The Madison Review University of Wisconsin Department of English 6193 Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park Street Madison, WI 53706
POETRY
Editors
Madeline Mitchell
Brett Dunn
Jordyn Ginestra
Staff
Alexandria Ruiz
Angel Chao
Bruce Wei
Carlee Kessler
Geneva Michlig
Jaan Srimurthy
Jake Reisfeld
Jasper Huegerich
Lauren Goulette
Lorren Richards
Madison Xiao
Mary Stroth
Samantha Diedrich
LAYOUT
Alex Gershman
Madeline Mitchell
Rissa Nelson
FICTION
Editors
Morgan McCormack
Alex Gershman
Associate Editor Taylor D’Andrea
Staff
Aideen Gabbai
Anna Lail
Anya Berry
Emma Stueber
Evan Randle
Kyler Hansen
Liv Abegglen
Lucas Miller
Nolan Heath
Priya Kanuru
Rissa Nelson
Sally Manning
Editors’ Note
Dear Reader,
Welcome to this Fall’s edition of The Madison Review. This issue wades through the immense difficulty of the human relationship. The following works tangle themselves within the inextricable human desire for family, friends and romance. We will wander alongside characters struggling to make sense of how connection both makes them who they are and challenges them to change. The writers compel us to ask ourselves how we learn to be loved, how we hope to be loved, how we are loved.
We hope you adore the Poetry, Fiction, and Art that shaped this issue so poignantly. Trust our contributors to bring human connection to life and do not be afraid to find hints of yourself living within their work. We would like to thank the entirety of our talented contributors for sharing their enthusiasm, artistry, and passion with us, as well as for choosing this journal as a home.
We would also like to thank our program advisor, Ron Kuka, for his immensely resilient patience, abundant wisdom, and steadfast support, along with the UW-Madison English Department and the Program in Creative Writing.
To the staff, thank you for the love you have poured into this journal. None of this would be possible without the dedication, profound curiosity, and careful attention you dedicate to the literary craft.
A final thanks belongs to you, our Reader. This issue would not exist without your devotion to, and appreciation for, the written word. We sincerely thank you.
Warmly,
The Editors
Kite-Flying Barbara Duffey
My sister and I peeled tar off our soles in sandy black pancakes we threw back on the beach. The whole pier creaked as we walked to the kite store—we were only scoping prototypes, we’d make our own from balsa dowels and trash bags and fly them in the park across the street from the paint factory. Dad would let us
draw on the kites’ plastic skin in Sharpie. I felt maybe I was learning to know him, & that I could be a knowing thing.
Before, my self had brimmed my sentience. I had a He-Man box kite, my only store-bought. In a photo, I delight in it,
as if it were my lover. When I went to draw my own figures on my own trash kite, that joy flew like a dollar in the wind of a cash-grab machine in a game show and I’m wrinkling my sleeves hoping to catch something, anything, even by accident.
The Tao of Stargazing
Benjamin Tedoff
September 1979
Billy Marks walks alone on the New York sidewalk, a tiny, pale figure shuffling along under gloomy clouds and tall buildings, from his mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive to public school on 92nd and Columbus. Billy is small, even for his age. His solitude makes him seem even smaller. His head hangs down. His dark hair, uncombed and unkempt, sticks up at all angles. His eyes are too large for his face, his jacket too large for his body, his teeth crooked or missing. A wind rushes up Columbus Avenue, blowing directly against him. He raises his head, grimacing gap-toothed defiance, like a tiny goblin. The wind ceases.
It’s certain that Billy was born on just such a day—at odds with itself, neither warm nor cold, replete with improbability and therefore conducive to coincidence. Today is his ninth birthday. It’s also the first day of school. Not that he feels put out or cheated by this sharing of his birthday with the first day of school, though he might if he weren’t preoccupied with other matters, like his mom, and his camera, and stealing. In any case, he doesn’t have enough friends to make a fuss over him, so he hopes no one in school will remember.
The fourth-grade teacher is new to the school, or so he’s been told. And she is late. This, to Billy, is surprising. Even refreshing. In his experience to this point, teachers are never late for anything. They are always there, first thing in the morning, and they remain marooned at their desks when the kids are released in the afternoon, as if they never go home at all. But on this morning, Billy shows up five minutes before the 8 o’clock bell, only to find a roomful of kids, the lights turned out so that nothing but the daylight illuminates the room, and no teacher. His fellow students greet him with reticence, or not at all. He scans the room and selects an empty seat toward the rear, up against the windows, under the somber clouds and the tall buildings outside. Without removing his jacket, he sits and waits. The room is abuzz with fourth-grade chatter. Billy frowns, causing his eyebrows to protrude slightly into open space. His pupils dilate. The day and the school year each at their square-one position confront him with a familiar sense
of beginning a penitential period of almost unlimited drudgery. The dimness suggests sleep. The school principal, Mr. Lamas, appears abruptly in front of the room in a brown polyester suit and brown shoes, announces that the new teacher should arrive any moment, to which announcement there is no response from the students, and disappears back into the void from which he’d come.
Billy stares at the clock. As it counts past 8:00, and the absence of the teacher becomes more conspicuous, the chatter grows proportionally louder. At 8:05, Billy’s classmates begin to wonder aloud that the teacher might not be coming at all, and the idea, in being attractive, seems also to be true. By 8:10, a certain giddiness infects the room. A paper airplane appears. A battery-operated toy chirps. David Offerman, who has chosen a desk behind and much closer to Billy’s than Billy would like, now begins to cast insults at the rear right-hand quadrant of Billy’s head, as had been his wont throughout the previous school year. By 8:15 some of the kids are abandoning their seats, chasing each other in circles around the desks, and caterwauling with abandon, and at the height of this riot, the teacher walks into the room.
She is much younger than Billy expected. Her large glasses and pinned-up hair give her the look of a librarian or a teacher or other learned type. But she also wears a soft white blouse, beads on her neck, and jeans. And unlike Mr. Lamas’s dress shoes, which tap along the reverberant linoleum wherever he goes yet paradoxically never give away his location until the last possible moment, the new teacher’s shoes make no sound whatsoever. She stops and stands in the front of the room, framed by the expanse of the blackboard. Those of Billy’s classmates who have abandoned their desks are now situated all over the room, and scramble back to their places. She waits.
When the room has settled down to her satisfaction, the teacher turns to the blackboard, raises a piece of chalk, and in the most meticulous, evenly spaced letters Billy has ever seen on any chalk-andblackboard medium, writes:
MS. LINDSTROM
“Good morning, everyone,” she says. “I apologize for being late. My name is Anna Lindstrom but you can call me Mizz Lindstrom...” the teacher gestures lightly toward that curious honorific on the blackboard. She goes on to make a few other brief announcements, about how glad she is to be at P.S. 84, and how she hopes the year will go, and the like.
Billy Marks is watching the new teacher as intently as he’d been
watching the clock only moments before. His toes fidget. His hair stands up higher, aligning itself heliotropically in her direction. His perception of her, through oversized and not entirely objective eyeballs, is that she is already very much unlike Mrs. Phelps, his second-grade teacher, who was old and shrunken, whose voice was deep, like a man’s, and who smelled of something akin to household cleaning fluids, and also unlike Miss Glemming, his third-grade teacher, who was of a frighteningly gigantic stature, and hated children, and was obliged at irregular intervals, often without visible provocation, to have crying and sobbing fits in front of the class. Ms. Lindstrom is neither shrunken nor gigantic, but of a very reasonable and attractive size. Her voice is girlish, but soft as a human touch. She speaks intimately, as if imparting secrets, but rather than drown her in noise, the other children lean their heads toward her to listen more closely. Her appearance and her gentle comportment seem to Billy as if suited to no other purpose than to calm restless fourth-grade spirits and lead them to their better selves. As the morning sun breaks through the clouds, and the classroom windows illuminate her reddishbrown hair, he can see a few glowing strands along her neck that have strayed free of her hairpins. A divine glint appears in her glasses, obscuring her eyes.
And now, “One final thing before we begin—I am late because as I was preparing for class this morning I learned that one of our students was lucky or maybe un lucky enough to have a birthday today, on the first day of school! So, I decided I would stop and buy a cake. Unfortunately, it took a bit longer than I thought it would, and again, I apologize. But, later today, we’re going to have a little celebration...” The class buzzes with approval, though it seems they don’t know whose birthday it is and they begin looking around at one another.
Billy is aghast. He has no desire for a birthday celebration—not among the likes of David Offerman and others who bear no love for him. For a moment, he looks around too, as if he doesn’t know whose birthday it is, either. His first instinct is to be angry, if only because lately that has become his natural state—but he finds he cannot be angry at this teacher. He isn’t sure why, and nor could he put it into words if anyone were to ask him, but he implicitly trusts that she understands all the things he cannot, and interprets them with benevolent consideration, and even when the sun grays and darkens behind the clouds again, she is still aglow with that understanding.
Most people and many things are taller than Billy, so he spends a lot
of time with his eyes cast at an upward slant, and thus he remains especially aware of the world above—the improbable flight of airplanes, gray groups of pigeons at rest and at play, the tops of trees, the faces of adults. In this way, too, he has come to notice certain signs of life on the rooftops of the tall apartment buildings in his neighborhood: gardens and greenhouses, water towers and safety railings.
On most days after school, Billy prefers not to go home because he’s never certain what he’s going to find there. His mother’s absence makes him feel lonesome. Her possible presence in the company of her unctuous boyfriend, Steve—a minor lawyer who could just as easily have been a minor advertising executive or a used car salesman—is worse. His own building affords him no roof access, so he begins to reconnoiter the neighborhood in an attempt to find his way to higher ground.
He is standing in the middle of the sidewalk on West End Avenue, peering across the street and up at a grand old Upper West Side building, one hand shading his eyes against the glare of the lowering September sun in the windows. The passers-by maneuver around him, and one or two are compelled by the steep angle of his gaze to follow it upward at what looks like a thriving, well-groomed little grove of trees on the roof.
Billy shrugs his backpack higher over his bony shoulders, crosses out into the middle of the wide two-way street where two Checker taxis, headed in opposite directions, are forced to slow—one gradually, the other jamming the brakes and swerving to a stop, the driver rolling down the window to scream at Billy in foreign tones, his voice cracking with rage. Billy dashes around the taxi onto the opposite sidewalk, and enters the building’s lobby.
The lobby is dominated by a chandelier, faux marble floors, and the smell of moderate Upper West Side prosperity. To one side, encircled behind a very tall desk, a huge doorman with a gigantic, quadrate uniform and a proportionately large block-like head topped with round doorman’s cap stands watching, the desk-station serving to mark his domain and, presumably, to barricade him from attack.
With head lowered, Billy tries to shuffle past.
“Hey, kid,” the doorman says.
Billy stops and looks up at him.
“Who are you visiting?” His voice is a strong baritone, but it’s the guttural East European accent that seems to preempt any debate or excuse.
“I live here.”
“No,” the doorman says. “You don’t.”
Billy narrows his eyes. “Calling me a liar?”
“I know everyone in this building, including kids,” the doorman says. “So what will it be? Get packing or we do it the hard way?”
“Pfft,” Billy says. But he turns and walks out.
He walks a couple of blocks south, turns east onto 93rd street, and finds a second building where, surprisingly, the front doors are propped open, as if to invite him inside. He sees no doorman, only a narrow but well-lit lobby, a bank of mail cubbies to one side, and an elevator at the far end. Almost as soon as he steps in, the elevator opens and a young woman with a baby stroller rolls out toward him. She is looking straight at him as she approaches and he makes the mistake of momentarily stopping in his tracks.
“Can I help you?” she says.
“No,” Billy says.
“Are you looking for someone?”
He gives her no answer. Her eyes flash an obligatory motherly concern, or pity, for his disheveled hair, ill-fitting jacket, and defiant glare.
But: “I think you’re in the wrong building.”
Billy turns and walks out again.
He is hardly discouraged—rather, merely irritated—and he finally succeeds by entering a huge building on 97th Street, the sheer size and less upscale qualities of which afford him a certain anonymity. There is no doorman—only an expansive intercom system with dozens of rounded silver buttons marked with apartment numbers. He jams buttons at random and is buzzed in after he lies to someone over the intercom about having lost his key. Encouraged, he takes the elevator to the top floor, walks past several apartment doors along an echoing hallway to the stairwell, and makes his way up to the roof.
There is no one atop the building. He guffaws at his triumph, grimacing with satisfaction—he is not accustomed to smiling—the rarefied New York air flowing in and out through the gaps in his front teeth. The open space is defined by a sturdy safety railing. Industrialsized vent ports stand here and there, quietly breathing. As he steps into the center of this space, the sky expands, unobstructed, above and to every side of him. Billy instinctively understands that he’s found something he’s been looking for—a paradoxical sense of privacy, and the boundless sense of power that comes with achieving unusually high altitudes through human ingenuity—and takes his camera from
his pocket.
Billy takes a few photographs of the skyline, and then climbs over the safety railing to sit at the very edge of the building, his short legs freely dangling over, to take photographs of people, far below on the sidewalk. He makes a game of spitting into the open sky, and then attempting to quickly capture his frothy missiles with his camera before they can precipitate out of view. Late in the afternoon, in an out-of-the-way corner, he discovers a pigeon’s nest in a vent opening with, much to his delight, a single gray pigeon sitting in it. He is able to get fairly close—enough that he can study the shimmering spectral purples and greens of the feathers around her throat, the reptilian red of her eye—and take a few photos before the pigeon’s better sense kicks in and she abandons the nest.
