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GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry, a craft essay by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

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GROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry
A Craft Essay
by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

Like most things, it began with beauty: My first apartment after college overlooked the backyard of several Crown Heights buildings, which had become an unofficial dump with stained mattresses, twisted remnants of recliners, and an impressive pack of raccoons. I’d just escaped an abusive relationship with a woman who’d unraveled my self-esteem and told me I’d never be a writer, and was working at a pizza shop by Union Square. I’d climb onto the fire escape outside my bedroom window to smoke and look down on this compromised patch of wildness, snow-draped in winter and then bursting—if you looked hard enough—into blossom by spring. I didn’t have my own plants then, but as I tapped my cigarette on the rusted railing and watched ash dance toward the green tangle below, I had a building sense that I’d traveled damagingly far from myself, a child of the Tennessee woods, and that whatever healing I was undertaking would involve returning, somehow, to that self who could lose hours crouched above a creek watching crawdads skim the bottom.

It wouldn’t be until a year later, in a room that overlooked an air shaft, that an acquaintance gave me my first plant—a tiny aeonium. I’d just started grad school, something I wasn’t nearly stable enough for but desperately needed, so was waitressing at a cavernous Italian spot in the Met Life Building by day and taking classes at night, and in between, doing any self-destructive thing I could dream up. It was, to say the least, chaotic. So it was shocking that I managed not to immediately kill the succulent. I even constructed makeshift shelving in my sole window to hold what became a small collection.

I didn’t bring any of those plants across the country when I moved to Oakland after graduation, but I found a rent-controlled apartment (every New Yorker’s dream) beside a tidal inlet called Lake Merritt, which faced the courtyard of a church with a magnolia that bloomed twice a year, including—shockingly—in February, purple flowers almost obscene against bare grey bark. And that was where I became both a poet and a gardener.

See, I’d strayed from poetry too, which had also begun with beauty—acrobatics of Emily Dickinson, passion of Audre Lorde, cleverness of Elizabeth Bishop—and somewhere between getting an education, I’d lost the exhilaration of writing, the unfolding of something simultaneously you and beyond your understanding. I’d dug into the “tradition,” experimented with form, learned what the “New York School” was, while uncoupling myself from the impulse poetry arose from in the first place. In that Oakland apartment, without assignments and deadlines for the first time, I learned how to read for pleasure again and to write for it too. I was Emily’s nobody, and I was free.

I filled the kitchen with succulents, living room with woody greenery, hall with trailing pothos. The blank page and new plant—strange, challenging—drew me forward. I learned about light levels, fertilizer, and potting mixes. I went to a lot of therapy. I bought a moisture probe. I fell in love. I put one word in front of another, cleaned dust from leaves, tried not to overwater, repotted. Something remarkable happened, and very slowly, grew.

Leaves came as I wrote between shifts at a café and, later, during my lunchbreak at a desk job near Civic Center. I walked to Dick Blick to buy handmade green paper and pinned it over the cubicle’s gray, propped grow lights in each corner, and then covered the majority of desk space with vines. I scoured the farmer’s market for what was variegated and fenestrated, what twisted and climbed. I am alive, my little grove seemed to say, even here.

As a decidedly language-arts kid who doodled through biology, each unfurling leaf bore a message—something moves beyond conscious knowledge but is imbued, nevertheless, with vitality—and so, I was drawn back, leaf by solitary leaf, to my own mysteries, which I’d long ago put aside as childish things. Turns out, my genius (in the classical sense) and intellect were not as “universal” as I’d been led to believe, but deeply individual. And, more than that, what I found interesting and gave my attention to was purely my own. So, I turned the same eye that kept careful watch over my plants toward myself—what parts of my writing had I kept in a dark corner; which grown rangy; which overfertilized? I saw the ways I’d contorted, been pruned almost unrecognizably. I saw parts of myself, despite it all, reaching toward the light.

Everyone has bad tendencies as a gardener, and my most prominent echoed a larger flaw—impatience, which leads to overwatering, fussing to death. I wanted everything and I wanted it now, but my own fecundity, like that of my plants, couldn’t be rushed. Instead of pressuring each poem with perfection, I committed to stewarding it toward its own unique potential. The poems, unburdened, started to become wilder and more surprising, reminding me of what I’d written before I knew enough to fear being found out as the strange, obsessive, particular writer that I am. In the process, I slowly uncovered a joy that I thought lost, sloughing off my anxiety about what might come next—I was excited to find out. As pothos grows one leaf on the back of the last, hidden until branching beyond its brother, I put one word before another, trusting the next would come, and the next. And I let go of the desire to be a “great writer” I hadn’t even known I’d harbored, and instead, surrendered to simply being a writer, someone who wrote.

Of course, my plants sometimes struggled—tips of leaves browning or yellowing, peace lily wilting dramatically—and so, forced me to stop, to not just look, but to really see until I understood what was needed. Poems were like this too, each particular in its rhythm, structure, and voice, and all I had to do was to spend time in their presence, look closer, listen deeper. And isn’t that what perpetually impatient me came to these practices for in the first place—to test whether focused, careful attention would be rewarded with beauty. And it always has been. Yes, care coaxes beauty, but so does attention itself—it honors and transforms the attended-to thing, is another word for love. And love transforms not just the beloved, but the lover too. In it, I found what was left behind in the woods long ago—a private grove where I could listen to my own wildness, and for once, see it mirrored in the world around me.

The patience honed by cleaning leaves with a microfiber cloth and monitoring progress against fungus gnats, I turned to sending out my work and meticulously documenting it. Spreadsheet cells gradually filled from a dozen to nearly a thousand over the twelve years since grad school. As the money tree scooped up from beside a dumpster grew stately eight-inch leaves, despite branches not being tightly woven like all others I’d seen, those hours began to add up from a journal publication, to chapbooks, to—thrillingly—a full-length collection. And my plants, prophets of patience, looked on. They outgrew their vessels, flexed into their own singular shapes.

There were (and continue to be) failures, like the anthurium thoughtlessly repotted in heavy, all-purpose soil that succumbed almost instantly to root rot. But hope keeps elbowing its way in—having rinsed ruined roots under a hose, I pulled decayed strands apart, and a few shone white, so I reduced the plant to what clung to those roots, and set it in a vase of clean water. And it thrived there, long neck gracefully bent. Similarly, I learned to love my reams of half-finished poems, knowing it often took several attempts to arrive at the poem I’d been circling. And, even if those explorations came to nothing, there was frequently an image or turn of phrase worth rescuing to root elsewhere. Most importantly, I found that even the entirely wasted, half-finished poem was worth the time as a room to think inside of. So, I’ve come to find failure a friend, following behind, handing me cutting for propagation.

Most of my plants survive these days, reach the size where pruning is required. I can’t say the same for poems, but I at least can tell when the sap is running, strange energy coursing down my fingers and onto the page. And the individual poem or plant isn’t what compels me anymore. Instead, they are simply a language by which to interface with a greater unfolding mystery, an offering to whatever life force animates plants to unfurl leaves and writers to turn toward the empty page, watching their pen glide like a planchette.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Look Alive—a finalist for numerous prizes, including The National Poetry Series, and winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press—along with seven chapbooks, most recently The Undead, winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She also serves as Managing Editor of the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQ+ literary journal and press Foglifter.

SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition  by Grace Evans

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SHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition 
by Grace Evans

While writing a first draft of a novel, I turned one scene and an economical one-paragraph description of a mother-daughter relationship into seven scenes dramatizing every aspect of their dynamic. Why? A writing craft book advised me to focus on plotting and crafting scenes, and that eventually I would string all my scenes together and find myself with a complete manuscript.

So, I stretched every idea into a scene that included conjuring an event, developing conflict, and fleshing out character. I invented beginnings, middles, and ends. My draft got longer and slower. It started to bore even me.

I didn’t end up with a decent manuscript draft, but with a realization: a novel should be some scenes, maybe even mostly scenes, but not every character detail or piece of information deserves a whole scene.

To be sure I wasn’t just exhausted from scene-writing, I started to notice large swaths of text in published novels that told. Like oral storytelling, like a folk or fairy tale. But summary or exposition like this is what we’re often advised to avoid. Yet I found that these sections were often where I felt most engaged. In-between is a place to process the previous scene, expand or compress time, show a character confront their feelings.

I noticed two distinct kinds of telling: Interiority: feelings, thought processing; and  Narration: compressed details, exposition that felt alive.

Sonya Huber’s excellent piece on LitHub, “The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’” delves into the merits of exploring interiority through telling; I recommend it. Here though, I want to talk about the second kind of telling I’ve identified–something that I’ve named “alive exposition.”

Let’s look t two examples of alive exposition. The first is the third paragraph of “Good Friends We Have” by Zilla Jones honorable mention for Room Magazine’s Fiction Contest 2020.

Ashdown was hell and I hated it. When I was younger, some of my classmates invited me to their birthday parties or played ponies with me at recess, but then we started junior high, and the other girls’ conversations changed from kittens and our favourite candies to rock stars, actors, and boys. I didn’t know anything about rock stars or actors because my mother refused to have a television in the house, and we were forbidden to listen to anything but classical music. My father was German and played Beethoven and Brahms obsessively, and we all played a string instrument – violin for me, viola for my brother and cello for my sister. As for boys, there was no chance of me meeting any. The other girls encountered them at their families’ clubs and summer cottages, or at dances with our brother school, St Alban’s, which of course I was not permitted to attend.

The main gist of the paragraph is this: My old school was hell and I hated it. When I was younger, I played with my classmates but as we got older, I was excluded from their interests. I never met boys because I never went anywhere and wasn’t allowed to. On their own, these three sentences are generic, express a familiar sentiment, but not interesting. Instead, Jones packed each thought with specific examples and sensory details for an effective telling paragraph of alive exposition:

  • When I was younger: kittens, candles, ponies, recess, birthday parties = inclusion, friends
  • but then we started junior high: rock stars, actors, boys, television = exclusion, rules, difference
  • I didn’t know anything: Beethoven, Brahms, violin, viola, cello, German father = stuffiness, educational, wholesome, restriction
  • As for boys: boys, clubs, cottages, dances = lifestyle, leisure, affluence

So many images and sensory details packed into this six-sentence paragraph! Reading it I feel close to the narrator because I understand how she feels: excluded, strictly guarded, outsider. I get a window into her young school life, teenaged years, homelife, and the lives of the more affluent students.

Jones could have developed these scenarios into multiple scenes, but she chose to set the scenes in the story elsewhere, such as an exchange between the narrator and the school’s mean girl, or the striking conversation where her mother balks at the narrator’s indifference to her school’s pretend slave auction for charity. These scenes are dramatic, memorable exchanges, and the reader is set up to understand the characters because of the telling that comes before.

Of course, if the whole story was told as alive exposition and no scenes appeared, I might feel outside the story. But here it works, and I can pull out themes that will reappear in the story, and that are reinforced and dramatized by the later scenes.

A writer can choose the places in their stories for scenes that offer the most dramatic tension and keep momentum in the story. Exposition allows the writer to compress time and necessary information, but alive exposition makes it vivid, tangible and compelling.

◊

Another work that made a difference for me features alive exposition is the first paragraph in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro, first published in 1999 in The New Yorker (and republished in 2013):

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absentminded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

In her “telling,” Munro places so many sensory details that are specific and therefore exciting for the reader:

  • House: big, bay-windowed, luxurious, crooked rugs, cup rings on tables
  • Mother: froth of white hair
  • Father: absentminded smile
  • Fiona: little car, cashmere sweaters, loud music on phonograph
  • Suitors: curly-haired, gloomy looking, small-town phrases
  • Proposal: cold bright day on beach, sand stinging faces, waves, gravel

What might otherwise feel abstract and general – house, father, mother, daughter, suitors, proposal – Munro makes specific and tangible, and therefore meaningful. The reader might find these characters familiar or they might not, but the story becomes more concrete and compelling via the specificity.

Without revealing interiority or character feelings, Munro gives me a sense of Fiona’s place within her family. She probably antagonizes her mother. She is rebellious, entitled, and playful. The last sentence sends the reader into a half scene featuring Fiona’s proposal, and the casualness of the question mimics the pace of the set up for the scene. It’s quick and the story keeps going.

I found it helpful break down the first 25 paragraphs of the story to better see the balance of exposition and scene:

  • 1 Exposition: Fiona as a young person
  • 2-3 Scene: Fiona proposes to Grant on the beach
  • 4-9 Scene: Fiona cleans the floor before she leaves to live in an assisted-living home
  • 10-13 Exposition: Grant found notes indicating Fiona was experiencing memory issues
  • 14-16 Scene: dialogue between Grant and Fiona regarding her memory
  • 17 Exposition: Fiona’s memory issues continue
  • 18-20 Scene: dialogue between Grant and Fiona regarding her memory
  • 21 Scene: Grant speaks to doctor (contains some summary)
  • 22 Scene: A line of dialogue from the doctor
  • 23 Exposition: Fiona was picked up by police while wandering
  • 24 Scene: Dialogue from Fiona to policeman
  • 25 Exposition: Fiona had asked about long-dead dogs, seeding in hints of conflict within their marriage

While Jones went deep with conflict-packed scenes, Munro’s scenes are shallower, quicker, and act as bridges between exposition. Munro’s exposition in these first 25 paragraphs is where Grant’s point of view emerges, his feelings are explored, the conflicts are made apparent. She brings it alive with details about vitamins, little yellow notes stuck to cupboards, the long legs and silky hair of old greyhounds. Then Munro quickly illustrates the conflict and characters through half scenes and dialogue without stopping the momentum of the story to with long scenes.

◊

While revising my novel I ended up reducing entire scenes to their essence, slicing out events I’d conjured only to show aspects of character or relationships that didn’t propel the story forward. Now I’m choosing to set scenes with vital action, and trying to imbue them with revelatory details, rather than dramatizing descriptions.

I’ll save my scenes for the drama and tell the reader the in-between parts using alive exposition.

Grace Evans is a writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her work has been published in Broken Pencil, Shameless, The Antigonish Review, and Hamilton Arts and Letters. She is currently completing her MFA at the University of British Columbia.

MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN: A Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei, author of THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI, speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell

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MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN
a Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei
author of  THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI
speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell

Tony Taddei’s debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli, is a fast read: the prose is smart and snappy, the characters are funny and flawed, and we can’t look away from the situations Taddei has put them in, situations he believes “best evoke their mortality and individual points of view.” I recently had the opportunity to speak with the author about his book and the craft of short fiction. The discussion included reflections on writing family sagas, the do’s and don’ts of assembling a linked story collection, finding just the right words, and how Taddei’s training as an actor has helped him as a fiction writer. Our conversation has been edited for clarity. —AC, May 2022

Andrea Caswell: Tell us about the title and the title story.

Tony Taddei: The title came to me after I’d finished a couple of stories about the “sons of the sons” – the second-generation boys of the Santorelli family. Those were the first stories I wrote, and I’d already decided on the surname “Santorelli,” which in Italian means “little saints.” I remember rolling around the words “the sons of the sons,” and at a certain point I scribbled down the “The Sons of the Santorelli” in a notebook. Reading it out loud, I liked the alliteration of it, and I also liked the way the words themselves captured the entire saga of multiple generations. Even use of the article the before Santorelli seemed to be a way to signify a whole clan rather than just a single man. Everything about it felt right to me.

It was quite some time after I came up with the title that I wrote the book’s title story, which I’d planned on being the collection’s origin story. By then, using the title “The Sons of the Santorelli” for both that story and the collection had become an easy choice.

You have to find a way to become receptive and very loose in your mind and body when you write. You need to open the pathways to let in those words and phrases that, when you look at them again, make you feel as if they came from somewhere outside yourself.

AC: The collection covers a span of 60 years or so, across the lives of three generations of the Santorelli family. How did you decide where their family saga would begin, and where it would end?

TT: I didn’t know the timespan the stories would cover when I started to work on them. I always knew there’d be a story for each of the first- and second-generation sons (eight in all). I also knew that I wanted an origin story and at least one story about the patriarch of the family, but I wasn’t sure if that would be a single one or multiple stories, and I wasn’t sure in what time period I’d set them. It was only after I’d written each of the above stories that I started to get the sense that the book would span at least 50-60 years – from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. After that, I started to play around with other stories that I thought needed to be added to round out the collection. For instance, I wrote “Commedia dell’Arte” because I sensed that the collection needed at least one story from Aida’s (the matriarch’s) point of view. I also finished drafts of four other stories that took the grandsons into their adulthood, as men in their 40s and 50s. Those stories would’ve taken the collection well up to the 2000s, but once I started to assemble the book, I felt the sensibilities of those stories were part of a different collection. I took those out of the running, and it remains to be seen if I’ll use them as the start of another collection someday.

The circumstances and driving aspects of a story can be a metaphor for the story’s protagonist as well.

AC: There’s a tremendous intimacy to these stories, in that we get to know each character well and see them at some of their most desperate moments. We meet the sons as children, and by the end, they’re adults with their own problems. Yet each story can stand on its own, without needing to rehash previous plot points. Can you share some of the challenges of creating a linked collection like this? Another way of putting it: how did you do that?!?

TT: Once I came up with the family tree, so to speak, and I knew whose point of view I wanted to tell a story from, I just wrote the most honest and surprising, stand-alone stories that I could, trusting that the stories would eventually link in ways I may not have even planned. Of course, as you write a linked collection, you do know each of your characters, and once you’ve written the first few stories, you can use small details from the previous stories in the story you’re currently working on to link them together. But it’s not something I would recommend a writer think too much about when they’re creating a linked collection. A lot of the work of linking stories takes care of itself automatically in the writing, as well as in the reader’s mind. Once the collection is finished, you can always go back and embroider more links to make the connections stronger. What’s most important is to make each story its own, knowing that if you understand how the characters are related, the links will come naturally.

AC: A successful short story creates a sense of immediacy, a sense that something momentous is happening to a character, and I loved that quality throughout the book. Each story is exceptionally focused: an evening walk home from work, one hour of a bachelor party gone wrong, the first time someone uses a snowblower. How did you decide on these singular moments to communicate larger truths about each character?

TT: Again, each of the characters in these stories has their own strengths and failings. Keeping these characters and their personalities in mind, I wanted to draw out the most acute aspects of who they were, and I waited until I found a circumstance to put them in that would best evoke their mortality and individual point of view. I also wanted the book’s stories to have a dark sense of humor as well as a bit of a slapstick quality—humor and slapstick being about surprises, and surprises being what I most wanted these stories to deliver.

I believe that the circumstances and driving aspects of a story can be a metaphor for the story’s protagonist as well. In writing these stories, I waited to find just the right match between character and circumstance. When I found it, a lot of the rest of the writing took care of itself.

AC: Building on the previous question, is the short story your favorite form? At any point in time, did you think you might try to write a novel about this family?

TT: Yes, I like writing short stories most of all. The time frame for writing a short story can give you a more immediate payoff (if by ‘immediate’ you think in terms of the couple of months it can take to write and polish a story, as opposed to the couple of years it can take to write a novel). I’m impatient and tend to lose focus if I work on one single thing for longer than a few months. Short stories allow me to make something good out of that failing of mine. Though I might have tried to write a novel about the Santorellis, writing about them in the short story form not only felt like the right way to do it, but I also think it best suited my talents.

I wanted to help the reader to feel what it might be like to be inside the heads of these characters as they experience the world in their own peculiar ways. 

Contradicting the above just a bit, I should add that despite my love of short stories. I have managed to write one pretty good novel, as well as a novella that I’m fond of (if anyone out there would like to read them, feel free to get in touch with me). I’ve also recently finished the first three chapters of a longer work (I don’t want to jinx it yet by calling it a novel). That said, short stories are my go-to form, and I have another full collection I’ve just finished. They give me a more immediate feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment that none of the longer forms offer.

AC: I learned from your bio that you’re also a trained actor. Has a foundation in acting been helpful to you as a fiction writer? If so, how?

TT: Absolutely. In fact, my writing career started with me writing plays and sketches for performances in small venues around New York City. It was only when I got tired of having to find people to perform my work (not to mention places to have it performed) that I turned to fiction. Once I did, I found that it was the form I had been meant to write all along.

When it comes to writing fiction, my acting training has been undeniably helpful in a couple of critical ways. First, being an actor, you learn to break down a script and understand a character’s and a play’s objectives, beats and actions. In short, you learn to parse dramatic structure, which is table-stakes for writing any good piece of fiction. Second, many good fiction writers fall short when it comes to writing dialogue. Because I was an actor and was taught to find a way to think and speak like whatever character I was playing, I can more easily put myself into the role of the characters I’m writing. Hence, the dialogue I put into their mouths will more often ring true because I find myself – quite literally – speaking it first in their voice before I write it down.

AC: You’re very skilled at conveying background information with a single sentence or short paragraph. There are many examples throughout the book, but I loved this sentence in “The Great Dream,” in which you wrote of the character Vittorio, “The donkey his father used to make a living ate better than he and his brothers did.” Can you share insights on finding just the right words to convey an entire way of life like that?

Keeping these characters and their personalities in mind, I wanted to draw out the most acute aspects of who they were, and I waited until I found a circumstance to put them in that would best evoke their mortality and individual point of view.

TT: I’m not sure there are any insights I can share here. All I can say is that you have to find a way to become receptive and very loose in your mind and body when you write. You need to open the pathways to let in those words and phrases that, when you look at them again, make you feel as if they came from somewhere outside yourself. There’s a physiological feeling I get when the right words, conveying just what I want to say, come to me. It’s a sort of frisson that ripples through my mind and when it does, I know I nailed it. Even though I may not know where it came from or if I’ll ever be able to do it that well again.

AC: These stories are gritty and realistic; we recognize the messiness of humanity in them right away. Yet two of the stories, “Little Man” and “The Son of the Sheik,” contain fabulist or supernatural elements, and you seem comfortable in that realm as well. Can you talk about those two stories in particular, as far as their departure from strict realism?

TT: Those two stories are the most obvious instances of me deploying a little magical realism in the work. But if you look at the rest of the stories, I think you’ll find that a lot of them are also a bit “fabulist,” as you put it. In one story, “We Now Conclude our Broadcast Day,” you have a guy talking through his TV set to 1960’s television celebrities, who sometimes answer him back. In another, “Deus Ex Machina,” you have the protagonist carrying on a dialogue with God, who answers him in some very eerie ways. In writing these stories, I’d have to say that I tried to thematically keep all of them just a little off-center. I thought this might make them more compelling to read, but I also wanted to help the reader to feel what it might be like to be inside the heads of these characters as they experience the world in their own peculiar ways.

AC: David Gates has praised the collection for its “unsentimental departure from the conventional immigrant family saga,” and for your intimate knowledge of these characters’ dreams and disappointments. As a child or younger person, did you interact with family members who, like Vittorio and Aida, came to the U.S. from Italy?

TT: I am a first-generation Italian American. My parents were born in Italy and came to this country with their parents when they were small children, nearly 100 years ago. I was also lucky enough to have grown up with all four of my immigrant grandparents, so yes, I did interact with family members who had some similar sensibilities and attitudes to Vittorio, Aida, etc. David is right when he says I have intimate knowledge of these characters’ dreams, and I do have a strong first-hand understanding of the types of people who live (and die) in The Sons of the Santorelli.

That said, I wouldn’t want a reader to think that the characters in this collection are members of my family, thinly disguised. I purposely gave the people in these stories broad characteristics beyond those of the family I grew up with. I also pushed them into circumstances that did not happen. What’s on the page here is fiction, and the most you might say about how I tapped into my family and their dreams to write these stories is that the stories bear an emotional imprint of who they were. Never a literal one.

AC: You’ve included film, television, music, and literature references throughout the collection. Some of your characters seek solace and escape in these art forms, which deepens our understanding of their emotional lives. Were any of these arts formative for you, as far as your ultimate path to becoming a writer? I’m thinking of “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, for instance.

TT: Early on I came to depend on the comfort and inspiration that the arts brought to my life. Reading, listening to music, and watching TV and movies allowed me to escape the small life I was living, to dream of worlds and ways of being that were just not available to me in the dreary Northeast town where I grew up. Like just about everyone else (then and now), my parents and extended family consumed their share of television, movies, and popular music (though none of them ever read anything more than a newspaper). What I realized when I was young was that books, movies, television, and other popular art forms had a far different effect on me than they had on others in my family.

I didn’t purposely set out to weave references to music, television, etc. into the work when I began writing the Santorelli stories. As I got into writing them, however, I found that using pop music, literature, and cultural artifacts from TV and movies as reference points for the characters made the work more accessible and, for me, more truthful. It was also a great deal of fun to have Jack London, or Sly and the Family Stone, or Dean Martin or G.I. Joe come along for the ride as their own minor characters and/or period anchor points in the work. It allowed me to reconnect with what art and pop culture meant to me as a boy. It also sunk me (and I hope the reader) into the stories in a way that would not have been possible without it.

AC: The cover design for The Sons of the Santorelli recently won gold in the prestigious Hermes Creative Awards. Congratulations to you and to all involved in the publication of this beautiful book.

TT: Thank you so much.

The Sons of the Santorelli, Bordighera Press, 160 pages, is available for purchase here.

Tony Taddei was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. His humor and fiction have appeared in publications including Story Magazine, Folio, New Millennium Writings, The Funny Times, Pif Magazine, Animal and The Florida Review. Tony holds an MFA from the prestigious Bennington Writing Seminars and is a recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship for fiction. A trained actor, for many years Tony created characters on stage before turning his attention to inventing life on the page. Tony currently resides in New Jersey where he raised three daughters and lives with his wife Karen and their 2-year-old Cockapoo Brodie.

Andrea Caswell is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine, where she runs the Short Story Clinic to provide feedback on short fiction (submit here). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 her fiction was selected for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, she now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. For an opportunity to write with Andrea, you can register for her upcoming class, The Write Time, here.

A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart, a Craft Essay by Vivian Conan

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A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF
On Writing from the Heart, A Craft Essay
by Vivian Conan

I was fifty-two when I chanced upon the bright marigold flyer taped to a streetlight in my Manhattan neighborhood. The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA, it said. One of the courses listed:  The Personal Essay. I had never heard that term, but it sounded like just what I’d been looking for.

From the time I learned to print, I’d wanted to be a writer, even though on a parallel track, I believed all the books that were ever going to be written had already been written. I got this impression from the pictures on a card game called Authors that I played with my brother. With old-fashioned hairstyles and names like Sir Walter Scott, authors were, most assuredly, all dead.

In third grade, I learned cursive, the grownup way of writing, and took up my pen. “Once there was a girl named Carol,” I wrote. “She lived in a wooden house. One day her house caught fire. After the fire, she could not find her mother.” The tension builds, there’s a resolution, and at the end of 579 words, “they all lived happily [ever] after.” I was on my way.

I don’t know at what point I realized books were still being written, but when I did, I despaired. How would I ever write anything that long?

At twenty-six, I became a librarian. My dream of becoming a writer went into hibernation.

But then, there was the marigold flyer.

For the past two years, I had been trying to write an article about my mental health struggles. After decades of unsuccessful therapy, I learned, at 46, that I had what was then called multiple personality disorder, or MPD. Because the diagnosis was often sensationalized in the media, I kept it under wraps. The more successful I was at hiding it, the more invisible and isolated I felt. I wanted to destigmatize MPD by showing that people like those in my support group were not freaks but ordinary people who had experienced childhood trauma and were trying our best to make it through each day—work, maintain friendships, shop for food, sleep. I had been rewriting the same few pages for months, unsure how to proceed.

I registered for the course.

Three weeks into the ten-week session, I got up the courage to bring in my draft. Comments were along the lines of “Fascinating, but too generic. We want to know about your experience.”

