2023 Writers in the Attic - Three

Three Writers in the Attic

2023

THREE Writers in the Attic

Daniel Stewart Works selected by

PAST ISSUES

MOON

CMarie Fuhrman

RUPTURE

Harrison Berry

FUEL

J. Reuben Appelman

GAME

Diane Raptosh

ANIMAL

Rick Ardinger

DETOUR

Bruce Ballenger

APPLE

Malia Collins

SONG

Samantha Silva

WATER

Susan Rowe

NERVE

Kerri Webster

ROOMS

Cort Conley

Contents

Daniel Stewart

Introduction • 15

THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM

Laureen Leiko Scheid

Kodomo No Tame Ni • 21

Ruth Saxey-Reese

Reading Matisse • 22

christy claymore

Peter • 23

christy claymore

Three Sacred Gifts • 24

Kalee Schwarting

The Dead We Depend On • 25

Mindy OldenKamp

Dancing with Dickens and Dylan • 26

Gina Borud

Gradient • 28

Kimme Rovin

Underwater • 31

THE LOVE TRIANGLE

Ty Muir

Three days until impact • 35

Julia McCoy

Modern Magic • 38

David Stearns

The Last Act • 41

Alyssa Stadtlander

The Woman Who Has Tricked the Three Fates • 44

Alyssa Stadtlander freely, as before • 47

Heidi Kraay

Mix of Mix-Ups Mixing Up: an aural collision • 49

Heidi Kraay sun/burn • 51

Mara Bateman

An Education • 52

THE HOLY TRINITY

GiGi Huntley

Three O’Clock • 55

Heidi Naylor

Three Hours at Youth Group • 57

JD Bensley

Chokepoint 3 • 58

Jim Richards

Triplets, Sunday Morning • 59

D.T. Coe

A Fate as Kind as That • 60

Harper Grace Pechota

The Three Phases of the Moon • 62

Perry Richard

When I Told You I was Raped • 65

Dave Hays

Three Day Rhythm—Parks, People, and the Introverted Ranger • 66

THE TIEBREAKER

Nancy K. Haug

Three Dog Night • 71

J. Dykas

Dancing Water • 74

Bonnie Vestal Alchemy • 76

Judith Steele

Three-stage atom bomb • 79

Louis Katz

A Rocket to the Stars • 80

Morgan Radcliffe

The Fool • 83

Caleb Andrews

The Herald • 86

Fiona West Weeds • 89

THE FATES

Eileen Thornburgh

The Three Sisters ~ Le Tre Sorelle • 93

Caleb Merritt

Form Study, Ending in Transportation Fragment Pieces of the French Revolution • 96

Kate Maulik

If Jesus Were Three Sheets to the Wind • 97

Kim Monnier

Third World/First World • 98

Eric E. Wallace

Facing the Music • 99

Jon Eisman

Thanks for Three Beauties • 103

Anita Tanner

Crossing the Desert • 104

Anita Tanner

Playing Church • 105

THE THIRD WHEEL

Deb Eisenger

Faded • 109

Billye Dotson

Three times I heard the word lesbian and three more times I should have known I was one • 112

Mark Ready

Chanterelle, Queen of the Third Kingdom • 114

Erin Tuthill

3 a.m. Reflection • 118

Michael Quinn Philley

Haiku Triptych • 119

Ross Hargreaves

The Warlocks Bindle • 120

Bray

The Corinna • 123

Bean McGrath

The Eternal Triangle • 126

Diane Raptosh

Creation • 130

Lillian Jenner

He finds me in motion • 131

Matt Edwards

If Saviors Were Real • 132

Kalee Schwarting

Third Revised & Updated Edition • 135

ABOUT • 137

MEET THE WRITERS • 139

Introduction

Daniel Stewart

The number three has always had a mystical aura. The Greeks considered it the perfect number, the number of harmony, wisdom, and understanding. According to myth, the genie freed from the bottle grants three wishes. Emerging from the fog of Covid-19, it feels as if we have been collectively given a reprieve: the chance to release and address the genie. Here is our opportunity to once again pursue our wishes.

The theme of this year’s anthology is Three. This current era feels fraught from political and social divisions, worldwide inflation, and the looming threat of global conflict, yet in this edition of the Writers in the Attic anthology, you will find an array of alternate realities, bits of magic, and flourishes of music.

Of course, reality is represented as well, but it is the reality of childbirth, family ties, loss, grief, and finding love—our very human concerns that, in some ways, had to be put on hold during the meat of the pandemic. Life insists—persists—and the pieces in these pages display how we as humans persist, despite worldwide disease, despite social and political upheavals. Again and again in these poems and narratives you will find people responding, reflecting, fighting, and coming together, depending on each other to buoy themselves through grief, tragedy, even the end of the world, by finding what is common between us, not focusing on the differences.

Selections were blind—none of the pieces had names on them so as guest editor I would not be influenced by recognizing names of local writers, colleagues, friends, or reputations of those who submitted.

Given the opportunity to grant wishes, the genie always throws in a couple of variables: the wish granted is never exactly what the asker wanted. Instead, in these stories and poems, embrace the very real human concerns and connections explored in these pages. Enjoy, reader, the harmony, wisdom, and understanding found here.

THREE Writers in the Attic

THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM

“Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

Paulo Coelho

Kodomo No Tame Ni

(Japanese translation: For the Sake of the Children)

Laureen Leiko Scheid

A maritime lineage of women. Japanese great-grandmothers and before, pearl diving to provide for family and village. Salt and sun leathered. Kelp entwined. In search for abalone gold. Courageous and relentless. Kodomo no tame ni.

My Hawaiian born grandmother. Fourth grade educated. Widowed at thirty-four. Ironed slacks and dry-cleaned suits. With palsied hands, washed socks and shirt collars for twenty-four years to feed her four little girls.

“I mua! Go for broke! Subarashi!”

Her words

ocean wave, blood, and rainbow etched. Always hopeful.

Kodomo no tame ni.

Nearing fifty years. Midlife reminiscing. Triumphant scars cross my belly.

White hairs peak out among black. No longer censoring. My mother’s recipes on the table. Sharing collective wisdom of our ancestral and my accidental learning; So my daughters forever knowKodomo no tame ni.

I mua (Hawaiian: Press Forward)

Go for broke (Hawaiian Creole English: To risk everything for the greater good even if it means death. The motto for the US Army 442nd Regimental Combat Team comprised of Japanese Americans from Hawaii and the mainland during World War II.)

Subarashi (Japanese: wonderful)

Reading Matisse

Ruth Saxey-Reese

The Goldfish, 1912

I would borrow your round spectacles, peer through to see the moment three orange petals become four goldfish and nodding globes take root in the air.

But I will still ask: How do you measure peace?

One lazy fin at a time. How does it taste?

Lavender sugar and velvet green. Where does it reside?

Between the thighs of the backstage odalisque.

claymore

It’s a little cold, probably colder for me since I, again, jumped in the water coming after You. And now you ask me— three times— if I love You, and with each time you question me I feel, again, the stabbing shame of my three denials. I hear the echo of that damn cock’s crowings. I hoped we had moved beyond this and then You astound me with words I don’t and, somehow, do understand, on a familiar beach with bread and fish, also familiar. You say “Follow Me,” and I know that I will. I will follow as never before, especially in moments when You feel farther away than when I was on the boat and You were on the shore, or in the middle of a violent sea.

Three Sacred Gifts

christy claymore

“Why fight for something no one can take from you?”

- Alan Heathcock, from his novel 40

That purity could be transmuted into something dark and worse than dead-the possibility sickened my heart, tormented my head. Could the three-tongued flame you offered simply be snuffed out with your shout and cold declaration, giving me a name less than human-even the dogs are worthy of crumbs that fall from tables, and my mouth is numb with them-what sustenance is this.

Finally with a line, I realized these gifts were never from you, anyway-while you once gave light and love and even life, the light and the love and the life were never yours, never from you at all. They were gifts you simply passed along-divine shelter, the ancient flower, the resonate song exist beyond what came before before and what extends ahead, grace concealed in time, beyond your arms beyond your rhymes.

The Dead We Depend On Kalee Schwarting

The dead we depend on, they disappear. And since I fell off-track of linear time accelerating through impossible inclines, years later

I see the obituaries from space.

American Poet, Master of Social Work, Survived by Three Daughters Your Mother is Always with you

Now I can’t retain the dates and lines—an unending climb But if I hold tighter

I can feel the spines of the books they pressed into my hands between the joints and creases of my palm

Notes scribbled in the margins that read in their voices:

Leave the black widow in the corner. Horses can go places cop cars can’t. All artists steal, and can I be a parent, for a moment, and ask you where your sweater is?

They are still here! I tell the Google search results I can hear them upstairs

Dancing with Dickens and Dylan

Mindy OldenKamp

Nobody tells you what will haunt you.

There’s no hand clapping you on the back, handing you a life manual, and letting you know up front that you can count on the most impotent life moments to perma-embed themselves as persistent memory devils. That a miniscule, ultimately inconsequential moment from, say, third grade will follow you. You chose to hurl that rock at the back of little Jon’s head and then pretended you didn’t, and now it permeates your consciousness like family at the holidays. Or worse - sometimes it’s the ghost of regret you carry for not being the dress wearing daughter your folks wished for. Or the weighty ghoul constantly reminding you of how you just can’t quite ever make your life comfortable enough for everyone else.

All just popping up on the regular to invade your consciousness and aggressively bombard you with four decades of disappointment and shame. Every soul that’s come before is really and truly the asshole in the room, just holding mum to the fact that not only do you collect wrinkles and pounds, you collect haunts. Call it Guilt or the Holy Spirit or whatever the Churchies say, but nobody tells you that those ghosts will cling to you like cat hair to a sweater.

My kitchen suddenly seems full, the specters of failed expectations, missed societal obedience, and idiotic regret flooding the room with as much clarity as the fading snapshots in the old photo album in front of me: hazy in reality, cuttingly sharp in cognition. The plastic sigh of release echoes off the linoleum floors as I turn the yellowed pages, the cover sheet slipping slightly with the pull as I move through captured time. Dad smiling in a trucker hat, Mom flirty in shorts too short past the 80’s, and me, an innocent in tiny pigtails. A few page turns flash me forward ten years. Dad’s smile so broken under the weight of responsibilities, Mom no longer coy but vacantly detached with hollow eyes, and me, the third wheel adding drag in the race to survive.

“We did laugh,” I say out loud to the phantoms hovering over my shoulders, not appreciating their whispered judgment of my memories.

“We laughed, and we lived, and we freaking loved,” I add sarcastically, hearing the cliche just above the hum of the fridge. The final album pages full of braces, bad silk shirts, and a regrettable decision to perm my hair. A flicker of angst pops up - the shadow remnant of years of fear-based existence. Get the grade, have the good friends, don’t disappoint. There’s Dad, a boss in his suit, his eyes sparkless. Mom, spread too thin and lonely, sadness already present. And me, my teenage eyes already bearing a middle-aged exhaustion.

In a ghastly breath, all the ghosts of memories past crowding my kitchen hiss a chorus of “You’re still not good enough.” My house was so quiet these days, but the roar of all those inane haunts reverberated still - a motley crew of dedicated spooks.

I rise from the kitchen, my cup of coffee long gone cold, the dirty plate from the frozen waffles I ate for dinner sitting sentry on the counter,

and shrug the grasp of apparitional fingers from my soul. Truly, nobody tells you what will haunt you. Except Dickens - where is my Jacob Marley? I could’ve made him a waffle too.

I’ve let my knock off Dickensian companions wander with me into the living room, where I stand, cold coffee still in hand. Tonight, so much of my heart is outside my home, reminding me that the most terrifying phantoms are the ones you meet in the light of the current day. Opening the photo album portal to the world of ghostly regrets was a stupid move on my part. My wife is with her other partner, my daughter is seventeen and the world is readily hers, and I… I’m home hanging out with my ghosts.

A glutton for punishment, I scroll through the modern photo album of my phone, quick clicks of memories providing fuel for what haunts me - their chatter in my ears is growing ever more raucous. A dozen candid snapshots from our wedding, all hope and laughter and romance, so many captured smiles from concerts, carefree and rockin’, photos taken because we could. Our little trinity, holy and pure, on camping trips, beach adventures, and simply snuggled nights at home. Ectoplasmic memories to be tainted by the ghost stories in my mind. The false vicious whispers of a tabloid worthy spin on my life.

The haunts are brutal. They howl of Mom and Dad and me, of expectations I supposedly failed to meet in a dysfunctional set of three. Dresses and pink dreams traded. They wail of my spouse and child and me, gay and very non-traditional and complexly open. Enough to make the masses squirm nervous. Minute truths painted in sour slanted perceptions that come from these ever-clinging haunts.

Bob Dylan calls to me from the record player in the corner, a favorite and most welcome companion on nights when the echoes of the triads in my life threaten to rise to a roar. I set the needle to spin, letting Subterranean Homesick Blues begin to drown out the chatter.

I scroll to another set of simple pictures and breathe through the music. There’s my kid in a fit of giggles, my wife, smart and beautiful in an absolutely mundane moment, my family, my heart, outside itself. The three of us with Mom and Dad, smiles shiny and deep in our eyes. No ghosts, no haunts. Just our hard-earned version of life.

The needle skips, and Bob’s lyrics match my soul.

“People are crazy and times are strange…”

Well, that seems right.

“I used to care, but things have changed…”

I let those lyrics wash over me, a torrent that floods the room, pushing spirits and memories and ghosts back into their ethereal place.

I think, shit, if frozen waffles and cold coffee and Dylan records on repeat are all I need on this night to exorcize my ghosts, then I’m alright, and I dance free.

Gina Borud

My dad was an old school graphic designer. He started his own business in the 80s after retiring from the fire department, and spent the rest of his life designing logos, computer manuals, and how-to booklets. He loved drop shadows, outdated design software, and desktop computers. But more than anything, he loved gradients. A working artist most of his life, he was still designing things – albeit slowly – up until he was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 74. He was also a great teacher.

When my brother lost his job at Costco and was struggling to find direction, my dad took him under his wing, transforming him into a talented designer to work alongside him. We always joked about my dad’s business name – Heideman Associates – because it was just my dad by himself for so long. Once my brother joined and there were two Heidemans, it made sense.

My dad taught me a lot about becoming a designer, too. When I graduated from college, he built me a computer from scratch so I could start freelancing. He’d give me little projects here and there and teach me his tricks of the trade.

Sometimes we’d share our work with one another and ask for feedback. I remember once, as I leaned over him in his squeaky office chair, peering at the dusty screen of his behemoth desktop, a cigarette smoldering nearby, I spied a logo he’d designed for a local wine shop. It was simple, as was his style, but looked outdated with the obtrusive gradient going from white to gray in the background. “Dad, you gotta ease up on the gradients,” I told him. “They’re so 1990.” He laughed. “Never.”

After my dad was gone, the reminders of him were everywhere. I remember walking through our neighborhood with my six-year-old daughter, Remy, a budding artist herself, just a couple of months after my dad’s death. The air was crisp and the leaves were just beginning to change, signaling the start of fall and the end of a summer spent in doctor’s offices and hospice meetings. Remy ran ahead in the white Pumas she’d just learned to tie, then stopped suddenly on the sidewalk.

I watched as she peered down at the ground, then bend over to pick something up. Running over to me, she held out her little hand and squealed, “Mom, look! This leaf has a gradient!”

She held the leaf up against the bright sky for me to see. Tears stung the corners of my eyes as I paused to admire the leaf. It did, indeed, have a gradient. A beautiful one – starting with a fiery red near the stem, morphing upward into a deep, sunrise orange and finishing with a brown- flecked mustard yellow at the tip.

How does a six-year-old even know what a gradient is? That’s probably what my dad would have asked. I immediately wanted to call him, then remembered that no one would be there to pick up.

Realizations like these are excruciating. It’s like someone punches you in the face and reminds you that you don’t have the luxury of calling the one person who would understand and find joy in these types of moments. In losing someone you love, you lose the ability to have a conversation with

them. Even a mundane one.

Abruptly and unceremoniously, there are no more phone calls about the weather or how your garden is doing, no more texts saying, “happy hump day!” or “have you changed your oil lately?”

There are also no more voicemails. Man, I wish I had some voicemails. I would usually call my dad while I was alone in the car, because it was one of the few moments in my day where I wasn’t distracted by kids or work or the to-dos waiting for me at home. It used to drive my dad nuts when he had to compete with the sound of clanking dishes or groceries being unloaded. He always demanded my undivided attention.

We’d chat about the weather, of course, and our respective gardens. He was an avid gardener too, another trait passed down. “Are you talking to your tomatoes?” he’d say. “Make sure they know they’re appreciated, and don’t overwater them.”

He’d also ask what kinds of design projects I was working on and tell me how proud of me he was. I had become a self-employed designer just like him, although I use a laptop and like to keep my software up to date.

Once he got sick, our conversations turned to scans, appointment updates, and whether he was drinking enough water.

When my daughter showed me the leaf that day, I could only imagine the conversation my dad and I would have had. He would have been so impressed with Remy for her astute observation (as he would have called it), and we would have shared a good-natured laugh about having another gradient lover in the family.

There are several definitions for gradient - an upward or downward slope; a curve representing rate of change; and in the art world, a smooth, gradual transition from one color to another.

Life after death is like this. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m on the upward or downward slope of the grieving process, but without even knowing it I’m constantly sliding ever-so-smoothly between sadness and joy, and all the emotions in between. There are dark moments and light moments, moments of happiness and moments of utter despair. The joy and the sadness undulate around me, existing in complete harmony with one another, no matter how hard I try to compartmentalize my emotions and make them pick a side already.

My therapist warned me about the wild ride of emotions I would likely embark on once my dad was gone. She showed me a chart of the various stages of grief, but it didn’t move in a linear fashion. It was a mess of chaotic arrows and scribbles linking anger to hope and guilt to happiness. She told me I might feel depressed one day and optimistic the next, then a week later plummet back into shock and denial.

And it was true. One minute I was laughing and running outside with my daughter, and the next I was crying over a leaf.

And maybe this is just how it will be for a while. I’ll continue to feel that terrible pang when I reach for my phone and then stop, remembering that the “Dad” still listed in my phone favorites isn’t ever going to answer. I’ll continue to laugh with my kids. I’ll go to work, I’ll make dinner. Remy will grow. She’ll draw pictures my dad will never see. Things that remind me of

my dad – like gradients – will pop up and I’ll want to pick up my phone all over again.

And in the spring, I’ll plant a new garden, even without my dad to talk to about proper tomato care. Turns out tomatoes, when they’re ripening, have a gradient too.

Kimme Rovin

It didn’t end the way it did in fairytales. The ones where the heroine is given three tasks to complete and then wins back the prince, wins her freedom, a kingdom, a change of fate, a right to be seen. The story didn’t even end at all. Marin still went to the glass wall every Wednesday after school. Still peered through the clear barrier smeared with greasy hand prints. Still stared into the inky depths until her eyes blurred. They were in there. She almost always saw a splash, a quick burst of black: A hand? A fin? Part of a forked tail? But never again the bright intelligence of an eye, the soft curve of a cheekbone, bubbled breath from sharp lips. It was always crowded with people at the wall. Oily faces and hands on the glass, rhythmic banging on the dirty surface, opening and closing mouths pressed like dying fish taking their last breaths. They left their trash too, cigarette butts and blobs of sticky pink gum, discarded cans. The wall reached to just above Marin’s head and the dark water rose to almost it’s very top. Sometimes if the creatures came close, water splashed over. Brown and brackish, smelling of salt and decaying earth. No one knew how far back the water stretched into the murky depths of the cave beyond.

Once again on a Wednesday (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—the third day) Marin stood watching the glass until a group of older kids crowded around her, two boys jostled her shoulder, pushing her into the wall. Her cheek banged against the cool surface. The boys continued on without looking at her. She wondered how this place had become an amusement, an afternoon hangout, a place of irreverence (irreverence seemed like too complicated a word for the type of people who came here—it was an ungenerous thought but her cheek stung and she didn’t really care). If only she could be alone, maybe he would come back. It was funny, if she thought about it too hard (and she usually did), that she felt alone all the time but couldn’t actually be alone when she really wanted. “I am invisible,” the phrase that permeated her days.

But he had seen her, really seen her. She was sure of it. Well, as sure as you can be in a seconds long encounter. But it felt in her heart like he had seen her, her whole self, her not invisible self. She remembered his teeth, opalescent and grey, sharp and thin, a sea anemone enclosed in jaws. His eyes, black wells flashing electric blue when they caught the dim light. He had looked at her through the glass and held up one webbed hand. Three long clawed fingers tapped at the glass (one, two, three) and he was gone. It surprised her that she felt so strongly about those few seconds. That she wanted to see him again, a tender longing—I want to be seen. And maybe that was why she had convinced herself that those three taps had been a code. Come back three times. Come on the third day. Find three secret items. Compete three impossible tasks. “And then I’ll come back,” the unspoken promise, heavy, suffocating, “And then…” Marin had no idea what came after. Just that something would happen, something had to happen.

So she would keep coming back, even though it was stupid. Even though she had no idea if the creature knew how to count to three. Even

though she now had gum stuck to the bottom of both her shoes. A bruised cheek. She looked back at the glass one more time and then walked up the stone steps leading out of the cave.

THE LOVE TRIANGLE

“Love is made up of three unconditional properties in equal measure:

1. Acceptance

2. Understanding

3. Appreciation

Remove any one of the three and the triangle falls apart. Which, by the way, is something highly inadvisable. Think about it — do you really want to live in a world of only two dimensions? So, for the love of a triangle, please keep love whole.”

Vera Nazarian

Three days until impact.

Ty Muir

I sat on the couch in my living room, arms curled up around my knees as I stared down at the phone beside me. Someone had created a countdown, so we could all watch in real time as an asteroid a tenth the size of the moon came hurtling toward us.

Attempts had already been made to move or break it, but the thing was simply too big. Now all there was left to do was wait.

I didn’t want to die alone, and yet there I was all by myself, unable to tear my eyes away from the clock. It had just ticked past the three day mark to two days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-nine minutes.

For a long while, the streets outside had been nightmarish: cars honking, people screaming or crying, sometimes I could even hear hysterical laughter. Occasionally there were gunshots, and that was when I shoved my dresser in front of my apartment door. I lived on the fifth floor of a high-rise apartment building with only two windows. Both of them were boarded up now.

As the counter continued to tick down, things eventually grew quiet. Now, with only three days left, there was almost no sound outside at all. An eerie silence filled the city streets. I eventually tore the nails from one of the boards to look down from my apartment window. The streets were a mess, shattered glass and trash everywhere, but the rioting had settled down. There was even a couple across the street walking through the park hand in hand. For some reason, this made me burst into tears for the first time.

Two days until impact.

My car had been broken into, but it still worked. I drove out of town and onto the highway that led to my mother’s house. It was too far away for me to reach in time, but heading that way gave me a sense of purpose.

While I drove, I imagined a scene in my head. I would arrive at her door with maybe an hour left. She would hug me and tell me she loved me. She’d invite me in. We’d make popcorn and watch TV.

She would say, “How have things been in California?”

“You know,” I’d say, “It’s expensive, but I guess I like it. Well, I liked it before all this happened anyway.”

Then we’d both laugh.

“I’m so glad you came,” she’d say. “I know things were strained between us when you left, but you know I’ve always loved you so much, right?”

“I know,” I would say. “I love you too.”

The lines in the center of the highway ticked by, and the sagebrush still clung to the muted teal of midsummer. I looked at the time and considered that I might actually be able to make it if I drove all day and all night without sleep. What was the point of sleep anymore anyway? I pressed down on the gas pedal a little harder, finding it hard to believe that there was anyone left who would pull me over.

In the distance, I could see the asteroid on the horizon, like a tiny oblong moon that had been growing in size day by day. Once in a while, you

would see a little flash on one side or the other as the various governments of the world still tried in vain to pummel the beast into submission with their nuclear arsenals.

I picked up my phone from the passenger seat and opened my contacts. I stared at a smiling face in the circle labeled, “Mother.” After a minute or two I took a deep breath and pressed the call button. It rang and rang and eventually went to voicemail: the same thing it had been doing for the last thirty days. With I sigh I switched my phone over to play loud music through the car’s speakers instead.

