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RING THE BELLS, a visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

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RING THE BELLS
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg


Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic “Blogging Towards Oblivion,” was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacketSome attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure):

To be precise and precisely patient.

To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing.

To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story.

To make of language something vital.

There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing.

While every piece in this collection is mesmerizing in its way, I wish to highlight the two bookends. “Polymorphous,” which opens the book, is launched by a first paragraph that contains a thousand seeds but remains rooted in a single patch of earth. Everything that is to come is augured here: Joan’s relationship with herself, Joan’s relationship with her neighbor, Joan’s relationship with her world, Joan’s relationship with time. It’s worth quoting in full, for what it teaches us about Hinnefeld’s method, which is to say her artfulness with encapsulation and the care she takes to be thorough but not didactic :

By the time she was 20, with a little baby and a household to run, Joan had already started to seem like some sort of local exotic to her friends from high school, home from college on their breaks. All because she canned her own vegetables and sewed her own clothes and breastfed her son, at a time and in a place where those things wouldn’t come back into fashion for a good while. Now, forty years later, she still gardened and canned and sewed. She’d even gone back to school and finished her own degree eventually, with a nice and useless and exotic major in English. But by now the things that made her colorful in the eyes of her friends and neighbors was her weekly outing with her eighty-year-old neighbor, a gay man named Richard Meredith.

Richard and Joan are prickly friends. Richard’s own exotic past contains complicated secrets. A pool of desire in that Bucks County land percolates with still-unanswered questions. History wields power over both these characters and they wield power over each other, the ebbing and flowing of which provides the tension in the story.

joyce hinnefeld author photo

Joyce Hinnefeld

In “The Beauty of Their Youth,” a mother and her 20-year-old daughter travel to Greece and Italy—the mother with hopes both of strengthening the bond with her daughter and of revisiting the people and places she remembers from an abroad summer years before. Fran, the mother, is both claiming and reclaiming, in other words, whereas Miranda, the daughter, is determined to see this new-old world through her own eyes. When the two meet up with Fran’s long-ago lover (in Greece) and long-ago friend (in Rome), Fran is confronted with a new and unwelcome version of the mythology she’d webbed around her youthful adventures. She is forced, as Hinnefeld writes, to reckon with some of the ways she’d not been trusted, some of the ways the world hides the most human parts of us from view:

There were things you didn’t post, Fran thought now, wide awake at three AM. Often the most important things, the things that had indelibly shaped your life. Your family’s secret history. Your marriage to a junkie. Your daughter’s slow, sure drift away from you. Your husband’s thoughtless and fleeting affair all those years ago. And your chronic thoughts of leaving him.

Hinnefeld writes empathetically. She writes, too, with lacerating emotional economy. In between she layers in the world—its reflective surfaces, its values, its artistic traditions, its gators, the secrets that are suppressed until they aren’t.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

 

 

The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld, reviewed by Beth Kephart

The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket
The Beauty of Their Youth: Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld Wolfson Press/American Storytellers Series, 97 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Some attributes of the fine short-story writer, as noted and further refined while reading Joyce Hinnefeld, who also happens to be a fine novelist (read her In Hovering Flight, if you haven’t already had that pleasure): To be precise and precisely patient. To enter quickly into the whole world of the thing with a minimum of explanation and a surfeit of knowing. To arc toward the kind of surprise that does not shatter the hidden rules of the story. To make of language something vital. There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket
SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder. Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” (“Music Making”), the bark of a ...
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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Degrees of Difficulty jacket cover
DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY by Julie E. Justicz Fomite, 300 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Many years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted. I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has ...
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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Ruby and Roland Book Jacket
RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan Milkweed Editions, 256 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind. When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills. Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she ...
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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cover art for The Way Through the Woods
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING by Long Litt Woon translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart When I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me. I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her structure is neither chronological nor intuitive ...
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ART CAN HELP, essays by Robert Adams, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Art Can Help Book Jacket
ART CAN HELP by Robert Adams Yale University Art Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 88 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart  “[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) The book marks Adams’ attempt to dissuade his readers from Jeff Koons-style glitz, which is to say “imitations that distract us or, openly or by implication, ridicule hope.” We are reminded of the power of art, Adams suggests, by studying art that is real. The work of Edward Hopper is here in these pages, as are the images of Eugene Buechel, Ken Abbott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, and others, but if you are already concluding that this is a book of pictures and captions, you’d be wrong. This is a book of eclectic wisdoms and collegial awe. “I am asked with surprising frequency, ‘How do you know ...
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THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO by Carlo Collodi illustrated by Attilio Mussino translated by Carol Della Chi MacMillan (1926), 401 pages reviewed by Beth Kephart The Oldest, The Newer, and the Four Pinocchios The Pinocchio in the book on my lap is not the persistently gullible feather-in-his-cap Disney version with the Jimmy Cricket conscience and the wish-upon-a-star existence. My Pinocchio—La storia di un burattino—comes from the mastermind himself, the Italian serialist Carlo Collodi, born Carlo Lorenzimi, who didn’t start writing for children until late in life. He’d been in the seminary as a young man. He’d volunteered in the Tuscan army. He’d written satire, translated fairytales, and by the 1880s, it would seem, he was primed for his most memorable creation. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago.  If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a ...
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THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and Bill Sulit Interview Each Other

juncture03
THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW by Beth Kephart For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts. As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production. ◊ STORY: They would need a teleprompter. They would need a script. They would need umbrella lights, an iPhone mic, a steady camera, an army of tripods. They would call this thing that they had made their Juncture memoir shorts (and here those things are: www.udemy.com/the-stories-of-our-lives/learn/v4/overview). Lessons on writer’s block. Lessons on illness. Lessons on time, or nature writing, or the kitchen. They would twine Mary-Louise Parker and James Baldwin, Abigail ...
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THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague

THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague
THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU by Beth Kephart Chronicle Books, 256 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end. Mira Banul is “medium everything—blond, built, smart.” She lives on Haven, where “We were six miles long by one-half mile…We were The Isolates. We were one bridge and a few good rules away from normal. We were causal bohemians, expert scavengers, cool.” Haven, a tiny island on the East coast, is a vacation destination in the summer. At the end of the season, the year-rounders return to their school in a refurbished bank and rule the island after-hours. Mira’s best friends, Eva and Deni, have done everything together for as long as they can remember. They work together, study together, compete together, and ...
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott
HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ...
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DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost

DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost
DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart illustrated by William Sulit New City Community Press, 190 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting ...
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WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance

WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance
CHICKEN DANCE by William Sulit & Beth Kephart Digital 3-D Design A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D "art," I wasn't going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very ...
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SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart

SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart
SCRABBLE by Beth Kephart I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire whipped and cruel:  you couldn’t be touched; you wouldn’t stir; you. I broke and I climbed out and I climbed through and I climbed down into the blue black red threads and sat until a fat clack cracked the hollow between the walls and I knew that it was the long-nailed scrabble of a squirrel or the procrastination of the fox or the wolf that is my thoughts. That was the first night after. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of fourteen books, most recently Small Damages, named to many best-of-year lists.  Three new books are set to be ...
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SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN, poems by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SOJOURNERS OF THE IN-BETWEEN
by Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 90 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Soujourners of the In-Between Book JacketIn his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder.

Sojourners of the In-Between is organized into five escalating parts. It’s a little noisy in the opening pages, full of harbingers and yelling priests, a street corner mime, the clink of wine bottles, a stained tablecloth, “The world’s blips and pings, street traffic,/glass clatter, hammer clank…” (“Music Making”), the bark of a neighbor’s dog, that aforementioned cat, who also sings. The world buzzes and the poet heeds, his poems derived from hub-bub, his language caught up with the sounds.

Section 2 finds the poet this side of aggravated—privately annoyed by the poor conversationalist, a little superior to a neighbor named Grace, irritated by the stranger who sits beside him at a concert. From “And Another Thing:”

Such dislike for the woman who’s come late
to the concert making our whole row rise just
as the tenor sax hits its high E-flat and now
she’s sitting next to me and texting—my god!—
during the drummer’s lithe percussive
rhythms which are not my rhythms judging
by my heavy foot beats ….

By the time Djanikian’s narrator is, toward the end of section 2, officially unnerved, we are too, “… pacing the afternoon/like a high-wire walker/from room to room/counting the steps.” (“Loose Ends”) What is one to do with all that noise? Where is one to file the irritants?

Gregory-Djanikian

Gregory Djanikian

Now something tilts. Now, in the final three sections of the collection, Djanikian turns his focus toward the things that fall away and the things that will remain, without us. The poems see beyond the irritants toward the bats from which we keep our distance, the loosestrife in the garden, the touch of a wife’s hand to the “soft lips” of a cow, the material accumulations of our lives. The poems here are clear-eyed and life-besotted, they are quieter, unafraid of (but not lethal with) uncertainty. The poet has time to think. He has time to stand. He has time to wait, but what is he waiting for? For a letter to arrive? For a cat to sing? For an answer from a person no longer with him? Djanikian’s mother imagines her own passing in one poem. Djanikian imagines his own heaven in another. There is too much of everything. There is too little. From the poem “An Uneven Dozen”:

Antinomies
The paradox of time, giving me too much time
and sometimes not enough at the same time.
Morning, evening. Seconds, years.
When I’m late for everything.
I’m early for everything else.

In the final glorious poems of the In-Between, it is always about time—about time and how we live it. Searingly unpretentious, the closest thing to authentic I can imagine, Djanikian’s lines provide a kind of shelter, as, with him, we watch and wait and wonder.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. A memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in February 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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HOW TO BUILD A HEART
by Maria Padian
Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

How To Build a Heart jacket coverIsabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them:

People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing.

I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice.

For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt.

In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way.  

However, that’s only one of the things that Izzy chooses to keep to herself. She keeps her interactions with Roz hidden from her mother (who deems Roz “a bad influence”) and she never tells anyone that she and Roz have a penchant for spying on popular guys named Sam Shackleton (in his own backyard). Izzy’s teachers and classmates don’t know she’s one of the only kids in her school who still uses a prepaid cellphone and has to buy her own minutes.

Maria Padian Author pic

Maria Padian

In one seemingly-perfect moment the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself to her family: they can get a new house—an actual house—through Habitat for Humanity. All that’s required is putting in a few hundred hours of sweat equity and telling their story to the surrounding community to help raise funds for the build. This means that everyone in Clayton County—from her school friends to her classmates—will know her most closely-guarded secret.

It’s here Padian takes the reader on a deep dive into the many themes of this book, all bound by a single overarching question: what is the price we pay for keeping secrets?

Padian explores this question through a balance of vivid description and witty, discerning storytelling – giving a refreshing zeal to Izzy’s first-person narrative. It’s this balanced writing style that helps envelop the reader in Izzy’s world. Her emotions run raw across each page, written with a passion fueled by Padian’s shared personal experiences.

Through Izzy we begin to consider the weight secrets hold. Izzy’s mastered art of keeping secrets is built upon the ability to lie, or at the very least withholding the truth. Lie after lie, she keeps parts of herself private from others at the expense of her own happiness, unable to live her life to the fullest. Izzy’s secrets also hold a greater burden; her desire to keep her lifestyle hidden puts her family’s new Habitat home in jeopardy. Without her cooperation, their story may not be impactful enough to get the support they need to build. The only other option is to get the help of their estranged Crawford family, but her mother’s own secrets prevents that from happening. Then there’s Sam Shackleton who – through a series of well-timed coincidences – has taken a fancy to Izzy, which will end her friendship with Roz if she finds out.

The secrets that surround Izzy – those she keeps and those kept from her – become the cracks that weaken the foundations of her life: family, friends, opportunities, love, and fulfillment. She thinks secrets are necessary for survival, but what Izzy and the reader come to realize is that secrets and lies only help you survive, honesty and truth help you live:

…Secrets don’t stay secret for very long. It all comes out, in the end.

Padian’s How to Build a Heart encourages us to embrace our authentic selves by letting go, not only of secrets, but of the desire to hide parts of ourselves in hopes that others will accept us. The key to building a heart, as Padian passionately writes, is a solid foundation of self-acceptance. Once Izzy begins accepting who she is, the need for keeping secrets diminishes. There are, of course, secrets we are all entitled to; however, this book teaches readers that some secrets are a heavy burden. Through honesty, the truth unburdens us of our fears, releases us from what holds us back, and frees us to live our lives to the fullest:

I cannot remember the last time I felt so light. Maybe it’s because my arms are finally empty of stones.

Kristie-GadsonKristie Gadson is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s in English. But, formalities aside, she knew that children’s books would become her passion when she found herself sneaking into the children’s section of Barnes & Noble well after she turned eighteen. She is a strong advocate for diverse children’s books, and writes diverse children’s book reviews on her blog The Black Sheep Book Review.

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS, short pieces by Elena Ferrante, reviewed by David Grandouiller

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INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, illustrations by Andrea Ucini
Europa Editions, 112 pages
reviewed by David Grandouiller

“Me” who? We’ll always know too little about ourselves.—Elena Ferrante

Incidental Inventions book jacketWho is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know?

What makes some readers so curious about a writer’s “real life”? Do we (because I’m one of them) want the fiction to absorb reality—to make a fiction out of the writer? Or are we trying to absorb fiction into reality? Maybe we feel alienated by the wall that is fiction—artists giving their eyes and minds and hearts and imaginations to the reader without having to give themselves.

“I refused to form a relationship in which I would be in a subordinate position,” writes Ferrante, “forced to yield to the enormous power of someone who is silent while you ramble on, asking you questions without ever really responding to yours, concealing from you his drives—while you reveal yours in the most vulnerable way.” This comes from Ferrante’s new book, Incidental Inventions, a collection of weekly columns written for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019, released in November from Europa Editions. In this passage, she’s talking about therapy, but the description could be applied equally to a readership, and the idea of her relationship with readers makes this book particularly striking—a pseudonymous fiction writer exposes to the reader a comparatively unmediated self. The wonder she expresses is presumably her own, the shame, the joy, the generosity, the fear, the pride.

I say, “comparatively unmediated,” because in nonfiction, the writer assumes responsibility for the narrator in a way the fiction writer doesn’t, but this is not to say the narrator and the writer are the same—there is always mediation. In David Shields’s collage manifesto, Reality Hunger, he quotes memoirist Patricia Hampl saying, “It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.”

I suppose Hampl’s distinction is slightly beside the point when it comes to Ferrante, who does not exist. If the writer’s relationship to the narrator is the defining difference between nonfiction and fiction, what does the term nonfiction even mean when the writer’s identity is unknown? Can I really call it “comparatively unmediated”? Can I say, “The wonder she expresses is her own?” Does it even matter? Does it make my encounter with this narrator less legitimate? In the new book, Ferrante goes further than Hampl and points out the artifice inherent in writing at all:

My effort at faithfulness [in writing] cannot be separated from the search for coherence, the imposition of order and meaning, even the imitation of the lack of order and meaning. Because writing is innately artificial, its every use involves some form of fiction. The dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture.

Maybe this is all I should need from a narrator—an effort at faithfulness as she constructs a self on the page. This makes me think, too, of how much the writer’s work, in this respect, is the work of every social being, how identity is often performance, in life as much as in art. “I invent myself for a journalist,” admits Ferrante, discussing her practice of taking interviews only by correspondence, so she has time to consider and compose her answers, “but the journalist—especially when she is herself a writer—invents herself for me, through her questions.”

If I begin to think of all human intercourse this way, I’m free to stop thinking of the invented narrator, in fiction or nonfiction, as a wall between the writer and me. I can begin to understand intimacy as the goal of invention. The writer behind Ferrante can’t give herself to readers, because the self can’t be contained—what she can do is create an artificial container, pour as much of herself into it as she wants, then offer it to the world, printed and bound and accompanied by Andrea Ucini’s illustrations. Which brings me back to the book—I’ve put off discussing it directly for too long.

In the fifty-one columns that comprise Incidental Inventions, each around five hundred words, Ferrante responds to prompts presented to her by Guardian editors at her own request. “I had no experience with that type of writing,” she explains in her introduction, “and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it […] I told the editors I would accept the offer if they would send me a series of questions.” Her self-awareness and humility are attractive, and the title itself—Incidental Inventions—understates the sense of purpose with which the narrator navigates each topic. But these pieces aren’t the work of someone who’s just trying her hand. Short and tightly woven, each of them meanders the landscape of the writer’s memories and thoughts with a practiced nonchalance, driving all the while toward a kind of volta in the last few sentences, and ending, usually, in a punchy, epigrammatic final line: “What perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people” or “We can be much more than what we happen to be” or “All in all, I’m doing fine.”

I wish the prompts had been printed with Ferrante’s pieces. I wondered, leafing through this calendar of idiosyncrasy, about her reactions to the editors’ questions, and also about how forward the editors had been, knowing how carefully Ferrante maintains her anonymity. How many questions did they ask that related directly to her biography, and did she resent it when they did, or did she take it in stride, being used to it by now? Do any of these columns answer the questions directly, or does she interpret them freely, wandering the open water once the coast is out of sight?

These are greedy questions, in some ways—the person Ferrante presents in this one-sided conversation is already so full and rich. We get reading recommendations, film recommendations, career advice. We learn about her first love and about the reasons she laughs when she does, about her fear of old age and her fear of letting her fear be seen. We learn why she admires her daughters and why she admires women who chose not to be mothers. We read some of what she thinks of Caravaggio, exclamation marks, religion, sex, Italian fascism, of lying and learning and change. She says a lot about writing—writing when you’re young and when you’re older, writing before bed or when you wake up, smoking while you write or writing after you’ve quit smoking.

And underneath all these things, providing the energy with which she propels each thought, is the wonder, “the wonder—the wonder of knowing how to read, to write, to transform signs into things.”

◊

As I write about Incidental Inventions, I’m thinking of another book that I consider linked to Ferrante’s collection—In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in English in 2016. The books share many characteristics: both were written in Italian, both translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Both writers are women whose novels are internationally acclaimed but who, before these books, had published little nonfiction. Each of these books was conceived as a series of weekly columns for a periodical (Ferrante for The Guardian, Lahiri for Internazionale).

Lahiri’s book is more focused than Ferrante’s. It follows a progression: she learned Italian, moved to Italy, transitioned from writing in English to writing in Italian. But she strikes many of the same topics as Ferrante—the wonder associated with learning to read, for example, or their interactions with journalists. Each of the books has a chapter on writing in a diary, in which they both describe having outgrown the diary. Ferrante remembers having begun to invent things in her diary when she was young, to account for lost time or missed entries, and so she gave up journaling and wrote stories instead. Lahiri, as an adult journaling in a foreign language, says, “Writing only in a diary is the equivalent of shutting myself in the house, talking to myself. What I express there remains a private, interior narration. At a certain point, in spite of the risk, I want to go out.”

A diary is not totally unselfconscious or unmediated, but this going out is still a momentous turning point in the life of the writing. A more elaborate, more conscious performance by the narrator is necessary, or at least expected. This going out is what Ferrante’s and Lahiri’s writings have in common, an emphasis on establishing a consistent voice, a persona, a narrator to whom readers can attribute each thought and experience, so that we begin to fill out the image of a figure, even if it isn’t exactly the image of the writer herself. Ferrante speaks in similar terms about the accumulation of qualities which makes possible the idea of a film star she admires: “[Daniel Day-Lewis] is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work […] If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me. Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.”

But maybe it’s exactly this indecorous spilling that some reality-hungry readers want. “Books are the best means […] of overcoming reality,” writes Lahiri, but maybe we want reality to overcome the book. Maybe we want the diary and not the story. Or the diary as well as the story. Is that possible? Where do we find it?

“Literary novelty,” writes Ferrante, “if one wants to insist on the concept—exists in the way each individual inhabits the magma of forms he is immersed in. Thus ‘to be oneself’ is an arduous task—perhaps impossible.” I think this is true, and it makes me wonder: how little advantage do most writers take of the diversity of possible forms available to them? And would employing a greater range of forms fragment the invented narrator in such a way that readers would get (maybe not a truer but) a different kind of insight into the person behind the persona?

I think a form that does this fragmentation well is the “crônica.” A giant in this tradition is the Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Her Selected Crônicas, published individually in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973, is like an encyclopedia of short forms—they range in length from a single line to one or two thousand words; they are proverbs, parables, and myths, short stories, reflections, interviews, memoirs, bits of transcribed dialogue, brief scenic sketches. Lispector makes little or no distinction, across these columns, or even within each column, between the fictional and the real, though she uses both first- and third-person narration throughout. This wide range may not have been a transgression of genre, in Lispector’s context, since she was taking advantage of the freedom of the form, which her translator, Giovanni Pontiero, calls, “a genre peculiar to Brazil which allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone,” he says, “is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or weekly columns in the European or U.S. press.” But to bring her indiscriminate range into a different literary context could be transgressive, could be productive.

Ferrante’s columns are not generically transgressive, except inasmuch as the frame of anonymity produces a unique reading experience. They’re much more consistent, even conservative, in style and structure—which is certainly not a weakness. But I think it’s important to note, by way of comparison, the possible breadth of the form she’s working in, and to call the breadth good. Ferrante’s narrator maintains her integrity, her wholeness, however artificially. That’s a different kind of victory than Lispector’s, but all of these writers help revive in us “the wonder—the wonder […] vivid and lasting.”

David Grandouiller lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he writes about faith and religion, Christian education, film, cats, and music. He is a third-year candidate in the MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University and the Nonfiction Editor at The Journal. His essay, “Holy Uselessness,” was a finalist for the 2019 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction, and a group of his essays won the 2019 Walter Rumsey Marvin grant from the Ohioana Library Association.

 

 

Source for the biographical Ferrante info:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante

OUTSIDE MYSELF, a young adult novel by Kristen Witucki, reviewed by Donna W. Hill

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OUTSIDE MYSELF
by Kristen Witucki
Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 232 pages
reviewed by Donna W. Hill

Outside Myself book jacket Superbly written, Outside Myself by Kristen Witucki gets to the heart of the human experience. Blended and broken families struggle with issues that tear parents and children apart. Trying to do their best, they are fettered by incomplete and often false information. At the center of it all, two very different blind characters, determined to create their own place in the world, grapple with the negativity in their families, communities and themselves.

Outside Myself covers roughly fifteen months from May 1994 to August 1995. It is told by two narrators; Tallie, a young and precocious blind girl, and Benjamin, a withdrawn grandfather who works at a library for the blind. They represent different age groups, genders, races, belief systems and causes of blindness, growing up in different eras with different rights under the law.

Tallie, the child of a broken marriage, attends a Christian youth group, where she realizes that some of the kids want to pray for her healing. She wonders why so many people are invested in her becoming sighted. Whether through medical advances or faith healing, their actions say they can’t accept her as she is. Even her father believes he must keep her safe until she can get an operation to restore her sight. Tallie knows what being ostracized and bullied means, but she grapples with her own insensitivity to others.

Divorced and estranged from his family, Benjamin rents a tiny room in the house of an elderly woman and her thirty-five-year-old, dope-smoking grandson. Through memories of his early childhood, we learn he once had some sight – not enough to fit in with the sighted world and too much to fit in the visually impaired one. He was out there on his own, trying to have more sight than he did. He could focus on just one print word at a time. “Everyone was in denial about the vision problem, even me.”

An avid Braille reader, Tallie wants to learn more about the cure her father has mentioned so she calls the adult section at the Library for the Blind and speaks with Benjamin. For the first time, Benjamin shares his own blindness with a client and challenges her beliefs. Tallie has never encountered a blind adult and, though angry, is intrigued by him. Their interactions help Benjamin examine his role in his family’s separation, while Tallie begins to seek independence from her own family.

Kristen Witucki, author photo

Kristen Witucki

Witucki interweaves the two points of view with uncommon agility. Her ability to blend action, dreams, and memory allows their stories to unfold smoothly, drawing the reader into their separate worlds, even as she brings them closer together. Music, literature, and the love of learning are lifelines throughout the book. There is a commentary on Heidi, Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s novel. Tallie’s concern for dry leaves and Benjamin’s relationship with the moon provide glimpses into their inner lives.

Misconceptions and stereotypes about blindness persist. The book helps readers consider that sighted people don’t always have the answers and highlights some of the challenges they have maintaining the attitudes of hopefulness and curiosity necessary for blind people to make a leap into an independent, nonvisual lifestyle.

Witucki’s experiences have placed her in an ideal position to tell this gripping and necessary story about the struggles and triumphs of life without sight. Born totally blind, she earned three master’s degrees in teaching gifted students, creative writing and teaching students with visual impairments and she is the Curriculum and Content Editor, Blindness and Visual Impairment at Learning Ally, the world’s largest library of volunteer-narrated books.

Outside Myself is unique in many ways, not the least of which is its double, first-person point of view. Carefully constructed with clear, concise language, nuanced characters and unexpected twists, it is an inspiring and enjoyable read. This beautiful and honest story of a mentor relationship reaches into several worlds to expose the deepest pain and the greatest triumphs of the human spirit.

Donna W. Will author photo with guide dogDonna W. Hill is the author of the educator-recommended young adult novel The Heart of Applebutter Hill, a fantasy for middle school and older readers. Find it in print and eBook versions through Amazon and other outlets. It’s available through Bookshare and Learning Ally for readers with print impairments. A former Philadelphia street performer, songwriter and recording artist, Hill lives in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains with her husband, her guide dog and their rescued kitty. Learn more at DonnaWHill.com

 

Purchase Outside Myself in Print, eBook & Audio Formats

Outside Myself is Kristen Witucki’s first full length novel. Purchase it and The Transcriber, a story for adolescent emerging readers, and follow Kristen at:

https://www.amazon.com/Kristen-Witucki/e/B00BCQVL4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Audible has Outside Myself Narrated by Stephanie Keefer and Royal Jaye. Listen to a Sample at:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Outside-Myself-Audiobook/B07CY6KGFQ

Options for readers with print impairments

Outside Myself is available through the National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS), part of the Library of Congress. Both books are also available through Learning Ally.

 

 

 

THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING: a Craft Essay by Nate House

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THE PROBLEM WITH SURFING AND WRITING
A Craft Essay
by Nate House

Long exposure shot of man surfing

Last summer I was supposed to finish a novel. But there were waves, so many waves. I did my best to try, to write.

Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, took the dogs out under the stars in our yard, smelled the oysters and salt from the Delaware Bay two miles to the south. Went back inside to attempt to write a few hundred words before the sun came up. Often, I wrote nothing worth a damn, gave up, put a few boards in the van, drove to my favorite break in South Jersey, one my wife and I loved. Got into the water and wondered how it was possible to surf perfectly glassy, waist-high waves all to ourselves in the most densely populated state in the country. When a wave came my way I turned, paddled, stood, walked to the nose of the board and lost myself in that magical moment where nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing, except catching another wave.

Herein lies the problem: being a writer who surfs, a surfer who writes. When there is a wave to be ridden, everything else in life—dogs, loved ones, deadlines and writing—gets put on hold. To make matters worse, once you’re completely and totally stoked from the waves, writing a coherent thought, especially one that attempts to describe the sublime experience of riding waves, becomes virtually impossible.

This could be why there are so few books about surfing that have been able to adequately capture the experience of walking on water. Yes, Daniel Duane’s Caught Inside, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days and Alan Weisbecker’s In Search of Captain Zero paint colorful portraits of the surfing life, and are filled with beautiful descriptions of the ocean, dolphin, and waves. Yet, the true experience of surfing itself seems to elude even the most talented surf-writer.

One could argue that all writers struggle to describe our most intimate and intense moments, agonizing over sentences that allow the reader to experience the love, sex, and heartbreak of their characters—but writers of those topics know that we all (hopefully) have likely brushed up against all three, and uses our knowledge and shared metaphors to put us into the mind and body of the character so we can feel or at least understand what they feel. Love, sex, and heartbreak can be put into a language we all speak. Surfing, I’m convinced, cannot.

Instead of writing about surfing, the best we surfers can do is try to use the experience of the sport, the pursuit, to open our minds in the same way jogging does for writers like Joyce Carol Oates or Haruki Murakami. While it may be impossible to write after surfing, what often happens—at least for me—is that a few hours in the ocean creates an intense awareness to my surroundings, be it the ocean, people, or even the traffic. It is during these moments of heightened sensitivity where we humans become aware of the smallest details—the old man in a brand new Mercedes at the gas station sitting alone, frantically scratching lottery tickets; the dead cat on the side of the road; the laughter from a group of teenagers smoking pot on the beach.

After some of the best surf sessions of the summer, I’d often find myself tearing up while watching videos of Bruce Springsteen bringing audience members up on stage. This increased sensitivity, when properly harnessed, might, I think, expose the writer—or at least this writer—to all the small details that make us human. The same details that make for good writing.

Here in Jersey, we had one of the hottest summers on record. The sand on the beach burned our feet. Cases of flesh-eating bacteria along the coast increased, most likely due to global warming. The flies, brought from the back bay to the beach in the light west winds, sawed through any exposed piece of flesh. The news incessantly pointed out the moral failings of our president, and yet his supporters still backed him. We surf to escape all of this, and yet it sometimes makes all that news all the more devastating because of our enhanced sensitive state.

I’ve been surfing for over twenty years, writing for thirty. I still struggle with each of them, trying to figure out how to make the two activities, my two passions, work with all the other parts of my life. When I’m at my worst, struggling with life, with surfing and writing, my wife kindly guides me back to Percy Shelly:

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

Surfing is its own form of art. It “spreads its own figured curtain” and “withdraws life’s dark veil,” leaving its victims unable to find the words to describe a single moment in time, shared by  board, mind, body, wind, tide and sand, that connects us to all the beauty and suffering that exists in the universe. Surfing and writing keeps us searching for that perfect wave, sentence, or poem so we can experience that moment again and again and again and again.

Nate House headshotNate House’s fiction has appeared in Armchair Shotgun, Kudzu House, The Bicycle Review, Monday Night Lit, The Schuylkill River Journal, and other publications. His columns have appeared in both local and national newspapers. He worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Tribune and currently teaches at Community College of Philadelphia.

 

 

 

Image credit: Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

 

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov reviewed by Dylan Cook

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SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES
by Varlam Shalamov
translated by Donald Rayfield
New York Review Books, 576 pages 

reviewed by Dylan Cook

Sketches of the Criminal World Book JacketA man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins don’t survive. A doctor refuses to treat new patients, fearing that someone has been sent to kill him. Characters like these populate Varlam Shalamov’s criminal world, the depraved underbelly of society born and bred in the Soviet prison system. Many of the criminal world’s citizens were locked up under vague pretenses of “counterrevolutionary activity,” so why should they uphold the laws that failed them in the first place? Why not murder and steal before your neighbor beats you to it? Morals, after a while, can become relative. Life in prison may get easier without a domineering boss, cheaper without children to care for, and safer without new faces in the ward.