Lydia Marks is short, dark, of Italian and Greek descent, with an attractive smile that can effect modest self-deprecation or frank condescension at her whim. For purposes of convenience, and despite an ugly divorce—not to mention the indictment and incarceration of her ex-husband for various white-collar crimes—she has kept her husband’s name. Lydia has long black hair with something of an unruly quality, requiring a good deal of care and management, short but well-shaped legs, and a prominent posterior, which isn’t something that Billy would have noticed or thought about except that her current boyfriend Steve, in a spectacularly ill-considered attempt to form a bond with the boy, verbally points it out at regular intervals.
She hardly needs to work, thanks to the divorce settlement, but she has little patience for idleness, so she has a job doing office work at a law firm. It pays well. Lydia wears close-fitting pantsuits or skirts with buttoned blouses to the office. The top button, or two, are often left undone. The lawyers at the office, most of whom are men, seem to appreciate her, though there are one or two female lawyers who don’t like her much at all. She comes and goes from the office as she pleases.
Last year, when Billy was in the third grade, the school principal called to inform Lydia that her son had been caught stealing from his fellow students. Billy’s larceny was apparently not for greed or covetousness, but simply for its own sake: a hand-held battery-powered game that failed to capture his interest, a toy handgun that he never played with but instead placed directly in the classroom trashcan when no one was looking, David Offerman’s Batman vs. Joker lunchbox, complete with PB&J sandwich, cheese ’n’ crackers pack, and box of apple juice, which he secreted in his backpack and later dropped,
with the food sealed inside, into a toilet in the boys bathroom. He was caught only after he became bored of not being caught.
Since he never kept the things he stole, this seemed more like he just wanted to draw attention. Or so the principal carefully suggested. The call hardly phased Billy’s mother. Besides the fact that she had a natural way with words and a built-in antagonism toward authority figures, Lydia works in a law office, is dating a lawyer, and has been through a long divorce that involved simultaneous but unrelated criminal charges against her husband. That is to say, with a certain lawyer-like expertise, she was able to make effusive yet reasonablesounding promises to Mr. Lamas, and to give him every assurance that it would not happen again.
That done, Lydia took Billy out to have pizza, just the two of them, instructed him in firm tones not to steal, reminding him pointedly of the fact that his father had similar disreputable habits (“but what he did was called embezzling ”), and finally, having elicited a perfunctory promise to never steal again, she rewarded him by buying a couple of the latest Mad magazines, per his recommendations. After a few days, once she thought things had settled back to the status quo, she returned to gallivanting around the city with her flavor-of-the-month boyfriend.
The problem continued. It won Billy many enemies among his classmates, earned him a great deal of distrust with the already distrustful Miss Glemming, and aggravated his mother to no end. At one point, the school recommended that Billy undergo psychological assessment, but Lydia managed to put that off as well.
Billy lost some of his interest in thievery after he discovered photography. But he really forgot the idea of stealing altogether on the first day of the fourth grade, his ninth birthday, when he met Ms. Lindstrom.
October 1979
Most afternoons after school, Billy returns to the same building on 97th Street, gains entrance by the same means—he has discovered that there is usually at least one person willing to buzz him in without engaging him over the intercom, and if that doesn’t work, he waits in the vestibule until someone comes in or out, and acts as if going through his pockets in search of his keys. He usually stays through the afternoon, takes photos, reenacts various scenes from action movies
by running from, shooting, or beating the crap out of various makebelieve enemies, visits the same perpetually surprised pigeon at its nest, sends down wads of sputum or chewed gum to see if he can hit a pedestrian, and leaves when he gets hungry or the sun goes down.
Today, however, he has come home directly after school, finding his mother absent. She’s left a twenty-dollar bill on the table for him, next to take-out menus for pizza and Chinese food. It used to be she would also leave him a note, telling him when she’d be home. Since the summer, there have been nights she doesn’t come home at all, and Billy sleeps alone in the apartment. Since she left him no note, he feels this will likely be one of those nights.
He watches a few cartoons on TV, followed by the inevitable Good Times and Happy Days . By 6:30, he becomes hungry and resigned to the idea that he will have to fend for himself. He needs film for his camera, and he doesn’t much feel like being home anymore, so rather than order food, he puts on his jacket, takes his camera, the twenty, and his keys, and leaves the apartment.
It is a clear, brisk autumn night. He stops in to the nearby drugstore and buys a roll of film and batteries. He then makes his way to Peppino’s Pizza on Broadway, where they know him on sight, for a dinner of two pepperoni slices and a large Coke. Filled with pizza and soda, he walks east to the building on 97th Street, and makes his way up as usual to the roof.
This time, Billy is surprised to find a man there.
They see each other, the man and Billy, as soon as Billy steps out of the stairwell. Billy feels he’s been caught at something, and then remembers he hasn’t. He wonders if he should turn back, but now the man calls out: “Hey there!”
The man waves his hand in the air as if to get Billy’s attention, though he already has it.
Billy waves back. The daylight is gone, so Billy can’t very well discern the features of the man’s face or his expression, but there is enough ambient light to see that he is youngish-middle-aged, very tall but decidedly pear-shaped, with an oversized cylindrical head, long arms, and large hands. He wears thick, dark-rimmed glasses much like Ms. Lindstrom’s only in a heavier, more masculine style. Billy has been warned about the so-called Son of Sam, who killed a bunch of people, and wonders for just a moment if maybe this is him. Interestingly, however, there is a large telescope on a tall tripod next to the man, pointed diagonally up at the sky. A cooler sits in close triangulation with the telescope and a short stool, and is strategically placed under
the telescope so that a tall man with long arms can sit comfortably with his eye to the lens and still have access to it. For the moment, however, the man is standing, a bottled beer in hand.
“How’s it going?” the man says. Billy is still thirty feet away, so the man is hollering. He has a strong New York accent. “Just taking some night-sky photos! With the telescope! Doug Van Buren! What’s your name?”
“Billy!”
“I’m Doug!” he repeats. “Stargazing! Just a hobby, y’know! They say you can’t see much in New York cause of all the light from the buildings, but you can see the moon, and most of the planets! Lookin’ at Venus! Can see just fine!”
Billy waits. For a moment the man seems at a loss for what to say next.
“Want to see one of the planets through a telescope?” he bellows.
“Okay!” Billy says.
“Well, c’mere then!” the man’s voice continues, softening as Billy gets closer, until it is rational-conversational. “Don’t be shy. I live here in the building. Fifteen-oh-two. I’m a professor. City University. Teach astrophysics. But this here is called ‘astronomy,’ actually.” His face is heavily pockmarked. The gregarious tone of his voice belies a sad uncertainty in his eyes, which Billy can now see through the shroud of evening shadows and the watery distortion of his thick eyeglasses. “Funny, I haven’t seen you around the building before. Your parents know you’re here?”
Billy has affixed his eye to the telescope, through which he sees what looks like a round, fuzzy, brilliant-white star. His little heart palpitates. He feels an urgent desire to be on that planet, to stand on its surface, and look back at Professor Van Buren, who naturally should be waving at him from the rooftop on Earth where he had stood just a moment before.
“Your folks know you’re up here?” the professor repeats.
Billy leans away from the telescope, looks up at the professor, and shakes his head.
“You don’t talk much, do ya, kid. I’d offer you a beer but, well, if I had to guess , you aren’t eighteen yet. Where’s your mom and dad?”
Billy shrugs and lowers his head to look back through the telescope, bumping it in the process.
“Hey, that’s a very delicate telescope, and it belongs to the university. I’m borrowing it, okay? So that’s Venus, there. Venus is not a star, it’s a planet, and it’s real hot and it gives off a lot of light because it’s
covered by clouds, the whole thing. We can’t even see the surface. Kinda reminds me of my ex-wife. Ever do any stargazing?”
Billy shakes his head. But now, he pulls his own camera from his pocket, and holds it up toward the professor, who takes it and, onehandedly, looks it over.
“Oh, sure, I have one of these. Nice camera for its size. You like taking pictures, huh?” He hands the camera back. “Well, as it happens, I was about to hook up the camera attachment and start taking some pictures, myself.”
Billy says nothing.
“Wanna take a picture of Venus?”
November 1979
Nine years old as he is, Billy is taken with his new teacher. It may be her kindness, her attentiveness, or any of several other qualities so antithetical to those of his mother. It may have been the unexpected birthday cake. It may also be the fact that her manner of dress does nothing to accentuate nor to conceal the delineation of her figure, the very appealing shape of which is only beginning to test aspects of his imagination that, outside the context of Steve’s running commentary on his mother, he had not found extensive use for to that point in his existence.
Ms. Lindstrom, in her own way, is taken with Billy as well. As it turns out, his initial impression of her was partly mistaken: she is not so calm and collected as she’d seemed at first, but is in fact a nervous, fussy teacher, uncertain of herself, inexperienced, and rarely in full control of the classroom. Although many of the kids listen, behave, and participate, there are enough who recognize that she is not a commanding personality, and ignore her or talk back to her at their whim.
As if in attempt to balance out her struggles, Billy has now made himself into a model of good behavior: he’s stopped stealing, does all his homework, and has even taken it upon himself to get into physical scraps with the worst of her antagonists, all of whom are larger than himself.
Ms. Lindstrom has not failed to notice. She lights up a little every time he speaks to her, not least because he hardly speaks to anyone. He can see the gratitude in her eyes each time he promptly sits down when she asks him to. On one occasion, when he looked up during study
hour, he saw her watching him from her desk. When she saw him look back at her, she smiled. Today, during just such a quiet moment, she approaches his desk and hands him one of her handwritten notes.
Billy has learned that Ms. Lindstrom, whenever she writes anything for the students, uses a stylized calligraphic lettering, often with two colors, one for the letters, and another for bordering, so that it takes her a long time to write even the simplest note. And despite that her class includes over thirty children, she often writes commentaries and encouragements on homework assignments and tests, all in the same elaborate script, complete with ornate flourishes, and often with careful doodles of flowers, puppies, or stars above, to each side of, or even interspersed within her texts.
Billy knows that this note, handed to him directly, means she wants to talk to him about something in private when school lets out. Indeed, it reads: BILLY, PLEASE RETURN THIS NOTE TO ME TODAY AT 3 O’CLOCK. To this, Ms. Lindstrom has added a drawing of a kitten, with two dots for eyes, which is sitting under a clock—a perfect circle surrounded by lines of varied length radiating outward, indicating a glimmer or glow—showing three in the afternoon.
He is elated. Of course, after-school talks are usually reserved for kids who have misbehaved in some way, but Billy is certain he is not in any such trouble. His academic performance has been good and his behavior exemplary, so he is very curious as to what she wants to talk about.
When school lets out at 3 o’clock and all the other children have stampeded out of the room, he approaches Ms. Lindstrom and, as instructed, hands her note back toward her across her desk. He has never been alone with her before. He believes, having perceived her mild teacherly smile with his outsized, infatuation-skewed eyeballs, that she has looked forward to this meeting as much as he has. She takes the note back with her delicate fingers, and as she leans forward and back again, he catches an unbearably fleeting scent, something fragrant in her hair or on her clothes. The room hums with the silent absence of numerous recently present children.
“Thank you, Billy. I just wanted to ask you: Is everything alright at home? Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m okay,” he says, surprised and a bit embarrassed.
“Well, I notice you don’t talk much with the other kids. Would you say that’s true?”
Billy shrugs.
“And you seem a little sad. Are you feeling sad, Billy?”
The question itself makes him feel like crying.
“No,” he says.
She seems unconvinced. “Well, I still think I’d like to talk to your parents. I could call them at home. Would that be alright with you?”
“There’s just mom, and she’s not home a lot.”
“She isn’t?”
“I have a friend. But he’s forty-seven. He’s a professor.”
“Your friend is forty-seven?”
“You could talk to him.”
She pauses to give him a look of frank concern, and takes up a sheet of paper. “Well, I think I’d rather have a word with your mom. You say she’s not home a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. Can you write down your mother’s full name and your home phone number for me here?”
Billy scrawls his mother’s full name and his home number in gigantic print, and pushes the paper across the desk.
“Thank you, Billy. You know, I talked to Principal Lamas about you. He said he’s spoken with your mother before...”
At that moment, invoked like an otherworldly fuscous-hued presence by the mere mention of his name, Mr. Lamas sticks his head in the door, and asks to speak with Ms. Lindstrom in the hall. She excuses herself and walks out to confer with the principal, leaving Billy standing alone with the desk and her personal effects—a small stack of completed quizzes and other papers, her purse, and on the floor at one corner of the desk, a second bag, canvas, invitingly open, in which the corner of a magazine is visible. Billy circles to the side of the desk, leans, reaches, lifts the magazine out of the bag just enough to discover a plain printed sticker showing a mailing address. In one motion, he pulls the sticker off the magazine and folds it securely into his fist, letting the magazine drop back into the bag. He is standing back where he was, in front of the desk, just as the teacher comes back into the room.
“Sorry about that,” she says, now standing and gathering her things together.