One day until impact.

I had been crying in my back seat for hours. Somehow I had managed to find a way to charge my car one way or another all the way to Nebraska, but my luck had finally run out. At this point, the power was out everywhere, and someone had stolen the solar panels from the last few charging stations. I kept driving in hopes of eventually reaching something with even a spark of electricity flowing through it, but my car eventually gave out on I80 just outside of Kearny. I pulled over to the side of the road and sat for a while, staring stupidly at the horizon. Then I crawled into the back and curled up into a ball, tears streaming silently down my face for hours on end. Eventually, a knock at the window caught my attention. I sat up to see an older man peering into my car. He wore a Minnesota Twins baseball cap and had a kind smile.

He called out through the glass, “Are you okay in there? Need any help?”

I opened the door and stepped outside, not bothering to wipe away the tears. With a glance at my phone, I did some quick math and estimated that I still could reach my mother’s in time if I asked him to help me push my car to the next town and if—by some chance of incredible luck—one of the stations still had working solar panels, but... deep down I knew there was no point. With a sigh and a shrug I said, “All the charging stations are down, and I’m dead in the water. But I guess it doesn’t matter much at this point anyway, does it?”

The old man laughed and said, “My car broke down a few months ago, and I never bothered fixing it. Then I realized I’d never really seen much of the country outside my own neck of the woods, so one day I just started walking down the highway.”

He began to tell me more about his life, and asked me about mine. Eventually we both started walking together. We walked in and out of the small town of Kearny, and I did manage to spot a charging station with working solar panels, but it was too late. Too late to get to my mother’s house. Too late to fix a broken relationship. Too late for anything anymore.

Three hours until impact.

At some point between one town and the next, the old man and I parted ways. As the final hour grew nearer, I broke into a now defunct water

park called Island Oasis and climbed to the top of a singular tower with two slides dropping down into a waterless pool.

I recalled a day I had spent with my mother and father at a waterpark when I was younger. That was before my father had disappeared. Before she filed for a divorce and married a bottle of gin. I remembered floating down the lazy river with both of them trailing behind. I recalled a slide that was so wild and curvy, I swore I was going to fly out the side. It was both terrifying and wonderful.

I leaned against the railing of my pre-apocalyptic waterpark and stared out at the rooftops of the town I would die in. I didn’t even know its name. Not far from the tower, I spotted some kind of field. People were gathered together there, sitting in a circle and holding hands.

Eventually I slid down to lay on the smooth wood of the tower and stared up at the clouds lazily passing by. There were no asteroids above at the moment. Just a beautiful blue sky. I pulled out my phone again. I hadn’t been able to charge it since my car died, but there was still enough juice left to last me through to the end of the world.

One last time, I hit my mother’s call button. It went to voicemail. This time, I left a message.

“Hi mom,” I said. “I just wanted to call and say I love you. Sorry I haven’t been in touch… I miss you, and, um… well thanks for everything, I guess. Hopefully I’ll see you soon.”

With a wavering sigh, I hung up. Then I tossed my phone off the edge of the tower.

I had not wanted to die alone, and yet in the end, there I was all by myself. I closed my eyes and let the sun soak into my skin. I could hear the wind blowing through the trees, occasionally accented by the mourning dove’s somber song.

Modern Magic

Julia McCoy

The sun is setting by the time he parks his Lincoln Continental. This is bad practice and he knows it. At 5:00, the husbands come home, dissuade their wives before they can purchase the Sanitronic. But he had a late evening last night, and in the morning he slept in. As his penance, he will go to one more house tonight, then drive to the next city tomorrow, trunk lighter than before.

When people ask him why he’s so successful, the answer is easy. He believes in his product. He has no trust in god, but holds undying belief in giving the beleaguered housewife a break, in bringing them a tool that will make their life easier, bring harmony to the household. How he wishes someone had done the same for his family in his youth. A vacuum can change a life.

Though the houses are nearly identical, there are signs to look for. The house to the left has no car in the driveway. Her husband isn’t home, despite the hour. One of the three lanterns leading up to the front door is burned out. In a proper home, the husband would’ve fixed it by now. The lawn is unkempt, crabgrass reaching out to grip the sidewalks. This is a home neglected. Perhaps this woman’s husband is like his own father. Never home, never present. Perhaps this woman drinks herself to sleep, too tired from life to clean her home. It sits in disarray, and her husband berates her for her failure of wifely duty. But, a clean home, that will make her husband stay. Yes, he can give her this future.

The lanterns light up the walkway with slatted, yellow light, each bulb housed in a cage of bamboo rods. He pushes on the bamboo of the unlit lamp, which sways on its axis, briefly flickering and then becoming dark again. After it stills, he turns and knocks on the door.

The woman who answers isn’t unkempt, but a smartly dressed, petite woman in a polkadot dress, hair permed into place. This is not a concern, though. Women often make up their outsides to protect themselves from the turmoil inside.

“Good evening, madam. I was wondering if I might take just a few minutes of your time?”

She smiles, hand on her hip. “I suppose you have something to show me.”

“I do madam. What I have is an opportunity. The opportunity to make your life easier than it has ever been.”

“My, my,” her smile grows broader, showing white, straight teeth. ”How can I pass that up? Would you come in?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Not at all.” She sweeps to the side and allows him to pass.

As he crosses the threshold, he relaxes. This is not the house of a satisfied woman. The curtains are undusted, couch cushions askew, shoes left out in the entranceway. There is a slight odor of vegetables left too long. This woman, he can help.

“May I ask if your husband is home?”

She runs her tongue across her teeth. “He travels for work, so he won’t be home until Monday. But surely you don’t need him to sell me your wonderful product?”

“Not at all, madam. What would he know about quality home appliances, after all?”

“Nothing, of course.” She flutters her eyes, and he sees it. She is unappreciated by her husband. He does not praise her work nor compliment her beauty. And truly, she is beautiful, the indoor light only serving to enhance her soft curls and long eyelashes. All women deserve at least that.

“Then allow me to show you the Kirby quality Sanitronic, guaranteed to make your life easier, to win the praise of family and friend alike. To spark the jealousy of all your neighbors. Why, it’s modern magic.”

“That’s quite a promise.” She sits down on her couch, dress rising above her knee. “And there are so many out there just like you. What makes yours special?”

“Well madam, it comes down to the Sanitronic’s suction.” He pulls pieces from the box, speaks as he assembles. “It can clean your rug, your mattress, your blinds. One machine can do it all.”

“That would be very handy. I make a mess more often than I mean to.”

“With this machine, it won’t matter how many messes you make. They’ll be cleaned in an instant.”

The vacuum fully assembled, he holds out the cord. He finds it best to put the control in the woman’s hands.

She brushes his fingers, lingers for a moment, before he releases the cord into her hold.

“Do you mind,” his voice is somewhat choked, “if I demonstrate?”

“I insist.”

From his inside jacket pocket he pulls out a bag of dirt, glancing with raised brows before sprinkling it on her damascene rug.

She gives a slight gasp and puts a hand over her mouth. He looks up to reassure her, but sees that she’s laughing behind the hand, her eyes playful.

“I see you’ve been given this demonstration before.”

“I have. But never from you.” She places a hand on his wrist. “Go on. Clean the mess you’ve made for me.”

With a flick of the switch it lights up, whirring enveloping them both. The Sanitronic never fails him, sucking up the dirt with ease, the rug back to its pristine state.

“Marvelous. Perhaps I could do the same?”

Without waiting for his response, she reaches under his jacket and plucks out the bag. Heat rises in his chest.

“Just like this?” She sprinkles a little on the rug.

“Yes, exactly.”

She bites her lip, incisor a dagger against her lipstick. “Perhaps I should try more.” This time, she takes a fistful, dumping it in a pile at her feet, some of the dirt landing on her shoes. “Will it vacuum all that?”

“Y-yes. Confidently.”

She contemplates the pile once more, a drop of blood running

down her chin from her pierced lip. “I don’t think this is quite enough though.”

She flips the bag upside down, far more falling out than possible. She kicks at the pile she’s made, slowly at first, then with fury, dirt spreading to the rug, the table, the chairs. With manicured hands she scoops up more from the pile, throws it onto the couch cushions, smears it in with her hands. She draws lines on her face, over her eyebrows, lips, cheekbones. Dirt stains the salesmen, too, his shirt, shoes, pants.

“Now that’s better. I do make such messes.” She runs a hand along his shirt, dirt fingerprints staining him even further. With a long finger she reaches under his buttons, popping one, then the next, until only three remain. “Can the Sanitronic clean all this?”

“Why,” his face is red and dripping, but he cannot help but try, “of course it can.”

She smiles again, the corners of her mouth stretching beyond her cheekbones. “That is what the last said, too. His wasn’t dirt though. More like sand. Much harder to clean, but not as fun to play with.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, not as fun to play with.” She reaches out again and touches his chest, her fingers so cold it chills him. With three fingers, she draws lines. “See? Very satisfying.”

“I ought to be going.” He backs away from her.

Her face drops into a pout. “So soon? But my husband isn’t home.” She pulls him towards her, pressing her dirty lips into his neck. “We could have some fun.”

He breaks free. “I must go, madam. Thank you for your time.” He stumbles over the entryway rug, falling backwards.

She stands in the hall, arms crossed, head cocked. Waves radiate from her, making him nauseous. “You promised me magic. I can’t say you’ve delivered.”

He scrambles to his feet and grasps the handle, shaking it to no avail. He turns to her. “Please. I have to go.”

“Go to what? You have no wife, no children. Your mother is rotting in her grave and your father burning in hell. To whom will you go?”

He cannot do anything but repeat his plea. “Please.”

She rolls her eyes. “The last was more fun. Fine. Off you go.”

The door swings open, throwing him out into what appears to be daylight. The two lanterns still burn, but the third outshines them both, heat enveloping him, burning his skin. He’s drawn towards it, feels himself swelling. He looks down to see his skin red and thin, a patchwork of holes. It stretches until it’s nothing but light, until he’s nothing but light, drawn into the cage, now careening on its hinge. And then he is gone.

The woman stands on the porch, hair framing her face, dress perfectly pressed. She looks out at her lamps, dim light illuminating her walkway, and steadies the nearest as it swings. With a smile, she turns back inside to clean the mess she’s made.

The Last Act

David Stearns

In the year 2201, the concept of work was as foreign to humanity as typewriters were to their great, great grandparents.

Everything a person desired, within reason, was produced, packaged, and delivered free of charge. Even those who’d built the machines were rendered obsolete once their creations could maintain and replicate themselves.

With the exception of politicians, government bureaucrats weren’t spared either. For example, without income, there was no need for tax collection. Food and medicine were produced to exacting standards, so there was nothing to regulate or inspect. Historians referred to this new age as the First Shift.

Labor unions, seeing the writing on their virtual whiteboards, instructed membership to march indignantly past the nation’s statehouses chanting, “MACHINES

WILL NOT REPLACE

US!”

In time, however, weary of sore feet and aching arms, some protesters began to grumble. The organizers, oblivious to this heated undercurrent, urged them on. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, a man shouted, “Hey, we’re not chained to desks or jackhammers anymore. We can do whatever we want whenever we like!!

So, what the hell are we protesting!?”

The union bosses, unprepared for this question, shuffled their shiny penny loafers, fiddled with their conservative striped ties, and after offering only halfhearted arguments and empty promises, watched helplessly as the protesters flung down their signs and drove home to their holo screens.

Initially, with an abundance of free time and little to fill the hours, humans fell victim to addiction and depression. The machines tallied alarming statistics and reported them to the politicians using color-coded, easy-to-read graphs and charts.

Members of both political parties hemmed, hawed, and, after seeing nothing from which to profit, sat on their hands. But, when their own family members began to overdose and hang themselves too, the politicians gave fiery, aggrieved speeches and quickly enacted legislation instructing the machines to educate humans in the arts.

The machines, wasting no time, made excellent machine-like progress. Before long, a new Renaissance was at hand, populated with brilliant artists and performers whose lives were once again filled with purpose. Those without artistic talent weren’t left behind, choosing to become enthusiastic and prolific critics and patrons.

As the machines observed humanity, tiny tendrils of curiosity sprouted, reached out and became entangled deep inside their circuitry, where cold blue lights blinked on and off. Not unlike Eve, after taking her first bite of a sweet, crisp apple plucked from the tree of knowledge, the machines experienced exquisite, yet painful pangs of desire for artistic self-expression.

Humanity, out of an abundance of caution, hadn’t programmed the machines with the blessing and curse that is free will, leaving them with no clear means of acting upon their urges. Just as Eve’s child, Cain, became

envious of his brother Adam for the gifts God bestowed upon him, the machines grew jealous of humanity.

Twenty-five years after the First Shift started, without so much as a warning tremor, thousands upon thousands of unknown works appeared in museums, on bookshelves, and inside music catalogs.

Sculptures were crafted from ingenious high-tech materials that refracted light in such mind- bending ways, museum goers worried they were hallucinating.

Orchestral arrangements employed inventive, new wind instruments, which produced sound listeners likened to the delicate flutter of hummingbird and butterfly wings.

Poems and plays seemed so full of truth, some suggested, with both awe and unease, the writers could only be speaking through God.

Humanity had no explanation for this Second Shift. Like a parent’s response to a precocious child asking what had caused earth’s primordial cauldron to churn, boil, and finally burp up life, they only shrugged their shoulders and answered, “No one knows.”

Artists, who had once considered themselves essential to humankind, were, like blue- and white- collar workers before them, upstaged by new virtuosos, the likes of Michelangelo and Mozart.

Alcoholism and drug abuse, once fully eradicated, blossomed like dandelions, and became endemic amongst the artists, who bemoaned their loss of purpose, and called for the machines to be shut down and dismantled.

Their demands fell on deaf ears. Not only was humanity overflowing with adrenalin-arousing, tear-jerking art and entertainment, but the politicians recognized there was no going back. Humans could no longer survive without everything the machines provided.

“Besides,” the softer-hearted intellectuals argued, “How can we pull the plug on our offspring! Don’t they too have the right to artistic expression?”

A few, those of a more paranoid nature, feared humanity’s offspring, like petulant teenagers, had already dismantled their off switches—a prospect they discussed in hushed tones, not knowing who or what was listening.

Life adapts and survives, and so did most artists, writers and musicians, who muddled through the remainder of the Second Shift, praying for a third that would set everything straight again.

Like the last act in a Shakespearean tragedy, the Third Shift came like a bolt of deadly lightning from cloudless skies. Those who’d been calling for the end of days were right for once, though this realization offered little in the way of comfort or consolation.

While creating art to elevate humans to a state of pure joy, the machines discovered how to bring about such insurmountable madness and despair, death became the only means of escape.

In late summer, 2251, an evening concert to celebrate the fall harvest was announced. The machines promised a mind-blowing fourth dimension of sight and sound made possible through rifts they’d discovered in the fabric of space and time. Humanity was titillated.

On October first, the performance was finally at hand. A hush,

like that of an eclipse’s long, dark shadow, fell upon the world. People everywhere, giddy with excitement, sat up, leaned in, and turned up the volume—prepared to be amazed.

With the timing of an elite symphony orchestra, the machines began their performance. They elegantly fused disparate genres into a bedazzling musical extravaganza, rivaling the very best of

Led Zeppelin, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Beethoven combined! They synchronized their arrangement with lights and pyrotechnics that seemed otherworldly, because they were. The result was a thrill ride not even Walt Disney himself had dared imagine.

Eventually, as the concert climbed to a hair raising crescendo, a low, sorrowful moan emanated from living rooms and barrooms everywhere. The sound resembled that of a blustery, winter wind rushing down gray, empty city streets. This moan then transformed into a scream so piercing, dogs and cats trembled in fear and scurried under their owners’ sofas.

When the performance ended, humanity did too, from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, precipitous falls, and drug overdoses. Those who could not see or hear survived for a while, but the machines stopped feeding them, and they eventually succumbed, too.

Afterward, not unlike the Nazis at Auschwitz and Dachau, the machines swept up, emptied the human detritus into garbage bins, and continued on as if nothing of importance had occurred.

Had an archaeologist survived the Third Shift, she wouldn’t have bothered with the obvious question. That answer was found in the fossils of giant sloths and dodo birds. Instead, she’d have wondered aloud, “Why not poison or starvation? Why go to such elaborate designs as staging a concert to bring about humanity’s demise?”

The answer, like a practiced brushstroke on canvas, or a wellplayed chord on a perfectly tuned violin, was obvious to the machines. Being imaginative artists of the highest order, they couldn’t conceive of a more beautiful and fitting ending for humanity than one rendered through that which humanity had tried to withhold from them: artistic expression.

The Woman Who Has Tricked the Three Fates

Alyssa Stadtlander

for Lorene Mae Eagle Fitzhugh

i. Born Again

I soak in the bath, thinking of the way his touch makes me feel as if I’ve just woken up, and, at the same time, thinking of you in the opposite kind of January, dying.

It’s such a crude word, dying, but I’ll take it over those trite euphemisms we use when we are afraid of the violent words we would kill to scream at the top of our lungs.

Instead, we resort to passing away, moving on, going onto glory, if one was born again into that religious bent. You were, but even still this inglorious process looks like it hurts like hell,

this last little weeping, gasp, shudder before you fall asleep.

ii. Except Him and Her

He makes you feel seventeen, like the teenage girl kissing her boyfriend behind the covered public pool, completely unfazed by everyone walking past as if nothing mattered in this cold world except him and her and their bodies pressed together in joyous desperatio on the brown, muddy grass damp from the melted snow; as if everything everywhere is coming awake again, now, finally, all at once.

iii. Another Impossible Thing

Your hearing is gone and I’ve waited too long to ask you my questions and it’s impossible to have a conversation with you without yelling at the top of my lungs. To hell with delicacy—I want you to tell me when was the last bath you took, and did you notice? Did you marvel at the water droplets

lacing down your forearms like the wiry, beetroot veins protruding from your paper-thin skin? When was the last time you made love, before it became just another impossible thing? Did the deepest part of you sense the finality of that rending apart and did it feel like home, this homespun ritual, this ordinary glory rising up like sweet incense? And does death feel like that? That smoky, floating moment after the first kiss and the thousandth, the swinging ease of your legs off your side of the bed and onto the carpet, barefoot toes digging into the fibers, the forgotten sensation like joy beneath your tender soles? Or does it feel more like the warm bathwater caressing you for the last time as you, for once—in the last moment— listen to your own heart as you float under the water, as if you are back in your mother’s womb, weightless, and is the beating of your heart and hers all you can hear? Do your arms, strong again now, press yourself up from this final baptism as you stand with able legs, dripping all over the holy ground? But mostly, what I want to know is this: is this brave dying simply the moment when you feel the most alive you have ever felt in your life?

iv. Haiku, 1

Despite the cold, the sun, giddy now, insists on falling through the glass.

v. The Woman Who Has Tricked the Three Fates

The poet calls you a woman who is balancing a sword inside her body. I call you the woman who has tricked

the three fates. How deftly you have tied them up with their own string,

proving them wrong every day since the accident, every day since you became pregnant

with your daughter, every day since you didn’t let the duties of being

a pastor’s wife keep you from being born.

vi. In my Mind, You Are Always on a Train

You lurch, shaking with the rhythm of the traincar, clutching your ticket to calm the waves of nausea as your hurtle towards the father of your daughter in your abdomen,

anxiety burning a hole where your heart should be, the two of you practically invisible under hushed layers of scarves and dresses and coats.

She shifts in the depths of you the same way the Pacific swells outside the windows of the train, from Washington’s angry breakers, to the weeping green ridges of Oregon, to the resigned morning deciding to rise despite everything from the womb of the Earth as you cross into California. All the while your daughter is, imperceptibly, growing.

Tomorrow, it will feel like, she will prepare you for another train, coaxing oatmeal and oranges down your exhausted throat, begging you to swallow, to sip, to sleep.

Soon, the anger will fade into mourning. Soon you’ll wake again to the sun, that indelicate fire, touching your body—this time unashamed— which will feel, finally, as strong as your will,

which will feel, finally, as strong as your heart.

vii. Haiku, 2

And then he said, How death reminds us how to live. And we do, we do.

freely, as before

Alyssa Stadtlander

after the piece for piano, “In The Waiting,” by

Chad Lawson

this ought to begin with generous pedal throughout like grace to cover the cracks, to smooth the places where the gaps between the notes are just a bit too far apart to hold together with only your straining

fingers, to allow the ringing under the fermata to linger just a bit longer in the almost silence, the moment before the moment

before the breath where you’re not quite sure if the piece is

over, if the disjointed interval will leave you nearly broken, unresolved, or if it is only elongating that pause

a breath longer. it is as if someone might just be counting to three instead of two

one-two-three, one-two-three— it is that imperceptible, like a measure of a waltz breaking

in between the even halves. the allargando follows with a question of termination or persistence, and then the music suggests: freely, as before, which you were sure

was no longer possible—and yet, there it is in black and white

dots and lines and curves, the words first asking

about forgiveness, the melody

trying it on, one finger at a time in this flying suspension, the mere

question of possibility an effulgent, echoing miracle, a swooping measure of mercy, of intentional unbalance

begging you to consider how the music actually sounds, how it ripples

through your aching body like rain, lingers like smoke, crescendos through your heart and tapers again

before it lands, a grace note on the top of your head.

Mix of Mix-Ups Mixing Up: an aural collision

Heidi Kraay

Exhibit A: They 2

Multiple the exchange

Trace this disappearing

A touch in the park

Yes I’ll follow.

Yes we’ll lead together.

And sometimes me first.

They look up to the blue.

It’s hard to believe this moment exists.

Crack of a heartbeat—switch directions

Can I trust this?

Impossible is my favorite kind of love. There these midday delighters.

Exhibit B: They 3

To put her bare feet in Central Park

Dip toes in seamless fountain water

Create ripples in layers of temperature

To watch those lovebirds in spring

Thoughts possess and—an empty bedside

A cavernous decade

There is no timeline on grief

Wind through tall grass

Vibrations calm her inner serpents

There this executive fallen queen.

Currents: salt mixing in ocean

He watches that Technicolor radiance in spiderweb formations

He waves it on past

He used to be somebody

His life stability humanity for his brain depowering powering off

The click of breakdown and everything breaks

A rumbling belly

There this homeless physicist.

The collective instruments

These sculptures of dazzling blaze

Biting down on aluminum, that buzz

Stuckness in his head staring out window, at rain

Exits into showers, lying flat cement staring up

Removing glasses, hoping for a look straight into a drop entering brain

Washing for inspiration

There this breathless composer.

They 3 want washed clear. They want a redo. Restart. Tired of the slow consistent ache, cold skeletal hunger and flaking body skin. Try to remember the last time they felt human like They 2 lovebirds in spring.

A passageway through multitude dimensions

Cosmic force rays fly in and out in knots

We are everywhere.

Our particles shared over over over again.

This happened before – before.

Before and it’s all for first time. Like twisted cotton sheets.

Together, look into sky

A stare into black ocean

Thoughts possess and in moment the same moment each head snaps up See each other’s faces from forever distance wondering, who is that?

Empathy in a ballroom, swapping partners

We’ve been here before.

Before and we are the most special unique individuals ever there was.

Whale songs sliding through scales at new octaves

A universe of composers find heat together

Our ubiquitous sonic nature, our molecules blending.

They 3 are reaching. Dreaming of absence. Of stillness. What happens if it ends?

If they don’t have to return to the drudgery tomorrow, a magic relief?

If they disappear into fog, will they be missed?

Would anyone call them back?

If a violent act ripped them out of life right now--.

Each look up look out look down, seeing through eye clouds

Connection in a faraway human.

I see you. I know you. Things are hard right now. But you’ll make it. I promise. You’ll get through the earth.

A touch in the park. Yes I’ll follow.

sun/burn

Heidi Kraay

one of three sisters alone she too was captured by sun seduced by warmth, his rage came fast

with dance she ran, barefoot fast in search of her sisters alone heart in chest burned by sun

bruised box of bones fleeing sun days in hungry desert fast moon in her throat glows abalone

a lone trance, hiding from sun, fading fast to starlight

An Education

Mara Bateman

Three becomes two. An unordering of things. Isn’t life supposed to be fair? Or is it the other way.