Varlam Shalamov was a natural dissenter. Born to an Orthodox priest in 1907, Shalamov lived as a staunch atheist. As Josef Stalin rose to power, Shalamov joined a Trotskyist group in direct opposition to the new government. There, he helped distribute pamphlets that were highly critical of Stalin, leading to his first imprisonment from 1929 to 1932. He continued writing politically charged pieces that brought him in and out of prison camps in Kolyma, the Far East of Russia, from 1937 to 1951. In the decades that followed, Shalamov documented his experiences through thinly veiled fictions in the six-part Kolyma Stories. The first volume, published two years ago, contains an updated translation of the first three parts, with stories that have been widely known since the 1980s. By contrast, many stories in Sketches of the Criminal World were only recently discovered and appear here in English for the first time. Together, the two volumes constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s fiction. While his writing was suppressed in the Soviet Union, his stories leaked out into Europe and beyond, placing him on the world stage as one of the foremost chroniclers of the gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, admitted that Shalamov’s personal experience in the prison system was “longer and more bitter,” and that Shalamov shed necessary light on life in Soviet prisons. Only in 1987, five years after his death, were Shalamov’s stories published in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s more lenient policies.Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Shalamov’s work is itself a protest, battling opinions on multiple fronts. Many “stories” in this collection are simply essays masquerading as fiction, offering Shalamov a platform to comment on literature, incarceration, and the intersection of the two. Russian literary giants like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Babel were all too mawkish for Shalamov’s taste, and their attempts to accurately write about criminals simply missed the mark. None of these authors lived among criminals, real criminals, long enough to properly understand their rituals and influence. Shalamov did. By writing these stories, Shalamov was providing what he thought was the most genuine account of the gangsters who lived in and controlled Soviet gulags. There is nothing redemptive about these characters—they’re no Robin Hoods or Jean Valjeans. For Shalamov, criminals are not romantic ideals; rather, they represent the nadir of human morality.

There are two breeds of criminals in Kolyma. First are the freiers, the petty criminals that have no place in the criminal world. Most of these people were taken in under Article 58, a part of the Soviet penal code that allowed the government to arrest citizens under any suspicion that they were disloyal to the state. These everyday people that struggle against the system are the “criminals” that Shalamov fears are being canonized. They’re far from the hardened criminals, the gangsters, that live and thrive in this system. Being a gangster is more than a career, it’s a generational calling. The gangsters in Shalamov’s writing are the sons and grandsons of gangsters, and they bear children to one day fill their shoes. Naturally, the gangsters prey upon the freiers, stealing bread rations from them and murdering them when convenient. The freiers want to survive; the gangsters want to wield more power. Shalamov, through his first-person narration, does not firmly align himself in either camp. He treats both sides equally, and by doing so, he gestures towards the transition from freier to gangster, from human to inhuman. In “The War of the ‘Bitches,’” the narrator witnesses rival gangs in conflict. As the “war” presses on, the gangs begin recruiting both freiers and gangsters into their ranks. The narrator watches inmates futilely join and switch sides, asking:

How? Could the ceremony of kissing a knife change a criminal soul? Or had the notorious crook’s blood changed its chemical composition in the veins of an old crook just because his lips had touched a steel blade?

Reading Shalamov often feels like a quick slip into darkness. Many of his stories are poignantly short, often fewer than five pages, some no more than a paragraph. Today, these would likely be categorized as flash fiction, offering glimpses into characters’ lives without any direct plot. Shalamov knew the effect of this length, and he used it with great precision. His shortest stories focus in on an object or moment and strip them of their familiarity. In “Graphite,” one of the most famous stories from the collection, Shalamov directs his attention towards pencils. Pens, he says, are the preferred writing implement in prisons. Only indelible ink ensures that gangsters cannot cheat in a card game or that doctors cannot alter a death certificate. Pencil marks can be erased and changed to change fate, so pencils are seldom found in Kolyma. In a few pages, Shalamov turns graphite into an unattainable luxury. He shows that the criminal world is not entirely isolated from the civilian world, but runs parallel beneath it. Pencils are simply one of the freedoms that become alien when crossing over into a prison camp like Kolyma.

The natural world that houses these prisoners is just as antagonistic as any gangster or mob boss. High in the Arctic Circle, Kolyma winters last for nine months of the year, and the short summers are hardly enough to thaw the ice. A short walk can become dangerous as frostbite can set in within minutes. Out of both respect and fear for this environment, Shalamov’s writing is that of a naturalist. Describing flora and fauna are some of the only times Shalamov embellishes his usually terse prose style. Stories like “The Path” and “The Waterfall” depict the brief Kolyma summers and the respite that they provided. Natural warmth like this was a gift of hospitality in an otherwise unrelenting environment. “The Resurrection of the Larch,” more than any other story, shows the inextricable tie between the prisoners and nature. It was common for prisoners to send larch branches to their families, not because they were particularly pretty, but because they could come back to life in a glass of water. By sending home life, prisoners could send a message, more tangible than a letter, that they were still there. At the start of the story, the narrator writes:

In the Far North man looks for an outlet for his sensitivity, when it hasn’t been destroyed or poisoned by decades of living in Kolyma. A man sends an airmail parcel: not books, not photographs, not poetry, but a larch branch, a dead branch from living nature.

Map of Russia with the Kolyma Region shown in red. Modified from Wikimedia Commons.

Map of Russia with the Kolyma Region shown in red. Modified from Wikimedia Commons.

 

To Shalamov, survival itself was an act of defiance. Staying alive meant that your will was stronger than the prison systems. In the most personal, autobiographical story of the collection, “The Examination,” Shalamov recounts the process of becoming a paramedic. In his early years as a prisoner, Shalamov worked in coal and gold mines. He fought to become a paramedic, a less strenuous job, knowing full well that his body likely couldn’t take more abuse in the mines. Shalamov’s life comes down to a chemistry exam given by an indifferent proctor. Chemistry, we learn, is one of his weaknesses because his chemistry teacher was executed for counterrevolutionary activity. Now, the knowledge he was robbed of is the only thing that can save him. Living through his exam meant living through his sentence, a win against the Soviet government. “I survived,” he writes. “ I walked out of hell. I finished the classes, ended my sentence, outlived Stalin, and then returned to Moscow.” In a world shadowed by Stalin’s Iron Curtain, the general secretary is very rarely mentioned. Shalamov uses the name sparingly, only when he’s sure of a victory.

“How does someone stop being human?” Shalamov poses the question to the reader many times throughout his stories. Slowly, he begins to answer it by offering bite-sized portraits into life in a Soviet gulag. Bringing clarity to an oppressive regime’s darkest moments wasn’t pleasant for Shalamov, but it was necessary. Doing so could have easily placed him back in Kolyma, but political dissidents like Shalamov have to take that risk. His relentless, macabre imagery is painful, both for the subjects and for the author who is reliving these moments. The fact that Shalamov was able to produce these stories at all is a testament to his integrity as an artist and documentarian. He leads us down the path towards inhumanity. He shows us that this path is lined with theft and murder and indecency, but he never outright blames anyone for following it. The criminal world could not exist without the government that created it, so this journey is just a symptom of the Soviets’ immoral, self-serving policy. Shalamov lays this bare as he brings us all the way to inhumanity. Only then, lost and battered, can we start answering the bigger question: How do we go back?

Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at dycook@sas.upenn.edu.

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

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YEAR BY YEAR: Poems
by Lynne Sachs
Tender Buttons Press, 64 pages

reviewed by Sharon Harrigan

YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs book jacketWhen Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she asked herself one simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of her life been affected by the public world beyond? The poems she wrote in response turned into this book. One poem for each year.

Sachs is a well-known experimental filmmaker. Year by Year is her first book of poetry, and in many ways it can be appreciated as the logical extension of her career as a visual storyteller. She describes her films as combining “memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes.” Such a description might also be applied to her poems. Year by Year dips into memoir when it recounts events in her personal life. The glimpses into current events have a documentary feel. When Sachs describes moments she was present for but cannot possibly remember, such as her own birth, the book takes us into fictional territory. The hybrid form (memoir/documentary/fiction) is one experimental element. But even more innovative is the way she often presents us with two versions of the same poem. The handwritten draft and the final typeset poem face each other, resembling a book of poems in translation where the original and translated versions run in parallel.

I first read Year by Year in two sittings, focusing only the final versions of the poems. It is unusual for me to consider a poetry collection a page turner, but this book was. It propelled me through time from the poet’s birth to the birth of her daughters and beyond, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War.

On my second read, I scrutinized the handwritten drafts alongside the final versions, one poem at a time, letting them resonate individually. The experience was fascinating not only because it showed what choices the poet made to tighten each poem, but also because reading the two versions side by side created a not-quite-synched stereo effect, or perhaps something close to a superimposed image in a film.

In “1962,” for example, the final version reads: “Two baby girls brown and blonde/at home with mom and a nurse.” The draft version is less distilled, but it has its own appeal: “A plan, an American plan, two eggs any style, not the Continental breakfast, baby girls blonde and brown at home with mom and a nurse, a black woman whose name no one remembers.” In particular, the fact that no one remembers the nurse’s name, in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s, sets the stage for the Civil Rights events that will happen in the later poems.

In “1966,” “fields of daddodils that never drooped” becomes “Droopless daddodils.” The conversational tone shifts to a pared-down diction that sounds more childlike and more artful at the same time.

Lynne Sachs

Lynne Sachs

The draft version of “1978” includes “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which the final version simply calls, “a feminist book on the body/I wish I loved.” The line breaks allow us to read the sentence as a whole and as a fragment, at the same time. We infer that the narrator wished she loved the book, but also that she wished she loved the body, the female body, her own body, enough to be comfortable learning more about its sexual functions. Having the name of the book on the facing page adds to the emotional impact, because so many of us know that book well, a cultural touchpoint that reminds us of how uncomfortable it can be to attempt to claim our bodies as our own.

The first poem in the book sets the tone by introducing the concept of time—the time of day, the time of year, the time of life of the poet’s parents when they became her parents: “Born at dinner time on an August evening,/the child of a twenty-one and twenty-three-year-old” are the opening lines. The use of time adds to the cinematic quality of the poem, grounding us in an “opening shot,” instead of the abstract or fuzzy entrance to a poem that a reader might expect. .

The poem “1964” immerses us in a scene that shifts from close up to zoom, from a little girl’s room to the vast night sky. We see the magical thinking of a young child, who might believe she can reach the stars or that she can change her parents’ behavior. The poem suggests the lack of control children have in their lives and the way they cope by refocusing their attention outward. As Sachs puts it, “My mother and father are fighting on the other side of the door./I lick the window next to my bed and pretend to taste the stars.”

It is not surprising that a poetry book by a filmmaker is lush with images. Even something as visually static as a phone call becomes vivid and tangible in “1982,” when the narrator is making a transatlantic call to her brother: “His hello transforms this dirty glass box/into four dynamic movie screens.” The poem then offers us glimpses of what the narrator imagines she sees on those screens, the events she is missing by being far from home. The poems also sometimes convey abstract concepts as physical objects, such as in “1961” where the future is a crystal ball that the newborn drops from her hands. It shatters and scatters “down the hall/out the front door of the hospital/into the sweltering darkness.” The “camera” zooms in to the tiniest of hands and then pans out to the room, the building, the outdoors. We can imagine two different “cameras” filming at the same time at vastly different scales.

Natural beauty and headline-making violence appear in the same stanza, showing, with that juxtaposition, that we cannot escape from the world around us. In “1999,” for example, “In our front yard now, Columbine grows wild./With each bloom, I think of her, a mother too.” The narrator cannot even look at her Columbine flowers without thinking of the Columbine school shooter. Again, Sachs uses something visual and concrete to pan over to the homophones they might prompt in a reader and writer alike.

Similarly, in “2004,” the narrator’s daughter’s first solo ride on the subway is made to coexist  with explosions in the Madrid metro by terrorists. The public and the private collide in its own kind of explosion on the page in a visual way.

The book ends with the fifty-year-old narrator looking back over her life—another visual reference. The scene is her birthday party, where she “perform[s]/split-second happiness for the camera.” The last stanza reads:

I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror
take another look at my own silent film
and listen once again to the soundtrack
I’m playing over and over.

This scene can be interpreted literally as the narrator watching a film she made. But the “film” is also a metaphor for her life, her private and public memories, and, by extension, this book. The last line is “I’m playing over and over.” As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.

Sharon Harrigan Author PhotoSharon Harrigan is the author of the novel Half (University of Wisconsin Press, June 2020) the memoir Playing with Dynamite (Truman State University Press, 2017). She has published more than fifty stories, essays, and reviews in the New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include: finalist, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for the Novel; International Book Award, first place in memoir, second place in new nonfiction; May Sarton Book Award finalist; Kinder award for best short story from Pleiades; Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award from Key West Literary Seminar; Sarah Pennypacker Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and Ted Berrigan Award from Naropa University. She teaches writing at WriterHouse, a literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE by Alice Hall

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IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE
by Alice Hall

birds flying overhead
the birds don’t circle the ways they do here…….collected in one
large cloud……a blanket of ‘of’ …….there’s no following
in backwards time…no picking back up or undoing…..the glass
hardens almost immediate…the soft bubble at the tip smoothed
to hard nub….the sound of liquid in yr straw….….a suck bitten
between  handful  of  teeth…. it  thinks  of  things  which  need
splitting…..division….via money…….via  labor….…. via  you’re
too  stupid…………look….how  pretty….….i’ve  become..in  yr
absence……..look  how you’re  faking  just look….you’ve  peed
yrself all over N –– J ––– Transit,….you’ve lost….yr flip flops in
old bridge & now we’re getting kicked off the train b/c,   well,
b/c i’ve sworn off swearing   sworn off being a woman yelling
instead i’ll be a reliquary….….so how about……..you give me yr
xbox?……yes, it was me….yr bungled up boyfriend….…come to
sew all the patches on yr clothes
…………………………………………………& come to split the field in two

Alice HallAlice Hall is poet living and working in Buffalo, NY, where she is pursuing a PhD in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Previously, she taught poetry and writing in Portland, Oregon. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Prelude, Dream Pop, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook One Million Nude Women (Industrial Lunch.)

 

 

 

Image credit: Michael Jin on Unsplash

TWO POEMS by Jeremy Radin

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TWO POEMS
by Jeremy Radin

Ode to the Nectarine

O secretive sunrise of an armadillo,
won’t you please uncurl for me? Of all
the fruits I know you alone must live.
Fiery armadillo dredged through blood
& yolk, I have been watching you for hours,
waiting for you to emerge from yourself
& shuffle across the kitchen counter, sniffing
at the knives. I set out a plum for you, bowl
of dead spiders. I haven’t the faintest as to
what you like to eat. The encyclopedias
keep your secrets well, but I am persistent,
little Jupiter. I will witness the unwitnessed.
Your unfolded golden splendor. Treasurous
armadillo, shall I place you in a bedroom
with another of your kind—scattered petals,
incense burning, Al Green playing low? Shall
I leave you to it & peek through the keyhole?
No. My eyes would never survive it; the sacred
savagery of your love—a pair of burning gods
divulging to the dark the unspeakable
violence of sugar.

Marriages

The Fries

At the burger joint your friend thinks it is funny
to snatch, while you are not looking, the fries

one by one off your plate, & stuff them, grinning
into his mouth. Even after you’ve explained to him

that it’s as if he’s reaching over & eating your beloved’s
hands, how she is all you have: a wife of piping gold

to stave off an encroaching dark. Though you gesture,
half-joking, with your edgeless knife. Though you growl

like a goblin Pagliacci he whips his hand, again & again,
eight, nine, ten times—until you hunch, ogre-ish, over

the fries as though communion were possible only here,
upon this bed of chipped linoleum. But what does he

care, munching the beloved—until something begins
moving within him, & he grimaces & leaps & rushes to

the bathroom, where, bending over the toilet bowl he
stares at what he’s vomited out: nailed, knuckled, & pale:

a mass of wriggling fingers…

The Sprite

The server brings
the Sprite & before
she is halfway turned
from your table
you’ve finished
the Sprite & request
another & within
seconds it too
is gone so she brings
another, then two,
then pitcher & you
do, you drink it straight
from the pitcher
like a mug
of coffee, jug of wine,
a vessel in which
white mums
have been melted,
& yes, of course,
you marry the Sprite,
you walk the aisle,
speak the vows,
lift the veil,
smash the glass,
& lick your love
off the floor…

The Oreos

So simple to be both lovers at ………….the same time one
munching a sleeve of Oreos…………. as the other begs him to stop
one shoving Oreos into his mouth…………. the other floating up
into space one gasping through crumbs…………. the other bellowing
but one’s head is a sugar swamp…………. so the other isn’t heard
while hauled through sleeves of stars…………. entreating the first
to take a break breathe…………………….. but one does not rest
one advances like an ocean…….      …… pulling catastrophe
into insatiable tide…………………          ….. as the other goes
finally silent ………….…………………………………swallowed up
in the hungry hush ………….………….………….       the plump dark
………….………….………….………….………….………….………….picking its teeth

Jeremy Radin author picJeremy Radin is a poet and actor. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Journal, Muzzle, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He is the author of Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody, 2012) and Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2017). He lives in Los Angeles where he once sat next to Carly Rae Jepsen in a restaurant.

 

 

 

Image credit: Heidi Kaden on Unsplash

THE CREATURE CRAWLIN by Trevor Alixopulos

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THE CREATURE CRAWLIN’
Notes on Fatherhood in 2019
a Visual Narrative by Trevor Alixopulos

Trevor Alixopulos’ visual narrative presents a thoughtful and visceral glimpse of new-parenthood through a male lens. In this piece, he questions the very nature of existence and what it means to be human. Who is this new being? How is the parent’s life now different? As he moves through time and space, Alixopulos gives us his own take on generational shift.

—Emily Steinberg
Visual Narrative Editor, Cleaver Magazine

headshot of Trevor Alixopulos

Trevor Alixopulos is a cartoonist, writer and editor. His graphic novel, The Hot Breath of War (Sparkplug Comic Books), was nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel in the Ignatz Awards and featured on tcj.com‘s “Top 100 Comics of the Decade.” His nonfiction comics essays have appeared on popula.com, where he was also a designer and editor. His various comics and illustration venues and clients include Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaiser Permanente, Fantagraphics Books, Turner Broadcasting, Seven Stories Press, Playboy, East Bay Express, North Bay Bohemian, and Scout Books. He lives in California.

Full Text: 

It perhaps reveals some essential psychological fact that I experience the good things in life, falling in love, having a baby, as isolating experiences
Baby: bah Father: bah

(Of course I am not alone in this, I have a partner, a family)
Father: are you real?
Mother: he doesn’t seem real

But in the past 11 months of fatherhood, while bringing much that is new, also revealed much that was always there, for good or ill. Into the light are dragged loneliness, inexplicable rage, and hidden resources, the good and bad alike

A rock is thrown into my subconscious, and the mind gropes in what comes up for relevant memories. My dad taking me with him in the pre-dawn to deliver papers, to the burger king he worked at, on his tractor mowing yards. Memories are distortions though, we recall the unusual, discard the typical , assign normalcy to what remains.

My father’s wisdom is lost to direct inquiry, it can only be inferred.

My paternal name, Αλεξόπουλος, means “son of the protector.” There is more to fatherhood than love and protection. With this little boy, I wonder what it would be like to raise a child in a world you knew. To set them on paths you walked, schools you attended, subway lines you rode. Perhaps the ceaseless change devalues fathers.

A child heightens the temporal vertigo of aging. The minutes fly by in a panic. He changes. We live a thousand lifetimes before the big long now of adulthood. He is not the same boy I left in the morning, when I return in the evening.

A baby is a little spaceman from beyond. A vulnerable stranger to a hostile world that is not theirs.

You get older and you become more like the world, it becomes more like you. Hip and strong, everything’s pointed at you. Every caprice, trend, draft notice.

Then some time in adulthood the world moves past you. You aren’t so much of this world anymore. You have one foot back in the beyond. Hard to say what of any value gets passed on.

These musings are likely artifacts of that mopey nature of mine, besides being drawn from a deep well of unwisdom. The parties are fixed, he’s teaching me teaching him.
Baby: AAAAHHH
Father: He’s like a cult leader, breaking down our personalities to indoctrinate us
(Day 10 of sleeping on the living room floor in order to “sleep train” him)

It’s been interesting to observe myself in this pressurized state. Having a child sort of exposes how much of your self-involvement was situational and how much was truly hard wired.
Baby: zsha
Father: Why is it I only ever have one good pair of pants

Not to imply that taking care of another has to be an unselfish act. At some point, living compounds too fast for us to process. Grief and loss surrounds, pulses and gathers in the dark beyond the hearth. We feel like refugees in our own lives, we take refuge beyond our selves.
Father: Jeez this is like the 10th article about “saudade” I’ve seen shared, people are fucked up!

I remember, a couple of years ago when my dad got sick. I quit my job, went on unemployment, spent most of the year driving up and down the state to check on him. I was alone on the highway. At the time it seemed hard.

Life is a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last. Even so, we miss them when they go.

FIELD WORK by Nathan Lipps

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FIELD WORK
by Nathan Lipps

image of a field at sunrise

He wakes back bent into a kind of platform
for what is meant to be goodness.

Heat of the sun in the soil near his face.

Imagine wind noticing itself.
That kind of silence

each morning. Across the field a body
of another, watching.

What Hegel said about two souls.
Each holding a seed

in their loose fists. Terrified
to let go, knowing the need

to sow. To join that patch-work quilt
landscape to something.

Receiving the fly-over-fuck-you
gift of nothing, despite the effort.

Back to bed, the soil cooling.
Again, again.

Terrified of claiming.
Of being claimed.

Nathan Lipps Author Nathan Lipps lives in the Midwest where he teaches English courses. His work has been published in the Best New Poets, BOAAT, Colorado Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Samuel Myles on Unsplash

SWINGERS by Alex Behr

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SWINGERS
by Alex Behr

swingset - black and white moody shot

I want an easy swing, that parabolic arc over grass, weeds, garter snakes, grubs, snapping turtles, beer cans, rotten logs. My legs out, my head and chest back. My arms taut. My thighs and ass pressed against the ball of rope: extending joy. I want that stomach lurch and gravity unease; blood shivers. I’ll land and wave to the one who pushed me, and I’ll climb back up the hill or out of the water toward that woman I’ve dreamt of so often. My REM time melts into her: strange visions of roads illuminating before us as we ride our bicycles in the dark. Is she dead, too?

We drink cheap wine stolen from Safeway and that woman—she has many names—will scratch her initials on my skin with a rock. Not deep, but enough to see later, before I rub myself to sleep. I’m seventy-nine. Can I admit to that rubbing? Older people who seek pleasure might have their hands tied to the arms of wheelchairs. So they rock back and forth. Maybe they drool. Maybe they moan. We don’t ask why. No one’s told me what’s appropriate now. I’ve been to more funerals than strip joints. I can’t ask my doctor. The only one who’s touched me recently was the nurse, but she stopped those friendly pats once I asked too many times to touch her hair extensions. I try to be friendly and culturally relevant, but I’m off the game. Can’t call anyone a turkey. They wouldn’t know what I meant.

To be a lover of the dead ones.

My last stripper friend died or stopped answering emails. (I should check—we do that now, in our seventies.) I’d wanted to co-write an advice book with her. Her thoughts on “basic dick.” How her vagina is hers. How she walks to demonstrate her dominance. The stripper mystique. No one will rub her velvet dress in a disco without her permission. I let strangers touch me. It’s how I was raised.

That swing: that cleaving from ordinary burdens. I present to clouds, to dirt clods, to the sun that I once believed saw me: spidery veins and rubbered skin. My crooked teeth. My barking laughter. My white roots showing through drugstore black. Something unseemly about the old. The flesh museum.

My age spots. My creaks. My slowness. My brain works like spongy brakes. I need more time for things to make sense, to remember the right word. Climate change is a useful topic with younger people. They want to talk to me, now that Roger’s dead. I took the gazelle rug to Goodwill after one made a fuss in an interview. The ivory-handled cheese knives went, too.

I sit across from Teddy, a man I’ve hired to go through my dead husband’s correspondence. We are in a booth, and the vinyl sticks to the back of my legs. I’m wearing a skirt that’s too short. We got so many clothes in the mail from groupies. I was too cheap to throw them out, but I did donate a lot to Goodwill. It’s embarrassing, what women send. Those stained thongs? The thing about aging: I lost weight. I can fit into the miniskirts, the fringed vests, the rayon jumpers. Most still have a faint scent. Roger always came home with some new odor. The suitcase reeked.

I hired Teddy because he’s handsome, but he’s off. I’m not into perfection. I like off-brand. Always choose the drummer, never the singer. That’s my motto and it’s served me well. Look at me now: I’m financially solvent. Penicillin solved the road romance and tour disease crises, or I insisted that Roger wear condoms. God, who cares now what he did or didn’t do. His ashes are on the bathroom shelf by his dentures.

Teddy, across from me, tells a story while driving French fries through catsup. He offers me a French fry. I shake my head no and sip my herbal tea. It’s about that childhood reckoning. He found maggots in a Hostess Ding Dong at the back of the cabinet, and at first he believed they were Rice Krispies. “I thought,” he says, “the world isn’t what it seems.”

Alex Behr author headshotAlex Behr’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Rumpus, Salon, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Planet Grim, was published by 7.13 Books.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit:  Jacob Rank on Unsplash

A FAMILY MAN by Theo Greenblatt

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A FAMILY MAN
by Theo Greenblatt

[TW: This piece includes sexual assault scenes that may be triggering for some readers.]

Picture of a victorian style house behind a white picket fence

Many times she had imagined, graphically and in slow motion, the bullet penetrating the pale, soft flesh of his temple; she knew intimately the faint indent, how it was edged with a line of graying strands slicked back with a dab of Brill cream, the shadowy crater of a chicken pox scar between the hairline and the eyebrow. She saw the skin parting and gently enveloping the smooth, hot tip of the metal missile, as if the bullet were melting its way in, as if the flesh itself welcomed the intrusion. This was the extent of her fantasy. She had never imagined the bullet exiting, or the blood. There was so much blood.

She went to the kitchen for a bucket and some Mr. Clean; took a sponge from the sink, a yellow one with a green scrubbie side, and a roll of paper towels. When she returned to the den she set the bucket down on the floor and began to sponge the blood—and other matter, she noticed—from the wood-paneled wall behind his chair. She worked carefully and methodically, but not with any thought as to “covering her tracks” or destroying evidence. She had no intention of hiding, it was just that she could not bear the mess. She wanted the room, the “scene,” to look clean and well-kept when it was examined. She sponged the entire wall, where sticky flecks of blood glistened as high as she could reach, and down to the floor where it had seeped into the crack between the molding and the patterned carpet. It had a particular gamey odor that wasn’t entirely dispelled by the industrial tang of the cleaning fluid. She almost liked that smell; it reminded her of hunting trips she had gone on when she was small, tramping through cold woods in gray morning light, her hands warmed by the ham and egg sandwiches packed in foil which she was charged with carrying.

She had to change the soapy water in the bucket three times before the wall was clean. She used Windex and paper towels to wipe down the pinkish spray that by now had dried onto the computer screen and keyboard. She winced as her touch on the keys produced an electric crackle and an image came into focus. She spread her hand so that the paper towel hid this image from her view. She could do nothing about his clothes or the blood soaking into the papers on the desk where his head now rested. It created a slowly changing pattern as it oozed and dried across the pages. She did not want to disturb the position of his body. There was a satisfying irony in the way his left arm seemed to point at the hinged picture frame (all the family members in separate frozen moments), his right arm palm up in his lap, head directly face down on the blotter. Not a sleeping pose, not restful, but the grace of arrested motion, a dance collapsed. She felt that the mess was acceptably contained in that small area, limited to his person and what might be considered his personal space. This was, after all, a deliberate act, rich with intent, not some out-of-control crime of passion. This was justice, this was necessity.

◊

It had never occurred to Frank that he could be aroused by the product of his own seed. True, he had felt repulsed by his wife’s body, hard and bloated like a badly upholstered sofa, but he thought that was a man’s natural reaction to pregnancy, and did not seem connected to what came later for him. When, as a young father, he noticed his reaction to the innocent touch of his small children he assured himself that this too was natural. For a long time he did not acknowledge that he moved around them in ways that resulted in their contact with his genitals; carrying them at a particular angle, holding them on his lap just so. When his son Tom was five, six, seven, he was entranced by the way the boy’s small penis evoked the shape of his own member; he could remember touching himself secretly when he was that size, thinking he must be the only person who could feel this because no one had ever spoken of such a thing to him. The two-fold thrill of touching Tom—feeling himself and the boy respond at the same time—was a pleasure he could not bring himself to forego.

As Tom grew older and more like him in size, more adult in his physique, the excitement diminished for Frank. His daughter Karen was beginning to appear less childlike at this time, too, but her maturing body had the opposite effect on him. She was not becoming womanly in the way that his wife Louise was womanly. Instead Karen had a spring-like newness, everything budding and blossoming at once. Her breasts were small and delicately formed, not heavy and pulpy like his wife’s; her limbs were smooth and ropy from outdoor play. Slowly Frank’s desire veered away from Tom and he sought time alone with Karen. At first he only touched her, held her against him for what he knew to be too long, and then secluded himself in the bath or bedroom to relieve his tension. He imagined over and over again the pale almost hairless triangle beneath her bathing suit bottom, and her slim legs parting like a cheerleader’s V.

The anticipation he created with this fantasy eventually became unbearable to him. Finally one night, fetching Karen from a late babysitting engagement, he consummated his need for her in just the way his imagination had detailed so many times. She had been asleep when he picked her up and he had suggested she lie down in the back seat of the Taurus on the way home. She didn’t question his pulling off the road or his clambering in on top of her. He avoided looking at her frightened face, pressed his mouth against her neck instead, feeling his own hot breath create a wet patch on her shirt collar. He drove the rest of the way home in red-faced silence, grateful for the solid seatback between himself and his daughter.

After the first time with Karen he could hardly bring himself to caress his wife. Louise was not unaccommodating, but he found her body grotesque in comparison with Karen’s. He developed the habit of staying up late to watch the news and Louise went to bed uncomplainingly without him. Nightly he would enter Karen’s room and, in the muffled dark beneath her flowered duvet, whisper hoarsely his love for her until he spent himself there.

Frank declined to examine this behavior in depth. He was sure he was a normal man with normal needs and desires. Just as no one had ever spoken to him as a child about the pleasure of touching himself, he assumed now that other men gave in to this uncontrollable urge and simply didn’t discuss it. Now that it had become part of his routine, he was able to set aside his thoughts of Karen during the day; it was a part of his life that simply didn’t touch on the rest.

