Issue #12
Editorial & Contents
The onset of Autumn often brings with it a sense of melancholy, a darkness that hovers like mist over an abandoned graveyard. Beneath the fiery colours of fall, there is an underlying sense of sadness and gloom, an endless bounty of emotion that sometimes comes with change. Whether it is the inevitable shift from summer to autumn, or a much more personal life event, change is difficult. Emotional. For Vine Leaves Literary Journal staff, most of whom reside in the Northern Hemisphere, this season—and thus this issue—is a poignant example. In the same breath, the team says goodbye to Senior Editor Amie McCracken, and welcomes back Co-founder Dawn Ius. Roles shift. Emotions overflow. And in the midst of all of it, there is this—Issue 12. Much like the changing of seasons, the bright colours of the cover mask the haunting artistry woven within its pages. Vignettes such as Nathaniel Heely’s PANIC AND TWITCH, or Dennis Vanvick’s clever and nuanced FATHER DAMIAN, 1956 will send shivers up your spine. We invite you to get lost in the haunting poetry of Frank William Finney and Chanel Brenner. To explore the stunning imagery peppered throughout the pages. We invite you to fall in love with change. Art and Photography Samantha Peterson ~ pg. 3 Amy Haas ~ pp. 6, 27 Sheri L. Wright ~ pp. 9, 12, 22, 24, 31 Paul Francis ~ pp. 15, 19 Daniel von der Embse ~ pg. 29 Terri Watrous Berry ~ pg. 33
Ray Scanlon ~ pp. 13, 15 Umbrella Man | What They Heard | How They Walked Jo Malby ~ pp. 16, 17 Her Hands | If She Were A House
Featured Authors
Sossity Chiricuzio ~ pp. 17, 28 Research | Summer Of 16
Danielle Susi ~ pp. 6, 22 Bitter | Ceremony
Claire T. Feild ~ pp. 21, 30, 31 Nomen | Elegant | Quarantined
Dave Read ~ pg. 9 Sunspots | Behind Trees
Kim Peter Kovac ~ pg. 22 Hoopoe | Machete Vs. Yakuza
When Love Is Too Big by Megathy Ryan ~ pg. 3 We Sorrow by Marie Slaight ~ pg. 4 Panic & Twitch by Nathaniel Heely ~ pg. 5 Oxy The Moron by Midnight Lawrence ~ pg. 7 Paul Simon by Rachel Hinkel ~ pg. 8 Smoke And Fog by Anne Whitehouse ~ pg. 10 Father Damian, 1956 by Dennis Vanvick ~ pg. 11 Watching Her Red by Amy Haas ~ pg. 12 Found And Lost by Howard Winn ~ pg. 12 Save As Draft? by Jacob Buckenmeyer ~ pg. 13 On a Rundle Mall Bench by Charles Leggett ~ pg. 14 I Can Still by E. Suzin Odlen ~ pg. 16 Floating Dawn by Tom Conlan ~ pg. 17 English Lessons in the Strawberry Field by Gina Williams ~ pg. 18 The Bird Women of Wells-Next-The-Sea by Ingrid Jendrzejewski ~ pg. 19
Olivia Stearn ~ pp. 24, 31, 36 Cheap | Scent | Bug Frank William Finney ~ pp. 24, 32 Night Shuts In | The Predator Plays Piano Robert Laughlin ~ pp. 26, 30 Men At Work #86 | Men At Work #87 Ralph Monday ~ pp. 28, 30 White Towels | Revelation Lauren Camp ~ pp. 31, 33 Cope | Our Neighbour’s Vegetables
Gum Scraper by Raul Palma ~ pg. 20 Lanzarote Morning: The Canary Islands by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt ~ pg. 20 Disclosures by V. Jane Schneeloch ~ pg. 21 Impressions: Searcy County by Ryan W. Murphy ~ pg. 21 Express Lane by Brandyn Johnson ~ pg. 21 Saatvik’s Masterpiece by Vaidehi Patil ~ pg. 23 Keeping The Dead by Chanel Brenner ~ pg. 25 The Veteran by Katherine Bonnie Bailey ~ pg. 26 The House on Agate Street by Cyn Bermudez ~ pg. 27 Photograph of My Father, Africa, 1943 by Daniel von der Embse ~ pg. 29 She Comes on Tuesdays by Jane Downing ~ pg. 30 Rain Swept by Fariha Eshrat ~ pg. 32 Blind Date by Carol Cooper ~ pg. 34 I Have Never Seen The Sky So Blue by S.G. Larner ~ pg. 35
WHEN LOVE IS TOO BIG
by Megathy Ryan
I flew on an eagle’s shoulders and I told him. As we were above and so I could see, When love is too big, I cannot hold it. I cannot feel that it’s mine. Maybe because, he says, and I listen. It is Everyone’s. Maybe it is not the love, that you cannot hold. Maybe, it is yourself.