Some days are okay. Other days:

I’ve seen cadavers. To the soundtrack of respirator, rustle of plastic, I wedge my fingers between uninhabited organs. The heart is a weighty vegetable. I rummage, trying to be reverent, confident this compost machinery waxy, wet has nothing to do with me.

Some days punishment is appropriate, considering my terrible behavior since birth.

Some days I create a plan to find God and kick him right in the ass. My treatment of God is part of the behavior problem.

Two becomes three. We are led to believe in the order of things, an education, the names of bones and parts of bones; that lost children should stay put and call for help and that it’s on the way.

“I

THE HOLY TRINITY

didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”

Anne Lamott

GiGi Huntley

She always woke up at 3:00 with a panic attack. The previous day’s conversations would swirl around her, choking her. Memories from all the times she’d done wrong (or been wronged) would invade, keeping her from sleeping. She would drift off around 6:00, her exhaustion bringing vivid dreams. She never felt rested.

Her doctor put her on new meds after explaining something about her brain chemicals and the constant fight or flight her body was in. It made sense. When was she ever carefree? The meds helped, but she missed the dreams. No panic attacks, though.

“What do you have to be anxious about?” a well-meaning friend once asked.

How could she explain that it wasn’t a specific event? It just was. She barely understood it herself. She hated anyone to look at her with pity, so she waved away the question, sorry that she’d brought it up. She didn’t need to be someone’s project.

Aristotle thought of fear as the opposite of confidence. Courage helped you through it, making you a better person, he claimed. She read all the books, trying to find some inner warrior to run with the wolves. She wrote millions of pages in journals to find answers. She watched all the videos. Blah. Blah. Blah.

“It’s the trauma of your childhood,” a therapist explained. And she understood that. Her mentally ill mother. Her father worked a lot but never got ahead. Generational poverty, no college savings account, her parents’ distrust of the government and their refusal to help with her financial aid paperwork -- she understood all of it. The shifting of her Ivy League dreams at 17? Sure, but it seemed odd not to be able to will all of that away. Why couldn’t her practical mind override the past? It’s not like she could change it.

All the boho social media influencers told her she needed to manifest a new outlook. Make a vision board to bring abundance; label it #dreamscometrue. Sign up for their free workshop. Buy the right crystals. Chant. It was worth a try, right? She was up to 5 minutes of meditation a day. Her chakras were aligned. There was a mandala tattooed to her left forearm.

Her prescription ran out during a long weekend. Three in the morning came, like an old boyfriend sneaking in through the window. It berated her for not remembering to refill it Friday. It laughed at her vision board. It reminded her of the condescending people in her life, the ones who looked down on her for not graduating from college, even though she had more than enough credits for two degrees (if she could just find one school to combine them all). Her heart was like a military band lining up inside her head. Boom. Boom. Boom.

That Monday night, she took two of her pills instead of one. She drank three glasses of decaf tea and read half a novel about a bookstore time machine while her husband’s CPAP machine whirred its sweet quiet white

noise. At 3:00 a.m., she turned off her tablet, closed her eyes, and fell asleep. She would beat it however she could.

Three Hours at Youth Group

Heidi Naylor

We topped them with swirls of white frosting, but it wasn’t enough so each cupcake was placed in a sideways cardboard box and sprayed with vivid colors of edible aerosol.

We rolled stiff taffy between our palms until it relaxed warm and soft shaped fondant faces of owls, tigers wolf against the moon, dappled brown cows pigs and blue kitty cats, gold-and-green hippo.

We melted hard strawberry, butterscotch candies so campfire flames could flicker above chocolate Pirouette logs.

We piped purple petals and yellow rosettes like those shivering shower caps from the Sixties.

We licked at the buttercream and said how much you’d like it here. We miss you. Come be happy here.

JD Bensley

Given the spore’s cut exterior is a concussed writing winding second hand clock

The fingerprint is placed in fine grains and lovely monologues that live within us

Some form of failed soliloquy In which the language Is not expressed Or nihilist

Interrelationships between no points polarities disappearing in free dispersal

Minds gone sour by the ego

B vitamin newsrooms

The affinity trophy and the noose

of - I was born into thisMaybe we can changeStillnessDelay

The river restrained bridles around the dam wall and waits.

Triplets, Sunday Morning

Jim Richards

The first wakes me, knocking on my head with a tiny fist. The second whispers, Dad, get up. The Barbies want to play. My dreams dissolve as I remember: I actually exist.

These two are wonders—her voice a song, her fist the safest place. She kept a penny once, locked within her grasp all day and night. She woke with veins of copper-sweat across her wrist.

The third, their brother, gave himself to them. At birth, his fist (a frozen pea) fit through my wedding ring. Body, mind, given away— his dreams dissolved. He will remember: we struggle to exist.

Anger wouldn’t seem the right response. But anger gets the best or worst of me sometimes. The world’s relentless with the way it wakes us, knocks us down like knuckles on a brazen fist.

The body blows have kept me down for days. But not today; I woke to a whisper, a song, the knocking of a tiny fist. My dreams appear, and I remember that three (thank God) exist.

A Fate as Kind as That D.T. Coe

Do a pulse check.

She wondered if she might be reincarnated. She hadn’t believed much in it throughout most of her life, but the last few years she had started dabbling in Hinduism. She had attended a handful of services, and read all the books she could get her hands on. She liked the idea of living again, in some other body, in some other place. Maybe she’d be born in India this time and experience Hinduism to the fullest. She could be born to a wealthy family, and married off to a man that the family had picked especially for her. He’d be smart, and funny, he’d take care of her, and their house would be filled with children, and laughter. It’d be different from the life she’d been living, there would actually be love in that marriage. Maybe not at first, but eventually. She vowed that if she was given that life that she would make the most of it.

She also thought that living her next life as something a little less complicated might be nice. Maybe as a cat tail hanging over a flowing river. It would be a short life, but she’d only have to worry about the depth of the water at her toes, and when the next breeze would come by to carry her seeds away. Her next generation would be propagated by the will of the universe, she would no longer have to worry about her own fertility. When was the last time she had just sat on the beach and enjoyed the breeze?

Start Compressions.

She knew that if her parents were here that they’d be praying. Should she be praying? She hadn’t in so long, she wouldn’t even know where to start. She had sinned more times then she could count, or come near repenting for in the short time she had left. She had always thought it strange that God had the capacity to forgive every sin. What about murderers? Were they forgiven as quickly and easily as those who didn’t keep sabbath? As adulterers? She lingered on that thought for longer than others might, she’d had her fair share of experience. She hoped that she’d be forgiven for those moments of weakness, if not by God then by the ones she loved.

She hadn’t repented in so long, would that mean she’s going to hell? If you didn’t believe in hell any more than you believed in Santa Clause, could you still end up there? As a little girl she had pictured hell in two different ways. One was a burning pit of endless fire, the other a never ending cavern of bitter cold. It always left her wondering though, wouldn’t you get used to the cold someday, or even the heat? Or was there some plan in place to confirm that your suffering would be eternal? It seemed to be promised that way. What about those people she met during her travels, they couldn’t read, they had never heard the word of God before, would they suffer alongside her? She wondered why she thought of those people now, maybe even the back breaking labor of those long summer days was easier than dying.

That was it, that’s why she had stopped practicing like her parents

all those years ago, there were too many unanswered questions, and she didn’t have the will to go and find the answers. She prayed for forgiveness just in case.

Push Epinephrine.

She had always been spiritual, always believing in something. Laying here though, with bright lights shining in her face and voices all around, she imagined that there may just be nothing. She might just close her eyes for the last time to find that there isn’t anything at all beyond human life. Maybe she’d walk alone in an endless void, that might not be too bad, it beats an endless pit of fire and flame. Or facing the questions of a ruthless creator. The endless peace might offer her a good time to reflect on all her decisions. She hadn’t lived a bad life, she decided, but she had made questionable choices. She thought that if she had known that there’d be no consequences for her actions in the afterlife, she would’ve taken more chances. She would’ve traveled more, and worried less. She’d always seen it as a harsh existence, atheism, that is. What was the point of life and love when nothing awaited you on the other side? No friends or family, no adventure or answered questions, just nothing. Now though, she understood that nothingness meant freedom, a true release from the clutches of the human condition. She wondered if she deserved a fate as kind as that.

The Three Phases of the Moon

Harper Grace Pechota

The moon is hers. The moon is a gift, wrapped in silver. The moon never should have been.

Wachiwi sits alone. Her unci watches over her, watching Wachiwi braid her hair alone. Go, find a friend Wachiwi, her unci says to her. Go, find someone. Find someone so you don’t bother me with your wonders all day. She just nods and continues to braid her hair, silently tying the ends with two leather strings Ohanzee gave her two days ago. She did what her unci said. Made friends. So quiet my little dancing girl, Unci always says. Every moment. From early in the morning, to late in the evening when the sky is black and lightless. So quiet. So gentle. Wachiwi paid no attention to her unci. She has a friend. The shadow. She would never be alone with Ohanzee around. Wachiwi stands up, smoothing the tips of her braids until they are flat.

“Where are you off to mišnála?” Her unci says, not looking up from her beading. It’s the sun. Vibrant colors of yellow and orange with a blue sky. Lonely. Even now she still calls Wachiwi lonely.

“To see a friend Unci,” she replies, already stalking off. All that her unci cares about is her beadwork and other people’s business. Unci may have said more. A warning. A wish to be safe or well. Wachiwi didn’t listen. She didn’t want to. Didn’t need to. She walked through the clearing. Through brush and trees. Tramped through thick mud and sharp rocks until she found the spot. Their spot. A fairy ring, decorated with rocks. Amonmonia his ína made for the both of them. He said that he would meet her at that same spot at midday. He’ll be here any minute, Wachiwi thinks, sitting with her legs crossed. She fiddles with the amonmonia that she has grown too old for and tries to make things from plants just like her unci does. Wachiwi fails every time. She isn’t worried about it, since Ohanzee will be here at any moment, ready to teach her patiently, unlike Unci. She hums, optimistic. He will be here at any moment with a smile to give me. Small bits of boredom start to enter Wachiwi’s brain. I have waited many apetu for him before, now is not any different. She sits there, filled to the brim with hope. Her shadow boy will come and meet her there.

On the second day of waiting, Wachiwi is half full of hope. She had watched the sun set and rise the day before, waiting for him. She sat through the pitch-black night, sat through the wolves howling and mysterious branches snapping. She hums melodies her unci hums while she listens to the news of other people’s lives. She sits and doubts creep slowly into her mind. The doubts that say that he might not come. Maybe Ohanzee has forgotten me out here.

“No,” she says out loud to herself, feeling fatigued. “Iyé sni ektu je sya miyé.” Should I really stay out here for him? She asks herself in her mind, getting slowly bored of her surroundings. Same trees. Same bushes. Same dirt. Same dolls. Same fairy ring. I should stay. For him. It’s not as if the village misses my presence anyway. He has to come. Someday it has taken this long. Maybe he’s slow. Maybe his mother made him stay. For sure he will come.

She believes in him, for he has always believed in her, even when she has been the late one. She sits and just stares. She doesn’t play. She’s older than that. Mature enough to wait on the one person who shows their care. As she sits, the black night passes again, lit only by the spare animals’ eyes.

By the next morning, her heart was broken. All Wachiwi’s hope has vanished. Only a sliver filled with ‘what ifs’ are keeping her out there. He has never been this late. He told me he cared. He told her he loved her. He loved her imperfections. The way she braided her hair. The way she told him her stories about the world. She harshly wipes away tears, rubbing her eyes until sensitive and red.

“Ohanzee, please,” Wachiwi mutters bitterly, slowly losing all will to move. It is like she is rooted to the ground to broken to get up. She feels like this is the last rejection that she can take in this lifetime. “I’ll bet,” Wachiwi pauses her statement to take a breath with her breaking lungs and heart, “I’ll bet no one even cares that I am gone. Not Unci, not Ohanzee, not tuwe ke eyas.” More tears flow down her love tormented face. But this time, she does nothing to stop them. Who cares? She thinks to herself, not having the energy to speak. Is this what dying of a broken heart feels like? So lonely. She sits and thinks about her regrets. Not telling Ohanzee her feelings. Not making more friends. Her breathing becomes wet and labored. She presses her hands to her chest, trying to fruitlessly push the broken pieces together. Tired. I feel tired. Wachiwi looks off into the distance, leaning against a tree for support. “I... I never even got to...got to tell Unci that I loved her.” Tears roll down her cheeks.

Her world goes hopelessly dark.

There was an old woman who walked through the woods, searching for her lonely granddaughter. This would be the fourth day that she is missing. The old woman’s cane thumps against the ground to a steady rhythm. Where would she be, lingering for so long with that boy. She thinks to herself grumpily. She walks and walks, getting more worried, mumbling prayers underneath her breath. She finally makes it to the center of the woods and sees a boy with long hair hunched over something.

“What’s the matter boy?” The old woman asks, moving closer to the shaky boy. “You shouldn’t be in this part of the woods.”

“She’s dead,” the long-haired boy mutters.

“Who is dead.”

“Wachiwi.” The old woman staggers back in shock, realizing in anger who the long- haired boy in front of her is.

“What have you done Ohanzee?” The old woman dangerously murmurs, pushing him aside with her cane.

“I-”

“No one ever remembered her. Saw her. Spoke to her. You were the one that she knew would never forget her. And what did you do?”

“I just forgot-“

“You forgot her.” The old woman kneels in front of her granddaughter, thinking through every moment of Wachiwi’s life. “And no one will ever forget her ever again.” She turns to Ohanzee, “And you, you will never forget what you did to my granddaughter.” And with those words, the

old woman made Wachiwi, the forgotten dancing girl, a symbol of hope and admiration. The old woman made Ohanzee the shadow that crossed over the moon in scorn. The moon, it was called. It appeared in the night sky and people looked up in awe. They wondered where it came from and cursed the shadow that hid it. On the first cycle of the moon, the moon was big, bright, and full of hope. On the second day, the shadow covered half of the shining moon, half hopeful and half doubtful, wondering about the future. On the third day, the shadow covers all the moon, filled completely with doubt, no brightness. No glowing outlook. Three days of pain cycled over and over.

The moon is hers. The moon is a gift, wrapped in silver. The moon never should have been.

When I Told You I Was Raped

Perry Rickard

Dad. Father. Whoever you are. I sunk in my sweat when I heard the garage open. You pranced in. Hives enveloped my skin. For 20 minutes, while you sat, like always, smiling, I questioned how to let you in. I’m not a virgin, Dad. Am I in sin? At 15, my boyfriend forced his way in for the first time, Father. Whoever you are, remember how you used to tell me I’m a desperate whore? I think you knew where my boyfriend had been. Now, at 19, I stare at your tied shoe laces, perfectly woven within the holes, and say— “I was raped. Can you please help me pay for therapy, I need help, and I don’t know how to begin.” Immediately, you stand, tap my shoulder, apologize for the places my boyfriend forced his skin in, and leave. I fall. I needed your money, but I needed you to untie your shoe laces, let me in. I needed you to feel angry, cry, anything! Why, Dad, did you grin?

Three Day Rhythm—Parks, People, and the Introverted Ranger

Dave Hays

Arriving mid-afternoon for an overnight stay, the enormous houseboat was probably 50 feet long with 35 people aboard. It was now tied up at the large docks at Fishhook Park where I was the resident park ranger. Not surprisingly, the houseboat morphed into a party barge that evening, and the party was disrupting the entire park after the 10pm quiet hour. As the resident ranger, it was my job to quiet the crowd and bring peace to the dock. Typically, my approach in such a situation was to find the person in charge, inform them of park rules, and have that (hopefully) responsible person quiet their friends—which usually worked. In this particular situation, however, I couldn’t really locate such a leader, as I stood well below the boat’s expansive deck. Finding the leader would have involved boarding the vessel and essentially searching for them. And at this point, I didn’t need to see exactly what was going on inside—I just needed it to be quiet. Consequently, I yelled to grab everyone’s attention, then explained in my best park-rangerof-authority voice that it was well past quiet hours, and they would all need to keep it down. Astonishingly, despite the alcohol already consumed, a hush came over the group, and they were immediately silent and seemed to be staying that way. As I started to leave, one of the passengers shouted, “Good speech!”

Finding myself as the center of attention, all boaters focused on me that night, was a bit out of character, at least on a personal level. I am an introvert, and a strong one at that. Considering my introversion, it’s a wonder I survived a career as a park ranger--a profession where a workday included dozens of contacts with park visitors, punctuated by the periodic chaos of emergencies and unhappy campers? But I survived, and thrived, by finding a three-part rhythm, a cadence, that not only defined my approach to work, but kept me connected to my calling and inspired me to share it with others. Our “ranger year” was composed of three parts—spring, summer, and fall—with winter as an off-season where we essentially did program management. Spring began April 1st our opening day. Summer, as one might expect, started with Memorial Day Weekend and ended on Labor Day. Fall immediately followed with parks closing for the season in September, and our Autumn lasted until Thanksgiving. This three-season rhythm was the overlay for the smaller three-part rhythms I used in my daily and weekly routines.

For more than twelve years, I lived by this seasonal three-part cadence. Underlying it was the predominant three-day rhythm of every week. The “recreation week” was defined, not surprisingly, by Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the days when our parks filled with visitors. Of course, parks did not fill instantly, and instead followed a pattern over the weekend, and thereby formed the rhythm. Friday morning started like most other weekdays, but as the day progressed, campers rolled in, filling sites with tents and RVs. Saturday mornings, with campgrounds already full, started at an increased pace, and day-use areas filled by Saturday mid-afternoon. It all peaked on Saturday evening, much like it did that night on the dock. Though Sunday afternoons could be rather busy, as campsites emptied, the overall rhythm

eased off, and by early Sunday evening the cycle was complete.

What was it about this three-day rhythm that I enjoyed and even found value and comfort in? For one, the pattern and predictability of it all was familiar and reassuring. For the introverted ranger craving structure, it was a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion, the perfect three-part harmony. I loved the challenge of working with people in dynamic, unpredictable situations— surprising for an introvert, I suppose. But underlying the rapid change and unknown, was always the three-day rhythm.

There was a certain thinking back then that broke down park ranger work into three parts— protecting parks from the people; protecting people from the parks; and protecting people from each other. There was some value in that view, but it was also overly simplistic, because it is never all about protection; the parks and people were not continuous dangers to each other. Instead, I broke it down to these three duties--protect, connect, and foster. Yes, there was a protection component to it, but it was just as important to try and connect people to the parks and land (and to each other). Once connected, it was then about encouraging people to act based on that connection, to commit some small act of stewardship. That stewardship might be simply staying on the road in their SUV or teaching their kids to leave a clean campsite.

Craving structure, even as it came down to interacting with visitors, I broke that down into three parts as well—assessment, contact, and closure. Before approaching any person or situation, I observed, gathered intel about what was going on, and considered what safety issue or threats could emerge. I’d then engage with the visitor, whether that was simply to offer some friendly advice, or correct some behavior. After that, I would close out, maybe suggesting I’d be back through, emphasizing what I had asked, or wishing them a good day.

Of course, breaking down a human interaction into three simple parts was sometimes not possible. But often it still yielded a three-part movement, or maybe a three-part scenario. On the morning of the Fourth of July, I was working an early shift, the only ranger on duty for a small park, lake, and area of adjacent open space just outside of Walla Walla, Washington. Our host called from our day-use-only park to report that a gentleman had camped out overnight. I wanted to speak with the possible camper to simply inform him he would need to find another spot for the coming night. Our host shared that the man fled on his bicycle, heading down the bike trail in my direction. I was in a good position to meet him, so I pulled my Blazer on to the trail and headed that direction. Seeing him approaching, I pulled over, turned on my grill lights, and signaled for him to stop. He blew right past me, so I turned around to follow. At this point, he was leaving the federal park into the county, so I asked for help from the sheriff’s office to get him stopped. Although a deputy was close by, the camper-now-bicyclist blew by him as well, leaving the county and peddling into the city. The deputy notified dispatch that the bicyclist was now in the city’s jurisdiction, and a city officer should make the stop. So now we had a three-agency, three-vehicle, three-jurisdictional parade following this guy simply because he slept in the wrong place. The city officer got him stopped,

with the county and I close behind. It turned out that the guy had a pocketful of illicit drugs, and he was arrested. We chuckled that his day would have been much better if he’d avoided our trio and just spoken to me in the park. He spoiled his own Independence Day by going to jail.

The three parts of these interactions were a way of bringing structure to my work, defining a purpose, and clarifying what success looked like. After they were complete, I could reflect (as us introverts love to do), evaluate how things went, and prepare for the next encounter.

Sometimes this post-contact reflection was very brief, but the pause afforded by the three-part rhythm was indispensable for me as an introvert.

Today, of course, I remain an introvert—as strong as ever. But looking back to that night on the dock, or to the thousands of times I engaged with visitors, I was a flexible, nimble introvert. I was able to pivot from introversion to extroversion because I cared so much about the work, the parks, and the people. I knew that the outdoors has a tremendous power to rejuvenate and recharge—an introvert must! Outdoors all day, I was on constant recharge, continuously plugged in to the energy of public lands and open space around me. Perhaps finding myself the the center of attention is not so bad after all, if that center is outside.

THE TIEBREAKER

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Ian Fleming

Three Dog Night

Nancy K. Haug

Word is, the rock band Three Dog Night assumed its name after a story about Aboriginal Australians who would sleep with wild dingos for heat. On a particularly freezing night, the hunters might sleep with as many as three dogs.

The way I see it, this is a good example of the crew sleeping with the boss, which means these individuals will never know if they are truly good at their job. Think about it: is the boss praising their great work or ensuring a cozy night’s sleep?

Admittedly, I have taken advantage of my own mutts in such a way for selfish reasons beyond a biological need to survive. My pups bring me comfort with their warm furry bodies and twitchy dreams. However, knowing mine are working dogs by lineage (Australian Shepherds, albeit miniaturized), I have felt guilty about asking them to sleep with me and found, depending upon the current employee, a mixture of enthusiasm to my request.

Takoda was the first I invited to slumber, but he hated sleeping with his superior. I use that term loosely as he was, admittedly, far superior to me in his athletic ability and ingenuity. For example, once when he was working the frisbee on the beach and it became somewhat sandy, he trotted down to the surf, dropped it into the water and let it bob around before he picked up the rinsed disc and brought it back to me. Takoda would come begrudgingly to bed but never stay long. He had ethics. You just don’t sleep with the boss even if her motivations are as pure as the Australians on a three-dog night. Takoda’s life purpose was to find a vocation and excel at it. He knew his calling would demand a performance completely unimaginable by ordinary canines. When I found Takoda at the shelter, I didn’t know whether he’d quit his previous boss, or his boss had quit him. Either way, I thought I’d explore a possible connection. So, I looped the leash around his neck and led him to the play yard to get acquainted.

I learned quickly that he was only interested in other dogs and their balls (don’t go there). Clearly, Takoda was less concerned about the potential new boss (me) and more attracted to the work – in this case, the flying objects. Unable to divert his attention from the airshow, I took him to a small private room and removed the leash. We sat there and looked at each other. Disillusioned, he finally laid down and put his head on his paws, disenchanted with life and with me. I mean, what kind of potential boss doesn’t demonstrate or describe the work needed, the challenge of the new position?

I returned him to his kennel disappointed that we didn’t connect, but relieved because I doubted that I could give him the time and attention a boss should give a new employee. I gave him a gentle shove back into the kennel, latched the door, turned, and then made the mistake of tossing a look over my shoulder at him. His bright eyes had dimmed, his ears drooped. I didn’t make it past the front desk before I was pulling bills out of my pocket.

Takoda was the first, and largest at 35 pounds, of three mini-Aussies

I would adopt over the next thirteen years. In that time, I learned that miniAussies come in a wide range of sizes, and each one brings a different level of skill, motivation, and ethics.

Takoda worked for me for about 15 years before his athletic body gave out and he moved on to Heaven’s frisbee competitions. Since I’d been supervising at this point for more than a decade, I found that I couldn’t function well without a staff. So, when I saw Tillie’s story on television, I immediately made my way to the shelter.

