Author Archives: Kendra Aquino

ENGAGED by Susan Tacent

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ENGAGED
by Susan Tacent

You scratch because it itches. You’re over the moon with excitement. Good news always drives your histamine reaction and now you’re breaking out in hives. You drink a glass of water. You breathe, slow breaths, in, out, the way the yoga teacher and the meditation guru and the homeopathist and the ENT guy instruct. The itch gets funky, like a dance, up and down your arms, the backs of your thighs, a place between your shoulder blades you can’t reach. You ask Ben to reach for you and he says he won’t because scratching only makes it worse. If you’re going to marry this guy, you want to know. You tell him he has to and when he does, you know you made the right choice.

Susan Tacent author photoSusan Tacent’s work has been published in a variety of literary journals including Tin House Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, decomP, Blackbird, Ontario Review, and DIAGRAM. In addition to teaching writing workshops, she facilitates an assisted living book club where the participants’ collective age exceeds 900 years. You can find her online at susantacent.weebly.com.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

SOME BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT by Reilly Joret

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SOME BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT
by Reilly Joret

My wife fingered the remaining chocolate syrup from her bowl to her mouth and announced she was going to bed. I’ll admit The Tonight Show monologue that night wasn’t going to change her mind. It was all obvious punchlines about the president’s Asia trip, with some cheap shots at the end for the congressman with the Honduran mistress maid, and the reality TV star with the unflattering DUI mugshot. I feared this was becoming the norm. I followed my wife upstairs, hoping we might discuss this unsettling trend, or get in something cursory between the two of us, but she fell asleep in a way that suggested a medical condition.

Our doctor had recommended we remove the television from the bedroom, claiming it was best for both of us, studies had shown, etc. We gave it to a woman at my work who said she needed one in front of her treadmill. It wasn’t going to win us any humanitarian awards, but I was still trying to scrounge up some goodwill at the office. It hadn’t worked, and I’d been left with the increasing inability to fall asleep. Forty-three minutes, an hour seventeen, an hour fifty-one, two hours and three. Our doctor recommended warm milk and counting sheep to ease what he casually referred to as “an adjustment period.” So, I drank glasses of warm whole milk, then skim, soy, half-and-half. I mixed them together and drank that. And I counted. I tallied the barnyard, then the parking meters along Sycamore Street, the counties in the tri-state area, the bricks on the First National Bank’s facade. No luck. I lay in the dark, staring at the steady shape the streetlamp cast across the ceiling.

Dino pushed into our room like an invading army. His collar clanged like armor. His tail flogged the framed pictures of vacation beaches and the home store Buddhas that helped my wife with her yoga. I hissed at him to lay down, closed my eyes, and counted the thumps his tail made on the carpet. The number was nearing one hundred fifty, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went to shoo him away, but the blankets pinned me to the mattress. My wife layered and tucked the sheets and covers, trying to recreate the feel of a luxurious hotel bed, and it closed around us like a finger trap. I rolled my body to create separation, and kicked at the blankets. As their grip loosened, I dealt a harder blow, and heard my toenail tear a gash in the top sheet.

Dino shot up and stared at me from beside the bed with his ears back in defense from the sound. I turned to my wife. She was still asleep in the same dead pose. I listened to her breath, counting the seconds between inhale and exhale, waiting for it to quicken or for some other sign she’d noticed, but nothing changed. Dino walked three cautious circles at the foot of the bed and laid back down. His tail began thumping again. I pulled myself from the finger trap and slunk towards the bathroom. I had known for a while about my toenails. They’d been burrowing weird shapes in my socks, and making certain shoes uncomfortable, but they hadn’t done damage. Now, I was disgusted with my lack of stewardship.

I sat on the edge of the tub counting the floor tiles, and remembered gently kidding my wife for the time she spent in here, but no one was laughing now. For five minutes of time, I’d have to explain a ruined set of sheets. Of course, it would have been five minutes if I hadn’t let things become so far gone. It took five minutes just to snake my fingers through to where the clippers resided, deep inside the vanity drawer long ago claimed by my wife, and overcrowded with fiendishly-shaped grooming devices that seemed to threaten harm. And then I had to slowly chip away at the proof of my negligence. The big toes offered the toughest opposition, but the clippers and I prevailed, even if it was only a short-lived victory.

The results were poor. My nails were too angular and jagged, still too much like blades—though now they were serrated. I went to the drawer again, and found my wife’s nail file. Its sides were bifurcated, split between increasingly finer grits and labeled accordingly, which facilitated the institution of an assembly line on my toes. Then, once they were smooth and glossy, my fingernails looked outrageous by comparison. It took another half hour of work until I could approve of my hands. I returned to bed and fell asleep instantly.

A feeling of accomplishment pervaded the next day until The Tonight Show monologue, when looking at my nails no longer did anything for me. In bed, the minutes ticked by again. I tried counting them, but this only made it worse. My satisfaction turned to discomfort, and then became a nag, which manifested itself as an itch that radiated from my groin out over my entire body. I tried to scratch, but my nails were too short to alleviate it.

Standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror, I witnessed the severity of the problem. Here I was, peacocking around about an overdue nail trim, when the rest of my corporeal chunk lurched like a Sasquatch. I was a thin veneer, shamefully pretending to be civilized.

Waxing began with my shoulders, then proceeded to my back. A makeshift combination of vise-grips, a spatula, and a golf ball retriever allowed me to access the more remote areas. My chest and thighs were easier, requiring only a protractor and a ruler. The groin was last, and as anticipated: not pleasant, precarious, but necessary.

The next morning, I took a post-shower victory lap around the bedroom. I paused in the middle of the room and posed, as though sculpting myself into marble for my wife to behold. The water droplets slid unhindered from my body.

“Since when don’t we use towels?” she asked.

She threw one at me from the pile of laundry she was folding unevenly.

The post office delivered my last check from the bottling company. Just the check, no additional remarks included. I spent the afternoon practicing my signature, not wanting to squander a final opportunity to show H.B. Davenport & Co. what they were losing; but my pen didn’t wet the page properly to give my letters the boldness they required. I searched the house, but we only had one cheap box of the same cheap pens. I left the check on the kitchen counter, took a couple naps, and trimmed my goatee until my wife came home.

She set the groceries and junk mail on top of the check and didn’t mention it. She barely mentioned anything the whole evening, and then said she was going to bed. The monologue dry spell was beginning to sour her mood, I could tell.

After she’d gone upstairs, I sat on the couch stroking my face. Dino pawed at my leg, apparently concerned I hadn’t also gone to bed. I’d shoo him away, he’d come back. He was picking up on the restlessness surrounding him. I walked him around the house, hoping it would tire him out. It didn’t, so I got his leash and took him around the neighborhood.

After midnight, our street was as quiet as could be. The pulsing of the day—husbands and wives back and forth to work, children canvassing lawns for adventures, contractors’ saws and hammers, pneumatics and rotating electrics, cars, delivery trucks, front doors, garage doors, voices carrying through open windows and across backyards—retreated without any sign of ever having existed. The houses were silent, just spreading placid pools of light from front porches and central hall chandeliers. I walked Dino through the silence, remorseful for the jangle of his collar, hoping we could somehow capture the smallest fraction of the austerity the other houses seemed to have in abundance.

We returned home, and I wandered room to room. I couldn’t find tranquility across our threshold, only turmoil. A strange, almost sixty-cycle hum radiated through the house. I unplugged the television and cable box, the microwave and coffee pot, and turned off everything except the front porch light. It felt worse in the dark. The chaos, imperceptible during the day, cloaked by the commotion outside, now threatened to vibrate the house apart. I had to root it out before it tore us to shreds.

I dealt with the drawers in the bathroom first. Dull scissors, baffling implements, half-used duplicates of deodorants and perfumes. They were all discarded without second thought. What remained was cleaned, consolidated, and organized. I applied labels to the drawer fronts to prevent a return to this state. The kitchen received the same treatment. De-Tefloned pans, right-angled whisks, wax-gobbed spatulas, and Tupperware in need of birth control were tossed. I raided the refrigerator and pantry, the cabinets and sideboard. Night by night, I moved through the house. No room, no item was spared judgment. I took special delight in ridding our lives of the plush throw blanket my mother-in-law bought us in Graceland. A calm, Spartan order was settling in.

One morning, while we drank coffee from two of our remaining mugs, my wife asked if I’d seen the stick blender.

I remembered pulling the stick blender’s phallic case from the abyssal cabinet next to the dishwasher. It was buried under three items I didn’t even know we owned. This was enough evidence to condemn it. Her tone implied otherwise.

“You’re throwing our money into the trash,” she said.

“What’s the alternative? Live in a heap because it’s our heap?”

“What are we going to have left when you’re done?”

I explained that it wasn’t about what would remain. It was about trading things for a new feeling, an organic environment where we could breathe. I asked her to stop for a moment and open herself up to receive the sensation of the house. She was having none of it. She stormed off to work, leaving the ingredients for her split pea soup on the counter.

My magazines finally arrived in the mail. I read them all by the time my wife came home. She had a take-out meal with her that she said was for dinner, but the men’s magazines condemned this as being too sodium-laden and processed. I declined her invitation, and took Dino for a run instead. He was getting to be a real chunker, and I had to get my heart rate to one hundred and fifty-three BPM.

I thought about the interior design magazines while I ran, and for a long time after. They implored me to embark on a soul search for my personal affinities to Country Glam or Boho Chic, to explore space as texture, and couple sleek mid-century lines with thrift store finds that expressed personality and whimsy—if whimsy was part of my personality, I suppose. But I didn’t need design gurus utilizing esoteric terms with flippant familiarity. I needed the Platonic ideal of our living room, the Truth of the space. These were layers of reality, not shag pillows and low-pile rugs. The wall between the living and dining rooms was reality—and also load-bearing, evidently. I had to find the room constrained within the room, yearning for its realization.

I awoke to my wife yelling from downstairs.

“Did you move the furniture?” she kept hollering.

I came down to find her collapsed on the relocated chaise lounge, howling, and cupping her foot.

“Did you move the furniture?” she asked again.

The answer to her question seemed obvious.

Her toe was turning a tumultuous swirling of purples and yellows beneath the hairs that sprung from her knuckle. I placed a frozen bag of French-cut beans on it, and reminded myself to wash the bag before returning it to the freezer. She diagnosed the toe broken, and asked for supplies so she could tape it to its neighbor. I had marshaled our first-aid kit into order during one of my organizational nights, and brought it to her as though it sat atop a velvet pillow, proud that she could perform her task with ease. I made coffee and brought her a cup, setting it beside her before loitering a kiss on her forehead. She shook me away.

“Why? Just why?” she asked.

“The living room was a farce.”

“It’s been that way for five years.”

“It was difficult to get the indentations out of the carpet,” I agreed.

She huffed, and limped upstairs to get ready for work.

When she came hobbling through the kitchen door that evening, I was waiting for her at the table. Before she had time to set her purse on the counter, I handed her a loose assortment of wrinkled, coffee-stained copy paper.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s a start,” I said.

She read the first page slowly, then thumbed through the others with increasing speed and decreased attention. She finished the last page, then stared at me blankly.

“What is this?” she asked. “Pages—pages—of one-liners?” She looked at the papers again and shook her head. “What is this supposed to be?”

“It’s a rough draft. I printed a good copy, and mailed it to The Tonight Show.”

She fell forward onto the counter, and looked at the first page of my manuscript again.

“This is how you spent your day?”

“I know the monologue has been bothering you—”

“The monologue has not been bothering me. This,” she said, gesturing wildly towards everything, “has been bothering me.”

“I can only do so much at once.”

My wife took up a new hobby. She made phone calls, scheduled appointments, and shuttled me to doctors’ offices. We had long conversations with several of the doctors. They were quick to point out that they had no desire nor intention to place blame. I was quick to commend them. The other doctors were less conversational, and only seemed interested in tests they intended to perform at later dates for additional co-pays, and future follow-up consultations for the same. This was concerning. My wife was collecting referrals like trading cards, and her new hobby was beginning to impede my progress.

One doctor sent us home with probes and monitors we were instructed to affix to specific parts of my body before bed, which would measure all the things needing to be measured. My wife spent the better part of The Tonight Show clamping and taping the dongles and meters to my prescribed parts until they dangled from me like the jewelry of a space pirate. I lost all freedom of movement with these devices tethered to me. I couldn’t shave or spackle, paint or hammer. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. They beeped when connected; they beeped when disconnected. I couldn’t make sense of what they wanted from me. After a few nights dragging those things around, they had my wife drive me to a sleep center for an overnight stay. I lost a whole evening reorganizing someone else’s room.

With the experiments over, I could get back to work. I was mitering and coping an inside corner when my wife came down the basement stairs to talk to me about talking with the doctors.

“Don’t you remember what Dr. Phillips said?” she asked.

“Not as such, no.”

“She said we needed to establish boundaries.”

I examined the cut I just made. The power miter saw was not strictly necessary. I could have performed the work without it, but it moved the process along while still maintaining the required precision.

“Apparently, that was one of her more salient points,” I said.

Crown molding was exactly the type of boundary our dining room needed.

“Where are the boundaries? It’s three-thirty in the morning. We don’t have any boundaries.”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

She leaned slightly while I carried the molding past her. Dr. Phillips, or perhaps Dr. Senglin, or Father Kendrick had stressed the need for us to engage with each other’s lives again. Maybe it was in one of the men’s magazines. I thought my wife might want to see what I was accomplishing, but when I returned to the basement with my next measurement, she was gone. She would have seen everything coming together.

The maintenance was becoming unsustainable, however. Something had to give. Everywhere I turned, a spot needed wiping, dog hair needed vacuuming, the yard needed scooping. Dino’s half-masticated rawhides were omnipresent. Stains were inescapable. My days were spent following him with disinfectant wipes and a garbage can.

He had to go.

My wife abandoned her hobby, and began spending long periods in bed. She didn’t watch The Tonight Show anymore, and she didn’t ask about the powder room I took down to the studs, or the old pickup truck I planned on using for runs to the home center, but had to park in the driveway and dismantle the engine. I worried she was regressing so far into herself that she wouldn’t be able to appreciate the transformations around, and that she would reach a place where I couldn’t reach her anymore.

I circled the bedroom one night, noting the frequency of the drafts swaying the curtains, and the patterns our feet left in the carpet. My wife’s breathing raised and lowered the blankets over her in the slow pulse of a summer lake. She slept on her back with her head turned to the arm curled behind her, and looked posed for a photograph or painting in the way that people used to. I saw the picture of her hung, huge and solitary, on the white wall of an empty museum. It had the same curiosity, drew the same fascination, as any great canonical work. It was easy to forget sometimes. When I looked at her, I saw the world drawn to scale, unified, pulled together in a more profound way than I was prepared to experience. That it would be her who was here, peaceful and full of grace, well…I was still as awed by her as ever.

I stepped back to take in the whole scene, to study it and burn the details I’d forgotten back into my memory. But the more I observed, the more it seemed out of balance. Her upper body flowed easy over the pillows and mattress, an effortless expression of comfort and serenity. A cocoon encased her from the waist down. Her legs were mummified under the blankets. Such an off-putting juxtaposition betrayed the truth of how she should be seen. I knelt at the foot of the bed and pulled at the pleats and folds like opening a present without damaging the wrapping. I found one leg under the covers, eased it out, and set on top of the blankets. This little correction changed the whole scene. It looked like she wore a flannel and down tunic as she descended from a Grecian urn. But her foot drooped to the side, making her look bow-legged. I reset it and adjusted the blankets to hold it upright. It fell outward again. I cradled her foot in my hands and inspected it for any inherent causes. Her toe had healed nicely, but those hairs were still on her knuckles. They were an aggressive disruption, asserting dominance over the idyllic scene. Those fine, haphazard hairs were all I could see. I retreated across the room, hoping distance could maintain the trance, but it kept receding. I didn’t want to lose her. I thought I could touch up the picture and hold on. There was still some wax left over. I retrieved the jar from the bathroom and set to work, but her scream shattered the tranquility of the vision, and it was gone.

She left a discomforting indentation on her side of the bed. Flipping the mattress corrected this concern, but there’s something disproportionate about living alone in a large house.

I’d ask her to come back, but there’s no helping some people.

Reilly Joret Author PhotoReilly Joret is a writer and mechanic. There isn’t as much overlap between those two fields as you’d think. He graduated from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. He currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. This is his first published short story.

 

 

 

 

Cover photo by ANDI WHISKEY on Unsplash

NORTHWEST STALKER by Jan Stinchcomb

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NORTHWEST STALKER
by Jan Stinchcomb

The truth is, she misses everything from those days, the skirts they wore and the bangs they had, side-swept, always on the verge of disappearing, like youth. Like life. It all slipped away, as her parents had warned her, even the people. Girlfriends you thought you’d have forever, poof, lost to marriage or motherhood or minds suddenly changed. They didn’t want to be girls anymore. They moved to other states. They changed their names and lost themselves.

Disappearance can happen so easily. It was her turn, that one summer, when she was still taking the bus home. She was walking to her apartment across a huge parking lot, nearly deserted in the afternoon heat. Done teaching for the day, in her business attire, carrying a briefcase. Good hair. Makeup starting to melt. As soon as he pulled up alongside her, she knew who he was and what he was doing. How could she miss him? His face was on flyers all over town, guest-starring on the local news. This time he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, trying to grow a beard. He had been to her apartment complex before; a woman’s screams sliced into her sleep one humid morning.

Hey, do you want a ride?

A ride? (But my apartment is right over there, she thought but did not say.)

Yeah. It’s hot, so I figured you might want a ride. (Perfect words, faulty tone. The lie crept out.)

This was her cue. She bent at the waist and leaned in to get a better look. The audition ended there, with her bowing before him, briefcase tapping against her knee, all her lines cut. He knew what she was doing, could already hear her calling the police, though she never actually did. He tore off so fast she couldn’t read the license plate.

Sometimes she thinks she should have gotten in the car. If she had sat right down in the mystery, she would have had her answer. The truth can be dangerous but she likes to brush up against it. What if she had chased after the speeding car until the sweat rolled off her? Or she could have ditched her briefcase, jumped on the roof, and held on for the ride of her life, surrendering her hair to the wind. Her favorite scene: throwing her head back and shouting Northwest Stalker!, just to see his face. To show the world she got one thing right.

Jan Stinchcomb author photoJan Stinchcomb is the author of The Kelping (Unnerving), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have recently appeared in Wigleaf, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in The Best Small Fictions 2018 and Best Microfiction 2020. She lives in Southern California with her family. Visit her at janstinchcomb.com or on Twitter @janstinchcomb.

 

 

Cover Photo by Brianna Santellan on Unsplash

TWO POEMS by Jaewon Chang

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TWO POEMS
by Jaewon Chang

Blindness

It began with a stove,
burnt mahogany dissipates in, wishing
the ember hinted the future: mother
running out of her favorite house,
home to the ancestors’ cedar trees. She had one last look
at her bedroom door, the one grandfather
painted pink, now dark red. I could only recall
the sound of its opening. I was raised
respecting scars that linger, knowing
they would not recover, the wail
of an old man coiling flames, the burning forests
sprouted in my eyes, planks of cedar etched
on my back. Every story
holds bliss, this story
was my mother alive. Every story
holds sadness, perhaps this story
was my grandfather’s. I was raised
knowing, able to see past my blank eyes.

◊

Pandesal

The charred grain edges, infused with
butter fillings, slices of white cheese

wedged in whole wheat, a hint of salt
sifting through openings, a treat Nanay

bought during my birthday. One piece
was considered a feast, enough

to satiate a mind. It was a hero, trailing
a path to provinces, as if arriving

at dark alleyways was happiness.
Nothing is perfect, Nanay says.

Contortions made the taste last long,
for years almost, as if it would erase

our memories of the burning cities.
The tongue would caress a portion,

like a mother covering the ears
of her child during gunshots. I wish

history was like a lily, without hesitation,
rising and floating away.

Jaewon Chang author photoJaewon Chang is a high school junior living in the Philippines. His works have been recognized by the Scholastics Art and Writing awards on a national level. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in District Lit, Austin International Poetry Festival Youth Anthology, National Poetry Writing Month Anthology (2020), Ilanot Review, Passengers Journal, and elsewhere. During his free time, Jaewon enjoys traveling the city on foot.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Kei Scampa from Pexels

SPECIFIC AIR by Rebecca Titus

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Rural neighborhood at sunset with grey tornado on horizon

SPECIFIC AIR
by Rebecca Titus

It is midnight in early March and I am on the phone, pacing the wood floors of my sweet, single-story house on the east side. Since moving in four months ago, I’ve come to love everything about this place, from the nesting red-tailed hawks in the front yard to the train tracks in the back. It’s a weirdly balmy night in Nashville and I’m talking to my musician-projectionist friend back in Virginia, comparing my mother’s old gardens to coral reefs. Before it sold, my friend saw that house for herself: the superabundant lightning bugs, the blooms on the trumpet vine, the fractal canopy suspended above the creek. She gets what I mean about the flowers. I jot down some notes, hang up, and go fill a water glass. I catch a flash of white light through the slats of my blinds and step on the back deck.

Oh hey, lightning.

Minutes later, in bed, I receive a never-before-seen mass text: Imminent Extreme Alert: TORNADO WARNING in this area until 1AM. Seek shelter immediately.

Housemate’s in Bali and parents are asleep and I’m too new in town to have a go-to, deep-help person yet, so I turn into my own go-to, deep-help person. I grab my backpack, my grandmother’s opal ring, and the key to the cellar. This house has one of those outdoor access, cement-stair basements, so I need to go outside to get inside. The siren sounds just like the movies. Trees lash the air behind me as I pull the doorknob tight with one hand and turn the key with the other. It gives and I burst into the basement, rushing over to grab a thick white comforter off my painting chair. Within seconds, the power cuts off and the room goes black.

Okay, okay, okay, I hear myself saying. There is unusual pressure in my ears. I want to watch from the doorway, but I don’t know if it’s safe. From the landing at the bottom of the stairs, I look up into the dark, churning sky. This is not a normal storm. The lights of downtown Nashville, which are usually visible beyond the skeletal winter trees, have completely vanished. Clouds flash the color of split pea soup. Bursts of blue-white light explode somewhere off to the right. I can’t see the hail but now I can hear it. The siren revs up again and I exhale, stretching a single-syllable curse into an entire emphatic sentence.

I slam the door and retreat into the basement. Time to decide which corner is most likely to keep me alive—definitely the creepy interior closet with the breaker box and the hot water heater. I use the faint light of my phone to navigate across the room, knocking into a couple boxes on the way.

Okay, okay. I feel dread pooling my stomach, tension in my lower back. I hear the familiar sound of an approaching train, but I know that this time it is not a train. I wrap myself in the blanket, squeeze into the narrow closet, and pull the door closed. Okay.

◊

The dreams started in my early twenties. It was usually the same clipped scene: me, standing outside, watching gunmetal-green clouds whirl above a forest. Half the time, I had my camera and took pictures of the funnel cloud as it dropped down, expanded, and started to advance.

For the most part, these were not violent nightmares of being crushed or flung into the air—I was just mesmerized and filled with terror. The dreams placed me in a moment of chilling recognition. Whenever I dreamed of a dark funnel cloud moving on the horizon, I saw the shape of absolute danger. The word impending comes to mind.

But what is it, actually, other than a symbol of doom? A tornado is a wild-card weather event, a ferociously spinning vortex of air brought to earth for a short time under exceptional circumstances. When a severe thunderstorm exhibits dangerous rotation in its mesocyclone, tornado formation is possible. But the factors that compel a particular supercell to level up its violence remain a mystery, as only a fraction of such storms actually produce tornados. It’s not yet possible for us to anticipate when or where a twister will touch down, if at all. In the dreams, and growing up back East, I always wanted to keep an eye on the storm.

◊

If you look closely, nature makes for pretty watchable TV. On any given day at my parents’ old house, you might witness the second a hawk snags a starling off right the lawn. More likely, you’d see a groundhog sprint for the shed, an aggressive spat between blue jays, or a towering cloud formation straight out of a dream—but anything was possible. That’s the feeling: endless potential. You could never get to the bottom of it.

My parents raised me and my brothers to take an attentive, reverent approach toward the world: to keep our eyes peeled for oddities and unexpected blips of beauty. We were taught that your day can be massively improved by a brush with the other-than-human world—elements, animals, plants, all of it. Beyond seizing these opportunities, we were encouraged to acknowledge and appreciate them.

Growing up, that meant that we stopped what we were doing to look at an enormous black snake wrapped around the back tire of my mother’s truck. It meant that my brothers and I built bonfires out of cherry tree trimmings and ice caves out of blizzard snow. It meant that I got a full report from one of them after he witnessed a lethal duel between a toad and a praying mantis, and that my mom and I got to brag about the curious fawn that approached us in the car.

All this to say: I grew up with the understanding that human beings are embedded in a field of interdependent relationships. Sunlight, ivy, owl, oak—I wouldn’t be me without them.

◊

Sometime after 1:00 a.m., when the tornado sirens stop, I leave the basement closet to check the sky again. It doesn’t look tranquil, but the freaky, dire feeling in the air is gone. Firetruck and police sirens start up, blaring louder and louder until there are blue lights flashing all over the trees. Nope, I think, exhausted. Too much. I go back inside the house, peek through the blinds to make sure my car isn’t crushed under a pine tree, and fall into bed. No dreams.

In the morning, I wake up to a bunch of texts from friends all over the place. Hey girl are you okay after last night? Call me when you’re up. Just checking in. We are safe. Damage to the property. Did you see?? It’s pretty bad. People died. Love you.

I issue a stream of responses and return a missed call from my brother, who studies, reveres, and tracks bad weather in a way that would make our farming ancestors proud.

“Did you get in the basement and everything?” he asks.

“Dude, I had to. It did not feel like a regular tornado warning. When the lightning lit up the clouds, they were completely green. Never seen that in my life.”

“You did the right thing,” he says, his voice knowing and grave. “You’ve got to respect nature.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking out the window at a line of cars being turned away from my block. The power pylon just down the street is now lying across the road, blocking traffic. “You really do.”

◊

Ten minutes away, my parents’ place has power, so I drive over with an overnight bag. In the kitchen, my dad pulls up the Weather Channel’s map of the tornado path. He points to my house in relation to the green line and I gasp so theatrically you’d think I was joking.

“No way. Dad. It was right there. It was right there.”

“Yeah, it was,” he says. “A couple hundred yards, maybe. Your mom’s gonna lose it. But think about it: as scary as it is, knowing how close it came—how much more terrifying would it have been during the daytime? When you could see it?”

I think of my dreams, get a chill.

Turns out, when I could no longer find the lights of downtown Nashville anywhere on the horizon, it was because the twister was on the ground, heading east, blocking my view of the city. At the time, I thought I was looking into the dark, but I was actually looking at the tornado.

◊

I try to spin the endless potential of nature as a good thing, but I’ll admit that its capacity for surprise is unnerving. At any given time, the outdoor environment you find yourself in may rapidly change. It can put you in a situation that didn’t exist ten minutes ago. Action may be required. Sometimes you’ve got to get involved.

My parents never said this out loud, but they modeled it all the time: my mom once rushed into the backyard to thwart a hawk’s raiding of a rabbit nest; my dad once had to catch a lawn-wandering, dinosaurian snapping turtle in a trash can. So it’s little surprise that when my brother and I encountered a dead white goose on the grass as little kids, we named him Gander and buried the body at the edge of the stream. We were known to scoop tadpoles off the pool cover in the spring, to check the filter for trapped frogs in the summer.

It’s not like doing this kind of shit makes you a saint or something. It’s just common courtesy. If we want to watch geese fly in a V-formation overhead and hear frogs in the summer darkness, we ought to show them some respect. To do what we can when we’re called to.

◊

On Wednesday morning, I get a text from my friend that got hit hard: Let’s document with art. Whenever there is daylight come. There are side streets.

My walk through Five Points is punctuated by a series of stomach drops. The tea and candle store, the art supply shop, the spot where I just saw M sing. The nail salon and CBD store no longer have walls to speak of, and the back of the brewery is missing, along with most of its mural. Next to a stretch of exposed drywall, half of a large, green, cone-shaped hop flower remains.

When I get there, my friend’s house is swarming with people hauling tree limbs and debris into trucks. Her trailer and outdoor tub are lying in a pile of disturbed earth behind the house. Her entire fence is leveled, save for a single painted slat of wood. Three birds and a squirrel lie still in a small patch of the garden. I find my friend and hug her. I take photos and move around.

I find a blue flowerpot in a deep hole under an uprooted tree. I spot two planks of stripped wood stuck straight through a door-sized pane of intact glass. I see buffet tables piled high with free barbeque. I see a woman with a crushed look on her face standing beside a roofless music venue. I see feather tufts in a small circle on the ground.

◊

Later, I try to get back to my house through the park, but it’s still taped off. I leave my car near the entrance, adjust my settings, and set off to see the downed trees.

I come across one pileated red-headed woodpecker, a couple of squirrels, and a single cyclist, but otherwise, the park is still. I feel physically activated and full of uneasy jitters. Full-sized trees are lying on the ground, limbs all over the place. Oak, pine, sycamore, hackberry, hickory, walnut—massive, gorgeous, ripped out by the roots like so many dandelions, strewn across the golf course, piled in crisscrossing heaps.

I swing my camera around and climb up on one huge, horizontal trunk, hopping across to another, shooting the landscape, checking leafy branches for birds’ nests. At the top of the hill, near my house, I see a ragged gap where the tornado crossed the train tracks. Looking down at the sloping hills of the park, I try to visualize an honest-to-god vortex thrashing its way through this quiet, green place. My imagination fails. I still can’t quite grasp it, even as my hand is sticky with sap from a felled forty-foot pine.

Thank you for the oxygen, I murmur again and again, passing from one to another. You were a great tree, tree.

◊

My recurring dreams were visceral and hard to forget. I talked about them, wrote about them, and read about them. All the dream resources advocated for keeping a morning record, so I got in the habit of writing down the scraps.

In this one dream, my mom and I are standing in a crowd on a shoreline, facing the water. There are a dozen white horses in the surf and six or seven waterspouts in the distance. Everyone is watching but no one is afraid. Taking photos, I turn to my mom and say, Can you believe this is real life? It’s just like my dreams! To which she shakes her head, astonished. At that moment, I’m really glad to have both a camera and a witness.

Why is it that most dreams swiftly dissolve in the daylight while others intrude on waking life, commanding our attention? Why does one supercell scare the dog and drench the city while another spawns ten tornados across middle Tennessee? Such uncountable, unknowable variables, these are. The human brain, the mesocyclone. We are subject to them both.

◊

Clearing debris on the north side of town the next day, I come across a small, unharmed tree that looks like it had been dressed with pale pink party streamers or cotton candy. Shreds of insulation hang from each of its thin branches, glinting in the sun like millennial tinsel. From a distance, it could be a cherry blossom or a dogwood. When I try to pick it off with my gloves, the insulation resists, coming apart in grainy tufts. The fine, pink fuzz clings to the bark like stubborn lint. I ache for a hand-held vacuum.

All around me, volunteers in boots and work gloves assemble in droves, hauling wheelbarrows and chainsaws. In the alleys, between towering piles of branches and roof siding, smiling people push carts full of water bottles and snacks. Inside the damaged middle school, folks are boxing up school supplies before the building is taken down. The day is charged with a palpable sense of purpose. The sun is high and bright. I’ve never seen such openness on the faces of strangers.

