Volume 18 Fall

OFF the

beat

volume 18 | fall 2017

OFF the

beat.

There are groups of us, in pockets around the world, whose tastes lean a bit toward the eccentric... volume 18, fall 2017 faculty editor Curtis VanDonkelaar

managing editors Paulina Minnebo Katie Dudlets Emily Claus

editorial staff Natalie Zunker

Alexa Koboldt

Michala White

Ah-Janai Hudson

Elizabeth Weitzel Jake Vaive Martha Spall

Cailin Haggerty Nicole Gaukel Ella Caudill

Sierra Richards

Holly Bronson

Kristina Pierson

Ben Bland

Nitish Pahwa Cheyenne Nutlouis

Jessie Alward Alayna Alfred

Stephanie Marceau

special thanks Julie Taylor

Lizzie Oderkirk

Laura Julier

Art Council of Greater Lansing

Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs

Michigan State Federal Credit Union

Copyright Š 2018 by Michigan State University The paper used in this publication meets the minimun requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Espresso Book Machine East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245 Printed and bound in the United Stated of America.

21 20 19 18

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN-13: 978-0-9978151-4-6 Book design by Sierra Richards Cover Art by Zane Kemper Visit MSU Espresso Book Machine at www.lib.msu.edu/ebm This activity is supported in part by the Arts Council of Greater Lansing, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Editor's Note While our summers were spent wandering off the beaten path, as the leaves began to change, we all found our way back to the poorly lit, little classroom in Bessey Hall. We dusted off our cobwebs and pulled our InDesign skills out of storage, gathering once more around our oversized conference table. As we began a new year, old friends were missed, but their departure ushered in new faces, each bringing with them inventive ideas and thriving creative spirits.

For months, the walls of The Offbeat have been filled with the sounds of lengthy editorial meetings, the smells of a pumpkin spice flavored something or other (and maybe the pizza we keep ordering) and the feeling of camaraderie as the whole staff worked to create something as unique and unusual as we claim to be. Thus, we present you with this ode to all things quirky and zany, Volume 18.

Within these pages, you’ll find that fall is . . .

Waiting at the window;

an unexpected love for your vegetable garden;

the time to be a fox.

And of course, the season for wrapping up in a blanket and enjoying a good book (perhaps the very one you hold in your hand).

We wish you luck wandering through these pages, Paulina, Katie, and Emily Managing Editors

Contents Volume 18 | Fall 2017

1

5

7

To My Siblings in a Time of Apocalypse Megan Baxter Fiction

Farmer’s Wife Turns Hubby into Scarecrow Sally J. Stevens Fiction

Nobody Saw It Coming Sally J. Stevens Fiction

8

9

10

Internal Ends Louis Nappen Poetry

17

Persephone in Summer Mary Catherine Harper Poetry

Tip ( Q Louis Nappen Poetry

The Empath K.D. Rose Fiction

18 20

What Hands Ask of Stone Mary Catherine Harper Poetry

The Lady in Red Darryl Denning Poetry

22 28 30

Department of Penitence Suzanne Farrell Smith Fiction

Organ Donors Adam Bjelland Fiction

Secrets Adam Bjelland Fiction

31

Time for Dinner Chad Lutz Fiction

33 36

Preventive Medicine My Extra Richard Bertram Peterson Dimensions Fiction Daniel Hudon Poetry

38

Trope Joanna White Poetry

39 41

Just Like All the Rest Kaleb Estes Fiction

Syria and the U.S. Georgia Park Fiction

42 44 46

Origami for Women Georgia Park Poetry

Floating Away Dana Perry Fiction

The Sixth Night Marion Deal Poetry

47 48 56

Night Limps in One Knee Marion Deal Fiction

Peanut Butter Russell Helms Fiction

Scarce Ann Huang Poetry

57 58 59

Just the Way You Are Sean Griffin Poetry

60

Grocery List Steve Penkevich Poetry

Picture a Face Here Franklin and Division Steve Penkevich Steve Penkevich Poetry Poetry

61

Food Is Cruel Anne Coray Fiction

67

Stalking Autumn Andrea Farber-De Zubiria Fiction

68 70 72

Don’t Sit There Cameron Bryce Fiction

Gone, Long Gone Robin Tuck Fiction

Hero of the Ool Robert Alexander Fiction

76

81

84

Dishes in the Sink Matty Layne Glasgow Fiction

Where Things Get Complicated Greg Bowers Fiction

Pink-Slipped David Holloway Fiction

87 90 91

The Squirrel and the Fox Danielle Dreger Poetry

There’s So Much the The Ventriloquist’s Ventriloquist’s Dummy Dummy Fantasy Doesn’t Want Coronation Speech Matt Schumacher Matt Schumacher Poetry Poetry

92 99 104 Feather Red K.B. Carle Fiction

Phonography Matt Gold Sequential Art

The Orange Farmer’s Son Lizzy Nichols Fiction

112 113 114

The Troll Under the Bridge Kari Wergeland Poetry

In Honor of Cowboy Wayne Robert Crisp Poetry

A Gift for the Weather Witch Robert Crisp Poetry

115 116 117

One Bubble Scott Leonardi Poetry

Equal and Opposite Heikki Huotari Poetry

The Grip Eleanor Shelton Fiction

130 131 133 Crackers and Marmalade James Hamby Poetry

Getting Over Dorothy Peter Murphy Fiction

Evolution of Grief David Lohrey Poetry

The Offbeat

To My Siblings in a Time of Apocalypse Megan Baxter 1. Dear Jake, With a job you get a routine, that boring thing that you’re probably afraid of getting. You wake up at a certain time, eat, get dressed, walk by the same people on the way to the subway, and sit somewhere all day with the same people. Since you don’t have a job, since you’re not out there having that routine, you won’t notice that one day there aren’t as many people, or that everyone looks sick and tired. There won’t be office talk about this or that bug that’s keeping everyone home and delaying meetings. You also don’t watch the news or read a paper so you won’t notice the headlines. You might read things online, or see posts on Reddit but for the most part, you drift above the normal world. You always have. As a little boy you were dreamy and soft, you slept late, your hair was like goose down. You have never been aware. We got our childhood dog because Dad was afraid you might be eaten by a coyote or a fox, you would have just sat there and watched the beast come to you. So I am writing to you first. It’s a wake-up call.

Nick may have the magical ability, as the only born-and-bred Brooklyn resident in your apartment to read that there is something beyond the normal weirdness of the city at hand. His sensitivities will be alerted by something hungrier than usual in the eyes of the street musicians. He’ll wake, in the night, like a hunter, to the sound of more sirens than he has heard on any other night of his life ringing through the buildings and bridge abutments like wolves howling in the forest.

Listen to him, see his fear, and know that you need to get out.

You can bring him and Kristin but not the rest of our roommates, there’s just not enough space for them here. Leave the city before they figure it out. Load up Kristen’s Porsche with only the essentials. You’ll pack your musical equipment, even if I tell you that we won’t have electricity for a while. I know it’s worth a lot to you and you probably can’t imagine a future where you won’t be able to plug it in to a wall.

Maybe one day you’ll gut the keyboard and find some important piece of hardware that’ll save all of our lives.

Baxter | 1

The Offbeat

The hard part for you will be leaving the city. Try to stay off the main roads. Follow Google Maps if it’s working and take exactly the route that you think no one else will take. Avoid waiting in traffic at all cost.

Stay on the move, even if you drive in circles. Once you are out of the city, take the low roads back home. I’ve sent you an old-fashioned map, just in case. Remember, dirt is better than pavement. It’ll take twice as long but don’t worry; you’ll get here. You’ll know the way as soon as you are in the valley. I’ll have dinner waiting for you and a bed made up. I worry about you more than Elise or Hannah, I don’t know why that is. I always have. My little brother, you are such a sweet boy, I need to know you are safe, under the same roof, so that my dreams are no longer dark.

2. Dear Elise, By the time you get this letter, you and Dave will be all moved into your nice house in the suburbs. All your wedding presents will be opened. Your honeymoon tan will have faded. You’ll be lonely in your big house, out past the T. I know you’ll notice it right away. You’ll see it on the way to work; you’ll read it a million times on your Facebook page and see it on the local news Channel when you drink your coffee in the morning. You’ll panic like you do about the flu and getting fat and you’ll read all about it on WebMD forums. You’ll text me, and I’ll tell you to get out.

Getting Dave to leave will be the hardest part. I know he’s planned for this, he’ll want to stay and fight. He has a whole room where he stores his whiskey and his guns; he’s prepared for this. You can bring your two fat cats; that’s fine. There are plenty of rats in the chicken coop for two more cats to feed off of. But you can’t tell anyone you are coming up here. I hate your friends, like deeply and truly hate them.

I’m not saying that I want to see them die; I’m just saying that I want no part in saving them. They claim to have graduated from college, and to be able to take care of themselves, but let’s be honest, you know they won’t. They’ll be those people that betray us all and I’m not dying because one of them screamed. All you need now is the family and Dave. He’s a good guy to have around in this situation. He can’t stay down there in the I-95 corridor, fighting off these things. Have you seen the eastern seaboard from space at night? It’s like a wave of light, like a tsunami washing into the Atlantic coast.

Get off the interstate as soon as you can. Come up through the Berkshires and then along the river. You’ll need to keep Dave calm because everyone hates drivers with Massachusetts’s plates. He can’t speed or cut people off. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself.

Just follow the river; you suck at directions, so I’m giving Dave this 2 | Baxter

The Offbeat

map. I’ll have dinner waiting for you when you arrive. You can have the big bed, upstairs because I know you are afraid of dark windows on the ground floor at night. Everything will be okay. I promise I’ll keep you safe.

3. Dear Hannah, I’m going to ask you to go against your nature. Right now it’s going to sound awful, and I can already feel you getting pissed off like when I mock you for not using deodorant or gleaning kale. When you start to see people getting sick, don’t help them. When the juice bar you work at starts offerings free clinics with an herbalist and cleansing Pilates for those affected, you can’t help out. You can’t volunteer at the shelters, or hand out boxes of leftovers from the super high-end market to those with a hunger that even goat cheese and lemongrass can’t fill. You, my beautiful sister who has always had hope, that the hungry will be fed, the dumb will learn, that our soap will no longer give us cancer, that our government will tell the truth, you are not wrong, but you will die if you stay and try to make things right.

We will start again. I promise you that we will live, finally, like we did those summers we worked together at the farm. We will wake with the sun and eat what we grow with our hands. Carrots from the soil, eggs from the hen house. The hens themselves we will stew in the fall and boil until they are soft and taste like a chicken was always supposed to taste. There will be no cancer-causing soap, we’ll have to learn to make our own from the leftover lard from last year’s pigs, and ashes, I think that’s how you make soap. We’ll have plenty of time to figure it out. Please bring CJ if you can. You two are perfect together in that wonderful love of youth where you look for in a partner the things that you most love in yourself. You two are like bookends to the same life.

I will comb your hair at night and put it in braids, so it doesn’t tangle when you sleep. Believe me, this future is better than any other possibility. We have the chance to build something again. Everything that we hate, we can leave behind. We’ll never have this opportunity again, ever, so don’t do what your roommates are doing, don’t stop to help along the way, think about yourself for once and don’t feel bad about it. If any of us should survive, it should be you. You are kind and caring and without pride. You can tend to the garden. CJ can try to grow grapes and make wine in the basement.

Come down through Vermont, the interstates shouldn’t be much of a problem, but it’ll be safest if you follow the back roads home, you remember the way that we went last summer when we visited Mom’s Baxter | 3

The Offbeat

family farm in Cabot. Dinner will be ready when you get here. We’ll spread mismatched linens over the picnic tables in the backyard, use all the nice dishes and light our meal with candles. We’ll wake in a world in which we have all the chances to be good and true again.

4 | Baxter

The Offbeat

Farmer's Wife Turns Hubby Into Scarecrow Sally J. Stevens Mrs. Abigail Smith, 68, of Plainville, Iowa, was taken in to the Plainville Police Station on Tuesday afternoon for questioning, when neighbors noticed that the scarecrow in her vegetable garden bore a striking resemblance to her husband, Mr. Harold Smith, who had been missing for five weeks.

Following her brief incarceration and subsequent release for lack of hard evidence that any crime had been committed, Mrs. Smith was interviewed by the Plainville Daily Press.

“It’s really quite simple,” she explained in her statement. “Mr. Smith and I had wonderfully cordial relationship, even though he had gotten involved with Bessie Bloom, of Forthright, Iowa, just down the road.

That she is a floozy is immaterial. These things happen in life. Men have a tendency to stray, and I understood that perfectly and bore him no ill will.” She smiled for the photographers and continued.

“At the same time, Mr. Smith had always been a practical man, and so proud of our vegetable garden, which won prize after prize at the Plainville County Fair. His favorite motto was ‘Waste not, want not.’ So when he was stricken unexpectedly with a mysterious case of indigestion, and there were no visible wounds or unsightly disfiguration to his face and body—except for a slight grimace caused by the discomfort in his abdomen and lower intestines—I thought to myself, Harold is obviously succumbing to the results of some unfortunate allergy. It’s a holiday weekend—it was Easter week, and our Dr. Billings is a devoted Catholic. I thought to myself, what would Harold want me to do in this situation?” She smiled again, and wiped a courageous tear from one eye.

“I thought of his deep love and pride in his vegetable garden. I thought that was the one place he would want to spend eternity, if he were to be given the choice. And while I was thinking, he slumped over his plate and stopped breathing.”

Stevens | 5

The Offbeat

Mrs. Smith was overcome with emotion here, and took a moment to compose herself. Then she continued.

“So I wrapped him in the table cloth and dragged him to the barn.

I experimented with some insecticides, and they seemed to preserve his body nicely—though they stiffened it, which was an unexpected fringe benefit.”

She continued, “I tenderly tethered him to the rake pole, between the rows of snap peas and cauliflower and planted his feet in the earth he so loved. The grimace added to the practical effectiveness of the ‘scarecrow’ duties, and I felt he would be pleased at the reduction in the number of black crows who now visit the garden. It was simply an oversight on my part not to inform the authorities of his passing,” Mrs. Smith explained.

Following the public statement, Mrs. Smith left the police station and returned to the Smith farm.

Bessie Bloom was seen standing at the edge of the crowd, dressed like a floozy and weeping uncontrollably.

6 | Stevens

The Offbeat

nobody saw it coming Sally J. Stevens They didn’t understand it when it happened of course, because it had never happened before. The sun simply did not come up that morning.

Alarm clocks went off all around the world in the appropriate sequential order; Eastern, Central, Pacific Time, and so on. In the minds of most people there was simply a very dark storm brewing. Or, in some cases, to those who had experienced an unusually intense evening of imbibing the night before, things just looked logically bleak. For others, the bedroom shades were drawn and they wouldn’t be raised until after a good toothbrushing, so nothing seemed immediately out of the ordinary.

No one panicked right away. But as the morning progressed, in time zone after time zone, it gradually became undeniably clear that the sun had not come up that morning, and was not going to come up.

Some people dealt with it fairly well. They had never been morning people anyway. Certain others began to experience alarm. The manufacturers of sunscreen products watched in horror as the value of their shares plummeted. Climate-conscious individuals who had taken out loans to finance solar panels on their roofs began to tear their hair out.

It didn’t take long before everyone on the planet began to question their own values.

In order to try to calm the citizenry and find a positive take on the turn of events, all the radio stations began playing the recording from Annie of “The sun’ll come out tomorrow . . . bet your bottom dollar that . . . tomorrow . . . there’ll be sun . . .

It was the first time in many years that people actually enjoyed hearing it.

Stevens | 7

The Offbeat

Internal Ends Louis Nappen What’s mine is hers

and what pers onality I

have left remains

dis jointed and drains

me. I start

things but, this

lack of ex pression, this lack of sex, sin, this ling erring

love

keep me in art ic ulate. My

empty young limbs are sick

as bells without tongues, as ring ed hands, once woven

in prayer, now miss

ing

fing ers.

8 | Nappen

The Offbeat

Tip ( Q Louis Nappen

working the edge ( nothing good can come of this ) knowing the sin of sliding it in ( yet . . . you think just one quarter inch ) to press the convex drum ( to revel in all inner ken ) the right tool swabbing too near ( motherload of pumpkin wax ) riding over unconditioned skin ( no thought just reaction ) angled bee postured for pollen ( pleading fingers to sweep further ) firm dolloped head teasing the well ( zen-like motion fooling whom? ) no questions just the tip ( quickly, quizzically end the itch ) once gently won’t hurt ( ok, half the tip end the inch ) or take the thing away

Nappen | 9

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The Empath K.D. Rose Stuck in traffic again.

There was a redness seeping from all the cars. Not well-formed, but the cars seethed brick red. The longer she looked at her watch, the more the traveling red seemed to thicken, conquering like an insidious fog among all the cars. Tufts of black puffed in sync from the roofs in small popping motions. Silent explosions, as if each car were an iron factory releasing fumes from the stacks.

If she felt hard, she could feel greens and blues trickling through here and there among the red cloud, which now seemed to cover everything in sight. The greens and blues, and oh, some silver there, wound their way in and out like small fishing lines wriggling amidst a larger, more overpowering current.

The man behind was thinking so hard. Intense, subdued waves that came into her car. He was focused on her car yelling “GET OFF THE ROAD!” Oh, how he hurt her ears.

“Why are you covering your ears, dear?” chirped her mother. “Traffic here seems much more civilized than I’ve seen at other times. All those nasty horns.”

Her mother sent out little silvery wisps with her speech. They floated and evaporated as soon as they formed. She watched them each break down delicately. It reminded her of watching bubbles burst in slow motion.

“Headache,” she answered. Her mother seemed satisfied. Hey, it was plausible.

She was starting to feel sticky. The red fog had some elements of gray, then some brown, as people began to get complacent about the situation, settling in for the long haul of . . . waiting. She felt it through her windows, the musty feeling of an old basement, still dank after a rain. She shivered a little. Her skin didn’t like the touch.

10 | Rose

The Offbeat

“Oh dear,” said her mother, “you’re not catching a cold are you?” Her concern wafted over blue cotton.

“I’ll be fine mother. Just anxious to get home,” she answered.

“Well, dear, you know what they say about patience,” said her mother, now content, flipping through a magazine.

She tried to remember what it was about patience, but saw her mother’s thought fragment with distraction, so she turned her attention once again to the road.

Tasting metal now. Why was she tasting metal? Oh, she saw as they crept up a few feet. A radio station on the side of the road. Honing everything together. Lots of focus. Lots of energy. Lots of metal in her mouth.

She took out a piece of gum.

“That will rot your teeth dear.” There was no form to that statement.

No thought existed behind it. It popped like carbonated soda.

The hair on the back of her neck was standing up. There was a cat . . . instinctual fear . . . somewhere. She craned her neck but couldn’t see it. Her mind felt around and it seemed to be crouched someplace off the side of the road. Perhaps behind a bush.

The cars sped up by a mile or two. Her heart raced unexpectedly.

An overload of anticipation and expectation came at her from all directions. She almost felt like ducking behind the wheel. But she could see the scene, an accident, and the reason for the traffic jam up ahead in the distance. The mass expectation that they would soon be moving was built on nothing real. She knew they were in for several more miles (and several more hours) of this.

Sure enough, waves of indigo hope turned into orange spears of disappointment. She concentrated on making herself non-solid.

No—that was not the word for it. She concentrated on the part of herself that could allow. Yes, that was it. Allow things to pass through her. She felt their spears come, but focused on allowing. The orange spears dripped and distorted. Soon, an orange-blue waterfall passed through her as if she were a sieve.

Where did it go? Where did all of it go? She saw the waterfall transformed by its contact with her. Now it was orange sparkles.

Rose | 11

The Offbeat

Minute, delicate sparkles emitted from her. A delightful picture. The orange sparks put on a show, snapping in front of her with life, and then began dancing away, each one still a small burst of energy.

She saw them come into contact with various people in her sight.

As a spark hit someone, they would involuntarily smile. She closed her eyes for a second. A happy thought, it seemed. The dancing sparkles evoked happy thoughts.

Her mother was smiling. “Do you remember that homemade stew your grandfather used to make? Wasn’t that the best you ever tasted?

I’m going to have to make some when we get home!”

She didn’t bother to reply.

And then, “Now I don’t know why I just thought of that.” Her mother’s face became quizzical.

“Yes,” she smiled at her mother, “It was delicious.” In fact, her own memory of the stew flooded her with a warm sensation. Like brandy flowing in her veins. “Yes, it would be wonderful to fill up on that again.”

“Well cooking is what I’ll do then as soon as we get home!” her mother said, “I think I’m in the mood to do some creating.” Her mother went happily back to reading.

Meanwhile, she turned to other things. The red fog was getting more insistent; she felt it crushing the space around her car. Weighing heavily in the air. Puffs of black exuded from the others tops at a faster rate. And the billows were bigger. She started coughing. Her throat felt as if it were in a roomful of smoke. A dry cough.

Pressure began building up from everything on the road. Something was forming itself. Taking in all the red fog, the black puffs . . . the grays and the browns. Absorbing individual orange spears here and there. Collecting everything in its path.

Making itself.

She began to feel afraid. She couldn’t see it yet, but it was happening alright. And the thing was so big.

12 | Rose

The Offbeat

She was allowed to move up a little. A car swooshed into the small space between her and the next car. She slammed on her brakes. The swoosh of the car was followed by a small lightning streak behind it.

The lightning seemed to start from the interloper and return back to it like a boomerang. The car had an afterglow of electrostatic.

Her head hurt. For real this time.

The massive thing continued to form. Like an otherworldly architect, incorporating the environment into its structure. She could see faint outlines now of where it would be, though it wasn’t tangible yet. Her head hurt and her throat itched and she wanted to be home. Small brown trails of pus were oozing from her. She instinctively stopped her self-pity and refocused on the road. She noticed horns further in the background. Her car crept up a little more.

There was bright blue up ahead. A neon-colored circle. She recognized it as the intense concentration of the workers at the accident. There was no red fog around them. It was as if an invisible wall of ten feet or so protected the center of the accident. No red fog within. There was only bright blue there and, yes, she saw some bright yellow, stark fear as well. Uh-oh, it must be bad.

She looked at the cars up near the accident and those beyond. At once, she saw an overview of the stretch of road. She became aware of two eyes staring at her from a distance. She was used to these eyes.

They came and went. She was never sure if someone was watching her or if she was watching herself. They were midnight black: deep, penetrating, and focused. When they came, she knew they would pierce into her core. Often, they would focus on an overview that she could not sense herself. Like a puzzle-picture completed. Other times they zoomed in like a telephoto lens focused on one microscopic detail. Sometimes she got their picture. Sometimes she didn’t.

But she was diverted from the eyes for a second. The thing had formed! She felt it behind her approaching. A gaseous, noxious . . .

But wait—somewhere at the same time she heard for the first time a tinkling. A silvery tinkling sound from . . .

Above? Yes, above.

Well at least not part of the fog, not affected by the toxic THING. The tinkling was the lightest bell. Like a bell made of feathers. And Rose | 13

The Offbeat

yet it made a sound. She thought it the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. It seemed set apart from everything.

Yet, she heard it. When she strained to hear it louder, it seemed to go farther away. When she didn’t strain, it almost seemed like . . . yes . . . although it was apart, it was also inside. But that doesn’t make sense, she thought.

Or, now it sounded like a bird. The far-off melody of a songbird above the din. No, not above, deeper. Ahh. It was a sound so light, almost inaudible, but with depth to penetrate the chaos all around. And it remained unaffected. Yes, that was what perplexed her. It remained entirely itself among the rest, and yet it was in no way separate. She listened, rapt.

She smelled evergreen somewhere.

Her gaze was drawn back to the eyes, still there. Unblinking, unmoving, focused lasers into the scene. This was one of the times she saw the other eye’s picture.

The snapshot was an overview of the road. The road that she and all the others were on.

