I rose again from the dead. I parted the Red Sea.”

“That was Moses,” V. reminded him.

“Whatever. And do I really need to mention the loaves and fishes?”

“You’re a legend, I get I, I really do. But in case you haven’t noticed, a very ‘what have you done for me lately’ vibe has taken hold in the last century or so and you…well, let’s just say 2,000 years is a long time between hits. But again, we’ve gotten way off track, so let’s cut the small talk and get back to work, shall we?”

At $475 an hour,” Jay cut in.

“It’s 525 now, check your latest invoice,” Veronica said swiveling her chair slightly to avoid the rays of the sun which was setting somewhere over New Jersey. “OK, temperature-controlled wine closet-check. Stations of the cross diorama with running commentary by a cast of Oscar-winning actors-check.”

“Did you get Richard Burton? What a voice.”

“It wasn’t easy, but yeah, we got him. Holy Mary Mother of God mural for the west facing living room? That’s where we’ve run into a little snag.”

“Define snag,” Jay growled through clenched teeth.

“The model we hired for Mary? Turns out she signed a contract with Netflix for 13 episodes of a new show, something to do with lesbian vampires who don’t drink your blood they just like to give you hickeys. In any event the Vatican considers it a clear conflict of interest. We’re actively seeking a replacement.”

“Francis,” Jay grumbled, clutching his glass of San Pellegrino so hard it shattered into dozens of glittering shards that turned into a tiny cascade of white frangipani blossoms drifting in circles around Jay’s head.

“Moving on,” Veronica said, barely looking up from her computer screen, “LGBTQ themed patio/pool deck with state-of-the art sound featuring performances by all of the divas from the 70’s and 80’s (living and dead) and of course Barbra Streisand, who drove a really hard bargain, by the way. She may be in her 80’s but Babs had my lawyers in a headlock and begging for mercy. After they licked their wounds and stopped crying, the contract got signed, sealed and delivered, so we’re all good there.”

“It’s about time we threw our homosexual pals a bone. But how did you get that one past the Vatican?”

“Well,” Veronica said with a sly smile. “Let’s just say there were a few skeletons rattling around in the ecclesiastical closet that made his holiness amenable to a bit of a compromise.”

Veronica was not a lesbian to be trifled with. She possessed a law degree from

Harvard, numerous mixed martial arts trophies lined her mantel and a cosmetology license from Marinello’s School of Beauty took pride of place in her bathroom. After a couple of gin and tonics she could be persuaded to show you her Joe McCarthy & Roy Cohn Memorial Shrine which housed a collection of shrunken heads.

“Compromise, that’s an interesting word V,” Jay said. This whole weekend house in the desert fiasco has been nothing but one compromise after another and to tell you the truth it’s turning into a little bit of a downer. Why am I even doing this?”

“Now Jay, we’re almost at the finish line, this is no time to lose your courage. You’ll be drinking Mai Tais in the hot tub and grilling steaks in the back yard before you know it.”

“Exactly, V. That’s what I’m afraid of. You were right when you said 2,000 years is a long time between hits. Where’s my passion, where’s my shock and awe? How do I make the world sit up and take notice? I’ve never said this to anyone before but I’m starting to feel a little like Liza Minelli to my father’s Judy Garland if you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean Jay. Why don’t we put a pin in it for now and pick this up again in a few days. Get some rest, The Greatest Story Ever Told is on TCM this week, that always makes you feel better. I’m signing off now. Talk soon. Ciao!

Jay sighed as only someone with the weight of the world resting on his bony, yet still sexy shoulders could sigh. Thoughts of war, famine, child abuse and the price of a Gray Goose martini on the Las Vegas strip flashed through his head then disappeared. He thought back on his childhood, bouncing around with his family from Nazareth to Bethlehem and all the other forgettable desert towns where he performed great miracles and built his brand. On the dark side, he once cursed a kid who bumped into him on the street, willing him to shrivel up like a wooden stick and die. And then there was that time he changed some boys he didn’t like into goats.

Jay made a mental note to have a deep moisture conditioning treatment for those split ends and lit another clove cigarette, then rubbed Ben Gay into his palms and feet and that scar on his side. The pain always got worse after sundown. Looking up, he saw the

fragrant white frangipani blossoms drifting in a perfect spiral up, up, up and up before disappearing into a bank of storm clouds tinged with gold. He slipped on his sandals, stubbed out his cigarette and slouched over to one of the Amazon boxes that sprang open with a touch of his hand. Inside was the paperback edition of Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior. Jay plucked one of the blossoms that had settled on his shoulder and inhaled deeply before tucking it behind his ear, then settled in and began to read.

after Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)

Neurons

poetry by Raymond Luczak

The brain is messy but divine with its mycelial precision. It always announces where it’s going. Well, sometimes. I knew exactly what I wanted when I spotted you shirtless, your thick chest fur matted from having swum laps in a pool. I couldn’t believe it. This was on TV! We’d met briefly after a talk at NYU where you discussed your experiences as a hearing person in the Deaf community. I’d sent ahead to you a copy of my essay (“Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer”) but I never got a response. Oh well, I thought. You must be very busy. At NYU, amidst the melee starting to envelop you, I introduced myself. You lit up and said that oh yes you loved my piece. Your eyes dazzled me. I didn’t know how intensely a man’s eyes could microscope deeply into my spinal cord of desire. Then attendees behind me demanded their turn with you. The mob swallowed me whole until I was ejected out on Washington Square. Later I heard that you were a closet case. How I wanted to fall into that marbling pool behind you on TV, having you dive right after me, just like how you could listen to one neuron-damaged patient after another their lopsided stories.

Downward Dogs

fiction by Stephen Wunderli

Elliot was the last to join. His wife died in April. A freak snowstorm buried the tulips, and he took it as an omen that hope had gone missing. An hour earlier the sun was out, perched first on the old shed he built for her to house the gardening materials and small tools. The shed is bigger than the garden, which is kind of the point. Gardening is more about having a place to be than harvesting. That’s where he found her. She’d been carrying a tray of snap pea starts and her heart just stopped. She lay on the ground unable to reach the soil, so she pointed up to the heavens and caused the snow before taking her last breath. “It was her way of telling us that if she couldn’t get her snap peas in then no one could,” Elliot said. The paramedics came and Elliot let the peas take root right there where the starts were scattered. After three weeks of eating nothing but Weetabix we decided it was time for an intervention.

Tad went in first while the rest of us waited for the signal from the sidewalk. You could tell we were widowers by the mismatched socks we wore. We idled on the concrete talking about the potholes that needed to be fixed before they killed somebody. God has a stopwatch and when He hits the stop you go. But if you’re stupid or crazy or just plain deserve it, your time is cut short, and everybody knows it. They say nice things at the funeral, but they know you were crazy stupid and deserved to be called home before the streetlights came on. “People are stupid to drive fast on these roads,” I said. Earl nodded. We waited a moment, for a volunteer among us to walk the damp, broken sidewalk, up the yawing porch steps and knock on the door.

Tad sold light fixtures his whole life, so he knew exactly the right approach.

“It’s time you brightened up the place,” he said to Elliot. Me and Earl stood broadly on the sidewalk, our feet squared to our shoulders for stability and our backs aching from bellies that folded our belt buckles forward. I was the first to convert to suspenders. Tad

said I had no pride left. He’s right. Elliot had the same shirt on he was wearing at the funeral. No tie. A pair of Walmart jogging pants that had never been washed. The hair he usually combed over stood out horizontal on one side of his head like the fin of a dead shark. “I’m not ready yet,” Elliot said. There were casseroles stacked up on his front porch from the church ladies, 17 of them all smelling like rotting tuna. Elliot squinted into the sunlight, the first he’d seen it for three weeks. “Well,” I said from the sidewalk. “The snap peas are dead anyway and Sandy would have your hide for the way the yard looks.” Elliot lifted one eye. “Don’t tell me what Sandy would or would not have.” Tad jumped in. “Well, she wouldn’t have you looking like that. We’re coming over tomorrow. Put on a clean shirt.” The door closed almost pinching that fin of hair in the jam.

Earl drove a Pontiac big as a hearse. It smelled like urine inside because his shiatzu took to relieving herself on the back seat. “Your dog is incontinent,” I said to Earl on the ride home. “You are,” he shot back.

Elliot didn’t show up Saturday. We hardly expected him to. When my wife died, I stopped reading for three months. I just couldn’t. Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty used to unfold meaning when I read them in the winter light with a longshoreman’s cap on. I teeter when I walk, that’s the line I remember most, dread the most. I don’t want to teeter in my old age, I want to trip over third base and listen to the laughter, smile at my mishap of a life, roll over onto the orange dirt and look up into the cloudless summer sky and just close my eyes. Everyone will have a good laugh at my expense and have a story to tell. That’s how I’ll stay alive forever, in the retelling. I don’t want to die sitting in a chair starring at the goldfinches of Donald Hall’s last day. Music stopped for me too. No more Mozart’s Turkish March in the mornings with its bright notes conning me out of bed. I sat in the truck in the garage every day for weeks so nobody would find me. I was restoring that truck and worked most days in the small space with the radio playing a ballgame. It was to be a gift to Doris, two old high school English teachers driving across the Great Basin, rumbling and bouncing to shake us alive, swaying onto the back roads that rose into

the woods of our youth. The woods that held unnamed creatures and birds and feelings. The breeze would belong to us again, no artificial poetry to salve our aged bodies. We would rename the creatures and the landscape; sottle and scrug, haloed snap birds and golden drap crawlers on boughs of winged ettle trees playing songs of lubble and fain. All of it would belong to us and no one else.

Tad knocked on the window. “Looks like you could use some light.” That’s how the widowers club became the Downward Dogs. Tad’s wife died seven years after he divorced her, so he was cheery about death. It cut the bonds that tied him down. “Divorce is like a 90-watt bulb in a closet,” Tad said. “Lights up every crack and cobweb so you can get on living yourself.” We picked up Earl because he pulled his hamstring in a boxing class at the community center, that was his excuse for going, “to stretch out my hamstring, then I’m done,” he said. “It’s a spiritual enlightenment,” Tad said. “Be ready to have the corners of your mind illuminated.” Tad stuttered his little Japanese car into the parking lot and parked in the handicapped spot under the hand painted sign that read: Sheryl’s Yoga. All levels. The three of us John Wayned our way through the door. “Shoes please.” The mousey voice was from Sheryl’s daughter. She checked us in by writing our names down and letting us know that the first two weeks were free and then the senior discount kicked in. That first day I remember thinking “If Doris could see me now she’d hurl down lightning bolts, me standing here surrounded by women half my age wearing spandex so tight there was nothing left to discover. Sheryl approached us carrying three rolled up mats. She was wiry and dark-skinned. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail and the only makeup she wore was what the sun had painted into her skin tones. She would’ve been a young woman to a man with glaucoma, her edges softened and face slightly out of focus. She was Tad’s mark. A good twenty years younger. “I brought the old boys,” Tad said. “Their minds need a little more wattage and their odometers rolled back a few miles.” He was smiling that annoying smile of a salesman. Sheryl smiled back. She knew how to keep a customer. The mousey daughter shut and locked the door, cranked the blinds shut and

turned the placard over that said: “Nirvana in session.”

Elliot didn’t come out of the house or answer the door. We stood on the porch until we couldn’t stand the smell of fish anymore. “He’ll brighten up in a few days,” Tad said. “We’ll come back.” Elliot had spent his whole career as the water master of the town. It meant he accounted for every raindrop that filled Hansen’s Creek, then diverted into a series of canals that branched into ditches that bloomed furrows on small farms between housing developments. He had a map in his living room of the Tooele County dendritic drainage pattern, an upside-down tree that began with the gush of snow melt from the Oquirrh mountains and fanned out into an alkaline valley that took decades of cow manure to make fertile enough to grow alfalfa and a few apple orchards with their squat trees and colonies of subterranean mice. Elliot set his watch to the seasonal quadrants: Summer irrigation. Fall dormancy. Winter accumulation. Spring runoff. Sandy used to go with him to check spring runoff levels at the chutes. The blessed water so loud they couldn’t talk, just stand in awe. Elliot would write down measurements and calculate gallons per minute pumping through the arteries of the desert from some faraway heart. I went there once with Doris when we first moved into the neighborhood in our early forties. The place electrifies your body. We stripped down and stood there naked in the mist. It was 2am and we were being born again, the only humans on the planet. Doris giggled uncontrollably. Sheryl shut off the fluorescents so the only light in the room was moored to the blinds. It would drift slowly toward the west during class, genuflecting across the room. We three old guys unrolled our mats at the front of the class. Tad inched slightly forward so he could zoom in on Sheryl’s chakra every time she changed poses. “Breathe,” Sheryl elongated in the voice of a mystic. We were sitting semi cross-legged. Earl was grunting like every breath was being forced out of him. His crack escaped the cheap waistband of his sweatpants when we moved to the Lord of the Fishes pose and I decided the old ladies behind us would enjoy the view, so I didn’t say anything. Sheryl had us roll over onto our bellies. “Lie flat. Breathe deep. Let your body drift into the universe.” I felt more like

an anchor than a gossamer sail that could lilt on the wind. Tad was doing everything he could to keep his eyes forward. Earl had given up and his forehead lie on the mat, his arms alongside his mound of a body like flippers. I decided he could’ve been the inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s Thalidomide Kid.

Earl drove a long-haul truck right up until one of his varicose veins burst, inking his entire lower leg purple. He and Astrid were the same shape since birth. That’s when they met. Two doughy babies were laid out side-by-side at a church picnic. The long-haul business is what kept their marriage together. She taped a map of the United States on the kitchen wall with a bright red pin that poked holes to show the kids where their father was. He sent postcards from every truck stop; that deepened the melancholia love Astrid wore like a red poppy. When he was home, Earl fixed things, sagging floor joists and split sewer lines. He cleared the backyard of chickweed and planted an apple tree that grew slow and crooked from malnutrition, barely surviving and producing a few white blossoms in the spring turning into green apples that never fully ripened. He was a better husband on the road, someone to be longed for. When parts of the map fell off the wall, perforated in odd shapes from so many travels, it was time for Earl to retire. He shaved his beard and sat shirtless in the sun missing the feelings of being missed. He didn’t fall in love with Astrid again until after she died and his heart could long again.

“Raise your head and stretch those arms as far as you can.” We were now in the Cobra pose. Tad licked his lips.

Tad came home with a motorcycle the day after his divorce. The seat sloped like a recliner and the gas tank bulged with more fuel than a man of his age could burn in a day. He roared up my driveway and revved the engine until I came out. The rumble of testosterone filled the air. Curiously, I was reading essays by high schoolers on Dante’s Inferno. Tad wrung the throttle again and it felt like the second circle of hell was about to open. He smiled proudly. Cut the engine. Heaved the kickstand down with the right foot clad in a new black boot with a heavy sole. He unstraddled the bike and stood unsteadi-

ly as if he had rode his legs numb. The bike slowly got away from him, rolled down the driveway—a sliding wildebeest, and tipped over in the street. Gas was leaking everywhere. The machine weighed more than two old men could lift. “Might be best to leave your bike in gear on a slope,” I suggested. It was a metaphor he didn’t get. You can’t just put your life in neutral. You’re going to roll backward. I was going to explain it to him, but he’s not the brightest bulb. So I walked next door to find some younger neighbors, perhaps some teenage boys that could right the bike with their youth, make the lesson more clear to Tad. He sold the bike a week later, a large, humiliating scrape across the polished red gas tank. People asked more about that gash than they did his divorce. I think he avoided a crazy stupid death.

When people breathe out, really push the breath out from the deepest parts of the soul, it smells wretched. Earl breathed on me, and it stank like soiled hospital sheets. I don’t know why we were facing each other to breathe, but there we were, our bodies stretched out and our faces turned to the side exhaling secretions from abscesses of regret. It was putrid. Earl started to laugh and turned his head. I raised my head and let my chin rest on the mat. I inhaled deeply as instructed, until my chest ached, fibers stretching. I held it while a burning sensation spread from my sternum to my lungs to my entire body. Every inch of me was sweating, soaking the mat with stench. Exhale. Tears poured from my eyes; I don’t know why. We followed Sheryl as best we could into the downward dog, that punishing pose that forces blood to your head while your calves and hamstrings howl in protest. I was releasing tension, bits of me were being shook lose like spare parts and misting in my dank breath. It was as close to a spiritual experience as a backrow church sitter could get. I wondered if the whole room were feeling the rapture. And then, Earl farted. Not a breezy kind of accidental passing, or a tight-cheeked squeak that could be mistaken for a dry door hinge; no, it was a rumbler. I collapsed onto my knees, strangled with laughter. It was the kind of laughing fit that purges all sorrow. I bought the senior discount.

Tad’s first wife went through a case of hairspray a week. She was a piece in his showroom. He said to me once that all he had to do was bring her to the store in a tight sweater and sit her down at a vanity with some soft light and he’d hit his quota by noon. Doris called them the magazine couple because everything about them looked like a Chesterfield ad. At a time when high hair was all the rage, Doris let her dark waves fall to her shoulders in natural rivulets. Once when she was pushing verbena into soft soil, she recited a limerick. It was Saturday afternoon, the kids were down the street, the spring sun effulgent, warming us after a long absence. I was raking manure into the beds just ahead of Doris when Tad and his showroom wife started arguing in the driveway about something apocalyptic like the price of a new handbag. Doris held the small, purple flower and talked to it as if it were Yorick’s skull:

A man in blue polyester

Had a girl whom none could best her

And a coif so tall

It caused her to fall

But she bounced right up off her chester

Doris made the mundane a human celebration. When we were both worn out from trying to sharpen dull young minds, we would sit in the backyard with our feet on the struggling grass. The dry needles were like acupressure, soothing the inflamed fascia in our beleaguered arches. I would breathe in her smell, the natural sweetness of her skin, touch her on the forearm and call for some entertainment. “I, Pitheous, require a verse from you to deepen my love.” She’d sigh and lean her head back to gather words from the air and begin. “For a man such as you so brazen. I would not entertain unshaven. But alas it is true. I am as stubbly as you. Thus, our affection would set the bedsheets a’blazin’.” We laughed and held hands and watched the children grow. Senescence seemed so far off, but it arrived with its slow threat to leave me alone, with no verses to recite, only Whitman to drown myself in while she slept, erasing memories until she could no longer speak them.

His verses became my own: “And I know that the hand of God is the promise of you.” I whispered again and again into the ear that shied coyly away from my breath, the lips that brushed my face in condolence when the diagnosis came. We would recreate our world again and name the forests and the trees on pads of newsprint. I drew birds and cats and each species of flower we had known together. The flora of our creation: purple angel wings and scarlet bubbles, minstrel grass and, curly shade beside the warming tree. The hand of God is the promise of us, the ghost writers of the universe.

We were still laughing when we got to Elliot’s house, all three of us rack-stretched and taller, dopamine charged and wanting to share the news with Elliot how Yoga releases all the toxicity from your body in sweat and gas. It was still early spring, and the sun only warmed the side of your body it splayed across. The other side was victim to the cooler air. The three of us walked up the porch together and stood next to the monument of casseroles. Tad knocked. No answer. The door was locked, unusual for Elliot. “He leaves a key on the windowsill,” Tad said, and reached for it. I suppose the last place you would look for a key is in plain sight. Tad rattled the key and pushed the door open. We all entered the room, one behind the other, and let our eyes adjust to the light. Elliot lay face down, half in the kitchen and half on the dining room rug. The stench of grief that left his body when he died hung in the room, waiting for us. I approached him carefully while Tad went for the phone. I crouched beside Elliot. Blood had flowed from his nose in streams across the floodplain of his linoleum. A trickle had branched off and dried up. His body was gray and cold, but his thick hands rested half open like the emerging blossoms of a peach tree. His heart had failed right there on his way to the kitchen, the paramedics told us. But I know he stopped his own heart. He hit his face on the way down and embraced the fall like Adam, the painful transition to another world. The paramedics removed all trace of him, all that is except his maps of dendritic water patterns that were a secret code to his soul. Sheryl was glad to see us again. We were the masters of three poses, four if you count the Standing Pencil which I contributed. Stand straight, hands above your head

like a diver. Breathe in. No flexibility required. Touching toes was out of the question. We rolled from front to back and back to front, grunting like burn patients turned over to avoid bed sores. And we did the Downward Dog. It was the one pose that challenged us, stretched at the dried leather sinews of our aged bodies, drew involuntary breaths from our fat-burdened lungs. When we dropped to our knees and placed our foreheads on the mat to exhale slowly and inhale in short rhythms, I was a sweaty mess. My pores opened and rank odor was released. I wept, again. A haze of pastel colors crossed my mind in waves. Sheryl opened the blinds and sunlight poured in. Old people behind me stood up, feeling the release of knowing they survived another day. I stayed in the child’s pose, arms outstretched, head down, tears dripping onto the mat. Earl nudged me: time to go.

“Leave me,” I said. I heard footsteps moving toward the door, and Sheryl’s soft breathing. I raised up and moved into a seated pose, mirroring Sheryl. Her eyes were closed yet somehow, she was aware of the karmic experience I was having. I closed my eyes and let my breathing match hers. My exhales moved the sun. I smelled the linen dress Doris wore after letting it dry on the wire in the afternoon. It was sage thousands of years old, and the early spring blossoms of fruit trees begging the bees to wake and collect pollen from their stamens and deliver to the stigma of neighboring blossoms, pollinating another world. I could smell the spring turned summer in that dress. It was an endless verse and at night, with her shoulders backed into my chest to watch the stars it smelled of blue pine from the tops of the mountains. We named the stars Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Angel and Jesus.

It was late afternoon when Sheryl opened the door for me and I walked out of the studio, aching with a line from Donald Hall: old age is a ceremony of losses. I ambled along the street for a time then crossed to follow Ranch Road curbed with new grass, tender and sweet smelling. The road bent slightly, headed dead West. I walked until the sun eased down the back side of the mountains and the stars jumped into the night like crickets, slowly at first, then all at once, arriving in a celebration. I followed the road un-

til it came to a gate locked by the watermaster. The key, like the one at his house, was in plain sight, hanging from the third fence post. The gate ached open, and I moved up the trail in the dark, listening to the rumbling grow closer, the maternal labor of the earth as it renews. I climbed the boulders then the short concrete wall and stood at the edge of the chute. Before Doris died, I made her promise me one thing. I whispered into her ear, and she slowly nodded her head. I made her promise me that she would send me a sign, that no matter where she was, she would somehow let me know that she was there, that she made it, that she was happy, that she was waiting for me. I stripped down and threw my clothes onto the boulders. The amniotic mist quickly covered me. I shivered. I balanced on the slab and drew my body into the warrior’s pose and listened to torrents turning over and slamming into the spillway demanding to be released. I breathed in deep and listened, listened carefully to those tide over currents that drifted off and became mist, became whispers, became the lasting, endless breath.

a belated ode to the amerikkkan dystopia poetry by

henry 7. reneau, jr.

is the Mack truck plowed through the carbon monoxide of rush hour traffic . a [w]recklessness as harbinger of [w]reckoning , the murder of crows exploded from the ancient oak loomed above the campus commons . is a premonition of cloven hoofs skipping up the avenue as some vindictive God’s heart colludes with the ruination of humanity . all Empires have eventually been brought to dust , Ozymandias-like consumed by Progress askew , and repetition oblique in mid-flight without a compass . the children are learning how to live with anxiety , can see past the lies in the Empire of hypocrisy . their prayers as generic and futile as the cardboard signs attached to homelessness . the economic tyranny of the precipice , as incendiary as hindsight looking into the fire , and conflagration looking back—every life burning both ends of the wick . how we do anything is how we do everything . the same atoms and molecules as them who came before us , like the rutted path of all suffering is born of yearning for more , is the pending strangulation of an Anthropocene nuclear winter . an errant Judas-voltage surged against the eye of the sun , and death tolled by degrees of latitude and longitude . the corporate corruption of rogue apostles and robot service representatives curdling a twilight’s souring to black blossoms , an epilogue of bleached bones made mountains of themselves and the earth wept the color of a transient’s smothered campfire ash as the blood moon bloomed through the blight tangled skein of the last trees on earth—dispossessed to dystopia , between the once city-planned idyllic and microparticulate sunsets . says everything about not in our lifetimes , that our children have gradually awakened to a fear of , because we always wanted more , and more , than was ever within arm’s reach .

Tytti Heikkinen, Midsummer Night

Squash Blossoms

poetry by Adria Vidales

Im crushing the squash blossoms against my chest

Held up by my faja

And I’m thinking about how land is life

And how many lives were taken for some land

For this land

For the land in Palestine

For the land in Mexico

For the land in the Philippines

For the land in all the places you could name

And all the places whose true names are forgotten

Les prometo a los muertos de la sagrada Falasteen que nunca les vamos a olvidar

Te llevo en mi piel y mi sangre en cada momento que estoy viviendo

Niños

Lloran por su madre cuando no está

Y yo

Lloro para la madre tierra cuando usted no está

Porque ustedes son su memoria respirando

Y aunque la respira te robaron

Nunca se falle la historia

Sigo luchando por el amor, mi amor

El amor es mi fuego

Y la alianza de nuestro alma colectiva

Glory and power to each and every martyr

Your blood shall sprout the red poppies that your children and their children will remember you

by

Your memory is as sweet as Gaza’s strawberries

Your death will not be in vain

We promise you that

On

Decorating the Rooms of a Poem poetry by

Kit Willett

In every poem, there are distinct rooms: this one has four. Each room can be decorated in a variety of ways; for instance, this room has warm white wallpaper: the words eggshell or alabaster are brought to my mind. Perhaps it needs a navy headboard and matching sheet set.

The bathroom, conversely, is cold: its bleak tiles freeze my feet, and its bright, burnished surfaces blind my eyes. To cut through the straight shape of crisscrossed stoneware, I must ornament the space with a gold, scented candle and a meagre succulent in a complementary, earthenware pot.

I move to the lounge, and I feel my whole self relax as I sink into a room already furnished with tan couches that sit against the mauve walls; the fireplace is mahogany, and the mantle is minimally adorned: a bowl, a framed image, a lamp. I was tempted to place a clock, but it would not go.

The cupboards in the kitchen are a cobalt blue; it can be jarring coming from the lounge: a shock. I have not decorated here: not much would fit with the confident colour our landlord has chosen. But, as I say, each room—each chamber—is distinctly its own.

A Certain Ghost’s Long and Final Fall Back to Earth fiction by

Peter Biles

I’ll just skip most of the pleasantries and let you know the basics, which are that I died on Christmas morning and woke up to find myself suspended against my ceiling with the full cooperation of this here incorporeal form, and that for the past five years, my belongings have been stripped from my quaint little flat but yours truly has remained nested in its empty halls.

