YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE Spring 2006
COVER GIRL IN SWIMSUIT, AFTERNOON
James Lee
Jess Dearing
PORTRAIT WITH CIGARETTE Ni( k
Ono(It
2
3
THE PAINTED WALL
4
FIGURE AND GROUND
5
THE DITCH
6
PROPERTIES
ON THE EDGE
Tess Dearing
9
ROME, WINTER 2005
Tess Dearing
10
UNTITLED, INK ON PAPER
Volume 78
Nick Vinocur
Ivy Y. Wang Adam Eaker
Emily Kopley Elizabeth Gumport
13
FOR A DOCTOR, JANUARY
14
SPRING
15
HOW SHE GETS CAUGHT
ISABELLE AND ZAK SMITH
Julia Hickey
18
CITY
Julia Hickey
21
THE MILKMAID'S SERVICE
Carl Fuldner
22 27
Jordan Jacks
Paula Brady
ONE DAY OF BRAHMA
Adriane Quinlan
Erich Matthes
Number
1
Girl in Swimsuit, Afternoon Tess Dearing
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Yale Literary Magazine
THE PAINTED WALL Ivy Y. Wang
Chu gazed at her for a long time, until at last he became unconscious of anything but the thoughts that were engrossing him. Then, suddenly he felt himself floating in the air, as if riding on a cloud, and found himself passing through the wall ... — Pu Songling There are rooms promised us in childhood that, growing old, we believe we'll never see. Long bright corridors, courtyards filled with voices, rooms with painted walls, one wall containing the girl with the unknotted hair. Chu landed in Chi Kang where halls and pavilions stretched away one after another, gleaming in the light. Because his legs were worn, the floor was strewn with thick mats. Because the girl was his wife, she tied up her hair and swept her long sleeves back. Each morning she slid open the paper doors. The shadows of women and demons passed over the walls on their way to the gardens, and the sound of water lay just beyond hearing. As all intruders must be eaten or expelled, one day the black demon came pounding. Chu hid beneath the bed, and the sound scratched like a swarm of locusts. He shut his eyes, and opened them in this world, once again alone. There are few things better than waking in a world free of gods, having lost the things we long for. It is like waking early, in the pale light, to the sound of birds calling from bare branches.
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FIGURE AND GROUND Adam Eaker
Look at the little monks, climbing their ladder to heaven! And below them, the hungry mouth of hell, and buzzing about them, the silhouettes of demons. Tempera paint on hammered gold, Byzantine figures on radiant ground. And the artist so confident in his separation of the two! As though context were entirely irrelevant, just the hump of a hill behind the clustered monks, each one waiting his strenuous turn. And instead of clouds, a pocket of angels, singing in Greek. Procopius said a monk's life was a kind of careful rehearsal for death — a rehearsal, then, without a backdrop, a free-fall, should one falter, into the void. How beautiful, to prune the baggage from the traveler, the childhood misery from the drunk. The icon in its wisdom refuses to explain, to measure the saint's hard work on the scale of landscape, or recount the weary detail of a life-as-lived. What matters is the miracle. What matters is that the viewer can be saved.
Portrait with Cigarette Nick Vinocur
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Yale Literary Magazine
THE DITCH
•
Emily Kopley
neatly dug out,
A drainage ditch,
of my family to the area,
Arranged for the arrival
of the house we bought.
Was the backyard boundary As kids we prized
and claimed the chasm
As belonging both
to my brother and me on the other side.
And the unthreatening three We slumped down,
legs slapped with sludge,
And played, plumbing
the mud to ply
Figures and talismen.
We pilfered filaments that burgeoned on the banks,
Of buttercups and crabgrass
that broke easily,
To braid bracelets
by tapping it with twigs.
Like the ice that we teased
trespassing through
We tripped down the trench, Our neighbors' narrower,
of jewelweed that popped
And pinched pouches
A furrowed firmament,
Between our fingers.
yet ours more sincerely...
Sewer's sweetheart, As adults we guard
•
neglected Nile,
and defend the ditch,
Mindful that we mean Since it became parched
the memory of it, at our departure,
And now cracks and crumbles, So the abyss(between Widens while
5 Spring 2006
cremating itself,
banks, friends)
we're away.
PROPERTIES Elizabeth Gum port
WHEN HENRY ARRIVED HOME, he found
the door to his apartment propped open by a suitcase. Inside, cardboard
boxes lined the walls. Rebecca sat at the dining room table, wrapping the last of her glass vases in tissue paper, el 'I'm sorry,' Rebecca said. Without looking up, she placed the vase in another box. Henry tried to summon surprise but failed. The ending had been slow; who had betrayed whom first, Henry couldn't say. Sentences trailed off. The phone rang late at night. 'Will you help me with these?' Rebecca was a glassblower, and their apartment had been filled with her bright, delicate ornaments, like the red tile she had placed in the window above their bed that, every morning, bled pink onto their sheets. Henry sat at the table and together they secured the vases with bubble wrap. When they finished, Rebecca lit a cigarette as Henry carried the box to the door. Later, Henry tried to recall what they had said to each other as they waited for Rebecca's aunt, at whose apartment Rebecca was to stay. He remembered Rebecca standing in the kitchen, picking seeds from a pomegranate, and later, after she kissed him on the cheek, catching her sleeve in the car door, but the words they had spoken eluded him. In the coming days, the event remained remote, like the frost that collected on his window that night: something briefly, appallingly delicate, which remained behind glass. After she left, he continued to gather the traces she had left behind — a ceramic flowerpot, an increasingly overdue library copy of Sentimental Education — and placed them on the kitchen windowsill. He could not bring himself to remove her pantyhose from the towel
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rack; when he showered, their shadows moved like arms preparing to draw back the shower curtain. Winter came on mildly, Snow faded into gray rain; morning showers drifted into pale sunlight. At night, as he lay reading the Times in bed, headlights flashed across his window and then disappeared. His sadness, too, moved with meteorological unpredictability. Some days, he couldn't look at his own bookshelf for fear of seeing a book she had forgotten; another week, he bought packets of cashews, her favorite food, and carried them, talisman-like, in his pockets. Some changes were permanent: in his mind, she became inextricably joined to corduroy, both the word and the fabric. He ceased using the Astor Place subway stop; the font Garamond became unbearable. Most of the women Henry knew had been Rebecca's friends, fellow artists or college roommates, and they subtly but masterfully made their alignments clear. Those who tried to comfort him brought wine, or sent complimentary articles about the design firm Henry worked for, and referred abstractly to women they knew who would be just perfect for him, when he was ready. His male
