Wayne Literary Review 2017

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W AA Y N E

LI TERAR L IL I T E R A R

YNE A W YNE

WAY N E

F A C U L T Y

L I T E R A R Y

R E V I E W

A D V I S O R

M. L. Liebler

E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F + D E S I G N E R

Megha Krishnan A S S O C I AT E

E D I T O R

Natalie Steenbergh

C O N T R I B U T O R S

P O E T R Y Alan Harris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Anum Kamran Sattar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Ariel Mokdad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Brandon Marlon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Carla Schwartz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 C L Bledsoe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 David R. Bowman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Denise Sedman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Emily Leider. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Emma Rose Fagan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Evan Nowlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Franziska Ruprecht. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Gregory Loselle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 J A farina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Joseph Gjelaj. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Judith E. Johnston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Julia Grace Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Kevin Hoskinson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Kir pal Gordon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 K T Lowe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Leena Ghannam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Monica Noelle Simon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Nadia Ibrashi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Nicholas Abanavas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Nina E. Robb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Penelope Orsargos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Riley Olson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Robert Michael Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Sara Jayyousi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Sergio A. Oritz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Sharon M. Franco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Stefan Yambao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Thylias Moss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Tim Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Veronica Dale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Wendy Mannis Scher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

F L A S H F I C T I O N Alexandra Smereka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Allison Lee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Bill Gaythwaite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Debra Di Blasi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Tereza Rabelo Moreira. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Zach Trebino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

F I C T I O N Bill Sinyard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Claire Robbins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 James Nelligan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Jillian A. Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Katie Strine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 MacKenzie Bidinger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Mehgan Frostic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Michael Kolesky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Paul Douglas McNeill II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Peter O' Keefe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Piper Matlock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Rachel Hackett. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Vic Sizemore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

N O N F I C T I O N Alan Harris and Christian Wisner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Minahel Munir. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Kudaja Navarrete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Thylias Moss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 John G. Rodwan, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Myronn Hardy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 John Daniel Combs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

D R A M A Evan Guilford-Blake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Mary Grahame Hunter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

poetr y.

AL A N H A R R I S THE HARD QUESTIONS

The Celebrex bottle is child-proof much to the chagrin of the children hiding in shadows roaming the halls like echoes ominous but not threatening yet nudging her with silent whispers to admit that there’s no solace in sleep when haunted by questions like how will she open this bottle what day is it will anyone hear her final words anyone besides ghosts regrets and the bad memories she shares her bed with

Alan Harris is a hospice volunteer and graduate student who helps hospice patients write memoirs, letters, and poetry. Harris is the recipient of the 2014 John Clare Poetry Prize as well as the 2015 Tompkins Poetry Award from Wayne State University. Harris is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

His work has recently appeared in The Lake, Poetry Breakfast and The Great Lakes Review.

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ANUM KAMRAN SATTAR SAVIORS The long tailed fish of the lake sneered at the mudskipper’s small fins.

They ridiculed his peculiar features that he deserved only mud.

On the shore stood an old heron who was weak but wily.

And when she could not catch another fish she thought of a ruse to sate her appetite.

Said she to the unsuspecting fish You do not know why I am weeping.

So they beseeched her to tell them and the heron fabricated her tale well; While I was resting with my comrade herons I heard the fishermen scheme against you.

They had decided to drain the lake and take the whole lot of you.

And though the fish were quite alarmed the heron reassured them

Luckily there is a pond nearby which they will never dry.

And she directed them to a waterhole with her three front pointed toes; But be warned that to reach it 8

you must fly through the air.

Do take us! implored all the plump and wriggly fish.

At first, the heron refused to help them, but then gave away reluctantly to their plea and one at a time she flew off with them in her bill.

The mudskipper watched from the shallows as the heron swallowed the others.

I’ll trust to my own fins, he said and when she tried to stab him in the reeds all the heron received was a beak full of duckweed and muck.

Anum Sattar is a sophomore studying English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her poems have been published in the American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Off the Coast and Wilderness House Literary Review. Â Whenever possible, she reads out her work at Brooklyn Poets in New York City.

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A R I E L M O K D A D BOB MARLEY AND JIMI HENDRIX DISCUSS POLITICS IN A CROWDED BAR

The wrinkles on your face always point to a better place, yawned Jimi, ordering a Moscow mule.

Let me take over, Jimi says to the bartender because everyone knows the big mouth saves the day.

The old man discovered tulle wedding dresses in full organdy— couture state of being, with a craft brew ring around his finger.

Jimi woke up with mangos on his mind’s lost libido somewhere in the rainforest.

Bob walks into the bar, a wafting smell of patchouli draws lemurs from his waist along the floor.

I know how to make people fall in love, he whispers in the chaos of the crowd— he won’t out live the music.

Outside the pub, the brick road whines, melancholy is wedged between the meniscus of a freshly formed frown—dimples at the end of both Bob’s cheeks.

Along the line of his Achilles tendons are the strewn together hearts of all 10

the girls he’s dragged along.

Stir it up Jimi cries, reaching for another cocktail.

Ari Mokdad is an award winning , published poet and performance artist. She recently read in WSU’s Open Field Poetry Series, and she performed her major performance art piece at The Jazz Cafe at The Music Hall in Detroit. She divides her time between Detroit and Traverse City, MI.

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B R A N D O N M A R L O N TROPICS Ships furrow the waters out at sea while civilization’s refugees anneal on the beach, their pestering cares a world away.

By the quay a lone stevedore ignores heat and thirst, dragging hawsers along the towpath to moor crafts gently yet securely, his funicular expertise accrued over many seasons in austral regions.

Below the surface, migrating turtles pause to munch on seagrass meadows rich in essential nutrients while lemon sharks chase rays through the mangrove’s red roots growing in tidal shores and deluged twice daily with saltwater.

Aloft the torrid orb parches equally, the clime’s merciless overlord punishing by its very presence, conferring both favor and wrath, defiantly resisting twilight till the decisor nightfall settles the struggle.

Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. in Drama & English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry was awarded the Harry Hoyt Lacey Prize in Poetry (Fall 2015), and his writing has been published in 150+ publications in 23 countries. For more: www.brandonmarlon.com 12

C A R L A S C H W A R T Z M Y FAT H E R’S H I K I N G B OOT S On Saturdays, my father wakes to the old G.E. alarm that buzzes him from the open-jawed stupor he prefers, and bends around to push himself up from bed.

Now, his cranky knees slow him, so he wakes earlier to turn on the radio, swirls rinse between his cheeks, throws a couple of sweet potatoes in the nuker, to pack for lunch, fills a water bottle, fills a bowl with cereal, fills his time until he’s ready for the crapper.

He picks up his boots, the current ones, at the door — not the several pairs of never worn, next-in-lines, brands he trusts — Vasque, Keene, Teva, bought on sale over the years, waiting patiently in his closet.

How many of these pairs will remain unused when he’s gone?

He grabs his keys and poles and clicks the garage door open through the window.

Soon, he’ll blame the stones he trips on.

Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Aurorean, ArLiJo, Blue Fifth, Common Ground, Cactus Heart, Fourth River, Fulcrum, Mom Egg , Switched-on Gutenberg , Poetry Quarterly, Naugatuck River, Solstice, and Ibbetson Street. Find her book, Mother, One More Thing on Amazon.com. Her CB99videos youtube channel has 400,000+ views. Learn more at carlapoet.com, or wakewiththesun. blogspot.com.

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C L B L E D S O E BLINKING The souls of butterflies hover in the mirror like dead eyes which means they no longer feel any pain.

I pinned them there so they wouldn’t be lonely.

Always, a camera pointed behind us.

Always, a crack to slip through.

When we come out the other side, we won’t be able to hear how bad everything is for everyone back there anymore.

But they will continue to complain.

It’s something I’ve become accustomed to ignoring.

They don’t know I am the noise that keeps everything aloft. If I stop staring straight ahead for even a moment, the horizon will fall.

Maybe you think it’s you keeping it up.

Maybe it is.

You are yelling and you are yelling and that is a form of trying and you are saying I need to go outside and measure the exact distance from sound to action, from water to concussion grenade to oil to death. This is why everything glows, you say.

It’s because the smolder is too expensive to extinguish.

I will go.

I will see if this thing you can’t spell is true.

But you go first, and when you see my name already carved into a stone all you will know is how far it is to get back home.

This is how the night feels: like a nurse with two hours to go in her shift. The night needs sensible shoes, everyone to shut up and do what they’re told when someone who knows speaks.

She knows the best thing about ears is how easily lies flutter into them.

They blink on and off and on and off.

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This is the language of hope, sped up to match the seasons. There is a list which accuses me of having a name, of trying.

Things are going to get so much worse for everyone but me.

Pick a direction and hobble. Â

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R E V E L AT I O N

I lost my eyes on the way to work, replaced them with a couple of brown recluses that were hiding in my sleeves. They crawled in while I spent a decade asleep. Dreams are the hardest thing to remember. The reason you wanted to sleep is the hardest thing to forget. The spiders didn’t like the light, so I had to squint. All I could see were flies.

But at least I didn’t have to worry about maggots.

There’s a man with a gun at the gate who’s supposed to make sure only the right people get in, but every day he lets my boss through. I’m not trying to tell anyone the best way to die; we’ll all get there.

Do you want to know the story? There was a woman in the street, standing, her arms raised to the sky like that meant something outside of a movie.

I looked at her and she looked at me and that’s where they went.

At lunchtime, there were protestors with signs talking about the treatment of animals. I didn’t know if they counted spiders, so I went out the back.

The thing about signs is you can write anything on them. The same is true of the heart.

What I mean to say is that it’s not the maggots, it’s the necrotic venom, the inability to focus, never knowing that woman’s name as the light changed and someone behind me began to honk.

I thought it was trumpets announcing Revelation, but it was just some asshole trying to get to death faster.

CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of fifteen books, most recently the poetry collections Trashcans in Love and King of Loneliness and the flash collection Ray’s Sea World.

He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

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D A V I D R . B O W M A N M. C. E S C H E R’S WAT E R FA L L S “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible… I think… I think it’s in the basement… let me go upstairs and check.”

M.C. Escher Not unlike evaporation- rise and fall perception. Looked through angles appeared perpetual. Confounded lens eyes tricked from three dimensional back to two then back again- evaporated in impossible constructs.

Yet water falls only to rise again– Jesus knows how the waterwheel turns lifts its load up again onto itself, against common physics- gravity has lost its pull.

Pray- how does water violate energies left behind in kinetic forevers?

Evaporation, lost only to find itself in angle folds, eyes misted must followillusion on lithograph, the addled mind provoked to conflict. Watch the wheel splashed fallings sluice along impossible angled aqueducts over into infinity.

Dutchman from lowlands would know graats- tricks of water tide lines rise fall. Columns support ruse in mathematical consternation. Mill house- an architectural device lifting view back to an agony of deception.

A lady hangs laundry on the line- like you.

Lines are duty. A man who stands out below against a terrace wall rapt in daydream 17

lost in the power of falling. This- is all of us.

Background of descending farm terraces affix depth of light, bizarre coned plants, bugle born, lacy coral-like limbs, magnified moss and lichen.

Tributes to Penrose’s triangle, the shape that cannot be. Water flows infeasible.

Interpretation of distances a continuum the brain insist it is- yet it is not- but still holds water with perspective argued to a draw.

Atop the aqueduct towers, two distortionsGeometric boasts of impossible- possible.

Polyhedrons, octahedrons confounding further the visual paradox- arithmetic of doubts all flowing over the edge turned angles of anomaly to a surrealistic real. Concepts of the irregular. One ponders the fibs.

Fighting reality. Imagine a junction where water falls- rises against itself.

Perspective, of course, is everything.

David Bowman served time in Italia for smuggling; four years. He does not consider it his high point.

He once lived in Sterling Heights and worked in Detroit, discussed poetry with M.L Leibler on his radio show. This, he does not consider his low point. Life is funny.

These poems are from a collection entitled “Art,Love, and other War Tonics.”

David’s poems and stories have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Pea River Journal, Mid West Review, POEM, Grub Street Literary Journal, Brooklyn Voice, Plain Spoke, Inkwell and others.

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D E N I S E S E D M A N THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING (Erasure from first Trump press conference on January 11, 2017) Nonsense was released today, it should have never been written, fake news.

I’m not allowed to talk about it.

It’s phony stuff.

They put that crap together.

I think it’s a disgrace. I think it’s an absolute disgrace.

Fake news was indeed fake news.

Look what Nazi Germany did.

I think it’s false and fake.

Never happened. A failing pile of garbage.

It’s terrible, fake news.

It’s just something we’re going to have to live with.

People were absolutely destroyed, but I didn’t do that.

I will tell you, that this should never, ever have happened, maybe it didn’t happen, it’s possible.

No matter where you go today there will be cameras in the strangest places.

Cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know about it.

You better be careful. Cameras are all over the place.

The American people are concerned about it.

But, I don’t think they care at all if it happens.

Because no matter where you go, it will happen, almost simultaneously, shortly thereafter.

It will be essentially, simultaneously, probably, the same day, could be the same hour.

Very complicated stuff.

I don’t feel like waiting a year or a year-and-a-half.

People will go crazy.

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It will happen.

People will all scream out; and they will scream out -I don’t want to wait a year-and-a-half.

It will happen.

I think what we’ll do is we’ll wait until Monday, and then also next week.

Denise Sedman’s short stories, poetry and provocative essays have appeared in local and national publications. Abandon Automobile, published in 2001 by Wayne State University Press, includes her signature poem “Untitled” about how she could use words to change her life. The same poem inspired a creative installation by architect students who gave the words back to the city of Detroit. This project appeared in University of Detroit Mercy’s 2003 [sic] v.10. Her poems are included in the Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology,” 1996, published by Bottom Dog Press, and in several past and the current issue of Wayne State University’s Wayne Literary Review. She is a regular on the poetry scene since the 1990s and has been a featured reader many times.

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E M I L Y L E I D E R PLAYER The way you cultivate the rich unsettles me.

Ditto your name-dropping tic. You think I care that you know bankers, that you have drinks with major donors to the new Conservatory?

You studied at the old one in the building that became a French- immersion high school. Once you were immersed, in playing piano. Your piano guru in those student days affirmed your lavish gifts, anointing you a re-born Schnabel.

Your Hammerklavier—how you brawled at those chords!

What fierceness.

The Beethoven who broke the piano strings— he was your man.

His “dark key” spoke through you.

You’d practice late at night, your hands finding their way out of the dark.

You knew all of Bach’s 48, could play the Preludes, Fugues, without looking at the music, all by heart.

At your recital, dressed in black, your thick brows in a scowl, you resembled Mephistopheles or maybe Beethoven.

Your shadow side came out to play.

After a Scarlatti and repeated bows at last a smile.

The crowd stood up and cheered.

Your shirt was wet with sweat.

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You live in a rich suburb now, teaching piano to the wives of brokers, bankers, doctors kids of same. They can afford your fee.

Black still becomes you.

You look good in a tux when you open doors for the expensive ladies who invite you to the opera in the city.

Seats in the Grand Tier.

You didn’t buy them.

You dream of real estate, security look forward to the day when you no longer have to teach.

Perhaps a cottage at the beach.

You have long excelled at building fires on sand.

The broker’s wife takes lessons every Wednesday, and she’s good enough to be a pro. What Bach!

She takes on the whole 48, then the Goldberg Variations. Heaven.

Oh, that Aria.

Who can resist such peace?

You help her with the fingering, show how to keep legato flowing while minimizing pedal.

No jumbled voices, please.

You demonstrate the way to trill with thumb and index finger.

Help her relax her wrists.

You count.

She learns to play it all by heart.

Emily Leider has published one poetry collection and four biographies. She lives in San Francisco.

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E M M A R O S E F A G A N APPLES AND BULLETS She is a set ornament An extra in the lives of the higher-ups for some greater purpose of domesticity A stroking voice of encouragement The two delicate hands that bring bitter morning tar The forgotten, unthreatening corner of the room No need for holy water where foul things do not root Today however, she was a pair of ears primed for the listening of nations Eyes that dare wander from suede shoes to look them in the mouth She could not swallow what she saw Her throat clogged with the thick cloud of cologne and smoggy desire waved Every time she entered the room Their talk buzzed with incoherence as perpetual smiles clicked and ticked Most of them unfazed by the caution tape that hugged street corners Those were far off places and far off happenings Not for the first time in history, the men in uniforms had snakes in their eyes The unofficial slogan: A bullet a day keeps resistance at bay Every blazer was a dozen warm body bags The conception of such a broken world Fostered by their seed She wanted to hear their bone sutures pop under the burdens of guilt and wasted life The orbitals in their skulls blinked and fractured with grins But their souls had recently shed in favor of fresh scales They itched for iron that they could paint gold While the media was lucid with a graceful dance Ever careful not to crush frail toes These wolves in suits played on beautiful harps with meat still coating their mouths They gargled blood to the tune of a sweeter melody The microphones jerked their necks in unnatural nods As if to say, yes, of course we believe you How could we disregard such a lovely song when you include lyrics of 23

freedom?

Is it because your throne is made of hunched backs?

Dress shoes tend to bite like metal cleats when they kiss exposed skin Piss colored nailbeds cling to trophies Until knuckles turn red and filmy membranes separate For so long, they almost had her fooled

Emma is a sophomore student at Wayne State University. Â She loves the English program and she is constantly inspired by the work of authors and her peers.

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E V A N N O W L I N THIS APP WORSENS MY SADNESS Don’t tell me you haven’t thought it, too.

You open your mouth, dog tongue lolling out, lol-ing at you and yours, the simplest life, reduced, filtered, meted out by feeds and feedings and filtered photos of vegan foie gras, duck face in sepia toned madness, sexy chic light, like you have something, like, profound on your mind?

A certain French philosopher (there are so many) would be proud of his postulates, but all I do is excuse myself, citing the “duck” in my molars, and enter into a somehow sexier granite bathroom, enthroning myself with bathroom club pop, the bathroom speaker’s live stream, and the most incredible #s of the day

Evan is probably debating with himself whether he wants to go to sleep or drink more coffee. Evan has probably elected coffee. Evan seemingly has a mild phobia of the letter “i,” especially when it’s in CAPS. Evan is, perhaps, excessively online. Evan wants to give a shout out to CWCWL (or whatever it’s called): hey, fam. Evan is just trying to be the best simulation that he can be in this life.

25

F R A N Z I S K A R U P R E C H T S AV I N G WAT E R, A N D S T U F F Disco ice-skating zu “Deine Augen machen bling bling” until the endorphin kicks in.

Each round he’s sliding by the one guy with glowing teeth, he does not quite know his way on me.

Still wanting to snatch his vanilla protein. Because it rhymes

Shaken by rough crackles from your knives/I wished I could also always dance on hits/at least be fresh made ice./ how could they hold hands (dazed by sweet perfume) in daring hockey circles, if I’d be stable and flexible as table tennis rubber?

The proud pirouette and the shy gaze would bounce off me like cluck cluck cluck…

No, I was flowing in the morning, powdered sugar scarring

In another world we’d be kissing like Monsoon/ Sari stuck to legs and you would hold me/too. somehow he never grasped how kostbar I am, though he did see the co-star I could have been.

Saving Mami Wata was foreign to him.

He let me steam up and run and run in the bathroom

26

until

it

was too

l

a t e.

The performance poet lives in Munich, Germany. She holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from WSU. Franziska teaches Performance Poetry at the University of Munich. Since 2001, she performs her work on stage, including at Schamrock Festival of Women Poets, Roskilde Music Festival, and in fall 2016 in NYC and Detroit again. Starting in 2002, her poems have appeared in international anthologies and magazines. She has received awards such as the Literature Prize “22.Haidhauser Werkstattpreis” in 2015. The book “Meer-Maid” is a collection of her poetry in German.

27

G R E G O R Y L O S E L L E HEARTBREAK IN ASSISI In the lower basilica, the handsome young monk with a day’s growth of stubble kneels, face pressed close to the stone, his hands spread out, fingers straining wide, embracing the black column surrounding the ancient body of the saint. the kneeler is so close he could whisper through the rock the prayers he’s not mouthing, silently rapt in his devotions, sure he’s heard.

I found him behind the tomb, a tourist pacing off the precincts of the place, a pilgrim with the impulse to purchase three candles to be burnt there, in the still grotto to the glory of the corpse in the black stone shaft. Then, behind the lilies and the fissure that offered no glimpse of the saint beneath its iron grate, I caught him in prayer.

I stopped and started, then looked away, then stared, afraid he’d feel the pressure of my gaze, afraid that I’d intruded on his prayers, afraid I’d somehow intervene and break the spell that constitutes communion of the living and the dead.

I stood and looked away again and wondered if it mattered if I watched, a lapsed believer fascinated at the blush his cheek pressed to the rock by candlelight, aware I’d never share his thoughts— his language (which I barely speak) like the veil of his proscriptions and his vows—aware of the sparse room in which he’d slept alone the night before hung in the tapestries of his dreams, in his belief, that catechized the leathered husk he’d come to venerate.

Between us, in embarrassed, curious dark, my doubt accrued. I wondered now, about the hands that reached out to embrace the stone that held 28

the saint, about the yearning faith, devotions, prayers echoed in the rock-cut grave, about the image of his dreaming face, the relic, and the body it embraced?

Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing , in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.

29

J A F A R I N A SOUND WAVES Between the atoms of divans, gilded mirrors and the faded strands of Asian rugs wavelengths in all frequencies hold the vibrations of our histories.

The sounds of seduction in thick parlor air Secret whispers fan the cobwebs of a cracked chandelier Long broken waves on private seashores, evening gown hems, catching on sand The quick intake of breath between Red lipsticked lips and the cold incoming tide Tongues exposed to taste the pheromones of ancient arias Sung in a slower rhythm Registers, low, deep, the rumble of imminent need that only lovers and the acoustically pure can hear

j a farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Canada. He has been published in various journals and Anthologies in Canada, USA and Europe. He is the author of two Poetry Books, The Cancer Chronicles and Ghosts of Water Street.

30

J O S E P H G J E L A J FOLKS You’re placed in one like a concentration camp.

People say you have to support your organization’s members like an AA group.

When you get in a fight with your affiliates, you must forgive and forget like first graders.

When your associates eat an overload of garlic, you have to press them with gum like a refresh button.

If someone near and dear to your peer commits suicide, you have to be by their side like Thing 1 and Thing 2.

When the company’s bosses are pissed off, you and your coworkers suffer like women before suffrage.

When your party throws a party for other parties your members must dance and mingle 31

like Democrats and Republicans.

People say you have to kill stooges if they mess with your gang like the Crips and Bloods.

You’re placed into a system like a child is born into a family.

Joseph is a fourth-year student who switched his major to English just last semester. He’s an aspiring novelist and current writer/poet.

32

J U D I T H E . J O H N S T O N SOMEDAY a penny will land on its edge neither tails nor heads the sea will crack mountains will meld to the shores of a cloud very few understand when chemistry mixes with ibm a penny may never again have sides

Judy Johnston is a poet from Eastpointe, MI. She has been a dedicated and longtime member of The St. Clair Shores Public Library’s Poetry Workshop.

33

J U L I A G R A C E H I L L M OO N L I G H T S O N ATA Triplet after triplet My fingers tripped over themselves trying to keep up with the Ever changing wave of accidentals I accidentally played a natural I am starting over Sorry I need to fix my skirt hem Adjust my hair My hair always gets in the way when I’m playing I keep cutting it shorter And shorter but I’m Sorry I Keep tripping over the pedals As well as The idea that you are listening to me right now Let me start over It was not called Moonlight Sonata until Three years after the passing of Beethoven ‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’ Opus 27 no.2 Did you know that Beethoven was actually retreating Into his own being when he composed this piece?

Yes, in fact his hearing was fleeting Fleeting fast and he tried to hide the fact that His perception of the world was starting to blur Melt into itself in Beautiful shades of blue And moon reflections Which brings me back into Moonlight Sonata It was actually given this name in 1836 Rellstab thought that the opus sounded Opalescent Like the moon reflecting over Lake Lucerne Which is known for its complex topography 34

The sharp bends separate it into four arms Which make me think of Giulietta You know, she was a student of Beethoven Yes, and he fell madly in love with her She was not his student for long It was composed in C-Sharp Minor The Sonata, that is And I like to imagine That Beethoven struggled to pick a key In the same way that I cannot play the key The keys The piano Yes, I am trying Let me adjust my skirt Think about the pleasure that this song might bring you If I could bring myself to play it right I know that if I just think about the way that Beethoven probably saw the reflection of the moon In the lovely bodies of water That existed within Giulietta’s eyes I think then maybe I could play You know, it is just because I feel a little more like My vision is blurring into ultramarine I have a blue infatuation And my fingers are working faster than my mind And I keep playing louder and louder But the keys start to blend together And I cannot hear I cannot hear I cannot hear That I am no longer playing ‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’ And in fact that I Have floated over to the window And am glancing at the moon over the pond And I think I see where Rellstab was coming from Because I can still hear my shaky hands Pounding out Moonlight And now I am 35

Surrounded with blue Infatuation

DEAREST, I imagine my spine as a column with Corinthian caps There is cracking And the column is crooked But I feel that it gives me character My flesh clings to my uneven ribs And I cling to my flesh Because I am scared of what I am without it Although I do not particularly like it I fear that I would not be lighter without my physicality Some days my being seems to bear weight unevenly on the column And I wonder if that is why it is lopsided As if my traits put stress on each individual vertebrae And my body cannot equalize the stresses and the knots That I was born into Sometimes I wonder how I survived my mother’s womb And her minefield of stresses But then I think that I may have choked on a stress knot Maybe this is why I feel lightheaded most days Feet stomping heavily on the pavement to remind myself That I am truly walking Because my vision is dizzy And my throat feels swollen I sometimes choke on my subconscious But this is because I have an inflated sense of self And I can hardly swallow an advil tablet My mother says that it is a mental blockage But I tell her that the stress knot is very much a physical being I can feel its pulsing on my worse days 36

But I do not hurt now I have become immune to how this feels And that is what concerns me the most Sincerely, Yours

Julia Grace Hill is a current student at Wayne State University. She is majoring in English and Global Studies with a focus in Near Eastern studies. Julia has several poems published through the non-profit, Read and Write Kalamazoo (RAWK), and intends to compile her poems into an anthology before she finishes her education at Wayne State University.

37

K E V I N H O S K I N S O N MODERN RETIREMENT wine cork bedevils

paunchy bartender-to-be, crumbles on the counter couple at the bar note his arthritic grip sweaty, ridged forehead supervisor in skirt and heels folds her braceleted arms stands silent in the corner the wife: “Take your time.

Those things drive me crazy.” barkeep: “Short drive for me,” grinning as he twists on supervisor: “It’s basic.” ten minutes earlier his first old-fashioned perfect in the rocks glass— whiskey & mulled cherry glistened amber-orange her stilettoes clicked on past to greet the fawning regulars the impossible goddamned cork squeakpops just then there was at least that

Kevin Hoskinson is a admirer of poetry and poets who writes for personal growth and enjoyment. He lives in Berea, Ohio, with his wife Alicia.

38

K I R P A L G O R D O N “THE WORLD IS A GHETTO” (MUSIC & LYRICS BY SCOTT, OSKAR, MILLER, DICKERSON, JORDAN, ALLEN, BROWN) Grokkin’ Why It’s I-Yi-Yi While bookin’ down circular Samsara Street herbalized but under investigation, I’m neck-jerk crookin’ & lookin’ at the sky crystallized in blue persuasion, starry-eyed-live but dying to be reborn in a klesmer-mesmerized occasion, knockin’ into my own weary-cried evasions, psychedelicized by how decay abides no delay, I’m grokkin’ why jazz meets the material world’s complaint of I-yi-yi with flirtin’ notes defiant: Floatin’ cool, sendin’ the mendin’ that rends the heart whole, lendin’ an opulent love honk when blendin’ tonics of black-brown-&-beige suites for the lion king in our belfry. Don’t you know that it’s true, emperor of ice cream & acid queen of our ego death dream, everyone we’ll ever love bids us adieu at dead & gone, so the Hippocratic oath in love medicine is first do no harm.

Human beings’ greed grows ghettos, why Hugh Masekela blows blues for Sowetto & conga-playing vatos from East LA sing free of despair that there’s no need to search anywhere for happiness is here, have your share & with their hearts open on the pure, dare add if you know you’re loved, be secure, Paradise is love to be sure extortin’ & exportin’ the message of the blues in a de-militarized, post-intifada-ied song breeze swingin’ through War & what it’s good for, as in absolutely nothin’ & say it again: Floatin’ cool, sendin’ the mendin’ that rends the heart whole, lendin’ an opulent love honk when blendin’ tonics of black-brown-&-beige suites for the lion king in our belfry. Don’t you know that it’s true, emperor of ice cream & acid queen of our ego death dream, everyone we’ll ever love bids us adieu at dead & gone, so the Hippocratic oath in love medicine is first do no harm.

Kir pal is a NYC writer.

39

K T L O W E FLOORBOARDS Just before the earth shriveled into the infinite nothing I sat at my desk to write you a letter about what it meant to be in your clarity.

Outside the libraries burned, the forests, cities, schools, fields – all fire and fuel. Black ash heaped like burial mounds in my gutters, but I finished my letter as service to the world.

I wrote to you because my eyes were broken porcelain my voice was sandpaper on steel and my skin was a linen shroud.

You shone like volcanic glass in situ, a diamond for a poor man who could see you amid the sharp black rock.

A chthonic pendulum ripped my house in two as I wrote of you and the night we slept on the bare floor of your room.

My back hurt but your long hair wrapped around my wrist as every sound throughout the empty house rumbled at us to get out.

Instead of leaving, you rolled over dug your shoulder into the floorboards.

When I finished, my cursive was unjoined, my pen bled on the paper. My hand shook so badly I switched languages partway through. And when I ran out of words, I drew a picture of you and me then folded the paper, blew gently on its corners as it lifted off my desk and out the broken window.

KT Lowe was born and raised in the Detroit area, where she first established herself with the Metro Detroit Writers. She has performed her work at the Scarab Club and the Detroit Festival of the Arts.

Her spoken word EP, The Basics, was released in 2006; a second EP is forthcoming. Her work has been published in Third Wednesday, Fourth & Sycamore, Plum Tree Tavern and Red Fez. She divides her time between Richmond, Indiana and Detroit, with one well-traveled cat and a stock of the world’s finest chocolate on hand at all times.

40

L E E N A G H A N N A M EVERYBODY WORSHIPS and december poured through the margins of calendars prayer in church basements for raffles predetermined a bottle of Whiskey, for the saddest, decided by the committee that she, oh thank you, god bless, declared necessity and when she found out she flew up in a flock docked down to the floor with Military boots in the crisp marble basilica, the mystery choir singing for her and only for her transient pleasures, drastic measures her Father used to tell her his Whiskey voice met with white noise billowing from distant factories always equidistant from you no matter how far you walk towards it completely isolated for weeks without calendars: he called her back to the dirt draft in who knows middle east flatlands blandfood waving American Flags in her sleep either a Cross or a Gun hidden under her pillow one tear from absolute implosion and she pulls out the something or other oh, phenomenal ending

Leena Ghannam is a freshman at Wayne State University. She studies art history and English. She has been published in several Berkley High School publications as well as the “Just Poetry!!!� National Poetry Quarterly.

41

M O N I C A N O E L L E S I M O N BOOTS boots on concrete where once silence now laughter hold onto it, soon we will be silent again i can’t write love because then it becomes a Love Poem and we’re not Love Poems but whiskey, weed and warm hats blankets of gray tweed like clouds outside we’re floating, all black jeans and tangled hair an ad from a magazine, but more beautiful yet none of it was beautiful metal on metal, the car got towed i meant to freeze the moment nail it to your front door so you can’t ignore it on cloudy days especially cloudy days it was a time that never wanted to be let go my mind isn’t muddy, can’t be settled, it’s clear water with a rock at the bottom our boot prints tattoo the surface too heavy to be moved

Monica Noelle Simon is a poet, writer and marketing professional from Scranton, Pa. She is the creator of Poets of NEPA. Her writing has been published on Elite Daily, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Burningwood Literary Journal, Commonline Journal, Poets of NEPA, and HelloGiggles. Her work can be found at http://www.poetrybymnoelle.tumblr.com.

42

N A D I A I B R A S H I LIKE THEY WERE DANCING ON STEPS, the ones at the top did not see them, and the ones at the bottom did not hear them.

Egyptian proverb The way I hover between Egypt, where I was the American, and America where I am the Egyptian, between the old country

where my name was Nâd-ia, now Nádia, both the â that sought adventure and the á that propelled me to move.

It might seem a minor difference, the rising of the â to an á, an American music, this opening of the vowel, of the mouth, breath flowing more easily now, floating an accent that strings along the past, even as the Nile’s silt keeps slipping between my hands.

What price freedom?

I know the gentle mocking of exile, its amber steps that yield beginnings.

I keep climbing, hold on to railings,

rest on landings where I observe my home,

in my new kingdom

of the lost and found.

Nadia Ibrashi’s work received prizes in National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Poetry Society of Michigan, Ebony, Writer’s Digest, Gemini magazine, Springfed Arts, X.J. Kennedy Awards, Detroit Working Writers, Springfed Arts and others. Her work appears in The Southeast Review, Nimrod, Narrative, Quiddity, International Literary Journal and Public Radio Program, Tidal Basin Review, The MacGuffin, The Whirlwind Review, Rosebud, Atticus Review, Alimentum, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change, The New Sound, Queen Mob’s Treehouse, Peacock Journal and others, 43

is upcoming with The New Engagement and has received acknowledgement with Tifferet Journal of Spiritual literature writing and The Raymond Carver contest.  She is assistant editor at Narrative magazine, and graduated as a fiction fellow with The Writers’ Institute, CUNY. She has practiced medicine in Egypt and in the States.

44

N I C H O L A S A B A N A V A S RUMBLO IN THE JUNGLO Recent rendered thought riddled seismic blast portends conversation imploded pyroclast.

Ripples form a ground swell undulating time air forced through a furnace to a body once supine.

What’s natural or destined has happened thus before.

Mantle moving shudder regenerates the spore.

Clouds of dust-filled refuse will spawn a silicate, the clash of night and darkened sky bring light precipitate.

Nicholas Abanavas received his M. Ed. in Teaching At-Risk Students in 2008. He recently retired from a career in public education. He has written two books: Scissors, Cardboard & Paint-The Art of At-Risk Teaching and Lemnos-An Artist and His Island. He was born and raised in New York City and is an avid fan of jazz music. His work has recently appeared in The Basil O’Flaherty and Lime Hawk magazines. His poetry has appeared as Poet of the Week on the Poetry Super Highway.

45

N I N A E . R O B B ON A WALK WITH MICHAEL, A FEMINIST Today, I bumped into Michael on my walk around the lake at Cranbrook. He led us over three foot bridges, down steps to a pond with a tiny island in the center on which someone had built a miniature red pagoda and a bench too small for any person, whose only purpose must have been to remind us of the possibility of quiet and solitude.

At every stop and turn I waited for him to complete his moment. When he was done watching the golden carp emerge and disappear in the verdigris pond he moved and we walked again.

When he stopped above the rose garden I stopped. When he was through he lifted his chin and I followed him up a shady hill dense with musty smells.

When he inhaled the deep ferment of the forest, I breathed it into my lungs.

I stood back as a mother stands back until her child has no more questions.

When the still green lake below with its lonely egret was enough for him he indicated he would go to his car now and so I finished his walk with him.

My own walk stayed silent, as fragrant and bothersome as a pine needle in the foot, cutting into me as I drove home taking the back roads so I could see the fall colors erupting in the trees.

46

Just for today, I hate Michael.

But, tomorrow I will run to him and all of our friends to tell them of this wonderful discovery of a deep, wide vein of narrow-minded self-oppression, hard to quarry, harder to illuminate, hell to get at, embedded, dynamitable.

Nina Robb’s prose fiction has previously appeared in The Iconoclast and Hayden’s Ferry. Her poetry and Haiku have been published in Har pur Palate and Frog Pond. She holds a B.A. in fiction writing from Wesleyan University and a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A Long Island, New York, transplant, she has called Southeast Michigan her home for the past twenty-three years.

47

P E N E L O P E O R S A R G O S D I S S OC I AT I V E. I D E N T I T Y. DISORDER. Gripping, tearing, pullingbehind the folds of the unconscious mind So many faces that are not mine Multiple hands reaching for that conscious cord Distance, separation, blackout, aftermath Like picking up pieces of wet newspaper on a tile floor Messy like the life I live because there is no control No permanence No relief When my eyes fold over a new leafWho will you meet?

Who will I be?

Identity, realization, reality, confusion My stability fadesLike blood diluted in water disappearing down a drain

Penelope Orsargos is a senior at Wayne State University. She will graduate with a major in English and a minor in Japanese. Once she is graduated she hopes to follow her passions of writing books and making music.