Checking my phone, I see my friend back on the east side is making plans to host a community drum circle. Local businesses that suffered damage give updates on their status; others that were spared raise money to support them. People share stories, solidarity, and links to donation drives. Music City knows.

I am trying to apply what my parents taught me—to respect the tornado’s right to exist while grappling with the tragic consequences of its power. To be aware, to be grateful. To hold the wreckage and the gathering.

A formidable force of nature tore its way through this vibrant city in the dark of night and the very next day, our interconnectedness suddenly appeared obvious. As if an ancient, secret lamp were turned on, revealing the fragile, knotted web that has always held this thing together.

We look good in this light. We should keep it on.

Rebecca Titus is a writer and visual artist whose work can be found in Mount Hope, After the Pause, Foundry, Susquehanna Review, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Hollins University, reads poetry for Flock literary journal, and draws live music in Nashville.

 

Cover photo by NOAA on Unsplash

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD by Melissa Brooks

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
by Melissa Brooks

The world was fuzzy. Victoria blinked. She blinked again and again until the room came into focus. A pixelated ceiling. A window opening to blackness. An unkempt man slouched in a chair, fist propping up a mess of greasy dark hair. He had sallow skin, dark bags beneath bloodshot eyes. Familiar eyes. Barry’s eyes? Benny? Billy? Billy.

“Billy?” she rasped.

He sat up straight, suddenly alert. He flew toward her, swooping down and kissing her before she could stop him. His breath smelled like something rotten—a forgotten peach, curdled milk. His lips smashed into hers, pressing her hard into the pillow. Every time she thought it would end, it somehow kept going. “I can’t breathe,” she managed to mumble beneath the weight of his lips.

He released her. He dragged a chair next to her hospital bed. “Do you remember the accident?”

Victoria had a vague memory of leaving work. Nodding to the resident peddler on the corner. Fishing a bruised banana from her purse for him. Staring at the steady stream of hypnotic white lines, the empty pavement stretching to infinity.

“You smashed into a tree,” Billy said. “You must have fallen asleep. The doctor said you have a pretty serious concussion.” He was grimacing.

“Why are you making that face?”

“It’s the baby,” Billy said. “They couldn’t save it. I’m so sorry.” He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, exposing a ripe armpit.

Victoria wrinkled her nose.

He grabbed her hand, but she could barely feel his touch. “It’s not your fault.”

She leaned back against the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m so hungry.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go find the doctor and hunt down some food.”

After Billy left, she examined her body. The left side looked all banged up—leg in a brace, arm in a sling—but she felt perfectly symmetrical. She felt a large bump on her forehead, but it didn’t even hurt, like it wasn’t even real. She moved her hands to her stomach. She hadn’t even been showing, and yet, she felt lighter.

It was nearing ten p.m. The hospital was strangely quiet. Victoria got out of bed. The thin hospital gown hung from her body like a bag.

Outside, leaves rustled in the trees. The breeze drifted in through the open window, grazing Victoria’s exposed back. She nearly fell over. She walked to the hallway on unsteady feet, wispy legs. The gown fluttered behind her. She could barely feel the ground beneath her feet, like she was floating.

She floated out of the room, down the hospital’s corridors, all the way outside. The street lamps lit up a mosaic of reds and yellows blazing in the trees, openly signaling their imminent decay. The breeze rustled her hair, blowing behind her, going through her, carrying her faster, farther.

She remembered the great big oak rushing toward her. The flash of bark. The exhilaration she felt when she thought it was all over.

◊

“Look what came!” Billy said, appearing in the kitchen. Victoria sat at the island counter, eating chocolate chips straight from the bag.

Billy set down a bouquet of pineapples, strawberries, chocolate-covered bananas blooming from a pot wrapped in crinkled red paper. “Get better soon!” the card demanded. “We’re lost without you.” It was from her coworkers at the marketing firm. Instead of feeling guilty, Victoria felt relieved not to be there, contorted in her desk chair so long her knees went stiff, her feet numb, tingling pinpricks climbing her shin until her entire leg fell asleep and she had to punch it back to life.

Billy wrapped his arms around her waist. He massaged her belly, slid a hand up her shirt. His fingers felt like clammy little tendrils. She slid off her stool and moved to the other side of the counter.

Billy sighed. “I know it must be hard.”

“What?”

He gave her a pitying look. “You know.” He placed a hand back on her stomach.

“Don’t you have tires to rotate? Oil to change?” she said.

“You have to talk about your feelings, Vicky.”

“What feelings?”

“I’m just trying to help you. You could meet me halfway here.” His irritation was palpable. A hot white light radiated from his body, but it was hard for her to care. She plucked a strawberry from a plastic stem. It tasted like ashes. She spit it out, covering her hand in a stringy mess of red entrails.

“Jesus, what’d you do that for?” Billy said.

She held out her hand. “Taste this, will you?”

“That’s got to be the grossest thing you’ve ever done.” He forced a smile to show he was only joking. He wiped her hand clean with a paper towel.

He took a fresh strawberry from the bouquet, sniffed it. Poked it with his tongue. Nibbled off the end. His expression lightened. He popped the rest in his mouth. “It’s good,” he said with his mouth full, garbling his words.

Victoria braved the chocolate-covered banana. The banana tasted just as ashy as the strawberry, but the chocolate casing was smooth and velvety. She wondered if maybe it wasn’t the fruit. If it was her. This strange, new body.

◊

Everything the living would consider healthy—the kale spinach smoothies she used to blend every morning, the medley of squash, carrots, and onions she’d roast for dinner—tasted repugnant to her now. The only things Victoria could stomach were peanut butter cookies, potato chips and onion dip, popcorn doused in a stick of butter—things she’d long avoided.

No matter what she ate, she didn’t gain weight. She remained light and buoyant. She didn’t even need to exercise anymore. She could spend the whole day curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, reading the books lining her walls that she’d been meaning to get to since college: The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights. She’d sit for hours, getting lost in worlds of heightened emotion that seemed so much more meaningful than hers ever did, oblivious to Billy puttering around the apartment, the neighbor kids squealing outside as they chased their barking dog, the phone ringing and ringing and ringing (“Don’t you hear that? The accident didn’t damage your ears, did it?”). When Billy asked Victoria if she was up for a game night with their friends, she didn’t even glance up from her book. “I’m reading.”

“I don’t mean now, I mean in a little bit.”

“I’ll be reading then too.”

“Don’t you want to see our friends?”

“I just want to finish this chapter.” She’d played Apples to Apples a million times. She’d never read Moby Dick.

She used to read all the time as a kid—The Boxcar Children, Goosebumps, The Magic Treehouse, transposing words into vibrant movies in her head while her classmates turned every boring facet of their lives into a game: pretend grocery store, pretend doctor, pretend dinner. But after college, marriage, the marketing firm, she never could seem to find the time or the energy to read as much as she wanted. It often made her angry, losing so much time to things that seemed so pointless—watching Billy’s intramural soccer games, reviewing ad copy for products no one needed. “You’re being ridiculous,” she used to tell herself. “You have to live in the world.” Still, the thought nagged at her, burrowing deeper and deeper, its roots taking hold and spreading as far as they could go.

It was the reason she finally acquiesced to Billy’s guilt trips about having a kid. Her boss wouldn’t make her come in for six a.m. website launches, stay until nine p.m. for client feedback, attend product launch parties over the weekend. She only realized what she was doing when it was too late. She couldn’t bring a kid into the world for a terrible reason like that. How selfish that would be. How cruel.

◊

Victoria walked straight at the bedroom wall. The limitations of the physical world she’d grown so used to for twenty-seven years overpowered her, so that instead of going through the wall, she collided with it. Her supposedly injured arm, locked in its sling, was the first point of contact. Her arms were turning into a mosaic of purple and blue splashes.

Billy called from the hallway. “I’m picking up tacos for lunch. You want fish?”

“Chorizo,” she called out. “Make it a chimichanga.”

She charged ahead again, faster this time, full of purpose. She willed herself to keep her good arm down by her side. To forget her old body. Still, she collided with the wall. She bounced back like a spring and fell to the floor.

“What the hell, Vicky?” Billy said, appearing at the doorway.

“I thought it might be one of the perks,” she said. He helped her up, inadvertently smashing an ice pack against her shoulder.

“You need to rest. You need to get better so you can go back to work.” He tucked her into bed and pressed the ice pack to her head, securing it with a long pink ribbon.

She loosened the ribbon under her chin. “Why would I go back to work?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Dead people don’t go to work.”

“Is this a bit?”

“I’m hollow inside, Billy. I float.”

He crossed his arms. He opened his mouth like he was about to say something, his chest filling with air, but then he released it in one big whoosh.

“You’re lying in bed, Vicky. You just walked into a wall.”

“That’s just an illusion.”

“So what then? Is your spirit really in the bathroom?”

She sighed. “I’m still trying to figure this body out. I realize I’m not a ghost, but I’m some sort of in between. Maybe a ghost with a human costume.”

“If you’re dead, why do you need to sleep? Why do you need to eat? Tell me that.”

“That’s the nice thing about being dead. You don’t have to do anything. You can do whatever you want whenever you want as often as you want. There’s nothing inside of me. No organs. Nothing to sustain.”

Billy put a hand to her breast. “I can feel your heart beat.”

“That’s just part of the costume.”

Billy shook his head, incredulous. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Vicky.”

“Don’t do anything. I don’t need you.”

“You don’t need me.” His voice sounded so cold, edging on anger. That’s when it hit her—there was no way he could possibly understand what was happening to her. She should’ve known, but her new head made everyone else so cloudy, so that she’d been doing and saying whatever she wanted without considering how it might be received, which was nice for a change, but it also meant she’d have to contend with consequences she used to be able to sidestep. Had she realized this before, she wouldn’t have said anything. “I’m sorry, Billy,” she said now. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m really tired, that’s all. I should rest, like you said.” She curled up on her side. The ice pack slid down her forehead, covering her eyes.

He sat there for a while, staring at her. She could practically see his body through the back of her head, the way it pulsed and blazed.

Finally, he left the bedroom, yanking the door shut behind him so it slammed. She squeezed her eyes tight, pulled the blanket over her head.

◊

Victoria perched on the edge of the exam table, her jeans crinkling the paper lining.

Billy sat in a nearby chair while the doctor checked her blood pressure, heart rate, the dilation of her eyes.

“Your husband tells me you think you died in the accident.”

Victoria sighed. She rubbed her face with her hands. “Would you believe me if I said I was kidding?”

“Were you?”

She stared blankly past the doctor at the wall. An anatomical chart of the human body hung there, illustrating stringy muscles she was glad she no longer had to worry about. “It doesn’t really matter what I say, does it? You’ve already decided.”

“She’s never this brazen,” Billy said.

“A miscarriage can be very traumatic,” the doctor said. “We might come up with all kinds of ways to cope.”

“It was the size of a centipede. People squash centipedes all the time,” Victoria said.

The doctor placed a little blue pill in the palm of her hand. “I want you to try this.”

“Why?”

“It’ll help you feel more like yourself.” He handed her a cup of water.

“But I feel better than ever.”

“Please, Vicky?” Billy pleaded. They both stared at her, a manic orange pulse radiating from their bodies, consuming the entire room until it engulfed her too. They weren’t going to let her leave until she took it.

She swallowed the pill, trying to assure herself that it couldn’t affect her anyway.

They both relaxed, and the orange receded back into their bodies.

“Wonderful,” the doctor said. “I’m going to have a word with your husband.” He and Billy stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind them so she couldn’t hear. Like she was a child, she thought. Maybe this was how the dead were treated. Patronized.

◊

At first, she didn’t feel anything. But after a while, she felt weighed down. The left side of Victoria’s body, the side that had been most banged up in the accident, now felt heavier than the right. She hobbled lopsided around the living room, her swollen leg crashing into the floor with each step. She walked too quickly and fell over, her bad arm breaking her fall. She rolled over on her back and rubbed her tingling arm. Shapes began to form on the stucco ceiling—Billy, her friends, her clients and coworkers and boss. She needed to go back to work. She needed to exercise. She grabbed her belly and felt soft flesh—too much flesh.

She remembered with painful clarity the tree speeding toward her, the flash of bark, the rush of anxiety, and it hurt suddenly, even though it was weeks ago, it hurt. She felt the tree bearing down on her, crushing her, crushing the baby. She squeezed her belly, empty now. It was her fault. She was careless. She was reckless. She was selfish.

◊

When she woke the next morning, before she even opened her eyes, she felt her body levitating above the mattress. All the worry was gone. She remembered that none of those things mattered. Why couldn’t she see it before?

You could work somewhere else, Billy used to say. Write for a nonprofit that helps the homeless.

And make my entire purpose and livelihood dependent upon their misery?

I’m just saying if you’re not happy, do something, don’t just bitch about it.

Well she’d gone and done something about it alright. She felt so lucky not to have commitments anymore. She refused to let Billy manipulate her back into her old ways, the ways of the living.

When she went to the bathroom, she flushed that day’s pill.

Later, when Billy said he needed to take her to a therapist, she smiled sweetly and climbed willingly into the car.

She tried running out the clock by reading The Grapes of Wrath in the drab pink waiting room, but people kept asking if she had an appointment. So she hid in the bathroom. She locked herself in a stall with her book for the rest of the hour, not even minding the open toilet seat crawling with bacteria, the smells wafting beneath the short, thin walls.

When exactly one hour had passed, she went outside to wait for Billy.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Fantastic,” she said, smiling extra wide for good measure.

◊

Billy walked in circles around the living room, straightening books, folding throw blankets, fluffing pillows—something she’d never seen him do before.

“You can go back to work you know,” she said, looking up from Anna Karenina. “Clearly you’re bored. I’ll be fine.”

He put on a record. The Temptations’ Greatest Hits.

He shimmied over to Victoria. “Hey, let’s dance,” he said.

“I thought I was injured.”

“Think of it as physical therapy.” He took her hand and pulled her up from the leather armchair.

They swayed in the small space between the coffee table and TV, her feet hovering above the ground. She could feel the music pulsing through her costume. Was it fun? Maybe. When she was alive, she used to enjoy dancing with Billy. Was even the one who’d put on records and rub up against him to make him laugh.

He pulled her closer, smashing her arm in the sling between their stomachs. He rested his head against hers, breathed her scent in deeply. “Remember when I used to sing to your belly?” He kissed her neck, then moved his mouth to hers. He ran his hand down her side, across her hip, between her legs. She didn’t push him, but she pulled back so his hand got stuck in the waistband of her underwear.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you. This body is all show.”

“You still think you’re dead?”

She sighed. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I need you to accept it.”

He grabbed her shoulders. “What’s the matter with you? I’m your husband.” He started to shake her. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Don’t you care?”

“Billy, you’re hurting me!”

“Now you can feel pain?”

Then suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, his anger turned to fear, to guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” To her relief, he rushed out of the room.

◊

The windows had frosted over, sealing them in a hazy bubble.

Victoria curled up on the couch beneath a throw blanket, reading The Stranger.

The phone rang but she ignored it. Billy picked it up without looking at her. He’d been avoiding her the last couple days, but she preferred it that way.

“Andy, buddy! No, I don’t think I can make it to soccer. I need to stay with Vicky a while.”

“You should go,” she chirped.

He moved to the kitchen, where she could still hear him mumbling earnestly.

She felt herself floating above the couch, her body filling with helium. She could float all the way up to the ceiling if she wanted to. She could float away. While Billy was preoccupied, she went to the sliding glass door.

Winter had arrived early, burying everything in snow, sealing streets and sidewalks beneath slick sheets of ice.

She glided out onto the porch without a jacket or shoes, but it didn’t matter because her socks hovered above the snow. She floated to the top of the railing. She wanted to float all the way up to the sky, but she felt invisible tethers tying her to the earth. She lifted her arms and closed her eyes, the helium tugging her up, up, up. Soon, the tethers snapped. They flapped loosely around her ankles as she rose above the house, the electrical wires, the tops of the bare trees. She knew she’d plunged into a cloud when the light filtering through her eyelids darkened and a soft, pillowy substance kissed her skin. When she was high enough, she stretched her arms out in front of her and flipped sideways, the better to soar across the great expanse of sky.

“Vicky, what are you doing!” Billy’s voice called from far below.

She would’ve ignored him, would’ve kept soaring until she could no longer hear him, but she felt herself being tugged back down, reeled back in like a kite. She floated down to the earth, landing softly in the snow.

When she opened her eyes, she was laying supine on the snowy lawn in front of the porch. She stared up at the sky. No clouds obstructed the sun, yet there was a dullness to it, as though it had spun farther away in space.

Billy towered over her. He must have yanked the tethers, pulling her back down. He picked her up and carried her like a baby up the porch steps.

“Put me down,” she said, but he didn’t listen.

He carried her inside and set her on the living room rug. He began peeling off her wet clothes. “Do you think you broke anything? How’s your arm? Christ, you’re soaked. You could have hypothermia. I better take you to the doctor.”

“I can’t get hurt, Billy. I told you.”

“You’re bleeding!”

She touched her head. Her fingers came back wet with red. She licked one. It tasted sweet, like corn syrup. “It’s not real blood.”

He stared at her, mouth agape. “For Christ’s sake, Vicky, we can’t go on like this!”

She looked at him thoughtfully, relieved that he finally acknowledged it. “You’re right. We can’t.”

◊

Victoria packed a bag. There were no clothes in it, only snacks and books, as many as she could fit. Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, As I Lay Dying. The bag didn’t feel heavy at all.

Billy had finally returned to work the day before, maxed out on vacation days. She only had an hour before he returned. She left a note so he wouldn’t go looking for her. It wasn’t right for the living and the dead to be together, she wrote. He needed so much, and she needed so little. She hoped he found someone who could give him the things he needed.

Victoria didn’t mind being in limbo, but she never expected limbo would reside on Earth. Maybe it was the ones who loved you in life that kept you in limbo after death, she thought, with their insistence that they owned you, that you belonged to them, belonged to anyone at all beside yourself. Without Billy’s demands weighing her down, maybe she would’ve already floated up into space. She needed to find others like her, others who needed nothing.

Despite the snow, she didn’t put on a jacket. She didn’t put on mittens or a hat. She did put on boots, but only because it would be easier to traverse the ice if levitation failed her. She walked out into the cold. Of course, it didn’t feel cold to her. It felt invigorating.

Melissa Brooks author photoMelissa Brooks is a Chicago-based writer with an MFA in Fiction from the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in The Matador Review, Arcturus, Gravel, and elsewhere. Her short story “Closed Casket Calling Hours” was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She currently works in marketing at the University of Chicago.

 

 

 

 

Cover Photo by amy chung from Pexels

DON’T WORRY by Charles Holdefer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

DON’T WORRY
by Charles Holdefer

Squinting against whiteness the child left her mother beside the woodpile. With the sudden drop in temperature an icy crust had formed on last night’s new snow. “We’ll find it!” her mother called, watching the child walk on the surface while she stood shin-deep, clutching her stump to her breast. It was tightly wrapped in rags. Bleeding was stanched. The throbbing had slowed, perhaps due to the cold. But she was burning up, dizzy.

For a moment her mind took flight and she observed the two of them from above. Her daughter moved away, shrinking to a dot.

“It all looks the same!” the child cried. “I don’t see anything.”
.
The voice brought her back.

“Everything will be all right. We’ll find it. I promise.”

Charles Holdefer author photoCharles Holdefer is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His work has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. His recent books include Magic Even You Can Do (hybrid) and the forthcoming Agitprop for Bedtime (microfiction). Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Spencer Selover from Pexels

MATRYOSHKA by Marion Peters Denard

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MATRYOSHKA
by Marion Peters Denard

When Mom died Rachel started asking questions. What did Mom make for Christmas morning? Egg casserole. When did Mom go back to school? I was fourteen, you were eleven. The questions got smaller and bigger, as though by their specificity they were magnified. What did she smell like? She wore Chanel No. 5. I know that, Tabbie. But what did she smell like? She smelled like orange honey and coral lipstick and bright green breath mints. What did her hugs feel like? They were nice. Tabbie. Like she was bringing you in and keeping you out at the same time.

You see, I remember everything. Rachel says I’m the only person who truly loves her because I know everything she ever did. She is my sister, my friend, and still—I lied to her.

Mom had a set of matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, that she kept lined up on her bookshelf. I can see inside people like the inside of those dolls, each self tucked inside the others. Much like a mother sees all the ages her child ever was: the baby in the toddler, the toddler in the teenager, the teenager in the thirty-year-old. Mom told me once that when I stood in the sunlight she could squint and see twelve-year-old Tab, five-year-old Tabbie, and Baby Tabitha deep inside. Matryoshka means “mother” in Russian. Maybe that’s why.

I realized I was different on Thursday, January 9, 1992. I was thirteen. I was riding the bus home from school, staring out the rainy window. Greg Saunders was sitting nearby and I was thinking about how he pushed me at recess back in sixth grade. It was March 7, a Wednesday. I’d had cottage cheese in my lunch and Sarah T. said that was weird. I told her she was weird. Then Stephanie started talking about her slumber party and we both shut up because we wanted to go. I remembered Stephanie’s slumber party. We watched The NeverEnding Story. I wore my pajamas with the dancing toothbrushes and my dad was twenty minutes early picking me up. I rushed to get my sleeping bag and I forgot one of my socks. It was Saturday, March 10, 1991.

This is weird, I thought. Does everyone remember like this? I started asking.

I’m fascinated by other people’s memories: What do they keep? What do they forget? How are those decisions made? My husband, Danny, tells me people don’t make decisions about what to remember. Just like I don’t choose to remember every detail, he doesn’t choose to remember only certain events.

But Danny is a person who forgets. After we’d been dating six months, I asked him what he thought after we had sex the first time. He stammered, searching. I could picture little men walking up and down his brain, looking for a file that had been misplaced, mislabeled, or recycled. They muttered to themselves: sex with Tabitha, first sex with Tabitha.

He said, “Oh, it was nice.”

He didn’t remember.

It makes me feel small, to remember these forgotten things. That’s why I lied. These memories are suffocating. They pile up on me and I cannot breathe.

The day Mom left us was a Tuesday. December 6, 1990. I was twelve and Rachel was nine. It was a school day, but a heavy snow came through in the night. Mom paced the kitchen listening to the DJ read the list of school closures. “Closing school?” she said. “Ridiculous—it’ll be melted by noon.”

She was showered and dressed when we came downstairs for breakfast. Most days she was still in her bathrobe, packing our lunches. Mom had a part-time job at a dentist’s office, doing the books. But she was home when we left and home again when we got off the bus in the afternoon so what she did during the day was invisible. She wore a cream turtleneck sweater, dangly gold earrings, and her camel church slacks. Her blonde hair was swept up in a twist. Dad had already left for work, leaving early to shovel out the car, and make his way through the snow to the office. She made pancakes, a rarity. She made too many at once and they sat in a cold pile on a plate by the sink.

“Eat up, girls. Then go play. We’ll go out in a little while, when they get the roads cleared.”

“No school!” We shouted, “Snow day, snow day!” We jumped up and down and held onto each other’s hands. At this age I was as likely to trip Rachel as I was to paint her nails. We were tight in the love-hate hug of sisterhood.

We went outside to play, but after a few snowballs the novelty wore off and the cold set in through my wet mittens. Rachel wanted to build a snow fort. I tried to tell her it was impossible, that the snow didn’t make ice blocks like it did in the cartoons.

“Fine, Tabbie,” she said. “Don’t help. I can do it.” She took a handful of snow, which crumbled in her hands. She shook the frozen clumps of snow from her mittens and set about pushing the snow into a mound. She’d find a way, maybe, but I was going inside.

The house was dark after the sunshine on the snow and quiet, like no one was home. I walked into the living room, my snow pants heavy and wet around my ankles. I stood at the bookshelf and looked at Mom’s matryoshka dolls. The biggest doll had a red coat with small blue flowers and pink painted cheeks and a mouth painted in a small red bow. Her black hair peeked out from her red kerchief. Her blue eyes glinted with a dot of white at the pupil. I pulled apart the belly with a satisfying pop. Inside, I found the next doll with a green coat and the same blue eyes, the same black hair, the same bow mouth. Underneath her, a doll with a dark blue coat, and then the orange coat, and then the light green coat, then the light blue coat, and, finally, a baby, wrapped in a painted pink blanket. Her eyes were closed, little painted half-moon lids, always asleep.

I heard my mother call. It was almost time to go. I put the baby in my pocket and went to change. I left the dolls open and scattered along the bookshelf like a series of unanswered questions.

Once in the car, I asked, “Where are we going?”

“The mall,” Mom said.

But when we got close to the mall, we turned left into the parking lot for Garcia’s, the Mexican restaurant. Mom took us each by the hand, walking in the middle, linking us together. I kept one hand in my pocket, rolling the small, egg-shaped baby doll between my fingers and palm. The restaurant was almost empty.

“Girls, I want you to sit right here. I’m going to go over there, at that table by the window. I’m going to have lunch with a friend. I’ll be able to see you. It will be your very own special lunch date. Just you two.”

She smiled. Her coral lipstick shined against her white teeth. She bent down and kissed each of us, hard. She stood up and straightened her sweater, smoothed her hands over her camel slacks, rubbed her lips together to redistribute the lipstick. She walked to a table by the window and she sat down across from a man.

The man wore a dark suit. I saw him only in profile, but I was sure I didn’t know him. He was losing his sandy-colored hair, but it puffed above his ears hopefully. He wore glasses. I had never seen him before.

Rachel kicked her shoes on the legs of her chair. “What are we doing? Are we gonna eat?”

I kicked her shin under the table. “Shut up. Stop it with your feet, ok?”

I was trying to listen to my mother and the man in the dark suit. They were too far away; I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The waitress stopped at their table, glanced over her shoulder at us, then took out her pad and pen. She brought chips and salsa to our table without stopping. I kept looking over at Mom and the man.

“Tab, what are we doing? Who’s that guy?” Rachel asked.

“Shut up. I’m trying to hear them.” Mom was talking using her hands. The man looked serious. He kept nodding. He’d say something—break into Mom’s talking—and her hands would flurry to a stop. They would fall, like birds shot out of the sky, into her lap, limp and still.

The waitress brought us two Sprites. She told us our mom had ordered lunch for us and it would be here in a few minutes. There was a TV in the bar somewhere over my shoulder and Rachel kept looking past me and zoning out. I bobbed the straw in and out of my Sprite, watching the bubbles push it up to the top. The tiny little bubbles shot the straw up into the air when my finger released the pressure. Rachel’s eyes looked glassy; her mouth was partway open.

Lunch came. Mom had ordered us each two chicken tacos, with a side of rice and beans.

“Plates are hot, ok, kids?” The waitress told us. The plates were white ovals and the rice and beans were gooey, melted together with orange and white cheese. Rachel asked the waitress for another Sprite. Mine was only half-gone. Mom and the man weren’t eating, but they drank coffee.

Mom was crying now. She had a Kleenex out of her purse and was dabbing her eyes with it. Her nose was red. The man in the suit reached out and covered Mom’s hand with his. Mom slipped her hand out from under his to steady her coffee cup to her lips. She sipped, nodded, then put her hand back on the table like an invitation. His big hand covered hers again.

The waitress came and got our plates. Rachel was still watching TV with that stupid look on her face.

Mom and the man stood up. They hugged. She turned toward us and smiled. The smile faltered like it wasn’t sure it could balance on its own.

“Who was that, Mom?” Rachel asked.

“A friend,” she said. “Get your coats, ok?”

She took our hands again as we left the restaurant. She walked briskly across the parking lot toward the movie theatre.

“Let’s see a movie, what do you think? Huh, girls? There’s that new one out. Alone at Home or something? Want to see that?”

“Home Alone,” I said. “It’s called Home Alone.” And yes, I wanted to see it. Jenny had seen it last weekend and said it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen in her life, she laughed so hard she almost peed her pants. But I was vaguely angry. What were we doing? Why was she acting like this was normal?

Rachel jumped up and down, still holding on to Mom’s hand. “Yes! Yes! Please?”

Rachel didn’t understand you didn’t have to beg when something had already been offered.

It was cold and the guy at the ticket booth wore red earmuffs. “Two for Home Alone,” my mother said. “One for… Dances with Wolves.”

“That one started about ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said.

“You’re not coming with us?” I asked.

“I’ll just be next door. You two are getting so grown-up, my goodness, we can do things like this now.”

Rachel asked for popcorn and Mom nodded. Rachel squeezed my hand like she’d just gotten us something really good. What’s wrong with her, I thought. Why doesn’t Rachel see how weird this is?

We got our popcorn and Mom walked us to the door of our theater. “I’ll be right next door, ok? I’ll be here when you guys get out. I’ll be waiting right here.”

I remember everything about that movie: the bit parts, the jokes that didn’t quite work. I remember more than just his hands on his cheeks in that mock scream. I remember him being forgotten as his family rushed out the door. It didn’t seem funny at all, to be left at home by yourself. To be forgotten.

When the movie ended, I was sick to my stomach from the Sprite and the popcorn and the wondering. I rolled the baby matryoshka in my sweaty pocket. We walked out of the darkness of the theater into the lights of the lobby. Mom was standing right there, just where she said she would be. I could tell she’d been crying. The man in the suit was walking out the door.

What had they done?

Mom drove us home. Rachel bounded into the house in front of us.

“Who was that man, Mom?” I asked.

“I told you, Tab. A friend.”

“Does Dad know him?”

She turned her head so fast a piece of hair slipped from the pins and slapped her on the cheek. “No,” she said. “No, your father doesn’t know him.” She walked into the house and left me standing on the steps.

Later that afternoon, I stood at my bedroom window and watched Rachel make snow angels in the front yard. She stood on the bank of the driveway and fell back, a trust-fall to no one. She was chubby in her snow pants, awkward as she tried to get up without ruining her angel. She waved at me in the window, but I just crossed my arms.

Mom walked out to the driveway and pulled a blue suitcase from the trunk of the car. She carried it to one side with both hands and the weight of it bounced up and down on her thigh. Rachel paused and looked up at our mother, carrying the suitcase. Rachel must have seen her, but she didn’t speak. The late afternoon light was thin, the shadows dark and cold. Again, Rachel fell back into the white drift, so sure the soft snow would catch her.

I listened as the suitcase was hauled up the stairs and then dragged down the hallway carpet. It must have been heavy. I heard my mother close her bedroom door. I walked the short hallway to my parents’ room and knocked once. I opened the door before she could answer.

She stood over the bed pulling out her green sweater from the suitcase. She had changed out of her camel slacks, back into jeans and a sweatshirt. She held the sweater by the shoulders like she was trying to decide whether to try it on.

“Tabbie, you’re supposed to wait for come in.”

“I know.”

“Want to help me?”

She handed me sweaters and I put them back into her bureau. She didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. Maybe she thought I wasn’t old enough to understand or I was too young to remember. Maybe she was trying to show me that she had decided to stay. I helped her put away sweaters, jeans, her fancy black dress. She put her mother’s pearls back into her jewelry box.

When we were done, I walked downstairs to the abandoned matryoshka dolls. I took the baby from my pocket and carefully recreated the shells of the dolls that held her. When they were complete, I took the mother doll with the red coat and kissed her little bow mouth. I put her back, safely, at her place on the shelf.

Over pizza that night, Rachel told Dad about going to the movies. Dad asked Mom, “What did you see, honey?”

“Dances with Wolves. The one with the guy and the Indians.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “I wanted to see that.”

“Well, you should. You should go. I’m sorry—I just couldn’t do a kid movie today.”

“No biggie,” he smiled.