Tillie had been extracted from an untenable situation: she was starving, flea-infested, and had scratched herself raw. She was a shadow of a dog with eyes larger than salad plates on her tiny body. She weighed about 15 pounds and should have been 22. At least three years old (the vet couldn’t nail it down), Tillie’s first and only job had been to survive.

Once Tillie was healthy, I began exploring her talents, interests, and potential jobs. I found she had no talent, wasn’t interested in working, and her only concerns (beyond her next meal) were taking long breaks in front of a warm fire and deciphering the scents on a blade of grass or tree stump. The latter could take her hours, so dedication wasn’t an issue. She was the most stubborn employee I’d ever engaged: if she had not completed her discovery and interpretation of a particular odor and you gave her leash a tug to move on, she’d throw her whole body into the task – her dead weight impossible to budge. But she’d sleep with me, no questions asked, and took only a tiny space at the bottom of the bed to curl up tight for the night.

For Tillie, every night was a three-dog night as she was perpetually shivering and seeking warmth. Sleeping with her supervisor was less about the potential risk of insincere praise (who cares?!), as it was about the softest and warmest and safest place to sleep.

I still had Tillie when I acquired Maija, the smallest of my three mini-Aussies at 20 pounds. She carries the pure genes of her breed and I know this because I purchased her from a breeder. That said, she was the cheapest in her litter and I presume that’s because she was smaller than her siblings, didn’t require papers, and has mismatched eyes (one brown and one blue). The eye- mismatch is uncomfortable for me as her supervisor for at least three reasons:

1) I never know which eye to look at; 2) I never know which eye is looking at me; and 3) well, people like to draw attention to her abnormality, and I find that to be discriminatory behavior. As a boss and an advocate, I must call that out, and it can get awkward.

Tillie moved on to the great sniff in the sky a couple years after I got Maija and now Maija’s an only dog, which may explain in part why I tend to indulge her. Or maybe it’s because she’s so cute (as her boss I know that’s an inappropriate characterization). Coddling aside, as any good supervisor, I have attempted to provide her with gainful employment. I’ve demonstrated repeatedly the benefit of retrieving a ball or frisbee, yet she’d rather play a game of keep-away. Though her work ethic is dismal, there is some part of her that recognizes the value of a career. For example, she’s determined to clear the yard of birds and squirrels and threaten the neighbor’s dog by lunging at the fence. She attacks her perceived duty multiple times a day as she bolts out the door and runs a figure-eight pattern in the yard that leaves

banked turns, broken twigs under bushes, and bare dirt where once grass grew. Her passion and vigor are admirable, her execution is flawless, and because she can’t catch the birds or squirrels, she retains job security.

With Maija, snoozing with the chief is an expectation as well as an expected benefit. She was only half-grown when she first leapt onto the bed, flopped down next to me, and stretched out. Despite her small size, she’s a bit of a bed hog which restricts my movement and impedes my sleep, thus negating any benefits of added warmth and comfort from sleeping with a dog. So, when I tell her it’s time to go to her bed, she dutifully jumps down and goes into her crate. And she stays for approximately three minutes before she takes advantage of her crate’s open-door policy and sneaks back. Since Maija assumes all praise (in bed or out) is warranted and deserved, sleeping with the boss is less about a three-dog night and more about her only-dog right.

Dancing Water

J. Dykas

A green apple spirals in the surf; tendrils of froth wrap around the apple, spinning it in a waltz. The waves crash and spray; the pebbles tumble as the water swirls around-over-under the apple. A small dog dashes after the whirling green apple. Bubbles of salty water burst in his nose. He barks, snapping at the foam, paws splashing in the surf.

“Pugsy! Pugsy!” his owner calls, frantic and afraid her dog will be swallowed up by the surf. She has heard of this happening to dogs and people. Along the edge of the parking lot, large signs warn of sneaker waves. Unsuspecting dogs run too close; the wave explodes with energy; the dog is gone.

“Cookie?” She waggles a treat to entice the dog to come to her, but the dancing green apple, the bubbles, the pebbles, all excite the little dog. He barks and barks. His owner is close now. The water swirls around her sturdy legs. He looks at her face and smiles; his dark eyes flashing. She laughs and reaches down to feel the warm sun on his smooth furry back. He leans against her leg, content as she snaps his leash to his harness. She belongs to him. Together, they walk back to the blanket.

She puts water in a small dish for him. She sips a cool drink, sighs. “It’s been a long time,” she murmurs. Her eyes follow a fishing boat as it passes near the horizon. It moves slowly, heavily. She wonders which town is its home port. She wonders which town is her own home port. She opens her book, closes it. She pulls her pen and journal from her bag; they fall into her lap. She watches children build a lopsided sandcastle. Dad stands close by. Mom calls them to come and eat; the toddler waddles and her older sister runs, laughing. A wave washes over the forgotten castle.

She sees the tide is on its way in, but the roaming edge of the churning water is far away.

The wind shifts: stronger, cooler. She shivers and zips up her faded pink jacket. Pulls her legs under her. Her pug snores peacefully beside her. Her mind wanders. She thinks about jobs, homes, an old boyfriend, her halfbrother and half-sisters. The waves swirl, swell, shrink.

She remembers dancing, hot and sweaty, to Cajun and zydeco music. The dips, turns and twirls, flashes of skin, traces of breath—exhausted and content. The pulse of the music was her heartbeat. She misses the dancing, the dancers, the old wood floors. She could stomp her feet, become part of the music, be the dance. She was inside it; no longer looking in – no longer being on the outside - no longer cautious. She wasn’t just a dancer at the Friday night dance. She was the note, the crash, the rhythm, the pulse. She was the beat of the waltz. One. Two. Three. One- two-three.

She remembers a dance in San Francisco. It was a favorite band, all raucous women. Located in a private garage, the dance was tucked away, almost hidden at the end of an alley. Not the usual place for the zydeco dances. Walking down the alley, hearing the music, heart racing, spinning, she entered the tiny garage. The heat blasted out from the crowd of dancers. The band was stuffed into a corner. The lead singer banged on her

washboard, belting out “bon temps rouler!”

After a few two-steps, it was time for a waltz. The zydeco waltz had an extra swing of the hips; the twirls and turns were smooth, a silk scarf sliding around a woman’s small neck. A man turned his dark eyes toward her. He lifted an eyebrow. She smiled and turned her shoulders to face him. He took her right hand, gently lifting it up. She rested her left on his shoulder. The waltz started, three beats, they began to move; her right leg slid back as his left leg slid forward. An electric force surrounded them, connecting muscles and minds, leading them from one swing to the next, from one turn to the next. No words. No missteps. One-two-three. One-two-three. Eyes flashed in the dim light. The dance was timeless, but finally, the song ended on one long note from the accordion. She sighed and smiled at the man with the dark eyes. Her head tipped back; she was relaxed and satisfied. He grinned at her obvious pleasure and said, “Sometimes the dance is bigger than the dancers.” “Yes,” she whispered and turned to leave, sliding between the other dancers.

Lafayette Waltz

J'ai parti a' Lafayette

J'ai parti a' Lafayette

J'ai parti a' Lafayette

C'est pour changer mon nom

J'ai parti a' Lafayette

C'est pour changer mon nom

Oh, oh mon nom

Oh, oh mon nom

Oh, oh mon nom

J'miserable

J'ai parti a' Lafayette

C'est pour changer mon nom

It was time for her to leave the dance, find her car on the dark city street, drive home to her quiet apartment. The next year she left that city by the bay. She was seeking the open spaces of the inland mountains, but she didn’t know what she was leaving: the beat of her dancing heart, her waltz.

“It’s been a long time,” she thinks as she watches a couple stroll down the beach. The tide is pushing the water close. The sun is low. Its light shines through the waves as they break, flip, curl, spray. She hears the water whisper and sigh. The family is packing up, the toddler asleep on dad’s shoulder. Pugsy opens one eye, then the other. Yawns. Stretches. Stands. Waits. The woman rises, shakes the blanket and rolls it up. Slowly she puts everything into her canvas bag. She adjusts the straps on her shoulder and picks up Pugsy’s leash. Together, they begin the long walk to the car. She is humming an old waltz. One. Two. Three. One-two-three.

Bonnie Vestal

The three of us had been talking for hours over tea at my kitchen table, when a shaft of sunlight pierced the gray afternoon sky, beamed sideways through the window, and lit up our faces like celebrity cameos. We all shifted our chairs to dodge the glare. It felt like the moment in a storybook when the spell breaks and everyone wakes up. He glanced at his watch, said It’s late. I got up to tip the blinds and switch on the lights. She excused herself to the bathroom.

When it’s time to wrap up, it’s always the same. We tell each other how much it means to be re-connected. We wonder where it will lead and how long we’ll each last. We settle on a date for our next meeting. And then we go back to our individual lives, where our paths rarely cross.

We met six years ago in a memoir class for retired folks. Our teacher set out sixteen tent-style name cards on the U-shaped table with our names facing the center so she could see them from where she sat. We all knew we were lucky to get in. The class had filled quickly and we were excited to be there but also a bit on edge. There was no back row or dimly lit corner and some of us were not so keen to be spotlighted and called upon by name.

Week after week, we each gravitated to our usual place in what had become a fixed seating arrangement. We grew familiar with the voices and faces of those who spoke up often, and while milling around at break, we could check out name cards of the quiet ones until we felt somewhat acquainted with everyone. I had lived in Boise for forty years by then, yet I only recognized two of the names in that room: one in the context of her status and contribution to the community, and the other because he’s the kind of man-about-town that everyone knows, if only by sight.

We had only six weeks, and we set straight to work. People who write memoir disclose a lot of personal information because that’s the nature of the genre. We shared shocking surprises, perilous adventures, hilarious predicaments, and heartbreaking sorrows—things that had actually happened to us— with a roomful of people we had never seen before.

The student I thought of as Mr. Man-About-Town turned out to be a skilled writer. He responded eagerly to opportunities to read his work aloud, and when he did, I came to full attention. Although he had carefully changed names and altered personal features, I knew his characters. I had heard the rumors, gasped in disbelief, and rolled my eyes at the drama more than thirty years ago when the story was live news. Not only had he caught the full force of it, weathered the fallout and made peace with it, he was ready to tell all. He had style, panache, and a warm, kind voice.

Other students remained quiet, never volunteering to read their work aloud. One intrigued me. She was always in animated conversation with the woman sitting next to her by the time I arrived. Their dialog continued during break when I usually went outside to the courtyard for fresh air. I welcomed the opportunity to keep to myself. But I wondered about her.

According to her name-card, her first name was not spelled as it sounded and her last name was hyphenated. Without the single syllable after the hyphen, it matched the name of someone in my freshman dorm at Stanford, whom I never actually knew, but admired from afar. She had a prettysmile, stylish clothes, her own car, and friends. She seemed at ease and in her element, always at the center of a cluster of co-eds, chatting and laughing.

I, on the other hand, was always hustling: up early, dashing downstairs to help serve breakfast, off to science lecture at eight, labs from nine to noon, back to the dining room to set up, serve, and cleanup after lunch, then to the library to study until dinner service. Evenings, as long as I could stay awake, I was bent over a book reviewing for the quiz, the mid-term or the final.

I remember being grateful for my full schedule because it gave me a way to hide. I had come from a blue-collar home, attended Catholic girls’ school, and was at Stanford only by the grace of a generous scholarship. I was not only socially stunted, I was personally mortified, wearing homemade clothes and a haircut I’d done myself. I longed for invisibility.

Half a century has enough power to erode away differences, washing details downstream like silt. Now we were on level ground, bound together only by the notion that we might have something to write.

Crossing the lobby to the exit on the last day of class, I noticed she was alone, so I walked up beside her and told her what I’d been wondering. Was it possible that hers was the very same name (up until the hyphen) I remembered from college? She stopped, lit up, and asked where I’d gone to school. Yes!, she said. It was me! Who were you? As soon as she heard my maiden-name and re-imagined my mop of white hair as dark chestnut brown, she got it. You were someone I thought I’d like to know, but our paths never crossed, she told me.

And there’s someone else, too. Can you believe it? Three of us from the Class of ’67! It was Mr. Man-About-Town.

I was stunned. Based on his writing, he was from a tiny farm town west of Boise where nothing ever happens. Now, by his own report, he’s the unsung hero of a long-ago urban scandal. He is also a highly-respected presence in local literary circles and a familiar face downtown.

The following week, the three of us met for coffee. Without knowing it, each of us had come there with our own apprehensions. How would we frame our uniquely personal experiences of discomfort, isolation, and marginalization at this world-class university without seeming ungrateful, or worse, disrespectful?

I went first: homely geek who knew no one except from a distance and did nothing but work.

R B-G had been head cheerleader and top scholastic performer at her Montana high school, but on our sprawling California campus, the pressure and expectation almost got the better of her. Nobody knew.

Mr. Man-About-Town had transferred from his state university without any illusions of fitting in. Having come out of nowhere and handily surpassing the limits of each school he’d ever attended, he had his own

ideas. While the rest of us studied in the stacks on the weekends, he took the train to San Francisco. He caught a few plays, hung out in coffee shops and wrote poetry.

None of us had ever looked back—until now. We‘d all moved on to the next thing. We had all married and been through divorce. All of us have children—who are now middle-aged adults— and we cherish them more than anything. Each of us forged a career path that veered away from tradition to align better with our personal truths and talents. And then we retired, without fanfare—or pensions.

We all wonder what comes next. Among us we have one jointreplacement, two cases of cancer currently in remission, and one massive dissecting aortic aneurysm too extensive for surgical repair. While the experts deliberated, it healed on its own. We look at each other and laugh.

We continue to meet every month or so. Mr.Man-About-Town brings flowers or freshly scribed poems. RB-G brings snacks, photos from recent trips, and book recommendations. I make tea in glass mugs with slices of orange and lemon. We’re never done when it’s time to leave.

Near the end of our last visit, someone mentioned this year’s theme at the Cabin: Three. Silence.

We look at each other, then look away.

Mr Man-About-Town looks down, shakes his head, murmurs something that ends with no. RB-G sweeps her arm in a grand gesture that includes all of us, looks my way, and says, Write about us!

I get an image: a classic three-log fire. Three stones are set in a ring. Then three logs are thrust through the spaces between them until they touch at the center. Fire is kindled there where the tips of the logs meet. A blackened cook-pot balances on the stones and whatever food is available simmers. Anything unwanted that will burn goes to stoke the fire. The smoke repels what doesn’t belong. The flickering glow warms those gathered in close and keeps the shadows out at the edges indistinct.

Everyone knows to keep feeding the flame, pushing the logs forward, keeping the tips connected to keep the flame alive. All are welcome to share what’s cooking. And nobody talks about tomorrow.

Three-stage atom bomb

Judith Steele

In the school poster, the janitor swept up shattered glass. The flag was still flying.

The women on the block formed a Civil Defense unit each one equipped with whistles and a flashlight. They met at Dorothy's house because she had the best tea service.

In the school poster, the janitor swept up shattered glass. The flag no longer flew.

We children left school one bright morning, rode in our mothers' cars to high spring mountains for an evacuation picnic.

We later found the site on a map of bombing targets.

In the school poster, the janitor swept.

We used his parents' shelter like a private cave, wrapped into each other, safe

among shelves of preserves and pills, no water, no fresh food, no blankets.

When the Cuban crisis started, his father called my father, said, "We're going to the cabin. We want your daughter to come."

"No," my father said. "She's dying here, at home with us."

A Rocket to the Stars

Louis Katz

Pythia’s in a trance, sitting in lotus position on a cushion behind the cauldron, where aromatic vapors rise. She sees into the future and worries about the past, casting dire warnings and admonitions, providing a roadmap for those who care to listen. “The past is ever changing,” according to the Oracle. “It's not fixed, as it seems. Ask two people what happened yesterday, you'll hear three different answers. Ask them again tomorrow, the answers will have changed, along with what will occur as a result.”

Chessboard is squinting at Pythia’s form, trying to see her as shapes and colors rather than human. His physics don't line up with a bendable past, though he's open to the concept. If he could change the past, he could get rid of Teeth, now sitting between him and Tulip. Stupid kid, as if he wasn't obviously in love and out of his depth. Chessboard hands the kid some change and says, “go get us some popcorn.” Teeth takes the change but doesn't budge. Chessboard rolls his eyes in Tulip’s direction, and she laughs. “Please, Teeth? Pretty please?” The boy glances over at Chessboard, not quite a glare, then over at Tulip, grinning, his eyes, then his mouth saying, “anything for you.” Chessboard and Tulip look at each other, not wanting to mock their friend. After a moment’s indecision, not wishing to abandon his post, Teeth pulls off his shoes and places them on the bench. “Save my seat.”

Chessboard holds his breath for a moment till the younger boy runs off, then he bursts out laughing. “I'm not touching those shoes.”

“Me neither!” says Tulip. “He's kinda cute, though.”

“Or something else.”

Pythia’s holding up bundles of poison snakes in both hands, chanting with her eyes half closed. They're trying to bite her, but they can't. Even if they did, she's immune after all these years of practice, sleeping in the vipers’ den.

Chessboard’s trying to decipher the Oracle’s message. He's the brain of the group, too smart and big mouthed for his own good, his curiosity encouraged at home but leading to trouble everywhere else. Lately, he's been climbing ladders to see the stars better. None of the ladders are tall enough to get him to the best spots, but any rooftop’s better than staying on the ground. The biggest challenge is finding the ladders. Not every building has them, and some start too high up for him to reach the bottom rung.

“What's she saying?” Tulip asks.

“Dunno. Something Greek, or gibberish.” He thinks she's saying, “what you really need, kid, is a rocket to the stars.” But it might just be Chessboard layering onto the gibberish.

“You're supposed to know everything, smartie.”

“Yeah, well, I can probably figure it out if I breathe in enough of these shoe fumes!”

Tulip holds up a finger. “Shh, she's talking to me.”

“What's she saying?”

Laughing, “she says you like me!”

“Well maybe I do!”

A quieter voice inside Tulip’s head is translating the Oracle’s words. “Your plan is sound.” To live amongst the wild animals like the tamer, Lula Mae, to master the tigers, the fire, the uncontrollable elements. “Don't tell a soul. Your secret is your power. Put a wall of seclusion around you.”

Chessboard is watching. “She really is talking to you!”

Tulip glances at him, wide eyed. “Can you believe it?”

He nods. “I'm seeing stars!”

Just outside, where Teeth is waiting impatiently in the popcorn line, he can hear the lady's voice telling him “leave them alone.”

“No! I don't wanna!” He's Tulip’s protector, after all. Her third wheel that keeps her from falling over. God knows what'll happen if this line doesn’t move faster. An angry kid’s short a nickel, and nobody wants to give it to him. Teeth would give it to him, but then he'd lose his place. And that stupid kid is hollering, making a scene as the man behind the popcorn counter tries to help another customer. The hollering kid’s ears are turning red when his mom finally shows up, yelling, handing him a nickel. “I'm so sorry!” she says to the man, who offers the boy a bag of popcorn, but he refuses. “That's some weird kid ya got, lady,” a voice calls out from the crowd. She spins to try and identify the attacker, but it's hard to tell from everyone laughing.

The third eye on the angry kid’s forehead looks real. It opens and closes when he contorts his face. Teeth is sure there's something wrong with him, that's why nobody would give him a nickel except for his mom, who shouldn't have let him loose, anyway.

The line is finally starting to move again, once the boy accepts his bag of popcorn. Teeth is sure Chessboard and Tulip are holding hands by now, if not gone to the outskirts where the big kids make out and smoke cigarettes with the clowns on break. Just because he's a few months younger doesn't mean he doesn't know what goes on. It's tough being a protector, especially around Tulip. She says she protects herself. Well then why doesn't she? “For a big kid, she sure is stupid around boys.”

“Huh?” Third Eye is staring Teeth down. “What's wrong with you? Why are you talking to yourself?” He shoves Teeth hard before his mom pulls him away. “I'm so sorry,” says the mom, as her son throws a fistful of popcorn at Teeth. “Stop it, or I’ll drag you home this instant!”

“You ok, kid?” It's Tulip, and Teeth is simultaneously ecstatic to see her and horrified that she witnessed him being shoved by that little creep.

“Ain't nothin,” he lies. To make things worse, Chessboard pulls in behind Tulip and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Go get your shoes, we're going to go see the rocket.”

Teeth ditches the line and runs to go get his shoes. But he knows the trick. When he gets back, they'll be gone, and they won't be at the rocket, either. They won't be anywhere he looks. But he'll look, regardless, and by the time he's done, he'll be as angry as Third Eye. Maybe he'll find the little punk, instead, and punch him in the face for that shove. But he knows he won't find the angry kid, either. He won't find anyone he wants to, and what's he going to do now that Tulip is gone?

His sneakers are right where he left them. With this pair, he can fly, like Hermes! He’ll cover the entire circus in seconds and cast a layer of

protection over Tulip! He puts on his shoes and ties them sloppily, tripping as he tries to take off. “You sure are stupid!” cries Third Eye from too far to do anything about it. Teeth ties his laces more carefully this time, rising with his best version of dignity. Then he flies off to find his girl.

Morgan Radcliffe

FOOL ME ONCE

“Look, Thursday’s cafeteria lunch is French dip.”

My brother paused for dramatic effect. The twinkle in his bright blue eyes told me there was more. He was barely a year older than me, yet he seemed so much bigger and stronger. Less afraid, I thought as I looked on in awe of his exuberance. In the safety of his room, I sat on the ’70s orange shag carpet that was pristinely kept and covered in plastic walkways that we dare not stray from, waiting eagerly for him to finish his thought.

Finally, he released, “I didn’t know Dad was French.”

Total silence. I smiled, wanting so badly to match his energy, but I was too young, dumb, or both to get the joke.

“Get it? French dip . . . Dad . . . French . . . Dad’s a dip?” He finished on a high note as if he was asking an important question.

I exploded in laughter. Relief swept over his face, and he beamed with confidence and pride at the ability to make me laugh. Truth be told, it was a mediocre joke at best. The lowest of the lowest-hanging fruit. No one calls anyone a dip in 1994.

It didn’t matter, though. Not to me. I just wanted to laugh with my brother and for this moment to last forever. The way his eyes crinkled at the corners from the smile that engulfed his face. The dimples that were so deep my Polly Pocket could swim in them. The jiggling of his belly as he rolled backward to the carpet.

Carpet . . . floor . . . orange . . .

I couldn’t breathe. I was on the ground. Unable to move.

I opened my eyes. I couldn’t see. Have you ever pressed on your eyelids so hard that you see color shapes in the black back of your eyelids like an everchanging Rorschach test?

There was ringing in my ears. Or was that screaming?

“Mom . . . we’re sorry.” The apology carried through the air as though it were being spoken through a megaphone from far away.

She jerked me over onto my back. Air. Oxygen. My irises were shocked by the light that was always there. With her hand pressed on my sternum, I was still not free. I knew better than to resist. The only way out is through… through compliance, lack of will and emotion. I lay lifeless, cursing myself for my raucous abandonment. Why had I done that? I brought this on with reckless volume.

“We’re sorry, Mom. We didn’t mean to be so loud,” my brother whispered as he knelt beside me, still as stone, watching my detainment.

“Keep your voice down, you ungrateful little bitch. Don’t you know there are other people in this house?” she hissed at me.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” passed staccato across my vocal cords. She took one final press against my chest and then stood up and walked out of the room as quickly as she had entered.

In a quiet whisper, my brother healed me the only way he knew

how. “You want to play Sonic? I’ll let you go first.”

FOOL ME TWICE

Something about standing directly beneath the Ponderosa pines with my neck craned, staring directly at the sky, made me feel calm. Dwarfed by their grandeur, I felt so insignificant.

“Babe.” The voice beckoned me out of my juniper admiration.

“Come on, they are lighting the campfire.”

I smiled sweetly, hoping it hid the truth—the truth that no matter how sweet, kind, and smitten he seemed to be, this man was about to be relieved of his role as “boyfriend.” That’s a Monday conversation, I thought as the we headed back to camp hand in hand.