friends tolerated his speechlessness, but their presence unsettled Henry: each one had an ex-girlfriend who, with varying degrees of regularity and spite, returned to his life and thus remained a motif within his days. All of them, Henry noted, had slept with these former girlfriends at least once after they broke up. Rebecca, however, did not defer her disappearance. By February, she was a ghost. Even reading the paper required a certain tactical agility. He found references to her in the clues to the crossword, and had to forsake the Sunday Book Review entirely. Instead, he read the Real Estate section with a newfound devotion. Each listing was an oubliette onto a life he might live, and each home was a new stage on which he could perform his Rebecca fantasies. Inwood, western exposures, Nicholas Avenue, maple floors: he lay in bed with all the incantatory words late into Sunday afternoons. From his window, he saw the low clouds erase the brown lines of train tracks and the broad, black avenues. Inside, he moved swiftly between Dutchess County and Morningside Heights, imagining the skills necessary to navigate each new home. He'd have to buy a lawnmower, or take the A train, or Rebecca would make curtains so their bedroom couldn't be seen from the apartment peering into theirs. Looking at homes in Connecticut, the foreign and abstract concept of 'mulch' repeatedly surfaced in his mind. He saw her moving in and out of doorways: exiting the elevator in an apartment building off Union Square, unlocking the entrance to a walk-up in Corona, or encouraging a stubborn cat to return as she held open the screen door to their home near Jones Beach. The picture of a cottage in New Canaan reminded him of the weekend they had once spent in Vermont, nearly three years ago. The air had smelled old and still, of moss and crushed acorns, and all night they had heard the scrabbling of squirrels on the roof. Birds flew perilously near the window, retreated, and returned again. They took a walk, stood on the bank of a stream. Rebecca wore red boots. They ate English muffins on the floor of their room. Rebecca took off her hotel robe in the
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doorway of the bathroom; Rebecca disappeared in her aunt's car. Some Sundays after Rebecca left, the night after he dreamed she finally came to collect her belongings, Henry dialed one of the numbers listed at the back of the Real Estate section. When the woman on the end of the line asked what he was looking for, Henry faltered. 'Don't worry,' the woman said.'Most people, even when they have an idea of what they want, they usually change their mind. Listen,' she said kindly,'why don't I set you up with one of our agents and you just start looking around?' That Wednesday, Henry met his agent outside a narrow, shabby brownstone near Tompkins Square Park. She was small and fair, like Rebecca, but her hair was a half-hearted, soapy blonde, while Rebecca's had had an unexpected whiteness. She introduced herself as Helen and unlocked the door. 'I don't know how much space you're looking for,' she said,'but there are three bedrooms and a maid's room, which you could convert to a study if you wanted.' Henry wondered where the owners went during these tours. The floors were bright and recently cleaned, and a bowl of oranges stood on the kitchen counter, but a half-open drawer revealed a mess of receipts and the tip of a dog leash. In the kitchen, Helen offered that the floor might need re-tiling. In the living room, she pointed to the original wood paneling that framed the doorway and fireplace. Henry imagined making coffee in the kitchen as he listened to Rebecca's footsteps upstairs. He wanted a house, he decided: he wanted to hear Rebecca move above him. At their next stop, a small, sunny apartment with enigmatic, childlike scrapings along the floorboards, he changed his mind. An apartment was best. The smaller the space, the closer they would be. Henry followed Helen all afternoon, heartened by the way she said 'brass taps' and her genuine excitement when they encountered an eat-in kitchen. At one such kitchen, in an apartment whose spaciousness was undermined by its residence above a particular-
ANNE
ly fragrant Mexican restaurant, Helen looked admiringly at the broad refrigerator. Henry asked her if she liked to cook. At first she looked frightened, as if he had suddenly grabbed her arm. Her face faded into startled appreciation. 'I do,' she said. 'I have four younger brothers, so I helped my mother with dinner every night. But the apartment I live in now is too small. I have to prop the cutting board over the sink.' She looked embarrassed at both the fact and the admission. Henry was fascinated: a real estate agent who didn't like her apartment? When she could enter any one of these fantastic worlds — a confident, revealing loft, or a touchingly humble ground-floor apartment with a garden, or, as must surely exist, somewhere in the infinite city, an apartment with two deluxe stoves — with such ease?'Do you cook?' she asked him, turning away from the refrigerator and touching the blue tile counter. 'No,' Henry said. Rebecca had cooked, and Henry had followed her culinary whims, which were erratic and often distressing to Henry's stomach. For a week, she had
weeks, an element of winter he always forgot until it was upon him. On Broadway, he passed streets that did not lead anywhere, that gaped without passage towards the Hudson River. A man in a dark coat stabbed at litter in the graveyard outside Trinity Church. He looked at Henry but did not seem to see him. The graveyard, Henry remembered Rebecca telling him, was one of the few in the borough: no new bodies had been buried there in years. This had always disturbed her, Manhattan's exile of its dead. It's like they have no use for them, she had said. On the next block, Henry came to a celebrated McDonald's that boasted of a piano player, several potted palms, and waiter service. Through the window, he watched a woman dismantle her hamburger, and turned towards the subway. At the corner, waiting for a lone van to pass, he realized his memory had betrayed him. Rebecca had said not them. She had said,'They have no use for us,' as if they were two restless ghosts, already among the
he said, feeling foolish.'Anyway,' he hurried,'where
dead. By the time he arrived home, however, he thought perhaps he was wrong, that Rebecca hadn't really given them up for dead so early. He only thought so now, he told himself, to ease the pain of her exit, to tell himself it had always been this way. That night, he dreamed he threw a cocktail party for all his past lovers. A student librarian disrobed indecorously in the corner; his high school girlfriend cut limes
else are we going?'
