Issue 4: Hungry Things

“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 08 10 12 14 16 24

EDITORS’ LETTER

Susan Anspach, Carlea Holl-Jensen, & LiAnn Yim

FOLKTALE

34 36 38

Elizabeth Bodi

MR. GIBBERS, GROCERIES, THE PROBLEM WITH EXES

Cathleen Calbert

LETTER FROM THE VELVET DITCH #4

Danielle Sellers

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

ANDREI

Matt Jones

Ranylt Richildis

PETAL-EATER

42

HUNGER—THE WITCH HAS A PURPOSE

44

THE BAKU’S BRIDE

46

Lutivini Majanja

THE PERILS OF FORBIDDEN DELICACIES

48

David Elsensohn

Liz Kay

Jon David Stroud

Sara Cleto

SOME TO NOTHING

Matilda Young

GONE THE GREAT DARK

Matilda Young

WRETCHES

HOW GRETA CAME TO BELONG

SOUL HARVEST

CHESTNUT

54

28

RAW VEGETABLES ON THE GO

Rhonda Eikamp

56

Skye Shirley

32

EATING GAME Danielle Sellers

58

Find them elsewhere

26

Elizabeth Bodi

ISSUE ART BY by Jen Muir

Hillary Joubert

AUDUBON

CONTRIBUTORS

Issue 4

2014

06 THE GOLDEN KEY

Editors' Note W

e called, and all manner of hungry creatures answered.

This fourth issue is The Golden Key’s largest compilation of work to date, a testament to the quality of work we received–and the rate at which we received it. A rush of entries flooded our inbox within the first hours of our submission period, in a charge that felt something akin to this issue’s theme: eager, nibbling, determined.

As always, we are honored to indulge in the findings with you.

Some of the hunger within is overt, lascivious. Hunger bolts from the gate with slobbering jowls and insatiable canines in Lutivini Majanja’s short story, “Wretches.” In Cathleen Calbert’s trio of poems, it saunters grocery store aisles, openly sizing up cuts of meat. Other strains of hunger are more delicate, less familiar. Can hunger be beautiful? So it can, as demonstrated by Rhonda Eikamp in her story, “Raw Vegetables on the Go.” What of exacting hunger? Elizabeth Bodi crafts a fine and peculiar exploration of the variation in her poem, “Chestnut.”

These short stories and poems summon fervor, longing, an appetite. They sharpen our senses, alert us to new flavors and textural compositions. They are hungry, but not blindly so—these pieces sink into their hunger to bring forward the colors, smells and shapes of a craving, lending new depths and dimensions to a basic, universal, and unifying condition.

Many thanks to our illustrator Jen Muir, who created the colorful, magical imagery for this issue, and to our 15 contributors of short stories and poems. And thank you for your support in reading The Golden Key. If you are able, please consider supporting us through a donation. All proceeds are put toward our goal of being able to pay our contributors.

— Susan Anspach, Carlea Holl-Jensen, and LiAnn Yim June 2014

07 ISSUE 4

“A woman curls inside the warm belly of a tiger...”

08 THE GOLDEN KEY

Folktale Elizabeth Bodi

I. A woman curls inside the warm belly of a tiger, eaten for refusing a toll of two sticky rice cakes.

Too greedy, the tiger is now on its way to the woman’s house where her two children play.

II. My mom comes home one day from a fortuneteller’s. I imagine purple turbans and tarot cards, but there was only an old Asian woman in her living room with a perm and culottes. She reads my mother’s palm and tells her that she’ll be rich, healthy, et cetera.

III. They deny the tiger entrance, though it claims to be their mother. Undeterred, the tiger paints its paw white with rice powder, to fool them; they are skeptical of whether or not it belongs.

IV. In kindergarten, my best friend tells me to be a ballerina. In first grade, I say I want to be a writer. When she asks me why, I tell her because I’m a liar.

V. This is when they let the tiger with its mother-belly in.

VI. The fortuneteller says my father will cheat on her. Even though she knows this is ridiculous, she tells him in a tone that is tinted slightly with fear. Even though I know this is ridiculous, I already feel sympathy for my mother.

VII. The stars take pity on the children and throw down sturdy rope ladders.

They climb to the sky – one becomes the sun, the other the moon.

The tiger is also given a ladder, but it is frayed and weak. He and the mother fall to the earth, bloodying a millet field.

VIII. Mom used to tell me stories that bewildered me until I realized they were not hers. The only tigers she had seen were at the zoo. Sometimes, we are both liars.

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Mr. Gibbers, Groceries, The Problem with Exes Cathleen Calbert

Mr. Gibbers Of ex-husbands the Lady Vampire has but one: a goblin, from the north country, by the name of Harry Leopold Gibbers. He’d charmed her with his drum-playing and his ravenous appetite for oral sex (the giving, not the getting). She felt for the first time in her life like a drumstick, like a delectable chicken breast, like the whole luscious fryer. But so too did he slobber over plates of brown food, first thing in the morning to boot. She shuddered over her dark cup at the sound of bones cracking between his strong teeth and his tongue slurping up mud-colored gravy. Otherwise, he occupied himself with shouting at sports programs, as if these meant something, and pounded his meaty fist on the table over misjudgments of the government.

She cool, he warm, she wan, he tan, she moon, he sun, she chatelaine, he out on the street with his hobnailed shoes and lumpy knapsack. For them both: relief. If men and women cannot live together, thought the Lady V., how then can we? For once, her goblin husband thought the same thing as he wiped the slobber of magical fruit from his triply dimpled chin.

10 THE GOLDEN KEY

Groceries The Lady V. waits until the gloaming to go to Stop ’n Slop, as she calls it, for the supermarket seems to her a slaughterhouse: the bloody steaks and ham hocks, the sticky chicken, and thick-thighed wives. Still, she folds her black coat closed, puts on her black shades, and makes her way down aisles as bright as hallucinogens or Capitalism. She knocks muskmelons and holds leafy bunches of cilantro to her quivering nose. She avoids the cloves of garlic and anything to do with Feminine Protection. Soccer dads draw near her as though they wish to kiss the crimson lips or sock her in the leprous jaw. Soccer moms feel themselves perilously close to tears as she passes by, but they adjust themselves and go home as loud and as hardy as elephants in orange and yellow culottes. For her part, the Vampire Lady fills her basket with reds and blues: tomatoes, eggplants, blueberries. Her hunger is for beauty.

The Problem with Exes As H. L. Gibbers strode and thunked along thorny paths and blue highways, happily always farther from the imperious and imposing Lady Violetta, he encountered multiple varieties of mushrooms to make his gravy and his tea and plenty of buxom lasses to take into his rough and tumble roadside beds or over his knee. He liked the women he played slap ’n tickle with to be toothy and tough, pink-lipped and drooling a little, their breasts swollen cantaloupes, their asses worth three of the Vampire Lady’s little dimpled buttocks. Oh, her buttocks. Dimpled. Little. Oh. Much to his annoyance and dismay, within a day or two of each new hay-lady, he was pushing the country miss to be more like his ex-wife: should she gobble up so much cauliflower stew? Would she not care for a sip of hummingbird’s blood instead? Could she stand in the shadows, just so, and call to him with a voice husky and low?

Would she lie in the shallows of the icy river until her skin chilled to stone?

With each new fumble-wump, he sought and fought the ghosts of his wife’s ironic smile and succulent limbs. Before long, he swore at the bumpkins and slatterns who used to please him easily, then made his way alone yet never alone again. Damn her lips, her eyes, her stories.

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Petal-Eater Ranylt Richildis She steps lightly down the burnished hall, its boards wide and long and polished. She’s hungry, but there’s so little that she likes to eat, and she’s distracted by the grand shapes and fabrics that stuff her home—by the salmon drape that curtains some intimate closet along her path. She stops, rubs her face against the sagging velvet. She likes to take her time when she heads to the kitchen, where the chore of eating interrupts her restless survey of Mama’s collectibles.

Yet even in the kitchen the furniture is grand. Silks and damasks loll over the edges of highboys. Great fat cookbooks plump out of shining wooden cases. A table reigns that room, a mesa laden with enormous fruits, gleaming ceramics, and a strew of tempting objects she will investigate another time.

Mama is good. There is a meal set out for her daughters—proper food, chosen for its wholesome attributes.

Petal-Eater considers it, but proper and wholesome don’t speak to her. They speak to her sister, who (proper) eats the prescribed meal without complaint. Her sister is fastidious, her hair short and neat, her toes clean.

Petal-Eater prefers her own mussed state. Her hair streams in the air as she walks, and her last bath may have been a day ago. The thing of it is, she is beautiful, and as such breaks rules without effect. Her light hair is gossamer and her eyes—eyes like the feathers of the brightest teal reflected in the brightest pond— sometimes unsettle. They don’t quite fit the sum of her head. They are slightly off their axis.

She passes her complacent sister, who barely glances up from her food. Her meal is elsewhere. It’s on a sideboard, in fact. It fills an enameled dish. It’s not intended for her—an accident—but she breathes over the dish, inhaling subtle rose, then puts a petal on her tongue. Another, this one white. Another, this red.

Petals Mama let wilt in the dish disappear down a gossamer throat. It’s better to taste than to see or smell.

To one side, her sister swallows meat without comment. Petals sweeten her mouth and sow a garden in her shrinking gut.

Now higher up, to Mama’s prize vase, where she will take her drink. Parting the stems of roses Mama chose to leave in water, she finds the nectar they live in and sips. The water has a brownish flavour but it also has a pearly note. She laps, unconcerned about the state of Mama’s flowers. Quenched, she exits the bouquet. The vase rolls and falls and breaks—destined for Mama’s mosaicking orts, fragments reconstituted into a different prettiness. Her sister watches, tense. She moves away, on to the other thing, the next fragile thing wanting her attention. There is a houseful.