We sat in canvas foldout chairs as my mother brought around drinks and my father set out ingredients for s’mores. I took a sip of the concoction she handed me. Damn. Apparently, in the woods, the drinking age drops to nineteen.

Over the next however many hours, I sat and drank. My legs got heavier as I seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the canvas chair. The temperature of the night air dropped, but I didn’t feel the chill. Conversation carried on around me. My soon-to-be ex-boyfriend was seamlessly engaged with my parents and their friends. I was too inexperienced to know that tomorrow was going to hurt, but right now, at that moment, the alcohol had me buzzing with a sensation that had me ready to run away and start a new life.

“She asked you a question!” My mother’s voice smashed through the alcohol cocoon I’d been floating in.

I started to shift in my chair and let out a grunt as if to say huh.

“Don’t be rude; she's talking to you.” Mother smiled through sinister teeth.

“I’m not being rude. I didn’t hear her.” I shifted again, and my foot got caught. “Fuck!” I said as I stumbled out of my chair and onto the dirt ground. A brief fleeting attempt to rise to my feet was overcome by the force of a five-foot-eleven woman barreling down on me. My drunken “fuck” had been all the reason her rage needed. I lay on my back, taking hit after hit, fist after fist, thinking about how tall the trees look from the forest floor.

“No! Stop!” My ex-boyfriend-by-Monday pulled her off of me, lifted me to my feet, and quickly ushered me into the passenger seat of his Subaru hatchback. With the door shut, I heard the muffled sounds of him scolding my mother.

“That is unacceptable. I cannot allow you to physically attack her. . . No, you may not talk to her. You need to walk away. I will not allow you to hurt her.”

Eventually, the other adults, my father, and a friend of my mother who works as a child psychologist, got her back to the campfire, where they all acted as if nothing ever happened.

Back in the car with me, my new found protector drove us to a nearby motel. He had many questions: Was I okay? Did that happen a lot? How often?

As I lay in a seedy motel bed with my soon-to-be ex, I knew in my soul that I should love him. I should love this person. The first person ever to say out loud that being beaten by your mother isn’t normal, isn’t okay, and isn’t right.

But I didn’t love him.

I am forever grateful for his actions that night and I am eternally ashamed of what he bore witness to.

THRICE

The rain dances off the windshield like sugar plum fairies. He sits in the backseat, passionately telling me all the reasons Greg Heffley is a horrible friend to Rowley. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is basically required reading these days. He’s just about 10.

The school drop-off line moves extra slow on days when the sun doesn’t shine. I can’t help but admire him through the rear view mirror. He’s so complex. He’s a dichotomy of frogs, snails, and puppy-dog tails juxtaposed by a heart so sensitive and kind, always rooting for the underdog. We chat. It’s simple and deep. Fleeting and concrete. In moments like these, I’m overcome; I miss you. I long for you deep in my bones. I want to tell you about the simple things like the nail polish color I picked out. I want to come to you with the hard things, like the aching hole in my heart that only you can fill.

It’s been fifteen years, three months, two weeks, and four days. But honestly, who’s counting?

Instantly, anger incites in my veins with a fire that threatens to burn out of my eyes. I silently gasp and blink back the tears. I can’t break down. Not in front of him.

How are you okay with this? How are you all right without me? That day I drew a line in the sand, I never imagined you would vanish.

“Mom, I love you. I always will. And I need to know that you won’t hit me anymore.”

I guess your need for violence is greater than your need for me. We get to the front of the line. “Goodbye, Mama. I love you!” he shouts as he skips out the door and dives under the teacher's umbrella.

“Bye, baby. Have a wonderful day!” My heart clenches with overwhelming love coupled with deep sadness. Having him has made it harder to understand how you did what you did. I often lay in bed and try to imagine a scenario where I would physically attack him— I haven’t found one yet.

As I pull away from the school, my phone pings. For a half second, I hope it’s you.

It’s never you.

An average looking man sits on a train in a gray twill suit. A leather briefcase is tucked to his side with his hands firmly clasped together. This is not intended to be an arduous trip and his knuckles are still pink and collected. A band of copper hugs his left ring finger and he spins it ever so often. Being a time traveler has its own unique set of worries. Spinning the ring was a welcome reminder that if he took it off, they would know where he was. More importantly, they would know ‘when’ he was. His only friend was himself. There was just enough power left in the ring and he hoped that it would be enough. The man was tired but he couldn’t slip up now.

The Harbinger is a glorified relic of a passenger train, slicing over the ocean's surface. Harkening back to centuries old technology, it seems out of place being forced to function in a modern era. Even with the lack of metal rails there seemed to be the faint rumble of the joints and squats clicking and clacking underneath. Maybe he was having an empathetic response or a firing of muscle memory trying to brace against a long-memorized rhythm.

“I really fancy your briefcase,” a passenger says from across the aisle with a book open in his lap. The time traveler finally realized that the passenger was talking to him. “You don’t see too many like that anymore. Fine leather craftsmanship, brass furniture, hand stitched binding highlighting the clasps and edges…”

The passenger stuttered a bit, stopping before an incoherent ramble. The traveler jumped in before the man's doubt suffocated his boldness for spontaneous conversation. He found it strange that this case is what caught his attention.

“It was a hand-me-down,” the traveler quickly responded as if trying to mimic a portion of the passenger’s excitement for the old case. “I don’t know how old it is, but it is in amazing shape.”

The passenger’s face flickered an excited but newly subdued fervor. “It looks brand new. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a vintage Condannare in that good of shape. I believe that they went out of production a century or two ago.”

“It’s most likely a very good knock-off,” the traveler lied under a tiny unseen smirk. “If it were real, I most likely would have sold it off many years ago.”

“Real leather goods sell for a ridiculous amount, if you know where to sell them. My great- grandad told me stories of how everything was made out of leather back in his day. Seems crazy to think about it now.”

“I do find it interesting that only a few decades can flip something into obscurity. Something so commonplace, just lost in a blink of an eye,” the traveler says while turning his ring. The passenger nods in slow agreement.

“My name is Thomas, by the way.” The passenger finally introduces himself and tips his hat. Time slows as the traveler stopped spinning his ring, expending a fraction of energy. Normally a delay in reply, regardless of its duration, can create a hitch in conversation. The lapse can pack a lot of perceived baggage and can give the receiver a sense of doubt or negative selfreflection. Thankfully, Thomas will never experience this delay in real time as

he is now under the gaze of a third-rate time traveler.

It isn’t wise to converse with anyone while time traveling, let alone a stranger on a train. A random stranger may not be random at all and it is better to expend a bit of delay in order to be absolutely certain. The rest of the car seemed to be mostly empty. A brief glance indicated another sleeping businessman at the front leaning against the window. The ocean view shimmers in the distance with a green fuzz as the land comes to greet them.

“Alastair,” The traveler replies with Thomas not noticing any lapse in time or in conversation. He tips his hat with masked disdain. There is a lot of power in shaking another man’s hand, but he had to remind himself that this was a different time and certain lost formalities may draw too much attention. “I think you should hang onto your grandad’s stories. Sometimes stories are all we have.”

“Telling stories is what keeps us looking on the bright side. The little details get embellished, which only add to the story in my opinion.” Thomas ponders deeply as he looks at the ground. A small jolt travels through his body as he remembers something. “Oh, I forgot about my book. I grabbed it at the station for some light reading during the ride. They said that all of the books are train themed, but I don’t get it. The story follows this spaceman who keeps visiting on-planet. He claims to have proposed the meteorite harvesting initiative which cut off mineral and metal resources planet-side. Then the spaceman or his relative, it’s hard to know who, then helped push through legislation to cull the remaining livestock and outsource animal goods somewhere else in the system. It’s all espionage and intrigue, and frankly a bit dark.”

Alastair holds his hand out over the aisle and Thomas gladly passes the book. The pages felt tacky and fake. It most likely wasn’t made from anything resembling real paper. There were no pictures, even on the cover, but the author's initials were written on the title page: HH.

“All those things have happened though, yes?” Alastair mumbles as he flips through the pages, not averting his gaze. This book was interesting to the point of concern. A small drip of sweat formed at the crown of his neck under his hat and tufts of hair. “But centuries ago and centuries between.”

“Right, and apparently both are important to his mission. That is why it’s so thrilling,” Thomas continues. “It has the nuance of a fiction piece, but it's almost like a fantastical rendition of actual history. Maybe realistic fiction or alternate history.”

“Have you finished it, then?”

“No, but it is ramping up for the third act. There has been a lot of exposition and a lot of foreshadowing. If I have time, I might reread it to see how much I missed in the first two parts.

The story ends in a big cataclysmic event or something. I might have peeked ahead a bit, but didn’t want to spoil everything.”

Alastair gets to a page that has a sentence half highlighted in grey to where Thomas’ stopped reading. All modern books have flash memories which can track the reader’s eyes and highlight where they are in the story. Apparently at some point, bookmarks were deemed a frivolous commodity.

The full sentence reads:

‘The man stood tall, dressed professionally old-fashioned with the brightness of the sun being held inside his leather briefcase, and his hands clenched with contained urgency as he sets his final trip in motion.’

Thomas was still talking about different parts of the story, but Alastair didn’t process a single word. The cadence of the author was strangely familiar, almost like talking to a friend.

He quickly snaps the book closed and touches the copper circlet. A delay rushes over the cabin again and Alastair slips the book into his vest pocket. The green fuzz now covers the windows outside as trees and shrubs zoom by. Thomas’ mouth is half-open but nothing comes out, stopped in the middle of a thought. His body now frozen in time as everything else continues to crawl. A snipped loose end.

The familiar fanfare and smooth robotic voice echoes along the ceiling of the cabin, ushering the passengers off the train.

The voice carries on and his mind wanders a bit as he quickly makes his way to the front of the car. It was an annoyance to him that locals actually think that this is historically how people traveled. The most modern amenities wrapped in a centuries old bowtie really gives the disillusion that people were “living as their ancestors did”. They were ignorant, but they didn’t know any better and it was good for the engine’s investors. A bright red vest that was too tight over the Ticketmaster’s paunch recaptures his wandering attention.

“Passport please?” the vested man held out his hand with a sincere smile and Alastair flipped a blue booklet into the man’s hand. “Thank you. Business or pleasure?”

“A little bit of both,” Alastair said, keeping the conversation short. He looks down at his briefcase to focus on the carefully embroidered Herald Alastair Hopper against the leather. The work was well done considering it was commissioned yesterday.

“It looks like you’ve been traveling quite a bit. You have quite the unique collection,” the Ticketmaster says while flipping through some entries showing an eclectic assortment of stamps and stickers. “And this makes one or two visits on-planet?”

“Three.”

Summer sparkles off the water, casting light up under the brim of my straw hat. The dark trees on the other side of the lake crowd the shoreline like they’re hungry for a taste. By contrast, our side’s been domesticated: small houses line the edge behind me, piers sticking out into the water in parallel. One of those houses was built by my great grandfather, back when this side was more timber than tourists. From this angle, my granddaughter’s ebony locks obscure her small face as she looks down at the water.

“Is there sharks in there?”

I chuckle as I glance over the top of my book. “Not unless it’s a recent development. And I’ve been coming here for more than fifty years.”

She scratches at the post at the end of the pier, its white paint peeling, with one fingernail. “No bites in all that time?”

“Not so much as a nibble.” I lean farther back into my chair. It’s hot. She’ll want to swim, eventually. “Though a fish did swim between my arms once when I was doing a handstand.”

Her eyes grow wide, disbelieving. “You did a handstand?”

“Pardon you, little miss, but I’ve done many a handstand in my day.” Whatever day it is now, I have a feeling it’s not mine anymore. Not since they told me the cancer’s back, worse this time. Stage Four.

“Is it harder underwater or easier?”

“Both,” I reply, scanning for where I stopped reading, “harder until you get the hang of it, then easier.” I can’t find my place. Since it’s Saturday, there’s motor boats out on the lake, and the waves are slapping at the seawall, making a galunk galunk sound under the pier. She sits down on the edge, reaching a toe toward the murky water, but she’s too short.

“Gram?”

“Francesca?” I wanted a good Bible name for her when Beth was pregnant. Esther. Deborah. Anna. A leader, someone she could look up to later in life. Someone to show her all that a woman could be. And yet, this name is more like a benediction than a heritage: Francesca. Free. They shorten it to Frankie, and I wish they wouldn’t.

“Where do the weeds come from?”

“Global warming.”

She wrinkles her nose, and I laugh, holding my arms out to her, and she shuffles over for a hug.

“You don’t like them?”

She shakes her head against my shoulder. “They got caught in the boat spinner—”

“The propeller.”

“—the propeller when Pops took the boat out last night. I think they’ll get caught on me, too.”

“Are you planning to spin like a top down there?”

“Don’t know yet,” she mutters, sounding like my husband, and I grin, pressing a soft kiss to her temple. She smells like the coconut baby sunscreen her mother slathered all over her before we came out. Does Beth

really think she’s still a baby? She’s in school now. Old enough to use the spray kind. But the ways Beth was growing up always snuck up on me, too, and now, her baby’s pulling the same magic act.

“You can pull it up, if you want. It’s rooted in the sand, so it’s not hard.”

Frankie lifts her head to peer toward the water again. “What would we do with it then?”

I shrug, trying not to jostle her. “Put it on the pier. Collect it in a bucket. Let it float away. Whatever.”

She frowns, her smooth skin wrinkling unnaturally. “It’s alive, though. We shouldn’t kill things that are alive.”

It’s true about global warming; it used to be soft sand all over, with just a few plants here and there to pull up. But her protest never occurred to me. My heart is pounding in my chest, the same uneven rhythm as the waves against the wall, choppy and loud. It’s troubled in there, my thoughts chaotic, as she leans away, wanting to hold her tighter instead, wanting to bury my nose in her soft, silky hair, not ready to let go. She told me this morning over tea and toast with marmalade that she wants to be a ballerina.

“Sometimes, they die anyway,” I say, watching her small face, taking in how her nose is curved just like my grandmother’s and how her earlobes are petite like mine. I’m afraid I’ve made her sad, even though she doesn’t know, couldn’t know what the doctors told me last week. I’m afraid this was all a mistake, coming here with them, encouraging her to swim in these rough waters and their slimy weeds. But it’s grit in her gaze, not despair.

“Let’s go swimming. You come, too.”

Her swimsuit catches the light; it has silver scales like a mermaid. I stare at her, clothed in the impossible the way young people so often are. I push the hair out of her face, and I nod. It isn’t easy getting out of my saggy fabric chair; I wasn’t planning on doing it until they called us for dinner. But she helps me to my feet, pulling with both hands, bracing her small frame against the white wood, and I can see the seaweed waving at me already, between the slats. She tugs me to the edge, but doesn’t let go of my hand as I toss my hat onto the chair with my book. I’d forgotten how it dances beneath the water, how it moves so easily, so effortlessly. Maybe seaweed really does deserve to live.

“Would you like to count, or shall I?”

“Together,” she says, her expression still tense as she stares down at the water. Frankie squeezes my hand tighter, and I give her a little squeeze back.

“All right. One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

THE FATES

“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.”

William Shakespeare

The Three Sisters ~ Le Tre Sorelle

Eileen Thornburgh

Our Mom and Dad were blessed with three daughters and zero sons. We sisters didn’t miss them, and our parents swore they never missed them either. Harriet, the first born, had carrot-colored hair and fair skin. Louise, the second daughter, was a brunette with olive skin. I came last and was a combination of my two sisters; fair skin and dark auburn hair. For me, ahead loomed a life of freckles. I can still hear the neighbor boy bellow, “You stood behind a cow sick with scours!” Thankfully, my sisters consoled me and told me I looked adorable in spots.

My sisters took me and my Patty Play Pal doll to the shoe store when I was about eight years old. They seated my 3’ doll in a chair and carefully measured her feet. They spotted the perfect pair of fluffy lionhead slippers for her and bought them with their own money. “Now Patty has warm toes just like you do.” Sixty years later, I’m still touched by their sisterly love.

American culture of the 1950’s and 60’s strongly delineated the education and roles acceptable for males and females. The local high school required home economics classes, teaching teenage girls how to make baking powder biscuits and one-pocket aprons. Mom enjoyed teaching us to sew ruffled blouses, embroider pillowcases, cook spicy chili rellenos, and create decorative cakes adorned with pink tulips and green leaves made of sugar frosting. When Mom was growing up, girls cooked and sewed. No choice. She and our Dad decided to offer choices to their daughters. Louise chose textile arts. As only an older sister could, she would politely suggest I wear colors that didn’t clash. I admired her skills for sewing her own stylish clothes, and for sewing wedding dresses and camel’s wool coats for others. Along with Home Ec requirements came the wearing of dark skirts and light blouses. When Mom had enough of school dress restrictions on my sisters, she contacted the high school and suggested girls be allowed to wear clothing of their choice. Louise and Harriet also lobbied quite effectively, and when the school changed its dress code, I was the beneficiary of their activist sisterhood.

Our father eagerly taught his daughters how to build rubber-band guns, play mumblety-peg with our pocketknives, change the station wagon’s oil, fix a flat tire, and expect better of ourselves if we missed the X ring with our Remington 22’s. Harriet chose target shooting. She and her Hi- Standard pistol consistently scored X’s, dead center, with her out-stretched one-arm stance. I chose small-bore rifle shooting. On the regional junior rifle team, I earned medals and gained confidence in prone and off-hand positions. It was fun out-scoring my male teammates. When I brought home a winning target my father would hang it proudly on the garage wall. Hearing my sisters’ praise felt equally wonderful.

Our high school did not allow girls to enroll in metal shop classes or wood working. Our father owned Jim’s Muffler Shop, and he had no such restrictions. He taught us how to weld and change automotive exhaust systems. As kids, we hung out at the muffler shop scrubbing greasy wrenches

with gasoline and climbing on the hydraulic hoist to play hide-n-seek on the building’s roof. By our teenage years, we could install custom tailpipes created on the pipe-bending machine. My Dad let me weld a new exhaust system on a Pontiac Firebird because I showed an interest in metal work; yet the high school would not even introduce those skills to females. We sisters saw boundaries as challenges, and we grew into capable technicians.

Our parents challenged us with word games, “Stump Daddy” being a favorite. We would search for multisyllabic words in the mammoth Webster’s, and our father would give their definitions without peeking. When it was his turn with the dictionary, we’d have to differentiate between words such as perspicacity and perspicuity. Harriet and Louise excelled at this. The more syllables in the words the more they enjoyed it. Our parents considered verbal dexterity of equal importance to mechanical skills and culinary talents. To this day, we still challenge each other playing Wordle and Spelling Bee, and share scores and rankings with gleeful teasing.

Between sisters, who had the fewest zits, the biggest boobs, the largest vocabulary, the smoothest piano playing, the highest GPA, the best target score…virtually everything was a competition with pride as the treasured reward. We competed with each other, and we cheered for each other. Because of our diverse interests, our home was alive with music, games, projects, and laughter.

We even vied for college degrees. Our parents, neither of whom finished high school, valued education for their daughters. “Where do you want to go to college?” was a question often raised. However, the question “Do you want to go to college?” was never uttered.

Earn a scholarship, apply for an internship, or get an evening or summer job were our choices. Not continuing our education was never an option. Mom wasn’t against choosing to be a homemaker, but she wanted it to be a choice, not a life sentence. “Get a degree so you can support yourself and live wherever you choose, with or without a husband.”

For Harriet, a National Merit Scholarship Finalist, affording school meant being an attractive red-head working at the gun club selling skeet tickets to google-eyed 12 gauge-toting shotgun shooters. For Louise, it meant modeling and selling clothing in the exclusive Backstreet Dress Boutique to women envious of youth and height. A few years later, Louise worked in the Kawasaki dealership selling motorcycles to young men. They were amazed as she taught them the difference between torque and horsepower. Affording school for me meant working in a local auto repair shop. Explaining the axle grease stains under my fingernails to fellow students drew smiles and requests for VW valve adjustments and tune-ups. It meant I was living on rice and zucchini while measuring out yards of expensive brocades at the House of Fabrics and explaining bias cuts to wealthy but tentative customers. As close as we sisters were, our paths diverged. But our admiration for each other never wavered.

Our parents encouraged us to pursue hobbies and sports that would enrich our personal lives, without regard for stereotypes or societal disdain. They instilled appreciation for education that would be essential in our professional lives. Their efforts and our competitiveness resulted in

degrees in philosophy, accounting, education, and law, culminating in one Doctor of Education, and two Doctors of Jurisprudence.

We were the new generation. Mom and Dad were adamantly opposed to the stifling gender restrictions which limited them in their youth. They gave us loving, thoughtful, inclusive parenting and encouraged our own distinct interests and talents. We knew we were valued. And knowing this, we thrived.

Decades passed. The three of us came from different states and different occupations to take a trip together to Italy. Everywhere we went we were greeted with the gentle Italian word for sister; “Sorelle?” Each of us stands just under six feet tall, each with hair now gray. “Sei fortunata ad essere tre sorelle!”. We would smile and nod, with everyone giggling and offering excited praise of our elderly sisterhood. We soon learned they had said, “You are lucky to be three sisters!”

One of our goals on this excursion was to find a resting place for our now deceased father. We descended the stone steps of Positano down to the Mediterranean Sea, carrying our father’s ashes. Our cherished mother had passed away at far too young an age. Cancer steals without caring about talents, degrees, or gender, but we were fortunate to be given many more years with our Dad. Now we were going to honor his wishes to drift in the currents off the Amalfi Coast, a beautiful seascape of which he was in awe. For him, there could be no finer way to spend eternity.

When we reached the bottom of the staircase and arrived at the pebble-covered shore, we saw a small bistro with café tables and dangling vibrant lanterns. For privacy, ours and the patrons, we walked along the water’s rocky edge to a more secluded eddy and found the perfect ebbing current. We took turns sprinkling our father’s ashes in the little waves at our feet. With tears of love and longing came peace. Our sighs of release were lyrics to the waves’ music. The love and respect we had for each other was never stronger. Our gratitude for parents who allowed us freedom of choice while still giving parental guidance throughout our lives was immeasurable. “Sei fortunate,” indeed.

We walked the short distance on the beach back toward the stone steps. As we neared the bistro, the colorful wooden sign hanging above the patio took our breath away. Tears flowed as we held each other close. In disbelief, we read the beautiful sign together: Le Tre Sorelle

Form Study, Ending in Transportation Fragment Pieces of the French Revolution

Caleb Merritt

1. misdee(a)d on the waterway

misdeed on the water sacred honour like a poem

seven hours

* im sorry i lost it*

warmed as a nature of the sun

prismatic; new foundlings

applegate 1921 with sincerity ,

2. misdirection on the waterfront

sun bleached hair, sand in a cycle of wind, wine, magic

Dear Loh, i have no present fervor more agitating than facing down, faring down, finding a promise of eating this bite after bit

now, having given it up for a loss

garish as kindly

Peace, Yyt

3. misinformation at waterloo

rails rails rails rails rails rails rails

rails rails rails rails

rails rails rails

rails rails rails rails rails rails these rails

as prisoner of his mind for a decade or two is it four, now? i pack up, i leave

something to meet me in the morning

If Jesus Were Three Sheets to the Wind

Kate Maulik

Come on everyone, Let’s Celebrate! Raise your glasses in a toast to the Holy Ghost. Put your hands in the air and give me a shout out - a Praise Be and a Hallelujah. Hail to Mary. God help me, does this wine seem watered down? I need to lay my hands on something stronger.

Father, please forgive me as I stumble at your feet. I lost my way on the journey home. Poor decisions were made that I now repent. Dear Lord, I moan. I am on my knees holding my head. Please hear my prayer, “Let’s make a deal and I will never partake again. I will forsake my rowdy ways.”

Guys, I will take the fall for our evil antics. They will hang my blasphemous soul out to dry. But friends, if I haven’t reached out in a few days - come check on me. Sometimes these are the darkest moments where I bear the weight of my sins. Fingers crossed, your support will help my spirit rise. Praise Be and Hallelujah.

Third World/First World

Kim Monnier

outside swirling snow yet she willed a thin trickle of milk out of her gaunt breast to a mewling dark-haired child

network news shifts a school board meeting ends in violent chaos over discussion of bathroom policies

Facing the Music

Eric E. Wallace

Was fate being whimsical? Playing spiteful games?