I never considered that my own life would be of interest. I had envisioned an article something like those in The New York Times Magazine, a level-headed overview of the clinical literature, sprinkled with just enough examples from my own experience to illustrate a point. I felt I needed the clinical theory for credibility. Yet in class, I’d listened to feedback on other students’ work and found there was a core of people I usually agreed with—the same people who felt my article wasn’t personal enough.

In my next draft, I put in more of myself but retained the theory.

“This is better,” the class said, “but we want even more of you.”

From the discussion that followed, I began to understand that there was a difference between an article, which I probably couldn’t get published because I didn’t have a platform—I was not a nationally known clinician or researcher—and an essay, which could come entirely from my own experience.

When the term ended, I reenrolled, and with each successive draft, I upped the me-content and removed some theory. The piece was becoming more personal than I was comfortable with. For the class, however, it was improving. “You should consider writing a memoir,” the teacher said.

The essay that appeared (under a pseudonym) in New York magazine on August 4, 1997, five years after I conceived it, was about 85% personal. By then I was in a class at the JCC of Manhattan called Advanced Nonfiction, working on a memoir, and with the help of the instructor, had acquired an agent. The essay led to an auction. Within a week I had a book contract. That was exciting, but scary. My completed manuscript was due in 14 months, less time than it had taken to shepherd one essay through its life cycle.

It took me six weeks to produce the first draft of a chapter. Workshopping and rewriting added another two. At first, this didn’t worry me. Shielded by tunnel vision, I was happy with the quality of the individual chapters.

No longer hesitant to reveal my insides, I wrote about how as a child, I created a fantasy world I called the Atmosphere, where kindly Atmosphere people gave me what I couldn’t get from my family. (My third-grade self had written about something similar, except it was a mother the girl had lost and a policeman who found her mother.) I wrote about how, as I grew older, the Atmosphere people became more real to me than real people, and about therapists who were flummoxed. Comments from the class showed me that though my story may have been extreme, it was also universal. Everyone related to my need to be seen and understood.

I continued putting my insides, unprotected and uncensored, into each chapter, until, all of a sudden, my deadline loomed. With something like whiplash, I snapped out of tunnel vision to assess the whole. Less than a third. My childhood dread rushed back: how would I ever write something as long as a book?

I submitted what I had, along with an outline of the missing chapters. The publisher granted me a six-month extension, then another six, then cancelled my contract. I returned the advance.

Far from being upset, I was relieved. My memoir would be finished whenever it was finished. Only then would I try to sell it.

If I had known it would take another twenty years, I probably would have quit. But I didn’t know, so I continued writing in the morning, going to work in the afternoon, revising in the evening, and re-upping for the workshop. Very slowly, chapters were accumulating. By the time I wrote “The End,” I was seventy-five.

It would be another three years before my book was published. By then I was comfortable going public with a very personal story: Losing the Atmosphere, A Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. The only clinical explanation is in the afterword, written by my therapist.

In hindsight, I can see that I needed all that time. I was a work in progress, evolving not only as a writer, but as a person. Early on, I hadn’t felt entitled to comment on other students’ pieces or make conversation as we walked out after class. Gradually, from listening to feedback on my chapters, I discovered I was a person worth discovering. I grew more confident, began to contribute to the discussion, and became part of a writing community. All the while I was still in therapy, healing at the same time that I was writing about healing. If I had finished the book earlier, it would not have had the same ending.

When I think back to my very young self, I want to hug her and say, Yes, little girl, you can be a writer. Then I realize she didn’t need encouragement. She just sharpened her pencil and wrote what was in her heart. So instead, I thank her for showing me how to write what was in mine. Both our stories are about hungering for a mother, but I took 450 pages to say it, and she took 579 words.

A librarian and native New Yorker, Vivian Conan grew up in a large Greek-Jewish clan in Brooklyn, did a stint in the Bronx, and now lives in Manhattan. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Lilith, Narratively, Next Avenue, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and Ducts. Her memoir is Losing the Atmosphere. Learn more at VivianConan.com.

 

A Conversation with Ann de Forest Editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING by Amy Beth Sisson

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A Conversation with Ann de Forest
Editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING
New Door Press, 258 pages
Interview by Amy Beth Sisson

I met writer Ann de Forest many years ago, but during the pandemic we formed a new connection around poetry. We became critique partners and attended Claire Oleson’s Poetic Anatomies class. Ann is an accomplished writer in multiple genres who often focuses on the resonance of place. When she mentioned she was editing an anthology of essays about walking, I knew it was something that I, as a walker, reader, and writer, wanted to get my hands on. After reading the advance reader copy, I was impressed not only by the excellent essays but by the thoughtful structure of the collection. I was delighted to have this conversation with Ann about the project. (The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) —ABS, April 2021

Amy Beth: Tell me how you came to edit this compelling collection of essays about walking.

Ann: In 2016, I was involved in Swim Pony’s Cross Pollination artists residency with Adrienne Mackey, JJ Tiziou, and Sam Wend. Together we decided our collaborative project would be to walk around the perimeter of Philadelphia. That experience, which I wrote about in an article for “Hidden City”, changed my perspective on many things: the city, my writing, and especially walking. After, whenever I told people about that project, I was amazed by how many wanted to tell me their own stories about walking. People like to talk about where they’ve walked and how they’ve walked. It struck me that there were all these possibilities for writing about walking.

Amy Beth: It’s funny that you mention people wanting to tell you their stories because after I read the collection, I wanted to tell you one of my walking stories. When my youngest was in sixth grade, we lived in Silicon Valley. He walked a mile to school. He was one of the few students from our neighborhood who did this. Some parents expressed their concern for his safety. I felt like they were worrying about the wrong risk. They were worrying about stranger danger which is rare, rather than the slow dangers of obesity or of climate change.

Ann: I love the idea that we focus on the wrong danger. On the first day of our walk around Philadelphia we encountered that. People at a driving range on City Line Avenue were saying, oh, you better be careful when you get up to X part of the city. These where white guys, and their fear of other parts of the city is fundamentally racist. It’s all the same city, but we mentally create these danger zones in our heads. And of course, that wasn’t the experience for us at all. The most dangerous places on our walk were the many places not designed for pedestrians.

When you walk you see how connected everything is. That one thing flows into the other. The other thing your story makes me think of is how the automobile dominates and controls our environment. So the “wrong danger” is not just the slow dangers like climate change. Cars themselves are lethal. Think how many car accidents there are. Yet we’ve built this society and infrastructure around the automobile and label that mode of transportation “safe.”

Amy Beth: This makes me think of the essay in the collection by Tom Zoellner, “Nobody Walks to LAX” about airports. They’re not created with walking in mind. That was one of the most surprising stories for me.

Ann: One of Tom’s great insights is how hard it is to walk in or out of airports but you walk so much once you get inside. Inside the airport walking is demanded of you. And it’s not the most pleasant walking.

Amy Beth: Several stories explore how identity influences walking. In your essay “Aberrant Angeleno,” you talk of your vulnerability as a woman walking alone. There is that striking moment in Lena Popkin’s essay “Tread Lightly” where men ogle her while on a walk with her oblivious father and brother and her struggle to get the men who love her to understand. Dwight Sterling Dunston’s essay “A Walk with Hawk” tells a compelling story of his father’s peril while walking in a white neighborhood as a Black man. Can you talk a little bit about that contradiction of things being both safer than we think they are and for some more dangerous?

Ann: Who you are influences how you walk. For some people, walking is not as easy as for others. Walking while Black is perilous. We see the tragedy of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder and other stories about people who are unsafe in certain places or neighborhoods. Places anybody who’s white doesn’t have to think about being in. It was important to me to get that perspective.

Victoria Farmer, who has cerebral palsy, wrote about her experience walking in London. She wanted to walk through London like Virginia Woolf, but she had to come to terms with her differences. She couldn’t walk as freely and unencumbered as Woolf. There’s this moment where she and her husband are waiting for a bus on a day that she is using her wheelchair. The bus passes her by because there is room for only one wheelchair. Disability is another identity that influences one’s way of walking in the world.

Amy Beth: In those diverse ways, the anthology takes the reader through history, time, and necessity.

Ann: Necessity is an important consideration. There’s a story in the anthology where the walk was a necessity. Yasser Allaham in “Crossing to Jordan” wrote of having to leave Syria in 2013 during the war. His city and his university were bombed. His family got out but he, because of various technicalities, was not able to go with them across the border. He spends a month in a no-man’s land between Syria and Jordan, trying to figure out how to get there. It reminds us that not all walks are leisurely or planned. And this same forced movement is happening right now. I’ve heard two million people have left Ukraine, many on foot. [Note: as of our conversation on 3/14/2022. The number is now much higher.]

Amy Beth: In the preface you say walking is subversive. Tell me more about that.

Ann: Walking is counter to the things our culture values. We live in a society that values speed, efficiency, and the arrival more than the journey. Walking contradicts all those things.

Nancy Brokaw’s essay, “The Hiker and the Flâneur” opens the collection with a history of walking and the ways writers and thinkers have looked at walking. Both the idea of a hike and the idea of being a flaneur, or someone who ambles through the city, are inventions of the modern era going back to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. They arise from the anxiety that’s attached to living in a fast-paced civilization. Walking is an antidote. Our culture tells us we have to have all this stuff to get through daily life. To walk is to say, I have my own body and my two legs, and I don’t really need any more than that.

Kalela Williams, at the end of her essay, “The Three Century Walk” talks about marching in protest after the killing of George Floyd, and the power of bodies walking together demanding justice. The protest marches of the summer of 2020 belong to a long legacy of walking alongside others in solidarity and protest to effect change. That’s another form of subversive walking.

Amy Beth: That brings me to Mark Geanuleas, whose subversive act is to walk absolutely everywhere.

Ann: Mark made a decision that he wasn’t going to use any other form of transportation. He lives in Lancaster and his parents live in Elkins Park. If he wants to visit them, he must decide to walk about seventy-five miles to Philadelphia. He also does a very long walk every year. For him it’s a philosophical choice about how to live. For Mark, to live fully in the present, walking is the only option.

Amy Beth: Which shows in another way the different ways people with different bodies experience walking. I was also struck by the idea that walking allows us to connect more deeply with history.

Ann: Kalela Williams writes about giving tours of Black history in Philadelphia so that people will see things that they might not notice otherwise because not all of it is acknowledged or commemorated. Walking in her case is a kind of commemoration and a way to be a witness to the past. When you walk you’re so much in the present tense, but I think you’re also more attuned to the fact that others have walked before you.

Jeeyeun Lee is a visual artist who has done amazing walking projects. For her the walk itself has a performative aspect as well as an aspect of discovery and witness, it’s almost like a form of moving land acknowledgment. In her essay “100 Miles in Chicagoland” she explores how Chicago got to be what it is today, with buildings and highways constructed on what were once native paths and native lands. She is walking with the heightened consciousness of what was there before, exposing the theft and displacement that underlies American expansion and settlement.

In a similar vein, Nathaniel Popkin’s essay “Finding Purchase: Walks of Witness on Stolen Land” is about tracing the steps of the Walking Purchase, the theft of Delaware Indian lands in 1735. He conceives his walk as an act of penance, and so it’s very ritualistic. He’s experiencing the river he loves and grew up alongside, but that he also realizes is part of stolen land. He links this to a walk along another river, in Chile, also wrested from the Indigenous inhabitants to build a hydroelectric dam.

Amy Beth: I noticed the strong connections between walking and writing. Kathryn Hellerstein in her essay “Walking on Shabbes” drafts poems while walking.

Ann: Yes, and Rahul Mehta in his essay “Tunnels” writes that he is tapping the essay we are reading on his phone while walking in Carpenter’s Woods.

Christine Nelson’s essay “Five Thousand Walks Toward Thoreau’s Journal” is about the relationship for Thoreau between walking and writing. In his diaries, he’s “keeping track” of the things that happen to him. I love that image because the idea of keeping track is related to the tracks you make while you’re walking. And that idea that the marks you make on a page look like tracks on a page. For Thoreau, it’s not just about walking; it’s about walking in order to be a writer, to be a thinker, to experience the world in a sauntering way. It’s not that there’s one or the other, but that those things become part of a holistic creative life.

Amy Beth: What are some of the other themes or surprises that emerged?

 Ann: I was surprised so many writers wrote about their fathers. There are a few beautiful essays about walking with fathers but only one essay about a mother: Mickey Herr’s essay, “A Walker’s Paradise.” It explores how her recovery from leukemia and getting stronger intersects with her mother’s getting weaker and more immobile. I was also surprised that given the power of nocturnal walks in literature there were only a few on the topic. Justin Coffin’s “The Way Home” is about walking through suburban subdivisions at night; it’s a walk he doesn’t want to be taking. When he arrives he experiences a revelation about home.

It was a delight to discover how the essays speak to each other. The anthology feels like this great conversation. Read all the essays and you may end up with an expanded view about what walking is and maybe it will encourage you to go out for a walk yourself.

Amy Beth Sisson lives in a small town outside of Philadelphia. Her day job is in software development. She tells programmers what business people want and tells business people why they can’t quite have it. She recently completed the University of Pennsylvania’s online Modern Poetry course, ModPo. Her fiction has appeared in Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. Her non-fiction for children has appeared in Highlight’s High Five and Fun for Kidz magazines.

 

Ann de Forest’s work often centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, Found Poetry Review, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Timber Creek Review, Open City, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. Her anthology WAYS OF WALKING WAS inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

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THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER
by Janelle Monáe
Harper Voyager, 321 Pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson

In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world where an individual’s inner circuitry—their deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires—faces judgment from the illuminating eye of New Dawn, freedom is sought out by those who find liberation in the shadows. Monáe’s songs follow the story of Jane 57821, whose queerness made society view her as a deviant with unclean coding—a “dirty computer.” Dreaming of a better future, Jane 57821 broke free of the chains of New Dawn by daring to remember who she really was, sowing the seeds of revolution in her wake. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collaborative work with influential writers of the Afrofuturism genre, exploring the expanded mythos Monáe created through her uniquely futuristic yet funky sound. Taking place in the same universe as Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian is a collection of short stories set after Jane 57821’s daring escape.

In the introduction “Breaking Dawn,” Monáe’s world unfolds like a memory uncurling itself within the corners of your mind. She sets the scene for stories to come, detailing the rise of an all-seeing regime hungry to peer into the clandestine inner networks of its citizens. What Monáe does well is that she immerses you in the story through her evocative writing, utilizing a distinct voice that merges the technological with the thoughtful, the analytical with the sentimental. Through her writing you feel the underlying humanity in an age where living beings are reduced to technical components, regarded coldly as “computers.” But what I found interesting was the last line of “Breaking Dawn,” in which Monáe beautifully introduces the larger themes interwoven throughout her stories: “Beyond time and memory—where the computer cannot reach—is dreaming.” This line calls upon the reader to consider the interconnectivity of time, memory, and dreams, and the cost of a future without them.

The presence of New Dawn serves as a critique of modern society’s intolerance of diversity, sexuality, and gender expression. New Dawn is the amalgamation of all the prejudicial laws and ideologies that persisted unabated in the nation’s past, which the reader comes to understand is our current day. In order to enforce their idea of what is socially acceptable, New Dawn developed technology to harvest, manipulate, and erase the memories of the populace. But as Monáe warns: “Memory of who we’ve been—of who we’ve been punished for being—was always the only map into tomorrow.” It’s this overarching theme that unites the different perspectives across her narratives.

Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson challenge our understanding and perception of memory in the titular story “The Memory Librarian,” where we get the perspective from inside the ivory towers of New Dawn. Seshet serves as Director Librarian of a city called Little Delta, and her job is to collect and analyze the memories of its citizens to ensure compliance with the New Dawn ethos. Under her watch, anyone who is revealed to be a dirty computer is sent to a New Dawn facility to have their memories erased, a cruel process called “torching.”Seshet was on her way to rising the ranks, until falling in love with a mysterious woman named Alethia 56934 sets off a series of events that threaten to undermine New Dawn’s influence over Little Delta. Facing an impossible choice between love and duty, Seshet considers doing the unthinkable to maintain control. It’s through Seshet’s inner turmoil that Monáe and Johnson beg the question, who are we without our memories—those encrypted echoes of the past that make us who we are and guide us into who we will become? In a world that violates the sanctity of memory, are we not the owners of our own soul?

Janelle Monáe

“Save Changes” switches perspectives to the other end of the spectrum of New Dawn’s influence, following the life of a family under near-constant surveillance. Amber and her sister Larissa live as outcasts as a consequence of their mother’s past rebellion against New Dawn; their time is monitored throughout the day. To escape their bleak reality the girls attend an illegal party on the outskirts of town, but this adventure turns out to be more than what Amber bargained for. Armed only with a mysterious stone her late father gave her, Amber must decide how to keep her family together with the time she has left before New Dawn takes them away. In this story Monáe and Yohanca Delgado explore an important aspect of time travel: how to make the biggest impact with so little time to make a change. Time is a force we cannot fully control and can barely fathom—so how do we find a way to utilize it to change our lives and the lives of those around us? Yet the beauty of Amber’s story is that she comes to realize that there is never a right time to take action, so long as you have the courage to act in the first place.

The last (and my favorite) story is “Timebox (ALTAR)ed,” where four children discover among the remnants of the past the future they could only dream of. Bug, Olagunde, Trellis, and Artis live in the town of Freewheel, on the outskirts of New Dawn’s “cities of light.” New Dawn took something away from each child—their parents, their homes, their health, their hope. One day they stumble upon the remains of an ancient city in a nearby forest and, with Bug’s lead, they create an altar of found art out of the junk. What I enjoyed about this particular story is that Monáe and Sheree Renée Thomas created a future for the children that reflected their individual talents—Bug the artist, Ola the inventor, Trell the healer, and Artis the lover. Seeing the Freewheel children discover how their gifts can change the future encourages readers to consider how their own talents can shape the future they live in.

What I love about The Memory Librarian is that its stories convey one of the tenets of Afrofuturism: that there is no way to create tomorrow without drawing from the lessons of yesterday. African Americans, as well as other ethnic minority groups, know all too well that those who neglect the past are doomed to repeat it. Remembering our history, both the pain and the triumph, serves as a way to guide our steps into the future we’ve always dreamed—one of diversity, inclusion, and equality. The book centers around another doctrine of  Afrofuturism: hope. Despite the current circumstances there always exists the possibility of things changing for the better. And although hope can be a source of motivation to move toward brighter days ahead, it can conversely become a burden that can keep you stuck within the limitations of the present. However, as Monáe writes, to hope means to “work out that invisible balance so you don’t get crushed but also don’t float away.”

As a reader, I enjoy character-driven narratives where the protagonists’ journeys challenge their perspectives and mold them into who they’re destined to become. I also connect with diverse characters who reflect my reality as an African American woman. I love that Monáe’s stories are filled with a unique cast of characters that are unapologetically BIPOC, queer, and feminine. The Memory Librarian spans different experiences and perspectives, from a driven yet fragile Director Librarian whose love is considered “dirty” to a young, black, gender-neutral child whose art is their way of connecting to their long lost mother. I found that I was able to relate to all of the characters, in part, because of the third person personal perspective through which the stories are told. I gained insight into the backgrounds, motivations, and inner workings of the characters from a point of view that explores their individual experiences through an objective lens. However, I also related to the characters because in them I saw pieces of myself: Seshet’s journey reflected my drive to succeed in a white-dominated field, Amber’s life being profiled harkened to my own experiences with racial profiling, and the hope of the Freewheel children ignites my hope for the future as well.

Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a provocative collection of narratives that urges us to take heed of our past, take hold of the time we have, and take action toward creating a better tomorrow for all. These stories ask us to tap into the inner software of our souls to find the courage to be our most authentic selves, to love freely and openly, and to make a difference in the world around us. It’s with Monáe’s final charge that we are called to action: “You’ve got to dream a future before you can build a future. Together, let us begin this dreaming awake.”

Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”

THE ORIGINAL GLITCH, a novel by Melanie Moyer, reviewed by Michael Sasso

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THE ORIGINAL GLITCH
by Melanie Moyer
Lanternfish Press, 362 pages
reviewed by Michael Sasso

“Jesus was a carpenter, King Arthur was an orphan, and Laura was a broke, lonely millennial.” This is how Laura, the artificially intelligent protagonist, is summed up in Melanie Moyer’s sophomore novel, The Original Glitch (Lanternfish Press, October 2021). Every generation envisions its savior as one of its most unassuming: so, while the Wachowskis gave us introverted, Gen-X cyberhacker Neo in The Matrix films, Moyer provides Laura, the downtrodden but culturally-aware Millennial. Unlike Neo, however, Laura cannot escape her virtual prison, and her “magical” digital powers are lackluster. It is telling of the Millennial ethos that, even though the novel is about saving the world, the universe of The Original Glitch is familiar, ordinary, prosaic.

Laura is created in reaction to a malevolent AI named Theo. When Theo’s creator, Dr. Kent, starts to believe that he’s an unhinged sociopath, she puts him in a digital prison locked inside a physical box. Then she conceives Laura: 1. to prove that an AI can be “good” and 2. as a possible weapon against Theo. (The Matrix parallels continue: Laura is Neo to Theo’s Agent Smith.) For more than half of the novel, Laura is unaware that she’s bodiless, made up of zeros and ones. Her virtual reality is based upon a small town in upstate New York, in which she believes she’s a twenty-something who works at a pizza parlor. Her existence is unremarkable, save her haunting belief that she is trapped within the town’s borders. She chalks her entrapment up to capitalist society: “She understood that everything about the way America functioned kept people in their place unless they were beautiful or brilliant (or rich).”

The narrative alternates between Laura’s perspective and that of Adler, a grad student and Dr. Kent’s protégé. He is one of only a few who knows of Theo and Laura’s existence. His (real-life) existence is depressingly like Laura’s (digital one). Each is consumed by melancholia, has little hope for the future, and is a borderline alcoholic. Adler is withdrawn from his friends but finds solace in “watching” Laura via a computer interface. In this way, Original Glitch becomes something like The Matrix meets The Truman Show. Adler’s affection for her is the only warm feeling to which he is attuned, and it remains ambiguous whether his voyeurism is stirred by platonic empathy or a creepy romantic interest.

Despite the plot’s layered complexity, readers will be disappointed that The Original Glitch never achieves its dramatic potential. The pacing is glacial. One loses count of the number of scenes in which Adler and Laura (respectively) pour themselves cheap whiskey to drown their sorrows, or the times Adler explains the grave danger everyone, supposedly, is in.

This threat of danger, which is technically the backbone of the plot, remains undefined, as Theo’s intent is obscure. Theo dismisses the idea that he will cause physical harm and he but half-heartedly gestures toward causing political chaos. He does, however, try to blackmail Adler’s closest friend. Yet, the victimized character handles it with remarkable poise; it amounts to little more than a stumbling block. Similarly, Laura—who is meant to be the novel’s messianic character—only comes to know her potential during the concluding pages, leaving her no time for significant growth or self-realization.

Melanie Moyer

The thematic focus, instead, is on Adler’s journey from a selfish loner to a more open, empathetic individual. On one hand, the friendships he fosters (with human beings) over the course of the book are charming. On the other, a reader may be frustrated by the hypocrisy he displays in treating Laura like a person while he calls Theo “not a someone…” and reduces him, and his emotions, to just “data.” When Adler responds to Theo’s coldness with outright meanness, the entire posse that aids him (including an insightful psych major) points out that maybe Theo isn’t so evil after all, that maybe he’s just cranky that he’s been locked in a box. Indeed, Dr. Kent admits that Theo “was a child who skipped important steps, that he never developed a moral code.” Yet Adler never learns to empathize with Theo. There seems to be great irony that, despite Adler’s and Laura’s growing abilities to self-reflect, Adler never considers treating Theo as an entity that needs help or care. The irony is compounded by the fact that the novel begins with an epitaph from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the words of the monster himself: “I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Like Frankenstein’s monster, Theo was never loved or nurtured. Moyer, seemingly by accident, espouses the cruel concept of misunderstood Otherness that Shelly’s novel criticized.

Original Glitch, nonetheless, has its virtues. It is a telling snapshot of the Millennial plight. While all its characters feel “stuck” in life, it is Laura—whose digital world is deliberately designed to keep her from progressing (geographically, romantically, or financially)—whose insight points to the limits of human agency. She is resigned to the fact that capitalist America’s socioeconomic flexibility is not what it once was. Her worldview is drastically different from Boomers’ “by the bootstraps” ideology; it is pointedly Millennial. The novel contends that our universe, with its defined limits and boundaries, is not much different than a computer program.

Moyer also explores the generation’s anxieties regarding reproduction. While the choice to not have children is less a taboo today than it once was, it is significant that most of the novel’s central characters—including Laura—are queer, part of a community for which child-rearing has always been an explicit choice. Dr. Kent, who asexually “births” both Theo and Laura, reflects and agonizes over her decision. She posits, “What is there to be earned, to be gained, in creating [life]?” The Original Glitch speaks to the evolving nature of procreation and parenthood. It even alludes to the possibility of a posthuman future where AIs are common members of the social milieu: Charlie, Adler’s ex, consoles Laura after she discovers that she is an AI, saying, “There’s more than one way to live. Yours is just…it’s a newer way, for sure.”

Far from the save-the-world-from-catastrophe thriller that its book jacket promises, The Original Glitch is a meandering inquisition of the purpose of life. Though Adler and Laura each find some temporary satisfactions, Moyer’s book offers no concrete answers. Instead, it suggests that asking the question is what makes one human. As Dr. Kent puts it, for an AI to be truly intelligent, “they’d have to be like us, eternally pining for purpose.”

Michael Sasso HeadshotAn MA candidate in English & Media Studies at Rutgers University, Michael Sasso has spent much of his adulthood wandering (but seldom lost). Before moving to Philadelphia, he made short films in Los Angeles, tended bar, taught yoga, and was a nanny in the Midwest. His scholarly and creative interests include critical posthumanism and fiction that captures the intersection of science and spirit. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlas and Alice and The Coil. Sasso is on Instagram @MickSasso.

POETRY SCHOOL A Workshop in Poetic Movements taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson, June 4—July 9

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POETRY SCHOOL
A Workshop in Poetic Movements
taught by Cleaver Senior Poetry Editor Claire Oleson
Saturday, June 4—Saturday, July 9
Asynchronous with optional Zoom sessions on June 18 and 25 at 11 am ET
Final Zoom reading July 9 at 11 am ET
$250

Register Now

Have you wanted to dive into the history of American poetry while keeping a focus on your own work? In this course, we will tour poetic schools throughout (mostly) American history, extracting their stylistic staples to apply to our own creative work.

Each week will feature a new school of poetry, from the sweeping metric slopes of Romanticism to the varying, slippery concept of contemporary poetry. The goal of this course is to both expose writers to a large swath of styles and poets as well as encourage them to find their own voice as they consciously adopt the tools and talents of the histories we move through.

At its core, this course juggles two things: providing an education and creating space for a generative workshop. At the end of the day, we are centered on the participants’ work, using the tour of poetic schools as a spine to encourage us to press our usual boundaries and bring intentionality and awareness to our own language, voice, and style. The workshop model will facilitate constructive responses from both peers and the instructor. Particular attention will be placed on adopting elements and tactics gleaned from different poetic historical moments while still preserving the inherent perspective of the participants as contemporary writers.

The two optional zoom class sessions will be used to focus on schools of poetry that invest in elements such as meter and performance: spaces that truly demand sound for full engagement.

The readings will be brief but rich, with the intent of inviting multiple re-readings, close readings, note-taking and flexibility for everyone’s lives and work. Supplemental reading will be available for those hungry for more plums from the proverbial icebox. Prompts will be provided inspired by the week’s reading, but will be designed more as springboards for beginning rather than hard-and-fast regulations. Work will be submitted weekly for peer and instructor review. One piece will be chosen by the student for revision for the final class. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism.