Somewhere nearby Mama invokes Petal-Eater by her other name, exasperated. Unimportant. What matters are the pearl and silk on her tongue and the rarified meal in her narrow belly. This last takes root— not to nourish but to ennoble.

12 THE GOLDEN KEY

“Petals sweeten her mouth and sow a garden in her shrinking gut.”

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14 THE GOLDEN KEY

Hunger— The Witch has a Purpose Liz Kay

I was born hungry, choking on dirt, and when I opened my mouth to scream the villagers were afraid. They lashed me in a shroud, shoved bricks into my mouth, and tried to smother me in a pit full of corpses.

What about my hunger terrifies? I gnash my teeth, swallow bits of stone, suck mortar like marrow from their bones. There is nothing I can’t devour. I came here to consume and be consumed.

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The Baku's Bride Jon David Stroud

Each night, her husband returns with a bellyful of other people’s nightmares. She, who seldom rests now, waits for his return. This time she fills in filling, herself, so that she may fill him. Her husband is not large, though he seems large, ever so large to her. Her husband is not large, but there is marvelous room in him, spacious volumes to contain a host of furies. They never trouble his digestion.

The first night they were wed, she dreamed of an early day in spring. Her grandmother calling her in from the garden, the garden where a little apple tree grew, that had just begun to bear tart, small apples. Her husband’s breath had stirred the leaves, the apples had ceased to be, she no longer dreamed of apples. The next morning, which in her new household was sundown, he had been cross and sullen.

The second night she shared his home, her mother-in-law brought her a good, hot tea. This tea had bled her of her troubles, she had felt some joy and much weariness. When she slept she dreamed of her sister’s wedding.

It had been a beautiful night, a summer night. No one had slept, but they had eaten, and of all the things they had eaten, she remembered, dreaming, eating her own grandmother’s cakes. Her sister had fed them to her right from her hand, plump, soft, fluffy cakes with sweet delicious bean paste inside. In the dream her mouth watered for the delicacy. Somewhere small frogs chirped, fairy lights were strung from tree to tree. Her husband’s teeth she could hear gnashing, but the little cake remained untouched. The pattern, the beautiful golden fish and sun-moon pattern her mother had sewn to her sister’s wedding dress, this disappeared instead, stitch by stitch, until she awoke. And again he was quiet and cross.

— For weeks, a nightmare rode her father, the fisherman. He would tell no one the nature of this nightmare, but anyone could see its shape, they had only to look for the impression of its sharp corners, its unfeeling weight.

His eyes became lusterless, shadows pooled and caught in places of his face that should not have been there for them. His three daughters worried for him.

She was his oldest, the comforter. “Father, please tell this dream, to me, to the tallest god, to the best god, to your mother who will know its meaning and be able to send it away from you!” But implore him as much as she could, he would not yield. This dream, he said, could not be sent away. This dream, he said, was sent by God, and so God could not lift it, not when he was tallest, not when he was best, for he had sent it when he was most grim and knowing, most un-changeable, and would never take it away. It was a death dream, he said, and so he would dream it until it came to pass, and he died. His youngest beautiful daughter wept for him, out of duty and love. Love, because he was a kind father, duty because she knew it was seemly for a daughter to mourn her father’s peace of mind. His clever middle daughter wept for him, out of fear and out of love. Love, because he was a patient father, fear, because she knew what could become of her mother and her sisters without him to care for them. His oldest daughter, comforter, wept for him, out of only love. Only love, because nothing besides love could induce her to weep.

She told him stories to make the night a friendlier place, but each time the sun came up, he was less and less a man. At last when all seemed lost, her husband, the dream eater, came to them. “I have been listening to your sad prayers, I have been listening on your rooftop, and I have come to save you this horror,” said he. He

16 THE GOLDEN KEY

17 ISSUE 4

was a thing like she had never seen before, all sleek, grey fur like a cat’s fur, or like smoke. His ears were big as dinner plates, so it was no wonder he had heard their prayers. His feet were like a tiger’s, his eyes were like an owl’s and they made a light of their own. He had no mouth or nose, but instead he had a sucking hole at the end of his long tapering face. With this he spoke, and snuffled at the pillow, and ate, though they never saw him eat.

But he was handsome to her at that moment, for hideousness can be. “All I ask in exchange, is that the daughter who tells the wonderful stories become my bride, and come to live with me at the top of the mountain. She I will care for, if she will care for me.” And she had said yes, and had climbed onto his back, and seen her family disappear, and come to his house at the top of the mountain. The goblins that lived on the mountaintop, faceless or long-necked or hairy-handed, had given her a wide berth. And there she had lived ever since, sweeping and entertaining and discharging all her wifely duties to satisfaction, all save one.

— She could not make him happy, and she knew why. She asked her mother-in-law, “Mother, how can I dream a dream that will please my husband?” But her mother-in-law said she understood only how to make the good-dream tea, and if that was not enough to satisfy her son, then the end of her knowingness had indeed been reached.

She went out to sweep in front of the house, which was indeed a neat and warm house, even if it was a cave on top of the mountain. She was wondering what was lacking in herself, when she saw what looked like an old man down the road, trying to make his way up the winding path through the trees. She went to help him and was shocked when he looked up at her to reveal an upside down face, with eyes that stared uncannily from above his chin, a mouth that held a pipe on his forehead, and a nose fit only to sniff at the sky. He was altogether horrible to see, and he leered and rolled his improbably featured head around on his neck, but nonetheless she asked if he needed assistance.

The old man was somewhat taken aback. “Aren’t you frightened, little woman? Aren’t I a fright? A spook? Why don’t you scream and run, or faint?” He looked honestly curious, if she was reading the right expression on his odd face.

“No doubt you are very frightening, but I am somewhat accustomed to such sights. You are no more terrible in aspect than any of my neighbors, and they seem not bad folk, if a little uncouth in their ways.” She smiled at him, and wondered if she had offended him. Evidently not, as he allowed her to take his arm and help him to his house, a damp plot of earth with bones on top of it underneath an ancient pine tree. On the way, she told him of her difficulty.

“Ah, the Baku’s wife. That explains a few things,” he said, “perhaps I can help you after all. Listen to what I have to say, and heed it well, and we will see if you are not the better for it later.”

Once there was a warrior with four grandmothers, who all knew the secret of making bread from gold. This was a secret no one coveted, and the warrior went walking to find his fox. He found it at last behind a tree, churning butter.

“This butter is from the milk of all the cicadas in the wood, and is for the bird and river king. You must take it to him,” it said, and so the warrior took the little cup of butter. Before he found the bird and river king, a witch who was washing her hair saw him and stood behind him half of the way there, and at last made him faint with weariness. She took the butter and was going to swallow it down, when the man was suddenly awakened by the fox’s yelping. Without a word to her he cut her left foot, and she fell down as a heap of bracken, which she always was, and he made off into the night.

She bowed and thanked him, and left him to return to her home. She did not know what to make of his strange story, but that night, when at last she’d worn herself out with trying to tease some message from it, she had a very peculiar dream. She dreamed of four old women, who asked her the secret to making bread from gold. She told them she did not know, and they laughed and said that they would show her. A fox brought them a cup full of butter, and an old man with an upside down face let her kiss his nose while they dumped whole palaces of gold into a hole in the earth. This hole they filled up, and waited for her to have two children, which she did, and then they removed the earth and took the bread out, and a witch came and seasoned it with longing, and her hands were made of wood, and a warrior sliced it in half, and suddenly there was her husband’s peculiar inhalation, and then there was no more bread.

The next sunset, when her husband came to sit before her, he was well pleased, and he laughed loud, and his laugh, she was surprised to hear, was like the singing of a bird. He told her of the wonderful meal he had had, of her

18 THE GOLDEN KEY

Each night, her husband returns with a bellyful of other people’s nightmares.

She, who seldom rests now, waits for his return.

19 ISSUE 4

dream that had been all the flakiness and warmth of gold, all the fullness of a quest, all the sweetness of a quest unfulfilled. She blushed with pleasure.

— The next night she went out to look for the little old man, but she could not find him anywhere. Sighing, she resigned herself to another unpleasant morning. As she climbed back up toward her home, she heard someone weeping. A woman about her age, perhaps a year or two younger, was sobbing by the roadside.

She didn’t know this woman, but approached her tenderly, hoping to console her. Just when she was about to lay her hand on the woman’s shoulder, she whirled around and let out a frightful screech. The woman’s eyes were so bloodshot they were almost entirely red, her face sagged awfully, her teeth were long and pointed, like sharp stones that had been set carelessly one beside the other. The woman-thing soared up and she saw that its feet were claws. When it landed again, it landed on its hands, and she saw that its hands were feet.

Although she was startled by all this, she wondered if the creature had behaved so because she had caught it off guard. “Were you crying? Are you alright?” she asked it, taking a step nearer. The womanthing balked and made as if to flee, or perhaps scramble up a tree. At last it seemed to realize its mistake and let out a laugh that was like the low hooting of an owl. “You are the Baku’s wife, are you not? I have heard of you! I am sorry if I upset you at all. We are neighbors. Come, let me take you to my home, and we will have tea.”

The woman-thing’s home was a ruined shrine deep in the woods, where no starlight penetrated. Its tea was delicious and earthy. In the course of their conversation, she told it all about her troubles with her husband. “I can see your problem. Well, perhaps I can help you as well,” it said, and with that it began this tale.

Once there were two winds, that bet each other which could make a nicer garden. The first sought out the Buddha, and the Buddha told it what to do. The second blew all over the world gathering the seeds of every flowering thing. When the time of judging came, the gardens were as different as they could be. The second wind’s garden was a riot of colors and fragrances, botanical chaos. The first wind’s garden was merely a single beautiful and unique bloom, the likes of which had never before been seen on earth. The first wind explained that it had blown up to the moon, and taken some seed from the flowers there, and brought them and tended them exquisitely. The Buddha pronounced it the winner. A passing wolf said it disagreed, and that it would rather have all the world’s abundance than just one thing only precious because of its frailness and novelty. So the Buddha agreed that the wolf was a better judge, and the wolf chased a rabbit through the two gardens, and the rabbit devoured the moonflower, and the wolf trampled the Garden of the World.

