The El THOMAS DOANE 46 The Locker MARK ISOM

=Migrant Bird Two JOEL HERNANDEZ

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Gardener

CAITLIN TESS ZITTKOWSKI

Ancient oak trees tower over

the butter-yellow shrine of my childhood, engulfing the house, the home I've outgrown, in a protective cloak of cool shade.

Bright sunlight sifts through

the dark green glossy leaves

and plays across the Gardener's pale face.

A haystack of hair piled atop her head, she dons her denim overalls, smeared with rich earth, and escapes to her serene safe-haven, her backyard.

Here she seems content to pass

the precious hours of her sultry summer days, tin watering-can in hand, surrounded by the flourishing fruits of her labor.

She caresses the daffodils, the golden trumpets of her garden, and the bluebells, ringing in the gentle breeze, with her cracked and care-worn hands.

A bead of sweat trickles down

the furrowed terrain of her forehead;

fresh dirt caked under her nubby fingernails, she is Mother Nature.

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"Leaving RACHEL PLOTNICK

A thousand times

you will brush your fingers against my face

before slipping out the door, a paper-thin silhouette

moving noiselessly, ghostly, from within my arms

and into the world. I will crawl into the cold space

and the sheets. I will whisper your name

and feel it slither away and hide in the unnamable cracks

under the bed, in the closet. You will plant your lips

on my shoulder so softly that no imprint is left, and tomorrow I will wonder whether

you were ever there at all.

* Unquestionably the Finest M I A B E A C H

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The El

THOMAS DOANE

While I was waiting-in a state of numb and absolute terrorfor the money to run out, I didn't have a fucking a thing to do, no job, and there was hardly anyone left around town that I still wanted

to see or talk to see who still had any desire to see or talk to me.

IN the fog I'd been living through in the months preceding, I'd done a lot of damage to myself and to others, and now it was showing up on me, manifesting in a variety of physical symptoms. Sometimes a sort of cloud would come down around

me and I would have a hard time breathing, and I could feel my heartbeat drumming from the inside-out along every surface of my body. I couldn't think straight. I was exhausted all the time, but I was having trouble sleeping. On the edge of a dream I would come up gasping for air.

I would ride around on the elevated train, switching lines along a carefully appointed sequence

of stations, maintaining a static rhythm so that I

could keep myself in a continuously repeating loop, circling around downtown without ever having to

pay more than two dollars for the ride which-on

a few occasions-I stretched out to make it last all

afternoon and late into the night. The trains stopped running at one am.

The trains in Chicago are particularly filthy.

I'd had occasion before to ride trains in Tokyo,

Singapore, Seoul: pure, pristine, soundless rides in meticulously scrubbed and vacuumed cabins where everyone smells good and no one talks too loud, where there's the stewardess pushing the refreshments cart up and down the aisle in a freshly pressed uniform looking like the chambermaid on a spaceship and the hors d'oeuvres and confections look so beautiful and exotic that the instincts of a

Westerner will half the time assume that they must be inedible, purely ornamental. Compared to the trains in Asia, the trains in Chicago are like cattle cars.

When the crowds would thin out, I would stretch out and doze. I remember once, falling into a deep sleep, and dreaming that I was riding in an RSHA transport in Nazi occupied Europe. The heat and pressure of bodies crammed, breathless, and slimy with sweat, like sardines in a tin, stuffed into the reeking black rectangles of space, barreling towards oblivion. I'd wake up and look across and there would a beautiful little girl with huge liquid eyes, holding her mother's hand and looking across the aisle at me, guileless and totally absorbed. Or: I'd wake up next to a fat, black woman in a leopard-print crepe-de-chine scarf and a fake fur hat, resplendent-inhuman, spheroid-in the impossible anatomical geometry of her obesity. Or: I'd wake

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up and the car would be inexplicably packed with Vietnamese, all of them apparently from distinct points of departure, all of them on apparently unrelated trajectories, all of them getting off at different stops, all of the cramped shoulder to shoulder along the rows of seats and clogging the aisle, filling the air with the almost avian, arithmetic twittering of their native tongue. Or I'd wake up to the voice coming over the intercom to tell me that this was my stop and I'd better get off. Or I'd wake up to nothing and no one, looking out the window the skyscrapers-standing still, gliding by outside in their glacial, sunken drifts -would seem tawdry and fake and monstrous.

