Issue 2: Old Things

the

Golden Key

summer 2013

issue 2 old things Featuring work by Jane Hertenstein, Dustin Parsons, M.V. Montgomery, Elson Meehan, Rose Swartz, Adalena Kavanagh, Michael Levan, Katy Gunn, Sandi Leibowitz, L. Chapman.

Art by Libby Burns.

“So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key.”

“Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest.”

Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm himself a little first. So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key. Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. “If only the key fits!” he thought. “Certainly there are valuable things in the chest.” He looked, but there was no keyhole.

Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key, and fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.

—Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “The Golden Key”

Table of Contents 07 EDITORS’ LETTER

Susan Anspach, Carlea Holl-Jensen, & LiAnn Yim

Fiction 08 TUPPERWARE FOREVER Jane Hertenstein

10 THE SWAN Elson Meehan

16 DUMBWAITER Adalena Kavanagh

24 ROSAMOND AND THURRY Katy Gunn

30 UNRESOLVED MYSTERY ITEMS L. Chapman

Poetry 32 KINDA BIG WITH THE GHOSTS BACK HOME Dustin Parsons

34 THREE GOTHIC POEMS M.V. Montgomery

36 INVERSION Rose Swartz

38 A-FRAME Rose Swartz

40 MY YOUNGER SON, M., DRESSED FOR TRICK-OR-TREATING Michael Levan

42 LIZZIE SIDDAL’S BLESSING Sandi Leibowitz

44 CONTRIBUTORS

Read more about this issue’s contributors ISSUE ART by Libby Burns

Issue 2

2013

Editors’ Note

O

n Jan. 1, we put out a call for submissions of old things. Our vision was for an issue steeped in days gone by, their antiquities, and preservations. Surely the Grimm Brothers’ iron chest could contain any number of old things: The fairy tale’s instance of discovery presupposes a thing having first been lost; and in this issue, we explore that loss in relation to time.

In one sense, old things are familiar to us, since with any old thing we share some history, some link, albeit one that may be forgotten or not explicitly known. There’s something familiar about the buried crescendo of sound that swells from within Adalena Kavanagh’s short story “Dumbwaiter,” for instance; something about the smudged handwriting in Rose Swartz’s poem “A-frame” we recognize as having been read before.

Yet old things, too, are surprising, for the very fact that they’re from a time different from ours, one that can cast a strange light on the present. Such is the case in “Kinda Big with the Ghosts Back Home,” the poem

by Dustin Parsons whose populations of townspeople—some living, some dead—intersect and lap at one another in ways that turn strange the look of a pebble, or the cast of the whole sky at sunset.

This is an issue of old buildings and abandoned lots. Tupperware babies spilling everywhere, multiplying.

Ghosts. Phantoms from the past that can’t be shaken or dodged. Burials, and things that just won’t stay buried. This is an issue of myths. In this issue we delve into the territories of the old, yes, but also the space between us and those territories—between the then and now, the there and here, the lost and found.

We have resident illustrator Libby Burns to thank for this issue’s art. Please note that Issue 2: Old Things features two new downloadable formats, ePUB and MOBI, in addition to its free PDF and web formats.

Many thanks to each of our contributors.

— Susan Anspach, Carlea Holl-Jensen, and LiAnn Yim June 2013

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Jane Hertenstein

Tupperware Forever When I was five or six my mother threw a Tupperware Party. A confetti of plastic bowls and lettuce crispers filled a couple of card tables. My father helped her unpack the boxes and arrange the array of storage containers with air-tight lids. There were punch-red pitchers and butter keepers. There were canister sets with spiral imprints. Juicers, measuring cups, cake storers, picnic sets, strainers, salt ’n’ pepper shakers, and oversized salad tongs. There were tall cylindrical containers for spaghetti and oblong ones for storing cereal. Funnels, cookie cutters, and Tupperware rolling pins along with a pastry sheet displaying concentric circles to help measure pie crust. Ice-Tups were special molds for making freezer pops.

My mother worked two days straight preparing fancy hors d’oeuvres and appealing appetizers. Saltine crackers with cream cheese peppered with pimentos and goose liver pate on little rye toasts and whipped deviled eggs to highlight the Tupperware deviled egg carrier.

Mom made a special trip to Esther Price candy shop for some of their prize bridge mix.

Come the night of the party and the living room was full of chattering women. My father, I remember, retired to the bedroom to read the newspaper. I was supposed to be in bed, but peeked through the crack in the door. My mother called the room to order and proceeded to give a sales pitch. I could tell she was nervous—especially when she tried to demonstrate the patented burp seal. Her sweaty fingers had a hard time grasping the tab. There was no whoosh.

After everyone left I crept out of my room, staying in the shadows, hoping to scavenge some leftover bridge mix. I especially loved the large chocolate-covered nuts, the ones Dad referred to as “nigger toes.” I spied Mom wearily sitting in a chair hidden behind a stack of bowls in Easter egg colors, her head in her hands.

Many of the display pieces ended up in our pantry. Growing up we always made orange juice in the ruby-red pitcher and the storage containers, used over and over, eventually changed color into a milky opaque. Mom kept a number of Tupperware bottoms and lids that never seemed to match. When my parents retired and moved, there were four or five boxes alone labeled Tupperware. And, every move after that we tried to lose Tupperware, but they seemed to have Tupperware babies. Finally, boxing up the stuff left in the cupboards when Mom moved to a nursing facility after Dad died, there was still so much. I remember standing alone in the echoey kitchen, the refrigerator humming away, turning over in my hands one of a dozen cereal keepers. I had no idea what I was going to do with all of them.

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Elson Meehan

The Swan Unknowable and ugly was their mother in her cups. Red clay stained her lingerie. She sang.

And in the vacant lot behind their house, it was always winter. The winter lot belonged to no one; it had belonged to the Dysons, but they were a ruin. The lot was deadening and harsh like a snowless January or the waiting room at the public clinic. The breath of it blew over their fingers when they gripped the chain-link at eight and nine and fifteen years old, a pair of twins, one boy and one girl, who sought the source of a cold that knew no season. Their finger-flesh fused to the fence before they could pull their hands away. Raw, then, their frost-blue burning fingertips, while beyond the chain-link the chaff and grasses stirred, waiting, and beyond the lot the forestry’s young pines confined them.

It was out of the forestry that the swan came rampaging late one evening in the April of their seventeenth year. Della and Alan were standing out back shooting pellets into the cans of Milwaukee’s Best that their mother’s first cousin, Tony Reaber, had abandoned on the stoop and kitchen counters, and atop the cinder block well house in the yard. Alan held the rifle steady, aimed, and missed; he was shortsighted, and it was starting to get dark. He cursed because he felt he ought to, but his dispirited, creaking voice belied his irritation. He blamed a headwind that rattled the cans and blew one onto the hard clay of their grassless yard. Della agreed that the wind was really something. It carried the scent of rotten fruit, and rain. She looked to the sky for signs of incipient rotation, but the pines stood so tall that it was impossible to see into the distance. A gust blew her long, flat hair into her sticky lipgloss. Flustered, she pawed madly at her face.

“Do you want to go in?” said Alan. There was one streetlight where their driveway met a storage shed that stood somewhat askew. It came on. Its light was orange.

“Do you want to?” she said.

The wind bent the pines’ crowns. They heaved and, without any warning, the swan hurtled over them and pulled the air along with it, a derecho on white wings closing in. It flapped violently. It honked nonsensically. Its huge pale wings beat upon the purple gloom. It attached itself to Della and took her bare shoulders under wing. Alan raised the rifle, but saw only swiftly shifting white clouds moving over his sister’s suntan, and something dark, like blood, where its lacquer-black feet broke and bruised her skin. He said, “Do you want me to try to shoot it?”

“Nah,” she said.

Alan raised the rifle anyway, but doubted both his pellets and his aim. Vaguely, he heard Tony Reaber’s matte black moped roll up the gravel drive. The rifle was removed from his damp hands. Tony swung it like a driver and knocked the swan off Alan’s twin. The streetlight by the shed cast an orange nimbus around Tony’s shaved head. Kind of like a halo. But that didn’t make any sense, thought Alan. Tony was a fascist. He wore his jeans tucked into his combat

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boots. He was breaking the swan’s neck. The swan was inert, and Della was on her knees. Her tank-top was torn.

She was refusing to get up. There weren’t any bruises on her, and there wasn’t any blood. Only depressions in her skin where the swan had gripped her, and the stain of red river mud on her legs.

Tony put the swan in a black Hefty bag and strapped it to his moped’s rear rack with a bungee cord. He didn’t stay to help Della back inside. It wasn’t necessary. But before he left, he said, “You better get her in the shower before something gets infected. Get your mom to take her to the clinic, too.”

— Three weeks later, Tony Reaber gave the swan back to their mother. It was a gift from Gary’s Taxidermy and Deer Processing after all the trouble. When their mother asked, “What trouble?” like she didn’t know, Tony shook his head and shrugged as if he hadn’t explained to Gary precisely what kind of trouble in details both harrowing and profane. So their mother said to Tony, “I’ll keep that swan, but I think you better leave,” but she didn’t mean it. She never meant it. Between his thumb and forefinger there rested a peach-scented blunt. He held it out to her, and she took it.

In general, their mother didn’t like Tony, but relation made her feelings somewhat irrelevant, and he grew marijuana in his closet besides. On weekend nights when he’d stayed too late drinking at the Starlite Exchange, he’d walk over afterwards and stay until four or five in the morning and smoke her out on the moldy lawn chairs that faced into the pines. He walked because he couldn’t drive, and he couldn’t drive because he’d lost his license, and he came over for late nights because he couldn’t stand to be alone in his brown moss-stained trailer in the woods when the coyotes were in rut. The noises, he said, were unbearable. Their mother pointed out that Tony also made a lot of noise. He told everyone about the swan, for example, and worse, the circumstances under which his license had been lost. How he’d been driving fifty—so not so fast—down Chapel Road, through a school zone in the afternoon, after he’d gotten kicked out of the Blue Horn Lounge. He was high as fuck. And a black cop pulled him over. He said if it had been a white cop, he would have been fine, but, “It was like he wanted me to apologize for slavery.” His words.

