The Cabin's Writers in the Attic Anthology: Animal

ANIMAL

writers in the attic

Selected by RICK ARDINGER Edited by JOCELYN ROBERTSON With an introduction by RICK ARDINGER

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org Š 2015 The Cabin All rights reserved.

Book design by Jocelyn Robertson.

Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 175 copies.

CONTENTS Introduction • 1

BEING

MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK Trumpeter Swan/Beaver: 1/1/11 • 7 MAGGIE KOGER Call of the Wild Swan • 8

ALEXANDRA ELLEN APPEL #65 from The Anchorage City Poems, February 2012 • 9 ANTHONY McARTHUR Bluebird • 10 ANN FINLEY Mama’s Hen House • 15

ALLISON MAIER The Pug House • 19

NICHOLAS DARLINTON The Taxonomy of Maria Cordero-Rodriguez • 22 CATHERINE KYLE Canyon Sailors • 26 JAN SCHLICHT Rahu • 31 CAROL MacGREGOR Cow Elk • 34 CLAIRE FENTON Intruder • 35 MAGGIE KOGER How Sweet the Sparrow’s Song • 39 STEVE LIEBENTHAL The Church at the River • 40

BEAST

M R SMITH Teeth • 49

GREG HEINZMAN My Hair is a Snake at the Edge of the World • 50 MARGUERITE LAWRENCE Jersey • 51 T O DAVIS Barren • 56 SHEILA D C ROBERTSON Winterkill • 57 CHRIS DeVORE Birdbrains • 62 ERIC E WALLACE Stopgap Gorilla • 67

MARY ELLEN McMURTRIE Lines • 73

FAUNA

ALICE LOUISE GERFEN Fever Dreams • 81 STEVE LIEBENTHAL Wy-kan-ush (The Salmon) • 82

CHERYL RICHARDSON Catch of the Day • 83 M R SMITH Keeping My Eye on Things • 84 RICK D HUNT Three Haiku • 85 ANITA TANNER New Year: Northern Red Shafted Flicker • 86

JENNIFER TROPLE The Sandpiper • 87 MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK A Presence • 88 Sonnet: Breed • 90

SHARLA ROBINSON NG Coyote Moon • 91 DEVRA McCOMISH-MARY Huckleberry and the Big Chill • 92

FERAL

KATHERINE DUGGAN Cats • 101 TIFFANY HITESMAN Gretel • 105 BILL COPE What’s All The Rukus? • 109 ROSS HARGREAVES American Sauce • 114 MICHAEL PHILLEY Bodies • 117

A C ROBERTSON Coyote • 123 HEIDI KRAAY how could you ever find air • 124 ANITA TANNER Gauntlet • 126

CREATURE

NICHOLAS DARLINTON Embolden • 131 CHARLES FRODE The Writhing Snakes • 136 A Crane in the Willows • 140

MIKE RITTHALER Raven Courts a Star • 146 ANTHONY McARTHUR Aphids in Babylon • 151 LAURA M GIBSON Dirts • 156

ALAN MINSKOFF Within the Lines • 162 AMY LARSON Chicken Dog • 164 ALEXANDRA ELLEN APPEL the evolution of dog • 169 ANITA TANNER Equinus • 170

INTRODUCTION Recently, my friend Chuck Guilford and I visited our old friend John Thomsen on his Forest Service lookout north of New Meadows on the Payette National Forest. Lick Creek Lookout is about a three-mile hike up from the trailhead, and hiking with a night’s feast and libations makes it even steeper.

Needless to say, John receives relatively few visitors over the course of a summer. After an evening of catching up, ranting over politics, talking over books, and watching the sun set through the smoke of Oregon fires, we called it a night.

Around 4 am I woke up and walked out onto the catwalk to hear, for my first time, two wolves howling the next ridge away, one wolf taking the high, melodic register, while the other took the lower necessary drone, for a forlornly harmonic convergence under a blizzard of stars.

Animal.

The theme for this anthology is “animal.” Some writers responded to the theme quite literally. Some sought the appropriate metaphor. Some were quite traditional, some deliberately experimental.

In selecting pieces for this anthology, names and addresses were redacted from the manuscripts, so the judging was blind to names we might recognize, and blinding any attempts to consciously or unconsciously impose gender or regional balance. Obviously, some contributors are more seasoned than others, some younger, some bolder, some preferring the high lyrical register, some preferring the low and counter, steady drone.

In commemoration of The Cabin’s 20th year, it’s appropriate to see this volume of voices — some wilder than others — take a place on the night stand or the bookshelf as a 1

generation of encouragement, a celebration of two decades of teaching and learning, manuscript exchanges, writing camp diligence, a field guide to literary impulse.

In the West the wild is never far away. Identity is influenced by place, and those that inhabit place can impact who we are, human and animal. The theme the writers explore in this anthology is elemental, a place to begin The Cabin’s next 20 years. — RICK ARDINGER

ANIMAL

writers in the attic

BEING It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium. — IVAN PAVLOV

MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK

TRUMPETER SWAN/BEAVER: 1/1/11 Here is my confession. When I said I was leaving to run an errand I meant walking to the cottonwood stand behind the technical college to see how many twisted trunks beavers had toppled since last summer ground itself to sand.

I’ve done this for years.

Snow muted vacant lots. Ruts marred the place where bulldozers gouged up wild poppies we found. Cold spun breath to lace.

Light grazed my face, cooled on cars.

Ice burned. Fields and engineering offices blazed with frigid gold in thin galleries.

The vivid always disappears.

A sound turned me. Half honk, half manifesto.

Seven swans, snowy flames from the river.

Big as A-10s, they skimmed treetops, so low a man with a snow blower heard them carve the air. Into pale sun they veered at the velocity of white, through the sky’s cloudy gears.

Every confession is an errand.

I’ve tried to say this so you understand.

The urge to believe is the speech of beavers perpetually unseen.

Every year is a ritual of late arrivals, a futile reach for the beauty of the fallen, the crash that stills the thunder no one hears.

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MAGGIE KOGER

CALL OF THE WILD SWAN At dawn an eerie cry unravels from the long neck of a wild swan reminds me I live by naming days — Sunday, Monday, spending a sigh here a tremble there, my calendar shielding me as I try not to remember the pure timbre of swan trumpeting epic cycles into a world meant to last larger and longer than I, songs repeating how I am truly nothing, if not to hear this call.

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ALEXANDRA ELLEN APPEL

#65 FROM THE ANCHORAGE CITY POEMS, FEBRUARY 2012 the Ravens of Anchorage chuckle chortle and hiss a mouthful of hardship and honey arbitrators of impasse on the empty folds of forever hold all known, a mouthful, Ravens just this. * under a calm February sky a gang of Ravens harassing two Eagles vanish into the implacable distance

9

ANTHONY McARTHUR

BLUEBIRD When a naked man goes running by the first thing you notice is the last thing you want to see. This is never more true than when your girlfriend has just told you it’s over, and there isn’t any sense in pretending to be friends and that it was all simply a temporary charade.

We were up by Basin in the forest we loved to get lost in.

We were sitting on the side of the rocky hill where we had first kissed, overlooking the meadow where the beaver dam had been. As difficult as things had been, I still hoped for an idyllic day where we could reconnect and perhaps, even, in the shadows under the ghost trees, rediscover our passion.

But instead, she dumped me right before some naked guy ran by.

As my mind began to swallow itself in the black hole of rejection I heard her mumble something about wanting to end it where it all began. Before I could even ask why, let alone offer up some hopeless protest, she was up, arching her back, taking a big swig from the bottle of wine I had just uncorked.

“Let’s go,” she said, “No sense in dragging this out.” She spoke of it, of us, as if we were some dead thing in a canvas bag in the trunk, to be hauled out and buried in a fire roasted portion of the forest, forgotten, as if it never had been.

“No,” I answered. “I’ll stay here.”

She looked down on me with a smirk and a roll of her eyes, as if to confirm every negative thought she ever had about me.

“Don’t be stupid. Your apartment is twenty miles from here.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll hitch a ride.” I couldn’t bear the thought of driving back, staring out the window in silence, trying to hold back the tears, the anger, the urge to grab the 10

wheel and take her station wagon off the high side of the highway to plummet to our untimely demise.

“Fine. Play the victim.”

She turned to stride away in her saucy, bouncy gait, like she’d just paid the grinder’s monkey, but not before I reached out and grabbed the bottle. She held on a little tighter than I anticipated, and turning back around to face me, even gave it a little tug. I held firm and freed the bottle from her grip.

She gave me a snarl and was off down the path in the same direction the naked man had gone. Maybe they’d meet up later on. Maybe it was all part of the plan.

I raised the bottle and drank the better part of it. I thought if I were quiet enough, still enough, maybe I could rise up and go on. I remembered the quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti, “to look without thought is to see without the interference of time, knowledge and conflict.” Stop thinking, stop feeling, be still and open. I was resisting the conditioning that somehow what we feel and think is supposed to equal what we deserve. I was staving off the urge to want to feel worse than I did, like wanting to feel guilty because I did not feel any guilt. And I was positive in that moment that Schopenhauer was wrong, dead wrong, Love was not the most important thing.

Then I opened my eyes and saw the bluebirds flitting about the meadow. For a moment that is all there was. The universe was a meadow full of bluebirds. One in particular was fluttering near the closest tree and I imagined it was paying some notice to me.

I remembered when we first came here. We stumbled across a beaver dam in the meadow. We were in awe of how vibrant everything was, how even the flies seemed to glisten.

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Deer walked in from the edge of the treeline, an abundance of birds flew between the trees and over the creek and a fox crossed in front of us. The beavers themselves were not to be seen. The center cause of the beauty we saw was absent. In that silence, overwhelmed, I wondered if this was my chance with her. But I never knew if I had a chance – I was never sure I wanted or deserved one. Desire requires surrender and sanity insists you know what you are willing to lose. I could not speak. My soul was choking, a spark under ashes longing to join the fire. And then she rose, pulling up her summer dress above her knees, walking in total silence to slowly wade into the beaver’s dam as if she were part of it, blending in to become what she perceived. I remained as still as a camera, hoping that something from me could forge the shadows and light into the unforgettable. And she returned, lowering her silty skin on my body to deliver a kiss, the place marker of the beauty that only survives its moment in memory.

At the end of the memory was the bluebird. Still in the tree. In the past I have heard non-human words. At midnight upon the cricket’s stridulation phrases emerge: who do you think you are? Why not imagine a phrase from a creature who sings for love with his wings? And so, too, with the bluebird.

I stood up with my bottle of wine and made my way to another tree, one that went away from the path of the naked man, toward the greater rocks and granite peaks above. And there it was again. I did not know if it was following me or if I was following it. And though I knew that the words that formed in my mind did not come from the bird, they would not have formed without its song. And in my mind I knew that every word was meant to woo. As I wondered at the rustcolored patch on its breast among its greater blue, I thought it said to me your suffering is minute. And surely it is, as meaningless as an ant on the bottom of my boot. I wondered if he could tell me from other men better than I could tell him from 12

other birds. I sat and listened and tried to leave my mind alone.

He hovered off the branch and dove down quick to the grass and came back to the branch again. Some things are solved by the way they dissolve. And then it flew away.

I went up the mountain. I had a need to ascend. I rose hard and madly. From above the tree tips dark hawks dove and I wondered what was preying on me. An owl feather fell from a branch I broke, landing on the shed skin of a snake. From a ridge crest I took the view. I stopped, my heart pounding in my ears. The still world spread out below.

Coming down the mountain I made my way to the old dirt road that hooked up with the highway, hoping I could get there before dark. Fiercely determined not to think but to conjure up an unlikely ride, I saw one rattling my way. It was an old Jeep that pulled over in a cloud of dust. The door swung open to reveal the naked man behind the wheel, only now he was clothed. There was no passenger seat. I had to kneel and hold on to the dash and the door handle. All he said was “I’m goin’ in if that’s where you’re headed.”

“Yeah,” I answered, “want some wine?”

With a yellow dust plume behind us on the washboard road we came to a stop to turn on the highway. There on the branch of a dead tree I saw a bluebird. I wondered if it could be the same one. The driver dropped it into gear and made the turn and the bluebird flew away.

Yet a silhouette was left of it on the branch a fading symbol in the back of my eye — as gone as an old girlfriend.

We went in. We finished off the bottle of wine along the way and followed it up with a few beers at the Five Mile Bar. I got pretty drunk and kept rattling on about bluebirds. He said his brother ran a tattoo parlor on Front Street and he could get me a discount. The last thing I remember was telling him I wasn’t that kind of guy, I don’t do tattoos. But when I woke 13

up the next morning there was this bluebird tattooed on my forearm with words in Celtic lettering circled around it, two above and four below.

Being Here Is the Only Prize I kind of went crazy for a while and had to move out of town. I keep to myself anymore, but the bluebird and I go everywhere together.

14

ANN FINLEY

MAMA’S HEN HOUSE The neighbors never did understand why my mother wanted the hen house to be built down by the creek, across a field and out of sight of the ranch house. The neighbors saw some reason for hope — we all did — in the fact that Mama intended to raise chickens. All the farm women in our valley raised chickens. Being from San Francisco and faintly resembling Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did not necessarily give Mama a bye.

The neighbors tried, but Mama just didn’t fit in. They never really related to a vegetarian ranch woman whose root cellar contained a bicycle, a Westerner who preferred Calypso to country, a horsewoman who could ride like a Comanche, but preferred watching horses through the living room picture window to riding them. She read voraciously, took afternoon naps, didn’t garden or play pinochle, and (it was rumored correctly) couldn’t have lifted a bale of hay to save her soul.

And still — though she vigorously denied any problems — her human nature wanted to fit in.

Every ranch in the valley had a hen house. Each morning up and down the valley, roosters crowed, drowning out the mourning doves and meadowlarks. Once in a while a pair of coyotes, sounding like a coyote camp meeting, sent their voices wafting down from the surrounding sagebrush-covered hills.

Our new chicken house was of board-and-batten. Mama said we should paint the boards red and the batten white.

So we did that. Unkind references were made as to its resemblance to a barber shop, but that was only on account of the colors. Otherwise it resembled a fireworks stand.

However, few people saw the chicken house, down by the creek as it was, all by itself out of sight, surrounded by

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trees and fields. Every morning the chickens were let out to scramble and scratch in wild forest duff.

Ranging free on the creek as they did, the chickens were vulnerable to predation. Every morning Woofer, the German Shepherd dog, made his rounds, staking his claim on key fence posts. He took on this job, paying it forward, as it were, and while he lived, we never lost a hen to coyotes.

Blue, the local goshawk, was another matter. Disdainful of dogs, the hawk periodically soared in from his home cottonwood tree up creek to look over the prospects, like a canny shopper on market day. The hawk would have made an easy target, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to shoot him.

It may have helped that he and his mate treated us to aerial ballets during mating season. “He has to feed his family, so I guess we can put up with him,” was the family consensus. (We were closer in mind to the neighbors than we or they thought.

They never harmed Blue either.)

We were amazed that chickens can be as emotional as they are. Few creatures on earth are consistently happier than a fat red mother hen with her brood of tiny golden chicks, as she marshals them across a barnyard or pasture, introducing them to the realities of a free-range chicken’s world. When she finds something good to eat, such as a worm or seed, she clucks to all the babies to gather ‘round. If the wide grey shadow of a soaring hawk floats across the ground, the family scatters, chicks skittering to the bushes, which are never far away. The hawk soars on, magnificent and beautiful, searching for the unwary.

When Woofer died, old in years and scarred from fights with generations of the neighbors’ dogs, predators descended on the hen house en masse. The coyotes proved less problematic than the city dogs that ranged up the valley, usually in pairs, sometimes in packs. The code of the west was that if you caught a dog bothering your livestock, you shot 16

it. Mama wouldn’t have this. She loved dogs. Nor would she pen up the chickens. We were selling free range eggs for an imposing price.

More important was the fact that Mama was taking fewer naps and more walks. She ignored the daily phone calls from the doctor’s office about something they had noticed in the course of a minor operation. Eventually the calls stopped. Just to be on the safe side, Mama bought a book at the health food store. She read about several different varieties of cancer and decided she had every one.

Our solution to the dog problem was to capture the killer dogs, check their collars for nametags, lock them up in the wooden granary and notify their owners.

One afternoon, however, two slick-furred town dogs conducted a slaughter that wiped out a third of the flock.

The carnage was terrible. That evening Dad found a survivor hiding among the black widow webs in a pile of locust posts.

Blood stained her rumpled feathers. Her neck had been wrung. She was still warm.

Dad brought her up to the house. Mama was never happier than when saving something’s life. It didn’t matter what the something was. If a heifer bumped her first calf on Christmas Eve and left it to freeze, the calf would wind up on a blanket by the wood stove in the kitchen, soaking up warmth and store milk until Dad had time to (tactfully) introduce it to the negligent cow. If a wild songbird crashed into the picture window and lay traumatized on the ground, Mama would gently pick it up, admire its bright black eyes, soft feathers, and feet so delicate, like her own hands. She would cradle it till it either flew away or died.

So this sole survivor among the wounded chickens was a challenge. First Mama got an eyedropper from the cupboard where she stashed her vitamins. She asked me to fetch a bottle of Green Chartreuse from the cellar. Green Chartreuse is an 17

herbal liqueur made by monks in a monastery in the French Alps, the secret formula of which is supposed to extend a man’s life by sixteen years. Mama never questioned the research methods by which this information was obtained.

It was French and it was Catholic, so what more need one ask? She drew a few drops of the fiery green liquid into the eyedropper and squeezed them into the hen’s slack mouth.

In the morning the hen was still alive, so Mama continued the Chartreuse regimen, several times a day. She also named the bird Constance. It was important when you wanted to heal something, that it have a name, as a kind of non-technical, maybe even shamanistic, recognition of its worth.

Constance grew stronger. We built a nest for her on the porch, for she could no longer be with the other hens — they would have pecked her to death. She was an odd looking hen, with a crook in her neck that placed her head out of line with her body. People would blink and I think I remember seeing one gentleman adjust his bifocals.

Every other day she laid an egg. What with the days getting shorter and the nights colder, this seemed an aberration of Natural Law, at least as far as Natural Law applied to chickens.

The other hens — the ones of our diminished flock who remained unscathed — all but stopped egg production as the temperature dropped.

Not Constance. She seemed okay with her solitary nest on the back porch. Of course the Green Chartreuse may have helped.

One morning shortly before sunup we heard a horrendous racket. The noise consisted of a variety of sounds long on decibels, short on musicality. It came from atop the fencepost nearest my parents’ bedroom window.

Constance was crowing.

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ALLISON MAIER

THE PUG HOUSE There were eight pugs in all, of various ages, colors and tragic backstories. Daisy was the only one acquired with any real intent. The rest had accumulated over several years of failed foster attempts and frantic phone calls from friends of friends. Josephine, Mops and Bug looked the most alike — a trio of fawn-colored fur and concerned expression.

Zooey never seemed fully aware of what was happening, an impression swayed by the fact that her tongue constantly poked out the side of her mouth. George needed several pills a day and was far too old to be amused by any of his housemates. Bette Davis was missing one of her eyes. Blossom was missing both. She would wander into corners, butting against walls before collapsing in defeat until I came to her rescue.

“Aren’t they just a hoot?” Anne said the day I came over to meet them. “Little clowns, all of them.”

As she showed me around the house, they followed en masse at our heels, jumping on the guest bed where I would be sleeping and then congregating around the refrigerator expectantly when Anne pointed out where she kept the string cheese.

“Just wrap George’s pills in a little piece of this and then give some to all the other dogs,” she said. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that they sometimes do their potty on the bathroom floor if I’m gone at work a long time. I trained them to go there instead of the living room. I’ll show you where I keep the cleaning supplies.”

“Okay,” I said.

That’s all I ever said when I was offered pet-sitting jobs from co-workers and their acquaintances, glimpsing the idiosyncrasies of their lives and their animals. I agreed to an 19

elaborate nighttime routine involving multiple treats and relaxing music for two golden retrievers, to go hiking with a basset hound, to feed worms to a robin recovering from a broken wing. I walked dogs for as long as they wanted to walk — hours sometimes. We would watch the sun go down and wander through the dark with no destination. I received anywhere from $5 to $25 a day. I had nothing better to do. * One side of Anne’s house was really just glass — a row of giant windows looking out at a cluster of pine trees and, in the distance, the dirt road leading back into town. Whenever a car would drive by, at least one of the pugs would bark, setting off the others. Blossom would howl from whichever dog bed or nest of blankets she’d found to curl up in as the others ran to the window. It became my alarm clock — the constant pug cacophony that commenced each day when the surrounding mountain dwellers started driving into work.

I would take the dogs outside and watch them waddle around the underbrush, keeping Blossom in a safe patch of ground. I would fill their personalized bowls with food. I would distribute cheese. They would stare up at me all at once sometimes — eight little wrinkled faces and 13 eyes.

“Just make sure they’re not alone too much,” Anne had said before leaving for a law conference on the East Coast.

“That’s really all they need. Pugs were bred to be around humans. It’s written in their DNA.” * I had expected things to look up once the winter passed.

The days had been so dark; I had never adapted to the weeks long stretches of sub-zero temperatures. But, of course, the 20

job was the same — the fluorescent lights and pots of cheap coffee and superficial conversation to distract from the fact that it was hard, stressful work and everyone was tired and underpaid. The two friends I had made since moving to Montana started dating each other, occasionally still meeting me for a drink once a week before blissfully drifting out of my life. I got cable TV. It’s nearly impossible not to question your life when you’re alone in the mountains. There’s something about the quality of silence there that can override even the sound of the snoring pugs in bed with you. It can send you looking for inspiration. It can also paralyze you.

I would lie awake for hours, feeling as though Anne’s guest room were drifting farther and farther away from any reality, wondering if I could stay in bed forever.

But somewhere in the darkness a car would turn onto the road below. The pugs would jump up from their sleep, barking so loudly it hurt my ears, running to the window and turning back at me with excitement in their big eyes. Telling me something was happening outside.

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NICHOLAS DARLINTON

THE TAXONOMY OF MARIA CORDERO-RODRIGUEZ I don’t want so many names. Maria Cordero-Rodriguez.

It’s like it’s too big for me. Like gargantuan. It doesn’t even fit on the little lines on my class assignments.

Name _________________

Sorry, Miss. My big booty name won’t fit on your silly little line. And my handwriting is perfect, so no, you and I won’t be compromising.

It’s like on the first day when the teacher says part of my name and there’s that pause where she’s thinking like Do I say the “Rodriguez” or just the “Cordero”? But I mean, we shouldn’t get all upset with her. It’s Miss’s first day of school, she don’t know nothing.

My name would be great if I was the Pope. It would totally make sense: Pope John Paul II, Pope Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Pope Maria Cordero-Rodriguez of White Pine Mobile Home Park. But that’s a great joke, right? Break it down. I mean, lady Pope. American Pope. Plus I’ve been to third base. But at least my name would fit in if I was Pope.

Maria is a bad name to have on the bus. There’s four of us on Bus 68. I remember when I first got on the bus, I didn’t talk to no one. Then I heard my name and I thought someone knew me, which was like Ya, I’m here. What? But then they weren’t talking to me. They were talking to some other Maria.