for drinks in the kitchen. The apartment was not his
made nothing but cheeseburgers; the month before she left, she added hot sauce to nearly every meal. Suddenly anxious to please Helen, who was looking covetously at the wide stove, he offered,'I'm good at pancakes, though.' Helen turned toward him, smiling. And bacon,'
'That's it for today,' Helen said.'What do you think?' Henry considered the rooms he had entered, the books left half-read on nightstands, the dusty staircases that smelled like wine, the wide, dark gash of the East River visible from the windows.'Let's look at the West Side,' Henry suggested. Helen nodded, and they exited the building. Outside, the city leaned towards night. Buildings lit themselves against the violet sky and people moved quickly, faces down, through the cold streets, To avoid the distress of sharing a cab, Henry said he had dinner plans, and, waving goodbye, turned downtown. He walked towards the Financial District, the canyon of enormous stone buildings that left the narrow streets in shadow. At night, the sidewalks were nearly empty. Gray slush puddled in the gutters. Menus and pages of The Wall Street Journal drifted in the slow current like leaves. Henry realized his hands hadn't been warm in
8 Yale Literary Magazine
own, and in his dream, he admired the high bookshelves and the red, vaulted ceiling. Upon waking, he realized Rebecca had not been there: the tense was wrong; the adjective did not apply. In the following months, he saw Helen at least three times a week. He trailed her all over Manhattan, down the dim, thickly carpeted hallways of high-rises in Carnegie Hill, into the elite, snowy confines of Gramercy Park, onto an elevator in a Tribeca warehouse that protested so loudly Helen insisted they take the stairs. He took the subway with her to Brooklyn, where he encountered a child's bedroom filled with headless dolls and surprised himself by buying Helen a hotdog. Over the course of their visits, Henry slowly admitted his project to Helen, lacking any other explanation for his constant indecision. He apologized and offered to stop wasting her time, but Helen refused. His company took her to parts of the
city she had never seen, and, without the need to make a sale, she could admire the apartments as Henry did. Helen, he discovered, was a good confessor. She listened quietly and seriously, and tolerated his moments of anxiety when, for example, he encountered one of Rebecca's bowls resting on a dining room table. If she offered advice, which was rarely, Henry noticed that she had a way of staring at her hand and spreading her fingers out as wide as possible. They were elegant fingers. Traveling with Helen, Henry saw the lives he could lead were countless. His days could shape themselves in innumerable ways: he might buy coffee at a bodega, or purchase a trim, white box of muffins at a bakery. He could drink on the tarred roof of an apartment building between 15'and A and see the vast, mysterious city gleam in the night, all those bright building's welded to surface of this island. All the potential patterns, the ways he might move his body each day, were unknowable. Instead of a roof, a terrace where Rebecca could hang her delicate, glass discs to reflect the sunlight. Slowly, however, Rebecca became incidental to these imaginings. Henry did not see one house in which he did not picture
On the Edge Tess Dearing
Rebecca — leaning out a window, perhaps, or shutting the door behind her as she left for work — but the narrative element of these fantasies sagged. He didn't know if this meant he was letting her go, or if this change signified something more insidious: the glamour of novelty had worn off his fantasy, but her presence persisted. When, helplessly, he envisioned them squabbling in a white, cold bedroom of a Greenwich Village duplex, he realized even his fantasies couldn't hold back defeat. One weekend in early March, Helen called.'A new apartment,' she said. 'Just on the market, you'll be the first to see it.' Henry liked to be early to an apartment, before the owners had time to erase all traces of themselves: he had seen a vicious Scrabble game the opponents had obviously been unable give up early, a number
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of Valentine's Day bouquets in various stages of wilt, all the common litter of our days. The address was one of the proud, old buildings on West End, but it was not until he arrived there the next morning that Henry realized it was where Rebecca's aunt lived. The apartment was a disappointment: the owner had died and her son had already cleaned out her belongings. Plastic tarps hung on some walls and Henry could smell the sharp, metallic odor of fresh paint. Helen saw his regret and shrugged sympathetically. As they were leaving, the elevator stopped on the seventh floor. The doors opened on Rebecca and her aunt's pug. Rebecca stared at Henry. She looked taller than Henry remembered, or maybe thinner. She was wearing a blue sweater he had never seen before.'What are you doing here?' The dog moved towards the elevator but Rebecca tugged it back. 'I'm looking for a new apartment,' Henry said. 'Here?' 'I didn't know,' Henry said. Rebecca looked at him. 'I didn't think you'd still be here,' he amended. Behind him, he heard Helen shuffle to the corner of the elevator. 'I'm moving out. My friend's helping me pack today.' 'Where are you moving?' 'Henry,' Rebecca said, in a voice he remembered from a very different time. When she hadn't been able to sleep, Rebecca would nudge him with her shoulder or cross her leg over his. 'Tell me a story,' she'd plead.'Just one story.' He remembered her nightgowns and the arrows of her hips. 'I'm sorry,' he said. The door began to close but he stuck his arm out.'How are you?' 'Fine,' she said. 'Hi, Persimmon,' Henry said to the dog, finally recalling its name.
Rome, Winter 2005 Tess Dearing
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Spring 2006
'This is Lucy,' Rebecca said shortly.'Persimmon died.' 'Hi, Lucy,' he said. The dog looked at him and began to sniff itself. 'Henry,' Rebecca said again. 'I'm sorry,' he said. She looked away. When the door began to close, Henry held out his arm again. 'No,' Rebecca said, 'I'll wait.' As the door shut, Henry heard a man's voice call her name. Outside, the sky was growing pale. Yellow light gathered over the avenue. Helen looked up at Henry.'I'm sorry,' she said. Above them, several sparrows fluttered in the bare branches of a tree, before rising, all at once, and swarming upwards. In the thin, long light, Helen's hair looked soft. Not a dirty blonde, but a kind blonde, Henry said senselessly to himself. 'Would you like to get dinner?' he asked. Unlike Rebecca, Helen fell asleep swiftly. She didn't ask for stories, or sit for hours, sleepless, in the blue, chemical light of the television. When he fought with Rebecca, Henry remembered, their fights were punctuated by long silences during which they both stared at the muted television, watching wind blow across a dry, anonymous highway somewhere in a desert, or followed a night-vision camera down a seemingly endless hallway. When Helen was upset, she cried without reserve. On their third date, she taught him how to keep a soufflĂŠ from falling. When they decided to move in together, Henry let Helen pick the apartment: he was afraid the remembrance of all those possibilities would oppress him, but he was happy with her choice, a bright, third-floor apartment. No terrace, but there was a garden on the roof. Henry could walk to work.
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After they moved, Henry began to dream about his old apartment. Sometimes he would walk into his old kitchen and open every cupboard in search of something he had lost, Other nights he was pursued by robbers who had scaled the fire escape. Usually, the apartment was bare, as if he had just moved in or was in the final stages of departure. One night, the night Helen finally finished painting their new bedroom, Henry dreamed he held a housewarming party for himself at his old apartment. In the dream, Rebecca left the room every time he entered: he saw her hand lifting a glass off the table, leaving behind a damp ring on the wood, or her bare feet as she crawled onto the fire escape. He thought he saw her perched on a piano stool, drinking gin with their former neighbors, but when he moved towards her, she vanished. He pursued her all night; in the dream, morning approached, and he still had not found her. Almost awake now, Henry realized the sun was rising; the edges of the sky went gray and then white. He heard Helen breathing beside him. He tried to re-enter the dream; he willed himself to catch Rebecca's arm, to follow her out onto the street. For a moment, they stood together on the top of the stoop. In the dream, dawn held off. Night lingered, cold and clear. The city seemed scrubbed clean: buildings stood sharp against the sky, and in the distance the Verrazano glowed a pale, luminous green, its lights reflected in the dark river. She said his name once and then walked down the steps. The bedroom was growing brighter but Henry kept his eyes closed. He watched her figure grow dark as she approached the avenue, illuminated only once by a wash of headlights. His breath, rising, followed her.
FOR A DOCTOR,JANUARY Jordan Jacks
Mornings, his two children, 'waking states like wars between red and blue, father and son. To the wife: a piano sensibly out of tune. To his own parents: a son out of town And a necessity, to politely forget. Those days at home. He had tired of waking for unappreciative chickens, mute cows, and so, in the end, had run away to medical school. The animals? Old women have taken their place. 'Varicose,' they cluck. In the waiting room, their husbands sitting with Harper's, heads lowered, bovines with the word 'prostate' continually on their lips — What had his mother been thinking, Letting his own father's swell? The truth is, Charles, A father does far better than a sunrise. He has no time for maudlin exercises. Before you rouse the children, better to dress, put your shoes on, watch the deer around the fence as they peer, silent, at a dead snake, like curious orderlies.
13 Spring 2006
4
SPRING Paula Brady
The women in our family, they don't fall in love my mother said. Spinsters. Married, but always alone in a room. By then, I had developed the hollow eyes, the long neck, stretched by out-reaching open mouths — Those are the signs. And in dreams, I found myself in the mulchy grove from memory, in a quilted coat, with a small shovel. At the foot of snow-covered beds, snaring my legs, brambly flowers made of bones. But it was true, I think, only for having been said. How is there always a new daughter to be warned, and could not the others have loved — only now, for some other reason, alone. I have found, women, what you said I would never. There, in the grove, instead of remains of unpierced ears, clogged hearts and mouths used only for eating — two hips, a pelvis and heaving ribs rise like precious metals in sand.
