Issue 3: Things Unseen by The Golden Key

“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”

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EDITORS’ LETTER

LAWN AND GARDEN

Susan Anspach, Carlea Holl-Jensen, & LiAnn Yim

Caleb José Tardío

MAGICIAN’S FORCE Darcy Shargo

SOMETHING ROTTEN Allison Wyss

THE MUTABLE FIELDS: AN ENSEMBLE Anne Brettell

THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES

PUSH WITH ALL YOUR LOVE KL Pereira

ROSAURA AND THE WELL Michael Luis Dauro

Devon Miller-Duggan

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OCCULT Glen Armstrong

CUT DOWN FROM MY HANGING TREE Sarah Sorensen

CONTRIBUTORS

THE DEATH OF A HAMSTER

Thank you for reading!

Angela Allan

ISSUE ART BY Stacy Nguyen

Issue 3

2013

The Golden Key

Editors' Note H

ow do you write about the invisible world? How do you sketch the outline of an absence, render for the reader what evades perception by the naked eye?

This is the challenge each of our authors takes on in Issue 3: Unseen Things, and each of them offers a different view of what cannot be seen. For some of them, the unseen is something frightening, dangerous in its unknowableness—a bad smell that comes from nowhere, a creature rising up from under the earth. For others, what cannot be seen is a source of wonder—the magician’s sleight-of-hand, or a mysterious transformation. These pieces face the void with humor and delight, bravely and also with regret. They make something out of nothing, a kind of conjuring. They insist on the thing, in all its dimensions, so that no reader can deny its existence. But they also open up space where anything can happen—where ghosts and invisible ink are equally as likely, where the dead do not rest easy, girls develop the power of flight, and a baby might just turn into a plum. We’re excited to feature illustrations by Stacy Nguyen, whose drawings—our first foray into color—capture the close-focus strangeness of these pieces. We’re so glad you could join us for this new issue, which marks the first anniversary of The Golden Key. Thanks to those of you who have supported us so far by reading, submitting, and spreading the word. It’s a pleasure to be bringing you the strangest, most unexpected work we can find, and we look forward to discovering many more wonderful things in the issues to come. Until the next time, you can also support us through a donation, which will be put forward to our goal of being able to pay our writers and artists.

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

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Magician’s Force Darcy Shargo I’ll teach you how to set your heart off like a skiff in rough water. How to exist in the shadows of a top hat, mere audience to your own life. See here the sleight of hand involved in the shuffling— this deck of cards strung to tales of misfortune that I keep taped to my inside pocket. I live as feather, paper bouquet, things that are dissolvable in water. I am only as alive as my deception allows me to be. It’s hard to recall how it all got started, how I ended up here on stage, the quivering saw cutting through a lovely stranger, her eyes themselves tricks of light, her skin and mine together a moving trompe l’oeil.

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The Mutable Fields: An Ensemble Anne Brettell

In an old old house there is a new baby. It cries and shakes until it turns into a plum. When the parents find it in the morning, they sigh and give it a tickle. It remains silent, but they can tell it is amused. Very amused. The dog comes in and licks it. The baby might have laughed but the dog bites it first. After a few weeks, the plum begins to smell. Ants and Japanese beetles and plumeria have crept into the nursery. Infesting, they say. All of the adults in the household—including but not limited to: a butler, a mother, a cook, a canary, a grandmother, a married older brother, a father, a doorman, a gardener—carry what is left of the plum and most especially the pit outside and throw it in the lake. “Plums receive a special kind of magic on contact with freshwater algae,” they read in a thick biology textbook. And it is so. The butler and the cook begin to build a small palace behind the barn, using pieces of dried bread and shoes the dog has chewed beyond walking. They carry out their building treasures at night while the mother and the married brother argue whether “Camembert” is a valid Scrabble play and end up settling on a half-point system. The canary feels that proper nouns are never valid, as a rule, and that the universe does not accept meaningless nomenclature, which is why the canary is relieved to remain nameless. The butler and the cook have not yet decided whether or not to name their palace, which they are imagining to be a paradise of secrets and a place for smells they usually have to rid themselves of in order to be paid. They like the crunch of the stale bread against their skin and the butler likes to imagine smelling places like Jordan and Sao Paulo in the ruined shoes. He knows the “family” travels widely but he isn’t sure which shoes they wear in which countries, so he has had to guess. He hopes the dark leather sandals with the subtle wedge heel have been to Santo Domingo but he has no way of knowing. He smells the coats, too, in order to find more clues.