It was totally new to me. Some other girl with my name, and her friends called her that and her mother called her that and her tia maybe called her that when she opened the door and brought over tortas. But I still was happy to have other Maria’s on the bus back then. I wasn’t alone. I was so dumb when I was young.

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I’m the second oldest Maria. We aren’t all the same though. Maria Gonzalez is nice, but not like she’s picking to be. She’s just nice by nature. She gives out gum. She doesn’t take your seat or talk to your ex-boyfriend. She’s just like listening to music and saying hello. She’s kinda boring.

Maria Mota is a total bitchface. One year less than me.

She’s always turned on her bus seat, toying with her hair and saying stupid shit. Blah blah my eyebrows look good today, blah blah seen him at the party. I stay away from her.

Most girls do, not the boys though. They’re like stupid little puppydogs with wagging tails. These boys are cute but need trained.

The youngest Maria is four years younger than me, which doesn’t make sense because she is the most like me. She’s just like Hey, what’s up? and then she listens to you. And it’s not like the other 7th graders that are all yappy yap yap. She’s cool.

And we both get good grades and such, I mean like she’ll have a boyfriend, but she still is herself. I mean it’s not like she stops being a friend to her friends. She’s cool.

So when someone yells Maria on the bus, we all turn.

These faces, chubby and thin, plain and all painted up, bitchface and not, and all these faces mean Maria, and it’s a really dumb system. Like who invented this? All these Marias on one bus. I mean in 5th grade Miss B. got super loud after some geek cried and she raised her hands and told us all that we were so special and so unique, which was weird because usually Miss B. wasn’t an idiot. But I got all those Marias and I got all these siblings, so it can’t be that true. Don’t always listen to your teachers because they’re wrong at least like 20% of the time.

And it’s a super obvious thing to say, but my bus takes 23

me home and that is like this whole other thing. There I am the only Maria, and we are all Cordero-Rodriquez’s. And so what’s that supposed to mean?

I put my bag by the door and yell out to my ma. It smells like laundry and pan, and I’m really hungry. So I go into the kitchen and my mom is all slumped on the kitchen table with her hands palm down. I was thinking she had been crying, but when she raised her head, I was like Damn. because she had her crazy eyes on and her hair was all wild lady. I was scared.

Then she pulled up her hands and there was this purple condom wrapper under her hand. My first thought was like: Gross, ma. That’s where we eat. She looked me right in the eye and said, “Don’t you lie to me.”

“Wait, you think that’s mine? No, ma. I don’t even. It must be Anthony’s or something. Like. No, ma.”

She stands up all slow and scary. She points to the pile of clean clothes and says, “Don’t you lie to me.”

And I was like okay okay ma. That was a really stupid idea, because then I have to explain that I’m not using condoms, I’m just had one in my pocket because my friends are weird.

The truth is so stupid. Claire just put it in my math notebook, so when I opened it 7th period on Monday, I like died of embarrassment and then put it in my pocket immediately and forgot about it.

Then my ma is close enough to hit me, which is likely.

She says, “Tell me the truth. You being a little slut?” Then she rattles on about throwing me out and how ungrateful I am. And that makes me different kinds of angry, because she should know the truth. She should just know it, without asking. I have been dating Fernando for three years and we like have our limits and she knows that. And also she’s such a damn hypocrite. She had a one-year-old boy by the time she was my age, and now she’s all pointing fingers at me in the kitchen.

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Sometimes when her sister and her get drinking, my mom tells the story of Alex, this handsome player and how they used to pass notes when they were little and then they laugh about this secret joke that my ma and tia have. I know it involves the state fair, beer, and the lake and my grandpa never finding out. The night also ended up involving my older brother, Anthony. So, I’m thinking Screw this, ma.

I look her deep in the eyes, because I’m probably only going to say this once. “I’m not a little high school slut. I’m not like you.” And then I run. Like boom out the front door.

I started walking to Fernando’s, but as I am thinking about it, I decide not to. I am not that kind of girl either. I don’t need Fernando to hold me on his parents’ ugly couch and tell me it will be okay. I got this. So I walk to the other side of White Pine and climb up the tree that is perfect for climbing to perch on the wall. From there I can see a bare field and this pretty busy street. Not like pretty and busy, like you know kinda busy street. So I sit and watch the cars go by. But mostly I think.

I’m not much of a Maria. I’m not much of a CorderoRodriguez. I’m a different kind of beast. I am not going to work at some stupid job for some pudgy white dude. I’m not going to spend my 18th birthday taking care of some baby alone. I’m not going to need a beer after work. I’m just going to grow up and be my own thing.

25

CATHERINE KYLE

CANYON SAILORS Two enormous wasps are making love in midair. Their ardor is ferocious. The bodies clang like two ships’ anchors, solid and violent and shaking. They fling themselves together as if they are trying to destroy each other, as if they are trying to rip out each other’s hearts. But they are not. They are fucking, aggressively, writhing in midair and bobbing all over like two chaotic corks.

Celia watches them and quickens her pace. She takes care to step wide of the passionate scene, dreading collision with the frenetic, humming mass. She walks swiftly by, but she cannot take her eyes away from the struggling, finger-thick bodies. She stares over her shoulder. Something about the way they move, their total commitment to the task at hand — their oblivious perfection transfixes her. They are, somehow, in their fierce gyrations, startlingly whole and complete.

She remembers the time she got on the boat. It was white, with dark green trim and very neat sets of stairs. The impressive bow had sliced through the water like a resilient axe, peeling off trails of foam that slid down either side of the stoically dominant V. It was night, and Celia had stared over the railing at the glistening city in the distance. She had not taken notice of the buildings’ silhouettes so much as their candy-drop lights, all sparkling yellow and fuchsia. The wind had blown strongly that night, scattering her hair across her face like a thousand plumes of grass. She was filled with hope and endless exhaustion. She was sailing to meet a man.

He was there right on time, his black two-door car thrumming patiently at the curb. She had stepped off the boat, shining in a floral dress she’d worn at his request.

Ducking nimbly into the passenger’s seat, she had smoothed her skirt and smiled frailly, hoping she’d looked graceful as 26

his hand clutched the gear stick and the car began to move.

The two had limped through conversation until at last, he plucked her martini from her slack fingers and approached her lips with his mouth. She had surrendered then, shutting her eyes and trying not to think of the things they would not say tomorrow, the sparse words and cropped chuckles that would fill in the canyon of silence and shame. She did not think of the stifled words as he removed the shining, floral dress. She did not think of the showers they would take, one first and then the other, as he traced her clavicle with the pad of his thumb, almost reverently, as if he cared. She did not think of the ride back to the terminal, the way the door would slam and the way she would not wave, as their bellies brushed and his hand gripped the headboard. Their eyes were faithfully shut as they moved. She knew the rules. They did not peek. They did not brush hands on the way back to the dock.

She did peek, though, just once. Only for a moment. She opened her eyes and watched his face as their bodies slowly collided. She wanted to see the way he wore concentration, the way urgency and gentleness knotted in his brow. She looked, for just a moment, on the forbidden thing, his face.

To her surprise, in that moment, the forbidden thing looked back. The instant their eyes met, they shut again, rapidly.

There had been no obligatory cooing after that, and Celia noted that when he curled into sleep with his back to her as usual, several inches of sheet stretched coolly between them.

As he showered in the morning, Celia had pulled back on her floral dress. It did not shine now, in the cold streaks of daylight. She would have worn his T-shirt, but it would have been too intimate. She understood. Rules were rules. She 27

pictured the inches of sheet.

She had paced around the kitchen, tugging a piece of her hair, listening to the echo of water striking tile. Her mind buzzed. She could not explain what she wanted to do.

Somehow, she wanted to bridge the gap, to pave over the canyon of silence. She wanted to fill it with rocks; she wanted to fill it with water and swim straight across it. Solitude, she thought. She was so tired of solitude. She paced around the kitchen and tugged her piece of hair. She fingered the cabinets, pulled open the refrigerator door. She was looking for something — something that would fill in the canyon. The cabinets were bare, the shelves of a bachelor who traveled for work. In the refrigerator she found ketchup, half a stick of butter, and a small carton of eggs. Not knowing what else to do, Celia picked up the eggs.

There had been that moment when their eyes had met.

She could not ignore it. The mutual transgression of it. They had agreed not to look. So what did it mean that they had?

Celia weighed the carton of eggs in her hand. So many promises broken with that look. So many ways to cook an egg.

Scrambled. She would scramble them. Nothing more. No overbearing gesture. There would be no serenade or butter drizzled over pancakes. No roses in a vase or a complicated omelet. Just eggs, scrambled, with a small side of ketchup. An olive branch, perhaps. A stone in the canyon. She admired the shell of the egg in her hand. * From where he had stood in the doorway, dripping and wearing a towel around his waist, he could not have seen what lay at the bottom of the bowl over which Celia peered intently with a conquered kind of anguish. He had approached her calmly, leaning on the counter behind her.

28

“What’re you up to?” he asked. He tussled his hair. He was only mildly annoyed.

“Oh,” she said with a shrug. “I was going to make you eggs. But, look.” She had handed him the bowl, passing it behind her so she would not meet his eyes. He looked inside.

Laying at the bottom were two solid, congealed egg yolks, their whites caked around them in mounds of pale frost. They looked sickly, more like dead birds than ruined eggs.

“They’re frozen,” she said. “They’re unusable.” She fingered the handle of a frying pan that she had set out on the stove.

He hesitated, staring into the bowl, contemplating the mess in the bottom. No one had ever tried to make him breakfast before.

“I had the fridge turned up too high,” he explained, slowly. He had looked up at her, but her face had been turned away. He licked his lips, glanced back at the mess, and continued.

“It’s just as well. They’re probably really old.” He laughed.

Curtly, a hollow sound. “I didn’t even know I had eggs.” He looked up at her again, desperately, dimples poised to charm, but her face was still turned away.

“Really, Celia. It’s just as well. It’s really just as well.”

He had set down the bowl of frozen eggs and returned the frying pan to its hook on the wall. He scratched the back of his neck and sighed.

“Look, don’t worry about it, huh? Go ahead and shower.

Let’s get you back to the boat.”

She watches the wasps making love in midair, resenting their ease and temerity. They grapple and tumble with hideous strength, cutting jagged silhouettes across the amber sky. When their limbs untangle, it is with such abruptness that Celia draws a sharp breath. The disparate bodies unhinge and depart, bumping heads once more as they set off down the 29

paths of their respective destinations. They fly away so easily, she thinks. Bridging gaps with the weight of their bodies and seas with the breadth of their wings. But they are canyon sailors. They can do as they please.

She looks out at the water and the city in the distance. And I? I am here at the station, waiting for a ferry and another chance at eggs.

30

JAN SCHLICHT

RAHU I learned about animals from my Cambodian grandmother. We sat in the dry season in the shade of the bamboo stilt house by the river. She cut up mangoes and papayas for me, and taught me which animals to like and which ones to be afraid of. The aromas of cardamom and lemongrass mingled with her stories about the animal world around us. In my child’s mind, there was no distinction between the real and the fantastic and my grandmother’s stories were populated with creatures of both kinds. She wanted me to know about the crocodiles that lurked in the river where we went to catch the fish to go with our sticky rice.

She kept her dog near her to chase away the tigers and other animals that might harm us during the night. On the rail of the porch, there was a carved seven-headed Naga, the snake spirit who provided rain. She taught me that we needed to have respect at all times for the power of the Naga. Without his power to bring rain, there would be no rice crop. We touched the head of the Naga each time we passed to secure his blessing.

I was never sure, but I thought that the spirits of the ancestors occupied the same shadowy space as some of the other animals my grandmother talked about. As with the Naga, I knew it was important to pay respect to the ancestors, in order that they might keep all manner of chaos away from our lives. Near the front of the house, Grandmother kept her Spirit House, and every evening just before dusk she set out incense there, and rice and water to feed the spirits of her ancestors so that their ghosts would come and guard the house while we were sleeping, protecting us from evil demons who dwelt all around.

When the stars came out, Grandmother told me that 31

each one was a soul who had died and was awaiting a new birth.

On full moon nights, we would look up at the moon before we went inside, so that we could see the rabbit that lives there. She told me how the rabbit got to be up in the moon. There was an old man begging for food long ago, and a monkey, an otter and a rabbit saw him with his begging bowl.

The monkey quickly ran to get some fruit from the trees, and the otter scurried to the river to catch a fine fish for the old man. The rabbit, though, had nothing he could bring except for grass, which was of no use, so he threw himself into the fire so that the old man would have meat. Before the rabbit could be burnt, the beggar revealed himself to be a holy man, and because of the rabbit’s sacrifice, he sent him to live on the moon, where his likeness could be seen and honored by everyone on earth.

The most fearsome demon, though, was Rahu. By trickery, he stole Amrita, the elixir of immortality, from the gods so that he could live forever. The sun and the moon caught him in the act, though, and warned the god Vishnu.

Vishnu lived on Mount Meru, which was the center of the earth, and around which the sun and moon revolved. When he heard about Rahu’s trickery, he sliced off Rahu’s head before the elixir got past his throat. Rahu was enraged at this, and to this day he chases the sun and the moon around the sky and sometimes swallows them, but since he has no throat, the sun and moon eventually fall out. Sometimes when she told that story, I thought I could feel the hot breath of Rahu nearby, and I moved closer to grandmother so that I could feel safe. And on the days when the sun or moon became eclipsed, we all waited, breath held, to be sure that they would again fall out of Rahu’s throat.

As I grew older and went to the school in the village, I learned that there really wasn’t a demon named Rahu that ate 32

the sun and moon, but that those celestial bodies disappeared because of the particular alignment of the earth, the moon, and the sun. I went home, excited to tell my grandmother what I had learned. I got out an orange and a mango, and lit a candle, and moved the fruits and the flame to show her what really happens to the sun and moon during an eclipse.

Grandmother shook her head. No, she said, that is not possible, and she went back to peeling mangos.

I went away from home when I got older, to study at university. I became a teacher myself, and taught children the ways of the heavens, and the science of the stars.

Last year when I went to visit my family, my grandmother was very ill, and I could see she was near the end of her life.

I sat by her bed and told her the stories about the rabbit in the moon, and, yes, the story about Rahu the demon. She died that same night and we hung out the white crocodile flag to signify her passing. I sat out under the bamboo awning after her death. I passed my hand over the Naga on the porch rail, and I listened to the magic of the sounds in the forest.

I marveled at the progression of stars across the night sky. I know how the celestial bodies travel and how far Betelgeuse is from the earth. I know, and have taught my students, how weather patterns create rain. That night, though, I was aware of how much I really don’t know. I thought I felt, in the way that you feel the lightest mist of rain on your skin, my grandmother’s presence with me. I gathered some rice and fish from the cooking pots, and placed it carefully in the Spirit House. I lit incense, too, because I knew the smell would help guide Grandmother’s spirit to this place, so that she could protect us from the Darkness that surrounds us.

33

CAROL MacGREGOR

COW ELK Every evening she emerged from timber to drink in the Big Wood River, Slowly at first, looking around, then lowering her great head to water, Still, statuesque, but skittish.

At first I stayed covered behind the porch pillar to watch her.

Then I stood silently to the side. She saw me but came anyway.

Several days later she revealed her calf, shy, dark with spots.

In a couple of weeks the calf was losing spots. I stood still in the gloaming, Beside the house. She knew I was there, and she tolerated it.

I was immovable outside, however elated and excited, revering each moment.

In the eternity of moments without noise at eventide, I knew this was what mattered: trust, quiet, natural life.

The season of newness, the sense of renewal: her calf, my life.

34

CLAIRE FENTON

INTRUDER A hundred and sixty miles separated us, it had all happened so quickly. I was lying in bed with Angelica sleeping soundly beside me reconstructing in my mind the events of the past couple of days. It had seemed such a trivial thing, but the oncologist demanded he check into the hospital immediately. Although the internist in our small community had assigned my husband’s case to an oncologist at the Mountain States Tumor Institute clinic of St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center he was still in the diagnostic stage and had had no occasion to visit him yet. Initial scans, blood samples and lymph biopsies had been performed locally and sent to the various laboratories for analysis. My annoyance grew as I considered how I had responded to the doctor’s orders.

Unquestioning, we had acquiesced to his bidding.

Mike had been at the house working on a project when we received our orders. Mike was one of my husband’s clients.

He worked odd jobs and exchanged his unskilled labor for my husband’s counseling services. It was mildly unsettling to me that he always found reason to be close by. Since news of my husband’s illness he would call often to see how he was doing.

He would stop at the house unannounced and being homeless at the time, he slept in his car, which he had even taken to parking each night in a lay by on the main canyon road, less than a mile from our home. When working on a project in our home, he would hang out for as long as he could, only reluctantly leaving when it became painfully obvious he was intruding on our family privacy. He made me uncomfortable, I almost felt as though he was stalking us. Now, he was by my husband’s side in Boise, while I was miles away, at home alone with our baby. I should be grateful he offered to drive my husband to the hospital. I am grateful; it was thoughtful 35

and generous of him. Why then did I feel unease at his benevolence?

I stared out of the open window, marveling at the beauty of the night sky as these thoughts tumbled through my mind.

I felt like a deserter. I should be the one to be at my husband’s side, not Mike. But there was Angelica to consider. Should I have packed up, torn her from the comfort and routines of home to spend endless hours in a hospital room, without knowing how many days he would be there or where we would stay? Mingled with my feelings of guilt, I now felt indignant.

The only possible purpose for my husband being in Boise was for the convenience of his doctor. We had sheepishly followed the doctor’s orders without requesting consideration for our family dynamics. I was determined to call him first thing in the morning to demand my husband be transferred back to our local hospital where he could be close to our baby and me. I tore my eyes away from the magnificent star strewn sky, turned my back to the window and rolled over toward the center of the bed, hugging my sleeping baby to my chest as I dozed off.

I was jarred awake by an unfamiliar sound. In the stillness and quiet of our sparsely populated canyon, only the blood curdling screeches of coyotes could be heard at night, and sometimes the occasional distant rumble of a car on the main canyon road. I heard it again. My heart quickened, and my body stiffened as I strained to identify the sound. It was footsteps. Tentative, stealthily searching for footing in the loose gravel and broken chunks of concrete that remained from construction, in the area that would become our kitchen patio. My mind raced. Did I lock the patio door when I came to bed? I was now rigid with fear. More steps, it sounded as though the person was right up against the kitchen patio door, which was directly beneath our bedroom. Could I hear him testing the door handle? The phone was on my husband’s side 36

of the bed. Breathing was an effort, my chest felt tight, my limbs awkward and heavy. As silently as I could, I rolled over Angelica and reached for the phone. Grasping the receiver I dialed 911 and then wriggled under the bed covers to muffle the sound of my voice. The emergency operator picked up my call. “I think I have an intruder, and I’m all alone in the house with a six-month-old baby” I breathed into the phone in a strained whisper. I could hear the operator dispatch the call then she calmly guided me through a series of questions.

We lived ten minutes from town. Maybe the police could make it in eight, perhaps even five in the dead of night without hindrance of traffic. It seemed like forever as I mechanically answered the questions put to me while at the same time straining to hear for any sounds downstairs.

At last the cars pulled up. “You can go down and unlock the front door now,” she said, “the police are there.” I hung up the phone and crept down the stairs fearful the intruder might now be inside. Three policemen quickly entered the house; one escorted me back up to the bedroom to make sure the baby was safe and to stay with me while the other two conducted a thorough search. Other policemen outside explored the perimeter of the house with the beams of their flashlights dancing and bobbing through the sage as they scoured the brush for signs of life. Their search turned up nothing. With the ground around the back of the house still strewn with construction rubble it was impossible to detect footprints. The lead policeman tried to reassure me as they packed up to leave, “As we drove up tonight a large buck with a full rack took off from near the house and sprinted toward the hillside. That’s the only explanation we can suggest for the sounds you heard ma’am.” I thanked him, and feeling only marginally assured I spent the rest of the night in a state of acute agitation.

I was feeling slightly nervous about arriving home to an 37

empty house at dusk after the previous night’s disturbance.

I felt quite sure the policeman had contrived the buck in an attempt to ease my fear. Having spent the day wrapping up studio business, I felt exhausted and distraught at the news that my husband would not be released until further tests had been completed. As I drove up our driveway I stared in awe as a large buck with a huge rack stood at the back patio door, stock still, eyes locked on my approach. I gradually slowed the car to a stop and stared back at him. He was magnificent. I marveled at his huge powerful frame and massive rack clearly visible in the fading light. We studied each other for several minutes. It seems silly to say, but I felt we made a connection.

This impressive creature who had been the cause of my fear the night before seemed to have come back to reassure me. To let me know there was nothing to be fearful of. Then with no apparent cause, he turned away from me and leisurely loped off through the sagebrush, to the protective cover of the trees in the gully beyond.

38

MAGGIE KOGER

HOW SWEET THE SPARROW’S SONG So little cause for caroling of such ecstatic sound Thomas Hardy A girl who holds the calls of birds so dear sits waiting for the Sunday rhymes to clear.

She feels no joy in clunky anthem beats, no organ thrum or choir synchronizing can match a yellow warbler’s zuzzy buzzing.

A meadowlark’s stout yellow open throat will spell an honest timbre to each note.

She longs to hear a Vireo’s cheerio chireep.

And so it is that nests and feathers sire the harmonies of soul she so desires.

So when the pushy hymns are finally done she’ll smile and bow her head and quickly run to rest beneath her friends of ash and alder to hear a sparrow’s cheep, cheep, T-reeeer!

39

STEVE LIEBENTHAL

THE CHURCH AT THE RIVER “I’m going to church,” said Grandma, as she hustled toward the door wearing one of three floral dresses she saved especially for Sunday. “Why don’t you come with me Zach?

You might learn something!”

Zach shot a look at Grandpa, who supplied no escape; only an understanding grin and a compassionate wink.

Zach would rather do anything than spend hours sitting on a hard wooden bench, as a preacher read from a book that sometimes sounded like English, but that Zach simply did not understand.

As Grandma scurried past Zach, the familiar smell of perfume followed her; lingered, then slowly dissipated. As the shiny silver Buick cruised out of sight, the engine’s moan faded into the silence that Zach had heard in this house for two months. At the window Grandpa watched the dust from the Buick’s tires fall back to the ground. Millions of tiny particles made a natural blanket that gracefully fell onto the old dirt road.

“I’m goin’ ta church too,” said Grandpa “Ya might like it if ya went with me!”

“Why do you wait until Grandma is gone before you leave for church?” Zach asked. “And why don’t you dress up like Grandma?”

“Yer Grandma and me go to differnt churches,” Grandpa answered.

“Where is your church?” Zach asked.

“My church is at the river,” replied this man whose hands were as brown as the old Ford pickup he drove, and whose wrinkled face belied an energy most men his age no longer displayed.

“The river?” Zach asked. “I’ve never seen a church at the 40

river.”

“C’mon,” said Grandpa. “I’ll show ya.”

The idea of going to any church made Zach uneasy. He had been to church a few times with his mother, on Easter Sundays. He felt confused each time, watching parishioners respond to the man who read from the big black book. It made him uncomfortable. Dad had taught him that God was a peaceful being who loved all men. Why then, did the Easter preacher get angry as he spoke of the religions of others? Why did he seem to hate Mormons, Catholics and Jews? Why did he say Islam was a crutch for people who were going to Hell?