“Ms. Lindstrom?”
“Yes?”
“Can I take a picture of you?”
“A picture? You have a camera?”
He takes his camera from his pocket.
“Hmm, so you do,” she says, now strapping both bags over her
shoulder. “Well, I have to warn you, I’m not very photogenic, but, alright, you can take a picture if you want.”
“Could you write your name on the blackboard like the first day of school, and then stand next to it? And undo your hair?”
The concerned look returns. “Wow, you really thought this out, didn’t you? Well, alright, but I’m going to leave my hair up. If that’s okay.”
Professor Van Buren’s apartment on 97th Street presents a mysterious, pungent medley of smells: of intellectual exercise, of hasty cleaning, of shaving cream, laundry, take-out containers, of masculine dust, masculine solitude. The professor claims to have shared this apartment with a wife, for years, but Billy can detect no remaining sign of her presence. The professor has books, everywhere—everything from large technical hardcover texts on physics to paperback sci-fi novels as well as multiple translations of the Tao te Ching and the I Ching. Cardboard boxes of unsorted records and cassettes sit near a large sound system and a larger TV. A small picture frame on the wall shows three symbols in Chinese calligraphy arranged in a vertical column on very old-looking paper. On the fridge, held by small magnets, are a postcard of a painting of Confucius, and a photograph of Richard Feynman, which partially obscures a printed card showing a Taoist poem:
The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home.
However splendid the views, he stays serenely in himself.
—Lao Tzu
Another picture, standing in a frame by the computer on the work desk, is of the professor himself, looking much younger, rather formally dressed but beaming with happiness, standing among several other people who are similarly dressed, his gaze turned to his right, a drink raised in that hand, his lips and teeth open—he is in the middle of bantering or laughing with someone out of the camera’s view—his left arm around the waist of a young woman who is wearing a black dress and has very long middle-parted blond hair, strikingly bird-like but very attractive features, and an intense but not-unhappy expression that is cast directly at the camera.
Billy comes in the late afternoon, after the professor gets home, where he is free to sit and watch TV, or play records on the turntable, or look at the professor’s Playboy and Penthouse magazines to his heart’s content while the professor grades undergraduate physics papers or works on his research. Sometimes the professor helps him with his homework, after which he orders out pizza or Chinese for them. They eat in front of the TV, usually watching sci-fi shows or old Kurosawa films. And some evenings after dinner, if the weather is clear, they put on their coats and ascend the stairs to the roof with the telescope and a cooler full of bottled beer and watch the stars until about nine p.m., at which time the professor sends Billy home.
Naturally, the professor has inquired as to the whereabouts of Billy’s parents. Billy avoided answering at first, but then told the professor that he hadn’t seen his father in three years and that his mother doesn’t worry over the details of his whereabouts. The professor offered to call Billy’s mother, if only to let her know that her son was safe and sound—curiously, he also inquired as to her name and “what’s she like?” and whether she had a boyfriend—but Billy said there was no point, and the professor did not press the issue.
Tonight, they are on the roof, the professor in winter coat and hat and Billy wearing his oversized windbreaker, both seated on short stools, in triangulation with the telescope.
Billy hands Doug a photo of Ms. Lindstrom standing by the blackboard, gesturing toward her name carefully written thereon, smiling self-consciously, her hair tied back as usual. The professor has to angle the photo toward the nearest light source, a dull light over the roof’s exit, to see it.
“Well,” the professor says, “I can see why you like her. ‘Ms. Lindstrom,’ huh? Nice handwriting! Divorced? Jeez, and she looks so young. Well, I guess my wife wasn’t much past thirty when we got divorced. It happens.”
In so many words, Billy explains to the professor that, lately, Ms. Lindstrom has not been herself. He is worried about her. She has seemed irritable and tired. She often loses track of time, even in class, and she has been late in the morning a couple of times. He thinks she tries too hard and he is worried she will be fired.
“Well,” the professor says, now holding the photo by his knee, “I doubt they’ll fire her. It takes a lot to get fired as a public school teacher. Besides, from what you’re telling me, she’s trying her best and she cares about kids, and that counts for a lot, even if she screws up in other ways. It sounds to me like she could use some meditation. Or
Taoism. Or a drink. You know, she’s gotta relax.”
“Taoism?”
“Yeah, remember? On the fridge?”
“Oh, that.”
Billy holds an open hand out toward his photo. The professor hands it back.
“Say, Bill, it’s almost eight o’clock. Don’t you need to get going home soon?”
“Nah.”
“Well, alright, but you’re gonna have to skedaddle soon. Not that I mind you being here. Married for seven years and we never had kids, so, ah, it’s sorta nice having you around. Anyway, I think I’m gonna go use the bathroom, maybe find a snack. Watch the telescope till I get back?”
Billy nods.
“You sure you don’t want a soda? Or a beer?”
Billy nods again. The professor chuckles.
“I’ll be back.”
Professor Van Buren lumbers past, opens the door to the stairwell, which pours out light onto the rooftop, and darkens again as he disappears inside.
Billy waits a moment. Then he stands, steps up to the telescope, unhooks the attached camera, sets it down, disconnects the telescope from the tripod, sets it down quickly but carefully by the camera, unlatches the brace that holds open the tripod, gently enfolds the legs in his arms and collapses them closed, and sets all the parts in their big silver-colored case, which lies near the cooler. He closes and latches the case, lifts it by its handle—it is quite large, and exactly as heavy as he’d imagined—and lugs it to the same stairwell. He carries it all the way down, past the professor’s floor, down to the lobby, out of the building and onto the street without looking back.
Fifteen minutes later, Billy Marks, eyes soaking in the gray fluorescence, dark hair akimbo like something that might at any moment detach itself and flee in search of its own destiny, sits on the northbound C train, the telescope in its large silver case on the filthy floor in front of him, not at all noticing the curious glances of the other several subway car passengers, whose perfect anonymity—the sublime forgettableness of their features and the sense they were born and continue to move about without the benefit of thoughts or personalities—is intensified by the discomfort of mutual temporary
trapped-togetherness in the dank underground.
He wonders if Doug will call the police. Then he wonders if his mother has found him missing and wonders where he is. The thought makes him angry. The subway doors open and he steps off the train and up the platform stairs to the street, his eyes cast down so as not to see the night and the pale streetlights and the owners of adult voices, silvery telescope case in hand, hatless hair absorbing the bitter night air.
He stops at a pay phone, digs a dime from his pocket, and calls the professor.
“Hello?” Doug answers. “Billy?”
“Yeah.”
“Billy, what the hell are you doing? You can’t just take people’s...”
“I’m not home. This is a pay phone.”
“Billy, what the heck? I thought we had an understanding, here.”
“Could you call my mother?”
“What?”
“I’ll bring it back. But will you call my mother?”
“Why didn’t you call her?”
“I don’t know.”
There’s a pause. “Okay, fine. Crazy kid.” The professor’s voice softens: “You know, you left your backpack here.”
“I’ll get it later.”
“Okay. Good. What is it you want me to tell her?”
Billy hangs up.
Earlier that morning, just before his alarm clock went off, somewhere between sleep and waking, Billy curled into a tiny ball under his blanket and half-dreamed, half-imagined that Ms. Lindstrom was sitting next to him where he usually sits by himself—on the floor of his room, near the bed—she in sheer black robe embroidered with pink floral patterns, leaning on one arm, her bare lower legs folded next to her, and he in his pajamas, the same ones he was actually wearing, the two of them looking together at a large photo album—and in particular, a short series of close-up photos of a pigeon in its nest—her hair down, finally down, almost touching his face as they lean toward the open album, her bare legs and feet close to him, the robe slipping by gentle accident off her closest shoulder, the two of them turning to one another, her lips slightly parted, whispering, “Billy...we mustn’t... I ...”
He silenced the shrill interruption of the alarm clock, spilled like
a liquid slowly out of bed and flat onto the floor, where he lay on his belly for a long while—he could hear his mother and Steve arguing in the kitchen—before contorting into a sitting position on the floor, removing his pajamas, gathering his clothes and shoes, dressing himself, and emerging from his room with his jacket and his backpack.
Theirs is an open apartment, with no separation between kitchen, living room, dining room. The slight echo of the high ceiling recalls school field trips to museums and libraries. His mother was there, preparing breakfast in the kitchen, her back to him, with Steve idling at the table nearby, coffee mug in hand, looking peeved. Steve was already dressed in his expensive suit for work. He saw Billy but offered no greeting. His mother was still in her pink-striped white PJs. Steve had been in the tanning bed recently and his supernatural orangebrown color, offset by the colors that comprised the rest of reality, was especially unsettling at such an early hour.
“Morning,” his mother said, with forced cheer, as she turned and put a plate on the table. “Here’s pancakes and bacon for you.” She turned her back again to fix plates for herself and Steve. “Get yourself some OJ.”
It was unclear what they were fighting about, but they had now made a point of not talking to one another. As soon as Billy sat, Steve checked his designer wristwatch, and stood up.
“I’m gonna go, Lyd,” Steve said.
“Go,” Lydia said, keeping her back to him.
Steve gaped helplessly at Lydia’s behind, and stood where he was.
“On toppa everything else, you made me late again.”
Now she turned, greasy spatula in hand. “Made you late? I made you breakfast, you jackass.”
“Mom, did my teacher call you?” Billy said, holding his fork upright, not eating.
“What, hon?”
“I told you I was fine with cereal,” Steve said, gesturing at the table. “You made pancakes and bacon.”
“I told you, I made it for Billy.”
“Mom...?”
“No, Billy,” she had another plate of food in one hand now, the spatula in the other. “I don’t think your teacher called me.”
“For Chrissakes,” Steve said. “The kid could’ve just had cereal, too.”
Lydia shook her head, regarding Steve with contempt.
“Just go, Steve.”
“Lyd...”
“And tell Mike I’m not coming in today. In fact, tell him I quit.”
Billy stood, took his plate in both hands, and with a shocking crash, smashed it to pieces on the floor. Lydia and Steve both flinched and stood staring at him, utterly stunned.
He quickly took his backpack and jacket, left the pile of pancakes, bacon, and shattered plate on the floor, and walked past Steve and Lydia toward the door.
“Hey!” Steve said.
“Billy!” Lydia said. “Where do you think you’re going? Get back here!”
He slammed the apartment door behind him.
Now he walks four or five blocks to a specific corner, and here lifts his face and looks up at the row of third-floor windows—the buildings are shorter than those in his own neighborhood—and especially the thirdfloor window at the corner of the building, where a light is on.
He turns away from her building to the building directly across the street, where he enters a cold, cramped vestibule, his way blocked by a firmly locked inner door. He rings a few of the buzzers at random on the intercom, and manages to convince one of the very irritable, elderly, Spanish-speaking residents to buzz him in, only to discover that there is no access to the roof through the building stairwell.
He comes back out, and discovers an alley in back, and an old, cast-iron fire escape that extends upward all the way to the roof. Fortunately, a large dumpster stands close enough under the ladder that Billy can climb up on top of it and reach the bottom. As he pulls it, the ladder lowers, all at once, with a grinding sound, metal-onmetal, and comes to a ringing stop. The fire escape leads past three floors of windows, the first dimly lit and shaded, the second filled with crepuscular darkness, and the third showing an old couple going about their domestic business within—he has to be careful not to be seen or heard, all while carrying the bulky silver case—and finally, Billy steps onto the roof, a bare, sooty, shadowed area, where it looks like no human being has set foot in years. He unpacks the telescope, with camera attachment, and sets it up in the shadows, this time pointed slightly down, across the street at the third-floor corner window.
Almost as soon as he finishes setting up, she appears in the window, and, cold as it is, opens it. Billy fixes his eye to the telescope. The light in her room is dim, perhaps from a lamp in the far corner. She is wearing a sheer, white robe, colored with East Asian patterns. Billy
is so astonished at his good fortune that he nearly forgets to start taking the pictures. Her copper-red-brown hair is down, finally down, around her shoulders. She looks upset. He watches as she steps away from the window and stands looking at herself in her full-length bedroom mirror. The telescope is so powerful and so clear it’s as if he is standing right next to her, but also slightly behind and above. She speaks animatedly to her own reflection, as if furious, her hands balling into small fists. Her robe is tied at the waist, but very loose. He can hear her raised voice, distant and small, through her open window, even from across the street. He can see that her body is bare underneath the robe—from behind her, the round contour of her hip under the silk, and in her reflection, only partially revealed, the gentle slope of her throat and breast. She is in tears. With every movement she makes, the robe seems about to fall away. She stops speaking to her reflection, touching one hand to her eyes and brow. Now she turns and comes back to the window, and looking right up into his lens without actually seeing him, closes it, draws the shade. A moment later, the light is out. She does not appear again.
Billy is exhausted. Despite the pictures he’s captured, he is sad and cold, thinking as much of his mother and the professor as Ms. Lindstrom. He wants to go home. He unhooks the camera and sets it down, reaches back up for the telescope, unhooks it, begins to fold the legs of the tripod, and only realizes that he’s performed the process in the wrong order when the now-loose telescope slides forward off the stand, sails silently over the edge of the building, and plummets to the sidewalk.