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The cook doesn’t waste time with other people’s adventures. She watches the lake for exactly 57 minutes every other day, just to make sure the plum isn’t forgotten. The palace grows bigger, but the lake only breaks with the occasional snake. She scrapes sludge from the sides of rocks and tests the pH. She tells the father and the nosy grandmother that it is a spice from the old country. They nod once and change the subject. She bakes the samples and boils them and freezes them. She would like them to glow (or grow)—either one, really. She goes to bed too late, trying to squint her eyes enough to magnify the samples, to change them. She sits slumped in bed, too tired to make love to the butler and it’s getting old anyhow. The gardener has already made her an offer that she considered for an entire hour before dismissing. The pH sticks have begun to clog the disposal. She dreams that the entire earth is covered with vines that tangle between her toes and she trips of course but for her tripping, the vines begin to flower, as if they were laughing. In the mornings, she soft-boils eggs for the grandmother, who sucks the yolk out with her gums— teeth lying on a china saucer placed directly in front of her juice glass. The sucking sound reminds her to check the lake and also to wear old shoes. The grandmother tries to tell her things between ladylike sips of orange juice, but the cook isn’t listening. She tries to make a song out of the whistling sound coming from the grandmother’s mouth. The grandmother is trying to educate her on the need to eject the married older brother from the manor. “He has gotten too cozy,” she repeats. He glares at her as if this word upsets his cereal bowl. He makes sure to scrape his spoon along the sides of the bowl in order to show his complete indifference. His wife has not called in approximately 39 hours, but he isn’t worried. He makes sure to mention her name an appropriate number of times a day in conversation, just to make sure that no one believes him to be too lonely or too happy while she is in India. He is presumably learning Bengali in the small guestroom on the third floor but no one has heard him chanting lists of verbs for some time. The cook likes his breakfast habits, though, because he is easy and mostly mute, and she wishes more humans could operate in this manner. Sometimes the rain makes the palace sag in places that are mostly bread and the butler surreptitiously tempts the dog with newer and newer shoes. The palace now smells like 43 separate countries, according to his calculations. The cook sighs and throws more bread into the lake. She ties some of the bread to the rocks and watches it turn green. Algae. She threads together a net the size of the kitchen counter and rows it out to the middle of the lake. She throws it there and anchors it with a dull knife. She spends the rest of the afternoon rowing in circles around the net, watching birds swoop down to peck small pieces on their way north. As she reaches the shore and steps from the boat, a breeze pulls juneberry blossoms into the water. As she reaches out to touch one, it happens. Her palm glows, faintly like a tiny strike of lightning has run along her right hand’s “line of fate.” She blinks and returns to the main house, leaving the old shoes in the bottom of the boat. The mother is helplessly trying to tie the legs of a skinned calf together in the kitchen, peering into the oven and taking measurements with her hands. She crawls inside and picks out burnt pieces of food, throws them into the sink, and continues to size up the calf. She delicately handles the meat cleaver with her left hand, but she never raises it more than six inches from the counter. The cook places the cleaver in her hand and points to the head: “Useless,” she says. The mother hacks it off and then steps out for a cigarette. — The mother is standing still, trying to mask her heavy breathing with overlarge drags on the cigarette. She used to imagine she was in a magazine advertisement for {insert expensive name brand women’s cigarette here}, registering to vote or driving a convertible with a girlfriend or a Labrador or a box of expensive chocolates in the passenger’s seat. The smell on her fingers at least saves her from biting her nails. This, though, satisfies her sense of consistency and she stubs out the long filter with

The Golden Key

the thin high heel of her shoe. As she looks down, she notices specks of blood on the front of her skirt. She walks back into the house through the front door and decides not to change. As she enters the foyer, however, the wallpaper isn’t the same as yesterday. Yesterday, it was sky blue with thin gold vines growing up toward the ceiling. They were so thin, you couldn’t see them in dim light. Today, it is a dark deep mauve with equally dark green leaves. The leaves float around in the purply surface, seemingly unattached to anything. The chandelier is, of course, gone and has been replaced with a gas lantern that has been made to look older than it really is. She calls out to be sure she hasn’t lost her way in the 124 seconds it took her to walk from the back door to the front. A voice doesn’t answer, but a small whistling sound begins shortly after she half shouts, “Hello? Is today Tuesday? I might be mixed up.” The canary appears from under one of her dressiest hats, as if he has been trying it on. He gives her a look of disdain. “Well, where is everyone?” The canary picks up the hat in its tiny pink claws and laboriously flies up the stairs. The mother decides to follow, at a distance of three feet, just in case. The family is gathered in the powder room, which has also changed its shape. The father and the gardener are questioning a well-dressed gentleman with slicked-back hair. Or possibly the hair was blown backwards from a long drive in a convertible. He looks utterly confused. The mother assumes he speaks Spanish or French because he looks like he could be the suave killer at a murder mystery dinner. “Did you CliMb through the WIN-dow?,” the father asks, in an odd intonation. “WHY aRe your SHOES wet?” asks the gardener, pointing at the floor. The man looks down and shuffles his foot across the burgundy shag carpet. His black-socked toe protrudes from a hole in the shoe and looks like a beetle scuttling across the floor. They all go to the window to look for signs of a break-in. “Grandmother found him here,” the father whispers to the mother. “He hasn’t spoken and he won’t tell us where he’s going.” The mother thinks the man doesn’t really look as though he’s in a hurry to leave and decides not to reply. The man points to a row of trees next to the house, but he looks disappointed. “You climbed a tree? To climb into the window?” the married older brother offers. The cook arrives and walks right up to the well-dressed man, her nose inches from his right ear. She inhales a long while, a jar of pond sludge tucked under the crook of her arm. She opens the jar and confirms the smell. He looks positively delighted to see the jar and puts his finger in the water. He offers it to each person in the room, in turn.