“Trust me,” said Grandpa. “Yer gonna like my church! Now git yer shoes, and let’s git goin!”

By the time Zach tied his shoes Grandpa was already out the door. Zach grabbed his jacket from the coat tree and skipped down the steps. The sweet smell of honeysuckle growing around the door frame was quickly polluted by the aroma of poorly burned exhaust. As his feet hit the long green grass Zach heard a noise in the barn. He went to investigate, and found Grandpa sitting on an old cooler, putting on rubber boots.

“These’re my Sundee shoes,” said Grandpa, with a twinkle in his eye. “We better hurry, it’s pert ‘near nine, and church ain’t much good after it gets too hot. Let’s git goin’, or we’ll miss the sermon.”

As the old Ford sputtered past neighboring farms, Zach looked up at a crystal blue sky, and thought of his dad, flying in a jet fighter at an airshow three years earlier. He recalled the feeling of utter pride he had felt as spectators gasped at Dad’s aerial tricks.

When Grandpa hit the brakes, the high pitched screech brought Zach back to the present. Grandpa was pulling onto the pavement surrounding a brick building with a tall white point sticking on top. As Grandpa eased the pickup between 41

two minivans, Zach thought he had been tricked.

“I thought we were going to a church at the river!” he objected.

“We are,” replied Grandpa. “But first I wanna tell you ‘bout this church; the Mormon Church. People’ll spend mosta’ the day here. Makes ‘em feel like they belong. Let’s git out for a minute.”

Zach tumbled out of the old Ford onto the black pavement.

“Ya feel that?” Grandpa asked “What?” Zach asked.

“The pavement,” said Grandpa “Does it feel natural?”

“Not really,” Zach answered.

“Come on,” Grandpa said, walking.

Zach followed cautiously, as the old man walked toward the brick building and put his hand against the wall. “Feel this.”

Zach felt the cold hard bricks. Grandpa put a finger to his lips to say “be quiet” and motioned Zach to follow him with the other hand. Again, Zach became suspicious. Sensing the boy’s concern, Grandpa whispered “Don’t worry; we’re only goin’ in for a second.”

Inside, Zach could hear a man’s monotonous voice, and that unusual language. The boy understood some of the words, but in between were “thous” and “thees ”that made it all sound foreign.

“Hear them words?” Grandpa asked “Think about who’s sayin’ ‘em.”

At that moment, the preacher’s voice trailed off, and the tones of an awkwardly played organ filled the air.

“Ya hear that?” Grandpa Asked.

“Yeah, it’s an organ,” Zach replied.

“Ya know who made that organ? Man made it. C’mon!”

Out they went, with Zach thinking about Grandpa’ words, 42

and Grandpa thinking about the next stop. It was a large building faced with granite. On top was a large dome from which an elaborately decorated cross shot up.

“Ain’t that a beautiful buildin’?” Grandpa asked.

“Yeah, I guess it’s kinda’ cool…”

“Guess who made it?”

“I think I get it Grandpa, it was man.”

“You catch on fast!” Grandpa said with a warm grin.

“That was a Catholic Church,” Grandpa said as he started driving again. “The people inside are eating bread baked in ovens and drinking wine that man has made from grapes.”

As they continued through the middle of the small Idaho town, Grandpa explained God and the Old Testament to the best of his limited understanding. He similarly explained the New Testament and how Christianity came about. As he was almost out of information to share, Grandpa’s eyes lit up at a familiar sign that read Lucky Dragon Palace. The old brown Ford crossed two lanes to pull into the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant that wouldn’t open for lunch for several hours.

“C’mon!” Grandpa said, bounding out of the truck.

“It’s closed!” Zach said, wondering if he would ever see the church at the river.

Grandpa looked Zach squarely in the eyes; not sternly, but with love.

“Trust me,” he said.

“Okaaaay...” said Zach.

Grandpa put his eyes to the glass door and cupped his hands around his temples.

“See that chubby fella there?” Grandpa asked.

“Yeah...”

“That’s Buddha.”

“Who is he?”

“Get in the truck, and I’ll explain on the way to church,”

43

Grandpa said while the wheels in his thoughtful head slowly spun. He wanted to carefully pass on some of the wisdom that had taken him so long to absorb.

Along the way Grandpa told Zach about as many religions as he could remember, and tried to explain the differences as well as he could. He also explained that there were probably many of which he wasn’t even aware.

“But they all seem to have one thing in common,” he said.

“They all preach hate. Some of the hate ain’t very strong, and some probably don’t realize when they say they’re the only true religion, they’re saying nobody else is good enough for God. At the edge of town, Grandpa turned onto a familiar dirt road.

“Why are we going to Dad’s farm?” Zach asked. “There is no church here…”

“Your Dad was killed by men who hated him because he didn’t believe in Allah.” Grandpa said softly as he made his way to the boat ramp Zach’s dad had finished building just two years earlier. A tear welled up in his eye, but his smile remained stalwart and strong.

“Your Dad understood nature better than anyone I ever knew,” Grandpa said, as he climbed out of the pickup and started walking slowly across the long sun bleached grass that grew under the cottonwood trees. Suddenly, he dove for the ground and cupped his hands over a bare patch of dirt.

He quickly brought them together, forming a cocoon, from which he slowly released a small tan grasshopper. Pinching the insect’s wings between his fingers, he put it directly in front of Zach’s eyes.

“You know who made this?” he asked.

“I know the answer isn’t ‘man’ this time.” Zach said moving his eyes from the bug and straight to the blue grey windows to Grandpa’s soul.

44

“Do you think it was Allah? Could it be Buddha? Was it God, or maybe Jesus?”

Zach was confused, not knowing the right answer but trying to find the one that would please this virtual stranger whom he instinctively loved.

“It’s okay,” Grandpa said, throwing the injured insect into the river. A trout immediately shot to the surface. There was a violent splash, and the grasshopper was gone.

“The answer is none of them, and all of them,” he said.

“It just depends on who you are. Now let’s go fishin’!”

45

BEAST One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain‌is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured. — ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

M R SMITH

TEETH On my drive to work I saw a woman in a hoodie at a bus stop confronting her device, arched thumbs like cobras striking wildly at the screen, while a boy, her son perhaps, circled in constant motion, babbling words I could not hear.

Like a slow motion nature video with the sound turned down I watched this tableau in passing, this cub tormenting this dark sow, waiting for her teeth to show.

49

GREG HEINZMAN

MY HAIR IS A SNAKE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD It is dead and wild. And that is the strangeness of it. If you have enough of it, people treat it like it’s alive. As if cutting it off is like chopping a finger.

Oh, you really shouldn’t have cut it, they say. You looked so native.

I thought it was my thousands of murdered ancestors that made me that.

The day I cut it, my girlfriend dumps me. You’re just not edgy anymore, she says. You look weak.

You look white.

The shiny black foot and half, tightly braided, feels like a copperhead. I rest it in a gift box coffin for an anonymous little girl undergoing chemo. A little girl I’ll probably never meet.

And what would I say? Hey, my hair looks good on you? It took me six years to grow that?

Most of me hopes she’s Indian, so my hair finds a head as old as the world. All of me hopes I see my hair someday, out in the sun, flashing black and radiant above a determined brow.

50

MARGUERITE LAWRENCE

JERSEY

On the day of the accident, me and Anton were standing on the curb smoking a Marlboro I lifted from the breast pocket of my mom’s new man that morning. He was passed out face up on the couch, an empty bottle of Jim Beam perched between his legs.

Just watching the street through the November drizzle, passing the cigarette back and forth, Anton was itchy. He had to be doing something all the time.

The drivers would look straight ahead, accelerate through greens and even faster through yellows. When the light was red they’d stop, and if they glanced our way, Anton would give them his gourd of jagged brown teeth smile. Not a smile you want to see on a 15-year-old, but a scar from a childhood shaped by his meth-addict mother and fist-friendly father.

Anton embraced his stained broken teeth, thought they gave him street cred. I admired him, kind of.

I was new to Jersey, just off the turnpikes and bridges, from Idaho. Mom met her man at the truck stop last spring where she worked as a waitress. He was passing through but not in a hurry. According to her, their eyes met and she just knew he was the one. Her man spent a month with us before he headed back to Jersey in his Buick, hoping to hit all the Indian Nation casinos along the way. Mom said he’d made a killing in the northern Idaho casinos, so he was loaded. A month after he left, he sent her some cash, enough for her to quit the truck stop and load us up in the old Dodge Caravan.

So anyway, I was new to Jersey and this Italian neighborhood. My red hair stuck out like a blaze, and Anton was the only person at school who showed me any interest. I think he just wanted to be seen with a misfit from somewhere else. I 51

don’t know if he even knew my real name. We didn’t have any classes together so he probably never heard Michael O’Brien.

He called me Flare.

Whatever the case, he hung around out in front of school by a big oak tree waiting for me pretty much every day. Anton always had old peaches or tomatoes or eggs in his backpack, probably lifted from Renaldo’s Grocery. We’d meet up and come to this corner.

Most days he liked to throw mushy or breakable shit at moving cars, watch them splat on the windows and hoods, and laugh at the drivers’ stunned expressions. If the cars were stopped he didn’t toss anything. He’d just yell at the drivers, hey fuckhead, hey fuckwad. He’d flash that saw-toothed smile and the drivers most times jerked their heads back to the road and would speed through the intersection as soon as the light changed. Anton would laugh and slap me on the back. I’d laugh too, sort of; we didn’t do stuff like this in Idaho.

Once he yelled at a cop driving past us, hey dickless dick.

When the cop slammed on his brakes and looked over at us, Anton took off, but I froze. The cop gave me the finger before he gunned the patrol car away.

The day the crash happened we were leaning on a lamppost. Anton had some soggy plums he was looking to launch, and I was daydreaming about a backpack trip I took last summer in the Bitterroots.

But then, my reverie was blasted by a shot of exhaust to the face. Anton yelled, holy shit, and we jumped back just in time to avoid a big old ship of a Chrysler as it side-swiped the lamppost, corrected its path, and blew past us through a red light. The Chrysler t-boned a Chevy Nova in the intersection and plowed it halfway into the next block. The Nova pinballed off two other cars along its path and slammed into some garbage bins in front of Fredo’s Pizzeria.

Me and Anton bolted to the crash. There was a mo52

ment of silence in the street, and then as if a movie director yelled action, the raucous situation in front of us came alive.

Shattered glass followed by screaming. Smells of rubber and brakes mixed with pizza and spaghetti. We got to the Nova and looked inside. A lady, her face smashed and cut was behind the wheel, most the windshield and driver side window was all over her head and shoulders. She was trying to move, but her arms weren’t working and she couldn’t get her head to stay up.

It kept flopping into the blown air bag.

Anton said what a fucking shit show and smiled large.

This pissed me off and I told him to shut up. Other people were starting to gather and a waiter I recognized from the pizzeria ran out and together he and I tried to open her door. It was rammed too far in though. In fact, it was shoved into the lady like a fist and she was leaching blood through her clothes from where her ribcage used to be.

The lady sat moaning, blood mixed with saliva gurgling from her nose and mouth. I heard someone behind us yell that he called 911 so we stood there, the waiter and me, shuffling our feet in the glass shards. I stared at the lady and kept saying things like ma’am you’ll be okay. Just think of something nice, a beautiful view, maybe a river or some mountains, a sunset.

There was a lot of commotion on the street. The Chrysler, smoking from the hood, suddenly roared backwards to the intersection, sending people leaping to the sidewalks or on top of parked cars. The driver skidded around the corner and like a gunshot was gone.

The two other wrecked cars’ drivers were running around screaming and blaming the god damn guinea in the Chrysler.

The waiter darted across the street to help one of them with his arm. It was twisted like someone had put it in the shoulder socket backwards.

Then Anton was yanking open the Nova’s passenger side 53

door. I didn’t know what he was doing because there was no way to pull the lady out from that door either. She was stuck like a deadbolt. Anton acted all nice and helpful like. Poor lady, he said, the ambulance is coming. The lady’s eyes were rolling back in her head and a smell part animal, part gas was rising from the car’s front seat. You’ll be fine, Anton said.

His voice smooth and sweet. But he wasn’t really being sweet because he leaned over the seat, patted her bloody shoulder with one hand, made sure no one but me was watching, and with the other hand, grabbed her purse. He tucked it under his jacket, straightened up and banged the car door shut. It rattled and shuttered and the rest of the glass in the windshield and driver side window fell on the lady and on the street.

Anton said loud enough so anyone could hear, I’ll see if I can find a broom. He ran down the street and vanished around the corner.

The cops came; the paramedics and fire department had to extricate the lady from the car. By the time they got her out she was done moaning, moving or anything. I’m pretty sure she was dead.

The next day at school, head down, clenched fists in jeans pockets, I felt gutted. And after school, there was Anton leaning on the tree waiting for me. He was wearing new Ray Bans and a Yankees cap. He showed me the contents of his backpack: a carton of Marlboros, a dozen eggs, a 32-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, and a lady’s compact.

He raised his eyebrows and smiled that grimy smirk.

Fuckin’ a, Flare, he said, let’s go.

It was the compact that made me taste vomit. I swallowed, took the first good long look up and down him, at his grungy pants and t shirt, the jacket with dried blood on a sleeve, his oily hair and face, and stopped at his grin, that mouthful of fangs. I grabbed the compact from his pack, jerked it open 54

and thrust the mirror at his teeth.

See these, Anton, I yelled. See your teeth? This is what you should have spent that lady’s money on. He tried to push the compact away but I dodged him and shoved the mirror even closer. You should have bought a fucking toothbrush, you low life pussy. I threw the compact at him, turned away and took off toward the city bus line.

I got off the bus in front of Mom’s new man’s apartment building, took in the drab sky, gray pavement and slumping storefronts. I stepped into the musty foyer. Garlic and rosemary, crying babies. I grabbed the handrail and started up the four flights. Maybe when Mom gets tired of him we’ll go home.

55

T O DAVIS

BARREN He had left Base Camp Delta a few weeks ago. Everything was and wasn’t there: Mary, the potable water, iodine tablets, a compass, flares, MREs, medicine, seeds of various extinct plants, the radio that had gone silent, rope, shelter, a life he couldn’t keep living. He had brought the important things; the things he, James, “The Beast,” Sanders, thought were important. He had a parka, gloves, balaclava, snow goggles, canteen with water filter, ice axe, his pride, and the medical grade vodka. He felt up to the challenge, had “survived” with these few supplies, but, now, staring into the frozen sun, James wondered if his corpse would be enough of a message.

Would Mary love him more now? Luck favors the prepared, not the foolhardy, he thought, and continued his trek across the icecovered wasteland and deeper into Mary’s heart.

56

SHEILA D C ROBERTSON

WINTERKILL Lanterns in the cook tent cast a golden glow over the drifting snow and big wet flakes begin to fall. Horses blow and saddle leather squeaks as five hunters enter camp. They have hunted elk all week and shot two bulls today just before dusk.

“Davey, get over here and make yourself useful,” orders Davey’s stepfather, a short, barrel-chested man, named Sludder. He is huffing and straining to unsaddle his horse as Davey dismounts.

Sludder corners the boy as he drags their tack into the saddle tent. “I spent a fortune on this trip and you haven’t raised your rifle in five days. I shoulda brought one of my buddies. You damned well better stop wasting my money and shoot tomorrow.”

Davey tries not to make eye contact and gazes past to where their guide, Zeke, is showing the hunters how to finish dressing out the elk quarters. Everyone is admiring the racks. Blood stains the white snow. Davey’s eyes refuse to focus through the falling flakes and his head swims at the sight of the gore. Sludder follows his glazed stare and shoves him toward the men, “Now get over there and learn something.”

Davey would like to point out that Sludder’s so-called buddies won’t hunt with him anymore; and yes, he’s spending a shitload of his mom’s money on this hunt. That isn’t Davey’s fault. Even his mom doesn’t think Davey should hunt yet. She argued that 12 was too young, but Sludder bullied her, saying every boy needs to ‘hunt to be a real man’. “I hate him,” Davey mutters trudging toward the butchering. * 57

After dinner the hunters clear the table in the cook tent and settle into their Jim Beam, cigars and poker. Davey pulls the schoolwork he has to make up out of a bag and opens a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. He loves animal books.

“Good book,” Zeke comments. “You like it?”

Davey nods. “It’s great. My friends and I like it a lot.”

“Your teacher made a girly choice on that one,” says Sludder. Davey shrugs and looks at Zeke.

“Good work today,” says Zeke changing the subject.

“We’ve got three more tags to fill though.” Zeke winks at Davey. “Tomorrow, Davey will get his elk, now that he’s seen how it’s done.”

“Damn right,” says Sludder.

Zeke lays down a card. “Cook says he saw wolf tracks by the creek today, so keep an eye out.”

“A wolf! Wow! I’d sure like to see it.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to shoot the sucker,” says Sludder.

“I grazed one last year,” says one of the hunters.

“Was it an accident?” Davey asks.

Sludder sneers. “Wolf shots aren’t accidents. Wolves just slaughter livestock and take our elk. They’re nothin’ but savage killers that eat their own young. Hell, I’ve seen them tear the guts out of a deer while it was still running.”

“But I thought…”

“Well don’t.” Sludder turns to the hunter, “Too bad you didn’t kill the damned thing.”

“I don’t think wolves really eat…” Davey starts, but ends with a stifled yelp as Sludder kicks him hard under the table.

Sludder reaches for a bottle of Beam and pours three fingers in a tin cup. He pushes it towards Davey. “Keep your mouth busy with this.” Davey stares at the whiskey and nudges it aside.

“You lookin’ to knock him out?” asks Zeke. “That’s near third of the bottle. How about a Coke instead, Davey?”

58

“Pick it up,” says Sludder. The hunters feign arranging their cards.

“I said. Pick. It. Up.” All eyes are on Davey and his face goes red. Slowly, he raises the cup to his lips. Lightening fast, Sludder slaps the bottom of the cup shooting whiskey into his nose and mouth. Davey chokes and rocks backward off the bench.

Everyone stares. “Aw, come on. He needs to man up.”

Sludder catches the disgust on Zeke’s face. Zeke bends to help Davey and Sludder comes around the table. He slaps Davey on the back. “Drinking Beam with men…now that’s something to brag to your buddies about. That and the elk you’re gonna shoot tomorrow.” Sludder looks at the hunters.

They refuse to meet his eyes.

Davey runs outside and slips into the saddle tent. He still hears Sludder still dissing wolves. In the dark, Davey plugs his ears. Sludder always talks big; bosses everyone. Seeing a wolf would be awesome. His friends would think that was cool.

Davey imagines the wolf tearing Sludder’s tongue out. * Next morning at breakfast Zeke announces, “I checked shortwave weather and there’s another storm coming. We’ll likely need to wrap up this hunt today.”

“The hell you say,” complains Sludder. “That’s a day early.

We paid for a week and haven’t tagged our elk yet.”

Zeke, looks out at the lightly falling snow. “We got to pack out before this stuff gets deep.”

“Awe, hell. What’s a little snow?” All eyes are on Sludder.

Davey turns away, embarrassed.

“Maybe. But now that we have elk, it will be slower going. Tell you what. We’ll try to give you or Davey the first shot today.”

59

By late morning they spot a bull. “By god, look at that beam. A seven by seven for sure,” Sludder says. “That’s gonna look great in my den.”

“Let’s let Davey take the shot. You up for it, Davey?” asks Zeke. Davey’s stomach knots.

Sludder frowns in Davey’s direction. “Don’t mess up.

That’s a trophy.”

Everyone dismounts and starts climbing. The terrain is steep and while the bull is in a wind-scoured meadow, the hunters have to climb over fallen lodgepole and wade through snow. Sludder slows and leans against a tree, breathing hard.

Davey glances at him thinking, too much Beam and beer. Zeke and the hunters pull ahead and stop broadside the big bull to wait.

“Move it! For God’s sake they’re waiting on you.” Sludder pants.

Davey looks at him and shakes his head, no. “I don’t want to kill it. You shoot it.”

“Like hell.” Sludder jeers Davey on. “Move your ass. We’re gonna make a man out of you.” Humiliated, Davey pretends to be busy with his rifle as they catch up.

Zeke grabs Davey’s shoulder and guides him to a boulder.

“This is the biggest bull I’ve seen in a couple years. You’ll get him. Just kneel and use the boulder to steady your rifle.” Zeke presses Davey to his knees. “Now take your time.” Zeke turns to another hunter, “Give him a couple shots, but back him.”

Even though he’s still wheezing and unsteady from the climb, Sludder argues, “What the hell. That’s our elk. I’ll be the one to back him.”

Davey cringes. Sludder’s peevish voice rankles on, demanding the second shot. He’s such a bully, always bossing everyone. Davey jerks the trigger. Then again and again. Four times he fires to block out Sludder’s tormenting voice. The bull staggers and falls. Zeke cheers, “Nice shot!”

60

Davey sees it fall and can’t move. He watches the bull’s last struggles, as one by one the hunters clap his shoulder. He bows his head and convulses a sob. Zeke nods towards Sludder. “Maybe you two better wait here a bit.” Zeke sends the men for the bull and starts back for the horses.

But Sludder can’t stand being left out, can’t stand Davey’s tears. “Crap, don’t pansy-up on me now. That’s a trophy for god’s sake. Your buddies are gonna be nothin’ but jealous.”

“I don’t want it. My buddies aren’t like your buddies. They will hate me. They called me killer when you made me take hunter’s ed.”

“What a bunch of pansy-asses. Clean the snot off your face and get down there. Your bull…you help gut it out.”

Davey kneels shaking and hating Sludder. Sludder walks away from the boulder. Then glances up and whirls around.

“Son of a bitch. There’s a wolf!” He swings his .308 to his shoulder and turning, snags his foot. Crashing off balance, Sludder jams his rifle barrel into the snow and dirt to catch himself.

“Shoot that goddamn wolf,” Sludder screams. He lunges and slaps Davey’s .30-06 toward the wolf.

Davey freezes. Furious, Sludder grabs his rifle barrel. He means to take the shot himself, but the rifle is clenched in Davey’s rigid hands. Sludder yanks it. Davey hears a crack and is slammed backwards by recoil. He smells the tang of powder.

A red bloom flowers across Sludder’s chest and he slumps.

Davey is screaming. Sludder is bleeding out on the snow.

Zeke and the hunters are running. They work on Sludder for a long time then get him up onto one of the packhorses. Zeke holds Davey, guides him to his horse and helps him mount.

Wild grey storm clouds are piling in as they ride out. Davey’s eyes blur, but he sees the wolf. It trots high on the meadow where big soft flakes begin to cover the bull.

61

CHRIS DeVORE

BIRDBRAINS Red ordered chicken-fried steak & eggs, and coffee black, the usual. Duncan and Jeremy had the same, only Jeremy really wanted a latte and a couple of 500s. You could see the old Ford from the window with the shotguns up in the rack. Jordan was milling around in the cab, ready for when he could run wild in the cattails bordering the Snake River. He would pee three times before he could even think pheasant. If he saw a jackrabbit, it was over. They called him birdbrain.