I don’t know why no one wanted to live here. Except maybe I do. Nobody wants to live in the flat where the previous tenant vaulted to his untimely demise. You know, I hardly remember what happened. I woke up ready to continue my tirade against consumeristic X-mas shopping maniacs and how the holidays are occasions for eggnog and nostalgia and kitsch Christmas gnomes and religious myths, went to the window balcony to shout it like I did every morning of the holiday season, and somehow that early morning lack of balance and a failure of depth perception had me flailing twenty stories to the snowy walks below. The railing broke. That much I remember. My balcony railing, a paltry assemblage of welded iron, gave way and sent this twenty-six-year-old philosophy grad student kicking against cold Christmas air until splatting into the Village. And when I opened my eyes, I was bunched up in the corner of the room, my flat, stilled stymied with junk food and magazines and pizza boxes, now fuzzed over with the gray light of semi-nonbeing.

Five years. The movers came and went. Some morticians in white suits carted the body away and the bellboy had to shovel the bloody snow into the sewage grate. Some other guys came up with my aunt and uncle, showed them the hellhole of a flat, sorted through what they wanted to keep I guess, amid the sniffles and head shakings of my courteous aunt, and then for five years, nothing.

No one could see me. I’ve tried it a million times. Let people walk through me.

Stood with the groomsmen in I don’t know how many weddings. The bellboy can’t see me, nor the secretary, nor those who flurry down the streets of New York. And I regret to report that Joey can’t see me either. That one tends to kind of hurt, but whatever—it is what it is. She’s moved on anyway. Furthermore, apparently the community of local ghosts is a scrawny one, because I haven’t found any ghoulish compadres along the way either.

But that’s enough for now. I’m a postmortem prospector in a city filled with souls of those who still scrambling for the golden egg at the end of the tunnel. Only, I’ve got news for them—they’re scrambling for residence in an empty flat where they’ll watch their nuggets of success get carted away by forgetful minds.

It was December 24th and on the eve of the fifth anniversary of my glorious plummet to ghost-dom when the door to the flat opened as I was hovering over the countertop in the kitchen replacing a chandelier bulb, and a middle-aged man and a boy of maybe ten tramped into the living room. They were carrying boxes. The boy sneezed and the middle-aged fella, who wore a Patriots beanie, thick ski gloves, and large round glasses, said, “God BLESS you, Stevie James!” And then they put the boxes down.

“So your first deposit includes this month and next month, and comes to $3100,” cooed the landlord from the hallway. “Drop it off when you can, and WELCOME home!”

“Thanks, Marta!”

Marta. Oh yes, good old Marta. I hadn’t checked in on her in a while. But my first reaction here was to still the chandelier and duck behind the counter. I can’t be seen, except maybe in the brightest modes of sunlight (haven’t verified this but have gotten some doubletakes whilst walking through a sun-banked Central Park last summer) but I can still touch the broken chandelier, and my hand isn’t so disembodied that it can’t rustle someone’s bedsheets or turn over a vase on the coffee table.

They were tenants, obviously—the first tenants the flat had seen in five years, and by the look of them, seemed pretty much over the moon to be here. “Wow,” the dad (presumably) kept saying. “Just wowza. I mean gosh. Isn’t this place so much better than our last place, Stevie?”

Stevie rooted around the hallway, went in and out of the two bedrooms, and reported back on the “nook” he’d found with a few books and magazines stowed away. I didn’t want him touching those. That was my nook, and this was my apartment. I hadn’t really thought of it that way until they came marching in there like that, but you get used to the silence and solitude after a while, and despite being ethereal, can’t help but feel like you’ve still got some property rights. At least he won’t find the stash of literature I’ve got stowed beneath the floorboards. That’s all crap from childhood. Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and all that stuff you feel embarrassed to like as a grownup.

Stevie lugged back a stack of the New Yorker magazines and splayed them on the floor as if they were cowhides. “Whoa! Hey we’ll read ‘em soon. We gotta help those guys with the other stuff.”

Over the course of thirty minutes, the father and son joined ranks with a couple of moving guys and brought in a measly grand total of a sofa, almost caved in at the center, two twin mattresses (which they put in the same room), a coffee table with so many gashes and scratches it could’ve been plucked from the rubble of some revolution, and a rug of many colors—not to mention the final addition, which was a spindly artificial Christmas tree, pre-decorated with wretched flossy twine and glass icicles and stars.

They stuck the tree in the most coveted corner of the room, stepped back to observe their work, and then Dad paid the movers and then shut the apartment door. I whooshed back to the kitchen with folded arms.

I was no millionaire in life—please understand. But I wasn’t…like this. They unpacked their boxes, filled with old pictures, dishes, a candle, and some other garbage. Most of the photos were of a young woman with dark eyes and a light, pensive smile. These they enthroned in various high spots in the apartment. Gosh. They were the real impoverished. Whether they’d signed a vow of poverty and disavowed the poisons of capitalism and had a portrait of our lord Karl Marx hiding somewhere in the box I didn’t know, but I started to get curious. These might be my kinds of people.

They didn’t have much to set up, as you might have figured, but the kid Stevie felt the need to explore the nook again, reemerging with another bundle of literature I’d snatched from the nearby Barnes and Noble. Why the accusatory looks? It’s not as if I could buy anything anymore. Besides, none of these corporate hogs deserve my cash—not that I have any to spare of course. Being invisible except in intense beams of light affords you the kind of liberties you should have had as a flesh and blood guy. Remember Gollum and the Ring of Power? He could do whatever he wanted, and for five hundred years. Sure, no one could see him or love or know him in such a condition, but he probably got what he felt entitled to, and without the repercussions. Obviously I’m not going out robbing banks, but a ghost has got to read his Nietzsche. I’m trying to be a refined person, okay?

They set up some more dingy Christmas decorations, including all these awful crayon depictions of reindeer and wise men—were the wise men riding the deer? And they even pulled out some “Advent” devotional book with illustrations of the nativity and angelic hosts and whatnonsense. I’m anti-consumeristic and anti-religion, so you can imagine that double whammy that accosts me amid the annual yule. So, they were poor, I guess, but shoot—they were the devout poor, and that puts this agnostic ghost in a tough spot empathy-wise.

After they were done adjusting the sofa, they stocked the cupboards with their paltry collection of mugs and plates, and I decided to flutter out for some fresh air. I fell the twenty stories as gentle as the dusty snowflakes cascading on the avenue, and swished my way to the sub where I sat between a man thumbing through a sudoku booklet and a middle-aged lady who kept dabbing her nose with a tissue although she didn’t seem to have a cold or anything. I got off at the square and “walked” into the Central Park amid the happy hordes of tourists, the ear-muffed runners in leggings and purple vests, the literary couples from 5th avenue who knew they were above the sentiments of the season, and the few cohesive families who threw frisbees to dogs and let their kids roam on the

stony knolls. One time I saw Paul McCartney here put in eye droplets on a bench. I followed him for three or four blocks and then stopped when a group of college kids assailed him for signatures.

Today, though, couples were hobbling in skates around the rink and men held their coffees to their professional chests, and I sort of got to missing it all. It’s a weird thing being able to see everything but not being able to participate in any of it. It’s like watching the world from a magic window. The window lets you get as close as you want to anything in the world, to any person, city, or treasure, but refuses to let you be a part of it. I whisked myself up above the trees to get an atmospheric view of the place, then zoomed back to limit my territory to a portion of bench by the pond. And just as I got to feeling more that sort of way, who should sit down next to me but the woman herself, the embodiment of tender perfection, the Venus standing in Botticelli’s clam shell—Joey Lander, dressed in a brown knee-length coat and a red beanie, brown curls bobbing from beneath. She crossed her legs and extracted a cigarette from her purse and struggled to light it in the wind—I put my blank flipper up to block the airstream and miraculously it worked. She piped away and breathed the smoke out into the cold air and rested her arm on the bench backrest. Almost so it was around my shoulder.

When we were dating in grad school, I asked her to move in with me—yes, the paltry flat that’s now being invaded by Stevie and his pa. I asked her that a couple weeks before my death, and when she was packing a suitcase in her apartment in the Village getting ready to go to Vermont for a ski trip with her parents. She raised her eyebrows as I pleaded and snagged a cigarette—that’s still her prime vice, I guess, and then she said she’d think about it while criss-crossing down the powdery slopes. It doesn’t take much guessing to know that she didn’t move in with me. Something was holding her back. “The stuff you talk about…” she said the next morning over coffee, kneading her forehead. “I don’t know. It worries me. I’m no religious nut but what you’ve got is some real anger. Some genuine bitterness at some cosmic daddy in the sky, and that…God, that really freaks me out.”

You might say that her silence on the ski slopes impelled me to become a slob that Christmas season, defame the flat into something of a pigsty, and conclude that if I was going to be an angry nihilist I might as well live like one. One too many drinks on Christmas Eve. One too many self-pitying rambles down the street and back. And then over the railing I flew, wishing my descent was like Joey’s on the mountain of snow—soft, elegant, and beautiful.

Today she looked almost the exact same as I remembered her. She had that spray of freckles under her green eyes, now webbed a bit with creases, courtesy of turning thirty-two. She pursed her lips a lot, because she thought a lot, and had those dimples in her cheeks as she drew in a deep breath and brushed her button nose with the knuckle of her thumb.

“Joey,” I said, loud and clear. Was it sunny enough? Not even close. I stood up in front of her, reached out my limp gray arm towards her, watched as she smoked and frowned at the scenery and checked her watch. Was she meeting someone? Why wasn’t she in Vermont skiing with her Neo-Con parents? Why wasn’t she at work sketching bridges and skyscrapers and all the infrastructure for all these bozos to enjoy? “Can we talk, Joey?” I said. “We never really got to do that, you know. I know you were sad about me dying, but that’s a minor hangup. Let’s talk about you moving in. Will you? No one will bother you there. There’s not a soul in the flat…”

She stood up and took off her beanie and ran a hand through her mousy brown hair and started off towards 5th avenue.

“Hold up, I can explain everything.”

Clip clop went the duck boots.

“Can’t you see me? Won’t you talk to me?” Somehow I stumbled on the sidewalk and went haywire, like tumbleweed, and ended up tangled in some thistles by the water.

Gravity’s no friend to a ghost. You need real momentum to get going. Wind helps, and sometimes earnest desperation. “Baby!” I swam through the thorns, but she was walking

fast and momentarily got lost among a horde of garish bikers.

It occurred to me that it was Saturday, and that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to go on weekend jaunts with no particular destination in mind. She usually abjured the subway and walked the length of upper Manhattan. Only occasionally would she invite me to go with her. She said once, in jest, I hope, that I’d just chatter about nothing the whole time, and she wanted to hear the engine of the city alongside the mechanics of her own brain. She said all that stuff was calming, and that sometimes she’d even speak out loud.

“To yourself?” I asked.

“No, not to myself.”

“To…like…the people around you?”

“No…I don’t know who I’m talking to on those walks. Call me sentimental. Sometimes it feels something like prayer. A really free and uninhibited type of prayer. Walking and talking.”

No wonder she didn’t want me with her on her pilgrimages. To talk out loud in New York City without caring if anyone thought you were crazy? To speak words not necessarily caring for reciprocation? As I squeezed through the pack of bikers, flowed through a potbellied man smoking a pipe beneath a 1920s-looking ballcap, I caught up with Joey and joined her in stride with my airy fingers tucked in my pockets. Her lips were still pursed, and she still smoked, finally discarding the yellow nub of cigarette into a nearby bin. Was she going to do it? Talk to the great nothingness? We walked beneath a bridge, passed the Balto memorial, and by the time we were a ways removed from the populous rim of the park, she actually did it—she started talking. Her voice was quiet, exasperated. She was ranting about someone at work who wasn’t submitting designs on time, and now they had to stall a series of housing projects until at least March. Then she closed her eyes, considered another cigarette, declined, and kept going, “I don’t know what to do,” she said. She opened her eyes wide and shook her head. “It’s been what…five years? Was it my fault? God, was it my fault? I probably never should’ve been with him, but there was something

about him…ah, I do this every stupid December. Get all weepy about it and wish…what am I wishing for? That he’d come back so we could wrap a bow on the relationship? Finally get some ‘closure’ as they say? I don’t know.” She huffed and brushed a tear from her eye, took a deep breath, and said, “Here’s the thing. You were a thoughtful guy. You were SO smart, and really going places with your education and career, but you were wounded. Angry and wounded. I could see it every single day. You didn’t tell me much about your relationship with your dad, but I figured…well, I don’t know what exactly. Just that he wasn’t around that much when you were a kid.”

Was she talking to me? Christ, was this actually happening?

“You never told me what happened. But I’m sorry about whatever it was that happened. You were mad. I get it.”

“Do you? Do you get it? What’re you so angry about if you can so easily relate?” I shouted.

I was barely getting over the fact that she was talking to me, nonexistent me, and that I had the insanely good luck (or misfortune) to witness it. Is this what she did when I was still alive and was this why she didn’t want me along with her on the walks?

“Five years,” she whispered on. “Five years ago, and I’m still living in the same city with the same job, while everyone else comes in and out, in and out. I guess I’ll be out of here too, one way or the other. Either by death or rent, it’s probably gonna happen.”

We were grazing 5th Avenue, where the women wore mink scarves, and the men wore furrowed brows and walked in arrow-straight gaits down the street.

“I want to say goodbye,” she said. “I know I want to say that much.”

I didn’t follow her across the street. I was starting to feel exposed, and the sun was out. It was a cruelly bright and cold sun that still permitted the crystal flakes of December to mingle with the trees and the building and the woman with the red beanie who had finally said goodbye to me, or to the ghost of me, rather. Maybe she said those same words every week on her escapades. Maybe those were the words she didn’t know how to articu-

late to any other human being so the best she could do was recite her woes to a ghost. Well. I can’t cry anymore but I wanted to.

I wandered the park some more, drifting out over the ice and gliding a few feet behind a young couple who kept having to hold each other up so they wouldn’t fall, and then, blue to the bone, I went “home.”

The father and son weren’t there. They probably went out to get some food or Christmas caroling or some such sentimental tripe. Here was another Christmas Eve and now the place had a ratty couch and an empty bag of Doritos on the coffee table. Man, how I miss the taste of coffee. I tried to drink it once out of a cup some lady abandoned in a café down in the Village, but it burned wholes in my incorporeal vestments, and I had to spend the next three days mending myself in the sunshine.

Oh well.

I went out to the balcony. The place where the railing broke five years earlier had been stitched back together with zip ties. Not exactly the most prodigious form of bonding, but it seemed to have held for this long. Cars beeped and plodded down the street twenty stories down, with those crosses etched into the buildings for Christmas, and hurried professionals scampering down the walks to make it home in time for granny’s homemade minced pies and peas. Back to their fathers and mothers and wives and children. I bowed my invisible head as the wind picked up and snow once again started to fall.

About the books in the floorboards. They were presents from my old man. That’s the reason I hid them and the reason I kept them. But something in what Joey said earlier made me want to uncork the locks and take another looksee at the original literature that got me started on this long academic track in the first place.

I reached beneath the floorboard in the master bedroom and used the heft of the spine of Huckleberry Finn to pop it loose, uncovering a modest array of goodies: Moby Dick, Don Quixote, David Copperfield, The Brothers Karamazov, and even the Bible, if you can believe it. Some of the best stuff ever written—or at least some of the most widely

and highly regarded. I sat against the wall beneath the gray window, teasing through the dogeared pages. He didn’t write a note or anything. My father told me that if I read these books, and reread them, my life would probably be deeper and truer and better. He said that as a major financier, a Wall Street bro. He said that as a millionaire if you can believe it.

I read them when I was twelve. At the time they were perspiring with the old man’s very presence. These books were like the word of God. But over the years, when the guy didn’t call all that much because of his “anxiety” following the divorce, when he forgot my following birthday and neglected the next consecutive ten Christmas gatherings, those volumes, I’ll admit, garnered a stench of suspicion. In college I discovered a lot of things. Liberal women, postmodernism, and intramural soccer, but I also found that, do a little digging, and your average student can make a career being markedly dissatisfied with the way things are. I was so pissed off and didn’t want to know what at exactly. Academify your sense abandonment and you’ll end up like me.

So, what now? That was the question. It was Christmas Eve and I’d had enough of my continuation without participation. But a proper goodbye was in order. Joey said it, and now I had to say it, too. I took the old sappy library and salvaged some wrapping paper from the living room, where a roll of it lay half-used already, and set it underneath the Christmas tree, which, shabby though it was, glimmered with gold and blue lights. I stood there watching it for a while, floating midway between floor and ceiling. By eight p.m., Stevie and his father were back in the living room, and I was hovering above the tree, stashed in my old corner.

I don’t sleep, but I managed to “close my eyes” that night curled up beneath the Christmas tree next to the gift. They might think it was weird to find a nicely wrapped package under their tree, which is why I changed course around midnight, wrote a note from Marta the landlord, and set the gift outside their door. When Christmas morning came, I summoned up every ounce of energy in these quickly dissipating bones and blew

against the door, so it rattled. Then I slid underneath the door as the father came over to open up and stood by the glass door leading to the balcony.

“What is it, pop?”

“It’s for you! From Marta!”

“For me?”

“Well geez, open it, open it! It’s Christmas, isn’t it!”

It took a double take to confirm that there were a measly total of three gifts beneath the tree, each no bigger than a chicken egg. And as the boy tore into the wrapping paper, heart pounding so loud it liquified by already disembodied state, the father knitted his brow, rubbed his chin, and turned around so he was facing me. Facing that Christmas morning sun. Who’s to know whether or not he really saw me, whether he suspected that his son had a ghostly benefactor? I don’t know, but he looked as close as a man has ever gotten to looking me into the eyes, and it was enough to conclude that I’d been made a little bit solid again by the sun. It was enough for me to tumble once again off the balcony after the dad held his breath in happy rapture and make my long and final fall back to the earth.

Guilherme Bergamini, O Grito

fiction by Sean Cahill-Lemme

I didn’t put a sheet on my mattress because of Nelly’s sweat stain. It sounds gross, I know, but it formed her outline perfectly, the way she used to sleep, sprawled, as if just having landed from a five-hundred-foot fall. She was gone now, but this was proof that she lived, that she lived here, and here with me. She was so wild, so undomesticated that, when she died, I thought I had imagined her, that it was impossible to be loved by someone like her, and to be loved enough for her to want to move in.

But the stain was proof.

I laid on that sheetless mattress now, late winter daylight shining through my bedroom window, listening to the cold drone of the city. I was a retched fetus, rolling side to side, searching for the cool parts of the pillow, fighting the spins that came with these afternoons. I fell back asleep and dreamt, and in the dream, I was productive—I showered, made breakfast, even put on makeup.

Somewhere between sleep and waking I heard knocking. I felt around for the bottle of liquor I kept near the bed. I remembered it being tequila, it could have been vodka. The knocking came again. I groaned out at whoever it was to go away. But it kept coming, blending with my dreams—first, it was my mother at the door, and I answered it, then my mother’s face became Nelly’s face, and we were together in a parkway between the boulevards, kissing beneath hammock-laced trees.

Finally, there was a gentler, more immediate knock on my bedroom door that was unmistakably real. I flung up from my bed and screamed, “You can’t just let yourself into my apartment. It’s fucking illegal. I will have your rent tomorrow.”

My bedroom door opened slowly. Fischer stood in the doorway. A gangly figure sprouting up from Doc Martens, hair like purple fire, clothing so tight it could have been painted on. “It’s me baby,” they said, “my gosh.”

Yella

They held out a cup. “Here, coffee.”

I waved it away. “I’m sorry sweetie,” I said, “I thought you were my landlord. He’s been knocking all morning.”

Fischer rolled their eyes. “The bitch has. I had to wait for him to leave before I came in.”

I finally found the bottle of liquor under a pile of clothes. I took a pull from it, stood up, swayed, and then took another. Immediately, I felt my hands steady. The room came into focus. I realized I was naked. I found a tank-top and pulled it down over my body. Fischer raised their eyebrows and said, “You have such nice titties.”

“Thanks,” I said, searching through mounds of clothing, holding up socks and sniffing them and deciding that clean was better than matching.

“Are you working tonight?” Fischer asked. They sat at the end of my bed, watching me with motherly eyes.

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“Cam or…”

“Or.”

Fischer sighed. “Baby, I just worry. Camming is one thing, because you’re at least safe in your own house, ya know?”

I gestured around at the squalor. “Yeah, seeing this room in the background would definitely turn people on.”

“I mean, it’s not that bad,” said Fischer. There was a pause before both of us broke out laughing. I sighed and sat down next to them and put my head on their shoulder. “I love you,” I said.

“You better,” they said.

I looked out the window, never able to tell the time from a winter sky in Chicago. Always just different shades of gray. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Four o’clock,” said Fischer. “You slept in, girl.”

I jumped up from the bed and the world spun again.

“Motherfucking shit,” I said, “I’m supposed to meet Mol for coffee.”

“Call her,” said Fischer.

“Can’t,” I said, sifting frantically through heaps of clothes, “phone’s dead.”

“I’ll call her.”

On the street the wind blew hard against my face. Mascara ran down my cheeks. I decided to walk backward against the wind. I walked past a façade that stood old and defiant amongst the changing neighborhoods. A worn banner hung across its front entrance that read, “Save Our Façade!” It was written once in English and again below in Ukrainian. An old man shoveled its front steps. I smiled and waved at him still walking backward. He frowned. I suppose I looked like a character out of Alice in Wonderland, this, racoon-eyed girl walking backward.

When I reached the coffee shop Mol was already there. She stood with one foot again the building, blowing into her hands. She raised her arms when she saw me. “What the fuck, dude?”

“Sorry,” I said, giving her half of a hug.

We sat by the window, as we always did, so we could people watch. My mom once told me that in Paris they turn the café tables outward specifically for people watching. Logan Square would give Paris a run for its money—platform boots, contoured faces, high rider jeans, suits, leather, mail, mesh, cloth, he, she, they, them. Mol took a sip of her coffee and said, “I’m working in Old Town tonight.”

I turned from the window to look at her. “Is this a new guy?”

She nodded. “He found me on Snapchat.” She paused and then put her hand over her face. Speaking through her fingers she said, “He wanted a picture of my feet.”

“Mol!”

“I know, I know,” she said, “but I probably won’t even have to fuck him.”

“No,” I said, “he’ll just want to keep one of your toes in his fridge.”

“Stop.”

I looked at Mol. I marveled at how beautiful she was, even beneath the greasy hair and beanie cap. Her eyebrows were thick and black, as if drawn on by a Sharpie, and they frayed naturally as they reached the center of her forehead.

She said something, but I wasn’t paying attention. “What?” I asked, still studying her. I loved this girl inside and out, not romantically, although maybe once I did, but now I just felt proud—proud of her, and, if I’m being honest, proud of myself for finding her.

“Where are you working tonight?” she repeated.

“Can we not call it work?” I asked.

“Why,” she asked, “because it makes us sound like hookers?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew if I said yes, she would call me old fashioned and tell me that sex work was legitimate work and that we had nothing to be ashamed of—all of which I would have agreed with. “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t think of this as my job. It’s just something I’m doing.”

“Isn’t that what a job is?” She saw the look on my face and smiled. “Listen, there is a difference between a job and a career, Yella. I mean, you definitely don’t want to call it a hobby, do you?”

I laughed. “Well,” I said, “we all do it as a hobby, don’t we?”

“So, who is it tonight?”

“Mr. OnlyFans.”

Mol cocked an eyebrow. “He pays.”

“Yes, he does.”

There was no sunset, only the sky turning a darker sort of gray. We left the shop and walked down the street, passing shuttered restaurants and dark marquees. Our conversation shifted from sex, to men, to politics, to the pandemic, to acting, and then back to men again. The general consensus on men was that despite what some of them did to differentiate themselves, they were all pigs: pigs in suits, pigs with ponytails, pigs that

banked, and pigs that painted. Mol gestured toward a homeless man stumbling down the street and said, “This is the only good man I know.”

He came toward us. The tattoos on his filthy skin seemed to be the only remnants of who he was once was. There was a name on his arm, Jennifer, or Jeanine? I wondered who she was, why she abandoned him. He might have been a pig once too, but now he just wandered the city, so constant that he had become an almost inanimate part of it.

“Hi Olly!” said Mol, handing him the rest of her bagel.

He responded in his own language, a language that was a variation of a single sentence, but that we somehow learned to understand.

“Getting’ milk for my mother, oh yes, that’s just the way the world is, oh yes, just the way, HA!” His head rolled around like an infant’s, and he smiled as he took the bagel.

Mol tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but he dipped away. She said, “I’m going to get you a coat from the house on Kedzie, okay?” I’ll give it to you tomorrow, okay?” He threw his head forward in a way that could have been a nod, and then it rolled back again.

“Just the way it is, milk for my mother, HA!” He staggered away down his usual route and faded into the grayness.

We sat down on a curb and sipped the cold bottoms of our coffee. Mol took a deep breath and turned to me. “Have you called your mom?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Did you tell her about Nelly?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What did she say?”

“What I knew she would say. She politicized it, of course. Said that this pandemic is more dangerous to young people’s mental health than the virus itself, and that what Nelly did was direct proof of that.”

Mol turned to look at me. “She didn’t ask if you were okay, or if she should come to Chicago, or if you needed help?”

I shrugged. “She never took our relationship seriously. I think she thought Nelly was my way of acting out.”

Mol rolled her eyes. “What are you going to do about your rent?”

It wasn’t often that Mol annoyed me. She never asked anyone else these questions, only me, because some part of her thought I had a choice, and that if wanted to, I could just go back to the suburbs, do community theater, and live off of my parents. “I’ll pay it tonight,” I said, “and as far as food goes, I filed unemployment certification today. It will land in my account on Wednesday.”

We sat in silence, watching the crowds on the street. Mol threw her hands up. “Come Mierda,” she said. I bristled—anytime Mol spoke Spanish, it usually ended with someone getting hurt. She was looking at the new Starbucks across the street. A girl in a shaggy sweater and baggie jeans walked out with something that was more dessert than coffee. Mol stood and screamed at her. “Did you buy those pants at Burberry?” The girl either didn’t hear or pretended not to. Mol screamed louder. “Gentrifying bitch!”

I pulled at Mol’s sleeve and said, “Mol, sit down.”

“They all think they’re closing the door behind them, don’t they?” She collapsed back down on the curb. I put my arm around her.

When she calmed down, we started walking again. We found ourselves strolling down an old boulevard hidden in the city. It was lined with Romanesque mansions, houses that were ancient on the outside but reborn on the inside—decorated with exotic plants and rugs and peacock-colored lights. They were home to curly-haired graphic designers and barefooted lesbians who painted silhouettes of breasts. These people spread throughout the neighborhood like morning glory.