It was on account of his being unable to drive, that he had enlisted the aid of his mother, Mamie Reaber, in the delivery of the swan to his cousin’s house. Mamie had a face like a Kewpie doll and had driven up from Hamlet.

Their mother made screwdrivers while Tony removed the swan from the back of his mother’s Chevrolet Blazer.

The blunt smoked in an ashtray on the front porch.

The swan, when Tony brought it in, was mounted to a log and silent. Its feathers were as white as teeth and everyone agreed that if they kept it near the wood stove, it would become dingy, so their mother put it next to the piano on the opposite side of the room. Della said, “It looks like an idiot. That lichen at the base looks like some cheap shit from Hobby Lobby.”

Their mother said, “I like it. It looks good in here. Inevitable. Like it belongs. Like god or something.”

Mamie said, “Don’t let Jesus hear you say that. God is listening.”

“Just look at it,” said their mother. “Look at it, Della. It’s like it was always here. I couldn’t have picked out something better. God, it looks like it’s from a French flea market. I love it. I really do.”

Tony said, “You’re welcome,” and they all stood back and stared at it. The swan’s shape against the log wall.

The swan beside the piano. “Kind of makes the place seem civilized,” said their mother. “Old world.”

Della rolled her eyes.

“I thought Tony was taking it to the dump,” said Alan.

“I wish he had,” said Della. “It looks trashy.”

“The Latin name,” said Alan. “Is Cygnus buccinator. I looked it up. It isn’t local. They have them out West.”

“Poetry,” said their mother. “Cygnus buccinator,” she sang. “I’ve always wanted something like this for in here.”

“Dad wouldn’t have had to look it up,” said Della. “He would have known as soon as it came over the trees. He wouldn’t have had to kill it either.”

“Our father was half the ornithologist I am.”

Their mother lifted her fingers to her throat and set her glass down atop the piano where it left another pale ring in the walnut veneer. “My neck,” she said. “I’ve never worn sunscreen, but I stayed in the shade. Look, my

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skin isn’t crepe-like at all.”

— In the early evening Della knelt beside the swan when she was certain she was alone. The adults had gone out for happy hour, and Alan was tethered to the computer in the kitchen corner playing Civilization II. She wished she hadn’t eaten so much for lunch. The waistband of her leggings squeezed her stomach, and she felt a little bit worn-out. She leaned against the swan and put her ear to its breast. Its heart beat, murmuring deep within the polyurethane form, muffled. Its heart beat irregularly. Its heart beat like it was pulling itself back together.

Della was familiar with that sensation. She wanted to cry or scream because the swan was stupid and frozen and melancholy. Its feet were wired to a log and its wings were bound to its sides. If it had been born of violence, the only brutality left to it were its violently white wings. If there had once been a long story in its eyes, all of that had been forgotten when they were dashed from its skull and replaced with plastic. The swan wasn’t all bad, she thought. It couldn’t have been all bad. But it was terrifying. Its heart beat. It stood still and absolutely mute, at attention, alive, but unmoving and relentlessly inactive. And therefore threatening.

— Within a year Della thought she might be pregnant. She told Alan, and told him not to tell their mother. But he couldn’t not, he said. Their mother said, “Not again,” and sent her to the Dollar Tree for a test, but it was negative. That was the year Della got fat. That was the year Alan got glasses. That was the year their mother went to Vero Beach for six months. That was the year Tony moved in. That was the year of the egg.

— Della cut herself in the bathroom while her friend, Leona Bixby, took photographs with a 35mm camera they’d bought at the Moth Mound Rescue Mission. She held a pink disposable razor to her forearm and sliced until she had sawed something like an algorithm or a flower into her flesh. It wasn’t clear which it was; blood muddied the design. After a little while she conceded that the plastic casing on the razor made it impossible to carve anything good, and she would have been better off borrowing one of the X-Acto knives Alan used for model making.

When Leona asked her if it hurt, she said, “Kind of, but not as much as an abortion.”

Leona lit a cigarette and turned on the extractor fan so no one would know.

Della continued, “I don’t want another abortion.”

“You think you’ll need one?”

Della wiped her arm with peroxide-soaked toilet tissue, and pulled down the sleeve of her blue sweater before the bleeding stopped. They were out of band-aids. It left a stain. “Nah,” she said. “Probably not. Tony and Alan said I smell. Do you think I smell?”

Leona approached and sniffed the air around the toilet, where Della perched upon the closed lid. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. You just smell like the Calgon stuff my mom sprays on her show cats.”

“That’s weird,” said Della. “I haven’t used anything like that. Just Secret. Sometimes I think I smell something, like sour, but I can’t tell if it’s me or the house. But I think a lot of these old houses smell kind of bad when it’s humid.”

“Maybe the septic tank?” said Leona. “We had ours replaced. It was ruptured. It was, like, sinking into the ground.”

“I think our whole house is sinking into the ground.”

“Tony’s place in the forestry actually was,” said Leona. “That’s what he said. Erosion. That’s why he’s had to move out, right? Did I tell you I dreamed I was in the forestry? I was at the top of the hill, but it was completely dark inside the trees.”

“Tony moved out because he got evicted,” said Della. She scratched her forearm without thinking and winced.

“He was blowing glass and growing pot, and the landlord found out. Was mostly concerned about the fire hazard.

That’s what Tony said. I don’t believe that.” She pointed to an orange extension cord that ran from the outlet beside the sink, along the baseboard, and into the hallway. “Now he’s growing pot up in our attic.”

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“You think he’d give me some?” said Leona.

“I don’t know.”

“What do his knuckle tats say?”

“White pride,” said Della. “He’s a terrible person.”

“Oh,” said Leona. “Oh. At least it’s in cursive and kind of hard to read.”

“My mom said he wouldn’t have been such an asshole if he hadn’t been in prison. She said you have to have something to belong to in prison, otherwise you get fucked. She’s always apologizing for him.”

“He’s hot,” said Leona. “I don’t care. I’d let him fuck me with those tats.” She put out her cigarette under the tap.

“Don’t be sick. You wouldn’t even let him finger you when we drunk. You just lay out topless in the yard until he told you to get dressed. When you went home, he said the last thing he needed was to get pegged as a sex offender.”

“He said that?” said Leona.

“Yep.” “Oh. So he can’t be all that bad, can he?”

— The swan moved for the first time in August. It moved so slightly that it might have been the house settling, but Della felt it even so. How the air stirred around her and carried through the house the scent of the creek below the underpass where she went sometimes to smoke cloves with Leona and the punk rock guys she knew.

After the swan moved, Della stared at it until it wavered at its base as though shifting its weight. It puffed out its feathers suggestively. The swan was growing bolder.

When Tony came down from gardening in the attic and found her with it, he told her he’d send her to Hamlet to stay with his mother if she didn’t stop acting weird. Della said, “Fuck that. I’m not going to Hamlet. There’s nothing in Hamlet but boarded up projects and freight rails. And that nasty Piggly Wiggly. And cockroaches.

And tornadoes.”

“Don’t you besmirch Hamlet,” he said. “I grew up in Hamlet. You better check that attitude. Anyway, the swan, Della. I’m just asking you to lay off. It’s creepy.”

“The swan!” she said. “It’s the swan that’s creepy. It isn’t me. Have you ever stopped and just looked at it? It’s breathing. It moves its eyes around the room. That’s some taxidermy Gary did, right? Even he’s not that good.

We should just get rid of it. There’s something wrong with it. It doesn’t belong in here like this.”

“You know I can’t do that. Your mom. Della, I got to tell you, I’m a little concerned.”

“Good god,” she said. “Maybe if you’re so concerned, you shouldn’t be like, selling around here while we’re at school. Doesn’t do much for home life. Load of junkies coming around.”

“What do you know about that?” he said. He narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms and looked to the coffee table, where rested a wad of balled up aluminum foil beside an empty bag from Burger King.

“Leona’s my friend,” she said. “Not yours.”

— Della brought Alan to see the egg in October. She led him to the winter lot, where she lifted up the faded blue tarp that draped the farthest side of the fence to reveal a gap in the chain-link. The wind met their hesitation, encircled the pair, and guided them in. Frost-stiff blades of grass and withered Virginia creeper broke beneath their footfalls. The hard, cold, compacted soil was frozen, and the cold rising from below ate through their sneakers’ soles. She directed him to the center of the lot where someone had abandoned an old electric cookstove.

The oven door was gone, and inside there rested an egg about thirteen inches in diameter, partially swaddled in Della’s old blood-stained sweater. The egg was not a particular color, but something more like a shadow across fallen leaves at dusk in January. Alan crouched down, poked it with his finger, and said, “That’s pretty unusual for birds in the Southeast.”

“It’s not from a bird.” She paused to pull her shorts out of her buttocks. “I don’t know what to do with it,” she said.

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“I know what. Let’s put it under Tony’s grow lights. Maybe it’ll hatch.”

“You don’t think he’d mind?”

“Leverage,” he said as he removed it from the oven. “We have leverage. This is kind of heavy. If it’s not from a bird, what’s in it? A snake? I’m not aware of any North American monotremes, but perhaps something escaped someplace. Lot of people around here keep reptiles. Didn’t Tony used to have an iguana? Are you sure this isn’t an ostrich egg?”

“I don’t know what’s in it,” she snapped. “I just found it. It’s probably nothing.”

— The origins of the egg were not made clear to Tony, but he suspected something horribly impossible, unspeakable, unnatural, and foul. Nevertheless, when Della and Alan brought it to him, he granted access to the attic and oversaw the installation of the egg in a cardboard box filled with pink fiberglass insulation. They placed the box under the grow lights in the foil-lined hothouse, behind the hydroponic buckets where Tony’s cannabis grew.

The hothouse was humid. He kept it at around eighty-degrees. Two small oscillating fans made the leaves to whisper, and the grow lights bathed the plants in lemonade-colored brightness. The hothouse was thus a place set apart from the shadows and the grime of the surrounding attic, from twenty years of cobwebs strung like ragged linens from the rafters, heavy with dust and the passage of time; from the boxes of brittle photographs and paperback books, ornaments, and water-stained uniforms and lace, grandparents’ belongings, a half-full bottle of something odd. A paper bag filled with cinders. When November came and they couldn’t pay the propane company, for Tony wouldn’t settle what was owed on the previous year, Della sat near the egg and waited for something to happen. It was the only time she ever felt warm.