When Karen started high school, he forbade her to date; she was allowed out only with groups, and kept to a strict curfew. Louise concurred unquestioningly with this. For Karen’s safety, it was understood. During these years Karen’s body changed, became hardened to him, and when at last she left for college, Frank had steeled himself to the loss. By this time he had outfitted the den with a home computer, and was finding his consolation online. Here in the privacy of his home office, while Louise assumed he was paying bills and poring over sports scores, he was able to find hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of boys and girls like his children had once been—gentle, delicate-looking children whose bodies appeared soft and compliant. He gazed with unstinted longing at their tender private parts, imagined their small hands running over his flesh, and was content to massage himself to climax this way rather than resort to relations with Louise.

For several years Frank looked no further than his computer screen for fulfillment of his sexual desires, and the period of his nightly conjugations with Karen faded into a blurry, unreal memory. It was easy to pretend it had never happened since he was certain that he shared the secret with Karen only. Karen herself never alluded to it, although relations between them were always distant and a little formal. He was not close with Tom, either, although no real animosity ever surfaced, and he had truly forgotten the extent of his earliest preoccupations with his son. Occasionally it occurred to him that this was not the sort of father he had set out to be, aloof and forbidding, but he did not really feel that he could have done anything differently.

When grandchildren came into his life, Frank allowed himself to be carried away by the same sense of fatefulness, of life’s inevitable course. At first when Tom and Karen visited with their own young families, he stayed out of the way, allowing Louise to sponge up the milky pleasure of having babies in the house again. But as they grew into toddlers and older, he felt the children sought him out. Louise’s attention was not enough for them, or it was different. They asked him for things—candy and pencils and piggy-back rides. They bumped into him, they snaked their slightly sticky fingers into his sweaty palm with no hesitation, they hugged him, pressing their faces to his corduroy-covered thighs, causing him to swell inside his briefs. It was like a rerun of his early parenting years and when the first cloud of guilt had passed he began to feel rejuvenated by these new stimulations. Clearly this was not something he controlled, this reaction of his, he was just wired this way. He allowed his anxiety to dissolve into enjoyment but at the same time he was careful in the presence of family and noticed that he was not often left alone with the children.

Louise had given him a digital camera for Christmas and it occurred to him that he could take pictures of his grandchildren and look at them whenever he chose. Frank became the family chronicler, taking pictures at every gathering and on even the smallest occasions. Many of these photos he sent out to Karen and Tom but there were some he kept to himself as well. Since everyone was so accustomed to seeing him with a camera, no one noticed his attention to particular details as he documented the children on film. He had countless images of his grandchildren at the beach, in the bath, getting ready for bed—images that fed his desire and held him nearly captive at his computer, with one hand pressed into his lap.

◊

Lying in bed he thought he heard a sound like a firecracker, but it was muted by the comforter he had pulled up over his head. He wedged himself further into the corner where the mattress met the wall and tried to silence his own breathing so he could hear what was happening downstairs, or if anyone was coming up. His sister was snoring lightly in the bed next to him, making little “puh” sounds when she exhaled. He had trouble falling sleep with her in the room. At home he had his own room, and he would always be alone when his father came in late at night. Last night his grandpa had come instead, and he had been nervous that his sister would wake up. He thought he understood that this night-time thing was something grown-up men did just with boys—at first he thought it was only his dad, but now he knew that grandpas did it, too. He also knew it was supposed to be a secret; probably because girls spoil everything, that’s what his dad would say, only half-joking.

He couldn’t make out any people sounds from the rest of the house, so he carefully eased the blanket down just past his ears and turned his head toward the door. A line of light shone along the bottom; not all the grown-ups had gone to bed. He couldn’t distinguish between their footsteps here because all the floors were carpeted, so he didn’t know who was still up. Everyone stayed up later when they visited at his grandparents’ house, he had noticed. He did hear a door close and someone moving about in the kitchen, which was directly below him.

At home he knew all the night sounds: the creak of every stair, the squeak of the floorboards by the bathroom, the furnace going on and the steam tapping in the radiators. Here everything was different and the unfamiliar noises made him anxious—the metallic knocking of the blinds against the window frame from the wind outside, the humming and clunking that he now knew was the refrigerator making ice. A lot of things were making him anxious, not just the noises, but the worst was that he really didn’t want his grandfather to come in again. It was different with his dad, he knew what to expect, but his grandfather was shaky and smelled of old man sweat, and it scared him. Also his father wouldn’t come in unless he was alone, but his grandpa clearly didn’t know the rules.

He shifted his head to look at his sister and watched her lips puffing rhythmically in and out for a while. He decided if he heard someone coming, he would reach over and pinch her to wake her up. She would cry and his grandpa would not touch him. Once he had this plan firmly in mind he felt better and relaxed his grip on the edge of the blanket. He waited a long time and finally someone was coming up the stairs. He tensed his whole body, ready to lurch forward, his fingers clenched to grab at his sister’s flesh; but the footfalls went past his door and there was a soft click as the hall light went out. Still he waited, lying flat on his stomach, watching the door, until it had been quiet for a long time. At last he felt sure his grandpa wasn’t coming. He pulled the blanket back over his head and began the slow drift into sleep.

Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, appears in The Normal School Online, Tikkun, Salt Hill Journal, Harvard Review, and numerous other venues. She is a past winner of The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Her collection Rescue and Other Relationships was a finalist in the recent Autumn House Press Full-Length Fiction Contest.
Theo teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI.

 

 

Image credit: Scott Webb on Unsplash

THE BOOK OF SARAH, a graphic memoir by Sarah Lightman, reviewed by Emily Steinberg

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THE BOOK OF SARAH
by Sarah Lightman
The Pennsylvania University Press, 237 pages
reviewed by Emily Steinberg

The Book of SarahSarah Lightman’s poignant, engrossing and poetic graphic memoir, The Book of Sarah , leads the reader on an epic odyssey, moving back and forth in time, from the author’s early twenties as an uncertain, dependent, and depressed young artist to a confident forty-five-year-old woman who is finally the architect of her own life.

Raised in England in a traditional Jewish family, Lightman perfectly plays the role of the sheltered, good daughter, but is squelched, suffocated and empty inside. She became more Orthodox as a way to feel part of something larger. She wrote to me in an email,  “I had great feelings of inadequacy and no idea about how to navigate life. I think religion can tell you how to live and it is easier than that long, painful journey of working out who you are and making up your own mind about things.” A late bloomer, she eventually discovered she no longer needed the architecture of orthodoxy and began building a “scaffolding of self” with permission to live her own life.

The heart of Lightman’s book is her art, and the black and white graphite drawings of architecture and often overlooked everyday objects are particularly forceful and beautiful. Intensely drawn, with energetic, almost obsessive marks and stark contrast of dark and light, we view sides of buildings with fire escapes, exteriors of family homes and dining-room table and chairs, interiors and exteriors of her boarding school outside London, her books, her therapist’s office, chairs and shoes.

line drawing of fire escapes

Lightman writes and draws about being a young artist, anxiously uncertain of her abilities.

 

line drawing of a bag of salad

“I worked through a salad as I waited for a rejection from a gallery.”

She writes beautifully of the overlapping of life events , or as she puts it, “The maths of life. A birth. A death. A Marriage. A death. Someone’s happiness. Someone else’s tears.”  She seeks love and relationship, but doesn’t know herself and so can’t know another.

line drawing of a toothbrush

“I had a toothbrush next to mine, so did that mean I was your girlfriend?”

Life evolves. She finds Charlie and has a Traditional Jewish Wedding. Then, her Grandfather is in Hospital and “we visit him everyday and read him psalms.”  She muses about motherhood at thirty-six, describing her son Harry’s arrival and what was like to be a new mom.

Life isn’t perfect for Lightman, but she finds a place of contentment that is enough. While searching for a scaffolding to build her life on, we see it was there all along in her art and in The Book of Sarah, Lightman leads us to a place that is both gorgeous and profound.

line drawing of a baby's head

“Oh my little Love.”

Sarah Lightman author headshotSarah Lightman is an artist who writes, draws and paints about her life experiences. She is co-founder of ​“Laydeez do Comics,” an international forum for women comics artists and editor of the incredible Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, (2014), a collection of the work of eighteen international Jewish female auto-bio comics artists. She earned a PhD from The University of Glasgow in the field of Women’s Autobiographical Comics.

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Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at emilysteinberg@cleavermagazine.com.

 

CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER MADE YOU A MIX TAPE, an interview by KC Mead-Brewer

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Author Claire Rudy Foster on a park bench

CLAIRE RUDY FOSTER MADE YOU A MIX TAPE
author of the story collection Shine of the Ever
Interlude Press, 194 pages
interviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

I got to know Foster’s fiction through their first story collection I’VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Foster doesn’t disappoint with their new collection, SHINE OF THE EVER, thirteen stories full of humor, beauty, sincerity, and refreshingly nuanced queer and trans characters. Foster’s dedication to challenging mainstream preconceived notions about queerness is well reflected in all their works, from their essays to their flash to their upcoming novel. In SHINE OF THE EVER, they focus their vibrant, energetic style to a deceptively simple task: no sad endings. To learn more, go here.

—KC M-B

KMB: I’m so excited about this collection! After your last collection, I’ve Never Done This Before, I’ve been eagerly looking forward to seeing your next big project. How long have you been working on these stories? Did they come together organically, long after you’d written some of them, or did you start out writing these with a book in mind?

CRF: Thank you—I’m excited to share it! The stories in Shine of the Ever run the gamut from very recent to some of the earliest I’ve written. The title piece, a novella, started out as my undergraduate thesis. I finished it in 2006. Since then, it’s changed about as much as I have. Living with, and in, a story is an intense experience. That novella inspired the rest of the collection, which includes a flash fiction piece that is contemporaneous with “Shine” and more recent pieces from last year.

Shine of the Ever is very close to my heart. As I started to come out as both queer and transgender, I struggled to find representations of myself in literary fiction. The stories I wrote reflected a yearning to see my experience and the experiences of the people I loved on paper. My identity came into focus through and with my creation of this book. The process was intimidating at first, but as I looked back, I saw that many of my stories included queer and trans characters. It seems that I’d been working on Shine of the Ever and its themes and people for a lot longer than I thought.

KMB: I love that Shine of the Ever includes both a flash story exploring a bisexual romance and a novella deepening this exploration (albeit in a very different way). How did you decide on the order of the book’s stories? Would you prefer your readers go at the collection from start to finish, or do you mind if they take a hodgepodge approach?

CRF: I associate bisexuality with feeling partly invisible. Bi erasure is common: there’s a sense, for me, of hiding in plain sight. I chose to include two stories about bisexual characters who deal with the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ in their relationships. They worry about seeming queer enough, or disappearing into heteronormative-looking partnerships. In both stories, there are many layers of intimacy. Platonic attraction can become sexual, or the reverse, or flow into another kind of relationship altogether. The collection can be read in any order; the stories are not linear, just as people are not. Sexuality and gender are complex—my hope is that the reader will appreciate the collection’s diversity of queer identities, loves, and people.

KMB: You let nothing go to waste in these stories; every detail has an echo somewhere, creating a powerful resonance throughout. I was especially taken with the story “Domestic Shorthair,” where the tension between burying “evidence” and unearthing “evidence,” at hiding identities and revealing identities, is wound tighter and tighter in every paragraph. Are these resonant details brought forward during your revision process, or do they rise up naturally during drafting?

CRF: My goal with Shine of the Ever was to collect stories that oppose, mirror, or challenge one another. I also explored tension within each piece, playing with what each character knows, doesn’t know, and isn’t willing to see. Amit came into my imagination complete, a very smart person with a blind spot that’s at odds with their incredible attention to detail. Amit is not ‘out’ in the conventional sense, but to the outside world, it’s obvious who they are. As “Shorthair” unfolds, the things Amit doesn’t see, about themself and their roommate, force them to come to terms with the consequences of staying closeted. As you said, the circle tightens around Amit, and the evidence they can no longer ignore provides a moment of insight that changes their perception of themselves.

The revision on Shine of the Ever was, I’m glad to say, not a brutal one. I think of my writing as music, a mix tape. The tones have to be right. When the collection was put together, it was easier to hear which sections were falling flat.

KMB: What books/stories/authors were you reading as you wrote these stories? How did they affect your writing process?

CRF: The way the stories feel was really important to me with Shine of the Ever. It wasn’t enough just to write about LGBTQ characters. I wanted the stories to feel queer, too. While I was working on this collection, I gravitated toward books and authors who were dreamy, unusual, and smart. Mostly domestic. I read Maile Meloy, Tessa Hadley, and Alexander Chee. I read Brandon Taylor’s tweets, of course, because he never fails to delight and provoke. I watched Personal Shopper over and over, and Certain Women.

In each of these, I was looking for a private moment of self-identification. A moment like this: a trans girl, alone in her kitchen, looks up from making a sandwich and thinks to herself, Damn, I’m super gay right now. And then she goes back to her sandwich. There’s no reveal; no ‘coming out,’ which we put so much emphasis on. The character is just hanging out with herself. Straight characters do this in fiction all the time. I sought to do the same with characters and voices that were like mine instead.

KMB: This collection reads as a celebration of the complexity and humanity of queer and trans women, characters who are simply and exquisitely themselves. I admire how artfully you build on your characters’ flaws instead of magically “curing” them in the end. How do you go about constructing your characters?

CRF: Queer characters are so frequently shown as two dimensional, or as supports for the straight main character. In art as in life, queer people aren’t allowed the same complexity as straight characters—at least, not without paying a terrible price in exchange. Some of the most nuanced images we have of LGBTQ characters are in film, yet they inflict terrible suffering on queer bodies and hearts: Moonlight, Boys Don’t Cry, and Brokeback Mountain. Although there’s been some positive change in representation, I think there’s still a real lack of queer characters who are not good or pure in a way that is a rhetorical device to invite sympathy and who also do not face painful consequences for being ‘imperfect.’

My characters come from my observation of life, other people. I look in the mirror. I listen to how people talk about themselves and others. What’s omitted. I’m especially interested in flaws, the things we struggle with and why. Redemption bores me.

KMB: In many of these stories, but perhaps especially in the titular piece, the question of authenticity is considered from a variety of angles. The energy and empathy with which you tackle this tricky issue is very refreshing. It reminds me a little of what you’ve spoken about in previous interviews regarding your personal struggle with addiction: “When I was in active addiction … I felt powerful, mysterious, complex. Like a real writer, whatever that is. Even as my drug use destroyed my brain and my body, I held onto the idea that I was part of something meaningful.” How has your wrestling with the idea of being a “real” or “authentic” writer informed your characters’ related struggles with authenticity?

CRF: I sometimes struggle with rejection and self-doubt. Who doesn’t? As a nonbinary trans person, in particular, it’s hard to feel invalidated at every turn. I’m not ‘trans enough.’ The language I have to describe myself is imperfect. I’ve lost important relationships because the people I cared about couldn’t ‘see’ me as I wished to seen, or know me as I desired to be known. However, I’ve never not felt like a real writer. The issue, in my creative work and in my gender expression, is finding people who see what I see—who see me the way I see myself. It’s the same for my characters. They don’t seek acceptance, necessarily. They want to be seen. Identity is a powerful thing. It can also be painful, to wear an identity that other people don’t notice or understand how to see.

Funny, I never feel shame in isolation. I am very accepting of myself. I only start to feel insecure or uncomfortable when I’m around people who don’t accept me. Whether it’s my recovery, my identity, my sexuality, or the way I choose to live—I’m good with myself. I struggle when I have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

KMB: As a writer, what things do you particularly love to see in a story when you read? What things aggravate you?

CRF: I read a lot, so my tolerance for trends is pretty low. I think there’s so much emphasis on writing something clicky. Clickbait is dull and formulaic. Every week, I see articles about how people don’t read long stories anymore, or how to optimize your reading with flash fiction. Many writing guides have tips about crafting a “hook,” or using other marketing techniques to grab the reader. That drives me crazy. I don’t even engage with those posts or the insipid debates they incite. Let literature be literature. I hate to see aspiring writers breaking their necks trying to stand out of the slush pile with cheap, attention-grabbing hooks or front-loaded stories.

I love to read stories that are compelling, and flirt a little. I like it when a story can be patient with itself, and when the reader is led into its world slowly, one sentence at a time. This is one of the things I loved about Aimee Bender’s fiction when I was younger; I see it less frequently now, as a style in fiction.

KMB: I know you’ve also been working on a novel recently. How does your writing process change as you move from a story collection to a novel?

CRF: Well, the submission process is more grueling. With stories or essays, I can write one in a day, send it to the journals, and get a response in about a month. With novels, there’s no such thing as spontaneity. The idea may come quickly, but the execution takes time. A novel is not a one-night stand. The novel I’m working on is in the rewrite phase, and my time frame is open-ended. I keep digging in, and it keeps giving me new material, so who knows.

I usually know right away if a story is boring or no good, and I can move on to the next thing. Novels are different—a different frame of mind. A project of that scope requires patience. You work, and you wait, and maybe the story comes along.

KMB: Some of Shine of the Ever’s strongest, most practical-minded characters are also those who engage in practices like tarot and crystal healing. Do you see any conflict or contradiction between these things? Do you practice tarot yourself? If so, are there other ways that it’s inspired or affected your writing?

CRF: I don’t see a conflict between those things. Tarot and other magic are invaluable tools for getting new insight, or seeing a problem in a different way. Who doesn’t want to see the future? We dedicate so much energy to scientific methods, mathematical predictions, and other theories that are supposed to tell us how things will be. I think tarot and other practices are incredibly practical. In my stories, it’s also a marker of time and place: witchiness is enjoying a resurgence in popular culture right now. From Lisa Marie Basile to Joanna C. Valente to the Becoming Dangerous anthology, I’m seeing a smart reinterpretation of what these ancient crafts mean to us in a digital world.

I think superstition, faith, and magic are important to a lot of people in the queer community. Feeling protected, integrated, and healed, connecting to a world that we don’t necessarily see, believing that there’s a higher purpose, even when life is difficult—people need hope, always.

KMB: Your stories here are so full of hope—something I haven’t often encountered in stories about queer and trans people. What does it mean to you to be writing stories of hope right now?

CRF: Representation is so important for growth: when you see it, you can be it. In Shine of the Ever, the rule is ‘no sad endings.’ That’s it. I didn’t want to sensationalize my characters or replicate the stories I see that focus on the extremes of queer life. It’s not all coming out, and gay bashing, and oppression. I object to packaging and marketing of queer suffering. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Interlude Press: they don’t publish books that fetishize queer pain. Making LGBTQ people into exotic or doomed creatures is just another way of other-ing us. We’re people. At the same time, Shine of the Ever is not inspiration porn. I didn’t want to create characters who were just so brave. I’m so tired of that. The constant overcoming. I wanted to write about everyday life, as I see people like me experiencing it.

I hate that being queer is a liability in our culture. I want that to change. There is so much joy for us, too. It’s my responsibility to show that. We deserve to be happy. We deserve to see ourselves happy. We deserve more.

Claire Rudy Foster is a queer, nonbinary single parent in recovery. Their short story collection, I’ve Never Done This Before, was published to warm acclaim in 2016. With four Pushcart Prize nominations, Foster’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, and many other journals. Their nonfiction work has reached millions of readers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Narratively, among others. Foster lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. (Author photo by Elizabeth Ehrenpreis)

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, NY. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY, a novel by Julie E. Justicz, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
by Julie E. Justicz
Fomite, 300 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Degrees of Difficulty jacket coverMany years ago, as a feature writer for a magazine, I spent weeks visiting with a family whose oldest son communicated not with words but with his body. He said yes or no, go away or come near, I don’t want it or I do by hurling himself toward gestures of acceptance or disdain. He was a beautiful boy, nearly adolescent, larger than his mother who was struggling now to control his outbursts by setting him into a warm bath or hugging him close and overwhelming to his father, who had left his job so that he might try to build a school that was just right for his own son and others. This family was among the most extraordinary I’ve ever spent time with—full of love, chasing hope, unwilling to give up on this first-born child of theirs, and yet so devastatingly exhausted.

I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has resulted in “the recessed jaw that would lead to feeding issues, the missing kidney due to frequent injections, hospitalizations, IV medications. And later, the seizures: Body-wracking grand mals that daily medications could not control.”

Julie E. Justicz

Julie E. Justicz

Ben is a young teen when we meet him. Attempts to find a boarding school where he might fit in have failed, mostly coming to violent ends. Perry, the father, keeps searching for a placement—leaving home often on his quest. Caroline, the Shakespeare-expert academic mother, can’t maintain her focus, can’t do much of anything, in time, but swirl a sedative into her tea. Hugo, the middle child, understands his brother best of all. Ivy, the oldest, can’t wait to leave home. Ben’s fractured chromosome is the primary narrative in each character’s life, and each character is presented separately by chapter, fracture by fracture.

The story begins in April 1991. It ends in April 2008. Sometimes chapters will close just as the crescendo of a crisis is reaching its fever pitch, leaving the reader to turn to the page toward a scene from months or years later, when the aftermath of the terror has now been woven into the characters’ new realities—a marriage under strain, a daughter in revolt, a middle child assuming increasing responsibility for Ben. We soon keep our eye primarily on Hugo, whose love for his brother and his ability to understand him have been rendered with heartbreaking tenderness.

Here, in the early pages, Hugo is rigging up a tricycle so that he might give his brother, with his twisted leg and nonverbal desires, a chance at a favorite pastime—speed. It’s Hugo’s voice that we hear:

“Yep. Hugo’s here. Now lean your choice, man, a left—this way, or a right—down there.” Ben sat perfectly still, trying to process the instructions, and Hugo took another blessed moment to breathe. Air moved through his lungs thick and warm as blood. The kudzu-swallowed trees added an iridescent sheen to the hazy sky. And the continued cicada sawing, a southern city’s jungle pulse. Shickkaw, shickkaw, shickkaw…. Hugo drew another deep breath; shicckaws ricocheted in his head. Sometimes he thought he could live like this, live with Ben forever. Sometimes he felt that he had already drowned.

Justicz writes with precision and authority. She knows chromosomes, Shakespeare, medicine, the rules of group homes, the bewilderment of unanswerable questions, such as: “Could a child ever ask too much of his parents? And if he did, what should a parent ask in return? That the child go away?” She also understands that real people cannot live without hope—and that readers are real people. There are infinite difficulties in Degrees of Difficulty. But there is also the glisten of redemption. We read across all that time and all those pages to discover (with gratitude) just what that glisten is.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly thirty books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of numerous essays, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her newest book is a collaboration with her artist husband—an illustrated journal called Journey: A Traveler’s Notes. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Ask June: Autumn Edition!

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Dear June,

For the past few months I have been working full-time on a national political campaign with a group of intelligent, committed, interesting people. One of these people—whom I’ll call Christine—lives just down the street from me. I had seen her around and chatted with her a few times when we walked our dogs, and had thought more than once that it might be nice to get to know her better, so I was pleased when I saw that we would be working together and hoped that we might become friends (and nothing else: we are both straight women).

But it looks like she wants nothing to do with me. She’s never unpleasant or rude, but she seems to go out of her way to keep me at a distance. People at headquarters are always going out to grab lunch together, and I have asked her to do so three times, twice as part of a small group and once just with me. She said no every time, saying she wanted to eat in. But she almost never eats in otherwise. I’ve also offered her a ride home several times, and she has always refused that, too, although twice I saw her getting into an Uber just as I was leaving. When I try to strike up a conversation with her about anything, even our jobs, she talks in monosyllables and extricates herself as soon as possible. With other people at the office she tends to be warm and vivacious, even outgoing.

Can you give me any idea what might be wrong with me, or what I should do to turn this situation around?  Other than the way she treats me, I really like this woman.

—Rejected in Riverdale

Dear Rej,

You haven’t said anything to make me think there’s anything wrong with you—except, maybe, for the insecurity that makes you ask what’s wrong with you.

There are several possible explanations, other than some real or perceived defect of yours, for Christine’s not accepting your overtures. It could just be a matter of a series of coincidences: she may have been swamped, or already spoken for, or in the middle of a riveting book, on the days you happened to ask her to have lunch. She may not have been going directly home on the days she ordered those Ubers. As for her apparent brusqueness with you, it may simply be that she takes a while to warm up to new people. Or that you have been catching her at busy hectic times.

Or she may in fact be putting you off, but not because of any quality of yours. Maybe she prefers to keep her work life separate from her personal life, in which case your living right down the street may actually create a barrier for her. Some people go to great lengths to leave office pressures and office gossip at the office, and the pressures and concerns of their home life at home. As for not accepting your offer of a ride, Christine may just like to unwind alone. I used to work at a stressful job with a long solitary commute—just me and music and something hot or carbonated—which I took pains to protect. In my experience, political campaigns do tend to be more intense and all-encompassing than most jobs, and the lines between work friends and all-purpose friends—or, as my non-work buddy Linda calls them, real friends—are more likely to blur. Christine may be trying to buck this trend. And, of course, she may just not want any new friends at all right now, even work friends. You say that she is friendlier to her other coworkers, but this may just be because she already knows them.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that it really is personal—that Christine just doesn’t like the cut of your jib. If something happens that forces you to believe this, try to remember that even the most worthy and delightful of us aren’t liked by everybody.

I know how much it can hurt to be rebuffed, if that is in fact what’s happening. But please don’t assume that there is anything wrong with you, and try hard not to dwell on the matter.

Besides, she may not be a prize herself. You say that you like everything about her except the way she treats you. But it doesn’t sound as if you know her that well; and even if she does turn out to have all sorts of other sterling qualities, the way she treats you is pretty much the whole show as far as you’re concerned. You don’t want to fall into the role of the pursuer, which can be terrible for the ego and take up lots of time and emotional energy.

You ask me what you should do to “turn the situation around.”  My short answer is: do nothing. Stop going out of your way to invite her to lunch, or offer a ride home, at least for the time being. Maybe she’ll start being friendlier after getting to know you better over the course of your both working together and living in the same neighborhood. Or maybe not, but your quite-reasonable friendly overtures haven’t worked so far, and persisting in them might have the effect of making her think you are needy, or bossy, or the sort of person who can’t take a hint.

I hope some blizzard or campaign trip throws you together and gives her a chance to know and like you, or that she warms to you over time. If not, her loss.

Carry on, and get out the vote!

LA WALLY SAYS:

I’ve had that happen. You could ask her what the deal is, but that might be awkward. Or you could just accept that she doesn’t seem to want to be friends. Not everyone will like you.

 

Dear June,

Last Christmas my least-favorite aunt gave my parents matching DNA/ancestry tests, and they duly sent in their swabs. Although neither of my parents found any new close relatives or anything, my mother got some surprising results. Her case was sort of like the one they used to show on TV, where some guy always thought he was German and found out he was “really” Scottish, except that for my mom it was Italian vs. Spanish (or maybe Portuguese): she had an Italian surname and, when she thought about the matter at all, believed that most or all of her family was of Italian extraction, but according to the DNA test she was 80% “Iberian Peninsula.”

The TV guy went right out and changed his lederhosen for a kilt. Unlike him, my mom did not see any reason to alter anything about her life. She had been raised in a tradition that was “basically unhyphenated,” as she puts it, and Italian-American only in the sense that they ate a lot of Italian food and went to the occasional opera. Mom is a fourth- and fifth-generation American, as far as she call tell, and figures that it would be silly to suddenly start revising her sense of ethnic identity now, since nobody in her family’s living memory spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or otherwise showed ties to Spanish or Portuguese culture. She plans to continue cooking and eating Italian food and listening to opera because, as she says, she always has—and because she liked them, and neither activity requires a license.

My dad, who is of mixed Northern European WASP origin and whose test told him nothing new, can’t understand my mom’s lack of interest in her test and what he calls its “startling” and “exciting” results. He keeps urging her to get a fuller genealogy done and find out more about these long-dead ancestors so that he can take her out to flamenco or fado—or, if some of these supposed forbears took a detour on the way to the USA, possibly mariachi—concerts, as appropriate, and maybe pay a visit to her place(s) of origin after a few language classes. She says no to any more research. As for concerts and trips, she says that she is up for most concerts and trips, but not because of any alleged blood ties she never even knew about until last Christmas.

Much to my amazement, this ancestry thing is causing real tension in my family. He tells her that she shouldn’t deny who she is. She tells him that she’s not denying anything, she just thinks her distant ancestry has very little to do with who she is. He says she should embrace her heritage. She asks him why he hell he won’t just let it go, and why he is acting as if she is a different person now, and as if he’d found out she and her family had been deceiving themselves or something. The other day when I was in their driveway loading up my car to go home I could hear them ratcheting up their disagreement, complete with name-calling: Coward! Creep! Totally lacking in curiosity! Un-American!

Do you agree with me that my dad is about 90% in the wrong here?  Can you think of anything to do to calm things down?  Why do people even take these tests???

—Had It in Haddonfield

P.S. In case this matters, I don’t think anybody in my family favors any of these cultures over the others. My dad loves Verdi and worships cannoli, and both my parents encouraged me to minor in Spanish in college and spend my junior year in Madrid.

Dear Had It,

I agree with you about your dad. In fact, I would up the percentage to, say, 96, and he only gets that 4% because your mother—it is your mother, right?– called him a creep, which is hardly ever a good idea.

From what I’ve seen, people—I am speaking here of individuals with a purely personal interest, not academics or scientists or amateur historians—get involved with genealogy and genetic testing for all sorts of reasons. Some of these reasons are clearly unexceptionable or even compelling, like health-related concerns, or the desire to learn more about the lives of recent ancestors and maybe find some precious photos or a long-lost cousin. Some reasons can be downright inspiring, as in the case of quests to uncover the past of enslaved forbears or victims of genocide. At the other extreme you have the snobs and bigots hoping to establish their superiority to the rest of us by proving that they come from what a repellant ex-acquaintance of mine called “good stock,” thanks to a family tree they can trace back to people nobody in ten generations would recognize if they walked up and played the fife at them.

But I suspect that most searches are somewhere in the middle, and are motivated by idle curiosity, with the hope of discovering something flattering or at least mildly interesting about one’s forbears. It sounds to me as if your unfavorite aunt sent the tests, and your parents took them, for reasons of that sort. (Actually, in your mother’s case, the chief reason may have been more on the order of: “Better just take the stupid test, but I would have preferred a scarf.”)  All in the spirit of harmless fun.

What a shame that your father is leaching away whatever scant amusement the test may have afforded your mother by making a big deal out of a report—which, by the way, could be inaccurate or misleading for any number of reasons you can read about in stupefying detail online—purporting to show that her remote European ancestors lived a few hundred miles west of where she used to think they had, if she thought about it at all.

If, upon reading her test results, your mom had squealed with delight, said “You know, I’ve always felt drawn to Spanish [and/or Portuguese] culture,” and run off to sign up for language lessons and amass travel brochures, that would have been just fine—as long as she didn’t go overboard and start thinking of herself as an instant minority or calling you “mija.”  But she didn’t, which is also fine, and it baffles me that your father thinks he has anything to say now that she has made her wishes known. She does not see herself as having any meaningful “Iberian” heritage to reclaim. This is totally her call.