I felt Mol brooding beside me.

We approached a particularly old building. It had no art in its windows or lush gardens, just scattered toys on a dying lawn. It fell just one block outside of the clutches of trend. We walked up to the front gate and buzzed.

“Yes?” said a voice through the intercom.

“Mol and Yella,” I said, and there was a loud click.

We climbed up the stairs to a second-floor apartment. I picked up an empty juice box on the landing. The apartment door was wide open when we came in. I ducked my head to avoid a flying tennis ball.

“Quinton!” I yelled.

“Sorry, Aunt Yella,” said a little boy.

“That’s okay,” I said, “but no throwing in the house. Where’s your momma?”

“Shower,” he said. Beneath his yogurt-stained Iron Man shirt and hot wheels pajama pants, Quinton was an old soul. He had a sort of innocent wisdom about him. More than once consoled me during hard times, putting his tiny hand on my shoulder and assuring me things were going to get better. He was the oldest of his siblings and the self-proclaimed man of the house.

I saw a pair of mischievous eyes staring at me from behind an armchair. I pretended not to notice them and started looking high and low. “Where is Tamara?” I asked. “I don’t see her anywhere.” A giggle from behind the chair. “Mol,” I asked, “have you seen her?”

“No,” said Mol, “I haven’t. Where could she be?”

The giggle exploded into a laugh as I crept toward the armchair. I crouched down around the chair and said, “Could she be … here?” I popped my head around the chair and Tamara shrieked with laughter. I swooped her up in my arms and punctuated each one of my words with a kiss. “There. She. Is. My. Little. Stinker.” She held her hands up to avoid my impending lips and her beaded pigtails rattled with her thrashing head.

The bedroom door flew open, and a naked shadow bolted across the hall into the bathroom.

“Simmy,” Mol screamed, “put some clothes on, girl!”

Simone’s voice called from the bathroom. “I’m sorry! I’m running so late.”

“Aye bendito!” said Mol, and Quinton and Tamara laughed. They loved when Mol

spoke Spanish.

Simone popped her head out of the bathroom. “Is my mom here yet?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said, “just us.”

“Shit—shoot, sorry. Can I ask you guys the biggest favor?”

“Anything, sweetheart,” I said.

“Can you watch them for like ten minutes, just until my mom gets here. I really have to go.”

I turned to Tamara who was still in my arms and planted more kisses on her face.

“Of. Course. We. Can.”

Simone finally came out with soaked hair and in scrubs. She rushed around the kitchen, talking over her shoulder while she put a small bag of food together. “I’m sorry this place is such a mess,” she said.

“Sim,” I said, “I don’t even have a bedframe.”

Simone turned around to Quinton. “Q,” she said, “you want nuggets or a corndog?”

He didn’t respond, he was watching a video of kids opening toys. “Quinton Anderson, I will take that laptop away so fast. “

“I can make it, Simmy,” I said. “You go.”

She gave me a defeated smile.

“Just mic it for forty-five seconds with a wet paper towel.” Then she snapped at Quiton and Tamara, who were now both entranced by the video.

“Hey,” she said, “I’m leaving. Come give me kisses.” They ran to her and kissed both sides of her cheeks.

“Okay,” she said, “Your grandma is coming. You be good.”

She turned back to Mol and me and said, “I owe you guys.”

“Go,” we said, and Simone closed the door with a kiss.

Mol and I sat in silence. Mol got up and started searching through cabinets. Before long, she pulled out a coffee mug and a sippy cup and went to the freezer. She filled each of cup

with ice. She pulled out two cans of hard seltzer from the fridge and filled the mismatched cups. She danced them over, taking one step forward, then one step back, tantalizingly.

“Oh,” I said, “we are classy.”

“These were the only clean ones I could find,” she said. She put the cups down and walked over to the kids. “Quinton and Tamara,” she said, “last time I’m asking, corndogs or nuggets?”

“Corndogs,” they said in mindless unison. Mol walked back into the kitchen and opened the microwave. “Abombao,” she said looking that the inside of it. “Looks like someone microwaved a head in here.” She went to grab a paper towel.

“Don’t,” I said. “You know how she is. You’ll embarrass her by cleaning it.”

“She needs help, Yella. This shit is gross,” She stared at me for a few seconds before dropping her hands in defeat.

“She’ll ask for help if she needs it,” I said. “Come drink with me.”

We sat at the small kitchen table sipping the seltzer and passing a vape back and forth. I looked around at the state of the apartment. Lines of water damage ran up the ceiling like bloated veins, and folds of duct tape held loose cabinet doors closed. “What else can we do for her?” I asked. Mol picked absently at what might have been crusted milk on the table. She shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said, “maybe we kidnap these bleeding hearts. Destroy their apartments. Bring the property value down so our girl doesn’t have to work so hard.”

It was this again, the feeling of being separated from the two of them and being quietly guilty for my whiteness. I was Puerto Rican, at least a quarter, but on my dad’s side, and ever the professor of history, he told me we were the descendants of Wild Geese—the Irish deserters of the English army who jumped ship off the coast of Puerto Rico. Over two hundred years ago.

“Am I one of those bleeding hearts?” I asked. Mol kicked me under the table and winked. “Yeah, but you’re okay.” She took a hard pull from her vape. “Honestly, the corpo-

rate bros in Old Town do less damage than these bleeding-hearts. At least they stay where they’re supposed to.”

I laughed. “Like my customer tonight?”

“For real, though,” said Mol. “Like, sure, a guy like that is doing some big picture harmful shit, but these people around here are making people homeless in real time, you know?”

“Which people?” I asked.

Mol motioned around. “These people, these artists, these people who move here thinking that they’re helping, these poets, these actors, whoever the hell.”

“You’re right,” I said.

I stood up and got the corndogs from the microwave. “Ketchup, guys?”

“Yes, please.”

I hoped Mol would come off the subject, but she kept on. “But they all put their signs in their windows, don’t they? They’re part of the struggle, right?”

I squirted ketchup in a way that made Quinton giggle.

“Aunt Yella,” he said, “you farted!”

“They can keep their signs,” said Mol.

The front door opened. A woman walked in with bags under her arms. She smiled tiredly, cursed under her breath, and dropped the bags at her feet.

“Mimi!” Quiton and Tamar rushed into her arms. She groaned, drawing them in for a hug.

“Hi babies,” she said, and then she looked up at us and said, “and hi to you babies, too.” She looked around the apartment, still breathing heavily from the walk up the stairs.

“Is Simone still here?”

“She just left,” I said.

“Shoot. She’s gonna be real mad at me.”

“It’s all good, Nina,” said Mol over her shoulder, “we’re here.”

Nina heaved the bags onto the kitchen counter and dropped herself into the chair between us. She eyed Mol’s sippy cup. “What are ya’ll drinking?”

“Seltzer,” said Mol. “Want one?

She waved the suggestion away. “Out of a sippy cup?” she asked. “Simmy don’t have any clean glasses?”

“Your daughter is a busy woman, Nina,” I said.

She grunted. “Try raising five kids and then tell me about busy. The girl can do some dishes.” Nina got to her feet and went over to the sink, speaking over her shoulder the same way her daughter had. “So,” she asked, “what’s new with you two?”

“Nothing,” we both said.

“Yella, you get your rent figured out?”

“I’ll have it tonight,” I said.

“Make sure you do,” she said. “Are you doing any writing, baby? I loved that one story you did, what was it about, that girl and her brother with the funeral sticker?”

“Procession,” I said, and she snapped her finger in recognition.

“Yes,” she said, “That’s the one. I never knew you could write like that, girl. It felt so real.” She started scrubbing something stubborn off of a dish and said, “I hope you do something with it.”

“We’ll see,” I said and took another drink. “Gotta pay the bills.”

“It’s not fair,” said Mol. She finished her second seltzer and was on her way to the fridge for a third.

“It’s the way it goes,” said Nina, spinning a dirty plate in her hand and shaking her head at the crust on it. “Same thing happened to us in Cabrini.”

“And so, what,” asked Mol, “you just moved your whole family out? Your whole life?”

“What else could we do?”

My feet started tingling after the third seltzer—the hangover was gone, along with the unplaceable hangover guilt. I looked across the table at Mol, who seemed no worse for

the wear—it was what made her so successful at what she did. She would drink her men under the table. And after they paid and cried about whatever demon she had dug up (typically something to do with their mothers), she would load them into an Uber and send them off. I asked her once how often she actually had sex with these men. One in five, she said. It was getting late. I stood up. “I think we have to go,” I said, but Mol stayed seated.

“I’m gonna stay a while longer,” she said.

“Don’t you have someplace to be?” I said, trying to put as much nudge, nudge in my voice as possible.

She shrugged. “Not anymore.”

“Can I talk to you outside?”

Nina put her hands up and got up from the table. “Sounds like you girls need to figure some things out. I’m gonna spend some time with my grandbabies. Get them off of that damned screen.”

When Nina was out of the kitchen, I asked Mol if her man had canceled. “No,” she said simply, “I just want to keep my toes tonight.” When she saw I wasn’t laughing she said, “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel like it tonight anymore.”

“I just thought we were going to take an Uber down there together.”

“I’m sorry, Yell,” she said again, “I’ll cover your ride.”

He lived downtown in a building that looked over the lake. I sat back in the Uber, leaning my head against the cool window and watching the rain drops race down glass. I tried predicting which one would reach the bottom first.

The lights of downtown rose up in a blurred brilliance. I could see his building—it stood high above the rest of the skyline. As bitter as I was, there was no denying the beauty of the city. I turned away from my window and met eyes with my driver.

“Going out tonight?” he asked.

“My boyfriend is making dinner at our apartment,” I said. “I’m heading there now.”

“A lucky man,” he said.

“Not tonight,” I said. “He’s making brussels sprouts, which always give me the worst gas.” I smiled and turned back out the window.

He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride.

My client lived on the fifty-ninth floor. I knocked, and after what seemed like a deliberate amount of time, he answered, still in his suit and tie. We exchanged the pleasantries that he thought necessary, the small talk that made it feel less transactional to him, and then we moved into this living room.

His apartment was filled with soulless touches—a generic photo of the skyline that I guessed he bought from Ikea, safe tones of beige and white, the boldest of his decorations was a color portrait of Mac Miller, with colors that ran down the rapper’s face like tears.

“Isn’t that cool?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, hating that he caught me looking at it.

“So,” he said. I turned around and he was naked, so naked that I asked, involuntarily, if we could dim the lights. He took a small baggie of cocaine from a drawer, sprinkled some on his knuckle, and snorted it. His pale skin flushed a deep red. Then he offered the baggie to me.

“No, thanks,” I said, trying to look anywhere else I could.

“Let’s go the bedroom,” he said.

He crawled into bed and laid down on his side, caressing the empty space next to him with a single finger. I snorted but was able to fake a sneeze before he noticed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry.” He smiled and patted the bed next to him.

“So,” he said, drawing circles with his fingers in the space between us, “how was your day?”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. I pulled his face toward mine and started kissing him. I tasted happy hour on his breath, hints of whiskey and Kung Pao cauliflower. The whole thing lasted ten minutes. Some fumbling touches, a few awkward thrusts, a whim-

per, and then it was over. I went to his bathroom to clean myself off. When I came back there was money on the counter and he was gone. I never knew where he hid after it was done, in his closet maybe, or under his bed? It didn’t matter to me, in fact, that’s probably the only thing I appreciated about him—he wasn’t a talker after it was done.

I waited outside for my Uber. Mel was tracking my ride, something that was policy for us on the nights we worked. The street, usually bustling with the sounds of paper and plastic, of clicking high heels, of honking horns, of street drummers, was empty. A thin old man in a felt hat stood across the street from me. Miraculously, he had matched his hat with his purple mask almost perfectly, or maybe it was the other way around. He leaned against a cane under the light of the bus stop. I heard him singing over the wind. I knew the song, Ragtime’s “Back to Before.” We made eye contact, and his eyes squinted, which might mean he smiled, but his bus pulled up between us before I could smile back.

My landlord was waiting outside my apartment. He went to open his mouth, but before he could say anything I held out a handful of cash. “Here,” I said, “and if you ever harass me like that again, I’m calling a lawyer.”

He looked down at me but didn’t say anything. He counted the money slowly.

“It’s freezing,” I said. “It’s all there. Can I go inside?”

He shook his head and made me wait until every dollar was counted. While I waited there in the cold, it occurred to me that I was part of a transaction between two men, bringing one man’s money to another. He stepped aside finally, and I brushed past him, making sure to check him with my shoulder. He started to say something, but I slammed the door behind me.

I opened my apartment door and walked inside. I took my coat off and hung it on the rack. I brought my fingers to my lips, kissed them, and pressed that kiss to a framed picture of Nelly. She was tipping her hat to me and everyone else who entered our apartment. And it did feel like ours again, for the next month, at least.

JC Alfier, On dit que c’est une femme de l’ombre · They say he is a shadow-woman

Bluebelle

fiction by C.S. Fuqua

Each one gurgled.

The dog’s ragged, labored breaths on the late August breeze carried slightly under the voices and occasional laughter from the kitchen. Danny edged closer to the window, arms limp at his sides, and pressed his forehead to the cool glass. The dog lay perpendicular to a large fence post on the ground some fifty yards away from the house. The boy tensed as his father Jeff again erupted in the kitchen with laughter.

A half-hour earlier, Danny had been shooting baskets at the yard’s far side, while his dad struggled at the pasture line to erect one of two massive, eight-foot creosote posts. Each weighed a good 250 pounds and would easily support the wide gate to the lower field. The opposite of his father, stout and mean, Danny was a lanky kid, his mother needling him at meals to eat more, to put some meat on them bones. Bluebelle usually yapped under the goal with him, bouncing up to bump the ball with her snout, but today she had found Jeff’s struggles far more entertaining.

“Git!” Jeff shouted at the dog.

Belle bounced circles around the man, barking, as Jeff wrestled one end of the post incrementally higher to slip the other into the hole.

“You gonna take it to the vet?” Jeff’s friend Bradge said in the kitchen.

Jeff made no reply.

“He could put it out of its misery,” Bradge said.

Danny closed his eyes, the image of the dog’s hitching chest lingering in his mind.

“Or I can put her down,” Bradge said.

“Nature’s good enough,” Jeff said.

“You just gonna let her suffer like that?” Danny’s mother said. “It just—“

“Damn it,” Jeff snapped. “Enough.”

Danny’s face flushed as the pause between each quivering breath grew fractionally longer, triggering spasms along the dog’s body. He backed away from the window and slipped out of the bedroom, past the kitchen entrance. He eased out the front, closing the screen door gently behind himself, and stopped at the head of the steps where his friendship with the dog had begun nearly a year earlier. When his father’d brought her home, Bluebelle—Belle to Danny—had growled at and avoided the boy. Then came Saturday morning as Danny ate lunch on the top step. The dog sat at the bottom stair, watching his hand move from plate to mouth until Danny picked up the pork chop and held it toward her. Bluebelle stood and leaned cautiously forward, shying back twice as Danny shifted. “Take it, girl,” he whispered. Belle took the meat between her teeth but didn’t bite down until the boy let go.

The two soon became inseparable. On Sunday afternoons while his father watched football on TV, Danny and Belle played their version in the yard, Danny waving the hound out for a bomb the dog would retrieve and then go racing back past the boy for the chase to begin. Then came the time the Herrell boy tried to bully Danny, taking aim when Danny told Herrell to go screw himself. Belle lunged, but Danny held the leash tight as Herrell turned and hauled ass home, screaming all the way.

Bluebelle’s chest filled, emptied as Danny drew near, wishing his father would end her suffering, the same as he’d wished someone, anyone to end his grandfather’s. Danny swallowed the emotion building in his throat. He glanced at the house and then back to Belle as he knelt beside her. A gully ran across Belle’s chest where the post had crashed down. Jagged bone jabbed through skin and blood-soaked hair behind one shoulder. The dog whimpered, exhaling through her open mouth, tongue languishing out one side, gray and caked with sand. The air around her had taken on a distinctly acrid odor, one that Danny recognized from when his father dumped a dead deer in the bathtub after night hunting.

Danny reached tentatively to scratch Belle behind an ear, his breath hitching.

The dog’s eyes opened to slits, straining to follow the boy as he stretched out gradually to lie on his stomach, head turned to face her, sand grinding into his cheek. Belle tried to shift, but Danny stroked her neck, whispering, “Be still, girl. Be still.” Another breath rattled in and out with a whimper. The sun burned through the boy’s clothes as he stared into the animal’s eyes, muddled and twitching slightly to the left, as helpless and pleading as his grandfather’s had been. Danny’s aunts, uncles, father, and mother had carried on in the hospital room as though they’d gathered for a family reunion, joking about the stroke-stricken old man as if he wasn’t even there.

“The prayer warriors at my church are all praying for him,” Kathryn, the youngest sibling, chirped. She nodded affirmation to approving mutters of “Yes, so many are, so many. God is merciful.”

Merciful?

Big Daddy’s palsied hand—the same hand that had grabbed Jeff’s fist only a month earlier to protect the boy—grasped Danny’s, squeezing and releasing repeatedly until the boy could take no more of the laughter and disrespect, and fled, ashamed he could do nothing but mutter pleas into the wind.

. . . . . .

Another burst of laughter from the house.

Danny placed his trembling hand gently on Belle’s shoulder. The dog made a sound lost in a gurgle.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, eyes wet with tears. “What can I—”

“Danny!”

Danny sat up, twisting around to face his mother, her hands wringing as she stood at the porch’s edge.

“Get up here now.” Her voice softened. “Come on. Leave that poor thing alone. She might bite.”

Belle would never bite anything again, that much Danny well understood, but he

rose and started for the house as instructed, glancing back to see Belle raise her head slightly before dropping it back to the sand. His pace quickened as his mother opened the screen door and disappeared inside. As Danny reached the porch, he heard her tell his father, “I wish you’d do something about that poor dog. Danny’s real upset.”

Jeff grunted. “Boy’s nearly seven. Gotta learn sometime.”

Danny opened the door and quietly went to his room where he again stationed himself at the window.

Chairs slid back from the kitchen table and footsteps passed Danny’s door toward the living room where the TV clicked on, filling the air with the booming fanfare of Saturday college football. Jeff and Bradge began debating one team’s ability to kick the other’s butt.

From his doorway, Danny saw that his father and Bradge had settled on opposite ends of the old couch. He didn’t know where his mother had gone, but she’d left the kitchen. He slipped out of his room, through the kitchen, and into his parents’ bedroom, pausing long enough in the doorway to make sure his mother wasn’t there. He knelt beside the bed and slid the case containing his father’s hunting rifle from underneath. He unzipped it as quietly as possible, withdrew the gun, and found it loaded with two shells. He stood and held the rifle at waist-level, barrel downward as his grandfather had taught him, one hand on the forestock, the other on the grip, forefinger resting against the trigger guard. He felt light with the knowledge he’d have hell to pay—bruises and welts that wouldn’t fade for days. So be it.

Danny crept through the kitchen, carefully opening and closing the back screen door as he went out. He glanced around for his mother and heard her on the far side of the house where the last remnants of her small, late-summer garden offered up the last of its squash. He crossed the yard to Belle, the dog’s chest bucking in small gasps. As he stepped close, she rolled her eyes toward the boy but could not raise her head. A breath rattled in, and she groaned softly. His own breath trembled as he knelt to rest the rifle across one

knee and stroke Belle’s neck. Her eyes had grown dim and milky.

Danny inhaled deeply, resigned, and stood. He placed the barrel tip to the base of Belle’s skull as she rattled out another breath.

“Danny!”

He glanced up as his mother rounded the front of the house in a strong walk toward him. He looked back down at the dog, tears smearing his vision. He wanted to say something, to apologize to her, but no words would come, only the wrenching sadness of loss. And rage—a burning ember rising from within to engulf.

“Danny,” his mother shouted.

Danny held his breath as he pressed the barrel into Belle’s fur and braced the stock under his arm. The dog gasped.

“Dan—”

The boy’s ears rang with the gun’s report. Blood flowed from the exit wound to soak the dirt underneath Belle’s head. Belle’s final breath burbled out. Other sounds began to snake their way through the ringing in Danny’s ears—his mother’s voice, muted cheers from the TV inside, the front screen door slamming, heavy steps clomping across the porch’s plank floor.

Danny’s mother stopped a few yards away, face matted by fear as Jeff started down from the house, fists clenched at his sides. Danny took a step back, placing Belle’s body between him and his approaching father. The screen door slammed again as Bradge came onto the porch and stepped into the yard. Danny’s father was raging something, but the boy didn’t understand for the blood rushing in his ringing ears. He held the gun firmly in both hands at waist level.

“Jeff,” his mother cried, reaching for the man as he passed, but he dodged her grasp as her voice pitched in fear. “He only did what you should’ve. Don’t you hurt him. Jeff—”

Danny’s father stopped abruptly and twisted toward Danny’s mother. “Shut your

damn mouth.” He turned back to the boy.

Danny stiffened. The gun rose slowly to chest level. His father took another step.

“What the hell you thinking, boy?”

“Hey, Jeff,” Bradge called from beside his pickup. “I’m gonna get on home, take care of the horses. Game ain’t no good no way.”

His father waved a hand without taking his eyes off the boy as Bradge scrambled into the truck. “I asked you a question.”

Danny glared at him.

“Answer me, boy.”

The boy said nothing.

Bradge’s truck grumbled to life. Bradge bumped the horn and pulled out of the yard, into the rutted lane for the main road.

“Get inside, boy.”

Danny’s grip trembled slightly.

“Did you not hear me?”

Danny drew a deep, slow breath, held it, his body calming, hands steadying.

“Give me the gun, son.” Jeff reached for the barrel.

Hot Air

fiction by Toby Jaffe

I’m a lonely sort of they/them AFAB so I do lonely sorts of things. It’s not unheard of, for instance, that I would be out to dinner all alone at like 9 PM at some empty restaurant in some awful unfamiliar-ass city cuz i’d tagged along with my twin brother for a weekend road trip but he neglected to tell me that the sole purpose we were up there was so he could hook up with some girl he met on Tinder; and now he was doing the so-called hooking up and God knows what else, and I was alone for the evening – not to mention basically the rest of the weekend.

This instance was not the first nor would it be the last. And yeah, anyway, this time I had been wandering for three hours after Billy met up with the girl at like 6 because I felt kinda anxious being all alone in an unfamiliar East Coast city. Three hours taking in nothing except some depressing office buildings, the sight and sound of my untied shoelaces scraping along cracked pavement, and a lot of dread. I am glamorous. Regardless – at the end of those three hours I found myself at a restaurant called Collin’s Diner or Collin’s Deli. Was it Colin? Two l’s? One l? Actually, the dude’s name may have been Harry. Doesn’t matter. Harry nor Collin were there. But lonely Mx. Sadie McPrioson was. God forbid they’d name the place after me!

This eatery, much like my story-telling ability, was a bit nondescript. It was located in a three-story brick building on a street corner with plain green awnings over the windows and had a small parking lot around back. The fluorescent lighting inside was dim, and the tacky chandeliers interspersed from the beige, tiled ceiling didn’t help brighten things up much. All the booths and tables were clear and pristine, a sign either that I was the first customer since the dinner rush or, more tragically, that I was perhaps the first customer all day.

There were mirrors and switched-off TVs placed along the walls. The counter itself

featured a great big mirror along the back wall, only it seemed to serve more as an impromptu display board because it was plastered with various pieces of paper, announcements, and photographs. I didn’t really get a super up-close look, nor had interest in doing so, but I could make out a sheet of paper with big bold letters announcing the soup of the day (French Onion) and I think there was a signed photo of Liza Minnelli. It’s probably obvious but I might as well just say it: the place was quiet. Silence you can feel. If the white tablecloth strewn on all the tables could talk, they’d probably choose not to. In fact, it was so damn empty and hushed that I wondered for several moments if the place was actually closed but whoever was responsible had forgotten to lock up.

I sat paralyzed in my plushy red seat in a booth near the front door even though I had begun to put together the pathetic possibility that I was waiting for service that was not forthcoming.

Key but unimportant detail, and one only revealed to me after several diversions and deflections: Billy had arranged for he and I to stay at the apartment of his hookup girl…

Don’t get me fucking started…

But this is why, I now realize, I stayed at Harry’s or Colin’s or Oliver’s or whoever the fuck’s Cafe even though 99.99999999% of humanity would have been rational enough to maybe take a hint and leave. I had not met hookup girl and I was not planning on barging in on my literal twin brother while he was enjoying a night of, uhhhhh, debauchery. So that’s my excuse.

The joke is on the 99.99999999% in the end though because, through the power of sheer willpower, I was able to somehow conjure a waitress. And oh my!

She appeared at the moment the whole situation was at its most hopeless (not that it made a difference to whether I stayed or went). I had been doing nothing but sitting at the booth and scrolling my phone for several minutes. Then in the upper corner of my eye, she appeared like a dream.

Maybe not a dream. But kind of. She had medium length brown-ish hair which she was wearing in a messy ponytail. Her uniform/outfit was a bit less casual: A blue button-down shirt featuring the restaurant logo tucked into stretchy gray trousers. I don’t know what the fuck it was. Maybe it was because it was just the two of us alone in the joint, or that her light flirtatiousness lit a match inside me or that I’m just so desperately lonely. But I was swooning for this lady.

“I’m so sorry!” she beamed, carrying a menu and wearing a nametag which read ‘Daisy’.

Her eyes were rapidly shifting and a bit blinky. They were inviting in a manic kind of way.

“That’s ok!” I replied, trying and failing to match her bubbliness. “I haven’t been here long.”

“It’s just me tonight,” she said as she put the menu down in front of me. “I got distracted back in the kitchen.”

I anxiously rushed to say something witty. “Well, now there’s two of us!” was the best I could do. All the while, I felt a sort of shaky flutter in my lower abdomen and might have blushed a tad.

“True!” she chirped as she walked away toward the counter. “Can I get you some water?”

“Sure,” I muttered.

“In from out of town?” she asked moments later as she placed the icy, drippy glass of water before me.

“Yes,” I nodded. “How did you know?”

She winked. “I’m just good like that.”

The back of my neck was sweating. So were my palms.

“I’ll be back when you’re ready to order,” she said with a soft, wide smile. “I’ll also be preparing your dinner tonight.”

“Oh, you really are the only one here tonight!” I replied with a bit of delay as she re-entered the kitchen.

“Besides you!” Daisy called from behind the swinging kitchen door.

I blushed again, and at this point I was fucking ready to marry this girl. In the interim between her return to take my order, and as I aimlessly flipped through the slightly bulky, laminated pages of the menu, I played everything out in my head.

We’d spend long ass days at the beach listening to My Chemical Romance and drinking a 30 pack of Natural Lights.