— Their mother returned the week before Christmas. Mamie Reaber drove her over from the train station. They brought fast food home for dinner, and as soon as they were in the door, luggage dumped and coats abandoned on the kitchen table, their mother said, “Della, you lost weight! Look at you. And your lil’ boobies got so big. No more turkey titties!” She took a plastic bottle from the back of the freezer and made Greyhounds for herself and Mamie with the grapefruits she’d brought back in a mesh bag. Underneath the hairspray and the ratting, and a thirty-dollar dye job, her hair was thinning and her scalp reflected the lights from the Christmas tree. Alan stood back with Della and whispered, “Arsenic. In the well water. We’re on a sheet of volcanic shale that leeches it into the groundwater. Grandma was bald, too. They all were.”

Della said, “But Mom’s been gone.”

Alan shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It builds up in your system over time. We’re all going to go crazy and night-blind.”

Mamie Reaber placed a diminutive Santa hat on the swan and said, “Isn’t this cute?” She tossed a handful of tinsel over it. Her fingernails were primarily acrylic.

Della said, “I think it looks stupid.”

“Jesus, Della,” said their mother. “Can you not just keep your mouth shut?” She leaned against the doorframe and cupped her glass with both hands. “Tony, it reeks of pot in here.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t know you were getting back tonight.” He opened up a beer and fed another log into the wood stove. Mamie sat down on the couch. Their mother said, “God, I’ve got to pee.” She wobbled and patted herself down.

“The indoor bathroom’s busted,” said Tony. “We’ve been using that pile of leaves some. Plumber’s coming tomorrow.”

“If he’s coming tomorrow,” she said. “Then I don’t care. I’m sure he’s seen worse.” She stepped into the hallway, where the orange extension cord was stretched along the baseboard and up along the closet doorframe. “What the hell is this?” she said, toeing it.

“I don’t know,” said Alan. “I think Tony stuck a bulb up in the attic to keep the pipes from freezing. There was a cold snap while you were gone. He was very helpful, somewhat. He got us some wood, anyway. We owe Suburban

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Propane four hundred by the way. We paid it down a little, but they’d still only give us half a tank.”

“There aren’t any fuckin’ pipes up in the attic,” said their mother. She yanked on the cord, but it was duct-taped at both ends and wouldn’t move. “What the hell is this?”

Della said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Me and Leona were taking pictures in the attic and set up some lights. I forgot to take them down. Sorry. I’ll pack it up tomorrow.”

“Like hell. Tony, pull that ladder down.”

“I’d really rather not do that,” he said.

“I can’t reach the pull-string,” she said, jumping up. “Alan, fetch me a chair.”

“Mom, you’re drunk,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “God, all of y’all are worse than useless.” She pulled a chair from the kitchen into the hallway, placed it below the attic door, mounted the chair, and pulled the string. The door’s hinges complained with a spring-loaded, metallic pop and low whine. She unfolded the wooden ladder, and looked up; the grow lights were on.

Their mother howled. She climbed up to the top where the lamps were like sunlight and she became a shadow and a silhouette thrashing. Two plants fell to the base of the ladder. Another landed on the chair, its unmoored pallid roots tangled up in its leaves. Then came another plant, and a rain of gritty water when she tipped a bucket over, and kicked it down. And then, the egg.

The egg fell fast, violently fast. And when the egg landed, its fall was not blunted by the debris in the hallway; it rolled off of the cannabis, cracked, and bled all over the pale peach floor tile. Their mother came slumping down the ladder, rung by rung, screaming about unmanned aircraft and thermal imaging technologies and the cops and the feds—all of them out looking for unusual sources of heat in attics and sheds all over the country. And the electric bill. Oh god, the electric bill.

The egg’s blood was thin and dark. It crept down the hallway and into the living room while Alan sought for paper towels with which to sop it up. Della was pale. Her lips were blue. She sat down on the couch next to Mamie, who sucked her teeth and chewed the ice left at the bottom of her glass. Tony tried to sneak out through the mudroom, but their mother caught him by the arm, and dragged him back, slapping him across the chest, calling him an asshole.

The swan spread its wings. It beat them once and pulled the wind through the house’s pores, the gaps in the log walls, cracks under the doors, and the window panes. The wind was warm, like April, and it smelled of sex and river water, raw sewage, compost, and silt. The swan lifted one leg from the log, then the other. Pins and wires fell away from the webbing of its feet, from its legs as it shook, stretched its neck, and opened its beak to taste the air. When it took flight, its wings beat supersonically and raised tinsel from the floor and loose pine needles from the Christmas tree. Mamie Reaber covered her face, and Della bent over and covered her head, as she had been instructed to during tornado drills at school. Alan ducked out of the room. Their mother was mounting the ladder again. Tony shouted and tried to pull her down, but the swan was quick.

The house was old, the ceilings were low. They were constructed of cellulose tile, warped and cracked and stained from various sorts of leaks and not running the AC enough during the summer. When the swan hit the ceiling, it burst. It blew a hole through the tile and erupted into a violent rain of foamy filling, and feather, and wing and beak, all propelled outward through the room. Its straight black legs fell with a clatter to the floor. The beak put out Tony’s right eye. Their mother took a feather in the arm, but only fell from the ladder when she tried to carry the grow lights back down with her.

The swan’s skin had been cast across the room by the force of the explosion. It was intact, though it had burst along the seam and it lay in a heap in front of the wood stove. In a haze of white feather, Della and Alan approached the skin where it lay, and found nested in its center, a new unbroken egg. But by then their mother was crying out for help. Tony had cupped a dirty kitchen towel over his eye socket, and Mamie Reaber, who was a little drunk, said somewhat involuntarily, “Who’s going to raise that?” She pointed to the egg, but when she realized what she had said, she sobbed and hedged and said, “Oh, it’s gone straight to my head.”

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Adalena Kavanagh

Dumbwaiter The building was so old it didn’t have an elevator. There was a dumbwaiter in the apartment but it had been nailed shut and painted over many years before. When we first looked at the apartment the manager told us that the previous tenant, Mr. Reese, had lived in the apartment for forty-two years. He’d raised a family, watched his wife die of cancer fifteen years prior, seen the neighborhood’s complexion change, twice, and then—the manager assured us this—he died peacefully in hospice care. His sons lived in California and Florida, so they didn’t want the hassle of subletting the apartment and decided to turn the lease back over to the landlord.

Frank asked the manager what the original rent had been and the manager laughed and said, “You don’t want to know. It’ll make you want to kill yourself.”

In that first visit it was clear just how lived-in the apartment was. At some point the Reese family had glued large mirrored tiles onto the living room wall that faced the windows overlooking the central courtyard. The mirrored wall gave the room a desperate 1970s air. The original fixtures and ornamental moldings had grown rounded and fat after years of sloppy paint jobs.

The manager spread his arms out. “Hardwood floors stripped and varnished. Walls repaired. Outlets grounded.

A fresh coat of paint. By the time you move in it’ll be the deal of the century.” He looked very pleased with himself and curled his lip when he smiled so that three teeth showed, the middle one much whiter than the ones to the left and right of it. Though I was distracted by the man’s tooth I decided to trust him.

Frank asked him about the other tenants in the building. The manager’s answer was swift and confident.

“Families. Lots of families. Quiet. No problems. This is a nice building with nice people in it.”

We thought we were getting a deal. We knew we were getting a deal—three bedrooms for $2,100 a month, in Manhattan. All the way uptown but we had that NY, NY address and I was getting the home office I needed. The extra bedroom could be easily converted into a nursery as soon as Frank and I decided it was time.

We said we’d take it. I squeezed Frank’s hand and as we walked out into the hall I patted the dumbwaiter door. I felt nostalgic for a time I hadn’t actually lived through.

— When we moved in we could still smell the paint but the walls were dry. There was new cabinetry in the kitchen and bathroom but I knew it was cheap. I didn’t say anything though because this wasn’t going to be our home forever. Certainly not somewhere we’d live for forty-two years but it was a start. Frank and I had only been married for three years.

The manager had been right. There were lots of families, but he was wrong about the quiet. One couple lived on the fifth floor and they had newborn twins. Without an elevator the poor woman had to strap one baby to her chest and the other to her back. I saw her making her way down the stairs at a snail’s pace. She moved like she was balancing a heavy sack on her head. I joked to Frank that if we had twins the only thing that would stop me from tossing them into a doggy carrier would be polite society. Seeing the woman and her squirming babies made me think, not it, not it, not it, like we were playing a game of tag and through cunning and swiftness I had managed not to be captured yet. I didn’t mention this to Frank.

Frank said his commute was perfect. Long enough to read a chapter in whatever book he was reading, but not

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so long that it felt like a schlepp.

Though I could have slept in, I woke up when Frank did. While he showered I made breakfast. Instead of taking a coffee break as soon as Frank went out the door with a peck on the cheek from me, I pulled on my running clothes and went for a run along the greenway that runs up and down Manhattan. In all types of weather I ran past the lighthouse underneath the great steel bridge and took comfort in its bulk and in my routine.

Before the move Frank had grown impatient with my late hours at the office. He always said, “What could you possibly be doing there so late?”

I’d been working for my firm for eight years before I met Frank. When he questioned my late hours the third time I realized he was jealous, maybe even afraid I was having an affair. I wondered if he would be more upset if I had a lover or if he learned the truth—my work comes first. Always.

After showering and eating a cup of yogurt I logged on and began my workday in earnest. Sometimes I played music but often I left it off and the daily sounds were the clicking keyboard, and the street sounds from below.

My firm suggested I work from home to save costs. When the HR rep explained what working from home entailed she said, “The thing is to create a routine and respect the limits of your workday.” After a beat she joked, “Or else you’ll go insane.”

I was trying to learn how to turn it off when Frank came home. The woman was right—routine is key.

Maybe Frank would understand better if I could explain my work but I can’t.