Untitled, Ink on Paper Nic k Vino( tic
14 Yale Literary Magazine
THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE SPRING 2006 FEATURE SECTION
1 I
The Lit asked six people who work with words professionally the following question:
HOW LANG] BRING UP SI-I
DOES UAGE ;YOU FORT? Here's how they responded...
the roil of image, in rational, cognitive, and analytical terms? How do we explain metaphor without bringing it to the banal?
Words can be irritating. They are inadequate to capture fully the currents of multiplicity and subjectivity that constitute artistic experience and expression. They are too precise or not precise enough, too bound to particulars or too vague, to allow us to move headlong and freely through them into the aesthetic sensibility, into the realm of the translu-
As a translator, I move among three levels of anguage and words in my work: from the aesthetic and connotative and metaphoric expressions of the original poem... to a kind of rational and denotative transfer station between both languages where structure and meaning must be found... and then, in my act of translation, in the process of creating a parallel work of art, back into the level of aesthetic experience
cent, the ephemeral, and the subjective where the artistic impulse resides. Words are part of the 'rational world,' where they define the context for common social and cultural bonds. When moved into the framework of poetry and
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created in a new language and existing in that a-rational world of art. It is in this process that troubles arise. As translator, am modulator, shaper, giver of sense and sound. It is in the effort to create a genuine aesthetic experience in the new
art, they are asked to function in an 'a-rational' context — in the dominion of metaphor - where they are expected to shake off their denotative dressings and move us into the richly connotative and the affective.
language that the words I am constrained to use get in the way. They do force my hand, they do bring me up short. Eut I know that it is in the fire of that effort, in the gnaw and rub of that fundamental irritation, that transcendence
By talking about a poem and 'what it means,' or writing essays about it, or translating it into another language, we seek to give a measure of rational and analytical coherence, through words, to an object and process that engage a sphere of mental activity
is found and art unfolds.
that is not quantifiable, and which is, in essence, like all art, non-cognitive. How, in fact, do we discuss the motivations of creativity, the internal rhythms of the artistic process,
\
— Jonas Zdanys, Poet and Translatpr
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I have always loved hearing people tell their stories — especially love stories. One of my favorite Sunday morning rituals is reading the Modern Love column in the New York Times. It's what I turn to first each week, even before scanning the front page. Contributors write about love in all of its permutations — from the constant yearning a mother feels for a dead child to the complicated relationship between two gay
•
men and their child's surrogate mother to the way that life-threatening illness can heal a troubled marriage. Each week I read something that illuminates my own life. In one recent column, an anxious new mother is fuming about her husband's blasé attitude about their infant's refusal to nap. She vows to leave him in one moment,and in the next, realizes his calm is the only
Yesterday two young Yale men walked down and asked if we had Pride and Prejudice. I said yes, downstairs. So they go downstairs and then one pops his head up and asks,'And who wrote that book again?' That was
HOW DOES
LANGUAGE
antidote for her neurosis. She writes,'I've never done anything gradually in my entire life. And Adam does everything gradually. That's why I married him and why I must stay with him forever.'
language that pulled me up short. — Patsy Recchia, Manager of Bryn Mawr Used Book Shop
BRING YOU UP SHORT?
Her words perfectly captured for me that moment as a new mother when I realized that, sometimes, you have to relinquish control.
•
— Karen Eisenberg, catalogue copywriter and freelance journalist
• When was the last time the spoken or written word was so surprising or hauntingly beautiful that your world was rocked in a small but real way? When was the last time literature or language brought you up short? What does language bring you up short of? What specific word fascinates you and why? Other.
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I spend my life playing with words — and the operative word is 'playing.' For translating is like a game or a complex crossword puzzle, it's trying to convey the meaning of words in one language into another and
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that demands understanding the meaning of words in both cultures and sometimes it requires stretching words or inventing words. Ultimately, •
of course, words are the way we touch one another and style is the morality of the mind. Hence, words must elucidate and not obfuscate, must be used honestly and not in an Orwellian sense to dishonour our sense
Once I was playing piano for a party in which the late Oscar Hammerstein's widow was in attendance. Hammerstein had been the
of reality. Hebrew is very compact. You can make one word by combining 4 or 5. There was a word in a story I translated years ago, gamaduto. It means 'his being a dwarf,' the state of being a dwarf. Gamad means dwarf,
lyric half of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the songwriting team that wrote many of the great musicals of Broadway's Golden Age, including Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. A young man asked Mrs. Hammerstein which of her husband's songs was her favorite.'Oh, that's easy,' she said. —All The Things You Are."
dut is 'being' and o is 'his.' And I've forgotten now what I ended up using — dwarfness? Dwarfitude? But that's the problem with those compound words.
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— Barbara Harshav, Translator
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I've been reading (and thinking about) Georges Simenon's novels. The ones I like, from the 19305 and forties mostly, are about people who lose their way, in every sense. La neige etait sale is one of my favorites. In English it's Dirty Snow. You couldn't say 'The snow was dirty' or, worse, 'The snow was filthy' —just sounds fussy. But Dirty Snow is wrong too. Simenon has a great title here that just won't budge from the French.
You are the breathless hush of evening That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
snow gets really dirty.
You are the angel glow that lights a star, The dearest things I know are what you are."
you 'The Dead of Winter,' another encounter with snow. Pay
special attention to what happens between lines 6 and 7 of this eightline poem (three to five words a line). Menashe brings us up short by a
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Rodgers wrote,"Da da, da da da da da da da." My husband wrote:
most private, the most hermetic, world imaginable. Neige makes some surprising, disturbing connections between stoicism and homicide. The
10 gives
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Mrs. Hammerstein stopped him.'That is incorrect,' she said.'Richard
"You are the promised kiss of springtime
the recent edition of Samuel Menashe's New and Selected Poems. Page
411
The young man smiled, and began humming the melody to this immortal song:'Da da, da da da da da dada...'
If you get past the title page, there are other rewards. The book uses what looks like objective, flat narrative to ensconce the reader in the
Simenon's novel has a quite a few words, 200 pages of them. Those who want to be brought up short by just a few words at a time might turn to
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pause between words. — Richard Maxwell, Professor of Comparative Literature
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
Great lyrics never die. After all, a tune without a lyric is only a melody. A lyric without a tune is just a chant. But put a gorgeous melody with a touching lyric and my heart knows what to do. It pulls over to the side of the road so we can both stop to listen. \ — Doug Konecky,songwriter, freelance author, critic, and travel writer
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they nique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty
are known. The tech-
and length of perception
because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. —Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique'
way of experiencing
HOW SHE GETS CAUGHT Adriane Quinlan
DENTON, ONLY HALF-MANNING REGISTER NINE, is doing some light reading on the Arabian knights: men who wore
cities of metal — breastplates like barns, visors like mirrored garages swung shut on the head — men who carried the hearts of their enemies within hinged doors, to be opened only to those bedded or slain. Looking up from the
book every
second page, he loses himself in a fluorescent wilderness, a terrible fortress from which he may be saving himself, or permanently trapped — without hope of an in between. McGull's Grocery Emporium carries canned peas, canned peanuts, canned pineapples. Not the canned hearts of Medievals, but yes, tomatoes: whole, diced, some sold as just the paste. Built to resemble a Swiss chalet, the grocery's single roof-beam straddles a twoslice roof, akin to IHOP's or to two hands, praying. This is a beam which will learn to buttress through soft bullets, will endure haloed bruises soft as smoke rings. Pick a can up like a baseball, toss it skyward till it smacks the original 1976 pine. Watch the can fall to the ground against its heart, its hands. When it does hit linoleum, approach as if nearing an animal corpse. Hold your hands out to clear away reeds, to prevent others in your party from approaching. If an eye darts, if the blood seems not to sop into the ground but comes unconditionally, if the wounded one throats a slow last yelp — do not approach. As the can grovels under the fluorescent lights, swinging on the hinge of its body — bend low, swoop it up, clench this with your fist. It is yours. It is dented. It is a thing made divine through dying. It is half-price.