We’d make out in my car in a Target parking lot while we waited out a downpour cuz we forgot our umbrellas and it was too nasty out to take the hundred or so steps into the store to buy paper towels or beanbag chair or sweatpants or whatever the fuck we needed.

We’d split dinner-making duties and more often than we’d like to admit default to take out cuz we’re just lazy and gay and cool like that.

And on the day the bells rang we’d sort of just laugh and eye roll through the whole thing while secretly basking in the love of our friends and family. Lazy, gay, cool.

I would never be so forward to assume she was a full-fledged lesbian, but I afforded myself the abject certainty that she was at least bi-sexual.

“Ready to order?” she asked, notepad and pen in hand.

I still had not really taken a real look at the menu, so I just defaulted to what I probably would’ve ordered anyway. Given that I was speaking to my future soulmate, the words flowed neither easy nor steady. “Um. Uh. Yeah. Chicken fingers, please.”

“Would you like fries with that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Ok. Will get right on that for ya.”

“Thank you!”

“It’s my pleasure!”

Fuck takeout, this girl cooks! And not just chicken fingers and fries but magical witchy potions that taste like Coca-Cola except it’s completely healthy and does zero short-, medium-, or long-term damage. And Daisy’s potions nurse poor little they/thems like me back to health. Not just back to physical health but cures AFAB morons like me of their crushing dread and social anxiety.

“Ok!” she announced as she once again emerged from the kitchen, now carrying the chicken fingers and fries. “Made this special just for you!”

It was as if I’d grown angel wings and was ready to ascend the multiverse with her. We’d reached a point in our budding romance that transcended thought and language, and as such all I could do was giggle.

“Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “Hehehehehe”.

I cannot begin to tell you how absolutely zilch I cared at that moment that she didn’t actually show again until it was time for the check nor that the chicken fingers weren’t super crispy and that the fries were a tad cold. I also would’ve loved some BBQ sauce or honey mustard. But hey! This is the reality of the modern relationship. Special relationships such as ours require communication and hard work. Perfection is an unobtainable fiction. We’ll work through this and come out so much stronger. Besides, the least I can do is cut Daisy-kins a little bit of slack after all the healing she has provided me. The street outside the restaurant afterward might as well have been the dead center of the entire Milky Way for all I knew. Me and Daisy at the center of the Milky Way. But that’s me: always floating around like a fucking idiot.

Some real fun was in store for me the next day. I didn’t sleep at all on the hookup girl’s couch, and I bolted out of there before I’d have to deal with either her and/or Billy. Beginning before the sun had even completely risen, I was once again wandering the decrepit streets of Small Former Industrial City, East Coast, USA like a sad sack; a sad sack,

that is, who couldn’t stop obsessing about returning to that stupid restaurant or at least somehow finding some magical insane way to run into Daisy somewhere. In the most roundabout of miracles, I succeeded.

Now, the easy, obvious thing to do would’ve been to just simply return to the restaurant. But that would’ve been cringe and desperate – and those are two things I just can’t abide (jk those are the only two things I abide). Like, what the fuck was I supposed to do? Talk to Daisy? Strike up some kind of charming conversation? Come on. That ain’t happening. I wasn’t about to take that risk and ruin everything I’d built up in my noggin. I needed something more… well… convoluted. Somewhere along the way I spotted a flier for an Open Mic event taking place that night in a small auditorium on Main Street. The small auditorium, it turned out, was two doors down from Harry/Colin/Collin/Whoever-the-fuck’s Magical Mystery Diner. That was reason enough for me to attend. Plus, I’ve deluded myself into thinking I’m a c r e a t i v e w r i t e r so I often attend these kinds of things to read my shitty poetry. And I of course hoped Daisy would be there and I could somehow win her affection with my quirky yet dark poetics. Think Shakespeare meets Mort Sahl. No. My verse is worse than even that.

I was to learn upon arrival that evening that this open mic was a weekly happening and that it was broadcast on local access television. The auditorium itself was hardly photogenic, though. It was poorly lit and pretty makeshift. The seating was movie-theater style – not the new kind where you’re invited to shift your seat with electronic buzzers and arrows and shit and take a nap and vibrate your pussy but the old kind with sticky flooring and unmovable cushioning. It seemed like most of the other people attending were regulars and as far as I could tell Daisy was not one of them. Both of these things caused me some stress. I felt like a fringe outsider and if Daisy wasn’t there, what was the point?!?

So, there I was, sitting alone in the seventh row watching a bizarre, sort of irritating hack-a-thon. The first guy was like 65 years old and rapped about his beloved golden dalmatian. It was sad. Then a pair of college aged hipsters–a girl and a dude–with acous-

tic guitars sang a duet about how much they hated their parents and how they smoke weed and fuck to avoid the pain. Just breathtaking musical innovation. Oh–and there was some lunatic who literally did nothing but rant about God and Karl Marx until the hosts, two bespectacled, bearded 30 somethings about as exciting as watching a feral ox take a slow, constipated shit (very exciting!) had to pull him off.

I was signed up in a slot toward the end and wasn’t sure I was going to make it. But much as it had the previous night, when things were most hopeless, Daisy was conjured. She was there. Holy fucking shit.

“Our next performer,” began one of the enthralling hosts. “Is one of our favorites. Please put your hands together for Daisy Leclerc!”

I nearly self-combusted. She looked different. She’d let her hair down and was wearing a tee-shirt and jeans rather than her work uniform. But most striking were her eyes: they were no longer so alive, actually drooping slightly, not blinking at all. As a whole, her movements were slower, less confident.

I was too fluttery to fantasize. The opposite actually. I now was fixated on the hyperreality of whatever was about to happen. I was about to meet the real Daisy.

My goodness gracious.

“So,” she began. “I apologize if some of you have already heard what I’m about to say but I’ve run out of material and i’m too lazy to write new shit. Humor me with your laughter anyway.”

Oh, I see. I thought. She does comedy. We can make that work. “Actually,” she continued. “I don’t see too many familiar faces out there. So that’s good. Except for the girl I served last night at the cafe…”

I froze. I did not outwardly react in any discernible way (I think, at least) but my innards were pulsing with electric, poisonous ooze that made it difficult to sit still. Some might call it diarrhea, but that would be too reductive.

She wasn’t quite looking at me, more tilting her line of vision down at her feet in my vague direction before lifting her head and moving around the stage. “I’m sorry about the chicken fingers by the way. It was late and I honestly just wanted to get the fuck out of there.”

She was addressing me but not really talking to me at all. She was more talking past me, using me as prop-like fodder for the rest of the half-dazed audience.

I started to slink down in my seat.

“I hate my job. I work at the cafe down the street. If I were you,” she was saying, finally facing directly toward me but looking through me like a ghost. “I’d have gone anywhere else. None of you should bother going. It sucks.”

“Unless my boss is here!” she said with mock enthusiasm. “Because in that case everybody should come and eat our salty ass soups and gross salads! Yay! Tell em’ Daisy sent you! Or I guess you’d be telling me because I’m the waitress.”

There was some light, polite laughter scattered around the room, but it was far from overwhelming. I can’t remember if I laughed… if I did it was out of the sheer surrealness and discomfort of the moment and some misguided yet quickly fading desire to connect with this person.

“Yeah, my job sucks. I always threaten to quit but then my boss lays this whole routine on me about,” she now mimicked Harry or Colin or Frank or whoever’s accent, which was vaguely Greek but somehow also French. “How the restaurant just needs you and we won’t be the same without you and just to shut him up I tell him I’ll stay. I think he wants to sleep with me. Maybe I’ll do it for the gag and the material I’d get out of it. He’s not a bad looking man. But not exactly a good looking one.”

She was bombing. To her credit, she didn’t seem to care. She was going to milk all of her allotted time, the rest of us be damned.

I felt like a fool. And not just any fool: this is such a recurring feeling for me that I have layers and layers of nuance to dig through. If I must somehow put it into words,

I would say that I felt like a big hot air balloon, patterned like a gigantic quilt in shapely greens, blues, yellows, and red, soaring over wine country somewhere (California, France, wherever) on just a perfectly crisp, cloudless day. And I decided it’d be a good and safe idea to climb up into the atmosphere and really enjoy the lovely weather. Up, up, and up I go. Then out of nowhere some sort of alien velociraptor with an insanely sharp beak dives right into the heart of my colorful paneling and within moments I’m rapidly approaching the earth and upon impact with the cold, hard ground I just explode into flames.

That’s the kind of fool I felt like.

It sucks to call off a wedding. Painful as fuck. Hard to process, let alone articulate. I guess I just thought we had something. But she had nothing, and I’ve got nothing.

At least Billy had fun that weekend. He wasn’t happy when he found out I’d taken the car and driven back home, leaving him to take a 90 minute train ride with two transfers to get back the next morning.

But at least he had some goddamn fun.

AROM

fiction by C.G. Dominguez

Amniotomy, or the artificial rupture of membranes (AROM), a common obstetrical procedure with manifold indications, which may be safely used to hasten the progression of labor.

- Beckmann and Ling’s Obstetrics and Gynecology

Maren Pitt had only ever been pulled over one time in her life. Sixteen years old and a quarter mile from school, she ran a red light. Floridalma was with her, as she was always with her, and she sat small and demure as Maren rolled the window down and handed her license to the sleepy State Trooper. He’d taken an unctuous satisfaction in showing them mercy, leering at their uniform skirts and knee-high socks, and let her off with a warning to cry helpless crocodile tears in the parking lot, remaining in the driver’s seat with Alma’s arm around her shoulders before limping late into homeroom.

If someone tried to flag her down now, she’d lead them on a merry chase that would end splashed across the evening news. OJ and white Bronco, redux. Let them try it, she thinks. Let them try to test the strength of her resolve, tonight.

She’s gunning 95 in the coal-black night. Glancing into her rearview mirror, she can see a phosphorescent ring around the moon, its light refracting off ice particles suspended lace-like in the upper atmosphere. She streaks, doppler effect shrieking, around lackadaisical semi-trucks and the occasional lone traveler in an oversized pick-up.

She does, in fact, get pulled over, just once, outside of Junction City, Kansas. She flashes her hospital badge so fast the cop can’t see the name of the facility, can’t see how far she is from home, but he’s sufficiently impressed by her haste to let her go without a ticket. She waits until the halogen glare of his headlights dims around the barely-there curve of the horizon, and floors it again.

She did not, technically, deceive him. “An urgent matter of patient care,” she’d said, when he’d asked her to explain herself. She hadn’t lied.

. . . . . .

“How’s it going, hotshot?” Alma asked, the last time she called. “Fine.”

“How are you sleeping?”

“Fine.”

Pitt waited, impatient. Her own health was not what she called to talk about. But Alma was not one to be rushed to the point. She never had been.

A pause.

“What did the doctor say?”

And Alma relayed, with practiced clarity, the findings of the final ultrasound. Polyhydramnios, and possible vasa previa. The nurse said her blood pressure was high, and Alma reported what she had been given to bring it down and how often she was taking it, as though she had the training to anticipate Pitt’s questioning.

The silence settled again as she trailed off. Maren waited to be asked the one question she wished she didn’t know how to answer.

“So, how bad is it?” . . . . . .

Pitt pulls over at a truck stop just across the Kansas-Colorado border, needing to piss. She braves the dark, smoky interior of the adjacent restaurant to push back towards the restroom, reeking of ammonia. She checks her phone while perched on the warped plastic seat. One text from Ben. Picked Frankie up from daycare. Call me. One from Dr. Feng, her attending, which she does not dare open. It’s a long one.

She buys a pack of gum and a massive foam cup of stale coffee, gets back on the road. Nearly nine hours out from St. Louis, three more until she reaches Colorado Springs. If she’s lucky, she can beat daylight.

. . . . . .

Pitt tells the glossed drama of her daughter’s birth over and over to family and friends, the story always structured to satisfy a loved one’s need to know that all’s well that ends with a healthy baby. The ugly details, the physical truth, those things she reserves for her colleagues. Being physicians in training themselves, they have a professional interest, a frame of reference to gauge the horrors of her experience.

The last time, she sat in the resident workroom while her chief stood behind her, braiding her hair. It was one of the new interns, a sweet little thing; blonde, with a warm Georgian accent, who asked her about her experience, wide-eyed with the familiar awe that childless women sometimes have for mothers their own age.

She meandered through the story; how she had a full day on the board in the OR, how she felt the first stirrings of pain in the middle of an endometrial ablation. How the break between cases found her sitting on the wood bench in the locker room, staring at her watch, keeping count of the span between contractions. Six minutes.

She did her own cervical check in a curtain-off changing room. The angle was awkward for her, reaching down and in. She’d always had small hands, but it got the job done. She estimated her own effacement and station and decided she had it in her to go back to work.

When sign-out was done, instead of trekking out to the parking lot for her car, she got into the elevator, went up three stories, and calmly walked herself to the desk at Labor and Delivery. Ben appeared an hour later, absolutely frantic, still in his suit and combed hair. She patted him on the cheek, let him kiss her, and sent him home to change and get their ready bag. He brought her food she could not eat, books she did not feel like reading, but oh how he tried and tried to please her, and that did please her.

Later, she recalled standing naked under the hot spray of the shower, wracked by waves of unmedicated pain. Ben stood gamely under the spray in all his clothes, providing counterpressure against the cramping in her back. Her world became a highway

tunnel of agony, waves of it flashing by like orange sodium bulbs, as she dove deeper and deeper and deeper into the depths of her new life.

She stalled for a while at 8 centimeters and resigned herself to the prospect of getting sectioned herself, imagining being wheeled to the very same rooms where she was so used to standing gowned and gloved and thinking what she would have to eat when the cafeteria reopened at one in the morning. She thought she might try and keep up a running commentary, make a point of asking if the assisting intern could make the initial incision for practice, and if there was a student on the team, let them close the subcu, could you?

But for all her high humor, a current of fear still throbbed low in the interim, some sense that things were not all as they should be. Her mentor, Dr. Feng, tracked her fetal heart tracings from the call room. Later he told her they’d looked like shit all afternoon, and he’d been on tenterhooks wondering if he was going to have to intervene, and she felt that low punch of dread all over again.

But time and Pitocin combined to do their work, and she made it to 10 centimeters sometime around 2 in the morning. She pushed for a terrible two hours, was left with a second-degree tear whose repair was worse than the labor itself.

Robbed of the energy to make her own agonies someone else’s teaching experience, she asked for the work be left to the attending. She and Feng exchanged a laugh as the last suture was tied, his head between her lifted legs, at the thought that they could be so comfortable with this, as colleagues. He’d even gone so far as to apologize for being a man in that moment, not because it made matters awkward (it didn’t) but because it meant that they could never have any such exchange in kind.

“If not,” he insisted, “you’d be the first one I called.”

He’d seen the quality of her repairs, how her Pfannenstiel incisions healed like paper cuts, I’ll do yours, if you’ll do mine.

Those things, of course, she left out of the story.

. . . . . .

“What an angel,” the new intern said, when she was finished. Pitt looked at her. Presumably, she meant Ben.

“He is,” she answered. And he was.

At six feet even, Pitt always found dating a challenge. In college, she even tried her hand at hooking up with women just to break the monotony of boys’ insecurities about her height. In high school, with her lacrosse and her cross-country career she’d been slender and interesting to look at, with her dark curls and easy tan and light eyes; the opposite, in some ways, of Alma’s own lush, classical beauty. But the demands of residency had stolen some of that fresh charm, leaving grey streaks at the temples and the crown of her head. She’d felt so fortunate to meet Ben, who didn’t mind the inch and a half she had on him, seemed not to notice it.

He never minded anything. From the beginning, his had been an unshakeable love. He had clung to her firm and fast, following merrily along when she matched in St. Louis and taking no small delight in the cultural adjustments of Midwestern life, so different from his cosmopolitan upbringing. When they recited their vows to each other, he made so many passionate statements of devotion and fidelity that Pitt’s mother (cheated on by every man she had ever dared to care about) wept openly and loudly in the front row, and nearly drowned out the sound of Pitt’s own words, much less florid in their intensity.

He reminded her sometimes of the hermit crabs they sold at the beach, content to cower in their gaudy painted and bejeweled shells, the fear of vulnerability overwhelming any thoughts of that instinctual dignity that animates all wild things. She should have known when he offered to take her name that she was putting herself in the way of just such a partnership, but the feminist victory of it had temporarily overwhelmed her better judgment.

But they lived in peace with each other, and he rose to the demands of fatherhood with ease and aplomb. When Ben first held Frances in his arms, Pitt couldn’t help but

think how well they made a complete picture of a family, just the two of them. He cried out with joy when her little pink hand took his forefinger into her grip, imagining a moment of poignant recognition of a daughter for her father, and Pitt did not have the heart to tell him that it was merely a primitive reflex. Something even baby monkeys did, to lessen the chance that they might fall out of their tree.

But the suspicion persisted, the thought that Ben and Frances had a connection with each other Pitt herself had no access to and could not understand. Certainly with time little Frank had come to resemble her father more and more, with her sensitive skin and her laundry list of allergies. And when Ben offered to cut back on his hours to pick up all the slack she left in her parenting, she did not fight him or try to resettle the burden of motherhood onto her own shoulders. She let him do what he wanted.

Two hours from her destination, the radio starts to buzz out. She’s still trying to pick up a station from Kansas, and she’s nearly in Limon by now, where I-70 and Route 24 diverge. She reaches out a hand to press the scan button, but pauses. Reflects. Lets the static wash over her, instead.

If Pitt found herself at a loss about her own husband, all she had to do was compare her own situation to Alma’s, and she found no end of relief.

No one had ever had to tell her best friend she was beautiful. It was a fact she might have been born knowing. She’d been a life model in college, confident enough (even a little vain) that her round arms and the softness at her waist were traits art students could appreciate, and they did. Pitt quickly lost track of the phone numbers Alma accumulated in that time, equally distributed between men and women. Nothing had ever come of it; it was far better, Alma said, to be the unattainable beauty, and not actually disappoint anyone by going on a date.

Then had come Paul, a Southwest pilot who whisked Alma away into a promised

wild blue yonder that never materialized.

Paul was a man sturdy in appearance, but fragile in fact. Not angry, not dangerous by any means. But volatile. “Anxious,” Alma said, and often repeated, like a mantra.

When the three of them were fresh out of school and embarked on a casual road trip, Pitt watched Paul flinch and fuss over a dirty gas station bathroom, souring his mood for the remainder of the drive.

The tension burgeoned and swelled until they were forced to drive in perfect silence. Every song on the radio irritated him, every subject of conversation was untenable. Eventually, Alma surrendered her shotgun seat to sit with Pitt in the back, leaning against her shoulder as she drifted off to sleep. Pitt had unballed her sweatshirt from her duffle bag and draped it under Alma’s neck, tucking the sleeves around and behind her so she was effectively swaddled. Alma hadn’t thanked her in words, too wary of speaking and sparking another rupture, but smiled sleepily at her, blinking out a Morse code message. “Thanks, babe.”

And so Alma married him, and followed him to a succession of grim hubs, settled at intervals in the exurbs of Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix. His eventual return to active service and consignment to the Air Force Academy took them to the taupe-tinged sprawl of Colorado Springs, and kept them there, while Paul tried and failed to position himself for some more prestigious job at the Pentagon that everyone knew would never come.

“I wanted you to be the first person I told,” Alma said, her voice a little thready. The high plains wind distorted her voice; she was outside, standing on the porch of the house she and Paul shared. She didn’t want him to hear whatever she said next. “I was late, a couple weeks. I took a test.”

And Pitt had never felt this way. Not even when she realized she herself was pregnant. She thought of the bodies the Paris police used to dredge out of the silt of the Seine, stones filling the generous pockets of their nineteenth century clothes. She was being

dragged down and down and down into the murky green depths of something she recognized, but did not want to name.

It will pass, she told herself. You just have to wait. You won’t feel like this forever.

Maybe it would cure her. Free her. Maybe knowing that she had the same interior architecture as all the other women in the world would cut through the Gordian knot that had been tying itself steadily together since they’d met each other.

Maybe it would only make things worse.

“Oh Flo,” she said, deploying the nickname that had only been hers to use since they were sixteen and living in each other’s pockets. “That’s wonderful! What do you need? What can I do?”

A nervous rill of laughter, and Pitt thought of a river again, not the brown Seine, but a clear mountain stream.

“Prepare yourself for a lot of stupid questions.”

“No such thing, coming from you.”

Sometimes, it felt like half the things Pitt said to Alma were intended for misdirection, designed to throw her off the scent.

She asked a lot of questions about Paul. She went on at length about Ben’s work and mild hobbies and his hopes and plans for the future. She did not talk about herself. She did not talk about the past.

Alma confronted her about it once, when Pitt shut down a nostalgic reminiscence about the times they would go tromping around in the weedy grounds around the high school in search of ecological specimens for a freshman biology project.

Not now, Flo. Let’s not, today.

Why shouldn’t we talk about it? Was it really so bad? It was a beautiful time, I thought.

And Pitt swallowed her own answer, made some excuse to get off the phone be-

fore she said something she couldn’t take back.

This time came from that time. How beautiful could it be, if it led to this?

. . . . . .

Once, Alma rang her just as Pitt was waking from a dream of the two of them in the little closet-turned-reading-room, the one from her childhood home, tucked under the knee wall of her attic. They’d been entwined on the large beanbag chair where Pitt used to curl up with her Redwall and her Le Guin, and she could now recall nothing but the hard jut of Alma’s collarbone under her lips, where she mouthed helplessly at the base of her neck. She had to wipe her mouth and scrub the sand from her eyes before she picked up the phone, answering it as was her habit.

“Pitt.”

In fumbled fragments Alma told the story of how she’d slipped coming down the stairs of a parking garage, bruising the backs of her thighs against the concrete. What should she do? Where should she go? Should she drive to the hospital?

And Pitt found she didn’t know. Every ounce of her training deserted her all at once. All the normal questions she should have ready at her fingertips, the staple queries of obstetric triage (are you having contractions how strong how often have you noticed any loss of fluid have you had any bleeding are you still feeling baby move how many times today?) were as though they have never been.

I don’t know, she said. Fuck, I don’t know. Where is Paul?

Floridalma Fields, thirty-one year old G1P0 at 25w4d by U=17, hx of placenta previa resolved at 20wk presenting today for rule out labor following a fall onto dorsal aspect of thighs and back. Denies VB, CTX, LOF. Positive FM. Denies N/V/D, HA, CP, VC. One MRBP in the office 2wks ago, normotensive at home. FHTs category 1 on threehour monitor (HR 150, moderate variability, acels, no decels). Mild irritability on toco. Dispo: Discharge home with scheduled follow-up. . . . . . .

Pitt listened to the message while sitting in her car, headed to a night shift.

Mar, it’s me. The doctor called. I haven’t made any change, he said he would like to schedule a C-section in the morning. Paul is on the first flight out of Miami. He says he’s going to try to make it, but I don’t know. I don’t think this is really his thing. All that blood. I know this isn’t what I planned on, but like you said, they happen all the time, they’re practically routine. I’m not afraid. Just wanted to tell you. Love you.

She always ended calls that way, but Pitt knew better than to think anything of it. They had always been that way, with each other.

The night was shaping up to be a busy one. No sooner had Pitt taken sign-out from the day team than she found herself scrubbing for a crash section. Even after two years, it still felt like battlefield medicine, comparing the messiness and urgency of the L&D theater with the sedate, civilized pace of a laparoscopic salpingectomy. Once, it had stirred a thrill in her, a sense of high purpose. But, as with anything one did for a living, experience soon dulled adrenaline’s sharp edge.

They were down within moments. Skin, subcu, fascia, peritoneum, and finally the uterine incision, no time wasted. She reached in, got both gloved palms around the parietal planes of the fetal head, gripped and heaves what she rightly guessed to be a perfect eight pounds, four ounces. Sixty seconds to wait before the cord was clamped and cut, and the child (good tone, good cry, good color) handed off. Her mind was still, quiet, riding the line between zen and stiff boredom, despite the palpable urgency in the room, the smell of fear.

And then, she made her mistake. She looked to her right, over the shelf of blue drape.

She didn’t see the patient. Instead, the face that looked up at her was Alma’s. Unmistakably. Her fine blonde hair was tucked beneath a bouffant blue cap, two little wisps escaping around her ears. Her eyes, glacial-clear and pale, wide with paralytic fear. She

was wracked with spinal shakes, jaw clenched tight, deep shivers pulsing through her from the rapid anesthesia. And Pitt froze.

She didn’t hear Feng call her name. She didn’t feel the scrub tech poke her with the suture scissors, trying to slip them into her hand.

She was unreachable, locked in the grip of the revelation, the half-ecstatic vision. All she could see was Alma, exposed to the senseless workplace chatter of the operating room, trying in vain to comfort her husband while it was her abdomen being opened to the sterile air.

And a jealousy beyond anything Pitt has ever felt rose up and overwhelmed her, a rogue wave. The acid grip of it seized her chest, stole her breath. Somewhere in the middle distance, she could hear Feng call for someone to scrub her out, but she was already half out of the room, tearing out the double-doors and down the corridor.

What would Paul do, at the sight of the clots and spilled fluid on the floor? Who would explain to her the singed smell left by the cautery was nothing to be nervous of? Reassure her that the names of instruments being called for were all things in common use, lay a hand in her hair and peek over the drape to jibe with the team and tell her how well she looked?

He doesn’t belong there. I belong there. She needs me, and I’m not there.

So, she got in her car, and drove West, into the black night.

Wiffle Ball fiction by V.A. Wisewell

Minutes ago, sweet minutes, we were three innings in—happily sailing the wiffle ball into the outfield and rounding the construction cone bases on our makeshift baseball field.

Dad was across the street, resting on our couch before the start of his four p.m. shift at the mill, expecting Mike, Jerry, and I to do what we do when he works late:

Stay out of trouble and stay outside until dinner.

Now, thanks to Jerry, whose wailing roused the whole damn neighborhood, Dad is storming across the gravel parking lot, coming for us in his white undershirt and scuffed leather slippers, face puffy as an irked cat at a speed much faster than I thought possible.

Damn you, Jerry.

Dad steps over the rebar separating the parking lot from our dirt field and, without slowing down, hollers,

“Somebody better tell me why he’s crying!”

Mike, Gil, and I look at our feet.

Jerry has been showing off since we started, swinging at every ball like it was the last game in the playoffs. Mike gave him fair warning,

“I’m done chasing your balls, Jerry. Cut it out. Or else.”

Jerry kept knocking ’em out of the park, leaving Mike to climb the fence and play fetch.

Jerry’s like that, a tank full of premium-grade stubborn. He never listens and is always out for attention.

Mike’s like something else. He doesn’t explain or ask twice. He teaches lessons the hard way, a fastball to the face.

We all know this.