The sound of the impact is no less shocking for being separated from him by three stories’ distance. There are not many pedestrians around, but those he can see have all stopped to look first toward the inexplicable wreckage, and then upward. Billy hides himself from view, slumps to the grungy surface of the roof, and sits perfectly still under the expanse of the reverberant dark of the New York night sky.
Two days later
It’s 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon. The bell has rung. Billy Marks sits and waits in his seat by the windows, watching as his fellow students rush out of the room with an urgency befitting their innate knowledge of the ephemeral nature of their weekend freedom. And she, sitting at her desk, and seeing him remaining in his chair, waits for the room to
clear, and the door to close, and speaks:
“Everything okay, sweetie?”
“I got in trouble. So did my mom.”
“Come here, tell me what happened.”
Billy rises, straps his oversized, overladen backpack over one shoulder, and approaches.
“Well, I stole a telescope. A really expensive one. From my friend Doug,” he says, and stands in front of her desk. “He’s a professor.”
“Yeah, you told me about him.”
“He called my mom and she called the police, and they came to our house. She’s the one who got in trouble because the police said it’s her job to watch me.”
“Yes, it is. You know, I spoke with her a few days ago.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She’s something else, your mom. It was like talking to a lawyer.”
“She is a lawyer. Sort of.”
She looks at him with the usual concern, but also as if she can’t think of anything to say.
“Miss Lindstrom, can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Are you divorced?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you seem sad a lot lately. Are you sad?”
“It’s really nice of you to ask, but...”
“Are you?”
“Yes, I’m divorced. And, sure, it’s a sad thing when people break up, but I’ll be okay. It takes time.”
She looks sad, though he is glad her eyes don’t well up and her voice doesn’t waver, which seems to happen easily sometimes.
“Here, Doug said maybe this will help.” Billy unshoulders his backpack, opens it, and produces a note on a single folded sheet of notebook paper, in his own handwriting. This, he hands to her across her desk. She unfolds it. It reads:
The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home.
However splendid the views, he stays serenely in himself.
—Lao Tzu
She laughs, gently, with surprise, and now the tears well in her eyes.
“You are a remarkable little boy, you know that?”
She hands the note back toward him.
“You keep it, Miss Lindstrom. Miss Lindstrom? Can I show you some pictures?”
“Sure, Billy, I’d like that,” she says, putting the poem in her purse, exchanging it for a tissue. With a louder sound than Billy expects, like a squeaky trumpet, she blows her nose. “These are pictures you took...?”
“Yeah,” Billy says, coming around the desk, unshouldering his bag again, pulling out an envelope filled with developed photos, and opening it in front of her on her desk. He stands as close as he can to her in her chair, and boldly presses his shoulder into hers. He feels her fingers touch his back as he shows her the first in his stack of photographs, a close-up, brilliantly clear picture of a single gray pigeon in its nest.
I DIDN’T REMEMBER MY CHILDHOOD
Faith Gómez Clark
Then pictures began to pop up like popcorn in the microwave of my skull. At first, I wanted to sit back. Relax. Enjoy the show. But the images were blurred. I couldn’t quite make out the characters. At least the feelings were clear. I felt things vividly in my body. Terror like giant jawbreakers in my chest. Loneliness, flamin’ hot in my heart. Sour worms of hunger squirming through my stomach. And there was this one character I felt really connected to. A small brown girl. I had that feeling. You know. When you meet someone for the first time and it’s like you’ve known them all your life? Like that. And I wished I could speak to her. One day, a new picture came up. Pop! Just like popcorn and I saw clearly my grandmother’s face. Her index finger with its Twizzler red nail polish pressed against tightly pursed lips.
I dream my mother and I go pick blueberries
Maddie Clevenstine
In the remaining day I watch the trees all tip toed spring out against other trees, backs bowed under Southern humidity bark like bones sawdusting through age. Here I try talking to grass but it says nothing back, stalks dancing their drowsy outstretched dance. Down the path I see my mother swallowing berries, fist full of mangled juice staining hands that particular blue, teeth discoloring into something unfamiliar. The back of her head almost the back of mine, freckled arms faded into landscape, heat pressed into our necks, sunburnt, hollowed skin. Here she knows offerings, puts open hand palm up asks if I’ve seen the branches acting as branches do, sun cast long in her face, the shadows eating all other shadows. She stays always five steps ahead but I know in this dream if I look too close I’ll see it: blueberries as eyes, fruit squished soft my mother never fully turning, juice running down her face, cheeks sticky. Around her ants crawling to feast, so fast I can’t bat them off, can’t pluck them from skin, my mother just standing there as the
ants make themselves a home, some crawling in her teeth, others sinking in her ears, others still making a path straight for her eyes, round and unblinking, watching me watch the ants, hands reaching towards her, hands dissolving into dirt, dirt dissolving under feet, the sky sinking, and then everything collapsing soil-blue.
A Scout is Trustworthy
Clark Gudas
Morris Callahan loved the scout camp rifle range. Every afternoon he leaned over his .22 to fire bullets into a dirt mound rife with devil’s bite, and every night he crawled into his tent with quiet satisfaction, his calluses torn and eyes raw with smoke. He was a Life Scout and would be forever because he was eighteen, too old to earn the coveted Eagle rank. “Just like Bill Gates,” he said from the shooting table next to me. Bill Gates probably didn’t steal bullets from the range, though, not like Morris, who slipped shells from the chamber when the Rifle Master wasn’t looking. I planned to rat him out once he unloaded the gun and couldn’t shoot me. I aimed downrange and fired. Bang.
When I retrieved my paper target, the score disappointed me: 5/50 points, shots scattered like a constellation. The gunsmoke smelled heavier than my mom’s nicotine.
“You aren’t pushing the butt into your shoulder,” Morris said. He was tapping holes into his target with a pencil, one for each unfired bullet.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting my rifle badge,” he said, lips split in a toothy grin.
I shrugged him off. I believed justice would surely come from the spittle-firing lips of Rifle Master Daniels. But Daniels was turned away, bowing to the industrial fan like it offered benediction. He handed five more bullets to each of us and we shot again. Again Morris pocketed the bullets. I pushed the butt into my shoulder and shot a 35/50.
“See?” Morris said, pencil-poking a 46.
“Master Daniels!” I shouted. Daniels peeled himself from the fan and approached while Morris cursed under his breath and threw his pencil down. He tried shoving shells back in the gun, but his fingers were clumsy with panic, and I felt a strange pity. It was important that scum like Morris got caught. At the same time, he trusted me, and I liked being trustworthy.
“What, Meggler?” Daniels asked.
The last time I lied was at breakfast when I folded my hands and prayed with the troop: I thank thee O Lord for this meal, amen.
“Gun’s jammed,” I said.
“What’s protocol?”
“Wait 30 seconds, pull the trigger, see what happens.”
“Why’d you bother me if you knew?” Daniels asked. He patted my back so hard I nearly fired, then he returned to the fan.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Morris asked. I didn’t answer because the shells bulging in his pockets caught the light and made me wince. The walk back to our campground was silent and tense, and of all the things I wanted to ask, I asked:
“Why are you in the scouts if you can’t be an Eagle?”
“Ethics, leadership, and self-esteem,” Morris said, sneer on his face, bullets jingling in his pockets.
Back at camp, my sort-of-friend Genrick was eating contraband Little Debbies in the tent we’d pitched between a fallen oak and an oak with leaves that rustled like Lake Michigan. I told him about the bullets. He recited the Scout Law to me with one hand up in the three-finger scout salute, the other crinkling a brownie wrapper. “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent,” he said. “Morris isn’t any of those.”
“Doesn’t it feel impossible? To be even one of them all the time?”
“Someone who isn’t trustworthy all the time isn’t trustworthy.”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“Morris broke real laws. Not just the scout ones. You ought to tattle.”
Genrick had points. I laced my boots and left the tent, ready to let a scoutmaster handle the issue. But in the clearing I saw Morris, sunlit, teaching a group of Tenderfoots how to use magnifying glasses for their woodburning projects. He moved from scout to scout, providing tips and pointers and high-fives when they got the sun to burn marks on their maple slabs. A couple scoutmasters watched from a distance with their arms crossed in satisfaction, grins tucked under their mustaches. Morris saw me and waved. I waved back. Then I unlaced my boots, entered my tent, and layed down to think.
Since the sixth grade, the scouts offered guidance wherever the church didn’t: in a fight against hypothermia, I put my hands on my balls. I perform CPR until the medics arrive. I tie slipknots for does and cleat hitches for flags. The more I volunteered for the scout’s coat drives and river cleanups, the more my pastor’s idea of goodness confused me–I had to be loyal to a guy who got credit for my good works? Come on. For six years, I had been hoping the scout program would teach me everything I needed to become a man. For six years, it had. Then Morris came along and made me feel like a little boy again.
In the second week of scout camp, my woodworking badge workshop met just after breakfast, when dew clung thick to the grass. Morris attended in full Class A attire: a beige button-up with the American flag on its shoulder and green khaki pants. After a quick safety course, we started whittling at our wooden blocks. Mine would take the form of an eagle with sharp talons, textured plumage, and a golden beak like a bell. The Whittling Master said this was too complex, even for an experienced whittler like me, but I didn’t care. The Eagle rank had been my dream since I joined the program. Every Eagle I’ve known had this air of inevitability about his life; there was a forward-looking spirit in his regimen I didn’t find in the clutter of my mom’s house. Other scouts would clap when I pinned the medal to my uniform. I just needed the woodworking badge.
Morris whittled in a shaded corner of the clearing near me. “Going to be an Eagle?” he asked. “Going to spread your wings and fly?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Just like J.F. fucking K.?”
I hadn’t thought about my equivalence to JFK (rest in peace). I hadn’t even thought about leaving Indiana yet. He scooted closer, within range of my open pocketknife—a dangerous violation of whittling rules. I rotated my blade and made a fuss of bumping the safe end against his shoulder. “You’re in my blood circle,” I said.
“I’m talking, pussy.” He kept whittling. I could barely hear him above the stress of being seen in each other’s blood circles. “Real good you didn’t snitch yesterday.”
“What you did was illegal.”
“Ever heard of Robin Hood? I’m giving ammo to people who work forty hours a week and still hunt to put dinner on the table.”
“Yeah right,” I said. “It’s 1991. Nobody needs to hunt anymore.”
“You got a girl, Meggler?”
“No,” I said, but I imagined Tyra next to me, dandelions behind her ears, wearing a grass wreath I had woven. She was always walking around in the back of my mind. I whittled hard and chipped a splinter into my finger. “Darn it.”
“You do,” Morris said. “What’s her name?”
“Tyra.”
“You kiss?”
“We’re just friends. We don’t kiss.”
“Holy hell, Meggler, then what do you do? We’re fixing this. Give me her number and I’ll ask her to camp,” he said. “We’ll have a party. And we’ll forget all about the bullets.”
“An Eagle would never,” I said. There were rules against camp visitors. There was a code of conduct prohibiting such clandestine acts. But even as I said no , my body shouted yes .
“True Eagles would spread their wings and fly,” Morris said. He carved chunks out of his cedar block and angled the relief toward me: it looked like a skull split in pieces.
Camp life separated Morris and me for days at a time, but the fantasy of Tyra became a fixture of my summer. Snare drums rolled in distant clearings, and I wanted her to hum a tune with them; in the slow afternoons, I fantasized about spraying Bugs-B-Gone at each other in a scene of youthful spontaneity before washing the pesticide off in the camp pool. I started flexing in the locker room mirror after swim sessions so I could see what Tyra might: a boy not quite scrawny, not quite big, but a healthy promise, an Eagle-to-be. Imagining us alone had me so riled I could barely sleep. I wanted her to see me in my Class A uniform. I wanted her to touch the muscles underneath.
During our next rifle session, Morris slipped an entire cartridge’s worth of ammo into his cargo shorts. He gave me a nod. I shook my head and turned back to my target. Aimed downrange. Fired.
His whittling wasn’t a split skull after all; it was a hammer and sickle, like the one my mom taped to the dartboard at the bar. When the Whittling Master saw the design, he marched Morris to the camp supervisors, but not before Morris could knock a pot of cobbler to the ground in contempt. It was a sorry sight: golden pie crust flaked the grass and flies swarmed the heap of buttered peaches. I asked the Eagles among us, who were supposed to be prepared for anything, what to do. They shrugged their shoulders. Frustrated, I volunteered Genrick and me to clean up the mess.
“He’s nuts,” Genrick said. “I heard him masturbating in the latrine last night.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.
Genrick didn’t laugh. “You need to stop talking to him. You’re on a slippery slope.”
When Morris returned for dinner, I sat at his table, and Genrick followed, probably because he had no other friends. “Why’d you whittle the hammer and sickle?” I asked.
“I’m a communist,” he said. I gasped, and Genrick pushed himself from the table with a blood-curdling screech of his chair.
“Take off that flag,” he said, pointing to the patch of stars and stripes sewn on Morris’s uniform.
“I’m a patriot, Genrick.”
“Of what? An evil empire full of gulags?”
“Of what we could be. A country that lives up to its values. Love, equality.”
“Hippie,” Genrick said.
“Genrick, come on. A scout is kind,” I said.
Morris smiled at me. “Here’s someone who lives up to his values,” he said.