Years pass that way: being polite and passing the breadsticks. I read once that there are years that ask questions and years that answer. But some questions are never answered, and the years pass anyway.

◊

I never discussed that day with anyone. I grew up, left home, married Danny. Mom got sick, and sicker, and smaller, until she was so thin her passing was like fog burning off in the morning sun. Rachel grew up, too, in her way. I never outgrew being the big sister. She started asking her questions about Mom. I answered them, faithfully. Until I lied.

Rachel was over and Danny was making paella. It was a Friday night and we were already on our second bottle of wine. Rachel sat on the counter next to Danny as he chopped green beans. They were talking about Spain. Rachel told him about a little hotel in Ronda she visited in college that had a theater room that played old movies. She watched Casablanca there, her favorite.

Rachel turned to me. “What was Mom’s favorite movie, Tab?”

“Out of Africa.”

“No. No—it was that other one. Kevin Costner. The one where he’s out on the prairie and there’s that Indian woman. What’s it called?”

“Dances with Wolves.”

“Right. Dances with Wolves.”

“That wasn’t her favorite movie, Rach.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“She never even saw that movie.”

“What do you mean? Of course, she did. I remember her talking about it.”

“No. Dad loved that movie. That’s Dad’s favorite movie. He went to see it by himself. On Saturday, January 12, 1991.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Really. God, Rachel. You know I remember these things. Why would I be making this up? He went to go see it by himself after my basketball game. I scored eight points and Megan Parker twisted her ankle. And then Dad went to go see that stupid movie. By himself.”

My heart was racing. My cheeks were slapped red from the wine and I could hear my voice getting higher, like bubbles fighting their way to the top of a straw.

“Sorry. God, you’re touchy.”

“No. No, I’m really not, Rachel. It’s just you don’t remember these things and then you ask me and you expect me to remember everything but you don’t even believe me when I tell you. It’s annoying.”

“Sorry. I won’t ask you about anything. Ever.”

“Good. Because I could tell you things you couldn’t even believe.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You have no idea, do you?”

I told her how about the snow day and going to Garcia’s and the man in the suit and Mom in her camel slacks and her with her stupid mouth open watching TV. I told her about seeing Home Alone just the two of us.

Then I lied. I told her we came out of the theater and Mom wasn’t there. She wasn’t there waiting for us like she said she would be. We waited and waited and she never came back. I told her we finally walked through the snow-drifted parking lot and into the mall where we held hands and walked the long mall, looking into each of the stores hoping for a glimpse of her twisted blonde hair, her cream sweater, but nothing. We found nothing. She wasn’t there. As it was getting dark, we walked back to the movie theater and sat huddled together on the floor next to the popcorn machine. The teenage clerk asked us if everything was ok and when we said yes he shrugged and walked back to rip tickets. How Mom finally walked into the theater, her blonde hair now down around her shoulders and covered with a fine blanket of new white snow. How she took us by the hands and told us to never, never, never tell our father that she was gone all day while we wandered around the mall.

I lied so she would know the truth.

I told her everything that mattered. I told her about the blue suitcase thumping up the stairs. I told her how I helped Mom unpack and put away Grandma’s pearls.

“Where did she go?” Rachel asked.

“She was gone, Rach. She was gone with him. And I would see him, all the time, growing up. He would come to my basketball games and wave to Mom. God, we had him and his wife over for dinner.” I heard my voice climbing higher.

“Who?”

“Dr. Tillman, her boss.”

“Tabbie,” Danny said, looking at Rachel who had started to cry.

“She has to grow up—she has to grow up sometime! I know this. Why should I be the only one who knows this? Why should I be the only one who has to carry all this around? All she and Dad do is talk about how perfect Mom was. All Dad can say is how much he loved her. Well, I remember. I remember the fighting, them screaming at each other. She never came back, Rachel. She never really came back. She left us. Just like she left us at that movie theater.”

I stood up and walked out the front door, into the cold night. It had started to snow while we were busy in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, sorting memories. I hadn’t stopped to grab a coat and it took just a moment for the chill to set in. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched the snowflakes fall in the circle of the streetlight. The snow settled on the street in a quiet blanket. Each unique snowflake landed silent and anonymous.

I heard the door open behind me, but I didn’t turn. I knew it was Rachel. She stood beside me with her hands stuffed into her coat pockets. She leaned into me, nudging her shoulder into mine.

“Tab, I know there’s a lot I don’t know. I know I don’t have your perfect, photographic memory—or whatever it is. But I know Mom loved us. I know she wasn’t perfect. I know I only talk about the good stuff. That’s what I choose to remember. Maybe she left us at that movie theater all day. But she came back. She was there for us after school. She was there at our graduations. She was there to watch you play basketball. She loved us. Your memories don’t change that.”

I nodded. My throat swelled with the pressure of words I couldn’t predict.

“You’ve got to be cold,” she said.

I turned to Rachel and my tears touched her cheek before anything else. I wrapped my arms around her. I felt her shoulder blades fold, like frail wings, under her coat. I saw her, a little girl again, making snow angels, falling back, trusting the soft snow to catch her. I held my little sister like a snowflake on my tongue.

Marion Peters Denard author photoMarion Peters Denard facilitates writing workshops at Writers’ Room, a creative writing studio located in Jacksonville, Oregon. She studied writing at the University of Puget Sound and Dartmouth College. Her poetry has appeared in Adanna, Peregrine, and Arc Poetry Magazine. She is currently at work on a novel for children.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by miram Oh on Unsplash

SOULS FALLING INTO HELL LIKE SNOWFLAKES by Roy Bentley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SOULS FALLING INTO HELL LIKE SNOWFLAKES
by Roy Bentley

“I saw souls falling into hell like snowflakes.”
—St. Teresa of Avila

Am I the only one in the Cleveland Art Museum today
looking for mercy? I’m looking at an artwork about Hell
or the end of the world, recalling my then-small son saying,
of the Challenger disaster, I’d have gotten out. In the painting,
there are boats and the boats are filling, the sea aswarm and
starkly bullying like the first dopplered image of a hurricane.
Angels with an artist’s idea of wings are manning the tillers,
captaining across a broth of larvae-white bodies, the deltas

and islands and archipelagos of extended arms and hands.
If the broken world in the painting does anything it repels,
a summation you’d prefer to skip altogether, thank you.
But if you’re lucky, you’re one of the rescued who
are now far beyond the graveyard of linear time.
When I was a kid, John Glenn went into space,
sardined into a Mercury capsule, Friendship 7,
and my hillbilly family cheered the tv-launch.

Appalachians think they know about an afterlife
and God—so when my silver-haired grandmother
read aloud from a King James Bible, finger tracing
the lines on the red-lettered pages, the birds of Ohio
a night-chorus outside the window, I could see where
this was going: to a hell of the Imagination. So I told her
to rest her eyes for a while. To settle back on her star quilt—
I’d read. I made up a Jesus. One without a beard and such

fragile looking skin. A man-god who looked like he could
appreciate rocket launchings, the quiet heroism inherent
in the dropping of bodies splashed down without shame
in a storybook Pacific, the wake of an aircraft carrier
roiling blue water under a big, glaring white sky—
my God looked like the astronaut John Glenn,
but I made sure he said the word verily a lot.
Enough to make him at least believable.

Roy Bentley author photoRoy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books, including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, which is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Cleaver, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah, among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award and will appear next year.

 

Cover Photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels

UNDONE by Elaine Crauder

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

UNDONE
by Elaine Crauder

The banana bread would not bake. Maddy had followed the recipe to a T, only substituting canola oil for half the butter, honey for half the sugar, skim for whole milk, and nutmeg for cinnamon. Putting on long oven mitts and pulling the door open, she checked the loaf again. Three hundred and fifty degree heat swept into the kitchen, already filled with late summer swelter. Not wanting to take the time to lift the single bread pan onto the top of the stove, she pulled out the rack, took off one mitt and stuck a toothpick into the loaf. Raising it straight up, it was plain to the naked eye—her reading glasses were sitting idle on the kitchen table—that raw batter clung to the sliver of wood for dear life. If it had been at all cooperative it would let the toothpick withdraw, leaving no trace on the twig, as if untouched by the experience.

She knew that there was a brief moment between when the middle was raw and when the entire loaf was done, but dry as August crabgrass. It was a narrow window and she wanted to catch it, having missed the moment between seeing her husband standing next to his suitcase—mouthing words, dropping keys on the kitchen table—and when he stepped out of the front door. He had looked at her, holding his duffle bag in his hand. His briefcase leaned against his leg. A large roller suitcase rested by his rear. “My keys.” He held them out as though in full explanation.

She wanted to say, What? You’re leaving? Leaving me? But she looked at him quizzically instead, not reaching for the keys.

He cleared his throat, as if disgusted to have to explain. “I was on a ski lift and fell, tumbling airborne. Afraid of falling, of hitting hard. Then I realized—you know you can realize things in a dream—that the snow was soft and I let myself go. Falling. Free.” He nodded. When she didn’t respond likewise he continued, “I woke up and caught myself almost rolling out of bed. Then I knew: it would be okay. I’d be okay.”

She wanted to say, That’s what you want to tell me? That you’ll be okay? But what came out was, “Ung,” and another, “Ung?” She would have given anything to be someone else—a woman in a sitcom, perhaps, with a smart answer followed by a laugh track and a younger boyfriend. “Ung,” she’d said again. “Ung.”

Now Maddy rechecked the bread. She flipped the finally golden-brown loaf onto a cooling rack on the counter, next to Tad’s first letter. It had been nine days and four hours since he’d left. She skimmed the first apology— “it’s not you”—and the second one—“it’s me.” Near the end was what she had waited for, and didn’t want to know, and didn’t want to go on not knowing. No one else. She didn’t believe it but appreciated the effort. Maybe four years hadn’t been completely wasted.

The spacious Philadelphia row house that they had shared sold quickly in early fall, before the housing market completely dropped. She would have felt bad for the young couple who bought high, but they were both lawyers and should have known better. The street that was now her street—with the narrow row house in her name only—was in walking distance of the old place. Maddy once ran into the buyers at the Italian Market. They were bargaining with a merchant, offering half the listed price for bok choy. She turned into DiBruno’s slip of a shop, inhaling pungent molecules of cheese and olives, heavy and thick as ricotta in a cannoli. She’d bought a quarter pound of one of the specials and determined that she should have asked for—that she and Tad should have asked for—more when they sold. Let the lawyers swim underwater.

A surprise October snow brought slush to her cobblestone street and ice to the front stairs. The slush turned brown and, in spots, black with hints of hunter green. Her boots came to her knees and thankfully so, for the brick sidewalk was pocketed with dips and trenches of the icy mix.

The next day was her thirty-ninth birthday. Feeling both industrious and a bit lonely, she joined a Tuesday night knitting club, admiring the creations of women who had been knitting and talking together since before she met Tad. She stitched a couple of scarfs and came to the realization that the women let her sit with them—let her knit with them, accepted her contributions of every other item for Appalachian orphans—and talked as though she wasn’t there. Not a question about her life.

At first, she appreciated being around new people and not having to say anything. When she shared a story or added a comment the others seemed to enjoy her anecdotes about her first-grade students. The knitters listened and nodded, as they twisted alpaca and mohair and worsted wool and clacked titanium needles in a rhythm steady as a cow chewing its cud, hour in and hour out. Their even rows grew with inattention, from balls of yarn into sleeves and backs; knit skirts with silk linings; and what might have been ordinary gloves and hats and scarves, save for a contrasting splash of orange or red against chocolate and navy.

Maddy also joined a papermaking class that met on Wednesday evenings and it wasn’t long before trees trumped sheep. She loved the rough textures, and draining color from carrots and beets and spinach to make dyes. After a few more weeks, however, she realized she had both a scarf and a set of note cards for her entire gift list.

Christmas came and went, with her gifts appreciated—though no more than store-bought—which confirmed the rightness of moving on. There was no future in wool, no tomorrow in paper.

◊

Decisions became more rather than less bewildering. She stuck with cereal for breakfast, yogurt for lunch, cereal for dinner, with an occasional candy bar thrown in when hunger appeared between meals. Evenings of industry devolved from arts and crafts into weeknights of dinner for one in front of the TV, which evolved into lost weeks, then months.

She noted all her anniversaries, but couldn’t bring herself to celebrate any of them. The original one—her wedding day? When he left? The day they sold the house? The date on the divorce papers? Her friends took note of none of these. They came in two varieties. Her oldest ones had known her growing up. They never had liked Tad, naming him JustaTad after the first time she introduced him over a barbeque and he wore loafers without socks. Just a tad not like them, and not trying to fit in. Her newer friends, from college and work, were concerned about the breakup and wondered if she’d considered counseling.

Spring was lost on her. The tulips could have saved their petals of yellow and red, the azaleas bypassed their blossoms and turned their brown twigs into coverings of green leaves without pausing to show off in pink, red, and glittering white. She saw none of it, and was surprised to see flyers advertising strawberry festivals at churches. June, she thought, It must be June.

Back at school on the teachers’ last day, the janitor had vacuumed each classroom but by the time he reached the end of the first-grade hallway the canister in his machine was full and he gave her room more of a symbolic cleaning than an actual one. Using her own supplies, she swept and mopped the linoleum; wiped the windows with vinegar and crumpled newspaper; sanitized the desktops and chairs; and lovingly rinsed the green board of layer after layer of chalk dust. After four rinses the water ran clear and there were no streaks on the board.

Alone in her classroom, Maddy spun around in the middle of the room, her arms reaching for the walls, then the windows, and admired the way the room sparkled. Catching her breath, she pulled a fresh box of colored chalk out of her desk. WELCOME MAPLE LEAVES she printed neatly across the top of the green board. YOUR TEACHER IS MISS JONES. She read the words aloud dramatically and made a large sweeping motion as though it were fall and the new students were entering her room for the first time.

“Why thank you. Don’t mind if I do,” the other first grade teacher, Annie, said, stepping into the classroom.

“I thought I was the only teacher still here.” Maddy laughed self-consciously. “Don’t you love the way the room smells, clean but with a hint of chalk?”

“Incorrigible,” Annie said, and also laughed. She waited while Maddy closed up her room and they walked down the long hall. The cement walls had been hastily painted and were waiting for fall artwork. “Beading,” Annie said as they approached the parking lot.

“The kids would love that,” Maddy said. She had a vision of a classroom full of six-year-olds stringing beads that they’d made out of clay into bracelets and anklets and necklaces.

Annie pulled Maddy away from her future students. “A bunch of us—” Annie said. “I promised I would get you to come. All year you’ve begged off joining us for a sushi Friday or a Saturday matinee. Tonight, you’re coming. It’s Chinese and I know you like it.”

Maddy thought about Annie’s group of single women in their mid-thirties, hanging out while they waited. Too old to be laissez-faire, too young to give up: determined to be single and happy, whether they were or not.

“Dinner’s at seven,” Annie said in her no-nonsense teacher’s voice.

Maddy decided she’d go once—and kept on going into July, enjoying the low-key momentum of idle drinks and afternoon movies with tubs of buttered popcorn. Returning from the outings she would hesitate with the key in the lock, bracing herself. Her rooms had taken on the stale bouquet that she remembered from her grandma’s musty apartment, though Maddy had no mothballs.

Weeks into her newfound social life, Maddy paused, unlocked, stepped inside and quickly relocked. This time there was nothing, no aroma of aloneness, of having been left. Maybe they’re onto something, she thought, though the admission cost a little pride.

Approaching forty had been fine when she was married, but she didn’t like being on the old side of Annie’s group. She wasn’t sure if she belonged. Her quiet apartment told her she did, her dinners for one drove home the point.

She’d been busy trying on marriage—as if it were a jeweled necklace that looked desirable through the window, but upon closer examination was far too expensive, and made with stones that weren’t precious at all. While she’d been tied to Tad, the others had formed tight friendships, vacationed together and worked out whose homes to go to for Thanksgivings and other holidays.

As much as she wasn’t sure that she belonged in the singles group, the singles group seemed unsure if she was one of them. She felt like an in-law: included all summer out of obligation because she was Annie’s friend.

The group always rented a house at the Jersey shore for a week in the middle of August—perfect timing for Maddy, before the school year started—but no one invited her. Maddy was okay with that until she found out there was an empty room. She said to Annie, “That week sounds fun. I’d love to go. I can pay for the extra room.”

Annie looked away. “We save that in case Katy’s sister can come. She came once, a few years ago. The lease is in Katy’s name, so she keeps it in reserve. I’m sorry.”

Katy’s sister lived in Milwaukee and the odds of her coming to the Jersey shore seemed as likely that week as Philadelphia being pleasantly cool with low humidity. Maddy knew where she stood, which left her almost as low as when Tad left. This felt bigger: if the single women’s group wouldn’t let her into their inner circle, there was no inner circle left.

◊

Maddy hadn’t gained over the last year but her weight had redistributed in a way that said Single and Not Caring. She took to wearing pants and tops with sleeves even in the late July sauna of downtown Philly. With a scant month remaining of her lush summer vacation, she was determined to make a pattern that she’d follow throughout the school year. Work out. Buy fresh vegetables. Cook.

She started by taking an afternoon to make a grocery list and leisurely shop. Heading home, she’d accumulated a cloth bag bulging with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella under one arm, and a petite basil plant under the other. She leaned down to sniff the velvety green leaves. The licoricey scent made her close her eyes and inhale deeply.

“Maddy!”

She looked up, saw that it was Nick—flashed what she knew about him—fourth grade teacher, kids liked him, thick brown hair—and stepped into a pothole in the sidewalk. In the moment it took to hit the ground, she’d clenched her arms around the bags, which kept her upper body protected, but her right ankle immediately sent distress signals.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying a smile, as Nick ran to her.

“I got it.” He reached out, grabbed her packages and placed them off to the side, then knelt next to her. The first few pedestrians—who had seen her fall—walked around her, but the next few walked right up to where she sat before curving sharply to avoid her, as though wanting to be sure to communicate their disgust at the way she’d inconvenienced their passage. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nick said.

“Not startled at all.” Maddy looked at her ankle, which felt like it had swollen into the size of an acorn squash, but was in fact normal-sized. “It’s not purple yet or huge, so I don’t think it’s broken.” Mandatory first-aid training at school came in handy.

“Ice, that’s first,” Nick said. He’d taken the same first-aid class. “Let’s get you up.”

She leaned into him, and shrieked a bit and winced a lot on her way to upright. He asked if she wanted him to take her home. Grateful, she hobbled the couple of blocks, focused on keeping as much weight off her ankle as possible and wishing she’d already started her exercise program. She was pretty sure that his arm, which was snug around her to keep her up, and his hand, which was securely around her waist and pulling her up and toward him at every step, communicated to the rest of him that she was not recently acquainted with the gym. “I’ve been thinking of joining a gym,” she said.

“Might as well wait until your ankle’s healed. Don’t want to waste your money.”

When they got to her row house, Maddy stared at the front steps as though she’d never seen them before. She sat on the second step, facing the street. Propelling herself upwards using her good foot and hands, she scaled the six steps as though she were mounting the summit of Everest, backwards. Winded and in pain, she rested on the landing for a moment before Nick eased her to standing. Limping into her hallway, Maddy said, “Thanks, then. I can take it from here.”

Nick laughed. “I’ll get you iced and put these away.”

The Valium she’d been prescribed—but not taken—after Tad left were almost expired, but came in handy now. Nick found the bottle in the kitchen cabinet, nestled between the thyme and vanilla.

Maddy awoke in the night, stretched out on the sofa with her feet resting on a pillow, with both her foot and head throbbing, and a light on in the kitchen. Tad? She knew that wasn’t right. “Ice,” she called out. “Please?” The freezer door opened, then shut.

“Thought you’d never wake,” Nick said.

“Nick.” That’s who it was. “I fell.”

He pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “I was there.”

“I know. I didn’t hit my head.” But she was disoriented and tired, and didn’t want him to leave. “Thanks for helping me home. And staying. And the ice. I’m okay now. I’m sure you need to go.” She thought he was married or had a girlfriend or maybe a boyfriend—someone who would be waiting and wondering, even if he’d called to say that an uncoordinated colleague had tripped and he was being a Good Samaritan and would be home as soon as she woke up. Not that she’d kept him on purpose. The last thing she wanted was to be needy or seem needy. She stood on one foot and held onto the arm of the sofa.

He smiled and shook his head. “I know when I’m not wanted.” He made sure she had her cell phone handy and helped her to the door. “Lock up behind me. Can you get back to the sofa?”

She hadn’t thought of that. “Of course.” She could always crawl.

Ice, compression, anti-inflammatories, elevation. Repeat. In a few days she was able to get around with an ace bandage and a limp, as long as she wasn’t carrying anything. She composed a thank-you email to Nick, wanting to get the right tone. Grateful, not groveling. Hard to convey that in an email. But a call would be too much. A text was not enough. Immobilized by doubt as much as by her tender ankle, she wrote nothing. Thank you would have to wait the three weeks until teachers started back to school.

Annie—it was Annie, back from the shore with a peeling sunburn—who raised her eyebrows over coffee in Maddy’s living room. “He brought you home, found your Valium, and waited for you to wake up.” Maddy shrugged and Annie continue her gentle scolding: “We’re four days later and you haven’t said a word?”

Maddy nodded, silently appreciating Annie’s unhealthy pinkness. She would have happily sat there with her lips and heart clenched shut, but Annie was waiting. Maddy sipped delicately, barely parting her lips. “I got stuck. ‘Thank you for getting me safely home’ sounded cold—and too short. ‘Thank you for saving me from permanent humiliation on the sidewalk and an evening alone in pain’ sounded pathetic. Even desperate.”

Annie shook her head and smiled. “Try ‘thanks for helping me. I really appreciate it.’”

“Oh.” Maddy inhaled deeply. “That could work.”

“You’re like Goldilocks—only you stopped before ‘Just right.’”

Maddy composed and sent. A correspondence ensued: emailing a couple of times a day. Still unsteady on her ankle, Maddy took out a gym membership. She knew to avoid the treadmill until her ankle was healed, but she hit the weight room, lifting light barbells up, across, down, and back in burning sets of ten. She was surprised that her body responded eagerly. After only one week and three workouts her biceps reverberated with more of a ripple than a wave when she made like Popeye. Though it was possible that only she could tell the difference.

Annie, who’d been offering running advice for Maddy after each email exchange, was ecstatic when Nick suggested coffee on Saturday afternoon. She advised, “Beans to You, that’s the perfect place. Not a chain and you can sit as long as you want.”

Thrilled but cautious, Maddy said, “It’s a cup of coffee, not forever.” She could bring up how the first and fourth grades might work on a project together. Which she’d thought of but hadn’t mentioned to anyone, let alone Annie, one of the other first-grade teachers. Besides, Annie would wonder why Maddy had to have a topic to talk about with Nick, but Maddy knew herself, and she did.

◊

Saturday morning, Maddy rose early and developed a new recipe for banana bread, with a touch of vanilla. Once again, her loaf refused to bake in the allotted time. She experimented with a second loaf: keeping vanilla, adding a sprinkle of cardamom, and doubling the bananas. She took the changes into account to calculate extra baking time. When she slipped the heavenly-scented loaf out of the oven the testing toothpick emerged clean and the top was a gorgeous light brown, with a slightly cracked crust.

Maddy checked her phone for directions. She wrapped the warm bread in a dishtowel and cradled it under her arm, excited to meet Nick and discuss her idea of class collaboration. Maddy knew where the conversation would begin; she did not need to know the ending.

Elaine Crauder author photoElaine Crauder’s fiction is in Scoundrel Time, The Running Wild Press Best of 2017: AWP Special Edition, The Running Wild Anthology of Short Stories, Volume 1, Cooweescoowe, Penumbra, The Boston Literary Magazine, and The Eastern Iowa Review. Another story earned The Westmoreland Award. Ten of her short stories are finalists or semi-finalists in contests, including finalists in Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award Contest and in the Mark Twain House Royal Nonesuch Humor Contest. Read more at www.elainecrauder.com.

 

 

Cover Photo by Whitney Wright on Unsplash

GRAB, SNATCH by Michelle Ephraim

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GRAB, SNATCH
by Michelle Ephraim

The hospice nurse is gloves-and-salve practical.

She says: your mother must want something from you.

My mother can’t walk or talk. Her body is bones wrapped in reams of moth skin. Her brain works in insect twitches.

At the nursing home, there’s an awkward expectation for her to die.

My mother looks at me, wanting something. The dark yokes of her eyes are always the same. I think we’re both confused about beginnings and endings.

I imagine telling the nurse: You’ve got the wrong girl. I never give her what she wants.

I’m a grabber and a snatcher.

I knew it when I plucked the rose from our neighbor’s prized garden. My small fist on the stalk. The snap made me think I’d surprised it, and I was ashamed. My mother, watching from the kitchen window, came outside with her Nikon. The picture’s in a frame on the wall. It is the closest of close-ups. Black and white. Me, in profile, the face slack, the one eye in distress, the flower-head pressed to my lips. I’ve stopped wanting the rose already.

I knew when I found the dead bird with the metal leg band in our backyard. I thought the metal was a precious thing, and I wanted it more than anything. I raced inside for my blunt school scissors.  The procedure was premeditated and slow. Long enough for me to be repulsed by my persistence. The leg flopped back and forth as I worked its sinew, working it into a not-a-real-leg. When it was over, I knew I’d mutilated a dead bird and that I’d never forget that about myself. Those digits etched in the flimsy cuff. The stupidity of hope.

Here’s what I need to tell that nurse. My mother started to want when I was one year old, when she took me on a plane overseas to see her dying, estranged mother.

My mother always told the story with gritted teeth. Her mother was gone by the time we landed. I had been an unsleeping terror on an all-night flight.

I imagine that plane’s hydraulic thrum. I hear it in the obscene lift the two attendants use to move her in and out of bed every day.

In the middle school popular clique, it was shoplifting. At the local department store, Liz Miller and I glided up and down the escalators, licking our chops. I plucked at trembling racks of earrings. I got so good I could take one, two, three cardigans on the featured rack. I wanted and wanted, and so it would only stop when I got caught. My mother says: You’ve always been a greedy little girl.

These things that I took and took and snatched and grabbed? The bird band and the rose and the cardigans? Their currency was bogus.

As soon as I get to her floor, I hear my mother loud and clear. She can’t talk, but now she is screaming.

Mutte! Mutte!

An attendant understands this as: More tea!

I’m the only one who can translate her. She wants her mother and I want my mother. I picture us all as hungry bird mouths. Little openings, skyward, stretched out to an aching point, stretched to infinity.

Give them permission to go. Help them settle the unfinished business. Assure them you will be fine.

I imagine death as no more asks and no more wants. I imagine the coolness that comes over the body, just like the hospice pamphlet described. My mother, myself, at peace, wanting nothing, limbs unencumbered by flesh and blood, unmoved by removal.

Michelle Ephraim author photoMichelle Ephraim is Associate Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she teaches courses on literature and creative writing. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Tikkun, Lilith, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Morning News, and other publications. She has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and is the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (Penguin, 2015).

 

 

Cover Photo by luizclas from Pexels

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT by Brenna Womer

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IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
by Brenna Womer

While shopping what’s left of the canned goods at the grocery store, an announcement at the top of the hour, robust and autotuned: “All employees must now perform a personal temperature check,” and I, in a pair of disposable vinyl gloves but not a face mask because Dr. Gupta says they’re unnecessary for the still- and now- and currently-healthy, holding the last can of Kroger no-salt garbanzos, recall they’ve always made this announcement, but two weeks ago they were checking the temperature of the meats.

Brenna Womer author photoBrenna Womer is a poet, prose writer, professor, and editor. She is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018), and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Indiana Review, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM by Mirande Bissel

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THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM
by Mirande Bissell

hands the swaddled child over. A dream is no place
for a baby. She has seen revelers pour the baby
from a carafe—he’s white wine, fruity like the summer
he is born into, and they drink the baby in the purple
dusk of a dream-cafe. She’s always too late to stop them.
She’s seen the baby become a city she might one day
reach, but the map shifts, its topographical lines
crowning, and her finger never lands on the same town
twice. Once, the baby grows up and becomes a murderer,
though not on purpose. She knows his heart is good.
He comes to her despairing, the knife slick and still
in his hand. His mother has splinters under her nails.
She has clawed the empty kitchen cabinets searching
for the baby. She’s flung open all the closets, ferreted
through the hamper, calling his name in ashen circles,
her light late and industrial, but his crib stays empty.
The numbers flicker silver on the afternoon clock
when the woman from the dream just hands her the baby,
adjusting the blanket on his head so his mother
will recognize him, saying, Keep him. Let him always
be a baby, and the woman pauses and scoops up
a stray piglet, pink and winky-eyed, and tucks him
under her shoulder before she turns to go.

Mirande Bissell author photoMirande Bissell lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, where she loves to hike in the Patapsco River valley with her beagle. Her poem “The Mammoth Steppe” was the winner of the 2019 Stone River Poetry Review contest. She is a recent grad of the MFA program at Bennington College.

 

 

 

 

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WALKING THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD by Stella Hayes

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WALKING THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD
by Stella Hayes

out my window colored heads bound in swiftness. in their decision to bring about movement

& motion. the snow is taking a break from falling, as it did just days before. the village is

painted in primordial gray, with roofs in color too happy even for a rainbow. eavesdropping

on a father being mourned at the mouth of the coroner’s bed. the aroma of death. a father

& daughter lost to loss’s gravity. a walk through the underworld would have to wait. his body

wasn’t friendly overnight. forgetting that it was capable of carriage, despite the force of gravity;

forgetting it was self-possessed, despite being broken down. anyone it keeps bumping into

when awake; it made what sounded like a voice of pleasure. but as closely as I allowed myself

to hear the bedtime fury, he was letting out what sounded like a body’s pain; wrestling to bring

itself respite. at least overnight. at least it should have been given a break. like in a fist fight

for survival. the mercury line inside the thermometer rising & rising. in cold flurries, the snow’s

motion resting, motionless. he inside the fury. I am with him, right hand on his forehead; as he is,

inside a breath, cataloging heat & cold. in hope of cooling. in hope of slipping free from the heat.

I am crossing a field with banks of too much snow. the grieving child watching with her eyes,

as she has seen too much too. you won’t recognize me. I see a twin likeness in the shadows,

under a thin light. we will be shadowless; skipping through somewhere where we can’t

or won’t want to be from

Stella Hayes author photoStella Hayes is the author of the poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). Stella Hayes grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in
Prelude, The Hunger, The Indianapolis Review, Small Orange, and Spillway, among others.

TO LIFT US UP WHEN WE ARE FALLEN by Leonard Kress

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TO LIFT US UP WHEN WE ARE FALLEN
by Leonard Kress

There are three women installed in the living room when I arrive. Smartly dressed, young moms most likely, with highlighted loosely curled hair, gleaming toenails, and tailored pantsuits. All have open laptops and cell phones—new information and guidelines saturate the air. I arrive with a friend because this is where our weekly writing group meets, at Hope’s house—because she’s wheelchair-bound and can’t easily secure a ride to our usual meeting places. The women are from the hospice—nurse, social worker, and gerontologist. It occurs to me that the more they deal with the dying, the farther away they get from death. They bring a pleasing scent to the room, perfume and doughnuts and pastries, which overpower the disinfectant used to clean up after Hope’s father’s renal stent failed in the middle of the night and urine soaked into the carpet.