A final optional Zoom meeting will be held as a reading of our work. This will be a veritable museum showcase!

Instructor Bio 

Claire OleClaire Oleson is a queer writer and 2020 Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. She is the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and the Poetry Editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her chapbook, Things from the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, debuted May, 2020.

 

SYLLABUS

1: Introductions: What’s School? I have a Confession…

We will open with an investigation of what is meant by a “school” or movement in poetic history. We will start with the Confessionalist movement of Post-War 20th century America. This school offers us a nice lean in: a clear identifiable style with a great deal of internal variation and a warm invitation to write sincerely about the self.

2: The Imagist Movement

This week, we will dive into writing that borrows inspiration from image. This movement is usually identified as originating in the U.S. and Europe around the 1910s and is nestled into the larger Modernist tradition. We will be invited to consider how language operates to create a picture and how that picture can function as a communicator in and of itself.

3: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry

In a sharp left turn, this module will explore writing the writing of the Language movement. Born in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, this movement leans away from the figurative and imagistic and promotes language as itself. This movement also focuses on the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning.

4: The Beat Generation

With fundamental influences from the Romantic movement, this school is firmly rooted in a tumultuous moment in American history from post WWII to the 1970s. This style is characterized by a rejection of narrative forms, explicit embraces of the human condition, and a fearlessness in the face of obscenity.

5: A New School but not The New School

In this final module, we will take a look at some stylistically innovative contemporary writers and participants will be asked to craft their own “school” or “movement” of poetry, communicate its identifiable features and ethos, and edit a poem previously submitted for the class to illustrate the style and voice they are presenting.

ZOOM 1: The Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word: Poetry as an Oral form In American History

ZOOM 2: Romantic Poetry (Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries) the Defining Forms

Schedule (June 4- July 9)

New Modules posted on Mondays,

Pieces due by Friday, 11:59.

Feedback from All Due by Sunday, 11:59

Zoom sessions on Saturdays at 11 AM

  • One on June 18 and one on June 25
  • Final zoom reading: July 9

TELL ME WHAT YOU EAT: Writing About Food and Ourselves, taught by Kristen Martin, June 7-28, 2022

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Writing About Food and Ourselves
taught by Kristen Martin
for beginner to advanced nonfiction writers
Four weeks
June 7–28
Zoom meetings 5:30–7:30 PM ET on Tuesdays 6/7, 6/14, 6/21, 6/28
Class Limit: 12
$250

Register Now

TELL ME WHAT YOU EAT and I will tell you who you are. Food writing most often calls to mind food criticism: reviews that capture and evaluate the experience of a meal. But the best food writing illuminates beyond food’s immediate appeal, providing insight into identity, culture, memory, and place. A sub-genre of food writing that provides that insight is the food-centric personal essay or memoir. In this four-week course, we will read and discuss work by writers like Toni Tipton-Martin, Francis Lam, Michelle Zauner, Mayukh Sen, and Ruth Reichl, and we will use our own memories of food as lenses into exploring ourselves.

Each week, we will meet on Zoom (5:30–7:30 PM EST on Tuesdays) for synchronous discussions of readings and writing exercises. During the last two weeks, participants will have the opportunity to workshop one essay/memoir piece with their peers. Participants will also receive written instructor feedback on one essay/memoir piece.

Week One: The Proustian Madeline—Using Food as a Doorway to Memory

Week Two: Food and Personality

Week Three: Food and Cultural Identity / Workshop Group 1

Week Four: Smorgasbord / Workshop Group 2

Kristen Martin is working on a narrative nonfiction book that deconstructs myths of American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR Books, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Believer, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Università degli Scienze Gastronomiche in Italy, where she was a Fulbright-Casten Family Scholar. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia University, and CUNY Baruch College, as well as for the Philadelphia literary community Blue Stoop.

THE WRITE TIME for practice and inspiration, taught by Andrea Caswell, Sunday, May 22 , 2022

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THE WRITE TIME
for practice and inspiration
Taught by Cleaver Editor Andrea Caswell

11:00 a.m.—1:00 p.m. ET
Sunday, May 22, 2022
$60 

Register NowTHE WRITE TIME is a generative writing session for writers of all levels and genres. Immerse yourself in this two-hour writing retreat, where we’ll read and discuss short prose, experiment with optional prompts during in-class writing time, and nurture a writing practice rooted in curiosity and creativity. Whether you want to begin new work or simply play in your notebook, you’ll enrich your practice with other writers in a motivational and supportive setting.

What you’ll get from this class:
-real-time meeting with your instructor and fellow writers
-reading and discussion of short inspirational texts
-strategies for building a personal writing practice
-dedicated in-class writing time
-optional prompts that invite experimentation and discovery
-a safe and supportive writing community

Andrea Caswell’s writing has been published widely in print and online. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, Atticus Review, and others. She holds a master’s from Harvard University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine, and is the founder of Lime Street Writers, a monthly workshop north of Boston. In 2019 her fiction was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now lives and teaches in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Contact her at www.andreacaswell.com.

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28

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MICRO MENTORING
Flash Fiction Masterclass
Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa
4 weeks
Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28
Asynchronous, with weekly (optional) Zoom meetings on Thursday evenings or Sunday afternoons.
$300
Class limit: 6
This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction.
Questions: [email protected]

SOLD OUT!

This workshop, for experienced flash fiction writers, is limited to six students and will feature a combination of generative writing prompts and in-depth discussion of works in progress. In addition to the optional twice-weekly Zoom meetings, students may also, if desired, schedule a one-on-one Zoom consultation with the instructor.

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28

MICRO MENTORING: Flash Fiction Masterclass, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28
MICRO MENTORING Flash Fiction Masterclass Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks Sunday, May 1—Saturday, May 28 Asynchronous, with weekly (optional) Zoom meetings on Thursday evenings or Sunday afternoons. $300 Class limit: 6 This class is intended for writers with experience in flash fiction. Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT! This workshop, for experienced flash fiction writers, is limited to six students and will feature a combination of generative writing prompts and in-depth discussion of works in progress. In addition to the optional twice-weekly Zoom meetings, students may also, if desired, schedule a one-on-one Zoom consultation with the instructor. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout ...
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WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Feb 20—March 27 2022

WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Feb 20—March 27 2022
WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks February 20—March 27 Asynchronous, with weekly (optional) Zoom meetings on Sunday evenings $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Do you tend to procrastinate? Do you often do your best work under pressure? Do you sometimes start stories but never get around to finishing or revising them? Do you find the whole process of submitting work for publication stressful or depressing? This five-week workshop is designed for busy writers who want to put writing time and accountability into their schedule with a combination of online prompts, real-time writing sessions, constructive revision suggestions, submission tips, and a group of writing buddies willing to take the submission plunge with you. We will focus on short flash (up to 500 words) and microfiction (up to 400 words). The first two weeks, we will work on generating new stories; in the third week, we’ll focus on revision; and by the fourth week, everyone will commit to submitting three stories for publication (as your classmates cheer you on). Kathryn Kulpa, THE ART OF FLASH; AFTERBURN; FLASH BOOTCAMP; WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH!, (flash fiction and nonfiction) was a winner of ...
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Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on her new collection SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa

Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on her new collection SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa
Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on SHAPESHIFTING from Stillhouse Press Interview by Kathryn Kulpa Michelle Ross has published short fiction in Cleaver (“Lessons,” Issue 13; “My Husband is Always Losing Things,” Issue 23; “Night Vision,” with Kim Magowan, Issue 34). She spoke to us recently about her new short story collection Shapeshifting. Kathryn Kulpa: This is such a strong collection! One thing I really like about Shapeshifting is the diversity of points of view, style, and even genre. There are short, flash-like pieces, longer stories, realistic and often funny pieces like “After Pangaea,” with the parents sleeping in cars to keep their place in line to sign their kids up for kindergarten, and darker, more disturbing stories like “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth.” Did you worry that the stories might be too divergent, or that publishers might want a more uniform voice? Michelle Ross: Thank you so much, Kathryn, and thanks for talking with me about the book! I can’t say I worried about the range of the stories in that regard. Many years ago, I accepted (and have since embraced) that I’m a writer who needs to work in a variety ...
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WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice, Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa, October 24 to November 21. [SOLD OUT]

WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice, Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa, October 24 to November 21. [SOLD OUT]
WRITE, REVISE, PUBLISH! Flash & Microfiction Practice Taught by Cleaver Senior Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 4 weeks: Sunday, Oct. 24 to Sunday, Nov. 21 Mostly asynchronous with one weekly Zoom meeting: Sunday, October 24 - Intro; 11 am Thursday, November 4, 6:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 7, 11 am Thursday, Nov. 18, 6:30 pm $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Do you tend to procrastinate? Do you often do your best work under pressure? Do you sometimes start stories but never get around to finishing or revising them? Do you find the whole process of submitting work for publication stressful or depressing? This four-week workshop is designed for busy writers who want to put writing time and accountability into their schedule with a combination of online prompts, real-time writing sessions, constructive revision suggestions, submission tips, and a group of writing buddies willing to take the submission plunge with you. We will focus on short flash (up to 500 words) and microfiction (up to 400 words). The first two weeks, we will work on generating new stories; in the third week, we’ll focus on revision; and by the fourth week, everyone will commit to submitting three stories for publication (as your ...
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FLASH BOOTCAMP, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Four Weekend Sessions in June-July, 2021

FLASH BOOTCAMP, taught by Kathryn Kulpa, Four Weekend Sessions in June-July, 2021
FLASH BOOTCAMP 4 Summer Weekend Bootcamps Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa June 4 - 6 June 18 - 20 July 9 - 11 July 23 - 25 Saturday and Sunday Zoom sessions 2-4 pm ET $150 for one session; $275 for two sessions; $375 for three Sessions; $425 for all four sessions. *Get focused!* *Get motivated!* *Get writing!* This generative mini-workshop is designed for busy writers who need to carve out some writing time to generate new work, and who crave deadlines and accountability to stay motivated. This class combines writing prompt "homework" you do on your own with group writing and discussion sessions. In just three days (Friday through Sunday), you will have six new micro-stories ready to revise! Format: Combines asynchronous (writing prompts you do on your own time Friday and Saturday) with two, 2-hour Zoom sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Focus:  Flash pieces 500 words and under. The exercises and feedback were excellent. I also appreciated the Zoom classes which helped me connect with other writers and discuss work. The workshop was incredibly helpful. Kathryn's critiques, prompts, and synchronous sessions were marvelous. The community of writers that formed was strong and committed. Plus, three ...
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AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | April 4-April 25 2021 [SOLD OUT]

AFTERBURN: Flash Revision, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | April 4-April 25 2021 [SOLD OUT]
AFTERBURN A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks April 4-April 25 $175 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. I loved having the ability to work on the material at my own pace, at my own time. I met several writers who I will continue to stay in ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | Feb. 25-March 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]

THE ART OF FLASH, taught by Kathryn Kulpa | Feb. 25-March 28, 2021 [SOLD OUT]
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa Feb. 25-March 28 5 weeks $200 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | January 3 to February 7, 2021 SOLD OUT

Neon Lightning Bolt
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks SOLD OUT Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and constructive criticism. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook ...
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AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | November 15 to December 12, 2020

AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | November 15 to December 12, 2020
AFTERBURN A Workshop on the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks November 15 to December 12, 2020 $175 Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | October 3-November 7, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

Neon Lightning Bolt
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 5 weeks October 3–November 7 $175 Early Bird before September 3, 2020 $200 Regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected]  [Sold Out] Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example-works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can be done at your own pace and on your own time—there are no required meetings (although we may have an optional Zoom pop-up or two and bonus prompts for those who are interested). We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and ...
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AFTERBURN A Workshop the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | August 3 to August 22, 2020 [SOLD OUT]

AFTERBURN A Workshop the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | August 3 to August 22, 2020 [SOLD OUT]
AFTERBURN A Workshop in the Art of Flash Revision Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa 3 weeks August 3 to August 22 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Flash fiction may be born in a lightning flash of inspiration, but crafting works of perfect brevity requires time and patience: sometimes cutting, sometimes adding, and sometimes starting all over again. In very short stories, every word must work, and revision is as much a part of writing flash as it is of writing longer prose. In this hands-on workshop, we'll practice the art of revision. Flash fiction writer and editor Kathryn Kulpa will share first drafts, revisions, and published versions of her own work and that of other flash and short fiction writers. Students will learn different revision strategies and how to apply them to their own work. We will create new flash together and work on taking it through several revisions, and students will also have the chance to bring existing stories to the workshop to revise with a goal of publication. Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has ...
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THE ART OF FLASH, Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction, taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa | May 9 — June 6, 2020 and June 20 — July 25, 2020 [both sections sold out]

Neon Lightning Bolt
THE ART OF FLASH A Workshop in Fiction and Nonfiction Taught by Cleaver Flash Editor Kathryn Kulpa Both sessions of Kathryn Kulpa's The Art of Flash are sold out—new classes by Kathryn will be announced shortly! Session 2: 5 weeks June 20 — July 25, 2020 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] [sold out] Session 1: 5 weeks May 9 — June 6, 2020 $125 early bird / $150 regular Class limit: 12 Questions: [email protected] [sold out] Flash is a genre defined by brevity: vivid emotions and images compressed into a compact form. We most often see flash fiction, but flash can also encompass prose poetry, micro memoir, lyric essays, and hybrid works. In this class, we will take a close look at different styles and forms of flash fiction, as well as flash nonfiction, hybrid, and experimental works. Each week, we will read and discuss one or more example works and generate new work from prompts. Students will share their work for peer and instructor feedback, then will choose one story to revise for the final class. This workshop has weekly deadlines and assignments to help motivate you to write, but the work can ...
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A Conversation with Melissa Sarno, author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS

A Conversation with Melissa Sarno, author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS
A Conversation with Melissa Sarno author of JUST UNDER THE CLOUDS published by Knopf Books for Young Readers Interview by Kathryn Kulpa Melissa Sarno reviews children’s and young adult books for Cleaver and has just published her debut middle-grade novel, Just Under the Clouds (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018). It tells the story of Cora, a middle-school girl trying to find a place to belong. Cora’s father always made her feel safe, but now that he has died, she and her mom and her sister Adare have been moving from place to place, trying to find a stable and secure home they can afford. Cora is also dealing with bullying at school and is sometimes challenged by looking after her sister, who has learning differences. But her life holds some good things, too, like a free-spirited new friend and her father’s tree journal, where he kept notes about the plants he took care of. Cora has kept his book and uses it as a way to record her own observations and feelings as she looks for her own true home in the world. While many children experience homelessness, it’s a subject that is seldom explored in contemporary children’s fiction, ...
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NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams Tin House Books, 151 pages reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa Joy Williams is an author whose work I sought out because once, in a review, someone compared me to her, and since I hadn’t heard of her before, it seemed like a good idea to read her. It was a happy discovery. Still, she was not an author I associated with flash fiction. Her dense, full short stories seemed more like novels writ small. Things change. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Williams has pared away all but the essentials. These very short prose pieces are novels written in miniature, pocket epics and cryptic parables etched on the head of a pin. Most are not more than two pages, some are a single paragraph, and a few are just one or two sentences: simple, even stark, yet weighted. The sixty-first story, “Museum,” for example, is one rueful sentence: “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.” Williams’s small stories, like the best flash, keep most of the iceberg under the water, leaving us with as many questions as answers. Each story ends, rather than begins, with a title, which often serves ...
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A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA, author of Girls on Film

girls-on-film-cover
A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA author of Girls on Film Paper Nautilus Press, 2015 Vella Chapbook Winner interviewed by Michelle Fost I had the chance to catch up with fellow Cleaver editor Kathryn Kulpa about her chapbook, Girls on Film. It is just out from Paper Nautilus and was a winner of the press’s Vella Chapbook Contest. An intriguing part of the prize is that the writer receives a hundred copies of the beautifully designed chapbook to distribute as she likes. Kathryn will be selling signed copies through her Etsy shop, BookishGirlGoods, and she’ll also have them available at readings, writing workshops, and other events. Paper Nautilus will also have the book on sale. For more about the Vella Chapbook contest and Paper Nautilus Press, have a look at the press’s website.—M.F. MF: Congratulations on winning Paper Nautilus’s Vella Chapbook Contest, and the publication of Girls on Film. I wondered if you might talk a little about the process of writing the chapbook. KK: All the pieces in the chapbook were already written, and most of them had been published by the time I put it together, so it was more a process of selecting and matching complementary stories to create a cohesive ...
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A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015. reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s. Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal  outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s ...
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THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins Lacewing Books, 200 pages reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer? That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister. The Book of Laney is a young adult novel about facing the worst things the world can hand out and learning ...
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YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa

YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa
YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa If God looked for Yvonne would he find her? If God looked down, past stars and satellites, through storm clouds thick and grey as dryer lint, would he see Yvonne in a stolen van, Yvonne in a darkened shopping plaza with Ma’s Diner and A-1 Hardware, Crafts Basket and Pets Plus? Yvonne is down on options, down on her luck. Listening to the sighs and snores of her dog asleep in the back seat, the beat of rain on the roof. Her world the smell of wet dog. Her face in the mirror, hair wild, curling in the damp. Everything about her seems high-contrast, vampirish. Face white, except for that bruise her cover-up won’t cover. Tired eyes. White eyeliner is the trick for that, Teena had taught her. No white eyeliner in Yvonne’s make-up bag. No black, either. Almost out of tricks. She pats more cover-up on her eyelids, feels the oils in the makeup separate. Always something red and raw to show through. Yvonne likes to think that in this whole world not one person knows where she is right now. A parking lot, a strip mall, two hours ...
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LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa

LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa
LOCAVORE by Kathryn Kulpa The streets smell like fried dough and there’s the carnival sound of an outdoor mic, a tinny crackle that makes him think of Little League games and awards day at summer camp. It sounds like the end of summer. The locals are celebrating something, the patron saint of clam cakes. They’re selling raffle tickets, but he’s not buying chances. The sky is dark blue, but he’s not watching the sky. The café door is open, inviting him to a darker world of scratched wooden floors and mismatched tables and hard metal chairs: the world of Latte Girl, whose sweet smile is only for the locals, whose cups she graces with sailboats and dragonflies and long-eared dogs, while his foam never holds more than an indifferent swirl. There’s a line—there’s always a line—but he doesn’t mind. He likes to watch her tamp and pull; he likes that everything is done by hand on one old espresso machine; he likes that they are her hands, small and plump, still childish, with chipped black polish on her short fingernails. As often as he tries to touch those hands, she pulls back. Leaves the change on the counter, slides ...
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WRITING THE BODY, taught by Marnie Goodfriend, May 25—June 22, 2022

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WRITING THE BODY
Taught by Marnie Goodfriend
For beginner to advanced nonfiction writers
5 weeks
May 25—June 22
Zoom meetings 7 pm—8:30 pm ET on Wednesday 5/25, 6/1, 6/8, 6/15 and 6/22
$250
Class limit: 12
Questions: [email protected]

SOLD OUT

We all live in and through our bodies. Connection to the self and how we perceive, and are perceived, by the world around us is intrinsically tied to the vessel we reside in. Bodies can be political battlegrounds, sacred spaces, pleasure palaces, and crime scenes. As creative nonfiction or hybrid writers, how can we deepen our writing and understanding of ourselves by looking at the layered relationship we have with our bodies?

Open to new and seasoned writers, this six-week workshop will focus on six pressure points to generate new material from different life experiences: eating, politics, health, intimacy, physical and emotional trauma, and crime. We will read works by writers such as Roxane Gay, Chanel Miller, Kiese Laymon, Maggie Nelson, and Porochista Khakpour to spark ideas about we can approach our own stories about the body.

Each class will include exercises, writing prompts, and discussions of assigned readings. Participants will workshop one essay and receive feedback on their generative writing in a safe and encouraging environment.

Week One: Eating

What we feed our bodies with shapes the physical vessel we inhabit and affects the way we are seen in the world. Week one explores the stories we have about edible consumption, deprivation, diets, habits, and traditions. We’ll write and share our in-class writing prompt in a safe and supportive space and discuss ways to expand upon generative exercises.

Week Two: Illness and Injury

Our physical and mental maladies — and those that affect our loved ones — can scar and strengthen us. What can we learn from listening to our bodies’ first language? How do we answer back? Week two includes in-class writing, sharing, readings and conversations around it hurts — the very first words we learned to express pain.

Week Three: Sex

Sex can be an act of love, passion, obsession, power, abuse, ectasty, and pain. It’s also arguably one of the trickiest experiences to write about. It requires the same vulnerability necessary to shed our clothing and express ourselves through touch. We will approach writing about sex with gentleness, honesty, and, depending on the experience, anger or humor. Week four will explore the often taboo subject and how we mine for the words to articulate our relationship to intimacy or the absence of it.

Week Four: The Body Politic

The choices we make for our bodies are hotly-debated issues that cause division among people and places. What do we do when our bodies become battlegrounds and personal choices are designated a public domain? How do we reclaim our bodies if we never had choices to begin with? Week three explores the body as a political instrument of power, persuasion and fear. We’ll write about seeing the body as a larger entity and our personal relationship to other people and institutions invading the skin we live in.

Week Five: Movement

Movement is another tool to express how we walk through this earth. Like touch, sense or smell, it guides a reader through our personal experience by showing not telling. As life observers and documentarians, how can we use gestures, motion or inertia to deepen a story? In week five, we’ll consider where we can include movement to add depth and dimension to our written narratives.

Marnie Goodfriend is a writer, sexual assault advocate, and social practice artist. She is a 2018 VCCA fellow, recipient of the Jane G. Camp scholarship, and a 2016 PEN America fellow. Her advocacy work, Write to Healing, helps sexual assault survivors reauthor their experience through narrative healing. Marnie’s essays, articles, and other writing appear in TIME, Washington Post, The Rumpus, She Knows, Health, and elsewhere.

Read her essay “Fund What You Fear” on Cleaver.

UNSHAPING THE ESSAY: Experimental Forms in Creative Nonfiction, taught by Sydney Tammarine, May 29—June 26, 2022

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UNSHAPING THE ESSAY:
Experimental Forms in Creative Nonfiction
Taught by Cleaver Editor Sydney Tammarine
for intermediate and advanced nonfiction writers
5 weeks
May 29—June 26
Zoom meetings 11 am—12 pm ET on Sundays 5/29, 6/5, 6/12, and 6/19
$250
Class limit: 12

Questions: [email protected]

 

SOLD OUT

Memoirist Patricia Hampl said, “Memoir isn’t for reminiscence; it’s for exploration.” Just as nonfiction writers explore the world and the internal landscape of their lives, they also explore the landscape of language: What is the best way to tell your story? How can the form we choose help us convey complicated ideas and experiences? And how do we know when a structure is working for us, rather than limiting us?

To answer that last question, I’ll borrow a few words from writer Brandon Schrand: “[I]f you have finished reading something experimental and if by the end, you can’t imagine it written in any other way, then the piece was successful.”

In this class, we will explore the boundaries—and boundlessness—of creative nonfiction, diving deeply into questions of memory and language while trying our hands at various innovative forms. Topics will include:

Week One: Found Forms, also known as the “hermit crab essay”
Week Two: The Braided Essay, to help us write what’s too hard to speak about directly
Week Three: Nonlinear Narrative, a breaking-free to flash backward and forward in time
Week Four: The Lyric Essay, where poetry and prose intersect

We will have weekly readings, writing prompts, peer workshops (asynchronous through Canvas), and discussions (synchronous through Zoom: 11am to 12pm EST on Sundays. Students will also revise one essay for instructor feedback. We welcome both new and experienced writers looking for motivation, structure, and enthusiastic feedback on their work.

Sydney TammarineSydney Tammarine’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, B O D Y, Pithead Chapel, The New School’s LIT, and other journals. Her essay “Blue Hour” was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2021. She is the co-translator of a book of poems, The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and teaches writing at Virginia Military Institute. She has led workshops at The Ohio State University, Hollins University, Otterbein University, and at high schools, including as Writer-in-Residence at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School. She serves as flash and creative nonfiction editor for Cleaver.

 

EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris

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EXTRA CREDIT
by Colette Parris

The three of us together constitute a smidge of impurity in what would otherwise be an unadulterated cup of salt. Not the Himalania Fine Pink Salt that will run you $8.99 for ten ounces at Whole Foods. (That’s right. I just googled the price of pink salt at Whole Foods, because I’m all about precision. And while I was at it, I checked to see if gluten-free blueberry waffles are back in stock. Alas, no.) I mean the regular iodized salt that you can get for less than a dollar at Target, the salt that comes in the dark blue cylinder with the yellow-dress girl and her wholly unnecessary umbrella. What do umbrellas have to do with salt? For that matter, what do girls in yellow dresses have to do with salt?

I digress.

By “the three of us,” I mean me, Lakeisha, and Annette. I am Patrice. Five foot three at best on a dreaded “high heels necessary” day, I have a snub nose, average body, shoulder-length braids, thick eyebrows, and red cat-eyes glasses. Lakeisha, whose willowy frame, heart-shaped face, hazel eyes, naturally pouty lips, and relatively well-behaved long hair would cause me to hate her if we weren’t besties, is at the low end of model height. Annette, with her signature bun and pearls, has an “AKA all the way” vibe. A little bit plumper than me and glasses-free, she is my height twin. We are all in our late twenties.

I am not going to describe my complexion, or either of theirs, as cinnamon, cardamom, caramel, chocolate, cocoa, coconut (shell, obviously), coffee, or anything else that begins with c and might make one hungry or thirsty if mentioned. Nor is it necessary to discuss potting soil or paper bags. Suffice it to say that we are each conclusively in the brown family, but we are not the same shade.

The three of us are law clerks at a courthouse in a newly purple state. I started last year. Lakeisha, who already had several months of clerking while black under her belt (“Really? You’re a law clerk? To a federal judge? In this building? Huh.”) when I arrived, encountered me in the elevator during my first week, stared conspicuously at my I.D. card, smiled widely, and said, “We are going to have so. Much. Fun.” She wasn’t wrong. Annette joined us around six months ago, and we seamlessly became Destiny’s Child (Michelle Williams era), the legal version.

The first time I was mistaken for Lakeisha, I had been working at the courthouse for about three weeks. I was confused but flattered, because hello, Lakeisha is hot. And then it happened again. And again. The reverse was also happening on a regular basis, which I assume was less exciting for Lakeisha; while I’m on the right side of presentable, ‘hot’ would be an exaggeration. Annette’s arrival did not help matters. It became axiomatic that on any weekday ending in y, at least one of us would be misaddressed by day’s end.

A meeting was held. (No, we did not go to H.R. Don’t be ridiculous.) We sat at a table in the courtyard during lunch hour, eating salads and casting envious looks at two male clerks devouring meatball subs nearby. Between dainty bites of kale and arugula, we determined that the problem would not go away and that we would need to make the best of it. We ruminated for some time over what making the best of it would entail.

It was Annette who first realized the glorious benefit of our coworkers’ ineptitude with respect to cross-racial identification. Her fork, loaded with greens and fat-free balsamic vinaigrette, froze halfway between her plate and her precisely rouged lips, and a Cheshire cat grin slowly meandered across the bottom half of her face. “Oh,” she said as she slowly returned her fork to her plate. “Oh, ladies, we’ve been looking at this all wrong. This is a gift.”

Lakeisha and I simultaneously cocked our heads to the left. “How so?” I ventured.

“Think about it. What is the absolute worst part of this job?”

Lakeisha beat me to the punch. “The stupid, interminable, purportedly optional but really mandatory after-work events.”