Dad’s thundering strides turn the dry dirt of our carefully marked field into a cloud of dust. At the center of the diamond, he levels Mike with a hard-as-concrete look. He moves from Mike, perched on the sandbag pitcher’s mound, to Gil at second. Last, he lands on me, guarding third with a stiff left leg.

I know what’s coming.

Dad jabs his log of a finger at me and says, “Ray, what happened here?”

Usually, I wriggle out of refereeing Mike and Jerry’s fights by hiding or lying. Today, with Dad, Mike, and Gil all staring at me, I’ve got no choice but to answer. I clear my throat.

Still crouched behind home plate sniffling, Jerry lets loose a loud whimper. It’s all I can do not to roll my eyes. Crying is Jerry’s go-to trick whenever he wants Dad’s attention.

Dad knows this.

He doesn’t turn around.

In my mind, I smirk and say, “Too bad, Jerry!”

In real life, with Dad’s finger pointing at me, I clear my throat again and say, “I don’t know, Dad. I didn’t see it.”

Before Jerry went to bat, Gil hit a line drive to third. I went for it, thought I had it, but bounced it off my glove. Gill was safe on second by the time I got the ball. Mike, always

supportive, delivered a moving pep talk,

“What? First day on the field? Next time, dummy, stop the ball!”

Followed by a shove that landed me face-down in the dirt.

Thanks to Mike, I was busy bleeding onto the black and gold emblem of my Bruins tee shirt when Jerry got beamed. The shirt is now wrecked for good.

Damn you, Mike.

Not buying my answer, Dad says,

“Didn’t see anything? Because you were out here not watching the game?”

I shrug, hoping my busted lip and bloody tee shirt answer his questions.

They don’t.

He keeps poking and says,

“Well, Ray?”

For an embarrassing second, I consider blurting,

“Mike hit Jerry.”

Mike’s the neighborhood’s short fuse. Gil’s quiet. He never loses it. His whole family keeps their feelings tucked into their back pockets. Mike and I learned this firsthand when Dad had us spend a restless August at their house four summers ago.

But then I think of Mike, balled into an angry fist, shouldering me into a corner.

Calling Mike out isn’t worth the cost.

So, instead, I say,

“Maybe he misread the pitch and got hit.”

The swelling in my lip turns my words into doughy-sounding lies.

Dad makes a face.

It isn’t a good face.

I brace myself.

I know what’s coming.

Unlike Jerry, I don’t get a pass when there’s trouble. Dad holds me equally in the blame, even if I didn’t start or cause it. This goes double when Jerry’s wailing. Mike says Dad takes up for Jerry because he doesn’t have a chance against either of us. Jerry’s smart and fast on his feet, but Mike’s right, one on one, he’d land on his butt every time.

I suspect Dad has other reasons for backing him.

Mike and I take after Dad—we’re big, with brown eyes and brown hair. We aren’t, as Dad says whenever he talks about Mom,

“Something special to look at.”

Jerry’s olive-eyed, with auburn curls and a nose that turns toward the sky. He’s cute, cereal box cover cute. When Dad looks at him, he sees more than a cute kid. He sees Mom.

From home plate comes another pitiful whimper. This time, Jerry adds a little extra by turning his bludgeoned eye toward Dad.

It works.

Dad says,

“Jesus. You three see that?”

We do. A wet welt, an imprint of the wiffle ball, frames Jerry’s eye. It isn’t pretty.

In my mind, I yell, “That’s what you get for showing off, Jerry!”

In real life, with Dad close enough to cuff me, I keep my mouth shut.

I stay quiet for other reasons, too.

Jerry’s stuck being raised mainly by Mike and me. It can’t be great. I’m twelve and relying on Mike while Dad works is far from fun. At least when I drift off to sleep, and my thoughts turn into thick, sticky honey, I can see Mom standing on our porch. I can hear her calling us for dinner. At least I have a time when she’s with me.

Dad shakes his head, now as pink as grocery store strawberry ice cream. He’s losing his version of patience. I’m guessing this is our last go-round.

I’m up first.

“Ray, you’re twelve. Four years older and a whole lot bigger. You know better.”

I lock on a spot beyond the fence and don’t blink.

Mike’s next on deck.

“And you, you’re fourteen. Twice Jerry’s size.”

Dad steps closer.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

Gil and I watch.

Mike’s a cement piling.

He’ll never crack.

Dad knows this.

Last to bat is Gil.

I give him a long look, one I hope says,

“Come on, step up and take one for the team.”

Gil’s untouchable. Our moms have been best friends since high school. Dad can’t do more than give him words about being careful and not picking on precious Jerry. Gil can issue a quick,

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” and go home. Tomorrow, he can come back brand new. It’s a perfect solution.

Dad knows this. He skips over Gil without saying a word and moves on to Mike and me.

Damn you, Gil.

Dad pins us together with his eyes as tightly as he would with his arms if we were standing shoulder to shoulder. When my insides are nearly liquid, he says, “He’s your brother. You two are supposed to look out for him.”

Guilt: The last resort.

We’re in this together now. If either of us speaks, we both lose. The strength of Mike’s will pushes against mine. We lean in and make a mental wall. An earthquake couldn’t shake us.

A slow minute passes. Then another.

I count every second.

Not getting anywhere fast enough to return to the couch and finish his nap, Dad grunts, releases us from his vice-grip and turns to the only person who can end this.

Jerry now has his face buried in the crook of his arm. His shoulders quiver in time to his sniveling. On cue, he gazes up at Dad.

A freckled moon.

A nebulous of auburn curls. A perfect reflection of Mom.

Damn you, Jerry.

Soothing as I’ve ever heard him, Dad says, “Jerry, what do you have to say about this?”

Jerry’s eyes brighten. Mike and I exchange a knowing look. It’s what he’s been waiting for— his chance to be the umpire, to make the call to win or lose the game for Mike and me.

Mike, Gil, and I stare at him, burning one thought,

“You better not tell,” into his brain like a laser.

Jerry exhales a broken breath, looks right at Mike, and says, “I wasn’t watching the ball and got hit.”

Dad walks over to Jerry, pats his shoulder with his calloused hand, and says, “It happens to the best of us. Get the peas from the freezer. Ice that eye. You’ll be good as new in an hour.”

Jerry wipes his nose on the back of his hand and nods. He takes his time standing, grabbing the diamonds of the wire fence to lift himself, like his legs are too weak to do the work alone, and starts for the house.

When Dad isn’t watching, he raises his right hand and gives Mike the finger.

Dad’s face is still puffy, but the strawberry ice cream color is fading. Jabbing his finger at us once more, he says, “You’re lucky. This time.”

He tilts his head toward the sky and sighs. We can almost hear the conversation he’s having in his mind. For his sake, we pretend not to notice. Just like he pretends Jerry isn’t lying.

In many ways, it would be easier if we were like Gil’s family, well-mannered and even-tempered. But that’s not us, not anymore. Now, we’re loud and rowdy and like to mix it up. For us, sticking together is the best we can do.

Dad knows this.

And when he visits Mom on Sunday and brings her favorite spring tulips, I’m sure he’ll stand tall on the table-flat cemetery grass and report that her boys, even her youngest, are okay.

Mom won’t be surprised. She’s something special. he already knows this.

We live for Halloween fiction by R.

P. Singletary

PLEASE NOTE: HIDE THIS FROM UNDERTAKER. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

[Prologue: Indecision]

I did, too. We both lived for it. But he could never decide: which of the two themes, for there were only ever two: (1) cover up, or (2) bare down.

[Act I: Funked-up Diacriticals]

In those years, he lived for Hallowe’en, which she thought odd for a grown man. Odder still was that apostrophe — ’ — he forced into an otherwise good, clean word, but she’d lost that argument when he pulled out a history book, a dictionary, and the H encyclopædia. By that point, he was spouting off on the “æ” (“that’s an ‘a’ plus an ‘e,’ but written wholly as one-letter”) and something about his favorite Latin teacher...in kindergarten??? I figured it all a lost cause by then. Quit while still ahead, ya know?

“Hurraaay for Halloweeee’en!!” Howie screamed, howling in delight, as he barreled in buck-ass naked.

“How f’ed up is that? Livin’ for a day all about THE dead...sounds freaky,” said Jon, perched on weedy pillows.

“More like kinky, I’d say,” said Marc. He danced his eyebrows and repeated: “K — I — N — K — Y! Heeey, sounds like another show tune!”

Marc looked for something to touch. Howie sprawled out on the sofa, just beyond his reach and grasp.

“I’d say pathetic. Just sad. Yet another Post-Millennial callin’-o’-the masses,” said Mat.

“P-ssssseudo-holiday that went up and done all cashed-out. Pathetic, yup,” Andrés said, lisping on purpose this time.

Finally, Howie answered them all: “Goddamn, can’t a girl getafuck’roundhere without Lived for loosinupapiecea—!”

A silent two seconds passed, a full-room rarity with our gang. Too vulgar, yes, even for us. Especially for me. I left the room, but unfortunately, could still hear the catcalls through the walls, the closed door.

“Put that on a greeting card, fag-gaaaht,” Mat said, waving through the air the remote that always got stuck. “Toooo mucho!” He waved again.

“Uh-huh,” Andrés said. “Sí, amigo.”

“That would be -ga,” Jon shot back. “Para ti.” He snapped his fingers mid-air.

“W-T-F y’all talkin’bout?” Howie said, leaning down a third time toward the coffee table for more—

But were they sitting-around smoking or drinking or gaming or ‘gram-ing or ...blowing?

I had walked in. During intermission or rehearsal. I was never sure with this group. And as usual, never absolutely certain of anything. With any of the crew. Even. And especially. After all those years. Of hanging out. Maybe they were rehearsing. Again. Why I went to law school. Not my thing. At all.

[Act II: Dressin’ The Part]

dressing up the closetful father, mother, son, daughter, dog perfect we didn’t have a daughter tea parties — Kmart clothing – look at what he has she said you’re pretty, not handsome — WTF

[Act III: Tired]

I didn’t want to end up like the unmarried cousin who still lived with his unmarried sister, his unmarried brother. Johnson had seen him in the john. Some relation said they saw— Ahead of the time. His time? Her time? Their time? Some ‘neck said he couldamadealotta money with all that junk, and he spat on the ground when he said those words. He walked away. His brother said, yeah, couldamadealotta money. Offa my brother, nodded he in the very direction of the man just walked away from our gossip. He divorced, ya know. Junk, he said, and he spat, too. I felt sorry for him, Johnson.

Remember that Tom Sawyer TV show fifty years ago? Was Tom really Becky-in-drag?

I had to be nearly 90 before the allure of leather bars’ polished chaps and weathered harnesses, bulged sweaty athletic jocks, scuffed he-man spit-shined work boots melted away in the fire of age. Old age. Tired of posin’. Not retired.

It all drooped as po’ as a limp ‘70s-circa porn-’stache now all the rage among Fourth Ward hipsters, but do ya know if they all live here, where they go when they hang up their leathers, the outfits, costumes for next year’s late-October li’l-bit-o’-fun? Pokin’ fun at us every other night, those years back when the world didn’t know any better about holidays, holy days, Halloween or the rest. We live in our time, don’t we? The magic of understanding. What to celebrate, the how why and when

The Rambler fiction by

Justin Carlos Alcalá

Cotton candy clouds hoisted a cherry sun over blueberry mountains. The splendor bothered a sleep deprived, Dramamine-inebriated Adam Montanez. His first vacation was already an hour off schedule, and he couldn’t spare a minute admiring skylines. Complications with Adam’s discount flight and rental car delayed him an hour, and even though his cabin reservation was self check-in, the Audits Manager fizzed like a shaken soda bottle as he dashed his 1.2 liter engine compact car along the evergreen road. He had to hurry if he wanted to unravel.

Adam’s Mexican parents migrated to the U.S., desperate for work. From the time of his birth, they yearned for his success. It was difficult for Adam to watch his parents suffer through four jobs in order to pay for his education, so when a corporate firm hired him as an audits accountant, he swore to climb the ladder. For the next decade, Adam’s efforts drew raises and titles with a side of anxiety, migraines, and insomnia. Through the fires of profit, Adam forged into a fastidious model employee with more stowed PTO than the rest of his department. Had his director not instructed him otherwise, Adam would be in his office now.

Adam’s romantic getaway retreat was situated outside of a tiny mountain town that showcased its bohemian charm. The village’s sign read Where Hippy and Hillbilly Are One. Adam sneered at the pottery store, karma shop, and tie dye shed with a misspelled sign that read We Die Here. Adam rode through the village’s main street, his rental tires trading pavement for gravel as he cut into the red maple woods. Fifteen minutes after snaking through roads and passing over a suspect river bridge, Adam parked before a timber frame cabin pinned on a hill. Adam glanced at his rental printout picture, followed by the shrunken lodge in front of him.

“I smell a one-star review,” Adam said to no one in particular, fetching his luggage and self check-in keycard from the passenger seat. “Time to get back on schedule.”

On the inside, the cabin resembled a forgotten history exhibit with a scorched stone fireplace, a low timber ceiling, and floorboards powdered in ash. Cast-iron pans adorned the walls like artwork, and secondhand furniture clung to splitting walls. A perfume of baked wood and mothballs stung Adam’s nostrils, and a steady draft purred through the house. Adam realized that his signal bars were likewise on vacation as he snapped a picture with his phone.

Adam unpacked in the cabin’s sole bedroom. The California King, smothered with lacy heart pillows, stole most of the resting quarters except a lone dresser where Adam transferred his carryon’s pressed flannels. Once complete, Adam returned to the living room loveseat, sat, and breathed his first paid-time-off breath. The cabin’s draft breathed back. Adam studied the ceiling, walls, and floors for secret treasures, and when he came up empty, he bit his cuticles clean. He avoided work thoughts by humming a tune that sprung in his head while pacing through the living room, porch, and bedroom. He tested the bathroom’s faucets, searched for the draft points of entry, then confirmed he’d locked the car. Adventure’s zenith arrived when Adam fetched logs from the garden’s mammoth, endless woodpile and lit the fireplace to cook markdown hotdogs he’d bought from a shady gas station. Depleted from the excitement, Adam retired to bed at the crack of eight-o’clock.

That night, as Adam settled in a bed that stunk like sex, he leered into the blackness unearthed by a lack of light pollution. Every branch crack, fallen acorn, and owl call amplified in silence. Adam was unaware of how long this purgatory lasted until the leaves spoke. At first, it was a distant shuffling of fallen brush that Adam attributed to a night animal, but as the rustling dragged closer, a song accompanied it. It was a raspy, gravelly baritone voice like the creak from a backdoor. Adam fixed in terror, listening as lyrics and leaves cut through the front yard, forming words as the stranger crossed the bedroom window.

“Wanna see the moon’s real color?

Wanna hear a secret song?

The finest things are always free, You’ll see if you dance along.”

Words fell apart as the vocalist wandered to the rear of the house, into woods. Adam’s fingers stung from clutching his comforter. When the lands offered back its old tune, Adam’s stone bones dissolved. He vaulted from his bed and scurried to the window, noticing an old condom stuck to the curtains as he drew them back. Moonlight washed the front row of trees silver. No phantom wanderer stirred.

“Nope, not doing this,” Adam said, whirling to the dresser. He donned his preset hiking clothes, snatched his car keys, then whisked outside to his rental. When he clicked the key alarm, nothing happened. Adam tested the door. A muddy handprint pasted on the driver seat and another along the open fuse box. Adam used his cellphone light to investigate. Somebody cut the wires like one would in a cheap spy movie. Adam reached to test the ignition, but a titanic crack from a healthy branch behind the backyard sent him into retreat. He darted to the cabin, locked the doors, then pushed furniture against every point of entry.

“Okay, Adam,” he said aloud, pressed against the door. “Let’s get some rest, then report the nightmare fuel in the morning. Maybe the police know someone who lives nearby…in the secluded wilds…who wanders the dark forest alone and tampers with cars.”

For the rest of the night, Adam huddled motionless with his back to a windowless wall, fireplace poker and plastic fast-food knife clutched in his hands. The somniferous orchestra of early birds, the wind’s keening, and his own humming massaged Adam’s thoughts into a dull drone until he conceded to slumber. Dreams of Florissant lit offices, corporate meetings, and an endless stack of marked reports stole Adam’s repose. When his body

jolted awake, Adam peered at his smartwatch and realized it was one o’clock p.m. His plotted trek to the police was four hours overdue.

“No,” he bounced up, pushing away the loveseat barricade and withdrawing the front door, leaving it open. “I can’t be late.”

Adam dashed outside, still armed with his arsenal, and followed the gravel road, polluted with dead leaves because of a breezy autumn night. He made it thirty minutes before the russet and pewter landscape spun him in circles. He thought he’d heard an office phone ringing by a pile of dead evergreens as he trudged on but wrote it off as exhaustion. By the time the cold and hungry Audits Manager reached the river, it verged on three o’clock in the afternoon. Adam’s gasping open mouth sealed into a grimace as he took in the overpass. Overnight, the suspect bridge turned into the broken bridge when a shore maple split the platform in twine.

“No way,” he rubbed at his dark mane of pomade greased hair until he looked like a rooster. “This isn’t a coincidence.”

Across the river, a distant slap like an axe to wood echoed between the trees. Adam didn’t spare a moment hurrying back towards the cabin, wood poker at the ready. He raced the sun’s descent, making it to the cabin’s locked door in time for shadows to trade places with trees. He fumbled with the keycard, then barricaded himself inside. The backyard’s woodpile was empty, so Adam used printed expense reports from his carryon to make a roaring fire. He peered at his wristwatch. Night stretched ahead, and Adam wondered if he could handle another double shift. He ate stale cereal, drank complimentary cabin chamomile tea, then retired to his windowless corner. It didn’t take long for him to fall asleep, returning to H.R. trainings, equity statements, and profit ledgers. The melody he couldn’t stop humming looped in his dream’s background. At three-fifteen a.m., Adam roused, overheated. The cabin stood still.

“A drunk,” Adam said. “An isolated incident.”

Adam moved to the bedroom, settling in the dark and listening to the earth’s mur-

mur. Wind, evening creatures, and plummeting foliage took the night off. His body melted into the cool mattress as repose took him. Visions of standstill traffic, break rooms, and copy machines formed before an electric chirp of the front door’s lock pulled Adam from his shaping nightmare. A desert wanderer’s voice crooned through the living room.

“We’ll Cha Cha on the Lord’s green hair, Play blackjack by the stream’s floor. Put some spiders in our pockets, Take our skin off near the shore.”

Adam locked in place. He listened as wet feet walked to the kitchen and dug through the cupboards. Adam recognized the crunch of chewing cereal, then the visitor proceeded past Adam’s locked bedroom door and into the washroom. Bath nobs squealed as the shower turned on. Adam heard his visitor draw the shower curtain back, step inside, then clear his throat before singing again.

“You ain’t lost if you are happy, I use fireflies for light.

We’re serving mouse veal and blood wine, A wolf’s feast is quite the sight.”

Adam broke through his spell and rocketed up. In a protean race, he struggled to shove on a boot before changing his mind, snatching his flannel, and then hurrying out of the bedroom. Light under the bathroom door shifted as the visitor trilled along. Adam wasted no time bounding out the open exit. A hazy, soft shower oiled the earth, causing Adam to slip through the yard. Adam plied his rental car as a handrail, but vaulted onto the narrow gravel road when alarm lights and honking vociferated for attention. The

shock to his system overloaded Adam’s perception. Computer typing, florescent lights, and burnt coffee flashed through Adam’s senses.

His mind returned to the woods, prompting Adam to sprint like an elk, his lungs ablaze in the brisk autumn cold. Adrenaline blunted the bottoms of his naked feet, unscrewed the tension in his neck, and galvanized his muscles. Adam’s instincts rushed over reason, ordering him to keep flying. Payroll, month-end emails, and other Sisyphean tasks were an afterthought. By the time Adam returned to the river, he wasn’t afraid anymore. Adam was thirsty.

He crawled on all fours to the edge of the river, cupped his filthy hands in the water, and drank. When he had his fill, Adam closed his eyes and breathed. Once his raw wheezing eased, Adam inspected his firm flush hands as the river’s whir soothed him. Muddy, shoeless, and rooster-haired, Adam sat on the cold ground until the rain subsided and light bit darkness’s crust. He lingered and hummed his tune while the sunrise’s apricot rays offered the gray province a second chance. Robins chirped, fish splashed, and the foliage beneath him thawed. The living portrait’s splendor roused up words from the melody rooting through Adam’s head. Adam sang throaty lyrics, his voice sounding like a buzzsaw.

“So come along, little baby, Forever we’ll gaily roam.

The thicket wants your company, Don’t you ever go back home.”

Mission

of Nombre de Dios

poetry by Lee Clark Zumpe

footsteps away from the Matanzas marshes, I place the votive on the floor where Menendez went to his knees to kiss a wooden cross.

no Catholic, I have puzzled at my compulsion, and at the ritual now performed a dozen times since you died.

as the glowing flame of the match kisses the wick, I gently caress my memories, closing my eyes—

with a spontaneous laugh you voiced perpetual encouragement; and to so many provided an enduring spark of inspiration.

I withdraw from the shrine as a string of pilgrims and tourists file through the door, clutching rosaries and cameras.

here, the light of the candle is soon swallowed in time, reminding me of your memory tucked in my mind.

JC Alfier, Le moi reflété chez une femme transgenre · The self mirrored in a transgender woman

Gift of Venus

fiction by R.G. Mint

The chilling air and setting sun signaled the end of practice to all the players but Donnie. He stood exhausted from the runs, bent over at the edge of the field, hands on his knees, watching the clouds of his breath form. The other players crowded around the star quarterback, senior Brandon Minks, who would, in their minds, cinch their win at the upcoming game.

Football season overtook campus life for the fall term, and Donnie relished the social garlands he would harvest. Invites to parties, tutoring help, and even particular physical release should the opportunity arise. The workouts were exhaustive enough, but he always stayed an extra twenty minutes to squeeze in solo training to prove his dedication.

Having just caught his breath, Donnie heard a stray “Go long, freshman!” coming from the mass of players moving toward the locker room and cocked his head up to see a football spiraling his way. He lunged upward to catch it, but the ball ricocheted off his shoulder and into the construction lot adjacent to the field, the space designated for a new grandstand.

The stadium would be complete one day, with bright red plastic seats and a giant mural reading “Home of the Spartans.” However, construction stalled due to lower enrollment, and the lot stood as an eyesore of broken cinder blocks and unfinished excavation pits. And, into one such pit, the football fell out of sight into a deep, handsized concrete cave.

Donnie looked back, his team having vacated the field entirely, leaving him to fetch the ball alone. Maybe it was a hazing ritual or a subtle prank, but he was determined to reclaim it as a point of pride. He slid down the dirt slope into the sunken lot, unafraid of stains on his already soiled jersey. He thought he had seen where the ball had gone and, kneeling down to the overturned concrete mass, reached his hand to grab it.

He grasped the pliable cowhide leather in his palm the way a football was intended to be held. Pulling it out, a strong resistance kept Donnie’s hand out of sight, the sharp pressure digging into his skin the more he pulled away. The sudden pinch jolted his arm back, dropping the football on the broken gravel and nearly tearing off his smallest finger. More pain and more panic exhausted him, and his mind reeled with the question: hospital or university nurse? Then the thought of tetanus struck him, and when his last shot was. The nurse’s office was closer, and she’d still be there with practice just ending.

Scared to see the damage done, Donnie averted his gaze from the gaping wound on his hand and removed his jersey to wrap around his laceration. As delicately as he could, Donnie reached his good hand into the hole to safely seize whatever weapon or gnarled metal might affect the outcome of their upcoming game.

Donnie clenched the object and pulled it out of the rubble, confident it was safe. His hand shook from the pain and shock, but in his grasp was a bronze arrow, the heartshaped tip smeared red. Rivulets of blood stained his forearm the same color, heightening his urgency. He abandoned the football, jostled out of the unfinished lot with the arrow in his good hand, and rushed through the arbored campus to the medical building.

I don’t know how it happened, he would tell the nurse. I reached in for the football, and this sliced me open. Please, will I need stitches? Can I still play?

Seeing the medical staff inside, Donnie approached the building and paused to adjust his makeshift jersey bandage. It unfurled despite his efforts, and his injured hand was exposed to the cool evening air. He winced, expecting the sting of open flesh in the cold, but looked down to see a perfectly healthy hand.

More than healthy, even. It almost glowed in the dwindling light. Donnie looked through the glass doors of the medical building. The on-call nurse remained ignorant of him while sifting through paperwork, and he dashed away before she could notice him.

Donnie shut the door behind him in his solitary dorm room and ensured it was locked before he began investigating. He set the arrow down on his desk and realized it

wasn’t his hand that had been shaking. The weapon rattled on his desk like a vibrating cell phone but emulated no rhythm—it remained a constant buzz.

The moment deafened around Donnie. The arrow, his hand, and the season’s final game were there. Those were all that existed. What would be his freshman legacy? A long-awaited victory obscured by an arrow through the hand? An arrow that now vibrated on its own in his dorm room tore into his hand enough to draw blood but left no lasting wound.

He’d been invited to parties all year but never drank and could not have been drugged by the likes of his teammates. Whatever this was, it was something different.

Donnie hesitantly approached the arrow, inching closer until he noticed the archaic symbols along its length. These symbols were familiar to him. They looked like letters from the alphabet he knew but were worn from centuries of attrition. The letters started vibrating. What had injured and seemingly healed Donnie now lured him in to solve his current conundrum.

Grabbing the arrow, Donnie held it closer to his eyes. The vibration emanating from the arrow intensified, and the letters rearranged themselves, coiling and twisting into an arrangement he could understand: Rise from the Foam.

No sound followed Donnie reading the verse to himself, but the vibration of the arrow extended to the air, pulsating the room around him. The wind tickled his neck and whispered a delicate instruction into his ear.

Speak the words. And he did.

The phrase left his lips, and from the arrow burst a wellspring of brine. The scent of saline water spiraled in a tornado around him, mimicking the whirlpool forming on his beige-carpeted floor. The light came next.

Donnie had grown accustomed to the glow in their incomplete university stadium, but without the protection of his helmet, the light in his room humbled the familiar floodlights. He covered his eyes, dropping the arrow into the liquid vortex to shield his

vision from whatever was happening. The light remained but mellowed into a comfortable glow through his eyelids. Confident he’d avoid being blinded, he dropped his hands and opened his eyes to see what could be causing such an eruption.

Before him stood a giantess awash in divine light. Hair, the color of honeycomb, flowed freely behind her, and she wore nothing but rows and rows of baroque pearls around her neck, an absurd number of necklaces failing to cover her nakedness. But the woman stood unabashed. If anything, Donnie noticed a smirk of pride on her face as he drank in her beauty. He thought she donned a golden crown headband, but it was a shimmering light emanating her divinity.