I did entertain (for about three seconds) the idea that, given the appalling way our government and some of our citizens are treating immigrants from the south and Latinx people in general, your mom should proclaim her new DNA status as an act of solidarity and stand with them. But this idea totally misses the point. All of us, including your mom, should stand with them—but I don’t see why your mom has any special right, or duty, to ally herself with Spanish, Portuguese, and/or Latinx people as if everybody with “Iberian” DNA is part of some kind of monolith, no matter where and how they have lived down the generations, what languages they speak, and what culture they see as their own.

Cultural heritage is a living, experiential thing, not something you get from a bunch of molecules. I’m reminded of a story I kept hearing years ago, when we were adopting a child and trading horror stories, about how a passerby walked up to the American adoptive mother of a Korean infant and asked how the family was going to handle the language barrier. Of course, that adoptive mom (if she really existed) probably went out of her way to expose her child to Korean culture and perhaps the Korean language, which makes perfect sense. Learning where they came from can foster a sense of pride and a feeling of connection for kids who have been adopted away from their country of birth—especially when their being ethnically different is obvious and will draw comments from curious kids and clueless adults. But your mom’s ties to Spanish or Portuguese culture appear so tenuous that laying any special claim to that identity almost seems phony, like posing. (I do not use the freighted term “cultural appropriation” because this letter is plenty long already and, given your mom’s attitude, why go there?)

So yeah, your dad has absolutely no right to pressure your mom or to question her attitudes about her own identity. But my saying that—and its’ being true – will not help you much with your question about how to “calm things down.”  It’s hard for me to imagine his maintaining his current level of concern for much longer; but, then again, it’s hard for me to imagine his having gotten so worked up in the first place.

You might try sitting your folks, or just your dad, down and explaining how you hate to see them disagreeing and arguing. Say that you see those test results as the mother of all non-issues, and really hope that your dad can move on. Add that you are grateful for your parents’ having exposed you many rich cultures, and especially for helping you spend a year in Spain.

One last note: from the tone of your letter, I assumed that you are as uninterested in your supposed Iberian-peninsula DNA as your mother. But was I wrong? Unlike your mom, you were already a serious student of Spanish language and culture, and had chosen to spend a year in Spain, before she got tested. I can see how you might like the idea of ancestors from Spain and/or Portugal, and might even want to explore your mother’s family tree a little further. And as long as your research is basically recreational, or part of a history project or something, and not a quest for a new sense of identity, why not?  Just don’t tell your parents, at least not quite yet.

LA WALLY SAYS:

I agree that your dad is being ridiculous. You should tell him to lay off. If it doesn’t mean anything to your mom, it shouldn’t to him. I do think they should take an extra (not substitute!) vacation to Spain and Portugal, though. Because why not?

Dear June,

Assuming good health, is it ever too late to write a novel? I am asking not for a friend but for myself, a woman in her late sixties.

—Geriatric in Germantown

Dear Gerry,

Absolutely not. If you think you have the stamina—and why wouldn’t you, in your sixties?—go for it. I know from experience as an editor that first novels by older people aren’t any worse, or better, stylistically than first novels by young people. And you probably have more to write about than all those whippersnappers whose experience is limited to summer jobs, M.F.A. programs, sex, and what’s left of academia.

I should warn you, though, that publishing your novel may pose special challenges, at least if you are hoping to work with a traditional house. I have only anecdotal evidence for this but, from what several of my friends tell me, it is harder to get an agent, much less land a publisher, as you get older. One novelist-professor I know is convinced that her first name, which was the third most popular baby-girl name in 1955, keeps all those twenty-something first readers at magazines and publishing houses from giving her work serious consideration.

She is considering a nom de plume—or, rather, a nom that nobody out there knows is de plume, but believes to be the name she was born with—one that’s younger-sounding and, while she’s at it, androgynous. I think she may be onto something here. If you’re just starting out as a writer, or just getting back to writing after a long time away, I’d definitely consider changing a name that might peg you as older. I’d go with a choice from the popular baby names lists of the late 90s or, maybe better, a name that’s young-sounding but also just plain weird. You could even change your email and, if you’ve got a friend or child who’ll help, your physical address while you’re at it: Fox Ambrose (fambrose@gmail.com, #2B, 100 Polk Street, Somewhere in Brooklyn) will probably get taken more seriously than Linda White (Linda1956@aol.com, Villa #5 Bayview Independent Living, Tampa Exurbs).

I am only half-joking about this gambit. But I know that, like most people, you probably have plenty of good reasons not to try it—like fear of discovery, preferring not to behave like a character in a silly movie, and liking your actual name and contact information. And you may have a well-developed sense of pride and personal integrity.

In any case, as I am sure you’ve heard, even the young and charismatic have a hard time securing good agents or traditional publishers. I hope and trust that, much as every writer would love to find a power agent and get picked up by a traditional house, fame and fortune (or, to add a hint of realism, midlist status and a small advance) are not what motivate you. Your letter doesn’t tell me much—for all I know, you are shivering in a garret somewhere, desperately hoping to write yourself out of desperate straits—but I like to think that you have enough money for essentials, and that you can make time for writing.

If you do have the time and money, write for the joy of it —the joy of the process, and the joy of accomplishment. Getting lost writing long fiction can be one of life’s great pleasures, sort of like an ongoing lucid dream. And this is true even if your novel is not a commercial success—indeed, even if it never gets published at all, or doesn’t turn out to be especially good, or never actually gets finished.

Do finish your book, though, and make some revisions, and maybe find or hire one or more people to look it over, and make some more revisions—and then get it out there, with or without a traditional publisher. These days it is quite honorable, and fairly affordable, to self-publish. I know people who, thanks mostly to the Internet, have done very well publicizing their book, getting online reviews, finding readers, and sometimes even earning real money.

Try not to waste time on self-doubt or regret. As George Eliot said: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  Well, actually it is, if you are talking about childbearing or climbing Everest or playing the Queen of the Night. But I think she’s got it right where fiction writing is concerned. And she should know: she published the great Middlemarch in her fifties, which is like being about 85 in 21st– Century years. So pick up that quill and get started.

LA WALLY SAYS:

No, it is never too late to do anything, except maybe have a baby. Always try any new thing that makes you happy!

Dear June,

My longtime (almost seven years now) partner and I are both women in our late 20s. Both of us are overweight, but Trudy, as I will call my partner, is heavier than I am. She is much more comfortable with her weight, perhaps because she has been big for most of her life, while I have only really struggled with my weight since I gave up competitive sports after college.

When I went for a physical this past July, my doctor suggested that I lose about thirty pounds. She said it might help me cope with the aftereffects of a knee injury. She also pointed out that my weight had been creeping up steadily for years and that this was something I should try to turn around sooner rather than later.

So I joined a support group and started tracking the food I ate. Also counting calories and measuring portions, which is kind of a drag, and working out three or four times a week, which to my surprise feels really good. So far I have been losing almost a pound a week and have gone down a size and a half. I get horrible food cravings sometimes, but most of the time I am happy with my plan and thrilled with my progress. I have more energy and my knee feels a little better.

But my relationship with Trudy is suffering. I never realized how much of what we do revolves around either eating or drinking or sitting around. Eating out and going to bars is basically how we socialize with most of our friends. At home, we cook for each other—I make great soups and casseroles, and Trudy is a wonderful baker. Then we veg out in front of the TV, usually with beer or wine and all sorts of munchies.

I can still do most of these things, but I am trying to cook much lighter meals (which I often make in two versions to accommodate her and which she is of course is free to augment in any way she pleases). And I really can’t eat more than a token bite of Trudy’s baked goods. When we go out, I drink seltzer and eat mostly salads. Lately I have been suggesting more movies and concerts and fewer big dinners out, because they are a bit of a trial for me. But Trudy acts as if my not eating fattening food along with her, and my not wanting our social life to center on food and drink quite as much as it used to, is insensitive or even hostile.  She also resents it when I go to the gym.  

Lately she has been going out of her way to bake my favorite breads and cakes and buy my favorite wines. One night about a week ago, when presented with a rich chocolate torte, I asked her not to do this so much and she started to cry, as if I had been ungracious about a gift, which I guess maybe I had. Then the other night when we were eating out with friends and I ordered just an appetizer she kept trying to get me to “do the restaurant justice” and not be such a stickler.  

Last night we kind of had it out. She told me that she didn’t recognize me, that I was becoming an uptight person and denying myself—and therefore her—life’s small pleasures out of a desire to conform to some societal idea of female beauty. That most people who try to take weight off gain it all back again in a few years, so why bother?  That she loves me just the way I am, and she hopes I feel the same way about her, but now she is starting to wonder. She said that I used to understand that fat was beautiful until I started counting calories and trying to be something I’m not.

What am I supposed to do?  I really love Trudy, but I also want to get healthier and, I admit, maybe look and move a little better. Do you think she’s right that I am sabotaging our relationship?

—Losing It in Lafayette

Dear Losing It,

No, but I do think she is sabotaging your diet—or, as we should probably call it if you want to maintain it, your “lifestyle change.”

What surprises me about Trudy’s conduct is how up-front she is. Most people who try to sabotage a dieter are a lot more subtle about it, and may not even know what they are doing until they get called out. But Trudy is quite clear that she does not want you to succeed with your current plan of eating less and moving more, and that she does not want your body to change, either.

Trudy’s behavior is terrible. She is tearing you down, disrespecting your choice, trying to make you feel guilty, predicting that you will fail, and trying her best to see that you do. If your new eating and exercise regimen were really self-destructive or unhealthy or doomed to failure, there might be some justification for her strategy, if not her tactics. But it is not as if you are starving yourself —I say this based on your steady but not startling weight loss—or hurting yourself in any way. You are acting on doctor’s orders, and your diet and exercise program sound reasonable—better for your body, in fact, than your previous lifestyle with Trudy. Nor do you seem to be trying to turn into a Barbie doll: you started out thinking primarily about your knee and your future health and well-being. If you end up looking “better” in terms of social norms, that is just fine, as long as you continue to accept and appreciate people who don’t look that way.

Trudy is right about one thing: most dieters regain the weight they’ve lost. Weight gain is a complex issue and often an intractable problem. And that’s a good reason to be vigilant, seek support or expert help if you need it, keep exercising (there is some evidence that exercise can help maintain weight loss, and anyway it is good for you), and go easy on yourself if you backslide. But it’s a very bad reason to give up in the middle of a successful diet and exercise plan, especially a slow, steady, reasonable one like yours that actually has a good shot at becoming a way of life.

I can see how it would be hard for Trudy to cope with the loss of your comfortable daily routines; but it sounds as if you are willing to compromise, and she should be willing to do the same.

Whether she is emotionally capable of his kind of compromise is another matter. Trudy sounds cripplingly insecure and terrified of rejection. Based on your history together, you might be able to reassure her that you will still love her body, no matter how your own body changes: after all, it sounds as if you were considerably thinner when you started dating her, and her size was not an issue then. She may also be worried that you will leave her for somebody thinner if you become more conventionally attractive to other women and they pursue you—an attitude which, when you stop and think about it, is fairly insulting to both of you: Does she think you are only staying with a fat woman because you are a fat woman, too, and can do no “better”?  You two need to discuss this.

The facet of her insecurity that worries me the most is her apparent belief that your losing weight, and living in a way that makes this possible, is in itself a rejection of her body and her lifestyle. If she can’t accept that you need to live and look in ways you quite reasonably think are best for you, I do not hold out much hope for your relationship. You two really need to discuss this.

I strongly suggest couples counseling. I am sure it would help Trudy to give her side of the story. She may want a neutral party to listen when she says that it’s hard to drink alone; hard to enjoy ribs and blackout cake when her ever-more-svelte partner orders baby arugula, dressing on the side, and six raspberries; hard to watch as the woman she loves puts on strange Spandex clothes and heads off to the gym on mornings that used to be for books and Danish and cuddling in sweatpants. And it is hard. But it’s necessary, and a healthy relationship can survive it.

Good luck. And may I suggest angel food cake, Vita Tops, and spaghetti squash with marinara sauce and shaved Parmesan? All under 150 calories.

LA WALLY SAYS:

No, Trudy is wrong. People grow and change. If this makes you happier and healthier you should do it. Everyone is beautiful, but Trudy needs to understand that you have to be the person you want to be. Don’t let her get in the way of your happiness.

 

ask-june-square-for-facebook-no-border-300pxCleaver’s in-house advice columnist opines on matters punctuational, interpersonal, and philosophical, spinning wit and literary wisdom in response to your ethical quandaries. Write to her at AskJune@Cleavermagazine.com. Find more columns by June in her attic.

 

La Wally is the nom de June of June Cleaver‘s adult daughter. In real life, she’s an artist and entrepreneur. What’s up with her name? In choosing a pseudonym, the two of them considered the names of the original Cleaver family offspring, both boys, but rejected “Beaver” for obvious reasons. “Wally” alone seemed too masculine and generally hideous. But “La Wally” brings to mind Catalani’s wonderful opera. Speaking of which, have you seen the movie Diva? You should.

 

Image credit: Jon Tyson on Unsplash

 

A Conversation with Greg Sestero Author of THE DISASTER ARTIST: MY LIFE INSIDE THE ROOM, THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE EVER MADE

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A Conversation with Greg Sestero
Author of THE DISASTER ARTIST: MY LIFE INSIDE THE ROOM, THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE EVER MADE
Simon & Schuster, 288 pages

Interview by Brian Burmeister

The Disaster Artist.jpgPerhaps no other film has so improbably risen from obscurity to cultural significance than 2003’s The Room. Grossing just $1800 in its original theatrical run, the film now famously dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” went on to connect with audiences through years of midnight screenings and an insightful, entertaining, and sometimes heartbreaking book about its making.

Greg Sestero, star of The Room, wrote this book in 2013, titling it The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. The memoir was hailed by Patton Oswalt as “A surprising, hilarious, and compelling account of the making of the modern Plan 9 from Outer Space” and by Rob Lowe as “Hilarious, delusional, and weirdly inspirational.” In 2017, Sestero’s book was adapted into the critically acclaimed film The Disaster Artist, starring James Franco, Alison Brie, and Dave Franco (who portrayed Sestero).

Through his twenty-year career, Sestero has acted in a wide range of movies, including the cult horror films Retro Puppet Master and Dude Bro Party Massacre III. More recently, he wrote and starred in the Best F(r)iends films alongside The Room’s enigmatic Tommy Wiseau.

In this interview, Brian Burmeister asks Sestero about his experiences on set, his current projects, and advice he has for fellow writers and actors.

Brian Burmeister: While The Room had slowly built a following in the years following its release, your book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made deserves a lot of credit for introducing the film to much of the world. Going back to 2003, could you have envisioned the amount of love that would eventually outpour for The Room and yourself?

Greg Sestero: Nooo. I thought it was just a movie that was going to be made by Tommy—and it was sort of his accomplishment, and that was going to be it.

Best Friends coverBB: There are a lot of inherent challenges for any writer working on an autobiography or memoir. In writing such a personal story, were there parts of your life and your experience that were hard for you to write about? Or concerned you because of what people might think—including those you wrote about?

GS: Yeah, I mean, I made sure to interview everybody from the story. And I thought it was very important to be as honest as possible and as respectful as possible because the story doesn’t work unless you share what you’re also not proud of. I think that’s what sets a lot of the events in motion. And I wanted to make sure to tell as much of the story as needed—and just be honest. I wrote it from the heart, and I think when you do that, you’re probably going to be okay.

BB: There were 15 years between when you worked with Tommy Wiseau on The Room [which he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in] and when you worked together on the Best F(r)iends films. In your book, you obviously wrote a lot about your experiences working on The Room. With Best F(r)iends, you took on different roles—this time you wrote the script, and Tommy was no longer in the director’s chair. By contrast to The Room, what was the experience of working on the two volumes of Best F(r)iends like?

GS: I definitely had more experience. I’d grown up a lot. And I knew Tommy could be very captivating in an acting role if it was composed properly. The goal was for us to try to make something new and have him be able to focus as an actor—and not have to burden all the pressure of producing. I really enjoyed making Best F(r)iends. I tried to take everything I’d learned and pour it into it.

BB: Earlier this year, a hilarious, jaw-dropping trailer for Big Shark was released. Any updates on the film’s progress?

GS: I know it’s something Tommy is really passionate to make. He’s on that, and hopefully it’s something special.

BB: What’s next for you? Are you planning to write more films? Focus on acting?

GS: I’m working on a horror film that I’m writing and putting together. So hopefully next year we’ll bring some interesting entertainment.

BB: Is the horror genre where you see yourself focused moving forward long-term?

GS: Yeah, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I think The Room is great and everything that’s come from it has been fascinating. But I hope to go in a kind of different direction and make some new things.

BB: One of the true highlights of the entire internet last year was the recreation of an iconic scene from The Dark Knight starring you as Batman and Tommy Wiseau as the Joker. Where did that idea come from? And what was it like filming that scene?

Greg Sestero headshot

Greg Sestero

GS: We were fortunate to get Lionsgate to release Best F(r)iends, so we did a promotion with the Batman scene. And it was a director at Nerdist who made the Batman/Joker audition tape who said, “Let’s go make a scene.” So for me, being a big fan of The Dark Knight, it was one of those things that was an experience you couldn’t pass up.

BB: On behalf of everyone who has seen it, thank you for not passing it up. As of right now, you’re on a mini-tour of the country with live readings of The Room’s script. Having just attended one of these readings myself, I can definitively say these events are pure fun and a great opportunity to pick your brain in the Q&A. Can fans expect more opportunities like these to see you in person?

GS: Yeah, I’ve done it a couple times. I think it’s something that’s very interactive and gives people a chance to be part of the film. So, we’ll see. I’ve got these other projects to make, but it’s always fun to get out there, meet fans, and interact.

BB: Final question. One of the major themes in The Disaster Artist is Tommy Wiseau’s one-in-a-million, limitless belief in his own dreams. That’s one of the many qualities that really separates him from most of us. If you were to offer one piece of advice to all the struggling writers and actors out there, what would it be?

GS: Follow the fun. If you’re not having fun, you need to figure out why that is. Creating should be fun. We sometimes put pressure on ourselves—which can be a good thing—but at the end of the day, as creators in that process, there needs to be some enjoyment. So try to drown out the negative voices. Just focus on your story or your music and follow the fun.

◊ ◊ ◊ 

The author wishes to thank Mr. Sestero for generously taking the time to sit down for this interview following his live reading of The Room in Des Moines on 10/25/19.

Brian BurmeisterBrian Burmeister is an author, cat cuddler, and educator living in Iowa. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.

 

 

 

GRAND UNION, short stories by Zadie Smith, reviewed by Eliza Browning

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

GRAND UNION
by Zadie Smith
Penguin Press, 256 pages
reviewed by Eliza Browning

Book Cover Grand UnionSince the release of her enormously successful first novel White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith has regularly published novels and essay collections, including last year’s acclaimed Feel Free.

Grand Union, a collection of nineteen works of short fiction, represents an exciting addition to her oeuvre. The characters it features—black and white, young and old, male and female, gay and straight, and hailing from both sides of the Atlantic—are as diverse a cast as populate her novels, but their stories veer from the first-person narrative to the nonlinear and surreal to the essayistic. Form is experimented with, even scrapped altogether. “Mood” collages fragments of ruminations on modernity, including imitations of Tumblr posts. “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” is an analysis of a child’s homework. What ties these stories together is not subject or theme, but Smith’s witty, thoughtful, and culturally attuned voice.

Politics hover in the background of many of the stories, although their references are typically oblique rather than overt. Rather than tackle the major issues head-on—Brexit, Trump’s America—they quietly remind you now and again of the world we live in. In “The Lazy River,” British vacationers seeking escape from the pressures of everyday life in a Spanish resort are occasionally flung back into reality with the occurrence of ordinary events: “The tomatoes are in the supermarket. The moon is in the sky. The Brits are leaving Europe. We are on a ‘getaway.’ We still believe in getaways.” The story ends with the unnamed characters sitting on the balcony after putting their children to bed, “where we look up his Twitter, as we have every night since January.” He isn’t named, he doesn’t have to be. It’s enough that the modern reader will immediately catch this reference that speaks to the state of the world today, an effect Smith masterfully achieves.

As much as her characters try to ignore the machinery of global politics, they will return to it, quietly, at the end of each day. Though not explicitly acknowledged, their concern will materialize as a sense of generalized anxiety that runs perpetually in the background, such as the parents’ worry for their children’s safety while strapping them into trampoline harnesses. It’s these children they will try to shield from danger, from ever-advancing technology (“the obscene bulge of those iPhones”), and from politics themselves.

Zadie Smith author headshot

Zadie Smith

Of course, in some cases these references are more transparent. In “Downtown,” a female Jamaican artist narrates her dissatisfaction with her life and the world on the day of Brett Kavanaugh’s swearing-in. “Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it—if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett—he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.”

How can this be happening, Smith seems to ask, despite all the other once-unbelievable things that have happened the past two or three years? And yet it happens, over and over again. We are the world that created Brett Kavanaugh. Throughout Grand Union, prejudice rears its head: racism and transphobia against the aging Cabaret star in “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” echoes of police brutality in the tremendously affecting murder of a black man in “Kelso Deconstructed” (set in 1959). These characters, unlike the vacationers in “The Lazy River,” do not have the luxury of ignoring these lingering realities; they live them every day.

Some of the most affecting stories follow the perspectives of children or young adults as they struggle to find their place in the world. The wonderful “Sentimental Education,” reminiscent of some of Smith’s earlier novels, focuses on the sexual history of a young woman and her relationship with one of the only other black students in her college. The opening story, “The Dialectic,” centers on the turbulent relationship between a single mother and her headstrong daughter. Like the characters in “The Lazy River,” the mother and daughter are on a seaside vacation, a liminal space which seems to function as a gateway to address larger truths. Some stories are more successful than others. While much of the familial interplay and interaction between a young boy and girl in “Just Right” rings true, a similar relationship— between a teenage boy and a young girl he is escorting to a funeral in “Meet the President”— falls flat; much of the plot is bogged down in dystopian details.

With Grand Union, Smith presents a vibrant, wildly digressive collection of stories that captures the full scope of her wit and imagination. It’s different from her earlier fiction, bolder and more adventurous but with the same sparkling tone, and at the same time quietly and heartbreakingly prescient.

Eliza Browning headshotEliza Browning is a sophomore studying English and Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, the Fitzgerald Museum, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, among others. This past summer she was an intern at Cleaver and a writing fellow in the Counterclock Arts Collective.

RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL by Faith Sullivan, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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RUBY & ROLAND: A NOVEL
by Faith Sullivan
Milkweed Editions, 256 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Ruby and Roland Book Jacket

Books recalibrate our imaginations. They expect us to make room, to put on our nearest pair of shoes and walk the hall, the street, the cornfields, whispering to ourselves and to the wind.

When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills.

Now midway into her eighties, Sullivan is still finding, within Harvester, commonplace stories of everyday appeal. Her new book, Ruby & Roland, begins not in Harvester, but in Illinois, where Ruby Drake is living an idyllic childhood with a childlike mother until her parents are killed in an accident. The orphan moves in with one family and then with another, packing tokens of her youth and holding memories near. It is at the Schoonover farm, in Harvester, that Ruby becomes who she seems meant to be—a reliable and literate farm girl. She plants seeds and she harvests. She cans and she bakes. She makes the mess of mincemeat and then scrubs away the mess. It’s a happy existence, but happy, Sullivan knows, is not enough. Complications make a novel novel, and so Sullivan has her Ruby fall in love with the beautiful, blue-eyed Roland, whose equally beautiful wife, Dora, lies inconsolable in an upstairs room, following the death of her infant daughter.

Faith Sullivan, author headshot

Faith Sullivan

Things move at a rapid clip. Glances become touch. Touch becomes sex. Joy becomes guilt. Dora suspects that her husband is cheating, but, following another tragedy, she must accept Ruby’s help in her house. To whom must one be true? That’s the story here. Are we better people when we walk away from those we love? Best when we decide that the thing that we want most is not ours to have?

With her orphan start and her borrowed homes, her love of the seemingly unattainable Roland, and her domestic duties in an unhappy house, Ruby may be Jane Eyre inspired but she is also very much her own character, capable (most happily) of seeing the beauty of her world. She notices “the heavenly perfume of good clean smoke wafting up to one’s bedroom at night when the sky was ebon and the stars icy.” (34) She appreciates the piano music that drifts out of open doors and the one “moved along the wooden walk as if in the pages of a novel.” (32) She’s living her life, in other words, and in living hers, we, the readers, are escaping ours, walking the hills and riding the trains, wondering whose happiness should matter most, burnishing the secret that propels the novel forward.

Reading Sullivan is like spending time in a hammock beneath a tree on a day when there is just the right degree of breeze. Somebody’s baking peach pie and the air is sweet. Somebody’s dog is singing.

Beth Kephart is the author of more than two-dozen books, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Wife|Daughter|Self: A Memoir in Essays will be published by Forest Avenue Press in spring 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST, poems by Carole Bernstein, reviewed by Claire Oleson

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BURIED ALIVE: A TO-DO LIST
by Carole Bernstein
Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages.
reviewed by Claire Oleson

jacket art for Buried AliveFrom satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead.

The book follows a loose chronology, drawing from glimpses of her living to form the picture of a complete and complicated life. Bernstein is unafraid in her direct examinations of familial sexual abuse, injury and aging, and the unfolding joys and strains of motherhood in clear, occasionally very casual language. This book trusts its reader with image and metaphor but also consciously stays married to narrative; a majority of the poems in Buried Alive: A To-Do List navigate by chronology, desiring to approach the terrifying and mundane with equal clarity.

Before the life of the speaker unfolds, the second poem and the titular piece of the book takes us to her coffin. In “Buried Alive: A To-Do List,” we see the speaker contend with waking up buried alive, a circumstance which prompts them to list tips for enduring their own situation. The tone in this poem resembles that of many others in the book, tackling both a morbid humor and a clear horror. In this voice, the buried-alive speaker advises themselves to:

Calculate the gravid mass of Amalthea, a moon of Jupiter.
Order a pizza using reverse osmosis.
Pretend a demon is fucking you.
Beg for your mommy, and everyone’s mommy,
even though you’re over fifty.

Here, and throughout the collection, there is a haunting synthesization of humor and fear. Nothing can really be done in this coffin besides wait, but this doesn’t stop worlds of thought from blooming in the speaker’s mind. The audience is invited to “Try to see the puckered satin lip-like folds/ inches above your face,/ you just know it’s pink and livid, like a fleshy diseased vagina.” The folded insides of the coffin itself may be static, but the lines that detail them are anything but. The poem moves from genitalia to contemplations of the post-mortem to being “relieved that you can stop worrying/ about being buried alive someday.” Inside horror, we are at least given one less thing to worry about.

Mirroring the oxymoronic title, the poem ends with an exhibition of both life and death. The entombed woman remembers a day in winter when she bought a newspaper for an elderly man who was incredibly grateful. She closes her eyes and remembers the cold day, remarking “Already you can see your breath.” The reader is left on this exhale of warm breath in chilled air, a sign of living and a possible stand-in for a last breath, clever in its ability to be read as both. The sardonic and sincere share these stanzas, flooding a single coffin.

Author headshot for Carole Bernstein

Carole Bernstein

The book returns to the subterranean in “The Visit” where “a flashlight rolls over the walls of a cave” that proves to be a pregnant uterus. The fetus’s presence is likened to newly-discovered cave-drawings as the sonogram presents its “grainy screen” “this tiny, blurry, leaping bison or bear.” The ambiguity of the screen, the touring of the uterus as a container for life, and the lack of clarity of what the life itself actually looks like all gesture back to titular poem. Though there is a clear and bright hopefulness in this discovery, this “first art we know” in a body that was thought infertile in the poem immediately prior to “The Visit.” Still, this life emerges in conversation with the deaths around it. The cave and the coffin each show signs of the living and the departed, neither simply houses one or the other, and in this way Bernstein complicates the funeral and the delivery room in the same breath.

Despite its regular use of sarcasm and its deployment of humor to both survive and illuminate the world it inhabits, Buried Alive: A To-Do List demonstrates a heartfelt love for the living. This love is made clearer and better for its confrontations with death, as is seen in “Pumpkin,” a poem where a pet cat being euthanized because

A thing in her head was pressing on her brain,
the little cat-brain that had known me,
kept her body warm, observed the rain,

There is immense tenderness held in this small space where a sudden rhyme brightens the otherwise dismal lines. This rhyme emerges without an established rhyme-scheme, softly hinging a defunct neurology to the weather. Embracing this unexpected whimsy, Bernstein’s following tercets occasionally, but do not always, rhyme while showing the death of this cat that cradled knowing of its owner in its brain. The emergency eventually calms and “Something at some point loosened, breathed.” The reader knows in the given context that this is a death, but Bernstein has already shown us breathing both ending and starting lives, and like the unexpected rhymes scattered without clear pattern, there is a soft glow of unpredictability offered in this detail.

Again demonstrating a link rather than a division between living and dying, Bernstein offers another sort of softness in “Domestic Interiors.” The speaker folds worn undershirts which are “soft as silk, soft as nothing” as

Our daughter, a small bundled person deposited carefully on the
bed while I folded laundry—too young to even roll, she lay,
shifted, breathed, sighed, looked at the ceiling fixture, heard the
light report of the clothes shaken out, the gentle thud of
towels—

Alongside the laundry, the infant is rendered almost another object, a bundle of something that invites touch. Possessing a texture close to shirts owned for years, the newborn lies still until the mother conjures her as a young adult, iterating “I must not keep her.” At once a baby soft among soft objects and “now a woman in boots, long brown hair and a big bag of books,” the child is simultaneously possessable and untouchable. The mother implores the shirts, asking if they remember the baby. This longing question also works to ask the audience: what can be held? Bernstein has shown us life in containers, life in an organ and life a casket that resembles the genitalia that typically leads to that same organ, but neither place can hold that life indefinitely. The softness that this book tours, from the satin interior of the coffin to the bundled worn clothing on the bed, are textures Bernstein makes both deeply inviting to caress and legibly temporary.

Carole Bernstein’s Buried Alive: A To-Do List encourages dying and living, newness and wornness, to share a sensation under the same hands, in the same lines. These pieces are not delineations between the sensations of loss and life, but rather, they are sites for their coexistence. From trauma to satire to placing a toy unicorn on your desk at work to stave off isolation and nihilism, Bernstein’s poems showcase something worth laughing at and something worth crying over, and do so, critically, at the same time.

◊◊◊

Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Claire Oleson is a writer hailing from Grand Rapids Michigan. She’s a 2019 grad of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, Siblíní Art and Literature journal, Newfound Journal, NEAT Magazine, Werkloos Magazine, and Bridge Eight Magazine, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize.  Contact her by email. 

AMOR FATI by Tina Barr

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black and white image of a girl on the beach

AMOR FATI
by Tina Barr                                                  

Chits came in stapled packets, five yellow slips
to a page, that ripped like postage stamps, perforated.
Three’d buy a creamsicle, or a barbershop twirl
of white vanilla shot with chocolate.