Allow me to clarify. Much to our consternation, our coworkers are rabidly social. There are happy hours. There are soirees to honor milestones reached by various judges. There are birthday celebrations, baby showers, holiday parties. Sadly, the list continues. These gatherings are not our jam. Our workdays are beyond exhausting. Not only do we spend long hours navigating the labyrinthian maze that is federal law in order to make our judges look good, but we do it while dealing with the usual, hourly micro-aggressions (with instances of blatant disrespect sprinkled in). When the sun finally sets, our instinct is to flee to our respective sanctuaries to lick our wounds and prepare to do battle yet again the following day. However, in order to avoid hearing that kiss-of-death phrase—“not team players”—applied to any of us, we had been dragging ourselves to these affairs. Good times were not being had.

“Exactly. Now think about this. Why do we all need to show up for this nonsense? These fools can’t tell us apart. If only one of us goes to an event, we all get team-player credit.”

Lakeisha and I mulled this over and saw no flaw in Annette’s reasoning. I whipped out a pen and notepad, and with input from my fellow Destiny’s Child members, listed all events scheduled for the next month under the heading “I’d Rather Poke My Eye Out With Any Object (Sharp Or Dull, Doesn’t Matter) Than Attend The Following.” We split the list into thirds.

Three weeks into Project Extra Credit, things are going swimmingly. I was able to avoid, among other things, a retirement party for a secretary who always looked astonished when she saw me enter the code for the employee-only bathroom. Of course, Annette and Lakeisha dodged a bullet when I alone attended Judge Foxwood’s coma-inducing lecture on preemption. I doubt that they fully appreciate my sacrifice. But that’s okay.

I am currently walking across the lobby with my co-clerk, Jennifer, a green-eyed, no-nonsense brunette. While we haven’t officially crossed over to close friend status yet, Jennifer and I get along exceedingly well, and I’m fairly certain about her stance on lives that matter (although we’ve really only danced around the topic). We are on our way to the florist to select a bouquet for our judge, whose birthday is approaching.

Halfway to the lobby exit, we are waylaid by Mary, one of the court reporters. “Jennifer!” she gushes, her alabaster cheeks pinkening with pleasure. “Patrice!” she doubly gushes. “It was so nice to see you at Rhonda’s shower! We love it when the law clerks show up to these things!”

“Happy to be there.” I smile.

After a brief coughing fit, Jennifer murmurs, “Same. It was a really nice affair.”

Additional pleasantries follow, and then we delicately extricate ourselves from Mary’s clutches. Once outside, Jennifer looks at me quizzically. “What was that all about? I was at that shower from the beginning to the bitter end. You most definitely were not. For any part of it.”

True. Rhonda’s shower had been Annette’s gig.

“Well, if you must know….” I proceed to explain Project Extra Credit and its origins, confident that even if Jennifer doesn’t approve, she won’t rat us out. Winding down, I do a little dance and say, “And now I can add the tenth-floor-Mary moment to our list of successes to date.”

I glance over at Jennifer. She has the most peculiar expression on her face, and for a moment my heart skips a beat and I wonder if I have this all wrong. I have visions of her outing the three of us to each of our judges and bad things following. And then she sits on a nearby bench and laughs and laughs. And then she laughs some more.

I am now relieved but perplexed. “Okay, I know it’s kind of funny, but is it really that funny?”

“Oh,” says Jennifer. “It is. It really is. That wasn’t Mary the court reporter in the lobby. It was Barbara from payroll.”

Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American attorney who returned to her literary roots during the pandemic. She is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in Streetlight Magazine, Vestal Review, BigCityLit, Lunch Ticket, Burningword Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine (forthcoming), and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Find her on Twitter @colettepjd.

 

ODE ON BRAISES (AND ODES) by Gregory Emilio

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ODE ON BRAISES (AND ODES)
by Gregory Emilio

For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 106,” lines 13-14

“Rhyme,” according to the poet and classicist A.E. Stallings, “is an irrational, sensual link between two words. It is chemical. It is alchemical” (Stallings 2009). It is fascinating to think of how words are connected by sound—that similar sounding words may be drawn to each other like magnets. Praise and days: some subterranean, implicit contract, light giving unto light, phoneme of the first letter, the sound of dawn. And to think that consonants and vowels are all we have to work with to create the kindred spirits of rhymes. Vowels expand, billow up with breath, while consonants crack open and/or shear off the edges. In the word “praise,” the vowel sound “a” gets buoyed up by the plosive “p,” sustained for half a breath, held aloft, before “s,” and the whole sonic enterprise, goes tiptoeing away. A word as graceful (and powerful) as a ballet dancer’s leap. Sounds matter, and when they get together, gather into meaning.

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The vowel I find most appealing is perhaps the easiest to pronounce. Rhyming across almost all the parts of speech—go, slow, so, though—oh is an aural and visual (and visceral) representation of the open mouth: a puff of breath, by turns a gasp of pleasure or a sigh of despair. Oh, that’s delicious. Oh, how terrible. O, on the other hand, is a bit different, distinct from oh, its homonym cousin. O, that most useful of interjections in the odes of the Romantics, floats up like a balloon, drifting toward the poets’ objects of praise.

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Keats: “O, Attic shape!”

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Shelley: “O, wild West Wind”

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Me: “O, braised duck legs!”

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I had a revelation around the middle of my life: I began to understand the importance of slow cooking. The kind of cooking you plan ahead for, the kind that deepens the whole house with its smells over the course of an afternoon. As a young home cook, all I did was rush: eggs barely over easy, seared steaks after final exams, impromptu carbonara after last call. But around my thirties, something clicked and I slowed down. Was mortality whispering in my ear? Had the carrot-snapping thwack of my ACL tearing on the soccer pitch set off a ripple effect warning me of the dangers of sprinting? Or had I simply exhausted the limits of cooking things a la minute? Of course, all are true. But I’d like to think it also had something to do with my evolving attitude toward poetry. Just as I used to throw a meal together at the last minute, I wrote most of my poetry on the fly, whenever the intensity of a feeling or an image reached its boiling point. I took Frank O’Hara’s advice in “Personism: A Manifesto” as a personal mantra: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep’” (1995: 498).

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Simply defined, to braise is to cook something slowly in liquid. It’s a technique that turns tough cuts—shanks, short ribs, cubes of beef chuck, root vegetables—into fork-tender morsels. The liquid is most often wine—as in coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon—or stock. And it’s the latter that’s perhaps most rewarding for the enterprise of slow home cooking. When you start to make your own stock, you begin to control your culinary destiny. Fennel fronds, onion ends, rinds of parm, mushroom stems, chicken discards—all can conspire over the course of an afternoon to give you the basic currency of a good braise. When the liquid is reduced and concentrated, when the bones give like twigs and the vegetables are mush to the touch, when the stock is strained, divvied into quart containers, dated and labeled and stored in the freezer for the uncertain future, you will feel a sense of self-reliance and accomplishment tantamount to getting out the first draft of a good poem or story. Fortunes may rise or fall, but you will rest with the certitude of your stock, more tangible than money in the bank. Risotto, chicken soup, wildly delicious sauces, and, of course, a panoply of braises are now within your reach.

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I’ve come to an age where I premeditate as much as possible, tasks edible or otherwise. I used to make almost daily trips to the grocery store, but when the pandemic hit and getting groceries became a perilous, postapocalyptic excursion, I had to plot out at least a week’s worth of meals. I’d read recipes, forecast weather, moods, temperaments, and then I’d make a list. This act of slowing down coincided, as I said before, with a slower approach to poetry. I went back and dug into form, rhyme, classics, trying to expand my repertoire. Composing a first draft now took days—and only after the subject or conceit was conceived. Before diving in, I’d ask questions, and I’d make decisions. Free verse or closed form? Sonnet or sapphics? To rhyme or not to rhyme? Like any dutiful cook, I’d break down the bones into stock. I’d read and I’d plot. I’d sharpen my knives. This isn’t to say the poems are any better or that this is the way to do it. I’m just becoming more attuned to my own tastes and preferences. And when I take my time, when I cook a poem, as it were, low and slow, I become more present and more predisposed to praise.

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There’s an irresistible, meditative quality to braises. Given over to the slow, deliberate task of chopping vegetables, thawing your stock, reading the recipe, rereading the recipe, seasoning your meat, searing, developing flavors at the bottom of the pot, adding aromatic mirepoix, deglazing the sedimentary fond, then putting it all together in the oven with time, you will find the calm, condensed center of the universe. You will free yourself up to think, to pause, to go for a jog, to read, or watch a movie, or daydream, or clean, all while getting dinner (damn good dinner) done.

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It might seem a far-fetched comparison, but Keats also went on his nerve. It can’t be a coincidence that his best work—the great odes—are written less than two years before his death, in full tubercular awareness. Nor should it be surprising that in his despair he turned to poems of praise. “When old age shall this generation waste,” he addresses the urn, “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man” (lines 55-57). This doomed young man had his eyes on the clock, but he didn’t rush, and he didn’t pity himself, knowing that there were greater woes than his own. I like to think that the formal features of the Horatian Ode—stanzaic order, meter, and rhyme—were like a recipe to him: a set of suggestions, malleable guidelines, never dogma. Nightingale, funeral urn, autumn: these were some of the subjects of his praise—artifacts, seasons, sensations treated to his hyper-articulate ooh’s, aah’s, and, of course, O’s. To study Keats is to see that with enough time and attention, anything is worthy of poetry. I have to imagine he liked slowly cooked foods—deep stews, hearty shepherd’s pies. I wish I could have cooked for him.

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“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” quips Emily Dickinson, “I know that is poetry” (1891). This is how I feel about the best meals, the most singular bites. Case in point, the braised duck legs I cooked last night, per Mark Bittman’s minimalist recipe at NYT Cooking. A simple one-pan dish of mirepoix, duck legs, and stock. Like so many good recipes, it all comes down to technique, patience, and order of operations. The legs go in first, skin-down, in a ripping hot skillet. This is your chance, your one chance, to get them golden, burnished, crackly-crisp, and to render out the rich fat that duck’s famous for. Remove the legs. Then sweat and caramelize the veggies in said fat. Then return the duck to the aromatic vegetables. Then add enough chicken stock (homemade, I cannot stress this enough) to immerse, but not submerge, the legs, and into the oven for a couple hours at 325 degrees. What emerges on the other side of this passage of time almost smells of dark chocolate, earthy and deep. The hash of infused vegetables glowing with flavor, soft as candlelight. And the duck’s skin crisp as the glassy surface of Crème Brule, and almost as sweet—a stark contrast to the tender, tenebrous flesh.

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The top of your head taken off: a Zen Koan-like shock to the tastebuds; a lightning strike to the brain.

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“Rhymes may be so far apart, you cannot hear them,” says Stallings, “but they can hear each other, as if whispering on a toy telephone made of two paper cups and a length of string” (2009). I’ve tried to hold them far apart, but I assume you saw them right from the start. Praise and braise, hiding in plain sight. All this has been an attempt to say that there’s a reason for this rhyme—that it means something. Like the martyrs for truth and beauty buried in Dickinson’s adjoining rooms, they are kith and kin, whispering back and forth all night, until the glacial moss of eternity renders them one and the same. Let us now praise famous braises is what I’ve been trying to say.

◊

But to eat and be done is never enough. We must reflect, give back to the things we eat for our thoughts. We must sing for our next supper because we might not get one. To end with the far-flung repetition of a prayer seems fitting. We might not catch the echo of the rhymes, as distant as they are, but as Stallings says, they can hear each other. In the plague-haunted days of the 17th century, Shakespeare was prescient enough to declare that we “have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” The declaration is somewhat ironic, coming from one so well-versed in the predilections of praise. Over four hundred years later, at the beginning of the new millennium, the Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky echoes Shakespeare succinctly in his “Author’s Prayer.” Directly addressing God, the speaker gives us this:

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

(2004: lines 14-18)

Twenty years later, hunkered down in our own plague-ridden epoch, when we are so often told that we live in an evil, uncertain time (indeed we do), we would do well to remember this prayer. Praise, like a good braise, is best served on the darkest, the coldest of days.

◊◊◊

References

Bittman, Mark. “Crisp-Braised Duck Legs with Aromatic Vegetables.” NYT Cooking, The New York Times, https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017472-crisp-braised-duck-legs-with-aromatic-vegetables. Accessed 15 November 2021.

Dickinson, Emily. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” The Atlantic, 1891, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsons-letters/306524/. Accessed 14 November 2021.

Kaminsky, Ilya. “Author’s Prayer.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53850/authors-prayer. Accessed 20 November 2021.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn. Accessed 20 November 2021.

O’Hara, Frank. “Personism: A Manifesto.” In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, 498-499. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 106: When in the chronicle of wasted time.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45102/sonnet-106-when-in-the-chronicle-of-wasted-time. Accessed 21 November 2021.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ode to the West Wind.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind. Accessed 21 November 2021.

Stallings, A.E. “Presto Manifesto.” Poetry Foundation, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69202/presto-manifesto-.

Greg Emilio author headshotGregory Emilio is a poet, cook, and critic living in Atlanta. His poems and essays appear in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, North American Review, [PANK], Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. Kitchen Apocrypha, his debut collection of poetry, will be published by Able Muse Press in 2022.

BROOD X by Gwen Mullins

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BROOD X
by Gwen Mullins

Brood X is the largest brood of 17-year cicadas. This brood is found in three separate areas centering around Pennsylvania and northern Virginia, Indiana, and eastern Tennessee. The largest emergence of Brood X appears as adults only once every 17 years.
—National Park Service

Back then, everyone still called me Gwendy, so it was in the body-in-progress of thirteen-year-old Gwendy that I first encountered the cicadas of Brood X. The emerging insects, like my boy cousins, were four years my senior. I was intrigued but disgusted by the intricate carapaces the cicadas left behind, and a delicious tingle of fear shivered across my skin when the living bugs slapped against my legs or tangled in my hair, their unwieldy, red-eyed forms a harbinger of anxieties that had not yet surfaced.

I spent a lot of time alone in those days—meandering through the town that is, even now, defined by the train that hums through it without stopping.

Once, as I examined a hard little sculpture—I always thought of them as sculpted, if not by a human, then by some other intelligent design—that clung to the bark of an oak, one of my cousins slipped up behind me, plucked the abandoned husk from the tree, crushed it in his palm. He laughed, just as he did when he caught lightning bugs and smeared their lit bodies on his cheeks for the fleeting effect of glow-in-the-dark warpaint. The fragments of the husk’s leg curled like clipped fingernails in his dirty palm, and the crushing of the empty vessel that once held the insect’s soft body felt deeply personal. I wanted to apologize for something I didn’t understand.

The year of that cicada summer, I learned to avoid being alone with that particular cousin, even as he endeavored to draw me to him, even as I longed to be touched.

Now, at forty-seven, I flinch at the damp, scratching smack of the living cicadas as they wing toward immortality, blinded by lust and light, though I no longer fear them or their abandoned exoskeletons. Just yesterday I came upon one of their husks, and I allowed myself to be lost for a moment in examination in the same way I had when I’d been called Gwendy. There was the amber bulge that covered the cicada’s scarlet eyes, the opening in the back as decisively split as my own body when my children came screaming out.

I examine the husk in my palm, turn it this way and that in the light.

◊

I am thirteen again, my grandmother calling me in for a summer supper of fried potatoes and slices of red tomatoes whose sides have fissured with swelling flesh. My hair is long and never quite clean, and I am as awkward and vulnerable as the cicadas before their wings have set and their new bodies have hardened. All through that summer, I sought out the absurd molts of the insects, collecting and marching their dried forms along a windowsill until my aunt, dust cloth in hand, let out a mild shriek at the sight of the cicada menagerie and swept them all into the trash.

“They carry germs,” Auntie insisted.

I didn’t tell her that my cousin Taffy Shea and I played with them, along with our Barbies and my discount-store Dolly Parton doll. The brown husks served, depending on the scene we created, as devoted pets, attacking marauders, miniature ponies, or, occasionally, the roast beast at dollhouse dinners, and broken bits of their whisper-crunch bodies mingled with the tiny plastic shoes and staticky toy hairbrushes in a box Taffy Shea had covered in pink glitter and gold heart stickers. Something about the form of the dolls, with their perfect but sexless manufactured shapes, next to the bulging eyes and menacing foreclaws of the cicadas made us delightfully uneasy, just like we felt when we examined a half-formed, bruise-eyed chick coiled beside the broken but still bluely exquisite robin’s egg.

Beauty means nothing in a vacuum.

◊

The wind picks up, and I am thirty. Rather than parting branches, pointing at delicate brown husks so that my young children could marvel at the ugliness left behind by the nymphs after their seventeen-year hibernation, I work toward a promotion at a job I will never love, under a boss I probably shouldn’t be. My marriage stumbles under the weight of unspoken-yet-somehow-still-broken expectations. We argue over how to teach our son to fold towels and who’s in charge of dinner on Wednesdays and how much to help with our daughter’s science project that’s due tomorrow. My husband’s heart collects plaque, steady and silent. The screams of the cicadas echo the brooding in my own head, and I am consumed by fears of mediocrity and mortality, as if fear and loathing could make such human notions less menacing.

Like my mother and grandmother before me, I am mired in a cycle of eating procreating and striving striving striving toward a goal that, unlike the cicadas, has not been encrypted in me and yet shimmers, teasing, at the edges of my vision in the quiet moments before sleep. The weight of the frenzied, corporeal demands of work and children and sex and what passes for love bury me in obligation. These are the hard years, and I understand why the cicadas spend so much of their lives underground, their skin thickening with each passing year, growing silently toward a dream of light, of purpose.

◊

It’s hot outside, or perhaps it’s only hot flashes again, but I am, at last, only me, the same age Kerouac was when he died, and I know that beauty is only enhanced by that which is broken and unbeautiful.

The cigarette burn on my grandmother’s green watered-silk blouse.

The silver-capped teeth of a laughing child raised on Mountain Dew and saltines.

The slow-healing scar on my husband’s chest from where they cracked him open to replace his clogged arteries.

The brittle husks, the wet flapping bodies, the red eyes that almost seem to glow.

These things seem designed to be as ugly and divine as my own soul. Bugs and Barbies and cousins and lovers conflate, and I see, finally, that beauty is not relative, as I thought when I was thirteen, as I still thought when I was thirty. Beauty, is, I think, an obsolete notion.

I recall an old songwriters’ voice made husky by cigarettes and gas-station whiskey and the sticky, unfragile wings of the cicadas when they first unfurl.

The cracks around my heart and the creases around my eyes remind me of the dark times when I neglected to pay attention, to appreciate the gifts of sunlight and yellow-tipped leaves and coffee-scented mornings.

I don’t know if I’ve always known this truth, or if I learned it from the cicadas of Brood X, but I am both broken and whole.

Gwen Mullins’ work has been selected for the Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2022, and her stories and essays have been featured in New Ohio Review, African American Review, The Bitter Southerner, The New Guard, PANK, and Green Mountains Review, among others. She is currently working on her second novel as well as a short story collection. In the winter of 2020-21, she served as the Writer in Residence for the Kerouac Project in Orlando. She works with writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

 

SKATE HAVEN by Amy R. Martin

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SKATE HAVEN
by Amy R. Martin

I’m already roller skating when the DJ announces it’s time for a “Couples Skate” and I see the sign light up on the wall next to the clock and the rink lights dim and I feel a whoosh and Sean—the boy who pops wheelies in front of my house every summer morning on his Schwinn while I eat Lucky Charms and watch The Richard Simmons Show, the boy who one day soon will give me an ID bracelet that I will have to return because my mom will say I’m too young and won’t let me keep it, the boy who one day after high school will move to Texas with a red-haired girl who everyone will call a slut and far worse things besides—reaches his hand out to me. He is the best athlete at school, and he has light brown skin and hazel eyes and a ready white smile and a mini-afro and his mom’s white and his dad’s black and I think that’s cool and at his birthday party I won a jigsaw puzzle of the United States of America and in fourth grade he used to take a break from playing kickball to “rescue” me from the top of the jungle gym when I called his name and also in fourth grade he asked me to “go” with him and I asked him, “Where?” I take his hand, and we start to skate side-by-side to Lionel Richie’s hit “Hello” while the strobe lights make rotating geometric patterns on the polished wood-paneled floor, which is soft and sticky and luminous. I don’t look at Sean, not once, just feel the jostling of his sweaty hand in mine, the cool air on my hot red cheeks and neck, the deep dark stirrings of something curling in the pit of my stomach, and I look over at my mom sitting, still in her wool coat, at one of the garish picnic tables by the snack bar; she’s got a Kent cigarette between two fingers, a tattered black purse from Hecht’s Department Store beside her, and before her a Diet Coke in a Styrofoam cup, a yellow legal pad, and a thick stack of white paper, a medical manuscript that she’s copyediting with a red pencil. Sean and I go around and around and around, counter-clockwise, trying not to fall but falling just the same. It’s 1984, and I’m at Skate Haven, but it might as well be called Skate Heaven, because that’s where I am, heaven, or as close to it as I can get at thirteen. As Richie sings his last, we release our sticky fingers without once looking at each other and skate to opposite sides of the rink, where I dodge a creeper who years later will be arrested for pedophilia and I slam my body onto the bench across from my mother, the sweat from the ends of my hair flinging droplets onto my mother’s STETS and itals and pilcrows, her caps and her boldfaces and deleaturs, and there are tendrils of cotton candy floating in the air, sweetening it, I could catch one on my tongue if I wanted to, and I hear the staccato pop pop pop of the popcorn machine, the click of wheels out on the rink, and I wonder where Sean is before I feel the skin on my forearms stick to the Birch beer I spilled on the table earlier, and for a moment, a breathless moment, my heart is a disco ball, a whirling mosaic of mirrors, and inside me, through me, and all around is a kaleidoscope of color and light.

Amy R. Martin is a producer and screenwriter, essayist, and medical and science writer. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, and Hungry Ghost Magazine, and is forthcoming from Variant Literature, JMWW, and Atlas + Alice. She is the Stage & Screen Editor and a contributing writer for the Southern Review of Books. She has an MFA in stage- and screenwriting and creative nonfiction from the Queens University of Charlotte. After living for fourteen years as an expatriate in the Netherlands, she now resides in Vienna, Virginia.

EVEN IN THE DARK by Cristina Trapani-Scott

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EVEN IN THE DARK
by Cristina Trapani-Scott

1.

You make sourdough bread because it’s easier to focus on the simplicity of water and flour than on anything else. You marvel at how water and flour blended can start life. You think of science and the way this pairing draws yeast from air. You remember the air in the hospital waiting room, the sour chill, and the way your yeasty thoughts bloomed faster than you could breathe, faster than you could form sentences, so the words came out lonely florets. Please, won’t walk, will walk, maybe, I don’t know.

2.

Now, you speak to flour and water in full sentences. You whisper to yeast the way you might a plant, like you did your child lying in the hospital bed. You cajole it with a gentle voice, urging it to expand and breathe, to grow and move.

Bread sustains us, you say.
I will love your crust, you say.

You told her to move, to find her space and take it even before you worried she might never walk again.

3.

Her left toe moved first, after you called her name, after you sang it to her because songs draw life from air, and she knows. You ignored the tubes that snaked from her and the thick paste of uncertainty. You focused on her feet, her beautiful feet, her toes poking out the end of the thin hospital blanket. As slight as the movement was, you wondered if the floor shook.

4.

You pour bubbling yeast into flour, add salt, sugar, oil, and hot water, and you knead. It will take hours for the yeast to expand, for the dough to double in size, but you wait like you waited for her toe to move and then her leg and then her other side. You are good at waiting. You’ve spent hours in waiting rooms. You count the hours and think they could add up to months, if not years.

5.

You wonder if the events of that week doubled in size rather than shrunk like you thought they would. You see yourself as you waited, the way you tucked your legs under you at night, knees and hips aching on the cold hard bench. Nurses appeared and disappeared like shrill ghosts. The clock ticked. Out the window from the eighth floor, you could see the front range spread for miles, even in the dark.

Cristina Trapani-Scott is the author of the poetry chapbook The Persistence of a Bathing Suit. Her work has appeared in Hip Mama Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, and Entropy Magazine, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and she serves on the leadership team for Northern Colorado Writers. She is at work on her first novel, and when she is not writing she likes to paint, bake, and hike mountain trails with her partner and their blind Lab/Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Follow her on Twitter at @CristinaTrapani.

A POEM WHEREIN I TRY, AND FAIL, TO IDENTIFY MY TUESDAY GENDER by Quinn Rennerfeldt

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A POEM WHEREIN I TRY, AND FAIL, TO IDENTIFY MY TUESDAY GENDER
by Quinn Rennerfeldt

Have you ever been forced
………….to swallow a pill of light
………….………….unguided hands rubbing

the tract of your throat
………….to slip it past the chokepoint
………….………….like a shhh and something blue

and lamplike then resides
………….inside you, threading the acids
………….………….of your stomach like an

anxious goldfish irradiating
………….the viscous liquids
………….………….in small neon pings

shining scales amongst darkness
………….morse code messages in bubbles
………….………….trying to regurgitate themselves

from your mouth
………….agitate against the fishtank
………….………….of molars and stress-clenched jaw

and yet you are still a stranger
………….always have been but now
………….………….you have an aquatic carcinogen

to fault, furtive bioluminescent flame
………….lighting the way for doubt
………….………….and the feelings cramped

in the fake sand, slowly stirring
………….the blonde grains from dormancy
………….………….like a creature where it oughtn’t be

Quinn Rennerfeldt is a queer poet earning her MFA at San Francisco State University, where she lives with her family and animal menagerie. Their heart is equally wed to the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Her work can be found in Slipstream, SAND, Mom Egg Review, elsewhere, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Her chapbook Sea Glass Catastrophe was released in 2020 by Francis House Press. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills, a graduate-run literary journal and press associated with San Francisco State University.

 

WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK by Louella Lester

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WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK
by Louella Lester

On the fifth day of the heat wave, even though the asthmatic air conditioner is faltering, Char stops going outside. Not to get fresh air. Or to exercise. Or to soak up the sun’s Vitamin D, of which a lack could cause her to…well, she isn’t sure what it will cause, but people are always talking about it like it matters. She just doesn’t give a shit anymore.

When Seth left, two months before, she lied about her feelings—told friends it was over long ago. “If he didn’t leave, I would have. Don’t worry, I’m enjoying the time alone.” So, the heat is a relief. A real excuse to stay home. A simple explanation. Wearing only panties and a tank top she melts into the chair nearest the aquarium that Seth left behind, getting up only to go to the toilet. Or drag delivery boxes through the door. Or feed the fish, though she doesn’t like fish.

On the twelfth day of heat, Char gives up reading books. Spends her time scrolling the phone, reading nothing longer than a tweet, until the screen is so smudged her finger can no longer glide, just stutters across it. When she finally looks up, the aquarium glass reflects her unblinking eyes and open mouth. In the background, plants wave above pebbles and the school of blue-backed tetras darts between bubbles.

By the seventeenth day, Char finds it difficult to get out of the chair. Arms stuck to her sides, she’s only able to flap her hands and flutter her fingers, her mouth pouting with the strain.

On the nineteenth day, when Char moves she feels a tug and her white fish-belly thighs can’t be pried apart. She rocks until the momentum sets her standing, toes facing out like a fish tail. She hobbles to the aquarium. The tetras stare side-eye as she heaves herself up and lands with a splash.

After the twenty-second day, Char would kick herself if she still had legs because she’d made no plan for food. Through the window she sees lamb’s wool clouds in a baby-blue sky. Pelicans glide on air pockets above the water. Song birds echo and gurgle. She knows it was stupid to jump into the aquarium, no guy is worth it, but now she’s stuck in the damn thing and the scruffy blue-backed tetras aren’t exactly thrilled either. They’re ramping up the side-eye, sticking to their school, and whispering. It reminds Char of her teen years, so she hides in a patch of hornwort and hears only snippets of their conversation, “…food flakes right over there…she doesn’t care…selfish…could all die in here.”