48

R I L E Y O L S O N DETROIT LEPRECHAUN- OPEN LETTER TO MYSELF KEEP AN EAR TO THE WINDOW FOR CLOSURE! Shriek at the cacophony of your premature sunset. whisper your way into indecent exposure Deafen your beat here or hear your voice reoccur.

Audition articulates personality as a threat.

KEEP AN EAR TO THE WINDOW FOR CLOSURE! Harmonize your ticking with the normal cynosure.

Consent – maskless blackness reverberates a bayonet. whisper your way into indecent exposure Not a soul on the planet listens as your heart murmurs.

Force sound – bend tone a crackling cigarette.

KEEP AN EAR TO THE WINDOW FOR CLOSURE! Yet blues flood my canal in our cage of fire.

Color the stark contrast of my silhouette. whisper your way into indecent exposure I lavish light, treasure gaseous giants, and let love transfer What is it about a car that makes me spill my deepest, darkest secrets?

KEEP AN EAR TO THE WINDOW FOR CLOSURE! whisper your way into indecent exposure

Riley is a first-year Political Science and Urban Studies double major at Wayne State University.

49

R O B E R T M I C HA E L H U N T E R AN ANGEL OF LIFE, AND A SUICIDAL YOUTH Precious youth, here! Grab this useless bucket; ride it up, if the scant vigor of my bony hands will bear you up, then ride up; if this rope, all frayed and cooked, will hold; and where the rope’s tied to the bucket, if it— oh, just grab on— grab on— don’t you listen?

The impatient bucket clacked the well-wall, and the echo drove the old one more impatient, as well as the strain upon his back.

The boy spoke in the bucket, as if to fill it up.

The self is insurmountable.

He pushed the bucket and sat down again.

What on earth is that supposed to mean, son?

Just that— well, nothing— nevermind.

There’s no explaining anything to men intent on life!

Intent on life, you say? [aside:] Angel of Life, no less; but he don’t know.— What sort of diseased logic broke you thus?

He dropped the bucket on the boy’s head; Bonk!

And lifted it, and dropped it once again; Bonk!

You’re a skeleton already, you buffoon!

Or can’t you hear the sound of your own skull?

Come up from this well, and I’ll make coffee.

No! Come down in this well, and we will die.

Bring coffee.

No! Come up!

No! Come down!

The old one dropped the bucket on the boy’s skull many times— he waited for him to look down or start to fall asleep to do so, 50

but otherwise he held the bucket just up out of reach.

Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

Old life-sayer; I question these your methods.

And yet I have decided— I will live— I just can’t bear these dreadful bucket-bonks. [aside:] Just as soon as you leave me alone,

I’ll employ some quicker method.

The old man gave the bucket down and pulled; when the boy neared the top the rope untied, and he fell, broke his neck, and died.

Robby is an English student at Wayne State. He likes literature very much. He is very quiet and nervous usually, but there’s a good reason for that: though he appears to be made of typical human meats, secretly he’s just a bunch of centipedes piloting a man-skin.

51

S A R A J A Y Y O U S I SPIT, PART. 3 SCALPEL: 6’4” White male with brown hair and brown eyes. 36 years old.

NEEDLE: He says it’s your prize for being special.

THREAD: You cannot remember what you won but you wake up screaming, mouth wide open, for most nights of the decade after.

Your own thumb inside your mouth begins to resemble a gun. You’re nine years old.

I get so alone that I throw the rope into unmarked graves only I know about. I stay alone until I feel the tugging begin.

I get homicidal urges when I’m sitting in a closed car with my mother and she taps on my thigh with her hand for speech emphasis. Spit fills my mouth. I try not to choke. Try to release my white-knuckled grip off of the door handle.

Instructions: Machine wash freezing-cold. Nine cups of salt in the wound.

You’re impure. You should have separated the blood-stained load from the whites.

Fetal position isn’t the same when you’re not in the womb anymore. It just becomes fatal. I know my mother’s lonely because she answers the phone when 1-800-[bullshit-AD-agency-here] calls and carries on full conversations with them. She must get sick of hearing nothing. It would be bad to apologize because then I’d have to explain that the noise in my head gets too loud and drowns out everything outside of it.

Tips to Soothe Yourself: don’t stay up late. All you do is find new ways to hate yourself.

I’m very easy to discard and erase out of existence. You’ve done it to me, haven’t you? Yes, you. I love you like a child. My head always snaps in the direction of your smell, my skull tilts towards it so it can leak into my ears and make the noise in my brain stop. “You’re so vain; you probably think 52

this is about you.” (it is) I never learned impulse control because then I’d get bored and boredom is a dangerous thing. A How-To Guide on Inventing New Ways of Killing Yourself: sit alone in a dark room and begin to think.

“Something is wrong with the baby.” “Say grace before you turn yourself inside out.” “Where is my boy?”

Bonnie Parker received a .38 revolver as a gift from Clyde Barrow. It was engraved with, “To Bonnie, I owe you one. - Clyde 2/28/32.”

My last breath isn’t going to be a sigh of relief. I entertain ideas of suicide notes in my head triple the amount of times an average male thinks about how to stop his boner. It will say: i’m just tired Tom Waits will sing “Dead and Lovely” from the other room. He’ll be tied down and forced to move his throat muscles while I flirt with the trigger.

I’m not always soft and I can’t be gentle with this much rage on the inside of my cuticles. Always stuck in the second stage of grief. I can get very distant. Very cruel. Cold too. Yeah.

Let’s keep her quiet. The nine-year-old me that has all of the answers the therapists pant and drool for. She’s caught in my throat, a little too redhanded.

SCALPEL: 6’2” White male with blonde hair and blue eyes. 29 years old.

NEEDLE: He says he loves you and takes you to his car. You give him a blowjob in the back between his two children’s car seats. He keeps his eyes closed making noises you can’t hear because your ears are filled with the sound of the windows fogging up, hiding the outside from seeing him at the back of your throat.

THREAD: You spend the rest of the day eating paper and tissue, thinking it will soak up what you didn’t understand. You’re nine 53

again.

Instructions: Dig the nails into the skin above your chest. Drag fingers down until you pulverize the flesh. Snap the ribs. Nothing beats. You always want to feel more, have something to bleed about, don’t you? Don’t you? Do I. In a past life, I was the result of a stillbirth. They had to cut me out of my mother since my bones had taken the shape of the womb. I was a thing that embodied a mistake. No one cried or screamed; they just stared until swarms of flies choked them through their gaping mouths and flooded their esophagi. I’m paying for it now. I’m still paying for it.

Show me where you hide your victims. I’ll put bandages on their cuts that match the size of your blades. Give them each a soft kiss goodnight.

Imagine their shock when you pass me the knife on their last day. My turn.

My baby bottles were filled with postmortem decomposition fluids. I was raised to be familiar with the rotting.

My tongue has turned into a useless chunk of wet meat that burdens me. It stops me from connecting the top row of teeth to the bottom and consuming myself whole. I try to move it from side to side but it has become too heavy with words that die at the tip of it. I’ll never confess.

I’ve got two decades of first degree murder charges with victims being each year of my life. I quiet them all with fists down the throat, nails clawing at the vocal cords, keep it hush. xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xx scratch it out scratchitout I said to keep it hush. But the dead still speak, don’t they?

Soppy flesh waging war with rattling bones into making more noise on the insides of your eyelids. shhh.

He wants me to strip. Lights. Camera. Clothes off first. Then the flesh costume-- Why is he running away?

SCALPEL: 6’1” Black male with brown hair and green eyes. 23 years old.

NEEDLE: You’re playing cards by yourself in the common room. He sits across from you and tells you he isn’t really crazy and shouldn’t be here. He says he wants to see how tall you are compared to him.

You’re in a hospital gown and filled with pills. He slides his fingers 54

up your legs.

THREAD: You walk back to your room, past the nurse’s station, and close the door. You find the patient’s rights folder and remove the staples from the corners of each packet. You line the staples into three rows with three staples and swallow each row separately, feeling them slice at your throat on their way down. The nurse doesn’t understand why you are throwing up blood and you don’t either until you see the bits of silver metal in the mess like treasure. You’re nine again.

I’m the magician’s assistant but everybody loves me most. I don’t flinch when the glint reflects off of the knife’s edge. The sharp anticipation scratching against me like an exposed fish’s belly. I lick my lips and the crowd goes wild.

I like when no one says anything to me. Mouths make too much noise. At a high enough volume, I am seven again. Mommy has me by the throat and I feel her spit on my face.

It would have taken you approximately five to seven minutes to turn off the engine of your car and open the garage door. The least you could have done was let me ride shotgun.

Sometimes when he kissed me, I felt too many teeth. He loved me, I know this. But he loved me like a vulture loves the carcass it digs at and devours.

The man locks you in a room and turns your body into his landfill but you love him like a god. The corners of his lips turn upwards with love at the way you curl around the battered bodies of the others at the dumpsites.

“Good girl.”

Bruises are a map to trace my way back to him. The blood he drew may be scrubbed raw and clean but, in a dark room with the right tools and perfected angles, I can show you what they looked like. Let me recreate the crime scene.

“Show us on the doll what happened.” But there aren’t any holes or veins.

Where am I supposed to put the knives and needles?

From Kristin Chang’s Saga: Father says / to cut the meat & release its ghosts / mother says / to trade yourself / for a girl / who thinks meat 55

is making / a comeback. some days I shut / myself up in a drawer / eat lipstick and play dead / feed on silence and other types of flesh / sometimes I love a god / and sometimes I love flowers / I pinch my lust like a petal / I solve my hunger / by screaming into a stranger’s mouth / there is no death / as brutal as birth / the way some wild animals / eat their own children / reminds me of ritual / of knowing that a house fire / is on the other end / of this phone call / and picking up anyway I am trying to break my bones and realign my limbs to reach you in an attempt to hear our tape played back. I take too many Klonopin and fuck my shadow self. It is too quiet and I want the frail to turn into broken. I use a straw to suck the marrow from your bones because it’s time to feed.

SCALPEL: 5’9” White male with blue eyes and a bald head, has one prosthetic leg. 57 years old.

NEEDLE: He says this is your safe place, remember you are safe.

Your best friend just killed herself and you’re upset. He tells you to sit on the floor between his real and fake leg. He touches you in ways you don’t understand but it hurts so you shut off. He sits you in his lap. He plugs your nose and covers your mouth so you temporarily can’t breathe.

THREAD: He says you have to establish a safety bubble and learn to say no. You are safe. You chew on your hair and swallow what you manage to tear out with your teeth. You’re nine again.

I feel the way static looks on a television screen: abandoned and left to rot. I breathe out of spite and cannot do anything in moderation. When movement occurs too close to my face, I flinch with the lack of telling the difference between love and pain. Do you want to cup my cheek or wring my neck?

Google this to see the walls of the inside of my skull: scratches at the wall of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

I can’t remember my favorite date with you but I know it didn’t include you hitting me, calling me a cunt, or watching my blood register in the needle with your glassy eyes.

My blood moves with the rhythms of your eyes dragging across me. I want you to test how sharp your blades are against my hipbones. The dishes pile in the sink and the only pair of shoes left at the doorway are my own.

56

Written with a victim’s lipstick on a wall above the crime scene by serial killer William Heirens: For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.

I eat toy soldiers until they get stuck in my teeth and my gums begin to bleed. The best type of bitter is using my mother’s pills as a pacifier. They always kept me quiet. I want to be quiet and alone with you. I’m best at finding a place to hide because no one ever seeks.

Because I can’t say it better than Nicole Krauss does in The History of Love: Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees. To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

My favorite pastime is warming his spoons for him. When your lips get left alone for too long, gnaw them to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp. I tear my eyelids off and wave them like white flags to tell you I will not blink. To tell you that I’m not afraid.

Anger is an energy. Anger is an energy. Anger is an energy.

I feel really sick lately. I don’t like that I’m getting quieter because that’s always deadly for me. I’m finding it harder to either stay awake or stay asleep. Nothing stays consistent, it always gets up and leaves. I’m tired of scrubbing fingerprints off of where they shouldn’t be.

Crumbs of brain matter in your sheets. The walls are thin enough for my limbs to rattle at the sound of fists connecting with flesh in the other room.

“How do you spell your name?” A-M-B-E-R A-L-E-R-T 57

Strange inventions are created by making a mistake. My parents should have been kept apart. Daddy spread his open palms over Mommy’s baby bump of me. What they thought was a pregnancy turned out to be a hemorrhage. I hiccupped blood clots.

You want to kiss everyone at this blood alcohol level. How many bathroom floors have you tasted instead? Ask to see the bartender’s tattoo for your home address.

Serial killer Jeffery Dahmer: known for cannibalism of victims. He said that he loved them so much he wanted them inside of him. It made him feel like “they were a permanent part” of him.

I’m sorry about all of the blood, sometimes it’s just there. You moan into my eardrums when we fuck but I’m away. I’ve floated to the ceiling and I’m looking down, watching through the slits in my skull, laughing, at the stupid way our wet bodies move. We begin to get stale. God, you sicken me.

I’m on a first name basis with my demons and they love the way my lips curl when I call for them in states of numbness. Keeping things you could should have said under your tongue for too long turns them into a pool of blood. Keeping quiet is a choking hazard.

From Tracey Berkowitz’s The Tracey Fragments: A man dumps the body of a girl in a ditch. The body rots, melts into slime. Flowers pop up where the body lies, seeds fly out of the flowers, and a bee sucks the flowers and makes honey. And the family of the girl buys the honey from the store, and the family eats the girl.

My satisfaction comes from seeing just how bad things can get. Hot, excited breath fogging the windows when you ask if I want another hit.

Flirting with death is just as familiar, just as revolting, as the sound of buttons and zippers being ripped open from clothes.

My bed takes the shape of a cutting board with thoughts slicing me wide open. Bring the salt. Bring your fists. We need to make sure that I maintain the art of withholding screams.

You aren’t safe with me. The red I lick off of my fingers could just as easily be yours. I will always be the starving one at the table, in the bed, 58

always asking for seconds. Always hungry for more. You don’t comprehend the shapes I make out of the meat chunks because you will never want what I have.

The X-rays detect the foreign objects I swallow repeatedly. The doctors strap me down, kicking and screaming, and pull out the words from the throat of childhood. No one can discern the syllables but they keep coming like spit. Like hair falling out in clumps, always falling. Like screaming without a mouth.

No one will sleep in the same bed with me because of the bony elbows.

Because of the noise I can’t stop making. I shake like I’m on the verge of foaming at the mouth and the slaughterhouse screams only sound like notes on sheet music to me.

Written on the inside of murderer Luka Magnotta’s closet in red ink: if you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care.

The thoughts begin like an odorless gas leak I never see coming. I’ve hurt these portions of myself too many times and accidentally induced numbness. I don’t feel the blood spilling too quickly and too heavily. I never see it coming.

Directions for cleanliness (because it is godliness): scrub the hospital from your hair and scrape the top four and half layers of skin from your corpse.

I sit in my skin suit quietly making more blood until they tell me what comes next.

Sara Jayyousi is a 21-year-old English Major at Wayne State University, hoping to one day settle down in an apartment far away from everyone and everything familiar and simply write poetry. Her work portrays a metaphorical image of what bleeding oneself dry onto paper would look like. A purge of all the evils she has experienced or witnessed, her often fragmented and chaotic writing inflicts on readers a type of wanted discomfort, experiencing the intensity of her emotion as she spits words most are afraid of, or are still searching for, to describe the desperation of passion experienced when in love, or in pain, and the loss of self in a world she feels unwanted in. Her writing portrays her need to regain control over herself, over abusive relationships she has had with others, and over the paranoia she reflects that has her believing comfort is found within pain. Heartfelt yet distant, her words scratch beneath the surface of the unspoken by pushing buttons, devouring the blurred lines of right and wrong , and mesmerizing the readers into her worn-out shoes. Centering around everything from the loss of childhood to the loss of one’s mind, Sara Jayyousi both breaks and heals the hearts of her readers as she gives them hope that they can find their mind even after losing it, or turn what it produces into something therapeutically beautiful.

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S E R G I O A . O R I T Z MY SEA IS STRONG I confess, in the heart of night, I imagine myself cascading on my lover’s body. My jewel is a dead sea, salty and safe.

Blessed lover soaked with my body.

He who drags me to his shore.

Who Who Who Who Who

gathers the moans I sow in seashells. tosses my kisses back to the sea. knows stones are also carved by water. steals whatever I have with precision. recognizes when to replace what was stolen.

This is how I love you, every second committed to your pleasure, but I never say it. I hide the salt crashing on your reef inside my veins.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee.

2nd place in the 2016 RamĂłn Ataz annual poetry competition, sponsored by Alaire Publishing House.

He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

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S H A R O N M . F R A N C O NIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE Carrying its cargo of lost souls and sorrow To the depths of tomorrow In an unknown place It streams its sonata to bounce off my ears, Repetitive sequence of silence and sound, Myriad grunts and high-pitched yelps Interspersed with an olio of long, lonely drones, Both sad and comforting, Rise to a crescendo Then fade to a distant nowhere in night: Like banshees moaning In search of their mates; Wounded wolf whimpers Approaching my doorstep, Retreating to die in the nest of the gods; Faltering efforts of handcuffed mutes Painfully trying to tell their tales, Then drifting off to a lost neverland, Searching for words to be understood And make them somebody who’s loved.

Smoke signals spiral, Whistle screams while Tracks rhythmically rattle, As this symphonic concerto Spawns verse in my head, Setting the stage For dreams to slink in As Orpheus plucks his enchanted lyre Through ice and through fire, Luring me into his welcoming arms.

61

Sharon Franco is a widely published poet. Here work has appeared in many literary journals, and she is a longstanding member of The St. Clair Shores Public Library’s Poetry Workshop. She lives in Eastpointe, MI. 62

S T E F A N Y A M B A O “VIRGINIA 2012” laundry in the backyard floated away the fawns floated, too, across the lawn yawning in their mother’s wake by then the ghosts perched on treetops regarded the house as one of their own that darkened house–a home for years until the moon and wind beckoned and all was lost forever for in the night a child was stolen a child’s cry in the kitchen rang out long after the child’s disappearance her sister standing in that same kitchen contemplating the golden age that should have lasted years

Stefan Yambao is a third-year law student interested in classic films, traveling , and dark fragrances. He is writing a novel. Previously, he worked as a Poetry Editor for Winter Tangerine Review.

63

T H Y L I A S M O S S AT A T I M E L I K E T H I S: Trump/Pence takeover Fair housing kaput Fair and equitable division of Fruits Of profit and financial wealth Unlikely, Hell in a handbasket At such a time of imminent disaster, I worry about my lovelife with Higginson Everlasting lovelife, so why worry now Since the eternal doesn’t have to make good on that Yet, not even at your club H, where Everything is good Even When I am not there But how can any part of your life (please don’t answer this) exclude me?

What sense does this make, except to acknowledge How this man Has become as everything to me, That lever in the voting booth, his hand slipping And grasping my breast that world that fits In his hand: he’s got the whole world of me in his hand, that Breast that used to produce milk, perfect food For raising a perfect army of disciples 64

None as faithful or dedicated as my H— My personal Hallelujah that I cry out just thinking Of him and pleasure that should be denied until heaven that I always get to experience just thinking of my personal Ezekiel: prophet of Millennial Temple visions Destruction of the US—but not destruction of us —yet if US (so much bigger than us) is destroyed what chance for a diminished us?

I do not hold with such diminished triads Even in jazz, suckled by and able to suckle anything By way of saxophones and trombones, love the slide, you Trom-boning into me hard, slide, slide, slide (and still you can’t slide out of me, as slippery as I am inside, you keep sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding: Six feet of trombone, seems you are just sliding inside yourself) Although Considered unstable: our relationship Or is it? Just what is it in a diminished moment of truth And trombones?

Such Efficacies Such light fog saxophones At a time like this trumping all the way, Hard wall, nearly communist manifesto between us, Monopoly past go: Da do run run, Da do ron ron Crystals (Dr. James Marion Sims) Dateline: 1845 US Never forget the da do ron ron Vesico-vaginal fistula—had I had that H would have seen it, H would have known; he 65

Had to know everything about me every truth And trombone of love: sound via lip movement, that endless Kiss with him, that taxi That has no brakes, that sackbut instrument, vibrating lips, Everything in life that vibrates vibrates with his kiss No Other motion, lip action his Just to eat the corned beef sandwich on rye, bread That rubs a little harder in my throat as the triad of him Diminishes deliciously down Telescoping slide the length of the instrument: six feet Of Higginson Yet that doesn’t give me enough of him To stretch like a cloud over Detroit, the one the Delta Jet could not exit to get me back to Detroit (A hymen of mouth, broken sound barrier Air sex —whoosh of kiss) By way of Flint the pilot said (whose name happened to be Robert, Bob) I felt better then, even knowing the plane would need to go to Flint For necessary refueling : large trumpet tromba + one A large cylindrical bore, Core: H -ydrogen h = Planck’s constant, quantum of action, most active force in the universe is his kiss Betty Everett, if I want to know anything 66

Traveling, anything moving, anything vibrating And speaking in tongues: fine plank of his tongue in my mouth Writing in every possible language, trombones Doing their H-job (trom-bombs, H bombs Detonating inside me just from kissing him Everything Entire universes Entire Empires born inside his kiss

Poet, author of 13 books, most recently, “New Kiss Horizon”, a romance novel, and “Aneurysm of the Firmament” a collection of poems written with collaborator Thomas Robert Higginsion. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan in English and in Art and Design. She’s the winner of a MacArthur Award, and numerous other prizes. She was born during a blizzard that covered cars on 27 February, 1954.

67

T I M T H O M A S THE ORGANIC BUDDHIST GARDENER HAS A DARK SIDE I am an organic gardener which means I don’t use pesticides herbicides or ecocides to help my garden grow.

No. I prefer to do the killing myself.

Or bring in the mail order mantis mercenaries to come in like the A-Team on insect stalks to eat all Hell of aphid leaf sucker, squash bud biter and pigweed crop kicker There is no rest for the wicked.

But even so, no DDT death plumes emit from my sphincter upon seeing Mr. Tomato Worm as he ambles like an elongated green hemorrhoid propelled on a thousand fingers to my most cherished Best Boy for lunch.

For I shall always prefer the splatter and twitch of two well struck bricks to the aftertaste of petro-chemical Dupont and let my karma fall where it may.

Tim Thomas is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at Wayne State University.

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V E R O N I C A D A L E T H E H A N D T H AT HOLDS MY HEART Grace seeps up from every fissure; makes its way down every crack.

The same hand that holds my heart, that wipes away my tears, tears me apart length-wise like a cloth.

And the wind blows through the tatters, which dance.

Veronica Dale is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Alliance of Independent Authors, and Detroit Working Writers, a Detroit 300 Heritage organization that has been encouraging high standards in creative writing for over 115 years.

69

W E N D Y M AN N I S S C H E R IN PRAISE OF THE ORDINARY “let my soul be as dust to all…” –from the Amidah, a series of daily Jewish blessings Taking three steps back, I pause before moving three strides forward and squint into morning—a flaming rose taking me back three steps. I pause, blinded before an open door, an instant of bearings lost, then restored.

I take them back in stride, pausing before I move three steps forward.

I open my lips and whisper to myself, as snow wrestles needled branches, an audible declaration—Yes, I open my lips, a whisper of myself.

Shed the coat, the hat, the gloves.

Let the cold sing on skin, my lips whisper, opening myself to the snow’s needles, to the wrestling branches.

Let my soul be as dust to all— a breath of sweet distraction caught in a hyacinth. Like a window smudged with oil, let my soul be. As dust to all who wander in a darkened room, let it ignite—slanted, sun-borne moment.

Let my soul be as dust, to all a breath of distraction, caught and then forgotten.

Wendy Mannis Scher, a graduate of the Low Residency MFA program for Creative Writing/Poetry at the University of Alaska/Anchorage, lives with her family in the foothills west of Boulder, Colorado.

Her poems most recently have been published or are forthcoming in Rise Up Review, Lunch Ticket, Sugar Mule, and Shout it Out! Poems Against Domestic Violence. In addition to writing , she works as a drug information pharmacist at a poison and drug information center.

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f lash

f iction.

A L E X A N D R A S M E R E K A W H AT I F I W E R E T H E N I G H T S K Y? The moon bathed her in an unearthly glow, giving her the appearance of a celestial being. Her eyes were like the stars, and as I gazed into them I searched for constellations in their dark depths.

“I can’t stay.” She barely breathed the words into existence, but their aftershock resonated through me as if she’d screamed them.

“I know,” I say too loudly in the quiet night air, “I understand.” I knew she would have to leave me behind eventually, we’re headed down such different paths it’s a wonder we met at all.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Go, spread your wings, that’s what you’ve always pushed me to do.”

“Not too hard, I hope?”

“Never.” In fact, in spite of her best efforts, I think maybe I was born flightless.

“You’ll be alright, won’t you?”

“Eventually.” I smile so I won’t cry. “We can always talk, right?”

“Of course.”

This friendship we have snuck up on me. I didn’t expect to like her at first, she seemed pretentious and aloof, but now I can’t imagine not knowing her. If I knew anything at all about that sort of thing, I think I might even be in love with her.

“The stars are beautiful tonight, aren’t they?” Her voice sounds like a violin.

“Gorgeous.” She’s always loved the stars and I wonder: what if I were the night sky? Would she look at me like that? As if a hundred years could go by and she’d never tire of the view? For me her laugh is more than all the music in the world, and her smile brings an answer to my lips when I wasn’t even aware of the question. I hold her in my heart, but she holds the universe in her eyes, full of infinite worlds and endless possibilities.

“I have to go.”

“I know.” I want to say ‘I love you’, but I don’t. “I’m going to miss you, stay safe,” is what I say instead.

“I’m going to miss you too.” I think she’s about to cry as she pulls me close to her, but no stars fall from her eyes so I decide it must have been the moonlight.

“Take care of yourself Astrid,” she said slipping away into the night without waiting for a response, but she doesn’t need one. We both know I will because no one else is going to. Now that she’s gone, I am alone, surrounded only by 72

distant stars I’ll never be able to reach.

Alexandra Smereka is a freshman at Wayne State University majoring in English. She has lived in the metro Detroit area her entire life and has had two poems published by the Live Poets Society of New Jersey in the National High School Poets quarterly.

73

A L L I S O N L E E HE FALLS ASLEEP Most nights his girlfriend watches as he falls asleep by the drone of JFK conspiracies on YouTube. His glasses still on. A large dog beside him. In the morning, he remembers all of it—the craniotomy controversy, the Lopez Report, the murder on the Georgetown Canal. After many months he will tell her he attended Choate. He may have slept in the same room as JFK, 45 years later.

When his eyes close and she hears a soft gurgling from deep in his throat, she covers him with a blanket, pats the dog’s head. She wonders when he will tell her if the bloody pebbles were carted away or swept into the Canal.

Allison Lee has been a meeting planner, a copy editor, a greenhouse worker, a baker of bread, and a New York City dog walker. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Cheap Pop, Gargoyle Magazine, Fiction Southeast, The Texas Review, and others. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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B I L L G A Y T H W A I T E THE UPGRADE

You told me Anne Hathaway annoyed the crap out of you. I remember this prompted a little discussion between us. We were sitting in that diner we went to semi-regularly, the one with the ripped booths and disheartened waitresses. I mentioned sort of liking the actress in The Princess Diaries a hundred years ago, but you just shrugged in a disinterested fashion. Then I offered up Brokeback Mountain, but you’d forgotten she was even in it.

“How about the movie,” I said, “where she had the Parkinson’s or something and she was naked a lot of the time?”

You stayed silent, staring hard at your menu. (Though who were you trying to kid because you always got the cheeseburger deluxe whenever we ate there!)

I wouldn’t give in yet and brought up that indulgent little indie she did about getting released from rehab only to wreak havoc at her sister’s wedding.

“She was pretty great in that one,” I said hopefully.

But you were unmoved.

So I told you I’d heard she was just a nice girl from New Jersey who didn’t drink or mess with drugs and was sweet to her family and let her friends and co-stars call her Annie, but then I paused because I began to wonder what it said about my life to know so much about hers.

You were giving me a strange look by then, so I went on.

“Of course, there’s her Oscar.”

“Les Miz,” you sighed, in a defeated way, and then the light disappeared from your eyes.

You waited a moment before blurting out, “Sally Field should have won that year because she gave a much smarter performance in Lincoln.”

I cheerfully agreed and mentioned that I recalled seeing Sally on television back then, telling Oprah that she’d read a lot of books to play Lincoln’s wife -but that’s when you frowned, shook your head and told me that’s not what you meant at all.

I remember this conversation took place shortly before those two frat boys went missing, just one week apart, from local bars near the university.

Later, when they were found drowned in the river, you took it hard, as if you knew them, and said it must be the work of some serial killer, though nothing pointed that way. So I tried to tell you that it was an unfortunate fact that frat boys drank too much and wandered off sometimes to fall in rivers. It was only a tragic coincidence that it would happen to both of them around the same 75

time. But you weren’t having any of this and you remained wild-eyed and inconsolable. And that was the end for us. We fought for the last time, you calling me heartless, and smashing your phone against the wall, but that part was all for show because we both knew you hated that phone and were due for an upgrade.

Bill Gaythwaite is on the staff of the Committee on Asia and the Middle East at Columbia University. His stories have appeared in Superstition Review, Alligator Juniper, The Summerset Review, Boston Literary Magazine and elsewhere. His work can also be found in Mudville Diaries, an anthology of baseball writing published by Avon Books. He was a prize-winning finalist in Glimmer Train’s Best Start Contest and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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D E B R A D I B L A S I HORROR COMICS AREN’T FUNNY AT A L L R. called to say his boss died and he found her body. He’s a psychiatrist at a research center. He reads gore. For some reason, he thinks I write gore.

Ok, I like maggots. The sound of the word “maggots” sounds like maggots eating a corpse. But I don’t get a boner writing about maggots. R. gets a boner reading about maggots and other gore — the worst kind: eyeballs popping out of squished heads, entrails, legs and arms torn off leaving jaggedy bones and skin… Shit like that.

Gross.

I wonder if he gets a boner describing gore.

He wonders, being a Jungian, if his entire life has led up to the moment he broke down his boss’s door to find her body four days dead next to her pleather sofa and then, because he simply could not contain himself, phone me to describe what he saw.

He said she had already started to liquefy. Her fingernails and lips and tongue (her mouth was open, tongue poking out) were blue.

“What shade?” I asked.

“Indigo,” he said. “Indigo blue.”

“Perfect,” I said. And, “Go on.”

He said the stench was horrifying. At first he said “uplifting” so I asked, “Uplifting?” He said, “Is that what I said? I meant horrifying.”

I said, “But you said uplifting.”

“Lapsus linguae,” he said, “slip of the tongue.”

I said, “Slip of the indigo tongue?”

He laughed, “Right.”

I asked, “How long before you called the police?”

He said, “She wasn’t murdered. I’m pretty sure she died from natural causes.”

I asked, “But how long?”

He cleared his throat twice.

“Wait,” I said, “are you still in her house?”

Debra Di Blasi is an award-winning author of six books, including Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions (FC2/University of Alabama Press); and 77

Prayers of An Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press). Her fiction has appeared many journals, including The Iowa Review, Boulevard, Chelsea, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, New Delta Review, Drunken Boat, and in prominent anthologies of innovative writing. She is a former art columnist, educator, and publisher who has returned to writing full-time. More at: www.debradiblasi.com

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T ER E Z A R A B E L O M O R E I R A PICNIC BY THE LAKE I wish I had a jacket with me. After a ton of disturbing thoughts, that was the first simple one that came into my mind. I had just stepped out of a large cold lake and the weather wasn’t so nice, especially if you are wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I kept remembering those eyes; even from under water, they were so intense. I did not plan anything, except the picnic of course. Today was supposed to be a nice day, November twentieth, the day of his birthday. I thought a picnic by the lake would be a perfect idea. But he did not, apparently.

From the moment I called him and suggested a surprise, he cooled down all my excitement with his lack of interest. I was able to convince him though, after a lot of struggle. When we were in my car, he kept complaining about the clouds. I admit, it was not a beautiful day, but I always watched the forecast channel, I knew it wasn’t going to rain. He didn’t believe me though, he never did. I was starting to get annoyed.

When we got there, more complaints. The food I had made with all my effort wasn’t good enough for him. I was getting to my limit. I suggested to go swimming; maybe a bit of cold water would calm him down. It didn’t. The temperature of the water was another reason to hear his implications. I could not take it anymore. His eyes, drowning in the water, and a whole bunch of bubbles. Those were the last things I remember seeing. I just wish I had my jacket.

Tereza Rabelo Moreira is an exchange student from Brazil, and is an English major. She is studying at Wayne State for one semester. Her university in Brazil is UFMG (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais).

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Z AC H T R E B I N O that time was just one time, wasn’t it? it wasn’t fair. the playground still believed in her disappearing act, but her eyes went supernova no further than uptown (he smelled “harlem” like a lifetime ago). “tell them who you’d been with!” – flattening questions into suggestions – “i’m not saying a thing” – passing a cigarette between three lips. nothing hadn’t changed. cooing changed; something appeared, ordered halfhearted gravity, and held onto its chair ‘cause the whole body became lighter, trembling with itself. laughing, “that summer with the aliens and their alien fingers exploring my hidden colony.” “of course!” – (anything to abate the occasional adaptation). she used to call after a conversation to dig into what transpired but it’s been months since he’s heard from her. finally: “how long have we dated?” they didn’t count. the romance never quite started (people in their twenties can only get sore from self-loathing). four days, four years – if it were a play, this would be the denouement – guilty as anything else that changed spectacularly when it was “supposed” to stay the same. the horniest people in the bedroom shook specks of plaster (sprinkled liberally) on their docile bodies like a preteen’s ejaculate. no longer completely flat, she arched her shoulders and butt and crushed him – buried him in the couch as her anus sent photons beaming against his abdomen. NOTHING. “go to sleep.” “what? too drunk to get back to brooklyn.” she lulled his back as a mass of skin left. her butt borrowed a hint until they cycled – hardly clean.

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he wore those dirty clothes like a live vaccine. it wasn’t working. “three months?” nothing – (capitalization is being ironic nowadays, anyway). “shut up.” the sigh – succumbed to the most unsuspecting straight teeth. her, over the bar, chasm toward his satellite. she shook, clamped his nose between her butt cheeks. “open,” she shouted, shaking color into her skin. “i’ve noticed…” “…i’m usually in bed when this happens.” she got up and smoothed out her skin. “…an honor to count down my time with you.” alternated between fingers, the throng of her thong – she got up and turned (SILENCE) and fumbled with the stairs. “the same train from my place. alone.” lips said, “i’m tired.” a smoke signal. from a cigarette (slime molests me after a bright cigarette showed me her lips in an alley). the cigarette pulling her back in time; she couldn’t protest the stubbornness despite squinting as he smiled abruptly. rising pavement. death. the curb. gravities swimming around their heads. he imagined wings tickling him till it hurt. “easy, fella,” a voice said from within his skull. “now we can both be silent for a while.” “you know, i just surprised someone who almost tried to kill me not intentionally and gave him a body check. ‘thanks, buddy,’ he said. ‘next chance i definitely will kill you.’” they were getting somewhere, so when they got to a park bench he diagramed their action with his finger and the shadow of a streetlight: “and that was my ‘oh, shit, i’m sorry.’” “i shouldn’t have gotten excited.” “no.”

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“yes,” elbowing him, jabbing his ribs, a one-man show. “reverse eternity and call it home.” “you should head home.” “when?” they both got up. her hips looked at each of them and wailed for an embrace. her chin said, “next time.” breakfast beckoned. they each said no, feigned surrender, turned – wondering if suddenly they didn’t know each other.

Zach Trebino populates the world with absurdly grotesque performances, plays, and texts.

His work has been published in journals including Noctua, From Sac, Crab Fat, deCOMP, Buck Off, Pretty Owl Poetry, LIGHTHOLE, The Clockwise Cat, MUSES, POPPED, and Black Box Literary Magazine, among others. His performances have been seen in cities throughout the United States, and his plays have been produced by Anam Cara Theatre, Homunculus, Muhlenberg College, and others.

He is the runoff from the apogee of nothingness, the outcome of a surrealist’s wet dream, a coded message sent to you from your pre-conscious brain telling you to “WAKE UP!” Zach lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. More at: www.zachtrebino.com 82

f iction.

B I L L S I N Y A R D DEAR VERA She found the first note under her wiper. It had taken Vera a while to find her car. There were so many blue SUVs in the parking lot. She put the groceries in the back. The metal of the hood was hot as she leaned against it to get the folded paper. She got in, rolled down the windows and blasted the fan before the air conditioning kicked in. She felt drained by the heat - even the parking lot sea gulls looked exhausted. With the windows up and the cool air flowing, she unfolded the lined loose leaf sheet of paper. The message was written in pencil. “I hope you haven’t forgotten me.” It wasn’t signed, just XOXO at the bottom. Wrong car, she thought, and left the note on the passenger seat. She took comfort in knowing she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find a car.