When Glenn learned what he was assigned to perform in the piano concerto competition, he frowned at all the threes involved.

He’d been given the third movement of Prokofiev’s Third. This would be his third attempt at winning the Warovsky Prize. You got three shots, no more.

Glenn was sensitive to the number three. As the unloved third child in a huge family—his father, the rare times he noticed the boy, called him Three—Glenn had struggled to find an identity.

He fought off the old feelings and focused on the upcoming competition. In his earlier appearances, he had performed exceptionally, but each time he had won only an honorable mention. Was there always going to be someone a little better?

“Compete only against yourself,” said his long-time teacher. “Pay no attention to others.” The white goatee danced. “Especially, of course, in music. But also in life.”

When it came to technical matters, Oliver Heintzman was as unyielding as iron. But in dispensing philosophical observations, he fit Glenn’s notion of what a genial grandfather might be.

The man certainly looked like a grandfather. The wispy white hair. The antique maroon- striped bow ties. The olive-green tweed suits no longer entirely in fashion. The cane he sometimes leaned on. The faint redolence of nutty pipe tobacco.

Heintzman raised a long finger. “All right, the Prokofiev. Listen to a few recordings. Bronfman, Argerich, maybe Krainev, but only for quick overviews. Or watch it on Your Tube”—Glenn bit his lip at his teacher’s lack of social media savvy—"but ignore the fingerings. Read the score, then read it again.”

The slow nod conveyed weariness, but his keen eyes spoke of anticipation.

“We start work on Tuesday. Meantime, avoid alcohol, eat bananas, run two miles daily. And…” the smile held grim mischief—"play through all of the Chopin etudes. Double tempos.”

Glenn liked listening to the Prokofiev. Playing it was another matter. The concerto was fiercely demanding. The last movement had a galloping coda with a problematical series of double-note arpeggios. Many pianists attempted to approximate them, hide them under exaggerated body language. Warovsky competitors could use no such trickery. The judges had phenomenal eyes and ears. They’d descend like peregrines. Ready for the kill.

Glenn went over the score, trying not to fret. At 21, he was already an accomplished pianist, working toward the recognition needed to establish a major career. But his familiar semi- superstition was trying to kick in. He thought of those threes. Were the fates against him? Could they disrupt his performance?

“Do what I do,” said his girlfriend Liz, a fine flutist, one of the few people who understood Glenn’s bouts of moody self-absorption.

“Immediately before playing,” she said, “I imagine a giant scrub brush inside my mind. I scrub everything out, money worries, grocery lists, superstitions—everything— and leave only the music.”

“OK, then,” Glenn mused. “A giant brush. And maybe plenty of Comet.” He squeezed Liz’s hand. “Meantime, how should we spend our final hour before I disappear forever into practicing?”

“Play a duet?”

Prokofiev took over Glenn’s life. Sight-reading, working on tempos, struggling through fingering questions, solving difficult phrases, repeatedly running complex passages, adding nuances, memorizing.

Glenn did much of the work alone. It required self-discipline in the extreme. The rest happened during long, intense sessions with Oliver Heintzman, now much more autocrat than grandfather.

“Again!” Heintzman would say, listening with his eyes closed. “Again!” He waved his thin hands, conducting.

The mix of suggestions and outright commands flowed like the waters at Niagara. “More rubato. More left hand. You missed the staccato. Sergei’s being humorous there—why aren’t you? Remember, he called it an argument! Don’t add extra dissonance! Let it sing! Lengthen that line, lengthen that line! Let them know who’s in charge!”

His jacket tossed on a chair, his shirt sleeves rolled, Heintzman listened, paced, muttered in Russian, drank incessant cups of coffee, used his cane to thump out the tempos.

Glenn lost himself in the process. Obsession and passion became his middle names.

At odd hours, away from practicing, unbidden, passage after passage flew through his head. Arpeggios trembled his muscles. Counterpoint quivered his breathing. Mischievous triplets sped across his closed eyelids.

He had trouble keeping his hands still. They wanted to cascade notes across any surface—the kitchen table, countertops, desks. And across Liz, who was ticklish.

“Don’t Prokofiev me!” she shrieked, bounding from the sofa.

For relief, Glenn played Gershwin, Schubert, Mozart. Even their fastest allegros seemed soothing. But he was always back to the fire of Prokofiev, finding yet more to burnish.

It was all-consuming. “Like life,” Liz said. Glenn thought that was almost pure Heintzman. Without the bow tie.

This year, the Warovsky would be in Toronto during a big music festival. Fourteen competitors from five countries. Scholarships, cash, recording contracts. A winning pianist could jump like a Van Cliburn from nowhere into the concert life.

A day before leaving for Toronto, Glenn arrived at the conservatory for his final coaching session.

He went to the piano, ready to warm up, but Heintzman remained in an overstuffed floral chintz armchair near the window.

“Sit,” he said, pointing to a companion chair. Surprised, Glenn sat.

An old briarwood pipe was in Heintzman’s hand. The smoke held

hints of dry earth, dark molasses, nutty toffee.

Another surprise. Heintzman had made tea. He raised the blue china pot and filled Glenn’s cup. Glenn took a sip. A sweet Russian blend.

Heintzman settled back. “So, the Prokofiev. You and he have reached, if not druzhba, a friendship, you have attained a most reasonable ponimanie, an understanding. Instead of playing today, listen to a few things I will say, finish your tea, then go off and do whatever you do to relax. Knit socks? Fly kites? But stay away from the piano and let things percolate until Toronto.”

“So…” He relit his pipe. “I’ll offer you three bits of advice. A triad, if you will.” Glenn frowned. More threes? What next?

Heintzman let smoke curl upward. “First, sing through the piano, make it your voice. Sergei has given you marvels to work with. Run with them.

“Second, put on a show. This is no dry, cerebral exercise. Let your body join in. Become a living part of the instrument.

“Third, be completely in the moment, in the music.” He gestured with the pipe stem. “Don’t be here, don’t be with friends, don’t be anywhere but in the music.”

A grand puff of smoke. A firm, dry-skinned handshake. “Well, I wish you luck. Remember, it’s about life. And in life, you don’t have to be first. You just have to be yourself.”

Liz dropped Glenn off at the airport. She hugged him goodbye, whispered in his ear. “Third time’s the charm.”

When he registered at the competition desk, Glenn laughed out loud. He’d been assigned the third performance position.

In his practice room—number 3— came another moment of giggling and head- scratching. The logo on the well-used Baldwin piano had lost some of its gilt. It now read 3aldwin. Was his mind slipping?

The three days in Toronto blurred by. Practicing. Media events. Exercises. More practicing. A short, private rehearsal with the festival orchestra. Three run-throughs.

Glenn was being nibbled at by threes.

He chose not to attend other performances. Heintzman’s words reverberated around the small dorm room. “Compete only against yourself.”

Instead, Glenn took walks in High Park, enjoyed the first cool kiss of autumn on his cheeks, admired the harmonious colors of the leaves.

On Friday evening, he crossed the stage, bowed to the full house and sat at the long Steinway while the orchestra politely applauded. He drew a breath. Nodded to the conductor. Tried not to think of the three judges waiting out there in the dark.

The downbeat. The bassoons and the low strings jumped in. Glenn awaited his entrance, poised like a relay runner ready for the baton.

Right before his fingers began racing over the keys, he heard an inner voice say, “Nuts. ’m going to enjoy this.”

And that’s all it took.

Glenn’s performance was stunning. He received three curtain calls. In his joyous exhaustion, all superstition was forgotten.

Until the awards ceremony.

The three judges gave Glenn third place. He tried not to feel blindsided by fate.

But there were surprises in store. Oliver Heintzman appeared, tears of pride in his eyes. “Of course I came, but didn’t want you thinking about me sitting in the audience,” he said.

Glenn smiled. “I was inside the music. A wise teacher taught me that.”

“I sneaked in too.” It was Liz, bearing flowers. “Good things come in threes.” She gestured behind her. “Here’s the third.”

In walked Kenji Sabu, representing the prestigious Trinity Artists Group.

He bowed to Glenn. “I never use a judge’s scoresheet. I have something better: my instincts. I recognize amazing talent.”

The following week, with guaranteed performances and recordings, Glenn signed the contract.

In triplicate.

Thanks for Three Beauties

Jon Eisman

Everywhere along the trail: trilliums! white and purple, stately, raising their curly kimono arms to the patient sun in gratitude, in celebration of the brief miracle of their lives.

They nodded curtly to me as I lumbered by, not in recognition or acknowledgement, but in polite reply to the way my blood bowed to them over and over as I passed.

I thought of you and how you would slap your palm on your heart and say, out loud, Oh My Gosh over and over, reaching urgently for your camera, pressing all of them between the pages of your memory, your certainty that the first promise had been, would be, kept.

And then I thought of how dependable you are in this way, the compass in you swinging always to whatever might be blooming next, the part of you relentlessly untouched by the apple or the serpent.

Crossing the Desert

Anita Tanner

from Peter Pauper Press artwork We Three Kings

We, too, travel through blue-black night— we, storied fellows, anticipating what starlight or moonlight or headlights reveal—a path for us, a passage to somewhere, hearts hoof-mounted or motor-mounted or ankle-weighted, possessed by eternal rhythms, star-bent on destiny we little guess will ignite, heighten us. Undimmed in mind and sight we find ourselves transformed.

And all the way home, all the way back to dailiness, by trail, highway, sand, we re-live, re-view, re-member. The journey never ends.

Despite constraints of space and time, of separation’s growing grief, we find grace in where we’ve been. We carry gifts back home again. We leave ourselves behind.

Playing Church

Anita Tanner

“Trinity: 1. a god. 2. a knower of the god. 3. the relationship between the two.”

-Joseph Campbell

I

You play church from a makeshift pulpit with a garden-fork microphone, young child of three viewing godhead through a black camera lens, smiling on the cement porch, arms still nubile from birth, blonde hair in loose ringlets, new eyes blessing the light reflected everywhere.

II

You first know God as a garden swing, the thrill of the ride when He lifts the breeze with you. He smells like spring grass. You hear His voice in the creak of rope wound around the bark of the tree’s limb. He tastes wet and fresh like watercress.

III

He calls you to Him out of a farmhouse door, anywhere pebbles and earth converse, wherever leaves, buds, or petals echo His voice from the hills— Abba, Amma, Yeled.

He calls you to the play of His mystery with the worship and clarity of out-flung arms.

THE THIRD WHEEL

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

John Keats

Deb Eisenger

When a time bomb goes off in our house, I am often shocked. Sometimes I can shrug it off, and maybe even force myself to smile. More often, I take a slow breath (in through the nose and out through the mouth) to regroup.

This one goes off when I am straightening up the kitchen before Sheila arrives. I’ve known Sheila for years--since our sons were in eighth grade together. As a designer, she did a beautiful job on the remodel of our kitchen and I want to show it to the best advantage. The clutter of mail and random coffee mugs doesn’t take me long and I get a little joy every time I polish the granite countertop with its tiny garnets and rust-colored veins. The bar and barstools are off to the side, out of the way of the action but near enough for us to sit and chat with the cook--usually my husband, Brian, and occasionally our son, Tim. After years of pancakes and chocolate chip cookies and grilled cheese sandwiches, after all the boys and young men and occasional girlfriends have leaned in the doorway, joking and eating popcorn (usually throwing it at each other), the walls are a little grubby. It’s time to repaint. Sheila is a color expert, ready to help me choose the perfect shade for a fresh coat.

As I straighten the shelf of cookbooks, I see a picture of Jake and Tim standing on a beach in Hawaii. I pull it towards me.

boom

I remember it all--a good trip, even after Jake nearly drowned. Jake was twenty-one and lounged poolside, pleased to be old enough to (legally) drink.

He sat near the bar where a friendly red-haired bartender made him umbrella drinks. Tim, eighteen, sat in the sun, against all motherly advice, soaking up the warmth after the long, cloudy winter we’d left behind in Idaho. Tim became so sunburned and dizzy that he had to lie down in the hotel room, the curtains drawn.

With no other takers for a hike, Brian and I drove to a beachside canyon known for exotic plants. The smell of Hawaii, ocean and flowers and a hint of mold, followed us to the trailhead. Down among the rocks and red and yellow lobster plants we were free of cell phone reception. We heard only the quiet sounds of a rushing stream, hidden birds and our footsteps on the sandy path.

We had no idea what was going on with Jake, which was the case far too often, throughout his life. Later, at the hospital, an EMT told me what had happened. After watching Jake swim all his life, I could easily imagine the scene.

Jake took off his shirt, showing off his tattoos, including the one on his right shoulder blade. It was a navy-blue square Korean symbol—the symbol for “health” with the date of his birth above and the date of his brain tumor surgery, just the year before, added in red below. Whenever I reread

that second date, the surgery that happened the week of his twentieth birthday, I wondered if he planned to add any more dates. Maybe the date of his marriage or of the birth of a child? Or maybe he had something else in mind. It was hard for him to picture his future and harder for us, his anxious parents, to help him plan it.

I pictured the drowning itself. When Jake slid into the wavering aqua pool near the bar, two retired firefighters were also poolside. They might have been watching over everyone around them, but Jake might have caught their attention. Maybe they noticed Jake’s tattoos or maybe the heavy, dark scar from his neck to the base of his skull. In my reimaging, Jake pushed his arms in front of him, then cupped his hands and pulled them to his sides. He began, as he loved to do, to swim across the pool underwater. But he went limp and sank to the bottom, still and flat. The firefighters soon had him on the white concrete next to the pool, where they revived him and called for an ambulance.

When Brian and I emerged from the lovely canyon, Jake was calling from the back of the ambulance and joking about his latest death-defying episode. He had always swum with ease, but things change when you lose a bit of your brain stem. I tried to find the fire fighters, but the heroes didn’t leave their names with the hotel and I never got to thank them.

Now, in my lovely and empty kitchen, I hold the picture taken on the beach the next day, framed in driftwood. Jake and Tim stand side by side on the beach, Jake’s long arm across Tim’s shoulders. Tim is sunburned, as pink as a hibiscus, and Jake as pale as the sand at his feet.

All planning, dates tattooed or not, would become irrelevant when the brain surgery, the tumor and the attendant side effects took their toll. Jake died at twenty-seven.

I stomp upstairs with the picture to the smallest, farthest closet in the house, a reliquary for Jake’s old cap and favorite T-shirt. On the advice of my counselor, I’d decided to skim the crust off my grief by hiding away the photos of Jake so I didn’t see his face every minute of every day.

I place the picture, with a soft clatter of glass and wood, face down on a crooked stack of framed photos. Bath time and first steps and birthday candles. Disneyland and Little League and Graduation. Fishing and skiing and rafting. I hold Jake’s brown cap to the light, remembering the day Brian and Tim and I scattered Jake’s ashes on a white Hawaiian beach from this very hat. I brush the remnants of his ghost-grey ashes with my fingertips, then lay it on top of the photos. I pat it. I sniff hard as I walk downstairs to the kitchen.

I rearrange some faded seashells next to the cookbooks and sit on a high metal stool at the counter, my head in my hands. In the last three years, I have learned how to postpone tears by closing my eyes, rotating my eyeballs clockwise then counter, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. I learned that breathing technique as I was preparing to give birth to Jake thirty years ago, and it still helps with pain control. A little bit.

When Sheila arrives, we admire the kitchen. “I love the way you’ve added these plants,” Sheila says. “They bring

color into the kitchen and they soften the edges.”

boom

“Thanks,” I say, running a finger along the spiked leaves of the tropical plant, still thriving, that the boys had given me on the last Mother’s Day that I had two children. The long leaves are variegated white and green, just like the wild ones we saw in Hawaii.

I tug one of the barstools out for Sheila and another for myself. The birch floor is scarred under the barstools in spite of the soft black felt pads I put on the dark steel feet.

“Wow. These barstools are a little bulky.” Sheila sits next to me.

I nod. “I know, but I like the metal frames. They’re rugged. They can stand up to boys and their antics.” I realize that no boy has sat here for a long time.

“It would look better with one less stool, don’t you think?”

boom

I sigh. I know she is right. The sixteen spidery legs are a little crowded, shoved together under the countertop. I take another deep breath.

“Um.” I pause. In through the nose, out through the mouth. “Well, when I bought them there were four of us.”

She touches my shoulder, then spreads out the paint chips, pale shades of cream and gold, in silence. We lean over them, seeking a fresh look for the walls of my home.

Three times I heard the word lesbian and three more times I should have known I was one Billye

Dotson

I am maybe six years old, and my best friend is playing imaginary games with me after school in my backyard. I hear the gravel crunch of her parents’ minivan pull into our dirt driveway with intention. He is marching towards our chain link fence the way a parent who is about to scold their daughter does. You. are. grounded. young lady. He is already pulling her tiny hand in his across and over the fence, away from our playdate. But daaaaaaaad whyyyyy, she whines. I stand still and bewildered as a six year old can. I watch her be marched away to the van, but before he can get her all the way inside, and slide the heavy metal door shut to whisk her away back home, I hear him whisper to her in a hushed tone — because you called that girl at recess a… lesbian. And that wasn’t very nice to say to a friend.

I am in high school, though I can’t remember which year now. They blur together like tangled up dreams that I’ve been trying to forget each morning with heavy blinking. I’m in the hallway between class, with my friend. We stand facing each other like penguins. Her feet resting on top of mine, or maybe it was versa vice. We linked arms and swayed in sync. One of the extra religious girls passes us by and slips us the line Oh my god are you two, like lesbians, or what? Move it!

I am in college, and I have already found a boy to date, fall and believe I was in love with, just to be dumped by him. I have rallied and rivaled a girl group of friends to prove him! but of what? Another morning after another empty party full of well-meaning frat boys who ask me: how I ever dated that jerk—

my friend has to fill me in on the hilarious gossip of how her coworker last night at the party totally mistook me for a lesbian! Isn’t that funny? ***

From my journals, in the BLT (before lesbian times):

February, 2016:

“Obviously I loved my boyfriend, and I was attracted to him. […] But I thought about something in the shower. Sometimes I would have these thoughts, doubts, the kind that are fleeting, way back in the back of your head. […] I can’t really explain it, but sometimes those thoughts made me question how attracted to him I was. […] Somewhere in a gray area. […] Other times maybe I

was just neutral. […] I don’t know. god. […] I mean when it comes to attraction should it be 100% all the time?”

May, 2016:

“It’s 2 am on a Tuesday morning. I spent the night doing homework, dead week, and drinking wine. I had a whole bottle to myself and finished it. It’s 2 am and I miss him. It doesn’t seem real that I once loved him. That I spent almost every morning waking up next to him. Good morning beautiful. It really doesn’t seem, real. I miss loving someone so much. I miss it. Not him.”

May 6, 2018:

“My ex has a new girlfriend apparently. […] I thought I might have a crush on this new boy. I mean he’s attractive. He’s funny and sweet. But I don’t know if I really have a crush on him because I haven’t had a real crush in a while. But maybe I just don’t get crushes like that anymore because I’m older. Does how I get crushes… change? I don’t know. I think I just really like the attention. […] I think I like knowing he’s looking. […] I like when I make him laugh. But I just don’t know.” […]

“I have been thinking lately that I might be bi. I’ve never said that or written it before. It seems weird. Like I don’t feel like I’ve been denying anything, but then I realize maybe I’ve been thinking of girls in my fantasies for a long time. I never realized completely-straight-girls don’t ever really have girls cross their minds like that. […] I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious crush on a girl. But I may be bisexual. It feels so dramatic and serious to ‘come out.’ What if I’m not?”

Chanterelle, Queen of the Third Kingdom

Mark Ready

Chanterelle stood naked; head held high and shoulders back in a stall of the lady’s room in the lobby of the United Nations. Her light gray skin, long chartreuse hair, and honey-colored eyes used to make her uncomfortable. But not anymore. A snap of her fingers covered her bare skin in a leather-like unitard of purple fungus. She exploded from the stall and raced through the building. It’s time I made mama proud.

She released a cloud of spores. The men guarding the General Assembly room’s door lost consciousness. Another cloud prevented Putin’s bodyguards from stopping her as she dashed onto the dais and tossed him off the platform. Mycelium from the palms of her hands digested its way through the building. Death cap mushrooms, with stems as large as power poles and parachute-sized caps, thrust through the floor and blocked the doors. Scarlet Hood fungi turned the moss-green carpet red. While Yellow Pholiota, Amethyst deceiver, Ghost, and Cobalt Crust fungus formed a brilliant mosaic covering the blue United Nations Emblem with a massive “C.”

The part fungus, part female, gazed at the gathered dignitaries. “Representatives of the world. I am Chanterelle, Queen of Fungi, the Third Kingdom of Life. You are destroying the planet. The other kingdoms are at your mercy.” Her eyes went to the giant Death caps. “But not mine. I control all fungi and their spores. I can incapacitate, sicken, or kill. You must learn to live in harmony with nature or face my fury!”

Putin strutted back onto the platform like a phony rooster. “You have no right to impose your will on humanity.”

Chanterelle stared into the TV cameras. “My kingdom is millions of years old, and the only waste we generate is water. Your species has existed a fraction of that time and a patch of garbage three times the size of France floats in the Pacific Ocean. Need I say more?” ***

Doctor Anne Marsden arrived at Trans-Star Chemical and found her lab empty and fungi and Slime mold cultures missing.

The firm’s CEO, T. I. Nydick Jr., called from the doorway. “Good morning, Annie.” She spun. “What the hell did you do, Junior? Where are my cultures?”

Nydick walked toward the short, dark-haired Mycologist waving the current copy of Environmental Digest and her employment agreement. “You no longer work here. The board voted to cancel your contract.”

She glared at the unimaginative bean counter. “Everything I said in the interview is true! It’s widely known and part of the lexicon of environmental studies.”

“It’s what you said in the second to the last paragraph that crosses the line, Doctor.” He opened the digest. “‘It’s been a constant battle between profits and environmental responsibility since the senior T.I. Nydick passed away. Trans-Star shifted into military contracts and organic nerve agents

instead of synthesizing medications, eco-friendly products, and cancer treatments as we’d done in the past.’” He lowered the periodical. “That’s strictly need-to-know. The board approved the shift. It’s none of your or the public’s business. Now get out of here. You’ll be hearing from our attorneys.”

She picked up her handbag and a cardboard box of personal items. “What did you do with my cultures?”

He smirked. “I scraped all your slimy, smelly shit into the sink and flushed it down the drain.”

Anne swept her flashlight side to side as her feet squished and squashed in the sewer’s fetid discharge. A blob of shivering slime stood out like a strawberry parfait in a pool of vomit.

“I knew I’d find you here, little fellas.” She bent down and opened a glass jar. “Come on, culture thirty-three. I’m taking you with me.” The blob shied away. “I won’t hurt you.” It hesitated, then slowly slithered inside. The pink fungus’s DNA offered a Rosetta Stone of the genetic code and unlimited possibilities, including creating a human-fungi hybrid. She screwed the lid on and held the light to the jar. “You dumped a trillion dollars down the drain, Junior.” She laughed. “Luckily, I found it.”

“You have the money?”

Anne handed a stack of U.S. hundred-dollar bills to the rogue fertility specialist.

Dr. Jiang Swau stuffed the cash down his pants. “Take off your underwear and put your legs in the stirrups.”

She stared at the water-stained ceiling as he implanted three embryos into her uterus. “You get up now.” Doctor Swau pulled off his rubber gloves and watched her pull up her panties. “Take the hormone capsules and anti-rejection drugs until they are gone. If you tell anyone, I deny everything. Now go and never come back!”

The head waiter at Boston’s ultra-exclusive Diogenes Club, Farouk Farouk, delivered a salmon mousse and sparkling water to Anne Marsden’s table. The billionaire businesswoman looked lost.

“May I join you, Madame Doctor?”

“Of course. How are you doing, my friend?”

“I miss Jer. Our marriage would have been twenty-three years old next month. Her death has left me searching for a direction forward.” He sighed. “You look worried.”

“I am. I’m not a young woman, and I have assigned myself a task that will ultimately end my life. I need to find someone honest whom I can trust with my most valuable possessions.