We offer to come back at another time, but Hope wants us to stay. She rolls into the adjoining dining room and we follow, spreading out pens and Xeroxed poems and coffee on the table. We’ve done this every week for more than ten years. Today I’ve written a sestina about the character from Verdi’s Rigoletto and related it to the overwhelming feelings of vulnerability a father feels for his kids. Patti’s written about safe places and all the terrible truths a child must be protected from. We come down harshly on her attempt in the final stanza to tie this in with a drowning female Narcissus. Hope’s poem is about the mythological underpinnings of celebrity worship, the Roman Saturnalia, and human sacrifice. By the end of our two-hour session, all three poems are substantially improved. We will place them in folders, stick the folders into desk drawers, and repeat the process next week. I will probably bring another sestina, Patti will bring another poem about wrecked innocence, and Hope will bring one about some other aspect of popular culture. Or one where she flirts with and then castigates the Italian painter, Caravaggio. We hold fast to our comfortable subjects and styles.

We hear the conversation from the adjoining room. I’m sure they can hear bits and pieces of ours. Hope’s dying father is brought in. The nurse asks him about an open sore in his groin and if he still has trouble swallowing his meds. The gerontologist explains what hospice means, using simple and direct language, avoiding the word death. The social worker asks him which facility he’d prefer after reeling off a string of them. How about this one, she says, and I picture her positioning the screen of her laptop so he can see from across the room. Or here, she says. He doesn’t respond, and I’m reminded of my meeting with the activities director of the nursing home where they sent my father to die. He was barely alive and had a feeding tube attached to his stomach. So, what’s your dad’s favorite ice cream, she asked, we pride ourselves on our weekly ice cream socials.

No one uses metaphors, and Hope’s father gives simple yes, no, or I-don’t-know answers. One time the nurse uses the word spot, referring to an open bed at The Arbors. I think of Wordsworth’s phrase, spots of time, when he relates a particularly overwhelming experience from his own childhood where he steals a small boat and rows out to the middle of a lake. He’s surrounded by huge mountains illuminated by the piercing moonlight, and he’s terrified. And yet, he writes, these very spots of time “lift us up when fallen.”

Hope sits with her back to the others. When someone asks her about her father’s sleep schedule, Hope raises her arm, and without swiveling around, waves the question away. Several times we suggest that she join the conversation in the living room, but she insists she’ll find out all she needs to know later. Patti points out that living rooms ceased to be called parlors once funeral homes became known as funeral parlors, living rooms as opposed to dying rooms. I ask if parlor derives from the French verb to speak. If so, I say, then, we should think of our workshop as a beauty parlor.

Leonard Kress author photoLeonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in The Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and others. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz were both published in 2018. Craniotomy appeared in 2019. He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio. Read more at www.leonardkress.com.

 

Cover Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash

TWO POEMS by Juheon Rhee

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Blue gate with two locks

TWO POEMS
by Juheon Rhee

SIX STAGES OF GRIEF

I. you are going to a Danish pastry down on Jung-gu road to sell your soul to the devil itself no one’s seen you will clutch your handbag once filled with perfumes and lotions full of cards of queens kings you do not recognize how upset you would be when the royalties can not accept your only gift as it withered and is wearing the helm of Hades that you wish existed

II. it is everywhere the steel-colored smoke you are afraid feel it yet you can sense the heat from its strong arms grasping you it weaves you through the silken thread of your mother’s hanbok lying in the cold basement floor you are a puppet body controlled by the gods above performing a dance arms flowing timelessly a nightgown hollowing into a ghostly figure as the wind’s talon digs its life out you do not know until your hand meets the ghost dissipating from your touch

III. you are suspended in the bowl you call time one minute you are moving next you are plunging endlessly on the rotting wood below your pupils will dilate remain unblinking a clear sky on your scicera you are not crying you are not for your tears are gone and your mouth is burning in the air conditioned room

IV. when you first hear the news you will laugh for its absurdity but then frown upon saying it is not a matter you should joke about while praising the rather authentic cries you will hear the heavy silence a weight tied to your neck dragging you down as voices are not spoken as you will not hear the “how did you know” and the “that was pretty good, right?” only the unspoken words dead on the phone

V. your eyes will be bloodshot but hands pale you can not breathe as your mouth lets out a coarse melody without notes or a beat an alarm to the graves — to the tombstones down below your vision is distorted and your hands are shaking are they

VI. you are stuck in bed because the blankets have imprisoned you embodied you they have made you a mansion without a door to leave thirty-six hours in bed and you have not yet slept for the dreams will reflect the pain in the eyes framed in your sunken mask as though one scooped ice cream off your cheeks for there will be no one to wake you up the next morning only a shadow of the urn on your desk

 

 

◊

 

(untitled)

did you know that when you are bitten by a snake a drop of that yellow tinted liquid can clot your blood before you speak let you fall onto the floor eyes wide open Staring at the blood leaking from the bite you’ll be helpless alright your group of empty-headed friends will do you no good so you will need this cure

Remedy for a non-venomous snake bite

1. Pick the greenest of all herbs straight from your garden: yerba buena, echinacea angustifolia, tanacetum parthenium, echinacea and feverfew
2. One although flower discarded leaves shaped like petals with a layer of translucent over the clover-colored film
3. Mash them up until it is now a dark green, much like when eyeshadow your only friend scribbled on her eyelid before running off to the girl she fell in love with
4. Slice the limb of the aloe plant growing next to the woven welcome! mat now hidden under the coffee colored dirt
5. Remove the slimy substance inside
6. And crush it until it is merely a slightly transparent liquid, color of her tears running through the thick layer of foundation when her mother told her of her disgrace
7. Mix the two substances until you hands are sore, like her legs when her parents dragged her up the mountain so she could confess her sins to the metal statue

You will end up with a green paste
You will not use it
For with or without the paste
You will be left with a scar you will hide

Juheon (Julie) Rhee is a 14-year-old student and is currently attending International School Manila. During her free time, she enjoys reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries and hanging out with her friends. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in K’in Literary Journal, Indolent Books, Heritage Review, 580 Split, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, and has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

 

 

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CLEAN LINES by Caroline Curran

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Lined notebook with coffee mug ring on page

CLEAN LINES
by Caroline Curran

Adrienne lay on the floor of her apartment, thinking that her life had become what she wanted it to be, when her phone began to ring. Sophia sat next to her, cross-legged, with a glass of wine, flipping flashcards and nodding when Adrienne said the right answer. Grassy late-April air drifted through the open window and the sound of crickets came to a swell outside. Neither Adrienne nor Sophia reached for the phone, letting the sound of fluttering bells continue.
…….
As she put down the last card in the stack, Sophia said, “Crazy that you’re studying for this.”
…….
“Maybe,” Adrienne laughed, picking up her phone. She didn’t recognize the caller, but it was an area number, so she answered it, still laughing.
…….
“Hello?”
…….
“Hi, is this Adrienne Perry?” It was a man’s voice.
…….
“Yeah?”
…….
“This is Emmanuel Barnett, the chair of the English department.”
…….
“Professor Barnett, hi,” Adrienne said. “I’m sorry, is there something wrong? I wasn’t expecting a phone call.” Sophia looked at Adrienne, head cocked to one side. Adrienne opened her mouth and shook her head.
…….
“I apologize for calling so late—I hope I’m not bothering you.”
…….
“No—not at all.” Adrienne’s mind shuffled through a catalogue of possibilities. She didn’t complete all the proper credits, she plagiarized, she couldn’t graduate, she accidentally sent her nudes to the listserv, someone died and it was her fault.
…….
“There’s a situation that has recently arisen regarding Professor Avery, who I understand is your thesis advisor.”
…….
“Oh,” she said.
…….
“The department has received a complaint about unprofessional behavior.”
…….
After a few seconds Adrienne realized that he was waiting for her to say something.
……
.“Okay.”
…….
“We’re taking this allegation seriously. We’d like to speak with you. Off the record, if you prefer. We’re just trying to understand the situation.”
…….
“The situation?”
…….
“We’ll explain more in person. I think that’s best.”
…….
Adrienne ran her tongue across her top teeth.
…….
“Sure,” she said. “I could come in tomorrow morning. To your office?”
…….
“That would be great. How is ten?”
…….
“Okay.”
…….
“Okay, Adrienne. Then we’ll speak tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”
…….
“Alright, bye.” Adrienne wished he hadn’t said her name. She hung up the phone and looked at it, then up at Sophia.
…….
“What was that?” Sophia said.
…….
Adrienne tried to explain.
…….
“Unprofessional behavior? That’s what he called it?” Sophia asked.
…….
Adrienne nodded.
…….
“Well, it’s definitely sexual harassment,” Sophia said. “I mean, right? What else would it be?”
…….
“I don’t know.”
…….
“But—well, this is going to sound really stupid. But you didn’t, like, suspect anything, right?”
…….
“No. Not at all. I mean, I asked him to be my advisor. He was always appropriate. In every way. Don’t you think I would have said something if he hadn’t been?”
…….
“Yeah, no. Of course. I don’t doubt you.”
…….
“And we’re speculating. We don’t even know what the allegation is, let alone whether it’s credible at all.” Adrienne stared at Sophia, who held her gaze for a second before looking at her hands.
…….
They decided to watch television. Sitting on the couch, her knees pulled up, Adrienne cleaned under her fingernails until the ends were pristine and white and, inspecting her thumb, she bit at the stray skin of a hangnail. When she finished, she held up her hand and admired her work.
…….
The next morning Adrienne showered. When the fog on the mirror cleared, she put on makeup and watched herself in the mirror, turning her face to its best and sharpest angle and practicing mild reactions. She wore her hair in a ponytail that flicked across her shoulders when she turned her head. On the walk across campus, she smiled at people she knew because she had her big sunglasses on, the ones that Sophia said made her look intimidating. On the ground were the pink petals of cherry blossoms, crushed little tongues lining the curb.
…….
It was the Friday of reading week, and so there weren’t many people around. Most students wouldn’t start filling the libraries until Sunday. There were a few people on the lawn playing frisbee, looking like paid actors. Adrienne watched them, and as she did she realized her time in college felt like a discrete event in her life, something that had happened some time ago.
…….
Adrienne pulled open the wooden doors of the English building and thought for a second that she should compose herself in the bathroom but then realized she didn’t really need to. Inside, Adrienne’s shoes on the tile were the only sound in the hallway, which made things feel unnecessarily ominous.
…….
Professor Barnett’s office had high ceilings and windows that looked over a memorial garden for a student who had died in a car accident a few years earlier. Adrienne had been in the office before, when Barnett had called her in to congratulate her for receiving a prestigious research grant. When Adrienne knocked he came to the door, stepped aside and motioned for her to sit on the green velvet sofa. He smiled like he was sorry. He probably was. There was a woman sitting in one of the armchairs, frowning. She held her phone in one hand and dragged her pointer finger across the screen. On her chest sat a large necklace. Barnett shut the door behind Adrienne.
…….
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “This is Maura Rollins, from the Title IX Affairs Office, which deals with these sorts of situations.”
…….
The woman looked up and put her phone in her purse. Adrienne smiled at both of them as she sat opposite on the sofa. “It’s no problem,” she said.
…….
“This is obviously not an easy conversation to have,” Barnett continued. “And we want you to feel comfortable and safe telling us anything. Obviously, you are not in any kind of trouble.”
…….
“Okay.”
…….
“Professor Avery, who I understand you know quite well, having had him as your advisor this past semester and having conducted research for him throughout your time here—several students have come to us expressing discomfort—that his conduct with them was inappropriate.”
…….
Adrienne nodded.
…….
“And as you might have heard by now—I know how information can spread around here—we wanted to give students the opportunity to come to us. We reached out to you because we know your relationship with Professor Avery was particularly close.”
…….
“I understand.” Adrienne crossed her legs. Maura Rollins did too, and Adrienne wondered if this was a tactic. Adrienne bit her lip—thoughtful, like someone in a screenplay—and inhaled.

“The truth is I never experienced anything I would call inappropriate,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what the allegations are. I suppose you can’t tell me?”
…….
“Unfortunately, no. It’s confidential. Out of respect—for the accusers.”

The meeting wasn’t long because Adrienne didn’t have much to say. She talked about Professor Avery, who she accidentally called by just his last name a few times, as she normally would. She had taken his class on British Poetry her sophomore year. He called her essays “profound” and her comments “astute,” and she relished the praise, and began going to office hours without much reason at all. He told her department gossip that he shouldn’t have, and she knew she was his favorite. He talked about his wife, who was a professor in the biology department, and Adrienne would often imagine their dinnertime conversations and what type of wine they drank, or wonder whether they had satisfying sex. Adrienne didn’t say all of this. She wasn’t groomed one way or the other. She said that Avery was impressed with her writing, and that he asked if she would be interested in helping him with his forthcoming book. Then, at the beginning of her senior year, she asked him to advise her thesis, which he had called “ambitious.”
…….
While Adrienne spoke, Maura Rollins wrote things down in a notebook. She wrote in a tight, quick scrawl and periodically shifted her hand across the paper like a machine on an assembly line. Her pen ran out of ink at some point and she made a few frustrated scribbles on the paper before reaching into her purse for a replacement. Barnett asked questions in euphemisms. He seemed to be pressing for something, but eventually he knew he had wrung Adrienne dry. Adrienne looked out the window and then back at him, and that was all.
…….
When she got home Sophia was spreading peanut butter on a bagel. Sophia looked up and took out her headphones. “How did it go?”
…….
Adrienne opened a drawer to grab a spoon. She dug it into the jar of peanut butter and pried it out, and the spoon bent a little at its neck. “Fine. I didn’t have much to say.”
…….
“Who was there?”
…….
“Professor Barnett and some woman from the Title IX office.” Adrienne sat on one of the kitchen stools.
…….
“What did they ask?”
…….
“They just wanted to know if I knew anything,” Adrienne said, licking the peanut butter off the spoon, coating her tongue smooth.
…….
Sophia nodded. She washed her dishes, singing bits of songs and making a little sound of annoyance when the water got too hot. Adrienne took out her phone and read Twitter for a few minutes. Once she tasted only the spoon’s slick metal, she held it in her mouth suctioned to her tongue.
…….
“Did you tell them about me?” Sophia said, breaking off her hum.
…….
Adrienne took the spoon out of her mouth. “About you?”
…….
“Yeah.”
…….
“No,” Adrienne said. “Why would I?” Sophia had never met Avery.
…….
“Maybe it makes sense that whatever Avery was doing he wouldn’t do to you.”
…….
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
…….
“I just mean that you wouldn’t be, like, an outlier. If you’re the student he was closest with, and you never suspected anything. Maybe he didn’t try anything because he knew you were gay.”
…….
Adrienne looked at Sophia for a moment.
…….
“Or maybe he didn’t try anything because he never did with anyone.”
…….
Sophia jumped. “I knew it. You’re taking his side.”
…….
“God, Sophia. I’m not taking sides. I only know what I know.”
…….
“You’re an Avery apologist.”
…….
“Did you just coin that term?” Adrienne stood and dropped her spoon in the sink.
…….
“It’ll be a thing.”
…….
“Fuck you.”
…….
“You don’t get to abandon all your principles just because someone you like was accused of something.”
……
“You understand how the real world works, right? Life isn’t one big political statement.”
…….
“You sound like a Republican.”
…….
Adrienne walked out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She knew she had some time before Sophia would decide to either apologize or demand an apology. Alone, Adrienne looked around her room to calm herself down. Stuck to the walls around her, propped on her dresser, arranged on her desk, was the paraphernalia of her life. She collected things from the world: triangular rocks in a line on her windowsill, four leaf clovers pressed flat inside act three, scene two in her paperback Othello. She kept bird feathers in a plastic bag in her desk drawer. When Adrienne noticed things, plucked them from obscurity, and ordered them, she gave them value.
…….
Avery was forty-three. He had gone to Brown, and when he talked about it Adrienne could tell he had done a bunch of drugs there. He had had his fun. Now he was reformed, an intellectual. Wore thin ties and Doc Martens, assigned Audre Lorde, referred to his wife as his partner.
…….
Adrienne was proud of how articulate she was around him. Words fell out of her mouth and once they were in the air she listened to them and thought, okay, that’s what I sound like. Okay. She liked the way Avery squinted at her and nodded, and sometimes opened his mouth to say something but was so taken by the twists in her conversational logic that he would just sit back in his leather chair and nod, and when she was finally finished he would tell her she was really quite something.
…….
They talked about graduation sometimes, what real life would be like. Avery said he was happiest when he was thirty-one. When he was thirty-two he got married, but that wasn’t why he wasn’t as happy, he had said. Avery had succeeded in the way that Adrienne knew people didn’t anymore. Things fell into his lap. He was a staff writer at a print magazine at twenty-four. The world had pushed and pulled him into the right station, where he could be wild then tame, drifting then settled, just as people like him were meant to be, and everyone loved him for it. Now there were too many people funneling for the same thing, you couldn’t count on anything to get you anywhere, it was all a game of strings to pull and cards to flip.
…….
Last fall, in his office. The tree outside was the yellowest on campus and in the wind its wet leaves stuck and unstuck to the window. Books stacked horizontally and vertically on the bookshelf, more on the desk. Adrienne’s umbrella leaned against the wall by the door, dripping into a small puddle on the wooden floor. She wore a turtleneck.
…….
“There’s not enough time for anything,” she had said. “If we’re hurtling toward environmental disaster, how are we supposed to try for anything? Or want things? None of it’s worthwhile. And it’s all really selfish, too. Who am I to feel like this? When have I ever suffered? You know? And the absolute worst thing about all my problems is that none of them even matter, like, at all.”
……
Adrienne wondered where Avery was right now and if he was afraid his career was over. Maybe it was. She thought about the plants on the windowsill of his office. Two small cacti in glass pots, prickly bodies, a visible web of white roots. A fiddle leaf fig tree, waxy, beaming. Was someone watering them? It seemed unfair that they should die too. Not that any of it mattered. But she still wondered.
…….s
In her bedroom Adrienne could hear music coming from the outside, periodic shouts. She looked out at a girl laughing so hard she leaned on her friend like she might melt. They were having a barbecue, celebrating not having to care for a day. Adrienne really didn’t have anything to do, but she didn’t want to leave her room and run into Sophia so she propped up her pillows on her bed and typed up some notes for her exam next week.
…….s
She was copying lecture outlines when she received a text from her mom, asking about lunch reservations on the day before graduation. Adrienne had planned everything. Her parents were going to meet Sophia’s parents for the first time at a restaurant downtown and pretend to have things in common over plates of hummus. But now Adrienne’s uncle wanted to bring his new girlfriend, so she called the restaurant and changed the reservation for one more person.
…….s
Her focus lost in open tabs on her computer, Adrienne checked her email. There was one new message in her inbox sent a few hours before. Subject line: Interview Inquiry, from a name she knew in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. The little skip her brain did at any notification died as her mind computed pixels into words into semantics into the understanding that the school newspaper knew about Avery and her name was inevitably attached to his. She opened the email and saw what she expected: the tired polite words of student journalism, the assurance that victims could stay anonymous.
…….s
She didn’t reply to the email. Adrienne knew that anything she said would calcify into search-engine results later on, and she also knew that anonymity was impossible, laughable. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked around. She stood up and looked at her reflection in the mirror, not because she cared how she looked, but because she wanted to understand what people saw when they looked at her. Up close, looking into her own eyes, she noticed a few zits and she squeezed them.
…….s
The concept of outside was overwhelming, but staying inside felt pathetic, so Adrienne decided to go for a run. She put on a sports bra and shorts and running shoes and wore headphones and listened to music she knew she liked. This would be good, she thought. A healthy thing to do. But when she had run just two blocks she saw a classmate from Avery’s class sophomore year. She didn’t have time to turn around so she just nodded at him and he gave her a pretty normal reaction but she couldn’t be sure. After she passed him she grew anxious and each person she passed after she felt like was whispering or thinking about her, or was on their phone to text their friend, hey guess who i just saw? Everyone knew and was in on the same joke, winking at each other in the blind carbon copy thread. Or at least they would be soon. Adrienne turned around and ran home.
…….s
When she got back to the apartment, Sophia was sitting on the couch painting her toenails orange.
…….s
“Hi,” Sophia said, without looking up.
…….s
“Hi.” Adrienne was out of breath and sweating.
…….s
“Can we talk?” Sophia said, screwing the cap back on the bottle.
…….s
“I was about to shower.”
…….s
Sophia got up from the couch and walked over to Adrienne’s doorway, her toes lifted from the carpet. “I’m sorry that this happened to you,” she said.
…….
“Nothing happened to me.”
……
“I’m just saying, I know he meant a lot to you. That this can’t be easy.”
…….
“He’s not dead,” Adrienne said. “You make it sound like he’s dead.”
…….
“Adrienne, he took advantage of his students. It was wrong.”
…….
“I need to shower.”
…….
“Can I kiss you, at least?”
…….
“No. Sorry. It’s just that I’m gross right now.”
…….
Adrienne didn’t linger. She walked to the bathroom to shower and opened Facebook while the water was heating up. Once the page loaded, her first thought was that the algorithm had worked, because at the top of her feed was the article. They must have wanted to publish as soon as they could. They really didn’t need Adrienne, anyway.
…….
Avery’s professional face smiled up at Adrienne from her phone. He looked smug, she thought, for the first time. He just had that sort of face. She didn’t click the article yet. She scrolled down to see what the comments said. Most were negative, from former students expressing disappointment in the university administration. She scrolled further and saw that a few friends had shared the article. She saw Sophia’s name there, without any additional comment. Adrienne wished she would cry but her mind went back to the graduation lunch.
…….
The shower ran hot for a while and Adrienne stepped in without testing the temperature. She washed and rinsed, then turned the shower off and twisted her hair until it didn’t drip anymore. When she toweled off she realized she was still overheated and sweating from her run. She walked naked to her room, shut the door, sat on her bed, and skimmed the article on her laptop. In it, there was a link to another article on Avery’s research on nineteenth-century novel manuscripts, in which Adrienne’s name was mentioned.
…….
She was quoted in that article: “It was really rewarding to work with Professor Avery. I’ve learned so much, and I feel prepared to take these skills and apply them to my own research.”
…….
Adrienne looked up from her laptop. In the dim afternoon, and with her shades drawn, her room was dark. In the mirror hanging from her door she saw herself illuminated by the computer’s bluish light. Her hair was tangled and messy and her skin still blotchy pink.
…….
Adrienne knew that this blip in her life would eventually be fine and forgotten. She was barely a witness to something barely exceptional. But it would always be there. Even once she graduated and moved to a new city and walked new routes and talked to new strangers, she would still think about this one thing sometimes and each time she did she would feel a thin fire of shame just beneath her skin. She wanted clean, deliberate lines. She wanted to trace in ink and erase the pencil underneath and hold her work in the light and nod, thinking: Yes, this is exactly how I wanted it.

Caroline Curran author photoCaroline Curran is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and creative writing. She is from Alexandria, Virginia and plans to move to Los Angeles after graduation. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and a screenplay.

 

 

 

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BLESSING ONE: BLESS ME by Sherine Elise Gilmour

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

a white wall with shadows and sunlight

BLESSING ONE: BLESS ME
by Sherine Elise Gilmour

I have a mother who once said car, lake,
who said, I couldn’t stand holding
your sticky hands any longer,
who said, I found a lake deep enough.

I am blessing myself on the phone
with the life insurance company.
I am blessing myself listening
to Muzak. I am blessing myself

because I have a mother who
bought a life insurance policy on my
wee head, because I have a mother
who made herself beneficiary.

She told me the ways she thought
I could die: top of stairs, quick fling
of small body. The road, how easy
to leave me behind.

And I am blessing myself speaking
to the customer service representative,
blessing myself at the notary public,
faxing over documents. And I am blessing

myself at the post office, licking
the stamp. Bless me. Bless my white matter,
my skull not cracked. My neck never broke,
my lung sacs full of air. I am blessing myself

because she has not. I am blessing
myself because who else will? I am blessing
myself because, most nights, I still want to be held
by a mother, and that never goes away.

Sherine Elise Gilmour author photoSherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Glass: A Journal of Poetry, So To Speak, SWWIM, Third Coast, Tinderbox, and other publications.

 

 

 

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CHICKEN FOR TWO by Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

restaurant scene with empty table for two

CHICKEN FOR TWO
by Kim Magowan

After we order the chicken for two, I run a theory by my friend Lois: certain professions are more conducive to being good spouses than others. I’m not referring to practical considerations here, like the wear and tear a surgeon’s hours (both long and unpredictable) will inflict on her marriage. Rather, the same qualities that make people good at certain jobs make them decent spouses. “Architects, for instance,” I say, “like me. We need to be meticulous, we need imagination and long-range vision. Looking at a building pared to drywall and studs, we picture the pristine home it will become. We gravitate to the fixer-upper.”

What I don’t say—but Lois knows what I am thinking, because I intend her to—is that I am married to the converse: someone whose job primes him to be a crappy husband. Curt is a food critic. A good food critic, like my husband, is the ideological opposite to the architect. Instead of seeing things through the rosy glow of potential, Curt sees flaws. He’s like the boy Kay in the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Snow Queen,” who gets a splinter of cursed glass stuck in his eye that makes everything grotesque. When Kay looks at a rose, he sees the slick, black bug crawling on the stem.

Also: a food critic is motivated to discover the next shiny thing. The new restaurant is the one suffused with a honey glow.

I used to imagine myself as Curt’s favorite restaurant, where we still go once a year and always order the same thing, where Lois and I are eating now. More specifically, I would imagine myself as a particular dish at his favorite restaurant: roast chicken, served with bread salad, black currants, and pine nuts. You have to order the chicken as soon as you sit down—there’s a note about this on the menu—because it takes fifty minutes to cook. It roasts at 500 degrees in a cast iron skillet. I know this because I bought their cookbook this summer, so I could make the chicken myself. I burned my hand lifting the skillet from the oven.

But it’s Lois here with me today, not Curt, because Curt is in Bologna. Bologna has the best food in Italy. Married to a food critic, I thought this was a universally known fact, though Lois is clearly surprised to hear it, after she asks, so casually, “Why Bologna?”

This makes me consider which other facts I consider universally known are not, and then which facts other people know that I would be equally surprised to learn. For instance, Lois just told me, assuming this is something that everyone knows, that only 15% of used clothes are donated to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. The rest become landfill. “Didn’t you know?” she says, perfect eyebrows arched. I’m at a loss to explain my horror is not just about the waste. Suddenly the world is full of knowledge that I am not privy to, and learning this knowledge will only make my world darker.

This feeling is so oppressive that I almost lose my appetite for the roast chicken and bread salad that I once believed represented me, the dish my husband would always rank first.

I’ve bullied Lois into ordering the chicken and bread salad, since the restaurant will only serve it to two people or more. Lois mostly avoids meat. I watch her pick at her chicken thigh and feel guilty, despite having every right to manipulate her.

Lois writes grants for nonprofits. She thinks this makes her a good person.

“So, what are you going to do all week while Curt’s in Bologna?” Lois asks.

“Work. See my friends,” I say. “And,” I hesitate, because I didn’t plan to say this next part. I consider reasons to disclose, reasons to withhold. It’s like an imaginary house I am building and dismantling. I hesitate for so long Lois repeats, “And?”

“And, I’m going to get my eggs frozen.” Lois’s eyes are her most beautiful feature, black and moist as olives. They widen. “I thought you didn’t want children?”

I’m almost certain Lois is having an affair with Curt. But I am willing to see Lois with an architect’s eye, and imagine as I look at her, her plum-colored lipstick mostly rubbed off, her lips shiny from the chicken skin that she only reluctantly eats, that Lois is having regrets. She feels guilty for betraying me. She suspects Curt is a pain in the ass, finicky and difficult to satisfy, and she could find a better man who would cause considerably less trouble and stress.

“Curt doesn’t want children,” I say. Lois bites her greasy lip. I watch her set down her fork with its chunk of bread salad, its dainty, impaled currant.

Kim Magowan author photoKim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2019. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. See more at www.kimmagowan.com.

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AUTUMN’S RECKONING by John Middlebrook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Windows with curtains, exterior view, night time

AUTUMN’S RECKONING
by John Middlebrook

The fiery fist above slowly loses its hold
………….and the musky lungs of autumn grow dry.
At last, fall staggers and drops upon the rattling grass
………….breaking the arched back of summer.

Charms tumble from its pockets like loose change
………….and glisten on yellowing fields of dew.
Now there’s lead in the leaves, and the birds
………….reconcile their wings with hostile winds.

As nights grow longer, between the sheets
………….the nearing cold grips and turns us inward.
And there—inside the gray bones of morning—
………….we tally things most dear.

John Middlebrook author photoJohn Middlebrook lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he manages a consulting firm focused on non-profit organizations. John has been writing since he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he served on the staff of Chicago Review. His poetry has appeared in publications including the Tidal Basin Review, Cleaver Magazine, and the Wilderness House Literary Review. John’s home on the web is here.

ANISCIA by Andrea Ellis-Perez

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

ANISCIA
by Andrea Ellis-Perez

When I come home from school, Papa is pruning the roses. His back hunched, an oval of sweat creasing his white shirt that la Señora Francisca had pressed this morning. He isn’t wearing the gardening gloves that Mama bought him because he insists that it doesn’t let him talk to the roses. They can only hear him through his skin and the rough canvas of the gloves offends their delicate temperament. 

I watch him as he goes from stem to stem, and snaps up the flowers. Even the buds, shy against the noon-day sun go tumbling into his hands and are tucked into his basket. I frown. “Papi, what are you doing?” 

He scowls. “It’s them,” he says and he jerks his chin to the concrete wall blocking us from the facility next door. It’s a home, the only one in the province, for the viejitos whose children are too selfish to keep them in their houses. “They keep taking them.” 

I follow his gaze to the wall. His roses have a mind of their own—they always have—and they’ve pushed through the concrete, their thorns cutting ribbons into the gray scrape of the wall and the buds blooming out of the holes their stems created like bubbles bursting. When Papa cuts them at the base of the head, they weep golden sap onto your palms. If you drink it, Papa says, you can extend your life by months. But it’s an empty promise. Time that can’t be spent except in sadness, your tears sticky like the sap of the flower. 

I leave Papa to his task and take myself inside. La Señora Francisca is in the kitchen with a bag of shrimp. She has two bowls in front of her and, one by one, she takes the shrimp from the bag, rips off its tiny head, slides a thumb under its shell and pushes off the hard exterior into one bowl, and puts its frail shrimp torso in the other. I offer to help her and she looks up from her task, a smile on her lips, before waving me off to watch TV or do homework. 

It is a silly offer, a private joke between us, because I cannot touch the food. My fingers carry poison like the spindle in Sleeping Beauty’s loom. When I was little, I fed the canaries my father kept in a cage in our backyard. It was a Sunday and I had watched my father pull their feed out from the laundry room to fill their bowl. I buried my hand in the same sack of grain and pulled out a handful, carried it to the canaries singing in chorus. By morning the next day, they were all dead. My father had to burn the feed. 

Papa comes in at dinner time to the smell of fried shrimp and yellow rice. La Señora Francisca is just pulling the sweet plantains off the skillet and placing them on a paper towel-covered plate to soak up the oil when Papa takes off his boots by the door and changes into his house slippers. He smells like soil and sweat-tainted cologne. “Did you get all the roses?” I ask. 

His brows come down, make a V on his forehead. “For now.” 

The roses grow fast. They have the conviction of a much less delicate flower. Tomorrow, Papa will have to cut them all over again after he gets home from work, but by then the viejitos could have taken them. 