She hated how artificial the place was. But she was complicit; she chose to live here. A white concrete parking lot was their front yard. The back door was sliding glass that opened to the small flagstone patio. Beyond that was a large commons lawn leading to a strip of beach - their view. She couldn’t hear the ocean today. It was flat, torpid and lifeless with no sea breeze to move the almost liquid air. She couldn’t hear the neighbor’s kids at the pool. Quiet. Air conditioners humming were the only indication of lives lived shielded from the sun. The automatic sprinklers popped up every evening and soaked the grass. It was unnatural, she thought, to have a green lawn lead to sand and beach grass.

The condo was empty. Larry was gone and had taken the dog. Too hot for a walk, she thought. Neither of them should be out in the middle of the day. They’re both too old for that. She put the groceries away and laid down on the couch with the news on the television. Larry came home with the dog and she pretended to sleep. He whispered and patted Lulu as he took off the leash. As the dog lapped its water and Larry rustled about, Vera drifted off. * Vera hated Larry’s driving but relented for short trips. He was going to the doctor and wanted her to come as if her being there would ward off bad news.

Such was her power and some days it was tiring.

On the way home they stopped at the pharmacy to refill his blood pressure prescription. She didn’t like the drive-thru, with the back and forth of the pod and tinny speakers, so she went in while Larry waited in the car. “Picking up 84

for Lawrence Olmstead,” she said. The clerk rustled through the prescriptions.

The pharmacist nodded, smiled and kept working. She paid, took the little white bag with all the papers she would throw away, and went back to the car.

From the door she saw Larry. He looked old but retained an innocence that should have been gone. He was gaunt now, and his hair was wispy and grey.

Beneath the wrinkles and sagging skin she could still see the remnants of the young man’s face. He smiled when he saw her, and she felt affection and regret.

The cold air chilled her as they drove home.

Back home she opened the bag and put the medicine in the cabinet over the kitchen sink. With the receipt and other papers stapled to the front, she noticed her name on a folded paper stapled to the back. She pulled it off and unfolded it. “Dear Vera, I miss you! Hope we can meet again.” The wall phone rang, jarring her from the message. Her daughter Liz was calling to set up a time for lunch. She read and re-read the sentence and studied her name while they talked.

“Mom?” “I’m here,” she replied. “Yes, Wednesday is fine.”

She thought about calling the pharmacy but knew she would get the automated service and didn’t have the patience to wait to get to a real person to ask, “Did you write a note to me and staple it to my husband’s prescription?”

No, that wouldn’t do. She folded the paper, went to the bedroom and put it in her dresser under some underwear. She would sort this out later. She knew she couldn’t tell Larry, he was such a worrier. She would tell Liz and show her the notes when they met. * On Wednesday Liz came by to take her to lunch. They took Vera’s car. Liz always filled it up for her - another part of the weekly ritual. Vera hated selfservice. Did the prices go down now that you had to stand in the heat and smell the fumes? No. Prices rose as people to help disappeared. Self-check-out at the market, ATMs at the bank, push this and that for help that won’t come, for English – press two. How could people not mind? But they didn’t and Liz dutifully pumped the gas and cleaned the windshield like young men used to when you would pull up and the bell would ring. I’m old, she thought.

She looked forward to their outings. They tried different places and Liz introduced Vera to food that Larry would never try. Liz’s kids were in college and Vera was elated when Liz and Bob moved down. She never quite understood what it was that Bob did. But, since he traveled for work, it didn’t matter where they lived. They had a house on a canal and a boat. Vera had gone for short trips with them several times but never so far that she couldn’t 85

see land.

Being out in the world with her daughter made her happy. They sat sheltered from the sun under a covered deck with ceiling fans and ate while boats sailed by and sparrows darted under tables for scraps. She noticed the gulls were livelier here than those poor specimens in the parking lot.

“Mom, are you OK?” Vera had gone quiet. She was startled, laughed and felt a surge of emotion when she began to speak. She had to fight back tears.

“I’m fine. This is just so nice.” She didn’t tell Liz about the notes. Didn’t want to ruin the moment. Later, she thought.

Liz paid and they walked past the other diners who took all this for granted.

Vera could not understand why people who had this view, the food, and each other chose to stare at their phones. At the front door, behind the hostess, the daily specials sign caught her eye. On an old fashioned blackboard reincarnated into a trendy accessory was Vera’s name. Liz was already at the door when Vera spotted it. Vera in cursive, standing out from the block letters announcing the day’s lunch specials. It was familiar and, while it startled her, there was something reassuring about her name up there in script – something nice about white chalk against black slate. Vera turned and waved for Liz to come back.

When she turned again, the girl was erasing the specials. Only the a was left.

Returning Liz asked, “What is it Mom?” But it was too late, and Vera told her it was nothing. She tried to maintain her composure but felt faint and unreal.

She was quiet on the ride home and Liz asked her if anything was wrong.

“No, I’m just a bit tired.” She didn’t think she was suffering from delusions or dementia. There were no voices, no messages from the TV or radio, nothing like that. She was sure she could draw a clock. She would tell Liz about the notes later. She wasn’t up to it now.

Vera checked her drawer when she got home. The note from the pharmacy was there. She went to the car and collected the first one. It wasn’t addressed to her so it could have been a mistake. So really, only one note, she thought. One note with her name that she thought could be explained. Perhaps she misread her name at the restaurant. She put the notes into her purse and resolved to go to the pharmacy in the morning and demand an explanation.

That evening, she and Larry sat out on their small patio. A slight breeze stirred the air. Larry was having a “sundowner” and she an iced tea. She could hear the ocean’s reassuring waves. They sat in silence. When it started getting dark they went in and Larry turned on the television. They usually watched Jeopardy and he would call out answers. She really didn’t care for the show but they had been watching every night for years. Not tonight. Larry called out to her that it was on but she told him to watch without her. She would keep this to herself for now. She had no other secrets and this was hers alone.

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* The sun was up but not yet punishing. She went to the patio to have her morning coffee and survey their sliver of beach. Though they were at the back of the complex, they could see the beach between the two buildings on either side of them. It was a distant but direct view. People popped in and out of sight as they walked while the swimmers and the sun bathers stayed in sight.

She could see brightly colored inflatables appearing and disappearing in the waves and could hear the indiscernible yelling and laughing of children. She would sip her coffee, listen and recall the times, before they moved here, when they came down with the kids.

Larry was sitting in the kitchen at the table having his cereal and orange juice. He didn’t like to eat outside and, except the occasional “sundowner,” rarely sat on the patio.

“I’m going to run a few errands,” she said.

“Well hold on and I’ll come with you.”

“That’s OK. I won’t be long. I’m going to do a little shopping. You’d be bored.”

With that she left before he could reassure her that he would be fine walking around while she shopped.

It was good to drive alone. She felt attuned to the new day as she glided down the streets in the quiet of the car. Maybe, she thought, I’ll just drive for a while. The pharmacy can wait. She took A1A towards St. Augustine. She’d call Larry in a little while. Right now she just wanted to drive. They used to take this route before Larry retired. Now, they rarely left their neighborhood. Larry couldn’t take the sun anymore, and she had never struck up friendships with the neighbors. At first the women would chat, sizing her up to see if she would fit in to play cards, golf or tennis. She didn’t do any of those things and they silently wrote her off, but in a neighborly way. They said good morning and asked after Larry but neither side tried to take it further. They were boring anyway, she thought.

From Jacksonville to St. Augustine they used to visit the nature parks, take the kids to the beach and go to the local places for dinner. They always wanted to live here and now, without the limits of time, the urgency to “pack things in” they watched Jeopardy and rarely ventured past the grocery store. Liz’s lunch dates were Vera’s main forays out. Their son lived in California and only came down once a year or so. She looked forward to his calls but, with time, his life was becoming more of mystery. She hardly knew her granddaughter who would soon be graduating from high school.

Why had she not done this before? She was nearing the city and turned 87

around to head back. The notes, the business she had set to attend to, were still in her purse. No rush, she thought. She pulled into a beachside restaurant. She sat outside and breathed in the ocean. It was humid, but there was a pleasant breeze. She started with a Mimosa. She sipped it until her sandwich came. The drink was strong, and she felt a comfort in the melancholy it produced. The moment was hers. The bill came and with it another message scrawled on the bottom. “Vera, You still look beautiful.”

She brought the check up to pay. She looked into the waitress’s eyes but she gave away nothing – didn’t comment on the missive. Vera didn’t ask. The girl is innocent, she thought. This is in someone else’s hands. She wasn’t angry or afraid. She felt relaxed and almost happy. The alcohol helped. It was enticing to be part of something beyond her. She knew she wouldn’t be going to the pharmacy.

They would know nothing. She pulled her wallet from her purse and saw her cell phone. She had three missed calls from Larry and one from Liz. She called Larry from the car and thought she must look like all the others with their cell phones stuck to their ears. That made her smile.

Larry was beside himself. He told her he had called Liz, and she too was worried. It was three in the afternoon, and they were frantic. She couldn’t blame them. It was out of character and she was sorry she worried them. She should have called earlier but hadn’t wanted to hear anyone. She apologized and resolved that this would change. Never too late. They’ll get used to it. * As the summer was coming to an end, the suffocating heat gave way to merely hot days and pleasant evenings. In the winter, it would actually get chilly and she would wear a jacket, sit on the patio and listen to the ocean. Then, only the locals walked the beach. After 5:00 p.m., dogs were permitted but Larry never took Lulu to join the canine festivities. Soon they would turn off the air conditioning and open the windows. Another season closer to a new year and her life – their lives – were passing in the glow of the TV. Larry, she thought, would go out with a whimper. Judging by Larry and the neighbors, her desires should be gone, dissipated and desiccated at a gradual unnoticeable pace. But that hadn’t happened. She still yearned for something more and that kept her alive. * She looked for notes, but none had come since a flurry of them in the late summer. All were short, cryptic and none had a signature. She missed them and the possibilities they held. Now that they had stopped, she reconsidered 88

investigating their origin. Maybe there would be more. She didn’t want to jeopardize that chance. She would wait a bit longer.

Her drives continued and Larry came to accept them. It was fall and sunny but not too hot. The waves looked inviting and the ocean was spectacular. The beaches were empty except for the occasional fisherman on the shore – very few boats on the water now. The noonday sun rendered the scenery fresh and untainted. The day felt like a promise.

In St Augustine, she turned to head back. On the median, at the stoplight, was a young man with a cardboard sign. “Homeless,” it said. “Anything helps.”

She usually tried to ignore them by not making eye contact. The light was red and there she sat. Just the two of them with the barrier of glass and steel between them. He was so young to be doing this. Larry always said if you gave them money they would just buy drugs or drink. She rolled down her window and called to him. “Excuse me,” she said. He immediately came to the window.

I’m doing this all wrong. I should be more cautions, she thought. Have the money ready and roll the window down a crack. Instead, she rolled it completely down and, vulnerable, bent over to get her purse from the passenger side floor. Her wallet was inside. She took it out, unzipped it and pulled out a twenty. The young man stood close but not close enough to alarm her. He knew the protocol. When she turned to hand him the money he smiled, thanked her, handed her the note and walked back to his spot on the median. “God bless you,” he said. She placed the note on seat, rolled up the window and turned back towards home.

“We hope you can meet us. We’d really like to see you.” Larry was watching television. Alone, she scoured this newest note for hints, for hope. Each one held possibilities and questions. Questions that she couldn’t answer, compliments she couldn’t respond to and now, an invitation. She put the note with the rest in a shoe box that she now kept in the back of her closet. She had dated each one and kept them in order. Those that were handwritten were in three different cursive styles. The fonts of the ones that were typed out, or printed, varied as well. Just tell me where, she thought, and I’ll be there. * It was 7:30 and the flat screen was the only illumination in the living room.

Larry was in his chair waiting and ready. While the host introduced the quiz categories, Vera quietly slid open the glass door and stepped onto the patio.

Larry didn’t look up.

The night was pleasant. The summer heat and humidity had lifted but no need for a sweater yet. She could hear the ocean. There was no moon so she couldn’t see the beach. The tide was in and the waves broke as they had for thousands of years. They would continue thousands more and, after she was 89

gone, they would not remember that she loved them. Perpetual motion. She sat and she wondered. She wondered about the waves, she wondered about her life and she wondered about the notes and wondered what was left? * Now, after dinner, she’d spend an hour or two on the patio. The breezes and sound of the waves replaced the categories, answers and commercials that had been their shared nightly ritual. Sometimes people walked the beach at night with flashlights. They came out to hunt for shells and other things that washed or crawled onto the shore. Their lights would flicker and dance and she would wonder who they were and what were they seeking. Larry sat a few feet and a world away answering questions whose answers never mattered to Vera. It was a relief to be free of it and Larry didn’t seem to mind. All those nights she sat through his shows had meant nothing. But now, she had her time, her ocean and her thoughts. Things were clearer now.

She needed her sweater now for evenings on the patio. Below, at the beach, were the flashlights. And this night, she noticed more people than usual. They were gathered between the buildings on her beach directly below. She saw fifteen or twenty lights and could hear their voices wafting up to the lawn to her. She stood up to look and listen. The lights had stopped moving. They were still and facing her.

She went inside to the bedroom. Larry was engrossed in some war that was being relived in black and white. Haven’t they had died enough? she thought. Fires burned in another European village as troops from one army or the other liberated or conquered what they had destroyed.

The box was where she left it. She tucked it under her arm and, sliding the door behind her, went back to the patio. They were building a bonfire now and it illuminated them. There were about twenty people and, as the flames grew higher, she knew they were her people. This was her invitation. She slipped off her shoes and felt the stone of the patio give way to grass under her feet. Grass gave way to sand as it should and would again in some distant future.

They were smiling as she approached. The heat of the flames felt reassuring.

She was warmed and welcomed. She was smiling too and felt the stirrings of a life she had forgotten could be. As they gathered around her, she pulled the notes from the box and fed them to the fire by the handful. She turned back and could see the blue light of the television in her window. She turned from her house to face the sea. The tide was coming in and the water was kissing her feet. That, she thought, is that.

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Bill Sinyard was born and raised in Detroit long ago and is a graduate of Wayne State. (B.A.in Psychology and a Master’s in Public Administration). Among his more interesting career moves was working in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the mid 1980s and serving as a hospital administrator in the Marshall Islands. Currently, he is exiled in Richmond Virginia where he is the owner of IKØNIK dealing in Danish and Mid Century Modern furniture and décor. He has previously published three short stories.

91

C L A I R E R O B B I N S A WALK We were trespassing on property owned by the university. I boosted my seven-year-old daughter over the low fence to my husband, who had already climbed over. We had been there before for walks, picnics, and to watch wild animals—deer, coyote, rabbit. This time, my daughter read out loud, No Trespassing, as I lifted her up under her slim arms.

We shouldn’t be here, Mama, she said. She already knew what trespassing was because we had walked up the high dunes along Lake Michigan all summer.

There were signs up everywhere.

It’s just a suggestion, baby, we’ve been here before, I said. But the signs were new.

We had noticed, crossing the street to the fence, a hawk fall down to grab up a small bird eating seeds by the side of the road. Later, we would come to think of the sighting of the hawk as a warning. But, walking across the road, hands linked, we had just looked.

Once over the fence, my daughter ran up ahead of us looking for feathers and deer bones. The property was a triangular shape bordered by highway and roads. It was mostly woods, patch-worked with some small clearings of grasses and brambles. There was a pond down on the north end where you could watch a blue heron catch fish. In the spring, you found spears of wild asparagus to cut down. The land was what environmentalists might call a scrap.

The university was doing some research there on bees. We stayed well away from the hives, and instead walked into the woods, heading towards the pond.

We followed a deer path to a small clearing, where long grass had been bent over by the bodies of sleeping deer. The sun was warm, but the air was chilly.

We were dressed in layers and warm from the walk. My husband unbuttoned his flannel shirt and laid it out on the grass. We thought it would be a good spot to nap. My daughter curled her small body behind me and ran her fingers through my hair. I closed my eyes.

And that should have been how our day went—dozing, watching vultures circle above in the blue and clouded sky, walking back through the woods, climbing calmly over the fence, walking home to eat rye bread and borsht for dinner, reading my daughter a bedtime story, and then rubbing my husband’s feet under the afghan. Instead, we heard noises, voices carrying through the woods, calling out to each other. Fuck, my husband said. My daughter stiffened, she pulled her hands out of my hair and wrapped them around my shoulders, tightly. I kept my eyes closed.

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The voices came closer and my husband whispered Fucking paint-ballers.

Cocksuckers. I opened my eyes, and saw shadows moving through the trees in the distance. My husband raised his hand up in a little wave, so they would see us and keep away. No sense in our child getting hit by a paint ball. The paintballer closest us, the only one I could see clearly from my position, was wearing camouflage pants tucked into his boots, and a brown tee-shirt. He nodded at my husband, maybe they would stay away.

Fuckers are frightening the wildlife. What are the deer supposed to do when they hear those idiots crashing through the undergrowth? There isn’t anywhere for a deer to run, bordered in on all sides by road and city. My husband said this for the benefit of our daughter, so she would know how intrusive people can be. This was a lesson we tried to teach her in small ways.

My daughter started to whimper. What are paint-ballers? She asked, her voice high and clear.

They pick teams, and run through the woods, with their fake guns trying to shoot at each other, not with real bullets but with small balls filled with paint that can bruise up your skin if they hit you.

Is this the reason I can’t play with squirt guns? My daughter asked.

Yes, my husband responded, one of the reasons. From farther in the woods we heard shouts, what sounded like Indian war cries. These people had no respect.

Let’s leave, I suggested. The woods, the light, the closeness was destroyed. I raised myself up on my elbows.

No, you weren’t ready to go until you heard their noise, my husband argued. Sighing, I lay back down, he had a point, this shouldn’t ruin our day.

I remembered then how a month ago our daughter had walked in while my husband and I were having sex in the afternoon. She had been listening to books on tape with her headphones downstairs when we thought, why not? We didn’t even hear her open the door, the bed was facing so that both of our backs were towards her. You aren’t my parents! she had yelled and then run downstairs. Her tape was over and she had forgotten how to open up the cassette player, take out the tape and flip it over so she could listen to the next story. We stopped.

I went downstairs to find my daughter in her playroom, barefoot, a box of marbles on the floor next to her. She picked out eight cats eye marbles carefully, holding them up to the light coming in through the window. She slowly placed one marble between each of her bare toes, and held her feet splayed out above the carpet. She didn’t look at me, but concentrated on balancing the marbles.

It seemed like the paint-ballers were coming closer, their voices loud. Isn’t the point of paint ball in the woods to remain out of sight, I wondered? A group of about ten came out into the clearing at that moment, only fifty feet 93

away from us. They seemed quite serious about their game—all dressed in military gear, carrying heavy camouflage packs, and full sized realistic paint-ball guns. Or were they? They wore military caps, and tan boots. The man in front pulled out a walkie-talkie and radioed over to someone. I caught the words bravo and unauthorized before my husband pulled me up, my daughter jumping to her feet. There were more men spilling into the clearing then, all of their eyes on my family—my blond daughter in a long dress and coat, my husband’s angry face, and me, grass in my hair.

This was not a paintball game. We turned and ran into the woods. Were they following us? Had they called the police?

Were those real guns? My daughter asked in a whisper. She was holding my hand tight. My husband picked her up then and carried her on the front of his body. They were chest to chest, arms wrapped around each other, her knees pointed back towards me, and her head looking at me over her father’s shoulder. Are they going to shoot us? She asked, starting to cry.

No, honey, I said. She looked so scared.

They must just be practicing, my husband said, breathless, we weren’t too far from the fence. They don’t have real bullets in those guns.

We should climb the fence in a different place, I suggested, afraid the soldiers had called the police. We heard sirens a few minutes after we climbed back over, but the police car sped past. My husband put our daughter down, and she walked between us, holding both of our hands shakily the rest of the way home.

Claire Robbins is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing , works in the university writing center, and serves as one of three fiction editors for Third Coast Magazine. She lives in Kalamazoo with her son and animals.

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J A M E S N E L L I G A N T H E V E G E TA B L E G A R D E N Mom doesn’t want me around the house when Noah gets home from the hospital, but I’ve gotten used to it. She tells me Noah is fine. She tells me try to not think about it too much. I start junior high in a couple of weeks and I think about that when I walk to Bo’s. He has the biggest backyard in the neighborhood, so I like to go there to play catch. Bo and I love baseball and have spent all summer playing catch in his backyard. Once Noah started getting sick we quit playing catch together.

When I get there, I see Bo looking in the vegetable garden. Bo’s ball and glove are set neatly on the grass. I stand next to Bo to see what he’s looking at. That’s when I see him, the rabbit eating from a row of cabbage. He’s eaten some of the tomato plants, too, but he hasn’t tried the beets, bell peppers, broccoli, onion, peas, rhubarb, or zucchini. The only way into the vegetable garden is a wood gate that Bo and I use as a backstop. The gate is locked.

I look at Bo. I can tell he doesn’t know how the rabbit got in the vegetable garden either.

Bo turns to me and says, “We should tell my dad when he gets home.”

Bo is wearing the Cubs hat he had gotten at Wrigley earlier this summer.

That was before his dad had started leaving the house more often in his dress clothes. The rabbit keeps nibbling on the cabbage. He takes a bite and then wiggles his face back and forth. He’s a brown plain looking rabbit, like the other rabbits that run around my side of the neighborhood. It’s the first rabbit either of us have seen in the vegetable garden.

Bo and I keep our eyes on the rabbit. If he notices us, I can’t tell. “Maybe we should get him out ourselves,” I say.

Bo squints his eyes. He does this when he thinks. Then he says, “We could get the BB guns.”

I think about it. I have never shot an animal before, though. Earlier in the summer when Bo and I got bored from playing catch, we would shoot at squirrels sometimes. But we always missed badly. I was too scared to find out what would happen if I hit one. Bo thinks I’m just a bad shot.

“Let’s try opening the gate first. Maybe he’ll just run out,” I say.

Bo agrees and opens the gate. The rabbit freezes and looks at us. Bo and I aren’t allowed in the vegetable garden, so we stand next to the opened gate and wait for something to happen. Finally, the rabbit darts away, hiding between the corn stalks that had died sometime in July. We shake the fence. Nothing 95

happens. It’s a couple hours past noon, the time of day that feels sticky. I can tell Bo just wants his dad to get home from work, so he can forget about the rabbit.

We keep shaking the fence, and I can hear the back door open. Bo’s mom comes out of the house wearing her reading glasses. Most of the time Bo’s mom is kind to me. She has given me leftovers from dinner, some of Bo’s old clothes, and some things here and there, like old books. I’ve noticed she has kept a closer eye on me after Noah got sick the first time from taking too much medicine. My mom doesn’t like her much.

“What’s making that noise?” she says.

Bo and I look down at the grass.

“May I speak to you, Bo?” she says.

Bo keeps his head down and follows his mom through the back door into the kitchen. I wait by the gate to the vegetable garden. The rabbit is still hiding somewhere. I look for some tracks, or any sign of the rabbit, but he’s gone. I wonder how a rabbit can get into the vegetable garden with the gate closed. I look for holes in the fence, but I can’t see any.

A few minutes later I hear the back door slide open again, and Bo comes outside with his mom. He walks up to me. He is looking down at the grass.

“Let’s just play catch until my dad gets home,” he says.

We pick up our gloves and look into the vegetable garden one last time. I still don’t see a sign of the rabbit. I think that’s the last I’ll be seeing of him.

Bo’s mom has pulled up a chair from the porch and tries to read. She watches us as we play catch. After a while, neither of us want to play catch anymore. We walk inside and Bo’s mom follows.

“Are you eating dinner with us again?” she asks.

She asks me this every time I go to Bo’s. I nod. Bo and I walk to the couch and watch TV until his dad gets home.

For dinner, we have chicken fajitas with onions, peppers, and tomatoes from the vegetable garden. Bo’s dad covers his fajitas with vegetables. He takes a bite and they plop onto his plate. Once he’s done with the fajita he eats what’s left on his plate with a fork. Bo’s dad is an important man. He has a mustache and is in charge of the plant across town where my dad used to work before he skipped town. My mom doesn’t like Bo’s dad much either, but most of the people in town don’t.

“How is your family doing?” he asks.

“Good,” I say.

“Is Noah staying at your house?”

“Yes,” I say. I think it’s an odd question. I think, where else would he go?

“I didn’t know if he was going somewhere else,” he says. “By now, I just thought he would be going somewhere else.”

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I’ve learned what to say when people bring up Noah. It’s what my mom always tells me. “He’s fine,” I say. “He just takes medicine when he isn’t sick.”

I know there’s something more to it, something that someone isn’t telling me, but that’s all I say.

Bo’s mom is eating her fajitas with a knife and fork. She sets them down when I say this and gives Bo’s dad a look I haven’t seen before. He shrugs. He starts to shovel the vegetables on his plate into his mouth and some onion falls on his tie. He wipes the onion with the back of his hand and walks to the sink to run water over the stain.

When dinner is over, Bo and I go to living room to watch the Cubs game.

Bo’s mom walks to the kitchen and begins doing the dishes with Bo’s dad. I think she tells him of the rabbit then, because I can hear Bo’s dad run out of the kitchen to the backyard. The Cubs are up nine runs in the fifth to the Cardinals, but Bo and I can’t miss this.

We go outside and see Bo’s dad stepping through the vegetable garden looking for the rabbit who has tried the broccoli since our last game of catch.

Bo and I stand next to the fence to get a closer look. The sun is beginning to set.

“Are you going to catch him?” I say.

Bo’s dad looks up at me. His face is red, and he is huffing, “No,” he says.

“Well what are you going to do to him?” I say.

He ignores me and walks past Bo and I into the shed. Bo and I look at each other. Bo bites his lip.

I look at Bo and ask, “What is he going to do to him?”

Bo doesn’t answer. I don’t think he knows either.

His mom finishes up in the kitchen and comes outside. She watches everything from the porch. Bo’s dad comes out of the shed tossing a hoe between his hands whistling to himself. He doesn’t notice everyone’s eyes on him. He walks past Bo and I into the vegetable garden. He walks through the garden poking the hoe through the plants. He’s in a hurry. He doesn’t notice when he steps on the plants.

Bo’s dad combs his hoe through the pea plants, and we all see the rabbit at the same time. He shoots past Bo’s dad. Bo’s dad chases behind the rabbit with the hoe above his head. His steps kick up the vegetables and some mud.

He doesn’t seem to care about the vegetables anymore. He chases the rabbit like that until he has it backed up against the fence. His leather dress shoes are covered in mud. He took his jacket off in the shed and his white dress shirt is covered in mud too.

Bo’s mom hurries off the porch toward the vegetable garden, “Honey,” she says.

Bo’s dad just stands in front of the rabbit. He is huffing again, “What, 97

dear?” he asks.

Bo and I wait for his mom to speak. It feels like forever. The rabbit is standing there shaking. His hind legs are against the wiring of the fence. He’s too scared to get any closer to Bo’s dad.

“You can’t do this in front of the kids,” she says, and looks at us.

Bo’s dad ignores Bo’s mom and takes a step towards the rabbit. The rabbit panics. He runs into the fence and falls on the dirt. He gets back up and tries running through the fence again, but without any luck. I can see the rabbit is hurt and he begins to limp away from Bo’s dad. Bo’s dad looks down at the rabbit and loses the color in his face. The rabbits falls down on the mud and closes his eyes. He’s barely breathing. Bo’s dad takes his eyes off the rabbit and looks around the vegetable garden. Most of the plants are dug up now. He puts his head down and walks past us to the shed. The rest of us stand there and look at the vegetable garden. We’re all thinking of something else. I’m thinking about Noah. I want to go home and tell him about what had happened.

Finally, Bo’s mom speaks. “C’mon Bo,” she says, “it’s getting late. Play inside for a bit then say goodbye to your friend.”

Bo and I go inside to watch the rest of the Cubs game. I sit on the couch and think about Noah. I remember when Noah broke his leg after he got hit by a car so bad he couldn’t remember what it looked like. The car gave him bruises all over his body, some broken knuckles, and a couple black eyes too.

We don’t know how, but he made it home from the other side of town where my mom didn’t want me going. Noah’s been in out of the hospital since. I know Mom doesn’t want me to think about it, but now I can’t help it.

Bo doesn’t stay awake to see the end of the game. He dozed off sometime during the eighth. He’s stretched out on the other couch and his snoring gets louder the longer he’s asleep. I get off the couch when Bo’s dad comes inside from the backyard. He still has dirt all over himself. He turns off the TV and puts a blanket over Bo. I know it’s time for me to walk home.

“I’m sorry this happened,” Bo’s dad says. “Sometimes these kinds of things just happen.”

I nod. Bo’s dad is right. I know that.

“Stay with us tonight,” he says. “It’s getting dark.”

“No,” I say, “I want to go home.”

Bo’s dad sighs and takes the car keys out of his pocket. “Let me at least give you a ride,” he says.

I don’t answer.

“Please,” he says. “It’s dark out.”

“No,” I say. “I’m walking home.”

Bo’s dad begins to say something else, but I don’t let him. I’m mad at Bo’s dad. I don’t know why, but I’ve never been this mad at someone before. It’s not 98

something that can be explained. I just don’t want to be at Bo’s anymore.

“I’m walking home.” I say again. “Will you just let me do that?”

Bo’s dad steps back and gives me the look Bo’s mom gave him during dinner. I don’t care, though. I feel better seeing Bo’s dad that way, it’s something else for me to tell Noah when I get home. It might even get a laugh out of him. Maybe I’ll tell him tomorrow. Maybe we can spend the day playing catch like old times. I walk passed Bo’s dad out the front door and he lets me go by. The neighborhood is empty except for some cars parked on the street.

Everyone has gone inside for the night. I can see light coming out of the windows in a few homes. Noah stays up late, and when I get home I know my house will look like this too. It makes me wonder about the other families in those houses with the lights on. I walk home thinking about the secrets they must keep.

James Nelligan is a broke college student who is an uncle, vegetarian, and Cubs fan. He is working towards his undergrad in creative writing and literary studies at the University of Indianapolis. One day he hopes to get his MFA, but not until he does something cool like work on an organic garden in Ireland. His work has not appeared in any other literary journals, but he plans to keep writing and submitting for years to come.

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J I L L I A N A . B U T L E R EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED Olivia DeLuca considered herself a patient woman, but here she was, nearly seventy years old and grandchild-less. She regularly reminded Catherine and Audrey that her mother had died at seventy-eight, but had fifteen grandchildren at the time. Audrey, the younger daughter, would in turn remind Olivia that she also had eight siblings. Catherine, the older, career-driven lawyer, would just laugh and tell her mother that she better get used to furry grandchildren because that was all she would be getting from her. Olivia would scoff and return her attention to her “stories” (aka soap operas.)

“Jesus, Ma. I could hear your goddamn TV from across the street. I’m surprised Mrs. Steinberg didn’t run across the lawn, again, and yell through the window to turn it down,” Olivia heard Catherine yelling, as she tripped over the oriental runner that had been in the entryway for at least twenty years. “For Christ’s sake! Move that goddamn rug!”

“Catherine Rose! Watch that mouth of yours! And shhhhh… my stories are on for heaven’s sake.”

Olivia was sitting in her faded blue suede, squeaky recliner that had been a gift from the girls on her sixtieth birthday. Catherine had been nagging her to get rid of the blue suede and white wicker motif because “it was so 80’s,” but Olivia didn’t want to change a thing. She looked at her watch: 3:47pm.

It was an unspoken rule that no one called or visited Olivia during the hours of two and four in the afternoon, except for Catherine. Catherine did not care about or adhere to conventions. Olivia’s rules never really applied to her oldest. It was not for a lack of trying, though.

At 3:54 pm, the phone rang. Olivia lowered the volume on the TV. “Let the machine pick it up,” she yelled.

Hey, Mom. It’s me, Audrey. I know it’s not four yet, but I figured you’d let the machine pick it up. I’m gonna be earlier than I thought. So, I’ll see you around 5:30. I’m leaving the library now, but I’ll be at home for a bit if you need me to get anything. So, just call if you do. Love you. See you soon.

Olivia smiled. It had been a couple of weeks since she had seen her baby girl.

She could hear Catherine rifling through the cabinets, yelling to her, but Olivia paid her no mind. If Catherine insisted on coming over during the only time of day that was a designated “No-No,” then she was going to be ignored.

Audrey, on the other hand, respected Olivia’s request for peace during the 100

designated time frame. Olivia could remember watching Audrey sit on the floor outside the living -room, patiently waiting for the credits to role, so she could come in and talk or play with Olivia. That was Audrey: patient, loving and sweet.

“Seriously, Ma. Do you ever open you mail? Why the hell do you still get Sports Illustrated? Do you still pay for it? Dad died ten frigging years ago. The Pilot? Really? You subscribe to the Catholic Church’s newspaper? Why?” Olivia raised the volume on the television. “Three minutes! Can you just stop for three minutes?”

She drew her attention back to the two young men on the show. “Ugh,” she murmured, as the two characters lovingly embraced. With that, she turned off the television. Olivia had been watching those shows for as long as she could remember. She’d settle into her recliner two or three minutes before the opening credits appeared- with her tea in one hand and pack of Winston’s in the other. There was an odd comfort in knowing that nothing had changed (except that Olivia had quit smoking) in her daily routine over the past twenty plus years.

Olivia turned the television off and followed the noise into the kitchen. She swept her white hair back into a loose bun and walked over to the fridge to pull out two thawed chicken breasts, along with a bag of potatoes and peeled carrots. Catherine was still going through the mail.

“Why are you going through my mail? And why aren’t you at work?

“Who the hell else is gonna go through it? Not you! There’s like three weeks’ worth of mail here. And when did you start getting Time Magazine?

Ohhhh… Thelma and Louise. I wanna go see that. Jesus. I had the doctor’s at noon.” She looked at the uncooked food laid out on the counter. “Who’s coming over?”

“Didn’t you hear the message? Your sister.”

Even though her back was turned, Olivia could feel Catherine’s gaze as she peeled potatoes over the sink.

“Doesn’t she have to finish that final project, or whatever? There’s, like, two weeks until she’s officially done. She’s the only twenty-four-year-old I know that refuses to go to a bar on a weeknight. I mean, I think I drank every night during my last year of law school. I’m surprised she didn’t cancel on you. I tried to get her to go out for a drink last…”

Olivia placed a cutting board, knife and two peeled potatoes in front of Catherine.

“Instead of snooping, cut. And yes, I believe that the project had to be turned in sometime in the next two weeks, but I haven’t talked to her in a couple of weeks. She’s been so busy. While you were being nosey, she called and left a message on the machine saying she’d be here around 5:30pm.”

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Olivia walked down the narrow hallway to the closet at the front entryway.

The girls called this her “shit closet.” Anything that didn’t have a proper place in the kitchen made its way into this catchall. Olivia stretched to the top shelf and grabbed a neatly folded tablecloth. She could hear Catherine still talking from the kitchen, but chose to ignore her. When she re-entered the kitchen, she caught a glimpse of Catherine rolling her eyes. Olivia put the tablecloth on the counter. This was the same tablecloth that she had placed and removed from the kitchen table every time the family ate dinner together. Olivia liked using the same tablecloth. It was familiar.

Catherine had barely cut up one potato. “What will the letters be that Aud will have next to her name once she passes these tests?”

“It’s CPA-Certified Public Accountant. She will be a CPA with an MBA. I think that was what she told me. So, how long have you and Adam been married now? Four years? When are you going to move out of that apartment and buy a house?”

“Here we go. Well, it’s 1991, and we were married in ’88.” Catherine counted her fingers. “ ’88, ’89,’90,’91… Four. So, four years.”

Olivia liked Adam enough, mostly because he was the male version of her daughter, but that was the extent of it. She thought he was, at times, disrespectful and rude. She stopped trying to talk to Catherine about it, because Catherine would just yell and tell Olivia to “mind her own business.”

“Why don’t you know that off the top of your head? I know without even thinking that your father and I would have been married thirty-six years this September.”

“Well, we don’t do anniversaries, so I forget.”

Olivia shook her head. Catherine stood up and tossed the cut pieces of potato into the empty pot on the stove.

“Since you didn’t ask me to stay for dinner, guess I’ll grab some take out and head home.”

Olivia watched Catherine stand up, huff, and walk out the side door. She chuckled at her daughter’s dramatics. She could have asked her to stay for dinner, but it was a rarity that Audrey was not busy, and they were able to sit and eat together. Audrey always seemed to be preoccupied with school or work and on the off chance they were able to get together, Olivia noticed her daughter to be distracted or rushed. So, she thought it better to not invite Catherine to join them tonight.

When she finished the last of the meal preparation, Olivia threw the chicken in the oven and set the timer for thirty minutes. The potatoes will have finished boiling and the carrots would be sufficiently steamed. That would leave about ten minutes to get everything on the table and ready for her daughter.