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'Denting Duty' entails pacing with a walkie-talkie, breathing into the black plastic, stalking for 'merchandise • threats.' Sure, there's pricing to do, but it's still a glorious, star-spangled shift. On Wednesdays when Denton knows Tonelle's writing up the calendar, he'll loll around the break room and whine to her. Tonelle is a manager with tiny eyes, tiny lips, a tiny picture of a tiny baby framed in a tiny magnet frame in a standardized employee locker.'We don't need two boys on denting duty this week,' she says.'Gary's doing it.' 'I'm not a boy,' Gary says into a mirror, pulling a comb through his snowplow moustache. 'Gary isn't a boy, Tonelle. And he doesn't even like denting duty.' 'He's right, I don't even like it.' There is a pause as Tonelle rolls her last quarter into the coffee vending machine. Together, they watch the tiny iron hands open for the cup to fall, clasp it there. They watch the coffee spouting down,the cup filling. The scene turns Tonelle suddenly merciful; a high saint holding a hot cup.
'Alright,' she says. Alright is the single word which — when seeded in the mind of a sixteen-year-old whose afternoons stretch before him, otherwise fated and un-extraordinary — plants an image, grows Denton a tropical rainforest of daydreams that storyboard like bad TV. Bare aisle at sunset. A girl on tiptoed mary-janes, her hair a soft wave against the spine, straining to reach the top shelf, maybe even fainting in the action, and slowly. Denton's hands on the hinge of her back, her slow crumple into his arms, her eyes — blank, back-rolled like those of statues — turning suddenly toward him in an attack of want. Even if nothing happens, walking the store is a better shift than register duty: the slamming of the till, the repetition of the 'have a nice day' so that all days — all faces — seem equally unlucky. Working the register has been especially bad since all the Chordia kids went missing. You see, it was in the tabloids, and if you didn't read it there, you're the last person in the world. Tonelle has gutted the impulse-buy wire racks of all news dailies, stuffing the otherwise-empty space with gourmet cooking magazines offering alternate versions of lighter cheesecakes, photographed in soft-focus. What Tonelle does not want to remind her customers of is also that which she, with her own missing kid, does not want to be reminded. One night a month back, the parents in all the little houses in the little town of Chordia unrolled the blankets on the top bunks and found their children were not present. There was a kidnapper — that's what it has to be — because in a single night every bed was empty, every child had been taken. The situation was absurd, surreal, and the town had devolved into a media flystrip, wagging in the wind of television broadcasts. Theories have blown between mass alien abduction and the second-coming of our lord Jesus Savior, who didn't take back any sinners (a proposal strangely proffered by Reverend J. Whitehead, whose angelic children are missing but who is still sinfully present, hoeing his front-yard on cloudy afternoons). Though the leading theory remains the mass kidnapping, it's not clear just where the 578 children of this small town were taken, Chordia's surrounding deserts — combed for tire marks,foot-prints, soda pops — came out clean. A general air, tunneling through the aluminum
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shafts of the empty grocery, is that the kidnapper walks among us. Certainly, McGulls is the first and last place to feel any repercussions since (as those sincere women who unburden themselves at the register are calling it) 'the event.' And Tonelle knows this. Gary, though, seems to prefer work since the tragedy. Smiles more, as though it were a spell of good weather. Gary hates kids, revels in the attractive mothers brooding over minor tragedies — the cans of Spaghetti-Os they picked up without thinking, the battered barrettes they unearth pulling forth their checkbooks. Gary is forty and looks like a fellow survivor. He wears a wedding ring though twelve-years divorced, seems like a father though gaunt and self-serving. He is a man whose eyes show that he can repair a deck, can mitt a ball, has seen the dark of attic crawlspaces where the cat gets herself stuck. His teeth are coffee-flecked, flaring yellow when he smiles in his somber way — as if, while laughing with you, he is watching his own profile in the car's side-mirror. But Denton is different. The boy is sixteen, and Tonelle's mothering instincts would kick in if she didn't despise his pouting academic flair as much as she does. Denton reads clunky paperbacks when business is slow (The Arabian Knights: A Revised History), turns crabby when he can't see the clock, leaves bad poems written on register tape lying around the back office, or thumbtacked in the employee lounge, or even, once, left rotting under a yellow fruit she did not recognize. 0, starfruit, star-cross'd, start over. — Denton Merriman, 306.233.2764 'What does this mean?' she had asked Denton, just joshing him a bit as he sipped his Yoo-Hoo in the breakroom, over a book. 'It's Shakespeare,' Denton said, looking back down to read. 'Did Shakespeare leave his phone number lying around?' 'Could you put that poem back under the fruit please, Tonelle,' he said, without looking up. 'I meant for someone else to find it.' No one had. Seven weeks later, the faces of the children of Chordia were in all the tabloids she was pulling down off the racks, and Tonelle could see, as she worked,
Denton's greasy paper tab still sticking out from beneath the starfruit. Starfruit: For something with a name so obviously beautiful, the fruit itself was sad, went unbought, untouched, unnoticed. Every so often a little girl would pick one up, wave it toward her mother, and open her mouth wide to exclaim in wonder what she had found — though her exclamation could not be heard over here, over the clanking drawer-slams of the register tills. And it had been a few weeks since kids came in at all. The only under-18s, including 16-year-old Denton, were from Smithville, one town over. And that, really, was where most of their business was coming from. Families ate less without sons. You could imagine the parents going through the pantry, weeping as they bit into Krispie treats. The kidnapper (or 'Piper', as ToneIle's husband was now calling him) had stopped precisely on the town line. It was easy to do this in the desert, where towns formed like moss around a central point of water, exhausted this, kept their population down so that they all could live on just this much. Outside of Chordia, Smithville's playgrounds throbbed and rattled. Chordia mothers didn't pass the town-line much, afraid to witness what their own lives lacked. And so, Smithville-based business hadn't slowed, but Chordia locals had trickled to a drought, replaced en flood by the reporters and the out-of-state police — a force which expunged the sandwich aisle; made light work of beers, chips, carrot-cakes and bac-o-bits; and dented cans. So now Denton works 'Denting Duty' mainly; imagines the sallow, fainting women; hears the heart-stop thud of a dropped can only from an aisle over; arrives at the slain victim always too late; spends a lot of the time pricing, turning the cans like planets on their axis, stickering bottoms with orange brands. In mid-revolution, at 3:58 p.m. this Wednesday, the Goya beans stop, clutched. He can hear her by the swish-swish boom-boom of her skirts and the heels which stop them. Cover the aisle with a layer of snow one-inch deep and watch for where she steps. A meter stick between indents would tell Denton what he guessed just now: a regular distance between each point, the slosh of her skirt filling the space between unevenly, like a boat's wake sluicing between pilings.