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The Twelve Dancing Princesses Devon Miller-Duggan I. My boatman’s hands are Like the silver branches. They tremble in the witchlight And shiver on my skin. II. It was my bed that hid The door, and all those years I fretted about monsters, falling Into slime and the cobwebs’ catch. All those years I knew there was Something besides shoes. III. My boatman’s eyes are gold as leaves On goldroot trees, lit Without a moon in the obsidian sky. “Follow.” IV. It should have been my bed. I’m never afraid of the dark, Cold stone, strangers, water. And Under my bed is neat. I even keep The ribbons of my slippers rolled And tucked into my slipper toes, Safe from the teeth of mice.

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IX. The music rises from the ground Through leather slipper soles, Slipper satin, stocking silk, and skin, To lend my legs the dance. And I keep to my toes.

V. On the first step my skin Woke to the slip and whisper of Silk against my legs. On the second step my skin Ruffled and danced With petticoats I’d never worn.

X. Someone will know. A maid Will find the seam in the floor, Though we can’t. My dress Will catch a diamond twig, Or one of us grow careless Humming or dancing in daylight, then The spell will dissolve and We’ll be common as Twelve daughters in an heirless kingdom.

VI. When the bed stood back To open up a country That’s ours alone, without alliances or hours, My breath stood in my body, Still for the enchanter’s air Breathing for me. VII. My ribbons come untied No matter How I cross and bow the silk. My hair unbraids, combed down Combed down by silver Fingers out of night as I run to the lake.

XI. My boatman’s grey, The others shine. His hands curl on me Faster than the music runs. His eyes are falcon yellow. His lips are red as fruit.

VIII. He watched my sisters go to all the other Boats and never Looked at me. The others’ poles slide In the lake and In without ripples. My Boatman stabs the water— Rings slap Back to shore.

XII. Each night the dance contains more steps, More turns. Each night My boatman’s arm tightens on my waist. Each night I feel the floor whirr, My slippers thin, My gown flies farther as I turn. I want a man who speaks.

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A Brief History of the Occult Glen Armstrong Enclosed are my regrets that I will not be attending the sĂŠance. You will notice that I wrote them in lemon juice on parchment thick enough to resist a bit of heat. Or if you have not noticed this, hold the paper above your candle flame. Careful. It took a little practice for the masters of this Victorian parlor trick to get the blank page close enough to the flame without catching it on fire. Warm the parchment without igniting it, and sticky, brown script will appear as if from my own invisible hand, as if from the world beyond.

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The Death of a Hamster Angela Allan