……………………………………………………..Inside the girl’s
locker room, open to sky: tuna, peanut butter.
Slatted boards laid their shadows beneath us.
Cross-legged, towel our card table, so nothing fell
through.

…………….Sun pooled; we painted our noses
with white, thick Noxema.

………………………………………..Go Fish, bubbles drifted
up from the nose of a cartoon orange fish;
or Old Maid, we’d scream, getting her, bun, spectacles
like death, in childhood’s parlor.

…………………………………………………..Legs lengthening,
tops beginning to bulge enough for training bras.

My Daddy said, You’re a man trap.

Mary’s older brother, a redhead, swam close
towards the dock; the end of the boardwalk floated.

Horseshoe crabs compassed under it, tails moving
needles.  Their blood blue from copper, scientists
drained it; it clots in response to toxins.

……………………………………………………………..Across
the harbor Watson was writing The Double Helix.

We were spun in the vortex of two-piece cotton suits
like Gidget.  Angus was older by a decade.  Only once
did he lift me onto the low rung of ladder, sea brown,
warm; clear jellyfish the size of figs swirled.

………………………………………..……………………………Once
a month lifeguards whistled us out;  sharks’ fins
streamed past a red nun.

………………………………………..Mary once invited me over;
I didn’t understand Catholic meant too many children.

Her mother had something called a “nervous breakdown.”

The phrase clotted in my head; forty years later, crouched
on our dining room floor, crying I couldn’t stop.

………………………………………..………………………………….Dreams
my father turned his head towards me in bed.

In photographs, lab technicians in masks, shower caps,
fold back each carapace, stick in steel needles, crabs
strapped above glass jars into which drips sky color.

◊◊

Tina Barr author photoTina Barr’s books include Green Target, winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poems published in NC in 2018, Kaleidoscope (Iris Press) and The Gathering Eye (Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize) and three chapbooks, all winners of chapbook contests. Her Fellowships include the National Endowment for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and MacDowell Colony. She teaches in the Great Smokies CW Program at UNCA.

 

 

Image credit: Mat Reding on Unsplash

 

DUNCAN by Nicole Rivas

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black and white photo of yo yo

DUNCAN
by Nicole Rivas

The yo-yo slams me in the teeth and I buckle to the ground. It makes the guys gleam to see me on my knees like this, like the women in the videos we watch who are always begging. Tyler grabs his blue jean crotch and says “Nice teats.” I am fatter than them, sure. Me and Tyler are thirteen. Ace, fifteen. About my weight, my mom doesn’t say that I’m a teenager, that I’m still growing. She says I’ll be as fat as my uncle Louis who died from stomach cancer when he was thirty-two. I was too young to remember him. Anytime I open the refrigerator—even for some ice cubes to drop down my shirt in the summer—Mom says, “It could have been all that sugar that did him in. He didn’t eat half as much as you, though.”

Where did my tooth go? I try to focus on one thing at a time, ignoring Ace’s toady laugh and Tyler saying things we’ve heard a million times before. “Big ol’ titties on Erick,” he says, lightly kicking me in the calf. “Did you see how well she took it, that yo-yo in her mouth?” His hands move from his crotch back to the yo-yo. He swings it, winds it up again. Loops and loops around his grubby middle finger. Walk the dog, around-the-world.

“Is the baby crying?” Ace asks, standing over me.

“It sthucking hurths,” I say. I manage to get up on one knee.

“It was an accident,” Tyler says, not looking at me.

“But it sure made me hard,” Ace says. He looks at Tyler for approval.

Tyler doesn’t respond, keeps working the yo-yo like a marionette doll. We’re behind the old Pizza Hut where we go to poke at condom wrappers, half-empty cans of beer, lone tufts of black hair. I half-heartedly look for the tooth, my hand mumbling over gunky bottle caps and dried balls of chewing gum.

When I find it, a shiny yellow-white fleck nestled atop a piece of potato chip bag, Tyler is rocking the baby. His face is calm, a sheet of pale dough. Paternal, almost. Maybe this is what Louis looked like. I don’t know anything about him aside from the fact that he was my uncle and he was fat like I am and he had cancer. Maybe he was like Tyler somehow. Maybe it’s good that he’s dead. I dust the tooth off and stuff it deep in the front pocket of my t-shirt.

“You do a trick,” Tyler says, throwing the yo-yo at me.

The yo-yo feels heavy in my hand, my jaw throbbing with pain. The only thing I’m able to do is make the yo-yo sleep. It purrs on the ground near the rest of my blood.

Tyler stomps it, grabs his crotch. “That one is called ‘gang bang,’” he says.

“Gang bang,” Ace says. He laughs and also grabs his crotch. They both look at me.

“Gang bang,” I say. I grab my crotch. When I pull my hand away, the splayed, bloody fingerprints look like a pitiful stain. Like a person turned upside-down and falling.

◊◊

Nicole RivasNicole Rivas teaches writing courses in Savannah, GA, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Alabama, and is the Flash Editor at Newfound. Her chapbook of flash fiction, A Bright and Pleading Dagger, was the winner of the Rose Metal Press 12th Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. For a list of publications, visit www.nicolemrivas.com.

 

WESTERN SPADEFOOT by Michael Rerick

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Close up of a toad's face

WESTERN SPADEFOOT
by Michael Rerick

she scans a glossy creak
lowland like wood floors
creased with alluvial fans
playas and alkali flats
before sandy gravely
shortgrass in a quiet pool
where roasted peanuts,
a sneezing fit, or snores
stroke a pocket comb
in a chorus of saws
floating in a San
Francisco rain and river
where power sounds

◊◊

Michael Rerick author bioMichael Rerick lives, teaches, and washes dishes in Portland, OR. Work recently appears or is forthcoming at Clade Song, COAST|noCOAST, Counter Narratives, Graviton, Mannequin Haus, Porridge, and The Wire’s Dream. He is also the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold, morefrom, The Kingdom of Blizzards, The Switch Yards, and X-Ray.

 

 

 

Image credit: Laurence on Unsplash

RICOCHET by Debra Fox

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Overhead projection of victims' names with the phrase "May these names be a blessing."

RICOCHET
by Debra Fox

October 27, 2018 9:07 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Twenty-one-year-old Matthew clicks his tongue in time to each step he takes. Tramping on carpet, he still makes the cupboards rattle as he descends the staircase into the living room. Knowing the clicking signifies contentment, his mother turns over in her bed and allows herself fifteen more minutes of sleep.

It’s the weekend, so Matthew has gotten himself dressed. He’s put his shirt on backwards and his shoes on the wrong feet. He plonks down next to the bookcase where his picture books are lined up. He removes one book at a time, rubbing each glossy page between his thumb and forefinger, and places it next to him, building a neat tower. Matthew is humming Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, probably inspired by Goodnight Moon, one of his favorite books. Or at least that’s what his mother hypothesizes as she lies in bed half-asleep, listening to him. She can’t know for sure since Matthew is severely autistic and non-verbal.

What she does know is that this sort of repetitive activity centers him, and enables him to block out competing sounds, colors and stimuli all vying equally for his attention.

◊

October 27, 2018 9:40 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

Three hundred and four miles away, David Rosenthal, fifty-four, walks through the doors of the Tree of Life Synagogue just as he’s done every other Saturday for decades. Positioning himself inside the sanctuary, he busies himself arranging prayer books and shawls for services. His older brother, Cecil, stands at the back of the sanctuary, greeting congregants. Like many who are intellectually disabled, these brothers appreciate the predictability of a Shabbat service with its routines and rituals.

◊

October 27, 2018 9:42 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew spins in circles, stomps his feet, and shrieks with delight, doing what his mother calls his “happy dance” as she makes his smoothie—frozen pineapple, banana, and mango. He has already asked his mother to tell him the “story of my day” many times this morning, fisting his right hand in a ball while leaving his left hand open and moving them in sync as if he is opening a story book. “You’re going to have a smoothie,” his mother says. “We are going to go for a walk; we will come home and eat lunch, and then you will play with your puzzles and books.”

Had his mother been shown a picture of David and Cecil Rosenthal, she would have taken note of David’s shirt, untucked from the front of his pants, and the way his eyes squint more than the average person when he smiles, as if he is using every available facial muscle to feel happiness.

Their graying hair would make her uneasy. She can’t bear to think of a time when her son will be middle-aged himself, and she too old to care for him.

As she pours Matthew’s smoothie into a glass, she remembers her dream from last night, a recurring dream in which she and Matthew are having a “normal” conversation, although all he is capable of in “real life” are approximations of words that only she and those who know him well can understand. Their conversations in these dreams are lovely, but she never remembers what they were about. Some nights she tries to force the dream, promising herself that this time she will remember the words. But it never works. She doesn’t have that kind of control.

◊

9:54 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

In the neighborhood surrounding the Synagogue, people begin their Saturday morning routines. Some wearing raincoats will walk their dogs as a light mist descends. Others will anticipate the afternoon Pitt football game or prepare lists for their Saturday food shopping.

From the parking lot of the Giant Eagle grocery store, shoppers hear a booming racket piercing the stillness of the morning. What construction is so important that such loud equipment must be used this time of day? they might ask. The popping explosions become sickeningly regular and staccato. Some who know what gunfire sounds like keep track of bursts.

The first 911 call comes into dispatch. “We are being attacked,” the caller whispers.

“Get out of there and don’t let anyone else in,” the operator responds.

◊

9:57 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew’s mother flips on the radio as she puts lemon poppy seed muffins into the toaster oven. The announcer reports about a shooting spree in a synagogue in a quiet neighborhood in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood she might be surprised to know is strikingly similar to her own, with brick and stone homes constructed at the turn of the century, gracing the community like sleepy unassuming giants.

Rinsing blueberries at the sink, she raises her head and stares through the window into the half-eaten eyes of a Jack-o-Lantern. Halloween is four days away. For the first time she notices the jagged bite marks scarring its face. The squirrels seem more aggressive and hungrier than usual this season, as if they and their food source are not in alignment. She remembers a film she saw some thirty years ago called Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance.” Instead of humanity growing apart from nature, as it did in the film, here in her backyard nature was growing apart from itself. She can feel herself shaping the natural world to the growing unease inside of her.

She turns on the blender, drowning out the radio. The noise is jarring, but she welcomes a reprieve from the relentless news coverage. She can’t bear to think how she might protect her son from gunfire if they were out in the world together. He wouldn’t understand. If anything, he’d be attracted to the overwhelming sensory sensation of repetitive bursts crackling through his body.

She wishes she could talk to him about the shootings, try to make sense of the insanity. Twenty-one years of living with him doesn’t erase this desire in her. If anything, it grows stronger.

Matthew spins in circles again, this time his arms outstretched like wings, bumping into her every so often. He’s laughing too, because for him there’s nothing better than the anticipation of a smoothie and muffin for breakfast on Saturday with his “Mama.” She notices that the front of his shirt has come untucked.

◊

9:59 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

Bernice and Sylvan Simon, eighty-four and eighty-six respectively, sit side by side in the pews as they anticipate singing the Sh’ma, an ancient prayer that opens Saturday morning services. Sylvan’s face is all curves: the rounded chin, the bulbous nose, the arches on either side of his mouth. He has the face of a kindly neighbor who picks up windblown trash from neighbors’ lawns. Bernice delighted in singing “You Are My Sunshine“ to her kids when they were young. Hard of hearing, Bernice and Sylvan don’t take in the commotion in the hallway. They don’t see the gunman who bursts through the door of the sanctuary until he is directly in front of them and shooting. They die in the same synagogue where they wed sixty-two years ago.

Zone 5 Police Commander Jason Lando shouts into his radio, “Every available unit in the city needs to get here now.” Sirens flood the neighborhood. They whip down alleyways and ricochet off glass. Melvin Wax, eighty-seven years old, hears them as he hides in a storage room at the back of the chapel. People shopping in the nearby supermarket hear them.

◊

10:00 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew’s mother would ordinarily delight in the sound of her son singing his favorite song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” He sings like this: “Naah na nana na naaaaahna, na nana nana naaaaaaah…”

Part of her wants to join in but she can’t. She can’t muster the cheerfulness the song requires. Not when there’s been another mass shooting. Matthew lifts his eyes from the muffin crumbs he is rearranging on his plate and looks expectantly at her. He doesn’t realize she is just now remembering the words, but not the melody, to a chant she hasn’t sung in forty-five years. Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. When she went to synagogue as a child, the congregation recited the Sh’ma at the beginning and ending of every service. She wonders as she says the words out loud if Matthew realizes they are in a different language.

◊

10:00 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

Rose Mallinger, ninety-seven, slowly bleeds to death on the sanctuary floor. She is one of those women who grow more beautiful in old age. In photographs the lines on her face, especially those framing her eyes and mouth, suggest a life gently lived, despite the fact that she survived the Holocaust. Her daughter Andrea Wedner, sixty-one, accompanies her to services, as she usually does each week. Though she is shot too, she will survive.

Police stationed around the perimeter of the synagogue hear Commander Lando’s voice crackle through their walkie-talkies: “We are pinned down by gunfire. The shooter is firing out the front door of the building with an automatic weapon.”

A cold drizzle falls. Shards of glass litter the sidewalk.

◊

10:17 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew’s mother thinks every Synagogue she has ever been in smells the same—a mixture of old carpet, musty prayer books, Aqua Net hairspray, coats reeking of moth balls, and the breath of old men.

◊

10:36 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

Outside the sanctuary, a toppled bottle of whiskey sits on a white tablecloth, awaiting a baby naming ceremony, the whiskey steadily seeping into the carpet. A SWAT operator reports finding four bodies in the atrium.

Black polyester yarmulkes in a carved wooden receptacle nestle into one another. Men’s hats, some with feathers, still damp from the outside, rest on top of the coat rack. The eternal light suspended in front of the ark and a symbol of God’s presence, glows.

From certain angles the Tree of Life Synagogue could be mistaken for a nondescript government building. With its simple rectangular shape and cement walls, it fails to distinguish itself. But inside the sanctuary, soaring stained glass windows spread prisms of light across the pews.

Melvin Wax weeps in the darkened space where he hides. As the door swings open, he lets out a whimper and the gunman fires at him, knocking his body back onto the storage room floor. Fellow congregant Barry Werber, also hidden in the storage room, checks Melvin’s pulse. There isn’t one. The stained-glass windows remain intact.

◊

10:42 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A glass hummingbird ornament above the kitchen sink reflects blue and green light onto the counter. A siren wails in the distance and for a minute Matthew’s mother assumes it is responding to the killings. She feels protected in her kitchen, her son within sight of her in the next room. She tells herself not to go outside where they might be vulnerable. Then she remembers that they live in a different city six hours away. The tooth she had a root canal on ten years ago throbs.

Matthew gets up from the living floor where he is assembling puzzles and makes signs for “siren.” He rotates his fist in the air over and over again until his mother says, “Yes, I hear the siren.”

◊ 

10:54 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania

Joyce Fineberg, seventy-five, who prayed at the Tree of Life synagogue every day since her husband’s death, lies dying. A retired researcher from nearby University of Pittsburgh, she had recently joined the Board of the Synagogue to help revitalize the congregation. Her bangs and chin length hair give her a no-nonsense appearance.

Daniel Stein, seventy-one who has recently become a grandfather lies dying as well. His children often joked that he hadn’t bought a new tie in years—that he didn’t care about style. Richard Gottfried, sixty-five, a dentist who treated uninsured refugees and immigrants, lies dying too.

What are the last sounds they hear? Bullets bouncing off walls or hitting flesh? People moaning? Or maybe something more consoling like soft water droplets hitting the stained-glass windows, or starlings chirping in a nearby tree, or even retreating footsteps muffled by carpeting, a door opening, then closing, indicating an end to the mayhem.

◊ 

11:02 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew listens for the sound of crunching leaves as he tramples through the neighborhood on his Saturday morning walk with his mother. Unlike Pittsburgh, the day in Philadelphia is dry. Yellow leaves on oak trees blaze like flames against a gray sky. Acorns ping as they drop onto parked cars.

In preparation for Halloween, the Malinowskis decorated their windows with bloody handprints. The Sussons have strewn yellow police tape across their front door. The Agnettas staked a skeleton hand in the ground, and it reaches up, as if it were attached to somebody buried alive.

Matthew crouches down on his hands and knees to get a closer look at a giant black spider decoration on the James’ fence. Afraid to touch it, he places his mother’s hand on it to see if it moves.

◊

11:08 a.m., Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania 

Injured and bleeding, the shooter finally follows police orders. He crawls on the floor and surrenders his guns. He’s taken into custody.

◊

11:21 a.m., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Matthew and his mother return home from their walk. He takes up his picture books again, this time lining them in a straight row on the floor.

The melody of the Sh’ma, deeply submerged all morning, unaccountably surfaces and his mother, sitting on the sofa, begins to sing. Matthew stops and listens, perhaps because this melody is unlike all the others in her repertoire with its minor key and melancholy. Then he hums with her, and for a passing moment the tiny muscles around his eyes and his forehead strain. She wonders if he experiences the sense of yearning in the music that she does.

On another day she might have sung “You Are my Sunshine.” But today she wants to be true to her emotions, wants Matthew to somehow understand her grief and know that something is different. Feeling restless, she goes to the windows and opens the Venetian blinds. Shards of light refract on the wooden floor like pieces of broken glass. Matthew touches them as if they possess some kind of life force. In a minute the sun will shift in the sky and they will be gone. But for now, she and Matthew focus on the same experience, which is what she realizes she’s been hoping for all morning.

◊◊

Debra FoxDebra Fox’s stories and poems have appeared in bioStories, Embodied Effigies, Hyperlexia Journal, Blue Lyra Review, Heron’s Nest, Haiku Canada Review, Modern Haiku, and Frogpond.  She is an attorney and founder of Story Tributes, an enterprise that preserves the stories of people’s lives.  She lives on the outskirts of Philadelphia with her family.

 

 

 

Image credit: Governor Tom Wolf on Flickr

4:44 by Leland Cheuk

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

4:44
by Leland Cheuk

I died Sunday, for sixty seconds, at precisely 4:44 p.m. Novel and beer in tow, I strolled over to my armchair and tottered. Nausea somehow morphed into this buttery light that bled over the edges of my vision. There were my parents. There was my childhood, my friends, and my lovers, all these thoughts tinged with forgiveness (though there was nothing to forgive). And then I was down, and then I was up, wheezing, gasping for air.

My memories of how I’d gotten to where I was (floor, apartment, city) were slow to return, as if I’d been concussed. I’d been gone for a long time—years—only to be reborn. Picking up my spilled beer and splayed-open book, I checked the time: 4:45 p.m.

“I actually died,” I told my oncologist the next day.

She prescribed a full day’s worth of scans. CT, PET, MRI, tests without acronyms. Nothing new was wrong with me. While the EKG tech gelled up electrode patches and applied them one by one to my bared chest with the feathery touch of a Jenga player, the wall clock’s minute hand shifted to forty-four after and I flatlined, spasming up a minute later, choking on the dense waft of the tech’s shea butter-scented hair product as she hovered over me, debating whether to administer CPR or fire up the defibrillator.

So-called experts had never seen anything like it. The cardiologist, who himself was centrally obese and labored audibly to breathe, said it “must be” a new type of arrhythmia even though I’d passed all the heart stress tests. The oncologist fondled her silver bracelet as she shrugged and said, “I’m deferring to the heart guy.” They recommended I wear an event monitor and hire a daytime caretaker. “Event monitor”! What a phrase! I couldn’t afford one. I was officially in remission, so I had to return to work. The company’s healthcare coverage was the only reason I wasn’t impoverished already. The doctors reluctantly cleared me.

Death was perfectly manageable. I was a marketing director at a credit card company, so at work, I blocked off my daily schedule between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. and jury-rigged my own event monitor: an alarm on my phone that gave me a two-minute death warning. Every day at 4:30 p.m, I’d go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, lean back, and try to get comfortable. Pants down (so no one would think I was just shirking work), I’d wait to die. Weekends at home, I’d sit in my armchair and make sure I wasn’t eating or drinking anything that might cause a mess, then I’d face the window, stare up at the sky, and safely pass away. At night, after rising from the dead, I’d pop half an Ambien to fall back asleep quicker.

I’d never felt like I was owed an average lifespan. I’d never had any huge goals. I wasn’t disappointed about the many things I hadn’t experienced. I’d loved and lost. I’d traveled. I’d met people I treasured and hated. We’re all just animals, imminent dirt. That we can experience love and heartbreak and hate is an existential bonus.

When I saw the yellowing light again and felt myself sinking, I tried to hold the memories of loved ones appearing in my dying flashes so I could recall them when I was reborn. First, it was my immediate family, but as the months went by, there were others:

Ed, my college roommate and childhood best friend. He lived out west and was a veep at a toy company. We only spoke to each other every year or two now. Kristen, my best friend when I studied abroad in Madrid. I’d been madly in love with her, an impossible love. She now had three kids in a small town in R—. Jennifer, a peer with whom I’d worked at a startup for five years. She was a Republican and I, a Democrat. We sat across from each other in an open floor plan and would spar about politics. I found myself thinking about her more often than I liked to admit. She lived in S— now.

I wished I were closer to them. I was alive but not the same type of alive I was when healthy. When you become seriously ill, you never rejoin the ranks of people who take health for granted. You feel one hundred percent but you know you can feel perfectly fine and have tumors eating you alive. A life-threatening illness forces both a constant awareness of mortality and estrangement of mind from body.

I wrote to the people I saw before my “death minutes.” I told them they’d made an indelible mark on me, as if I were previously a blank canvas.

“The thing I like about you, Ed, is that you were always so loyal to me,” I emailed. “I’ll forever remember what you said about me at your wedding. That you wanted to be like me. Articulate, creative, funny. I’ve never felt like I had any of those attributes.”

“Hang in there, bud,” he replied. “I know this cancer thing’s thrown you for a loop. You’re not losing hope, are you?”

To Kristen: “I loved that you hated everything. Just like me! You were so cool, so skeptical, so cynical about life. When you’re nineteen, all you have to be is cool. God, how I’d wished you had feelings for me. After a while, it fucking hurt to be so close to you and know you didn’t feel the same way I felt about you.”

“I did have feelings for you,” she replied. “Maybe not those feelings. But you were the only reason I didn’t go out of my mind with loneliness while we were abroad. I just didn’t express my feelings well back then. We were all so preoccupied with being cool.”

When I told Jennifer how much I still thought about her, ten years after we’d worked together, she refused to take the emotional bait. She didn’t write about what she’d been doing for the past decade. She only said she’d visit soon so we could “hang out.”

But she started writing me every couple of weeks with funny stories about her current boss at the bank where she worked.

I’d write back and joke about the many different ways I played the cancer card in the office. I frequently took Fridays off, pretending I had doctor’s appointments. I’d call in sick complaining of ridiculous ailments, blaming my weakened immune system—the more absurd and obscure the illness the better (UTI, hemorrhoids, shingles, hard-to-pronounce diarrheal diseases). If I sensed that some higher-up doubted my proposals, I’d cite that compared to beating cancer, any of our top initiatives were easy, and they’d be reassured by my intestinal fortitude and suddenly believe in my ability to make my proposals reality. I told Jennifer that business would take me through S—, even though that was untrue. Would she like to meet up? Yes, she would.

My oncologist informed me that after conferring with several doctors, she thought my “death minutes” could be fixed by implanting a simple pacemaker.

“What does the heart guy think?” I asked.

Her gaze dropped. “He passed away last week.”

I blurted a wow. As a seriously ill patient, you assume your doctors are masters of their own health and somehow impervious to mortality.

“What if I don’t want to do it?” I asked.

“You’re risking death daily.”

But I wasn’t ready to stop dying.

“You’re young,” she said. “You should lead a normal life.”

A normal life meant you let things pass you by. You lost touch with people. You allowed the routine to distance you from your loved ones. You forgot the feeling of genuine connection.

The oncologist’s lips parted, her breath held—for an instant, she looked dead. “I suppose we can try beta blockers or something,” she muttered. “Let me check with the heart people.”

I rented a car and drove five hours to S— because when I flew now, I almost always got sick. When I got to the hotel, my phone battery was dead and I discovered that I’d left the charger at home. Jennifer had agreed to meet for a late lunch and was already on the way from the suburbs. The surly concierge requisitioned my phone and agreed to charge it in the back. (Later, I’d find a fee of $14.99 for “Electrical Services” on my bill.)

I’d have to wrap up my reunion with Jennifer before 4:44 p.m.

We met in the hotel lobby. A decade ago, she’d worn knee-high boots and expensive blouses, and designer sunglasses, even in winter. Now she wore Birkenstocks, khakis, and a white, long-sleeved wicking shirt. Still, I could see the twenty-three-year-old I’d known.

“You look terrific,” she said, inspecting me up and down.

“Cancer works wonders!” I’d lost fifteen pounds in the past year.

“I…didn’t know what to expect.”

“You expected worse.”

“Am I terrible for thinking that?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re healthy.”

We went to a brunch place a short walk from the hotel. Jennifer was an animal lover. She owned a dog and a cat. She volunteered and helped raise money for animal shelters. She enjoyed her job managing technology projects at a large bank. She had a gaze that could stare even death into the ground.

And she’d been partnered with a woman for eight years.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I was with someone before the diagnosis,” I said. “Together four years. I was going to propose, but then she was offered a job in Hong Kong. I wasn’t going to go there and do nothing. So she left.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Now? No,” I said. There we were, sitting across from each other again, this time in a restaurant instead of an office. Why was I playing games, trying to woo her with my death-sparked soulfulness?

“Hong Kong would’ve been amazing,” Jennifer said. “I’d have figured out the work thing later.”

“Had it happened after the cancer,” I lied, “I’d have gone with her.” I’d recently written Mika, my ex, opining that our split was for the best because we didn’t truly love each other.

Jennifer smiled with furrowed brows. “Are you sure?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You seem like a stay-in-one-place type of guy,” she said. “You’ve never left the City. You watch the river go around you. I can’t. I get restless. I’m, like, two different people. There’s the dutiful bank employee who loves animals and the adventurer who moved to the City at nineteen with nothing but twenty dollars.”

“So, like, the Democrat and Republican in yourself.”

Jennifer laughed. “Which is which?”

“The lesser of two evils!”

Jennifer laughed, which made me laugh, which made her laugh.

Later, walking with Jennifer through the cypress groves of S—, I learned there was nothing she wouldn’t try. Ribbon dancing. Sky diving. Trapeze. The old me would’ve been intimidated by someone so up for everything, but the post-death me was emboldened. I was now like Jennifer—restless and in search of adventure too! Maybe she’d be up for cheating on her long-time partner! With a man, no less!

Storm clouds gathering, we passed the gates of the town’s famous cemetery, which looked alive, ironically, the wind its breath, the trees stretching and bending, like giants doing calisthenics. The headstones looked like a child trying to wriggle out of a sweater. I realized I had lost track of time; my death was likely imminent.

“I should go,” I blurted, interrupting Jennifer’s story about a recent trip to Bhutan.

“Is everything okay?”

“I have a work call.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Yeah, my boss is a dick,” I said, spinning around. “How do I get back to the hotel?”

Jennifer gave directions I was too agitated to absorb. I saw the yellow light. She smelled of pine needles. She said my name. I said hers. I considered asking if I could kiss her. If not in the moments before death, then when?

I thought I could see her thinking: The next time I hear about him, it’s going to be because he’s dead. She hugged me so tightly that I squeezed harder to match her force. We seemed to embrace for a long time. I worried I’d die at any moment in her arms. But then Jennifer let go. And I had done nothing. I was indeed the stay-in-one-place, watch-the-river-go-around-me guy.

“I’m glad you got back in touch,” she said, professionally, as if to erase what had just happened. “Keep me updated on your health.”

I said goodbye and bolted. Rounding the nearest corner, I died.

When I came to, my cheek was on the sidewalk, badly abraded. I tongued a salty gap in my gums. I’d lost a bicuspid. I staggered back to the hotel, spitting blood along the way. The doorman eyed me suspiciously and didn’t offer any help. The concierge returned my phone (only half-charged though I’d been gone for hours). I went to my room, cleaned myself up, checked out, bought a car charger, and drove back to the City.

◊

Soon after I returned, I began to die for two minutes twice a day. A few weeks later, three minutes. My oncologist warned that, according to “the brain lady,” after six minutes of heart stoppage, the brain begins to die. And yet, when my deaths surpassed six minutes, I continued to rise undamaged. That’s when the doctors requested my consent to be studied. I refused, having had my fill of hospital time.

Now, after about a year, I die for a full hour daily. One down, twenty-three to go! I did make one concession to my oncologist and agreed to wear a CPAP mask during my times of death to ensure some oxygen flow to the brain, and at work, where I had blinds put up over my office window, I frequently extol to my colleagues the many virtues of afternoon meditation. I block off more and more time, telling anyone who will listen that our lives are borrowed on credit, the interest rates are variable, and we’re all headed for zero balance.

Mika returns from Hong Kong tonight to celebrate my birthday. We’ve been corresponding daily for the past year. She’d recently said recovery had changed me, that I’d been given a new life. Not new life but death, I hadn’t said.

◊◊

Leland Cheuk author photoLeland Cheuk is the author of three books of fiction, including the novels The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong and most recently, No Good Very Bad Asian, forthcoming from C&R Press in October 2019. His work has appeared in Salon, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, among others. He has been awarded fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, Djerassi, and elsewhere. He runs the indie press 7.13 Books and lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

Image credit: Karen Rile

AFTER MISS COLUMBIA by Kathryn Fitzpatrick

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

a beauty queen receiving her crown

AFTER MISS COLUMBIA
by Kathryn Fitzpatrick

On Memorial Day other small towns watch parades. There’s hotdogs and fireworks and tall bearded men dressed up like Abe Lincoln with plastic top hats and that old man who might ride the streets in his vintage Mustang, decked out with streamers and his pre-teen granddaughter. The topiaries are usually draped in American flags or sprayed with blue and white paint. The toddlers run in the street while volunteer firefighters chewing tobacco throw fistfuls of Bazooka at them, almost missing their heads. Veterans march. Wives throw rice like they’re at a 1970s wedding.

Thomaston’s Memorial Day celebration is almost like that. We do the parade and the candy and the cars, the police smoke cigarettes and glare at the kids on skateboards, but at Thomaston’s parade, everyone wears white. Thomaston’s parade trickles down the center of town and builds momentum as it marches up the hill up to the cemetery with the manmade lake in the middle. Miss Columbia recites the Gettysburg Address in a boat in the pond. Girls toss daisies at her. Women cry.

Miss Columbia is the prettiest girl in the senior class. Maybe she’s sporty, involved. Each year she’s the product of a long line of Thomaston folk—the daughter of the basketball coach or the owner of the Country Grocer or the head of the Thomaston PTA. She’s blonde, usually, and her destiny is set in stone the minute her parents decide to bunker down in the town they grew up in. Voting for the event takes place in September, when the PTA picks three girls who’s names they recognize in the senior class and nominate them. It comes down to the senior class to make the decision. Sixty kids hold the fate of the most important title in all of Thomaston.