Her car wasn’t quite up to the accident, which she knew now must have entailed death. But the other eyes saw the road scene she had already left behind, as well as the rest up ahead. Past that too. She saw through the eyes for a minute, though she recognized that she was not taking in the expanse that the eyes themselves could see. Perhaps she just could not translate the scene in the distance. It appeared to her as blurry, though she knew the other eyes must be seeing it as perfectly clear.

She could see the parts closer to her. There was the murky red veil of fog behind her. She saw it went way back now. The line of traffic snaking back over hills and down beyond for what seemed like forever.

Somewhere in the distance there was no red fog. But this was dimmer to her view. She assumed a place existed clearer, probably filled with only the little individual traits of pinks and turquoises, maybe whites and purples. Little streamers from drivers, zooming forth in what seemed like empty space, unaware of their own creation up ahead.

The red fog in front of her stood like an impenetrable wall. The majority of the road was opaque now. She ignored the desire to glance in her own rear view mirror and instead kept her vision internal, in 14 | Rose

The Offbeat

sync with the other eyes. She could see her little car if she looked carefully.

The red pollution was a ways back.

Up ahead she saw the death scene, still surrounded by blue. Only through the other eyes could she see purple as well. Her own vision had missed it. A rich, resonant purple that seemed to sing.

She could take in the picture as from a satellite shot. The mass of cars passing by slowed at the accident. The passengers, for all their previous hurry, were awed and quieted by the sight. Their change caused the red fog to dissipate. They surrounded themselves with the deep gray of contemplation. Not the smoky, gray haze of complacency from before, but one that was profound and stark. Even with the kaleidoscope of colors that she saw through the other eyes, these cars stood out. Like a solid wall of motion, past the neon blue, and singing purple of the death scene.

Beyond that her vision became blurry, but she could see another haze.

It seemed sky blue. She wished the other eyes gave her more than sight, as she would have liked to feel up ahead with her mind, as she did other things. But all she could make out was a thin film of sky blue. She could tell it was not made of the same matter as the horrid red fog. Not the same material at all.

Suddenly the eyes withdrew, catching her by surprise, and she was back within her own senses again at the wheel. She turned to glance at the passenger seat and saw her mother dozing, magazine on her lap.

Then she did something unexpected. With no prior thought, she jerked the wheel sharply to the left and cut across the highway divider onto the other side of the road. She was now going the opposite direction.

She was also alone, as the commotion of death had blocked cars from traveling this side of the road. She would tell people later, “A little bird told me to do it.” She looked over to where she had been, a little surprised that no other cars had done the same thing.

“I guess they were intent on where they were going,” said her mother, awakened by the sudden turn of events.

Rose | 15

The Offbeat

“You don’t mind, mother?” she asked. She caught a knowing smile on the corners of her mother’s mouth and the twinkle in her eyes.

“No,” her mother answered, with a grin that made her look years younger.

Her eyes gazed into her daughter’s. “I just like to go.” Pink cotton candy emitted from her mom, surrounding a circle of beautiful purple.

Nah, it couldn’t be, she thought to herself.

She put her foot on the gas and floored it.

16 | Rose

The Offbeat

Persephone in Summer Mary Catherine Harper She reveals that it was she who seduced him by plucking a narcissus from her garden and mashing it between her thumb and forefinger.

After anointing his eyelids and lips with the fragrant oil, she led him to her pomegranate tree and enthralled him with the color of her heart.

She tells me she returns to him because her wishbone was broken, not by him but in an accident of nature involving her mother.

Evidently, when a woman finds her daughter to be too much like her, the stars notice and make a correction to misalign one or the other body.

Then she and I go at it, this during the heat of July and August when, as she puts it, she buzzes through the bulrushes looking for ripe bodies to pollinate, ripe as the men and women oiled for tanning on the beach.

I am too spellbound, too drugged up in her, to care about her purpose.

Afterwards, she tells me she returns because she likes the sex with him, but only during what we air, tree, and ground dwellers call The Night.

Generally, she finds him much too moody during the daylight hours, too narcissistic, she laughs, for any meaningful day-to-day activities.

Later, she describes him as the most attentive god she’s ever met; she returns each fall because he cries when she leaves, wastes away.

He dotes on her all winter, wrapping her in textures of minerals only found in the underworld, reminding her that she too is immortal.

And thus our conversations go, me learning everything about her, or nothing, except that she is made of several stories, several voices.

All these women, their faces like petals opening and closing in turn, charming me toward the cave’s cool mouth, and the alarm of October.

Harper | 17

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What Hands ask of stone Mary Catherine Harper a girl making her home in underground caverns choosing to live in underground caverns in underground caverns six months out of every year why would a girl do that

she knows what it means to be

before she knows the mind of a woman before she is that woman a woman grooming her daughter a woman knowing she grooms her daughter

underworld a woman knowing

daughter will live in underground caverns in underground caverns six months out of every year why would a woman do that

knowing

her daughter will disappear into the underworld she can become a woman she becoming a woman

how her daughter will come to have the mind of a woman in the bowels of the earth in a dark so dark she will not see her own hands

what they must touching what women must

things of the dark not needing

eyes for asking what hands do in the early morning or afternoon or twilight of day

18 | Harper

before a woman

for the her

before wondering

touching to become

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her underworld hands doing to see the dark of the moon hands in a dark so dark they need no eyes what hands do need no ears to hear stone swallowing sound

nothing but what hands ask of stone her hands asking

nothing to feel

needing

nothing

Harper | 19

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The Lady in red Darryl Denning The impulse was irresistible.

His razor sharp letter opener, Poised to defile her envelope, Crusty and caked with blood.

The woman next door.

The Lady in Red. Always veiled, illusive, Wandering at night, Reeking of Blue Dahlias.

Some said her face was Scarred in a blazing fire.

Others that her cheek Had been sliced open Like a pink pig’s belly.

Thunder grumbled over His shabby apartment.

Rain was hurled under Waterlogged shingles, Drops collecting in dirty pools, Sauntering down dingy walls, Soaking his non-precious print, “Venus Rising from the Sea.” The visage of another goddess, Now crumpled and in ruins.

Then soft footsteps, as quiet As a tarantula crawling over A badly battered body.

She’s back!

Her door closes gently, Dead bolt quickly clicks.

The letter will have clues.

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The mystery will be solved.

He knifes the enigmatic mail, His eyes dazzled with disbelief. “Damn!

Just an ad for carpet cleaning.�

Denning | 21

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Department of Penitence Suzanne Farrell Smith Date of Incident: ON/AROUND AUGUST 20, 1995 Report Entered: 22 YEARS AFTER THE ALLEGED CRIME Crime: PETTY THEFT BY EMBEZZLEMENT, WITH INTENT Suspect: SUZANNE FARRELL, 18, FEMALE Defense: CLAIM OF RIGHT Vehicle: 1988 CHEVROLET CAPRICE CLASSIC, CHAMPAGNE Witnesses: STORE MICE, SUSPECT’S CONSCIENCE Narrative & Statements: On August 20, 1995, or thereabouts, 18-year-old female Suzanne Farrell, alias Cupid, poked a righteous thumb in the eye of her boss and made off with holiday merchandise. She was not caught and therefore not charged with a crime.

Background information was obtained from the suspect by her repentant self, over two decades later.

The suspect was born the fourth and final daughter of a Christmasloving family. Every year on All Souls’ Day, the mother pulled thirty-odd holiday boxes from closets and basement corners. Garland was looped around the living room banister and along the mantle.

Hand-sewn stockings were hung for the children, their pets, and their dolls. The suspect and her three older sisters shaped and decorated salt-dough ornaments. Clumps of pine branches tied with burgundy and gold ribbon—“Victorian clusters”—were hung on the mailbox, lamppost, front door, backyard fence, garden statuary, birdbath, swings, wheelbarrow, and car antenna. Christmas trees were located, sawed down, dragged in, and erected in the living room, family room, porch, and basement.

“If you sit for five minutes,” the mother said, “you get a bow.”

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Everything got a bow, including the cats. The neighbor, over to borrow pruning shears, found them waiting with a green bow. The lunching priest sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, with a red bow pinned to his black pocket. It worried the suspect to see a priest with a bow pinned to his pocket. Priests, she thought, should not look jaunty.

Devout, the suspect’s family did Christ too, lighting Advent wreath candles and playing cassette tapes with traditional hymns. They laid the manger on Christmas Eve and took turns placing the baby Jesus.

They deposited gifts labeled “Girl: 4 years” or “Unisex: infant” under the giving tree for needy children. They prayed for the poor, for lost loved ones, and for Christmas to come quick. It didn’t. Christmas came slow and steady, like an approaching ferry on the nearby river.

When it was over, Christmas lingered in the house for a long time.

When the suspect and her sisters were all under 10 years old, their father was killed in a car crash. Two years later, the suspect’s house burned in a fire. Much of Christmas was lost.

The mother desperately upheld the holiday. Rather than growing bleak in her home, Christmas grew brighter. Over the years, even as the mother’s body, riddled with then undiagnosed Lyme disease, and house, riddled with repair needs, deteriorated in parallel, the mother held the holiday center. Her commitment to equality bridled her daughters, especially at Christmas. The mother’s equality meant more than just parceling out gifts in fours. It meant she was equal to the task of handling Christmas alone. She was equal to her neighbors.

She was equal to the monstrosity of Christmas. The family’s small Navy town suffered during the late 80s and early 90s, as the recession and Gulf War took money and people. Four local employers—Electric Boat, Dow Chemical, a Navy base, and Pfizer—shrank. The mother put bows on a fading home, and Christmas itself put a giant bow on a heap of hardship. The longer the Christmas season, the longer the sisters forgot their sadness.

That the suspect would work in the Christmas industry seemed preordained. After a babysitting stint and time serving as a waitress, she walked into *** *** to ask about the open position as a reindeer.

The owner, ****, a Jewish man who loved Christmas, showed the suspect around. The main floor hosted a sea of round tables, each covered by a Christmas-themed tablecloth, bearing multi-layered displays of snow globes, Santa Clauses, angels, and secular figurines.

Spilling from ceiling beams were display racks of ornaments organized by size, shape, or color. A special room for Department Smith | 23

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56—the company known for its quaint ceramic villages—showcased four wintertime worlds: Dickens, Alpine, North Pole, Christmas in the City. The suspect named them without checking the signs. She was hired on the spot. *** *** ’s owner had a sizable tumor on his face that weighed down the left side of his mouth, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much.

The suspect never asked about it. When she started, most reindeer names were up for grabs, and she requested Vixen. But the owner decided the suspect would be Cupid, perhaps because she was the youngest employee.

Cupid was prompt, organized, and very friendly with the customers.

She learned the layout intimately. She even cleaned the bathroom.

Noticing her pluck, **** put her in charge of the stock room. She got to know the inventory inside and out. She knew exactly how many tree skirts were left, how many glass balls had been broken in shipping, and how all different kinds of snow fell on tabletops.

As all of the other reindeer left and new reindeer were drafted, Cupid became the most senior employee, though still the youngest. First hired was Dasher, short, blonde, and bossy. Then, Prancer, someone the suspect claims not to remember well. Finally, a tall thirtysomething with an apple-red bob cut and perpetually fresh lipstick.

She was christened the new Vixen.

Cupid liked her job. It empowered her to be responsible for herself, her paycheck, her life. A hard-working American teen, forced by parental death from financial stability and feelings of safety, stowing dollars away for college. She liked driving to the store and coming home after dark. She liked studying for AP exams behind the counter.

She liked wearing the green shirt.

As Cupid, she was becoming.

The Crime: Cupid got so good at her job that the summer between high school and college the storeowner gave her the highest reindeer responsibility: payroll. Bi-weekly, she collected time cards, calculated hours worked and total owed before taxes, and gave **** the list.

When the checks arrived, she handed them out.

The first week she dished out payroll, Cupid noticed that Dasher, Prancer, and Vixen made more money than she did. Their $6.25 an hour bested her $5.50 by almost 15 percent. She asked her boss for 24 | Smith

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a raise. “No,” he said. He frowned, though with the tumor he always looked like he was frowning. Cupid told him she knew the other reindeer were making more. “They’re grown women with children of their own,” he said. “I am a child of my own,” said Cupid. But **** didn’t budge.

As far as Cupid could tell, the reindeer all pulled equal weight except for her. She pulled more. One evening before closing, she calculated that for the 10 months between when Dasher was hired and when she started doing payroll, for about 50 hours a month, she had been making $0.75 less an hour than she should have. It was ****’s mistake, he just didn’t acknowledge it. As far as Cupid was concerned, he owed her over $300.

By virtue of her Catholic upbringing and her family, all sweet girls of tragedy, Cupid had been called an angel most of her life. She did not participate in the drug and alcohol consumption that festered in her high-school parking lot. She never got in a car accident. She earned near-perfect grades and graduated top of her class. When not working at the store, she filled out multiple scholarship applications, hoping to pay for school. She was good.

Yet **** was going to shortchange Cupid. She chewed on that for a while. And, she says, as her tenure at the store wound down, something in her broke bad.

Cupid’s goodbye party before she left for college was lovely. Dasher and Prancer gave her candles and lotion and a book. The storeowner gave her advice, and Cupid swore his misshapen mouth twitched with pride. Vixen gave her a saucy petal-pink silk pajama set with short shorts and only three buttons on the top. (**** had been right all along about Vixen.) Cupid offered to close that night. She told everyone she wanted to imprint in her mind each item, each song.

They left Cupid with her Christmas.

Around 9:15 p.m., Cupid ran some calculations. Then she taped together three cardboard boxes she had broken down earlier that day.

And with the toss of a tube of glitter, she began. She grabbed lights and ornaments from display shelves. She added a wreath decorated with gold musical notes. She fingered a snow globe and a dancing Santa but opted against flashy items.

Instead, she chose an extension cord with a built-in switch, paper cocktail napkins, and a package of tiny bulbs.

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In the spirit of cleaning up, she snagged a few damaged items from the stock room: incomplete magnet sets and cards with busted packaging.

She thought about her family, about how the holiday kept her older sisters coming back from college to sit with her mother around the Advent wreath. Her sisters would like scented pinecones, wouldn’t they? Her mother, rolls of ribbon for more bows? The boxes filled.

Soon, Cupid had tread the entire store except for one corner: Department 56. The dancing Santa had stopped, his hips jutted out to one side, his plastic eyes fixed on Cupid. Nearby, angels prayed.

Drawing breath, Cupid stepped into the sacred space. She couldn’t take something so big as a house, so stately and expensive. Instead she took accessories: iron gates, tiny metal sleds, a red mailbox. A couple snow-tipped pine trees for her dead father’s still-operational train layout.

Based on her math, Cupid took about $375 worth of goods: no more than what she believed she was owed. She logged each transaction in the of-its-time computer. The only fields were date, number sold, and price. Her boss had the habit of changing prices on the spot if he wanted to cut a deal, or a neighbor needed wrapping paper on the cheap, or that one time Tony Bennett docked his yacht on the river and decided to outfit it for the holiday. An inventory report would show the total number of items sold and the total income from those purchases. To cover her tracks, Cupid entered all the items across multiple dates and changed the price of each to zero.

Cupid wrote a note of thanks to **** and the gang for the goodbye party and for imbuing her with two years of nonstop Christmas spirit.

She turned off all the lights, Christmas and overhead, loaded the boxes into the family station wagon, locked the back door, and fled.

When asked what she remembers about the crime now, Cupid says, “I guess what I remember most is that in those moments at the store, with carols still chiming from all corners, I felt the holiness of Christmas come back to me. At the store, the Christian Christmas was hard to come by. But as I knelt before the cardboard boxes, I became a supplicant. I had been wronged. I had lost. And in my despair, I decided to play Robin Hood for my family. I made the choice of who to be, what to take, why to take it. I’ve never been more aware of my body and decisions, my authority, my intent, than in that moment, alone late evening in the Christmas store.”

26 | Smith

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Judgment: Cupid’s crime, since it was committed on the premises of a place where she was lawfully allowed to be, was “theft” rather than “burglary.” Since she took less than $500 worth of goods, it was “petty” rather than “grand.” And, unlike shoplifting, Cupid took goods from her trusting employer. It is clear she meant to do it. Petty theft by embezzlement, with intent.

In basic moral frameworks, taking things that don’t belong to you is wrong. Inexcusable. Children learn early and suffer consequences when they transgress. They are deemed “naughty,” and Santa knows it.

Cupid knows it too. She has not stolen anything since. She lives a reformed life. During her confession, she says, “I felt the dancing Santa, the angels, all the ghosts of Christmas, and even my mother, dead a year, urging me to come clean at last.”

But did Cupid deserve the $375? Maybe. Who deserved the $375 more: Cupid, by having worked a certain number of hours over time without being compensated at the same rate as her junior employees, or ****, by owning the store and purchasing the items to be sold within it? Was the storeowner’s claim on his property greater than the value of Cupid’s dignity, hard work, and family needs? Can the two even be compared? Is it possible Cupid’s claim on the $375 perfectly co-existed with **** ’s right to the same?

The suspect’s repentant self doesn’t know. Just doing a job. Book her.

Hard Evidence: Each year since the alleged crime, Cupid unloaded an item or two by gifting, donating, or trashing. In 2012, her baby son’s first Christmas, she dropped the last of the stolen goods, those gold musical notes that had adorned the wreath, at a local Salvation Army. All the goods have been distributed around the country and no evidence has been found in the suspect’s home.

Circumstantial Evidence: **** sold the store to a paper company and moved to ****** . What remains is a 22-year-old story and memory.

Sentence: Time served.

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Organ Donors Adam Bjelland She grabbed his hand, pulled him out of the hallway and into the florescent light of the stairwell and down to the first landing, unbuttoned her shirt, and, smiling, dug her “Blushed Pink� fingernails into the skin between her breasts, pushed her fingers into her skin, through her skin, broke through her ribs, and pulled out her heart.

She extended her bloodied arm, uncurled her hand, offering him this gift; it was pumping faithfully.

I’m giving it to you, to do with as you wish. It will come in quite handy, actually. When you are cold, it will help to circulate your blood, and bring color back to your skin. When you are alone, it will beat side by side with yours, in synchronization, if you wish, its rhythm keeping you company. When you are weak, it will give you strength.

When you are sick, it will heal you. When you are lost, listen for its beat, as a signal; follow its direction, and it will guide you back to me.

He took the heart and dangled it between his thumb and forefinger like a dead rodent. He tried to drop it into the pocket of his cargo shorts, but when it would not fit, he just rested it on top of the coil of emergency fire hose that hung on the wall.

Then he unzipped his fly, began to put his hand down into his pants, noticed the bloodstains, and decided to use his other hand. She watched him shove his clean hand down into his underwear and fumble around, his tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth in concentration, before he violently jerked his hand upward.

In his clenched fist, he grasped his disconnected penis, he held it out to her, his breathing slightly heavy.

Her smile subsided into a straight line.

28 | Bjelland

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This is to give you pleasure. It will fill you up. You can always have a piece of me inside you. When you feel incomplete, it will make you whole.

She looked down at the penis. Ever so slightly, it throbbed—once.

A slight raise of his eyebrow and a curl at the side of his mouth gave away that he’d done it intentionally and was proud of his display.

Shaking her head, she reached out, took her heart off the fire hose and ran back up the stairs, leaving a trail of blood on the steps, and leaving him holding his penis in his hand. It was the last time she ever saw him.

Eventually, when she garnered the will, she stitched her heart back into her chest. It ached for many weeks and the scars never truly healed. To this day, whenever she trots up a flight of stairs, she swears she can feel echoes of pain.

As for him: later that night, he reconnected his penis and was sore until the following morning.

Bjelland | 29

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Secret Adam Bjelland It’s like having a mouth full of marbles. Imagine it: 13 marbles in my mouth, but I’m not allowed to let one fall. Must keep them contained.

Hidden. Secret. So how can I talk to you? Nothing comes out right.

I try to smile and make eye contact, but all the while I’m thinking, Don’t you let a marble fall—not one fucking marble! I’d imagine I must look like a madman, like a firewalker, liar-liar pants on fire, fire ants in my pants, crossed-legged doing the pee-pee dance, but apparently I don’t, because you smile and nod and look me in the eyes; please don’t look me in the eyes, because when I see inside of you, I so desperately want to climb in, I want to let all those marbles hit the floor, and they’d still be bouncing and rolling down the stairs after my words betrayed me, and changed our lives forever.

30 | Bjelland

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Time For Dinner Chad Lutz Once upon a turn, a human being was so afraid of their own long shadow they stepped up to a mysterious plate called Life and whiffed.

It was a massive whiff, at a fat, fat pitch. A fat whiff at a pitch so forceful, so impacting, and so moving it blew three trees and the northerly breeze down. It shook strong green leaves from their agrarian eaves. Water fled a saunter. Animals cocked their heads in wonder and corralled their young ones closer.

This was all before dinner, naturally.

“Kevin!” his mother yelled. “What in God’s name are you doing up there? It’s been 10 minutes since I called for dinner. We’re waiting!”

Kevin took another long look at the screen on his phone. There in a crystal clear 1136 x 640 pixels at an aspect ratio of 16:9 were a pair of wrists belonging to his friend, Todd; the skin mutilated and slashed like a tire. Underneath the picture was the caption, “Now I can’t be a burden.”

Outside the wind fell apart. The atmosphere disintegrated. Gravity lost all meaning, all feeling; its hold on the world, at least temporarily, voided.

“KEVIN!” he heard his mother yell again. “I’m not asking again. If you’re not down here in one minute you’re grounded from television for a week. You hear me?”

Through his over-heightened senses, Kevin began registering the smells of overcooked meatloaf and creamed corn wafting up through the small, dim-lit hallway from the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.

He looked down at his hand . . . really looked; the tendons and muscles were strained; his veins were popping out. He tried to look away from the image on his screen but he couldn’t. He had the feeling, deep down, that if he moved his eyes, his ears, his ankles, anything, he’d

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simply disappear from existence. Poof. Gone. See ya; wouldn’t wanna be ya.

All he could do was stare at his cellphone and wonder what serrated flesh felt like and what could possibly drive someone to want to open their arm like a filleted steak.

Most of all, above everything else, amidst the flurry of snow falling soundlessly in his bedroom, the hush of the crowds watching intently from unseen stands situated behind cracks and crevices that bend where the light can’t reach, Kevin wondered if this was the last time he’d ever talk to Todd.

From the kitchen, his mother informed him the television was going on a week-long vacation. It was at that moment Kevin knew that he had.

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Preventive Medicine Richard Bertram Peterson Why, yes, thank you. I am feeling well. But you, my dear friend, look a little peaked. I see a sallowness under the eyes, a barely perceptible tremor of the hands. Are you certain you are not feeling ill? No? Only tired?

Hmmm.

Come, sit for a while. No, I have time. My job was too stressful, so I quit.

Are you having any worrisome signs or symptoms? An upset stomach, perhaps. Or queasiness? The occasional rapid pulse, headache, insomnia, malaise—all could be indications of an impending medical disaster.

There are jillions viruses out there. And bacteria. And the fungi are just awaiting the right opportunity.

Even now you might have sarcoidosis. Or amyloidosis. Maybe psittacosis. Perhaps even a psychosis. AND NOT EVEN KNOW IT! Do you sometimes get short of breath—SOB in medical lingo? Maybe it’s a collapsed lung. Better get a chest x-ray immediately.

Your body is a complicated machine consisting of many parts. Do you know the location of your Organ of Zuckerkandl? Your hippocampus?

Your fabella? Ignorance can be deadly, my friend. Any moment a part may fail, placing your entire body in imminent peril.

You need to know all about your innards. Study an atlas of the human body and dissect a cadaver.

You also must get tested and diagnosed—just in case. A complete blood analysis followed by total body imaging is a good start, together, with a thorough physical examination and a genetic history.

The doctors at the Mayo Clinic know me well. I can give you some references.