I met Satan under a blanket. It was around the time I started thinking I could change red lights to green with my mind. I’d decided that my brain had unusual power, and that even if most people couldn’t see the devil or halve the time of their daily commute, I was different. This was also around the time that I practiced what I called ‘radical empathy’: frequent attempts to understand others’ perspectives by copying their behavior. On that day in particular I was crawling around under a blanket in order to empathize with my hamster. Just when I began to understand what Bugsy liked about blanket-world, I saw two red eyes peering back at me and recognized the biblical villain. He kissed me. His breath was pleasantly warm and recognizable, and he traced all kinds of beautiful designs in my mouth with his forked tongue. Pretty soon we were clutching each other and twisting around, engaged in the kind of passionate make-out session you’d expect from sixteen-year-olds in the back of a Volkswagen Rabbit. I didn’t tell him that I was thirty years old and married—we didn’t have to wade through any small talk because I correctly assumed his omniscience. The make-out session turned rough and when we finished kissing I had indentations all over my skin, claw marks from his desperate, loving nails. My mouth felt soggy, and, remembering why I was under the blanket in the first place, I mumbled “Bugsy.” “Who’s Bugsy?” the devil hissed. “My hamster,” I answered. I heard a little squeak and smelled smoke. The devil had incinerated Bugsy with his mind. “You’re terrible,” I whispered. “I like it.” The blanket, the warm, dark hider of sin, was yanked off with a swoosh by my husband. With the rage of a cuckold, he grabbed Satan by the horns and brought him to his hooves. Then he punched him repeatedly in the face until Satan was bleeding from his nose and both eyes. Satan didn’t fight back, just glanced down at me sadly as if to say, “Sorry about your hamster’s premature cremation.” I recalled the swirls of his forked tongue on the insides of my cheeks and wished I’d never thought of radical empathy. “I’m going to forgive you,” my husband said later that night. “But only because it was the devil.” The devil had been taken to the emergency room, and my husband faced assault charges, but when the devil disappeared in a puff of smoke on the operating table, the charges were dropped. “If you had gone to jail, I would’ve stayed by your side 24/7,” I said to my husband. “I would’ve sat outside your cell and fed you minestrone through the bars.” “Jail doesn’t work like that,” my husband replied. “You can only come during visiting hours.” The next day my husband went to work and I was back under the blanket with Satan. This time we didn’t make out, just pinched each other’s nipples with clothespins he made hot with his breath. He was surprisingly hairless except for a happy trail, and I didn’t venture under his flame-printed underwear because I was scared of what might happen if I touched the devil’s dick. The next week my husband noticed that Bugsy was gone and asked what had happened. “Why did it take you so long to realize?” I asked. “He died a whole week ago.” “What did you do?” my husband asked. “Bury him? Flush him down the toilet?” “It doesn’t matter,” I answered, pouty-faced. “It was a whole damn week ago.” The devil didn’t come anymore after that because I lost the power to conjure him with my mind. I couldn’t

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change stoplights anymore either, which ironically made my husband suspicious because it took me twice as long to get home from work. “Don’t you remember when it used to take me this long?” I asked him. But he shook his head no and went back to his book. What I didn’t know then is that even if I couldn’t conjure the devil, he could still conjure me. Down in his fiery hell, he pulled a wool quilt over himself and hallucinated my presence with enormous mental force. On the nights when this happened I could feel the echoes of his forked tongue all up and down my thighs, and I scratched them so much my husband thought we had bedbugs. “We have to wash the sheets in boiling water,” he insisted. “That’s the only way to get them out.” “Maybe they’re not there,” I said. “Can you see any?” “You can’t see bedbugs,” he answered. “And why else would you scratch at night?” The devil’s forked tongue licks came when I was at work sometimes, and my colleagues noticed me twisting uncomfortably in my chair. “What’s wrong?” Rhonda whispered at break time. “Do you have a yeast infection? An STD?” “No,” I answered. “It’s just restless leg syndrome. It runs in the family.” My husband heard “restless leg syndrome” from Rhonda later at a party, and asked why I’d never mentioned it to him. He immediately recalled the bedbug scenario and wondered if it wasn’t psychosomatic. “Psychosomatic is exactly what it was,” I answered. “Then why did you make me wash the sheets in boiling water?” “You did that yourself, because you thought we had bedbugs.” At home, we stopped making love as regularly. Sometimes I’d imagine his eyes turning red and I’d shudder. Maybe the first time it had just been him in a devil mask; maybe he had sent himself to the emergency room and that’s why the charges were dropped. I only thought of these things when I was halfway between dreaming and awake. Those were the scariest times, the times I was most susceptible to the devil’s capture. I started doing math problems in my head to avoid daydreams—he couldn’t conjure me if I was doing square roots. Weeks of math problems, and I began to think I had defeated him. But then my husband started itching at his thighs. “You can’t take him hostage!” I whispered to the devil at night. “I’ll stop doing math, just let Sam go!” But the next day I came home and Sam was under the blanket, moaning. The blanket was the portal—how could I have forgotten? And when Satan zapped me to dust, it didn’t hurt like I’d thought it would. That made me feel less sorry for poor Bugsy.

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Lawn and Garden Caleb José Tardío