Riding around all day, I would read books. I read a lot of books. I would finish one and fish

another out of my backpack to start it, without even pausing for a minute in-between-time. I remember reading the Tropic of Capricorn for the seventh or eight time that way; remember remembering to myself how it had made me feel the first time reading it-like a demigod or a Hindu-demon, so alive, on fire -and how now when I was reading it, it mostly made me feel afraid that death was not the end, dreadfully suspicious that there was no escape from the hideous and relentless rush.

It's a very complicated book.

I remember looking up from my books and out between the people across the aisle from me, out through the window and out along the long vertical gaps above the street below and between the buildings looming above; looking out at the sky behind everything and wondering if it would ever open to admit me. I remember other times, looking from my books and between the people and through the glass and looking at the buildings themselves with their mirror-tinted glass, one after another, their huge surfaces reflecting the other huge, mirror-tinted objects and surfaces all around them and feeling like the city was dissolving.

One time I woke up from a dream I'd been dreaming about being in a movie-theater. There'd been a locomotive chugging across the screen. I woke up back on the El.

I thought I was alone until I registered the presence of another man sitting across from me some way down the aisle. When he realized that I was awake, he rose and sort of hovered towards me. He was wearing a nice shirt, blazer and trousers. They looked tailored though they were rumpled, sort of like he'd been wearing them for a while, sleeping in them maybe. He had on a kind of peacoat with fur-lining. A tall, fat, mustachioed with a kind of harried face, red-cheeks shot through with cabbage purple varicose veins. He made me nervous looking at me as he approached. He sat down and he gave me a long spiel about the pitiful state we were all in and the bad and spineless times we were living through, at the end of which, he advised me to get a job. When he was finally quiet he looked at

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me, as if he were expecting me to respond. Okay, I said. So you really want ajob? he asked. I shrugged my shoulders to signify: Sure? Why not? I've got ajob for you ifyou feel up to it. Would you like my card? I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I wouldn't object to any direction that he wanted to take this conversation in. Here. Take it. He gave me his business card.

It was an antique pistol. It looked about a hundred years old, maybe World War 1 era. Maybe even older. It was short-barrelled. Flowery, gilt crucifixes had been embossed into the grips, and a plate of smooth, bright silver had been inlaid along the butt, and another along the butt of the magazine nested inside it. Through the marbling of tarnish I could see my face in it. It was heavy, more than ten pounds probably. I doubted that it would fire.

Now don't go flashing that anywhere or telling all your friends that you might have something lined up, he said. This isn't ajobforjust anybody, he told me. You give me a call whenever you're feeling up to coming in and trying to see ifyou're up to the kind of work

that's required. Ifyou want to contact me justpush that

mu le square with the roofofyour mouth, and depress

the trigger. I'm on call twenty-four hours a day. I don't remember what I said, or if I said anything. I must have sort of nodded and he kind of moved away. He got off at the next stop.

THE EL

That night the train was jam-packed. Sometime around the last-stop things were starting to thin out and I picked a paper that had been stamped and partly shredded by a million muddy shoeprints. The headline was talking about nuclear tests in North Korea. I picked it up and read it for awhile, read maybe halfway down the page before getting bored and distracted. I was thinking about another thing that the man had told me during his spiel, which seemed sort of odd. I couldn't remember

the context that he'd said it in. He must have been

talking about the train or something-probably about how 'here we are, and isn't it a shame' and he'd mentioned (he'd realized during our brief interview that I was somewhat educated) that the word "El" was a Hebrew suffix or prefix that could be linked on to any name to indicate that the subject-object signified by the word was an agent under the employ of God. Or that it was part of the 'manifold manifestation'-whatever that was.

Rapha-el. Gabri-el. Etc. El-oheinu. El-oheim. Etc. That was how he said it: 'under the employ.' He'd said: part of the manifold manifestation.