In my work we don’t leave an electronic trail if we can. In the old days we’d use typewriters and lock up our ribbons in steel cases, but now we run in-house software that encrypts our electronic files. Non-classified documents come to me by courier, and I go into the office to work with more sensitive documents.

Sometimes I miss my cubicle.

I do research, which can be done at home, but because of its sensitive nature, when a stranger asks me what I do—a question you can’t avoid in New York City—I tell him that I’m a freelance writer. Most people just nod knowingly, already losing interest, but to the ones who continue to pepper me with questions I make an apologetic gesture and say I write for trade journals nobody reads. This quells any curiosity.

I had my reference books out and was getting lost in the hunt for facts. Sometimes I think of these searches I do as balls of string that I have to somehow untangle. Each thread of the inquiry leads me to another knot I have to work through, until I reach the final snare, the final puzzle, and then everything is unraveled and clear. Frank says I get into a trance, which is why I set an alarm at regular 45-minute intervals so I remember to eat and go to the bathroom. I’ve heard rumors that some of my more dedicated colleagues rely on adult diapers.

I was running my finger down a Manhattan residential phone book from 1987. The time of this incident was 2011 so this gives you some idea about the resources my firm keeps available to us researchers—we’ve been subscribing to the telephone directories of major American cities going back to when telephone books were first produced. Renting the space to house telephone books in addition to all the other types of reference materials we require is costly and inefficient.

So it’s now some poor temp’s job to digitize the lot. Once that project is completed the firm will then store the collection in temperature-controlled rooms in upstate New York. Just in case.

Most of the inessential staff has been moved offsite so that our once floor-through office has been reduced in size by half. Management hasn’t said this in so many words, but my closest colleagues, the ones who made it through the first round of layoffs, think that this new project we’re working on is an audition to keep our jobs.

A few weeks after the layoffs I received a memo from my supervisor’s superior. It was a warning. Somehow I had made a mistake in my research and written a report on a man with the exact same first, middle and last name as the one I had been assigned, but our target was the father, not the son. In my research I had missed that the son had dropped the “junior” from his name. My mistake had cost us time. I would not be so careless again.

I was deep in the K’s for 1987 Manhattan when my alarm went off. I looked up. I’d bought a strong protective case for my otherwise slim phone because I have hurled many phones across the room and my firm began to question my requests for replacements.

I was in that bewildered state where half my thoughts were stuck in my quest—this time it was the search for an address of a man whose last name contained the letters NAGH but no U. I had been chanting that to myself the entire time.

Begins with a K but no U. Which should have narrowed my search considerably but I’d already stalked 1999-1988 and was working my way back without any luck so far. The courier had given me a dirty look when he delivered all those telephone

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The Golden Key

directories, but I’ve gotten used to his looks. The firm is somewhere in 2001 in the digitization project, and has yet to break through the 1990s and 1980s which has necessitated these heavy deliveries. I wondered who signed off on the digitization plan. One person is doing the earliest books, the other the newest books, and they’ll meet in the middle somewhere. I would have suggested that the more recent past was more crucial to our work but, oh well, not my problem.

When the alarm went off I had to stop what I was doing because I’d placed my phone across the room. Instead of hurling it against the wall I just cursed and went to turn it off. I took a moment to assess my needs. Was I thirsty? No. Did I have to use the bathroom? No. Was I hungry? I could eat a snack. So I got up and went into the kitchen. I was sitting at the table eating an apple—another rule, no eating and working at the same time. I scheduled these short breaks; otherwise, my neck and back got all cramped up. Once I’d thrown away the core, I lay down on my yoga mat and worked my way through a series of stretches.

I was stretching when I finally heard drips coming from the bathroom. I stood up and investigated. There was a substantial leak over our bathroom sink. I put shoes on and ran upstairs hoping someone was home. A young man, someone who could have been in high school, opened the door even though it was only 12:45pm. I told him there was a leak and asked him to check things on his end. Instead of going back into the apartment to check out his bathroom he looked at me like I was telling him old news. “Yeah. Call the super. It’s the pipes. They leak all the time.” I asked him if this had been a problem before we moved in. He nodded, his eyes looking droopy like he was ready for a nap. “For years. Call the super.”

I thanked him and went downstairs. I called the super and he came upstairs and tried to look surprised when he saw my ceiling. When I asked him if this leaking had been a problem before we’d moved in he opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. When I raised my eyebrows to prod him to speak he stammered. “They told me they fixed the problem when they fixed up the apartment. I’ll call the plumber and see what we can do.”

The plumber came. There was plenty of banging and clanking from the apartment above and below and while the leak had stopped, when I looked up at the ceiling I could swear it was bulging a bit. I told Frank to take a look at it and he got up on the stepladder and said that it felt damp. So we called the super and he called the plumber and that was a pattern that was well established by the time we’d been living in the apartment for seven months. At least once a month the ceiling sprang a leak.

— There is this empty tinny quality that cell phones have that cannot match the deep vibrations that an old-fashioned landline telephone is capable of sending out through an apartment. I know there are ring tones made to sound like an old telephone but the effect is not the same. The digital version you hear with your ear, the analog version you hear with your whole body. Our neighbors received calls on their landlines all the time, which was odd, and annoying. I could hear the rings through the floors, the walls, and the ceiling.

We heard so many things in the apartment. One time Frank and I had an argument because we heard sex sounds coming from the apartment below us. Frank insisted that the man below us must have brought a date home but I insisted that he was just watching pornography.

Sometimes the wind whistled in the stairwell. I sent Frank up to make sure the door to the roof was locked. Each time he returned and said, “Locked tight.”

They say old houses settle and creak but so do old apartment buildings. Maybe everyone was used to the hissing, clanking radiators and the creaky floors but instead of feeling comforted by the sounds of the human hive I felt wary. Who were these people? Why had we trusted them?

When I first heard the dumbwaiter mechanism I was in my office working in silence. I looked up from my report and listened. There was a whining sound and an electrical hum that I could feel in my head and my neck. I stood up to hear better and when I looked out the window I noticed an absence but wasn’t sure what it was until the young man who usually spent the day standing outside the building leaning against his car returned to resume his position. This was a corner boy.

Like me and my daily runs past the little red lighthouse in all kinds of weather, this young man stood outside the building seemingly doing nothing every day, in all but the worst weather.

At first the noise was intermittent, but within a day it was near constant. Each time I looked out the window I saw that Carl, the young man who lived on the fifth floor with his mother and his grandmother, had disappeared into the back alley only to return not long after.

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That night I tried to tell Frank about the noises but he just said I should go get my ears checked because he didn’t hear anything. I told him I was too busy. The deadline for our project was fast approaching and there were still too many loose ends. I couldn’t finish my report. The noise was worse when I was alone working, deep in concentration, making my way through each new puzzle.

I asked Frank what he thought Carl did outside all day. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want to make any assumptions,” he said.

I made plenty of assumptions. When I heard the noise I ran to put my ear against the dumbwaiter door. I could feel the vibrations coming from the shaft. Something was definitely moving inside and I began to feel confident that our Carl, or perhaps someone above Carl in whatever organization he was affiliated with, had gotten the idea to rig up the old dumbwaiter system to transport drugs. Far-fetched? Possibly. Brilliant? That’s what I thought. And I congratulated myself for figuring it out.

When Frank and I had looked at the apartment we hadn’t given much thought to the neighborhood. It had seemed nice enough. Diverse enough. Convenient enough. Several waves of gentrification had already crashed through the area so we felt confident that the worst of the 1980s drug trade had moved east and south of us. Carl had not been standing watch outside the building when we signed the lease. Not that Carl ever gave us any problems aside from the few times he was joined outside by a few friends who drank big glass bottles of beer out of brown paper bags and talked too loudly. Frank and I weren’t the kind of people who called the cops just because of a little noise.

— The next night Frank announced that his firm was sending him to Macau for a few days. I teased Frank because his childhood Cantonese is slangy and just above baby talk—certainly not business appropriate. He teased me back though, saying my Mandarin is textbook Chinese. Which is true. I learned the language in college, not at my grandmother’s knee the way Frank had. It has helped me in my work, though. Sometimes I have to make phone calls to Taiwan and China on behalf of my firm. I’m always complimented and told I sound Chinese. They assume I’m white because I’m American. I let them think whatever they want to. When I make these phone calls I always use an alias.

It’s company policy.

Macau has a law that states that legal documents cannot be removed from the island, not even electronically. Frank had to travel to the other side of the world to sit at a computer in Macau and do the work onsite even with the wondrous technological advances that have made that sort of necessity obsolete. I was glad he was going.

I hadn’t told Frank that I was afraid that the firm was weeding us out and that this project was a test. He would have just encouraged me to quit. He was making enough money to support us but my work has never been about the money.

I had been breaking all of my rules and worked late into the night and sometimes I slept in the guest bedroom so I wouldn’t disturb Frank with my tossing and turning. Without his wary eye trained on me I felt I could concentrate and make the final push and untangle all the threads of the inquiry before the deadline.

When I joined him on the morning he was set to leave, dead-eyed, he said he didn’t like me pushing myself so hard.

“It’s just this project,” I said. “It’s important.”

“It’s always some project,” he said. “What about us?”

Privately I thought, what about us, but to Frank I said, “I’m sorry.”

When Frank left he kissed me and then held my face in his hands. He forced me to look in his eyes and said, “Make sure you sleep.”

It was the first time I’d made myself available to his touch in a long time. His hands felt like a stranger’s hands.

I told him not to worry and he hesitated, as if he was about to call off his trip. Then he asked, “Are you still hearing those noises?” From the tone of his voice I could tell that he wanted me to say no.

So, I lied. I said I was fine.

He eyed me carefully, kissed my forehead again, and was out the door.

One time my mother casually mentioned that when she was a young woman, before she immigrated, a baby spirit had possessed her. It wasn’t a euphemism for an unwanted pregnancy. She truly believed that a minor spirit had taken hold of her. It was the kind of odd thing my mother sometimes said, all matter of fact, without any hint of selfconsciousness. I chose to take it in stride, like the time she told me about having a tapeworm. I listened to her story without questioning her or questioning her sanity. It was easier to just humor her. When Frank left I could tell that this was the approach he was taking with me. I could tell he was humoring me and I let him.