When my mother was a senior in high school, she was a Miss Columbia. There’s still pictures in the house: 80s feathered hair, a white dress with sleeves puffed up to her ears, the little brown boat. Men in curly mullets nestled between headstones, their children splashing in the water.

Her mother was a Miss Columbia too, only it was the fifties and people had big dreams: nice cars, nice wives, nice place to raise a nice family.

My senior year of high school saw me shave my head and walk the halls in Birkenstocks and Hillary 2016 t-shirts. I didn’t shave, and I wanted everyone to know. In class once, when the English teacher asked why Holden Caulfield called everyone phony, I proudly raised my arm to show off my armpits, bleached and dip-dyed blue.

“He doesn’t fit in to the adult world,” I said.

Everyone groaned.

When Miss Columbia voting rolled around, I wasn’t nominated, and I didn’t care, but my mother, clinging to the window when I got home from school, wanted to hear all about it.

“So who is it?” she asked. “Did you get it?”

I gave her a look.

“Well, who was it?”

She looked concerned, panicked. As if she’d just received news that her parents were both in intensive care. She busied herself with the dishes, wiping nonstick pans and putting them in the lazy Susan beside the stove.

“I don’t know yet.”

◊

Everyone in town could tell you who Miss Columbia is, but no one could really tell you what it is—the strange boat ride across the man-made pond filled up with dog piss and green scum, the gravediggers halting their work to catch a glimpse of thong under a flyaway skirt.

The tradition started as a welcome home celebration in mid-July in 1919, when Union veterans were still alive and the most important pillars of the community. Thomaston was at its height back then, and the fanfare of the celebration matched the commerce. The New York Times had called Thomaston the ideal place for families and businessmen alike (just two hours from the city and three hours from Boston), so the Miss Columbia celebration served as both an honoring of war heroes and a self-congratulatory pat on the back. Businesses closed their doors at noon and everyone marched together and Miss Columbia stood proud as the pure symbol of victory, white against the murky water, driving her community forward in the “best parade event” the town had ever seen.

But then the last Union soldier died, and the Great Depression rolled through the area with all the force of a crumbling building, and everything was consolidated. The armistice homecoming was kicked out in favor of a “Miss Columbia Celebration” during the annual Memorial Day Parade, and the boat ceremony was rebranded to suggest pride for Naval officers serving in World War I. Organizers added a convertible ride through town for their queen, along with a firing squad and a trumpet.

Of course, if you asked a local today what Miss Columbia stands for, they’d probably say it’s an excuse to drink Bud Light in public.

◊

The year my mother was named Miss Columbia, she took her then boyfriend, Scott Lambert, to prom. He was a skinny white guy, with one of those wiry haircuts parted straight down the middle. In pictures he’s wearing a white tux and too much acne, cradling my mother in an awkward, sexually-charged embrace that saves almost enough room for Jesus. From the pictures, it’s clear they didn’t belong together; she didn’t belong with any of the people she took pictures with that night. She was six feet tall and played JV basketball—which meant she was still womanly enough to be desired, not muscular enough for the big leagues. All of her friends had home-done hairdos and messy eyeshadow; dorky, shy boyfriends with bad teeth.

At family parties she’ll pull out the pictures and say something like, “look how pretty I was,” then rattle off the story about dumping Scott Lambert after a quickie in the car when he sneezed, and a booger fell in her mouth.

“I said, ‘I’m better than this,” she’ll say. “I deserved better than him, so I ended it.”

Dumping Scott Lambert, to this day, remains one of her biggest achievements.

I, on the other hand, wore Dr. Martens to senior prom and brought a kid from church. There was enough room for Jesus to stretch out his legs.

◊

Holly’s is Thomaston’s townie bar. They’ve got green felt carpets, wood paneling, a sink with rust stains in the bathroom. On Fridays and Saturdays Holly’s does karaoke, where white guys do Darius Rucker covers or “God Bless America” on an infinite loop. They sell Cheetos by the bag and fine cheese platters for $3.99, and the owner, Holly, is always sipping Absolut behind the counter, so you have to tell her how to pour a Guinness while she slurs along in agreement.

Holly’s is always open. On Christmas and Easter they open at four, but most days they start serving at noon, perfect for the old men who loiter at the sticky bar and complain about their wives and kids. Holly’s does Veteran’s specials on national holidays: red, white, and blue Jell-O shots for a dollar, which works, because every surface of the place is draped in American flags and “Don’t Tread on Me” paraphernalia.

Everything’s cheap there—the clientele, the drinks, the ladies’ night specials—so I’ve recently become a regular, but my mother, who’s worked as a fine dining waitress for the past thirty years, never dared.

“That’s where the homeless go,” she said once. “They’ve got bedbugs.”

Once I got her to go with me, drove the quarter mile downtown in her red Audi to the bad side of town near Reynold’s Bridge where the people without cars loiter.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “What if somebody sees me?”

“It’s fine, I’m here all the time.”

She gave me a look.

The bartender that night was Courtney, a girl a few years younger than me who was expelled from school for starting fights. She was pretty in that way aging actresses might be pretty, like her time had run out, except she was only eighteen.

“What can I getcha?” she said. She sounded like cigarettes.

My mother asked for a sauvignon blanc.

“What? We don’t have that.”

I asked for a Beefeater soda.

“What kind of soda, hun?”

I asked for club, but she said they didn’t have that and gave me Sierra Mist.

“I hate it here.”

“No you don’t—it’s fun. And cheap,” I said. The gin and lemon-lime combo wasn’t working, but at $3.75, I couldn’t do much better.

“Anyway, what’s that bartender doing here?”

I laughed. “Courtney?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t she a Miss Columbia?”

Maybe it was unclear to my mother, but we all belonged there. There were old men she recognized from high school sitting at plastic tables, mouths caved in where their teeth should be. The place was owned by Holly Chandler, longtime Thomaston raggie. Her family had worked in the lipstick tube manufacturing plant for years till, like everything else in town, it closed up and moved South.

There’s always a desire to escape in Thomaston, with the label “raggie” lurking overhead with the seagulls. Most people get their biggest escape at Holly’s, since they can get piss drunk on cheap Yaeger shots without worrying about getting home. My mother tried to get out once, got her degree in fine arts alongside kids who wore parachute pants and asymmetrical mullets. But she failed art history—twice. Now she paints people’s dogs on canvases in our living room, stacks them against the wall and takes pictures for everyone else to see. It’s her side hustle—she’s lucky if she gets forty bucks apiece.

I thought I was better than Thomaston at one point too, so I went away to a private liberal arts school where the girls shaved their heads and wrote communist propaganda. When I came home the second weekend into the semester, crying over the lesbians who’d called me apolitical, over the gluten-free food and the Lunar Howling Society, I decided I was a raggie too. Not even a nose ring could disguise my hometown roots.

My mother was mad at me after I brought her to Holly’s and I was mad she didn’t like it, which was immediately obvious as we drove home in tense silence, with not even the radio to mediate. I wanted her to see Thomaston for how it was and what it wasn’t and what it never would be. There weren’t any cul-de-sacs or gated communities, and most people lived in the sort of ranch-style houses she liked to point out as a place she was glad she didn’t live. Miss Columbia was the cover that people in town used to pretend they lived somewhere special, even though nobody really knew its roots. Maybe going to Holly’s was mean-spirited or selfish, but in the same way it’s mean to tell your friend she looks fat in that dress. At least it was honest.

◊

Miss Columbia, my year, went as expected—it wasn’t me. The honor went to some girl who was head of the student council and played field hockey, and all the men in town were there to watch and lip-synch to her quiet rendition of the Gettysburg Address. Some old veterans played a march on out-of-tune trumpets. I went for the free beer someone else’s dad might offer me. But my mother, who was in the market for some new cabinets, went to the Lowe’s Memorial Day Sale instead, dreaming of the kitchen she’d always wanted.

◊◊

Kathryn Fitzpatrick HeadshotKathryn Fitzpatrick’s essays have been featured in Out Magazine, Gravel, Crack the Spine, and elsewhere, and were called “brutally honest and not school appropriate” by her high school principal.

 

 

 

 

 

 Image credit: jbundgaa from Pixabay

DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS, a Visual Narrative about Depression by William J. Doan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

DEAR FAMILY AND FRIENDS
A Visual Narrative About Depression
by William J. Doan

Depression is a wiley adversary. Those fortunate not to know what it’s like to exist in this dark realm can’t grasp its life-sucking grip. Those afflicted are told, “ You look fine,” or “You have nothing to be depressed about. Your life is good.” But to read Bill Doan’s visual narrative Dear Family and Friends, an intimate, heartfelt account of coping strategies, is to viscerally feel what it’s like to live under the leaden sky of anxiety and depression. In a series of mostly black-and-white self portraits done in ink, Doan’s visage morphs wildly in expression and mode as he writes a letter, in elegant script, explaining how one can look outwardly fine while inwardly struggling on a minute-by-minute basis with crippling depression. Doan’s letter lifts the veil on a shrouded topic that is often spoken about yet still widely misunderstood. “Dear Family and Friends” is part of the rapidly emerging genre known as Graphic and Narrative Medicine, which combines words and images to relate personal experience with illness. Doan is a professor of theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture and artist-in-residence for the College of Nursing at The Pennsylvania State University. He will serve as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020. I’m am so pleased to present Bill Doan’s work in my maiden voyage as Graphic Narrative Editor for Cleaver Magazine.
—Emily Steinberg, Editor
    Philadelphia, September 2019

Download PDF Version of Dear family and friends

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William J. Doan, Ph.D. is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a Fellow in the College of Fellows of The American Theatre. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, Doan has co-authored three books and several plays. He has created solo performance projects at a variety of venues across the U.S., and abroad. His current work includes a new performance piece, Frozen In The Toilet Paper Aisle of Life, part of a larger project titled The Anxiety Project. Work from this project includes multiple short graphic narratives published in the Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine. He is a Professor of Theatre in the College of Arts and Architecture and Artist-in-Residence for the College of Nursing at The Pennsylvania State University. Doan will serve as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020.

Text for Dear Family and Friends

Panel One: Dear Friends and Family. Text bubbles around the figure read from left to right: 1. It was as if I had brain worms constantly moving around in my head. Changing my mood and making me feel afraid of something all the time. 2. Fear responses. 3. Amygdala 4. Neural Circuitry. 5. Hippocampus 6. Prefrontal Cortex 7. I’m screwed 8. Where’s the off switch?

Panel Two: Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year. And the numbers for children are staggering. The personal, social, economic, and ethical cost of anxiety and depression is almost impossible to imagine but is certainly real. Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year and I was one of them. Text bubbles in image: 1. 17 million adults had a major depressive episode last year. 2. No shame if you were one of them.

Panel Three: Seventeen million adults had a major depressive episode last year and I was one of them. Text bubble in image: It’s one thing to think the unthinkable. It’s something very different to say it.

Panel Four: If you’re going to write about a life lived with anxiety and depression, you have to take a hard look at the past. But how do you do that without judging yourself, others, or all the social circumstances not of your own making? There’s nothing to be gained from blame. But there’s no moving forward without an honest look at the varied and complicated events that brought me to this confession.

Panel Five: There’s nothing to be gained from blame. But for me, there was no moving forward without an honest look at the varied and complicated events that brought me to this confession.

Panel Six: Sharing what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression is like undressing in front of strangers. It’s awkward, and I’m sure I’ll get tangled up, stumble, and fall into something.

Panel Seven: But how to confess, how to tell this story? I tried doing it in my head like I did as a boy in church, bless me father for I have sinned… But the fact is, hiding it was actually one of the ways I survived.

Panel Eight: Maybe I should try a letter. I sat for days in front of a blank page. I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote a letter. Dear Family and Friends.

Panel Nine: When anxious and depressed, which was most of the time, I would laugh a lot. My laughter was fake as often as it was honest. I knew that laughing and smiling were key to hiding the truth.

Panel Ten: Don’t’ misunderstand, it’s not that I didn’t feel happy, or experience joy. It’s that I figured out how to use a smile of a laugh to mask feeling anxious or depressed.

Panel Eleven: The fact is I can be surrounded by a thousand people and feel completely alone. Text inside the image from top to bottom: Ingredients of Anxiety and Depression, Luck, Evolution, Brain Stuff, Shit Happens, Brain Stuff, Gender, Trauma, Brain Stuff, Class, Childhood, DNA.

Panel Twelve: I always felt like the whole world was going one way while I went another. I laughed it off as often as I could.

Panel Thirteen: Over time I developed an advance ability to pretend everything was OK. This made it possible to show up for social events, work, whatever was required. I mastered “fake it til you make it.” Often, once I was present, I could find a way to enjoy myself for a time. But the cycle of dreading having to be somewhere, followed by regret, anger, or feeling guilty was exhausting. I just knew I had to keep moving.

Panel Fourteen: Pretending easily became lying, which became telling people what I thought they wanted to hear. I could pretend my way through almost any situation by lying to myself, convincing myself that I was the problem.

Panel Fifteen: Just push it away and keep moving. Text inside the image: series of words about being above and below the threshold of awareness, fighting feelings, blocking feelings.

Panel Sixteen: Inside I was slowly dying.

Panel Seventeen: As I got older, I grew angrier. And as I grew angrier I grew desperate to keep what I was feeling inside. Sometimes I thought my brain was on fire and I would never be able to hold back my rage. It became increasingly difficult to keep all this hidden.

Panel Eighteen: I’ve barely reached the heart of the matter in this brief letter. But it’s a start. What I know for certain is that it’s no longer possible for me to pretend I don’t live with anxiety and depression and I hope this helps you understand why I need to talk openly about it. My mental health, my well-being requires me to tell the truth. Especially to my family and friends.

Love, Bill

LAST SUMMER AT SUMMERLAND by Dana Fang

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

dark image of lilac flowers

LAST SUMMER AT SUMMERLAND
by Dana Fang

I

When she trimmed the holly,
when she trellised each lilac,
her knuckles were starchy blue,
her skin luminescent as if
she had been torched with apricot
light. At last, for a handful
of hours each week,
she burnt, and my heart outbid
all else for her attention. To be
her shelf and shovel, her shear
and sled for just a little while; to ache
an ache that justified the rest
of her calculations—
is how her garden grew.

II

The garden is built like the guts of a palace               evergreen and glistening

the way any beautiful thing                                        glistens ripe with being

beautiful                                                                      The garden is

the inner sanctum of a dream     pink like peach flesh

lush with sewer cap lilies and

a little lake to litter with wishes                                 There is nothing

of the World in this world                                          On the other side

of the limestone wall is a pallet door

maybe the door to someone’s single courtyard, where a basket of shelled

peanuts sits in a pile of loose skin and someone

who has departed has

finally returned with sweets and toys

Now anyone can visit

After a fee       any sweaty sack          can sit and

maybe sheer proximity will make my dream reappear

as the skittish animal that animated

the dark           that no matter how little money I make

I will be happy

III

The most famous gardens in China are

south near the sea. I wonder

whose hands mixed the lime, held the

tree before swinging the axe, whose hands

touched the tiny parcels of stone. I think

it would have been people like my family,

we want more than we can afford, we want

to participate because we want

to know we are people who can still

see the arch of light at sunset despite

the scattered pink haze, a bit

of the sky we bite, we breathe.

IV

 

I found the pamphlet online, through the
library. The photos inside the pamphlet
blur the bodies of gardeners
in the gardens, except for the photos
at the end, of the garden being assembled
for the Museum and even then
no names. No wonder why resurrections
go on forever in America. I wonder
if the language of gardens is the same
language I use to ask for money, to be
a little drunk in the cemetery,
the familiar language of mercy, of
shame.

My cousin purchased an audio tour
of The Humble Administrator’s Garden
when we were there. While we strolled
between bodies, along the pavilion
and into the shade, I noticed
that she did not sweat. Not
a single dark stain on her denim dress.
She stopped to fiddl
with her device, is yours broken too?
I don’t have any sound on mine and while
my little black box, strung around
my neck, sang to me, I knew the word
plum and none of the rest, so
I said yes.

V

There are too many ways that say

this is the right way                There is

always the half hour of the day

where I am overcome by the certainty           of time passing

and all the leaving bundled with it                 I think this summer is

the last summer

we will be back which means

I must remember                                             would give everything

to ensure that I remember

Why wait

for change when you could become the changing

…………thing

◊◊

Dana Fang, author photoDana Fang is a queer, nonbinary, Asian-American poet living in the Midwest. They are a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Their work has been published in phoebe, Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, and is forthcoming in Sonora Review.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Antonina Bukowska on Unsplash

MAKING HUMANS by Misty Urban

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Little girl working with hammer

MAKING HUMANS
by Misty Urban

The girl wants to go to the kids’ museum. Since her brother is sick and dad has command central on the couch, dispensing Tylenol and blankets and puke bucket and juice, that leaves me to drive her. I want to shut myself in my office and work on my novel, far from puke and clacking toys, but then she’ll say of her childhood that her mom did nothing but sit in front of her computer all the time. Aren’t her needs supposed to be bigger than mine? I take my journal and magazines along with snacks. I’ll sit on the bench and read. I’ll never be Mom of the Year, but look, my mom never played with me. She considered it her job to feed and clothe me, make me go to school, drive me to appointments, and I turned out just fine.

But the girl doesn’t want to play with the exhibits, she wants to go to the tool shop. This requires a supervising adult and a pair of plastic safety glasses that press my regular glasses into my head in a painful manner, and entails me standing around reminding her to tighten the vise and keep both hands on the saw while a background soundtrack of hammering, the instructions of other parents, and an endless loop of Disney tunes also presses into my head. There’s nothing, in this particular moment, I’d like less.

I ask her what she’s creating.

“A magical make-believe machine that can do anything you want it to,” she says.

Oh good, I can use one of those. How long will this take? There’s no place to sit, and I’m bored. I’ve finished my project, an airplane for the boy, so I ask if she’s nearly done.

“Do you know how long it takes to make a human?” she says.

In fact I do: thirty-eight weeks. Forty weeks counting from last menstrual period, which I don’t know why anyone does since the egg isn’t ripe until two weeks later and you have that narrow window to do something that can never be undone, not ever. Or thirty-seven weeks in her case, same for the boy, both my little over-achievers, pushing their way out early in great gouts of blood.

She ignores me. She’s the authority, seven years old, plastic safety glasses, pink nylon pants I bought for pajamas, the purple spangly shirt that says “Play Like a Girl.” Hair tangled in a cowlick though I brushed it three times. Dirty beat-up sneakers missing half a Velcro strap. She got dressed when I asked so I decided not to fight about what she chose. Her belly sticks out like a full moon and I’m the only one who cares about this; she’s gluing string, silk flowers, plastic hats to her piece of wood and sometimes to her finger. Other parents help their kids, sawing, measuring, offering items to nail and tape. I watch and criticize, the whiny chaperone. I don’t like it, but I don’t know how to make it stop. Stick it to the surface before it sets. That’s too much glue. Aren’t you done yet? I have to pee. You know we have a glue gun at home.

“Yeah, but we don’t have all this stuff.” She slugs another round into the glue gun, picks yards of gooey string off her hands.

Such patience she has. Creating humans. I know how I must sound to the other parents, the ones directing and guiding and gluing for their kids. This creation is her own and she wants it that way. Am I helping her become a scientist, physicist, mathematician, engineer? Am I failing to teach her female grooming habits, the lack of which will cause her no end of agony when she’s thirteen?

She drops her wood pieces and the tape breaks. She swoops in with glue. The flower eyes were my limit; now toothpick eyelashes? We can do this at home, I tell her in the modulated, low-pitched voice of the chastising parent, especially the parent being an a-hole. I know not to say it, yet I hear myself saying it: I didn’t pay to come here to do stuff we can do at home.

What is the matter with me? A dad glances our way, keys and cell phone clipped to belt, gluing the pieces he sawed for his daughter while she wanders around rifling through buckets, bored. Hashtag parenting fail. He hijacked his kid’s project, knowing how to do it better, and I’m killing hers. Both of us trying to keep things between the rails, wishing we had the blueprint for how this turns out.

She’s so focused, those eyes brown as walnuts—the same surprising shine, the intense concentration I remember in her as a baby, or at least remember from the pictures of her as a baby. The times I don’t have photos of are hazier in my mind. Still so chubby, and I worry about that, too. My head hurts and my feet hurt and all of a sudden it’s intolerable right now, standing here with the Disney songs and nothing to do but watch her start on glue stick number three.

“Fine,” she says when I set the limit at four eyes. “I’m done anyways.”

I get to pee, sit, open my journal, take a breath and let my head clear of the smell of glue. I lose sight of her, find her again, climbing the tree house, picking fruit, following a new friend into the toddler house, reading a board book to a baby doll. Then she’s in postal coat and bag, sorting mail, so serious, so intent. At the fire station she pulls on the chief’s hat and too-big jacket, hauls out the hose, puts out the fake fire. I’m watching, but she doesn’t glance over to see this; she’s off to the store to tie on an apron and ring up other kids’ groceries. Her hair’s sticking out every which way again and she makes perfect change every time.

On the bench her creation, thick with glue, stares at me with its strange flower-spiked eyes. She’ll put it on her dresser and forget about it. But she won’t forget my head in a book, nagging I didn’t come here for this. Or if I let her put toothpick eyelashes on her humans. Let her wear the pajama pants. Let her toss her imagination into the air like a weather balloon and stood beside her, watching to see where it lands.

She floats by the bench, leans silken hair to my cheek. I wrap my arms around her and rub her back and, for a moment, she lets me. She’s solid and she smells like cupcake hair spritz and that new, clear, talc-y scent of seven-year-old skin, unscarred. Then she’s off, and I can pocket one moment, one, before she’s eighteen and moves out and doesn’t have to put up with my crap any longer, when I held her, when I told her I liked the thing she made, when I was the mom she deserves. Thirty-seven weeks to create her, no idea what was coming. So much longer for her creating me.

◊◊

Misty Urban headshotMisty Urban is the author of two short story collections, A Lesson in Manners (Snake Nation Press, 2016) and The Necessaries (Paradisiac Publishing, 2018), and several works of medieval scholarship, including the co-edited essay collection Melusine’s Footprint (Brill, 2017). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Literary Mama, 3Elements Review, Draft: A Journal of Process, and My Caesarean (The Experiment, 2019). She lives in real life in Muscatine, Iowa, and online at mistyurban.net or femmeliterate.net, a site for literary feminism and women in/and/of books.

 

Image credit: PxHere

SILO by Meggie Royer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

17th c tulip painting

SILO
by Meggie Royer

In one town, an apricot held in the mouth
of a rabbit like a swollen tongue.
In another, a pear clasped between the fins
of a fish. The pit of a cherry nestled
in the eye socket of a crow.
Once, my grandfather’s aneurysm
bloomed in his body like a tulip.
There are certain things that shouldn’t be,
and yet they are.
Out of place, the way the jawbone migrated
into the ear region over time.
To think,
we used to be able to taste pain
long before we could hear it.

◊◊

Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who is currently working in the domestic violence field in Minnesota. Her poems have previously appeared in The Harpoon Review , Melancholy Hyperbole , The Minnesota Review, and more. She runs a literary journal, Persephone’s Daughters, dedicated to empowering survivors of domestic and sexual violence and child abuse.

 

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

DEAR CITY  by Poul Lynggaard Damgaard

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Houses in Aarhus, Denmark

DEAR CITY
by Poul Lynggaard Damgaard

I want to tell about the gap between houses and the way the windows are beyond everything. Do you know anything about that? Do you know the way neighbourhoods have been pulled on a string through your consciousness, and the groups of people emerge on the fringe of an area? I am not sure you do. Sometimes the zip of your coat is a downhill highway and you turn your back, you throw your coat off, jump into the water and swim away. The shining of your long wet hair is the light of the night´s illuminated space. On the corner of the main road where the neglected house without windows used to be, a booth has been placed, where the gaps and the building’s memories are being sold to visitors. Was it really your unknown brother, or was it just you, I looked into the eyes right there?

Best regards
a house

◊◊

Poul Lynggaard Damgaard author photoPoul Lynggaard Damgaard, born on 24th December, 1977, is a Danish poet living in Aarhus, Denmark. Since 2012 he has been connected to the Aarhus Centre for Literature and the Hald Hovedgaard, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators. His work appears in many Scandinavian anthologies and Danish poetry collections. He has participated in several International Poetry Festivals in Europe, and his poetry has been translated to many different languages.

 

 

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KINDNESS WOMAN by Michelle Ross and Kim Magowan

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woman smiling broadly

KINDNESS WOMAN
by Michelle Ross and Kim Magowan

Kindness Woman has been working here barely seven months and already we hate her. This hate is of a different flavor than the antagonism we feel for Faye, who takes so many damn smoke breaks over the course of a day that even her emails reek of cigarettes—emails that often include full sentences in all-caps, sentences that bend and break with her scorn like the cigarette stubs she twists and grinds into a tin coffee can behind the building.

Kindness Woman’s brand of obnoxiousness sits on the opposite end of the spectrum as Faye’s. Her emails contain rainbows—each sentence a different color and a different font. Her emails invite us to help ourselves to the cake or brownies or homemade cranberry-walnut-unicorn bread that she has baked for our enjoyment on this beautiful day. Her emails always end with the word, “Enjoy!” It’s a command. As if that isn’t enough, some days she will walk around the building hawking a platter of brownies or a jar of lollipops. She stops at every desk. She says, “A brownie to make your morning sweet?” or “A lollipop to brighten your afternoon?” The price: only your dignity and having to endure her self-satisfied grin.

Kindness Woman won’t just anonymously leave her baked goods in the kitchen, like everyone else around here who wants to kill us slowly with sugar. Kindness Woman wants credit for her kindnesses. She wants applause.

“The thing about her is she never matured from high school,” says Terry, who works in HR and maintains that HR will turn the sweetest, most extroverted person into a misanthrope, so it’s not her fault she hates the world. “She’s still on the hunt for Senior Superlatives. Cheeriest Demeanor! Most Spirited!”

“Most Likely to Fill Up Your Email With Exclamation Points!” I say. Terry and I exchange a meaningful glance. Exclamation points are to us the splinters of punctuation marks. We share a deep disdain for those rows and rows of exclamation points in Kindness Woman’s emails, stiff and spiky like the barbed hooks of a stickabur. We share a disdain, frankly, for enthusiasm. Sometimes the only words Terry and I will exchange over the course of the day are “Shoot me now.” And yet—and I am being completely sincere here—we communicate so much with those three words, depending on where emphasis is laid. “Shoot me now” means seriously, it’s my turn to moan. “Shoot me now” conveys urgency, this level of bullshit is surpassingly dire.

Now Terry says these words, and she emphasizes all three. Her use of emphasis is so extreme, it brings to mind Kindness Woman’s exclamation points, but I don’t point this out to Terry. Kindness Woman is the reason for this bloated, bloodshot “Shoot me now.” Because Kindness Woman filed a complaint to HR against Faye for being mean to her.

“There’s a form for meanness complaints?” I say.

Terry squints at me. Then she says, “And who do you think Pamela tasked with the joyous assignment of investigating this complaint?”

“What’s an investigation entail exactly?” I say. “Do you tap their phones?”

Because we’re talking in the break room, we both eye the door constantly.

“Why doesn’t anyone file a complaint against Chad?” is what Terry says.

“Hard to prove a man is consciously looking at your breasts every time he talks to you?” I say. “Could be like being cross-eyed? He could say he can’t control his eyes?”

Terry sighs. She says, “For starters, I have to talk to these women. I have to sit down at a table and have conversations with the two most intolerable women in this lunatic asylum of an office. I have to get their sides of the story. I have to take the complaint seriously.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of envious. I want to be a fly on the wall. Maybe you could record your interviews? Just surreptitiously turn your phone face down? I’d love to hear Faye explain why she’s mean to Kindness Woman. What do you predict? ‘Because she’s fucking annoying?’”

Terry does not crack a smile. She folds her arms over her chest and looks at me bleakly. “Do you know why I got into HR?” she says. “I thought I could do some good in the world. I thought I could have some kind of influence on, say, diversity of hires. On practices of inclusivity. Bringing in good people and, okay, slapping the bad people, because dudes like Chad deserve to have their lives made uncomfortable. But no one utters a peep about Chad! Instead I get complaints along the lines of, ‘Faye said, Get those blondies out of my face, I do not give a shit if they have butterscotch chips.’” Terry bites her lip, then passes her hand across my forehead. “Obliviate. You didn’t hear me say that.”

Terry is always doing this, letting confidential things slip and then wiping my memory clean. I let my tongue hang out and glaze my eyes in response, performing successful memory eradication, but there is no cheering Terry up today.

“I think I’ve finally hit bottom,” she says. “I think this is the bottom of the goddamn well. The ninth circle of hell, here I am, getting chewed on by fucking Satan.”

“Here’s what I don’t get,” I say. “Isn’t this against Kindness Woman’s whole ethos? Isn’t lodging an official complaint pretty much the antithesis of kind?”

Terry looks at me pityingly. She says, “Isn’t our company motto, ‘All for one, and one for all’? Yet you remember how Pamela said to Julie when she found Julie using Isaac’s office when Isaac was on vacation, “You’re not on an office-level paygrade.” And then Julie came to me about it, me in my little cubicle five feet outside of Pamela’s office! All I could do was laugh until my face hurt. I said to her, ‘Julie, when the president of the company is also the director of HR, and your complaint is about said president, what do you expect me, who is also not office-level paygrade, to do about it?’”

Pamela enters the breakroom then, so I quickly switch the subject. I say, “Yeah, I started buying the generic sparkling waters. They taste the same but they’re nearly half the price.”

“Which flavor?” Terry says.

We try to look like we’re not monitoring Pamela out of the corners of our eyes as she slices a chunk of Kindness Woman’s latest will-you-please-be-my-friend bribe: something crumbly and weirdly white, like it might just be made entirely of sugar. That or cocaine.

“Lemon,” I say, “though the coconut is pretty good, too.”

Normally, I take pride in my ability to quickly come up with inane shit to talk about in Pamela’s presence, but right now, for some reason, I feel this sickening sadness. A lost-every-tooth-in-your-mouth kind of sadness. And that’s when I remember that I had this weird dream last night that I was excruciatingly depressed. Weird because normally I dream out-of-this-world shit, but a dream about being depressed is dreadfully of-this-world. In the dream, I was walking very slowly through a putty-colored landscape. I was on my way to buy Cascade liquid-powder combination dishwashing capsules; my shoulders were slumped. When I first woke it wasn’t immediately clear to me that I had been dreaming, or was now conscious, or what, if anything, distinguished the two states. I actually said out loud, “Wait, what?” and rolled over to my left. But of course there was no Karl lying next to me.

“Anything wrong, Grace?” Pamela says. She’s watching me narrowly with her bulbous eyes.