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She found that the older she got, the more planning she did. Olivia liked to have and be on a schedule. This made her feel that time neither dragged nor sped up. It moved at a pace she could handle. It wasn’t always like this. When the kids were younger and still living at home, there was no time to plan anything. They were always on the go. Now that life is slowing down for her, she needed distraction.

Olivia went into the small bathroom off the kitchen to check her hair- the heat from the stove would often turn her silky, white hair into a frizzy mess. She stared at herself in the mirror. Sometimes, Olivia barely recognized the image that stared back. * “Ma?” The front door shut, and Olivia could hear shuffling down the hallway. She coaxed the straggling hairs back with a little water.

“I’m in the bathroom, love. Be right out.”

Audrey sat in her mother’s recliner and flipped through channels on the television until Olivia appeared in the doorway. Olivia walked over to the recliner and kissed her youngest on the top of her head. She loved having Audrey home.

“Good to see you, sweetie.”

Audrey turned off the television and looked up at her mother. There was something in her eyes that Olivia could not place, but had seen before. When Audrey was in middle school, she had become friends with a new little girl.

Olivia had pushed the shy ten-year-old to invite her new friend over, especially since she was all Audrey could talk about. She would say, “Some other time, Mom”, and continue playing with her beloved Legos. When Audrey had asked if it would be ok if she stayed over her friend’s one Friday night, Olivia told her that she needed to meet her friend’s mom before the sleepover. Audrey got upset.

“Mom, you won’t let me go if you meet them.”

“Why?” Olivia asked.

“Because they’re black, and Renee doesn’t live around here. I already know what you are going to say. You never say nice things about the black kids, but I really like Renee, Mom. Nobody at school is nice to her, but I do. She’s my best friend.”

That was where Olivia had seen that look.

Audrey, though quiet, had strong opinions and a certain way of seeing the world, and at times, Olivia’s conservative and (somewhat) bourgeois views would cause a rift between the two- even at a young age. Olivia disliked change, difference or anything that was out of her privileged comfort zone. Audrey 103

embraced and embodied all of those things.

“Are you hungry, love? Dinner is all ready in the kitchen.”

Audrey stood up and stretched. “I’m starving.”

Olivia raced into the kitchen and pulled the food from the oven. Audrey slowly followed. When she had everything set on the table, she sat and asked Audrey if she would like to say grace. Audrey shook her head.

“You can. If you want.”

“Lord, bless this food and my baby as she finishes graduate school. Amen.”

She looked over at Audrey.

Audrey sighed, “Amen.”

“Your sister was here earlier. She doesn’t seem to understand the word privacy. She drives me crazy sometimes. Is everything hot enough, love?”

“It’s great, thanks.”

“I’m thinking about going up to New Hampshire, maybe the Mt. Washington again, sometime in July, probably the last week. I’m going to call and make a reservation. I’m sure your sister and Adam will only go on the weekend. Would you be interested? We had fun last year! Remember those godforsaken paddleboats we rented? Catherine wanted no part of it, so we just left her an paddled.” Olivia laughed.

“Sure. I think that will work.”

“Good. “ There was a layer of silence that Olivia was unable to break, so they just ate. Olivia’s mind started to wander through all of the possible reasons for Audrey’s impending silence. Did something happen with school? Did she somehow get in trouble with the law? Was she pregnant? The questions were so unreasonable and unlike Audrey. She knew her youngest too well and could feel that something was not right.

Olivia cleared her throat, “I can’t handle this. What’s wrong? Are you okay?

Did something happen at school?”

Audrey knew it was unavoidable. She took a deep breath.

“I know. I know. I am going to tell you something, but please don’t freak out. I need you to be calm and just hear me out?”

“Well, I’m freaking out now. Why would say don’t freak out? What is it? Just tell….” Olivia stood up, smoothed her pants, and then sat back down.

“I’m gay.”

“What?”

“I’m gay.”

“I heard you the first time.”

She saw Audrey’s face fall.

“This is hard for me, Mom. I’m telling you, now, because I love you and what you think of me, well, it matters a lot.”

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Olivia sat there and finished the rest of the food scattered around her plate.

She did not know to react.

“Mom? Did you…”

“I heard what you said.”

Olivia sat there as Audrey squirmed in her seat and wiped the tears streaming down her bright red cheeks. Audrey stood up. In an attempt to pick up her plate, the fork fell to the floor, spilling the remainder of mashed potatoes onto the terracotta tile. Audrey let out a small whimper.

“Just leave it there. I’ll clean it up when I’m done.”

Audrey picked up the fork and dabbed the floor the paper towel she had just wiped her eyes with.

“Mom? Do you want me to go?”

“Yes, please.”

Olivia stood, smoothed out her pants and walked over to the sink. She could not bring herself to look at her daughter.

Gay. She’s Gay. The words played on repeat like a scratched record playing the same verse over and over again. She barely heard Audrey leave over the volume of her thoughts and the sound of running water. Olivia washed the plates and the forks, placing each gently into the strainer. Tears started to pool in her eyes.

She took a step back from the sink and cried.

Her mind wandered to all of the places she had trained it not to go over the past few years: Audrey never had boyfriends. Audrey hated dresses. Audrey’s “friend,” Allison, was probably more than just a friend. She’s Gay. Olivia reaffirmed the facts for herself. She had small suspicions, but repressed any thoughts she may have had about her daughter’s sexuality. Prom. When Audrey and her friend Rachel decided they would go “stag,” but get ready and go together, Olivia decided it was great they could have fun without the stress of dates. It’s impossible. She would tell herself. They (Olivia and her family) did not know a single gay person and no one in their family was gay. Therefore, Audrey could not be gay.

When she finished cleaning up the kitchen, Olivia turned off the lights and walked upstairs to her bedroom. She pulled the throw pillows from the bed and tossed them onto the armchair situated in the corner of the room. She went into the bathroom, brushed her hair and washed her face. The phone on the nightstand rang, startling her.

“Hello?”

“Are you kidding me? What is wrong with you? Your daughter grows the balls to tell you the most important thing she’ll ever tell you and…”

“Catherine!” Olivia yelled into the receiver. “Stop! Did she call you already?

I know you’re mad at…”

“Mad? I’m not fucking mad. I’m shocked.”

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“I’m trying to process all of this. I was caught off guard.”

“All of this? She’s fucking gay, Mom. It’s not like she has cancer or killed someone. Though, I’m sure that would be easier for you to swallow. Jesus. She loves you enough to tell you and you fucking blew it.”

“You knew?”

“That my sister was gay? Are you serious? Of course I knew. You knew, but your closed mind just couldn’t accept it. Allison lived with Audrey for like, four years. C’mon. You were at their apartment, Mom. One bedroom.”

“But, they were just roommates they said.”

“Mom, they did everything together. Don’t you remember last Easter?

Allison wasn’t there, and Audrey was a complete mess. They had broken up.

Allison was her girlfriend, not her roommate.

Olivia was mad. How dare Catherine call her close-minded! She was a kind, church-faring woman who could not hate anybody.

“What? Why wouldn’t she… What did she tell you? I didn’t say anything to her.”

“Her? You mean Audrey, your daughter? Jesus Christ. You made her leave, crying. She’s the same fucking person. Nothing has changed. I told her you’d be an asshole about it.

“Catherine! That was uncalled for. You act like I… this is hard for me, too.

What am I going to tell people?”

She started crying.

There was silence. With the phone to her ear, Olivia walked over to the tall dresser near the window and removed a folded, pink nightgown from the middle drawer. She laid it on the bed and smoothed out the wrinkles.

“I’m going to hang up now. I don’t want to say something I’ll regret. She is still your perfect, thoughtful, loving daughter. Oh, and remember this nugget of information: she’s the one that’s gonna be taking care of your old, sorry ass when you can’t do anything for yourself any more. So, sit with that.”

Click. Catherine hung up.

Olivia undressed, pulled the nightgown on and took the little white sleeping pill next to the glass of water and statue of Mary on the nightstand. It was only seven, but she had dealt with enough today. She got into bed and slid onto her side.

She firmly believed that “God never gave people more than they could handle.” Finding her husband, in bed, dead of a brain aneurism, Catherine not wanting children, those were things that were hard, but certainly manageable.

This. This was something, she believed, that was more than she could handle.

The panic slowly turned into sedation, and Olivia fell asleep.

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Jillian Butler firmly believes that words open the door to a world of infinite possibilities and acceptance.

Jillian is the founding editor of Provocateur, an LGBTQ+ literary magazine. She holds an MA in English/Education with a concentration on Creative Writing. Â When she is not writing , reading , or teaching , Jillian can be found just North of Boston, where she resides with her wife and two-year-old daughter.

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K A T I E S T R I N E TOG E T H E R; S E PA R AT E The dreams linger in the morning; like an aftertaste, he is still on my tongue.

I suck at acerbic taste buds and swallow each memory.

But he’s not in my bed. This is another man. A man with shape and form and contours brought with age - a curve of weight at his waist that wasn’t always there.

It isn’t his fault that I dream of another man, and then I remind myself of which antecedent I’m pairing with ‘his’. My husband’s, I think. It’s not his fault.

At one point, it was. His affair, his secrets. But then it became about more than that.

Innocence taints quickly. First I laughed at his jokes, then let him find me on social media, then sent him direct messages on twitter. But when I deleted the messages, I felt guilt cover innocence: an eclipse. Bright enough to detect because I could feel it slipping away. And then he began appearing nightly in my dreams. He wrapped around my subconscious and seduced my dormant self.

I eye him sleeping beside me now: his bare chest toward the ceiling; his thick thigh against my warm body; his stubbly face turned away from me. We lay intertwined as any married couple might.

A knock at the front door shocks my wandering mind. I wrestle with the weight of pillows and blankets; in my sleep, I’ve buried myself.

“Who’s at the door,” he mumbles into his pillow. I grunt a reply and find footing in disorder. A dresser’s elbow jabs my hip. The bed post lunges toward me. A pile of clothes claw at my feet and cotton hooks in between my toes.

I fumble with our front door’s three locks: the speckled brass of each feels rough against my spidery fingers. Behind the door is the neighbor, a middleaged man clad with flannel and a faded baseball hat. He explains to me his apologies - it’s early, he knows, but did I see the electric wires last night? “I think the trees are banging into them and causing friction. Or vice versa. Can you take my phone number? I have to leave for the weekend. I called the electrical company. I gave them your number. Honestly, I’d deal with it, but like I said,” he throws a thumb toward his packed-up truck, “I’m leaving town.

Fishing trip.” A shadowed skunk nibbles at some object across the street. Its shape camouflages against the grass. The neighbor thrusts a corner of paper through the doorway and I eye the ten scratched numbers. When he’s gone, I try to remember if I saw the electric friction last night and think maybe I did.

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Maybe I thought it was lightening or the neighbor’s wayward car beams or a make-believe lighthouse.

I return to a ritual of mine - a daydream mashed from my night dream. His features form like a Picasso - boyish curls, a sharp jawline, strong shoulders and my memory vibrates emotions from my chest to the pit of my stomach to my toes. I sleepwalk from the foyer, to the bedroom, to the shower within this false world where he and I exist.

Until, snap. Reality. A harsh crunch rings in my ears. Pictures from my marriage interspersed with maps of our holidays and jaunts, a mosaic of our happier times, splays against the bathroom wall. I eye an unidentifiable bug as its body swims across the papered ocean. He appears lost at sea.

My husband’s voice breaks from a still shot: I’m here - it’s me - remember our life together?

Oh, yeah, I shrug: our life together. The one caught on film, the one with tangibility, the one I’m willing to desert.

Under the rush of hot water, I rotate suds over skin. A burst of cool air slips in as he enters the space. “Who was at the door?” I explain the issue with the wires, the electrical company, the hasty neighbor. “Yeah, he’s a headcase. I can deal with it, you know? I can call or be here or whatever. I saw those sparks last night - an electric blue - but I was too groggy. It didn’t register.” I tell him no big deal and he slinks back to another hour of slumber, dawn crawling in bed behind him, and I’m alone again with my thoughts. It’s a sad sensation, apathy. It’s numb and raw all at once, a constant vibration of ‘whatever’ buzzsawing at my core.

In the in between time of hushing my dreams to sleep, I see him. And it’s convoluted. I walk down the makeshift corridor of cubicles - beigeness ripples against my skin - and I count steps until his opening. After a fraction of a shared smile, his eyes drop to his work. I sense a similar response - or do I project that response? - and I continue walking to my desk two spaces away and hide behind my own beige wall. Colorful thumb tacks jutt out in terrible misorder. I trace them into constellations until the phone jarrs me into reality.

“Hello? Mrs.-” the line jumbles or he mumbles and my name is lost, “I have you as a contact number for the issue on Knight Street, is that correct?” I agree: it’s correct, although I don’t admit that I’ve already forgotten all about it.

“We need to come to your house - enter into your backyard. Will you be there tonight?” I again agree, tonight is okay. I describe the house’s brick facade to him - ours is the one with green shutters and the apple tree. You’ll know it when you can’t see it, I chuckle with him, because it’s true. All the other houses face the street without disguise.

My husband suspects my adulterous behavior. I come home from work and he asks me - he states first, I’ll just ask you this one time - if there’s something 109

I need to tell him. Alarm rises inside me. A tick-tick-tick of the silver clock fills the void. My eyes dart toward a framed drawing of a fisherman, his face abused by time and wind and sun and the world’s myriad natural abilities to obliterate the strongest of men and leave them vulnerable.

I consider the times I’ve fantasized divorce papers or fantasized other men or fantasized reversing time in order to alter my present life. Our marriage drained of love, an emptiness of waking up alone (but beside him) and a thunderous yearning I’ve ignored and ignored and ignored. Which of those does he want to hear?

Before I can answer, he does. The color in the room shifts from a warm yellow to a villainous blue.

“I know because I read your notes.”

Notes? He means this story. He read this story and drew the character out of context - the man from the dream - and now stands questioning my motives with him. What will I do with him? How far will I take it?

I erase details with the pink tip of a number two and provide some appeasement. The light shifts again and I hear branches scratch against the westward window. Beyond the trees I watch the men from the electrical company: their saws buzz in an explosive orchestra. They methodically create a clear path for the wires at the expense of the trees: broken limbs crash onto the earth.

My attention flashes back to my husband. Our eyes do not match. I watch a shade of black from an abstract place cover his eyes: a nightmare spills around his retinas. I recoil and flash out of my body to see my dirty-blue eyes. Who is the victim here? I laugh at the accusation of an affair and offer him to read anything of mine he wants: I’m an open book.

The words inked onto pages of thick paper splash onto the kitchen floor and with them I tighten my emotional instincts and let the words sprawl, sprawl, sprawl.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “I’ve read them all. I’ve seen all the words. I’ve read them all.”

We have a fight then, adding new and darker words between us. We don’t bother to turn on the lights even when the sky succumbs to night and swallows the minutiae of our marital dwelling. The men with saws have long disappeared and dragged those still-alive tree limbs with them, the leaves rustling at the sidewalk’s edge.

Eventually silence walks into the space between our bodies and our mouths feel empty because enough has been said. Everything except I love you.

We make violent love in every room of the house between the kitchen and the bedroom and collapse when completed, exhausted and temporarily satisfied. Our bodies unlatch. We fall into rhythmic breathing - I take my 110

cues from him. I wait until his breath drops from awake-breathing to nightbreathing: the air dredged from a far-away place. I sync my lungs with his and let the poetry of our night noises lull me to sleep.

I quilt previous dreams together, an invention. I remember the parts I like best and replay them. Warmth-infused gray smiles; the knitted fabric of our fingers; an animated feeling within my stomach. I fall away. He’s on me or I’m on him and our bodies are soft but not sweaty - it’s not like we’ve been making love. There’s a sweetness in the air and an easiness in the effort. I can feel love.

I can feel I love this man - this imaginary version of a husband created from a person I see at work who sometimes messages inappropriate jokes and who sometimes flirts behind his eyes.

He’s tucked into my bed (the bed from my marriage: the queen size, whatever-it-is-sheet-count sheets, the too-many pillows). And then my husband walks in. Into my dream. Into this personal moment I’ve created without him, and his eyes broil a darker shade of black as he mutters that he knew it, knew it, knew it.

I don’t wake in a panic. I follow my husband and watch as he lays down in our guest bedroom. Grandma’s quilt - a wedding gift - sprawls in want of a body. The distorted version of myself - the one who embraces an affair between the sheets of reality and a dream - goes back to the master bedroom and asks the other him to leave. I sheepishly follow him with my eyes: his almost naked body pieces itself back together. In a together but separate way we toddle toward the quickest exit from the house to the outside world. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought it was something innocent, but it’s not.”

He looks at me, his grey eyes holding my reflection, a rounded, bubbled shape. I slide my finger across his bottom lip in lieu of a kiss.

I feel (not guilt) but remorse. Remorse and (maybe) regret. But it’s the right thing to do, I tell myself, even if it’s too late.

In the haziness of this elongated dream, I watch him leave. I’ve removed him from my bed and I wanted to hug him longer before he had to go, but I removed him.

In the kitchen - in the cold, sterile kitchen - my husband stands and I sense he wants an answer to a question that he does not (and will not) ask so I begin to tell a story. He comes after hours, I say. After I’m asleep. And he just sleeps.

It’s just sleep. We don’t sleep together, no, no, no, not that. We just share the bed.

And it’s partially true.

He comes into the bed once my eyes are shut and I’m further away from reality than most daydreams so since everyone else is asleep, too, it’s innocent, right? He’s a whisper that you only heard tonight and before that the sound breathed into a passing wind.

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Morning turns on. The alarm’s red numbers announce a garish hour. I stare at the ceiling and run my mind along its cracks, a plaster-like lightning storm.

I think back to the break-up from my dream. I think about wires on fire and blue flames and broken hearts. I know my mind wants it to end. But for the remaining day, throughout the motions of work and marriage and life, I think about how maybe (just maybe) tonight I can recapture him. Return him to the warm spot in the bed where the sheets smell like me.

Katie Strine’s first publication, “Meditate and Wait”, will be featured with The Writing Disorder in March. Her second publication, “Midnight Man”, will be featured with Visitant in June. She recently earned a Master of Arts degree (English, Creative Writing) from Cleveland State University.

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M A C K E N Z I E B I D I N G E R A V I E W T H AT’L L K I L L You were beautiful, with long hair that curled in a tight fashion around your clavicles. It was if you were born with little to no flaws and this notion always flew right over your head. All 5 foot and 2 inches of your every being was just as adventurous as the person that you always strived to be. In your cottage located at 523 Tolly Dr., Ohio, you had a push pin map with the brightest red pins stuck in every crevasse visible. You would laugh after each push because you had accomplished yet another great adventure. One time you pushed so hard that you poked the smallest hole in your finger. You didn’t even notice.

You picked up another pin and covered it in blood, still not noticing. The crimson red blood matched the pins and maybe this was why you kept pinning pin after pin.

Your plan for the summer was to pin every major waterfall in the East side of the United States. Michigan was completely covered, including the ones that were the greatest tourist attractions. Your father proposed to your mother at a waterfall called Cathedral Waterfall in West Virginia. Of all of the pins within your map, this spot was very pinned. Your hand had never even been near this place. Your mother was killed at this waterfall four years ago, when your father shot her with his Smith and Wesson that you always shot at Thanksgiving growing up. Mary, your mother, was just as adventurous as you. She had a push pin map, just like yours, but was covered in more black. Her map was pushed with gold pins for all of the places that she and your father didn’t fight at and the black were for the places that they did. You hated the color black and tried to stay away from the color gold. You chose the color red because it was your favorite. Red is the color of your towels and your sheets. Red is the color of the blood that was soaked into both.

Your adventure to Tahquamenon Falls was your latest and this was the pin that cut your finger. Tahquamenon Falls, both lower and upper falls, was a breath of fresh air for you. You had recently thought that you had seen your father since your mother’s funeral at the local grocery store. The look alike picked up the miracle whip that you always hated, especially since your mother preferred real mayonnaise. You threw up in the box of watermelons and ran out of the store before buying the three items that you usually bought.

McIntosh apples, caramel dip and a gallon jug of water; your usual go to items for waterfall chasing. These were your favorite because it allowed for you to stop and eat something sweet, while watching the earths beautiful creations.

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After you finally noticed the blood dripping from your finger, you smeared the blood directly over West Virginia. Cathedral Falls to be exact. With the most angelic of words, you whispered, “the greatest adventure of all.” The next day you had gathered up enough courage to walk into the grocery store again, buy your three items and be on the road, yet again. Only six days would pass between your latest adventure and your newest and this wasn’t any different. Your TJ Jeep Wrangler was old, but was the perfect adventure machine for you. You even named him “The Adventure Machine.” Just like your gold knife, you named her too. Her name was “memories.”

Nine days passed before anyone heard anything about you. West Virginia was no more than 10 stretched hours away from your cottage, but it took nine days for anyone to hear anything. The news traveled to your aunt in Colorado because she was your closest known relative. Colorado was pinned in every crevasse as well, exact for the waterfall right outside of her house. She was your father’s sister. You had shot yourself in the head. Caramel dip, McIntosh apples, and a gallon of water surrounded your pool of blood. Your fathers Smith and Wesson had flowed to the end of the falls.

MacKenzie Bidinger is a senior at Wayne State University, majoring in English. She plans to attend Wayne State’s Law School soon! She is new at creative writing , but has fallen in love with it.

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M E H G A N F R O S T I C FLÀNEUR It was what people had grown to expect from him and others like him. The photographs of graffiti tagged buildings, abandoned houses with over-grown lawns and ivy weaving its way through cracked cement like tentacles. The so called “ruin porn” that so many people associated with Detroit. He had no issue with being called a “Ruin Pornographer” but made an effort to show some of the other sides of the city, the one that people often chose to ignore.

The poems and photos about the destruction of the city were not what he was all about.

To him there was something beautiful about the threads of green poking its way through the cement and brick. The weeds and ivy overgrowing, expanding its tentacles reclaiming what had once been its. These man-made structures destroyed by nature, a return to what once was. A renaissance in a way.

The shutter clicked and he put down his camera. It was the first time he’d been out shooting since fall began. He suffered through the 90-degree heat to get shots during the summer months but soon found it more amenable to stay inside. But now that the weather had cooled off he could easily carry his backpack of equipment without sweating profusely while shooting.

He always used the phrase “shooting” when describing going on these photographing adventures. It reminded him of hunting and in a way, that’s exactly what he was doing. Hunting for the perfect subject, the perfect lighting, the perfect moment to press a button and imprison whatever it was he was looking at in a 4x6 square. But the main thing being a photographer had in common with being a hunter was the requirement of patience. All that searching for perfection required the ability to sit and wait.

Which is what he was doing before the police came. Sitting on a cracked block of cement, probably once part of a pillar or stair, armed with his camera and waiting for something to grab his attention.

First was the colorful graffiti on the walls, contrasting the monotone grey of the abandoned automotive plant. Tangled ivy, which when he looked at the photo later looked as if it had been photoshopped along the edges, making an unnatural frame of green. They hung over the colorful, bubbling letters of other artists who, like himself, had ignored the DO NOT ENTER sign posted at the entrance, armed with the weapon of their medium; spray paint, sketchbooks, cameras. All things which allowed them to create their version, their vision of the city. Their Detroit.

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“Hey!” He turned at the sound of someone yelling at him and saw a uniformed cop sauntering towards him.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself. Standing up he let his camera hang from his neck and kept his hands visible.

“Do you realize you’re trespassing?” the cop asked.

“I was just leaving.” He said. Truly he wasn’t, but not getting to spend enough time in the plant exploring was a better option than going to jail.

“You got some I.D. with you?” the cop said extending his hand out, like a greedy kid demanding, not asking for something.

He reached in his back pocket and retrieved his wallet, fishing the card from its clear plastic slot and handed it over.

“Louis LeBlanc.” The cop read, pronouncing it Lou-Is rather than the Louee he had grown to prefer in his 26 years of inhabiting Earth. But he didn’t dare correct him.

“I’m sorry kid, but I’m gonna have to call this in. Follow me.”

Louis got the feeling the cop wasn’t really sorry but packed up his gear and followed him to the cruiser waiting outside. He wasn’t as nervous as the first time a cop approached him for trespassing, but the longer he stood by the squad car while the cop ran his info, he felt his heart race a little more, a few more drops of sweat on the back of his neck. He began to actually get worried as the time slowly ticked by. He began to wonder is this considered a felony?

How much money did he have for bail? Would his dad answer his one ten-cent call from the police station?

“Okay,” the cop said getting out of the car with Louis’ ID and a long piece of paper. “I’ve issued you a citation. You’ve got 14 days to pay or set up a court date.”

“Yes sir,” he said taking his card and ticket.

“Let me tell you something; you aren’t doing yourself of the city any favors by breaking the law to take these pictures. I don’t know why you ‘artists’ think you can break the law for the sake of art. If I catch you again I won’t be so friendly. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The cop got back in his car and drove away. For a brief moment Louis considered going back in the plant and finishing what he had started but thought better of it. Instead he walked the block and a half back to his car, a spot he chose so the cops couldn’t catch him. He’d made the mistake of parking right in front of the plant the first time he visited it. Once the engine turned over he headed back into the more populated sections of the city. The thriving, populous part where people walked around with no worries.

The streets were more crowded than usual due to the Tigers game 116

happening at the same time of a concert at Ford Field next door. Louis didn’t recognize the name but supposed he wasn’t the best person to ask about the latest trends when he was still listening to The Smiths on vinyl and the term “Grunge” had been used to describe his clothing by friends. But he wasn’t going to change or deny who he was in order to make someone else happy.

In a way, he thought, that was a similarity he had with Detroit. He didn’t follow the example of others. Detroit wasn’t like your typical big city like New York or L.A. It had been hit and hit hard but refused to be cast aside like most people thought it would or should be. It was like the old pair of shoes you just couldn’t bring yourself to throw away. Scuffed and worn and faded along the edges, but when you slipped them on it was a feeling unlike anything you could describe. Despite all they had been through they were still a perfect fit that no other shoe could replicate.

He stayed downtown for a while not wanting another run in with the Detroit police. Instead of the broken windows of the literal broken homes, he took pictures of the baseball tailgaters, cars in rush hour traffic, people sitting and reading or talking in Campus Martius. He made a mental note to return to this spot in a few months when the ice-skating rink was reopened, and get pictures of the friends and lovers and children skating in the glow of yuletide cheer.

He went into Midtown and took pictures of the gushing fountains which were actually working in front of the art museum. Of students enjoying the fall weather by laying in the newly installed patches of grass at the university.

There was a guy with a guitar sitting on a park bench in the middle of campus strumming. Students ran by him with backpacks hanging on their shoulders and cups of coffee or cans of energy drinks in their hand. He remembered living off cardboard cups of hot liquid, although he was sure these students attended class more often than he did. He had less than perfect attendance in his math and science classes but had a perfect record in his photography and literature classes. He spent the time he was supposed to be learning about quadratic equations or the periodic table exploring the city and taking photos and writing poems. He always justified it by saying he was working on stuff for his other classes. “C’s get degrees after all.” And the last-minute study sessions gave him passing grades in his other classes and even though they’d never directly say it, his art professors had an unspoken admiration for his dedication to his craft. Now he used those skills he gained from skipping class to make a living. Of course, his family made sure that his young, impressionable family members knew that was the case.

He went to his favorite coffee shop to edit photos once the day got even colder. Most of the pictures were after his near arrest; smiling faces of people downtown, the glowing top of the Ren Cen, students studying in 117

the fall afternoon. Pictures of things he knew he should take more of. “The real Detroit,” is what some people said in response to the ruin porn. But he knew that while positive, they weren’t the “real” Detroit. But neither were the abandoned buildings and homeless people. It was all these things mixed together in the melting pot of a city bigger than Manhattan or Houston. That was the real Detroit.

It was Louis and artists like him. It was students from the area, or who lived in dorms thirty-two weeks out of the year. The suburbanites who commuted each day for work. Every person, every thriving business, every abandoned building, every resident and commuter.

That was the real Detroit.

Mehgan Frostic is a graduate of Wayne State University and currently an editorial assistant at D Profile Magazine server and bookseller. In the future, she hopes to obtain her MFA in Creative Writing , continue writing , and teach at a university.

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M I C H AE L K O L E S K Y THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOE So see. I stumble through these big wooden doors. And I was thinkin’. ‘It’s weird for a liquor store to have wood doors. And who the hell is that dude they got all these pictures of nailed to a cross on the wall?’ And that’s when it dawned on me, man. This ain’t no liquor store. This must be a church. Good thing I keep a pint in my pocket at all times. ‘Cause you know I wouldn’t be able to listen to my father if I weren’t drunk. Gotta be in the same state of mind as him when he’s hollering at ya for God know’s what. But back to the church. I won’t sit through a sermon if I’m sober. Too many people talking this shit that I can be saved. If I’d just put down the bottle. But the joke’s on them. I put the empty bottle down on the steps outside. So now who needs to be saved?

So I notice nobody is sittin’ in all the pews. So I yells at the top of my lungs.

To whoever was in there. I couldn’t see a damn thing. Had my sunglasses on.

And my vision was blurring a bit. “It’s one o’clock on a Sunday! Why ain’t anybody here for mass?!”

And some dude walks over in his robe and says. “Sir. It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday.”

“You’re shittin’ me man? Damn. I remember I poured myself one drink Saturday night and I woke up this morning still drunk.”

“Sir. This is a church. Please refrain from using that sort of language.”

“Hey man. The only problem is because of how my face is structured, my eyes can’t watch my mouth. But I’ll try my best. As long as you as you refrain from callin’ me sir. I may be a creature of the night. But me and the Queen have a rocky relationship. So she won’t knight me. So you calling me sir just digs the sword that has never tapped my shoulders in further. Deeper. Ya dig?”

“My apologies. Can I help you with something?”

“Yeah actually. Can I get a job application for the priesthood? I’d like to have a job where I can work in my bathrobe. And I hear the blood of Christ is about 10% alcohol. So I wouldn’t mind becoming a vampire for a little booze.”

“If you have come here to simply insult my faith I will be forced to remove you.”

“Nah nah. You’re misunderstandin’ me pops. Can I call you pops, Father?

I meant those as compliments. I was kidding about the job though. I already have one that I apparently never showed up to for the past two days. Funny how the boss expects you to be a bartender and not have a drinking problem.”

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So finally the Pops was gettin’ a tad agitated and says I can pray quietly or I have to dip. And since he was watchin’ me pretty closely, I knew I’d never be able to sneak some shots in while I was in the pews. And that’s when I noticed this wooden box at the side of the building. Now I guess in hindsight it was a booth. Not a box. But I figured, close enough to a coffin. I’m sure the Pops wouldn’t mind if I drank myself to death in it.

I gave a quick glance before I staggered into the box. Ya know. To make sure the Pops wouldn’t know I was drinking myself to death in there. Thought it’d be a much funnier joke if someone just happened upon my corpse. Dark humor is like food though. Not everyone gets it. But the Pops had a little grin on his face as I sneaked in. I took it as a sign he was ok with my joke.

So I’m sittin in that box. And it’s weird. Cause there was a bench. But it was only about a foot off the ground. So how the hell was I supposed to sit on it?

And the area I stepped into was only about half the size the box was on the outside. And the wall had no door to get to the other side. Just this weird peep hole type thing with a grate over it. “What is this? Some sort of peep booth that you can’t get off to?”

“I’m sorry son. What did you just say?”

“Woah man. I know this is a church. And a lotta them religious types are against gays. Now I personally don’t have a problem with it. But if this is a peep show I’d much rather see a woman than a man. Just like the Pops out there would probably rather wanna see a boy than a man.”

“Son. This is a confessional booth.”

“Really? Then I guess in a way it’s a bit of a peep show. But I’m supposed to be the one showing.”

“Son-” “No. I don’t mean any offense by that. I just mean. This is like going to a shrink’s office. They sit there and their ego gets off to hearing how screwed up everybody else is. It’s kinda perverted to wanna see someone’s soul. Ya know?

I’d be much more comfortable taking my cock out than taking my soul out for ya.”

“Are you saying you have nothing to confess?”

“Nah nah. See. What I mean is I don’t have much of a soul left to show.

And even if I did I have one, I’d keep it chained to a radiator in my basement.

I wouldn’t wanna see that ugly thing.”

That voice behind the grate paused for a moment when I said that. If my sunglasses had been off I probably coulda seen through that grate. Or at least had been able to make something up about it. Not just refer to it as a voice.

Makes me sound like a schizo. Having an inner dialogue with myself. Or a Jesus freak. Thinking God is on the other line. Even though the landlines are as dead as He is. Or like I popped too many tabs. But my acid supplier has been out so 120

I haven’t even been able to lose my mind that much lately. I was about to reach for that pint in my pocket. But then the voice came back.

“By the wording of your last statement it sounds like you indeed of have something to confess.”

“What are ya man? Some kinda psychoanalyst? Or some kinda writing critic reading between my lines? The only thing between my lines is the coke I’m too shaky to straighten into a line.”

“No. I’m just here to talk to you, son. Call me a conversationalist. I’m just trying to maintain a dialogue between us until you decide you’ve gotten what you need to get out of the confessional.”

“A conversationalist. I dig that man. That’s the line I use on women I meet through Tinder. I tell them the reason I come across as so needy is because I’m a conversationalist. And I’m just tryin’ to maintain a conversation with them.”

“Does that work?”

“Well. They don’t block me. Just never respond. I guess I’m just a conversationalist. Not a great one like yourself.”

“Son. You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m just a conversationalist.”

“Nah nah. Don’t be so humble man. You’re a great conversationalist. You’ve somehow gotten me to maintain a conversation with ya. And a pretty honest one at that.”

“So you’re saying you don’t talk much? Have you ever tried being honest with these women and telling them that you don’t talk much but want to?”

“Hey man. Don’t go psychoanalysing my responses again. Unless you wanna not be a great conversationalist.”

The voice let out a little bit of a laugh. By the sound of it, you’d swear this voice was my conscience. Overanalyzing my responses. Finding the repressed clues. Trying to give me advice. But still laughing at the self-loathing. Just generally trying to humanize me. I’d swear man, if I didn’t know how bad my life choices have been, this would be the conscience I never had.

“Since we are in the confessional, I will confess something to you son.

It was unprofessional of me to laugh at your response. It’s technically unprofessional of me to continue talking to you if you’re not confessing.”

“So then why ya doin’ it?”

“I feel if you humanize a person enough. And talk to them enough. They will feel comfortable confessing to you if they don’t feel that way when they first step into the confessional. Since you walked into the confessional, whether consciously or subconsciously, you must have something to confess. So I will ask you again. Would you like to confess anything son?”

“Man. You’re pulling that Freudian stuff on me. Next thing you’re gonna tell me I drink too much to fill the role of my dad. And I go after women that don’t respond to me cause of my mom.”

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“Say ten Hail-” “Woah woah woah. Did I say that was my confession? Nah. My confession is that I’m a writer.”

“Why must you confess that? Writers are interpreters for those of us who can’t understand all the vague glimpses of beauty that life has to offer.”

“That’s a bunch of bull- That’s a loada- That’s meaningless. The only vague glimpse of beauty I’ve ever seen was when I was on acid and sniffed poppers.

For thirty seconds I understood the entire universe. The good. The bad. And all the vague glimpses of beauty you’re talkin’ about. Then everything went to black. And I came too on the floor unable to put my experience in English.”

“So you said you’re confession was that you were a writer. As a writer you must understand that words have connotations to them. If you say that being a writer is your confession, then you are admitting that writing brings you a sense of guilt. Why do you feel guilty over being a writer?”

Could ya get a load of this guy? He’s gonna sit here and tell me what I’m supposed to do as a writer. Then ask me why I disagree with him. As if I’m wrong. As if I knew why I disagreed.

“Son. What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about this phrase that came to me that I haven’t been able to do anything with. Bob Dylan’s ‘I’m Not There’ in the style of the Stooges.”

“Are you saying Dylan deserves the stigma that Iggy has? That Dylan is just as trashy as Iggy?”

“Nah nah. I’m sayin that degenerates get the same deep and profound thoughts that prophets and poets do.”

I think he took offense to the prophet thing. It was a figure of speech, though. It wasn’t like I’d been cursing at him the way I was doing to the Pops earlier. He was being silent again. Pulling that psychoanalyst role that he said was unprofessional and all. Since he was gonna be unprofessional about it, I may as well get stewed too. So I pulled out the pint and began drinking.

“Son. Please don’t drink here. This is a house of God.” “I get it. I’m not a minor. So you don’t want me sippin’ the blood of Christ.

Just those second graders making communion. So they’re easy for ya.”

“Watch yourself. I’ll let your jokes slide while we talk. But I will not tolerate attacks like that. Please, son. Put the bottle away in this house of God.” “It’s funny. I don’t remember buying this property. But how you gonna tell me that I can’t drink in my own house?”

“So you have a God complex I see.”