Morris’s communism was glaring the next morning when we gathered in soldierly, straight lines before the flag for reveille and the pledge. Fog ate up the clearing and the halyard clanged against the pole in twanging thrums. Morris stood next to me. He didn’t salute for reveille, and he didn’t place his hand on his heart for the pledge. “I pledge allegiance, to the flag,” I said in unison with the scoutly mass. Morris wasn’t saying the words. I wanted to spur him to speak, because surely the scoutmasters could sense his lack of pledge-saying. In rhythm with the rite, I said, “If you actually love our country, then silence is offensive, and disrespectful.”
“It’s just a piece of cloth,” he said, out of rhythm and loudly. I was ready to argue but instead I gasped. I muttered through the rest of the pledge, voice weak, lips less sure of the words stumbling out. At the end, I regained some semblance of patriotism. But I omitted “under God,” and it felt good.
The summer dragged on. I sweated. I dreamed of Tyra. Genrick insisted the only honorable choice was to drag Morris into the light of justice, and while I agreed theoretically, Morris defied practical judgments. After the Fourth of July fireworks, he snuck the Tenderfoots and me to a cornfield beyond Camp Tecumseh and taught us how to make firecrackers. A shower of orange sparks lit their gleeful faces and Morris’s proud grin. On my seventeenth birthday, Genrick cooked me a cobbler, and on my birthnight, Morris gave me a cigarette. “Being sober sucks,” he said. Late July, Morris and I picked blackberries on the old train line, cooked a jam over the campfire, and shared it with the troop. When they spread that jam on warm toast and ate, nodding like it was their entire world for just one moment, I wondered if I should forgive Morris and move on. He broke rules, but there was a sense to it. There was an order.
August came, and with it, scout camp neared its end. I tried to focus on the pull strokes of my woodworking project, tried to carve with the grain so I could whittle something worthy of the Eagle rank. But I wasn’t focused. I thought about Morris’s offer constantly: give me her
number, and I’ll ask her to camp . I hadn’t seen Tyra all summer, and I missed her like the June bloom, when I could shake a maple’s limb and whirlybirds fluttered down.
I caved on poker night. I wrote her number on my half-smoked birthday cigarette and threw it in the pot, mostly candy and pennies. Genrick was fuming, unhappy that his air mattress was host to illicit gambling, doubly unhappy because he wasn’t any good. He bet a Little Debbie to match my cigarette, then folded shortly after. I folded too, let Morris sweep up the winnings. He must have seen the number, because he pocketed the cigarette, pulled a massive, coal black satellite telephone from his duffel, and stood to unzip the tent flap.
“Cashing out? Or redistributing?” Genrick asked.
“Gotta spread those wings,” Morris said, grinning giddy, and gave me a slap on the back. Within the hour, the plan was set. Tyra would visit camp late the next night.
The last full day of camp was eggs and bacon, bonfire smoke, green maples on the pond’s edge. Despite a summer of patience, practice and effort, my wood carving of the eagle was not very good. It scared me. Its wiry neck led to a boulderlike torso, and the beak stuck out like a pyramid. Apparently, it was good enough for the Woodworking badge. With the badge on my sash, I satisfied every requirement for my Eagle rank—all I had to do was pin the medal to my uniform the next afternoon. Genrick congratulated me without looking in my eyes.
“I don’t get why you never tattled on Morris,” he said. “You know he doesn’t say the pledge?”
“It’s just a piece of cloth,” I said.
“It’s still the flag.” He was silent for a long time, frowning, looking at me like he wanted to hear a list of all that America had done for him. I didn’t know what to say. I shared some of the cookies Morris and I had stolen from the mess hall.
Scouts and scoutmasters patted my butt in congratulations. They asked about my future. I told them: apply to Harvard and study engineering, though I didn’t want to study engineering anymore, I just needed to sound like my life would be interesting. The only future I could think of was the coming evening with Tyra. When Morris knocked on my tent flap in the black of night, I donned my boots and tried to get off the air mattress without waking Genrick. I failed. “Huh?” Genrick said.
“Latrine,” I said. I left and crept among the tents with Morris. Must have been three in the morning. We were silent as we walked to the camp gate where Tyra would be waiting. I wanted to ask Morris about
girlfriends, how does it work, what do I say, but I didn’t want to seem uncool, so I said nothing. We turned the corner around a thicket of maples and entered into the clearing where I finally found Tyra, tall and freckled, laying on the hood of her car. She was stargazing, her hair in a bun, flip flops dangling from her toes. To see her at camp seemed impossible, like a fantasy from my dreams, and I ran to her for a hug and hello before straightening my sash of badges against my Class A uniform.
“Stan, you look like a dweeb,” she said.
“I’m an Eagle,” I said. “I’m a man now.” Tyra smirked and turned to Morris.
“Don’t look at me, I’m just a Life Scout,” Morris said.
The two of them laughed, laughing for so long that my face reddened, and the silhouettes of the trees began to feel like claws, my sash a constricting belt. What did I do wrong? Tyra must have noticed my distress, because she pulled me into her arms and patted my head. “You’re okay, my sweet puppy. You’re a man, you’re a man.”
We roamed the campground in the darkness. Tyra told me about her family in Birmingham, her brother recovering from alcoholism. Eventually we wandered onto the camp rifle range. In the night’s eerie stillness, where distant coyotes howled and all that was close was silent, I imagined all the bullets that had ripped through the spot where I stood. Tyra said the place felt like a skinhead bootcamp.
Morris took a cigarette to the hill downrange and fell against it, pluming smoke. Tyra and I stayed behind, talking slowly and walking in circles, sometimes bending over the grass to listen to grasshoppers. The quiet was electric. Did she notice how close we stood, how her moonlit shadow fell on my pants? Alone with her, pointing finger guns at lightning bugs downrange, I was nervous and breathless, trembling on the edge of my life. When the smell of Morris’s cigarette reached us–skunky and acrid–we realized it wasn’t a cigarette at all, and we left the range.
“You’re friends with him ?” Tyra asked.
“He’s a bad scout but a good guy.”
Outside the camp general store was a freezer that hadn’t been locked. Inside was a trove of ice cream tacos in foil wrappers, glinting in the moonlight. “Want one?” I asked.
“That’s stealing,” Tyra said. “You never steal.”
“Do you want it?”
Tyra smiled. “I like this new you,” she said. She reached for the ice cream at the same time I leaned in to kiss her. She kissed back,
giggling underneath it, and then we pulled away and kissed again. At first, I felt the scorching pang of hell and my scoutmaster’s disappointment wrapping around me. Tyra displaced them. Our bodies were perfect complements, groove against groove, and the motions came to us, easy like a breeze. She kissed like this was it, us, here, now, everything feeling warm and slow. Eventually her finger slipped under the waistband of my Hanes and traced a line from hip to hip.
“This cool?” she asked.
Her touch was warm, sweeping across my skin, it was a blessing like communion wine. “You tell me,” I said, and Tyra took my hand and guided it to her flimsy green blouse. I unbuttoned her quickly, then slowly, methodically, like I was whittling. She squeezed my bicep, and I was in a dream, a warm sweet daze in an impossible paradise, and I wanted it to last forever, so I said, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
Tyra extricated her hands. Not until she pulled away did I realize I was clawing her shoulder, latching on with such intensity that she was wincing. She didn’t say yes or no, just buttoned her shirt, and she didn’t want to kiss anymore, so we settled in the grass against the side of the store. I used what remained of my Lutheran shame to strangle my wants and play it cool. She landed in the crook of my neck, and I cradled my chin atop her head. I hoped to hold her there for a long time, as long as the moonlight would let me.
She said, “I’m going to Stanford, you know.”
“And?”
“We’ll have a hard time seeing each other.”
“I’ll buy a car. I’ll learn to drive. On breaks we can meet halfway, in Colorado.”
Tyra traced circles on my chest. “I don’t know, Stanley. I think, if you really liked me, you would’ve congratulated me first.”
“Oh. Congrats.”
I spent the night with my arm over Tyra’s shoulder, gazing into the forest, wondering if I would ever feel this good again. At sunrise, she dusted off her pants, and we walked to her car. She still didn’t want to kiss. We hugged and said some shy things about seeing each other again before she drove away, muffler puffing smoke.
Even as her car struggled over the hill, I felt her there with me, stuck in the lines in my fingers. I thought, forget the scouts . I would have hopped in that car and gone anywhere with her if she had asked. In the damp cool, striding under oaks and crunching pinecones, I wondered how I would thank Morris for this. I had done everything
right that summer because it had culminated in kissing Tyra.
Everyone at camp was still asleep, except for Genrick. As I slipped through my tent flap, yawning and bleary-eyed, I found him sitting upright, a headlamp strapped to his forehead, a bag of .22 caliber bullets in his lap. The metallic shells clinked as he picked them up and threw them into the valleys of the air mattress.
He nodded to the open flap of Morris’s tent. “He’s eighteen, Stanley. Adults go to jail.”
Jail was a heavy word, a gavel. I rubbed my eyes, delirious with exhaustion and riled with shock. “Let’s put them back and not tell anybody.”
“He’s a bad person, Stan. You are too.”
“But he’s giving those bullets to people who have to hunt to eat.”
“Nobody does that anymore. This is America.”
Not knowing what else to do, I reached for the bullets.
“SCOUTMASTER!” Genrick shouted. I punched his arm, and he punched back before shouting again, and we tussled for a moment before I shoved him off to zip the tent closed. Across the clearing, a scoutmaster grumbled, a tent unzipped, and a pair of footsteps grew louder in approach.
“Apologize for replacing me with Morris and I’ll pretend you didn’t know,” Genrick said.
Bullets covered the air mattress, too many to pick up, too many to explain away. Footsteps crunched across the grass. Sleep-deprived and afraid, I rushed into an idea I had only half-formed. “I’ll say they’re yours.”
“What?”
“It must have taken you months to steal this many.”
“Morris stole these,” Genrick said. He clenched his jaw. “No one will believe you.”
“They will. I’m an Eagle Scout.”
“But you’re you , Stan. You’re chicken. You’re bluffing.”
“Scout’s honor I’m not,” I said.
“What the heck’s got you screaming?” our scoutmaster said. His shadow loomed over the tent door. “Hello? Anyone alive?”
Genrick and I watched each other. He bared his teeth. I closed my eyes. Dawn had lit the treetops where robins and finches were singing.
“I’m fine,” Genrick said. “I had a bad dream.”
“Can you open up, let me see you’re not pale as a ghost?”
“I’m not dressed,” Genrick said. “Give me five minutes?”
The scoutmaster was silent for a moment, then he cracked his neck. “Challenge yourself next time,” he said, walking away. “You can handle these things yourself.”
Genrick and I sat motionless until he was gone, then we picked up the bullets, one at a time, so they didn’t clink. I tried to apologize, but Genrick just said fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Afterward we laid on opposite ends of the air mattress, waiting for a sign of the universe’s verdict, maybe for a scoutmaster to catch us after all. A little after sunrise, Morris knocked on the tent. “You fellas seen my bag?”
Genrick opened the flap and handed the bullet bag to him. “I wanted to tell,” he said. “I didn’t.”
Morris took it and inspected the contents. “Cool.” He ran back to his tent and returned with his communist whittling, which he must have finished outside of class. It was better formed than my project, with a hammer that slid in and out of the sharp, smooth-planed sickle. He offered the hammer to Genrick and the sickle to me. “Comrades like us stay together,” Morris said with a wink.
I accepted the token. Genrick didn’t. “Comrade” seemed to cloud over him with a stormy muteness that no peach cobbler, no water balloon fight, no Little Debbie could fix. When we recited the Scout Law at breakfast, he spoke like he was looking for the luster in the words, and when we packed our tent, he seemed too tired to withstand even the wind that rustled the boughs. Each time he told me to go fuck myself, I tried to remain calm, because I had been there. I understood. That afternoon, I pinned the Eagle medal to my uniform, and the scouts applauded, whistling and woohooing. Receiving their praise after six years of imagining it, I felt no pride or shame. If I told my mom what I did that summer, she might have grinned between pulls of beer. If I showed Tyra the medal, she might have laughed. I looked at Morris, I looked at Genrick, and I thought: I’m an Eagle, sure.
There is So Much Dust on the Venetian Blinds
Francine Witte
Listen, no one is coming to touch them. My mother took her fingers when she died. Her house was never clean enough either.
But that’s not the reason I didn’t have friends, or at least the kind that would want to sleep over.
One time, I invited my whole class over to a record party. We were doing the twist that year, tiny corkscrews in the cafeteria.
I was surprised when no one showed up, and the next day, a girl told me why nobody likes my house.
She said she heard that my father throws things.
I might have explained that sometimes he gets mad at the television, and sometimes my mother is standing in front of it.
Those nights, my mother would slip a thimble of wine into her coffee, turn a butterknife in my father’s direction when she thought I wasn’t looking. Then she would walk over to the window, which was dusty and filthy.
She’d open the metal slats of the Venetian blinds. She’d seem surprised that she couldn’t really see anything.