“That pit bull from next door,” Duncan said, rearranging the sugars.

“What about Jordan?” asked Red. “He was asleep, inside, somethin’,” lofted Duncan.

“But you know it was the pit? You could hear it? The kids?”

Red watched the waitress in her tight jeans return to the counter and regurgitate their orders. He was disappointed she didn’t have some fancy diner jargon like kill three cows with a cluck, fried eggs all day, and drop the starch; three times leaded.

Still, her jeans sparkled.

“I don’t know…he’d been in the yard at least three times before.”

“Paw prints?”

“Yeah…Of course…I tracked them to the fence.”

“Blood?”

Duncan: “Blood and feathers and scrambled eggs.”

“So now what?” It came out more as a challenge than a question.

Duncan: “Bag my limit, that’s what. This time offense is the best defense.”

They’d been arguing about who could hit the softball the 62

farthest. The three of them in the two-car garage, around a keg of Coors; the wives, girlfriends, and kids inside playing Candyland and eating goose meatballs with wild rice. They were surrounded by a volume of antlers like stories stacked upon stories. Jeremy considered an argument he’d been having with his wife, then an old girlfriend, then the frequency of driving on the edge.

Their faces were red.

“You hear from Jackie ‘bout the meeting?” Red shouted over his shoulder from the keg, looking like he was voiding his bladder.

Duncan: “We still need a shortstop?”

“Pigpen has some young buck.”

“Can he hit?”

“With the three amigos at the middle of the lineup,” said Red, “we should be nasty.”

Outside it was raining and snowing. They were in no hurry. The night would be long and the fields were months from playable.

Jeremy had a mouth full of gummy bears, avoiding the red ones for some damn reason.

Jeremy claimed he’d never change his beliefs. “They’re solid, immoveable,” he said, “There are universal truths that don’t have anything to do with growth or time.”

Red and Duncan considered, once again, the shape of his head.

Jeremy pounded his glove with those thoughts until a coach taught him to get around the ball, not straight to it. He convinced him to field forward on the short hop, keep his bare hand to the side for better positioning and vision, and abandon the alligator chomp, not because it was wrong but 63

because it was negotiable. Jeremy couldn’t explain to Red and Duncan how the earth now revolved around the sun. He fielded groundballs from a pitch-back and the living room wall.

He fielded ground balls while heading to the bank, kissing his wife, or eating tuna fish casserole, usually in that order because his wife hated the smell on his breath. The world — so stable, monstrous, incorruptible — was under interrogation.

Youth, was again, wasted on the young.

Duncan had grown up watching the Thunderbird air shows at Mountain Home Air Force Base. There was just something about the twirling, the sky, and the innocence.

They had gotten up to the piano of their alarms, stuffed the ice chest into the minivan, and parked on the highway.

Duncan had grown up with Lisa. She was a volleyball and basketball star. She made it to nationals in the Elks Hoop Shoot. Duncan liked that at 5’ll” he looked her right in the eyes. She was all red hair and calves and green eyes. She was all argument. Their life was a sprint: marriage, three boys before he’d even opened his eyes.

The kids were making him angry, but he held it. The plane came down in a spiral. They could see the pilot below his parachute, and then the explosion.

“Was that supposed to happen?” his wife asked.

Red was standing over her, wearing a stocking cap and fortitude, communicating anything was possible. People with the hero gene were exiting their cars, while others were running from view. It was always winter, and for some reason she needed to do this publicly. Was he out of his mind or was this all an act? Performance art? The bearded guy in a long black coat, Mario Bros. pajama pants jetting out, representing the world to the world. He was present. He was aware that how it seemed was never in sync with how it really was. They hadn’t said a word. She was stuck between the driver’s seat and the door, a caged peacock. He didn’t blame her for these staged 64

moments. He understood her need to show him rather than tell him. She needed him out of the house. He heard her. She was known. She ducked left, slammed the door, and walked purposefully toward the coffee shop. He walked several blocks to the Maverick, where several high schoolers were getting energy drinks on their way to another Tuesday morning at the school where he’d made his greatest plays in the six hole. He wanted to run out in traffic and set the streets aflame. He saw a great-horned owl in an old snag, its head on a swivel. The owl spoke to him with the voice of God until someone tackled him. He hit his head against the pavement. He didn’t even feel the punches, but he knew he deserved them.

The three of them were over the neighbor’s fence with bats on their shoulders. Red laughed. It had been Jeremy’s idea to put on their uniforms, like an elaborate joke. Their red jerseys seemed to penetrate the darkness. Jeremy tried to swallow himself while Red struck the pose of Zeus. Duncan snuck around the tan prefab shed with his bat raised. Jeremy was saying his prayers when the glass door slid closed. It took a few minutes to recognize the low growl, and Jeremy rescinded his amen and rewound to the beginning. It was like some kind of telepathy worked between them. Jeremy knew they were about to cut bait and run all the way up until Duncan swung.

Murder. You could hear the metal against bones and above that a chthonic battle cry. They were gods. Red looked jealous.

He swung, hitting meat. It sounded like a gun shot, thunder, a trumpet.

“Bulls-eye,” he stage-whispered.

Jeremy wanted to run. They were either associates or amigos.

More swings.

“Get yourself some.”

Duncan and Red were breathing heavily. First the Christmas lights turned on, then several windows were glowing 65

angelic. It began to rain even harder, a thousand tiny drumbeats. They begged for violence. They needed him to assimilate, corroborate. It was like a melody without its final notes.

All that was needed was ceremony. Jeremy dropped his bat.

He knelt down next to the pit and heard its rattle. He threw a barrage of punches until he ran out.

They were over the fence and bloody into the night.

“That was ferocious,” they said to him between excited breaths, a new respect in their mouths. Jeremy didn’t look at them. His soft knuckles were bloody. It was like a dream almost, the stench of metal and winter rain merely empirical.

In the house, they hugged the children, protecting them from everything all around and inside.

“No kidding, it was basically this neon sign: Idaho Fries,” said Red. Duncan: “Anything can pass for art these days.”

“No. I really wanted to understand it. It did nothing for me. I’m serious. The kids were trying to drag me away but I’m sitting there thinking, what’s the point? I’ve seen better art in a motel. Then this painted lady says something about what a great conversational piece it is and right there I was pretty angry, I’m not gonna lie. It pissed me off. I didn’t want to be there in the first place. Obviously.”

Duncan: “Geez. This really got you goin’.”

“Nah. I’m not gonna let it up my skirt.”

After a beat, “Can trespassers claim self-defense?”

Jeremy came out of the bathroom still running his hands together. He saw that it was pancakes and coffee and the same bored waitress in the same jeans, in the same town with the same art and rain. We are always sailing feverishly into the past with a single idea. He was sitting across from them, watching them devour their pancakes and whisper in a way.

They were loud men hammering memories into the shapes they found most attractive. He could imagine Jordan chasing the jackrabbits. They called him birdbrain.

Jeremy was searching for his wallet.

ERIC E WALLACE

STOPGAP GORILLA Elise shuffled out of the store restroom wearing the heavy gorilla suit. She struggled to get a decent breath inside the rubber mask.

“Well, well,” said the manager, a snotty blond kid not much older than she was. “Look at ya. Furr-fect!” He snickered. “Let’s zip ya up.”

He half-twirled her. She had to lean on him for balance.

He reeked of tobacco. He groped near her tailbone. Leisurely pulled up the zipper. Fluffed the hair on her lower back.

Before she could protest, he twirled her again. Her eyeholes lined up with his chin. Two errant hairs swayed like whip antennas on a redneck pickup.

“Yeah. It suits ya.” Another snicker. “Get it? So, if you want the job, it’s yours, Lisa.”

“Elise,” she said. The mask ate her voice. The jerk probably heard “Eveef”.

“Easy money,” he told her. “The owner’s springing for $7.25 an hour. Pretty generous, if you ask me. He coulda just borrowed a gorilla from the zoo.”

“Wuf ache at.” How could she not take it? The job market was flatter than her bicycle tires, and her creditors were throat-clearing.

The owner thought a frolicking gorilla would draw attention to his new business. How a hairy ape would help sell computer gadgets wasn’t Elise’s concern. Jump around for a few hours each of the next fourteen days, waitress at Benny’s three nights a week, and maybe she could hold it together until a real employer liked one of her job applications.

Playing gorilla wasn’t in her career track. She’d never envisioned that a business graduate might jump right from cap and gown into a monkey suit. Pomp and crappy circumstance.

67

As least she didn’t have to growl or roar or whatever gorillas did. Just leap about. And feel dumb.

What Elise felt her first morning was hot. Hot, moist, clammy. The gorilla costume was not air conditioned. The fur-and-vinyl hands and feet, velcroed on tightly, sealed her inside. To itch. To sweat. To feel trapped. The eyeholes drastically restricted her view, eliminated much of her peripheral vision.

She felt she was inside a shag rug. Cleopatra, that’s me. She giggled. Earned a mouthful of faux fur.

Sean, the hands-on manager, had told her to keep moving. “Dance like you got ants in your pants.” She saw part of a leer through the mask’s limited view. Sean had been happy to zip her up again, all touchy feely. Zippedy doo-dah. Tomorrow, Elise decided, she would put the suit on at home. Her roommate could help with the zipper.

Meantime, here she was in front of Computrix, bouncing about, an ersatz gorilla. She pirouetted. Executed deep knee bends and plies. Threw in moves from childhood ballet classes. Oh, for a tutu! She waved wildly. Did energetic jumping jacks. Attempted frantic cheerleader routines she’d enviously watched her older sister practice.

A few drivers tapped their horns. Some whistled, yelled semi-intelligible wisecracks. Most ignored her.

Her good humor dissipated. Soon her simian cavorting slipped into a soporific rhythm. A semi-dreamstate. An inane thoughtswirl of rewriting resumes, begging for job offers, juggling debts.

Late afternoon she went home, exhausted, dazed, drenched, smelly and in a gas-fume, damp-fur funk. Only thirteen more humiliating days to go.

“Rent’s due,” said Tania, without preamble, tossing her purse on the couch and wrenching off her jacket. “God, what 68

a day. They expect me to work like Superwoman but give the paralegals all the credit.”

“Can you help get this thing off?” Elise had removed the head, hands and feet but had given up on the zipper. She slumped in an armchair, still encased in the gorilla torso.

“Jeez, girl! Look at you! Talk about a bad hair day!” Tania helped Elise out of the suit. “So when can you fork over some bucks?”

“I get a check Friday. Can I pay you then?”

Tania sighed. “Sure. Pay me when you can. So how was it—playing King Kong?”

“Not the highlight of my budding career. It felt claustrophobic. Ridiculous.”

Tania smiled. “My roommate the gorilla. Boy, that’s a conversation starter.”

The next morning, Tania helped Elise rig a long zipper pull, and they figured out how to hide it in the fur. Now it’s hands off, Sean, buddy.

Sean was grinning like a hyena. “I guess ya done good, Lisa. Yesterday the owner drove by a coupla times. Undercover boss kinda thing. He likes your little act.”

“My what?”

“Your shtick. It’s not too bad. But he wants you to beat your chest.” He thumped his own chest vigorously.

“Do female gorillas do that?”

Sean shrugged. “Who cares? This is advertising, not ‘Animal Planet’. Thump your chest. Wiggle your ass. You’re not a gorilla, you’re a gimmick.”

Elise put on the head, lumbered outside and began work.

Between leaps and gyrations, now she pounded her fists on her furrowed vinyl chest. For this I aced econ?

Most pedestrians walked quietly by. A few stopped to watch. Made dumb jokes. One guy scratched under his arms.

69

Some wag in an SUV threw a banana. It smacked her in the stomach.

She felt no respect, either as gorilla or as performer. People treated her indifferently, even disparagingly. They didn’t recognize there was intelligence, spirit, sensitivity inside.

She felt sorry for herself. Trapped. Stuck. Not just in this grungy suit but in all aspects of her life.

Somewhere in her unhappy reverie, she found herself trying to imagine what a real gorilla might be like. She couldn’t connect the little she knew of those beasts to this sidewalk idiocy. Maybe they dress up in human skins and act silly? The notion made her snort. She inhaled fur. Thumped her chest. Cried.

That evening, after washing her stinky suit, Elise googled ‘gorilla’ on Tania’s laptop. She was shocked to learn gorillas were a critically-endangered species. Poaching, trophytaking, the bushmeat trade, civil wars, diseases—including diseases transmitted by humans—were decimating entire populations.

One article really made her cringe. Mining for coltan, an ore used in making cellphones, meant disaster for the apes.

The mining was destroying their habitat. Worse, hunters were slaughtering gorillas to get food for the miners.

“Can you believe it?” she said to Tania. “Our addiction to cellphones is killing gorillas. What the heck am I doing in that stupid suit?”

“Jeez Elise,” Tania said. “I think you’re a closet activist.’

The week oozed along like sludge in a gutter. Day after numbing day, Elise forced herself to prance on the sidewalk.

The costume had shrunk in the wash. Now it chafed. Irritated her skin. Stank of fetid rubber. She felt even more constrained. Felt even more sorry for herself. Her mind repeatedly revisited the carnage in her checkbook, the unfriendly 70

job market, the looming student loan repayments.

Beating her chest became cathartic. Finishing one really good thumping, she howled at an unseen moon. Through her fur-edged eyeslits she saw a nervous little pedestrian gaping.

She roared at him. He flinched, scurried away. You’re losing it, Wolfgirl.

She began thinking about gorillas. Her mind settled down. Focused. Remembered what she’d read. And I think I have problems?

On Sunday, Computrix didn’t open until noon. Elise had a few blessed hours off. She walked to the zoo, found the gorilla exhibit, a scruffy half-acre of trees and shrubs. She entered an adjacent concrete building and peered out the floor-to-ceiling window.

A short distance away, three gorillas sat around a clump of dry grass. A male, chewing a twig, watched two females grooming each other.

Elise read the interpretive sign. These western lowland gorillas — Jabari, Bina, Zahra and LaWanda — had been born in captivity. Wild but not free.

There was a shift in the light, a shadow moving. Elise turned. Another female gorilla was knuckle-walking toward the viewing window. Elise decided this was LaWanda.

LaWanda stopped a few feet away. She puts my two-bit costume to shame. Long arms. Wizened hands. Rippled skin. Soft, short hair, brown-gray except around the enlarged forehead, where it was reddish. A broad, heavily-wrinkled nose. Deep-set eyes, brown with a hint of yellow.

Elise had read that direct eye contact could upset gorillas.

But this one showed no sign of unease. LaWanda looked right at her. Held her gaze. The gorilla’s eyes were expressive, compelling. Elise sensed considerable intelligence. Shy curiosity.

Deep sadness. And I worry about being trapped?

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Elise slowly raised her hand to the glass. The gorilla watched, tilting her head. Elise spread her fingers, pressed them against the smooth coolness. LaWanda shambled closer, in slow motion, rolling her head slightly.

The animal gently raised her long left arm. Reached out. Edged closer. Touched the pane. Jerked her arm back.

Reached out again. Put her whole hand on the glass. It was directly opposite Elise’s hand.

Elise pressed hard, imagined touching the wrinkled palm.

She looked calmly into the gorilla’s eyes. Felt an odd sense of sisterhood. Breathed deeper than she had in eons.

“OK,” she whispered. “I can make it.”

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MARY ELLEN McMURTRIE

LINES We’ve always called her Marge. Never Mom, or Mama.

I wonder about that now that I will be a mother in a few months. It scares me. Especially the crooked genes I will probably pass on from Marge. When Marge shows up, you can bet on crazy.

She’s insisting we get my sister, Carmen, and pack into the mountains to perform a ritual for the safe delivery of a healthy baby. I know Marge’s plans are looney, but I’ve always been scared to ignore them. What if the feathers poked in the shingles on our roof when I was twelve really were the reason we never had a tornado?

We make it a short hike and set up camp close to the trailhead. Marge says we’ll have to go in to Gravy Lake tomorrow to get the bushes she needs to burn and bury. When we get up in the morning I know the night on the thin sleeping pad is not a good start for a hike. Marge and Carmen set off, and I snuggle back into the warmth of my sleeping bag inside the little tent. As I doze, the sounds of the waking forest mingle with disconnected dream images. When finally I grab consciousness, it seems like the loud sound of breaking limbs has been crashing through my dream for centuries, but it isn’t a dream. I squint past the mosquito netting and see the bear.

He is busy in the brush around a log twenty feet from the tent.

He is big and brown and shaggy.

I’m so fascinated with being this close to something so wild, I forget to be afraid. When he turns toward the little makeshift kitchen by the rock in front of the tent, I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve taken a breath – carefully in and out through my mouth to avoid any chance of noise. Marge and Carmen’s breakfast fixings are laying on a rock. A giant paw smashes the peanut butter tube and a tongue daintily be73

gins to lick the banquet from pine needles and pebbles. I am transfixed, expectant. It doesn’t take long to finish the puny ration, and licking the leftovers from his whiskers, the bear sits back on his haunches and looks for dessert. I watch his limp paws dangle in front of him as he sniffs the air. Then he looks straight at the tent.

I remember the stuff-sack of food we have stored at the foot of the tent to protect it from chipmunks. The bear rolls onto all-fours. He knows the food is here too. His wet nostrils are only inches from my face as he investigates the smells. He pushes against the netting. I don’t move. I try to straighten my thoughts to see if I’ve ever heard what to do in case of a bear.

Do they like the smell of human flesh? Will the sweat collecting under my arms encourage him to come in? No answers.

I figure holding still is best. Each joint so locked I can’t move anyway. Just then the bear’s eyes focus past the net and consume me. We stare so long, nose to nose, into each other’s eyes, I crumple into the details of his small pupils, and the matted mucous hanging from the corners of his lashes. The smell of his breath falls down hard on me.

He sits back on his haunches, raises his paw, and as he pushes it, the flimsy netting brushes my face. I slink back holding my belly with both arms. Almost lazily, the bear raises onto his hind quarters. His paw lashes out. The netting rips, but just a little. Then he pulls up his entire height and stands, a tower over the tent. Quickly I grab the stuff-sack of food.

Maybe, if I can get it outside, he won’t want to come in. As I will my hand toward the zipper, the bear grabs the tent and, hugging it to him, he rocks back and forth. Crashing from one side to the other, I hold to the food-sack like an anchor.

Lurching against the sleeping bags and pads, I become aware of a wild, piercing scream from up in the trees. It sounds neither human nor beast. Every pore on my body raises a goosebump, and the hair on my neck stands out so 74

stiff it hurts. The shrieking continues. Trying to brace against the pitching side of the tent, I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for my life to flash across them. As quickly as it began, the tumbling stops. I open my eyes to see the bear turn toward the eerie howl. Marge, mouth wide open, arms waving wildly, legs racing, emerges from the trees covering the trail she and Carmen hiked this morning.

As Marge rushes toward the tent and the bear and me, Carmen yells above the wail for her to stop. Marge keeps coming. She’s close enough to the bear now to touch it, and he lets go the tent to turn toward the commotion. Back on all-fours he growls toward the short wild figure shrieking and jumping in front of him. As if to prove to Marge that she can’t deter him, the bear raises up and turns back toward the tent.

His paw comes up and out so fast I don’t even see it until it rips through the thin wall. Just as quickly, I see four lines of dark blood glisten from my shoulder to my elbow. I watch the drops form rivers. That’s when I see Marge again.

She’s quiet. Absolutely silent, and low. Low to the ground with her back arched and her head extended from a neck that seems to get longer as she stretches toward the bear. She begins to circle behind the huge animal. Her body skulks, and I see her lips curl back exposing her teeth. Not the familiar flat teeth I am used to seeing behind her smile, but long carnal teeth for ripping flesh. A low growl comes from way down somewhere inside the body that has become fluid. The bear watches a moment, and slowly takes a step back from the predatory creature circling him. Then I hear a hissing and see my mother’s nose wrinkle to draw her lip even further from the exposed teeth. The bear keeps turning to keep his eyes on the fiend. The creature’s mournful growl crescendos to a screech that splits through the atmosphere as precisely as the bear’s claw has sliced through my flesh. And then the pounce.

Straight up and toward the massive frame. The bear shies 75

away from the attack with an agility that doesn’t match his size.

The demon crouches and resumes the growl. The bear takes one quick look at the wreck of the tent, and turns toward the stream. It isn’t an amble, but he doesn’t actually scurry away either. I watch the brush on the far bank gather in, and I hear one last growl just as he disappears. Before I can turn back, Marge is disentangling me from the ripped tent, and swearing at the blood that continues to run from my arm. Just Marge.

That’s all. My mother. Ordinary, and busy, and cussing.

Carmen is sobbing, and I look from Carmen to Marge to the blood running down my arm. For the first time I feel the pain. Big red-hot waves of it. From then until the hospital everything is a muddle of semi-conscious walking, resting, riding, sirens.

What’s left are the scars. Now I have to reach across this big bulk of a belly to trace those thin lines from shoulder to elbow. We have never talked about what happened outside that tent, Marge and Carmen and me. Marge isn’t much for dwelling in the past. Even with the scars, I don’t know for sure if what I remember is true.

Even though we didn’t create the ritual Marge intended, somehow, when I think about it now, I feel a little more like it will be okay to have this baby. And late in the dark, when Bob is asleep, I swirl the words around inside my mouth out loud.

Marge and Mama seem to make the same sound.

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FAUNA The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness. — JESSAMYN WEST

ALICE LOUISE GERFEN

FEVER DREAMS it was like my body was a beehive, and you can climb into the honeycomb of my heart but all you’re going to find is hexagons, heliotropes, hello to hello to hollow out the holes and find fruit flies in their place. even wasps would steer clear of here. even you wouldn’t touch: sticky fingers in slicker spaces, slender faces stretching out these familiar places too small and scared to stand protest. hands here never lie out flat: they curl up and stretch out and go where you could never go, puncture wounds from a minotaur in a labyrinth of flesh.

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STEVE LIEBENTHAL

WY-KAN-USH (THE SALMON) A swift soul slips past seines and the Devil’s dams Always upstream, often undulating, but constantly creeping up-current Inches, feet, miles; across longitudinal lines Eluding eagles, breaking braids and spitting spears To the gleaming white gravel; Engrossed in a graceful gambol Ending; eulogized energy, enshrined in earth

82

CHERYL RICHARDSON

CATCH OF THE DAY Resourceful when forgetting his creel, instead an old bucket was used to hold his day’s catch. The fishing gods smiled; the bucket grew heavy. Soon tails thumped and bumped out their homage. At day’s close, the steep climb up the bank with fishing rod, tackle box, cooler and bucket became a Sisyphean task. At the crest of the hill, loose gravel gave way as he threw the bucket over the edge before falling. He managed to stay conscious when his head and elbow met sharp rocks, at last coming to rest in stunned silence near the shore. It required several stitches to put flayed skin and muscle back together.

Though his appearance was cause for dismay, if asked, all he talked about with a shit-eating grin was the catch of the day — a big bass, two nice rainbow trout and a large string of perch.

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M R SMITH

KEEPING MY EYE ON THINGS Winter morning, pale light near dark, cars stream down the road with dull fish eyes.

In the bare tree below my window hops a crow among festive lights hung tight and close.