17 Spring 2006
The cart is the catamaran pulling her behind, a float from which she may be waving. The woman wears a face of pitted cheekbones, fluffed hair that nets the light, creamsoaked hands like gloves over the bones. Her sharp lips are sliced; as a knife may fall at such an angle that the teeth sink in. She de-shelfs bread, throws it cart-a-ways, makes a quick glance over the beans and Denton's terrified rump, and paces past — no vegetables for this gal! Denton sees her, makes the sign of a cross, breathes into the talkie,'Emerald Lady, seven aisle seven, I see twenty, thirty bolognas from here. Over.' Gary is the first to whisper back. A college girl stares back at him over the register, watching as her diet sodas refuse to be conveyed down a conveyor. Time stops. 'Roger, this is Turpentine here, we got an Emerald Lady on our hands, where's she coming from, boys? Over.' 'Roger that Turpentine, this is Denter, I see she's got full ice cream check Vanilla check Strawberry check BananaFudgeMonkey'sDanceParty check Rockeee 'Denter, Denter? This is Turpentine. Rocky road? You faded out. Over.' 'Rocky road check. That's it on the ice cream. We got bread, twelve loaves. Forty I thought but maybe fifty bolognas. I fear the ol' E.L. feels she's being watched. Over.' 'Roger. We're going to cock-block the journalists over in Produce, let's watch this one ourselves. Over.' The Emerald Lady approaches Produce. She sails across oceans of linoleum, her chest heaves at the prow of a pyramid of yellow apples. She reaches for a forbidden fruit, pulls back, reaches for another, lifts, holds the apple to her cheek, brushes it there, against that skin. 'Yes,' she says.'We want these.' She speaks to no one but is overheard by three men. The first is a wilted Denton peering over the notches of starfruit. Numbers two and three in dark suits linger back by the zucchini, the snails in their ears attuned to a microphone taped to the underside of her cart's full basket. Together they have cringed at the magnified tock of every grocery she's dropped in, and here we see that they have finally got her where they want her: Which is holding an apple and staring back. Though Denton misses it — he's watching her chest shudder — Gary spends some minutes watching the two men speak into their wrists. What has this woman done?
1. 4 / 11,-3
4' ^104
Isabelle arid Zak Smith Julia Hickey
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Gary thinks. And then he turns around toward the paying customer (ToneIle has been on his ass lately) and scans the diet sodas, reads the price aloud, takes the fist of exact change, opens and slams the till drawer, turns right back around and sees the empty place where the Emerald Lady was standing, sees the two cops talking to the sixteen-year old kid, their arms frozen at the rakish angles of anger. They are like a picture in a magazine he read that morning — two children arguing, poolside, over J.ase of a diving-board, their yellow hands frozen in absurd gesticulation against the time-stopped water. ToneIle stands talking to the men with her arms crossed, her hips banking against the grapefruit, and makes some claim Gary can't hear, points toward the exit's gaping maw,or toward the pumpkins patched outside in Seasonal. The men leave without argument. A glint of light refracted from their teeth shines off of the plate glass, like they're sure they'll be back. Though what the men wanted isn't made clear, there's really only one thing the men in the town want right now, and that's to be the one who finds him, her, them: The Chordia Kidnapper. 'ToneIle,' Gary shouts, across to Produce. 'Hi there, Turpentine. Rough rider here, Over,' she calls back on the talkie. 'Can't we speak without machines, Tony?' Gary shouts out. 'This is more professional, over,' the talkie says. 'Who were those guys?' he says into the plastic. A grandmother sets out her condensed milk, her piecrusts, her PurinaOne. 'What people buy is private,' the talkie says.'They didn't think so. Over.' A long pause as he scans the piecrusts, which won't ring up until he types the code manually. 'It's your kid, Tony,' Gary says. He doesn't say 'over.' He stops, caught in the tensile moment between the action and the regret. Turns the walkie-talkie off. Doesn't want to hear the static creep along, or see ToneIle approach like a lighthouse; nearing without seeming to move at all. 'Let's talk without machines,' ToneIle says, her hands at the belt's open maw, one sharp nail squirreling with
19 Spring 2006
the tattered rubber. The old woman (she's still here), smiles over a pastel checkbook. 'Listen, ToneIle,' Gary says,'I'm sorry for what I said just now. I'm a fucking idiot.' 'Apology accepted. Thank you Gary.' 'That's it?' 'Yes, that's it. Right as rain. Even keel on the deck. Done.' 'Even enough to play shuffleboard?' 'Yes, we're even,' Tonelle stresses, eyeing the doting customer's glassing eyes. 'Don't walk away just yet,' Gary says, waxing dramatic. 'I know why you didn't give Emerald Lady over.' 'Because?' 'Because,' he whispers,'You're sure she didn't do it.' 'I'm sure,' ToneIle says, and does walk off. Denton, emerging from an aisle, having watched the whole thing though ostensibly on D. Duty, watches ToneIle recede. He takes a step back and looks at his cuffs. 'I'm sure the Emerald Lady did it,' he says.'I'm sure as gold she took those children. Buried them alive. Watched the limbs snake out of the mud. Gary?' 'Yes.' 'I know why I like her, but why do you like her?' 'You first.' 'Because I'm bored,' Denton says.'She looks sort of like a girl I knew. Half Queen Marie from TV, half — I don't know, something else.' 'Oh?' Gary says. But nothing comes of the intonation. Denton's waiting. 'I like her because ... I've never met a skinny girl who eats like a trucker.' 'You've never seen her eat, though.' Denton laughs. 'Push pops? Beef Jerky? You think she's buying a well-rounded meal to bring her offspring into the world?' Gary asks. 'She bought those apples,' Denton says. 'No she didn't.' Gary sighs.'She didn't buy them after all.' Didn't buy them...It is then the two men realize she has bought nothing, is still somewhere in the store cradling the apples in her creamy hands. Denton looks at Gary, who flicks his mustached lip. There is the trademark sideways smile, the teeth yellowed, the eyes wary. And then she unfolds from aisle four, as if cued by the fleck of
light couched in Gary's teeth, as if the unhinging of his jaw, connected to a system of pulleys and springs, had lowered a trap door that bears her down upon them. Basically, the woman is beautiful, Eyes spread far apart, enough to see two sides of a thing she holds in front of her face. She has a gentle, despairing nose, a chin that has rested on mahogany, on spruce and felt and glass. She is the soft part of a fruit you could fall into, could bite through without worry. She rings up on Gary's register $578 dollars worth of groceries, and then says 'Thank you' and 'I'm sorry I'm so much trouble.' 'No trouble,' Gary huffs. He's almost stuttering. He has to stop himself. 'Oh my oh my,' she says, watching Denton wrap a leg of lamb inside a sheaf of paper.'Oh my oh my,' Denton replies, smiling up. She does not smile back, seems instead to sigh, looking at Denton's young pallid face, his tuft of hair. 'Are you from Smithville?' she asks. Gary hears her ask it.'The boy's from Smithville,' he cackles.'Or he'd be gone, va-va-voom, tralala, over and done with,' Gary takes one finger and trails it across his neck, in a motion that reminds him of fishing in Erie with his father at age eight, when the man would stick one finger over the boat's side, trail it through the morning water, pull it out and feel for which side dried. This was how you knew the water temperature, wind speed and direction, this was how a man could feel for currents, could know where not to go for fish, could visualize a world beneath the bracken that pulsed and heaved according to geometric rules.