She wished her new friend goodbye, and thought about the story it had told her. Perhaps there was a moral to it, perhaps there was not, she could not quite tell. That night, she dreamed of a river on which floated all the blooms of the world. In the river swam many rabbits, thousands of rabbits, a whole sea of snow white fur. The rabbits ate the moons, all the moons which were the reflections of the moon in the sky.

And then she heard her husband’s tongue, licking, slurping as if to dredge the last bit of goodness from the bottom of a bowl, and then she woke up.

That sunset her husband was boisterous, jovial. He embraced her, and his fur was soft, softer than anything she had felt before, as soft as sleep, twice as plush as any down. His embrace was tender, and when his long snout tickled her ear, she found it gentle. His snout was also covered in fur, but finer than the fur of his pelt, dustier, velvety. This fur she delighted in stroking most of all.

—

20 THE GOLDEN KEY

The next day, when her chores were completed, the woman went out walking as was now her custom.

Before long, as she expected she would, she spied a boy a little ways off the path. The boy was turned from her, and was reaching his arms up. Just out of his reach a little paper bird had become caught in a low branch. She went over to him and plucked the toy from its perch, and when she turned to hand it to him was not surprised at all to find that his one eye was inches from her face, his head having projected itself out from his body on a long snaking neck. “Is this your toy?” she asked him. He blinked at her, catfish mouth gaping.

The boy’s house was a deserted eagle’s nest high in the craggy mountain fastnesses. She told him of her adventures, and of the events of her day. She made no mention of her troubles to him, for they seemed now remote to her. He for his part was an excellent joker, loved to jeer and jest and laugh like thunder.

He told her he was not, had never really been a child, and that the only one on this mountain older than himself was the mountain. She for her part told him a story she had been thinking of, and he told her one in exchange, and this is how it went.

The gods spilt some light on the earth once, a green and violet light that covered everything. There was no more night or day, and everything was a strangeness. The cherries tasted nothing like they had before.

At last when she could stand it no longer the grasshopper’s daughter took pieces of her favorite shawl and bound them together into a perfect fan. With this fan she covered her face and went out walking. Before long a dragon that was curled up in the lap of a water lily saw the heavenly vision, and in his longing for her he became immense. He followed her all over the sky, and she led him down a path that twisted all over the world. Everywhere they went his scales and feathers brushed the light from the sky until all its sheen was swept into him. They are married now, and she lives in a house far to the north, so small that there is only room for the dragon’s head along with herself and all her possessions. But the dragon does not mind, and if you go there, the long body can still be seen trailing through the sky.

That night she dreamed of an incomparable radiance. In her dream, the beautiful light was being stirred by her mother, and she was brush, brush, brushing her mother’s hair. Her mother told her to please bring a pearl from the back of the dragon’s throat. So she sang to the dragon, a song she had heard only twice from her grandfather’s mouth when she was a girl. And the dragon opened his jaws and she plucked one of the pearls from the back of his throat. And as she dropped it into the pot she felt the kiss of her husband on her neck, and heard him mewl with delight.

The next morning her husband at first said nothing, but came to her and laid his head in her lap.

“The meal you fed me last night was perfect. I can gorge myself on nightmares for the rest of time and be content with the deliciousness of that flowing black hair, that pearly luster, that weird light. You are released from your bondage. No mortal girl should be forced to live amongst unclean spirits and bugbears merely to fulfill the caprice of an aging gourmand with nothing to offer but the purging of a small nightmare. Go with my blessing, and take with you any precious thing from my cave.” He spoke all these things with a pitiable resignation, but when he was done she laughed. “You are my husband. I am a fisherman’s eldest daughter who you loved before you ever saw her, because you loved her stories. My neighbors are generous, hospitable folk. My house is neat and beautiful. I am content and will remain so for as long as I am permitted to stay.”

She lives there still, with her husband. She reads all night long, filling herself to fill him, with ghost stories and fairy stories and stories of women and men who had marvelous lives. She reads also news of the goings on in the furthest parts of the world. She has learned something about cooking, and that is that much of a dish’s savor is in finding superior ingredients. You can borrow them from your neighbors if you must. He comes home with a bellyful of other people’s nightmares every night. But her dreams are always of the sweet kind.

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“And so Rapunzel’s mother thinned and bulged as she spun herself inexpertly from human fiber into something rare and ravenous.�

Perfection is attenuated, spun thin as thread—straw into gold, never the other way round.

The Perils of Forbidden Delicacies Sara Cleto

Perfection can never be fed anything but itself.

Perfection is hungry.

Rapunzel’s mother sought it. She would not feed her daughter:

1) Wonder Bread, white, preservative laced 2) chicken cutlets, bathed in impure oils 3) chocolate, so sweet, decay ignites on contact —the list went on.

And so Rapunzel’s mother thinned and bulged as she spun herself inexpertly from human fiber into something rare and ravenous.

The Witch’s garden, sprawling green and gold beneath the Hollywood sign, contained the cultivated vegetables that might, if ingested under a gibbous moon, precipitate the combustion process that yields perfection as a remainder.

A scent—lemon-rose? Peppermint-hyacinth, a hint of vodka?— both soothing and astringent made her stomach grind like teeth.

The lettuce was lit with the studied glamour of a sixties starlet, framed in tiny bulbs, a pearlescent choker.

Rapunzel’s mother grasped the head between her hands and twisted hard, roots snapping like bones.

At first, the leaves in her mouth tasted of everything— bloody steak, tapioca pearls, fried plantains— and then of nothing.

Her tongue lathed the cathedral void of her mouth.

The Witch, a twist of chiffon over skin over bones, laughed, thirty-two incisors gleaming, and claimed the child within her— Not to keep in isolation but to unleash.

Rapunzel ate her mother first, devoured her slowly over nine months.

A husk entered the hospital, expelled her, and died.

Rapunzel was perfect, as promised, all long lines and clean gestures, smelling sweet and sharp as peppermint.

Her hair spilled from her skull in rivulets.

24 THE GOLDEN KEY

As a child, she consumed indiscriminately— all the foods her mother had denied and more.

Gem-hard candies, thick cakes, cookies warm from an oven or cool and crumbled from a bag.

Age refined her palette. In adolescence, she cultivated a keen taste for princes.

She found them in:

1) the clubs, sweat glinting in the tender hollow of their throats 2) secondhand bookstores, hands crossed with ink, gloved in dust 3) Internet forums, Times New Roman trembling with need and loneliness —the list went on.

At first, she nibbled on their hardiest emotions— Anxiety. Lust. Terror. Love— until they tarnished, dulled.

They went on to become bankers, husbands, and other occupations that do not necessitate defined edges.

But she grew thinner, a spare and brittle frame from which to hang her hair.

A taste for flesh, for gristle and bone— it crunched so brightly between her teeth, like lettuce— Grew apace.

She ate the most beautiful pieces— Cocoa dark eyes, skin as white as snow or black as ebony, teeth that popped like tapioca pearls under her tongue, slender femurs, livers slick with oil— As their small perfections lay heavy in her gut, she thought she loved them.

Rapunzel grew careless, safe and sated, the bones strewn through her apartment, mixing with unopened mail and dirty dishes, cinching her conviction.

They walled her in a tower— no window, doors, or princes— and hoped that she might starve.

They should have known not to build her tower from bricks so square, so perfectly red.

25 ISSUE 4

26 THE GOLDEN KEY

Chestnut Elizabeth Bodi

Begin by scouring the ground for fallen cupules; if they are scarce, irritate the branches and run before the spines cascade. Approach with cautious feet; toe them gently and begin with burrs already kissed open. Using a lever or the soles of your shoes, pry apart the split; expose the fruit. Expect two or three within each hollow. Note at one end, a flame-tip; the other, a pale attachment scar. After gathering, remember the fruit has two skins – the outer husk is polished, the inner adheres closely to the seed itself.

To loose the fruit inside, cut an X into the skin of each nut. Boil the marked stones, let them cool until they can be handled. Peel the nowlenient shell and reveal the delicate flesh, sweet and supple-white. Remember how the husk was hard. Remember that the spines were sharp.

27 ISSUE 4

Raw Vegetables On The Go Rhonda Eikamp

We’d been in the kitchen a long time and the food was all gone. Burckhardt found me in the corner where I’d appropriated a chair and was defending it with my life. His lips were raw steak below blueberry eyes. “You always do this,” he told me. “Pretend you’re outside it all.” His lank yellow hair looked so luscious, brimming with oil. I’d been trying to recall the taste of salt or sweet by concentrating on various parts of my tongue, touching them to my teeth or the roof of my mouth, but the exact sensations evaded me. It’d been too long, the qualia lost to me.

“I want you to see something,” Burckhardt said. He took my hand and we worked our way through the press of bodies in the kitchen. The slippage was reminiscent of oysters going down a gullet. He felt it too, I knew. His hand was shaking. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen Burckhardt at this party that had petered out so long ago, but he’d grown thin as fishbones, worse than the rest of us.

His skin was glassine tissue.

“Here.”

We were shoved up against the counter, in a still backwash of partygoers. Maddox was there. At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing. He stood facing an upper cabinet, the door half-open, his jaw tilted toward the dark opening as though he thought there might be food inside. Then I realized he was gnawing on the wooden corner of the door. White gouges in the pumpkin pine showed where his teeth had been at work, streaks of pink in the white from his bleeding gums. This was what Burckhardt wanted me to see and I watched for awhile, my stomach awakening at the sight of a mouth in consumptive movement. Maddox’s lips groped the wood like a horse with a carrot.

“You shouldn’t have left him alone.” Burckhardt was our police, or thought he was.