“You’ve summoned me to a university dorm of all places,” the woman said, her voice echoing more than it should in his concrete bedroom.

“Summoned?” Donnie was at a loss for anything further to say.

“Yes, Donnie. Summoned a goddess. And you’ve returned what belongs to her.”

The goddess plunged her hand into the water at their feet and plucked out the arrow, yielding it in her palm before it disappeared in a flurry of sunlight. The whirlpool vanished, and the carpet dried in an instant.

“You know my name?”

“Yes. And you know mine. It has been a shadow behind your back, a celestial twine tied around your wrist, a myth or legend you had wished for but never knew.”

“You are—”

The glow intensified, and Donnie squinted his eyes.

“I am the dawn. Conceived by the blood of the father of titans, born of the sea amid froth and foam, the bride of fire and mother of desire. I have been called many names over countless lifetimes, but you know me as Venus.”

“Okay.” Incredulous and confident he had lost his mind, Donnie responded with good nature: “You’re Venus? Botticelli’s Venus? And I’ve returned what’s yours?”

“My son’s arrow. He always longed for my gifts but never kept track of them once

he was done playing with them. And now, you’ve returned it to its creator. You’ve earned my favor.”

This isn’t real. The pressure, extra workouts, and exams have all been too much. I need to see someone.

“You doubt me, Donnie Alvarez. You think I am a conjuring of your mind, a figment or illusion. Far from it. When you touched my arrow, I saw all of you, your joys and sorrows.”

“You don’t know me,” Donnie said. His brow tensed, but his defiance only lengthened the goddess’s divine smirk.

“You are a young man thrust into a new world, and in it, you feel alone. You give all of yourself to your team to impress them. You want a name for yourself because you’ve never had one. It exhausts you to train endlessly under the guise of gamesmanship. Oh, yes, you want their praise, but you want something more. You want the affection of one of them. And you and I both know who.”

Donnie dropped his head. She did know, and there was no use hiding it. “He was so nice to me. He told me everything I needed to know and then some. He invited me to the best parties. None of it seemed real, but my feelings showed up one day and haven’t left, no matter what I do.”

“Your life at this university was going to be a fresh start,” Venus began, “Shedding the dregs holding you back in your small town. Here, you started anew, searching for all the avenues to finally gratify yourself with other men, a pleasure you’ve always yearned for but were denied until now. You even began searching in virtual worlds on your little device, but all that changed when you met him.”

I’m talking to a goddess in my dorm room about Grindr, Donnie thought.

“The star quarterback, the senior who is adored by all. It was only a surprise you hadn’t fallen for him sooner.”

“Brandon Minks,” Donnie said. His eyes welled.

“You have my favor, Donnie. You need not cry. I can give you what you want. You only need to ask.”

“How can I be with him? He could have any girl in this school. Why would he pick me?”

“I have my ways, powers lost to the world reserved for those who earn my patronage. The real question is, how far are you willing to go?”

Love magic, a concept reserved for antiquated fairy tales, was now on offer, and that realization gave Donnie pause.

“I have an item of great power. The Girdle of Venus. It’s been used without fail. Anyone you wish to love must see you wear the item, and they will be yours.” She could make Brandon fall in love with him. Take away any choice in the matter and give him what he wants.

“I want him to love me for me, not because I forced him.”

“That is where it always begins. What would you have me do?” Donnie thought of what options a goddess could offer.

“Is there a way to get us time alone? I want it to be real, but finals are coming up, and we both have the championship to think about.”

“I see the conundrum. Why not wait until after the game?”

“This is his final year. He’s going to graduate and go off and do . . .whatever anthropology majors do. No, we can’t wait.”

Venus smiled. “You don’t want him to lose his choice in the matter. You only want to give him a little push, is that it?”

Nodding emphatically, Brandon confirmed his wish.

“Done. Take out your device and write him a letter, saying you want to see him.”

Thumbing sounds filled the room as Brandon dutifully typed: Hey, I’m starving. Wanna grab a bite to eat?

“Now, what?” Brandon asked.

With a delicate hand, Venus reached her fingers toward Brandon’s phone, which

glowed with a shimmer, vibrating like the arrow. “I enchanted your message. I’ve done the same with many love letters before. This won’t be different.”

Together, they waited in silence for Brandon’s phone to ping with a reply.

Brandon’s response lit up Donnie’s phone: Studying rn. Maybe next time. “I don’t understand,” Donnie said. “How is he resisting?”

“It’s happened before. It might mean he isn’t interested in the company of men as you are. Or it could be he just saw your message and didn’t open it. For the magic to work, the message must be opened like a letter.”

Tossing his phone on his bed, Donnie exhaled his frustration.

“I have an ancient goddess willing to help me, and nothing works! What else can we do?”

Venus, without hesitation, waved her hand and conjured a duffle bag with another flash of vibrance. Tagged on the bag was a cut nylon ribbon embroidered with the name Brandon Minks. Unzipping on its own, the bag opened to reveal a rubbery lump rising from the sports bag and hovering in the air. Brandon’s mouthguard.

“When is your championship battle?”

“Our game is two days from now.”

At Donnie’s words, the little lump shone and fell into his hands. “These protect your teeth, correct?” He nodded. “Put that in your mouth, and when he uses it tomorrow during your final practice, you will be the first thing on his mind.”

The thought of taking away Brandon’s agency unsettled Donnie, but he knew it wasn’t the same as using the girdle. He popped the mouthguard in, getting it sopped with his saliva, and took it out again. It floated out of his hand and zipped itself back into the sports bag. The entire duffle then evaporated at Venus’s instruction.

A pause lingered following Donnie’s choice. “What now?” he asked.

“Rest, Donnie Alvarez. For tomorrow, you may get what you wish for.”

Practice the next day was a bust, and Donnie returned to his room, defeated by his lack of progress. He slammed his door shut and flopped on his bed.

“Did things not go your way, Donnie?” Venus spoke as she materialized in her signature divine shimmer.

“No, they didn’t! He didn’t even talk to me, and I saw him put in his mouthguard. Please, I’m really losing my mind with all this. I don’t know if you’re real or if your gifts can do literally anything!”

Chuckling to herself, Venus tilted her head back, oblivious to Donnie’s feelings.

“And tell me, did you speak to him? Did you so much as make eye contact with him? I have been told by you that you can get him to talk to me, get him to even see if he has feelings for me, and nothing has happened! Please tell me what will work. Once the game ends, we won’t have any reason to see each other. He will be ‘the one that got away,’ which kills me!”

Venus wrinkled her perfect face. “I’ve heard every love song ever created. No need to recite that one.”

Her comment went unregistered by Donnie, who curled up on his side, defeated. “I don’t care about my classes; I don’t even care about the championship; I just want some way of making it all happen. I want to connect with him, and nothing’s worked.”

“There is one more option. If you’re unwilling to speak with him directly, to tell Brandon how you feel despite it all, I do have my girdle. You may use that, and it will guarantee his love.”

Thoughts swirled within Donnie. Weighing the costs of what it would mean to use an enchanted girdle on a senior university football star, despite what it may get him or how real it could ever be. Still, the feelings were there and wouldn’t go away. They were fighting inside and urging him to take away whatever resistance kept Brandon from talking to him. Donnie rationalized the action and rationalized it again to be sure.

“Let me see it,” Donnie said.

Venus outstretched her arm once more, and an ancient belt made of embroidered cloth appeared. Imbued upon the fabric, pearls, and other precious stones were secured in an intricate pattern.

In his hesitation and inner tumult, Donnie took the girdle, its power emanating in his hands.

“If I wear this, he will fall in love with me, yes?”

“In an instant. What happens after is for you both to discover, but it will work. You need only be glimpsed in this, and he will not be able to resist.”

“Can you make it look any . . . different? This isn’t something I could ever wear and not look insane.”

Venus mused over the novelty of being asked such a question. “My girdle is meant to enhance any part of the body, so much so that lust is inevitable. What would you like to enhance?”

Donnie already knew the answer to her question. He knew what a girdle was and what could appear mundane enough to avoid calling unnecessary attention yet sufficient enough to be seen by Brandon before the game.

“Do you know what a jockstrap is?”

Both the energy and the scent of men grew palpable in the locker room the closer the game approached. In twenty minutes, the coach would reaffirm the plays, give a rousing speech, and say something about how “Spartans bleed red and gold” in his gruffest voice before launching his players onto the field. There, the cheer team would perform a fine-tuned dance before voices rang out of the speakers from the announcer box, and the game began.

Before that, Donnie sidled close to his corner locker and dressed down to nothing while his teammates did the same. The unnerving nature of being naked with other men had always been an unavoidable crutch for Donnie. A battle he fought between his desire and ethics. But for what he wanted, the battle favored desire.

Brandon’s locker was closer to the showers and, therefore, the perfect position for him to walk across the locker room, glimpse Donnie, and exit onto the field with the rest of the team.

No one else would bother looking at the naked freshman player, and if they did, Donnie had been assured by Venus herself that the magic wouldn’t work. It would make Brandon fall in love with him without fail and would not affect any other player. It was up to Donnie to pull the trigger.

In Donnie’s mind, guilt and desire tackled each other in a constant cycle—as rivals do—in the same way the Spartans were about to fight their rival, the Dolphins. He could have everything he wanted. Sure, they might not win the game, but he would go on the next three years to play for the team, and he could at least see if there was something of substance with Brandon. But it would be a lie. It would take away any choice for Brandon. He wouldn’t really love him. And it would be coercion, deception, and the worst kind—unchecked and unfalsifiable. No one would ever know, the fact which scared Donnie and yet tempted him the most.

It was time. If Donnie were going to use the magic, he had to wear it now. The guilt was more robust than he had ever felt, but it was not enough. He pulled the jockstrap out of his locker, looked around as if anyone would have cared, and shimmied into it, the elastic straps fulfilling Venus’s promise of accentuating any part he wished, and it was his ass he wanted Brandon to see. Everybody loves butts, Donnie thought. Big or small, an ass is an ass.

The coach blew his whistle, and hollers erupted as the team finished dressing and went out to hear the game plan for the final time. Donnie stayed in position, and Brandon appeared behind the segmented wall of lockers. The heartbeat under Donnie’s chest thumped so fast it felt like club music that shook the room.

Brandon walked almost out of sight when Donnie said, “Good luck out there.”

His teammate and crush looked casually at first glance but paused to do a double take,

looking at Donnie and his undergarb. At that moment, Donnie witnessed the magic working, and his stomach filled with the feeling of hard stones weighing him down to the floor.

“Yeah, you too,” Brandon said, his eyes lingering on the jock as he joined the rest of the team. It was game time, and after their victory or defeat, Donnie could speak to Brandon, unafraid of the potential rejection he had feared since the first meeting.

But at what cost.

Finishing putting on his uniform and grabbing his helmet out of his locker before closing it, Donnie sighed loftily at his actions and anxiously awaited what would follow the championship game.

The match was a slaughter, and the Spartans emerged as the victors. They had a presumed win—a home game, a nationally acclaimed coach, and a star player beloved by the entire university—but Donnie knew the love Brandon would return would only go to him. He grew ill and wanted to leave as quickly as he could.

The team returned to the locker room in euphoric cacophony, with players banging their fists against the lockers in celebration and hoisting Brandon up over their heads. The game was like nothing the university had ever seen before. The star quarterback scored rushing touchdown after rushing touchdown while also defending the freshman tight end, a tactic that confused the opponents enough to ensure the Spartans’ success. Though Donnie hadn’t heard it in the throes of focus and guilt, the announcers observed to the roaring crowd how successful a pair the star senior and sole freshman had made during the play. The university paper would publish a quippy story in the next issue about how history was made for the Spartans. Remarks would be written on Donnie Alvarez, who showed immense promise with his almost superhuman ability to block the opponents— what was to Donnie the only benefit of his hand being skewered by Cupid’s arrow— while Brandon Minks ended his college football career with the most vital game of the decade.

Everything was his—the championship game of his debut season would be a

historic win, and his teammates would forever see him as an asset with his god-like strength, especially as they were losing their star player the following year, and it was confirmed that Brandon was in love with him. Yet it all felt vile.

Through the cheering, Donnie slipped away. He sickened himself, stained his self-image, and needed absolution. Only Venus could give it to him. Brandon called for him, but even the other players holding him yelled at a volume that washed out his words. He would have chased after Donnie, but his arms and legs were secured by his ecstatic teammates.

Donnie called his patron goddess in his dorm, and she appeared in her glory. His face dripped with the guilt-ridden tears shed during his race back to his room. The pressure exerted by the presence of Venus dried them in an instant.

Take it back,” Donnie said, holding up the jockstrap and seeing it return to its gilded form. “Take it and undo the magic. I don’t want it. This was wrong. I didn’t know how wrong it would feel, and I don’t want it.”

“You knew,” Venus said, reclaiming her girdle. “You knew, and yet you did it anyway.

You accepted the love magic, and now you have everything you wanted and then some. I do not see what would make you this distraught at a goddess’s help.”

“The guilt. It’s eating me alive, and I just want it to go away.” Donnie began to weep, falling to his knees before Venus.

“You expressed wanting similar anguish to go away when you felt you couldn’t have him. Now that you’ve done what you felt was required, you returned to that pit. Mortals are funny in that way, wanting what you can’t have and then doing whatever you can to be rid of it.”

Venus crossed her arms, the pearl strings around her neck clicking together, revealing her lily-white breasts. The expression of growing impatience on her face bore down on Donnie as he grappled with the choices he made.

“Is there any way to undo the magic? I don’t want this; it feels filthy, and I want it to end.

Please, it’s your girdle. You gave it its power, and you can undo it. Please, I’m begging you.” Donnie’s choppy speech told Venus the time had come to reveal all to him.

“Donnie, I’ve been waiting for you to make the leap on your own, and you haven’t. I must spell it out for you.”

“What do you mean?” Donnie asked, looking up at the goddess.

“The message, the mouthguard, even my girdle in all its holy power, can you not think of why none appeared to work? Honestly, do you still doubt me?”

Through the roiling emotions, Donnie thought for a moment, quizzically reliving the events that gave his hand an otherworldly strength yet failed to ensnare Brandon’s affection. “He’s an anthropology major. He’s cataloged objects and studied relics from thousands of years ago…”

The smile returned, brighter and more potent than it ever had. “You don’t think you stumbled upon that arrow by accident, do you? You never even saw who threw the football that day. It’s humorous to me to imagine the minute scope mortals have when everything is laid out before you.”

“The football brought me to it?”

“Now you’re understanding. He uncovered that arrow among the dusty collections of this university’s reliquary. He spoke the same words as you and, at long last, returned what was mine. I gave him my favor for such a gift, and he wanted the same thing you did.”

“He forced me to love him? That’s why I did what I did?”

Venus laughed harder than she ever had. “That didn’t make you do anything. Did you only start to love him when that arrow pierced your hand?” Donnie shook his head.

“You were both playing with toy swords, shining and polished like a blade with none of the bite.”

We both did these things for nothing.

“You’re telling me that’s why it didn’t work each time? Because there was no need.”

“Of course. Eternity is difficult to grasp for mortals, but my existence is quite for-

lorn without you all. I can always be assured that if love is involved, mortals will do things they never imagined they could.”

“So, I never really earned your favor. It was some trick because some football player returned your arrow?”

“I’m the goddess of love, and I see it in all forms. You are not the first of your kind I’ve shown my favor, nor will you be my last. Alexander, Julius, and Leonardo all found their rapture as you have with my gift.”

“What gift? We deceived each other. You can’t build trust after that.”

“Not everyone has a goddess to help them. You didn’t need my favor, neither of you. Yet, you both now know you love one another, and the might of the arrow, though it didn’t falsify love for Brandon, certainly gave you an advantage in your game.”

“You did that so we would win?”

“That was Brandon’s idea. Why do you think he fought so hard to protect you? Even when he believed none of my magic had worked, he wanted to give you your best chance once he was gone.”

Panic swirled with Donnie’s shame, creating a seasick feeling. He nearly vomited into the plastic wastebasket by his desk, but Venus steadied him with her arm, a strength unlike any he’d felt on the football field or by any human. He paced his breath and steadied his heartbeat.

“You are young. I have seen what love makes people do. You have both scorned the other out of fear, and fear pushes people to do unspeakable things. Of this, you both are equally guilty. What happens next is now up to both of you; my role has ended. You may reconcile, or you may not. But my parting gift to you is this: he is waiting for you. You are both aware of the love and pain each has for the other. You may go and make amends or never speak to him again. The choice is yours.” Venus spoke with a fading voice, her final words a whisper as she disappeared from Donnie’s dorm room.

For an hour, Donnie ruminated on his and Brandon’s actions. Having made his

decision, he rose and left the room. Venus hadn’t mentioned where Brandon waited, but Donnie knew.

Racing as he had the night he’d punctured his hand and the whole mess started, Donnie sprinted to the abandoned concrete lot next to the football field. From a distance, he saw the chiseled figure of Brandon waiting for him where he expected. His thoughts spiraled as he approached, but Brandon’s face reflected each of their feelings. The pain remained, but so did the love. They knew what would come after, but they embraced each other with a kiss long in the making. There would be time for the rest. To apologize to each other and then apologize ten times more. They could try their best to pick up the pieces from then on. Together.

ICONS OF WAR

A POEM WITHOUT WORDS

poetry by Tony Brinkley

There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish.

— Carolyn Forché

So I am still and I am silent, because if I open my mouth, I may never stop screaming.

— Franz Kafka

When bewildered Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the appearances of things and of the life in things changed. News from a distant war infected the everyday, and we could see what we hadn’t seen before. Of course, this could have happened earlier - there was never any shortage of catalytic atrocities (they were - they are - everywhere to name) - but we had had the vigilance to screen them out (however acknowledged) at the borders of vision to maintain more or less an emotional oblivion. And then, as Lincoln said in another catastrophic time, “the war came.” And the look of things altered if we looked into their life. For the most part there was nothing you could say, but the change could be everywhere to see. The head of a burned match could appear to have a human face. Trees had a way of facing you. The smudge on a paper towel became an icon. Since February 2022, I have tried to picture these transformations as the things I live with become icons.

I began with photographs of the things around me - in the house, in the yard, on the street, in the garden. I wanted to see what my phone would picture, and as I looked at the digital photographs on the phone’s tiny screen, as I edit the pictures with the limited editing, rearrangements and montage for which the phone allowed, I found images I hadn’t seen before but (like the animals that surface from the face of clouds or the rock walls in paleolithic caves) were beginning to come to life. I began to see what my mind was ready (but unprepared) to witness: poems without words, icons that look into your face.

Just as any object can embody the Buddha and center a space if regarded as such, just as every thought can become a koan if received as a koan, images become icons if they face us as icons. Pavel Florensky writes that an icon is an appearance of the energy for which it is the leading wave. As the wave floods in the mind, the appearance dissolves but its spirit becomes palpable. In my eyes the poems without words that I could find in photographs of things became icons for terror and love that coexist as incommensurates in my mind. Inevitably this coexistence for me and for everyone pre-existed 2022, but for some of us Putin’s War made it visible again and as if for the first time. Outcries became visible if not audible, silenced in acoustic shadows. Our shock testified against us.

In 1940 Walter Benjamin wrote that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we are living is not the exception but the rule. . . The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. The amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.” Still in the winter of 2022 the shock was (and the shock continues to be) palpable.

driftwood

cross-genre literature by Casey

Charles

Crenellated. That was the word I was thinking of while I followed footprints down the wet berm. The sand that had burned my bare feet only a few hours earlier now pliant and warm, I headed eastward toward Shela, the high-end tourist village north of Lamu, a Muslim town famous for its narrow alleys and defecating donkeys. I was staying at Kizingo, the far southwestern corner of the island, in Banda 5, a hut on the beach in a remote resort. Why I had picked the middle of nowhere for my final days in Kenya had something to do with the wind ripples in the dunes created by the trades, linear patterns of striation that striped the sand like bland zebras. The cloud cover reminded me of thick gauze yet transparent and creased in spots; it too a kind of pleated quilt that permitted occasional indentations to a faint blue. Winds scurrying across the surf reiterated the same pattern strangely enough, yet chaotically, white caps rising like notches across the shallow shoreline, where ghost crabs shuffled over the dark bar, scampering up beach to beat the foam. Troughs and crests.

The indentation in the low tide beach was a size or two smaller than my foot, but I gave into an impulse to track, hoping by some miracle to come upon a friendly jambo goat herder with a staff and bright kikoni, ready to come unwrapped for a moment of mutual release. I was a deeply lonely man who sought by some improbable embrasure to relish my solitude, to feature myself as some kind of Thoreau-like eschewer of the cacophonous garrulity of Nairobi and Bombay, where I had been breathing exhaust for the last four weeks. But on arrival after a forty-minute skiff ride through mangrove inlets, the Yamaha 100 not exactly full throttle but fast enough, after I flew all the way to this remote corner of an East African island with its creepy winds and skittish sandpipers, I realized how contrived my pose. I was already ridiculously eyeing the Luo porters as I drank the

passion juice they, dressed in white, handed me on arrival. What was I thinking? Four days skirting sand cliffs and searching for unbroken shells among the plastic flotsam commonplace even here, where Al Shabbaz, Somali Pirates, and camouflaged U.S. military bases coveted their clandestinities.

I spotted the only other denizens of the resort coming toward me with boogie boards under arm, a pale Brit couple from Nairobi. She was quite short and homely but game enough for some surfing up shore, he a white-skinned, early-thirties guy with a designer stubble, some hair between his pecs, and a rather straight but pronounced mouth that kept him from handsomeness. “It’s quite a way,” she told me, referring to the spot with decent unchoppy surf, “a k and half, I should say.” I thought they might be honeymooners, actually, this bland pair of breeders—not to put too pejorative a point on it. We parted and I continued my Leatherstocking hunt for horny fishermen, lost in some inane fantasy of filling up my queen size bed with more than a laptop losing its charge. The ebb tide had left the shore wrinkled and hard enough to allow a proper pace, though I was worried about finding my way back, all the gray palm-thatch roofs rather fungible from shore. Not to worry about the worry, I thought as I marched on, eyeing broken shells, reminding myself of the original proposed purpose of my walk, namely a swim in the sea. The wind kicked up. I bucked it, mistaking driftwood for sunbathers, assuming a potential liaison if I had it not, scanning swells of dunes peopled with scrub pine that rose from the high tide line. Loose sand skimmed the shore as I looked up to see before me point after point of pointless sand, beautifully empty, bereft of the humanity I both disdained and desperately needed. Even Muslim men, I convinced myself, in their white kaftans, were known to indulge in some fraternization with heathens on occasion, before returning for the call to prayer across the sound systems that reminded me of WWII air raids. I’m not that old, but the movies have introduced us to lives we never have led, turned us into Burt Lancasters even if our midriffs are now rather protuberant, in spite of our worked-out chests.

He could have been Kikuyu, tall and thin. A dark blue-black dude with a yellow t-shirt, a long stick and a striped kikoni, that wrap-around cloth that men wear in lieu of shorts. He sat under a shrub back beach. Was he a mirage? At first, I could only see his knees from where I sauntered near the break, staring up at him sheepishly, with just a hint of the intensity made famous by forward Frenchmen. I knew I was in his field of vision as I scuttled through the foam, glancing up shore in an attempt to signal my insouciant nonchalance. How far was he? Fifty yards? A stone’s throw? I maintained the butch tromp of a football player walking around his apples, signaling however, with an occasional stoop to gather a broken sand dollar, my availability. Cruising, like fly fishing, can be a painstaking sport, requiring a persistence that borders on the manic.

There were laws in Kenya, I tried to warn myself, even if the president of the country was rumored to be a power bottom. The unprosecuted sodomy statute—no doubt copied from Henry IV’s dictum—prescribed lengthy sentences behind bars even for foreigners, mzungus like me, though the government had yet to adopt neighboring Uganda’s death penalty. There was also the new anal exam provision, giving port-in-a- storm policemen the right to probe the rectums of suspected buggerers for evidence of intercourse. These formal laws, no doubt honored in the breach, paled beside the interdictions of ranting sheiks and round-faced Anglican bishops who encouraged askari mobs to raid hoteli in Mombasa where same-sex weddings were rumored to be underway, these the same clerics—along with their evangelical counterparts from places like Tennessee and Arkansas—who had seized upon a YouTube video of two male lions in flagrante delicto to rail against the recent influx of Caucasian homosexuals come to safari in the Mara.

Even the dating apps Grindr and Scruff posted warnings when I landed in Nairobi, though my friend Binyavanga, a local, pooh-poohed such alarmists, telling me to chill, telling me the MSM scene in Kenya was legion, telling me to log on to Planet Romeo with my usual time-wasting intensity. “Just watch out for hustlers,” he said. In Kenya, he

pontificated, the only crime is a lack of money. I figured he ought to know, so, Wi-Fi-less here on Treasure Trail Island, instead of using the two good hands god gave me (the left actually) to wing my way into ejaculatory bliss that afternoon, I decided to hunt for my own private Obama, who had apparently snorkeled in Shela near the Peponi Hotel, where—had I an ounce of sense in my head and no inflated notion of my rugged individualism—I would have checked in, ordering oysters on the half shell while Australians played backgammon and drank Tuskers beside randy Italians who sipped cappuccinos with their hired butt boys.

Hell, I was ready to pay a sex worker myself, if only for pure sociological curiosity about the intricacies of the trade, which apparently was quite common, madam, on the coast near Malindi. But lord, to be a pot-belied Scotsman from Glasgow strolling through the narrow streets of Lamu with a dreadlocked twenty-two-year-old fresh from donkey races seemed a bit much. To be lured by a hustler into a back alley, to be beaten and robbed and humiliated. Was I willing to follow my desire into an ambush, a stoning, a rope around my choked throat? Was I that desperate?

All I really wanted was another man to hold tight, a back to clasp. I was determined to find mutuality, not some thousand-schilling fellater who would suck and run, failing even to pinch my cheek—not some unzipped squirt in the interstices of indistinguishable dunes. I wanted to look my man in the deep cavern of his eyes, lay my chin on the hollow of his bony shoulder, feel him squeeze, filling—if only for a night, an hour—the nooks and crannies of my salty anatomy. Interstices was another one of those words that reiterated, like a cresting glans, in my word-swamped consciousness, seeking to feel the yin and yang of my Jungian symbology.

From the shore I waved at him, the crook of an arm lifted over my lowered head.

“Jambo,” I thought I heard him call back, like the herder I had seen earlier, elongating the last syllable with either a kind of feigned friendliness or, as I was too eager to assume, a genuine interest in the white man with a nautilized chest and Nick Nolte looks. I was the catch

of the day, I told myself, as I slowed my stroll, heading to the surf while ghost crabs burrowed. I figured everyone knew I must be a shoga , even if forcedly cisgender. A middle-aged American, alone and cagey when asked about his family, traveling under the guise of research—what local would not suspect a sex tourist, a credit card philanderer, hiding behind the veneer of rest and relaxation, looking for some uncut cock to corrupt and inculcate into the decadent ways of the West.