Suddenly I Was Grabbed by A Sailor
Dyson Smith
I am telling you again about this repeating nightmare where I’m drunk driving my blue 2005 Jeep Gladiator back to the bar backing into a spot already occupied by an O nine Volkswagen. and I never feel the impact but always back into and crush the buggy’s headlights. Smearing around its high beams with my license plate leaving glass disarrayed, decorating the asphalt with sparklesand I enjoyed picking up those shards. letting them run through my hands only to fall to concrete again. After I finish celebrating the mess I’ve made I always get back in the car and put it back in reverse
every time you listen with such intensity to the point where you can walk me through my own dream in greater detail than i told it i love watching you talk over our morning coffee seeing that you believe in what i have to say love this time together in communication with each other you feed me what’s in the cabinet help me tie my shoes sometimes your earrings complement your eyes and even if they didn’t they still would it’s an unbreathable sight to watch you put on
your foundation your big heart necklace in the morning i’ll share my cigarettes you could be the poster child for any indoctrination and id join with cultish fever you we can bathe each other put each other to bed sanitize each others welts sneak behind eachothers back end up in the same place waive the lease on one of our apartments or what apartment even is it and call it in squeeze the pus out of each other’s abscesses try again all of this is to say i am terrified of the near future where we will not be in each other’s immediacy truthfully there was never a nightmare i dont dream much and never owned a truck or saw one in any night terror truthfully i framed it all the nightmares chronology the face i made after waking up in hopes that it would bring us closer and you’d have the decency to be concerned for me and stick around a little longer truthfully i almost proposed before i left for texas but couldnt bring myself to do that to us and im sitting alone in a dennys at 3am yes you were never here ive been talking outloud inside but i want you still like the navy man returning from war kissing his beloved on the picture overhanging the clock at dennys
I put myself back in the driver’s seat
Of my 2005 Jeep Gladiator Revving the engine once and put in reverse.
Solar Eclipse
Dyson Smith
Once in a decade solar eclipse and all I saw through my cereal box was light creeping through the seams I don’t know where people got glasses where the glasses came from didn’t know of the eclipse until it was happening after it was over didn’t see much of it any of it really was busy riding amtrak to Sacramento eating train pizza looking out of the window critiquing graffiti alone feeling the guilt of doing anything on the cusp of living the train stops where it’s supposed to so I pick up my backpack nod my head towards a man in a hat sip train coffee inhale burnt espresso over capitol corridor pine step out on the platform to start my new life for the day conversing with strangers about a celestial beam I never saw This is how I know I have lost more than I can ever gain back
This Is Just To Say Halina Duraj
“‘I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox,’” Therese recites, as she drives across town to her parents’ house early one morning. She memorized the poem in Mr. McCord’s senior A.P. English class, but she is no longer in high school. She is 21 years old, and she has graduated from college, moved home. Not home, exactly, not quite. She lives in her father’s other house, the house across town, with her sister Bea, and they both pay rent to their father; he wouldn’t let them see their mother if they paid rent to any landlord but him. Now, she is driving across town not to see her mother, but to take her father to Urgent Care. Her mother called at six a.m.: “Come quick. Your father has terrible stomach pain. He thinks I’ve poisoned him with rotten plums.”
“Call an ambulance,” Therese mumbled into the phone. Bea was already in the shower; she left for work earlier than Therese did. But her mother didn’t hear her; she’d dropped the phone. Therese heard it clatter and hit the floor with a thud. “Oh, fine!” Therese said. “I’m coming!”
She knows why her mother hadn’t called an ambulance. Ambulances were expensive, her father believed, and what were adult children for if not transportation to the hospital? If he got an ambulance bill, he’d blame it on their mother. He’d regret the ambulance thing someday, Therese thinks. Someday it would be a heart attack and he’d need CPR. Therese didn’t know CPR, nor did her mother.
At Urgent Care, Therese and her mother sit on hard plastic chairs outside the curtained cubby where a nurse takes Therese’s father’s vitals. When Therese’s mother peeks around the curtain, he yells in Polish, the language they speak at home: First you poison me, now you want to watch me die? The nurse looks alarmed, glances at Therese. She knows the nurse cannot understand the words, but the tone is unmistakable.
Therese looks at the ceiling. “‘And which/probably you were/ saving/for breakfast,’” she whispers. Or was it, “‘And which/you were probably/saving/for breakfast.’” Yes, that was it. The second one.
A doctor comes through the waiting area, then another. Both, Therese notices, wear clogs with their scrubs—one pair is brown
leather, one pair is green rubber, like gardening clogs. She has never seen a man wear clogs.
Her father receives an exam, then a scan. The green-clogs doctor comes to speak with them. Her father has an obstruction in his small intestine; he will need to go to the hospital. He will probably need surgery. Therese’s mother asks if the obstruction is a plum.
“No,” he says, “but, interesting, that’s what your husband asked me. No, this isn’t caused by food of any kind. It’s probably an embolism, a blood clot. He’ll need an MRI at the hospital to verify that, but that’s what I would guess.”
“Doctor, could you…could you tell him that it’s not a plum?”
Therese does not look at the doctor. She looks at his green clogs, his blue scrubs; she looks at the ceiling. She will look anywhere but his eyes, because she knows he’s looking at her.
“I did try, Mrs. Sobka, but he didn’t seem to understand. You— or your daughter—might want to try explaining to him in his own language? Maybe that’s the issue?”
Oh, boy, Therese thinks. Nope. Nope, that’s not the issue. How quaint—to think this was a language problem, a matter of translation.
Therese sits with her mother and father at the hospital the rest of the day. The surgery has been scheduled for the following day because first the fluid in her father’s stomach must be removed. It snakes out through a tube inserted in his nose. When her sister arrives after work, Therese drives her mother home. Her mother goes to the refrigerator, kneels in front of it with a black plastic garbage bag, and begins dumping the contents of the fridge into the bag. First the plums from the crisper drawer—thwomp, thwomp, thwomp, go the plums, one by one, into the bottom of the bag, the plums from the backyard tree that had to be harvested before the birds and squirrels got them.
“How can someone be poisoned with a plum?” Therese asks. “Does he think they went bad?”
“I made a compote,” her mother says.
“Ah. A compote of poison.”
“Help me,” her mother says. “What does this date say?” She holds out a package of ground beef, squinting at the label.
“It says, ‘Expired, but good for poison.’ Do you want your glasses?” Therese ducks into her parents’ bedroom, returns with the glasses from her mother’s nightstand.
Now her mother’s removing Tupperware, lidded pots, glass bowls with plastic wrap stretched taught. She mutters, “Two weeks old, that
is from last week, he tells me not to throw anything out, but if he gets sick it’s my fault.”
“Stop, Mamo . Stop. The doctor said it isn’t anything he ate.”
“Here,” her mother says. “Hold the bag open.”
“‘So sweet and so cold,’” Therese says.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The next morning, Therese watches, transfixed, as fluid continues to emerge from her father’s stomach, filling a clear plastic canister, the low drone of the pump like a refrigerator humming in the night. Her father sleeps, and slowly, the fluid level in the cylinder rises toward the gallon mark, bubbling finely at the top. The color is green-brown, nearly black. Gastric juices, semi-digested food, Therese knows. But she pretends anyway that the pitchy fluid being pumped out of him is everything that’s wrong with him, everything she hates, everything that makes him the kind of husband who smashes a mug of tea out of his wife’s hand before he accuses her of poisoning him with plums. She pretends that the surgeon will not just unclog his intestine but rewire him completely.
Before the nurses roll him into surgery, Therese’s mother leans over and kisses her husband on the lips—a light, quick, husband-and-wifekiss. Therese realizes she’s never seen her parents kiss before—not on the cheeks or on the lips.
Let him come home different, Therese thinks. Let him come home sweet.
From Your Trans-American Boy
Lex Page
written after the death of Nex Benedict
I was raised on railroads and red dust, tires skimming pot-holed roads, cartoon cowboys riding for the gilded & glorious West, in the shadows of men who have never known this land in its brutal shades of red, white, and bruise-black blue, who have never known the fence where that boy was tied all night, waiting for someone to bring him home. There’s no glory left here— Land of Enchantment, land of vigils, land of blood-stained bathroom floors.
I’ve seen enough of this country to know I’m your true trans-American boy —American in the sense that I’ve bled all over America, boy in the sense that I no longer bleed in private, only on stages, in courtrooms, on the national news—
I grew up throwing darts at the map, searching for your promise, or the state of tolerance, bargaining with bald-faced legislators in a middle-school tongue: I don’t need to be loved, just allow me to be alive. How long will we keep telling the young ones to grow up and watch them die trying? How long will I mourn my brothers to avoid the weight of my own corpse? Aren’t we tired of turning tides just to be swept under by the tsunami, breaking ceilings that cut us
with the shards showering down?
I’m still waiting to be cut down from the fence posts where you tied me the day I learned you keep no promises to boys like me.
Father Song
J.M. Braun
we leave our eyelets to our muckboots open a row of eyeholes left to dry onshore we who lie sunstricken in this world of mud my father the keeper of grass fistfuls under a shadetree within earshot of nightfall onlookers to cottonwood seeds afloat down our canal towards spillway depths and late-night fishermen casting their nets in what divide between wastewater and clear exists under gulls circling in eddies here my father flies me as he might a seine after underwater glints of minnows he holds me the way he’d haul corded wood spins me how he would a boot knife higher above his barehead so I might witness what it is my father wants me to see gas flares above slag heaps faraway burning with the moon on the river at dark serried windsocks alongshore raised in salute to a land my feet have never known though when my father holds me in this way mostly all I see are flocked drippings blotches of paint dried red on his shirtsleeves I see how he smells of father smell the way a house does in sawdust and spackle listening to the sounds of surf break in laps on our river along with the trumpet calls of sandhill cranes in the reeds so when my father returns me to the earth gravel underfoot losing its warmth I know the name to this song I call my father
Hunger
J.M. Braun
Our woods set with deadfall, snares cinched with ice.
Two heads full of crocuses on a creek’s mud banks, that other time never had, never, it seems, around.
Ours is a country of tongues married to salt licks, teeth that break on ridgepoles.
Time of classmates fallen asleep in snowdrifts our plows, our salt trucks, will bury passing through.
Bodies found come spring.
For now my brother and I lie in our hunger, in our house. We gnaw on roots, nosh salt, chew dried yarrow.
From here we can hear all. A butane torch on pipes, an antler against black ice. A breaking through.
Something to give, our father finds us here in this place.
He drags into this house a dead animal, a carcass of deer, of goose, of what
neither of us can tell.
It is all, is only, flesh.
To our father, we give our thanks. We bend to where he has thrown these pickings before us, on plywood, on sawdust, the peeled-back skin of this house mostly made, and, like this, we eat.
The Brights
Nicholas Maistros
Dale bought a bottle of chardonnay at the Hastings Walmart. He’d chosen it for the label, a portrait of a woman, Marie Antoinette perhaps, hair piled absurdly high, sketched as if in sand with portions already scattered to the wind. This woman’s face looked out from the refrigerator door every time Dale opened it, reminding him of Vivien’s impending visit.
Not that he’d forgotten, or hadn’t prepared in other ways—cleaning the bathroom, washing sheets, making lists. The bottle, or rather the face on the bottle, was its own specific reminder. Of his impulse to buy the wine. Of clicking glasses and gestures of meaning—that this visit would have a meaning.
When they were fourteen, and in their version of love, Vivien had briefly lived with Dale and his mother. This was years before Dale would come out as a gay man and Vivien would move to New York to become an opera singer. Now in their early thirties, they hardly saw each other, and apart from the occasional phone call, occasional text, they hardly spoke. Dale had been trying, these last several years, to break contact. He was one of her remaining links to Hastings, and he despised this.
The night before Vivien arrived, Dale removed the bottle from the refrigerator and drank it. He fell asleep with the TV on. The next morning, seeing the empty bottle on the coffee table, and despite his headache and the sour taste in his mouth, Dale decided to buy a new one. Red this time, nothing on the label besides the name, the year, and an innocuous trellis.
They were drinking this new bottle now, Dale and Vivien. She’d arrived twenty minutes before. They’d exchanged awkward pleasantries—“I can’t believe it’s you”—and Vivien had used the bathroom while Dale checked the wine glasses for smudges. He’d been convinced Vivien would never come back, but here she was in his kitchen, sitting next to him on a creaky stool, and she no longer seemed a symbol of New York, of elsewhere. She was looking at him, a look he hadn’t remembered until now—absorption, gratitude— and he felt something he was afraid to feel again, something he had, among his other preparations, guarded himself against.
He told her it was good to see her.
——I wasn’t anywhere when I got the text. Waiting for a bus, somewhere in the 120s. Why was I up there? I work in Hell’s Kitchen, and Sumit’s on 77th. Anyway, the point—I was standing there, nowhere, waiting for a bus in front of a Laundromat, and it was getting dark, and there was an old woman sitting on the bench and this kid with a tattoo on his neck that looked like a hand, at least in the dark it did—that’s where I was when I got the text. Parker’s dead. Call me.
I called my friend, the one who sent the text, Megan. You remember Megan. She went to school with us, I lived with her for a bit…you know, after. She answered quickly, said something about how hard it was to get a hold of me anymore. She hates that I moved to New York, even still. “Ms. Vivien,” she said. She calls me Ms. Vivien because she says I remind her of Vivien Leigh, without the accent, and she read somewhere that in those days everyone on set had to call her Ms. Vivien. Not Miss. Mizz. It was in her contract.