“I was just remembering this incredibly boring dream I had,” I said.

“Hmm. People say they have interesting dreams, and when they describe them, they’re incredibly boring. I wonder if that would make a description of an incredibly boring dream interesting? Or would it just be that much more boring?”

Pamela’s affect is so flat and deadpan that it’s impossible to distinguish between her philosophical observations and her jokes. Terry takes a gamble and laughs, and Pamela smiles graciously, so we know Terry guessed right.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to your dreams and sparkling water,” Pamela says, and departs holding aloft her powdery square of Kindness pastry.

Terry raises her eyebrows. “Now I know how to get Pamela to make a fucking fast exit. That was even speedier than when Sam starts telling stories about the latest accomplishments of her twins!” She looks at me more closely. “Hey, what’s up with you? You look like someone hit you with a hammer.”

There are a lot of things I could say at this point, but what I latch onto is what I woke up thinking, what made me so sad my reflection in the bathroom mirror shimmered and blurred. “I miss Karl.”

Terry looks at me, just looks at me, then nods. I’m pretty sure I know what Terry’s thinking but not saying—that I was the one who pushed for the separation, that I said Karl lacked the introspection to really love someone.

We hadn’t yet separated when Kindness Woman first showed up, and I told Karl about that woman’s damn emails and her peddling her treats around the office, and he said, “You sound like that Faye woman. It’s like you’re allergic to kindness. It’s like you want to be miserable.” I tried to explain to Karl that that’s the thing: it’s not kindness if you’re constantly begging for credit for your actions and if you’re pissed off when people don’t give you the thanks you believe you’ve earned. I said, “Maybe she believes she’s being kind, but that’s not kindness. It’s phoniness.” I’d talked before that point about us separating. I’d already said many times that I didn’t believe he really loved me. I’d said to him that I believed he believed he loved me, but that I didn’t feel genuinely loved because I was constantly having to ask him to be thoughtful towards me, and that on the rare occasions he was thoughtful, he made a big fuss about wanting me to praise him. When I called the Kindness Woman phony and manipulative, that was the turning point for Karl. That’s when he said, “You know what? I think you’re right. We should separate. Because you’re impossible to please.”

That’s when I thought, shit, he really doesn’t love me.

“Shoot me now,” I say.

Terry, who passed me Kleenex six months ago and said, “But Grace, isn’t the point that you didn’t really love him either?” nods again, turns her fingers into a gun, and takes aim. I’m standing there waiting for that too-slow, invisible bullet to pierce my heart when Kindness Woman enters the kitchen. She looks at me. She looks at Terry. Then she turns around and leaves, as though she couldn’t remember what it was she’d wanted.

◊◊

author photo michelle ross and kim magowanKim 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 is forthcoming from 7.13 Books this July. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, Smokelong Quarterly, 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. More at www.kimmagowan.com.

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (2017), which won the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Pidgeonholes, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other venues. Her story “One or Two?” was selected for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2019. She is Fiction Editor of Atticus Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. More at www.michellenross.com.

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PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNEXPECTED, WITH FRIENDS by Peter Leight

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green door, doorbell

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNEXPECTED, WITH FRIENDS
by Peter Leight

When you don’t know what to expect you’re almost always expecting something, even if you’re mistaken, as when you expect somebody to come and somebody else shows up—it’s not mutually expected. Or you expect to hear from your friends and they don’t even text. It’s true, your friends have a lot of things that are happening in their lives that you’re not even aware of, it’s kind of like takeout you never ordered. You’re not sending it back, you’re not angry, after all they’re your friends, even when they’re not telling you anything, even when they’re unfriendly, as if they’re eating the takeout you never ordered. Sometimes it’s easier to think about what you don’t expect, I mean you’re not thinking about whether they’re actually your friends, even the ones you like, even the ones who are just like you—you’re not giving up on your friends. You don’t want to disappoint your friends. It is difficult to anticipate what’s unexpected—there are always times when you expect something to happen even though you’d rather expect something else, as when your friends are supposed to come and you think they’re not going to show up—you don’t need to believe your friends. You often think it’s better not to expect anything at all, even though they’re your friends, because you almost never see them anymore unless they need something from you and they’re stopping by to pick it up, they’re in a hurry to get somewhere, they never stay—honestly you never expected them to.

◊◊

Peter Leight headshotPeter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in the Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, and other magazines.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Antonina Bukowska on Unsplash

AQUIFER by Thomas Cook

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blue water

AQUIFER
by Thomas Cook

I could be more perceptive. Beneath me, 750 ft., my wife is thinking. I fool no one. My sweater is nice, and it keeps me warm, but at the end of the day it folds into a flowered bag and I am naked with the thoughts lonely in my mind.

My arm is asleep. All morning I shake it and wait for the blood to come. I confuse Denver with New Orleans, and then I consider the real differences. How French are any of us, anyway?


Thomas Cook is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Light Through a Pane of Glass (Big Table, 2020). Since 2009, he has been an editor and publisher of Tammy and Tammy Chapbooks. A recent series of poems appeared online in the Quarterly West special feature Salvage/Selvage.

 

 

 

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HOW IT IS by Alison Hicks

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

white car, aerial view

HOW IT IS
by Alison Hicks

The white car that lives in the white of the eye
comes out of the sun
behind the line of parked cars,
the potted plant on the corner.

Always there, travels submarine.
Hides in white blood cells,
cruises arteries and veins,
slides through the body politic.

All the times it hasn’t shown
you’ve sensed its filmy existence,
so never completely a surprise
when it surfaces in peripheral vision.

The white car could be an actual car.
It could be an election,
getting lost in the woods for five days and nights,
a birth or death.

Too late to hit the gas, to swerve,
always your fault.
Tuck your head as it pulls you down,
slide through until it stops.

◊◊

Alison Hicks author photoAlison Hicks is the author of poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook, Falling Dreams, a novella Love: A Story of Images, and co-editor of an anthology, Prompted. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. Her awards include the Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two PA Council of the Arts Fellowships. She is the founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

 

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BISCUIT POEM by Sophia Friis

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a hand holding a biscuit

BISCUIT POEM
by Sophia Friis

Bitch I.

An animal, let’s say
my dog, has issues
with the end of the world.

She’s lined the back porch
in plastic bottles
to collect moon water

to pour in a juice glass
to drink with breakfast
to douse her children with you are

holy.
In our side garden,
the bees

lap it up like Mountain Dew.
Inside a church,
the pendulumic golden bowl

of donation passes while the soul sits
like an ephemeral burrito
in the abdomen or thorax. These

are her meditations.

Bitch II.

Here wet heat wrinkles
the ridges of stretch marks,
a bellied tomato

vines rot at the speed
of a sleeve of ash,
humidity

stills in a woman’s
vertebra, they’re all sleeping
with their chiropractors.

This is the after.
Man,
left her high and dry as a leather saddle.

Her poems
used to be of
overwhelmingly this

the yellow green of tannery water,
marrow, oily eyes.
Bury a skull, any skull

and cavernous tomatoes
will walk from the fields,
red valves onto pavement.

Bitch III.

Everyone knows how
a biscuit should sit
in the hand. Sage gravied,

say grace-full spring onions
the second largest beginnings.
Here,

the order goes
seed, bulb, biscuit
all split open the same way,

steaming, such delicately constructed
biology. We used
your mother’s recipe.

Over the phone, she and I
spoke of ham hock,
jaws, a creaminess

that could be the inner thigh
of almost spent milk,
the expiration dates.

◊◊

Sophia Friis author photoSophia Friis is from South Carolina and a current undergrad at Furman University for a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work appears in the Barely South Review and the Yellow Chair Review. She keeps bees.

 

 

 

 

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BESIDES YOURSELF by Jean-Mark Sens

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BW image of two figures with shadows

BESIDES YOURSELF
by Jean-Mark Sens

As of lately you said you have been strangely strange—a bit besides yourself, which you noticed when you take a walk someone constantly in your shadow, a palpable presence almost shoulder to shoulder-not disturbing, even companionable.
On the fence along the park, passion flowers trellised through a canvas of lozenges– appearing, reappearing, the old German church steeple, something of a fez with a cross on top in the course of your steps through the interstices.
Blood remembers its mechanism of cells, globules, given to you and borrowed and what you eat becomes a minute replica of its substances to rarest–in a few steps still a mark on the sidewalk—where blood splurged, crimson and oxidized as a long map between life and death out of an old man bleeding against the curb stone. A presence, you and not you, till as in a motion picture in a slow back reel you call up help, and the man before you with his pepper curly hair sits up.
You still walk feeling besides yourself, a sort of double entendre and yet you are not a puppet or a ventriloquist—tempo, time, rage time, 100% pure rag, you wonder—words on liner—tattooed water mark, a page inevitably creates margins even at the first word, a lean spine between silence and thoughts, Capital letter, the urge to start the larger size of the letter to launch word after word, afterword, foreword, beside themselves–do they respond to a pre-order, reptilian part of the brain, syntax and transgressions, you wonder “love” in a two way mirror.

◊◊

author photo jean-mark sensBorn in France, Jean-Mark Sens has lived in the American South for over twenty-five years. He is currently in Pre-Theology II, formation for Priesthood at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. His work has been published in the U.S. and Canada, and he has a collection, Appetite, with Red Hen Press. He is also working on culinary book Leafy Greens & Sundry Things.

 

 

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Flickr

TWO POEMS by Andrew Hamilton

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yellow umbrella hovering over a lake

TWO POEMS
by Andrew Hamilton

How to Serve a Yellow Knife Lunar Side Up

Green
stripes only.
No round, less square,
don’t forget orange grapes.
Stem-plant that table, soldier!
Christ, where’s a pinstripe umbrella
to kite a ripple in the glade of this sleep tide?
Go on then, dive a slice of those paradise knives,
but do not peel the spoon orbits off that licked brick!
I know you broke the yolk rope when I ordered
eggs unshaded on the Darkest Side of Hades.
Dummy. You niced ’em dry on inverse—
money is slicked outside amphibious.
Even the weather is up to you and
I’m looking for clock the sun
hit moonlights out of me!
Back when lightning
sold out the strike
and fire
cried.

◊

Wanted: The Ego

Hidden from searchlights
stabbed electric through barbed
fire walls at Fort Lauderdale’s
Asylum, rain and red stoplights
smear blood across wet streets
knocking on dead room door.
Telephone rings. Flashback
flood flashing locust buzz
through static television set
screeches dark radar warning
the weatherman the Poltergeist
sees Hurricane Andrew’s eyes
“I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”
Hissed the Sandman licking
light beneath the bedframe,
humming dead dial tones
from phones off receivers—
tornado sirens twisting
rusty red shriek sounds
scratched from the attic
off meat hooks scraping
chalk through eardrums
panged against the pane
of palpitations eating
love through the heart
of fear stalks faith
self-masticating
all religion.

◊◊

Andrew Hamilton author photoAndrew Hamilton graduated with his MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. He received awards for creative writing at the University of Tennessee. His work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Main Street Rag, San Antonio Review, Blue Fifth Review, The Rush, BlazeVOX, Glassworks, Crack the Spine, and Yes Poetry with new work forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Dream Pop, I-70 Review, Dead Mule Surfaces.cx, and Abstract Magazine TV. For more information, please feel free to visit his website: andrewhamiltonwrites.com

 

 

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SONNET FOR ALEXANDRIA by Benjamin Renne

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sunset colors

SONNET FOR ALEXANDRIA
by Benjamin Renne

1. I caught you staring at that great Midwestern sunset sewn together with photons from the last six months
2. in the hibernation of the moment, beneath blue water towers or stunted trees, the metaphors dried so you sealed them onto flat circlets of pine
………………—for preservation, you said
3. highways ran the length of your spine, the whole suburban vertebrae, your body down in Mokena, and the sky held onto the afternoon snow for so long it made us heretics again
4. where we picked up each others’ breaths and condensed them onto our chins
5. from my stiff beard to your perpendicular hands
6. the ritual persisted
7. uninterrupted by the new routines we made for ourselves or the contrasts against everything that came before
8. in the way your body reassembled itself like a Cubist, forming and reforming fragments in space beside mine
9. …………in the locked screen your reflection
10.………..in the locked screen a spring crown
11. ……………..in the locked screen color became slowly archived
12. ……………..in the locked screen ultra violet rays pulled at your hair
13. ……….and your breast glowed amethyst, shined brightly on a lineless
…………….page stained with lavender, your voice bubbling up
14. …………………….to jump clear and purposeful into the corrugated evening

◊◊

Benjamin Renne author photoBenjamin Renne lives and teaches in the Washington, D. C. area. He reads feverishly in his time off and likes the feeling when a poem or story curls up behind his brain for a few days and just sits there, refusing to budge. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University and his poetry has appeared in Ghost Proposal, SLAB, CatheXis Northwest Press, and more.

 

 

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How to Boil a Child by Michael Zimecki

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child facing into the sunset

How to Boil a Child
by Michael Zimecki

My grandson is five months old, and smiles as he orients to the burble of voices above him, the sounds we adults emit when we are making baby-talk. We coo when we are cuzzling infants and raise our voices when addressing foreigners, as if the sound and tone of our speech will cue them to what we mean. Someone should give us a talking-to, or, perhaps, a spanking.

The soft vocalizations that make us sound like Old World monkeys are the least of our offenses to the young. Baby talk, researchers say, may even aid children’s development.

What we are doing to the planet is another matter.

A June heat wave cooked mollusks in the rock beds of Bodega Bay, littering the shoreline with shells opened like the mouths of infants waiting to be breastfed. Someday, climatologist James Hansen warns, the earth’s oceans may even boil away.

◊

Imagine the earth is an enormous pot. Solar radiation warms the pot like soup in a microwave, but the pot doesn’t boil over because some of the sun’s rays are reflected back into space in the form of invisible light, called infrared radiation. Since the Industrial Age, greenhouse gases entrapped in the upper atmosphere have significantly reduced the amount of infrared radiation reflected back into space.

It is like partially closing the pot with a lid. Infrared radiation still rises from the pot like steam, but the kettle is getting hotter and hotter.

◊

You can throw a frog into a pot of cold water and gradually increase the temperature of the pot to the boiling point, and, contrary to popular opinion, the frog will NOT allow itself to be boiled to death. The frog will leap from the pot. That’s because frogs, like other ectotherms, use environmental cues to regulate their own body temperatures, and will respond to increases in external temperature by getting out of the heat.

Thermoregulation by changing location—seeking sun or shade or Calaveras County-jumping from a boiling pot—is a necessary survival strategy for frogs. With human beings, particularly very tiny ones, not so much.

Humans, like other endotherms, such as dogs and birds and rats, regulate body temperature metabolically. We raise body temperature through muscle contraction and reduce it by increasing blood flow to the skin. We shiver, we sweat, we pant.

These mechanisms enable us to maintain a constant core body temperature.

Unfortunately, children may not thermoregulate as efficiently as adults. The human infant is more vulnerable to cold temperatures and more prone to hypothermia than adults. Due to this vulnerability, the infant’s body compensates with extra fatty tissue and reduced sweat production, but this compensatory response may make infants more susceptible to higher temperatures. Infants and younger children also may be physiologically more vulnerable to elevated temperatures because they produce more heat in relation to their body mass, and expend more effort to cool down, shunting blood to the skin and away from the body’s core muscles.

◊

Physiology may not matter much at all, of course. Neither frogs nor children will escape the boiling cauldron of our planet’s future. Unless you are one of the billionaires booking a flight on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, there is nowhere to leap.

In space, you cannot hear the screams of those you left behind.

◊

Like Musk, I am a citizen of the only country to refuse to sign the Osaka joint statement on climate change, the nation that withdrew from the Paris Accord in 2017. The main aim of the accord, ratified again in Osaka, was to keep the rise in the global average temperature below 2ºC (3.6ºF) above pre-industrial levels, primarily by reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Due, in very large part, to my country’s refusal to get with the program, that goal will not be met.

◊

As the sun sets on Bodega Bay, it almost looks like the ocean is aflame. Sunsets, the novelist Laura van den Berg once said, remind us that we are at the raw mercy of the earth.

As the sun sets on the planet’s future, our grandchildren’s mouths are like seashells, open in arrested cries.

◊◊

Michael Zimecki author photoMichael Zimecki is the author of a novel, Death Sentences. His prose has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The National Law Journal, and College English, among other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan.

 

 

 

 

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EXPECTING HIM  by Natalie Gerich Brabson

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Little girl drawing with markers

EXPECTING HIM
by Natalie Gerich Brabson

Maite and her daughter Pala arrived home only minutes ago, and already Pala’s settled in. She’s plopped in front of the TV, watching an inane show on the cartoon channel, all done telling Maite how she ate a cupcake at snack, that Lucy wasn’t playing nicely during recess. Maite hasn’t yet had a chance to change her shoes or chug a glass of water. Her feet ache like hell.

It’s quarter to six. Maite’s father should be here by now, should have beaten them home. Maite pulls back the curtains and scans the street once, twice, before acknowledging he has not arrived. She steals a moment to go into the bathroom, pull off her work shoes, and wash her swollen, sweaty feet. Hair strands and dust gather on the tiles; she hasn’t had time to clean for weeks. Sitting on the rim of the tub, she tips her chin up and shuts her eyes as she holds her feet steady under the cold stream. She pretends she is elsewhere, imagines she is smiling, then laughing open-mouthed.

Back in the front room, she peers through the window, and still her father’s car isn’t on the street. Pala has come to expect his visits. Every Friday afternoon, after Maite finishes her shift at the restaurant and picks up Pala from aftercare, he arrives at the house at 5:30 to take Pala to the neighborhood park. But it’s nearly six and he’s still not here. Maite’s throat tightens. She wants to huddle next to the window and press her face against it, watch until his car pulls up, just as she used to.

Word travels fast in their too-small town. When her father returned last fall, after many years gone, he soon learned of Pala and tracked down Maite’s number. He called and left a voicemail. He called again. She promised herself she wouldn’t pick up. She didn’t have to. When she did, he told her, “I’m different now. I wouldn’t have left you, Maite. Or I’d at least have visited. I wish I could do it all over again.”

She said nothing. Eventually he cut through her silence. “Can I meet my grandbaby?”

No, no, Maite thought. Pala. But should she deny any relationship? And if he was, as he averred, in town to stay, and if he really could be in Pala’s life…

Half a year now, every Friday. He has never been this late. Maite stands clutching the curtain—she wants to curl up, and, if his car doesn’t appear soon, hide her face in her knees. But she cannot, not in front of Pala.

Pala tugs at Maite’s pants, and Maite steps back. Pala wants to look out the window too; already she’s resting her chin on the windowsill. Maite places her hand on Pala’s head and guides her toward the kitchen, where she prepares Pala’s snack, apple slices alongside a dollop of peanut butter. Pala eats noisily, looking around the room, squirming in her chair to look at the door.

“Soon,” Maite says. “I’m sorry.”

Pala nods. She puts an apple slice flat on her plate and squishes it until a drop of juice emerges. She licks the drop off the plate, looking at Maite as she does so, but Maite doesn’t correct her behavior.

Maite notices the emptiness in her own stomach. Most days, she doesn’t eat lunch because the restaurant where she waitresses makes her pay for any food she takes, and it’s too expensive. Now, she fixes herself her own apple and peanut butter snack, the two munching in silence. Then Pala asks, “Can I watch my show?”

“I think it’s over by now.” The clock shows a quarter past six. Maite checks the voicemail, but he hasn’t left a message. She thinks, This is the time, this is when it will happen. He’s not coming for her.

“I want to make sure,” Pala says, glancing back at the front room.

“Your show ended.” Maite doesn’t want Pala checking for him again by the window, nor discovering that the cartoon channel plays endless reruns after new episodes air. “You can draw here.”

Pala scowls at Maite, but she finds her markers and paper and returns to the kitchen table without complaint. Soon she’s immersed in her artwork. Pala’s expression is strained, betraying her worry, but Maite doesn’t say anything more to her. Maite chomps into her second apple, this time without cutting it up first. She dips the skinless wound into the peanut butter, then takes another bite, gooey.

Finally, his knock. Maite opens the door, and he stoops right on the porch, stretching his arms wide. Pala leaps from the couch, and runs into his embrace.

“My sweet little bee girl,” he coos. He kisses her head only once, his eyes meeting Maite’s.

“I’m so sorry I’m late. Traffic, you know. Hi, honey.” He rises to hug Maite. She lets him, but she goes stiff, moving away from his body until he releases her.

“How was work?” he asks.

She shakes her head and turns away, toward Pala. “Well, your grandpa is here for you,” she says. “Do you want to show him your drawing?”

Pala crosses her arms behind her back, and softly says, “Later.”

“Let’s get going,” Maite’s father says to her.

“Hold on,” Maite tells him. “It’s 6:30. Maybe the park’s not a good idea anymore.”

“It’s safe. It’ll be light out all evening,” he says.

“Let me finish this apple,” Maite says. I’m almost done.”

“You don’t have to come with us. Rest. I’ve got her.”

“I’m coming.”

The park is down the street. Maite’s feet still hurt, and she drags behind her father and Pala. Her father glances back once to smile at Maite, saying to Pala, “Your mother should be like me. She shouldn’t work so hard.” Maite can’t get herself to smile back.

She speeds up, walks close enough to overhear their conversation when her father turns again toward Pala, who’s chattering away, no longer, apparently, distressed at her grandfather’s lateness. He’s good at talking to Pala. He’s better at responding to her tangential conversation style—new since she turned five—than Maite.

“What did you like about school today?”

“It was Ella’s birthday.”

“Did she bring any treats for the class?”

Pala nods. “The cots in kindergarten are bad.”

“What makes you say they’re bad?”

“We have to nap every day.”

“You’ll be missing that in a few months, when you grow up and go to first grade.”

It’s early June, and near the park, cottonwood seeds float everywhere. The wind gusts and releases more from the trees. There’s a gully alongside the path, filled with a few inches of water. Some seeds have been blown by the wind into the runoff. They form clumps on the surface as they are carried away in the slow-moving water.

A seed catches in Pala’s hair.

“Snow,” Maite calls to her, but Pala doesn’t hear.

They step through the park’s gate. There are already children on the playground, and Pala studies them before reaching for her grandfather’s hand to walk over to the hill. Maite follows them to the top and finds a tree trunk to lean against. From this tree, she’ll be able to see Pala all the way down to the edge of the park, and on the playground too, if Pala leads her grandfather there.

Pala pitches forward, briefly on all fours, then sprawls on the ground.

“Are you going to roll down the hill?” Maite’s father asks.

“You roll, please,” Pala responds.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how. You have to show me.”

She springs up. “You know! You know!”

“I don’t. Teach me how to roll down the hill.”

Pala lies at the top of the hill again, and tips into motion. Her limbs are loose, and her roll is clumsy and slow. She’s not yet halfway down when she stands and falls again, trying to roll faster. Her white leggings, new, are streaked green and brown.

Maite’s father trails Pala’s path, only a few steps behind her. Maite hopes he’s keeping an eye out for rocks that Pala could bump her head on. She wants to look out herself or take her father’s place behind Pala. If she saw any danger ahead, she’d pick Pala up, run. She could run fast, even on her work-swollen feet. She could run faster than anyone for Pala. She imagines running with Pala all the way down the hill, gaining momentum, and flying her out of the park, across the street and beyond, to the good side of town. They’d go to New York, somewhere big, a place where Pala could do anything, where she’d be unharmed.

If they left now, Pala might forget these early years, the last few months. They would have to leave soon, though—her memory is getting stronger, and she’s beginning to track patterns. She knows when Friday is coming, when Friday’s here, when to expect his car in the driveway.

Maite takes off her shoes and socks, folds the socks into a ball and places them in one shoe. She lets herself feel the soles of her feet on the bristly grass. She pulls the grass up with her toes, then gathers the blades and throws them into the air. They do not hover—they fall before the wind can catch them. The blades of grass don’t have the magic of cottonwood seeds.

Pala is tumbling down the hill again, but the hill isn’t steep enough, and she comes to a halt every few rotations. The late afternoon light, glaring, hits Pala’s hair, makes it glow. Momentarily she lies still, belly-up. Her hair has fallen in front of her face, tangled and wild. Watching, Maite holds her shins and pulls her legs close, huddles, hugs.

Pala jumps up to catch her grandfather’s hand, dragging him to his knees. He calls, “Mind yourself! Log coming through,” and waits until Pala backs away, safe, before he begins to roll. Pala takes another cautious step backward, then springs into motion and runs after him.

Maite won’t admit it to him, but she remembers her father took her to this same park, before the playground equipment had been replaced. It must have been only a few months before he left. She was twelve, and was reluctant to play, believing she was too old to be at the playground with her father. She remembers too well.

Watching Pala chase her grandfather down the hill, Maite feels a tickle on the bridge of her foot: an ant. She is momentarily fascinated by its steady crawl, how it wields its antennae like windmills. Then she reacts, shaking her foot violently to free herself from the ant. It falls to the grass, and soon disappears.

Her father has not yet led Pala back up the hill. If Maite called to Pala now, her voice would not carry. She digs her feet into the earth and pushes her back against the tree trunk. She scrapes her heels furiously, and the dirt loosens and allows her to hollow out depressions. She cannot root herself enough.

The sun has not yet neared the horizon. It’ll be light for another couple of hours, but there are fewer children on the playground. Those remaining are much older than those Maite noticed when they entered the park. She can’t see any adults among them. The teenagers cluster near the swings. Their laughs are loud and movements loose. One boy has his arm hooked around the swing’s pole and hangs back carelessly. He looks toward the hill. Pala might not be visible to him. Maite hopes he won’t lead the teenagers any closer to Pala.

Finally, Pala races her grandfather up the hill.

Maite calls to her. “Let’s go home!”

Pala glances over briefly but pretends she doesn’t hear. She bows her head as she runs, her eyes directed to the ground, serious.

Maite cries, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” She pronounces go like goo, as if she’s joking.

“We just got here. Let’s stay a little longer, Mom,” her father says. “Maite, it might be the best day of the summer. Let her play.”

Maite throws her head back to the sky, too blue, and doesn’t argue. Pala recognizes that she has more time, and she pulls her grandfather toward the teeter-totter, which is thankfully far from the other playground equipment and the teenagers. Maite’s father walks slowly, and Pala hangs on his arm, dragging him, giggling, shouting, “Faster, Papa!”

He slows down, and says, “I can’t! You’ll have to leave me behind.”

Pala’s overtaken by peals of laughter. She’s clutching his arm too tightly, refusing to release her grasp. Maite thinks, Let go, let go. One day you may not have a choice.

Maite will tell him he can’t come late for Pala. No, she will tell him it is best if he doesn’t come at all. She fears that his disappearance will repeat, that it’s inevitable.

She’ll tell him today, she promises herself. She’ll send Pala to her room to clean up her toys when they get home. Pala doesn’t clean yet, but she pretends: she will get caught up with playing and won’t try to overhear. Maite will tell him then. She’ll say it doesn’t matter that he is Pala’s only grandfather—she can’t let Pala get attached to someone who eventually won’t be there for her.

But when they arrive, Maite is slow to take off her shoes. Pala immediately leads her grandfather to the kitchen, hands him her drawing, and beams at him as he studies it. Maite can’t bring herself to interrupt their connection. She lets go of her breath, remains silent for one more moment.

“It’s beautiful,” he tells Pala. “Is it a cheetah?”

Pala shakes her head.

“A lion? An ocelot?”

No, no.

It’s a housecat, Maite thinks. It’s the only thing Pala ever draws, for years now. But her father is patient with Pala, and he plays her game and keeps guessing until he gets it right. And when he does, he tries to hand the drawing back to her, but she tells him, “You can have it.”

He bends down to hug her, not apologetically as he did when he greeted her, but fully. Pala steps on his toes to hug him back. She looks toward Maite, waits for her grandfather to pick her up.

◊◊

Natalie Gerich Brabson author photoNatalie Gerich Brabson is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, and holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College. Her fiction has been published in New World Writing and Eunoia Review. In 2017, she received the Go On Girl Book Club Unpublished Writer Award. She lives in Philadelphia, and is at work on her first novel.

 

 

 

Image credit: Rudy and Peter Skitterians on Pixabay

TINY THINGS by TALEEN A. SHALEH

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Little girl with big glasses

TINY THINGS
by TALEEN A. SHALEH

The way she squints worries me, my mother tells the optometrist. In the dim room, sitting before the gentle doctor, being whispered to, One or two? Three or four? I learn a secret. My ability to see tiny things up close is superhuman. The doctor tells me so, not like she’s telling a child a complimentary fib, but like she’s embarrassed since it was the only word to use and it sounds silly.

It makes sense, though, because I’m tiny, too. At school, a boy I hate calls me “mouse”. My friend Nina says, At least a mouse is cute, and totes me around like a doll. We line up by height for all occasions, and I’m always first. During lessons, I bend as close to the page as possible, examining the shapes inside the pencil-letters, and I’m so focused I don’t hear when the teacher calls my name. Sometimes the principal doesn’t even notice me sitting in her office, I’m so small, but there’s no office to send her to for not paying attention.

My mother doesn’t believe the optometrist, but she’s too busy to make another appointment with a different one.

At home, armed with the knowledge that my up-close seeing isn’t me being a total weirdo, but a power, I search for the tiny. I realize the problem with being called a mouse is that a mouse is not small enough. I can do so much better.

The ants that march through our kitchen are okay, but even more interesting are the near-microscopic mites. The ones that look like specks of nutmeg until they start to move. I invite one of them onto my finger.

The day-after-Valentine’s-day tulip bouquet my mother bought for herself is nice, but way better is zooming in on the center of a single bloom, taking in every grain of pollen dusting each stamen’s tip. The threads of color striping along the petals are playground slides to tumble down. I reach out and smuggle a dot of pollen.

In the healthy dinner I’m forced to eat because my mother is just one woman trying her best, a fleck of quinoa is still too large. I concentrate on the mini tail whipping out and pick it apart from its seed. Why are you squinting at your finger like that? my mother asks.

Because they’ve invited me to tea, I want to say, but don’t. After dinner I run upstairs with my three new friends on my fingertip. One breath, and I join them.

We’re sitting together in downtown Crayola, surrounded by sixty-four multi-colored skyscrapers. The mite, the velvety fleck of pollen, the curly quinoa tail, and me. We don’t need teacups. We slurp directly from the single droplet before us.

When my mother enters the room, she calls and calls, but doesn’t see anything.

◊◊

Taleen Alexander author headshotTaleen A. Shaleh’s writing has appeared in The Bold Italic and Cal Literature and Arts Magazine. She lives in San Francisco, where runs a research team by day, parents a spirited toddler by night, and writes when she can (you should see the notes app on her phone). You can find her on Twitter at @taleenashaleh

 

 

 

 
Image credit: Luisella Planeta Leoni on Pixabay

TWO FLASH PIECES by Joshua Shaw

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a candle

TWO FLASH PIECES
by Joshua Shaw

Later They Didn’t

After the house fire, the neighborhood boys searched the rubble. A chimney teetered. Cinders smoked. Parents said it wasn’t safe. Stay away. The boys didn’t listen. Treasures might be found. A young couple had lived there. Maybe a bra had survived the fire? Maybe a blackened spoon?