The empty white box of a house across the street from mine, with its deteriorating facade and exposed joints, became occupied by a family to match: the Mitchels were a patriarch with deep-set eyes and a thick mustache the color of TV noise, a wraith-mother, a daughter in her twenties (a wraith-in-training), and Bobby. Bobby was thirteen like me. He had sleep in his eyes, a perpetual scab over the bridge of his nose, and was flat in every way. The Mitchels dressed like computer technicians of the seventies—the women only wore long khaki skirts, the men only slacks. Bobby’s sister had gray hairs already. Bobby’s room: a cell that was mostly empty since his toys were kept in his parents’ room for safekeeping. Bobby’s only privilege was that he could hang out with me, only me. His parents approved of me; my parents pitied him. Twice a week I would find him waiting for me when I got home from school, sometimes loitering in our undomesticated garden, often with soiled fingers. We spent most of our time at my house, because of the customs and regulations at Bobby’s, and because of the trenchant odor of fertilizer. I introduced Bobby to comic books and he received them like a revelation, except for Swamp Thing, the sight of which made him cringe and cough. Comics adequately occupied the silent ebb left after we’d exhausted the questions that adolescent boys ask one another. I asked him if he went to church. He looked away from me. “My parents—,” he said, reciting, “we worship the nameless, eyeless, subterranean god whose herald is the tower-worm.” That is the only thing I remember him saying. One night, blue and red strobes cycled across Bobby’s house and I never saw him again. Some neighbors told us (as we stood on the Mitchels’ remarkably empty porch, glimpsing into the hollow home) they heard young screams; Bobby’s dad was led away through their parched and scratching lawn, almost smiling, in handcuffs. Several days later, I came home from school and found in our yard (and ours only) certain worms like I’d never seen, standing erect out of the ground like tendrils abandoning the earth. The ground was dry, but smelled a feast of iron and nitrogen. I looked up and saw a green-black silhouette framed in the bay window. It had knotted, wooden, elephantine shoulders from which protruded an oblong pillar of stone: its sightless face was striped with phosphorous and sulfur. The worms danced when I came near. I began running, choking, to the neighbor with the wilted face, where I dialed 911 and screamed into the mouthpiece. When the police arrived, they found my folks asleep in their clothes, and all our houseplants uprooted. There was soil in every room, but more in mine. Explanations were mouthed, but they didn’t know. Nobody knew why they let Bobby play with me, only me.

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Something Rotten

Allison Wyss

As the moving van pulled away, she stood on the front lawn and pictured the tulips she would plant along the flowerbeds and underneath the windows. He saw himself hammering together a swing set in the backyard. They both thought of the extra bedroom to fill in their new house as they walked through the front door, holding hands. But as soon as the door clicked shut behind them, she noticed a strange smell. It poked out from beneath the expected dust and mildew. If it had a color, she thought, it would be a brownish, mucousy green. “You’re paranoid,” he joked, reaching a hand under her shirt and tickling her rib cage. She squealed, flashed a finger from her mouth to his ear, then squirmed out of his grasp.

“There’s definitely something rotten in here,” she said and lifted her nose into the air. Over the next few days, as they stripped away the dirt and mold, the underlying odor grew more prominent. Soon, he noticed it, too. He thought it came from the kitchen. Maybe sour milk in the refrigerator, a dead mouse behind the stove, or rotting cabbage in the drain trap. She scrubbed both bathrooms until she saw her reflection in the porcelain. Then she rented a steamer and cleaned all of the carpets. But the problem only got worse. A faint egginess clung to her eyelashes. For him, the stench curdled into a sickly sweet headache behind his eyes. It would ooze down to his sinuses if he stayed too long in the morning, so he rushed out quickly, showering before the water got hot and knotting his tie on the highway. He made enough money now that she could stay home, so every day she fought with the odor. After a few hours, it would turn into a faint nausea that she cradled in her stomach. It rocked back and forth throughout the day, so that she was always close to vomiting. Instead of hanging the curtains, she threw them out, along with the bedding, even though they were wedding gifts and had not come with the house. She washed all of their clothes repeatedly. “Hey, I think it’s getting better,” he would say, pretending not to hold his breath, as he stepped through the front door after work. But she was never fooled. “Don’t lie to me.” She scrubbed the walls until they squished like wet diapers. The air got thicker with the smell. It settled, bile-like, on the backs of their tongues and burned their throats when they breathed. She spread his shoes out in the yard and sprayed them with the garden hose. Her own footwear she drove to a remote location and sniffed scientifically until she was sure each pair was safe. He tried bringing home fresh flowers every day, but they withered quickly in the infectious air. Instead of planting bulbs, she tossed the dried-up petals out of the windows and into the empty flowerbeds. She did not get around to any of the re-decorating she had planned, so the “Early Spring Green,” “Sunshine,” and “Young Passionfruit” cans of paint sat untouched in the garage along with the train stencils and bunny wallpaper border, which collected equal amounts of dust. He saw no point in assembling the furniture they’d picked out for the extra bedroom, so it also lay stacked in the garage, flat-packed in cardboard boxes. His toolbox bulged with hammers, nails, screws, but he never opened it. The fumes wafted into a yolky, sticky shimmer in the air. Nothing was clean or fresh anymore; the odor left a film on the coffee table. She started wearing her rubber gloves to bed, keeping a spray bottle always on her nightstand. Vicks VapoRub almost blocked the stench, and so he smeared it on his chest every night. Their love life grew very bleak and so she found a job after all. Still, every evening and weekend they would both clean and scrub and it never seemed to change except now they fought as they cleaned. “You did that on purpose.” He accused her of tripping him with the cord to the steamer, which they had purchased. She yelled when he left appliances in the middle of the floor. “Damn you and your damn refrigerator.” To escape for a few hours, he would shop for cleaning supplies. Every weekend he drove farther and farther in search of stronger bleaches and sharper scrub brushes. He started to wonder if the stink was coming from her and then he worried that it was actually himself. She thought about whether it could be her husband who smelled and then became convinced that it was actually herself. Eventually they both knew that even if the stench had not started with them, it was a part of them now. Foul vapors poofed from his crotch and from his armpits. A sulfurous mist curled off the end of her long, slinky ponytail. They stopped fighting as they cleaned. They stopped swearing and pretty much stopped talking to each other altogether. But they scrubbed side-by-side and found a rhythm in their cleaning. One Sunday they were scrubbing the walls in the extra bedroom. She started to the right of the door and he to the left and they were working their way around to meet across the room. Both of them used the same circular strokes, the same three-squirt, two-wipe pattern. She felt the hard lump in her stomach tighten and turn over. The sugary pain behind his eyeballs twisted into something sharp and stabbing. As they drew closer and closer to whatever was making their lives so miserable, both of them knew, no matter how they labored, they would never find it, never expel it from their lives. Instead, the stench hovered invisibly between them, holding them together.