“Incredible, isn’t it? So effing weird.” She’s got a mouth. Lots of ef , even around her kids. Or maybe she exaggerates with me. I try to be generous. I could hear hellos in the background, the old gang. You wouldn’t know any of them. Strange girls. “I guess it was a few months ago,” Megan said.
Car accident. I was waiting to hear car accident.
A bus pulled up at this point. Not the M11, though I’m not sure I even checked. It hovered there. Shift change.
“Was it an accident?” I said.
“They don’t know. At least they’re saying they don’t know. We think…” Some commotion in the background. “We think he did it on purpose.”
Crashed. Drove the car into…over… “Did what?” I said.
“Drowned.”
They found him in the lake. Just down Chief Noonday Road, near Chicago Point. We used to go to the lake all the time, Megan was saying. We as in me and Parker. “Holy snot, was it that long ago? Ms. Vivien, you need to get home more often.”
The old woman decided she wanted the bus after all, the one that wasn’t the M11. She stood and made her way to the doors.
Megan said she didn’t mean to freak me out. “Thought it was more funny than anything. It was what, ten years ago? And he was such a jerk, remember? So celebrate. Parker’s dead. We’re all so effing old.”
She said she’d come visit me. She asked if I was still singing. I said my bus was here and we hung up, but there was no bus. The one that had been there was gone. I heard someone say, “Good news?” It was the kid with the tattoo.
“No,” I said. I was almost ready with my next line— An old friend just died , or maybe, an old boyfriend , or maybe, just killed himself —but the kid pointed at me with his chin. “You’re smiling,” he said. And I was.
Dale was preoccupied with his appearance. Did he look bored, or as though his mind were wandering? Were his eyes red? He propped his chin with an upturned palm to show interest. He forgot which of Vivien’s eyes he’d been looking at.
Adding to his preoccupations were the sounds of his mother down the hall—her bedroom door opening, her shuffling along the carpet, a grunt, a wheeze, the bathroom door. Vivien seemed not to notice. She knew that Dale was still living with his mother—or rather, the reverse—but Dale wanted to put off their reunion. He wanted this moment, before their time together was colored by his reality and her distance from it.
What was she saying now? Something about an ex-boyfriend who had drowned. An accident.
“That must have felt…” he said, having noted her silence. He remembered how frustrated she used to get when he’d try to put order to her thinking, so he decided to say, with ambivalence, “…surreal.”
“Yes,” she said, unsure of the descriptor, or unprepared for the way he’d said it—how had he said it? “I suppose.”
Dale heard the toilet flush down the hall—the first, he knew, of many flushes. He decided they needed a snack, so he got up, opened cabinets. He removed a box of crackers, a can of tuna, peanut butter. “I think we’ve got some cheese.”
“I’m okay,” Vivien said, and Dale put everything back. He refilled her glass. He leaned against the counter opposite her.
The toilet flushed again.
——We’d met in Hastings, at the County Grill where I was serving. Parker was a cook. I’d say we would take breaks together, have a cigarette, but I never smoked. I can’t stand singers who smoke. You smoke, but that’s okay, you’re not a singer.
We’d been together almost a year, Parker and I, until I went away to study voice in Ann Arbor. At least, I think that’s why we broke up. College girl opera singer and a small-town cook. Makes sense. But
everything else—foggy.
A night drive, only us on the road. Maybe on Chief Noonday. Something like it anyway, the stretch between Hastings and the lake. The windows were down, and there was music. Indie-folk-rocksomething. He was a music snob, yes. Dark, tortured. That was part of the appeal. I held my hair back, but wisps still spun around me. I watched the road ahead. The headlights, the brights, on the limbs of trees as they passed us over. We’d been fighting—I’m not sure why— and we were now replacing it with this night, the drive. We drove, with nowhere to go.
I cried at work. The day after I got the text, in the bathroom. It was easy. The tears. I’m not sure what I expected—that I’d have to gear up for them maybe, like I do for a role. It was just after a lunch rush. That might have helped.
Another server came in, a lifer from Washington Heights, Jade. Very sweet. I told her about Parker, or I tried to. I still didn’t quite know what it all meant, except that now I was crying, and that had to mean something. She hugged me. She asked if I loved him. I can’t be sure, but I got the feeling that she was, a part of her was, envious. I told her I thought I did. I didn’t tell her it had been ten years, though why shouldn’t a person still be attached, still be in some kind of love, after ten years? What’s so unreal about that?
Jade was moved, I could tell. She was able to be this person, you know? To wet a paper towel and dab my mascara and say, “Listen, you can’t be here today,” and she would be able to say to other people all day long, “Isn’t that sad?”
Dale needed a cigarette, so they took their glasses with them to the back porch.
“I’ve been talking your ear off, haven’t I,” Vivien said.
“Of course not,” Dale said. “Talk it out.”
They leaned against the railing. Dale tried to keep the smoke from Vivien, but the wind kept changing, and he kept turning, adjusting. Vivien remained still. She held her arms. She said she liked the breeze, a nice early-autumn evening in Hastings, Michigan. Dale thought she looked beautiful there, next to him on the porch with her wine glass, going quickly cold, her gloominess, her fluttering hair, the nostalgic pink of the sky behind her, the sky in her glass. When he finished the cigarette, he lit another, so she wouldn’t have to move.
——That night was our first dress rehearsal. Lauretta in Schicchi . Good
for my range.
We were performing in this church on the East Side, one of those Episcopalian churches that look so beautifully ornate and out of place in the city, no matter where they are. I was afraid, on my way over, that I wouldn’t be able to go in. That I’d stand outside, at the bottom of the church steps, hearing bells and thinking of Parker in a coffin somewhere, his body still blue and bloated from the lake. I’d stand there, and other cast members would pass me by, and members of the orchestra, the conductor and the conductor’s family, trying to ask if I was okay but thinking they shouldn’t.
I would go in eventually. There would be nuns in the audience, if Episcopalians have nuns. It would come time for my aria, and I would find my mark, on stage now, at the pulpit. My cue would come, and then it would go. The conductor would stop. The director, Marco— he’s gorgeous, I’ll introduce you whenever you come to New York— he’d be sitting in a middle pew with his clipboard. “Missed your cue, Viv. Everything okay?”
I’d nod. I’d be trying, really trying. I’d turn away and bow my head, gather myself. The conductor would start up, the cue would come, and I’d hit it, that octave leap. I’d float. I’d give Lauretta the life she’d always wanted. The nuns would cry. The conductor’s boys would stare. It would be a sound I’d never been able to make in all my career, what little career I’d had. Even with all those lessons, all that training, Anna Iverson screaming at me in her studio, I can’t do anything for you. No one can. You’re wasting your money. You may as well go back to Ohio or wherever the ef you’re from, if you don’t feel it, if you don’t feel that . It’s there ! Let it the ef out!
The aria would conclude, and Lauretta’s voice would echo down a back hall. And before anyone could do or say a thing, I would walk down from the pulpit into the audience, I’d walk up to Marco and I’d say, “I can’t do this.” He’d say, “What are you talking about? That was amazing.” “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.” And I would leave the sanctuary. Of course, nothing ever happens that way. When I got off the bus, Marco was sitting on the steps. He didn’t even stand when he saw me, just shook his head, a well isn’t this great kind of smile on his face. “Netflix. Shooting here the next three days,” he said. “Guess they got a bit more clout than our little opera company.” I looked up at a big cinema light that was shining into one of the windows. I told him I was glad.
Dale’s mother gave no indication of how long she’d been there, on the
other side of the screen. She wore a long T-shirt, no bra, and pajama bottoms. Her scalp was visible beneath patches of thin hair. Otherwise she was, or could be, a very pretty woman, a face of sharp, almost youthful angles, hastily made up and giving off a false, composed delight, as though, all things considered, life should still be enjoyed.
“Dale?” Then to Vivien: “Nice to see you again, honey. Dale? What are we doing about dinner?”
“Chinese. It’s Tuesday.”
“But…” Panic bubbled under the composed delight, that weary display of teeth. “But who’s gonna order? Was I supposed to order?”
“They have the order.” To Vivien: “It’s the same order every Tuesday. I just go pick it up.”
Dale’s mother looked at Vivien, as though she’d forgotten, in the space of this short conversation, who she was. “There won’t be enough.”
“There’s always enough.”
“There won’t be enough. We need more, and I don’t have the number. Why don’t we have the menu on the fridge like I always say? It’s a simple thing. You say it’s clutter, but really, Dale, it’s just photos and the postcards I like, and those magnets from Pike’s Peak where we had those doughnuts—remember, better than Dunkin, highest point in Colorado, at least I think it’s the highest, remember, you probably don’t remember, you probably want to throw them away, and those Christmas cards from Patsy, they’re all I get—she never calls, and if she does, I know it’s because she feels an obligation, I can hear it, those kinds of calls. Really, Dale, it’s a simple thing. But now it’s…now I have to…I’ll have to find the number.”
“The number’s in my phone. And they always give us plenty.”
“Ask for more cookies.” To Vivien: “They skimp on the cookies.” She smiled grandly, then left the screen.
Vivien looked as though she were considering whether to ask how things were going, how Dale was doing, but didn’t want to embarrass. She gave a sympathetic smile instead, no teeth, something that said, or attempted to say, I know . And though Dale smiled back, offered a nod as though they’d actually shared something, all he could think was, This is mourning, Ms. Vivien. This is mourning.
——I called Sumit. He was still at work, doing books. For a while, I would misspeak and tell people he cooked books, and he would quickly correct. It would get laughs. We can be funny together, or could be, and at least then it seemed to make sense; it made sense to
other people, and isn’t that how we usually see our own relationships anyway? Through the eyes of other people?
We decided to meet at this Italian place we like on Amsterdam. I took my time getting there, thinking I should arrive later than Sumit, but then I thought it would be better for him to see me there already, that the sight of me sitting alone with a candle on the table would help. So I hurried out of the subway. I ran into the restaurant, out of breath, and there he was, waiting in a crowd. He was still in his work clothes and he looked handsome. He’s not really very handsome—not that he’s ugly or anything; he’s fine—but he looked handsome, there in the restaurant, and for some reason that upset me.
“You okay?” he asked. He put a hand on my hip. I nodded. He said what the wait would be and suggested we go somewhere else. I decided I needed the restroom, but then I saw the line, and Sumit asked what’s the matter again, so I turned to him and just said it. “Parker’s dead. You don’t know him, but he meant something to me, and he’s dead.”
Sumit began to notice all the people now. He took my arm. I pulled away. I knew if I didn’t say it all, I’d lose it.
“I loved him,” I said.
There was a feeling, saying it like that. I could feel each muscle in my face, wanting to—what?—wanting to laugh. To smile and laugh, the way I had when I’d heard the news in front of that kid with the hand tattooed on his throat. Saying it to Sumit, I loved him, it made the thing real, what I was feeling, and it made Sumit look at me in this way. He was confused. He was handsome and confused and seeing someone that suddenly wasn’t me.
“Who was this?” Sumit asked.
I told him who he was. I told him I’d never stopped loving him. I told him it was hard for me to say.
“Okay,” Sumit said. He was trying. “It’s just that, in two years, you’ve never mentioned him. You’ve mentioned other guys”—he was whispering now, close to me; he was embarrassed—“and I remember being jealous of some of those other guys. That one before me who kept calling and hanging around your restaurant. Remember? I’d come by at lunch to see you?” I did remember. I realized how much I was hurting him. “It wasn’t just to see you, you know. I came for lunch for nearly two months, maybe more, to confront someone named Steve who never showed, or who ran off when he saw me and realized who I was. But Parker. You’ve never mentioned a Parker.”
I put a hand on Sumit’s chest. I told him that I had to go back home, to see Parker.
“Okay,” Sumit said, saying okay again and again, like he was figuring it out, making decisions, cooking books. “I’ll come with you.”
“You can’t,” I said.
He pressed his lips together so he wouldn’t say okay again. He took my hand and we left the restaurant. We walked side-by-side, five blocks or so. I was afraid of what he’d say. That I was making it all up. That this wasn’t about Parker. That there wasn’t even a Parker. That this was just my way of doing things, of forcing reasons where there weren’t reasons. The reason for Sumit and 77th, for ending it with Sumit and 77th, the reason for moving to New York in the first place, the reason I still sing.
The reason I didn’t cry when I was thirteen and my father died, and when I was fourteen and my brother left, the reason why those things seemed to make sense. Of course a man, a healthy man who doesn’t wear bright, reflective clothing and jogs at dusk is going to, eventually, get hit, of course, and of course his son who didn’t want a daughter when he was still himself a kid would up and vanish when the opportunity for vanishing arose. Another girl, who looked nothing like me, who looked unfathomably adult and beautiful, who couldn’t sleep after doing things with my brother and wandered to where I was in my room or in the kitchen or on the porch, did my nails, told me about the life she wanted, about being an opera singer and practicing in the shower and being a natural talent and someday —and certainly there’s a connection there , a reason there for why I sing, why I continue to sing. This unfathomably older, beautiful girl who drove up in her, or someone’s, red pickup, her hair pulled back with one pair of sunglasses and another pair on her nose. And me watching, trying to watch through the bushes in front of my window as my brother, with a backpack over his shoulder, like it wasn’t enough for him to leave forever, as my brother hopped in the truck, as he took the pair of sunglasses off his girlfriend’s head and put them on, as they laughed about this and pulled away.