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In the world that you see without seeing, Gary's cut head rolls off, bounces among the Cheez-its on the belt, falls to the floor and rolls to her feet. The eyes roll back, the head looks up and sees her looking. Nine days later, Gary and Denton are loading unsold pumpkins into ToneIle's trunk to sell back to the farm 1/4 price for composting. The stems split their hands.'Linda,' Denton says.'That's her name on the checkbook.' 'Linda. Hmm...Those goddammned feds don't stop her from coming, do they.' 'She must be innocent,' Denton says,'Or she would give a damn,' He picks up a tiny pumpkin, pretends to bite out of it as from an apple. 'I don't know,' Gary says.'Maybe she did do it. It makes us right if she did.' The theory is — a theory that perhaps needs explaining — who would buy this many groceries each day, if not to feed an army of kidnapped children? It's assumed they're hiding in the Lady's basement, buried in some unregistered bombshelter, bank vault, crawlspace. That's the direction of the investigation that is starting, with each failed lead, to not really give a damn. Because if the children are not being fed with McGull's groceries, they're probably already dead. I mean, they're dead. They're definitely probably already dead. 'ToneIle,' Gary shouts through the walkie-talkie. 'Roger, ToneIle here, Over.' 'Can I break now?' 'Roger.' He flips the talkie off so the soft fuzz stops. Gary locks the register door, whoo-whoo whistles to
City Julia Hickey
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Denton, who jogs up to the front to open register nine and help a nun with a small tower of Fancy Feast. The automatic doors open into the first twilight brush of desert cold, and the doors strike him, opening, as of that old sea, parting. He raises his hand, impersonating the motion Moses once made, or others made after him in movies. The nun watches. Outside, after he has pulled out the pack but before he lights the first cigarette, Gary sees the two cops lounging on the hot hood of their white Taurus looking, empurpled by the soft twilight, like extras in an advertisement for a rental car. The gaunt one sits up, waves Gary over with two flicks. He can't see the men too well from across the lot. In the growing dark, he can see that the one reclining is younger, sports a nest of ragged hair, must say 'please' and 'thank you' to the older one, the gaunt one, who has flicked Gary over and still stares out at Gary not coming. 'Who are you?' Gary yells across, unlit cigarette flopping out like a second tongue, listening to hls voice echo against Cadillac grills. 'We're cops,' the young one says.'We'll arrest you if you don't come over.' 'I don't think you will,' Gary laughs.'But you could.' 'We won't,' the old one says. 'He won't, but I will,' the young one says, sitting up. Gary walks over. His boot heels clap across the asphalt. Somewhere in the lot, a cart rattles over gravel. Gary shudders. Too much gravel and you have to replace the wheels. It's hot work — the screws get under your thumbnails and you pray you picked the right size or you're gonna have to do it over and then there's ToneIle who will not pay overtime when it's your fault, and you do a dumbshit thing like that. She's got a home and a kid, or a home, at least. She's got a home and a photo in a locker.
The Milkmaid's Service Carl Fuldner
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Spring 2006
'Gentlemen,' Gary says.'Do you have any questions for me? Am I a witness?' 'Sit down,' the gaunt one says. Gary sits on the hood of the Taurus.'Do you have any questions for us?' the cop asks. 'What was with the chick?' Gary asks.'What'd she do?' He lights his cigarette. The young cop starts laughing.'To the chase he cuts, to the chase!' The cops ask Gary how many bolognas he thinks she bought. 'I don't know,' he says,'Fifty?' 'Fifty seven,' the young cop says.'That's a lot of bologna. Enough to feed an army —' '— Of children,' the old one says. 'I don't know,' Gary says, sucking back smoke.'We've all thought of that, but it seems a bit on the crazy side. This case must be really going nowhere.' 'It's not,' the younger man says. 'I mean you're right, it is going nowhere.' 'I mean, bologna as evidence? So she's feeding her family. So she has six kids and a pig who eats scraps.' 'But did those look like child-bearing hips to you?' says the older cop.'Did those look like hands that had fed a pig?' 'Let me ask you this,' the younger cop says, prodding him.'Why do you watch her?' From outside the store, in the dark, he can see the litup inside, as if the building was a drive-in people watched in the dark. There is the old woman counting back her change in the apricot light of a Cadillac's makeup mirror, the new cart boy wheeling in the strays from the North section of the lot, a bakery girl out by the watermelons, smoking half-heartedly. You cannot see Gary from the
store. Like most things, you can see only one way, can move toward only one thing. 'Why do I watch her?' Gary asks. 'I just like her.' 'Why?' 'Come on.' 'We already know,' the young cop says, leaning back to lie on the Taurus.'You don't even have to say. Eats like a trucker, framed like a highway cloverleaf — built for speed with curves in all the right places.' 'Jesus,' Gary says.'But you guys really think it's Linda?' 'We don't,' the old one says.'We definitely don't.' 'But it is Linda,' the younger one says. 'It's gotta be Linda.' Gary hops off the roof and walks back, toward the watermelon patch, still watching the cops, but moving toward ToneIle, whose eyes are pressed flat against the glass, looking for him. When Gary gets back in, Denton is in mid-retelling of last night's episode of Prince Valegaunt, Warrior to the customers brooding between their registers.'So the horse runs off,' he says, cocking his head like there's something running and he's watching it recede.'And now Hector — London city prissy, skinny guy — is left in this desert, right? This absolute wasteland. And you're thinking the whole episode about how there's gotta be a craft services table fifteen feet behind the camera, there's just gotta be. And Hector's face's all haggard like he's sure he's gonna starve.' 'Like me on my lunch break,' Gary says, over the crowns of the customers' heads. A woman with carrots, broccoli. Two boys with string cheese, sodas, teardrops of toothpaste marking their t-shirts. He can imagine the boys outside on the lot wall in a minute, peeling the sticks of cheese as Gary's grandmother had once peeled down
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strips of wallpaper; revealing a boarded layer beneath, without paint or flowers. 'What you think is good for you,' Denton says. Is not ever good for you. That's the lesson of the show.' 'How can that be true,' the woman in the aisle says to Denton, offering forth a bag of carrots.'And these carrots? Are these terrible, too?' She wears her grey hair clenched in a barrette. He has seen her hold an egg up to her ear over in Dairy and has wondered what she listened for. It doesn't apply to things like carrots,' Denton says, grabbing the bag out of her fist to scan. 'It only applies to things like life goals, like Hector's plans for the castle's water tower.' 'Maybe,' the woman says.'Or maybe prissy Hector would have had more time to research the water tower's probable site if he had spent less of it with Marie.' Denton glowers. There's a picture of Queen Marie on the cover of a magazine he stares at when there are no customers in line. She wears a smile, though she stands alone, naked in a forest, brushing back nettles. 'Marie was what wasn't good for him,' the woman says, snaps up her receipt, heads past. Denton glowers, steams up, gives up. Gary knows the faces Denton makes like he knows the faces in the magazine: their stockpile dimple grooves, their many-headed monster. 'Denton?' Gary says.'Why did we start to call the E.L. the EL.?' 'Um,' Denton hums.'Her green shirt. It was twice she wore it, just something you or maybe I recognized.' 'Emerald Lady, Emerald Lady,' Gary says, into the mic. The boys go a few minutes without speaking. The customers are quiet, nodding at the 'good evenings.'
