The Fable Online Issue 21

The Fable Online Issue 21 June 2017

Sarah Kedar Executive Editor Heather White Associate Editor Readers Benjamin DeValve Chris Champe Fiona Ryle Hannah Lawrence Heather White Memphis Trace Sarah Kedar Tim Tanko

Cover illustrated by Luke Spooner

Š2015-2017 The Fable Online|Contributing Authors

Foreword

by Heather White In poetry, we often see a “volta”, or turn, in the last few lines of the poem. In a sonnet or tanka, it is a requirement that the last two lines include this: the turn often changes the meaning of the piece, bringing a new emotional meaning and energy to the themes presented. The turn is often what takes a rather generic piece and elevates it to an emotional sucker punch.

Prose can have turns too, although we often call them twists. This month’s issue showcases poetry and prose that seem to start one way only to end in another, delivering emotional gut punches that can wrench at you. Sudden realizations, transformations, unreliable narrators all await you, to show how quick a turn can take you.

Table of Contents His Duty As He Sees It

by John Grey ....................................................................................................................................6 Nook

by Erica Olson .................................................................................................................................8 Stone

by Don Thompson...........................................................................................................................9 The Downfall

by Arjun Dahal ..............................................................................................................................10 Cash For Gold

by Geraldine McCarthy .................................................................................................................12 Fontanelle

by Daniel Angelone .......................................................................................................................18 Her Blood and Fire

by Nick Muzeraki ..........................................................................................................................20 Lowering The Boom

by Joslyn Chase .............................................................................................................................23 The Epiphany

by Nick Gallup...............................................................................................................................26 The Actuaries

by Joseph McKinley........................................................................................................................42 About the Authors.......................................................................................................................54

Poetry

His Duty As He Sees It

By John Grey

How can you look on a whore and not see darkness.

I don't mean the streets.

Or the cars. Or men's leering eyes.

Caesar's purse opens and crimson nails grab greedily.

The heart is painted on.

But how can that be a heart?

What did my mother say?

All but me are the devil's spawn.

Look at your Aunt Rita,

pregnant to that sailor.

Beelzebub's child more likely.

And that girl next door, the way she dresses.

The more you see the dingier it is.

All that flesh where no lights shine.

Preaching won't do the least good, my mother said.

There's other ways of doing God's work.

So I do God's work two, three times a night.

At this rate, I'll be God eventually.

Nook

By Erica Olson Dragon of my heart Breathing flame, death, hopelessness; Burnt black, I crumble, But I reach in, hands through ash...

There! A space for bright new seeds.

Stone

By Don Thompson

“I am stone. I endure and nothing can move me.”

But it was only a pebble.

A boy picked it up and skipped it across a lake.

“I am stone. I endure and nothing can move me.”

But it was only a boulder in a field.

A farmer with a bar pried it loose and added it to his stack of stubborn rocks that had tried to hinder his plow.

“I am stone. I endure and nothing can move me.”

It was a cliff, solid granite and sure of itself.

But engineers came with dynamite, blasting it to gravel that Caterpillar tractors shoved around.

“I am stone. I endure and nothing can move me.”

It was a human heart that resented being tossed aside like a pebble, that never forgot being manhandled, that gathered up its shattered pieces and swore again that it would endure, unmoved.

The Downfall

By Arjun Dahal

The poignant eyes, The vivid smile, The mesmerizing shyness, The woven beauty, The euphoric memories, The futile dreams, Now all dried up.

Only the thorn remains.

O' Lovely Rose, Your charm has gone.

FICTION

Cash For Gold

By Geraldine McCarthy

Sadie popped her heels into a plastic bag under her desk and tied her runners. At last, the books were balanced. It was getting tougher all the time, and the bank’s policy stipulated that employees weren’t to leave until everything was in order. She yawned, her concentration completely shot. It wasn't the career she would have chosen, having no head for figures.

Waving goodbye to the security man, she made her escape. Outside in the fresh air, she began to unwind. Landmarks passed in a blur as she walked: the church, the vet’s clinic, the sprawling houses where the retired professionals lived. She was edging to get to the supermarket and to get home.

Friday evening and Dunnes’ grocery section was heaving. She made her way to the chilled cabinet and surveyed the ready meals. Sadie grabbed lasagne and garlic bread, flung them in her basket and headed straight for the wine section. She would get two bottles, one for tonight and one spare, as Jacob’s Creek was on special offer.

The express checkout was choked. The old woman ahead of her fumbled in her purse for loose change, her arthritic fingers struggling to grasp the coins. Sadie always seemed to get stuck behind some slowcoach. At last, she got to the top of the queue. Scanning her items, the cashier’s expression remained impassive. Taking her shopper out of her handbag, Sadie bagged her purchases, paid with a fifty Euro note and continued on her walk home.

It was a dry evening, which was something to be thankful for. Traffic whizzed by on the ring road. The footpath was busy too—teenagers having a smoke as they sauntered along, young mothers pushing buggies, their shopping bags laden with fruit and veg, joggers in their highlighter vests. It was years since she had gone jogging. She didn't need to. Everyone told her how thin she had become, which was probably code for 'you're looking haggard and drawn’.

She reached the estate and walked up her driveway. The lawn needed mowing. She wasn’t green-fingered, not like the crowd next door, who made pilgrimages to the garden centre of a Sunday. In the kitchen, she plonked the shopper on the table. Rinsing a glass under the tap, she cast around for the wine-opener and remembered it was in the sitting

room. She retrieved it from the coffee table, bought second-hand and tarnished now with ugly rings. Returning to the kitchen, she plopped the cork and poured the first glass of the evening, taking a long, vital slug.

Her handbag began to vibrate. Damn! The phone was still on silent. She poked around in the depths and retrieved it. Máiréad. Lucky she was calling early. Then, Máiréad was good at timing things.

Sadie took a breath. "Hi love, how's it going?"

"Fine, Mam. It's just I can't come down tomorrow. I've lots of study to do."

"Oh, that's a shame. I was looking forward to lunch with you." That was the third week in a row Máiréad had cried off. The exams weren't for months yet.

"We'll do it some other time."

"No bother, love. How are things otherwise?"

"Oh, fine. A few of us are thinking of going to the Canaries, when the exams are over, you know. We've nothing booked though."

"Oh, that's nice." It was years since Sadie had been on a holiday. She could never seem to stretch to it.

"Sure, I'll be in touch anyway, Mam." "Okay, I'll let you go, so."

"Cheerio."

"Good luck."

Sadie sat at the kitchen table, deflated. The idea of meeting Máiréad had sustained her all week. She took another glug of wine and tried not to look at the photo on the fridge.

The four of them in Kerry, Dingle Bay in the background. Their last mini-break together.

Joe had a new doll now, a quiet, sensible wan, who was full of understanding and sympathetic smiles. When he had kicked Sadie out five years ago, she thought it would only be temporary. The bit she couldn’t stomach was that both girls opted to stay with their father. Áine took after Joe of course—she didn’t just bear a grudge, but cradled and nurtured it. She was away a lot on the airlines. Home or away, it would make no difference. Máiréad, though, had a sweet nature—wherever they got her—and was doing well, ploughing through exams while working for an accountant by day.

Sadie brought the wine into the sitting room and flopped onto the couch. She wouldn't

bother with the Six-One news. She had enough problems. Her Kindle was on the arm of the couch but she wasn't in the mood for reading either. She tried to think back to the last time she met Máiréad. They went for lunch in the hotel on the square, that place where they served the gorgeous chicken goujons. She racked her brain to see whether she’d said anything to offend, but it was hard to think straight. One lunch melded into another. She had a few G’nTs in the house that morning, though they would only have minimum impact. And Máiréad was always blessed with the capacity to overlook things.

Sadie poured another glass and tried to get things straight in her head. Máiréad wouldn't be meeting her tomorrow, but said that she was going to the Canaries later in the year.

Máiréad couldn't afford that, not on the pittance her boss paid her as an apprentice.

Maybe Sadie could help? She laughed out loud at the idea. The noise echoed off the magnolia walls. She swirled the wine in the glass and did her sums, which were were easy to do. She had no spare cash and barely managed to pay the rent and the bills.

Once the ESB had threatened to cut her off, but she got her act together in the nick of time.

It was all a fine balancing act—getting herself to work, conducting the transactions and double checking everything, keeping up the banter with the customers. For the most part, she avoided any hassle with her manager, a young wan with a Commerce degree.

Davina would throw her a filthy now and again when Sadie came in with her uniform creased, so she made sure to do her ironing early in the evening. She never called in sick though. Never. She might be as slow as be damned, but she was functioning all the same.

The wine ran out and she went to the kitchen to break open the second bottle. It would be nice to have someone to confide in, but her friends had scampered years ago, tired of the complications. There were only young wans in the bank now anyway, bold and brazen and groomed to within an inch of their lives, with their nude lip gloss and manicured nails and hundred Euro highlights. They would put years on you.

If Máiréad wanted to go to the Canaries, Sadie would pay for her flights somehow. Surely there was something she could sell. That rust bucket of a Toyota, maybe? She always walked to work now anyway. It was easier than getting breathalysed of a morning. She'd ring Mikey the mechanic and find out how much she might get for the jalopy. He would be toiling away, Friday evening or not, a pure workaholic. She had him on speed dial.

"Hiya Mikey, sorry to bother you. It's Sadie."

"How are you, Sadie?"

Was it her imagination or did she hear a sigh?

"Mikey, I was wondering could you tell me how much I'd get for the Toyota?"

"Well now, it's nearly twenty years old. And it just scraped by in the last NCT. I'd say it'd be only fit for scrap now, to be honest."

Fit for the scrap heap. How apt. "Ah, thanks a million, Mikey. Sorry for disturbing you."

"No problem at all."

Well feck that, anyway. She would have to come up with some other plan. She poured another glass of wine and noticed how heavy her limbs were. She was exhausted. The effort of getting through the week took its toll.

She rubbed her fingers absent mindedly. Her rings. They were in a drawer upstairs. Joe never skimped when it came to jewellery. There was her wedding ring, her engagement ring, a charm bracelet and a few other pieces. It would tear her apart to flog them. She had loved the bones of that man one time. Her cheeks began to burn and the tears came and she let them flow. That was the great thing about drink. It was a tear releaser.

She poured the last glass and decided to bring it upstairs. Clinging to the banisters, glass in her left hand, she made it to her room and flopped onto the bed. Leaving the glass on the locker she closed her eyes a while.

It was eleven in the morning when she woke. The waist of her skirt and the wire of her bra dug into her. Shit. Conked out again. The glass of wine from last night beckoned her from the locker. Down the hatch it went. What a worthless excuse of a human being she was. She descended the stairs with care, a dullness in her head, her mouth dry, noticing in the harsh light of day how the place could do with a hoover. There was still some bottled water left and she poured a glass and began sipping. Next she put on the kettle and heaped two spoonfuls of instant coffee into a mug.

When the coffee was ready she carried it into the sitting room. The curtains were still open. She flung out the window and sank into the couch. What had tipped her over the edge this time? Oh yes, Máiréad avoiding her. She’d come up with some hair-brained idea. Oh yes, to sell her jewellery. A get-rich-quick scheme. A better plan would have been to ditch the drink.

It was six years now since she had gone to that drying out place. Chores in the morning and counselling in the evening. Mopping the floors was no problem. It calmed her mind.

The group sessions were another kettle-of-fish. Mark was the counsellor's name, in his thirties, with serious eyes and a head-tilt whenever he said 'I see'. He saw quite a lot. He

probed her about her lost twin, the sister who had died at birth. How could she talk about someone she never knew, yet someone she felt the absence of? These thoughts swirled around in her head, but couldn't be put it into words. Not in front of those other misfortunates, Mary with the depression, and Jack with the weakness for the gee-gees.

She signed herself out after a month, and came home, unreformed, unhealed, and more uneasy in herself than ever. Another failure in a long line of failures.

She threw back the lukewarm coffee and organised a bowl of Rice Krispies. If she showered and made a move she could be on the one o'clock bus to the city and go to that Cash for Gold place in the shopping centre. She put the lasagne and garlic bread in the fridge and went upstairs to get ready. * "Hi love, how is the study going?"

"Oh, it's slow, you know. Is everything alright, Mam?" "Oh, yes, everything is fine. I was in the city today actually. I knew you were busy so I didn't call round."

A pause. "Oh, right. Did you get anything nice?"

"No, just had a browse, that's all. I was thinking about your holiday to the Canaries. I've a bit of cash put aside. I could pay for the plane tickets, maybe give you a bit of spending money as well?"

"Mam, I'm not a child. I can fund myself."

Sadie’s shoulders tensed. "But I'd like to help you out."

"I won't take your money, Mam, and I think you should leave me alone for a while. Give me a chance to focus."

"What's brought this on?"

"Mam, you know yourself. You're all over the place, even worse than usual. I just need a break from the chaos."

She tried to keep the sharp edge out of her voice. "What chaos?"

"Mam, don't go there. I'm hanging up now."

Silence. Sadie went to the fridge to get the white lemonade. Her legs were weak. Vodka and white was what she needed. What did Máiréad mean? Hadn't they had a lovely lunch the last time they met? Was that the day she forgot her purse? Surely she wasn’t going to

be penalised for an honest mistake. Or maybe it was the day the waitress asked her to keep her voice down? A little hussy, barely out of school. Someone had to put manners on her.

Sadie woke in a panic, sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window. What day was it? She checked her phone. Sunday. Thank God. Her head spun. She would be fine after coffee. But she wasn't fine after coffee. In fact, she felt worse. She paved a way through the fog, and replayed the events of the previous night.

She pulled on jeans and a jacket and set out for Dunnes. The sunlight stung her eyes, even with sunglasses, and the screeching of the children in the playground went in and out through her. It was dead quiet in the supermarket. Normal people were tucking into their Sunday roast. She got a bottle of whiskey on special offer, and seeing as she had extra cash, a spare, and pounded the pavement home. She was in a hurry to get going.

Normally she paced herself on a Sunday, knowing that Monday morning would loom all too soon. But this Sunday she didn't take it handy. She poured the whiskey down her.

After a while she didn’t bother adding water. She could call in sick in the morning, say she had the ‘flu. It would be her first time ever. Of course they would believe her. Wasn’t she one of their longest-serving employees?

Fontanelle

By Daniel Angelone

Vincenzo Andolini? I tell you everything thing I know about Vincenzo Andolini, the man made of stone. I tell you a tale of the beautiful, bellissima neonata, the baby girl Fontanelle and of the man who want to take her from Sorrento to Napoli to give the girl better life, but tragically it end in the ruins of Pompeii, where he drop her and they both die.

But don’t cry a tear for Vincenzo Andolini. His Mama, she try for make a quiche but end up with scrambled egg. That boy he have every opportunity and he have a brain, but his brain, it is like old auto, it work only when it want to. A stone, I tell you!

Vincenzo, he always making trouble. But one day he make trouble with the wrong man.

You see, he make a beautiful baby girl. But he make it with the wife of another man!

What a stonato, yes? And this other man, he not just any man. He is a mafioso. A great man. And when this great man find out, he come after Vincenzo.

The baby girl, when she born, she is molto malaticcio, very weakling, yes? A the doctor said she is a egg, he don’t know what wrong with her, her bones they break too easy. And young Vincenzo he take this egg and want to make right for once in his life. But the mafioso, he coming, wanting his vendetta.

So Vincenzo, he is very smart, so when they come to his house he is changing the bambina’s swath near the wash basin, and they drive their car to the house he see them, so he take a rag and wrap his face like old maid, and he take Fontanelle under the bathwater and shake her into lather. And when the men they hop from the auto with their pistols and they say to Vincenzo, “Washwoman, brutta, where is Vincenzo? Tell us now, woman, for we are dangerous men and we have business with him!” And Vincenzo, he shake the baby like washing a bundle, and he snap at them “I am a poor old maid and I am very busy. Vincenzo is inside taking a bath. Now leave me to my work, or he will beat me.” These men run inside, and Vincenzo run away with bambina and he steal their auto and hightail it out of town!

But no, the mafiosos, they find Vincenzo, they find him on the roadside by the river. He run the auto to it run no more and then continue to walking to Napoli on foot, if that’s what it takes! But by the evening he gets tired, and Fontanelle, she is a crying, so he stop

to feed her a bottle. These men, they sneak onto Vincenzo good and they want a start shooting. Vincenzo, with his Andolini cunning, he trick these men again, and this time he take the role of the fisher. He think quickly and toss Fontanelle in the river, after tied her to a string. And Fontanelle start a floundering in the river as the men come with their pistols ready to a shoot. And Vincenzo, he leap up and tug the string and he shout, “Ey, look at this one, a big flounder, help me boys, I may lose it!” And the bad men they were so sure they found Vincenzo and now they think they have the wrong man and no want to waste the time, so they run back to the road and keep going.

And so, Vincenzo he escape them once more, and he continue to Napoli.

But this where the story comes to the end. See, Vincenzo, he smart, but they find him, and catch him when he is passing by the ruins of Pompeii, where men turn to stones.

And Vincenzo, he try to trick the mafiosos for the third time and he hold himself still as a statue. But the neonata, she can’t help it, she hungry, and she start a crying, and blow up their cover.

The mafiosos, the great men, they don’t let him slip away this time! They shoot Vincenzo in the head. And they say Vincenzo Andolini, the stonato, so stubborn in life that when they shoot his head, it crumble like a stone. And the baby, Fontanelle, the egg, she fall and she crack. Very sad.

Vincenzo Andolini? If you want to find this man, he is in Pompeii where he die. I am a simple mason, and I tell you I know a stone, and Vincenzo Andolini, he is a stone. I’m sorry I talk your ear over, and I am very tired. Say, help me with this brick, look at it, she is a heavy.

Her Blood and Fire

By Nick Muzekari

She woke and felt his presence. It had been more than five years.

She got out of bed and looked out at the window, at the soft white field illuminated by a half-hidden moon. He was there, atop a boulder in the front yard, the rest of the wolf pack scattered in clumps surrounding the log home.

He howled, shattering the silence of the quiet night. The others joined in -- creating asymphony that sent deep chills down her back.

She hurried down the hall, her heart beating hard, glancing in at her parents’ bedroom as she passed it. They were asleep.

Once downstairs, she quietly opened the front door.

The Alpha lifted his nose to the wind, confirming her scent. The other wolves moved to close in.

"No!" cried the girl. "Have me...just don't hurt them."

He growled, stopping their advance.

He gazed at her.

The girl quietly shut the door and, with a slight limp, made her way toward the boulder.

The other wolves surrounded her, prowling.

At the boulder the air was thicker, colder. He peered down at her. His dark, intense and penetrating stare reminded her of the attack five years ago. She had been a marten then, and being young, without mature blood in her veins, could only shift into a similar body type or smaller. So she became a dove and darted into the air. He had jumped and swiped, clipping her tail, but she escaped.

She didn’t want it to come to this. But she had been cornered once again, this time between her own life and her family’s.

But she was older now: her blood and plasma more developed and seasoned. Potent.

The wolves pressed closer around her, stirring with excitement. The Alpha jumped down from the rock, whining. He dipped his neck and moved toward her.

This wasn’t a mere meal he had searched so long for—consuming the flesh and blood of a Shifter Animalia was a coveted desire among the fauna for its mysterious vitality. But it was a life-force fauna, including wolves, knew little about: ignorant of its seasonal growth and potential.

The Alpha arched his back and pounced.

The wolf leader had lunged toward a little girl...and slammed into a grizzly bear.

The humongous beast buried its head into his body, sending him crunching to the ground where it mauled him without mercy.

She turned on the other wolves, raging with speed and fury, crushing as many as she could, all 440 pounds of her pummelling flesh.

Many got away, scattering in all directions through the field and into the safety of thick trees.

She roared at them as they fled, baring all her red-stained teeth and gums. Her blood swirled, full-bodied lava, scorching the gentleness of her brief childhood.

She paced around the corpses of her enemies, calming herself, feeling the fire surge and wane.

A crisp wind cooled her sweaty fur and gently shook the foliage in the trees.

She felt their presence and turned, gazing up at the second floor bedroom window.

They looked out at her--speechless, terrified--the two of them who had become her parents when they had taken her in that night, thinking she was lost and orphaned.

She groaned, wondering how much they had seen. The thin fur beneath her eyes moistened.

Amidst broken bones and bloody fur, she stared back at them as through water, remembering as much as she could about their love and the five years they had given her. She longed to thank them, hug and kiss them—but she knew leaving was her only choice now.

She turned and lumbered up the hill without looking back.

The moist, earthy air enveloped her when she entered the forest, drawing her whole body into itself. She stepped over stone and wet flora, inhaling pungent soil and the raw bark of trees. It soaked into her hide and flooded her senses, reawakening nature’s memories.

As she walked deeper into the woods,the fire reignited, simmering in her glands.

She forgot about being a child and let it burn.

Lowering The Boom

By Joslyn Chase

Holding tightly to her valise, Bonnie glanced over her shoulder before stepping onto the platform. Gunpowder-colored clouds swirled in the distance, stretching from the prairie to the heavens. The blizzard was coming fast, and the conductor’s strident voice rose above the furor of the crowd, urging everyone to get on board so they could stay ahead of the storm.

As she placed her foot on the step, anxiety prickled the back of her neck. She’d forgotten something, and couldn’t shake the feeling it was vitally important for her to remember.

She tried to stir her thoughts, but they lay sluggish in her mind, grown heavy under the weight of alcohol. Bonnie knew she drank too much, too often, and she planned to change her habits with this fresh start.

She’d come by it honestly, raised by a drinking father. He was a fisherman, and a damn fine sailor. Many times, she’d accompanied him in his boat, listening to his shanties and sharing his bottle, once he deemed her old enough.

“Take care, my Bonnie lass, to hold your liquor well. Else I’ll have to lower the boom on you.”

The boom was a long spar that extended from the mast to hold the foot of the sail. In a changing wind, the boom could swing wildly and if you weren’t careful, would fetch you a mighty smack, or knock you overboard. To her father, lowering the boom was the worst kind of punishment.

Bonnie found a seat at the back of the train and settled her things. The seat opposite was occupied by a sparse-haired woman with a cold eye and prim look. She returned Bonnie’s greeting with the merest dip of her head, turning to stare out the window, lips pressed so tightly together they disappeared against the sallow skin.

Despite the cold shoulder, Bonnie sat in a pleasant mist of warmth, generated by the bottle of wine at lunch and those last two whiskeys on the way out of town.She missed her old dad. He hadn’t died at sea. His passing had been far more prosaic, involving the indignities of a land-locked hospital bed and acute hepatitis. Bonnie and her older sister, Belinda, were left to themselves. Belinda was a sensible girl, a good manager with a pretty face, and she soon married. She extended as much help as she dared to Bonnie,

but her husband, Gerald, held a tight rein on financial contributions, reckoning most of it went into the till at the local pub.

Bonnie felt both the legitimacy of his reservations and the injustice of his prejudice. His bias against her became more marked after Belinda bore a child, a boy they named Peter. It became clear that for the peace of both parties, Bonnie must break ties and start fresh elsewhere. It was best this way, but Bonnie would regret the loss of her sister’s companionship and the opportunity to watch little Peter grow.

Again, the hairs on the back of Bonnie’s neck prickled and she felt vaguely disturbed. The train had chugged out of the station and was making good time eastward. She craned her neck to look out the window and saw the blackened sky they’d left behind. The train car shuddered under the force of a bitter wind and Bonnie was glad to have escaped the boom of the lowering storm.

She allowed that she may have driven too fast on her way to the station, and maybe not as carefully as warranted, but she’d made it without mishap, leaving the car where Gerald could collect it later. Serve him right to have to come looking for it.

The conductor came round to punch tickets. “We did well to leave when we did,” he said.

“Blizzard’s shut down everything behind us. So thick out there you can’t see your hand before your face, and cold as my ex-wife’s Christmas card.”

Bonnie felt a chill finger penetrating the warmth of her buzz. Something was definitely wrong. She gave her head a shake to clear it and began organizing her thoughts. There was nothing she could have forgotten—not much worth taking, in the first place. She’d packed her valise and one small handbag. That was all. Stowed it in the trunk of the car and returned to the house for a last hug and kiss from Belinda.

The sisters held each other tightly, then Belinda pushed back and looked hard into Bonnie’s face.

“Are you sober?”

Bonnie was so good at hiding it, and the wine-laden lunch was two hours past. “As a judge,” she replied.

“If that’s a reference to Judge Stanton, then we’re no farther ahead. Are you good to drive?”

Bonnie insisted she was.

“Then you must do me one last favor. I’ve got a cake for the ladies’ luncheon in the oven,

and I need you to collect Peter from preschool. You should have plenty of time to bring him home before your train leaves. Will you do this for me?”

She’d tucked Peter into his seat, tucking the blanket around him, planting a kiss on his sweet and slightly sticky face as his cornflower blue eyes smiled up at her. He’d fallen asleep before she’d turned the corner.

Now, seated on the speeding train, an icy sword of panic sliced into Bonnie’s heart. Had she delivered him home? Surely, she must have, but she had no clear memory of it. She did remember stopping by the pub for a quick top-up. The child was sleeping and she’d be only a moment.

She’d hurried in and downed a quick whiskey or two, dreaming of her future, visualizing something grand and wonderful. When she came out, she’d been thinking only of the train station and her fresh start.

Oh God, what had she done? She threw an agonized glance back at the snow clouds swirling in the distance behind the train, and a scream tore from her throat as clarity returned and fate lowered the boom.

The Epiphany

By Nick Gallup Nigger. It was 1947 in Mississippi, and that’s what every white I knew called them. Not Negroes, or blacks, or African Americans. The only concessions we made had to do with things of a public nature, such as “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains. A politician, pandering for votes from us retarded whites, would call them nigras, although he’d most likely pronounce it niggeras.

Anyway, it was summer-time, and school was out. There were about ten or twelve of us that hung out together, and it was our norm to play softball in the field behind the white high school. The niggers were always there when we showed up to play, but, with the aid of Mr. John, we quickly commandeered the field. They never argued with us. They just shrugged a little and maybe mumbled a few words to themselves and collected in a group off the field to watch us play. We weren’t very good, and we could hear them snicker when one of us struck out or botched an easy catch.

“Y’all niggers better shut up, or we gonna come over there and kick some black butts,” we’d threaten.

We couldn’t have done it if we wanted to. They knew it, and they knew we knew it. It was academic, though. They knew what’d happen to them if they beat up a bunch of spiteful white kids.

Mr. John was in his eighties and lived across the street from the playing field. He had only a wisp of hair, all white. He had false teeth, which I never personally saw him wear. Every time I saw him his mouth was recessed into his face as if someone had whacked him with an axe. His voice had deteriorated with age, and he sounded like a parrot screeching. And he did a lot of screeching, He lived across from the softball field and had decided the field was his by default. Most times we didn’t even have to chase the niggers off the field. Mr. John would see us coming and scream at them to vacate the field or else, the or else being he’d call the cops. Not exactly a threat to be taken lightly, because the consequences for the niggers would’ve been pretty grim if some redneck cops had to show them the exit.

Having only 10 or 12 of us whites didn’t make for a very good game. Five or six on a side was okay for football, but it just didn’t cut it for softball. It was difficult to get a team out

when there were only five or six players defending. So we played “work-up.” But work-up wasn’t a whole lot of fun. We had to change positions every time someone got out, and then it took forever to work our way back up to bat again.

I can’t remember whose idea it was, I know it wasn’t mine, but one day someone came out and suggested we challenge the niggers to play us. That way we could have a regular game.

“Are you crazy?” Most of us roared .

“No. Come on, they ain’t no good. We’ll beat ‘em easy. Ain’t y’all getting’ tired of this workup?”

A lot of head-scratching ensued. We didn’t decide to play them that day, but the seed had been planted, and, as it germinated and began to grow a little, playing a regular game of softball, even if was against a bunch of lowly niggers, sounded better and better. And that made us hate work-up even more.

Our innovator renewed the subject. “I been thinkin’ some more about playin’ them niggers.”

“So?” “So, I think we oughta challenge ’em.”

“What about Mr. John?”

“He ain’t our daddy. He can’t tell us what to do.”

The unconvinced among us grumbled kind of nervously.

“What’s the matter? Y’all scared they gonna beat us? They ain‘t no good.”

“Ain’t no way a bunch of niggers gonna beat us!” We dutifully replied. I had my doubts, though. If only briefly, I’d seen them play before we kicked them off the field, and they looked pretty damned good to me.

“Well, somebody go over and challenge ’em.”

“Someone? What’s wrong with you. It was your big idea.”

Our innovator paused. “My daddy don’t like me talkin’ to niggers.”

“What’s he gonna say when he finds out you been playin’ softball with ‘em?”

“How’s he gonna find out? One of y’all gonna tell ‘im?”

“No, no,” we assured him.

“Then one of y’all go over and challenge ‘em to play.”

It was kind of what you might call the logic of a bunch of twelve-year olds.

Responsibilities had to be shared. Whoever came up with the brainstorm was generally given a pass on having to implement it. So, a discussion began as to which of us it was to be who would go over and throw down the gauntlet.

“Wade’ll do it,” a boy who until then I had presumed to be my best friend decided.

I, unhappily, was Wade. “Me, why me?”

“Cause you know how to talk to niggers.”

How he’d come to this conclusion was beyond me. But his premise quickly gained popularity, as no one wanted to be known as the white boy who’d invited the niggers over to play softball.

And so the sharks began to circle. There was no longer any doubt who was going over to deliver the challenge. It was just a matter of how long it would take my to shame me into doing it.

“Well, my step-daddy’s ain’t exactly crazy about me talking to niggers either” was my lame-ass reply.

That was the truth. My step-daddy’s name was Maurice Duvant, and he hated niggers more than anyone I knew. The irony, though, was that he worked on the shrimp and oyster boats in Biloxi, which meant he was outdoors most of the time and had a suntan so dark he was mahogany-brown. His nickname, in fact, was “Nigger” because he was so dark. He was a Cajun from New Iberia, Louisiana, and Cajuns and niggers were rumored to cohabitate on occasion, and…well, true or not, you get my point. So old Maurice worried he might have more than a little nigger DNA . He came from France, he insisted, maybe by way of Arcadia, but France nonetheless. He had a French name and spoke Cajun French better than he spoke English. He was French, by God, and he figured the more he bad-mouthed niggers the more people would buy into his being from old Parie. A failed strategy, as everyone still called him “Nigger” behind his back.

Well, they finally shamed me into walking over to the niggers and talking to them about playing us. I lived on Keller Avenue, only a few houses from the railroad tracks, and the tracks were more or less what separated the white trash section of Biloxi from the nigger section. The houses on both sides of the tracks were equally decrepit, made of unpainted wood so old it was almost petrified. The roofs were all tin and rusting, and every pot and pan in the houses had to be called into service to catch the ubiquitous leaks when it

rained. There was running water and toilets and electricity, although the electricity was turned off more than on because most of us, both nigger and white, had trouble coming up with enough money to pay the electric bill. The niggers were poor, and we whites, at least economically, were just as bad off as them. That didn’t mean, though, that I knew how to talk to them.

I eventually found myself standing in front of the niggers, who were lounging on the grass at the far edge of the playing field. They sure as hell weren’t afraid of me, skinny as I was, but they still looked at me warily.

“What you want, white boy?” asked one. “We ain’t on your field.”

“Yeah,” said another. “You gonna chase us off here, too?”

“No.” “Then what you want?”

I cleared my throat several times. “Well, we was wondering…”

“Wondering what?”

A tall nigger stood up and walked over to me. He stopped a foot or two from me and gave me a friendly smile. “Well, maybe if y’all shut up for a minute,” he said, “this white boy’d tell us what he came over for.”

“We was wondering if y’all wanted to play softball against us. You know, niggers against the whites.”

“Y’all mean it?” He asked. He looked more than a little shocked. So did the rest of his group.

“Yeah.”

His smile reappeared. “You got yourself a game. Y’all ready now?”

“Yeah.” For someone who knew how to talk to niggers, my vocabulary was surprisingly limited.

“What’s your name?” The tall nigger asked.

“Wade,” I replied.

“Wade? What kind of name is Wade? They call you Wade cause you don’t know how to swim?”

All the other niggers snickered.

“I can swim, I’m a good swimmer. What’s your name?”

“Jesse.”

“They call you Jesse cause you rob banks?”

He laughed. “No, but that sound like a good idea. How old you, Wade?”

“I’m 12. How old you?”

“Gonna be 13 next week. What you gonna get me for my birthday?”

“I’m gonna get you a gun to rob banks with.”

He laughed again. I was fairly tall, but he was taller, and much more broad and sturdy than I. He was light-skinned, at least three or four paint shades lighter than my no-good step-daddy. He had a nice smile, and it didn’t take a genius to see he liked to laugh and kid around. His facial features were near- perfect, small nose and ears flat against his head, and large brown eyes that seemed to take note of just about everything.

So the games began, and, as I had feared, so did the ass-kicking, When we whites were in the field all we did was chase balls that the niggers hit over our heads. I played right field, the position accorded the worst player on the team. I began to play so far back I could barely see our pitcher. It’d take us forever to get them out. Then it got even more humiliating. No matter where we hit the ball, some streak-of-black-lightening would be there waiting for it. Three up and three down was pretty much the story of our offense.

At least most of my team could get a bat on the ball. I was the strike-out king for sure.

One time, after an especially embarrassing strike-out on my part , I passed Jesse as he was coming off the field.

“You ain’t keeping your eye on the ball, Wade.”

“Huh?” “You taking your eye off the ball when you swing. You looking where you want to hit it.

Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your swing level, hit it as hard as you can, and just followthrough. Nothing to it.”

I was a little ungracious to say the least. “I don’t need no nigger advice.”

He ignored my slur and disagreeable manner. “Yes, you do. I seen you run out there, even if it’s running after balls we hit over your head. You fast and athletic. You can be a good softball player.”

I turned to leave.

“Ain’t you got no glove, Wade?”

“No, somebody stole it.” I lied. I couldn’t afford a glove.

“Here,” Jesse said. “We’ll share mine.”

Several innings later it was my turn to bat again. I swung at the first pitch and missed it by a mile. I swung at the second pitch and missed it by two miles. What the heck, I thought, as I waited for the next pitch, why not give the nigger’s advice a try? Nothing to lose, that was for damned sure. As the ball approached me I fixed my eyes on it. As it drew abreast of me I swung level and hard and followed through. I impacted the ball perfectly and could tell from the solid clunk I heard, that the ball was destined for the road that ran behind the high school. The nigger left fielder couldn’t believe it. After they’d seen what lousy hitters we were, their outfielders had begun to play in on us, easily picking off anything we managed to hit over their infielders’ heads. Not so my hit.

Even had he been back, and even as fast as he was, he could never have gotten to my ball. I was stupefied, in absolute shock. I just stood there. I’d hit a home run. Well maybe not, I realized, if I kept standing there looking at the ball as it rolled across the road.

“Run, stupid,” my team mates all screamed. “Run before they throw your dumb-ass out at first base.” So, I began to run. As Jesse had noted, I was fast, and, once I emerged from my shock and started to run the bases I made good time. Still, because of my delay in the initiation of my base-running, I made it to home plate only a second before the ball the niggers’ equally fast left fielder had retrieved from across the distant road thumped into the catcher’s glove. We’d scored our first run against them.

Jesse stopped me again as we whites headed back out into the field. “See, Wade, I told you you could do it. Now, I gonna teach you how to field.”

And so he did. School didn’t resume for a few more months, and we played the niggers nearly every day. After every game, Jesse held a little seminar for me. He hit hundreds of fly balls to me and taught me how to get moving in the right direction as soon as the ball left the bat. He taught me how to field ground balls and how to throw a hard and accurate peg all the way to home plate.

More and more of the whites began to stick around to benefit from Jesse’s coaching.

Tired of continually getting our butts kicked, though, we decided to racially mix the teams to make the games more competitive.

And, thanks to Jesse‘s coaching, I’d been promoted to left field.

As each day passed we became friendlier with the niggers. We soon knew their names and kidded around. Sure, we had arguments and even a fight now and then. But the fights never went on very long. Jesse’d immediately step in and break them up. Even the worst nigger-hater in our group looked up to Jesse, not only because he knew Jesse could whip his butt or that Jesse was the best softball player out there, but because he was just so friendly. He might’ve been a nigger, but you couldn’t help but like him.

Of course, Mr. John didn’t like him, and Mr. John especially didn’t cotton to whites and niggers playing softball together. It was hard enough for him to tolerate it when we were playing against them, but it became more than he could bear when we started having whites and niggers on the same team. Eventually, he couldn’t stand it any longer. That’s when he called the cops.

Southern cops. What can I say? They didn’t have any entrance exams to be a southern cop, at least that I ever heard of, or, if they did, they only accepted applicants who missed most of the questions. I never met even one who had a high school diploma. Of course, they had to be familiar with guns. But that was hardly a problem. Even the poorest southern white man I knew had at least one gun and knew how to use it. I’m amazed to this day that there’s a single squirrel left alive in the state of Mississippi. And it helped if they were bullies and spoke fluent white trash. The cops that showed up in response to Mr. John’s rebel yell far exceeded the minimum qualifications of a southern cop. They made Bull Conner look like Mr. Rodgers.

Summer vacation was almost over, and we’d been dreading the approach of September, as it marked not only the beginning of hurricane season but the start of a new school year as well. It also meant we’d have to start wearing shoes again, after having spent the whole summer training our bare feet to walk on the crushed oyster shells with which the city paved the streets.

Anyway, as soon as the cops rolled up that day, the niggers did a Jesse Owens and were miles away before the two cops, Officers Mullet and Butt-Wipe, could untangle their beer guts from the patrol car and confront us. We whites didn’t have the brains to run.

The two cops waved us over to them. We reluctantly approached. Officer Mullet was a big man, very mean, with a reputation as one of the toughest brawlers in town. You didn’t mess with Mullet, who, by the way, didn’t mind being called Mullet. Officer Butt-Wipe, on the other hand, identified more with my step-daddy, in that he didn’t care much for his nick-name either. Too bad, because what was done in Biloxi in the way of conveying nicknames couldn’t be undone. Butt-Wipe, too, was a large man, but he was mostly fat,

while Mullet, despite his prodigious beer-gut, had a lot of muscle tucked away on his hefty frame.

Mullet laid into us. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Biloxi white boys playing baseball with a bunch of niggers! I told Mr. John he was seeing things when he called us.”

“How can y‘all play with them dirty niggers?” This from good old Butt-Wipe.

“Cobb’s right. I don’t want any of y’all to even get close to me,” Mullet yelled, pretending to shudder. “No telling’ what y’all done caught runnin’ around with ‘em.”

The dumbest of us white kids then spoke. That’d be me. “But Mr. Mullet, we was just playing softball.”

Mullet plowed through the crowd to get at me. He slapped me hard on the side of the head and knocked me down. “Wade Temple. I mighta knowed one of the little nigger lovers’d be you. Wait’ll I tell Nigger what you done. He’ll give you a whippin’ you ain’t never gonna forget.” Nigger was my step-daddy.

“And you deserve it, too.” Butt-Wipe again, grinning like the devil he was.

“Cobb and I know everyone of y’all, and we’re gonna tell all your daddies what y‘all done.”

A collective shudder followed Mullet‘s peroration. Satisfied that they’d adequately intimidated us, they drove away, stopping briefly to heap praise on old Mr. John for his good citizenship. He was all gums.

We reluctantly went home to face the consequences for our grievous crime. I was hoping for a miracle of some sort, but my hopes were dashed as soon as I opened the screen door . My step-daddy, aka Nigger, was waiting for me, belt in hand. My mother tried to stop him, but he easily flung her aside. As he jerked me to him, I could smell the booze.

He was prone to rage when he’d knocked back a few, and I knew from bitter experience that only by minimizing resistance and maximizing crying, would I weather his boozy storm.

He really lit into me. I didn’t have to fake screaming and yelling. It really hurt. He was more drunk than usual, so the beating was more rough than usual. The visit from Officers Mullet and Butt-Wipe had added more fuel to his already well-fueled fire. I finally grew tired of screaming and just shut up and hung limply in his hands like a rag-doll. I think that scared him a little. He thought he’d finally gone too far and killed me. He paused to check me out. I kept my eyes closed and just slumped to the floor when he let me go.

“That teach you, nigger-lover.”

“You gonna kill him if you don’t stop beating him like that, Maurice. He’s just a little boy,” my momma cried as she rushed to my side. My whimper told her I was still alive. She cradled me in her thin arms.

“That it. Take up for him like you do. He no just boy. He big. When I his age I work on boats. Like a man. He nigger-lover. I shamed to talk to Mullet and Butt-Wipe. They my friends, and I no look them in the eye I so shamed. He need beatin’.”

Well, you get an idea as to the kind of English he spoke.

My poor mother. She had terrible luck in picking out husbands. Her first husband, my real daddy, wasn’t much better than old Maurice. He abandoned us when I was four, saying he’d found a job in Nevada and would send for us. The only time we heard from him again was when he got a quickie divorce in Reno and sent a copy to my mother with a note saying he was marrying some bimbo who thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Then she met old Maurice. Somehow, don’t aske me how, he charmed her into marrying him. As soon as the marriage ceremony was over, though, he shed the gentleman charade.

She had married him about eight years ago. So he’d been my step-daddy for eight glorious years.

I’d mostly recovered from the beating he had given me, but, although a week had elapsed, some of the whelps and belt marks he’d anointed me with remained. School had started, and I was ambling home one day when I ran into Jesse. I was really glad to see him.

“Hey, Jesse. How you?”

He smiled that friendly smile. “I’m all right. But how you? You over that beating your daddy gave you?”

“How you know about that?”

“I could hear you hollering all the way down to my house.”

“No way. Where you live, Jess?”

“Kellar Avenue, just like you.”

He had, in addition to his school books, some other paraphernalia. “What you got there?”

I inquired.

“Just some pictures I painted” I reached for the them. “Lemme see.”

He gave me an embarrassed look. He wasn’t crazy about it, but he didn’t resist when I took them from him. I perused the drawings, which really weren’t drawings or sketches, but actual paintings on pasteboard. I was sure no art critic, but I knew some pretty good paintings when I saw them. The first one I looked at was of a pelican sitting on a piling. It looked like a photograph it was so realistic. I expected the craggy old bird to just get up and fly off the page.

“Man, Jess, that’s really good. I sure wish I could paint like that.”

He was still embarrassed and just murmured something about it wasn’t anything special.

I went through the other paintings, growing more and more impressed as I viewed each one. “Wow,” I gushed. “This one looks just like the shrimp boat my no-good step-daddy works on. And here’s the Back Bay bridge and the Ocean Springs bridge. And I really like this one of the Biloxi Light House. Look how you got the sun to shine on the water. How you ever do that?”

“You just mix a little yellow and white paint together and kind of smudge it on the waves.”

My mouth was open in total awe. “I swear, Jess, these pictures are beautiful. You oughta go to art school. You could be a famous painter.”

Jesse looked at me as if I were the dumbest person alive. “There ain’t no art schools for coloreds, Wade.”

“There ain’t?”

“Naw. Don’t you know nothing?’

“Didn’t know that.”

We were pretty close to Kellar Avenue, where we both lived, so we walked along together as we headed home. He noticed the remnants of the bruises and belt whelps I’d incurred from my beating.

“Your daddy do that?”

“My step-daddy,” I corrected. My daddy abandoned kids. He didn’t beat them up.

“What’d he beat you for?”

“The police came by my house and told him we’d been playin’ softball with y’all.”

I happened to look over at him, and his dark brown eyes, which normally shined with good humor, now looked sad and somewhat guilty. “I sorry about that, Wade.”

I smiled over at him. “Well, at least I learned how to play softball first.”

His good humor returned. “Yeah, you did. You gonna be a good softball player.”

“Good as you?”

“Maybe better. You faster than me. How you get so fast?”

“Running from my step-daddy, I guess.”

I never became a good softball player. Softball was no big thing in Biloxi. It was all football and maybe a little basketball. I tried playing football, but was so skinny I kept getting hurt. Being fast helped me a little, but even as fast as I was, I’d still get hammered every once in a while, and I’d be hobbling around for weeks. Even as dumb as I was, I soon realized I should try another sport. I got into track, thinking that with my speed, it was made to order for me. Turned out, I was only fast up to a certain point. No one could beat me for the first 30 yards, but, after that, it was as all uphill.

So, by the process of elimination, I got into basketball. I happened to mention to Jesse I was going out for the junior varsity basketball team. Turned out his knowledge of athletics wasn’t confined to softball.

“I play on our team. First thing Coach told us was to learn how to dribble without looking at the ball.”

“How can you do that?” I asked in amazement.

“Practice. He made us tie a handkerchief over our eyes.”

“Don’t he teach y’all how to shoot?”

“Yeah, but he makes us really play hard at defense. Wants us to get turnovers If my coach had told me all that, I probably would’ve just blown it off. My trust in Jesse was such, though, that when he spoke I paid attention. Even though I had a hard time learning it, I taught myself to dribble without looking at the basketball. Most basketball players get off on shooting, but for some reason what Jesse had said about defense motivated me to play all-out defense when I was in a game. My 30 yard speed enabled me to intercept balls that no one thought I could ever get to, and, once I had the ball, no one could catch me as I headed for the basket. It was really no big deal, though, as basketball was kind of a post script sport, just something to do when football season was over. I got so good at basketball , though, I was a first string player as a freshman on my

high school team. When I’d bump into Jesse I’d fill him in on my progress. He’d always listen attentively and affably offer me little tips he’d picked up from his coach.

“Sound like you really getting’ good, Wade. I’d sure like to see you play.”

That was an impossibility. Niggers, other than the janitor, Brady, weren’t allowed in the white gym.

We were both getting big, Jesse far more so than I. He looked almost like one of those body-builders you see in magazines, and he was only about 15 or so then. I was tall like my mother, but skinny. But, even so, I’d grown taller than Maurice, and, although he still screamed at me, it’d been a while since he’d taken a belt to me. Something about having to look up to someone, even though he’s still a boy, makes a man like old Maurice think twice before he tries to push him around. It did come to a head one night, though.

He was drunk, and I guess my momma made the mistake of asking him for some money to buy food. I walked through the door, and there he was, drunk as a wino, slapping my poor momma around. I think I was in the 10th grade then, and, other than a school yard tussle or two, had never had a fight in my life. I don’t remember willing it, but suddenly there I was, standing between him and my momma. The booze gave him the courage he needed to take me on even though he had to look up at me.

“Oh,” he sneered, “now big basketball player gonna fight his daddy, huh?”

“Leave my momma alone.”

He stepped back, as if my declaration had convinced him, but I knew him and his sneaky ways. He turned away, then as quickly as a drunk could, turned back and threw a gnarled fist at my face. He was drunk, and I was sober. He was slow, even sober, and I was 30 yard quick. I saw the punch coming as if it were in slow motion and easily stepped out of the way. He missed me completely and fell face-down onto the floor. I felt like stomping his head through the petrified wood floorboards, but didn’t. I let him get up.

“Leave my momma alone,” I repeated.

He gave me the hateful glare I’d grown to know so well. “I drinkin’,” he slurred. “You and me, we finish fight tomorrow. Maurice not drunk then.”

I worried about it at school the next day, but I really didn’t have to. When he finally came home, drunk as usual, he just snarled at me like the mean, mangy old dog he was. He staggered to the kitchen table and yelled for my momma to bring him some food.

I met Jesse coming home from school a few days later and told him about it.

“I’m glad you didn’t hurt him, Wade.”

That’s the kind of person Jesse was. Anyway, we were just walking along talking about basketball when a police cruiser pulled up alongside of us. My two favorite cops, Mullet and Butt-Wipe were in it.

“What you doin’ walkin’ down the street with a nigger, Wade,” Mullet demanded.

I assumed my whipped-dog persona. “Nothing, Mr. Mullet.”

“I told you he was still a nigger-lover,” good old reliable Butt-Wipe chimed in.

“That right, Wade? You still a nigger-lover?”

“No, sir.

I saw Jesse less and less after that encounter. When I did see him again, I’d almost have to run him down in order to talk with him. He always seemed a little nervous, looking around to see if anyone was watching us talking. He’d always have some drawings with him. He’d reluctantly let me look at them, but he’d kind of ignore my compliments and say he had to go. It was strange. I just wanted to talk to him.

Anyway the years slipped by, and I was a senior in high school. I’d been a first string basketball player for four years. We won the state championship my junior and senior years. After we’d won our second championship, a coach from Southern offered me a full-ride basketball scholarship. I promptly accepted.

My mother cried when I told her. She held my face in her oh-so-rough red hands and kissed my forehead. Her once beautiful black hair now looked like straw with white streaks in it. Those deep blue eyes were now a lackluster gray, her brow a crossroads of wrinkles. The only good thing I could say was that she no longer had any bruise marks from old Maurice. I’d grown to six-three and he left her, and me, alone, Anyway, old Maurice soon became history. Shortly after I got my scholarship to Southern, damned if he didn’t get himself drowned on the shrimp boat he was working on. They were laying down a net, and he fell overboard as he stretched to help spread it out. He came up under the net, and it just dragged him down. There was some talk that they could’ve saved him if they’d reversed the engines to take the pressure off the net and make it less taunt. The captain panicked, though, and gunned the engines hoping to pull the net off.

The boat owner was, if not a decent man, then a practical one, and, after hearing that a

lawyer had approached my momma about possibly suing him, offered to cut our rent in half and give my momma $500 in cash. He even lined her up with a few more houses to clean. She took the settlement.

I can’t say I cried for old Maurice. I can say that our little world was a far, far better place without his sorry ass in it. I couldn’t wait to tell Jesse all the good news. Of course, knowing him, he’d never say that someone getting killed was good news. He was too much of a gentleman. I had no such compunctions.

I looked and looked for Jesse, but couldn’t ever seem to bump into him It was puzzling.

Then one day Mullet and Butt-Wipe solved the puzzle for me. I was walking home from school, showing off the jacket the school had awarded me for playing basketball for four years when my two favorite cops rolled up.

“That nigger bothering’ you any more, Wade?” Mullet demanded.

“What nigger?”

“The big one what always follows you ’round.”

“He never bothered me.”

“Well, it looked like it to us, so we tuned ’im up a little and told ’im to stay away from you.”

“Tuned him up? What‘s that mean?”

“Damn, Wade, You dumber than he is. We kicked his black ass.”

“Y’all shouldn‘t have done that.”

“I told you he was a nigger-lover.” Good old Butt-Wipe again.

“Maybe you right, Cobb. Maybe we shoulda tuned up the nigger-lover ’stead of the nigger.”

Mullet roared away again, making me jump back as he once again as he showered me with crushed oyster shells. So that’s why I rarely saw Jesse anymore. Mullet and ButtWipe had beaten him up because they didn’t think it was right for us to be seen talking to one another.

It was late, and I reckoned Jesse would be home. I’d never been to his house, but I knew he lived on my street, Keller Avenue, and it had to be close if he’d heard me screaming when old Maurice beat me up that night five years before. So, I decided to walk down to the nigger section to see if I could talk to him. I stopped at the first house across the tracks. An old lady was sweeping her front porch.

“Jesse live here?” I asked.

“Jesse a good boy,” she answered, looking at me suspiciously. “He ain’t done nothing.”

“He’s my friend. I just want to talk to him.”

“He live there,” She pointed to a house across the street.

I walked to the house she’d designated and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again. I heard some voices, then I saw someone peeking though a window. Finally someone came to the door. It was Jesse. It was months since I’d seen him, and he seemed to have grown taller and even more muscular. He didn’t invite me in, nor did he even open the screen door to look at me. He just gazed at me through the screen with eyes much like those of the lady across the street. Eyes devoid of humor. Eyes filled with suspicion. Cautious eyes. Eyes stripped of hope, as if someone had beaten it out of them.

“Hey, Jesse, how you?”

“I okay.”

“Did you hear my step-daddy got drowned?”

“Yeah, I sorry to hear that.”

“Did you hear we won the state championship again?”

“I hear that, too.”

I smiled, hoping I might coax a grin or two out of him. “Did you hear a coach from Southern came up to me after the championship game the other night and gave me a basketball scholarship? He told me I was the best defensive player he’d ever seen at the high school level. And I played defense just like you told me. I held their best player to only two points. He kept complaining to the referees I was fouling him. But they were clean steals. He got so mad he wanted to fight me after the game.”

For a minute I though that might’ve done the trick. He smiled, if only a little. I knew he was proud of me, that he was happy for me. But the smile quickly disappeared. “I gots to go. My momma got chores for me to do,” he said and turned to retreat back into his house. He stopped, though, and looked back. “Best of luck to you, Mr. Wade,” he said.

Then he was gone.

Mr. Wade? Mr. Wade? Why was he calling me mister? It ought to be the other way around. He was my superior in every area I could think of. He was bigger, stronger, more intelligent, and damned sure better looking than I was, not to mention he could draw and paint better than anyone in the whole sorry-ass state. He lived in a better house than I

did and even had his own softball glove. Finally, finally I got it. He was a lowly black, and I was white, and even though I came from the lowest kind of white trash, I was still his superior and he had to call me mister. He couldn’t even be my friend any more.

That’s not right, I told myself. That’s just plain unfair. And that was my epiphany.

The Actuaries

By Joseph McKinley

So much air up here, yet I can hardly breathe at all.

Not that I can remember to, not with the snow rising up toward me, not with the crystalline sun above it all. I lean forward, shift my weight, and I’m a bullet, leaving all laggards behind. I shout into the oxygen mask, little microphone therein, “Hurry up, y’all.

Gravity’s going to get tired of waiting, let you float off into space.”

I don’t really sound like this—my mother was an accountant, and my father, an engineer, and inventor. We were only allowed to use slang on special occasions, and our unabridged dictionary nearly fell apart from overuse—Duct tape held it together. The family Bible gathered dust. Still, we fall into rolls—fall into what others expect of us.

Falling . . . *** “Meredith, damn it,” Jack’s shaking, still high from adrenaline. “Can you . . .” and he pulls off my helmet, casts it aside. It’s split down the middle. I try to reach out, grab it with my arm. No luck. Just a stabbing pain.

“Hey, babe, what’s wrong?” I look up at Jack. Why do I sound so distant from myself, as though hearing another person speak? Someone lands nearby. I can hear the gentle thud and the ruffling of the chute. It’s perfect, graceful.

Footsteps.

It’s Bob—with the little feet. (Bob hates when I point that out.) He kneels over me and peels off his gloves. Bob’s a medic, of sorts. I feel him gently slide his hands behind my neck and run his stratosphere-cold fingers over my skull. He must be checking for cracks.

“Can you hear me, Meredith?” he nearly screams at me, “Do you . . .”

“Stop yelling!” Oh! My voice is back. I realize what happened. “I didn’t land on my ears!” The boys smile. Is it that bad—so bad they’re relieved I can still be a bitch?

Something sharp goes in my big toe.

“Ow! Torture me some more, why don’t you? Because I’m otherwise just fine!”

“So you felt that?” Bob sounds shocked, but I can’t see his expression.

“Yes, I felt that! What the hell was it? A knitting needle?”

“It’s for giving horses spinal taps, actually. We only used it once,” Jack’s cradling my head, massaging my skull as he says it. More smiles. The boys are pleased with themselves.

I look up. The drone whirs into view and hovers, washing me with air. Bob calls out to it, “Drone, land!” And it does. It’s electric motors go silent almost immediately thereafter.

I feel the boys picking me up, my body—flaccid, sore. They’re not letting my feet touch the ground, and I wonder how much of me is broken. All of it? I look over at the high altitude drone and the drop-release seats, all of it blacked out with radar-absorbing paint.

I imagine the harness pressed tight against my body—against Every. Broken. Bone.

“I don’t know about this. I don’t . . .”

“Well, you can walk, Merrie. It’s only fifty miles.”

I narrow my eyes to slits—they’re the only thing I can still move. *** The crab suit works pretty well most of the time. All you do is slide it on (or have someone slide it onto you) and wait for it to gently press your bones back into their correct positons—it’ll keep them that way until they heal—and it’s weight-bearing with neuro-responsive gel motors, so you can walk (awkwardly)while wearing it and use your broken hands as pincers. It can’t handle compound fractures, however, and that’s where Bob comes into play.

“This is going to . . .”

“Ow! My arm! What’d I ever do to you, jackass?”

“You want me to make a list?” Bob smiles as he pops the bone in, and blasts the gaping wound with a jet of antiseptic that should (I hope) simultaneously clean and debride the flesh. “I could type it if you like. What about an engraved plaque?”

“I think I’ll pass.” I feel the pain dull to a mere throb. “Seriously, how much longer with the torture?”

“Just a few hours. Nothing to it.”

“Hours?” I can feel my lip quiver, but just for a second.

“Pussying out on me?” and Bob’s smile drops—I realize he’s been wincing along with me, despite his efforts to hide it. He grows serious: “I wish I could give you something for the pain, but given how your father engineered you. Well, you know.”

I look directly into the surgeon’s light overhead, and I can almost see the skeletal face and burning eyes—a man pared down to the essentials, without softness, without waste.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Maybe I could find some tranquilizers, send out the drone, but that would be . . .”

“Drug me? You think I’d trust you unsupervised? With these glorious tits?”I manage a smirk. Bob returns it. “Now get on with it.” I try to grip the side of the steel table with my mangled hands and pull my tongue back so I don’t bite it off. Bob nods.

I wait. I feel something cold against my leg—a mallet—it’s right below the fracture in my femur. This is the fastest way to get it back in—I know that. I hear the whoosh of air as it swings back.

I smile up to the dead man in the light—I’m not going to make any noise—nothing more than a hiss—not going to distract the almost-doctor with the hammer. I inhale. Everyone is smiling now—me, Bob, even the old man in the light.

Funny how that works. *** I learned to play without chips—not gambling, although I did that as well, and we did use cigarettes instead of cash, but that’s another matter—meaning I was never insured. I was one of about three percent by then. Everyone else was tagged, usually at birth, by one of the big three—Putin Bank, Umbrella Risk Management, or Shanghai Commercial and Civil —although I think there were a fewer smaller groups before the great consolidation. At first, they were just trackers and health monitors—passive—and designed, so we were told, to make children un-kidnappable. I understood that—at least before organ regeneration was perfected, kids and their pristine little organs were worth their weight in platinum. There was a certain logic to implanting trackers in people’s skulls—no visible scars and difficult to remove. But as with everything else, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.

And the features kept improving. And then they stopped being passive.

If you’re going to insure someone—health, life, driving, liability, even against natural disasters—you have a stake in their behavior. They smoke—you pay for lung treatments when they get cancer. They drink, drive, and plow into a bridge pylon—you pay for hospitalization when they end up in a coma for a week. They vacation in a hurricane zone —you pay for a rescue when the big one hits. They eat too much and don’t exercise enough—you pay for gastric bypass surgery when they can’t stop eating, knee surgery when they’ve pulverized their joints, and antidepressants (which, ironically, make them

even fatter)when they can no longer see their own genitals and fall into a funk. So you’ve got a vested interest in everything they do. You can’t deny them insurance—that’s illegal —so all you can do is offer them discounts, which you do in exchange for them behaving the right way. But you can’t trust children to follow the rules—and we’re all children now —so what’s the solution? How do you protect people from themselves? *** I don’t remember how I got up the tree. I climbed, of course, but the memory of that is gone. So I’m already up there when the memory starts—already staring up at the branches and the sunlight breaking through them, hearing the kids below me cry.

No one would follow me. I didn’t understand the fear that flashed across their eyes so often then—why they’d start shrieking if they were more than five feet off the ground. I didn’t know the chips triggered that—I didn’t understand that the networked implants triggered emotional responses in accordance to formulae developed by the actuaries and applied by the cloud. Given enough time, the chip ceases to matter—the fear becomes embedded in you. Then you’ll never be free, never be rid of the crippling caution.

They couldn’t understand it—why I kept going up—and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t. There weren’t many kids outdoors anyway. Most of the kids were home, on treadmills, playing dementia-delaying games and power walking toward a healthy old age. (The chips convinced them that was fun, I suppose.) Then there was the wind, and my weight shifted ever so slightly.

The branch felt strong enough, but it wasn’t. I thought I had my foot firmly planted on another branch, but I didn’t. I went down headfirst, down five storeys. I tucked in my head in, flailed my arms—pure instinct—and.

Bounce!

A branch must have caught me, but it was soft. Then it caught me again. I’m on my feet, unharmed but rattled.

Dad? He dusted me off, calmly picked up the branch that had broken. He inspectedit, held it up to me, and smacked me with it, hard enough to bruise my ego and knock me back a bit: I’m stunned. “Don’t be an idiot, Merrie,” he clicked his tongue. “I won’t be around to save you forever.”And he turned, slowly walked back to the bench, and picked up his reader from the ground—he must have dropped it and run.

I measured the distance, years later, curious as to how far he had traveled—one hundred

feet. He must have made it in under two seconds. *** “Meredith, you alive?”

My ears are ringing. I suppose that’s from the pain. I can smell the antiseptic and the faint iron aroma of blood. The crab suit is tight against my body. Something’s wrong though.

“Bob, my leg? What’d you do to it? Cut it off?”

“Fried it with greens, dearie. Pity you missed it—not bad, if a little fatty.”

I snort.

“Seriously? What?”

A switch flips, and he’s all concern. “I had to screw it together. It was,” he sighs, “well, I’ve seen less metal in modern cars. If it was anyone other than you . . .” and your amazing GMO body—he doesn’t need to say it.

“Anything else?”

He grabs a tablet, reads off the checklist: “Spine—good. Brain—okay, if a little underused,” ha, ha—I guess I deserved that. “Hands—only broken in seven places, but no nerve damage. One punctured lung—not quite certain how you managed that, but . . .”

“Prognosis?” I cough a little and feel the pain. Exactly how many ribs did I crack? Er . . . How many didn’t I crack?

“You might not want to attend any orgies for a few weeks.”

I raise my arms—the suit seems to be working, everything is staying in place, and I can move well enough, if slowly—and inspect the smooth black polymer.

“Aw! I’ve already got the outfit.”

“Hey, we got your helmet camera,” I can hear the near-glee in Bob’s voice, “want to see the footage?”

I blink, realize how sore my eyes are, how heavy they feel in the surgeon’s light. Still . . .

“Why not? I paid enough for it.” Then it occurs to me. “Has Jack?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Keep it that way. He’s . . .”

“A bumbling nervous wreck who’s been pacing outside the door for the last three hours,

looking like he’s the one whose harness failed?”

Oh hell.

“Help me up,” I reach out to Bob. He reaches for me.“And no grabass!” And I’m standing up—dizzy, but standing. I rub my temples with my claw-hands. “Okay, let’s do this.”

“You’re sure? I could just tell him you’ve . . .”

“No, no,” sigh “you know how he gets.” The truth—I want to see him too. Bob gives me a knowing look, and I lean against the table, bracing myself. I nod toward the door.

“Open it.” *** The footage—it was beautiful, up until the last seven seconds or so when snap! the harness breaks, and I tumble. My last words—what I thought would be them—after aw shit!—I apologized to Jack, even managed to get out that I loved him. Odd I had the presence of mind. Odd I was so quick to accept it. But that’s me, apparently. I’ve never felt immortal—indifferent, frequently; pissed off, perpetually—but never immortal. I’m all the more glad Jack didn’t see it.

One of the smaller drones helps me around the lab, picking up one thing or another, pouring this and mixing that. It doesn’t drop much, and what it does usually isn’t too toxic, but I’m not entirely comfortable having it handle anything explosive, so Jack the Lost Puppy becomes Jack the Dogsbody for a week, until my hands have completely healed (GMO wonder girl, remember). I try to absorb the pain—play through it. I don’t have much choice. Anything weaker than carfentanil has no effect on me. So I stay busy.

That’s all I’ve got. *** “Meredith, Meredith,” I hear Jack calling through the door, quietly. I look up from the floor at the steel door. I’ve locked it. I don’t remember why.

Tap! Tap! “Meredith, Meredith,” the words come out quick—he sounds nervous.

Yeah, Jack. But my words don’t come out at all.

“Yeah . . . Jack,” cough, rattle, “I’m stuck, babe.”

My leg is throbbing, and I can smell the festering of the wound.

“What?”

“Get Bob, okay. He’ll . . .”

“We’ve got to take you to the . . .”

“No! Shut up, Jack! Get Bob. Quit . . .” Wow! I’m dizzy. “Quit lollygagging! GET! BOB! IMMEDIATELY!” And the footsteps depart.

My mind’s racing with fever. I shouldn’t have let the infection get this far. Drain the wound and . . . and if the meropenem isn’t working . . .

I stand up, drag myself toward the door. I make it to the latch, slowly.

I turn the wheel with all of my strength. *** Light! and I hear the beeping of machines. Where’s my crab suit? Then I feel it—old tech.

I’m bound and rigid, losing muscle by the minute. The crab suits—Dad’s patent—never caught on. It wasn’t that they didn’t work well enough. It was that they didn’t make enough work. Replacing two technicians (and one rehab specialist) with a suit seems a great idea for the patient. For the techs, it’s a different matter entirely. So this means I’m . . .

“Jack, you little son of a whore!”

I hear running, and the nurse leans over me. This one’s human/non-robotic. More makework, I suppose. Anyway . . .

“What is it, ma’am? Something amiss?”

“I . . . I . . . Have you seen Jack?”

“I’m afraid I don’t . . .”

“Thin guy, pale as a sheet, shifty eyes. Bad breath—probably the one who brought me in —kind of a weasel.”

“Well, no, I don’t . . . So I take it you’re not overly fond of this man?”

“We’re married,” That’s about true, I guess, “somewhat.”

“Oh!” she nods, “Okay.”

And then it dawns on me.

“Who’s paying for this? I mean, I don’t have . . .”

She taps a screen. “SCC, of course.” Nobody forgets these things, nobody!

More footsteps. I recognize the sound of the walk.

“Jack!”

He’s leaning over me, looking hangdog sad.

“I thought,” I notice the nurse is preparing an injection of something—rat poison? I don’t like the looks of it, so I breathe, slowly. Calmly: “I thought I told you to get Bob.” Inhale. “I thought,” forced smile, “I was abundantly clear on that point.”

“He was gone.”

“Excuse me?” My face is about to crack from all this smiling. “Where. Did. He. Go?” “Well, he was out, er, you know, up!” He looks toward the sky. (The stealth drone is more than a little bit illegal, and unlicensed HALO jumps, more so.)

“I see,” I’m trying to see this through Jack’s eyes, trying to think of what I would have done were I him. “Okay,” breathe, “What about the . . .” I realize the nurse is still there. I look at her. “Would you kindly give us a minute?”

“Of course,” she leans close to Jack—sniff—then back to me, “His breath isn’t that bad.”

She’s out the door.

“What? My breath?” Jack’s confused.

“Inside joke. Forget it.” Then I start to whisper. “What about the insurance?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Come closer, you pain in the ass!”

He does.

“The insurance. What about the insurance? How did you?”

“Well, you were . . .” sigh “I didn’t . . .”

“Spit it out, Jack!”

“I had you chipped. It was the only . . .”

“Babe,” I fight the urge to scream in his ear. I win, barely. “You! Idiot!” *** I hobble out the hospital doors, and I see the prisms in the air at once. Snow? But the air is dry and warm. No one else seems to notice.

“Jack. Jack, are you seeing this?”

He’s behind me—looking guilty. He pulls up closer.

“What, Meredith?” He looks around in all directions. “What?”

“The air. There’s something fine in the air. Crystals. They’re catching the light.”

He looks around again.

“I don’t . . .” he finally sees one. “They’re everywhere. They’re, uh, little diamonds.” And he looks around again, this time at the people. “Do you think everybody sees them?”

I can feel the fear rising up—fear I never had before. The chip is burrowing its way— making me lose curiosity, making me want only to be safe.

“I think we need to get home.” *** They’re sharp—you notice that under the microscope—and almost perfectly adamantine.

Jack was right—little diamonds, little cut diamonds, each an identical, perfectly faceted cylinder with a tiny black inclusion, always at exactly the same spot. Bob saws open my cast, and I see them fly everywhere. They’re embedded in the plaster. A few minutes outside and millions of them worked their way into it.

Bob starts coughing. He’s never sick.

“Bob?” Cough, cough, cough—him, not me.

“Bob?” “Yeah?” Hack! He spits up blood, gasps for air.

“How long have you had that? The cough?”

“I don’t know. I guess since I went for the last jump. When was that—a week ago. Weird weather recently. Haven’t been out since.”

“Weird?” I look up from the cast.

“Yeah, the clouds. They’re everywhere. All altitudes. And dry.” Cough! More blood. “I can’t describe it exactly. It seems as though they follow you—follow anything . . .” Hack! Hack!

“They follow anything that moves?”

“Exactly.”

“And one other thing—they swirl. They abrade things, pretty much blast everything clean.”

Bob’s weak, covered in sweat. I realize what’s wrong with him—pneumoconiosis. He must have figured it out long ago.

“You’re going to have to get some new lungs, buddy. You know that, right?”

“Everywhere is fresh out. Seems everybody wants a pair,” he smiles, resigned, “seems as though they’ve gotten trendy—fashion’s strange stuff, isn’t it?”

Now, I understand the look. Bob’s waiting to die. There’s nothing I can do to help. *** They—the diamondons—are starting to stick to things, and it isn’t entirely random. They cyclone around the power lines, eat the insulation, and draw away all the current. They eat elemental carbon too, but slowly. That’s what Bob saw topside—there’s no reason for him to not go up anymore. There’s no reason for him to fear anything at all.

They’re not in here yet, in the lab, except for the few million that fell out of my cast—I managed to coax those into a bottle with a little oscillator inside. I drop the bottle into a Faraday cage, and they settle down. So I know that much—they’re taking orders from somewhere, and they communicate conventionally—nothing quantum, nothing some properly grounded copper wire can’t stop. That’s why they don’t see us—underground and grounded. The whole place is a cage, with one entrance, one elevator to the surface.

And that’s why I’m okay as well, why I’m not afraid down here. My chip is connected to nothing—nothing except me. *** Jack’s the one who watches Bob die. He’s better at this anyway—showing sympathy, tending to lost causes. But I talk to Bob a few hours before.

“They’re building, Jane,” cough, cough, “but it keeps falling down.”

“Building? Building what?”

“Solaris. I think it’s Solaris.”

“He’s out of it, Jane,” and Jack thinks he’s hearing the ramblings of fevered mind—he isn’t, “Leave him . . .”

“Jack, babe, grab a coffee for me, will you?”

“Uh, okay.”

And he does. I plop down beside Bob, gracelessly—the leg is still a little weak.

“How much damage have they done? Is everything gone?”

“That’s the thing,” cough, cough, hack, “Not much. Half a city, maybe less. These things—I think they’re pretty stupid.” Bob grabs my arm, wraps it in a death grip. “We could stop them, Jane. One big blast! One pulse! And they’d be gone. If only everyone wasn’t so damned . . .”

“Cautious?”

“Chicken shit! But they just, they just . . .”

“Sit inside, pissing themselves, afraid of their own shadows.”

“Yeah!” cough—and he spits up a little more blood.

And Jack’s back with the coffee. Bob lets go of my arm. We sit in silence. I can’t think of anything to say. *** We’re on fuel cells. After them, there’s diesel. We’re hopeless, but we’re not. I see the answer. I could build the answer. Hell, any moderately bright infrastructure-destroying nihilist could build the answer. But they’ve been chipped too, and even the terrorists are as easily terrified as the rest of us (Does all this fear count as a win for them? A loss? Did they beat the spread? Anyway . . .) One pulse! But I can’t build the bomb, not with that I’ve got down here. So I’m waiting, trying to think of something to do as the diamondons multiply above us, wearing all down to bare earth. *** The other kids were terrified of Dad. I didn’t understand why at the time. To them, he must have been awful, wild, a dangerous animal, at least compared to their too-timid-tomake-eye-contact-with-the-wife-and-tell-her-to-hike-her-skirt-twice-a-day-as-the-goodLord-intendedsorry excuses for fathers. To me, he was a god—he was what I wanted to become. So they scattered when he blew past them, when he caught me in his arms.

I wasn’t scared—not of Dad, although I was little rattled by the fall. I was hurt, so I wandered over to him, tears in my eyes, tail between my legs.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” boo hoo, boo hoo, “I didn’t mean to . . .” sniffle.

Dad’s eyes remained on his reader. I was invisible. I tried again.

“I really didn’t mean to . . .” sniffle, sniffle, boo hoo. He looked up, slowly.

“Merrie,” his eyes narrowed to slits (that’s where I learned that expression—the perfect look to convey annoyance in a fraction of a second) but his voice was even, “dry up. No one respects a weakling.” I did, wiping the tears on my sleeve. “Now, start again.”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I know you’re angry . . .”

“Angry?” he let the word hang. “You think I’m angry?” He was impassive.

“I won’t, I won’t do it again.”

“Do what exactly? Land on your head?”

“Climb.”

“You think I don’t want you to climb?” I knew this game—Dad didn’t like to make things too easy. He sighed, deliberately. “So why do we come here?”

He was getting at something—I just didn’t know what, so I threw a hail Mary: “Lunch?”

“Yes, lunch,” he chuckled for a moment, catching himself after a beat,“An adequate answer for the time being.” He stood up, slid the reader into his pocket, and started toward the car. I didn’t move, didn’t follow. He glanced back at me, curious.

“Come along, Meredith. You can’t let yourself be paralyzed by every little thing—you’ll become as pathetic as the rest of them. Then where will we be?”

Yeah, then where will we be?

About the Authors Arjun Dahal is undergrad student of Physics at Tri-Chandra Campus, Tribhuwan University, Nepal. His interest lies in Physics, Mathematics, Music, Literature, and Philosophy. His writings have appeared/forthcoming in Blue Marble Review and Burningword Literary Journal, Yellow Chair Review, and Ann Arbor Review. His published Nepali Poems can be found via arjundahal.blogspot.com

D. Angelone doesn't know where he is right now, and he wants to go home.

Don Thompson was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, and has lived in the southern San Joaquin Valley for most of his life. Thompson has been publishing poetry since the early sixties, including a dozen books and chapbooks. For more information and links to his publications, visit his website San Joaquin Ink (don-e-thompson.com).

Erica Olson is a Montana girl, dog lover, and Beethoven disciple. She enjoys philosophizing and dreaming nostalgically about her university days at Penn, Oxford, and St Andrews.

Geraldine McCarthy lives in West Cork in the Republic of Ireland. She has been writing creatively for over a year now. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Fable Online [July 2016] and The Incubator Journal [December 2016]; her short stories have appeared in Seven Deadly Sins: a YA Anthology (Gluttony) [November 2016] and The Scarlet Leaf Review [January 2017].

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Joseph McKinley is a researcher living in Kentucky. He taught English in the People's Republic of China for more than three years.

Joslyn Chase is a classical pianist, teacher, public speaker, and storyteller. She has ridden camels through the Nubian desert, fended off greedy monkeys on the Rock of Gibraltar, punted on the River Cam, and hiked the Bavarian Alps, but she still believes that sometimes the best adventure is in getting the words on the page

Nick Gallup is a native Mississippian, Army veteran, and retired DoD worker. Graduate of Brett Favre University (Southern Mississippi). Worked for the Dod in Ohio, Virginia, D.C., and Philadelphia. Nick is a has-been, would-be novelist and now writes to combat senility and amuse himself. He lives in Florida and is proud to say he is the only person in his town who voted for Hillary.

Nick Muzekari lives in Hatfield, Pennsylvania with his wife and five children. He enjoys exploring darkness, beauty, and mystery through story. His fiction has been published in Typehouse and on Story Warren. He is also the author of, “A Gift for Matthew,� a picture book about the ancient art of Christian iconography, published by Ancient Faith Publishing.

Thank you for reading. Till next time!