Well, of course. These aren’t things to cry over. This is science. Predictable. Seasonal change that isn’t really change, not really, if it’s always the same.
So I was afraid of what Sumit would say, but when finally he did say something, it was more generous than I could have ever expected. “This is because I stopped coming for lunch, isn’t it. Stopped waiting for Steve.” I told him it wasn’t, but telling you all of this now, I think maybe it was.
Their order wasn’t ready when Dale and Vivien arrived. “Ten minutes,” the owner said on her way to the kitchen. Dale was fine to sit and wait, but Vivien said, “Let’s get a drink.” The order was ready before they were halfway through their beers. Dale was nervous, leaving his mother for so long.
“Tell me about you,” Vivien said. She opened the brown bag and removed the spring rolls. “Weren’t you telling me about…someone, last time we talked? What was his name? You met online, right?”
Dale didn’t want to talk about himself. He was thinking of a time ten years ago when he’d decided to take his mother to the restaurant where Vivien worked. This was after Vivien had moved out and was living on the other side of Hastings with Megan. Vivien had acted surprised to see them in her section. She took their drink orders. Then another server brought the drinks. Dale asked where Vivien was and the new girl, looking at her order pad, said her shift was over, she had to run, she was sorry. Toward the end of their meal, on his way to the restroom, Dale spotted Vivien through the circle window in the kitchen door. She had her arms around a cook. Parker. Dale had seen Parker’s face, which he now remembered perfectly, and which he was sure Vivien could not remember, and he’d seen the way she looked at him, which he was also sure Vivien could not remember.
When he’d gone back to the dining room, his mother was hovering over a glass of water. He watched her from a server’s station as she drank the entire glass through a straw. Before she was finished, and without looking up, she reached for Dale’s glass.
——On the flight, I thought about when I lived here, with you. How when I showed up on your doorstep, after my brother left, I knew, just like I know now. I was thinking of the things we would try, when your mother wasn’t around. I’d make up the weirdest excuses to brush up against you or flash a little skin, reaching for things on high shelves, not caring at all for what it was, feeling you watching and that you knew what I was doing.
I was thinking about that time in the bathroom. I knocked. You were in the tub. You said to come in. Neither of us thought anything of it, or maybe we did. I closed the door and sat on the ledge. I can’t remember what we talked about back then. Secretly I was plotting to go and find my brother, and I thought you’d be my companion, that it’d be an adventure, but we didn’t talk about that. Or if we did, I kept out the part about my brother, and we just talked about places, hotel rooms, the open road, that sort of thing. You asked—I think it was you
who asked—if I’d like to get in the tub with you. You were looking down at the water and saying, If you want. Of course, I’m thinking all of this years later on a plane. Back then, I think we were both simply trying not to laugh.
I guess we knew it wasn’t right. You knew, you had to, and really, so did I. We didn’t fit, sexually or otherwise. There were spaces. There were cracks. But that’s what I remember feeling so good. That kind of exploration, the idea that I could actually figure myself out, that with you I could find, I don’t know, a number. My number. And we were so close to it, weren’t we? That’s the closest I think I ever got.
I was on Chief Noonday Road this morning in my rental. I sprang for a full-size. I only have a bag or two, but I liked the thought of it, the feel of driving something from so high up. I’d come to that intersection on 37 where you either turn left for Hastings or right for the lake. I turned right.
Do you know why they call it Chicago Point? Al Capone used to stay there, back in the twenties or whenever—at least, that’s the story my dad used to tell. We were out there on the lake, Dad telling us about all the bodies that were thrown over that precipice with lead shoes and burlap sacks, still below us, the currents lifting their arms toward the bottom of our boat. Dad always told people afterward that I cried and we had to go to shore, but it was my brother who cried. He was twelve and gangly, he wore his hair long, too tough, already water-skiing with the older boys, and he was crying.
I wonder if I ever told that story to Parker. If that’s where he got the idea. What must he have felt to want to join those bodies? What kind of guilt or shame is that? Or is it either? That’s what I wanted to know. Parker was no longer there, of course. He’d been dragged out, buried in my father’s cemetery, but I wanted to see, to stand where it happened, on that precipice, and feel what went through him. Feel whether he was thinking of my father’s story when he jumped.
But I didn’t make it. I’m not sure I can explain why. I was driving, and as I drove, I tried to recall that night ten years ago. Me next to Parker, the window down, the brights. I tried to enter the memory, like I wasn’t going to the lake now, but the lake ten years ago. Except I couldn’t make it work. I was in the wrong seat. I was sitting too high up. It was day. Even the trees looked wrong.
Then I remembered—I’m not sure how I did, or even if the memory was real—I remembered something I hadn’t before, a piece of that night, an image. I’d been sitting low, like I said, in the passenger seat. I’d been shifting my vision between the lights on the trees and
my own reflection in the side-view mirror, feeling young and feeling, even though Parker was barreling down that empty road, motionless, floating, the nothing between my seat and the blur of running pavement. That’s when I saw it, there between the trees and the mirror—antlers, a deer caught in the lights. We were headed right for it and, I swear, it’s all I can see, closing my eyes, looking at you now, all I can see is that deer, that buck, moments before we collided, lurching into its own motion, charging right for us.
Don’t ask me if we hit the deer. We must not have. I don’t remember. All I know, and what I felt this morning on Chief Noonday Road, is that it was a mistake. To come back. To turn right. Whatever I was feeling, or wanted to feel, since I got the news— Parker’s dead —I could not, could never actually…I’d thought it was accessible, that memory, that night. I’d thought it was something I could inhabit. I’d thought grieving for Parker…
This is why I called you, why I wanted to come back. I’ve been away for all these years—really, I haven’t been back since, you know, before your mother was sick, and that’s awful, that’s the most wretched thing I could have ever done—to do nothing, to know you were here and leave it at that. But I’m back now. And I know. I know what it means for you to be here, caring for her. People always think you grieve for the loss of other people, but that’s not true. I didn’t grieve for my father when he died. And I didn’t grieve for my brother. I grieved for the idea my father had of me, the way he looked at me, even if it wasn’t the way I looked at myself, even if he said I was the one who cried in the boat—that’s what I missed. I missed all the people I was or could have been according to my father. I missed all the people my brother never considered I could be, the person I could have been to Parker, the person I don’t even remember. And you miss all the ways you could have been admired and loved and hated by lovers and enemies and coworkers in cities like New York, or better than New York, cities that don’t even exist—you miss the ideas of the people you could be, could never be, in all of those endless, imaginary cities. Sumit would say it’s ego, but so what? It’s all any of us can pretend to know.
I think we had it right back then, Dale. Knowing those spaces and cracks were there, and climbing into the tub anyway. Whatever it was we thought we were missing, whatever the reason I had for leaving, it doesn’t matter. We’re always missing. A part of us, or all of us, we’re always…
Dale put a hand up. They were parked in the driveway, next to
Vivien’s rental. The smell of Chinese food filled the car. Dale acted as though he were listening for something. Vivien blinked, disoriented, still completing the sentences in her mind. After a moment, she started where she’d left off, but Dale shushed her, loudly. He left the car. He walked quickly into the house, down the hall and to his mother’s room.
She was in her bed, watching something on the tablet he’d bought for her. The lights were out, and the tablet, propped on her stomach, rose and fell with her breathing. Her face floated in the light. He sat down on the bed next to her.
“Sorry we took so long.”
She made a noise in her throat as if to say No matter, not hungry anymore. Her hand removed itself from the sheets and found his leg. “The house gets so quiet,” she said, “when you’re not here. Even when you’re here and you’re asleep or someplace I can’t hear, it’s not the kind of quiet when I’m alone. I’ve got this thing on mute so I can listen.”
Dale took his mother’s hand and massaged it with his thumbs. She started telling him about the show she was watching and why she no longer liked it.
As his mother spoke, Dale thought about Vivien in the car. He pictured her there, knowing he would continue to picture her there even after she returned to New York. Vivien alone in the passenger seat, parked in a driveway in a neighborhood that was not hers, the lights of other houses reflected in the side-view mirror, the lights of a passing car.
Moon Goddess Chang’e Gazing
Xiaoly Li
Yi requested the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West, but Chang’e stole it and fled to the moon.
—Han Dynasty, Liu An, Huainanzi , before 139 BC
I see candlelights flicker & shadows on earth below. Shepherd’s purse pies & chive dumplings’ steam arise from the rosewood table. I’ll never taste this mortal life again.
I long to hold that box in the glass cabinet filled with sea treasures, Abalone, Conch, Sand Dollar, Screw Shell…remnants of days spent with you, Yi— when the moon split into thousands in the ocean, a dragon root drifted here, & you held me tight under a Laurel tree.
Foolish poets gaze up at the crimson moon and recite dreamy sighs. Do they know how lonely I am on this desolate moon? Only I watch the jade rabbit tirelessly pound, mixing elixirs, hoping for one day to return.
I would trade this eternal solidarity for the earthly light, even to weep like that woman I see, alone in the woods, let icy petals sting my face.
Blaze Starr Disrobes
Hunt Hawkins
What she had she didn’t so much show as allude to, the way a butterfly suggests a flower, waving glittery wings that grabbed the eye even in the dank halls of East Baltimore Street. She had concealing fans, feathers, balloons, boas, and a couch that started smoking when she reclined, then burst into fake flames. What is truth? Celestial body, she danced into her fifties, menopausal, fiery, her sagging curves still stirring the minds of high school boys sneaking into the Gayety. Later she made costume jewelry selling at the mall, returned to West Virginia, and went to earth, revealing shiny bones. We can imagine her a girl in Newground Hollow, walking through fields of gleaming flowers. In the hearts of boys grown old, she lingers. What she had, she always will.
Contributors
Barbara Duffey is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (The Word Works, 2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Jentel Foundation, and the South Dakota Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she lives in Mitchell, SD, with her son.
Benjamin Tedoff is a Jewish-Latino writer, originally from New York City, now living somewhere in New Jersey. You can read more of his work at The Southampton Review and the Blue Earth Review.
Clark Gudas is a writer from Winamac, Indiana. This is his first fiction publication. You can find him on Instagram @this_isnt_clark and at clarkgudas.com.
Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter from the Midwest.
Dyson Smith is a Chicago born poet studying Statistics at the University of California, Davis. As a third year senior, he is currently working on Honors Thesis in Poetry titled “Tomboy Ballet,” and his Honors Research Thesis on “Social Proximity to Gun Violence and Chronic Health Conditions in California.” Dyson serves as a Community-Coordinator and DJ at the campus and community radio station KDVS, a Researcher at the UC Davis Innovations and Research Lab, The producer of Dr. Andy’s poetry and technology hour, a submissions reader for the literary magazine Open Ceilings, and is a member of the UC Davis boxing club. His work has been published in KDVATIONs, Open Ceilings, The Sacramento Poetry Center’s Poet News, GTFO Poetry’s 2024 Anthology of Sacramento Poets, and The Madison Review.
Faith Gómez Clark (she/they) earned their MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. She has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, CALYX Journal, Huizache Magazine, Shō Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is RADIO WATER (Roadside Press.) Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com.
Halina Duraj’s writing has appeared in journals including The Harvard Review, The Sun, and Ecotone. Her flash fiction chapbook, Turtles Are Animals That Move With Their Homes, was released by Bottlecap Press in April 2024. She teaches at the University of San Diego.
Henry Hu (born. 1995, Hong Kong) is a self-taught artist of Chinese descent. Hu arrived at his practice through modern technological tools and software. Easily accessible, the digital medium served as an immediate resource. His early work engaged aspects of digital art and graphic design. The years followed, in an attempt to shift towards a more physical manner, Hu took on new materials, working between formats, to incorporate his digital creations into tangible forms. This ongoing exploration has manifested in mixed-media paintings, lens-based works, computer-generated animation, and more recently sculpture and installation.
Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Hunt Hawkins’s book of poems, The Domestic Life, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, Poet Lore, Plume, Epoch, and many other journals. Twice winner of the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, he has lived in Norway, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Poland where he taught as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He has served as English Department Chair at Florida State University and the University of South Florida. Active in local and state poetry groups, he has been President of several organizations, including the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.
J.M. Braun’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Fiction International, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. Braun is a 2024 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where they won the John Logan Poetry Prize.
Lex Page is a poet from Madison, WI. They recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in English and have poems featured in The Virginia Literary Review and VMag at UVA.
Maddie C. is a poet from South Carolina. They have a cat called Goose.
Mickie Cope (she/her) is an indigenous queer artist from Wisconsin, completing her Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her focus is painting and printmaking. She is participating in the Advanced Undergraduate Painting Workshop (Spring 2025), and interning with the Arts + Literature Laboratory (Fall 2024).
Nicholas Maistros works in nonprofit finance and lives with his partner in Dayton, Ohio. His stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions, Boston Review, The Baltimore Review, Witness, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. More of his writing can be found at nicholasmaistros.com.
Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, MN.
Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry is featured, or anthologized in Tampa Review, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, PANK, Chautauqua, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. Her poetry collection manuscript, Between the Sun and the Moon was a finalist in the 2023 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests and the Word Works’ 2024 Washington Prize.