The wind blew north across the shore, sending white caps sideways in irregular crests, hardly worth attempting to ride. I saddled up to the dunes where strands of mangroves snaked through the nourishing grains. My friend was there and not there, hidden and exposed as the wind-shifting boughs of the grey-green bush veiled and unveiled his bent legs, his arms resting on raised knees, his eyes focused on a faraway dhow, his kikoni flapping in intermittent gusts. I didn’t want to get too close. Discretion, though hardly the better part of valor, marks the art of the gay stray who approaches from a studied distance and probes with furtive glances for approbation. I had spent the better part of my life barking up the wrong baobab, coming on to men who announced their girlfriends, real or imagined, within a minute of our acquaintance.

Kenyans are not known as major water sporters, but some swim, and on Lamu, there are races. I removed my blue t-shirt, cap, and shades, searching for a log to hold my belongings down while I headed into the choppy break, hoping to take some wave for a ride, heading down the hard strand toward the water in my jams as I fiddled like an adolescent with my expanding mickey. The Speedo was back in the banda. I could have pulled it off, but in this climate of vanity walls between urinals and Muslim customs, I figured it best to follow the Romans, even in this tourist destination, wearing my lengthy bathing costume, as the British call swimsuits. I had already SPF 30 smeared over my fair freckled skin even though the sun had long since spent the force of its ultraviolet rays. In fact, the orange orb had begun its long descent into Zifunoni on the mainland.

I glanced over my shoulder before entering the suds of the receding break. I

wanted some gesture, some clue, some scratch or fly slap to assure me that my Dorian, my Hermione, was not just a torn tractor tire half buried in the shifting sand. Even if he were not to join me in the warm surf for a game of banana fish, even if he remained an aloof Masai posing for the hapless white man, I needed to know he was alive, that he existed, that he and I were the only creatures, beside stilts and crustaceans, in a five-kilometer radius, that we were there together, like Robinson and Friday, thrown within two hundred feet of one another by serendipity and—why not—the lark of longing, our outcast fates no longer bemoaned. I thought I saw him raise one arm to his forehead as if to rub his scalp. Perhaps I was projecting.

The water was deliciously warm, the slope of shore gentle and forgiving even with a strong crosscurrent. I kept my eye on the footsteps from my shades and shirt so as to remain in line with my belongings and my man. As I dove underwater, I imagined his sleek torso beside me grabbing me by the waist and pulling down my trunks; I imagined wrestling with him, my fingers interlaced with his dusky rose palms. I felt him thrusting his head between my thighs, hoisting me on his shoulders as we flailed away amid the rise and fall of an incessant sea. I could even feel his long fingers holding my wet scalp as we gazed at our divergent features—his broad nose, my wrinkled forehead, his curls glistening, my wet dark locks matted around sunburnt ears. He held my cheeks in his hands as a surging wave surprised and knocked us under.

Neither of us spoke any language but body, buoyant in salt water, his legs wrapped around my middle as I felt my muscle fill the hollow of his aching crack, that long slit from sacrum to perineum that invited the fill of a forearm or a fist, that harbored within its fold yet another indentation, the beloved sphincter, closed to all but the ardent, all but the intimate. We were not to go there. Yet. And even if we faced that threshold, even if I invited him back to my banda and watched him remove his wet turquoise briefs still pouching his shriveling genitalia in a perfect yam curvature, even if, the balled shorts husked on the palm floor like a coconut shell, the two of us washed off in the

solar-powered shower, even if I scrubbed his back and he mine, our fingers slipping into the crevices where fullness met the hollow, where our slippery soap digits found the creased but expandable crater, seeking incrementally for a finger to find a replacement with a circumferent instrument broader and potentially more lethal in its pleasure that begins as pain, even then we would have to face the elephant under the mosquito net. We would have to disclose our status—or not. Kenya is tied for fourth with Mozambique as the nation with the highest incidence of HIV among its population. Many men don’t know, don’t want to know, the stigma of testing itself a kind of affirmation of sero-conversion, regardless of outcome or treatment afterwards. I assumed my friend no more than thirty something; his toned torso coming from work in the mangroves chopping wood without enough food at home, his smile Cheshire—as if suspended in the animation of nightfall— while mine—when and if it came—blended yellow into the splotchy sunburn of a mottled unshaven mug. Would I have to disclose my status, now that I was undetectable? Could I just tear the tin-foiled kondumi, hoping to let action speak?

He was dangerously thin himself, this man I wanted to nickname Subira; his long body almost fatless but also—not gaunt, not caved in by the side effects of some first line protease inhibitor, but yet somehow unreplete in all the senses of that word. He displayed a leanness, a concavity that abhorred his vacuum, that somehow compelled magnetically the excess of a milk-fed American, one who nevertheless could understand him, identify with the deep-dredged sorrow of his exile from intricacies of kinship in Kipungani, his village on the far side of the spit where his childless wife had appealed to the mullahs for talac, her stud singularly uninterested in her womb even when morning wood made his stand rigid, his pelvis rhythmic in its automatic thrusting. She was to lie on her stomach and even then, he preferred the smaller aperture to her circumcised one. He could close his eyes and recall the uncle that had showed him his room when he was just in third form—just 14. They would play bao while Joseph moved his toes across the teen’s testes

under the table. Joseph was 30 with hair on his chest and a hard-on that reminded the boy of the wooden club called rungu his teachers wielded at the church school where he was teased for his ineptitude on the cricket field. Shoga they called him, as he ran to the far side of the island with his dog to the waves, drowning his destiny in the brackish fury of southerlies.

He still, now years later, came here to getaway. Often. He watched the beach brush, its yellow buds jitterbugging in the blow. He watched Mataoni Bay flow like a mammoth river into the lagoon where his brothers fished with nets for snapper. The dolphins were his friends. They wanted nothing from him when the curve of their backs hailed him on the horizon, nothing more than to know that he could find refuge in the desolate reaches of half-moon crescents that repeated for more than ten kilometers to the northeast, where Shela sat waiting for his occasional appearance, he in his shorts as a teenager leaping into the sea from the concrete quay near the famous Peponi Hotel, where smug Londoners came with their burnt offspring who pronounced tomato and banana with short vocalics that reminded Swahilis that imperious nostalgia still ordered the day behind the clipped hedges of the ex-pat set south of Nairobbery. He had been once with his father to the capital, bouncing over potholes in matatus through a sleepless night that only confirmed his susceptibility to man touch, his hand slipping into his pocket to hide his inescapable proclivity, he wedged sideways between brothers.

Fault was a western term, he thought, as he leaned his chin on his braceleted forearms. He blamed no one for his tendencies. Blame was not a word he would use to describe the bubbled butts of shirtless soccer players outside the hoteli in Shela, the light skinned soles of their feet sailing into the deep sockets of his eyes like midfield shots on goal. What he saw and what he felt when he stared at the avocado that looped down from his father’s pelvis was a magnetic miracle, a confirmation as sure as a cyclone’s rain, the drum of a heartbeat, that joy could find its way into his precarious life. He had loved his uncle and still did, even after that man’s stern conversion to Christianity and now tortured distance.

Mary, his sweet bride, he could cuddle but could not manage yet to swyve. He held his head high after dusty beatings on kickball fields. When dart-eyed schoolmates followed him into the dune fields, into the hidden slack for a quick, dazed jack or suck, he came back home feeling used, spent, hungry. He went inside himself, mute before his mother’s queries, determined to hold on to the boom that took him downwind from the myopia of his panoptic township. Lamu was a prison.

For him fault was a word that conjured cracks in the earth he had learned about in school. Fault lines were crevices, plate slips, fissures that reminded him of the kind of sex men up-island wanted from him, were willing to pay proper schillings for. Fault was the opening in his mouth where they sought to insert their often intumescent danglers— these German men in mid age, lonely and drab, men with bellies who had traveled across the earth in search of insertion, in search of comfort really. Nothing more. Looking for relief from the cold stares of a bank teller or the death grip of an eager lender. They had exhausted the intactility of pornography and come here in anonymity to risk disease and arrest for excitement. They had found him drying off on a ledge, his heels bouncing against the mussels and seaweed of the wharf. He did what he could to allay their fear, relieve the emotional starvation that reminded him of the pit in his stomach that he faced nowadays—now that he had been all but exiled after his bout with pneumonia.

He had turned one taboo into a totem, but this stigma, this viral load, weighed down his toned shoulders as he peered into the slant of dusk for tidings from the tide pools, desperately fending off the despair that turned his swollen eyes into a kaleidoscope of multiplying miseries, bobbing like buoys in the leeward bay where roped boats of his village interrupted the smooth clarity of a morning’s stride across the hard tidal shore he used to sprint down as a kid. The falling sun, orange orb now before his eyes, flaming ball he could never learn to score, filled a trillion cups on the rippled surface of the cobalt sea, bruised blue almost like the sores he had seen on those in his township who had

succumbed to the bug that was now trying to replicate in his frightened body. Five hours on the bus to Malindi, through ten checkpoints, searched bags, and frisks, he had faced the mortification of the clinic, seated on the hard plastic scoop of linked waiting-room chairs, peopled primarily with bold women who were not afraid to treat and test. He had seen the thrush on his mirrored tongue, had swallowed the Septrim and after the sneering doctor asked him how he got AIDS, rode home with the drugs in his backpack, swallowing them religiously day by day with the cabbage juice he could barely tolerate. He was now undetectable.

The punctured sun globe, about to smash now against the mainland, spilled its papaya light across a silvering sea. He sat in his daily daze, wondering if ever in a thousand sets and rises he would realize the vision he had colored so often on the kanga of his imagination, the canvas he had stretched and brushed with an indelible dye that sustained his stubborn pride, chile red, dark and solid like mahogany. His core a carved canoe sinewed through the maze-like groves. Msenge was a word some used. In Mombasa, in the big hoteli , there were men like him.

Here no, here only sex workers who wanked for schillings and later cursed their clients. He no. He had the bad habit of falling in love with tricks: the Dubai tennis player who wanted him to play doubles in the boudoir of a rented Manda mansion; the Barcelonan in Lamu who took his picture and promptly ushered him out of his ancient home after a five-minute fuck. They bought him off mostly, rarely wanted to hug and kiss and shower and talk to the sundown, beach combing for scal loped shells.

Handholding, spooning, snoring, back rubbing, the swing of a shared hammock. The things his dreams were made of. The unfinished corners of his canvas. Holes that needed filling, needed actually more than filling, more than the ugala, the tasteless white corn meal that filled his stomach without nourishment, tired of the stuff of dream stories

that reeled behind his closed eyes at night, pictures of good strong men, Irish men, with freckled forearms and thick backs, men with calves that billowed like sails above their tan ankles, men who had fallen in love with honesty and held on to justice like a diver gripping a rope ladder in rough seas. He wanted a man who made his body the temple of his soul, a man of any and all colors, who fucked for more than money, who saw chat and pics as a prelude to a dance, looking beyond discrete encounters spelled incorrectly, a man who wrote songs, and thumbed his nose at hook uppers who labeled themselves by positions, as if love were reducible to a bunkbed.

The guy in his mind, named William, called Will or Willy, hated Trojans but wore them anyway, walking the sticky spent tubes from bedspread to waste basket. His Will was out and positive and loved to feel a cock grow hard in the hollow of his fist, coming seconds after Subari came, running the tips of his fingers over his lover’s chest post orgasm with the invisible massage of a cool breeze, like a spontaneous song that brought morning back to night again, embers of their bonfire on the beach glowing like electric fish darting in and out of the niches and caves of coral reefs where they dove and snorkeled on Sundays.

If only. If only Will were real, Subari whispered to himself, raising his long piano hand to his forehead for a moment, raising his brow from the sand divots his buried feet had come to dig during his reverie. He would never give up looking, never stop scanning the horizon for his kayaker, his boogie-board surfer sauntering down shore from the rich resort. Even now as he glanced upward for a moment, he thought he saw a man pushing his sunscreened legs through the forgiving sand. Another potential Will that would morph instantly, no doubt, into a honeymooner, he figured, another middle-aged investment banker on holiday with his blonde wife and two children named Brittany and Thomas. Another dismissive wave from a self-contained mzungu, justifying his conspicuous consumption as a boon for the local economy, tipping ten percent magnanimously before boarding Kenya Air to return to his castle not in the sand but in Perth or Devon, some Harry Potter first-world fantasy come true.

He shouted his signature “Jambo” anyway, out to the shore as if to airwaves of the wind, as if to the undetectable currents of his weak moment of desperation. Sometimes he had to fight to hold on to this love that he had dared to cherish, had to let the streaks dry on his cheeks, collecting sand grains, had to wipe his eyes on his forearms, pray to the ocean he swore would never let him down, his eyes staring at lines he had etched in the sand.

Moments later he looked up again, his eye sockets glistening with the ferocious demons that sought to buck his fate, smeared with his catharsis. In the crook of his arm, he wiped the windshield of his lashes, and spotted suddenly, he thought, the waving arms of a man, beckoning him to the water. Maybe it was driftwood. He would take a look. He needed a swim.

Spotlight on Jake Bonsell

Bonsell photographer· Los Angeles

Hello,

I’m Jake, a 30-year-old self-taught photographer from Los Angeles, California.

Having lived here my entire life, I never run out of fascinating places to explore and photograph. Each photo I take involves a lot of effort, whether it’s researching specific locations or simply wandering around to discover hidden gems. While I often have a general idea of what I want to capture, I frequently stumble upon unexpected scenes, like alleyways adorned with street art or intriguing urban architecture.

I find great joy in photographing everyday life, as it presents a complex and authentic narrative of people going about their routines. Once I have my raw photos, I dedicate countless hours to editing, striving to enhance them while preserving their essence.

Although I usually have a vision for how I want a photo to look, I always experiment with different techniques to uncover new perspectives I might not have considered before. From the moment I step out of my house to the final export of my images, I relish every part of the creative process. And it’s a process that has turned into a life lesson for me to never give up and to always go out and be the best person and artist I can be and things will turn out beautifully.

ARE YOU A SPOTLIGHT, FLASHLIGHT, STREET LIGHT, OR NEON LIGHT?

I am unequivocally drawn to neon lights; their intricate artistry and craftsmanship never cease to captivate me. Seeking out and photographing these luminous creations is one of my favorite things to do.

SUMMARIZE YOUR WORK IN ONE WORD

The term that best encapsulates my work is candid. I have a passion for capturing life in its most authentic moments, whether it involves a person, an object, or a captivating landscape.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?

I hail from the multifaceted and stunningly complex planet Earth.

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR AURA?

I am undeniably fond of the color green in all its shades. To me, it is an exceptionally beautiful hue that is prominently present in the world around us.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE HUMAN BODY?

The human brain is my favorite part of the human body; it is the source of our creativity and enables us to produce remarkable and beautiful works.

WHAT YOUR IS MISSION

My mission is to illuminate the beauty inherent in everyday life. Regardless of whether it is simple or complex, I strive to convey this essence in each of my photographs.

My Permanent Liminal Space nonfiction by

Stephen J. Lyons

You never know where life will take you. And that brings me to a Walmart parking lot on an anxiety-producing gray day in central Illinois where snow and Xanax might or might not improve the ambience.

The Illinois location is irrelevant because truthfully I could be in any mid-sized city where generic America is engaged in full frenetic overdrive; where the rough edges of our individual choices have been ground down to our most basic consumptive urges; the commodities of modern living reduced to greasy, sugary mouth feel, impulse bulk buying, soy lattes with sprinkles, all of this dutifully conducted while passively watching flocks of non-migrating geese negotiating four lanes of SUV traffic in a treeless bland tableau of Anywhere USA.

I guess it’s probably fortunate that no one breaks it to you early in life that instead of, say, winning a Nobel Prize for Literature, saving white rhinos or curing cancer, you will spend much of your time in uninspiring situations like this; that you will be, as I am this January afternoon, a layabout, idly watching a covey of sparrows foraging amid discarded shopping carts outside my car while I wait for my wife to emerge from the store with necessities for her 98-year-old mother. I can almost detect grains of sand swishing through the hourglass of my life. Time is running out, but I’ve been living on borrowed time since I arrived 65 years ago on a frigid December evening on the South Side of Chicago. We are all day-to-day.

This bit of avian activity seems so horribly out of place. Why are they here when there are forests and a river within flying distance? Yet, the birds choose to nest in the eaves of Walmart’s massive structures. Sometimes I even spot them flying inside those buildings, mostly in the gardening section, that part of the store that smells of fertilizer and mulch. 150

There was a time when I would have reached for a field guide to Illinois birds to conclusively ID these sparrows, of which there seems to be dozens of varieties. I used to travel with such books, binoculars, and a notebook to record those findings, but it now seems less important to be able to distinguish the subtle differences between a Savannah sparrow and a Vesper sparrow. I’d rather just revel in their movements and their songs, and be blissfully unaware of the obscure markings on their heads.

So, I watch these unidentified “lbbs,” aka little brown birds, flit and fight over French fries, heels of soggy bread from Subway, and shreds of iceberg lettuce. I’m not opposed to learning new things. I just want to know more about what I already know. Or maybe I am simply worn out.

I happen to be parked directly in front of a car that shows the effects of a recent accident. Driver’s door is bashed in, the spider web of a cracked passenger window held together with black electrician’s tape, and a dented passenger’s door held together more or less with a bungy cord. Its windows are tinted so I have no way of knowing if someone is watching me.

My doors are secured with electronic locks. I have pepper spray in the arm rest because crime is rampant in these desperate and uncertain days of COVID, when unemployment and poverty are on the rise. Yet, I would probably forget that I even had the spray if I was suddenly carjacked. There is a security company that patrols the area in a pickup truck, but rent-a-cops have never been reassuring. Anyway, who wants a 15-year old Subaru without Bluetooth capability?

Some of the people I observe coming and going from Walmart look eerily like the MAGA folks who breached the Capitol last January. I am not happy about my reflexive prejudice. Still, I see the same sullen, menacing don’t-mess-with-me looks I saw on TV that fateful day of insurrection, and the sloppy sweatshirts and beefy Carhartt gear that might conceal a loaded Glock-19.

Stationed at the entrances and exits to the parking lots are the homeless sentries with their cardboard signs that are all coincidentally written in the same typestyle. The homeless, who might be “veterans,” might have “cancer,” might be “disabled,” or might be “starving,” sometimes have puppies with them. Because of those cute dogs I have dispensed money and food, but I have become more suspicious when an acquaintance told me he once saw them disembark from a van and disperse over the area, as if they were carpooling to a 9-5 job.

I guess I could look at this moment in the parking lot as wasted time, as an hour that I will wish I had back at the end of my life, but, truthfully, there have been so many of these moments in my six-and-a-half decades that it would be hard to rank one from the other. (Then there are all those lost hours asleep.) I tend to be more cautious than impulsive; more careful than courageous. I am neither a follower or a joiner, and I reside so deeply inside my mind that I crave idleness and quiet space above all else, much to the detriment of perhaps, well, participating in making the world a better place or learning a new language.

Yet, it has occurred to me that the definition of wasted time is different at this upper middle age than it might have been earlier in my life, if I was even thinking of it at all back then. Like a veteran quarterback, the game of life has slowed down sufficiently that I can now see the entire playing field. I am craftier, relying more on experience instead of mindless, youthful hormonal-guided risk, to guide me through the myriad of obstacles that confront a human being in his sixties. I guess that translates to not caring quite as much about cooling my heels in a Walmart parking lot. It’s not like I was going to split the atom today. Or tomorrow for that matter.

One might assume the opposite: that every second remaining in the next twenty (if I’m lucky) years is itself a precious opportunity to finally accomplish well, what exactly? I’m forever nagged by the thoroughly American guilt-filled notion of striving to overachieve. I can hear the nagging (phantom) critics: How can one watch birds without

identifying them or sketching their beaks? How do you observe the homeless yet not interview them for a book about poverty, or pour one’s life savings into a shelter for these unfortunates? I mean, how lazy can you get?

Guilt can be a thoroughly worthless emotion, especially if what you feel guilty about not accomplishing that which you could never possibly accomplish in the first place. At sixty-five, I am what I am, and will always be, and I have the rest of my life to come to terms with what I have achieved. But how to evaluate what those achievements are in a country obsessed with accumulation, the Big Splash, the Next New Thing?

Toward the end of writer Raymond Carver’s life, in the fatal throes of cancer, he wrote a poem titled “Late Night Fragment” that strips away all our silly strivings down to thirty simple words and shows the real meaning of wealth.

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

My own beloved will return soon, take my hand in hers, and reassure me (once again) that I am fine despite my fears that I am not doing my share to help others. “Well, you help me every day,” she will say.

Until she returns, I will sit here, in this unlikely location with my eyes wide open. I’m taking it all in—this liminal place of scavenging birds and desperate people—and conclude that what I am seeing is quite glorious, every bit of it, if, that is, I will give it my undivided attention.

JC Alfier, Lumière d’escalier · Staircase light

March 14-21, 2023

Hi Baby,

Linage Letters

nonfiction

by

Adria Vidales

Letter to Baby

I’m writing to you as a 22 year old (still feeling like a) kid, still growing up and still confused. I hope this letter finds you well, that you feel happy, loved, warm. I don’t think I can know yet how loving you will transform me, expand my heart in ways I never knew it could. I wonder what holding you for the first time will feel like, who you will be and how we will be forever entwined by our love for each other. I’m writing you this letter as part of one of my last finals for college, in my last year at UCSC. My last class for my Critical Race & Ethnic Studies major. It’s a part of a letter writing practice in which I’m working through themes of lineage by writing to your abuela Rita, myself, and you. There was an author whose work we read that informs this practice of mine named Qui Alexander and they wrote about letters as ways of addressing crises. I am not sure which crises to bring to you, I don’t want to place my burdens on you, but at the same time I want to be transparent with you, so you can get a snapshot of who I was when I wrote this to you. I want to gift you with this piece of me. I am saving seashells and stones for you, collecting gifts for you, dreaming of when I can place them in your hands and tell you their stories. I think I will just be truthful with you, I want to always be truthful with you, so you know you have my trust and hopefully I will have yours.

Well baby, I am full of contradictions. I am sometimes sad, sometimes it is hard for me to bring myself to do all the things I need to do. I spread myself thin and I neglect taking care of myself sometimes. There are times where I don’t know how to get through without calling my mama once or twice each day. I also have moments where I remember

that everything is love, where I feel I am embodying medicine, learning my lessons, and that I walk through this world as a special and unique person with a purpose, even when I don’t really feel like I’ve fully met that purpose yet. I am passionate about organizing, and creating change so you can inherit a world that is kinder and more just than the one I am currently living in. I dream of raising you in a house full of mamas and their babies, where we can cook for one another, help each other raise our kids, and study revolutionary texts together, organize together. I dream of a world where you won’t have to worry about housing, or where your next meal is coming from, or about the violence of incarceration or imperialism or war. At the same time, I’m scared the world will not have changed so much by the time you become a part of it and I worry that instead of raising you without the looming presence of these things, that instead I will have to teach you how to navigate them. How to survive them and resist them.

I have wondered how so many other parents with radical tendencies navigate these things and it was recommended I read Revolutionary Mothering before writing this letter to you. I’ve gotten about halfway through the book and it’s already taught me a lot to read about how so many mamas commit to mothering as a revolutionary act, within their own revolutionary practice. How they struggle with it, grow with it, love through it. I feel so raw and tender thinking about it. In Revolutionary Mothering, Mai’a Williams said that, “all mothers have the potential to be a revolutionary (95).” For many of us, raising a child against the hostile systems of oppression in this world is a revolutionary act in and of itself. When the world wants to see our babies incarcerated, put to work, and struggling to survive, committing to nurturing these children is a radical act. Mothering children who are not meant to survive or thrive in this world is one of the most revolutionary acts there is. Committing to the wellbeing of another means we are also committing to a world where our babies’ wellbeing is prioritized, something against or other than the status quo.

Cynthia Dewi Oka says that, “the ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies. It presents a fundamental contradiction to the logic of capitalism, which un-moors us from each other (108).” It is exactly this which presents the practice of mothering as something that has the potential to be deeply revolutionary. I hope I can embody this revolution when I am your parent. Capitalism would have us separated from one another, it would have us feel shameful for relying on one another and connecting in meaningful ways. By separating us in this way, it makes us forget how powerful we are when we connect to one another and organize our communities. In doing this, it makes us easier to exploit and when we are so overwhelmed by the ways we are being taken advantage of, it can be harder to recognize where the roots of our pain come from. I share this with you so that you will know and be able to identify this enemy that would have you so downtrodden and lost. I hope that from a young age we can talk openly about oppression, so that you can identify it and move through the world in ways that will build your resistance to falling into its structures and ways of being. I want to build a life to ensure that you are surrounded by a loving, supportive community where we are intentional with each other and commit to each other’s wellbeing. As I said before, I dream of raising you in this type of community that understands and practices an ethic of radical care.

I think also of how by committing to you thriving, I am also committing to our whole lineage and the world around us. When I think of you, I think of how much healing work I have to do so that I am careful with what I am passing on to you. I want to make sure I can be the best version of myself for you. There are a lot of ways that I show up for myself that I don’t want to pass on to you, so I know I must continue my healing journey. I think I will be healing for my whole life, even after you are a part of it, and there are most likely hurts and struggles that we will have to face together. There is a lot of hurt in our lineage already, but also a lot of power, love, and determination. I don’t think we could

have one without the other. It’s not easy and healing is often a messy process. There is a lot of grace to be had with how I heal and show up for myself and for you. I want to be intentional with how I treat myself, because we are all reflections and extensions of one another.

Lately, I have been struggling on a daily basis to get through. It is partly that I am overwhelmed by everything on my plate and also partly my own mental health struggles, which don’t exist outside of their connectedness to all other parts of life. It has been easy to neglect myself or be mean to myself, which is honestly a form of self-betrayal. But my self-betrayal does not act alone. By betraying myself, I am also betraying the others that I am connected to, including you. Guilt won’t help me to change this, but a deep love and commitment to you and all my relations will. In committing to myself and nurturing myself, I am also committing to you and to everyone around me. I cannot show up for you if I am not also showing up for myself. As I write this to you I am remembering that. I often get caught up in my head and worry about the future. I forget how the future is a gift if we get it, but that it is never promised. Even as I write to you, you are not promised to me.