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The day before Frank was due to return I sat in my office poring over a New York City property map from 1967 when the noise became unbearable. On top of that, the bathroom ceiling was leaking again, but I was sick of dealing with it.

I made a decision. I was going to open up the dumbwaiter door and investigate. Frank wouldn’t be able to chide me out of it. I was going to find out once and for all if my hypothesis was correct.

I looked at the dumbwaiter door closely. I had thought it was nailed shut but there were screws in place and of course many layers of paint. I’d have to buy a chisel to break through the paint and pry the door open after I managed to loosen the screws. I passed Carl on the street and he nodded at me as I made my way to the hardware store. On my return trip Carl was with a friend and the friend pointed at the heavy chisel in my hand and asked, “What you gonna do with that?”

“Everyone needs a weapon,” I answered.

I was a little apprehensive about what lay behind the dumbwaiter door. Though an exterminator came and sprayed the apartments every couple of months I was sure there were mice in the walls. Most buildings in New York have some cockroaches even though I hadn’t seen any in our apartment—something to be grateful for.

When I used our power drill to loosen the screws and managed to chip the paint away from the seams of the door I took a deep breath. I was sweaty and suddenly nervous. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. Even if I knew for sure that someone was using the dumbwaiter what would I do then? I certainly wasn’t going to call the police and report my suspicions about Carl. That was none of my business.

I wanted to be sure. I was desperate to know for sure. So I grasped the handle and tugged. I had to put one foot against the wall and lean my body back until the door finally gave. When it did I crashed against the opposite wall and stared into the shaft.

I could have cried.

It was empty. Completely empty. Where there should have been woven steel cables there was nothing. A cold draft came out of the shaft but that was it. I had expected a foul odor but instead, when I got up the courage to move toward the opening and peer in with a flashlight, it smelled like dry plaster and nothing else. I put my hand into the void and felt goose bumps travel up and down my body because the change in temperature was so drastic. Still, there was nothing there. No mechanism. I pulled my hand out and leaned my head in and listened. The noises were as loud as ever but there was nothing there.

I decided to pay another visit to my neighbors upstairs and downstairs. I tried to come off as friendly, not nagging and intrusive. I asked the mother of the boy upstairs if she was using some type of machine because there was a weird noise in my apartment. I was deliberately vague, trying to come off like this was just a minor problem, but the truth is I had to know where the noises were coming from. She looked at me with a slight frown on her face. I could see what she was thinking. Was I trying to make trouble for her? She had her hair done up in curlers and wrapped in a gauzy scarf.

I had seen her nip down to the bodega across the street in her curlers so she clearly didn’t care about appearances but she wasn’t sure what to make of me.

“No. We don’t have any machines in here.” Then she paused. “Maybe it’s the video game. Sammy plays that game all the time. Is it too loud? I’ll tell him to turn it down.” I shook my head, no, which made me wince in pain. I had a headache that was a vise around my scalp.

She looked at me and asked, “You alright?”

I told her I was okay and I was sorry to bother her.

As I retreated down the stairs she called out to me, “This building’s so old. It makes all kinds of noise. Just ignore it.”

I turned to look back but she had already closed her door.

I had even worse luck with my downstairs neighbor, the one who Frank finally admitted watched pornography at a very loud volume. He came to the door with his hair slicked back like he’d just taken a shower. I gave him the same spiel. There was a weird noise in my apartment. Was he using some kind of machine? He looked at me for a long time and then shook his head slowly, as if he was deciding what truth to tell.

“Nah. I don’t have any machines. Don’t even have a home computer. Just the TV.” He narrowed his eyes. “Is it too loud? I can turn it down if it’s too loud. Just let me know.”

I was frustrated. These people clearly had no idea what I was talking about but I had to try. “Yeah. No. It’s not the TV. It’s more like a whining and a hum. It’s weird.”

The man chewed on his lip and sucked his teeth. “Sorry. Sometimes the pipes bang when the heat comes on but nothing like that. Maybe it’s your refrigerator. Maybe you should get it checked out.”

Like the woman upstairs he had barely opened his door so that only a sliver of his body appeared. Neither had

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invited me inside. This is why whenever a crime is committed in New York City the neighbors always say, “He seemed like such a nice man. Quiet. Kept to himself.” It’s because nobody knows the neighbors and everyone is happy to keep it that way.

“I don’t think it’s that but thanks,” I said.

Once it was clear our interview was coming to a close he smiled and said, “Sure. No problem.”

When I returned to my apartment I looked at the mess I had made opening the dumbwaiter door. I was too tired to clean up and I couldn’t face my office and the work that waited to be done.

Since Frank had been away I had been sleeping in the spare guest room—the future nursery. It was the room furthest away from the dumbwaiter. I went inside to lie down and tried to rest. We had painted the bedroom yellow, a neutral color, saying, just in case, but with the pressure from work, the secret fear that I was going to lose my job, the thought of a baby was unbearable. Frank always turned to me when there was a commercial with an adorable baby or puppies in the frame and he smiled and raised his eyebrows as if inviting me to give it a try.

I was so tense no amount of stretching could work out the kinks I felt in my muscles and the ache in my bones. I decided that I wouldn’t bring up moving until our lease was almost up. I would tell Frank that I couldn’t live with a perpetually leaking bathroom ceiling. Each drip punctuated my frustrated thoughts but I ignored them and thought about what I would say to Frank. I would tell him that I didn’t like the neighborhood. I would suggest we try someplace new. Maybe Brooklyn. Maybe Queens.

As I lay on the bed, my head throbbing, my neck tense, the noise buzzed in my ear like an angry insect determined to eat my brains. I just wanted some peace. Some quiet. No more mysteries. I was scared and wished Frank was there to hold my hand.

Anxiety had kept me awake for days but soon exhaustion settled on me like a lead blanket and I slept.

Frank woke me. He shook my shoulder and asked me why there was a mess in the hallway. “Didn’t you hear the leak?

The bathroom ceiling’s completely collapsed. The floor’s flooded.”

I hadn’t heard a thing.

When I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong.

“Your face,” Frank said. “Sheila. Your face.”

I reached up and touched the right side. It was numb. When I tried to speak I realized that my mouth didn’t work anymore. Half of my face was completely paralyzed. My ear throbbed, full of the impossible noise, now louder than ever.

At last my horror was fully realized. There was something terribly wrong with me and Frank could finally see it.

There was no room to pretend otherwise.

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Katy Gunn

Rosamond and Thurry

“We will begin with the natural hills and their desperate inhabitants in the early dark years, those for whom the manor provided a figurehead toward which they might till the hills and cultivate the begrimed and rustic exuberance budding inside them, which would grow into high regard and loyalty to this home, the Earldom of P—” “We should begin with the present.”

“That sounds awful.” Thurry convulses in a hyperbole of a visible shudder. He has been reading too many novels this morning.

We wait to settle into our usual tremors and flatus before we continue.

“In beginning with the present, iron and cement, et cetera, we will illustrate through contrast the beauty of farmed fields, fallow fields, formal gardens, the lawns spreading once more from the trampled foot of the manor, the manor straightening once more into blue skies. It is important that these images appear attainable, and we must therefore begin in realism. The audience might grasp on to the images of once more and around them form alternate models for the future. We could effect or at least sow the seeds for a reversal.”

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“The current model being skyscrapers? You would identify it as such, Rosamond?”

“Thurry, we must be aware of our audience.”

We turn our faces toward opposite walls, one toward the portraits of our forebears, the other toward the open window through which the acrid smell of production has begun to seep, as it does every morning. We are constantly appalled by the failures of Harriet, our maid-of-all-work.

“Maid-of-all-work” is a carelessly compressed and impossible term. A home this size cannot be managed by one employee. When we were children, twenty-three kept warm and bustling residence under our floors. As younger adults, we employed no fewer than seventeen.

Harriet has been hired on impossible terms, but still she might attend to the windows.

“Servants’ quarters are a coffeehouse now,” says Harriet.

We tell her even a maid-of-all-work should not be allowed to retort. Especially a maid-of-all-work, who should be too busy to gather her vitriol. She flaps her paper in a motion as white and irreverent as her plump derrière, knowing she might as well have bent over to bare it before us. We are trying to write an address to the people, and she must transcribe.

Our special historical knowledges have been solicited for the opening of the museum tomorrow afternoon. We have only just been informed of our important role, and that our address it will be read by a skilled young orator early in the proceedings.

“I thought you two were just bickering,” says Harriet.

“Composition is an art of process. We are identifying the seeds of our argument. How are we to organize our ideas if you have not recorded lists or at least rough representational charts?”

“It’s supposed to be two hundred words.”

“You have no interest in rhetoric!” Thurry strikes the arm of the fourth Earl of P—’s chair and a puff of velvet dust rises. We all glare through the dust. Harriet is not to be relied upon. We chose the furniture from the fourth Earl’s personal bedchamber for our old age because it is exceedingly soft and comforts us, but it takes Thurry long moments to rest his jittering hand on the cushion again.

Harriet nods. “No time for interests, I’m a maid-of-all-work.”

For a while Harriet draws something out on the paper and the room is filled with small mutterings: “ethos,” “logos,” “panache.”

“This Earldom may one day be the last haven of good and natural candlelight.” Thurry waits to make sure Harriet has begun to transcribe. “Candlelight has a quality that no electric mechanism can reproduce. That is history. Our life has been lit with that strong glow, and we are proud to preserve it for your children and their children before them, ad infinitum.”

“Not ad infinitum. They will hear the Latin as excessive.”

“Dear Rosamond, how are we to live in this world?”

We turn for another moment away from each other, brother toward the sideboard empty of meats and sister toward the ornate stopped clock, the best china, the piano, and the assorted dinner garments we requested be brought up to our chambers when we retained more influence over the comings and goings in and of the manor. It clutters up the private breakfast room, but they have declared us too ancient to risk walking from room to room, and they deposited the clock, china, piano, and dinner garb after they set us up in the fourth Earl’s chairs and dragged in our beds.

