The Madison Review Spring 2021

THE MADISON REVIEW

We would like to thank Ron Kuka for his continued time, patience, and support.

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Copyright © 2021 by The Madison Review the madison review

University of Wisconsin

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POETRY

Editors

Hannah Goldbaum

Tyler Moore

Associate Editor

Nina Boals

Staff

Aidan Aragon

Evelyn Poehlman

Sarah Shaw

Milly Timm

Sam Wood

FICTION

Editors

Emma Cholip

Chloe Christiaansen

Associate Editors

Matthew Bettencourt

Hannah Kekst

Riley Preston

Staff

Eloise Johnson

Alex Moriarty

Kora Quinn

Nadia Tijan

Fall 2020

Spring 2021

Dear Readers,

The Madison Review is thrilled to bring you our anticipated 2020/2021 Mega Issue! The staff at TMR have been working beyond our wildest dreams towards putting together a truly impressive array of work spanning across varied settings, cultures, and perspectives. It is ever impressive how the staff continually overcomes the difficult barriers that have been brought about by COVID-19 among other literary world complexities. They truly have beaten the odds and produced an issue with stellar pieces. We hope these short stories, poems, and art published in this edition evoke comfort, astonishment, and enrichment for you, who have chosen to read this issue. We sincerely hope these works bring happiness and a sense of wonder during this eventful 2021.

The work we receieve here continually impresses us. No literary journal can exist without the work of its submitters, and we cannot express how honored we are to be trusted with these skilled contributors’ poetry, short fiction, or art and to dissect it in such a way that fills us endless excitement. We are continuously reminded of how grateful we are to the authors who have been so gracious with us as we navigate the myriad of issues presented to us, and are excited to finally be putting their stories and poems out into the world. This issue would also not be possible were it not for you, our dear reader. If you’ve picked up a copy of this book, or are looking at it online on our website, we thank you for even opening the page out of curiousity, and hope that you continue reading. Our readership pushes us to compile the best issue possible, and we’re proud that you’re a part of our community.

The Madison Review would also like to thank our program advisor, Ron Kuka, for his constant encouragement, advice, and limitless support. We would also like to thank the UW-Madison English Department and the Program in Creative Writing for their help and support.

The Cello Has a Mournful Sound Rachel Jamison Webster

Everyone at the UPS store was wearing masks and waiting too obediently, most of them mailing books and paperwork

back to their home countries. An older couple was sending their daughter a cello in a hard plastic case the color of

congealed blood. It took several tries before the attendant realized there wasn’t a box it would fit in,

so they’d have to break down a few and staple the cardboard around the cello as if it were a body.

I know a woman who made her riches like that, ironing out the legalities of shipping bodies across states and nations.

You never think of the businesses that do better in a plague. You never imagine that before the cremation they lay out

your loved one in a long cardboard box, because it’s disposable and quick to incinerate. There were whole years I forgot

that Stanzi’s cello sat in my basement, unopened in its yellow case, an extraordinary instrument unplayed.

There were whole ways of being I had clasped shut and put away. When we’d met, we were both so cracked

open by loss it was like hearing music no one else could hear and having trouble concentrating on the reality

on which everyone else seemed to agree. She could never complete the usual assignment, but wrote about her brother in everything,

not naming him or telling me what had happened, but I knew he’d made the dollhouse sing, infused everything

with a dangerous clarity, as they watched the dolls alight and pirouette from the rooftops. We could feel them, our astral dead,

moving us like puppets through their orchestrations, threading us up, as we canticled and climbed in our minds, until we could almost see

through their eyes, looking down on our own small bodies like toys we could decide how to use—

for fun or for good—some tone in the ongoing notion of soul. We were trying to believe that we too had the radiance we had known

in them, albeit in lesser measures. Eventually, I cut the strings. I stood in line to send something

so long I forgot what I was sending. I was remembering the music, the way it felt when someone else was breathing me,

using the bow of my body to strike a low, whole tone, a single note in some larger symphony.

Violin Making on Mars

Christopher Heffernan

You’re sitting in front of the coffeehouse, looking across the way at the bar at eleven in the morning and there are people outside smoking and you’re not sure if they just got there or if they’ve been up all night. You know it’s possible to be up all night like that. You’ve been up all night like that. Here in this city, and other places. But mostly here. Work starts at the sushi place in two hours. You’re on your third cup of coffee and feel sick. The mug sits on your thigh as you sit in the chair leaned against the wall, still watching the people. You know them all by the nicknames you’ve given them. Smokey, Soccer-Guy, Chicken Face, Dr. Nose, The Bitch With The Sweaters. There’s one woman who sits on the steps to the bar with her legs open, flashing her underwear to all who pass. She’s there night and day. Not always outside. But always around. She never seems drunk. She sits on the stoop, though, every time she comes out for a cigarette. And always flash, flash. She is now Crazy Panty Woman. She has a nice haircut and is your new friend. She takes down half her drink in one pull. She lifts her chin and blows thick plumes of smoke. You know, of course, she is not your friend. None of these people are your friends.

You need the proper tools at the outset. It starts with planes, saws, then gauges, spool clamps, regular clamps, measuring tools, a thickening caliper, reamers and shapers, bending tools scrapers, and purfling. You will also need good F-hole tools, soundpost tools, and a uv cabinet. A solid workbench is a necessity and a good general work area to build and keep your materials and tools organized should be made and kept clean.

After their order is put in, you dole out the miso soups into bowls and decide to put the soups on the good tray, the one with no cracks or paint chips, and begin to bring them over. I’ll give them the royal treatment, you say to yourself. You see the old French architecture of the old and strange buildings outside the front window as you make your way to the table and wonder for a flash why you have moved here. It’s only a second of a flash but it’s sharp, like a single hair

suddenly yanked out of your head. You look back out the window and look at the buildings and then instead of thinking, they’re strange, you think, they are weird. There is a difference. You say the word weird in your head the way Angie Dawson said weird when she called you weird before the two of you started kissing for the first time. Exotic. Adventurous. As though from another planet. You are on another planet. But a good one. Mars maybe. Not crappy Neptune. You sigh. I’m not adventurous, you say to yourself. But you kind of know you are. As you place the miso soup down, serving to the guest’s left the way fine dining serves (for the royal treatment!), you tip the tray and spill soup on your chest. You jerk and almost drop the tray but bite your lip and hold on. The soup is on your shirt and clinging to the top of your breast and burning white hot. No one at the table notices. No one at the table notices anything—the soup, the walls, the weird adventurous buildings, you. You finish going around the table, placing the soup from the guest’s left, then walk/jog to the back where you hold the shirt from the burn and wince, throwing cold water down your collar, by the sink as the cooks laugh and ask you if you’re ok.

It helps to familiarize yourself with terminology. The chamfer, first turn, fluting, second turn, center ridge, outer wall, inner wall, pegbox floor, shaft, fingerboard, button, shoulder, overhang, top plate, upper eye, upper wing. These are just a few of the vocabulary you’ll need to know. There are lists and drawings you should study and have on hand as you proceed.

Ella is standing by the pool table, wearing the hat she always wears. She sways some and you can see her mouth moving along to the music though she is trying to hide it. As you walk over you see she is playing with Wendy and you look around the crowd for anyone else who might be playing but no one else seems to be involved in the game. You walk up next to Ella and bump her with your hip which knocks her a step. She bumps you back and after you bump her again she pretends to hit you with the cue stick. Everyone is laughing. At this. At other things. Wendy asks if you want to play teams when they’re done.

When sharpening your tools you must keep two aspects in mind. You want to make the edge as keen as you can, and you should aim for the ideal shape. To do this there are two steps. The shaping of it which helps with nick

removal. Then there is the honing.

It was Ella who brought you around and first introduced you to Wendy and Alex and the others. Ella works at the coffeehouse and would come outside to smoke and would talk to you or whoever was sitting there. About her life. Cats. Dogs. Books. The rain. She’s been through it all. Or maybe not all—but enough. Her mom used to smoke meth and stole from her and threw her out of the house when she was a teenager. Sitting there and talking to you, Ella would flick her cigarettes at the pigeons begging for crumbs, which you thought was funny, and always she gave some of her tips to Clarence the onelegged homeless man who only drank a can of orange soda a day and always smelled like shit. Ella was also always drawing a comic of a girl with her dog in outer space, looking for Earth. People (aliens) keep telling her Earth isn’t real. I know it is real, she keeps saying. She keeps looking. You, the reader, are not sure Earth is real, but she is—she just can’t find it. She has a little spaceship and she flies around. Sometimes when Ella is drunk and drawing at the bar, she’ll draw a page and tack it up on the bathroom wall. The girl’s name is Tina. What’s Tina up to this time? everyone asks. And they read the comic while shitting and pissing. There are always several pages of the comic up in the bathroom at any given time.

The foundation of your construction is the template. Much effort needs to be put into its proper execution. First you must decide if you are going to build an exact copy of an already existing instrument or move to make something more of an interpretation of what already is. Also, you may decide to construct the shape of the template yourself, without it being based on any existing violin.

Back home there wasn’t anyone like Ella. If there was, the closest thing for many miles was you. Which speaks volumes of THAT place. When thinking of home, that’s how you always say it to yourself. THAT place. THAT place.

It is best to choose a good maple when preparing the ribs. It should satisfy both visually and physically. A help is if the wood is flamed and flexible. But keep in mind that the more

flame there is the more difficult the maple is to work. This may prove unmanageable especially if you have no previous experience bending wood. If this is your first violin use a plainer, less marked, wood.

You’re sitting on a stoop that was once a doorway but is now all bricked up. Only the stoop remains. Ella is leaning against you. The two of you are across the street from the bar. The bar is still open. The lights of the bar shine through the glass of the front door. Ella just told you she wears a hat all the time because she thinks her hair is falling out. It made you laugh. As you turn to her to tell her her hair is not falling out, she is looking at you but her eyes are closed and even though her eyes are closed you know she can see you, that she can see right through you, as she leans slightly toward you and you both, without anymore talking, begin kissing. You can feel Ella running on your skin. She runs into your eyelashes. She rolls through your mouth like water where the two of you swim around. You think that thinking this is silly but being with Ella like this now has given you the ability to laugh at yourself, to be alright with yourself, with how you are silly, corny, stupid, smart, strong, vulnerable. Looking down from above at the two of you together, vulnerability now is not a weakness but a vein of your own sensitivity and how that sensitivity meets an abrasive outside. A rawness that is where, in a way, you are special. You touch her face. She puts a hand on your side and her thumb brushes your nipple.

In cutting the C blocks, first use a chisel to remove the wood about 3mm beyond the projected tips of the corners and then using the proper gouge pair away the wood in the upper and lower corner blocks where the C ribs will actually be. Naturally extend the curvature past the tip of the corner block. It is best to be sure that the block you are working with rests on the workbench as you apply pressure to only the block otherwise the block itself may crack or break off.

You see her as you walk into the coffeehouse and she smiles. When she gets a minute, she comes outside to smoke while you’re sitting there.The two of you talk about a magazine article you’re reading, an album she’s listening to, a band the both of you have seen but in two

different cities. After you pack up your stuff, you go to the bathroom even though you don’t have to go so you can walk by the counter to invite her out for a drink or a bite to eat or something later. She says, yeah sure, she’d love to. At the bar, you have a few beers and play a few games of pool. You keep telling Ella how good she is and joke about taking lessons from her. You ask her to show you a few things and she does but mostly she watches you go. She brings back a beer then smacks herself on the head and says she forgot yours. She goes and gets one for you. Mostly she is not talking. Her mouth is flat and she looks sort of angry. You ask her once if anything is wrong and she shrugs and says no. A few times you catch yourself thinking about this girl you saw last night at the convenience store buying cigarettes. She was telling the guy behind the counter that she just moved to the neighborhood and you felt your pulse going a little. On the corner, saying goodnight, you kiss Ella and she kisses you back but it’s just a kiss and you know something has ended even before it had legs. A nice something. A small something. A something that could’ve been a big something, you think, a great something, you think, and as you unlock your bike and peddle home, you remind yourself that you told yourself that when you moved here you were not going to let yourself feel sorry for yourself anymore for little things, for big things, for anything. It was nice, you say out loud. It could’ve been better, you say inside your head. You sing songs about fun, good, love at the top of your lungs as you ride through the dark streets of a strange, weird, place, in front of strange, weird buildings, lit with the lives of people you have no idea about. It does something for you to not sing songs about sad, dumb, love. This now feels different than when you were at home (THAT place) and this makes you peddle faster and sing louder.

For the front plate, the wood needs to be as flawless as possible. Check and recheck to make sure the wood is clean. There are figures and models to help you out. Be sure the wooden billets have the dimensions for violin building. And make sure to check the growth line density. It is alright if the growth line density varies but mostly on the edges to the center. Some wonderful instruments have a medium density on the outer end then move to a thicker density at the core. Dense growth lines throughout should be avoided.

In part, you came to this city for the music scene. For the clubs and the busking. For the constant history that is actually taking place now with all the people going back and forth from pianos to banjos, etc. If you thought about it, you could remember when you played last. A month maybe. But you haven’t practiced consistently since you’ve been here and you know that, and knowing that is making you feel shitty. You walk past the sushi place and its been three weeks since you’ve worked there, which is also kind of shitty. It’s summer and it’s slow, was what they said as they fired you. Or laid you off. You hold no grudge. They are nice people and maybe when the festival season starts in the fall they’ll take you back. There’s still some money saved from when you moved. You can float for a while. Not eating much. Not going out. But you went out last night. For one night of fuck it. You met a woman. You were at Uncle Tiki’s Hawaiian Torch Bar, a sort of dirtbag place that has cheap drinks and an Island theme which makes it funny for you to see the tropical grass-hut murals behind the tattooed faces of what the middle class keeps trying to flush through the toilets of the suburbs. It surprised you when a short, blonde, older, much older, woman in a business suit sat down. It was one thirty in the morning and she asked you what was good. You turned to tell her not to get the blue-whale mixed drink special because it turns your piss blue, and you almost fell off the stool because of how drunk you were and how suddenly you moved. You righted yourself, laughing, and said, Bluewhales are bad for piss.

The sides must be planed at right angles to the bottom surface using a number 6 jointer plane. Clamp one end of the piece and support the other with a block of wood to make sure there will be no bending while planing. You must make sure the growth lines run parallel to the center and you must make any corrections now before the joint has been finalized in the following step.

She told you about how she works in the medical industry and travels a lot, though you were not exactly sure what she did. She bought you a drink. Then another. You tried to buy her one but she shouted it down by saying she had a tab going. You also had a tab going and knew that was no reason not to have a drink bought for you but it came across that she wanted to buy all the drinks. Or in some way had to. That it satisfied something in her that needed satisfying. So you let her.

Remark the center line on the ribs if necessary. Put the ribs on the front plate facing upside down. Mark the very top and bottom of the ribs. When you’ve removed the ribs at the two points you have marked ‘A’ and ‘B’ drill two holes about 4mm in.

Leaving, she stumbled out the door and almost fell. She laughed as she grabbed at the air, grabbed at the walls to keep herself up. You thought, man, this chick is way too drunk to drive, as you laughed and caught her, catching her purse and made sure she stayed on her feet. As she straightened, the two of you were very close and kissed. This one went off with a giggle. A little joke only the two of you heard and got. A flake of something holy to be put in the tabernacle of your memory, and be brought out later, perhaps to raise the dead a little when necessary.

As you are removing wood from the top plate with a suitable gouge, be careful in the corners where they split easily. Make sure you are sensitive to the grain and apply only a slight force. The gouge should be razor sharp.

Her breasts were much larger than they looked when she was all dressed up, and you’ve seen business women, especially business women, who hide their bodies in order to keep traction with their careers. They do not want anything extraneous to interrupt or sideline what they have worked so hard for. You must be pretty. But not too pretty. Etc. Her breasts fall away from her as she removes her top, straddling you. They roll and you can feel the weight of them as she pushes them into you.

Distortions will happen with older instruments, especially very old instruments, the wear over the centuries may cause a drop in the height of the top and bottom. You do not want these in your instrument, you want your instrument to have a sound arch that will stand up to the ravages of one hundred or two hundred years of time, of use.

She kept telling you to go down on her. Go down on me. Go down on me. She was kissing your neck, kissing your ear. Go down on me. You were planning on it but now it seemed to be an imperative so you stopped kissing her neck and her ear and slid yourself down along her body, kissing off a little trail like Hansel and Gretel going deeper and deeper into the forest.

There is a way to visualize the arches better. Try using a marking caliper to make contour lines. It will help you to see the irregularities in the arching. Based on the arching itself your lines will differ but in this way it should come easier and flow more gracefully.

You were both laying there, nibbling. A kiss placed on her side, placed on her chin and you felt how she was feigning exhaustion, that her body throbbed but she kept pulling away. It started as you were coming back up and she was slowing as sleep seemed to be taking her. You kissed and touched but less and less came back. You’d run into this before like with Rachel Parsons. Someone who only wants things done to her by a girl. She wants a girl, loves the girl, but will only lie there and have it done to her. Will not expend any energy or show even a simple desire to do something to the girl sharing her bed. You saw the outline of her cheek and jaw in the dark. You propped yourself up on an elbow with your breast just touching her shoulder, and with a bird’s eye view of her face in the dark, drew little roads along this beautiful foreign country. Her eyebrow, her nose, along her lip. She smiled once and then her mouth flattened and then she did not smile.

Simply, to make the f-holes flow better with the arching the lower wings are fluted. It is done so that the fluting gradually rises to the corner wing. In the area of the tip of the wing you must cut deeply. You must cut as deep as how intense you want the flute to be.

The bed was white. The sheets were white. The walls were white. All the furniture was white except one brown chair and one brown end table next to the chair. It was all, also, extremely expensive stuff. She was not there. You lay in bed a long while then got up and dressed. There was a note on the end table. Had fun last night. Was too drunk to remember if I gave you my number—then the number—Call me!

Kiss Kiss! You put the number in your phone and made sure the door was locked as you left. Then you are walking past the sushi place. It is hot and there is no one around. No people or cars. Thankfully no one at all is left in the world. You think about practicing when you get home. You feel good thinking about the music you’re going to go over. You feel good about maybe trying a new piece. Coming up to your apartment, you stop in the shade and text her. Birds chirp. Not pigeons. Nice birds. Had fun, too! Very hung over. Let’s have dinner soon. She writes back three hours later—ok.

The wood for the back panel is harder and carves in a different way than the front. You must prevent tear-out and in order to do this it is best to have a razor sharp plane with the mouth set to the minimum and the chip breaker set very close. And for different parts of the back of the instrument different planing directions may be needed.

You have dinner and fool around. You have dinner and fool around. Her bag costs fifteen hundred dollars and she will not go down on you.

For the neck, choose a piece of maple whose flame matches the back. It helps to have the medullary rays at right angles to the top plane, the growth lines parallel with the fingerboard. In order to reorient the wood grain, if necessary, you can use a simple template.

You keep crashing into the bar as you walk over to the couple Jeff and Jeff you sort of know. You put an arm around each of them and sing songs about good love and dumb love at the top of your lungs. The thinner Jeff knows some lyrics and sings along. The bulkier Jeff rolls his eyes. Ella is there. The money you’ve saved is gone so it doesn’t matter how much you spend anymore. Ella asks you if you want to play pool in teams. She leads you away from Jeff and Jeff. You play with Ella, Wendy, and a guy named Mitch. You don’t remember anything after the first game. Oh yeah! you remember. You remember pushing the balls around on the table, trying to get them all into one pocket at the same time and someone shouting. But you’re unsure if it was your game or someone else’s game you ruined. The light is on

your face and your eyes are open in Ella’s bed. No one is there. She has a loft way up in the air. Nine feet in the air. There is no AC. Your clothes are sticking to you and you must climb all the way down with sweaty hands and sweaty feet. In the kitchen, Ella is wearing her hat and making breakfast. Ella always makes breakfast for everyone in the house. Three people on her side, three on the adjoining side including whoever is crashing, boyfriends, girlfriends, stray dogs, a cat named Crackers, a snake named Apollo. You hit it pretty hard last night, she says. I don’t mind sleeping on my couch, she says, but let’s not make it a habit. You sit at the table against the wall. She tells you about all the stupid shit you did. The fights you started. About locking yourself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. She half laughs. You do not laugh. Then she hands you a plate of eggs and beans and asks you if you want a job at the coffeehouse.

In order to cut the rough form of the neck, use a coping saw or belt saw. Do not under cut. Constantly check the lines and where the blade falls in relation to the lines to make sure you have a good cut line and are going in the right way.

The guy who runs the coffeehouse is mostly insane. He’s from the Middle East—where exactly you’re unsure, but he half-whisper/ half-yells everything and demonstrates and explains buttering a bagel as though you are seeing and hearing of bagel buttering for the first time, giving you the correct way to hold the knife, hold the bagel, the proper amount of butter to use for the best taste and still remain cost effective.

You must make sure the general outline is flawless before you begin the carving of the fluting. The gouge you use for the fluting, and you should have several on hand, should have a round shape. It is perhaps best to have a completed neck before you begin for reference.

The dead zone is between two and three. No one comes in between two and three. It is a perfect time to clean and get all the dishes and mugs washed. You are outside sitting in a chair against the wall with a cigarette, watching everyone at the bar across the way. Chicken Face, Soccer-Guy, Crazy Panty Lady. It’s pink panties for her today. For everyone today. There’s one girl sitting at the coffeehouse sidewalk

tables all the way down at the end. She bought one cup of coffee about two hours ago. She has a shaved head and a laptop. She sees you looking at her. She gets up and walks past you to go inside. You saw a deflated earlobe where a large gage had been taken out not so long ago, and part of a coy fish tattoo. The coy fish must be three feet long and sticks out from under her half shirt, going up her ribs and going down into her shorts around the bottom of her back, coming out and around the back of her thigh and down her leg. There are other tattoos, too, but the giant fish that grants wishes was the one that caught your eye. It zips and swirls. When you look into the coffeehouse, she’s waiting by the counter. You flick your cigarette at the pigeons and go inside. She’s from Eugene, Oregon and has just moved to town. She’s lived here before, though. I lived here for two years, three years ago. I love this place. I don’t know why I left. I guess I do. I was a little beaten up from work and the lifestyle and needed a break. Now, I guess I had to get away from Eugene, she laughs. She has a light way of talking that surprises you. As though she’s telling her exterior a story of tenderness that her inside already understands. She spills coffee on herself when walking and doesn’t clean it up. She calls herself a silly goof when talking about having forgotten her bus ticket at home when she first tried to leave Eugene to come here.

Clamp the back to the ribs before gluing. You may make your own spool clamps and use those. See the section on tools for instruction on making spool clamps. Make sure as you align the ribs you do not over tighten clamps. Put the knife and brush you have set aside in hot water.

She comes back the next day. And the day after that. She’s looking for a job. There’s a sushi place probably hiring soon, you say. It’s festival season and things are picking up, you say. Tell them I sent you over there. It might do you some good. They’re alright people.

Push the knife into the joint and use your fingers to spread the joint if necessary to make sure enough glue is being used. Look over the bouts, and look over the top and bottom block. Let dry.

During the dead zone, she’s still there. This time she’s sitting right by the door. You sit next to her. You tell her you only smoke a couple cigarettes a day and you don’t know why you started. She bums a

drag and blows it in your face. You smile and flick ashes at her as she hands it back. She’s telling you about the sculptures she’s made—she’s a welder. She took classes in welding but didn’t like the nine to five welding world but still uses it to sculpt. Actually, she admits, I don’t think I ever wanted to be a welder. I just used that as an excuse to get myself to pay for the classes. I’ve been more of a bartender than anything else, she says. You’re in the right town for that, you say. You’re sitting very close. There’s a table between you but it’s small and you’re both sort of slumped toward each other. Your hand brushes her knee. Then her hand brushes your hand and doesn’t move. Should I grow my hair out? she says. Do you think that’ll help me get a job? I’m thinking of growing my hair out. Then you say, If you grow your hair out I’ll kill myself. She laughs and squeezes your finger. She won’t stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny. She’s laughing and squeezing your finger. You rub the back of her knuckles with your thumb. A divine pronouncement in the afternoon. At the little table with the little chairs. A song made of fingers and thumbs. Of knuckles, and thumbs, and laughter.

Make sure before closing to go over the surface that will end on the inside to be certain there are no splinters or other loose material that can cause damage or buzzing later on. You may remove what is left of the glue if necessary.

She’s not as good at pool as you are but it doesn’t bother her.

The drunker she gets the harder she smacks you and everyone else on the ass. Butt shot! she yells. Whack!

She listens to you play the violin and requests songs. The ones that you wrote.

She tells you to get in a band. Or at least get out there and play in the street. People should hear you, she says. People need this sort of thing. They always need this sort of thing. And you have it. You should give it to them. They’re too stupid to give it to themselves.

The night before you decided to go busk for the first time—and actually do it—she is next to you on the couch with her arm under you and her other arm around you, with the flicker of the movie in the dark of the room where you see her hand come up against the half

light of the TV to touch your face, illuminating the image of you to her so that the two of you may see the other one last time before sleep. Before all the things you cannot control in sleep. And what comes after sleep.

Also, before the instrument is sealed it is the custom of many makers to put a personal label inside. The label can be any shape or size. And what is on the label is up to the craftsman. Usually, it is the builder’s name, the date and where it was created. It is, most times placed in the center and can be seen from the outside, through the f-holes, but many put a mark somewhere else. Sometimes a simple initial further up toward the neck. Sometimes it is only a symbol somewhere on the ribs.

She comes down the street toward you in the white shirt and black pants of the sushi place and puts an iced-coffee at your feet where she sits with her iced-coffee, against the building, looking around, looking around at the sidewalk. There are people walking by, there are people standing and listening. You switch what you were playing right in the middle of a song, a popular, crowd pleasing, whatever song, to something she has not heard before but something you know she will like. A new one you’ve written that you hid so you could bring it out like this, with the sun and the iced-coffee, subtly while she would be sitting there after work, exhausted and cranky, needing a cigarette. The afternoon people are watching. You can see the way the music is coming off your violin and going at the air, like fallen orange and yellow autumnal leaves caught in an updraft. She says your name. She says your name again and you look at her as you are playing and she smiles at you and says, This one is so beautiful. So beautiful. I heard you practicing it in the bathroom when you thought I wasn’t home yet. It made me cry.

Weeks Spent at White Creek

Kate Musso

In talking about the slow finish to sounds you must have realized that we are the hush.

Looking out over your hills, the last of sun somehow your prize, do you bother with the thought of reward?

This is no home, it never was more than the pale bottom of creek, a glitter at noon, unseen at dusk.

All I remember is, the day was an arbitrary division, long before we got there.

Fratello

Mikele Prestia

I remember the day you took the chair from the kitchen and put it between rows of stakes in the vegetable patch. I opened the side gate and you were sitting there, nearly camouflaged among the soil and leaves, a garden gnome come to life. As always, you had a smoke held between your knuckles, and a mug of instant coffee, which you gripped from the rim. You look childish sitting between the rows of plants, like you’re half-assing a game of hide and seek.

I think you might be about to tell me something.

The screen door rattles and Dad bursts into the backyard, with flushed cheeks and an immovable Elvis pompadour. I immediately guess you’ve left something lying around again. He tells you to get the fuck out of his vegetable patch, put the chair back in the kitchen . You spray out a laugh. He says if you’ve damaged anything he’ll take his handsaw to the neck of your guitar, then your neck. He says you’re a dirty dopesmoking donkey whose sponge-brain isn’t fit to wipe down his sink.

Things between you are not good at this point.

Your eyes gleam with amusement from behind your fringe. You take a long drag on your cigarette. You stand up. You wait for him to stride over to you, potbelly first, through the tomato plants, and grab you by your collar. Your cigarette falls into your coffee. Your coffee falls onto the ground and spills over his black-leather pandófla. He shakes you so hard your head bobbles back and forth. You’re grinning, almost laughing.

Dad’s eyes pop so far out of their sockets I think you’re going to pick them out, one and then the other, like bocconcini. You must have seen fear, or at least vulnerability, in his eyes because you push him hard in the chest. You open your mouth to scream but the sound that comes out is more like a bleat, a long mournful wail.

It sounds like a question.

You push Dad again and he stumbles backwards over a divot in the soil and falls onto a tomato plant. The wood of the stake snaps cleanly and now Dad is on his back. There is red everywhere and I think he’s been impaled, before a sweet rich smell fills the air and I realise it’s the tomatoes he’s crushed. You’re standing over him, torso hunched forward. Your face is slapped-ass pink. Your teeth are bared.

I run towards you and lock my arm around your neck. I pull your head down into my chest. You tell me to let you go, then you tell me I better not, that if I ever do you’ll fuck me in the ass with a spanner. I can see the vein by your temple pulsing angrily as you turn red. Eventually, when you stop punching me in the stomach and you don’t have enough air to yell anymore, I let go.

This is the one memory of you I fully trust, the only one that won’t crumble with use.

Mum has these moments where she grips the kitchen bench top for balance and starts cursing the saints in Greek. I usually close the windows when this starts because the neighbours in the flats next-door start laughing at her from their balconies and this upsets her more. I still prefer this to when she actually takes her antidepressants. I once came home from uni and found her by the stove, burning an empty pan. She was tutting at it like it wasn’t cooking fast enough.

I’ve been researching trauma lately.