photograph by Samantha Peterson
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
WE SORROW by Marie Slaight We sorrow the lost legend. Standing by the grave side by side We don’t turn, drop the spade And walk away, parting. We don’t lie on the grave In the earth Beating our palms Keening for the dead. We stand and days pass. The sun grows slow across the sky. The earth is cold. We tremble and talk, Commiserate, mumble, echo Our frustration and grief Frozen in our knees, bitter. One will leave the entrenchment, Leave the sweet, cold place Brutalize against the scream.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
PANIC & TWITCH by Nathaniel Heely They saw the shadows painted on the walls. The bodies came skulking and hunched, the skin ragged on their bones, the colour of their clothes deeply saturated the same hue of the desert and of the wall their shadows walked on. The entrails spilled out into a maze the two soldiers traced with their eyes. Occasional clouds of smoke came out through the window and there were two cans of Copenhagen wintergreen open on the sill. The one on the left, who still had his helmet on, and who everybody called Panic, nudged the one on his right. This was the one everybody called Twitch. Twitch’s eyes were bug-like, the skin tightly hugging the eyeballs that wanted to pop out. It had been fifteen minutes since the last mortar rounds had kissed the desert. Panic and Twitch sat in a second story bedroom wrapped in the harsh shadow of the late afternoon. They sat on wooden chairs and held their rifles to their chests. They watched the body in the street. The body parts in the street. They had heard low murmurs of agony for a minute or so after, but the diaphragm was shredding into the clay now. The head was fully wrapped. Scattered in the vicinity of the body were scarlet and brown streaks of shrapnel, cloth and innards. Already in fifteen minutes these viscous rags of human were drying so that they looked as though they had the consistency of discarded corn husks. The two tiny figures were walking on barefoot tiptoes. They bent their bodies in the traditional figure of prayer. They lay there with their gaze trying to cut the cloth that entombed the body. Panic and Twitch could hear the higher register of their voices. The smaller one, the one with the curly hair and blue tunic went down to the bottom of the body and, for a moment, assessed the incomprehensible. Thereafter he tried to pick up the stout legs and push them together like dismembered puzzle pieces, scraping flesh, bone and sand together, an incidental plaster. The taller one
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stood up and took hold of the other’s shoulders. The legs were in that moment in the wheelbarrow position. Slowly the legs came down and rested in the dirt. The two children walked back around the corner. The last of the smoke was exhaled and two pinches of black Virginia-grown tobacco were pinched and placed behind respective lips. Panic leaned back. He took the rifle from across his chest with the barrel up and stood it upon its stock. He looked serene and calm and began to feel his lids grow heavy. Twitch leaned forward over his knees. He made a small pool of foam and brown spit between his toes, his weapon pointed crosswise at the ground and against his shoulder. They sat like that, speaking in spit and savouring the taste of home in their mouths. When the shadows came back the soldiers moved their eyes but nothing else. There was a thin blanket laid on the ground beside. They each picked up a leg of the bottom puzzle piece and lay it slantwise against the cloth. The soldiers could see the spine now as the sole structure that connected the two pieces. The top was moved via the arms. They took the legs again and attempted to centre them according to the spine. They wrapped the other half of the cloth over so that now only the sandaled feet could be seen distinctly. Underneath there were only faint impressions of where the body curved. The body was lifted to pelvic level and the two straddled it and shuffled away back around the corner. Panic and Twitch sat with home in their gums not saying a word. Sweat greased them over. They sat for twenty more minutes as noise and language familiar came from downstairs somewhere in the streets. Finally, Twitch looked over and Panic nodded. They stood up and walked downstairs into the dusty streets each taking a last, careful look at the scarves of debris and the wall that was now painted the colour of twilight.
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photograph by Amy Haas
BITTER
by Danielle Susi There is nothing more important than putting your fingers in your mouth after picking a dandelion. A child’s obligation to wrap her tongue around the bitterness of pollen.
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
OXY THE MORON by Midnight Lawrence The scabs of scripture having flaked off, Oxy turned and watched the priest —a stiff vestige of piety— melt away into odd silence. What then please? Well, he pondered long. Finally he puckers and shares in the bite of a kiss and now intimate friendship with a stranger. La-dee-da-la-dee-da he searches for a point which when found never is there, never. Walking certain borders as he does he vibrates with sharp tugs of extremities and learns the anchored voyage: this in a sea which he infers is without bottom. As time and place disappear he calls out, When and spot! Thus here Oxy sits now on Victoria’s wing-backed chair drowning in the art of blowing bubbles.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
PAUL SIMON by Rachel Hinkel I used to make love to Paul Simon; his body was slight, warm. In dreams, I can still feel his weight. In dreams, Paul still sings at noon and we eat Lucky Charms after with one bowl, two spoons. We eat five or six servings while Paul’s baby gestates in my womb. Awake, I recall the first time Paul eyed me across a crowded room: My face lost in the flicker of a candle to which I busily confessed homesickness. I was a stranger in Paul’s city, but we found commonality in being the only two party guests dressed in denim. He whispered jokes into my ear tangling my feet in punch lines and soon we rode the love we found like a luck dragon across the burden of a continent. We copied cooing from pigeons, borrowed howling from wolves, gave new names to constellations. We made benches throughout Boston proper blush scarlet and moms and dads covered the eyes of their children. We were wanted in Palm Springs. We untwisted a Joshua Tree’s branches. Paul said, “You are a shiksa.” I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “We can never marry.” I said, “No, it’s too soon.” We finished our game of shuffleboard. I beat him by a lot. “Being dominated is cool,” he said, “Too bad we have no future.” I searched his serious face for sarcasm, laughed then almost threw up. A woman walked towards us, grinning. “Your love is beautiful,” she cried from a face old and grotesquely made-up. We thanked her, walked backwards to our hotel room, locked the door and watched reruns of Golden Girls on the Hallmark Channel. The width of the continent expanded and compressed with dropped calls and heavy breaths. Togetherness wore on us like new shoes; absence wore on us like famine. “I need a protractor and a compass,” Paul demanded with a sip of iced coffee. “You can’t measure every angle,” I admonished, sniffing the holes in the receiver,
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reaching for my sandwich. “Who is Jacob. What is the Ark of the Covenant,” he muttered into his phone while mine was anchored between my head and a pillow. I fell asleep while his game show audience applauded in the background. My eyelids vibrated at ultra-high frequencies, his name always on my tongue, his voice always in my head. Then suddenly: darkness, silence—no candles flickered, no punch lines slacked around my ankles. “Hello love,” I sang to stars before they dipped behind cloud cover. A day would pass too slowly. Another would take its sweet time. “Are you trying to break my heart?” I scribbled on a Post-it note then stuck it to the tailwing of a mourning dove. “Goodnight,” I whispered into an empty soup can attached to a string. Then, on the ten o’clock news: half of California bobbed in the Pacific, a rift formed along a fault line. “I’m coming to L.A.,” I shouted into vulgar daylight, “I’m coming before it’s too late.” A response: “It’s already too late,” Paul said, “You know we have no future.” Darkness darkened; silence hissed. The east coast had seen the sun permanently set so I walked west. I walked until my legs said stop. They finally gave way outside St. Louis. By then it was morning. By then I was someone different. *** Paul and I spoke recently; it’s been years. I said, “Sometimes I have these dreams—” He said, “When can I see you?” I said, “When earth finally falters on its axial tilt and each place where we loved smoulders under too much sun or withers under too much moon, and then, through the prodigious impulse of propagation, flourishes again under a new air, a new name. Then, then I’ll see you again.”