Each of our beds took six large men to move. We held our heads high to show we recognized this reparation for the injustice done to us. Rosamond and Thurry, heirs to the Earl of P—, feel few damaging slights, but we are both too large of person and persona to share the private breakfast room for all our sitting, sleeping, breakfast, tea, dinner, baths, and tending to our nether-businesses.

Thurry creates a great rumble in the depths of his chair, as if to illustrate our point. We cough politely. We take a moment to remember where we were, and whether we have begun.

“It gratifies us to bestow our home upon you ladies and gentlemen gathered—” “They are not,” says Thurry through another great cloud of velvet dust.

“We must use the colloquialism of the day. Pathos.”

“Ethos,” says Thurry.

“It gratifies us to bestow our home upon all of you, piddling, impecunious, gobbling tinpot philistine boors. Please take your pick of our rooms to drag your doggish arses through.”

“Rosamond!”

“We are only warming up. Composition is a process.”

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Harriet is writing speedily now, the left half of her bottom lip wrenched up purple between her teeth. She is unattractive, this maid-of-all-work. We must remember our tall and handsome footmen who matched like marble bookends and used our proper titles, and we must comfort ourselves with this memory. Harriet releases her lip to form a silent “impecunious,” and we wait for her to make a stab at the spelling so we might carry on.

“We might form the speech within bookends. Begin with the manor, mention the skyscrapers, and return to the manor. This way the form of our address would stay true to the way the skyscrapers pop up and jut through the middle of our lives, monstrously.” It takes time for Thurry to revise his plans.

“They aren’t skyscrapers,” says Harriet.

We really must not be derailed. The replacement clock they will have ordered for the museum is ticking along, if ours is not. We nod or scowl at Harriet until she bows over her page again.

“Our library has been one of the richest since the first Earl, a man of great knowledge and charity, filled its shelves.

Every Earl since that admirable man has gathered more knowledge and built more shelves—” “Had them built.”

“—for the dual pursuits of learning and pleasure, and we are grateful for the opportunity we are now given to open these timeless pursuits up for you.”

“Learning and pleasure,” says Harriet.

We hold our chins high in our very soft chairs.

“They’re dismantling the library for a video theater.”

We must admit to overturning the side table. There is nothing fragile on top, and it does not travel far. It wobbles slightly; we use both hands and engage our knees, and it lands with a not unemphatic crack.

The effect of the side table turned actually on its side, its stiff legs bowed like those of a dead horse or the legs we imagine a dead horse to have, for we know little about death, reminds us of that inevitability nonetheless. Thurry reaches out his hand toward the end table, our window, the buildings shading our window, or his dear overstimulated sister.

“We will take tea early,” we say. “We will take tea and Scotch.”

Harriet rifles through the sideboard cupboards.

We clear our throats.

“There’s just tea left. You used up your stipend last week.”

“What,” says Thurry, “is a stipend.”

There will be times when we must employ our influence as leverage. These times have come. “You will take one of these artifacts downstairs and trade it for liquor of some variety.”

Harriet grins at us, showing many teeth. She puts her pencil down her top and chooses the best dinner gown of the eighth Lady of P—, who was in truth a scandalmonger and of little substantial benefit to the Earldom in her time. If we can help her service the manor posthumously, we should.

— The maid-of-all-work brings back twelve bottles of wine and a kitten.

It will do, we decide. Harriet may even keep one of the bottles as a bonus to her pay, for where would we be now without her and her functioning legs?

“In the private breakfast room,” we agree.

Still, she has improved the setting, which is a synonym for the function of a maid-of-all-work. We wait for a moment in high hopes but find ourselves forced to remind her of her position. She retrieves her pencil, shaking her head.

Perhaps there is a great gnat buzzing about her ears, with which we might sympathize. Perhaps in bringing the kitten to her face to kiss it, she sucked a tuft or piece of fur into her nose, and she knows it would be impolite to sneeze and can think of no other remedy for it than to shake her head profusely and roll her eyes around.

“They found him when they were cleaning out the smoking room,” Harriet says. “All those ghastly deer heads fallen on the floor and he was eating their skins and curling up to sleep in them, happy with himself and sardonic as you please.”

The kitten mews. Harriet shows him his tail, and he bites it.

“There were rabbits too. But you two were beginning your memoirs?”

“The pastoral today does not roll out in a patterned carpet from the foot of the manor but turns back on it, pushing its tendrils through mortar and wedging itself to crumble the bricks of our home,” says Thurry. His face turns quite

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white and dark red intermittently.

We take a moment for reflection in which Thurry might remember to breathe.

We correct Harriet. “We were beginning an address to a particular audience for which we must tailor our rhetorical strategies. Let us review the rhetorical situation. Authors, the son and daughter of the late—” “The last,” corrects Harriet.

“—Earl of P—. Subject, the opening of the museum in the main rooms of this manor. Audience, the stinkpot visitors–” “The arts and history council.”

“The council founded and funded at the expense of the manor, through our charity!”

“Occasion, the opening of that museum. Purpose, reclamation and the reshaping of attitudes.” We fold our hands on my lap and look around the room with pursed or sagging lips to locate any reminders of points we have forgotten.

Harriet, we are proud to see, has drawn a triangle on her paper and is labeling the points. The kitten micturates in the shelter of the end table.

“Tell me,” says Thurry, “how are the gardens?”

This is a defeatist impulse. “We will name the kitten Pas de Fin,” we interrupt.

“Have they been suffocated in the laying of concrete or have they perhaps with the rabbits and wild cats overgrown?”

“Here, kitty kitty Pas de Fin. Come to Lady Rosy-Rosamond.”

The kitten climbs into Harriet’s fat lap and folds himself neatly.

“For the banners of purple loosestrife streaming from the roof in the sunshine were like the triumphant flags of nature herself, staking her claim to the building, in its ruins—” “Hold your tongue, Thurry!” We are distracted; we are furious. “We need not read so many novels nor tire our poor Harriet’s hand with quotes from them, especially when they are so new and untested as that, and written with such burgundy and overblown fatalism.”

“What do we have in this world that is not overblown and saturated with all manners of sanguinary hues?” Thurry tosses his hand toward the northeastern corner of our private breakfast room, where the crimson brocade chosen by the sixth Earl of P— to paper the walls peels down in great swaths to reveal deposits of fulvous powder streaked wetly red, as if truly with blood.

“We are not in a novel.”

“We are the concluding volume of a verbose serial, and they have decided to adapt us to film!”

“How terrible,” we agree. This judgment rings through the breakfast room. There passes a general convulsion by which even Pas de Fin is afflicted, and then we take care to straighten ourselves once more, to rub the soft arms of the fourth Earl’s chairs and sip quickly our wine, so we might be fortified.

Harriet makes another round with the bottle.

“Share our wealth with the young, the emblem of our future,” we declare, so Harriet fills a tea plate for the kitten. He sniffs it, recoils, and bats it with his paw. Pas de Fin licks his haunches and tracks claret across the rug.

We cannot pretend to be unaffected. Thurry slumps into an aged pile, his elbows in the hollows of his legs, his hands full of wrinkles and weeping.

— The Earl of P— is entitled to wear a coronet adorned with eight matched pearls and eight golden strawberry leaves.

We have kept this ornament in velvet tucked into the great dead clock where it could not be requisitioned by the arts and history council. Thurry decides he will wear it for tea.

It sinks halfway down his forehead and makes indented lines above his eyebrows and ears. He requests that Harriet right the side table and wipe it down. He has her open the next two bottles of wine. He desires almond scones with cream and repeats this request obstinately, even though the private breakfast room has no adequate oven, and since she was hired Harriet has only made sandwiches with ingredients that will keep at the temperature of the private breakfast room.

Harriet shakes her finger at Thurry and leaves the room; we are afraid we have done it, we have dismissed our maidof-all-work in the season of fewest applicants and now all the work will remain undone, but after another half-bottle of claret, which is immature and provokes much confabulation about the correlations between age and value, Harriet returns with a paper bag from the coffeehouse in the servants’ quarters. Coffee of P— the bag reads, but the rest of the appellation has been soaked through with grease.

The maid-of-all-work has found cinnamon scones, and we get our first taste of the commodity the Earldom threatens

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to— “Has,” says Harriet.

—become. The scones are slightly dry. For many years we would have showed our courteous appreciation nonetheless, but under the present circumstances we find it challenging not to smack our lips and guzzle our claret between floury nibbles. Be them as they may, our refreshments fill the function for which they are named, and even our brother appears to unfurl like a dewy if doddering flower.

“Ladders and gem-thief-men,” Thurry addresses the private breakfast room and Harriet, whom he rushes with fluttering his hands to pick up her pencil and paper. “My dear boozepots and muffinbottoms, do you feel in the depths of yourselves the weight of the walls around you pinning you lovingly here to these carpets, and beyond them, to the very soil of these hills? Do you feel yourself able to return to your homes at the end of this address, or have the tendrils and veins that comprise you reached their healthiest new growth outward, invisibly, down through the floor, so one step past that land which you are now linked, impassionedly, would rend you to threads and chords of amaranthine lament?”

“Boozepots and muffinbottoms,” we positively bellow. “Amaranthine lament.”

Pas de Fin has never heard a force so loud as us, to which downstairs hammering and the crudely barked jokes of workmen cannot compare. He sends up a thin orange howl not of a volume but certainly of a timbre befitting a mature jungle panther.

“He has after all grown up in the smoking room,” Harriet says.

“That was the sensation that overwhelmed one brave man, who dropped to his knees in the dirt of these hills spouting the promise that he would devote himself and his line, infinitely, to the cultivation and welfare of all that grew here, from the smallest sprout to the fathers who fed their children with it, and this man fed those children, built a church—” “Had it built.”