Push With All Your Love KL Pereira

Listen, the first time you fly is unlike anything else—it is falling so fast the air burns your cheeks and it is the tight knot in your chest because you do not yet trust the air to hold you, because you do not yet know that now it is only up to you to save yourself. You do not yet understand your wings, black and webbed, bursting through your thin winter coat. The membranes of your new skin are too thin, you think, because you don’t know it as the strongest part of you, nor do you understand how to love this new part of yourself. You still hold the past in your hands, unable to let it drop from the sky. — The Golden Key

I knew our father meant to feed us to the Spirit. He sputtered round and round for days, spitting Gospel backwards, bloodying his fists against the walls. Mother had hidden all the guns, the knives, forgetting that one doesn’t need weapons to kill, not when there are arms to twine and teeth to tear flesh. We were alone in that dark country. And even if anyone could have helped, Mother was too proud to have allowed it. We licked butter from our own dirty fingers when there was no bread and watched as she butchered our milk cow, Delilah, rather than beg meat from the neighbors. Father sat in a corner licking fly paper, picking pests off the tacky strip and grinding them between his broken teeth, ignorant to any hunger but his own. The worst that our father had done was not to try to kill us. His mercy was never that kind, not until, of course, the Spirit possessed him. Then he stopped defiling us, and was concerned only with abusing his own body, pressing his pocket blade into his skin until the words of his master covered his flesh. I was not fooled. His violence would not taper. How could it when that was all he was made of? I followed him into the woods that day, not because I gave up protecting myself, protecting us, but because I made up my mind to kill him. The rage in my blood had boiled so long, I could not distinguish it from the rest of me. It grew blacker, harder, as if one morning I would wake to find it twisting from my bones like thorns. We trekked for hours. He sang the backward psalms of his Spirit and spun us in circles, hoping, I think, to disorient me enough so that if I ran, I would never reach home again, that I would perish of starvation, animal attack, exposure. Yet how could these kill me when they hadn’t already? We climbed to the caves, loose dirt rivering around our feet in currents as we pushed higher up the slopes. He panted and sweat steamed off him like he was already on fire but with each step, my body grew lighter, as if I floated on an ocean, a sea of blue (though my body had never seen such a sea). When we reached the hole, neither of us said a word. Falling was almost the most beautiful thing I had ever felt. My body was so light—even the cracking of my bones did not feel bad. And when my flesh split open and the blood left it in a great rush, a sigh descended over me, a relief, a balm. I was cushioned on blackness, not the loam or mud at the bottom of the pit, but a web, hard yet buoyant, that grew from my arms, that burst through the worn wool of my coat until the cloth rent and fell like an apron over my shoulders. How did these wings feel? Hidden for so long yet new, they were part of me; they fit me and felt like they had been with me forever. I discerned no suture, felt no strange or cumbersome new appendage—they were as mine as were my legs and breasts and head. But the wings belonged to me yet more, having come only from me, having never been touched by another’s hand. I did not get to marvel at their unfolding, their flap and glide, not yet. I knew what I must do, knew that only I could save my sisters. We would wing and soar later, later, when we were together. Back at the farm, our father was easily done. The Spirit abandoned him the moment he stepped off the chair, and as his bowels released and shins twitched the last of his life out, his eyes were remorseless brown flecks. I let him swing. In a moment he was joined by our mother, who did not cry for him, or for herself. The fear, the love that lived in my sisters’ eyes, was broken, aggregated as a likeness in a shattered mirror. I wished I could carry you all away at once, though I never promised you that. You would never have believed it. Instead I dressed you, my next youngest sister, in an old coat of mine, one that had seemed too big only days before, so much, if you remember, we stuffed the elbows and shoulders with straw. You seemed to have grown since our father led me away, your spine straightened, your eyes calm, light. I kissed your mouth and took your hands and led you away. The currents of dirt continued to flow down the hills we climbed together and with each step, the air seemed to whisper in our ears, songs of country death and life. And when we reached the hole, I pushed with all my love. I did not wait for you to soar up, to ascend through the pines into the sea of blue sky, though I knew that you would. We had other sisters to attend to, after all.