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SUNSPOTS by Dave Read
upon a wall of light I read in sunspots the story of my headache
BEHIND TREES by Dave Read
behind trees folded like hands no one suspected the forest was bluffing
photograph by Sheri L. Wright
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
SMOKE AND FOG by Anne Whitehouse On one side of the road was ice and fog, on the other, smoke and fire. We were driving by the river while the fire burned above us a quarter-mile away. Cool on the driver’s side, and on the passenger’s, the closed window glass was hot to the touch. Suffocating smoke billowed into the air, suffusing the atmosphere like waterless blood. The river was clogged with floes of ice melting in a sudden thaw. Drawn out of the snowmelt, a hazy fog hung low over the water. Above our heads, above the roof of the car, the smoke from the fire met the fog off the ice. The road took us straight up the middle, as if that were a choice we were free to make.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
FATHER DAMIAN, 1956 by Dennis Vanvick Father Damian sat at the solid oak desk in the rectory. He loved this desk, with its brass corner protectors and drawer handles and the mother-of-pearl crucifix on its top, left as a gift by his predecessor when Father Damian took over this small parish. The desk’s inert gravitas granted him authority. It also served to garner respect and awe. A bit of fear was also part of the equation. Father Damian was preparing words for a memorial service for a parishioner who had been a mechanic. He pulled open the file drawer and fingered through the folders to find “Manual Labourer.” It contained germane references about the dignity of working with one’s hands and the well-worn quote from Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” He would embellish, say something about God’s role as the great mechanic of the universe. He smiled. Perfect. The mechanic left behind an alcoholic wife and a twelve-year-old son needing male guidance. Father Damian wrote a note reminding him to call the mother and schedule a visit. Perhaps the boy was interested in becoming an altar boy. Chuck, the latest, was simply not working out. Fourteen was too old for an altar boy. Eleven to thirteen was ideal, when they were still malleable, before they became too sure of themselves, before the testos-
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terone began raging, when it was still possible to influence, to channel. Plus, the boy always recoiled a bit when Father Damian innocently draped an arm over his shoulders and he had refused a sip of wine after Communion, alone with Father in the Sacristy. He also neglected to sign up for Father’s camping trips for fatherless boys, up north in Itasca State Park, celebrated as the headwaters of the Mississippi. Chuck would never experience the joys of the outdoors and the undeniable thrill of male camaraderie out in the wilds and never hear Father Damian say, “If any of you are scared you can bring your sleeping bag into my tent. Don’t be ashamed, everybody feels afraid sometimes.” Father Damian, known by his flock as a teller of fearsome ghost stories, sat on a log in front of a blazing campfire, his flushed face unearthly and distorted by the flames below. The boys sat across the fire while Father Damian spoke in a deep growly voice about the hunters who had recently come upon corpses ripped apart and partially devoured by beasts not found in the boys’ natural science texts. After he doused the fire—when his face had regained its innocuous who me aspect in the moonlight—he again told the boys not to be ashamed of their fear, simply unzip his tent fly and come in. Foreboding virgin pines loomed dark around the campsite, their higher branches undulating and keening in the wind, a mournful, wistful sound.
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WATCHING HER RED
by Amy Haas
Red polish slides from cuticle to tip; the way a broom sweeps dirt. She narrows her eyes under chandelier light, humming as if nothing is happening. But it is—and has before. I watch her softness harden red while wet polish reflects countenance in each crystal the chandelier dangles and drops in front of her.
FOUND AND LOST by Howard Winn Why do we wonder that there is something instead of nothing? Is infinity better than zero?
photograph by Sheri L. Wright
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
SAVE AS DRAFT? by Jacob Buckenmeyer She sent him a playful, sarcastic text message back––Fiiine without any punctuation––but he couldn’t remember what had been fine and he wasn’t at all interested in scrolling through their history to find out. He was watching reality TV with the volume down––a show about a dysfunctional family business that maybe had to do with cars or tattoos, or maybe both–– lounging on the couch in the dark when the text came through. He tossed the phone back onto the ottoman when he saw it was from her. The matriarch of the family had her hands on her hips; she stood outside the family home or business, or both, in a gravel back alley and hollered in a shrill voice at one of her adult sons as he tore off in a shiny brown Nissan. Eyes still on the TV, he reached again for his cell to check her message––still Fiiine. He flipped open the phone’s mini-keyboard and was about to text her back when another message came through from her and he opened it. This time it said, talk soon? The whole family crowded around a little work table, eating dinner and talking shop; nobody agreed how they should move forward so everybody repeated their opinions three or four times, their voices rising until the son pushed away from the table and stormed
out. The shaky camera moved in close on the matriarch’s face and focussed there––her expression blank as she watched him go. He hit Reply and a blank message popped up. He glanced from the phone to the TV and back to the phone, realized he had nothing to put there. He pressed Cancel and the phone asked whether he wanted to save the blank message as a draft. No. “There’s nothing even there to save,” he said out loud, to the phone or to the TV. The matriarch came from the backroom into the parlour and caught the same adult son leafing through a magazine with his boots up on the counter as two customers wandered through looking at displays in glass cases. The son rolled his eyes at his mother and she stepped toward him and shoved his legs down to the floor. He stood up and towered over her and they got into a shouting match right there in front of the customers and the TV camera crew. The credits rolled down one side of the screen and on the other were equally-dramatic highlights from next week’s episode. He cycled through his other recent texts to see whether there might be one from someone else––someone he actually wanted to hear from––but he couldn’t imagine just then who that might be.
UMBRELLA MAN by Ray Scanlon Beard, thin, black umbrella. Passes bench, sits on platform. Eye contact. Mistake. “It starts to rain, I open the umbrella, I’m okay. Stops raining, I close it, and I’m good.” More: found abandoned, plastic ribs for good eversion recovery, sketchy runner jams, hangs it from a karabiner to dry. Didactic Gump leaves me in peace only when he boards the train. Haven’t met his ex-wife, but I have a theory about the divorce.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
ON A RUNDLE MALL BENCH by Charles Leggett God-awful techno disco sonic garbage from the Jetty Surf Shop to my right but from behind me to my left I hear, forlorn and wordless, gently squealed, a chant —indigenous?—of long, gnarled vowels drawn from deep within the singer’s bottomless throat. People streaming past, on cell phones, pushing prams; in grade school uniforms; some smoking cigarettes, some drinking sodas, holding hands or carrying purses, bags or backpacks. The incantation dwindles and dies out but soon resumes, unaltered—and transforms the scene into a promenade of ghosts the more affecting for their nonchalance, crepuscular in tones if not in light. *** What I cannot explain is how I never found—was it time, as busy as I was with notebook, pen, Cohiba, all the ghosts or was it more the nerve?—to turn and see just who that prehistoric vocalize was coming from. I couldn’t even tell you if it was man or woman, let alone what had been worn, or what if anything was sought, or in what posture. An omission I often question, and don’t quite regret. —Adelaide, South Australia, March 2002
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WHAT THEY HEARD by Ray Scanlon
A distant large-bore motorcycle does a slow glissando towards its red line. Some soul damns itself to perdition practicing on drums. A plaintive killdeer patrols the edges of the paved acres. But mostly it’s the wind. An unlatched Plexiglass showcase door slams alternately open and shut. Gust-driven sand hisses off parked cars. Discarded plastic rolls, skids, tumbles across the asphalt. Scraping. Horseless clip-clops.
photograph by Paul Francis
HOW THEY WALKED by Ray Scanlon
A guy with four days’ white stubble and gimpy leg soldiers on with his asymmetric rolling gait towards the train. A grey stooped woman trudges out of the funeral home, easing her fragile bubble of resigned inwardness through a universe suddenly sharp and viscous. A tall twenty-something woman carries poise, confidence, and under her arm a hula hoop. We agree that this amuses the cosmos and exchange smiles as we pass.