Did you know it impairs your ability to retain memories?

That it implodes the boundary between past and present?

The thought of not being able to find you scares me.

I’m trying to remember, before the yawning hole in my head strips the rest of you away from me.

My earliest memories are smooth and convex like freshly paved roads; I can travel down their spines and still feel each contour.

Dad in the backyard: on a stepladder by the rusted iron fence, trimming the vines that crowned its edges, a fatly rolled cigarette jutting out of his mouth like a bandaged finger.

Michael, seven years old and playing on the clothesline: swinging himself to and fro, until it gives a metallic lurch and obligingly begins rotating.

Eleni in her nappy: sitting chubby-legged in the overgrown grass, turning from Michael to Dad and then back again, unwilling to miss out on the actions of either for too long.

Mum in the kitchen: the water boiling and the pasta sauce bubbling thickly in the pan, gloop glooping like molten lava. She sings Il Mondo through the kitchen window as I read on the back veranda.

From the moment he was born, Michael was No One’s Boy.

After my exhausted mother had been stitched back together, she rubbed away the tears of an eighteen-hour labour with the back of her wrist and drank in her newborn son. Apparently, Michael had stopped crying as soon as he was placed in her arms. The big head that had stubbornly demanded a Caesarean stared back at her with wide unblinking eyes. She looked at her baby and couldn’t quite place him. She ran her eyes over his small body as she would a freshly sewn jumper, inspecting the seams, admiring her embroidery, looking for herself in every stitch. His eyes were liquorice, deep black engulfing the faintest trace of chocolate. His eyebrows were furrowed and pronounced from the start, hooding a bewildered stare.

When the doctor clipped the umbilical chord, Rosa mourned for an intimacy she would never feel again: her first love.

My father, Aris, stuck his head into the hospital foyer and proclaimed in Greek, and then English, to the rest of our family, ‘Our fatso has arrived!’

The scar tissue had barely woven itself into my mother’s skin before she was cut open along the same line so I could be born thirteen months later. Unlike Michael’s birth, mine was gory and nearly calamitous. I would later learn that the placenta had broken prematurely and I had come adrift within my mother. By the time I was delivered Rosa had lost so much blood she couldn’t open her eyes. After her second transfusion she regained consciousness to the sight of a tight-faced Aris standing at the foot of her bed.

‘Did I lose the baby?’ she asked, barely aware if she was dreaming or not.

‘No, but we nearly lost you.’

I imagine it’s common, when a loved one dies, to stare into the past and find that it’s coming for you. As if stirred by a necrotic dogwhistle, shadows step out of the mist and begin their crepuscular march.

I’m sitting with my father in the darkness of the lounge. The heat of the day is pressing against the redbrick of the house and I can feel it beginning to seep around the edges of the closed blind.

The room smells of Dad’s old recliner: fibrous and dusty, like a sweater once washed and never worn again. The chair is a deep empty blue, which could just as easily be navy or black, with faded green lines running along its back in no pattern in particular. Whenever I close the blinds and shut out the day, the whole room seems to become the colour of the chair: a miserable swamp of nostalgia, the shrivelling remnant of a baby’s umbilical chord. I feel if I rest in it, it will consume me.

When my father sits in this chair, it’s for keeps. It lurches back on its base, as if ready to fling his squat body into oblivion, before rocking forward with a contented creak. A Calenda isn’t a Calenda, by blood or marriage, without something to consume them. This chair was, and still is, what consumes my father. When he walks to it, smooth forearms dangled by his sides like a marionette, his troubles nearly buckling his back, he craves the amnesic embrace.

On my way out, I often walk past my father in the lounge, in his chair in the dark, and feel a contemptuous pity. This room is the liminal space between past and present; it’s where you waste away. My father knows what he’s doing.

Other times, after dinner, when the waxen light from the kitchen trickles across the house and traces silhouettes in the darkness, I find myself joining him. Across from the clatter of dishes in the sink and Eleni’s tired answers to my mother’s daily questions, we sit in silence. Sometimes the television is on, sometimes it isn’t. It never matters; the silence has the same quality, the static crackle of a blank screen when the signal drops out. This is the silent contract my father and I have agreed upon, this pretence of waiting. Nothing happens, nothing needs to. I try not to sit with him for too long. If I look across and see that he’s asleep in his chair, I will ease myself off of the tight leather couch with a squelch and join Eleni and Mum in the kitchen. I refuse to let myself be trapped in the same way as the other men in my family.

I see it now in my father’s unblinking stare, his pupil contracting tightly around cyclical memories. I can see the density of his haunting, thickening around him until he is indistinguishable from the chair in which he sits, the room in which he hides.

I think I have trouble sitting with my father, even more so getting up to leave him, because of my familiarity with his wide-eyed absence. I walked past that expression on Michael for so many years, its recurrence in my father compels me to stay and sit.

Eleni passes by the frosted glass of the half-open sliding door.

‘I’m going to the beach.’ She says the words defiantly, not stopping to make eye contact with either of us.

At first, Cathy was hair. She was a golden shock of curls disappearing behind a closing door. She was a strand of straw coil caught in the upholstery. She was a thin streak of colour amidst collective black hairs shed in the shower drain.

Then she was a sixth set of cutlery at the kitchen table.

And then there she was.

My mother was not the type of woman to allow competition for her son’s affection. Rosa tolerated Michael bringing women to the house, so long as she never had to see or hear them. As long as they came in through the laundry via the side-gate, left the same way, and preferably didn’t stay the night, nothing needed to be said.

Aris would often tell us, in the tone of voice you can easily ignore, that he hand picked each brick that he used to build our house. Looking at it now: pale red and squat like a Calabrese uncle, I still don’t find it impressive. I do have to thank my father’s fidelity to workmanship and good materials for the fact that I never heard Michael in his room. A double-bricked barrier kept out the noises and the voices.

I still knew there were women; when Michael wasn’t smoking in the backyard or riding his bike, he was hovering by the front fence either welcoming or thanking someone. Michael never seemed to need more than himself and I had never known him to express affection for any of the women in his life, it seemed too close to dependence.

That’s why when Cathy, beautiful fleeting Cathy, started shedding her time all over our house, I started paying closer attention to my brother.

The voices hadn’t started yet. Or maybe they had, though they could have been phone calls; I don’t know if Cathy was a fan of talking on the phone.

She would come over before dinner and kiss my mother on her warm bony cheek. Rosa would offer her face to Cathy as a priest offers a hand at communion and Cathy would take it with magnanimity, cooing through the house: Senora, come sei stata? Cathy’s parents were from Napoli and I worried Cathy’s attempts to impress Rosa with Italian were futile in the face of my mother’s bastard dialectic. But Rosa was never rude to Cathy. She would look at her, eyes narrow, as if straining with effort to understand her.

In the patter of Cathy’s feet on our spongy carpet, the gentle ebb of her voice through the house, there was a peace in Michael we didn’t know to be possible. Not to say that much changed. Michael’s mood changes were sudden and initially imperceptible, like a drop in temperature or a last breath.

I wish I could recount this properly, and say: here, this! This is how happy Cathy made my brother . But there are no specifics. My brother was not an overt person. There was no Cathy-smile that grew onto his face whenever she was around. He would talk about her quietly with the same gravelly drawl he spoke about everything; you had to project the excitement into his voice. But it was there.

Looking into the past is like cracking open a hatchet and letting ghosts stream into your head. Nothing is real until you decide it is, and you need to decide.

So I have decided that Cathy’s presence in our house for those truncated years was like the release of a valve, a gentle decompression, a cleansing of the air.

Eleni recently found a photo of Michael and Cathy. They’re at a wedding, or a christening. The room visible over their shoulders is typical of a west side function centre: panelled wood and vast space. They’re sitting at a white-clothed table: Cathy and Michael, and the photo seems to have been taken by the person to my brother’s left.

Michael’s hair is a frizzy helmet that ends in a jagged line just above his eyebrows.

There were far worse styles to come.

As usual, his chin is tilted upwards, showing as much contempt for the camera as possible while remaining placid.

For once, Cathy isn’t smiling with her teeth, but you can feel them pushing against her lips. Her face is titled slightly down and her blue eyes are payfully chiding the camera with that eternal expression of put that thing away . The photo cuts off at the edges of their shoulders, but it feels like he has an arm around her.

Eleni holds the photo out to me with an extended arm, as if she cannot bear to let it close to her. I know all she can see when she looks at this picture is the end, dormant and inevitable. Something a psychiatrist might have called a genetic predisposition. I look at it and wonder if my brother was ever happier than he was then.

I doubt it.

I remember now. The photo was from Eleni’s sixteenth birthday, which means it was taken not long before Michael last went to Greece.

Our family trips overseas were never something I looked forward to. My parents first took us to Greece and Italy, the homelands from which they jettisoned themselves, when I was six. I remember having to present to the class about a smooth rock I found on the side of the exit road from my father’s village. He told me that Halatsi was home to the oldest amphitheatre in the Peloponnese. I later found out that most of the marble that made up its benches had since been pillaged and sold off by locals. I told the class that I imagined my rock might have chipped off from a Minotaur’s skull or a man turned to stone by Medusa, and they nodded in marvel.

Once we arrived at my parents’ respective villages, Halatsi and Bovalino, it was pure word of mouth and misfortune that that dictated whose roof we would be staying under.

Once, when I was about twelve, my Zia Chichina, my mother’s auntie, sent her son Domenico to pick us up unannounced from the airport. We proceeded to spend the next three weeks in a ground floor flat with Chichina, her three sons, their wives, and six grandchildren, in a one-bedroom apartment. My memory of that time is all the male cousins lined up to sleep on the lounge room floor, squashed in a Calabrese concertina. My two female cousins, Giovanna and Chiara, were the eldest and they got to sleep on the couches either side of the wriggling mass of fanculo questo and basta, basta! Eleni slept on a fold out mattress with my mother, at the foot of Chichina’s bed. It usually took hours for us all to fall asleep, despite the hissing for silenzio from Giovanna. Michael and my eldest male cousin, Mauro, would pass the time by spitting into their hands and throwing it up in the air, before shoving their faces into their pillows in innocence. The room would fall silent for a brief moment before one boy or another would shriek in disgust and the others would giggle in excitement: figlio di puttana! Giovanna would step her long angular feet in between the tightly packed bodies and twist Mauro’s ear until he gave an effeminate squeal and the game stopped. Chiara would just laugh to herself and turn away from us. I never slept much in Bovalino. Even with the window open, the air palpated with the slickness of wet skin and body heat. I once woke up to see Chiara’s couch empty and a pale light trickling through from the bathroom. I watched through thinly slit eyes as Michael slowly sat up right next to me and looked around before silently slipping out of the room. When I woke up the next morning they were both back in their usual spots.

I remember once asking Mauro what there was to do in Bovalino. He told me there was a beach but when I asked him if we could go he

raised his eyebrows and smirked: Non lo facciamo .

So we passed our time by taking turns riding bikes around the chlorine-blue apartment building and listening to Chichina’s stories. Her husband, my Zio Francesco, was a respected local politician. He was campaigning for the position of mayor on an anti-gambling mandate: no slot machines in bars and restaurants, no advertisements in public spaces. Francesco knew well that this policy would draw him attention from the worst kinds of people, but he pursued it anyway. He would speak passionately to crowds in the town square, decrying the men with slicked back hair and golden pinkie rings who would visit small business owners and insist on increasing their profits. Then, one night during dinner, when their boys were still little, there was a knock on the front door. I imagine it was staccato on the wood, the kind of sound that punctures the air. Invariably, my family left Bovalino in a state of visceral restlessness. By the time we arrived at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport, the heat had run through the spray in my father’s hair and matted it around his skull like a glossy net. He charged between service desks, barking Greek to himself while my mother walked behind, the skin of her arms and face splotched with sweat rashes and a glazed look in her eyes.

There was more freedom in Halatsi; death and diaspora have scattered my father’s relatives into the wind. Only his godmother, Fofo, still lives in the town. Her apartment sits behind a corner of the town square, we stay there knowing nothing is required of us except warmth for the empty beds. Fofo’s husband, Konstantinos, died from lung cancer before I was born and her two sons live in America. In the sitting room, gold-framed black and white photos stare at each other across frequently dusted shelves and the curtains stay drawn. In one of the few coloured photos, Fofo and Konstantinos are standing arm in arm in the town square, squinting into the sunlight. The apartment is behind them, bright white against a clear blue sky. Now, heat has flayed the building’s skin and its flesh is scabbed grey.

We would wake up early in the morning to the caw of a rooster and Fofo would take Eleni and I to the small courtyard behind her building to feed the chicken coop. Eleni would cling tightly to the back of Fofo’s pant-leg, eyeing the chickens in horror. Fofo dipped into a plastic bag full of the week’s food scraps and produce some stale crust or lettuce, which she would place into my palm. The birds disgusted me, feathers wet with grease and heads jerking side to side as if constantly overhearing new conversations. I only took the scraps in my hand because

I had to distance myself from the pitiful sight of Eleni quivering behind Fofo’s leg. Despite Fofo’s assurances that they will only touch the food , the chicken’s beaks were coarse and sharp, prodding against my skin. I ran upstairs to my mother and tearfully presented my upturned palms like a miniature martyr. She would make a fuss and take both my hands in one of hers and peck them with little kisses.

From maybe the age of ten, I would go for walks at every opportunity, my legs still cramped and restless from memories of Chichina’s lounge floor. A steady ebb of conversation, that would rise and fall in turn with the wind, drew me towards the town square. Here, teenagers sat at the front of cafes yelling and gesticulating around frappes and card games. Old men in flat caps sat on benches, wrists crossed atop walking sticks, watching the world in deep silence. The laughter of the village boys rumbled hungrily from the town square through Halatsi most nights. On trips to the grocery store, kids and adults alike stared at us on the streets. Their eye contact was long and unwavering, without a hint of self-consciousness. There must have been something in our posture, a wideness of the eyes, marking us as strangers: xéni . Michael just smirked and winked at girls and old men alike, revelling in the alterity.

I felt a deep longing for the communality of the young boys and girls. The weeks spent in Halatsi could feel endless and cyclical, the town could be circled within half an hour, yet their eyes never dulled, their voices never faltered. I felt a peculiar loneliness, sitting with Michael as he smoked loose cigarettes he’d charmed from the grocer. I would softly read out Greek shop signs, my accent robbing the words of their rhythm as they met the air. I asked Michael if he wanted to help me practice my Greek. He bunched up his eyebrows, considering me with a long drag of his cigarette.

Óhi , he said, blowing the smoke into my face.

On weekends, foldable chairs would be lined up in rows at one end of the town square and the space in front became a makeshift stage. Men who spent their weeknights at home with their wives, falling asleep in front of Greek soap operas, were reborn as crooners, bouzouki players, and rock lotharios. Michael loved putting on his best leather jacket and skinny jeans, and strolling down to the town square on nights like this. He would lean against one of the olive trees that lined the square’s edges, smoking and watching microcosms of Greek life play out in front of him: the misty-eyed yiayiáthes in the front rows, letting themselves be transported back to their own youths; the

smiling families on holidays from Athens, revelling in the nostalgia of their home town; the young people, too cool to act like they enjoy the music, flirting with each other by fountains and lamp posts.

It’s easy to speculate about what might have been.

This is not a discussion I can have with my parents, and it hurts my sister too much, so I’m having it here. To my parents, she did it: the witch, the whore, the devil. My parents have always been detached from the moorings of reality and now they remain adrift, numb. To them, there are only the facts of what happened, consideration of anything else would be to diminish the memory of Michael.

But I know this is part of the problem, and although I haven’t said this to them, I think we are all to blame for what happened. I have no interest in deciding to what extent, there is no game in culpability, no joy in connecting omission to consequence. I think on some level my parents know what they have done, that’s why they have inoculated themselves from the truth. My mother has her medicines, my father has his chair, and Eleni has the rest of her life to live.

Only I can look backwards, not because I am strong or even a good person, but because I too was complicit in my inaction and Michael deserves to be understood.

Yes, it was after Garry’s wedding; Michael and Cathy seemed to have a kind of happiness that needed no witness. He spent his days working with Dad in the garage. He would come through the door for lunch, sweaty and shirtless, with a satisfied exhalation and a kiss on the cheek for Mum.

Michael had started contracting his own clients with the skills he’d learnt. Nothing elaborate, a shelf for a friend, a liquor cabinet for Cathy’s father. He was saving. He and Cathy were going overseas: he actually wanted to show Cathy Halatsi and Bovalino, as well as to finally see the rest of Greece and Italy. My mother thought that Michael planned to propose to Cathy, and listened to his plans in wistful silence: the closest thing to approval she could offer.

About a month before they were due to leave, I started noticing Michael acting strangely. He would walk into the lounge and growl at me to change the channel, no matter what I was watching. Fuck off, I’d respond, but he’d just snatch the remote from my hand and throw himself into Dad’s recliner.

Dinner became a nightly platform to berate my mother and the quality of her cooking. The pasta was shit, the sauce was cold, the Parmesan tasted off.

Initially, God bless my mother’s singular devotion to her firstborn,

she took his rudeness as constructive. Okay, just let me microwave it some more for you. Oh? The cheese smells fine to me, what do you think Aris? Before Dad slammed his fist on the table and told Michael to take his bowl and leave, and he did. For those last weeks, Michael would take his dinner from the table and walk it out to the vegetable patch, where he would eat in rushed joyless mouthfuls, before dumping his plate in the sink and going to bed. You’re a grown man , Eleni would call after him. Dad would gesture to his empty seat at the table and respond, He’s not a man.

The day before he left, the two of us sat watching daytime television. Some affable guy in a khaki shirt and akubra was squinting in the sun and telling us the best time of year to grow parsley.

Fuck off , Michael said suddenly.

I put this shit on for you , I remember yelling in disbelief.

I know you’re trying to kill me.

I realised he wasn’t talking to me. He was looking wide-eyed at the television but somehow through it, beyond it. The look in his eyes reminded me of a terrified child; as if something he had long feared had finally come for him.

Fuck off, just leave me alone.

I don’t remember what I said to him. I only remember my intense aversion to my brother in this moment. I know I did not ask if he was okay or comfort him. I looked at him, strapped to his chair with fear, and felt that something within him hungering for primacy had finally thrashed its way to the surface.

I let Michael eat dinner in the garden that night, quickly and sadly, a child sent away for misbehaving, and didn’t say anything. I let Michael leave for the airport the next day with a peck on the cheek from Eleni and a grunt towards my parents, and didn’t say goodbye.

I identified Michael’s body six days later. In the photograph they showed me, his eyes were wide and impressed, as if in the early throws of an awesome high. His eyelids and mouth are lined with the raw pink of burst blood vessels, which exploded as his body was logged with seawater. A morning jogger found him facedown in the foreshore, lower back arched slightly into the air and arms limp by his sides, as if he’d plummeted into the sand from outer space. There were no signs of physical trauma, the police think he walked into the ocean and misjudged the strength of the tide.

At the time, none of us knew his relationship with Cathy had ended weeks earlier, that there were never any plans for the two of them

to travel together. So it was with a strange ease of acceptance that I heard that my brother Michael was not in fact smoking at a cafe in Greece, but drowned on a beach in Australia.

I hope that Michael was able to return to Halatsi with Cathy. Take her to the town square, poised in perpetuity, years later as an adult. Except this time, he would be the one grinning to the music, love struck, as the bouzouki wailed and Cathy spun herself under his arm with an Ópa!

Or maybe they were sitting under an olive tree, Michael smoking with Cathy’s arm locked through his, gently persuading him to come dance with her. He might have smiled with his eyes and told her I don’t dance . He didn’t dance, but he might have for her.

Swinging

Karl Michael Iglesias

i spent my early life in the apartments off of third and mitchell. a block away from the freeway. a sprint from the only basketball court in the neighborhood (which wasn’t for the little kids) and a parking lot, made mostly of grass, that knew one day, it could be a park. a pink sneeze every spring and sour red every summer. the apartments were surrounded by our poppin’ ass neighbors, the crab apple trees. would move a block away to third and maple, to a house that was second from the corner. and on the way home from allen-field elementary which was on eighth and lapham, after a long john and flamin’ hot popcorn from the gas station, my birthright was to climb up those trees. swung from the wooden bars of an old shakey cage, it thudded dozens of crab apples. snuck them home in the black plastic bag from the gas station stuffed in my backpack because mami thought it was nasty to eat off of some southside neighborhood-tree. i’d wash the apples of course, most of the time. and during thursday night smackdown, i’d feast, and later dreamt of being a park.

He Almost Died Joshua Dick

Lalo came to an empty park—an acre of grass with a few pine trees and sycamores. Clapboard houses lined the side streets. The sun had just set over the mountains to the west of Salinas. The playground in the center of the park had gang signs spray-painted up and down the slide.

Lalo walked over to a bench. A boy a year older sat there. The boy stood. “Sup, man?”

“Sup, Junior.” They slapped hands and banged fists.

Junior took a pod out of his right ear as the reggaeton he was listening to pulsed. “You ready for this?”

“Hell yeah,” Lalo said, jutting his head up.

Junior spit into the sand. He wore a Forty-niner’s football jersey and baggy jeans. He was a little taller than Lalo, but just as thin and dark. Among the various chains that adorned his chest were two pendants—a gold cross, and a silver plate with an engraving: Alberto “El Gallo” Castaneda/R.I.P. hermanito.

“Ain’t no big deal,” Junior said to Lalo. “I remember when my turn came. Almost blacked out.” He spit into the sand again. “Protect your head. And keep breathing so you don’t pass out.”

They spotted another boy strutting toward them over the grass. His face was pocked and pimpled. He was a few years older than Lalo and Junior.

He stopped in front of the bench. “Sup, fool,” he said to Junior.

“Kiki,” Junior said.

Kiki and Junior slapped hands and banged fists. Kiki slipped a cigarette from his left ear, lit it, and took a drag. Then he looked over at Lalo, his grin like the twisted smiles on the clown-faces tattooed up and down his left arm. “You ready, fool?” He snickered. “You’ll be black and blue tomorrow.”

Junior spit into the sand.

“Thirteen seconds,” Kiki said to Lalo, blowing smoke. “Your skinny ass don’t stand a chance.”

A group of seven other guys showed up, about the same age as Kiki. Some of them wore baggy jeans and large white T-shirts, like Lalo; others had on long flannel shirts and khakis bunched over their

Converse All-stars. One guy was bigger than the rest, built like a steamroller. That was Manny.

They all made a circle on the grass. Junior slipped his pods into his jeans while Kiki smashed his cigarette out. Manny stood with his back to the playground. Lalo was opposite him.

“ Qué onda ?” Manny said, in a low voice. He peered around at his gang.

“Junior,” Manny said.

Junior nodded.

“Kiki,” Manny said.

“Sup, fool.”

Manny reached into his pocket. He pulled out his right hand in the shape of a gun. Manny pointed the imaginary pistol at Lalo and closed one eye. He pretended to shoot him, making a little “pop” noise.

Manny laughed, and even Lalo laughed with him.

Then it was quiet again.

Manny said, “So, Lalo, how you feeling, man?”

Lalo said, “All right.”

“After this, there’s nothing we won’t do for you. And nothing you won’t do for us, entiendes ? When I was twelve, younger than you, your big brother broke my nose.” A couple of boys laughed. Manny glanced over and they stopped. “Protect your cabeza ,” Manny said to Lalo. “And don’t look around. Less you want to lose some teeth.”

Manny kicked a pinecone on the grass in front of him. “You ready?”

A breeze rustled some dead leaves on the grass. It was darker now.

A family crossed the street into the park. The father and mother noticed the group of boys and slowed, but their two little girls were already running to the playground. The older girl started digging sand under the monkey bars while the smaller one went over to the slide.

“Give it a minute,” Manny said.

The father approached the playground and said to his daughters, “ Vamos .”

The one playing in the sand looked up but kept digging.

“ Lily, vamos ,” the father said again, and the girl dropped her sand and ran to his side.

The smaller one climbed the ladder to the top of the slide and stood above everyone. She was maybe five.

“ Sandra ,” the father said. “ Vámanos. Ya .”

She seemed to understand that these boys were the reason her father was calling her.

“What are you doing?” she asked them.

Manny folded his arms and smirked. “Well?” he said to Lalo. “What are we doing?”

Lalo gazed up at the girl.

The father started toward the slide.

“ Tranquilo ,” Manny said to the father, showing him the palm of his hand. “ Está bien .”

The father stopped near the monkey bars.

Manny said to Lalo, “Go ahead, cabrón. Answer her.”

Lalo said, “Well. We’re about to have a—a party.”

Manny and the boys laughed.

“Is it a birthday party?” the girl asked.

Lalo glanced at Manny and shrugged. “I guess so.”

They all laughed again.

The girl’s eyes lit up. “Whose birthday is it?”

The boys shook their heads, snickered, glanced over at Lalo.

“Echale,” Manny said to Lalo. “Tell her.”

Lalo peered into Sandra’s brown eyes. “It’s my birthday.”

Smiling, Sandra said, “Your birthday?”

Lalo nodded.

Sandra turned to Manny and the rest of the boys. “Did you bring him presents?”

Manny said, “We’re going to give him lots of presents.”

“I like presents,” Sandra said. “My daddy gave me a rabbit for my birthday. His name is Jasper and he eats carrots and lettuce. And he sleeps all day long.”

Manny said, “All day long, huh?”

“And then we wake him up, and he hops around the backyard, and one day Charlie, our cat, almost killed him. He almost died. Now he stays inside.”

“Close call,” Manny said.

“Yeah.”

Sandra slid down the slide, over the lines of graffiti, and ran to her father. She looked back at Lalo and said, “Happy birthday.” The family hurried off toward Alisal Street.

Manny said, “Shit.” He sighed and ran a hand through his black hair. He pointed at Lalo. “We’ll do this another day. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Lalo, Junior, and Kiki watched the other boys cross the grass and disappear.

Kiki slipped a pack out of his jeans. “Damn, fool,” he said, sparking

another cigarette. “Your ass got lucky.”

Junior made the sign of the cross and kissed his silver pendant.

Lalo looked down and noticed the pinecone. He picked it up and squeezed until the sharp scales dug into his palm.

Early April at the Sponge Docks

William Rudolph

At the Hellas Restaurant, Head Chef Emmanuel Psomas pulls the suckered Gorgon Vulgaris out of the steam and counts her legs again.

Nineopus? Novopus? Eneapus?

No nomenclature some neighborhood teuthologist might slap onto the body of a nine-legged inkfish could do justice to this four-leaf clover

cephalopod. Labels limit. Codifications calcify. Aphorisms atrophy. Whether whispered or chiseled into granite

names deaden. Nullify. Why try to simplify such harbingers? Why not

reach out with the extraneous arms we suspect we possess and propel ourselves closer to what we’ve always been? Why not bless our own fluky stars and eclipse the boundless alternatives to all we can never be? Meanwhile

back at the sponge docks, Chef Psomas watches his wonder slide back into the bubbling pot. Adding vinegar, olive oil, the juice

of lemons— he serves her nine-times-blesséd body whole to the luckiest hungry soul.

Rotten Apples

Stephen Spicehandler

TW: This piece contains descriptions of drug addiction and suspicious consent.

So I’m, as usual, with the Mother Superior, this time climbing up the stairs of 967 Rivington to call on the Pope, and the Mule—who I call the Sicilian Jack-Ass but only “Chuch” to his face—is playing lookout. Now you might think that the Mother Superior would be trodding up these tenement stairs to genuflect to a Pope, but you’d be dead wrong. Because this Pope is just your average Lower East Side John (it says “J./C. POPE” on his mailbox) and this Mother Superior is just a plain Mother, one who bears gifts, except they’re the kind of gifts you have to pay for. My job is to collect. Sometimes I got to collect with the use of my blade and frankly I’m kind of hoping today is one of those days because I’d really enjoy sinking it into this phony Papa, Mr. GoodyGoody who’s just not that goody. Yeah, he’s a Pope like I’m a ripe apple. Go ahead, Johnny, bite me, you’ll soon find out how sweet I can be.

No, I’m not feeling sweet today. My shoes are soaked through from this miserable downpour and I’m all chilled as if I’m in stage one withdrawal, which I might soon have to be in, what with this latest crackdown. I’m wet, I’m cold, the hallway is dark and clammy and the rain is going machine guns on the metal roof door. And so I say, fuck you, Mr. Pope.

But then, here’s the thing: we’re outside Pope’s apartment door and there’s voices there, way back from the door and none of them are Johnny’s: a man and a woman’s but I don’t know them, and her voice is somewhat between a girl’s and a mother’s and his is gruff and has that song I recognize even though he’s not actually parlando -ing Italiano as you’d figure he would of some excuse in his pillow talk voice.

“Tell your friends to come in, Johnny,” and he steps back so that Donna Reed has a chance to welcome the nice neighborhood drug dealers into her lace-and-doily home.

“Yeah, come in,” he says, “but don’t stay too long” except he never says this last part, but we get it. Even having gotten invited in is a fuck-

up from my point of view. We’ve been trying to be invisible all day doing business, and now we step forward into the brightly-lit “parlor” of Apartment 3B.