Issue 3

Rosaura and the Well Michael Luis Dauro From a square plot of clothesline, white sheets hang like walls of limestone. Soaked in moonlight the sheets glow like the peeled skin of a luminous onion, pinned to the lines by some mad vesper. Yet the steam that rises carry the scents of a sleeping city: of jasmine, burnt pork, pollen, diesel. Behind the sheets a shadow paces the four corners. A woman trapped in well. She tests the walls with the tips of her fingers. Light pours from the sheets, splashing first about her ankles, then rising to her knees, the well flooding with the opal waters of moon to her open mouth. It lights up her skull like a paper lamp. The moonlight swells in currents, shudders below her, tucks in and crashes over her, pulls her down and pools in her lungs. As she struggles, the four sheets that wall her in simply ripple and flutter. What if I told you that with a snap of two fingers upon the head of a clothespin, I did save her? That the water that poured onto the ground spun the soil into brooks of rusted sea foam? What if I told you that no gasping shadow, no sunken woman washed to my feet, but a nightgown soaked in moonlight?

The Golden Key

Issue 3

Cut Down from My Hanging Tree

Sarah Sorensen

For Aunt Pam, who was as nine-lived as any cat. Wish you hadn’t spent them so fast.

They hung me high, but it didn’t take. I cut myself down with an old switchblade shoved inside my glove and walked into town that same night. “It didn’t take,” I said. But they all thought I was just the specter of myself. I could have been and I might still be. I saw the moon that night and it was like none other, a big yellow calloused-looking moon. That moon doesn’t care if I hang or if I cut free and run, I thought. That moon has no judgment. It’s not much but a light in the sky, pockmarked by its time and fate, like me, like you, and like everyone. I got out my blade and freed myself. It felt good to walk in the cool damp air, choked as I was and hurt over the purple welt around my neck. They hung me high and told the town I was dead and the whole town just milled away. Said I was guilty of perversion, arson, and abuse of substances. Said I was nobody’s friend and nothing much would come of me. Said I was best dragged from my home and hung up like a white star to jerk my dance against the sky. They set out the scaffolding and placed folding chairs around the field and a punch bowl and sandwiches. It looked like a cheap wedding for a knocked-up girl on her folks’ lawn. But I lived to lie in that clammy grass, and to drink the thin remains of their watery alcohol Kool-Aid punch. I lived. Take that, motherfuckers. They hung me, but it didn’t stop the troubles I’d let them all in for, the mayhem I’d created. It was me that burnt down the old tavern on the west end of town, but you know I wasn’t trying so hard to do it. It just sort of happened and the flames caught their rhythm fast and I just stepped away. I led out the last of the patrons and we all stood together in the lot and let her burn. It was a cigarette, a mistake. We all held our drinks and took a breath. A cool IPA helps me think clearer, helps me keep a Zen mind and an open heart. And it was me that slept with old man Peterson’s spinster daughter. Her skin felt like bruised peaches and she tasted like sadness and oatmeal. I loved her a little and for a time. She liked my boots and my hands that are large for a woman. She liked my little gifts that I brought her—the drugstore jewelry box with the little dancer inside, the flowers I picked out of her own yard. Peterson thought that I was just a girlfriend and really I suppose we might still call it that. I drank up his gin without his permission too. What of it? Well, he came to watch me hang. I guess he thought he saw a pretty good show. As to the other intoxicants, what can I say? I said yes when I should have said no? It doesn’t change much to deny it. Guess you’ve heard all that before. But here I am, still walking this town. Still leaning into the same taverns and drinking down the same beers. I can’t quite catch if they see me and neither can they. None of us can say if I am real, least of all me. But I know that I am here. I sat down at the river’s edge and felt the water run over my feet. I plucked an apple off the Schillers’ tree and it still tasted tart and wet and sweet. I am still out walking this town and I hope that if you can see me you will take the chance and tip your hat. I want to see if you still know me. Issue 3

Contributors

The Golden Key

ANGELA ALLAN was born in the Philippines. She likes to eat rambutan and poke at dead jellyfish with sticks. Her previous work has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the Best of Smokelong Anthology. If she could make anything visible? “People’s bones. Everyone would be an animated X-ray, with sort of vague, transparent skin. It would be both macabre and anatomically educational.”