You can hear ToneIle stocking with the scanner blip in aisle three. 'Good evening,' says the young cop. 'I didn't know I could summon you,' Gary says. 'What do you mean?'says the old one. 'I said Emerald Lady into the microphone three times,' Gary says. 'Twice,' says the young one. 'Are the mics miked,' Gary asks.'Of course they are, right?' 'Of course,' the older cop asks.'We bug to know about every vegetable, If we know exactly what each town in this citizen is eating, and from where, we will know how these children are living. We are going to starve them out.' 'I'm seventy percent sure you can't do that. Human rights, something amendment, something. Bad.' The young cop has a zany plan to ration a certain amount to every citizen, to give food out only from a central holding pen, to scour each house ignoring all other broken laws, just looking for the kids. Pretty soon the Chordia Kidnapper (or 'Pied Piper' as the bureau chief is starting to call him) will have to come forward if he wants to feed them. If he really cares about the kids — which obviously he does because, you know, they're all gone. 'Wouldn't he just rather let them starve?' Gary asks. 'Well,' the younger cop says,'That's a chance I'm willing to take.' 'That's probably not a chance any of the mothers are willing to take.' 'Probably not,' the younger cop says.'But their willingness is a chance I'm willing to take.'
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'It's so crazy it just might work!' Denton says. 'Shut up.' The older cop elbows Denton. The E.L. enters. The cops must have known she was coming, must have followed her here. She makes the usual round. Today: cornflakes are added. 625 dollars worth of groceries. God. She chooses Gary's lane again. 'Nice to see you each time, Ms. Linda,' Gary says. She smiles without baring teeth, opens her mouth without speaking. When she leaves, the men wink at Gary, and follow her out. The scene seems to go fuzzy when the lady is gone, like she was some focus that the light held. The next day is a Tuesday. This is the day of the climax, and also of a small and predictable denouement. At noon, the Emerald Lady enters, does her rounds, takes and takes and takes. Seems lovely today, her hair up off her neck. Her cart wheels seem to cream the linoleum, she smiles at Denton in the canned section where, yes, he is on Denting Duty, and yes, he is watching her. ToneIle is somewhere else in aisle eight, babying a display of 'world grains.' The Emerald Lady does it like this: She throws a can so it hits the beam, smashes against it, descends like a tetris cube's slowly ticking fall. She cradles the dented can, does it again, does it again. Denton can only watch — there is a scrim between him and this woman, it is obvious that he cannot tell her anything she does not already know. She anticipates his eyes, lets out a blippy 'Oops.' And tending to the quinoa, ToneIle can only glower.'DENTON!' she yells,'DENTON!' All speech fails him, he cannot stop her, stop either of them. ToneIle approaches and stops the woman, walkietalkies Gary who, according to policy, must fill out a
meager report, sign his name, affix a stamp, call a bureau. This is what the feds were waiting for and, as if on cue, they enter smiling madly, taking the woman by the hands to reprimand her gently. It is clear they are following policy but that they want something more. On the Wednesday papers that arrive at 6 a.m. on McGull's front stoop, the E.L.'s face is bared without its beauty, its jaw unhinged in a slow moan, its chin squared inside the text's thin border. To draw a perfect circle, you think of the square it would fit inside. 'So it really was her,' Gary says. They're both opening today — punishment for yesterday's long list of Denting Duty failures. They learn nothing more about the woman from the blurb, or from any of the events that follow.
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Days regain their track, adhere to a former pattern, Denton's shifts wax later, he prefers a halo of darkness about the edges of things. Nights he watches a triangle of white moonlight on the floor of McGull's Grocery Emporium. It spreads across the linoleum now. 'What does the clock say, Gary?' Nearly twelve. Denton cannot read the wall clock from register nine, only the light — shrinking as the moon bears up. He watches how it slurs and stops and spreads sometimes, how it puddles and pools about the bases of the racks, how it softens when it hits a plum. It strikes him that the light is like a face; Like the one we make between the stubbing of the toe and the pain. It too is a shape formed of anticipation, arbitrary as a clock.
ONE DAY OF BRAHMA Erich Matthes
In the space of a breath the universe becomes and had become and became and was ended, and that breath of time was called kalpa — the regular rise and fall of worlds. The sweet air shuttles in and out and in each inhalation lie the endless ways in which the varied complexity of life may be reduced to a single expulsion of wind. 2.
It has been a month of stolid days and weeks later, your scent still lingers in my bed, hiding under the sheet-wrinkles — the fading suggestion of a presence. When you left, you did not kiss me, but leaned close, and spoke a silent word, lips smacking the air, emptying your lungs in my face, your breath the rich stink of soil.
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STAFF
Alexander Nemser
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The editors would like to thank Ruben Roma and Anne Fadim in the English Department, the Branford and
SENIOR PUBLISHER DESIGNER
Jonathan L. Sherman-Presser
James Lee
MANAGING EDITORS LITERARY EDITOR
Saybrook College Masters' Offices and the Yale Elizabethan Society. The designers would like to thank George
Abigail Deutsch & Laura Schewel
Jeremy Kessler
Guman at RIS. The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Poetry is 'The Painted Wall,' by Ivy Y. Wang.
SENIOR EDITORS
Paul Gleason, Helen Vera The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Fiction is
& Julia Wallace
'How She Gets Caught,' by Adriane Quinlan, ART EDITOR
Amelia Simpson Poetry and fiction were judged by Anne Fadiman.
ONLINE MEDIA RELATIONS MANAGERS
David Chernicoff & Gordon Jenkins
The text face is Whitney Light. Headings are set in Van den Keere, designed in 2005 by James Lee after the
PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGER
Erich Matthes
EVENTS COORDINATORS Chloe
Kitzinger, Dayo Olopade
& Joanna Zdanys
The contents of the Yale Literary Magazine are copyright 2006. No portions of the contents may be reprinted with-
CIRCULATION AND DISTRIBUTION
Russell Brandom (Manager)& Nadia Kanagawa ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER ASSOCIATE EDITORS
1573 2-line double pica roman by Hendrik Van Den Keere.
Alexandre Lessard-Pilon
Annie Galvin, Emily Kopley
& Joshua Starr SELECTIONS Laura
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