“Well. Everything I write is about me. I’m not trying to write the Gospel According to Joe Schmo. I wouldn’t be writing if my words weren’t so important and needed to be heard.”

“You say you’re important. Yet the lifestyle you live seems to be a 122

punishment for you. You say you write because your words should be heard.

Yet you feel guilty over being a writer.”

“This is why I never went to church as a kid. They’re always fillin’ you with that Catholic guilt for touching yourself after every broad turns you down.

Actin’ like Mary wasn’t a whore. It’s a bit Freudian that Jesus was seeing a broad that had the same name as his mother. And when I called her a whore, I meant his mother. Like she was a virgin. I don’t remember sleeping with her the same way I don’t remember sleeping with most women. And notice I used the hard R as not to swear in my own home.”

“Is your writing about these women you don’t remember and the substances to help you not remember?”

“In a sense.”

“A sense?”

“Yeah. I guess I’m not exactly true to my writing. Sure. I do a lotta substances. So I can convert all the friends that are concerned about me into fiends. But the women are exaggerated. I wouldn’t feel guilty about sleeping with them ya know. It’s just I don’t have the opportunity to sleep with them because women don’t really care for me all that much.”

“Are you guilty about your writing because it’s not true?”

“No. Because the feelings are true. The events are the only blasphemy to my name.”

“You’re giving this information up very easily now. Aren’t you going to make me work to get you to confess?”

“What do ya want from me man? First you give me this whole psychoanalyst thing saying you’ll wait till I’m ready to confess. Now I am confessing. And you’re saying I’m not fighting back enough.”

“I’m just saying. You seem like somebody that sticks to your morals. And one of your morals seemed to remain a closed book.”

“I’m amoral. Not a moral. I’m the epitome of escapism. So my philosophy is whatever helps me feel the least at the moment. Right now. I’m pretty drunk.

And I’m just going with the flow of the liquor. Which is weird cause I haven’t been able to afford coke for a while to keep me ramblin without consequence.

But in all honesty. I’m a pretty open book. If you just take my work off the shelf and read between my lines. But I want you to still judge me by my cover.”

“So you are published. Congratulations.”

“No. I’m not. Never will be. I wouldn’t be able to escape if my work were published. Cause the psychoanalysts and writing critics of the world, like yourself, would refuse to judge me by my cover.”

“The Lord can’t judge anybody by their cover. God knows the absolute truth of who you are. As long as you confess to your wrong doings, he will understand why you commit them. You just have to believe.”

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“I don’t believe in anything but myself. So I guess I believe in God.” “Whether you like it or not, everybody believes in something. You admitting you don’t believe in anything is your belief. Belief isn’t a matter of God. It’s not a matter of schools of philosophy. Belief is your motivations and actions.

You can’t escape believing in something. Even if your belief is escapism.”

“Woah, man. Get a load of this guy. Am I right? Thinking I do things cause I believe. I do things because I have no concern for myself or others. If I were concerned I’d be living much differently.”

“If you weren’t concerned you’d be published.”

“Fuck you, man!” I yelled to the voice as I downed the last of the pint. “I can mock your precious church all I want. Don’t mock me or my writing! You don’t know what shit you’re talking.”

“I’m just judging the book by the cover. Just like you asked. And the cover says the book is full of sins. Therefore you must be a sinner.”

“You bet your ass I’m a sinner. And my only sin is wanting to be heard.

That’s why I write. Cause I want somebody to hear what I have to say for once in my life. Cause nobody listens. None of the women listen to my womanizing. None of my fiends listen to my decadence. Nobody in the world listens to my writing. I just want somebody to listen for once. Not that I’m fucked up because of the drugs and women. But that I use those as a cover to my book of how fucked up my soul is. So maybe that was the Freudian slip of how I ended up in this damn confessional. With this damn voice trying to psychoanalyze me.”

“Say ten ‘Hail Mary’s.”

And with that I left that damn coffin. Cause I wasn’t about to die that shit of a hell hole they call a church. I lit a spliff as I was walking outta my own house that they were getting ready to kick me outta anyways. I turned around one last time to yell some sarcastic hallelujahs or amens. But as I turned around, I saw stepping outta the coffin the voice. It was a tall, older man. Long white beard and white hair. Long robe. If the robe had been red, I would’ve sworn it had been Santa that I was talkin’ to the whole time. It’s not like there’s that big of a difference between Santa and God. They both monitor all of us.

Deciding if we’re good or bad.

The only gift he got me was reaffirming my hatred for the church. Can you believe that? I tried to watch my mouth as much as possible for this guy. I was even starting to think I might be able to respect him, too. And that’s the gift he gives me.

So. I was walkin’ around the crumby parts of town. Looking for the good kinda peep show. That kind where you can drink and smoke. And see real women. Taking off real clothes. And I was tryin’ to find one where a woman named Mary that I couldn’t remember sleeping with was working. And I tipped 124

her well. Cause she still remembered me.

I sat in my stool. And I’m pretty sure I just meant the chair I was sitting on.

But I had run up quite the tab. Sitting there. Whispering to myself between shots. “Hail Mary.” And I must’ve said it at least ten times. That’s the thing about misogynists. We don’t love sex. We praise women. But throwing all those tips at her. And drinking as much as I do. My wallet was pretty empty when it came time to pay my tab.

And that’s why I’m writing this story. As an explanation. I’m not trying to sucker free drinks. I’m more respectable than that. I’m not that bad of a guy.

No matter what my cover says. Would I even be able to put a cover on this story? Since it’s written on a stack of bar napkins. The only thing I deserve to be published on. With the exception of rolling papers. So my confession is just as much smoke up your ass as I am.

I just wanted to explain. That I can’t pay my tab. Cause Santa Claus told me to praise the woman. And damn. Did Mary deserve all the money I threw at her. Despite the scar tissue from spending the tips on track marks at the horse races. And the wear and tear from trying to figure out if my cover was armor or paper. I could still see a lotta vague glimpses of beauty in her.

Michael Kolesky has been referred to by many as “something else.” Although some use this as an attack against him, Kolesky embraces being caught in the crosshairs of fitting in everywhere but belonging nowhere. This allows Kolesky complete freedom in his work. By not following any rules or styles of writing , he is able to smear his brain across the page, allowing his thoughts to take on whatever form and words they choose. Despite his main passion being writing , he is also an artist and musician.

125

P A U L D O U G L A S M C N E I L L I I ARCTIC SOUNDS I open my eyes and watch the tiny feet do their little dance under the door.

I squeeze my eyes shut, open them again, and watch an exact replay. One more time to be sure. I close and open my eyes, and the third performance lets me know all is okay. Every time I open my eyes, a short, private show. Our thin mattress lies directly on the floor and provides the ideal view. The debut performance caused a panic, but now after a few weeks, I’ve memorized every step of this little dance.

My wife sucks in a loud gulp of air.

“Oi, bebe,” she says.

“New one or old one?” I ask.

“The man had a bunch of hands covered in brigadeiro, and he tried to smother me with a bunch of pillows, but then he turned into DNA.” “I just had one where I was in love with our toilet, and I kept thrusting my hands in the tank and my feet in the bowl, and that’s how we fucked.”

“Sim, amor,” she says as she rubs my head.

A minute or an hour passes, and I turn over and see the shadow man shifting his weight on each foot. A few blinks usually make him disappear. I close my eyes, but the shadow man is still there, rocking back and forth. I try to erase him one more time, but he won’t go away. I stare as hard as I can at the dark, but shadow man won’t stop swaying. I slowly sit up and swing my open hand at fidgety shadow man. I make contact.

“What the fuck?” I kind-of ask.

“Ai, bebe,” my wife says. “I’m scared. I think I hear somebody.”

I jump from the bed, grab the empty wine bottle by the door, and walk naked into the living room.

“It’s like a bunch of knocking and scratching,” she says.

I look out the living room window, at the front door. Nothing. Nothing but four feet of snow, strong winds, and a thick sea of white dust, fog, and haze lit by towers of reflected light that stretch up and across a night that never ends.

Heavy steam rises and drifts from every roof. Every few seconds, tiny snow tornados are born and die. I can’t help but be amazed that the only horror movie set here was actually filmed in New Zealand somewhere.

“Bebe, let’s try sleeping with music or something, sim?” my wife kind-of asks.

We go back to bed, and I try to play our Sleepytime Spotify playlist, but the 126

Internet is out – again. Instead, I listen to the constant Arctic racket. I thought the top of Alaska would be eerily quiet, but it’s nosier than our ground-floor Brooklyn apartment, our condo in Beijing, or our ocean-view rental in Rio. The Arctic winds howl as they pass under the house, beat against the walls, shake the tinfoil and plastic covering the windows, and force the house to sway on its pillars. The water pumps groan every ten minutes or so, the heating vents clang and click at odd intervals, and snow machines roar at all hours. Freezing dogs howl, and their stiff chains rattle. Gunshots pound the air. A constant sub-polar symphony. The first few nights in the Arctic, you barely sleep, senses piqued. Every sound might be a looming murderer, and you want to get the jump on the bastard before he takes you down. But, you soon realize that you are just in a standoff with the breeze.

A minute or an hour passes, and a new noise joins the Arctic concert: the unmistakable sound of the snow crunching and whining under the weight of heavy boots, and then the clanks and thuds of footsteps on our steel stairs.

My wife and I sit up at the same time. She grabs her empty wine bottle; I grab mine. I peak out of our bedroom door, while my wife stands behind me with her nails digging into my arm.

“Call the cops,” I say.

At night in deep winter in the Arctic, everyone looks like Death, and a black-hooded Grim Reaper is knocking at our window and trying the knob of our front door.

“Cells not working, bebe,” she says.

Door. Window. Door. Window. Fist. Knuckles. Foot. Fingertips.

“Wait, wait. It’s ringing. Hello? Hello? Police? Yes? Someone is at the door.

Someone is at my door. There is a man at the door. A man is at the door. Ai, bebe, she can’t understand me,” my wife says as she hands me the phone.

The hooded man keeps knocking and twisting, knocking and twisting, relentlessly.

“Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah? I am at 1539 apartment B. Someone is trying to get into my house.”

“Who is it?” the dispatcher asks.

“I have no idea. Please send somebody.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s completely covered. He’s got a hood on. All black. Just send somebody over.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s trying to get in my house.”

“Alright. Where you at?”

“1539 B, next to the Search and Rescue building.”

“Alright. We’ll send somebody,” says the dispatcher.

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“Do you want – ” “Sir, they’re coming, ” she says before hanging up.

A minute or an hour passes, and I just stand in the bedroom doorway, naked, with nothing but an old wine bottle in my hand, hanging, ready to throw or strike. Hooded man keeps up his compulsive knocking, twisting, knocking, twisting. He looks well-rehearsed at this little upper-body-only choreography.

I stand in the bedroom doorway, trying to make sure he can’t see me. The sodium vapor lights ooze through the blinds, slashing rows into the darkness across my face and my gut and our collection of city maps covering the walls.

I briefly think about James and Humphrey and Edward and Fred and Burt.

I look at my Indiana Jones fedora on the hat rack. I realize the only things standing between hooded man and me are an empty wine bottle, a flimsy window, cheap blinds that won’t close, and a plastic Christmas tree.

Finally, two new light towers stretch across the haze. I walk over to the window. A police SUV pulls up. Hooded man turns, sees the car, walks down our steps, and turns toward the back of our house. Just before he disappears around the corner, he pauses and everything freezes – as if I had just taken a snapshot. He looks through our window, the ember of his cigarette barely revealing his face before it’s covered with a cloud of half-smoke, half-water vapor. The light reflects off his snow goggles and hits my eyes. I blink, and he’s gone. I turn to the police officer, who’s looking in our window, briefly examining a naked, shaking man. He puts his car in reverse and drives away.

“That’s it?” my wife asks.

“Maybe he’s going after him,” I say.

“But he went the other way.”

“Maybe he’s trying to fool him.”

I put a chair next to the window and sit and wait for the officer to return.

A minute or an hour passes, and I wake up in the chair with the wine bottle between my legs. A note on the front door reads: “Gone to get locks.”

I sit in the chair and think about Joe and Daniel and Macaulay until screaming and an abused snow machine grabs my attention. I pull the blinds aside just enough to see out. My neighbor and his girlfriend are fighting again.

“You’re the fucked one!” she screams.

“Get outta here!” he replies, and turns the accelerator on her snow machine.

I just stand, naked at the window, watching this argument on repeat. The two players replaying their parts over and over. The chorus of “You’re the fucked one” and “Get outta here” plays on a loop, accompanied by a solo from the snow machine. “Fucked one. Outta here. Vroom! Fucked one. Outta here.

Vroom!”

A minute or an hour passes, and my wife returns with a plastic bag full of chain guards and swing bars.

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“Bebe, stop snooping for a second and help me put these on the doors,” she says.

“In a minute, bebe. I need to look something up on the town’s yard sale page,” I say.

“I got the locks already. I’m not buying used locks.”

“I’m looking for guns.”

My wife laughs hard – like my mother used to laugh when I said, sitting in my highchair, “I can make my own dinner.”

“Bebe, you can’t buy a gun on Facebook,” she says - laughing.

“You can here. Pretty cheap.”

She looks over my shoulder as I scroll through photos of rifles, shotguns, handguns, piles of guns, half-empty ammo boxes, some artistically posed and framed, some barely visible in blurry, rapidly snapped shots.

“We aren’t buying a gun, bebe,” she says.

“Amor,” I say. “After last night –” “Babe,” she says as she pets my head and scratches my beard. “We aren’t buying a gun just cause you got scared.”

She starts drilling holes into the door jam just as the Search and Rescue helicopter lands nearby, and I stare at the Christmas tree lights through the haze of my freshly brewed coffee and try to drown out an orchestra of buzzing, whizzing, grinding, swooshing, screaming.

Paul Douglas McNeill II is a writer and English professor living in the Arctic Circle of Alaska and teaching at a tribal college. He is managing editor of Aglaun, the literary journal of Ilisagvik College.

His poetry has appeared in Off the Coast, Monsters Amongst Us, and Awakened Voices.

129

P E TE R O' K E E F E N O P L A N S U RV I V E S CO N TAC T My hands were jammed into my jacket pockets as I trudged down the sidewalk. I’d let the dog off the leash as soon as I left the house and he was patrolling the front lawns and flower beds, darting in and out of the illuminated halos cast by porch lights. Most nights, the leash’s leather strap hung from my wrist and the long metal chain dangled at my side, rhythmically scraping my jeans in time to my footsteps. On this particular night, for no reason that I can remember, I’d spun the chain links tightly around my clenched fist and thrust the armored mass into my pocket, like an inadvertent set of brass knuckles.

At least that’s how I remember it.

I was fourteen. It was early fall, slightly over a year since the ’67 riots. The tense racial armistice that had settled over my west-side Detroit neighborhood had recently been shattered by bands of black youths roaming the deserted nighttime streets looking for a little payback. Earlier that summer one of these ad hoc posses’ had chanced upon another skinny white boy and beat him into a coma with chunks of broken concrete. The scene of the crime was two blocks further south of where I was walking my dog.

At night, framed by the trestle-like trunks of mature elms, my street was a gloomy, sepulchral tunnel scaled for giants. Streetlights illuminated the billowing tree canopy at regular intervals. The sturdy brick homes were mostly dark and sealed as tightly as pillboxes. The soft diffuse glow from the occasional backlit curtain was the only sign of habitation.

I was almost to the corner when I realized the dog had disappeared. That part is absolutely true. In memory and in fact. Rex was a five dollar beagle mix from a puppy mill pet shop. I loved that damned dog. I don’t know if he loved me back. He certainly had no reason to. I was a crappy owner. I was a teenager.

Our evening walks were the extent of our relationship. He ran away after I left for college. I’d always hoped he’d found a better home.

I was just starting to wonder where the dog had gone to when I saw them: two black teenage boys--my age, maybe a year or two older--were standing on 130

the sidewalk in front of the first house on the next block. They were talking but I realized that something was off. They were trying too hard to be casual; their manner was stilted, like two background actors faking a conversation. I didn’t recognize either one of them and the house they stood so cheerfully in front of was occupied by a white couple without children. When I stopped, they abandoned their pantomime and strode purposefully toward me. A half dozen other boys surged from the darkness between two houses and joined them.

I was less than half a block away from my own house but for some inexplicable reason it never occurred to me to run. Well, not so inexplicable really: I’m stubborn, more stubborn than brave, with a visceral, nearly irrational hostility to being bullied or intimidated. Over the following decade, in barrooms, at basement dance parties, on warehouse loading docks, I would find myself utterly incapable of initiating a fight. And utterly incapable of backing down from one. It is a trait that has not always served me well.

I walked into the street and stopped directly under the streetlight, facing them. They veered into the middle of the street and approached me in a group.

I gripped the chain in my pocket until the individual steel links dug into my knuckles. I remembered the advice from one of the neighborhood tough guys: hit the leader as hard as you can and the rest will lose heart. Total bullshit I told myself. Something he’d probably seen in a movie. Besides, which of those silent, sullen boys was the leader? I gripped the coiled chain and stood there, completely still. I was strangely calm. I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt incapable of making a decision. And there was still no sign of that damned dog.

My response would be completely instinctive. Contact would decide the issue.

The scrum of boys compressed as they approached. They were steps away.

And then…

And then.

Up until now, up until this very sentence, everything I’ve written, every word, is as close to the truth, as reliable, as accurate as I can recall it after all this time.

That no longer holds true.

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I made an honest attempt to write what happened next. I tried to reconstruct the event as carefully as I could: the moment when that surging group of boys and I came into contact. The first time, I wrote it precisely as it happened, as I remembered it. I wrote it down. I read it. And I put it away. I put it away for a long time. It just didn’t work. I mean, I’m a writer and I was there and even I couldn’t bring myself to believe it really went down like that.

It read like a movie. Like a bad movie. And trust me, I know, I’ve written some bad movies.

So I changed it. I changed the ending to something that seemed less preposterous. And when I read the revised story, the now fictionalized story, I cringed. I’m a writer of fiction. A spinner of tales. A practiced wordprocessing bullshitter. But, somehow, grafting a fictional tail to the body of this very real event felt like the worst sort of heresy. So I dropped the ending altogether. This is a story with no ending. Everything else is true, as true and as accurate as I can type it. Up until that moment. The moment of contact.

Afterward, the dog came back. A few years later he ran away for good.

Decades later I found myself in the same room as one of those boys. It was like encountering a former classmate, when you find yourself shocked by how old he looks, so much older than yourself. My long-ago antagonist was a balding middle-aged black man with a paunch. He could have been the manager of a muffler shop. A Fedex Driver. A school teacher. He seemed like a nice guy. Like someone I could be friends with. I’d overheard his name by chance and I knew immediately who he was. Because of what happened.

Because of everything that came after. He didn’t recognize me. Why would he?

I would not have known him had I not heard his name. In that context. In my old neighborhood.

I took the first opportunity to leave. I found myself striding down another dark Detroit street. As I walked to my rental car I realized I had the key fob gripped tightly in my fist. The serrated blade of the car key was jammed between my fingers, protruding from my knuckles like a spike. It was pure instinct. I stopped under a streetlight and studied the key in my clenched fist.

I relaxed my hand and allowed the key to dangle loosely from my fingers. And this part is true. This is a memory you can absolutely rely on. In that instant. In that moment. I felt happy. I felt very, very happy.

Peter O’Keefe is a writer and filmmaker, born and raised in Detroit, now living in Racine, Wisconsin.

He has worked in episodic television and feature films, written TV movies for German networks, and 132

scripted direct-to-video movies for Hollywood schlockmeisters under an assumed name. His narrative short films have screened at a variety of film festivals and other venues. Mr. O’Keefe’s documentary “Dreaming In Public” (producer/director) was recently awarded a Midwest/Chicago Emmy.

133

P I P E R M A T L O C K W E N E E D TO TA L K A B O U T AUNT DIANNE Mom always joked that Dianne was an accident - and maybe she was. But from my perspective, she was more of a consequence. The consequence of a happy marriage that turned into a happy lifetime that ebbed into a happy twilight and became a happy mistake. But mistakes have consequences, and there was Dianne. A full twenty-five years later than her oldest sister, a bubbly child playing with me, a niece only two years younger. She was around most of the time when we were growing up, and we were close. We were more like sisters, best friends, than an aunt and her niece. Grandma, Grandpa and Dianne lived just down the street. We ate dinner together, went to church together, watched television together...

Things were perfect. Until they weren’t.

We were all devastated after the accident happened. After their old station wagon swerved off of the road and hit a tree, causing the windshield to explode and the metal to crumple like paper. My mother, father and I were allowed to visit them in the hospital briefly, but there’s something so strange about putting flowers next to a body that you know is never going to wake up.

Grandpa went first, and grandma followed soon after.

Dianne was fine. Other than a couple of scratches on her face and a sprained wrist, she was completely unharmed. She came to live with us after that. My heart had broken with hers, but I was secretly kind of happy that she got to come stay with us. She lived in my room, halved down the middle, our beds facing each other. I was excited that we were going to be able to stay up late at night and talk about boys and homework and sports and television.

And when that didn’t happen, it was like another tragedy had happened.

We hadn’t just lost Grandma and Grandpa in the accident. There was a part of Dianne that died too that day. She didn’t speak for two weeks, but in the nights I heard her muffled sobs coming from under her comforter. She was twelve years old.

She eventually started to speak, to open up, to eat and play again. The scrapes and bruises from the crash were replaced with ones from the yard.

She started to smile more. I was so happy that I had my best friend back. We fell into a routine, every day the same sequence of events - school, soccer, television, dinner. It was comfortable.

But even then, Dianne had changed. She got into so many fights at school 134

that year that they threatened to expel her. I walked into our room once to her standing in front of the mirror with a pair of scissors and a handful of her long, brown hair, and though it was less frequent and I really did think that she was getting better, I still heard her crying sometimes at night.

I overheard my parents talking about her a lot when they thought I couldn’t hear them. My father always called her “wild” and I’d hear my mother defend her, endlessly, saying that she just needed some time. She loved Dianne. My father loved her, too, but it was different for him. She couldn’t be infallible in his eyes like she was in my mother’s. He would stop defending her, to a point, and she hated him for it.

Still, we were all family. My father was a photographer and my mother was a writer - that’s how they met, collaborating on an article for a magazine they both freelanced at. The dark room in the basement always fascinated me, but I was never allowed to go in there. Dianne got her first camera for her fourteenth birthday, and the two were inseparable from that point on. If you saw Dianne, you were probably seeing her pointing her lens at something and snapping a picture. She started spending more and more of her time down in the basement, developing photos. She called it her “one true passion” and started going on and on about how she was going to go to school for photography.

And then one day, it just stopped. Full stop. No more Dianne and Camera, not anymore. It sat on her desk untouched for weeks, and instead of spending hours in the dark room, she spent hours on her bed, staring up into space with her headphones on. Every time I tried to approach the subject – “Dianne, what about photography school?” – She’d insist that she was fine. And she was lying, of course, but I knew better than to push her. I didn’t want to end up like all of the kids at school that sported scars that came from her hands. An angry Dianne was like a storm. She was scary and wild and only calmed down after she ran her course.

But honestly, for a while there, it seemed like everything could have been normal. We were growing up together, and I was figuring myself out at the same time I was figuring her out. I should’ve known it wouldn’t last. She packed up and left, without telling anyone, on her eighteenth birthday. I found a note on my desk the day after she was gone that told me that she was sorry, not to worry about her, that she would miss me, and that she loved me. I hid it in the bottom of my drawer so my mother wouldn’t see it. I knew that it would’ve broken her heart more than Dianne leaving. I didn’t want my dad to see it either. Surprisingly, he seemed to be the most affected by her disappearance. I had never seen my father angry before, he handled every situation coolly, with an even head. The day she didn’t come home, he punched the wall next to the stairwell so hard that he broke his hand and left a hole.

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They spent years looking for her. They contacted the authorities, but were told that since Dianne was technically an adult, there wasn’t really anything that they could do. Since it seemed like she’d left on her own, and there were no signs pointing to her being in any real danger, they said that the only thing we could do was hope she’d come back. They said most people who ran away returned within the first week.

But, we always knew that Dianne wasn’t most people.

My mom and dad ran advertisements in newspapers, begging her to come home. I walked in on my mom crying in her office more than once. From my father - silence. I felt like I had to tiptoe around him to avoid stirring him - he wasn’t the same. He’d yell at us over petty things, and though he always, always apologized, it still hurt to see my father a changed man. He started drinking, not heavily, but enough for me to notice a change. He didn’t talk much anymore. Just did a lot of staring out the window. I think he hoped he’d be the first to see her walking up the driveway. Maybe it was the stress he was under, or the sadness that came with losing yet another member of the family. Maybe he was predisposed to it. But, for some reason or another, he got very sick. I watched him wither away within months. He sat in his chair, getting more and more emaciated each day, always staring out the window. After that, he didn’t last much longer. We stopped looking for Dianne pretty quickly after that.

Life went on. It went on differently, but it went on. My mother and I didn’t speak to each other as much as we used to. It was alright. A bit sad, maybe. She would drive me to school every morning in silence, and in silence she would pick me up every afternoon. We’d eat dinner with a couple of pleasantries exchanged, but other than that, we didn’t speak. I had my friends from school who would come around, and she would be friendly, but she was not the same, talkative, funny woman. Maybe it was her way of trying to move on from everything that had happened. We tried to move on for so long.

My senior year of high school, we got a call from a local precinct in Chicago asking us if we knew Dianne. We told them we did, and they told us that we needed to come there as quickly as possible to identify her body.

She was dead. For all that time we’d been searching for her, she’d been wasting the days away in Chicago, drifting through life, getting into trouble.

Dying with a fucking needle in her arm. I was livid. I hated her. How dare she die so abruptly while I read the letter she’d left me every day wondering where she was. How dare she leave me alone?

We drove ten hours from Atlanta to Chicago, and when we arrived at the apartment she’d been staying at, a police officer pulled my mother aside and began talking to her. I wandered around, looking at the drawings and books that Dianne had collected for however long she’d been gone. It was messy, but Dianne was always sort of a messy person, so I wasn’t surprised. I saw the tiny 136

glass lion I had given to her when we were children, right on her nightstand.

I picked it up and put it into my pocket. Then I heard a glass break and my mother’s scream.

I’d had some experience with watching a parent lose control, but my mother had always been so quiet and timid. The police officer put her hand on my mother’s shoulder as she held her face in her hands, and I could see that she didn’t want to be there, so I intervened and grabbed her arm.

I saw the note in my mother’s hand but I didn’t say anything. It was time to bring Dianne home, and even for all of the emotions stirring up within me, hatred, sadness, and crippling loneliness, I didn’t want to make this harder than it needed to be. We drove home in silence.

I asked her about it the next day and she told me she didn’t know what I was talking about. I never brought it up again. What good would it have done? My mom was timid and kind, but she was a stubborn woman. If I had prodded her anymore, it would have just made my life much more difficult than it needed to be. It was a fruitless interaction, and I accepted that. I wish, in hindsight, that I pushed further. Maybe if I’d found out the truth back then, it would have been easier to handle. But she was always such a stubborn woman. What else was I supposed to do? And so I left my mother alone. I graduated high school, moved out and down to Savannah for art school and only talked to her when she called me. She’d ask how I was, and I’d feign interest in all of the things that she told me. I didn’t understand, why after all of those years she would never tell me the truth.

She died my junior year.

It was a weird feeling, being the last one left after my family had gone through so much turmoil and anguish. The last one after such a happy, normal childhood. But, I was. Technically, I was an orphan, and though I had a couple of other aunts and uncles up north, I never talked to them. I was the only person at the will reading. I received all of my mother’s assets. That was that.

I had only been gone for three years but my old home was dilapidated. The paint peeled off of the siding, the wood stain on the porch was chipped and worn down. One of the windows in the upstairs hallway had broken, and every now and again I could see a glint come from the carpet where a piece of glass lie, regarded with such apathy that it never had been bothered to be picked up.

I wondered how long my mother had gone before ceasing maintenance on the house. I wondered how long she’d gone before ceasing maintenance on herself.

Poor me. I clutched my chest and felt tears well up in my eyes. Poor me. I looked to pictures and albums, seeing the smiling faces of me and Dianne, my mother and father. I felt so sad for my plight that I put them away. I looked at the drawings in frames that Dianne and I had made when we were children. I felt so sorry for myself and felt tears start to crawl down my cheeks. I realized 137

that my hands were balled up into fists and I sat down on the couch. I needed to clean up, to get everything I needed to get out of here out. So I began to clean. I sifted through years of memories, folding them up and putting them away. I moved into the office where my mother had worked.

I saw electric bills, letters she’d never get to send. I saw a picture of me and Dianne, toothless grins staring up at the camera. My father had probably developed that photo. I saw an envelope with my mother’s name written on it. I remembered seeing it in my mothers hand. I remembered it. I remembered exactly what it was and plucked it from the pile, and I tore into it.

“Katie,” I read aloud, furrowing my eyebrows upon the discovery that the letter was addressed to me and not my mother.

“I don’t expect you to understand why I left, or why I did what I did to myself, but I need you to know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault or your mother’s fault. It wasn’t mine, either.” I frowned.

“In a better world I could’ve lived with your family forever. I could have been better than what I turned out to be, and I wanted to be so much better.

I’m sorry for that. You need to know what kind of a man your father is.”

Do you know what your world shattering behind you sounds like? It sounds like the crumpling of the metal on a car hitting a telephone pole. And the only thing you can do is keep reading an impressively detailed account of how your father would molest the girl you grew up with almost every day of your young life. The way he would take her into the dark room and turn the lights off. The way he’d sneak into our room if I wasn’t home. The things he would do to her.

The things he would say. That he said he would kill her and kill all of us if she told.

She told me not to go into the basement, and I didn’t listen to her, because why would I? She wasn’t there anymore, and I needed to see it for myself.

Everything was starting to blur together and my thoughts weren’t making sense. My father could not have done this. He was a kind man. He stopped living after she left but this couldn’t have been why. This wasn’t why.

I turned the handle to the dark room and walked in, flicking on the light.

Everything was so dusty that it was almost comical. I turned a key into the lock of a drawer that had the simple label “Old Prints.”

I pulled them out.

I saw what I needed to see.

I walked back up the stairs and my legs collapsed out from under me.

And in a firework boom instant it wasn’t home anymore.

The next day was the first time I had visited Dianne’s grave since we buried her. I set the letter down, and I cried for a long time. I wanted to let her know I was sorry for everything that had happened. I was sorry for hating her when she had died. I was so fucking sorry for everything. All I wanted to do was to reach 138

over to her crying in her bed and tell her everything was going to be okay, but I knew I couldn’t. I knew nothing was going to be okay again.

There wasn’t any way to change the past. I was the only one left, the only one that carried her secret. I burned the letter. I sold the house and torched everything that had to do with him. I didn’t want to remember him, and I didn’t want him to have the luxury of anyone else remembering him either. I made sure no one would.

I visited her a lot after that. I talked to her like I used to. Sometimes I’d just sit in silence for a long time. I wondered where she was, if she was looking down and talking back. But I mostly hoped she was just resting.

She deserved to rest, after this.

Piper Matlock is writer who believes that literature should be able to touch on some part of the human experience. Through language, she hopes to be able to relate to experiences many people have but are afraid to express or talk about.

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R A C HE L H A C K E T T HOW LUCKY Every Tuesday, Sara ate blue moon ice cream with her brother Carl in silence. Mrs. Simon never bought any other flavor. Sara and Carl were required to use Mrs. Simon’s house as a pick up/drop off site for parenting time. Sara would have enjoyed talking to Mrs. Simon’s daughter, Angelina, while she waited, but Angelina had piano lessons on Tuesday afternoons. The ice cream was her brother’s favorite, and every Tuesday he had a blue mouth and blue specks on his superhero t-shirts. When they came home, their mother always complained about the state of Carl’s face.

“Doesn’t your father ever feed you kids anything but ice cream?!” she whined. Sara didn’t bother telling her that it was Mrs. Simon who fed them the ice cream. It was the only thing she looked forward to on Tuesdays. “Every week Carl comes home looking like a ragamuffin. The least your father could do is clean your brother’s face.”

One Tuesday, Sara and Carl’s father brought them back to Mrs. Simon’s a bit later than usual. Sara was disappointed because this meant she wouldn’t get to hang out with Angelina when she came home from piano lessons for as long as usual before her mother came. As soon as they turned into Mrs. Simon’s driveway and saw their mom’s minivan already there, Sara knew things weren’t going to end well—her parents had only communicated through lawyers since the divorce. Carl and Sara unbuckled and got out of the car as her mother came out of the house, followed by Mrs. Simon, who hovered in the background. Angelina stayed inside, but she watched through the screen door, pressing her nose and hands against the screen.

“You’re late, Scott. The court order says to bring my children home from parenting time at 8:00,” her mother said, stepping out of her car. Her mother wore a suit from Salvation Army, and her hair was falling out of her loose bun.

Carl scurried into his mother’s car before Sara, ignoring the confrontation, and immediately absorbed himself in his Gameboy. Sara watched her parents through the car window, eyes wide and fingers tapping the arm of the seat unconsciously. She glanced at Angelina, whose eyes were wide and glued to the scene happening on her driveway. Sara’s mother furiously pointed at the line from the Judgement of Divorce that specified the parenting time details, looking at Mrs. Simon as if she were the one arguing about it. Sara knew that her mother carried a copy of it with her at all times, and she knew that it was not good if she ever had to pull it out.

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“He was only a few minutes late, Jennifer,” Mrs. Simon ventured before she was interrupted.

“I’m late because I was taking your children to dinner.” He laughed sarcastically. Sara’s hands stopped tapping and she went completely still.

“I guess that means you don’t want your parenting time, then,” her mother said. Mrs. Simon frowned disapprovingly, and looked sympathetically at Sara, who quickly avoided eye contact with her and turned her attention back to her parents.

Her father’s forehead creased, highlighting the faint wrinkles of his face as he reached for something in his pocket. Her heart leapt into her throat because it looked like he was reaching for a gun. Instead, he pulled out his phone and held it up to record video. “Don’t you dare record me!” her mother shouted.

Mrs. Simon looked for a moment as if she wanted to intervene, but thought better of it and remained silent, although she tried to wave Angelina away from the screen door.

“What’s that about taking my parenting time away? Do you want to go back to court?” Her father laughed again, but he put his phone away, fumbled briefly to put the seatbelt over his large paunch, and finally roared away in his blue sports car down the street. He knew that she couldn’t afford the lawyer’s fees, even if she wanted to go to court. Mrs. Simon looked at Sara’s mother.

“I don’t know if I’m comfortable serving as the drop-off site for Scott’s parenting time anymore.”

“I understand,” said her mother. She slammed the car door so hard that the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror almost fell off, and drove them away.

She didn’t turn on the radio like she normally did, so the car was eerily silent except for the music coming from Carl’s Gameboy.

“I’m Mario!” the character from the Gameboy said, interrupting the silence.

The unexpected noise made her mother jump.

“Carl, turn that goddamn thing off !” her mother yelled. Carl looked up, surprised, but obeyed. Before long, the silence became too much for him, so he got bored and started to pull Sara’s long brown ponytail. Sara didn’t want to antagonize her mother, so she tried to ignore Carl, but he pulled too hard and an “ouch” escaped her lips. This enraged their mother so much that she pulled over.

“Give me your Gameboy, Carl,” she said. Carl looked bewildered, but he handed over the Gameboy with his eyes wide, wondering what she was going to do with it. Sara’s mother took the Gameboy, not meeting Carl’s eyes, rolled down the window, and pitched the thing into the ditch outside. Carl sat in silence after that, blinking back tears.

The next week, they were picked up at Mrs. Fletcher’s, and Carl cried when he didn’t get his blue moon ice cream.

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* Nine years later, Sara attended college, choosing to live on campus even though her mother lived only twenty miles away. She was in her second year of university when her professor told the class that they had to see a performance at one of her university’s theatres. She decided to see The Glass Menagerie, a play that she thought sounded pretentious, yet interesting. Thinking that she would turn the rather dreary assignment into a night out, she decided to buy an extra ticket for Carl, since she hardly saw him anymore—he was always busy with his high school football practices.

Sara arrived at the theatre half an hour early. Although the theatre had once been lavish, the lobby was now walled with old, drabby brown wood.

Posters from past shows cluttered the walls. To her left was a staircase. A sign above the open doorway read, in red paint, “MEN’S” with an arrow pointing downward and “BALCONY” with an arrow pointing upward. To her right were two window-like openings with bars in front of them. She decided she liked this old, beat up theatre. It was well-used, but still loved. There was a bit of a line at the box office, and to Sara’s surprise, she recognized a short, gray-haired woman ahead of her.

“Mrs. Simon?” She tapped her on the shoulder.

