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TWO POEMS by Juheon Rhee

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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

 

 

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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 Rhee Author PhotoJuheon (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.

 

 

Image credit: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

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CLEAN LINES by Caroline Curran

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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.

 

 

 

Image credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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.

 

 

 

Image credit: Henry & Co. on Unsplash

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.

Image credit: De an Sun on Unsplash

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

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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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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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SQUEEZE by Nick Kolakowski

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

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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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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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.

 

 

 

Image credit: allison christine on Unsplash

STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD by J Pascutazz

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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.

 

 

 

Image credit Gregory Hayes on Unsplash

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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WELCOME 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

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 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 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

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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

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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

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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

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LARCHMONT 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 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

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IN WARD G
by Kharys Ateh Laue

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 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 (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 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

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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