On the twenty-eighth day, when Char can no longer remember if Seth said he’d come back for the aquarium, the door knob rattles, giving her hope. “No one’s seen her since her boyfriend left, and neighbors have been complaining about a smell.” It’s the building manager, followed by two police officers.

One officer ambles off to the bedroom, while the other peers into the tank and sniffs. “This tank is the source of the smell,” he says. The tetras freeze against the glass in a clump of fear. Char, tangled in the hornwort, can’t move either.

The first officer returns from the bedroom. “Nothing else seems amiss. But that tank really is a health hazard.” They offer to help, then heave the fish tank up between them.

“Blub…blub…blub!” say the tetras, as the officers shuffle towards the bathroom.

“Blub…blub…blub!” says Char, as they drain the fish tank into the toilet bowl.

The building manager hears something as one of the officers pushes the toilet handle but tells herself it’s just the flush and swirl.

Louella Lester is a writer and photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Litro, Five Minutes, The Drabble, SoFloPoJo, Daily Drunk, Dribble Drabble, Grey Sparrow, Six Sentences, New Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks, is out there (At Bay Press, April 2021).

 

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross

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THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS
by Michelle Ross

Andrew

It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else remained: a package of sliced extra sharp cheddar; a Yoplait with its silver, reflective seal that you peel off, making me think of Andrew’s tube of anti-itch cream; a crinkly plastic bag holding a few wrinkled, mushy green grapes. “Are you going to eat those?” I asked him that afternoon. Unless we were making out, I sat on Andrew’s desk chair. His bedding left a slightly sour smell on my skin. “I might,” he said. “But they’re mushy and gross,” I said. “Some of them might not be,” he said. “Even if some aren’t, they will be soon because of the company they keep,” I said. Andrew plucked one of those mushy grapes from its stem and told me to open my mouth and catch. I turned so that it bounced off my cheek.

 

Jorgé

Always there was at least one saucepan. If the saucepan was small, plastic wrap stretched tight across the top, held in place by a rubber band. If the saucepan was large, it was sealed by its glass lid, which wasn’t airtight, Jorgé lamented, but he didn’t have a rubber band that could stretch that far. In those saucepans, there might be French lentil soup with softened onions and carrots, mushroom risotto, a chunky stew, or sweet potato gnocchi he’d made by hand. When I tried to help him cook, he snatched up knives and spoons and various ingredients because I was “doing it wrong.” This was when I lived in Minnesota for a couple of years, the winters so cold that except for school (me) and work (him), we hardly left Jorgé’s apartment. Jorgé grew his own mushrooms in that apartment—inside a hall closet that he’d dedicated to that pursuit. My first visit, when I opened that closet door by mistake, looking for the bathroom, Jorgé freaked. The next time he invited me over that door was duct-taped, and it remained duct-taped all the time we were together.

 

Max

Swampy green juices in glass jars. At least two kinds of beans. Something approximating the name of an animal though it was not animal: tofurkey, ground be’f. Max was a fitness instructor, a thing I liked about him until I didn’t anymore. He was always beginning sentences with, “I’m really into” as in “I’m really into functional strength” or “I’m really into eating to live rather than eating for pleasure.” As much as Max liked to talk about himself, I didn’t really feel I knew him at all. He was like those juices in his fridge: stripped of fiber, stripped of anything solid.

 

Derreck

A refrigerator like a time capsule, the way it recalled my childhood refrigerator: white sandwich bread, packaged deli meat, condiments, pickles, peanut butter, jelly, a head of iceberg lettuce. “What about vegetables?” I said the first time I opened Derreck’s fridge, and he opened the freezer and pointed to frozen stir-fry mix, frozen corn. Staring into that refrigerator, I said, “What about pleasure?” and Derreck said, “What are we talking about exactly?” I’m not sure “ex” is even the right term for Derreck. I slept with him no more than five or six times. He’d take off his shirt, and I would envision that loaf of sliced white sandwich bread nuzzled next to a gallon of white milk on the top shelf of his refrigerator. That was another thing about Derreck, he drank milk with dinner, like a child.

 

Noah

Noah’s refrigerator was the most beautiful, most immaculate refrigerator I’d ever seen—the fridge of my dreams. It had a clear door so you could browse without wasting energy. Its contents were as organized as the books in a library. Noah was a meal prepper, so there were always healthy, macronutrient-balanced, ready-to-eat meals stacked on the second-to-top shelf: salmon with mango salsa, roasted chicken with broccoli, breakfast enchiladas. On the third shelf from the top were little glass containers of berries with measured servings of yogurt, carrot sticks with hummus, no-bake energy bars Noah had made himself. Unlike the contents of a library, though, Noah’s food was not for sharing. When he emerged from the shower one afternoon and caught me eating one of those yogurts with berries, he said, “That was my mid-morning snack for Thursday!” I said, “There’s a lot of food in here. Can’t you snack on something else Thursday?” Noah explained, once again, that he planned every meal and snack for the week out on Sundays and that there were no spares. “Well, that sounds like poor planning,” I said. “There should always be something to spare. What about emergencies? What about me?” I offered to buy him a carton of yogurt and a pint of berries to replace what I’d taken. He said, “There isn’t room for your stuff in my fridge.”

 

Trey

Trey is not an ex, but my brain can’t help but look for the details that will define him if he ever does become an ex. His sourdough starter, maybe. The way he talks about that sourdough starter—“I have to feed my sourdough today”—like it’s a pet. He stores that starter in an unmarked container in his fridge, and inevitably, I open the container looking for food only to find a bubbly, gooey glob. However, if I were to make a list of things I love about Trey, that loaf of sourdough he bakes every Saturday morning would make the top five. When it first emerges from the oven, it’s so hot, I have to hold that loaf steady with a paper towel when I slice into it so I don’t burn my hand. The way the salted butter submits to that bread. Like a lover, I think. I would seriously miss that bread.

Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (November 2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (forthcoming in April 2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50 and will be included in the forthcoming Norton anthology Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.

 

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti

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RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT
by Charlotte Moretti

She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at me—sharp, suspicious looks. I watched through a shaft of sunlight coming in from the windshield as dust billowed in through the open windows of the Jeep and settled, lazy and drifting, on my lap.

Her arm was freckled like I remembered, but now the skin was loose, bunching and drooping. I wanted to touch it, to lift it up back into place; it was as though I had closed my eyes and she had melted by the time I opened them.

I leaned down and pulled out a cigarette from the pack that was nestled in my bag between a few of my other things—a pair of gas station sunglasses, a bottle of iced tea, a jade necklace, a couple of credit cards. As I brought the cigarette to my lips, lighting it, she glanced at me, alarmed, and swatted it from my mouth.

“Don’t,” she said, instinctively. “Don’t—you don’t. You don’t smoke.” Her certainty faded. After all, maybe I did. What did she know?

I nodded, choosing to take her admonishment as an instruction rather than a question. “Okay,” I said evenly.

I glanced out of the window; the dirt road we had been barreling down was now paved, lined with squat buildings and plastic signs that had been pushed stubbornly in the hard, thawing spring grass and now stood lopsided in the heat. We passed my high school, a Taco Bell, GNS Heating & Cooling.

She switched on her turn signal—cautious, I thought—and we pulled up the steep driveway to the house she lived in with John.

I got out of the car, staring up at the condo and immediately resenting it. It was smug, with its neat grey siding trimmed with matching white shutters, wind chimes dangling from an eave. The porch steps were flanked by huge flower pots—gardenias, I guessed. I had been with a botanist once.

I walked up the steps carefully, primly, my shoulders stiff. I wanted her to know I didn’t feel welcome. She stepped behind me, and I could feel her impatience radiating from behind me. She always had a quick temper, and with her red hair, we used to call her Heatmiser, like from the old Christmas movie. I would piss her off—breaking a dish in our stupid, too-small kitchen or spilling her perfume—and she would toss her hands up, frustrated. “Goddamn it, Hannah! I mean, come on!” she would say, her voice high. Then I’d say, slyly, “Sorry…Heatmiser,” and she would slowly look up, trying not to smile until she couldn’t avoid it, and she would chase me around the house until she had me pinned down, tickling my ribs while our sheepdog Louie ran in circles around us, howling and licking us.

When I got older, she would come out of her bedroom clipping on her big gold earrings or zipping up her black leather boots, going on a date to see Ozzy Osbourne or to some beer crawl, and I would be mad and alone and hungry and tired, and I would call her a whore under my breath, it didn’t matter if I teased her and called her Heatmiser later. She’d leave, and I’d spend my night spooning peanut butter from the jar for Louie and I.

I stood facing the door. There was a wreath and a welcome mat.

“Hannah, come on,” she said, her voice low and tense behind me.

I pushed open the door and stepped over the threshold. There were a lot of words for what her house with John was—cute, small, charming—but mine wasn’t one of them.

John was boring, that much was clear. When I had been growing up, my mom had decorated our apartment with candles and gauzy drapes, Oriental rugs she had haggled for on Delancey when she had lived in New York, she told me. It was always dark and messy and ours. Girls from school would come over and take their shoes off, and my mom and I would laugh at them.

I didn’t say anything, just looked at the beige and the floral print. The decorative stone angels. “Where’s John?” I asked mildly.

“He’s at work,” she said. “Listen. If you want, you know, a night alone with just us, no men, just let me know, okay? He can stay at his sister’s.”

I shrugged. “I’d like to meet him.”

She kicked off her shoes, lining them along a plastic mat in the foyer, and made her way to the kitchen to rinse her hands at the chrome sink. “Okay, baby. That’s fine. But, you know, just let me know if you change your mind.” She opened the refrigerator—balls of cantaloupe in neatly stacked Tupperware, a carton of soy milk, a clump of asparagus.

“Okay,” I said, scooting up onto the kitchen counter. “But I mean, he is like, my new daddy, right?”

Her shoulders tensed, and she stood with her head still in the cool of the fridge. One, two, three deep breaths. She turned around and smiled. “What do you want to eat, baby? Anything you want. I can make lasagna, we can order Chinese, pizza—I don’t care. Anything you want.”

Melon balls, I thought before deciding not to bait her. The thought of my mother’s hands with their chipped black fingernails wrapped around a melon baller was alien and comical, something we would have laughed at. “Chinese sounds good.”

She rubbed her hands together, excited. “Yum. Perfect. Okay. There’s a great new place down the road; you’ll love it.” She paused, closing the refrigerator and leaning against it as she stared at me, drinking in the face she didn’t recognize, reconciling herself to the fact that this was me. “Baby…I’m sorry we don’t live at the apartment anymore. I know it’s…I know it’s hard for you to come home to this. But, you know, John already loves you. I love you so much, Hannah.”

She leaned forward and touched a lock of my hair, pulling it forward. It fell gently into place along my jaw. The last time I had seen her, my hair had been long and tangled, falling midway down my back. “I know, Mom.” She lifted a hand to stroke my hair again, and I instinctively backed away. “Can I see my room?”

She led me down a carpeted hallway to a bedroom. There were dents in the carpet, probably from a desk or maybe some exercise equipment. John loved me, my mom said, but let’s see if he loved me more than his Stairmaster.

There was a twin bed in the corner. It was neatly made, the unfamiliar duvet pressed and tucked. There was a stuffed shark propped up on a pillow, a cheap claw machine prize my high school boyfriend had won me at the bowling alley. I had forgotten what we called it.

The walls were bare save for a poster of Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of photos of the two of us she had tacked underneath it. I hadn’t even really liked Siouxsie and the Banshees, but my boyfriend had.

My mom sat down on the bed, picking up the shark and putting it on her lap. She picked at its cotton teeth, running her fingers back and forth. “We tried to keep your stuff. You had so much stuff, you know. Remember those posters? God, your walls were covered. We had a hell of a time picking the gunk off the walls. You know, Hannah, you wrote on your walls in Sharpie? Do you remember that? It took, I don’t know, something like three days to scrub all of that off. We went through two whole bottles of Lysol.”

She was talking, I knew, to cover something up. The silence, the stink in the air, the weight of the years I wasn’t here. To silence my silence, to shut up the ugly that had happened to me. If she talked and talked and talked about scrubbing and Lysol, something clean, something that smelled good, we wouldn’t have to talk about where I had been, how I wasn’t clean anymore.

I walked to the window. I had a street view. There were no blinds, just long, white, clean curtains that billowed gently. I pressed a hand to the window, my index finger catching on the corner of something. I ran my finger against it—it was tape, a little scrap of paper still stuck to it. I scraped at the tape with my fingernail until it came loose. Holding the paper up, I could just make out capital letters ‘NG’—like in ‘MISSING.’

She sighed. “Fuck. I told John to take that down.”

I shrugged. “He did.”

“Well…not enough, I guess.” She patted the spot next to her on the bed. “You shouldn’t have to see that.”

I sat and turned to her, surprised. “I’ve seen them. You used my senior picture, which you knew I hated.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Hannah. What did you want me to do? Use a baby picture?” She stiffened. “You looked different, anyway. I guess it didn’t matter.”

Six hours earlier, when my mom had picked me up from the train station, she had been sobbing—deep, guttural, animalistic cries. It was alarming, actually. I didn’t know how she hadn’t crashed her car. My first thought was that something was wrong—someone died, Louie or my grandma, until I realized that I was what was wrong—and now it was right.

When she had last seen me, three years ago, I had been seventeen. My hair was long. I was skinny—all knees and elbows and ankles. I liked Harry Potter and running track and blue nail polish. I drank Smirnoff Ice with Erin, my best friend, and hadn’t done more than give a blow job. We liked to go to the woods behind her house with her older brother and his friends and whisper and flirt. I liked racing Louie in my backyard. I was good at math, and teachers liked me, even though my mom never chaperoned on field trips or baked brownies for the PTA sales. I liked listening to Oasis and thinking about kissing Henry Nelson in his mom’s Ford Taurus, like I had done once my freshman year. I liked to dream—I liked to think and think, to be somewhere else, until the places that I was imagining myself out of were too bad to be ignored.

I thought of these things as though Hannah were a different person. She was a sweet, stupid girl who had been pissed off at her mom and had run out of the front door on August 18th and who had never been back through it. Poor thing. The irony of being a track star that couldn’t get away was not lost on me.

I was soft now, rounder, less attractive. I had a scar on my belly, a scar on my neck, a scar on my wrist. She didn’t know this, she had thought the terrible men had done it, but I cut my hair myself in the train station bathroom with some scissors I had bought from a Rite Aid.

My mom stretched out on the bed, putting her feet on my lap. “People missed you, Han. There were these shitty spaghetti dinners that…Jesus, you would have hated them. Caitlyn Burke organized one. I was like, hello, you didn’t even know my daughter. She bullied you once in eighth grade, I remember.”

I shook my head. “Who is Caitlyn Burke?”

The shark rolled out of my mom’s hands and off the bed. “Caitlyn Burke. She…you went to elementary school with her.”

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Oh. Well. It doesn’t matter.” She scooted up, sliding off the bed. “Well, you should take a nap, baby. It’s been a long day. John will be home around six; we can eat then.”

She left, and I crawled under the covers. Siouxsie stared at me. You wish you could pull off short hair, she said. I closed my eyes.

◊

John was short and affable. He was the exact opposite of the kind of person I would have dreamed my mother would be with. He ate his Chinese with a fork and knife, nodding happily at my monosyllabic sentences. He acted as though I were coming back from a study abroad in France—and oh, sorry, while you were away, we moved, and your dog died, and your mom started wearing cardigans. He slurped a lo mein noodle, rubbing his fingers together to wipe off the soy sauce on them. “Hannah, I don’t know if your mom has mentioned this, but I work for a travel agency.”

I wrapped a noodle around my chopstick, pulling it up as high as it would go until I nearly had to extend my elbow. “Uh-huh,” I answered.

John cleared his throat. “So, you know, I talked to your mom and we thought, whenever you’re ready, we’ll take a trip.”

I felt my face flush, imagining myself smiling with Mickey Mouse ears next to John. Three hours inside and they were already pushing me out. “A trip where?” I said quietly, the pitch of my voice betraying the calm I was faking.

“Anywhere, babe,” my mom put a hand on mine. I started to sweat. “Paris, the Grand Canyon, Hawaii,” she rattled off. I knew she had an image in her mind too, of riding a tandem bicycle under the Eiffel Tower, a baguette perched cheerily in a wicker basket up front.

I swallowed my food hastily. It was suddenly too strong, too palatable, the glistening chicken and whole snow peas seeming obscene. I could feel panic start to rise from my stomach, numbing my fingers and toes. I took a sip of water, relishing the cold of it as I ran my fingers against the threadbare tablecloth, feeling for a grip.

“Han?” my mom said, gently prodding me with a chopstick.

I met her eyes. “Do you think,” I said, unaware that I was even speaking, “that you deserve a prize?”

They were both silent for a moment. Even John’s fork clinking against his plate subsided. “I don’t know what you mean, Hannah,” my mom said eventually.

I shook my head. I could feel tears forming behind my eyes, and I knew if I spoke they would fall.

For all of his apparent deficiencies, I had to admit that I admired John’s tact in that moment, his careful disengaging from the scene as he gathered the plates and take-out cartons and edged his way into the kitchen under the guise of clean-up duty.

My mother and I sat across from each other. I could feel her eyes on me, waiting for me to explain what I meant, as if I had the words; as if I wasn’t relearning how to speak again.

“How could you do that?” I finally whispered. “How could you be dating and fucking and breathing with someone while I was gone? How did you do that? How did you just pick yourself up like I was still here? What did you guys talk about? ‘Hi, I’m John, I’m in travel.’ ‘Hi, I’m Teri, my daughter is missing and presumed dead’?”

She sat perfectly still for a moment, stunned into silence. Her lower lip was quivering daintily. She looked for all the world the perfect part of the grieving mother, each tear sliding down her cheek glossy and round, the tip of her nose blossoming into a flower-petal pink.

“Is that what you think?” she whispered.

I gestured around madly. “What else can I think?” My voice was low and dangerous and unfamiliar.

She stood up and walked to the living room, slowly easing herself down onto the arm of the couch. “Hannah, I met John at a banquet in your honor. He has a niece at the high school. I…I needed to talk to him because if I didn’t, I swear I would have killed myself.”

She rose from the couch now, catching her breath. “How would that have felt, then? It wouldn’t have been just Louie and just the apartment, it would have been me! You would have had no one!” She swiped furiously at her nostrils with the back of her hand, her gaze never leaving mine. “I lost twelve pounds. My hair fell out. It made me sick, physically sick, being in that apartment without you. I thought you were dead. Isn’t that big enough for you, Hannah?”

I stood up, my body moving of its own accord. I felt hot and cornered and panicked. I was creating a mess where there wasn’t one. Her body had been a vigil to me—there were the candles I missed so much. She had consumed them like a side-show performer, consuming every bit of me, every article that still smelled of me or bore my skin, hair, nails. She had tried to raise me from these fragments, and here I was, but changed. I felt myself crumple to the floor—how could I bear this? How could she?

She knelt on the ground with me, rubbing my back.

“I’m mad, Mom,” I wept. “I’m mad and I’m still scared.”

Her tone was hushed and reverent as she sat with me on the ground, the person, like a side-show apparition, that had, quite literally, disappeared into thin air. “I know,” she said. “I am too,” she said.

◊

The sun had just set, and the sky was the blue-purple of a bruise. I sat at the foot of the closet, lacing up my old sneakers from high school, flexing my toes against the tight fabric. I could hear the TV, the sound muffled from the living room where my mom and John laid on the couch, their bodies curled up together like smoke.

I left the lights off as I crept down the hallway, grateful, for once, for the soft padding of the beige carpet. I didn’t want the questions; the worry shaped like a whistle and a flashlight, a car creeping slowly behind me. There had been eyes on me for three years. I hadn’t been alone for three years.

When I was little, my mom had a friend in jail. His name was Thomas, and he had known my mom from when she was a bartender and he a line cook at some dive bar that had closed down before I was born. He had been locked up for some bogus drug charges, my mom claimed, and she visited him semi-regularly, eventually bringing me along when she figured I was old enough or she just couldn’t find a sitter. He was a good guy, she would say on the long drive to the prison, just a bad prisoner. He would get solitary for weeklong stretches for fighting with other inmates or giving a guard attitude. When he’d get back to “gen-pop” (it didn’t make me popular to know prison lingo by the 5th grade, believe it or not), he would be skinny and scary, his eyes bruised and puffy, his knuckles red and scraped raw. It took me awhile to realize that he didn’t go in looking like that. When he couldn’t fight with other inmates, he fought with the walls. He had to get fourteen stitches from his left earlobe to his left eye socket once, but my mom never told me why.

I thought about Thomas as I shut the door behind me, stepping into the cool evening air. Cicadas hummed as I knelt down on the dew-damp lawn, breathing in the heady smell of the grass and my own sweat. For Thomas, ‘solitary’ was a dirty word, imposing, choking, threatening. I ran the word over my lips, tasted it as though it were a fruit on my tongue, dissolving there. It was delicious and intoxicating to me. I had been solitary, when three years ago I stepped off a porch as recklessly as if I had stepped on a landmine. The thrill of independence had beckoned me until it had warped, rotting and grotesque.

I wanted it back, I realized, stepping through the long blades, carving my own path. It was my grass. It was my moon that was beginning to slice through the dark of the sky. These were my legs, scraped and long and strong, that were now running, the weeds and wildflowers grabbing at them. It was my body.

It was my mom, I thought, who had been alone for two years, who finally threw open the windows to let in some air. I was mad, and I was hurt, but I was whole as my heart kept pace in my chest with my feet, pounding and angry. I’m here, it said. I wasn’t a ghost anymore, a cautionary tale whispered with a frank yet titillated whisper at barbeques and in grocery store aisles, afforded only to those whom tragedy has never touched, just skimmed its fingers along as a flat tire or a missed flight.

I passed trees, their green branches reaching for me like fingertips. I reached back, brushing against them, feeling the cool, waxy leaves against my skin. I hadn’t been to Paris, I thought. I hadn’t been more than forty miles away from where I was born. But the world seemed to open itself to me, as if a flower blooming, and I knew that I would go—I could go. At this moment, twenty-four whole, heavy hours later on the other side of the split that had divided us, I couldn’t run to Paris or the Grand Canyon or Hawaii, just down the sidewalks I had learned to crawl on. But that was enough—and so I ran.

Charlotte Moretti is a filmmaker and writer based in Detroit, MI. She graduated from Wayne State University, where her fiction earned her the first place Tompkins Award for creative writing. Shortly after graduating, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she formed the production company Ride Home Films (ridehomefilms.com). She returned to Michigan to make the films Call Me When You Get Home (2019) and Fairmount (coming 2022). “Running Alone at Night” came from a dream about a missing person poster taped to a window, and explores themes of femininity, independence, familial ties, and the changes that slowly—or quickly—overtake us all.

 

LEAVE NO TRACE by Robin Neidorf

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LEAVE NO TRACE
by Robin Neidorf 

the full moon rises in the cleft ……………………………between rock and green-turning-
gold on gravel trails twenty miles ……………………..northwest of this circle of stones
today’s bootprints start to erode
under those traces lie yesterday’s
…………………………… …………………………… …………lower still are strata dyed maroon and olive
then grey again
each line demarcates a slow disaster
ninety-five percent of species gone in the blink
…………………………… …………………………… ………of a few million years
…………………………… ……………………………… …………………………..the glaciers are receding
…………………………… …………………………… ……………………………..the data do not lie
………………………….. ……………………………………….. ………………….each season frees

another era’s liquid

………………………….. ………and debris
………………………….. …………………………..once rock met
………………………….. …………………………………………………..rock and hove        upwards now
every raindrop makes its choice
…………………………south to delta silts          ^^      west to crashing waves and saturated sunsets

take one breath
…………………………….another
the owl’s wings beat            no soundwaves      glacial pond’s surface still as fossil
come December will we remember
how to read…………………. across the gaps in the record…………….to extract
this September evening
bonfire sparks snapping carbon
-scented smoke following the half-missed…………. swoop of a dusk hunt
……………………………………………………….D-chord
…………………………………………………………………………..fades

just one
breath
more

Robin Neidorf started a love affair with poetry via (of all things) a sestina after more than two decades of focusing primarily on creative nonfiction. Her work has been published on the blogs of Best American Poetry, TC Jewfolk, Postpartum, and Matter Press. She lives in Minnesota and actually prefers its winters to its summers.

DESPINA, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden

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DESPINA
a visual narrative
by Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, soon to be out in French. It was named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The New York Times, Library Journal, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and NPR. Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She has also self-published two collections of her online comic strips, Rushes: A Comix Diary and A Flight of Chickens. Recently she finished a graphic travel novella called Le Chat Noir about her disastrous yet hopeful love for France. Hayden has lectured at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Drexel, and NYU, and is currently finishing her first work in color, a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner. She is hoping to use the proceeds to hire a personal chef. Author photo by Jen Davis.

WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST by Candace Hartsuyker

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WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST
by Candace Hartsuyker

It happens like this: your sister is skipping with a jump rope, her feet slap slapping the sidewalk. You go into the house to get a glass of water, and when you come back, your sister, her sneakers that are bright as Wite-Out, and her sparkly pink jump rope are gone.

After her disappearance, your father’s restless hands will hold a length of rope: he’ll tie and untie it, reconstruct the sailor’s knots he learned when he was a boy. The figure eight, the bowline, the clove hitch.

You will deal with your grief by tying yourself into an intricate pattern of knots. You’ll step onto the living room coffee table and slowly go into a backbend. It will remind you of the game of Twister you played at parties, a foot sliding backwards and to the right, a leg crossing under someone else’s arm. Your feet will move toward your hands until you are grasping your ankles. Your head will move back until only your throat is exposed. Then, you’ll stand back up.

Next, you’ll drag your father’s suitcase from out of the hall closet, twist and bend, contort your body into its smallest shape. You’ll move as gracefully as a Slinky that is being cradled from one hand to the other. Once you are safely inside, you’ll close your eyes and pretend the suitcase is partly zipped up, leaving a small pocket of air so you can breathe. You’ll practice twisting your body into smaller and smaller knots until you are a balled-up knot that can’t be untied.

You’ll spend nights imagining your sister being picked up from the patch of sidewalk, then thrown into the trunk of a car. You’ll fold yourself into a myriad of animal shapes: a frog, a swan, a wolf. You’ll imagine what it is like to be kidnapped. On the days you are the saddest, you will tangle your limbs until your body is not flesh but rough and fibrous, a snarl of grief, a human knot. You’ll practice becoming a girl who can squeeze into spaces smaller than a fist.

One day, you’ll arch your arms over your head and turn your body into the shape of a key. You’ll find your sister behind a locked door. She’ll be there, waiting.

Candace Hartsuyker has an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. Her work has been published in Fractured Literary, Cheap Pop, Flash Frog, and elsewhere.

DON’T KICK THE DOG by Phillip Schaefer

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DON’T KICK THE DOG
by Phillip Schaefer

Just last week doves glued to the beach, stuck between
physics and chemistry. Beneath the Puget Sound. No guns,
no sharks. A simple conundrum. There is a history within history,
angles prior to geometry. Names predating language. Before before,
we thrived. Now we thumb the doldrums of memory like cattle
lost on an interstate in a country where cars hunt with their headlights.
Last week a murder in Moab: a Mormon with a throat-knife
tighter than an oath on a ledge. So we buy cheap groceries
to keep our pantomime legitimate. We smack
the television out of its static. It feels good to drink
milk right out of the carton & it feels good to apologize
for nothing. Cancer comes then goes until something worse
arrives in the hearse of our bones. Life echoes
quietly backwards. Only one person may attend
the trapeze artist’s final performance. The smartest animals
know when to close their brains to the wolves
who hover in hunger. Rather than tossing rocks, we taste
the earth, understand it better. Perhaps this is a new era.
Our burial happened on the beach. Our burial happens without us.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He recently opened a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.