This is not my planet and I don’t belong here. And that’s why I don’t want to be here. Their railroad flat has been made all nice: spicand-spanned, with decorations and stuff like it’s not even part of this goddamn slum. It’s like a room from an Andy Hardy movie except put together with spit and polish and the hands of some immigrant carpenter. There’s an opened ironing board, some used plates and glasses on the dining table, the smell of vanished mashed potatoes; there’s someone’s Old Man and there’s Wife and politeness. Much too much like a home. Me, I just need four walls and a cot and no rats in the bathroom.

Mother starts to beg off when Pope extends his arms to make introductions, which is exactly what we don’t fucking want. But then Pope’s father, Pope Senior, grabs Mother’s thick hand to shake it and suggests we all sit down and get to know each other. “Take off your sunglasses,” he says and if I wasn’t actively hankering for the shadows of a hallway, I might have found the idea of Mother, all dripping wet, hiding behind his shades under the glare of all this wholesomeness, but far from the glare of any goddamn sun, funny.

“I’m sorry,” says Wife, “I didn’t get your names?”

I can’t even look at her, forget give my name. She makes me feel ugly, like a deformed cripple. She’s so beautiful without even any make-up, blond and friendly, as if if I made myself at home and took off my raincoat I wouldn’t be the son of a whore underneath it. I’m tall and thin because it can be hard to get fat on dope, and she’s got all those rounded curves and looks like she wants to give us coffee and pastries, but if I can’t just give her a poke up against the living room wall, what else could I do in her company? So I stand there dickless, staring at my shoes.

“I’m getting your floors wet. Maybe . . .” and I start to fade towards the hallway apologetically.

“Yeah, we’re all getting your floors wet,” says Mother, but not because he’s so considerate. “Johnny, can we talk to you in the hall maybe?” Mother’s kind of an ape and he shuffles like an ape in mourning towards the door.

“Nice to meet you,” says Wife, though there was nothing nice about it, because, let’s face it, there is no meeting here. Mother, Chuch and me are never going to be in no Donna Reed movie and she’ll never be in ours.

So it’s a goddamned relief to get out of there, and we’re back where we belong now, in the hallway, the No Place that leads to Wherever You’ve Gotta Be Next, which is never home since there’s no place like that. But there are a lot of those No Places. OK, my favorite’s the No Place where I got a bed, some syringes, my own private shit hole and a nearby fire escape where I can hear the kids’ voices taunting each other (better the torture be outside the window than in). That’s my sunlight: the distant sound of kids exploding around the neighborhood.

And now Johnny comes out to play, carrying a light jacket as if he’s got somewhere to actually go, but that’s a joke, because there’s no place. Chuch is hanging off the ladder that leads to the roof, the one that Mother owns because he’s leaning on it, the way he leans on Chuch and me, with patience and some kind of contempt or something.

Johnny draws Mother towards the stairway, away from his apartment door, away from his marriage, too, and maybe from Chuch and me, I think. Maybe so he can seduce Mother with his bullshit. I can hear him trying to disguise his whining like he’s coating it with cool, but it’s still whining. He’s been trying to find us, he’s saying, to let us know . what? That he needs more time? Of course. We all need more time, especially junkies.

“Yeah, everybody’s trying to find us,” I say, uninvited, indifferent to whether Wife or Daddy gets wind of me. “Junkies all over town are after us. But so are the cops.”

“This is the big one,” says Mother. “They’re shutting the lid on the whole business.”

“Or they’re trying to,” I jump in. I don’t like being excluded from their conference. “ You can’t find us because they can’t find us. We’ve gotta find you.”

“We’ve always been a shadow operation,” says Mother. “Now the shadow’s in shadow.” And from the shadows, he whispers, “So what do you got?”

Johnny’s such a handsome Italian boy, but he’s fidgeting now like he’s peeling inside, like soon his handsomeness won’t show, it might leak from the pores of his skin, escape from his raised shirt collar which serves to hide him from the glares of those who haven’t the faintest idea he’s leaking.

These, these are the moments I really like, the moments that make us all equal. Four junkies in a hallway.

But only three of them are living off it. Which is why Johnny’s reply to Mother’s “What do you got?” is—

“I got this problem.”

“We know that, “ I laugh. “We’re not stupid.”

“Unfortunately, now is not the time to talk about your problems,” Mother says softly, as if he could be sympathetic on some other occasion, which is his sales style. “What I need to hear about now is how much you have for us.”

“You see, my father showed up in town,” Johnny whispers, as if his father might overhear and learn, oh my God, that he’s in town! “So I got distracted. I haven’t had a chance. .”

“No no no. Maybe you misunderstand,” says Mother. “This isn’t a favor . This is an obligation . The deal is you get something and then I get something in return. It’s a business. And for my business to remain a business, it depends on timely payment.”

“What have you been looking for us for if you don’t have the money?” I ask. “To invite us to your family dinner?”

“That’s just it.” Johnny’s talking to the floor, the only sympathetic listener. “My father’s going to be here for a few days and I need some stuff to tide me over. And then I can pay you back everything I owe you after he leaves.”

“Likely story,” I chime in. “What’s going to be so different then than now?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

“Listen, my friend,” Mother places his paws on Johnny’s shoulders, leaning on him, man to man, his confidante, his boss, his coffin. “Pay what you owe me and then we can discuss something to tide you over. I can help you out, but you gotta play by the rules, right?”

“I’m sick, Mother! I don’t think I can make it until tomorrow.”

Mother steps back as if he’s done, but he isn’t. With just a little nod of his head he can send whole telegrams and he’s just sent one to Chuch who gets off his jungle gym and manages to surprise his old neighborhood friend by twisting his arm behind his back with one hand while headlocking him with the other.

“You’re going to feel a lot sicker if we have to keep coming back for the dough. But here’s something that might help you to feel better.”

Mother snaps his fingers. My cue. I lift the hem of my jacket to pull the cold revolver from my pants waist, freeing my belly and leg from the comforting constriction of a dangerous weapon.

“Here, Johnny,” I say.

Chuch pushes Johnny towards me and the gun, but Johnny recoils as if it was a knife I was holding.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I say. “Not before you pay Mother! What sense would that make? The gun’s for you.”

“I’m not giving you a loaded gun,” says Mother. “I’m giving you a prop. Something to help you make your payments. You’re an addict, Johnny, and your habit’s going to get more and more expensive. So you might as well face it: you’re not going to be able to afford it any other way. But, hey, whatever you decide, if you don’t have the dough for what you already owe me, I wouldn’t worry about where to get your next fix.” Mother pauses, as if waiting for Johnny to see the light. But from the darkness that is now Johnny, there’s not a glimmer. “I’d worry,” Mother says, “about how to deal with all your bones that are going to be broken.”

And then, what I love about Mother, his uncanny salesmanship. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a packet, no larger than a tea bag and extends it towards Johnny as if they had agreed to a transaction. Johnny’s eyes light up in relief, he’s been graced by a great big god, now he can take all the beatings we might dish out. He reaches out to grab it.

“What am I doing?” says Mother as he quickly withdraws the offer, holding the bag up as if keeping it out of the reach of some minor or of some barking dog. “I’m not thinking. I originally was so sure you’d have something for me that I was going to advance you a bit. What a disappointment. For everyone.” And he re-pockets the stuff.

Johnny makes as if he’s pulled by some wire towards Mother who knees Johnny with a thud to the balls. As Johnny slowly struggles to stay on his feet, I do the only merciful thing. I sucker-punch him so he can rest comfortably on the grimy hall floor. Although he’s the only one making noise, he says, “They’ll hear us in there!” in a really agonized moan, which he’s having trouble suppressing, poor thing.

“Then shut the fuck up,” is my friendly advice.

“I know you’ll have the money for me tomorrow,” says Mother. “Because you’re a smart guy. And then I’ll show you how nice I can be.”

“You can be real nice, Mother,” I testify.

Anyone who’s got the dope on them can be real nice. Real real nice. Like Mother. He who nurses us all out of our conditions. And like the nurses who nurse the “nurses,” the benevolent hospital thieves in white, and the neighborhood wise guys who milk the nurses who nurse the “nurses,” all experts in relieving the Lower East Side of the Lower

East Side.

Mother and I, having done all we can for our patient, descend the stairwell, Mother having dispatched Chuch to the rooftops so that our operation is less susceptible to the prying eyes of cops. Me, I’m glad to be out of there. I’d rather be out in the dirty New York City rain than around the four-square members of the Pope family. Of course, by that I mean to exclude Polo, Johnny’s baby brother. He’s not there today. Must be at Polly’s Place, shoving deadbeats to the street as usual. Polo knows what’s real. He sees it all and takes his step back. He knows how to walk these streets without getting sucked into the sewer. Of course, it helps he was too young to get tortured in Korea, saving him from getting that sweet introduction to dope on his way to recovery. But you don’t need to land in Korea to fall. Who knows, maybe one day Polo too’ll succumb to the good old slum remedies.

The way I see it, we’re all going to go for the remedies at some point, because, face it, this is one big fucking relentless slum. Even north of Fourteenth Street. Don’t try to tell me that uptown people aren’t living in the same slum. They still have to deal with human nature, it’s just that on the Lower East Side, there’s more human nature to go around. People are too worn out trying to make a buck to disguise it, is all. So everyone finds their remedy for their own particular reality. And for me, being part of the sales team for the remedy I dig the most makes the most sense. I’ve found my little cubbyhole in the system, and its easier access to the big nipple suits this babe just fine. Even if it comes with days like today, when the cops are breathing down your neck. Hey, I’m sure every job has its down side.

The other thing about this job is it’s dependable. Junkie behavior is just not that variable. Mr. Pope is going to need Mother’s blessing no matter what. I guarantee you that later tonight or tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest, Mother’s going to have to throw a delusional, shivering mess of a man named Johnny Pope over his shoulders onto some bed and feed him with his hypodermic. The only question is how much pressure we’ll have to put on him or his family to pay up for the medicine. But I know Mother is a good businessman. I know that Mother knows just the right amount of blood that’ll need to be spilled to get the greenery to our wallets and the fairy dust to our veins.

So now it’s two days later. We’re parked on Ridge under the Williamsburg Bridge, in our little inkwell of darkness. And we get what we need: a sharp little lullaby beneath the skin courtesy of our Mom. Now we can finally feel one fucking moment of peace, having almost been caught by the cops three times already today. At this point, we’re better off consuming the stuff rather than having it on our person.

Which brings to mind the fact that this luxurious Packard serving as our shadowy home away from home comes courtesy of someone who currently has nothing on her person, other than a beige trench coat and a pair of heels. Man, we’re so lucky! Here inside our roomy little caboose parked under the low grind of all those cars making their way to Brooklyn and we even got our own little Putski for the night (“That’s not my name, you dumb wop.” “I know, I know, you’re a fucking Vanderbilt.”). And tonight Mother, Chuch and yours truly, Lord Apollonius, got reservations in Connecticut at our very own Little Gloria’s parents’ place, the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Putski, where we will float along the hallways of Putski Vanderbilt Manor, maybe all of us having nothing on our person other than, maybe, raincoats.

But one last thing before we go. True to form, young Mr. Pope didn’t have what it takes to jump off the moving boat—let’s call it the U.S.S. Dependence—and his baby brother had to beg Mother for a little powdery compassion. Mother has very little compassion, powdery or otherwise, but knowing Polo’s desperation made him a good bet for quick paybacks, Mother couldn’t resist. So Polo had to—I don’t know, cut off another arm or leg, sell his old Ford, do a little hustling himself so that he could give Mother his due this evening.

Mother wants to take care of business before we all start feeling too good to care about taking care of any business. So pretty Little Gloria needs to stay put since she’d only be in the way and a kind of distraction. Better she stay in the deep shadows of the Packard’s back seat.

Mother gives her her un-marching orders.

“You’ll be safe here if no one can see you. I can barely see you, so you’re OK. But if you start traipsing around the streets like some barefoot contessa . .”

“What’s a barefoot contessa?” asks Chuch.

“Ava Gardner,” I tell him.

Mother’s starting to get his mellow on so he sounds almost sweet and fuzzy as he bosses us around. “Eh, shut up, you guys.”

“I’ll stay put,” she says (being a Put ski). “I don’t want any more

surprises today. I would have more than this on if it even occurred to me that The Albert would be raided. It’s not like I was in Harlem,” she pouts.

No, she was just in a Greenwich Village hotel, home to the other kind of delinquents, the intellectual kind, the privileged kind that shouldn’t pay for their filthy habits like we do down here on the Lower East Side.

“It’s not like she was in Harlem,” I’m parroting incredulously to the two other Mother Brothers as we start to swim up Ridge in slow strokes, one block—one long block—to Rivington. The street—is it quieter than usual? Are the bambinos all on cough medicine? Could it be Mother’s little helper has already kicked in, giving this scabby trap of a neighborhood its Vaseline glide on this glorious (Gloria’s!) evening? Maybe so, maybe so and Mother clangs like a bell, his laugh echoing up ahead of us to help us find our way. Because tonight is going to be very rich, a little joy juice in our veins, some Putski in the back seat and some unaccustomed luxury for us bums so we can taste our bliss out of some rich fancy teacup.

And yet, as we turn on Rivington, I sense the tenement stone is kind of smiling at me, kind of hailing me, “Yo, Apples!”

I know this place, I think to myself. I love this place. This is my brother stone.

I fall into his arms, the arms of the tenement’s stoop.

“Look at you,” admonishes Mother. “Get off the fucking stoop, you dumb cluck,” and he wraps his beefy arms around me as if he loves me. We start laughing. It’s some kind of recognition scene in a weepy movie. It’s too funny for words.

We marshal our forces and embark on our necessary adventure into the magic hallway.

There will be no bad blood, the magic hallway promises.

No broken bones. No trampled skulls. No knife to the face inscribing “Bill paid,” no Farley Granger huddled around any of our fists.

So me and Mother shove each other forward, like we’re plunging into this river of dumb cluck love.

Mother finally steps up to the apartment door and knocks. He’s big, a baby King Kong, his back broad enough to support someone like me who still can’t manage to chase this long stream of giggles out of my mouth. He’s my staff, my truck-wide-shouldered father, this Mother.

You know what I love about you?

Chuch, who’s been bringing up the rear, walks past us, past the Pope’s apartment door and is escaping to the roof.

“Chuch, where you going?”

“I told you, Mother, I don’t want to hurt Johnny.”

Mother floats the universal sign for “Come back down, you idiot.” It’s a slight jerk of the head as if reaching for a pillow.

You know what I love about you?

Mother embraces the door. It’s his mattress and he engulfs it.

“Johnny, open up. It’s Mother!”

“He ain’t home,” I say. The nerve of that guy.

“Chuch, you want to go to the roof so bad, go in through the fire escape and open the door.”

You know what I love about you, Mother?

“What do you love about me, Apples?” He’s not even looking at me, because I got his back, he doesn’t need to. He’s somewhere inside Motherland in this close, dark hallway, inside his self. No visitors allowed.

“What I love about you . . . .”

I thought I knew. What was it? Something about the way the day goes, something about time, the time and the music, I can’t think of the words. Something about how just being in this hallway and waiting to get into Apartment 3B feels like eternity, but the kind you want to be in. Because it’s always now in this eternity.

“You got all the time in the world,” I say, “because you make your own time. Like music. You make your own music.”

“Hey, Apples, didn’t know you could sing scat like that.”

“I scat alright. I scat.” I hear the sound of the window being forced open. I hear scoo dobbity bee bop. I hear the tom tom approaching on the other side of the door. I hear Chuch and the door pushes open.

Enter! We tumble in. Light bulbs beckon. The apartment is warm and sunny in spite of the sun having folded ages ago. Come to me, cries the dining room table up ahead, abandoned as if in mid-meal. I say, Sure thing , and find bowls half-filled with soup, cool and wet to my fingers. I lick them looking for the essence of Miss Donna Reed and I find it in a pinch of mom, a dash of pussy. I dawdle in the bowl for a second helping, leaving my autograph for Donna to discover. I think, hey, nobody here except a whole kitchen I can raid to my heart’s content.

I can hear Chuch mention my name. He’s whining to Mother who tells him, no, you look after Putski while we do business, and if she keeps groping you, well, that’s the cost of business, handle it like a man. Someone’s got to keep an eye on her, not a bad assignment if you ask me, if only she’d keep her trap shut, you know which one I

mean.

Chuch stalks out with a pout—he’s been pouting all day—and now I have the fridge to myself and I’m pulling shit out of it like I’m a surgeon removing vital organs. I find an unopened milk bottle, tear off its bonnet and glug a nice portion down my suddenly greedy gullet, wiping the plenty that lands on my lips with the back of my hand. No Nedick’s orange soda anywhere in sight, but ooh! a pitcher, half filled with orange juice, teeming with torn little pieces of pulp.

And then I find their little family secret, a sorry cup of coffee. What the fuck? Donna Reed reheats coffee. And it’s probably even instant!

Dingalingle ling!

It’s loud and brassy and jingles like an alarm across the room. This isn’t pleasant like a Good Humor Man hawking his popsicles to the kiddies, no this is irritating. I’ve got no patience. I’d rather listen to “How Much is That Doggy in the Window” while on weed. Where is that damned phone? I find it right outside the kitchen on a coffee table and I steal the receiver from its cradle.

“Hey!” cries Mother, but I forget to care.

“Wrong number!” I announce with authority into the phone, because, obviously, any number would be the wrong number and I’m about to laugh at my giddy self when, before clanging the receiver down, I kind of recognize the voice on the other end. It’s Ginnino, from Polly’s, going “Polo? Polo is that you?”

“Ha!” I bark into the phone. “Jimmy Ginnino?”

“It’s Ginnino!” I laugh to Mother.

“What do you know! Jimmy, it’s Apples! Hey, long time!” and now I’m on a roll, unwinding around the living room like a tapped billiard ball slowly ricocheting around the table. “Oh, Polo and me, we go back ages. Uh, no, he ain’t here right now. He’s somewhere . So! How’s it going? You OK?”

There’s a little commotion coming from the doorway and now I see Putski’s naked gams broaching the sanctity of the Popes’ apartment. She and Chuch are going through some kind of drama, griping to Mother about who’s groping who, like a bunch of goddamn squirts. Stop groping and start fucking, I’d say if I gave a shit.

“Any sight of the old bitch?” I ask Jimmy. He doesn’t seem to like that. “Well, she’s my mother, after all. If anyone can call her that, I guess I can. You always did have a soft spot for her, Jimmy, didn’t you? Soft and not so soft, if I remember correctly. I’m just kidding! . . . Well, if you see her, tell her Louis says ‘mangiare gazzo!’ No, maybe you better not, unless you want to give her some ideas of your own. Man, it’s so

good to hear your voice.”

Mother has separated his squabbling children. Chuch is standing by the door in his safe corner and Little Gloria has found a spot to spread her legs at the dining room table, quite a blood-rushing distraction, I must say.

“Oh yeah. Polo. I don’t know. Should be back any minute. I certainly hope so. Any message? ‘Call Jimmy pronto.’ OK, got it. Not a problem. You, too, my man.”

I let the phone wire lead me back across the room and into Putski’s court, where she awaits me with stoned indifference. So I grab one of the dining room chairs and place it so that I can get a nice view of the spot where her raincoat reveals the dark path between her legs, and wouldn’t it be nice to probe it? It would be so nice! So nice. This is the reason I’m here, it seems to me now, so I can serenade that sexy resting place. And so I do, becoming each instrument in the Miles Davis group as it contributes its part to “All of Me.” Doo doo doop . . . Mother seems to catch my wave. doo-doo-doo doo doo doop. He’s nodding his head to the beat, floating back and forth to shore. Meanwhile, the sweet bitch is ignoring me, pretending that she’s not hearing my call to be consumed, to be taken, taken whole. No matter. I take her with my song instead. Not that she knows it yet.

“Now what’s going on?!” Chuch wails. He’s got no imagination. A quiet room is just a quiet room, a naked girl is just a naked girl. He sees no possibilities. So he’s bored. Like he’s just awakened from a brain-dead dream.

“What’s wrong with you! You don’t like music?” I ask. You don’t like women? I’m thinking. Mother has grabbed a book from one of the Pope’s shelves, a big block of one with its library wrapper still on it and is sunk deep in the first page. Why not take each moment to improve one’s lot? You know what I mean?

“I like music. It just depends on who’s singing,” Chuch mutters. “I mean, why are we waiting around?”

I’m not waiting around. I’m busy. Exploring the Black Forest with my penetrating mind. And Mother’s boning up on his education. I remind His Muleness that any minute now some money is going to come walking through that door.

“Oh yeah. That’s right. The money.”

Putski’s now had enough. With a sigh of disgust, she embraces the dining room table like it’s her pillow, her thighs shifting and pushing against her raincoat.

Mother’s in love with his book. He doesn’t even hear us. Although

it’s not like he’s found page two. I guess page one is too good for words.

“What are you studying?” I ask him. “The Bible? ‘And then there was light!’” I recite. “Right? There was light or something.”

“Yeah, keep it up.” Mother seems awfully moody. He’s wallowing in Motherland. I should let him be. But for some reason, I can’t.

“Oh, you see, I’m getting Mother mad, Chuch. You know how much he likes the Bible!”

Chuch shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head in despair. “Who reads the Bible outside church?”

“You know,” I say to Mother, “you’ll go blind if you read too much. Reading and other things.” Chuch snorts, shaking his head, as if I’m saying something stupider than even he would.

Without lifting his eyes from the page, Mother finally gives in. “Hey, where’s that gun you gave Johnny?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“So maybe you’d do me a favor and suck a bullet.”

Instead, I take a big suck of air, a hard laugh knocked out of me.

“You want me to suck a bullet?!”

“Yeah, but it’ll be from my gun!”

Chuch is chortling away but I’m not laughing any more.

I remember this wise guy my mother once brought home. He didn’t like my crying, it was interfering with his fucking concentration. He unhooked from the saddle (my mother), found his shoulder holster and put his revolver in my face.

“Open your mouth, you little twerp.”

My mother, the bitch who introduced me to this motherfucker, starts to scream her bloody head off.

I remember the taste of the gun metal as he threatened to blow my head off if I didn’t shut up and go to sleep. I remember it tasted good.

I’ve got so many fond memories of home.

But now, I’m not home. In fact, no one’s home. That’s the point. And this home feels emptier than empty right now.

“What’s so special about your gun?” I ask.

Mother’s still on page one. “You’ll find out.”

“You know what? I don’t think I’ll find out.” I put my hand in my pants pocket, looking for my switchblade.

“You don’t, huh?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Hey, guys,” Chuch whines, “cut it out, will you?”

“Don’t worry,” Mother says. “Apples can take care of himself, right,

Apples?”

Yeah, I can take care of myself.

“He don’t need me.”

No, I don’t need nobody. And nobody needs me. I know all that. Still, I feel like a foundling Mother’s leaving on someone’s doorstep. I’m not a foundling and Mother can’t leave me on nobody’s doorstep.

Mother’s relentless. He goes on. “You can always go back to hanging around subway men’s rooms with your hat brim pulled down to your chin. And clobber poor guys for small change towards your next dope supply. How many poor saps did you have to do each day to get your day’s worth?”

Now I’m pissed.

“Hey, Mother, since when did you become a charity organization? And those ‘poor saps’—half of them were goddamn pervs! Hey , I was doing it for the kids , right, Chuch? Doing it for the sake of the kids!”

“Don’t get me involved in this. I don’t know nothing about pervs in rest rooms.”

“Naah, you wouldn’t know a perv even if he had his dick all the way up your ass.”

Now I did it. The mule is riled. He stands up and squares his shoulders, aiming his chin in my direction. He looks like Dondi, but thick with muscle, not the waif-like war orphan drawn in the comics. Dondi in Benito Mussolini position.

“Oh yeah?” he says. “What’s wrong with you, Apples? Why can’t you give me a break?”

“Cool it,” Mother coos, looking up slowly from page one. “It looks like he’s got his dick up your ass now.” Then he says to me, “You know what that makes you.”

Now I’m not the one so happy. I stand up, my hand in my pocket clenched around the handle of my blade, ready, in fact, to be a Mother fucker.

But I’m the one who’s motherfucked. Before I know it, Mother’s mug’s risen from its library stupor and is in my face. He’s managed to twist my knife arm behind me, throwing me over the back of the Pope family sofa, my knife and my long legs hitting the ground together. Then he grabs my hair in his fist, pulling me backwards onto the sofa and back under his sweaty domain. There’s nothing left to do but succumb to the no-choiceness of it, and maybe that’s what I want all along. Kind of the way it feels to be family, a kind of numb belonging.

Somewhere outside the numbness, I can hear Chuch and Mother going at each other. Chuch is sounding all stressed from the ruckus; he

doesn’t want any trouble. Then he’s off on these tangents. Some kind of nonsense about puppies and old ladies, but without the words it just sounds like a junkie whining to his pusher. The stupor I long for has started to make its home in me and I don’t care about banter or wise cracks or any kind of city traffic whatsoever. I want to stay right here, feeling the stress on my scalp where my hair is pulled. It reminds me of something. And though I can’t figure out what it is, that’s OK, too, because I like the searching, I like the searching for something familiar. “Take it easy, Chuch,” I hear myself say, trying to keep his agitation away from me, but that doesn’t stop him, he gets even louder and more pathetic and I hope Mother slugs him one. If I have to take sides between the two of them, I definitely will choose the spigot. All good things flow from Mother. I catch Mother’s eye to let him know there’s no harm done here, that we two are still a killer team.

But before Chuch can get his whupping, another candidate for a little discipline stumbles through the door.

It’s Mr. Johnny Pope. Before he can get his bearings, Chuch slips behind him blocking his panicky exit. Well, well, Johnny, where are you off to? I saunter back to the dining room where, overlooking the balcony of Putski’s long legs, I can sit back and watch the scene in comfort. I’ve seen this movie before. I know what’s coming. Johnny isn’t going to look so pretty anymore.

“How did you guys get in? Where’s Celia?” Johnny shouldn’t look so confused. He knew there was the devil to pay.

“Where’s my money? Screw Celia.”

Putski suddenly sits up high, roused as if from a deep sleep by some puppeteer pulling her strings. “Who’s Celia?” she says like the princess puppet under a mighty spell.

“Yo!” Mother delegates to me. “Pull her together and get her out of here!”

It looks like I’m going to miss the fun. But the buzz is still fine, and suddenly witnessing the climax to the action no longer seems important. I’ve got Princess Little Gloria to handle and handle is what I intend to do. I tug the skirt of her raincoat around her legs, getting to sneak the tiniest touch of her silky, inner knee. I try to guide her from her chair with a little help around her waist, but she’s doing the lindy and unwinds from my grasp as if from a turn on the dance floor. Now she’s found pretty Johnny and she looks taken with him, a little flustered kind of and very prettily announces, “Please don’t get any wrong ideas about me. I’ve only just met these gentlemen. We have but the merest acquaintance.”

“Let’s go find a dress for you,” I say as a way to lure her out the door.

“No, no,” she says, “you’re not the shopping kind of guy. I know your type. You just do the selling.” She tries to straighten out her raincoat with her available hand. “Just so you know, there will be no transactions tonight. Of any kind.” And then, to Johnny, “It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

“Come on!” I give her a yank and pull her offstage, ending her drawing room drama with a little good-old-fashioned burlesque.

And now, the garbage-ridden streets of the Lower East Side are expecting our entrance. Come out, you players, they cry, you hypnotized piles of bones, you victims of atomic immigrant fallout, come out to our lamp-lit cobblestoned alleys, our stadium of traffic farts and radio overflow seeping out of our tired, winking windows. Dance through this junkie graveyard while you can. Way in the distance, in one of many possible directions, lies the magic land of Connecticut, and if we can make it that far in our metallic hulking gondola, maybe we can have one of those humming, happy nights free of electric shock cop jitters, with only sea breezes travelling through our brains. The slutty princess and I walk our bones down the wormhole tenement stairs, indifferent to the darkness, comfortably lost to ourselves. Tonight Johnny has a price to pay and he will pay it. We’ll pay one of these days, but who gives a fuck? Paying is what we’re used to. We steal the night and pay all the tomorrows, right?

Inspired by characters from the play “A Hatful of Rain” by Michael V. Gazzo

Yes

Karly Vance

TW: This piece contains depiction of depressive episodes.

She sat on the bathroom floor between the tub and the sink. I found her there, perched like a bird, perky and plump. She said I’m ok, I like it here. So I lowered myself down by the toilet and I joined her.

She did not want to take a shower or bath, so we took down her perfume bottles, round and made of colored glass, bright as Christmas ornaments. I filled them with water from the faucet and we misted ourselves like two old dames in a powder room.

She did not want to get dressed, so we wore pajamas all day. We put on funny movies and sad movies and ate popcorn from a microwave bag and picked at kernels in our teeth with our fingernails.

She did not want to go to church, so we took turns on the rosary she keeps by the recliner in the living room. I’ve never felt right praying to Mary, so she did all my Hail Marys for me.

She did not want to take her pills, so we went out back and planted them in the ground in rows like seeds and imagined what kind of plants they would grow into, and would the fruit be juicy or firm, sweet or bitter?

She did not want to open her eyes, so I closed the shades for her and we both kept our eyes closed. We each picked a dream and concentrated very hard on having it.

Getting Out Bill Hemmig

TW: This piece contains depictions of intrusive thoughts and compulsive behavior.