He hops from branch to branch, to berry-blue, to cherry-red, looking with one eye, then the other at each glowing light; the same, the same, then he moves on.

I try his perspective, closing one eye, then the other, while the cars pass in a river below.

I see them become fish wriggling for the sea, programmed by habit, driving toward hope somewhere down the colorless road.

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RICK D HUNT

THREE HAIKU An unseen bird’s song Lacing through a sultry day: Perfect counterpoint.

A hawk hangs transfixed In the pastel-shafted dawn; Suspended desire.

Tendrilled autumn clouds.

Three soaring doves turn and swoop, Boldly sign the sky.

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ANITA TANNER

NEW YEAR: NORTHERN RED SHAFTED FLICKER It’s the flash of vermilion they carry on the underside of wings that sabotages my breath at the opposite side of glass.

A pair of them swoop down over the hill fence into the frozen garden, their deep undulations an adoration of winter.

Elongated beaks peck the bark of the backyard olive, tinctured wings folded in — gashes of red carnelian like embers that will flare up at any moment in the aluminum air, matchwood catching on, wingspan conflagration spreading across the fence, down into the neighbor’s yards.

From fire to fire their wound of beauty turning and lifting away.

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JENNIFER TROPLE

THE SANDPIPER

A sudden scuttle The pebbled sand shifting A fluff of feathers Burrowing into water Stillness wishing invisibility Black beads watching Graceful ebony legs appearing As ginger steps are made Back onto the grainy shore

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MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK

A PRESENCE I return to Indiana County to find small rabbits, jumpy as the French Resistance, have tunneled under Studio C Hairstyling now that the dope dealers who used it as a front don’t stalk like sunburned refugees past duct-taped windows anymore.

A mosquito truce whirs where rhododendron violet peppers the red Bilco cellar door.

Summer is a presence that wanders back to the sunken porch of our last knowing.

Young canoe birches sprout skyward and are toppled by beavers in the time it takes you to place a palm on chewed bark as you cross charred leaf pulp on a weedy riverside path.

Late afternoon glare plunges its branding iron of rum in the copper current’s aftermath.

Every return clears ground for one that follows. Yellowthroats plummet, and the earth gnaws decades away. The eastern black swallowtail, ecstatic 88

on drugs of daylight and air, beats an erratic code for living from wings of chimney-sweep ash, a rhythm of glide and blunder.

The subterranean heart races, bright as death in its warren, twitches like moon and thunder.

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MATTHEW JAMES BABCOCK

SONNET: BREED Harriman State Park, June 1999 Let me say that I envy the eared grebe.

Those orange flamenco sleeves, cloak dark as soot.

His heart bangs like a beast against his ribs.

Parades his passion with panache to boot.

I can’t fan brash ear tufts and crest, as bold as the rain god Tlaloc, shake lake droplets like hot mercury on hammered gold, can’t mesmerize my lover, eyes blood-wet, when the time comes to pass the genes along.

This cinderblock apartment is no nest.

We rendezvous in no caldera stream.

Still, lightweight and lovelocked, we’ll sound our song through gorges of blue stone, heedless of rest, reborn with sun, wind, rock, sky, moss, air, dream.

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SHARLA ROBINSON NG

COYOTE MOON An ephemeral December night in the Bruneau Sand Dunes Heaven’s winds withdraw And we surface like air bubbles With loved ones rising From the depths of an icy lake Into Creation’s very eye.

All air and blue and the half blue Of dusk drawn down by ribbons Of geese streaming to reveal A full and beaming moon — As if Death’s heavy cape slipped, Her translucent gown giving way To an impression of the landscape awaiting us.

Behind this moment, coyote-sprinkled tracks Lay like steady bread crumbs indicating a way From somewhere to someplace at some time For something by fair means and good in the long run.

And in this, the coyote’s full-moon night, The children venture from camp to sled With firelight and flashlight and moonlight And streams of laughter echoing — Loosely tethering our generations to the sky.

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DEVRA McCOMISH-MARY

HUCKLEBERRY AND THE BIG CHILL When I drove my Westfalia from our Rocky Mountain home on that beautiful winter morning, I had no idea I would be risking my life in the next two hours.

I’d been jogging along a snow-packed trail in the national forest around 10 am when I heard a yelping. At first I paid no attention to it. After all, I was in the wild.

As the sound of the moaning grew nearer I could tell something was in grave distress.

When I crested the bend, I could see that an animal was struggling to get out of a hole in the center of a small frozen lake. I felt so sorry for the unfortunate one who was sure soon to die. I knew if something wasn’t done quickly I would witness a tragic death.

It was when I found myself trying to make up my mind to help that I got a surprise. Out of that thrashing, splashing and writhing about, reared a head. I recognized the black and white fur. For a moment, I saw him, see me, alone on the bank. I wanted to heave as I did not want to believe what I saw.

Pawing and scratching the ice ledge was Huckleberry, my faithful border collie, vying for his life. It’s hard for any man to stand and watch his best friend helpless. I knew in my core I had to find a way — for I had seen the two times where Huckleberry had laid down his life so that I might live.

My yelling and pleading had no effect on his attempts to regain his freedom. I began to crawl out on the ice but cracking ensued. I panicked and lurched back to shore. I knew better. Down on my knees, I pleaded; “Huck you’re a good dog, Huck, You can do it. Huck Come! You got this buddy!”

Further coaxing, “You can do it, Huck!”

Huckleberry, who came along with me everywhere, could do it. But he was tired after our hour long jog.

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I looked up and saw an old leaning miner’s cabin. Closer to me was a weathered shed. I ran up, grabbed the handle and slid the door open exposing a small boat. Just then a tall, burly, broad-shouldered man came at me from nowhere and said, “What the hell are you doing?” His untamed salt and pepper hair obstructed the view of his face.

“I need this boat, take the other end, my dog fell through the ice. He’s drowning.”

Together, we lobbed the boat on the thin ice, fracturing pieces in large shards. We jumped in and grabbed the hibernating paddles, long and wooden.

I could see Huckleberry twisting and slashing as we broke through the ice toward his bobbing head. He was a bold one, I knew. After all, he had struggled and bartered for a few dog lives already. Once an abandoned pup who survived on insects, stream trout and rock grub in the wild until, as an animal shelter dog, rescued by me after my father died. He was a fighter, but it was taking us too long. We needed to purchase 20 feet: but it might as well been 100.

He said, “I got a chairsaw back in the shed, but I don’t think it’s gassed up.”

“Let’s get it” I churned. By this time my fighting blood was boiling and I only hoped Huckleberry would feel some of the heat.

The man fired up the chainsaw. We boarded the boat, paddled back to where we left off. Huckleberry’s few movements appeared in slow motion. Careful not to tip the boat, I grabbed the back of the man’s belt loops while he leaned out and cut inverted V’s into the 4-inch thick ice. Then I could pop the triangle with the end of the oar. Foot by foot we advanced closer to the victim. I kept coaxing. I hung to the man, he sawed, and I popped.

Over thirty minutes had evaporated. We got wet from the flotsam created by the chainsaw; it quickly froze. Huckleberry 93

went under again and didn’t surface for about a minute while we worked. God he was a good dog.

“Huck.” I said, “You can let go now buddy.” I wailed.

I popped. I hung on to the man’s pants. I said good bye. I wailed. We were so close. I could see Huckleberry slowly surrendering to hypothermia. Huckleberry bobbed to the surface but his fighting fire left his eyes, just ten feet away, disappearing into the unknown.

I wailed, coaxing his spirit, saying, “So long old boy. I love you. I love you. Thank you, thank you. You were a good dog, damn Huck, you were a good buddy.” I couldn’t figure it out. He was such a survivor — a real fighter. But, at 10 years old, he was tired. Mother Nature was winning this time. She usually does.

The man endured the sawing, more sawing while I kept on popping, more popping. I gave it my all. Maybe Huck knew it, maybe I knew it.

We made it to the dark hole at the same time a wet black nose broke the surface.

I gasped and saw the man reach over the bow. I held tightly to the chainsaw slinging, big burley man’s pants while he grabbed the collar around Huckleberry’s frozen stiff neck.

The next thing I know, Huck’s frozen carcass lay on my lap, with legs straight like sticks and eyes fixed; purple tongue protruding from his half opened mouth. I cooed my gratitude in a bluesy melancholy tone while I massaged and rubbed him vigorously.

Back at the shore, while the man steadied the aluminum skiff, I stood up and with brute strength heaved my 50 lb. love over my shoulder, up the bank to the sunshine. Huckleberry gurgled for a moment then a minute of stillness. Then a little more gurgling.

The man brought a blanket and said, “There’s nothing we can do.”

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I resisted his words and worked on my trail buddy, my companion with a loyal will.

Huckleberry began blinking, restored his tongue to his mouth and breathing erratically. Exhausted and dumbfounded, I looked up at the tall man and said slowly, “What is your name?”

“I’m Cameron,” he replied. I said, “I am Dana and I can’t thank you enough. You are the kindest man I’ve ever met.”

He said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. You’re a crazy woman. Man, never could have imagined a morning like this one. We risked our lives out there.”

I watched Cameron disappear in the rearview mirror as we headed home. Even though I was unsure of Huck’s fate, I talked to him, “Hey buddy, I’m taking you home to lay by the fire. We’ll get you comfortable.” All the while thinking I soon may be digging his grave.

At home I sensed a little life left in Huck. The vet had said in my earlier phone, “After 40 minutes in freezing water, he would be brain dead and might never walk again; if he lived.”

My shoulders twitched with the thought.

Huckleberry slept coma-like by the fire. He breathed shallow, gurgling puffs. I administered droppers full of warm milk every half hour. Fireside, I read Steinbeck aloud to soothe our connection, and perhaps his transition.

What came next shocked me. Huck stood up, sidled next to me and fell back onto the wood floor. I wrapped my arms around his belly to lift him. He ambled toward the door. I braced his neck against my leg and I led him outside. Huck trickle peed non-stop like a leaky spigot for a long time. He swaggered back to his spot by the fire. Huck had life. Now with a red tongue he licked my hand once, blinked his eyelids and nuzzled in close.

The vet was astonished with the news when I called her at 5 pm. She advised me to bring Huckleberry to her office right 95

away. She said, “This dog has an amazing will to live. We owe it to him now to do all we can.”

Upon arrival at the office, three vets came in to examine the dog who escaped the frozen death. They took photos and asked me to repeat the story. The vet injected Huckleberry with an antibiotic for pneumonia and said, “Huckleberry may be alright after all.”

It was a miracle, our Huckleberry Finn was all right. The next day, we drove out to find Cameron, my kids in the backseat holding a homemade apple pie. Huckleberry, spent and dazed, sat between the kids’ car seats.

Cameron acted bewildered and elated that our efforts paid off. He ushered the kids down towards the lake. I listened to Cameron and watched his hands wave about while he recounted the story.

Huckleberry’s struggle and will renewed something vital in me: to persevere is to live fully; to believe in humanity is to know faith; to trust in oneself means anything becomes possible.

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FERAL He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

— GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

KATHERINE DUGGAN

CATS In the Shanxi province of China, the people of Lijiashan still live in caves. Fires, lit beneath their age-smoothed stone beds, keep them warm in winter. Stairs, cut deep into the cliff face by long dead men, still feel the patter of young feet.

Swaddled in the very thrum of the earth, these people crouch and lick the same dust from their lips as they did when man was young and squirming. They’re living with muscles thin and sharp, teeth stained and barbed. Their lives are close to the hot green of the oaks, the musk of the spotted sika deer and the cry of the red-crowned cranes, close to the blood within their own primal hearts.

At least, that was what John told me, as we sank in the thick fog of the hookah bar that Tuesday night. It was a Russian place in Coney Island. The broad-shouldered men around us hummed away in a foreign tongue, the rosewater vapor curled in our lungs and out our noses. Our cave. He loved to talk about Primalism when he got like this: light headed on absinthe, condensation seeping through the paper napkin stuck to his cocktail glass. His arm dripped down to my thigh, kneading it in his thick rope fingers. Lean legs spilled beneath the table as he stretched out and spoke of men who clothed themselves with furs they had skinned. He spread his palm across the top knob of my spine and sighed to spread his arms at the summit of the mountain. “We should go camping in the Catskills.” I took his hand. “Let’s go home.”

The midnight air was cold after hovering over the hot coals in the hookah lounge. He didn’t give me his jacket as we ambled back the fifteen blocks to his apartment. Instead his fingers bent to my back, swishing up under my t shirt.

He laughed with narrow crooked teeth and raked his hair out of his deep amygdaloid eyes when I spoke. In his basement 101

apartment, we ate sticky rice and chile watercress with lacquered chopsticks. His mother made it; she would cook for him until the day he married. He brought the wide rimmed bowl to his lips and ate with slick serpentine speed in big, predatory bites. With that same mouth, he pressed his pink tongue to the corner of my lips and pulled the thick butter flesh of my ribs between his fingers. Leaned his chest against mine just like a cat rubbing against my calf. Smile and growl rumbled up his throat till my jeans were off. His close feral breath echoed fast in my ear. I felt his jutting cheekbones rattle hard beneath my thumbs as I held his jaw to mine. Let the cold slap of skin ring in my head. Our backs arched, ribs poked together, till the hair on our necks prickled.

The night was no longer cold as I kissed his cheek and went to the kitchen for water. There in the living room was John’s big orange tabby. Mercury. I stopped. Lowered myself slowly to the hardwood floor. In my own tiny apartment, I longed for a cat. But I slept on a couch and ate dollar pizza, Mercury was the best I could do. He never much seemed to like me, allowing me a couple perfunctory pats before running off to kill mice and birds. If I caught him in the right mood, however, he might let me scratch behind his ears, or even run a loose string under his nose. Once, a guttural soft purr had started up in his chest when I petted him just right.

Maybe tonight could be one of those times. Silent, I waited, not looking right at him so I wouldn’t spook him. He licked at his big paws extravagantly, pulling them down over his ears with an air of boredom. Fickle, like all cats; didn’t like people who liked him. I shimmied, flat footed, before he stopped to stare. I raised my hand ever so slightly and he skittered off to the futon. “Fine.” I went and filled a mug with tap water before prancing past the silly cat on my way back to bed. John was already half asleep as I rolled under the blanket. His soft hairless arm found its way over the small of my waist, a sigh of 102

contentment rattled in his chest. Soon the whole of my back beaded with sweat from his body heat. I traced the tattoos of his arm until I fell asleep, counting the whorls of ink like sheep.

I wake in the same curled position, but John’s arm is gone.

In fact, he’s all gone. The bed is empty, the room is still, the apartment is quiet through the cracked bedroom door. Instead, Mercury snuggles into the cup of my legs and torso, his soft animal heat just perceptible through the blanket. I stretch out ever so carefully, but he doesn’t stir as I spread myself wide across the cool bed and doze.

Hours tick by before I rise. I move deliberately, sitting cross legged on the bed, examining myself from the mirror hanging on the door. A bruise is starting to color my neck. I let the shower water creep up to extremely hot before I step in the high white walls of the tub. I find tea — white jasmine — in his cupboards. This is what I love. This, more than the bars, the conversations, the parks, the kisses, the long subway rides to see him, is what I love about John. The clear quiet mornings after he has gone to work, when his apartment is my own.

The big living room with the mirror-paneled walls, the little windowsill with the houseplants and cigarillos, the bookshelf with Ayn Rand and Arabic: Level 2001. The high school graduation picture where his hair is short and slicked back. I feel like I know him better when he’s gone. I make the bed and wash any dishes just to justify my staying. I bring a book, for the long train ride back, but sometimes I sit on the futon and read. Only a chapter or two, with Mercury curled up beside me. Mercury will always find me when I’m lonely. Just like John found me, reading alone in Barnes and Noble, trapped in a summer without end. Recently, I am reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Mercury and I sit, reading together before I must go. After thirty pages, I sigh and shut my book. I close 103

my eyes and pet the cat. In the courtyard out back, someone is coughing. Far off, somebody’s kid screams in delight. Time to go. “Well, goodbye Mercury.” I reach to give him a farewell pat and he rears up, sticking his claws deep into the paper flesh of my hand. Raw crimson crisscrosses my hand and I yelp as I hurry to my bag, a trickle of hurt in my heart. He spits at me as I go. I lock the door behind me and make shaky steps to the subway. He had never turned on me like that before; a nervous taste settles in my mouth.

My next inspection in my own bathroom mirror reveals a tiny purple fingerprint on my throat, blood thickening round the hollow of my eye. John doesn’t call for a month. But then I find myself on that F train back from Coney Island once again, summer gone, a scarf wrapped tight round my throat.

Some people just don’t realize you can’t love a cat. He’ll hate you for it.

104

TIFFANY HITESMAN

GRETEL The problem was that Zella spoke in roses, while Holbert spoke in tools. Rather than realize this was normal for married couples of their background, they let the space between their words grow. And the space grew and grew until the tools rusted and the roses died.

What kept them together was Gretel. She slept under their bed, secure. Her breath filled the space between their own; for a while, they forgot the space between their breaths existed. Each morning, she waited for the alarm to sound, then, having already stretched, she stuck her wet nose on to Zella’s hand and requested to go outside. Zella always ignored this request, just as she ignored the alarm; it was Holbert who lumbered in the dark, opened the door, and let Gretel out to pee by the dead rose bushes. When she returned, she was rewarded with a scratch behind the ear, and then she watched while Holbert filled the kettle to boil the water for coffee.

Rewards are important, and part of her knew that she should just ask Holbert each morning to let her outside, but Zella provided the food, so she earned the right to be asked first.

Gretel could not remember a time without Zella and Holbert, although she could remember when things changed between them. She was a cattle dog, and her job was to observe. Observe she did. Her habits formed when she was just a puppy, when the three of them worked outside together, Zella in the garden and Holbert building something out of wood — generally something Zella requested. Gretel kept the squirrels in the tree where they belonged and reminded the birds that the seeds under this particular soil were not for their consumption. Gretel watched Zella’s face crinkled as Holbert wore his muddy boots into the house. She watched Holbert’s shoulders slouch as Zella ran through the plans for their 105

weekends. And she watched their hands; hands that rested at the base of each other’s back at the end of the day, hands that dug down deep into the soil, hands that flipped pages in books, hands that pointed, hands that threw sticks, hands that moved with the rhythm of words.

In the evenings, once hands were washed, they went on longs walks by the river and Zella would yammer with her voice and her hands until an exhausted Holbert would explain, “You are ruining my reverie.”

Things shifted. They adjusted. Holbert worked late and stopped building things out of wood. Zella still requested, but he ignored. Or, Zella still nagged, and he did not have time.

Sometime after the ignoring began, Zella stopped planting seeds. Gretel kept up her part of the deal; the birds stayed out.

The walks continued even after the yard browned, but they became silent. Feet padded along the dirt road, red noses were wiped in the cold, and each time they walked by Old Bruce and Gretel did not bark, she was told she was a good girl. At first, it seemed no words were needed except for the reminder that she was indeed good, since they all knew what the other would say. But then the silence shifted, too.

By the time Holbert threw the coffee cup, silences had grown thick, cut only with small words that meant more than the dictionary allowed. When the glass broke, the crack forced Gretel to growl. Her black hair stood up, lips curled, and she lowered her head — making sure to keep her eye on him. Zella sat with her hands in her face, trembled, and said silence. It was uncomfortable. She had not expected it — the volume of his voice or her reaction; nor did she expect the guilt. His shoulders slouched when the crack and growl sounded, and his eyes closed; the anger left his face and his cheeks sagged with regret. That night Gretel slept next to the couch rather than under the bed. Holbert was the person that opened the door for her each morning, the person who made the coffee 106

while she watched, and still, when provoked, she had shown him her teeth.

She knew that teeth should not be shown, but still.

Tirades replaced the small cutting words for a while after the coffee cup broke, but just as space had grown between the words, the space grew between the fights. The silence that filled the walks crept into the house and stayed. The stale silence was better than the anger, and Gretel felt secure under the bed again. Then, Holbert’s smell changed when he came home from work — not his, per se, but the others layered on top of his. Gretel would interrogate his boots with her nose as he came through the door, and he would laugh and scratch her head.

It was good to hear him laugh, but still.

And what Gretel smelled, Zella eventually smelled too.

She tried not to, but there it was. Holbert was a good man, an honest man, or at least he needed to think such things, and when evidence pointed to the contrary, he did not handle it well. Gretel could see the red stiffness in his hands and as he gripped the back of a chair, his jaw clenched and his lips pressed. She saw this; she was good at seeing. Her low growl was lost in the swarm of his rage and before the chair could leave his hands, her teeth attempted to sink deep into his leg, but her teeth were stopped by denim. The bite was still effective, if creating a roar was the intended effect. For the first time, she it occurred to her to be scared, but her fright turned to confusion as she watched Zella rush to Holbert.

“What is wrong with you? Bad!” Zella shouted. It was the punctuated “Bad!” that signaled the reprimand was for her, and not for Holbert, so she hid under the table while Holbert’s pants came off so that they could inspect the damage.

Part of Zella felt vindicated; Gretel, who loyally followed Holbert down the hall each morning, had come to her defense.

But more than vindicated, she felt broken, as the thread that

107

tied her and Holbert together unraveled.

It was determined that Holbert would not need stitches and that they should not shout at each other in front of the dog — at least this is what Zella said. Other things were not said, but it seemed as if the dog was forgiven. Once the lights went off, she snuck from under the table, to under the bed, and curled up tight underneath Zella, who breathed deep in sleep.

Holbert’s eyes stayed open, alert. He heard Gretel settle in and he heard the breath of his wife and once he was certain that the night had filled the room, he slid out of bed. As he laced his boots by the door, aware of the bits of mud that cracked and fell onto the wooden floor, it occurred to him that Gretel had not followed him down the hall. What felt like a rock formed in his throat and he could not swallow it away.

After he buttoned his jacket, he opened the door — still no Gretel — and slipped into the blue-black air.

108

BILL COPE

WHAT’S ALL THE RUKUS? Squee started it. I was catching a doze and didn’t hear him until old Rax scamped across my back and woke me. “You clumsy …” I barked, and then heard Squee. He was up near the top of the big, big sycamore, clattering like falling ice.

Everyone could have heard him, I figure, from Mother Walnut to the wild rose hedge at the end of the street.

“What is this?” I yelled after Rax, but he ignored me, old fool. Mim, coming up behind, answered.

“Don’t know. But I’m sure gonna find out.”

She’s a bushy, little Mim. If I were a bit younger, I wouldn’t mind doing some tail-twist with that one.

Three more flicked past, bouncing over the road to the sycamore yard. Epp, Gim and Za went one after the other, and not a one of them knew why he was going.

“To see why Mim went,” chirped Epp in passing.

“I’m following Epp,” said Gim, seconds later.

“What else is there to do?” grumped Za, and that made sense to me.

I took my time though. I’m not one to go racing like some fool over the road without checking for smashers. I even considered forgetting the whole commotion and taking another look for that acorn. The one I can’t find. The one I’ve been looking for all summer. Blasted nut. I know it’s out there, under those leaves, under that grass, somewhere. I hid it close to the brick walk, I think. Or the petunia bed, maybe. That was one fine acorn, if I remember. With everyone else skipping off like fools, I figured maybe it was a good time to go scratching around again.