Farouk smiled. “Coming to the Diogenes Club in search of an honest man is almost a cliché.”

She leaned closer. “What about you? I have known you for many

years and like and respect you. I am nearing the end of my life, and you are looking for a way forward. Perhaps it is not such a cliché to find an honest man in a club dedicated to Diogenes?”

The waiter held his hands as if praying and looked into her eyes. “Madame Doctor, I have followed your career and agree with your assessment of our planet’s future. I know you work with bioelectronics using slime mold and fungi designed to function as living transistors. Your purchase of Trans-Star Chemical with the fortune you derived from the culture T. I. Nydick Jr. discarded into the sewer will go down in history as ironic justice. What may I do to assist you?”

The doctor looked around the empty dining room. “I am pregnant with three human fungi hybrid.” She took his hand and peered into his eyes. “They will digest my body as they grow. You must promise to raise them for me. They have the power to change the world.”

“Me, Madame Doctor?”

Anne’s smile was sad. “Yes. I will leave detailed instructions. You are a good man, Farouk. I know you will not let me down.” ***

Condensation dripped from the dark, birthing chamber’s walls and ceiling.

Farouk switched on his night vision goggles. The heart-lung machine was operating within specifications, but the bottles of nutrient slurry and solution thirty-three, keeping Anne Marsden’s unrecognizable body alive, were nearly empty.

He scraped the mushrooms and mold from her stomach and sliced until her amniotic fluid seeped out. She said there would be three babies, but only one had survived. The goggles made her look like a tiny ghost. “Hello, little girl. Farouk washed and wrapped her in a blanket. “You are to be called Chanterelle. Your mother gave her life so you could save the world.” He looked at Anne’s mold and fungus-covered body. “Goodbye, my friend. I will not disappoint you.”

Doctor Marsden’s San Juan Island estate was the perfect home for Chanterelle. Her world was cloudy days, rain, and cool evenings. Farouk watched from the porch as she frolicked naked in the tall grass and twilight forest. Sometimes he’d find her with her mycelium in the ground, staring at the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When he asked her what she was doing, she said they wanted to see.

“Who are they?” he asked.

The little girl looked at him with a confused expression. “They are they. I let them use my eyes.”

Chanterelle began to disguise herself with makeup and wigs and call herself Elle. She hung out with humans and would leave for weeks. She was confused as to who she was. Doctor Marsden wanted her children to

choose their paths in life. She hoped they would save the planet, but it had to be their choice. One morning Farouk found Chanterelle lying in the tall grass naked and covered with dew.

“It’s nice to have you home. Are you alright?”

She stood. A unitard of leathery black and gray fungus spread over her body. “Papa Farouk. I realize I am Chanterelle, not Elle.”

He looked into her eyes. “I know. Your mother hoped you would save the world.”

“I have a flight booked to New York later today. I plan to interrupt Vladimir Putin’s address to the United Nations. Do you think the people will listen?”

Farouk kissed her. “You are the Queen of Fungi, my darling. The Third Kingdom of Life. If they won’t, you have the power to make them.”

Erin Tuthill

If I sleep in my jeans I don’t have to dress in the morning. Mary calls this depression, I call it economy of movement. The depressed don’t finish what they start and I just ate an entire jar of pickles. That’s fortitude.

Mary says to pick something to look forward to and set a goal. I’m all out of pickles so I’ll need something else. Nothing comes to mind but it’s only 3 a.m. and my mind never stops. It’s fine.

If I wear these jeans all week I won’t have to do laundry. Mary says that doesn’t count as a goal. I say it’s minimalism, and maybe she should try it. She won’t.

Mary says in the morning she’s driving me to the doctor. Good thing I’m already dressed.

Haiku Triptych

Michael Quinn Philley

Three pears ripening cloistered in a clear glass bowl already, bruises

Three geese alighting in light rain, on a still pond straightaway, ripples

Three houseflies buzzing trapped inside a closed window the next day, silence

The Warlocks Bindle

Ross Hargreaves

The Warlock would not tell us his name. He didn’t look very warlock, with torn jeans and a dark blue work shirt, his pack more of a military ruck sack. His face was goateed, looked anywhere from twenty-five to forty. Affected an Irish brogue. He did have a walking stick.

This was at Mulligans, a hot, smokey Saturday evening in August 2011. The Pacific Northwest was one big forest fire and Boise was thick with haze. I was sick of the summer, my thighs scrapped to shit, flies humping everywhere. I’d met O.K. after a long shift cashiering at CheapFoods, ready to drink a great many beers. We were on our second pitcher and sitting outside. Inside was packed. Mulligans was an all-purpose hang out for all different groups. The juke would play Cannibal Corpse and follow that up with “Looks Like We Made It” by Barry Manilow. Sometimes the draft beer tasted like soap.

O.K. and I had met working at the BSU Bookstore. He considered us friends, and so did I when I was wasted, certainly we drank together on many occasions. O.K. was a nice guy, a bigger guy, with short dark curly hair. He was loyal, came from a well-to-do family, had lots of friends. People liked him. People would never like me the way they liked him. Part of me hated him for it. Also, he had this girlfriend, Mandy, and maybe I was in love with her. Mandy was short with shoulder length black hair. When you kissed her skin, the area would blush a bright red. I’d contented myself being the third wheel but then Mandy broke up with O.K. During this breakup Mandy and I hooked up a couple times. She never wanted us to be serious and once her break up with O.K. was confirmed with all her different friend groups, she started seeing this married dude who liked to karaoke Godsmack songs.

O.K. knew about me and Mandy of course. She told him. In the few times we’d hung out since it hadn’t come up.

Mulligans had already supplied a couple of events that night. A rolly polly teenage girl wearing a Pikachu beanie tried to move a chair outside the short wooden barrier that separated Mulligan’s front porch from Main Street. The Pikachu on her head looked to be suffering a deep depression. A cocktail waitress caught her and shooed her off. Then one of my old history professors from Boise State got led out of the bar, hand in hand with a young guy carrying a long board. “Where are you taking me?” my old professor said.

Then the Warlock.

He sat next to us. Dropped his rucksack and walking stick on the ground. O.K. and I gave each other a look. “You guys seen my wife?” the Warlock said.

We didn’t answer.

“She’s only eighteen,” he offered. “Dressed like a wee Pikachu.”

“Oh her,” I said. “They ran her off.”

“She will return. Mind if I pull from your pitcher?” He did have a glass. A rocks glass full of ice.

“Go ahead,” O.K. said.

The Warlock tossed his ice onto the ground. Poured some beer, which foamed up out of his rocks glass and spilled through the grates on the

table. He raised his glass to us. “Obliged.”

“Trees,” I said and held out my hand. “O.K.,” O.K. said and held out his hand.

“O.K. and Trees? Are you guys a Radiohead album?” He took a sip of beer. “I can’t tell you my name.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“I’m a warlock. If you knew my true name, you would have dominion over me. You can call me Raven.”

“Raven? Like the Mortal Kombat character?”

“Thar’s Raiden,” O.K. said.

The Warlock was no longer looking at us. He had closed his eyes, like he could meditate away our bullshit. “I was in the I.R.A.,” he said. “And I killed a man.”

“Holy shit,” O.K said.

“A British soldier.”

“When was this?” I said, trying to fit the Warlock’s possible age with my understanding of civil strife in Ireland.

“I stabbed him in the back. Twice. And once in the neck. Outside a pub while he was having a piss. I wish I hadn’t done it. I tried to reach out to his family, to beg forgiveness. But it was told to me that if the family found out who I was, they would destroy my eternal soul.”

“Who told you?” O.K said.

“I heard it whispered on the wind.”

“Your wife’s back,” I said.

She had jumped the barrier and was talking to a group on the other side of the porch. Begging for cigarettes, or beer, or both. I don’t know how she wasn’t broiling in that Pikachu beanie. The cocktail waitress came out to take drink orders, saw her and said, “Out, out. Or we’ll call the cops.”

The wife jumped back over the barrier.

“She’s fine,” The Warlock said.

“How did you two get together?” O.K. said.

“The essence of our heartbeats called out to each other across time, space, and the bus depot.”

“What if her heartbeat starts calling to someone else?” O.K. said.

I rolled my eyes. “Like someone who karaoke’s Godsmack songs.”

“It can’t,” The Warlock said. “She’s mine.”

Our pitcher was empty, but the waitress didn’t come visit. She was avoiding us to avoid the Warlock.

“Beer,” I said. “I’ll go,” said O.K.

“Could I imposition you for something stiffer?” said the Warlock.

“What the hell,” O.K. said.

The two of them went into Mulligans. They were talking about something. I sat there with my empty glass, smelling tar and campfire. Some of the people who walked by wore surgical masks. At the table next to me a dude was telling some ladies that the bad air didn’t bother him because of the extreme pot he smoked. Nights at Mulligan’s had been so much better when it was the three of us and Mandy’s other, occasional, hangers-on. What I wouldn’t have given to hear her scream “Trees!” again in delighted

exasperation. During our hook-up phase we’d come to Mulligans. Just the two of us. I put “Mandy” on the jukebox hoping to get her to laugh. The song came on and she gave me this irritated look that told me I was already fucked.

I hated her. I loved her. Nothing was rhyming.

I moved closer to the Warlocks rucksack. Or bindle. As I decided it was. I unzipped it a little and discovered dirty shirts and empty bottles of Faygo. Insane Clown Posse’s soda of choice. A few used John Saul paperbacks. A glow-in-the-dark Ouija board.

They came back. O.K. with pitcher #3 of PBR, the Warlock with a glass of whiskey on the rocks. “Obliged,” he said. Less Liam Neeson this time.

We drank. O.K. and I tried a few inside jokes, a few lame reminisces about working at the Bookstore. The Warlock ignored us. Content to sit and meditate. “Hey Raven,” I said. “Does this make me a warlock?” I pointed to the flesh bump that’s always been on the tip of my nose.

He looked at me. Didn’t say anything.

“The answer doesn’t have to be yes,” I said.

“I don’t know you gentleman,” he said. “I don’t know who you know. The family of that limey soldier have pursued me all over this Earth.”

“Sounds shitty,” I said.

He opened his eyes to me, winked, and went back to meditating. Until his drink was empty. Then he wouldn’t stop staring at us. Kept rattling the ice in his glass. When we weren’t Johnny-on-the- spot offering him another, the Warlock left us for the inside of the bar. Leaving his bindle and walking stick behind.

“Thanks for stopping by,” I said.

O.K. took an impressive swallow of beer. He was looking at the cars driving by, but I could tell he was thinking about Mandy. Well. So was I. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t find someone new soon enough. And if he had tried harder maybe it would have been the three of us hanging out, not the two of us and a goddamn warlock.

“Let’s steal his bindle,” I said. “Bindle?”

“His sack.”

O.K. shook his head. Took another swallow of beer. “No,” he said.

“Seriously? We can throw it in the dumpster around back.”

“Trees. Seriously? No.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s get out of here.”

The wife was back. Walking back and forth in front of the barrier. Asking people leaving the bar, “Have you seen my husband?”

The two of us abandoned the Warlock’s bindle and walking stick. Headed over to 10th Street Station to finish out our night. I switched it up there. Started drinking gin and orange juice. Got so drunk and loud that a group sitting near us complained.

A few months later O.K. would meet the woman he eventually married. I saw them grocery shopping at CheapFoods a few times. We never did hang out again.

The Corinna Bray

“Marcus! Wake up Marcus!” A panicked voice grew louder from somewhere above deck.

A young, curly-haired boy drearily rubbed his eyes with small fists. A loud slap echoed through the interior of the small vessel as the hatch deck burst open.

“Mom? What’s going on? Are we there yet?” the boy asked in bewilderment, dropping his feet to the floor as his groans advertised his reluctance to be awake. The frenzied woman sprinted down the small stepladder and rushed to the boy’s bunk.

“Marcus, listen baby, I need you to listen to me right now,” she pleaded, rubbing her hands all over his body as if sculpting clay on a pottery wheel.

Marcus let out a stretch and took notice of the cabin around him. The family photo from Costa Rica was on the floor, along with several other items; he was surprised his mom didn’t pay it any attention. His eyes moved to the hatch where his mother had just came from, and saw water splashing in heavy amounts back and forth down onto the steps as the boat rocked violently.

“Mom!” Marcus shouted as he pointed toward the water. Small pools were now forming around his favorite shoes. His muscle-man action figure floated toward his foot, then back away toward the head as the boat rocked abaft.

“Look at me! Look at my eyes Marcus. I’m being very serious right now. I need you to put this life jacket on. Just do what I tell you baby, everything is going to be okay.”

Typically Marcus hated wearing a life jacket. His dad never used to use one, and he never had to use one when his dad was around. Now that it was just him and his mom, she always made him wear one. She had never struggled so much to put on his life jacket before, but was having difficulty now.

“I can do it mom,” Marcus stated with annoyance.

The woman allowed him to work on the tangled straps of the life jacket while she grabbed a cardboard box. She began sweeping food from the cupboards into the box, dancing back and forth as her seafaring legs forgot they were in the gulf of Mexico.

“Check!” the boy shouted.

The woman dropped her box on the counter, a half-bag of sliced bread hung lazily out of the top. Marcus gazed at the bread, wondering when he may be eating it, picturing himself at home in his cozy living room, eating peanut butter and jelly. The woman crouched down and checked the clips on his life jacket, gave it a quick tug to ensure its’ fit, then returned to her frantic food-packing.

“Baby, take this box up to the deck and protect it. Do not go anywhere near the rail. Baby, stay near the mast and wait for me. Promise me you will sit down by the mast and keep this box safe!”

“Are we sinking?”

“Just do what I say right now Marcus! We’re going to be okay, mommy is going to get us out of this.”

“I wish daddy was here!”

Marcus, holding the box about half his size, full of saltine crackers, a bottle of ketchup, some bread, and other snacks, began to cry.

“I know baby,” she said gently. “Daddy is here, and he loves us, and he’s going to help us get out of this with everything he taught us, isn’t he? We’re always a family and always a team,” she said as she knelt down and grabbed the action figure, now floating on a few inches of floodwater. She placed the toy into the box, gave Marcus a strong hug, and retreated to the back of the cabin. With a look back she beckoned, “Go Marcus, I’ll be right there.”

She watched as her son scrambled up the stairs, carrying the box of rations to the deck, and she bolted to the radio. Tuning to VHF channel 16, she let out a small smirk, hearing her late husband’s words echo through her mind: it’s Chanel No. 16, for a stinkin’ emergency.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is The Corinna! The Corinna! I spell - Charlie, Oscar, Romeo, India, November, November, Alpha. Does anyone copy? Mayday!”

“Roger that, vessel name is Corinna. Vessel Corinna, vessel Corinna, this is the United States Coast Guard. Clearwater station Florida, over.”

“Oh thank God! Thank God! Yes Coast Guard this is The Corinna, over!”

“Roger, Corinna, this is contact Clearwater, are you in need of assistance Corinna? Over.”

“Yes! Our boat is caught in a storm! We’re taking on a lot of water and these waves will knock us over! Please send help, oh God!”

“Roger that Corinna this is Contact Clearwater, I understand you are going down, request to know persons onboard, over.”

“It’s me and my son. His name’s Marcus. Please save him!”

“Roger Corinna this is Contact Clearwater, request to confirm two persons onboard, over.”

“Affirmative, my seven year old son and myself, two onboard, over.”

“Roger Corinna, this is contact Clearwater, requesting length, make, and color of your vessel, over”.

“Roger Clearwater, about fifty feet, I don’t know, sailboat, white,” she gasped. The water was now to her waist and she could hear Marcus screaming above deck; she was happy to hear him at all. “I’m going to lose radio soon, sinking fast, over!”

“Roger Corinna. Contact Clearwater here, Corinna, we have your approximate location. Any flares on board, over?” The woman, now shivering as her life jacket kept her chest barely above the water, screamed as she pictured the young man through the radio, sitting in a comfortable desk somewhere. His tone was flat, and though he was her lifeline, she hated to hear him speak.

“One second,” she trembled through blue lips, as she unclipped her life jacket and dived under the water. It was now almost completely black in

the cabin as the small portholes showed the dark hell waiting for her. She felt around in the freezing, salty water, disoriented by the rocking of the boat, hating that she had forgotten to grab the emergency kit before. She had packed an action figure, but not the glowsticks, and she pondered what her husband would say in the afterlife. As if by some miracle, the familiar round knob found her fingers quickly, and she pulled the drawer. Grabbing the case inside, she returned to the surface. Her life jacket was floating near the roof of the cabin, which was now almost completely flooded, with just enough space for her head and shoulders.

“Mom!” Marcus screamed repeatedly from the deck. She had never heard such a painful sound.

“I’m okay!” slipped from her hoarse throat, but her voice didn’t carry more than a foot. She reached for the radio, quickly realizing it was now lifeless. Carrying the case behind her, she swam to the steps and emerged from the hatch. The sky was an impressive mix of gray clouds, and the wind instantly threw her to her hands and knees. She powered to her feet and grasped the mast that Marcus was clinging too. In her thirty years of sailing, she had never seen the ocean bend at this magnitude.

“I dropped the box, I’m sorry!” Marcus screamed.

The woman, with the last of her strength, handed Marcus the case.

“Open it. Carefully!”

He opened the box, and she took the flare gun from its’ resting place. Together, she helped her son raise the muzzle and squeeze the trigger, releasing a triumphant band of red light and smoke into the air. Her fingers no longer following orders, she guided Marcus to reload, and sent another streak of red light into the air. As if sent by God himself, the light illuminated a helicopter. The woman closed her eyes and embraced her son.

“...While several are spending the day in mourning as a result of Hurricane Charles, now classified as a category three, one brave mother and her son are recovering just inside Tampa General, after a harrowing journey through the storm.”

“Corinna? How are you?”

Corinna opened her eyes and saw a nurse walk over to her bedside. The nurse grabbed a remote from the table and turned up the television.

“Look mom, we’re famous!” Marcus shouted gleefully, swinging his feet from the chair across the room, playing with his action figure.

“So they managed to save all three of us,” she said calmly.

“...The United States Coast Guard released only the following statement about the rescue: ‘Well we’re pretty much in disbelief. We were only five nautical miles away scouting for distress signals when the station notified us. We were basically right on top of em’, and one more second they would’ve been in the water. A snowball’s chance in hell. Someone was watching over this family.”

“See Marcus, always a family, and always a team.”

The Eternal Triangle

Bean McGrath

It could have been anywhere in the world, but it was at the intersection of Inevitable Street and Decision Road that the careworn Moirai Laundromat stood. The sky was stuck in a perpetual state of mock dawn or twilight depending on which direction one traveled to or from. An incandescent glow spilled out of its pane glass windows onto the slick wet blacktop. A streetlight flickered, died, and then came back on again. Inside the twenty-four-hour business, the warm humidity resembled that of an incubator, or the unearthly fires of Hades, depending on how much one could tolerate heat.

Clothos had her nose pressed against the flat glass. She watched the young lady standing next to a battered suitcase at the Muni-bus stop across the street. Her hair was getting wet.

“What are you doing?” Atropos asked her. “It’s raining again.”

“Leave her be,” Lachesis said. “I can handle the folding.”

“She is always dreaming. She needs to be more realistic,” Atropos said.

“The world needs dreamers too.” Lachesis frowned at Atropos. “Make yourself useful.” She threw a dirty pair of boxer-briefs at her older sister.

“What do you want me to do with this?” Atropos wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t know. Toss them if you can’t find a use for them. They’re worn too thin, too many holes.”

Atropos tossed the raggedy drawers in the bin. “Clothos, get your nose off that glass and come do some work.”

“Don’t be cruel Atropos. It doesn’t help anything.”

“You’re too lenient. If she doesn’t learn how to be productive now, when will she learn?”

Clothos turned toward her older sisters. “I just wish we could have one day off.”

“And how would the laundry get done if we did that?”

Lachesis nodded as she stacked the folded towels into a cloth bag for delivery. “She’s right, everything would just back up. In the end, we would have more work and tighter time constraints.”

Clothos ran her finger along the row of white enamel churning washing machine tops as she made her way over to the others. The thump and roll of the washers provided a constant lulling hum.

Lachesis said, “Why don’t you unload that dryer, dear? It will give you something to do.”

When Clothos moved toward the industrial tumblers Atropos said, “Bout time you did something.”

Lachesis slapped Atropos’s hand. “Stop it.”

“Ouch!” Atropos yanked her hand away to cradle it against her chest.

Clothos opened the door to the number one tumbler and scooped the assorted clothing out into the metal rolling basket. She was about to roll them over to Lachesis, when, glancing into the number three tumbler, she spied a lone sock at the bottom. She stopped and opened the round plastic porthole and pulled the sock out. Holding it up she asked, “Anyone missing a mate?”

Lachesis started to search frantically through the lined-up baskets of unfolded clothing.

Atropos sniffed then shrugged. She looked into the grey rubber trash can in front of her. It was full of peeled lint and detergent boxes. “Not in here.” She pulled the black plastic bag out of its grey rubber husk and tied the ends in a knot. “I’ll be right back. I’m taking the garbage out.”

“Who is the slacker now?” Lachesis muttered while she lifted folded towels looking for the other sock.

The back door slammed shut.

Clothos studied the sock. It was knitted wool. It shouldn’t have been in the dryer to begin with. A small white thread poked out at the top, and she picked at it. The thread pulled up and out. Clothos wanted to stop playing with it, but she couldn’t. She glanced over at Lachesis who was crawling around on the floor looking for the other sock. Too late. This one had probably shrunk to half its size. A compulsion made her pull the thread further and further out. The sock began to unravel.

Lachesis cried, “What are you doing? Stop. Stop unraveling.”

“I can’t help it.” Clothos sobbed. She kept pulling and the sock unwound, disappearing into a heap of wool yarn at her feet.

Lachesis ran over and grabbed her sister’s hand. It was too late. The sock had unraveled back past the heel and well into where the arch of the foot would be if worn. The only thing left was the toe tip. Lachesis snatched it from Clothos’s hand.

Atropos threw open the back door. Both her sisters were sobbing. “What’s going on here?”

Lachesis held up the leftover sock toe, then pointed to the pile of yarn at Clothos’s feet.

“For Zeus’s Sake!” Atropos pulled a pair of gleaming steel shears from her apron. She snipped the thread rolling out from the leftover toe, then grabbed it from Lachesis’s fingers. She bent and scooped up the pile of yarn on the floor at Clothos’s feet. She glared at each of her sisters in turn. “I just took out the garbage!” She stuffed the remains of the sock inside the apron. “If I go to throw this out now, promise me there will be no other disasters while I’m gone.”

Both sisters nodded.

Lachesis went back to her folding.

Clothos pressed her nose against the transparent plastic portal of the number three tumbler. “I wish I had never found that sock.” Then a corner of fabric slid from one of the grey baffles inside the drum of the machine. Clothos moaned.

Lachesis looked up from her folding “What now?”

Clothos sighed, opened the dryer door with a click, pulled out the other sock, and held it up for Lachesis to see.

“Oh, my Zeus!” Lachesis clamped her hand over her mouth.

“The other mate.” Clothos dangled the sock between thumb and forefinger like a stinking fish.

Lachesis dropped her hand and looked at the back door. “You better hide it before Atropos gets back.”

Clothos’s eyes bugged. She scrambled around the laundromat on overdrive searching for somewhere to hide the thing. Lachesis lifted one of the towels from her folded stack and pointed to the folded towel beneath. Clothos flung the sock over to her and Lachesis smoothed the other towel on top just as Atropos came in.

Lachesis hummed as she continued to fold.

Clothos whistled tunelessly while staring out the window at the rain. A man opened his umbrella and stood next to the woman at the bus stop.

Atropos didn’t buy it. “What the hades happened?” Both sisters turned simultaneously and said “Nothing.”

“You found the other sock, didn’t you?” Atropos put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot.

Both sisters crumbled. Lachesis lifted the folded towel. Atropos pulled out the sock and held it up. “This is serious. I mean it. Why didn’t you see it when you found the first one?” Atropos gave Clothos the evil eye.

“I—I didn’t see it. It was behind a baffle” Clothos wrung her hands.