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Have you kept up with the medical literature? Your personal physician is much too busy to read his journals or to listen patiently to your complaints. You will want to know the latest medical info and get treated properly for your unexplained symptoms. Start with The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Read the more specialized journals if you’re concerned about a particular diseased organ.

You never know what lurks within those hollow tubes inside you.

Do you know the condition of your colon flora? Do you have mucus or heartburn? Better get your colonoscopy, bronchoscopy, and gastroscopy scheduled right away.

And while you’re at it, get a CAT scan and a PET scan. Worried about cross-species infection? Better get your pet scanned, too.

Be sure to watch those informative TV drug commercials. They will alert you to diseases you may have overlooked—restless legs, psoriasis, mange. The list goes on. You must be ever vigilant. Best to be tested for these ailments before they gain a foothold inside you.

Maybe you should contact those medical malpractice lawyers now just in case those healthcare people mess you up.

Presbyopia? Here, can you read this? Blurry, is it?

Hmmm.

Leg pain? Could be clots in your veins. They may even now be moving to your lungs. Pulmonary embolism is the inevitable consequence.

Then, it’s game over, my friend. I’d recommend an emergency ultrasound for you.

Depressed? Man up and get some meds. Feeling lethargic? Skip the caffeine and take a pill.

ADHD? Hey, are you paying attention to what I’m telling you?

Is it constipation or, God forbid, fecal impaction? Better get that enema kit and put it to use.

Nature has built redundancy into its important organs—that’s why you have two testicles. And it’s important they be properly maintained. Use ’em or lose ’em, my friend. Don’t worry. I know a few women who can assist you.

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Getting stoned? Not if they’re in your gallbladder or kidneys. Those rocks will roll you.

Don’t fret about appendicitis. Get that useless appendage removed now and, while they’re mucking around inside you, get that gallbladder out too. And to eliminate the risk of diverticulitis, get a colostomy.

Borborygmus? Listen carefully. Your bowel is speaking to you.

And the plague . . . So you think that’s funny? Well, one bite from an infected flea, my ignorant friend, and you’ll be buried within the week.

Exercise, you ask? Nah, I never do it. It’s too dangerous. That guy, Jim Fixx, the running guru, do you know he died while out jogging one morning? Heart attack. Kinda ironic, huh?

Does Keith Richards exercise? Do you think? And he’s still going strong. Better to lie quietly in bed until the impulse passes.

Oh! Excuse me for a moment . . .

I’m so sorry. I just now felt a subtle twinge, a slight pressure to the right of my umbilicus. Probably nothing. Just something I ate— unless . . .

Oh, my God! Call 9-1-1 . . .

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My extra Dimensions Daniel Hudon After Tania Hershman I read a story about string theory, the new theory of everything, which is so complex it needs eleven dimensions to explain how everything— protons, neutrons, atoms, all of matter, even exotic matter, not to mention exotic dancers,

is made of tiny vibrating strings. No one knows they are there, these extra dimensions, they are, like old geological strata,

“compactified.”

All the characters had their own extra dimensions

and they used them like pockets to keep their best secrets: an elderly man hid the cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to be smoking

(one cigarette per extra dimension) and a young girl kept her bleak little poems

that she didn’t want her mother to see while her mother, who all but forgot about her extra dimensions and rarely checked them,

kept her own tortured little verses that she thought she might one day show her daughter.

So I got to thinking about my own extra dimensions

and how useful they would be to have around as a place to keep my favorite tango moves

because who knows when I’ll need to do a boleo in the middle of the street or a gancho at a cocktail party

never mind with you on the dance floor; or a list of jokes that made me laugh because I can never remember

who walked into a bar together or how many light bulbs I need to prevent knocking about in the dark.

In one of my extra dimensions I would keep a bottle of Scotch

because it’s one of those things you want to have handy, like after canoeing in the rain,

or just to know it’s there.

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I would find room in my extra dimensions for all the books I always wanted to read,

so I would always know where they are, and if I’m stuck on the subway or in traffic,

I could just reach through the invisible Venetian blinds that hid my extra dimensions

and pull out War and Peace, or Infinite Jest because they’re too big to lug around; and, because there’s never enough, I would devote one of my extra dimensions

to time, and actually read them comfortably, in my favorite multi-dimensional chair.

My tenth extra dimension I would keep empty,

just for the time being.

And in my last extra dimension I would keep a copy of that story about string theory

with all those quirky people and their

extra dimensions (along with a few vibrating strings,

which sound so cool like enigmatic but delightful koans)

because it makes me think that life is full of possibilities,

in all its dimensions.

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Trope Joanna White I trust you know the story of the nightingale. In an English garden, she pricked her breast with a thorn, burbling a drop of crimson onto the foam-white rose in the name of love, but her life ebbed to a sliver.

The lizard scooted down from the oak to tell the cuckoo, who was in between the notes of Beethoven’s sixth symphony disguised as a clarinet. Her name was Philomela, he whispered, before she was turned into a bird, her tongue cut out so she would not tell her terrible secret. A lament wafted up from the forest, traveling from town to town, country to country, all the way to Rome, where it settled, whistling, under the branches of the Pines of the Janiculum.

Back in England at dawn, a poet perched under a plum tree; and when he heard the voice of the nightingale, he knew he would die.

Stravinsky, on the other hand, heard the very same song and thought instantly of flutes and dancers. Rossignol! he cried, and ran to fill his pen with ink. From the nib, he dribbled scales and arpeggios onto the lines of the staff on his page.

You might think that the nightingale, that drab brown bird of midnight fame, had a tragic fate—but would you believe she ended up as an emblem on the Croatian one kuna coin? Even now, some say that when the sky purples and lovers meet in Berkeley Square, you can hear the shadow of her song.

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Just Like All the Rest

Kaleb Estes “Don’t you think this was a mistake?” she asked through trembling lips.

It was never a mistake. I loved them all, even the regrettable ones— the ones I probably needed the most. I loved the ones with whom it never would have worked anyway, the one who used me to get back at her father, the annoying ones, the one-night stands, the clingy ones, the superficial ones, the deeply religious ones, the sarcastic ones, the one that got away, the first one, and this one.

She sat hunched against my gaze, facing the toppled wine glass, the cast-off clothes, the sleeping city outside the window. I loved the smooth knobs of her spine, the inset curves of her shoulder blades, and the steady trickle of thick, sultry blood that traced them, painted my love on her back.

But I didn’t tell her that. I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away and my fingers grabbed only the damp cotton where her palm had rested. Love leaked from the corners of her eyes, dripping from her cheeks, mixing with our sweat, mixing with her blood. The sheets were stained with our love.

Love is familiar comfort, like your favorite warm blanket. But one day it becomes itchy, and you cast it off more vigorously than you stripped each other’s clothes in the heat of your most lustful night—when comfortable familiarity becomes bluntly routine. The excitement is gone. No more gushing over one another; the vicious cut over her eye was the only thing gushing now.

“I don’t know if I ever loved you,” she told me, but she lied. She would always love me. She needed me. Love is a mutual satisfaction of need, and she needed to hate me now more than she needed my companionship. She was caught up in it. She was consumed by it. She loved it.

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“Darling, I didn’t mean to,” I said. Love was lying to her. Love was being angry about how I wasn’t good enough for her, knowing one day she’d figure it out. Love was being angry that she figured it out.

I did not protest when she shakily stood and gathered her belongings, said those hateful things, threw my stuff around the apartment, and slammed the front door. I did not stop her as she walked out into the street, her dress unzipped in the back, her makeup smeared, and her eye still bleeding, bleeding out love onto the sidewalk. She looked vulnerable but aggressive, like a cornered animal. Pain, the inevitable consequence of Cupid’s arrow, showed in her stiff, persistent gait. I waited at the window for it, for her to look back. She did, of course, and in that glance, she admitted that she loved me too.

40 | Estes

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Syria and the U.S.

Georgia Park

“I don’t understand why you can’t just marry a nice Korean man and never come home again life is nice there for you you have that dog and that girl and that job and you can walk anywhere and you’re not scared of anyone and why are you involved with a Syrian don’t you know he’ll end up going back to his country to fight for his parents?

There’s nothing left here for you you’ve been gone long enough we don’t miss you.

Also, there’s been an incident . . . something involving guns in Florida . . . yeah, another one.”

“I don’t understand why you’re going back to Syria it’s dangerous and you know that and your family’s gone already and you will be too if you even take a step out of that airport and why are you wearing that cross on your neck tuck it in do you want everyone there to know you’re not a Muslim they’ll shoot you point blank.”

“Why did you come back to America why here where you know bad people why didn’t you take the chance to start over again when you had it now everything’s ruined.”

But how could I never have gone home again? No matter how little of it is left, how can you ask that of any one person?

Some people are staying.

Park | 41

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Origami for Women Georgia Park You didn’t tell anyone anything you told such distorted stories or went so dead quiet people didn’t really believe in you after or your confessions so it all piled up in your head on scraps of toilet paper and napkins crumpled up balls jostling as you nodded complacently and then you ran off to a foreign land away from the so-called illiterates where you didn’t tell anyone anything and then you met someone who told such distorted stories or went so dead quiet or kicked you in the head again

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You said something.

You said, “This is wrong, isn’t it?” and everyone stopped to listen because they were thinking the exact same thing you made a paper airplane and threw it to them when they opened it up there was just your number and name written on it dotted with hearts and they’ve been calling ever since so you can tell everyone everything and then, you can listen.

It makes origami it makes confetti and you can add glitter to it you can even start to like it a little bit you can do anything with these bitches you can make a paper chain

Park | 43

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Floating Away Dana Perry I thought I had sealed it shut. I remembered wrapping the corners with twine and hanging small magnets as weights from the edges.

I had held my cheek to the seams to make sure no air was coming through. But somebody must have broken through my barricade, because there it was: my window gaping open as a gust of wind pulled my life’s details out through the dirty screen.

I wondered how long it had been open. Hours? Days? Could it have been weeks? I became frantic. The pieces I had worked so hard to protect, the ones I had catalogued and stacked and saved. Which of these particulars were now aimlessly floating through dark alleyways, becoming caught in chain link fences? I counted with my trusty fingers: the most important bits. The moments that led me to right now.

1) On my thumb: the day Winlet had kittens and I watched her lick all five of their faces clean. The first time she let me touch one and scratch under its calico neck.

2) My index finger: that was the smell of cigarettes and pine needles.

Early morning sleeping bag sweat. How to move the pins in cribbage.

My mom and dad smiling, his and hers crinkle faces. His gentle tease, her slap on the arm.

3) My tall middle finger: my favorite maple tree, the one I could climb into and be hidden from the rest of the world. Scratching my initials into the bark with a rusty safety pin.

4) My ring finger: screams and shots, the heave my mother released with each half-empty liquor bottle and the thud as each one hit the grass outside. The shame in everyone’s eyes the next morning.

5) And my pinkie: blue chlorine in the hot tub on Jesse’s deck, and his glass of Coca-Cola. How quickly ice melts in bubbling water, and how slowly it melts on human skin.

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They were there, the bits from before. I counted all five on my right hand where I had stored them, but my left hand was completely empty. The moments hadn’t happened yet. I couldn’t find them. I had wanted to travel. Thailand? Laos? London? I couldn’t remember where I had wanted to go; my left thumb was completely empty. What was I supposed to be? A veterinarian? A musician? A stay-at-home mom? The colors on my left ring finger were so murky I couldn’t make them out. I stared deeply into the ridges of my left pinkie. Was I supposed to get married? Move to Long Island? Or move back home?

I ran to the draft window, heaved it shut. Squeezed caulking in the corners, wiped the excess away. I lined the ledges with paperweights and pointed a fan in its direction, but I knew it was already too late.

I wasn’t paying attention and it all flew out the window. Somebody must have opened it. I’m afraid it might have been me.

Perry | 45

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The Sixth Night Marion Deal If I lived a life where each deer was gilded and every leaf had the face of a somber statesman in its veins guiding the fall then I do not think happiness would be too much to ask because now when the ones around me breathe young and fierce sharpening their minds on the soft spots in the world the wild horses run without golden rings in their eyes to the margins of the night and beyond and I don’t need wings to keep up only the thrum of tires on rock and the knowledge that this could become more if we breathed once twice down the white tile and through the flies’ wings (but this night’s all rotten at the core anyway hollow-backed and gaping like the roots of ancient trees because unless I have the silver wings they would not catch my words and peel back the skin to see sunrise flesh and golden veins inside but I can and do pretend they love me even so because that casual cruelty doesn’t make them any less human and it’s nice to walk among men for a while feeling every clack of their teeth virile and unknowing)

46 | Deal

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Night Limps in One Knee Marion Deal Need is a word for the veins in the attic and the fools in the belfry who don’t notice the vision dripping out of nail beds and felt coffins It’s for the ones who plunge elbow-deep and are not strong enough to see the work of oracles who say all they are and all they are not and fail in the way that revolution twines They forget to leave greasy trails traced on backs (wode or paint, these are the marks of the artist) Sometimes I think I could resist but I am made of blood and bone even my eyes are stiff and hard suit collars turned up at the ends and left in the closet terracotta legions for the everyman and their spleens’ demons the hollow sickness has gotten to them and me too through palm and prescience until perception screams and I do need because I reach for tyger paws and loose lips and the feeling of hair in my lap but I am almost alone in a dark room and there it is a rare bird on the edge of the bed Deal | 47

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Peanut Butter Russell Helms When Starla Loveless suggested to the principal of Little Creek Middle School, Mr. Deer, that peanut butter should be considered a gluten-free ingredient in the school’s progressive allergen-free menu, she raised the ire and specter of Nut Free, the parent group headed by the father of the Gribble twins, the dashing Lane Gribble.

The Gribble twins, Dudley and Dwayne, looked more than allergic.

The pallor that lingered around their eyes and noses seemed, according to standardized testing, to extend to the interior of their smallish heads, to suggest far deeper, far more complex “problems” than just mere allergies to nuts, fish, honey, asparagus, diet soda, and peppermint.

A meeting was called by Principal Deer—a panel discussion to clarify the growing concerns of the parents of gluten-intolerant children, for whom peanut butter was a saving grace in regard to sufficing their children’s caloric needs, weighed against the entrenched and, some would say, militaristic policy measures of the Nut Free gang.

In the few days leading up to the meeting, a tense and watchful pall settled over Little Creek Middle School. Starla Loveless had rallied, sending out tentacles of gluten inquiry to every parent, including those who were already members of Nut Free. She had to get the numbers up. Nut Free boasted 47 sets of parents. Prior to the alarming survey sent out by Mrs. Loveless—Is your child allergic to wheat? Does your child complain of stomach pain after eating? Does your child have trouble sleeping at night? Does your child complain when told what to do? Did you know that gluten was responsible for wiping out the Inca empire?—three underweight children, voracious complainers with dark eyes, soon became 23 with seven of the newcomers being of Hispanic descent. And thus, Wheat Free was born.

With five years of Nut Free under his belt, Lane Gribble drilled Dudley and Dwayne, preparing them for the Big Meeting. “When you walk into a room and smell peanuts, what happens? Dudley, you go first.”

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Dudley looked a little queasy. “My heart skips. Then my tongue gets dry. My pupils in my eyeballs get to be like little pinpricks. The bottoms of my feet start itching. My nose gets runny . . . ” “The breathing, Dudley, tell us about how you’re choking, can’t get your breath.” Lane Gribble’s eyes shone. His mouth hung open, waiting on Dudley’s reply.

“Daddy, it makes me sick talking about it,” said Dwayne.

“Wait your turn, son. Dudley, go on.”

“I can’t get my breath. I get to feeling like an—” “Like there’s an elephant on your chest, son.”

“Like there’s an elephant on your chest . . . ” “No, your chest. Not my chest.”

“My chest. An elephant on it.”

“The squeezing. You get dizzy, remember? Now pull out your EpiPen and hold it up high so everyone can see.”

Dudley held his EpiPen over his head.

“No, take the cover off so people can see the needle. They have to see the needle. See, you have to have this injection or you’ll die. Right?

But what happens if you eat wheat? Do you have to put a needle into your leg? Dwayne?”

“Uh, no sir. If you’re allergic to wheat,” and he made air quotes around allergic.

“Good, good,” said Lane Gribble.

“If you’re allergic to wheat, you get some really bad gas and have to sit in the hall for a few minutes.”

“Exactly. Perfect,” said Lane.

Wheat Free held their first meeting just two days prior to the Big Meeting with Nut Free. It was imperative, said Starla Loveless, that Helms | 49

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the group get their heads together and make a plan. Make a plan.

She liked how it sounded. Once she cleared up the misconception that Wheat Free was not formed to provide free buns to the children but rather to “make a plan” on how to go about ridding wheat products from Little Creek Middle School and adding peanut butter back to the lunchroom menu, she lost two parents.

“Okay, let’s move on,” said Starla. “My little Sara Mae is shy so we need a couple of kids to testify at the Big Meeting on the dangers and intense complications of gluten, which is an awful glue found in bread and such. You ever see bread mold? How awful it looks? That’s the gluten poisons coming out all green and black and blue. When your child eats bread, it turns all green and black and blue in their stomachs. It’s like eating rat poison.”

A few parents nodded. The school lunchroom smelled like milk, and the janitor kept sweeping in close with his enormous push broom. He wasn’t allergic to anything, except trouble, which seemed fond of him.

His broom knocked the long low table.

“Do I need a doctor’s test to make sure Jimmy is allergic to wheat?” said one parent.

“Well, to take the blood test, your child would have to eat a loaf of bread every day for a month. That’s the only way the test works for sure. Heck, I wouldn’t risk it on my baby.” She ran her fingers through tiny, waiflike Sara Mae’s hair. “Sara Mae here can walk in a room where there’s bread, and she pulls back like she’s been snake bit.

Tell ’em baby, how it does you when you smell it.”

Sara Mae sat twisting a hair tie in her small hands, swinging her legs.

“Do I have to, Mommy?” She looked hungry.

“This here is why we’re going to need some volunteers. Sara Mae’s shy, plus just talking about wheat makes her sick.”

“What exactly are the symptoms?” asked Mrs. Winkles. She was breastfeeding her newborn and held her fifth-grader, Simon, by a long leash that looked like a monkey’s tail.

“Well, usually it starts off with their little hearts skipping a beat.

Then their little tongues draw up and turn dry-like. If you watch their eyeballs, the dark round parts squinch down to tiny dots. Little Sara Mae’s feet here start itching. Her nose gets all runny and I hate to 50 | Helms

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spell it out but there’s terrible gas and cramping of the gut.” Starla found herself wanting to stand on the table to emphasize her points.

“All my kids eat is spaghetti and white bread,” said a parent. “If I take wheat away, what can she eat?”

“Well, there’s a whole new world of gluten-free foods. We all know how nutritious peanut butter is. Completely wheat free. The satisfaction of God guaranteed. Smear it on some wheat-free bread or just eat it straight from the jar.”

“Wheat-free bread?”

“That’s right, made with rice and other stuff. Tapioca and potatoes.”

The breastfeeding mom said that her son was allergic to potatoes.

“That’s why peanut butter is so important,” said Starla. “It’s guaranteed in the Constitution.”

The Big Meeting drew a full auditorium. Tan brickwork provided an odd sensation that there was something special about the acoustics in the auditorium, but it could have just been the large Peavey speakers on stage. Lane Gribble, the king of Nut Free, with his thick, combedback, prematurely gray hair, was thought handsome. Starla Loveless, the upstart wizard of Wheat Free, who specialized in little black dresses for such occasions, was held in high esteem by perhaps half of the parents in the audience that night. There was one deaf child among them, little Harry Spitz, and an interpreter stood below the stage, directly in front of him.

“I’d like to call this meeting to order,” said Lane. His teeth seemed extra white.

“How come you get to call order?” said Starla. Her flexed calves seemed extra firm.

“I think we are all very aware that Nut Free has led the battle against food allergies here at Little Creek Middle for nearly seven years. I do want to ask the mom who is breastfeeding there. Yes, you ma’am.

Mrs. Winkles, I believe. Yes, Mrs. Winkles, we have a child here tonight who is allergic to breast milk who is on your immediate right.

Yes, the child who is waving. Before we continue, if you wouldn’t mind . . . Yes. Thank you. And if there are others here with milk allergies—” Helms | 51

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“Did you answer the question? I don’t think you answered the question,” said Starla. “How come you’re in charge? Are you allergic to questions?”

A titter erupted in the audience. The janitor with his broom made his way down the center aisle, intent on a clean floor.

“I do think, Mrs. Loveless, that we have an agenda, and it clearly states that I will serve as the moderator of this meeting, which involves getting us started.” Lane raked his thumb across the podium and winced.

“I’d like to know why Principal Deer is not here,” said Torrance Valdez. He stood, hands in his back pockets. “Shouldn’t he be in charge here?”

“Nut Free has the confidence of Principal Deer and as such his blessing as well,” said Lane. “This new group, Freedom from Doughnuts, or whatever you’re calling yourselves, needs to let experience talk.” He paused and made a gesture with his left hand.

“How many lives have been saved through the actions of Nut Free at Little Creek? I estimate that number to be nearly one hundred.

What you may not be aware of, Mr. Valdez, is that first of all, the Inca Empire never vanished. It simply relocated, probably to Mexico City. They have lots of pyramids there. And second, the number of undiagnosed food allergies at Little Creek, and I’ll go ahead and throw in wheat, is practically unknown and—” Starla Loveless stormed the stage in her high heels and glove dress.

From the side, using the unusual acoustics to her advantage, she addressed Lane. “Mr. Gribble, you may know a lot about the Aztecs and such, but what you don’t know about wheat allergies might just fill a really big bathtub.” She paused and rendered a really big bathtub with her hands. “Do you drop acid, Mr. Gribble? Lots and lots of acid?”

Mrs. Winkles lost the leash on her son Simon, who was allergic to cinnamon and aftershave lotion, and did her best to land a foot on the monkey tail before he got away. Once, when her husband had come home from the barbershop with a bag of cinnamon rolls, they had nearly lost Simon.

Right away, Starla took the advantage from Lane, noticing his jaws relax at the sight of Mrs. Winkles’ bared, milky breast. “I’m assuming the answer to the acid question is either ‘Yes’ or ‘I don’t know,’” 52 | Helms

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said Starla. “Now to get this meeting back on track . . . I think Mrs. Winkles could use some help there in the front row.”

“Please be mindful of the milk proteins,” said Lane. He watched a droplet soar to the cement floor. He had suspected that he too was allergic to breast milk, but was not one to talk about it. “It’s always the proteins,” he mumbled.

The janitor had stopped sweeping and was taking a Kleenex from his pocket. The drop of breastmilk formed a perfect white pearl on his polished cement floor. He moved toward it like a carefully aimed ICBM. “Simon!” Mrs. Winkles hauled him in one-handed, while gripping her baby, like reeling in a blue-fin tuna. Her husband, Mr. Winkles, had bowed out of the meeting, claiming stomach upset, but she suspected that he was allergic to controversy and had said as much.

Starla made a move for the microphone, sweeping it from Lane in a graceful grab. A loud squeal from the Peavey speakers. Even little Harry Spitz cringed.

“So, since the Nut Job folks have been around for seven long years, we should all be on firm ground regarding their beef. What’s needed is an education toward wheat, which contains an ephemeral chemical called gluten!”

“I object!” said Lane. He threw his hands in the air and stomped his foot once. “This is an equal opportunity meeting, and we don’t need name calling.” His voice didn’t carry as well as Starla’s.

“Well then, let’s just slice the carrot cake right down the middle, shall we?” said Starla. “I’d first like to call my daughter, Sara Mae, to testify to what I sometimes call the wheat-ola virus, a gluten infestation, hot sticky poison in all its bastardly glory!”

Lane Gribble hollered for his twins, Dudley and Dwayne, to come to the stage, to be ready for the counterattack once scrawny Sara Mae had said her piece. There was much commotion and a general disturbance as the children mounted the bright stage. The janitor, now in the back of the room, shook his broom like a shaman at an ayahuasca ceremony.

Sara Mae stood next to her mother, looking down at her Ugg boots.