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
I CAN STILL by E. Suzin Odlen
Your bathrobe still hangs on a hook behind the bedroom door. I rub my face in the soft fleece, hunting for the scent of you, but it’s gone. For comfort, I lean on the door and press my body against the robe’s length. I remember when I bought it for you. It was the colour that sold me, a luscious shade of green, a cross between honeydew melon and kiwi. I could taste this colour but couldn’t name it. The perfect word eluded me…this shadowy green. Perfect. Eluded. It hid, like a cat under a bed, or something stashed in the back of a cupboard, or a crab in the sand. “You have a way with words; you’ll find it,” you told me. And then, “Asparagus?” you asked, trying to be helpful. You favoured the robe for lounging, instead of sweats or jeans. I’d study you in it, dreaming of the right word, but it was always lurking. Seafoam? Jade? And when I’d ask, “What colour is your robe?” You’d smile and say, “Green.” “Is it similar to the ocean in the Turks and Caicos
Islands?” I’d ask. “It’s similar,” you’d say. But the colour didn’t matter to you. The robe was comfortable, easy to slip on, and that was enough. I was the one who craved definition, as if pinning down this colour could give it permanence. Permanence. It wasn’t until a year after you passed that I found the word. Did you point me to it? I was in bed, admiring little objects displayed in the room, tucked between books or perched on top of them. And there it was, not five feet away… my collection of sea glass. And that indescribable colour popped into my head: sea glass. Sea glass. I told you you’d find it. We were on a beach in Nice. The sand was dark and gravelly, not like the white silk that lines the Jersey shore. I searched for shells, as I did on any beach, every beach, while you bathed in the sun, and that’s when I spotted the tiny shards of glass, shimmering like emeralds in the rough sand. I can still feel the joy in my fingertips as I scooped them up. I can still hear them tinkle like bells when I shook my fist. I can still.
HER HANDS by Jo Malby
A little girl giggled by the fountain as her daddy covered his face then appeared again. Her hands, small as buttercups, splashed him and their laughter peppered the air like chimes on a summer breeze. I watched, patient in the shadows. Like a crocodile cooling from the midday sun, except these tears are real. They fall like pins onto my dress, forever pricking my soul, keeping it in mourning. It doesn’t go away, my friend had said, but it does get easier. Memories such as these don’t fade. They linger in the body that once held life, however briefly, and that emptiness, it stings. Her absence is still felt as sharply as the moment I woke without her soft strawberry heart beating inside me,
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never again to see its red light pulsing on the hospital screen. Life is such a fraud, a trick of the light. Don’t give up, they say, don’t give in, but my heart, that heart, it knows. It pounds deep in my chest and keeps waiting, like a tea set that is always there but never used. Though now it’s too delicate, its paint too faded. It’s long past being dusted down and drank from. Besides, no one drinks from those kinds of cups anymore. I watched again, the water and the girl. My daughter would be nine now. Her hair like mine, eyes too, wide and blue, smiling. Her entire life was like my mother’s engagement ring flashing only briefly in the sun.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal She would stand proudly, no matter the scandal of her occupants, for there would be scandal. In a house such as this, the visitors would arrive in their motorcars a little too early and dine and laugh and dance a little too late, then something untoward would always occur. Guests would fall out of their bedrooms and tiptoe together in whispers, their gowns and silken suits shimmering in the candlelight, their faces taut and uncertain as they search and look and murmur in the dark. Perhaps it was the butler, he always had an odd manner. Or maybe that maid…or groundsman or the footman. Did you see? For if she were a house she’d be as haunted as she is in life and the guests—like the servants—would keep moving around her like ghosts, even long after the visitors were dead and gone.
RESEARCH by Sossity Chiricuzio
I love libraries. Rooms full of books, made just for books, with answers just waiting to be found. Stories and legends and science and magic. Love and sorrow and laughter and mystery. Safety. There’s no shouting or pushing or competing allowed. No little kids yelling, no grownups too busy to talk. Just helpful librarians and other people reading. Just the world I pick. Like a colouring book in my mind, I fill in the details, and the hero can look like me. The smell of books, the hidden alcoves at the ends of rows, the formed plastic chairs like a cupped hand. My legs going numb from dangling over the hard lip of the seat, my shoulders and head all curved into the world between those covers. Squinting in the light when it flickered, automatically, all attention inward. Almost locked in more than once, so that the librarians learned to check for me in the depths of physical sciences or psychology, any books nobody tends to read, before leaving. I read the entire Alice in Wonderland series, not just the first part that they made all soft for Disney, the real story. The conflict and the angst and the tension. The confusion. The real stuff dressed up as fiction. I read every book of mythology and find some hints of comfort in goddesses and amazons and warrior queens. I’m looking for the women that aren’t afraid. The girls that are smart. The way out. I travel to Narnia and Pern and Mars and am still disappointed when I get there. It still ends in a kiss I don’t want. A man who knows more. A woman who is a support beam. A cook stove. A baby carriage. A stranger in a strange land. A woman on the edge of time. The last unicorn.
FLOATING DAWN by Tom Conlan
She wakes in darkness and rises slowly. Southern summer air hangs heavy over the pending day. Coffee, just one cup, is brewed, and she grips the cup, circles her strong yet delicate and tanned fingers around the ceramic mug. She dresses light, for no-one will see, and steps across the sill. Grass slips between her toes. Wet with dew. A broad, sweeping lawn breaks before her, and she ambles slowly down the slope. Finding the pointed vessel lying in tall weeds at the edge of the water, she lifts, then flips, and shakes remnants of rain. A lone spider scurries away but she does not see. Rather, she stares up at the grey sky. The first signs of day begin to sweep over the bay, and like a mother, hold her thoughts warmly. She nudges the kayak along the ground and into the water, steadies the gunwale with both hands, both arms taut and extended, and slides into the cockpit, while at the same time, she reaches for the two ended paddle, and pushes off. Dark waves emanate from the movement of the vessel’s hull. Gliding now, she paddles out, ever outward, ever deeper into the fluid, water world. She leaves behind fettered, earthly ties and floats free. Forgets the hurt, and nothing matters save her pacing, her concentration, and her balance. She loses time, and looking up after moments or years, sees the sun beginning to break the horizon, and sees the pink and purple and gold reflected on the bay, through dimples of wake her vessel has created.