The next morning, I am walking out the front door when I see a woman bent over one of Papa’s rose bushes. She has white hair and a long blue dress that covers her like a sack. Her arms tremble as she tugs on the head of one of the roses and, when it snaps and the syrupy ichor starts to spill, she bends her body down slowly to lick it up. 

“Señora!” I call, “Get out!” I feel strange, having never said those words to an older person. My tone sounds wrong and I can’t figure out what to do with my hands besides wrap them around my backpack straps. 

She turns back to me and gives me a smile, her teeth dripping gold. “You have so many,” she says and holds up the bloom she tore. “Why can’t you just spare one?” 

I don’t know how to tell her that it isn’t worth the effort. That she’s better off with the time she has left and that borrowed time will only make the end that much worse. 

But I don’t have the authority to make it sound real so I clench my fists instead. “I’m going to tell my Papa.” Papa is a towering man with an empty holster at his belt that does most of the job that his gun—tucked away in a locked toolbox in his truck—would do. I wish he were standing beside me so the woman could understand my threat. 

I don’t have to worry. Her face falls and a drip of sap leaks from the side of her mouth as she hustles out of our yard, to the front gate, and out onto the sidewalk. I watch her backside swish under her dress, her age bearing down on her like a thickly woven blanket.  

Mama has only pins and needles on her tongue for me when I come in the house. “Put your backpack away, Aniscia! Y tu tarea? Ay, niña, look at those shoes. Have you been tramping through mud?” She is a flurry around me, yanking off one thing after the next and shooing me off into the shower. When I spot a bowl of pear slices on the kitchen table, I reach for one and she slaps my hand away. “Toma,” she says and pops the pieces in my mouth, her manicured nails scraping my skin.  

At dinner, Papa is a tempest. He blows in the front door and slams into his chair, rattling the tea cup with his espresso. “They’ve done it again.” Mama purses her lips and sips at her water. “They rip them, tear at them, their blood soaks the thorns,” he shakes and I can hear the grind of his teeth. “No me respetan.” 

I sit up straighter in my seat, look at Papa with an anger I hope matches his. “I saw one of them this morning. She came into the yard.” 

He slams a fist onto the table and it sets off his place mat. “That’s it. Ven, Aniscia,” Papa stands up and wraps a hand around my wrist. I scurry to keep up with his pace and tumble out of my seat, my feet skipping under me to stop me from falling. 

Outside, the sun is sitting low in the sky and the mosquitoes pounce on me as soon as I’m out the door. Papa swats at them as he leads me to the tea roses—his favorites—and points. “Touch them. All of them.” 

I shake my head. It doesn’t count, it’s not food, but Papa reads my mind because he crosses his arms. “If they want to eat, let them eat.” 

I don’t want to argue with Papa. I don’t want to think of the viejitos falling to the ground like the canaries. I run across the yard as fast as I can with my hands outstretched. By the end of it, I’m covered in beads of red where the thorns have pricked my skin, a bite reminding me they don’t want this any more than I do. 

The next morning I wake to the sound of hushed voices in the kitchen. Papa’s baritone and Mama’s alto toying a line between a quiet song and the hiss of a snake. “It’s their own fault. I’m not responsible for an old woman trying to cheat death and failing,” Papa says. 

Mama’s anger, cutting crisp in her consonants. “El veneno fue tuyo.” 

“And what am I supposed to do?” 

“End this madness.” 

I hear the click of her heels and huff of air that sounds like Papa’s, then the door to the house, with its distinct, heavy kuTUM, slams shut. 

I see Papa when I’m heading off to school later, the knees of his slacks sunk deep into the grass and his back in a hunch that I recognize as something like defeat. The yard is empty, brown circles of solemn soil where creeping stems once flowed into nature’s vainest beauty. Piles of uprooted roses lay in Papa’s basket. “Where are you putting them?” I ask. 

“La basura.” 

A twitch in my chest and I think about the part of me that lives in them now, the small bit of venom I passed into each of them that they carry like a shield. Would it waste away as they sat at the bottom of the trashcan? Or would it poison everything they touched like a plague?  

I think about taking them from the trash in the night, after Papa has gone to bed, and replanting them. I could claim that he left some part of the root and they fought to come back to the surface. But I don’t have Papa’s hands. The roses would never grow the same—or worse, they would wilt in plain sight without the dignity of privacy. They would be bodies buried upright. Papa’s garden would be a graveyard. 

I squeeze Papa’s shoulder instead. He places a hand atop mine, his callouses rough against the baby hairs of my fingers. Tomorrow he will plant bougainvilleas, he says, and he will let them crest and trough as they please and they will be less headstrong, he thinks. More temperate. 

I picture them now. They lie low to the ground like a hound and blanket the concrete wall in a tuft of color, shades of pinks and purples glinting off the sun, eagerly crowding each other. They have that vague, lovely scent of flower that fades as soon as you’ve smelled it and, underneath it all, the near-distant memory of roses.  

Andrea Ellis-Perez author photoAndrea Ellis-Perez is lots of things, but mostly she is a writer of several published stories, an MFA student at Stetson University, and a lifelong lover of the stories her mother told her of her childhood in Venezuela. She lives in Florida with her wife and cat and works at the library, where she takes advantage of her proximity to books to read constantly.

 

 

 

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SORRY TO BE LATE by Marc Harshman

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SORRY TO BE LATE
by Marc Harshman

He knew how it would be—should have.
Forgetting the keys on the table,
………….doors locked, window’s open, returning
……………………..on a loop of memories
……………………..to finding and un-find
……………………..the forgotten un-begotten.

There was something to be done.

Pilgrimage or errands . . .
Doors and windows.
Roads and stars.

Here in the foyer is the overflow, the detritus
………….from the wedding, birthday, wake.
He wouldn’t know what to say
………….even if he knew these people.

 

He turns on the lights.
Tries the back yard.
The key fits the road like a feather.

Something.  There is to do.

A bird has fallen smoothly
…………out of the inconsequential sky,
…………begins thrashing in the underbrush.

Another threshold.

There he was . . .

……………always unexpected and the rush
……………to apologize, to do something.

And then
………….he let each of us
………………………shake his hand.

Marc Harshman’s Woman in Red Anorak, won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater, co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.

HOW TO COMB SOMEONE’S HAIR by Uma Dwivedi

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HOW TO COMB SOMEONE’S HAIR
by Uma Dwivedi

long hair with flower petals

the first step is to love someone who will let you touch their hair. this is very important and cannot be avoided. next, to find them one day in their kitchen, shoulders so tense you think of cliffsides taut with stone—so you take them by the hand, pull them to their living room and sit them on the floor in front of their couch. the couch is soft with love, easy and giving as water. you go to their bathroom and fetch their comb from the coffee mug by the sink. you take a seat. place the comb under your right thigh. then, you tuck their shoulders between your knees, take out hair pins if they’re wearing any, gently tug out rubber bands or hair ties or anything else pulling their hair tight from their skull. don’t start yet with the comb. first you must run your fingers through their hair, careful, so careful not to catch painfully on any snag or tangle. you whisper your fingers through, flicker them softly when you encounter a knot, do your best to pull it apart without yanking at the root. it is not always possible. if you must cause some pain, as sometimes you must, give them warning. a soft, murmured sorry will suffice. consider coconut oil, warmed between your palms, soaked into the roots of their hair like fresh rainfall, pulled lovingly through each strand. when their hair seems softer, their shoulders slacker, the muscles of their neck less prominent and stiff like a royal guard, it is time to take out the comb. here, too, you must be gentle. work slowly, methodically. right to left or left to right. starting always at the root. move slow and sure when there is a tangle, brace the comb against your hand whenever possible so as to spare their scalp. do this for some time. silence is like fresh snow settling on the lonely earth, the shuffle of snowflakes as you work through another snare, the thick, dappled comb glinting with lamplight. even so, they might speak, and you must listen, responding in a low, warm voice whenever appropriate. this is love, you know. this is how you must learn to love. with the patience to sit for however long it takes, the bones in your seat going blunt and numb, your muscles filling with restless thrum. pull the comb through the same section of their hair until it travels smooth and easy and shines with your still effort. you will do this again. you will do this for every section, every strand, you will sit until the work is done. and then, you will press a kiss to the top of their head, you will squeeze their shoulders, and let them walk away.

Uma Dwivedi author photoUma Dwivedi is a sophomore at Yale University. They’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Black Warrior Review. Their other publications include Picaroon Poetry, Right Hand Pointing, Broad Recognition, and Third Wednesday. They are a prose editor for Persephone’s Daughters and a poetry reader for Winter Tangerine. Previously, they’ve been a finalist in Write Bloody‘s 2017 manuscript competition, an editorial intern with Scribner, and a poetry mentee with The Adroit Journal. Dancing Girl Press released their first chapbook, They Named Her Goddess (we called her girl), in January of 2019. Catch them watching Winnie the Pooh or the Paddington movies.

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EXCERPT FROM ‘THE FLAT WOMAN’ by Vanessa Saunders

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a plastic elvis figurine hanging from a car's rear view mirror

EXCERPT FROM ‘THE FLAT WOMAN’
by Vanessa Saunders

AT NIGHT THE WOMAN’S DOORBELL RINGS. IN HER DOORWAY, THE MAN HOLDS HIS DOG IN HIS ARMS.  

Is that a dead dog, she says, moving so the man can puncture her otherwise quiet house.  

In her living room, the man lowers his dog towards her couch cushion.  

Squinting at his whimpering dog, he says, Sartre might die. 

The man tucks a nylon blanket under Sartre’s chin. Sartre pants. Sartre ate too much chocolate cake, he says, shifting towards the woman, Thank you for being here. She says, I’m glad you came over. Sorry he got poisoned. His steps pace oddly around her living room. Are you alright, she says. Hugging her bathrobe to her waist, she wanders to the window, where her reflection is foliage, gargled vines.   

Pacing in her hallway, he says, It makes me fucking sick, how we all eat, eat until we burst, and I can’t do anything to change it… 

 

◊

 

THE WOMAN AND THE MAN LIE ON THE MAN’S BED, WATCHING TELEVISION, WHEN SUDDENLY THE MAN LEAPS OFF. 

As he begins to kneel on the carpet, the woman says, What are you doing.  

The man says, kneeling, I have a question to ask you. She stands, and he stays on his knee.  

The man says, Will you move with me to High Plains, Nevada.  

A hot pause.     

The man says, I’ve been offered a position at the world famous All-Elvis enclave.   

The woman says, Elvis.  

The man says, It’s been a life dream to mimic the king. I’m moving to High Plains, where my face will be plastered on television sets across the nation. I want you to come with me.  

The woman says, Let me google it.  

 

◊

 

THE NEXT DAY THE WOMAN MEETS HER AUNT IN A COFFEE SHOP WITH OCHRE STAINS ON THE CEILING. MAKING A FACE AS SHE SIPS HER WATERY COFFEE, HER AUNT ASKS:  

So you’re dating that guy who writes perverted love songs about birds. The woman says, I guess you could say that. The TV attached to the wall displays an image of a female’s headless body, oiled, positioned on a dinner plate. An advertisement jingle plays. Her aunt says, Don’t you think it’s a little funny you’re dating an activist. The woman says, I guess so.  

The waitress approaches them to ask if they would like anything else; her aunt looks at the woman and says no.  

I’m sure you know what you’re doing, her aunt continues, By the way, it looks like I’m about to go through another divorce. Do you have any money I could borrow. A man in a suit enters the coffee shop with blood on his shoes, tracking it as he bumbles over to the register. The woman says, I don’t have access to my university stipend anymore. Plus, I’m moving to High Plains. He got a job at one of those Elvis enclaves. 

Her aunt’s face goes slack and she hesitates, You should probably follow him there. She sniffs. Well anyways I’ve got to get going. These lawyer checks won’t write themselves, and unlike you I don’t have an Elvis Impersonator for a boyfriend. She tosses a crumpled five-dollar bill on the table, adjusting her faux-fur vest and prancing around the blood tracks in her soiled-cream stilettos.  

 

◊

 

BEFORE BOARDING THE TRAIN TO HIGH PLAINS, NEVADA, THE WOMAN AND HER PURSE ARE SEARCHED. HANDS GROPE BENEATH HER BREASTS. AN EXTRA SECOND.  

She sleeps during the ride and wakes to the slur of wheels slowing.  

From the window her eyes stare at High Plains, Nevada. Black tall buildings, a sky tinged with smoke.  

At the arrivals platform, the man waits behind a barrier. His shoulders clumped. Moving towards him. A haze of stubble over his forehead, chin. She’s clutching her potted plant from Pinecoast against her hip. 

At the edge of the throng, their bodies sizzle. As she collapses into him, she says, Home at last.  

Careening through the emptied station, he offers her a white handkerchief. To protect your lips from the ash, he says, forehead glossed with sweat.  

Luggage in tow, they sprint towards the yellow cab gunning in the shade. Heat throttles in her lungs.  

Yellow cab smashing through strange cool streets. A graffiti-phrase on the side of a concrete building reads, HIGH PLAINS, CITY OF HOMELESS COWS. She says aloud, Homeless cows. Cab driver says, In High Plains, cows run free in the city. There is nowhere for them to graze. All the nearby pastures have caught fire.  

He says, Look.  

In the street, a herd of cows exposing their slack pink tongues. Ribs poke out from their skin. The woman licks her lips.  This is us here, the man says, dispensing a wad of cash into the cab driver’s palm. In front of their new apartment complex, the woman widens her step to evade a cow snacking on the innards of a vulture.  

Vanessa Saunders author photoVanessa Saunders is a writer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She teaches writing at Loyola University, New Orleans. Her cross-genre manuscript, The Flat Woman, was a finalist for the Seneca Review‘s 2019 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Contest. That manuscript was also longlisted for the 2018 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Award. Her poems and cross-genre work have been published in PANK, Entropy, Nat. Brut, Stockholm Literary Review, Poor Claudia, Passages North, Heavy Feather Review, and other journals; her nonfiction has been published in Redivider. She studied at the University of East Anglia and San Francisco State University for her BA in creative writing and received her MFA from LSU. She is presently at work on a novel of eco-fiction.

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EMPTY PARKING LOT by Matthew Tyler Boyer

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a parking lot space with yellow lines

EMPTY PARKING LOT
by Matthew Tyler Boyer

The first of my brother’s birthdays that he wasn’t there for was three months and two days after he passed. He would have been twenty-two on the 22nd day of June, but he wasn’t. We let twenty-two lanterns go over Shanksville School. We lived a minute from the school. It has this big parking lot, it’s small compared to other schools, but so damn big when no one’s in it.  Big enough. All of our immediate family and friends came and parked and stood and let go of the burning pieces of paper that are supposed to work like tiny hot air balloons.

It was windy. We lived on a hill. The school lived on that hill. The burning paper lanterns couldn’t get off the damn hill. Some of them did, about eighteen, made it over the pine trees.

I spent eight hours of that day at work, thinking about how much I wanted to stay there and not go home to spend time with my family in a lot of burning paper.

Three of them wouldn’t take off. One got stuck in a tree. Aunt Betsy, who bought the lanterns for her first nephew, said she’d have to call the fire department. That the little fire would burn the whole tree down, and then the school. I hoped it would. Burn down everything so we could start new, fresh, the soil fertile from flames and mistakes and misjudged wind.

We laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. My grandfather sat in a lawn chair on the pavement with his oxygen tank and laughed. My uncle kicked the pebbles left behind by winter snowplows and laughed. Betsy picked up smoking again and shook smoke out from the belly. My grandmother talked to my cousins on the other side of the family, told them it’s okay to cry. His best friend showed up late, but that made sense when nothing else did. We laughed when his wouldn’t take off the ground, wanting to stay in his hands. No one cried externally. I think we all cried on the way home. All 98.6 degrees of us helped to burn down the bad of the day, but we had to wake up the next day and do it all over again, without each other.

Matthew Tyler Boyer, author photoMatthew Tyler Boyer is a writer from Western Pennsylvania. He is a student in the Creative and Professional Writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He is the author of the self published book Due to an Underwhelming Sex Education System in America. He is a fan of cats and oversized sweaters.

 

 

 

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CLOSET by Neeru Nagarajan

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open closet with hanging clothes and the torso of a mannequin on the floor

CLOSET
by Neeru Nagarajan

“This closet can hold many dead bodies. At least fifty.”

That was the first thing I told my roommate when I first met her.

The closets in our bedrooms really are huge. They are wide. They are tall. You could stack corpses up in there like sacks of rice. One on top of the other, rows of stacks. Many tall stacks. Not moving, not breathing.

My roommate uses her closet to line up faux fur coats and scarves. They’re lined up like a small army of foxes. I like to run my fingers on the soft furry surface and pretend that I am raising obediently still pets in her closet space.

But me, I keep mine simple. I walk past all the clothes, mounds of clothes strewn on my bedroom floor like defeated soldiers at the end of a long-fought battle. I slide the heavy wooden door open, get under my warm sheets, slide the door back closed, and lie still, until I fall asleep in the perfect dark.

Neeru Nagarajan author photoNeeru Nagarajan is a writer from Chennai, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext, Kitaab, The Adirondack Review, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she is at work on a novel.

 

 

 

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SQUEEZE by Nick Kolakowski

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dangling hands bathed in red light

SQUEEZE
by Nick Kolakowski

The infection needs ten hours at most to take your life, the doctors tell you. Nothing will buy you more time: not pills, not potions, not prayers, not even amputation. The fungus forms a second body under your skin, shadowing your veins, wrapping around your bones. Its spongy mass smells like roses, if you slice a bit free of the host and hold it up to your nose.
…….
If you want to live, never hold any part of it to your nose. One stray spore in your lungs is all it needs to colonize your meat. In our homes, we keep the windows shut at all times, even in the moist-blanket heat of deep June. When we step outside, most of us wear surgical masks and goggles. How did Ron and I ever think we could bring a child into a world that’s rotting like this?
…….
We didn’t think about it. We just loved, and that was gone too soon. Two hours after we said, “I do” in our living room and exchanged our plastic panda-bear rings, someone rang the bell at the top of the hill. Ron left our reception with a couple guys from his guard shift. “There’s just one down in the culvert,” he said, picking up a plastic can of gasoline and his favorite machete as he headed out the door. “You’ll see the fire when we’re done.”
…….
Swamp Things, Ron always called them. My mom, when she was still alive, preferred the term Flower Heads, because she thought it sounded funny. Sometimes all you can do when confronted with grinding horror is laugh. I refuse to give anything related to this fungus the dignity of a name, even if it has the power to kill everyone I love, or transform them into something awful.
…….
The patrol in the culvert went wrong, because more than one of those things had found their way up from the basin, drawn as always by our lights. They crept from the humming night and wrapped their hands around Ron’s friend Billy and tore him apart like overcooked chicken. We burned what was left of him the next day. Before Ron could retreat up the incline with the rest of the crew, one of the creatures swiped his forearm, leaving three shallow scratches from elbow to wrist. Barely broke the skin, but it was enough.
…….
At first, everyone smiled and said everything would be okay. And every time they did, I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming in their faces. Nothing is okay. Not anymore.

II.

When the infection first swept the city, a military platoon turned our sleepy neighborhood into a fortress, boxed by high fences topped with barbed wire. When the troops pulled out, following new orders, they left behind enough weapons and supplies to keep us self-sufficient while the power died and the surrounding hills burned. We learned how to use the rifles, and took turns at the gate that bisected our main avenue. We set up a field hospital in a ranch house beside the fence, after clearing out the furniture and draping every inch of the rooms in plastic.
…….
Following the bloodshed in the culvert, the other guards took Ron to the hospital and burned his clothes and strapped him naked to a bed in one of the rooms. (Two years into this mess, we all know what to do when anyone’s wounded.) He was already feverish, his body slippery with sweat. When I arrived, the nurses on shift refused to let me through the plastic sheeting that covered the doorway. So I struck a bargain with Jill, the nurse in charge: three gallons of fresh water—a small fortune that hot summer—in exchange for two hours in her Hazmat suit.
…….
“Take it from someone who’s lost someone,” she said as I suited up. “Getting closer won’t make it any better for you.”
…….
“We’ve all lost someone,” I told her, my voice muffled through the filter-mask, and unzipped the plastic that kept me from my husband. The hospital bed stood against the far wall; the only other furniture was a folding chair for visitors, a propane lantern for light, and a five-gallon plastic bucket for vomit. On a tray beneath the bed sat a long blade in a scuffed plastic scabbard, in case things went bad, because a gun might send a bullet through the plastic or a wall.
…….
I took a seat and reached for Ron’s hand. My heart thundering with panic. My throat tight.
…….
“Don’t touch him,” Jill called out, as she zipped the room back up. “He’s highly infectious, he’s about to start bleeding everywhere. We might have to burn that suit, and it’s not your suit, it’s mine.”
…….
“Got it,” I said, letting my hands dangle between my thighs. The suit was too big for my body, loose as a tent around my thighs and belly, and cooling sweat pooled at my waistband. The filter, cobbled together from cardboard and melted plastic and other spare bits, made my rushing breath taste like a charcoal grill.
…….
“Sweetie?” I asked Ron.
…….
“I hear you,” he said, and swallowed hard. His face pale, eyes wide and black, his cheeks shiny. I kept remembering the first week after the electrical grid failed, when we spent nights in our enormous claw-foot bathtub because it was the coldest place in the house, keeping the fear at bay by dredging up our grade-school jokes about farts and diarrhea and death. I remembered the way we held hands as we walked the neighborhood’s empty streets in daylight, squeezing in code. I love you. I’m here for you. We’ll get through this together.
…….
“Good, because this thing makes me sound like Darth Vader,” I said, before deepening my voice into the world’s least-convincing James Earl Jones impersonation: “Luke, I am your father.”
…….
“That was horrible,” he said, grinning now. His front teeth flecked with blood.
…….
“Oh, I know. But at least it made you smile.”
…….
“It did,” he said, and his eyes closed.

III.

A few days after the electrical grid collapsed for good, we saw the first Flower Heads. They came only at night, slinking on the roads toward the brightest lights. Beneath their mossy veils, sprinkled with bright petals, we sometimes recognized the eye or lip or tattoo of a lost relative. They weren’t zombies, at least not in the George Romero sense. When they bit us, we realized they still felt hunger. When we shot or cut them down, and they bled over the pavement, we realized their hearts still beat.
…….
“This fungus, or whatever it is, I bet it gets in their brains,” Ron said, after we killed a herd of them at the gate. “Plays them like a joystick. I remember watching this nature show a couple years back, it said some insect parasites can do that, control the host neurologically.”
…….
“But most of the people who get infected by this stuff,” I said, “they die. Why do some of them keep moving around?”
…….
He shrugged. “I don’t know, genetics? Who knows anything anymore?”
…….
“Any more beer in the cooler? I could use about three.”
…….
Around that time we had started drinking heavily, breaking into empty houses and grabbing every bottle we could find. Can you blame us? Sometimes we would fall asleep so drunk Ron pissed the bed, and neither of us noticed until the next morning. We spiked our orange juice with vodka at breakfast and filled our water bottles with bourbon before we headed out on patrol.
…….
After too many nasty hangovers we decided to quit, but with sobriety came insomnia, and as I lay in bed at night, my traitorous brain kept imagining its own hijacking. Did it hurt, as the fungus wormed its way inside the house of your skull, or did you just get delirious and sort of fade away? And after the takeover, did a part of you continue to exist, deep within some buzzing void? Could that part of you still see out your eyes, as you shuffled and moaned?
…….
Curled against Ron’s sleeping back, I wondered again and again if I could drive a blade through his infected head. Or would I hesitate, as so many people did? Could I keep living after taking steel to flesh I loved, stopping it for good?

IV.

When I turned to the doorway again, Jill stood on the other side of the plastic, making a show of staring at her watch. I rose from the chair, shaking the numbness from my legs, and walked over. “I need a new suit, one I can touch him in, because I’m going to treat him,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “And also painkillers, bandages, bottled water, whatever you have.”
…….
“There’s nothing we can do. You know what’s happening here.” Jill spoke so loudly I worried Ron would hear. “You need to stop thinking about this like a fixable situation.”
…….
“Just get me a suit and supplies,” I said. “I know you got crates of that stuff.”
…….
“I’m not handing anything over for a helpless case. Not when I have to treat all sorts of injuries, curable illness.”
…….
“But the rest of this hospital is empty.”
…….
The demon part of me wanted to tear through the partition and grip her by the throat. “Let’s make a deal. What do you want?”
…….
It was impossible to read her expression through the shimmering barrier. “You live in that white house on Marigold? The one with the blue shutters?”
…….
“Uh, yeah?”
…….
“It’s a big house,” she said. “It’d be nice to move away from the fence a bit.”
…….
“You’re not moving in. Not for any length of time.”
…….
“Well, it didn’t hurt to ask. You got sugar, coffee, preserves, anything sweet?”
…….
“Yeah, canned preserves in our pantry, made them myself.”
…….
“And let me guess: your pantry’s locked, right?”
…….
Who didn’t keep their supplies secure, or hidden? “The lock’s a keypad. Code is one-oh-five-five,” I said. Doesn’t really matter, I told myself. It’s not like I had much left in there, anyway.
…….
Jill nodded and disappeared from the doorway. Beneath the rustle of plastic and the hiss of Ron’s breathing I could hear her speaking to the other nurse in hushed tones, probably explaining why she had to leave for a bit.
…….
While I waited, I turned to check on Ron. His eyes closed, arms and legs trembling slightly. I wondered if the red petals would burst from his skin before he died. Do I have what it takes to kill you, baby? Do I kill myself afterwards?
…….
Jill reappeared, snapping off her gloves as she angled for the decontamination shower bolted to the ceiling of the foyer. “I promise I won’t take more than my fair share,” she called out as white liquid gushed from the showerhead, soaking her suit on its way to the drain-hole cut in the floor. “And don’t leave that room. The supply closet is locked, and Sarah won’t let you in until I’m back.”
…….
Her sterilizing complete, Jill stripped off her protective gear, changed into a pair of cargo pants and a long-sleeved shirt, snapped on a respirator and swimming goggles, and left. I took a seat again, wondering if she would keep her word about not taking too much of our stuff. Maybe it was an illusion, but I swear I could feel the heat of Ron’s fever baking through the thin plastic of my suit.

V.

Over the next eight hours my husband alternated between sweaty dozing and calling my name over and over again. His fingers and toes turned white and waxy, the skin cracking. The paleness crept up his forearms and shins like a creeping ice floe, the hair falling out along its path. At one point his back arched, rising high off the bed, and I saw the topsheet coated with hair and bits of skin. The cracks followed the paleness into the deep meat of his arms and legs and he began to bleed, little spots that quickly became black rivulets in the flickering light from the lamp on the floor.
…….
I would have given anything to heal him, but all I could do was daub at the bloody cracks with my rolled-up cloth. When the cotton soaked through I tossed it in the nearby bucket and fetched a fresh one. I thought about us walking along hot roads, our sweaty fingers entwined. Squeezing messages. I love you. I need you.
…….
By the ninth hour, Ron began to cough up his insides. His lips bloody. His face had the telltale patches now, faint webs on his cheeks and neck that gleamed against the paleness before shading into pink. I waited for them to deepen into red. At that point, my husband would start sprouting flora like a damn terrarium. He would have laughed at that comparison.
…….
Whether or not I had to put him down, I knew what would happen after he died. Our burial brigade always moved with the grace of a well-rehearsed chorus line: four men in Hazmat suits stripping the corpse, wrapping it in a large plastic bag like a piece of dry cleaning, stuffing it into a scorched metal box. The brigade carried every boxed body to the ash-pit beside the highway off-ramp, where they set it to burn atop a pyre of gasoline-soaked wood. It took six or seven hours to reduce an infected body to sterile ash.
…….
I had no idea if Ron wanted us to burn him in his two-piece black suit, or one of his favorite t-shirts. We had never talked about funeral plans. Maybe we thought it would jinx our chances at living. What did it matter what we dressed him in, anyway? I would never get to touch him again, and that was the worst part. The thought of forgetting the smell of his skin made my stomach cramp, hard and fast, as if someone had punched me.
…….
As I bent over, sucking air through my miserable filter, I noted that my new Hazmat suit was spattered with blood from Ron’s dying. For the first time I hoped Jill had taken whatever she wanted from our home, because I had wrecked this precious outfit. Sorry, Jill.
…….
Ron stopped coughing. His breathing hitched. I sat up and willed my quaking knees to hold steady. I kept my eyes locked on his face, telling myself that it was my duty to bear witness. That after he passed, I would become the sole keeper of our shared memories, all the quiet moments that formed us.
…….
I leaned close to his leaking ear and said: “I’ll keep the ring on.”
…….
“You’d better,” he whispered back. Or maybe I imagined it. The eldritch light had cast his mouth in deep shadow.
…….
I glanced toward the doorway, which framed darkness. I hoped the nurses on the other side had dozed off.
…….
As quietly as I could, I peeled away the tape that covered the seam between my right glove and the sleeve.
…….
All that matters in this life is what we give each other. That I felt your presence in the dark, and that you felt mine in return.
…….
Pulling off my right glove, I reached over and took my husband’s cold, slick hand. “I love you,” I said, and squeezed.
…….
Ron squeezed back.

Nick Kolakowski author photoNick Kolakowski is the author of the thriller novels Maxine. Unleashes Doomsday and Boise Longpig Hunting Club (both from Down & Out Books). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, North American Review, McSweeney’s, Shotgun Honey, 7×7.la, Carrier Pigeon, and other venues. He lives and works in New York City.

 

 

 

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THE SUBSTITUTE by Amy Kiger-Williams

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a ball of crumpled paper

THE SUBSTITUTE
by Amy Kiger-Williams

The children make a ball the size of a cantaloupe out of looseleaf paper and book tape. They throw it across the classroom, not listening to my adult cries of “Stop it!” All I want is quiet. These children don’t know how to behave. They are boisterous and loud, and I wonder what their parents would do if they were left alone with them for five minutes. I don’t even want to be here with these children. I am substituting, a thing I do when I am only left with ramen and frozen corn in my larder. Substituting is the emergency brake of my life, the ripcord on the parachute. It keeps me from crashing harder, falling farther than I otherwise would.

These children are wild and out of control. They are not doing the work their teacher left for them, but instead some are playing poker in the corner. Others are using the rest of the roll of book tape to encase the left sneaker of the smallest kid in the class. These children toss the ball across the room, the object whizzing toward my head. I lift my hand in the air and grasp it. It was in motion, and now it’s not. The children gasp. I am too old and worn to participate in their homemade games. I am of the adult world, I am the one who is asking them to grow up, to take things seriously, yet they don’t want to. I am falling hard and fast. I might not be the best role model for these children. They look at me and roll their eyes. I roll my eyes back at them. They are not nonplussed. They’ve seen this look in adults before.

But I hold the ball in my hand for a moment. I keep it in the air, holding it before them, a jerry-rigged, disappointing, cobbled-together world in my hand. They expect me to throw it back to them because I am the sub. I have a light bill that was due last week. I am tired of their shenanigans, and other things, as well. I already ate the last bit of pretzel dust in my lunch bag. There are no more snacks at home. They are wearing me down. I have nothing to lose. I hold the ball for a moment too long, and then, with great deliberation, I throw it at the loudest of them all.

Amy Kiger-Williams author photoAmy Kiger-Williams holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers Newark. Her work has appeared in Yale Review Online, X-R-A-Y, Ghost Parachute, and Juked, among others. She is at work on a novel and a short story collection. You can read more of her work at amykigerwilliams.com and follow her on Twitter at @amykw.