But Squee was making it harder and harder to pretend I was ignoring him. “Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick!

Quick! Quick!” Just like that, over and over. It was the crows 109

that made me decide. A clot of them picked up from the ash way down in the fat man’s yard and circled Squee’s perch like flies, their racket almost as loud as his “Quick! Quick!” That was all I needed. I hate those crows. All crows. Too many of my best friends been picked out by those blasted crows. I wish just once I could get my chomps on a crow. I’d show him what it feels like to be picked out.

I checked for smashers, then made my dash. I’m not as fast as I used to be, but I can still out-dash any fool cat. And most of the smashers, too. Not that I’m going to try. I’ve seen too many of my friends try to out-dash a smasher and end up crow pickings.

Soon as I hit the grass on the other side, that young fool Epp came at me. He had a round of back-and-forth on his mind, I could tell. But I was in no mood. I showed him my chomps and he backed off.

“Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick!” He was still up there, Squee, but I couldn’t tell if he was mad or crazy or what. I high-stepped through the deep leaves blown up around the trunk. Anymore, it hurts my knees when I have to kick so high. The young ones like it when leaves clutter the ground. It makes them feel happy, they say, all that crunch-crunch under foot and the cool air on top. But I hate it, that leaf clutter.

I’ve lost more acorns under that mess than I can count. Just before the last rain, I lost the finest, fattest walnut I ever got my chomps on, all because the fool maple I buried it next to dropped its leaves overnight. Blasted leaves. Especially those sycamore leaves. Broad, tough, deep, sharp, those sycamore leaves.

I went up the trunk as far as the second crotch. Mim was there, in a crook just above me. I startled her. She jumped and did a mid-air snap-back. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, Sil!” she clucked. In no uncertain terms, I told her, “Looky here, missy. It’s not my fault you aren’t giving proper 110

attention. Imagine if I’d been that striped cat. The one who’s almost as quick as we are. Imagine that! You’d be cat pickings by now.”

I expected her to apologize, but she just said, “Oh Sil, you old crock. Be quiet, will you? I’m trying to understand what Squee wants.”

Let me tell you, I was ready to take a chomp at that pretty, pretty tail of hers, just to teach some respect. But I didn’t. It was all too mysterious, this commotion, and whatever Squee was trying to do must’ve been working. They were coming from every direction. From my spot, I could see the whole Lak clan come bouncing over the roof on the old skinny woman’s house. Rikrik and his brother Tik, Chur and Ploo and Lup, the whole fool bunch of them. One after the other, flew off the roof to the lilac at the corner, they did, then came through the garden like a snake, each nose buried in the tail of the one ahead.

“Oh look, Sil,” Mim squealed. “It’s the Laks! I haven’t seen them since before the leaves grew back.” She went down the sycamore trunk like a crack of summer lightning, using my head for a grip on the way. “I’ll see if they wanna go some back-and-forth.”

Others came. They came from the sunrise side and the sunset side. They came from as far as I could see up the street, and down. A few came on the wiggle wires from the next road over. I didn’t know even half of them, they were coming from so far. Before it was over, I figure there were four, maybe five clans, all mixed up like fools, skitting from branch to branch on the sycamore, racing up and down and around the spruce and the catalpa, going the back-and-forth between the peony patch and the plum tree.

It was sort of exhilarating, if I say so myself. Especially when that man with the hat went by like he does, walking his snot-snorting dog, the one who always thinks he has a chance 111

of snagging one of us. Old Snot Snorter took off after one of the younger Laks, but all the sudden, he found himself looking into the chomps of six or seven others, gathered up in an angry clump with their tails flared out wide and high. I laughed until I almost dropped out of the tree to see that fool hound spin around and scoot back to hat-man with nothing but a whimper.

Even the striped cat wouldn’t come near. I caught sight of her slunk down in the ditch. Counting on she wouldn’t be noticed, it looked like to me.

Squee went even higher, up where it all bends down and feels like it’s going to break under your weight. “Quick!

Quick! Quick! Quick! Quick!” He kept it up until they stopped coming. More crows came too. Some of them landed way up there where Squee was. But he had no mind for them.

“Quick! Quick! Quick!” He hardly stopped, only to climb farther up, farther up. He was even above the crows. I thought for sure they’d be picking him out before all of this was over.

But when all that were going to come had come, he stopped and swung down, going some back-and-forth with others on his way. I even played a round. With Mim and Epp and old Rax, it was. It felt good and young. I was glad to be there. Happy, even.

At the end, the sun dropped behind the fat man’s roof and the others started heading back to their own yards. The Laks pooped out first, hungry I figure, and snaked back through the garden, up the lilac to the old skinny woman’s roof, and over the top. I probably won’t see any them again until the leaves grow back. If I make it that long.

The other clans dribbled off, back over the wiggle wires, back to Mother Walnut, back to the wild rose hedge, back to wherever was theirs. At the end, the only ones left were me and Mim and Squee, catching a breather in the crotch of the sycamore. “Then what was all the ruckus about?” I asked 112

Squee as we watched them scatter away.

“Don’t you remember, Sil? You used to start it. I learned it from you. Back when I was just a bush-tail and not much else. I watched you do it and I learned it from you. You could call them in from forever far, and it was such, such fun. Don’t you remember?”

And then I did.

113

ROSS HARGREAVES

AMERICAN SAUCE They save all the leftover ranch for the raccoons.

What did you think happens to all those party platters and cold-cut trays made up for the seminars, conferences, speaking engagements? They only ever finish the wine. Us night janitors dump the rest of that shit down the garbage chute lined with Febreeze sprinklers. Into the Cauldron. After a year the ranch glues the carrot sticks and grape tomatoes and ham slices into something with a crusty Jell-O consistency.

The night of the Hunt they raise the Cauldron out from the campus underground and dump it all in the middle of the quad. Raccoons can’t resist all that garbage. They live all over campus. In the trees and over by the river. If I could tell how many times one of those mothers has jumped out at me when I was taking out the trash. You know the night of the Hunt isn’t the only night people need rabies shots. When enough raccoons have begun to gorge themselves on ranch, that’s when the stadium lights turn on and “Tom Sawyer” by Rush starts blaring. The Hunt begins.

No guns of course. Not since the eighties and that drunken idiot blew his knee-cap off. Most of the hunters use make shift spears with their frat letters on’em. The dorm kids go at the raccoons with steak knives. They’re the ones lining up at the first-aid tents for rabies shots. Some kids dress up in camo, others as safari hunters, a few knights in cardboard armor. And yeah, some years bring the asshole dressed up like a grand wizard in the KKK. Tom Chambers was wearing a toga and sandals.

Most kids hang back. Armed to the teeth and I have to poke at them with my broom, tell them to get themselves on out there. Usually, the hunters get one or two raccoons and 114

the rest hightail it for the trees. Most Hunt nights are like the Superbowl. A let-down. Watching kids throw spears that bounce off trees. Hearing the raccoons hiss down on them.

That night first kill went to some punk kid who’d skewered himself a baby. It died with more dignity than the punk going on and on like he’d killed himself Jerry Sandusky. Before anyone could bag another, the rest of the raccoons made the trees. Everyone came back to the staging area to get away from the bag lunch smell and regroup. Sharpen their spears with pool chalk. Except Tom Chambers. He walked out under the trees in his toga. Armed with a trident that began its life as a rake. And now he’s dead and here you are talking to the janitor.

They say rabies was among the reasons Edgar Allen Poe died.

The kids are saying Tom wanted the rabies. Read that it makes you come like 40 times a day. Guess he was willing to risk the insanity and dying of thirst for that kind of pleasure.

And hell, maybe one of those raccoons that fell on him that night had rabies. He had a lot of skin showing for the Hunt.

The raccoons got ahold of plenty of it. Ripped it right off his bones while he waited for the orgasms to start.

And then everyone’s screaming and freaking out worse than the knee-cap incident.

Now I don’t know what you think of me and my culpability in all this mess. Depends on how radicalized your cable news channel is. I will say, get rid of the Hunt they’ll just kill ’em all with poison. I pay five bucks a credit and take one creative writing class every semester. Most working nights I find an empty room and read until it’s time to clock off. Tell people 115

I play piano at old folks home if you feel like giving me more humanity.

While they were picking up the pieces of Tom Chambers, me and the rest of the janitors left to scour the Cauldron with acid-based lather and hot water. You can’t wear clothes you’d ever want to wear again. Even with the masks they give us the smell of year-old ranch never leaves your nose hairs.

It is always spic and span sparkling when we’re done.

The gutters of campus run white with maggots. It seems like there’s been more of them since Tom Chambers died.

We’ll hose them out into the streets when the Administration invites up all the parents and their check-books.

So you’ll write for your blog or whatever and maybe the Hunt will get stopped and maybe it won’t. I have no doubt it does not matter. One night I will go throw out the trash and a horde of those things will spring out at me. Some might say it’ll be no more than I deserve.

Not the Japanese. They have no love for raccoons.

116

MICHAEL PHILLEY

BODIES The pimply-faced girl struggles to answer Quade’s questions. Her buzz cut might give her a nun-like appearance if she weren’t wearing blue denim cut-offs and canvas sneakers, her mouth outlined in berry-red lip gloss. Her seventeenth birthday, just a few days ago, was a disaster. She wouldn’t have told her boyfriend if she’d known he would freak out like he did.

“Jimmie’s the only one who knows,” she says, “and he talked me into coming here.”

Slouched beside the girl, her boyfriend scratches at the stubble on his chin. One side of his neck displays a bold multicolored tattoo — a disembodied arm, its biceps bulging, the hand grasping a flaming torch. Below the arm, the word, “FREEDOM.” The girl isn’t showing. Quade thinks it’s still the first trimester, but he isn’t sure. Drugs can suppress the endocrine system, keeping a body thin.

“What will it cost?” the boyfriend asks, fidgeting with his car keys.

“It depends,” says Quade. “Dr. Weerasinghe will do a pelvic exam. If it’s normal, you’re looking at five hundred.”

“Fuck,” mumbles the boyfriend, slumping lower in his chair. The girl stares at her sneakers.

Her eyes move to the calendar hanging on an otherwise bare gray wall. It shows a hummingbird hovering over a brilliant red flower, the days of August in thirty-one white boxes.

“When can it be done?” she asks.

“You’re in luck,” says Quade. “There’s been a cancellation. Not to rush you, but Wednesday of next week will work.

You’d check in at two o’clock, probably go home by four.”

The boyfriend straightens from his slouch, “We can do 117

that. Right, Babe?”

“I don’t know…what if something goes wrong?” The girl’s face is pale, her pimples fiery.

“Don’t worry. Dr. Weerasinghe has done hundreds of procedures. You’ll be sedated. You won’t feel any pain.”

A long silence, “Okay.”

She signs the consent form. Quade follows them to the door.

“Drink plenty of water. We don’t want you to come in dehydrated.”

Quade turns in the patient record and clocks out. He’s facing yet another weekend cloistered in his dreary apartment, the discount dry cleaners next door sucking all the AC from the building. He’ll drink some cold beer and maybe watch a few movies on TV. He’ll take his usual evening dose of Klonopin to help him sleep. Monday will arrive and he’ll return to doing intake at the nondescript clinic in south LA. It’s the only work he could find after his precipitous departure from the Army Medical Corps. What was it the Army shrink had said to him in Frankfurt? Not all wounds can easily be seen.

Country music on 92.9 FM counters the anxiety that has stalked Quade all day. He pops the tab on a can of Red Bull and turns up the volume. Carrie Underwood’s voice floods the cab of his pickup as he merges onto the 405.

Friday rush hour is bad, and sure enough the southbound traffic slows to a crawl. Quade sees a flashing red light in the distance. Creeping along he comes to the source of the trouble. A rusted out Ford Tempo tilts against a chain-link fence that runs parallel to the freeway. One front tire is blown and the bumper dangles loose. Standing next to a highway patrolman is the boyfriend with the neck tattoo. The girl squats near them, smoking a cigarette.

Quade stops and stretches across the seat to roll down the 118

passenger window. The patrolman scowls at him and yells, “Hey, move along!”

“Sorry, officer,” he shouts back. “I know these people.

They’ve just come from a meeting where I work.”

The patrolman motions for him to pull over. Quade parks behind the patrol car and gets out. The flashing red strobe makes all of them shimmer even in daylight.

The boyfriend rocks back and forth from one foot to the other, like he needs the men’s room.

“This day is shit!” he growls.

“Jimmie couldn’t help what happened,” the girl pleads.

“He’s a good driver.”

“Nothing on the road,” says the boyfriend. “Then, WHAM! Next thing I know we’re fishtailing into the fence.”

“Maybe it was an animal.” The girl stubs out her cigarette on the pavement.

The patrolman nods, “It happens.” He jots something on his clipboard. “Maybe a pet that’s strayed. They’ll survive on garbage, you know.” He looks up from the clipboard and shakes his head, “Around here it’s slim pickings. Nothing but oil storage tanks and concrete.”

The patrolman’s partner has been crouching at a distance, near the fence. He stands and walks towards them. “It’s a coyote, a female,” he says. “Not a pretty sight…it was carrying pups.”

The girl looks towards the fence. “You won’t leave it there, will you?”

“No,” says the patrolman. “LA Sanitation will pick it up.

They’ll take it to the landfill.”

Quade imagines the coyote and her unborn pups buried under mounds of rubbish. Nothing to mark the spot; their deaths forgotten.

His mind conjures images of shrapnel-riddled flesh, shattered bones, bleeding on the brain — mangled soldiers, many 119

barely older than the girl. He remembers cursing at God, and his Iraqi counterpart praying to Allah, as they administered morphine to the wounded and dying. An old woman had entered the field hospital and detonated a bomb cleverly disguised as an infant in her arms.

“I’ve got a pickup. Let me haul it away.”

“Might as well,” says the patrolman, “Before it begins to smell.”

The patrolman’s partner helps Quade lift the dead coyote onto the bed of the pickup.

The girl sits squeezed in the middle; her boyfriend rides shotgun. Her knees get in the way when Quade shifts gears.

After several miles, she breaks their silence.

“That coyote gives me the creeps.”

“Fuck the coyote!” says the boyfriend.

“Think about it, Jimmie. It came out of nowhere.”

“So?” “It had babies, for Christ’s sake!”

“You’re lucky the car didn’t flip,” Quade says.

“Damn right,” says the boyfriend.

The girl half-whispers, “Maybe it should’ve.”

Quade veers onto the Garden Grove Freeway and follows it to the Bristol Street exit. “Turn left,” the boyfriend says.

“It’s half a mile to the trailer park.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Quade. “I grew up here.”

They take a route he could follow in his sleep — over the railroad crossing at Santa Clara Avenue, past the Mexican grocery on 17th Street, through a classic neighborhood of two-bedroom homes built during the tidal wave of migrants to Orange County after World War II, all with tidy lawns surrounded by roses, gladioli, and bougainvillea. He delivered the Orange County Register to these houses, waking at five in 120

the morning to fold papers and stuff them into a canvas bag draped over the handlebars of his bike. He would finish the route just in time to grab a bowl of cold cereal and hop on the school bus, his mother still asleep, his father who knows where, long gone.

The trailer park sprawls behind a shopping mall where one of the last orange groves in the county stood defiant until developers razed it.

“Over there, by the Target store,” says the boyfriend. They enter the parking lot and stop.

“We’ll walk from here. Come on, Babe, let’s go.”

“Thanks for the lift,” says the girl. She hesitates as if she wants to say more, but doesn’t.

“Wednesday at two o’clock, right?” Quade reminds her.

“Sure.”

The engine groans and shocks squeal as Quade’s pickup climbs the rough Jeep road. He hasn’t been to the Santa Ana Mountains in years, but he remembers a pretty spot ahead at Black Star Canyon. He parks at a small roundabout by a trailhead and steps out to take in the view. Countless rocks and boulders lie scattered at the base of high cliffs bordering the chaparral.

The sun is setting when Quade finishes building the cairn. A full moon rises as he places the dead coyote on a bed of pine needles. His hands are bloody, but he doesn’t mind.

He sits motionless on a slab of granite, his eyes red and moist.

It’s good there’s no body bag.

Hours pass. The broad swath of the Milky Way is like a stream of silver sequins. Quade hasn’t witnessed such a multitude of stars since the outpost in the desert, when he would go without sleep until sunrise. He remembers how it was to look at a night sky that had guided shepherds in biblical times.

The howls interrupt Quade’s musing. They are faint, as 121

if coming from a distance, but soon the howling becomes louder, deep and melodious. A chorus of howls echo against the canyon walls.

The howling stops as suddenly as it began. A shooting star fades and disappears at the horizon.

Quade doesn’t waiver from his position. He’s a loyal sentry, bearing witness. He wonders how it would feel to be nothing but a point of light, without a body to slow him down, streaking through the darkness and shining fiercely.

122

A C ROBERTSON

COYOTE Out of the orchard he runs Like a fugitive, rushing From fields, a thin fading Blanket of mist offers no cover.

Under the bead of the sun, Expecting no mercy, blowing up vapors, He cries through the onion field, Labors down the beet rows, stumbles Through the corn stubble, Limps across puncture weed, Scrambles the rock pocked butte, He tumbles with the tumbleweed Below the cinder pit, To land in the bitterbrush, His hungry home.

Later, a pheasant springs up Like a refugee, rising from cheat grass, into the air Brushing free with the beat of his wings His tail feathers corkscrew out of the scrub.

His plump shadow shades coyote’s empty gaze.

123

HEIDI KRAAY

HOW COULD YOU EVER FIND AIR there’s a different world you see, when you’re schizophrenic when you’re there in that world for real, you’re drowning, you don’t know how you could ever find air and any source of heat (like a body a drink cigarette) helps your feet find floor even ocean floor even bottom you’ll know when you drown there’s nothing but kicking and thrashing eyes bleeding you can’t speak can’t breathe can’t yell for help …so: those days my body passed door-to-door swimming, I flew upside downside, not sure which way was up I’m not saying it’s your fault or yours (or yours) I’m just saying you’re an animal and so are you and you

because you didn’t pay attention, long enough to notice, I was sick you made things worse (and you and you [and you]) I don’t blame you (but I have to stop blaming me too) you’ll understand if you ever live underwater for years:

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you don’t hear the same you can’t see for all that salt, the tides the dark the cold you can’t smell or you choke and everything tastes like weight

so what? so I can’t take it back those years when I died in unknown stinking arms I can’t count, those years… but I can say: Please. Please. Please, look at those girls you pick up (PLEASE) pay attention to those lost, dead-looking ones they don’t need your hands on them to be human, think a second longer (please) they may be silent they may want it but some of them are filling with water and your hands and waists stuck together aren’t helping them find air it’s not your job to save them but maybe pay attention and go home earlier than you(r animal needs) want All is not this brutal acid falling on your face. There is touch that is love that is longing.

I am not your fault — I can still feel sorry — I can still ask favors.

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ANITA TANNER

GAUNTLET Be pyrite or flint, be the one who starts a fire, the one who survives it.

Swallow your life whole, one gulp and the nourishment goes down to your grave.

Loosen the hold of visible things.

Open your heart to its flash point and burn.

Down on your animal knees you’ll see we have underrated many things, mostly stones.

Drop your story, unguard your heart, add depth to your sorrow where the quest for God is repeatedly lost and found.

Pare your five senses as you would an artichoke, down to unimaginable delicacy.

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CREATURE Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.

Yet he is lord of all the animals. — GEORGE ORWELL

NICHOLAS DARLINTON

EMBOLDEN To embolden my first tree frog with physicality was both exhilarating and simple. I narrowed my eyes and focused my mind, dropped my jaw and whispered the 76 flits to bring the thing to life. One moment, a green flat ink shape on the page; then crouched and shimmering on my work desk. It looked curious and unaccustomed; it was paralyzed by the sight of me or of life in general. To exist can be confounding.

Trent clapped twice in appreciation, and I scooped the frog up and marched to the Amphivian Quarters to place it in the terrarium labeled Baja California treefrog, sexing her on the way. Fourth of her kind, another species securely brought back to existence in sorcerous captivity. It felt good; a clear step up from my months practicing pulling earthworms to life, a clear step toward my teenage dream of restoring the great and numerous species of the past. But it wasn’t enough.

I spent the rest of the day indexing species of toad and crossreferencing what we knew of dart frogs: some folios suggested poisonous, others harmless. This is the risk of our current work. Toxic skins, poisonous fangs. We are tasked with bringing to life the creatures we have never known, and can only research in the decaying texts of the dead centuries. I ultimately determined that we should consider the species a threat and wear our protective gear, regardless of the conflicting information.

Then Trent emboldened a mid-18th century hand drawing of a Foothill Yellow-legged frog. Trent’s sandy face shifted to a smile, his curtain of black hair grazed his brow, and he looked over his glasses at me. “I’d piss myself, too, if I was summoned to life on a Monday.” The yellow strips under the frog’s legs were not visible in the original drawing and the 131

colorful vibrancy was amusing and, yes indeed, unfortunately placed. Trent mused: “I wonder if we could fix that little oversight. Maybe make a less shameful coloring for him. Maybe add some red to cheeks to show his embarrassment.” Trent whistled on his way to the Amphivian Quarters, and I sipped on sage salt tea.

That’s how we worked for the next two months. Quietly, diligently. I became an expert at frogs, even emboldening worn, water-stained paintings into physicality. Once from a crosshatched charcoal drawing in a first edition encyclopedia, I pulled forth a Northern Leopard frog, its rusty-brown base pulsing with mossy spots. My skill was developing. As I stared at its glossy expanding chest, I whispered, “That’s magic.”

By the time Trent and I moved into amphibians with extended vertebrae, 15 salores long or more, the work was just work. We toiled through newts drudgingly, axolotls being the only flash of excitement amongst them. Then Trent took a week of vacation with his wife to the Pan Andreas Islands, on my recommendation, leaving me to give physicality to the limbless amphibians of greater than 20 salores. I encased my fifth Mexican burrowing caecilian and returned to my desk to pretend at researching. I ultimately nodded off and dreamt of a great red hawk jumping from the page, talons scraping my open textbook, wings spread to the edges of my desk, a goldsunburst eye fixed on me.

The following Wednesday, Trent came back different, mumbling of island sun and haunted by palm shadows. The humorous shift of his eyes now held a omniscient glance, a hallowed locking. He toted a folio daily, bound in fresh leather, tucked under his arm and when I was not looking, during lunch or before clocking in I would hear him slowly flip through the pages; and it worried me, and it intrigued me. On three occasions, I flipped through it frantically while he adjusted the humidity of the Ambivian. The first ten pages 132

had thick single charcoal lines, sprawled fitfully, separately, as hills, as hooks, as squiggles. On page eleven the lines doubled, entwined on both ends to make thin crescents. They gained a dimension that frightened me. By thirteen, another line split just above the bottom one. It shot through me: the smirk of a snake. He’d drawn them primitive and stupid. They were more the cranks of a turntill, more the work of a crazed demigod, than an evolved creature.

On my fourth attempt to explore his drawings, I was discovered. Trent announced his return to the room with a quiet cough. I looked up at him and said, “These are dangerous, Trent.” He nodded assent. I looked down, turning to a figure that swiveled back and forth from the right to the left page, dominating both. “This has never existed.”