IF SHE WERE A HOUSE by Jo Malby
If she were a house she’d be a grand one with secrets, one with dark rooms and darker corridors to which no one knows where they lead. A house with servants that move around her like ghosts, humble and silent. With carved staircases and fine empty rooms with fires that still crackle even when no-one is home.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
ENGLISH LESSONS IN THE STRAWBERRY FIELD by Gina Williams The woman does not speak until noon. She is small and thin, her face soft, eyes too creased. The smell of smashed berries and earth and sweat rises. I watch her hands fly. The lunch horn sounds. The sun is high and hot. I pull a sandwich and a mason jar of milk from my backpack, push my hat down low. She sits cross-legged four feet away, slowly eating rice balls, sipping from a small thermos. There are other kids my age scattered around, telling stupid eleven-year-old jokes, throwing bread crusts at each other. She looks up, points at my jar of milk. “What name?” she asks. When she smiles, I can see one black tooth. “This?” She nods. “Milk.” She repeats it, “Mirk.” No, “Miiilllk.” We laugh, and so it begins, new words, pointing. Sky, grass, cloud, spider, sandwich, apple, rose. “Me, Rose Vu. From Saigon.” A home, after supper, my Dad puts on his old reel movies taken in Vietnam, his war flickering in one dimension. We sit in the dark eating popcorn, laughing at his silly mustache, how skinny he was then in his white sailor’s uniform. But now I think of Rose as fighter jets take off from the aircraft carrier, the Victory at Sea soundtrack swelling in the background on our old record player. I think of how her hands flew, how she never dropped a berry. I think of new words to show her tomorrow.
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THE BIRD WOMEN OF WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA by Ingrid Jendrzejewski They lie in flocks on the beach, tangled amidst the seaweed, their sinewy, sun-stained bodies sprawled amidst sand and terry cloth. They watch the ships with unblinking eyes, nictating membranes twitching with the breeze that comes in from the sea. Their limbs are wet with oils, and the smells of herring and coconut emanate from their crevices. I walk awkwardly among them, blanched, puffy, foreign. I am from a different clime, a place where the sun is weak and clouds rule supreme, a place where feet are cased in leather and briefcases are wielded as weapons. I am afraid of them, these bird women of sand and salt. When they see me, they point their sharp beaks in my direction and stare with the forward-facing eyes of birds of prey.
photograph by Paul Francis
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
GUM SCRAPER by Raul Palma
The boy has learned to appreciate this time of day when commuters caught in rush-hour begin to flick on their headlights even though the sky is not yet black. Streetlamps gradually hum to full brightness. And palmetto bugs, enamoured by the light, swarm, clumsily bumping around. Hundreds gather under the yellow canopy at the 57th Avenue Shell station, seeking out mates, warmth, crossing antennae. Below, commuters form lines. They wait to pull in and refuel. This isn’t the best time to drag out the orange cones and block off a pump, but the manager’s grandson has little else to do. He sits on the smooth concrete, pouring paint thinner over globs of dried gum. Though he has a scraper, its blade is dull and not so effective. Too often, the gum doesn’t let loose of the ground, so the boy digs into it with his blade or picks at it with his fingers. But there is so much dried gum on the floor, so much dirt packed into it—black circles upon black circles—mint interposed with cinnamon or bubbalicious, fruity-tutee. Some men lean against their cars, ties undone. They browse through their phones, or smoke cigarettes in spite of the “flammable” warnings, or consider the relationship between gallons and dollars. They ignore the boy, the roaches, the sound of the blade digging into
the concrete, the slums that surround the filling station. The boy pounds at the concrete while male and female hookers pace back and forth on the sidewalk, while sirens blare in the distance, while his grandfather sits inside and counts money. A grown man, bearded, barefoot, sits with the boy, asks him if he needs any help. The boy ignores him. “Estas haciendo lo mal,” the man says. He takes the scraper and the paint thinner. Using his thumbnail, the man indents small crosses onto a piece of dried gum, pools paint thinner over it. “Ahora esperamo,” he says. “We wait.” And so they watch the paint thinner snake along the concrete, and watch cars enter, fuel, and depart. After some time, the man gently slides the blade under the gum, which rises and curls up like a hollow cigarette, revealing a pink underlining. The boy takes the gum, looks through it like a telescope. He sees the city lights, the patrons paying, and his grandfather rushing out to the pumps. His grandfather yells at the man, tells him to leave the grounds, and so the man does, walking south, towards another well-lit station. The boy watches him, walking past all those cars stuck in traffic, on a sidewalk that is also caked with gum.
LANZAROTE MORNING: THE CANARY ISLANDS by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
The water is violet, turquoise, and there’s a strip of white at the horizon, edging into a fresco blue sky. It is early morning; the only sounds the insistent coos of doves and the wind sifting through feathered leaves of pineapple palms. I am waiting for the lustrous stream of silver on water that will wash over the sea when the sun burns away the early morning clouds. Behind me are sand hills, burnt ombre, sienna, rising to the sky like pyramids. Here there is so much stark colour: the thick green of cactus, the bright yellow of the prickly
Issue
pear blossoms, the magenta of hibiscus, and the flaming orange of birds of paradise. The colour is a savoured taste, a breath of pleasure caught in the throat. This is a landscape that stops time, memory, loss. Settles my restive heart. For others it is a barren badlands of volcanic earth, lava and ash, and jet black slabs of boulders staggered to the sea. But for me this petrified land absorbs my body, my flesh, my past. I dissolve into the scene. There is nothing left to mourn.
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Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
DISCLOSURES
EXPRESS LANE
Reading my words in an old journal, I am stopped by the word “minute.” Somewhere in the joining of the n and the u I see my mother’s hand, her careful Palmer method slipped into my casual scrawl. She surprises me like that now peeking out from a chip in an ironstone dish, whispering words from an old song, calling my name as I wake.
After the bald man emptied three items from his basket to the conveyer belt: foot powder, mouthwash, hemorrhoid cream, the young cashier erupted with laughter
by V. Jane Schneeloch
by Brandyn Johnson
that broke into sobs. She disappeared into Employees Only. He shrugged & stared down wiping his palms on corduroy pockets, raining fuzz to the tiles at his feet. While her replacement bagged his items, holding out his change: snapped up into yellow fingers, the glass-eyed girl peeked through the plastic
IMPRESSIONS: SEARCY COUNTY by Ryan W. Murphy
This is cloud country crack of rifle setting sun howling dog wrinkled men at the lumber store in stained shirts hickory trees on a ridge dry creek tumbled stone the cut of cliff high on 65 county history in the library basement musty leather volumes of deeds the barefoot mother her blue dress in line at the grocery store. August fogs make December snows The lifted fingers in passing trucks a limping woodchuck a bird of paradise snatches a dragonfly in the breeze by night, the steady west wind the whine of a distant engine.