 

 

 

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LA LINEA by Beth Alvarado

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Cacti against a blue sky background

LA LINEA
by Beth Alvarado

Even though she sometimes wanders off on her own, which is strictly forbidden, of course, especially now that she is pregnant and about to pop, the Good Samaritans need people like Jillian. Well, they need all the help they can get, but especially from people like Jillian—those who have a second sense about where they can find the nearly-dying-from-thirst even if they are hiding. They want to find them or provide them with water before they become “human remains”—way before that, way before their muscles start cramping from heat stroke and dehydration, before the nausea, before the dizziness and delirium, before their brains start to sizzle in their skulls, before they try to drink sand, before. . . and, here, Jillian always stops herself from thinking, for no one likes to think about what happens to the human body in such heat. The Samaritans want to find them before they become bones. Pure and simple.
……
There are places to hide, Jillian knows, especially when a person is afraid of coyotes, both human and animal. This desert is not barren. It can be as beautiful as it is dangerous. There is the occasional mesquite tree, its leaves velvety green in spring; only a mesquite might provide enough shade. There are fields of ocotillo, their skinny fingers orange-tipped and reaching to the sky, thickets of cholla whose thorny joints will fish-hook in the skin, the ubiquitous acacia, the spiked pads of the prickly pear, and the tall dry grasses rustling. There are, Jillian has been told, over 2,000 miles of unmapped trails and that’s just in the tiny area the Samaritans call the tip of the pinky finger, trails that have been used, probably, for thousands of years and that wind down into and through steep, rocky canyons. There are giant boulders in whose shade a snake might sleep and arroyos filled with sand but that rage like rivers after the monsoons.
……
But the sun. The sun, in summer, is so bright. Relentless. It bleaches the sky of color, it bakes the skin, makes heat radiate from the ground as if from an open oven. It is a dry heat that sears the nasal passages and parches the tongue, dries even the tissues of the throat and lungs. And most of the time, there is no water. As quickly as it falls from the sky, it evaporates or seeps through sand to ancient aquifers. Even someone who has a gift for hearing water will hear only the faintest of whispers far, far below. There are reasons the snakes hunt at night. Reasons this land was not inhabited, not even by those, like the Apache, whose warriors, they say, could run through the desert all day without carrying water. Maybe they carried a miracle stone in their mouths, Jillian had always thought, and from it sprang trickles of cool water.
……
Jillian knows she makes the Samaritans nervous, and she hates to do that to them, especially her friend who has taught her to dance, but she needs silence if she’s going to hear lost or escaping souls. On this day, a cool day in early November, while the other Samaritans are leaving bottles of water and flats of cans of beans, she finds a man squatting in a tiny circle of shade. He is a small man—when he stands as if to run, she sees how small—his clothes are torn, his shoes, they have been taped together.
……
She holds her hand up, wait, and then puts the palms of her hands together as if to pray. Really, she thinks, she must seem strange to him, this very tall, very pregnant woman wearing a cowboy hat, appearing from nowhere, especially since she is saying nothing. She must look like an apparition, she thinks, but surely she does not look dangerous. She takes off her backpack. Offers him a jug of water and the sandwich she had packed for her own lunch. They share an orange because she thinks maybe his blood sugar—and maybe hers, too, now that she thinks of it—might be low.
……
His skin is much darker than hers and when he speaks it is a language that is not Spanish or English. She shakes her head and shrugs, holding her hands out to indicate she doesn’t understand. Then she holds her fingers over her lips to indicate that she cannot speak, is mute. He says Guatemala. She nods. He gives her a piece of paper with an address in Salt Lake City. ¿Donde? he asks. Where? So he does know at least a little Spanish.
……
She holds her hand up again, wait, to indicate that he should watch. She draws a line in the dirt with a stick. ¿La linea? he asks. The border? She nods. She points with her stick in the dirt. ¿México? She nods and then walks about six paces in the direction from which he has come and makes another line and an X and points at him. ¿Guatemala? She nods. Then she walks back to the Mexican border and makes another X just above it and looks pointedly at him. ¿Aqui? She nods. Yes, this is where we are. She takes two more large paces to the north and makes another X. She points at the paper with the address. ¿Utah? She nods again.
……
He is about three-quarters of the way there, she guesses. One long quarter to go. He retreats back into his puddle of shade and crouches on his haunches again. She can see his face has fallen. He takes another sip of water, but a very small one. She gives him his piece of paper. If she could speak, she would say, It is still so far, yo sé, muy lejos. Lo siento. Lo siento mucho. But she isn’t sure he would understand or that her sentiments would help. Her heart feels as if it is resting right on top of the shelf the babies make.
……
By then, two of the Samaritans have found them. They put extra tape on his shoes and give him two pairs of fresh cotton socks—because the feet are so important—and a sweatshirt because it is starting to get cold at night. They give him a bag with food and a medical kit and more water. One of them gives him some cash. Jillian eats the second sandwich she had packed for herself, feeling with each bite, piggish, although she is suddenly ravenous. The babies, she thinks, must be hungry. She watches as the Samaritans try to explain to him how to get to Tucson, where the Border Patrol Stop on the highway is and how to avoid it. Maybe hop a train in Tucson, they say, but even though they are speaking in Spanish, the man seems to understand very little.
……
Plus, Jillian sees, he is dazed. He is so alone. She knows, in the same way she knows how to find people—it comes to her maybe in the memories that are escaping them as they begin to let go of this life—she knows he has not always been on this journey alone, many of them started together, but then, suddenly, men with guns came. Long guns. Masks. Maybe los zetas. Who can tell? Maybe the Mexican police. Somehow, for some reason, he is not in the group when the men come, he is off in the trees, maybe taking a piss, and so he sees everything through green and as if from a distance. He wants to cry out, to run towards his friends to help them, to stop the men from tying their hands behind their backs, from loading them into the backs of trucks, but he must be very quiet. Even his memory is like a nightmare that awakens him, his heart pounding, then that momentary disorientation when the fabric between sleep and waking, this world and that, is tissue thin. And yet here he is, in this even newer world, still disoriented. He feels at once grateful he escaped—his head is still on his body, after all—but guilty, guilty to have left them behind. He has been so alone since then, so alone in his grief, so weary, for even when he joined small groups of other travelers, even when they were kind and shared what little they had, they did not speak his language. Like with these large white people, their mouths moved until here and there a word would come into focus. La migra. El tren. La bestia. Riding on top of la bestia at night. The woman who fell off and lost her leg. Another thing he does not want to remember.
……
Jillian takes out her small notebook and tries to draw a future for him, a way to the people in Utah who are waiting. She draws their faces, their welcoming arms. She draws tamales and tortillas. Water. She draws plenty of water. Roads for him to avoid and smaller roads to follow. A train. Yes, a train might be good. A kind person in a car once he is well past the Border Patrol point, she draws that, too. Finally, maybe most importantly—how could she have forgotten?—a tiny angel up in the corner to watch over him. Before they leave him, she folds up her map and tucks it into his hand. At this point, the point of leave-taking, she feels the sadness wash over her. This? This is all the help they are allowed to give? What about loving the stranger as you love yourself? But, yes, by law, she knows this is all they can do, and staying with him or walking with him might only draw attention. She puts her hand over her heart in parting. She gives him another orange.

Beth Alvarado author photo“La Linea” is excerpted from Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales, by Beth Alvarado, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in September 2020.  Alvarado is the author of three earlier books: Anxious Attachments (finalist, Oregon Book Awards, and long-listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award), Anthropologies: A Family Memoir, and Not a Matter of Love.

 

 

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WELCOME TO TRAIN WRECK by Catherine Parnell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

person sitting on a train

WELCOME TO THE TRAIN WRECK
by Catherine Parnell

You cannot cross train tracks without holding your breath, nor can you drive over a bridge without a lungful of air. Your children witness your fears, think it’s a game, and they, too, hold their breath going over tracks or bridges. You would like to tell them it’s not a game, like Duck Duck Goose or Red Rover, but you decide that the universe will drop its own bomb of terror on them, and what possible good would come of your own unburdening?

At the playground you circle the swings, hoping to find an old wooden seater, but no such luck, so stop living in the past, please. These days everything is built for safety—full buckets for babies who can barely hold their heads up, half-buckets for toddlers with wobbly balance, swing and slide seats for the brave and daring under-tens, because no one wants to get caught dead on a swing after that. Your five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter screech as they run to the blue rubber swings, kick off, and hit high velocity. You did this when you were their age. There was a time when you believed you could fly if only you pumped high enough. You still believe this, but it has nothing to do with swings. You aren’t sure if you need wings or stronger legs.

Although she has been dead for a very long time, Donna peers down at you from the blue and green hard plastic climbing structure topped by a fort big enough for four and no more. You tell your kids to keep swinging as you climb up the ramps and ladders toward Donna. What are you doing here, you ask, and you’ve got one eye on her and one eye on your kids. You’re a little happy and a little unnerved—she’s still following you around, but you’re as used to it now as you were in first grade.

Donna’s wearing a plaid skirt, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, frilly socks, and scuffed saddle shoes. Her black barrette is askew and she’s sucking on a dark strand of her hair. You’re not supposed to do that, you tell her, and she spits the hair out of her mouth.
…….
Oh, grow up, she says.
…….
Yes, you say wearily. I’ve done that.
…….
Aren’t you the lucky one, she says, licking her finger and rubbing at a scuff mark on her shoe.
…….
You think so?
…….
Nyet, she says.
…….
Your son and daughter run up the ramp and ask who you’re talking to. Your ripped jeans and baggy sweater make you look like an itinerant, and you’re pretty sure you haven’t washed your hair in a few days. You make googly eyes at your kids.
…….
Myself, you say.
…….
You’re crazy, says your son.
…….
You are crazy, Donna says.
…….
Maybe, you say, and your son laughs. Donna looks mad, like the time your first-grade teacher told her she’d never get to second grade if she didn’t learn to read. Mrs. Piasecka paired you with Donna for reading time that day and every day thereafter until spring dropped by for a seasonal hello, and you all went outside to eat lunch, and Donna announced she could read, and everyone clapped, because everyone loved Donna, especially you. Then you all sat on the warm green grass pulling food from your lunchboxes (yours had a tractor on it), and when you’d all eaten, Mrs. Piasecka passed around homemade molasses cookies because you were wonderful children.
…….
You never hated molasses cookies before, but you sure do now.
…….
When the playground loses its thrill, you and your children walk to the supermarket to buy milk and Smiley Face Fries. Donna sits in the frozen food aisle, eating cookie dough ice cream. Now what? you ask. Your son turns to you and says, I want ice cream. Donna grins. It’s really good, she says. You ought to buy some. You never know, do you?
…….
You put your arm around your son and walk away. How about a candy bar? you ask, and your daughter wants one, too, so you let them pick and they get big chocolate bars and they eat them on the way home, and then you have to wash their dirty little faces, but you don’t mind so much. You serve them hot dogs and fries and big glasses of milk, and your daughter spills her milk, and you sop it up, telling her not to cry. It’s just milk you say. Your daughter asks if there are enough cows in the world so that everyone gets milk. It’s not that simple, you tell her. Milk can be expensive. Some people can’t buy it.
…….
Your son announces he wants a cow. That way he will always have milk. You tell him he has to learn to milk a cow first, and you promise him a trip to a dairy farm. When you were in first grade a local farmer brought a cow to the playground, and everyone in class learned to milk a cow, but Donna was the only one who squirted milk right into her mouth. Mrs. Piasecka gave Donna three gold stars on her pink construction paper balloon that was taped to the Look At Me wall. Your balloon was blue and you had just as many stars as Donna, mostly from getting high marks on class handouts and clapping dusty erasers. If you’d known you could have earned stars for drinking milk straight from the cow you would have done it, even though the cow smelled like shit and hay. Even then you knew the value of awards, especially public commendation.
…….
Donna never had milk money, so you shared your milk with her. The two of you sat in the cafeteria with two straws stuck into one carton and counted the number of slurps it took to drink all the milk. Now you can’t remember how many, but you do remember Mrs. Piasecka telling you how nice it was to share, and she stuck a gold star on your blue balloon. Your mother let you give your old play clothes—overalls and t-shirts from Sears—to Donna, who was a size smaller than you—that was a kind of sharing. Your mother was big on charitable causes, but not so big that you were allowed to go to Donna’s house. When you wanted to play with Donna, your mother insisted Donna visit your house. Your father just shrugged. Your mom rules the roost, he said. Now you get it—your mom was a chicken. Or a cow. Probably a sheep.
…….
Donna sits in the rocking chair by the kitchen’s bay window, watching your children eat. Your mother was a product of her time, she says.
…….
What time? you ask, and your daughter says, Daddy? Dadeeee?
…….
You remember your mother looking at Donna and telling you she was just off the boat, which you were sure was not a good thing in your mother’s eyes. Your father was right, your mother ruled with an erratic iron fist, which is something Donna, had she grown up, would have told you is exactly what she and her family were fleeing from when they left the USSR or Russia or whatever it was then. Donna always whispered U-S-S-R in your ear and then looked around to see who was watching. You thought the USSR was a battleship like the USS Wisconsin or something, but your father, home on leave, said it used to be a country, more or less, and not a great one at that.
…….
Every country has its ups and downs.
…….
That night as you’re reading to your children, Donna sits beneath the window and clutches your son’s red and white striped monkey. Let me read to them, she demands, but you shake your head. When the story is finished you tuck the children in and kiss them goodnight, leaving the nightlight on.
…….
They should say their prayers, Donna says as you walk out of the room and shut the door, and you say, Look where it got me. The two of you sit down in the hallway and she starts in on what she tells you every time she shows up, that she was in the back seat of the car next to the picnic basket, her father was driving and the train hit the car hard like a Batman punch Pow! Blam! Her mother called Jesus Save Us, and then the car spun off the road, hit the arch of the bridge and nosedived into the water, and was it ever black, Donna says, but we hit the river bottom and the water came in and you grabbed my hand and we went out the window.
…….
Donna, you say. She stands up and shakes her head, already denying you.
…….
You know I wasn’t in the car, you say.
…….
I have to go now, she says.
…….
Jesus, you say. I wasn’t there.
…….
Eleven, she says. That’s how many sips it took to empty the milk carton. And she’s gone.
…….
You wanted to go on the picnic with Donna’s family, but your mother said No.  Your father said the world was a big place and you’d better get used to it, so go have some fun. But there was no answer when you telephoned Donna to say you were allowed to go. When news of the accident spread your mother took you straight to church and told you to pray for Donna’s poor soul, so you bowed your head and asked God to bring Donna back, and he did, and now you are stuck with her and her stories, which have grown old and maybe even a little boring, but it would be a lie to say that you wished Donna would go away. She is the last time God answered your prayers, and he has a lot to answer for, not that you’re asking. So you hold your breath when you go over train tracks and bridges, and you let your kids think it’s a game instead of telling them to get ready for a world full of sad stories that don’t mean a thing unless they happen to you.

Catherine Parnell author photoCatherine Parnell teaches at Southern New Hampshire University in the MFA program and at Grub Street in Boston. She is the editor for Consequence Magazine, and her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Tenderly, TSR: The Southampton Review, Post Road, Baltimore Review, Redivider, and other publications. Parnell also works as an independent consultant in communications, writing, and the arts, and is the author of The Kingdom of His Will.

 

 

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AUTO CORRECTED by Jackie Craven

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

abstract image of cracked phone screen in black, purple, and magenta

AUTO CORRECTED
by Jackie Craven

Today has dawned a nude beginning. The male truck idles
at the curfew and the bruisepaper waits on the porch. Already
children climb the pill to their elementary scheme. Today
has dreamed a new pretending. I rub my sighs and put coffins
on to brew. If only I were yogurt! Gazing out my chicken window,
I watch a flock of wretches necking in the trees. Somewhere
a lawnmower begins to whore. Today has donned a blue
bikini. Goblins scream and squeals scamper across the dawn.
If it weren’t for the chills, I’d quit my throb. Sometimes
I wonder if I’ll have enough ink to carry on. So many sweats!
I cheat my toast and rush to worry, drinking 65, 70, 82. Today
has spawned another sinning. Lions flash in my mirror
and everywhere I turn, white helmets. Raised pistils.
Scowling faces of two dozen—peonies?

Jackie Craven Author photoJackie Craven is the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Agni, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, River Styx, and Salamander. She’s worked for many years as a journalist covering architecture, design, and cultural travel for various publications.

 

 

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GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS by Tatyana Sundeyeva

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Street view of an eclectic shop window

GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS
by Tatyana Sundeyeva

It starts with a ring you buy at an antique shop in your neighborhood which you hadn’t noticed before—a dusty little place of creaky floorboards and a name to match: Gaslight and Shadows.

When you see it, gleaming at you from behind a pane of glass covered in fingerprints long left behind, you’re not sure why it feels familiar. Something about the tarnished silver and the large pink stone haloed by small green gems reminds you of a lily pad on a cool still lake.

The shopkeeper sees you looking. She sidles up and offers to open the display, to which you’d normally object. I’m just looking around, you’d say. Passing time while I wait to meet a friend, you wouldn’t add because you’d want to create the illusion that you might possibly buy something, that you’re not just looking for a place to stay out of the chill for fifteen minutes.

But your lily pad sparkles from its stand, a slim halved finger of blue velvet.

You point to it—so unlike you to be so direct, your husband would say—and with a jingle of keys, the shopkeeper leans in and pulls out your ring, your lilypad.

You’re not sure why it would fit. You’ve noted with some shame that your fingers are of above-average girth. It’s not flesh, you told your husband when you went to try on wedding bands, it’s the bones. The knuckles are wide and knobby, inelegant. A washer woman’s hands, you joked and he laughed and you stared at the things with distaste.

But you slip it on now and your lily pad glides over bone to settle firmly against your skin, its band nestled in the soft pad of your ring finger.

The shopkeeper unpacks her array of compliments and backstory, Rare piece, 18th century engagement ring, you won’t find a better price, it looks like it was made for you, but you hold out your blossomed hand before you, twisting it a little to watch the light bounce off the stone.

When you meet Sonia, you are cradling a cup of English breakfast tea in your hands, peeking every now and then at the gem that has temporarily displaced your engagement and wedding rings to the opposite hand. You watch it scintillate—catch the light and echo it—on the cup’s dull grey porcelain.

Sonia seems nervous, fidgeting with her phone lying face down on the table. You’d noticed she’d been swimming religiously but now that she appears in a tight new athletic ensemble, you appreciate how thin she’s gotten, how slim and light. How the bones in her face push at taut skin.

She talks about the usual: the office intrigues you’ve missed out on, the questionable parenting choices of mutual childed friends, and men. She hasn’t been dating much lately. Nothing juicy to report, she laughs, a peculiar note in her voice, her mouth strange with secrets.

She asks, How are you doing? and her eyes finally cease flitting about to focus on yours.

When she asks about the ring, your lips curl into a smile, and you tell her, It’s new, kind of. And when she asks, New to you? you just laugh and grip your cup tighter until your tea grows cold.

When you return, Dave is sitting on the couch but the TV is off and you are surprised to find him home at dinnertime because his meetings with Japan (or was it Australia?) now take him later and later into the night.

He asks, Had a good lunch? And when you don’t reply he follows up with, We need to talk, his eyes still focused on the dark screen, a window onto a black moonless night, and all you can think about is how he still prefers to be called Dave. How he’d introduced himself that way in college and how it had been fine then, if a little conventional, and how you’d imagined the man he’d become, the David he’d grow into: strong, proud, fertile.

There’s something you should know, he says, as you pull the long cool needles out of your bag, relishing the way your lily pad gleams even in the gloom of your twilit living room. Taking a seat on your favorite armchair, the one you tell yourself you’ll use to breastfeed, you begin to knit—something tiny and blue, for the someday future—because that’s always helped you focus in the past and he says, Since when do you knit, and Look at me, trying to find your eyes with his, but you are elsewhere now, fixated, watching the gleaming needles respond to every move of your wrists.

How undignified to take a name like David—a king’s name, a warrior’s—and break its legs, turn it into the sound of groveling.

The needles click, sharp and efficient, and your lily pad flashes as your hands move deftly, of their own accord now, perfectly synchronized, transforming blue yarn into something real. Turning nothing into a form, a shape of your intent.

I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it’s gotten serious, he says, as though he believes it, as though it could’ve been anything but deliberate, as though a heart can beat by accident.

Still looking down, your eyes shift out of focus as you settle into the pattern, the needles working at the speed of muscle memory.

But you were wrong then, in college. He is no David and never will be, and she is no Bathsheba, and as your needle sinks in, meeting soft flesh, your laugh is not your own, but familiar. Your hands rest, the needles warm where the grip is tightest, the stone somehow still gleaming in the dimness of the room and you remember something the jeweler said when you were choosing an engagement ring, how light can pass through a diamond in two ways, either as white light or as fire and you wonder is that what this is? Is this fire?

Tatyana Sundeyeva, author headshotTatyana Sundeyeva, originally from Chisinau, Moldova, is a Russian-American writer and novelist living in San Francisco. She has just completed her first novel. Find her online at TatyanaWrites.com and on Twitter @TeaOnSundey. This is her first published fiction.

 

 

 

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STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD by J Pascutazz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

starry night above a large city

STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD
by J Pascutazz

Shouldn’t it let me buy everything
and pay with negative interest?
All those swirling golden stars
teeming, unbalanced in the sky
Since I was Vincent in a past life
I told the collector on the phone
A measured man. Had he dealt
with my unlikely work before?
I did the masterpieces everyone loves
now worth billions in museums
then shot myself dead in the heart
before I made a single cent
So I had unlimited credit—I
reasoned—with the starry dynamo
The nauseating spinning started
when Mr. Money didn’t buy it
He sympathized. I was unmoored
lost in a cosmos of pure color
I’d eat cadmium yellow orange
wash it down with turpentine
I threatened, before hanging up
I walked to the local park
scissoring the starry sky
into a million irrevocable
pieces, and in the dark
dug a hole and buried it
along with the bill
in the ultramarine
shadow of the Cypress
and went about my art

Author photo of J PascutazzJ Pascutazz is a non-binary writer with Asperger’s syndrome, a graduate of Bennington College, and was raised in rural Ohio. J is a resident of Brooklyn. J’s work has been published by Right Hand Pointing, Dime Show Review, Miracle Monocle, and others, and is forthcoming in The Fabulist Words & Art.

 

 

 

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TWO FLASH PIECES by Savannah Slone

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TWO FLASH PIECES
by Savannah Slone
rear view of person in yellow slicker on snowy sidewalk

ON WHITEOUTS & FATAL SHAPES

I saw it happen before I heard it. My phone dropped from my grip, pulling my earbuds out and to the ground with it. A cellist played in my head. My breath hot, fogging and unfogging my glasses. I licked my chapped lips before doubling over to retch onto my rubber boots.

It had been snowing that morning. What some called a whiteout. Each step to work was a near-silent crunch. Unable to make anything out in front of me, I was one of the only employees going in because of how much had accumulated overnight. I would have been paid if I had stayed home, but I didn’t believe in taking unearned money. Working kept me busy, anyway. Keeping my mind occupied was the only way I could avoid unraveling since the accident.

Two sets of headlights came into view in front of me. A Jeep, at a stop sign, spun out. A snowplow, coming on perpendicular, didn’t slow down. Didn’t know to slow down. The Jeep’s brakes couldn’t hold up on the ice. The plow couldn’t see them coming. It was out of their control and now someone was dead. I had never witnessed a car get crushed into something so small and unrecognizable. There was smoke and a sizzling. The driver of the plow got out and ran, in slow motion, to his vehicle’s victim. He tried prying, what might or might not have been the door, open but there was no point in optimism for the surely distorted body. The man ran toward me. The Chariots of Fire theme song played, which made me chuckle. His murmuring’s volume increased as he grew nearer. I couldn’t hear him over that song, over my heartbeat—my temples pulsing. Vomit lodged in-between my teeth. I spat onto the ground.

“Call 911! Call 911!” He shrieked, too close to my face, before running back.

My eyebrows drew closer. I looked down at my empty hand, then my gaze fell to the ground. It was covered in the snow that kept falling. The snow that didn’t let up, even after it had pocketed a life. I ungloved my right hand, but my screen was too saturated to dial.

My wife, two winters earlier, died in a car accident on a day not unlike this one. As the Jeep morphed into its new, fatal shape, before my eyes, I finally felt released. My grief transformed into a sadness for whoever loved this individual as much as I loved her. I hoped it had been as instantaneous for her as it was for them. I hoped neither felt the pain that losing them unearthed. Approaching ambulance sirens overpowered the man’s sobs. I set my phone back down and tossed my glasses onto the ground, too. Red flashing lights came around the corner. Red flashing lights that I never called. I laid down and let the white everything consume my vision until my eyes couldn’t stand it anymore.

◊◊

PARCHMENT, ABSORPTION, & SPLINTERED PALMS
After Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhone” (1888)

Every night I was intermittently woken up by a flashlight peeking into the small window in my door. A confirmation of my staying put. Double checking my pulse without having to hold my wrist. I’d been there for years. Set schedule. Second hand desk that you can’t brush up against without getting splinters. The walls and floor, off white. My bed sheets are pale blue. My smock, pale blue. Most of the time, I wish I could be pale blue, too. My mind winning marathons, winning trauma responses. This is my box of unhealthy coping mechanisms. This is the box where they’ll bury my empty body. Pins in my mouth, in my eyes. Maybe ashes to be spread, spilled, swallowed. I am a pacing nothing. At night, the internal hum dimmed. Everything outside of my body grew quieter at night, too. The river outside continued flowing—still reflecting, still evolving. From my encased window high above humanity, I had an even better view of the moon than the people who sat on park benches, who walked their dogs, who knifed open champagne on their anchored sailboats. I preferred moon slivers to full moons. I liked when the water balanced out and I could see every glowing bit of the above resting on its surface. I’d often stay up all night trying to replicate it on canvas. Trying to capture it in my hand. Trying to tuck it away—to save it for when I couldn’t see out. When the sun rises, I can still feel the constellation aftermath on my skin; yes, I am made of stars. My bones are these window bars. This is my rib cage. I am encased. Some people like to watch the sun rise and set; I prefer the in between. Yes, I am an in between. When your mind doesn’t fit the mold, it is the ever-changing phases of the night sky that show me I’ll be okay. Their flashlights walked me outside. Their fingers on my pulsing wrists. I soak up the night. I put it on paper. I save it for later.

Headshot of Savannah SloneSavannah Slone is a queer writer, editor, and English professor who currently dwells in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Paper Darts, The Indianapolis Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in Chief of Homology Lit. Savannah is the author of An Exhalation of Dead Things (CLASH Books, 2021), Hearing the Underwater (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and This Body is My Own (Ghost City Press, 2019). She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at www.savannahslonewriter.com.

 

Image credit: Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash

WELCOME TO MY GALLERY OF GENUINE LOOK-ALIKES by Anne McGouran

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Street with stone buildings and pedestriansWELCOME TO MY GALLERY OF GENUINE LOOK-ALIKES
by Anne McGouran

1

That grating drone is the wind off Nottawasaga Bay whipping along Main Street. The Freshii outlet just duct-taped their front window and Happy Hooka Bait & Tackle closed one hour early. As I struggle to stay vertical, a Gandalf lookalike falls into step beside me. We walk abreast for several blocks and I stare at his perfectly shaped cigarette ash. He turns into the Molly Bloom Pub where he’ll trot out his magic-cigarette-ash bar trick for all the old vets and rooming house drifters.

In the Arboretum, a man who sleeps rough near the meditative labyrinth is examining the Trembling Aspen’s memorial plaque. Arms around its pale white trunk, he’s a dead ringer for the epic-bearded cigarette ash guy. Homeless people make me nervous, sad and guilty but I try to make conversation. “Hey man, did you know that the aspen has hands down the most restless foliage of any tree? My tree atlas says its leaves pivot in the slightest breeze. No kidding.”

2

Easter egg hunts on the windy Plains of Abraham, sugar shack excursions for boiled maple sap rolled in fresh snow… I always pictured my mother’s Quebec City childhood as a kind of lost paradise. The year after she died, I retraced my mother’s childhood haunts. Still standing were J. A. Moisan General Store (now an ultra-hip foodie haunt) and Le Capitole recital hall (now a Beaux-Arts theatre with a “Who has not looked for calm in a song?” frieze above the loge seating). I lingered in front of her old house on Saint-Gabriel: a three-story Georgian, the green shutters gone, half-moon fanlight miraculously intact.

Eighty-three-year-old cousin Annette was my mother’s last surviving relative. During our brief visit, I was struck by her resemblance to Madame Hermine, the flirtatious landlady in Children of Paradise… the same tight curls and chain of office necklace. Annette’s idea of haute cuisine was a 7-Up and a “Super-Club” sandwich at Snack Bar St-Jean. After dinner, she executed a soft-shoe on the rain-slicked cobblestones while warbling “Je cherche un homme bon caractère. S’il est galant et beau, envoyez le moi. Expérience, pas nécessaire.” (I’m looking for a man of good character. If he’s gallant and handsome send me to me. No experience necessary.) Annette stopped hiccuping after fennel tea and a shot of Harvey’s Bristol Cream then stared off into the distance. “After Sunday Mass we’d walk down to Basse-Ville for tartelettes à la crème de citron and boules au rhum. The baker’s twine cut into my fingers when I carried that big cake box up the hill… a white box with blue letters that said ‘Patisserie Kerhulu. ’”

3

Quebec’s Charlevoix region is notorious for its hilly terrain. While we were admiring the north shore’s panoramic views, our Dodge Caravan’s back axle began braking and revving as if possessed. “Cripes!” my husband said. “I know you had your heart set on whale watching but we’d better head back… stick to the concession roads.”

We made a last-ditch stop in the village of Les Éboulements overlooking the St Lawrence River. Inside a dove grey, shotgun-style barn, an elaborate diorama overflowed its papier-mâché backdrop. Hand-painted terracotta figurines, tiny country chapels and cedar-roofed shacks arranged in tiers. A replica 19th century village of millers, bakers, lamplighters, town criers, knife sharpeners, aioli makers—all daydreaming, pontificating and haggling.

A pale, freckled girl named Adélonie wrapped our purchases in butcher paper and twine and affixed a label: “Les Santons de Charlevoix.” When I asked if the santonnier modeled his figurines after real people she half-shrugged, half-winked. Later that afternoon in Quebec City, a mechanic replaced our car’s universal joint and threw in complimentary maple sugar candies.

Twenty-eight santons populate our front room bookcase: a bearded peddler with a samples case; a midwife balancing swaddling clothes in an olivewood cradle; a village fool in a rucked-up nightshirt. The baker woman carrying a pannier full of bread and cakes bears an uncanny resemblance to cousin Annette who died twenty years ago. The same sultry-avaricious vibe.

Headshot of Anne McGouranAnne McGouran’s stories and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Account, CutBank, The Smart Set, Mslexia, Switchgrass Review, Gargoyle, Queen’s Quarterly (cited in Best Canadian Essays 2019). She lives in Collingwood, Ontario where she has developed a fascination with ice huts and orchard ladders.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Scott Webb on Unsplash

THE ART OF MAKING ANGELS by Marilee Dahlman

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THE ART OF MAKING ANGELS
by Marilee Dahlman

Blurry black-and-white chair

I’ve seen two angels and both were named Reginald.

The spirits appeared as a consequence of my life’s work: dentistry. I came by the profession naturally, as my father was a blacksmith in a small Missouri town. Before heading west, people needed help with their teeth as much as they needed wagon axles. And Pa was no butcher. As a child, time and time again, I witnessed his God’s gift with pliers.