They declared their partnership over last month, Corbett moved out on Saturday, and now it’s Monday and John is alone in the house, getting ready for work. He’s gotten dressed and is standing in the center of the en-suite master bath. He fixes his eyes and ears on the toilet. Its lid is down and it is not running. His eyes move to the wall switches near the shower. One controls the twin heat lamps and one controls the exhaust fan. But there’s too much light in the room. The ceiling light is still on and it can’t be and so none of this can start yet. He goes to the double switch by the bathroom doorway and turns off the ceiling light. Now it can start.

He re-establishes himself in the center of the room. He is able, has been for a long time now, thanks to the coaching of his therapist, to check everything off the list without having to touch it all. In addition to enabling me to get out of the house faster in the morning, this has enabled—or, rather, this enabled me, simple past tense—to complete signing off on the bathroom with diminished commentary from Corbett.

He fixes his eyes and ears on the toilet. The lid is down and it is not running. His eyes move to the wall switches near the shower. Both are in the off position. He finds himself across the room, touching the switches. They are not warm and they are in the off position. Of course they are, stop it, you’re past touching everything, stop it or you’ll have to tell Maureen that you backslid after all this time, it’s because Corbett isn’t watching. He steps away from the switches.

For eighteen years Corbett’s worked—no, Corbett worked—from home and every weekday he’d just be getting out of bed as I was getting ready to get out of the house and go to work. It took several years for the checklist to fully take hold, but once it had I thought it was just coincidence at first but then I realized, no, he’s choreographed the beginning of his day in order to follow me through the checklist.

“The toilet’s not running,” he’d say.

“It’s August. No one’s had the heat lamps on since March,” he’d say.

I found Maureen, and she coached me eventually to reduce it to only visual checkpoints. And not to get distracted.

Which he now is. Distraction means starting over. It has to be a clean sweep once all the lights are off, toilet, heat lamp switch, exhaust fan switch, so on.

Visual checkpoints only.

He stands in the center of the room. Eyes and ears on the toilet, fixed on it long enough to form an acknowledgement. The lid is down and the toilet is not running. To the wall switches near the shower. Heat lamp switch off. Exhaust fan switch off. He backs up two steps and looks up. Heat lamps off, the ceiling fan is still, the ceiling light is out.

“Yes, everything is off,” Corbett would sigh from the bed, or just beyond the bathroom doorway. The bathroom door is open when the toilet is not in use. That’s always how it is.

He is on his toes, arm stretched upwards, three fingers against the motor housing of the ceiling fan. It is not warm. Of course it’s not warm, it wasn’t on this morning.

He pulls his hand away. This is not good. I have to get out.

This is, was, such a part of why the relationship had to end. He must have believed he was encouraging me to stop, and yes I see where he would find it personally frustrating, but how could he not see that he was making me feel stupid and helpless? So finally I found Maureen and she coached me to reduce it to a series of visual checkpoints. That made it less obvious. And me less vulnerable to him.

“Yes, the ceiling fan is off. It’s the dead of winter. Nobody uses it.”

And the fear of hearing that was enough to send me on to the next checkpoint.

Back to the center of the room. Toilet lid down. Toilet not running. Wall switches near the shower. Heat lamp switch off. Exhaust fan switch off. Back up, back up, stop. He looks up. The heat lamps are off. The ceiling fan in still. The ceiling light is off. He turns toward the doorway. There’s a rhythm to this when it runs smoothly, like clockwork. Clocks are so wonderfully complicated, all those dozens of gears and wheels and springs and pins behind the face and the hands and the hours and minutes and they all need to be clean and work perfectly together and that’s why I have the shop in town full of lovely old clocks and I fix and clean them and make them run. And when it’s all working perfectly you don’t know any of it is there, you don’t see the gears and wheels and springs and pins, you just see time passing,

like Corbett back there observing only a clean, smooth series of visual checkpoints and still sometimes “Trust me, dear, the bathroom light’s been out for ten minutes.” I never respond—responded (must work on adjusting my tenses)—because that would a) constitute a confession and b) prolong the distraction he’d just supplied me.

Crap.

He doesn’t check the time because that’s not part of Getting Off the Second Floor and it doesn’t matter. He knows it’s getting late, later than usual. The clocks in the kitchen—the oven, the microwave, the toaster oven—are still to come. He’ll find out then. Corbett has moved out. He re-establishes himself in the center of the room.

Toilet lid down. Toilet not running. Wall switches near the shower. Heat lamp switch off. Exhaust fan switch off. Back up, back up, stop. He looks up. Heat lamps are off. Ceiling fan is still. Ceiling light is off. He turns toward the doorway and fixes on the switches for the ceiling light and ceiling fan. Switch for ceiling light is in the off position. Switch for ceiling fan is in the off position. He leaves the bathroom and walks the length of the bedroom. The bedroom ceiling light is out. The switch for the bedroom ceiling light is by the door. The switch for the bedroom ceiling light is in the off position.

The bedroom door is always open. He leaves the bedroom. Like clockwork.

Heading toward the stairs and then down, I’m reminded again that I never need to checklist everything—anything, nothing at all—in the hall, the guest room, the guest bathroom, Corbett’s office, the stairs.

Nor do I need to check off anything in the front hall or the living room or the dining room. He goes to the front hall closet and pulls out his coat and scarf and puts them on. Why can I glide by or through all these other spaces without making checklists of them? He goes to the hall table with its drawer and takes up his wallet, cell phone and keys. I do make a mental note of the lack of checklists as I pass by or through each, as I’ve just been doing, but that is not the same. After all, every part of the house contains the gears, wheels, springs and pins that make it run. He stuffs everything into his coat pockets and then goes to the kitchen.

Before today Corbett would have pulled on his bath robe and slippers as I was occupied in the coat closet and come down to the kitchen to make himself a pot of coffee. He would be standing at the island right now, or at the stove.

He begins his sweep of the kitchen. Tugging on the knob to the back door will make a sound that will attract derision and so he can see in

the space between the door and the jamb that the dead bolt is in place.

“Are you afraid that if the back door is unlocked someone will come in and steal me?”

Corbett is not here. Corbett has moved out.

So wait. Does, did, Corbett follow me only through the rooms that I had checklisted? Or did I checklist only the rooms that Corbett uses— used—at this time of day?

He reaches out and tugs on the door knob. The door is in fact locked. Stop. No backsliding. You’ll have to tell Maureen.

His eyes return to the space between the door and the jamb.

I don’t know what my role is here without him.

Visual checkpoints only. Must get out. The toaster oven is next to the back door. The microwave is above it. Both are plugged into the double wall socket beside the toaster oven. Both have digital clocks that aren’t really clocks at all, they’re just little computers that tell you the time. Which is eight forty in the first case and eight thirty-nine in the second. If they were real clocks it would be possible to get them perfectly in sync but they are not real clocks as the microwave clock goes over to eight forty. Visual checkpoints only. Both machines are turned off and of course there are no sparks shooting out of the wall sockets around the plugs. He finds three fingers and a thumb lightly squeezing the plug to the microwave. The plug is not warm.

“It’s alright, dear, the appliances aren’t overheating while turned off.”

Corbett is not here.

His hand drifts down to the plug to the toaster oven. The plug is not warm.

Stop. Of course the plugs aren’t warm. Visual checkpoints only.

It is now eight forty-one and eight forty. It’s a fifteen-minute drive into town. If I get out of here in the next four or five minutes like a normal person I’ll get the shop open in time and I do know enough not to schedule customers for nine but I have what’s-his-name coming in at nine fifteen with his Seth Thomas for cleaning. Visual checkpoints only.

Visual checkpoints mean somewhat less derision and humiliation.

So let’s say Corbett has not moved out. Let’s say he’s standing by the stove boiling water for coffee or across at the island spooning coffee into the press pot while the water heats up.

“Seriously, dear, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll make sure the kitchen doesn’t explode in your absence.”

For the moment toaster oven and microwave are in agreement at

eight forty-two. His eyes make a deliberate sweep of buttons and dials and plugs. Both machines are turned off and the plugs are calm. On to the refrigerator. Visual check that the doors are completely closed which they are. Now to the sink, in the corner under the window. Three checkpoints in a vertical stack, bottom to top.

“After you’re gone I’m going to wash up after breakfast. After which for my own amusement I will stop up the sink and run water until the whole place floods. I promise to clean up before you get home.”

Vertical stack, bottom to top. Drain filter: in the open position. Faucet: no water is dripping. Window: lock in the locked position. He turns away from the sink. The stove is ahead on his left and the island ahead on his right. He approaches. The not-a-real-clock on the stove tells him that it’s eight forty-four which is ludicrous if it was just eight forty-two behind him thirty seconds ago. I’ll have to fix that but not now, now I must glance very quickly at each of the dials that light the burners except the one that Corbett is using to boil water for coffee and make sure that the rest are in the off position except that Corbett is not here.

His hand goes to each one of the dials that light the burners and it jiggles each one gently and acknowledges one and two and three and four and five and six and also yes the center dial that controls the oven that each is in fact in the off position.

Corbett is not boiling water for coffee.

The kitchen ceiling light is on. It stays on when I get out of the house because Corbett is still in the kitchen.

Corbett is not in the kitchen.

Corbett is not here.

When I get out of the house it will be empty. Is it possible to miss someone’s worst qualities most of all?

The ceiling light will need to be turned off, and then I will need to acknowledge that it is off and then that the switch is in the off position. The not-a-real-clock on the stove needs to be reset.

There may also be lights on in the living room. The dining room. The fireplace flue might be open. The light in the front hall.

Maybe the back door is unlocked.

The gears and wheels and springs and pins have stopped and the house is broken.

He walks around the island, where there is no press pot. He returns to the back door and tugs on the knob.

Contemporary Poem

Benjamin Aleshire

Your cartography of desire, etching itself across the sky’s purpling bruise or whatever

My flock of griefs, what pulses in the space between us etc

Our panopticon of melancholies, witnessing each other witness each other

Our semiotic weapons-ban, words like blithe like glyph like amethyst etc

Our anthology of astonishment, verbing itself into being—

Now something different, something unsayable without an italicized remaking of the landscape:

The sound of your hymn breaking

The sound of a neoliberal elegy announcing itself to the dawn’s crepuscule or whatever

The sound of a Wikipedia entry being edited to death by unpaid interns

The sound of the body becoming cliché in poems five years ago but none of us can stop

In the porno we make, your cumming is a fermata you hold.

When the government comes, I’m gonna run.

Let the reader write their own meaning into the poem.

(In the end-times, all poems will become eulogies)

Two-Step Julien Blanchard

two sets of steps. of voices dandelions. only one foot wide,

the cattails on either side grew away the stream where you talked to ghosts, whispering your world we walked signals about the next day rain:

the dock held our weight and you cut that liquid world. in your silence

maybe the colors come back, a body leaning

i only heard cicadas, a path lit up by lacing my pace between yours

from the gravel parting, leading us to other people, and grandmothers.

the midnight air, singing, sending warning we will be flooded. we will be drowned.

the water with your toes, flesh piercing i wondered what you see after you die.

maybe you would see my body, against yours.

Dream House #8

Sean Cho A.

chunks of the ocean are melting back into ocean form fake rain: water forced into gravity feels like rain on our heads when it’s dark the moon is sexy when it’s late theories are sexy I want you to explain the logic behind the dreams I’ll be having soon my dog will be bitten by a larger dog but my teeth will stay in their rightful spaces so you change the subject and ask why so many poems are about the moon I say it’s because there are poems about the moon you misunderstand what I mean and say duh I say no I mean there were poems about the moon and poets read those moon poems and wrote more poems about the moon you ask what about before there were any moon poems and I say that there were a lot of years before ‘69 and how the imagined world is much more interesting you look convinced and I ask you to prove it to me

Summertime

Mary Carolyn Morgan

TW: This piece contains mention of suicide.

It was hot sitting under the marquee next to Granny Alice’s U-pick raspberry and blueberry patch as my cousin Quentin and I minded the store on the gently sloping field. Even the raspberries we’d gleaned to eat with our turkey sandwiches seemed to be melting. I was reading Pride and Prejudice ; Quentin was draped across and Adirondack chair, absorbing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

Despite the ninety-degree heat, his long legs were sheathed in leather pants. A single strand of multi-colored love beads adorned his bare chest and his hair was artfully tousled. It was the summer of his Jim Morrison fixation. Every few months he comes up with a new identity to try on, always picking someone famous and dead. Like a method actor, he loads up on all the information about the person he can find and then crams himself into the more aesthetic crannies of their persona. He collects people the way some people acquire stamps, coins, comic books or baseball cards.

The previous summer when his incarnation had been Franz Liszt, he’d parted his longish brown hair down the middle, donned a brown tunic with round gold buttons and played “Liebestraum” repeatedly on Granny’s Steinway baby grand—a luxury she was finally allowed after what was snippily termed “Ethan’s big business deal,” by relatives on the Rowe side, bemoaning the loss of family heritage.

Quentin has also appeared as F. Scott Fitzgerald and that past Christmas during a chest cold he transformed himself into John Keats, lolling on the living room sofa in a brocade dressing gown while spouting lines from “Endymion” and “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” He’s good at maintaining illusions; he’ll probably make a fine actor some day, though I prefer the literary figures to the musical because they make less noise.

He attempted to press the rewind button on the boom box between our chairs. My hand got there first, blocking access to the tape. He’d recorded “Break on Through” repeatedly so it played continuously for a half hour tape side. We’d had about ninety minutes straight of it at

that point. He peered over the top of his Ray-Ban aviators. “What?” He said.

“Variety is the spice of life,” I said.

“I thought this was your favorite Doors song.”

“Two days ago, it was,” I said. To me the eerie echoes of the song really are more suited to reverberating in dark interiors than wafting around a pastoral Vermont meadow full of shimmering light, sweet air, and bright dashes of color, sprinkled like confetti non pareils in the haze of grass beyond the blueberry patch: pink clover; black-eyed Susans; cadmium yellow dandelions; and tiny red bracts of paintbrush. I prefer to listen to that song in small rooms wearing headphones, or in a closed car while driving back roads at night, allowing it to pour into confined space like water.

He reached down to pry my hand off the control buttons. While he was occupied, I took out the cassette and pretended to shove it into the pocket of my shorts, dropping it instead between the slats in the chair.

“Give it back, Constance Grace.”

“Give it a rest, Quentin Stanley.” I really leaned on the Stanley, which he hates. He says the only favor his father ever did for him was to talk his mother out of bestowing Stanley as his first name. Quentin is a moniker he likes even though it makes him the namesake of the suicidal scion of a fictional southern family: Uncle Calvin was in his Faulkner phase back then. “Think Dad was trying to tell me something?” Quentin once mused.

Quentin lunged from his chair, but I was out of mine, running toward the first hedgerow of Taylor raspberry brambles. I swerved to the left, but he tackled me; prickly ends of the grass blades stuck my bare arms. His leather-encased legs straddled me as his hand slipped inside and rummaged around the pocket of my pants. Realizing the tape was not there, he pinned my arms, pressing them into the grass. My reflection in the lenses of his sunglasses stared back at me, giving me a chance to consider the resemblance to Quentin upon which everyone comments. My nose is longer and my face rounder, but we are not dissimilar. We’re all Gran’s—especially the gray eyes and angular build—to look at us, so says my mother who favors her father.

Quentin leaned into my face and shouted, “MY TAPE NOW.” As he did so, his peripheral vision must have picked up the figure clad in pink polka dotted culottes walking up the dirt path; she’d shadowed him all summer, turning up at every performance he gave as Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Red Barn Community Theatre. To boot, she’d seemed on the verge of converting from Methodism to

join us over at Christ Episcopal Church the Sundays Quentin played hymns during the organist’s vacation.

“Later,” he said, lifting himself off, the leather creaking as he moved. He zipped down the causeway dividing the two banks of hedgerows before disappearing between the four-foot-tall bushes flanking row seven.

Holly Sands, fifteen-year-old face all eager anticipation, reached me as I was brushing dry grass off my tee shirt.

“Is Quentin around?” she said, tossing her blond curls over her shoulder as the sound of the tractor lawn mower starting reached us.

“He’s doing the paths,” I said, heading back to the shade and the boom box to insert “Concerto for Two Trumpets in C” by Vivaldi before our visitor could commandeer it and find a radio station playing something drippy like “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” The din of the mower distorted the brilliant purity of the trumpets.

Holly is the daughter of Granny’s nearest neighbors, living in one of the mock-colonials built on the forty-five acres of farmland that Grandfather Ethan—a C.P.A. who reminded me of a stainless steel, darning needle and hadn’t farmed anything more involved than a vegetable garden since he was eighteen—sold off twenty years before. He reduced Rowe Farm to just the white connected farmhouse and barn, a four-acre lawn, three woodlots, a small apple orchard and what became the U-pick berry patch: a developer sub-divided the fields to create the neighborhood called Sugar Maple Estates.

Pretty, sweet, with an affinity for Barbara Cartland romances and Top Forty love songs, Holly had a crush on Quentin, who was having none of it. She’d come down every day to pick berries and bat her doll-like eyes at him. Mostly he dove into the bushes the minute he got wind of her: she was drenched in enough Charlie perfume to announce her presence twenty yards away. Every time she’d, “keep me company,” as she put it, bees, wasps and yellow jackets would approach us. Despite my aversion to insect repellents, I started keeping a can of Deep Woods Off next to my chair.

We glimpsed Quentin as he drove the mower along the bottom row. Granny ordered him to trim the main paths between the hedgerows— fearful a customer could slap her with a lawsuit like the one that cost Ralph Gunn of Gunn’s Orchards $15,000 when a man slipped off a ladder while picking apples. The day before Aunt Arabella, Grandfather Ethan’s sister, got her toe caught in the tangled strings of overgrown grass, knocking her snout first into a box filled with two quarts of raspberries. The long bangs that almost concealed his eyes

as he hunched over the wheel were amber and gold in sunlight. “I see him,” Holly said. Her big eyes opened wide.

“Lemonade, Hol?” I said, filling a paper cup.

“Do you think Quentin knows how cute he is?” She told the cup by her pink-nailed fingertips.

I had become the repository for her confidences—not just about Quentin either: fights with her mother and sister, travail in her adolescent social set, and gossip about her friends. For some reason, people feel comfortable unburdening to me. They tell me I’m a good listener, which means they think they’re getting compassionate attention as well as a little free therapy.

Not exactly. As a writer, listening is a useful technique for gleaning information about human nature: it’s not dissimilar to what Quentin does when he assumes another identity. He tries to feel what it’s like to be another person, and I try to study how people behave and interact.

Still, it surprised me that anyone who spent as much time watching Quentin as Holly could sum him up so incorrectly. Quentin can be termed many things: handsome, alluring, mercurial, clever, but definitely not cute.

“Quentin is very aware of his effect on people,” I said, thinking of his most recent stunt. On July third, he’d leapt onto the diving board of his father’s swimming pool, sang “Happy Birthday” to his stepmother, unzipped his fly and flashed the assembled family and friends before doing a splashy flip-cannonball combo that drenched everyone sitting poolside. Needless to say, he got the desired result, proving not only that he is a big prick, but he has one, too. Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be a wild card, lobbing surprises like cherry bombs at the status quo and daring the world to disapprove.

“Does he have a girlfriend at college?” Holly said.

“I doubt it,” I said, answering this question for the tenth time that week as he mowed by us. Rivulets of sweat ran down his back, branching into little tributaries between his shoulder blades. He leaned to the right as if examining the front tire when he passed rather than toss a wave to Holly, who practically turned a cartwheel, to get his attention.

“It’s so neat that you were born on the same day.”

“I’m older by two hours, and, like me, Quentin is also an only child—lonely children we say—except during the chunks of summer we spent together “up home” as my mother calls the farm.

The summer we turned nine Quentin and I told—or rather Quentin told and I went along with it—some of the kids inhabiting the S&M

Estates, that we were fraternal twins. We kept the illusion going for almost a month: because of our physical resemblance, the same birthday, and Gran’s cursory acquaintance with most of the young families who lived in the sixty houses set on her father’s former cow pastures, it was an easy sell. Quentin was extraordinarily convincing, and, at my suggestion we dressed similarly each day to further the illusion. On Mondays, we’d wear red shorts and white shirts, Tuesdays white shorts with Izod shirts, and Saturdays the tee shirts emblazoned with the Old Man of the Mountain we’d gotten when my parents took us to Franconia Notch. We knew we’d pulled it off when we overheard the mother of identical twins named Jason and Jimmy Perkins holding forth on the subject of “the dominant twin” to Holly’s mother when she said that Jason and Quentin were good examples of them.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Perkins mentioned her theory to my mother and Aunt Cathy, Quentin’s mother, when they were strolling through her cul-de-sac. When they got home, my mother preached to us for half an hour on the evils of deception and how it reflected on our family. I imagined my small, horrid self holding an immense silver hand mirror that shot a spotlight onto the disappointed faces of every sober ancestor listed on the pages clamped into the black binder Grandfather Ethan used for his genealogy charts that traced the family, on his side, “almost” to John Alden, never finding the “missing link,” as Gran called it.

Gran got tired of listening to her and said, “Candice, stop haranguing like Cotton Mather in high heels or I’ll tell the kids about the time you ate yourself bilious on two trays of Grammy’s maple candy and denied it until you tossed up all over Pop’s overshoes.”

“My child will not lie,” was Mom’s response. Maple candy incident notwithstanding, she sets a high premium on scrupulous honesty and insisted on a vigilant ethical code that serves as a built-in chaperone, shadowing every emotion or thought and judging its appropriateness. The only thing I can add to this is that Mom avoids maple foodstuffs assiduously.

I dutifully added to my penance by taking ridicule from my playmates at S&M to heart. They chanted a chorus of “liars, liars, liars” at us the next day when we rode our bikes down into the neighborhood. Quentin reminded them that they’d been “dumb enough to buy it.” He was nonplussed by public opinion: the only comment Aunt Cathy had managed was to vaguely tell him it wasn’t nice to make up stories.

Still, I liked having a brother; it made me feel so normal. For

that period, I was one of the bunch with my peers in a way that didn’t seem second-hand or vicarious—it’s pretty hard to take part in discussions about pesky siblings when you don’t have a pesky sibling to generate the appropriate anecdotes. During that month, neither Quentin nor I heard the sulky comment, “You’re so lucky to be the only one.” Besides, playing an integral role in one of Quentin’s escapades was exhilarating.

Granny made us a birthday cake every June 21 that we tended the berry biz for her: chocolate with a raspberry jam filling. The summer we turned nineteen, she invited Holly up to celebrate with us. Quentin wasn’t pleased. He likes his birthday to be commemorated quietly because it’s the anniversary of his mother’s death. A day before he turned ten, Aunt Cathy swallowed a double-digit number of sleeping pills. Alive when he found her lying on their bathroom floor after his Little League practice, she lingered enough hours to die on her son’s birthday. Two months later Uncle Calvin married Lydia, his research assistant; Quentin was absolved from attending the wedding after threatening to “shove Lydia’s fucking face into the cake.” Uncle Calvin knew better than to push it. Ten months later, Quentin was living with our grandparents, visiting his father, who resided thirty miles away, every third weekend until he went to St. Paul’s Academy.

Holly planted a kiss on Quentin’s lips before he could squirm out of it and handed him a sugary, red card that looked more like a Valentine and an Italian horn charm in 10k gold that he later donated to the church rummage sale. She approached me one evening when I was pulling sucker plants to sound me out about gift ideas, ignoring my advice that a simple birthday greeting was sufficient. Note: the microscopic card and floral-themed scratch and sniff stationery she gave me were considerably less elaborate.

“I’ve never heard of two people in the same family who aren’t twins having the same birthday,” she was saying as I covered my right arm with bug spray to fend off a circling yellow jacket. A girl with orange pigtails and a boy with red hair bounded up to the table where I’d stacked the cardboard pint boxes and quart-sized buckets next to the scales. As they bumped and shoved each other, the table shivered, knocking ten gingham-topped jars of Rowe’s Red Raspberry Jam into ten quart-sized containers of Rowe Farm Dark Amber Maple Syrup

Every year when the sap runs, Uncle Calvin taps the sugar maples in the wood lots and boils it down in the sugar house, attempting “to recapture sensations of the labor of simpler times.” He thinks that

spending a couple of weeks each year making syrup in back of his mother’s house allows him to better interpret Thomas Hardy’s rustics when writing literary criticism. Still, it’s good syrup. I put my hand on the sliding jars to steady them.

A red-haired man wearing an explosion of rusty freckles, madras shorts and new-looking brown loafers scurried up behind the kids.

“Welcome to Rowe Farm. We’re offering Taylor and Latham raspberries today,” I said.

“Kids, wait a minute,” the man said as each child grasped a box while arguing about who was going to pick more raspberries. “Two buckets.”

“Rows ten through twenty are open,” I said, handing them to him.

“To the left?” He said pointing as his offspring played a game of shove-your-sibling in to raspberry canes.

“I’ll show you,” Holly piped up. Quentin had rounded the bend near the cross bar post anchoring the top wires trellising row twenty.

“That’s okay. Official business with the Boy Wonder,” I said, leading them down the path while gently suggesting the correct comportment and technique for effective berry picking. Even so, I knew those kids would present me with a bunch of under ripe berries, trailing hulls, stems and leaves at checkout.

Quentin stopped when he saw us heading into row twelve. “Pickers in the next ten.” He nodded and moved off to circumnavigate the blueberry patch of Augusta, Brunswick and Top Hat cultivars.

Holly sat vigil most of the afternoon; except for the few minutes she cornered Quentin by bringing lemonade to him. He tried to wave her off, but she kept skipping backward ahead of the mower, until he stopped long enough to swallow it in one gulp. She beamed all the way up to the marquee, holding the paper cup from which his lips had drunk clasped to her heart.

We got busy after that: several families; Mrs. Perkins, who still calls us “the twins”; the new minister from the Congregational church and his wife, who bought ten quarts for jam making; and ten kids poorly chaperoned by two adolescent counselors from the day camp up the road who started pelting each other with raspberries and handfuls of the sawdust mulch we used as ground cover between rows until I broke it up with a threat to evict them from the field. When three teenaged girls, much to Holly’s annoyance, came up to Quentin-watch—he was a better lure than the discount coupon flyers we stuck on windshields at the shopping center—Quentin decided that Granny’s lawn also needed mowing and rode off, leaving his fan club disappointed.

At three-thirty Quentin, who had thrown on a white Oxford shirt devoid of buttons and acquired a Panama hat from some hidden nook, dragged himself up to where I was counting change. Filling a cup with lemonade several times, he gulped at least a quart, wiping the run-off from his mouth on the rolled-up cuff of his shirt. Holly was going through the collation of music tapes we’d thrown in a tote bag that morning before coming down from the house. “Don’t you guys have anything on the charts right now?” she said clutching copies of Hot Rocks by the Rolling Stones and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

Quentin took off his hat, brushed his forearm across his sweatdrenched hair, and then perched along the wide arm of my chair before spitting a disinterested, “No,” at her.

“Next time I come over I’ll bring some things I taped off the radio.”

“We’re probably not culturally advanced enough to understand the arcane allusions in the lyrics,” Quentin said.

Holly looked surprised. It was the first time he’d ever directed a sentence consisting of more than three words to her. Few people could have missed the insult: not even a young girl too in love to believe that her beloved couldn’t stand her. Still, she carried on as always.

“They’re happier than the things you guys listen to,” she burbled.

“Auditory uppers,” Quentin said. His leg was pressing against my right bicep, I gave it a shove because he made me miscount a dozen quarters and because, next to my own sweaty skin, the heated leather was too warm. He slid into the chair, squishing me against its side. Throwing the money into the cashbox, I stood up.

“Do I offend?” He said, raising his arms to expose the wet circles under his arms. Laughing, he stood up and walked down to the aluminum tool shed by the blueberry patch.

Holly shouted something to him about maybe seeing a movie together sometime, but he didn’t stop. A sad expression hung about her face. She sniffed and blinked, but didn’t let tears roll down her white cheeks. “He doesn’t like me.”

“He doesn’t like anyone,” I said, picking up Pride and Prejudice and fluttering the pages. Elizabeth Bennett had just received Mr. Darcy’s “Be not alarmed, Madam” epistle, and I was eager to get back to it. Eliza Bennett is a heroine of mine—a rebel who beat the system without being exiled from it. I wished that Holly would get the hint to toddle home. She’s a nice girl. Having had my share of adolescent heartbreak, including an impossible crush the summer I was fifteen on a guy named Jamie Degnan, I could relate.

Jamie was the seventeen-year-old son of the housepainter Granny

hired that year: black Irish and well built, he always wore white painter’s overalls with no shirt and a Red Sox cap. Too shy to say much more than, “Hi,” I’d watch him from vantage points around the yard as he applied paint with long, even strokes that sent his deltoids and bicepses undulating under his tanned skin, planning out in my mind the elaborate conversations that we’d have together if I could just get more than a monosyllabic amenity out of my throat. Listening to Carpenters’ albums, I’d muse for hours about feeding him raspberries, popping them between his lips while he rested his head on my lap. One afternoon I observed Jamie, leaning against a sugar maple in the back woodlot French kissing Quentin. Watching them, I felt like my stomach was dissolving.

So, I understood Holly’s plight—though I doubted she’d find herself in Rich’s discount store anonymously tapping a few destructive sentences onto a piece of scrap paper stuck in a typewriter on display while “Close to You” played over the Muzak—but it had been a long day, and her unrelenting devotion to Quentin had become annoying.