“He’s not my responsibility just because I fucked him.” I took Maddox’s arm, spoke his name, and he spun away from his meal, shied like a horse, the same rolling eyes. Out of his trance. Maddox had been beautiful once, not like anyone else here, a little miracle of a face, but now his cheeks were gray receding clouds and he stank. At the side of his mouth hung a patch of fibers, the pine cabinets only fake hardboard after all, more fibrous dust on his teeth, and it looked so organic I leaned in to him, stuck my tongue in his mouth, then his was in mine. Eating what we could. The hardboard tasted of bitter flour, bitter just another lover I’d forgotten, hunger whooshing inside, ringing bells in my blood. The moist meat of him playing against my teeth made me want to bite down. Burckhardt pulled us apart before I could.

“You see what’s going to happen,” he hissed. “Not much longer now, for any of us.”

Us, the wood, the faucets. I knew what he meant. We’d consume it all, or try to.

Beside me Maddox saw the gouged tip of the cupboard door and coiled over the counter, holding his stomach like he’d been punched. “Stop me,” he moaned. “Please stop me.”

28 THE GOLDEN KEY

Not everyone’s like him, I turned to say, we’re not all of us broken, like toast dropped and ground into the floor, but Burckhardt had moved off to where the row of cabinets ended and was pressing his ear to the wall. I joined him, put my face up close to his. “Who made you head honcho?” I asked.

He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Crap, Burckhardt, just because we can see the end doesn’t make us leaders.” The quiet he was waiting for arrived, one of those maddening silences that came unbidden and in which every one of us in the kitchen could always hear our stomachs roiling, and in that brief death of sound I heard the answer.

Somewhere on the other side of the wall, far away in the next apartment, a party was going on. A bass beat, loud voices erupting in laughter, jaws working fuzzily, snapping closed again and again on what could only be hors d’oeuvres.

— Party food, dips and stews left to simmer on stovetops, breads and nuts and cocktail onions. Raw vegetables maybe, cucumbers. Maybe pretzels.

In the end we chose to tunnel down. The fridge, quickly shoved aside when enough hands helped, revealed a grate over a hole in the floor. A vent once, or a crawlspace. Clogged now, but the substrate was fudge-soft. We had spoons and ice-cream dippers and garlic presses. Burckhardt worked the hardest. Down three feet, then leveling off. Digging beside him in the half-light, I thought he didn’t look that ugly. Whenever I came up to be spelled by other partygoers, I’d catch Maddox watching from the corner. He looked stunned. I wanted to slap him.

Hunger dug. I was on my hands and knees, in front at last. The beat of music was close now, the glossolalia of indistinct conversation just ahead and above the tunnel. There was only one apartment next to ours. A couple of yards more and we could start digging up. If my arms didn’t fall off. I passed the ice bucket full of dirt to the guy behind me, his name long forgotten, though his unfortunate pairing of a shaved head with a too-round face made me believe we’d nicknamed him Frog. There was a frog croak coming from him, puffs of sound, accelerating like a locomotive gaining speed, and when I leaned close to hear I realized they were chained words of food euphoria.

“Guava wieners shakes sourdough brie sushi mutton yams—” “Frog.”

He crooked a fingertip of soil from the bucket and ate it.

Burckhardt inched around him to touch my shoulder. Behind them both I could see the bucket line had broken down, all its members collapsed with their faces pressed to the floor or the tunnel

29 ISSUE 4

walls, chewing. I imagined these gaunt mole people coming up into the party we dug toward, dirtmouthed, casting a shadow forever on the souls of the well fed. We’d never make it now anyway.

“We can do it alone, Tania,” Burckhardt told me.

“We’re exactly halfway there.”

He smiled and his lips cracked and bled. “Point of no return.”

I imagined Burckhardt’s brainpan as a crusted thing, a roasting pan blackened from meat left sizzling too long. As if he read my thoughts and knew I was made of the same fused crackling, he motioned with his spoon. We went back to work.

That’s how we got where we are now.

Flaking, scraping, denting. We piled the dirt behind us until we were a hole of two people rolling forward in coffee darkness. A glint, a clink, my spoon slid off something hard.

“This is metal,” I said, someone said.

“It’s another spoon,” two of us said.

The woman and I cleared the hole we’d made and stared at one another. She was older than me, thinner, emaciation’s face, marasmic stars in her brown eyes. Her black hair had fallen out in bunches. I didn’t know this was beauty. We were too shocked at first. Past her I could see another woman and a bald man with a flashlight, packed dirt behind them that meant they’d had to abandon their bucket line as well.

“You’re 3B,” the woman leading them said. Her voice was a dying caress. Her cheeks were so hollow the skin had become perforated. Bones made her real; she was a pared-down angel, an angel because she was pared down. “Where the party is.” She pointed up and behind me with her spoon.

“The party’s there.” I pointed up and behind her with my spoon. Firecrackers were going off in my head, small hard bursts, like the shooting pains in my stomach. “You’re 3A.” We cleared the rest of the dirt and the five of us hunkered at the midpoint. I told her the sound was coming from behind them and she told me it was coming from behind Burckhardt. They’d been at it longer than we had; they’d waited longer to start. She started to laugh, a fulminant hysteria that made her kick the walls like a baby, then she quieted. We knew then that the sound was coming from above us, through the tunnel’s roof of steel-reinforced concrete that would snap all spoons, where no apartment could be. I could hear individual lip smacks, the cackle of potato chips, an exudation of pastries. We sat, and after a while I touched the woman’s hand, drank in her disappointed look, the absolute wisdom, and she touched me back.

— This is how we got where we are. I love Burckhardt and I love the woman whose name is Celia.

I love us all. I think sometimes I should have stayed back with the others, died of coprophagia, but then I would never have seen Celia’s face. Sometimes I think of Maddox. We sit like this, listening and growing weak, wondering who’s up there partying and what it is they’re eating.

30 THE GOLDEN KEY

“You shouldn’t have left him alone.”

31 ISSUE 4

Against my advice, he jumped out to see what he’d hit.

32 THE GOLDEN KEY

Eating Game Danielle Sellers

Mid-argument, a muffled thump. The force of it skidded us off the dark two-lane highway. I held my daughter in my belly.

Against my advice, he jumped out to see what he’d hit. It may be a bear, I said, having heard on the news of the many black bear sightings in the Oconee Forest.

He was gone too long, and I thought about sliding across the bench seat, pulling the truck in drive, and leaving him there with only a flashlight.

He reappeared, reached over me, popped open the glove box, and drew out a leather-sheathed knife with a bone handle.

Young wife I was, didn’t know he owned a knife so accessible.

You like venison?, and left before I answered: I’ve only had it once.

I was ten at my great-uncle’s country home in the North Florida swampland: A man brought over a deer he’d drowned while canoeing the Suwanee.

The net like wind going over, the deer’s freedom sudden then gone.

Being forced to her knees under the muddy water, everything larger than herself.

I imagined the struggle, her spindly legs thrashing, silt filling lungs.

Then in the frying pan, the sweet meat coated in flour tingled my throat.

I wanted to impress my cousins, those grown men with dark mustaches who felled pines with chainsaws and rope, who smelled of sweat and fire.

When he came back his chest was smeared with blood. Wrapped in his shirt, chunks of round, what he could see to cut with the flashlight in his teeth.

That night, he stewed it with pinto beans and tomatoes. My daughter, my daughter ate it because I did, because he didn’t think I would. It tasted like a game.

Letter from the Velvet Ditch #4 Danielle Sellers

I teach my daughter the art of vegetarianism, which cheese should be eaten with which bread, how ginger is a cure-all for stomach and heart pain.

It is good, at each day’s beginning and end, to quiet the mind, to balance the vata.

Chopin’s preludes require a light hand and a tuned piano.

At night, I read her Blake’s Songs of Experience, of Yeats’ isles in water.

She knows goodnight in French and your grandmother’s German.

When she sleeps I clear the fruit, from the table where we used to play Scrabble.

And sometimes at the sink I’m startled by the ghost of your hands on my waist.

34 THE GOLDEN KEY

“how ginger is a cure-all for stomach and heart pain�

One dizzy night I drank too much Jack and ginger and skid and hit a limping fawn. It didn’t bleed as much as split open to reveal a diorama: tiny stars drizzled syrupy light upon a yawning girl in bed, her hands resting upon an Ouija Board.

Public Service Announcement

Even though it was illegal not to report a dream deer as they were called

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

the woods. Through my squinting vision trees appeared to be patting swelling

I couldn’t risk speaking to cops with a slur. Lake effect snow crackled with television static and the girl’s awakening stirred

bellies as the girl circled palms against the board. I rushed to my truck and furiously turned the key but the engine flooded as winds picked up and spun snow around the cab in a chrysalis.

I felt drowsy and rested against the window, beating myself up about the metamorphosis that was beginning.

36 THE GOLDEN KEY

“It didn’t bleed as much as split open to reveal a diorama: tiny stars drizzled”

37 ISSUE 4

38 THE GOLDEN KEY

The city of Shebalino solved its stray dog problem with the help of Andrei the orphan boy. The mayor had his barely-gone body exhumed from an unmarked plot in the woods, a plot that only the dogs could find. Andrei’s face was dark from the few days he had spent under the earth, the dirt a cool and constant soak beneath the topsoil of his skin.

The mayor shook Andrei’s bones awake gently, rustled his loose limbs so the earthworms fell and his eyelashes blinked away the silt that had collected in firm crust at the corners of his eyes as if he had only been sleeping.

‘Andrei,’ he whispered so his words dug stubby-fingered through the clods of dirt trapped in Andrei’s ears. ‘Andrei,’ he whispered once more so his voice burrowed down and down into the crypt of Andrei’s head, the sounds of each letter echoing and fading in the dark of a tomb between his ears. ‘Andrei.’ The mayor shook him once more and Andrei’s eyes blinked open. ‘We have need of you.’