“Sara! It’s so nice to see you, dear! You look so cute,” she told her, hugging her and admiring her tea-length powder blue dress. Mrs. Simon was originally from Alabama, and she had always been affectionate towards her, calling her “dear” and “honey” in a typically Southern way. Sara hugged her back. Mrs. Simon was next in line, and as she was speaking to the box office worker, Sara was horrified to notice her mother walk into the lobby of the theatre.

Normally Sara would not have been horrified to see her own mother.

But ever since that day in the driveway, Sara’s mother hated Mrs. Simon and Angelina, almost as much as she hated her ex-husband. She even threatened to sue Mrs. Simon if Angelina spoke to Sara, because she thought that Angelina was “infecting you with liberal ideas.” She also thought that the Simons were going to try and take her kids away from her by saying she was an unfit parent, but they would have no reason to do such a thing. Sara actually wasn’t able to have an actual friendship with Angelina for half of her senior year of high school because of her mother’s threat. Since starting university, Angelina and Sara had renewed their friendship secretly, but hardly ever saw Mrs. Simon anymore.

By now, Mrs. Simon had finished speaking with the box office worker and turned around to speak to Sara again. “See you later, honey!” she said, but then she noticed Sara’s mother approaching. Sara didn’t reply because she 142

didn’t want her mother to see that she had been talking to Mrs. Simon, and she prayed that her mother hadn’t noticed. Mrs. Simon seemed to understand and quickly went into the theatre.

“I see you’ve been talking to her,” her mother said from behind her, not even bothering to say hello. Sara closed her eyes and tried to remain calm. She wished that Carl was arriving sooner, so that she could escape into the theatre with him. She chose to ignore her mother’s choice of words and stay civil, even though it wouldn’t change how her mother behaved.

“Hi, mom, how are you?” she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

She noticed that her mother had tried to curl her hair but had failed miserably.

However, she was wearing a form-fitting black dress, and her makeup looked professionally done. “What brings you here?” She didn’t know that her mother had any interest in theatre.

“Robert got me tickets and he promised he would take me to that new Brazilian steakhouse afterward. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that bitch was going to be here.” She again ignored her mother’s choice of words, even though she wanted to defend Mrs. Simon, who was the complete opposite of a bitch. Robert was her mom’s boyfriend, and Sara thought that if he had been standing right next to her, she probably would not have spoken like that.

“Well, that was nice of Robert.” Just then, she saw Carl enter the lobby, since he stood out with his lanky, but broad-shouldered body. Thankful that he showed up just in time, she blew off her mother and ran over to him.

“Thank God for you,” she told him. “Mrs. Simon is here.”

“Oh no. Mom didn’t see her, did she?” Carl said. Of course, right then, Angelina herself walked in. She wore vintage red heels and a simple gray dress, and she met eyes with Sara immediately.

“My mom is here,” Sara said, and Angelina immediately recognized the situation.

“Don’t worry, we’ll just ignore her,” she told Sara. Since the show was beginning, they all joined the line to enter the theatre. On the main floor, where their seats were, there was a center section and two side sections. Sara and Carl went down the right aisle, while their mother and Robert went down the left aisle. Mrs. Simon and Angelina were already seated in the center section, not far off the right aisle. Sara hoped that her mother and Robert would be far away from them as she looked for row G. Finally, she found it and realized that her seats were on the aisle, right next to the Simons.

“Hello again,” she said, sliding in next to Angelina. They smiled back, and said their hellos to Sara and Carl, but right then the lights dimmed.

“Please turn off all cell phones and noise making devices,” a voice said. “Take a look around you and notice where the exits are in case of an emergency. Thank you and enjoy the show.” Out of the corner of her eye, she 143

saw the dark figure of a fat man in a blue polo shirt awkwardly stepping on people’s feet in the darkness and blocking their view as he sidestepped down the row. Behind him was the shorter figure of a woman. Because it was dim in the auditorium, she didn’t realize until they were right next to her that the dark figures were Robert and her mother.

They were sitting right next to them, with only Robert between her mother and the Simons. Sara sank lower in her seat and held both armrests tightly, hoping that her mother wouldn’t recognize the Simons.

The curtain opened languidly to reveal the set: closest to the audience was the old-fashioned living room of a tenement building, with a dining room through an arched doorway. There was a photograph of a man in military uniform on one of the walls, and there were tiny glass animals spread throughout the room. A man dressed as a merchant sailor entered, lit a cigarette and began to speak. Before long, Sara became engrossed in the characters and the tension of the story and forgot about the real life tension sitting right next to her. * A few scenes into the play, the actor playing Tom ranted, “Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn ‘Rise and Shine!’ ‘Rise and Shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!’” Carl leaned over and whispered to Sara.

“Sounds like me when mom wakes me up for school,” he said. Carl snorted audibly, which caused their mother to glance in Carl’s direction. Unfortunately, this caused her mother to sit up, lean past Robert’s bulk, and notice the Simons.

Sara looked between her mother and the Simons, noticing the brightly lit stage reflected in Angelina’s glasses the same way that you notice little details just before a car crash. Her mother glared at Sara or the Simons, or maybe all of them but sat back in her seat. Sara almost relaxed, but knew there would be trouble at intermission. * The actor playing Amanda sat in a chair, encircled by the light of the spotlight. She spoke into the telephone prop: “You’re a Christian martyr, yes, honey, that’s what you are, a Christian martyr! Well, I just now happened to notice in my little red book that your subscription to the Companion has just run out! I knew that you wouldn’t want to miss out on the wonderful serial starting in this new issue. It’s by Bessie Mae Hopper, the first thing she’s written since Honeymoon for Three. Wasn’t that a strange and interesting story? Well, this one is even lovelier, I believe. It has a sophisticated, society background. It’s all about the horsey set on Long Island!” The light faded out and the curtain dragged 144

closed. Suddenly the lights came on again in the auditorium, and Sara braced herself. Robert had fallen asleep next to her, leaning back in his seat, his hands folded across his belly.

“Robert! Wake up!” Her mother lightly slapped his arm to get him to wake up. Robert woke up with a start.

“Is it over?” he said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“No, it’s intermission. I don’t want to sit near the devil herself,” she said, picking up her scuffed leather purse. Robert, who didn’t know the background between his girlfriend and the Simons, thought she was referring to Sara. Sara threw her head back in her seat and covered her eyes, pretending she wasn’t there.

“Jennifer, I don’t think your daughter is the devil,” he said, shocked.

“Not her. That bitch,” she said, pointing at Mrs. Simon. Carl got up and left without saying a word. Mrs. Simon looked perplexed, as did Robert who had no idea who Mrs. Simon was.

“Jennifer, we don’t want to cause a scene,” she told Sara’s mother. Sara looked helplessly at Angelina, who frowned sympathetically.

“You’re the one causing a scene, you bitch,” Sara’s mother said, before she grabbed her jacket and started sidestepping down the row, stepping on everyone’s toes. Robert shrugged his shoulders and followed.

“I’m so sorry,” Sara said to Mrs. Simon and Angelina, about to cry. Angelina held her hand, and Mrs. Simon moved to where Carl had been sitting to be next to Sara also. She put her arm across her shoulders sympathetically. The man who had been sitting next to Sara’s mother leaned toward them.

“Do you need me to call the house manager? Is she drunk?” he asked, pulling at his bow tie. Sara didn’t respond, consumed in a memory from over a decade before. She remembered sitting at the kitchen table next to Carl, looking outside and watching the birds eat from the birdfeeder. The table took up most of the space under the simple chandelier, and seemed even bigger to 7-year-old Sara. She didn’t want to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

She had them at least three times a week, and she was starting to get sick of the taste of raspberry jam and peanut butter, not to mention that somehow the sticky jam always got in her long brown hair. Her mouth was dry and the peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth, and the seeds from the raspberry jam got stuck in between her teeth. She ate most of the sandwich, but left the crusts on her plate. Finally, she got up from the table, scooted around Carl’s chair, and was about to toss her crusts into the garbage when her mother walked up.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Taking care of my plate.”

“I still see food on your plate. Go back and finish.”

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Sara obediently went back to her place, hoisted herself onto the chair, and sniffed at the crusts suspiciously. She bit off the tiniest bit, but was unimpressed with the taste of bread without peanut butter or jelly. Noticing that her mother was no longer in the kitchen, she again got up to try and get rid of her crusts. Before she could make it to the garbage, however, her mother leaned over the counter that Sara could barely see over.

“I told you to finish your food!” her mother screamed. She took the bread crusts and crumpled them over Sara’s head. Sara froze, holding her empty plate and looking at her mother with her eyes wide. This also attracted Carl’s attention, who stopped chewing his carrots in shock.

Suddenly, Sara’s mother’s face softened and she sank to the floor sobbing.

Without a word, Sara set her plate down on the counter and grabbed a tissue from the bathroom. She handed it to her mother, who took it to wipe her eyes.

She opened her arms and hugged Sara. Sara hugged her also, breathing in the scent of her mother as she cried.

“Mama, here,” five-year old Carl said, holding out a tissue in one hand, and his carrot stick in the other. Sara’s mother broke out of the hug and smiled, taking Carl’s tissue.

“I’m sorry, Sara and Carl. If I ever get mad and yell at you again like that, just tell me to stop.” Sara and Carl nodded. “Do you want to go to the mall with me?”

“Ok,” Sara said. The children ran and put their shoes on and piled into the car.

Sara’s mother took them to the mall and bought Carl some badly needed new shoes. She let them play at the germy playground inside the mall for a bit, then took them back home and started dinner. When the meal was almost finished cooking, the front door opened, and Sara’s father stepped inside. Sara watched from the kitchen table, where she was engrossed in a coloring book.

“Who bought shoes today?” he asked, strangely calm. Sara looked up.

“I did!” Carl said, as he ran from his place at the kitchen table and jumped to set off the lights on his Buzz Lightyear shoes. He looked up proudly at his father, who glanced at him, but quickly ignored him. He pushed past Carl to be closer to his wife as she stood in front of the stove. Carl looked disappointed that his father was not more excited.

“Who gave you permission to spend my money?” he said very slowly to his wife. “Jennifer, those shoes cost $30. Did you earn $30, you bitch?” Sara’s mother trembled, not daring to say anything. Carl backed out of the kitchen, unsure of why there was tension. Sara snuck out of the kitchen to be near Carl and avoid what she knew was coming. Although they didn’t see it, Sara and Carl heard the sickening sound of a hand meeting flesh as their father slapped their mother across the face.

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* Sara stayed until the end of the performance, but she didn’t enjoy it as much as she had thought she would. Thinking that her mother and Robert had left the theatre already, she walked out into the lobby with the Simons. Instead, Robert and her mother were standing in the lobby. Robert stood with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, and her mother held her jacket over her arm, pacing back and forth. She met eyes with Sara as she came out of the theatre.

“You’re coming home with me, Sara,” she said, ignoring the Simons.

“What? Why?” “Because I said so,” her mother said. Sara paused and frowned.

“No, I’m not. I’m staying here,” she said. Her mother’s forehead creased, but she turned, grabbed Robert, and left. Somehow, she felt lucky.

Rachel Hackett is in her second year at Wayne State University. She is a double major in English and French, and enjoys reading , writing , and petting cats. Her favorite book is The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.

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V I C S I Z E M O R E PRAY FOR US ELPIS The True Life Marriage Counseling Center, Inc. is really just one man in the front room of his decrepit ranch house, the way some fortune tellers work.

The young girl is nervous. The man who answers the door is small and bald and wears long-outdated wire-rimmed glasses.

“He looks like a creeper,” the girl whispers.

“It’s fine,” the boy whispers into her strawberry blond hair that also smells of strawberry shampoo. He is aroused. They will be having sex in his apartment soon—probably before lunch. “I checked him out,” he tells her. “He can see the future for real. Mom and Dad used him way back before they got married. Said it changed their lives.”

“How much is he charging then?” the young girl asks.

“Dad paid. It’s a wedding gift.”

They sit on the couch and the sun shines in a picture window behind them, casting the boy’s shadow across the floor and into the small dining room.

The carpet is stained and dirty. The young girl’s shadow runs up the wedding counselor’s legs and over one shoulder, leaving his creepy face in the sunlight.

The house smells of cats, of neglected litter boxes. Hairy dust balls line the walls, and dirty laundry lays cast about, yellowed whitey-tighty underwear and all. The girl is allergic to cats. Her nose springs a light flow of watery snot. She snorts. Snorts again. She whispers, “If he can see the future, why’s he live like this?”

The boy flickers an annoyed glance at her.

“Cats,” she says. Her eyes begin to itch. She resists the urge to rub them.

This is a big day for the young couple. The young girl bought a new outfit just for this day: a cream silk blouse, long sleeved, and a short burgundy pleated skirt, cream hose and burgundy flats. She spent two hours on her face and hair. He put on his good jeans and a blue button-down Oxford. He rolls the sleeves up above his elbows.

“Are you ready?” the little man asks. His glasses reflect light from the window so they cannot see his eyes. His hair is slept on and greasy.

They giggle, clasp hands, nod in unison.

“Once we begin we cannot stop until the end,” the little man says. You understand that?”

The boy straightens his back and takes a deep breath. “Yes,” he says.

“Let’s do this thing,” his young bride adds, squeezing his hand with both of 148

hers.

“Okay,” the man says. He takes a yellow legal pad and a gray Sharpie marker with a black lid from the table beside the easy chair where he sits. He puts the marker in his mouth, chews on the cap. His front bottom teeth cant toward one another and overlap. The left one is yellow while the right one is whiter for whatever reason.

“You are getting married on August third,” he says.

“We haven’t decided for sure,” the girl says. “There are some scheduling issues at the church.”

“You don’t understand,” the man says. “When I say it, then it is already accomplished. The only thing left for you to do is go through it. August third. You will be married. After that you will travel to Hawaii for a weeklong honeymoon.”

“Hawaii?” The girl laughs and turns to her young husband.

“His father has already made arrangements,” the little man says, nodding his head toward the boy.

She squeals and grabs the boy’s arm. She says, “Oh my god.” She sneezes three times in a row and snorts, reaching up to rub her itching eyes.

“Gesundheit,” the boy and the small, creepy man say in unison.

The boy’s pinches in annoyance as he turns to the man. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Upon return,” the man says, “you will continue working for your father in his accounting firm.”

“That’s no revelation,” the boy says. “Everyone knows that.”

The girl sneezes three more times. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and returns her hand to her knee, turning it slowly when no one is looking to transfer the snot to her skirt.

“And you,” he says to the young girl, catching her in mid-wipe, “will get pregnant and deliver your first child three weeks after you earn your degree in elementary education.”

“Oh my god,” she says. “Really? A boy or a girl?” She sneezes and rubs her eyes. Her face is blotchy now, her eyes red-rimmed and teary.

“A boy.” The man holds his Sharpie marker like a cigar. There is no writing on his legal pad but he keeps looking at it.

“A boy.” The boy cocks his head, smiles proudly.

The girl squeezes his hand again and pats his biceps. He’s been working out a lot lately and the purple veins on his forearms bulge.

“You will not go to work as a teacher,” the man says.

“No,” she says. She snorts phlegm into her throat and it sends her into a short coughing fit. “I’ll use my degree. I love teaching.”

“You will have two more children and stay home for twelve years. You will 149

be unhappy and depressed for most of that time.”

“Why?” she asks. “I’ve always been a happy person.”

Turning to the boy, the man says, “She will lose interest in sex. She will also struggle with her duties as a mother.” He leans forward and whispers, “Pills and booze.”

“He’s lying,” the girl says, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve never been depressed a day in my life.

“Stop,” the boy says to the man.

“You will live like this for several years,” the man says, staring at the legal pad. “You will grow more and more miserable with one another. You will fail to communicate. This time of your life will culminate in your”—he nods to the boy—“having an affair with a girl who works with you at your dad’s firm.”

“Jennifer Grumbach?” the girl gasps.

“She doesn’t work there yet,” the man says. “She is still in grade school.”

“Oh my god,” the girl cries, smacking the boy on the arm. “You are disgusting.”

“You will carry on this affair for a full year,” the man tells the boy, “and decide to leave your family for her.”

“You son of a bitch,” the girl says. Her eyes itch now with burning heat. She twists her knucklebones into them, twists and twists. When she looks back at the man, small purple dots the shape of Mike & Ike candies spun hazily around his head.

“The next two years of your life,” he tells her, “will be misery like you’ve never known, and chaos much of the time. You will sometimes neglect your children; you will drink and make bad decisions. You will sleep with a number of men, and even try to convince yourself that you’re falling for a couple of them. In the end, you will feel used up by men, emotionally dead.”

“Who recommended this guy to you?” the girl whispers to the boy. “Let’s get out of here.” Her face is red and wet. She is wheezing.

“Why do you call this a counseling center?” the boy asks, pointing his finger at the man. “This isn’t counseling.”

“The good news is that you get back together.” To the boy he says, “You realize that you don’t really love this other girl. You miss your family. You ask if you can come back.”

“And you,” he says to the young girl, “are so beat down that you let him come back, and convince yourself it is what will make you happy. Of course it doesn’t. The same old stresses are there, except now there is a deep undercurrent of anger and bitterness that neither of you can shake.”

“Do we go to counseling?” the young girl asks. “Do we get help?”

“You do.”

“And?” 150

“Your children will move out one by one. The middle son will come back and live in your basement on and off. He will have a drug problem. Your daughter will live there too for a while, with her own daughter, while she gets back on her feet after an ugly divorce. You will repeatedly bail all three of them out financially. They will remain perpetual adolescents, and they will suck you dry.”

“Stop,” the girl says. She tries to rise, but she cannot. She puts her hands over her ears and starts to hum.

“She,” he says to the boy, “will get breast cancer at the age of fifty-four, just after she has decided to go back to school and start teaching. She will have a double mastectomy and go through chemo. She will be sicker than either of you can possibly imagine, retching with not even stomach acid left to come up.”

The boy wipes tears from his own eyes now and looks at the girl he loves with all his heart. Her red eyes are closed tight as she presses her palms over her ears and sneezes, flinging snot onto the front of her blouse.

“You,” the man says, “will stay with her through this, but you will resent her because you will have to quit your car club and your softball league and drinking with Steve and Charles and Marcelo over sports trivia at a bar called Mudpuppies. The outer borders of your life will shrink to your office and your home. You will not be able to even attend a work dinner in the evening without finding a sitter for your wife. Your children will grieve you so much that you will stop asking for their help.”

“Who are Charles and Marcelo?”

“Friends. You haven’t met them yet.”

The girl stops humming and pulls down her hands.

“The cancer will spread,” the man tells her.

“What?” she yells. “Cancer?”

“Your husband will have to bed you, toilet you, dress you. It will drag on for another two years before you die.”

“You’re full of shit is what I think,” she says.

“After she dies,” he tells the boy, “Your children’s anger over your infidelity will surface. They will blame you and hate you for every bad memory of their childhood. They will not come and visit. You will spend time with your friends but it will be hollow. You will be unhappy. Then you will get cancer too.

Prostrate. The doctors will take care of that, but it will be in your lungs too.

You will die unhappy and alone.”

“This is bullshit,” the boy says. “We’re getting married in a month and we’re going to Hawaii. All the rest of that shit isn’t set. And your house reeks of cat piss.”

“You’ve already asked around. You know what I say always comes to pass.

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That’s why you’re here.”

“What if we don’t get married?” the boy asks.

The small man shrugs and runs his fingers through his greasy hair.

The boy and young girl stand up. The little man walks them to the door and thanks them.

As they walk to the new Camry the boy’s father has given them, he says, “You’re right. He’s full of shit.” The sun is higher in the clear blue sky.

Everything is clear and sharp in the bright daylight.

“Of course he is,” the young girl says. She wipes her nose with the back of her thumb. Her eyes are puffy, her face red and splotchy. “We’re going to have a great life together.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. So much.”

They get into the car. He starts the engine and backs out of the driveway of the decrepit brick ranch house.

“Your mom get the caterer?”

“She did. The guy does ice sculpture too. We’re going to have an ice swan looking over the champagne fountain.”

“That’s so cool.”

“Isn’t it?” She takes a deep breath, snorts.

“Your allergies cleared up fast,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “They’re not that bad.”

“God, I love Hawaii.”

“I’ve never been.”

“I know it’s a cliché to call it paradise—that’s the only way to describe it though: paradise.”

“I can’t wait.”

“It’s going to be so great.”

“I know it is.”

“All of it.”

“Every bit. I can’t wait.”

They drive down the street and turn across the oncoming lane onto the interstate highway. They clasp hands on the console as the boy accelerates confidently toward their future.

Vic Sizemore’s short fiction and nonfiction are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, Connecticut Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, PANK Magazine, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, Reed Magazine, Superstition Review, Entropy, Eclectica, Ghost 152

Town, and elsewhere. Stories from the cycle Eternity Rowboat are published or forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Letters and elsewhere. Her fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and two Pushcart Prizes.

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n onf iction.

A L A N H A R R I S A N D C H R I S T I A N W I S N E R MEADOW’S EDGE My beautiful 8 year-old granddaughter will start off a conversation by looking into my eyes and whispering, “You know what, Poppa, I’ve been thinking…” And lately that, above all else, has gotten me…to thinking…

I’ve been thinking about the things that wait for you—past the tree-line, over the ridge, at the edge of the meadow. Catface understood. He often kept a watch as I would lose myself in shadows and light. I was always in search of the perfect still photo even when life circled around me, refusing to remain still.

Dinner simmered on the grill. Over on a nearby table, carefully positioned Northern California vegetables awaited their photo-op for the 10-year anniversary Farm to Table 2016 Calendar. That’s when my favorite feline, my companion, my trusted friend whose only official proof of his identity was printed across the top of the Veterinarian’s patient file—Catface, drew my attention to the edge of the meadow. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. But that’s how it is. Whatever is waiting for us is often intent to wait in silence. Either that or it is simply one of the frailties of being human; we don’t have a clue that the most important things in the world are out there watching us, waiting for the right time to pull back the curtains.

Catface looked at me and said in no uncertain terms that he was about to see what was out there—and he preferred company. I understood this partnership which we shared. I had agreed to it the morning I discovered him under the porch of the Kneeland cabin. I had come to this place with a woman in need of rescuing. Maybe I was that thing at the edge of her own meadow that beckoned her away from an abusive marriage. She and her two children enjoyed the safe haven of a photographer’s woodland home. I was merely a temporary oasis until they found their way back to their own world. That’s what an oasis is—a stopping point to rest before you either continue the journey or return safely from where you started.

Just when I thought I was once again alone with my darkroom and my lenses and my negatives—Catface and I found each other. The feral feline was there all along, under my footsteps, comforting four baby raccoons in a nest under my porch. So I did what I’ve always done, I fed him and coaxed him and offered to share equally my oasis with him. I asked for nothing in returned but 155

he offered anyway to keep a watch on what lurks and waits and watches at the edge of the meadow. As the aroma of dinner drifted above the grill, Catface looked with an anxious intensity. His eyes darted toward the edge of the meadow. As he carefully crept towards God-knows-what I reluctantly brought up the rear while holding a goblet of California Port. With the cabin, cabbage, and cauliflower behind us we approached the edge of what more and more seemed to be the boundary of our comfort zone—where the oasis ends and unknown adventures begin.

He was startled by something. His hair stood straight up. His back arched.

His tail curled. His eyes opened wider than I’d ever seen. I looked past the treeline at the meadow’s edge. I searched the brush looking for movement. As yet I saw nothing. As yet I heard nothing. But then I smelled it.

At our feet was a large pile of bear shit. Still steaming. Lurking all this time at the edge of the meadow was a large predator marking its territory, sending a message. Catface and I heard the message loud and clear. We just reacted differently. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it. The lumbering brown bear looked like a full grown adult foraging among the bushes. My first and foremost thought was to haul ass back to the cabin. I wasn’t prepared for this just yet—to confront what waits for me, for you, for any of us at the edge of the meadow.

Catface had no intention to turn back. As he too caught sight of the beast, my furry friend turned into Puss ‘N Boots with anger management issues. I sensed that his ill-conceived bravado was about to over-compensate for what he lacked in size. As Catface moved forward to challenge the beast, I stepped up—not to defend him, but to scoop my feline companion into my arms and race back toward the relative safety of the cabin. I quickly grabbed him but our pivoting change in direction from fight to flight was not without bloodshed.

Catface sunk his teeth deep into the curve of my left hand between my thumb and index finger. Across the yard I spilled blood from my left hand and red wine from my right. What a sight we must have made to the bear.

I ran so fast I didn’t stop to save the vegetables still posing for their opportunity to become organic media stars. I didn’t stop to grab dinner off the grill. Behind a locked door Catface and I stared through the window monitoring the tree-line. To this day I don’t know if he bit me out of fear or anger. But I’ve since figured that either emotion would be acceptable among friends when we come face to face with what waits for us at the meadow’s edge.

This is a collaborative work. Christian Wisner was an award-winning professional photographer.

Alan Harris is a Wayne State University graduate student and hospice volunteer. Harris is a Tuesday 156

Story Writer for Hospice of Sparrow Health Systems. The Meadow’s Edge is a collaborative memoir piece which Christian shared with Alan, who in turn, transformed the oral-story-telling into a gift for Christian’s family, a personal narrative for others to share.

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M I N A H E L M U N I R PLAYING WITH SPLINTERS I grew up with the familiar curve of spruce wood pressed into my palm. It was in the fourth grade that I first laid eyes on the brown crème body of the violin. Mrs. London walked us into the cafeteria in a neat little line. Seeing the rows of instruments on display – flutes, oboes, clarinets, French horns, and at the far end, the violin and its brethren – we all waddled in different directions.

I tried the clarinet, but its metal buttons glared at me like the glistening eyes of a beast. So I strolled down to the far end, to the towering bass and the dainty violin. The woman showing off the instruments waited for me to sit down on the plastic chair. She wedged the violin under my chin and, holding the bow like a club, I dragged out my first note.

Since then, I’ve spent an hour of every day learning the intricacies of a stringed instrument. How to turn the hardwood pegs, pluck the strings with the pads of my fingers, suspend the violin on my shoulder. How to press my fingers onto the string so they come away with grill marks, curl my pinky on the frog of the bow with the other fingers hanging off the fiberglass as if clinging to a monkey bar. In orchestra we all stumbled and grew, and our arms and minds transformed into the spruce and willow and ebony of our instruments, until we were like trees, the wind blowing tunes through our hollows. But sometimes, when the gusts blew, I bent, bowed, felt like breaking.

I discovered an immense fear of leadership, which sits on my shoulders to this day.

In high school, we refined our skills to a point of mastery. We dragged the rosin and coated horse-hair across the strings in the unending conundrum of sound called legato. The notes with dots called sometimes for staccato – short and pronounced, and sometimes for spacatto – the feathery touch and bounce of the bow to the string. While waiting for the teacher to finish instructing the cellos, or violas, or basses, we would run our thumbs raw against the wire string, plucking discordant notes, and reeling through half-remembered Coldplay melodies. It was always a rush, a sort of rooted feeling, to play with so many people. Each section played their separate half, eighth, quarter, or whole notes. Each played their different dynamic of piano or forte, and carefully listening and watching each other, we created a rustle of ebbing and flowing sound which blew over the audience and bounced and danced across the ceilings and floors.

In my sophomore year, I auditioned for the solo in one of our pieces. I got 158

the part, and so began the grueling process of preparing to play in front of hundreds of people. The solo, like many of our pieces, required me to shift into position. This means as you play, your thumb slides quickly down the neck of the instrument, and your fingers follow the string to the appropriate place, further down the fingerboard. You have to hook your thumb at the saddle and maneuver the rest of your fingers from there. Here, the notes are higher, more delicate, and much more demanding. The bow has to move faster, and vibrato becomes even more important. Your fingers have to wobble back and forth on each note, like the swaying of branches, to warm the sound and color it in shades of chocolate and honey. You have to pull and push the bow with great conviction, the muscles in your arm perfectly in sync with the rhythm, and your index finger pressing out the proper volume. Higher up on the fingerboard, all the notes are finicky and needy, and require that your finger pads rest just at the perfect distance. If you do it wrong, the note comes out sick, and squeaky, and it stains the ear with the marred pitch.

On the night of the concert, I sat first chair with my back rigid and my palms leaving streaks of salty water on the clean wood by the f-hole. The bright stage lights glared like petty suns, and the murmur of the crowd dimmed as I played the tuning A. An eerie, tuneless cacophony of flat A’s jumped and fell onto the scratched black stage. Our teacher walked to the conducting stand, bowed, and raised his arms. He smiled at me. Grimacing, I raised my violin to my shoulder, tucking the black plastic under my chin, positioning my bow on the string with a slight crunch. My fingers shook like leaves in an afternoon breeze, and the fingerboard was slick with my sweat.

A note here: my teacher had made clear the first high G I played would set the key for the entire piece.

I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of the orchestra’s expectations. I felt the faint impatience of the audience, their eyes and mouths ajar, the hisses of speech dying down. I slid my sticky finger down the neck with a squeak, and played. My finger slurped up to the note, the high G that everyone was waiting for. I pulled my bow and cringed. The note came out strained and angry and flat. Very flat. My teacher’s smile became fixed, and I felt the disappointment of the entire orchestra bear into me like a thousand stakes of polished wood.

I withered under the guilt I felt for that one note years and years after the moment had passed, and the notes had slid back into pitch, and the crowd had cheered, and all I could think was I messed up, I messed up, and the tiny suns glared at me with all the focus they could muster.

Minahel is a sophomore at Wayne State and is majoring in biology and minoring in English. Her career goal is to be a dentist, but she also has a goal to publish at least one book in her life time.

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K U D A J A N A V A R R E T E DO YO U U N D E R S TA N D You were never the best father.

You laughed at me when I cried over that butterfly. I remember the way Raj aimed for it. He told me he was going to do it. He yelled at me to watch. With one wave of the flimsy stick, it fell on the ground among the dead leaves and the dirty path of the alley. Carrying it in my hand, protecting it from the world, I took it home. It fluttered its wings, soft and white. And then it stopped.

You didn’t like animals in the house. You said they were messy and too much responsibility. I laughed at you. I knew better. That little kitty was my escape. With every yawn and scratch, it healed me. I remember the day I found him, in the middle of the alley. He was an abandoned child, like me, that’s why I connected to him so fast. I took him home and made him a bottle. I wanted to help the poor thing heal. One day, I lost sight of him for a minute.

He got out. I called out his name, “Scarface, come here! Scarface!” He always came running when I called him. This time he did not. And I wished I had never found him. I don’t know how it happened. How could anyone do this? I wanted to gather his dead body in my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to. He had mixed into the dirt and the world around him. I yelled at you. For throwing him out.

You came home to see me in tears. You looked in shock but she had done it again. I was a whore in her eyes for sure. You didn’t understand what the problem was. It’s not something I could have told you. I couldn’t share with you how my skin burned. My skin disgusted me. I could still feel his touch, on my neck, on my face, on me. He betrayed me, us, yet he got away. Moments before, I stared at him. His eyes screamed victory. His words spoke of lies.

I ran. I couldn’t share with you how I hid among the jackets in the closet. I wiped tears on their sleeves. They understood my pain. I closed my eyes and wanted it to be over. It was quiet in my little closet. I thought the storm was over, I felt relieved, my heart rate going back to normal. Light streamed into my dark world, she found me. You didn’t understand how I lost myself.

I had heard the stories about how I drowned when I was a toddler. No one was watching, nothing new I guess. Mom had gone to the city with Affa and Raj. I had fallen into the lake behind our house. I was under for ten minutes. I almost died. Mom didn’t care. You were so far away and neither did you. You were closer when I was trying to grab onto something, anything to lift me up.

I was under for so long. I had slipped on a rock when I was trying to reel in a 160

fish. I could feel something crawl up next to me, tangling me into the depths of my pain. I tried to move up to the surface, anything to catch one breath, but it wasn’t working. It was beginning to feel like the end, maybe it was really my time to go. Almost giving up, I opened my eyes, all I could see was darkness.

After what felt like forever, I finally got a hold of something strong. Something grabbed onto me and helped lift me up. I was finally able to breathe. Using all my strength, I moved up and walked across the street. You saw me. You looked at me and asked me why I was wet from head to toe. I looked at you in disbelief. I was gone for so long and you didn’t check to see where I was. I was angry. You let me drown once again.

I can still remember the taste of that vanilla ice cream as we walked out of the McDonald’s. Arman and I skipped that day. It was a bright day for autumn, not too breezy, not a cloud to see in the sky. We were just two kids, unaware of the dangers we were surrounded by. I can still close my eyes and remember the brown freckles he had on his already brown skin. Even then, it wasn’t a flaw. He told me a joke, but I was more focused on his pearly whites than I was at the lack of humor. Arman made me happy, always made me laugh. I remember the look on his face change as he pushed me to the ground. He fell on top of me, I felt the wetness on my shirt. I saw him, frail and hurt, something I never imagined he would be. He was smiling and slowly, it faded.

You yelled at me. Mom called me a whore. I was having a relationship with an unknown boy. What shame I was bringing to the family. You forgot to see that someone lost a child, a child that died protecting me, your child. You didn’t understand how cloudy my bright world had become. You didn’t get that I was hurting, ignored the tears. I yelled at you. For not understanding.

There’s a man on the moon. Do you remember that story? Supposedly there’s a man on the moon that watches over everyone. He grants wishes of those who wish and wish from the bottom of their heart every full moon. I know how it sounds, such a childish story. For a child that carried so much pain and agony, it meant a lot. So what does a child with a broken heart wish for?

Every full moon, I looked outside and glared into the moon looking for the man. I prayed and hoped he listened to my wish. I swore that it was the one thing I wanted from the bottom of my heart. Every full moon, I closed my eyes shut and wished. You watched me from afar and laughed. I really wanted to be fixed. You didn’t understand.

I was a whore. She said that. How disrespectful I was of our family name. I could hear her from the other side of my room as I woke up from my nap. The reality came into view slowly. There was an IV attached to my arm, pumping a clear fluid. I didn’t remember how I’d gotten there. The nurse came in and asked if I needed water. I shook my head. More people came in and flooded me with questions. I was dozing off again. I woke up in my own clothes. Mom 161

was crying. She told them she was worried about me. She didn’t understand why I would do that. She said she loved me. It was a nice and quiet ride home, mom held my hand. It felt nice. She never held me. You guys helped me inside and sat me on the couch. I was still in a hazy state. You approached me slowly.

Mom was sitting next to me, still holding my hand. I was wrong though, I was dreaming. She held me down, as that belt whipped every inch of my body. She muffled my cries and I twisted and writhed in pain. You hurt me but you still didn’t understand.

You had taken her back home to get married. Affa, my wonderful and naïve sister, had made the horrible mistake of falling in love. You guys chose the man for her, she wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t even finish high school. After just a few months of being married, Affa had already gotten pregnant. Mom was furious. She told her to get an abortion. I yelled at mom. I blamed you both for ruining my sister’s life. She might have been the eldest, but she was still a child. I saw what happened to her. I didn’t want that for myself. So, when I fell in love, I knew it wouldn’t work. I denied him and looked elsewhere. I knew I couldn’t lose him. I cried that day. But he never saw it. When you found me that day, huddled in my closet, you didn’t understand it.

He cried for me, the first person to ever cry for me. I had given up that day. It was just hard and I had enough. But one look at him and it all changed.

I could see the pain he felt for me, those beautiful brown eyes telling me to fight on. He gave me hope and he felt like enough of a reason. I hated myself for hurting him. Every tear that dropped from his eyes broke small pieces of whatever I had left of my heart. The whole school knew. Mom came in that day; the counselor was already speaking to me. They tried to get her to understand my situation, how bullying can lead to depression, but mom didn’t get it. I already knew what was running through her head. At that moment, I didn’t care. I went home that day feeling like a different person. His face stayed etched onto my mind. That shattered the moment I saw you. With one slap, you reminded me why I wanted to kill myself.

He was 21. I was 15. A boy from a rich family with many acres of land. He was residing in London, in college, about to start up his career. To be honest, at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was that he was rich. The dowry was going to be grand. That’s all mom cared about. It didn’t matter that he might treat me bad, that he might leave me like Affa’s husband did, that he wouldn’t care about me. No, it was all about the money for you. I cared though, if he would treat me well, if he would let me finish my education, if he would support me. I didn’t want to risk having a life like Affa, raising a child by myself with no high school diploma. I said no to this arrangement. Mom wasn’t happy about it. Neither were you. You had already given your word to your friend, now you’d have to take it back. It was going to tarnish your name.

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You never asked me why I said no. You never cared to understand.

You told me to shut up, to not make noise. You said the neighbors would hear us. There was money missing and I was pinned as guilty. I knew you didn’t believe mom but she had gotten her way; she didn’t need an excuse. She grabbed me by the nape of my neck and I could feel a bruise forming. I should have been used to this by now, but it was different this time. The repeated kicks, I could feel him hurt. She threw me towards you, you tried to shield me.