“—allotted farms, provided salaries, and disseminated culture, all from the spot where you now stand, vandals and philistines, and it is this man whose line has continued to devote itself to his pledge, and we all owe our respects to each Earl who has carried this manor on his back, and to the Earldom’s remaining descendants, those who carry the last drops of blood identical in composition to the mineral wealth of the ground beneath us from which the walls around us were built with pride, the last blood of the first honored Earl of P—” In our emphatics we knock the undrunk fourth bottle of wine into Thurry’s admittedly previously dampened lap; the coronet slides forward to rest on his nose and cover his eyes, and the kitten leaps mid-wail for the golden strawberry leaf in the middle of Thurry’s forehead, for it has caught the afternoon light between dank cement buildings and glittered for a second like prey or a toy. Harriet lets out a burst between guffaw and flatus, and then we are all scrabbling at the metal covering the Earl’s second son’s face; in losing his eyesight he seems to have forgotten other functions of his body as well and is turning quite purple, hacking and seizing.

Perhaps it was best for him to be cut off where he was. It feels right to let the name of our home hang transparent and fragmentary as the flickering apparition that it, and those for whom it was named, have become. “Let us not tie that name to this ruin, dear Thurry. Let it back away graciously, P—,” we agree. Pas de Fin settles down to an irregular purr.

We take some time to recuperate from our excitement. Harriet changes the pants on our quivering Thurry. He sleeps for a spell. Harriet sharpens one half of her broken pencil and sketches a competent study of the scene, except the proportions are drawn strangely. The towers in the windows are only as big as the late Earl’s heirs, but the kitten overfills the private breakfast room and has burst the locks to the adjoining chambers so he might comfortably spread his tail and paws.

There is a breeze from the factories to the east; it smells foul.

Still we recover our strength before the evening is out. Thurry stirs groggily, rubbing the bruises crowning his face.

“There was the strangest sensation,” he says, “of the body disintegrating into the hills and the sky. There were dampening clouds and the squawking chicks of albatrosses.” He reaches for his empty cup and brings it up to his lips.

Harriet smudges the outline of his face with her thumb.

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L. Chapman

Unresolved Mystery Items 1.

The survivalist club meets Thursday nights, once a month, and the week always changes. Popcorn, the kind sold in bags and not popped in the microwave, is served in paper cups. Water and soda is also served. A lot of paper cups are used with every meeting. The street is lined with cars parked side by side, cars on the lawn, on the drive, cars blocking one another. Their wraps and jackets and coats and bags take up two rooms in the lodge. The survivalist club has a secretary who takes minutes. The president welcomes new members—every week there are at least one or two new members—and opens the floor to questions. If your house was burning down, what three things would you take with you? Death by drowning or strangulation? How many tracts of land could a community of two hundred people live off of? What was the most horrible thing that happened to you when you were nine? Someone is stealing things from the coat rooms, both of them, pockets are turned out and the non-valuables, the secret things are exposed on the carpeted floor, like a woman’s panties, odd keys, perplexing notes in shorthand, exotic nuts, a very small remote control. Turned inside out, the survivalist club does not know what to do. They collapse slowly, the popcorn goes soft and the soda flat and their cups tip over until water spills and forms a lake in the middle of the room, cratered like the moon.

2.

They lived in a house built into a hill, so it was inverted. The kitchen and living room were at the top floor, and the bedrooms were all on the bottommost floor. They existed like moles, living there. They came upstairs only to forage for food at night. During the day they slept and made love and burrowed deeper into the hill. They could have existed blind in that house. They felt their way upstairs and fed themselves. When they were done, they moved by memory back down the stairs to sleep off their feast. Over the years the house opened up tunnels into the quick of the hill. One of the tunnels sloped up into the attic they never built. One tunnel passed into the abandoned halls of a snow queen. One tunnel streamed into the dim spaces of their memories, twined there, knotted, and took root.

3.

In building a coffin for the unicorn, they find that they need special lumber, and special nails, and special sandpaper, and special glue. It all needs to be specific because the coffin needs to contain sugar and stream and smoke. So the lumber must be reclaimed from a two-hundred-year-old fir and the nails made of cold iron to keep the fae away and sandpaper from the bristling skin of a fish that surfaces only once in its lifespan and glue drawn from of the spit of a mountain. Only then can the unicorn be put away, peaceably.

4.

Men drag the ghost river for bodies while their women, if they have them, hug the riverbanks with their hands and knees. No true river, this: this is a swamp of pitch and tar and creatures have been wrecked in it. They are searching for their dead, the ones lost long ago, they’ve heard the dead may be found entombed in the river. Grandfathers and grandmothers and stillborn children and dogs that warned them of snakes lying in wait and fathers who took belts to them sometimes and mothers who stuffed packets of secretive herbs under their husbands’ pillows. The men comb their hands through the river, pulling, pulling. Each time their hands come out, their palms are slick. Their women urge them on, saying, Look there, you were so close that time. Almost you had it.

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Dustin Parsons

Kinda Big with the Ghosts B 32

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Back Home

It is a bad time to be a ghost what with all the hunters out there.

But they persevere living in the smallest of towns they can find. For some, it means going home.

Too many give up their mansions or boughs, their smoke in favor of oiled boots and two pairs of socks. They float down the heavy asphalt highway from the bowling alley to the bar like they are on a booze cruise and they regale each other with stories of their living days. One reaches down and moves a pebble closer to the ditch to prove he is not useless. Company trucks parked in every driveway. The refinery is so far from the crude oil here it’s easy to forget what it becomes. Where it is from.

Lilac steeps in the humidity curling the corner of a ghost’s former home. He remembers his wife planting it, waking to the taste in his mouth like syrup from a freezer pop.

In life they were so poor they could only afford to open one door a day. What dim logic tied him to the pumpjacks of his youth? His son still leaves small piles of food in remembrance.

He lost his arm before he died, and has spent years looking in every hole a pulling unit opens.

He finds himself in the crow’s nest, on the pipe rack, atop the horse head of the pumpjack wishing he could feel the easy shade of a cloud covering the sun.

They can’t afford to leave now, the ghosts back home. For them the street hovers an inch above the ground. For them, the low cool of the ground is distant as the moon.

As morning approaches they retire dragging their chains back to the beds of their trucks. They might soon pull a man’s arm out of a well.

The empty streets and closed-up shops and the séances rattling from the machines they were born feeling in their feet are kinda big with the ghosts back home. Their stories don’t scare anyone, but in the spare moment of twilight they still write.

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M.V. Montgomery

Three Gothic Poems

I. The Dependents

II. Shades of Betrayal

Just think about it, she said. You can write all our names on your tax return. All of you? he queried. Yes, she said, Didn’t I tell you about my children from a previous engagement? Perhaps you did, he said, scratching his head. And so the dependents filed in one by one, like a line of raptors. She said, We’ll just require this room here, and your study for a nursery, and do you mind if we throw some of this old memorabilia out? And he replied, sure. He was in love. And it came to pass that one of the children grew sick and needed more round-the-clock care, so he switched to the night shift at work, hurrying home on his breaks to clean up as quietly as he could, for this new family left offal everywhere. Then another one needed an organ transplant, and would he mind sparing a kidney, and perhaps he might also see well enough out of one cornea? And the children in the house grew like nestlings with hungry mouths open, and he managed as best he could with a sore side and one good eye, until she came back and spoke of yet another operation, one that would solve their problems once and for all, for she could see that he wasn’t quite his energetic self lately, too much running around after kids. And he consented again without thinking, so much did he love this woman, and he remained patient as the two twin babies were sutured onto his body, hence he could nourish them himself without having to go out of his way. The babes made a sport of pointing and steering him along like pilot fish, and he somehow managed to get along in this way, despite growing thinner and more wan, as nutrients were sucked from his very pith. Until one day, the man simply went belly up. And the mother said to all her hungry ones, Just a moment my babies, I’ll be back with a knife, it’s time you gained your freedom from that thing! And afterwards, she used the man’s leftover parts to make a gentle broth for her babies, who were grown used to that food. The children played with the bones, peering out shyly at visitors from under the archways of ribs. And so they all lived happily in the dead man’s house. .

The desk sergeant thinks he face an enlisted man approaching, dre her husband has been seeing an down to her drooping bouquet w whole appearance speaks eloque sergeant counters: You’re attemp wants no part of you. And then as if to say, You’re a disgrace t woman reflects a moment, stat and this wicked temper. What ha the sergeant says. Lilies are f both, the woman counters, flou furiously. What the Sam Hill are this mortal coil, the woman exp crystals should do the trick! Wel the sergeant scolds, for now yo the ultimate treachery! Not quit sniper rifle from under her w renounce my God, and you s trumpet flowers have started to

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es just another domestic situation— bride of essed in wedding gown, angrily announcing n enemy spy. From her veil and false lashes with colorful ribbons dangling, the woman’s ently of betrayal. But all of a sudden the pting to frame an innocent man, the Army a small monkey steps around his shoulder to all of us, and to your own species. The tes, You’re right—I really can’t trust myself as given me away? The bouquet was a tell, for funerals. Not so!—Calla lilies work for urishing the bouquet and biting into it e you doing? he exclaims. I must shake off plains, and these poisonous calcium oxalite ll then, you’ll fry in hell, Miss Delta Dawn, ou’ve renounced your very essence. That is te, the woman says, slowly pulling out a wedding dress. Before I’m finished, I shall shall, too. Now hurry, please, these silly burn my throat. .

III. Blackledge Road Blackledge Road wound from an abandoned parking lot into the woods. My little family and I followed it as it became dirt and eventually forked into two smaller paths. We were poor and hungry and the situation clearly called for seriousness.

But though I might have wished to express consternation, my facial muscles didn’t seem to contract in that way. My wife was a large and earthy woman, rather domineering. My child, a girl of eleven or twelve with a constant smirk. Perhaps she was a step-daughter by marriage? No, that didn’t seem right. In my heart, I believed she had always been my own. We hadn’t been able to afford to eat at the small restaurant in town. Perhaps it was hunger which had deluded me, but I suggested heading to my relatives’ house for a meal. In truth, my old mother and I had not spoken for years, and I had difficulty remembering anything about her.

When we reached the fork, my wife wanted to turn back. I do not know the source of her enmity towards me. Still, I felt that at the core of our relationship there must be trust of a kind. .