They made her feet sweat. “Mommy, do I have to?” When she turned sideways, she nearly disappeared.

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“Come here, little tiny baby.” Starla popped a squat and dangled her trim legs over the stage’s edge. “Sit by Mommy and tell our friends what you know about wheat and such.” She held the microphone to Sara Mae’s tiny mouth, which was kind of like a cricket’s.

“I get diarrhea.” Sara Mae hung her head.

“Oh!” shouted Lane Gribble. “Wish it was that simple for peanuts! How do the squirts stand up to being on a ventilator in an ICU, carried there by a helicopter!”

“Hold your hoary old tongue!” said Starla. “My daughter is speaking the truth.”

“Mommy, I’m scared,” said Sara Mae. “Are you scared of the wheat, darling? Just tell it like it is. Get it out of your system.”

“If a bread truck goes by the house, I get a fever,” said Sara Mae. “One time my daddy ate a bagel and then kissed me, and I got a rash in my privates . . . Mommy, I’m done, please?”

“What else honey? We got more. Tell it all. These people, most of these people, are our friends. God made you like He made you. You need that peanut butter to grow.” She opened her legs just a bit more. “She’s so tiny.

Itsy bitsy.”

Sara Mae concentrated. “When I was little, I ate a Twix bar, and then I lost four teeth.”

Little Harry Spitz, the deaf child, had a good laugh at that one.

The crowd began to squirm. Starla felt that Sara Mae’s testimony would stand brighter once opposed to the nonsense of Gribble’s twins. She stood. “Here you go, Professor Bonkers.”

Frowning, his forehead shining, Lane grabbed the microphone and sized up his twins on stage. He had a foolproof plan to forever brand the deadly nature of peanuts into the minds of everyone present. He would be rid of Wheat Free and Starla’s quest to have peanut butter reinstated in the cafeteria.

First Dwayne spoke and then Dudley. Both had had emergency tracheotomies, Dudley’s carved with a piece of broken glass on the 54 | Helms

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playground. They passed the microphone back and forth: “Eyes swelled shut . . . ” said one. “Testicles hiding . . . ” said the other. “Turned blue . . . ” said one. “Choked on my vomit . . . ” said the other.

The janitor made a pass down the middle of the aisle without his broom.

He wasn’t exactly sure why Lane Gribble had given him a Benjamin to smear peanut butter on the twins’ shoes, but it sure beat the hell out of work—pushing a mop and cleaning toilets. He pulled the jar from his roomy jacket pocket, swiped off the lid, and dug in with two fingers. The speakers squealed and a great confusion engulfed the room.

The twins, smelling the peanut butter, began to hyperventilate, their skin going splotchy like a giraffe. Starla was on her cell phone, dialing 9-1-1, watching in horror as Lane injected his sons with epinephrine. The janitor continued sweeping, hitting the feet of parents and children who scrambled toward the exit as if someone had yelled “Tsunami!” The fire station was next door, and soon four paramedics burst into the gym and ran for the stage, where the Gribble twins lay in the ecstasy of a peanut butter conflagration.

“Peanut Butter!” yelled Lane Gribble. “Oh God, peanut butter!”

Helms | 55

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SCARCE Ann Huang The thought of the universe is expansive, Short and unanimous. Seeing, Not loving and loving; Overly taught; Women and dogs, Left fumbling And scarce.

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Just the way you are Sean Griffin When your fist hit my face, the knuckle bones with fingers tucked away, met my mouth, that had dared issue forth timid words, and the skin between all those bones is what took the most damage.

Your hand’s hillsides got cut on teeth, my lips got cut on teeth. The same teeth that gnash at food and tear into meat until it’s unrecognizable. My lips weren’t the same you had put yours against moments before.

My hand was open and hovering by my mouth looking like I was trying to catch rain in my palm.

Some drops landed and spread into the ravine of my lifeline “I’m leaving,” I said with a few more splattered drops, “You know I’d never ask you to change.”

In the kitchen, you had the point of a knife making a small valley on your wrist. “If you do I do,” you said. I thought about calling your bluff only instead I apologized.

Griffin | 57

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Picture a face here Steve Penkevich And adjective appendages Pantomiming the soul— A heartbeat malaprop.

One hopes the puppet Is better than the ventriloquist, More elegant despite The same tongue.

Or at least more handsome And sober.

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Franklin and division Steve Penkevich One day we will all wake up The loneliest Burger King Crouched at a single blinking-red intersection, In that skeletal factory district.

We rather the few Remaining patrons Would just stay away And let the roof cave in.

Then maybe we could sleep.

We’ll watch them spiral in and out Of the liquor store down the block.

The one with splintered windows Children dare each other to touch.

Even in daylight.

It’s like those clocks with the Animatronic figures marching in circles Around the intersection from drink to food To begging to sleeping while singing: “It’s a small world after all,” All the while.

“At least we aren’t there,” The frycook says.

Are we not?

Damn their audacity to think so.

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Grocery List Steve Penkevich Look at all these aisles.

I swear to God I’ll cook you The feast you deserve.

Name the sides.

Fulfill all those desires you Didn’t realize you had.

Christian dads who vape Filling shopping baskets with Double-ply toilet paper covered In presidential fun facts.

Rows and rows of vibrators To fit my battery collection, And oh so many types of zucchini.

You’ll pretend the slow-shuffle old couple Doesn’t annoy you—how adorable they are!

I’ll buy you an old couple romance Right this instant: Free mail away rebate with a Gold card membership.

Half-off cat litter, free kittens in the river, Sing the out-of-season Caroling children (Last Chance Clearance).

Who has time for the dreams That will no longer keep us up at night?

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Food is cruel Anne Coray Lydia was scrunched in the corner practicing her lynx eyes. That was what she did most often when things were quiet, times like now as Mama washed the supper dishes with her soaped-up scrubber, making circles with her hand on the earthenware in rhythm to her humming.

Daddy was at the table lost in his own patterns as he drew the blade of his Puma forth and back, forth and back, a drop of honing oil every few minutes slickening the stone. And me playing my role of big sister, big daughter, toweling the plates and stacking them in the cupboard, bringing Daddy his toddy, filling our dog Bridger’s bowl full to the top with water.

But always watching, watching, especially watching Lydia, not trusting the lynx to keep its respectful distance, knowing that cat could transform into something more hardened, a weasel or grizzly boar. You never knew with her. Because she was perfecting many looks: she had owl, she had eagle, she had rabbit and beaver and spotted frog.

Sometimes even in the middle of our lessons, when she was bored with her sixth grade correspondence, she would practice. I’d give her a good nudge, but I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t find any word in my list of vocabularies to explain her.

Lydia loved animals, maybe too deeply. We could have been all right as a family if it wasn’t for that. Daddy’s drinking wasn’t sullen or excessive, and he only hit Mama twice. Let me explain: it wasn’t the swollen-eye kind, just once a back-of-the-head thwack that made her grimace, and another time a wrist-flick to her cheek surprising her more than frightening.

Both times it was half Mama’s fault, for her giving in too much to Lydia, who was strong-willed and stubborn just like Daddy. Neither of them could help it; it was in their genes. See, there are reasons people do what they do, and if Mama was sometimes too whimpery about the patchy clothes we wore or the lack of toys we had to play with, then she needed Daddy to set her straight. ’Cause Daddy had the big job, he hunted hard two weeks in fall for moose, and through the winter Coray | 61

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to the end of March for spruce grouse, and all year for black bear and rabbits and squirrels. While Mama and Lydia and me mostly just tended the garden, planting the starts outside around June 1st when it’s at last safe in southwest Alaska, with no danger of frost. Of course there was weeding, watering, and harvesting, but honestly it wasn’t much, not compared to Daddy tracking animals and sneaking through the woods. It’s true that when Daddy got a big one, I had to help with the skinning and packing because Lydia wouldn’t do it and Mama had to empty the meat house. The meat house when it wasn’t in use was our storage shed, allowing us to live in our too-small house without knocking elbows, and Lydia’s were keen. I was glad we managed a little distance even though Lydia was my sister and I loved her.

But this night when she was lynx-eyed, I was afraid of where she might go. I had a right to that fear, too; I certainly did. I’d seen her studying Daddy at supper and her glowering when he said eat your meat. Lydia didn’t hate meat so much as the thought of meat. What got her, I think, was the composition: the muscle and tissue and blood that made it what it was, but most of all that it had been molded around a living animal’s bones. When Daddy got up for his toddy and we were still at the table, I was afraid she’d slip a front leg of squirrel into her jeans pocket, which I’d have to extract before Mama and me did the wash. Lydia had done this before, and I’d remembered the morsel too late, but I fed it to Bridger, who didn’t care that it was two days old. Bridger I’m sure liked it better for the aging, the way he wagged his tail.

I was relieved that Lydia followed Daddy’s order and chewed. She never said another word, and by the time Lydia and me toppled into the single bed we shared, she was solemn and sleepy. I wrapped my arms around her the way I always did and she leaned into me, full body, relaxed and peacefully happy. I wanted to tell her things then, about how people can’t help their appetite, we shouldn’t consider it sad that feeding is three-quarters life. It’s the way of the world, and if you’re religious (though we weren’t) you accept God’s plan. She fell asleep, though, before I could explain.

The thing with Lydia was she didn’t let things go, and when I woke in the morning, I saw her lids were already opened wide. It was still dark out, being November, about the rottenest month I think, with the weather so dismal and hardly any snow. I could hear Daddy snoring on the other side of the curtain and I figured Mama lay awake beside him, like she always did, ’cause what was the sense in starting the day when once up there’s laundry and cooking and arguing?

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Well maybe not arguing, exactly; that is a matter of definition and degree, as Mama likes to say about pain. Just sometimes there were disagreements. But that’s the way of all human people, far as I know.

We didn’t spend much time around others, living isolated like we did.

Lydia was awake and I touched her little finger and said, “What are you thinking?”

She blinked and stared up at the rough ceiling of our bedroom, built too low when Daddy ran out of lumber.

“I’m a loon,” she said.

I knew what she meant. Not that she was crazy but that she planned to spend the day looking at us sideways, through big dark ovals, and gliding around us like she was in water, even though the lake outside our window was too cold now for birds. Only the mergansers could stomach the water so late in the season before it froze.

I decided to ignore her. I’d learned this much in my fourteen years, that ignoring is sometimes best; if you just go about your business and keep your tone even, those strange things around you start to fade.

Lydia ended up helping, chipping in with straightening and sweeping, ’cause those were the chores she liked most and the ones me and Mama were happy to let her pick. Then we had our lessons, and Lydia helped me with math, which was getting into algebra. She was ahead of her grade. She was good at calculating and liked it and I wasn’t and didn’t.

The day part went okay, but then there was evening and Daddy came in with two rabbits that he strung from a beam. He cut around the feet, sliced once backside and took the fur off whole, like a sock. “It was a good technique, fast as a fiddle,” said Daddy, and he was proud of it too. But every other time he’d done it in the field in the fork of a tree, so I don’t know what compelled him to bring them inside. Maybe as a demonstration to Lydia, or maybe outside it was just too cold.

Seven degrees below stiffens the fingers when they’re wet with blood.

Anyway, Lydia looked at those rabbits and her mouth shut. When she opened it, I knew there’d be trouble.

“They look like skinned cats,” she said.

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“They’re snowshoe hares, honey,” said Mama, as if Lydia didn’t know, and she reached out to stroke Lydia’s cheek but Lydia pulled back. I was sopping the blood that had pooled out on the counter.

Daddy grunted, severed the heads, and tossed them and the hides in our plastic dish tub, which was all we had for a sink.

“Look how clean the meat is, no hair on the hare!” I smiled wide, trying the best I knew to lighten the mood.

Lydia took another step back as Daddy set about butchering. He severed the hind and forelegs, slit the chest cavity and pulled out the innards. He separated the guts from the organs and that was when he took up one of the hearts. I saw him heft it in his hand like he was judging its weight. Then he turned and zeroed in on Lydia with his palm inches from her face. This time she didn’t flinch or step back but stood there with her head up as if flaunting her long neck.

Daddy wore a scowl. “You think you’re too good for this?”

Lydia didn’t answer. She just gave him her loony sideways look and I thought she might yodel or scream.

“I work my hind end off, and this is what I get for thanks?” Daddy’s jaw was set like two-day concrete.

I stepped in then, right between them, one hand on Lydia’s chest, the other on Daddy’s. Mama’d learned not to interfere, but I didn’t think Daddy would ever hit me. I was kind of his favorite. Not that I tried to be.

“Please,” I said. “We’re family.”

That diffused it for a while. Daddy went back to his ribcage, which wasn’t much, paper-thin and looking useful for nothing but flavoring stew.

Lydia clenched her fist, claw-like, more raven than loon, then threw on a hat and a light jacket and flew outside.

I breathed, deep and even, because we’d gotten through it, hadn’t we?

Except an hour later it was supper.

Lydia, cheeks still rosy from the cold, slid into her seat and fixed her eyes on some distant point on the wall. Her long thick braids made 64 | Coray

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her look regal, that was the vocabulary word that sprang to mind.

I sat quiet with one hand in my lap while Mama passed around the biscuits. Then the gravy, then the diced potatoes, then the kale. That was how she always did it, one thing at a time, saying thank you, thank you, for each dish, sort of a blessing, but never with Lord or Jesus or Mary tagged on.

Lydia dutifully filled her plate, then came the hare, roasted with water and covered so it was close as it could get to tender. But I knew it wouldn’t help much, it being a fall rabbit, stringy and gamey tasting like they were this time of year. I worried Lydia would pass on the serving dish to the corner of the table and the remaining hind and foreleg which was her portion would sit and stare at us like weapons daring to be used. Instead she dumped the legs on her plate and looked at the little bowl of livers and hearts that Mama hadn’t passed around and said, “Anyone going to eat that?”

Daddy looked up from his mouthful of braised rabbit and gave her the narrow eye, wondering likely what she was trying to pull. Mama smiled a gentle half-smile at her youngest daughter and shook her head no. I waffled a minute, thinking if I claimed at least the hearts then Lydia wouldn’t feel the need to snatch them up and carry out whatever trickery she was hatching in her dangerously creative brain.

At the same time, I felt intimidated by her intensity. So I just made a little gesture with my hand that said, “Go ahead.”

And that’s what she did. Lydia speared the hearts first and then the livers, holding her cutlery knife blade-up with her fist wrapped around the handle. Then she gave her wrist a twist and slid the first liver into her mouth, her teeth like a vise set just wide enough to keep the blade from getting clamped. That liver took a long chew, weighing in at a couple ounces, but she worked it fervently. That was another word I’d learned in my list of vocabularies.

She finished it and ate the other, then started on the hearts, picking up the pace, looking from one to another of us with a kind of wildness that was part fear and part challenge, as if we were going to try and wrestle those morsels away. But no one moved or knew what to say because this was not Lydia, not my sister and not Mama and Daddy’s daughter.

I tried to act normal. I swallowed some biscuit and tested the rabbit, which was about how I’d figured it, like shredded dental floss and not easy on the jaw. The kale was better but you could tell it was heading Coray | 65

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into that rot stage with winter now serious, getting softer and more fragrant is how Daddy described it.

Then Lydia started on her plate. She went straight to the meat, with no fork, just fingers, and I knew now she was eating angry, doing her wolverine and gnashing up those hare legs with a snarl. She didn’t look regal anymore. Daddy just watched her and took long sips from his toddy.

“My, but you’re hungry,” said Mama.

Lydia finished her the last piece, the foreleg, using her teeth like a drawshave, following right alongside the bone. She smacked her lips.

“I’m the world,” said Lydia.

At that instant Bridger rose from his resting place under the table and nosed my hand, and I couldn’t help it, I felt his perpetual need for food, and I slipped him what was left of my biscuit, which no one noticed because Lydia had all their attention.

Now Lydia got a thoughtful look beneath her scowl. “Hunger is to carnivore what current is to electricity,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I followed her logic, but I could see she’d been studying her lessons and was employing one of those analogy things to get her point across. Not ’til later when I thought about it did I see she was talking about what drives us, what puts things in motion. But at the time I just stared at my sister, and I loved her a tiny bit less.

Bridger licked my hand, wanting more, wanting meat.

Then I watched Daddy’s hands relaxing around his toddy. His fingers that had always been strong as a moose’s hindquarter were starting to lose their sinew, looking weirdly plump now and closer to putty as they tried to grip the glass. And I thought, food is cruel.

Lydia slid back from the table without touching anything else on her plate. She stood, and her eyes tracked front. “I’m full,” she said. She didn’t even ask to be excused.

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Stalking Autumn Andrea Farber-De Zubiria Dear Autumn, You’ve probably never noticed me with all the attention you get for your foliage, but I’m the one who loves you even when your reds and golds turn brown. When your leaves’ crisp staccato softens to damp sighs, when others find you cold.

I love your empty branches and your fleeing birds, your dark mornings of grey sky, your scent of smoke.

I love your thickening animal fur, how you invite humans to retreat to dream caves, to each other’s skin and to wish that we could hoard and hibernate.

Who wouldn’t love to find the perfect pumpkin among hay bales? But I also admire your fat orange children, no matter odd shapes, where they grow in my yard; I cradle them as they release their umbilical attachment to your soil.

Autumn, I’m the one who loves the ring of the doorbell and finding no one there. I love your owl’s hoot and your lonely skeletons picked clean, clacking their bones in the night of our minds.

Your promising notebooks . . . new shoes in September . . . Of course.

But who else is still charmed come November, when half-solved problems and crumpled thoughts have accumulated in desks and soles show the wear of our leanings?

I love how your seriousness after the playground of summer makes us resolve to be better, more organized, more productive, more frugal, but how mostly we remain twins of ourselves.

You were the season of my birth, Autumn, and have left me more than fifty times since then. Please come back.

I’ll be waiting at the window.

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Don't Sit There Cameron Bryce

“You shouldn’t sit there. I’ve seen that couch swallow a man whole before. I shit you not.”

It started, as so many of the most interesting events of my life have before, at around six in the morning. There were two of us left awake in the flat, and we were chattering like birds in a tree. It came to that time when I needed to find myself a note, and so I turned to Mikey and asked him for the twenty we had been using all night. After a bit of fidgeting and checking his pockets, he looked up at me with a confused face.

“Fuck knows, mate,” he said, “must’ve lost it.”

“How can that be possible? We haven’t moved off this couch since last night.”

“Fuck knows. It must have swallowed it.”

“Wait!” I replied.

“I’ll look for it in a minute . . . calm yerself.”

When a minute passed, Mikey began by putting his hands down the sides and back of the couch. Nothing returned. You see, it’s not one of those couches where you can just pull off the cushions and look at the bare bones of the thing. This couch is sewn together at the edges, except for its wretched mouth at the back, where from which things cannot return.

“Hawd on! I think my fucking bank card’s down the back of yer couch as well,” he said to me.

“Surely not?” I replied.

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“Aye.” “How? Why would you have your card out?”

“Why do ye think, ya prick? Do ye think that all just get crushed into a fine powder by fairies?”

“Oh aye, right enough,” I said, feeling like a moron.

Mikey had worked himself into a bit of a rage by now, swearing as he searched under, over and all around the couch. I stayed back, out of fear that he would soon blame the owner of the furniture and I would have to fork out twenty quid. He seemed to be disappearing and further with each time he dived in search of his belongings. He would return for air, more redfaced and furious each time. It was then that it happened, and though I know you won’t believe me, I beg you heed the warning: the couch opened up its jaws, revealing the never-ending black of its gullet. Like plankton into the mouth of a whale, I watched that beast swallow him whole.

So, you can sit there if you like, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Gone, Long Gone Robin Tuck Elle comes home on Tuesday to discover Melancholy has taken shape and is oozing hazy darkness all over her velveteen armchair. Purple stains mar the fabric and drip down the arms, spreading across the hardwood floor. It chose crooning country music as a soundtrack, the used vinyl popping loud through the speakers of her turntable, a forty bottle of cheap beer propped on what must be, she supposes, its lap.

The apartment is cold—windows that were once cracked are now shut tight against summer breezes and sunshine, and the air smells thick and wet like earthworms after rain.

There is no way, really, to prepare for such a homecoming. She sighs, kicks off her flats by the door, and wanders into the kitchen. Elle can hear Melancholy warble a hello over the sound of slide guitar. It’s a half-hearted welcome that she ignores.

Pressing her fingers into her eyes, she contemplates escape. She could grab her keys and race back out into the world, away from what the night will inevitably hold, but she has learned, many times, that it is not safe to leave Melancholy alone. It only grows larger and darker until it becomes something much worse.

Instead, she thinks, “What do you make Melancholy for dinner?”

Pasta salad doesn’t feel right. There is no point in asking, she knows, it will only croak regrets at her. Reaching into the freezer, she pulls out a brick of venison wrapped carefully in white paper and drops it into the microwave. Elle punches defrost and watches it spin.

In the other room, Elle hears Melancholy get up and flip the record; the quiet between sides a small blessing. There’s only so much harmonica one person can take. The microwave beeps and she pulls the bleeding package out and tosses the whole lump in a pan. The only good thing, she decides, is that Melancholy will eat just about anything.

A few thin days separate her from the last appearance of Melancholy.

Respite is shrinking. She remembers, not long ago, when it had been slow meandering weeks, a sweet eclipse of time that almost 70 | Tuck

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tricked her into thinking it would never return. But here it is, feet, or something anyway, propped up on her coffee table, rambling about Lost Youth and scaring her cat.

Poking the venison with a spatula, she imagines an apartment bathed in silence, without the dribbles of darkness so difficult to scrub from the curtains. How light she would be, the weight of worry dissipating like the last hummed notes of a song. Guiltily, she glances into the living room, as though she spoke her thoughts aloud. Melancholy can’t help being itself.

The record spins itself down, and Elle announces the venison is ready.

Melancholy slinks into the kitchen, taking its chair across from her, tendrils of smoke and ash twisting along the table. She eats small bites in silence. Melancholy eats nothing, just sucks beer from the bottle and warmth from the room.

“So bored. Go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed. Every day the same. No connections, no thrills, nothing to look forward to.”

She slides carrots onto her spoon, takes aim, and flings them into the void of Melancholy’s open maw. It doesn’t pause, or even notice. She has heard its litany of complaints over so many meals she imagines she could recite it by heart. Logical arguments hold no sway, nor impassioned ones; the only solution she’s found is to wait it out with distractions and chores.

Scooping up the plates, she busies herself putting the kitchen to rights while Melancholy cracks open a new beer. Another record frizzes to life and Elle washes plates already scrubbed clean so she won’t have to leave the kitchen. This is what she despises most about Melancholy, how avoiding the spills of it across the floor keep her from the things she loves. It seems to fill up the space of her small apartment until there is nothing left. She yearns for it to go, take its darkness out into the night so she can breathe, but even now she dreads its leaving, knowing full well she’ll pay for her hours of solitude.

Elle glances down at her fingertips where they turn slowly gray, so light and subtle no one else would notice. Of course this would happen, she thinks, checking her toes for signs. Melancholy seeps into everything. She’s not so special as to be immune. Would it happen slowly, or all at once? Would she become Melancholy, or just its shadow?

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Hero of the Ool Robert Alexander All heroes have costumes. Mine is a stained gray tank, faded red trunks, mirrored aviator sunglasses, a backwards red cap, a lanyard whistle, and white globs of SPF 15. Once armored up, no longer am I just Rob Alexander. I become the Lifeguard: Protector of People, Savior of Swimmers, Defender of the Drowned, Hero of the OOL. I scrawl these titles—along with other doodles and rules—on a dry erase board below my ten-foot-high chair where I sit, waiting for the children to read and ask me, “What is OOL?” And I’ll crook my aviators down just a notch. “It’s Pool, but notice there’s no pee in it. I’d like to keep it that way.”

Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes roll their eyes. A few never get the joke and stare like hairless guinea pigs. It matters none. Because telling jokes is not all I do. Constantly scanning the premises, searching for that distressed swimmer in the shallows or that body face down, drinking the dead man’s float—I save lives.