I got yanked and thrown and punched. You told her to stop, but she didn’t listen. She never listened to you. It wasn’t me she was hurting, I wanted to yell to you. It wasn’t me. And then he was gone. And you didn’t understand my loss.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Dark bags under my eyes and bruise on my neck. Sweat pouring down my neck. After working this shift for eight hours, I was ready to leave. I still had fours more hours to go. My legs were aching from the when Mom stepped on them. My throat was hurting from when you grabbed me a little too hard. I didn’t eat for two days, after mom threw the food out of my hands. She wouldn’t let me eat and you didn’t persuade her otherwise. I wasn’t doing enough for the family. In a household of eleven, I was the person responsible to feed everyone. But no one fed me.

I was responsible to take care of everyone’s needs and wants, but mine weren’t important. I was responsible for it all, but no one was responsible for me. At the end of the day, I went home, hungry and in pain, with no money in my account and all the bills paid. I walked through that door with the smell of food lingering in the air, yet none for me.

You said so easily to not come home. I honestly don’t know where it came from. It was the night before my prom and I was kicked out. How easy you made it seem to just disown a child. Then again, you had eight of them, seven now. I screamed into the phone, I begged for you to change your mind. But I was a whore. You said so.

The breeze swept my short hair in a way that some strands attached to the stickiness of my lip balm. Looking up into the night sky, hoping to see a few stars but living in the city that I do, stars are hard to come by. However, the moon shined bright that night. It illuminated the sky, silently watching the world. I was waiting for him to come outside, and afraid to reveal a secret I held onto my whole life. I was giving him the last part of myself. Will he accept me now? We have been together for years. After what felt like hours, the man of my heart sat down next to me. He knew I had a heaviness on my heart, he always knew. I looked at him and my heart leaped out of my chest. The most beautiful brown eyes looked at me, eyes that look like a pool of milk chocolate that swallows me up and for once, I’m okay with drowning. He wiped away tears that I didn’t know were falling. I told him my secrets, my disgust, my 163

horrors. In that moment, he looked at me broken, like that day in high school.

Those mesmerizing brown eyes started pooling with tears and I regretted telling him and hurting him like I did then. Not knowing what he was feeling, I felt the worst. Our time was over? Was this too much for Him? With one swift move, he wrapped me in his arms and healed me.

I remembered the many times you laid in a hospital bed. There were long nights and many vials of blood. The scent of ammonia in the halls and the feeling of death always lurking around. It was cold. It was frightening. I knew that day was different. You were hooked up to so many wires. I did not smell the ammonia, did not feel anything. I watched you. I heard the faint sound of your heartbeat. I touched your feet, gave them a tight squeeze, expecting you to wake up and tell me to stop. You always hated it but I didn’t, that’s where heaven is, was. All I could do was wish and pray you would wake up. You needed to wake up so I could say sorry, so I could beg for forgiveness, so I can hug you. I needed you to wake up so you could watch me get married, hold my kids, see me be successful. The doctors were not that optimistic, but I was. You always made it at the end.

I’ve never believed in ghosts. Of course, after watching scary movies, the concept of it would frighten me. After you passed, I wanted ghosts to be real.

I wanted you to spook me as I turned a corner. I needed to see you again, anything to see you again. I needed you to punish me for being selfish. When I found out about you dying, I didn’t believe it either. Parents don’t die when you’re twenty. Forget about me, the youngest of your children was only nine.

I never thought you’d die. I found him and I told him. It wasn’t until I spoke those words did it hit me. I felt my legs lose all the strength they had to keep me up. I felt my heart stop beating. I felt like I was drowning. After what felt like forever, I let out a scream.

I couldn’t bring myself to visit you. What does one say? It took me a few months. At first, I didn’t know where you were. No one would tell me. Then again, I was the forbidden child. I was the one people told stories about. I was to be ashamed because I chose a boy over my family. No one saw that I actually chose freedom and happiness in the form of a boy. It wasn’t even about the boy. I went to the cemetery and asked for where you were buried. I sat in that office, minute after minute, passing slowly. I was scared. What do I say? I finally had the strength and went to find your burial place. At the end, I wasn’t strong enough. I hope you understand.

I stood in front of your grave. They spelled your name wrong on it. Those idiots! After a while of just standing there, I started to speak to you, “Hey Dad. I don’t know what to say to you. I’m sorry I didn’t see you. I’m sorry you didn’t see me. I’m sorry. Dad, I didn’t mean to hurt you this way. I’m sorry for being selfish. I shouldn’t have left you. I spent my whole life taking care of you. I 164

can still remember the medicines you had to take and when. I knew which ones not to mix and which ones to take directly after you eat. It was like a built-in schedule in my head. I knew that when I left they couldn’t take care of you.

They didn’t take care of you. if I had stayed, you would still be alive. Did you miss me, like I missed you?” Tears fell from my eyes as I apologized, over and over again. I knew now that no amount of apologies would bring you back.

No amount of apologies would make me feel any less guilty. I leaned against the tree near your grave. It has been four months since you’ve been there, the tree longer. It was the middle of summer yet this tree was gray and naked. No leaves to decorate it and to fill it. It was empty as this cemetery, empty as my heart as I stood over your grave.

On a nice Autumn night, with the breeze slightly chilly and the moon brightening up the sky, the world around me changed. It had snowed the night before and the snow looked like little diamonds on the ground. The shine on the ground was nothing compared to the one on my left hand. That man made me happy. He made me the happiest. I knew it was happening though, we talked about marrying each other. I always dreamed of having his kids, but also dreamed about the one we lost. He is that ray of sunshine at the end of the tunnel that everyone talks about. He is my only sunshine. He might never know how much I love him, but I wish he never leaves me in a position where my world would turn gray. At the end of that day, I looked up at the moon and the child in me thanked the man that my wish came true.

I have lost a friend that only wanted to protect me. I have lost a child that I couldn’t protect when I was supposed to. With every loss, I lost myself. Are you watching over me now? Are you up there with Scarface as he prances around from cloud to cloud? Did you meet Arman? Did you see my beautiful boy? Daddy, do you see me? I am finally understood.

Kudaja Navarrete is many things. She is a wife, a student, a sister, a daughter, an employee. At the end of the day, those are titles that don’t describe her. She is strong , fierce, hard-working. She is what her past turned her onto. The struggles she had to overcome made her. Kudaja’s life wasn’t easy, but bringing her down will not be either.

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T H Y L I A S M O S S (THE COLOR OF CARING IN) DREAM BABY TIENDA He said he didn’t want to parade me, after so many years of being apart, and getting back together after 30 years, this time admitting some feelings, but I wanted to be paraded and let it happen to the Vashti I had become for him at his Dream Baby Tienda.

As he surveyed the parking lot of his store, a white bird that flew through his nightly dreams, his own thoughts soaring outfitted with those sweet, soft feathers, he realized he didn’t want them to return to earth. He preferred his Vashti thoughts soaring, careening, dipping, swooping, swirling, performing every possible flying feat before landing softly at his feet, magic carpet filaments as Thomas Robert Higginson prepared to walk into a store of Vashti.

He still prayed that there was time for Vashti to become, if she wasn’t already, glad to celebrate these events that honored her as only love could, that she’d be very glad all of this was happening, as glad as the bird flying in his mind, higher and higher, where ecstasy resided.

He was the architect of his own dreams, a poet, and that identity explained everything, including the store, as poets had a reputation for being the best dreamers of them all; who but a poet would have a Dream Baby Tienda?

He planned to catch each feather like snow on his hot tongue, curved like a bowl; it melted away his thirst. It had been raining, stars had been falling like raindrops, like hulls of dreams coming true, shattering and splashing their way into realities. Puddles dotted this parking lot, adorned it with his thoughts growing hotter and hotter, boiling love, his inferno brain nearly ready to detonate.

Each puddle was a melting of a Dream Baby.... He could count them and follow them, knowing they would lead to Vashti, whatever was left after the melting, but it would surely be enough for him, and as he approached, the puddles deepened and widened, multiples of ten and ten thousand, soon enough he was swimming in an ocean of Dream Babies hatching and hatching and hatching…He drank from this ocean also, freshest water on earth, as fresh as Vashti always was… Her blue silk dress that matched his eyes whenever he looked at it, unraveling and unraveling, slender blue rivers of thread he pulled, his transfusion of Vashti into a form of blood that made him live better.

Thomas Robert could see them, and could see Vashti becoming just as blue as the shadows of veins he also saw, and linked them in the light of the fire…

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Vashti as brown as autumnal heaven, leaves changing into her buttered toast color, and Thomas Robert was much more milky, more like a planet where astronaut Vashti landed, smack dab in a wilderness of perfect dreams: together: cream in his coffee. Aisle 4.

What egret rituals in a parking lot!

—Lane lines were more blue veins, in the dead of this thoroughly illuminated night, lane lines, veins of the streets, reflected in the puddles — water was in them also and leaves, twigs like bony fingers with knots, not Vashti’s fingers, however, which were perfect in his Vashticized mind.

They were handles of trapdoors also, fall-in-love formation happened right here, Banjo Vashti across his knee, straddling it perfectly; she had grown into just the shape for straddling him perfectly, molded by his wishes and her desires once in his presence: Vashti quicksand all around him, surrounded only by delights.

As breezes rippled them, Vashti’s hands touched him, pulling him into a bottomlessness that he wants, but not quite total fulfillment until rock bottom, a destination he will never reach, as he will fall in love with Vashti forever. That endless falling in love with her; everything that moved, danced to the beat of his falling in love with her. Even his mouth and tongue as he struggled to explain to his wife this bigamist phenomenon of how he’s also married to these unstoppable thoughts of Vashti, but maybe that was just a meteorological phenomenon, some strange weather to which he had to surrender, as everything does, as nothing about him was exempt from Vashti weather as each puddle reflected the neon Dream Baby Tienda sign, stretched it, molded it into that craved endlessness, shaped like an upside-down horseshoe, “n” not “u”, “u” not “n”, depending on your preference, to catch luck, or shower it on those who entered the store, so colorful, streaks of blue, orange and green, gem-worthy yellows (& some barely-there pinks of perfect sunsets, rubbings of canvases of lives and loves, Vashti’s pink lipstick that would decorate his thighs like octopus suction cup imprints, costly fabric tattooed with kisses flickering when clouds covered the sun, the moon, the colorful neon, the alternative rainbows.

Every color he could think of by any name was represented in the store sign, and some of them just names for wild pulsing of blood in veins and arteries; colorful streams as anything already shades of red and blue as visual effect, matters of skin and what was only skin deep: human blood always red, light causing veins to appear blue, optical illusion, a magician’s trickster wavelengths, and transitional colors between those poles, those pillars; some babies were born with bluish coloration, some even tonight, “blue baby syndrome”, Thomas Robert, had no doubt about that. Blue lips, tips of fingers, toes also. Heart defect, but feeling love such as what Thomas felt (and 167

Vashti —ideally reciprocating just for him; why would he dream anything else for himself ?) was no defect at all, but a realization of some of love’s power, look at what love was doing to water, stunning blue ice in the great lakes, but nothing as great at this impenetrable love. None of this if not for his blue eyes filling with tears; a love so pure it made him cry, he ached for want of it, and each tear was also an egret, each tear sprouted wings and began to lift him, higher and higher. Water wings he surely wouldn’t need given suspected shallowness of each puddle, masks for unending depth —as he would know once he fell in completely; there was no better drowning, no better intoxication —Vashti, just as he desired, would be so very pleased to have this effect on him… His reaction honored Vashti. Gave her reason to have her light-giving beauty; he skimmed his way to the revolving doors, his feet barely touching the ground, here and there, here and there, like tracing rough outlines of an aura of the moon now peeking through clouds, so starkly white, as if inventing that whiteness, that fine china, he and Vashti sang it together, wrote it again and again, circle and circles of Vashti; he was a humming cloud over the store… He was being kissed already by thousands and thousands of Vashti pulses growing, glowing through him as he navigated Dream Baby Tienda’s electric eye doors, at least a hundred winged Thomas Robert pythons snaking their way to the electric eye revolving doors: a radiant and glassy pinwheel. Of course. The way they danced led by Queen Cobra Vashtis; go ahead and crown every one of her; she wore a crown even better than he wore any of his fifty hats; and when it slipped down, every Vashti wore that crown like a hula hoop, and it shook with her, like first attempts at flight. He was getting nervous; he wanted his dream to be perfect in case it never really happened. Thomas Robert Higginson was in love, in case there was any doubt. * At the entrance to my store, I was greeted by Vashti herself, just as I’d imagined always, it seemed, but intensely since 1988 when you were in my movie. You wore a red, no blue striped dress that I practically drooled over.

I could see the shape of my Vashti through it; you must have bathed (“I did, Thomas,” I heard you say to me) just before coming to my store to usher me in and greet me, anoint me, as you seemed studded with glitter from the bath… Your skin sparkled, your eyes, your navel with a diamond in the center, perfect bull’s eye, rivulets ran down your legs, like the most elegant pee I’d ever imagined —not that I had pee on my mind very often, but seeing you, Vashti, like this invited me to see you in every possible way, including some moments in which you’re just as beautiful as ever, no woman more beautiful; was not possible, (“Are you sure, Thomas?” I heard Vashti ask, tempting me even now, 168

making me admit things I’m trying not to admit). Vashti, you don’t have to ask me anymore; I’ve already told you, and I am no liar; (“Say what you will about Thomas, he is no liar,” Vashti whispered in my ear), as I remembered those dreamed moments, those real moments, like now, in which you, Vashti, graced my toilet with your bountiful ass that smelled so sweet when you’re done and you spritzed a little perfume on it, the scent you already knew I liked, that stuck in the hairs; pure silk spider webs dyed dark, brunette between your fabulous legs; just wait till you, Vashti, wrap them around my neck, right in the store.

I reached in my pocket, and there was a ticket to this store; I didn’t have to take it out; I knew what it was. The edges felt gold-embossed, thicker with something precious, valuable. I wouldn’t feel what I feel for something routine, all those women I passed on street after street; I didn’t follow anyone else, I followed only you, Vashti. Even when others beckoned me, tried to summon me. I couldn’t believe that you had made yourself available to only me. What did I have? Maybe Vashti didn’t realize just how ordinary I am. Maybe you didn’t realize that I was hoping beyond hope, even praying, that you, Vashti, would see who I really am and still want me (“Always” Vashti whispered in my ear), as I remembered those dreamed moments, those real moments, like now, in which you, Vashti, wrapped your fabulous legs around my neck, right in the store.

“I fingered my ticket carefully, it was turning green now, E pluribus unum green now, every nick, superficial tear, every microscopically jagged edge, as I (halfheartedly) prepared to surrender it in the check-out line, but I really wanted to keep it, sleep with it under my pillow, so feathery with you; I wanted to dunk it in my Vashti-brand coffee and suck the chocolate and hazelnut off the Biscoff Vashti, drawing it across my parted lips, sawing them apart if necessary, a Vashti saw, those jagged edges still what I craved, that little bit of arousing pain; do it Vashti, I ordered you, and you complied precisely.

I fondled the cookie Vashti quite thoroughly, memorized the feel of it, the texture, thickness, the shape (already reshaping my thinking) and this was so thin, like Vashti, your tiny perfect figure, the ticket must be sheer: the dream baby skin of it: Dream Baby Tienda, home of Vashti brands; your hair was the wind, Vashti, and I was wrapped in strands I could not even see, even my lips followed you as you perfumed the air, each feather then an applicator, that I held dabbing your invisible irresistible throat, your perfect breasts, made just for my hands to cup them, and my lips became applicators also; I kissed your throat Vashti, I’m really ready, I’ve been wanting this for so damn long… yet I couldn’t help feeling a little trepidation, although this was exactly what I wanted, exactly what I somehow designed, engineered. I’m good at this work, and “I am proof,” I heard you sing in my “mind: ‘I am Woman, I am Proof, I am Vashti.’ You sure as hell are!

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I fingered my ticket thoroughly, and tenderly again, wondering just when did Vashti slip it in my pocket, and how could you do that without touching me? But I was getting so hard that you had to touch me; had to, I wanted you to touch me again and again: touch me now, Vashti, you have my permission if that’s what you need. Don’t make me beg you to touch me, but I will if I have to. You spoke to me as you always did: your hair was the wind, and I was wrapped even tighter in strands I could not even see, even my lips followed you, Vashti perfuming the air with kisses blown to me, and I blew kisses back to you, and you caught every one and kissed me back, tossing these kisses that only I could catch, and I never dropped the balls, certainly not my own, and you blew kisses right to them, massaged them, sucked them so sweetly with your feathers, each feather now an applicator, dabbing your throat, and mine, that taste of me still there, your breath was the taste of me, the way you swallowed me was “so damn divine and your lips were applicators also; you kissed my throat even more as I navigated the store, “ready for anything, ready for you Vashti in any, in all of your forms.

“Oh the music, classical tunes, funk, deep-grooving soul, and notes, somewhat familiar, yet sounds I’d never heard before, I felt the rhythm, I’m infected, and all I could think about was taking Vashti’s hands and spinning her, lifting her as high in the air as the soaring egret, and letting her go, and she rolled like waves, then easily found her way back into my arms, her hair all over her back, becoming her only dress, and my hands under it, slitting it even more, shredding it tenderly before my hand entered her and spread to every corner, the moisture of her walls secreting only love, and I grabbed as much of it as I could, my own nuts storing this fuel; it’s as if I am became drunk as I grabbed a cart and pushed it; I reached into my pocket again and found an engraved “preferred shopper’s card” —I fully expected to pay full price! to barter, always making the highest bid! No amount would be too exorbitant. My last dollar just to have Vashti like this, my last dime, last everything.”

He caught every crumb in his generous lap, nothing changing except that recognition that he was less than he should be for his Vashti; he could not forget that she was his (or that he was hers), and he sucked the cloth that the cookie crumbs touched, the pouch the crumbs form, nearly a third ball bag, and the bliss on his face was everything he had ever imagined: see how the cookie smiles Thomas? he heard as Vashti kept talking to him, although he was married. That was always there. Egret versus albatross.

He looked at all the Vashti aisles, and he was a kid in this Vashti-candystore, nothing but a hundred, but seems like a thousand Thomases shopping in the power of multiplication, and he was one of them, his hands were almost as white as his hair, color drained out of them and imparted to the handle of the cart he pushed, his footsteps echoed on the bright linoleum, each block of 170

which was Vashti’s smile; she looked up at him as he pushed his cart through her, and he thought that Vashti welcomed him here; never wanted him to stop dreaming, buy one, get one free, but he had already paid for this, he had already bought all this with what he felt… He was in love with what surrounded him, and he could tell no one, but he felt it and Vashti in his head and heart felt it also, loudly and clearly.

Knock, knock, his wife wasn’t here…

How could he not feel what he was feeling? Every night, more than twenty years of this, felt like one endless night to him… That was how science fiction worked. Maybe he was just inside an endless pocket of the Tardis, time machine and spaceship from Dr. Who? Who? Vashti, that’s who, a show he was sure Vashti must have invented the way she traveled to him, a Vashti parade whenever he wanted, reserved parking spot for the Tardis in his heart. How can he not have things exactly as he wanted them, even if he won’t admit them to anyone, barely to himself, but he really ought to inform Vashti for real in language she understood and could not mistake. She could act on this, if she knew. He had to give Vashti a chance to accept this… He could not assume that Vashti would refuse, not until and unless she did refuse, and maybe she wouldn’t… He had to take a chance, because, despite everything, Vashti might take him, surely she would, making both of their lives better.

Select varieties of pure Vashti brand butters and cheeses, rare cream sauces to pour over exceptional fish fillets, the fish were whole and in display cases, their mouths puckered, and in the act of practicing kissing, and the texture of the steaks, the grill marks like Vashti’s eyebrows, the kale-like greens in the produce section, grafts and transplants of them between her legs, the clusters of grapes that are also clusters of Vashti’s breasts… Every Thomas, this one in particular, added Vashti to his cart. He snatched a grape from one of the bunches, his cart of Vashti, already piled as close to the ceiling as he could manage without a ladder, and when he bit into it, thinking to whittle her waist which he did, but he also saw himself biting her lips, juice running down corners of his mouth, somewhat like a bloody mustache. Just a bite transformed, fermented the grape juice, staining his open shirt and chest, into wine, rarest wine possible; Vashti licked his chest. He liked for Vashti to like to lick his chest; he was one lucky old man, but hardly matters how old he really was, for his age was the perfect age for Vashti, everything about him was perfect for Vashti.

Selecting a grape, his fingers barely brushed each grape, announcing his presence in the grapey neighborhood, a caress nearly bursting the skin that was already yielding, eager to be opened, eager to be chosen and plucked — of course the skin burst as his fingers came close, those luscious long white fingers, those cuticular half-moons —he had a natural manicure in preparation 171

for touching his Vashti, those half-moons on his fingernails glowed, a glowing enriched by buffing the nails with the flesh and skin of the grapes his fingertips pierced in order to lift the grapes of Vashti to his willing mouth; Vashti grapes massaged his mouth, his tongue was stunned by the sweetness as it was lubricated —nothing had ever tasted like this, and then his throat —he happily traced the whole journey, his hands on himself, like that time he was doing something considered wrong, discovering himself and how much he liked it, but this time, nothing interfered —Were he not in this special tienda just for him, he would not have been able to afford this Vashti wine. Rare.

One-of-a-Dream-Baby-kind-of -climax. Grape after grape —how many did he eat?

— as time stopped in Dream Baby… and I was paraded as I always wanted to be, in his heart, and back to mine. The precision of our having come together, despite my having been told to find a nice black man; if what was meant was the stereotype of black men being superiorly endowed; well for this parade of this Thomas Robert Higginson salute, there couldn’t possibly be anything better, more than enough for any “discriminating” woman; it ain’t just size alone, though even on size alone, Thomas Robert was just fine; I would never kiss and tell, but I assure you that he knows how to use whatever he’s got, and there’ll never be a complaint from me. I’ve known black, brown, and white men, circumcised and uncircumcised. Thomas Robert was better by far, a hit parade, a real man, for this real woman, and this happened, but for the sake of the relationship still fighting its way amidst so many prying eyes and uninvited opinions, I cannot say; and anyone else would need a ticket and only Thomas Robert had one, no expiration date. Ever.

Poet, author of 13 books, most recently, “New Kiss Horizon”, a romance novel, and “Aneurysm of the Firmament” a collection of poems written with collaborator Thomas Robert Higginsion. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan in English and in Art and Design. She’s winner of a MacArthur Award, and numerous other prizes. She was born during a blizzard that covered cars on 27 February 1954.

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J O H N G . RO D W A N , J R .

CAPABILITY “It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of.”

– Clive James I Perhaps music could be defined as math mixed with emotion, but it always seemed like magic to me. I don’t make music, but no form of art means more to me, not even literature, the only art I’ve ever made anything like a serious attempt to create.

I’ve had just enough experience trying to make music to know that I’m no musician. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I was in a short-lived punk rock band with friends. I did not abuse any musical instrument myself: I was the howler. Our first gig was in a high school gymnasium. Our last was in a bar attached to a bowling alley opening for a band that threw frozen animal parts at the audience. There were no other public performances. Much later, in my thirties, I took piano lessons for several months. (Though I had no ambitions to perform in front of people again, I did have the sense that professional piano players were particularly savvy: no one expects them to lug their own instruments to the concert hall.) While I did learn enough to know that I could have, after much time and effort, produced something akin to music, I also realized that, lacking the time to put in the practice required, I’d never make that kind of sounds that resonate with me, the kinds that make music matter so much to me.

II As a writer, I’ve produced virtually every type of nonfiction: personal essays, so-called creative nonfiction, scholarly essays for peer-reviewed journals, book reviews for newspapers and magazines, journalism, even encyclopedia entries. I’ve also published numerous poems in literary journals. Some of my purportedly literary work has been reprinted in books with my name on the covers as well as in anthologies assembled by others.

As a reader, however, my usual preference is for fiction, mainly novels – a form I’ve never attempted or even seriously considered attempting. If I could compose fiction of quality comparable to that of the novelists I most admire, then I probably wouldn’t bother with poems or essays (let alone bill-paying hack work).

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I recall a college friend, an aspiring writer of fiction, remarking that some author or another wrote so astonishingly well that the novels made him question why he should try to write at all. He feared he’d never reach that standard. I understand that feeling, but I don’t share it. Admiring novelists all the while, I instead wrote what I thought I was capable of: essays and, occasionally, short poems. Great fiction never deterred me from writing; it simply motivated me to write something else.

III Though I remember my drawings being praised by a high school art teacher, I always knew I’d be no Velazquez. I haven’t attempted many pictures since adolescence but I never lost my enthusiasm for art or my admiration for those able to make it. As a resident of a few different cities and a visitor to many, I’ve always been a museum-goer. When we were in our 20s, my wife (before she was my wife) and I spent a summer driving around the country. For the most part our itinerary was improvised, with destinations, or even directions, decided on the spur of the moment. Yet we did have two planned stops: Chicago, to see an exhibit of one of my favorite artists (Rene Magritte), and Houston, to see one of her favorites (Max Ernst). On that trip and others since then, we did not load up on souvenirs, but over the years we did assemble quite a collection of books documenting various museums’ collections and specific exhibits.

In addition to frequenting museums, we often go to opening receptions at art galleries. (We do this because we know a lot of artists, or we know a lot of artists because we do this. Plus, my wife is an artist.) Both among the institutionally sanctioned art in the museums and in the less predictable setting of a group show in an independent gallery, I can find myself forcefully impressed by a combination of technical ability and uninhibited imagination – a powerful blend I know I do not possess but feel elevated by when I’m in the presence of it.

IV Anyone who has read this far will have noticed that I’ve considered only artistic capabilities. Teaching might not look like a challenge, but only to those who’ve never done it. I have done it, and I learned plenty about one of the many things I’m just not that good at doing.

At least I wasn’t good at it at the time, which was when I was in graduate school and was tasked with teaching composition to first-year college students.

Composition turned out to be the nominal subject. The classes really amounted to remedial English, which disappointed me and forced me to scrap my plans for instruction in structuring essays, conducting research, developing arguments and supporting them with evidence, and other writing techniques 174

and instead to address basics grammar and the differences among “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”

I don’t think I became the teacher any students would remember as having inspired them or having inflamed in them a love for language. (After one dreary class, a student approached me and asked if I even liked teaching.)

But I could name several teachers – at that school where I taught for a few semesters, at the college where I got my undergraduate degree and even, in a more complicated way, at the high school I unwillingly attended (and hated) – that inspired me and sparked an enthusiasm for literature. I can’t quite say how they did what they did in the classroom (which I did not do myself), but I know that they did it and I remain touched by it.

V Homeownership offers ample opportunities for acquiring capabilities one might never have realized he or she might one day need.

From the time I left my parents’ house until my early 40s, I’d always rented.

Having grown up observing how much time and effort maintaining and repairing a house required, I opted for the relatively care-free life of a renter, who, if anything went wrong – a broken appliance, a leaky roof – could call the building’s owner and wait for someone else to deal with – and pay for – fixing it. I didn’t have to shovel snow or mow a lawn, let alone remove wallpaper, patch plaster, paint, perform minor electrical, carpentry and plumbing work, or assemble a sizeable collection of tools in order to do those and countless other tasks.

Once my wife and I decided to buy a house, I started doing all of those things. I’ve replaced numerous light fixtures and switches and electrical outlets.

I’ve installed sinks and flooring. While I achieved some level of competence doing things I never had to do as a renter, I’m aware of my limitations: I’m better in some areas (working with wood, for instance) than others (anything involving plaster).

In addition to obtaining a variety of skills, I also learned that with some tasks it’s simply better to call the truly capable specialists than to attempt them yourself.

VI Although I think Clive James is correct when he observes in his Unreliable Memoirs that capabilities we do not possess can affect us powerfully when they are exhibited by skillful others, I think it just as often happens that we most fully appreciate some capabilities once we do acquire them.

When the bicycle leaning against the apartment wall came up in conversation, its owner described how she’d built it herself after taking 175

lessons in bicycle maintenance and repair at a local shop. Her pride in her accomplishment was plain. And wholly understandable. Knowing not only how to ride but also how to fix, adjust and tune bicycles enhances the feelings of independence the machines give their owners. My friend did not fully appreciate the various skills required to build a bike until she learned them. The ability to do whatever needed doing to her bike is useful, sure, but it’s more than that; it’s empowering in the truest sense of an oft-overused word, which my friend only realized once she became capable in this way.

VII Maybe, counter-intuitively, having capabilities in wholly unrelated realms mutually reinforces those abilities. Maybe figuring out how to put together a bicycle made my friend a better journalist, by compelling her to think about something in ways she hadn’t before and thereby questioning other subjects from angles she hadn’t considered previously. I don’t think anyone would contend that Miles Davis was equally talented as a painter and a musician, but I wonder if his painting helped him as a musician by flexing other creative muscles, perhaps, or giving him time away from his trumpet during which he could nonetheless work out musical problems. Thinking along similar lines, Teju Cole posits that Derek Walcott’s “competent” watercolors permitted him to bring “the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems.”

Even limited capability in one area can bolster capability in another.

Time spent on home improvement projects is time not spent on writing. Or is it? I sometimes find that when I’m away from my desk, doing something else, I think about whatever it is I’m writing in a productive way.

In any case, exercising abilities other than what I consider my main capability is beneficial in at least one way. During my years as an art- and music-loving, apartment-dwelling scribbler, I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t have to do things like mow a lawn. As a homeowner, I’ve found that I don’t really mind cutting the grass: there’s never any question when you’re done and it makes an immediate and noticeable improvement. In other words, it’s nothing like writing, and it’s satisfying for precisely that reason.

John G. Rodwan, Jr., is the author of the essay collections Holidays & Other Disasters (Humanist Press, 2013) and Fighters & Writers (Mongrel Empire Press, 2010) and the co-author of Detroit Is: An Essay in Photographs (KMW Studio, 2015). He lives in Detroit.

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M Y R O N N H A R D Y HAVING MISSED I was told of grandfather’s death through an email. My sister had typed it, sent it from her home in Indianapolis while I sat in Mohammed V International Airport, Casablanca: this after having missed my flight to Lisbon, this after eating an overly priced and dry cheese and lettuce sandwich, my stomach unforgiving, this as I sat knowing I would spend the night in the airport.

I read my sister’s email over and over again, attempting to inhabit that new reality, its finality. Part of it was realizing I couldn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral in Arkansas, the funeral that would be in one week, no final goodbye as I had done, as I had been privileged to have done for two grandparents. I was disoriented, unbound from that which connected me to land.

I quickly emailed my sister saying I would try to write something for the funeral, for my grandfather and if she would read it if I did. She agreed. I didn’t know if I could write anything as I found this extremely difficult but I am supposed to be a poet, a writer and I needed to do this for him, for my father (his father), for the family, for me.

The last time I saw him was in February, nine months ago. I’d traveled to Arkansas for my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday of which I missed the party due to storms delaying flights out of New York City. However, I did see her afterwards, in her kitchen. The same kitchen I’d seen her in all of my life, every childhood Christmas and summer: the round-fluorescent ceiling light, the yellow walls, the white tablecloth beneath plastic, the brown pleather chairs with wheels that didn’t quite roll. She was preparing breakfast for all those who happened to have come over and my mom was helping. I asked grandmother to sit down and I wished her a happy birthday before embracing her. She then told me I needed to come home, that I needed to be closer to her, to rest of the family. I smiled shamefully thinking to myself that I needed to be where I was, exploring, writing, seeing something new. Not that I hadn’t missed her, my grandfather, my whole family but my life, my separate life had directed me physically, continentally away from them. This was typically American. This, the idea of moving away to find or begin something new was the same impulse my parents had when they moved from the south, Arkansas, to the north, Michigan, to begin careers and have a family. I was following in their tradition, the known narrative of the hero’s journey not that I’m a hero.

But yes, my journey was perhaps more extreme as I’d left North America, left a continent for another. And I’d assumed I would return but the years kept 177

having doors that opened to the same new land I was compelled to see, my extension of that American need to find and make one’s particularly life theirs.

I heard my grandfather singing as he was being given a bath by two health workers. Not the singing brought on by joy, but that of helplessness and angst.

For about three years, he had suffered the complications of Alzheimer’s and each day it had gotten worse. When the men wheeled him to the table strapped in a wheelchair, my mom placed a plate of eggs and toast in front of him. I hesitantly spoke, “Hi grandfather.” His eyes were dull as he continued to eat.

He didn’t know me. I didn’t expect him to but I couldn’t help hoping. The skin around his eyes was gray as was the tint of eyes. Fog I thought, heavy fog, years of it. My sister had ordered several copies of my new book of poetry, published the previous month, and placed the stack on the kitchen table. I was reminded of being a child and my grandfather intensely listening to me read a story I had written. How he would stare, hear the peculiar words I used to illustrate something I imagined. He would say, “Good,” and I’d laugh looking at the ashen fedora he used to wear, the short-spotted feather pluming from the left side.

I would wait for night to come where we’d sit around the table to hear one of his stories. Sometimes, after I’d read to him, we’d walk in the field together and gather blackberries or squash or string beans. That was what I loved: being with him as we picked things he and my grandmother had planted months ago.

Nine months later, I hear of him dying in his sleep. I hear of this in Morocco where I’d being living for five years. That day I was en route to Portugal to do research for a book I was writing.

What, really, was I doing in North Africa? Perhaps my grandmother was right, I should be at least in the United States. Perhaps not in Arkansas or Michigan, where I grew up, but in New York City, my favorite city in the world: writing, being among my artist friends, living in my apartment, being a two-hour flight from my family. But I have a job in Morocco, a job I enjoy: university students I deeply care about and able to make see and examine new ideas, important perspectives regarding a variety of topics including their country. I was having an adventure. I was learning a new culture, language.

I was being inspired by a new country. I was writing about the country, becoming part of it.

In the taxi to John F. Kennedy International Airport, after having spent August in Michigan and New York City, I called my father. He told me I needed to come back, “What if something happens to me? What if something happens to one of us? You need to be closer.” He went on saying I promised this would be my last year in Morocco but I never said this. My father always has ways of “suggesting” things then conveniently making these suggestions “truths,” “promises”.

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I told him I didn’t promise that but he said, “I thought you did.” He then paused, dramatically as usual, “Make this your last year.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

If I had been in New York City, I would have been able to attend the funeral. I would have been able to be with my family. I would have been there but I was in Casablanca waiting for another flight.

I finally got up from the table and wandered through the airport, terminal two, terminal one. The reason why I missed the flight was because I was waiting in terminal two, as stated on my ticket but in reality, I was supposed to be in terminal one. How was I supposed to know this? When I finally realized I was in the wrong place, I ran to terminal one, waited in line to check in where people in front of me were typically arguing loudly with the airline employee.

Upon handing my passport to that same Royal Air Maroc employee, he told me I had missed the flight. I was there an hour before take-off, but he told me I needed to have been there two hours before the flight. I was furious and explained that they had made the mistake as my ticket stated I should checkin in terminal two. We argued back and forth until he finally said he was only doing his job.

I felt defeated leaving the desk: my light backpack seemed a little heavier as did the small piece of luggage I’d hoped to check. I sat down in that same terminal and happened to meet a group of students from the university where I work, preparing to board a flight to Dakhla. I told them I had missed my flight. They offered me a large bottle of water of which I refused as I made it a point to drink very little when traveling, one never knew how horrible the bathrooms might be as I had been in many nightmarish bathrooms: developing world, developed world it didn’t matter, I wanted to keep these experiences to a minimum. Of course, this often made me extremely thirsty to the point where my temples would throb but I was fine with that.

Eventually, I rescheduled my flight for the next day and paid the penalty for their fault. The choices were few and I wasn’t in the United States where customer service has some meaning. I was in Morocco.

I wandered back to the café, that other terminal, where I’d found out about my grandfather’s passing. I sat at the same table. It was empty. Waiting for me to return to it perhaps because I couldn’t return to Arkansas, to that seat at the kitchen table in front of my grandfather where I’d read to him. Many people stared at me, some even stopped to ask where I was going. When I told them Lisbon, some would smile or give me another glance before turning away. I noticed the names of the cities they were heading in blinking red lights above the long lines they formed: Yaoundé, Abidjan, Porto-Novo, Bamako, Lomé, 179

Luanda, Accra, and Nouakchott. These were the late night, early morning flights as it was almost one in the morning. The flights I’d longed to take, see those cities where I might gain sight of a fragmented self, the flights to other parts of Africa in a country where many don’t consider themselves African. It may be a wish for many Moroccans that the country would just break off from the African continent and became an island as the Iberian Peninsula did in José Saramago’s 1986 novel, A Jangada de Pedra. Or better yet, if it was discovered that Morocco was actually, somehow, physically connected to Europe, all of the current maps had been erroneously configured. Colonialism has been murderous here.

I came to Morocco to be in Africa. I came to Morocco because I hadn’t felt rooted in the United States. I didn’t know my origins. But thinking about my grandfather, thinking about the photograph I have of him bailing cotton, the one I’d kept above my desk in New York City, I feel, now, wholly American. My origins are the American south: Arkansas and Mississippi. This is who I am. I wish I could have told my grandfather this. I wish I could have explained this to him as we walked on his land: cicadas singing in the background.