“Then you’re saying that it’s not me.” Her heart-shaped face still retained a trace of hope.

“He’s not going to hold hands while you share an ice cream cone on the bench in front of the Dairy Queen. Stop thinking that he’s like a moody hero in a romance novel who needs the tender love of a virtuous woman.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was sorry, but I didn’t go after her.

Closing my eyes felt good. A slight breeze blew across my face, breaking through the heat. Lifting my ponytail so it trailed down over the back of the chair, I felt the perspiration on the back of my neck evaporate, replacing the sticky wet with a tingly cool. A pair of hands unclasped my barrette and spread my hair across the top of the chair back. The sensation of another person’s fingers in my hair, playing with the strands was pleasurable: an electric thrill of hundreds of tiny unpredictable movements across my scalp. Opening my eyes, I found myself eyeballing Prometheus, Quentin’s boa constrictor.

A squiggle draped across Quentin’s shoulders, Prometheus flicked his black tongue out a couple of times. Quentin moved his hands from my hair to my temples, massaging them softly. He’s got a great touch: larghetto to adagio in motion and feel. His right hand slid down and cupped my chin. I reached up and ran my hand up the top of his arm, fingers gently burrowing under the sun-bleached hairs on his warm skin.

“Holly’s gone. You didn’t need the extra incentive,” I said, staring up into his eyes. He’d discarded the sunglasses. His left-hand braced Prometheus’s upper body.

“He likes getting out of the aquarium. Stretch the old scales,” he said, dropping back into his own chair, rubbing the snake’s extended head. Prometheus is kind of pretty, especially the thickest part of his back where the tan and brown pattern of asymmetrical, bow-shaped splotches is most intricate, though I don’t care to touch him. Quentin dropped him around my shoulders once: it took all my self-control to keep from freaking out, but I kept my cool. Once Quentin decided no drama could be provoked, Prometheus and I were never forced together again. Occasionally, I’ll stroke his back lightly in Quentin’s presence just to underscore the point.

“I told her that you had no plans to become her leading man and she got upset.” My head gently rocked from side to side, giving the illusion that the rounded green mountains stretched before me were undulating.

“You were probably kinder than I’ve been all summer.”

“It made me feel cruel. Too bad love isn’t always mutual.”

“No guarantee of happiness when it is,” he said. Quentin’s fingers stroked Prometheus’s luminous beige underside. The snake had shed his skin a few days earlier, and his hide was very bright.

The breeze carried the clean sweet smell of the fresh grass cuttings into my nostrils. Thousands of ridged raspberry leaves rustled, jiggling the plump, red clusters of fruit suspended on the delicate branches like edible drop earrings. I imagined them hanging from my earlobes and twined about my throat and wrists, worn as if they were ropes of rubies that had popped their facets. My mind adorned Quentin’s fingers and wrists with berry jewels set like solitaire rings and the loose chain-link I.D. bracelet Jamie gave him when they exchanged tokens the summer they were in love. Three weeks later, Jamie dumped him after a run-in at the Lyric Theater on Main Street—a gaudy film palace, circa 1927, upholstered with red velvet and gilt fixtures that degenerated into an itch house running 99-cent bargain nights.

Quentin had badgered me into going to the movies even though I’d been offish to him without explanation since my discovery; wrapped up in his own concerns—being in love made him quite good natured—I’m not sure he noticed. Having nothing better to do, I went along, not understanding why he had the hots to see “The Great Waldo Pepper” until he maneuvered us down the aisle covered by worn carpet into squeaky seats behind Jamie and Sarah Perkins, the

sister of Jimmy and Jason. They were sitting with another couple, a beefy football-type and his bosomy girlfriend; brawn and breasts, that unfailing combination for high school social success.

I have very few impressions of the movie, and I doubt that Quentin got much out of it either. Mostly we watched the shadowy love scene that played before us during the film: Jamie and Sarah’s two heads pressed together for a marathon of kisses that occasionally prompted Quentin to kick the back of Jamie’s seat “accidentally.” He “apologized” with a terse, “sorry,” on the instance the force was sufficient to separate the young lovers, jolting Jamie’s head forward so his mouth slipped off Sarah’s. I just sat there unfairly hating Sarah even more than Quentin since that day in the woods.

When the film was over, Quentin sat glowering at Jamie and sliding the I.D. bracelet up his forearm before tartly saying, “See ya round,” as Jamie’s friends stared up the aisle. Jamie lagged ostensibly to pick up a popcorn bucket.

“I told you not to come here tonight,” Jamie said in a strong whisper.

“Do you think Sarah would be so eager to lock lips with you if I told her where your lips have been recently?” Quentin said loudly, letting his fingers drop the bracelet against his skin. A slight clink emitted as the links fell against each other.

“Stay away from me,” Jamie said. He quickly caught up with his friends and hurried the group out the exit while explaining, “Pop and I painted their grandmother’s house.”

Quentin fidgeted in his seat for a second before he bolted up and tried to follow them. He moved to brush past me, but my hands clutched his shoulder and left wrist.

“Let me go,” he said and started dragging me into the hallway that led to the alley.

“Let him go,” I said when we reached the exit.

“You don’t get it,” he said. The dusty yellow light diffused by the tarnished filigreed sconces lining the wall highlighted two glistening, parallel lines running down his face.

“I understand,” I said, getting him to stand against the wall by pressing my hands into his shoulders.

“You don’t get it.” He started to push me away. I gripped my hands onto his forearms.

“You’re making a fool of yourself over a guy who doesn’t want you,” I said. Quentin looked at me for the first time since he’d started to leave his seat, surprised that I’d figured him out.

“He just doesn’t want to be seen with me,” he said.

For the first time since that day in the woods, I felt bad for him— almost as bad as I’d been feeling for myself. But with my solicitousness came a small solace, mean but human that Quentin would also have to give up on Jamie. “It works out the same way,” I said gently rubbing my thumbs back and forth across the skin of his arms.

“I’m going to Friendly’s,” Quentin said. Before the movie started Jamie and his crowd mentioned they might go there for burgers. Quentin broke away and opened the door. “You coming?” He said, turning to look at me.

“No,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, stepping outside.

Quentin got home about twelve-thirty; I was upstairs reading in the corner bedroom I slept in when visiting Granny Alice. The wallpaper was covered with dainty pink flowers and the furniture had been placed in the room before 1939. Leaning against pillows that smelled like the musty cedar chips in the linen chest, my eyes traveled over the same paragraph repeatedly while I worried that Quentin had stirred up more ugliness than I’d already made.

Fortunately, he couldn’t find Jamie’s group. Either they changed their plans or left by the time he’d peddled his ten-speed to the restaurant.

Knocking on my doorjamb—the door was purposefully open after a few weeks of being firmly shut—Quentin hovered outside as he apologized for ditching me. He seemed subdued. He flopped across my bed to talk about my knowing about “you know” and how he thought that when they found out everyone might freak and blame it on the trauma of his mom’s suicide, which would be wrong, but so like them. He then segued into the details of his futile quest that evening and “the Jamie-thing.”

We talked for a while. A few times during the conversation, I considered mentioning my own abortive crush on Jamie, but held back. Call it a sin of omission rather than a lie: at the time, I told myself that I’d hurt Quentin enough and a full confession, especially my surreptitious epistle to Jamie, might damage our relationship, but now I think it had more to do with the fact that Quentin had the emotional provenance of reciprocated love; my feelings for Jamie were still dear and raw enough for me to not want them overshadowed by someone with a better claim. Once again Quentin had outdone me.

Still, I was relieved that some of the jealousy I’d built up towards him dissipated: jealousy makes one feel like being brutal. At one point

during the movie, as Jamie stroked Sarah’s hair, I’d wanted to yank from her scalp the locks his fingers had touched. I didn’t do it, and had no right to even wish to, but the desire had been there.

“Are you shocked?” Quentin said, tracing the circles on the pink and white double wedding ring quilt with his index finger. His lower right arm was bare: he’d divested himself of Jamie’s bracelet, shedding it on the road between Friendly’s and home.

The next day I retraced his route on my bike, recovering the bracelet from the sandy shoulder at mile two. The clasp was broken and there was a long scratch across the nameplate. Curling the links around its end, I put in my jewelry box, storing it in the nest of turquoise velvet lining that container until I out grew the need to keep a memento of a boy I once liked, albeit someone else’s discarded souvenir.

“Where’s my tape?” Quentin said, breaking my memory trance. The raspberry field came back into focus.

“Under my chair.”

“How’d we do today?” He said as he retrieved the cassette from the thick grass spears, Prometheus still across his shoulders.

“A couple of syrups and five jams. $217.50 on the berries.”

“A lot of raspberries.”

“Probably one for every time you’ve played that song today,” I said, smiling almost benevolently.

“Could be,” he said. He inserted the cassette into the player and started it going.

Marmoset

Isabelle Doyle

You trail like cirrus clouds. You swim in the river. You kill glitter flies with pink plastic fly swatters, stare after each escapee into the airbrushed blue ether.

Your life curling in at the edges like paper. Track vanishing flies with alien-wide eyes. Know each individually with your memory like a marmoset’s.

Fled flies all the way down the river of your mind. Holding kitchen scissors cutting the moon from the river. Swimming lightless and depthless in the moon-empty river.

Grasping at freshwater spinners with slender fingers. I float like leaves on your surface and feel like a fossil, ammonite vestige of something ancient, inoperable,

millions of years past making some crucial imprint in the bedrock of your will. I put my feet in the same river over and over and make no difference—

now that butcher knife of longing cuts me deeper than even you could ever picture—deeper longing than stones moving at the bottom of a white river.

You’re swimming the river with blades in your palms, tossing shards of light and water over your shoulders for me to catch. You’re surfacing, skipping your stones.

You’re giving me the moon and back or something like that. Alien-wide eyes. Silt on my heels from days I slipped your mind. You’re swimming the river

and surfacing and skipping your stones and scrolling through Twitter, rubbing the nape of your crooked spine with a winnowed finger, opening your face to me with a smile like an alibi so beautiful

I can’t help but believe it. Beauty impossible like animals being born on the ocean floor, like the stones that became the Himalayas

used to be miles and miles underwater— miles deep. And you’re giving me this fragment of your life. Anything you can carve away

and offer me, I’m asking for. You’re giving me. I’ll take a minute of your body, whatever mind you have left at the end of your days to offer me—

not too proud for shards of you. Give me the peel of skin on your lip fine as a wet petal, give me an ocean that fits in a thimble.

The Mary Garden

Melissa Ostrom

TW: This piece contains mentions of a suicide attempt.

My father died a long time ago, but Mom still lives in the old house on the corner of Washington and Baird. These two streets, same as plenty in this part of the city, don’t meet squarely, so the lot juts out at an acute angle, making the yard a V with the house at the point, like an arrowhead in a drawn bow. I can’t say how many times, growing up, I perched on the front porch step and waited, poised to go somewhere, anywhere, fast.

The hospital sits across from the house, and traffic shoots off Washington Bridge, a structure unseen from the step but heard. It produces a constant clattering. Not a reassuring noise, but it hasn’t collapsed into the Tonawanda River yet. Cars clunk over the bridge, then speed past Dina’s Bowling Alley or veer left to stay on Washington Street. Every so often, they climb the hill to the better part of town.

As kids, my friends and I called this steep section of the street Banana Hill, for though most of Wilton undulates, the city swoops into an Everest on Washington. Not until I entered my teens did I learn adults coined it Suicide Hill. Then, around my eighteenth birthday, Manton Hospital became a psychiatric hospital. The hill, the hospital, their proximity: the stuff of morbid humor.

But I miss when the rambling brick building housed everyday emergencies. Leaning forward from my step, I used to peer into the cars slowing by the entrance and guess the situations—severed pinky, chest pain, busted head, a baby on the way. The faces in those cars said a lot.

I don’t hang out here much lately, though I am now because it beats sitting inside, listening to Mom talk on the landline to my oldest brother Jay in the tone she reserves for him, questioning and doting.

I’m the one who visits once a week, hauls the trash to the curb, listens to Mom’s stories of mysterious pains, and tinkers with whatever loosened, ripped, or broke during the previous six days. Jay—and my other two brothers, for that matter—visit once a year, at Thanksgiving.

Yet with Mom, it’s always, “What do you think, Jay-Jay?” or “Well, if that’s what you would do, Jay-Jay…” My brother directs from afar. Like God.

I complained once, maybe three years ago, about shouldering everything. It was at the once-a-year family table, over the half-empty bowls of mashed potatoes and squash and succotash, when Mom had shuffled into the kitchen for the pies.

Three sets of stern eyes settled on me, but Jay, of course, was the one who spoke. “You owe it to her.”

That’s it. Five words, delivered like a holy commandment.

I made a face but didn’t argue. I knew what he meant: The Incident, the hospital bills, the breaking-of-Mom’s-heart. When a person becomes a hill-and-hospital story, she doesn’t invite a recounting of the tale. Not even if it’s old (more than a decade old, for Pete’s sake) and she’s completely changed, improved, and holding down a job, making a good name for herself as a teacher at Euclid Elementary. No. She keeps her mouth shut and hopes everyone forgets.

Inside the house, Mom giggles.

I wrap my jacket more tightly around me and automatically eye the bridge traffic expectantly, before I realize what I’m doing and lift my gaze determinedly to the sky. I shake my head at the clouds, disgusted with myself. As if Mick would drive the same car after all this time, as if he hadn’t left Wilton years ago, as if he’d come this way even if he still lived here.

Mom tee-hees again, and I clench my jaw. She’s got three dresses she needs me to drop off at the drycleaners tomorrow during my lunchbreak. Couldn’t she have handed them over before settling in for her cozy chat?

I shrug up a sleeve. My watch is more of a bracelet, plastered with fake diamonds. The twenty first graders who fill my classroom prefer bling and lots of it. They’d appreciate the accessory especially at this hour, twinkling madly in the drenched evening light that manages to turn even the April-mucked Washington Street shimmery.

The line of shining houses and brilliant windows doesn’t fool me. I’m dismissing the current sparkle and frowning at the traffic-glut at the foot of the hill, at the peeling faces of old homes and the winterbeaten strips of grass that, like filthy Band-Aids, separate the uneven sidewalk from the potholed road—really getting into the spirit of adding up everything I hate about this place—when, from around the corner, comes a screeched, “Nina! Get back here.”

Then the answer, closer: “Nope.”

The succinct sauciness of the retort prepares me for a girl, but the person who saunters my way is a woman. She’s as tall as a man, needle-thin, and all in pink: loose pink pants, tight pink top, dark hair caught back from a dark face with a pink ribbon. She pauses to absently toe the mailbox by the corner, reminding me of my old jewelry box ballerina that pops up on a spring-rigged pole when the lid is raised. I half-expect the woman to start spinning, but she merely continues along Washington, arms swinging, hips swaying, the light folds of her pants rippling, long legs eating up whole sidewalk squares in single strides.

She doesn’t look remotely startled by my presence. She slows to a stop, fits her hands in her back pockets, and nods. “There are two of you tonight.”

I glance behind me and come up empty. My gaze flicks to the hospital across the street.

She grins. “I’m not crazy. Yet.” She tilts her head in the direction of Mom’s Mary statue. “You and the Virgin.”

“Oh.” My mother calls the front beds on either side of the door her Mary garden. Winter obliterated the greenery, and now the statue sits a few feet from the naked branches of a Rose of Sharon on a brown carpet of dead vegetation.

The stranger moseys up the walkway, lazily lifting a hand out of the back pocket. I think an introduction is imminent, but as I start straightening out of my hunch, she drifts to my left, pauses in front of the statue, and touches the stiff folds of Mary’s robe.

The door bounces open behind me. “Nina!” Mom backhands the air. “Where you been?”

“Here and there, Mrs. C.” The visitor straightens. Mom knuckles my crown and ignores my yelp. “You meet Josie?”

“How’s it going?” I ask, finally getting to my feet, not so much out of politeness (why bother when this Nina doesn’t?), but because I feel at a disadvantage with Mom hovering behind me in the doorway, this new person looming over me, and Our Lady standing off to the side, arms outstretched, hands raised. I grimace at the statue. Mary’s stance suddenly strikes me as inappropriate, too beckoning, bound to lure strangers onto the lawn.

Except this Nina isn’t strange, at least not to my mother, for the visitor’s musing, “So this is the one who tried to off herself over the asshole.”

My mouth drops open. I turn to scowl at my mother. “ Jesus . Do you have to tell everyone?” I’m not sure which outrages me more:

Mom’s divulgement of something so personal or this woman’s casual mentioning of it.

Mom opens her arms, technically matching Mary’s pose, but somehow channeling impatient disgust rather than all-encompassing love. “If you didn’t want the world to know how you felt, you shouldn’t have advertised it.”

“I was eighteen.” Cut a heartbroken girl some slack.

“Plenty old enough to have a little sense. I was pregnant with Jay-Jay at that age.”

“Well, I didn’t try to kill myself.” I fall back to my step, limp and exhausted. Mom sucks the starch out of me.

“You drank yourself unconscious.”

“Hardly on purpose,” I mutter to the ground. I can’t lie to her face. I did want to die. I thought to drink myself to that end.

“Stupid behavior— expensive behavior. The fight with that girl, the accident, the broken arm, the drinking and more drinking. Doctor bills. Shrink bills. So much money. Oh, God, the money . Money we didn’t have.”

“I’m paying you back.” Every freaking day, paying with my life. “And I’m sure plenty of other moms could tell similar stories. Drinking isn’t exactly unusual behavior for a teenager.”

“But so unmindful of me , Josephina, of your poor mother who put up with that nonsense from your father.”

I press my lips together and stare straight ahead. This point (the child-of-an-alcoholic-ought-to-know-better) clinches the argument. It always did. It still does.

How did this start? We haven’t rehashed the drama in years. I glare at Nina. Thanks a lot, Twinkle-Toes.

She smiles, not bothering to disguise her cheerful interest. “Nice to see Ma and I aren’t the only ones who duke it out.”

“Ah! Tell me.” My mother lets the screen door slam behind her and skips down the steps, almost stomping on my hand in her haste. She cuts in front of me, forcing me to scoot to the side, and rubs her hands together. “What’s up with Gina now?”

“Oh, you know Gina. Same as all the DeRosas.” Nina flutters a hand, like she’s whisking away a mosquito. “Fired up about college, how you can’t do anything if you don’t get the right degree. ‘School makes the American dream the real deal,’ as Uncle Arty likes to say. Ma’s mad as hell I’m dropping out.”

My mother chuckles, a reaction that amazes and irks me. Obviously, other daughters’ misdeeds are excusable, even amusing. I’m the only

one who can’t make a mistake. The unfairness aggravates me. I get to my feet and tell the dropout, “Your mom might be right, you know. I’m glad I became a teacher. Beats making minimum wage at Tops Market. A degree opens doors.”

I try to smile kindly at Nina, but my face must indicate the condescension I’m running on because Nina raises a single eyebrow at me. After a pause, she answers, “I have a degree. Two, actually.”

“Gina wants her to finish the doctorate program at UB,” Mom explains. She sighs and wags her head. “Sure I can’t blame her. It’d be something, bragging about your daughter, the doctor.”

Nina shrugs, swings back toward the statue, and gracefully sinks into a crouch. Her fingers nudge aside some moldering leaves. “You got spring coming up.”

Beet-red shoots stubble the earth Nina clears around the statue’s base. They’re spiky, like fence posts rising out of the ground to guard Mary.

“Lily of the valley.” Mom crosses her arms, beams. “They grow well in the shade. Too well. They’re taking over the bed. I’ll have to dig some up and move them. But boy, wait till the white bells open. What a perfume.”

Sweet. I can practically smell them now. The remembered scent makes me recollect other things, too, a whole, blurred repetition of moments: me dolled up and waiting on the step, Mick’s car (his dad’s old Cadillac, a geezer’s car, he used to complain, though its spacious smoothness struck me as luxurious), the sight of it flashing scarlet and ripping up Washington, how he’d ease to the curb and lean out the window to smile and say something silly (Want some candy, little girl?) before stepping out and striding to where I stood on the step. He’d hug me around my thighs, lift me right off my pedestal, and let me slide along his body to my feet, an exciting trip, like sledding straight down Banana Hill. I’d stop breathing, then a moment later, breathe too quickly, as if to catch up on the air I forgot I needed. All that heavy breathing. That’s probably why I remember the scent of lily of the valley.

For two years, our dates began that way: me waiting, him appearing, us leaving together. It was better, smarter, to wait outside for Mick.

Nina has cleared a foot-wide circle around the statue, and Mom stands over her, speaking instructively: “That’s Solomon’s Seal coming up over there. The rest are daylilies, oh, except for the pink peony behind Mary—see the red shoots?—so pretty until it rains hard. Then splat , the whole bush droops to the ground, drenched, like my hair on

a rainy day. There’s no bounce in peonies. I ought to stake the bush. Maybe Josie will help me stake it this year.”

Maybe. Maybe not. I’m getting tired of the jobs-for-Josie routine.

Nina nods, like she’s offering up my services. Jesus. Is she in cahoots with my brothers?

She rises, unfolding into her full pinkness. A perfect flower; no slouchy peony in her. Again, the ballerina quality of her frame and demeanor impresses me. I wonder if her degrees are in dance. Do dancers get graduate degrees?

Dusting her hands together, she frowns down the street. “I’d better head back. Ma will be having a conniption. Don’t want her suffering a stroke.”

My mother laughs, like the neighbor working herself into a lifethreatening fit would be a treat. Funny how I didn’t even know Mom had a nemesis around the corner, an enemy with a friendly daughter, Mom’s new marvel, a princess to go with Prince Jay. The DeRosas must be recent additions to the neighborhood. I would have known all about Nina, had we grown up near each other. You don’t overlook someone like her.

Abruptly, I ask, “So you live and work around here?”

“Neither.” She waves toward Baird Street. “I’m only visiting. Ma moved in with her cousin three years ago.”

“Janette Lisandro, the widow,” my mother explains. Then, in that gushing voice usually reserved for the favorite son, she adds, “Nina works at the Audubon. Practically runs the whole place.”

“Is that what Ma tells you?” She snorts. “Nah. I just dig in the dirt all day.”

“She’s a conservationist, Josie.”

“Neat.” Obviously, as far as Mom’s concerned, Nina’s right up there with Sophia Loren, Andrea Bocelli, and Jay-Jay, Brother Extraordinaire. Has she ever, even once, announced, with that same reverent pride, what I do for a living?

“I’ve got some dahlia tubers if you want them, Mrs. C,” Nina says. “I dug them up in the fall and wrapped them in newspaper. Ma wanted a few pink ones, so I got them out of my basement, but I brought some other ones, too: red, yellow, purple. Dinner-plate variety. Absolutely outrageous, they’re so big.”

I’m only half-listening. In the process of correcting my Nina-theBallerina theory and restyling her into a dirt digger, it hits me that this woman, with her two degrees, surely knows tons more than Mom does when it comes to gardening—probably, in fact, identified every little

pointy nub poking through the dirt, long before my mother started yacking about them.

Mom twists her hands together, her face equal parts longing and reluctance. “The big ones, huh? Oh, I like those big ones. They won’t winter over?”

Nina shakes her head. “Too tender.”

“I don’t know. The shoveling is getting harder for me. I never found the energy last October to take out the cannas in the back. They’re probably dead. But I really like those big dahlias…”

“I’ll get them out for you when it’s time,” Nina offers.

Mom’s eyes widen. “Would you really?”

“Do it all the time at work. I don’t mind.”

But I do. I do mind. I glare at her. “I’ll do it,” I say, my voice loud and clipped, almost a bark.

Mom is skeptical. “You hate gardening.”

“That’s not true. You just keep me busy doing other things. I’ll make time for it. I wouldn’t mind one or two of those dahlias myself, if you have any to spare.”

Now they look surprised. I’m kind of surprised, too.

“You don’t even have a yard, Josie. You live in an apartment.”

My hands come up in a floundering way, like two fish flopping on the floor of a boat, until, inspired, I explain, “Well, the fact is, I’ve been planning a butterfly garden with my first graders. The dahlias would be a pretty addition. We’ve already got seeds.” I think hard, trying to recall the names of flowers. “You know: daisies, marigolds, um, lavender…”

“Growing lavender from seed?” Nina’s mouth curls. “Wow.”

Concentrating on weaving this tale, I absently step back and nearly trample Mary.

“You’re crushing my plants,” Mom snaps.

“Oh! Sorry.” I turn quickly, begin to lose my balance, and throw out my arms to right myself, inadvertently high-fiving one of Mary’s hands in the process.

“Don’t slap Mary’s hand like that.” Mom’s frown is fierce. “That’s disrespectful.”

An incredulous gasp escapes me. “It was an accident, Mom. I wasn’t trying to disrespect the Blessed Virgin.”

She points a finger at my chest. “Just now, how you said that, sarcastic-like. That’s disrespect.” I start to defend myself, but she continues loudly, “You got that from that boy ten years ago, and you

haven’t lost it yet.”

Got what? I share my bewilderment with Nina, but Mom’s visitor isn’t watching. She’s returned to Mary, wrenching out the dead matte of peony brush behind the statue.

“That Mick,” Mom sneers, “oiling his way to our house, all slick and superior, a nasty rich boy in his daddy’s car.” Her voice is low and terrible. “I can see him now, strolling up the walkway, tweaking Mary’s nose, laughing. So rude. Evil .”

Still in a squat, Nina shakes her head over the clearing. “Offending the Holy Mother.” She clucks. “That’s bad.”

Mom thrusts a hand toward her guest, raises her eyebrows: See ?

“From the time of your first date with that smug cheater, you started getting snotty—too good for your own family.”

I blink. “That is not true.”

“Then why’d you never invite him in?”

“Because of Dad,” I say in a near-whisper. A kind of a whimper.

“It might have done your father good, to see his only daughter getting silly over an arrogant asshole, to have to man-up and do the parent’s job of questioning the wise guy. It might have brought him to his senses. But he knew you were ashamed of him. He’d watch you and Mick from the window. And he’d just go right on drinking.”

I can’t speak for a moment. Disbelief and hurt dam the words in my throat. Finally, I get out, “So now Dad’s drinking is my fault, too?”

Mom looks away. “I didn’t say that.”

We all fall silent. Mary’s the only one smiling.

Nina finally rises. For the first time since her arrival, she looks uncomfortable. Her glance my way is sympathetic. “Oh, well, there’s no making sense of the heart, Mrs. C,” she murmurs. She dusts her fingers together. Dirt scatters. “Be back in a flash with those dahlias.”

I’m shaking my head, still reeling from the attack.

Lips compressed, face flushed, Mom doesn’t turn to Nina or me but nods once, then stiffly, creakily, takes Nina’s place on the ground by the statue and continues the clearing. Given my mother’s kneeling position, Mary appears to be smiling straight at her, a sweet smile, the kind of expression I try to give my first graders, especially the ones who, I suspect, never find enough smiles at home.

“Ready, Josie?” Nina’s on the sidewalk.

“Oh.” I didn’t realize I was collecting the dahlias with her. I move hastily down the walkway. Relieved. It feels good to move closer to the speeding traffic, to hit the sidewalk. Leave behind the front yard. I’d like to run. Fly away. But for all its arrow-like appearance, Mom’s

place is more of a boomerang.

We walk without speaking. One of the cars coming off the bridge is a familiar red. But I don’t look closely. I won’t let myself, not in front of Nina. The old searching suggests something pitiful, something sad about me.

Capricorn Terry Allen

Right now, you may be feeling the weight of a Komodo dragon on your shoulders. But I want you to know that it’s not as bad as you imagine. All righteous algorithms are in harmony as the planets align in your favor. Can you rise to that higher level to see the difference between a raven and an albatross? I believe you can. Know that you’re not defined by your past like that time in college when you took a part-time job with the grounds crew over the Christmas break, and you only lasted half a day after you were assigned to make the rounds with one of the full-time employees in a beat-up maintenance truck, and it only took less than a minute once the doors were closed for you to be overwhelmed by the stench of dust, oil, and body odor mixed with the hot air of the truck’s heater and that’s when your senior partner took out a crumpled metal band-aid box from his coat pocket that looked as if he had rescued it from a dump, and he pulled out a homemade cigarette and lit up inside the closed vehicle, chain-smoking all morning, and you tried not to breathe, but failed, although you were able to remain conscious, knowing that if you passed out, you were sure to succumb to smoke poisoning, but as is usual with your sign, you soldiered on no matter how daunting the tasks, taking one moment at a time and putting one foot in front of the other just as you will do this very day.

Mermaids Amanda K Horn

Last year’s edition of Hiking the Heartland: A Weekender’s Guide to the Best Hiking in the Midwest described the Lake Fischer Wildlife Preserve as follows: “This sleepy town just two hours west of Milwaukee has a truly special secret—mermaids! Lake Fischer is one of few habitation sites for the rare freshwater mermaid, a regional subspecies of the blonde saltwater legend. Editor’s note: Always exercise caution around wildlife. Mermaids are extremely dangerous , and under no circumstance should be approached directly.”

My hiking guidebooks are just the beginning of it. Everyone, everywhere says the same thing about the Lake Fischer mermaids—so that’s why, at 7:56 a.m., four minutes before the first period bell, I slam my locker in Justine’s face and tell her no.