“Nice ‘n slick,” he’d mutter from the side of his mouth, one hand gripping a customer’s jaw, his other hand wielding the steel tool. I’d have both palms on the customer’s sweaty forehead, pinning the head back against the high-backed chair. Pa’s knuckles would whiten and I’d close my eyes tight. Seconds later, I’d hear the pebbly sound of a tooth hitting the concrete floor, and the rattle of the pliers landing on the workbench. I’d tilt the head to let the blood stream down the chin.

I’d asked once, “What happens if the bleeding won’t stop?”

“They become angels,” Pa said. “Most of them.”

I was about twelve when I saw the first angel, Reginald Cooper. He had a wide head, a sandpaper voice, and eyes darker than a rabbit’s. When he sat back in the chair, he spit a stubby cigar to the floor. I tried to avoid touching the wart on his sweaty temple.

“I want it done quick,” Reginald said.

But it must have been a sticky one because Pa wrestled with that tooth for a while. Reginald fainted dead away after eleven minutes. His head felt damp and heavy. I held him until Pa grabbed my shoulder and said, “Leave him be, now.”

Mrs. Cooper showed up and so did the undertaker. Mrs. Cooper gave a few coins to the undertaker and a few more to Pa, even though Reginald had already paid. Pa flipped me a silver three-cent piece. That evening, I walked into town and stopped in front of the undertaker’s. Slowly, above the building, Mr. Cooper himself appeared, his outstretched arms shimmering, his whole body floating straight up to the stars. It was late and I’d had no dinner, but still, I saw what I saw. The next month, Mrs. Cooper married my father.

I must have turned the three-cent coin over in my pocket a thousand times, but I never spent it.

Five years later, I secured a position with the Army, Union side, assisting a doctor. Afterwards, despite my considerable skills and experience, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery rejected my application. I reckoned I could set up a shop anyway and make a success of it. I settled in Chicago, and found that I didn’t mind a big city where I could blend in like a drop in a river. My trade card said: “Painless, perfect, prompt tooth extractions! Always reasonably priced! Patients treated like angels!”

When I first started, I employed a strong lad who held down my patients. The patients were mostly stockyard workers, women from factories, and prisoners in chains. I took advantage of scientific advancements, experimenting with laughing gas (never worked well), ether, oil of cloves and a cocaine solution injected directly into the gum. Such products made it easier to work alone. I bought a drill operated by a foot treadle. I imported the finest gold leaf to push into cavities after extracting rot. I acquired a reclining chair, the latest design, a pump-type hydraulic.

My customers became wealthier. Some fathers, on the occasion of a daughter’s 18th birthday or wedding day, would pay to have all of her teeth removed and replaced with beautiful false teeth that would never give her trouble. I gave them exactly what they wanted.

I regularly advertised in the Tribune—Enjoy gentle dental surgery by polite professional!

Other dentists fill their offices with carnivore taxidermy, scientific diagrams of blood vessels and nerves, and even human skulls. Not me. I have oak-framed pictures of Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists, and keep fresh-cut flowers in painted porcelain vases. Vials and instruments stay locked in a cabinet until my patient is in the chair. I do keep a variety of books on the shelves, to lend my office a scholarly look, including my favorite text, Skinner’s Treatise on Human Teeth. The metalwork is all matching bronze—the handles on drawers, the gaslight sconces on the walls, and the lock on the door.

Last spring, a new Reginald—Reginald Dupree—opened a dentistry across the street. His advertisements claimed that he graduated third in his class from the University of Michigan’s dental school. One day, Reginald Dupree visited my office, a hand to his cheek. No warts on him; his young skin would feel smooth to touch.

“Can’t do it myself,” he said.

“I’ll treat you like an angel.” I smiled. “Now?”

“Ha! Too many customers today.” Reginald patted a gold watch into his vest pocket. “I’ll set an appointment for tomorrow at two.”

Before leaving, Reginald tapped the doorknob a few times, and turned back to me. He tilted his head and smiled, like an adult might if he sees a child do something wrong. “You practice without the proper education, madam.”

I didn’t answer.

“There’ll be laws soon. And no exceptions.” Reginald put on his hat. The ring on his pinkie flashed. “But perhaps I could use you in my office. We’ll see.”

That evening, I walked along the lake. I enjoyed the weight of my wool suit against the night cool, and the way a copper nodded politely as he passed. I rubbed my thumb against the old three-center, looked at the stars, and thought about throwing the coin into the water. Pa was no butcher, I decided; nor was I. It was just that, now and then, you meet someone who’s better off an angel.

Marilee Dahlman author photoMarilee Dahlman grew up in the Midwest and studied English at the University of Minnesota. She spent ten years studying and practicing law in New York. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. When not writing or working, she enjoys movies, art museums, and getting outside on the hiking trails or her bike. Her other short stories have recently appeared in The Colored Lens, Five on the Fifth, Metaphorosis, and The Saturday Evening Post.

 

 

 

 

Image Credit: “Historic Dentistry” by Clive Varley on CCSearch

NO REST, NOT HERE by Connor Goodwin

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NO REST, NOT HERE
by Connor Goodwin

dancing flames

NIGHT ONE

The fire writhes, manic in a straightjacket. I too feel an appetite for all things.

I managed to open a bottle of beer with two rocks—modern man and the fire in his belly.

The beer rebels and foams, a harmless volcano.

It knows its criminal, this beer.

Night approaches. All the usual: purple, orange, blue. And then everything at once. Big black nothing, Conor Oberst sings.

Started the fire too early. Tent poles, broken but taped. A lopsided pyramid, instead of one forgiving arc. I zip up my sarcophagus.

The embers have a forcefield of heat that outdoes the light. If I wish to write, I will be burned.

I’m not far off the highway. Every truck frightens me.

 

NIGHT TWO

I knew it would be cold. But knowing something means very little.

The embers in the sky could outlast those of my fire. I might burn writing this. I’m on the last page. Imagine, all these words burning. The fire would go a little longer. A few minutes. Nothing more. Hours, months of writing, gobbled up by my most faithful reader.

 

NIGHT THREE

Nothing is buried here. Everything is beaten, skinned, feasted upon. Tread lightly.

The first bone I found was clean of fur and meat. A crow nearby cawed and flew off into the buttermilk sky, wings beating in my ear.

The sun shrugged over the first mountain, and then the next. Turn back.

I gathered wood and came back with bones empty of marrow.

Tufts of animal fur flitted through camp like dandelion wings. What beast?

The sight of trash set me at ease. Mountain Dew bottles, candy wrappers, the many plastics of this world. These were things I knew.

I am a forensic scientist trained by Hollywood horror. Images from that buttered darkness (dull chainsaws, slashed tires, beards dribbled with chewing tobacco) visit me here in this boneyard once known as a picnic site.

 

NIGHT FOUR

Solitude. I wish I didn’t write that word. I have nothing to say about it other than I’ve had a lot of it.

 

NIGHT FIVE

Those with many rings write history. Elms write poetry. Wet wood, the kind that blows smoke, writes headlines.

Best known for tragedies, fire has authored the end of cities. Remember Chicago, the cow, the water tower.

Leave a mark like a fire would. Which is to say, no signature but itself. Recognizable to all, but only legible to the fire department.

The final burn. Let the sleeping pills settle. Throw on a free newspaper from the gas station and watch it bloom into black. Watch fire ants race over its petals and fly into the wordless night.

They say democracy dies in darkness, but lots of things live there too.

 

NIGHT SIX

If you listen close, the fire says all kinds of things. Sometimes it says Rice Krispies in a bowl of milk. Sometimes car wheels on a gravel road. What would the fire say if I burned my notebook? Would it hiss or sigh or die? Or would it simply burn.

 

Headshot of Connor GoodwinConnor Goodwin is a writer and critic from Lincoln, Nebraska. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Poets & Writers, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, X-R-A-Y, Back Patio Press, and elsewhere. He is working on a novel. Follow @condorgoodwing.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: heymarcela on CCSearch

THE GREATEST LANDSCAPE HE HAD EVER SEEN by César Valdebenito, translated by Toshiya Kamei

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Barren desert landscape
THE GREATEST LANDSCAPE HE HAD EVER SEEN
by César Valdebenito
translated by Toshiya Kamei

In the summer midday, he was seated on a blanket in his underwear, with his boots on. His horse was five or six meters away while his gaunt dog Toby was asleep. He had turned on the radio and was listening to the news, but twenty minutes later he got bored. About fifty meters away his flock of sheep wandered. Robust, peaceful, and healthy, they kept grazing. He grabbed his rifle, which he had brought back from Pueblo Seco, Mexico a few years earlier. He had always wanted to try it, but he had never found the time or the opportunity. He was one of the best shooters, if not the best in that mountain range and had always wanted to know how good he was. What had stopped him? He had no answers. So he took aim at the nearest tree. The shot sounded and the leaves shook. The dog woke up and the horse jumped. Then, with great deliberation, he aimed toward his herd. He gunned down a sheep with the first shot. The horse trotted away. With amazing quickness, he aimed at the horse. For a moment he followed it with the crosshairs and, seconds later, knocked it down with another shot. The horse kicked and lay there. He kept aiming at the flock and knocking down sheep. Each time one fell, he lowered his rifle and gazed into the landscape. He felt the warm air as the sun scorched the earth. He felt drops of sweat forming on his forehead. He continued firing for three or four hours. After that, the flock had been halved. The dog watched the sheep raise their heads and then continue to graze. As the dog observed, sometimes they collapsed or disappeared behind the horizon. “See, Toby? I’m very good, aren’t I?” said the young man. Then his cousin arrived on horseback. He came full gallop. He stopped about thirty meters away and shouted at him what the fuck he was doing. “You’re nuts! You’ve gone totally nuts! Bernardo!” shouted the cousin. But the young man aimed at him, fired, and gunned down the horse he was riding. The cousin ran out and got lost in the plain. In the middle of the afternoon, gunshots were heard throughout the region. The young man had already been surrounded by PDI agents and public security officers. But still, from time to time, he loaded the rifle and aimed at a sheep. The last image he would ever see was his dog looking at those sheep and the sheep looking at him. In the end he would think this was the greatest landscape he had ever seen in his life.


Born in 1975 in Concepción, Chile, César Valdebenito is a poet, writer, and essayist. His books include the novels La vida nunca se acaba (2017) and Una escena apocalíptica (2016), as well as the short story collections El bindú o la musa de la noche (2017) and Pequeñas historias para mentes neuróticas (2018).

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in venues such as Abyss & Apex, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Helios Quarterly Magazine, and Samovar.

 

Image credit: Ivars Krutainas on Unsplash

TOAD by Marianne Villanueva

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TOAD
by Marianne Villanueva

green toad isolated on white background

I’m a spotter. I’m good at spotting people, what their weaknesses are.

I look for what feels familiar, it’s that simple. It’s that easy.

I see you, gentle men and women. I see you.

You may smile smile smile. Always smile smile smile.

But all the time I’m waiting. Waiting for you to slip.

I’m thinking about power. Always thinking about power.

 

The First Mark

“Come with us, we’ll show you,” I say to the short man.

“I don’t trust you, I don’t know you,” he says, pulling slightly away from me. “Why should I go with you?”

“Sounds like a Wookie,” I say to Joe.

“Sometimes,” I say to the short man, going right up to him, “sometimes you just have to get out.”

Victims aren’t always helpless. Does that sound like an oxymoron?

Is it strange, that I’m asking?

The world is made up of those who control and those who are controlled by. That’s just the way it is. No use, as they say, wishing for the moon.

Perhaps you think I sound manipulative? Cold?

All I’m saying is: Don’t get a wife. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

Or you bury yourself. In a tomb bigger than Arundel’s.

 

The Second Mark

As to how the situation with Molly developed.

She was a toad. She had big, gelatinous eyes. Why was she squatting in my life, what cause did I give her ever? Tears always spilling from her eyes, towards what end?

She called me a brute. Oh la-di-day, oh la-di-day.

“Molly,” I said, “Is there someone you love? More than yourself, I mean? Because six days a week I toil. Driving that cab around.”

“You make me sick, Molly,” I said. “The way you’re always making things all out of proportion. And are you a pauper? Do we live like paupers?”

Molly crying and rubbing her eyes. She going: “Why do Dorothy and the others get to live like queens? Up-lane, in the big houses that always smell sweet, like roses? And we ourselves smell like tinned meat.”

“You seemed to like it once, Molly,” I said. “Ten years ago, you’d no complaints. You seemed to like it, remember? I would tickle your bare feet – Good God! Unspeakable! I must have been mad. And if I were brave enough – Stuff your cooking and your cleaning! And the three wee nippers, good Lord! The way the lot of you eat – ! Has you starved? Has any of you? What dreams I had once, Molly. That’s the stuff.”

 

You’re a toad, Molly Molly Molly. And again I said Molly Molly Molly. You go hop hop hop, hop hop hop, giving me the stink-eye. Hunkers hard like a cow’s, but no milk in your udders. Lips cold as snow.

 

Now, only the Lord knows. Only the Lord knows why.

Being a victim is like having a smell. When some people drink a lot, their skin begins to smell like corned beef. It has nothing to do with cleanliness. The smell comes from somewhere deep inside.

And this particular smell, the smell of a victim, is a lure.

But oh that’s all water under the bridge now.

I’m as jointed armour now, true as a knight’s steel.

Bees sting and ducks swim. Sniffing out marks – that’s what I’m good at.

That’s what I do.

Marianne Villanueva was born and raised in the Philippines and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has published three collections of short fiction: Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila, Mayor of the Roses, and The Lost Language. Her novella, Jenalyn, was a 2014 finalist for the UK’s Saboteur Award. She has also collaborated on a full-length opera with the New York composer Drew Hemenger. Marife, the opera, received its world premiere in New Hampshire in 2015. She has just completed her first novel.

COAXING LIFE FROM DEAD MAN’S FINGERS by Keygan Sands

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COAXING LIFE FROM DEAD MAN’S FINGERS
by Keygan Sands
underwater scene

Branching tendrils like spongy green fingers cling to surf-pummeled rock, doing their endless work of collecting sunlight filtered through silvery cloud. The air chokes and refreshes, rot and salt-scent both thick and invigorating. I pluck the seaweed fronds, Codium fragile or “dead man’s fingers,” from their nest amidst skin-slicing barnacles and mussels: they falter to human hands where endless pounding water could not break their holds.

Within the seaweed are tiny beings: pale, semi-translucent, grazing sea slugs. A plume of rubbery filaments—cerata—crest their backs, each one brilliant green with a thick web of dendritic veins. Their bodies taper, are topped with two independent eyestalks—rhinophores—that cast about gracefully and shrink at my touch. They feed upon the skin of the seaweed, ripping into the flesh, sucking from them chloroplasts. They are sacoglossans: sapsuckers.

Much later—I have migrated from rocky shoreline to sterile, clean-lined lab room—I separate the slugs from their food. I hold them with utmost care in a pair of metal forceps: squishy saclike body oozing between cold, hard prongs. The largest of them could stretch out comfortably to full length inside an eighth teaspoon. I place the slug in a glass vial which goes into a plastic box of water; the vial must be in a controlled environment. Tubes snake from the plastic into a steel box the size of a mini-fridge that calculates somewhere in its dark maze of innards how to keep the water bath at a constant temperature of 4℃. Another device connected to a thin probe impaling the vial’s cap measures dissolved air within the slug’s tiny, artificial environment. Just like that, I control a world.

Being an animal, the slug respires. I cover the vial in aluminum foil, blocking all light. Oxygen decreases predictably as the sacoglossan uses up what there is; it’s a neat line being birthed in blue on my computer screen: oxygen concentration as a percent of atmospheric pressure. After the designated period of darkness, precisely timed at half an hour, I proclaim that there be light, and remove the foil without jostling. The slug clings to the glass, muscular foot flexing to progress its pinprick bulk, film of mucus left in its wake. The light, warm and piercing from a lamp suspended above, casts a halo glow upon the sacoglossan’s semi-clear skin, and green becomes gold. Amazingly, over the next thirty minutes, the little line of oxygen rises on the graph.

Some sacoglossan slugs don’t kill and digest the chloroplasts from algae they consume. The organelles, fragile sacs of green pigment and photosynthesizing apparatus, make their miraculous way through gastrovascular systems and into the cerata in the slug’s back. There, the chloroplasts continue to coax sugar from light, life from sunshine.

Are the chloroplasts, then, alive? They survive, somehow, the vicious rending of the slug’s toothy, tongue-like radula tearing through algal flesh, the passage through the squirming digestive tract, and entrapment in a foreign body. Some varieties of these fed-upon seaweeds have incantations imbedded in their genetic coding that toughen their chloroplasts and enable them to function independently. Are they merely functioning, or truly living?

A well-known hypothesis: in the long-ago depths of evolutionary time, chloroplasts were once independent organisms—single-celled, photosynthesizing bacteria—that, upon being engulfed by another cell, did not break down, but traded nourishment for protection. They were incorporated into algae and, eventually, plants ever since. It seems to be happening again: perpetual innovation of the animal kingdom. Kleptoplasty: the stealing of plastids.

There is still ambiguity. Do the chloroplasts camouflage the slugs, or feed them? The answer might depend on species. Mine, Placida dendritica, remains a mystery.

I return my specimen to its tank. The seaweed is slowly decaying. A webwork of emerald slime floats like mist—I need to refresh the water—but the slugs, tiny pale specks, feed on. Even as the algae dies, the chloroplasts live. Mortality is a spectrum sometimes.

 

Headshot of Keygan SandsKeygan Sands is a candidate in the Creative Writing and Environment MFA program at Iowa State University. Her work explores the confluence between science, nonhuman environments, and society. Her writing appears in Cold Mountain Review and the climate fiction anthology Nothing Is As It Was. She presented literary research at the Fantasy and Myth Anthropocene International Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. Her visual art was featured in the “Welcome to Iowa: Letters to Carp and Other Immigrants” exhibit at the Signal Poetry Festival in Ames, Iowa.

Image credit: Shane Stagner on Unsplash

 

REDUX by Kim Magowan

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REDUX
by Kim Magowan

Two gold wedding rings on white background

Meg’s first husband was a kind man. They’d been good friends before they started dating. On long walks Meg would complain to Louis about her boyfriend of the time. At some point she realized that Louis was in love with her; however, she wasn’t attracted to him. But she liked Louis so much, and she feared that he would find a girlfriend, whereupon his devotion to her would inevitably slip away. So Meg overcame her lack of attraction. She did this partly by imagining Louis as an art object. Things about him that were repellent, like his concave chest or almost hairless legs, became appealing when she imagined him as composed of marble or aluminum.

For several years they were very happy. There was a skylight above their bedroom that opened on a hinge. Sometimes a wild peacock would land on the roof, and they would feed it Crackling Oat Bran through the skylight.

Louis was extremely neat, and did virtually all the cleaning. Before his family members would come to visit, he would scrub, sweep, and mop, and send Meg out to buy fresh flowers. Once Meg’s sister Evelyn, over for dinner, rinsed dishes and stacked them in their dishwasher, and Louis promptly restacked all the dishes. This offended Evelyn (though she was very fond of Louis). She asked Meg if she found her husband overly controlling. Meg shook her head in confusion; she couldn’t understand why anyone would object to having a husband do all the cleaning.

Louis had faults, though it took a long time for Meg to perceive them as such. He drank too much. His kindness trumped honesty. He would lie to people, including Meg, to avoid hurting their feelings. And eventually, though its source was mysterious to them both, he stopped being attracted to Meg. Her attraction to him had been of the talked-into variety, responding to his own rather than independently reaching toward him. So they stopped having sex altogether, and finally split up, though their break-up was painful and protracted, since Louis was such a kind man.

Meg’s second husband, Nicholas, was an honest man, though Meg sometimes felt that he used honesty as a club to bash people. Nicholas was messy, and Meg did nearly all of the housework. Sometimes she would pass a flower stand and think of how Louis would send her away from the house when he was on a cleaning frenzy and have her select fresh flowers.

As she approached middle age Meg thickened—that’s how she saw the twenty-five pounds she’d put on, as a thickening, a wrapping of fleshy layers around her body, like plaster of paris around the chicken-wire webbing of a sculpture. She knew the best way to lose weight was to quit drinking, but this prospect filled Meg with despair.

Occasionally Nicholas would stack the dishwasher, and when he did, Meg would restack it, because he left too much space between the plates. Nonetheless she resented the gender dynamics of doing the lion’s share of the housework. One day she told their daughter, “Vicky, make sure when you get married that you marry a tidy man or woman, because the tidier person in a couple by default does ninety percent of the cleaning.”

Vicky laughed, thinking Meg was kidding—Meg would often make light, snippy complaints about her husband to her children in this semi-abstracted way.

But Meg stopped her dish stacking, horrified.

She realized that she had become, in her second marriage, tidy, passive aggressive, hard-drinking, and duplicitous, that she now prized kindness over honesty. Even though she had deliberately married an honest man, she resented and blamed Nicholas for his candor. Meg had become, in essence, Louis, as if she needed to fill his vacancy with her own self. Thus her second marriage perfectly reproduced her first.

Kim Magowan author photoKim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 2019. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

 

Image credit: melindapack on Unsplash

BELLECASTLE STREET by Anna Oberg

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

BELLCASTLE STREET
by Anna Oberg

street view, new orleans

I come in the back door from outside, where the cicadas whine as I take out the trash. This is the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived, my first home with my first husband who I am still not convinced will be my last, but some invisible thread binds us. We say this love will last forever.

In the kitchen, there is a dingy curtain covering what is below the sink. A dirt floor I cannot clean unless I dig it up entirely.

This is New Orleans, I’m told. Which is supposed to mean I should expect something less than I’m accustomed to. The Big Easy.

I walk the hallway toward the bedroom, past what we have chosen to call the office. It houses my treadmill, where I spend hours running, the only thing that quells my anxiety.

The bedroom is dark. A cool space. Interior. A mascara smudge stains one of our white pillow shams. The mark is from a day I lay crying. A time when things got to be too much, and I stabbed the truck key into my skull, bleeding a trail home from the church.

There is a mysterious dark matter that collects on the bedspread during the day. We sweep it off with our palms, reading the texture of the bedding with our hands before we climb in, silent. To sleep.

One night we awaken there, clinging to one another, afraid the house will capsize at the sound of thunder rolling in off the Gulf.

I trail my hands along the dusty window frame as I enter the living room. The couch sags under a slipcover concealing where the dog ground her teeth into the cushions, liberating a cloud of filler beneath the loose fabric.

There is a two–inch space between the bottom of the front door and the floor. When I stand outside at dusk, looking in from the street, a pool of lamplight floods through the gap like a warm puddle on the front porch. This is where the bugs get in.

Headshot of Anna ObergAnna Oberg lives and works in the Colorado Rockies. She is a professional photographer, specializing in terrain and creative headshots. When she’s not hiking around Rocky Mountain National Park with her camera, she writes from home. This is her first publication.
 

 

 

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

YOU’VE GOT A TALENT by Stefani Nellen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

YOU’VE GOT A TALENT
by Stefani Nellen

female runner on a sidewalk

Another 5K, another easy win. With about half a mile to go, Shanna knew she had first female. Time to overtake some guys. This one, for instance, with the long hair and the Union Jack shorts. She surged past him, already eyeing the next target: the red-haired geek in the Hash House Harriers shirt, no idea what his name was, they’d raced each other before but they’d never spoken. She passed him at the finish line.

Once she could walk again, Shanna handed in her timing chip and picked up a banana. The harrier ambled past her, and they acknowledged each other with a nod.

People crowded the lawn next to the finish. A band shredded through Walking on Sunshine, and the Children’s School sold pancakes. Pink ribbons and healthy living information were on display everywhere.

Shanna walked to the curb to watch the other runners coming in. She hated the moments between the finish and the podium, when the adrenaline drained away and the soreness set in. Her desire to win embarrassed her as soon as it was satisfied. Once she’d made the mistake of looking at the finish photo provided by the race organizers as part of the registration swag; she’d looked like a boiling, contorting lizard.

As if on cue, Meghan arrived. Perfectly decked out in pink-and-black running gear, she shot out of a group of walkers and strode towards the line in photogenic agony, raising her fists to show that she had Overcome. As soon as she’d passed the photographer huddled on the ground, she dropped her arms.

Shanna hadn’t expected her. Sure, a few weeks ago, Meghan had announced that she had taken up running, too, that she had to find out what kept Shanna pounding the pavement for hours each week without going nuts, but she hadn’t mentioned wanting to run a race, let alone this one. Yet here she was, pointing a finger at Shanna with a gesture between threat and favor. You. Don’t move.

Once she was next to Shanna, Meghan said, “Man, this was brutal. So brutal.”

Shanna wondered whether she should tell Meghan that she had won the race.

“Where’s that husband of mine?” Meghan said.

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Typical.” Meghan put her foot on the curb and leaned forward. The sight of her legs and butt contained in shining black fabric made Shanna think of a scorpion.

“I had an idea for us,” Meghan said. “A friend of mine can get us entries for the Chicago Marathon. He works for a charity, I forget which.” Before Shanna could say anything, Meghan continued. “I know I’m slow. But I’ll work so hard. And besides, it’s about doing this together, right?”

Shanna felt lonely at times, but never during running. On the contrary, running was the one thing she wanted to keep for herself. She could try to explain, but it was hopeless.

“What do you say?” The question was a ritual. “You and me?”

◊

Shanna and Meghan had met as teenagers. Shanna had been the new girl in class, and Meghan knew everything about bras, boys, and beyond. Every once in a while, Meghan singled out a girl to make fun of. Not often, not excessively, but there was always a moment when Meghan stood with her hands on her hips, a bunch of people behind her, and the victim scrunched up her face trying not to cry. When Meghan asked her to hang out after school, Shanna was terrified and expected Meghan to drop her quickly. Instead, Meghan kept her.

With Meghan as a friend, Shanna didn’t need to talk to anyone: Meghan spoke for both of them. Her voice was deep and clear. You wanted to listen to her.

A few weeks into their friendship, Meghan would sometimes close her eyes as if she were asleep, and become smaller than before, more fragile. It happened after parties, when they sat in the back seat of Meghan’s car, music playing softly on the radio, or when they lay next to the pool and toasted on hot stones, screams and the smell of chlorine, hot dogs and sunscreen all around them. When Meghan opened her eyes again, she’d whisper: “Hey. You and me.” The words were Shanna’s treasure. They proved how important she was—more important than anyone could guess.

◊

Meghan spent her first post-grad year volunteering and shopping around a children’s book about gay marriage. She herself married an older man named Kyle, who played the cello for the Pittsburgh Symphony. They quickly had a son, Leo.  Shanna moved into a one-bedroom rental with a view of the Giant Eagle parking lot and worked as a research assistant for the Psychology Department. The part of her job she hated most was cold-calling potential research participants; she memorized a script to work through her list as efficiently as possible, and not a few people became irritated with her droning voice. Some thought she was mocking them. Her strong point was data analysis, and the professor she worked for regularly asked her to talk him through the statistics she’d used so I can sell it to the funding agencies; she’d been co-author on quite a few papers. The professor kept encouraging her to apply to graduate school, but the thought of teaching classes or presenting at conferences was too intimidating. “As you wish,” the professor said. “Remain our secret as long as you want.”

◊

Shanna became a runner by accident. One evening, after a whole day inside, she put on sweatpants, a fleece sweater, and an old pair of sneakers and started to jog around the block, not expecting to last longer than half an hour. She came home long after dark.

As a girl she used to dream of having her pack: friends that accepted her without words, recognized her like a long-lost sibling. She found them in books about running: The Lonely Breed, Young Men in a Hurry, The Perfect Mile – grainy black-and-white pictures showing young men running on grass tracks and in Scandinavian forests and in the dunes at Portsea. She was running, too, on the hills in the park and on the public track. Over the months, her hard training sessions started to feel easy. She shed the cocoon of her daytime self and became a new person – but only in her mind. The fewer people she met while running, the easier it was to imagine she was in the grainy black-and-white world of her books, so she made it a habit to run early in the morning or late at night.

Only at the races did she briefly show her face, her body, and—most intimate of all—her speed. With each race, she moved up in the local hierarchy, until she was one of the fast girls. At first she competed in baggy clothes, but eventually she switched to “professional” running sets she would never dare put on anywhere else. During a race she spat and groaned and fought to beat as many others as possible, as if she were in one of the legendary races she read about at night instead of a harmless footrace for weekend warriors.

It was as if Meghan had leapt from behind a black-and-white tree in one of the pictures in Shanna’s books, shouting, “Hey! Did you forget about me?”

◊

The Chicago Marathon was in October, which left them about five months to get ready. Their first official training run took place on a hot and humid Tuesday. Meghan planted her feet with rhythmic concentration. Shanna ran as slowly as she could.

At the picnic area, Meghan splashed water on the back of her neck, sliding her fingers inside her shirt.

“How are Kyle and Leo?” Shanna asked.

“Don’t get me started.”

Shanna waited.

“All right,” Meghan said. “I might as well fill you in. Kyle moved out.”

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“It’s been building for a while. He hasn’t been sleeping, and he’s been saying really strange things. He’s in Boston now. His mother knows a psychiatrist there.” She wiped her hands on her thighs. “He said he needs to get away from me—as if I’m some kind of monster.”

“That sounds scary. Is there anything I can do?”

“You already are. Being out here makes me feel so much better.”

◊

As spring turned into summer, Meghan and Shanna built mileage. Their long runs became their short runs. Kyle was crying every time they talked on the phone, Meghan said, and they’d talked about divorce and dropped it. Kyle was so incoherent it was hard to tell what he wanted. Leo took it the hardest: he was only two and half years old and kept asking for Daddy.

“Wait,” Meghan said. “Side stitch.”

They stopped.

“Put your hand there.” Shanna tapped a spot above her own belly button. “Maybe move your hand around a bit so your muscles can warm up. ” She demonstrated.

“Where exactly?”

Shanna put her hand on Meghan’s belly. “Here. Try to breathe into my hand.”

“You’re my savior,” Meghan said. She moved into the touch, and Shanna felt her warmth through the wet nylon.

“You and me,” Meghan said. “Once more.”

Shanna pushed back against Meghan’s weight.

◊

September brought cold rain, muddy trails, and the return of Kyle.

“He’s stable,” Meghan said, and left it at that. She and Shanna were meeting for coffee to discuss the charity that sponsored their marathon: the American ALS Foundation.

“How does it work?” Shanna asked.

“They bought race entries and sold them to runners like us, who agree to run in their name—wearing t-shirts and stuff. There will be a bunch of us in Chicago. Team ALS. Most importantly, they hope we’ll tell our friends that we’re running the marathon, and inspire them enough to make a donation.”

“Why should they?”

“It works, you’ll see. We can post our training runs and share pictures on social media. What do you think?”

“It sounds fake. I thought we were going to train and try to run a good time. I didn’t know we need an audience.”

Meghan looked up in surprise. “It’s a charity, you know? Don’t be such a bitch.”

◊

With Kyle back in town, Meghan started to skip training. Kyle needed a ride to therapy, the mortgage person had promised to call, she needed to search for jobs to apply for.

When the time came for their most important workout—a twenty-mile long run—Shanna arrived at Meghan’s house to find her sitting on the porch in black jeans and a sequin top, smoking a menthol cigarette as she sometimes did after a really bad day. “Look, I’m not feeling it tonight. Join me for drinks, okay? Tanya is coming too. Remember her? From Pitt.”