—

Andrei Matt Jones

Before Andrei was dug up by the mayor of Shebalino, he was just an orphan boy with a mother and a father who marinated themselves in vinegar and mean words, who soaked themselves so deeply in the salt of the past that everything about them stung.

Andrei ran away from his parents and moved to the streets of Shebalino in the dead of winter when he was just seven. He lived in the crooked alleyways and shadows of leaning buildings, crumbling brick faces punctured by open windows and clothes flapping in the frigid breeze, fibers frozen to crisps in the winter air.

He would have died much earlier than he did had it not been for the city’s stray packs.

The dogs that roved the city in droves of mange, carried an exalted by seas of pulsing fleas that sucked the very blood from the air.

To win their affection, Andrei climbed up windowsills and plucked snoring cats from their perch. He carried them by the scruff of the neck to the pack leader and the dogs gorged themselves on thick bristles and hissing that eventually quieted itself into soft slopping. For this, Andrei earned his place among them. He found warmth in the itching and the scratching, the friction and raw heat that came from the drag of his nails across his skin, and he fed the dogs scraps of himself when there were no cats, took the fleas up in the soft space of his throat, coaxed them through the holes in his pockets so they might grow full on him. And the dogs watched over him.

— The dogs mobbed the excavated Andrei with fervent licks and slobbery kisses that turned the dirt on his skin into sweet mud that oozed and hardened and cracked off with each shaky step he took.

‘Andrei,’ the mayor explained, ‘the dogs have grown restless without you. They bark constantly. They howl with such longing that my own ears have forgotten how to miss the silence.’

Andrei said, ‘Yes, I have heard their footfalls, their wayward howling, the sounds of their teeth shucking the scabs from their worn skins. Their noise has reminded me again of what it means to be alone.’

The mayor nodded nervously and peered his head up at the meager sun. ‘The packs have grown restless and dangerous without you. They seek to destroy the town. To nip the heels of any citizen that sets foot from their front steps. And the cats!’ the mayor exclaimed.

‘There is not a single meow that goes unanswered without the crunch of hungry jaws.’

Andrei felt no warmth on his skin. He felt no breeze across his back. He had only been dead for a few days and already he longed for the cold under the ground once more.

— Andrei had been heard preaching to their mass of tangled mange and fur when he was still alive. Citizens passed warily through the city square and cocked their ears toward the slim and small seven-year-old named Andrei, the cage of his ribs like metal bars soldered to the inside of his chest, eating up the skin, becoming more prominent as the winter grew harsher. The citizens of Shebalino looked on cautiously as he preached to the kennel of wagging tails and raised ears.

‘Fellow hounds and pups,’ Andrei cried and the winter chill stuttered each sound into a shiver of slow-freezing syllables. ‘We are low of cats and even the pigeons have gone cold and rigid up high on ledges far out of my reach. We need to move from this city! It has done little for us. No one has sought to keep us warm or fed.

No one has taken care of us!’ and the dogs bayed and the fleas bounced from body to warm body, turned to stiffened specs of blood-sacs that fell to the ground in miniscule shattering.

Andrei said, ‘Let us find our own way in this world. Let us move to the countryside where we are no longer a bother.’

— The dogs sniffed and leapt at his risen form. They danced four legs around him and Andrei smiled in their presence, evidence of his burial smeared between his teeth.

The mayor said, ‘Andrei. Can you help us?’

‘What could I do?’ asked Andrei. ‘I am no longer even alive. Your city abandoned me,’ and Andrei knelt down to nuzzle the snarled jaw of one of the hounds.

The mayor scratched his head and said, ‘You could take them with you, like you planned. To the fields beyond the city, to the plains between the mountains.’

Andrei snapped, ‘I do not wish to be alive anymore, to be an orphan anymore. I’d rather stay dead.’ The dogs growled at the mayor, bared their teeth and webbed slaver.

‘Of course not,’ said the mayor. ‘I meant to the fields of rest.’ The mayor gestured his head toward the ground. ‘The garden of the sleeping. You could bring them with you, you know? They would be much happier.

And I’m sure you would too, yes?’

Andrei looked at the pack, how skinny they were. How their fang-flecked skin arranged itself in a twist of scars and scabs. He longed for them to have better than the city, and in his longing, he understood what the mayor meant. ‘Okay,’ Andrei said. ‘What would I need to do?’

— When he was still alive, Andrei led the dogs out of the city on a day when the snow sputtered forth from the woods in crashing waves, walls of white building and tumbling and washing toward the shoreline of the city’s edge.

The citizens were relieved at his departure. They gathered in the city square and the pigeons shook themselves loose of their icy feathers and perches and descended back down to the ground to peck at the garbage lined in the alleyways. Even the remaining cats showed themselves, arched their backs at the fresh air, and hissed off into the distance.

40 THE GOLDEN KEY

Still, only two days had passed, just one night with a lonely moon, before the entirety of the dog pack came back and raided the city. Before their tortured yowling and barking returned home like hundreds of feral cries calling out for what they had lost.

— The mayor suggested a particular garden, dainty stalks and bulbs in rich hues of purple and pulse poised up toward the sun. Pitcher plants ‘for their appetite,’ he said, and venomous larkspur ‘for their taste,’ he said.

Andrei planted each flower in the cusp of the woods, the halfway point of shade and wilderness that lay between the city and the mountains. He dug his stiff fingers into the dirt again and again and the dogs raised their legs to relieve themselves on what he had planted.

When he was finished, the mayor said, ‘Now remember. They will not suffer but briefly,’ and Andrei took some of the larkspur to his lips, mashed it between his teeth until the spittle turned purple and leaked down on to his chin. ‘You see,’ he said to the dogs, ‘eat.’

The dogs did as he did and they swarmed the sweet lark and chomped at its bulbs and Andrei waited for their insides to roil, for the poison to take hold of their weary bodies, for them to collapse seizing in the soil.

And when they finally did, the hungry pitcher plants unfurled their leaves and licked at the dogs’ mange, rolled their bony canine bodies up inside their green tongues and turned them into earth.

Andrei dragged himself to the empty plot from which he was exhumed and the mayor called, ‘Andrei, thank you! You have done us a great kindness.’

Andrei shooed the mayor away and started to scoop handfuls of frozen silt and hard dirt over his body. As he disappeared once more beneath the earth, he felt the cold welcome him back into the ground, the chill a comfort and a reminder of when he had not been alone. Like earthworms grinding in between each grain, the soil filling his ears once more, he heard the dogs pounding across the plain behind his eyes, dashing through the dense thickets of darkness that set on as he found rest once more.

— On his last night alive, Andrei trudged through the snow with the pack by his side. He watched the city of Shebalino disappear behind him. He saw the trees growing up around him, the branches whipping numbly at his frozen skin, ushering him into the woods.

The dogs traded off carrying him on their weak backs until their legs gave out in whimpers and moans of exhaustion.

He hunkered down with the dogs once night fell, an orphan boy with his skin shorn red and pink gone purple and blue from the flush that left his body. He lay down in the middle of their sleeping hides and huddled up close to the many kicking and dreaming legs that jerked around him. He felt the cold enter him until he felt warm, until he drifted off into a sleep where he too ran wild, where his legs flexed errantly and his feet pounded toward a better kind of life.

41 ISSUE 4

Some to Nothing Matilda Young

When I swam up to you, your small floating round, half cockle, a flash of weight on the surface, the limbs of it crashing in a song reaching even to the bottom of my canyon, singing, a troubled one approaches, all you could see perhaps if you were looking was a surfacing of dulst, shining and dark bodied.

I saw the crest of your hair, creature of strange floating coral, lashing, relashing the body of it back together with your hands.

I know what man is.

I know the white, strange yellow-white of the arcs of you when you fall off your corals and fall apart.

I know what land is.

I have seen the black heat of the bottom breathe into rocks that will not be overtaken, not for generations and generations of great singing ones, mouths tufted with teeth.

I keep losing the songs.

Sometimes, the men sing, but you are not singing.

I know what I am.

42 THE GOLDEN KEY

I have eaten men in my time.

It was convenient, and I was hungry, and the men were already dead.

I know drowning.

It is what happens when your nature becomes wrong.

All of my family drowned high on the rocks, too old, too broken-scaled to reach the next wave off the land we swam to, as if hunger had an end outside our element.

I am stronger for now, but you are not.

Your hair catches light and shatters it.

I know what light is.

I have watched for a long time.

I used to try to help men, as I would an old singer menaced by blank-eyed bone mouths. Fanciful of me, really.

The bottom of my canyon is silt and stopped ones, some to white, some to nothing.

I will know what your end tastes of.

I know what I sing.

43 ISSUE 4

Gone The Great Dark Matilda Young

Be a nice little monster, a good little monster, a nice little good little thing.

Drive Volvos. Wear compact tampons.

Carry enough for your friends.

Keep to old kingdoms.

Keep the bleeding to yourself.

You are always hungry.

Even the last barrow is lit by construction of a new Trader Joe’s.

A sensitive monster. clean little monster.

Repair the hole in your cape.

Bury your each beloved with ceremony.

Haunt birches to the north.

Kitten boots are in, black as the barrow.

Groundling, believe in your happiness, and blend your foundation.

44 THE GOLDEN KEY

Be of good cheer.

An amiable monster.

It was your kingdom once.

They looked for you on the roofs.

Sleep well.

Sleep well.

Keep the blood to yourself.

A good monster. good little monster.

Sleep with one sex at a time.

Haunt lightly. Wear it well.

Always the hunger.

The bleeding stops after a time.

Bend only saplings. Accessorize.

Good little monster.

A well-tempered monster.

Keep your blonde as blonde as sable.

Don’t mourn too loudly.

Don’t go to the roof.