She stares at me for a second, and then resumes slowly chewing her gum. “Okay,” she says, “I knew you were going to say that. That’s why I invited Matthew Prestler.”

“What does Matthew Prestler have to do with me?”

“Oh please. I see you talking to him in Bio. He’s perfect for you! Everything about this situation is perfect. You and Matt, me and Jake…Jake’s brother can get us some beer, we’ll go out to the lake, see the mermaids or whatever…it’s perfect.”

“I don’t drink, and camping isn’t allowed,” I say, stuffing my Trig text book into my backpack and zipping it up. “Plus, what you’re describing sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. Jake already likes you—just ask him out like a normal person.”

Justine gives me one of those affectionless looks of hers that I hate. “Who wants to be normal?” she asks, and not in a nice way.

“I’m normal.”

“And you’re hot stuff, clearly.”

Typical Justine—she doesn’t mean it, she’s just being a jerk about not getting her way. I shake it off like usual, sling my bag over my shoulder and say, “Have fun with that, J. I’m going to class.”

“Maddy—wait!” She jumps in front of me, holds up both of her hands in a dramatic gesture that would have been cartoonish on anyone else. Her eyes are wide, hazel, long lashes clumped with black mascara. It seems like she’s a foot taller than me, even though it’s only

two inches.

“I know we didn’t hang out much over the summer,” she says, “but you’ve been my best friend since like, fifth grade. I really like this guy, Maddy, and I just want everything to be perfect. Please come with us? I promise nothing will go wrong, I promise you’ll have fun. I really need your support right now.”

I can’t remember the last time she looked so serious. Finally I sigh, because for Justine there’s only ever one answer. “Okay,” I say.

She jumps and gives this little squeal, loosely wraps her arms around my shoulders for a second, barely touching me. “Perfect! I’m so excited you’re coming!” she says. “We have to take your truck though, do you mind driving? Daddy doesn’t want me taking my car on gravel roads.”

Those mermaids are the only thing that makes this town special— without them, we’d just be another boring, medium-sized city in the wholesome expanse that is Wisconsin. As a result, they’re the only thing anyone ever talks about. The Wisconsin DNR conservatory at Lake Fischer Nature Preserve is the biggest employer in town. The high school football team is the Fischer Sirens. WELCOME TO FISCHER, the painted sign on Highway 18 reads, HOME OF LEGENDS. Underneath, a mermaid with long blonde hair beckons. This strikes me as funny for two reasons: 1) Freshwater mermaids look nothing like that, not that anyone would really know, since 2) as an endangered species, no one except scientists are allowed close to them. That’s not to say people don’t do it—every year, some stupid tourist tries. Sometimes they’re fine—their friends haul them out, or they swim ashore laughing, I don’t see what the big deal is! Other times— like the lady from Chicago last year—they are torn limb from limb, reduced to a bloody, pulpy tangle of sodden clothing that washes up on the rocks. That woman’s family tried to sue the preserve, but the case was thrown out almost immediately.

“We’re talking about wild animals here, apex predators,” a spokesman for the DNR said, during the press conference that aired later that night on KCRG News at 9. “It can be difficult to remember since they look like humans, but mermaids have been designed by evolution to hunt, to kill.”

Every kid in Fischer studies mermaids in elementary school. In fifth grade, the year Justine moved here, we had an entire unit on mermaids—freshwater and saltwater varieties. We had to identify at least four of the seven species, including geographical location, physical characteristics, and primary food sources. Our class even took

a field trip to the preserve. We sat through a short informational film at the Nature Center, and then walked through a few interactive exhibits about the development of the ecological system that made life for the mermaids possible. After that, they even took us out to the lake—right up on the pier, as close as anyone could get!

Of course they wouldn’t have taken us to the pier if there was any chance of actually seeing a mermaid. They’re nocturnal, for one thing, and the field trip was scheduled during the spring, while their strange, fishlike bodies were still in hibernation at the bottom of the lake. The surface of the water remained undisturbed except for the soft, murky green waves lapping against the pier. The bus ride back to school at the end of the day was silent, deflated.

As if summoned by our disappointment, Justine moved here two weeks later. A California transplant with tan, skinny arms and a streak of bright pink dyed hair pulled up into her ponytail, she stood at the front of the class and surveyed her prospects.

I tried to imagine what she must have seen: a room full of landlocked Midwestern kids in baggy jeans, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with bands that were popular two years ago, shoes a little too small, or big, plain-faced, bovine eyes staring back at her, unembarrassed by their curiosity.

Things must have looked pretty bleak, for Justine to have chosen the empty desk next to me .

“We have to get there early,” she insisted, “ so don’t be late .”

I arrive at Justine’s house at exactly 7 p.m., just as the sun is going down, filling the sky with an ominous red light. I park the truck in the street, and trek through her yard to the front door; even though it’s October, it smells like freshly cut grass. I have to ring the doorbell twice—no one answers the first time.

When Justine finally yanks open the door, her hair is wrapped up in a towel and she’s wearing an old, too-big T-shirt and sweatpants, no makeup, nothing.

“You’re wearing a hoodie?” she says, looking both concerned and disgusted.

“It’s going to get cold after the sun goes down. You’re not ready yet?”

“Do you want to borrow something? You can dress in layers, it won’t be that cold.”

“No thanks, I’m happy with my hoodie.”

“I’ll see if I have anything that might fit.”

I follow her up the plushy, carpeted stairs to her room, which is, like usual, a total disaster. The door to the closet is permanently wedged open, clothing pilling out across the floor. Her dresser is piled with jewelry, trinket boxes, make up, hair accessories, a curling iron, abandoned cups left half-full of liquid. I try to avoid stepping on anything.

“I’m trying to decide between this crop top and skirt, or jeans and that sweater,” she says, pointing at her unmade bed. The clothing in question is laid out, a chunky yellow sweater and green and black plaid skirt. The sheets, pink and white, have been whipped into cotton waves, and shoved up against the wall.

“A skirt? You’ll freeze.” I take a seat on the corner of her bed, careful not to sit on any clothing.

“I have fleece leggings, obviously,” she says. She’s digging through her closet, back to me. “I think I have two pairs, actually, if you want to borrow a dress—I have one that might look okay with those sneakers.”

I sigh; I like my sneakers. “Thanks, J, but no thanks. It’s not exactly a date night for me.”

She snorts, then after a moment says, “Fine, wear what you want. I’m just trying to help.”

This comment irritates me, a fiery surge under my ribs. “Look, I’m not like you. Maybe I don’t want to be dating anyone—especially not Matt Prestler. Shimmying into one of your old dresses from middle school isn’t going to change my life.”

“Yeah right!” she laughs. “As if you don’t like him.”

And yeah, okay, maybe Matt is kind of cute in an awkward, nervous sort of way, and maybe he’s fun to talk to in Bio, but I didn’t agree to this stupid plan for Matt. I did it for Justine—who only asked because she knew I’d never say no. Suddenly I feel overwhelmingly alone, floating on my back in an open, endless ocean.

Instead of saying this, I say, “I’m too busy for dating.”

“Right,” she repeats, busy unwrapping the towel from her head. “Just be yourself, Maddy—guys love confidence.”

Just be yourself—as long as that self is gorgeous, out-going, and confident. Justine is shaking her hair loose, and it hangs in wet, dark tresses around her face. There’s a reason you never hear shy, awkward, plain girls tout the values of “just being yourself.” There’s a reason you’d never hear me say it. The most beautiful thing about me is Justine, so what does it mean that she irritates me so much lately? What’s so valuable about beauty, anyway?

“Thanks,” I say. “I will, hoodie and all, so will you let up?”

She rolls her eyes but, for the first time since I came in, stops what she’s doing. She comes over and throws herself down on the bed next to me, a flurry of wet hair, on top of the plaid skirt and the sweater, reluctant like a little kid giving a forced apology.

“You can wear that stupid hoodie if you want,” she concedes. “It’s very…you.”

I know this show of gentleness—no matter how inelegantly delivered—should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. Instead I feel cruel. You don’t look like anything , I want to tell her. Like a glass of milk, Justine’s complexion blends flawlessly into her hair, flows down the curve of her spine and into her legs, her arms, the elegant bones of her wrists. You could dissolve into mist and I wouldn’t even notice . I’m not beautiful, but at least I’m real—every ingrown hair, peeling cuticle, and crooked tooth holds my body to the ground in a way that she would never know.

But of course I don’t tell her any of this. “Thanks Justine,” I say instead.

When I was twelve, I once overheard my mom refer to me and Justine as an “unlikely pair.” I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I’m seventeen and get it.

We’re finally on the highway. It’s too dark to read the dashboard clock—my truck is old, and nothing but the odometer is backlit—but it’s probably around 9:30 pm. Jake and Matt are crammed into the backseat, a bulky plastic sack sitting between them.

Jake says, “It’s wild the two of you are such good friends.”

Next to me, Justine is sitting without a seatbelt on, twisted around with her back up against the dashboard, legs crossed on the seat, facing the boys in back. She smiles, triumphant. “What’s so wild about it?”

“You guys are just so—different,” he says.

“Maddy is the little sister I never had,” Justine declares, flipping her hair over her shoulder and smiling at me. “The boring, normal sister I never had—just kidding!”

I know this is my cue to jump in, say something witty or playful or affectionate, to demonstrate what a selfless benefactor Justine is, to see people for their personality and not image. Instead I pretend that driving is taking up all of my attention. My old truck has a manual transmission and I’m the only person I know who can drive stick—probably the coolest thing about me. Each time I wrench the

shifter between third and fourth, I hope someone will notice and say something.

Matt eventually asks, “Is the truck supposed to shudder like that?”

Justine answers for me, “Who even knows, this rust bucket is positively ancient.”

“It’s a 1982,” I say, a little more abruptly than I intended. “My dad rebuilt the engine himself.”

“Cool,” Justine says, and everyone is silent.

A large, bright orange sign marks the turnoff from the highway: Lake Fischer Wildlife Preserve. It’s too dark to see, but underneath it reads WARNING: Live mermaids on site. Swimming and fishing prohibited. Enter at your own risk.

The reflective sign catches my truck’s headlights and flashes orange as we turn off the highway. “I think there’s an access road a little before the gate, we can park down there so no one will see the truck,” Jake suggests.

I nod wordlessly, straining my eyes for a break in the dark woods, something that looks like a road. Maybe I won’t say anything else all night, just keep my mouth shut. Maybe I won’t even go down to the lake—I can wait in the truck, I’m sure they’ll be fine without me. I start to really get into the idea, but I know better—in the end, I’ll end up going.

The road comes up fast; I make the turn and pull over. In what feels like one long elegant motion, slam my foot on the clutch, wrestle the shifter into neutral, yank the parking break up, and turn out the lights. “Here’s good,” I say, to no one in particular.

“Does anyone know where we’re going?” Matt asks, as everyone files out of the truck and the doors slam shut, one after another.

“No,” I say.

“Yeah,” Justine says. “We’ll go to the pier!”

“You think it’s safe to go that close?” I ask.

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“Let’s go to the lookout instead?” I suggest. “It’s a little further, but there’s a good view of the lake.”

“I guess,” Justine sounds uncertain.

“Yeah, that’s good,” Jake says. A plastic sack is rustling in his hand. “Let’s go to the lookout.”

The gate to the preserve closes at sundown; two long, dark green metal arms come together, wrapped in chains. A yellow sign, almost the same color as Justine’s sweater, actually—shiny and new, replaced each year by the Lake Fischer Preservation Society—is emblazoned

with a black skull and crossbones. LIVE MERMAIDS, it reads.

As we climb over the gate and continue our trek, Justine is positively gushing. “I’m so excited! I’ve never seen a live mermaid! Can you believe that? Have you guys?”

“They’re actually really rare in the wild,” I say.

“I saw one at the zoo in St. Louis once, when I was a kid,” Jake says. “It was the saltwater kind, though.”

“What was it like?”

Jake shrugs. “I don’t know, we couldn’t get close. It looked kind of like a person, I guess.”

“Probably like the pictures?” Matt asks.

Jake snorts. “Yeah, just like the pictures.” I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not; I couldn’t tell if Matt was being sarcastic either. God, this is awkward. I glance at Justine, but she’s not paying attention to me.

We make our way to the lookout, a rocky outcropping that sits at the edge of the gorge. If it were dark, the landscape would have been treacherous: scrubby, scratchy bushes and rocky crevices perfect for twisting ankles, breaking necks. But the full moon is up, and the world is bathed in milky white light, as bright as day. Black forest stretches out on either side; below us, the lake is perfectly still, mysterious, unknowable.

We find a mostly flat spot at the very top of the lookout, and Justine spreads out a couple of quilts I recognize from her living room sofa. Instead of spreading them side-by-side, she lays them on top of each other—“It’s more comfortable this way,” she says—but I don’t know how she expects us all to fit. I take a seat on a corner, my butt barely on the blanket, stretch my legs out, plunge my hands into my hoodie, and wait for everyone to settle in.

It’s amazing that three people can make so much noise: Jake is peeling the plastic sack from a six pack of beer. He hands the sack to Justine, who wads it up and stuffs it into the canvas bag that previously held the blankets. Matt is asking whether we’ll get in trouble if we get caught out here with beer, and Justine responds, “Most definitely.”

Underneath all of this noise, the night is teeming. The chirping of crickets mingles with the hum of other insects in the brush. I can hear frogs calling from the lake below, and the occasional mysterious rustle in the forest. Raccoons, I guess. Or skunks. Or white-tail deer. Somewhere in the distance, a great horned owl calls: who cooks for you?

“Does she want a beer?” Jake asks Justine. Justine looks over at me. “I have to drive,” I say. Jake shrugs, wrenches one of the cans free, and

opens it with a sickeningly loud hiss and crunch. The sound repeats itself two more times.

“So you said you used to come out here a lot?” Justine says to Jake, resuming some previous conversation that I wasn’t there for. She sits down next to me, so I am on the outside—furthest from the boys, closest to the dark woods.

“Yeah, I used to go to Camp Fischer.”

“Camp Fischer?”

“It’s a summer camp,” Matt jumps in. “You know, a camp where kids go in the summer.”

Justine laughs and it sounds like breaking glass. Her laughter is right—that was an uncommonly stupid thing to say. My heart sinks, but I don’t know why. “I know what summer camps are, you dork,” she says, but affectionately.

“I figured,” Matt says quickly, “I just can’t picture you at one.” Good save, I think bleakly.

“Oh,” Justine says. I hear her also thinking: Good save . “Yeah, I’ve never been to summer camp.”

“Never?” Jake asks. “What did you used to do in the summer?”

“I had to go to Santa Barbara to see my dad until last year. It’s so boring out there—I mean like, wow , there’s nothing to do.”

“More boring than Wisconsin?” Jake wants to know. “I’m impressed.”

“Way more boring than Wisconsin,” Justine smiles.

So this is going to be my night, I think. Lucky they decided to come up here—I can jump off the cliff to end my misery if it comes to that. I plunge my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and draw my knees to my chest, staring out over the ledge into the dark night. Somewhere out there, the owl calls again— who cooks for you , one lovely, lonely syllable after the other. I sigh.

“Definitely soon, right, Maddy?” Justine says. Hearing my name startles me—it’s been over an hour and I was pretty sure they forgot I was there. “Sorry, what?”

“The mermaids,” Justine says. Everyone is looking at me. “We’ll probably see them soon, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Probably.”

I don’t know how many beers the guys have had, but Justine’s first is still sitting in front of her, untouched. Does she even drink? I wonder. I realize I have no idea. Jake is teasing her by touching her hair; she’s asking him to stop but laughing. How does she expect the night to

end? I realize I have no idea about that either.

“Do you guys remember learning about mermaids in fourth grade?” Matt suddenly asks.

Justine’s voice is a little cold. “That was before I moved here,” she says.

“Yeah!” I say, maybe too loudly. “Remember those presentations we had to do?”

“Yeah, my group got the deep angler or whatever, and I kept getting nightmares about them.”

“We did the freshwater mermaid, actually.”

“Really? Do you remember any thing cool about them?”

“Yeah! All of it!” I say, ready to begin reeling off facts. The freshwater mermaid is the only nocturnal subspecies. Plus, did you know that the only type of mermaid not to produce a song is the deep angler? Or that the annual migration pattern of the Pacific mermaid almost exactly matches that of the great blue whale?

“Look at the two of you!” Justine laughs. “You guys make the perfect couple!”

Matt doesn’t miss a beat. “I’m already dating Molly Felder,” he says.

I didn’t know that, and Justine probably didn’t either. She’s unfazed, though. “Okay, but are you actually dating Molly?”

Poor, stupid Matt frowns. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m just surprised, is all. She looks like a gremlin, don’t you think?”

“A what?” Jake bursts out laughing. Even Matt’s face cracks into a little smile.

“A gremlin. Like, you know, a weird little goblin who hates electronics.”

Both boys are laughing now, even Matt, and Justine looks triumphant. “What?” she protests, falsely, looking back and forth between the giggling boys. “Don’t you think so?”

I know Molly, she’s in Science Club with me, and once told me how much she liked my backpack. Matthew’s face is contorting as he laughs. He looks grotesque. I’m suddenly annoyed with Justine.

“Molly’s actually really good with electronics,” I say. “She built this robot last year with a proximity sensor and two old CDs.”

“Uh-huh,” Justine says. “Cool.”

I look away. The forest on either side is a hateful black tangle of tree branches and bushes. Below us, the lake is spread like spilled milk. Justine starts telling some story about Santa Barbara, and I sigh, drawing my legs to my chest.

12:47, the face of my digital watch reads. We’ve been out here for almost three hours and we’ve pretty much fallen silent by now. I’m tired and grumpy and cold, and I’m not the only one—the beer is gone and the boys are kicking an empty can back and forth. Justine has her sweater wrapped around her, long legs stretched out, crossed at the ankle.

“How much longer before they come out?” Matt wants to know. “Probably pretty soon, right? I need to get home soon.”

Justine looks at me expectantly; I shrug and look away. The rock is boring through the blanket into my tailbone. Milky moonlight filling the gorge, tinging the night sky blue, drowning out the stars. From time to time, bats swish overhead. I begin to wonder what I’m doing here—Justine seems annoyed with me, but this was her idea, the whole stupid thing.

Suddenly there’s a splash from below. Matt jumps, the empty can forgotten, and hisses “What was that?”

“Just a fish,” I say, but the splash is followed by others, and the sound of movement.

Suddenly we’re all looking back and forth. Jake is crouching, leaning close to the edge to look over. “Don’t let them see you!” Matt hisses, grabbing his shoulder.

“What’s down there? Can you see?” Justine wants to know.

“Shh,” I say. “Shh, shh, everybody shut up! Listen!”

Something is happening—there are sounds, splashes and rustling, but also vocalizations, high whines and a low cry that I’ve only ever heard in video clips and recordings. The mermaids.

“Let’s go!” Justine jumps off the rock, and turns to look up at us. “Leave the stuff, we’ll come back for it.”

“Are you crazy?” Matt demands. “Listen to that—there’s no way I’m going down there!”

“Then why did you even come tonight,” Justine coolly replies.

Jake is looking back and forth between the two of them, and I can hear my heart pounding. I’m surprised by Justine’s bravery, is it a show for Jake? Is she drunk? After all, she has no idea what she’s talking about. She never learned about mermaids. She never sat through the informational video at the Nature Center, doesn’t know anything about their feeding habits. But surely she’s seen pictures, she must know what we’re in for?

And then I surprise myself. Knowing what I know about mermaids—knowing what I know about Justine—I grab a flashlight from the blanket and jump down next to her. “We’re going,” I say.

“Are you guys coming or not?”

“Not,” Matt says. “You guys are fucking crazy. Come on, Jake, let’s go back to the truck.”

Jake hesitates, looks down at us and then over the cliff towards the lake. “I don’t think you guys should go down there,” he says lamely.

“We’re going,” Justine says firmly.

“You can come with us or go back to the truck,” I add.

Matt gives this incredulous snort, throws up his hands, calls us crazy again. Jake, illuminated by moonlight, is frowning as though pained. “We’ll meet you back at the truck,” he finally says.

There’s nothing else to say. Justine and I turn, ducking into the woods, dashing along the narrow footpath, guided by the bouncing flashlight all the way down to the lake.

The mermaids are crawling over rocks near the shore next to the dark pier. We creep out of the woods and down to the shore, until we are maybe ten feet from them, silent and still, wide-eyed, hearts pounding. They have not seen us, but here, this close, we have a perfect, clear view.

In pictures, freshwater mermaids always look gruesome—flat, corpse-like faces, wide mouths filled with sharp little teeth, pond-scum green hair hanging limply over thin, bony shoulders. Maybe it’s the moonlight, but these mermaids don’t look like the pictures. They look strange, it’s true—their faces are not quite human, and they move with an eerie precision, like something out of a horror movie—but there is something familiar about them, something enchanting.

We are crouched perfectly still, watching, entranced by their strangeness. One pulls herself up onto the rocks and arches her back into a long, lean C-shape. The moonlight catches her ribs, which ripple beneath her white flesh. She opens her mouth as she stretches, and we can see each of her teeth, crooked but razor-sharp. A third mermaid suddenly pulls herself from the water. Much louder than the others, she makes a truly bizarre, low, guttural whine and shakes her head, and rubs up against one of the others. The other mermaid hisses and shoves her back; she splashes down into the water, and the other two yelp with something that could have been delight.

Next to me, Justine’s eyes are wide as though this was the first time she has ever seen ugliness. I feel strangely calm, though, looking down at the black water. One of the mermaids stares back at me, her movement creating ripples that disperse across the lake’s surface. Then she slips silently under the water, and is gone.

Oppenheimer Scarcely Breathed John

Blair

He scarcely breathed. He held onto a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when . . . there came a tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, Memorandum for the Secretary of War Concerning the Trinity Test of the Atomic Bomb

Relief is the deep well beneath the moving current the river pooling in its hollows thoughtless as a cyst or it’s the anoxic zone where crabs crawl in among the corpses to die because they’ve forgotten to want to breathe in the uncanny self-absorption of a silence in which suffering is devotional an offering to the mud from which they were made and to which they so promptly return kyrie eléison, Christe eléison ;

one sweltered night when Oppenheimer was young at camp with other boys he was dragged from his bed by his bunkmates to an icehouse and beaten stripped bare his pubescent genitalia painted with green house paint & then he was locked naked inside among the indifferent blocks of ice to shiver himself empty of his shame and of his pity ( the clay makes the bowl Lao Tsu says but its emptiness gives it purpose );

to feel relief is to feel yourself become unfilled to return to a zero state where nothing is begun where there is no pain and anything might still happen inside the un-rung bell of possibility of unknowing what you can’t unknow for long ( physicists have known sin

Oppenheimer later lamented and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose ) where in the intoxication of completion in the orgasmic instant of making

you can for a moment forget absolved by the profound calm of aftermath a mad stir of sky made turbid with breaking above you shading a desert plain lapsed into its relic self into earth without form and void the face of the deep itself a single mind unformed before the first words are spoken apogee of days

before there were days before we made the atlases of night or called in their own voices the names of clay-baked creatures shy in the forests before even we made altars for forgotten gods who have forgotten us too to whom we prayed perhaps (just briefly) before they in the bliss of their fading-away

left us to live for whatever time we have in the light of the fires that we ourselves have made to feel relief perhaps (just briefly) under a dome of sky a bowl turned and emptied of its blue and filled again with bitter dust and falling with radiance and omens and a sun like any rapture just too bright to last.

Amjad & Khalid

Amal Alhomsi

“Life is the flight of the alone to the Alone.” - Plotinus.

He washes under cold water and his sins clog the drain. Blocks of black bakhoor burn by the mirror filling the bathroom with the scent of the Kaaba. The faint voice of a Yemeni child reciting the beginning suras plays from the radio of the orange taxi parked outside the building; “Aleph Lam Mim. This is the book in which there is no doubt.” He smiles at the merited arrogance. Our mother wanted me to be with him. You’ve been hiding from God long enough , she said. He shrouds his nakedness with two white cloths without ornaments and walks barefoot towards the orange taxi. The road to Mecca is not paved , says the taxi driver, so driving feels like riding a camel .

The road is worse than the streets of Calgary , says the bus driver as he manoeuvers up rugged hills. The passengers jerk their heads searching for the promise of scenery veiled behind jealous trees. An American man with yellow binoculars dangling from his neck talks to a couple sitting behind him. I know he is American because he starts each sentence by saying I. I am single , he says, so I can tolerate hostels and hitchhikers . An old man sits in the back humming a song about sleeping buffalos. The breath of trees carries the smell of the earth and lightdamped flowers pray at the side of the road. We stop at an orange sign reading Lake O’hara . The guide lists the rules of camping and mentions something about the weather. Make sure to try the carrot cake at the tea house , she says, it’s the world’s best . I know she is not Canadian because she only smiles when she means it.

He munches on some dates that the taxi driver gave him. The dates of Madina are unparalleled; they taste like caramelized chocolatehoney. The call of prayer travels on the backs of pigeons as big as cats. God is greater. God is greater. Mecca smells like pigeons. It smells like feet and Ethiopian beggars, like Himalayan Musk and cheap hina, like faces washed with zamzam and tiles washed with tears, like Persian carpets, roasted chickpeas, and prophets. He wants to run to the Kaaba and drown in the crowd behind Abraham’s stone. He wants to walk up Mount Arafa, down to Hajar’s well, and around the Jamarat, but he hunches his shoulders and walks the other way. The streets

of Mecca carry him to dunes of people sitting under palm trees. He approaches coyly like the daughter of Jethro and sits next to a man from Palestine. He knows that the man is Palestinian from the way his dark eyes search for belonging. A thick bearded imam stands on a rock lecturing about the gentleness of God. He should be talking about hell , says the Palestinian man, hell is more believable than God .

He has Sartre’s eyes and Moses’ shyness. The cabin is warm and the carrot-cake tray is empty. The guide introduces him as Ben. He is known as the flowerman , she says, no one in the Rockies knows native flora better than him . He blushes and wipes his round glasses. The American man stands outside the window talking about him-related topics. Three excited girls sit at the front with pencils and notebooks. I’m not as old as my hair suggests , Ben begins with a joke, but years of encountering grizzlies will suck the color out of you . He divides the flowers of the Rockies into categories of colors and speaks about each flower the way an imam would speak of God’s gentleness. He talks about blue harebell and violet alpine harebell and how both look the same to everyone but him, about rayflower and butterwort which got their names from looking like a ray of light and having butter coated petals, about saxifraga flowers and mountain heathers, about nerium shrubs, valerian roots, purple saw-wort, about the flowers bears like best and the shrubs elk like more, about which stem can kill you and which can make you a cup of tea. He concludes with a picture of his wife and allows time for questions. I raise my hand and I ask him if he could be a flower, which flower would he be. He blushes and avoids the question. At night while using the drop, I hear a voice from behind the thin wall, I’ll be a heather. They look strong, but they fall at the slightest tremble He falls on his knees and trembles. Clouds of white and grey push him back, but the promise of redemption and the scent of the Kaaba pull him forward. The mountains I saw yesterday are no longer the same. I do not pass the fields as a stranger. I know their names and they know mine. The saw-wort smiles at me when I recognize its shade, and the heathers bow when I tread by them carefully. He skips a step to avoid trampling on a locust; spilled blood spoils pilgrimage. He runs under ottoman arches, each arch a perfect reflection of the hundred before it. The rocks shake under my feet. God is waiting in the wet bush, on top of the mountain, in the black stone. The river is wailing on the drapes of the Kaaba. Will God’s image melt us like the people of Moses? Like jellyfish under the sun? We are our mothers’ sons; always running towards God even when running away from him. Ben said that if two flowers of the same kind grew one inch apart,

each flower will bloom with a different color, depending on the soil. Were my roots in the wrong soil? Or were you blooming in the shade? We run past the arches and the mountains. He is there, nameless, waiting. We fall on our faces. Mother told us that everything revolves around God. Who knew she meant it literally? We circle the Kaaba that is hidden between forest and valleys. You never knew such a shade of blue existed; I never knew a scent can be this sweet. A voice calls from behind the trees; God is greater, God is greater. We wash our faces in the lake, in Hajar’s well, and the water stays clear.

The Ponte Delle Torri, Spoleto William Brown

TW: This piece contains description of suicide.

“The Ponte Delle Torri, Spoleto”

— JMW Turner (1840-5)

A man jumped off the aqueduct my first day in Spoleto. The rain worked away the afternoon and scrubbed off all the signs.

My first day in Spoleto, the rain sobbed heavy on the mountain as I scrubbed off all the signs where Turner did his painting.

Sobbing heavy on the mountain, policemen and officials grouped where Turner did his painting. I said all I could, “Che bellissima.”

Policemen and officials grouped us students in Piazza della Liberta and said all they could, “We’re sorry,” then left us trying to understand.

We students in Piazza della Liberta worked away the afternoon. They left us trying to understand, “Un uomo è saltato giù dall’acquedotto.”

Gusanitos Benjamin Faro

TW: This piece contains discussion of human trafficking.

Estimates from the United Nations Population Fund put global numbers of women and children forcefully relocated and enslaved at around two million, annually. According to the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act, about fifty thousand of these women and children end up on American soil.

Every year, between 1,000 and 1,500 Central American children, mostly girls, are illegally adopted by white families in the north—sold off by destitute parents offering up their sons and daughters for a better life. 1

1 Vlachová, M. (2005). Trafficking in Humans: The Slavery of Our Age. Connections , 4(4), 1-16. Retrieved November 3, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/26323192

I’m waiting for you, hermanita.