I know what you think. I am no hero. That I get paid to do nothing but sit, tan, and watch. But you, madam or sir, fail to comprehend the true peril of the job, the mental danger of repetition, the heavy stagnancy of boredom. Like the madness that settles in the brain while waiting for each click of a waterproof watch. Or the drops of sweat streaming down cheeks, stopping on a stubble of chin, about to drop . . . about to drop . . . about to . . .

Have your ear drums ever burst from the endless screeching of young soccer moms nagging their child to “get out of the pool, get out right now! I mean it!?”

No? Well the mind travels to dark places, my friend. Crazy places. Many fallen guards have succumbed to that first-aid insanity, their whistles and soggy suits dripping on hooks until they dry. But not me. I will always be

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ready, always be waiting, scanning for each eternal eight-hour shift. The Lifeguard’s Credo.

Today, however, my eyes snag upon the giant breasts of a pale girl. At first, it appears the girl has two bald albinos in a headlock, but soon I realize it’s just her parts, and I become lost in the space between them, wondering what she looks like underneath that purple bikini top, hoping that she’s in college and not high school. The girl glances up, not quite catching me in the act, for all she sees is her own reflection in the aviators and my head moving side-to-side in phony survey. My secret identity remains hidden, but inside my head, personalities clash. A battle between man and hero erupts.

“Lifeguard, stop!” I say. “These are not heroic thoughts. We need to tell those kids over there to stop chicken fighting. Tell those other kids to stop hanging on the lane line. And tell that woman she can’t bring a glass bottle on deck.”

“That’s boring,” the Lifeguard says. “Babysitting is not saving lives.”

“But look, over there. At the deep end,” I say. “That father and daughter bouncing on the diving board at the same time. That’s dangerous. They could break their necks!”

“Could, but won’t,” the Lifeguard says. “And anyway, we’re not watching the diving well. There’s another guard down there. It’s her duty.”

The Lifeguard, the Hero of the OOL, turns our head back to the hopefully-in-college girl, who is no longer even in the pool, but spread out on her back in a chaise lounge chair, one leg bent, one straight. She reads a Cosmo magazine by holding it up in the air, shading only her face.

“Now there’s a sight that could save lives,” the Lifeguard says.

This is no good. The Lifeguard is a sleaze. We are a sleaze. I always thought heroes should have vices, you know, to add more depth to their characters, to make them human. Heroes should also save people. We never actually have. We sit all day, watching different families perform handstands, toss gutter balls, dip their fries and fingers into puddles of ketchup, then wash their bloody hands in the chlorinated water. We watch and do nothing.

Why does no work and no play make a hero? Can I blame us for staring at something new and exciting? At least we’re not sleeping. At least we are watching someone. And if that pale, college girl with giant tits were Alexander | 73

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to choke on an ice cube, we’d be the first to wrap our arms around her belly, the first to administer the ole Heimlich, the first to glue our mouth onto her lips and blow that lifesaver air inside using only a tiny bit of tongue. Maybe we’d even have to take her top off, to get a proper placement of our hands to perform CPR. Damn.

Stop.

We need to think of something else. We need something else to happen. Like a fight to break out. Or a little girl to almost drown. A boy to bang his head while attempting a gainer off the diving board.

A bee sting.

A heart attack.

A floating turd. Anything. Just a problem for us to fix and distract us from our perverted eyes.

Is that what we want? For disaster to strike? That’s not heroic either.

What we need, what all good heroes need, is a villain. Someone to think the bad thoughts for us. Someone to give us purpose. Hidden behind my glasses, I squeeze shut my eyes and wonder what sort of super-anti-lifeguard villain it would take to save the day. *** What is a lifeguard’s worst enemy? Water? Lightning? No, archenemies need to be a person. Though it can’t just be a maniac who wants to kill kids at a pool. That’s too ridiculous.

But what about some sort of reincarnation of Charles Darwin?

He could show up on a modern and refurbished HMS Beagle and declare that lifeguards are harming the evolution of species, interfering with nature’s natural selection.

And the Lifeguard would counter that the invention of pools protected by lifeguards, and the decision to go to those pools, is a part of evolution, part of natural selection.

“Those children, those offspring should drown,” Darwin cries.

“Not on my watch,” the Lifeguard retorts.

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“Then your watch must end.”

And of course, their words accomplish nothing. So there is a climactic clash between the Lifeguard and Darwin, obviously taking place on the refurbished HMS Beagle during some torrential storm, and right as Darwin unleashes his spotted turtle-shell dagger, the Lifeguard blows his deafening whistle, stunning the father of evolution for just enough time, allowing the Lifeguard to dodge Darwin’s signature dagger attack, the Galapagos Gash, and that’s when a monstrous, rogue wave crashes starboard, tossing Darwin overboard, but the Lifeguard, always ready, always waiting, throws out his red rescue tube.

“I got you,” the Lifeguard says. “Hold on.”

But Darwin only sees himself in the Lifeguard’s aviators. An old decrepit man who no longer can survive on his own.

“Survival of the Fittest, eh, Lifeguard?” Darwin says, and for the first time in a long time he smiles as his hands let go of the rescue tube, letting the Charybdis whirlpool swallow him whole. *** A real, deafening whistle blows, waking me from the mad day dream, signaling time for rest period, and more importantly, my fifteenminute break. I climb down the ladder and a little boy sprints past.

“No running,” I yell, and the boy changes his run into some sort of constipated speed walk. A second later, the boy stubs his toe and stumbles forward, but catches himself at the last moment.

“Well done,” says the Lifeguard. “If that boy were running, his face would be Hamburger Helper right now. And we are even on break.”

“A hero never breaks,” I say.

Together as one, we walk west toward the sun, toward the snack-shop, where if we are lucky, the cute snack-shop girl will make us a Reese’s Cup milkshake before rest period ends.

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dishes in the sink Matty Layne Glasgow Every 52 years the Aztecs destroyed their household belongings, their pottery, their dishware, to stave off the world’s end. The New Fire ceremony—xiuhmolpilli—began the next cycle of the Aztec calendar.

I. In passing I saw them there Tuesday as I steeped a bag of dirty chai in a scalding stream— steam of cinnamon & cardamom & clove & espresso upon my face. My chai was not the dirtiest thing I’d seen that day, nor the dirtiest dish. There, beyond the spiced mist, lay two plates of faux antiquity, black on orange on black. Eye within flower within sun—blazing. There, with burnt red lip curling upward lay jaguar eye and tail curling around black coffee mug. There, soiled fork in the communal sink of our English department’s kitchen. I am told in the Midwest these things happen.

II. An email from the Department Chair

Date: Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 11:53 AM

Subject: Dishes in the sink

I found some dishes in the sink in the 2nd floor.

If you lost them, you collect them from me.

Best wishes.

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III. Concern I worry for my roommate. Our Department Chair came by our house. She saw our sink through the kitchen window, and now the great eye in the sun is after him. No. Impossible.

Then she would understand how bad things can really get. I still worry for my roommate; those dirty dishes in the office looked familiar.

IV. Philosophical questions If a man leaves his dishes in the sink, knowing where he left them, understanding their location, that others will see them, that others will move around them to wash their own dishes, if a man leaves his dishes in the sink and they are then taken, are those dishes in fact lost? Can something be lost and taken at the same time? Or are they simply lost or taken?

V. I once wrote a poem about priorities It began: A fungal civilization erects its green Tenochtitlan upon plumes of fine china, towering

out of twin silver foundations.

The sinkscrapers climb floor

by gluttonous floor; sweat rank

as rotting meat oozes from the hundreds of thousands of workers in this, their First and only

Great Age of production.

This is a different poem, though it shares a common image. I see new civilizations rising daily in my shared Iowa kitchen, though I no longer lay their foundations.

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VI. Anxiety

I will never dirty a dish at the office again.

I will never dirty a dish again.

I will never eat at the office again.

VII. Hindu Proverb

I will never eat.

On the box containing my teabags of dirty chai, there reads an ancient Hindu proverb:

He is a real teacher who not only instructs others, but practices the same instructions himself.

VIII. We own a dishwasher.

It rests adjacent to

a tower of soiled pots & cups & plates & pans the sight of which the Aztecs would have surely looked upon awestruck, cried out to Huitzilopochtli to celebrate the magnitude of a single man’s construction.

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IX. Concern (reprise) I worry for the person who types that passive aggressive email. I am told in the Midwest these things happen. Fingers don’t mince words.

They encourage us to use professional email etiquette with our students. To model how we expect them to communicate their needs. My students write to me: if you want my assignments, you collect them from me. I want to place those students’ balls in a vice and reply: If you lost your balls, you collect them from me. But they didn’t lose their balls. I never touched their balls.

I never sent an email invoking such power.

I’ve never been good at following by example, whether elder or superior.

Best wishes.

X. Realization Our home’s kitchen is located on the first floor, unless you count the basement as its own floor, which I am told in the Midwest, you do not. I have not seen our Department Chair’s bushy light brown curls lurking around our kitchen window, so, though I was nearly sure before, I am now completely certain my roommate is safe, that our Department Chair has not been by our house yet. She certainly referred to the second floor of Ross Hall in her note. I remain scared of our Department Chair. I am not the only one. I must fall on the dirty fork for my beloved colleague no matter who he or she may be.

I am told in the Midwest these things happen.

XI. Revising Hindu Proverbs In this instance, I feel a change in gender is appropriate to keep up with the times:

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He She is a real teacher who not only instructs others, but practices the same instructions himself herself.

XII. Sacrifice Today, through our Department Chair’s closed door, I heard the soft whimper of a colleague—fear filling each choppy breath. But then something else. Over the bleating there came Oh Huitzilopochtli, I honor you with our weak, our inconsiderate, our dirty. You want these souls. You collect them from me. Then: the quick thud of a dirty fork through the heart. Then: the muffled shattering of moderately priced china upon the carpet. Then: silence.

XIII. A metaphor I am a dish in the sink.

Please find me, before she does.

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Where Things Get Complicated Greg Bowers We each live in our own snow globe.

I liked the way that sounded. It sure was better than my first idea— “We’re all betta fish in our own clear plastic cups on a shelf at WalMart.”

We each live in our own snow globe. Short. Concise.

Everything is behind glass. Look, don’t touch. We can see each other, but real human interaction is where things get complicated.

We each live in our own snow globe.

Yes. Better.

I stood outside the pizza place, put one hand on each end of my sign and danced, side to side, like a happy character on a children’s television show.

That’s not a stretched metaphor. Like most service jobs, this was acting. I wasn’t actually happy. Who could be happy dancing outside a pizza shop with a “Hot ‘N’ Tasty” sign?

When people asked, I would tell them that I worked at the pizza place.

But the lie made me feel even worse. What sort of job do you have when working at a chain pizza place is your cover story?

It didn’t matter, I told myself. Every world has its limits.

The limits of mine were the driveway that cut through the curb so customers could drive into the parking lot and a leafless bush that caught plastic shopping bags in its bare branches. When it was windy, they made a rattling sound.

In the space between, I danced, side to side, with my sign. Human advertising.

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It could be worse. A couple blocks down, a dancing gorilla advertised a Cuban sandwich shop.

I’d never actually spoken with the gorilla. One day, on my way to the pizza shop, I walked by the gorilla but didn’t say anything. What could I say?

Sometimes we waved at each other, but even that may not have always been intentional. One time, a car drove by and honked its horn. I thought it might be someone I knew, so I raised my arm. The gorilla thought I was waving at him, so he waved back. Awkward.

I decided that I didn’t owe the gorilla anything. This was not a relationship. It was just a wave, right? I was careful not to raise my arm for the next several days. But then the gorilla waved at me.

What happens now? What should I do? Did I have anything in common with the gorilla? Did the gorilla tell his friends that he made sandwiches for a living? Was that his cover story?

Did he live around here? Was the gorilla even a man? Did I know him? It was all so complicated.

Most of the time, the gorilla and I were lost in our own worlds. The gorilla held his sign that blared, “CuBaN FoOd”—with every other letter capitalized in some eye-grabbing typographical trick.

A short leg was mounted on the back side of my sign. The idea was that I could grab the leg and the sign would be easier to spin. Most of the time I didn’t spin it though. I just held it on each side and did my little character dance. That was my style, my signature. There are no rules, are there?

Sometimes there could be trouble. In the summer, you could stand out there in the heat of the day until your forehead and nose turned red and your t-shirt stuck to your chest.

Or you could work into the evening when drunken college kids would sling empty beer cans at you because they thought it was funny.

Did the gorilla have to deal with that crap?

One night a guy threw a bottle that made me jump when it broke against the curb at my feet. My first thought was to glance down the 82 | Bowers

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block and see whether the Cuban sandwich gorilla was looking. But the gorilla had his back turned.

We each live in our own snow globe.

In the winter, the gorilla was fatter—a winter coat stuffed under his gorilla suit.

Cars kicked up slush. The wind blew.

I wore a wool hat, pulled down to just above my eyes. A thick winter coat made me look sluggish.

But I wasn’t sluggish, was I? I danced and swayed, and earned my money just like I did on the warmer days. This wasn’t some weird work ethic. I was a pro.

One winter night, a car full of girls startled me by pulling up along my curb. A window lowered. She was beautiful. Long, golden hair.

Blue eyes. A smile that sparkled like a cartoon.

“Hi,” she said. “Do you know how to get to the movies?”

I could see her breath in the cold air.

I nodded and pointed vaguely.

She began raising her window, but stopped and looked at me again.

“I like the way you move,” she said.

I suddenly felt dizzy. Maybe it was because she was beautiful. Or maybe it was because it was the nicest thing that anyone had ever said to me.

She closed her window and the car pulled away.

Tail lights.

Exhaust.

Alone.

Just then a gust of wind rattled the plastic bag bush so hard that some of the bags broke free and swirled high into the night.

And the air filled with snowflakes.

Bowers | 83

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Pink-Slipped David Holloway JJ Caxton It seemed like overkill, two guys who could pass for pro linebackers being called in to control a 55 pound 9-year-old. Last year a thirdgrade girl in Mr. Kenyon’s class freaked out and threw a stapler. Now Mr. Kenyon takes out his glass eye at assemblies to scare the kids straight. Now they always send two security guards.

One stood quietly next to me in the aisle while the other searched my desk. They took everything—books, crayons, candy wrappers, the works. I wanted to keep the story about my dog, Zigster, but the company owns the work product. One of them shook out my Spongebob Squarepants backpack. They kept the colored pencils and soft pink eraser that fell out. They left the peanut butter sandwich and three broken cookies.

Mrs. Henderson stopped teaching and gave me a printed pink slip of paper. I wouldn’t be getting another report card. She explained to me that Alfred J. Harmon Inc. Elementary School had to stay competitive. They had to trim some dead wood. I knew that Harmon Inc. needed more arithmetic, and my performance plan required reading a Beverly Cleary book. I claimed that I had finished my map of Michigan, but I never drew the Upper Peninsula. I just did the mitten. Jimmy Chandler finished his and added a drawing of a car next to Detroit.

What a suck up.

Most of the kids wouldn’t look at me, but Jimmy smirked and waved goodbye.

The security guards walked me out of the classroom and down the empty hall.

I haven’t felt so small since kindergarten, when Mrs. Mason called me a radical for saying goose, goose, duck instead of duck, duck, goose. I guess the writing was on the blackboard even then.

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Now I just sit at home collecting my uneducation benefits and drinking chocolate milk. Maybe I’ll try again next fall, maybe I won’t.

It’s for the best; me and elementary school, we weren’t a good fit.

Still, it makes me a little sad to imagine some other kid sitting in my old chair learning the state capitals and wiping his boogers under the desk when he thinks Mrs. Henderson isn’t watching.

Mrs. Henderson Like most teachers, I can spot the expendables by the end of the first week, but the front office makes you give them at least six. I spotted JJ Caxton as trouble from day one. He couldn’t focus on the task.

Instead, he looked all around at the classroom, out the window, at the bulletin boards, taking it all in with those deep brown eyes.

There are two types of kids; there’s the kid who’s directed inward and wants to show what she or he can do. The winners.

Then there’s the dead weight like JJ. He just tried to absorb everything and didn’t worry about producing. By fourth grade, the good ones understand the business needs of the classroom, but I could tell that JJ would never get there.

I worked with him as much as necessary, even though I knew it wouldn’t help. He never really took off the way that a good company kid does. He’d be working on drawing a map of the state, and get distracted by a dog barking outside, or he’d spend so much time trying to decide how big a dot Traverse City should get that he never finished.

It’s not my job to teach them time management. If they don’t have it by now they never will. That’s what all of the psychological studies say, and that’s why we start trimming the dead wood in third grade.

Frankly, I’m surprised that JJ made it through third. He definitely wasn’t fourth grade material.

He wanted to ask questions about everything: Why does water freeze?

Does a cat think like a person? Who invented numbers?

Everything he needed to know was in the textbook, but he was one of those annoying, directionless kids who wanted more. A teacher’s nightmare.

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I documented all of the warning signs, all of the infractions, and the operational psych profile. That op-psych system has saved me from wasting so much time on underperformers. I can’t imagine keeping the class healthy and productive without it.

I gave him an extra week to make sure he wasn’t going to turn things around and then I sent the paperwork to HR. The next morning security escorted him out of the building. It’s very important to do these things in a businesslike manner. It sets the tone for the rest of the class. They used to just send letters to the students’ houses telling their parents that they were no longer needed at school, but as you’d expect many of the parents pretended that they never got the letters and continued sending their kids to school for weeks afterward.

Nowadays the teachers call security, the pink slip goes out, and problem solved. If only more kids could be like Jimmy Chandler. Now there’s a kid who’s going places.

Jimmy Chandler I knew that they’d sack JJ from the first day of class, and most of the other kids did too. The kid had dreamer written all over him. That might be okay in pre-K but by the time you hit fourth grade you gotta be a realist.

He never learned to work the system. Take me, I did six pages of easy addition and subtraction while JJ struggled through a half-page of multiplying fractions. Production, production, production. I learned that in second grade. Don’t bore yourself to death drawing a map of Michigan, start with a drawing of a car and then put Michigan around it. Don’t read a whole book! The cover and the first and last chapter give you plenty to write about.

When the teacher tells you that you did something wrong say thank you. Sure it grates your cheese, but that’s what my dad taught me, and he’s a VP at Google now.

Focus on the unwritten rules and the secrets of what they want out of you. If you don’t, security will be dragging you out next. I’ll smile and wave bye, bye.

86 | Holloway

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The Squirrel and the Fox Danielle Dreger

Wear nondescript clothing, maybe a baseball hat, but not one with a team logo. Sneakers make too much noise; invest in a pair of loafers.

Despite the season, wear a jacket. Do not carry a bag.

Bring no identification.

Work in large crowds, particularly holidays when shoppers are too frazzled to notice your hand in a stranger’s purse. Work quickly. Be a fox. Now is not the time to dick around. Now is not the time to get caught.

Do not make that mistake. Remember, you are a fox.

You are not a fox. You are a squirrel.

You are Robin Hood.

Carry your cash in envelopes. Use only twenties. Large bills are suspicious.

You do not want to be suspicious.

Follow only women with children. They are more distracted, tired, defeated. They are the ones who need you the most.

Stay 10 paces behind her until she stops to finger a silk scarf. While she caresses the fabric, brush by her long enough to deposit the envelope into the diaper bag. Or into her purse. Or into the Gap Kids shopping bag attached to the stroller.

Ignore the temptation. Do not look back. Resist the urge to wink at the child as you pass by. You do not want to be remembered.

Work in large department stores. Deposit no more than one envelope per store. Never do more than three in one day.

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Try not to smile when you exit the store. Remain stoic until the food court. Order a pretzel and small coffee. Smile at the cashier.

Go to a movie.

Go to the bank.

Go home.

Drive across town. Find another mall.

The women at this mall do not need your help. Wander Nordstrom for hours until you spot her. Her toddler is having a meltdown in the shoe department. Act fast.

Your first mistake is this mall.

Your second mistake is this store.

Your third mistake is the shoe department. There are too many eyes.

When you are caught, say nothing. Security will drag you to a windowless office behind the bathrooms. It will smell faintly of bleach.

The air conditioner will be broken. You will sweat through your shirt.

Wait until the manager arrives before you make your case. You are not a thief. You are Robin Hood.

The manager will look at you in disbelief until he confers with the woman. She will go through her purse and find an envelope she does not recognize. She will dump out the contents onto the desk. Ten crisp twenties will slide across the surface. Everyone will look at you in surprise.

Reach into your jacket and pull out two more envelopes. Add four hundred dollars to pile.

Say nothing.

Sweep your arm across the desk and send the bills into the air. When the manager, the woman, and the security guard move to collect the cash, make your escape.

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Drive to a new town.

Find a mall.

Start over.

Dreger | 89

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There's so much the ventriloquist's dummy doesn't want Matt Schumacher my oh my do I, the dummy, not DESIRE your preHensIle thuMBs, your DEcADence, your speciesism, your birthright to preeminence, your pissing contests, food stains, mensa memberships, your adolescence and old age, and all the failures of your big brains. your award shows, your genocide campaigns. your pills, bird-killing oil spills, and lead-poisoned babies, your foamings at the mouth for more like you have rabies. i’d rather just be deaf and dumb then waste all that you waste. i’d feel ashamed. i don’t need your pretense or your pride, your self-important, scrutinizing gaze, your bmws, your solipsistic greed, your smug need to be chic, your exclusive clubs and gated neighborhoods, your xenophobia. your racist hate. i don’t want your fast gadgetry, your slick gimmicks. the way you rifle through what’s left after a loved one’s death. your plagiarized eulogies, inane with cliché. your trifling selfies beside dying baby whales. while you’re at it, keep your breath and heartbeat. your suffering and pain.

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the ventriloquist's dummy fantasy coronation speech Matt Schumacher That’s right—now look who’s king. give me my crown, my throne, my ring, my championship belt, my spoils and your everlasting loyalty.

And don’t drone on. I want a heartfelt ceremony that shows you know I’m what it’s all about.

I’m the cadavers Monsieur Alexandre made shout. I’m the howl of a baby thrown down a well.

I’m ancient Greek Gastromancy.

The lore of oracles entranced, the priestess Pythia, whose hollow sound and echo meant supposedly Apollo spoke. the voices of the unliving that tell you how to live.

The dead author.

Take me off the shelf.

I’m the power, the sound that differentiates self.

I’m how you feel when you hear your own recorded voice. and think, my god, that can’t be me.

Schumacher | 91

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Feather REd K.B. Carle Now, before I get to learning you something I’ll give you what them white folks call a displaining: I curse, a lot, and I been noticing you covering those sensitive baby ears you got sticking out on either side of that thick head of yours. Well cut that shit out and fucking listen to these goddamn words that be spilling from my bonafide and sanctified mouth. You listen to Feather Red, the baddest motherfucking train hopper you ever gonna meet here, there, and every fucking where, and you might just be able to stand on those sorry excuses you dare to call your feet.

1. Always listen to Feather Red. If it’s coming from my mouth you best assume it’s important. If it ain’t coming from my mouth then you can probably forget it unless I repeat the thing I didn’t say first.

2. You ain’t jumping you hopping. You ain’t jumping shit, and you ain’t skipping shit. Last I check you can’t fly, gallop, and I’d question my own fucking sanity if you wanna call yourself floating any goddamn where. You get it through that head of yours that the only people who ever jump trains are those that got a death wish.

3. Never trust the bag boys. Though they the same color as you, they snitch in a minute. For every hopper they give up, a shiny nickel finds its way into their pockets. Don’t even look them in the eye unless you have to. Only time you can trust a bag boy is when you pretending to be one which ain’t gonna be often ’cause lord know with them tits you ain’t posing to be no boy. Snitchin’ boys ain’t even got a pot to piss in.

4. Only go into the city when you need to. Whether it’s to get or send them letters to your Daddy telling him the saint I is for taking you under my warm, loving wing, for fresh water or food, don’t go making a habit of riding passenger trains. Not only is they hard to get on but they got too many eyes just searching for a hopper. Bag boys, conductors, white folks, and black folks if they can pile into them last two cars. It ain’t worth it so don’t go making a habit of it.

5. ALWAYS listen to Feather Red. If I tell you to find me some fucking food you best be bringing me back a buffet. I say jump you best be trying to touch that blue sky. I say run, your scent best be the 92 | Carle

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only thing marking where you once stood. Don’t make me have to say this one again.

6. Find something that’s yours. Get that one thing can’t nobody take away from you. Mine’s my hat with this red feather. Like to think Abraham Lincoln wore it before me and tell people I took this feather off the tail of a hawk that tried to pluck me off the side of a cliff. I done ate that hawk too. Cooked that sucker over a fire and just let his juicy goodness slide down my throat. True story ’cause it came right out of my mouth meaning you gotta listen to it.

7. If they done right by you, do right by them. I ain’t helping you for charity and nobody else will neither. You gonna remember what I’m doing for you, taking good time out of my day, to help you get your footing. I had important things to do the day I let your sorry ass follow me on that train and I expect my good deeds to be paid back in full. You gotta help other hoppers too ’cause no one else will. Now I don’t mean handing out my food or nothing, but if someone ask you the word in Alabama, you tell them their branches ripe and ready for swinging. Which brings me to rule 8: 8. Don’t—I don’t care if you got family, if you grandmother sick and waiting for you so she can go ahead and die—DO NOT take your sorry assed self south. You go south, rest assured you gonna get shot, beat, dragged through the dirt, spit on, drowned, dragged again, and shot again, ’cause that’s how crazy white folks are. People say “Feather Red you so crazy!” I ain’t crazy! Pick up one of them paper notes you see them white folks just posing in front of a swinging colored. If you have to go south I ain’t gonna waste my time mourning for you. I done warned you what would happen.

9. Lie. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’cause it ain’t their business what you be doing or what you been done. You out here to get away from something and don’t try to tell me you ain’t ’cause no girl in her right sense would just be sitting alone on a train platform— ‘specially someone as young as you. We all running from something and ain’t anybody’s right to interfere with someone else’s personal shit when you trying to get rid of it. Now don’t confuse this rule with the others, I’m being nice and telling you things you need to understand.

And I ain’t telling you again, my hawk story is true! Snapped that bird’s neck, I did, and boiled his body in a gumbo pot I got from this Gullah speaking woman missing her left ear, right eye, and all of her goddamn toenails.

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10. ALWAYS LISTEN TO FEATHER RED. Why is this so hard for you to get into that thick skull of yours? I done told you not to put a lick of trust in them bag boys and then one falls on the platform and there you go running trying to help him. Leave him lie! He done made his choice just like he chose to tell his conductor on us and now we stuck walking to where we need to be going. You a stubborn girl, always think you know better but you gonna learn. Find me a good hammer so I can beat the living shit outta you until you get this rule in your head.

11. Borrowing and trading is a means of saving. I just made that up, pretty good rhyme if I say so myself—and since I do, you have to listen to it. We ain’t thieves, so when you go in someone’s bag, make sure you replace what you borrowing with something else. Last someone under my warm, loving wing, for fresh water or food, don’t go making a habit of riding passenger trains. Not only is they hard to get on but they got too many eyes just searching for a hopper. Bag boys, conductors, white folks, and black folks if they can pile into them last two cars. It ain’t worth it so don’t go making a habit of it.

5. ALWAYS listen to Feather Red. If I tell you to find me some fucking food you best be bringing me back a buffet. I say jump you best be trying to touch that blue sky. I say run, your scent best be the only thing marking where you once stood. Don’t make me have to say this one again.

6. Find something that’s yours. Get that one thing can’t nobody take away from you. Mine’s my hat with this red feather. Like to think Abraham Lincoln wore it before me and tell people I took this feather off the tail of a hawk that tried to pluck me off the side of a cliff. I done ate that hawk too. Cooked that sucker over a fire and just let his juicy goodness slide down my throat. True story ’cause it came right out of my mouth meaning you gotta listen to it.

7. If they done right by you, do right by them. I ain’t helping you for charity and nobody else will neither. You gonna remember what I’m doing for you, taking good time out of my day, to help you get your footing. I had important things to do the day I let your sorry ass follow me on that train and I expect my good deeds to be paid back in full. You gotta help other hoppers too ’cause no one else will. Now I don’t mean handing out my food or nothing, but if someone ask you the word in Alabama, you tell them their branches ripe and ready for swinging. Which brings me to rule 8: 8. Don’t—I don’t care if you got family, if you grandmother sick and waiting for you so she can go ahead and die—DO NOT take your 94 | Carle

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sorry assed self south. You go south, rest assured you gonna get shot, beat, dragged through the dirt, spit on, drowned, dragged again, and shot again, ’cause that’s how crazy white folks are. People say “Feather Red you so crazy!” I ain’t crazy! Pick up one of them paper notes you see them white folks just posing in front of a swinging colored. If you have to go south I ain’t gonna waste my time mourning for you. I done warned you what would happen.

9. Lie. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’cause it ain’t their business what you be doing or what you been done. You out here to get away from something and don’t try to tell me you ain’t ’cause no girl in her right sense would just be sitting alone on a train platform— ‘specially someone as young as you. We all running from something and ain’t anybody’s right to interfere with someone else’s personal shit when you trying to get rid of it. Now don’t confuse this rule with the others, I’m being nice and telling you things you need to understand.

And I ain’t telling you again, my hawk story is true! Snapped that bird’s neck, I did, and boiled his body in a gumbo pot I got from this Gullah speaking woman missing her left ear, right eye, and all of her goddamn toenails.

10. ALWAYS LISTEN TO FEATHER RED. Why is this so hard for you to get into that thick skull of yours? I done told you not to put a lick of trust in them bag boys and then one falls on the platform and there you go running trying to help him. Leave him lie! He done made his choice just like he chose to tell his conductor on us and now we stuck walking to where we need to be going. You a stubborn girl, always think you know better but you gonna learn. Find me a good hammer so I can beat the living shit outta you until you get this rule in your head.

11. Borrowing and trading is a means of saving. I just made that up, pretty good rhyme if I say so myself—and since I do, you have to listen to it. We ain’t thieves, so when you go in someone’s bag, make sure you replace what you borrowing with something else. Last someone told me, the word equal ain’t in the word trading, so what you given don’t have to be equal to what you borrowing. You don’t like to think about it that way then think of it as we are liberating—didn’t think I could use a big word like that, did you—things from people who don’t appreciate them like we can. Shoot, I’m on a role! You best be remembering all this, girl.

12. Don’t get attached. This thing we got only temporary and once I’m through teaching you, you best be on your way. Getting tied to things that don’t want you cause a breakdown in our natural order.

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Next thing you know you’ll be asking who I was before Feather Red, if I gots me a family somewhere, and all this personal shit I don’t wanna be sharing. All you ever gonna get is Feather Red, so just settle in that and move on before I have to make sure you get gone.

14. Don’t pay no mind to nothing that wish ill upon you. That includes numbers, shattered mirrors, ladders you gotta crawl under, and black cats, animal or human! Life a bitch as it is, don’t need to be messing with nothing to make it any worse.

15. Don’t shower in your drinking water and don’t drink your shower water. Us hoppers get covered in shit day in and day out. Things you don’t want slipping down your throat and turning you belly five kinds of sideways! If one of us is washing in the river, even if your throat is shriveling up into nothing, you best believe you showering that day.

I don’t care if you stink so bad the man standing next to you just fell out and died. You see someone drinking out of a pond you best believe you drinking too.

16. Never share your food, unless you giving it to Feather Red. What I got I eat and what you got I also eat. That’s it. I get my meal, I earned my meal. You get my meal then I’ll give you what you earned too. We just one step away from being beggars but we gotta make sure not to take that step. Soon as you do, well, can’t say what happens ’cept the fact you got your hands out looking all pitiful and hungry. We already hungry so we don’t need to be looking some kind of pitiful. Yeah, that’s what that step will do, so don’t take it.

17. Find yourself something to learn. Keeps your mind right and fills up them real quiet moments when I don’t feel like speaking two words to you ’cause you done worn my nerves with how stupid you get.

I don’t care if no one else was around when we got to that drinking hole! I wanted to get the dirt from outta my toes so you had no excuse to be trying to get a sip of that water! Always listen to Feather Red, and don’t be drinking my showering water!

18. Don’t name yourself. By now you must have figured, though I doubt it since you so hard to educate, but Feather Red ain’t my birthing name. When the other hoppers start recognizing you for what you is, a hopper, they gonna give you a name. Something that fit you just right like Spatz, Skunk, Two-Tone (don’t go messing with him, never know which color he going to be posing as), Shitless Sam, Bastard Bill, Switchback, Black Jack, White Jack, Yellow Jack, Copper Jack, or Jimmy Jack (only so many colors a man can be).

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Getting your name gets you one step farther away from that personal shit you trying to get away from.

19. Keep in touch with your Daddy. Lord know I don’t need another person after my ass with all I done done. Don’t you go asking me about it neither! I’m out here as Feather Red and that’s all you need to know. Now I know I done told you several times to be rid of all that personal business but I’ll let you keep your Daddy. Plus, I’m starting to have nightmares about what he done told you in his last letter.

Innocent and unsupposing me pulling into that platform and him just waiting with that shovel.

20. ALWAYS. LISTEN. TO. FEATHER. RED. When I tell you to get gone, your ass need to be getting gone! Don’t make me have to throw a rock at you! You always so hard headed, ain’t no wonder no man want nothing to do with you. _____________________________________________________________ 12. (Correction) Only get attached to one person. Never thought it would hurt to see you getting gone but I can’t keep you for myself on account of your Daddy scaring the shit outta me, and I ain’t got nothing else to be teaching you. Believe you known that for a while now, me repeating things over and over. You probably gonna mess up somewhere, get yourself caught up in some kind of backwards shit storm and my stupid ass gonna be right there to drag you out of it.

Then we both gonna look up into the eye of that storm and wonder what we done started. Until that day comes, I’ll see you around, Quill.

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Phonography Matt Gold

Gold | 99

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100 | Gold

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Gold | 101

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102 | Gold

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Gold | 103

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The orange farmer's son Lizzy Nichols Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

-John Steinbeck, East of Eden The leaves on the front lawn of Millersville High School crunched violently under Jim Defeu’s heavy, quickened footsteps. The class, minus Raegan, was already gathered on the front lawn, waiting.

When Jim reached them, he threw the weight of the trash bag off his shoulder and it hit the ground amidst a cloud of dry dust. Panting in the dry night’s air, Jim pulled a cigarette from his worn denim pocket and lit it impatiently.

Waiting for Raegan. Just like the time his gang had smoked their first cigarettes in the same spot. While clusters of the small class chatted angrily, Jim ruminated on that night. He could almost feel the freshly watered grass’s dew and mud soaking through the ass of his pants while waiting for Raegan to join the ritual of discovering what secrets Nate’s big brother’s Marlboros held. The air that night had been humid, dewy, in a monsoon glory.

Now, dry fire tunnelling through Jim’s respiratory system in imitation of the dry heat pressing against his skin, he heard a growing crunch approaching through Millersville’s dead grass. Breathing out a yellowed plume of smoke, Jim grinned. *** Jim was only partially trying to hold onto his consciousness. Not for the sake of Mrs. Weatherford, or his education, or his classmates, and certainly not for those fucking angry Grapes, but simply for the sake of avoiding another call home. Try as he might, though, Jim’s eyelids refused to hold themselves up. Look at Jim Casey’s initials. What do they remind you of? Certain phrases crawled through Jim’s fuzzy awareness as he fell deeper into the precipice of full-on sleep.

Was the silence that followed his final arrival to a REM cycle? Or merely the reality of a high school English class faced with the void 104 | Nichols

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left by the only girl who’d cared? Just last week, the Garcia family had taken Rosa away to a Someplace Else, California’s Central Valley having nothing left to offer.

“Jim!” At the sound of his name, Jim rocked to full attention, shaking his tiny desk and warming the classroom’s stark silence with soft laughter. “Would you kindly read the passage on page 110 starting with ‘I got thinkin’ how he was holy…’ for us?”

“Uh…yeah.” In a state of panicked stupor, Jim frantically fumbled through his worn library-copy of The Grapes of Wrath, till his pulsing fingers found it. “’I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth an’ run off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin’ an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the holi-ness. But when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang— that’s right, that’s holy.’” After stumbling through the Okie vernacular, Jim looked up, slightly embarrassed, at Mrs. Weatherford.

“Thank you, Jim,” she replied. “I want you all to pay close attention to this passage as we continue with . . . ” The bell ending the school day sounded and everybody began to pack up. “Excuse me, the bell does not dismiss you, I do.” Everybody begrudgingly sat back down. “I want you to pay attention to this idea of togetherness as we continue with Steinbeck for these next few chapters. Okay, thank you. Have a nice weekend, and chapters 19 through 21 are due Monday!”

And with that, the entire class of 15 ran to the door at once, jostling to be the first ones out. Jim waited with aggressive stagnation at the dam of classmates, until finally reaching the front of the mass and gushing into the hallway’s rapids.

Among the chaos, Jim naturally gravitated towards his friend Luke Jensen. The Jensen and Defeu farms had been neighbors for generations and Jim and Luke had gone home together since first grade. The two burst forth into exchanging notes on Halo the moment they were seated on the bus.

The Jensen farm was just a few miles closer to the school than the Defeu, so Luke got off first. Alone in his row now, Jim scooted over to the window and leaned up against its dusty panel, dizzying himself watching perfect row after perfect row of fallowed orange trees speed by.

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*** “Man, what took you so long?” Luke asked.

“I couldn’t find it! I’m actually super behind on the reading.”

“That’s fine,” Jim said as he snatched the bent copy from Raegan’s sweaty hands.

Cigarette in mouth and Raegan’s book in hand, Jim bent down and turned the trash bag upside down, spilling about 50 copies of The Grapes of Wrath onto the lawn. He threw Raegan’s on the top.

The rest of the class followed suit. *** “Well there just isn’t the water for that!” Jim’s dad said, pounding his fist on the table just hard enough to make the silverware tingle. In the faint background of dinner conversation, Jim had only partially registered that his mom and dad were back at this year’s crop again.

His dad was generally not a violent man and usually hid his stronger emotions from his son. This momentary crack in the levee brought Jim, a little surprised, back to the conversation just in time for his dad to retreat from what had begun to slip through his fingers like water.

His dad hunched and leaning forward across the table, Jim’s mom sat stock upright with discomfort at Jim’s presence. “Jim, are you done with your dinner?” she asked levelly.

“Yes,” he responded.

“Will you please let your father and I talk then.” It was not a question.

“Would you like me to clean my dishes?”

“No. I’ll get them.”

Jim stood up with a scrape shredding through the kitchen’s tense silence. “I’ll be out back with the boys then.”

“Okay,” his mom said with an attempt at warmth that stumbled on curtness.

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A hot night, the kitchen door was already sitting ajar, and Jim opened the screen door with a slow creak. Immediately upon its bouncing bang behind him, the conversation recommenced as if the barrier between the conversation and Jim was nothing more than the screen door’s mesh material.

“How are we supposed to even buy food with the amount of oranges . . . ” “Sheryl, there is not enough water for all the trees this year. There’s barely even enough for the ones that are growing. I don’t know what you want me to do. Water everything and let it all die?”

Jim checked his phone to find that the gang had already been at the Death Star for about half an hour. Stomping along the orchard’s collection of dead leaves, and even the stray fallen branch, Jim headed towards the middle point between the Defeu, Jensen, Patrick, and Stanley farms where, miraculously, the gang had found a small, abandoned, crumbling, one-room house in childhood. The Death Star’s title had not matured with age.

Almost as soon as he was close enough to detect acrid cigarette perfume, Jim heard Nate’s greeting: “Jesus, Jim! Even Raegan got here before you today!”

“Dinner started late,” Jim responded, accepting a cigarette from Luke and using his own lighter to set it aflame.

“Did you hear that Carl moved to Montana?” Raegan asked him.

“Nah, why?” Jim said, knowing the answer. He was snapping his lighter on and off, watching its violent explosion into the dark night and its equally violent departure.

“His old man’s gonna work on his mom’s dad’s farm there.”

“I thought his mom was from California too?” asked Nate.

“Nah, Montana. I think she had, like, extended family in Millersville or something? But his dad’s been here for, like, three or four generations though,” Raegan said.

In a momentary flash from his lighter, Jim caught a glimpse of a worm sliding across the empty window sill’s aged brick.

“When did he move?” asked Luke.

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“Like last week?”

Suddenly, Jim picked the worm up and held the lighter under its squirming end until it caught on fire. The flame it created was dim, calm, and brief, seeming to perhaps only melt the worm a bit.

“Woah man!” exclaimed Luke, “awesome!”

“Coooool,” Raegan added.

Jim chuckled, “Bet we could find something better!”

The gang immediately dropped to their knees, lighters out, searching the crumbling earth for a more promising fuel source, giggling to the point of breathlessness through it all. *** Every muscle in his body clenched and aching with an accelerating pulse, Jim held his lighter above his head, a tiny torch raging steady in the stagnant air, heavy with the static of hatred. His cigarette clenched between his teeth, smoke poured forth with nearly every word.

“Look at those fucking angry Grapes! Look at what the state of California’s making us read about ourselves from some fucking Okie!”

“Fuck Steinbeck!” shouted Lou Ann. “Hell yeah, fuck Steinbeck!” Jim yelled back. “Are we going to keep letting Mrs. Weatherford and the state of California call us the bad guys!”

“Fuck no!”

“That the drought is our fault!”

“Fuck no!”

Jim’s passion was becoming so great that his face burned with blood, and tears were beginning to fall from his fiery eyes. “I sure as hell am NOT going to keep letting some dead Okie bully me in fucking English class!”

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“If you’re a Californian like me, get your goddamned lighters out!”

The entire class thrust their lit lighters above their heads in imitation of Jim, yelling every swear word they could remember mingled with the name Steinbeck.

Falling to the ground next to The Grapes of Wrath pile, all Jim could think to yell as he placed his lighter on a book was “goddammit!” *** California was trending. Having exhausted any posts that might have managed to successfully distract Jim from his The Grapes of Wrath reading, Jim turned to the trending bar on the right side of his Facebook page. It was about the drought, of course.

What happened to the beaches and movie stars? Jim thought as he clicked on the first article that came up. It was some website called The Desert Sun, which scrawled its name across the top in font pretentiously shadowing The New York Times. Jim’s heavy eyes lazily ran across the article, picking up the stray phrase here and there.

Agriculture consumes 80 percent of the water that Californians put to use. A picture of a man leaning over a field. “Farmers don’t like to be told what to do any more than the rest of us do. But we’re in a drought, and what do you do in an emergency?”

Jim’s window was open, an invitation to some breeze that didn’t exist.

To the tune of early summer crickets, Jim found himself in a moist sweat which seeped, slowly, into the dry night.

Back button. Next article. The Daily Beast: Large scale farmers are enjoying extraordinary profits despite the drought . . . Agriculture is at the heart of the state’s worsening water crisis . . . consumes a staggering 80 percent of California’s developed water, even though it accounts for only 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic product . . .

Central Valley, which is, geologically speaking, a desert.

Jim reached for the bag of Cheetos which were installed, permanently, next to his computer. The cheese powder mixed with his brined fingers to coat his hand in a thick orange goop. He sucked it off before clicking back to Facebook’s California tend. Fox News. A man in a pink shirt stands on a pumping station. As California struggles with a devastating drought, huge amounts of water are mysteriously vanishing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—and the prime suspects are farmers whose families have tilled fertile soil there for generations.

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Jim clicked the back button again and, sighing, finally turned to his The Grapes of Wrath homework. He opened a new window, keeping Facebook on hand, and went to Sparknotes. Chapter 19:

The narrator describes how California once belonged to Mexico but was taken away by hungry American squatters who believed that they owned the land because they farmed it. The descendants of these squatters are the wealthy farmers who defend their land with security guards and protect their wealth by paying their laborers extremely low wages. They resent the droves of “Okies” flooding into the state because they know that hungry and impoverished people are a danger to the stability of land ownership. For their part, the Okies want only a decent wage and freedom from the threat of starvation. Settling in workers’ camps, they try their best to look for work. Sometimes one of them tries to grow a secret garden in a fallow field, but the deputies find it and destroy it.

Hungry American squatters.

Wealthy farmers.

Want only a decent wage.

Jim’s eyes falling from line to line, he sat up in his chair and furrowed his brow. “What the fuck?” he whispered to himself as he scrolled to Chapter 20.

A new handful of Cheetos in his mouth, Jim read on about the Joads, who had replaced their fight against the tractors with a battle against the Californians.

“Seriously, what the fuck?” Chapter 21, the last chapter of homework, California locals form armed bands to terrorize the “Okies.”

Jim scrolled back to the top of the page and read the three chapters’ summaries again.

“What the goddamn actual fuck!” Jim yelled at Sparknotes.

Dumbfounded, Jim turned to his library copy of The Grapes of Wrath and put his eyes to its printed pages for the first time. He found Sparknotes right about Steinbeck’s Californians. Incredulous, Jim turned back to Chapter 18, and found, there too, his ancestors put in some bad guy costume usually meant for aliens or murderers or gangsters. Chapter 17 was the same. He found himself reading, backwards, all the way back to Chapter 1. He slid past California’s villainy and into a wrought Okie heroism when the West had fallen beneath the earlier chapters’ horizon. And then he went beyond: 109 | Nichols

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Chapter 22, 23, 24, all the way to Chapter 30, the end, and some sicko sucking on Rose of Sharon’s tit. It was the first whole book he’d read since fifth grade, which had been a Boxcar Kids mystery.

Late now, but pulsing with rage, Jim returned, ferociously, to his Facebook and copied and pasted Chapter 19’s Sparknotes to his English class’s group chat. He furiously began to type. *** The fire’s dry heat was overwhelming Jim’s reddening front side when the class first heard the fire truck sirens.

“Shit man! What do we do!” Raegan frantically asked Jim. “Do you think it was one of the neighbors?”

Instead of answering, Jim just gave him a look that meant “shut the fuck up.”

The fire truck pulled up next to the front lawn’s fire hydrant and men in heavy brown suits started pouring out. They hooked up the fire truck’s hose to the fire hydrant and started running over to the flames, yelling “Get away! Get away!” at Mrs. Weatherford’s class.

The class quickly scurried to a new distance from the fire while the firemen closed theirs. As they became closer and closer, though, they began to slow down.

“Wait, the school’s not on fire,” one of them said, coming to a slow realization.

One of the firemen turned to Jim and asked, “Are you kids having some stupid bonfire? Don’t do it on your school’s front lawn, you morons!”

“I broke into Millersville’s library and stole all of its The Grapes of Wraths. We’re burning them,” Jim answered stoically, receiving a slight shove from Nate. The fireman looked at him hesitantly, the hose resting precariously in his arms.

“Uh, what do we do?” one of the men behind him asked. “The city might get on our asses for using water on some book burnin’.”

“Oh shit, you’re right,” the first fireman said, slacking his arms slightly, but still gripping the hose.

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Like dominos down a line, the rest of the firemen slackened their grip in the throes of deep thought. Their mouths slackened too beneath a row of eyes deploring the fire for an answer. The class was looking to the firemen to see what they would do, mouths also loose. Jim turned to face the heat with the full brunt of his body and lit a cigarette.

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The troll under the bridge Kari Wergeland His stony visage glowered over me— a rock of a face, gray and huge, renowned; just resting still and learning how to be.

Medusa’s guys—like him—are free of sound.

That troll beneath the bridge watched me stroll up to his gigantic hands—I held my ground.

I stared him down, and I could only shrug.

Yes, for a moment I sidestepped the rain and checked his good eye, a silvery hub.

I’d poke it out—right into his brain, as I did in East Davis Park down under the rainbow bridge we tripped over as rage impaled one child’s open-eyed wonder; and we rode on past the antique bike, a big-spoked wheel above one roller.

It’s almost a unicycle—too huge to ride.

We shot past on ten-speeds with curly bars, and left red circles twirling in the night, as streetlamps stood still and drowned out the stars.

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in honor of cowboy wayne Robert Crisp I can’t countenance what I don’t cotton to, says Cowboy Wayne, in love with his scruff and the tin alloy of his voice, the blue smudge of life in his veins, the chalky cliffs of his teeth.

Li’l dogies burst into flames rather than incur his wrath, which stretches from barbed-wire to unsettled valley, old homestead to bloodied hearth.

When he coughs, mermaids boil in distant oceans.

In a closed theater, a talkie runs backward, a great feat for the projectionist who whistles past the graveyard in his memory, the black and white grain of Cowboy Wayne’s gaze.

On the blasted prairie, the man of the dismal hour bakes his supper to death, gurgles a hymn through a cup of black cider procured from the medicine man who warned him to lay low, avoid people, eschew praise.

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a gift for the weather witch Robert Crisp He had a gift for the weather witch, something small and fragile, a hair-thin item he’d kept secreted away.

Tending to the clouds, she ignored him at first, but he presented himself in the form of rain, so she had to hear him out, his liquid words making motion in her stormy head, clockwork heart, and fibrous spirit.

She extended her mossy hand toward him, palm up, and received the gift, laden with sighs, rain, and tears.

“I know I’m supposed to thank you,” she said, “but I can’t.”

He took corporeal form and nodded. For a flashing moment, he looked like her father, possessed of the same flaming eyes.

“In time, you will,” he said and vanished backward into color.

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One Bubble Scott Leonardi If I had a pebble for each time you loved me, I could build a castle to the stars.

If I had an atom for each shred of longing, I could play God and create our very own galaxy.

For every ‘I love you,’ I believed you.

And if you were given a dollar for each time I returned your love, you could buy one piece of gum.

Blow one bubble.

And it would pop.

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Equal and Opposite Heikki Huotari One of these two things is different from the other therefore one of these two things does not belong.

In an interior a spiny antibody meets a spiny anti-antibody then the one that wins is swinging nonchalantly from a chandelier or stands corrected on a pedestal, depending on which way the wind is blowing, one demoted, one promoted.

I was wrong and you were right or vice versa.

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The Grip Eleanor Shelton My name is Francis Duffy but after the operation my mother called me Frankenstein. Then the press picked it up. I knew they meant Frankenstein’s Monster but rather than take offense, I reveled in the moniker because without my new arms I wouldn’t have known love.

I was the kind of kid who sat alone in the school cafeteria; afraid of never being kissed and just as afraid that I would. I was scrawny and had asthma. Sometimes I used a breathing machine at night. I fell asleep with my skinny arms dangled over the sides of my bed, as if part of me was trying to escape, waking up to numbness.

My mother made me accompany her to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. The only father in my life was Father Pike at Sacred Virgin Catholic Church. My mother had it in her heart that I would become a priest. The first time I walked down the sanctuary aisle as an acolyte in my cassock and surplice, carrying the cross, my mother let out a squeal as if she’d just caught a glimpse of one of The Beatles.

I didn’t want to be a priest. I didn’t even believe in God. I just wanted to play baseball.

I had no muscle definition to speak of and my hands were too small to grasp the end of the baseball bat with any firmness.

When my mother was at Bible study, I watched baseball games. I didn’t care who was playing. The way the players gripped the bat, holding it tight, the wood an extension of their arms. Then swinging with all their might, sending the ball flying into the stands. To me they were impossible heroes. Performing miracles I never could.

That is, until I got new arms.

It happened quickly and innocently. When I was 26 and not a priest, but a computer programmer, I attended a company outing. It was a daylong picnic at a local lake, a meeting place for families during the day and lovers and drug dealers at night. A thick rope dangled from 117 | Shelton

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a tree over the water. As I gripped the rope and pushed off, my small hands couldn’t take my weight and I slipped onto an outcropping of rocks. I gashed my left shoulder and had to go to the first aid station at the park headquarters. They cleaned the wound and gave me ten stitches. My mother told me that it was God’s will. A punishment for not becoming a priest. Probably the first of many in her lamenting eyes.

My wound wasn’t healing well and became alarming. The skin around it blackened and oozed, swelling so that the rub of my shirt fabric felt like explosions. I tried to ignore it, but then my mother saw it.

“You know where infections and pus come from?” my mother said.

Mistakenly, I thought the question was rhetorical, but she waited for me to answer. “Bad bacteria and reproducing cells in nature?” I finally answered.

“It’s the Devil himself working through nature,” my mother said wagging a finger at me.

I told my mother that I was going to confession but instead thought the hospital a more useful choice. Unfortunately, the necrotizing fasciitis or flesh-eating bacteria, had taken hold in my system and both my arms had to be amputated just below the shoulder.

My mother cried for me. She despaired because priests needed to have arms. I reminded her I didn’t want to be a priest. Baseball players also needed arms.

They gave me prosthetics but they irritated my sensitive skin and I didn’t like the mechanics of plastic and metal. I used my feet to stuff the fake arms into the umbrella stand by the front door. They stuck out like hands ready to answer any question. At night my mother took the arms out of the umbrella stand, putting them on the chair next to my bed. Each morning I opened my eyes to see two hard and cold arms reaching out for me. I put them between the balls of my feet and maneuvered them back to the umbrella stand.

I had to quit my job. I stayed home with mother who read passages out of the Bible every day. If I had had arms I might have considered hanging myself, which I knew is a mortal sin.

The only person who touched me was my mother who had to rub my stumps to keep the blood flowing and apply daily antiseptic to keep Shelton | 118

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putrefaction from setting in. I couldn’t bathe myself, wipe my ass, or put on a shirt. What little lust I had died when I couldn’t stroke myself. I couldn’t fluff my own pillow, or put a frozen meal in the microwave. I longed to put my arms around another warm being, hold something soft to my body, or what was left of it. It became a feeling more powerful than fear or joy. I stopped watching baseball.

After a few months, maybe a year, I was able to walk without falling, much. I attached a plastic rod to a suction cup so that I could brush my teeth. The hospital gave me a catalog of useful contraptions, like a wooden stick with a hook that I could manipulate with my feet to pick objects off the floor.

It had been close to two years since the surgery when I got a call from the hospital. They called periodically to check on me and make sure I hadn’t committed suicide, which is difficult with no arms. They were the only calls I got and I looked forward to them. So, when the phone rang and I saw the hospital number on the caller ID, I used my big toe to push the speaker.

“Mr. Duffy, this is Dr. Zachary. I am an orthopedic surgeon at Brigham Hospital,” he said. “We have had some success recently with bilateral arm transplant. According to your file you would be a good candidate. Is this something that you might consider?”

“You mean I could get new arms? Real ones?” I asked. I could feel excitement flowing from my feet upwards. My eyes watered.

“In some cases we can re-attach limbs and with a little luck the nerves regenerate, giving you almost full range of motion in time. We would like to have you come to the hospital for an evaluation and some blood and tissue tests.”

My mother and I met with Dr. Zachary the next day. “This procedure is new and doesn’t come without some risk. Once we have a match, the surgery is delicate and time consuming. There will be months, years of therapy. Barring tissue rejection, the donated arms have a good chance of being viable. Never quite like your own, but better human flesh and blood over plastic prosthesis, right?”

“Donated arms. Someone has to die for me to get arms?”

“That’s right Mr. Duffy. We would do an allograft, meaning we would be using donated parts from someone else. We’ve come a long way in 119 | Shelton

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organ, tissue and now limb transplantation. It’s a matter of attaching veins, bones, and skin and hoping there is regeneration. It’s tricky, but it can work. It all depends on the nerves though.”

“Franky, I don’t like the idea of you having a dead person’s arms,” my mother reached over as if to pat my hands before remembering and sitting back. “It sounds unnatural, like voodoo. I can take care of my boy just fine.”

“Will I be able to make a sandwich? Hold a telephone up to my ear to have a private conversation? Could I swat a fly off my face?”

I stared at Dr. Zachary, willing him to deny me any of those things.

“Yes, theoretically, all in good time. Some of our patients have gone on to be able to do all the things they used to do before losing their limbs. But it takes time, work, and most of all finding a match.”

I signed my name to a consent form using my mouth, entered a donation database, and gave samples of all my bodily fluids. I was ready.

During the months and years that went by, my mother clipped my toenails, drove me to see a movie of her choosing and ran a Q-Tip into my ears each morning after a bath. By the time the call came, I had forgotten Dr. Zachary’s name.

“We have a match.”

Ignoring my mother’s barrage of warnings of all the things that could go wrong, that evening she drove me to the hospital where they wheeled me into the operating theater. There were a bunch of people in the room milling about, each with a separate task. A cooler on a table had the interlocking, three ringed symbol of medical waste stuck to the top. They gave me the initial sedative and my vision started to blur.

“Do you want to see your new arms? We can look at them for the first time together,” Dr. Zachary said.

I nodded already feeling the cool effects of the sedative. Speech around me was melting. The anesthesiologist was preparing my mask.

The doctor opened the lid. Inside were two of the biggest, blackest arms I had ever seen. Finely muscled, with swirling tattoos that Shelton | 120

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looked to my tranquilized brain like three capital B’s. Big hands capped by wide strong fingers.

“They’re beautiful,” I slurred. “They’re beautiful.”

“There’s been some mistake in the paperwork. We have to cancel the operation.” The frenzy in the room halted.

I felt like my clutch on life was being yanked away. “I want those arms.

Please give me those arms.” I remember the doctor making a call on a phone attached to the wall. As woozy as I was, I gave videotaped permission for the operation to continue.

As the doctor put a mask over my face and told me to take a deep breath, I knew, as I faded toward oblivion, that there was nothing I wanted more in this world than to call those magnificent, black arms mine.

When I woke there was so much glowing white around me I wondered if I was in heaven. And there they were, pinning me down to the bed were my arms. They were supported by braces and completely wrapped in gauze and bandages all the way down passed the fingertips. A dull ache at my shoulders ended in nothing. I was in heaven.

My mother sat next to me rubbing her rosary beads, already worn down from years of worrying. I had a tube down my throat, so I croaked. She looked up, gave me some water around the tube and I fell back to sleep.

When I woke the heaviness of my new arms was still there but also the pain of the drainage tubes installed in both my shoulders. Through the gauze I could see they were big and wonderful. They gave me substance and presence. But below the screaming nerves of my shoulder, I felt nothing.

“Francis I’ve been asking God for a speedy recovery,” my mother said, leaning over me so close I could smell her Yardley rose powder.

All I could so was smile.

Dr. Zachary came in to check on my progress. “How do you feel?”

“Heavy,” I whispered. “Complete.”

My mother wore her skepticism like a favorite coat. “Those arms don’t look like Francis’s arms. They’re too big. I could bring in a picture and show you what his arms looked like.”

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“I wish we could special order body parts but we can’t. We were lucky to get these. We may never find any other arms that are a match to Franget these. We may never find any other arms that are a match to Francis’ body chemistry, blood, tissue or cells. That’s why we used those, with Frank’s verbal permission of course.”

I shook my head to stop Dr. Zachary from giving any more details. “Can you tell me when I will feel them?”

“The nerve endings of the donor arms need to repair, grow and build themselves into your own nerve endings. Your blood needs to feed the tissue. It could be weeks and months before you begin to have feeling, much less be able to use your new arms and hands. You will need physical therapy for a year or more. It is unlikely that your new hands and arms will be as dexterous as your original set. But science and technology keep improving so . . . ” He shrugged. “Right now we are most concerned with infection and rejection. So far we see no signs of either.”

The doctor felt my shoulders and new arms, asking if there was any pain.

There wasn’t except where the stitches connected my slim shoulders to the big hulking upper arms. The nurses took my temperature four times a day, and blood samples twice a day. They also checked for a rash, the classic sign of impending rejection. None. It was as if these arms were meant to be mine, they wanted to be on my body. But they were so heavy.

It was the last day I was in the hospital, before my mother arrived to drive me home, and the day I would get the gauze and bandages removed. I asked Dr. Zachary the question that had been on my mind since I first saw my new arms.

“Can you tell me about the man who used to have these arms?” I tried to raise them up but they just sat immobile and useless against my side.

“Usually we don’t divulge donor information, but in this case I’m going to make an exception. Successful limb transplants are rare and as far as I can tell this is the first biracial transplant in history so it’s likely we’ll get media attention. The donor’s tattoos are distinctive.” Dr. Zachary seemed to consider how to begin. “We’ve asked his widow, and she has given consent. Dimetrius Bigelowe was 31 when he died. His brain was smashed in the ring.”

“Ring?” I asked.

“He was a professional wrestler. Went by the moniker Badass Bigelowe.

Have you heard of him?”

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“Don’t follow wrestling. Was he good?”

“Apparently not good enough, at least on his last day.” Dr. Zachary flipped open his laptop and checked all the recent entries that confirmed that my heart rate, blood pressure and weight were all satisfactory. “He died in Las Vegas and his arms were flown here within four hours of his death. They were in excellent condition.”

My mother had arrived and it was time for the bandaging to be removed. My mother hovered. Wheelchair ready to evacuate me.

“I’ve got your bed all set up with these special firm pillows to support your arms. There’s a new tray on wheels so you can set your audio books and snacks in front of the TV. I’ll take care of you . . . ” The sound of her car keys hitting the floor made the nurse jerk the scissors, cutting into my new left arm, the first one revealed to the air. I felt nothing. “Are they supposed to be that color after surgery?”

My mother came closer to inspect my new limbs. “They seem swollen.

What are all those bumps? I hope they fade.” She licked her finger and rubbed my right arm as she had all my childhood when she tried to remove dirt and grease. “Can we use a special soap to clean that color off?”

“My arms belonged to a black wrestler. That color won’t rub off,” I said.

My mother stepped back in horror. “Oh my God, you’re black? What have they done? You look like an Oreo cookie. A Chinese game of Go. Where’s my son!? They’ve turned you into Frankenstein. Oh Francis!” my mother wailed.

“No mother, I’m not black, just my arms are. I’m mixed race.”

My mother’s knees buckled and she placed her hand over her forehead in an awkward swoon. I could feel my asthmatic lungs closing. A nurse gave me a nebulizer and soon my breathing returned to normal.

“Is this going to be a problem?” asked Dr. Zachary.

“I believe so.” I replied as I was helped from the bed into the wheelchair and a nurse attended to my mother.

“Just a word of warning,” said Dr. Zachary. “As your nerve endings regenerate and repopulate the donor limbs, you may experience some 123 | Shelton

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pain, involuntary twitching, and occasional uncontrolled movement.

As the nerves and the cerebellum begin to communicate normally, you will see improvement in your motor skills and coordination. But that could take months of therapy. At times you may feel pin pricks in your fingers, but that’s good. It means the nerves are growing.”

To my mother, I was a pair of black arms that hung heavy and useless on the bed, chair, or by my side. Physical therapy lasted hours each day. It began with a preliminary examination of my new skin for a rash, which meant tissue rejection was in the works. But there wasn’t any.

The therapists used electrical stimulation to delay the muscles in my new arm from atrophying. After a few weeks, I had the pinpricks in my fingertips just as Dr. Zachary predicted. A few months later there was some movement. I concentrated, and the tips curled inward. My left hand was dominant, which was an odd thing for me because I was right handed. My left arm began to tingle just as my right hand was catching up with the curled fingers. After almost a year, I could raise my left arm halfway to my face with a spoon then bring my mouth down to meet the cereal, pasta, or meatloaf that my mother had cut into small pieces. A year and a half later I could feed myself, though not always accurately.

When my mother helped me get dressed, take a bath, or perform other rudimentary tasks she tried hard never to let her skin brush my arms. I wasn’t allowed to accompany her to church anymore or sit with her at the movies.

I spent hours staring at my beautiful arms and touching the taut dark skin with all its hard-earned topography. From the Internet I learned that Badass Bigelowe was a flamboyant wrestling champion whose persona was part gangster, part urban champion of the underprivileged. His signature move in the ring was called The Grip. He took his big hands and oversized arms and squeezed them together around the chest of his opponent. His grip was so tight that his adversary would lose his breath and pass out. Whether this really happened or was part of an intricate performance was anyone’s guess.

But I watched footage of Badass in the ring and he was a master. A chef of competition. A controller of constriction. I loved him.

After 22 months and no sign of rejection, and with my range of movement slowly increasing, Dr. Zachary asked if I was willing to be featured in a press conference about the ethics of biracial Allotransplantation. By now I had feeling in both arms but little Shelton | 124

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coordination. Badass Bigelowe’s widow wanted to meet me and I admit that showing off my new arms seemed like a fine idea. For the first time ever I felt manly and strong. If I jerked with surprise each morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror, it only brought a smile to my face when I remembered these colossal things were mine.

At the press conference there was a long table, microphones, a room full of reporters, and me sitting at the end near a podium. I was covered up with a sheet like I was sitting in the barber’s chair. I thought that was a bit theatrical but the hospital public relations team wanted Dr. Zachary to explain the process with a PowerPoint and the ethics behind a biracial limb transplant first. When he was done and the audience had waited long enough, Dr. Zachary removed my covering with a flourish. There was a collective gasp and flashbulbs burst their white lights like fireworks.

Reporters yelled questions to me like, “What does it feel like knowing you have a dead person’s arms?” or “Do you consider yourself to be black or white?” or “Do you feel any connection to Badass?” My least favorite, but the one that got picked up by all the network news stations, “Are you our modern-day Frankenstein?” I heard my mother whisper loudly from the front row, “Amen!”

Before the press conference I felt like an exhibition at a World’s Fair.

Afterwards, I was like a freak show at the circus.

Mrs. Badass saved the conference. This woman, wearing tight spandex that extenuated her wide hips and thick thighs, and a blouse exposing cleavage that could have housed an aircraft carrier, got up and raised a hand. There was instant quiet.

She swayed herself to the podium slowly swinging her fleshy bottom and flinging her long curly weave. “That man is no monster! As far as I’m concerned he’s family.”

She spoke of her husband’s sacrifice, his saintly contribution of not only his arms but his eyes, heart, and kidneys. As she whirred on I felt a small quake, a tingle. I didn’t recognize it at first because it’d been so long. But I was getting an erection. Mrs. Bigelowe was standing so close to me that I could smell her cloying perfume and I could see a few beads of sweat run down her neck and collect at the apex of her bosom. My left arm started to twitch and I watched in horror as my new hand leapt up and goosed her bottom.

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She squawked and jumped, her long feather earrings fluttered behind her. I wanted to disappear, put the covering back over me and slide under the table. I was about to apologize to her and the audience, when she smiled.

“I’d recognize that touch anywhere!” she exclaimed. “That was all Badass through and through.” Widow Badass turned to me, “Honey, don’t you fret. What Badass and me had was powerful. It come through the grave. Even death can’t stop that man!”

But it seemed that Badass had a powerful connection to a lot of women. As the nerve networks in my arms bonded, and the muscles responded to the commands from my brain, so did Badass’s bad behavior. The arms wanted to go out drinking, bet on pool games, get into fights, and especially touch women anywhere they could. I tried to stop them. I apologized, made excuses. My touch wasn’t demure or caressing, it was confident ownership. A grip that left no doubt who was in control and what I wanted, or rather what my arms wanted.

My notoriety grew and it seemed no one cared what my arms did.

Except my mother.

“Do you hear what people call you?” she fretted.

“They call me zipper arms, the gun show, daz armz Howse!” I tromped around my room raising my arms like a drum major in a marching band. My small head and shoulders wouldn’t be able to keep my arms swinging if it hadn’t been for centrifugal force. I had to sit on my bed to make them fully stop, catching my breath into my wheezing lungs.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore. You aren’t the Francis that I brought into this world. You’re a freak. You’re hideous and prideful!

I’m going to sue the hospital. They messed up your brain during surgery. They took my little boy away from me.”

“Your little boy is right here. Don’t you want me to be happy?” I said.

“I want you to be the way God created.” My mother huffed off but stopped. “I could have taken care of you. That would have been better than this.” I heard her mumbling, presumably to God, as she rummaged in the kitchen cabinets looking for something to eat.

Mrs. Bigelowe visited me often, bringing some of Badass’s things: clothes, arm weights, hair gel, lotion, and photos of him in the ring.

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tattoos and raised BB brand on each bicep. When I ran out of lotion Mrs. Bigelowe would bring me more. She began making shirts for me using the arms of Badass’s shirts sewn into small shirts she picked up from thrift stores. She’d come into my room, against my mother’s wishes, and close the door. My twin bed was no match for her ‘womanness’, and the third time she sat on it the frame broke. Her lips were luscious and she had wide gaps between her front teeth. I let her hold my hand and stroke my arms.

“You know Badass smoked cheroots and after each match he lit a Newport. I’ve brought you some.” She placed a thin box on my dresser.

“My mother wouldn’t like it if I smoked.”

“It’s a nasty habit,” Widow Bigelowe agreed. “It’s just sometimes I miss that smell. He’d go into the garage and when he come out a cloud of smoke followed him in. I’d yell at him and he’d yell back at me and we would have our fight,” Mrs. Badass chuckled, her hefty bosom shook like a water balloon. “But then he’d touch me with those fine arms of his, and wee oo! Fight forgotten, baby. Just like that.”

“How did he touch you?”

“You wanna try?”

“I want to learn to touch you the way he did.”

Mrs. Badass Bigelowe scooted in close to me and pulled my arms around her soft body. I leaned in. She smelled of ivory soap and Crisco shortening. The nerves in my fingers still weren’t great, but between the pins and twitches, and even though I couldn’t get my arms all the way around her, she felt like paradise. Comfortable as dough, silky as a sail, and lavish as a string of diamonds. Sometimes we’d sit for an hour like that, my head balancing on the platform of her breasts and her dead husband’s arms encircling as much of her as possible.

Widow Badass brought me money and gifts, like Badass’s massive, gold chain and cross that slapped the top of my testicles when I walked, or his moped that he named the Badass Bike. One day she brought in a baseball bat. Badass coached a Little League team from the neighborhood and the bat had BB burned into the wooden club.

She took my hands and gently rolled them around the bat. I clenched as tightly as I could and swung at an imaginary pitch. I could see the 127 | Shelton

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ball climbing high and disappearing into the stands. I clung to the baseball bat for the rest of the day.

“Franky,” Mrs. Badass said to me one day, she didn’t like to call me Francis, said it sounded too girly, “give me your hand.” We were sitting on my repaired twin bed. My mother’s shadow filled the light under my bedroom door. I offered my pink palm, the one that had stroked her all those years. As I twisted my forearm up, I flexed my new bicep. It amazed me to see the defined muscle bulge like the curved back of an angry cat. Mrs. Bigelowe bent over and placed a wet kiss on that magnificent work of manliness, smudges of bright red lipstick blotted my skin. When she sat up, she took my hand and placed a sparkling big B keychain in it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I want you to move in with me. It’s a big house. A Big Bigelowe house, and I need a man in there with me. Someone I can look after. I need Big B to touch me.” She stopped and looked at me. “You’re part Badass. And part Badass is better than no Badass at all.” She gave me her gap-toothed grin. She placed her husband’s arms across her middle. “Maybe show you some of his secret wrestling moves.”

“My mother won’t like it,” I said.

My mother burst through the door. “Francis, it’s time you stopped this nonsense.” She put her hands on her hips. “Mrs. Bigelowe I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You can’t take him. He’s my son.”

Widow Badass peeled my arms from around her belly and stood. My mother disappeared from my view behind her large frame.

“Parts of him are my husband.” Mrs. Bigelowe said. Both my mother and Mrs. Bigelowe turned to me. It was a standoff.

Badass’s arms hugged me. For several days I’d felt a stinging itch along the scar. I reached up to scratch the shoulder and felt the braille of the rejection rash. I slumped, letting the hands fall to my lap.

“Mother, I’m moving out. Mrs. Bigelowe needs me. It’s time a go,” I said with less strength than I had hoped.

My mother stepped from behind the widow’s shadow. “I need you too.

What else do I have?”

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“You have God. I have these arms,” I said lifting the behemoths like a supplication.

My mother let out a whimper and left the room. “Will you teach me to play baseball tomorrow?”

Mrs. Badass came back to where I was sitting. She leaned over, ruffled my hair, and kissed me on the forehead. I tilted my head up and caught the top of her lip. She chuckled, “You’re something! Whew, aren’t you just! Remember, I’m a married woman.”

“I remember,” I said and brushed the growing rash that haloed my left shoulder like a crown. Then I wrapped the arms around my chest, flexed Badass’s biceps and squeezed so tight that I could barely breathe.

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Crackers and Marmalade James Hamby Crackers and marmalade— a monumental feast!

How marvelous to dine with you, a rose amongst the beasts.

Dazzled by your splendor, I don’t know what to do— and yet there’s something wanting in your effervescent hue.

Usually bright and sunny, but often rather dour— you’re more like an autumn than a springtime flower.

Prattling on for hours, this dinner’s grown too tame— a chatterbox of nothingness, I can’t recall your name.

Your marmalade is rancid, your crackers taste like hay.

Why must you keep persisting?

I wish you’d go away.

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Getting Over Dorothy Peter Murphy

Greatest family film of all time!

Discover your courage.

Follow your heart.

And find your way home.

-from the trailer O screeching, winged-monkeys. O avocado-tinted witch. O wrinkledfaced Munchkins with your silly, shrilly voices. O yappy dog. O man of hay; tin-can man, man-lion shill of Lay’s potato chips. O horrible Dorothy with your enchanted, blood-colored lips and pumps. I call on you. I say, I will fear you no longer.

You have given me nightmares since mommy and daddy dumped me in a dark theater to watch you four times in one weekend when I was five so they could get blitzed at the corner bar without the encumbrance of me. True, I wasn’t alone. They attached me to a gang of cousins who stole my popcorn money as I cowered in my seat, eyes closed, covering my ears, with nowhere to hide. Since then you’ve driven me from the living rooms of friends whenever you’ve shown up on television. You’ve made me a nervous man who cannot bear to walk along your yellow brick road. Christ, you’ve made me fear rainbows.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself—frightening him like that. Until now. Now, I refuse to let you terrify me.

I have just charged my Discover card seventeen bucks to see you supersized and in 3-D at the IMAX. I swiped my card again at the candy counter to buy a wheelbarrow-full of buttered popcorn which I never eat since my heart went bad. I will watch you, and I will not cringe, I will not weep, I will not fear, and I will not leave this theater until the closing credits roll.

As the lights dim, my hand opens and closes like the claw of a crane, lifting the cholesterol-causing corn kernels to my mouth, over and over—I cannot stop. I cannot stop—except to sip from the halfgallon of Diet Sprite to wash it down.

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But when I pat my pocket where I keep my tiny bottle of nitroglycerin, I feel nothing but change. My big gulp quivers when I realize it’s not there. And as the great winds spin across the colossal screen, I look up to see a farmhouse swirl toward me, courtesy of the magic of 3-D. I duck as it lands on a witch’s head instead of mine, and hear the little ones croon, Ding-dong, ding-dong, the witch is dead. I sit there, white-knuckled for one hour and forty-two minutes as they sing Dorothy off: She’s off . . . She’s off . . . to see the Wizard.

My first heart attack, when I was 40, felt like Dorothy placed her palm on my breast and gently pressed down. Then she punched me, the bitch, grabbed me by the throat, threw me to the ground, and jumped up and down on my chest until the Munchkins pulled her off and dialed 9-1-1.

No. No! It was an accident! cried Dorothy. I didn’t mean to kill anybody!

Since then, the nuclear stress tests, the echocardiograms, the catheters threaded through my groin, the medicated stents, the Plavix, the Lovaza, the Metoprolol, the Lipitor, the extended-release Isosorbide, the aspirin, and the missing nitroglycerin have been working together to prevent the next arterial clog that I know is dying to build up.

Well, ring around the rosy, pocket full of spears! cackles my angina.

Thought you’d be pretty foxy, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to start in on you right here!

But instead, the jaded witch dissolves into the gutter, and Dorothy wishes herself back to the farm, and I rise from my seat and leave the darkness behind.

O IMAX screen the size of Kansas, I have come, I have watched, and now that I have finally conquered, I have nothing to be afraid of except . . . wait . . . my chest . . . my chest . . . a pain in my chest . . .

Oh, you cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! Melting!

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Evolution of Grief David Lohrey I am a beached wail, a lonesome dove without wings, a caged hamster who’s gnawed away its paw.

I haven’t done anything for which I can be blamed. I’m like an anorexic who’s trying to disappear. Fifty more pounds and I won’t be able to stand.

I’d do anything to avoid responsibility.

Even give up sex. Better to be repellent than to risk rejection.

Better to be withdrawn than be ignored.

Get out before someone pulls the alarm, like a hoodlum fleeing through the kitchen to avoid arrest.

I’ll have to learn to pee sitting down.

Better to starve than to be fulfilled.

When you get too small to be loved, you can call yourself a worm. You’ll be like a frog, too weak to croak.

A million years on, you’ll develop the ability to spit blood. Your glistening flesh will be toxic. You will be left alone at last.

You will finally have the rock all to yourself.

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Meet The Authors Andrea Farber-De Zubiria grew up in Connecticut in the

quintessential four seasons. She works as a Physical Therapist and lives in Fresno, California empty-nesting with her husband, a 20-pound tuxedo cat and five therapy chickens. For fun she recently put a refrigerator in the street with big print magnetic words so passersby could make poems at an open street event. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Cargo, Hoot, Foliate Oak, Mother’s Always Write and the San Joaquin Literary Review.

Fall is my favorite time of year—a good time for walks and reading, soup and naps, the last burst of energy before death.

Joanna White is a music professor who has works published in

Examined Life, Healing Muse, Abaton, American Journal of Nursing, Intima, Earth’s Daughters, Sow’s Ear, MacGuffin, Cape Rock, Chariton Review, Pulse, Third Wednesday, Temenos, The Offbeat, Measure, and the Poetry and Medicine column of JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association.

Fall is a reminder to poets that the seasons are a metaphor.

Kari Wergeland, who originally hails from Davis, California, is

a librarian and writer. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry from Pacific University. Her poetry has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Jabberwock Review: A Journal of Literature and Art, New Millennium Writings, Pembroke Magazine, and many other journals. In addition, she wrote a children’s book review column for The Seattle Times, which ran monthly for 11 years. Her chapbook, Breast Cancer: A Poem in Five Acts, was recently accepted by Finishing Line Press.

Fall is when I burrow into potting soil and rest with naked bulbs.

Robin Tuck is a Michigan native who lives and works in Ann Arbor.

Fall is her favorite season.

Sally J. Stevens lives in Los Angeles and works as a singer and

vocal contractor in Film, TV, and Sound Recordings. She’s also written lyrics for film and sound recordings. (“Who Comes This Night?”, Music

by Dave Grusin, was recorded by James Taylor in his first Christmas CD, 2004.) She also sings the Main Titles of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Mockingheart Review, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, The Raven’sPerch, and No Extra Words Podcast. Two new stories are to be included in Between The Lines Anthology.

Fall is…time to hunker down, to reset the clock and contemplate the changing light.

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s work explores memory, trauma,

health, education, and parenthood and has been published in numerous literary and academic journals. Recent work appears in Santa Fe Literary Review, ink&coda, Copper Nickel, and Under the Gum Tree. Essays have been listed as Special Mention by Pushcart and Notable in Best American.

With an MA from The New School and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Suzanne teaches writing and education courses at Manhattanville College. She lives with her husband and three sons in Connecticut. More can be found at suzannefarrellsmith.com.

Fall is city-born boys now knuckle deep in berry bins: a fresher start than spring.

Eleanor Shelton is a proud MSU graduate who suffered through

football Saturdays living in Ann Arbor for 12 years, where she worked in higher education marketing. Now, she works as a freelance writer in Northern Colorado, where she is active with the writing community. She received her M.A. in English from Eastern Michigan University and has been writing fiction as often as time permits. She’s had her fiction published in The Huron River Review and Current Magazine and non-fiction published in the Ann Arbor News, Aspen Magazine, Edible Aspen, Career Focus Magazine, The Welding Journal, Cornucopia Magazine (Turkey) and several others. Eleanor teaches creative writing and helps students and adults find and hone their stories. Her first novel is with her agent who will start shopping it around any day now, which is causing Eleanor many sleepless nights.

For some, fall means the end of things like summer and warm weather. To me fall means the beginnings of some of my favorite things like colorful foods made with squash, Big Ten college football, and the the smell of wood-burning fireplaces.

Matt Schumacher’s fifth collection of poetry, Ghost Town Odes, was published last October. His poems have recently appeared in Gingerbread House and Duende. The managing editor of the New Fabulist journal Phantom Drift, he lives in Portland, Oregon, near a Paul Bunyan statue.

Fall, to him, means “that first frost of glittering grass, and last senescence, those maple-mad reds and yellows that leave you dazed.”

K. D. Rose is a poet, essayist, and author. K.D.’s book, Inside Sorrow,

won Readers Favorite Silver Medal for Poetry. Her poetry, essays, and short stories have been published in Word Riot, Chicago Literati, Poetry Breakfast, BlazeVOX Journal, Ink in Thirds, Northern Virginia Review, The Nuclear Impact Anthology, Stray Branch Magazine, Literary Orphans, Maintenant Contemporary Dada Magazine, Lunch Ticket Arts and Literary Magazine, The 2016 Paragram Press Anthology, Eastern Iowa Review, Bop Dead City, Santa Fe Literary Magazine, Hermes Poetry Magazine, Slipstream, Wild Women’s Medicine Circle Journal and The Offbeat. K.D. was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry for There Are Species of Stars Yet to Be Seen.

Fall is crisp air and linens.

Richard Bertram Peterson lives on the California Central Coast and has published stories which gravitate toward the absurd, but not the improbable.

Fall is the result of the Earth being off-kilter.

Dana Perry spent most of her childhood writing stories about resi-

dent fairies (and other small woodland creatures) in rural northern Idaho.

Now, she is a Brooklyn-based freelance grant writer and copywriter and has been published by Neutrons/Protons, Bacopa Literary Review, and numerous zines. She holds an MA in Sociology from The New School and is currently studying clinical herbalism at ArborVitae in NYC.

Fall is the last deep breath before you jump.

Steve Penkevich is a West Michigan poet who studied literature at Eastern Michigan University. You may recognize him from Junto Magazine, Belletrist Magazine, or more likely as the guy reading at your favorite bar. Please buy him a drink or follow him on Instagram: @poe_a_tree.

Fall is a sexy strip-tease for trees.

This is where you’ll find Georgia Park when she’s not globetrotting. She has been published, paid to perform her poetry, is the managing editor of Sudden Denouement (a literary collective), and is the author of www.PrivateBadThoughts.com and the book Quit Your Job and Become a Poet (Out of Spite). She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree, raising a puppy, and happily dating a much younger man than herself.

Fall is best experienced in New England.

Lizzy Nichols is currently an MPhil. student in literature at Trin-

ity College Dublin in Ireland, and her work has previously appeared in The Prompt Literary Magazine, Cardinal Sins, Inklette, and elsewhere.

Having lived in four different countries between the US and Europe, she hails originally from the saguaros, ponderosa pines, and red dirt of the American Southwest.

Fall is the deciduous trees’ last exhale before sleep and the coniferous trees’ waking dream.

Louis Nappen received his BA/MAT degrees from Monmouth Uni-

versity, where he served as editor-in-chief of both the college newspaper and literary magazine and was honored with the English Department’s Creative Writing Prize, the Communications Department’s Journalism Award, and the University’s Outstanding Student Award. For several years, Nappen taught high school English and journalism, then attended Seton Hall University Law School. He presently works as an attorney in a small firm that focuses on constitutional and civil rights. The poem “Contempt” is part of a larger collection Nappen is working on, tentatively titled “Fifty Lawyers.”

Fall is a diaspora of leaves and pages, a scattered curriculum vitae describing an almost naked oak of a man.

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City

where he operated heavy equipment, managed a nightclub and drove a taxi. He is the author of Stubborn Child, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, has two books of writing prompts and five poetry chapbooks. His essays and poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Common, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Guernica, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, The New Welsh Reader, Rattle and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University.

Fall is… what Icarus did

when his arms got tired of stirring the air.

Chad W. Lutz was born on the run and hasn’t stopped. They attend Mills College in Oakland, California, where they work and live with one of the finest collections of stuffed pigs this side of the Sierra. One of the pigs is 26 years old. Chad graduated from Kent State University’s English program in 2008. They originally hail from Stow, Ohio.

Fall is the last hot breath before the chill.

David Lohrey is from Memphis, and now lives in Tokyo. He graduated from UC Berkeley. Internationally, his poetry can be found in Otoliths, Stony Thursday Anthology, Sentinel Quarterly, and Tuck Magazine. In the US, recent poems have appeared in Abstract Magazine, FRiGG, The Offbeat and Apogee Journal. His fiction can be read in Crack the Spine, Dodging the Rain, and Literally Stories. David’s The Other Is Oneself, a study of 20th century literature, was published last year, while his first collection of poetry, Machiavelli’s Backyard, was released in August. He is a member of the Sudden Denouement Collective.

Fall is the best time of the year, although perhaps not so much so on the West Coast with those Santa Ana winds, but everywhere else it is cool and refreshing. It’s soup season, Halloween, and time to wear sweaters. It is the hap-happiest time of the year.

Scott Leonardi is an aspiring screenwriter with genres focusing

around comedy, sci-fi/cerebral, and drama. Scott lives in Southern California and in between sweating for President paper at work and having a good old homegrown all-natural existential crisis, he does his best to get some writing done. For the time being, examples of his work can be found on his Facebook writers page called ‘Lost in Moss.’

Fall to me is like the last day you get to spend with your best friend before they move away. Only in this case that friend is the sun. You take time to appreciate everything you’ve been through, admiring just how beautiful they make the scenery and reminiscing on all the times they made you feel warm and happy before that feeling must say goodbye and return to the ice until the next thaw reunites you.

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past

century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems appear in numerous journals, recently in The Journal and The Penn Review. Heikki is the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest. Forthcoming books will be published by Lynx House, Willow Springs and After The Pause.

Fall is when I’m on the stage but I have failed to learn my lines.

Daniel Hudon, originally from Canada, is an adjunct lecturer in

math and astronomy. He likes to write both prose and poetry. His first book was a popular astronomy guide, The Bluffer’s Guide to the Cosmos (Oval Books, London). His new book is a lyrical homage to recently extinct species called Brief Eulogies for Lost Animals: An Extinction Reader (Pen and Anvil, Boston). He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Fall is a great reason to live in New England.

Ann Huang was born in China and moved to Mexico when she was

a teen. As an MFA recipient in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Huang’s poetry has appeared online and in print extensively. Her poem “Night Lullaby,” was a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize finalist. Huang’s book-length collection Saffron Splash, was selected as Finalist in the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Poetry Competition. Huang’s new poetry collection, Delicious and Alien, was published in March 2017. Her poems follow the surrealistic gestures that weave reality into divergent realms of perspectives and perceptions. Visit AnnHuang.com for more poems.

Fall is soaking into our hearts with deep paths to the forest, and wild dreams to keep them warm.

David Holloway lives in Northern Virginia but grew up in Flori-

da. He has been published in Kayak and Gargoyle. His short story “How I Became the Cheeseburger Kid” won the Southeast Review’s writer’s regimen contest in December 2015. He spends time reading, writing, and daydreaming about being reincarnated as an undiscovered deep-sea creature.

Fall is summer taking off dirty socks and throwing them on the lawn.

Russell Helms has had stories in Le Scat Noir, Bewildering Stories,

Drunken Boat and other journals. He holds a lectureship in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His novel, Sprinkle Cheese, is with Sij Books.

Fall is the beach ball, losing air, relaxing.

Mary Catherine Harper lives in the confluence of the Auglaize

and Maumee rivers in Ohio where she organizes and reads poetry at the yearly SwampFire Retreat of artists and writers at 4 Corners Gallery in Angola, Indiana. Most recently her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Old Northwest Review, Pudding Magazine, SLAB, MidAmerica, Print-Oriented Bastards, and Sheila-Na-Gig, and her poem “Muddy World” won the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. Her Some Gods Don’t Need Saints chapbook was recently published. See http://mcharper.faculty.defiance.edu or swampfire.org.

Fall is an alien season where heat mirages snake up against the sky and sweat runs down the back. Where to be hot is to be fully alive.

James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at

Middle Tennessee State University. He also studies Victorian Literature (particularly Charles Dickens), eighteenth-century literature, the development of the novel and folklore and mythology. He is primarily a formalist poet, and his nonsense verse is influenced by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Edward Gorey. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Light, Lighten Up Online, The Road Not Taken, Measure and others.

He was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award.

Fall is the season of the year when we are reminded that all living things have life cycles.

Sean Griffin received his MFA in Creative Writing from Manhat-

tanville College. His creative nonfiction has previously appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. He’s an editor of the literary journal Inkwell.

Sean lives in New York with his three dogs.

Fall is the sylvan sections of our lives stripping their way towards nakedness, while we bundle ourselves up for the dizzying isolation of winter.

Born in Coshocton, OH, Matt Gold is based in Brooklyn, NY, where he divides his time between music and photography. As evidence of the democratizing nature of his approach to photography, Gold has no formal training in the visual arts. His first image, a picture of his cat on a Sony Ericsson Z310A flip phone, was taken in 2008, and he has continued to explore the aesthetic possibilities of that instrument, resisting the updated phones and apps available and revealing a contemporary nostalgia that encompasses the prolific imagery of our visual culture. Gold’s work has been featured in numerous publications and journals.

Fall is the time for rejuvenation, the shedding of skins and the renewing of one’s self.

Matty Layne Glasgow is a poet and MFA Candidate in Cre-

ative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University where he served as the poetry editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment.

Matty’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in journals including, BOAAT, The Collagist, Rattle, Muzzle, Frontier, among others. He presently reads poetry for The Adroit Journal.

Fall is a fragile flame on a branch, a charred-out Ugg boot, a smoldering pumpkin-spiced soul.

Kaleb Estes was born and raised in rural Alabama. He attended the

United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where he received a Bachelor of Science in English. Kaleb’s writing is often transgressive, always honest, and never apologetic. His favorite authors include Aldous Huxley, Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk, Martin Amis, and Dr. Seuss.

He also prefers creamy peanut butter to crunchy. You can find out more about Kaleb and his work at www.kalebestes.wordpress.com.

Fall is like the perfect parachute ride on a crisp, clear day, floating peacefully down to the earth.

Danielle Dreger is a writer and librarian in Seattle. Her short

fiction has recently appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Betty Fedora, and Pinch Literary Journal. Her stories have also appeared in The Dime Show Review, The Driftless Review, 200 cc’s, and Stratus. Her first YA novel, Secret Heart, was published last year and she is currently working on a new one. Danielle is also a contributing writer to Preemie Babies 101, the official blog for the Hand 2 Hold Organization.

Fall is her favorite season because it is an excuse to drink hot toddies and stay inside and read.

Darryl Denning was first published at the age of 12, as a prize-

winner in the Los Angeles Examiner’s “Bill of Rights Essay Contest”.

His most recent poetry publications include The Saved Objects Project, Flashpoint Publications, The Offbeat, and The Curious Element.

Fall is Ambiguous.

Warm On one side, Cool On the other.

Marion Deal is an actor, poet, storyteller, and scientist who enjoys

challenging others – and herself – and alchemizing the ordinary into the extraordinary through the power of interdisciplinary thought. She runs an online newspaper, The Endeavor, acts in the Bristol Renaissance Faire, and has seen her work published in magazines like the Glass Kite Anthology. Deal hopes to utilize these and other artistic and intellectual enterprises to provide audiences with the greatest gift, that of seeing the world through other lenses.

Fall is a chance for Orpheus to have another go at dragging his love from the mouth of the grave.

Robert Crisp lives in Savannah, GA, where he teaches English and writes poetry as often as he can. Learn more at www.writingforghosts. com.

Fall is a chance to breathe again as the oppressive Georgia summer blessedly takes its leave.

Anne Coray is author of the poetry collections Bone Strings, A

Measure’s Hush, and Violet Transparent; co-editor of Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment; and co-author of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Coray is the recipient of fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation. She lives at her birthplace in remote southwest Alaska.

Fall is a good time for do-overs on last year’s fucked-up election.

K.B. Carle earned her BA from Old Dominion University in Virginia,

MA from West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and MFA from Spalding University’s Low-Residency program in Kentucky. When she is not exploring the realms of speculative, jazz, and historical fiction, K.B. avidly pursues misspelled words, botched plot lines, and rudimentary characters.

Her work can be found in Pennyshorts, Sick Lit. Magazine, 50-Word Stories, and the WomenArts Quarterly Journal.

Fall is sipping hot apple cider at the base of a red maple, watching leaves play in the wind.

C.J. Bryce is twenty-four years of age, born and raised in Glasgow,

Scotland. He has been writing fiction for the last three years, often focussing on the surreal and the bizarre. He likes cheap cigarettes and standing the wrong way in elevators.

Fall is fleeting in the city of four seasons in a day.

A former sports reporter and editor, Greg Bowers taught journalism at the University of Missouri. Among other subjects, he’s written about rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry performing in a basement club in St. Louis, and the Mutual Musicians Foundation, an all-night jazz room in Kansas City. Greg lives near York, PA.

Fall is playoff baseball. Playoff baseball is fall.

Adam Bjelland is an English teacher at as his alma mater, Valley Stream Central High School. His story “The Last Will and Testament of Allan Kenneth Hall” was first published at Word Riot, and an audio version is now featured on The Other Stories podcast. You can look for Adam’s next story “Displaced Words” in Microtext Anthology 3, published by Medusa’s Laugh Press.

Fall is calloused hands and crisp sleep; it’s broken sun rays and bellowed curtains. It’s buffalo plaid. Fall is a Ray Bradbury short story.

Megan Baxter is a currently an MFA candidate at Vermont Col-

lege of Fine Art. She lives in South Carolina with her boyfriend and three dogs where she manages an urban farm and coaches Crossfit. Recently, her work as appeared in Skirt! Magazine and The Open Bar at Tin House.

Fall is a verb at her house, which sits under five old oak trees; on a windy night acorns drum the roof and ping off the carport, scratch her cheek if

she ventures outside and clutter the grass and deck like sharpened, brown marbles.

Rob Alexander is a former swimmer and swim coach from Co-

lumbus, OH. Currently, he resides in St. Louis, MO and teaches Creative Writing and Composition at Lindenwood University-Belleville.

Fall is the draining of outdoor swimming pools, whistling the longest rest period of the year.

Call for Submissions

The Offbeat is calling for the zany, the thought-provoking, the humorous, and the quirky to submit work for us to read! We specialize in undisputedly unique works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and sequential art, is accepting submissions. Submit writing that is intriguing, eccentric, and, most importantly, “off the beaten path.�

Please go to offbeat.msu.edu for guidelines and to submit your works of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and sequential art.

We ask for different. We DO NOT mean unnecessarily explicit content produced purely for the purpose of being shocking. We are interested in quality. No matter where you come from or what you do, we want to hear from you!

General Guidelines: Up to three poems may be submitted. Sequential art should not exceed ten pages. All other pieces should be limited to 4,000 words. Authors may submit to each category only once but to as many categories as desired.

Simultaneous submissions will be accepted under the condition that you will immediately inform us if your work is being published elsewhere.

The Offbeat