While in Lisbon, I imagined this. I imagined speaking to my grandfather.

All of this, as I climbed those steep streets to sit in Castelo de São Jorge and look at the terra cotta roofs of the entire city. I thought of this while buying chrysanthemums and leaving them inside the cathedral.

I boarded the train in Casablanca upon my return. On that train to the city of Meknes, I finished what my sister would read at the funeral. On that train, I’d forgotten I wasn’t by myself as someone asked me if I were alright. I looked at him. He was an old man with a full head of gray hair. I wanted to say I was fine but just blurted that my grandfather had died. I noticed the wet strikes on my jacket and was immediately embarrassed as I couldn’t believe I was crying in public. He hugged me and I cried even more. Right after him, someone else hugged me, and another and another. Strangers hugging the strangest stranger, the crying stranger because they felt it was only human to do so. It was perhaps part of their communal culture or it was just them, there.

Those kind, specific people on that train making me feel I wasn’t alone, there.

I wasn’t alone in my loss.

I was overwhelmed by these strangers’ generosity, their unexpected generosity. If my Arabic were better, I would have told them this but instead I shared the chocolates I’d brought back from Lisbon and we talked about Morocco and plumbing and vegetables and Islam.

On a Saturday while having dinner with a friend, I looked at my watch realizing the funeral was taking place at that time. I told her this.

“Your sister is reading what you wrote.”

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“I believe she is,” I said before putting lettuce in my mouth. I still wished I could have been at St. Mary’s Church in that small Arkansas town. But I was in Morocco, on a mountain in Morocco thinking of him.

Myronn Hardy is the author of four books of poems: Approaching the Center, The Headless Saints, Catastrophic Bliss, and Kingdom. He divides his time between New York City and Morocco.

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J O H N D A N I E L C O M B S A TOWN CALLED HOLTSVILLE Well, not exactly. Although there were other Villes in the area: Potterville, Webberville, even a Dansville. The place I call my hometown is actually known as Holt. Which itself is a nickname, received shortly after it was settled in 1837. Seems the local Postmaster found it impossible to leave his own name out of the proceedings when telling people how to address mail sent to this unassuming burg in the southern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. It technically isn’t even a town. Not big enough. I’ve always taken great pleasure in having grown up in a municipality that, population-wise, falls somewhere between a city and a village.

Where in mid-Michigan is Holt, you ask? Hold up your left hand, palm facing away, and touch your right index finger on a spot in the middle of it, an inch and a half above your wrist. People laugh, but having a map of your home state attached to your arm can come in handy. Yes, I know there’s an entirely other Michigan peninsula, sitting placidly to the north, just below Lake Superior; it looks more like a shark waiting to gobble up any unsuspecting swimmers. I didn’t grow up there.

My “salad days” were spent in what is officially known as Delhi pronounced dell high - Township. Not by choice, mind you. Had I been consulted, I think a more tropical area would have entered the conversation.

But my adopted parents were blissfully unaware of my preferences. I was fourteen months old at the time, not possessing what I would call a big vocabulary, lots of baby talk and pointing. If they had asked, I’m pretty sure translating Tahiti from whatever sign language and one syllable sentences coming from my direction would’ve been rather difficult. I suppose I should consider myself lucky; might’ve ended up in Tibet.

Our little family started out in East Lansing. My father was a graduate of Michigan State University and, like many other alumni of that prestigious institution, didn’t find it necessary to leave the area in order to land a decent job. Holt High School immediately snapped him up. As they should, him walking around with a Masters in Education sticking out of his back pocket.

Moving was completely painless. In fact, I don’t remember a moment of it.

I’d turned five the previous winter, and the focus of my life had shifted from having fun to preparing my eager little brain for kindergarten. Mom and Dad always made school sound like the most amazing place. And from what I’d seen of the few educationally oriented kids shows on TV, they were right.

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But that could wait.

My first real Holtsville memory is of the whole family - a sister had been added by this time, naturally, no adoption necessary - standing at the end of our street, waiting for a parade to come by. There I am, running round and round my dad, him half-heartedly trying to catch me. I stop when another boy close to my age appears from behind what must be his father, who I later discover is the owner of a small grocery store a couple of blocks away. His folks start talking to mine. They live in the house next door to ours.

A slightly unique arrangement, our neighborhood. Every house on our side of the street had an extra lot on the back, so when an unscrupulous developer inevitably shooed away all the wildlife lurking out there and parceled out the land, we wouldn’t suddenly find another family basically living in our back yard.

A few hundred feet beyond that yard was The Swamp; a gathering place, an adventureland, a dump. There was a tiny manufacturing plant on the other side of it that would toss wooden crates out their back door and into the shallows.

Actually the whole bog was nothing but shallows. Neighborhood children would wade its length and breadth in search of frogs and snakes. Well, most of us. I would tag along, but the thought of grabbing any kind of reptile or amphibian made my skin crawl. I had a hard enough time getting across some of the squishier spots; the feel of mud being squeezed between my toes is not one I find all that pleasant.

And, of course, there was a particularly mucky area used as an initiation rite for new kids. Older, more experienced children would guide them toward The Quicksand. Not at all like the real thing but close enough to give a newbie a good scare when their legs sunk into it. We would laugh as they tried desperately to extricate themselves, only to form a rescue line - each kid holding the hand of the one adjacent - to pull them out when we’d gotten enough entertainment from their terror.

There were other areas to keep us amused. I remember a large hole that had been dug by some previous Hall Street occupants that the kids who lived near it had covered with logs. I don’t know what kind of dwelling you’d call this pit-like affair but it served as a kind of clubhouse. We would hold meetings of our tiny minds in its grubby interior. And directly behind my home was a spot that may have been a place where residents from even further back in time had thrown their garbage. If you dug down far enough, you just might be rewarded with an antique glass bottle or bit of broken crockery.

I don’t remember any adults ever coming back there to see what we were up to. The next door neighbors had a dinner bell they would ring when it was time for their three sons to return to their tastefully decorated ranch-style house.

My dad thought the bell was a great idea, we kids—yet another sister had been produced—showing a tendency to range quite far out into the woods and fields 183

to the south. He modernized their system by substituting a musical blast from an air horn for the bell’s metal clang.

At one end of The Swamp, across an open field and past a couple of spooky old trees is an area that still goes by the name Dead Man’s Hill. No one knows how it got that name. The prevailing theories include one about a gruesome ax murder. Everybody likes that one the best. In the summertime it’s used primarily as a party spot. In winter it serves as a magnet for children of all ages. All you have to do is drag your sled out there; any kind will do - wooden with metal runners, brightly colored plastic, toboggan-style—then launch yourself from the top and glide to the bottom.

Or not.

There are plenty of bumps and humps to interrupt a smooth ride, often resulting in spectacular crashes. And, of course, a couple of large rocks near the bottom, covered in snow, waiting to bloody a nose or knock out a few teeth. Some kids up the street took their brand new toboggan down that side of the hill shortly after receiving it as a Christmas gift. They only got one ride out of that beautiful sled before a big crack appeared, punched into the front by one of those overgrown pebbles.

On two occasions Dead Man’s grew an ice patch. Once as a direct result of our having put in a considerable amount of effort pouring water on it. We spent most of an evening filling plastic bottles, dragging them out to the hill, and dumping them at a spot we located after talking my father into running some eight millimeter footage he’d filmed the year before. It didn’t take long for us to realize that our home-grown luge track made sleds completely unnecessary.

One of the boys who lived next door was the first. I can see him now, wearing a dark blue polyester full-body snow suit, mittens, and a woolen stocking cap. He sits down at the top of the hill and slides to the bottom almost as fast as he did on his toboggan. I go down in a belly flop, ice crystals spraying into my eyes. Three boys from up the street grab a kid who lives in the subdivision on the other side of The Hill, throw him to the ice, and ride him down! Anybody who would wear a pseudo-military outfit complete with shiny black boots, camouflage uniform, and a black beret to a sliding party deserves to be used as a sled.

The path we took to reach this most wonderful of leisure spots ran between a row of tall trees and a cornfield. Or should I say a battleground. Many a long summer’s afternoon was spent playing War among its stalks. Most of our fathers had fought in WWII. But that was long ago and far away. The only experience we ever got of combat—because no dad in the neighborhood ever talked openly about his time in either the European or Pacific theaters of operations—was through our black and white television screens. War movies 184

were still quite popular.

This was just before the conflict in Vietnam became a national issue, and was seen up close and personal every night on the evening news. Suddenly confronted with the grizzly details, some of which dealt with the large numbers of civilians among the casualties, the adults in our neighborhood began to question the morality of what seemed to have become our national pastime.

We kids had no idea that in only a few short years our innocent diversion would be seen as the height of bad taste.

Ten or so boys would divide into two groups, pull out whatever plastic weaponry was stashed in our toy boxes, and proceed to hunt and “kill” each other. These games could last for hours, sometimes dragging on over disputes about who was dead and who was not.

“Got you!”

“Did not!!”

“Did so!”

“I’m only wounded! Medic!”

Holtsville has never been immune to the influence of the world at large. At about this time my dad and a couple other teachers from the neighborhood moved from our rural/suburban high school to one in the city of Lansing, several miles to the north. These men would bring tales of Civil Rights unrest and student protest back to our peaceful township, dampening our moods and making us painfully aware that these problems were not simply fodder for the six o’clock news, but things that must be dealt with at every level of society.

Our war games deemed uncouth, we spent more time in the park. I’m not sure when the township supervisor allocated the funds for its construction. I know it was there when we moved in, two streets over. Mostly wooded with a forest floor, lots of swings, huge slide, and a merry-go-round. My dad helped build some log picnic tables for it while being a member of a local service organization. Tucked in behind a tall chain-link fence, this perfectly adequate recreation area includes a small parking lot, on the other side of which rest two tennis courts. The high school playing fields are on the other side of them.

I don’t remember when I first picked up a tennis racket. There must have been at least one in all the junk stored in our attic. Almost everyone else in the neighborhood had one as well. Along with a set of golf clubs. The nearest course was technically in the next town over but if you were feeling particularly energetic, you could walk there. Most of the boys were given memberships one Christmas.

The whole area began to take on a bit more style after that. The surrounding fields were replaced by suburban tract houses, thus depriving us of the occasional wandering cow, clopping through our neighborhood. The Swamp was drained and a street laid down in its place, complete with modern, two 185

story homes lining the fresh asphalt. The only thing left in the immediate vicinity of any character was Old Man Charlie.

And he more than made up for the sudden lack of distinctiveness.

I can’t say that I ever saw the guy. I do remember crawling through waisthigh grass - must’ve been early autumn because I’m peering through something that resembles straw - near the old man’s ramshackle house. From that angle you could only get a good view of the second story, the first floor obscured by a dozen piles of junk. Very well-organized, but nonetheless items discarded by others and meticulously arranged in heaps sometimes fifteen feet tall.

Closer, closer; still no Charlie. Wait. What was that noise? Could it be the sound of a shotgun being cocked? We hightailed it out of there, crouching down to avoid being hit by the load of rock salt we were sure was heading our way. Nothing. Maybe the stories weren’t true.

We found out how untrue a few years later when a couple kids became bold enough to actually get onto his property and snatch a few treasured items. I ended up with a totally rusted but perfectly functional lantern, one an old time train conductor would use for signaling. I spent a week trying to sand down to the original metal, then took it next door to show off my progress.

Satisfied that I would one day have a decent-looking antique, we retired to the den to watch TV. Soon after, the mom of the house came in to say that someone was at the front door. He wanted to have a little chat with us. Her stern expression led me to believe that regardless of who this was or what he wanted to talk about, we had some serious explaining to do.

And we did. Turns out Old Man Charlie was not the kind of person to shoot at trespassers. No, he did what any normal homeowner plagued by thieving children would do: he called the cops. This officer was pleasant enough. I think he realized the futility of interviewing a bunch of kids in the comfort of their own home. We must have been ready for him, because none of us cracked. Even though one of the stolen pieces in question was sitting on the floor near his left boot the whole time.

On the other side of Charlie’s place the wider world began: a roller skating rink, miniature golf course, a tavern, pharmacy, the grocery store, bank, flower shop, post office. And a barbershop.

One day my parents announced that they were going to give me a taste of freedom. Instead of waiting while I got my haircut, Dad would drop me off and come back later to pick me up. This sounded fine to me. My father told me that if my hairs were trimmed early, I was allowed to patronize the adjoining five and dime store, so he would know where to find me. Having been called to the barber chair right after he walked out the door meant that I had plenty of time to wander the toy department, mostly checking out model car kits. Bored, I stepped outside to watch for the family station wagon.

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I waited. And saw our car as it drove right past me and headed toward our street. Crap! Standing on that side of the building did nothing but hide me from my father when he came looking. I rushed back into the barbershop. Why would he leave me?! They calmed me down and called my house. He returned in a few minutes. By the time we got home we were almost laughing about the whole affair.

There were other kindly proprietors in our bustling little township: a bank manager who just happened to find my account book in the parking lot after it fell out of my car and immediately rang me up; a pharmacist who suggested an ointment to clear up a nasty rash on my left jowl; the guy who ran the bowling alley. One of my junior high classes made a field trip there. My mom was a chaperone. Neither of us knew the first thing about bowling. This gruff but patient man took the time to walk us through the whole routine, from shoes to the complicated scoring system.

Don’t get me wrong. Life wasn’t always perfect. But tragedies were few and far between, most often involving fire or flood. I remember a huge pillar of smoke billowing above the trees behind our house. All the kids in the neighborhood either started running or jumped on their bikes. Down the street, through a few yards, across a main avenue, and out into the country.

Sprinting, I finally caught up to those standing astride their two wheelers. A barn fire. Not as big as we thought but still impressive.

And there were a few car crashes; one that lead to a life lost. A man who lived on the next street over was crushed when his VW somehow slid under a semi. And I remember being told by my second-grade teacher that a girl who had been out sick for an extended period wouldn’t be coming back. She had died of cancer. I was so young I didn’t really know what that meant.

Small town America. That’s where I’m from. No doubt there are many of you reading these words who know exactly what I’m talking about. Or feeling.

Most of us grew up and moved away, intent on making a name for ourselves or maybe just a better wage. I ran into a high school friend one day while visiting Holtsville, long after crossing what I thought of as a rather limited horizon.

I talked about where I’d been and what I’d done. He said that if everyone moved away, there would no longer be a Holt. I agreed. But later found myself thinking that you’d get the same result if everyone stayed.

I recently visited a woman who used to live up the block when we were kids and now resides a few streets away from the old neighborhood. It happened to be during Old Home Week, although I was completely unaware of that fact.

As we sat and reminisced the sound of fireworks filtered through her picture window. I’d ridden my bicycle down, so bid her farewell and rode three blocks to the park.

When I was younger, going with the family to sit on a blanket and watch 187

the primitive pyrotechnics of the day was thrilling. I’ve since witnessed some of the most sophisticated rocket shows in the world, either in person or on television. Standing there, holding my bike in one hand, I could see and feel just what it was about those childhood displays that knocked me out. I hadn’t been that close to the dazzling, roaring, sphitzing, sparkling things since then.

I stood in awe, the little boy in me smiling the biggest smile.

Born in Pontiac, Michigan and adopted by a loving couple in Lansing , John Daniel Combs has made the best of his sixty years in the world. Novelist, screenwriter, playwright, composer, actor, adventurer ; has he done it all? Not yet, but he’s getting there.

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drama.

E V A N G U I L F O R D - B L A K E YASMINA, CLORIS AND GORDAFARID: THREE VIEWS OF WAR AND PEACE CHARACTERS: Yasmina, early 30s Cloris, 21 Gordafarid, 50 SETTING: A bare stage. The production is encouraged to use sound as much as possible to create the environment.

TIME: Approximately the present synopsis In Yasmina, Cloris and Gordafarid (18 minutes), three women -- a wounded war veteran, one about to leave for a war zone for her first tour of duty, the third making the choice to sacrifice herself to serve her country -- “write” letters to significant others describing their feelings about war, the experience/anticipation of it, and their part in it.

Playwright’s note: The wars that are the settings for what is described in Yasmina, Cloris and Gordafarid, the women who describe them and the incidents to which they refer are, all, entirely fictional. War is not a thing of time, place, generation or specific circumstance.

Production history Elite Theatre Company, Los Angeles - 2017 Ventura (CA) Marina Community - scheduled, May 2017 ~For Roxanna~ 190

AT RISE: The stage is dark. Lights rise slowly on YASMINA. [NOTE: It is suggested Yasmina begin her monologue in black and that she remains in shadows until she says “I think a lot about darkness.”]

YASMINA Dear Rikki -Good news at long last. They’re sending me home! I tried to call you but I got the goddamn voicemail -- we have got to get rid of that message. First thing we do after I walk in the door. After you kiss me, of course, for what will probably be the thousandth time since I get off the plane. That message sounds sooooo sweet. So instead of me -- live from 5,000 miles away -- you get this, instead.

E-mail isn’t the comforting sound of your voice, and I’ll try again later, but I’m so excited I couldn’t wait to tell you. And, besides, I need to practice my typing.

Ignore the mistakes: This keyboard is really small and no way I’m gonna let anyone proofread it.

The other good news, I s’pose, is that you won’t have to come. And I’m grateful for that. I mean, it would’ve been awful goddamn hard for you to get in here, let alone just get here; and we couldn’t’ve afforded for you to stay long enough to make the trip worth it. And, b’sides, I figure I still don’t look so good. I don’t know if I’m ready to have the world see me like this -- however “this” looks. There’s still some pain -- the doctor says there will be some pain at least a few more months, maybe now and then after that, because of the nerves. You remember.

(Nervously reassuring)

But, really, I’m a lot better. The bandages came off this morning -- for good! When they said they were going to do it?, I kept thinking: The nurse ’s gonna gasp like in that Twilight Zone show. I’ll never know if she did: I thought they’d let me be awake for the “unveiling” but, no, I was under. And groggy as hell when I woke up. But now I get to feel my face again. Rik -- there are ... lots of scars.

Lots. More than I guessed there was. I mean, I knew there’d be scars, it hurt so much, it was like my skin was gettin’ tore up again and again, but God, I’m so afraid of what I look like. I’m afraid for you to see me. I know I’m ugly, and they can’t do anything reconstructive for years, maybe never, and I don’t want to look like this, I don’t want to look like someone little kids will scream at when they see, like someone you’ll have to hide what you’re feeling when you see. I know you didn’t want me for my looks in the first place, and eleven years 191

is a long time, but, you’re so goddamn beautiful and hey: How people look, it’s always made a difference to me.

(Laughs) I guess it won’t any more, huh?

I guess it’s good I never had kids.

CLORIS Hey, Paulie.

There are lots of stars out tonight. They make me feel silly. Like when you and me’d get in the car, go ’way out into the country, and just lie in some field, listen to the crickets, drink and smoke pot and tickle ... and all the rest. Tonight, before we got ready for bed, Mita and me sat on the rocks outside and looked at them. The stars, I mean. They’re really cool, out here. I mean, CLORIS (cont.) like there’s no lights, well, except for the ones around the base. But you can see, it’s like, a hundred miles, across the water, across all the boats -- ships, I mean; I still call them boats sometimes, the officers get real p.o.ed. Mita thinks it’s funny. Sure not like the city. Or the county. I never seen this much darkness back home.

I wonder if it’ll be like this, there. They keep showin’ us pictures, but I can’t tell nothin’ from pictures. I guess I’m excited about goin.’ I mean, who ever thought I’d get to go somewhere on a dif ’rent continent, on a plane and all.

Some of the girls’re scared. I mean, all the stuff you see on TV, that’s in the papers. Mita’s brother tried to talk her out of joining up. He comes here every week, and he always tries to get her to sneak away. “What you wanna do this for?” he says. “You gonna get your sorry ass killed.” Mita just laughs. “Maybe,” she says. But I know she doesn’t think she will, get killed I mean.

Me neither. I mean, I know I ain’t the sharpest crayon in the pack, but I been payin’ attention -- real careful attention -- to everything. For the life of me I can’t remember that boats ’re ships. But I do remember the stuff that counts; and I know how to take care of myself. Hell, Paulie, I always took care of myself. War’s just a dif ’rent way of havin’ to do it. You know. I been banged 192

around; you get good at bangin’ back.

GORDAFARID My dearest Son, Your uncle (whose name I cannot write here, of course) was very understanding. He left the decision up to me; he did not apply pressure. He is a good man. He explained how a woman would not arouse suspicion, as a man would, entering such a place. And he urged me to discuss it, with him, and with you and your sisters, because you are all old enough to understand. But you, my Son, are too far away and it was not something that could be discussed by letter; even this I must leave with someone whom I know you will think of when you hear what has happened, and that person will place it where you will think to look. Your younger sister does not understand why I would do this. She has babies herself and a husband who is alive and good to her, and who cannot go to war because he cannot walk. She only feels, not thinks. She did not come to see me today. Uncle said it was best if no one entered the house today who did not enter it every day.

Your other sister remains in the hospital. Her wounds are healing but she will, I think, never again be well. She has nightmares every night about the bombing, wakens screaming, her husband tells me. Of course, I have not talked to her of this. She sees people die every day and to know her mother has planned her own death would be more than she could bear. Please explain to her when she is well enough just to weep.

Uncle fears the authorities will punish the rest of the family. I fear that too, but they will claim they had no knowledge of my act. Now that I have made the decision he said it would be all right for me to write this for you to find later, but he cautioned me: Do not use anyone’s name.

YASMINA Anyway ... I’m making progress in Braille. I still can’t read much, but I got through a whole page today. Took me an hour, I had to go over some of the words three ’r four times, but there’s what the therapist calls “context”: If you figure out the first letter is “e” and the last one is “t” you can figure the one between them is prob’ly an “a.” If it’s a three-letter word, anyway. I get confused on the longer ones; I forget what letters I read. It’s probably good I’m reading Stephen King. I think the longest word in Salem’s Lot is “vampire.” And 193

feeling that word -- it conjures up lots of images. All of them having to do with darkness. ... Different kinds of darkness.

I think a lot about darkness. Like being in a tunnel that’s too long to know there is a light at the end. Before I came here, before the explosion and the pain and the wanting to die, I loved it. Lying there with you, late at night, pitch black and all the sounds magnified. Every breath you took, every rustle of the sheets, the tiny tiny sound of my finger tracing the circle around your areola, the licking of your lips before you kissed me. It’s true: You are more aware of sounds when you can’t see. Here, I hear planes, footsteps in the hall, the other women crying, crying out.

Sometimes I hear people die.

CLORIS Right now, I’m lyin’ here, waitin’ for them to turn off the lights. Lot of the girls are doin’ their last minute packin’. Mine’s done. The plane leaves at six o’clock -- whoops, I mean: zero six hundred -- and I don’t want t’ have to get up a minute earlier than I got to. I’m used to it, though, fin’ly, gettin’ up real early, I mean. Last week when I wrote?, I was only complainin’ ’cause I was sore, from all the marchin’ and stuff. I feel good now, now that we’re about to do it. Fin’ly.

Hey: before I forget: Thanks for the present. I love it! I am twenty-one as of yesterday. Mita and a couple of the girls bought me my first legal beer, at the commissary. Mita said she would’ve taken me out for a big celebration but, of course, we can’t leave base. But first leave we get?, we’re gonna go paint the town. If there is one. In the pictures, it don’t look like there’s much there at all.

Kinda dull. “Have to get our excitement from the shootin’,” is what Mita says.

GORDAFARID I write this with both sadness and exhilaration in my heart. I have prepared myself, with uncle’s wife’s help. She too is sad but she understands things the way I do; it is the way men must understand: This is war and, in war, we all must be soldiers. There is more at stake than one woman’s life. There is what we believe, what we live for. I will leave in a little while but it is important to write to you, to be able to say these last words to you, my Son, so you will remember that what I do is done from belief in our cause, and faith, and love.

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What, after all, is death but an opportunity to join God? I am fifty -- that is not old, but I have lived a full life, loving and being loved by your father, giving birth to my children and watching each of you grow. You are my legacy, as you are your father’s. He will be proud that I have chosen to serve God and our people, just as I am proud of you for the service you perform in protecting our nation.

I know there is much to say that is important, yet it is the weather that impresses itself on my mind. It is a warm day, but not so warm the bindings are uncomfortable. When we put them on it GORDAFARID (cont.) felt odd, to know I was dressing for the last time, that these would be the garments in which I would say my last prayer, that the photograph uncle’s wife will take of me will show me in this unobtrusive clothing in which no one will notice me. Few people have noticed me in my life, except your father, and I have not minded: I have lived a simple life, as God has willed. This is good. I come to my death with my eyes and my heart open, in clear conscience, despite the deaths I know I will cause. I believe those, like mine, are the will of God. It is bright outside, a beautiful day. I am grateful for God’s kindness in granting that: Walking where I must go I hope I am not so absorbed that I fail to notice the sun, the sky, the children, even the scarred streets and buildings. There is so much beauty even amid the rubble their bombs and soldiers have left. And so many of our friends, our loved ones, dead.

YASMINA I’m not going to die, Rikki, not for a long time. The doctor says I’m in “surprisingly good shape.” I oughta be: You can’t train other soldiers for six years if you’re not. But it’s gonna be hard to live, I know that. For both of us. When I get back?, we should go right away, someplace where they’ll let us and really tie the knot; you think? If you’re still willing. And I believe you when you say you are. That’s what’s been keeping me going the last four months, knowing: There is a light at the end of this tunnel. I might not be able to see it, but I can feel it. It’s warm and it feels - safe. I love you, Rik. Thanks for loving me -- not because of, not in spite of. Just - loving.

CLORIS Hey, Paulie: just got time for one more thing before lights out: You know I love you. And I know you’re scared for me. Thanks for workin’ at not showin’ it. Jeez, when you was in, I was only twelve, thirteen years old! I’m glad there wasn’t no war then. I’d’ve been scared for you, if I’d known you then, I mean. And thanks for understandin’ how I had to do this. I loved my Daddy, and he’d be scared for me, and he’d be proud of me, too. And when I come back -- and I am comin’ back; you can bet your ass and mine on that -- when I come back we are gonna get married and have us a dozen kids, live happily ever after, ’cause there ain’t never, never gonna be another war.

GORDAFARID I recall when you were a baby, how I was filled with hope as much as milk, and I nestled you to my breast and you drank of it. How I loved that! My breasts are dry now but still, whenever I think of you I think of that, your lips gently suckling, your eyes closed, your tiny hands reaching out for me. It is I who reach out now, to you, to the rest, asking for your prayers. Heaven will be a lonely place if your father is not waiting for me, if you and your sisters do not join us one day.

I am not afraid. Uncle assures me there will be no pain; I will hear nothing.

The end will come too quickly for me to even notice. I will close my eyes, take a breath in which I will pray and speak your name, your sisters’ names, your father’s.

YASMINA I’ll see you soon.

CLORIS Gotta go now. I’ll write you from the plane.

GORDAFARID Then I will press the button and go to meet God.

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YASMINA Yours, Yasmina CLORIS Love, Cloris GORDAFARID Goodbye, my Son. Pray for me.

Blackout

Evan Guilford-Blake (ejbplaywright@yahoo.com) writes plays, prose and poetry for adults and children.

His plays have been performed internationally and won 44 playwriting contests. Thirty-six of his scripts are published.

Evan’s published prose includes the novels “Animation” and the award-winning short story collection “American Blues,” for adults; and the novel “The Bluebird Prince” for middle-grade students. His work has also appeared in roughly 75 journals and anthologies, winning 24 awards (including Wayne State’s Judith Siegel Pearson Fiction Award) and garnering two Pushcart Prize nominations.

He and his wife (and inspiration) Roxanna, a healthcare writer and jewelry designer, live in the southeastern US. 197

M A R Y G R A H A M E H U N T E R THE VERY WITCHING TIME Setting: Church camp, rural Appalachia. Summer.

SOPHIE, 20. An emotional wreck, but in a hollow, understated fashion. She wears the unofficial uniform of all camp counselors: staff t-shirt, old jeans, Chacos.

LEAH, 20. Trying to help Sophie in her emotionally wrecked state but frankly unsure how to do so. T-shirt and pajama pants.

SCRATCH, ambiguously aged, but on the young side. Androgynous. Enigmatic.

Thunder and lightning.

Occasional flashes of light illuminate the porch of a camp cabin with two rocking chairs.

Sophie is seated in the stage right chair, knees hugged to her chest, staring blankly ahead.

As the lights return after another flash of lightning, SCRATCH is discovered onstage.

SCRATCH (leaning against the cabin) Sophie.

No response. Thunder and lightning continue. When lights resume, SCRATCH is discovered on the opposite side of the stage.

SCRATCH Sophie.

No response. The next flash reveals SCRATCH immediately behind Sophie. They lean over her chair and whisper in her ear.

SCRATCH Sophie.

SOPHIE starts and turns her head. A final, climactic flash-bang.

198

When lights resume, SCRATCH is lounging in the stage left rocking chair. Thunder and lightning have given way to the sound of steady rain.

SCRATCH It’s late.

SOPHIE (without affect) Yes. SCRATCH New campers tomorrow.

SOPHIE Yes. SCRATCH Sleep?

SOPHIE Not now.

SCRATCH Didn’t you hear me calling you earlier?

SOPHIE It was loud.

SCRATCH I like storms.

SOPHIE You would.

SCRATCH They keep you up?

SOPHIE Something like that.

SCRATCH Sophie.

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SOPHIE You do like my name.

SCRATCH It’s a good name. Means wisdom.

SOPHIE I know what it means. How come I don’t know your name? (SCRATCH stretches in a feline manner and doesn’t reply.) And how come you never answer my questions? (No response from SCRATCH.) I shouldn’t even let you around here.

SCRATCH But you do.

SOPHIE (more to herself) But I shouldn’t.

SCRATCH And why is that?

SOPHIE Why shouldn’t I, or why do I? SCRATCH Does it matter?

SOPHIE I can’t remember. I feel like I used to know. Did I used to know?

SCRATCH I can’t remember.

SOPHIE I thought you were the one who knew things.

SCRATCH When did I say that?

SOPHIE First time I met you.

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SCRATCH Where was that again?

SOPHIE Mouth of the holler, down by the creek. You meet so many people around here you lose track?

SCRATCH You’d be surprised.

Sophie continues to stare dully. Beat.

SOPHIE What do I do now?

SCRATCH About what?

SOPHIE You know about what. I haven’t slept more than four hours in weeks, what else could be keeping me up?

SCRATCH Campers. Frustrated longing. Storms.

SOPHIE Go to hell.

SCRATCH See, you say that like— SCRATCH is cut off as the cabin door opens and LEAH pokes her head out.

LEAH Soph?

SOPHIE (with a start) Hey. LEAH (softly, closing the door) Hey. (Beat.) It’s late.

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SOPHIE (rubbing her eyes) Yeah.

LEAH Do you want company?

SOPHIE I’ve—yeah. Sure, yeah.

LEAH (producing a pint of Captain Morgan and offering it to SOPHIE) Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

SOPHIE (drinks) Wilson pick this up?

LEAH Takes good care of us, bless her.

LEAH moves to sit in the stage left rocking chair. SCRATCH vacates the seat just in time to avoid LEAH sitting on them. Throughout SOPHIE and LEAH’s exchange, SCRATCH flits around, combing their fingers through LEAH’s hair, swiping the bottle from SOPHIE’s hand for a sip, etc. Whenever SCRATCH touches SOPHIE’s face/ neck/shoulders in an attempt her regain her attention, SOPHIE swats them away. It is important that this blocking be fluid and not interrupt the flow of dialogue. LEAH is completely oblivious to all of it.

LEAH How are you?

SOPHIE I’ll be fine. You know me.

LEAH There’s nothing really to say, is there?

SOPHIE If there is I haven’t thought of it.

LEAH Yet.

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SOPHIE Hm? LEAH If anyone can think of something to say at a time like this, it’s you.

SOPHIE Thanks. (drinks) LEAH But if you can’t, you know it’s fine.

SOPHIE Sure.

(SOPHIE emphatically swats SCRATCH away. SCRATCH retreats to lean against the cabin door. Beat.)

LEAH I’ve always loved the rain out here.

SOPHIE Me too.

LEAH Everything feels cleaner. Damps down the dust.

SOPHIE Not so damn hot.

LEAH Watching the thunderheads roll in over the mountains. Like the hand of God, huh? (SCRATCH rolls their eyes.)

SOPHIE Forty days and forty nights. (drinks) LEAH Damn long time to be afloat.

203

SOPHIE Is it?

LEAH We’re up here for sixty days a summer and that seems like an eternity. At least we get to go outside.

SOPHIE Except when it rains.

(Beat.)

LEAH Sophie? Are you sure you don’t want to— SOPHIE Yes. LEAH Because you know that— SOPHIE Yes. LEAH There’s nothing you can do right now.

SOPHIE I know.

LEAH I think I’m gonna go to bed. Not too late, okay? Storm’s almost passed.

SCRATCH moves away from the door just as LEAH reaches for the handle. Exit LEAH. SCRATCH (resuming their seat in the stage left rocking chair) Rude.

SOPHIE Oh, shut up. It’s your own choice.

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SCRATCH We only show up to people at crossroads.

SOPHIE This is a porch.

SCRATCH When did you get so literal?

SOPHIE My head hurts.

SCRATCH What you get for drinking that devil water.

(Beat.)

SOPHIE (with more emotion than she has displayed thus far) What am I going to do?

SCRATCH You know your options. Know where to find me.

SOPHIE Why do you always come to me, then?

SCRATCH Professional tenacity. Problems appear, I appear. You have a problem, thus, you have me. (SOPHIE stares at SCRATCH.) Sophie.

SOPHIE Hm? SCRATCH Do you love— SOPHIE With every breath I breathe.

SCRATCH And it hurts? To breathe?

205

SOPHIE (nodding, gasping, choking something back) I just want...

SCRATCH Tell me, hm? Tell me what you want.

SOPHIE I want us both to be whole again.

SCRATCH (gently) I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

SOPHIE Then what use are you?

SCRATCH I said I deal in problems. Work it out for yourself.

SOPHIE My problem would disappear if you could just make— SCRATCH (hissing) Do you honestly not understand? You are human. Humans are not meant to be whole. I can make you painless, I can make you comfortable, I can even make you happy. I cannot make you whole. What a nauseating thought.

SOPHIE If...If I were to do it.

SCRATCH If, if.

SOPHIE It wouldn’t be for myself, you know.

SCRATCH Perish the thought.

SOPHIE It would be for—

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SCRATCH Of course it would.

SOPHIE And you could...

SCRATCH Make them comfortable, that’s right. Make it stop hurting.

SOPHIE And I would have to— SCRATCH Just the usual.

SOPHIE Just myself.

(Beat.)

SCRATCH (reassuring) People do it all the time.

SOPHIE Do they really?

SCRATCH Absolutely.

SOPHIE (putting her head in her hands) But it’s me.

SCRATCH Yes. Has that not been clear all along?

SOPHIE It’s perfectly clear.

SCRATCH I don’t understand what your question is.

207

SOPHIE The question is what happens to me.

SCRATCH You just said you weren’t doing it for you.

SOPHIE I’m not, but...I still have to live here.

SCRATCH Where?

SOPHIE Here! In myself ! So you have to tell me what will happen to me.

SCRATCH I don’t have to do any such thing.

SOPHIE You think I won’t do it if I know? (SCRATCH eyes SOPHIE warily. SOPHIE realizes she’s hit the nail on the head.) Get out.

SCRATCH Now Sophie, be reasonable.

SOPHIE Don’t call me by my name, I hate it when you call me by my name. Leave.

SCRATCH And what good will that do you, if I slink back down the holler? You’ll still know I’m there, Sophie. Not really gone. Never really gone, Sophie.

SOPHIE Don’t do that!

SCRATCH (taking a step toward SOPHIE) Sophie— SOPHIE throws the now-empty rum bottle at SCRATCH. It shatters. Catlike, SCRATCH jumps back and scampers away, exiting stage left as the door to the cabin swings open and LEAH emerges. Thunder.

208

LEAH Sophie? Are you alright? (No response from SOPHIE, who is staring at the spot where SCRATCH used to be.) What happened?

SOPHIE I thought there was someone…

LEAH Someone out there?

SOPHIE I don’t know. (She turns to LEAH, shaking, a sob forming in her throat.) Leah, I don’t know.

SOPHIE breaks down completely and lets LEAH envelop her in a hug. They sink to the ground and remain, SOPHIE crying, LEAH rocking her, holding her tighter. Lights.

Mary Grahame Hunter lives in Detroit, where she reads a lot of books, writes a lot of words, and sings a lot of choral music. She is a Kenyon Review Young Writers program alumna and her work has previously appeared in The Riveter Review and Terminal Books Online.

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“A n d n o w

I am Surrounded with blue Infatuation”