GLEN ARMSTRONG holds an M.F.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He also edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. If Glen were invisible, he’d probably just hang out quietly in the studio while Tom Waits records his next record, taking mental notes, soaking it all in.

ANNE BRETTELL is a mostly poet who lives, teaches, and mostly writes in Alabama. She is the current poetry editor of the Black Warrior Review and an MFA candidate. “I would love to sneak into people’s houses in order to hang out in their attics. I think an attic is the best place to snoop and gather writerly material. Closets, too.”

MICHAEL LUIS DAURO was born in Long Island, New York. He received his M.F.A. from Indiana University and continues to live in Bloomington where he works, writes and tutors at an after-school program. This selection is taken from his epic poem, Sierra Amnezia. His work has appeared in At Length, Poets Weave, La Fovea, and is forthcoming in Toe Good Poetry. He is a Ten Club member and a CantoMundo fellow. “First reported in the aftermath of the Great Easter Flood of 1913, many Indiana residents have reported sightings of mysterious cloud taxis, fleets of phantom gondolas, that row across the skies of our once-sunken towns. On the anniversary of this devastating flood, these invisible gondoliers hold races in the moonlit sky-ways. I would want to see these races, their banners, their faces as they sing their vernal hymns.”

DEVON MILLER-DUGGAN has published in Rattle, Kestrel, and Gargoyle and won a few more or less respectable awards. She teaches creative writing at The University of Delaware. Pinning the Bird to the Wall (Tres Chicas Books, 2008) is her first book. Neither Prayer, Nor Bird, a chapbook, is due out in fall 2013 from Finishing Line Press. “Were I to be invisible, I suspect I’d behave rather badly, spending all my time sabotaging planet-damaging corporations and writing poems I love on walls and sidewalks everywhere. If I could make anything visible, I’d probably go for motives.”

STACY NGUYEN is a graphic/web designer, illustrator, and writer working in Seattle. She is a former news editor and the current editorial consultant for Northwest Asian Weekly, the oldest Pan-Asian weekly still in print on the West Coast. Her illustrations have won awards from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. Stacy earned her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.

Issue 3

KL PEREIRA likes to traipse around the dark, woody crevices where most would rather not wander. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming via Deathless Press, Innsmouth Free Press, Jabberwocky, Mythic Delirum, and other fantastic publications. Chat with KL about monsters, music, and fairy tales on Twitter (@ kl_pereira) and keep up with the enveloping darkness on her website (darknesslovescompany.com). Asked what invisible thing she would make visible, she replied, “I would make souls visible. I think they’d present themselves just like Baudelaire’s chimeras–each enveloping us with their enormity, both beautiful and terrifying as they bore “witness but no despair” to our darkness and humanity.”

DARCY SHARGO lives and works in central Maine, where she and her husband dream of leaving the grind behind to start a small farm. In the meantime, she fights massive amounts of mother guilt, writes poems, gardens, and tries to become the person she’s meant to be. Her poetry has appeared in Smartish Pace, The New Orleans Review, Salt Hill and Crazyhorse. Asked if she could make anything visible, she said, “I’d like to see a visual representation of the soul manifest on everyone’s chest—and I’d pay special attention to the souls of children, which I feel confident are the most vibrant of all.”

SARAH SORENSEN has most recently been published in decomP, The Boiler Journal, and Blaze Vox. She holds an M.A. in English from Central Michigan University and is currently at work on her first novel. She is also at work on her thesis for a second M.A. in Film Theory and Criticism. When asked what she would do if she could turn invisible, she replied, “Spy. I would spy, pure and simple. I love to people watch, but do not enjoy being watched.”

CALEB JOSÉ TARDÍO lives in Denver, Colorado. He studied English Literature and Philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he received an award for his story “The Cubist” and a scholarship for his essay on Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy. This is his first published story. If he were invisible—he would stay in your house and move your furniture around; stack it up in corners and lay tables on their sides.

ALLISON WYSS grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, earned an MFA from the University of Maryland, and now lives in Minneapolis. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in [PANK] Magazine, Metazen, Southeast Review, MadHat (The Mad Hatters’ Review), and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. She’s also working hard on a novel. It’s a freaking beast. Asked what invisible thing she would make visible, she answered, “Every time I leave the house, my keys become invisible. I wish they would stop that.”

The Golden Key

Issue 3

Staff EDITORS

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

Stacy Nguyen DESIGN

LiAnn Yim MASTHEAD ILLUSTRATIONS

Libby Burns WEB DESIGN

Lang Born COLOPHON

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