“We can’t run a marathon if we don’t train.”

“I don’t have time for this. The sitter’s with Leo, Kyle’s with his mom, and I’m partying tonight. Join me or don’t.” Meghan brushed past Shanna and started walking towards her car.

“You call this inspiring?” Shanna called. She hadn’t meant to.

Meghan turned around. “Cute. I know you have nothing better to do on a Friday night than run loops in the park. And you know what? You’re damn lucky. My family’s on the brink. We’ll have to sell the house, my kid is biting his friends, and I’m married to someone I don’t know anymore. And I will not run twenty miles tonight. End of story.”

Shanna stood still, aware of her tight clothes and the sweat drying on her skin. Up and down the street, windows were lit; people could probably hear every word.

Meghan flexed the fingers of her right hand, then got her keys from her purse and opened the car door. “Are you coming?”

“No,” Shanna said.

◊

Instead of doing the 20-miler on her own, Shanna entered a small marathon one state over. She was one of fifty participants. The course went out and back along a riverbank, and the field strung out quickly. Very far ahead of her, she saw two men reach the turnaround point marked by an orange cone, and start back. When they passed, they raised their hands in greeting. A thin layer of ice covered the water, and her cheeks felt hot and fresh in the cold. Afterwards, they ate chili in the boathouse to warm up. One of the two men who had greeted her pulled up the chair next to her. He was young, with a full beard.

“You’re a hell of a runner,” he said. “What was your time?”

“Three oh six.”

“Nice. Ever thought about trying to break three?”

“Not yet.” She glanced out the window, at the pebble trail along the water. She didn’t want to talk, but she loved the young man, and all the runners here, for their tacit agreement that they were not crazy doing this.

◊

It took them hours to get their race numbers at the marathon expo because Meghan had forgotten her confirmation letter and got into an argument with the volunteers. When they finally got to their hotel room, Shanna wanted to lie down and sleep off her headache, but Meghan had scheduled dinner with the rest of Team ALS and insisted Shanna couldn’t leave her to go alone.

They ate burgers and pasta at an American food place. Meghan talked non-stop. Her eyes were bloodshot; she’d put on clumps of mascara, the way she used to as a teenager.

“Just think about what we’re going to do tomorrow,” she said. “Twenty-six point two grueling miles!”

Everyone except Shanna acted disgusted. Weren’t they all so crazy?

The woman next to Meghan was drawing the course in the air with her finger. “And here’s the wall. Right here. It’s us versus the distance.”

“I’ll drink to that,” her husband said, and they all raised their glasses of alcohol-free beer.

Back in the hotel room, Shanna and Meghan picked everything they needed for the race the next morning from their suitcase: their gels and drinks, socks and shoes, numbers and pins. They were both dressed for bed in drawstring pants and tank tops.

Meghan spread her race day outfit on the desk, on top of tourism folders and a laminated room service menu. On top of her race number she had written GO MEG. Below it, she had written STRENGTH.

“I’ll bonk so hard tomorrow,” she said. “It’s going to be embarrassing.”

Shanna put a hand on Meghan’s back and started to massage her shoulders. The muscles felt like caramel; they promised softness to someone with patience. Shanna circled her thumbs, and Meghan sighed.

“I was such an asshole the last couple of weeks,” Meghan said. “I was, like, an evil puppet.”

“You’ve got every excuse.”

“Tomorrow’s going to be hell.”

“We’ll do this together.” Shanna was still kneading Meghan’s shoulders, settling into the rhythm. “I’ve run a marathon before.”

“You did?”

“After you bailed on our twenty-miler.”

Meghan closed her eyes. “How did you do?”

“It was okay.” She slid her arms down Meghan’s side. “You would have liked it.”

“I would’ve spoiled it. One more beer, and then to bed?”

Shanna got a real beer from the mini bar, and they sat down on Meghan’s bed, knees up, backs against the pillows. All the lights were out, except the spots above the night tables.

“You know what?” Meghan passed Shanna the bottle. “ALS is giving me the creeps.”

“I know,” Shanna said. “Me too.” She drank and passed the bottle back.

“You know something else? I started running because someone told me they saw you run at like five in the morning. I was jealous. To have something like this all for yourself.” She turned to look at Shanna. “And now look at us. We’re here together.” She put down the empty beer bottle on the night table, and Shanna laid her hand on Meghan’s belly. Breathe here, right here. Slowly, she moved her hand down. When her fingertips reached and lifted the elastic of her pajamas, Meghan slid down on the bed so she lay flat on her back, and pushed down her pants. “That’s better.” She reached for Shanna’s hand again, leading her between her legs.

Shanna closed her eyes and felt the pubic hair shaved down to a precise triangle, the smooth, cold skin around it, the warm slipperiness further down, the lips so different from her own. She heard Meghan’s moan like a soft breath in her sleep, the hiss of her heels against the linen, a croak inside her throat. Shanna moved only her fingers, mere twitches in exactly the right place.

Meghan rammed her elbow into Shanna’s ribs and sat up.

“What?” Shanna whispered.

Meghan started to rub her crotch in a way that made Shanna think of scraping ice off a car window. After she had finished with a series of dry, efficient screams, she lay back again, sprawled out and kneading her breasts.

“Okay,” she said, “you want me to return the favor?”

Shanna palpated the sore spot where Meghan’s elbow had struck her. “No,” she managed.

“Okay.”

Shanna got up and lay down in the other bed. Within minutes, Meghan slept.

◊

The next morning, they stood next to each other in front of the bathroom mirror in their matching red ALS running tops.

Meghan waved at Shanna in the mirror. “Are you ready to rock this?”

“No.”

They brushed their teeth, looking at each other. They spat out the foam and rinsed.

“Last night hit the spot,” Meghan said. “I slept like a baby. You’ve got a real talent.”

Shanna saw and felt the familiar blush spread on her neck and forehead, but forced herself to speak anyway. “Why did you push me away?”

“I like to finish by myself.”

“I guess,” Shanna said. “I’m sure Kyle appreciates it.”

Meghan put her toothbrush into the plastic cup. “Fine. Be that way.”

“You and me, right?”

Meghan leaned on her hands and looked at her reflection. “I always felt responsible for you. You never had anyone else.”

“You’re not responsible for me.”

“At least I’m watching the time,” Meghan said. “We’re late for the start.”

◊

Thousands of people were looking for their corral, and it took them a long time to find theirs. Each charity had a different color: red for ALS, purple for cancer, gold for Parkinson’s. The start shot had already gone off, but it took another half hour before Shanna and Meghan crossed the starting line, bumping elbows and feet with strangers. The runners around them were chugging Gatorade and taking photos of each other with their cell phones. Some stopped to hug friends and family along the course. Discarded paper cups stuck to their shoes. At seven miles, the course freed up a little. Meghan was limping.

“Do you want to take a break?” Shanna said.

“Do I look like a quitter?”

One of the spectators heard her and shouted, “You’re a hero!” Meghan pushed out her chest and pointed at the ALS logo, pressing more cheers from the crowd. And so another slow mile crept by, and another. Shanna’s legs hurt from being reined in. At mile ten, she screamed at herself: Just run! Every time she sped up for sheer pain relief, the familiar voice called her back: “Hey! Wait!”

Between miles ten and eleven, Meghan’s limp got worse. When they passed an aid station, the medics trained their eyes on her like vultures. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Meghan gritted her teeth and pushed on.  Once the aid station was out of sight, she stopped. “I can’t do it. It’s too much.”

“Where’s the pain exactly?”

“My foot.”

“Let’s sit down. Over there, on the curb.”

Meghan took off her shoe. Her sock was drenched in blood. Shanna took a band-aid and gauze from her pocket. “Just look away for a sec.” She squeezed open the blister. Meghan groaned, and Shanna cleaned the blister with water from her bottle, dried it with gauze, and covered it with the band-aid. “If you have some painkillers, take them.” Meghan pulled a strip of pills from the back pocket of her shorts and took two with the rest of Shanna’s water. “How do you know how to do this stuff?”

“From my long runs.”

Meghan moved her jaw. Mascara was drying on her cheeks. “What was your time in the other marathon?”

“A little over three hours.”

Meghan put her shoe back on and tied the laces with great accuracy. “Hey!” she called to everyone close enough to hear. “Being fast isn’t important, right?”

“No!” someone shouted back. “It’s not!”

She pointed her thumb at Shanna. “My friend here just told me she’s faster than I am!”

Shanna looked down at the asphalt. She felt the spectators’ laughter like slaps to the face.

“But we’re all winners!” Meghan yelled. “No matter how fast, no matter how slow!”

“Right! Go Meg!”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

They started jogging again. To Shanna, it felt like running in place. She was sick of the toy-train speed of this run, and of Meghan. She thought about the swish of turning the pages, of the burned smell rising from her books, of veined necks and thighs and the snap of finish tapes in the fifties. Of sucking frost from her tongue during her solo marathon, and of crunching the pebbles under her toes with each step, as if she could push herself forward forever.

“Try walk-breaks,” she said to Meghan. “That’s your best chance to finish.” Then she took off.

At first, the spectators booed her for leaving her friend behind. This changed as soon as Meghan was out of sight.

“Looking great!”

“Way to move!”

“Get it, girl!”

The sun was high and she started to sweat, but she didn’t care. She was one of the fast girls, and if she was empty where the night before she had opened up and closed around another person, she preferred it—the lighter she was, the faster she could run. And she ran as fast as she could, because it felt good.

Stefani Nellen author headshotStefani Nellen’s short stories are published or forthcoming in Guernica, AGNI, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, PRISM International and Web Conjunctions, among others, and have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Alexandra Kleeman), and placed as the runner-up for the Wabash Prize (judged by Adam Johnson). She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, where she had the opportunity to work with Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, among others. A psychologist by training and originally from Germany, she now lives in the Netherlands with her family. She’s at work on two novels and a collection of short stories.

 

Image credit: Stage 7 Photography on Unsplash

 

A SATURDAY MORNING EMAIL TO MY FRIEND: FIRST DAY OF MY VACATION, NOT WITH YOU by Mary Senter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A SATURDAY MORNING EMAIL TO MY FRIEND:
FIRST DAY OF MY VACATION, NOT WITH YOU
by Mary Senter

young woman sitting at a laptop in a window

It’s raining? Just as well I didn’t go down for the fiesta. I can get crappy weather here. But … I can’t get you. I miss you. I shouldn’t, I know, but I do. I want to see you again. That week I spent with you was among the best weeks of my life. Even though we didn’t do anything super exciting or have any grand adventures, like my typical vacations, I enjoyed just being beside you and holding you in my arms. Even though I cried buckets on my walks—like I did the trip before, when I saw you for the first time in twenty years—I also laughed and smiled and sang. I was happy.

I’ve tried to find a word to describe how I felt, but I don’t think a word exists in the English language that properly conveys the emotion. I’ve tried words like content, safe, comforted, loved, serene, protected, calm, energized, hopeful, joyous, peaceful, blissful, whole, but none of those words alone is quite right. Even together, they don’t portray the particular feeling. I’m not sure I could even describe it. Maybe I don’t need to. Maybe you felt it, too, I don’t know. Odd that being in a person’s company could make me feel such things. I don’t understand it.

I can’t describe with a word how I felt, but I’ll try to describe it this way: It was like … It was like carrying a heavy load for a very long time, alone, over treacherous terrain and often in torturous weather conditions, through tribulations and strife, hunger and pain, fighting thieves and scoundrels along the way, and thinking all the while that you’re doing just fine. But then, you come to a refuge, where someone welcomes you, and knows what you’ve been through without asking. They invite you into a place that is new to you, yet feels very much like home. The person removes your pack, rubs the pain out of your shoulders, runs you a hot bath, and prepares a delicious, nourishing meal, accompanied by a cool, clean glass of water. They sit with you and let you tell them your troubles and joys while you sip wine after dinner. They lead you to a cozy, warm bed, tuck you into the down comforter, stoke the fire, and bar the door against the elements and anything else that could hurt you. As you close your eyes and listen to the crackle of the fire, you let out a deep sigh as you realize how bone-weary you have become, carrying that load on that long journey; and you think, briefly, of how much farther you have yet to carry it. But for that evening, it all falls away, and you have not a single worry in the world.

That’s the feeling I had with you.

Mary Senter HeadshotMary Senter writes in a cabin in the woods on the shores of Puget Sound. She earned certificates in literary fiction writing from the University of Washington and an M.A. in strategic communication from WSU. Her work can be found in Chaleur, SHARK REEF, Claudius Speaks, Six Hens, FewerThan500, Red Fez, and others. Visit her at www.marysenter.com.

 

 

Image credit: Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

LINES SO SHARP by Tommy Dean

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LINES SO SHARP
by Tommy Dean

Kennedy motorcade 1963

You stand on the balcony of this ancient castle looking down at the American President’s wife, eyes transfixed by the pearls in three rows against her neck like teeth sucked from the ocean. White gloves from fingertip to elbow separate her, mark her celebrity and off-limits. Your status from the arranged marriage affords you this glimpse, but it’s like a bird looking down at a lioness.

Here, in India, the other young women chitter. And why not, you want to ask, but you’ve promised your husband that you won’t make any more scenes. This word he spits just before saying good night, his sturdy door locking hollowly behind you. Now, from the walls centuries old but as strong as ever, keeping out the poor and pestilent, you raise your hand, desperate to reach across time and space. Months you awaited her arrival, fantasies of sharing meals, of grasping her skin around her elbows, whispering your condolences about her Earth-returned child, asking her to grant her mercies upon your own swollen stomach. There is no time to think of ways to get closer. No way to land at her feet, so you wave at her back.

When the news of her husband’s assassination makes it to your country, you sit in the closet, legs crossed, and scream. I know, I know. The pink dress, so feminine, its lines so sharp, but soiled with blood and loss. You no longer wish to be her, and yet you continue to ask for pearls, because the desire for elegance never leaves your mind, because all other escapes are forbidden. You think, but do not utter your wish to drape them over your child, a talisman, surely, for though her husband is dead, Mrs. Kennedy lives, broken-mouthed, and rotting with grief.

Your due date comes and you hold the bloodless infant in your arms, dabbing endlessly at the forehead that will never wrinkle at the surprise of your touch. You ask for pearls and you are rebuked with a solemn shake of the head. You demand white gloves and your husband acquiesces under your silent grief. For days he makes promises while you wait for the cloth to arrive, inspecting every thread before sending it off to the tailor. How you hate yourself for not having the skill to sew them yourself.

And still you pray for Mrs. Kennedy, twinning her eternity with that of your child’s as if braiding their hair together. You pray without hope, rote ritual creating a stupor that numbs. You blow softly down the length of your child’s body, guiding her spirit out to the balcony where it might mingle with the wind. Again, you think of those pearls, wondering what it would feel like to run them through your hands. If spirits could nestle into objects, you think this would make a fine palace for your child to spend her eternal days.

 

Tommy Dean author headshotTommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. He is the Flash Fiction Section Editor at Craft Literary. He has been previously published in BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His story “You’ve Stopped” was chosen by Dan Chaon to be included in Best Microfiction 2019. It will also be included in Best Small Fiction 2019. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

LARCHMONT CHARTER MIDDLE by Matthew Greene

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Empty classroom with desksLARCHMONT CHARTER MIDDLE
by Matthew Greene

Sometimes when I set up for the afterschool program in the multipurpose room, I see Miles skateboarding down the sidewalk, cutting class. Miles is in my fifth period writing elective but mostly he’s not there. Mostly he’s off somewhere in his red hoodie.

Sometimes I look out the second story window of Mr. Creasman’s room, where I teach my writing class, at L.A.’s looming maw, the chattering raspado carts, the gathering haze. I imagine Miles in his red hoodie, at the LACMA, stealing a Picasso or Cezanne’s Still Life With Cherries, or getting a burger at Tommy’s on Rampart where all menu items come with chili, unless otherwise noted.

I envy Miles’s freedom and yet every day I set out in the late morning toward the great grey chasm beyond Pasadena, sharing the Gold Line with the others not pulling their weight full-time, those who fail to produce. We careen above the Arroyo Seco as the skyline grows bigger in the graph paper of the train windows. When the train breaks down or someone kills themself on the tracks, I cross the city in buses, waiting at street corners in the wake of fumes. Once, at Union Station, I saw a woman on the Red Line platform with her eyeball hanging out by the optic nerve. On sixth street I saw a man steaming along on a skateboard, waving a sword.

Sometimes, setting up the afterschool program in the multipurpose room, I fart and listen for an echo.

When I see Miles skateboarding down the sidewalk, it’s like I have to tell him something urgently, knowing all the while that if I knew what I had to tell him, everything would be different.

One day, cutting class, Miles found a naked man in the alley behind the school and poked him with a stick. Another kid filmed with his iPhone. The man woke up and began muttering things beyond language, low growls, hoots.

After I lock up at night I usually see Miles sitting on the curb by 7-11, sometimes with a girl. Miles is bad at skateboarding. His face is all cut up from falling.

One time I didn’t know what to do so I drove up Mount Wilson. I got up above the smog. I found a trailhead with train tracks from when you could ride all the way to some resort. The tracks led into a tunnel and when I came to the other side I expected a miracle, some gleaming ruin with banquet halls and martini glasses, but it was just more of the same—gravel, train tracks, little wisps of trees and the long way back down.

Matt Green author photoMatt Greene teaches writing in Appalachia. “Larchmont Charter Middle” is from a linked series of prose pieces, some of which have appeared in or are forthcoming from the Cincinnati Review, Spillway, Split Lip, and Wigleaf. Other recent work has appeared in Moss and Santa Monica Review and is forthcoming from CutBank, Conjunctions Online, and DIAGRAM.

 

 

Image credit: Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash

IN WARD G by Kharys Ateh Laue

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

IN WARD G
by Kharys Ateh Laue
Dark room with two white cots

A man died in Ward G two nights before my father. The man’s name was Trevor. I know because on my first morning at the hospital a doctor wearing purple Nike running shoes squatted by his bed and asked, Do you remember your name? He did. Trevor, he said. Trevor and my father did not know each other, yet their lives converged at the end. Their last days were spent in the same atmosphere of sound and light and air. Now, when I think back to those last days with my father, I think of Trevor too.

Trevor was alone when he died. I keep going back to that, how he died without anyone being there to touch him or speak to him. I could have gone to him and I did not. At the time, my father took up all my inside space.

Afterwards I could not get my head around what Trevor had done. The doctors behaved as if he had performed a simple and explicable trick, as if he had turned off the lights, for instance, or walked out the door. They acted as if his disappearance were temporary and he would reappear whenever he chose. But I could not get my head around it. I wanted to know how it was done. I wanted to say, He was here a moment ago. Where is he now?

◊

Earlier that night, a woman had tried to feed him Sprite through a straw. She arrived late, after Trevor’s usual visitors, and stood looking at him with the can in her hand. He lay on his back with his eyes open. The sheet hung from his puffed belly and his arms lay stiff as branches at his sides. He was breathing badly. The woman put one hand flat on the bed and bent over him, coaxing him to have a sip of Sprite. He would not look at her. When she pressed the straw to his lips he turned his head away and said, Not thirsty. He spoke in a clear small voice, like a child. The woman straightened, setting the soft-drink on the bedside table. She left the room and returned a few minutes later with a nurse.

What’s wrong with him? she said. He wasn’t like this yesterday.

The nurse gazed down at him.

Please do something, said the woman. Why is he breathing like this? I tried giving him a drink and he wouldn’t have any.

The nurse picked up Trevor’s wrist. She pressed two fingers to his pulse and watched his face. After a time she laid his arm on the sheet as she had found it.

I don’t know, she said. I’m not sure what’s wrong.

But he shouldn’t be breathing like this, the woman insisted. It’s not normal. Please do something.

I’ll call the doctor, said the nurse. The doctor will look at him now-now.

I’m telling you, said the woman, this is not normal. He should not be breathing like this.

The nurse nodded.

I’ll call the doctor, she said, and left the ward.

The woman leaned and held her hand flat against Trevor’s forehead. She watched him closely. He panted.

This is not normal, she said to herself. No, this is not normal.

The woman left at seven thirty. Before leaving she kissed him on the cheek.

The doctor’s coming soon, she said. You keep very well. I’m going to leave this in case you get thirsty in the night, okay? She raised the Sprite can for him to see and then replaced it on the bedside table. I’ll be here first thing in the morning, she said.

I never saw her again. Sometimes I wonder about her. I wonder who she was to Trevor and how she took his death and whether, when she thinks of him now, she remembers us four, me and my three siblings, crowded around my father’s bed on the other side of the room. As for me, I remember her. I can’t forget how she spent her last half hour with Trevor trying to feed him Sprite through a straw.

◊

Trevor became restless after she left. Something in the arrangement of his body bothered him. He rolled his head from side to side on the pillow. He fiddled the hemline of the sheet with his thumbs, holding it tight against his chest, and pressed his shoulder blades into the mattress. He parted his legs under the sheet as if he were preparing for a birth. Then he stopped shaking his head and began looking around. His eyes were dark and unusually large, and he looked at things with the keen regard of a man taking a final reckoning of his world. He looked at the ceiling and IV stand and the nurses passing along the corridor. He looked at the can of Sprite on his bedside table. He looked at me.

The last thing he did was push off his sheet. It must have depleted the last of his energy but he did it. But for his nappy, he was naked. His belly, lumpy with deposits of fat, bulged out of him as though stuffed with rags, and his limbs were thin and brittle-looking. He was by this time very still. He seemed an ugly and misshapen doll tossed aside by some long-ago child, who had become bored of him or found some newer plaything, and now lay waiting to be retrieved. Minutes before his death he became fretful again and began feeling his bare skin with his fingertips. He felt his throat and collarbones and chest, as if he knew there was something unusual inside him and wanted to identify it, or as if he were craving the sensation of touch. When I looked up again the nurses had drawn his curtains.

If I had spoken to him just beforehand, perhaps he would have told me what it was like. Perhaps he would have said what he was waiting for or what he was thinking about. But I did not go and speak to him. Now I can only imagine what he would have said, but even that is useless. In my visions of myself speaking to him he only ever looks at me and smiles, his fingers working here and there over the surface of his skin.

◊

There was a small commotion at Trevor’s bedside after his death. The doctor in Nikes had been standing at the foot of my father’s bed, looking through his file and answering our questions, when one of the nurses touched her forearm. She glanced up at him and the nurse gestured come. The doctor looked at us and said, Excuse me a moment, and followed the nurse to Trevor’s bed. They disappeared behind the turquoise curtains. There was a brief silence and then the doctor said, How long has he been like this? I did not hear the reply. The doctor emerged from behind the curtains and went into a storage room that opened off the corridor. She pulled out a machine on wheels, reversing from the narrow room, and turned it about and parked it on the far side of Trevor’s bed.

I was in a camping chair facing the corridor. My brother sat opposite me. My sisters stood at the foot of the bed massaging Nivea cream into my father’s legs. His skin was dry and papery, discoloured by fretworks of shattered veins below the surface. When the doctor brought in the machine, my sister glanced up and made a sound with her tongue.

A resuscitator, she said. The last thing we need.

What? I said.

I too had seen it, but I had thought it was an X-ray machine.

A resuscitator, she said again.

She took hold of my father’s hand and put her head down against his thigh.

I could hear them working on Trevor behind the curtains. There came a low murmur of voices and the indistinct sounds of objects bumped against one another and then the steady pneumatic hiss of the resuscitator. When the doctor spoke again, her voice was clear and calm.

Yes, ward G, I need your help now.

The sound of the resuscitator continued, puffing on and on in the silence of the ward. At last a male doctor came in at a jog and stopped at the foot of Trevor’s bed. The doctor in Nikes came out from behind the curtains shaking her head. He stood looking at her with his hands on his hips, breathing heavily. It was a good healthy sound. Not like Trevor’s gasps or my father’s laboured breaths, rattled with phlegm.

No, she said.

Too late, he said.

She laughed.

Ja, too late. There was a pause and then she said, I told you I wouldn’t need the resuscitator. She laughed again. She was exhilarated, full of adrenaline.

My brother glanced over his shoulder and then looked at us.

That man just died, he said.

My sister nodded and looked at my dad. She held his hand and squeezed it.

What? I asked. What did you say?

Later that night, I said to my sister, Did you see how that doctor laughed? She actually laughed.

It’s a defence mechanism, she said. Sometimes people do that.

◊

It was after midnight when they removed Trevor’s body. By then, everyone was asleep except me and my brother. We were taking it in shifts and my sisters had gone home to get some sleep.

Two nurses came in with a morgue cart and bodybag. They wore white latex gloves. I watched them disappear behind the curtains and listened to the sounds they made. I heard the shiver of wheels and takkies scuffing the vinyl floors and whispering and the rustling of the plastic bodybag. I gathered these sounds, examining them. I seemed to see the nurses moving around the bed murmuring directions to one another as they transferred the body to the bag on the steel cart. Then there came the low resonant whine of a zipper pulled home and I knew they were done. The nurses came out. They opened the curtains and stripped the bed and emptied the dustbin. One of the nurses noticed the Sprite. He took the can to the sink and poured out the contents and threw it away. Then they left with the cart. On it lay Trevor, unborn in his plastic womb.

◊

After Trevor’s death, I felt spared. I felt relieved that it was he who had died and not my father. It was not a noble emotion but it is what I felt. Rising, I lay my forehead on my father’s chest where his breath was. For the first time I understood that he was gathering himself to go and I wanted to feel his breath. I wanted to feel the texture of its movement inside him. Dear father, I wanted to say, we are here. Soon you will be elsewhere and then you can do as you please, but for now let us be here.

My father lived another day and a night. He died on the morning of the 25th of March 2019 while the sun was coming up. My sister was with him. She said he looked at her and his eyes were very blue and clear. He knew what he was doing and was calm about it. My two other siblings and I arrived a few minutes after he died. New sunlight was quickening and shimmering on the white wall behind him. He glowed.

My dear father. We are here.

Kharys Ateh Laue author photoKharys Ateh Laue is a South African writer whose short fiction has appeared in Brittle Paper, New Contrast, Itch, and Pif Magazine. In 2017, her short story ‘Plums’ was longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize. Her academic work, which focuses on the depiction of race, gender, and animals in South African fiction, has been published in Scrutiny2 and the Journal of Literary Studies. She currently lives in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

 

 

Image credit: Raphaela Linders

BUS PLUNGE, AN OTHER OPERA by Jude Vivien Dexter

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BUS PLUNGE, AN OTHER OPERA
by Jude Vivien Dexter

a lonely road at dusk or dawn

/ counting one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four; / and, then, standing, the woman says: / what’s the line? / and the first time i made love and the first time i made love and the first time i / bus plunges from bridge and eight die / in the paper that day / and one one thousand and two one thousand and three / and, standing, the woman says: / and removing things, fiddling with buttons clanking and the loud roar of zippers / you don’t need all these let’s get more comfortable / and then later telling friends, the first time i made love i / but who knew love could feel so like anger / a guttural punch / on the day of the murder / and, standing, the woman says: / mother and father can’t come home no more but will be home soon no more / one one thousand and two one thousand / and let’s play games and you be the patient / and i, the nurse, / on the day of the murder, fire in his fists / and, standing, the woman says, the first time i made love i made i made made made made no more / stop no more / mother and father can’t come home / and mom are you there mom / mom is not coming home / but mom, well versed in your lies, doesn’t believe your stories / bus plunges into river below / in the paper that day / the day of the murder / no one / no more / bus plunges into river below and eight die / six one thousand seven one thousand eight / made you bleed / ripped you in two / buckling under his weight / no more no more / count one one thousand two one thousand three / until he lets you breathe / and lungs fill with breath / and then out again / the day of the murder / when she had it coming / and, standing, the girl says: the first time i / quit telling lies! / mom wants you to quit telling lies / and i and i and i / no more no more no more / and crawled out like eggs split cleanly open / and bus plunges into river below and eight die

 

Jude Vivien Dexter author photoJude Vivien Dexter (they/them) is a poet living in Charleston, SC. They like to write poems about things, in that order.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Alexander McFeron on Unsplash

BRINGING DEAD FRIENDS INTO CONVERSATION by Corey Miller

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BRINGING DEAD FRIENDS INTO CONVERSATION
by Corey Miller

restaurant scene nighttime

I think about how I’m always depressed, which makes me more depressed, and I wonder if it’s because my friends (all three of them) have died and now I have to attempt to talk with someone who won’t be able to replace them but maybe could hold a candle next to them like that scene in Star Wars where the dead mentors are watching over Luke and that sister he kissed before knowing it was his sister (but we won’t talk about it) and that they’re there guiding me into this conversation with a stranger at a bar that may think I’m hitting on them when all I really want is someone to vent to and help me feel less lonely and maybe they’d help me perceive some purpose on this planet at this specific time in the universe and that I could do something meaningful with my life like how I wanted to become a scientist who studied molecular biology (before I settled for data entry) so I could create things to change the world instead of standing awkwardly near people drinking beer hoping that they’ll ask me absorbing questions so I don’t have to make the first move like: Hey, you look familiar, did we go to college together? or Hey, you look like such a fun and interesting and smart person, would you like to join my trivia team every Tuesday night? and I’d be swept away by all of these new people on a team that banded together as the family I never had (not that I don’t appreciate my grandmother who raised me, but I wish she’d remember who I am when I visit the nursing home) and our team would go on to win some national trivia team competition and travel and we’d room together and none of us would feel the sadness that I’ve sat through in the past because we’d accept each other for who we are and wear helmets but this guy realizes I’ve been standing behind him staring without a beer even and everyone is looking at me like I shouldn’t be here and that I’m weird for bringing my ghost friends to hover over me wherever I go, so I go and I don’t know if I ever can go back to this bar again (another space off-limits) but maybe I’ll try chat rooms, for now.

 

Corey Miller headshotCorey Miller lives with his wife in a tiny house they built near Cleveland. He is an award-winning brewmaster who enjoys a good lager. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Barren, Bending Genres, Writers Resist, Hobart, Gravel, and Cease Cows. When not working or writing, Corey likes to take the dogs for adventures. Twitter: @IronBrewer

 

 

 

Image credit: Benjamin Ashton on Unsplash

IT’S GHOST TIME AGAIN by Francine Witte

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

IT’S GHOST TIME AGAIN
by Francine Witte
Abstract ghostlike image

It’s ghost time again,

and my mother doesn’t know. But I know, and it shivers me like stone February to see this ghost that’s not at all like my father, who is lonely and clean-shaven. This ghost doesn’t give a hoot that my mother is asleep, but I’m not so sure she’d stop it, because if sleeping in separate rooms is any indication, my father hasn’t touched her in years. And that started around the time he lost his job and moved himself a sock at a time, a shirt at a time until he was gone. And now they are both sexless, but at least my mother has sleep. Not like it used to be with her walking the floorboards, tango or foxtrot or whatever the hell. I live in the room under hers and when she stopped moving I went up there, and that’s when I saw the ghost, his white ghosty sex hand trailing up her nightgown and she’d moan and shift, and she really seemed to like it, big smile crossing her sleepy face, and that’s when I came to realize that a ghost can be a better lover than a real-life lover, and it just might change how I think about dating and marriage, which, to tell you the truth is kind of a dead thing anyway.

 

Francine WitteFrancine Witte’s latest publications are a full-length poetry collection, Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books and the Blue Light Press First Prize Winner, Dressed All Wrong for This. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals, anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) and her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind, has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in New York City.

 

 

Author photo credit: Mark Strodl

Feature Image credit:  JR Korpa on Unsplash