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ribbons of curtain. The automatic door malfunctioned, he wrung the air from his bag with a twirl in the moment of pause, ready to get home where nobody would ask.
NOMEN
by Claire T. Feild Her name is Love, for she not only stitches lightning’s edges, but she also savours the taste of a heap of tornadoes. After she dies, she is left to become one with soil’s worms, the caretaker for her wounds nonchalant, having been mentally lame since birth, a floater from town-to-town.
a floater from town-to-town.
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photograph by Sheri L. Wright
HOOPOE
by Kim Peter Kovac The Hoopoe circles over desert cliffs like a soaring Farsi poem.
CEREMONY by Danielle Susi
I mourned for you before anyone else. Abandoned your patterns in the doorjamb. Here are footprints and fingerprint fossils left in dust. We collect their image for an album. Perpetual motion of memory. Careful curatorial eye of gatherer. Ceremony of the air.
MACHETE VS. YAKUZA by Kim Peter Kovac
Alone between the cellblock and danger, the enlightened escapee, fleeing the guardhouse, handily instigates a Japanese jailhouse killing, lancing with a magical machete, neatly offing his opponent. With precise quickness, he reverses course, sprinting toward an uber-unearthly vanishing point, a way to a walkabout in western Oz: Xanthippe, a yakuza-free zone.
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
SAATVIK’S MASTERPIECE by Vaidehi Patil Each layer of Saatvik’s disintegrating canvas exposed an older trend. For a decade he had waited—letting the canvas get ready, poster by poster, outside the city’s most reputable art gallery. And now he greedily worked away; revealing hidden strokes, forgotten colours, disputed originals and debated interpretations. Long, knobbly, rubied fingers removed strips and patches with dexterous care, painting without paints, keeping a remnant of one show, removing a sliver of another. He did not answer the curious public, not even those who seemed genuine lovers of art. “It may bias what is in my head, the struggle for explanation,” he said through confident rips of paper. That night, an opportunistic media-man posted a snapshot of the unfinished piece on the web. By morning, the art world had debated itself out on what it conveyed. And so the decade-long wait to create his masterpiece was wasted, when Saatvik hadn’t even unveiled half of what he thought his brilliant mind held. But minds change fast, in the post-modern world. “A snapshot of our city’s art history, through the last decade, layer by layer,” he told the media-man and got away with it, having been famous for decades himself. No-one said he pulled a Duchamp. The original was carefully removed from the wall and auctioned off for a grand sum. The excited curator documented the masterpiece on a beautiful print. Outside the now even more famous gallery, the print stayed for a week before the artist for the next exhibit covered it with his shiny new poster. A decade later, Saatvik worked at another try—after being cited as an old fraud by some; by others, a much debated, misunderstood artist. Long, knobbly, dirt-lined fingers removed strips and patches with dexterous care, painting without paints, keeping a remnant of one show, removing a sliver of another. This time, he wouldn’t let it be clicked. Nor would he expose the bottom-most layer of his new canvas.
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CHEAP
by Olivia Stearn
i live on fingernails and boxed wine. by forced compliments on my shoes. they used to be nice but then the streets cut them up and ate them.
NIGHT SHUTS IN by Frank William Finney
The night nurse scares my veins apart. Under the staircase the games are in gear. The curtains exhale as I creep down the hall. The floorboards complain of side effects. The shape appears. The trial begins. Under the blankets I cover my tracks. photograph by Sheri L. Wright
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
KEEPING THE DEAD by Chanel Brenner 1. Desmond finds a hummingbird on our front porch, kneels over its stillness. I don’t want to bury it in the dirt, he says. 2. He wants to put it in a box, keep it in his room, take care of it forever, he says. 3. At night: Mommy, is Riley with me? I think of his brother’s clothes resting in the drawers below his bed, their little carcasses all lined up.
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#12
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
THE VETERAN by Katherine Bonnie Bailey From here I can see the wrinkles etched deeply into his leathery skin. Not faint lines, but grooves. Grand Canyons. I can see how faded his blue T-shirt is, almost grey. And I can see the gaping holes in his tattered jeans, exposing already reddened flesh to the sun. He paces back and forth on a square of sidewalk then turns and makes his way to the street corner. His shuffling gait makes it obvious he’s suffered some injury. His hip, maybe? Or his knee? Something is wrong, but I can’t pinpoint it. From the park bench across the street, I can’t make out all the details. The grime—the filth that must cake the man—is not visible at this distance. But I know it’s there. The dark smudges under his eyes, produced by many sleepless and uncomfortable nights, aren’t distinguishable. But I know they must be present. The sadness, the pain in his lowered gaze, is aimed at the ground, hidden from my eyes. But his hunched shoulders give it away. A lady with a shopping bag passes him on her way to the crosswalk and ignores his outstretched hand. A businessman in a suit, probably on his lunch break, is close on her heels. He gives the man a glance. Nothing more. Several others follow. A mother with two
children, a young man in slacks and a buttondown. An occasional dollar, a handful of change. But no words are spoken, and the smiles are one-sided. As I watch, the man sits down on the blazing hot concrete, his head in his hands, his cardboard sign propped against his knee. It reads “VETERAN PLEASE HELP.” The large letters are written shakily in black marker. I could go to him. I could ask him about his life. Where did he grow up? Who does he love? And, maybe more importantly, who loves him? How many stories does the man on the corner have to tell? He looks up, maybe because he feels my eyes on him. He catches my gaze and smiles, the wrinkles receding even farther into his skin. He raises a hand. A friendly gesture that seems strange coming from this abject figure. My breath stops short. My heart races. I am overcome with embarrassment and shame, and not just because I was caught staring. Why, then? I attempt a smile, but it isn’t much. I don’t cross the street. I don’t ask him about his life. I don’t even offer him the change that litters the bottom of my purse. My gaze falters, and my cheeks grow hot. I look away.
MEN AT WORK #86 by Robert Laughlin Nelson, a restaurant owner The two factors that matter most are prevailing wind direction and nearby foot traffic. That’s why the location I picked was perfect. Our fans are designed to direct cooking aromas outside, and the wind usually blows them at the people going into or out of the street entrance of the busiest subway station in town. As our motto says: churches promise salvation, Nelson’s Steak House promises salivation.