As I left to scout the area, I was drawn to a little clearing. I paused there to think, if thinking were possible. In truth, I felt myself little capable of introspection. Why, when I searched my memory, could I find nothing? How had I ever reached this point where I had become so inept a leader of my family? It was then that a nearby bundle of papers caught my eye. I tore into the binding and read, “I know you will take care of these boys out of your love for my son.” Strange—it was a letter addressed from my old mother to someone named Isis, or Iris. But I remembered then that Iris had been my wife. I peeled another paper off and read. This was a shared holiday letter to a grandmother from two twin boys—my own dear boys. I sat there, remembering all for a moment, until my brain resumed its perpetual fog.

I now held a final document in my hands. It was my diary, which had once recorded my thoughts and dreams down to my last moments on Earth. I knew my family must have become lost and waited in this place for help. I searched around me but saw no unburied bones. Doubtless, an animal had dragged them off long ago. I handed one letter to my distant wife, the other to my sullen daughter. You see, you see what must have happened? I pleaded. It was my fault—forgive me. I don’t wish us to be lost in this forest forever! But the woman angrily tore the paper and flung the traces away. The girl briefly glanced at her letter, a look of confusion on her face. Momentarily, I thought I caught something else there, too, perhaps just a glimmer of recognition or confirmation of a long-held suspicion. The unhappy girl had no time for reflection, however. Her mother took the paper from her hands and began dragging her back the way we had come. No, no, it’s this direction, I said. Now we know the path to follow! But she only glared at me with a look which demanded, Are you coming? I did not respond to her, and she left with the girl. .

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Rose Swartz

Inversion I was looking for you everywhere.

It was dawn here and dusk there.

I hurried through the green double doors, down in the cave where I heard you teaching. The interminable hall ended at your classroom door.

I slouched at the door, as not to interrupt your lecture. Its subject, the myth of the inversion: that one about those lovers who were never awake in the same time or space. There were only two students in the class, twin versions of our younger selves.

I was braiding your hair. You were strumming a small guitar.

In my lap was a book of verse, an unlit cigarette.

I raised my old hand to ask a question. A bell rang inside the cave. The diagram of the myth unfinished, its chalk outline becoming dust. My young twin insisted you finish speaking, but you shook your head— it was late and time for sleep. Your young twin noticed me in the doorway, hand still raised. Do you have a question?

I do. Will you love me when I am old and you are sleeping?

I will, said your old self from behind the lectern. So will I, said your twin, don’t worry. My young self began to cry.

I walked to the front of the room and erased the board with my hands— in it, the dust of your drawing. We embraced and I left two palm prints on the back your dress. Where the wings would go in a different myth. Don’t imagine me as an angel, you said, even if I look sweet asleep. You turned out the light and I rushed back into the day, searching for a newspaper, a toothbrush.

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Rose Swartz

A-frame An A-frame house is the letter inside, a letter I read, a letter I write. It’s begun a hundred times already. A litany, volcanic, from basement to attic. The ink smudged irrevocable, something atrophied in photocopy. Along the left margin, a wing’s begun. At bottom, an action painter’s spasm.

A statement begins we should and ends with a cabin in northern Michigan. The dog I said I’d walk arrives at your place in Oregon. Amicably, the letter asserts, we can live together sometimes, apart all of the others. A frame is a house inside a dream. On the dream-stove in the dream-kitchen is an egg in a frame. We’ve been married there already or again. We jump the broom quite often. Are you aghast or are you beaming? Here you are again, filed in the previous decade, that era of tactile reality, among the abaci and acid-rock, the b-sides, bus rides, and Battleship; before alphabet, before birth, analogous, aubergine, an August afternoon.

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Michael Levan

My Younger Son, M., Dressed for Trick-or-Treat Every day is Halloween. Every day trees’ last hints of dress are cast across front lawn, sidewalk, under the Murphys’ ’56 Fairlane. Each day I close my eyes and see less of my son’s face. There is only the skull with top hat he took from his older brother’s closet and wore three Octobers. White satin tablecloth I cut up, tied around his neck so the mask’s black eyes, dark gaps between its teeth, came at me from some place like snow, but colder.

Every day is another chance to imagine watching him stop his car under a maple, stand on the tracks as a locomotive pulls the bend. I don’t know what will last longer than my memory of being led to the crossing gates, warning lights flashing, tinny clang ticking like a heart, and every day after coming in red leaves that settle over him, clothed in white.

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ting

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Sandi Leibowitz

Lizzie Siddal’s Bl

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lessing

Alive, I served his dreams.

A draught of the poppy granted me release; sleep came as easily as weeping.

And then no more, I thought, would I have to play the muse.

No blessed damozel, I never once leaned down from heaven or peered up from hell, a load of lilies in my arms, stars marring my brow, demanding adoration.

If he pursued my image down death’s dark alleys, it was no concern of mine.

Seven years after my burial when hands reached down into my grave, I felt no surprise— but oh, those hands reached past me, past the hair he loved, my gold-red hair still growing bright about my bones, to raise up to light and life only his abandoned manuscript.

I gave him a gift then, set free into the skull-grey pages a single golden strand of guilt.

Is that me crossing Cheyne Walk?

Do I fly into his hands on chaffinch wings, giggle behind the garden door, shimmer in the gaslight, hover nightly at his bedside?

Neither oculists nor occultists can cure him.

Long may he enjoy my inspiration.

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Contributors

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The Golden Key

LIBBY BURNS is an illustrator and designer based in Des Moines, Iowa. Her work has appeared in Northern Virginia Magazine, Bethesda Magazine, Arlington Magazine, San Diego Magazine, Illustrated Ladies, TheKitchn.com, Vox Magazine, Women Who Draw, Amelia’s Magazine, Drake University’s Blue Magazine, Maker’s Magazine, and more. Visit her online portfolio at http://libbyburns.com.

L. CHAPMAN owns stacks of paperback mysteries. She is at work on her first children’s book, for which she is both writer and illustrator. Her fiction has previously appeared in Lightning Cake.

She says, “I would have to say that my favorite old thing is a collection of wind-up circus animals made by my grandparents.”

KATY GUNN is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama with writing forthcoming from Quarterly West, Devil’s Lake, and Birkensnake.

She says, “An old thing I would be: Jane Marple.”

JANE HERTENSTEIN’S current obsession is flash. She is the author of over 30 published stories, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise, and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Frostwriting, and several themed anthologies. She can be found at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/.

Asked what old thing she would be, she replied, “I’d be a toothbrush, because whether old or new there are always many uses for a toothbrush.”

ADALENA KAVANAGH is a librarian and drummer for psychedelic rock band Early Spring. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Hot Metal Bridge, Kartika Review, and Stumble Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and can be reached at adalenakavanagh.blogspot.com.

“My favorite old thing is the record player. Having to flip a record to the other side gives me a reason to stretch my legs when I’m deep into a story.”

SANDI LEIBOWITZ is a native New Yorker who writes fantasy fiction and verse, often based on myth, folklore, and fairy tales. Her work has appeared in such places as Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Apex, Luna Station Quarterly, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, vol. 5. She has been haunted by the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Rossetti and Burne-Jones, since she was a young girl.

“If I could be any old thing, I would be an antique Arts and Crafts brooch, perhaps amethyst, opal and moonstone with curling silver leaves. I would be an odd thing for years neglected, out of fashion, made from materials too inexpensive to be worth melting down and yet too precious to toss away. In my velvet box I’d wait for just the right person to discover me and exclaim what a marvel I was, how exquisitely wrought, who’d take me from my box and proudly wear me.”

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MICHAEL LEVAN received his MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. Currently he is an Instructor of Writing at California University of Pennsylvania. His work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, and Harpur Palate. He lives in southwest Pennsylvania with his wife, Molly, and son, Atticus.

He says, “My favorite old thing is the previously undeveloped film in garage-sale-found cameras from the 1940s through ‘60s, which spurred this piece, and many others, over the past few years.”

ELSON MEEHAN lives in Carrboro, North Carolina with her husband. Her fiction has appeared in Drunken Boat and Metazen, and she blogs sometimes at elsonmeehan.com.

Her favorite old thing is Pando, an aspen colony the age of which is estimated to be at least 80,000 years.

M.V. MONTGOMERY is a professor at Life University in Atlanta. He is the author of several books, most recently What We Did With Old Moons (2012, poetry) and Beyond the Pale (2013, stories). His author site is mvmontgomery. wordpress.com.

His favorite old thing? “Old books. Especially the unexpected ones you can sometimes discover at a used bookstore where you are allowed to position the rolling ladder under the shelves and climb to the top. Of course, an online search can be exciting too, and less musty.”

DUSTIN PARSONS an Assistant Professor of English at Fredonia State University. He served as nonfiction editor for Mid-American Review for five years and was the recipient of a NYFA Nonfiction grant and an Ohio State Arts Grant in nonfiction. He has work appearing or forthcoming in American Literary Review, Fourth River Review, Seneca Review, and I-70 Review. He lives in Western New York with his wife, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and their two sons.

Asked what old thing he would be, he replied, “I’d be the castle rock formation in western Kansas—a limestone formation left over from the glacial retreat, I’d look like craggly twenty-foot-tall fingers rising up out of the hard pan in the valley of Gove County, Kansas. I’d have been subject to the winds and the elements, blowing small breath-fulls of my self away, for nearly 700,000 years.”

ROSE SWARTZ is a writer and visual artist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She loves to travel and most recently spent six months teaching in Beijing, China. She is currently teaching English at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan and also making prints of the photographs she took while traveling in China and Southeast Asia.

Her writing has previously appeared in Carrier Pigeon Magazine, The Kenyon Review Online, Front Porch Journal, and Asylum Lake Magazine.

She says, “My favorite old thing is a pale green coffee cup that has been sitting upturned on a stick at an artestian spring well out behind my grandfather’s cabin in Northern Michigan. The cup has been there as long as anyone in my family can recall. When visiting the cabin, it is tradition to drink some of the spring water out of the cup (after wiping out the cobwebs, of course).”

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The Golden Key

STAFF EDITORS

Susan Anspach Carlea Holl-Jensen LiAnn Yim COVER ART & ILLUSTRATIONS

Libby Burns DESIGN

LiAnn Yim MASTHEAD ILLUSTRATIONS

Libby Burns WEB DESIGN

Lang Born COLOPHON

Built in Adobe InDesign. Fonts used: Archer, Chokle, and Articulat.

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The Golden Key