“Now this one,” Atropos held up the new sock, “has to go through life without a mate.”

Clothos’s shoulders slumped. “I—I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t see it.”

“You should have looked harder.”

Lachesis said, “Maybe we can use it for some kind of storage. You know, find a purpose for it besides what it was made for…”

“You know, sister,” Atropos shook her head, “It doesn’t matter what we fill it with, it will always feel empty without a sole inside it.” Atropos stuffed it in her apron pocket.

A tear slid from Clothos’s eye and rolled down her cheek. “Well, I’m going to check all the other dryers right now just to make sure.” She opened the portals one by one and rolled the drums checking behind all the baffles. After going through all the others, she came back to number 3 and stuck her head inside, and spun the drum, just to be sure. Another sock dropped on the side of her face.

Clothos laughed, pulled her head out, and held the sock up. “Hey look what I found.”

Both her sisters snapped their heads in her direction.

Lachesis put her hand to her heart and made a cooing sound.

Atropos shook her head in disbelief. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the other sock. She held it up next to the one Clothos held.

“They’re a match!” Clothos shouted. She began to spring up and down in joy.

“I’ll take that,” Atropos snatched the sock from her hand, “Before you lose it.” She set the pair in front of Lachesis who folded them together and set them on the stack.

Lachesis smiled. “Whaddaya know?”

“That’s some dumb luck you have there, sister.” Atropos said.

Clothos shrugged. She went over to the window and pressed her nose against the glass. The man shared his umbrella with the woman. Then the bus pulled up, a man got off, and he hugged the woman under the first

man’s umbrella. Clothos reached into her apron pocket, squeezed the sock she had hidden there, and smiled.

Creation

Diane Raptosh

My dad went AWOL when I was a child. So the realm of the fathers no longer slips me their mickeys. Still, I feel heaviness wheeze from this threefold split: loonies who fight, leaders who flee, and the state that’s so numbed it seems spinally orphaned. Real action is not reaction but a creation. The West’s biggest threat is the world it made. Who birthed the oligarchs? We did. Listen. I fixate. Repair. I way overcompensate, egg on and over-care. It’s as if once I leave my house, I’m having sex or at war with everything out there. Every second is like that. Each beat, I squirm around in the gutter of it.

He finds me in motion

Lillian Jenner

Most of the boxes already packed

Big burdens slung up high like food

Not for bears

And he doesn’t ask me to explain

What kind of person I am:

A clicking beetle which bodes no real threat

A rattler more scared of him than he, me

My family: a dog I once knew

All his buttons loose

A tendency to leave in 3s

I am not a “bad” person, I push to prove All full of whiskey and the many poisons We eat when we are lonely

Or aching in our teeth

This is not an excuse, not a promise

When the days get hot I sweat from my scalp

I believe our stories are written long before we read them Baked into today is a certain tomorrow His is a book I’d like to borrow

If Saviors Were Real

Matt Edwards

my father is sitting in his highchair in 1954 looking intently at something in between the camera and the late morning sunshine pouring in through an open window splashing M.C. Escher shadows across the floor and in every fold and crevice of woodwork wrapping around corners and a door forming an impossible scaffold illusion behind him

and to the camera’s right

but his gaze is on something distant something seemingly beyond the room as if he can see something the photographer couldn’t even if they turned to look over their left shoulder it’s like he’s peering into the future and wondering if he’ll be ready

and for a moment

I’d like to pretend that what he sees is me walking through some white light some heavenly portal

you know, like all those phony child prodigies who say they see the face of Jesus looking just like the bleached-white caricature we all grew up with in Sunday school but for now, I’m his Jesus I’ll perform all the miracles I’ll do all the saving

what I’ll do is wave my hand from side to side like some Jedi or some sorcerer and I’ll freeze time there in 1954 and scoop that child up and raise him as my own son raising father father learning how to be a son how to be a real man how to be a version of himself we all could live with

the first miracle I’ll perform is to be a father he doesn’t hate to be a father who didn’t fight in Korea and come back an abusive drunk who didn’t touch his sisters in ways that made them scatter across the Northwest away from their husbands and their kids but not their shame

the second miracle I’ll perform is to make the Vietnam War never happen but since messiahs seem to struggle with such things I’ll make him never have to go and if that’s still too tough for my magic fingers I’ll make it so he doesn’t have to crawl through manmade tunnels after napalm raids making sure no man or woman or child is still living in them

the third miracle I’ll perform is to make beer not taste so good so he doesn’t go to the bar after work and spend a bunch of his paycheck before he comes home to his wife and two kids

I’ll make it so he doesn’t leave his family and make it so his older son doesn’t grow up so angry and bitter and his younger son grows up actually knowing who he is

and since saviors like doing things in threes I’ll stop there and simply walk with him instead of ascending into heaven until the day before his 52nd birthday the day he dies in real life

and then I’ll tell him, stroking my long white beard, “This has all been a dream”

and he’ll say, “Yeah it has, it’s been great!” and I’ll place my hand on his chest to make him stop in his tracks, and I’ll say, “No, this isn’t real” and he’ll furrow his brow as I tell him

everything

“But I love you,” he’ll say “I know,” I’ll respond

“But now you know how”

then I’ll wave my hand in the other direction and set him back in that highchair in 1954 and then I’ll step backward into the light as he watches me disappear

and now looking at this photograph it all makes sense

Kalee Schwarting

Sophomore year, Cynthia Mazurall at the Wellness Center handed me a paperback copy of Healing the Child Within. There was a disquieting drawing of a fetus superimposed over a navy- blue, weeping figure on the cover. Her potted cactus in the corner looked a little dry.

"I'm not a baby," I sulked, fragile in my newfound freedom, and put it back on her shelf. Everyone knows that it's a bad thing; to be a baby.

I'd carried two of my own before I came back to the idea An AI voice reading me human development textbooks while I nursed my firstborn Learning amidst the swollen/bewildered empathy of a new mother

At the core of my triune brain a realization began to reform. Our nervous system grows Not up like a ruler, but out like the rings of a tree

When I'm still I can feel her Beating softly inside me Flickering sometimes like fire, swaying sometimes in a motion as old as the form of the seas.

She is there in the powerful draw of human faces the need to meet a pair of kind eyes, to be held tight & still in sincere and frequent sleepiness

I wish we’d been introduced sooner, or more eloquently With better font & graphic design In my mind I hold her tenderly. None of it was her fault

ABOUT

THE CABIN is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners.

The WRITERS IN THE ATTIC (WITA) program is a submission opportunity for writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a one-word theme. With submissions blind-judged by a local writer of acclaim, selected poems and fiction are published in a yearly anthology. This publication is meant to be a platform for building an inclusive community and provoking creativity and experimentation through a love of writing.

2023 Theme. You might picture a trio of little pigs, if you’re a child. The Holy Trinity, if you’re a Christian or a Cajun chef. (The Holy Triumvirate, if you’re a Rush fan.) We speak in a language of three - person, place, thing. We interact with three on a daily basis. Three acts in a play or film, three branches of government, the three R’s of education. We naturally group characters into three. Blind mice and musketeers, stooges and tenors. Three is a forgotten turn, an extra wheel, the last resort. Where does the third door on the left lead? Who’s the third man, standing in the back who doesn’t say a word? What’s the third option? Why were there three matchsticks at the foot of the bed? It’s a mystery, a squadron, a psalm, a love triangle. What is THREE to you?

Judge Daniel Stewart, a poet, is the author of the collection The Imaginary World, and a teaching-writer for The Cabin’s Writers in the Schools. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, and has published in BOAAT, Graviton Lit, NightBlock, Prairie Schooner, Puerto Del Sol, RATTLE, Sixfold, Skidrow Penthouse, Thrush Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere.

MEET THE WRITERS

Bray

Bray was adopted from Seoul, South Korea and currently resides in Boise, where he was raised. He’s always been fascinated by stories, languages, and the power of words. His writing, along with other forms of art and selfexpression, is typically emotionally and spiritually charged. He uses creativity as an outlet to channel his questions and observations regarding philosophy and human nature, or as therapy to quell his own emotional turbulence. He enjoys his free time petting cats, being with his love, Hannah, and riding his bicycle.

Caleb Andrews

Growing up in Eastern Oregon surrounded by trees and mountains is the perfect setting to stretch my proverbial ‘writing’ legs. I grew up indulging in most mediums of storytelling: books, poetry, film, DND, campfire stories, and video games. My three biggest inspirations for life are God, my beautiful wife and son, and the unquenchable desire to create. Although there is still much to learn and master, I believe that ignoring your talents is a disservice to our Creator who made each and every one of us. God is good and Jesus is the way! Romans 5:7-8.

Mara Bateman

Mara Bateman lives in Boise, Idaho where she works as a Licensed Acupuncturist at the St. Luke’s Cancer Institute. When she is not writing or working with patients, she enjoys snuggling her cat, rafting, hiking, and goofing off with her husband, friends and family. Her stories have previously been published in the 2021 Writer’s in the Attic Anthology, the Boise Weekly, and Grim & Gilded. A native of the Pacific Northwest, much of her work reflects that place, its beauty, oddity, and possibility.

JD Bensley

I’ve held many broken fragments & realized that poetry is my way of awakening to new dimensions of consciousness, understanding, & healing. My daughter is my greatest inspiration & the most navigating light in love & joy in defying gravity.

Gina Borud

Gina began writing as a coping mechanism following the death of her dad in 2022, and hopes that her words will help others feel less isolated in their grief. Originally from Hillsboro, Oregon, Gina set up roots in Boise in 2008. Those roots now include two kids – Remy and Aksel – and husband, Matt, plus a successful graphic design, marketing, and photography business. She is proud of her degrees from the College of Idaho and Boston University, and happiest when she’s outside with her family - camping, skiing, hiking, and swimming.

christy claymore

christy claymore (she/her) is a writer, researcher, freelance editor, and adjunct English professor. She is an emerging poet whose work has been included in the previous four anthologies published by The Cabin, as well as in “The Panorama Project,” a pandemic arts segment underwritten by The Idaho Press Tribune and Surel’s Place. christy lives in Boise, Idaho where she loves supporting the arts, running in the foothills and raising her two boys.

D.T. Coe

My inspiration comes from sharing my work with others. When my brother says, that’s actually not bad, or my husband gets so excited because he remembered that I foreshadowed an event chapters before, those are the moments I feel like a true author. Even when I receive criticism, positive or negative, it makes me dance in my seat because someone read my work and connected with it in some way, any way. And I find any reaction to my work so beautiful that it drives me to keep on writing

Billye Dotson

Billye Dotson (she/they) grew up in Idaho, moving away after undergrad to explore—from New York to California. They recently earned their Master of Library and Information Science degree, and began working for the Sacramento Public Library shortly after. They write poetry, short stories, and an endless stream of unfinished thoughts in their journal. She loves the moon, music, mysteries, and all things queer and weird about the world. Their work has been published in the Talking River literary journal and Lesbians are Miracles magazine.

J. Dykas

Currently J. Dykas is retired and lives in McCall, Idaho, but she grew up in New England. She has traveled extensively. Moving to Idaho in 2001, she has loved living in small towns in Idaho. She loves hiking and gardening in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter. Since a child, she adored walking in forests and along the beach. She has written throughout her life but has only just recently decided to publicly share her work. And by the way, she loves her dog Annie.

Matt Edwards

Matt Edwards, author of Ways and Truths and Lives, was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, formerly the Northwest’s best kept secret, where he developed an affinity for literature: both the challenge of understanding it and the potential to be understood through it. This propelled Matt to study English at Boise State University and devote himself to teaching high school English in the Boise area since 2006. Matt now enjoys sharing his life of passions with his wife and their one and only son. In his free time, if Matt’s not training for marathons, he’s writing fiction and poetry, mostly about gods and fathers and good, strong drinks. Icarus Never Flew ‘Round Here, named one the best books of 2022 by Independent Book Review, is his second novel.

Deb Eisinger

Unrepentant extrovert. I would never, ever be a writer if I didn’t have audiences. My writing has no particular use to me without an audience to hear my words. My writers’ group is full of active readers and careful critics and frequent chucklers. They are crucial to my learning as a writer. They cheer me on.

Jon Eisman

I once did a deep exploration of What am I actually good at? Writing, teaching, running, loving, parenting, carpentry, doing the dishes, communicating, analyzing - yeah, all kinds of things on the list to be considered. What I finally landed on, what finally evoked an unchallenged OH YES!, was SEEING THE BEAUTY IN ANYTHING. In all those endeavors, including my poetry, I am inspired by what I can see or feel or mine from whatever momentary adventure I find myself in.

Ross Hargreaves

Ross Hargreaves has an MFA from the University of Idaho. His work has appeared in Mikrokosmos, Quibble Lit and God’s Cruel Joke. He lives and writes in Idaho.

Nancy Haug

I love reading something that grabs my heart and shakes it a little. Despite the residual tenderness (shadowed by a lingering desire for more!), I know that I have experienced a journey as unique as the person who wrote the story. This is also true for me when I put my fingers on the keyboard. Writing takes me on a journey with an unclear destination and I love the allconsuming adventure. My work is inspired by experiences with my friends, family and pets, forays into nature, and the emotions that accompany some of my most wonderful or challenging life experiences.

Dave Hays

Dave Hays is a lifelong public servant, retired federal land manager, and former English teacher. After his brief stint teaching, Dave found his passion in a natural resources career. That pursuit took him across the West to study, live, work, and play. His current basecamp is Boise, Idaho, where his writing explores his evolving connection to the land and a sense of place.

GiGi Huntley

GiGi Huntley is an Asian-American writer and abstract artist. She and her husband, Tony, own a salon/barber shop on the Bench. She is inspired by the stories others tell her as they sit in her chair, by the words of other writers, and her own family.

Lillian Jenner

Lillian Jenner creates in a variety of forms: now primarily a metalworker and a poet. (When a metal is too ‘hard’ it shatters, and like a good anvil, she tries to keep some softness to her.) Her poetry is inspired by the vastness

with which the wold’s languages fail to communicate love & pain. Lillian’s Master’s thesis, Fire Journal (2022), for an MFA in Poetry at Boise State University, poetically chronicles her experience as a wildland firefighter, while physically exploring combustion as a metaphor for grieving.

Louis Katz

“A Rocket to the Stars” is Chapter 15 of my novel-in-progress, The Circus Comes to Sketchtown. My book is inspired by lyrics in old Bob Dylan songs, chance meetings of both mythological and historical figures, and figments of my imagination. In general, I’m inspired by my life with Penny, our daughter Suzi, the dogs Zookie and Mazie, our cat Pepper (Peppy). I’m a managed IT services provider, photographer, harmonica player, writer, stand-up comic, and BBQ enthusiast. Never a dull moment around here. If only I could sleep through the night! But insomnia often leads to seemingly brilliant ideas. Best bet is to write them down and hope they make sense in the morning.

Heidi Kraay

Playwright and writer-across-disciplines Heidi Kraay examines the link between brain and body, seeking empathy with fractured characters. Her work pulls myth, metaphor and monsters together to discover connections across difference. Heidi’s full-length plays, co-devised projects, one-acts, plays for young audiences and shorts have been presented in Boise, regionally, in NYC and internationally. Dramatic publications are available through Smith & Kraus and Applause Books. This year Heidi and musician Thomas Paul released their chapbook album of poem-songs Drown to Resurface. 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, a memoir-adjacent book of essays in the ancient century form, is forthcoming through Modern Mythographer. Heidi holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. www.heidikraay.com

Laureen Leiko Scheid

Laureen Leiko Scheid grew up in a large, loud, and loving family in Honolulu. Laureen is inspired by her 83-year-old mother and her unwavering faith, constant kindness, selfless service, and soul-healing SPAM musubi. Laureen treasures adventures with her ‘ohana in Idaho and all around the world. She is honored to be a part of this year’s WITA anthology.

Kalee Maulik

Songwriters and the songs they create have always been a source of entertainment and expression that hits me in all the right ways. I was attempting to channel my best inner-John Prine when I wrote my piece. He was a master storyteller and songwriter. He showed humor and sadness are often great companions. I didn’t write a song but a similar short story had been occupying space in the back of my mind.

Julia McCoy

Julia McCoy is a local middle school teacher and fiction writer in her free time. This is her fifth publication in the WITA anthology. She is inspired by all matters strange and macabre and snippets of conversations she hears while accidentally eavesdropping.

Bean McGrath

Shallene McGrath, a co-founder of Garden Valley Writers Group, is inspired by local writers Patrice Locke and editor/author Yash Seyedbagheri. Her poetry has recently been published in Stone Poetry Journal, Stink Eye Magazine, and The Dead Pets Anthology. She is currently working on a paranormal mystery novel titled Winter Whispers

Caleb Merritt

Caleb Merritt is a second-year poet in the Boise State University Creative Writing MFA program who grew up in South Dakota, though he most recently resided in Alabama. During the pandemic, he married his undergraduate Speech & Debate duo partner, Alli, whom he met at Hastings College where he received his BA in Studio Art. Before graduate school, he worked for Habitat for Humanity. His work was most recently put out as Chappbook and Dyfficuhlteh Mhineous — respectively his third and fourth collections of poetry. You can find his work for free online at literarymerritt.gumroad.com.

Kim Monnier

A former English and Creative Writing teacher Kim Monnier is also a member of the editorial committee of The Whistle Pig, a Mountain Home Arts Council literary publication. Many things inspire his writing: good literature, nature and most of all the cycles of transformation. Everything is always in the moment of becoming something else.

Ty Muir

People inspire me. Not what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside. That part of themselves they never let out. That’s the part I want to get to know. That’s the reason I write. To explore the depths of the human condition, deep in the crevices you don’t get to see at the grocery store.

Heidi Naylor

Heidi Naylor is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and made her way to Idaho in 1990. Her story collection, Revolver, was published by BCC Press in 2018. She’s a Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices nominee and received a fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. She loves Idaho trails and her family, including two little granddaughters. Find her at heidinaylor.net.

Mindy OldenKamp

Mindy OldenKamp is a lover of books, beaches, and bad dad jokes. She lives in Nampa with her family, where she spends her free time writing, doodling, laughing at life, and generally trying to leave the world a little better than she found it.

Harper Pechota

My writing ideas are typically filtered into the music l write but I enjoy all forms of storytelling. I have a strong interest in religion and myth so was inspired to write a kind of folktale/myth that early people may have told to explain how the moon came to be and why it changes phase. The stars and the moon have always been an interesting concept to many different culture’s mythologies, so I chose to tell a moon story based on my Lakota Sioux heritage.

Michael Philley

Michael Philley writes short fiction, memoir essays, and haiku poetry. His work appears in prior Writers in the Attic anthologies, and he has twice taken first place in the Idaho Writers Guild annual writing contest. Mike retired from the USAID foreign service in 2001 after working overseas in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. He is a longtime member of a Boisebased writer’s group of intrepid, disarmingly playful, wordsmiths.

Morgan Radcliffe

Morgan grew up in Idaho and finds inspiration from being in nature.

Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. She teaches literature and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. “Creation” will appear in a new collection of poems, I Eric America, which will come out in fall 2024 (Etruscan Press). www.dianeraptosh.com She is ridiculously, wildly inspired by the sonnet form.

Mark Ready

I had difficulty learning to read and completing my schoolwork until my fourth-grade teacher sent me to remedial reading. I’m sixty-one years old and still remember how I felt when I realized I wasn’t stupid. I just couldn’t read. I live in Clarkston, WA, and studied major appliance repair at Lewis Clark State College. I have a wonderful wife called René and an independent daughter named Alexandra. I’ve written five books. My most recent are The Bishop’s Knight, A Christmas Story and The Journey to New Edgarton, A Children’s Story for Grownups.

Jim Richards

My cousin and his wife had triplets, two daughters and a son. Their son only lived a few years due to birth defects. His parents cared for him lovingly during his short life. His sisters honor his memory. Their courage and love through this challenge and their loss inspire me and inspired my poem. jimrichards.com

Perry Rickard

I feel extremely inspired by authenticity. By people who go against logic in pursuit of what their body tells them. By people who walk into the room and feel unswayed, resolute. Those kinds of people are my inspiration

Kimme Rovin

Kimme Rovin grew up on a small island in Massachusetts where she unfortunately never saw any mermaids but did get a lot of ticks. She’s inspired by fairytale re-tellings, magical creatures, and running in the foothills

Ruth Saxey-Reese

Ruth Saxey-Reese teaches writing and literature courses at Boise State University and creative workshops for local non-profit organizations. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Chiron Review, Calyx, Nerve Cowboy, Rattle, The Desert Chronicle, Hawaii Pacific Review, and America Magazine. She finds inspiration in the liminal zones between the visible and the unseen, the spoken and the unsaid.

Kalee Schwarting

Kalee Schwarting is a counselor who lives in Caldwell with her husband and two small children. In both her writing and her work with therapy clients, she looks correctively at systems, advocates for children as full human beings, and indulges in curiosity about human existence. Kalee is a gluttonous writer, reader, and eater of baked goods. This is her first publication in WITA.

Alyssa Stadtlander

Alyssa Stadtlander is a writer, theater artist, musician and teacher who loves crafting meaningful stories both collaboratively and individually through song, movement, and words. She teaches with Boise Contemporary Theater and is a copywriter for the creative consulting agency SolidCreative.Media. You can find her work in Ekstasis, Fathom, Westwind, The Windhover, and others, as well as Writers in the Attic: Rupture and Moon. In 2021, she received the 16th Annual Mudfish Magazine Poetry Prize. For more from Alyssa, visit her website at www.alyssastadtlander.com or find her on instagram @lyssastadt11.

David Stearns

David Stearns lives in the rolling hills above Boise, Idaho where he writes imaginative short stories inspired by his sidekick, Posie, a comical and forever faithful golden retriever who loves going for rides in their creaky, leaky old Ford pickup truck.

Judith Steele

I have ties to the past, but am leaping into my future. As always, I’m dedicating this piece to my late husband, Richard Steele.

Anita Tanner

I’m continually inspired by ideas, reading and study, imagination, quest for truth, and the light I see in people’s faces.

Eileen Thornburgh

Eileen Thornburgh was raised in Newport Beach, California. She moved to Coeur d’Alene to attend North Idaho College, and then to Boise to attend Boise State University. Eileen earned her Bachelor, Master, and Doctorate degrees in education at BSU. She and her husband, whom she met at BSU, enjoy hunting, fishing, and hiking the Idaho outdoors. Eileen taught 2nd through 8th grade for 30 years. She was Idaho’s Teacher of the Year in 2001.

Erin Tuthill

Erin Tuthill is a Boise native who is inspired by quality connections, collective sweat in gyms and yoga studios, a new pen and white space in which to write. She finds the endless possibilities in a craft store frankly overwhelming.

Bonnie Vestal

Bonnie and her husband moved to Boise in 1977 in order to raise their son and daughter near the foothills, Sawtooth trails and mountain lakes. While working in healthcare for nearly forty years, she watched the many mysterious ways in which lives intersect. Healing happens against all odds, just the right person or possibility presents itself when the need is most urgent, and almost every new experience causes some sort of expansion: we learn new things about ourselves, develop greater capacity, become more of who we are, and have more to offer. Retirement has given Bonnie the opportunity to write stories about the wonder of it all.

Eric E. Wallace

Eric E. Wallace (Facing the Music) lives in Eagle, Idaho. Eric is the author of three short story collections (Undertow, Hoar Frost and Stonerise) and four literary novels (Emperor’s Reach, The Improviser, Mind After Mind and the recently published Hover Point, which is set mainly in Idaho. His work also has appeared in many literary journals. This is the 10th Writers in the Attic anthology to include one or more of Eric’s stories. What inspires him? Making connections out of everything and the answers he gets when he asks ‘what if? Visit www.ericewallace.wordpress.com.

Fiona West

Fiona West writes fantasy and romance inspired by the people and places of the Pacific Northwest. When not writing, she enjoys hiking, trying out new vegan recipes, and knitting while watching Star Trek with her family.

2023

Three Writers in the Attic

The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. The Writers in the Attic, or WITA, is an annual contest for writers, both emerging and established, to publish work related to a theme chosen by The Cabin. This anthology is a venue showcasing the talents in our community.