EVEN THE DOGS by Ronda Broatch

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EVEN THE DOGS
by Ronda Broatch

The horses hid the day I walked out to pasture
to catch my appaloosa. Ferro, eluding the drape
of lead rope over his withers. I found him deep

in woods I’d never entered, and slipped the halter
over his dappled head. Time and distance enough
to mute the shot it took to fell the bull

back at the barn, meat truck parked, everyone
gathered around, beers in hand, to watch. I tied Ferro
to the post, curried and saddled him for our ride

along the slough, past winery and autumn fields, years
before the bike path, down the stretch of dirt we raced
until my eyes ran, Ferro’s body sinking

closer to ground as he flew, as was his birth right.
Sweating, we returned, the bull’s headless torso dismantled,
chatter of onlookers bartering who got what.

I opened the gate, led Ferro back to pasture, watched him
roll in dust. Blood on the wind that day, the dogs hanging
close by, keen, squirrelly. A wild ride

while muzzle nuzzled temple, a galaxy opening inside
the bull’s brain. To be touched by God might be so brutal,
so beautiful. The day I wandered the pasture,

found my horse, slipped the rope around his quivering neck,
haltered his roan dappled head, wondering,
what is this God, anyway?

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist for the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered.

ABLATION by Lisa Lebduska

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ABLATION
by Lisa Lebduska

Faced with a choice between freezing or burning, my mother chose burning. Her decision surprised me because she hated Florida, where she had never lived, and she hated summers in New York, where she spent July and August with a crochet-edged hankie tucked behind her ears to catch drips of perspiration.

Never known for her tractability, my mother, daughter of an odd-jobs man, had a heart that insisted its own wild beat, and a passion for cheesecake, chianti, and despising my father, who had, as she put it, “traded her in for a newer model” at the age of sixty-five. The cardiologist diagnosed her with both tachycardia (beating too fast) and arrhythmia (irregular beating) and prescribed a phalanx of pills to block the renegade signals in her atria. Over time, the meds stopped working. “She’s breaking through,” her cardiologist said. I pictured her driving a motorcycle through a barn-sized paper ring. “She has to be ablated,” he added.

“Burned?” I asked.

The cardiologist narrated the procedure in the third person, as if neither of them would be involved: The patient will be mildly sedated. The doctor threads a needle through the groin and triggers an arrhythmia, so that he can identify misfiring cells and destroy them, by either freezing or burning.

Like “Fire and Ice” I thought. The end of the world.

“No,” she said. “Just let me drop dead.”

The doctor looked to me for back up. I faltered. How could I urge her to lie awake while a stranger pierced her heart with a wire until it trembled?

I put her on the phone with my doctor brother, who had been following her condition at a safe distance.

“A heart attack might not kill you,” he reasoned. “You could have a stroke that incapacitates you. Please, Ma,” Stephen said. “You’ll have it at my hospital, with someone I know. Do this for us.”

I nodded.

“OK,” my mother bargained. “If you’ll stop cutting the cake so thin I can read the newspaper through it.” We agreed on summer, when I had a more flexible work schedule and she could convalesce outside. I stocked her refrigerator with low-fat milk and roasted broccoli.

“Go home. You have your own life to lead,” she said, touching my cheek. Her hand was thick from years of labor but still soft and dimpled like a baby’s. I left wondering where the line fell between my life and not hers. Did other people slice away their loved ones with surgical ease?

A month later she called. “It’s a sign from God. No sheesh-ka-bab.”

Eyes swollen, skin scarlet from scratching, and blisters weeping from her cheeks to her ankles: a raging case of poison ivy.

“She made a salad with it,” my husband offered.

“My mother doesn’t eat salad.”

Over the phone my brother shouted that he was resigning as her personal physician and cancelling the procedure.

“That’s good,” my mother said. “You should rest.”

I felt the same relief that twists through me when I find a sprung mousetrap and no corpse. She had escaped our best intentions.

Two weeks later, my mother’s heart rate spiked to 232 beats per minute, landing her in the Emergency Room.

We arrived to find her propped in bed, pink-cheeked and complimenting the nurse’s manicure. “Have some applesauce,” she said to me.

“You have to have the operation. This will take care of everything. I’m sorry,” I added.

I waited on a hard chair in a dim room. When it ended, they brought me to her. “We got it,” her cardiologist said.

My mother looked up at me, dazed. “They gave me the sheesh-ka-bab.” As the sedative wore off, she whimpered, and I gripped her baby hand.

A year later, my mother’s internist suffered an incapacitating stroke, and his family sold the practice. I did not tell her.

My mother never had another palpitation, though afterward she said that her heart wasn’t firing right. “Something is missing.”

Scarred tissue cannot conduct electricity, the medical books say.

When meteors enter the atmosphere, friction usually ablates them before they can reach the Earth. We need to understand this, or we will squander our days like errant signals, running amok.

Lisa Lebduska directs the College Writing Program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in expository writing. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Forge, Lunch Ticket, Writing on the Edge, and The Tishman Review, among others. She lives in Salem, Connecticut, just around the corner from Devil’s Hopyard, where she and her husband enjoy hiking with other people’s pets.

 

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES
by Eric Rasmussen

I.

McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the knife, but this woman is the boss of the guy she came with. By the time the host raises the blade again, it’s too late. Her pinky is in the exact wrong place. McKenzie tries to yell, but her synapses can’t work that fast. The woman slams the knife down and cuts off most of her finger. Besides the thunk, McKenzie’s gasp is the loudest sound in the room.

Within moments the kitchen enters full meltdown. The host’s husband wraps his wife’s hand in a white cloth napkin, asking “What happened?” over and over. A semi-circle of partygoers around the island pulls out their phones to call ambulances or Google “how to treat a severed finger,” and a woman in too-tall high heels barrels towards McKenzie and the freezer behind her. “I’ll get ice,” the woman says as she busts through the other guests. “For the pinky. To keep it cold.”

As McKenzie sneaks out of the kitchen, she imagines what will happen when she tells this story tomorrow, to a friend or her sister, probably her mom. Whoever it is won’t even care about the finger. “Who were you there with?” they’ll ask instead.

“Tim?”

“You’ve never mentioned a Tim.”

“I met him at the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

“Patient.”

“You work in a urology office,” she (friend or sister, hopefully not mom) will point out. “That’s not weird?”

“We saw each other later, at a sandwich shop. What’s weird about that?”

By this point the commotion has drawn most of the partygoers to the kitchen, but McKenzie finds Tim where she left him in the piano room.

“Is there punch left?” he asks.

“I didn’t make it that far.” She turns as a shout reverberates through the condo. “Your boss just cut off most of her finger.”

Tim overacts his shock by jerking forward with eyes open wide, as if she were joking. Back in the exam room at the clinic, he was understandably quiet and timid, and these were the same traits he exhibited in line at the deli. But since then he has opened up like a comedian getting comfortable on stage, and this is what McKenzie likes most about him.

This time, as the seriousness sets in, she can tell he has no idea what to do. It’s date three, a pivotal one either way, and she had been hesitant about accompanying him to a work thing. But he insisted.

“Is there anything you need to do?” Tim asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, medically? Are you obligated to help?”

“I don’t know what I would accomplish.”

“Should I go help?”

McKenzie watches Tim consider his options. In a way, he’s like the woman staring at her recently detached digit. The action he takes now will determine much about the connections he hopes to maintain in the future.

“I think it’s best if we excuse ourselves.” Tim stands up. “Right?”

“I have no idea what party etiquette is when the host maims herself.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll send a card.” Tim gestures her towards the door with one hand outstretched and the other on the small of her back, and that, as far as McKenzie is concerned, is the exact right choice.

“Finger reattachment surgery is way more successful than you’d think,” she says as they find their coats on the hooks behind the door.

“Yeah?”

“Seventy percent success rate.”

 

II.

Tim has been to worse parties, except his fishnets are killing him. The waistband digs in under his hip bones and the netting cuts into the skin between his toes.

“Nice legs, dude,” says the Tarzan guy seated at the rec room bar next to him. The flurry of introductions when Tim and McKenzie arrived overwhelmed him, but he thinks this is Tarzan’s house. No idea what the dude’s real name is.

The costumes were McKenzie’s idea—early 2000’s goth kids, with black boots, cutoff jeans, and the aforementioned hosiery, black hair covering their eyes and faces caked with black makeup. She can pull off the look. Tim cannot.

“My girlfriend wanted me to shave them,” says Tim. “I almost did.”

Tarzan smirks as if Tim just revealed his bank account number or his porn fetishes. Most of McKenzie’s nursing school classmates married men who sell real estate or own their own landscaping companies, and they all have enormous basements that smell of paint and new carpet, like this one. Tim has no idea how to talk to them.

Tarzan’s wife is wearing a Jane costume, and she stands in a circle with McKenzie and the other nurses. McKenzie had explained the set-up on the thirty-minute drive out to the suburbs. “Everyone’s having kids, so they’re desperate to prove they’re not old and lame.”

“Do you feel left out?” Tim had asked.

“No. Why would I?”

So far, the nurse moms are succeeding. Most of their costumes would look more appropriate at a college house party, and they’ve paused for shots three times in the hour since Tim and McKenzie arrived.

Tarzan holds up his beer. “Fucking beauty routines.”

“Amen,” says Tim. “Although, I understand it feels pretty good. Smooth legs on cool sheets. Might be worth it.”

The King of the Jungle shakes his head, then excuses himself, and Tim follows the perimeter of the room to the table with the snacks. If he never stops moving, he won’t have to talk to anyone else. Every few minutes McKenzie turns from her group to offer him gratitude with eye contact and a smile. This attention is the only thing making the party bearable.

A couple hours later, someone turns the music down, the nurses shed their wigs and shoes, and most of the gathering opts to sit. Tim’s phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s his mom. I promise I wouldn’t be texting if it wasn’t important…

McKenzie is perched on the arm of couch next to him, and he waits until she finishes her conversation with a lingerie-clad devil about the difficulties of cleaning breast pump tubing. When McKenzie turns back, Tim whispers, “My dog just died.”

“You don’t have a dog.”

“My childhood pet, from back home.”

“Was he old?”

“She was thirteen.” Tim squeezes his eyes shut as his shoulders slump. “But she got hit by a car.”

“Oh my god.” McKenzie brushes the hair away from her eyes and rests her hand on his shoulder.

“I need to go.” Tim shakes his head as he leans forward on the couch. “I’m sorry. Can I drop you off?”

McKenzie stands. “I’m coming with you.”

“You haven’t met my parents yet.”

“I know.”

Tim tugs at the ragged hem of her cutoffs. “And you’re wearing this.”

“You said I look hot.”

“How much have you had to drink?”

“Enough that accompanying you sounds like a good idea, not enough that I can’t give full consent.”

Tim can’t bring himself to react to the joke. “You really don’t have to,” he says.

“Let’s go meet your parents.” McKenzie pulls Tim up, then leans in to whisper in his ear, “They can’t be any older and lamer than these people.”

 

III.

The box has been sitting in the middle of Tim’s boss’s coffee table since they arrived, which means it’s inevitable. Before the evening is over, they will be playing Overshare: The Hilarious Couples Party Game That Will Have Everyone in Stitches! McKenzie has come to detest Tim’s work gatherings. He expects her to act like she’s having a blast and laugh off every lame comment. His coworkers expect her to share every detail of their relationship and play terrible games. Still, she keeps focused on the lid’s yellow bubble lettering because it distracts her from Tim’s boss’s pinky. A year after the pickle incident, it’s still discolored and swollen. And a little crooked.

“I’m so happy we can gather like this.” Tim’s boss remains elegant despite the finger, in a draping blouse and showy jewelry. “We have so much to celebrate.”

Their company manages civic fundraising campaigns, and they recently nailed a big one, twenty-one million dollars for an aquarium in North Carolina. Parties accompany all such victories, but this one is the smallest yet, with only employees and their romantic partners. No one will need stitches tonight, no matter what Overshare promises.

Tim leans over and asks McKenzie, “Are you comfortable?” She sits on a distended ottoman. At least Tim is on the floor.

“I guess,” she says.

Tim rests his hand on her knee. The awkward angle makes it an unnatural gesture. “Are you okay?”

“Super fucking okay. Okay?”

Tim retracts, and McKenzie considers apologizing. Instead she goes back to staring at the game box.

The group talks about nothing: favorite shoe brands, some office snafu that the romantic partners don’t understand, how long it’s been since everyone’s been to the dentist. Soon Tim’s boss directs the group to the kitchen for food, and McKenzie eats off the relish tray because everything else spread out on the kitchen island contains seafood. While they stand there, one of Tim’s coworkers asks McKenzie when she plans on getting engaged. McKenzie nearly chokes on her olive.

Finally they reconvene in the living room and Tim’s boss lifts the lid off of Overshare, which makes a farting noise. “Goodness, excuse me,” she says. Then she reads the directions, in their entirety, out loud. Overshare is basically Truth or Dare geared for church social groups. Which piece of your partner’s clothing do you find most alluring? Perform a PG-rated strip tease for your partner.

Tim must be able to sense McKenzie’s dread, because he whispers a preemptive, “Can you please try to have fun?” in her ear.

The action progresses around the living room. Butts are squeezed, sex acts are alluded to, and the accompanying laughs are gentle and polite. When it’s McKenzie and Tim’s turn, he gestures her towards the pile of cards in the middle of the coffee table. It’s a truth one. What was your first thought about your partner when you first met them?

“We first met when I was at work.” McKenzie can feel Tim wincing from the floor next to her. He hates this story, but he’s making her play Overshare and if Overshare wants the gritty details, she has no choice but to comply. “I’m a nurse in a urology office, and Tim came in for a procedure, so my first thought was… he’s really hairy.”

“Wait,” says one of Tim’s coworkers, a tall guy with slick hair. “That means you saw his…” The guy gestures a circle around his crotch. “…his ‘area’ right away?”

“Yep.”

“Nice.” The guy nods and leans back. “And I assume you were so impressed that you had no choice but to ask him out?”

McKenzie rolls her eyes. “Exactly. I was mesmerized.”

This time the chuckles sound more genuine. “Alright Tim, now I’m curious,” says the woman who handles social media. “He really is the whole package,” says the wife of the company’s vice president as she taps McKenzie on the shoulder. “Get it? Package?”

Tim waves them off. He isn’t smiling. “That’s enough. Whose turn is it?”

Later in the kitchen, Tim pulls McKenzie into the corner. “Why did you have to tell everyone?”

“It’s funny. They liked it.”

“I work with these people.” Red splotches creep up his neck towards his ears.

The last time she shared the story was at a dinner where two of her nursing school friends managed to guess Tim’s specific procedure, then referred to him as “The Strangler” for the rest of the night. After that incident, McKenzie promised never to bring it up again. “Can we fight about this some other time?” she asks.

McKenzie returns to the living room, and ten minutes later, when she tries to find Tim, he’s gone. No one saw him leave. Tim’s boss completes a quick search of the condo but comes up empty-handed. “That’s so odd,” the woman says. “Did he say something and maybe you didn’t hear? Could something serious have happened?”

 

IV.

McKenzie leads Tim into the back room of the restaurant, and no one gathered there shouts “surprise.” This is fine, because people jumping out of the dark is a bit cliché, and anyway, Tim had noticed a few text alerts on her phone that indicated she was planning something. Still, as he stands in front of his coworkers, his parents, and the handful of McKenzie’s nursing school friends who have become his friends too, he imagines how he would have reacted if he had gotten the full surprise party routine. Eyes wide, big smile, hands crossed over his heart in gratitude. Maybe he would have bowed.

“Thanks for this,” Tim says to McKenzie before they separate to greet their guests.

She kisses his cheek. “I told you I’d make it special.”

Tim finds his mom first. “What a nice party. That McKenzie is so thoughtful.” She drinks a bright red concoction out of a martini glass. “This seems like a big step.”

“Yep, she’s great.” Tim looks past her to check the line at the bar. “What are you drinking?”

“I have no idea.”

Next Tim finds Tarzan, whose real name is Jason, at the bar. He holds his beer with his pointer finger and thumb circled around the neck and gestures by waggling the bottle. “I heard a rumor you’re going to propose tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“Or maybe my wife just thinks you will.”

Tim snaps around with a force that startles them both. “Does McKenzie think that, too?”

Jason holds up his hands and takes a step back. “I have no idea. I’m only repeating what Gina said.”

Six months ago, Tim had finally happened upon what he and Jason have in common: whiskey. They joined a bourbon club that meets once a month at a bar downtown. But their relationship is still tenuous, so Tim says, “Sorry. No surprise proposals tonight. Hopefully someday soon.”

Jason claps Tim on the shoulder. “You’ll get there.”

By the time Tim finds his boss, other guests have started to leave. He’s only had two drinks, and he’s barely touched the food.

“When you first brought McKenzie to our place,” she says, her stack of bracelets clinking as they slide down her arm, “I knew you two were going to work out. I could see the electricity between you. How long ago was that?”

“Almost two years.”

“That’s right.” She holds up her hand with the infamous yet surprisingly normal-looking pinky, and the bracelets sound again as they slide back towards her elbow. “Thanks to that little blunder, I’ll always know exactly how long you two have been together.”

Three hours after the start of his party, Tim locates McKenzie in the restaurant foyer.

“Gina and Jason just left,” she says. “I said goodbye for you.”

“Can we leave too?”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it lame to be the last person at your own birthday?”

McKenzie shrugs. “I’m still having fun. What about your friends?”

“I don’t care about them. I’d rather be with you.”

The ringing of pots and pans from the kitchen and the throb of conversation from the dining room fill the foyer, yet the absence of a response from McKenzie surrounds them like the vacuum of outer space.

“Is this a sex thing?” she asks after a moment. “We can still do it, even if it’s late.”

“No.” Tim runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. Why did you throw me a party if you’re not ready to get more serious? That doesn’t make any sense.”

McKenzie interlaces her fingers into his, and Tim believes she would give him what he wanted, if only she could. But all she can muster instead is a gathering in the back of a steakhouse. “Tonight was a lot of work. Can we focus on that for now?”

“Fine.”

“And if you want to leave, we can leave.” She glances at her watch, then twists to see who remains in the backroom. “Twenty minutes. We need to say goodbye and wrap everything up.”

“Sure,” says Tim. “What’s twenty more minutes?”

 

V.

McKenzie crouches in the boulevard next to her car and prepares for the onslaught of three-year-olds.

“Tenzie!” shouts Gina’s daughter as she dives in for a hug.

“Y’all are getting huge,” McKenzie says when she stands again.

Gina approaches across the lawn in a red, white, and blue sundress. “Get away from the road,” she instructs the kids, who scatter towards the backyard.

“Is he here?” McKenzie asks.

Gina crosses her arms. “Jason invited him. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s inevitable, I suppose.” McKenzie follows her friend, who walks slowly, almost as if she’s offering McKenzie a chance to bolster herself before seeing Tim for the first time since the break-up.

“The landscaping looks great,” says McKenzie. Gina and Jason have redone their entire yard since her last visit. Instead of evergreen shrubs and broad swaths of grass, stone paths crisscross the property, leading to juvenile trees extending upwards from bursts of hostas.

“We’re not sure the lindens are going to take,” says Gina. “The soil’s pretty sandy.”

“They look like they’re doing okay.”

In Gina’s backyard McKenzie finds the type of party she’s grown accustomed to. Some drinking, some talking, mostly chasing kids. Tim stands by the grill with Jason, and McKenzie avoids looking at him until she’s certain he notices her not noticing him. Then she pours herself a glass of wine from a folding table and joins the circle of her nursing school classmates. They used to talk about weird patient stories. Not anymore.

“They just raised our deductible,” says one of her friends. “We couldn’t afford to have another kid if we wanted to.”

“Are you trying?” asks another friend.

“We’re talking about thinking about it.”

Jason summons Gina over to the grill to whisper in her ear. Gina returns to the circle and gestures for McKenzie to lean in. “Tim wants to know if you want him to leave.”

“Are you kidding me?” McKenzie responds.

She crosses the stamped concrete patio to Jason, Tim, and the plume of greasy hamburger smoke. Tim is not a bad guy. He’s a great guy. Kind, funny, always able to make her feel special, and even some muscle definition across his shoulders. But if McKenzie has to pick one human to hang out with daily for the rest of her life, would she pick him? And that’s not even the question she’s been asking herself for more than two years. The real question is, would she pick anyone?

“We need to talk,” says McKenzie, hands on her hips, facing Tim as Jason backs away with his metal spatula up like a samurai sword.

Tim gestures her towards a boulder surrounded by fresh mulch, this time without his hand on the small of her back.

“We need to fix this,” she says. “I don’t want to make the whole party weird.”

“Me neither.”

“Good. So it’s easy, right?”

Tim overacts his shock with an open-mouth double take. “Of course it’s not easy. It’s anything but easy. But I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

He puts his hands in his pockets. “You’re welcome.”

Then, they party. Wine, burgers, a new yard game with frisbees and beer bottles. No conversation is so deep that it can’t be interrupted by a beverage refill or a handful of potato chips. When McKenzie tires of listening to toilet-training war stories, she leaves the patio and enters the yard to find Tim chasing a group of three-year-olds in between decorative rocks and tufts of waist-high grass. With his arms out he looks like a zombie trying to catch enough kids for a modest lunch. It’s obvious to everyone that this is what he wants: the yard, the kids, close friends standing around, debating whether to have one more beer.

McKenzie sits on a boulder as a thought occurs to her. For the next barbecue, if Gina and Jason only choose to invite one of them, they’ll most certainly choose Tim.

For another moment she watches the chase and listens to the screams. Then, in an instant, Tim falls to the ground and grabs his ankle. The kids stop, then return to stand over him with their fingers in their mouths.

“Are you okay?” Gina’s daughter asks. “What happened?”

The party relocates around Tim as he grimaces and inhales through clenched teeth. McKenzie keeps to the periphery. “I’m so sorry,” Gina says to him. “They needed to replace some of the in-ground sprinkler heads, but they didn’t have enough on the truck, so they left holes everywhere.” She hits her husband on the arm. “I told you someone was going to break their leg.”

“It’s not broken,” says Jason.

“I don’t know,” says one of the nurses, and the rest chime in with their opinions. “He could have fractured his talus.” “I’m sure it’s just a sprain.” “Look at the swelling. That’s an anterior tibialis tear for sure.” Before they reach a consensus, the excuses start. “I’d drive you to the hospital, man, but I’ve had too many beers.” “I just put Gwen down for a nap.” “How’s your insurance? Do you have ambulance coverage?”

And just as quickly as the injury earned everyone’s attention, Tim loses it again. A kid grabs a handful of cake, another spills his juice. A girl screams at some terrifying bug she finds on the ground. Gina leaves to find a bandage, the rest of the group drips away. Except McKenzie. She steps towards her ex-boyfriend and crouches on the brick path near his head.

“What’s your diagnosis?” he asks.

“They’ll probably have to amputate.”

“That sucks.”

“Seriously, though. I should probably take you to the hospital.”

When McKenzie tells this story (to a friend or sister, probably her mom), she’ll say that she picked him up and carried him to her car like a fireman rescuing someone from a burning building. In reality, the trek across the yard is much more awkward, with his arm around her shoulder, her trying to lift him with one arm around his ribs, and him hopping in between gasps and winces. When they reach her car, he says, “Are you sure you don’t mind leaving?”

“Not at all.” She leans forward to pour him into the passenger seat. “I hate parties.”

He relaxes, leaning back on the headrest like he’s finally arrived home. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought you did.” She grabs the seatbelt and hands it to him. “You do now.”

Eric Rasmussen is a Wisconsin writer who serves as fiction editor for Sundog Lit, as well as editor for the regional literary journal Barstow & Grand. He has placed short fiction in North American Review (2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize runner-up), Fugue, The MacGuffin, and Pithead Chapel, among others. Find him online at theotherericrasmussen.com.

 

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984
by AJ Strosahl

A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy himself. Clyde told Sylvester that it happened as these things do, which is to say: out of nowhere, on an unremarkable day. Clyde was fishing for perch on a stretch of shore where you could wade in, waist-deep, with your feet anchored in the silty lake bed. It was late in the day, with the sun high and the air thick with pollen and light. Clyde had just felt a tug on his line when a silence fell.

It was the loudest silence he’d ever heard.

“It was kind of . . . respectful,” Clyde said, when Sylvester asked how he’d known to cease all movement, to still his hands and the slow shifting of his legs in the water and even his own breath. “Like your Ma used to say: sometimes time drops a stitch. Everything stopped so he could come to the water and drink.”

The animal itself seemed to materialize out of the air, a few yards to Clyde’s left, at the lapping shoreline.  At first its form was unclarified, just a blobby haze. Then, a slow coalescence: a hulking form of textured sable, mountainous dorsal hump and questing snout, a predator stink on the breeze, glittering black eyes. It bent low to drink from the waters at the shoreline. The bear’s teeth were endless and profound; it was a grizzly, unmistakably, and barely three yards from Clyde.

“What did you do?” Sylvester always asked when he could tell that Clyde was sauced enough to tell the story the right way.

“What did I do?” Clyde would bray his screeching laugh. Sometimes, depending on how late in the evening it was, he would also hang his head in disgust, like he was shocked he could have raised such an imbecile.

“Don’t be a smart aleck! I pissed myself!” Then the laugh would come again. “Son, there wasn’t any do. A grizzly, you get me? I didn’t think one single thought, let alone do. I froze like a fawn and accepted the state of things, just like any intelligent animal does when it’s beat.”

Sylvester had pictured it so many times, he might as well have lived it: his own body cramped up in involuntary surrender, awed face slack, with hot urine running down his legs into the lake. The moment was locked in time so stubbornly it felt like an exhibit in a museum that Sylvester could visit at will.

The bear wasn’t the end of the story and it wasn’t the end of Clyde.

As soon as the bear turned its massive head and took note of Clyde for the first time—its eyes narrowing and hackles coming up—a writhing cylinder burst forth from the water and towered above them both. If the bear had stopped time, then the monster from the lake was all motion, pulling the rest of the world along at its own speed.

It was odorless and scaled, its hide pulsing with all colors at once, like an oil slick. It was as big around as the trunk of the elm tree in Clyde’s yard growing up, which his mother had said was hundreds of years old. It moved as a snake would and with such force and precision that, Clyde said, he knew instantly that what was visible was only a fraction of the whole animal. Its head darted to and fro above with dizzying, alien grace. The prehistoric scale of it—the suggestion of its true length—was sickening.

“It could have taken us both, or taken every house from here to Penticton, or plucked a single acorn from a tree five feet away. The control it had! All that tail beneath the water, the part of him I didn’t see . . . it could have been a hundred feet. And strong, like God’s own hand.”

Clyde always whispered that part, like he didn’t want anyone except Sylvester to hear him name the extent of the animal’s focus and power.

It was a serpent, and it was not. It was whalelike and it was not. It had a face and it did not. It was Ogopogo, as indisputable as the bear. Ogopogo, to whom the lake belonged. Ogopogo, who strained its massive body up and out toward the bear, moving past Clyde so quickly every hair on his body stood on end.

Then, the bear’s face was obscured by a flexing, muscular coil and its body was whisked forward into the lake, like it weighed nothing at all. The last things Clyde saw before he passed out were the ass end of the bear, dragging through the water, and his fishing pole, which had been wrenched from his hands and sucked into Ogopogo’s wake, irretrievable. The pole and the bear vanished completely, save for a rippling movement below the surface, just a glimmer of iridescent scales.

◊

As he waits inside a hollow log for his own death to arrive, Sylvester thinks of his father—who died of a stroke in ’76, just after the war—and of Ogopogo. He wonders what death will feel like and suspects it is probably already in progress. It hasn’t hurt badly so far, at least not worse than he can bear. He has shelter and there is fresh water everywhere and, though the forest has become a horror to him, it is not unlike somewhere he’d have selected as his final resting place, if he’d been given the opportunity to choose in advance.

The log is strangely dry inside, despite the rain. For the first time since he and Elias got lost on their way back to camp, Sylvester is grateful he doesn’t have a flashlight, so at least he does not have to see what insects and animals are sharing the space with him. He can feel them against his skin, crawling and burrowing. During the days, he’s been eating all the beetles and worms he can find, because he knows they’re safe. But if he puts something in his mouth without seeing it, in the damp, dark log, it could be a poisonous spider or something else he’d regret. He’s regretting quite a few things now, truth be told.

Last night, he’d ripped spongey moss in huge handfuls from the ground and stuffed it into the log around him as tightly as he could. Like eating bugs, it was another thing Clyde had told him to do when Sylvester was a young man, if he ever found himself lost in the woods. The moss helps, but it’s still getting colder. The temperature has dropped every night since the forest had swallowed Sylvester and Elias up, eleven days ago, and, once the rain turns to snow, if hunger hasn’t already put him down, exposure will.

Sylvester and his friend Elias had camped by the river dozens of times on fishing trips in the Tualatins. It took a hammer and a surprising amount of strength to finish the trout off once you hauled them in, but they were delicious charred over a fire. Elias was good company in that he mostly kept his own counsel. They’d fish and build campfires at night, sticking close to the river, sometimes hiking to Wapato Lake or setting rabbit snares. Elias was gone now, lost somewhere in the pines.

On their fifth day gone, Elias had eaten something poisonous that came back up in a froth of green vomit. Whatever it was made his mind go haywire and his forehead burn with fever. He’d wandered away from Sylvester, mumbling incoherently about running out to the store for a pack of smokes. They’d been walking so long, and Sylvester was so hungry and frigged up himself that he’d been too tired to stop his friend. He’d watched Elias stumble through the brush, the back of his red shirt vanishing slowly, then Sylvester had just kept walking. That was six days ago, he was pretty sure. Or seven. It was hard to keep track.

Things hadn’t gone wrong all at once, but Sylvester knew that they usually didn’t. It was another thing Clyde always said; in the bush, it’s death by a thousand cuts. First you find your water source fouled. Then you stumble into some poison oak and your legs swell up like balloons or you break an ankle or something starts bleeding too heavy to stop. Then there’s a storm. It’s rarely ever like it was on the banks of Lake Okanagan that day, the day Clyde dodged death twice without moving a muscle; when people die in the forest, it’s the result of dozens of little wrong decisions. And so it is for Sylvester.

The first mistake: he and Elias had followed a trail of chanterelles after they’d finished fishing for the day. They’d been south on the river, at a deep reservoir, where Elias’s cousin said he’d caught good-sized crappies and walleye. It was slightly further afield than their normal spot, but neither had registered it as particularly far from camp or taken any special note of it. The chanterelles bloomed from the forest floor like tumors, delicate and a cheerful ochre color. They were so plentiful that Sylvester had taken off his overshirt to make a pouch for them as he and Elias picked. Elias had brought a quarter stick of butter on the trip, which they’d planned to save until their last night. As they picked further and further away from the river, they couldn’t stop talking about the mushrooms, how delicious they’d be roasted directly under a fish, smothered in butter and salt.

By the time they realized that dark was falling, they’d inched a good ways down a craggy incline. They couldn’t even hear the river anymore. And two hours after that, wandering in what felt like circles, Sylvester had fallen and gotten his bell rung, hard. And instead of hunkering down in one of the logs or crevices they’d seen, they decided to walk through the night, certain that they’d come across their camp. They weren’t far from it, they were sure!

The second afternoon, Elias and Sylvester ate the mushrooms raw while they walked and spent the next night and day shitting their brains out on tree roots and ferns, their fingers clenched into the dirt. They never found camp or the river again—just an endless ocean of trees—increasing and decreasing altitude and constant unknown animal sounds, a storm that seemed to be malevolently gathering right over their heads. A thousand cuts, indeed.

And so: the log. The left side of Sylvester’s face still aches from when he’d fallen on the first day, and he keeps using his dry tongue to worry the socket of the incisor he lost and the jagged half of its neighbor that remains. The wind moving through the pines howls and the rain hitting the canopy sounds like waves. But the log is quiet, a dead structure—solid, and stuffed with live things.

Down here, low to the ground and packed in moss like a toad, Sylvester only hears the susurrations of the beetles and spiders, the rustling of ground cover as it is struck by the rain. His stomach doesn’t even hurt anymore, but it feels like his bones are made of slowly-cooling metal, like they could drop right through his skin. Thoughts float through his mind without stopping; he cannot attach meaning to them or to anything.

If Sylvester wakes up tomorrow, he thinks, he will crawl out of the hollow log with more ticks burred into him and aphids filling his mouth. He will squeeze moisture from the damp leaves he finds on the ground for something to drink and then he will walk. Maybe he’ll fall, like he did on the first night, and knock out more teeth or split his kneecap on a poorly-placed rock. Maybe the next handful of pine needles he eats will be coated in something toxic and he’ll die with his throat puffed shut and his nose full of blood. Maybe he’ll stumble on a bear, so majestic and terrible that time itself will stop. Or maybe it’s the walking that will get him and his body will come to its end that way, in shambling motion that slows and slows and slows until he is nothing but another carcass decomposing on the forest floor. Twenty-eight is too young for a long death, he thinks. I hope what’s next happens fast.

The trees moan with the wind and Sylvester trembles. It’s cold, yes, but the moss, his boots and warm socks, and his wool overshirt, long emptied of the chanterelles, are keeping him warm enough. Perhaps the cold snap won’t come tonight. It’s early October, which can stay quite mild, even in the mountains. Sylvester tries to fall asleep, if only to pass the time until he can walk in daylight again. He wishes Elias was here so there could be some companionship in the fate that has found them both.

Every inch of the forest in front of him these last long days is the part of Ogopogo his father could see: stunning, but only cursorily representative of the whole monster. All the forest beyond what Sylvester sees is the long tail beneath the surface of the water, the source of its control and power. Sylvester could walk forever, probably, and not come to the end of this wood. It is all he knows now. It is the world.

◊

Clyde’s buddies got sick of the Ogopogo story eventually—though Sylvester never did— and not just because they’d never believed it. It was because Clyde used it for everything; it never had a fixed meaning. Sometimes he’d seen the bear and Ogopogo that day because the good Lord knew that Clyde was the only mortal man worthy of viewing His most fearsome creations. Sometimes he’d seen them because he was a lucky man or a humble one or a brave one. There were other stories out there, after all, about frail sorts who’d seen the monster and collapsed, stone-dead. Even To’o Jessup, a known hard-case, had been found face down in three inches of water right on the shoreline in ’73, not a scratch on him, and he’d only been forty-two.

Sylvester was having a whiskey with his dad at the tavern in Oroville one afternoon that year when To’o’s sister Coee came in. Sylvester and Clyde were both working the orchards then, before they moved to the Tualatins. Coee came into the bar already half-drunk and Clyde was never not in his cups by that time of day. So he’d started up with her, telling her how To’o must have been unable to handle what Clyde had seen and survived and more’s the pity.

Sylvester had winced and started apologizing immediately; he liked Coee and he’d liked To’o, too, and even though Sylvester never got tired of the story, it was just not the time. But Coee had laughed in Clyde’s face, unbothered.

“You pussy,” she said when she was done. “You fucking leech. You saw N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ and you are telling me you lived because you were stronger than my To’o? Christ, you’re a donkey. Fucking moron.”

“They both could have had me, but I kept my wits and Ogopogo…” Clyde started, but Coee laughed louder, more violently.

“Don’t you call him that, fool,” Coee spat and took a pull of the sweating Budweiser the bartender had just set on the bar in front of her. “That beast saved your life. He knew you were weak. He saw the bear and he knew you never stood a chance. N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ doesn’t need to eat you; he would have spit you up like trash.”

Coee had helped Sylvester roll Clyde out of the bar later. When Sylvester asked her what she’d meant about Ogopogo, she’d told him, more gently: “Your father was never in any danger and my brother had a heart attack. Just his own dumb ticker. Your dad doesn’t even know how blessed he is, or why. God protects drunks and children, right? Well? N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is his name. The lake god. Don’t you ever let me catch you calling him Ogopogo again. That dumbass might not get it through his thick skull, but you can. Right?”

After they’d deposited Clyde on the couch at his friend Happy’s place, which was next door to the bar, Coee walked Sylvester back to the dormitory where all the pickers slept. She hummed ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ so vigorously that Sylvester joined in. When they finished, laughing, he said: “I’m sorry about him.”

“Don’t be sorry about Clydey, kiddo,” Coee scoffed. Her teeth shone white in the darkness as she grinned. “He doesn’t need your sorry, he’s sorry enough.”

They stood in silence outside the dormitory barn for a moment more before she shooed him off to bed.

“Don’t forget,” Coee whispered as Sylvester cranked the lever to open the barn door and the sound of the sleeping breaths of the off-shift pickers filled the air. “Don’t forget his real name.”

◊

Ten years later, in the log, in the cold and rain and incomprehensible wilderness, Sylvester thinks: N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, please I beg, and it is his last thought before he falls asleep.

The next day, he is too weak to leave the log. He spends the day with the upper half of his body sticking out one side, like a half-peeled egg, watching the daylight move across the forest floor. Sylvester eats two pads of moss and three earthworms, then retches it all back up. He lets the intermittent rain wet his shirt then sucks the water from its sleeves.  He wishes for a monster, a savior, to appear, but he is in the bear’s jaws now or he is the bear, in the grip of a deity. He’s not sure. Sylvester sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps again.

Wakes again.

Sleeps.

Sleeps.

Sleeps again.

Wakes to snow.

Sylvester uses his hands to pull himself out of the log, reaching and grabbing the earth, then dragging himself forward. His entire body shakes. Once emerged, he can see the snow everywhere; it has remade the forest under a dusting of variegated white. But he doesn’t feel the cold of it, or the wet, even as he watches his fingers turn red and then a mottled purple. He’s been wrong, he sees that now: he won’t walk out of here. He can barely crawl.

Sylvester recalls faintly that hearing is the last sense to go before death; in the end, you are reduced to your ears. He’d read that somewhere or maybe someone told him; the nurse he dated in Pocatello? Coee? His mother, Kiyiya, who had died herself when he was eleven? Sylvester can still see, mostly, though his vision is warped on his left, and on his right pocked with dark spots. The light in the forest is working strangely and he cannot tell if it is day or night. But he is alive.

Sylvester decides he will crawl to the next tree.

It takes a very long time.

When he gets to the next tree, he collapses in its roots, in the snow. His fingers are blue. There is a constant, cyclical breath that rattles his body and threatens to shake him apart. The breathing sounds somewhere outside of him, so outside that he could feel it, scalding hot on the back of his neck. But who was to say? He had lost track of where the mountains ended and where he began.

N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ or something like you, he thinks, please come.

Something does.

It doesn’t come as a serpent god from a lake. It doesn’t come as a bear.

It comes as light.

Sylvester rolls over onto his back and lets the snow fall into his open eyes, his mouth, across his cheeks. His vision wavers, but inside him there is radiation, a warlike feeling, a suffusion of brightness and energy. He can move again. He’s nearly weightless, he can carry himself with almost no effort at all. Inside, he is aglow.

Sylvester feels it suddenly, a separation of mind from body, like he is looking down at himself from six inches above his head. He can make this starved, frostbitten shell do whatever he likes. Sylvester rises, feels nothing. Just light, light. He is beyond it all. He walks forward ten paces, stiff-legged, before he can bend his knees again. Then ten paces after that. And then he begins to run.

He runs. And he is the bear blundering toward the lake’s shore on a spring day and he is his own father holding a fishing pole with lake mud between his toes. And he is life itself, he is a human animal made of skin and cells and spells, he is running toward death, headlong and heedless, an endless nova of darkness spiraling through him, dimming his vision to almost nothing, just flares of light winking out.

Sylvester knows now what his father never did: that he is blessed, he knows that death’s light is a sonic landscape of the next world, that it is his holy fortune to have found himself here, running blind and dying through a snowy forest. He is running faster than he ever thought possible, down a steep slope now, just light and light and more. More. The world is so big, so astounding. It is unending. He is on the razor’s edge between something and nothing, between mortal terror and the miraculous. If this is his lot in life, it will also be his privilege to run off the edge of it all.

Sylvester runs and runs, for hours or days, in this world or the next. He runs until he falls and then he gets up and runs even more. By the time the ground has leveled off and he thinks he can hear the flapping of canvas tents in the wind and the distant trill of children’s voices, he never wants to stop. Even when he runs into another body, feels warm living hands catching him and holding fast, he still strains madly forward, longing to stay in motion and sound and light. The hands hold him tight about the shoulders and Sylvester weeps with dry, unseeing eyes because he is saved, yes, but also he is stopped. And oh, oh, oh: he’d been absolutely flying.

AJ Strosahl is a writer and small business owner who lives in Oakland, California. She has work published or forthcoming in Oyster River Pages, Signal Mountain Review, Ruminate Magazine, and other outlets. Her essay ‘Dogs I’ve Read’ was recently a finalist for the 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction prize, and in 2022, AJ will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Vashon Island Arts Residency and the Bryn Du Art Center. ’N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, 1984’ is an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Only In Pure Air.

 

 

WALKING ON THE FURNITURE by Jessica Klimesh

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

WALKING ON THE FURNITURE
by Jessica Klimesh

In fourth grade, after Ellee and I learned how thin the crust was, how hot the mantle and core were, how fragile Earth in general was, we spoke in cautious whispers. What if? You think? Shh. We spoke of boys the same way. Curiosity mixed with innocence and fear.

At sleepovers, we held tight to the covers of our shared bed and to each other, our dreams fixed and frantic. Where were we safest? In a few years, we would explore the softness of our own bodies, the way it felt to press into another’s. But in fourth grade, shielded by darkness, we simply lied about the boys we had kissed, speaking in wary whispers, our bodies delicately intwined. And when the sun came up, we floated from footstool to coffee table to easy chair, walking on the furniture and tiptoeing lithely if we had to touch the floor. We were determined not to fall through, not to break the earth open. At school when the other kids ran, their footfalls hard and rugged, the earth shook, and Ellee and I would look fearfully at each other. Should we tell them? Shh. No. It’s our secret. But it wasn’t. After all, they’d learned about the Earth—about the crust, mantle, and core—same as us. We just understood it differently.

One Saturday afternoon, we decided to chance it. Just once won’t hurt, would it? What if? Shh, it’s fine. But as we ran for the swing set, our feet broke through the crust, and the mantle swallowed us up like quicksand, our feet melting, our legs turning to rubber and char. We fell deeper and deeper into the abyss of Earth, into the core, a hot rush of gold and darkness and light and silver. This is it, isn’t it? It is, yes. And as we fell, we grabbed hold of each other’s hands and laughed. And for a moment, life was glorious. For a moment, life was true.

Jessica Klimesh is a US-based writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, Variety Pack, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, FlashFlood Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cedar Crest College and an MA in English from Bowling Green State University. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash.

THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE OTHER SIDE
by Ann Stoney

When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself, they crash unexpectedly, then fade away—a tide that rips, then spits you on the shore of waking.

You think of tomorrow. You’ll divide the day into three parts: (1) a business activity, something practical, (2) a bit of exercise, (3) something creative, whatever that is.

But when tomorrow comes, you fill the day with useless things and once again are left with the night to figure it all out.

So you do. You consider taking the yoga class in the morning, but it starts too early, you’ll never make it. Not now, when you’ve been up half the night.

Let’s face it, they’re all over—the mice. This keeps you awake, too.

Your mind is adrift between sleeping and waking. Is this what death is like? Or is it more like anesthesia? You worried a lot as a child about dying—Am I gonna die, Daddy, am I gonna die? Wondering in your child brain how it would feel not to exist, knowing on some level that this was a contradiction, but you wondered anyway.

Your family moved around a lot. That was hard, always the new kid on the block. Pretty much the same as not existing. Maybe that’s why you wondered about it.

You were eight years old when you’d get up in the middle of the night to guard the house. You believed this was necessary for your very survival. Because your parents were about to be kidnapped, you were sure of it, and you needed to be awake when it happened. You’d listen for any noise, tapping or knocking, stand in the hallway military-style, pacing back and forth, back and forth.

Why is it when you can’t sleep, your childhood haunts you? A distinct memory of bullying—you were twelve, kids picking hard red berries from trees, throwing them at you. You ran into the house and up the stairs, followed by a kid, the only concerned one. You turned around, snarled like a dog until he ran away.

You think about smoking pot. Your retired husband sells it part-time, doesn’t have the same problem with it that you do. He’s sleeping peacefully next to you, twisting and bending every now and again, uttering guttural sounds.

The pot is everywhere—grains on table edges, roach butts in film canisters, inside the leather pouch in his backpack. You don’t think he realizes, really, how dire it is. You could pad downstairs in slippers and robe, light up on the deck.

But that’s an issue. If you smoke tonight, you’ll want more tomorrow. Inhale it with your coffee, then all day long. In fact, that’s why you can’t sleep in the first place. It’s been two days since you quit. If you give in now, the pot will keep you awake before putting you out. Tricky. So you lie awake in a fog with your mind racing.

Your husband laughs at you when you make those silly faces. At you, not with you. Part of your past. Like your mother, he says. Don’t be your mother. Your mother, may she rest in peace, loved to amuse, entertain, scrunch up her face, howl and speak in funny voices, snort until you were screaming with laughter, gasping, Stop! Stop!

You’ve carried that with you so far, the funny faces, the silliness, but your husband says it makes you unattractive. It’s not who you really are, he says.

So you don’t do it around him. You stop the primal impulse to be silly. Other men used to laugh their asses off, proclaiming you a comic genius, but not your husband. You’re more sophisticated than that, he says, made for better things. But you love letting off steam, being wild and crazy and decadent. It’s in your nature to be so.

So, this is something that has to be resolved, one of the things you think about when the dark pierces you awake.

Exploding Head Syndrome. It has a name. You looked it up on the Internet. Another reason why you can’t sleep; just as you’re about to, it grips you in the terror of paralysis. It comes on slowly at first, a far-off wave, rendering you powerless, until it takes over and you’re drowning in noise like wind whooshing through your brain. A siren, a high-pitched ring.

A rare condition, a misfiring of the neurons, the brief article said—brief, because no one knows much about it. A condition difficult to track. Like a cougar. You never know when it will attack. What’s the point of going to a sleep clinic when it might not attack that night?

The Exploding Head Syndrome waits until you try to quit smoking pot. But at least you recognize it now, and that helps a little. You relax with the noise and hope for the best. Release yourself to the gods.

The first time it happened you were sixteen, certain you heard a woman in a voice of steel say, “And a man stood before you.” You spent years in therapy trying to figure out what that meant. Where did the voice come from? Who was the woman? Were you molested at some point in your childhood? your therapist asks hopefully.

When I was fifteen, you reply. A family friend, but it was consensual and we never had intercourse, although we did everything else. Does that count?

In school you mentioned the Exploding Head Syndrome—you didn’t know what it was called then—to Mr. Lenz, your study hall teacher, who sometimes made short films starring a student or two. He showed one of them in class once, about a beautiful girl whose name you’ve long forgotten, sitting on a blanket in the park, peeling and eating an orange so sensuously that you longed to be that girl. So you flirted with him enough to land a date, the kind a girl has when she’s about to make out with her teacher and lie to her mother about it. You tell her you’re sleeping over with a friend, which is true, but you leave out the part about how Mr. Lenz picks you up at the Wythe Shopping Center in front of the A&P and takes you to his apartment where you neck on the futon couch until you’re afraid to go any further and then he brings you back to your friend’s house where you try to fall asleep but can’t.

You wonder what it is about this experience that keeps you awake. It’s only one of many, why this one? The men were usually older, that’s what you liked. The family friend at fifteen, then the high school teacher—years and years of broken relationships, exhausting you into middle age until you finally met “the one.”

So now it’s all settled; he’s sleeping beside you. You no longer need to run to the arms of strangers. He’s only eight years older, an improvement, blessed with a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City and a house upstate with a view of the lake and a yard full of wildflowers. He really loves you and you really love him, so it’s all settled. You no longer need to run at all.

Yet your mind races as if it’s got legs, ready to run a marathon.

You bolt straight up in bed; he’s taking too much of it. You measure, just to be sure, not with a real tape measure, it’s too dark for that, but with the one in your mind. You lean over, feel the amount of space between him and the edge, and it’s huge! At least six inches, if not eight. You’re dying for a king size bed, but you know he’ll never agree. It was a major battle to convince him to buy the queen.

He’s always inching in closer, forcing you to move further away until you’re practically falling off and this is why, you suddenly think, you cannot sleep. This is the sum total of all the reasons right here. You need space. You cannot have anyone touching any part of your body while you sleep. You don’t know why this is true, but it is. You wonder why this never occurred to you before.

Is this normal? Is it normal for someone to not want human contact, even from her husband, while she sleeps? You’re not sure whether it’s normal or not and this makes you nervous so you think about it some more, about maybe bringing it up with your therapist except that you’re no longer in therapy because you decided you were okay. You’re settled and okay. Still, it’s an interesting question. Maybe you should call her about it—this problem you have—or is it a problem? Your mind races back and forth as to whether it’s a problem or not. Can you help it if you sleep better alone? Aren’t a lot of people like that? Isn’t this why older couples often retire to separate bedrooms? Does this mean you don’t love your husband? Does this mean you’re not fit to be in a relationship, that you’re better off by yourself?

But you were alone for years, you gently remind yourself, gently because you’re now in a state of panic over the bed situation having put your whole marriage on the line in thirty seconds flat. You remind yourself of all the years alone, hopping from one man to another, miserable and lonely. You remind yourself over and over.

Once you were a stripper. You took off your clothes and men rejoiced. They also hurled insults and dumped beer on you. Like slitting the throats of kittens. Who was that person? You stare at the ceiling, so black you need a flashlight to get to the john. You can’t believe someone once paid you five hundred dollars to … don’t think about it. That you did it for so long, your husband says when you finally break down and tell him. More like an eight yearlong moment, you say every time he mentions it—to support the acting career. Just a fact, nothing more. Please don’t tell any of our friends, he says.

So you don’t. No one knows about it. Except of course, the friends you knew back when, the ones you hardly ever see. Misfit friends. Let’s face it, his friends are more interesting anyway—writers, artists, a whole group of them. You’re not used to groups. But somehow, you’ve managed to fit into this one. They like you. You can’t believe it. You’re amazed.

You’re relieved you told him early on. What would you do if you had to go through all that now? You’d be beside yourself. He went on and on about it for two years in couples counseling until you were ready to pull your hair out. Waking you up at four in the morning, obsessing until dawn. Asking questions like, why? What made you do it? For which you had no answer.

But you endured. You calmed him down, stroked his brow, told him over and over how much you loved him until he finally shut up.

Was it really that big a deal? Stripping? He certainly has no qualms about telling people he sells pot, which has always been a sore point, a contradiction in your marriage. You’re muddling through the bottom drawer of the file cabinet in the office. You’re not sure how you got there, on the floor in your nightie searching for sheet music from a previous life, when you performed your original songs in cabaret. Before you transformed yourself into an English teacher. Recorded a demo that never made it. Your boyfriend at the time—the sax player who would later break your heart—helped you arrange them. You find the demo first, under a pile of tax returns.

You imagine life with the sax player. You’d probably be stumbling across condoms in the wastebasket right now, flipping through his little black book. Spending your days with the names of women fluttering in your heart.

Some of them—your songs about stripping—are buried deeper than others. Dust clings to your fingers as you hunt.

You find the songs, draw a bath and sing them, softly so as not to wake him. He’ll never know. You like taking baths, building a castle within his walls. The claw foot tub a smoke away from the window, the scented candle from two Christmases ago, sea salts with fancy names. A piece of a throne you’ve pulled together, complete with lavender scrub and loofah mitt.

You sink into the tub, sing about how you once made love on a pier and it didn’t matter. Then you sing about a stripper who steps outside to take a break, lights up a joint, then huddles alone in the alleyway. The customers think they’ve got her by the tail, but in the end she gets all their money and takes a taxi home, where she tosses and turns all night wondering if she’ll be okay.

You sing to yourself and lay down your weapons. Give up the notion that your life is nothing more than a boxing ring with the men in one corner and everything else in the other. As the construction worker you once dated said, that’s all over now. He would have given up the others to spend the rest of his life with you, which would have been okay, except that he had a habit of tearing up your nightgowns and throwing things. Let’s not forget the night you were forced to flee to your girlfriend’s place on Christopher Street.

No, these songs are private now, best sung alone. There is no turning away from the person sleeping in the other room. Not that you’d want to. You love him. Then you cry, which is what you always do when you sing your songs in the tub.

You slip back into the bedroom and grab some clothes. How about a walk to the lake? Why not? It’s not as dark as it was. You peer out the window to make sure. Dawn is slowly revealing itself, the sun beginning its journey towards the maple trees. You dress quietly, tie your sneakers and head downstairs.

You’re lucky to have the lake so close, nestled at the foot of the winding trail your husband chiseled from the woods with hacksaw and scythe. An amateur landscaper, he enjoys carving footpaths, lining them with ferns and wildflowers, transplanted from the wildlife preserve nearby. Ditto for the annual Christmas tree, rescued from one of many in the forest.

You cross the road and reach the dock, pulled onto the marshland long ago, so rickety you fear you might fall right through, though your husband has tried many times to steady it with extra boards and nails. He fixes things in a ramshackle way, as if using a Band-Aid will stop a rushing tide of blood. But he’s so proud of his efforts, you find it endearing—the driftwood he turns into yard sculptures, the broken birdfeeder from a yard sale he manages to glue back together.

The dock is a little better. You grant your husband a mental tip of the hat. You don’t usually sit here, preferring the lounge chairs further up, but the early light beckons you closer to the water, as if its ripples have something to say. You pull up your knees and cast your eyes across the lake; a row of pine trees shimmers through the mist.

You wish you had a proper dock, but you and your husband don’t have official lake rights. You enjoy the water on a neighbor’s land, originally owned by the grandmother, her ashes scattered under the apple tree. The warring grandkids can’t decide what to do with the property, so no one comes up and nothing gets done. Thank God you’re allowed to use it and keep the canoe there, too. The house itself is uninhabitable, a faded elegance complete with white plastic swans and crumbling stone steps. It wallows behind you, its paint a spackled teal blue, collapsing inch by inch into smithereens.

Sometimes you take guests down to see it. Cocktails in hand, giggling like school children, you peer through cracked windows at frayed wallpaper, wicker chairs fanning the premises as if they owned it, grimy shelves dotted with porcelain figurines. Like a scene from New Orleans. Once your husband offered to buy the piano. Hell, he tells our guests, we’d buy the whole property, house and all, if only they’d sell. They nod in agreement. We’d have lake rights and could build a dock, a little gazebo. They look longingly through the windows again.  Of course, you know that this will never happen, the family will never sell.

Your husband can’t stand things going to waste. He’s always discovering new treasures on the street and dragging them into your lives, which annoys you at first, but then you get used to it, sometimes even enjoy them when you’re not worrying about the clutter. What’s wrong with these people? he asks, as you sip cocktails on the crumbling porch.

But you understand what’s wrong with them. You stretch out your legs, watch the ducks making their way across the lake, innocent and smooth, mother in front, babies soldiering behind. The family can’t bear the idea of change, that their memories of those delicious summers visiting their grandmother will be shattered if they sell a single item. So they keep the abandoned place intact, even as it falls apart.

You keep your eyes on the ducks. Like all creatures on this land—the squirrels, birds, chipmunks, the occasional fox—they are fascinating to watch. You envy the simplicity of their lives, the purity of it, their only worries finding food and not being eaten. But you also know this is an illusion, that nature is unforgivable and cruel; their lives are as complex as yours, if not more so. No living creature can escape that.

The ducks are swimming effortlessly to the other side, where the sun is just beginning to rise. It’s more isolated there, further away from the road, no houses, at least not yet. But some of the land has been cleared, a hint of things to come. You and your husband take advantage of the privacy while you can. On sunny days, you pack up the picnic basket with beer and snacks, sometimes a joint if you’re smoking, and canoe to your favorite spot—a makeshift beach amidst the pine trees and rocky, uneven ground. You spread out the blanket, hoping the ants won’t invade, and inhale the sun. Your husband always wants to swim, no matter how cold the water, and begs you to join him, but you rarely do. You can’t swim like the ducks, and he has an annoying habit of shouting pointers at you whenever you try.

Instead, you prop yourself up and watch him through your straw hat—strong arms plowing through the water to what he affectionately calls the finish line, a tree trunk stranded in the middle of the lake. You can barely see it from where you’re sitting, here on the dock. If it ever disappeared, he’d have nothing to guide him, no marker in sight. He needs that log as much as he needs you, as much as you need him.

Now that’s something. You zip up your sweatshirt. The sun, now full in the sky, has disappeared behind a cloud. You need him, but why? Why so much? He’s strong, lean and attractive. Maybe that’s it. The best sex you ever had. Women go crazy for him. They tease and flirt. Once a couple was visiting and the wife, feigning shock at some silly sexist remark he made, threw an ear of corn at him, and he laughed it off with a twinkle in his eye. He hardly ever gets angry. You can yell and scream, which you’ve often done, and he can take it. He won’t leave. He will never leave because he loves you. You can’t understand why—you, a former stripper and pothead driving him crazy with your ups and downs, but he does. For some reason, he does.

You know just how important this is.

Yet how engulfed you are in his world, his circle of friends—this beautiful house with its deck and birdfeeder and bench in the yard, as though you’re already deep in the middle of the lake. You could swim there now if you wanted to, even though you’re a lousy swimmer. Take off your clothes, sink to the bottom. No one would know, at least not for a while. You contemplate wading through shallow mud, wild reeds tickling your face until you reach the deepest part, the crystal clean part, the depths of which your feet cannot touch, where you would swim the best you could until you could no more. You contemplate this like you did as a child when you wondered how it would feel to not exist—to disappear.

You don’t, of course. You cling to the rickety dock, fingers clenching the slats, wondering if he’s awake by now. He’s probably making coffee and breakfast and suddenly you’re ravenous, ready for fried eggs, sausage and grits. You love the fact that he cooks for you. He may be controlling, but at least he cooks. He cooks and cleans and has no qualms about doing the laundry. He’ll do anything for you if you ask.

Soon you’ll return to the house, tell him where you were. You’ll say you couldn’t sleep and went down to the lake to meditate—the truth, sort of. You’ll sit with him on the deck and leisurely eat the breakfast he lovingly made. You’ll kiss him, thank him for making it. You’ll both watch the birds, talk about what the day might bring.

But for now, you linger a little bit longer, staring across the lake to the other side, where nothing exists except the sweet smell of pine, and the rocky ground beneath it.

Ann Stoney is a writer based in NYC. She is the most recent winner of the Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in PIF Magazine, Duende, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She has been recognized in several contests, most recently as a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal’s 2021 Rick De Marinis Short Story Contest. When she is not writing, she’s busy reviewing stories for the Bellevue Literary Review.

TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD by Richard Casimir

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TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD
by Richard Casimir

There is an image etched in my childhood memory from Haiti, which I find hard to erase. I admit I never try to block it out because it looks like a natural backdrop in my field of vision. It is indeed a troubling view but one from which I cannot escape. Therefore, I grow accustomed to it, absorbing it, despite myself, into my world of thoughts, dreams, and aspirations.

My vision of the image has altered over time, dimming some details, such as the age of the little boy it features, sitting on a school bench, sobbing inconsolably, under the menacing eyes of an exasperated teacher waving a leather whip. I do not recall the circumstances which prompted his punishment. But I remember the mournful tune of his lament, hovering over the dissonant sound of a merciless whip searing into his flesh. Finally, when his agony subsided, this desolate soul stretched out his little arms to feel his battered posterior. His short blue pants adorning a pair of skinny legs were soaked in blood, sticking to his skin. For days, he refused to take the pants off, dreading the discomfort of peeling his skin. Soon after, his wound got infected and did not heal for many weeks. Following his recovery, he suffered several epileptic seizures due to the constant stress he faced at school. One day, he recalled experiencing a seizure attack at the exact moment the teacher was about to hit him. He tried asking for help in vain, managing only to mouth the words without any sound.

Most victims of violence, namely children, suffer from three different kinds of pain: physical and emotional pain, and a feeling of guilt originating from their inability to rationalize their ordeal. They believe there is something wrong with them, which elicits deservedly the punishment they receive. I am the little boy represented in that image, and I have suffered from the same kinds of pain. My parents later told me that the school would have terminated the teacher who had so cruelly punished me had they not intervened on his behalf. They conceded they were indeed distraught by the ordeal, but they did not want me to lose the opportunity to get an education, provided at the time only to a select few in the country.

For many years, the trauma of my childhood experience haunted me, not only in my dreams but also in my daily life. It altered my attitude towards people, towards love and friendship, leading me to reevaluate the purpose of knowledge. Hence, I predicated every enterprise in my life upon the operant conditioning of reward and punishment. Thus, I was afraid to fall in love, to go to college, and to start a family, dreading a chastisement that no longer existed. I did not know what fueled my fear to explore life and uncover its hidden promises until a peculiar incident happened in my final year of undergraduate studies.

Following an acoustics final exam, which I thought I had not done well, I went into the course teacher’s office to inquire about the results. Seated behind a small desk with his hand solemnly folded, the latter directed a severe look at me standing at the door before inviting me to come in. I burst out in tears, asking for his forgiveness, convinced I had miserably failed the exam. It was an impulsive reaction, prompted by the fear of reprimand I had come to expect for “missing the mark.” I was relieved to find out later that I had passed the exam. But most importantly, I discovered from that experience that my motivation for learning was sadly the fear of punishment.

I often wonder why we are so hung up about maintaining order, discipline, and the fear of authority in our schools. It is evident we have structured our educational system with a military approach, assembling students in a geometric enclave, requiring them to wear the same uniform, and teaching them antiquated knowledge to maintain order and continuity. If any of the students fail to conform to these conditions, they get severely punished.

The framers of early childhood education such as Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Maria Montessori understood the fragility, the uniqueness, and the limitless potential of children. For that reason, they laid the foundations for an education that primed above all their humanity and their individualities.

In my native tongue, we use a poetic term to describe children. We call them “timoun,” which means: “little world.” That is because we believe that children hide within themselves an intimate world of thoughts, longings, and ambitions associated with the realities of their life. However, the endless potential for growth they possess is affected when they experience traumatic situations that are too complex for them to rationalize. When that happens, their memory often compresses that experience in a snapshot image. My snapshot image is that of the little boy sobbing on a school bench. To escape the anguish that vision provoked in me, I took refuge in teaching music. In that capacity, I try to repair the wrongs that I endured as a child. I see the face of that little boy in my students, who I try to provide with the love, attention, and understanding he did not receive. Even in the most stressful situation, I try hard not to injure their pride, crushing their motivation for learning. I repeat to myself, like a litany: they are just “timoun,” planted seeds entrusted to me for their cultivation and personal growth.

I learned two decades ago with relief that corporal punishment was no longer allowed in Haitian schools. Coincidentally, as if by magic, my nightmares and daytime visions suddenly stopped. Thus, the mournful lament of the little boy has turned into an aubade, which today inspires the adult he has become.

Richard Casimir conducting the Sagrado Corazon Youth Orchestra for a benefit concert in the Parliament of Navarra, located in the city of Pamplona. That concert entitled ¨Music against Inequality¨ was organized by Oxfam Intermon, to raise public awareness in combatting poverty around the world.A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Richard Casimir graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with both Masters and Professional Studies degrees in Violin. He worked as a violin instructor at the Preparatory Division at Temple University and as a String teacher in the Philadelphia Public Schools before moving to Spain in 2006. Until that time, Richard focused his attention mainly on teaching music and performing. But the recent social and political upheavals taking place in his native country have awakened in him an irresistible urge to write. Recently, his essays on arts and culture in education have been published both in his home country and in the United States. He believes that opening a debate about the usefulness and the adaptability of these topics to the challenges of our times can help foster tangible social changes.

 

BREAKFAST SOLILOQUY by William Erickson

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BREAKFAST SOLILOQUY
by William Erickson

After breakfast I discovered
an accretion disk around
the empty container of
raspberries, an iridescent
plate of ablated drupelets
circling recyclable clamshell
like discarded astral projects
on the kitchen counter.

God is summer fruits
and moldy gauze.
God is absorption.

Our new light fixture
is the Hubble beaming images
of war and elections over
history while the dishwasher
counts another minute
from its dry cycle. An arid star
blinking the name of cleanliness.
We do not understand,
but nonetheless we orbit
one another’s names like
the last ring of cereal,
saturated and without integrity,
evading the spoon in an expanse
of milk as thick as the emptiness
contained in our daily need to eat.

God is an expiration date.
The streaky windowpane
is an event horizon.

William Erickson is a poet and memoirist from Vancouver, Washington. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in West Branch, Heavy Feather, GASHER, The Adirondack Review, and many other publications. He is the author of a chapbook, Monotonies of the Wildlife (FLP).

 

WE WERE NOT SO BIG by Windy Lynn Harris

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WE WERE NOT SO BIG
by Windy Lynn Harris

There were three marriages and three sets of children, a pair for each union. For some reason, my father could only hold four children at a time. He told me this once, really tried to explain it to me. What I remember most was his sincerity in that moment. He wanted me to know things were different for me.

When my father called, I would listen to him tell me what he wanted me to know about his life and then I would ask about his family. He would tell me what he wanted me to know about them, too. He’d ask about me, politely, and I knew he’d report some of my things to the rest of them, but that wasn’t the same as being part of a family. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

It was a while before we visited the house where he and wife number three lived. My sister and I were invited to dinner one Saturday, and I saw their wedding photo for the first time. I’d imagined the ceremony we weren’t invited to as something plain-clothed, quick. A judge or some official-looking man from Town Hall, but in the framed photo, I saw elegance and planning, the whole lot of them smiling. There was space in the photo, off to one side, and I thought, We could have squeezed in. We were not so big.

Windy Lynn Harris lives in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by cacti, lizards, hawks, and sunshine. She has received fellowships from the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and The Maribar Writer’s Colony, and has been supported in part by professional development grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, which receives support from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been featured in The Sunlight Press, JMWW, Brevity, and other places.

A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS

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A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS
7.13 Books, 157 pages
Interview by Grace Singh Smith

Full disclosure: I met Namrata Poddar—writer, editor, UCLA professor of writing and literature—in a room filled with Vermont sunlight, at Bennington Writing Seminars. But what I should actually say here is that I met Joohi Mittal, a widow whose fortunes have fallen (“Poor Joohi, Mount Sinai duplex to Malava cubicle!” Mount Sinai. Need we know more?). Joohi appeared in Namrata’s story, “Silk Stole”, which we were “workshopping.” I don’t remember any of our comments, helpful or not; what I remember is a day in Joohi’s life unlike no other in her recent memory, where, thanks to an unexpected return from an investment, this mother of three—who works “three plus jobs”—allows herself a window into her lost life. She buys a designer silk stole, a drink at an Americanized café (Coffee Keen!), and—if only for the length of a facial massage, a Prada purse-wielding snooty fellow customer notwithstanding—Joohi feels “the lines on her forehead dissolve.” Ahhhhh. But then the story’s last two words disturb Joohi’s, and our, brief equilibrium. She “. . . sank deep.”

Several years after I wanted to clobber that Prada purse-wielding woman who checks out Joohi’s chipped toenail polish, “Silk Stole” appeared—has just appeared—as part of Namrata Poddar’s debut novel Border Less. Joohi appears, of course, but she is part of a large cast of border-crossing characters who are searching for a better life. Border Less traces the migratory journey of Dia Mittal, an airline call center agent in Mumbai, and as Dia journeys to the United States, the stories of other border crossers—travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, hospitality industry workers, Bollywood artists (junior and senior), hustling single mothers (like Joohi), academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees, and more—appear, not so much vignettes as threads in a vast web. And true to the complexities and struggles of immigrant life, the lines on these characters’ foreheads, if they do dissolve (figuratively speaking), only do so at a price.

Namrata and I talked over email about what inspired this many-voiced novel, her publication experience, how she navigates writing male characters (and tackles racism and classism), why she chose to end Border Less with a story written in the voice of the goddess Shakti, her advice for aspiring debut authors, and so much more. This interview has been lightly edited. You can read more about Namrata on her website.

—Grace Singh Smith, March 2022

GSS: Congratulations on this gorgeous symphony of a novel that challenges so many preconceived notions of form. When I first heard the title—Border Less—I was very intrigued. Why not, you know, Borderless? Then the novel’s epigraph, by Édouard Glissant, a stunning confirmation of the novel’s power and potential, answered my question, or at least I think so. Can you tell us a little more about the novel’s title (and the epigraph)—how it informs, inspires, and is also driven by the voices within it?

NP: On the title, it’s definitely the verb over the adjective. Meaning, it’s less “borderless” because we live in a world with a rising wave of nationalism in so many countries including the U.S. and India, increasingly under Trump erstwhile and Modi’s current leadership. To suggest that we literally inhabit a  “global village” with no borders—even if it’s true somewhere within a digital universe composed of Facebook, Twitter, and the like—would be to suggest a political utopia, a reason I didn’t care to name the novel “borderless.” That said, most characters centered in the book have experienced geographical dislocation in one way or another, and are borderless to the degree that they do not claim allegiance to just one nation-state. Also, a spiritual interrogation and a yogic worldview punctuate Border Less along with its political exploration around the word “border.” Among several ideas, I see the novel offering a meditation on what it takes for women to let go of all the expectations and “ borders” placed on their being by society, families, parents, children, lovers, husbands, arty gatekeepers and more, and to tune into themselves and truly feel borderless.

The title as a verb—Border Less—also has multiple interpretations in the book. But if I’d to boil it down to a dominant one, Border Less alludes firstly to the novel’s closing chapter, an epilogue of sorts where the Hindu goddess of creation Shakti is calling out the Euro-American literary establishment and asking it to borderless forms of literary storytelling, especially the novel.

Lastly, the epigraph by the Nobel-nominated Afro-Caribbean writer and intellectual, Edouard Glissant, that opens the novel reinforces this circularity in the novel’s structure; it alludes to communities who have endured oppression and historic marginalization and how they have produced other forms of storytelling that subvert the assumptions of mainstream Western storytelling. Much of Glissant’s oeuvre explores forms of postcolonial storytelling and was a big influence on Border Less.

GSS: This novel defies the traditional form of the mainstream Western novel, with many voices and narratives. There is Dia Mittal, the airline call center agent in Mumbai, India, whom we meet in the first story Help me Help you and who eventually journeys to greater Los Angeles. Then there are all the stories that intersects with Dia’s—all border-crossing characters like Dia. Related to the first question, too—did you always know you would write a novel in this form? How did Dia appear to you as the fount of Border Less?

NP: I did not ever imagine I’d write a novel (even if I wanted to), let alone a polyphonic novel like Border Less. Maybe that’s because, for the longest time, I saw the novel, at least for my own writing aspirations that progressed over my U.S. years, via the American literary establishment and its market forces. Here, the novel follows the psychological drama of a few protagonists, is character-driven, and the plot often involves tracing a character arc on the page, a story movement from conflict to some sort of resolution in a way that won’t interrupt what John Gardner famously called the ”vivid and continuous dream” of an implied bourgeois reader’s experience. What I’m paraphrasing here are the assumptions of the modern realist novel and a decisive rise of the Anthropocene in storytelling, both of which, to me, have their origins in the West. Across much of the world and throughout history, storytelling hasn’t worked in this specific way.

As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer.

As a literary critic, I spent many years focusing on the realist novel as it manifests in 21st-century literature by writers of color; it’s a body of writing I still love. As a fiction writer though, this template of the novel did not inspire me at all—I don’t viscerally connect with its assumptions of continuity and wholeness, zooming into one or more main characters. To me, these arty assumptions come from white male history, assumptions that have been laid bare in works by several writers of color including Amitav Ghosh, Matthew Salesses, Gish Jen, and Edouard Glissant. As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer. All this critical reasoning, though, happened in the later stages of writing the book when I was thinking about form in serious ways.

As for Dia, she kept reappearing in my drafts over many years—an insistent voice of a lower-middle-class Mumbai girl, one who doesn’t come from the Bombay of writers like Salman Rushdie or Suketu Mehta, all Bombays I deeply love; one who crosses multiple borders between languages and cultures, like so many Mumbaikars have; one who insisted I put her story down on the page. That said, her voice rarely came to me as the dominant voice amid the multiple voices and stories I drafted toward the book; it came interspersed with other voices that spoke in my head. It’s this juxtaposition of voices that I’ve tried in many ways to capture within the book.

GSS: As someone who’s been slogging over a first novel for years, I find your journey and the novel’s publication inspiring. How long did it take you to write Border Less, how many drafts did you write, and how did the work evolve through the various iterations? For example, did you have a sense from the beginning that you’d split the novel up into the two sections on which these interconnected narratives hang, Roots and Routes?

NP: From its earliest drafts that I wrote while on a sabbatical from grad school to the time it was done with its final stage of line-edits in 2021,  Border Less took seventeen years to write. I rework compulsively most things I write. Even a story or an essay of 5,000 words takes me, at the least, around twenty-five to thirty drafts. So you can imagine the various versions that must’ve happened over seventeen years with a manuscript of about 50,000 words.

Honestly, I didn’t feel inclined to keep a precise count as I feared the results would create a limiting belief in my head that would interfere with the process. That said, Border Less did evolve over many, many drafts, especially since I was revising not just its content and doing the developmental as well as line-edits at different moments, but also, thinking seriously through questions of form at each step.

Border Less first started as standalone scenes and vignettes, many of which evolved into stories that often connected organically to become a collection of interconnected stories. This collection then morphed into a novel, yet a novel that draws inspiration from a BIPOC legacy of novels and storytelling at large over a white legacy of the novel.

GSS: I love how you use slang, of the sort you’d heard on the streets of Mumbai and also Hindi terms/words—“bhunkuss,” “jaan,” plus the names of Bollywood songs—without explaining, or even giving hints, as to their meaning in English. What kind of considerations go into that—do you worry about uninitiated readers stumbling over it?

…when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing.

NP: One of my biggest motivations in writing Border Less was to see more Anglophone fiction in both my homes—India and the U.S.—reflect the English my people and I speak. After all, every Anglophone writer reflects the world they come from in the way they use language—whether it be Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros or Raymond Carver.

And yet, when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing. In fact, this non-explanation of one’s world and an opacity with language is the only way I’ve ever encountered and consumed “literary” writing. I felt no desire to play a literary pioneer here and pursue the goal of full linguistic transparency as if that were possible.

GSS: In Firang, the narrator’s husband’s friends, a slightly cringe-inducing group (IMHO), call her Firang, foreigner because she spent her childhood in Mauritius before moving to India, France, and Northern California for school, then finally to Orange County where she settles down with her husband, Vish. Firang is a very loaded term. The narrator’s journey across borders aligns with yours—or at least the places where you’ve lived. How much of your own immigrant experience informed Border Less?

NP: Firang is certainly a loaded term, although like with any word or concept, it gains and shifts meaning with context, something I hope cultural insiders will recognize within Border Less, too.

I believe Noor, the narrator in Firang, and I have overlapping life journeys to the extent that we have both lived in India and France, but I haven’t lived in Northern California and Noor hasn’t lived in the East Coast cities of India and North America as I have. Where our life journeys overlap is in the fact that we have both crossed borders and lived in more than one place. Although that’s the case with most characters in Border Less.

Migration or the constant navigation between countries, continents, languages and cultures,  impacts my life in crucial ways. If it seeps into all of my work—fiction, nonfiction, translation, teaching, and editorial work—that is because it’s a huge part of who I am. It’s a topic that can never not interest me, on the page or otherwise. 

GSS: Brothers at Happy Hour has unlikable men complaining about the women in their lives (it doesn’t exactly end on a complimentary note for these bros). There’s this character, TJ, who’s finally settled down at the age of thirty-four with a distant cousin, after a month of “rumored dating,” causing everyone to be “surprised yet relieved he wasn’t gay.” (That yet, though.). TJ is the first brother—“brothers”, since they aren’t related, after all—we hear from in this story. He launches into a bitter complaint about his “super Type-A wife.” I found myself feeling mildly sorry for TJ, in spite of myself. How hard—or how easy—it is for you to write sympathetic—and, conversely, unsympathetic male characters?

Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story.

NP: I agree. With all the moments you share from the novel above, TJ comes across as a fairly unlikeable character. That said, there are other moments within the novel where TJ is also relatable to readers, or I hope, especially when it comes to his loyalty for his friends, or the inside jokes they share as Indian American “brothers.”

Like other male or female characters in the book, I see TJ as an ambivalent character—he embodies the good and the bad, and I hope this makes him more than a one-dimensional character.  Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story. TJ to me was as hard or as easy as writing other male or female characters within the book, whether it is Dia the protagonist, or perhaps the most likable of all male characters in Border Less, Jeetendra, a motel owner in Southern California, the narrator of the chapter, “Victorious”.

GSS: Another question from Firang. “Every cliché on India I’d heard from white folks in the west, my new brown family in the West was recycling, joke after joke on the motherland’s lack of civilization, the poverty, the population, the heat. . .” I found it easy—too easy—to identify with the narrator’s irritation, and it is evocative of the layered racism often invisible from the outside (that is, most people are aware—or such is my hope—of colonial and post-colonial attitudes of Westerners towards Indians but then there’s the racism, discrimination, and classism within the nation itself, part of my experience growing up in rural northeast India.). I note, too, where the call center supervisor in Help me Help you makes a jab at the way “interns from Ahmedabad” pronounce certain English words. Did you intentionally create these moments, these nods to the often invisible reality of inter-Indian racism and classism, or did the story produce these moments “organically”?

NP: I didn’t intentionally create these moments. They showed up organically because like you, I’m quite aware of racism, classism, and casteism within our South Asian communities—in the subcontinent or its diaspora worldwide. In the later stages of writing the book, though, when I did wear a critic’s hat, these moments stood out to me as a key highlight. After that, I did my best to hone these moments, as a storyteller, for the reader.

GSS: Kundalini, the closing story, is a brilliant, fierce takedown of patriarchy in all its avatars, from religious to literary, and it is written in the second person! By the goddess Shakti, no less, she who “[owns] that ancient game of Form and Illusion”. I think it is important for readers of Border Less to know why you chose to end Border Less with her voice. Please tell us more.

NP: Glad you enjoyed the ending. Although to be honest, I didn’t always choose to end my novel with Shakti’s voice. When I think of storytelling in rational or conventional terms, ending the novel of Dia’s journey and her eventually finding “home” made sense to me. And yet the last chapter came to me almost as is, that is, Shakti, speaking directly to some of the big figures of South Asian history and mythology, not to mention the Western literary establishment and other characters in Border Less. When I was transcribing the voice I heard, I loved what I had on the page, except that I didn’t know what to do with the epistolary short fiction I’d downloaded, as if from ether. I put it away in my digital folder for “extras” yet Shakti’s voice kept insisting that I put her back into my novel and also that I give her the last word.

This led me to think of the manuscript I had in deeper ways, to think through the questions of form, and a postcolonial legacy of storytelling including hybrid novels that I was already familiar with, thanks to my life in and involvement with teaching and literary criticism. And surely, in the structural revisions of the manuscript, ending the narrative with a secondary character who repeatedly comes up in the book as a leitmotif made sense, especially since Border Less is less about character-driven fiction, and way more about community-driven fiction. “Kundalini,” especially in its performance of the great cosmic dance of destruction and creation, the Tandava,  heralds a new world order; it echoes the epigraph by Glissant that opens the novel by reaffirming an alternative world with other forms of storytelling that come from communities who have endured historic oppression and marginalization. It thus also reinforces a circularity over linearity of “plot”; it echoes the circular movements of the Rajasthani dance ghoomar that punctuate the novel; it creates a frame that encases Dia’s story as well as her community’s, and frames are crucial to Rajasthani art forms from my ancestral home in India, from our performing arts to haveli architecture with its specific forms of windows or the jharokha.

In short, ending with “Kundalini” made so much more sense than with Dia’s journey that appears in the novel as its penultimate chapter.

GSS: You are an author, an editor, a professor of literature and creative writing at UCLA, and last, but not the least, a mother.  Who have been your greatest influences, people who have anchored you?

NP: My biggest influences as life anchors or as a working mother are my mother and my sister, who’ve always had to work very hard to earn a living and yet have been very present for their families, especially their children. Other big inspirations on the road are a whole community of mother-writers who also raise children, produce books, hold day jobs and are active literary citizens. Watching multitasking working women who’re no suckers to patriarchy or systemic oppression at multiple levels lead their day-to-day lives and simply be themselves in all their light anchors me on the road. This list of peers and role models in my life is very long, although my mentors, Dr. Francoise Lionnet and Dr. Shu-mei Shih at UCLA, and Jill McCorkle and Angie Cruz from my time at Bennington Writing Seminars first come to mind, as do peers like Camille Dungy, Tiphanie Yanique, Bich Minh Nguyen, Sonora Jha, Pooja Makhijani, Anajli Enjeti, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Kaitlyn Greenidge, among others. Another huge life anchor of mine is a close circle of friends, working mothers of color, who keep life very real for me, and who uplift me when I trip, and it’s my hope that I do the same for them—shout out in particular here to SoCal writer-sisters Shilpa Agrawal and Aline Ohanesian, and academic sister from Mumbai, Dr. Urmila Patil. 

My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.

GSS: And lastly, what has been the publication journey like, for Border Less? What were some obstacles that you had to reckon with? Do share any advice you might have for others who, like you, are laboring over work that challenges the literary status quo.

NP: As with most BIWOC—more so, those not born and raised in the U.S. and those who don’t strictly center the U.S. in their work—I had a hard time shopping for my manuscript within an American literary industry known to be eighty-five percent white at all levels of executive decision making. And while I talk openly, teach, and write about these structural inequities in American publishing in most of my recent nonfiction and editorial work, I reckoned early enough with the fact that my manuscript was unlikely to get a pass by the Big Five. Firstly, because I didn’t have an agent until I already signed the contract for my novel, and secondly, because of all the “rules” Border Less resists when it comes to “literary storytelling,” and because the novel’s last chapter in calling out the literary establishment is fairly incendiary.

After a point, I shopped my manuscript mainly with small and indie presses known to take an interest in BIPOC voices. Here, too, while the manuscript was a contender for three literary awards for first books from Feminist Press, Black Lawrence Press, and C&R Press, it didn’t garner enough interest toward an actual publication. I’m someone who doesn’t believe in giving rejection too much energy so at some point, I just stopped tracking the numbers—but I did submit and receive rejections continuously, until one day, Leland Cheuk, an Asian American author, the founder and publisher of 7.13 Books, reached out to me with an offer for publication.

My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.

Beyond the completion and circulation of a book, get clear on what you want from your writing path. Then start looking for ways to make that happen. Walking the road as a “minority” writer who takes her work seriously is already a pretty demanding path, no matter what choices you make, unless you come from generational wealth or financial privilege. Every choice on the road to publication is a tradeoff, but once you know what you truly want, paying the cost toward your choices will come easier, I think, as will contentment and hopefully, joy.