45 ISSUE 4

Wretches Lutivini Majanja

46 THE GOLDEN KEY

Next to Obwocha’s blue house with red clay tiles on the roof, there is a shed made of tall green corrugated iron sheet walls surrounded by twisted barbed wire. Half the shed is roofed with the same green corrugated iron sheet. The other half is an open space that lets in sunshine, rain, and wind with the pieces of outdoor debris that it carries. We do not know how many dogs live inside the shed but over the years we hear Obwocha mimic the gentle puppy cries that mature into deep and lowpitched barks, more beast than doglike. We estimate how big these dogs are. We have never seen them.

They are noisy. It’s a never-ending barking face-off. Barking is what our normal dogs do. Behind the green walls we hear echoes of something loud; it scratches our hearts, it booms and goes on unceasing. We constantly shift between staying away and being close enough to hear all of it. We anticipate the startled newcomer’s unhurried drive or walk along that road until the noise invites them into our reality. Then, we laugh.

Obwocha’s flat forehead has been a fixture at the supermarket, at the butchery and now at the nearest slaughterhouse. He sprints from his parked car, always bothered about the quality of meat for his canine family. All we ever see, as he does not need a concrete fence like us, is that these dogs consume more mutton, beef and maybe even more donkey meat than we cook for our annual neighborhood end-of-year party. We assume that he will apply for a wildlife-hunting license so that he can forage at the game reserve for duikers, wildebeests, warthogs and hyenas to supplement the dog diet. Hyenas! Laughter everywhere.

Obwocha’s employee, Don the gardener-caretaker-cook, chops meat on an old log. Always, Don dresses in the same stained coat, patches of old and new blood. Just before sunset, grunting sounds accompany the tak tak tak of the axe meeting the wood below the meat. Thereafter we hear chunks of meat dropping into plastic feed buckets. Obwocha arrives in his car with fresh meat for the next day.

Obwocha, firm handshake and smile, greets the aproned Don who opens the gate. Obwocha goes straight to the house, never stops to admire the trimmed kie apple hedges, the red Nandi flame petals or to pick up the fallen avocados. He takes large strides as Don pants behind with crates of meat to be refrigerated. Inside the house, he complains. “The kie apple hedges are still uneven, can’t you see?” Don mumbles. Obwocha exchanges his office coat for the stained and slightly ripped apron that Don stores for him. Obwocha trots out of the house, follows the scent of bleeding flesh and his dogs. He smiles as one would at the sight of a long lost friend.

Close enough and we hear him leap into an embrace inside the shed. Obwocha calls their names, having long run through the conventional pet names—Simba, Chui, Duma and now he has Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. We wait to hear Ex, Why and Zed. Howls escalate. We edge close to our walls, lean on our windows even though our bodies tell us to flee. The meat is never enough for the beasts behind those walls. More than once he carries out the bleeding corpse of a dog killed in the clamor for food. He buries it near the kie apple hedge. Don receives instructions to plant bauhinia. He boasts that he is raising dogs the way God intended them to be: Wild.

Obwacha has to travel far away from home, to Kitale, for business. All the way to Kitale is seven hours away. This has happened before. He expects to return after a day. For one day, the dogs will not eat. Nobody else can feed them.

“This has happened before.” He tells Don. He feeds them twice as much as usual on Monday and leaves early the following morning to catch the bus to Kitale. Don gets the day off. The dogs make their scary dog noises.

Don is away all day, lingering around his friends’ workspaces in his orange armpit-stained blue shirt and his wrinkled grey trouser. No apron. At feeding time nobody drives home. The dogs—they roar, they gnash teeth, squeal, they wrestle, howl, they do not sleep. We stuff rags into our ventilation passages above our doors and windows to block out the noise. We do not sleep. In Kitale, Obwocha finds more work than expected. He exceeds his twenty-four hour deadline. He has to spend three days away from his much loved animals.

Don’s Nokia rings in the morning just as he gets to work. He blocks one ear (so much noise) and listens to his boss.

“Hallo!”

“Even babies can survive three days without food,” Obwocha says.

“Pardon? Are you sure?” Don asks.

“I know what I am doing,” Obwocha snarls.

“Okay.” Don breathes. Don leaves.

Two nights pass. The shed rattles. Our houses empty at night, some of us cannot sleep here. Obwocha’s compound is littered with drying leaves and petals, but these will wait just like the dogs. On Thursday, Obwocha returns from the slaughterhouse with an extra load of food. Don resurfaces. Tak tak tak the axe has so much to break. Obwocha rolls up his sleeve and helps. Obwocha calls the dogs from outside the shed. “Simba, Kappa, Chui…?” They whine. He lines up the meat-filled buckets outside the shed before stepping in with just two. He speaks slow and gentle, tossing chunks of meat in different directions. The dogs scurry, jump and wrestle. He chuckles and then shouts, “No Chui! No Duma!” He screams, “Swara stoooop!” He does not come out for more meat. Instead they eat all of him: skull, foreface and cheeks. They rupture his veins, tear his hide, cut into his flesh, crush his bones and scratch the hair off his head. They swallow.

How Greta Came to Belong David Elsensohn

48 THE GOLDEN KEY

The squirrels had come to warn her that day, after she had cast her divination.

She was grateful, for the signs had made no sense. A fair and scrupulous creature, she was a grandmother to all, dwelling in a house she had baked herself, speaking to birds and to beasts, asking for news and healing them when they fell ill. Yet the warnings were earnest: human children would bring about her downfall.

It was not wise to ignore such portent, so when the two children had arrived, curious and hungry and arrogant, she acted. She kept them safely locked away, gave them food, kept a critical eye on their health as she wrung her feelings, deciding what to do with them. Her home was her haven, and her power waxed there, so she waited. Then one day, they left, agony in their wake.

Months had passed as she recovered, lying burnt, eating broken corners of charred gingerbread, her house reduced to crumbs and great sweet slabs that the dumb animals of the forest came and sampled, afraid. To this day still she awoke, wreathed in sweat and fear, remembering the hiss of the oven and the crackling of the flames as they ate her hair, melted her lips, left her teeth in an open sneer. She wore a wig now, and an attractively embroidered veil, and told others she was from the East. She kept a glamor on. She procured glasses with which to correct her blindness. Her sight had never been good; she saw more clearly now.

Grown weary of her memories, the grandmother traveled, luring the occasional wayward child into her bag to eat.

She stopped to ponder, massaging her bent spine, questioning missing gods who never answered. Revenge was the only pure-hearted action, she decided. All others were sudden, self-fulfilling responses to other goads. Revenge was a true action, a choice, and since humans were the only creatures to have developed it, she was justified. They had eaten in her home, stolen her wealth, tried to murder her. She served them pancakes, she had, her own batter, with apples baked in, and sugar, and walnuts for strength.

But did they not outsmart her, best her at her own game? Yes, yes they did. Hans was such a handsome lad, Greta so quiet and servile, and she had forgotten herself. She would therefore improve, and climb higher again in the food chain. That was natural.

She found their old home, the one they had left, for she could smell their tracks even after so many years. It was of wood chopped by steel, humble and sad-shouldered.

The father had died. She found his grave, and the grave of the stepmother, she who was said to be so hard-hearted as to send away the children.

“They misunderstood you, dear lady, as Eden misunderstood Eve,” she whispered gently at the dirt. “We women are always at the root of the troubles, aren’t we, always punished. In the stories the stepmother always dies conveniently, to free one from challenge.”

The grandmother bent her back to dig at the earth with a shovel, brushed dirt from the withered face and whispered in worm-ridden ears, and raised her as a servant. The stepmother, no longer fully dead, sat on the dry soil, her skirts splayed about her, and bowed her stringy-haired head as if to weep, although this was impossible.

The grandmother patted her shoulder, very gently. “There. The stories aren’t told from our point of view. They say you were the stepmother, but we know the truth, eh? You are their mother. A mere changing of the facts, it was, to blame woman yet keep a shining vision of virginal motherhood. You merely came up with the solution, as we always do. Survive.”

The mother plodded behind the grandmother, silent and reluctant, as the old woman continued, throwing a shawl over one shoulder. “You tried to teach them self-reliance, how to provide for themselves and not be a burden, but no.

They thought only to find their way back, and the forest creatures helped because they knew no better. They came back, to make you give, and give, and give until your breasts were dry and your eyes were hollow.”

The grandmother walked dirt roads, then cobblestone, the mother-servant in tow. In the cities she cast glamors

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to keep them beneath notice, as they passed wagons, suspicious-eyed guards, and townsfolk too simple to understand. To her servant she applied herbs and perfumes constantly, for the death had not quite left her. The mother’s face, too, was veiled.

Along the way they met old Grýla, struggling under the weight of her sack and stumbling over a giant ragged cat who slunk always underfoot. They traded leftover meats, and sat together, on opposite sides of a campfire.

“Those children. I tried to take Greta under my wing, to teach her skills and seek independent thought,” the grandmother said, sucking the marrow from a shin bone. “But Greta thought only of her brother, her handsome, stupid brother. They assumed God would not forsake them. What kind of lesson is that? What happened to God helping those who help themselves? That’s where they were helped. They helped themselves—to what I made.

And because I did not assume in my arrogance that God would not forsake me, I was burnt.

“But there is no use in complaining,” she nodded.

“And what was their reward for their wickedness?” asked Grýla, sniffing her meat judiciously. The horrendous cat at her feet growled; she gave it a punch in its sunken ribs, jingling the bells on its neck. “Did they marry a prince, or did they fade from the story, living happily and ever after?”

“The latter, I think,” replied the grandmother. The mother’s face lowered silently.

“Then their story is not done. Go see Frau Trude,” said Grýla. “She knows all about willful children.”

— “You went about it all wrong,” offered Frau Trude, not unkindly. She beckoned to one of her servants, a blankeyed huntsman, who poured another cup for her visitors, although the silent mother had not drunk any.

“My heart was not yet hardened,” said the grandmother, fidgeting. The house was quite warm from the blocks blazing on the hearth, and she did not like the closeness of the flames.

“Go see Dame Jaga,” said Frau Trude. “She will have lessons for you.” She waved away the massaging hands of another of her servants, a handsome collier, whose awkward grip was annoying her.