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#12
photograph by Amy Haas
THE HOUSE ON AGATE STREET by Cyn Bermudez
When I was eleven years old, I packed a small plastic bag with a week’s worth of clothes and my favourite book and stayed in an old abandoned house down the street, something I had seen my older sister do when she was angry with my mother. Two other teens sheltered there—a boy and girl—they took a spot near the ashen fireplace, charred wood scorched the firebrick. They held hands and kissed and asked me questions: what my name was and why was I there; we all slept under a thin cotton throw on cold concrete, the wooden floor boards ripped from the ground. The smell of dust and mould filled every corner, every break in the wall, the crumbling popcorn ceiling. A teenaged boy named Mason, who rode around the neighbourhood on his bicycle, brought us scraps of half-eaten corn ears and burnt tortillas and day-old cold chicken. We feasted on the floor, a turned over crate the finest table, our food on plastic bag plates. Mason called the lovebirds Elvis and Marilyn and every time they’d chuckle. Elvis played music on a guitar he had bought with six whole dollars, money he saved cleaning yards and cashing in plastic bottles at a Five and Dime. He strummed the chords and Marilyn watched him dreamily. Elvis was going to be a big star someday, Marilyn his wife. He’d build her a house in the woods; she’d be safe there. He said I could come too. Marilyn put her arm around me and said of course. Mason said he’d bring the food.
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
WHITE TOWELS by Ralph Monday
Clean white towels were all she ever used. No coloureds, no stripes, no beach towels with tropical designs set to create an imaginary vacation.
Opened like a discovered ancient tomb, mothball smell whispered out from a chest filled with white towels as though this was a burial shroud not meant to ever be seen.
After the morning shower a white towel like an artic snowstorm ballooned about her damp form, and she wiped dry as though an athlete toweling down from a race.
Underneath the milky fabric was a smaller box, when opened more hand towels, and in those, white envelopes now yellowed, sitting silent as observant snow owls, filled with letters.
They sat everywhere in baskets like nesting hens, the living room, bedroom, bathroom, den. Sometimes I thought they followed her around like a genie riding a magic carpet.
Trembling like a thief afraid to be discovered, a voyeur peering in the window at her naked form, I sorted them through my hands. Most were postmarked from over a quarter century earlier.
At the morning toilet, towel covering her hair, draped around her slender form, she would sit with a snow hand towel and wipe her face as though rubbing through the skin to erase
I read through the words of an angry lover, mad words, insane words, hurtful phrases rocked in bitter cadences. Hate and scorn and sorrow and bitterness as alive now,
something buried deep, some inner tremor that shook her like earthquake aftershocks. I always wondered why this obsession with white, but I never asked.
fresh as a morning flower opening to the sun preparing for another day of experience before the night closes in with dark sounds and forest visions.
Until one morning rummaging through the closet for shoes, I struck something hard as a doornail bundled in a white shroud. I removed the cloth. Beneath, an oak chest painted white.
The text locked away in white like the bridal garter at the bottom of the box, a final note removed from smooth skin, two messages no longer read.
SUMMER OF 16 by Sossity Chiricuzio
The stars seem closer than usual, even accounting for the fact that I’m up a tree. The storm pushes them towards me, or me to them. The leaves flatten against the wind, dream of flying free. Or maybe that’s me again. The lightning stretches blue white light across the length of time worn mountains and the back of my eyelids. My skin is tingling from widows peak to toes curled tight against peeling bark. I’m snugged into a thick crook, hugging the trunk, head back and mouth open to better taste
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the ozone. To better smell the creosote, wet for thunder. Want is deep in me like a jagged splinter, invisible pressure on a bundle of nerves, impossible to grasp with my fingers. All I’ve known of sex is pain. Passive and stolen away. This rough tumbling of air and electricity, this press of sap and breath and gravity, is another channel entirely. I want to open up like roots to water. Want to climb the sky.
#12
photograph & poem by Daniel von der Embse
PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER, AFRICA, 1943 You sit there your eyes saying things I never heard when you were here This is the only image I keep of you In the photograph you are always twenty-four daring with a cigarette balancing in your mouth and a .45 in your hand Is that a dead body at your feet?
Did you kill him? Did he try to kill you? I forgot to ask you before you left Next to you, your lieutenant the man for whom I am named is saying something, funny perhaps, to take your minds away from the killing work you did today
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
REVELATION
ELEGANT
by Ralph Monday
by Claire T. Feild
When you swam naked toward me and climbed golden and dripping onto the pier, I thought of
She holds her teacup a certain distance from her nose, her Mother counting in her head each time her daughter takes grand by the hand.
several things: where you had said that birdseed is like thoughts, the husk must be peeled away to find the electronic core, eaten, digested, passed through day’s system as something fledgling like a star bursting from its gaseous cocoon, or microscopic creatures swimming in a raindrop— all unnoticed until the moment the ordinary is stripped away and we see with unabated eyes. Like I spy you now, an ancient story of a woman bare in her glory moving not toward a sexual moment, but of amber honey in a jar, bee churned out for winter’s frigid desolation. Your smile when you towel long auburn hair is like the bee kissing the flower’s liquid thoughts, and I know that there is faith in the faithless, pebbles rubbed raw by tide’s unceasing swell.
SHE COMES ON TUESDAYS by Jane Downing
She comes on Tuesdays, sometime between five and six, depending on the traffic. I hear her tread on the gravel and have the door open before she gets there, even in winter when the cold nips to the bone. Hello Nonna, how has your week been? She bends to kiss me, and lately she needs to lean in farther because I am shrinking. Age pushes down on you so. It’s always the best china and the teapot with the roses—the things we brought with us from the Old Country. I tell her how far the cake plate under the lamingtons has come, and who gave us the spoons as a wedding gift. She’ll often scald her lips, she drinks her tea that fast. Nonna, you should write these stories down. She says this every week. Her words smell of chocolate and coconut. It is only as I sit here at the table with Giorgio’s fountain pen in my hand, the one they gave him when he retired, that I realize why she says it. Write it down, Nonna. She has been brought up well: she is far too polite to say her Nonna’s remembrances bore her. She cannot bring herself to tell me to simply shut-up with the stories. The only irritating noise my writing makes is the scratch of nib on paper. Issue
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But the daughter resents this therapy her mother calls divine by diving into an old pair of jeans and staying that way, even when it is time to go to church. The word compromise floats in the air between the two extremes, two helpings of fig preserves between them producing just the amount of sugar needed for a long-needed amendment in their lives: a reconciliation.
MEN AT WORK #87 by Robert Laughlin
Doug, a junior executive I owe my perfect GPA—my graduation, really—to a sure instinct for finding professors in need of a boytoy. The company started me above the usual manager trainee step, and frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing, but with any luck, I’ll be off the payroll before they notice. I vetted the company officers before I applied here, and there are plenty of unmarried lady execs looking for the right man or recovering from the wrong one. I’ll never get rich any other way; being a trophy husband is all right with Yours Truly. #12
photograph by Sheri L. Wright
QUARANTINED
by Claire T. Feild
Set apart because she has MERS, she wonders if she will ever get well.
COPE
She thinks of her immune system as a set of defective cells, all arguing with each other to see who will take its learning to scientists and and who will drop like flies.
by Lauren Camp At her job in the city, she tended a strict list of events and occasions while her employer shook fistfuls of anger and paced with impatience. The girl dreaded the spreadsheet of vocation, the dolling of self, the clothes and approach for a cause. She never could pose in a posture of perfect remarks. She ate slices of insults and tallied her future. The work gave her headaches and hungers. When each day ended, she tasted a small loss of position then entered the subway, the number 6 train travelling towards a nude night to the north, her ride home emptied of stars. Sun dropped over corrugated shoulders of buildings like wool, and her heart grasped new reasons to hide.
SCENT
by Olivia Stearn i bought an atomizer. a-t-o-m-i-z-e-r. at a flea market it’s broken. but i couldn’t spell it so now it’s mine.
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
THE PREDATOR PLAYS PIANO by Frank William Finney
‘Madamina! Il catalogo.’ Mozart’s Don Giovanni
Rigoletto turns red and takes a bow. A suite in A minor follows the gigue. He takes blues to breakfast. A maestro on a mission. Takes the Trout to lunch in Tupperware. He seasons his supper with tempo robato. Imagines dessert spiced with Kinderscenen. Now I’ve heard that he’s fond of the Glockenspiel. But they say he plays God on a baby grand. He’s promised a concert in the garden this evening. He’ll tickle the birdbath with a surge and a splashdown— He’ll make waves in the dark all the way to Bulgaria. His Moonlight Sonata will tickle the stars.
RAIN SWEPT by Fariha Eshrat
It started as a tapping on the car bodies, the wind whistling between the palm leaves beckoning for more and then it went rampant. A wave of exhilaration must’ve been thundering across the skies, maybe the clouds were venting my overwhelming sensations… probably not though. It’s been a fine few years. But now my soul’s turned as barren as this desert’s farms, and my sweaty palms no longer suffice in bridging the moisture between my lids and this air. In Nigeria, we’d let the trees hide us from the rain—watch it as it invaded our fields, our rooftops, our hearts. All the rain tells me now is that we haven’t been “us” in forever, none of us go home anymore. Maybe if I returned home, if we all returned home, we could dissolve our worries in reliving our childhoods. We could hide under the banana leaves and watch the rain steal our breaths. Soak our sore hearts in the even stillness of rain drops smashing against mud. … It’s 4 p.m., the rain’s still tapping, my window’s still clear and my phone hasn’t rung in ages.
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OUR NEIGHBOUR’S VEGETABLES by Lauren Camp
We drive the two-lane road past trailer clutter and chickens every Saturday through summer to oversweep of storm and undershelves and drying racks, sacks of chile. The farm will flood, will dry out. He will plow potatoes under. Squash will set to seed. In winter the sun will thin in lonely phrasings. And rise again, already overcome with the next seam of green. We will drive the two-lane road next summer.
photograph by Terri Watrous Berry
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
Blind Date by Carol Cooper (an excerpt from the novel, One Night at the Jacaranda)
Christ! The fucking woman with her fucking notepad. She wasn’t writing now. But she was asking a shit-load of questions. Like ‘Whereabouts in Slovenia?’ Her eyes shone with enthusiasm. What kind of enthusiasm, he couldn’t tell. He just knew it was the wrong sort. “I was working in a tiny village. You probably wouldn’t know it unless you’d travelled around the country a bit.” “I’ve never been to Slovenia.” That was a relief. “But you should. It’s a beautiful country.” “So what’s the name of your tiny village?” “Kika.” Smooth recovery, that. Kika was no fucking village. It was his first dog, the one they’d had before his dad legged it. “Tell me about it.” “Not much to tell. Mainly farms. Couple of shops. Oh, and a school. Education is taken very seriously in Slovenia.” “Is there a church?” “Sure, there’s a church. And a place that fixes tyres. Everywhere’s got those. Because the roads are so bad, you see.” Nice touch, he told himself. Pat on the back. If you didn’t pat yourself on the back, nobody else was going to. The most basic life lesson ever. “What were you doing there?” “I was helping with some construction work.” “Really? And did you get to see much of the country?” “A bit. It’s pretty, especially the north of the country.” Nope, nothing wrong with the Slovenia story. It sounded just right. Nobody ever asked him what he was doing these days because they were so impressed by his little travelogue. “So what’s your job now?” OK, almost nobody. “Well, basically I collect, categorize and deal in classic computer games. They’re very popular.” Pure fucking genius, he told himself. Nobody who was that brilliant should have ever ended up behind bars. “Vintage computer games are so in right now.” Better be. They were the only kind he knew. She wasn’t taken in by this diversion. “Do you work for a small company? Or a large one?” Christ! She must be a copper or a lawyer. Whatever, she was exactly the type of woman to be avoided. “Well, it’s a newish company, not that big.” “I might know it. What’s it called?” That hooter didn’t come a moment too soon.
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#12
Vine Leaves
Literary Journal
I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE SKY SO BLUE by S. G. Larner
The chair wobbles under me. I toss the rope over the beam, and stare at it dangling, snake-like. It offers a return to ignorance, a rejection of the knowledge Eve grasped in both hands. Birds are singing. I don’t know what kinds of birds, and now I never will. I close my eyes and remember the YouTube instructions: hold the rope this way, pass it over, make a loop, pull it through. My hands are trembling but by the end they’re steady. A quick yank reassures me the construction is sound. Someone is cooking lamb. I hate the smell of lamb, it sinks into the pan and you can’t wash it out. Like depression. You can’t wash that out, either. A cool breeze sighs; my skin goosepimples and I shiver. I slip the noose over my head. The rope is rough and prickly against the skin of my neck. I gaze out at the world. The leaves of the eucalyptus are dark shadows against the oceanic sky. They sway with the wind. I have never seen the sky so blue.
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#12
photograph by Samantha Peterson
BUG
by Olivia Stearn he was stuck on his back legs flailing. i wouldn’t help. i wanted to see how it would end. he finally flipped over and died right then and there. i think i saw god in a beetle.