Mama says that telling stories is the best way to teach you what our voices sound like, before you know anything about mangoes or lemons or other pretty, delicious things.

So here is a story:

The world out here is like mama’s mermelada de jocote: much too bitter until you add the sugar. When you come out, I’ll teach you how to add just enough. I promise.

I’ll teach you which trees have yummy fruit.

We’ll sneak around Doña Elena’s chicken coop, and since my knees knock and one leg is no good I’ll prop you up and you’ll be the one who climbs. You’ll be smaller and lighter to reach up and get them all.

I’ll teach you how to eat jocote around the pit and how they taste a little like green apples. I’ll teach you what those are, too.

After we pick as many as we can carry, I’ll help you down, and we’ll go back around the shed and across the alley to the beach. We’ll pop some in our mouths and dance together.

As you examine the jocote in your hand—two, maybe three resting in your tiny palm—you’ll find a little green gusanito, and I’ll tell you to eat it anyway. When we make the mermelada, you know, we just throw everything in to boil, worms and all.

“Adds to the jelly,” mama says.

That’s her only joke.

All the rest of the time you better watch out. I think ‘cause papi doesn’t like her very much, mama doesn’t like other people either. Not even me. And when things get bad, I’ll teach you how to pray.

Here’s another story, hermanita:

I’m going to find a yellow marble today, in a cup in the dirt. I’ll pick it up and pretend it’s the sun. Imagine I was that big, holding it between my fingertips!

Even though it’s all pretend, I’ll feel so powerful. Think about it. The sun has the force to keep comets returning for visits across the ages. Heat to evaporate entire planets.

That yellow marble is everything I want to be.

Then Mama will slap it out of my hands.

It will bounce across the kitchen floor, and she will tell me to go and fetch it.

Papi will be asleep in the dirt under the table, and I won’t want to

disturb him. The way God made me, it’s so easy for him to push me to the ground.

But mama will keep telling me, “Go and find it.”

So I’ll get down on my hands and knees and crawl slowly over to where I think it rolled, avoiding all the ants and glass.

First I’ll search around the edges of his body, where his skin and clothes rest on the sand. I’ll look up and down, careful not to touch. I’ll lean a little bit closer, looking into the nooks and crannies. Nothing.

I’ll sit back in a squat and try to recall just which way it had bounced, although I’ll know there’s no point. As Abuelita used to say, “Life is like a marble in the dirt. You never know where it’s going to go.”

But I’ll think I know; so I’ll try again, this time digging deeper than I should. I’ll move Papi’s hand gently, trying to get behind his bottle of aguardiente. The only place I won’t have looked for my little sun is under the moonshine.

Then, with one smack, I’ll be in the air. My head will crack on the table, and I will cry. Mama will kneel down, pull the yellow marble out of a small pocket in the front of her apron and say, “This isn’t the sun, stupid. Quit playing like you’re God.”

The next day, Mama will know I took them.

So I’ll run. As much as one can run, at least, with a foot that doesn’t do its part.

I’ll steal all the marbles her mother’s mother bought for a few tortillas from the Spanish soldiers in the park. The green marbles that had been misplaced behind the armoire, in a lock box with a lost key. A two-story drop will break the chest and send them flying. I’ll probably look like a crazy person trying to be quiet as I chase them all around, soft ankle bending.

I’ll take the red ones from the top drawer, behind all the forgotten socks without a match. The black ones that she used to polish with her father’s shoeshine. And my favorite yellow one from the front pocket of her apron.

Mama takes care of her heirlooms, and she fears the thought of losing them. They are her legacy. She locked them up, hid them, and warned me, “A marble in the hand is as good as rolling away.”

So I’m going to take them and run with my lopsided, unfixable gait—and Mama’s belly will heave with you inside as she screams

every last one of my names. You’ll hear everything.

But I’ll limp out the back door while her big body lurches and struggles to rise.

“Hija,” she’ll say. “Please.”

Gasping at the top of the hill, I’ll sit with my treasure. I’ll lay on my back and hold each little sphere up to the sky, dreaming among my favorite flowers. Marigolds. Sunset sprouting from the Earth itself. I’ll gaze into those curious planets, watching the light move.

Looking into the tiny spheres at the right angle, the world comes from above; and in those moments, I fall in love with the way things change.

But not all change.

Soon Mama won’t be yelling anymore. She’ll be pleading. There will be blood and shouting and they will only be able to save you in the end.

No matter how long I stare into my multicolored micro-worlds, no kaleidoscope will ever make any sense of that. And now she will forever know I took them.

I’ll put them in a bottle and show you how to see with them. I swear. . . .

Some say fish possess memories more pure than the conscious human mind. Souls that trace back to the origins of the earth.

They say that after death some men transcend their worldly desires to join the good spirits of water, darting free in the blue.

Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it?

But then they say the ghosts of men like me—men who remember love and pain and fear and hunger—remain anchored to the very bottom.

This world doesn’t know me anymore.

They say I’m the last in town to keep the old ways of hook and line. Your grandfather made these nets, and I still sit on the jetty and repair them. I twist and pinch and tug and drink, and the young men drink too, but with new boats and dynamite.

“Better catch up, old man,” they say.

I tell them they’ll destroy the reef, but they never listen.

On land, the world whizzes by. The ocean, it seems, is where I

belong. The Sacred takes me there, and the fish scatter when they hear Her coming. The low, slow drum of a crippled motor, held together by rusty screws and a bit of wire. But She keeps me afloat, vibrating through the depths under a waning crescent moon, last rays of red disappearing.

Ripples refract the light in a vibrant choreography.

What is that world over there, on the other side?

Fish must look up sometimes and wonder the same, watching the moon twist and bend. Dance, moon, for the fish tonight.

They say that the galaxies are billions of fragments from the first glass that God ever dropped, thirsty after six days of creation. He made the Earth, heavens, fish, and moon. He made gravity, love, and curiosity. He made memory, and memory made Him, everything perfect and reciprocal. Except the stars and me.

After six days night fell, and even God had to sleep. His drinking glass slipped from his grasp, too tired to hold on tight.

Moonshine burns, and as the bottles empty, I yell—filling them with things I wish to forget but never do. Then I throw them overboard and watch them float away, as I sink into stories that refuse to disappear.

The Sacred lists until I vomit, unhappy with my prayers.

And here is a little about me, My Love:

I am a fisherman.

I give my grief to the sea and have learned to expect nothing in return.

When the evening sky is clear, I drink to that. I love you.

As the Sacred breaks through burgeoning swells, I taste saline spray and sweat. How many times have I held those three words on my silent tongue? A night doesn’t pass that I don’t wish I said it more. Or at all.

Sometimes, My Love, I see the way the ocean twinkles and I think the sea is the sky.

Your mother said the sparkle in the stars is just a simple trick of the heavens, anyway. I remember when she said it, clear as day.

A little dust, nothing more, she said. They’re not nearly as beautiful as they seem.

A nibble. A tug. God?

I yank to set the hook.

It swerves desperately and cuts my gloveless palms.

Strange vibrations move the line, like no fish I’ve caught before.

Tension pulses as the animal pulls and rises. As it comes to the surface, I see that it is not a single fish, but two. Hooked by their tails, each trying to flee in their own direction. I heave them out of their world and into mine.

Terrified, they flop and gasp and twist in the belly of The Sacred.

I cut their spines.

I hear a voice.

Why do you hurt them, Papi?

Selfish little girl.

This is all I can do.

You’ll never realize what I’ve done for you. Now you will be free of me, so take what I have provided, and never forget it. Ever.

Nevermind, my dear. You’re not selfish. You just don’t understand, My Love. Forget what I said. Will you accept my apology?

Stars sparkle—bits of glass glinting against the night. God’s most beautiful mistake.

Wind picks up and whitecaps break on the bow.

Am I tasting sea, sweat, or tears now?

Another drink washes it all away.

Beyond the cosmos is the sea.

Beyond, the cosmos is the sea.

What is the difference?

The stars and waves combine.

Above. Below. All around.

The ocean is as firm as land.

I have two fish, but two are not enough.

I cast my net into the darkness, stumbling, praying for it to be filled.

Trying to catch my fish.

Trying to catch the stars.

But it always comes back empty.

Time after time I reel in nothing.

All the spoils of life have fled.

I am feared.

Goodness fears me.

I wander the surface of the water, hoping to stumble upon a school

of something. But they hide from me, and they hide well.

I put my head between my knees.

Water and blood wash over two skeletons.

What was it like for you, over there, in the dark?

I think about everything that’s down there. Billions of fish. Trillions maybe.

And what do I have?

I see their faces. I watch their eyes. I drink.

What good are two fish in the midst of an entire lifetime?

Even if I can feed you tonight, what will come of tomorrow? And the day after that? Where is my good fortune? Where is the answer to my prayers?

I drink again and grab their tails and heave their naked bones back out to sea, where they float until they drift like feathers to the depths, becoming food for someone else. My darkest fear come true.

I drink again, and the world is spinning, as it should be.

I think of you, curled up in your rags. Dirty fingernails and knotty hair. A pile of sand your pillow. Do you want me to bring you something home? But I am like the fish, helpless on my back in the belly of The Sacred.

But for you, My Love, I scrape. I climb.

I can see them there, glinting in the moonlight. Stars like sea glass, smooth from eons of cosmic erosion. Wouldn’t that be a wonder?

A star for you, My Love, before I say goodnight

Sometimes you are in my dreams. Sometimes I doze among a tangle of shredded lines and broken glass, blood hardened in my palm. The sand is loose and dusty. Ants crawl on my neck. Chickens scratch the dirt at my feet. This morning I did not get the milk.

“Despiértate, Papi,” you say, then you wait an hour without another word, knowing I won’t wake up.

In my dream the swell is rising. The Sacred trembles, rising over whitecapped crests, plummeting into troughs. The oars break free. Driftwood now that will wash up somewhere along the coast. I reach for my nets, but they’re not there. We’re in the crashing sea, sinking, and the souls of the deep look up to see a curtain falling.

You Devil, they say.

Then I wake and I think I hear your voice. Wake up, Daddy.

Are you there, My Love?

Perhaps it was an echo.

When I open my eyes, the world is bright and vague. I stumble out to the beach, and I think I see your shape in the distance, tossing garbage on the beach because nobody has taught you any better. You push the sand with your toes, digging little holes and picking up tiny things. You find a pen. You poke your skin with it. You’ve never held one before, and when you bring it to me, I can’t show you what to do.

“Put it in the box,” I say.

“What box?”

“Where we keep the things we hope to one day use but know we never will.”

“No,” you say, and you clutch it tighter. Selfish little girl.

“I want to go to school, Daddy,” you say. But I’m under the table again. Or maybe I’m out at sea. Nets and broken glass, rusty hooks my treasures. Before the sun is gone, most of the day’s events have already evaporated into clouds, ready to storm down on the world again tomorrow.

The day you’re born, hermanita—the day Mama dies—my world is going to change.

I’ll become the Other One.

Papi will love you, not me.

On Thursdays he will make you buy his aguardiente from Doña Elena’s pulpería, but he will also let you buy a candy bar with his change.

You’ll offer me some—thick caramel stretching as you break off a piece. But he’ll push me away, and my half will fall into the sand.

“No no,” he’ll say. “This is for My Love,” ushering you outside while I’m left to salvage the sticky mess.

Have you ever tried to pull a thousand ants off of a string of caramel? Or a million grains of sand from a layer of melting chocolate?

Ants, sand, worms. I always eat my fair share.

But it won’t be your fault. I’ll always love you, hermanita. You will never intend to hurt me, I know. And I will be happy that you’ll get

to taste your salty treat without needing to grind bitter bits of Earth between your teeth.

We will have to work for the reward, though.

Thursdays are market days when we will take the bus into Chinandega to sell our mermelada. And since Mama won’t be around, we’ll spend all afternoon making jalea de jocote the day before. And because we will have to spend Wednesday morning gathering leña for the fire, that means Tuesdays will always be for gathering the fruit.

And one day, hermanita, this is how it’s going to happen:

We’ll be chewing with our mouths wide open, chomping down on our sour, fruity mush; and we’ll be laughing because we’ll both know we’re eating worms.

We’ll be walking slowly because you will have patience, and I’ll keep smiling the whole way home.

“More!” I’ll say.

And you’ll kick the sand and stick out your tongue and gnash your teeth, pretending you’re a dinosaur and the chewed up worms are yummy little people.

You’ll make me laugh even harder, and bits of jocote will spray everywhere.

We will be each other’s joy.

Mondays will be days for discovering.

I’ll teach you about the beach and the ocean, hermanita. I’ll teach you how to find things in the sand and how to dive beneath the waves.

Yes, I can still swim, even with my foot.

Water makes me lighter.

I’ll show you how to time your hop so that the passing waves lift your feet off the bottom, let you float for a moment, then set you gently back down. Up and down forever. Endless energy. And we’ll grow stronger together, fighting the undercurrents when they come. You’ll learn what it’s like when the thundering ocean makes you so tired that you realize how unstoppable it really is. When it shakes you up so much that you decide you’ve had enough for the day.

Then, sprawled out in the sand on our backs, exhausted and sucking in our deepest breaths, we’ll wonder together.

“What if we could build a room,” you’ll say. “What if we could build a room where you could meet anybody you ever wanted to meet? Famous people. Friends. Family.”

We’ll take our marbles out of our pockets and lay looking through them, watching clouds pass above our favorite palm.

“But not just a room,” you’ll go on. “A dance club. With purple lights.”

You will always be the one to start ideas, and I’ll be the one to add.

“But the catch is,” I’ll say, “when you meet those people, in this room, you forget who it is you came to see in the first place.”

“So everybody ends up being strangers,” you’ll say. “Poor things.”

I’ll nod.

You will always have a good heart.

And we’ll agree to build this room, which will turn out to be much easier than either of us would have thought. In the end we ‘ll just draw a box in the sand, and we’ll dance together on discovery day, pretending that we’ve never met.

But you’ll always be good at knowing when to set aside pretend, because you’ll see that I will get tired quickly; so, before we dance every time, and in between when we take breaks, you’ll smooth out the sand to make it easier to lift my lazy foot.

Then you’ll scatter shells and call them lights.

Boys will walk by and call us tortilleras, but that’s because they’re idiots.

I’ll teach you that, too. Boys will never know what it’s like to be you, and that means they’ll never know what it’s like to be sisters.

Real strangers will show up though, hermanita.

We’ll be there sweating in the shade, sucking on our jocote while ants devour the cores we’ve already spit into the sand.

Ants eat the worms too.

But then the Yankees will come in their Hawaiian shirts and offer us a different kind of worm. One that doesn’t burrow tiny caves into the things we eat.

They will give us candy, and it will be even better than mermelada. Green and red and yellow and orange—covered with white sprinkles that tickle your tongue like sugar and lemons. Like nothing we’ve ever tasted.

They will give them all to us, and we will forget about dancing and lick our fingers and toss the wrappers in the sand.

I didn’t say sleep tight, My Love, before I left.

I didn’t say anything, in fact.

Now She carries me on the water, and the kerosene lamp is almost out. I forgot to fill it before I launched. “Never forget to fill the lanterns,” your abuelito used to tell me, glaring eyes imploring. In all the blank space of my mind, this memory forever burns.

He asked, “How strong is the strongest man if he cannot see what he is doing?”

At least that’s what I recall. There is much that he said that I will never remember.

In the darkness I drink until I’m dreaming. The swell is larger now, and I feel The Sacred heaving, lurching to throw me overboard. I do not touch the water. There is no dance tonight. The moon is hidden below the sea, where desperate souls drop anchor, waiting patiently until at last their hope dissolves.

In the distance, the sky lights up like giant fireflies are hiding among the clouds. Winds whip. Rain floods. Lightning strikes from sea to cloud, and ribbons of protons fill the darkness overhead. Like the pulsing veins of God, they burn the sky.

When I wake, the dawn is rising and I have no fish. No catch. No spirit.

The water is calm, and the moon is new.

Sea birds soar and dip and dive. There was a story they used to tell that gulls following boats are watching over drunken sailors. Maritime angels soaring above.

Are they here to save me or eat me when I die?

I watch them fly, and behind them wisps of pink cloud bend over the horizon.

My Love, you will not eat tonight. *

Here is another story, My Love: One day a Yankee, maybe two, came to me and said, “We will help you.”

We were on the jetty.

They gave me money.

The seaweed on the rocks makes it slippery, so you always have to step on the barnacles. Before The Sacred came into my life, I used

to walk out to the end of the stone pier and sit until sunrise, trying my pathetic best to lure in a catch. I sat and never pulled in anything. Sometimes it felt like I was the sorry fish hooked at the end of a forgotten line, snagged on the rocks, abandoned. Even God doesn’t make the perfect cast every time. But then He never came for me. The line was too knotted and tangled. I never got reeled in, and everyone knows a fish can’t remove the hook from its own mouth.

They said they would give you a better life. They approached while you were off with the Other One, looking through marbles at the sky. They waited until you were distracted by your little kaleidoscopes, and they came to me with more money than I had ever seen.

“Think about your little girl,” they said, and I knew that I could not deny what they were offering. God’s blessing or the Devil’s temptation, it didn’t matter. After we agreed, they appeared intermittently in the quiet corners of our village; and I would catch glimpses of them sitting at the back tables of Don Pablo’s comedor, watching you, taking notes while chickens fried.

One time you were running from some monster that you dreamed up in that beautiful mind of yours, and you bumped into them outside Doña Elena’s bodega. You hit your nose on the taller one’s knee and fell into the dirt. You started to cry, but he knelt down and peered into your eyes. He patted you on the head, I remember. Then, in our language he told you that everything was going to be okay, more clearly than I ever could. I drank and watched these angels fill their Yankee mouths with my southern tongue.

The next day they came in floral shirts and khakis and milled about in the sand. They knew about your buried treasure, those angels.

I just watched.

Doña Elena kicked sand in my face and said, “Wake up, pendejo. They’re going to take your children.”

My skull pounded like the surf.

Fire ants stung my scalp.

Roosters crowed.

My nose bled in the dry winter heat.

I thought about you.

“These Yankees,” Doña Elena said, now with motherly sternness, “They’ll take everything you’ve got.”

But she didn’t know the deal I made. She didn’t know my reasons.

She didn’t know what it was like to wear no shackles but still be chained to the bottle, which weighs more than anything in the world when you’re trying to stand your tallest. She didn’t know what it means to be crippled by mistake after divine mistake, ground to a pulp like a scorpion under my own bootheel, venom oozing. She didn’t know I’d given up.

She didn’t know shit.

“Go to Hell,” I said, and her image began to blur, light bending through tears.

“They’ll be better off,” I said. “The angels promised.”

I told her I didn’t want to remember. I told her I’d write your names on a piece of paper, slide them into a bottle and offer them to the sea.

I told her about the power of the ocean.

“Yes,” she interrupted. “The ancianos used to say that the ocean was the only place for storytelling. That’s why we always go to the beach and face the waves when we speak. We don’t stand in a circle, because we’re not talking to each other. We entrust our histories to the water.”

Of course she had heard it all before.

Sometimes I forget what it means to be of the same people.

Doña Elena squinted in the sun, holding up her hand to shade her eyes.

“The kids these days,” she said, “claim that when you speak to the sea, really you’re speaking to yourself. They say, too, that a fall from great heights is all it takes to recover all those lost secrets.”

She and I looked over to where the Yankees were sitting in the sand under the browning palms, thirsty in the December drought.

“You’re going to let them, aren’t you,” she said, and I wanted to tell her that it’s not a matter of letting.

It’s a matter of God.

It’s a matter of poverty, addiction, imperialism, and love.

I wanted to tell her that this isn’t in anybody’s hands but His.

A plane flies overhead, lights flashing in the approaching night. Red. White. A man and woman sit with their children, watching movies on tiny televisions. A teacher, doctor, secretary, and salesman, up there all together; but the fisherman’s life does not lend itself to flight.

We float and drift, barely clinging to our most valuable things

Sometimes, though, it’s best to be bound to water.

Around the Ring of Fire, tectonic shifts push magma up from

underground and make the whole Earth shake. Managua was destroyed by an earthquake two days before Christmas in 1972. Fires raged unchecked through the city, the world’s biggest candle commemorating the birth of Christ.

Hundreds of thousands of believers anticipating their most holy day, and He took everything from them. Homes burned, bones crushed— their Christmas gift from the Lord.

But it happened like that, you know, because the Earth is brittle. It jolts, it cracks, it crumbles.

The Ring of Fire, however, cradles the Pacific; and water absorbs tectonic energy. It takes God’s power as its own and grows and grows and grows.

It rises, it swells, it swallows people whole.

The late morning sun beats down, and the air is still. I lay in The Sacred while She rests on the sand, waiting for the tide to come in, but it keeps going out and out.

I watch My Love and the Other One play together on the widening beach.

They’ve taken out our Box Of Things We Hope To One Day Use But Know We Never Will from behind the oil drum and buried it in the sand at the base of the tallest coco. They go away, then they come back and dig it up again, pretending it to be a pirates’ bounty.

They hold the box, brushing sand off the bottom.

Then they flip it over, brushing more sand off the top.

“¿La quieres abrir juntas?” The Other One asks.

My Love smiles at the invitation, and they each put one hand on the lid, together opening their box of secret treasures.

The Other One picks up the pen, gasping, “Do you know what this is?”

My Love shakes her head.

The Other One smiles.

“I’ll show you,” she says. “This is the real caleidoscopio.”

With her new kaleidoscope, a bubble gum wrapper becomes as big and blank as space itself. My Love picks up the pen, wanting to draw stars, not knowing how to hold it.

The Other One grabs her fingers, biting her lip as she places them one by one.

A gulp burns. My first attempt to erase a day that I will forever try to

forget. I watch and drink like rum is water, and the tide keeps falling.

One hand grasping another, the two girls put the pen to paper. The Other One guides their hands down, making a single vertical line. She lifts the pen up and puts the tip back at the top of the line, then draws a short arc to the right. Then a bigger one beneath it.

The receding tide leaves reefs dry and baking in the sun: lower now than I’ve ever seen it. Logs rumble underneath The Sacred’s hull as long heave-hoes move Her across the stretching beach, chasing the whitewash.

Their hands move up at an angle. Then back down. Two tall lines make a roof. A little dash connects them.

The most difficult task is maneuvering past the break. I watch the waves and find a weakness in the crashing surf. With a thrust from the motor, we are past, and the current takes over, sweeping us along with the sinking tide.

Looking back, I see that where the shallows used to swirl, now is nothing but a wide, dry basin. Seaweed dissicates on the exposed seabed. Fish flop in shallow pools. * Down. Across. Across. No, no, no. Keep them all connected. Like this:

In deeper water, I cast my line and pray. I do that when I’m reaching out into the darkness, but the darkness always feels deeper than the prayer; while He’s always whispering from above, “Just reach a little farther.”

Down, then across. Don’t lift it. Yes.

Somewhere out there, the Earth’s thin crust is the only boundary between two great seas of liquid rock and water. Funny how, when there’s a crack, the lava turns black. Shouldn’t it be purple, if red and blue are mixing?

I guess there’s no such thing as blending land and sea. They’re separate. That’s what makes layers. That’s why bedrock floats on magma and the ocean doesn’t filter through. That’s why I’m safe up here from the fire, floating in my own way upon The Sacred.

Like an infant’s skull that never fuses, the Earth’s plates never fully join. They move around, smashing into one another. At this very moment, the Caribbean Plate is crumpling into mountains as it buries the Cocos Plate, sending it back to the inferno.

And this morning at dawn, as humpbacks sifted krill and loggerheads drifted in lazy equatorial currents, the Caribbean and the Cocos collided in another passionate, cosmic kiss, sending their energy across the water.

In the distance, now I see a dark wall rising. I collapse to the bottom of The Sacred.

God, please.

In all your goodness, take me up in your net and cut me down with your blade.

Sever my spine.

Do not let me drown.

Same letter as the second. Good.

“Mira,” the Other One says. “My favorite word. Do you know what

it means?”

My Love shakes her head.

“It means—” the Other One thinks for a moment. “Freedom,” she says.

I can’t feel my body, lying in a pool of blood and ocean. On my back I watch the sky erupt into an elegant performance, light flickering like I was looking up from underwater.

Tears this time.

Is that you, God?

Are they truly sparkling?

I am rising.

The dark wall comes, and the Sacred lifts me up and up and up. She lifts me ever higher, as the full force of His power passes underneath, barrelling towards the shore.

I’ll tell you what happened, My Love, but you have to understand that not everything divine is good.

Not all stories have happy endings.

Down by the water the Other One drew a big box in the sand. She took you by the hand and said, “Mira, I’m going to show you how to move your feet.” Then, as naturally as the sun rises, she began to move. Maybe the music was in her head, maybe it was in the waves, but you could hear it just by watching her.

“Hermanita, you just have to do it like this,” and she pulled you in. “This is called La Cámara,” she said, giggling a little bit. “This is where we’re free.”

And you saw everything, then.

History, present, future—because it was all the same.

She showed you that all that mattered—all that would ever matter— was this moment.

Now.

Looking out, the edge of the sea was almost lost over the curve of the horizon, and you were dancing where you wouldn’t have been able to touch the bottom. You hugged each other while gulls feasted on stranded shellfish among the withering kelp. You moved like you didn’t know you could, certain it would last forever—twirling and fairylike on

the ocean floor.

But tides shift, and when you’re young, you don’t pay as much attention to change.

Tsunamis rise out of the depths before you see them, and they tear away your most beloved. They topple trees and shatter homes. They sweep away villages like a simple wave of God’s hand.

And when fear grips you, the only thing to do is run.

And you ran, My Love, as fast as your little legs could take you.

Much faster than the Other One.

You ran to the jocote tree and climbed higher than you ever had before, and underneath, the land became water.

Doña Elena’s pulperia wasn’t there anymore, and neither was she.

Fishing boats smashed against trees.

Pigs and chickens bellowed and squawked and splashed in the rising water, and you knew that it was time to pray.

Gasping. God.

Please. Make me a strong swimmer. Can’t breathe.

Getting tired.

Gulping.

Scream for help. Reach. Reach.

She will never learn to write without me.

She’ll never learn her flowers.

Getting tired.

Gulping.

No. No. No.

He will sell her to the Devil.

Can’t breathe.

Getting tired.

Drowning.

The ocean is glass once again. Another day has passed and I still have not returned to shore to see

the destruction.

At sunset, humid air weighs heavy.

Not a ripple. Not a sound. Not a bird in sight.

No fish. No angels. The boat, I think, is spinning slowly.

Sweat drips from my brow even in the growing night. I stand and lean over the edge of The Sacred. Empty bottles clink. Off the bow the ocean is clear and empty. Even in the dimming light I can see straight to the bottom.

My eyes trace tiny dunes. Waves in the sand. More movement there than on the surface.

Each time I shift my weight, I break the perfect, endless mirror. I try to remain motionless from morning to night, melting into the malarial stillness.

The last bottle is empty by midnight, and I look out, knowing you are gone.

Sky up and sky down. Two moons. Two memories.

I touch the water, and it draws me closer. Only the sea has seen so many tears. Only the ocean knows this side of me.

So enticing, to be crushed in the depths and consumed by the bottom dwellers. It would not take long. In the open blue there’s nothing to grab, nothing to hold onto. Reaching wildly for something to keep me afloat.

Such a familiar feeling.

I find myself dancing with an empty bottle.

Tambourines keep inaudible rhythms as guitars play unheard melodies.

Harmonicas and spoons, too.

Her wedding day.

Smooth steps and beaming smiles.

I cannot make out the faces around us, but she is here, as she never will be.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and the wonderful, silent music continues. “A pitiful life I have led, I admit. Do you accept my apology?”

We continue to spin, and I hold on tight.

This is the moment I want to remember forever. Why can’t this be real, God? Let me keep it without consequence. This is what every person is meant to feel. That’s all I ask. Let us keep dancing forever.

Dancing, spinning, spinning.

My foot catches on her toe.

A flood. A chill.

For a moment I still have her in my arms, before she fades and I

begin to see myself, silent. Peaceful.

An interstellar drifter now sinking to the center of the Earth.

But the body panics no matter your state of mind, and an instinct more powerful than my will to depart in peace shoots me to the surface.

I splash.

I beg.

The boat is close, but I cannot reach.

I stretch.

I kick.

Don’t take me, God. Not now.

I scream.

Please, God.

Gasping. Gulping.

Salt water in my mouth and in my lungs.

Sinking again, the sky becomes the cosmic stage, beautiful and broken. Hypnotizing, perfect randomness, raving with the ocean’s current.

God, tell her I am sorry.

And tell me she’ll be free.

After the waters subsided, the Yankees find the girl kicking through some rubble where she thinks her house used to be.

They approach the child and offer her a flower and some candy.

“Your family is gone,” they say.

They speak in Spanish, and she thinks that they are angels and that’s why they are so light and pure.

Her little soul, unlearned, listens.

“You know that worms are good for flowers, yes?” The man says.

“Yes,” the girl replies. “The flowers on the hill are always brighter in the places where we dig them up in the dirt.”

“Well these worms,” the man continues, holding up a cheap bag of sour candy, “are just like that. Only, if you eat them, they’ll help you get brighter. You want to be just like a bright yellow flower, don’t you?”