Only metal eyelets were found, shoes erased by flames, metal tarnished by heat so the eyelets looked like tiny ancient coins.

The boys hid them in a hole by a tree. Later, they remembered where. Later, they didn’t.

◊

Wicked Source of Light

Before he dies, my father asks, “What’s a six-letter word for a wicked source of light?” Outside, wind shakes power lines. Plastic bags snap on bare tangled limbs. Dad’s newspaper rustles.

“A wicked sort of life?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “A wicked source of light.”

A week later, my sister’s kids find a box in his closet, scented candles, the ones Mom used to decorate their home. Her kids line them up on the kitchen counter, rank the scents. Christmas Cookie is best. Balsam Wood and Life’s-A-Breeze are the worst.

“Don’t you want any of Dad’s things?” my sister asks.

There’s an empty bowl on the stoop outside his kitchen’s sliding door, a dish he’d leave out for strays. I think, candle.

◊◊

Joshua Shaw author picJoshua Shaw is a philosophy professor at Penn State Erie who began writing fiction midcareer because it made him glad to be alive. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Booth, Split Lip Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Sundog Lit, and Kenyon Review Online. More information about him can be found here.

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

 

HOW TO (TRY TO) BE CUTE by Julie Benesh

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Little girl in sailor suit looking down into street

HOW TO (TRY TO) BE CUTE
by Julie Benesh

Before Trying

Your daddy took one look and said, “She’s beautiful—she looks just like me!” Funny, but no joke. He’d experienced mirrors, and mirror neurons, even if he’d never heard of the latter. It helps to have a handsome father because evolution makes babies look like their daddies so their daddies will know they belong to them and take care of their genes.

Don’t Try Too Hard (TTH)

Your uncle is a professional photographer, and your mother always wanted a little girl to dress up—she’d waited 15 barren married years to get one. There’s a picture of four-year-old you in a navy sailor suit with a brimmed hat. The hat makes your head itch and you pitch it out the car window after the shoot, you temperamental mo-del!

You’re a fourth grade crossing guard—they still have children do that in 1970s Iowa. You have an orange flag and you use the pole to push the walk button to let the littler kids cross. One day on the lunch patrol two boy hippies walk up. One asks your name and mentions that you have curly eyelashes. When he asks if you are “old enough” and chortles, you feel nauseated and tell your school he asked “if you were old enough—to take drugs.” Which makes no sense or just makes it worse, you don’t realize until you are just about old enough for whatever.

Quadruple whammy: glasses, braces, nose zits. Acquire a terrible, clever nickname based on your last name. Epic cuteness fail for several years.

Try Harder

Braces off, tanning helps heal the zits and acts as nose contouring, and you only need glasses to see. Meanwhile you’ve grown your T&A and got some nice curves.

“Hey sexless,” some guy will yell from a car, just when you thought you’d made it.

“She tries to be cute.” Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. You are controversial, like Sarah Jessica Parker, like Jennifer Aniston will one day be. A girl’s girl. Good company.

Take a Break

Live in an engineering dorm in college. Just saying. At the time, 90% of your dorm mates are men. It’s a numbers game.

Get married young (snag an engineer!) and don’t have kids. Work out. Don’t wear a lot of makeup.

Try Harder

Get divorced. Work out more. Get an expensive haircut and go all-out blonde. Discover spray tanning.

Juggle a lot of jobs to pay the rent while middle-aged randos on the street stop you to say: “Smile! It’s not that bad.” It is, though.

Surrender?

Settle down with an actual aesthetics professor and stop dating. He thinks you are both cute and sexy. He also thinks beauty is a real thing, and also not your thing. But it’s hardly anyone’s! Why are you crying?

Get older. Try to straddle the line between Trying Too Hard and Letting Yourself Go. Keep the long bright hair the homeless guys always comment on. You’re still getting caught trying!

A woman will try to compliment you by saying she likes you because she prefers smart girls to pretty girls. What? Can’t one be both? Why not? Better try a lot harder or else give up completely.

Some guy yells from a car, “I want to ________ you in the _______,” then: “No I don’t.” Caught trying again?

Do beach yoga as two adolescent boys lounge nearby, gazing toward you in a friendly fashion. One starts talking about his grandma—she’s so crazy and hilarious. He obviously loves her a lot. Realize why he thought of her, at the beach, with so much else to pay attention to. You…reminded…him…of her!

Just Be

Make up. Make up to break up with makeup. Make up with your mirror; make up with yourself. Make up your mind. Make up your own rules. Make up for lost time.

◊◊

Judy benesh author photoJulie Benesh lives in Chicago with two cats and a lot of books. Her creative writing has appeared in Tin House, Florida Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other magazines and has been anthologized in Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader. She has earned an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College, an Illinois Arts Council Grant, and a Pushcart nomination. She is completing her first short story collection and is working on a book length micro-memoir manuscript. She teaches writing workshops at the Newberry Library and has a day job as a professor and management consultant.

 

Image credit: Dulce Láriz on Unsplash

CONSTANCE COMES HOME by David Priest

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

living room with sofa, plant

CONSTANCE COMES HOME
by David Priest

Danielle hated her feet. She hated that the knuckle at the base of each big toe bulged out like a Ping-Pong ball. She hated that if she pressed the pad of her finger against, say, her right foot, it would leave a little oblong mark for full seconds before blood seeped back in. They were always cold, too, but sweated continuously. This was the worst part. It was the reason she wore socks in her own home. Otherwise she’d leave moist negatives of her feet on every hard surface in the house.

But now Danielle was barefoot. She was walking slowly, allowing each foot to light on each tile, one at a time, in Constance’s house. When she closed her eyes Danielle was Constance, with her white pants that boasted a runner’s lithe confidence, confidence that rendered the usual socks unnecessary. Of course, neighbor Constance was really at the gym—Monday/Wednesday/Friday—and daughter Harmony was at school and husband Dorian was working till five-thirty. She had the house for hours.

Here was Danielle—walking tile-by-tile, sitting at the kitchen island, perusing Fitness Magazine, sauntering to the fridge and pulling out a futuristic glass cylinder of sparkling Norwegian water, drinking it luxuriously, savoring the carbonation tickling down her throat. Danielle straightened a picture magnet of the pert young Harmony gripping a platinum-blue tennis racket and resting it on her shoulder—the sinews of her forearm pronounced as if she’d been perfecting her backhand only moments before the photographer had snapped the shot.

Danielle turned, screwed the metallic top back onto the water bottle, and gazed at the rich cream tile floor. In the bay window light, her damp footprints tracked from the front hall to the kitchen like soft gold islands. The tracks led to ten wiggling toes, nails colorless.

Danielle turned to the clock as Constance had probably done countless times while making dinner, waiting for Harmony and Dorian to come bursting in, poised to smile and laugh—activities catalyzed by Mother’s wonderfully aromatic food. Spaghetti and meatballs, a classic, magically infused with joy. Dorian would cup one breast while Harmony looked away, embarrassed by her parents’ carnality. He would nibble her neck in just the way to make her shiver. Danielle shivered.

◊

Danielle’s daughter Julie had screamed the night before. She’d been standing in the center of her pink room, Danielle in the hallway looking in. Husband Bob was downstairs on the couch. In the silence right after Julie’s first shriek (“You’re such a bitch!”), Danielle thought she heard the volume on the television downstairs tick up.

Danielle made herself small. She felt apparitional in the dark hallway. Julie was standing splayfooted, hair mussed, the ceiling light above her purging the room of shadows. One side of her head was shaved.

Danielle didn’t fully understand why Julie was screaming. Mother Danielle had simply expressed concern for her daughter’s romantic possibilities with such a haircut. Dark purple tears were tracing parentheses on Julie’s face, around the “o” of her mouth. It was like some indecipherable text message.

“Why do you even care?” Julie had screamed, fists balled at her sides and torso tilted forward. Danielle thought her daughter looked cartoonish, a mannequin donning adolescent fury.

The teen curled her upper lip—experimentally, Danielle thought. “You’re going to die alone, you know.” Now the girl was aiming for cruel. “But you don’t know. You have no idea. I almost feel sorry for you.”

Be the adult, Dani, Bob had chided some years before, when Danielle had shouted at Little Julie to go to her room. Little Julie had said dinner tasted like dog shit.

The casserole wasn’t worth a fight, he’d said. Be the adult, Dani.

“Julie,” Danielle said now, arms folding, “don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?”

◊

By this time, Danielle knew Constance’s home intimately. She visited twice per week, on Monday and Wednesday, since schedules seemed a bit more fluid on Friday, what with Harmony returning home early to pack for weekend tennis tournaments, and Constance of course pumiced and made-up to drive her daughter counties or states away, as needed, always smiling.

But today (Wednesday) fell in the middle of the workweek when, Danielle knew, most men of the subdivision would be preoccupied amid the routine of eat/work/sleep, and most women’s to-do’s would dwindle to kiddycare, hubbycare, and bodycare. She and Bob were no different, only he stayed late most weekdays now.

Wednesdays were Danielle’s favorite, because she felt the safest in others’ homes. Less chance of being interrupted, of having to slip out a sliding glass door in back as she’d had to do twice before—neither time a Wednesday. But today was not just any Wednesday. Today was special. Danielle could feel it.

◊

The back stairway hair-pinned, a strip of plush carpet rolled directly down the middle of each flight, hugging the contours of each stair, attached with a line of heavy-duty construction staples under each wooden flange and at the crook of each step. Danielle knew the staples were hidden in the carpet’s abundant pile because she’d examined them closely the first time she’d explored Constance’s home.

Danielle was proud of her eye for detail. She went barefoot on these expeditions to memorize the feel of each carpet, laminate, tile. She laid her cheek to each countertop, watched how her breath stayed or dissipated from the marble, the soapstone, the quartz. Danielle could write a book on the empty homes of Court of Spruce, a book only for her.

First floors, for example, tended toward the immaculate, with untouched sitting rooms and wife-kept kitchens. The only rooms that occasionally showed some wear were those the men inhabited—shoes congregating in the corners, plates with crusted-on unidentifiables slid halfway under the couch, video game consoles in the middle of the floor with bundled cords slithering out and toward the televisions. When one visited another’s home (socially, that is), one was almost guaranteed a brief tour, including the controlled mess of the male-inhabited living room (which sometimes even boasted a live specimen before he fled upstairs).

On Wine Wednesdays, for instance, Ilana Burkins made a habit of clicking her tongue in gentle reproof at her eighth-grade twins finishing a shooting game on the TV.

“Boys,” she would say knowingly, and the other women would sigh and roll their eyes.

Boys, men, and their mess were to be displayed, within reason. Danielle knew this, because she’d often seen Ilana’s house six hours prior to Wine Wednesdays, and she knew which rooms were tidied, and which weren’t.

At first, Danielle had found first floors to be of great interest. She discovered pornography stashed in cardboard boxes and external hard drives, sometimes in plain sight. She quickly came to understand that most men on the block watched pornos, and many women were either fully aware or in denial. Bob was one of the few who seemed not to masturbate daily, and Danielle had secreted in her chest both a bud of pride at this revelation and a flowering, prurient captivation with the unfulfilled sexuality in other husbands. Like animals caged, she thought.

With time, though, Danielle tired of the performance of the kitchen, the living room, the entryway. The clearest windows into the life of each house were in the bedrooms.

The second time Danielle had visited Ilana Burkins’ house, she’d found a large, purple and elaborately textured dildo tucked snugly between the baseboard and the mattress of the master bedroom. She looked at Ilana differently for weeks.

While Ilana was out of town, though, Danielle made the discovery that Ilana Burkins wasn’t the one who utilized the tool. It had been moved, recently scrubbed with lavender soap, midway through her vacation. It had to be Husband Alex. Danielle seriously doubted that Ilana was unaware of its presence, and would smile to herself while making dinner, imagining that Alex may in fact have asked his dutiful wife to penetrate him with it. Danielle had to fight back the titters imagining it. She was certain Ilana would comply with any such requests.

The drama reached its pinnacle, though, the week Ilana and Alex celebrated their anniversary in the Caribbean, when Danielle had found the dildo missing from its usual spot. Instead it was tucked haphazardly under the bed of one of the twins. The boy must have fantasized about his vestigially pretty mother using it. The families on Court of Spruce all had such secrets that only Danielle knew.

◊

Constance Jones’ home was the first Danielle visited. This was a year ago now, after Bob had asked whether Danielle still used her gym membership. Realizing he truly wouldn’t notice, she canceled it, leaving two hours of every weekday suddenly unoccupied. She began by reading, picking up a stack of books—mostly romances—from the library and flipping through them while cradled in the front window seat. But she couldn’t concentrate, and so found herself watching the other homes around Court of Spruce. It was like a miniature society, so slickly routined Danielle could unfocus her eyes and the day would pass in moments.

It was nothing at all that started it. Constance’s daughter, Harmony, the last to leave on Tuesday mornings, left a cup of coffee on the roof of her car—a cute European toy made life-size. It slid off the roof, smashing on the street as she raced away.

Danielle walked out to the street, gathered the porcelain shards, and gingerly carried them to Constance’s front door. She knocked, though she knew no one was home. She tried the knob, found the door unlocked. Then, without knowing why, she entered. Closing the door behind her, Danielle realized suddenly that she hadn’t taken a full breath all day, maybe all week. She inhaled the lingering essence of Constance, and discovered it to be the same Sweet Pea perfume Danielle had worn in high school. She recalled holding her wrist to a friend’s nose, the friend breathing and sighing. I like it. When had Danielle started wearing more “adult” perfume, and then just deodorant? She couldn’t remember.

Danielle started testing the doors of all her neighbors, at first bringing long-forgotten borrowed eggs or cups of sugar, then bringing nothing. Only two of the women on the block worked. One, Charlene, had a maid. The other, Breena, couldn’t keep her home clean. When she made it to Wine Wednesdays, she would half whisper her contentment to the other women, her confidence that Husband Barry fully supported her law practice. But Danielle knew Barry didn’t even delete his laptop’s history, which boasted video of busty maids after video of “lonely wives,” grinding against various cleaning and cooking tools. There were no videos, Danielle noted, of sexy lawyers.

The stay-at-home mothers like Ilana had their secrets, too, their weaknesses. Danielle would remind herself of this while staring in the mirror after the evening she hosted Wine Wednesday, where Katerina Fuchs averted her eyes from the kitchen sink, empty but still streaked with grime. How had Danielle forgotten to scrub the sink? Well, thought Danielle, how had Katerina allowed her daughter to get pregnant in college?

Yet in all her time inspecting Constance Jones’ home—two days a week for a year now—Danielle never found anything out of place. Nothing to suggest sexual kinks in Constance and Dorian’s room. No drugs or alcohol or even condoms under Harmony’s bed. Closets were in order, desks were work-only, and computers practically sparkling.

◊

Danielle stood in the center of Constance and Dorian’s room. The carpet was beige, the walls white, the bedding brown with ornate, crème stitching. In one corner of the room a door led to the master bathroom—all marble and frosted glass. On Dorian’s side of the bed (right) lay a short stack of police novels, edges flush. Constance’s side was furnished with a vanity. A gold carousel of jewelry and a makeup bag rested on top.

Danielle felt something click inside her chest, like a clock’s hour hand locking into place. She picked up a glass bottle of Crybaby-Pink polish and hopped onto the bed like she was at a slumber party. She’d always wondered how the bottle would feel in her hand, how Crybaby-Pink would look on her toes. She’d always wanted to lie in this bed. The perfect bedspread broke pleasantly underneath her. She rested her chin on her knee as she layered thick polish in even stripes onto her toenails. She sat back against the pillowed headboard and stretched her toes, worming them in the gentle draft of the A/C.

Danielle could breathe out, reclining on Constance’s bed. This house was calming her. She could always count on that, from the first time until now. Everything was organized, proper. Everything was soft. She pulled the lump of her cell phone from her back pocket and dropped it on Dorian’s pillow. She turned toward the open closet door and began planning the outfit she would put on when her toes dried.

Lying there, Danielle fell asleep.

◊

Last night, Mother Danielle had pulled Julie’s laptop from her backpack and sat in the living room. She decided to read some of Julie’s school assignments. Maybe there she could find some sense in the girl’s behavior. It’d only been a few months of this, of new music, new clothes, new makeup—all darker. Maybe it was just a phase. Or maybe, she thought, mousing through folders on the desktop, it wasn’t.

“Not a good idea,” said Bob, feet on the coffee table, hand on the TV remote.

It’d been a few months since Danielle had inspected her own home, let alone Julie’s laptop, but she quickly found a folder called “School.” She skimmed an essay on the Civil War, on democracy. She read the introduction of an essay on an author she’d never heard of, tried to bite her imaginary tongue, failed, thought, Well, it’s not grabbing my attention. She deleted a comma, exited without saving.

Julie’s door opened upstairs, and Danielle slid the laptop back into place, pulled her knees against her chest, and hugged them.

◊

Danielle’s phone was vibrating beside her head, floating across the pillow as though trying to creep away unnoticed. It was an unknown number. She picked it up.

“Hello, this is Constance.”

“Hello?” A man’s voice. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for Mrs. Danielle Kimpan.”

“I’m sorry,” said Danielle, yawning the sleep from her voice. “This is she.”

The clock beside the bed said 2:20. Constance should’ve been home by now. Danielle stood, surprised by her own calm.

“Your daughter is Julie Kimpan? This is Principal Quinn.” The man covered the mouthpiece of his phone and spoke to someone on the other side. He returned. “I’m sorry to call you, but Julie’s in my office right now. A teacher found her smoking marijuana in a school bathroom. Can you come in today?”

He sounded bored. Danielle could empathize.

“I can’t,” she sat on the bedside, gazing down at her new toes. They looked nice, and for once, Danielle didn’t mind her feet. “Actually, can you call back another time?”

She hung up. After a few moments the phone vibrated again. She silenced it.

Where was Constance? Danielle wondered again at her cool, wondered if it was simply this home, so perfectly composed, that made Constance herself so perfectly composed.

Another part of Danielle nagged. Something was wrong. Then again, Constance was often late. If she met up with friends for a post-workout brunch. If she stopped at the bank or grocery.

But maybe something else had happened. Maybe, maybe Constance was in an accident. Maybe she’d gone to the hospital. Maybe she wasn’t coming home at all.

Danielle yawned again, stretched, and felt her whole body expand. Why worry? She tossed her phone back onto the bed. Who cared where Constance was? She was here.

◊

That morning, Bob had been eating breakfast in his dress shirt and boxers, daubing flecks of egg from his plate with a too-small bit of sourdough. His fingertips were yolky. With the other hand, he scrolled through headlines on his phone, reading them aloud the same way he read signs and billboards as they drove, to fill the silence.

“South Carolina man dives off waterfall trying to save dog,” he said. “New Jersey mom strangles newborn, throws her in garbage.”

Danielle sat beside him, taking slow bites of yogurt, setting her top teeth to drag against the curve of the spoon, her tongue to hollow it out. Suddenly, she realized it’d been weeks—maybe more—since she and Bob had made love. Finishing another bite of yogurt, she scooted her chair toward Husband Bob, and slipped her feet under his thigh to warm them.

“Entitled parents are hurting their kids.” He lifted his leg, pushed her ankles with his yolky hand. “Jesus, your feet are clammy. Put on some socks.”

Danielle waited until Bob left for work, then she went to his desktop to watch porn—perhaps just to leave a single blemish on his history. When she clicked on the browser, a window was already open—an icon for an online document, connected to Bob’s work email. It was titled, “Dear Danielle.” For a moment, she couldn’t think who would’ve written it. To Julie, she was “mom,” and to Bob, she was “Dani.” Yet there it was. She hesitated a moment, then clicked it open.

Dear Danielle, We’ve been married for a long time and it has not been an unhappy marriage but not a happy one either.

Danielle cringed at the punctuation.

I think it would be best if we took some time apart. Julie says it is better to grow up with divorced parents than miserable ones, and I think we are both miserable if I am being honest.

Danielle felt her jaw pop, and realized it was locked shut. She tried to open it, failed.

Next steps might be hard but they are what we must take. We both contributed to the house but I think whoever Julie decides to stay with should keep it.

Son of a bitch. Of course Julie would pick Father Bob, because Father Bob—soon to be Bachelor Bob—let her do whatever she wanted. Fifteen years ago, they’d used Danielle’s inheritance from her dead aunt to put a down payment on this house, and now—now what?

The room began to spin. Danielle gripped the arms of her chair, felt their edges dig into her palm. She squeezed her eyes shut, lowered her forehead between her knees. She tried to breathe, found her lungs weren’t working properly, and ran outside, across the street, into safety.

◊

Constance’s closet was organized by season and color. Across from the monochromatic tones of Dorian’s suits, Constance’s blouses (top rack) and pants (bottom rack) opened up like a box of pastels. On one end of the pants rack was a bureau with the top-drawer half open, bras carefully folded inside.

Danielle shed her clothes in a small pile and walked to the dresser. No pushup bras, she knew. Constance was pragmatic. She fished out a lacy bralette Constance didn’t wear enough and pulled it over her head, cupping her breasts into place one at a time. The underwear drawer remained, as usual, unopened. Danielle slid on a pair of white jeans, sucked in her belly, and buttoned them. She couldn’t wear them as low on her hips as Constance, but she could wear them.

For her top Danielle already knew the tunic she wanted. It matched her toes—a pink, loose fitting, button-up whose translucence whispered of the bra underneath. On Constance, the top hung loose with subtle swells at her breasts and over her bottom. But as Danielle buttoned up in front of the mirror, she thought it fit her better. The buttons at the bosom looked eager to unclasp, revealing a hint of black lace and soft flesh underneath.

Constance’s summer heels were still under the bed. When Danielle looked for them, she realized they had migrated closer to Dorian’s side over the cold months. She circled the bed, knelt, and stretched, hooking two fingers over the straps of a pair of toeless heels. Suddenly she noticed the tearable fabric under the mattress falling strangely: the faint shape of an envelope. New since last week.

Sitting on Dorian’s side of the bed, heels beside her, Danielle turned over in her hands what she’d found. Thick paper. Plain white. Written in tiny, exact print on the front: open alone. The flap looked to have been torn open hastily. She pushed it open and pulled out the card. On the white front, a glittery gold print read Happy Birthday, Daddy! Inside the card was one line, penciled by the same hand as the envelope front: 10:30 in the copy room. -Catie.

That was all.

Danielle’s throat tightened. Dorian didn’t have a second daughter. Little dark-eyed Catie—an intern, Danielle was sure—waiting in the copy room. One lamp would be on in the corner. Her highlighted hair would be teased, playing at her collarbone. A little diamond stud would be tucked in her bellybutton, under that fitted dress shirt and high-waisted pencil skirt.

Danielle snapped the card closed and strapped on her heels, a perfect fit. She stood, a little wobbly at first, and walked to the bathroom. Danielle stared in the mirror at her red-rimmed eyes. She slapped herself, just once. A sharp sting radiated on her cheek before receding into a dull warmth—a cute half-blush, she thought. Danielle turned on the faucet, cupped water, and washed her face.

After she finished, she walked to the bed and picked up the letter, sliding it back into the envelope. As she tucked it into her pocket, she noticed how sexy her heels looked. They were nude leather, and her toes poked out like a pink bouquet, like roses.

She walked down the front stairway, pulling her hair back into a tight ponytail. Someone had left the door cracked, so she closed it. Her heels clicked tile-by-tile down the front hall to the kitchen, Crybaby Pink gloss shining in the light. A glass water bottle was sweating, puddling on the counter. Dorian was always leaving the kitchen such a mess, she thought. She put the water in the fridge.

She walked to the pristine sitting room—where she’d wiped the coffee table and pounded the couches two weeks ago for spring cleaning. The curtain rings squealed on the rod as she let in the sun. Dorian would be home soon. Constance sat on the couch. She folded one leg over the other, reversed them, and set the envelope on the coffee table in front of her, in full view of the front door. She folded her hands. She waited.

◊◊

David Priest author photoDavid Priest is a journalist and a 2018 International Regional Magazine Association (IRMA) Gold Award recipient for Nature and Environmental Writing. His stories and essays have appeared recently in The American Literary Review, Salon, Arkansas Life, Reservoir, Transect Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Louisville, KY with his wife, Lindsey, and two sons, Idris and Atticus. In his spare time, he can be found playing board games with his family.

 

 

Image credit: Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

POSTCARD FROM A JAPANESE BOXING GYM by Jason Emde

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

a pair of boxing gloves

POSTCARD FROM A JAPANESE BOXING GYM
by Jason Emde

Joe joined my gym when he started third grade so I pick him up after work and we bike over to Gifu Yokozeki Boxing Gym, companionable, Joe chatterboxing the whole way and throughout each session, Dada, Dada, his lungs propelling his eight-year-old voice, small, high, curious, into the ambient soundscape that includes whirring jump rope thwacks, heavy bag thuds, the quick rattling smack of the speed bag, the start and stop of the three minute timer, general shufflings and cracks and grunts, somebody yelling with every punch, somebody’s ragged panting breathing, my own. And because Yokozeki-san puts it on when Joe and I arrive there’s also the Beatles radio channel: Getting Better, I’m So Tired, Joe singing along to Strawberry Fields Forever.

Usually: warm-up stretches, jump rope, shadow boxing, mitt practice with one of the trainers, heavy bag, weights, that roller wheel thingamabob, cool-down stretches. Sixty to ninety minutes.

Joe uses a stool so he can reach the speed bag. I can hear his faltering, patient practice over the sounds of Ruito and Nozomu whaling on each other in the ring.

When you’re finished with heavy bag work you mop up your sweat with one of the yellow mops provided for that purpose. It’s customary to mop up everybody’s sweat, whether they’re finished or not, when you mop up your own. Joe sometimes forgets this.

My mother had asthma, and recently I’ve felt a tightening in my chest. Try and remember to relax with the breath. Leave the breath alone.

The unlikeables I imagine while I belabor the heavy bag: the janitor at the school where I work and his incessant hissing, the teacher who grunts all day long, various enemies and rivals from my near and distant pasts. Joe has his enemies too: mockers on the dodgeball field, unkind classmates, the fifth grade kid who kicked him in the balls.

Jogging with my father, a long time ago. Legs and lungs working. Proud to keep up with him.

Boxing is getting back to your body, staying in the body. Boxing is getting lost in your body for three minutes at a time. Boxing is running your breath down your shoulder to your fist. I forget this sometimes.

The world is full of things that will hurt my son. Leave the things alone.

The ring floor is blue, the ring ropes red, white, and blue. The neutral corners feature a smiling cartoon tiger face with the words CHINA FOOD above and SAN COCK below. Joe and I drape our hand towels over the red top rope and do two rounds of light sparring. Very light. But if he gets lazy or sloppy I’ll tap him on the forehead or belly. He needs to know.

Japanese uses one character for both breath and son.

◊◊

Jason EmdeJason Emde is a teacher, writer, amateur boxer, Prince enthusiast, and graduate student in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He’s also the author of My Hand’s Tired and My Heart Aches (Kalamalka Press, 2005) and the co-author of the parodic action novel The Crunch Gang Meet the Deadly Zombie Ninjas of Japan (Amazon e-book). His work has appeared in Ariel, The Malahat Review, Anastamos, Miracle Monocle, Prometheus Dreaming, and Short Writings from Bulawayo III. He lives in Japan.

 

 

Image credit: Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

THE PASSENGERS by Vivien Cao

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

beach at night

THE PASSENGERS
by Vivien Cao

When your father tells you he secured a flight for you and your husband and children, you don’t ask questions. You race home and fill up a suitcase with photos and heirlooms. You tell your three-year-old to grab a spoon and thank god that the baby is still fed by your breast. Your husband tells you to slow down so he can remember where he put the passports and you regret ever loving him. You wish you had more time to hug your mother and father. You wish your children would stop crying. Fraught but calm, you try to memorize the shadows on the wall cast by the afternoon sun, bougainvillea tapping lightly at the windows, a tender scent woven into the furniture and the textiles and all that you will leave behind.

You push your family into the taxi and tell the driver where to go, to hurry. He nods and sweats and stomps on the accelerator. The car crunches down a rocky driveway, stirring up a cloud of red earth. You can’t see them but you know the neighbors are watching, always. And soon the commandos will come. They will knock knowing no one will answer. They will enter knowing no one will return. They will take knowing no one will stop them. No one will be there to resist them—yet their sandals will still leave skid marks.

Your husband instructs the driver to go faster, but the square is glutted with mopeds and bicycles. “Fuck this country,” your husband sputters. You hate how quickly he blames others. You stare out the window and paint a memory of this place. Mothers yank on bony child arms. Food vendors stir and grill. A lunch crowd spills into the streets, bodies lithely crouched and clustered and doing what they must to survive uncertainty. Mutts are shooed away. A legless man pulls his torso along, trailing empty trousers. Your three-year-old is hungry and asks to stop for chè. You shush him with dried mango strips as your baby roots for your breast by kissing the air.

Your family arrives to chaos. The plane is full. But how can that be. No one will listen to you. But your father made arrangements. But nothing. But wait. Your children cling to you, frightened by your forceful insistence. Your husband drops the suitcase to clutch your arm. Do something, his grip begs. Why did you choose this man to marry? An official in a crisp white shirt scurries by and you thrust your passport in his face. You announce your name, your father’s name, his job and title. You promise your father’s good word. You promise glory and status. You hold out your jewels and promise to keep your promises. You demand to speak to someone with more authority. You plead. You pray. You fall apart. The plane departs without you.

You spot the driver’s scaly elbow slung out the window, a cigarette smoldering towards his thumb. Your family files inside the idling taxi, but where can you go when there is no one to trust. “Fuck this country,” your husband whimpers while you weep. The driver nods and steers, knowing of another way. He takes you beyond the hustle of the city. Past the pastures and the paddies. Heavy with fatigue, your children sink into your flesh. They smell like sea mist, so potent that it fills your lungs and lulls you under, and under, until dusk turns the earth to rust.

Your family arrives as moonlight sweeps the water. You walk to where the shore is shallow. Your three-year-old dips his spoon into the mud and makes a little hole that can’t be seen. The dock is neither here nor there. The boat is neither big nor small. On it is a figure crouched and waiting. The driver says the captain is a kindly man who can take your family to a place, and there it should be easy to keep going—but the boat cannot accommodate your suitcase. You stare at the driver whose eyes are gleaming in the dark. You glance at your husband, whose eyes are also gleaming. Your heart racing, your eyes must be gleaming, too.

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Vivien Cao author photoVivien Cao is originally from Los Angeles. She previously worked in film and television, and has taught writing at several CUNY campuses. Her writing has also been published in SmokeLong Quarterly.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Ryan Parker on Unsplash