I hate how that makes it sound like you belong to me. You will never belong to me, you will never belong to anyone. You will only belong to yourself, no one should take your autonomy away. At the same time, that does not mean we are not deeply connected to and responsible for one another. As you learn how this world works and how to navigate it while growing up, I hope you remember that you are never alone. My commitment to you will be for life. You will grow into a community that loves you and a family that cares for you. I will always do my best to keep you safe, happy, cared for and well loved.

This world is so beautiful and also so hard, my baby. Each day is both a gift and a struggle. I am learning how to hold this contradiction a little more each day, but I think

it is normal to struggle through things. Every day I think of my ancestors, our ancestors, and all that they had to go through to get me to this point now. A lot of why I do what I do is to make them proud, I know they are always with me even if they are no longer physically present in this realm. I hope I can make you proud as well. I hope one day you can grow your relationship with your ancestors too. I hope you can see pictures of them, hear the stories shared and that you feel connected to them and all their prayers to get you to exist in this realm. I hope you can travel to ancestral homelands and walk the same lands they did. I hope you get to drink tea made with the leaves grown from ancestral soils, watered with rains that refresh the same rivers that flow through you. I have so many wishes for you, my love. Prayers I whisper that are embedded in each of these words. I hope you get to travel far, relish and grow and thrive in love, that you are abundant in your magic and your community. I am excited to see you explore the world and connect with the divine all that is. I cannot wait to see your eyes glimmer with excitement, and I cannot wait to hold you when you are sad, too. I am excited to learn how to support you in the ways that feel best for you. I don’t know who you will be, what you will look like, how you will move through this world, or even if you will be my blood. But I am excited to love you in whatever forms you choose to take. I will continue growing and doing my best, so that you will be received into this world by me and the rest of your loved ones with so much love and attention. I will be waiting patiently for you should you choose to bestow me with the honor of being your parent.

Yours with love and patience,

Adria Marie Vidales

March 16-21, 2023

Dear Adria,

Letter to Me

I need to talk to you. I feel as though lately so much of my days have been filled with disillusionment and anxiety for the future. I worry I’m not spending my time correctly in this one short life and I worry I won’t be able to build the meaningful life I dream of. (Why do I feel like it is not yet meaningful? Why do I feel like a meaningful life is a destination not a journey?) I find myself struggling to find the hope I need so that I can build these things wholeheartedly. I still find moments where I remember life is beautiful and there is so much to be grateful for, but then I sink back down into worry. I wake up anxious and thinking of tasks to do and getting out of bed and facing the world feels so hard sometimes. It’s like worry is who is waiting for me in bed, she holds me tight as I fall asleep and kisses me awake with thoughts too big for me to handle. I try to talk about it with my friends, with my therapist, with my parents, but none of it changes the fact that for weeks if not months dread has been licking at the edges of my emotions over what I have to do each day and the next. I struggle to stay present because it feels like there is always something else to worry about. It’s rare to feel the reprise of being with myself or another in the moment, and when it does happen it feels like coming up for air. I often feel so tired of doing even the simplest things and that makes me really sad.

So I need to talk to you, to us. But specifically the version of us that has learned how to embody revolutionary hope and optimism. That one of us that has learned how to swallow the sun and hold it in their chest for days when it is cloudy and gray. I know you exist, there are days where I can feel you bubble up to the top and help me see straight. How do we get to the point where revolutionary hope has become a discipline we have made a daily prayer? What will it take for us to get there and how long will I be trying to get there? How can I begin to learn how to embody this hope a little bit more each day?

This morning I woke up and I felt you whispering to me in my dreams, which I grasped for while waking up. I wrote in my phone’s notes app, “Serve the people, break free from individualism, these feelings won’t last forever.” It reminded me that part of why the days have felt so daunting is because, for the most part, I feel as though I am facing them alone. As an organizer, I know this is no good. In Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton said, “we can never bring about the revolution without the people (294).” One person alone cannot be a revolution, it must be a people’s movement, full of connections and community. I am recognizing that my feelings of being alone in my struggles can lend themselves to individualism, and this is counterintuitive to building collective power and fighting for liberation. It’s work that cannot be done in isolation. No meaningful change can be done without working as a collective. As humans, we aren’t made to function alone. We are created and shaped by our communities.

I think it is the goal of racial capitalism to alienate us from one another, to make us feel alone. To let alienation win discounts the abundance of community love and support I truly do have. Even when I feel alone, I know that I can reach out to someone and be able to connect for a little while, and that’s a great privilege. I can lean into love each day just with the way I treat myself and others. I wonder how you have built your life and yourself up in a way that it is not so hard to remember this. I hope we can remember that we are not alone in our struggle, nor in our joy. Will we be surrounded by beloved community always? Comrades and loved ones? I also wonder, what is the role of a healthy relationship with solitude? I know I will not always be surrounded by others, so how do I mend my relationship with being alone so that I am not so reliant on others to be okay?

When I think of Huey P. Newton, I think of how he had faith in communities coming together and the people winning their freedom. Faith in something much bigger than himself. Faith is something I think I’ve struggled with always, from sitting in a church pew

to believing that I will one day be able to embody hope so well that it fuels me. It can be hard to believe in something we can’t always see or that doesn’t feel so immediate all the time. And yet, I know you must know how to be faithful. Such a big part of hope is faith that things will change and be better one day. How do we hold on to that?

I often wonder if I am doing enough. And yet, I also feel like part of why I struggle is because I am doing so much and am spread so thin. How can I be of service to others if I am not also tending to myself and my ability to live? I wonder what my place in revolution and liberation is. I wonder if I have the skills to build community with others in a way that lends itself towards meaningful, lasting relationships. The words “revolution” and “liberation” alone often feel so big, and I know it is a goal that I might not get to see happen in my lifetime. I am fighting for a future I might not ever see, but have to fight for so someone else and their children can see it. At the same time, maybe liberation is not always a destination, but also a way of moving through the world. Maybe it’s something we pull from other realms into this one which brings us closer to being liberated overall. How do you embody liberation? Is it in the way you treat yourself and others? Is it in the kindness and grace? The determination and courage to keep on going even when it gets hard?

I don’t expect that every day will be perfect and golden, I know there will always be times of struggle and that things are constantly shifting and changing. But what does it take to find joy and meaning even when we are dealing with the immense weight of the world? I feel shame that I even feel anything other than gratitude for this life, for the gift of this breath. Even as I write this, I feel a rift between the peace I know is a part of me and the discord that I feel expressing my hardest feelings to you. I think since I often don’t sit with those hard feelings, they just get pushed deeper inside and rather than moving through my emotional, physical, and spiritual body, they get stuck in me and lead me to

feeling this way so often. I am tired of being so sad. I am tired of being so scared. I know this is not sustainable.

The thing is, I don’t think shame will bring me into becoming you. I don’t think I can guilt myself into optimism nor into being truly revolutionary. The shame I feel doesn’t serve a purpose other than keeping me stagnant in negativity or keeping me from believing in myself as a capable, worthy, and powerful person. I think only by loving myself and others so deeply and expansively will I be able to build my capacity for hope and therefore my capacity to keep going, keep fighting for a different world to be born. How can I continue to get closer to you and embodying revolutionary hope by expanding my capacity for love? What does embodied love as an everyday practice look like?

My anger and grief, while they have a place, will not fuel me forever. In fact, I think it is perhaps because I have let my grief take the wheel recently that I am struggling so much now with being hopeful and optimistic. It feels easy and suffocating to drown in sadness and hopelessness, but ultimately these do not serve to keep us well. And if we are not well, how can we fight? Or do anything at all? Is it not our collective wellness that we are fighting for? I don’t think grief and wellness are a dichotomy and in fact I think processing grief is critical to our wellbeing, but if we are not processing it, it is getting stuck in us. It can lead to feeling hopeless about things and I know that hopelessness serves someone in power.

If we are hopeless, it keeps us from believing we can change things. It lends itself to those feelings of isolation and keeps us from connecting with one another and our power. I read on a friend’s Instagram story a post where @officialleoncio said, “You should not succumb to this pessimism because you are living in the very country that perpetuates this violence on a global scale, and to do that is to abandon the people suffering in the oth-

er parts of our world.” When I read their words, it felt like a fire in my chest, reminding me exactly what my hopelessness means and how it extends far beyond myself. I cannot abandon my siblings, comrades, loved ones, in other parts of this world while I sit comfortably in the imperial belly of the beast. Instead, I must continue fighting, I must continue studying, I must continue growing sharper in my analysis and actions. I will not abandon them, and I will not abandon myself.

I am tired of being sad and scared. I am tired of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I am tired of almost believing that the world is hurting so much that the hurt is too big to heal. I refuse to be a microcosm of that belief. I refuse to let my hurts drag me down so much that I can’t breathe the air that the trees so lovingly exhaled into the skies. So today I want to promise you that I will be okay. I want to promise myself that I will become you one day. When I say I will embody revolutionary hope and optimism, I mean in every cell of my body I will keep on fighting for a better world to be born. I will conjure hope and let it flow through my heart like thick, sweet blood. I will let it run through my fingertips and toes so that I am rooted in hope, and I sprout into doing something about it.

A friend once told me that the opposite of fear is not love, but connection. I’ve felt this lesson ring true as my most expansive moments are ones in which I am connecting with others. When I break through my own fears to connect to others, it often proves to be the most fruitful in terms of helping me to feel hopeful and well. Mass movements do not happen on the shoulders of a few people, and building community is so integral to the whole process of liberating ourselves. We all have a role to play and I know I must take up those roles that feel the most aligned for me.

Thank you for reminding me on the days where I feel small that there is so much in the world to connect to. Even when I am feeling disconnected from you and the world around me, I know it means there is still so much room to grow. There’s so many people to meet and

love and fight alongside. Every day is another chance for us to make choices that connect us to one another and the world. Every day is another chance to continue transforming ourselves and the world around us. When I get glimpses of you in the mirror, it feels sweet to know that I am able to cultivate the life I desire. It feels daunting and simultaneously refreshing to know that it is my responsibility to go after and hold on to what brings me joy and peace in this world. I am excited to think of how being in community with others and building that world where we are free together is where I can find so much of that joy. I pray I can let go of the rigidity of fear that keeps me from embracing life as the ever fluid and transforming thing that it is. I hope I can accept each day for what it is and that I can make it to a point where I am excited about finding my way through the world alongside my loved ones. I hope I can continue learning how to become you and that you are not afraid to teach me what that looks like. In many ways, I think I already am you, I just need to remember that on days when you feel far away. I am excited to continue learning what it means to embody revolutionary hope and optimism and I pray that I grow into that being a little more each day.

With love,

Adria Marie Vidales

March 7, 2023 (full moon in Virgo)

Letter to my Mother

Mama,

My one and only. Thank you for this life. I went on a walk today and oh my gosh all the wonders I saw. I saw a garden that reminded me of you. I want to build it for you. Something for you to sit in on your breaks or your lunch hour. Something for you to look at and remember I loved you so much I curated life for you like you created life for me. You are my first home. My body was your body, every beat of your heart was every moment of my life, you were building a promise for me. Today I get to sit by the beach, write poetry and smell the salt. I get to eat delicious food and walk somewhere, and I get to have somewhere to call home. I get to feel my feet plant roots with every step I take. I get to touch the ocean and remember I am the world, just like you. You are my world. My first experience with the world was you. Your womb and your heart. Your spirit and your mind.

I know those times were hard. When I was you and you were me and we were feeling it all together. The beginnings and ends of life. I am infinitely grateful that your papito got to hold me, call me a chuparrosa, su mariposa. Maybe he knew before any of us did that I would travel far through this life, flitting my wings and landing in so many places, but always with home in my heart. I am grateful that his strong hands held my small body and I am grateful for the prayers he must have been whispering over us. It is okay to be sad that we didn’t have more time. I am feeling this today. Yo sé que llevas una carga mamá. Una carga de su muerto y que lo piensas que eso muerto ha hecho a mi corazón y mi mental. I know that you carry that carga every day. I wonder often what it would take for you to release that carga. Release doesn’t have to be total. Sometimes it can just be the small acts of forgiveness that whisper to us that we are whole anyways. That we are here despite it all. We passed through so much hurting together mama. We leapt through portals of grief and

loss. I suckled on tears as much as I suckled on joy. Maybe there were more tears than joy sometimes. I know you might be crying already but please forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself because you did nothing wrong. Forgive yourself because for so much of your life you had no control over the pain you had to go through. Forgive yourself because we survived. You know I’m not just talking about your papi’s death anymore, right? I’m talking all the pain. I’m talking you crying in the bathroom while dad yelled at you from outside. I’m talking us with no money no jobs, at least grammy and papa could lend us the money to buy us the food. I’m talking bathtub filled up with dollar tree purchases because the idea of taking all those plastic flowers to your papi in the cemetery made you feel like maybe he would take the depression away. I’m talking the pills that made it feel like you weren’t there, couldn’t cry couldn’t smile either. Forgive yourself that I was and am so committed to being your baby that I have always wanted to take your pain and hold it in me so that maybe you wouldn’t have to so much. I forgive myself for that one too. Maybe I tried to hold too much of the pain and not enough of the joy. You know I’ve been sad and anxious for so long.

I am learning now that part of my responsibility to you isn’t to hold all the hurt, but to hold all the joy and love too. Part of how I heal us, part of how I can make you proud is by finding what makes me happy and holding it in my hands. Holding on to it as much as I can. I can’t heal both of us, but I can heal me. I can take what we went through and I can transform it. You didn’t just pass on la tristeza, you also passed on your love. Your nurturing, your care, your hugs and kisses. You passed on the skill to break cycles of trauma and abuse. Remember that. If you can’t, I will remember for you and tell it to you too. I will tell you that your decisions to keep us away from the drugs, the hiding things under the rugs, the erratic mess of the family was a valid choice to make. Not leaving us alone with your mom because you knew she might hit us if we said or did the “wrong” thing, was a valid choice to make.

Olvida y deja de las cosas que pudieron pasar. You broke cycles mami. You did. You looked the memories of your pain in the eye and you made the decision that you did not want us to go through what you did. You are so powerful mama. You are a magician for that. You transmuted your pain, you did the thing!! If no one has told you they are proud of you for that, I will. I am so proud of you. I am proud of you for making it through each day. I am proud of you for committing to love us more than probably anything else in the world. I am proud of you for the way that means you have had to commit to yourself and keeping yourself afloat even when you felt like sinking. I love you so so much mama. I love you thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much and more. I love you for to the moon and back infinity times.

I don’t know what I will do or who I will be when you are gone. I have been thinking of that lately. I know you say don’t talk about it but I want to prepare even though I know I will never be prepared. I don’t really know how though. I hope we have a long time together. You know I’ll wipe your ass to the very end. So don’t worry about that. I won’t put you in a nursing home until I have to go with you.

There’s one more thing I want to talk about with you before I go. Before I leave this beach and don’t come back to this moment. I want to talk about being queer mom. I don’t mean queer in the slur way I mean queer in the expansive into all horizons, doesn’t know how to quit and probably never will way. I mean queer as in fuck these systems of oppression and fuck anyone who benefits from another person’s suffering. I mean queer as in there’s a mushroom that has 541 sexes. I mean queer as in the roots that connect the whole world together. I mean queer as in I will keep fighting until my last breath for a world where my baby and everybody else’s babies can grow up not knowing what oppression feels like, even if I don’t get to see that world in my lifetime. Where they don’t have to hold their breath around a pig ass cop or not know where their next meal is coming from. I know you know queer mami. I know you hold it in you. I don’t forget that day in Eddie’s pizza where you

told me that if something happened to dad you wouldn’t be in a relationship with a man again. I know you want that pixie cut so your curls can kiss your face in the breeze. I know why you buy the pride snoopy shirts and love to see me cut my hair and love who I love how I love them. God, I wish you would just get the damn haircut. I wish you didn’t have to cook every dinner for him and wash every dish. I wish you were free mama. I wish you were free. I hope one day you can be free before you’re free from this world. I will keep fighting until you are. I will keep loving abundantly until you are. And if you are too scared to break through what holds you down, I will live free for the both of us. I will laugh like a drum, walk like thunder. I will kiss that person and walk like thunder. I will stick my toes in the sand and give thanks for this life you blessed me with. I will mark my body with medicine and reminders of why I am alive and why I’m the medicine too. I will go home and leave and go home again. I will drink tea in Piri and eat aguacates and I will be queer forever and ever. I always have been and always will be. I think maybe you have too. Okay.

I think that’s all for now. I love you. Remember to breathe. Remember work won’t last forever and remember to find joy in between the shifts. Remember I will take care of you like you have taken care of me. Thank you for taking care of me. Thank you for answering all my calls, cooking me your yummy food, giving me all the hugs and back scratches I ask for. Thank you for choosing me to be your baby and plucking me from the spirit world to make you proud in this lifetime. Te amo para siempre y mas mamá.

Your baby,

Adria Marie Vidales

Contributors

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent poetry collection, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work. Their intents touch upon transgender femininity, with artistic directions are informed by photo-artists Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

My name is Justin Carlos Alcalá, a Mexican-American horror and dark fiction writer. Born and raised in Chicago, I now live with Bigfoot in the mountains of North Carolina, where I write. In the past twelve years, I’ve published four novels and thirty plus stories in American literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, and won several literary awards, including the Speculative Literature Foundation Finalist Award and Horror Writers Association Grant Award. I have 19,000 Twitter followers, another 10,000 followers amongst other platforms, and am eager to promote my work to find readers.

Visual artist and photographic reporter, Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and the various narrative possibilities that art offers. The works of the artist dialogue between memory and social political criticism. He believes in photography as the aesthetic potential and transforming agent of society. Awarded in national and international competitions, Guilherme Bergamini participated in collective exhibitions in 54 countries.

Peter Biles is a fiction writer and essayist from Oklahoma. He is the author of Hillbilly Hymn and Keep & Other Stories and has authored numerous articles and stories in various journals.

Jake Bonsell is a 30-year-old self-taught photographer from Los Angeles, California. Having lived there his entire life, he has never run out of fascinating places to explore and photograph. Each photo Jake takes involves a lot of effort, whether it’s researching specific locations or simply wandering around to discover hidden gems. While he often has a general idea of what he wants to capture, he frequently stumbles upon unexpected scenes, like alleyways adorned with street art or intriguing urban architecture. Jake finds great joy in photographing everyday life, as it presents a

complex and authentic narrative of people going about their routines. Once he has his raw photos, he dedicates countless hours to editing, striving to enhance them while preserving their essence. Although he usually has a vision for how he wants a photo to look, he always experiments with different techniques to uncover new perspectives he might not have considered before. From the moment he steps out of his house to the final export of his images, Jake relishes every part of the creative process. It is a process that has turned into a life lesson for him, teaching him never to give up and to always strive to be the best person and artist he can be, with the belief that things will turn out beautifully.

Before retirement, Tony Brinkley taught literature at the University of Maine, where he was also the Senior Faculty Associate at the University’s Franco-American Centre. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Four Centuries, Hinchas de Poesie, Hungarian Review, MayDay, New Review of Literature, Puckerbrush Press, Poetry Salzburg Review, Otoliths, Shofar, Metamorphosis, OPEN, and World Literature Today. Recent translations include poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova.

Kathy Bruce is a visual artist based in Argyll & Bute Scotland. Her work traces the mythologies and histories of women, plants and landscape. Her collages have appeared in Three Rooms Press. The Vassar Review, Alchemy Literary Magazine, Open Minds Quarterly Journal, The Perch Yale University School of Medicine, The New Southern Fugitives, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Ignation literary Journal, The Variant Literature, Landlocked Literary Magazine, The Rejoiner Rutgers University, The Brooklyn Review, Twyckenham Notes, The Porter House Review, Pushing Out the Boat, The National Women’s History Museum, and Minding Nature.

Sean Cahill-Lemme was born in Park Ridge, Illinois—yes, he consider that Chicagoland—to a family of raconteurs, the Northside descendants of Erin. He is not the best storyteller his family, something he has no problem admitting (you wouldn’t either if you ever shared a pint with his gramps), but he is the only one who believes it is more than just entertainment after the “real” work is done. Five months ago, after being encouraged by an incredible culture of Chicago writers, Sean finally decided to start submitting his work. He has since been published seven times.

Casey Charles writes across genres from Palm Springs, California and Missoula, Montana—two different homes that reflect in many ways the two lives of the writer—queer man and Rocky Mountain hiker, poet and author of novels about the West. His memoir Undetectable (Running Wild Press, 2024) explores the intersection of HIV survival and troubled relations with lovers, work places, and the vexed health care system in America. Activist, lawyer, and teacher, Charles works with desire and place in his writing, trying to explore the tensions that inhabit the searching self.

C.G. Dominguez is a proud queer Boricua working and writing on the margins of Appalachia. Her work has or will soon appear in BRUISER, Muleskinner, Hofstra’s Windmill, Paddler Press and elsewhere.

C.S. Fuqua’s books include Fatherhood ~ Poems of Parenthood, Walking After Midnight ~ Collected Stories, Big Daddy’s Fast-Past Gadget, Native American Flute ~ A Comprehensive Guide, and White Trash & Southern ~ Collected Poems. His work has appeared in publications such as Year’s Best Horror Stories XIX, XX and XXI, Pudding, The Horror Show, Pearl, Chiron Review, Christian Science Monitor, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, The Writer, and Honolulu Magazine.

Tytti Heikkinenis a Finnish visual artist, who has graduated from Turku Art Academy. She has participated in exhibitions in Finland and Denmark. In the USA, her latest visual pieces have appeared (or will be appearing) in Arkana, Lumina Literary Journal, Miracle Monocle, Mayday, and Memezine. Heikkinen’s works combine photographs, painting, and sometimes sculpture with the possibilities of Photoshop and other digital tools, such as vector graphic and animation programs. She is interested in both abstract and figurative art. While doing her artwork, she enjoys listening to art history lectures. You can read her three poems in the Offing.

Toby Jaffe has been published in New Republic Magazine, Belt Magazine, Paste Magazine, The Baffler, the Gay and Lesbian Review, the American Prospect, and the Progressive Magazine.

Rob Leone lives in San Francisco and his work has appeared in Two Hawks Quarterly, Ravens Perch, Hawaii Pacific Review, Prometheus Dreaming, Spank the Carp, Tuliptree Story of the Week, Rosebud, Evergreen Chronicles, Bay Area Reporter, and other publications. He co-wrote Rights of Passage, a full-length play that was produced at the New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco and published by Samuel French, Inc.

Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 30 books, including Far from Atlantis (Gallaudet University Press) and Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss (Unbound Edition Press). The most recent anthology he’s edited is Oh Yeah: A Bear Poetry Anthology (Bearskin Lodge Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. An inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [raymondluczak.com]

Stephen J. Lyons is an established author with a national following—the author of six books of essays and journalism: Landscape of the Heart (Washington State University Press); A View from the Inland Northwest (Globe Pequot); The 1000-Year Flood (Globe Pequot); West of East (Finishing Line), Going Driftless (Globe Pequot) and Searching for Home (Finishing Line).

Stephen is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in prose writing from the Illinois Arts Council and has published articles, reviews, essays, and poems in numerous publications, including Wall Street Journal, the Independent; Washington Post, Salon, Toronto Globe & Mail, Manoa, Newsweek, The Sun, Chicago Tribune, Funny Times, Witness, and High Country News. His work has been featured in fourteen anthologies alongside such noted writers as Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Edward Abbey, Barbara Kingsolver, Anna Quindlen, Dave Barry, and Louise Erdrich. His books include blurbs by Terry Tempest Williams, William Kittredge, and Bill McKibben.

Johanna Nauraine has been a serious student of fiction for decades. Her fiction has been published in Bright Flash Literary Review, Bristol Noir, ASP Publishing, Vol. 11 and she has forthcoming publications in Witcraft, The Pure Slush Anthology on Loss, Vol. 9. She is a retired psychotherapist who lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. Her first novel is being represented by Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media, and she’s hard at work on her next two novels.

Paula Praeger is an artist, poet and fiction and nonfiction writer. Her prints have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad. Her poems have been published in Hindsight, a mixed-media portfolio, Cancer, Months to Years, Close Up (Poems on Cancer Grief Hope and Healing), Visible Ink Anthologies 2021-2022, 2023, 2024, and in the Sad Girls and Humans of the World blogs.

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience & a barbwire conviction that prequels the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press.) His work is published in Superstition Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Zone 3; Poets Reading the News and Rigorous. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

R. P. Singletary is a lifelong writer, a budding playwright, and a native of the rural southeastern United States, with recent fiction, poetry, and drama published or upcoming in Literally Stories, Litro, BULL, Cream Scene Carnival, Cowboy Jamboree, Teleport, CafeLit, JONAH, Ancient Paths Christian Literary, EBB, Flora Fiction, Ariel Chart, Syncopation, Last Leaves, Stone of Madness, Written Tales, Wicked Gay Ways, Fresh Words, The Chamber, Wingless Dreamer, Screen Door Review, Microfiction Monday, mini plays, Pink Disco, Lost Lake Folk Opera, The Stray Branch, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Bending Genres, and elsewhere.

Kit Willett is an Auckland-based English teacher, poet, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

VA Wisewell lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. Her work has appeared in The Lake, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, 34th Parallel Magazine, Sad Girls Literary Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, OJA & L Magazine, Front Porch Review, Five on the Fifth, and Panoplyzine Magazine. You can find her on Instagram at @vawiswell and www.vawiswell.com.

Stephen Wunderli is a writer living in Utah. He is the recipient of the Bridport Prize for literature and has published in The Grub Street Literary Magazine and Lunaris.

R. G. Mint is an English teacher in Seattle, Washington. When he isn’t in the classroom, he often stays busy writing stories aimed at thrilling, unsettling, or provoking thought in his readers. He is passionate about shedding light on diverse perspectives and harnessing the power of writing to bring about positive change. You can follow him on Instagram at @r.g.mint.

Adria Vidales (they/he/ella) is a 23 year old Chicano kid from the Central Valley; Stockton to be more specific. Con raíces de Michoacán y Jalisco, Mexico, they come from a long lineage of poets, artists, dreamers, curanderas, brujas, campesinos and migrants. They celebrate and honor this lineage by being authentic to themself as a poet, artist, dreamer, curandera, bruja, and campesino. Every day they strive to make their ancestors and descendants proud and they can feel their Grammy bragging in heaven that she now has two published poet granddaughters (both in the ana). He can be found most days somewhere in Stockton or out in Lickeford, tending to youth, plants, or his family and himself. He can also be found on Instagram @plant.papit0 (lmao). Ella manda muchos bendiciones para todos que leen este publicación y que encuentran algo especial en su misma palabra, muchas gracias, tlazocamati, diosï meiamu

Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment editor with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his degree in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Publication credits include Tiferet, Zillah, The Ugly Tree, Modern Drunkard Magazine, Red Owl, Jones Av., Main Street Rag, Space & Time, Mythic Delirium and Weird Tales. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter.