Volume 16 by The Offbeat

volume 16 spring 2016

There are groups of us, in pockets around the world, whose tastes lean a bit toward the eccentric... Volume 16, MAY 2016 E DITOR IAL STAFF

Cailin Ashbaugh

Taylor Mackey

Ty Bortell

Casey McDougall

Jenny Crakes

Taylor Neverman

Sarah Eaton

Lizzie Oderkirk

Kelsey Hannaford

Amanda Pastunink

Sarah Kane

DuRay Petersen

Anastasia Kordomenos

Sarah Polega

Brindsi Liberty

Becca Rohde

Mary Litteral

Allyscia Smith

SPECIAL THANKS

Laura Julier

Ben Gilholme

Jonah Magar

Eileen Hedrick

Curtis VanDonkelaar

Danielle DeVoss

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Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN: Book design by Alison Hamilton, Sylvia Promislow, Morgan Redding, Emmanuel Williams II, Sarah Polega, Brindsi Liberty, Jenny Crakes, Allyscia Smith, Becca Rohde Cover Design by Sarah Polega Cover Art by Danielle “Deo” Owensby Visit MSU Espresso Book Machine at www.lib.msu.edu/ebm

@Oureditors The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 @OffbeatReaders Hello and thank you for your support. The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 Our journal isn’t looking for the average follower, those who retweet and “follow for follow!” We know that’s not you, @OffbeatReaders. The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 We know you’re looking for something #different something #zany, @OffbeatReaders, and we hope the words between these two covers do that The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 We hope to create a platform for artists & you, dear @OffbeatReaders, to seek out these parts of life & fearlessly explore this #weird world The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 What is different? What is zany? Bringing together 18 editors to define “offbeat” was as bizarre as buttered toast on the road The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 @OffbeatReaders we hope these words in #vol16 inspire you to join us in our quest for a definition, for a way of being #offbeat The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 When you have read your fill, follow us on Twitter @OffbeatLitMag, like us on FB, and tell us which #Vol16 piece was your fav! The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 Maybe your submission will be in #Vol17. Check http:// offbeat.msu.edu/ for our call, & please cnsdr supporting us! The Offbeat @offbeatlitmag May 3 #sincerely @OffbeatLitMag

Contents

Volume 16

Sometimes, Ordinary

The Apple-Flavoured Cow

Dianne Borsenik Poetry

The Gem of the Heart is in 7-11 Michael Bartlet Poetry

Dominic Dudley Fiction

Alice’s Window Charles O’Hay Poetry

Eternal Drag

Reincarnation Nation

Haran Sivapalan Fiction

Mark Brazaitis Poetry

17 Egg Cuts and King Kong

19 Flightless

Greg Bachar Fiction

Kelly Nelson Poetry

The Muscle

It Could Be Worse

Donald Illich Poetry

Gil Prowler Fiction

24 25 In Rome

Charlie Burgess Poetry

The Middle of Nowhere

Daniel Connelly Poetry

26 Two Kings

35 Elucidation

C. Gregory Thompson Fiction

Gregory Goodrich Poetry

1-800-ART

An Intellectual Property

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens Poetry

Elytron Frass Fiction

43 44 Goldilocksâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;MuseumViewers David Sheskin Graphic Fiction

Synchronicity

David Sheskin Graphic Fiction

45 47 Essay Transparent Almost to Midnight

Men Dressed as Toads

Robert Vivian Non-Fiction

My Life: The Movie

Melanie Strouse Fiction

Hurt Play

Mark Brazaitis Poetry

Christopher Moylan Fiction

A Is for Apple M K Sukach Poetry

What I Like and Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Like About Jogging in the Summer in the South Ben Sloan Poetry

61 Requiem

62 Eclipsed

Erin Gray Poetry

Dianne Borsenik Poetry

“Was That Your Arse Sticking out on the Corner of Radcliffe and Maconie?” Simon Williams Poetry

QUOTE REFERENCE NUMBER (VE/S/09/99) JoeAnn Hart Fiction

Inclinations

Rejection Wiki : An Amalgam

Gregory Goodrich Poetry

Dawn Davies Fiction

78 Fermatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Last Theorem

79 Forward

Stephanie Spector Poetry

Brittany Boza Poetry

The Walrus Who Touched the Sun

The Cannibal Hall of Fame

Brett Petersen Fiction

84 If I Have to Choose S.J. Dunning Poetry

Ann Epstein Fiction

85 Expedition

Payton Cianfarano Poetry

Harmony Murray Fiction

Red

The Night Your Eyes Melted in My Mouth, Not in My Hand; Or How I Gave Away My Virginity

Marvin

Patty Somlo Fiction

99 “I Am a Man of the Road These Days” and Other Things You Want to Say Daniel Levin Poetry

Natalie Adams Non-Fiction

The Yard Sale

Charles O’Hay Poetry

The Offbeat

SOMETIMES, ORDINARY Dianne Borsenik Sometimes, ordinary isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t near enough. Sometimes, you need a breath of whimsy, a brush of the macabre, to make you feel alive. Sometimes, you need to pluck out your glass eye, roll it around on the table, get it pinstriped by Von Hot Rod just for the hell of it, just because you can, just because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s there.

Borsenik // 1

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THE APPLE-FLAVOURED COW: A CAUTIONARY CHILDREN’S TALE Dominic Dudley Picture in your mind some trees in the middle of the countryside casting long, slow shadows on the ground. The evening eases itself towards night as the shadows get so long that they almost touch each other, but before it is totally dark, a farmer wanders out into his field to bring his cows in for the night. As he gathers the herd together he always has to walk a little bit further to find one particular cow. He always finds her standing all on her own in the far corner of the field. The farmer used to worry that the cow was lonely, but after a while he came to realise that she was the happiest cow he had. All the other cows liked to eat the grass on the side of the field nearest the river, but the solitary cow didn’t like it there. She preferred to stay near an apple tree, sheltered under its big heavy branches from the rain in the winter and using them to keep cool from the heat of the sun in summer. And whenever she got the chance she liked to eat the apples that fell from the tree onto the ground. The other cows hated the apples, so there were always plenty for her to eat. The farmer started to call her Cox’s Orange Pippin, because that was the type of apple tree it was. But for short he called her Pippin. Every morning, the farmer would take all the cows from the barn into the parlour to milk them. Most of the milk went to the shops, but he would always put the first bit to one side and keep it for breakfast for him and his family. Pippin liked to sleep on the far side of the barn, furthest away from the draughty door. Each morning, she had to wait for every other cow to leave before she could make her way to the milking parlour, so she was always the last to straggle in. One morning the farmer was distracted by a toothache and forgot to put the first bit of milk to one side. He only remembered that they still needed some for the house right at the end, so it was the milk from Pippin that he took back with him that morning.

2 // Dudley

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The family all sat down together for breakfast. The farmer put some of the milk into his coffee. His wife poured milk onto her cereal and his son poured out a big glass of milk to drink. “This milk tastes extra sweet and a little bit funny,” said the farmer’s son. “Like there’s apples or strawberries in it, or pear mixed with honey.” The farmer raised his mug to his lips, tasted his coffee and agreed. It was different than usual. His wife had a spoonful of cereal and said she thought it tasted strange too. In fact, she thought it tasted even better than it ever had before. At first the farmer wasn’t so sure, so he thought about it a bit more and had another sip of his coffee and said, “yes you’re right, it does taste better.” Then the son took another big mouthful of milk, leaving a big fat white moustache on his top lip. He licked it off and agreed too. Everyone thought it was the best milk they’d ever tasted. The son had an extra glass of milk, his wife had an extra bowl of cereal, and the farmer had an extra cup of coffee with extra milk. His toothache even seemed to fade away the more he drank. The farmer thought about what had been different that morning. He remembered that he had milked Pippin last as usual, but then he had taken some of her milk which wasn’t so usual. But why would that make a difference? he wondered. And then he thought about all the apples she ate. To make sure he was right, the next morning he used Pippin’s milk again, and once more, it had a deliciously strange flavour to it. The family all agreed it really was the best milk in the world. “Just imagine, we could have apple-flavoured everything,” said the farmer. “We can use the apple-flavoured milk to make appleflavoured cheese, apple-flavoured yoghurt, and apple flavoured cream. This apple-flavoured cow could be an apple-flavoured dream!” He started thinking that if he could persuade some of the other animals to join Pippin near the apple tree, maybe the apples would have the same effect on them. He started humming a little rhyme to himself:

“Apple-flavoured bacon and apple-flavoured beef / AppleDudley // 3

The Offbeat

flavoured steak and apple-flavoured geese / Apple-flavoured chicken for an apple-flavoured soup / And, to finish, some apple-flavoured desserts made with apple-flavoured fruits!” The next day the farmer took one of his favourite pigs over to the corner of the field towards the apple tree. The pig snuffled around. It seemed contented and munched away at two or three apples before losing interest and nosing around towards another part of the field. It was too soon to tell if all this would have the same effect on the pig as it did on the cow. In fact, the only way to tell would be to eat the pig, but the farmer didn’t want to do that, at least not yet. Still he was emboldened by the chance of early success, and so the following day he brought in one of the sheep and one of the goats, knowing they could, like the cow, be milked. The sheep and goat’s milk was kept to be turned into cheese, which would take a while. But the farmer was getting impatient to know if all his apple-flavoured dreams would really work. So he grabbed some apples from the tree and crushed them up into juice, which he mixed in with the feed for the chickens. A few days later he tried out the eggs, which they had laid, on his unsuspecting family. His wife made an omelette for the family using the new eggs, mixing them up with some cheese and tomatoes. It tasted better than any omelette she had ever cooked before. The farmer was becoming overwhelmed with the strange, magical apple-flavoured things he was producing. It was all so good that whenever they had any visitors and shared some of the spoils with them, the guests always asked where they got it from or what the recipe was. The farmer and his wife would say that it was all home-made but the recipe was a secret, at which point people would ask to take some leftovers home with them. Before long, people started to come up to the farm, especially to buy the food. There were queues of cars down the laneway. And all because of Pippin. Yet the farmer was starting to become dissatisfied. The eggs and the milk and the cheese might be great—and they were—but they didn’t really make a full meal. What he really wanted was something he could get his teeth stuck into, something he could chew around in his mouth properly, something that would really fill him up. It slowly dawned on him what he really wanted was to see what the cow tasted like. He wanted a good juicy steak or perhaps a hamburger to wrap 4 // Dudley

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his lips around. At the dinner table the next day he suggested to his wife and son that they take the next logical step. They were both aghast and refused to allow him to hurt Pippin. Their minds turned to the breakfast table they would be sitting at the next morning and they wondered what it would be like if they had none of the milk to drink or put on their cereal. They wondered about it and didn’t like the idea at all. The farmer persisted with his arguments for a while but soon recognised that he wasn’t going to be able to persuade them. He still wanted to do it though, and he knew that if his wife or son tasted the results they would be amazed and would thank him for being so brave. His wife knew deep down that her husband was still intent on tasting the forbidden dish, so she told her son secretly that the two of them would have to watch over the farmer closely to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. Each morning the son would volunteer to help the farmer take the cows out to pasture and he would watch Pippin extra carefully. During the daytime, when the son was at school, the wife would keep a close eye on her husband to make sure she knew where he was and what he was doing. She kept an extra close eye out for Pippin too. Day after day the son and the wife would watch the cow and watch the farmer. They’d watch the farmer watching Pippin and see Pippin stare back. And as each day passed they began to wonder a bit more about what Pippin might taste like. Each morning they drank the milk and wondered even more until they could barely stand it. The farmer hadn’t given up on the idea of tasting the apple-flavoured meat and every now and again he would return to the subject. Each time he mentioned it, his wife and his son’s determination to stop him crumbled a bit more until eventually they all agreed that it would be fabulous to try it, even just a bit. They didn’t want to lose Pippin of course, because she earned them so much money and she was their favourite cow, but after a lot of thinking and talking they agreed that there was a way they could taste just a little bit of the meat. The next day, the farmer cut off one of Pippin’s ears. They had decided that she didn’t really need it—she still had another one Dudley // 5

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and anyway cows didn’t need to listen very much—she just had to walk from the barn to the milking shed to the apple tree and back to the barn each day. She had a simple life and could easily survive with just one ear. When the family added the ear to a stew that evening, they agreed it all tasted fantastic—with just the right amount of beef flavour and just the right amount of apple. Pippin was a bit grumpy at first but soon she recovered. A few days later, after thinking about it a bit more, the farmer and his wife and his son realised that Pippin didn’t really need her other ear either. She always just followed other cows or the farmer, so there was no need for sound in her life. A few days later the farmer cut off her other ear, cooked it up, and again they all wished they had more to eat. A few days after that, after they had studied her a bit more, they agreed that it really wouldn’t do any harm to cut off her tail. Pippin wasn’t so happy anymore. She walked more slowly and couldn’t flick away the flies that annoyed her because she no longer had a tail. But the family didn’t really notice. Instead they just tried to dream up new ways they could have a little bit more of the appleflavoured cow to eat. After a whole week of trying to think up a way to be able to eat a little bit more, the farmer came up with an idea. What if he cut just a part of the cow’s flesh out. It surely couldn’t hurt it too much. It wouldn’t be fatal. It would be as if the cow had just suffered a big cut. They could put a bandage on the cut and let the wound heal. That evening, just before dinner, he took Pippin around to the side of the shed, away from the other cows, tied her tightly to a post, and took out an extra sharp knife. Carefully at first, then more brutally, he carved into the side of Pippin. She mooed, lowed, whined, and kicked out against him and the knife, but there was nothing she could do to stop him. Eventually, he extracted a lump of meat. The blood poured down the side of Pippin, staining her proud black and white skin, turning the black into purple and the white into a pinkish-red. The farmer felt guilt at the pain he had inflicted on her but it was quickly overridden by his sense of excitement. He put some bandages over the wound he had made and tried to stroke her on her nose to calm her, but she nearly bit his hand off as she stared back at him with eyes clamped wide open in terror. He 6 // Dudley

The Offbeat

thought about untying her but was worried that she might try and attack him, so he decided to wait until after dinner when she would have calmed down a bit. He went into the house. His wife and son were watching television in the front room and he snuck into the kitchen to prepare the meat. When he had cooked it to perfection he called them in, promising them something special. They sat down at the table and he made them both shut their eyes while he put the plates of food down in front of them. “It’s an extra-special surprise, so keep closed your eyes. Just open your mouths to taste, and be carried off to a magical place,” he told them. It was without a doubt the best food any of them had ever tried. When they finished the first helping, the son asked for more. And then the wife asked for more. And then the farmer gave himself an extra serving. The meat was so tender it melted in their mouths, the juices dribbled down their checks and back onto their plates as they ate. Even when they were full it tasted so good that they wanted to keep on eating. It was like a dream and the pot never seemed to run out of meat. There was always another ladle-full that could be drawn from it and delivered onto their plates. They spent hours at the kitchen table that night, eating continuously. At the end, when the food really was running out, they took turns running their fingers around the bottom of the pot to get every last morsel they could. The meal seemed to last forever and by the end of it all they felt so satisfied that they just wanted to sit down and relax. They went into the living room and slumped down on the sofa in front of the television, three abreast. First the farmer’s wife fell asleep, then the farmer’s son, and then the farmer himself. They slept so soundly that none of them woke up until the morning. When the first sunlight came drifting through the windows it fell first onto the farmer’s face and woke him up. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was because he was used to waking up in his bed, not on the sofa. But then he recalled the meal the previous night and a smile drifted across his face, following the path of the sun across his lips from one side to the other. He still felt completely full and satisfied. He glowed from within with a warmth that matched the sunshine. And then he remembered Pippin and how he had left her. Dudley // 7

He got up and walked through the kitchen to the back door where he stopped and noticed all the empty dishes and plates piled high. The bin was overflowing with big thick bones. He went out the back door, heading to where he had left Pippin tied up. But when he turned the corner there was nothing there except two lengths of blood-soaked rope in the shadow of the wall where she had stood. There were pools of dried blood on the ground, a few bones, and a hoof. That was all that remained of the solitary, apple-flavoured cow.

8 // Dudley

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THE GEM OF THE HEART IS IN 7-ELEVEN Michael Bartelt The donuts saw what we did in the fluorescence of 7-Eleven, among the rows of artificial food and drink. And their holes were filled with warmth stripped from them at birth. And the Slurpee machine abandoned its cold-blooded nature. And the Milky Way bars came down to Earth. And the sour worms were sweetened, while the Sour Patch Kids grew up. And our Chuck Taylors were subpoenaed as possible co-conspirators, but the laces were undone, as is the case, which we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t lose given our jury of peersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; smokes, beer, gum, candy, clear eyes, coffee, and Coke. They all saw the beauty in the crime that took place when you held my hand and slipped an Abba-Zaba into your purse for me.

Bartelt // 9

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ALICE’S WINDOW Charles O’Hay Saturday night, after the kids were asleep, Lyle told Carol, “I’m going down to the Rooster for a beer.” What he didn’t mention was that he would stop along the way and stand below the window of a woman named Alice, and from one of the town’s few remaining pay phones dial a number he believed to be hers. Nor did Lyle mention that each Saturday night before calling that number he would tell himself, “If she answers I will let my life go where she takes it.” But she didn’t answer. Not on the first Saturday, nor the next. Week after week, Lyle stood below that window and from that same payphone dialed that same number, without reply. After several months he began to notice how alluring and like honey the light from Alice’s window was. And Alice’s window began to notice Lyle, the way he stood below her each week and made the bells in her head ring. When a year of Saturdays had passed, Lyle stood below the window one last time and shouted, “Will you run away with me?” Without hesitation, Alice’s window leapt from its perch and into his arms, killing him instantly.

10 // O’Hay

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ETERNAL DRAG Haran Sivapalan I’m fed up with this Sisyphean existence; tired of this journey’s wanton banality. To quote a limousine driver I once met, “I’m sick and tired of having to eke my way through life.”

Yet, ostensibly at least, my life seems trouble-free.

Eat. Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Repeat ad nauseam.

But what’s the bloody point?

Every morning begins the futile attempt to justify my being, a daily foray into nothingness. Hunting, ornithology, the occasional socialising—these are but mere perfunctory pursuits serving only to temporarily fend off boredom. When performed time after time, day after day, these pursuits soon fail to imbue life with any real meaning. Imagine an ice-cream taster on his twentieth scoop of the day. Soon his ‘leisurely’ exploits become trite and saccharine, failing to elicit the glib, ephemeral pleasure they once did. Like everything else, they’re consigned to meaninglessness. Of course, confronted with life’s futility, my body and its constituent cells foolishly cling to their sentience. It’s understandable; they’ve been pre-programmed that way by thousands of years of evolution. To them, survival is key.

Alas, my head knows better.

I’m resolved. Today’s the day.

My method will be uncreative but, ultimately, effective and within my means. I can’t exactly ask the limousine driver I once met if I could borrow his car. The awkwardness of the discussion would be unbearable. I would need to borrow his hosepipe, too; an awkward, if not blatantly foreboding, pairing of items to request from someone I Sivapalan // 11

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barely know. I can imagine the conversation now: “Hey man, I don’t know if you remember me, but you gave me a lift once. Odd question, but do you mind if I borrow your £100,000 luxury limousine? Oh yeah, I’ll need a hosepipe, too. Oh, no, don’t worry man, I’ll return the car. Well not me personally, probably some paramedics and a forensics team.” No, I won’t recruit anybody else into my plans. My final day will be spent, like too many of its preceding days, alone. There was little need to put my financial and legal matters in order, but I did so anyway, perhaps out of some rational reflex. The money I had wasn’t mine; it was inherited from the woman who loved me. Her name was Jane—a corpulent, woefully single woman. Of course, I didn’t love her back; but she wasn’t to know. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it, but I used her like a parasite, leeching shelter and sustenance while only having to cede the odd uncomfortable hug, back-rub, or kiss from her ashen lips. It was a decent trade-off.

Right, everything’s in order; it’s time to do this.

I ascend, step-by-step, to the 15th floor. And with each step, my life sentence is commuted; enduring solace awaits me. It’s daytime, but I tread silently, careful not to disturb the slumber of both the night-shift workers and the gainfully unemployed who reside in this block. Looking down from the 15th floor balcony, the sea of concrete unravels beneath me. Yes, yes, this will do nicely. But the seeds of doubt immediately begin to sprout. “Oh, errrr, do I really want to do this? Maybe I can turn things around?” Nah, life has taught me that I’m powerless to make any real change, akin to a Facebook status update in the midst of world famine. Such a sense of hopelessness has ossified through years of unfruitful experimentation—no matter what I’ve tried, I’ve been unable to derive any meaning or happiness. I lack agency.

But do I really want to end it all?

You know, I predicted this would happen, this doubt… C’mon, don’t be such a pussy. This must be my foolish body talking. Those desperate cells, brainwashed by the cult of life, doing their best to 12 // Sivapalan

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dissuade me from logic and reason. Although I’m in no particular rush, I could do without this hesitation.

Do I really want to do this?

‘Do I really want to go on another day?’ is the more apt question to ask. To which the answer is ‘No, no, I don’t.’

So I leap.

It must be milliseconds to others, but to my heightened senses it seems an eternity. As I descend past each floor, I think to myself “So far, so good…so far, so good.” Then I think, “Have I just plagiarised a French film from the nineties?” God, even my thoughts are, like my existence to date, so unauthentic. Alas, it’ll soon be over. Thud. Temporary blackness is soon succeeded by undesired consciousness. The uniformly grey concrete comes into focus, its surface marred by a growing pool of blood. It’s reminiscent of the scene left by an inebriated vagabond lying supine on the pavement, his scarlet drink, earlier concealed by a brown paper bag, spilling into pavement around him (although heaven knows how a vagabond would afford a bottle of Merlot).

But wait. What the hell? How am I still alive?

Oh, for God’s sake1. Clearly I had miscalculated things. As someone who once prided themselves on, and was indeed paid for, their exceptional planning ability, my tail was well and truly between my legs. But this is no time to lick my wounds. The adrenaline continues to course through my veins, some of which, judging by the nascent blood, must have been chiseled open by the fall. I ready myself once more. Right, this is it. I’ll go to the 16th floor this time and complete the deed, inshallah2. I scale the stairs again. By virtue of my newly sustained injuries, it takes longer than last time. As I ascend, the blood leaves a trail on the steps, as if I was an exsanguinating Theseus en route to slaughter the Minotaur. But, unlike our wounded Greek hero, I won’t 1. Not literally of course, I don’t believe in a God or an afterlife. Perhaps that’s another reason to remain within this pitiful existence? 2. See footnote 1. Sivapalan // 13

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require such a navigation aid; there is no need to retrace my steps. I’m off to slaughter a more frightening beast—life itself. From the 16th floor, it’s hard to make out the bloodstained concrete below. Ah, yes, the lack of visual detail suggests this must be high enough. Or perhaps the blood loss has made me woozy and unable to focus my vision. Either way, who cares? The end is nigh.

I leap once more.

So far, so good. So far, so good.

Thud. Consciousness resumes, bringing with it the gloomy awareness of my life. A life squandered in this damaged but still functioning feline body. Alas, it’ll soon be over. Up to the 17th floor I go.

14 // Sivapalan

The Offbeat

REINCARNATION NATION Mark Brazaitis Suicide wasn’t a great career move. In the afterlife, the unemployment rate was high. It wasn’t necessary to work, however, because all of life’s necessities, including food and shelter, were no longer necessary. This didn’t explain the one-eyed man’s hot dog stand or Luigi’s Restaurant, which advertised a Thursday family night—“Kids Eat Free.” Eventually, I signed up to volunteer on the Souls’ Welcoming Committee, work of sorts, although I quit when I realized I would be answering the same question— “Where in the world am I?’—with the same words— “In the next world”—eternally. I became obsessed with returning to earth. Fortunately, there existed a business that promised resurrection and another that promised reincarnation, although both were located in a neighborhood that looked like Oz after the wizard had bankrupted it and run off to the Bahamas. Resurrection, I decided, might be messy— I’d been dead for months, after all, and I didn’t know what was more offensive, my body or my body odor. Though my options at Reincarnation Nation were limited—a grasshopper, a bullfrog, a rabbit— I practiced hopping. Soon enough I found myself in a pink bedroom, in a young girl’s lap. She was struggling to fit a doll’s purple dress over my long, floppy ears. I bounded to the floor, sprinted into the hallway, raced down the stairs. Ahead, an open door—heaven! I didn’t count on the fenced-in yard Brazaitis // 15

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nor the Rottweiler easing out of his doghouse like a man strolling into his favorite diner. Now I work with Marco the Magnifico, who every night at the Magic Mausoleum says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Presto,â&#x20AC;? and pulls me from his top hat and into the applause of the astonished dead.

16 // Brazaitis

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EGG CUTS AND KING KONG Greg Bachar

Fears No, it isn’t simply that they (Finch and Strether) have been coworkers for so long now that one of them (Finch) has secret longings to kill the other. No, it isn’t because one of them (Strether) has determined to drive Finch to the edge with silence (knowing full well that Finch’s greatest fear is the fear of silence; which is also why—even though Finch has long ago accepted the fact he hates Strether—he cannot help himself from talking to him. Talking to him about all and nothing at all—just to talk—to fill in the silent spaces with the caulk of conversation, to keep out the fear of silence as well as the fear of The Other—a fear that both Finch and Strether suffer; which is also why Strether continues to listen to Finch’s babbling, for he too needs a distraction from their shared anxiety they have never mentioned aloud to each other—but Strether has recognized Finch’s need to talk, and Finch has noticed that Strether doesn’t like to talk much—so they both somehow carry out the job despite their nagging, gnawing, tooth-grinding, stomach gripping, breathless fear of heights). Is it any wonder that Finch and Strether are window washers?

Lunch Boxes “What have you got?” Finch asks, dangling his legs over the side of the platform. Strether unlocks his lunch box, holds it up at eye level and peeks inside. “C’mon, open it.” Finch says, knowing full well that Strether always has the better lunch but that he (Finch) today has the rice pudding with raisins that he (Finch) despises, and that he (Strether) loves but is not allowed to eat.

Strether opens his box and sets it down next to him, on the Bachar // 17

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platform between himself and Finch. Finch leans over Strether’s lunch box and narrates the removal of the mouthwatering contents. First, the thermos: “Homemade minestrone soup with cheese tortellinis...” Then: “Beef brisket with horse radish on an onion roll with side container of juice for dipping, still warm, tossed mixed salad, mustard vinaigrette, a cheese calzone, sparkling mineral water, three kiwis, full of vitamins, chocolate mousse and a slice of cherry pie. Not bad.’’ “What have you got?” Strether asks, leaning over to look into Finch’s box, infinitely smaller than his (Strether’s) with no room inside for the thermos that he (Finch) must carry separately every morning, meaning that, on average, three to four thermoses are dropped and broken each year. “C’mon, what have you got?” Strether asks pleadingly, his mouth watering because he knows full well that Finch has the rice pudding that he (Strether) is not allowed to eat. “The usual.’’ Finch says, lifting the lid a bit. Strether hunches over, smells the usual sour milk interior of Finch’s dented box and recites the contents aloud. “Processed turkey on enriched white bread with mayonnaise and a pickle, grab bag size bag of corn chips, one carton of warm milk, three Oreos and, let’s see...” Finch opens the lid completely and peers inside, as if staring into the dark bottom of a well to see if there are fireflies there or not. He pushes the corn chips aside and lifts the thin sandwich in its clear plastic wrapper. “And?” Strether says excitedly, eyes wide, hands clasped as if in prayer, elbows extended like forgotten wings on a dead fly, tonguelicking lips already sensing the texture of the— “—rice pudding with raisins,” Finch adds with feigned disinterest. In fact, Finch can’t wait to get the rice pudding with raisins out of his box. He cannot stand the sight or thought of it, his mind repeating endlessly the phrase, “raisins have no business except in bread,” but he knows that he has to sublimate Strether’s desire for his beef brisket sandwich, the tossed salad, one of the kiwis, the mineral water and the cherry pie. It is the latter that Finch really wants, but the power of his (Finch’s) rice pudding with raisins is such that Finch can finagle Strether into sacrificing a wholesome lunch, in exchange for nothing but just the right amount of manipulative enticement. 18 // Bachar

And rice pudding.

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FLIGHTLESS Kelly Nelson Erasure of Octavio Paz’s poem “La Rama”

Canta en la punta del pino un pájaro detenido, trémulo, sobre su trino. Se yergue, flecha, en la rama, se desvanece entre alas y en música se derrama. El pájaro es una astilla que canta y se quema viva en una nota amarilla. Alzo los ojos: no hay nada. Silencio sobre la rama, sobre la rama quebrada.

Nelson // 19

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THE MUSCLE Donald Illich They’re here to pound you mercilessly, until you give up cash, jewelry, till your arm hangs off your body; your legs will need snow-white casts. They don’t mind their jobs. Since age eight they’ve worked on their profession: shaking down milk money, decorating student faces with black bruises. You can’t talk them out of their duties—they feel no hate toward you. You could be anything they need to break: a piece of wood, a fragile crate. At home they’re peaceful. They gently close cabinet doors, never rattle the toaster to let go. They sleep without disturbance. Dream of nothing.

20 // Illich

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IT COULD BE WORSE Gil Prowler We first met as she lay in her coffin. I gently bent down, whispered some small pleasantries in her ear and continued along the line. I was depressed; it had been a very hard day for me. With the service over, I walked out of the church and passed through the mourners, each in various stages of bereavement, as a hearse idled at the curb. But God I never felt so alive. It was a blessing indeed, that, as out of sorts and disheartened as I was, I happened upon someone, a stranger, whose sad final chapter had been written. Whatever thoughts I had about the human condition, mine specifically, it beats being a sack in the back. Yes, it could be worse. Morbid, you say? No. Depraved, sick, unabashed? No, no, and no. Their end was a way to my means of staying afloat in a sea of uncertainty and chaos. I tried medication, dabbled in meditation, even medicinal masturbation (don’t ask) but nothing calmed me like a funeral. Anyone’s. I first tried going to weddings but that didn’t work out. While the payoff — the food, the drinks and music, the fights and the flirts — made for a near perfect evening, it was a hard ticket to get, walking in off the street. Funerals, though, were full of secrets and sobbing and rarely did anyone think to discourage someone who may be privy to the deceased. Of course, I had on occasion been questioned about my relationship to the departed. When I would say an “acquaintance“ or “someone I met briefly“ I almost felt a kinship to Tom, Dick, Mary or whomever was lying about. I felt no joy in their passing; it was certainly nothing personal, although an objective ear such as mine found that there were often those in attendance who felt differently. The dead do tell tales, my friend, it’s just not them doing the talking. Prowler // 21

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Two plus years ago I came into a sizeable inheritance that allowed me to first, find my own place and second, get a divorce. My wife and I had been renting so the only monies were in some stocks and cash; it was a fairly easy mathematical calculation. I kept the inherited annuity and gave her a liberal settlement of the remaining assets. In the beginning, our marriage was ideal: with smooching, hugging, and incoherent murmurings of love. As time passed though, what was once cute became quirky and then annoying. The one consistent in our relationship was sex. As time passed, however, it was not with each other. Moments of indiscretion become habits and when our willful ignorance of each other’s deceit was no longer working it was only a matter of time and circumstance. And that’s when someone’s untimely —for them anyway— passing, reared its fortuitous head and I was able to escape not just unscathed but in better shape than ever. But my funds, as generous as they were, had a shelf life of three years before they were all paid out. I decided to leave my job as a customer service doormat and pursue my ambition as a writer and bon vivant with gusto. I would be a success in no time. Well, I’m finding out that ‘no time’ is when it will likely happen. Here I am approaching the finish line of my ”plan” and what do I have to show for it? Rejected short, medium and long stories, a bar bill that leaves me shaken and stirred and an inevitable eviction. I’m afraid that for one such as myself, full of promise yet void of talent, the end is near.

It’s getting difficult.

Is it wrong to seek out those moments that remind one that life is worth living? No, of course not. So, whenever my mood shifts into low it’s time for me to wander out to a ”watering and planting”, as I call funerals, and find the nearest service to help lift my spirits. The obituary pages are a good start if you first want to read the ‘back story’. I like to play a game with myself as to what sorts will be attending the service by the life’s work of the deceased. I’ve had the good fortune, unlike the guest of honor, to recall many moments of sheer joy their burial provided me. The average Joe, that’s a mixed bag because someone in the family always needs money —badly. And someone else does too, but 22 // Prowler

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brother, there just isn’t enough to go around. Cheap liquor brings out the stories but bounty brings out the knives and they’re rarely dull. When it’s the big money guys, well that delivers those wearing suits to the service and those filing them in court because death is a zero sum game; one big loser and plenty of prospective winners. And don’t be fooled, low tones bring high drama, believe me I’ve heard it. I remember at one service for a man of industry, someone said that ”six feet of dirt isn’t going to be enough to stop the SOB”, and that was the pastor speaking. I was asked to be a pallbearer at that event because they were short one guy. Of course I did. What a great day. Still, there’s something to be said for serendipity. Sometimes I’ll just wander along ”death valley” as I call the stretch of nearby churches and parlors native to that trade. Lately, though, my need for reassurance is no longer confined to ”viewing hours” and often times I go looking for a candlelight vigil or, if it’s super late, a street memorial. There’s anger and angst all around, bad mojo for sure, but such is life and it fills in the gaps.

I’m not doing so well.

Soon what little money I have left will be gone and I’m making plans to move to an abandoned property overlooking potter’s field. It’s becoming difficult to maintain what little sanity I have left as each day brings me closer to ruin. I fear that, as my situation becomes more and more desperate, I won’t be able to fend off the utter despair that comes with abject poverty and hopelessness. And then, my friends, I’ll have little choice but to wander day and night, night and day, through cemeteries and catacombs seeking salvation until that time comes when I join all of those poor bastards.

Still, it could be worse.

Prowler // 23

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IN ROME Charlie Burgess

she lay naked in the center of the Pantheon

a golden chain rose from her navel to the oculus

24 // Burgess

i climbed the roof and looked in

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THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE Daniel Connelly The bus to the Middle of Nowhere collected me from the cul-de-sac. Mine was the only seat remaining. Upstairs and down was packed with cheerful souls chatting about the long journey ahead and how they could not wait to arrive. The smiling driver handed me a one-way ticket and I took my place next to a priest who said he was only going to check the location and would return home immediately to inform the bishop. I replied that I had packed the bare minimum and I was ready to give Nowhere a whirl; I had left a note for my family on the kitchen table. As we exited the highway, night was falling and the surrounding barren lands began to look like the bottom of a deep ocean, but our spirits were high and we sang old songs of freedom to which the priest did not know the words. We shared our sandwiches and turned our heads to smile at one another as we drove through the night, even after the road ended. It turns out Nowhere is almost too small to have a middle and that everywhere is at least somewhere. In fact, once the bus pulled up at the entrance just after dawn, we had to alight and go by foot to the small stone circle with the words Middle of Nowhere carved out roughly with a chisel or a knife. Our journey had concluded and it was with great solemnity and a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;this is itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; look in our eyes that we joined hands and bowed our heads in silent awe of destiny attained. It was at this point, I believe, that the priest began the long walk back to his parish.

Connelly // 25

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TWO KINGS C. Gregory Thompson A body falls out of the sky, landing on the hood of my car with a metal-crunching thud. Whites of eyes, brights of teeth. Brakes screech, fast glances in the rearview hoping there’s no one behind to slam into me. I turn Marilyn Manson’s shrieking voice off as the Ford LTD lurches to a stop on the shoulder. A mound of flesh lies outside the windshield, still, unmoving. Unsure if dead or alive. Blood smears, trickles, across the cracked safety glass. Arms twist in unnatural directions. Face looking in at me. Cold, staring eyes. This isn’t happening. Guts roil, nausea. Sweat prickles across the top of my head. I open the driver’s side door and throw up. I can’t be found with a dead body. Can’t stay here, can’t be seen. What the fuck do I do? Shit. Think, Brett, think. I put the car in gear and carefully pull back onto the ten-lane concrete freeway. The 210 between Tujunga and Pasadena is quiet at three in the morning on a Tuesday in January. I pray that no one else drives this stretch. Or sees us. Too late, shit, fuck. Headlights in the rearview. Please pass, don’t look over. Don’t look, please. They cruise on by, no response. I head to the closest exit, Pennsylvania Avenue, a quarter-mile away. The body, a man with a beard, brown skin, black hair, wearing paint-spattered jeans, dirty white Reeboks, and a Dodgers windbreaker, jostles as the car wobbles. The weight of a 1984 Ford LTD at full speed forcing it to rock side to side. The man’s curls, a full head of hair, blow around in the freeway speed-induced air. Who is he? Did he jump? Fall? Why the hell me? He still stares. The eyes saying “help me.” The police? Not an option. A hospital? Can’t happen. Fuck, I can’t do this right now. I just picked up several pounds of shit. $50K worth. From a guy who cooks in Tujunga. My regulars know Wednesday is their day. Why me now? I drive up the exit and look for side streets; away from commercial thoroughfares, possible sightings, and peering security cameras. A parked car’s headlights jam on; illumine the man on the hood. The person in the car sees and flashes headlights on and off, waves frantically via the open driver’s window. I pretend not to notice, gunning it, they don’t try to follow. I 26 // Thompson

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pull into Crescenta Valley Park and stop under the oak trees. Gnarled branches, forest-green leaves, wild and overgrown, hover over and protect me from view. When I turn off the engine, it sputters before going quiet. I look out at the bearded face, blood dribbling from a corner of the limp mouth between purplish lips, at the eyes that continue their help-me stare. I open the door, the oil-thirsty creak startling me, and put a tan-colored Carhartt work boot on the pavement. The Santa Ana winds blow cold. Branches on the oak trees rustle violently, leaves and dust float in the air. Grabbing the door frame, I pull the rest of my 175 pounds out of the car. I stand, my six foot two frame tall enough to grab the prickly-edged oak leaves dangling overhead. Three steps forward and I can touch the man. News of a slow pulse doesn’t solve a thing for me. Dead instead of alive might have been easier. Either way, I am still screwed. Decision time forces me back behind the wheel. We can’t hang in the park much longer. Moving him into the car will take too long. Better he stays in position. I drive us home to my place, a dump of a house that I rent in the foothills of La Crescenta. Questions flood my brain the moment the man crashes into my life. A mere forty minutes ago that feels like forty years. Who is this person? Where are his people? He comes from someone, somewhere out there. He has a mother and father. Is there a wife? Are there children? Are there hearts loving him, needing him, wanting him? Life is shitty to some of us. His brown skin in Southern California makes him in all probability Latino. Illegal? Here alone with family back in Mexico or some other South American country. Paint on his pants, he’s an under-the-table house painter, making crap money, paying off his coyote and wiring the rest home to his family. Sad and shitty. Does he fall running from somebody? A thug the coyote sends to collect his overdue debt. Chance money. Pesos on credit spent with a prayer that a better life awaits. Or maybe he is pushed over by the husband of the woman he takes up with? A woman he knows from his village back home. He jumps because the prayer goes unanswered. The better life never arrives. He knows he will be paying the coyote back forever. He jumps because the woman, the love from his childhood, decides to stay with her husband. Hands fused to the steering wheel, ten and two o’clock, fingers white from gripping too tightly. I sit in the LTD in front of my house. Pushing synapses to make electrical connections. I need help. Hank? Yes. A client, a meth head, but an ex-EMT if I remember correctly. I call him on my cell phone, and he agrees to come over. Thompson // 27

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When he arrives, he immediately goes hardcore EMT. Tossing out phrases like triage, blood loss, amputation. I know it’s the meth talking. I calm him down, and he does a quick assessment of the man. Yes, still alive; the slow pulse shows a heart pumping enough blood to keep him breathing. I’ve grown used to the unblinking, staring eyes; to the mangled, bloody, inert body. We carefully move him off the LTD’s hood onto a plastic tarp. Inside we place him on a bed in the spare bedroom. A room where I dump crap I can’t deal with. Tall stacks of cardboard boxes full of books, magazines, and old newspapers tight up against the walls make it hard to navigate. Hank squeezes in and checks the man over with the razor sharp attentiveness borne of his addiction. I watch and wait. Questions, thoughts, fragments of cognitive energy continue to ping-pong inside my cerebral cortex. What will happen to him? What will happen to me? I search his pockets to see if he has a name, something to tell me who he is in this world. Who his mother and father wished him to be: a Pedro, a Miguel, a Jesus, or a Javier? I wedge out of his back pocket a worn-out leather wallet. Inside, two twenty-dollar bills and a photo of a woman holding a little girl. Something is written on the back in Spanish that I am unable to read. No driver’s license or government-issued identification. Death suddenly complicates life. If he dies I won’t know who he is, I won’t be able to return his body to those who love him, or tell them of his passing. I’ll have to dispose of him, his corpse. The empty shell he leaves behind. Toss him on the side of the road like he’s a victim of a hit and run? Too risky. Easy to be seen, caught. Take him to the desert and put him in a shallow grave, the type animals dig up, exposing a long-unsolved crime? A jawline appears, gold tooth glinting in the desert sunshine. Sheriff’s deputies, detectives, and forensic specialists with their cameras, tools, and brushes descend and excavate the rest of the skeletal remains. Best for me if he stays alive. Best for him? I can’t answer. For now, he’ll be a Juan Doe instead of a Pedro, a Miguel, a Jesus, or a Javier. I help remove his dirty, bloody clothes. I clean dried blood off his hands and face. I look into his still-open eyes and answer the questions they ask. Yes, I am going to help you. Yes, I’ll try to keep you alive. Hank wants to take him to a hospital. I tell him that’s impossible. They will ask questions. Hank agrees to treat him in my house. He writes a list of things he’ll need, and I leave to get them. With the items I bring back, and with stolen EMT supplies he already has, Hank starts. First, an I.V. to replace lost fluids. Then casts for the broken arm and legs. He wraps each limb in web roll dressing then fiberglass wrap to keep them rigid. Using curved needles, he 28 // Thompson

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sutures cuts on the man’s face, chest, and arm. Methodically running the needles on curvilinear paths through the skin on both sides of the wounds, fresh blood trickling over dried, creating a crosshatch of black thread that knits the damaged skin together. Finally, he applies topical ointment and gauze dressings to wounds not needing sutures. Two hours later, the man rests and the spare room looks like a quasihospital room. Hank stays with us. I ask him to, I need him to. Without X-rays and a hospital, we don’t know if the man has internal injuries. Drug-addled Hank makes the man his project. He likes putting his EMT experience to use. I pay Hank in meth. He binges when he needs to, but still maintains enough to care for his patient. A week passes and the man comes to. His eyes blinking rapidly, he squints at the bright overhead light, groans at the pain he abruptly feels, and mumbles in Spanish. He tries to get up, to move, to leave. I tell him he must stay still. I ask his name. No response. He looks at us with fear in his eyes. “English? Do you speak English?” “A little,” he answers. * * * Santa Anas, that’s what they call them. Devil winds. El viento del diablo. Salvador learns of them when he is first in el Norte.

Fiercely they blow, hot sometimes others cold. They piss off men and frighten children. The mountain passes, the canyons, give them life. They shrill down at more than forty miles an hour, tossing palm tree fronds into streets, stirring up dust and grit, and making the people of Los Angeles act crazy. L.A., Salvador’s new city. The name is so pretty in Spanish, it reminds him of Mexico, his home. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles. The Town of Our Lady, the Queen of Angels. Little towns all over Mexico are named after the Virgin too. Devil winds, cold, make his eyes water and chap his skin on a Tuesday night in January. His last day on a job painting a house in a place he doesn’t know. La Crescenta, a town near mountains he can see from the flats below. A two-hour bus ride up from the single room he shares with seven men in downtown “El Lay.” A room the landlord kicks them out of that morning. Where will he sleep tonight? Forty dollars, all he makes for two day’s work. The only job he has all month. When he doesn’t work, he puts his hand out. Walking in traffic on Alvarado Street, holding a cardboard sign with “homeless and hungry” written in black marker. Words he doesn’t understand. A sign he finds in the gutter that another pobre like him leaves. Strangers rarely help. A dime, a quarter, a one-dollar bill. Not Thompson // 29

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enough. The burning, gnawing in his stomach never quits. Homeless, he walks for hours. Walking across a bridge that spans a freeway, he stops in the middle. He climbs. Up the chainlink fence, a protective barrier to the concrete below. At the top, he stops and looks down at the cars rushing by. He is Salvador, his grandfather’s name, his mother’s father. Twenty-nine years ago his mamá gave birth to him in their town, Dos Reyes, “Two Kings,” located in the state of Jalisco. Last year, in December, he paid a coyote to smuggle him across the Rio Grande. No jobs in Dos Reyes. No money to support his wife and little girl. A man takes care of his family. A family he probably won’t see again. Three-thousand dollars, his debt to the coyote. Money he doesn’t have. Dollars he won’t ever possess. He jumps. Up. Into the night sky. He is flying. Freedom. The air, icy, burns his skin, seeps beneath the windbreaker he wears. Then, he feels nothing. Unafraid, he is not there. Gone, into the ether of time. Non-existent, soul fleeing earthly confines. Plasma, tissue, bones, blood lacking form, void of humanness. Now he knows everything. He returns to his physical body, a split second only, when it hits something hard, metal, warm, roaring, and moving faster than the devil winds. The pain, the ache of broken bones departs quickly. Angel-like, he rapidly soars back up. Out of body, to that happiness he never knew until now. He looks down at his mangled body speeding down a freeway he doesn’t know in el Norte. What is happening? Am I dead? The car stops, fast, jerking him forward. He almost falls off, but the dent made by his body hitting the car’s hood holds him in place. He lays twisted and torn; the iron and steel protecting him. An orange light blinks on and off, on and off, on and off, and the car slowly moves back onto the freeway. A funerary chariot, the car slinks along neighborhood streets, slow and fast, abrupt turns and sudden stops. His body jostles back and forth in time to the swaying movements of the rumbling machine. Who is driving? His eyes, wide open, looking for knowledge. His two legs and one arm cracked, broken from the velocity of his 223 pounds slamming into the metal of the car. Blood trickling from open wounds, drying in the rush of air. Shattered, at the edge. An open door, ethereal figures beckon, calling to him in Spanish. He starts to follow. His long-dead abuelos, his grandparents. “Come, ven mijo. Ven !” Trees, shadows, the winds, a tall white man touches his neck, then darkness. He leaves his body, now a heap of flesh on the hood of the car. He floats off, above, away. 30 // Thompson

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“Salvador !” His mother calls to him. He is five, and they are at his grandfather’s farm in Jalisco. He is in a field with the animals: the sheep, the cows, the goats, the chickens. Running, playing with his cousins, he is King of the Hill. They have wooden swords; they fight each other off a dirt mound to be the supreme ruler of all the land. “Salvador !” “One more minute, mamá ! I am King of the Hill.” He tells his cousins to obey his commands, or they will be sent to the dungeons and held prisoner. “We are leaving now, Salvador. Come, please. Be a good, sweet boy for your mamá.” He shouts back to her, “I am coming, mamá !” He enters a vortex, winding around and around; he runs up the dirt mound, back down and up again, over and over. He doesn’t mind. He rests now. Time ceases. He runs up and back down, up and back down. Up and back down. He hears himself speaking foreign words. “A little,” he says. Who is he talking to? His eyes flutter fast but he doesn’t see. A blur. A room somewhere. He lies in a bed. Bright light overhead. The room smells, damp and musty. Shadows move over him. Someone is speaking to him in English. His body hurts the most unbearable pain. * * * Seven days after Salvador jumped off the overpass he woke up. First thought relief he hadn’t died, then: What do I do with him now? Not well enough to leave but eventually, he’ll have to. Over the next several weeks, steady improvement. Once he was able to get out of bed, he moved around, awkwardly with the two leg casts. I helped him at first. He slowly ventured into other parts of the house: the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom. We ate meals together, usually with the television on, little to no conversation. Salvador sat in an old, stained armchair in the living room, T.V. remote in his lap, watching fútbol. He surfed the Spanish stations watching as much of Mexico’s national team as possible. Soccer wasn’t a sport I knew much about; I sat and watched with him, learning about this passion of his. Weak, nodding off, his strength not fully recovered, I’d hijack the remote and switch the channel to COPS. He’d wake up and say, “Ay, no !” COPS made him nervous, the police chasing after criminals and arresting them. A compromise eventually achieved: he watched soccer when his team played; asleep, he snored loudly when I watched COPS. Just like roommates. My first since college. Alone my preference. By week six, the wariness that I felt from him since his arrival disappeared. An exuberance emerged, his energy returned. I experienced him as he probably would be at home, in Mexico with his family. He spoke to me in Spanish despite my not understanding; teasing and mocking me. I could tell by the inflections and the occasional hijo de puta and cabrón. I tossed it right back at him in Thompson // 31

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English he didn’t understand. I continued operating my business. Wednesday, the busiest day of the week; clients coming and going all day, not easy to hide. I figured if Salvador had issues, he could leave. He wouldn’t go to the police since he wasn’t legal. Three months in, Hank removed the casts from Salvador’s arm and legs. He now walked with a limp. The bone in one of his legs hadn’t knitted together properly. He stepped, and his right leg swung out from his hip, and down. A hitching, halting gait, now the first thing people would notice. Before his brown skin, before his accent. The day that Hank removed his casts Salvador offered to work for me. My first reaction: No way. I can’t work with someone, not a stranger. But business had been good, and I saw this as a way for Salvador to earn the money he’d need to leave. Not sure why, on gut instinct only, I liked and trusted him. For three months, I’d watched the man, studied him, and learned about him. A risk, yes, but one I decided to take. * * * On his first awake Wednesday, Salvador looked out the bedroom window. All day long people came and went, parking their cars, knocking lightly on the front door, and leaving a few moments later. Drogas ? He wondered if Brett was selling drugs. Hielo ? Ice? Yes, probably. If this gabacho, this white boy, sold drugs, that was his own business. He momentarily wondered if Brett’s meth came from the cartel near his village. He spent most of his time missing his family; his wife, Maria, and his little girl, Angela. Watching T.V. in a bathrobe that Brett gave him, too small and smelling like the white boy, Salvador kept the only photo he had of his wife and little girl in one of the robe’s two pockets. He touched the pocket often or pulled the picture out to hold. When Brett wasn’t in the room, he spoke to the image. Telling them how much he missed them, and that he wished he could come home soon. He wiped away tears with a bathrobe sleeve if Brett appeared. Salvador, stuck in place; trapped by weakness; worried about what he would do once he was well enough to leave. Here, he had everything he needed. Should he try to stay? Would Brett let him? Or should he try, again, to find work as a pinche mojado, a fucking wetback. Pretending to like the stranger caring for him exhausted him. He wanted to watch fûtbol alone without the white boy asking questions he couldn’t answer. He wished he could stand so he could 32 // Thompson

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cook a meal, a puchero, a nice beef stew. Enough with the hot dogs, canned soup, and take-out pizza Brett fed him. His face hurt from smiling, pretending to understand the white boy’s jokes; pretending they were friends when he believed they were not. A pounding one afternoon, when Brett was out, woke Salvador up. Not the normal day for sales. He hobbled to the front door. A young woman, messy red hair, scabs on her arms and legs, teeth yellow and rotting, stood looking in at Salvador. Not a regular customer.

“Please? A friend told me I could score here.”

Salvador told her no inglés, but he knew why she was there. She held cash out to him; eighty dollars. He told her he couldn’t, in Spanish, over and over while closing the door. She pushed it open. “Por favor.” He knew how much to give her. If Brett thought Salvador was asleep he’d work in front of him, so Salvador learned to sleep with an eye open. He grabbed a half gram from Brett’s stash, inside a banged up, putty-colored, metal file cabinet in the living room, took the girl’s money, and she left. Then, he slowly worked his way across the living room, holding on to pieces of furniture, and slid the cash underneath the mattress in his room. Before hiding the money, he kissed it and prayed a novena to St. Jude, patron saint for those in need. During Salvador’s twelfth week of healing, the other white boy, crazy Hank, removed the casts from his arm and legs. Up and walking around, and feeling much better, he asked Brett if he could work for him. The sixth night after Salvador became a drug dealer was a Tuesday, the day Brett always picked up his supply of drogas. Brett drove the LTD to a place called Tujunga. Another town Salvador didn’t know in el Norte. He sat in the passenger seat looking out at the dent his body had made in the car’s hood. It was the middle of the night when they made the run. The devil winds blew again but this time, warm not cold. Windows open, hot gusts pushed through the car. He closed his eyes, the rocking sensation of the machine lulling him into a half-sleep. On the return trip, eighty miles an hour on the 210 East, a week’s supply of meth secure in the trunk, the overpass appeared above them. He remembered. Climbing up the protective chain-link fence, pausing at the top, falling forward, and slamming hard into warm Thompson // 33

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metal. Brett looked over at him when they went under the overpass. Salvador did not look back. He sank lower into the seat, turned his face into the rushing wind, and closed his eyes. Dozing, warm air soothing, he heard his mother call: “Salvador ! We are leaving now. Come, please. Be a good, sweet boy for your mamá.” That night, late, alone in his room, he knelt, elbows on the bed, hands together in prayer; he prayed to la Virgen, the blessed Virgin Mary. He prayed for forgiveness, for sins he’d already committed and for future sins he might make. He asked her to come to him. To remain at his side. To walk with him as she had before. He remained on his knees, mumbling, in prayer, for over an hour. When he felt God’s grace within him again, he went to Brett’s stash and grabbed up all that was there. Next he went to where Brett hid his cash, a ceiling panel above the refrigerator; he reached in and removed it all, just over $15,000. He put the drugs and the money into a duffel bag, and then he quietly opened the front door and walked, his halting, hitched, one-two gait taking him into the night. Down the driveway, to the street, along the neighborhood block, to the boulevard at the bottom of the hill, on his way home.

34 // Thompson

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ELUCIDATION Gregory Goodrich

Retrospects of inclusion; coming to conclusions that were no longer illusions, which eluded to exposure: like a poorly developed photograph. A vision with such unbridled brilliance yet such little elation.

Suffering is creation. Chaos â&#x20AC;&#x201D; euphoria.

Goodrich // 35

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1-800-ART Jennifer MacBain-Stephens magenta plastic frame black and white Brooklyn Bridge repurposed blue wooden frame bemused Audrey Hepburn blue and white striped frame Mr. Met smiles green with gold flecks wolf pack roaming nature scape fire engine red rectangle Mojave Desert at night thin wispy black metal frame Picassoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s three-eyed woman glares at us from every angle dreams of looking straight ahead

36 // MacBain-Stephens

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AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Elytron Frass As we are in the center of a world created and, as yet, undestroyed—the incunabula of any event is most ambiguous. This is something I’ve come to piece together while scanning through various legal documents, newspaper articles, research papers, and statistical analyses for that mythical creature known as origination. Yet, what pattern I’ve discovered, regarding the survival of a specific personality, might more than compensate for the uncertainty of its beginnings. Take what I’ve found within the law case of Browerian vs. Dodsonian for example. Not too long ago, there was a hearing in the States. One writer sued another on the grounds of plagiarism. The plaintiff, Browerian, was a wordsmith of short fictions. His most recent work was based upon a dream that his porter, Mekonan, had experienced while they were journeying the borders of Somalia. Dodsonian, the defendant, was a non-fiction author and psychologist—published by various academic journals—regarding his extensive fieldwork on past-life regression. The plaintiff, Browerian, complained that large excerpts of his story were copied in their entirety by Dodsonian. Just three days after Browerian’s aforementioned work of fiction hit the press, Dodsonian allegedly— rather coincidentally—had published a certain case study of a young boy from Afghanistan. The Afghani’s past-life testimony was nearidentical to the plaintiff’s fictional work that was based upon his Somali porter’s dream. The defendant, who countersued for slander, stated that his academic paper, published in the American Journal of Psycho Logic, was, in totality, taken from four months’ worth of research done abroad—studying and recording what he’d claimed was exponential proof, suggestive of an incidence of metempsychosis or, dare I say, reincarnation. Both writers’ works were written in their own respective styles; it was the content, however, which was remarkably redundant. Mekonan, the Somali porter, and Ustad, the young male from Afghanistan—whose accounts were used as source material— Frass // 37

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were present in court to testify. Both were cross-examined before an awestruck jury. Under oath they swore never having met; although their testimonials were identical and queer. The defendant, a psychologist by trade, argued that—while various theories could be formulated—it was sheer coincidence that fated both their works. Having the full courtroom’s attention, Dodsonian reminded the jury and the judge of the improbabilities of plagiarism. Both plaintiff and defendant were synchronically, in very separate and remote parts of the world, collecting source materials for each respective work for several years. Dodsonian suggested this case would only be unraveled through the statements of its witnesses, Mekonan and Ustad—and more specifically, through their reminiscences as a singular identity from generations past. Little did the jury know that more layers of peculiarity were yet unpeeled. The interrogation, led by Dodsonian’s lawyer, went on as follows: Synopsis of Statements of Ustad Beltoon and Mekonan Dhaanto Statements made xx/xx/xxxx Beltoon, U. / Dhaanto, M. Long ago, I was someone else.............................................................Y/Y I was a somnambulist............................................................................Y/Y My name was Yaritza Zayas................................................................Y/Y My father’s name was Renoldo [Zayas].............................................Y/N My father’s name was [Renoldo] Zayas.............................................Y/Y My gender was female, and I was white.............................................Y/Y I grew up in [Ceylon], Brazil...............................................................Y/Y I grew up in Ceylon, [Brazil]...............................................................Y/Y Mother wore clogs...............................................................................N/Y Mother tended to her garden..............................................................Y/Y In the garden were snakes and geckos...............................................Y/Y Knew which snakes were harmless/poisonous...................................N/N An abandoned station stood beyond our land...................................Y/Y Was a den of pimps and thieves..........................................................Y/Y One night, I sleepwalked over to them...............................................Y/Y They called me ‘gringo loco’...............................................................Y/Y My family owned a horse....................................................................N/Y The horse’s hair was also white..........................................................N/N I rode to work on horseback................................................................Y/Y Worked at the local hospital................................................................Y/Y Wore a uniform with white stockings and garters............................Y/Y I wore buckled shoes............................................................................Y/N Lost my virginity to a physician in the bathroom.............................Y/Y Physician was a single man.................................................................N/N His name was Pazuzu Santos..................................................................?/? He was my only lover............................................................................Y/Y 38 // Frass

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Got me pregnant and contracted herpes............................................Y/Y He paid for my abortion..........................................................................?/? These remained our secrets..................................................................Y/Y Administered blood and intravenous drugs.......................................Y/Y Treated many pts with various infectious disease.............................Y/Y Was accidentally pricked while giving an injection..........................Y/Y I was treated by my lover, the physician.............................................Y/Y I did not know that he had given me placebos...................................Y/Y These took the place of the STR [standard treatment regimen]....Y/Y Caught fever two months later............................................................Y/Y Saint Lazarus [figurine] placed at bedside.........................................Y/Y Physician diagnosed pneumonia..........................................................Y/Y Much later family paid for second opinion.........................................Y/Y Hepatitis B, cirrhosis of the liver, end stage renal failure.................Y/Y Walls were colored green....................................................................N/Y Geckos climbed them in the night......................................................Y/Y No windows in the hospital..................................................................Y/Y I died a gringo, yellow, by the morning..............................................Y/Y The hospital’s name was Santa Isabel...................................................?/? I was compensated by the author for my story..................................N/N Total Number of Statements..........46/46 Number Correct...............................37/37 Number Incorrect.................................6/6 Number Unascertained........................3/3 Although forgotten were some of their earliest memories as one Yaritza Zayas—whether in a dream or in a past-life—the two male subjects went on to recount vague recollections of themselves in other forms. They shared identical experiences—both abstract and inhuman—as that of nitrogen and hydrocarbons, tertiary proteins, single-celled archaea, a reckless moth who’d flown into a burning lamp of phosphorescence, a superorganism which—composed entirely of ants—extended throughout the country of Brazil and up into the Northernmost reaches of South America. By the time Dodsonian’s lawyer finished cross-examining Mekonan and Ustad, the jury was baffled by the sameness of their answers. In the end, the confounded judge dismissed the case; yet, Browerian, the plaintiff, was given one last opportunity to speak before the court adjourned. “Piracy is piracy no matter what the circumstances are,” Browerian argued. “I am an artist; so, it is my duty to reiterate matters of reality and fact. On the contrary, the defendant is a man of science; ergo, his inventions shouldn’t have a basis in the realm of Frass // 39

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tales and dreams. That man there’s a pirate, and his Afghani friend is nothing but a stone-faced co-conspirator; this, I’m sure!” “Objection!” shouted the defendant’s lawyer—the judge’s gavel striking shortly after. Before either side could slander the other any longer, in a case that seemed as though it could go on and on into forever, the court was finally adjourned. Miles away from where the building of the 3.7 million dollar lawsuit stood were two motels. Both were as neglected and as bulletridden as the other. Comped by separate law firms, pent up in separate rooms, in separate derelict motels, Mekonan and Ustad shared a final thought that night. Mekonan scribbled brief but vulgar criticisms on a wrinkled napkin of his “exploitation,” as he put it, “by a cross-examination for the benefit of lawyers, plagiaristic writers, and other social parasites.” Meanwhile, Ustad, just under thirteen years of age, drew a detailed picture on a piece of paper of Dodsonian and Browerian as pirates –both their lawyers clad accordingly to what was once considered fashionable for nautical cutthroats of antiquity. Together—upon their pegged legs—they were depicted boarding an unarmed galleon, adrift atop the high seas of what Ustad had labeled as the Saragossa. In a second hand-drawn panel, they plundered precious cargo, a modicum of personal belongings, and other tradable materials; lastly, in the third, they sailed off with as much merchandise as any men’s hooked hands could hold. Stolen properties were rendered theirs. These were Mekonan’s and Ustad’s last documented ponderings. As an eyewitness, taking my routine and lonesome walk that night, I hastily reported what I’d seen there at the crosswalk, between the two motels, beyond refracted streetlights in the twilight fog, what appeared to be two foreign individuals, staggering towards each other, blind and sleepwalking, until converging face to face and pausing, remaining in their trancelike states, as if sizing one another up for combat, whilst their eyes were shuttered tightly and the sounds of slobbering and heavy mouth-breathing garbled through their teeth, with the taller, older male dropping slowly to his knees to meet the younger’s height, then in the next moment lunging in drunkenly yet precisely at each other’s throats with shards of mirror-glass-like objects held in their left hands. As I’d somehow managed to pull myself free from a frozen state of shock and disbelief while phoning the authorities they’d bled out together without ever waking, sighing 40 // Frass

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before slumping down as if to signify relief. The coroner’s report deemed both males were unconscious for several hours up until their deaths. Despite evidence of stress from the rigors of daily court proceedings and the writings and drawings found within their rooms which indicated their repressed resentments for Browerian, Dodsonian, and possibly each other— Ustad and Mekonen were ultimately found “not guilty, on the grounds of duel somnambulism,” or what media outlets called, “THE MOST SPITEFUL SLEEPWALKING-COINCEDENCE IMAGINABLE!!!” After years of research and reflection upon unwritten clues within all that’s documented and leading up to personal experience, I’ve come to theorize that that gruesome mutual engagement between Mekonan and Ustad was not some easily dismissible “coincidence” but an act of consensual homicide; moreover, I believe their actions were not a means to a determinate end but a means to a new and, once again, unified beginning. What I’ve deduced, which has a way of hiding in between the lines, suggests a single stream of consciousness once managed to—somehow, within the midst of its most recent transmigration— geminate into the parallel existences of two biologically different persons. Mekonan and Ustad, I’m sure, came to this very realization as they gave their identical statements before the court—eyes staring into an uncanny mirror of the other’s and reflecting the identical identities within.

Frass // 41

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Perhaps, through death, they could find some peace in the void of existence or yet another rebirth—this time, as an undivided entity. Since bearing witness to their fates, I often wonder if my own person—my dreams and my ideas—are anything but recyclable components of an infinite shared memory. If so, is the act of claiming ownership audacious, fraudulent, and cruel? The answer, I’m sure, is most ambiguous.1

1. Please note that the content you’ve just read is in violation of an existing intellectual property right. Upon the date of publication, the author of this work, Elytron Frass, was issued a subpoena by the representatives of Dr. Steven Ianson, as Mr. Frass’ convoluted ramblings blatantly infringe upon specific copyrighted excerpts found within Dr. Ianson’s scholarly text, Two Cases in Support of Reincarnation (Whereabouts Press, 1992). 42 // Frass

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GOLDILOCKSâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;MUSEUM VIEWERS David Sheskin

Sheskin // 43

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SYNCHRONICITY David Sheskin

44 // Sheskin

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ESSAY TRANSPARENT ALMOST TO midnIGHT Robert Vivian

And so looking glass, looking through, essay the prose of almost clairvoyance, essay seeing what canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be said or spoken, essay seeing that the pumpkin seed and mountain are one, essay glowing like a low wattage GE superhero, essay learning light in his bones down to marrow knowledge and the tunneling of rays, essay in a swarm from the first word to the last and essay as abandoned still as the wind-scrape of a child on a street corner in Detroit, essay taking the light and giving it back again in one utterance then another, then another and one sentence for all in the clause of a heartbreaking mercy, essay clear as gin or a trout stream up north in the woods, essay clear running water and the trembling of water that knows no equal for clarity of life, clarity of loveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and essay running water now almost to midnight, essay not hiding anything in obscure allusions or references, essay no learned doctor but naked savage, naked and clean-limbed beast leaping over a fire, essay quoting no one except the vapors of the dead that hang over the wetlands at dawn, essay mistyeyed and clothing the young deer with half-light and grayness, essay doing his noble work of simple declarative what-not, essay in love with all infinitives especially to be, to be, essay a Romeo with a rose in mouth, essay on one knee asking a sycamore to marry him in budstoked union, essay fish-haunted and the flashing of scales before the fish goes out, goes down, vanishes in the whip finish of a boil, essay smooth as glass and see through again, essay wanting to be simple and pure and good while knowing his desires are a furnace cranking out sexual heat and contrails but also the fervency of atavistic prayers, essay opaque, worm-holed, dappled like a Petoskey stone when it comes to meaning, essay unable to fathom his own word-driven existence or the dream of rivers teeming in his veins, essay going, going, gone now lighting out for the territory, for the hoof sparks of gleeful fleeing with the bit in his mouth and his wild eyes tearing it up for the warning track and beyond, essay galloping centerfielder once more running down a line drive in the gap, I mean chasing the fucker down, the pill, the seed, catching it at full run at the end of his Vivian // 45

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outstretched glove while the fans in the bleachers lose their voices, cheering on his reckless abandon and giving up his word-strewn body and the cheetah in his legs as they roar and cheer because he got the jump of a lifetime, a universe, one gleaming star with a singer belting out his song at the top of that cold shining world for now, for always, for forever.

46 // VIvian

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MEN DRESSED AS TOADS Melanie Strouse Emetrio saw Gonzalo in the distance in his suit with his red and white polka-dot bow tie. Gonzalo saw Emetrio standing stout in the courtyard in his denim overalls. Emetrio clasped the fingers of his cracking, callused hands. Gonzalo, the councilman, walked briskly across the courtyard to Emetrio, a construction worker (or part time painter, [Gonzalo paints with oils at night]). Emetrio tried not to look at the wall behind him. A mural. Gonzalo says nothing. Turns. Blinks—once, twice—frowns. Emetrio quivers. Gonzalo nods and leaves the courtyard. Emetrio turns, cocks his head at his mural, and lets out a loud, croaking laugh towards Gonzalo, who frowns, realizing he is late for his next meeting.

On the wall is a mural, of two toads dressed as men— or, two men dressed as toads. Strouse // 47

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MY LIFE: THE MOVIE Mark Brazaitis In the movie of my life, I will play myself. I will also play all the other roles, except for my love interests, because in the scenes of my teenage years this would be too painfully autobiographical. My father will be easy. I have his anger down. My mother? The laugh; the ability to become animated after midnight from nothing more stimulating than an idea or a joke; the gray hair. In a pivotal scene, my sister, in imitation of a DJ, will count down my meanest moments. Remarkably, I, as she, will still love me. It will be easy to play my enemies, as the worst of them have been working inside my head, little men who have never learned to keep the wheels of happiness whirling but are all too adept at maintaining the great factories of self-blame and regret. In the climactic scene, I will have the chance to eliminate them, but the cleverest, the handsomest, the gentlest will look at me with his seductive, mournful eyes and plead, â&#x20AC;&#x153;But I am your art.â&#x20AC;? I will turn my back and brace for his bullet.

48 // Brazaitis

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HURT PLAY Christopher Moylan Hurt play emerged in the club scene, initially as a smack to the face timed to coincide with the quick, eye-watering finish on a line of coke, just as the head is in full pivot into that happy place of laughter and ‘oh yes.’ It’s said that someone first did this as a joke, and someone else did it to return the favor, and that spawned a daisy chain of slaps, tears, slaps, laughter, tears, slaps from one bathroom stall to another. That was the story and some version of it was repeated, like that succession of slaps and tears and laughter, from one end of New York to another, from one coast to another, sometimes with small embellishments, sometimes with wild exaggerations. From rumor to story to fact: the evolution of these things is hard to predict and harder to control. In this case, control was very much beside the point. When the word got out and spread, when the rocking noise of bodies slamming against the bathroom stalls got out, everyone wanted some, and not only in bathroom stalls but at parties and gettogethers, in motel rooms where no one would ever tell and beach house shares where everyone was into everyone else’s business. Hit, slap: Hurt play. People wanted in on the secret. And once in on it they wanted to share. They couldn’t wait to spread the fun around; that was the punchline. From a marketing perspective, coke was the extraneous element in what was going on in those stalls and motel rooms. If people wanted to hurt each other they should pay for the pain, not the coke. That required an inducement, a novelty. Remove the cocaine and replace it with a new kind of rush, a neural undertone to the ambient insults to the brain and epidermis inflicted by alcohol, pills, lines, and high decibel body contact on any given evening in any given city in America. The marketing coup was to brand pain as a déclassé additive, a naughty something extra, like fishnet stockings or wife-beater t-shirts or bad makeup to those who would never be caught dead Moylan // 49

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wearing such things except as accessories to the ever evolving game of urban young professional irony. What is more vulgar and perverse than a dose of hot, knee trembling pain delivered from an aerosol can or a spice candy in the bathroom of a downtown restaurant. Burst from the stall and stagger around, gasping and beading up with tears and sweat and see what other customers make of that. And it needn’t be merely a slap or pinch; there was an immediate push for new variants, new pain ingredients and formulas. Add fruit flavors to tobacco and electronic cigarettes become as compulsive and delicious as candy. Add spice and color to pain and it becomes as hot and decadent as a single malt in a stripper club. The new aerosols and pain ingestibles made it a simple matter to deliver ‘exotic blends’ and new sensations: pain spray with a stroppy attack and a gasp inducing peppery finish; pain suckers with names like pinprick, prod, or throat burn; ‘new romantic’ appliques — Heartbreak, Ambush, Swoon and Burn-for-love. One line targeted middle-aged men and featured an array of health benefits clinically demonstrated in the Institute of Pain Research: increased stamina, energy, and vigor and improved memory and focus. Another line appealed to older women, stressing benefits to complexion, tone, regularity, and mood. Every brand offered convenience and simplicity, with the not-so-hidden contrast to pleasure with its annoying subtlety and mystery, its diminishing returns and demands for variety and originality. Pleasure was so difficult, pain so easy. Pleasure made you weak and indulgent, pain made you strong. Within a few years pain, moved out of the clubs and into bedrooms and private bathrooms, commuter trains and cafeterias. It became available in vending machines and newsstands, pharmacies and groceries. Coffee wasn’t the same without the burn on the roof of the mouth, the iron aftertaste of pooling blood that wasn’t pooling blood; it was just a drug. Chewing gum plumped the lips with bruise marks and raised blisters on the tongue, giving devotees that prisoner of war feeling that got them through a boring day. Lovers dabbed lotion here and there, turning their evenings into a delirium of soft caresses and face twisting neural sun flares. Love was never the same. I should know. I was there at the beginning, the very beginning, and I was there at the crucial moment when Hurt made its hostile takeover bid for love. I met her at a Spray Shot Hookup, a singles party featuring drinks spiked with chemicals designed to deliver an eye-watering 50 // Moylan

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neural jab whenever erotic interest crossed a certain threshold of intensity. The neural spikes jabbed like a sewing machine needle when Cynthia walked into the bar. She was slight with pale skin and black eyes so candid and world-weary her glance could snuff out candles. She certainly looked out of place in a room full of older women with tall hair, bad teeth, and short attention spans, the sort of women who smoke during sex and finish when they reach the filter. They were ex-productives, déclassé and bored beyond redemption, years of no work and no hope having robbed them first of their husbands then of their despair. No doubt their husbands, even more jacked up on pain stims, were trolling bars like this elsewhere in the city. Circles of the lonely and the discarded moved round and round the New York bar scene, wheels within rusted wheels. Cynthia was too young, too pretty, too cool for bar life, and yet there she was. I couldn’t understand what she was doing at this après-divorce party in a drab industrial area of Queens. When I caught her eye it was clear she couldn’t understand the same of me. She took the initiative and walked over. It was like watching a new form of dance unveil step by step. It was like something in a movie: the best part, the part that wasn’t even there, but you remember it anyway, step by step.

“Are you feeling anything?” she asked.

“Like I’ve been punched in the gut,” I said. “This drug makes standing up seem like an Olympic event.” “Why don’t we go to the restroom and see if we can get you to your knees.” What happened next would have been illegal a year before, not just for what we did but for the interest taken by the men and women who crowded our stall. Cyn, as she preferred to be called, was deft in the art of playing pleasure against pure anguish, one blending into the other until I begged her to stop. She stopped, pulling her hands back in mock surrender. I sagged, perspiring and exhausted, to the floor and at once the crowd dispersed, as if avoiding a cold rain shower. “You were very convincing,” Cyn said, when we were alone. She stooped and pulled me up from the urine stench by the toilet. Moylan // 51

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“In what way?”

“It was like you had never done this before,” she said. “If I had my eyes closed, I would have sworn you were a kid doing this for the first time.”

“Maybe you have that effect on me,” I said.

“I’m not complaining,” she said. “In fact it’s kind of sexy. You have me curious.” She was curious enough to give me her number and to see me a second time, and a third. We met in public places — Central Park, a waterside park downtown — and even with the benefit of mild pharmaceuticals we achieved that rare addled fusion, something between embracing on a bed of nails and a bower of bliss, that makes all the false starts and decadent blackouts in the Hurt world seem worthwhile. Her one requirement in these encounters suited me perfectly: that I play a role. In the park, I was a park ranger hitting on her right in the middle of the reservoir jogging path. By the water, I was a young lawyer—a yuppie as they used to be called—on my way home after a long day to meet my wife when I spied Cyn alone by the water… I have a talent for improvisation, among other things, although the darker edges of fantasy held no appeal, however persuasively Cynthia whispered in my ear. But the drugs provided the necessary edge. They never fail. Apart from the physical sensations she caused me, she had a way about her—pensive and ironic, as if she were observing her own actions from a bemused distance—that drew me to her from the first. I suggested that we meet for dinner. It was such a conventional idea, so pre-Hurt, that I was afraid she would dismiss it and me without a second thought. But, no, she thought it was a lovely idea. She even used the word lovely. We met at restaurant near the river in Greenwich Village, a place known for comfort food, good beer and a long tradition of poetry readings. Signed photographs of literary figures who read there over the decades lined the walls. The waitress called us honey. Some of the customers actually wore plaid shirts. We could almost believe that we were back in the Beat days except for the occasional scream outside, and the sounds of bodies crashing into the sidewalk chairs. 52 // Moylan

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“Who are you?” asked Cyn, running her finger over the rim of her glass. “Aside from your name and number, I don’t know anything about you.” “I’m just someone you met in a bar,” I said, toying with my beer. The menu had a long description of this beer, with words like auburn, floral, spirited, like someone had made a brew of Cynthia’s hair. I wasn’t used to ingesting something that didn’t try to ingest me first.

“What were you doing there?”

“I could ask the same of you.” Her eyes took on a weird shade of black sometimes, maybe because of all the Hurt stims she took, darkness cutting right through without the least friction but leaving an ache behind all the same. This was one of those times. “All right then, I’ll start. I was there with a friend from work. She was an office manager at the arts consulting group I’m part of, kind of an older sister and, anyway, she’d been divorced for a while, and laid off, of course, and she was trying to put her life back together…” “By dating.” I didn’t have to spell out the cynical trend of my thinking; what else was a woman in her position to do? The chances of an ex-productive landing another job in her lifetime were about as great as the chances of getting an insurance policy on a seaside home. Barring some great stroke of luck, you were just going to watch it all fall to ruin.

“Dating. So I came along to give her moral support.”

“Some moral support! Did you tell her what happened between the two of us?” “Some things, not everything. You haven’t answered my question.”

“I was doing research.”

The laughter around us was getting louder. The flannel shirt guys were holding the edge of their tables and staring at each other dead on while they talked. Even the folk music coming out of the speakers had a satanic rasp. That’s the way it was in those days. The lightning was about to strike and we were trying to come to terms Moylan // 53

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with the sudden clarity in the air. “At a singles bar? What kind of research was that?” she asked, her look teasing and provocative, daring me to come up with a bigger lie. “I work for a pharmaceutical company. A Hurt company. We’re sent out in the field to see how the products are received, how they’re being used, what people say in an informal context.”

“You were spying on people?”

“Something of a cross between espionage and simple voyeurism. There’s only so much you can learn by hooking people up to a brain scan. Sometimes the best way to learn how people tick is by going out and listening to them…” “Yes, I’m learning lots by listening to you right now…” She ordered another pink drink. The wind coming off the river was lashing grit and leaves against the window. It was only a matter of time before the rain slapped against the asphalt and overwhelmed the storm drains. The prudent thing to do would have been to leave, just as the prudent thing for the bar to do would have been to drop the emergency grate. We were past that, everyone in the restaurant, everyone in New York was past any of that. I ordered another beer and described other research forays in clubs and bars. I could tell that she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either. What I told her was sort of a lie, kind of an exaggeration; between an exaggeration and a good story, what’s the difference? She played along, asking me about the latest Hurt drugs and pain research. “Everything has changed since the introduction of Hurt science,” I said. “Human possibilities have expanded tremendously. There’s so much one can accomplish with a good jolt; concentration is better, muscles stretch so much farther and hurt so much more efficiently, appetite is healthier, desire much fiercer with a touch of pain. Everything is just… better.” “It works for me.” She smiled at me over the rim of her Cosmo, her eyes bright with the absurdity of my pretense. “People are absorbing more Hurt all the time. Everywhere you look now it’s Hurt, Hurt, Hurt… So do the benefits follow the rate of exposure: more pain, more gain?” 54 // Moylan

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“For the stockholders, yes. For everyone using this stuff, there are limits. There must be limits. The increments need to be studied and controlled, as with anything else,” I said, realizing that I had just about reached the limit of my supply of credible sounding jargon. I couldn’t keep this up much longer. “I’m guessing you’re one of those stockholders,” she said, tossing back the rest of her pink drink. “A minority stockholder, as in the tiniest minority: a stockholder with a conscience.” “It’s disgusting the lengths that some people go to be in on the latest in shudder art and quiver technology, how many jobs are opening up for pain scholars and curators, pain archivists. The endowments for the University of Exquisite Pain and The Pain Institute are enough to fund the budgets of several third world countries.” “Do you know what I love about you?” she asked suddenly. “Your eyes are so sad, especially when you talk about these things. Not tired, overworked; everyone in New York is tired… Sad.” The lights dimmed, then died. The entire city was dark as far as I could see. The rain and wind kept everyone inside, in the pitch dark, with no cell or internet service, no way to find out how or why this was happening. Here and there a match flickered, revealing a smile or grimace as the pain stims combined with the anxiety of the moment. I reached for Cynthia’s hand across the table, but before I could draw her to my side she cried out in pain and surprise. Others shrieked in anger and fear. Chairs overturned. There was a general shoving and pushing. Cynthia lashed out at the man behind her who was grabbing her blouse. His arm drew back over his head. I caught him with a jab on the neck just below his jaw. He staggered back, more surprised than hurt, and Cyn and I shoved past him towards the door. Luckily, we hesitated before stepping outside. A group of men with sidearms were running down Spring Street in the general direction of the restaurant. It was like the fourth of July out there, with sounds of explosions and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire around the city, sirens stretching down the avenues and the spooky sweep of police helicopter spotlights tracking overhead. We could take our chances in the mayhem or we could stay inside and fight our way to a corner, maybe hide behind an overturned table. Cyn’s body was shivering against my arm. Moylan // 55

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“I love this,” she said, leaning close and speaking softly into my ear. “I love every minute of it.” Not long after the lights came on around the city. When we turned to go back inside the restaurant a phalanx of waitresses and waiters was standing behind us, shotguns and handguns at the ready. I don’t know what they were planning to do. Perhaps if we made a move towards the street they would have shot us. Perhaps they would have provided cover for us until we ran out of sight. As you know, there were many nights like this over the coming months and not every crisis ended as peacefully or quickly. Cyn and I moved in together, partly for mutual security, partly because we were in love, or in whatever passes for love in a time of emergency. We could hardly plan for the future; the future was falling in massive chunks from the polar ice caps and slipping underwater along the coasts. My work had dried up and my savings were dwindling; Cynthia’s company was following the market trends into Dark Arts and Freak. I couldn’t follow her down those psych holes, but I couldn’t blame for her taking that direction; most everyone else was. We had our apartment, dinners together and sometimes with a few friends, old movies on the box. We had our small pleasures. We had Pain. Sometimes she asked me to make the Sad Face. I have to admit doing so came easily. She’d smile and give me a kiss, sometimes she would laugh. There came a time when she asked me why I made that face so often. She would not accept an evasive answer or a joke; she had to know. “Maybe it was the night of the blackout, maybe earlier,” I answered, “I realized that your taste for Hurt has no limit. You don’t just enjoy the excitement or the buzz; you want more and more intensity, even if it kills you—no, not even if, because it can eventually kill you…” “Of course that’s what I want,” she said, stroking my hand absentmindedly and looking at me as if seeing me for the first time. “That’s what everyone wants from Hurt. To flame out. The world is dying, sweetheart. The end is getting uglier and uglier. I don’t want to end up raped and bleeding to death in a riot, or dying of some hideous cancer that no hospital has the bed open to treat. Better that my heart give out on stims…” 56 // Moylan

“It’s all a fake,” I said. “Stims, stimulants, Pain, Hurt

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Play… All the rituals and games, the Hurt cool. It’s all manipulated, corporate nonsense.” “I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying,” Cyn said. It was her turn now to look sad. We were sitting in our dining room, or what passed for a dining room in the tiny space of our apartment, dishes piled in the center of the table and juice glasses holding the last sips of a cheap bottle of wine. “Corporate manipulation? So what? Fake, real? If a piece of chewing gum gives me a burning sensation on the roof of my mouth, who cares whether the ingredients are natural or artificial?” “We were paid,” I said, saying what I had sworn never to say, had been paid generously to forget. “Those incidents of Hurt Play in the men’s rooms of downtown clubs, all those were staged. It was just a gimmick to draw larger crowds. I was one of the actors. We never hurt each other and we were never on drugs. It was an act, a little play, Hurt Play. Most everything I’ve told you about myself—my work, my education, my past—has been lies. The company made me sign a piece of paper giving them proprietary rights over all that. I was never a big pharma rep or research assistant. I didn’t receive a degree from Princeton or do graduate work at B.U. I never even finished college.”

“So that research you talked about was a lie?” Cyn asked.

“It was at the time. The only research involved was market research. Hurt Play: designed to sell you up and out.” Booming sounds echoed from the direction of downtown. They might have been explosions, or glaciers calving in the harbor, maybe another building collapse. They might have been anything, except anything good. The sun was going down, and Cynthia’s face was framed in the livid colors of dusk, smudged and darkened by plumes of dark smoke over downtown. She looked tired yet vaguely pleased. “You have that sad look again,” said Cynthia. “You think you’ve disappointed me, that I will think less of you.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

Downtown bloomed with orange, toxic light. The aftershock of the explosion thumped against the window like the back of an Moylan // 57

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enormous hand. This was going to be a long night, a bad night. “You know how much I love that sad face,” she said. “There’s no Hurt like that, nothing I want more while the bombs fall. So does that make me a monster? Tell me, spare nothing and I’ll love you to death.”

58 // Moylan

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A IS FOR APPLE M K Sukach Also for avarice and asshole, nouns that might have proved handy on the playground, or not, I don’t think anyone has ever said, oh, ambulance of my eye, or he’s got a pronounced Adam’s algorithm, besides, that’s too hard to picture in a coloring book. A is for acerbic or acetylene, or worse, A is for art and abracadabra where animals are blue, the sky purple. Sure, I’m still remedial... “developmentally arrested.” A is for aphasic. And I still write with a dictionary and cheat through (a) thesaurus because A is for ambiguous and allegorous. A is a grade and grade A is aleatory. With any luck no one will mark you a “B” and remand you to an institution with all the other crack ups. Sometimes A is an H with its hands raised or spread out on the pavement like the notorious X. A for fully self-actualized, aardvark, and abacus. A for orchards of Red Delicious, arrow, adventure, and ambidextrous. A for the first finger the doctor uses to point out what’s wrong with you.

Sukach // 59

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WHAT I LIKE AND DON’T LIKE ABOUT JOGGING in the summer IN THE SOUTH Ben Sloan After disrobing a squirrel in the street, two turkey vultures snatch slimy rodent chunks out of each other’s hooked beaks and peer out of the corners of their ochre eyes at the adrenaline-powered corpse running past. They sense my organs are shutting down one by one and know my head is empty, like the road-flattened mouse I jump over, his (or her?) guts stacked in a neatly folded pile one inch from the still-open mouth. Meanwhile, on a fence post a mockingbird turns his head for a quick look and considers flying away, but instead sends up a full-throated laugh at the ostrich’s flapping, flightless music. Ok I’ve had enough. I give up. Lying on my back now, I see boldface Garamond V’s circling in the sky. All I know is it feels great to be covered in slime.

60 // Sloan

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REQUIEM Erin Gray Raw tiny hands twist and turn the rustic dials of the broken radio. Nimble fingers rewind frayed copper cables to disfigured coils and diligently caress mercury-laden vacuum tubes. The boy fidgets in silence, the purpled knobs of his spine propped against the blistered ceramic of the bathtub. Blank eyes fixed in malignant awe at the methodic movements which chapped fingers replicate in the conservation of violence. And maybe he thinks he could sail away from this place, his tub wading against those woe-heavy waves. If only his palms could mend those bitter cables. Then, through crackled static his voice would call out. “Hello? Is anyone out there?” …

Gray // 61

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ECLIPSED Dianne Borsenik —Thursday, October 23, 2014

missed the eclipse it slipped a disc whisperkissed the sky and disappeared a solar whisker will o’ the wisp

62 // Borsenik

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“WAS THAT YOUR ARSE STICKING OUT ON THE CORNER OF RADCLIFFE AND MACONIE?” Simon Williams After Martin Figura

At the corner of Radcliffe and Maconie, where in winter, steam vents from the heating systems, there was an arse projecting from an open manhole. It hadn’t been there the previous night, according to a street seller. Perhaps it was a drunk, who wandered out from Joey’s, took a turn at the corner, slipped, got wedged. That wouldn’t explain where the cover had gone, how anyone could fall in hands and feet first, why the arse was uncovered. A police-tape cordon stopped folk barging into it, the thousands on their way to work, but there was argument over jurisdiction, which department should be charged with its removal, whether it was a crime scene. By mid-morning, the arse was looking cold, a definite blue tinge to its pink cheeks. Surprising nobody seemed curious of its provenance, or even keen to check its gender; a simple matter for a blue-gloved hand, or one of those robots. At lunch, forensics and the fire service stood, debating techniques of extraction. Onlookers stood five deep. Upstate news crews, leading on ‘The Broadwalk Butt’, asked if it might be terrorism. An expert answered, “No, it’s an arse.” When we came by again that evening, it was gone. Williams // 63

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No tape, no microphones or cameras, the manhole cover back; nothing to suggest an arse. Commuters walked by and over the manhole, heading for their sweet homes, their remotes.

64 // Williams

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QUOTE REFERENCE NUMBER (VE/S/09/99) JoeAnn Hart The 747 made a stomach-sinking lurch, jostling the First Class passengers from their naps. “Turbulence, eh?” said the man sitting next to Madeline in the aisle seat. His bare arm, pink as pork, rested between them. Madeline looked out the window. “We’re in the clouds,” she said. “I can’t see a thing.” “Turbulence is invisible,” said the woman behind her, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.” The man stretched up and pressed the call button, “I need a drink.” “And a snack,” said a man across the aisle who filled his seat and then some.

The dozen passengers yawned and shook themselves awake.

“I’ve never been in First Class before,” said Madeline, hugging her torso. “I feel like I’m floating on air.” “Is it your first time to the Turks and Caicos, dear?” asked the woman behind her. “Yes!” Madeline twisted around, practically kneeling on her seat. “I have an interview for my dream job, checking out five-star resorts around the world for the travel industry. It seemed too good to be true—almost like a scam—especially when I found out I had to wire half my airfare to the company. But the man I talked to said that was only so they’d know I was serious, and they’ll refund it at the interview.” All of First Class nodded and smiled. “I was so relieved when I got to the airport and the ticket was there, and here I am!” She looked around in amazement. Hart // 65

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A woman up front turned to them. “You’ve got to spend a little to get a lot,” she said, fondling the chains of gold around her neck. “I increased the limit on my credit card to buy into a stealth shopper network, and it was worth every penny! They pay for everything: clothes, restaurants, cars, you name it. My deposit was reimbursed after my first online review, just like they said.” She looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “I’m ‘working’ as we speak, checking out this airline.” “I’d give a D for service,” said the man next to Madeline, reaching up to press the call button again. “When we got on board, they stuffed us with so much food and drink we all conked out. Now they’ve disappeared.” “Point taken,” the Stealth Shopper said as she opened her laptop. “You’ve got to take chances to make it big in this world,” said the man across the aisle. “Amen to that,” his wife said, leaning across him to talk to Madeline. “Why, we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t taken a chance on a Nigerian Prince.” “Made a ton of dough fronting Prince Okon the money to get him out of his country,” said her husband. “Once he got here and was able to access his accounts, he paid us back a millionfold.” His wife leaned back in her seat and smiled. “Okon even wanted to give Frank here one of his daughters as a second wife but I put the kibosh on that. I’m the only princess in this family!”

Everyone in First Class chortled.

An older woman in the back row, no bigger than a stork, cleared her throat. “I didn’t even take a chance! That I know of at least. Out of the blue, I got a million-dollar grant from the United Nations for alleviating poverty. The email said all I had to do was send my bank account information to Western Union so they could start depositing the money. I get $7600 a day!” “And you don’t have to do anything?” Madeline asked. “Like help alleviate poverty?” 66 // Hart

The woman shrugged. “They didn’t really say. I thought I’d

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check out the islands. I figure if I spend a lot of money there it’ll work its way into the hands of the poor.” She looked at her own hands, admiring rings the size of golden walnuts. “Where the hell is that attendant?” asked the man next to Madeline. He stood up and banged on the door to the cockpit. When there was no answer, the woman in the back row pulled back the privacy curtain to see if the attendant was hiding in Economy, but it was a blank wall.

“Odd,” she said.

The Nigerian Prince woman peered out the window and squinted. “Funny,” she said, “there doesn’t seem to be a cockpit.”

“Or wings,” said her husband. “Is this a new type of plane?”

“How are we staying in the air?” the woman in the front row asked, clutching her necklaces in one fist. They went silent. Madeline wondered why there was no mechanical droning from the engines. Had there ever been? The Stealth Shopper started clicking wildly on her laptop, and all of First Class stood to gather near. “Found it,” she said. “Outwit death! Instant longevity with Secrets of the Ancients. Use this one-time code today.” She looked up into the somber faces of her fellow travelers. “Have your credit cards ready.”

Hart // 67

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INCLINATIONS Gregory Goodrich Photographs like a French guillotine— Vive la Révolution! Quiero tu cariño como tú no entiendas— sucked in by every word falling from your sweetened tongue. my thoughts reverberate in different languages igniting your incandescence, som en löpeld när du korsar mitt sinne. Your unwavering stature, pensive and yet still light as fresh snow. You’d have to be an emotional shipwreck to succumb entrapment to my glacial gregariousness— to make your way into my hands lined with Himalayan heartache. Even in hindsight: you are still celestial in my apparitions. We sing sin, our bodies connect like constellations, and finally our degrees match our inclinations.

68 // Goodrich

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REJECTION WIKI: AN AMALGAM Tier 1A

Dawn Davies

Re: Submission The status of this submission has changed. You can go here to view the submission: http://thehornjournal.submittable.com/user/submissions/1233040666

Clicked on link: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Declinedâ&#x20AC;? Tier 1B Dear [insert writer name], We are sorry to report that the work you submitted has not been selected for publication. Yours truly, The Editors

Bionic Jigsaw Magazine:

Where Science and Art Collide 3/17/2015 9:47 am Dear Writer, Thank you for submitting your poetry/prose to us. Our staff is committed to giving a voice to both established and emerging writers, and as such, please be patient with our editorial process. We want to give your piece the personal attention it deserves. We look forward to considering your work for publication in Whelping Man. Davies // 69

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Sincerely, The Editors

Whelping Man Journal of the Arts www.whelpingman.blogspot.com Est. 2014 3/17/2015 4:33 pm Dear Yon, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Yon J. Yonson,â&#x20AC;? Thank you for submitting your work toWhelping Man. Our editors have given your piece very careful consideration and, unfortunately, we are not able to accept it for publication at this time. Sincerely, The Editors

Whelping Man Journal of the Arts www.whelpingman.blogspot.com Est. 2014 Tier 1C Dear Ms. Yonson, We have been overjoyed to read work from so many different writers, many of whom took the time to get to know our literary magazine by purchasing back issues for only $12.95. They can be found at http:// thenoose.biz/backissues. As you might gather, we will not be using your work for this coming issue, though submissions for the regular submission cycle remain at the very economical $7, so feel free to try us again as often as you like. Also, we would like to announce our latest prose contest, which will be judged by our secret celebrity (TBA) who may or may not be Roxanne Gay. Entries are just $20 per piece up to 500 words, $25 per piece up to 1000 words, and $30 per piece up to 2500 words. Enter here: http://www.thenoose.biz/contest. And finally, remember to visit http://thenoose.biz/merch for Noose Magazine merchandise including our very popular handmade paper journal and our zipless hoodie. Almost sold out! Sincerely, 70 // Davies

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The Noose

http://thenoose.biz Tier 1D Yon Yonson 14647 Bakersfield Road Black Water, Wisconsin, 53518

Animal Hands Journal of Arts and Letters Breck Building 414 North Department of English and Classics Antigone College of Liberal Arts Florida, Massachusetts 01247 Dear Mr. Yonson *Thank you for sending Animal Hands Journal of Arts and Letters your manuscript, Lights Out. We appreciate the chance to read it, but unfortunately, it’s not a fit for our literary press. Best of luck in placing it elsewhere. Yours truly, Joan Kaufman A.A., B.A., M.A., M.A., M.F.A. Editor

Animal Hands Journal of Arts and Letters Antigone College of Liberal Arts Florida, Massachusetts

*This is a form letter. This letter is what is known as a “rejection letter.” Tier 2A Dear John, Thank you very much for sharing your chapbook, “Sexual Misconduit” with us. Each work we receive is important, and worthy of the same kind of attention it most likely took to create. We are especially grateful for your patience in waiting thirteen months for Davies // 71

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a response. Even though this particular submission is “not a fit” for us, we are grateful for the chance you’ve given us to both read it and consider it for publication we further invite you to share more of you’re work with us in the not too distant future. When submitting, please remember our strict non-simultaneous submission policy! Sincerely, The Editorial Staff Westeastern University Press Westeastern College Westeastern, PA P.S. Just a bit of feedback from one of our interns-you might want to consider compressing the piece in order to make it a better read. Its a little wordy! Also, you might benefit from a proofread.. Tier 2B Hey Yon, Thank you for submitting your prose piece, “Shots on Goal.” Unfortunately it is not a good fit for us. Our aesthetic is current and hip. Artisanal, if you will. We are looking for experimental pieces that speak to a certain generation, one for whom the establishment, as such, is often eschewed. If your piece doesn’t have an epic beard or drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, chances are we aren’t going to want it. I suggest you get back the drawing board they call Duotrope. (drops mike) Cobalt Jones

Warm Mash Magazine

http://twitter.com/warm_mash http://vine.com/warm_mash http://instagram.com/warm_mash http://snapchat.com/warm_mash Tier 2C Dear Mr. Yonson, Thank you for trusting us with your piece, “Shots on Goal.” Our editors were interested enough in this to bring it to an editorial meeting, but ultimately, we struggled to determine its category. Due 72 // Davies

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to its rather stream-of-consciousness prose, and lack of plot points, we couldn’t establish whether it is indeed a short story or an essay, but no matter. It’s not a good fit for our readers at Red Heron. Our aesthetic is slightly more traditional than what this piece represents. Sincerely, Rob Jackson Managing Editor

Red Heron Literary Journal Tier 2D Dear Mr. Yon Yonson, Sorry to say, but “Ducati” is a no for us. We appreciated the chance to read it, but unfortunately, it’s not right for us. We read several thousand submissions per cycle and end up publishing only few of them, so most of the time...it’s not your fault. Remember, higherranked journals such as ours often have acceptance rates as low as .005 percent. That’s five thousandths of one percent. Your piece almost made it to the table, however, and editorial staff would like to mention that, on the whole, we appreciated the prose, but found ourselves truffle hunting when it came to plot. Was there a plot? Thank you for considering House of Skulls as a potential home for your work. Feel free to try us again with another piece once you have attended a few more workshops. That’s a brand new piece. Not the same piece revised. We don’t want to see that one again. Best, Hieronymus Bosch MFA candidate Fiction Editor

House of Skulls Journal Tier 2E Dear Author, Thank you for trusting us with your valuable creative work, “Angels Davies // 73

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in the Architecture.” We were absolutely delighted to read it. There were many fine elements of prose writing, including, but not limited to: narrative structure, language, plot, and characterization. We have seen lesser stories nominated for Pushcarts, so when we say we loved your work, we really mean it! It’s one of the best pieces we have ever read! Unfortunately, we won’t be publishing it. Best of luck in finding a deserving home with, dare I say it, an editor for whom it is a better fit. Congratulations, though, on writing it! Regretfully, The Editorial Team

Prose & Promise Magazine Tier 3A Re: Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension Literary Contest Dear Contestant, The Fractured Plane Review is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 “Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension” Literary Contest. As you can tell from this form letter, you aren’t one of them. Please visit our blog at http://FracPlane.org for the full press release and better luck next time, though, between the subjective lark that is each judge’s individual, and often histrionic aesthetic, and the fact that most of our submissions are largely skimmed by undergraduate volunteer readers and prostituted for the entry fee, you have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning one of these things. We wish to congratulate all our finalists and contest winners! Tupac Shakur Award for Poetry Judge: Doc Suds First Place: Berry Brightly, “Much Tongue” Runner-Up: Jennifer Wilson, “Sweet Home Sandinista” Finalists: Steve Roggenbuck, Claudia Rankine, Albert Goldbarth Dawn S. Davies Award for Creative Nonfiction Judge: Dawn S. Davies First Place: Viktor Stashewsky, “Taking the Browns to the Super Bowl” Runner-Up: David Antoine, “Well-Hung at the Guggenheim” Finalists: Alex Van Halen, Bill Bruford, Stan Lynch Humbert Humbert Award for Fiction 74 // Davies

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Judge: Ander Monson First Place: Comfort Nichols, “The Hole in the Kitchen Floor” Runner-Up: Jack Kettlesmith, “Balloon” Finalists: Richard Bachman, Robert Gailbraith, Sieur Louis de Conte All contest entrants will receive a subscription to Fractured Plane Review’s Spring 2016 print edition, Issue 109, which will include the 2015 contest winners—a fine consolation, indeed. Thank you for your support of the Fractured Plane Review. With appreciation,

Fractured Plane Review Editors FracPlane.org Tier 3B Dear Yon, It pains me to say this, but after soliciting your work for ALLCAPS JOURNAL, we won’t be accepting it for publication. I know this may come across as an affront, since we asked you for your work, but ultimately, we were disappointed in your submission, “Mollusks Have I Loved.” We have seen some of your other essays and admired them, and are baffled by this piece. Do you consider us to be a lower-tiered journal? Are you sending us work that has previously been refused by multiple journals? Is our review on the The Review Review not quite good enough for you to “waste” your best on us? I’d say try us again, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed. SERIOUSLY, John Butterfink Managing Editor ALLCAPS JOURNAL Tier 3C Dear Don Johnson, I won’t beat around the bush: sadly, we will not be accepting your short story, “Three Sheets to the Wind,” for publication. Here at White, we pride ourselves on prose that speaks to us, narrative that Davies // 75

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moves mountains, and complex, quality language that honors the tradition of The Great Writers. It’s both a vast and a minutely small target, and you haven’t quite hit the mark. If I may, I’d like to suggest the following prescription: Carver, Raymond Cheever, John Faulkner, William Hemingway, Ernest Henry, O. London, Jack McCarthy, Cormac Salinger, J.D. Updike, John Feel free to submit to us again once you have carefully studied all of the above authors. Very truly yours, Jack “Kerouac” Kettlesmith Assistant Fiction Editor

White Magazine Tier 4A Dear Applicant,

Thank you for applying to the PC-SUPR writer’s residency at Sandlot City Writers’ Hub. This is a highly competitive residency and unfortunately, you were not selected for the Fall 2015 program. Since we are committed to balancing the politically incorrect climate by offering a safe artistic haven to underrepresented writers of color, as well as womyn, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual, disenfranchised or otherwise marginalized writers, we wanted to take a few moments to let you know that, no matter how strong your writing sample, “Three Sheets to the Wind” was – and it was strong – your application looked just plain desperate. We know it is difficult to get ahead in the industry. We know MFAs who have taken jobs as crossing guards and night janitors just to pay off their loans. We know how hard it is to claw past teaching adjunct developmental writing classes at lesser technical colleges, but honestly, this one would have been a tough one to pull off with today’s social media records. 76 // Davies

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We’re not into judging, but Yon, we’ve seen your Facebook and your Instagram. We know you are a white male. You are so white your legs are lavender next to your khaki hiking shorts and Green Bay Packers jersey. Your favorite restaurant is Hooters, your favorite snack food is Gogurt and we know you’ve seen Wilco, Bob Schneider and Phish in concert within the last six months. I mean, honestly, your name is Yon Yonson. You work in Wisconsin. Did you think that checking the “other” category in the optional demographic identification section would help hide something? After being force-fed generations of white-male curricula, Sandlot City Writers’ Hub members are committed to the continued climb toward breaking barriers, though frankly, we shouldn’t have to be doing this at this late stage and you know it. Please don’t try this again with us, but best of luck in your writing career, and seriously, check your privilege. Fairly, Zhang Wei Whitehorse Director PC-SUPR Program Sandlot City Writers’ Hub Tier 4B Dear author/artist (circle one), We’d like to be able to thank you for submitting your poem/prose/ visual art (circle one) to us, but we can’t. Your so-called “best work” constituted considerable effort on our part just to slog through the pointless plot/iambic pentameter/figure-ground relationship/ backstory of death (circle one). If we even see your name in our inbox again, we’re going to find out where you live, come to your house and kick your biscuits into your throat. We don’t care what high-ranking MFA program you came from, you are a terrible writer/artist (circle one). Go fuck yourself. Sincerely, The Editors

Slap Happy Quarterly

Davies // 77

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FERMATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LAST THEOREM Stephanie Spector I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;PIERRE DE FERMAT

Robots stretch modular functions into the ether one thousand years after Andrew Wiles solves the inconsequential puzzle.

All of the willows have died. But an enigma will stoke the legend of the phoenix, for a man has sobbed at invisible angles in the lilt of divergent swings. Tears run out of the tomes of Arithmatica, which rumble and glow inside their spines.

New conjectures fire like supernovae, and out of the ashes, red birds sew stars for him.

78 // Spector

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FORWARD Brittany Boza 1. I apologize in advance, ahead of time, so sorry, too, if I rhyme, but it is a matter of importance that I must share. The muse, she is dead, and the muse, she is not there. She was a friend I once had, and once lost, and really there is nothing to be said on the matter. It’s hard to say anything at all when it’s your muse that makes you write. Did I mention that she was dead? Oh, it was tragic. You should have been there. I was there. You were there. There were robes, curtains, trumpets, and —oh, the music! 2. That was not the song I would have used for a funeral; I would not even inflict it upon the poor people patiently piling into the elevator. Nor is it a song for your birthday, if you had one. My computer broke, and yet here we are, with me still typing and you just sitting in the corner, watching. Why? I thought you were dead already, go away before I kill you again. She was laying in the street for attention, but I walked over her because I knew— no, I helped her up like a gentleman. No, it was not my jacket over that puddle. I was the one on the ground. Her heels walked over me without remorse. 3. I heard there are bells when you die. If only the muse was here to tell me if that’s true. Now there’s only empty space and trumpets. I think it’s time to apologize, as it has been a while. Apologies for the while and the wise and the wile. It was neither of our faults, but still the muse is blamed, and only her death is on my hands. Sometimes it’s hard to get laid, sometimes it’s hard to write, but at the same time, it’s all easy. I will tell you now that it is never worth it, not the easy part, not at all, but what comes after. She dies. Boza // 79

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THE WALRUS WHO TOUCHED THE SUN Brett Petersen The Walrus yelped as his finger made contact with the sun. His arm snapped back like a rubber band, and he dipped his burnt paw in the snow. The cold soothed his wound and after a few minutes he forgot he had even been injured. He reached for the sun again, but before the tip of his index claw could graze the corona, a door opened in the middle of the sky. A shriveled man wormed his head through the door and wrapped his arms around the Walrus’ claw. “Just what do you think you are doing, big fellow?” the man chortled. “Don’t you know that stars are too hot for fleshy beings to touch?” grip.

The Walrus grunted and continued to push against the man’s

“Of course you don’t,” the man sighed. “Your little brain can’t process consequential information.” jowl.

The Walrus’ face slackened. A rope of drool hung from his

“Oh, brother,” the man grunted. “To think that Master Virus needs data on all life in the multiverse, including these dim-witted walruses.” The man studied the Walrus once more. A seagull had perched on the Walrus’ shoulder and was pecking at his head. “Uh-huh.” The man scribbled something on a notepad. He left the box ‘noteworthy life forms’ unchecked for planet Wddjskawibbil. He closed the door and was glad to be home amongst the smog and machines of his own dark and chaotic world. The Walrus felt rubber balls bouncing in his head. They tickled his brain and made him hungry. He flopped onto his belly and began to lick the salty snow covering the ice floe he stood on. Some time before, he had been chewed and spat onto the floe by an arctic dbdbl bird who tried to make a meal of him but found his meat tasted 80 // Petersen

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like rubber and burnt carapace. The Walrus’ diet of scrab goo and loblin eggs may have contributed to his unappetizing flavor. The scrab and loblin populations were dwindling due to tribes of tripeds fishing in the area, but the salty ice satisfied the primal tug of the Walrus’ hunger for the moment. For most creatures, hunger made time grind to a halt. Until they filled their bellies, every thought would jump to food. But the walruses of planet Wddjskawibbil were different. For them, time sped up the hungrier they got. So it came as no surprise that without a hunting/gathering instinct, most of the Wddjskawibbilian walruses quickly died out. How and why evolution birthed such an inadequate animal baffles scientists to this day. The Walrus continued to lick. The salt reminded him of the snow potatoes his mother used to make for dinner. In his mind, everything was okay. Everything had always been and would always be okay. Moments cycled and crashed into each other. One afternoon, one day, one-hundred-and-fifteen cycles passed. The Walrus died. He did not feel it happen. It never occurred to him that after a certain point, he could no longer taste the salt. His body froze. His carcass became an ice mummy in which woolly snow-bugs spun cocoons. Ten million generations of snow bugs came and went. The Pole became a sea, went back to an ice cap and became a sea again. Incalculable numbers of life forms lived, died, evolved and went extinct. Then one day, the sun shrank to the size of a small coin. Wddjskawibbil’s atmosphere, oceans, mountains, civilizations, every animal and plant that had ever lived, died, decayed, and became fossilized in the planet’s crust, including the seagulls, dbldbl birds, scrabs, loblins, tripeds, woolly snow-bugs, the Walrus, his mother, and every one of his ancestors were slurped up by the emaciated sun as it became a black hole.

Petersen // 81

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THE CANNIBAL HALL OF FAME Ann Epstein You have often asked, child, how you came to live with me, but not until the appurtenances at the ends of your arms reached full size did I deem you ready. The time has now come. In the days when the Colossal Human Carnivores (or ChuCs) roamed the earth, meat blanketed the planet like pigeon droppings on an elevated train platform. That was before dung-fever killed off the cattle and swine. When the virus mutated, it also destroyed all the fish and fowl. Only those who had been vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella survived. So the CHuCs, their stomachs a-gurgle with protease and other meat-digesting enzymes, were forced to eat one another. The squeamish among them either died of iron-deficiency anemia or were, themselves, eaten. Those with the strongest will to survive not only forced themselves to swallow hapless citizens but quickly discovered they liked the taste of their neighbors. It was soon revealed that, in addition to providing sustenance, dining on one’s fellow CHuC conferred onto the eater valuable attributes of the eatee. Unlike primitive tribes of old, however, who prized the brain for its magical properties, CHuCs found that the greatest powers were transferred through the eating of hands. Dexterity and strength were the skills most needed to survive in those harsh times. Thus, hands became a great delicacy. The less meat to be found on the bony appurtenances, the rarer and more precious the specimen. Celebrities and politicians hosted Gnawing Soirees in which the elite consumed cheek crudités and braised buttocks appetizers before proceeding to the main course of fingers flambé and palms à la pesto. As prone to conspicuous consumption as their forebears, who displayed the empty carcasses of vintage wines they’d imbibed, the CHuCs saved and mounted the skeletal remains of the most prized hands that graced their tables. When their private collections outgrew the space in their homes, philanthropic CHuCs donated their 82 // Epstein

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digital remains to museums. It wasn’t long before the Handicrafters League and the Manual Laborers Association came up with the idea of establishing an institution to celebrate the noted and notorious individuals eaten by their fellow CHuCs. Thus was born the Cannibal Hall of Fame. Designed by I. M. Palm, the edifice recapitulated a human body with its arms raised above its head. The lowest floor held the skeletal remains of feet, middle levels progressed through legs, torsos, and skulls, and the top floor was where visitors came to venerate the great eaten in the Sanctuary of Honored Hands. Their skeletons were preserved in polyurethane and mounted on butcher block, stained and striated to resemble sinew. Beneath each hand was a plaque with the honoree’s name and prowess, and the resulting accomplishments of the ChuC who’d had the honor of consuming it. For example, there was George Wristington, a ne’er-dowell with an uncanny ability to chop down fruit trees with a single swing of his hand axe. He was eaten by Ringo Robespierre, who subsequently gained fame for exterminating the last of the nagging vegetarians. Ringo invented the wrist guillotine that sliced off their hands neater than a Vegamatic. Unable to cultivate new crops, the Lettuce Eaters died off when their hoard of arugula ran out. Another crowd pleaser was Pinky Child, whose recipe for blanched balls de boeuf inspired countless culinary copies before dung fever decimated the domestic meat supply. She was eaten by Fannie Finger, who invented horehand candy, created her signature dish thumbs thermidor, and launched the fast food franchise Fingernails Fricassee. But the most beloved hand belonged to Joyce Knuckle Oates. While others were revered for their athleticism or marketplace savvy, Knuckles, as she was affectionately called, was famous for writing fiction in longhand on yellow legal pads. Knuckles was gobbled up by Alice Mitteno, who produced short stories esteemed for their haunting narrative and lyrical powers. You, my child, are the last living direct descendant of Mitteno and sole heir to her literary gifts. Before your mother, Mitteno’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, was eaten, she entrusted you to my care. There, there, dear. Don’t be scared. Come, sit in my lap. Let me hold your hand. Epstein // 83

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IF I HAVE TO CHOOSE S.J. Dunning I am a house of china from Rajasthan or farther. I am a Smash Shack. I am shelves, toppling—galactic teacups (hand-painted). What a spectacle, the beast of burden is: horns, laboring breath—all that fine dust it makes, dancing in me. Tell me I’m not alone, shopkeeper. Tell me I’m not the only one who chooses the thunder of huge bones running through an open door. Tell me someone will buy what’s broken. Tell me you’ll make a mosaic if they don’t— that you’ll hang it up in a cathedral with the rest of my dead darlings.

84 // Dunning

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EXPEDITION Payton Cianfarano your heart hitchhikes out of your body, goes north, straight to greenland. there it will plant itself among the ibex and long horn goats. burying itself in danish soil, your heart extends aortas and ventricles rooting and planting weaving itself an intricate home in a place you would never think to look twice. unraveling into sheets of snow, your heart realizes this climate is somehow warmer than your body. elk make for more compelling company and are by far less suffocating. you replace your bones with branches, trade out blood for salt water. arteries become oxen and cuticles become banks of ice. you turn yourself into a place youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been. let birds build nests in your makeshift bones. and dive into your own sea of salt water blood.

Cianfarano // 85

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RED Harmony Murray It drips down the walls. It puddles on the floor. The red is everywhere. This seventeen-year-old cannot be trusted with a knife. Her mother is screaming. Her father is shaking his head. Disappointed. The red glares in vivid contrast against the white cupboards. “It was an accident, I didn’t mean to,” she said. Her words dripped with regret much like the red now falling off her hands onto the floor. She had to think to herself. Was it worth it? Should she have anticipated this? All for a snack. Pomegranate. Should have known.

86 // Murray

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THE NIGHT YOUR EYES MELTED in my mouth, NOT IN MY HAND; OR HOW I GAVE AWAY MY VIRGINITY Natalie Adams Name: Westin From: California Classification: triple-threat (surfer, skater, stoner) Daydream level: three months Infatuation: bleeding into obsession Residence: third floor, West Holden Hall Date: between Thanksgiving and Christmas Age: 18 Text messages: “hey can i ask you something ? not gunna lie, it’s a little spicy …” “i tried to trim my beard but fucked it up, do you wanna watch me shave ?” Joint: strawberry, rolled with love After: Camel Filters, smoked in haste Poison: Budweiser (can); Grey Goose (water bottle) Confession:“I liked your beard”/“thanks” Eyes: blue, candy shell, hooded, nervous Paralysis: eye contact through the mirror Disruption: “lemme go roll a jay” Joint: strawberry, rolled in haste After: Camel Filters, smoked in haste Bed: floor of the study lounge Study lounge: second floor Lights: off Carpet: dirty Privacy: tilted table barricade Noise level: lip suction Blanket: winter coat Question: “why do you want to do this with me ?” Declaration of sentiment: “I don’t want anybody else to have it” Condom: red, sticky Sweat: cold Socks: four, black, remained Adams // 87

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Conversation: “I went”/“okay” After: Camel Filters, smoked in haste Goodnight kiss: tobacco-flavored

88 // Adams

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MARVIN Patty Somlo Marvin despised the heart Karen had clipped to his collar the afternoon he came back after his weeklong disappearance. As if the size of the heart, which resembled a dog’s tongue, jabbing him in the neck whenever he licked the fur on his left shoulder wasn’t bad enough, the Pepto-Bismol color was downright embarrassing. He couldn’t even claim the heart didn’t belong to him. His name was emblazoned in silver capital letters across the widest part. Unbeknownst to Marvin, while he’d been away from the house those seven days, Karen had printed his blown-up photograph on a flyer that announced in thick black letters at the top, MISSING CAT. The flyer described Marvin as a short-haired tabby with black, brown, and gray markings, going so far as to say he resembled a tiger. This missing cat, the flyer said, had green eyes and was independent but would come if called. What really pissed Marvin off—besides the idea of Karen plastering his picture on telephone poles all around the neighborhood, telling perfect strangers about him, even the homeless people pushing their carts—was that the flyer claimed he was pudgy. As if to punish himself, Marvin went right ahead and read that part three more times. Then he walked up the back steps, slipped with some difficulty through the narrow cat door, and padded into Karen’s bedroom. He stood in front of the mirror hanging on the outside of Karen’s closet door. From the front he looked fine, except for that silly pink heart, of course. He gave himself a moment and then turned to the side, swiveling his head to the right. He did not like what he saw. That he’d gained weight wasn’t exactly a surprise. In fact, three weeks before he’d taken off, Karen had brought it up as she was rubbing his belly late one night. “You’re getting fat, Marvin,” she said. Somlo // 89

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Just like that. She didn’t sugarcoat her words or say something complimentary first so the criticism wouldn’t sting so much. The next day she cut back his food, giving him only half a can of his favorite grilled tuna feast in gravy instead of a whole. The same sad fate awaited him the next morning. He finished the creamed salmon and cod in seconds and then sat right next to the empty blue bowl on the gray and white-squared marmoleum floor and bawled. It was her choice if she wanted to starve herself, Marvin thought, but she didn’t have to starve him at the same time. The following week he had trouble sleeping. Normally during the day, he liked to sleep for hours. His stomach growled and ached from hunger, which made it impossible to get any rest at all. He usually looked forward to meals, eagerly rubbing his head against Karen’s leg the minute she got out of bed in the morning. The performance was repeated at night when Karen came home from work. Starving, Marvin let out his signature feed me howl. He kept up this mournful, slightly wavering wail until he heard the little whoosh the drawer made as Karen pulled it out, and then the crack and whirr when she opened the can of creamed chicken feast or marinated beef morsels. Suddenly, the kitchen would fill with the sharp oily aroma that caused Marvin to dance around in circles, as if chasing his tail, and one thin line of drool would form at the side of his mouth and start to slide down his chin, soaking his whiskers in the process. The lack of sleep and food caused Marvin to mope. Karen noticed. “Whatsa’ matter, Marvin,” she asked, early on the third morning. He’d gulped down the spoonful of food she’d left him, finishing off the gooey lump so quickly he could barely taste or smell it. He lay down, his chin resting on the rim of the bowl, as if he didn’t have the strength to go on. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Karen’s legs rising above her feet in a pair of shiny black three-inch heels. Those legs that he normally loved to rub, his head brushing her ankle and calf, were so painfully thin they looked like they’d been replaced in the night by Karen’s arms. 90 // Somlo

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She knelt down and reached her hand out to pet him. That’s when he saw that her arms were an even greater horror. They had shrunk so that Marvin could almost have missed them if he hadn’t opened his eyes wide. The forearms against which he’d rubbed his head countless times appeared fragile as icicles. He moved his gaze to the upper arms and shoulders, where he was horrified to conclude that Karen resembled the famine victims in Africa that Marvin had seen on TV. Whatever Karen was doing to herself, he did not want to happen to him. He felt her hand lightly rubbing his head. “I’m sorry about the diet, Marvin. But the vet told me I needed to feed you less.” Marvin looked up. He tried to remember how she’d looked only a few months ago. Even then, Marvin wasn’t happy. That’s because Karen was bringing a man home. Marvin learned the unwanted intruder’s name the night Karen lifted him off the bed and set him down on the floor. “Marvin,” she said, her voice an unfamiliar husky whisper. “We have a visitor. Alec.” Just then, the visitor emerged from the bathroom. Even before looking up, Marvin knew Alec weighed a lot. The hardwood floor underneath him shook, a further insult after being so unceremoniously evicted from his favorite place on the soft mattress. Alec made the bed thump more severely than he’d shaken the floor. The thumping went on for hours and caused Karen to scream and cry. Marvin hopped up to the bed hoping to save Karen from this ogre, but the huge, horrible guy swatted, causing poor Marvin to fly into the air and come down hard on the wood floor. Thankfully, the thumping and Karen’s crying eventually stopped. Marvin heard Karen giggling and was relieved to know that his beloved owner was all right. Marvin couldn’t have said how many weeks or months went by, with his body being flung like garbage out of bed to make room for the big oaf, and then the thumping and crying followed by Karen’s giggling, while Marvin stayed alone on the hard floor. For all Marvin knew, the ordeal might have lasted three or four months. In any event, Somlo // 91

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what had become a trial to Marvin eventually came to a close. Marvin was lying on the bed, stretched across both pillows, trying to enjoy himself as much as he could, knowing he would soon get heaved to the floor. He heard the front door close and braced himself for Alec’s feet pounding across the floor. Instead, he heard a quiet tap-tap-tap. The tap-tap-tap entered the bedroom. Then he heard the most dreadful sobbing. Something hit the bed just below where Marvin lay stretched out. The mattress shook ever so slightly with her sobs. Marvin felt Karen’s sadness enter him, as if he’d woofed down a soup-size bowl of her sorrow. He scooted off the pillow to lie next to her, then lifted his left paw and rested it on her arm. Finally, after Karen had sobbed and coughed so long that Marvin worried she might need a doctor, she turned and put her arms around Marvin and lifted him up. “Oh, Marvin,” she crooned. “At least I still have you.” Even though he’d considered running away several times after Alec pitched him from the bed, Marvin knew what Karen said was true. He couldn’t help but stick around. Try as he might to be mad at Karen, he knew he was devoted to her. The next morning Karen looked down at Marvin as he sat on the kitchen floor cleaning his right paw. Since she was mumbling he thought she might be talking to herself. “He said I was fat. He said he didn’t want to marry a fat woman because then he’d end up with fat kids.” Marvin didn’t notice that Karen, who normally ate a big bowl of multigrain Cheerios for breakfast with an entire sliced banana on top, only drank black coffee that morning. He did notice that she’d stopped crying. And most of all, his beloved owner took time to cuddle with him in bed and quit making him sleep on the floor. Still, Marvin felt a sense of dread. In the evening when he stretched across the pillows, he braced himself for the sound of the front door closing and the pounding across the floor that would signal the big oaf’s steps. One night, some weeks after the last time Alec thumped the bed, Marvin’s fears were realized. 92 // Somlo

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This time, though, the floor didn’t shake quite so much. The bed, as it turned out, didn’t thump as long. Karen’s screams were soft and the giggling was quick and muffled. Soon after, and before it even got light, the guy was gone. And so it went. After a few months, Marvin understood that the guy arriving, the pounding across the floor, the thumping and screams, a quick burst of giggles, and the guy’s departure, had become a regular feature of Marvin and Karen’s life. It also became clear that unlike during the big oaf Alec’s time, the unwanted intruder was never the same guy twice. Marvin didn’t understand this, but realized another thing had come into their lives. When Karen lifted him into bed after the guy of the night’s sudden departure, she hugged him and said, “My handsome Marvin,” and he smelled the foul odor of alcohol drifting off her tongue. Marvin knew something was wrong. Like most of his species, he had a sixth sense. Or rather, he understood things about life without having to be told. The first thing Marvin understood was that his beloved owner had given up. Marvin didn’t have to see that Karen was disappearing daily to know this, though his heart ached every day when he confirmed what this new diet regimen was doing. She even smelled too thin to Marvin. Her streaked blond hair he had loved rubbing his head against had grown brittle and smelled like dust. Whenever Marvin dared sniff around Karen’s head, he fell into a fit of sneezing he feared might never let up. Then, of course, there was the inevitable aroma of alcohol. Worst of all, some mornings when she pulled him close for a hug and belly rub, he was nearly overpowered by the odor of stale whiskey dripping off the thin line of sweat on her arms. Though he might not have cared to admit it, Marvin would have agreed, if forced, that he’d left home those seven days because he’d figured something terrible out. Karen was trying to kill herself. “I was so worried about you,” Karen said, as Marvin stood there batting in futility at that stupid pink heart. “I had them put my cell number on there under your name. That way, if you get lost, they’ll know where you belong.” Where he belonged? Belonged? Marvin wanted to shake Karen, to scream at her to wake up and see what was happening to Somlo // 93

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their lives. The truth was, Marvin did not feel like he belonged here at all. Not with this woman who refused to eat and was withering away to nothing. Not with this woman who brought a different guy home every night. And not with this woman who had alcohol seeping out of her pores every morning, and who smelled like old whiskey and dust. Marvin worked at the heart for an hour, but the thing refused to budge. He felt dizzy and weak, the half can of tuna having long since been digested and its calories burned up. The sadness lingering in the air seemed heavier to him now than before he’d gone. He wasn’t surprised the next morning when he found her on the bathroom floor. Marvin climbed on top of Karen, rubbed his head and pawed. He lay down next to her and sniffed her nose, chin, and mouth, which was slightly open now. The aroma was stale and sad, acrid and awful. He pawed harder, digging his claws that needed clipping into her red sweater, where they caught and he had to yank hard to get himself undone. With little else to try, Marvin started to quietly mew, and then more loudly to meow. When this didn’t rouse her, he raised his voice. Not long after that, he began to howl. The flashing red, blue, and white lights hurt Marvin’s eyes. Large men were everywhere, and the floor shook with their booted steps like the poor cat had never felt before. Marvin watched as they lifted Karen’s body up from the bathroom floor onto a long flat board. Those men huddled around her and Marvin couldn’t see anymore. The next thing he knew, the floor was shaking again and the men were carrying Karen on top of the long board toward the front door. Marvin ran to stand next to the door and kept his eyes on his beloved owner as they carried her out. Because of the noise and excitement, the pounding floor and shouts, Marvin didn’t realize that he’d been crying or that he’d been howling at the same time. The piercing siren hurt his ears and he howled even more. The floor shook one last time. Warm fingers patted the top of his head. The fingers dropped in front of his face. He saw red-painted nails and smelled something clean and nice. That’s when he was lifted high up in the air. 94 // Somlo

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“It’s all right,” a sweet voice like Karen’s said to him. “She’ll be all right.” The woman had on a big black hat and a bright yellow coat. She held him close to her chest and stroked his right front paw. “We’ll take you with us to the firehouse,” the woman said. “We’ll keep you there until your owner gets better and can come home.” He felt the fingers poking around his neck. What’s she doing? Marvin wanted to know.

“Let’s see here,” she said.

She stopped.

“Marvin,” she said, looking directly into his pale green eyes. “You are so cute, Marvin.”

For a moment, the attention got Marvin to quit howling.

Marvin took his time finishing the entire bowl of cream salmon and chicken morsels. He wasn’t sure he even had an appetite. Halfway through the bowl he stopped. It might have been because he was worried about Karen or that he felt sad about her being gone. It could have been due to the noise and confusion and being in a strange place he’d never been before. Or, just as likely, the blame might have been placed on the fact that the food had not been served to him in his usual blue bowl but in a completely alien white one. The most likely explanation was that Marvin’s stomach had shrunk. He could, it turned out, finish only half the bowl. Once he’d nibbled his way from the outside left edge of the white dish to the center, he was too full to go on. Marvin was sound asleep when he heard a now familiar woman’s voice. “Marvin,” she whispered. She was so close to his face, he could feel her warm breath brushing his nose.

He opened his eyes and gazed into hers. They were pale Somlo // 95

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green, just like his and Karen’s. At that moment, he wondered if she had become his new owner. The thought that Karen might never come back from wherever those men had taken her made Marvin so sad he could feel himself starting to well up. Before he’d squeezed even one tear out of his eyes, the woman patted his head and smiled. “Guess what, Marvin,” she asked, and waited, as if expecting the cat to come up with a response. “Marvin. We’re going to be on television.” Unbeknownst to Marvin, Karen was watching the six o’clock news that night. She was feeling much better. They’d pumped her stomach and she’d slept almost twenty-four hours straight. The raging headache was gone. For the first time since she’d downed an entire bottle of Scotch, Karen felt grateful to be alive. “A cat named Marvin is responsible for saving his owner’s life,” announced the tanned weekend anchor with the perfect smile. “He’s being taken care of right now by the firefighters who responded when a neighbor called 9-1-1, after she heard Marvin howling. “Karen Sanders is alive and well, resting tonight at Good Samaritan Hospital. All thanks to Marvin.” Marvin was sitting there, looking straight into the camera. Karen wanted to reach out and touch the screen but she was hooked up to too many tubes to get out of bed by herself. Instead, Karen looked at Marvin, remembering how happy it had always made her to pet his head and feel him rub up against her leg and meow. The tears made it hard for her to see the rest of the report. She realized that when she’d started to gulp down that Scotch, she had never considered where Marvin would end up. At the firehouse, Marvin didn’t know what all the fuss was about. One after the other, the men left their seats in front of the television and walked over to where Marvin lay outside of the little basket they’d bought him, patted Marvin on the head and said, “You’re famous, Marvin,” and “Here’s our hero.” 96 // Somlo

When they were done, Marvin finished half his dinner

and left the rest, no longer able like he once was to clean the bowl. Seconds later, he started carefully licking his front left paw.

Somlo // 97

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THE YARD SALE Charles O’Hay There was a town-wide yard sale one day each spring. At dawn, tables began to sprout from front lawns. The Cossacks sold swords and furs The Palmers sold golf balls. And the Freuds, as usual, sold cigars and sublimated desires. But most people sold whatever had been languishing in their attics and basements: broken clocks, vases, vacuum cleaners, trousers long out of fashion. Last year, to everyone’s surprise, Grace had her marriage stuffed and placed on the front lawn. People stopped and stared, as though at a shipwreck, but nobody made an offer, though the price was quite reasonable. At the end of the day, everyone moved their unsold goods back inside. But Grace let the marriage stay. After a few rains it began to sag. Even the birds would not nest in it. On windy days bits tore away and drifted down the street. Other parts soaked into the ground. When it had vanished entirely, Grace planted a fistful of gladiolus bulbs on the spot and began to feel much better about everything.

98 // O’Hay

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“I AM A MAN OF THE ROAD THESE DAYS” AND OTHER THINGS YOU WANT TO SAY Daniel Levin Tonight, you drive straight into the big dipper— to do it, you fall straight forward three hundred thirty-five miles into a cold fog. The truck ahead has logs on it—big logs. You stop halfway at a McDonald’s and realize the jazz in the bathroom is a cover of “Julia” by the Beatles. Like everything else in your life right now, it is a bad rendition of the original. If you listen to a podcast on the way, it is about how lightning literally rips the sky into pieces, and if we used that same energy to turn trash into plasma, everything could be alright. You stop listening now and realize the highway, barely a metaphor, is a straight line—the distance between your present and future. You aren’t too sure about either. It is okay to feel weird and to love your car for being safe and small. For giving you control over temperature, volume, and speed. For having windows through which you can see the stars urging you, inevitably, forward.

Levin // 99

@OurAuthors Ann S Epstein’s novel On the Shore is being published by Vine Leaves Press. Her stories appear in Sewanee Review, PRISM, Long

Story, Passages North, Red Rock Review, William & Mary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Copperfield Review, The Normal School, Carbon Culture, and The NewerYork.

Ben Sloan is from Missouri. He teaches at Piedmont Virginia

Community College inCharlottesville and the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. His poems have appeared in the Hartskill Review, Ozone Park Journal and elsewhere.

Brett Petersen writes because it is more fun than mopping

floors or running cash registers. His stories have appeared in publications such as Loud Zoo, Peculiar Mormyrid and Centrifuge. He also plays guitar in the band Bluem. Google them!

Brittany Boza is a second-time poet for The Offbeat, having

first been published in Volume 14. She’s glad you like her angsty poems she wrote in her freshman year of college. Or maybe you don’t?

C. Gregory Thompson lives, and writes, and plays in Los

Angeles, California. He dreams of living in the south of France so he can speak French every single day. He recently gave up watching T.V. so he can read more. Life is so much better, says him.

Charles O’Hay is the author of two collections—Far from Luck (2011) and Smoking in Elevators (2014). He believes it is the job of the poet to make us nostalgic for the present.

Charlie Burgess is a singer/songwriter/poet living in Ka-

lamozoo – a 1979 honor graduate of the Michigan State School of Music. Charlie’s 2013 album of original songs, Amsterdam, won WYCE’s (Grand Rapids) Listeners’ Choice Album of the Year.

@OurAuthors Christopher MoYlan has taught English in Bahrain, Jor-

dan, & Long Island & is active in online collectives. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the author of Border Taxi (Abaton 2010) a collection of travel fiction and poetry. #poet #shortfiction #litcritic

Daniel Levin writes poems that live in the gray area between absurd and profound, where he finds things like fat cats, soup ladles full of stars, and biblical figures with trees where their insides should be.

Daniel Roy Connelly was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy

Poetry Prize an d the 2015 Cuirt Prize for New Writing. He is forthcoming on Uncle Vanya in Critical Survey. He is a professor of English, theatre and creative writing in Rome.

David Sheskinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest work utilizes the format of a Scrabble board to provide a unique perspective on a variety of fictional and topical subjects.

Dawn S. Davies: #MFAblackhole, pubs in @missouri_review

& 5x in @fourthgenre (#nohaters) & more. 4 #pushcartnoms in 1 yr. Best Am Essay Most Notable 2015, Pushcart Special Mention 2015. Book out soon #buyit

Dianne Borsenik OH #poet/performer/#publisher/#redhead

@DBorsenik loves #asparagus whollandaise, #disastermovies, convertible rides & @LedZeppelin. Newest book: Age of Aquarius. Find @ dianneborsenik.com.

Dominic Dudley is an Irish-born, London-based freelance

journalist and photographer who mainly covers business and politics in the Middle East. He has previously had fiction published in Structo and Popshot magazines in the UK.

Donald Illich reads books and writes verse in the Metro D.C. area, where he leads workshops, hosts readings, gives readings, and follows poetry wherever it goes.

@OurAuthors Elytron Frass percolates/&/stimulates @insect_sternite9 &/inhales #oil via his/its #spiracles @on_the_edges_of metamorphosis/&/time tarpaulinsky.com/2015/05/elytron-frass/sleepingfish.net/13/026_Frass.htm

Erin Gray is an upcoming poetry and prose writer in the East Lansing area. Inspired by the classical horror genre, Erin is known for her distinct macabre style. Contact Erin: Erin.e.gray.21@gmail.com

Gilbert Prowler was born in Brooklyn when you could use a

public restroom without first having to through security. Gilbert Prowler is a freelance writer and filmmaker. He’s usually doing one of three things: working, looking for work or running down checks.

Greg Bachar lives in Seattle. He earned his M.F.A. in Creative

Writing (Fiction) from the UMass, Amherst. His writing has appeared in

Conduit, Rain Taxi, Indiana Review, Redactions, Arroyo Literary Review, Southeast Review, and Litro.

Gregory William Goodrich is a metaphysical poet from

Los Angeles. The poems featured will appear in his debut collection Prelude to Solitude. All his work is housed at shangrixla.com.

Haran is a stand-up comedian from London, performing under the

stage name Haran X. He is unrelated to Malcolm X. He is grateful to The Offbeat for providing a platform for his written work and allowing him to describe himself in the third person.

Harmony Murray is a sophomore secondary English education major at MSU. #sophomore #educationmajor #MSU #microfiction

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. Recent work can be seen at Jet Fuel Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and decomP. Visit: jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/.

JoeAnn Hart: #author, #novels, FLOAT, ADDLED, JoeAnnHart. com.

@OurAuthors Kelly Nelson Ambidextrous anthropologist & author of 2 chapbooks. Car free since 1999. MSU alum now teaching Interdisciplinary Studies at ASU in Tempe. Kelly-nelson.com.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of seven books, including The

River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Other Language: Poems.

Melanie Strouse is a graduate of Michigan State University’s

creative writing program. She is a practiced yogi, a marathon runner, and a fledgling grant writer. She lives to travel and draws inspiration from the stories of the amazing people she meets along the way. More of Melanie’s work can be found in Dirty Chai Magazine.

Michael Bartelt was born in Pasadena, CA. He is a poet, English teacher, and basketball coach.

M K SUKACH is a solvent but nonetheless lowly civil servant salvaging day after day what reason remains in meeting after meeting of utter hebetudinous bunk by spurring that proverbial elephant in the room.

Natalie Adams rural romantic / skeptical stoic Payton Cianfarano has been studying literary arts for the

past four years. Despite her multiple literary accomplishments, she still gets excited when she uses a comma correctly. In her spare times she likes to go on adventures to find the nearest dog in need of a good pat.

Patty Somlo, author of The First to Disappear (Spuyten

Duyvil), has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, one for storySouth’s Million Writers Award, and a Notable Essay designation in Best American Essays. www.pattysomlo.com

Robert Vivian’s latest book, a collection of dervish essays called Mystery My Country, will be published this spring.

@OurAuthors S.J. Dunning lives in Tacoma, WA and teaches online. Her poems have appeared in San Pedro River Review and Front Porch Journal. Her essay “for(e)closure” won Creative Nonfiction’s 2011 MFA Program-Off contest.

Simon Williams has poems in mags & books, performs them

widely & has an original fold in a Japanese origami book. He has cats: Tribble, named after the Star Trek furballs, and Puck, not an ice hockey reference.

Steph Spector’s poems and films are inspired by ahimsa, the Sanskrit term for “do no harm.” In 2015 her fiction was shortlisted for a Glimmer Train award. She works for Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC.

Call For Submissions

Calling the zany, the thought-provoking, the humorous, and the quirkyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we want to read your writing! The Offbeat, a literary journal specializing in undisputedly unique works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and sequential art, is accepting submissions. We cater to the bizarre, the whimsical, and the outlandish. Show us writing that falls off the beaten path in an intriguing way! We ask for different. We DO NOT mean unnecessarily explicit content produced purely for the purpose of being shocking. We are interested in quality. So no matter where you come from or what you do, we want to hear from you! Please go to offbeat.msu.edu to submit your works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and sequential art.

Featuring Work From: Ann S Epstein Ben Sloan Brett Petersen Brittany Boza C. Gregory Thompson Charles Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hay Charlie Burgess Christopher Morlan Daniel Levin Daniel Roy Connelly David Sheskin Dawn S. Davies Dianne Borsenik Dominic Dudley Donald Illich Elytron Frass Erin Gray Gilbert Prowler

Greg Bachar Gregory William Goodrich Haran Sivapalan Harmony Murray Jennifer MacBain-Stephens JoeAnn Hart Kelly Nelson Mark Brazaitis Melanie Strouse Michael Bartelt MK Sukach Natalie Adams Payton Cianfarano Robert Vivian S.J. Dunning Simon Williams Steph Spector

Stay Offbeat... Offbeat.MSu.edu facebook.com/theoffbeat @offbeatlitmag