“But it can.”

My eyes narrowed.

He said, “We can invent; we can make what has not been.”

I replied, “We do not even understand that which has existed before us. I forbid it.” His reckless desires shifted us.

His madness gave me authority. We brewed in silence, sipping sage salt tea. We catalogued reptiles quietly, diligently.

He left early, giving me opportunity to as well. As I grabbed my satchel to walk home, the bulk and heft off-set me: Trent’s folio was inside.

His blasphemy kept me awake. I blazed through the drawings repeatedly, angry and fascinated. The possibility burned my fingers, but I knew its piping danger as well. With each page, Trent’s work developed from rudimentary to refined, achingly tangible. These were slender beasts that could be, that had not yet been, and that could be forever. I slept sweaty, if at all.

I arrived at work early and placed his book on his desk.

The morning was silence between us, save for the turning of thick encyclopedias and the sipping of tea. After eleven, he 133

turned his chair. One hand was placed on the arm rest. One hand was placed on the edge of his desk. His glasses were on.

Leaning forward, he said, “We could.”

My response: “I thought we should start this morning with an initial round of reptile varieties of similar size and feature.

You can research and embolden the Eastern blackneck garter snake, while I attempt the checkered garter snake.”

Snakes did not pause and consider their sudden existence as the frogs did. Upon emboldening, they slithered off the encyclopedia, darted as our fingers braceleted their bodies. We completed the garter snake sets that morning in a taut silence.

When I returned to my desk from placing the last in the Reptivian Quarters, I found that Trent had placed a beautiful sketch on top of my desk. He had drawn a hefty snake, reticulated patterns ending in two bold stripes upon its back.

Charcoal with freshly bruised shading. The shape was refined, possible. It enraged me. “Trent, it is not our place to create.

We don’t even know what this snake would be like. What would it mean? Damn it, don’t be such a child.”

He said, “The danger of what I have imagined is equal to the danger of what has been.”

I crumpled it and quickly turned our pages to the next set of drawn extinct creatures: the coral and milk snakes. “We start now.” He didn’t reply. We both dropped our jaws, and our tongues started the series of rattles and flits. My milk snake gained physicality first: bright red, black and white rings; I scooped him up and walked to the Reptivian. When I returned, Trent stood arched over the encyclopedia on his desk, wide-eyed and panting, both hands gripping the desk.

Beneath him the snake was slowly hiding itself; half of the coral snake was already obscured from sight by the desk and half still swerved out, its tail almost touching Trent’s right foot, and from his left hand sparkled two beads of blood.

I smiled. “Feisty.” I put on my leather gloves and roped 134

the snake up from the floor, controlling it from the base of the neck. I encaged it in the Reptivian and returned to my desk. Trent tended his wound and went to make us tea.

By the time he returned, the bite had swollen and his breathing had become the slow heaving of a handsaw. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes: “It’s proof.” He slowed down, I slowed down, time slowed down. Then he altogether stopped.

The reality of the situation did not take shape in my mind for a while, as we both sat there, different kinds of motionless. Then my throat shrank into my chest and pulled down the tears. I did not move or breathe until I was smoothing out Trent’s crumpled drawing on my desk. I studied the bend of the charcoal snake’s angles, the geometry of this new thing.

I touched the shadowed belly, my sorrow, and my rage: at Trent, at the snake, and above all at myself.

I wiped aside my tears, stepped back, locked my eyes on the charcoal, dropped my jaw, and whispered it to life.

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CHARLES (CHAS) FRODE

THE WRITHING SNAKES A writhing ball of alicante snakes along a rural road in Mexico, and all the men from Ochómitas steer their fading pickups over each squirming ball of struggling snake they meet, and when they gape in the rear view mirror, the snakes are still thrashing, flailing, and jerking, even after the laughing men stop looking and are blithely away, many kilometers far down the same road.

A long fence running to their horizon, with infinite stiles and anonymous posts that converge in a point beyond their sight, pull us forward now into them all, and continue as we do, slightly bent to one side or another, rooted, connected, more decrepit, brittle, and white with every winter’s freeze and thaw, still containing our lives’ stock, to lean against who holds whom up.

Muted and slow-motioned shattering of the women’s hearts, like the opening of a Shostakovich symphony for eleven-million Russian war dead, like the ice-cold silent answer of snow, like mutilation, rape, and impalement in Goya’s “Disasters of War,” like a fearful sequestering and mental handcuffing of their own dear children, and the brittle husks of those women’s men.

In a scanned visual field the mind and eye’s f-stop brings into focus another door, a scream, a speedometer, piercings, the white and light dawn gold, a moon and a sun, a woman walking a dachshund by a man in Madras shorts, a motorcycle bar, a slowly stumbling red-faced man, another left or right turn, all there, in every moment, picked out by a turn of the head’s neck.

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Images concatenate in mind like particles or waves of light, a sequence or a simultaneity of past and present, beyond someone’s ken, an understated face or voice, the persistent memory of having once been loved, a scent of intimacy, a shopping list and stamps, the suddenness of a weekend, a rogue and transparent future, what to do next, emptiness, a silence, disappointment.

Cinnabar or vermeil exposures; viridian green vestigial washes; mazarine blue skies in a Hagia Sophia; leveled grey and atrous Iraqi cities of unseen golden sanctuaries; cretaceous faces mop up claret pools of inculpable blood; then fulvous and gamboge fields of lentils, wheat, rice, and barley; a puerperal cape of mountain night: colors are the argent beauty of ecstasy and dread.

Every sound and utterance springs from a still-point of silence: a sob of loss, a bullet’s crack, lascivious whispers, sudden rain drops starting and stopping, wheezing and snoring, a difficult question and painful answer, John Coltrane, a hammer on an iron anvil, washing machine’s chuka-chuka, ravished shrieks of rapture, a knocking gasoline engine, and every “Thank you.”

An onomatopoeic ocean of every thing and being’s name, chanted in unison, antiphonally on every side by mortals, vapors, spirits, helpers, seas and earths, colors and songs, all musics of a common mind, and when a name is uttered, each colossal shadow echoed eclipses bystanders’ hearts left behind, in line, who also wait for the symphonic invocation of their own names.

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A melody sticks in your mind, and when you hum it, the rhythm of every wooden or skin drum, every plucked string of gut or steel, every calabash, thumb piano, flute, clavés, didgeridoos, berimbaus, throat singers, and all wailers everywhere, merge with the cacophónic clamor of all the world’s music and song in harmony with the rhythm of the cave and concerto heartbeat.

All that is conceptualized and sensed by every sentient being, unspoken from scars of muteness, ignorance, and fear, now articulated and reverberating into the world’s eardrum of suffering and delight, and every entity’s innermost and intimate secrets flowing out, from the dissolution of dimension, the feeling inhibitions in every individual’s breast, and with it the guardians arrive.

All minds beget the field where all leftovers of the past, the electrical excitation and vibratory presence of the present, and hopeful and evocative invocations of a future synthesize piece-by-piece the gruel of our thoughts, experiences, and memories, without dimension, a going-to and merging-with all other unapparent but gorgeous still vibrating othersides of everything.

Complex sensations, scents, aromas, tastes, and sheens of all cultures portaged through ancient stone and modern steel ports of intellection, curiosity, and commerce, on boats and the backs of mules and men, wealth, speculation, sweat, and slavery, sugar and spice, rope and gunpowder, a mulatto and mestizo exotica, a breathtaking bazaar of human allure, seduction and exchange.

The unmatched and singular mental vision of art and design, the crosshatching or shading of form, the disappearance of 138

perspective to a point, a refracted beam of light makes ochre or madder red, mastery and technique disappearing into the material, a Rembrandt, Klimt, or Wright, who else breathes God’s breath, touches His mouth, builds Eden of color and line?

On a sandstone and sedimentary portico of mind, a writhing ball gathers my consciousness, assembles and dissembles every faceted sparkle, scintillates across an array of synaptic network, rollercoasters around a roulette wheel of dates and time, a perpetual spinning of ionic fabric, awareness thrown out like a gathered fishing net that unfolds into a spiral galaxy.

The writhing ball is everything, controls autonomic nervous systems, voluntary and involuntary emotions, love at first sight, alienation and divorce, my recipe for double chocolate brownies, removing a stubborn staple with my fingernail, aiming a twelve-gauge at a flying clay pigeon, and deciding whether to write another stanza in this poem about my mind, or not.

Whirling planets precess to this life, velocity in Coriolar and oblique beauty of poignance and desolation after fifty, where a chromosomal eddy in a larger maelstrom sucks everything down into itself, an unavoidable undertow that hisses, snarls, and spits as a courtesy to itself, heavenly vertigo in a moment, bliss, and a reaching out to grab the snakes, the writhing snakes.

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CHARLES (CHAS) FRODE

A CRANE IN THE WILLOWS You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel.

Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exultation and horror that her presence excites.

Robert Graves, The White Goddess If I awaken to recall a flooding flight of veering stalls, soaring and floating, Effortlessness rushing, pivoting reversals, tacking and wheeling according to my will; If I mark my terrene journey forward with each dream-step back down from my sky-play, Where my wings beckon and wield invisible authority to gambol with the wind’s body; And if I leave the skies assured of a capacity and understanding both veridical and vaulting, Thrall to my body’s plumed and volant perceptibility, a responsiveness to sky, air and wind; Then I am a crane in the willows, man-creature floating in the realm of the White Goddess, Touched down again to rest a moment, a lifetime, near the puissant mystery of The Beloved.

Let me dream again and coax the power from impermanence, snatch his hand in motion, Guess the sacred names of each god and goddess, charm the power of their immutability, And enter the lubricious pantheon of sensation and fecundity that multiplies my mothers, 140

Each caliginous breath an unconscious sea of swelling and inundation, diastolic embrace.

Absorb each germ and seed of wishing, willing, and invisible transformation, all in its time, All in time to surrender convulsive sobbing ecstasy, spasms of impacted and shriveled images Release their invisible hold, roots pierced through an unconscious floor into my flooded grotto, Transparent and turquoise from the humming, deep currents of her dark, hidden basilica.

I will walk through an open doorway, approach her seat of power, disperse myself as incense, And with fervent stylus inscribe words and pictures in her soft clay, a rebus for The Goddess, Vast undulating fields of barley and oats, ripe heads swelling to an inner motioning, Darkening green lengths of slender willow, strong, pliant and supple, put to good use, Everything that savors divine adoration, hinge between the worlds of mind and sensation, Intimate with under and over worlds, as if I’d blinked awake, and still been in her Presence, Whose names are Woman, and when invoked, sonant, matronymic forces marshal and deploy, Universes expand, galaxies merge, planets spin, moons revolve, seas swell, and I dream this.

Who can imagine reckoning such affairs of the heart back ten, twenty, or thirty-thousand years, To stone — La Gran’mère du Chimquière, La Dame de Saint-

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Sernin, Venus von Willendorf, Unearthed and chipped from her own granite and limestone ashes, parous and mesmerizing, To the bewildering but sonorous metathesis of adoration — Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Danu, Nerthus, Gaia, Hera, Artemis, Venus, Umai, Maya, Mahimata, Aditi, Devi, Shakti, Mary, Black Madonna, my mother’s name, names which summon the od and auras of the women-creatures Who have governed the shape and rituals of my own secret invocations, pastoral swellings of Lush Vaughn Williams thronging strings, impressionistic Ponce guitar codas plucked pizzicato.

Gather grain with stone and wooden sickle, gather and bind in bundles, thresh and winnow, Prepare the ancient foods, divide bread, pour beer, eat honey, feed the family of The Goddess, Endless cycles in her Earth, her Water, my seed, endless cycles of planting and harvesting, In her body’s furrows with planting sticks and seeds, from her rows with my strong hands I pluck your roots, worship your earth with fire and seed, offerings of celts, arrowheads, beads, Shaped and pierced with sacred words and chants, earth and body rituals, Ouroborous, I say, Mounting her Earth, while seasons emerge from her altar — blood, water, Woman mystery.

I place stones around Woman, around her Woman altar, stones that will live far beyond me.

With my finger I trace the double spirals on the stone door — dawn to dawn, dark solstice to 142

Dark solstice, my birth to my final journey, then on my knees I enter the beehive barrow, put on The sacred antlers of the stag, drink the blood of the white bull, eat the sacred toadstool of Dyonesius, spin the wheel, enter the labyrinth, listen to the gods’ voices, see four boxes, await The seven heroes and nine princesses, and with them we burn the oaken log, and in darkness we Hew a cunning vessel to the other world, Elysion, in darkness I travel to the other side, around And around I enter her, on my knees I enter, her darkness I enter, touch the sacred Omphalos I enter, realm of the darkest goddess where I die, realm of the goddess, where I live forever.

I pass houses from whose barren eyes issues golden incandescence, secret, from the center It burns, a beacon, a warning, passage in the night, boatman on the river Styx, reminder, Metaphor for the finest love filament of charred, smoldering, flickering, searing Goddess, Incalescent and beckoning, like light, follow me inside, she whispers, where I will feed you, Put bitter soma in your open mouth, burn white sage over your graceful body, touch your Enthroned chakras, lift your dimensional presence into a sky of heavens, illuminate the golden Point of your awareness, flood your emptiness with consecrated nectars from my innermost Altar, blessings upon blessings, limitless, my love, with no arrival or departure.

Now, however, as these black and white plumes fall from my body and dark emerald leaves fall 143

From yours, each feather and blade syncopates on its breeze, rods and cones create their image On my eyes’ sun, and every neuron in every ganglion in every tissue in every creature resonates To the way those feathers and leaves oscillate, the way photons penetrate invisibly ever more Deeply, and how I am pulled and condensed even more thinly, densely to you like orphic Hallucinations now recall years later, fractal blooms of urgent yet calming lucidity.

So I ask, must this seductive scurf of scales slough off unceasing, never still its syncopation, Oscillation, assembling and disassembling, wrapping and encircling? and you answer.

There, as they encircled him with the five-fold bond, honey- sotted, within the circle of stones, By the sacred oak, they beat Hercules, blinded and flayed him, castrated and impaled him, they Divide his regal body into joints, catch his blood in alder basins and asperse the tribes gathered, Roast his flesh over oak-loppings, dance the figure-eight and tear his strength with gnashing Teeth, and in an alderwood boat send his head and genitals down the lost river to an islet where He no longer makes the rain from meteors in an oaken chest; no longer does a lion-skinned hero Make love to the fifty water princesses of the mountain goddess, heal with a quail and oak leaf, Or bear his weapons of hawthorn blossoms, acorns, rock doves, mistletoe and a serpent.

So I am adrift now, crane in this willow tree, abstracted in this scene, grieving a Hercules, and I write my grief 144

With tree magic, divination from the thirteen consonants—the birch of inception, mountain ash of quickening, And ash of sea power, the alder is fire, willowed enchantment, the Hawthorn invokes chastity, oak is the door to The gods, holly increases, hazel is the tree of Wisdom, the vine is joy and exhilaration, ivy is resurrection and Intoxication, elder is doom; And the five vowels, favorites of the White Goddess — silver fir is Queen of the Druids, gorse is The Spring equinox, heather is the queen bee’s passion, white poplar is a shield of old age, and The yew is the tree of death. I am all these, all these, and I write their sacred names on woman.

My words are enchantment, both a divination and a shield, and I am old now, beyond not Knowing that all trees are hallowed and numinous, intimate with the body of their woman, as I Too with each woman know that all are hallowed and numinous, and the instinct in my hollow Bones and ethereal feathers guides me from willow to willow, blind, in other worlds, unsleeping When all sleep, vigilant and gratified, yet flying on, not to rest but to trace double spirals on her Stone doors, spin the wheel again and enter her labyrinth on my knees, and there, stare out into The darkness from this darkness, see her honeyed incandescent eyes looking back for me, And there follow her through the doorway of dreams to her darkest altar of sky-ecstasy.

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MIKE RITTHALER

RAVEN COURTS A STAR “He’s an odd bird, that Joe Raven,” said Jenni in a low voice. I nodded in conspiracy.

Florence still heard her. “I don’t care what you think, Jenni, we should worry when he disappears. I don’t think anyone else does.”

Behind the counter, Indigo popped her gum and smiled.

“I think it’s cool how free he is. Nothing holds him down.”

Jenni busied herself cleaning tables. “Free to come and mooch a meal, you mean. He’s probably just hiding out in that shack of his. I swear to God I don’t know what’s keeping it up.”

He was an odd bird, Joe Raven.

Two weeks ago, I had sat down next to him at Smokey’s.

Indigo had turned get my coffee cup, which hung behind the counter.

Joe spun his stool around to face me. “So, I was down in the crick fishing for them rainbows, caught a big one, too, when this one says to me, Joe, I’ll tell you a secret if you let me free. So I go, well you tell me that secret and we’ll see if it’s a good one. I do like trout, you know, and I was awfully hungry.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So that fish, realizing he was in a bit of a predicament, told me he dreamed of having a pair of butterfly wings, silver and blue. Ain’t that great? Butterfly wings! But I says to him that wings ain’t good for nothing, and ain’t ever done me any good. Then I fried him right up.

“Butterfly wings!” The whole story had doubled him over in great croaks of laughter.

“Wings?” I said.

His face suddenly became tight, and his eyes lost their 146

sparkle.

“It ain’t no good. I can’t take another winter here alone, that grey wolf ever day at me, gnawing at me.” He looked across the counter where Indigo slowly putting glasses away.

His eyes took on a deep focus. “I remember now. I need to get a wife. That usually does the trick!”

Hop-stepping up, he turned and headed out the door. He hadn’t been seen in town since.

Now, Florence looked down her nose. “Jenni Ursus, how many people still live here? Not enough that we can afford to lose them. Tomorrow, we should start looking through the cabins and the refinery, and if we don’t find him, I’m calling the sheriff.”

Jenni’s retort was cut short as the front door of Smokey’s was flung open. Joe Raven stood there. His face was scrubbed and his hair combed back into a tight ponytail and greased with God only knows what.

A pair of tight white pants grasped his legs, and overly large tan shoes clung to his feet. His suit jacket was awe-inspiring, the large butterfly collar set perfectly, gleaming with rhinestones.

His eyes flashed around the room, and then he strode in, head held high, feet swinging in a proud step. He walked right up to Indigo who was slowly wiping the counter and dropped two crumpled dollar bills.

“I need some quarters. For the jukebox.”

Indigo looked at him with raised eyebrows and opened the cash drawer. She swept the bills off the counter and counted out the eight quarters, dropping them carefully into his hand.

He winked back at her, his eyes dark and very large. She grinned in return, her cheeks bright red. Jingling the quarters 147

in his hand, he walked back across the room to the old jukebox and plugged them in. He flipped through the catalog and punched in some numbers. The entire room watched silently, every eye on him. An ancient honky-tonk began to play and Joe Raven began to dance.

It was absurd, of course. He was a scrawny old man, duded up in some cast-offs from the Goodwill, strutting out on the creaky floor — a skinny rooster with a borrowed set of feathers. At first, he moved like a puppet on stretched-out strings, his shifts a beat too late, his slides out of time with the song.

As the song hit the second refrain, everything synchronized. His movements gained strength, and suddenly his two-step was driving the song, anticipating and rolling out the words with each foot fall. In the dim light, his face smoothed out, the skin losing some of its leather. With each swing of his hips, the shirt showing under the jacket seemed tighter, as if the muscles were expanding and gaining definition.

When the first song ended there was only shocked silence; my own mouth fell wide open. Then Johnny Cash began plucking the guitar percussion of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Joe started a different dance, not the two-step, but a slow circular motion, his hands going up in the air, then back down together with the deep metronome of the beat. Soft showers of sparks began to fall from each clap, bouncing bright and incredible on the wood floor.

What the hell was the old fool up to now?

Florence and Jenni were riveted on Joe. Florence’s fingers began tracing lines and knots on the table in front of her. As I watched, shimmering threads formed in the old wood, a carpet of light and glimmer.

Each time Florence’s fingers moved over the threads, a new pattern would appear, lighting her face and eyes from below.

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“He’s going to take me out of here, Randy.” Jenni’s cheeks were moist and her gaze strained into the far nowhere. “He’s gonna take me out of here, and we’re going to drive, drive, until the stars fall.” I could see her body swaying in time to Joe’s handclaps.

“Hell yeah! I knew someone here could party!” It was Indigo who jumped over the counter to finally dance with Joe. She began on the opposite side of the circle he had traced out in the floor with dying sparks. Her orbit counterpointed his, her hands rising while his fell.

Now the sparks from Joe’s hands changed color.

Clap! A shower of green.

Clap! A shower of red.

Clap! A shower of white.

Even I was mesmerized.

Indigo’s claps also began to drop sparks, each deep blue as a Christmas light. But Indigo’s sparks didn’t disappear when they hit the floor, instead flowing together into a shimmering path of light. On its edges, I saw small flames flaring up on the old wood.

I tried to grab Joe as he went by — “Joe, it’s on fire! The goddamn floor is on fire!” — only to snatch my hand back from the wave of heat blazing off of him. He kept dancing, his eyes closed.

For a few moments, Jenni and Florence did nothing, before both shook off their dreams. Florence screamed, and Jenni grabbed a pitcher of water to throw at the fire, which had grown into waist-high multicolored curtains of heat and light. The flames waved and bobbed, falling as Joe and Indigo passed over them, flaring back up between them.

The water that Jenni threw only hissed to steam and disappeared. I tried to get to the fire extinguisher on the wall, but was driven back by the heat. We watched as flames embraced Indigo and Joe, licking their faces and hair with glow149

ing whispers of red, blue, and green.

A bright orange light flared on the table next to the circle; in a few moments the rest of Smokey’s would be consumed.

Jenni’s voice punched through the fire. “Joe you gotta get out of here! Indigo, it’s on fire, Indigo! Joe! Come on!”

Indigo’s face glowed bright silver, and her hair floated about her face as twisted strands of fiery light. Her eyes were closed in ecstasy, her claps keeping the rhythm of the song, sparks still streaming from her hands.

Joe turned his face and looked at us, a young man whose eyes were dark pools of midnight. Then he blinked, noticed the tables on fire, the fire swirling all around, and the bright intensity of Indigo. He leaped out of the circle, almost knocking us over. We all tumbled through the door and out into the street. I looked back to see Smokey’s wreathed in fire, thick black smoke funneling into the night. Strangely colored sparks flew from the flames, each one streaking far, far into the sky.

I could hear Jenni’s strangled cries as I stood up. She and Florence knelt beside Joe, who didn’t move. His jacket, pants and shirt were blackened and smoking, his face an old man’s again.

“Well, batshit and rotten corn!” Joe sat up suddenly, incensed.

“Figures this would happen again.” His hands patted at the burnt jacket. “It wasn’t cheap neither.” He stood up and started walking into the darkness.

“Joe?” Jenni’s voice was quiet.

The deep shadows under the trees were silent, until there came a great whoosh and thrum of heavy wing beats escaping into the night.

150

ANTHONY McARTHUR

APHIDS IN BABYLON “Oh my God,” Mom said, looking out at the cab parked in front of the house, “she’s back.”

The bent figure of a seventy-year-old woman looked after the cab and waved to the driver as he pulled away. She took a few steps on the sidewalk toward the front door then stopped, leaving her worn bags on either side of her boots. She lifted her head up and closed her eyes, taking a long deep breath, then opening them wide again and fixing a look on her face as if to take control of the house with her ecstatic smile.