“Red,” the little girl says. “Like this one.” She twirls the flower the man gave her, releasing a puff of pollen into the air.

“You can be any color you want,” the Yankee says. The little girl looks at him.

“You’ll see,” he reassures. “So, would you like to try one of these magic worms?”

The little girl smiles. Of course she does.

And that’s how easy it is.

From the start, the journey is bumpy. Seven kilometers from the nearest paved road. Potholes and small boulders rattle the old jeep, as the ocean and all its depth and destruction recede behind brown hills and jicaro.

“Sit straight. Put your seatbelt on,” the first lessons begin. But the little brown girl doesn’t want to do what the white men say. She feels something of herself dissolving with the fading view of Cosigüiña—its scarred rim blasted away by an eruption centuries ago. The road to Managua is a mirage, twisted by the sun’s dry heat and smoldering garbage. The girl watches out the window as she leaves her country behind, and when they arrive at the air strip in the heat of the day, the crew is just finishing packing up the Cessna.

They take her to a white tent, where she sits in a plastic chair at a plastic table and eats Spaghetti-O’s and says, “Look, these are special worms too,” scooping some up with her plastic spoon. “They don’t have a beginning or an end.”

Fundraiser

Ayesha Raees

I am half my mother. Half my father.

Again

No country in my arms

I woke up drenched between my legs. Fever. But not enough. 99. Only.

I don’t have that much.

Money in my account. Money in my account. Money in my account. Money in my account. Money in my account.

Babe.

Tik Tok. On the clock. But the party don’t stop.

Oh, whoa, whoa-oh. At the border control. The officers don’t pop.

Thank God.

I am half earth. Half water. Too much sob softens my stand.

Too much grit hardens my breath

But the artist visa still costs $5000 $5000 $5000 $5000

Look at my face.

My glitter is stressed.

I woke up because my sides had started to hurt.

Water. Half a piece of bread. A walk. In December to Popeyes. Yes. 3 Chicken Tenders Combo please.

Yes. That deal. On the poster. The one for $6.00$6.00 $6.00 $6.00 $6.00

Cha-ching.

I am so alive. The ghosts are getting scared of me. Want to meet my mate?

Well. Too Bad. It costs to meet her. Her venmo is @youkilledher&her&her&her&her&her&her&her&her&her&her&her&her

mine is @AyeshaRaees

@AyeshaRaees

@AyeshaRaees@AyeshaRaees

@AyeshaRaees

Thank YOU for asking. I am half broke. Half mend. But on a spring day

I smell nice.

Cha-ching.

Refusing to Call it Incest

Kathleen McCormick

TW: This piece contains discussion of domestic emotional abuse.

And that doctor said, “You’ll always experience remnants…residues… traces of those boundaries he crossed, boundaries that, once tampered with, never become fully intact again.”

You and your mother both realize, at least theoretically, that when your father’s at work, you could go to lunch at Emile’s, a French restaurant less than a mile away in Harvard Square. But in a different world. She says, “The very notion he could come home and discover us”—even though her fear (which, at fifteen, you inevitably share) is irrational since he doesn’t get in from work until 5:30 and probably has never heard of Emile’s—“would ruin the whole experience and probably upset both our stomachs.” You don’t dare take the risk. But every summer, when he has a four-day business convention someplace out of the state of Massachusetts, you and your mom become “ladies who lunch” at Emile’s. Of course you’re not aware of that term back then. Your mother saves up bits of the allowance he gives her every week for groceries and other essentials in the false bottom compartment of her (costume) jewelry box. She’s careful that no evidence ever comes home with you—particularly the classy box of wooden matches with the monogram Emile’s stamped in gold and placed in each clean ashtray on every table. The pleasures of Emile’s are immense, as your father only takes you two out to Howard Johnson’s. And that’s pretty rare. You spend time getting dressed, then casually stroll from your somewhat rundown, three-family house on Concord Ave. over to Brattle Street, neighborhoods improving with every block. You sit in that intimate atmosphere and savor just one delicious appetizer each. For three days straight. Five or six years before, when you and your mother first begin eating out during his business conferences, you discover you love escargot (snails!) and that vichyssoise may just be cold potato soup, but it’s oh-so-delicious with all that cream. You also realize that soft-spoken waiters, candlelight (even in the daytime since the restaurant is quite dark), what must

be French accents, and heavily starched white table linens induce a feeling that you are both incredibly special.

This particular day at Emile’s, however, you can’t dispel his shadow hovering over and controlling you, despite his distance. And it just about spoils your lunch. The two women a table away are talking about Holy Child, the co-ed, award-winning, fully equipped, multibuilding, regional Catholic high school where many from St. Michael’s Grammar—certainly all the smart kids—go when they graduate and which you’d fully expected to attend. St. Michael’s Parish High School for Girls, where your father makes you go instead, has such a bad reputation that, in addition to losing all the boys, it retains only a fraction of the girls, usually those who can’t get into Holy Child or whose parents won’t let them go to public school. The high school is forced to admit girls from outside the parish just to stay afloat. Most of these girls are not only Holy Child rejects but frequently expelled from the public school, and some even arrive or become pregnant during their time at St. Mike’s. Out-of-wedlock (which you don’t judge because in the 1970s you’ve decided you believe in free love), out-ofparish (which could be an advantage), and, educationally, just out of it (this is where you draw the line). Traces

Your father, who says he prides himself on your academic achievements and general braininess—all of which, of course, he contends are inherited from him, even though your mother points out that he can barely change a washer—won’t accept any of these arguments against the parish high school. He doesn’t care that Holy Child has tracked classes, that you’d be taking AP everything instead of being stuck in St. Michael’s sort of reform school. He doesn’t seem bothered that now you’re down in the 80th national percentile or lower in every subject instead of being in the 98th or 99th. Your falling scores don’t shake his faith in parish schools. Residue .

When you and your friend Agnes visit Holy Child in the eighth grade, your mother, much to your surprise, really argues with your father to let you transfer. “We should give her the best chance to get out of here,” she yells. But discussions with him at varying decibel levels lead to nothing but tears, door-banging, and upset stomachs.

Upon hearing those women in Emile’s, you stop talking about how beautiful Brattle Street is, with its millionaire houses and trees that flower all summer long, and begin rather intense eavesdropping. You can tell they’re wealthy from their voices and their high-class combination of black and beige outfits and accessories. Your mother says no one wears black in the summer unless they can afford air-

conditioning.

“Listen,” you whisper, interrupting her perusal of the luncheon appetizer specials, “those women are talking about how good Holy Child is.”

“Oh, Robert soooo prefers Holy Child to St. Cate’s,” says Beige and Black.

St. Catherine’s. Belmont. Posh. An infinitely better parish school than St. Michael’s, but still they prefer Holy Child.

“Baaahst thing we evahh did.”

Black and Beige raises her water glass to Beige and Black. Or is it something like a G and T?

“Mindy’s exactly the same…Soooo many more opportun—”

“Not to mention their independence,” Black and Beige interrupts. You look at your mother. “Are you listening to them? Even though they’re from St. Catherine’s, where cousin Ali goes, they think Holy Child is better.”

Your mother smiles. She’s reading the menu. “I can only pick up the odd word, but I did hear that everything is ‘sooo good.’” And you both giggle.

“Mom,” you say, “despite those hoity-toity women, I really should transfer to Holy Child. At least I’d have two years to catch up before college.”

She stares at you blankly, like she hasn’t heard. “Let’s not upset our lunch, Bridey. Have you seen the three-course luncheon special? I know we can’t afford it, but maybe someday—”

“Sorry, Mom.” And you genuinely are. You love these lunches almost as much as she does. “But I need a better school.”

“Decided what you’re having?” she asks pleasantly. You roll your eyes.

“Oh, Bridey, can’t we talk about it some other time? I’ve been waiting to savor Emile’s for so long this year that I’d rather not think about your father at all.”

But you can’t seem to stop this rare self-advocacy, perhaps induced by the comfort you feel in Emile’s.

Eventually the place fills up, and the general hum prevents you from hearing those women anymore. And your waiter brings your appetizers ( Madame?… Mademoiselle?… ) in what surely is a perfect French accent. Your mother’s having stuffed squid with lemon wedges, a new item on the menu since last summer. You choose your old favorite, escargot in garlic butter. For a while you both simply relish the food and the French bread and are silent, except to remind yourselves

to eat more slowly. You even listen to Édith Piaf in the background, who sounds so much more interesting ever since Mrs. Ellis—the “pinko, commie, gowny” (your father’s terms) woman you babysit for—explained that Piaf is France’s greatest ever popular singer even though she was raised by prostitutes in her grandmother’s brothel. You think they’re playing “Je Ne Regrette Rien” but can’t be sure. More proof that you’re really learning nothing in French class. Remnants .

You put your fork down after you eat two of your four snails. But your motivation for the pause isn’t the usual—that conversation will make your small portions last longer. “Couldn’t we talk to Dad about Holy Child?”

Your mother sighs. “Honey, he’s already said no once, and the whole issue just about caused World War III. Having you in the parish school makes him feel you’re safe.”

Your nose tingles and your eyes tear up. You eat your third snail to distract yourself.

“Why are you bringing this up now, Bridget?” asks your mother. “You haven’t even mentioned Holy Child for the last year or two.”

Your low national mid-high school test results that came a couple of weeks ago and your father’s utter lack of reaction to them have upset you. Ever since the school told them you were smart in the first or second grade, he’s bragged constantly and much to your embarrassment that “our Bridey isn’t only the top of the class at St. Michael’s, she’s the top of the class in the USA.” He’s always been more excited by those scores than you. So his silence about them is perplexing. Down over twenty points and he didn’t bat an eyelid. Just looked at them and said nothing. “Can’t he see my national scores are dropping because I’m not learning anything?”

He used to go over your homework with you in grammar school for endless frustrating hours every night after dinner until you eventually got sick and even had to be hospitalized. Your mother didn’t tell you then that the doctor said your illness was caused by your father’s “inappropriate intrusiveness.” That his fixation on your schoolwork wasn’t to help you excel. That he was living vicariously through you to blot out his own pain, his own sense of failure. That it was emotional incest. His term, not hers. She never repeats that word to you. Ever.

And the doctor demanded that she—who couldn’t really defend herself—protect you from him and require you to study in your own room. With the door closed. You were so grateful when she bought you that small, second-hand desk and chair for your bedroom. Marveling at her bravery, it took years for you to discover it was the doctor’s

status (and threats)—not your mother’s tremulous “Don’t you dare!”— that kept your father from opening your door and dragging you back to the living room to study with him.

A cacophony of shrinks have had a field day helping you analyze why your father was so invasively caught up in your schoolwork for years, why he abruptly stopped, and why he wouldn’t let you leave St. Michael’s.

“All that homework review can be understood simply as your father’s overidentification with you and his general overenthusiasm for his only child.”

“Perhaps he actually believed you weren’t smart enough to succeed without his help. Keeping you at your school could have been his way of trying to stave off your disappointment when you discovered that you weren’t particularly exceptional.”

You walk out of the offices of the numerous doctors who offer such benign readings. You hardly need to pay someone to defend him. You find different doctors.

“His relationship with you and your schoolwork was rooted in his own narcissism. It existed to satisfy his desires. He used and trapped you and betrayed the parent-child trust. His ‘love’ was more confining and intrusive than nurturing.”

“It’s a classic case of what’s called ‘covert emotional incest.’”

You never repeat that word to her either. Ever.

“He was living vicariously through you, virtually entering you, invading, and mentally abusing you with an intensity equal to physical penetration.”

You do stay for a time with some of these doctors. They promise to release you from your anxiety, perfectionism, general sense of feeling out of control, and distrust of your own judgements. You talk and talk and wait for the release.

Of course you’re also unaware, until years later, that once your father is stopped from interfering in your schoolwork, he begins ranting nightly to your mother that your grades’ll drop, that, without his help, you’ll never achieve your potential. You couldn’t know then how gripped he was by anger and abandonment, being no longer allowed to experience that certain pleasure. Only with you. Only at those times when he had you to himself and you could both be smart together. When you could be a version of him. He had to punish you for leaving him. And you became, in his mind, no longer intelligent. He planned to watch you fail. Because without the gratification you’d previously given him, your father was just not that interested in you. So when he saw those most recent test scores, he felt vindicated. Even a little bit pleased.

“Bridget, there are so many reasons your father isn’t going to let you

go.”

You slowly eat another piece of bread, she another tentacle.

“Don’t be too hard on your father,” she finally says. She’s come to believe his actions never had to do with incest. That the doctor was ridiculous. That your father was just overcompensating for his own failed dreams, poor man.

“Why not be hard on him when he makes my life so difficult?”

She sits up more straightly in her chair. “You’re probably old enough to know now.”

You quiver inside. She’s about to divulge another family secret. Frequently it feels like your parents spend most of their lives telling you lies only so there can be these confidential revelations after endless confrontations, revelations that are supposed to heal everything.

“This is really important, Bridget, and it’ll make you see your father in a whole new light.”

You extricate your final snail from its shell. You waited too long. It’s cold.

She clears her throat before she splutters, “Your father could have gone to Harvard. I mean by all rights should have gone.”

What’s she saying? “Dad? What? Dad? Dad, go to Harvard?”

Your mother nods.

“Why didn’t he?”

“Harvard gave a scholarship to one local boy each year who showed the most promise. The family just had to pay some nominal amount. And your father was the one they chose from our year.”

A vision of how different your life would be with a Harvard dad punches you in the gut. No resentment of rich people. No living in a shabby neighborhood. No St. Michael’s. His life so interesting, no time to care about your schoolwork. He’d still love your mother. You’d be the ones who were higher class, maybe living on Brattle Street. He might even like Mrs. Ellis…even Emile’s.

“There’s one simple reason why he didn’t go.”

You put your fork down.

“His father, of course. What else?”

You think that Grandpa, as miserable as he is, might’ve been proud to have a Harvard boy in the family but say nothing.

“When your Uncle Joe was little, before your father was even born, Grandpa discovered your grandmother had TB. He prayed to God that if He spared her, he’d give his firstborn son to the church. Typical Irish. So superstitious.”

You smile. He’d say the same about her because she’s Italian.

“Grandpa sent Joe to the seminary, against his will I might add, and it apparently cost a fair bit of money. So there was nothing left for Harvard.”

“What was wrong with Dad that he didn’t fight back?”

“Nothing was wrong with him. Not then. Remember, Bridey, I dated him all through high school. He was the coolest guy with plenty of fight. The only boy with a mustache in the whole school, head of the Drama Society, editor of the yearbook, the valedictorian.” Your mother lets out a short sob. “He began to change right then. He knew they didn’t have a pot to piss in. He wouldn’t talk about it, acting like he didn’t care, but you could see, right away, the spark very slowly going out of him.”

“But Mom—”

“I know he’s bitter and unhappy now—but he used to be so full of life, like he could win at anything. He’d be a different person today if your grandfather—self-centered, yellow-bellied shit—hadn’t stopped him.”

“Perhaps your father’s inability to attend Harvard caused him to believe that keeping you out of Holy Child seemed natural, even the right thing to do.”

“Coffee? Dessert?” your waiter asks, handing you the small dessert menus.

“Please give us a minute,” your mother smiles pleasantly.

“We can leave if you want, Mom.” You’re overwhelmed by this family secret and the thought you might need to be more sympathetic to your father.

She seems lost in the past. “He was smart as a whip but such a clown and so charming. Everyone liked him.”

Impossible for you to imagine your father as a clown. Or charming. But then, you didn’t even know he had a mustache in high school.

“The reason he’s been so concerned about your education and so involved in your schoolwork is because he’s never going to let what happened to him happen to you.”

Édith Piaf is suddenly silent.

“How can you say that, Mom, when that’s exactly what he’s doing? Isn’t his not letting me go to Holy Child just like his father not allowing him to go to Harvard?”

Your mother blanches.

The waiter reappears. “Ready, ladies?” His French accent is gone.

Her eyes dart between you and the waiter. “I’ll have coffee. Just more water for my daughter. No dessert,” her previous agreeable-tothe-waiter voice now depleted.

“He’s not being like his father,” she snaps. “You know what he used to say when someone asked him what his job at the insurance company was like? ‘It’s about nothing.’ What the hell kind of answer is that? Apart from you, he doesn’t feel he’s accomplished much. So he’d never do anything to hold you back.”

But that’s just what he’s doing. Your mother’s story backfires.

“When a child is the object of a parent’s covert preoccupation…the relationship is distorted to meet the parent’s rather than the child’s needs.”

“His breaking down boundaries that should have remained intact between you is what allowed him to project his own sense of loss and failure onto you and enact the repetition compulsion.”

You stuck with the repetition compulsion doctor for some time. She probably did you more good than you give her credit for.

As your mother sips her coffee, you notice that all the ladies who lunch have left. The check’s already on the table. She puts down a crisp twenty and leaves half the coffee. The bright, warm sun on Brattle Street momentarily calms you both.

When you do eventually have the courage to ask him about Holy Child at the “welcome back dinner” your mother feels she must put together, his response is worse than you could have imagined.

“Listen, missy, there’s no way you’re getting away from St. Michael’s. Why’d you want to leave the one place that thinks you’re a star?”

“But Daddy, don’t you have any faith in me? Don’t you think I could shine in a better school?”

“You’d be shining more right now just where you are if you still worked with me. The reason those national scores of yours—and yes, don’t think I didn’t notice them—are dropping isn’t because of your school but because you don’t let me help you anymore.”

One doctor said no one is ever “cured.” True enough, you think today, since you hardly feel intact, despite all that talk for all that time. You still so often second-guess yourself, panic, feel out of control, and all the rest. It seems more like you have simply (well, not simply at all) learned to live in among those remnants…residues…and traces. And that possibly his invasiveness will always be a fact of your very being.

Even if, or perhaps because, you won’t ever call it what it really was.

You bring your aging mother to Emile’s. He’s dead now so you could go any time. You’ve got a job, a good job, and close enough to your mother, who’s still in Cambridge. But you two haven’t been back there. Not since his last business trip. The maître d’ is the same person. Of course he wouldn’t remember you. He’s aged a hundred years and probably doesn’t notice how threadbare the place has become.

“Go right to the three-course lunches, Mom,” you say. “That ‘someday’ has finally arrived.” She smiles and nods but looks so frail, especially because you easily picture her with the sense of wonder she used to have upon entering the restaurant.

Her eyes widen. “Look at the prices!”

“Don’t worry,” you reassure her.

You’re suddenly concerned about how her stomach will handle the rich food. Everything is “in pastry” or “with cream sauce” or “drenched in herb butter.” But she’s a trooper and eats every morsel. She seems to have a great time. Neither of you mentions your father. You take the matches. She rubs her finger over the gold Emile’s monogram.

Pantoum for George Floyd: 8 Minutes and 46 Seconds

Charles Safford

TW: This piece contains discussion of police brutality, murder, and racially motivated violence.

On the unforgiving pavement, handcuffed face down on the asphalt, there is no open passage for oxygen to travel, no safe pathway to breathe freely and live. With a knee on your neck, your throat a paper straw pinched at its far end,

there is no open passage for oxygen to travel and your lungs will start to crumple like a dead doll. No mercy. No justice, your throat a paper straw pinched at its far end for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. A single knee contains gravity enough

for your lungs to start to crumple like a dead doll. No mercy, no justice under the deliberate weight of another, ready to erase your future in 8 minutes and 46 seconds. A single knee contains gravity enough to ignore your pleas, to silence your silence, held down - like too many others -

under the deliberate weight of another. Ready to erase more futures, the old anvil of knee or noose again and again set loose in the world, to ignore the pleas, to silence the silent. Held down like too many others, you have 8 minutes and 46 seconds left, your soul set to be unplanted,

the cold anvil of knee or noose again and again set loose in the world, no safe pathway to breathe freely and live. With a knee on your neck, you have 8 minutes and 46 seconds left, your soul set to be unplanted on the unforgiving pavement, handcuffed face down on the asphalt.

Contributors

Anni Wilson is a print-maker working in a combination of linocut and stencil. Anni’s work depicts a fictionalized past imbued with modern themes: class divides, gender inequalities, the greed of capitalism, the alienating effects of technology. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, The Harvard Advocate, and Reed Magazine.

Rachel Jamison Webster is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University and the author four books of poetry, including September (NUP/TriQuarterly Press, 2013) and Mary is a River (Kelsay Books, 2018) which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in journals such as Tin House, Poetry, Paris Review, and The Southern Review.

Christopher Heffernan was originally born and raised in upstate New York. He has had poetry and fiction placed in magazines and journals around the country such as The Believer, The Writer’s Journal, Pacific Coast Journal, Cottonwood, Talking River, The South Dakota Review, Louisiana Literature, the Sierra Nevada Review, the Tampa Review, Whisky Island, and Big Muddy. He has a book of poetry and flash fiction titled Rag Water, and spends much of his time working and walking in the sun.

Kate Musso received her creative writing degree at Harvard College where she studied with Seamus Heaney and Richard Tillinghast. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including “Louisiana Literature,” “The Avalon Literary Review,” “The Harvard Advocate” and “Oxford Magazine.” She has won a number of awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Untermeyer Poetry Prize, and the Dana Reed Prize.

Mikele Prestia is an Australian author, freelance journalist, and lawyer.

Karl Michael Iglesias is originally from Milwaukee, WI, and a proud UW-Madison Alumnus. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His work can be read on Apogee, The Acentos Review, The Breakwater Review, The Florida Review, RHINO Poetry, Kweli Journal, Haymarket

Books’ Breakbeat Poet Anthology, Westchester Review. His debut chapbook, CATCH A GLOW, is available now on Finishing Line Press.

Rebecca Pyle ’s artwork is most recently in the art/lit journals Blood Orange Review, The Klecksograph, Gulf Stream, Gris-Gris, The William and Mary Review, and Sand Hills . Artwork by her has also been featured on covers of JuxtaProse, Raven Chronicles Journal, The HitchLit Review, The Underwater American Songbook, and Oxford Magazine . Rebecca lives now in “the intermountain West”—which sounds like many mountains in constant conversation with each other—and she is also a writer. Her fiction, essays, and poetry are also in many journals. See rebeccapyleartist.com.

Joshua Dick ’s short stories have appeared in Red Rock Review, Santa Clara Review, and Ghost Town Literary Magazine. He holds a master’s degree in fiction from Columbia University. Joshua grew up in Northern California, lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, for many years, and now resides in New York City, where he works as a Spanish teacher and chess instructor at the Bronx Global Learning Institute for Girls.

William Rudolph , who earned his MFA in Writing from Vermont College, has spent the early Covid-19 months exploring imaginary oceans for inexplicable sea creatures by working with David Koehn and Rusty Morrison through an online Omindawn “Prosody & Revision” workshop. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, Quarterly West, Rattle, SLANT, South Dakota Review, Steam Ticket, and dozens of other journals— including, most recently, DASH, The Ekphrastic Review, Flint Hills Review, Great Ape, Grub Street, Midwest Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. He coaches student writers at Grinnell College and in GC’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program.

Stephen Spicehandler is the author of the novel “Run Away on the Heavenly Express” which grew out of the short story he wrote entitled “To Calvary” published by The Iowa Review.

Karly Vance grew up in Bay City, Michigan and studied writing at Hope College. Her writing has been published in The Offbeat,

Common Ground Review, and Dunes Review, and Midwest Quarterly. She currently lives with her husband and son in the Chicago area.

Bill Hemmig has twice been named a finalist in the New Millennium Writing Awards (43rd and 47th) and twice published in the online journal Children, Churches & Daddies (cc&d). He also has a short story included in the anthology The World Takes: Life in the Garden State, published this past October by Read Furiously.

Julien Blanchard received his BA degree in English from The College of New Jersey, where he received the Holman Award for the highest level of academic academic achievement in the department. He is a previously unpublished poet and currently working as a writing consultant. He will be pursuing a JD in environmental law in the fall of 2021.

Mia Reiland is a writer and photographer from Brooklyn, New York. She uses a 35mm camera. Her work mainly focuses on comparing and contrasting inanimate objects and human life: especially the ways in which the non-living show fragility and even characteristics of a human body.

Benjamin Aleshire ’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Times UK, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Adroit, London Magazine, and on television in the US, China, and Spain. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress, POET FOR HIRE, was featured at Lit Hub and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. Find him at www.poetforhire.org, on IG at @benjamin_aleshire, and on twitter: @droletariat.

Sean Cho A. is the author of “American Home” (Autumn House 2021) winner of the Autumn House Publishing chapbook contest. His work can be future found or ignored in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, The Penn Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California Irvine and the Associate Editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal. Find him @phlat_soda

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, Phoebe, Folio and the

New York Quarterly. His work is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NYC.

Mary Carolyn Morgan has a Master of Arts in English from Penn State and is a graduate of Manhattanville College. She writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in The MacGuffin, The Sandy River Review, Snake Nation Review, Wisconsin Review, and Eureka Literary Magazine. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut.

Isabelle Doyle ’s poems can be found in DIALOGIST, Bluestem Magazine, Typo Magazine, Map Literary, The Red Eft Review, Cargoes, Street Light Press, Thin Noon, The Round, and Clerestory, with work forthcoming in The Chiron Review. Her poetry manuscript O’Riley was a semifinalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize, and her poetry manuscript BABYFACE was the 2018 recipient of the Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University.

Melissa Ostrom is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her short stories have appeared in many journals and been selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 , Best Microfiction 2020 , and Best Microfiction 2021 . She teaches English at Genesee Community College and lives with her husband and children in Holley, New York. Learn more at www.melissaostrom.com or find her on Twitter @melostrom.

John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016) as well as poems and stories in The Colorado Review , Poetry , The Sewanee Review , The Antioch Review , New Letters , and elsewhere. His seventh book, The Art of Forgetting , is forthcoming this summer from Measure Press.

Amanda K Horn has served as an editor for publications including the Columbia Journal and The Offing. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded a 2019 Felipe De Alba Fellowship. She currently lives in New York City.

Terry Allen is an emeritus professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he taught acting, directing and playwriting. He is the author of the chapbook Monsters in the Rain (Kelsay Books, 2019) and his new full-length poetry book Art Work

(Kelsay Books, 2021). His poems have appeared in many journals, including I-70 Review , Third Wednesday , Popshot Quarterly , Cloudbank , Into the Void, and Main Street Rag .

Amal Alhomsi is a Syrian writer currently residing in the Canadian Rockies.

William Brown is an MFA student in poetry at the University of Florida. His work has appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Columbia Journal, Copper Nickel, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere.

Benjamin Faro is a green-thumbed writer living in Asunción, Paraguay. His prose and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Vassar Review, Invisible City, and STORGY Online, among other literary outlets. Read more at www.benjaminfaro.com.

Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW’s The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Raees’s first book of poetry, “Coining The Wishing Tower” won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and judged by Kaveh Akbar, and will be forthcoming in March 2022. From Lahore, Pakistan, Raees is a graduate of Bennington College, and currently lives in New York City. Her website is: www.ayesharaees.com

Kathleen Zamboni McCormick is Professor of Literature and Writing at Purchase College, SUNY. Her creative work has been published in Green Hills Literary Lantern, Euphony, Witness, South Carolina Review, Good Works Review, phoebe, Italian Americana, Zone 3, CAYLX, Paterson Literary Review, Superstition Review, Kestrel, Sweet Tree Review, armarolla, and many others. Her novel, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian Sometimes Awesome but Mostly Creepy Childhood (Sand Hill Review Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2020 Rubery Award, won the 2017 Foreword Reviews Gold Medal in Humor, the 2017 Illumination Bronze Medal for Catholic Books (Pope Francis won the Gold!), among other awards in humor and religion. “Refusing to Call It Incest” is one of the stories Zamboni McCormick plans to use in her next novel, which focuses on

social class and abuse. You can read more of her work at kathleenzmccormick.com.

Sonnet Mondal is an Indian poet, photographer,and author of Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin 2018) and Ink and Line (Dhauli Books 2018). Founder director of Chair Poetry Evenings - Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival, Mondal edits the Indian section of Lyrikline (Haus für Poesie, Berlin) and serves as editor in chief of the Verseville magazine. His works have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Chinese, Turkish, Slovak, Macedonian, French, Russian, Slovenian, Hungarian, and Arabic.

Charles Safford ’s poems have appeared in dozens of poetry journals and quarterlies, including Wisconsin Review, Clockwatch Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and Poet Lore. He is a member of US1 Poets’ Cooperative and was a longtime member of the Atlanta Poet’s Collaborative. He works in the Atlanta area as a psychotherapist and is a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Collaborative, a non-profit organization recently formed to reshape models and approaches of policing.

Anni Wilson

Rachel Jamison Webster

Christopher Heffernan

Kate Musso

Mikele Prestia

Karl Michael Iglesias

Rebecca Pyle

Joshua Dick

William Rudolph

Stephen Spicehandler

Karly Vance

Bill Hemmig

Julien Blanchard

Mia Reiland

Benjamin Aleshire

Sean Cho A.

Roger Camp

Mary Carolyn Morgan

Isabelle Doyle

Melissa Ostrom

John Blair

Amanda K. Horn

Terry Allen

Amal Alhomsi

William Brown

Benjamin Faro

Ayesha Raees

Kathleen McCormick

Sonnet Mondal

Charles Safford