The grandmother nodded, and thanked her friend for her wisdom. Gathering up her skirts and her companion, she left the house, nodding at the thick-jowled butcher who held the door.

She attended study groups, taught by Dame Jaga in her house that crunched underfoot. Each lesson left them in another city, for Dame Jaga moved endlessly; not for her to stay in one place. Still, it was worthwhile, for the grandmother learned technique, and spells, and patience. She must, Dame Jaga said, go and get what she was living for, not wait like a fat spider for prey. Go, she said, and spread secrets like a blanket. The world requires balance, and even a gift will always bring payment. Go, and give, she said. The grandmother nodded, while the mother-servant sat in the corner and wept from dry sockets.

— In a city that smelled correct to her, the grandmother had no difficulty in finding work as a cook and a baker, applying her expertise in seasoning. It was distressing to use an oven, to move hot iron over a stove, but she chewed up her fear. She gave to others, and received praise. In an eyeblink she was raised to head chef. At night she took desserts home to the mother-servant, who swallowed with her dry throat.

Then one day, as she was buried under responsibilities and had almost forgotten what she had been traveling for, Hans entered her establishment, a plump and handsome man with pressed trousers and a tall hat. She knew it was he, instantly. He sampled this and tasted that, and nodded, and declared her creations quite tasty.

Every day he would return, asking what was special, and soon the grandmother began concocting pastries and pies and dainties just for him to try, laden with sugars and creams and privilege and goodwill.

“It is so good!” he declared as always.

“Of course, dear.”

“It reminds me of… it reminds me…” he looked troubled.

“Just recipes,” she said kindly. “Recipes handed down to me.”

“Would you… are you available as a personal chef? I will pay! More handsomely than what this bakery can

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offer.” Hans beamed, as if the idea was the grandest anyone could possibly have had.

She of course agreed, and took along the mother-servant, claiming she was her daughter. She took command of his kitchen, and made him roast pig with apples and laziness, and hearty stews of beef and rhubarb and compliments, and baked him pies bursting with berries and indulgence.

She was careful never to bake him gingerbread, and thankfully he did not crave it.

He grew fatter, coming home from whatever gentlemen did, handing his hat and coat to the silent servant and bragging of his life as he ate the grandmother’s creations. A powerful burgher, he was never brilliant, but he had always been good at following trails. He followed the trail of money, and cared not from whom it came or who suffered from its absence.

“What a fool,” she grumbled to her servant as they cleaned the dishes. “He is worthless. His own sister had to save him, for he knows only to follow pebbles and crumbs and papers, and take and take. He believes God provides, and so God provides. Why is that rewarded?” Here, he was being fattened even more than in her own house. She did not even want to eat him, although she felt she probably would, to complete what she had started.

Dame Jaga always urged her to complete things.

— He had many people he thought were his friends, and he often invited them, boasting of the skills of his chef.

Always they agreed that the chef was outstanding, and her spices rare and delectable, and joked that such a man as Hans did not deserve such a chef. He laughed with them as they drank his brandy.

One cold day Hans’s sister Greta arrived, arm in arm with Hop Thumb. The grandmother, picking herbs in the garden behind the house, smelled her instantly, and shuddered. The girl was a high-society dilettante, she could tell, experienced at making others give her things, and giving very little in return. She was well taken care of. Bundling her herbs, the grandmother ducked into the kitchen and began to think.

“Hello, sister!” Hans cried, and had the servant take her coat and hat and muff. Greta stood in a fine cambric dress, her saffron hair gathered expertly into a voguish bouffant, and the servant gazed silently at her until Greta and Hop were discomfited. Hans rushed them into the dining room, bowing grandly, and his sister mocked him.

“Look at you! You are such a boor, Hans.”

“Oh, Greta, do relax and be pleasant. You are so busy dashing from suitor to suitor that you cannot stop to enjoy an evening.”

“I smell something in your house,” said Hop Thumb, uncertainly. He was not tall, and quite thin, but his suit was well-tailored, for Greta would not have it otherwise.

“Of course you do!” roared Hans, sticking his thumbs in his suspenders. “A rack of lamb, with potatoes and leeks, with herbs from my garden out back, don’t you know! And later, some brandy. That is what you smell, Hop.” His old friend drew him aside. “I grew up on the streets, an urchin who had to live by my wits. If you have ever done so, do so now.”

“What are you saying, Hop? Ha! I live by my wits every day. Why don’t you stay? We will have a smoke together.”

They all sat then, and dinner was served. Greta squinted at the cook, hidden behind a veil, and at the silent, polite servant whose hands were so thin, like paper stretched over twigs. She looked carefully at her food before she tried any of it, and Hans thought she was praying. He laughed, and then grew sober.

“I miss Father.”

“Oh, yes, Father,” she replied, trying a bite of the potatoes, which were quite excellent and made her furious.

“So kind, so stupid.”

“Greta! You have no appreciation.”

“And Mother,” she continued. “I do not miss Mother.”

The dead maidservant dropped a spoon, curtsied, and slipped out of the dining hall. Greta watched her exodus, pretty eyes narrowed.

In the kitchen, the grandmother took up a ladle and bit it in half, chewing. How should her revenge be

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shaped? Greta was, she could see, canny for all her beauty.

“I am worried for your brother,” said Hop quietly as they shrugged on their coats.

“Don’t waste your worry,” said Greta.

“Have him meet me at the club, and I will talk to him,” said Hop. “We will have dinner there.”

— Hans’s anger eddied into the room after him, as he nearly threw his coat at the mother-servant.

“Hop knows nothing! I don’t see why I associate with him,” he growled. “He envies me and all I have, is what he does.”

“Of course, dear,” answered the grandmother, and served him a berry tart and extravagance, and a digestif. “There is no need to suffer such indignity. But why not invite your dear sister over again?”

“And wherefore should I? I have built everything I have from my own work, and she does nothing. She is my only family, but she has gotten where she is from the goodwill of men like me.”

“Still, perhaps. She is your only kin. What would happen to her if you were no longer?”

His sister was invited the very next day.

“Where is my brother?” asked Greta acidly, shaking the rain from elegant shoulders. The mother could not answer, so hurried away with the sable coat.

“He has turned in early,” said the grandmother, hands clasped in what she hoped was a harmless manner. “He did, however, wish that you eat, and enjoy yourself. Do please sit in his chair at the table, for he would wish that.”

Greta sat, and watched the grandmother bustle, serving her a meat pie as an appetizer, steam twisting gently from the golden crust.

“I am sorry to displease my brother, but I am not hungry,” she said. “For I have already eaten.”

“Then please come again tomorrow,” smiled the grandmother. “And bring your appetite.”

Greta did so, arriving the next evening and handing her foxfur coat to the servant.

“Hans could not join us again, for he had a business appointment,” apologized the grandmother, serving a roasted haunch, carved into delectable pale slices, with a light gravy.

“I wish I could eat it, but I have been feeling ill all day,” said Greta.

“Oh dear! Then please come again tomorrow, and I will make you a soup,” said the grandmother, mouth twitching under her veil.

— “I believe my brother is dead,” said Greta to Hop Thumb, working her pretty mouth into twisted shapes as she thought.

They sat at a cafe, sipping tea.

Hop started, and nearly cracked his cup on its saucer. “What? How could it be? What has happened?”

Greta tapped her chin, stirring absently. “He never would have guessed. It was I who had suggested the breadcrumbs, I who had noticed the witch’s poor eyesight and whispered to him to prod a finger bone through the bars.”

“What are you speaking of?”

“So again I enter the prison, but willingly, for my brother is dead. I am not lured by candy and sweetness. By hunger, yes, but not the simple hunger of a stupid child.”

“I knew something was wrong!” Hop frowned.

“Nothing is wrong. Hans contributed nothing, learned nothing, and in his death there is no difference.”

Hop was scandalized. “Greta! He was your brother. You are… I cannot associate with such a cold-blooded witch.”

“No one is asking you to,” said Greta calmly, and rose from her seat to walk away. She walked across town, to Hans’s house, and raised the brass knocker. The door was opened immediately, and the mother-servant nodded. Greta stalked past her and into the kitchen.

“I remember, Nana. I remember when we found your house, hungry and young, and you tried to teach me. You have so much wisdom, and I know now that I hunger for it. I want to make my own way, not balance on society’s blade, waiting for my beauty to collapse. I belong to society, but none of it belongs to me.”

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The grandmother looked at her for a long time, face blank behind her veil.

“What of Hans?”

“Why, is there anything left of him to serve?” answered Greta, with a soft shrug. “He is dead, and in his will, he left everything to me. I want you to stay here forever, Nana, and cook, and teach.”

The grandmother was troubled. She knew the young woman was canny.

Still, she agreed, for Dame Jaga told her to give. She began to teach Greta her ways of herbs, and of spices, and of flowering plants, and poisons, and sweets, and spells. Greta learned to bake pies of sweet dough, filled with fruit and respect, and create stews of rich lamb, bitterness and secrets. The grandmother was very careful never to turn her back on the young woman, or get between her and the open oven, but could not deny that Greta learned quickly and well. She began to warm to her.

“You are doing so well, dear,” she said. “I think soon you will be ready to meet someone special, someone who could teach you more than I.” The mother, too, tried to reach out to their young visitor. She would take her coat and try to caress her arm, only to have that delicate limb pulled violently away. She would look longingly at Greta as she ate at Hans’s place at the table, only to meet a green-eyed glare. She tried to speak to her, but there was no voice in her dusty lungs, only to be ordered to go away. She would leave, to collapse in a corner far from the kitchen, shoulders shaking.

“Perhaps she means well, after all,” the grandmother said one day before Greta was due to arrive, sliding a tray of newly kneaded and sugared cookies into the blazing oven. “Greta is the daughter I never had, I daresay.”