“Jesus,” Dad said, “What planet is she arriving from this time?”

“Brian,” Mom said, “last time she said she’d be here for two days and it turned into three months.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen this time.” Dad rolled up his sleeves to demonstrate his resolve.

As the doorbell rang Mom snuck upstairs to hide for a moment while dad conducted the intake. She’d be back down shortly to tell Aunt Clara, in her best phony sing-song voice how good it was to see her again and how wonderful she looked.

Dad said Aunt Clara was crazy. Maybe so. But she was nowhere near as boring as my parents.

Dad was president and CEO of Interglyph Inc., an international clearing house for all things analog. Mom was his copilot. Together they had resurrected the family finances from the Great Recession. They both travelled all over the place and I was often left in command of my sister Melanie (a worldclass ten-year-old pain-in-the-neck) and little brother Joel (the youngest, totally spoiled). Anyway, they both worked insane hours and made lots of dough. If they could, they would lord it over Clara for being a hapless international vagabond (as Mom would say), if it weren’t for one thing. Interglyph was 151

her idea. Eight years ago Mom and Dad were really freaked out about money. It was so bad it looked like we might have to give up the house. Then one night, after dinner, when Clara was smoking one of her famously suspicious Turkish cigarettes, she asked Dad if he knew what the word interglyph meant. She explained that it was a space between grooves. She had a vision after hanging with Zen masters in Kyoto and hooking up with a German sound engineer who had come to despise the music industry. Her vision was that vinyl and some forms of analog would make a comeback and that the right move at the right time would make the right amount of money, and it would be called Interglyph. She thought Dad and Mom could spearhead the operation from here. Dad started telling her she was nuts, like he always does, that he didn’t know what she was on but in case she didn’t notice the whole world was on the verge of economic collapse, including this family, and the last thing we need is chasing after some transcendental pipe dream. But the German engineer, Lars, showed up the next day and changed Dad’s mind.

My parents resented Clara because they had done everything the straight, hardworking way while Clara just floated from one place to the next, sometimes flush, sometimes busted flat. Mom and Dad had met at Cornell where they were both computer geeks. But between the two of them they maybe had the imagination of an old dog and a bag of sand. I know everyone thinks their parents are boring, but these two are the worst. Ever.

Mom and Dad always seemed like they were out of their depth. Clara, on the other hand, prided herself in owning as little as possible and never falling into the snare of attachment. She was a hippie before the word was invented. To us she was always Aunt Clara, but to others she was Zora, Ryvre, Dharma, Echo or any one of a dozen other names, depending on where she met the people who used them for her. Though 152

Mom and Dad were intolerant and dismissive of everything Aunt Clara, they knew she had saved their bacon more than once.

The biggest conflict between them and Clara was religion.

Mom and Dad had gravitated back to the Catholic Church because, as Mom said, it was stable and not so noisy, nosey and nasty. After a huge fight and refusing to go anymore myself I asked my dad why, why did he go? “Because, damnit, that’s what we were told to do!” We never talked about it again.

Clara, on the other hand, pretty much seemed to believe in everything, without giving any particular version of one faith prominence over another. And yet she said most religions ended up in the hands of charlatans and psychopaths — just like politics.

The six of us sat down for dinner, Aunt Clara had Joel and Melanie on either side of her. As the food was being passed Mom spoke up.

“So, how long will you be staying?”

“Not long. I’m leaving for Meherbad the day after tomorrow.”

“New guru?” asked Dad with his scornful smile.

“No. Old avatar.” She knew Dad had no real interest.

Wanting to stir the pot a little bit, I asked her if she could recount her oldest incarnation. Mom glared at me while Dad rolled his eyes. Aunt Clara put down her fork to tell her story.

“It’s silly to talk about; I mean it doesn’t really matter. But I was an aphid. I had just had my fill of phloem from a plant in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. My kind was comprised only of asexual sisters and they moved about me in swarms so thick I could barely see the Tower of Babel. And then a parasitic wasp came to visit me. All I had known were my sisters, the plants, the butterflies, the sun and the tower. It took hold of me with its ovipositor stinger and laid its egg inside of me. I don’t know if anything I’ve ever been felt more pain.

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But as this egg grew in me and began to eat its way out of me and as the last flash of life left my small senses I was borne on the dust to join the swirl of a trillion souls that spark forever against the darkness. I was far too small to have a god and far too pure to have the ego to worship. What I was became another and another. What I am and will be is the continuing consequence.”

She picked up her fork and resumed eating her potatoes.

My brother was the first one to break the silence.

“I’m guessing reincarnation is like evolution of the soul.”

Joel said.

“Goodness,” Aunt Clara said, “what an imagination.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Melanie warned.

“What about you?” Aunt Clara looked at me over the chard dangling on her fork.

I was only half paying attention since I was thinking about girls, which I do a lot. But I heard the question and took a stab at it.

“I looked into it,” I answered. “I wondered if I was the reincarnation of Shel Silverstein since he died on the day I was born. But then on the same day, twenty some people died in a bus crash in New Orleans. I could have been any of them or any of the other one hundred fifty thousand people on earth who died on that day.”

“Not to mention zillions of aphids!” Dad was in full smart ass mode now and even Aunt Clara was laughing. * On the morning of Clara’s departure I was volunteered to drive her to the airport. She wore a thick scent of patchouli that she quickly overrode by lighting up one of her Turkish cigarettes.

“How long will it be before we see you again?” I asked.

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“Hard to say. You might have to come to India.”

I was thinking of her advice to my parents regarding Interglyph, and whether or not she might have a suggested path for me.

“What do you think I should do? What advice do you have for me?”

“Spend as much time outside as you can. You’re too pale.”

“I’m talking about my future, what should I do?”

“You’re too shy. You need a girlfriend. But remember, you can meet the most beautiful woman in the world and right as you are about to kiss, you can step in a pile of dogshit.

That’s your karma. Don’t be a whiner.”

Once inside the airport at security she kissed me on the cheek and disappeared in the crowd moving below the United sign.

When I got home I made a list of all the girls I thought were interesting who didn’t have dogs. I made this list with great ambition. They had to be girls who might want to go to India, girls who might once have been aphids in Babylon.

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LAURA M GIBSON

DIRTS Friday, Cal rode hard, his legs burning. Pearl keened inside the crate on his handlebars. He thought of his mother’s call for the cat, a musical escalating “loo- loo-loo” and how Pearl — her eyes milked over with mind-of-their-own membranes, half-deaf and reeking, always, of something rotten — would come prancing from the woods, gray hair snarled with brambles, her tail a mast with a right-angle break at the tip.

His mother’s baby.

The road crested at Nurse Log Hill, revealing a valley and the river’s lightning-bolted jag past the Miller’s farm. He stopped to catch his breath. Through the crate’s bars, Pearl clawed at his arm and hissed. The sun bored holes through clouds, canting shafts of light on the Miller’s field of sheep, and beyond that the gravel circle where he was headed. Cat Town.

It wouldn’t be like yesterday, he resolved, and then he descended without braking. * Two days before. Wednesday. Early release due to a power outage, mid-May and sunny for once.

Cal pushed his bike down Fir Street toward Zeigler’s Diner, his birthday money and new cell phone a rich weight in the back pocket of his shorts. Days they got out early he and Sasha had lunch at Zeigler’s, though sometimes she didn’t order, which made Cal feel caught. By the mill that pressed them underneath a roof he couldn’t explain. And by the plain irrefutable fact of being Dirts. You were born a Dirt or you weren’t, and there was nothing to be done, though Cal knew two working parents meant he was luckier than most.

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At Zeigler’s front door, he waved to Sasha inside and steered his bike toward the rack past the building’s long row of windows.

He walked while looking in, his mouth watering for garlic fries. Each booth was obscured by a stained glass transom, new additions salvaged from the demolished Queen Annes by the river. A preservation the Cinder Falls Historic Society, where his mother worked, had recently lost to the new coal port project.

Booths empty except for the last. A woman’s back to him. Behind the tabletop jukebox by the window, her fingers tangled in the paws of a man with muscular, hairy arms. She rubbed her long, lovely thumbs along her partner’s knuckles.

On her left wrist the watch Cal had given her for Mother’s Day. He raised his fist to knock on the glass, when the parts of the scene snapped into place and he understood the arms were not his father Finley’s — strong, lean, freckled — but belonged to Joe, his mother’s boss.

Cal’s stomach heaved and burned up into his cheeks. He stepped beyond the window, around the corner, leaned his bike against the wall, and then pulled the cell phone from his pocket, reckoning the grenade of possibility in his palm. He held a finger over his Dad’s number. If he called now, Finley would pull his flip phone out of his shirt pocket and shout above the din of forklifts shuttling crates of toilet paper, paper towels, Kleenex.

He pressed the call button, heard Finley’s voice. “What do you need, son?” Cal opened his mouth, couldn’t summon a single coherent word.

He hung up, kicked twice at the brick wall, felt he was teetering at the lip of a scene requiring precise action, but his 157

thinking was frozen, slow-moving as an iceberg beneath him.

The phone vibrated, chimed in his hand, his Dad calling back. Cal flicked the ringer off, then touched the screen to open the camera. Only ten photos so far, mostly selfies of him and Sasha. Another of his parents dancing The Hormone Fray after birthday cake.

Cal held his breath, took three long strides back around the building to face the windows. He located the pair of hands through the lens and snapped two pictures, saw the hands dart underneath the table. He thought they’d seen him, but then the pregnant gingham-aproned belly of Jasmine appeared and her puffy hand slid the check onto the table. He snapped another photo, jammed the device into his back pocket and retreated, shaking.

The phone buzzed insistently and he let it ring, his ears roaring. He gulped deep breaths, bit the inside of his cheek.

Swinging a leg onto the bike he rode away, remembering at the next intersection he’d promised Sasha lunch, but she didn’t have a phone and he couldn’t go back.

Through the next call he pedaled, clenched his teeth, then worried Finley would think he was injured. Cal pulled over and dialed. “Dad. Sorry. Butt-dialed you.” Finley talked about a mowing job he’d gotten for him, what was for dinner.

The burden of easy conversation almost more than Cal could stand. * Monday, his thirteenth birthday. The wreckage of a pan of lasagna. Pearl curled up in the dining room chair next to his mother. Dad’s birthday speech and choreographed dance, annual traditions.

“A bloody skirmish, the teen years,” Finley said. “In preparation, I give you…The Hormone Fray.” Wool socks slid158

ing on the wood floor. Dad’s four-step dance, an elbow-flying mashup of hip-hop and clogging.

His mother smiling, cradling her face in her hands. Clapping. “You’re ridiculous, Fin. One of these days you’re going to run out of material.”

“Never!”

The smartphone Cal had asked for.

“No way!” was all he could say. He opened it, touched the dark screen, felt the world blooming beyond Cinder Falls.

“Mom, how’d you get him to say yes?”

“I’m very clever,” she said and winked. “It’ll make us all more flexible and independent. You’re ready.” * Now, past the Miller’s farm, Cal aims toward the road’s dead-end above the river, thick and slaty from rains. He parks the bike near the willows and sets Pearl down in front of Cat Town, a partial replica of Cinder Falls fashioned from a row of dog kennels with various facades. A shiplap sheriff’s office and jailhouse. A brick post office, a yellow Queen Anne with lavender gables and tiny porch swing. Zeigler’s. Open tuna cans and food bowls tipped on their sides litter the street of the deserted miniature town.

Cal looks behind him at the Miller’s battered white farm house, its foundation listing toward the river. A loud scrum of sheep hug the fence line. Juncos flit in the willows, chittering.

He is supposed to be in school.

Two days since Ziegler’s, and the best he’s done is feign sickness and hide out in his room, scrolling through the photos, trying to decode the evidence but doing nothing. Yesterday’s ride back to town with Pearl purring inside the crate on his handlebars more evidence of cowardice.

On hands and knees, he watches Pearl press against the 159

back of the crate, her dusky fur springing from the ventilation holes. Pearl’s wide, ghostly eyes study him.

He stands, wipes his sweaty hands on his shorts, and leans down to open the door. He steps back and waits, takes his phone from his pocket and poises it to shoot. His ears pound and his unsteady hands dizzy the camera-framed view of Pearl emerging.

When she doesn’t move, he tips the back of the cage up with his foot and she slides out, crouching, ears alert. He touches the video mode and films her struggling to get back inside, pulling her paws back as if the surface scalds. He takes his foot away; the crate levels; he loo-loo-loos to her. She steps out, rasps a meow, rubs against his shins, the crooked finger of her tail curling around his calf, the ask to be picked up.

He thinks of his mother’s hands. Of Joe’s.

“Whore,” he says softly. “Go on, you little bitch.”

He kicks at Pearl. She startles, drops her center of gravity.

Rage at her stupidity and inertia unspools him. He kicks again and again. Sprays gravel over her. Screams for her to die. She streaks into the thicket of willows.

After, he stands panting, heart drumming.

When he can breathe again he replays the video of Pearl, hears himself shrieking into the wild unfocused air until his documentary ends, an accidental swipe of a finger. He puts the phone in his back pocket and listens to the roiling water.

He recalls being much younger and the parade of injured creatures he found in the woods near their house upriver — squirrels, birds, rabbits, a fox kit — all of them trundled home in the crate, cuddled, played with until they died. After, his mother, rocking him, rubbing his bony shins with her thumbs, murmuring, “You’ll learn how not to love things too hard. Creatures need room to breathe.”

Pearl the exception. Before Cal’s memory began, Pearl 160

had chosen them, had tucked her mangy body inside the engine of his mother’s car and lived to tell about it.

Cal jogs to the willows, crawls on his belly inside the dark tangle of thick growth where the ground is warm, damp, littered with trash.

“Pearl! Come back!”

The mill’s shift-change whistle shrills.

“I’m sorry! Come back!”

He loo-loo-loos for her, growing hoarse, knowing she is gone.

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ALAN MINSKOFF

WITHIN THE LINES Five times should be enough for anyone.

My wife, Royanne, laments as I weave the Volvo homeward on the straight road.

Four of these quasi-wrecks were inanimate objects: the black metal tube fence, twice.

The wall beside the garage, popped out a few bricks; I backed straight into her mom’s classic Mercedes parked in direct line (some people look before they go in reverse), then there was the young teacher in the parking lot (settled for damages). Royanne taps my shoulder, is there a reason you are wandering listing into the other lane. The kids snicker.

That’s Dad. My wife adds gratuitously, try to stay within the lines for just the few minutes until we are home. I am thinking of the Ten Commandments, debating which ones leave wiggle room for an end-of-the-century man.

Dad, you missed our turn comes the cry in unison from the back seat. Snatched like a trout from its wet world, I reply.

Sorry, but I am within the lines. Entering the driveway, my wife reminds me not to smack into the garage and asks me to pull in straight. You’ve been parking on a slant. I hit the brakes harder than I intend still puzzling over the coveting commandment; it’s too late to rectify taking the deity’s name in vain. I am a product of the Sixties when creative blasphemy was a required course. Perhaps 162

I could commit to a day a week. In the distance I hear, Could you shut the car door? I stroll the yard and throw a tennis ball to our young golden retriever. She brings it back, drops it at my feet. While I’m deep into the coveting debate, she puts her paw on my knee. I pick up the fuzzy yellow ball, toss it a high arc, it lands making a quiet plop in the creek. Sadie, the dog, and I watch it float downstream.

The rusty colored golden looks puzzled, the bobbing ball slides out of sight. I pet her red fur, ask her the difference between covet and desire, need and wish. She presses her paw on my shin, hums a low moan.

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AMY LARSON

CHICKEN DOG I wasn’t one of those crazy dog people that “coochiecooed” or baby talked to dogs. I’d watched the Dog Whisperer; dogs don’t respect that and the other humans laugh, too. I came from a long line of mere dog “tolerate-ers.” Mother occasionally touched pets with two fingers, and then she’d go wash her hands.

A dog in the “new” home we’d just spent eleven months building was the last thing I wanted. Dogs tracked in dirt, shed, had dander, and had bad, bad breath. Three full-time messer-upper offspring were enough. A dog wasn’t even on my radar.

Had it been anyone other than Sandy, I’d have said “no way,” but everything involving Sandy was magical. She had these ginormous Christmas tree burning parties at her ranch, where teenage boys tossed eight trees onto the flames at once as the bonfire grew taller than the house. When the fire died down, it became a barbecue. The Christmas before moving into our country house, she brought the “Twelve Days of Christmas” to our dreary between-home apartment, although she never admitted to it. If Sandy suggested something, our family did it, went to it, ate it.

“An Australian Shepherd would make a great gift for the ki-idddsss,” Sandy said in her persuasive, sing-song tone, “Belle and Bear just had puppies, you should take a look.”

I went to appease her, but you know how that works. It takes a cold heart to say no to puppies. The black and white female’s nail got painted red, marking her as “on hold,” and I waited the two weeks until Christmas Eve. It was a joyous year. The house symbolized renewal. We were back together after a near-divorce, had lived in our small home for a trial period, and then decided to go big and com164

mitted, seven acres by the lake. The homebuilding project took all of our time, forcing us to work together. Newly varnished flooring scent mixed with the fragrant pine tree from Idaho City. Our family was intact, we had a new house, it was Christmas, and we were getting a dog.

We named her “Callie,” after a German Shepherd from the kids’ dad’s boyhood, one that met with an untimely end.

I smuggled the new Callie into the house in my ski jacket after the kids were in bed. For a puppy’s first night away from its mother, not being heard was a long-shot. While the husband and I adored her as she crawled all over our bed, she made quick work of wetting his pillow. I laughed as he picked up the drenched item.

She stole my heart right then and there.

Sitting under the tree with a big red bow the next morning, no other presents got as much attention. Sandy was right; our kids thought she was the best thing ever.

Callie naturally took to her new pack, following the kids everywhere. She was territorial, and learned her boundaries fast, never straying. I couldn’t understand why my daughter tripped over the dog a lot until I watched them from the front porch one afternoon. Callie was trying to herd, attempting to keep the kids in a tight circle of three, and my daughter was the free spirit.

When Callie leapt onto the trampoline for the first time, running around in a frenzied circle, all three were delighted until they got out of formation. She barked, head-butting them back into place.

When we built an ATV racetrack, I was mystified when such an intelligent creature cut me off at full speed. I braked hard, bumping her, and almost flew over the handlebars.

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“What are you doing, dog?” I yelled, “Do you want to get run over?”

She cut me off two more times before I realized she was herding me, too, on machines that went faster and were way more of a challenge.

Getting chickens solved that problem. We never lost a chicken with O.C.D. Callie on guard. All birds stayed in the designated area. Until their hypnosis, that is.

“You guys have never hypnotized chickens?” said my Texan friend Jenny in disbelief, “I thought everyone knew how to do that,” she drawled, “I’ll show y’all how.”

She grabbed a white chicken named “Penny” and set her down on our gravel driveway with her beak to the ground, then ran her finger in a straight line several times before Penny’s eyes. When released, Penny stayed put, beak to ground, with a glazed, non-blinking expression.

“Then y’all have to snap them back out of it,” she explained, clapping her hands and yelling, “You’re a chicken!”

Penny came to and tottered off, looking like she’d been drinking.

When I tried, the chicken named “Ginger” went into a temporary trance.

“Don’t do it too many times, it makes their brains a little funny,” Jenny warned.

I forgot to tell that part to the kids.

They slept out on the trampoline that summer night, with Callie on guard. Nothing had ever happened to kids or birds on her watch. Shocked at the feathers and general carnage on the lawn the next morning amidst peacefully sleeping kids and dog, I wondered what on earth had occurred. I later discovered the departed had become over-tranced, making them sitting ducks for raccoons, fox, or coyotes. It had all gone down so quietly, the Chicken Nazi heard nothing.

I found it odd that Callie was an exhibitionist. Seven 166

acres on which to do her business, and she went smack in the middle of our front yard, with dozens of cars passing by. I’d look out at the squatting, straining body, and say, “Dog… geez!

You’ve got all this space and you pick the most obvious. Have you no pride?!”

Neighbors and friends commented on Callie’s fetish so much, we briefly entertained naming the place “Squatting Dog Ranch,” in an effort to own it.

When the kids boarded the school bus, Callie and I had our ritual. I contemplatively sat on the front porch, looking at the nearby forest as I ate my shredded wheat. Callie ran around the corner, wagging her tail-less bottom, hoping I’d let her lick the bowl. I petted her for a minute or two, and then obliged. When my heart was heavy, I buried my nose into Callie’s thick black and white fur, and cried. She’d stand patiently until I was done, then wag her backside. We carried on like that for six years, through happiness and sadness, until the day my marriage ended. I packed the kids, our stuff, and the dog and drove into town to a rental house with its tiny square of a fenced lot.

I watched as our dog sniffed the contained yard, knowing I couldn’t do that to her. Callie was a farm dog. She’d memorized every inch of that acreage where the kids’ dad continued to live. Her job of herding the remaining chickens was out there.

She stayed with us overnight, and then Callie and I took our last trip together. While driving those winding roads, I tried not to think of the end of our friendship. The kids would see her soon, but for me, I wasn’t so sure.

She jumped out onto the pasture grass, not looking back.

I wondered if she would miss me, or if she’d adjust, the same way she’d done that first night without her mother.

Eventually the new Mrs. moved in, taking over the home I’d helped build. She enjoyed my flowers, ate off my plates, 167

slept in my old bed. And she got to be with my dog, ironically petting the same fur I’d cried into. Callie wouldn’t have minded, though. In her world, love was love. She was always up for a good petting.

I heard that the new Mrs. cooked with a lot of fat and processed cheese, that Callie got table scraps, and got so heavy that she couldn’t run around the pasture anymore. There were a couple of other sort of mean dogs in residence, ones Callie had to hold her own with. I wished I could rescue her, but the time for that was past. He’d clearly gotten the dog as part of the settlement. I sent her good vibes, prayed for her wellbeing, and missed her thick black and white coat. Sometimes I dreamed about her.

One day, the kids told me that Callie had died. She wasn’t very old; I suspected processed cheese had played a role. Now she was with her friends the deceased chickens, and, I liked to think, could come visit me in spirit on the porch. I’d set my bowl down for a minute, pretending.

We waited years before getting a new dog. This one has freaky yellow eyes. Gracie stays close, never needs a leash; never runs away. Though she’s a short hair, and her eyes are not that deep, expressive brown, I like to think Callie sent her, and that she’s got a little Callie in her.

I am a crazy dog person.

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ALEXANDRA ELLEN APPEL

THE EVOLUTION OF DOG the evolution of dog from the poet’s p.o.v or catch a spider and release or everything is a poem from the poet’s p.o.v or why not loneliness is another form of evolution that’s why.

Dog.

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ANITA TANNER

EQUINUS Where have all the horses gone, their nk nk nking at the trough, the shing of hooves over musical pavement?

What trot, walk or single-foot gait awaits this heart now heavy with time, my nose up against their throatlatches?

I remember them, shy-eyed, wide-nostrilled, neighing praises, russet, onyx hide quivering annoyance at flies, the bulbs of their hoofprints like neurons of memory in time.

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