You call me anytime, now, he'd said over his shoulder, stepping out through the doors and out onto the platform.

I folded up the filthy sheet and put the mangled newspaper down. I got off at the last stop. u

* Birds CHRISTINE JANG

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The Locker MARK ISoM

1. The plan was mine. 1 could have easily found a partner with some experience, but I picked you. I guess I thought I could pass some knowledge of the trade on to posterity. You should have listened more, practiced more, talked less. 2. I spent months in my soggy basement working out the perfect plan whole thing up.

and it only took you a second to fumble the

I watched the Boy's fingers work. Waves on the ocean I thought; smooth, fluid, and powerful. The old man might as well have never even bought a watch; it was deep in the Boys pocket before the old geezer even selected a cigar from the box. Youth has its advantages, I thought. My seat rumbled as the train hit a rough spot on its old iron track, it would be nice to pick pockets and make enough to live on, but you reach an age when your girl becomes your wife and money saved for baseball games gets spent on new curtains or that sag in the roof. "Cigar sir?" the Boy asked me. The tips of his fingers were brown, where the dark stain of the cigar box had rubbed off on them. "I wouldn't touch one," I replied, "and I don't know that you should either, for your sake." His pale blue eyes broke their hold on mine as he realized I wouldn't be reaching into his box.

"I just peddle the shoes mister, I don't walk in em," the boy replied before turning to the man with the funeral directors smile across the aisle.

I settled back into my seat and watched the Boy move like a phantom towards the front of the train stopping occasionally to leave a cigar with smiling old men who dropped coins in his box without the least idea how much the cigars were actually costing them. Everybody has to make a living, I said to myself, but I was suddenly feeling depressed, imagining one of these men, sitting at a diner in Chicago, searching frantically his pockets for the wallet that wasn't there. Could a thief be a good guy? A noble criminal?

3. If I hadn't kept my head and paid your bill at the hotel when you fled, the police would have been on you

in an instant.

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4. I told you not to kick out of town with out paying the tax. If I hadn't paid Chicago Joe for the both of us he would have surely had us as new displays in his museum at the bottom of the lake. Kid, Igot off easy

with a broken hand, you can't just pinch in the city and

hope Joe won't hear of it and you don't have a reputa-

tion to protect you like I do. IfI had even whispered your name you'd be dead for sure.

The doors in the front of the car rolled open and a rum barrel stomach walked in, pulling behind it a man with a beard you'd need a compass to navigate and a grin almost equal in size. A dancing bear my father would have called him. I watched this Bear

of a man saunter down the aisle like a great ship in a narrow harbor, scraping his round hull against the tiny ornamental passengers flanking his path, and each elaborate hat he knocked from their heads was accompanied by a jovial apology and a comical struggle to assist in its replacement upon their respective peak. "This seat taken?" Not waiting for a reply the Bear lurched himself into the vacant seat beside me

as the rest of train sighed, relieved at his docking, and began to reassemble themselves.

"It's yours," I replied, turning to the Bear, I said this a bit after the fact, but I was trying to be polite so I offered him a friendly smile.

The Bear grinned back, a grin worthy of Texas, and continued, "You want a drink boy?" the Bear said. "I think I'll get a drink." He turned to the young lady, who had quietly slipped into the car with a drink cart a minute before, and said, "Miss, I think I'll have my drink now," his grin grew impossibly wide, "A brandy perhaps to start, and could you fetch that cigar boy quick as you can. I'd like a smoke or two."

The Bear turned to me expecting my order and when I offered up my, "No thanks," he looked hurt. We sat quiet for a moment and I pulled my pad back out to work, but as soon as the Bears drink hit his stomach he started his talking again, apparently over my insult. "How'd you hurt that hand son?" the Bear asked marveling at the blue and black of my broken right hand. I thought about Chicago Joe's hammer and the stupid kid skipping town.

"Shut a window on it." I lied, "Yeah, my fault for asking the wife to help me with repairs, dropped it right down on my hand." The Bear's great stomach