The mother, behind her, stood straight, her bone-thin arms quivering. A spark suddenly gleamed in her dead eyes, and she pushed. The grandmother lost her balance, and disappeared into the massive oven, shrieking, clambering to get out, the old pain devouring her.

This time, there was no escape.

The front door thundered, and Greta tore into the hallway and into the kitchen, in time to see the motherservant, devoid of life, slumping to the tiles like the dead doll she was. The young woman rushed to throw open the fiery grate, to no avail, for the grandmother’s cries had stopped.

She wept, for there was no one now to teach her, and in a rage she kicked the mother-servant’s body into pieces.

Through her tears, she blinked, looking about her, at the seasonings and utensils and pans. The grandmother was there no longer, and there was no way to absorb her knowledge—save to absorb her.

When the oven cooled she hauled out the burnt, frail body with great effort, and began to prepare her, skinning, seasoning, and dressing, putting all the learning she had received into her work.

Soon, she sat herself to dinner.

She left the house, locking the door behind her, infused with the spirit of the grandmother, and ready to learn, to obtain things for herself, with her own power. She turned, and beamed, for a great hut stood before her, bowing on its legs. Dame Jaga waited, beckoning with a gap-toothed smile.

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“wear ugly hats, forget to visit your mother in the nursing home, are a member of a secret society�

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Soul Harvest Hillary Joubert

If you: fear daylight feel self-conscious about your sixth finger, live alone without a radio, rearrange furniture every Tuesday, feel like a flounder stranded eye-side up in the sand, still shiver under your comforter, wear a wig, still listen to 80’s eight-tracks, think burning incense will keep you alive longer, ride around town in a taco truck, never receive postcards, have never been amazed a little by lightning, never seen a real rooster on a roof, never had a hickey on your tongue, have just stepped out your box, are a garage sale goer, are balding, green, or missing teeth, have had a miscarriage but refuse to get the baby taken out, call your wife mama, your husband daddy, are married and own a sugar shack, fantasize about how your children might look, are missing a testicle, have a triple nipple, have never baked a cake or eaten a mud pie, never climbed a tree or pissed outside, have never left the porch light on for trick-or-treaters, wear ugly hats, forget to visit your mother in the nursing home, are a member of a secret society, have had to wear hand-me-downs your whole child life, are unable to trust, grow your own oregano, have never flushed a goldfish down the toilet, have never swallowed a dime, have never been made to pick your own whipping switch, or if you just have a bad case of the devil, then sign on the next line.

By tomorrow, when you wake, you’ll weigh a breath less.

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Audubon Skye Shirley

So many times this summer I would reach my fingers to the branch, bursting with hard berries, and you would tell me never to eat what I could not label (all foragers must know the name of that which fills us); I must find each fruit indexed as edible, however tempting, the bright pigment, smiling like a trickster.

Perhaps it all boiled down to something unnamed, we could never find the Latin word for it— the way you love me with so much caution

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(all foragers must know the name of that which fills us)

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Contributors

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ELIZABETH BODI is an English adjunct at Northern Virginia Community College and a recent George Mason University poetry MFA graduate. She currently lives in Northern Virginia. Her work can be seen in Booth, Cobalt, Painted Bride Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Sou’Wester.

The meal she always hungers for is a huge, hot bowl of oxtail soup with white rice and a nice spattering of coarse salt: simple, savory, perfect.

CATHLEEN CALBERT’S writing has appeared in many publications, including Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. She is the author of three books of poetry: Lessons in Space, Bad Judgment, and Sleeping with a Famous Poet.

The strangest thing she craves? “I crave my dog’s feet. The pads smell like flowers, and I want to inhale them. My other dog’s feet don’t smell like flowers, but her ears smell a little like cheese, which is not a bad thing.”

SARA CLETO is a PhD student at the Ohio State University where she studies folklore, literature, and the places where they intersect. She also teaches freshman composition, which she shamelessly uses as an opportunity to convince her students that fairytales are the coolest.

Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Cabinet des Fees: Scheherazade’s Bequest, Ideomancer, Niteblade, the anthology A is for Apocalypse, and others.

When asked about her strangest craving, she replied, “I inherited my strangest craving from my mother—we are both sporadically overcome with the imperative need to eat ‘brine food.’ I have been known to drive to the grocery store at midnight for a can of hearts of palm, which I then devour over the sink. You’d think I’d learn to stock it in my pantry, but I never do.”

RHONDA EIKAMP is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. She has been writing since the 90’s (with a long hiatus and a reboot in 2012). Stories of hers have appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and others are forthcoming in The Journal of Unlikely Cartography and the Lightspeed special issue “Women Destroy Science Fiction.” She works as a translator for a German law firm.

If she could have one meal a day, it would be words from the mouths of others, minds opening up, telling their stories, preferably over cheese and smoked salmon.

DAVID ELSENSOHN lives for coaxing language into pleasing arrangements, and for making good chili. A native of Los Angeles, he lives with an inspirational wife and a curmudgeonly black cat. He has works published in the Northridge Review, Grim Corps II, Kazka Press’s California Cantata, and Literary Underground’s Unearthed Anthology.

He has the occasional unexplained craving for green-tea-flavored Kit Kats.

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MATT JONES is a fiction candidate in The University of Alabama MFA program. When he is not daydreaming about the details of his surprise wedding, he is toiling away on his first novel.

His previous work has appeared in Paper Darts, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, theNewerYork, and is forthcoming in Spry Literary Journal.

When asked about sustenance he always craves, he replied, “Baleadas. There is something about mashed up beans smeared messy across the rough plane of a tortilla that I can’t go without. I want to wrap them up hot in tinfoil and carry them by the dozen sticking out of my pockets, stuffed into my rolled up socks, peaking out of the brim of my baseball cap so I am left with the scent of sweat and warm crema come the end of the day.”

HILLARY JOUBERT received his BA degree from Louisiana State University and his MA and MFA degrees from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he works as an Instructor of English. His poems have appeared in Sin Fronteras, Platte Valley Review, Nerve Cowboy, The Louisiana Review, and other journals. His poetry won a 2009 Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship award in Literature and a 2005 Ruth Lilly Fellowship for Young Poets nomination.

He craves hard for Tom Yum. JEFFREY H. MACLACHLAN also has recent or forthcoming work in New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, Skidmore Penthouse, and Clay Bird Review, among others. He wishes there was a Literature Combine. He can be followed on Twitter @jeffmack where you can read jokes about sports and music. He hails from Skaneateles, New York.

What meal is he always hungering for? “Anytime I’m back in New York, whether it would be Brooklyn or the Finger Lakes, I can’t go too long without hitting up Dinosaur BBQ. They have brisket, wings, mac & cheese, and craft brews all under one roof. The fact that you can also watch sports on televisions is pure gravy.”

LUTIVINI MAJANJA was born in Nairobi Kenya. She holds a BA from the University of Nairobi and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Her work has been published in Kwani? and McSweeney’s. She has previously worked as a food sales and delivery person, an event organizer and a book publishing person. She is currently a teacher.

Lutivini always finds herself hungry for green mangoes spiced with ground red hot pepper.

LIZ KAY is a founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and the journal burntdistrict. Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, and RHINO. Her chapbook, Something to Help Me Sleep, is available from {dancing girl press}.

When asked about her strangest craving, she responded, “Babies. I want to inhale them, to slurp their cheeks, put their toes in my mouth. I don’t (anymore) because my children are too old for this sort of thing and they smell like boys now. Also, other parents seem uncomfortable letting me hold their infants. I can’t imagine why.”

JEN MUIR is an illustrator based in the UK. She uses mainly watercolours and inks and enjoys drawing animals and strange things. See more of her work here: https://platypusradio.me

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RANYLT RICHILDIS is a writer/editor whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ottawa Arts Review, Postscripts to Darkness Volume 2, Myths Inscribed, Pavor Nocturnus, and The Haunted Traveler. Her film and book reviews have appeared in the NYC-based online magazines In Review Online and The Second Pass. Her short story, “Long After the Greeks,” earned an honorable mention in Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ranylt is the founding editor of Lackington’s Magazine.

Her strangest craving is a spoonful of fig preserve from time to time, and the meal she always hungers for includes olives.

SKYE SHIRLEY graduated from Boston College in 2010 with a major in English and Creative Writing, and currently teaches Latin at an all-girls school. Her poetry has been published in multiple journals, including Sow’s Ear, Susquehanna Review, Deep South Magazine, Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009, Pure Francis, and Post Road.

She craves the vanilla-like smell of old books, and hungers for pumpkin bread, cider, cranberries, or anything else that tastes like October.

JON DAVID STROUD is a writer just embarking on his literary career. He is currently attending school in the Midwest pursuing a degree in the narrative arts. He is an avid believer in fairytales. His work can also be found in the literary magazine Gingerbread House.

He eats three or four red apples a day, green if they cannot be had, and is always hungry for more. His other craving is for ghost stories, even though they give him nightmares.

MATILDA YOUNG lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. She is a third year poet in the Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Maryland. She currently works as a paralegal in appellate law, where the lawyers are great, but there is a depressing dearth of adjectives.

She is at all times experiencing a low-level but undeniable craving for the queso and freshly made 50-cent flour tortillas served by Taco Cabana in Houston, preferably served with an orange Fanta, but the flavor of Fanta is negotiable.

DANIELLE SELLERS is originally from Key West, Florida. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she held the Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.

Her book, Bone Key Elegies, was published in 2009 by Main Street Rag. She lives in Winter Springs, Florida, where she edits The Country Dog Review.

The food that gives her the most sustenance is “probably the day-after-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich. It’s got to be homemade white bread cut thick, slathered with mayo, turkey of course, jellied cranberry sauce from the can, and dressing. It reminds my of my childhood, my grandmother, all things that are good and holy.”

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Staff EDITORS

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

Jen Muir https://platypusradio.me/ DESIGN

LiAnn Yim MASTHEAD ILLUSTRATIONS

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